Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of March 15

President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he supports changing the Senate’s filibuster rule back to requiring senators talk on the floor to hold up a bill, the first time he has endorsed reforming the procedure the White House has for weeks insisted the president is opposed to eliminating.

A proposed Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult or taunt a police officer

It's one of several provisions included in a larger bill that seeks to increase penalties for crimes related to riots. A state Senate committee passed the bill last week.
Under the bill, a person who "accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response" in a public place would be guilty of disorderly conduct in the second degree. The offense would be classified as a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and fines of up to $250.
That particular section of the bill includes language around "intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm" -- an apparent reference to demonstrations in Louisville and other cities last year.

Democratic state Sen. David Yates was among those who opposed the bill, criticizing its language and arguing that law enforcement officers should be able to resist provocation if someone happens to be yelling at them.

Jury selection is ongoing in Derek Chauvin's trial in Minneapolis.

This twitter thread from a Buzzfeed News reporter is disappointing but not surprising.

An eighth juror has been selected to serve on the jury.

He believes Chauvin "did not have any intention of harming anyone" and that he did not "set out to murder anyone" but that somebody did die.

Wow, a potential juror just said she had no idea that Blue Lives Matter was related to police officers. She thought that Blue Lives Matter meant "everybody else" besides Black lives.

She becomes the ninth juror to be selected to serve on the jury.

During her questioning, she said she strongly believes that "all lives matter" and that if someone says Black Lives Matter she takes it to mean that other lives don't matter to them.

History! Senate Confirms Deb Haaland As First Native American Cabinet Secretary
Native News Online link

I'm happy dancing!

Interesting read on "Pastel QAnon" from the Global Network on Extremism & Technology

The aesthetic and branding created by these influencers softens QAnon’s propaganda grounded in Chan culture and imagery. The Pastel aesthetic is the polar opposite of the “raw” QAnon content that would be found on 8kun. In softening QAnon propaganda, the Pastel QAnon community creates new recruitment and radicalisation pipelines into female dominated ecosystems. Not every post these influencers shared were slathered with QAnon hashtags or propaganda, rather it is dispersed among their other content and brand.

Using a sample of 76 influencers in the Pastel QAnon community (with a total of 2,700,000 followers), here is a breakdown of the type of accounts that are found in this analysis:

• There is multi-level marketing QAnon, which is comprised of Instagram influencers who had built their initial brands via various MLM schemes: e.g., Arbonne, Tupperware, essential oils, exotic salts, camel milk, etc.

• There is esoteric QAnon, which is comprised of Instagram influencers who have built their brands around Gnosticism, yoga, crystals, 5th dimension spirituality, tarot reading, mediumship, belief in angels, light-weavers, belief in Pleiadians or the Galactic federation.

• Lifestyle influencer QAnon is comprised of women who built their brand as Instagram fitness coaches, fitness models, and lifestyle coaches who use their influencer over their followers to radicalise them onto QAnon propaganda.

• Alternative healing QAnon is comprised of Instagram influencers that built their brand as mommy bloggers, through the promotion of natural parenting, exotic diets, anti-vaccines, or alternative medicine and cures, who now also amplify QAnon propaganda on top of their medical disinformation.

So a US Capitol Police officer got suspended because he brought The Protocols of the Elders of freaking Zion to his work. The conspiracy theories and anti-semitism in this country are just so widespread right now, it is insane.

• Capitol Police officer suspended after antisemitic document found at checkpoint

U.S. Capitol Police suspended an officer Monday after a copy of an infamous antisemitic tract was found near a Capitol Hill security post Sunday, alarming a congressional aide who viewed the document in plain sight at the checkpoint.

Photographs provided to The Washington Post show a printed copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion on a table inside an entrance to the Longworth House Office Building.

Breakdown on how insane this document is from the Anti-Defamation League.

• A Hoax of Hate: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a classic in paranoid, racist literature. Taken by the gullible as the confidential minutes of a Jewish conclave convened in the last years of the nineteenth century, it has been heralded by anti-Semites as proof that Jews are plotting to take over the world. Since its contrivance around the turn of the century by the Russian Okhrana, or Czarist secret police, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" has taken root in bigoted, frightened minds around the world.

The booklet’s twenty-four sections spell out the alleged secret plans of Jewish leaders seeking to attain world domination. They represent the most notorious political forgery of modern times. Although thoroughly discredited, the document is still being used to stir up anti-Semitic hatred.

This is literally the work that is the basis for the "Jews are controlling the world and creating a new world order" conspiracy.

This is just further proof that the US Capitol Police force is deeply systematically flawed and needs to be completely recreated from the ground up.

• “No One Took Us Seriously”: Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years

Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”