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DoD Report Describes Trump Doctor Ronny Jackson as a Lecherous Boozehound and All-Around Terrible Colleague


Ronny Jackson, it appears, made many, many enemies during his rise as a Navy medical officer that ultimately landed him a gig as the physician to the president of the United States. Donald Trump, however, was not one of those many, many detractors. Trump was so enamored with Jackson, a square-jawed doctor with a nose for the political winds, that Trump tried to hand Jackson a spot in his cabinet in 2018, as the head of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Jackson’s nomination, however, was ultimately scuttled when former colleagues and subordinates began expressing how they really felt about Jackson.

What emerged was an unflattering portrait of a maniacal boss that liked the sauce, not to mention the the odd sleeping pill, all of which resulted in numerous inappropriate interactions with female subordinates and coworkers. The blowback was sufficient enough to prompt an investigation by the Department of Defense inspector general, which, after years of digging, confirmed a number of grisly details about Jackson, who with Trump’s backing ran and won a seat in Congress last year representing the Texas panhandle. ................(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/defense-department-report-doctor-ronny-jackson-sexual-harassment-all-around-terrible-colleague.html

CPAC, conservatives and the culture war: Why Republicans will become more extreme in Trump's absence
This is a very radical group of people and they are much more extreme than they were in 2016

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
MARCH 3, 2021 2:29PM


(Salon) Back in 2017, the dominant post-election analysis held that the people who voted for Trump were driven into the arms of the billionaire, populist, demagogue out of an overwhelming sense of "economic anxiety." Political pundits spent months wringing their hands over how the Democrats had somehow failed to address the basic, workaday, kitchen-table-issues of these hardscrabble Americans while Donald Trump gave them hope that he would ease their burdens with his very stable business genius.

That was never very accurate as anyone observing the Trump phenomenon could see. Those voters were just mad at the fact that society is changing and they feel they are losing their status. In other words, they don't want to share the culture equally with people who think and live differently than they do. Donald Trump spoke their language of grievance and exclusion and they reveled in it. They followed him around like a bunch of red-hatted Deadheads, dancing, chanting and cheering ecstatically at every insulting, degrading remark he made, unashamedly telling the press that they loved him because he said out loud what they were thinking.

....(snip)....

New York Magazine's Ben Jacobs smartly observed that the American right has pretty much abandoned any pretense to libertarianism and is now much more aligned with the European right than its ever been. (Yes, their paeans to "freedom" are as shrill as ever but, as Jacobs points out, the point seems to be more aimed at "owning the libs" than any adherence to principle.) He notes that while there were some tepid gestures toward small government economics, the over-arching theme at CPAC this year was demagogic, culture war red meat, with "strident warnings about Marxism and Black Lives Matter, hardline stances set out on immigration and the rise of China and newfound zeal to combat and regulate social-media companies." And Jacobs notes that politicians all tried to tap into the "'but he fights' ethos that fueled Trump's rise." .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/03/03/cpac-conservatives-and-the-culture-war-why-republicans-will-become-more-extreme-in-trumps-absence/

(Detroit Free Press) The University of Michigan is banning 375 students who haven't taken required COVID-19 tests from entering non-residential buildings on campus, the school announced Wednesday morning.

The undergraduate students had their Mcards, which they scan to enter buildings, deactivated and received emails Tuesday telling them of the move, after what the university said was multiple attempts to reach them.

This means the students can't go into buildings housing classes, laboratories or even social activities. The vast majority of all classes being offered this semester are virtual. It's not known exactly how many students are actually on campus or using buildings. ..........(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2021/03/03/university-michigan-coronavirus-testing-building-access/6900995002/

The first tunnel boring machine (TBM), named Elsie, broke through to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (L.A. Metro) Wilshire/La Cienega subway station in Beverly Hills.

It is the first of two TBMs that will reach this last station on Section 1 of the L.A. Metro D Line (Purple) Extension project.

Tunneling for the first four-mile section of the subway project is now two-thirds complete. More than 90 percent of the tunnels have been mined safely and L.A. Metro anticipates completing tunnel mining this summer. Excavation for all three subway station boxes beneath Wilshire Boulevard has been completed.

