The Right's Assault on Facts, Data, and Reality

[LFC]

Here's another opinion on the mask mandate decision by the unqualified Trump judge.

But what Mizelle lacks in experience, she made up for in her ability to rack up conservative credentials. In addition to her Thomas clerkship, Mizelle clerked for two other prominent members of the conservative Federalist Society. At a 2020 speech to that organization, she quipped that paper money is unconstitutional.

Mizelle was also nominated by a president who was about to be repudiated by the American public — Trump officially named her in September 2020, two months before Joe Biden defeated Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The Senate confirmed her while Trump was a lame duck, a week-and-a-half after the election was called for Biden.

Mizelle’s opinion in Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden, the case striking down the masking requirement, is so poorly reasoned that it is difficult not to suspect that it was written in bad faith. Its primary argument is that federal law permits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require businesses to clean up contaminants that can spread disease, but that the law does not permit the CDC to actually prevent such contamination from occurring in the first place. But, to arrive at this interpretation of the law, Mizelle takes extreme liberties with statutory text.

I do not believe that Judge Mizelle is as incompetent as her opinion suggests. When Mizelle was up for Senate confirmation, the American Bar Association determined that she “has a very keen intellect, a strong work ethic and an impressive resume,” despite the fact that she lacked enough experience to be traditionally qualified for the federal bench. By all accounts, Mizelle is a smart early-career attorney who could be a very effective advocate. Neither Justice Thomas nor Jones Day have a reputation for hiring rank incompetents, though the former, in particular, is known for hiring hardline conservatives.

The most likely reading of her opinion, in other words, is that she simply disagreed with the Biden administration’s masking policy, and concocted a justification for striking it down. That approach should trouble anyone who cares about democracy, regardless of what they think about mandatory masking on airplanes.

Sounds like a perfect future pick for right-wing SCOTUS.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 20, 2022 15:24:06 GMT LFC said:

Here's another opinion on the mask mandate decision by the unqualified Trump judge.

But what Mizelle lacks in experience, she made up for in her ability to rack up conservative credentials. In addition to her Thomas clerkship, Mizelle clerked for two other prominent members of the conservative Federalist Society. At a 2020 speech to that organization, she quipped that paper money is unconstitutional.

Mizelle was also nominated by a president who was about to be repudiated by the American public — Trump officially named her in September 2020, two months before Joe Biden defeated Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The Senate confirmed her while Trump was a lame duck, a week-and-a-half after the election was called for Biden.

Mizelle’s opinion in Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden, the case striking down the masking requirement, is so poorly reasoned that it is difficult not to suspect that it was written in bad faith. Its primary argument is that federal law permits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require businesses to clean up contaminants that can spread disease, but that the law does not permit the CDC to actually prevent such contamination from occurring in the first place. But, to arrive at this interpretation of the law, Mizelle takes extreme liberties with statutory text.

I do not believe that Judge Mizelle is as incompetent as her opinion suggests. When Mizelle was up for Senate confirmation, the American Bar Association determined that she “has a very keen intellect, a strong work ethic and an impressive resume,” despite the fact that she lacked enough experience to be traditionally qualified for the federal bench. By all accounts, Mizelle is a smart early-career attorney who could be a very effective advocate. Neither Justice Thomas nor Jones Day have a reputation for hiring rank incompetents, though the former, in particular, is known for hiring hardline conservatives.

The most likely reading of her opinion, in other words, is that she simply disagreed with the Biden administration’s masking policy, and concocted a justification for striking it down. That approach should trouble anyone who cares about democracy, regardless of what they think about mandatory masking on airplanes.

Sounds like a perfect future pick for right-wing SCOTUS.

She better hope the right wing maintains a majority in Congress in 2022 and 2024.  The life of a federal district court judge is stressful.  Very heavy dockets, lots of evidentiary things that a judge has to decide in short timelines, and really nasty attorneys are daily life for these judges.  Someone with no real litigation experience is going to find that it's a rough road.  She might decide it isn't worth it to wait until she can get a nice Circuit court appointment with a more leisurely schedule.

