DL Open Thread: Friday, January 12, 2024

Rethug Governors Reject Food Aid For Children.  Inflicting pain is the point:

More than eight million children in 15 states, all led by Republican governors, will be shut out of a new federal food assistance program intended to help needy families during the summer months.

Set to begin this summer, the new program provides low-income families $120 per eligible child, which can be used to purchase food at grocery stores, farmers markets or other sanctioned retailers when such assistance is not available in schools.

This week, the federal Agriculture Department announced that 35 states, all five U.S. territories and four tribal nations, mostly in Oklahoma, had signed up for the program, which provides a total of $2.5 billion in federal funds for an estimated 21 million children whose families already qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

The 35 states included the ones led by Democratic governors, and a dozen led by Republican governors from all parts of the country.  But 15 Republican-led states said no. Some of those governors voiced concerns about the mechanics and administrative costs of implementation; some indicated that they had ideological objections, and a lack of faith in the federal government.

They didn’t cite not wanting Biden to get credit for a program that helps kids.  But you know it was part of what passes for their thinking.

Is World War III Underway?  I’d say no, but the widening of this skirmish can’t be good:

A U.S.-led militarycoalitionstruck Iran-aligned Houthi militants in Yemen on Thursday, a dramatic escalation after the group ignored repeatedwarnings from the Biden administration and other governments to stop attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

The operation follows weeks of hostility as the Houthis, protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, have disrupted global trade by making the vital passage a dangerous place for ships to transit. The group, which functions as the de facto government in parts of Yemen, has carried out at least 27 attacks since November, officials have said, leading to repeated altercations as the United States and partner nations have surged warships into the region to protect against the incoming fire.

If Only Biden Wouldn’t Charge Them With Murder…Gov. Abbott and his Texas militia would shoot migrants on sight:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said his state continued to use “every tool” in its arsenal to stop migration along its border with Mexico but added that the only thing his officers weren’t doing was “shooting people who come across the border.”

“We are using every tool that can be used, from building a border wall, to building these border barriers to passing this law that I signed that led to another lawsuit by the Biden administration, where I signed a law making it illegal for somebody to enter Texas from another country,” Abbott said on a podcast with former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch last week.

“The only thing that we’re not doing,” the governor added, “is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

Thanks for clearing that up.

Thinking Of Donating To The NRA?  Here’s how Wayne LaPierre and his accomplices hid his NRA-funded luxurious lifestyle from the members:

At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Trace and ProPublica. The recording was unknown to New York’s attorney general, who is pursuing the NRA and LaPierre over a range of alleged financial misdeeds. It shows, in real time, the NRA’s treasurer enlisting the group’s longtime public relations firm to obfuscate the extravagant costs.

Captured on tape is talk of LaPierre’s desire to avoid public disclosure of his use of private jets as well as concern about persistent spending at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a PR executive and close LaPierre adviser.

During the meeting, which took place in the Alexandria, Virginia, office of PR firm Ackerman McQueen, executives agreed that Ackerman would issue a Platinum American Express card to Tyler Schropp, the new head of the NRA’s nascent advancement division, which was responsible for bringing in high-dollar contributions from wealthy donors. Ackerman would then cover the card’s charges and bill them back to the NRA under nondescript invoices.

The use of the Ackerman American Express card, according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ expert witness on nonprofits, skirted internal controls that existed to ensure proper disclosure and regulatory compliance and to prevent “fraud and abuse” at the nonprofit. As a result, outside of a tiny group of NRA insiders, everyone was in the dark about years of charges by Schropp — who is still the head of the nonprofit’s advancement division — for luxury accommodations, including regular sojourns to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton. The NRA, in response, said the report was “rife with inadmissible factual narratives, impermissible interpretations and inferences, and improper factual and legal conclusions.”

Sounds like a textbook definition of ‘non-denial denial’ to me.

Dog Bites Man: Big Oil Launches Climate Disinformation Campaign:

Launched Tuesday by the nation’s top fossil fuel interest group, the Lights on Energy campaign will work to “dismantle policy threats” to the sector, American Petroleum Institute CEO, Mike Sommers, told CNN in an interview this week.

The ad blitz—which uses images of farm vehicles, footballers under floodlights, and concertgoers holding phones lit up —comes after US oil production reached a record high in 2023, which was also the hottest year ever recorded. “We’re already moving in the wrong direction on fossil fuels,” said Timmons Roberts, professor of environment and sociology at Brown University. “They want to push us further.”

Roberts said the new ad blitz is rife with the kinds of “discourses of climate delay” that the fossil fuel industry commonly uses to thwart climate action, as documented in a 2020 study he co-authored on the topic. A video ad posted on Tuesday, for instance, says “demand for energy is growing and so is the need for American oil and natural gas,” positioning the sector as essential to continued human flourishing—a form of discourse Roberts and his co-authors call an “appeal to wellbeing.”

Dirty Police Officer Seeks To Have Conviction Overturned Because Of LEOBOR.  He, of course, had every right to shoot that guy and to lie about it:

A former Wilmington police officer convicted of crimes related to dishonesty has argued that secrecy built into Delaware’s police disciplinary laws should invalidate his criminal convictions.

MacColl is appealing that conviction, citing the vast protections Delaware police have to hide from the public information that shows how local departments investigate and handle allegations of dishonesty and abuse within their ranks − protections that have been the subject of debate and reform in recent years.

On Wednesday, the Delaware Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the evidence that built the case should have been kept secret under constitutional protections against self-incrimination, as well as Delaware’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, a controversial law that blocks public disclosure of how Delaware police handle misconduct allegations.

There is it folks, right out in the open.  LEOBOR effectively turns Delaware into a Police State. Regardless of how this turns out, the virtual license to kill and to lie about it is part of LEOBOR, and will continue until Our PAL Val, who owes her ‘other’ job to the police, is out of power and hopefully out of office.

The REV gets a new job.  Should be–interesting.  But the podcast is the same circle-jerk.  Until Madinah comes on about…waiting, waiting…23 minutes in.

What do you want to talk about?