18 February 23
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Democrats must reclaim patriotism and affirm its true meaning
Last Tuesday, House Republicans stood for a 43-minute recitation of the United States Constitution. This came just after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee instituted a requirement to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before each meeting. Further pledges, flag salutes, and Constitution recitations are planned.
Why are Democrats allowing Republicans to blanket themselves with conspicuous displays of patriotism, especially when the GOP has become the party of traitorousness and treachery?
Recall that eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives objected to the certification of electors in the 2020 election, based on no evidence. Many continue to deny the outcome of that election. Several are still repeating Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him.
Last June, Rep. Liz Cheney charged members of her own party who continued to support Trump’s Big Lie with “defending the indefensible,” warning that “there will come a day when President Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Well, Trump is now almost gone. His nascent presidential campaign is sputtering. But instead of ostracizing them, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given those who defended Trump plum seats on congressional committees.
Democrats should repeatedly speak out against these Republican traitors.
Democrats should also criticize Republican lawmakers who are equating patriotism with white Christian nationalism.
In a recent speech, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — whose popularity in today’s GOP rivals that of Trump — called on Americans to “put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes.” DeSantis has prohibited the teaching of Black history, prevented teachers from discussing gender identity, and made it easy for parents to remove books from schools. He is now asking state universities for the numbers and ages of students who have sought or received sex-reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions.
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado says she is “tired of this separation of church and state junk” and “the church is supposed to direct the government.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says, “we need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”
Democrats should make clear that Christian nationalism is the opposite of patriotism. America’s constitutional and moral mission has been to separate politics from religion — providing equal rights to Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Mormon, atheist, and agnostic. Real patriots don’t fuel racist, religious, gender, or ethnic divisions. To the contrary, patriots seek to confirm and strengthen and celebrate the “we” in “we the people of the United States.”
Nor do patriots ban books or prevent teaching about the sins of our past.
Democrats must also remind the nation that patriotism requires taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping America going — sacrificing for the common good. Paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes or seeking tax loopholes or squirreling away money abroad. Paying America’s debts rather than using the threat of national default to extract political concessions from the other party.
Above all, Democrats should be saying that patriotism involves strengthening our democracy — defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard rather than claiming without evidence that millions of people voted fraudulently. True patriots don’t put loyalty to their political party above their love of America. True patriots don’t support an attempted coup.
Patriotism means refraining from financial contributions that corrupt our politics. Blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one’s job. Volunteering time and energy to improving the community and country.
And Democrats need to reaffirm that when serving in public office, patriots do not use their office to increase their wealth. When serving as judges, they recuse themselves from cases where they may appear to have a conflict of interest. When serving on the Supreme Court, they don’t disregard precedent to impose their own ideology.
In sharp contrast to the superficial demonstrations of patriotism now being utilized by the Republican Party, Democrats must remind Americans that one of the major responsibilities of lawmakers and other public servants is to maintain and build public trust in the offices and institutions they occupy.
Now is the time for Democrats to reclaim patriotism and affirm its true meaning.
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Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 recover a suspected Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon that was downed by the United States over U.S. territorial waters off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, U.S., Feb. 5, 2023. (photo: U.S. Fleet Forces/U.S. Navy/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Object Downed by US Missile
May Have Been Amateur Hobbyists' $12 Balloon
In a hectic stretch, a jittery U.S. may have been using sophisticated weaponry to bring down harmless objects
An unidentified airborne object had been detected over Alaska, the military leaders said, and they were not sure what it was. But they said it posed a risk to civilian planes, and they could not rule out that it had surveillance capabilities, so they were recommending that the United States shoot it down just in case.
Faced with a report that resembled a science-fiction plot, Biden agreed. He gave the order, and on Feb. 10, an F-22 Raptor fired a missile at the object and it plummeted onto Arctic sea ice below.
Almost identical scenarios would play out on each of the next two days. On Saturday, radar identified another unmanned flying object making its way over Canada’s Yukon, and then a third on Sunday in the skies near Michigan. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and two senior officers — Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command — notified the president each time, and Biden followed their recommendations that they be shot out of the sky.