[jackd]

Unfortunately, a lot of really awful federal district judges remain in place despite the pressures and make the stresses on parties and attorneys greater than is intrinsic to the system.

[pnwguy]

Apr 20, 2022 15:24:06 GMT LFC said:

Here's another opinion on the mask mandate decision by the unqualified Trump judge.

Sounds like a perfect future pick for right-wing SCOTUS.

Now that RW evil isn't even being hidden, one has to wonder if The Pelican Brief tactics are in consideration, to up the SCOTUS majority even further. The Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, and Oath Keepers would probably be happy to participate, as well as some of Putin's goons. Fox News would be happy to broadcast an assassination live. Tucker Carlson Presents: Patriot Justice!

[goldenvalley]

Apr 20, 2022 15:41:29 GMT jackd said:

Unfortunately, a lot of really awful federal district judges remain in place despite the pressures and make the stresses on parties and attorneys greater than is intrinsic to the system.

Is it the Peter principle at work?  These judges have nowhere to go...not to appellate level, and no law firm wants them around either if they can't make money for the firm.  So they become mediators and arbitrators.  

[jackd]

Or they stay in office presenting a problem for chief judges who have to steer serious cases away from them.

[LFC]

Looks like the Biden administration will appeal the ruling that the CDC isn't allowed to control disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday asked the Justice Department to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that lifted the CDC’s mask mandate for travel on public transportation.

“It is CDC’s continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health,” the agency said in a statement. “CDC believes this is a lawful order, well within CDC’s legal authority to protect public health.”

The CDC’s request comes a day after the DOJ said it would appeal to revive the CDC mask mandate if the CDC still thinks the mandate “remains necessary for public health.”

The CDC’s announcement follows a ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who was appointed by former President Trump, that struck down the federal mask mandate. Mizelle ruled that the CDC overstepped its authority with its mask mandate on planes and other forms of public transportation.

In her order issued Monday, Mizelle dedicates pages of writing to the definition of the term “sanitization” — and suggested the CDC’s purview was restricted to cleaning things.

[jackd]

Unfortunately, this Supreme Court may destroy our present administrative law and hold that Congress cannot xelgate discretionary regulatory power to an agency which will abolish regulatory law altogether for most purposes.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 21, 2022 19:12:36 GMT jackd said:

Unfortunately, this Supreme Court may destroy our present administrative law and hold that Congress cannot xelgate discretionary regulatory power to an agency which will abolish regulatory law altogether for most purposes.

It takes about 10 minutes to write a paragraph that will destroy the current regulatory administration and will take years to collect the expertise needed to staff the rebuilding of one.  Congress members are not experts in anything but fundraising and a few develop limited expertise in substantive areas but the world is too complex to leave it to some folks egotistical enough to run for elected office.

[LFC]

Apr 21, 2022 20:18:08 GMT goldenvalley said:

Apr 21, 2022 19:12:36 GMT jackd said:

Unfortunately, this Supreme Court may destroy our present administrative law and hold that Congress cannot xelgate discretionary regulatory power to an agency which will abolish regulatory law altogether for most purposes.

It takes about 10 minutes to write a paragraph that will destroy the current regulatory administration and will take years to collect the expertise needed to staff the rebuilding of one.  Congress members are not experts in anything but fundraising and a few develop limited expertise in substantive areas but the world is too complex to leave it to some folks egotistical enough to run for elected office.

And better to let the unelected right-wing SCOTUS to do the dirty work for you. Passing laws is hard and you actually have to vote for them! If Republicans never had another vote of significance, sticking to the mundane and performative, I'm sure they'd be thrilled.

[LFC]

More is being found out about DeSatanist's banned book list. Follow think link as well.

The horror.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his office have been incredibly tight-lipped about what exactly the state education department found to be so appalling in those 54 math textbooks that the state decided to immediately ban them from public schools.

