BC GOVERNMENT
Saved by @Alex1Powell

1/ How do we prevent the next grifter-in-chief and stop Congress from enabling criminals in government?

 2/ Trump and McConnell are both pushing pardons. Trump wants pardons for his criminal cronies, enablers, and children. McConnell wants pardons for meat packing plants and corporate criminals.
3/ Although past presidents have had family members working for them - Attorney General Bobby Kennedy is a famous example - none have ever had to pardon their family members for criminal activity in the White House. Until Trump.
4/ Trump’s family of grifters have been extracting money from our government and the American people since day one, starting with the inaugural fund scandal. Just since he lost the election. Trump has raised over $170, million: the grift continues!
5/ Trump has sold out our country and our values. He’s given top-secret information to foreign adversaries, embraced dictators and autocrats around the world, and enthusiastically damaged our relationships with allies. It’s almost as if he’s working for a foreign government.
6/ Now we are experiencing 9/11 death rates every single day caused by a virus Trump refused to save America from. Why did he let a quarter million people die and several million become severely disabled from Covid? Incompetence, treason, or a new grift?
7/ Our healthcare system is collapsing; except for the wealthy person‘s stock market, the economy is shredded; and every day average people across America are getting multiple fundraising appeals from Trump.
8/ Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell wants America’s worst corporations pardoned for forcing workers into situations that cause death and disability, both from Covid and other conditions. And he’s holding Covid aid hostage until he gets his corporate pardons.
9/ With very few exceptions, pretty much every elected Republican in the country is supporting both these men in their corrupt pardon demands. Which is crazy.
10/ Since Reagan, Republican ideology has had at its core the fantasy that corporate behavior should never be regulated; when corporations do bad things, the marketplace will punish them so government regulations are unnecessary.
11/ It’s crazy, of course, but it’s the excuse Mitch McConnell is using to say that big corporations in America like meat packing plants and warehouses should not be held responsible if they make decisions that cause their employees to get sick or die.
12/ McConnell’s demanding pardons for corporate criminality in the Covid relief is as obscene as Trump preemptively pardoning his children and criminal co-conspirators. Republicans screamed for years about Bill Clinton pardoning Mark Rich, but now? Crickets.
13/ Trump and McConnell are revealing the true essence of what the Republican Party has become since radical right-wingers took it over with the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1981.
14/ In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich doubled down on the new Republican grift with his Contract on America, where 6 of his 10 points were variations on tax cuts for rich people and his giant corporate funders. Gingrich is now in deep with Trump’s new email fundraising grift.
15/ Republicans’ Reaganomics grift poisoned our air and water and froze workers’ wages for 40 years, while making CEOs and GOP politicians like David Purdue mind-bogglingly rich, all rationalized by a rightwing echo chamber so most Americans didn’t realized how poisonous it is.
16/ Now the GOP’s “Government can’t do anything” grift is out in the open; it’s killed a quarter-million Americans, and led to open, naked, unabashed criminality in the White House, where even second- and third-level functionaries proudly flaunt the Hatch Act and election law.
17/ Trump wants his pardons for himself and his family and criminal buddies; McConnell wants his pardons for the corporations that give him money. Both will probably get away with it, but we need to make sure this level of corruption and criminality never happens again.
18/ After Trump leaves office, we need to revisit the 1970s when Congress passed multiple laws regulating money in politics to protect American from criminals in the White House like Nixon and Agnew. This is so much worse: Congress must act!

More from Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ When will America wake up to the evil that has seized the Republican Party?

2/ We’ve seen it around the world and throughout history: when a political party or government exists solely to serve the very wealthy, and begins to lose power, they inevitably turn to authoritarianism and police violence.

3/ We saw this in Florida when Gov. Ron DeSantis sent State police with guns drawn to intimidate the family of whistleblower Rebekah Jones, who he’d earlier fired for refusing to lie about Florida coronavirus statistics and is publishing a daily “Florida coronavirus dashboard.“

4/ We see it with Donald Trump committing a felony for which you or I would immediately go to prison, trying to tamper with the outcome of a legitimate election by threats, intimidation, and offering bribes to government officials.

