FirstCircle

Did you hear? Eleventy bazillion people showed up to hear Donald Vonshitzinpants drone on for hours about himself in Wildwood, New Jersey. Welp, Lisa Fagan, spokesperson for the city of Wildwood, is the one who guestimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 attendees were there, "based on her own observations on the scene Saturday, having seen 'dozens' of other events in the same space." This really needs a 'Sure, Jan" gif. Trumpers ran with that number, but Fagan and I'm going to guess that she's a Trump supporter, who knows, was way off.

The story has changed. Wildwood officials now say the 80K to 100K number was not the number on the beach at the rally but the total number of people "in our town," including restaurants, bars, and other places. Imagine that.

Two years ago, some incumbent Republicans lost primary elections to challengers to their right, marking the growth of hard-line conservatives in Idaho politics.

Those legislative victories bolstered a far-right voting bloc at the Statehouse and strengthened the Idaho Freedom Caucus, whose membership and influence have fought with and sometimes swayed the state’s red majority. Far-right lawmakers have endorsed fringe views and proposed passing a range of bills, like ones to outlaw COVID-19 vaccines, limit same sex marriage or pursue the phantom of growing cannibalism.

Now, a set of legislative candidates with extreme views on abortion, COVID-19, the 2020 election and gender-affirming medicine who would be new to the Capitol are running in the May 21 Republican primary.

As Republicans clash in competitive primaries, these challengers in Treasure Valley races have expressed hard-line views, shared misinformation or perpetuated conspiracy theories prominent in far-right circles.

The recording, which we are not posting at the request of our source, is an unfiltered look into a fracture among key far-right figures in Idaho politics, in a state where many races turn on contests of conservative purity.

It’s a portrait of the tangled relationship between a power broker and a politician. It includes Nate insulting other legislators and accusing Scott of joining the establishment. It shows Scott questioning both whether God wants women in leadership and whether she wants to remain in Idaho at all.

Heather Scott and Maria Nate have each established their own perch in Idaho politics.

Scott, from her district near the top of the Idaho Panhandle, has made plenty of headlines. During her first week in office, lawmakers accused her of cutting down a piece of the fire suppression system because she believed it was a “listening device” — a claim she denies.

She’d explained that the Confederate flag she’d been photographed waving was merely signifying her support for “free speech.” She’d been removed from a committee after she was overheard saying that female House members “spread their legs” to get leadership positions — the same month that Moyle married a fellow legislator.

But despite all that — or, perhaps, because of all that — she’s cultivated an army of die-hard supporters from the North Idaho grassroots.

“Heather, do you just not trust me because I’m a woman?” Nate asked. “I do wonder, because you’d said to me a lot of times that women need to follow men.”

Scott insisted she trusted Nate but acknowledged that she does “think men are stronger leaders.”

“I just think that’s how God designed us,” Scott said. “Obviously, we’re in a time of attack and crisis. And I think that God has put a lot of women in leadership positions because we’re in judgment. That’s why we’re always — it’s not natural, I don’t think.”

“Probably the biggest misunderstanding is they’re all homeless,” she said. “Instead, 76% are low-income elderly who worked their whole lives, are living on Social Security and are struggling.”

The newly named soup kitchen opened on St. Patrick’s Day 1982. It soon was serving an average of two dozen people,

“We thought this was a temporary fix — we never thought it would last,” Pieciak said. “Things were not good then, but they’re horrible today.”

The local influx of older patrons mirrors the situation statewide. According to “The State of Senior Hunger in America” report by the national hunger relief organization Feeding America, an estimated 8% of Vermont elders are considered “food insecure.”

“We know that inflation and the increase in food prices have hit people on fixed incomes hard,” said John Sayles, CEO of the Vermont Foodbank.

A medic who worked at Sde Teiman's field hospital said that Palestinian detainees there are stripped "of anything that resembles human beings" and that the harassment and torture are done not to "gather intelligence" but "out of revenge" for the October 7 attacks.

Israel has detained thousands of Gaza residents since October, with many of them held under a recently amended law that empowers Israeli authorities to imprison people indefinitely without charge or due process. Human rights organizations have documented Israeli forces' brutal and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees, including women and children.

"A 19-year-old detainee told an Al Mezan lawyer that he was tortured from the moment he was arrested," the group said. "He described how three of his fingernails were removed with pliers during interrogation. He also stated that investigators unleashed a dog on him and subjected him to shabeh—a form of torture which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods—three times over three days of interrogation. He was then placed in a cell for 70 days, where he experienced starvation and extreme fatigue."