The result was an unusual and often surreal few days, as Biden was essentially confronted with deciding whether to shoot down three mysterious objects, leaving a baffled public. The government avoided explicitly calling them unidentified flying objects — UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena, a similar term that also evokes jokes about alien life. More than once, the administration felt it had to explicitly clarify there was no evidence the objects were extraterrestrial.
“I just wanted to make sure we address this from the White House. I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday. “It was important for us to say that from here, because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”
During the three-day stretch, officials urgently analyzed weather patterns, contacted other countries and scrambled to determine why so many of the objects were appearing in rapid succession. At one point Biden found himself on the phone with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, discussing whether to shoot down the object that had made its way to Canada’s airspace.
It now appears possible, even likely, that the mysterious objects — described variously as “car-sized,” “cylindrical” and “octagonal” — had entirely mundane origins. In remarks on Thursday, Biden said there is no evidence to suggest the three served nefarious purposes.
“Nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country,” Biden said. “The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”
Biden also said there was no evidence of a sudden increase in the number of aerial objects, saying the United States was finding more of them because of radar adjustments.
The history of this episode could be that a jittery U.S. government, on high alert following the discovery of a Chinese espionage balloon, used sophisticated military weaponry to shoot down routine objects. Still, that may not be known for sure until the debris is recovered from remote wilderness, which could take weeks.
There were stark differences between the suspected spy airship and the three objects that followed, and they were treated differently by the government. U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking the Chinese craft for nearly a week by the time it crossed into American airspace last month, and they postponed shooting it down to minimize the risk to people on the ground.
When it came to the three additional airborne objects, in contrast, U.S. officials had no idea what they were or if they were nefarious before deciding to shoot them down. Some experts suggested Thursday that they might have been launched by hobbyists.
Some White House allies and outside experts said the administration was especially sensitive to Republican arguments that the suspected Chinese spy balloon should have been shot down sooner. Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a planned trip to Beijing in response to the incident, and Biden said he heeded the military’s advice in waiting to shoot down the balloon, which had a payload the size of three school buses, until it was over water.
In the meantime, Biden said, the United States was able to gather valuable information about the balloon. But the incident’s aftermath left the military in a hypervigilant state.
“The White House has attempted to walk a very fine line here,” said Brett Bruen, who was a senior National Security Council official in the Obama administration. “On the one hand, they obviously took a lot of criticism for a slow response to the first balloon, and they have attempted in these last three instances to try and show that they were more aggressively defending U.S. airspace. At the same time, I think it has raised a number of questions that they haven’t always had great answers to.”
That lack of clarity left the administration facing questions about why mysterious objects were suddenly being discovered on a daily basis and why it has been so quick to shoot them down.
U.S. officials said the three airborne objects, floating between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, posed a “reasonable” threat to civilian air travel, while the Chinese spy balloon, at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet, did not.
The discovery of the suspected spy balloon made military officials aware they were missing slow-moving objects in the skies, prompting them to adjust their radar and discover a new universe of flying objects with unclear intent.
The radar adjustment, analysts said, was akin to an online shopper searching for a house, then tweaking the filter and suddenly getting far more hits.
Now, with no shoot-downs for several days, it is unclear if the Biden administration and the military have again adjusted their response. Austin, asked in Brussels on Thursday if the military is wary of shooting down more objects, declined to answer directly.
“I’m not aware of any additional objects that have been reported operating … in the space in the last 48 hours,” Austin said. The Pentagon chief added that it is “absolutely important” to recover the debris of the objects shot down. With the latter three objects down in the Arctic Circle, a remote area of the Yukon and under deep water in Lake Huron, however, recovery is expected to be lengthy.
The drama began on Feb. 2. The Pentagon determined that an object over Montana, visible to civilians on the ground, was the Chinese surveillance balloon they had been tracking, and officials were hastily assembling a news conference when NBC News broke the story.
Biden had been notified about the airship — some 200 feet tall, with a package of sensors and other equipment roughly the size of three buses — a day earlier, as it crossed into the continental United States from Canada.