5/ We see it in Michigan where the Macomb County GOP seems to share an address with the group that showed up, armed, to threaten and intimidate the Secretary of State and her four-year-old son as they were preparing to watch “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”
POLITICS
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ The Nightmare Scenario SCOTUS is Plotting For the 2024 Election Takeover:

2/ Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced — a story that has largely flown under the nation’s political radar — that they’ll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.

3/ Here’s how one aspect of it could work out, if they go along with the GOP’s arguments that will be before the Court this October:

4/ It’s November, 2024, and the presidential race between Biden and DeSantis has been tabulated by the states and called by the networks. Biden won 84,355,740 votes to DeSantis’ 77,366,412, clearly carrying the popular vote.

5/ But the popular vote isn’t enough: George W. Bush lost to Al Gore by a half-million votes and Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes but both ended up in the White House. What matters is the Electoral College vote, and that looks good for Biden, too.
ALL
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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ Rebuilding trust in democracy and our American government requires both holding seditious Republicans accountable and restoring the protective functions of government. Here’s what Democrats must do and why. (THREAD)

2/ The reason tens of millions of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden won the election is a 40-year betrayal of the American public’s trust by Republican politicians, grifters, and con artists exploiting the once-good name of Lincoln‘s Party.

3/ Science, religion, and conspiracy theories are all, essentially the same thing: systems or attempts to explain the unknown, to make sense out of things beyond our senses or immediate, touchable reality. Thus, our vulnerability to con artists like Trump.

4/ It’s impossible for any individual to know or understand everything. We believe electrons make our computers work, but for all but a few scientists who’ve actually seen and measured electrons, it’s only a belief. We must trust their word.

5/ This is why trust is central to science, and why scientific norms and institutions require multiple layers and dimensions of confirmation before things are asserted as true or even probable.
DEMOCRACY
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ It’s time to defund the GOP. In yesterday‘s rant, I laid out all the reasons why Democrats should put at the top of their priority list “defunding the Republican Party.“ Here’s a little background, and how to do it. (THREAD)

2/ Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party. While the Republican party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions.

3/ So Ronald Reagan, as part of his “Reagan Revolution,“ figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America’s unions. His first shot was to destroy Patco, the air traffic controller‘s union, and he did it in less than a week in August, 1981.

4/ He, with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court than embarked on an eight-year campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus wiping out the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.

5/ It worked, and by 1992 American union membership, and their ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party had to take money from giant corporations and billionaires to prevail in that election year.
FOR LATER READ
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartmann
1/ Mitch McConnell wants to let corporations kill you without consequence. (THREAD)

2/ Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence.

3/ Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.

4/ Mitch refused to even allow the Senate to discuss the HEROES Act until or unless the legislation also legalized corporations killing their workers and customers. To this day, he refuses to let it even be discussed in the Senate.

5/ We’ve seen companies fire people for refusing to take their lives in their hands, executives organize betting pools on which employees are going to die first, and companies lying openly to their workers and customers about the dangers of COVID-19.
FOR LATER READ

More from Government

The SNP
The SNP
@theSNP
First Minister @NicolaSturgeon: "Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us today. I've got quite a lot to cover in my opening remarks today so please bear with me, but it's all by way of important and, I hope, useful update to you."

NS: "First of all, to today's statistics. The total number of positive cases reported yesterday was 2,649."

NS: "That is 11.3% of the total number of tests carried out, and the total number of confirmed cases is now 143,715."

NS: "660 of the new cases are in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, 389 in Lanarkshire, 357 in Lothian and 302 in Tayside. The remaining cases are across 9 other health board areas."

NS: "I can also confirm that 1,467 people are currently in hospital. That is an increase of 83 from yesterday."
GOVERNMENT
@amuse
@amuse
@amuse
CAPITOL RIOT QUESTIONS FOR SPEAKER PELOSI: There is no group in America more interested in the safety and security of the Capitol than members of Congress. To that end, members have asked @SpeakerPelosi to answer these basic questions:

1/ What was your role in authorizing or denying National Guard support before and after Jan. 6?

