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Sherman Smith at Kansas Reflector:

TOPEKA — As the Kansas Legislature renewed its yearslong assault on transgender children, Sen. Mary Ware told her Senate colleagues Monday she had a “simple” question for them.

“What is the acceptable number of youth suicides?” Ware asked. The Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. To speak with a certified listener, call 988. Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To speak with a trained listener, text HELLO to 741741. It is free, available 24/7, and confidential. Ware’s question set the tone for debate in the Senate, which voted 27-13 to override Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of Senate Bill 233, legislation that would ban gender-affirming care for anyone younger than 18. But the override attempt fell short in the House on an 82-43 vote, two short of the two-thirds majority required.

The bill would have blocked teenagers from receiving hormone therapy and other treatments recognized as necessary by medical professionals. And it would have banned state employees from supporting “social transitioning,” which is defined to include an individual changing their preferred pronouns or manner of dress. Rep. Susan Concannon, R-Beloit, and Rep. Jesse Borjon, R-Topeka, flipped their votes from earlier in the month to sustain the governor’s veto. Two other Republicans — Rep. Mark Schreiber of Emporia and Rep. David Younger of Ulysses — also joined Democrats in blocking the legislation from becoming law. “We hear about mental health, about suicide, and ask why,” Concannon said. “We’re not listening to the impact of youth. Government involvement is not the answer.” On the Senate side, Sen. John Doll, R-Garden City, and Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, joined the chamber’s 11 Democrats in supporting the veto.

Opponents of the bill pointed to extensive medical research that shows transgender children, who are already at an elevated risk for suicide, are more likely to die from suicide if they don’t receive gender-affirming care. “This bill ignores, or should I say tramples, on the rights of some Kansas citizens to live peaceably, lawfully and free to make their own decisions about their own bodies,” Ware said. Republicans argued the bill would protect children from life-altering decisions they could end up regretting.

[...] The House delayed taking action as Republican leadership tried to secure enough votes to override the governor’s veto. Before closing the roll call, Republicans locked the chamber doors and issued a procedural declaration that requires every member to cast a vote, rather than abstain. Borjon said he would support a ban on gender reassignment surgery and limits on the use of hormone blockers for minors. But for him, the bill went too far in restricting speech and behavioral health care for transgender youths. Rep. Tobias Schlingensiepen, a Topeka Democrat and pastor, said it was clear the “politically motivated bill” would make the lives of trans kids and their families more difficult.

Good news: Kansas's anti-trans gender-affirming care ban for trans youths will not take effect, as Gov. Laura Kelly (D)'s veto of SB233 has been sustained in the House. #KSLeg

See Also:

Erin In The Morning: Kansas Republican Votes No On Trans Ban: "Govt. Involvement Is Not The Answer"

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“To see this unambiguous symbol of Jewish hatred on our campus is deeply distressing. There is no such place for such hostility and hate at USC,” USC Hillel said in a statement.

Hillel called for the administration “to demonstrate moral clarity and leadership, to condemn this overt act of antisemitism, and directly address hatred on our campus wherever it manifests.”

Fewer than 20 minutes after Hillel’s statement was posted, President Carol Folt posted on social media that she had been made aware of the swastika.

“I condemn any such hate symbols or any other forms of hate speech as deplorable,” she wrote. “Clearly, it was drawn right now just to incite even more anger at a time that is so painful for our community. We’re going to work to get to the bottom of this immediately.”

The statement was deleted and then reuploaded with an update shortly after to add, “and it has just been removed,” in reference to the swastika.

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So, there's a lot of USians around who are very clearly fucking fed up with their political choices this election cycle, and planning to sit it out.

And I get it! What's the point of voting if there's no one to vote for?

The thing is, I'm Australian. In Australia, voting is compulsory. We don't get to sit out our elections, and I'll be real honest with you - we don't exactly get better choices than you lot. So how do you vote if there's no one to vote for? You find someone to vote against. And there's always someone to vote against.

Now, we have the pleasure of preferential voting in Australia - We get to rank every candidate from 1 to X, and I'll tell you, there's something so cathartic about putting the biggest bastard of the lot at the very bottom of your preferences. I understand that USians don't get that option - you get to mark one person, and that's it.