Biden asked the military to present options to shoot the balloon down immediately, but military officials told the president that presented a risk to people on the ground. Biden then directed the military to make a plan to shoot down the balloon over U.S. waters and provide the best possible chance of recovering debris.
When the balloon moved over the Atlantic, it was flying at a height that limited how it could be taken out. The Pentagon ultimately selected a pair of F-22s, its most advanced plane in air-to-air combat, and a pair of F-15s from the Massachusetts Air National Guard, both of which can reach higher altitudes than other aircraft.
In clear, sunny skies, the jets struck just off the coast of South Carolina — still in American airspace, but in a pocket where debris could fall into relatively shallow 50-foot waters, where Navy divers and other sailors could recover the remnants.
As Navy and Coast Guard teams pulled debris from the water two days later, VanHerck told reporters on Feb. 6 that similar surveillance balloons had appeared previously over the United States without U.S. military officials detecting them. Those incidents, he said, were discovered only retroactively, raising questions about why they had not been detected at the time.
“That’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” VanHerck said.
Three days later, on Feb. 9, military personnel with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, spotted a mysterious flying object soaring northeast across Alaska at a height of about 40,000 feet. At such an altitude, the Pentagon concluded, the object posed a threat to civilian airliners.
At 1:45 p.m. Eastern time on Feb. 10, the Pentagon dispatched two F-22 Raptors that destroyed the object, raining its debris onto snow and ice near Alaska’s frozen coast. U.S. military personnel attempted to recover the remnants but struggled through the subzero windchills and have so far come up empty.
Hours later, NORAD radar spotted another object soaring over Alaska, and as it crossed into Canadian airspace on Saturday, Biden spoke with Trudeau. They agreed the object should be shot down, and U.S. and Canadian jets were deployed to go after it, with an F-22 eventually bringing it down over the Yukon with a Sidewinder missile.
Before that shoot-down was complete, the radar picked up indications of the third flying object about 70 miles north of the U.S.-Canada border, heading toward Montana. VanHerck scrambled F-15 fighter jets from Portland, Ore., but the pilots did not find anything as darkness closed in and military personnel lost track of the object on the radar. NORAD released a statement describing the incident as a “radar anomaly.”
Several hours later, early on Super Bowl Sunday, an object appeared on radar over Montana, tracking east to Wisconsin. VanHerck said he believes it was probably the same item, but it’s difficult to be sure.
Senior U.S. military officials scrambled aircraft again, this time F-16 fighters from the Minnesota Air National Guard. They monitored the item moving east over Lake Michigan and then across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and over Lake Huron.
Two F-16s launched one Sidewinder missile each, the first one missing and the second striking its target, U.S. defense officials said. The object drifted as it fell, VanHerck said, “most likely” landing in the Canadian side of Lake Huron. Milley later said that the water in the area was probably about 200 feet deep.
U.S. officials have yet to recover debris from any of the three objects.
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Created in the early 2010s, Wagner Group is a paramilitary mercenary group composed mostly of former Russian military personnel that trains local forces, conducts combat advising, and provides direct-action services. (photo: Creative Commons)
The White House says 90 percent of Wagner Group fighters killed in Ukraine since December were convicts.
The US estimates that 90 percent of Wagner Group fighters killed in Ukraine since December 2022 were convicts, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at a regular briefing on Friday.
Half of the overall deaths among Wagner mercenaries have occurred since mid-December, as fighting in Ukraine’s eastern city of Bakhmut intensified, according to US intelligence.
Kirby said the mercenary group had made incremental gains in and around Bakhmut over the last few days but those advances had taken many months to achieve and came at a “devastating cost that is not sustainable”.
“It is possible that they may end up being successful in Bakhmut but it will prove of no real worth to them because it is of no real strategic value,” he said, adding that Ukrainian forces would maintain strong defensive lines across the Donbas region.
Kirby told reporters that Wagner continued to rely heavily on convicts, who were sent to war without training or equipment, despite recent comments from Wagner’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that he had stopped recruiting Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine.
