Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalFCC chair suggests agency is not independent amid fears of Trump power grab
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is not an “independent” agency, its chairman suggested on Wednesday, as the word was scrubbed from its online mission statement.
Brendan Carr’s declaration to senators raised concerns of a further power grab by the White House, amid concerns surrounding efforts by Donald Trump and his officials to exert greater control over independent agencies since his return to office in January.
The FCC, Carr told the Senate’s commerce, science, and transportation committee on Wednesday, “is not an independent agency, formally speaking”.
Shortly before Carr spoke, the FCC recorded its status as “an independent US government agency overseen by Congress” in a mission statement on its website, according to a screenshot captured by Axios. During his testimony, however, the word “independent” was removed.
Carr is a vocal Trump supporter, and was accused in September of threatening TV networks that broadcast content the president did not like, notably ABC, after critical comments about Trump made by late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/17/trump-fcc-brendan-carr
Is this even constitutional? Oh wait, Shitler doesn't care about the Constitution.
UnitedHealth reduced hospitalizations for nursing home seniors. Now it faces wrongful death claims
hree nursing home residents died because employees of the American healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group helped delay or deny them critical hospital care, two pending lawsuits and a complaint to state authorities have alleged.
The three cases involve a UnitedHealth partnership initiative that places medical staff from the company’s direct care unit, Optum, inside nursing homes to care for residents insured by the company’s insurance arm.
UnitedHealth says one of the initiative’s goals is to protect patients by reducing unnecessary hospital admissions. Those are admissions the insurance giant would otherwise have to pay for.
In Georgia, the family of a woman named Cindy Deal filed a lawsuit alleging that the 58-year-old died because Optum and her nursing home failed to hospitalize her for hours after she started foaming at the mouth and appeared to be having a seizure.
In Ohio, the family of a retiree named Mary Grant filed a lawsuit claiming that the 70-year-old died after Optum and Grant’s nursing home failed to send her to the hospital, though she had suffered a traumatic head injury and began vomiting.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/17/unitedhealth-nursing-homes
I think Luigi Mangione was justified on behalf of these families. YMMV
Shitler is going to address the nation tonight
I have better things to do. I'm watching a basketball game. My JMU Duke ladies are opening conference play against Coastal Carolina.
What are you doing instead?
The Real Reason These Nativity Displays Bother MAGA Christians So Much
A Massachusetts church is under fire for their holiday display featuring a pro-immigrant take on a classic Christmas decoration: the Nativity.
St. Susanna Parish, a Catholic church in Dedham, reportedly first put up the display shortly after Thanksgiving. In lieu of the standard image of Mary, Joseph, shepherds, farm animals and wise men, the church had two simple signs: One reads “ICE was here” and another letting parishioners know “The Holy Family is safe in The Sanctuary of our Church” and advising them to contact the hotline for LUCE, an immigrant justice network.
While far from their first rodeo making statements of this nature, the latest move from the parish follows clear and pointed statements top-down from Catholic leadership on the “dehumanizing” immigration policies in the U.S., including the Pope calling them “disrespectful” himself.
Per Mass Live, Father Stephen Josoma, the priest at St. Susanna, defended the decision on Monday and said that he would refrain from taking down the signage, as requested by the Boston archdiocese, until he could have a clarifying conversation with leadership
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nativity-immigration-ice-protest_l_69386662e4b0447a52b87ef5?origin=article-related-life
When Christians call something ‘sacrilegious,’ what they usually mean is, ‘This challenges the version of Christianity that benefits me"
Merch commemorating drunk Virginia raccoon raises over $250,000 for animal shelter
Merchandise commemorating the raccoon that gained international fame by barging into a Virginia liquor store, smashing bottled spirits and passing out drunk in a bathroom on Black Friday has raised more than a quarter-million dollars for the local animal shelter where he slept off his bender.
The Hanover county animal protection shelter raised the charitable amount after caring for the inebriated raccoon in question and teaming up with custom apparel maker Bonfire to create and sell items seizing on the internet virality achieved by the creature.
Emblazoned with the words “Trashed Panda”, the shirts, sweatshirts, cups and stickers contain an image of a raccoon spread-eagle next to a spilled booze bottle – unmistakably evoking the compromising position the animal that burgled the Ashland ABC store on 29 November was found and photographed in.
Proceeds from the campaign anchored by those limited edition items “directly support shelter animal care and enrichment”, according to Bonfire’s website.
Figures posted by the company based in Richmond, Virginia, indicated the campaign had raised more than $254,000 as of Tuesday morning. At the time, the campaign was also within 250 sales of its goal of selling 19,000 items.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/16/drunk-virginia-raccoon-merch-fundraiser
On another note, the Virginia ABC stores have posters featuring "Raccoon's Recommendations" which advertise the various brands of booze the raccoon sampled
'You don't have to do it alone': how US cities are helping each other resist ICE
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set its sights on Chicago in September, Chicagoans sprang into action to protect their immigrant neighbors: teaching each other how to recognize and safely document ICE agents, setting up “know your rights” trainings, and distributing whistles en masse so people could loudly alert anyone in the vicinity when ICE was spotted.
In the months since, whistles have become a popular raid alert tool in other cities across the country – New Yorkers wear them around their necks to warn neighbors, the people of New Orleans blast them outside ICE facilities and Charlotte residents used them to ward off Customs and Border Protection officials. While strongly associated with Chicago, the tactic is actually one that city organizers learned in part from groups in Los Angeles. Its spread is illustrative of the many ways cities are helping inspire and equip one another in the face of often unlawful federal activities.
