DL Open Thread: Saturday, May 15, 2021
So-Called Police Accountability Task Force Votes Against Police Accountability. Just the way Speaker Peter drew it up:
- FAILED – Create policies creating civilian review boards for police agencies
- FAILED – Review the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights
- FAILED – Review Collective Bargaining Agreements, in particular their relationship with Freedom of Information Act requests
That’s how you kill police reform in Delaware. Publicly announce that you’re serious about it. Then fill a task force full of cops and police groupies, and let them kill it. Nothing will change until the House leadership changes. Three leadership positions, two cops/one legislator who depends on the cops for her job. Oh, and an ex-cop to head the Task Force. Garbage in, garbage out.
Netanyahu’s ‘Wag The Dog’ War Appears To Have Worked. For Netanyahu. Nobody else:
Mr. Netanyahu, whose career seemed threatened in recent weeks after a fourth indecisive election, oddly stood to benefit from the crisis, which has sidelined concerns about Israel’s political gridlock. The crisis also has given momentum to Hamas, the militant group in Gaza that does not recognize Israel’s legitimacy.
An irredeemably evil man.
How To Deal With Trolls Masquerading As Reporters:
AOC Being Harassed By Marjorie Taylor Greene In 2019. You simply must watch that video from Andrew Kaczynski. This woman is insane and dangerous. She must be thrown out of Congress.
Trump Targeted Immigration Lawyers At Border:
Taylor Levy couldn’t understand why she’d been held for hours by Customs and Border Protection officials when crossing back into El Paso, Texas, after getting dinner with friends in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in January 2019. And she didn’t know why she was being questioned by an agent who’d introduced himself as a counterterrorism specialist.
Levy was part of the legal team representing the father of a girl who’d died the previous month in the custody of the Border Patrol, which is part of CBP. “There was so much hate for immigration lawyers at that time,” she recalled. “I thought that somebody had put in an anonymous tip that I was a terrorist.”
Not even Nixon was this Nixonian.
Yep, Dark Money Group Wrote Those Voter Suppression Bills:
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
The leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. It’s no coincidence that so many GOP-controlled states are rushing to pass similar pieces of legislation in such a short period of time.
Horse Racing, Medication And The Derby. Does this sound inhumane to you? It does to me.
Buccini/Pollin Hits Yet Another Jackpot: Welcome To Riverfront East. I think they should just name it The Landed Gentry, as in gentrification, which will be the inevitable result.
What do you want to talk about?
Mayor Mike specifically said the land is brownfields so no gentrification will be necessary.
And really, where’s all this supposed gentrification in Wilmington? I don’t see any stampede to remake the existing parts of the city. For nearly 40 years now they’ve been focused on building up the riverfront and ignoring the rest.
I suppose it would be ridiculous to point out that with all this investment, they still haven’t fixed a sewer system that discharges sewage into the Christina whenever rainfall exceeds 1/10th of an inch. No new taxable property in that, I suppose.
That’s a good point. The neighborhoods have largely been ignored in favor of the Riverfront Development.
Of course you could do both. But that’s not what they’ve done.
Re: Horse racing. It’s all true. It’s also true that the immature bodies of young gymnasts and football players are exploited for profit. We don’t call that child labor because, conveniently, if you don’t pay someone, what they’re doing isn’t labor.
In theory, you have parents looking out for the children. In theory.
The horses, though, man, with all the horses dying at certain tracks across the country, I wonder if it’s time to put the sport…out to pasture.
I know you’ve been to the track a few times. What do you think?
I think animal rights activism will ultimately put an end to it, but not for years to come.
There’s no national oversight of racing — it’s done state by state, and recent attempts to impose national standards is being fought in court by state racing boards.
Racing will always exist in some places — animal rights activists might win in England and the U.S., but horse racing is an international industry. The Arab states will never give it up, and Japan and South American aren’t exactly animal-rights sensitive.
Only tradition keeps it alive in the U.S., and if traditions lasted forever we would all belong to the Shriners, the Elks or the Internal Order of Odd Fellows.
I just stumbled on this great article on horse racing. Not only will people learn a lot, but it’s really fun to read:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/24/can-horse-racing-survive
Marjorie Taylor Greene got illegal tax break by hiding second Georgia residence:
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/fulton-county/investigation-marjorie-taylor-greene-filed-homestead-exemptions-2-homes-violating-state-law/IXIQMH5PBFBGLCFF5ZV44QC6XY/
Only comment on this State News article — https://baytobaynews.com/stories/state-ramping-up-vaccinations-as-many-places-as-we-can,48108 — about Delaware ramping up vaccinations in places with low rates of getting the shot:
“SAD! Now they want to INJECT their Warp-Speed PHONY FAKE DEADLY WARPED Poison into children???? SICKENING!!!!”
You can’t reason with these people, truly. How does our society continue functioning with people like this?
I choose to read it as satire.
Butcher Boy Bibi can now update his resume on innocents and children killed and maimed by his legions of doom. “Wag the dog” hell Butcher Ben has killed the dog and is feeding it to his adoring public. Deranged would be too kind a word to describe this malevolent excuse for a human.
At least 145 Palestinians, including 41 children, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Monday. Some 950 others have been wounded. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have killed at least 13 Palestinians.
Representative John Kowalko
F FOP Frank!!!
That is all!