The United Kingdom’s ministry of defence estimates Russian forces have likely suffered up to approximately 200,000 casualties since the start of their invasion of Ukraine.
“The high Russian casualty rate, especially the high ratio of deaths to injuries, continues to have deleterious effects on the Russian military’s combat effectiveness and is likely prompting Russian officials to continue crypto-mobilization efforts,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said on Saturday.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 17 February 2023
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) February 17, 2023
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/79EeudgP5j
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/XHzsXcaPNB
Meanwhile, Wagner chief Prigozhin has claimed the settlement of Paraskoviivka north of Bakhmut was completely controlled by his forces, the Russian agency Interfax reported on Friday.
Russian military bloggers wrote that Paraskoviivka had been an important node of the Ukrainian defence lines. If the neighbouring villages of Verkhivka Berkhivka and Yahidne were also captured, the Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut could no longer be supplied from the north, the bloggers maintained.
There was no independent confirmation of the Wagner chief’s claim and the Ukrainian general staff’s evening report did not mention the advance on Friday.
The battle for Bakhmut has been raging for months.
Prigozhin also used the Paraskoviivka announcement to take a jab at the Russian Defence Ministry, saying the Wagner advance had succeeded despite an “ammunition blockade”. The fighting, he said, had been attritional and bloody.
Earlier on Friday, the Ukrainian government urged all Bakhmut residents to flee as heavy fighting is expected to continue.
“If you are rational, law-abiding and patriotic citizens, you should leave the city immediately,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in an appeal on Friday to what is believed to be the remaining few thousand people in the battered town. She made her comments on a Telegram channel.
According to the Ukrainian government, five civilians were killed and nine injured earlier on Friday. The city of once 70,000 inhabitants in the Donetsk region now has about 6,000 civilians, Vereshchuk said.
Many elderly residents are holding out because their homes are their only possession and they do not want to leave their birthplace. Some also sympathise with Russia.
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Paul Davis is a retired physician in Findlay, Ohio, who gets weekly treatments of the drug Kimmtrak to help stave off the progression of his rare cancer - uveal melanoma. He worries the accumulating cost of the drug - nearly $50,000/week if he has to pay it out of pocket - could saddle his family with crushing medical debt after he's gone. (photo: Maddie McGarvey/KHN)
That left Davis, a retired physician in Findlay, Ohio, contemplating a horrific choice: risk saddling his family with huge medical debt, if he had to pay those bills from the hospital out-of-pocket, or halt treatments that help keep him alive.
"Is it worth bankrupting my family for me to hang around for a couple of years?" Davis pondered. "I don't want to make that choice."
How much Davis will end up owing for his care remains unclear. One of the hospitals that has administered the costly drug is appealing Medicare's initial payment denials. And the family might not even know their total balance until Medicare rejects all the appeals.
But the uncertainty has compounded the stress of living with an aggressive cancer.
The new drug buys time
Davis, 71, was diagnosed in November 2019 with uveal melanoma, which afflicts eye tissue and is "one of the rarest tumors on the planet," he said.
The cancer spread from his eye to his liver, which typically proves fatal within a year. He was told a new rare-disease drug called Kimmtrak offered the only hope for prolonging his life.
Approved by the FDA in January 2022 as the "first and only" treatment for metastatic uveal melanoma, Kimmtrak has kept his tumors stable, according to Davis. His oncologist told him he should stay on the drug "until it stops working." Its manufacturer markets the drug's power to deliver "6-month improvement in median overall survival."
Davis said he started taking the medicine last summer at the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital in Columbus.
The hospital billed a total of $49,367.70 for his intravenous chemotherapy administered on Sept. 13, 2022 – one of his ongoing, weekly treatments. The charge for the drug alone came to $47,838; fees for lab work and for administering the drug accounted for the rest of the bill. Medicare paid the provider and Davis didn't need to pay anything for that week's treatment.
His subsequent treatments at the Columbus hospital were covered in the same way, according to Medicare billing statements Davis reviewed.
But things changed after he transferred his care to a hospital in Findlay in October to spare his wife, Jane, from driving him 100 miles each way to weekly appointments in Columbus.
