March 16, 2024

Gang of Four - Damaged Goods + I Found That Essence Rare + At Home He's A Tourist + Love Like Anthrax

Label: EMI – EMC 3313, EMI – 0C 062-63 201
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo, Red Spine On Cover
Country: UK
Released: 25 Sept 1979
Genre: Rock
Style: Post-Punk, New Wave

March 16, 2024

Trump-Backed Candidate Says Gay Hookup Profile Was Ex-Intern's 'Prank'

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-backed-senate-candidate-bernie-moreno-says-gay-hookup-profile-was-ex-interns-prank-report



Bernie Moreno, a business executive and Trump-backed candidate for the Ohio Republican Senate nomination, is denying a report that links him to a profile seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on a casual hookup website. Instead, Moreno’s lawyer told the Associated Press, which published the report on Thursday, the profile was created by a mischievous former intern.

The news agency linked the profile “nardo19672,” which advertised its user was “looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling,” to Moreno’s work email address through data that was leaked from Adult Friend Finder in 2016. The AP noted that it could not verify whether Moreno had created the account himself—only that someone with access to his email had.

On Thursday night, his lawyer provided a statement from the intern, Dan Ricci, who admitted to the whole “juvenile prank.” Ricci said he was “thoroughly embarrassed by an aborted prank I pulled on my friend, and former boss, Bernie Moreno, nearly two decades ago.”

The AP also could not independently confirm the veracity of Ricci’s statement. Ricci did not respond to the agency’s inquiries.

Read it at The Associated Press

March 16, 2024

White House Chose Not to Block Schumer's Bombshell Netanyahu Speech

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-chose-not-to-block-schumers-bombshell-netanyahu-speech

The White House did have advance warning of what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was going to say about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a highly critical speech Thursday, but the administration did not block him from saying it.

In the latest sign of growing discord between Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem, Schumer called for Israel to hold elections to replace Netanyahu, whom he described as one of several “major obstacles” to achieving lasting peace between Israel and Palestine. His comments—which provoked immediate condemnation from Netanyahu’s allies—came just days after the Israeli leader was reportedly left “fuming” by a U.S. intelligence report that forecasted widespread protests inside Israel calling for his resignation.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that Schumer “did give our team advance notice” of what he was going to say. “This wasn’t about approval or disapproval or editing in any way,” Kirby insisted. “But it was—but he did give us a heads-up that he was going to do it.”

President Joe Biden has been at loggerheads with Netanyahu in recent days about a possible invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, a matter the president says he considers a red line. Netanyahu has repeatedly publicly vowed to go ahead with the invasion despite the U.S. warnings.

March 16, 2024

Project 2025 March 11 Update

GPAHE tracks the activities of those behind Project 2025, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America. To be clear, these plans continue regardless of who is president, and the groups in this extremist movement are relentlessly implementing initiatives at local, state, and federal levels. Today we look at women’s rights: “recreational sex,” contraception, IVF, and animal-human hybrids.

https://globalextremism.org/post/project-2025-march-11-update/



Heritage Foundation: condemning “recreational sex” and contraception

A central tenet of the Christian Nationalist movement is reverting to a traditional, Biblical family where marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman and sex outside of procreation is discouraged, if not verboten. On February 28, Project 2025 lead, Heritage Foundation, fresh from their first-ever International Coalition on Gender Imperialism conference the previous day, reposted a tweet from Critical Race Theory and DEI opponent, Christopher Rufo, a former Heritage and Claremont Institute fellow (a Project 2025 advisory group).





Students for Life of America: Contraception causes abortion, harms nuns, and empowers pedophiles

Another Project 2025 advisory board member, Students for Life of America (SFLA), which boasts chapters in all 50 states, believes that contraception use is not only “senseless,” but it can be downright dangerous and lead to unwanted pregnancies. As reported by Rolling Stone, the staunchly anti-abortion lobbying group SFLA states on its website that “contraception tends to feel like a ‘side issue’ for some pro-life advocates.” They add, “But we do have a responsibility to address it as it plays a significant role in the supply and demand for abortion – in addition to causing a number of abortions itself.” Birth control pills, injections, patches, rings, and Plan B are all abortifacients, the organization claims, “unnaturally” ending the life of a “conceived person” before they have a chance to implant in the lining of the uterus.