2/ Reps. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Comer R-Ky., on Feb. 15 asked you five pointed questions about your role in Jan. 6 and your preservation and compliance with document requests. Will you answer them?

3/ After the 2011 shooting of now-former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., what changed with regard to security?

4/ After the shooting of Republican House Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., were any changes made to security?
GOVERNMENT
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Stephen Wolfe
Stephen Wolfe
@PerfInjust
Thread:
I'm thinking about Tim Keller's influence.

There is the curious fact that Keller is well-regarded among the culture elite (or at least has not suffered the sort of vilification one might expect given his influence). How can we explain this?

Looking at Prodigal God and other writings, you see that his approach to urban ministry is deeply political in a way that appeals to Democrat-heavy cities. It involves two moves:

1) equalizing sins: elevating the sin of hypocrisy, "moralism," and "religion" (the sins of "conservatives") and equating these with the sins tolerated among liberal (e.g., homosexuality)
&
2) emphasizing "self-righteousness" as a sort of chief sin (the sin of "red states").

Keller effectively downplays the sins that liberals tolerate while elevating the sins of their political enemies, the red state conservatives.

But the greatest appeal to liberals is that critiquing the "self-righteous" vilifies political action, particularly the action of social conservatives (e.g., anti-gay marriage). And the equalization of sins eases concerns over changes in social policy (e.g., gay marriage).
HEALTH , GOVERNMENT
stephen fowler
stephen fowler
@stphnfwlr
NEW: the Georgia House Special Committee on Election Integrity is meeting at 3 this afternoon and just added HB 531 - a 48 page omnibus elections bill that proposes a *lot* of changes. #gapol

Here's the text:

First, it would ban county elections offices from receiving outside funding to run elections.

This, after CTCL and Schwarzenegger gave money to both D and R counties in 2020 to help with pandemic.

(although I wonder if the county gov't could take the grant, then disburse?)


Next, it outlines ways that poll workers can serve adjacent counties (currently, you can only work in your county of residence)


This section mirrors an SOS-backed bill from 2020 that would require more machines, more poll workers or splitting up precincts if a 2,000+ person precinct has lines of more than an hour.

More on that proposal: https://t.co/7BfIcrI81q


This is an anti-Fulton County mobile voting bus section

(although I still believe that it's using the wrong code section since the busses are for *early* voting and fall under 21-2-382)
GOVERNMENT
Youyang Gu
Youyang Gu
@youyanggu
Which metric is a better predictor of the severity of the fall surge in US states?

1) Margin of Democrat victory in Nov 2020 election
or
2) % infected through Sep 1, 2020

Can you guess which plot is which?


The left plot is based on the % infected through Sep 1, 2020. You can see that there is very little correlation with the % infected since Sep 1.

However, there is a *strong* correlation when using the margin of Biden's victory (right).

Infections % from https://t.co/WcXlfxv3Ah.


This is the strongest single variable I've seen in being able to explain the severity of this most recent wave in each state.

Not past infections / existing immunity, population density, racial makeup, latitude / weather / humidity, etc.

But political lean.

One can argue that states that lean Democrat are more likely to implement restrictions/mandates.

This is valid, so we test this by using the Government Stringency Index made by @UniofOxford.

We also see a correlation, but it's weaker (R^2=0.36 vs 0.50).

https://t.co/BxBBKwW6ta


To avoid look-ahead bias/confounding variables, here is the same analysis but using 2016 margin of victory as the predictor. Similar results.

This basically says that 2016 election results is a better predictor of the severity of the fall wave than intervention levels in 2020!
GOVERNMENT

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Nanganallur Anjaneya Temple
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Bhaktha Anjaneya temple at Nanganallur in Chennai is one among tallest Anjaneyar Vigraham. Here Anjaneyar blesses with relief to all illness. Vigraham is about 32 feet height made of single  stone.
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