Yes, it is.

Of course, the easy response to that would be to say that we're always repeating our history anyway. Pft!

I really appreciation the propaganda side of this war. :nod: Makes it difficult to trust the information we get from social media, but the Ukraine's game is strong.

how would you ever 'trust' a gov't/miltary that would fire artillery, mortars, and tank shells at an active 6-core civilian commercial nuclear power plant?! :eek: :gone:

Good question. It would be quite tough to trust them yes.

Texas judge suspends Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to treat gender-affirming care as child abuse

A Texas judge on Friday issued a temporary injunction blocking Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) order to treat gender-affirming care as child abuse.

The decision by Judge Amy Clark Meachum stems from a lawsuit filed this month by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal, the LGBTQ legal advocacy group, on behalf of an anonymous family and a Houston-based psychologist. The lawsuit seeks to block a statewide directive ordering the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate parents for child abuse if they allow their children to medically transition genders. The court heard more than seven hours of testimony Friday before ruling against the state.

Courtney Corbello, an assistant attorney general for the state, argued that the court cannot “stop a state agency from doing what they are statutorily tasked with doing.” Corbello also argued that the plaintiffs did not have standing to seek a statewide injunction because the agency has not taken further action beyond an interview.

“All Jane Doe has been subject to is one investigation, one meeting with an investigator and nothing further,” Corbello said. “She’s not in the central registry for child abuse. She hasn’t had her child taken from her. Her child is not off of any medications or lacking any sort of medical treatment.”

“It can’t be that all it takes for the judicial branch to infringe on the executive branch’s ability to perform such a critical task in ensuring the welfare of the state’s children is simply to claim that you’re being investigated by DFPS, by the agency tasked with doing so, and you don’t want to be,” she continued.

The plaintiffs called Randa Mulanax, a Child Protective Services investigations supervisor who said she had resigned because the order upset her. Mulanax has worked in the Region 7 office, which includes Austin, since 2016. She oversees three investigators, and their office has begun investigating three families with transgender children.

In a typical investigation, Mulanax explained, an intake screener or a supervisor like herself contacts the person who reported the abuse and others with “credible information.” Mulanax and her colleagues then decide whether to pursue an investigation.

Abbott’s Feb. 22 order took away that discretion, Mulanax said. In her testimony, she said that two days after Abbott issued his order, she and other managers were called into a virtual meeting and told not to put anything about the investigations in emails or text messages. Mulanax said that even in cases involving serious abuse, she has always used email and text messaging to discuss cases. In that same meeting, Mulanax said, her supervisors told staff that they could not label cases involving transgender youth as “priority none,” meaning unnecessary to investigate, and that they could not use alternative, less invasive methods to investigate the claims, either.

The only other cases treated that way, Mulanax said, are “child death cases” or ones involving a conservatorship.

In a typical case, she testified, investigators might contact psychiatrists, pediatricians or other doctors for their opinions. “If they’ve already recommended these treatments, it is not our position to step in and say they are incorrect,” Mulanax said.

The governor’s opinion, and the DFPS response to it, felt like “overreach,” Mulanax said. “It was placing us in a situation that the department should not be in. We are not qualified to say that statements from a doctor and a psychiatrist and other medical professionals is not correct.”

Mulanax said she submitted her resignation on Wednesday but plans to keep working until March 31.

“I’ve always felt at the end of the day, the department has children’s best interest at heart and families’ best interest at heart,” she testified. “I no longer feel that way with this order.”

The court also heard from both plaintiffs, as well as two doctors who treat transgender children.

DFPS also held a separate hearing Friday where it solicited public comment on the new order. Agency officials said they have opened nine investigations against parents of transgender children. Families with transgender children are afraid to testify in public, advocates say, so organizations such as Equality Texas solicited volunteers to speak on their behalf. Many were in tears, a person who attended the hearing reported on Twitter, and Adri Perez, a policy and advocacy strategist for the ACLU of Texas, told DFPS commissioners that one mom reported that her child has begun self-harming because they are afraid CPS will take them away from their family.

This month, Judge Meachum granted a temporary restraining order to the plaintiffs, but she stopped short of blocking investigations statewide. In her ruling Friday, Meachum said the governor’s order “changed the status quo” for Texas families with transgender children. His order had the effect of creating a new law or agency rule without following the democratic process, a move Meachum said violated separation of powers. Meachum also disagreed with Corbello’s argument that the plaintiffs do not face imminent harm.

“For example, Jane Doe has already been placed on administrative leave at work and is at risk of losing her job, her livelihood and her means of caring for her family,” Meachum said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md...-aclu-hearing/

I haven't trusted anything coming out of Russia's mouthpieces for about 20 years now. But I am also conscious that Ukraine has an interest in the image it is projecting right now. You don't need to be an authoritarian dictator to understand that images and stories are important during wartime.

I hope the Texan judge is the start of a reversal of that disgusting and life-endangering move from the Texas government. But considering how similar laws are being enacted across red states, I rather doubt it.

:eek:

Eh?

Harry's spell is Expecto Patronum and Expensive Petroleum is a play on initials and words. :nod: the spell is from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Oh, I understood what it meant.

I just don't understand the joke, I guess? Is expensive petrol a reference to Russian propaganda or to Gov Abbott?