According to SFLA, the availability of birth control also puts an anti-constitutional burden on nuns and encourages pedophiles. “Students for Life of America does oppose violations of Constitutional conscience rights in forcing people, such as nuns, to purchase or subsidize drugs or devices which they find morally objectionable,” they state on their website [emphasis theirs]. “We also oppose efforts to sell products with the capacity to end preborn life over the counter, in part because such products empower abusers, who attempt to avoid pregnancy as their criminal acts toward minors take place.”

Students for Life of America: Abortion drug may lead to extinction of endangered species

According to SFLA, abortion drugs also violate the Endangered Species Act. (Project 2025, ironically, would abolish all efforts to protect endangered species). In an amicus brief, SFLA outlined their opposition to mifepristone in a case the US Supreme Court is set to hear at the end of March. They posited that the approval of the abortion drug mifepristone in 2000 has put the country’s waterways in danger. SFLA warns of “the inevitable harm that has and will continue to result to endangered species and the environment from releases of this dangerous chemical.”

Despite Project 2025’s disdain for bureaucracy, SFLA is calling for a host of government studies on mifepristone, which should be banned until it can be proven there is no environmental impact on endangered species. “The FDA’s actions on Mifepristone have failed to meet the requirements of the ESA and, therefore, must be revoked until the agency can implement measures to ensure that its actions do not adversely affect listed endangered or threatened species or designated critical habitats. Failure to do so could lead to the extinction of these species.” Animals at risk due to human abortions, which SFLA’s legal brief highlights in photos, include the red wolf, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the leopard darter, the California condor, the whooping crane, and sockeye salmon.

Family Research Council: IVF can lead to cloning and chimeras.................

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March 16, 2024

The magic of the mundane

Pioneering sociologist Erving Goffman realised that every action is deeply revealing of the social norms by which we live

https://aeon.co/essays/pioneering-sociologist-erving-goffman-saw-magic-in-the-mundane





Think back to the last time you fell over in a public place. What did you do next? Perhaps you immediately righted yourself and carried on exactly as before. I bet you didn’t, though. I bet you first stole a furtive glance at your surroundings to see if there were witnesses. If there were, then you may well have bent over and inspected the ground as if to figure out why you tripped, even if you already knew why. Or maybe you smiled or laughed to yourself or uttered a word like ‘Oops!’ or ‘Damn’. At the very least, I bet your heart rate increased. These behaviours seem irrational. If you were uninjured, why do anything at all after the stumble? For some reason, such public mishaps – stumbling, knocking something over, spilling something, pushing a ‘pull’ door, realising you’ve gone the wrong way and turning around – provoke an anxiety that compels us to engage in curious behaviours.

This is because, the sociologist Erving Goffman shows us, there is nothing simple about passing through a public space. Instead, we are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order. We do this by conforming to all manner of invisible rules, governing, for example, the distance we maintain from one another, where we direct our eyes and how we carry ourselves. These complex rules help us understand ourselves and one another. Break such a rule, and you threaten a ‘jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility’. When you fall over, you fail to comport yourself in an acceptable way, and so immediately pose a threat. ‘Is she dangerously out of control?’ others might wonder. ‘Is she a menace?’ Fear of social punishment – from a dirty look to outright ostracisation – will prompt you to engage in what Goffman calls ‘remedial work’, an attempt to show that you’re not a problem after all.

Looking at the ground signals that you didn’t choose to move strangely – you were subject to an unexpected obstacle. Smiling signals that you see the incident ‘as a joke, something quite uncharacteristic’. And swearing signals that, since you can use language, you are compos mentis, and that your fall was a blip in an otherwise ordinary life. In performing such a ‘normalcy show’, you re-establish yourself as an insider, and order is restored. Goffman realised that behaviours of this kind, much as they might feel like it, are not the results of idiosyncratic anxieties, of excessive self-consciousness or awkwardness. Instead, they are sensible responses by people appropriately attuned to the complexities of the social world.