In announcing its decision, the Florida Department of Education declared a handful of the books included “prohibited topics,” like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). Some of the other books were supposedly rejected — meaning the state will no longer purchase them for Florida schools — in an attempt to weed out Common Core from the state curriculum.

But DeSantis’ press secretary made it pretty clear that the DeSantis administration is just tossing a handful of concepts the right-wing hates into a bucket and labeling it Critical Race Theory. In a tweet on Monday, she encouraged any parent who wants to teach their kids “Woke Math, where ‘2+2=4’ is white supremacy” to go ahead and purchase the books themselves.

The actual content of the banned books highlights just how far the right-wing has gone to manufacture outrage around issues that don’t even exist. After Florida released a list of the 26 math textbooks banned for “prohibited topics,” Popular Information tracked down several of the books to comb through for anything that might smell like CRT/SEL/Common Core (or what the far-right things those things are). The results are truly laughable and you should read the piece for yourself here, but some highlights:

• One of the books rejected was an elementary school math textbook that has sections in various chapters that encourage students to “work together” and “listen to our friends and teachers” while working on math problems. It also has a series called “Math is… Mindset” that asks students questions like: “How can you show that you value the ideas of others?” and “What helps you understand your partner’s ideas?” Truly terrible stuff.

• One of the 8th grade level math books deemed inappropriate has a repeated section throughout the textbook that gives students little factoids about mathematicians in history. Two of these sections highlight the fact that … Black mathematicians exist, writing on the works of Elbert Frank Cox and Dorothy Johnson Vaughan.

• If you squint hard enough you could see a semblance of something vaguely political in a few of the high school math texts, but only because a few of the word problems in one of the texts mention words like “prejudice” or “stereotyping.” For example, one word problem mentions the word “prejudice,” but “only as an example to illustrate that correlation does not equal causation,” in Popular Information’s words.

[LFC]

I've literally been waiting for something like this to rear its ugly head since Floriduh's GOPstapo first announced its book ban. While I don't know if VA's gov Glenn Trumpkin is truly the beneficiary I have no doubt that only one publisher sailed through this corrupt process points to some major grift and political backscratching.

A viral Twitter thread is alleging collusion between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) over textbooks.

The thread, posted by user @sternlevine, alleges that Florida’s HB7—a new law aimed at curbing the teaching of ‘critical race theory’ in schools—opens the door for various collusion. The user cites a Tallahassee Democrat article earlier this week stating that “the only publisher approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education for K-5 mathematics is Accelerate Learning, a company out of Houston, Texas.”

Accelerate Learning, according to the article, was acquired by private equity firm the Carlyle Group in 2018. Gov. Youngkin was co-CEO of the Carlyle Group from 2018 until 2020, when he left to run for office. Youngkin was with Carlyle Group for almost 25 years, joining the firm in 1995.

“​​Since taking office, Youngkin has pushed legislation that mimics Florida’s almost to the letter,” the thread states. “Meaning, the company that he was affiliated with until running for government, would benefit from legislation he’s pushing through.”

Youngkin has frequently praised DeSantis for his leadership and attempted to follow his track record as governor, repealing mask mandates and signing executive orders that align with DeSantis’ policies.

[LFC]

I guess this company, which has been working with Florida for years, isn't paying to play or at least not paying the new, DeSantis inflated grift tax.

But how can a math textbook “indoctrinate” students, and which textbooks were rejected for doing so?

The publishers of these textbooks don’t seem to know either, even through the department gave high scores to some of their mathematics books but the books were rejected as part of a state review on math textbooks in Florida.

Savvas Learning Company, formerly Pearson K-12 Learning, submitted 29 textbooks for the education department’s consideration, but 15 books were rejected.

“Savvas has a long and successful track record of working with the Florida Department of Education to ensure that our instructional materials deliver high-quality, research-based pedagogy designed intentionally to align with the current Florida standards for mathematics,” according to a written statement from the company.

