VIDEO OF THE DAY: Jamie Raskin drops nightmare news on Trump
Rep. Jamie Raskin joins Brian Tyler Cohen to prove that Trump should be disqualified from running for office, once and for all!
Producers of “forever chemicals” knew they were toxic, say UN experts
In today's episode of "Corporate America has been knowingly poisoning you for years," a UN human rights team has called out a PFAS manufacturing plant in North Carolina as the poster child for irresponsible behavior. Nine independent UN human rights advisors placed blame for widespread contamination in the area on a Chemours plant — a Dupont spinoff — near Fayetteville and said “even as DuPont and Chemours had information about the toxic impacts of PFAS on human health and drinking water, the companies continued to produce and discharge PFAS.” The UN team also roundly criticized American regulators for failing to do their jobs, saying that the EPA had been "captured" by the corporations and did their bidding. It is truly shocking to consider just how much harm corporate America has knowingly heaped on the public, whether its hair products or processed food or air pollution or even microplastics in your clothes — and the complete lack of any kind of repercussion more serious than a slap-on-the-wrist fine and finger wag truly gives away the rigged game.
GOP millionaire to swoop in on crucial battleground Senate race
Tammy Baldwin for Senate: Banker Eric Hovde is planning a run for Senator Tammy Baldwin’s must-win seat. This man is a megamillionaire capable of pouring at least $20 million dollars from his own fortune into the race — and you know that McConnell’s dark-money network is set to pour millions more in to replace Senator Baldwin with a right-wing extremist ready to do Trump’s bidding. Will you chip in to help re-elect Senator Baldwin and protect our Senate majority?
When your home state also becomes your abuser
The GOP's true intentions and extremist policy agenda are becoming terrifyingly clear as women in red states find themselves tied to abusive partners by pregnancies they can't abort and threatened by the loose gun restrictions that allow their abusers to own deadly weapons. "Three systemic crises" are "converging in Texas...creating a deadly new normal for women," writes Alanna Vagianos for HuffPost. Pregnant and postpartum women are more than twice as likely to be murdered than to die from sepsis, hypertensive disorders, or hemorrhage, and since the fall of Roe v. Wade, domestic violence has increased precipitously in the Lone Star State and other red states. Even more alarming, calls citing firearms in situations of intimate partner violence in Texas have increased dramatically — 47%!!! from 2022 to 2023. Republicans are creating nightmare scenarios for at-risk women in which they are tied to men by forcible impregnation, and in some cases, forced to endure abuse until their partner decides to kill them. Let's hear it for the party of FaMiLy VaLuEs™.
The story behind the New York Times' Oct. 7 exposé
Stunning new reporting by the Intercept continues to reveal the extremely disturbing and ethically questionable decision making by the New York Times around their blockbuster article accusing Hamas militants of committing systemic sexual assault during the October 7 terror attacks. The foremost of those choices was assigning a former Israeli air force intelligence official, Anat Schwartz, to the story despite her having no prior reporting experience whatsoever. Schwartz was initially dubious about being assigned to conduct the majority of the interviews for veteran reporter Jeffery Gettleman (“I have no qualifications," she said), but she and her nephew, Adam Sella, dutifully did their reporting anyway — at the behest of the NY Times leadership, who spearheaded the entire article. Schwartz would later give an interview to an Israeli podcast about her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. Numerous independent journalistic groups have flagged serious inconsistencies and contradictions in the stories told in the Times report, and the opening anecdote about the alleged assault of murdered rave attendee Gal Abdush is even disputed by her own family members, one of whom said “the media invented it.” Further complicating matters, Schwatz was found to have used her personal social media account to endorse genocidal rhetoric, like “turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse.” This in no way negates numerous substantive accusations of sexual assault during the October 7 attacks, but the idea that the New York Times is abusing its position as one of the world's most respected journalistic institutions to push questionable reporting with deadly serious implications is very disturbing indeed.
Florida’s new driver’s license rule is blatant trans voter suppression
Republicans' ongoing crusade to erase and eradicate the most marginalized among us hasn't skipped a beat since Gov. Ron DeSantis ended his disastrous bid for the White House. Quietly and behind-the-scenes last month, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles — run by a DeSantis ally and political appointee — issued a bullshit memo indicating that they will no longer honor Floridians requests to amend the gender marker on their driver’s licenses. In a statement that FLHSMV made to several media outlets after news of the memo hit the press, the message was even clearer: "you do not get to play identity politics with your driver license." Not to be outdone, the Republican-dominated state legislature is advancing a bill to prohibit amending gender identity on licenses altogether, a move Equality Florida, the statewide LGBTQ rights group, has rightly dubbed the Trans Erasure Bill. Across the country, trans voters have already been confronting barriers when voting due to state voter identification rules. An estimated 203,700 trans voters faced possible disenfranchisement across the United States in 2022, because their identity documents did not list their correct name and/or gender. In Florida alone, 30,300 trans people who were eligible to vote did not have accurate identity documents. In the context of voter suppression, Florida’s new state identification policy takes on additional dimension: some trans voters may be prohibited from renewing their driver's licenses with an accurate gender marker. Some may decide not to vote rather than have to show their inaccurate license to polling place workers. For a trans person who doesn’t have accurate identification, their safety can be at risk. And on a macro level, the systematic suppression of an entire voting bloc puts the health and safety of our democracy at further risk.
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