Elsie, the 1,000-ton, 400-foot long TBM started west at the Wilshire/Fairfax station on May 29, 2020, and broke through to the Wilshire/La Cienega station site about one mile away on Feb. 25. L.A. Metro’s first TBM arrived at Wilshire/Fairfax on April 4, 2020. .............(more)

https://www.masstransitmag.com/rail/infrastructure/press-release/21212376/los-angeles-county-metropolitan-transportation-authority-metro-first-tunneling-machines-reaches-future-la-metro-wilshirela-cienega-subway-station

(CNN)In a critical voting rights case, conservative Supreme Court justices on Tuesday suggested they were ready to uphold two provisions of an Arizona voting law that Democrats argue violate the historic Voting Rights Act.

Supporters of voting rights are fearful that the court's new 6-3 solidified conservative majority will weaken a key provision of the act that prohibits laws that result in racial discrimination.

For over two hours of telephonic arguments, the justices grappled not only with the Arizona law at hand but with a standard that courts should apply when considering such laws going forward. Lawyers challenging the provisions came under consistent attack in various forms from all of the conservatives on the court who seemed skeptical of the tests put forward by a lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee. ...........(more)

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/02/politics/voting-rights-act-supreme-court-oral-arguments/index.html

The mayor of Paris has described as “inhumane” plans to force the city into weekend lockdowns to combat the continuing spread of Covid-19.

Anne Hidalgo has vehemently opposed government plans to shut down the city and its suburbs at the end of the week, saying its residents, most of whom live in apartments with no outside space, “need a horizon” and have to be able to escape to outside spaces such as parks, gardens and riverside areas.

“These places are vital for us to breathe in our city,” she added stressing that it was safer for Parisians to be outside rather than cooped up inside flats and offices.

The idea of a weekend lockdown was “a proposal that is difficult, hard and even inhumane”, she added. ..............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/02/weekend-lockdown-paris-inhumane-mayor-anne-hidalgo-coronavirus

(Detroit Free Press) LANSING – Gov. Gretchen Whitmer remains a popular leader, but her support has slipped over the last several months in what a pollster believes is a reflection of public frustration over the coronavirus pandemic, nearing its one-year anniversary in Michigan.

In a new poll from EPIC-MRA of Lansing, 52% gave Whitmer a positive job approval rating and 47% gave her a negative rating. Also, 49% said they had a favorable opinion of Whitmer, while 44% said they had an unfavorable opinion of her. Another 7% were undecided or refused to say.

....(snip)....

Whitmer is most popular in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, where 59% said they had a favorable impression of her and 35% said they had an unfavorable one. She is least popular in northern Michigan, where 73% say they have an unfavorable impression and 27% a favorable one.

....(snip)....

Among Black voters, 84% of those surveyed had a favorable impression of Whitmer. White voters were pretty evenly split, with 46% having a favorable impression of the governor and 47% an unfavorable one. .............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/03/02/whitmer-job-approval-favorability-polling-coronavirus/6866890002/

So hard to choose.....

CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy: Was it deliberate? That hardly matters
Extremism experts on CPAC's "inadvertent" use of a Nazi-associated rune: A clear signal, with unclear motives

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
MARCH 2, 2021 11:00AM


(Salon) Once upon a time, the Conservative Political Action Conference was a relatively traditional and "mainstream" gathering of many divergent currents on the political right.

Fueled by the obsessive racist backlash against Barack Obama's presidency and paranoid fantasies about a bogeyman fictional version of "the left," the Republican Party rapidly became more extreme, contemptuous not just of "liberals" but of multiracial democracy and reality itself. During those years, CPAC came to resemble a political zoo or circus where assorted cast-offs, broken toys and fringe figures from the Republican Party and conservative movement could gather together and hatch their nefarious plots.

As a result, during the Obama era CPAC became something of a bellwether or leading indicator of the Republican Party's embrace of right-wing extremism and anti-democracy fervor.

....(snip)....

On Twitter, author Jared Yates Sexton recently echoed Arendt with a contemporary warning:

.................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/03/02/cpac-veers-into-neo-nazi-fantasy-was-it-deliberate-that-hardly-matters/