Tracker

According to the Freep, our punting is in good hands with Legghio- he was seen hanging punts with very good distance and placement.

Furious Trump demanded leaker who revealed he fled to his bunker during protests be executed: report According to Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender's bombshell book, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, a furious Donald Trump demanded that officials in his government find out who leaked the story that he fled to his bunker during the George Floyd protests in D.C. and wanted them tried for treason and then executed. As the report notes, Trump, his wife Melania and son Barron were escorted to the bunker -- news of which quickly made it to the press, which caused the president to blow up. Bender reports the former president, "held a tense meeting with top military, law enforcement and West Wing advisers, in which he aired grievances over the leak." According to his book, "Trump boiled over about the bunker story as soon as they arrived and shouted at them to smoke out whoever had leaked it. It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president," with Bender reporting Trump yelled, "Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason! They should be executed!" Furious Trump demanded leaker who revealed he fled to his bunker during protests be executed: report - Alternet.org

Could genocide really happen here? Leading scholar says America is on "high alert" Alexander Laban Hinton on his new book, Trump's snake metaphor and the rising danger of white-power movements Even the title of Alexander Laban Hinton's new book provides a chilling summary of the current danger facing this nation: "It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the U.S." Hinton is one of the world's leading authorities on genocide and atrocity crimes. He is the author of 12 books on the subject and directs the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. He testified as an expert witness, at the trial of Nuon Chea, who was prime minister of Cambodia during the genocidal tyranny of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. With sober analysis and in assiduous detail, Hinton explores the ways the United States is "simmering at a low boil," and evinces every risk indicator for widespread mass atrocity crimes. White supremacist organizations and armed militias are mobilized for political action, the Republican Party has declared war on multiracial democracy and right-wing voters have become increasingly radical and hostile, falling into the personality cult of Donald Trump and the apocalyptic cult of QAnon. As historian Timothy Snyder, philosopher Jason Stanley and former Republican insider Mike Lofgren have also warned, the U.S. is teetering at the edge of fascism. With "It Can Happen Here," Hinton brings his knowledge and experience to bear on a dynamic history of the Trump administration — taking his readers inside his classroom, to white power rallies and to his own testimony at the Chea trial. One of the book's strengths is its accessibility. Written with literary style rather than in dry academic prose, it makes for fascinating, albeit deeply disturbing, reading. Could genocide really happen here? Leading scholar says America is on "high alert" | Salon.com (The entire article is well worth the read)

See what happens when you live too close to the Saskatchewan border?

I'm afraid that when you spout quotations from Donald Trump and Fox News, you are leaving yourself wide open to all manner of sarcasm, not to mention the questioning of your intelligence.

Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea offered this brief update after practice: “He had an appointment he had to get to.”

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed: Jan. 6 was a "turning point" in American history Pulitzer-winning Harvard historian on the battle for the past and the fragile state of American democracy: In the past six months, since the events of Jan. 6, I have been meditating a great deal on William Faulkner's wisdom and warning: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." American history is a puzzle, full of contradictions and complexity. But some people, instead of studying this history so as to make better decisions in the present and future, choose to take a hammer to the puzzle. They smash it and then hammer the pieces back together so as to fit their self-serving lies and distortions. Consider the moral panic created by the white right against "critical race theory." Of course, as deployed by right-wing propagandists, "critical race theory" possesses little if any resemblance to the epistemological framework of the same name. For the white right it's a term that means everything and nothing, a convenient vessel into which they can pour white rage, white fear, white victimology and white supremacy in an ongoing attack on multiracial American democracy. Writing at the Atlantic, historian Ibram X. Kendi summarizes this: The United States is not in the midst of a "culture war" over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren't divided. The American people are being divided. Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: "a way of looking at law's role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country," as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. … Right-wing hysteria about "critical race theory" is not happening in a vacuum. It is part of a much larger project by the Jim Crow Republicans, neofascists and the broader white right to legitimize a new type of American apartheid in which nonwhites — especially Black people — do not have equal rights with white "conservatives" and others loyal to their cause. This crisis of democracy has forced questions of history and public memory to the forefront of America's struggle against neofascism and authoritarianism. In an essay for the New York Times, historian Timothy Snyder warns of the threat to democracy posed by Republican attempts to whitewash American history — quite literally — through Orwellian laws that ban the teaching of "critical race theory": "This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws. … Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws' portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so. We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent."

Leaked police documents show violent plots continued following Jan. 6 insurrection Hackers leaked Washington, D.C., police documents showing that lawmakers received numerous threats in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, right-wing extremists plotted further attacks around the nation's capital. The leaked documents, which were stolen and published by the ransomware attack group Babuk, show metropolitan police recorded threats to lawmakers and public facilities after Donald Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, and law enforcement stepped up surveillance on far-right groups, reported The Guardian. "[The group Patriot Action for America is] calling for others to join them in 'storming' state, local, and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event POTUS is removed as president prior to inauguration day," police said in one Jan. 13 bulletin. Some of the stolen documents were redistributed by the transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets and showed intelligence indicated that anti-government Boogaloo groups planned to attack various targets around Washington, and mentioned a possible second suspect in the placement of pipe bombs near the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters before the riot. A Jan. 22 bulletin shows a heavily armed Pennsylvania man was arrested for sending threats to Democratic senators. "I'm going to DC to kill people and want to be killed by the police," the man said, according to the bulletin. Leaked police documents show violent plots continued following Jan. 6 insurrection | Salon.com

Adviser to pro-Trump GOP group sent out a newsletter ‘so racist’ it could ‘make a Ku Klux Klansman blush’: report Pro-Trump Republicans often engage in subliminal racism or "dog whistle" attacks — that is, code words that they will insist aren't racist. But when Florida resident Rip McIntosh, an adviser to far-right Trumpista Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, sent out a fundraising newsletter on April 29, there was nothing subtle or subliminal about the racism in the newsletter. In the newsletter, Talking Points Memo's Nick R. Martin reports, someone going by the pen name E.P. Unum wrote that Blacks have "become socially incompatible with other races" and that "American Black culture has evolved into an unfixable and crime-ridden mess." Martin described Unum's rant as being "so racist it might make a ku klux klansman blush." According to Martin, the newsletter that McIntosh e-mailed, "also said White people aren't racist but 'just exhausted' with Black people. It portrayed post-Civil War America as a 150-year-long 'experiment' to see whether Black people could be 'taken from the jungles of Africa,' enslaved, and then integrated into a majority-White society. It said that experiment had failed." McIntosh is on Turning Point USA's advisory council. Although McIntosh is 85, Turning Point is a youth outreach organization; its mission is to convert Millennials and members of Generation Z into far-right Republicans. Martin explains, "The newsletter, which McIntosh says has more than 25,000 subscribers and which he sometimes publishes as often as five times a day, is frequently filled with culture war rants, conspiracy theories, racism, and other types of bigotry, but this e-mail stood out even among that toxic stew. In an interview, McIntosh said neither Turning Point nor its co-founder Charlie Kirk, whom he considers to be a personal friend, has any role in the publication of his newsletter. McIntosh also denied writing the essay, which was published under the fictitious byline 'E.P. Unum.'" McIntosh told Talking Points Memo and The Informant that E.P. Unum is "a nom de plume of a friend" who "doesn't want his name out there because he's a teacher" and "doesn't want to be canceled." Unum's racist rant in the newsletter was headlined, "On the Question of Systemic Racism in the United States." Martin writes, "McIntosh acknowledged that the essay, which it turns out borrowed heavily from an article first published years ago on a prominent racist website, was 'a bit extreme,' but said he had no regrets about publishing it. He also said he believed both Turning Point and Kirk would stand by him. Adviser to pro-Trump GOP group sent out a newsletter ‘so racist’ it could ‘make a Ku Klux Klansman blush’: report - Alternet.org

Looks like he has the arm and the touch to drop the ball in where he wants, but it would be good to see how he ad-libs on broken plays and handles pressure.

He was part of the CFL catch and release program.

Could this have been God punishing a lie?

This will only further increase the disillusionment and cynicism by Americans about the effectiveness of their political system. Which will serve the GOP and Russian agendas.

