Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalVideos show Chicago police fired nearly 100 shots over 41 seconds during fatal traffic stop
Plainclothes Chicago police officers fired nearly 100 gunshots over 41 seconds during a traffic stop that left one man dead and one officer injured, according to graphic video footage a police oversight agency released Tuesday.
Five officers from a tactical unit who were in an unmarked police vehicle surrounded an SUV last month driven by Dexter Reed, allegedly for failing to wear a seatbelt. Video shows the 26-year-old Black man briefly lowering a window and then raising it and refusing to exit the vehicle as more officers arrived, yelled commands and drew weapons.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability said preliminary evidence showed Reed fired first, injuring an officer in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the city’s West Side. Then four officers returned fire, shooting 96 rounds.
The gunshots continued even after “Reed exited his vehicle and fell to the ground,” COPA said in releasing the body-worn camera footage, 911 calls and police reports.
https://apnews.com/article/dexter-reed-chicago-police-shooting-0529419b830040e41bff495f1b8f0313
I wasn't aware that failure to wear a seatbelt was a capital offense.
Godawful Pastor Cancels 'Demonic' Autism Awareness Week
The day before Easter, Pastor Matt Baker of the Trinity Christian Academy in Lake Worth, Florida, emailed the school community to inform them that he was canceling Autism Awareness Week because “the teachings and actions of my Jesus are fully able to do all that this program intends to achieve and so much more.”
“Anything that teaches our children to have their identity in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic,” he declared, as first reported by WPTV.
Baker wanted to make sure there was no room for doubt regarding his edict.
“Let me repeat myself just so I am not quoted out of context: any philosophy, teaching, or program that teaches our precious children that their identity is found in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic. Period.”
The pastor was repeatedly using a word that the parent of an autistic kindergartener considers hate speech.
“As a Christian, I consider being called demonic probably the worst thing you can be called,” Andrea Gallik, mother of 6-year-old Miles, told The Daily Beast on Monday.
It was all the more shocking because the school had been so warm and welcoming to her son.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pastor-matt-baker-of-the-trinity-christian-academy-cancels-autism-awareness
Apparently not any more. Go find yourself another school...and another church, ma'am. This one is unChristian.
'Political efforts': the Republican states trying to ban lab-grown meat
At a press conference in February, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, told a room full of reporters: “We’re not going to do that fake meat. That doesn’t work.” He’d been discussing legislation under debate in the statehouse that would ban cell-cultivated meat – an emerging technique that, instead of slaughtering animals for consumption, grows meat in a lab using a small sample of animal cells.
A few weeks later, a Republican member of the Florida legislature – and cattle rancher – Dean Black took to the House floor, saying, “Cultured meat is not meat … it is made by man, real meat is made by God Himself … If you really want to try the nitrogen-based protein paste, go to California.”
In March, Florida passed the legislation both men had been addressing: making it the first state in the nation poised to ban “lab-grown” meat. (DeSantis still needs to sign the bill.)
Florida isn’t the only state on track to ban cell-cultivated meat. Three other states – Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee – are currently debating legislation that would ban the production or sale of cell-cultivated meat, despite the fact that cell-cultivated meat isn’t actually on sale anywhere in the country. Sixteen states plus the federal government have already instituted regulations on labeling cell-cultivated meat, such as prohibiting companies from using the word “meat” in their marketing, or requiring them to print a disclosure explaining that the product contains cell-cultured products.
But experts say these new laws sweeping red states aren’t so much about the many safety, ethical and environmental questions lab-grown meat pose – they’re about the culture wars.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/09/us-states-republicans-banning-lab-grown-meat
Because of course they are---it's not "real meat", and "real men" eat "real meat". 
'Moscow Marjorie': Republican accuses Greene of irresponsible Ukraine rhetoric
The far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is ungovernable and should be known as “Moscow Marjorie”, said a former Republican colleague in the US House, accusing Greene of “getting her talking points from the Kremlin” when opposing new federal aid for Ukraine.
“My experience with Marjorie is people have talked to her about not filing articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office, not filing articles of impeachment that were groundless based on other individuals in the Biden administration,” Ken Buck, a Colorado rightwinger who left Congress last month, told CNN.
“She was never moved by that. She was always focused on her social media account. And ‘Moscow Marjorie’ is focused now on this Ukraine issue and getting her talking points from the Kremlin and making sure she is popular and she is getting a lot of coverage.”
Congress returned Monday after a spring recess. Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, must govern with a tiny majority and a restive right. Just before the recess, Greene filed a motion to vacate, a means to remove Johnson from his role.
Greene filed the motion (though did not force a vote) after Johnson relied on Democrats to pass a $1.2tn spending bill and avoid a government shutdown.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/09/marjorie-taylor-greene-ken-buck-ukraine
She's only in it for herself. She envisions herself as "Madam Speaker". Not gonna happen.
