GGoss

GGoss's Journal

January 31, 2023

Canada province tests decriminalizing hard drugs - RawStory

Canada province tests decriminalizing hard drugs - RawStory

A Canadian province on Tuesday decriminalized the possession of small amounts of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and other hard drugs in a radical policy shift to address an opioid overdose crisis that has killed thousands.

Adults found in British Columbia with up to 2.5 grams of these drugs, rather than face jail or fines, will be provided with information on how to access addiction treatment programs.

Police will also not seize their drugs.

Sellers and traffickers of hard drugs, however, will continue to face criminal prosecution during the three-year pilot project.

Link: https://www.rawstory.com/canada-province-tests-decriminalizing-hard-drugs/

January 31, 2023

What ??? Ron DeSantis Taught School ?!?!?!?!?

After Yale, he taught history and coached for a year at Darlington School. He subsequently attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a Juris Doctor cum laude

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_DeSantis

https://twitter.com/MarvinDunn4/status/1617914357635256326

Twitter bit found here: https://www.rawstory.com/students-vow-to-sue-desantis-over-rejection-of-ap-african-american-studies-course/

Latest here: https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-education/

January 31, 2023

Florida House dress code: No skirts more than an inch above the knee. Is this 2023? - Miami Herald

Florida House dress code: No skirts more than an inch above the knee. Is this 2023? - Miami Herald

The Florida House, not content with creating an election police force, banning books in schools or regulating women’s bodies when it comes to pregnancy, has apparently taken on yet another enforcement role: fashion police.

Women, say goodbye to your sleeveless tops “when members are in the building.” The sight of your upper arms is too much for the hallowed halls of the Legislature to bear, it seems. And short skirts?

We can’t believe you even asked. A flyer circulating in the Capitol shows, complete with helpful photographs, what a person can and cannot wear. Some items are labeled as “NEVER work appropriate.” No “dress or skirt more than one inch above the knee.” No “low cut blouses or dresses.” No shoes without socks — that one, refreshingly, is aimed at men.

There are different (extra conservative) rules for days when House members are present. Suits are required for both men and women on the House floor.

https://twitter.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1618437919789961218

Link: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article271727237.html

January 31, 2023

Secret block placed on DOJ phone search of J6 Freedom Caucuser - RawStory

Secret block placed on DOJ phone search of J6 Freedom Caucuser - RawStory

A federal appeals court issued a secret hold that temporarily blocks the Justice Department from searching the phone of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), the chair of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a key figure who helped former President Donald Trump try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, reported POLITICO on Monday.

"In a sealed order issued earlier this month, the three-judge panel temporarily blocked a lower-court ruling that granted prosecutors access to Perry’s communications. The Dec. 28 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell was the product of a secret, monthslong legal battle by prosecutors who have been fighting the Pennsylvania Republican’s attorneys on the matter since August," reported Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein.

Perry's phone was seized by the FBI last August, as part of the investigation into the plot to overturn the election.

"The existence of the legal fight — a setback for DOJ reported here for the first time — is itself intended to be shielded from public scrutiny, part of the strict secrecy that governs ongoing grand jury matters. The long-running clash was described to POLITICO by two people familiar with the proceedings, who spoke candidly on the condition of anonymity," said the report. "The fight has intensified in recent weeks and drawn the House, newly led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, into the fray. On Friday, the chamber moved to intervene in the back-and-forth over letting DOJ access the phone of Perry, the House Freedom Caucus chair, reflecting the case’s potential to result in precedent-setting rulings about the extent to which lawmakers can be shielded from scrutiny in criminal investigations."

Link: https://www.rawstory.com/phone-search-scott-perry/?utm_source=123456&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12908

January 31, 2023

"The door to Santos' district office in Queens was locked and former Rep. Tom Suozzi's name is still

"The door to Santos' district office in Queens was locked and former Rep. Tom Suozzi's name is still on the awning." - RawStory

"Business leaders and donors say they feel betrayed after sponsoring fundraisers," reported Jennifer McLogan. "'I'm taken back and offended on so many things. This is a black eye for the GOP,' said David Zere, a Santos campaign donor. Zere said Santos' 9/11 and Holocaust lies were the last straw."

