[AMV] #979 Worse than Saigon

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Op woensdag 25 augustus 2021 09:03 schreef Knipoogje het volgende:

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Natuurlijk is dat geen historische bipartisan overwinning. Die matige bill is een dikke cave-in naar de republikeinen toe. Het echte broodnodige vlees zit bij de andere grotere bill. Dát heeft Amerika echt nodig. Dat jij het daar ideologisch niet mee eens bent, prima,maar die eerste kleinere bill is gewoon een klein goedhoudertje dat vrijwel kapotgemaakt is door de GOP omdat ze het liefst helemaal geen bill zagen.

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Op woensdag 25 augustus 2021 05:27 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

En alweer fout: dat budget is er wél anders lag de weg naar de partisan bill ook niet open

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Op maandag 23 augustus 2021 15:53 schreef Harvest89 het volgende:

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Ik verwachte totaal niets van die kerel. Charisma van een natte tosti, en een slechte spreker.
Maar liever hem dan Trump.

Maar hij presteert heel goed moet ik zeggen. Veel geïnvesteerd in infrastructuur, een zak geld om de pandemie te bestrijden, terug naar het Parijs akkoord, en nu de stekker uit een kansloze oorlog trekken.

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Op woensdag 25 augustus 2021 21:14 schreef Frikandelbroodje het volgende:

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Eens. Ik ben geen Amerikaan, maar ik zou best tevreden met hem zijn. Heeft tot nu toe vooral juiste beslissingen gemaakt en beleid uitgestippeld. Ook zeker zijn fouten, dat wel.

Overigens vind ik hem best charismatisch. Sympathiek en empathisch vooral. Maargoed, ik hou dan ook van saaie politici dus kan aan mij liggen.

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A federal judge in Michigan has ordered that Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood and seven other attorneys who filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election be disciplined, calling the suit “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.”

In a scathing 110-page opinion, Federal District Judge Linda V. Parker wrote that the lawyers had made assertions in court that were not backed by evidence and had failed to do the due diligence required by legal rules before alleging mass fraud in the Michigan vote.

“This case was never about fraud,” she wrote. “It was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

She ordered the lawyers to pay the attorney’s fees for their opponents in the case — the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. She also wrote that she will require them to attend legal education classes. And she referred the group to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, as well as attorney disciplinary committees in the states where each attorney is licensed, which could initiate proceedings that could result in the lawyer’s being disbarred.

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Op donderdag 26 augustus 2021 01:45 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Disciplinaire maatregelen bevolen tegen de complot-advocaten:

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Op woensdag 25 augustus 2021 23:56 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Steeds meer scholen trekken zich niks meer aan van het verbod van DeSantis op mandates:

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Wat een timing ook om financiele hulp werklozen stop te zetten

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Op donderdag 26 augustus 2021 07:22 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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Complot advocaten. Dat is nog netjes geformuleerd. Het zijn een stelletje cssino pokerhaaien die door Trump en co naar voren zijn geschoven om zijn belangen te vertegenwoordigen.

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Op donderdag 26 augustus 2021 07:27 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

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Ik had eerder het idee dat ze het voor hun eigen eer en glorie en grotere naamsbekendheid deden omdat je bij opdrachten van trump weet dat je mogelijk niet betaald krijgt.

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Op donderdag 26 augustus 2021 01:45 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Disciplinaire maatregelen bevolen tegen de complot-advocaten:

[ twitter ]
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Op donderdag 26 augustus 2021 07:25 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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Dit zal nog even in de hoofden van de kiezer blijven hangen..

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The House approved the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on Tuesday in a party-line vote, kicking the legislation to the Senate — where it faces longer odds of passage.

The bill was approved 219-212, with zero Republicans voting for it.

“Nothing is more fundamental to our democracy than the right to vote.” Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), a main sponsor of the bill, said from the floor during debate on the legislation.

“It was in my district that ordinary Americans peacefully protested for the equal right to vote for all Americans,” Sewell noted, referring to the struggle of the late Lewis and other civil rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge 56 years ago.