RFK Jr. Fundraisers Tied to J6ers, QAnoners, Christian Nationalists, and Far-Right Extremists
On March 23, Steve and Tracy Slepcevic hosted a fundraiser for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the San Diego area. Tickets started at $575, and those who paid $2,750 were to be treated to a “private sunset reception” before RFK Jr. would chat with the assembled and pose for photos. It was hardly surprising that the Slepcevics were supporting Kennedy, given that Tracy is a long-time anti-vaxxer prominent within the autism community. But the personal politics of the Slepcevics illuminate the weird currents propelling Kennedy’s White House bid, for the pair have hobnobbed with QAnoners, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and other pro-Trump extremists. Steve, who has a checkered past as a businessmen that includes an arrest (but not a conviction) for allegedly defrauding victims of Hurricane Katrina, was in the crowd of Trump devotees outside the Capitol on January 6.
Last year, Tracy Slepcevic published a book called Warrior Mom about her years raising a son with autism that she blames on routine childhood vaccines. The book was endorsed by Kennedy and championed by Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser for President Donald Trump who has become a QAnon-friendly Christian nationalist and a leader within the far-right patriots movement. The Kennedy campaign sells signed copies of the book for $150 a pop. Tracy has been an ally of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vax nonprofit that Kennedy ran before entering the 2024 contest. In November, she spoke at CHD’s annual conference in Savannah, Georgia, where she hawked her book and palled around with Kennedy, a longtime peddler of Covid and vaccine misinformation. On Facebook, she declared, “Had a great time at the CHD conference in Savannah with some amazing people…I’m so blessed to be on this journey with each and every one of them.” In promoting her book and activism, she has shared platforms with Stew Peters, a far-right anti-vaxxer who has been tied to QAnon advocacy and has spread (according to the ADL) antisemitic tropes, and with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced scientist who wrote a discredited paper linking autism to vaccines.
Tracy is a regular on the far-right conspiracy circuit. In November 2022, she joined the ReAwaken America tour as a speaker. This was a traveling road show that fused Christian nationalism, QAnonism, and MAGAism. It was a feast of election denialism and assorted conspiracy theories that featured as headliners Flynn, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, conspiracy-theory-monger Alex Jones, and Lara and Eric Trump. At these events, there was much talk of demons. (At one stop, Stone proclaimed “there is a Satanic portal above the White House” that appeared after Joe Biden became president.) Last June, Tracy attended the premiere of Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening, the third in a trilogy of conspiracy theory movies produced by an independent filmmaker named Mikki Willis. The first was loaded with debunked notions about Covid and vaccinations, and Facebook and YouTube each removed the film from its platform. The third one claimed Covid lockdowns were “synchronized tyranny” concocted to control the masses, decried a “purported plot” for one-world government, and dubbed Black Lives Matter a pro-communist organization.
In February, the Slepcevics hosted what they called the “Autism Health Summit” in San Antonio. The speakers included numerous anti-vaxxers, including Willis, Judy Mikovits, another Covid conspiracy theorist, and Del Bigtree, a notorious anti-vaxxer who is now the communications director for the Kennedy campaign. Tracy has endorsed election denialism by promoting on her Facebook page 2000 Mules, the much-debunked documentary made by Dinesh D’Souza (a felon pardoned by Trump) that falsely claimed that during the 2020 election thousands of Democratic operatives were paid to illegally gather ballots and stuff them into drop boxes.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/rfk-jr-steve-tracy-slepcevic-fundraisers-trump-qanon-january-6-extermists/
Raise your hand if you're surprised.
In Georgia, a Rare Bipartisan Push for Disability Rights
Georgia could become the next state to end the subminimum wage for disabled people, a widespread and now widely opposed exception to minimum wage laws that extends to some 40,000 workers with disabilities—and the first state where such an initiative would be led by Republicans. 16 states have passed bills to end or reform the practice; in its last legislative session, which ended in March, Georgia’s state House passed what may be the seventeenth. It’s a bill that legislators are likely to pick back up when the state’s next legislative session begins in January 2025.
Georgia’s politics are fractious, with attacks by state Republicans on LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights driving divisions with state Democrats. Georgia Republicans hold majorities in both the state Senate and House of Representatives. Yet the bill to end subminimum wage in Georgia isn’t completely partisan. The bill’s lead sponsor is GOP state Rep. Sharon Cooper, who said at a committee hearing that she “just couldn’t believe that we are still allowing” the subminimum wage. One Democratic representative is co-sponsoring the bill, and none opposed its passage through the state House.
By contrast, multiple attempts to appeal the subminimum wage law at the federal level have stalled, most recently in 2023. When the United States established a federal minimum wage in 1938, it made an exception for disabled workers, allowing employers to pay them less than minimum wage—some just 22 cents an hour—through a certificate system. Many such certificate holders also operate sheltered workshops, effectively segregated workplaces that often exclusively hire disabled people earning subminimum wages, most with intellectual and developmental disabilities. There are currently just eight of these certificate holders in Georgia as of 2024, each employing as few as four to as many as 77 disabled workers.
