And another day of things you didn’t know about BBB, turning outrage into power, reminders, refusals, avoiding paying taxes, the debt limit hike, statues, criminalizing hate speech, suing Facebook over genocide, a huge Amazon outage, and a 14-year-old having “a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends” comes to a close:
“Is anyone surprised at how corrupt this country really is?” -- Regina Marston
“We cannot have a system where a current president can’t be prosecuted, and then, because we don’t want to look backward, the former president can’t be prosecuted; that they’re somehow too big to jail.” — Laurence Tribe
“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Deaths
US: 812,205 (+1959)
World: 5,286,528 (+8930)
Cases
US: 50,270,136 (+121,456)
World: 267,388,164 (+695,340)
10 things you didn't know are in the Democrats' Build Back Better bill:
$900 tax credit for purchasing an e-bike
$35 cap on insulin costs
12 months of Medicaid coverage for new moms
Extra assistance for the jobless to buy health insurance
Tax credits for local news outlets
College completion grants
Public housing repairs
Salmon conservation
National parks and forests preservation
Funds for lower-income families to buy food over the summer
Turning outrage into power: How far right is changing GOP. The path to power for Republicans in Congress is now rooted in the capacity to generate outrage. The alarming language, and the fundraising haul it increasingly produces, is another example of how Donald Trump, the former president, has left his mark on politics, changing the way Republicans rise to influence and authority.
Trump Just Wanted to Remind America that He Committed Obstruction of Justice. “If I didn’t fire Comey, they were looking to take down the president of the United States,” the former president said Sunday as he admitted to a crime…Trump is pretty clearly saying here that he fired Comey because the FBI was investigating his administration’s ties to Russia. This is obstruction of justice, regardless of whether Trump believes the investigation was being carried out by a “hornet’s nest” of crooked Deep State actors.
“When you can repeatedly confess your crimes on national television for years without any consequences you are officially above the law.” — Don Winslow
Mark Meadows to halt cooperation with January 6 committee. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows will no longer cooperate with the House select committee investigating January 6 insurrection, according to a letter from his attorney to the panel…Meadows' about-face is due in part to learning over the weekend that the committee had "issued wide ranging subpoenas for information from a third party communications provider," the letter notes.
Jan. 6 panel threatens contempt vote after Meadows withdraws. The leaders of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection are threatening to hold former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress after his lawyer said Tuesday that his client will cease cooperating with the panel. -- Stop threatening to do it and just do it for fuck’s sake.
These Real Estate and Oil Tycoons Avoided Paying Taxes for Years. Donald Trump and other ultrarich Americans have earned billions, but they’ve also managed to repeatedly avoid paying any federal income tax by claiming huge losses on their businesses. He is among a subset of the ultrarich who take advantage of owning businesses that generate enormous tax deductions that then flow through to their personal tax returns. Many of them are in commercial real estate or oil and gas, industries that have been granted unusual advantages in the American tax code, which allow the ultrawealthy to take tax losses even on profitable enterprises. Manhattan apartment towers that are soaring in value can be turned into sinkholes for tax purposes. A massively profitable natural gas pipeline company can churn out Texas-sized write-offs for its billionaire owner. By being able to generate losses — effectively, by being the biggest losers — these Americans are the most effective income-tax avoiders among the ultrawealthy, ProPublica’s analysis of tax data found. While ProPublica has shown that some of the country’s absolute wealthiest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, occasionally sidestep federal income tax entirely, this group does it year in and year out…The techniques used by these billionaires to generate losses are generally legal. Loopholes for fossil-fuel businesses date back practically to the income tax’s birth in the early 20th century. Carve-outs for real estate and oil and gas have withstood sporadic efforts at reform by Congress in part because there has been widespread support for investment in housing and energy. The commercial real estate and fossil fuel breaks have enabled some of the wealthiest Americans to escape federal income taxes for long stretches of time. Sometimes they amass such large losses that they cannot use all of them in a given year. When that happens, they fill up reservoirs of deductions that they then draw down bit by bit to wipe away taxes in future years. Before ProPublica’s analysis of its trove of tax data, the extent of this type of avoidance among the nation’s wealthiest was not known.
