chango369 wrote:ETA: Turns out the letter is bunk. Disinformation from Twitter.

Letter from the US Capitol Police to the "Blue LIves Matter/Back the Blue" party.

rep8.jpg

The letter was circulated by Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin's office to other chiefs of staff on Capitol Hill, as several of his constituents are officers. According to a spokesperson for Raskin, the officer who provided the letter said that it represents the sentiments of 40 to 50 officers.

The U.S. Capitol Police Department said in a statement that the department does not take positions on legislation, and that they had no way to verify that the letter was sent by Capitol Police officers.

[source]

SkyMutt wrote:

chango369 wrote:ETA: Turns out the letter is bunk. Disinformation from Twitter.

Letter from the US Capitol Police to the "Blue LIves Matter/Back the Blue" party.

rep8.jpg

The letter was circulated by Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin's office to other chiefs of staff on Capitol Hill, as several of his constituents are officers. According to a spokesperson for Raskin, the officer who provided the letter said that it represents the sentiments of 40 to 50 officers.

The U.S. Capitol Police Department said in a statement that the department does not take positions on legislation, and that they had no way to verify that the letter was sent by Capitol Police officers.

[source]

"Bunk" and "disinformation" denote something that is completely bogus. Is there information that repudiates or supersedes what was reported above?

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "mentally ill" and described any plans to separate unvaccinated and maskless House members from their vaccinated colleagues as akin to Holocaust-era tactics.

On Thursday, the congresswoman posted an Instagram video of herself shredding a letter from William J. Walker, the House's sergeant-at-arms, informing her that further violations of the House's mask mandate would result in a $500 fine, then a $2,500 fine for subsequent infractions. In the video's caption, Greene accused Pelosi of "putting our Constitution through a paper shredder."

On the same day, the Georgia Republican appeared on Real America's Voice show The Water Cooler." During her interview, host David Brody said Pelosi had spoken of "segregating" unvaccinated House members. The show then aired a clip of the Speaker criticizing unvaccinated lawmakers for "endangerment to other people."

"What is this, the honor system?" Pelosi told reporters in the clip. "The honor system? As to whether somebody has been vaccinated? Do you want them breathing in your face on the strength of their honor?"

Later in Pelosi's remarks—which the Real America's Voice segment did not include—she added: "We could come to a place where we say 'If you don't wanna wear a mask and if you're not vaccinated, don't even come to the floor, we have facilities up above in the gallery where people can come to vote.' We don't want to deter anybody's ability to exercise their constitutional duties."

Greene reacted to the clip aired on The Water Cooler by stating: "This woman is mentally ill."

She went on: "You know, we can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated as second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.

"And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about."

Greene also accused Pelosi of flying in lawmakers who had COVID-19 to Capitol Hill on the day incoming members were sworn in. The congresswoman did not provide any evidence for her claim.

"She brought in positive COVID members and exposed everyone in the entire building, and they travelled across the country spreading COVID," Greene said. "So this is a woman that doesn't care about people's safety, this is a woman that is hyper-focused on her own power and control."

Greene is one of seven Republican lawmakers issued a warning over their failure to wear masks, the Associated Press reported. The others were Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Chip Roy and Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Bob Good of Virginia and Mary Miller of Illinois.

Three GOP members of Congress were fined $500: Brian Mast of Florida, Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Beth Van Duyne of Texas.

Dr. Brian Monahan, the Capitol's attending physician, said in a statement on Wednesday the House floor's mask mandate would remain in place "until all members and floor staff are fully vaccinated."

Alan C wrote:For a nation that goes on about freedom it's pretty good at denying it to citizens, especially if you're not white and/or rich.

The_Piper wrote:I'm not aware of any state that could send someone to prison for smoking a joint. I think the majority have de-criminalized it, and it's into the double-digits for states that have legalized it. There may be a few leftovers who could technically do it for possessing one, but I highly doubt it would happen to anyone not already on probation these days.
I'm not sticking up for the warped justice system, just saying.

Florida governor signs law to block ‘deplatforming’ of Florida politicians

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday that bars social media companies like Twitter and Facebook from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians.

The bill, SB 7072, was proposed in February, weeks after former President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the deadly right-wing riot at the US Capitol. The law bars social media platforms from banning Floridian political candidates and authorizes the Florida Election Commission to impose fines if these candidates were to be deplatformed. The fines range from $250,000 per day for statewide office candidates and $25,000 per day for non-statewide offices.

“This will lead to more speech, not less speech,” DeSantis said during a press conference at the Florida International University in Miami Monday. “Because speech that’s inconvenient to the narrative will be protected.”

Many are already skeptical about the new law’s legality, with the tech-friendly Chamber of Progress calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” As a state law, the measure could be overturned if courts find it conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly immunizes platforms from liability for good-faith moderation activity. It could also be subject to a constitutional challenge under the First Amendment, which has been interpreted to broadly prevent government interference to corporate speech.

But regardless of its legal status, the measure will help establish DeSantis’ political bona-fides among the anti-tech wing of the Republican Party. For years, Republicans have pressured platforms like Facebook over their content moderation policies, accusing the companies of being biased against conservative speech online. DeSantis’ bill is one of the first major victories for populist Republicans in opposition to the power of Big Tech.

Carl Szabo, the vice president and general counsel for NetChoice, a trade group representing large tech companies like Facebook and Amazon, argued that the law could be found to be unconstitutional. “The First Amendment prohibits the government from compelling or controlling speech on private websites,” said Szabo. “If this law could somehow be enforced, it would allow lawful but awful user posts including pornography, violence, and hate speech that will make it harder for families to safely navigate online.”