The statement continues: “Like many other companies that submitted bids to the Florida DOE, Savvas has been notified that some of our math programs developed specifically for Florida have not been recommended at this time. Once we obtain additional information from the state as to the specific reasons why, Savvas will work toward an appropriate resolution.”

According to a new link from Department of Education, one of Savvas’s books, enVision Florida B.E.S.T Mathematics Grade 2, received a high score from the department for aligning to new state standards, but was rejected for “Inclusion of Special Topics.”

Which topics? The document does not elaborate.

[LFC]

A review of the Republican working class rhetoric versus anti-working class policy. It's why they have to keep them outraged and racist. It keeps them from seeing their pockets are being picked. As LBJ said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

In 2012, Mitt Romney ran for president as an unabashed representative of the billionaire class. He said things like “corporations are people, my friends” with a smile that suggested that he was faintly amused that anyone disagreed with that statement.

In more recent years, the GOP has been trying to shed that image. Donald Trump got the ball rolling with his first run in 2016—when he constantly talked about bad trade deals and “draining the swamp” of D.C. corruption, and how he would bring the coal mines back to Appalachia and the factories back to Youngstown.

He was, of course, lying about most of this, but all of that rhetoric almost certainly played a role in pushing him over the finish line in Rust Belt swing states in 2016. Trump was defeated in 2020, but many other Republicans have caught onto the idea that rebranding themselves as “the party of the working class” is a winning strategy—even as they continue to support union-busting and deregulation.

Take Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who gave a fiery speech at last year’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC). “The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs,” Cruz said in a summation of that speech, “it is the party of hard-working, blue-collar men and women.”

If anyone is tempted to take that self-description seriously, they should take a look at the freshly adopted 2022 platform of the Texas GOP. The part that got the most attention was their official adoption of the right-wing conspiracy theory which holds that Trump actually won the 2020 election. Others have noted the blood-curdling extremism of the platform on social policy. For example, Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson noted to me that the platform “cracks down on gambling, ganja, and gay marriage,” concluding, “so much for freedom.”

What most struck me, though, was the dramatic contrast between the “party of the working class” rhetoric and the policy substance of the platform. In Cruz’s speech at CPAC, he listed off some of the groups he insisted were being represented by the GOP. “[T]he Republican Party is the party of steel workers and construction workers and pipeline workers and taxicab drivers and cops and firefighters and waiters and waitresses.”

I’ll give him “cops.” And presumably “pipeline workers” are going to be given jobs through the approval of pipeline projects against any environmental objections—though I certainly wouldn’t expect the Texas GOP to side with any pipeline workers who go on strike over wages and working conditions.

But what does Cruz’s state party want to do for the rest of those groups?

The platform explicitly calls for the repeal of both local and federal minimum wage laws. It calls for the repeal of municipal ordinances mandating “sick/family leave” for employers with city contracts. It opposes “card check,” a process which would make it easier for all those construction workers, waitresses, cab drivers and so on to form labor unions by letting the decision of a majority of employees in some workplaces to sign union cards suffice—without the need for a drawn-out unionization process. Oh, and it includes this crisp unambiguous statement: “We support privatization of the Social Security system.”

To quote "An American President":

Lewis Rothschild : People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd : Lewis, we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference.

[LFC]

While not as bold and loud as Florida's, the rush towards a dictatorial gov't in Georgia continues. In this case its Georgia's Public Service Commission skipping hand in hand down the path of siphoning more money from residents while blocking any accountability whatsoever.

Patty Durand reached her tipping point in 2019, when Georgia’s Public Service Commission was considering a rate case that would have huge implications for energy bills for people in Georgia. Durand was president of an energy nonprofit in Atlanta, and the commission had invited her to present research on consumer support for various plans that would keep bills lower. Yet the PSC eventually approved a different rate plan, one supported by the state’s powerful investor-owned utility, Georgia Power, that raised power bills by an average of $6 per month.

“Georgia Power gets what Georgia Power wants,” Durand said. “I was outraged. I knew Georgia Power was gonzo for profit, but I didn’t know they’d harm vulnerable populations, and I didn’t know the PSC would allow it.”