6 states account for more than half of the country’s recent Covid hospitalizations. Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois accounted for the majority of the nation’s increase in patients hospitalized with Covid.
Judge blocks Biden vaccine mandate for federal contractors. A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Joe Biden’s administration from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees of federal contractors, the latest in a string of victories for Republican-led states pushing back against Biden’s pandemic policies.
Thousands of service members miss Covid vaccination deadlines. The deadline is looming for the Army, while it has passed for other service branches. Some who have not received the shots could see their military careers come to an end. -- Because this is the hill to die on? Strange.
The NBA has warned teams that due to Canadian laws, players who are unvaccinated against Covid-19 and do not have approved medical or religious exemptions will soon not be allowed to travel to games in Canada. — Way to go, Canada!
“If there were black or brown families all posing with guns in front of their Christmas trees on social media, do you think these same GOP reps would be celebrating it as 2nd Amendment freedom, or using it to fear monger about a “race war” or “invasion” or some such?” -- Asha Rangappa
Congressional leaders reach deal to hike debt limit. Congressional leaders reached an elaborate deal Tuesday that will allow Democrats to lift the nation’s debt limit without any votes from Republicans, likely averting another last-minute rush to avoid a federal default.
Accuser says Ghislaine Maxwell assessed her body for Epstein when she was 14. “She came in and felt my boobs and my hips and my buttocks and said I had a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends,” the woman, who is being identified as “Carolyn,” said...Carolyn said she wound up going back to Epstein’s mansion “over 100 times” where she had sex with him and sometimes with another woman. She said she also posed for nude pictures.
Statue of KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest taken down on land near Nashville. A statue of an early Ku Klux Klan leader and Confederate general that long raised the ire of motorists along Tennessee's Interstate 65 was removed Tuesday morning from the private property where it sat for decades. -- It took until 2021 for this to happen. Ugh.
European Commission looks to criminalize hate speech and violence. The European Commission wants to amend one of the EU's founding texts to more forcefully fight violence against women, LGBTQ+ and other minorities.
End of an era: Germany’s Merkel bows out after 16 years. Angela Merkel was assured of a place in the history books as soon as she became Germany’s first female chancellor on Nov. 22, 2005. Over the next 16 years, she was credited with raising Germany’s profile and influence, working to hold a fractious European Union together, managing a string of crises and being a role model for women.
Rohingya refugees file lawsuit against Facebook over genocide. The Muslim minority group are requesting $150 billion in damages for the role the social media giant played in facilitating a campaign of genocide against them. In the complaint filed Monday in California, the Rohingya charge that the algorithms Facebook uses, and its inability to pull hateful rhetoric down in a timely fashion, led to real-world violence. Facebook's unwillingness to remove hate speech exacerbated violence against the Rohingya, they said.
'An exceptional day': Chilean couple can finally get married after same-sex approval. “At last, we will be able to be recognized as a family before the state," said dental surgeon Jaime Nazar, now able to tie the knot with engineer Javier Silva. Chilean lawmakers legalized same-sex marriage on Tuesday following more than a decade of legal campaigns to change the rules as social mores shift in the largely Catholic country. The bill itself was first sent to Congress in 2017.
Major outage hits Amazon Web Services; many sites affected. Amazon’s cloud-service network suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, disrupting access to many popular sites. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press. Roughly five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, the company said in a post on the AWS status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem responsible for the outage. Shortly thereafter, it reported that “many services have already recovered” but noted that others were still working toward full recovery.
Instagram tightens teen protection measures ahead of Senate hearing. Instagram said on Tuesday it will be stricter about the types of content it recommends to teens in the photo-sharing app and will nudge them toward different areas if they dwell on one topic for a long time.
ON THIS DAY: 80 years ago, the Empire of Japan launched an air raid on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor that claimed 2,403 American lives.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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