July 27, 2023

Thursday, July 27, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Trump and his lieutenants didn’t care whose lives they wrecked with their lies.

Giuliani concedes statements were defamatory in Georgia election workers' case.

Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and Ruby Freeman.

July 26 (Reuters) - Rudy Giuliani, onetime attorney for former U.S. President Donald Trump, admitted in a court filing late Tuesday that he made defamatory statements about a pair of Georgia election workers.

Giuliani told a federal court in Washington that he does not dispute that comments he made about Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and Ruby Freeman "carry meaning that is defamatory per se."

Moss and Freeman said in a December 2021 lawsuit that Giuliani injured their reputations when he accused them of conspiring to produce and process secret batches of illegal ballots. No evidence supports such claims, which have been repeatedly debunked by Georgia election officials.

Giuliani said in the filing that he was making the concession "solely for purposes of this litigation" and "without admitting to the truth of the allegations."

Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, said in a statement that Giuliani wanted "to move on to the portion of the case that will permit a motion to dismiss."

Michael Gottlieb, a lawyer for Moss and Freeman, said in a statement that Giuliani's filing concedes that Freeman and Moss did their jobs as election workers "in full compliance with the law; and the allegations of election fraud he and former President Trump made against them have been false since day one."

Freeman and Moss are seeking sanctions against Giuliani, alleging he failed to preserve important evidence. Giuliani's attorney Bob Costello denied those claims in court papers on Tuesday, saying that issues raised by the plaintiffs about the quality of the evidence stemmed from the handling of electronic devices seized by federal authorities in a separate probe, in which no charges were brought.

Tuesday's court document said Giuliani wants "to avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes." (Reuters).

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Do all Republican Politicians have no brains as well as no morals?

GOP Governor DeSantis certainly proves the case-again.

Kennedy, who is running for president, but as a Democrat, recently opined that the COVID-19 virus was engineered to spare Chinese and Jewish people.

The Crazies unite.

DeSantis Says He'd Put Anti-Vaxxer RFK Jr. In Charge Of CDC.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, amid a “reboot” of his beleaguered campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, on Wednesday said he would consider naming anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration, should he win the White House.

“If you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve. Or sic him on CDC,” DeSantis said on the popular “OutKick” podcast, explaining that he agreed with Kennedy on many of his views on medicine and the “corruption in the health bureaucracies.”

He added that he probably wouldn’t choose Kennedy, who is himself running for president but as a Democrat challenging incumbent Joe Biden, as a running mate.

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a HuffPost query. The DeSantis campaign responded by encouraging HuffPost to report on his entire answer to host Clay Travis, most of which dealt with DeSantis’ disagreement with Kennedy on too many issues ― such as climate change and affirmative action ― to consider making him his vice presidential pick.

One prominent Republican DeSantis donor, speaking on condition of anonymity, described his new comments in a single word: “Stupid.”

Kennedy has spent decades making false claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and has become a critic of those developed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, he claimed that the disease was specifically engineered to be less harmful to Chinese and Jewish people.

DeSantis had aggressively pushed COVID vaccines when they first became available to health care workers and the elderly in December 2020, staging dozens of events around Florida. By the following summer, when the supplies had grown to the point where they were available to everyone but the anti-vaccine segment of Republicans had become dominant within the party, DeSantis had stopped pushing them.

  As a result, Florida’s COVID death rate spiked in late 2021 with the arrival of the virus’s delta variant. The state also earned the distinction of suffering more COVID deaths after vaccines were readily available than before.

Nevertheless, DeSantis has continued to attack the medical and pharmaceutical communities for encouraging the vaccine, pushing laws that make it illegal to mandate vaccines in Florida as a condition of employment and creating a special grand jury to investigate vaccine makers.

DeSantis, who recently won a second term as governor by a landslide margin, entered the presidential race with high expectations among Republicans eager to move beyond coup-attempting, under-criminal-indictment former President Donald Trump. But since an initial surge after his November reelection, DeSantis has seen his polling numbers against Trump plummet, both nationally and in early state surveys.