Durand decided to run for office the next year, seeking to unseat PSC Commissioner Tim Echols, who had backed the Georgia Power-supported rate plan and was up for reelection in 2022. She launched her campaign in July 2021. Durand also moved into Gwinnett County, located in the district where she’d compete against Echols—a move she said she made for personal reasons, but one that allowed her to meet residency requirements for the election set by Georgia law.

But Durand seems to have underestimated the will of the PSC to keep utility critics out of the room where decisions are made—and the immense power of redistricting.

In late February of this year, regulators with the PSC released a new districting map, as part of Georgia’s larger redistricting effort following its census. Surprisingly, the map moved Gwinnett County, where Durand now lived, from District 2 to District 4, a significant change from the previous map that Durand and other critics say does not track with corresponding demographic changes. The change also meant that Durand no longer met the residency requirements.

While Republicans claimed that the changes were a necessary reflection of population shifts, Durand suspected that the map may have been manipulated to purposefully exclude her from the race. After a judge ruled her ineligible to run against Echols in District 2, she sued.

It seems that Durand may have been right. In text messages from January turned over to Durand’s lawyer, Echols and Commissioner Tricia Pridemore single out Durand’s new address as they discuss the new map. “Don’t forget to get her home address and send it to me please,” Pridemore texted Echols on January 26. Echols responded with Durand’s home address in Peachtree Corners.

[LFC]

Nice move, especially since it was all about facts and it riled up Gym Jordan.

The Republican outrage was described as a "small political side circus," after U.S. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) succeeded on Thursday in having several fact-checking articles exposing Republicans' false claims made part of the Congressional Record.

The articles all debunked the false and baseless claims conservatives and the far right have been making for nearly a year, that Attorney General Merrick Garland called parents speaking at school boards "domestic terrorists," and was investigating them.

Cicilline first tried to read the articles into the record, but Republicans immediately objected.

The Democrat from Rhode Island appeared genuinely surprised that the Judiciary Committee Republicans would object to the very basic and standard procedure. He was forced to describe the articles to have them included in the official record – something the Republicans also caused a commotion over.

Referring to Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Cicilline said that "the ranking member made reference to a Department of Justice whistleblower memo and grossly mischaracterized its content. So I'd ask unanimous consent that I'd be permitted to read the memo into the record."

Republicans objected.

"You object to reading into the record the memo?" Cicilline, shocked, asked. "Then I ask unanimous consent that the document that the Republicans were afraid to have be read aloud be introduced into the record."

He read the titles into the record (NCRM has linked to those titles online below.)

I wonder if this quotation (bold mine) is accurate. If so it's an awesome truth telling by one of the dumbest people to ever be seated in Congress in America.

Cicilline then asked "unanimous consent" that Republicans "read these documents and stop making false claims," to which the Chair responded, "Good luck with that."

Republicans were outraged.

"Point of order!" yelled one.

"The gentleman just impugned our integrity!" Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) decried. "I would demand that his words be taken down. He is not allowed under the rules to impugn false statements by this side."

Gohmert literally point his finger at Cicilline as he yelled.

"And as far as Politifact, and some of those, they couldn't find the truth with both hands," Gohmert, making what would likely be a "pants on fire claim," also charged.

[LFC]

Brian Kemp plays the good German Republican and accuses Stacy Abrams of doing what he actually did himself. That's pure Republicanism right there.

Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp says he has a problem with boycotts, particularly ones related to Georgia’s new voting restrictions law. But apparently that repulsion to boycotts only applies to Democrats and issues he favors, because Kemp has personally proposed boycotts of his own.

Kemp and his campaign have recently reupped false attacks on Democratic rival Stacey Abrams, accusing her, erroneously, of promoting a 2021 Major League Baseball boycott in Georgia as a means to pressure conservatives into repealing the new voting law Georgia passed in April 2021.