That means that you get one shot, so aim it at the biggest bastard of the lot. The candidate you most utterly detest. Put your vote in the worst possible place for them. Don't even think about who that vote's going towards, that's not the point. Remember, every vote is a vote against someone. Make sure you fuck up that someone's election day!

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Prosecutors in New York City have announced that they returned to Cambodia and Indonesia 30 antiquities that were looted, sold or illegally transferred by networks of American antiquities dealers and traffickers. The antiquities were valued at a total of $3m, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement on Friday. Bragg said he had returned 27 pieces to Phnom Penh and three to Jakarta in two recent repatriation ceremonies, including a bronze statue of the Hindu deity Shiva, which was looted from Cambodia, and a stone bas-relief sculpture of two royal figures from the Majapahit empire, which reigned between the 13th and 16th centuries, that was stolen from Indonesia.

Continue Reading.

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Democratic leaders in Maine are threatening to eliminate the state's split-vote system for allocating Electoral College delegates if Nebraska Republicans move forward with their plan to do the same.

The two states are the only ones in the country to allocate some delegates proportionally by congressional district, which in 2020 allowed President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump to each secure one delegate in states that were otherwise won by the other – Biden in Nebraska and Trump in Maine.

But in early April, Trump, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and other prominent Republicans endorsed a legislative measure that would change Nebraska's allocation of Electoral College votes to a Trump-favorable, winner-take-all system. The state currently awards one vote for each of the state's three congressional districts and then two for the overall winner of the state.

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In the suit, which was filed in the U.K., the plaintiffs alleged Grindr disclosed user information about their health, sex lives and sexual orientation to advertisers without user knowledge — breaching data protection laws.

More than 670 people have signed their names to the class action, and “thousands” more Grindr users are interested in joining the suit, according to London-based law firm Austen Hays, which filed the suit.

“Grindr owes it to the LGBTQ+ community it serves to compensate those whose data has been compromised and have suffered distress as a result, and to ensure all its users are safe while using the app, wherever they are, without fear that their data might be shared with third parties,” said Chaya Hanoomanjee, managing director of Austen Hayes.

Users who can join the suit must have been affected prior to April 2020, when Grindr changed its privacy and user consent guidelines.

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Suspect Shot Dead After Shooting 3 Kenner Louisiana Police Officers, One Officer Was Shot In The Arm, The Other Officer Was Shot In The Leg, And The Third Was Shot In The Stomach During Standoff – New Orleans Louisiana reporting

The standoff ended with the suspected shooter, 31-year-old Matthew Lathers, dead.

"We attempted to negotiate with him numerous times, and we attempted to make contact, but there was no answer by any means, nor did he ever try to negotiate with our SWAT officers," Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto said. "And it wasn't until he took the positions that he did that they fired upon him."

When officers arrived, they found two people shot inside a vehicle outside the home on Farm Avenue which he said is the home of Lathers’ relative.

“We actually believe they were either going to or coming from church. They just happened to stop there in front of that residence, and they were shot,” said Cunningham.

One of the victims has non-life-threatening injuries and the second is in critical condition according to Cunningham.

Lathers tried to shoot at the police armored vehicle, he was shot by a JPSO sniper. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Lathers was also wanted for an attempted murder and armed robbery of a 56-year-old man Tuesday, April 23.

In 2012, Lathers was convicted of Armed Robbery and sentenced to ten years according to Kenner PD.

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A big cost and concern for many seniors in the U.S. is the price of prescription drugs and other healthcare expenses—and this year, thanks to The Inflation Reduction Act, their costs may go down dramatically, especially for patients fighting cancer or heart disease.

I learned about the new benefits because my ‘Medicare birthday’ is coming up in a couple months when I turn 65. I was shocked that there were so many positive changes being made, which I never heard about on the news.

Thousands of Americans on Medicare have been paying more than $14,000 a year for blood cancer drugs, more than $10,000 a year for ovarian cancer drugs, and more than $9,000 a year for breast cancer drugs, for instance.

That all changed beginning in 2023, after the Biden administration capped out-of-pocket prescriptions at $3,500—no matter what drugs were needed. And this year, in 2024, the cap for all Medicare out-of-pocket prescriptions went down to a maximum of $2,000.

“The American people won, and Big Pharma lost,” said President Biden in September 2022, after the legislation passed. “It’s going to be a godsend to many families.”