Over the past two weeks, his campaign has cut nearly half of its staff in an attempt to reduce spending and said it was restructuring to improve its ability to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency. (HuffPost)

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Trumpers hate Barbie.

While the Margot Robbie star smashes box office records, conservative ideologues accuse the film of being left-wing propaganda.

Barbie has a 90% approval rate on Rotten Tomatoes. It breaks box office records daily. It makes Americans feel happy and playful.

Of course, the out of touch Right-Wing extremists hate it.

This article 👇 lists the Scrooge parade.

Elon Musk Slams ‘Barbie,’ as Box Office Hit Gets Right-Wing Backlash – The Hollywood Reporter.

Introducing Culture War Barbie?

Elon Musk has entered the Barbie chat by mocking the summer’s biggest box office hit on Twitter (or X, or whatever he’s calling it this week).

The billionaire wrote: “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends.”

Musk was responding to a Barbenheimer meme that compared Twitter to Barbie and his new X name for his social network to Oppenheimer.

He’s the latest to accuse Barbie — from filmmaker Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie — of being left-wing propaganda in the wake of the movie earning the biggest opening weekend of the year, racking up $162 million domestically. Barbie follows “Stereotypical Barbie” (Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbieland and journey into the real world following an existential crisis.

Mattel executives have tried to keep the film from being viewed as political. Robbie Brenner, Mattel Films’ executive producer, said the film was “not a feminist movie.” In an interview with Time, Robbie seemed surprised by that claim. “Who said that?” she reportedly asked. “It’s not that it is, or it isn’t. It’s a movie. It’s a movie that’s got so much in it.”

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro went viral over the weekend after breathlessly ripping the film for 43 minutes on YouTube in a clip that’s been viewed 1.6 million times. “The basic sort of premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides and they hate each other. And literally, the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women,” he fumed. He predicted, “[Barbie is] absolutely going to fall off a cliff [at the box office] … repeat business is going to be nonexistent.” Shapiro also set fire to Barbie dolls on a BBQ in protest. His review generated plenty of online mocking of its own (“They finally make a movie for people who are 12 inches tall with no genitals and those people don’t even like it,” tweeted comedy writer Jesse McLaren).

Writing for the New York Post, Piers Morgan opined: “If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking the matriarchy, and depicting all things feminist as toxic bulls–t, I wouldn’t just be canceled, I’d be executed … the movie achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve and that is to establish the matriarchy as the perfect antidote to the patriarchy when in fact it’s just the same concept that they asked us all to detest in the first place.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz accused the movie of “kiss[ing] up to the Chinese communist party because they want to make money selling the movie in China” for its alleged inclusion of the “nine-dash line” on a map that favors China’s territorial claims to the South China Sea (yet he admits he didn’t see the film).

Podcaster Matt Walsh, who made the anti-trans documentary What Is a Woman?, dubbed Barbie “the most aggressively anti-man, feminist propaganda fest ever put to film.”

Ginger Gaetz, the wife of Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, called for a Barbie boycott criticizing Gosling’s Ken’s “disappointingly low T” and “beta energy.”

Yet the vast, vast majority of Barbie viewers don’t seem to agree.

Barbie not only has a 90 percent positive critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, but an equal 90 percent positive audience score, resulting in a rare critical and viewer blockbuster for a title that isn’t a superhero film or an extension of a preexisting cinema franchise. While Barbietowered over Oppenheimer, the three-hour Christopher Nolan historical epic also had a strong performance this weekend, delivering $82 million (and also, oddly enough, had a Rotten Tomatoes number — 94 percent — with the critic score exactly equal to its audience score).

Leading up to Barbie’s release, the creative team and cast spoke about the more than decade-long journey of getting the iconic doll on the big screen, and their vision around the Gerwig movie (which she co-wrote with partner Noah Baumbach) being both a feminist and inclusive take on the toy brand.

Issa Rae, who plays President Barbie, told Time that the point of the movie is to portray a world where there isn’t a singular ideal: “My worry was that it was going to feel too white feminist-y, but I think that it’s self-aware. Barbie Land is perfect, right? It represents perfection. So if perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anybody can get on board with that.”