While Abrams did not encourage that boycott—and, in fact, publicly discouraged it—Kemp himself personally called on Georgians to boycott companies when it suited his political agenda, and asked state legislators to take punitive economic action against Georgia-based Delta Airlines over ideological differences.

You can read about Kemp's words and actions as he lashed out at Delta and also at various companies over guns after the Parkland massacre. Meanwhile here's what Stacy actually said.

Those two moves would appear to undercut Kemp’s ongoing attacks against Abrams. However, the attacks are baseless to begin with: Abrams did not, as the Kemp camp says, encourage the boycott that led MLB to pull the All-Star game out of Atlanta that year.

When that claim resurfaced this year, PolitiFact rated it “False,” citing Abrams’ own words—an issue the site had also addressed after Kemp’s attacks at the time. As it turns out, the state’s most influential Democrat had actually taken the opposite position, asking supporters to “not boycott” Georgia.

In a video posted to Twitter in March 2021, Abrams said she understood “the passion” behind the nationwide calls for boycotts in response to controversial voting restrictions that Kemp had signed.

“But here’s the thing: Black, Latino, AAPI (Asian American-Pacific Islander) and Native American voters whose votes are the most suppressed under SB 202 are also the most likely to be hurt by potential boycotts of Georgia,” Abrams said. “To our friends across the country please do not boycott us. To my fellow Georgians, stay and fight, stay and vote.”

Kemp’s tweet last month that Abrams had “pressured” the MLB to withdraw the All-Star game cited a Fox News report from April 2021, which ran with the headline: “MLB commissioner decided to move All-Star Game after pressure from Stacey Abrams on voting issues: sources.”

However, those anonymous sources did not say that Abrams had pressured the league to move the game, but had asked the commissioner to forcefully denounce the new voting law. In those meetings, Abrams had encouraged the MLB not to pull the game out of Georgia, as Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein later reported, and the league confirmed to PolitiFact.

And when having the evidence shoved right in their faces they pull a Full Mitt Romney.

In response to The Daily Beast’s questions, Kemp press secretary Tate Mitchell—who went after Abrams in the boycott issue last week—claimed speciously that Abrams had edited her own USA Today op-ed, and asserted that Kemp “has never supported a boycott of our state.

Lies, lies, and lies to cover up their lies.

[LFC]

The 87,000 Armed IRS Agents Conspiracy Theory Is Just The Latest Republican Assault On An Agency In Crisis

If there was a defined Republican talking point during the debate preceding the House passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, it was this: that the bill would mean the hiring of 87,000 new, armed IRS agents kicking down the doors of middle class America and killing the people they find inside.

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) chuckled the first time he debunked a very loud recitation of the conspiracy theory by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), but the humor had drained from his fact checks as he corrected the claim over and over again during the next hour.

The outlandish talking point is being parroted not just by conspiracy theory-minded House freshmen like Boebert. It’s coming from some of the highest-profile Republican senators too.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, published a letter addressed to “American job seekers” warning them that applying to the IRS means that “you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them.”

“Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa?” pondered Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Fox and Friends.

None of that, of course, is true. Momentarily setting aside the idea of bloodthirsty tax enforcement agents, other key plot points of this dark Republican fantasy are also devoid of fact. The 87,000 number stems from an old Treasury Department report, pre-dating the IRA, estimating the number of full-time employees the agency would be able to hire by 2031 with $80 billion in additional funding. Those employees would not all be working in enforcement, but be spread across the agency. And many of them will be replacing people expected to quit or retire in the meantime.

A very small number of IRS employees — just over 2,000, per 2021 IRS data — are armed special agents. They work alongside other federal law enforcement entities, as tax crimes often overlap with other ones, like drug trafficking. As multiple tax experts reminded TPM: it was the IRS that took down Al Capone.

That’s a very small percentage of the nearly 80,000 people who work at the IRS and an even smaller percentage of the roughly 132,000 federal law enforcement officers total.

Republicans have been out to destroy the IRS for decades. Those of us schmucks who make a paycheck have all our earnings automatically tracked and taxed. The wealthy? Not so much. This is all by design so the top 1% can get more and more creative and brazen without any worries about prosecution. It's the Republican way.

