January 29, 2021

Texas Prepares To Test For Lead In Schools' Drinking Water For The First Time

Texas will soon begin a program to test drinking water in thousands of elementary schools and child care facilities across the state following an update to federal standards on lead and copper exposure.

The change comes in the aftermath of the Flint, Michigan water crisis that began in 2014. Michigan had switched the community’s water source to the Flint River but failed to properly treat the water to ensure it did not corrode the pipes. Lead and other contaminants leached into the predominantly Black community’s water supply as a result, a problem that went ignored for more than a year.

In one of the last actions by a Trump-led Environmental Protection Agency, the December update to the 1991 federal rule on reducing lead and copper in drinking water — which hadn’t been updated in decades — requires water utilities to test water at elementary schools and child care facilities. The rule also lowers the threshold for doing corrosion control treatments on pipes and replacing lines that contain lead.

In Texas, it will be the first time the state’s roughly 25,000 schools and child care facilities will undergo mandated water inspections for lead and copper — the state did not previously have any testing requirement. Young children are particularly vulnerable to the health effects of lead poisoning on the brain and nervous system, according to the EPA. Lead exposure in children is known to cause slowed growth, behavior and learning problems, difficulty hearing and lower IQs.

Read more: https://www.tpr.org/education/2021-01-28/texas-prepares-to-test-for-lead-in-schools-drinking-water-for-the-first-time

January 29, 2021

At Least 19 Texans Face Charges In The Wake Of The U.S. Capitol Siege

Three more Texans have been charged in the aftermath of the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. At least 19 Texans are now facing charges.

Garland Resident Daniel Phipps was arrested Tuesday after law enforcement said they discovered evidence on social media that he took part in the Capitol insurrection. In several posts attached to a federal affidavit, someone purported to be Phipps can be seen in what appears to be the inside of the Capitol building.

“I went to DC. I helped take the Hill," he said in one Facebook post, according to court documents.

Phipps is now being charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on capitol grounds.

Read more: https://www.tpr.org/texas/2021-01-19/update-at-least-8-texans-charged-in-the-wake-of-the-u-s-capitol-siege
(Texas Public Radio)

January 29, 2021

Jimmy Kimmel Live: MAGA Buffoons Take Washington & Reddit Takes Wall Street

January 29, 2021

Confederates and miscreants: Hawley, Cruz would join infamous list if expelled

WASHINGTON -- Only 15 people have been expelled from the U.S. Senate in its 232-year history, 14 of them senators who backed the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Just nine members have been censured — formally reprimanded — an ignoble list that includes the red-baiting demagogue, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz are facing calls that they receive some form of this historically rare discipline.

Seven Democrats have asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate whether their challenges to President Biden’s Electoral College totals helped create the climate for the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot and to determine whether they should be censured or expelled.

Read more: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article248804225.html

January 29, 2021

Puerto Rico governor plan for a 'shadow delegation' draws criticism amid pandemic

MIAMI, SAN JUAN, AND WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A plan by Puerto Rico’s governor to fund elections for a new group of shadow representatives in Washington requires the elected officials to support statehood — and opponents are declaring the proposed election an unconstitutional waste of money amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Newly elected Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, a Democrat and president of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, told reporters Tuesday that funding the special election for a mostly symbolic group of shadow representatives lobbying for statehood is “the best investment” of public funds because the island will receive much more federal funding if it were to become a U.S. state.

But Pierluisi’s party lost its majority in the Puerto Rican legislature after the 2020 election in November, and now his plan is drawing criticism from opponents who say it is “insensitive” to advance a political cause and spend an estimated $8.9 million on a special election amid the coronavirus pandemic. To guarantee the election could take place, Pierluisi’s New Progressive Party passed two laws three days before losing power in December to require the new delegates to speak both English and Spanish and swear under oath that they will defend statehood.

“This person has an obligation to believe in statehood. So if a person wins with the endorsement of the Puerto Rican people to be part of that committee and that person believes in independence, they will exclude that person,” said Puerto Rico House of Representatives President Rafael Hernández Montañez. “So there you have yet another element of illegality.”

Read more: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/article248799180.html

January 29, 2021

"This Is War": Inside the Secret Chat Where Far-Right Extremists Devised Their Post-Capitol Plans

When the FBI arrested Edward “Jake” Lang on Jan. 16 for his alleged role in the U.S. Capitol attack, court documents show agents had followed a seemingly straightforward trail from his public social media to collect evidence. “THIS IS ME,” Lang wrote over one video that showed an angry mob confronting police officers outside the Capitol. The same post showed him trashing a police riot shield.

The government charged Lang with committing assault and other crimes, but the account of his activities spelled out in court papers doesn’t mention how the 25-year-old spent the 10 days between the riots and his capture: recruiting militia members to take up arms against the incoming Biden administration by way of an invitation-only group on the messaging app Telegram.

“Everyone needs to get 5 patriots in this group tonight that’s the goal 🙌🏻🇺🇸🗽,” Lang wrote in a chat on Jan. 9, one of more than 2,500 messages obtained by ProPublica. “We need each person to go out and fight for new members of this Militia like our lives depend on it.”

ProPublica gained access to the group after Lang sent an invitation to a reporter’s social media account. It’s unclear whether Lang knew he had invited a reporter, and the reporter joined but did not participate in the chats.