Another crucial medical necessity, the shingles vaccine, which many seniors skip because of the cost, is now free. Shingles is a painful rash with blisters, that can be followed by chronic pain, and other complications, for which there is no cure

In 2022, more than 2 million seniors paid between $100 and $200 for that vaccine, but starting last year, Medicare prescription drug plans dropped the cost for shots down to zero.

Another victory for consumers over Big Pharma affects anyone of any age who struggles with diabetes. The cost of life-saving insulin was capped at $35 a month [for people on Medicare].

Medicare is also lowering the costs of the premium for Part B—which covers outpatient visits to your doctors. 15 million Americans will save an average of $800 per year on health insurance costs, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Last year, for the first time in history, Medicare began using the leverage power of its large patient pool to negotiate fair prices for drugs. Medicare is no longer accepting whatever drug prices that pharmaceutical companies demand.

Negotiations began on ten of the most widely used and expensive drugs.

Among the ten drugs selected for Medicare drug price negotiation were Eliquis, used by 3.7 million Americans and Jardiance and Xarelto, each used by over a million people. The ten drugs account for the highest total spending in Medicare Part D prescription plans...

How are all these cost-savings being paid for?

The government is able to pay for these benefits by making sure the biggest corporations in America are paying their fair share of federal taxes.

In 2020, for instance, dozens of American companies on the Fortune 500 list who made $40 billion in profit paid zero in federal taxes.

Starting in 2023, U.S. corporations are required to pay a minimum corporate tax of 15 percent. The Inflation Reduction Act created the CAMT, which imposed the 15% minimum tax on the adjusted financial statement income of any corporation with average income that exceeds $1 billion.

For years, Americans have decried the rising costs of health care—but in the last three years, there are plenty of positive developments.

-via Good News Network, February 25, 2024

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Monday his state will not abide by the Biden administration’s sweeping new changes to Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination at government-funded schools.

In a letter to President Biden, Abbott railed against the revised rules — which provide new protections for transgender students — saying they’re “illegal” and the result of a “ham-handed effort to impose a leftist belief onto Title IX,” which Abbott said “exceeds your authority as President.”

“You have rewritten Title IX to force schools to treat boys as if they are girls and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity,” Abbott wrote in his letter, arguing that step exceeds Biden’s authority.

Abbott’s criticism comes as a growing number of Republican-led states have pledged to reject the Title IX rules finalized this month by the Education Department.

Top education officials in Florida, Louisiana, Wyoming, South Carolina and Oklahoma have publicly rebuked the Biden administration’s new Title IX, arguing the new policies roll back the rights of women and girls by expanding the landmark civil rights law’s definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity.

Abbott said in his letter he will instruct his state government not to adhere to the new policies, citing concerns that they conflict with Texas state law.

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Aldous J. Pennyfarthing at Daily Kos:

Just two weeks after Donald Trump urged radical leftists to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this November—because “he’s got some nice things about him” and “I happen to like him”—he’s suddenly taking a different tack.

In the wake of new polling suggesting RFK Jr. would siphon more votes away from Trump than President Joe Biden, Trump is stablin’ and geniusin’ up a storm, taking to his perpetual prevarication platform Truth Social to knock the wind out of the independent candidate’s campaign. His latest tirade comes just days after Trump claimed RFK the Lesser could hurt both major party candidates but “he might hurt Biden a little bit more.” On Friday night, as Trump dithered between wishing his wife a happy birthday or lauding South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for her new and courageous puppy-murdering stance, he suddenly swung in an entirely different direction: claiming the guy he once praised as “very smart” and a “very good man” is actually a total disaster. And not because RFK Jr. would be forced to attend state dinners in a giant acrylic hamster ball to avoid infecting other world leaders with smallpox. No, it’s because Trump—and Republicans as a whole—are suddenly very nervous that Kennedy will loosen Trump’s once-reliable hold on the demon sperm vote. 