Goffman’s ‘microsociology’ reveals that even the most incidental of social interactions is of profound theoretical interest. Every encounter is shaped by social rules and social statuses; ‘whether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will find that the fingertips of society have reached bluntly into the contact’. Such interactions contribute to our sense of self, to our relationships with others, and to social structures, which can often be deeply oppressive. Never mind the dealings of the courtroom, the senate, or the trading floor, it is in the mundane interactions of everyday life, Goffman thought, that ‘most of the world’s work gets done’.

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March 16, 2024

'Make the RNC White Again': GOP Ends Minority Outreach Program

With Trump allies taking over the RNC and cleaning house, one of the casualties was a minority outreach program that seemed to be working for Republicans.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/make-the-rnc-white-again-gop-ends-minority-outreach-program



After years of accusations of financial mismanagement, the Republican National Committee is overhauling its 2024 election operations—a full-on MAGA makeover that the RNC claims will curb excessive spending and steer as much money as possible to supporting Donald Trump’s campaign. But it appears that one of those strategic spending moves may have a profound effect on a successful minority outreach program, which two people with knowledge of the plans characterized as self-defeating, potentially erasing gains with groups of gettable new voters who have cooled on the Democratic Party.

As one of the sources put it to The Daily Beast, the tagline might as well be “Make the RNC White Again.” The program at issue is an initiative from the 2022 midterms where RNC field staff engaged voters through gatherings and events held at community centers in areas with heavy minority populations, most specifically Latino communities. In January, The Messenger reported that the RNC had already shuttered most of the nearly two dozen Hispanic Community Centers that served as the base for the program, leaving just five open. (The Messenger’s content vanished when it went out of business shortly thereafter, but the article was captured by the nonprofit Internet Archive.)

At the time, however, the RNC chalked the closures up as a temporary byproduct of its budget cycle. However, the organization also announced that it was preparing to double down on these efforts for 2024, opening 40 new centers in Latino, Black, Asian American, Native American, Jewish, and veteran communities across the country. That would include establishing outposts in key battlegrounds like Las Vegas, Nevada, Tuscon, Arizona, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, The Messenger reported. Jaime Florez, the RNC’s Hispanic communications director, told The Messenger that “Democrats have taken the Hispanic community for granted for far too long” and vowed that the RNC planned to capitalize on those opportunities.

“Republicans will continue to make historic investments in Hispanic voter outreach, from opening more community centers to launching ‘Deposita Tu Voto’, that will further our gains with Hispanic voters and deliver Republican victories in 2024,” Florez said at the time. But two people with knowledge of the plans told The Daily Beast that the RNC has decided to scrap that effort. Instead, the people said, the community center program now appears to be another casualty of the RNC’s recent restructuring—a bloodbath that has already claimed several dozen jobs, including senior leadership posts, along with the apparent decimation of field operations and other strategic realignments that could come at the cost of Republican candidates across the country not fortunate enough to be named Trump. Instead of going after minority voters, the RNC apparently plans to remake itself even more in Trump’s image.

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March 16, 2024

Novo Nordisk Discontinues Insulin Medication After Cutting Its Price. It Won't Be Sold In The U.S. After This Year.

https://prospect.org/health/2024-03-14-novo-nordisk-discontinues-insulin-levemir/

A year ago today, Novo Nordisk announced significant list price reductions on its insulin medications. Unlike co-payment caps or discount cards, these were real cuts in the actual cost to patients and payers, by 75 percent for vials and prefilled injection pens (FlexPens) of NovoLog, and by 65 percent for Novolin and Levemir. The new prices would begin January 1, 2024. “Novo Nordisk remains committed to ensuring patients living with diabetes can afford our insulins, a responsibility we take seriously,” senior vice president for market access Steve Albers said in a statement. Eli Lilly and Sanofi, the other two major insulin manufacturers, also cut their prices around that time, mainly due to a Democratic-passed change in Medicaid rebate policy that would have led to significant losses for the three companies. Praised by insulin users and advocates, it was seen as a positive step for a pharmaceutical industry that rarely gives patients much to smile about.

