Shawn Boburg, Emma Brown and Ann E. Marimow, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan:
Yet more corruption reports on Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, as well as how Leonard Leo of The Federalist Society is running a campaign to counter the endless accounts of his corruption. This is one of the nine human beings on the Supreme Court who defines how the laws are to be interpreted for the other 333 million of us. I find it both amazing and very sad that the U.S. Senators have done nothing to hold this man accountable for his dishonesty and lack of ethics. He was never qualified to be on the court in the first place, and should have been impeached and removed from the court several years ago when his vast corruption first became known.
Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, listen during his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. Credit: Doug Mills / AP
The 25th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was approaching — a moment that would draw attention to his accomplishments on the bench but also to the misconduct claims that had nearly derailed his rise. Among the wave of retrospective accounts set to come out that year, 2016, was a star-studded HBO film dramatically recounting Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations.
That spring, a flurry of opinion articles defending Thomas and railing against the film appeared in news outlets, penned by a D.C. lawyer who had worked in the George H.W. Bush White House during the confirmation. Websites celebrating Thomas’s career — and attacking his onetime accuser — popped up. And on Twitter, a new account using the name “Justice Thomas Fan Account” began serving up flattering commentary.
“Justice Thomas: The most open & personable of Justices, intimate in sharing his feelings, easily moved to laughter,” read one early tweet on […]
Ron DeSantis is taking Florida public school education back to the 1870s when White Supremacists tried to decontextualize slavery as something harmless that was done to benefit Black people. DeSantis who is a sadist and without ethics has transformed Florida into an anocracy state I wouldn’t even want to visit. Watch, and you will now see other Republican controlled states do the same thing with their educational systems, and this is going to create yet more disparity between Red and Blue states.
White Supremacist MAGAt Republican Governor Ron De Santis, peddling a reversion of history back to the 1870s. Credit: the Orlando Sentinel / Tribune News Service / Getty
Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”
After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Dozens of Black residents were killed in the massacre, which was perpetrated to stop them from voting.
According to members of the board, that distorted portrayal of the racist massacre is factually accurate. MaryLynn Magar, a member of the board appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, said at the board’s meeting in Orlando on Wednesday that “everything is there” in the new history standards and “the darkest parts of our history are addressed,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
In every way that one can check actual factual data, and Thom Hartmann gives an example of what I mean, Republican governance is inferior to Democrat governance. So why would any rational person vote for a Republican? The answer I think is grievances. The Republican party has become a grievance cult, and the MAGAt culture is a culture of fears, hates, and grievances.
Arkansas MAGAt Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders Credit: Al Drago / Getty
The easiest and laziest way for a state government to deny its citizens a benefit to which they’re entitled is to wrap it in so much paperwork, make people jump through so many hoops to qualify, that they give up in confusion or exhaustion.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, one of the nation’s cruelest — he’s shipped refugees out of state based on lies, put a $10,000 bounty on the heads of pregnant women, and is alleged to have ordered his own police to throw children and nursing babies into the Rio Grande River where razor wire awaits them — is all-in on this with regard to Medicaid.
Here is some interesting good news. Commercial buildings no longer needed, either because workers are working remotely, or because of changes in businesses are being turned into vertical farms. In the future as the changes that are coming occur this is going to make an enormous difference, to people still living in those cities.
A group takes a tour of Area 2 Farms. Area 2 Farms. Credit: Smithsonian
In an old paper company and warehouse building, machines are whirring again. But instead of reams of paper pressed and cut, this warehouse is home to Area 2 Farms, which now pumps out greens, herbs and root vegetables. There’s even a weekly CSA serving customers year round, all in an effort to bring locally grown food to the Washington, D.C. area. Really local. “When was the last time you picked up a strawberry and could confidently say you knew the farmer’s name?” asks Jackie Potter.
Potter, along with Tyler Baras, helped co-found the farm in Arlington, Virginia, where office vacancy rates reached 23.7 percent in the first quarter of 2023.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic drove workers out of their offices over three years ago, many office buildings still remain deserted. According to data gathered in 10 major cities, office usage rates just crossed 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels in late January, and these numbers seem to […]
What stands out for me about both Gregg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, as men, as individuals, is that say are both sadists. Here is the latest example of Abbott’s evil. He has transformed Texas, in a negative way.
Victoria Varela embraces her son Darwin in an ambulance on July 18, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. Credit: Brandon Bell / Getty
Human rights advocates called for federal intervention Monday after it was reported that state troopers assigned to Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border militarization initiative have been ordered to push migrant children back into the Rio Grande and to deny water to asylum-seekers amid a life-threatening heatwave.
The exclusive reporting by Benjamin Wermund of the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News is based on a July 3 email in which an unnamed Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer “discloses several previously unreported incidents” they witnessed in Eagle Pass, where Abbott “has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.”
As the outlets — both owned by Hearst Newspapers — reported:1
According to the email, a pregnant woman having a miscarriage was found late last month caught in the wire, doubled over in pain. A four-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through it and was pushed back by […]
