Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

T R E 4 5 O N

Come on, man.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

In my day, never was longer.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

You are here: Home / Politics / Violent Insurrection at the Capitol / Capitol Police: Congressional Gold Medals for Jan 6, Virtual Gold Medals for Calling Out the Lies

Capitol Police: Congressional Gold Medals for Jan 6, Virtual Gold Medals for Calling Out the Lies

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Today the President signs H.R. 3325, “An Act to award four congressional gold medals to the United States Capitol Police and those who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” into law.

The President and The Vice President deliver remarks today at 4:30 Eastern time.  (All times theoretical!)  Make that 5:15 Eastern!

I so admire the police officers who are speaking up.  We need more of this, I think.  Each lie that stands turns into a platform for the next lie.

They shouldn’t be standing alone.  Not again.  What can we do to fight the lies?  Who else is calling out the lies?  How do we thank them every day for doing that?

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Reader Interactions

61Comments

  3. 3.

    Elizabelle

    Look forward to this. I’d heard they were being honored. No link whatsoever on C-Span.

  6. 6.

    misterpuff

    Mike Fanone to GOP members of Congress: “You guys don’t seem to have a problem when we’re kicking the shit out of Black people. But when we’re kicking the shit out of white people, uh-oh, that’s an issue.”

    GOP: That’s about right. And stay aways from the Orange people too.

  8. 8.

    Elizabelle

    I think Biden is going to have a good speech.  I wonder if the cable nets will cover it.

  9. 9.

    trollhattan

    @NotMax:

    An opening to note that Sacramento, the State Capital, contains the State Capitol.

    Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

  10. 10.

    Tony Jay

    @cain:

    How did you know I was the voice coach for Stewie Griffin?

    Also the body-double for his Dad, but that’s because I like the beer.

  13. 13.

    Another Scott

    Good, good.

    More good news I missed, maybe you did too (from yesterday):

    VIDEO: KAINE & YOUNG APPLAUD COMMITTEE PASSAGE OF THEIR BILL TO REPEAL 1991 & 2002 AUMFS

    For video of Kaine’s remarks, click here

    For video of Young’s remarks, click here

    WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Todd Young (R-IN), members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), applauded committee passage of their bipartisan legislation to repeal the 1991 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Iraq. The legislation will formally end the authorizations for the Gulf and Iraq wars, reasserting Congress’ vital role in not only declaring wars, but in ending them. The repeal of these authorizations will also recognize the strong partnership that the United States now has with a sovereign, democratic Iraq and reflect the end of the U.S. combat mission there. In June, the House voted to repeal the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs.

    “Congress has a responsibility to repeal these unnecessary war authorizations,” said Senator Kaine. “Keeping the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs on the books would only risk future misuse and undermine our partnership with Iraq. Iraq is not an enemy and we should not treat it as if it is. I’m glad that my effort to repeal these outdated AUMFs, which I have spearheaded since arriving to Congress, has finally reached this pivotal point. I hope the Senate will promptly pass this bill and President Biden will soon sign this measure into law to show the American people that the Article I and II branches can work together on these critical issues.”

    […]

    One of our best protections is showing that the government can and does still work even with all of the divisions.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  14. 14.

    Betty

    Since guys like Fanone are not Capitol police officers, has anything been done for them?

  16. 16.

    sab

    Dumb question. Has anyone figured out what Fanone’s accent is?

    One of my husband’s friends from parochial high school is a retired cop who worked his way up pretty high. My husband and my first memory of Jan 6 is of this guy calling us up beyond outraged at what he was seeing on TV. Interestingly enough, he spent at least 10 years undercover as a narc, mostly concerned with coke, meth and heroin.

  17. 17.

    Elizabelle

    @sab:   Not a dumb question at all.  Guessing the Time article will give some of his background, although it’s behind a paywall.  But:  how often do any of us ever read Time these days anyway …  click away.

  18. 18.

    Ken

    @Another Scott: I had no idea that 1991’s was still in effect. For that matter, shouldn’t 2002’s have ended with that big “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner?

    And may I suggest that next time around, they actually declare war as per the Constitution? Ideally, the President would refuse to act with just an AUMF, but that’s probably a bit too much to ask.

  19. 19.

    sab

    @Elizabelle: My Dad does. Fanone’s mom lives in Va. But that doesn’t mean much.

    I kind of like Time. It’s not real flashy, but sensible reporting of stuff I actually care about. They wete drifting towards right wing conventional wisdom a while back, but then they got rid of that executive editor and came to their senses.

  20. 20.

    Elizabelle

    @sab:   Good to hear.  We subscribed to Time when I was young.  I loved reading it every week.  Glad the flirtation with RW is done.