In March 1965, a 26-year-old Lewis and company were brutally beaten by state and local police on what is now known as Bloody Sunday.

Lewis’s skull was fractured in the brutality, and images of Bloody Sunday were viewed by television audiences nationwide, becoming a major flashpoint in U.S. history.

Five months after the attack, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law.

Lewis died last summer after representing a Georgia district for more than 30 years in the House.

“All battles have indeed become new again,” Sewell continued.

“While literacy tests and poll tax no longer exist, certain states and local jurisdictions have passed laws that are modern-day barriers to voting. So as long as voter suppression exists, the need for full protections of the VRA will continue,” Sewell said.

The bill approved Tuesday centers around restoring the federal preclearance originally instituted by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was eroded by a 2013 Supreme Court decision.

The preclearance required states and jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination — largely the Jim Crow South — to gain approval from the Department of Justice before implementing any change to voting procedure.

In the landmark Shelby v. Holder case, the Supreme Court ruled that the formula used to dictate the preclearance threshold was outdated and therefore unconstitutional. However, at the time, Chief Justice John Roberts left the door open for Congress to draft an updated formula that would more accurately reflect the status of voting rights around the country.

Also included in the bill is a booster for Section 2 of the VRA following a July decision from the country’s top court that upheld a pair of Arizona voting restrictions.

While Sections 4 and 5 outline the preclearance, Section 2 outlaws states and other jurisdictions from implementing voting procedures that discriminate against Americans on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group.

Voting rights are at the forefront of the national political debate after last year’s election, and a sharp partisan divide has emerged over the once-bipartisan issue.

Nearly 20 GOP-controlled states have passed at least 30 laws this year that throttle access to the ballot box in some form; in total, hundreds of voting restriction proposals have been brought forth in the past eight months.

Republicans have cast the state measures as steps to stop voter fraud, but opponents have noted that voter fraud is relatively rare and that the measures will likely depress the votes of predominantly Democratic voters, including minority groups.

Unsurprisingly, GOP members grilled the Democratic bill.

“I hope my colleagues and the American people will see this bill for what it is: a partisan power grab, which circumvents the people to ensure one-party rule,” Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) countered during debate.

Some conservatives decided to shift the conversation to Democrats’ handling of Afghanistan, a situation that has forced the White House to play major defense.

“Thousands of Americans stranded in Afghanistan, fearing for their lives, and Democrats are focused on passing legislation to make sure states can't require photo ID,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said.

Earlier in the afternoon, during debate on the procedure of the vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she hoped “there would be some level of bipartisanship” on the bill.

But any level of bipartisanship was unexpected given the poisoned relationship between Republicans and Democrats in the House, much of it spurred by the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and the votes by a majority of the House GOP conference after the attack to toss out the results of the presidential election in certain states.

In the Senate, the Lewis bill faces a filibuster, meaning it will need 10 GOP senators to back it to get through the chamber.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), a centrist Republican, was an initial co-sponsor of a different version of the bill in the last session of Congress and issued a joint statement with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in May urging bipartisan support on the measure, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has described H.R. 4 as "unnecessary."

The bill is seen as having a better chance of moving forward than a more sweeping voting rights measure known as the For the People Act.

Either legislation could get to President Biden’s desk if all 50 Democrats agreed to make an exception to the filibuster, but Manchin and fellow centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are against any kind of filibuster reform.

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Here in the United States, the message looks different. On July 9, a little more than a month after the study was published, the CDC released updated guidance for schools, including the recommendation that masks should be worn indoors by all individuals (age 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated. Ten days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics took the guidance a step further and said that everyone in school over age 2 should wear masks, regardless of vaccination status. (The CDC later matched the AAP’s guidance.)