Rain Skau, a co-coordinator of the Fight Fascism campaign of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles, said Angelenos began to use whistles to alert neighbors about ICE presence when agents first started hitting the city in June. Despite the federal government’s claims that these raids were targeting hardened criminals, Skau described one of the first raids at a Home Depot as mostly snatching women vending food in the parking lot, stuffing them into vans as meat sizzled on the grills they left behind.
DSA and other grassroots groups in the city set up patrols of ordinary citizens to create a consistent presence at the Home Depots when day laborers and vendors were most likely to be out and about. (A September report by Rent Brigade found that Home Depot locations became “the most dangerous places in LA for immigrant workers”.) Volunteers passed out “know your rights” information, and when a tip came via a citywide hotline about an ICE sighting, the groups sent out patrols to document what was happening, collect belongings and get in touch with family members if someone had already been detained.
By the time ICE hit the streets of Chicago in the fall, organizers in Los Angeles felt like they had some wisdom to share. Members of DSA in LA began having informal conversations with those in DSA Chicago. “One comment that someone made was, ‘We’ve never done anything like this before,’” Rain remembered. “And what I said to them was: ‘We hadn’t either, before all this happened. We had never operated ICE watch patrols, but we were able to do it. And here’s the great thing: you don’t have to do it alone. You don’t have to figure out all of this from scratch, because we’re here to support you.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/ice-immigration-raids-cities
Chicago showed us the way!
Ilhan Omar says Trump's repeated attacks fuel climate of political violence
US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Donald Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences.
Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act.
“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she told the Guardian in an interview at her Washington office. “We have people that are being prosecuted right now for threatening to kill me and so it is something that does stay in the back of our minds. But I also worry about those people finding someone who looks like me in Minneapolis or across the country and thinking it is me and harming them.”
Trump made the remarks at a rally-style event last week in Pennsylvania, where supporters chanted “Send her back!” after the president pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that Somali-born Omar married her own brother to become a US citizen. The Democrat, who arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen at 17, described Trump’s fixation as “vile” and an “unhealthy and creepy obsession”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/minnesota-congresswoman-ilhan-omar-trump-attacks
He needs to be shut up, FAST
Democrat on ousting Republican in Pennsylvania's 'swingiest' county: 'Partnering with ICE is a losing proposition'
Only 40 miles north of Philadelphia, Bucks county has gained a reputation as the “swingiest” county in the swing state of Pennsylvania and one of the most pivotal political bellwethers in the country.
Party registration in the county is almost evenly split among Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden won it in 2020, Donald Trump triumphed there in 2024. November’s elections there were local – but a hot race for county sheriff drew much wider attention as a microcosm for America’s contentious debate around immigration policy – and the result signaled a shake-up in how the county approaches enforcement.
In the second Trump administration, incumbent sheriff Frederick Harran, a Republican, had joined many other conservative law enforcement officials across the nation and signed an agreement to work with the federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency.
(snip)
Danny Ceisler, a 33-year-old army veteran who worked at the Pentagon and for Pennsylvania Democratic governor Josh Shapiro’s administration, stood against Harran as a Democrat for sheriff. In his campaign, he pledged to terminate the partnership with ICE.
And Ceisler won, not even narrowly. His 23,000 extra votes was an 11% victory over Harran, who had been a law enforcement officer for more than three decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/15/pennsylvania-bucks-county-sheriff-race
Shows you what the average American thinks of ICE!
Not enough has been said
at least in this country, about the guy who stopped the Bondi Beach massacre in its tracks before it got even worse. His name is Ahmed al Ahmed, and he too is a Muslim, or so it would seem. He hid behind some parked cars. and when he saw an opening, he ran and tackled one of the gunmen. He was shot in the arm and hand by the other, but apparently the police or somebody managed to subdue that guy and end it. Ahmed is being hailed as a hero in Australia, but little is being said here about him. He has a shop near the beach where he sells fruits and vegetables, but it looks like he'll be out of work for a bit.
Ahmed is an Australian citizen of Syrian origin, originally from the city of Idlib. He told his cousin Monday morning that when he say people were dying, "God gave me courage and strength" to do what he did. His parents said he doesn't discriminate between one religion or nationality and "all Autralians are the same." I hope he heals swiftly and well. He is the stuff heroes are made of.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/15/man-who-tackled-alleged-bondi-gunman-couldnt-bear-to-see-people-dying-cousin-says-ntwnfb
'They're selling everything as trauma': how our emotional pain became a product: Katherine Rowland
In March 2023, Dr Gabor Maté, a retired family physician and among the most respected trauma experts in the world, boldly diagnosed Prince Harry with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), during a live interview.
Having read the Duke of Sussex’s ghost-written memoir, Spare, Maté said that he had arrived upon “several diagnoses” that also included depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. These were not evidence of disease per se, Maté went on to elaborate. Rather, he said: “I see it as a normal response to abnormal stress.”
What Maté did is nowhere near customary clinical procedure: a diagnosis requires a structured assessment and adequate time with a patient. And to render a diagnosis publicly raises obvious privacy concerns.
However, the gesture was much in keeping with the rash of diagnostic claims and self-labeling that have swept the internet and mass-market publishing, creating a space where confessional zeal and memeified pseudoscience – sometimes abetted by therapists who should know better – have become almost routine.
Today, an entire industry has spawned around the idea that everything is trauma. Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual.
This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health
Emotional pain is not trauma is not emotional pain. One does not equal the other, and nobody should diagnose someone they don't know.
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