DL Open Thread: Saturday, February 6, 2021
Biden To Trump: ‘No Briefings For You’. One less opportunity for him to monetize his Presidency. BTW, the President is the sole arbiter as to whether Trump is entitled to briefings.
RWNJ Boebert Apparently Paid Off Restaurant Liens By Collecting Phony Travel Reimbursements. The liens, as you might expect, were for not funding unemployment insurance.
Biden Lining Up Nominees For Judgeships. He gave D senators a ‘hard deadline’ of January 19 for submitting names.
Complaint: Hordes Threatened Hawley Family–With A Copy Of The Constitution. ‘Whataboutism’ at its most impotent.
Who Can Defeat DeSantis? This entire Florida Democratic Party must be rebuilt.
‘Petro-Masculinity’: Yet Another Oily Byproduct Of US Energy Policy:
What, then, explains the political power of fossil fuels? Hefty political donations and the long-term need for some supply of the fuels, albeit paired with some kind of technology to capture emissions, only tell part of the story. The industry, especially in the U.S., also serves as an avatar for a certain kind of cultural worldview, one that resonates with tough-guy masculinity and patriarchal families.
In 2011, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that white males were overrepresented among people who denied the reality of climate change. Researchers attributed the phenomenon to a desire to “protect their cultural identity.”
“Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it,” the study’s authors wrote. “Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.”
235 Seditionists Arrested–And Counting. This finding from the University Of Chicago:
Political scientists at the University of Chicago who studied the profiles of arrestees and published their conclusions in the Atlantic found that many were middle-class and middle-aged – with an average age of 40. Almost 90% of them had no known links with militant groups. Some 40% were business owners or with white-collar jobs, and they came from relatively lucrative backgrounds as “CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants”.
The one common denominator uniting this large group is not any extremist group, website or media outlet, but an individual – Donald Trump. This is why the connection between the pending impeachment trial and the ongoing FBI roundup of suspects is so critical.
Doesn’t look like the ‘Trump told me to do it’ defense will fly. But some will try.
Redding Consortium: Educational Reform Can’t Wait:
(Jea) Street pointed to stunningly low proficiency scores among students in the Christina School District to further bolster the need for these investments.
“What is happening in the city of Wilmington is an outrage,” he said. “Just in the Christina School District, you’ve got a subject matter in the school where 0-point-something percent of the students have met the standard, less than 10% meeting the standards across the board.”
(Sen. Tizzy) Lockman said discussions are ongoing with the governor’s office on how to best implement these priorities. If funding wasn’t available for all of the initiatives, she wasn’t yet ready to prioritize.
“It’s 2% of the overall education budget. We think that these are all things that deserve to be immediately prioritized in order to get heading in the direction we want to,” she told WDEL.
A spokesman for Governor John Carney said he looks forward to discussing the Redding Consortium’s recommendations with lawmakers.
Bold leadership. Not.
What do you want to talk about?
Not surprised at all that police and the military were involved and arrested, both are authoritarian groups and both have an us vs. them mentality. But a few arrests will change nothing, call me back when their cooling their heels in jail. Would love to see charges filed against politicians like Hawley who clearly advocated overthrowing the election, hoping to see charges against the protestors at his house thrown out, that pesky first amendment thing don’t ya’ know. Finally you know that Trump would remain Putin’s channel to state secrets and intelligence, especially if a few million came Trump’s way.
Trump’s Election Falsehoods Have Already Cost Taxpayers $519 Mill–And Counting:
The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.
Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/cost-trump-election-fraud/?itid=hp-top-table-main-24