As Daily Kos noted Tuesday, new polling from NBC News shows Kennedy support at 13%—but notably, he “picks up 15% of Trump's support in the head-to-head while attracting only 7% of Biden's original voters.” But that’s not all! In the Marist poll, Kennedy gains a point; and “17% of Trump voters threw their support behind Kennedy in this poll, compared to 11% of Biden voters.” [...] Trump’s latest rants represent a stark departure from what he was saying just last year, after it was revealed that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had spent “months” recruiting RFK Jr. to run against Biden and serve as a “useful chaos agent.” In June of last year, when RFK Jr. was still running as a Democrat, Trump said he was a “very smart guy,” a “good guy,” and a “common sense guy.” He even lauded the Kennedy scion’s allegedly robust poll numbers, saying, “He’s a very good man and his heart is in the right place, and he’s doing really well! I saw a poll, he’s at 22. That’s pretty good.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has increasingly targeted his campaign to MAGA-curious messaging to appeal to disgruntled Trump voters, and that has Donald Trump shaking in his boots because indications that RFK Jr. will poach more from Trump than Joe Biden.

See Also:

Salon: RFK is now openly gunning for Trump voters — and Republicans are starting to worry

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Wow it’s almost like the oversexualisation of queerness is one of the reasons why asexuals, non-binary folks and aromantics are not seen as queer enough to be part of the community

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Jessie Golem has spent much of the last six years sharing the stories of participants in Ontario's basic income pilot program.

A former participant herself, the Hamilton photographer says the promise of three years of guaranteed income was life-changing. 

She was one of 4,000 low-income earners who signed up for the pilot in 2017. At the time, she was working four jobs and hoping to start a full-time photography business. The pilot gave Golem the chance she needed, and she calculated that she could launch the business and be earning more than the $34,000 ceiling for the pilot before it ended.

She didn't get that chance. The Ford government cancelled the pilot in 2018, within a year from its start under the previous Liberal government under Kathleen Wynne.

"If the pilot had been allowed to continue, my life would look a lot different right now," Golem told CBC Hamilton this week. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

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Incredibly frustrating how the last several years have been a clear win for progressive economic views but no one wants to admit that because that's not the same as overthrowing capitalism

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Nicole Narea at Vox:

Protests against the war in Gaza have spread to college campuses across the country in the days since students at Columbia University were arrested last week, evoking images of historical student protests that were met with similar backlash.

Recent protests have not yet reached the scale of the major student protests of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War or the 1980s against South African apartheid. But on campus, they may be “the largest student movement so far” of the 21st century, said Robert Cohen, a professor of social studies and history at New York University who has studied student activism. In recent decades, there were mass protests against the Iraq War, as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and after the killing of George Floyd, but they were primarily happening off campus. Just like the protesters that came before them, the students who are now being arrested, and in some cases suspended, for setting up encampments on their campuses in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza have been demonized by politicians. The vast majority are peaceful protesters who have been overshadowed by a minority of bad actors, some potentially not even affiliated with the universities where these demonstrations are taking place.

Some of their demands, including divestiture from firms that support Israel’s war and occupation, mirror demands that past protesters made to divest from South Africa’s apartheid government. And their discontent has similarly intensified in the face of police crackdowns. But there are key differences as well. Besides their smaller size, the present-day protests have faced swifter suppression than their predecessors dealt with. In perhaps the most extreme example at the University of Texas-Austin, administrators quickly dispatched police with horses and riot gear absent any signs of violence at a pro-Palestinian protest; charges were later dropped against all 57 arrested. And that signals a deterioration of schools’ commitment to protecting free speech that emerged in the 1960s. “I think that the fact that this has happened so quickly is unprecedented. And the call for suppression of speech is much more public,” Cohen said.

[...]

What today’s protests do and don’t have in common with the antiwar protests of the 1960s

Columbia students famously occupied university buildings in 1968 in protest against segregation and the Vietnam War before the police forcibly removed them. They wanted Columbia to end the construction of a segregated gymnasium nearby in Morningside Park and to cut ties with the Institute for Defense Analyses, which was researching weapons development for the US government’s war effort.

This all happened against a backdrop of broader anti-war and anti-racism protests across the US, both on and off campuses, that helped energize the student movement. Student protests swept college campuses in the 1960s, involving thousands of students and hundreds of universities. Those protests remain the biggest in history; the current protest movement is “clearly growing, but it’s nowhere near that scale,” said Angus Johnston, an adjunct professor at the City University of New York studying student protests. The tactics employed by protesters in the 1960s were also vastly different. While many started and remained peaceful, at their most extreme, students rioted, barricaded themselves in buildings, fought with police, burned down ROTC buildings, and raided draft boards to steal or destroy files. They culminated in the Kent State massacre in 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard shot at a crowd of unarmed student protesters, killing four and injuring nine.