I have not been watching the hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee for Ketanjee Brown Jackson, but I'm learning how well she's doing in them & unsurprisingly Republicans are sinking to new lows. At least some some U.S. Senators are. Part of why I haven't been watching is because this is predictable no matter how qualified Jackson is. I do hope that she gets confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. Here's more on this:


Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing into a political circus


At 2.54pm on the second day of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings that will determine whether she takes a seat on the US supreme court, the solemn proceedings took a nosedive into farce.

Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, turned theatrically to an outsized blow-up of a children’s book, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi. Pointing to a cartoon from its pages of an infant in diapers taking their first walk, he asked Jackson: “Do you agree with this book … that babies are racist?”

“Senator,” Jackson began with a sigh. And then she paused for seven full seconds, which in the august setting of the Senate judiciary committee hearing felt like a year.

For the one and only time in the 13 hours of questioning that Jackson endured that day, the nominee appeared flummoxed. Or was it flabbergasted?

Here she was, aged 51, with almost a decade’s experience as a federal judge behind her and, if confirmed, the history-making distinction of becoming the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s highest court ahead of her. And she was being asked whether babies were racist?

“I don’t believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or not valued, or less than, that they are victims, oppressors,” she said eventually. When Cruz refused to drop the subject she gave a more direct answer.

“I have not reviewed any of those books,” she said. “They don’t come up in my work as a judge, which I’m respectfully here to address.”

That Cruz chose to focus on critical race theory (CRT), the years-old academic theory that has become the latest conservative hot-button issue, in his questioning spoke volumes about the brutal social issue politics of today’s Republican party. That he did so to a Black woman lent the exchange the astringency of a racial dog-whistle.

Cruz’s attack was not unique. Four hours before he began his interrogation, the official Twitter account of the Republican National Committee posted a gif of the nominee bearing her initials “KBJ” which are then scratched out and replaced with the letters: “CRT”. Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.

There was another twist to Cruz’s questioning. The private elementary school at which he claimed CRT was being taught – Antiracist Baby and all – is Georgetown Day School on whose board Jackson sits as a trustee. When GDS was founded in 1945 it too made history as the first integrated school, serving both Black and white children, in the nation’s capital.

Lest any of the attendants of the hearings inside the Hart Senate office building or following along on television had doubts about Cruz’s motivations, he grilled Jackson on several other racially charged subjects. He began by vaunting his own anti-racist credentials by expressing the admiration he shared with Jackson for Martin Luther King.

Within seconds of that warm embrace, however, the senator segued to a speech that Jackson made in 2020 – on MLK day – in which she referred to the 1619 Project.

The project, initiated by the New York Times, seeks to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the role of African American women front and centre of the national narrative. Cruz asked Jackson if she agreed with some of its more contested conclusions, which he claimed were “deeply inaccurate and misleading”, to which she replied that she had only mentioned it because it was “well known to the students I was talking to”.

Again, she stressed, this was a subject that had absolutely nothing to do with her work – or by implication, the job of a supreme court justice.

Outside observers were incensed by Cruz’s tactics. “What we saw today was an attempt to assail the character of Ketanji Brown Jackson, because her record is so wholly unassailable,” Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the racial justice organization, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said on MSNBC.

Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia and former senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta where King once preached, pondered in the New York Times: “Would they be asking these questions if this were not a Black woman?”

There were other awkward moments in Jackson’s epic inquisition, which she survived while barely dropping the perma-smile from her face. There was the moment that Lindsey Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, flounced out of the hearing having earlier wrongly accused Jackson of having called George W Bush and the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals”.

Yet more bizarre was the episode when Marsha Blackburn, Republican senator from Tennessee, asked Jackson whether she could “provide a definition for the word ‘woman’.” “No, I can’t,” came the curt reply.

It was all a far cry from the promise delivered by Senator Chuck Grassley, the top Republican in the judiciary committee, at the start of the hearings. There would be no “spectacle” or “political circus” coming from his side of the aisle.

Several Republican senators followed that pledge by channelling QAnon. Senators Josh Hawley from Missouri, Cruz and Graham all pursued the inquisitorial line that Jackson had been unduly lenient as a federal district court judge in her sentencing of sex offenders who consume and distribute images of child sex abuse.

Though they avoided stating so explicitly, the senators clearly intended to imply that Jackson’s sympathies lay with pedophiles. That’s a short stone’s throw away from the core conspiracy theory peddled by QAnon, the toxic Donald Trump-supporting online movement.

At its “Pizzagate” inception during the 2016 presidential campaign, QAnon fantasised about a child trafficking ring around Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders and liberal Hollywood celebrities.

As Media Matters has noted, the claim that Jackson was lenient towards sex offenders consuming images of children first surfaced last month. A conservative group American Accountability Foundation (AAF) ran an “investigation” into her writings while a student at Harvard law school in which she explored discrepancies in sentencing policy in such cases.

The group misleadingly claimed that her writing exposed her as a radical judicial activist dedicated to “social justice engineering”.

Days before the confirmation hearings began, Republican senators had taken up AAF’s lead and were plotting how to use it during the confirmation process. Last week Politico obtained a document that was circulating among the senators in which they rehearsed the claim that the judge “routinely handed out light sentences”, and that the lightest of all were in “child pornography cases”.

A pedophile-sympathising, critical race theory-loving, judicial activist, radical leftist social engineer. The vision of the nominee that was presented over hours of Republican grilling made for quite the spectacle.

But will the political circus work? “They are trying to find some way to make her look less than qualified,” Nelson concluded. “They failed miserably.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...mation-hearing

The GOP bias is showing, for sure. They had no issue appointing Justice Douche Bro but a black woman, oh no! :crazy:

Yes. :nod: