Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Who on this thread is throwing anything snood said away?

A follow-up to last night’s examination of the confusion among the Republicans about their budget plans: today when a reporter said to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that the chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), had said that he and McCarthy were finalizing a list of proposals to give to President Biden about spending cuts, McCarthy answered: “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Noise also continues from former president Donald Trump, who early this morning posted on social media that his indictment could lead to “potential death & destruction”; hours later, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg received a death threat in an envelope with white powder in it. For three days this week, Russian accounts have emailed bomb threats to the court buildings where the grand jury is meeting.

Tomorrow, Trump will hold a rally in Waco, Texas, where a 1993 government siege to extricate the leader of a religious cult who witnesses said was stockpiling weapons led to a gun battle and a fire that left seventy-six people dead.

Although a Republican investigation cited “overwhelming evidence” that exonerated the government of wrongdoing, right-wing talk radio hosts jumped on the events at Waco to attack the administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton. Rush Limbaugh stoked his listeners’ anger with talk of the government’s “murder” of citizens, and Alex Jones dropped out of community college to start a talk show on which he warned that the government had “murdered” the people at Waco and was about to impose martial law.

After the Waco siege the modern militia movement took off, and Trump is clearly using the anniversary to tap into domestic violence against the government to defend him in advance of possible indictments.

But will it work? His supporters turned out on January 6, 2021, when he was president and had the power—they thought—to command the army to back him. In the end, that didn’t happen. Since then, Trump’s foot soldiers have been going to prison while he dines at Mar-a-Lago and rails about how unfairly he has been treated.

Trump is also in more trouble today, as Judge Beryl Howell ruled last week that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, former top Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, former national security advisor Robert O'Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, former deputy chief of staff and social media director Dan Scavino, and former Trump aides Nick Luna and John McEntee all have to testify before the federal grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Special counsel Jack Smith had subpoenaed these members of the Trump administration, and Trump had tried to stop their testimony by claiming it was covered by executive privilege. Howell rejected that claim. In the past, she rejected a similar claim by arguing that only the current president has the right to claim executive privilege and Biden had declined to do so. Meadows is the key witness to Trump’s involvement in the events of January 6.

Also today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of so-called right-to-work legislation passed in 2012 by a Republican-controlled legislature, whose members pushed it through in a lame-duck session without hearings.

That legislation had a long history. U.S. employers had opposed workers’ unions since the organization of the National Labor Union in 1866, but the rise of international communism in the early twentieth century provoked a new level of violence against organized workers. In 1935, as part of the New Deal, Democrats passed the National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law.

The Wagner Act confirmed workers’ right to organize and to bargain with employers collectively (although to appease southern Democrats, it exempted domestic and agricultural workers, who in the South were mostly Black). It also defined unfair labor practices and established a new National Labor Relations Board that could issue cease and desist orders if workers testified that employers were engaging in them.

The Wagner Act gave workers a unified voice in American politics and leveled the playing field between them and employers. But while most Americans of both parties liked the Wagner Act, right-wing Republicans hated it because it put large sums of money into the hands of labor officials, who used the money to influence politics. And organized workers had backed Democrats since the 1860s.

So, in 1947, a Republican-led Congress pushed back against the Wagner Act. The previous year, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had launched “Operation Dixie” to organize Black workers, which seemed a threat to segregation as well as white employers. Together, business Republicans and segregationist Democrats passed the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Ohio Senator Robert Taft (who was the son of President William Howard Taft) claimed that the Taft-Hartley Act would simply equalize power between workers and employers after the “completely one-sided” Wagner Act gave all the power to labor leaders.

The Taft-Hartley Act limited the ways in which workers could organize; it also went after unions’ money. Although the Wagner Act had established that if a majority of a company’s workers voted to join a union, that union would represent all the workers in the company, it didn’t require all the workers to join that union. That presented a problem: if workers were going to get the benefits of union representation without joining, why should they bother to pay dues?

So labor leaders began to require that everyone employed in a unionized company must pay into the union to cover the cost of bargaining, whether or not they joined the union.

The Taft-Hartley Act undermined this workaround by permitting states to get rid of the requirement that employees who didn’t join a union that represented them must pay fees to the union.

Immediately, states began to pass so-called right-to-work laws. Their supporters argued that every man should have the right to bargain for his work on whatever terms he wanted, without oversight by a union. But lawmakers like Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who pushed a right-to-work law in his own state, were clear that they were intent on breaking the power of organized workers. He was determined to destroy the political power of unions because, he said, their leaders were stealing American freedom. They were, he said, “more dangerous than Soviet Russia.”

Michigan had been known as a pro-union state, but in 2012, Republicans there pushed through two right-to-work laws over waves of protest. Repealing the laws has been a priority for Democrats, and now that they are in control of state government, they have made it happen.

Joey Cappelletti of the Associated Press notes that twenty-six states currently have right to work laws, and although Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law in 2017, it has been 58 years since a state repealed one. Indiana voters repealed theirs in 1965; Republicans put it back into place in 2012.

Republicans say that since the neighboring states of Indiana and Wisconsin have right-to-work laws—although there were huge protests when those laws went into place in 2012 and 2015—Michigan’s repeal of right to work will make that state less attractive to employers.

But after signing the law today, Governor Whitmer embraced a different vision for the state, saying: "Today, we are coming together to restore workers' rights, protect Michiganders on the job, and grow Michigan's middle class."

When does a State Guard turn into a personal army? With DeSantis, Florida may find out | Opinion

Gee, just what Florida needs: a bloated, expensive State Guard with boats, planes and helicopters, possible cell-phone hacking powers, the ability to arrest and carry arms and a $10 million headquarters, all in a force that can be called up only by the governor. That’s the latest proposal coming out of Tallahassee in a session where lawmakers never seem to reach rock bottom in their scraping obeisance to Gov. DeSantis. They call it a civilian defense force, but this is a personal army in everything but name, a scary proposition in a state that is already using governmental power to squelch dissent and target vulnerable groups. Voters across the country should take serious note if they’re considering the Florida governor as their potential standard bearer in the 2024 presidential election.

But what is our excuse in South Florida? Many here have experience with strongman-style governments in other countries and have seen first-hand what this sort of dangerous concentration of power in a single person can do. We, who should know better, seem blind to the threat. The proposal to expand the State Guard, after DeSantis brought it back last year in a much more modest way, is excessive in the extreme. Why go from 400 members to 1,500? Or increase the budget to almost $100 million? Why do we need a $750,000 contract with the Israeli company Cellebrite to create a new “Digital Forensic Center of Excellence” to go after human trafficking and drug and child exploitation crimes? Don’t forget the other stuff we would all be paying for if House Bill 1285 gets approved: six boats and tow vehicles, $49.5 million for planes and helicopters and, this one takes the cake, $22.7 million just to store those vehicles. Under the bill, the scope of the guard would also be expanded — not just for emergencies but also to “protect and defend the people of Florida from threats to public safety.”

Why do we need any of this? Just last month, DeSantis made a claim that would seem to run counter to the whole idea. He bragged during a visit to New York that “our crime rate is at a 50-year low.” Subsequent reporting showed that his claim was muddied — a lot — by the fact that national data collection on crime run by the FBI was moving to a new method of collection right before the pandemic, so numbers from one year to the next couldn’t be considered comparable. There were other complications: DeSantis was using “major crime” as a measure, and comparing one city (New York City) to a whole state. There’s a lot more to that discussion, but let’s just say he’s right. Why, if crime is at a half-century low, do we need this big expansion of a state-run police arm? In DeSantis’ original pitch to bring back the Florida Guard, he said the 400 members would supplement the state’s overworked Florida National Guard. That was only last year.

What has changed so dramatically since then to require all the shiny new hardware and vastly expanded police presence? Yes, there have been migrant surges, but even at their height earlier this year, Florida was far from being overwhelmed. We still have police forces in cities and counties. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is still operational. The National Guard still exists, as does the U.S. Coast Guard. We even have the governor’s much vaunted elections police, who have used their mighty power to crack down on something like 20 people, with a number of the charges eventually dropped. No, the one thing that has really changed in all of this is that DeSantis is planning to run for president. He’s trying to out law-and-order Donald Trump. And Florida is his personal lab experiment.

Legislators, of course, should provide a check on the overweening ambitions of this governor. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. But they won’t. Do they have any limits, any line they won’t let the governor cross? It doesn’t look like it. In the end, it may be up to voters across the country to say, as they did with Trump: Enough.

A deaf Florida woman may hit the city of Austin, Texas with a lawsuit after she was arrested and jailed during her three-hour layover at Austin-Berg­strom International Airport in September of 2022, The Austin Chronicle reports.

When Karen McGee, 71, discovered there was another plane at her gate headed to the same destination, according to The Austin Chronicle, she asked a ticket agent "if she could switch her ticket to this flight."

Although she had difficulty understanding the agent "because her hearing aids weren't working well," she "understood the answer was no" and proceeded to ask another agent, who phoned the police.

After McGee was "placed in a wheelchair" and arrested, she was taken to Travis County Jail.

The Austin Chronicle reports:

At the jail, McGee said, she was shoved against a wall as officers stripped off her clothes, and she screamed, 'Not my ring!' when officers began to remove it. She said an officer then told her something she did not understand, she asked, 'What?' and in response a different officer twisted her handcuffs with enough force to break her arm.

Rebecca Webber, McGee's lawyer, said the airport agent who "read McGee a trespass warning" prior to her arrest, didn't "get down on her level at all, which is the only way to get her to hear you."

She continued, "If they had any training about how hearing aids work they would know that in a loud area she won't be able to distinguish just one voice. The person needs to get down on her level, speak slowly, and then she'll be able to put it all together."

McGee "awoke in a jail cell with her clothes back on, but inside out," with an aching arm — on which she had surgery — and was only given Aleve for the pain, before she was able to reach her husband and spend the night in a hotel.

According to The Austin Chronicle, Travis County Attorney Delia Garza decided not to prosecute.

But lawmakers like Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who pushed a right-to-work law in his own state, were clear that they were intent on breaking the power of organized workers.

When a stubborn pain in Nick van Terheyden’s bones would not subside, his doctor had a hunch what was wrong.

Without enough vitamin D in the blood, the body will pull that vital nutrient from the bones. Left untreated, a vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis.

A blood test in the fall of 2021 confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis, and van Terheyden expected his company’s insurance plan, managed by Cigna, to cover the cost of the bloodwork. Instead, Cigna sent van Terheyden a letter explaining that it would not pay for the $350 test because it was not “medically necessary.”

The letter was signed by one of Cigna’s medical directors, a doctor employed by the company to review insurance claims.

Something about the denial letter did not sit well with van Terheyden, a 58-year-old Maryland resident. “This was a clinical decision being second-guessed by someone with no knowledge of me,” said van Terheyden, a physician himself and a specialist who had worked in emergency care in the United Kingdom.

The vague wording made van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case.

Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people...

An overview of the cases so far
Number of people charged, federal: 994
Number of people charged, D.C.: 24
Number of people who have pleaded guilty: 541
Number of individuals who have had jury or bench trials: 67
The number convicted on all charges: 42
The number acquitted on all charges: 1
The number with mixed verdicts: 24
Number of people sentenced: 445
The percentage of people sentenced who have received prison time: 58
The median sentence for those who received prison time, in days: 60
The prison sentence range: 7 days to 10 years
The number of cases dismissed: 5 federal; 8 D.C. Superior Court

45 was gonna pardon them all, i heard...