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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Troy Wolverton, - Reader Supported News/ Business Insider
Stephan: I am always amused when I hear or read some corporate millionaire whining about socialism. The truth that dare not speak its name is that America is, and for decades has been, an overwhelmingly socialist nation. There is no other developed Western nation that even approaches the level of American socialism. It's just that it is socialism for the rich, not in support of societal wellbeing. Bernie Sanders has always been very clear about this, which is one of the reasons I have supported him
Bernie Sanders showed Friday he isn’t afraid to call out hypocrisy — particularly when it comes from someone like Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Musk on Friday tweeted out a meme critical of Sanders and his brand of socialism. The tweet was in response to an article about a bill Sanders introduced Thursday that would place a 60% tax on the wealth gained by billionaires such as Musk during the coronavirus pandemic. The meme, dubbed the “Official Bernie Sanders drinking game!” showed a picture of Sanders along with the text: “Every time the Bernster mentions a free government program, chug somebody else’s beer.
Rachael Bade and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: Thursday's Republican Scum Report shocks even me. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who will be the Republican candidate from Georgia, from a district so Red she will almost certainly win, even by her party's appalling standards is an outlier. She is openly a White Supremacist anti-semite. That men and women and Georgis would vote for such a person is depressing enough, but the loud embracement of her by Trump and Republican Congressional leaders is just gob-smacking. It think it is telling us that this election over the next 83 days is basically going to be a contest between White racists and the rest of America. The Republicans are betting they can suppress or sabotage the voting process to the point that even though they are a minority, they can win -- if not the vote, the electoral college.
Construction executive Marjorie Taylor Greene, third from left, claps with her supporters at a watch party in Rome, Ga., on Aug. 11, 2020. Credit: Mike Stewart/AP
President Trump and Republican leaders’ embrace of a House candidate who has made racist statements and espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory is again highlighting the party’s willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions.
Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Georgia primary Tuesday evening, was a “future Republican Star,” who was “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” The office of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who ignored multiple pleas from his members to wade into the primary to stop Greene — has said that he will seat her on congressional committees.
The decision has left many House Republicans privately griping about irresponsible leadership, even as they do little publicly to challenge the party’s position or to state their opposition to Greene’s joining their conference if she is elected in November, as is expected, in a reliably Republican district.
Stephan: This is what the Republicans have been working on, underneath the Trumpian fecal storms, and it will take a generation to cleanse the American judiciary of toxic choices.
Obama inherited a country in sharp decline as a result of Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans in Congress and pulled the country back together again. Now Biden and Harris are going to have to do the same thing all over again. Any historian can tell you that Republicans from Reagan on have always harmed the nation more than they have helped it, and Democrats have always left the country in better condition than the found it. That isn't partisan, that's just facts.
President Trump arrives at the U.S. Capitol to attend the Republican’s weekly policy luncheon on March 10, 2020, in Washington, D.C. He is flanked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Sen. Roy Blunt. Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty
After Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate in early 2015, they set out to pack the federal courts with radical right-wing judges. Mitch McConnell said, “My goal is to do everything we can for as long as we can to transform the federal judiciary, because everything else we do is transitory.” Under Article III of the Constitution, federal judges serve for life, so a 50-year-old appointed today could serve 30 years or even longer.
McConnell and his sidekick, Sen. Lindsey Graham, started by refusing to confirm President Obama’s judicial appointments. Most notably, they wouldn’t even consider Obama’s appointment of moderate Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court. When President Trump took office, there were more than 100 empty federal judgeships waiting to be filled with Trumpian favorites.
In today’s hardball politics, the federal courts are especially important. Even if progressives […]
Agence France-Presse, - Raw Story/Agence France-Presse
Stephan: I am always trying to look for good news trends, but they are very hard to find. But here, at least, is some good news. I just liked the story, that's why I'm running it.
Beluga whale Credit: Agence France-Presse
Two beluga whales from a Shanghai aquarium have returned to the sea in an Icelandic sanctuary, conservationists said Monday, expressing hopes of creating a model for rehoming some 300 belugas currently in captivity.
Little White and Little Grey, two 13-year-old females, left behind their previous lives entertaining visitors at the Changfeng Ocean World in June 2019 when they were flown to Iceland’s Klettsvik Bay in the Westman Islands, in specially tailored containers.
On Friday, they were moved from their landbased facility to care pools in the sea at Klettsvik Bay — the first time the two belugas have been in the sea since they were taken from a Russian whale research centre in 2011, the conservation charity Sea Life Trust said in a statement on Monday.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
They will stay in the care pools “for a few weeks” before they are released into the bigger sanctuary, a 32,000-square-meter (344,445-square-foot) sea pen that will become their home, organizers said.
Stephan: An SR reader who is an epidemiologist and part of a coronavirus research team sent me this and asked me to publish it, which I am happy to do. If obesity is an issue for you or someone in your family I would take this very seriously.
For a world crippled by the coronavirus, salvation hinges on a vaccine.
But in the United States, where at least 4.6 million people have been infected and nearly 155,000 have died, the promise of that vaccine is hampered by a vexing epidemic that long preceded COVID-19: obesity.
Scientists know that vaccines engineered to protect the public from influenza, hepatitis B, tetanus and rabies can be less effective in obese adults than in the general population, leaving them more vulnerable to infection and illness. There is little reason to believe, obesity researchers say, that COVID-19 vaccines will be any different.
“Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
“Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
More than 107 million American adults are obese, and their ability to return safely to work, care for their families and resume daily […]
Stephan: This is Wednesday's Republican Scum Report. It describes how Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley are both operating as Russian agents seeking to sabotage American democracy. It is unspeakably shameful.
Republican senator and Trumpian orc, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin
Senator Ron Johnson’s investigations involving Ukraine have become a conduit of Russian disinformation.
Earlier this month, Johnson defended himself on a local Wisconsin news station saying, “What have I published, what have I reported on, that is not true, that is any form of Russian disinformation? There has been nothing.” Similarly, in his 11-page letter, Johnson asserted, “It is neither me, Chairman Grassley, nor our committees that are being used to disseminate Russian disinformation.”
The senator surely knows better, and his 11-page defense of his actions reveals it. Published on Monday, Aug. 10, the letter itself contains apparent products of Russian disinformation. And while Johnson denies taking information directly from two specific Ukrainians linked to Russia and its disinformation efforts, he makes no mention of his staff taking information directly from one of those individuals’ principal collaborators, which reportedly occurred over the course of several months.
Fellow Republican Senators — including the previous and current Chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sens. Richard Burr and Marco […]
Stephan: You have probably already heard this, but I want to bring it back into focus because while everyone hears it, we have all become so accustomed to Trump's lies that we don't really hear how radical what he is saying is. Nothing he says can be taken as truthful, but he is consistent in his intentions, and I take this seriously. If this man is re-elected America, as we know it, will end.
Credit: Michael Tercha/Getty
President Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon openly vowed to permanently “terminate” the funding mechanism for both Social Security and Medicare if reelected in November—an admission that was seized upon by defenders of the popular safety net programs who have been warning for months that the administration’s threat to suspend the payroll tax in the name of economic relief during the Covid-19 pandemic was really a backdoor sabotage effort.
Announcing and then signing a series of legally dubious executive orders, including an effort to slash the emergency federal unemployment boost by $200 from the $600 previously implemented by Democrats, Trump touted his order for a payroll tax “holiday”—which experts noted would later have to be paid back—but said if he won in November that such a cut would become permanent.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
The Trump campaign was apparently so satisfied with the public acknowledgement of the president’s promise to make the payroll tax permanent—a move that would inherently bankrupt the Social Security system—that […]
Stephan: My daughter is a middle-aged single mother herself, with an eight-year-old son, as well as the president of a large social services agency, so she has her own experiences, as well as listening to her therapists, and the agency's clients. In talking with my daughter, and reading and watching the news each day, what comes across to me is how a competent government, faced with something like Covid-19, would in anticipation of the coming months of pandemic have immediately begun to create and fund an educational system geared to the new social circumstances. Of course, we don't have a competent government, and as I read the news about how Trump and the Republican governors are pressing to reopen schools, the image that comes to me is that they think of America's schoolchildren as lab rats. They are perfectly willing to put them and their teachers, and their families at risk, just as they put the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies at risk without making sure they had proper funding and equipment as they have labored to save the lives of the rest of us.
It is so callous, so unconscious, so ugly, and so obviously wrong-headed. And it is not as if clear signs of this were not obvious. In the last two weeks 97,000 American children and tested positive for coronavirus, and Israel, which opened its schools too early is facing a sudden spike of child cases and closing them back down.
A boy has his temperature checked as he receives a free COVID-19 test in South Los Angeles in July. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty
At least 97,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 in the final two weeks of July and there’s been an estimated 338,000 cases involving kids in the U.S. since the pandemic began, a new report finds.
Why it matters: The report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association comes as schools and day cares look to reopen in the U.S.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced Friday that school districts in the state could resume in-person classes in the fall amid lower coronavirus transmission rates.
Some schools have already reopened for in-person learning in the South — including in Georgia, where authorities confirmed nine people had tested positive for the novel coronavirus at one school.
There have been many reports about the virus spreading through schools and summer camps, and evidence has begun to support the notion that children can play a key role in community transmission, Axios’ Caitlin Owens notes.
