President Joe Biden:

“Republican lawmakers—who had no problem with the government forgiving millions of dollars of their own business loans—have tried everything they can to stop me from providing relief to hardworking Americans. Some are even objecting to the actions we announced today, which follows through on relief borrowers were promised, but never given, even when they had been making payments for decades. The hypocrisy is stunning, and the disregard for working and middle-class families is outrageous.”

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Let's remember that our GOP dominated Legislature recently passed a bill outlawing local taxpayer oversight of County Sheriff offices. This is scary stuff, people!

At least one state, Texas, canceled credit for the sheriffs’ training after determining the course content – which it said included a reference to “this is a war” – was more political than educational. But other states, such as Tennessee, have approved the training, in part because it was hosted by a local law enforcement agency.

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August 21, 2023
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
AUG 22, 2023
The wildfires that raced across Maui, Hawaii, on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 8 and 9, driven by high winds across land that had been suffering a drought, have fed a familiar political narrative.

Monty Fritts is living down to expectations as our State Representative, Demonizing the "left" for supporting the Governor's call for a Red Flag Law, which ask judges to keep weapons out of the hands of demonstrably violent or mentally ill people, such as the person who killed three nine year old school children and three adults at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville.

One has to wonder if Fritts is receiving enough campaign money from weapons lobbyists or if he's just enamored with guns? Senator Yager, who I usually think has kinder leanings, seems to be on the side of the shooters as well. Why is this?

How deep does the gun lobby have its claws into our legislature? The legislature continues to vote against the will of Tennessee citizens:

Vanderbilt Poll: majority of Tennessee voters support red-flag laws
Conducted three weeks after Covenant School shooting, the poll found 3 in 4 Tennesseans support measures taking guns from people at risk for harming themselves or others

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The Roane County News story on this is as unbalanced as it can get. I am greatly saddened.

"...The latest poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (Conducted prior to this week’s Fulton County indictment)...found that 53% of Americans “approve of the Justice Department indicting Trump over his efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.” Wonder how that needle has moved AFTER the GA indictments?

Here are even more fun toons from Juanita!

We own a cabin in the mountains of South Carolina. It is rural and remote and 1700 feet from the county road. Our electric co-op just hung a fiber-optic box on the wall and we are waiting for the modem and router installation. Here in Tennessee there is no future in sight for high speed broadband in most of our rural areas. Here's why:

An initial draft of the broadband investment act included a provision to remove barriers for nonprofit electric cooperatives to build more high-speed networks in rural areas. But AT&T successfully lobbied for the bill to change into only a tax cut. As the largest private broadband company in Tennessee AT&T is likely to receive the lion’s share of the tax benefit versus the nonprofit cooperatives that are, in most cases, not paying sales tax.

Last year, lawmakers passed a $204 million sales tax exemption for broadband companies.

On the surface, the tax break looked mild and was innocently named the Broadband Investment Maximization Act. But after diving into the bill's history and who will benefit, the legislation is anything but.

The act was initially designed as a compromise between electric cooperatives and AT&T, Tennessee's biggest political spender. But after some lobbying from the telecom giant, lawmakers removed the part benefiting cooperatives. All that was left was a tax cut primarily helping AT&T.

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For those of you playing along at home the total is now over 90 felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for court adjudged rapist, Donald Trump.

There are lots of good journalistic stories for you to choose from today. Here's a good one:

Trump faces thirteen counts, including RICO. Those include charges of solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to commit false statements, conspiracy to file a false document, filing false documents, and making false statements.

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At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

All with people connected to legal cases before the Supreme Court of the United States:

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The carnage from our recent storm is horrendous to see. Our house power line is underground, and while there have been dozens of outages in the 32 years we have lived here (all cured by the good efforts of hardworking utility folks on murderous overtime), none have been due to the drop to our home.

I predict we will see more trees cut down to protect power lines from the ever increasing fury of global warming enhanced storms.

Think about that!

And as our power comes back on we can watch from a distance as Hawaii burns and Republicans do everything they can to block Biden and Democrat efforts to combat the horrible tragedies of global warming.

If you don't read Joyce Vance you are missing some very knowledgeable commentary. Try this one, where Vance quotes Hillary Clinton, for starters:

According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

So by "Incel" we mean "LOSERS"?

Read this!

More really good toons

Donald Trump pled not guilty to crimes everybody in America saw him commit.

Heather Cox

Today a grand jury in Washington, D.C, indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor.

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the government; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

30,000 workers will lose their jobs and $650 million has disapperaed!