But last November, Novo Nordisk made a different announcement. Levemir, one of the drugs that got a price cut, would be fully discontinued in the U.S. at the end of 2024. (The FlexPen version would be discontinued next month.) Supply disruptions, the company said, would begin to hit patients in January—the same month the price cuts took effect. The alternative to Levemir that Novo Nordisk makes for the U.S. market sells for over three times as much. The announcement shocked Alison Smart of Salt Lake City, Utah. Her 15-year-old daughter, a competitive tennis player with Type 1 diabetes, takes Levemir, a type of long-acting insulin that was particularly useful for young people and athletes. “Not everyone realizes how great Levemir is,” Smart told me in an interview. “[But] there’s a whole history in diabetes care, once an insulin goes off-patent, it’s not worth it to make it anymore.” Smart started a small patient advocacy group called the Alliance to Protect Insulin Choice, and has been working to keep Levemir going.

Novo Nordisk, which thanks to its breakthrough GLP-1 weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy now has a higher market capitalization than Tesla, has thus far declined to alter its decision. Smart has spoken to numerous politicians, regulators, global health organizations, and generic manufacturers. She has gotten approving signals from generic producer Civica Rx that they could create a biosimilar alternative to Levemir, which has been off-patent for five years. But, Smart said, Novo Nordisk would have to keep Levemir on the market for three to five years, giving room for Civica to make the generic before patients and insurance companies settled into alternatives. The Levemir situation shines a light on the high-stakes corporate decisions over prescription drugs, and their impact on patients. Patient advocates say that Novo Nordisk is opting to bolster its weight loss drugs over insulin products, while making sure that its long-acting insulins avoid generic competition. “Taking off an insulin product that has already been on the market and has users,” said Shaina Kasper, policy and advocacy director for diabetes advocacy group T1International, who herself takes Levemir, “in favor of this drug that has a significantly higher profit margin, is putting profits over patients’ lives.”



Type 1 diabetes patients require a continuous supply of insulin, and that can be delivered in two ways. You can attach an automated insulin pump, which delivers the needed amounts accurately. But this must be worn practically all the time, and patients who compete in contact sports may damage the pump. The other option is a series of daily injections, usually taking quick-acting (or bolus) insulin with meals, and long-acting (or basal) insulin to essentially run in the background. Pump users do not need basal insulins; it’s primarily for those who do injections. Levemir, which came on the market in 2005, is one of only three basal insulins, something that Novo Nordisk has sought to obscure. In a direct letter to Smart, Novo Nordisk named eight different alternatives to Levemir for her daughter. However, six of those eight are variations on the only real alternative molecules: glargine and degludec. Levemir, which came on the market in 2005, is one of only three basal insulins, something that Novo Nordisk has sought to obscure. In a direct letter to Smart, Novo Nordisk named eight different alternatives to Levemir for her daughter. However, six of those eight are variations on the only real alternative molecules: glargine and degludec. “By taking Levemir off the market, you are consolidating more,” said Kasper.

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March 15, 2024

They Don't Want Trump OR Biden. Here's How They Still Can Elect Biden.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-03-15-they-dont-want-trump-or-biden-dual-haters/



President Biden and Donald Trump have now each won enough delegates to ensure their respective presidential nominations. Yet we are facing an election in which an unprecedented share of voters desperately wish that the two major parties don’t nominate these leaders. We’ve had such “dual haters” before. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton faced Donald Trump, they comprised 18 percent of the voters and they played a pivotal role in putting Trump in the White House. They gave Trump an over 20-point margin in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This year, the “dual haters” are 23 percent of the electorate, and they will not be easy voters for Biden to win. Right now, he is losing them by 8 points in a two-way contest and by 10 in the multicandidate field.

