Pastor Fired for Promoting Vaccines

August 28, 2021 at 1:19 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 82 Comments

Pastor Daniel Darling, the spokesman for a major evangelical nonprofit, was fired for promoting vaccines on the "Morning Joe" cable news show, Religion News Service reports.

*Darling was told he could sign a statement admitting he had been insubordinate, and admit that his pro-vaccine statements were wrong, or be fired.*

when we were sitting in the dark watching tv

It's a spider crawling around in front of one of my solar deck lights.  It really was pretty creepy.  

The floor looks really dirty

Caleb Wallace, a Texas man who helped organize the "Freedom Rally" and other prominent protests against pandemic restrictions, has died from COVID-19. He was 30.

Jessica told the Standard-Times that her husband initially refused to be tested for COVID and instead turned to unproven home remedies to fight the virus, including high doses of Vitamin C, zinc, aspirin and Ivermectin -- a parasitic worm treatment intended for animals that is not FDA-approved.

Caleb Wallace had been a vocal opponent to pandemic restrictions and mandates, appearing in interviews criticizing school closures and mask policies as well as organizing a July 4 "Freedom Rally" last year to protest government restrictions. He also founded "The San Angelo Freedom Defenders," a group that hosted a separate rally last year to "end COVID tyranny."

The president was brutally candid in broaching these factors, a tough line to hew given the sacrifices given by so many who served.  Mr. Biden was courageous in his decision and sticking to it in the face of suspect criticism.  

The evacuation was difficult and deadly. But starting war is easier than ending one. There was a reason that Trump left that part until after the election.  The Administration has been faced with the corrupt Afghan officials and now the hapless media.

By letting the Texas bill go into effect, the Supreme Court blithely discards a 40-year precedent, and, also, permits legal enforcement of the Texas law by random citizens. A Stasi- like citizen turning in another citizen.  Dependents, even if they win a case, can't recover legal fees.

In the dissent of Sotomayor (four dissents: Roberts, joined by Kagan and Breyer, and separate but joined by other dissenters except Roberts, by Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan), Sotomayor starts with: "The Court's order is stunning."

.... And continues: "Last night the Court silently acquiesced in a State's enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50-years of federal precedents. Today, the Court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of its own making." Justice Sotomayor refers to the Texas enforcement scheme as "bounty hunters."

Justice Breyer writes "Texas law delegates to private individuals the power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion during the first stage of pregnancy. But a woman has a federal Constitutional right to obtain an abortion during that first stage."... And, a State cannot delegate...a veto power over the right to obtain an abortion which the state itself is absolutely and totally prohibited from exercising during the first trimester."

The "nontheistic" organization, which is headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, joined the legal fray this week by sending a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration demanding access to abortion pills for its members. The group has established an "abortion ritual," and is attempting to use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (which was created to allow Native Americans access to peyote for religious rituals) to argue that its members should be allowed access to abortion drugs like Misoprostol and Mifepristone for religious purposes.

I am proud of the House Progressive Caucus.  

and more recently Mike Pompeo

Pompeo Takes His Own Arrows Over Afghanistan

August 26, 2021 at 7:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 123 Comments

"Few GOP officials have been more intimately involved with U.S.-Afghan relations than Mike Pompeo, who as Secretary of State helped lead negotiations with the Taliban to lead to an end of the 20-year-old war," Politico reports.

"With that ending now mired in chaos, Pompeo has rushed to the airwaves to defend his work and differentiate it from the job that the Biden team is doing. Republican strategists say it's no coincidence. Pompeo, they posit, recognizes that his own electoral fate could be directly impacted by how the public perceives the current situation in Kabul."

Sirhan smiled, thanked the board and gave a thumbs-up after the decision to grant parole was announced. It was a major victory in his 16th attempt at parole. But it does not assure his release.

The ruling will be reviewed over the next 90 days by the board's staff. Then it will be sent to the governor, who will have 30 days to decide whether to grant it, reverse it or modify it. If Sirhan is freed, he must live in a transitional home for six months, enroll in an alcohol abuse program and get therapy.

Marc Bernier, a right-wing Florida radio host opposed to vaccinations, has died of Covid-19 after a three week hospital stay.

Phil Valentine died a week ago; right wing radio host in Nashville.

Jimmy DeYoung, whose Christian radio show "Prophecy Today" was carried by 1500 stations worldwide, died of Covid August 15.

Dick Farrell, also of Florida, who called Dr. Anthony Fauci a "lying freak" and said Covid vaccines are "poisonous" died August 6.

Cougar illegally kept as pet in New York apartment heading to Arkansas

Unfortunately, the story goes, they didn't make it out of Afghanistan and still remain there.

A couple of questions I have.

I guess that's a good news/bad news.

Vaccination Rates Rose In August As COVID Cases Surged Due To The Delta Variant

Some people are commending the Taliban's takeover as "a lesson in love for the homeland, for freedom, and for religion," SITE said in its weekly bulletin on far-right extremists.
Neo-Nazi and violent accelerationists -- who hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war, which would lead to a Whites-only state -- in North America and Europe are praising the Taliban for its anti-Semitism, homophobia, and severe restrictions on women's freedom, SITE found.

For example, a quote taken from the Proud Boy to Fascist Pipeline Telegram channel, said: "These farmers and minimally trained men fought to take back their nation back from globohomo. They took back their government, installed their national religion as law, and executed dissenters ... If white men in the west had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently," SITE found

I'm particularly fond of the term "globohomo".

McConnell Says Biden Won't Be Impeached

September 1, 2021 at 2:19 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard 104 Comments

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that "there isn't going to be an impeachment" of President Joe Biden over the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, CNN reports.

Said McConnell: "I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box. The President is not going to be removed from office with a Democratic House and a narrowly Democratic Senate. That's not going to happen."

George A. Romero, like a lot of independent artists, had to die before he was taken seriously. He was influential, which became the most unfortunate stop gap to his being taken seriously.

By 1978 he'd save himself from the brink by collaborating with Italian filmmaker Dario Argento on the long awaited sequel "Dawn of the Dead," but it was touch and go for most of the decade. Sometime in 1973, a Pittsburgh-based organization called Lutheran Services approached the hometown hero to ask if he'd shoot something for them about the myriad ways society discriminates against the elderly. Eager to work, Romero agreed. "The Amusement Park" so appalled the Lutherans that they refused to release it. Romero didn't have the time or energy to fight them and moved on. It is only now being seen by the public almost a half-century later, having played in New York this past weekend.

In a world kinder to artists like Romero, the rediscovery of this lost film would be an event on par with the restoration of Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind."

I call BS.

Anyone who has lived there and dealt regularly with the local  right wingers knows this is BS.

in the years I was at Digital Domain, this is really at the beginning of the rise of social media,  almost a decade before the founding of Facebook, we had a "social mailing list"

It was called "The Life List".  You could be on it or not.  It was a forum for discussing all things.  I spent most of the time battling the right wingers.  Serious, rabid right wingers.  Educated intelligent highly paid right wingers.  

I have thought many times those people were just waiting for Trump.

Anyway.  The republicans in CA are f'ing nuts.  It's one reason they have lost everything.  

But Lisey's Story, I understand the mixed reviews.  And even the bad reviews.  A little.

It's clear to a fan what this is.  This is said to be Kings favorite story of everything he has ever written.  It's like he said, this time, this one time, it's going to be exactly as written.  And it really is.   More than anything I've ever seen.  It's amazing how well they create exactly what the book describes.  He wrote all 8 episodes.

The thing is some of it just doesn't work that well if you have not read the book.  I think everyone who loved the book will love this series.

I'm pretty sure, considering how many King stories have been filmed, King knew this would be the effect.  In a way maybe it's the point.  It's totally a passion project.

The study began with a simple test to see how a person judges the pain of someone else when they are only aware of their socioeconomic status. The first trial included 126 participants who viewed and rated perceived pain sensitivity across 18 pain scenarios for 20 white male subjects - represented by neutral images of their faces and information about their jobs.

Those with low-income jobs and lower levels of education were generally rated as feeling less pain than those who ostensibly held high-income jobs and higher levels of education, even when they were said to hurt themselves in the exact same way.

In a slight variation on the experiment where no photos were shown and only a story was read with descriptions of subjects such as "low-SES white females", 248 participants found individuals with a lower socioeconomic status to be less sensitive to pain than those with a higher socioeconomic status, even when their described injury was exactly the same.

Follow-up trials included factors like sex and race to see how these variables might interact with the results. While Black patients and female patients tended to have their pain dismissed more than white and male patients, the authors found social status actually subsumed these other biases.