So here we are 20 years later. I saw someone ask a couple days what was your most mundane memory from 9/11. I realized I don’t have any mundane memories from that day. This isn’t to say my day was especially traumatic, especially compared to so many others. I wake up to the TV I had left on to CNN the night before (I was single at the time) and see the first tower on fire and trying to make sense of it. Not in some deep existential sense – I was half asleep. What am I seeing? Then the second tower gets hit. (I’m still not certain if I saw the second tower hit live or a replay from a few moments earlier. I think it was the former but it’s all a jumble.) Then I’m talking to my then girlfriend in her office on Capitol Hill on instant messenger who’s telling me ‘we’re next, we’re next’. Then they get a call to evacuate. My most jarring memory from that day was seeing military vehicles on the streets of Washington, DC, something that seemed simply unimaginable. I don’t remember what kind precisely, some kind of APC, I think. Not being moved from one place to another but on patrol.
In some ways that was the most jarring thing for me. After getting my initial bearings I went outside to make sense of what was happening to report on it. I was still trying to make sense of what any of it meant. I had literally just rolled out of bed, remember. Seeing military vehicles patrolling the streets of the American capital. I understood deeply and intuitively that that meant something terrible and unimaginable had happened.
In the twenty intervening years I’ve become mostly accustomed to seeing national guard troops in fatigues carrying automatic weapons in train stations. If you’re old enough to remember, this was simply unimaginable before 9/11.
Continue reading “Remembering 9/11 Before ‘9/11’” →
Republicans are raising hell after President Joe Biden on Thursday implemented far-reaching vaccine mandates requiring that:
- All federal employees, contractors that work with the federal government and health care workers who work at facilities that receive Medicaid or Medicare to get vaccinated with no option to opt out with testing
- All employers with 100 or more workers to either make sure the employees are vaccinated or test them weekly (employers must provide paid time off to get the vaccine)
The President’s decision unleashed a flood of outrage from conservative governors and lawmakers (plus right-wing media cranks) who have fought tooth and nail to block COVID-19 safety measures even as cases skyrocket across the country. Several governors, such as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), have already vowed to sue the Biden administration.
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NEW YORK – An associate of Rudy Giuliani’s told a federal judge on Friday that he solicited campaign contributions from a wealthy foreigner as part of a bizarre plot to get political juice for a marijuana business.
Continue reading “Giuliani Pal Admits To Soliciting Foreign Money For U.S Political Campaigns” →
President Biden’s new vaccine mandates are not only good public health. They’re good politics. We hear constantly how we’re divided as a country, polarized into two roughly equal camps. On vaccinations though that’s not true. Epidemiological vaccination rates are not the same as electoral vaccination rates. Already an overwhelming percentage of adults are vaccinated. Roughly 65% of Americans over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated and over 75% have had at least one shot. What’s more, the older you are the more likely you are both to be vaccinated and to vote. So if anything that 65%-75% benchmark understates the voting majority of the already vaccinated.
If you’re vaccinated, requirements and mandates don’t seem burdensome. In fact they seem to have widespread support since the vaccinated, who make up the overwhelming majority of the country, are losing patience with the voluntarily unvaccinated who they blame (rightly) for keeping us stuck in the pandemic. Biden spoke for a lot of Americans yesterday when he said: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us, so please do the right thing.”
Continue reading “Biden’s Vax Mandate is Good Politics In Addition to Good Public Health” →
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Fire And Fury
Republicans are livid over Biden’s sweeping new vaccine mandates.
- GOP chair Ronna McDaniel pledged to sue the Biden administration:
- Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) declared that he asked his state’s attorney general to fight the mandates:
- Fox got in on the action:
- In what’s almost becoming the norm among pro-Trump hardliners, Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel, hinted at responding to the mandate with violence:
Biden Gets Fed Up
- The President established several new broad vaccine mandates on Thursday that require:
- All federal employees, contractors that work with the federal government and health care workers who work at facilities that receive Medicaid or Medicare to get vaccinated with no option to opt out with testing
- All employers with 100 or more workers to either make sure the employees are vaccinated or test them weekly (employers must provide paid time off to get the vaccine)
- The mandate will affect 100 million Americans, which is two-thirds of the country’s entire workforce, Biden estimated.
- Biden also got blunt with Americans who still refuse to get vaccinated, asking “What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see?”
- “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” he warned. “And your refusal has cost all of us.”
Abundant Warnings Of Jan. 6
Two days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, hundreds of officials from intelligence “fusion” centers for tracking domestic violence threats had a conference call to discuss intel that “a significant number” of individuals were planning or advocating for violence on the day of Trump’s upcoming “Stop the Steal” rally.
- The FBI planned to use a special hashtag “#CERTUNREST2021” to “track, organize and coordinate incoming threats” related to Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, according to an email summarizing the call obtained by Politico.
- The National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium (NTIC) in D.C. “is working diligently to protect public safety, as well as privacy, civil rights and civil liberties,” the president of the National Association of Fusion Centers wrote in the email.
In Case You Missed It
Sidney Powell and her Kraken crew are on the hook for as much as $204,000 in legal fees racked up by the city of Detroit and the Michigan Attorney General’s office in defending their bogus lawsuit attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.
- The legal bills were submitted after a federal judge sanctioned Powell and her colleagues for the clownish lawsuit.
- The sanctions also required that the pro-Trump lawyers take legal education classes–and to top it all off, the judge referred the attorneys for suspension or disbarment.
Scared Boys
Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio sent a panicked audio message to fellow Proud Boy leaders via Telegram in July about whether the senior members of their group who were criminally charged for breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6 were cooperating with the feds, according to a recording obtained by Reuters.
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- Tarrio fretted that the members would “turn on each other” if one of them cooperated with the feds, “and that’s what we are trying to fucking avoid.”
- After Tarrio’s message got leaked to Reuters, the outlet received a second leaked recording of Tarrio complaining about the first leak.
- “You know it’s hard enough to fight a fucking entire government […] to have to worry about dudes in here fucking putting you in felony territory. Not just regular felony, like a serious felony,” the far-right leader ranted.
- Tarrio had put out calls for the Proud Boys to go to D.C. on Jan. 6 prior to the insurrection, but the leader himself was not in the city that day due to him getting arrested on Jan. 4 for burning a Black Lives Matter flag that had been stolen from a Black church.
- It is unknown whether Tarrio is being investigated for the attack. He was handed a five-month prison sentence in August for the flag burning incident and illegally carrying firearm magazines.
- By the way, Tarrio used to be a “prolific” cooperator with the feds before he became the Proud Boy chair in 2018, and he helped in the prosecution of more than a dozen people, according to a prosecutor in his 2012 criminal case.
Must-Read
“How Students in 12 Countries Are Taught About 9/11” – The New York Times
Don’t You Dare Tell Me To Be Decent To People!
“Show some respect” to flight attendants who enforce airline mask requirements? No thanks, says Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.
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While announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates that include an executive order requiring all federal employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19, President Biden on Thursday took aim at the unvaccinated amid surging cases of the coronavirus nationwide due to the highly contagious delta variant. Continue reading “Biden Takes Aim At The Unvaccinated Who Keep Country From ‘Turning The Corner’” →
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Thursday declared that he’s taking his crusade against the House’s proxy voting protocols to the Supreme Court, despite surging cases of COVID-19 throughout the country due to the delta variant. Continue reading “McCarthy Wants To Take His War On COVID Mitigation Rules All The Way To SCOTUS” →