Service charges; resort fees; "surcharge" add-ons: If you've been startled by unexpected fees when you pay your check at a restaurant — or book a hotel room or buy a ticket to a game, you're far from alone. But if you live in California, change is coming. A new state law requiring price transparency is set to take effect in July.

"The law is simple: the price you see is the price you pay," Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Wednesday, as his office issued long-awaited guidance about a law that applies to thousands of businesses in a wide range of sectors.

Restaurant owners like Laurie Thomas, who heads the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, say the changes will bring higher prices and sticker shock, which could then raise a psychological hurdle in customers' dining habits. That, in turn, will hurt restaurants and their workers, she warns.

"If it's in the core price of the menu, there will be a pullback" in patrons' spending, she told NPR shortly before the attorney general released the guidelines. "There are some people, I think, that are hoping that the restaurants will just absorb that cost, because we've seen people say, 'Oh, it's too expensive with the service charge.' "

Restaurant Association head thinks it's perfectly OK to mislead customers into thinking that prices are lower than they actually are, and gouge them after they've consumed/used the product. Because having knowledge of true prices would cause some customers to make informed decisions that might hurt sales. What other product information could be withheld to boost sales? What product misinformation could be provided to get those customers to "yes"?

The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner after the company disclosed that employees in South Carolina falsified inspection records on work done where the wings are joined to the fuselage body.

Boeing informed the Federal Aviation Administration in April that, despite records indicating completion of required inspections, workers had not performed some of those inspections to confirm adequate bonding and electrical grounding at the 787 wing-to-body join.

“The FAA is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records,” the federal safety agency said via email.

Boeing said its engineers have established that this newly discovered lapse does not create “an immediate safety of flight issue.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11456897

Congressman Adam Smith says ‘totalitarian’ protesters are ‘trying to silence anyone who dares to disagree with them’

Protesters calling for Israel to cease fire in its war with Hamas who have disrupted US public events and infrastructure are practicing “leftwing fascism” or “leftwing totalitarianism”, a senior US House Democrat said, adding that such protesters are “challenging representative democracy” and should be arrested.

“Intimidation is the tactic,” said Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the House armed services committee. “Intimidation and an effort to silence opposition … I don’t know if there’s such a thing as leftwing fascism. If you want to just call it leftwing totalitarianism, then that’s what it is. It is a direct challenge to representative democracy now.”

A resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.

“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”

Florida Governor Ron DeStantis has signed a law that prevents cities or counties from creating protections for workers who labor in the state's often extreme and dangerous heat.

Two million people in Florida, from construction to agriculture, work outside in often humid, blazing heat.

For years, many of them have asked for rules to protect them from heat: paid rest breaks, water, and access to shade when temperatures soar. After years of negotiations, such rules were on the agenda in Miami-Dade County, home to an estimated 300,000 outdoor workers.

But the new law, signed Thursday evening, blocks such protections from being implemented in cities and counties across the state.

Miami-Dade pulled its local heat protection rule from consideration after the statewide bill passed the legislature in March.

"It's outrageous that the state legislature will override the elected officials of Miami Dade or other counties that really recognize the importance of protecting that community of workers," says David Michaels, an epidemiologist at George Washington University and a former administrator at the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).

The loss of the local rule was a major blow to Miami-Dade activists and workers who had hoped the county heat protection rules would be in place before summer.

In Texas, Austin and Dallas created ordinances that required employers to provide paid water breaks to outdoor workers. But last year Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a "preemption" law that blocked local jurisdictions from making such rules. The goal, Abbott's office said, was to prevent a "patchwork" of differing local rules, which they contended would cause confusion for businesses in the state.

Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates held 12 focus groups with students, teachers, community members and school board members and put together a “Leadership Profile Report.”

The original report, released on March 13, 2024, included a section of “Desired Characteristics of the next Cedar Grove-Belgium Superintendent as identified by the school board.” One of the points listed was: “must match the make-up of our community (conservative, Christian values).”

Making religious beliefs a desired job characteristic is illegal, said Ryan Cox, legal director with ACLU of Wisconsin.

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, including in the recruitment phase,” Cox said. “The ACLU of Wisconsin is extremely concerned that a public body might be attempting to apply a religious test as a condition of employment, or even as a preferred ‘qualification.’

Cox added that the ACLU plans to investigate further, including past actions taken by the board and will “take appropriate action to enforce the law as the facts require.”