[LFC]

One set of rules for thee, another for me. This is pure MAGAt clickbait, right up until the "Corrections" section at the end.

In the two-plus years since the George Floyd protests, conservative pundits and politicians have accused progressives, racial justice activists, and police reformers of deploying divisive anti-law enforcement rhetoric. They've also roundly ridiculed calls from some quarters of the left to "defund" the police.

They have a point. There has been a dangerous increase in anti-police rhetoric lately, and it has only escalated in recent months.

Several prominent left-wing commentators1, for example, absurdly accused law enforcement officers of planting bombs to frame Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters.2 Other left-wingers, including Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, have baselessly accused police of engaging in false flag operations.3

One high-profile progressive pundit even went on the most-watched progressive news program in the country4-- and then on several other MSNBC shows5 -- to claim that the police officers injured during the George Floyd protests weren't cops at all, but "crisis actors."6 Other left-wing pundits not only refused to denounce her, they praised her and cheered her on.7

After the highly volatile no-knock raid8 that resulted in police officers shooting and killing Amir Locke,9 left-leaning law professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. had the temerity to second-guess the officer's tactics, calling them "excessive" and "gratuitous," only to later discover that he'd been wrong about key details of the raid.10

Even as racial justice protesters attacked federal courthouses, progressive pundits derisively dismissed protesters' attacks on police with the laughable claim that because the protesters didn't have guns, they were “mostly peaceful."11 Other liberals then blamed police officers themselves for "riling up" the violent protesters.12

And the rhetoric has only grown uglier:

Lots of examples followed by this. There are 20 more corrections not quoted.

CORRECTIONS:

* Instead of “left-wing,” this headline should should read “right-wing.” Also, this entire post is satire.

Please see a long list of additional corrections below.

I regret nothing.

1 Instead of “left-wing,” this should say “right-wing”
2 Instead of “Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters,” this should say “January 6th protesters”
3 “Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren” should read “Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz”
4 “progressive” should say “conservative”
5 “MSNBC” should read “Fox News”
6 “George Floyd protests” should read “January 6th protests”
7 “Left-wing” should read “ring-wing”
8 “Highly volatile no-knock raid” should read “comparatively mild knock-and-announce search”
9 “police shooting and killing Amir Locke” should read, “police searching Paul Manafort's apartment, after which Manafort was permitted to turn himself in voluntarily”
10 “left-leaning law professor Eddie Glaude, Jr.” should read “right-leaning law professor Jonathan Turley”
...

[LFC]

Look at how glibly this smug dickhead denies the facts. I wonder if an apology will be made for being wrong. (Just kidding. There's no way he'd ackowledge that red Oklahoma has a higher violent crime rate than either New York or California.)

Here's a report from March entitled The Red State Murder Problem.

Every news outlet from FOX to CNN to The New York Times to local newspapers has a story with attention-grabbing headlines like “US cities hit all-time murder records.” Fox News and Republicans have jumped on this and framed it as a “Democrat” problem. They blame it on Democrat’s “soft-on-crime” approach and have even referred to a New York District Attorney’s approach as “hug-a-thug.” Many news stories outside of Fox have also purported that police reform is responsible for this rise in murder and have pointed to cities like New York and Los Angeles.

There is a measure of truth to these stories. The US saw an alarming 30% increase in murder in 2020. While 2021 data is not yet complete, murder was on the rise again this past year. Some “blue” cities, like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, have seen real and persistent increases in homicides. These cities—along with others like Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis—are also in places with wall-to-wall media coverage and national media interest.

But there is a large piece of the homicide story that is missing and calls into question the veracity of the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.

For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations. In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry, over the stunning levels of murders in these and other places.