Pitted between the hospital and Medicare
Medicare has denied Kimmtrak coverage on claims submitted by Blanchard Valley Health System in Findlay, Davis said, pitching him into an agonizing dispute with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills at stake.
After a KHN reporter contacted Blanchard Valley, the hospital connected Davis with a patient relations liaison, who said she is working to resolve the billing problem. Davis said last week that Medicare apparently rejected the claims because the Findlay hospital had made a mistake in the way it billed for the drug; the coding on the bill incorrectly suggested Kimmtrak had been given to Davis for a different type of cancer — one for which its use is not FDA-approved.
Davis said the patient relations liaison told him it might take at least 45 days to straighten out the bill, but the hospital would not dun him, even if it lost the appeal.
Meanwhile, the charges for Kimmtrak "are in limbo," Davis said.
Amy Leach, the hospital's director of public relations, said she could not comment on Davis' case, but in an email wrote: "Blanchard Valley Health System is committed to ensuring that accurate billing occurs and we work with our patients to promptly resolve any concerns."
Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy and drug pricing expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said Davis is right to worry.
"I hope the hospital will fix this for him and that they are communicating with him about it," she said.
Sebastien Desprez, a spokesperson for Oxfordshire, England-based Immunocore, which manufactures Kimmtrak, said its list price was $19,229 per weekly dose. He said the drug's approval by the FDA shows "there is value for patients."
Prices of cancer drugs continue to climb
Cancer drug prices "are outrageous," said Dr. Hagop Kantarjian, who chairs the Department of Leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. Kantarjian said the prices manufacturers charge for cancer drugs have soared from less than $10,000 annually in the late 1990s to more than $200,000 annually today.
And that's not even the full cost. Dusetzina said hospitals often hugely inflate the price of drugs in the bills they issue "so that if someone doesn't pay, [the hospital] can write it off." Merith Basey, executive director of Patients for Affordable Drugs, an advocacy group, said no ordinary person can handle the price of these drugs.
"It's simple: Drugs don't work if people can't afford them ... no one should be poor because they are sick or be sick because they are poor," she said.
This is not Davis' first time staring down a supersized medical bill.
Davis and his daughter, Elizabeth Moreno, were the subject of the 2018 debut article in the KHN-NPR "Bill of the Month" series over her $17,850 bill for a urine test.
Davis wound up paying a Texas lab $5,000 to settle that bill, which private insurers said should have cost a hundred dollars or less. Davis spoke at a May 2019 White House event to support legislation to crack down on "surprise" medical bills.
But at least he knew where he stood with the urine testing bill. Now he's facing escalating costs of his cancer care without knowing how it will affect his family's finances.
"How do you make an informed choice if you have no information?" Davis asked.
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A Proud Boys rally in Washington, D.C. (photo: WP)
A federal prosecutor showed jurors a string of messages that Metropolitan Police Lt. Shane Lamond and Tarrio privately exchanged in the run-up to a mob's attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Lamond, an intelligence officer for the city’s police department, was responsible for monitoring groups like the Proud Boys when they came to Washington for protests.
Less than three weeks before the Jan. 6 riot, Lamond warned Tarrio that the FBI and U.S. Secret Service were “all spun up” over talk on an Infowars internet show that the Proud Boys planned to dress up as supporters of President Joe Biden on the Democrat's inauguration day.
Justice Department prosecutor Conor Mulroe asked a government witness, FBI Special Agent Peter Dubrowski, how common it is for law enforcement to disclose internal information in that fashion.
“I've never heard of it,” Dubrowski said.
Tarrio was arrested in Washington two days before the Capitol attack and charged with burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a historic Black church during a protest in December 2020. He was released from jail before the riot and wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6.
In a message to Tarrio on Dec. 25, 2020, Lamond said Metropolitan Police Department investigators had asked him to identify Tarrio from a photograph. He warned Tarrio that police may be seeking a warrant for his arrest.
Later, on the day of his arrest, Tarrio posted a message to other Proud Boys leaders that said, “The warrant was just signed.”