These numbers come from a survey of 2,500 potential voters in battleground states that Democracy Corps and PSG Consulting conducted at the end of 2023, which included 500 over- samples of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians at the end of the year. Our survey used the thermometer scale used by the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies, asking voters to give “warm” and “cool” ratings on a 100-degree thermometer. The most important finding was the share of these “dual haters” who are potential swing voters. Fully 45 percent are independents; 51 percent are moderates. Only 4 percent are “very conservative.” And a 55 percent majority say they’ll vote for independent candidates, led by Robert F. Kennedy. In a simulated race against Biden, 57 percent said they’d choose Nikki Haley. This is a group of voters that could break for Biden.

We cheered President Biden’s spirited State of the Union speech, which could reverse the momentum and get this race back to parity. It was a speech that could well have won over some moderate Republicans and Liz Cheney conservatives. But the president was not yet speaking to the “dual haters,” though he will have many more opportunities to do that in this long campaign. The president started the speech by declaring “the state of our Union is strong and getting stronger”—which probably didn’t ring true for these alienated and angry voters. A daunting 91 percent of such voters say the country is “on the wrong track.” They are looking for a big change; barring that, many would choose not to vote. Only a third chose 10 on the 1-to-10 ladder that measures voter interest, compared to over half of all voters. They are not close news-watchers and might well have skipped a 68-minute speech.

Democrats will have a better chance of winning them if they bring a more accurate view of what they have achieved and how it impacted people. The expanded Child Tax Credit, for example, expired and many reductions in prescription drug prices are anticipated in the future. Working people saw bigger wage gains under Trump; consumer confidence is still 20 points below its level when Biden took office; and by a wide margin, “dual haters” think Trump will help more than Biden in ensuring wages keep up with prices. They give the Republicans a 33-point advantage on “getting things done.” But Biden can still get ahead with these voters because our survey of the battleground shows he has the potential to get heard on abortion and women’s rights, and on opposition to MAGA Republicans. He can connect with these voters’ fear of autocracy and white supremacists. They liked his joining a picket line and getting billionaires to pay taxes. They wanted to hear more on climate change.

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March 15, 2024

Ken Paxton, America First Legal, and Premonitions of Project 2025

https://prospect.org/power/2024-03-15-ken-paxton-america-first-legal-project-2025/



Over his nearly ten years serving as the attorney general of Texas—almost nine of which he has been under criminal indictment—Ken Paxton has pushed steadily more extreme, right-wing policies to deprive Texans of their rights. Be it their right to clean air or water, their right to basic democratic participation, or their right to not face discrimination, Paxton has attacked them all. In these efforts, Paxton has had help from right-wing influence networks. In recent years, that has been especially true of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). This partnership is important in its own right, but it also gives us a preview of what Project 2025—the Republican program for a second Trump presidency—looks like at the state level.

For readers who haven’t heard of it before, CPI is a Wall Street–backed conservative incubator and training organization that continuously challenges the Biden administration in court. It is also a holding tank for right-wing extremists, replete with former (and potentially future) Trump staffers, like Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell. It has seven sub-organizations spanning many issue areas and advocacy styles, including those detailed in Project 2025’s notorious policy agenda. CPI’s organizations include the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the Election Integrity Network (EIN), the State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN), America First Legal (AFL), the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), American Cornerstone Institute, and American Moment (AM).

CPI affiliates are well integrated into the Project 2025 network, and are quickly rising to prominence by virtue of their associations with it. American Moment, for example, is a key component of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, for which AM’s personnel manager Sarah Calvis was also a project coordinator. (CRA, a separate CPI sub-organization, run by former Trump Office of Management and Budget appointee Russell Vought, is also a Project 2025 partner.) While not a formal Project 2025 partner in its own right, CPI’s America First Legal (AFL) functions as a litigation-on-demand firm for the network, and since its founding in 2021, has quickly made itself indispensable to the conservative legal movement writ large.