We collected 2019 and 2020 murder data from all 50 states. (Comprehensive 2021 data is not yet available.) We pulled the data from yearly crime reports released by state governments, specifically the Departments of Justice and Safety. For states that didn’t issue state crime reports, we pulled data from reputable local news sources. To allow for comparison, we calculated the state’s per capita murder rate, the number of murders per 100,000 residents, and categorized states by their presidential vote in the 2020 election, resulting in an even 25-25 split.

We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. And finally, many of the states with the worst murder rates—like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas—are ones that few would describe as urban. Only 2 of America’s top 100 cities in population are located in these high murder rate states. And not a single one of the top 10 murder states registers in the top 15 for population density.

Whether one does or does not blame Republican leaders for high murder rates, it seems that Republican officeholders do a better job of blaming Democrats for lethal crime than actually reducing lethal crime.

[LFC]

Oh, Nikki. You really did become a Republican political whore. Maybe you don't have quite the stretch marks around your lips like Little Lindsey but seriously, this is just f***ing lying.

Somebody went and compared crime rates of where her son goes to school compared to where he lives with her. I don't know how she allows her children to live in that hellscape. It's no wonder she sent him away to someplace safe.

Villanova, PA got a grade of A+. "The rate of crime in Villanova is 7.54 per 1,000 residents during a standard year."

Kiawah Island, SC got a grade of F. "The rate of crime in Kiawah Island is 136.57 per 1,000 residents during a standard year."

[pnwguy]

Republicans are all about emotions and fear, not actual facts.  If the facts don't match your narrative, just lie about it.

[LFC]

Scratch the surface of a right-wing victim story, find a steaming pile of shit. Bold of lies mine.

There’s more with the Rubio canvasser attack story.

Sunday night two men assaulted Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon. Rubio went on Twitter the next day claiming it was a politically motivated attack. But Monzon did not say anything like that in the police report of the incident and only began making the claim after Rubio did. Attention has also focused on the fact that Monzon has a long history with racist and antisemitic extremist groups, including being one of the alt-righters at the Charlottesville “Jews will not replace us” rally in 2017.

Today Rubio angrily attacked the press for “smearing” Monzon’s past, claiming that Monzon had “rejected” his past extremism. But today he was the guest of honor at a Proud Boys rally organized to support him.

“I’m going to clear my name,” Monzon told The Miami Herald in a brief impromptu interview at the rally.

[LFC]

More details. It's becoming clearer and clearer that Rubio and his racist are creating alternative facts for political gain. Gee, how very, very Republican.

After yesterday’s Proud Boys rally in Hialeah, Rubio canvasser Christopher Monzon appeared at a GOP event in Miami Springs today during which he gave a fiery speech with numerous new details about the allegedly politically motivated attack he suffered a week ago. Remember that in the initial report to police he didn’t mention any political remarks at all. Now they said “F**k Marco Rubio,” along with threatening to kill Monzon for being a Republican.

The Herald also has more details about the father of one of the attackers who apparently tried to break up the fight. According to the Herald he also introduced a limp today that he didn’t have yesterday.

Basically every eyewitness or contemporaneous police report makes it fairly clear that this was a street fight of some sort that Monzon and Rubio are now making into a kind of GOP martyrdom story.

[LFC]

The well funded assault on reality continues and in the face of it the MSM continues to be useless. They have no real interest in countering what's going on.

🧵Quite amazing most the media do not seen concerned we are seeing some of the same individuals involved in Cambridge Analytica engaged in covid disinformation

That CNP (Bannon, Mercers, etc) set up disinformation groups

2/ February 2020 members of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons were already claiming they had a cure for covid (HCQ) there was no need for any measures

3/ AAPS members Vliet and McCullough repurposed the Truth for Health Foundation into a religious covid disinformation group promoting alternative treatments

This was with Bill Cook founder of the Black Robe Regiment, a religious militia organisation. Cook preaches about witches
4/ Cook is also responsible for book burnings you may have seen clips of. Black Robe Regiment believes civil war is inevitable and call to prepare for it, they are also close to Michael Flynn and Rodger Stone, key individuals in the attempt to overthrow US democracy

The thread goes on and on.