And another day of indictments, major heat waves, MT activists, no heads of military, Swiss cheese legislative districts, worried teachers in FL, hidden fees costing doctors, and how FOX keeps FOX News on the air comes to a close:
“It's pretty damn amazing that virtually no Republicans are telling Trump to get out of the presidential race. That's pure fear of his idiot hordes turning their simian rage on them.” -- The Rude Pundit
Trump and 18 allies charged in Georgia election meddling as former president faces 4th criminal case. The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of acts by Trump or his allies to undo his defeat, including beseeching Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes for him to win the battleground state; harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favorable to Trump. In one particularly brazen episode, it also outlines a plot involving one of his lawyers to access voting machines in a rural Georgia county and steal data from a voting machine company. -- One day we will not have to talk about or concern ourselves with Donald fucking Trump.
Meet the 18 people charged with Trump in Georgia indictment. The shared charge alleges the defendants participated in a “criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia — and elsewhere — to accomplish the illegal goal” of keeping Trump in office, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) said Monday. Here’s what to know about the other 18 people charged with Trump in the Georgia probe.
Why Trump cannot seek a pardon to make Georgia charges go away. The state-level charges, formally unveiled late on Monday, also cannot be pardoned by Georgia’s governor under the state’s constitution. Instead, the southern US state has an independent board that issues pardons, but such requests can only be made five years after a sentence is served. That means that even if Trump or another fellow Republican wins the White House in 2024 – or if a Trump-friendly politician becomes Georgia’s governor – the state case will not be able to go away with the stroke of a pen.
Major heat wave creates dangerous fire potential in Pacific Northwest and Canada. The Northwest US has mostly been able to dodge major heat this summer, but it has arrived with a vengeance and could help to stoke and start wildfires, including in parts of western Canada where hundreds of wildfires are raging out of control. People across parts of Washington and Oregon will face a rare “extreme” level of heat risk through Wednesday with temperatures expected to run as much as 20 degrees above normal. The “extreme HeatRisk” is the highest possible risk level for heat, akin to a “high risk” for tornadoes. It is meant to warn of significant heat impacts, including heat-related illness, and urge preparation.
Young environmental activists prevail in first-of-its-kind climate change trial in Montana. Young environmental activists scored what experts described as a ground-breaking legal victory Monday when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development. The ruling in this first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change. If it stands, the ruling could set an important legal precedent, though experts said the immediate impacts are limited and state officials pledged to seek to overturn the decision on appeal.
Three military services now without Senate-confirmed heads for first time in history. Three military services are now without Senate-confirmed heads for the first time in history, as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) holds up the confirmations of more than 300 senior military officers to protest the Pentagon’s new abortion policy. -- One person should never have this much power. He’s endangering the country with his bullshit.
Lawsuit targets Wisconsin legislative districts resembling Swiss cheese. Though the Wisconsin Constitution requires legislative districts “to consist of contiguous territory,” many nonetheless contain sections of land that are not actually connected. The resulting map looks a bit like Swiss cheese, where some districts are dotted with small neighborhood holes assigned to different representatives.
Florida teachers are worried new policies could get them fired — or even criminally charged. Teachers say they are going into classrooms less confident about their lesson plans, confused about changes to state laws and on high alert that once-benign instructions could now get them fired or charged with felonies...The new laws and policies change how schools teach African American history and topics involving LGBTQ people, among other things. -- Fascism is happening before our very eyes in Florida.
Arkansas Education Department won’t allow credit for AP African American Studies course. The news comes amid a national shift in education systems as several states restrict what educators can teach about race, gender and sexuality. -- Arkansas says to Florida: “Wait for me!”
Six former Mississippi officers have pleaded guilty to state charges for torturing two Black men. In January, the officers entered a house without a warrant and handcuffed and assaulted the two men with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects. The officers mocked them with racial slurs throughout a 90-minute torture session, then devised a cover-up that included planting drugs and a gun, leading to false charges that could have sent one victim to prison for years. Their conspiracy unraveled months later, after one of them told the sheriff he had lied, leading to confessions from the others.
