The only reason the world was a better place during your childhood is because you were a child. – J.R. Rim.
And now they have screwed that up.
Barricaded Siblings Turn to TikTok While Defying Court Order to Return to Father They Say Abused Them
A judge concluded the children were victims of “parental alienation,” which continues to influence family courts, despite being rejected by mainstream scientific groups.
The judge also authorized police to use “reasonable force” to remove them from their mother.
Two siblings in Utah have barricaded themselves in a bedroom at their mother’s home in defiance of a judge’s order to return to the custody of their father, despite state child welfare investigators determining that he had sexually abused the children.
The judge has authorized police to use “reasonable force” — including entry into locked rooms — against Brynlee Larson, 12, and Ty Larson, 15. Ty has spent the last month livestreaming on TikTok to call attention to their case.
Of course, he has.
The showdown is the fallout from the latest family court battle over “parental alienation” — a disputed psychological theory in which one parent is accused of brainwashing a child to turn them against the other parent.
Despite a history of fraud, one family has thrived in the regulatory no man’s land of health care sharing ministries, where insurance commissioners can’t investigate, federal agencies turn a blind eye and prosecutors reach paltry settlements.
Bonnie Martin kept the bleeding secret for as long as she could. Her sisters, boyfriend and sons knew nothing of her illness until suddenly, during a family gathering in October 2018 at a diner in Annapolis, Maryland, she began hemorrhaging.
A tumor had burst through the wall of her uterus. Doctors performed an emergency hysterectomy and removed what cancer they could reach. She needed multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, expensive stuff. As her family grew fearful, Martin walked that fine line between resilience and denial — she’d beat this, she said. She focused instead on fun things ahead, a trip to Ireland with her boyfriend and sisters, for instance, and a Rolling Stones concert.
Luckily, or so Martin thought, she had placed her trust — and her money — in Liberty HealthShare. Liberty is what’s known as a health care sharing ministry, a nonprofit alternative to medical insurance rooted in Christian principles. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on such organizations for basic health coverage. They promise no red tape, lower costs and compassion for the sick. Although Martin wasn’t religious, she found comfort in Liberty’s pledge to “carry one another’s burdens.”
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Fines TitleMax $15 Million for Predatory Lending
The federal consumer watchdog group says the Georgia-based company intentionally evaded laws meant to protect military families from predatory lenders.
Meanwhile, in our corporatocracy, well, honey, that shit cannot stand.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a case that could hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and advance a key project of the conservative legal movement: to limit the power of independent agencies.
A ruling against the bureau, created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act after the financial crisis, could cast doubt on every regulation and enforcement action it took in the dozen years of its existence. That includes extensive rules — and punishments against companies that flout them — that the agency has written to govern mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans and banking.
Stuffing the Supreme Court was never about abortion.
Prosecutors and Judges Push for Conviction Reviews, Ban on Junk Science of 911 Call Analysis
Attorneys have called for punishing prosecutors who used the technique, knowing it was inadmissible in court. One conviction gets another look.
The technique’s chief architect, Tracy Harpster, developed a program to spread his methods and says police and prosecutors who take his training will learn how to identify guilt and deception from the word choice, cadence and grammar of those calling 911. So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed.
I am so not calling 911. I would be doomed.
See what I mean, right there. Who says doomed?
After a Decade of Tracking Politicians’ Deleted Tweets, Politwoops Is No More
Whether officials were deleting an embarrassing post or just correcting a typo, Politwoops tracked them all. But service changes made after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter have rendered it impossible for us to continue tracking these tweets.
Tennessee Lobbyists Oppose New Lifesaving Exceptions in Abortion Ban
With an amendment to Tennessee’s abortion ban on the table, a powerful anti-abortion group pushes Republican lawmakers to take the narrowest interpretation on when a doctor can legally intervene in high-risk cases.
How Unemployment Benefits Are Taxed in 2023
Find out how federal and state taxes work for unemployment benefits this tax season.
Texas Governor Says Most Gun Crimes Involve Illegally Owned Weapons. That’s Not True for Mass Shootings.
The majority of the state’s 19 mass shootings over the past six decades were carried out by men who legally possessed firearms.
Without mentioning the Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week declared school safety a priority for the current legislative session and again dismissed calls for more laws that would restrict access to guns.
“Some want more gun laws, but too many local officials won’t even enforce the gun laws that are already on the books,” the governor said during his annual State of the State address. Without providing a source or clear data, he then asserted that “most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally.”
Abbott proposed a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for people who are not legally allowed to have a firearm but have them anyway.
“We need to leave prosecutors and judges with no choice but to punish those criminals and remove them and their guns from our streets,” said Abbott, a Republican.
Repeated investigations of the center have revealed patients who were beaten and humiliated by staff, and staff who lied to cover up their actions.
Let me guess. Didn’t even look.
Low-paid staff, poorly-trained, poorly-managed and nobody really cares anyway. Too many patients.
One way or another too many of us already in strait jackets. Not always the right ones.
Can’t look.
This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk
Almost half of products cleared so far under the new federal biofuels program are not in fact biofuels — and the EPA acknowledges that the plastic-based ones may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment.
When an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy was run over on a Wisconsin dairy farm, authorities blamed his father and closed the case. Meanwhile, the community of immigrant workers knows a completely different story.
What happened to Jefferson and his father is a story of an accumulation of failures: a broken immigration system that makes it difficult for people to come here even as entire industries depend on their labor, small farms that largely go unexamined by safety inspectors, and a law enforcement system that’s ill equipped to serve people who don’t speak English.
A Norfolk Southern Policy Lets Officials Order Crews to Ignore Safety Alerts
In October, months before the East Palestine derailment, the company also directed a train to keep moving with an overheated wheel that caused it to derail miles later in Sandusky, Ohio.
94 Women Allege a Utah Doctor Sexually Assaulted Them. Here’s Why a Judge Threw Out Their Case.
When dozens of women sued their OB-GYN for sexual assault, a judge said the case falls under the state’s medical malpractice law. As the women appeal, lawmakers are asking whether that law should be changed.
At 19 years old and about to be married, Stephanie Mateer went to an OB-GYN within walking distance of her student housing near Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
She wanted to start using birth control, and she was looking for guidance about having sex for the first time on her 2008 wedding night.
Mateer was shocked, she said, when Dr. David Broadbent reached under her gown to grab and squeeze her breasts, started a vaginal exam without warning, then followed it with an extremely painful examination of her rectum.
She felt disgusted and violated, but doubt also creeped in. She told herself she must have misinterpreted his actions, or that she should have known that he would do a rectal exam. Raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she said she was taught to defer to men in leadership.
School District Pays Legal Fees After Banning Mothers From Reading Sexually Graphic Passages at Meetings
The Mama Bears, a group that seeks to ban library books it considers obscene, has settled a federal lawsuit against a Georgia school district after one of the group’s members was barred from reading explicit excerpts at school board meetings.
Last February, Mama Bears member Alison Hair read pages from the book “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” that was available at her son’s middle school library at an FCS Board meeting.
“I know that you give someone a blow job by putting your penis …” she read.
And they stopped her right there.
Which raises a point: should we have books in a middle school library that an adult can’t read aloud amidst a group of adults?
Cindy Martin, the chairwoman of a “grassroots” parental rights group called the Mama Bears, said that the prominent Moms For Liberty group, which has played a major role in the parental rights movement across the country, reached out to the Institute For Free Speech to help the Mama Bears fight the school district because they believed their First Amendment rights were violated.
“We couldn’t believe it because we thought we knew our rights were violated, but we thought nobody’s going to care. We’re just a group of moms trying to talk to our school board, our local school board in this tiny little town,” Martin said. “So we feel like it was God. And they contacted us. They reviewed our case. They felt like we had a very good chance to win it. And they said they wanted to represent us.”
So, are you saying if I am, whatever, a tattooed transgender Muslim mother who’s been muzzled, I can count on the Institute For Free Speech to come to my rescue? It would be like Allah. I just feel it.
Settling With Kushner Companies Was Hard. Getting Money to Former Tenants May Be Harder.
A decade ago, Jasmine Cox was living with her young son in the Cove Village rental complex in Essex, Maryland, just east of Baltimore, when she started experiencing a plague of problems. The bedroom ceiling started leaking one day, then maggots started coming out of the living room carpet, and then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink, she said. She stopped cooking to keep food away from the sink. With so much black mold around, her son started needing an inhaler. When she moved out soon afterward, the landlord, Westminster Management, sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs.
The experience haunted her for years.
Kushner-owned Westminster Management agreed to pay millions to settle allegations of maintenance horrors and excess fees in its Maryland rental apartments. Finding former tenants and paying them meaningful sums is the next challenge.
Find them. Stat. Anything, just don’t let that Arab-sucking vampire keep the money.
What you just read is entirely true. Just one day’s outrages, among so many unnoted in America.
Like this one.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla — A Florida senator filed a road designation bill to rename a portion of a highway in Hernando County after American conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh.
Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, filed SB 982 to rename the portion of the highway between U.S. 41 and State Road 50 “Rush Limbaugh Way.” The designation is in memory of the conservative political commentator who passed away.
“Rush Limbaugh is an American icon having inspired me, as well as tens of millions of Americans, to get involved in politics,” Ingoglia said in a statement.
“He stood for freedom and American excellence. His passing left a void in the conservative talk radio space that will never be filled. This road designation will remind people of his passion and love of country.”
Limbaugh died from lung cancer in Palm Beach back in 2021.
“Rush Limbaugh graced Brooksville’s own WWJB for many years with a message of American freedom,” Brookeville Mayor Blake Bell said in a statement. “Limbaugh believed in democracy, capitalism, and the First Amendment.
“It is only fitting for the state to honor this Floridian by naming a road after him in Brooksville.”
If passed, the bill will take effect on July 1, 2023.
