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- Losing My Perspicacity November 22, 2024
Losing My Perspicacity November 22, 2024
Matt Gaetz is out but Linda McMahon is in; RFK Jr.'s shameful role in the Samoan measles outbreak of 2019; the Pride take on the Spirit for the NWSL crown; Caitlin Clark wants and NWSL team in Cincy; Georgia fires their entire Maternity Mortality Committee; and The High Note.
Julie DiCaro
November 22, 2024
Good morning and Happy Free Friday! We got the first snowfall of the year in Chicagoland yesterday, and it was the first time I’ve felt my spirits lift since the election, then quickly dampen again as I slipped and slid across the Menard’s parking lot in a quasi-blizzard. It is good reading/bingeing weather, though!
A quick shout to all the new subscribers I’ve gotten via Bluesky and elsewhere the last few days. Howdy! I’m glad you guys are here. This newsletter is always free on Friday, but we talk sports, news, and laughs five days a week. So if you like what you read, I hope you’ll consider supporting independent journalism and becoming a premium subscriber.
Thanksgiving-palooza at my house begins tomorrow, when I’ll be in Bloomington picking up my youngest from school. IU takes on OSU at The Horse Shoe on Saturday, and I hope we can all come together in the spirit of hating OSU that brings the Big Ten together. According to Paul Finebaum, IU is going to get “throttled,” so he’s dead to me, along with Matt Leinart, who picked Nebraska to "rout” the Hoosiers (we won 56-7).
Today: Matt Gaetz has been vanquished, but we still have Pete, Linda, and RFK Jr. to contend with; Get ready for the NWSL Championship match on Saturday night; Caitlin Clark wants to bring an NWSL team to Cincinnati; Georgia fires their entire Maternity Mortality Committee; and The High Note.
Let’s ride.
Matt Gaetz is out, Linda McMahon is in
As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for Attorney General, in much the same way Michael Scott withdrew his name from consideration for Jan’s old job. That is to say, when he realized he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting the actual job and, according to CNN, an hour after they called him for comment on their impending story that he’d had a second incident with the 17-year old he allegedly paid for sex.
The woman who says she had sex when she was a minor with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz told the House Ethics Committee she had two sexual encounters with him at one party in 2017, sources familiar with her testimony tell CNN.
The woman, who was 17 years old at the time, testified that the second sexual encounter, which has not previously been reported, included another adult woman. She also testified to both sexual encounters in a civil deposition as part of a related lawsuit, sources said.
After being asked for comment for this story, Gaetz announced he was backing out as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee.
Of course, as men so often love to tell me, “This is he said, she said.” Except that there are also Venmo receipts to back up her claims.
Because Gaetz is dumber than a stump, he couldn’t think of any other reason he was paying a 17-year-old thousands of dollars for things like “joy!” and “being awesome!” And even if Gaetz didn’t know she was underage, his lack of knowledge is not a defense to trafficking a minor or statutory rape.
The only questions that remain are these: 1) This case has more evidence than many rape cases I’ve seen prosecuted; what the hell is Merrick Garland doing over there at DOJ? Why wasn’t this case prosecuted? and 2) Given that the House Ethics Committee report has still not been released, what else is in there that Gaetz and the GOP are so terrified of?
Of course, you had to know Majorie Taylor Green wasn’t going to sit this one out.
I don’t know what kind of hold Matt Gaetz has over MTG, but she’s threatening to release a whole bunch of secrets if the Gaetz report gets out. Don’t threaten me with a good time, Marjorie.
For his part, it took Trump only a few hours to find another croney to nominate for AG. This time, it’s Pam Bondi who, as Florida AG, declined to prosecute Trump University for fraud after Trump donated $25,000 to her campaign. America!
Meanwhile, Trump has also nominated Linda McMahon, who somehow stomached being married to Vince McMahon for 58 years — though they are reportedly separated now, for Secretary of Education. McMahon has almost no experience in the education field, besides serving on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year and her time as a trustee at Sacred Heart University. She is also a named defendant in a civil suit that claims that, while she ran WWE, she failed to stop a ring announcer from grooming and molesting children in the 80s and 90s.
Are you guys seeing a theme here?
Then there’s good ol’ Pete Hegseth. Mediaite managed to get a hold of the police report from the sexual assault allegation against him in 2017, and it is not pretty.
