Tim Adams, - Reader Supported News / The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Bernie Sanders, in my opinion, is one of the smartest, most ethical, clearest thinking members of Congress. Had it been my choice he would be president. He tells the truth and here it is.
Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders Credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / Getty
After the State of the Union address at the beginning of this month, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece that argued: “Joe Biden is Bernie Sanders.” By this it meant that, somehow, by stealth, under the cover of darkness, a “democratic socialist” – both words apparently terms of abuse in the WSJ commentator’s lexicon – had invaded the White House and was now making policy for ordinary Americans, interfering in the unjust struggle of their lives, trying to help them get decent jobs and provide them with affordable healthcare. The implication was clear: offshore your assets and offer unhinged prayers to Marjorie Taylor Greene!
Speaking to Sanders last week, I wondered if that was how it felt to him.
The 81-year-old senator for Vermont gave one of his brief, gravelly guffaws, his concession to small talk. “Not quite,” he said. “I do go to the White House every now and then and chat with the president but no, I’m not in the White House. But that’s the Wall Street Journal, […]
I have been telling you for years now that the Republican Party is trying to split the United States into two countries one run by White Supremacist, male dominant christofascist MAGAts, one run by social progressives who are fostering wellbeing in their states. The Great Red / Blue Schism I call it. And I have also told you that based on fact-based social outcome data the Red states are dramatically socially inferior to the Blue states; indeed, it is only the support the Red states get from the Blue states that allows them to function. Am I exaggerating about all this? Here's another take, and it agrees with mine.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) reacts during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
A so-called “national divorce” would work out poorly for red states, which a new analysis shows depend heavily on blue states.
MSNBC economic analyst Steve Rattner presented data on “Morning Joe” showing that states won by Donald Trump contribute far less to the federal budget than states won by President Biden, which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and some other Republicans said should be separated from one another.
“The Trump states, virtually every single state except for Utah, don’t ask me why Utah, got back more from Washington than it paid,” Rattner said. “So it would not really work very well to their advantage to leave. In fact, the top states for getting a better deal from Washington are Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia.”
Higher state-level poverty rates correlate with support for Republican candidates, Rattner said, while Democratic-leaning states tend to have higher income.
“You can see with your eye that the red states tend […]
Abby Cartus, Postdoctoral Research Associate with the People, Place, and Health Collective at Brown University School of Public Health - The New Republic
Stephan:
Everyone who reads me knows my views on the American Illness Profit System that passes for healthcare in this country. Here is another researcher who has come to her own conclusions about U.S. healthcare, and her views mirror my own from a slightly different perspective. What also stands out for me is that SR picks up trends about five years before media in general recognizes them.
Credit: Craig F. Walker / The Boston Globe / Getty
I never went to Dixmont, though lots of my high school classmates and friends did. My parents mildly discouraged me from venturing up into the thickly wooded hills where it sat, not because kids went there to drink and smoke and scare each other (which they did) but because the dilapidated buildings were full of friable asbestos and the underground tunnels were probably even more structurally unsound than the buildings. The property, at the time I was a teenager, had been essentially abandoned for more than a decade.
Dixmont was named after Dorothea Dix, the nurse and reformer whose lobbying efforts were instrumental in creating the asylum system in the United States. The asylum movement, originating in the 1840s, aimed to improve the treatment of people with mental illnesses, who were typically subject to a litany of esoteric forms of abuse and neglect including, but not limited to, exorcism, bloodletting, and warehousing in jails. Dix, who worked in a jail as an English teacher, was shocked […]
If you can bear to listen to MAGATs long enough they will eventually tell you the truth about themselves. As an example here is Greg Abbott making his White supremacy racism clear. I was deeply involved in the 1950s and 60s in the civil rights movement, but I don't ever remember White supremacy, except for a few Southern states, being as prevalent and as strongly and openly promoted as is happening today in the Republican Party. Nor do I remember it framed as discrimination against Whites.
Texas MAGAt Republican Governor Greg Abbott
Texas has declared that there will be no racial bias allowed in hiring by state agencies. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But this being Texas, duplicity lurks. The Texas Tribune reported the facts of the case.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s office is warning state agency and public university leaders this week that the use of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — policies that support groups who have been historically underrepresented or discriminated against — is illegal in hiring.
In a memo written Monday and obtained by The Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate told agency leaders that using DEI policies violates federal and state employment laws, and hiring cannot be based on factors “other than merit.”
“Merit” is the critical word. Readers should ask themselves if Abbott’s concern is to maximize the quality of government workers. Or is he cynically entrenching whites in the state’s bureaucracy?
The Tribune adds:
Pate said DEI initiatives illegally discriminate against certain demographic groups — though he did not specify […]
Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel, - Reader Supported News / Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
There is the most amazing sewage of misinformation on the internet about this question: Where did Covid come from? Here, I think, is as accurate an answer as we currently have, and even this answer is not a universal consensus amongst people with access to the best information.
A nurse cared for a patient at a California intensive-care unit in May 2020 as Covid-19 continued to spread across the U.S. Credit: Allison Zaucha / WSJ
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