    It has just seemed very thin, and conventional wisdom, when I’ve looked in lately last year.  Do love their series of Trump cover drawings though.  Hilarious.

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    One for Cheryl (assuming she’s lurking) while we’re waiting.

    Eco-mag "Harvardt Business Review" endorses the Democratic People's Republic of Korea "green energy" investment towards clean nuclear detonation technology.

    — DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) August 5, 2021

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  24. 24.

    Catherine D.

    Since this is an open thread – I’ve been listening to the BBC Proms Golden Age of Broadway. I had no idea Clarke Peters (The Wire, Treme) could sing.

  26. 26.

    Elizabelle

    First Rose Garden event in ages that has not made me wince.  TFFG.  Gah.  (Although:  the night that Melania wore a dress that was perfect green screen material — that was great.  Those memes should go in a museum some day.  The covid molecule!)

  27. 27.

    JoyceH

    Who are the kids who were standing right by Biden at the signing? He had that long line of pens they do, and I heard him tell the little girl, “This is a silly way to do this – your mommy will explain it later.”

  30. 30.

    Scout211

    I read that TIME article earlier today and I was blown away.  It was hard to read in so many places but very well done.

  32. 32.

    Yutsano

    The TIME article wasn’t paywalled for me. It’s a definite must read. It was really tough to get through, but worth it

  34. 34.

    Elizabelle

    @sab:   Per Time article, Fanone is a DC native.  Maybe a rural Maryland accent, picked up from his extended family??

    Fanone was born in the District and raised in Alexandria, Va., his father a lawyer, his mother a social worker. They divorced when he was 8. His dad was a partner at a big firm, but Fanone hated the stuffy status-grubbing of fancy-pants D.C. He spent his free time with his mother’s working-class family in rural Maryland, boating, fishing, crabbing, hunting and watching John Wayne movies. “Michael was a cowboy from the time he was 3 years old,” says his mother Terry Fanone.

    Attempts to smuggle the self-styled backwoods boy into the professional class were unsuccessful. He spent a year at Georgetown Prep, the private school whose alumni include two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, but was asked not to return. When his parents sent him to boarding school in Maine instead, he saved his pocket money and bought a bus ticket back home. After his parents kicked him out, he got a job working construction and eventually completed his high-school diploma at Ballou, a nearly all-Black public school in southeast D.C.

    Fanone joined the Capitol Police shortly after 9/11, but he knew by the time he finished at the academy that he didn’t want to spend his career there. Fanone and his buddy Ramey Kyle would drive down to the projects on their lunch break and chase drug dealers, to management’s chagrin. “We were 21-, 22-year-old adrenaline junkies—we wanted to run and gun,” Fanone recalls. After a couple of years, he and Kyle both moved to the MPD.

  35. 35.

    MomSense

    When I think about what happened that day and the continuing pain it caused it makes me so incredibly angry.

  36. 36.

    Elizabelle

    Yeah.  We get a few free articles from Time each month, and the Fanone one looks well reported.

    I take back what I said about Time being lightweight.  In this iteration.

  37. 37.

    Mo MacArbie

    @WaterGirl: I remember someone many years ago cracking that they liked to add words to the old Nightline theme: “I’m Ted Koppel/I’m the star of the show”.

  38. 38.

    narya

    @sab: I’ve been guessing Pittsburgh, or that crossed w/ Balmer, but I don’t know. That is truly a pure guess on my part. Where are the folks from DARE when you need them.

  40. 40.

    narya

    @raven: The Fluffya/Balmer/Pittsburgh overlap and NON-overlap fascinates me. I grew up watching Fluffya TV stations, and you can hear it in my accent sometimes, though I have a little NY/NJ thrown in just for good measure. My ex could always tell when I was talking to my family on the phone, just by re-emergence of my accent.

  41. 41.

    MazeDancer

    Beautiful ceremony.

    The Police Officers looking happy, and recognized, their kids,@POTUS signing, and telling them they’re all going to the Oval Office to take pictures.

    Mr. Biden taking the time to greet all the family members who came.

    After his great and heartfelt remarks.

    Imma tearing up.

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    ObOpenThread for M^4 – STATNews – With a nudge from AI, ketamine emerges as a potential rare disease treatment:

    […]

    The ketamine research that mediKanren found was years old, but nobody had advocated for the drug’s potential as a treatment for ADNP syndrome — until it landed in the inbox of a neurosurgeon named Matt Davis.

    In February 2019, Davis was nearing the end of his residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, catching a quick moment between cases. “I was waiting for a patient to wake up from surgery and looking on my phone, and I got this email from Matt,” said Davis.