The report, provided by the City of Monterey, California, was previously released to Hegseth in March 2021, per his request. It runs 22 pages and details the allegation leveled by a woman who claimed in 2017 that she was sexually assaulted by the cable news star at a Republican women’s conference.
She was assaulted at a conference for Republican women. You can’t make this shit up.
According to the report, the police were first made aware of the alleged assault when Doe, who was 30 at the time, submitted for a rape-kit exam at a local hospital. A nurse from the hospital called an officer at the Monterey Police Department and reported the assault claim. Days later, police spoke with Doe as part of their investigation.
Doe said she spoke with Hegseth on the final night of the conference, during which attendees were drinking in a suite and at a bar in the hotel. Doe told police that Hegseth was flirting with women and putting his hand on their legs at the conference, and this prompted her to tell Hegseth she did not appreciate how he treated women.
Two different women who attended the conference and spoke with police said that Hegseth put his hand on their legs and asked them to come back to his room on separate occasions. One of the women, who worked at the conference, told police that she told Hegseth the physical contact was not acceptable. She said she then called over Doe to act as a buffer so he would not continue to pursue her.
That’s all I’m willing to share here, because I really don’t even need to know the details. They are always the same. If you want to read them, I’ve linked the piece for you above the blockquote.
Despite the police not giving a reason for not moving forward with the prosecution, Hegseth insisted today that he’d been “totally cleared,” which isn’t true. Not being prosecuted is not the same thing as “being cleared.” Cases are not prosecuted for all kinds of reasons, including victims who don’t want to put themselves through a criminal trial in front of a jury, where they will have to answer for every single thing they did that night, as if they are the one trial.
REPORTER: Did you sexually assault a woman in Monterey, California?
PETE HEGSETH: I have -- ah -- as far as the media is concerned, it's very simple. The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared, and that's where I'm gonna leave it.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar)
5:13 PM • Nov 21, 2024
I’m guessing that Hegseth wasn’t prosecuted because he reached a settlement with his victim and she didn’t want to pursue it any further. It’s a reasonable choice for a victim who feels too fragile to go through a trial, but still wants her rapist to pay for assaulting her. Unfortunately, society too often labels victims who settle their cases quietly as “gold diggers” or “blackmailers” when all they’ve done is chosen the best path for their own peace.
Let’s hope Pete is the next nominee to go down.
Up next, let’s talk RFK Jr. and measles
I’m seeing way too many people who think having RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services wouldn’t be such a bad thing. First, I will refer all of you to this article, which goes into all the reasons why even RFK’s family thinks he’s nuts. Secondly, I want to talk about the 83 people, most of them children, who died in the measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019.
This Mother Jones article does a great job of breaking it down.
During the stretch in which the vaccination coverage was dropping in Samoa, Kennedy visited the nation in June 2019 and gave a boost to anti-vaxxers there who had used the death of those two infants to help cause the drop in vaccination rates. He had a meeting with Taylor Winterstein, a prominent Samoan Australian vaccination foe. In an Instagram post featuring a photo of her with Kennedy, Winterstein wrote, “I am deeply honoured to have been in the presence of a man I believe is, can and will change the course of history. This was a divinely timed, once in a lifetime opportunity and I will forever cherish the conversations and moments we shared together in Samoa.” She added hashtags used by anti-vaxxers. Public health experts complained Kennedy’s visit to Samoa helped amplifly anti-vax voices.
Kennedy later tried to claim that this meeting wasn’t really about vaccines, but no one really bought that argument. He’s all about the anti-vaxx life.
After the measles outbreak struck in November 2019 and the Samoan government implemented an emergency compulsory anti-measles vaccination program to contain the spread, Winterstein and Tamasese opposed the effort with misinformation and harsh rhetoric. Winterstein compared the operation to Nazi Germany. Tamasese called it a “killing spree.” He declared the vaccination operation “the greatest crime against our people” and suggested the vaccine itself was the cause of the outbreak. Tamasese advocated against the use of conventional medicine and antibiotics and urged people to rely on papaya leaf extract and vitamins instead of the vaccine and antibiotics.
Per the AP, 83 people wound up dying from measles during that time period. Health officials working in Samoa blame Kennedy’s influence for making a bad situation worse.