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Minority Leader McConnell froze mid-sentence.

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The historian Michael Beschloss -

President Truman seventy-five years ago today [July 26] ordered desegregation of U.S. armed forces -- crucial, historic day that American schoolchildren should know:Not long ago. 75 years. Also Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 when he was 14, would have been 82 this past Tuesday. This all is not far in the past.

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Ghana takes a brilliant step.

Ghana votes to remove death penalty, calling it a sign of ‘inhumane’ society.

Lawmakers in Ghana voted to remove the death penalty from the country’s criminal laws this week, hailing the move as a victory for the West African nation.

A majority of Ghana’s parliament voted Tuesday to pass a bill to amend the Criminal Offenses Act, substituting the punishment — generally implemented by hanging or firing squad — for life imprisonment in crimes such as murder and piracy.

“Today the parliament of Ghana has made the country proud,” the deputy majority leader of parliament, Alexander Kwamina Afenyo-Markin, told the state-owned Ghana News Agency after the bill passed.

“The death penalty is no more a punishment in our statutes books,” he added, noting that the decision put Ghana in line with the “international human rights position.”

Some 170 nations have abolished or introduced a moratorium on the death penalty so far, according to the United Nations, but it remains legal in over 50 countries, including the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Ghana is the 29th African nation to abolish the punishment, following in the footsteps of Chad, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea and Zambia, among others.

The private members bill was introduced by lawmaker Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu, who represents the Madina constituency, a suburb of the capital, Accra, in the country’s south. He told Reuters that the parliament’s decision was in line with opinion polls in the country.

“On death row, prisoners woke up thinking this could be their last day on earth. They were like the living dead: psychologically, they had ceased to be humans,” he said in a separate statement.

“Abolishing the death penalty shows that we are determined as a society not to be inhumane, uncivil, closed, retrogressive and dark … and reflects our common belief that the sanctity of life is inviolable,” he said the statement.

Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, who has publicly expressed support for abolishing the death penalty, will need to sign the law before it formally comes into effect.

Human rights group Amnesty International hailed the vote as a “landmark” decision.

“Today’s parliamentary vote is a major step by Ghana towards the abolition of the death penalty,” Samira Daoud, Amnesty’s West and Central Africa director, said in a statement. “It is also a victory for all those who have tirelessly campaigned to consign this cruel punishment to history and strengthen the protection of the right to life.”

However, Daoud noted that Ghana’s constitution still allows for the death penalty in cases of high treason, and called for the constitution to be revised as well.

The Death Penalty Project, a U.K.-based nonprofit, said it had worked closely with Ghanaian lawmakers and interest groups to ban the penalty for all ordinary crimes. It also worked on a similar campaign in Sierra Leone in 2021.

“Today’s vote for abolition is historic and places Ghana squarely within the worldwide trend,” Saul Lehrfreund, its co-executive director, said.

As of Monday, Ghana had 172 men and six women on death row, according to its national prisons service, among its total prison population of just over 15,000. However, no executions have been carried out in the country since 1993.

Last year, Amnesty recorded 883 executions in 20 countries, a more than 50 percent increase from the year before, it said. The figure did not include China, where more than 1,000 executions are thought to have occurred. The group said it had recorded at least 576 in Iran, followed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States, where 18 executions occurred in 2022.

In the United States, the number of executions, death sentences and public support for capital punishment continued a decade-long decline last year, according to a 2022 report from the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks data on capital punishment. However, botched executions remain a concern, with 35 percent of all executions improperly carried out by personnel, the report said. (The Washington Post).

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The Royal Shakespeare Company celebrated yesterday.

We marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays at Windsor Castle, celebrating some of his most enduring plays that would have been lost without it.

King Charles III and Queen Camilla are shown a first and second folio of works by William Shakespeare by Gregory Doran, Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Rt. Hon. the Baroness Vadera, Chair of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The King and Queen hosted the RSC Reception.

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