“It frustrates me to see that a number of these sheltered workshops have executive directors or CEOs that make five-, six-figure salaries while paying people with disabilities pennies per hour,” said Dom Kelly, CEO of nonprofit New Disabled South, who also noted that the governmental entity Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities has led the charge in advocating for the change.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/georgia-republicans-bipartisan-disability-workers-sub-minimum-wage/
Fox News Uses the Solar Eclipse to Fearmonger About Migrants
With millions of Americans eagerly anticipating Monday’s total solar eclipse, Fox News delivered an ominous warning to its viewers: The dramatic celestial event presents a “real opportunity” for migrants to illegally cross the southern border.
While mainstream news coverage focuses on the eclipse’s path of totality and the potentially troublesome weather forecast, the conservative cable giant’s “hard news” programming found a way to link the event to Fox’s nearly round-the-clock fear-mongering about immigrants.
“Fox News alert! A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground,” America’s Newsroom co-anchor Dana Perino declared on Monday morning. “The southern border will be directly in the path of totality today when the moon covers the sun for nearly four minutes.”
Taking the ball from Perino and running with it, co-anchor Bill Hemmer added that officials at the border “are bracing for higher traffic than usual,” which means “a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-uses-the-solar-eclipse-to-fearmonger-about-migrant-invasion
It's gonna bring the "rapture" too. Maybe the Faux Nose folks will be caught up in that and we won't have to listen to them any more. Oh well, we can hope anyway.
Michael Flynn's Anti-Vax Pals Want to Take Over a Hospital
The sister of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and a band of conservative anti-vax activists are running for the board of a renowned public hospital in Florida under the banner of “medical freedom.”
If they win, they’ll hold a majority over Sarasota’s award-winning facility where one of their allies—elected in 2022 with two other “health freedom candidates” to the nine-member panel—is already trying to peddle vaccine misinformation.
The rogues’ gallery includes Mary Flynn O’Neill, who directs her brother’s nonprofit and routinely appears on right-wing shows with QAnon conspiracy theorists; Tanya Parus, the president of Moms For America’s Sarasota chapter and co-owner of a “freedom-based” health clinic, and Tamzin Rosenwasser, a dermatologist who once railed against the Federation of State Medical Boards’s warning to doctors who spread COVID vaccine misinformation, comparing the organization to Stalin’s secret police.
A fourth contender, Dr. Stephen Guffanti, has a longstanding grievance against the hospital, Sarasota Memorial Hospital (SMH), related to his 2021 stay there for COVID. He filed a police report alleging false imprisonment, battery and theft and has dogged the facility’s officials ever since. In speeches, Guffanti has called the COVID vaccine a “bioweapon” unleashed by the FDA and big pharma.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/michael-flynns-anti-vax-pals-want-to-take-over-this-florida-hospital
This is absolutely horrible. My daughter's friend has MS and moved to Sarasota for her health. I think this is her hospital.
Police shot Nakala Murry's young son. Now, she could lose custody of her kids
A Mississippi mom could lose custody of her three children nearly a year after a police officer shot and wounded her 11-year-old son in their home.
In a new court filing obtained by NPR, Sunflower County, Miss., officials reference the May 2023 police shooting of 11-year-old Aderrien Murry and accuse his mother, Nakala Murry, of neglecting her three children — including Aderrien, — during the domestic incident.
Aderrien had called 911 for help. He was seriously injured after Sgt. Greg Capers of the Indianola, Miss., Police Department shot him in the chest.
The court filing argues that an unnamed witness saw Nakala Murry's ex-boyfriend, John Nolden, jump on her during the May 2023 incident in front of her three children.
The filing also indicated the unnamed witness said Aderrien Murry's shooting was a "result of the mother and boyfriend domestic violence that [has] been happening for years."
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1242953901/nakala-murry-custody-rights-aderrien-murry-shooting-mississippi
Mississhitty GODDAMN!
Kristi Noem, South Dakota governor, banned from second reservation in state
Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota recently sued for promoting a cosmetic dentistry company on social media, suffered another kick in the teeth when she was banned from a second reservation home to Indigenous people.
“This person has made a lot of accusations about the tribes, about the cartel, council representatives being in bed with the cartel, stuff like that,” Robert Walters, a Cheyenne River Sioux representative, told a tribal council meeting this week, presenting a motion to ban Noem from tribal lands over allegations about crime linked to Mexican drugs gangs.
“It’s all false information. I make a motion at this time to banish her from the Cheyenne River Reservation … I believe there has to be some kind of policy set up for her to show up at these tribal meetings. She can’t just go in there and do her thing.”
Walters’ remarks were reported by ICT, an outlet covering Indigenous peoples, and the Rapid City Journal.
Noem has achieved national prominence as a supporter of Donald Trump and is widely seen as a possible vice-presidential pick. Her claims about crime and corruption on tribal lands are widely seen as a ploy to curry favour with Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/05/kristi-noem-south-dakota-governor-banned-reservation
OK, Rosebud, it's go time!
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