The law includes a measure, added earlier this month, exempting any company that owns a large theme park or entertainment venue. At the time, Republican state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia said that the exemption was put in place to protect the Disney Plus streaming service. Florida’s economy benefits greatly from The Disney World parks in Orlando which provide significant tax revenue for the state.

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project
Objections to the appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones to an academic chair are the latest instance of conservatives using the state to suppress ideas they consider dangerous.


Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism.

The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s appointment to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship, after a “rigorous tenure process at UNC.” But in an extraordinary move, the board of trustees declined to act on that recommendation. Hannah-Jones was instead offered a five-year, nontenured appointment following public and private pressure from conservatives. Notably, other Knight Chairs at the journalism school have been tenured on its professional track, which acknowledges “significant professional experience” rather than traditional academic scholarship. Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer and MacArthur genius grant surely qualify.

One anonymous trustee told NC Policy Watch that “the political environment made granting Hannah-Jones tenure difficult, if not impossible.” A statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted that “if it is accurate that this refusal was the result of viewpoint discrimination against Hannah-Jones, particularly based on political opposition to her appointment, this decision has disturbing implications for academic freedom.”

If you’ve taken recent debates about free speech and censorship at face value, you might find Hannah-Jones’s denial of tenure deeply confusing. For the past five years, conservatives have been howling about the alleged censoriousness of the American left, in particular on college campuses. But the denial of tenure to Hannah-Jones shows that the real conflict is over how American society understands its present inequalities.

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

The 1619 Project is a particularly powerful part—but not the cause—of a Black Lives Matter–inspired reevaluation of American history that began in the waning years of the Obama administration. Many Americans were struggling to understand how a nation that had elected a Black president could retain deep racial disparities not only in the rate of poverty, access to education, and health care, but also in matters of criminal justice and political power. The election of Donald Trump, a president who understood American citizenship in religious and ethnonationalist terms, accelerated that process of reevaluation.

Like all the works this period of reevaluation has produced, the 1619 Project has its flaws—although fewer than its most fanatical critics would admit. But the details of its factual narrative were not what conservatives found most objectionable. Rather, they took issue with the ideological implications of its central conceit: that America’s true founding moment was the arrival of African slaves on America’s shores.

Hannah-Jones’s conservative detractors cast this claim as an argument that America is a fundamentally and irredeemably racist country—indeed, as NC Policy Watch notes, a columnist at the right-wing James G. Martin Center complained that the 1619 Project “seeks to reframe American history as fundamentally racist.” A different columnist at the same organization fumed that “young people—the white ones, at least—are even taught to hate themselves for the unforgivable sins of their ancestors.” The idea that ugly aspects of American history should not be taught, for fear that students—white students in particular—might draw unfavorable conclusions about America, is simply an argument against teaching history at all.

In truth, the animating premise of the 1619 Project is more threatening to the right—the idea that America can indeed be redeemed, by rectifying racial imbalances created by government policy.

Seabass wrote:

Florida governor signs law to block ‘deplatforming’ of Florida politicians

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday that bars social media companies like Twitter and Facebook from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians.

The bill, SB 7072, was proposed in February, weeks after former President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the deadly right-wing riot at the US Capitol. The law bars social media platforms from banning Floridian political candidates and authorizes the Florida Election Commission to impose fines if these candidates were to be deplatformed. The fines range from $250,000 per day for statewide office candidates and $25,000 per day for non-statewide offices.

“This will lead to more speech, not less speech,” DeSantis said during a press conference at the Florida International University in Miami Monday. “Because speech that’s inconvenient to the narrative will be protected.”

Many are already skeptical about the new law’s legality, with the tech-friendly Chamber of Progress calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” As a state law, the measure could be overturned if courts find it conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly immunizes platforms from liability for good-faith moderation activity. It could also be subject to a constitutional challenge under the First Amendment, which has been interpreted to broadly prevent government interference to corporate speech.

But regardless of its legal status, the measure will help establish DeSantis’ political bona-fides among the anti-tech wing of the Republican Party. For years, Republicans have pressured platforms like Facebook over their content moderation policies, accusing the companies of being biased against conservative speech online. DeSantis’ bill is one of the first major victories for populist Republicans in opposition to the power of Big Tech.

Carl Szabo, the vice president and general counsel for NetChoice, a trade group representing large tech companies like Facebook and Amazon, argued that the law could be found to be unconstitutional. “The First Amendment prohibits the government from compelling or controlling speech on private websites,” said Szabo. “If this law could somehow be enforced, it would allow lawful but awful user posts including pornography, violence, and hate speech that will make it harder for families to safely navigate online.”

The law includes a measure, added earlier this month, exempting any company that owns a large theme park or entertainment venue. At the time, Republican state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia said that the exemption was put in place to protect the Disney Plus streaming service. Florida’s economy benefits greatly from The Disney World parks in Orlando which provide significant tax revenue for the state.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/24/22451425/florida-social-media-moderation-facebook-twitter-deplatforming

The_Piper wrote:I caught her saying "ethnicicity" as well.

newolder wrote:Does she think Satan is a character from history?

Tortured_Genius wrote:Actually, given the amount of posts we've wasted on her, MTG's role within the Republican Party is obvious.

As a distracting glove puppet when the men in charge are facing actual criminal charges, she's brilliant.