The recent protests, on the other hand, have not gone anywhere near as far. “What we are seeing in this spring’s wave of protest is students who are not engaging in property damage. They are not for the most part occupying buildings. They are certainly not initiating physical altercations on any large-scale level,” Johnston said. “In the late ’60s, what we were seeing was protests that were much more aggressive in their tactics than the ones that we’re seeing today.”

Some students vocally opposed these tactics in the 1960s. Notably, Donald Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr was among a group of Columbia students, known as the Majority Coalition, who banded together to defend the university buildings from protesters and were incensed that they could not attend class. Student opposition to today’s protests has highlighted antisemitic incidents at or around some protests, raising concerns about their safety. For instance, one student at Columbia wrote an op-ed in Haaretz with the headline, “Jewish Students are No Longer Safe at Columbia University.” He wrote that a masked student on campus showed him a Hamas insignia and said he was “with them,” and that another protester near campus shoved him against a wall. At the same time, Jewish students have also participated in the protests, which have been largely peaceful.

[...] One way today’s protests resemble those of the 1960s, however, is that they’ve escalated when university administrators have sent in the police to break them up. Both now and then, students who did not participate in the initial or more radical elements of the protests resented being characterized as confrontational and disruptive. [...]

Today’s protests have a lot in common with anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s

A better analogy for today’s protests might be the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s. Students built up their power in university governance and assembled lobbying groups throughout the 1970s. They also became more of a political force when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1972. That meant that, by the time protests against South African apartheid gained steam in the 1980s, they had accumulated more political influence and were better organized. Their demands of university administrations were practically identical to what protesters are asking for today. They wanted their universities to divest from firms that supported or profited from South African apartheid. And they were effective: 155 universities ultimately divested. And in 1986, the US government also bowed to pressure from protesters and enacted a divestment policy. Along with increasing protests within South Africa led by organizations including the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and trade unions, that kind of international pressure helped force the white South African government to begin negotiations that ultimately ended apartheid, at least officially.

But protesters also didn’t face much pushback in the ’80s because there was a “certain embarrassment among elites in the United States that there was complicity with South Africa’s white government,” Farber said. “It was kind of pushing against an open door,” he said. “It wasn’t really a polarizing issue.” That differs from today, when the Gaza war has revealed a major generational divide and there doesn’t exist the same kind of consensus among Americans.

The divestment movement against the apartheid government — which started with universities and then was adopted by the US federal government — also arguably packed a bigger punch due to vulnerabilities in South Africa’s economy, including the fact that many of its goods could be substituted with products from elsewhere. Assuming that divesting from Israel would be possible (and some say it is not), the scholarship on such divestment movements’ effectiveness is mixed. It would be very difficult to effectively boycott or ban imports of all Israeli goods, many of which do not have substitutes or at least would be hard to replace. That includes computer technology, medical devices, drugs, and advanced machinery in heavy industry. That doesn’t necessarily mean that divestment from Israel would not have a significant impact on public perception of the war in Gaza and the Israeli occupation. But the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement — which predates the current protests — has so far had a negligible economic impact.

Vox analyzes the comparison and differences between the current college campus protests against Israel's genocide campaign targeting Gaza and past protests.

See Also:

The Guardian: US faculty speak up and stand alongside student Gaza protesters

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A newly proposed bill introduced by Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, could change how the yearly cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security benefits is calculated, potentially boosting checks for retirees and other recipients.

The proposed legislation, called the Boosting Benefits and COLAs Act, is an attempt to amend Title II of the Social Security Act to require the Commissioner of Social Security to use the Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers (CPI-E) to calculate the yearly cost-of-living adjustment, better known as COLA, instead of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). Should the CPI-W be higher than the CPI-E, the first should be used instead of the latter.

The annual COLA is currently based on the percentage increase in the CPI-W between the third quarter of the previous year and the third quarter of the current year. If there's no increase, there's no COLA. The idea is to adjust Social Security benefits so that they can keep pace with inflation: in 2024, the COLA was 3.2 percent, a much smaller boost than the previous year, when the adjustment had been 8.7 percent.

But Gallego argues that this formula doesn't consider the specific costs that retirees have to face, which are different from the rest of the American population. For example, medical expenses weigh more heavily on elders than younger people—a number which is reflected in the CPI-E, but not necessarily in the CPI-W.