The extreme political heat around the issue of masks in schools is making it hard to have a coherent conversation about the science. At the risk of generalizing, much of blue-state America is strongly in favor of masks in schools, while much of red-state America is opposed. In Florida, Tennessee, and elsewhere, local school-board meetings are verging on violence as parents and officials fight over the question. But with tens of millions of American kids headed back to school in the fall, their parents and political leaders owe it to them to have a clear-sighted, scientifically rigorous discussion about which anti-COVID measures actually work and which might put an extra burden on vulnerable young people without meaningfully or demonstrably slowing the spread of the virus. In that context, the best practices for mask use in schools — elementary schools in particular — are much less obvious than CDC guidance and news headlines about keeping schools safe might have you believe.

The study published by the CDC was both ambitious and groundbreaking. It covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16 to December 11 and was, according to the CDC, the first of its kind to compare COVID-19 incidence in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures. Scientists I spoke with believe that the decision not to include the null effects of a student masking requirement (and distancing, hybrid models, etc.) in the summary amounted to “file drawering” these findings, a term researchers use for the practice of burying studies that don’t produce statistically significant results. “That a masking requirement of students failed to show independent benefit is a finding of consequence and great interest,” says Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “It should have been included in the summary.” “The summary gives the impression that only masking of staff was studied,” says Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist and the senior author of a separate CDC study on COVID-19 transmission in schools, “when in reality there was this additional important detection about a student-masking requirement not having a statistical impact.”

After the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued their student-mask guidance last month, I contacted both organizations asking for the evidence or underlying data upon which they had based their recommendations. The AAP did not respond to multiple requests. The CDC press office replied that since children under 12 cannot be vaccinated, the agency “recommends schools do universal masking” and included links to unrelated materials on vaccines and a recent outbreak among adults. Over the course of several weeks, I also corresponded with many experts — epidemiologists, infectious-disease specialists, an immunologist, pediatricians, and a physician publicly active in matters relating to COVID — asking for the best evidence they were aware of that mask requirements on students were effective. Nobody was able to find a data set as robust as the Georgia results — that is, a large cohort study directly looking at the effects of a mask requirement. (The closest is a study published in Science, based on a Facebook survey, that was suggestive but not conclusive of a marginal benefit of student masking.One doctor, who is on TV regularly and has around 100,000 Twitter followers, sent me two studies where masks were required of all students so there was no way to determine the effect; the authors of one of the studies explicitly noted, “​​we were not able to examine the impact of universal masking owing to nearly 100 percent adoption of this intervention,” and authors of the other study wrote, “it was not possible to determine the specific roles that mask-wearing played in the low rate of disease spread.” )

“A year ago, I said, ‘Masks are not the end of the world; why not just wear a mask?’” Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center, told me. “But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside.” She continued, “I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”

Schechter-Perkins is just one of a number of top experts calling for this type of discussion — and raising questions about the CDC’s recent recommendations and what has become accepted conventional knowledge. “We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says,” Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote recently. While there are models, and simulations on mannequins with masks, “mechanistic studies are incapable of anticipating and tallying the effects that emerge when real people are asked to do real things in the real world,” Vinay Prasad of UCSF wrote in a critique of the CDC’s child masking recommendation. “The CDC cannot ‘follow the science’ because there is no relevant science.”

This question of “relevant science” is what makes the Georgia study worth careful consideration. Over and over, studies and reports on children in schools with low transmission rates claim in their summaries that masking students helped keep transmission down. But looking at the underlying data in these studies, masks were always required or widely worn, and implemented in concert with a variety of other interventions, such as increased ventilation. Without a comparison group that didn’t require student masking, it’s difficult or impossible to isolate the effect of masks. (This is the error made by Duke University researchers who wrote a report about North Carolina schools, later summarized in a New York Times opinion piece.) I reviewed 17 different studies cited by the CDC in its K-12 guidance as evidence that masks on students are effective, and not one study looked at student mask use in isolation from other mitigation measures, or against a control. Some even demonstrated that no student masking correlated with low transmission.

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While the protective value of a mask mandate for children in school seems, at best, uncertain, experts have concerns about the potential downsides of them in a learning environment.

“Mask-wearing among children is generally considered a low-risk mitigation strategy; however, the negatives are not zero, especially for young children,” said Lloyd Fisher, the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It is important for children to see facial expressions of their peers and the adults around them in order to learn social cues and understand how to read emotions.” Some children with special needs, for example those with articulation delays, may be most affected, he suggested. Fisher stressed his opinions are not to be perceived as contradicting AAP’s stance for universal masking of students but said he wanted to discuss some of the potential harms and the importance of using evidence and data to drive decisions on when to eliminate mask usage.

“There are very good reasons that the World Health Organization has repeatedly affirmed their guidance for children under 6 to not wear masks,” said a pediatrician who has both state and national leadership roles in the AAP but who wished to remain anonymous because they did not want to jeopardize their roles in the organization. “Reading faces is critical for social emotional learning. And all children are actively learning language the first five years of life, for which seeing faces is foundational,” the pediatrician said.

One troubling aspect of the CDC and AAP’s guidance for masking children in school, nearly every expert I interviewed said, is that it has no endpoint or specific metrics. When asked when kids can remove masks in school, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said, “If our children are vaccinated, we have full vaccination in schools, we have full vaccination in teachers, we have disease rates that are low — I think then we can start thinking about how we can loosen up.” In practical terms, this seems to translate to the distant future. Likely a percentage of teachers will not get vaccinated. And estimates are that the vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11 may not be approved for emergency use until the winter or later. When an EUA does come, a significant percentage of parents won’t vaccinate their kids. By Walensky’s criteria, children may be in masks for years at school.

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More broadly, Schecter-Perkins said, “I don’t think that Delta changes the calculus because it still seems clear that it doesn’t cause more severe disease, so it still doesn’t change the fundamental question of ‘What are we trying to achieve by masking kids when they are still extremely unlikely to suffer from severe illness or death if infected?’ And the adults in their lives have the opportunity to be vaccinated and also protected so we don’t need to worry about transmission.” The pediatric immunologist said, “Even with a new variant, the onus is on those who recommend masking kids to robustly demonstrate a meaningful benefit, especially when the pre-Delta study of the Georgia schools did not find one, and when there are obvious socio-emotional and educational harms from masking children for this unprecedented duration of time.”

Several of the experts I spoke with said that given the lack of evidence of a substantial benefit from a student-masking requirement, it’s not at all clear this measure will be effective against a more transmissible variant. One of the costs of an intervention that lacks clear benefit, said the immunologist, is distraction from the tools that we know protect people — in the case of schools, vaccination and ventilation.

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The Florida Hospital Association is sounding the alarm, saying a survey shows 68 hospitals have less than a 48-hour supply of oxygen.

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Op donderdag 26 augustus 2021 19:50 schreef speknek het volgende:
How it started

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How it's going
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https://www.wmfe.org/surv(...)rth-of-oxygen/188797

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“Ultimately, the effect of SB 1110 is to prevent a perceived, yet unsubstantiated fear of the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ by replacing it with an actual ‘tyranny of the minority,’ ” the Supreme Court wrote in its opinion, adding that the law conflicts with “the democratic ideals that form the bedrock of the constitutional republic created by the Idaho Constitution.”

The new law is now void. The Idaho Legislature will have to pay Reclaim Idaho and the committee their attorney fees for the lawsuit, on top of the fees paid its own attorney to defend the law.

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A group of seven Capitol Police officers filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing former President Donald J. Trump and nearly 20 members of far-right extremist groups and political organizations of a plot to disrupt the peaceful transition of power during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

The suit, which implicated members of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers militia and Trump associates like Roger J. Stone Jr., was arguably the most expansive civil effort to date seeking to hold Mr. Trump and his allies legally accountable for the storming of the Capitol.

While three other similar lawsuits were filed in recent months, the suit on Thursday was the first to allege that Mr. Trump worked in concert with both far-right extremists and political organizers promoting his baseless lies that the presidential election was marred by fraud.

“This is probably the most comprehensive account of Jan. 6 in terms of civil cases,” said Edward Caspar, a lawyer who is leading the suit for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It spans from the former president to militants around him to his campaign supporters.”

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