Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalLara Logan, who compared Fauci to Mengele, says Fox News pushed her out
The former CBS reporter Lara Logan, who compared Dr Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, has claimed she was “pushed out” at Fox News because the conservative network does not want “independent thinkers”.
“I was definitely pushed out,” Logan told Eric Metaxas, a conservative radio host, this week. “I mean, there is no doubt about that. They don’t want independent thinkers. They don’t want people who follow the facts regardless of the politics.”
Fox News has not commented on reports that it “quietly benched” Logan over her remark about Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. On Friday, a spokesperson for Fox News said the network would not comment.
Logan has not appeared as a guest on Fox News since making the comment about Fauci. There have been no new episodes of her show on the Fox Nation streaming service, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, which is still available.
Logan made the comment about Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who conducted medical experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp, in November, during a discussion of the Covid pandemic on Fox News Primetime.
Logan said: “Dr Fauci, this is what people say to me, that he doesn’t represent science to them.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/09/lara-logan-fox-news-mengele-fauci-remark
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Poor li'l victim 
'Anti-Grooming' Rally at Disney Is Latest Stop for Culture War Traveling Circus
The Disney corporation has been accused of supporting grooming children ever since it withdrew its support for Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The law, which has inspired similar legislation elsewhere, bans teachers from teaching kids up to age 12 anything about sexual orientation or gender identity. In just the past week, the Disney grooming conspiracy has rapidly morphed into wild claims that the corporation is on a covert mission to indoctrinate children with a satanic agenda or is a front for a secret pedophilia ring.
Wednesday’s rally was organized by Sean Feucht, one of the “patriot pastors” who has risen to national prominence in recent years amid a surge of Christian nationalism within the GOP. Feucht and his ilk view culture war issues—election conspiracies, vaccines, critical race theory, LGBTQ rights—as primordial battles between good and evil that not only offend Christianity but also threaten what it means to be American.
The Disney controversy couldn’t have come at a better time for the far-right, which has lately found itself rudderless and in need of a new cause du jour. Anger over mask mandates and vaccines, which brought disparate elements of the far-right under one banner, has dissipated now that COVID restrictions have been rolled back.
The vast array of conspiracies against Disney have recently shown up everywhere from the social media feeds of Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to anonymous forums and far-right Telegram channels. The far-right has latched onto the debacle—as well as a recent slew of state bills and laws targeting the LGBTQ community—as an excuse to traffic in tired transphobic and homophobic slurs, bashing gay and trans people as sex predators or pedophiles. On one pro-Trump forum, users have made threats against teachers , especially LGBTQ teachers, saying “Hang them all” and “Groomers get the rope.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88g3ep/anti-grooming-rally-at-disney-is-latest-stop-for-culture-war-traveling-circus
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Little Sean can't even spell "fucked" right. Probably can't say it right either, but sure is fucked up.
Alabama Is Set to Pass 3 (Three!) Anti-Gay Bills Today
Alabama lawmakers are trying to win a prize for the most bigoted bills passed in one day, and fine, we will give them the asshole trophy.
Today the Republican-controlled state legislature is set to pass a so-called “bathroom bill” that would ban transgender students in grades K through 12 from using the bathroom and locker room corresponding with their gender identity; a felony ban on doctors providing gender-affirming healthcare to transgender minors; and a so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit teachers from discussing sexuality in kindergarten through fifth grade. If passed, the bills will go to Governor Kay Ivey (R) for her signature.
The bathroom bill, HB 322, has already passed the House, and the Senate is considering it today. Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brian Lyman said on Twitter that right after the bathroom bill was introduced on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. Shay Shelnutt moved to add a “Don’t Say Gay” amendment to the bill. (Shelnutt is the lead sponsor of the healthcare ban.) Lyman reported that the amendment passed 24 to 6 and the larger bathroom bill passed 26 to 5, sailing right on through. It will now go back to the House for final approval.
he Senate has already passed the health care ban, SB 184, and the House will take it up today. It would make providing gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormones a class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. That bill could also potentially out trans kids to their parents by forcing schools to report gender non-conformity to parents. Lawmakers haven’t yet voted on the health care ban. but we’ll update this post after they do.
https://jezebel.com/alabama-is-set-to-pass-3-three-anti-gay-bills-today-1848763049
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Alabummer. Notice no one seems overly concerned about transgender MALES?