    The other Matt was Matt Might, director at UAB’s Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute. The two were connected not just by their university, but by their experience as fathers of children with rare disease. Davis’ son Benjamin had been diagnosed with ADNP syndrome, which is caused by a mutation or deletion in the gene responsible for activity-dependent neuroprotective protein, a molecule that plays a crucial role in brain formation and the development of other organs; Might’s son, Bertrand, had another genetic condition called NGLY1 deficiency.

    Related: How an AI expert took on his toughest project ever: writing code to save his son’s life

    Might had been building an artificial-intelligence-driven system called mediKanren to help find treatments for rare diseases, including Bertrand’s. Part of the Translator project funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the program works to harvest biomedical data from diverse sources, structure it, and connect the dots. It’s looking for what Might calls “unknown knowns”: drug interactions that have already been revealed by science but remain buried deep in millions of data points.

    “It looks like low-dose ketamine is an upregulator for ADNP,” wrote Might. “Do you think this makes sense for ADNP patients?”

    On his phone, Davis did a quick literature search. “It was an absolute lightbulb moment,” he said. “I was immediately struck by how exciting a potential treatment option this was for ADNP.” In addition to broad disturbances in sleep, vision, cardiac health, and digestion in many patients, the syndrome is characterized by intellectual disability, speech and motor delays, and autism symptoms. Most drugs for neurodevelopmental disorders act at the level of the synapse by changing neurotransmitters, Davis explained. But Might’s system suggested that ketamine could alter ADNP gene expression — addressing the syndrome almost at its root.

    […]

    This is what’s supposed to happen with AI and Deep Learning and all the rest. It’s good that it is happening. Exciting days.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  43. 43.

    sab

    @narya: Sounds like he has working class Alexandria. Makes sense to me. Va working class coastal, but near DC. Not backwoods Va.

     

    @narya: American accents sure are nuanced. DC to Pittsburgh, and any of them possible

    ETA Kind of like Ed Schultz’s accent.

  44. 44.

    CaseyL

    Very good speeches.  I like that the medals will be displayed in the Capitol.  Make the traitors still in Congress see them every time they enter the building.

  46. 46.

    Kay

    If you’ve never heard the 2008 Trumka speech on racism it’s great:

    RIP to one of the greats. This is still one of the best things anyone has said or written on racism and the working class, much clearer and more nuanced than 99% of post-2016 commentary (my own included)

  47. 47.

    Another Scott

    Sen. Jon Ossoff has introduced the Right to Vote Act, legislation that establishes a first-ever statutory right to vote in federal elections — protecting U.S. citizens from laws that make it harder to cast a ballot.

    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 5, 2021

    http://www.Ossoff.senate.gov.

    S.2615 is now in the Rules Committee. It’s still very new – the bill text isn’t there yet.

    There are lots of paths forward, and they’re being worked on.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  50. 50.

    Another Scott

    Another ObOpenThread: We’ve been discussing Tuckems off-and-on recently. I’d forgotten this.

    Gaetz kind of threatened to take Tucker down with him, which is the only interesting thing Matt Gaetz has ever done. https://t.co/tzLrZCBCsk

    — LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) August 5, 2021

    Yeah, too many people seem to think that if TFG doesn’t/can’t run that there will be an orderly battle for the GQP nomination. I don’t see it. Too many stupid people over there think they deserve to be next and it will be crab-bucket politics on a grand scale. “Cuck” will be vaguely remembered as a term of endearment in comparison…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  54. 54.

    Torrey

    @sab:

    Re Fanone’s likely accent. A quick guess after listening to a short segment: Maryland, possibly suburbs east of D.C.

    I haven’t had the chance to sit down and listen to the testimony, so I haven’t heard an extended segment.

  55. 55.

    Torrey

    @Torrey: And I see after I finished my post that Elizabelle has the information. It makes sense. One picks up one’s accent from one’s friends, not one’s family, generally speaking, and he could easily have gotten a mix of rural MD and suburban Virginia. His self-identification as someone who preferred to hang out in rural MD suggests he might very well take on those speech features, such as the distinctive /o/ sounds.

  58. 58.

    Geminid

    @Torrey: People in the mid-Atlantic coastal areas, like the Maryland Eastern Shore, seem to have a diferent accent from that of people further west. Fanone sounds like he got has accent from his mother’s family and friends. His dad probably talks differently.

  59. 59.

    Madeleine

    @Kay: Thanks, Kay, for linking Trumka’s 2008 speech. When I heard it then, I thought yes, this is what we need. I’m glad to hear it again tonight, but I’m also in pain. He is still needed and he should not be gone.

  61. 61.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @CaseyL:

    I hope for an all-out, Mad Max-style war among the GQP hopefuls.

    The problem is that a Mad Max style war among the GQP hopefuls will kill a lot of innocent people along the way, and I’m not talking metaphorically any more, not in the time of COVID.

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