Public health officials said at the time that anti-vaccine misinformation had made the nation vulnerable.
The crisis of low vaccination rates and skepticism created an environment that was “ripe for the picking for someone like RFK to come in and in assist with the promotion of those views,” said Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist from New Zealand who worked on the effort to build back trust in the measles vaccine in Samoa.
Petousis-Harris recalled that local and regional anti-vaccine activists took their cues from Kennedy, whom she said “sits at the top of the food chain as a disinformation source.”
“They amplified the fear and mistrust, which resulted in the amplification of the epidemic and an increased number of children dying. Children were being brought for care too late,” she said.
The AP article also mentions Braden Fahey, who appeared on the cover of RFK Jr.’s anti-COVID vaccine book, even though Branden never received the COVID vaccine and died as the result of a malformed blood vessel in his brain. His family is still looking for answers as to why RFK included their son in his book. I’ll give Gina Fahey, Braden’s mother, the last word on this.
“It’s very manipulative. And you know, he’s making money off of our tragedies,” she said, adding, “How could you want somebody running our country that operates like that?”
The NWSL Championship takes place on Saturday
The Orlando Pride will take on the Washington Spirit (owned by Michele Kang, who just donated $30 million to US Soccer) on Saturday, November 23. The game starts at 8 pm ET on CBS.
Check out this sweet hype video for the Pride.
Orlando and Washington were the two best teams this season, but the playoffs have been really fun and entertaining nonetheless. The Pride beat the Spirit twice this season, and, of course, feature legendary Brazilian superstar Marta, your favorite player’s favorite player, and Zambian legend-in-the-making Barbra Banda. On the other side of the pitch, the Spirit are led by USWNT stalwarts Trinity Rodman and Casey Krueger, and were without Rodman for their second to the Pride this year.
As a girl who had to play varsity games on the boys’ practice fields for several years, I still can’t get over a women’s pro soccer league being broadcast in prime time on network television. I never thought I would see it in my lifetime, and I’ll never get tired of it. Hope you’ll all tune in!
Caitlin Clark joins Cincy’s bid for a NWSL team
Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark is part of the ownership group trying to bring an NWSL expansion team to Cincinnati.
Cincinnati is one of a handful of finalists bidding for an NWSL expansion team that is expected to be awarded before the end of the year. The team would begin play in 2026, joining a previously announced expansion team in Boston to bring the NWSL to 16 teams.
Who run the world? GIRLS!
Georgia fired their entire Maternity Mortality Committee
Shoutout to Jessica Valenti and her fantastic newsletter, Abortion Every Day, for covering this story.
I’m sure you remember ProPublica’s investigation into the the deaths of two women killed by Georgia’s abortion ban, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. In response to that news, do you think politicians moved to change the law, or tried to protect pregnant people in the state? Of course not.
Instead, they fired every single person on the state’s maternal mortality review committee.
ProPublica reports that commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, Kathleen Toomey, wrote a letter to the committee dismissing all 32 members a few weeks ago. Toomey’s reasoning was that “confidential information provided to the Maternal Mortality Review Committee was inappropriately shared with outside individuals.”
In other word, Georgia’s Republican leadership didn’t like that someone from the committee told a reporter that the state’s ban was killing women. (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the committee also happened to find the two women’s deaths preventable and connected to the state’s ban.)
This is why women are so angry. This. This kind of thing. Meanwhile, women are dying.
The High Note
Because the world is falling apart, I endeavor, each day, to leave you on a high note. Here’s today’s high note.
As I’ve said before, Sam Bentley’s Instagram is great for reminding us that smart people are working on big problems around the world, and succeeding in finding solutions.
I’ve been arguing with my kids that “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is not WHAM!’s best song. Neither is “Careless Whisper.” This is.
Finally, because 12-year-old Julie will never not love George Michael, I’ll leave you with perhaps my favorite video on the internet. This is George Michael’s soundcheck for the concert to honor Freddy Mercury. Notice who’s standing around watching.
I’ll be taking some time off next week, but there will be a LMP on Monday and Tuesday. As I said yesterday, I’m going to have 19 people over for Thanksgiving, and it’s taking more time to prepare than I anticipated. Thoughts and prayers appreciated.
Hey, survive and advance today. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
See you all next week.
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