How Fox uses the World Cup and Masked Singer to keep Fox News on air. Every three years, cable providers and TV networks agree on a flat, monthly fee that is passed on to the subscriber – and, since cable subscribers generally do not get to choose what channels are part of their cable bundle, that fee is paid regardless of whether or not the subscriber watches a given network...When the ominous message crawled across the bottom of Glee, Fox was demanding a huge fee increase from Cablevision. Fox executives were deploying a strong-arm strategy they had been honing for years: getting their audience to fight the battle for the company...These carriage fees are now so valuable to Fox that reporting from Media Matters has found that Fox would still have a profit margin of more than 35% even if it sold no advertising. Last year, Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of the Fox Corporation, boasted that Fox was becoming less reliant on advertising thanks to its increasing carriage fees. Today every cable subscriber, regardless of viewing habits, pays about $2 a month to Fox News – a fee bested only by ESPN, and substantially higher than those paid to CNN and MSNBC ($1.06 and $0.36, respectively). Now, in the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, Fox Corporation is renegotiating its carriage contracts with three of the country’s biggest cable providers: Cox, Xfinity and Spectrum. Recent reporting from Vanity Fair suggests that Fox News is looking to raise its rates to a whopping $3 per head – which would allow the news network to extract over $1.8bn annually from carriage fees alone. And if the past is any indication, Fox is likely to leverage its sports and entertainment programming – including the World Cup, NFL, Bob’s Burgers and the Masked Singer – in this battle for higher carriage fees for Fox News...So why have cable companies put up with Fox’s repeated rate hikes? Many have told the FCC that Fox employs bad faith negotiating tactics. These include threatening and enacting blackouts and directly telling consumers to switch providers...Critics of Fox News have been increasingly vocal about their opposition to Fox’s strong-arm tactics: in 2021, the NAACP sent a scathing letter to the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, telling the league to stop letting Fox use the NFL as a bargaining chip in its carriage fee negotiations for Fox News. “The NFL’s programming should not be used as a bargaining tool for Rupert Murdoch to help fund Fox News’ hatred, bigotry, lies and racism,” the NAACP president and CEO, Derrick Johnson, wrote...Still, while the number of cable subscribers plummets, ever-increasing carriage fees are helping networks like Fox News stay afloat and buffer themselves from public accountability. Heresco says that arrangement always puts customers on the losing end. “I’m generally a pretty optimistic person,” he says, “[but] I don’t think these opaque, black-box, long-term, multibillion-dollar negotiations in which the audience is enlisted and weaponized by one company against another company – I don’t think there is any scenario in which that actually benefits democracy, or citizens, or education, or accurate information.”
The Hidden Fee Costing Doctors Millions Every Year. It was a multibillion-dollar strike, so stealthy and precise that the only visible sign was a notice that suddenly vanished from a government website. In August 2017, a federal agency with sweeping powers over the health care industry posted a notice informing insurance companies that they weren’t allowed to charge physicians a fee when the companies paid the doctors for their work. Six months later, that statement disappeared without explanation. The vanishing notice was the result of a behind-the-scenes campaign by the insurance industry and its middlemen that has largely escaped public notice — but that has had massive financial consequences that have rippled through the health care universe. The insurers’ invisible victory has tightened the financial vise on doctors and hospitals, nurtured a thriving industry of middlemen and allowed health insurers to do something no other industry does: Take one last cut even as it pays its bills. -- Capitalism is not the ideal economic and political system one might think it is.
Parents cannot challenge school gender identity policy, US court rules. A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that a group of parents could not challenge a Maryland school district's policy against telling parents if their children identify as transgender or gender nonconforming...The policy, which the Montgomery County Board of Education adopted for the 2020-2021 school year, permitted schools to develop gender support plans for students to ensure they "feel comfortable expressing their gender identity."
States that protect transgender health care now try to absorb demand. For those refuge states — so far, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Washington and Vermont, plus Washington, D.C. — the question is how to move beyond promises of legal protection and build a network to serve more patients.
Baylor University Is No Longer Required to Protect Queer Students From Sexual Harassment. Biden’s Department of Education has granted Baylor University a religious exemption to Title IX provisions that hold schools accountable for sexual harassment against LGBTQ students, despite the university’s troubling history of alleged Title IX violations. -- You are free to hate and harass anyone under the guise of religious liberty. What a bunch of bullshit.
Many Americans wrongly believe exposure to marijuana smoke is safer than tobacco, study finds. Research on the impact of cannabis on health is in its infancy. Historically it has been difficult to study cannabis use because weed has been illegal — and still is — in many states. In addition, the federal government historically had very strict regulations on how marijuana could be studied. That began to ease, and with the legalization of cannabis for recreational use in many states, more researchers are now exploring the consequences of the habitual use of weed. “What is generally known is that frequent smoking of marijuana is associated with chronic bronchitis, throat and bronchial inflammation,” Boyd said. “While marijuana smoke contains carcinogens, such as benzoprene and benzanthracene, it does not appear that smoking marijuana causes lung cancer.”
Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves. Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity. The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.
Ultra high-speed train connecting Vancouver B.C. to Portland would 'transform the Pacific Northwest,' Washington Democrats argue. A team of Washington Democrats is calling for the federal government to help fund a high-speed rail line that would travel up to 250 miles per hour and stretch from Canada to Oregon...At 250 miles per hour, a rider using the high-speed service would travel from Vancouver to Portland in under two hours. A rider could travel from Seattle to Portland in under an hour. The top speed of 250 mph for the project is faster than other rail services on the horizon in North America.
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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