Leaked Messages Reveal the Origins of the Most Vile Hunter Biden Smear
DAN FRIEDMANLate in the 2020 presidential campaign, trailing in the polls, Donald Trump and his allies worked to make a campaign issue out of a trove of files on a laptop that his opponent’s son, Hunter Biden, had apparently abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The effort to publicize compromising emails, images, and videos from the device involved prominent Trump confidants including Rudy Giuliani and Steven Bannon. But it also featured an unexpected player: Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese tycoon who was working with Bannon to build a small empire of Chinese-language media outlets, nonprofits, and other ventures.
Mother Jones obtained scores of WhatsApp audio messages Guo sent to supporters, along with underlying material from Biden’s hard drive that Guo’s assistant distributed at his behest. Previous reports have noted the role of Guo allies and companies in publicizing sex tapes and other material involving Hunter Biden. But the WhatsApp messages, and sources who were involved in the effort, reveal that Guo—who has been accused in lawsuits of fraud and rape and of secretly acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party—played a larger role than previously known in ensuring that explicit images and videos from the laptop appeared online, and in spreading lies about them. (Guo has denied the allegations made in the lawsuits against him.)
Guo stage-managed an October 2020 effort to disseminate videos and pictures showing Hunter Biden engaged in sex acts and using drugs. After Giuliani, then President Trump’s personal lawyer, gave him material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Guo issued detailed instructions to two WhatsApp groups that included dozens of Guo’s supporters. Guo directed these supporters to package, post, and promote hundreds of explicit images and other material about Biden on websites Guo controlled, people involved in the effort said.
The material Guo publicized seems to be real, but he instructed supporters to couple it with false claims that it came from Chinese sources, and that the Chinese government had used it to obtain leverage over Hunter Biden and his father, Joe Biden. “We have to express…The Chinese Communist Party used these to threaten Hunter and [Joe] Biden,” Guo told supporters in an October 24, 2020, message. (Mother Jones is quoting English translations of messages that were originally in Chinese. Multiple people independently verified the translations.)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/hunter-biden-laptop-guo-wengui-bannon-giuliani/
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Might have known that vile pusbag was involved
Out of prison, TikTok influencers are reshaping how we think about life behind bars
My favorite TikTok video starts with a clean-cut man in a baseball cap walking down a snowy street.
“I’m going to my favorite teacher’s house from when I did my 21-year prison bid,” he tells the camera. “She is the BOMB. She doesn’t know I’m coming. Here we go, let’s surprise her!”
He knocks, then turns back to the camera.
I’m So Nervous Right Now,” the caption reads.
Seconds later, the door swings open.
“Mr. Lacey? Oh my God! How are you?” his former teacher cries, dissolving into laughter and then tears before inviting him inside.
The 54-second video went viral last year with more than 2.7 million views. Michael Lacey — who did 21 years in Indiana prisons and now posts under the username Comrade Sinque — went on to become one of the top creators in the niche realm of prison TikTok, where people who did time tell the rest of the world what it’s like and put faces to the concept of mass incarceration.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/prison-tiktok-influencers-rcna23090
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I didn't know where to put this, but Media finally seemed obvious. I'm more of a podcast person myself, listening while I do other things, but TikTok apparently has a LOT
Judge deals blow to Steve Bannon's legal defense in coming trial
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon cannot argue at his trial that he is not guilty of contempt of Congress because he was following the advice of his lawyer, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said such a defense is not available in a contempt of Congress case, dealing Bannon’s defense a major setback. He faces trial in July.
“It’s a serious blow, because he doesn’t have another good defense,” said Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor. “He’ll now have to make a decision about whether to proceed to trial or try to cut some kind of deal.”
A federal grand jury indicted Bannon in November on two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. One count accused him of refusing to appear for a deposition, and the other was for declining to produce documents requested by the committee.
If he is convicted, Bannon, who is 68, could be sentenced to a year behind bars and a fine of up to $100,000.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-deals-blow-steve-bannons-legal-defense-upcoming-trial-rcna23314
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Potential fine and sentence are insufficient for this pusbag.
Texas school plans to oust a teacher who fought for LGBTQ rainbow stickers
The school year at MacArthur High in Irving, Texas, began last fall with the administration scraping off rainbow stickers that had been posted on campus, prompting hundreds of students to walk out in protest. Seven months later, LGBTQ students say things have deteriorated further.
One faculty sponsor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance is facing having her contract terminated, another is preparing to resign, and a third has been removed from the classroom. The alliance’s weekly meetings became monthly, and attendance dropped from about 40 students to fewer than 10. The student newspaper has functionally shut down. Two teachers said that the school’s principal asked teachers to take down gay pride flags in their classrooms and offices.