Woman Dies With Two COVID-19 Variants After Contracting Virus From Different People Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters A 90-year-old Belgian woman has become the first person known to have contracted two variants of COVID-19, likely from different people. The worrying discovery was announced by Belgian scientists who said the woman had both the Alpha and Beta variants when she died in March 2021. “This is one of the first documented cases of co-infection with two variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2,” molecular biologist Anne Vankeerberghen, author of the study released by the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), wrote in a statement. The patient was not vaccinated.

It is soooo nice to be back bickering and kvetching about Bomber stuff.

The five undervaccinated clusters putting entire U.S. at risk. "These clusters of unvaccinated people are what is standing in the way of us putting this virus down permanently" Anew data analysis by researchers at Georgetown University pinpoints a number of under-vaccinated clusters of the United States that pose a significant threat to the nation's—and potentially the world's—gradual progress against the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly given their potential to serve as "factories" for extremely contagious variants such as the now-dominant Delta strain. The five most significant clusters identified by the Georgetown researchers are largely located in the southern U.S., in states such as Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana—all of which are currently experiencing a rise in coronavirus cases as Delta rips through communities concentrated with people who have yet to receive a single vaccine shot. Those clusters include more than 15 million people. "The group of counties in each cluster... together have lower vaccination coverage than expected, and make up a large population size. All of the top five clusters are focused in the southeastern U.S.," the researchers note. "The more geographically clustered unvaccinated individuals are," the analysis continues, "the higher the chance that an unvaccinated individual will interact with another unvaccinated individual, and the higher the chance that a disease transmission event will occur. Low vaccination clusters, therefore, are locations where risk of transmission of Covid-19 remains high (in the absence of social distancing and masking)." Because "variant emergence stems from disease transmission," the report notes that every new transmission of the disease "creates an opportunity for a new variant to transmit to another host and take hold in a population. Therefore, the researchers write, "curbing transmission events is our best recourse to prevent variant emergence." The five undervaccinated clusters putting entire U.S. at risk | Salon.com

No small feat, given the Rider debacle,

When evangelical snowflakes censor the Bible: The English Standard Version goes PC. How a Bible edition aimed at right-wing evangelicals has quietly scrubbed references to slavery and "the Jews" Long before Donald Trump made attacks against "political correctness" a key theme of his 2016 election campaign, evangelical leaders like Wayne Grudem, author of "Systematic Theology", have railed against it, particularly when they see it invading their turf — with gender-neutral language in Bible translations, for instance. But a new study by Samuel Perry, co-author of "Taking America Back for God" (I've previously interviewed his co-author, sociologist Andrew Whitehead), finds Grudem himself involved in much the same thing. "Whitewashing Evangelical Scripture: The Case of Slavery and Antisemitism in the English Standard Version," looks at how successive translations have changed in the English Standard Version of the Bible, for which Grudem serves on the oversight committee. In revisions from 2001 through 2016, Perry shows, the word "slave" first gains a footnote, then moves to the footnote and then disappears entirely — in some contexts, like Colossians 3:22, though not others — to be replaced by the word "bondservant," which could be described as a politically correct euphemism. A similar strategy is used to handle anti-Semitic language as well, Perry shows. It's one thing for politicians to hypocritically switch positions mid-air, or hold contradictory positions simultaneously, but it's quite another thing for theologians — or at least it's supposed to be. Evangelical Christians in particular are supposed to revere the literal truth of the Bible, not fiddle around with it to make it sound better to contemporary audiences. When evangelical snowflakes censor the Bible: The English Standard Version goes PC | Salon.com

There are probably things growing in the back of your fridge that are smarter than that.

I am disappointed that Connor Griffiths is a no-show. He had a pretty impressive resume.

In American reporting, mercenaries are now referred to as "contractors". These are essentially hired killers who have been soldiers for one country or another but have been let go, usually for sociopathic behaviours and actions and although they are usually side by side with American/British/ French troops, the mercenaries are paid 3-4x more than regular soldiers and are immune from prosecution.

If you need any further proof that Trump's GOP has become as crazy as shithouse rats, here is their seven point plan to re-install him in the next 30 days: Andrew Solender on Twitter: "CPAC attendee sent me this pic of a card they were handed about a “7-pt. plan to restore Donald J. Trump in days, not years,” which involves installing Trump as speaker and ousting Biden & Harris. https://t.co/dS0tQ5jW7b" / Twitter