Read more: https://www.propublica.org/article/this-is-war-inside-the-secret-chat-where-far-right-extremists-devised-their-post-capitol-plans

January 29, 2021

How new voters and Black women transformed Georgia's politics

In July 1964, Georgia restaurateur Lester Maddox violated the newly passed Civil Rights Act by refusing to serve three Black Georgia Tech students at his Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta. Although this new federal law banned discrimination in public places, Maddox was determined to maintain a whites-only dining room, arming white customers with pick handles – which he called “Pickrick drumsticks” – to threaten Black customers who tried to dine there.

Endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan in his successful 1974 bid for the governorship, Maddox was once called “the South’s most racist governor.” But hostile treatment of minorities has often been Georgia’s chosen style of politics.

Until recently. On Jan. 5, Georgians chose a Black pastor and a 33-year-old son of Jewish immigrants – Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – to represent them in the Senate. They also elected Democrat Joe Biden for president in November.

Georgia’s turn from blood red to deep purple gave Democrats their slender majority in the Senate, surprising Americans on both sides of the aisle. This historic moment was a long time coming.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/how-new-voters-and-black-women-transformed-georgias-politics-152741

January 28, 2021

Which Direction Now, White Folks?

Anti-racism activist Tim Wise surveys America’s shredded racial canvas. A Prospect interview.


Gabrielle Gurley: 2020 was even more tumultuous than 1968, but many Republicans are wedded to Trumpism despite the pandemic, summer protests, and the Capitol Riot. Why?

Tim Wise: You’re absolutely right, and I say that as someone who spent most of 1968 in my mother’s womb, and so I think I inherited the trauma. For some Republicans, there’s this pose of unity, can’t-we-all-get-along self-preservation, because they realized that they stoked the fires that burn, metaphorically, and, perhaps, literally on the sixth. Some of them have to make the calls for unity because they worry about their future if they remain tied to the craziness. Others like Marjorie Taylor Greene embrace the craziness; some of them are just that far gone.

Others are intensely political animals like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, who want to distance themselves from the lunacy of January 6, but not on principle, just for preservation. They’re sticking to the script, trying to govern as the minority, at least from a position as responsible stewards of good government, but their side just tried to overthrow the government. To me, it’s a very hard sell.

Gurley: How do you assess the response of white America to all of this?

Wise: It was heartening to see so many white folks getting to see what Black and brown folk have been trying to get us to see for a long time. Part of what allowed a lot of white folks to have their eyes open in this moment, where Eric Garner or Tamir Rice didn’t, was the pandemic moment. If they’d been going about the hustle and bustle of their daily lives, they could have just hit the snooze button like they have been for generations.

What we see now was utterly predictable. It’s what Carol Anderson at Emory University talks about in her book, White Rage, this backlash that happens throughout American history. There is a perception on the part of a certain segment of white America that Black folks have either made significant inroads and progress or are in the process of organizing for that purpose. So since abolition there has been this rageful response.

Read more: https://prospect.org/politics/which-direction-now-white-folks-tim-wise-interview/
(American Prospect)

January 28, 2021

Former GOP Gubernatorial Candidate: God Removed Trump From Office for Being Too Pro-LGBTQ

During Sunday’s “Swamp Rangers” radio program, radical anti-LGBTQ activist Scott Lively declared that God stripped Donald Trump of the presidency because of Trump’s promotion of the LGBTQ agenda by giving a gay man, Richard Grenell, prominent positions within his administration.

Lively was an ardent supporter of the former president and had hoped that Trump would use his presidency to destroy the LGBTQ movement by enacting Russian-style anti-gay laws in the United States. Since that didn’t happen, Lively said that God had no choice but to remove Trump from office.

Lively lamented that Trump was good on just about every issue, “except on the homosexual issue, which I think is his biggest mistake” and “the reason why he lost the election.”

“He defied God on a fundamental tenet of the Bible and never repented of it,” Lively said. “If Donald Trump was, as I believe, God’s man in the White House for four years, why did God not preserve it? Because if God had given him favor, nothing that mankind could have done could have removed him from that office. And yet the one thing that he did during that time that would virtually guarantee God’s favor being removed was to put his own personal stamp of approval on behavior that God condemns in the harshest possible terms in the Bible, which is specifically male homosexuality.”

Read more: https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2021/01/former-gop-gubernatorial-candidate-god-removed-trump-from-office-for-being-too-pro-lgbt/

January 28, 2021

Bomb thrown into El Monte church criticized for extremist views on gay people, others

An El Monte church that was threatened this month with an arson attack over its extremist views and condemnation of same-sex marriage was damaged early Saturday, Jan. 23, when someone threw a bomb at the building, blowing out windows.

No one was injured in the explosion, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said. The First Works Baptist Church at 2600 Tyler Ave. was also vandalized, the El Monte Police Department said.

The FBI is investigating the attack, which it said involved “an IED,” or a homemade or “improvised” explosive device.

The church, a target of recent protests, has asserted that the government should execute gay people, San Bernardino hate-speech expert Brian Levin said Saturday.

Read more: https://www.sgvtribune.com/2021/01/23/bomb-damages-el-monte-church-that-opposes-gay-marriage/
(San Gabriel Valley Tribune)