Just three years ago, the Trump administration overruled the Pentagon to certify that Yellow was critical to maintaining national security, qualifying it for a $700 million federal loan during the pandemic. Both White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were personally involved in the deal, which Trump’s 2020 campaign used to suggest Trump was friendly to workers.

Heather Cox Richardson has that and other information:

“If we invest in ourselves and our people,” he said back in 2021, “if we fight to ensure that American businesses are positioned to compete and win on the global stage, if the rules of international trade aren’t stacked against us, if our workers and intellectual property are protected, then there’s no country on Earth…that can match us.

More toons

Professor Ian Lowe of Australia’s Griffith University told The Guardian that he recalled reading the 1985 report that identified the link between greenhouse gasses and climate change, and worked to draw public attention to it. “Now all the projected changes are happening,” he said. “I reflect on how much needless environmental damage and human suffering will result from the work of those politicians, business leaders and public figures who have prevented concerted action. History will judge them very harshly.”

Republicans will ramp up the use of fossil fuels and hasten the destruction of our planet. They are a death cult.

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UPS has settled with a nice bump in benefits and pay. Was that so hard?

This is an abomination! To Republicans, Freedom means they are free to do anything they want, no matter how repulsive, and we can't stop them.

Patients sue Vanderbilt for releasing transgender clinic records to Tennessee AG

The AG’s investigation into the medical center’s transgender surgery billing practices allowed the state office to request access to a wide swath of patient records

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And, it was mahvelous!

More

This is so absurd that the mind boggles. Do these people have any shame whatsoever? Diversity is Discrimination? Slavery? What??

A letter from a coalition of states attorneys general, including Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti, compares compares diversity policies within many Fortune 100 companies to slavery and racial segregation.

“Diversity breeds innovation and the companies that attract the most talented and diverse workforce will succeed in our rapidly changing world,” Ford says on its “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” section of its website devoted to job-seekers. Ford is in the process of building a $5.6 billion electric truck plant in west Tennessee that is expected to employ more than 6,000 workers. The state gave Ford nearly $1 billion in incentives to come to Tennessee.

Memphis-based FedEx, Tennessee’s biggest company, says on its diversity and inclusion webpage that research demonstrates the benefits to businesses for making diversity a priority. “But there’s another, far more important reason why we embrace diversity and inclusion: It’s simply the right thing to do,” the company says.

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July 12, 2023
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 13

Today, in Vilnius, Lithuania, President Joe Biden spoke before a crowd at Vilnius University to champion democracy and the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

“If I sound optimistic,” he told the crowd, “it’s because I am.”

“NATO is stronger, more energized, and, yes, more united than ever in its history,” he said and continued, “It didn’t happen by accident.” Faced with a threat to “democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself” when Russian president Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine in a rejection of the rules-based international order, the United States, NATO, and all our partners stepped up to stand behind the brave people of Ukraine.

“After nearly a year and a half of Russia’s forces committing terrible atrocities, including crimes against humanity, the people of Ukraine remain unbroken…. Ukraine remains independent. It remains free. And the United States has built a coalition of more than 50 nations to make sure Ukraine defends itself both now and…in the future as well.”

“[O]ur commitment to our values, our freedom is something…[we] can never, never, ever, ever walk away from,” Biden said. “It’s who we are.”

More

This is real time fascinating modern war with old Russian protagonists in which there are no good guys. It pits the Wagner Boss Prigozhin, who owns the Troll Farm that helped Trump gain the Presidency, against Putin, the dictator who used the Wagner Group to commit heinous war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere.

In our last episode Prigozhin was on his way to Moscow with a small army of Ukraine war hardened mercenaries when the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, says he negotiated a truce between Prigozhin and Putin that would require Prigozhin to stand down and exile in Belarus.

Ha! I made the claim at the time that Putin and Prigozhin cannot both remain alive for very long. One will kill the other.

The Belarusian president(read dictator) says Prigozhin is no longer in Belarus but in Russia. Putin raided Prigozhins Petersburg estate and found weapons, gold bars and wigs. Prigozhin is bald.

Wagner group associates have been "detained" in Russia and are being interrogated. 5th story windows have become seriously dangerous in Russia, as generals, journalists and associates of everyone but Putin seem to fall out of them on a daily basis.

Follow some of the events at the Guardian: (link...)

Who is your money on? What's the betting line on Putin v Prigozhin Fight of the Century?

"In my opinion, the “soft fascist” model pursued by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the most likely to prevail here in the US should a Republican win the White House: Orbán simply used his government’s influence to facilitate the takeover of virtually all the consequential media in that nation by a handful of friendly oligarchs, so every radio and TV station in that country now most closely resembles Fox “News” and praises Orbán’s every move, day after day."

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The other toons