Before the trial started in January, Tarrio's attorneys said Lamond's testimony would be crucial for his defense, supporting Tarrio’s claims that he was looking to avoid violence. Mulroe said Lamond has asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
Tarrio's attorneys have accused prosecutors of bullying Lamond into keeping quiet by warning the officer he could be charged with obstructing the investigation into Tarrio, a Miami resident who was national chairman of the Proud Boys. Prosecutors deny that claim.
Sabino Jauregui, one of Tarrio's attorneys, said other messages show Tarrio routinely cooperated with police and had provided Lamond with useful information. Jauregui said prosecutors “dragged (Lamond's) name through the mud” and falsely insinuated he is a “dirty cop" who had an inappropriate relationship with Tarrio.
“That was their theme over and over again,” Jauregui told U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly during a break in testimony.
Lamond was placed on administrative leave by the police force in February 2022, according to Mark Schamel, an attorney for the officer. Schamel said Lamond aided in Tarrio's arrest for burning the Black Lives Matter banner.
In a statement Wednesday, Schamel said Lamond's job required him to communicate with a variety of groups protesting in Washington and his conduct “was appropriate and always focused on the protection of the citizens of Washington, DC.”
“At no time did Lt. Lamond ever assist or support the hateful and divisive agenda of any of the various groups that came to DC to protest,” Schamel said. “More importantly, Lt. Lamond is a decorated official who does not condone the hateful rhetoric or the illegal conduct on January 6th and was only communicating with these individuals because the mission required it.”
Tarrio and his four lieutenants are charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors said was a plot to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power and keep former President Donald Trump in the White House after the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, disrupting a joint session of Congress for certifying the Electoral College vote.
Proud Boys members describe the group as a politically incorrect men’s club for “Western chauvinists.” They often brawled with antifascist activists at rallies and protests for years before the Capitol attack.
In a message to Tarrio on Dec. 18, 2020, Lamond said other police investigators had asked him if the Proud Boys are racist. The officer said he told them that the group had Black and Latino members, “so not a racist thing.”
“It's not being investigated by the FBI, though. Just us,” Lamond added.
“Awesome,” Tarrio replied.
In another exchange that day, Lamond asked Tarrio if he had called in an anonymous tip claiming responsibility for the flag burning.
“I did more than that,” Tarrio responded. “It's on my social media.”
In a message to Tarrio on Dec. 11, 2020, Lamond told him about the whereabouts of antifascist activists. The officer asked Tarrio if he should share that information with uniformed police officers or keep it to himself.
Two days later, Tarrio asked Lamond what the police department's “general consensus” was about the Proud Boys.
“That's too complicated for a text answer," Lamond replied. "That's an in-person conversation over a beer.”
Tarrio's co-defendants are Proud Boys chapter leader Ethan Nordean, of Auburn, Washington; Joseph Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, a self-described Proud Boys organizer; Zachary Rehl, who led a Proud Boys chapter in Philadelphia; and Dominic Pezzola, a group member from Rochester, New York.
They are among a slew of Proud Boys members facing charges in the riot. In a separate case this week, the president of a West Virginia chapter of the group, Jeffrey Finley, was sentenced to 75 days behind bars after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor illegal entry charge. The Associated Press sent an email to Finley’s attorney seeking comment Wednesday.
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Activists protested last week against the proposed 'Copy City' in Atlanta. (photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA)
Petition to Fulton county superior court seeks halt to building work while appeal against huge police training center is ruled on
The workers are taking the first steps in building an 85-acre, $90m police and fire department training center planned for the land, called “Cop City” by activists.
The police shooting last month of “Tortuguita” – one of dozens who camped in the forest during the last year-plus to protest the training center and a separate, corporate project threatening an additional 40 acres – helped bring the movement to national and international attention.
But this week, local residents took the fight to city hall – or rather, the county commission, a zoning appeals board and Fulton county superior court – in an attempt to stop the tractors while an appeal against Cop City is ruled on, based on claims that the project will contaminate a stream with sediment that runs through the forest, in violation of the Clean Water Act and state law.
