Stephan: Be very clear: the Republican Party and its Congressional leader Mitch McConnell don't give a damn about your wellbeing. They care only about the corporations who basically legally bribe them, and they demonstrate this allegiance every day. Here is but one example.
Moscow Mitch devoted servant of the corporations that fund him.
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to let businesses and governments deny sick leave to workers who fall ill with COVID-19.
As Congress negotiates an end-of-year pandemic aid bill, McConnell is trying to block an extension of a paid sick leave program for people who get COVID that expires in two weeks, according to multiple Hill sources with knowledge of the negotiations.
Back in March, Congress passed a law mandating that workers are able to draw two weeks of paid sick leave if they contract COVID, two weeks of paid sick leave to care for a quarantining relative, and up to 10 weeks of paid family leave to care for a child whose school or daycare is closed for COVID-related reasons.
Those provisions are set to expire at the end of the year. Democrats initially sought to broaden the scope of the program and extend it. Those goals were lowered to merely extending the program for several […]
Stephan: I will be so happy and the world will be such a better place when we get this crime family out of the White House.
Jared Kushner Credit: Shutterstock
Jared Kushner helped set up a shell company that secretly paid President Donald Trump’s family members and spent nearly half of his 2020 campaign’s funds.
The president’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser directed his sister-in-law Lara Trump, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman to sit on the shell company’s board, a source familiar with the operation told Business Insider.
Trump’s top advisers and campaign staff told Insider they were unaware of how the shell company operated, and campaign officials even conducted an internal audit of its operations under former campaign manager Brad Parscale but never reported those findings, and the next campaign manager Bill Stepien had little involvement with AMMC.
Isaac Stanley-Becker, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Lena H. Sun and Josh Dawsey, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: How is it possible that the Trump administration over the months of this pandemic has not designed and put into place a system to get a vaccine out quickly and smoothly? The answer of course is that everything Trump and his orcs do is both criminal and incompetent. As a result yet more Americans will die because of the Trump administration's incompetence and lack of commitment to help ordinary Americans.
Officials in multiple states said they were alerted late Wednesday that their second shipments of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine had been drastically cut for next week, sparking widespread confusion and conflicting statements from Pfizer and federal officials about who was at fault.
Margo Mazzeo, a nurse in the coronavirus testing center, is the first at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Mass., to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, on Dec. 17, 2020. Credit: Stephanie Zollshan/Berkshire Eagle/AP
The reduction prompted concern in health departments across the country about whether Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine accelerator program, could distribute doses quickly enough to meet the target of delivering first shots to 20 million people by year’s end.
A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans, said the revised estimates were the result of states’ requesting an expedited timeline for locking in their allocations for the following week; notification of how many doses they could order each week was consequently advanced from Friday to Tuesday. Since Pfizer is producing doses daily, the official said, fewer doses were available […]
Stephan: Law enforcement in the United States is so deeply corrupted and compromised in so many many ways, including racism, an affinity for fascism, and the kleptocracy of civil forfeiture. It is little wonder American justice ranks so poorly in the world, 19th to be exact. Here is the latest proving civil forfeiture, a favorite of police and sheriffs is just theft under the color of authority.
Police officers in Atlanta in June. In a recent civil forfeiture case, a suburban Atlanta sheriff spent $70,000 in forfeiture funds on a muscle car that he uses solely to drive to and from work. Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty
In 2015, New Mexico lawmakers unanimously passed a bill to all but end civil asset forfeiture, the process that lets police keep cash or property they seize, even if they never charge the owner with a crime, so long as they suspect that it’s linked to criminal activity. High-profile lawsuits and press attention had prompted some states to reexamine their forfeiture laws.
Law enforcement officials howled in outrage. In New Mexico, sheriffs and prosecutors implored the governor to veto the legislation. Eliminating civil forfeiture, they argued, would hand the bad guys a win and put public safety at risk. “You’ll get less law enforcement,” predicted the chair of the state sheriffs’ association, Ken Christesen, who noted that police departments use forfeitures to help fund their budgets. (The bill still allowed forfeiture, but only through criminal court, which imposes a much more stringent burden […]
Stephan: If you feel we are in an existential crisis as a country, you are part of a large majority. The answer as to what to do? I spelled it out in The 8 Laws of Change.
It's up to us to make things better; no one else is going to do it. That's for sure.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — From the pandemic to the presidential election, there’s no question 2020 has been a turning point moment in United States history. Unfortunately, most believe the year’s problems haven’t left them in a good position moving forward. A new survey finds nearly eight in 10 Americans say 2020 caused an existential crisis for the country.
The OnePoll survey asked 2,000 Americans about their experiences throughout this tumultuous year and finds that 77 percent agree 2020 has sent the U.S. into crisis over its identity. Baby boomers are the most likely to agree with this statement (82%), compared to 76 percent of Generation X and 75 percent of millennial respondents.
As America deals with its major issues, it’s no surprise that 65 percent of respondents feel like they’ve had their own personal crisis at some point during 2020. The survey, commissioned by Vejo, finds 68 percent of Americans said the year has left them feeling defeated.
The top event leaving 63 percent of respondents feeling defeated entering 2021 is, of […]