Since being sworn in and amid his refusal to resign, the report noted, he is not actually doing his job as a congressman, leaving people on Long Island without constituent services.

"The door to Santos' district office in Queens was locked and former Rep. Tom Suozzi's name is still on the awning. Local officials in the third congressional district must turn elsewhere for help," said the report. "'Dealing with FEMA for example, or dealing with clean water with the EPA,'" said Mineola Mayor Paul Pereira.

From: https://www.rawstory.com/george-santos-supporters/

January 31, 2023

Maddow hammers sketchy behavior at Bill Barr's DOJ involving Michael Cohen - RawStory

Maddow hammers sketchy behavior at Bill Barr's DOJ involving Michael Cohen - RawStory

More questions are surfacing about why Michael Cohen went to prison for the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels but Donald Trump was never charged with anything. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has finally agreed to reconsider charging Trump for his personal involvement in shady business practices that resulted in 17 guilty convictions for his companies.

Now that the information is being revealed as part of that trial, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow harkened back to a book published by the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who questioned possible corruption happening in the main Justice Department in Washington by trying to shelve any connection to not only Cohen's conviction but any connections to Trump.

"They pursued no charges against Trump. Instead, they told the court that this other guy committed the crime with Trump and for Trump and at Trump's direction, they prosecuted the other guy and sent him to prison and they never brought charges against Trump. Never said anything about it. Nor did Trump's business get prosecuted even though prosecutors spelled out in court the business was used to launder the funds that cohen and Trump used to commit the crime."

Meanwhile, David Pecker of the National Enquirer essentially did the same thing as Donald Trump, only he used private funds from a company to do it, and never went to prison because he made a "deal" with the prosecutors to say he met with Cohen on the issue. Now, Pecker is being forced to talk to the newly impaneled grand jury about this piece of the scandal.

Link: https://www.rawstory.com/questionable-justice-department-actions-cohen/

January 31, 2023

Veteran reporter goes there: Was 'crooked' Russia-friendly FBI spy the source of the Trump and Clint

Veteran reporter goes there: Was 'crooked' Russia-friendly FBI spy the source of the Trump and Clinton lies to the NYT? - RawStory

Veteran reporter Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer questioned the reporting from The New York Times that was published in 2016 during the campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Among the many false things that the Times reported was the allegation that new emails were discovered related to Anthony Weiner's underage sexting case. None of the reporting was true.

Today, MSNBC's Joy Reid said that the report "sparked a lot of questions, not just about the Justice Department's decision-making but also the FBI, because the push for that announcement was coming from the FBI's New York field office, which according to Reuters, had a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton."

Last week, former FBI counterintelligence chief at the New York office, Charles McGonigal, was arrested and charged with money laundering and other concerns related to his relationship with a Russian oligarch.

"At the time, James Comey made his unprecedented public announcement in 2016, there was no bigger consumer of the Clinton email story than The New York Times," Reid explained. "They ran story after story on her emails in 2016, devoting two-thirds of the great lady's front page to Comey's announcement. That was followed up a few days later from another helpful piece for Trump citing unnamed intelligence sources headlined investigating Donald Trump, FBI seized no clear link to Russia. Something that would later be proven untrue."

Link: https://www.rawstory.com/new-york-fbi-russia-nytimes/

January 30, 2023

The Day a Native American Tribe Drove the KKK Out of Town - Narratively

The Day a Native American Tribe Drove the KKK Out of Town - Narratively

Two crosses burned in Robeson County, North Carolina, on January 13, 1958. One was outside the home of a Native American woman who was dating a white man, the other outside the home of a Native family who had moved into one of Lumberton’s all-white neighborhoods. The blazing signs were clearly the work of Klansmen — not that the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in the county had ever been subtle. Caravans of Klansmen had been driving around the segregated county (where the local population included blacks, whites and Native Americans) every Saturday night, terrorizing the Lumbee Indians.