Judging by a late Friday afternoon court ruling denying a temporary restraining order on the project, plus a county inspection of the forest site, that fight mostly resulted in losses.
“We’re back to where it started,” said Sam, part of the Atlanta Community Press Collective, an anonymous group of activists who use journalistic methods to monitor the project. She was referring to local politics, and the late 2021 Atlanta city council decision to lease the city-owned land for $10 per year to the Atlanta Police Foundation – despite the nearly 70% of more than 1,000 comments from residents opposing the plan.
One and a half years later, Amy Taylor, a resident who lives within 250ft of the forest – and who serves on a “community stakeholder advisory committee” meant to offer input on the training center – last week appealed the Dekalb county commission’s “land disturbance permit” to the city of Atlanta. The land is located in the county and owned by the city.
Emails obtained by open records request at the collective show that Dave Wilkinson, chief executive of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the project, responded to the appeal by stating his intention to “continue full speed ahead unless the county issues a stop work order”.
So it was that on Thursday, residents packed the Dekalb county commission’s monthly meeting to urge its members to support such an order – as the county’s own code appears to suggest it should have done as soon as the appeal was received, and until the appeal is heard by a zoning board, which will happen in April. Several days earlier, Ted Terry, former Georgia Sierra Club director and the only county commissioner opposed to building Cop City in the forest, also joined a petition to Fulton county superior court seeking a temporary restraining order against the foundation while the appeal is under review.
Despite the high profile of the case, it appeared the issue had, for now, obeyed the maxim, “all politics is local.”
A flurry of documents, legal and otherwise, has resulted, including a Dekalb County inspection report that claims the “path clearing” and “tree removal” occurring in the forest in recent weeks “are not defined as land disturbance,” said Andrew L Cauthen, county spokesperson. “Since there was no land disturbance, there’s nothing else for us to do.”
This caused Jackie Echols, board president of the South River Watershed Alliance and a plaintiff in the Fulton county superior court complaint, to say: “We’re in a situation where we’re just parsing interpretations of on-site conditions … earth is still being moved, and there’s heavy equipment … [and] we don’t have to redefine land disturbance!”
On Thursday, Alan Williams, project manager for the foundation – which has the distinction, among police foundations nationwide, of having the most employees, the highest-paid chief executive, the largest PPP loan during the pandemic and, in 2020, the second-highest amount of donations – filed an affidavit with Fulton county superior court.
Williams made no reference to the environmental issue at the heart of the appeal, and instead drew the court’s attention to how much the project is costing the foundation. Sixty million of the project’s estimated cost would come from its corporate donors, which include Chick-fil-A and Delta; the remaining $30 million would come from taxpayers. If the project is stopped while under appeal, Williams wrote, it would cost the foundation more than $2m a month, nearly half of which goes to paying 120 police officers.
“Nothing drives these issues more than money,” said Echols, who has been working to protect the South River watershed, which include the forest, more than a decade.
Meanwhile, at the Dekalb county commission meeting on Thursday, residents addressing the body included one who lived in the area 33 years, another for 23 years, and a third who called herself a fourth-generation resident. “I don’t want my children to grow up hearing explosions,” said the latter, referring to bomb testing that may occur at the training center.
The testimonies stood out in contrast to the steady drumbeat of Georgia elected officials – including Republican governor Brian Kemp and Democratic Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens – who have sought to reduce all opposition to the project as the work of “outsiders,” a trope that observers have noted has appeared in the south since at least the civil rights era to minimize any activism that includes people from other states.
Taylor, who lodged the appeal with the zoning board, also spoke at the meeting. “My community has no voice or representation, except for my voice,” she said. “This is one of the most notorious landscapes of environmental injustice. Atlanta can move the project, but you cannot move South River Forest.”
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Mother and baby manatees at Three Sisters Springs in Crystal River, Florida. (photo: James R.D. Scott/Moment/Getty Images)
“Opening the stretcher and seeing her slowly swim out of it and exploring the natural environment for the very first time here at Blue Spring—it’s just amazing,” said Cora Berchem, manatee research associate at the Save the Manatee Club, who helped carry Bianca into the warm water near sunrise at Blue Spring State Park, north of Orlando. “We’re hoping that she doesn’t have too much of a learning curve, that she’ll be able to find friends here at Blue Spring and acclimate pretty quickly.”