It’s also stacked with conservative extremists. Russell Vought is a defender of Christian nationalism and a member of AFL’s board of trustees. Past AFL board member Mark Meadows, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, architect of a 2013 government shutdown in hopes of sabotaging the Affordable Care Act, and Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, was up to his neck in January 6th and is currently facing charges for his role in the attempted putsch. Further, AFL president Stephen Miller is one of Donald Trump’s longest-serving aides and “catch-all symbol of the racism and malice” of Trump’s White House. Miller has also previously promoted explicitly white nationalist books and articles and has long-standing ties to prominent white nationalists, like Richard Spencer. Miller was also the architect of some of the Trump administration’s most heinously cruel immigration policies. Miller, notably, has also been floated as a potential attorney general under a second Trump administration.

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March 15, 2024

AIPAC Talking Points Revealed

https://prospect.org/world/2024-03-14-aipac-talking-points-revealed/



NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND – This week, approximately 1,600 foot soldiers from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) congregated inside the garish yet functional Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, for the PAC’s annual policy conference. It took place this year amid Israel’s bloody war in Gaza, which has left at least 30,000 Palestinians dead and is turning into a critical wedge issue in the 2024 elections. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed attendees by videocast, along with Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog. According to an incomplete speaker list, the entire Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress delivered remarks—Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Mike Johnson. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) were both in attendance, among other representatives.

In past years, the conference has been a media spectacle, with a widely disseminated lineup of powerful speakers to showcase AIPAC’s enduring political influence. This year, however, it was locked down, with few social media posts and broadcast speeches, largely because of the threat of disruptions from anti-war protests. The goal of this year’s low-key gathering was to fire up attendees for AIPAC’s 2024 agenda, before sending them off to Capitol Hill to strong-arm Congress on supporting Israel. The Prospect has obtained documents from the conference that preview the PAC’s lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill this week. The documents reveal AIPAC’s legislative strategy and the talking points it will use to support an unconditional $14 billion military funding package that has thus far been held up, among other policy changes. They also include numerous positions on aspects of the U.S. response to the war that have not previously been made public, from abolishing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to opposing recent restrictions imposed by the Biden administration on Israeli settlers. There is no mention of a two-state solution.

“This is damning evidence that AIPAC is completely aligned with the far right of the Israeli government even as tensions emerge between Netanyahu and the Biden administration,” said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now. Though many of the policy positions are consistent with AIPAC’s past advocacy, this trove of files offers a rare glimpse into the conversations the PAC holds with members of Congress behind closed doors, and the arguments it’s deploying. Though the primary motivation for the conference was lobbying, the event also informed members about the PAC’s congressional spending plans. AIPAC has pledged to drop over $100 million on campaigns this election cycle to defeat any congressional candidates critical of Israel. This week, the PAC touted its prowess to members as “dollar for dollar, the largest contributor to candidates in the 2022 midterm elections,” via its super PAC United Democracy Project. One brochure even pulls quotes from critical articles in The Intercept and Slate as testaments to its pre-eminence as an electoral juggernaut.



AIPAC has long described itself as a bipartisan organization that endorses the full leadership of both parties, despite the fact that financial disclosures show that many of its top donors overwhelmingly back GOP candidates, including former President Trump. Yet in 2022 and this year, almost all of AIPAC’s electoral spending has come in Democratic primaries. At the conference, the lobby did not hide its slant in campaign funding. In one pamphlet given to conference attendees, the only featured Democrats were from safe blue seats where they’d defeated a more progressive “anti-Israel” candidate in the primary, such as Reps. Haley Stevens (D-MI), Shontel Brown (D-OH), and Glenn Ivey (D-MD). The featured Republicans, however, either flipped their seats or represented highly contested frontline races held by only narrow margins. Those were Reps. Young Kim (R-CA), Don Bacon (R-NE), and Ken Calvert (R-CA). It’s been clear for several election cycles that AIPAC might sway the electoral map more so for Republicans, but this document all but signals that directly to its members.

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