“They wanted you to see them. They wanted you to be afraid of them,” Lillie McKoy, who grew up watching the KKK drive by and later became the mayor of Maxton, a small town in Robeson County, told The Fayetteville Observer in 2008.

The county had been split in three since the 1880s, after the Lumbees resisted North Carolina’s post–Civil War efforts to segregate its citizens into two racial categories. The county had three sets of buses, three separate water fountains and three school systems.

But in the 1950s, things were starting to change in Robeson County, and the Klan wasn’t happy about it. Brown v. Board of Education had recently outlawed school segregation throughout the United States. More locally, the Lumbee Tribe had been formally recognized by the state of North Carolina, and Solicitor Malcolm B. Seawell, a local law officer who would later become North Carolina’s attorney general, had given a speech addressing 15 arrested Klansmen, warning them that Robeson County “would not tolerate” the Klan.

“Your society is neither invisible nor invincible,” Seawell said in his speech to the Klansmen. “You may discover that the easy way or the hard way. Take your choice.” The KKK chose the hard way...

Link: https://narratively.com/the-day-the-native-americans-drove-the-kkk-out-of-town/

Charlie Warriax (left) and Simeon Oxendine (right) wearing the captured KKK banner around their shoulders symbolizing the Lumbees’ victory over the Klan. (Photo courtesy the Charlotte Observer Photograph Collection, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County)

Just discovered this site: https://narratively.com

Celebrating humanity through authentic storytelling

I like it.

January 29, 2023

What the videos don't show - WaPo

What the videos don’t show

In an interview with The Post, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis said there’s a gap in the video record her department is releasing: Authorities don’t have any video footage of the initial traffic stop.

The officer who initially stopped Nichols was driving a brand-new unmarked car that was not equipped with dashboard cameras, Davis said. The unit is assigned patrol cars, but they have the option to drive unmarked cars if they’re carrying out surveillance.

Davis said she doesn’t know why the officer was in an unmarked car, or how the initial encounter between Nichols and the officer unfolded.

When the video begins, “this officer and the other officer that joined were already ramped up about Mr. Nichols in his car,” Davis said. “If something did happen we don’t know what it was. They allege that he was driving on the wrong side of the road but we have not been able to prove that.”

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/28/tyre-nichols-police-video-description/

January 28, 2023

Watching the unwatchable cruelty in Memphis - WaPo

Watching the unwatchable cruelty in Memphis - WaPo

Of all the footage released Friday showing Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols, the lamppost video is the most chilling. It shows the violence from on high and at a distance, with a camera angle wide enough to capture the larger context, a quiet dark corner of the suburban everywhere. And it transpires in silence, which gives it the feel if not the substance of objectivity.

Without sound, the video eliminates the emotions of the individual actors: the officers’ breathless rage, alternating with almost bored indifference to the man they are beating. Lacking the frantic, jerky motion of police body-camera footage — the lamppost video was recorded by an automated security camera fixed to a street pole — it conceals the moment-by-moment escalation of a traffic stop into what prosecutors argue was second-degree murder by police.

By avoiding the drama, we seem to get more of the facts. But that’s not true, because the sounds captured on the other videos — the shouting, the contradictory orders, Nichols’s calls for his mother — are essential facts, too.

What the video’s sterile, bird’s-eye view makes starkly clear is that the officers acted collectively. They rushed in to strike and kick a thin young man like a broken puppet. It reveals the cruelty as brazen, gratuitous and unnecessary. And more than anything else seen on these obscene videos of authoritarian officers recklessly abusing their power, it makes the case for radical reform of the nation’s police. As officers swarm around a man who can barely hold himself upright, as they join, leave and rejoin the melee they alone are perpetrating, the message is painfully clear: More cops means more chaos, more violence, more death. There is no law and order here, just cops.

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/01/28/kennicott-memphis-videos-tyre-nichols/

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