Bianca was among a record 12 manatees to be released in one day at Blue Spring. Even more manatees were released this week in Crystal River and Apollo Beach, both near Tampa. The nearly two dozen releases so far this year represent a rare bright spot as an unprecedented die-off of Florida’s manatees continues.
Nearly 2,000 manatee deaths were recorded statewide in 2021 and 2022—a two-year record. Conservation groups say the mortalities represent more than 20 percent of the state’s population.
The calamity prompted wildlife agencies to go as far as to provide supplemental lettuce for starving manatees in the Indian River Lagoon, a crucial manatee habitat on Florida’s east coast where water quality problems have led to a widespread loss of seagrass, the sea cows’ favorite food.
Many of the sick and injured manatees rescued during this time now are ready to be released, and the wildlife agencies acknowledge they are eager for the bed space, so to speak, as the habitat problems that have contributed to the die-off will not be resolved anytime soon. The die-off has strained the aquariums, zoos and other rehabilitation facilities that have taken in the ailing manatees. SeaWorld plans to double its rehabilitation space to accommodate more manatees.
But the releases also represent an opportunity to celebrate the immense work that goes into saving a single manatee like Bianca, an orphan whose mother was injured and did not survive. Some rescued manatees are near death when they arrive at facilities like SeaWorld, and the recovery from starvation is much longer than that for other problems like red tide. For starvation the recovery can last six to eight months and much longer for orphaned calves like Bianca, who never learned basics from their mothers like finding food or warm water during the cold months.
“It’s been a very tough couple of years for the field biologists being out there. We’ve seen a lot of things that are really sad, depressing. It’s heart-wrenching,” said Monica Ross, senior research scientist at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. “The fact that these calves are getting a second chance, they’re able to get back out there and they look in great health, it really gives the huge kudos to the entire program, specifically the rescue group and the facilities for getting these animals into such a condition that they can have a second chance.”
The releases also come as things may be looking up for Florida’s manatees. The number of deaths this winter is down, an encouraging sign for the cold-sensitive animals, and the wildlife agencies say manatees in the wild appear to be in better health and less emaciated. That could be because the agencies’ lettuce program is helping, but it also could be because the die-off has reached a point where there are fewer manatees left to die. Nonetheless there also are spots in the Indian River Lagoon where the seagrass appears to be rebounding.
Florida’s manatees still face many threats. One concern is their dependence during the cold months on the warm waters around power plants, like the one on the Indian River Lagoon in Cape Canaveral where the wildlife agencies have been providing supplemental lettuce, said Pat Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, who has advocated for the iconic sea cows for some 50 years.
Over time power companies will move away from fossil fuels because of climate change, and manatees will need to be weaned off these artificially warm waters and transitioned to naturally occurring ones like Blue Spring, where the temperature year-round is 72 degrees. Rose also fears the losses related to the ongoing die-off may be generational.
“We’re seeing very, very few calves, and so not only did we have all the death that we experienced, reproduction and so forth has been very limited,” he said.
The manatee was downlisted in 2017 from endangered to threatened, a decision that has generated widespread outcry. In November the Save the Manatee Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic, Miami Waterkeeper and Frank S. González GarcÃa, a concerned citizen, petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore the manatee’s endangered status. The federal agency has until Monday to respond.
Meanwhile, Bianca and the other released manatees will be monitored for the next year to ensure they thrive in the wild. Sometimes orphaned calves struggle and are rescued again and returned to the wild after another short rehabilitation. But at Blue Spring, Bianca appeared ready to be free. She weighed a robust 900 pounds, with a nice round belly and round shoulders.
“Sometimes I wonder myself what goes on in their heads because they’re used to being in a pool, in rehabilitation, for a couple of years,” said Berchem of the Save the Manatee Club. “Hopefully they get used to being wild animals sooner than later.”
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