Several students said that either they or their classmates have been called homophobic slurs and bullied, and school staff members have failed to intervene. Some said they’re discouraged by the Irving Independent School District’s response to the concerns they’ve raised through the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) and school board meetings, and they feel less safe at school than they did a year ago. Two students said human resources officers with the district questioned them about their involvement with the GSA.
“It feels like a target was put on us,” said Adaiah Knight, a junior who identifies as gender-fluid and nonbinary and who said students have harassed them. (Knight uses they/them pronouns.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lgbtq-students-texas-school-rainbow-stickers-rcna23208
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Texass. Again. Can we just secede from them?
The Invisible Hand of Steve Twist
When Josh Tate was sentenced in 2017 to 10 years in prison for getting caught with drugs multiple times, his wife, Claire Tate, tried not to dwell on the moments he would miss with their two young kids. She didn’t see the purpose in sending Josh — who had struggled with a meth addiction for years but never been convicted of a violent crime — away for so long.
“You can’t punish a drug addiction out of somebody,” Claire Tate said recently.
Last year, state legislation supported by prominent conservative groups seemed to offer Josh Tate a chance to serve a larger portion of his sentence at home after completing education and self-help programs.
Claire and Josh began making plans, big and small, for once he was out of prison: going to a grocery store, visiting a hot dog stand in a small southern Arizona town, taking the kids to the beach.
One man had the power to delay their early reunion: Steve Twist. Twist has never held elected office. But over four decades the Arizona victims’ rights advocate, adjunct law professor and former assistant state attorney general has had an enduring impact on policies that created one of the nation’s most punitive state criminal justice systems.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-invisible-hand-of-steve-twist
America needs more doctors and nurses to survive the next pandemic
When Covid-19 first hit the US health care system, the biggest concerns about responding to the crisis were about physical infrastructure: Would hospitals have enough ventilators or physical space to care for a surge of patients? But the shortfalls that limited the American response were ultimately about the country’s human infrastructure: There were not enough nurses in hospitals, not enough staff in long-term care facilities, not enough public health workers.
There still aren’t. With a fourth wave building in December 2021 after the omicron variant emerged, Roberta Schwartz, a senior executive with Houston Methodist Hospital, summarized the conundrum like this: “You can send all the ventilators you want. I have no one to staff them.”
One of the primary lessons of the pandemic is that the United States must develop the ability to temporarily increase our health care staffing capacity whenever the next public health crisis arrives. We can’t magically create hundreds of new doctors and nurses at a moment’s notice. But we can make it easier to use the medical personnel we do have more effectively, to give us a fighting chance in an emergency scenario.
“Surge capacity is probably the name of the game,” Michael Chernew, a health policy professor at Harvard University, told me, adding that it would be difficult and expensive to run a health system at pandemic capacity all the time. “That’s really hard to support.”
https://www.vox.com/22934992/covid-19-pandemic-doctors-nurses-public-health-shortages
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I have 2 brothers. One is a doctor married to a doctor, I'm a nurse. We have 10 kids combined (counting steps), no medical personnel. I have 11 grandkids, one brother has 3. None of us has encouraged our kids to go into the medical field. There are reasons.
Trauma among health care workers comparable to that of combat vets
As Covid cases surged across the U.S. in spring 2020, comparisons were routinely made between war zones and hospitals in a state of chaos.
Health care workers of any specialty — from urologists to plastic surgeons — were recruited to help with the tsunami of extremely ill patients. Intensive care specialists were unable to save lives. Many thousands of patients died alone without loved ones because hospitals barred visitors. And workers were constantly terrified that they, too, would get sick or infect their families.
The war zone comparisons may not have been far off the mark: In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers reported that the levels of mental health distress felt by doctors, nurses, first responders and other health care personnel early in the pandemic were comparable to what's seen in soldiers who served in combat zones.
What health care workers faced early in the pandemic is a type of post-traumatic stress called "moral injury," said Jason Nieuwsma, a clinical psychologist at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, and author of the new report.
Moral injury can manifest in different ways, including feelings of guilt or shame after having participated in an extraordinarily high-stress situation that required immediate and often life-or-death decision-making. It can also manifest as feelings of betrayal.
For combat veterans, such scenarios are easy to envision.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/betrayal-guilt-shame-trauma-health-care-workers-comparable-combat-vets-rcna22918
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