Trina's Kitchen: Sugar Free Fudge in the Kitchen

Lillian e-mailed to note My Mountain Kitchen's recipe for sugar free fudge:

Ingredients

1 Cup Low Carb Sugar Free Sweetened Condensed Milk
1 Cup Lily's Stevia Sweetened Chocolate Chips

Instructions

Combine both ingredients in a microwave safe container, and microwave for 1 minute.
Stir, and microwave in 10 second intervals until chocolate chips are completely melted.
Pour into molds and freeze until solid

Lillian has Type II diabetes and a sweet tooth. She's looking for sugar free recipes and low carb ones. She got permission from her endocrinologist before trying this recipe. It's now her go to for when she's having a serious sweet craving.

It's too easy. I read it and I knew I'd post it here but it's so easy that I asked the kids and grandkids if anyone wanted fudge -- yes! -- and made some tonight. I've worked over 12 hours before coming home (I'm a nurse) and I wasn't planning on making a sweet tonight. But reading over the recipe, it was so simple and so I ended up making it. Turned out great, everyone loved it.

Lillian found a great recipe at My Montana Kitchen.

Dylan Mulvaney has been in the news lately. LGBTQ Nation reports:

The trans influencer who documented the first year of her transition in her “365 Days of Girlhood” series on TikTok recently sat down with Rosie O’Donnell for the latest episode of her podcast, Onward with Rosie O’Donnell. The two discussed everything from their shared love of Broadway—before coming out as trans, Mulvaney appeared in the touring production of The Book of Mormon—to the backlash Mulvaney has received from right-wing trolls and pundits for her endorsement deals with Nike and Bud Light.

The moment was actually incredibly moving, and it’s something the host does all the time.
“I have tried to be the most uncontroversial person this past year,” Mulvaney said, “And somehow it has made me controversial still. I think it comes back to the fact that these people, they don’t understand me, and anything that I do or say somehow gets taken out of context and is used against me.”
“It’s so sad because everything I try to put out is positive,” she continued. “It’s trying to connect with others that maybe don’t understand me. It’s to make people laugh, or to make a kid feel seen.”

She also shared that she’s less concerned with that right-wing talking heads and podcasters have to say about her than with what their words may inspire their listeners to do.

“It’s gotten so bad, to the point… with all these bills, that we just have to stay alive,” she said. “This is the time for not only straight people, but we need [the LGBTQ+ community] to show up for us. It’s all hands on deck. It is not a time to sit idle.”

Here's the interview.

Until C.I. defended Dylan last week, I'd never heard of her. Now I can't escape news of her. That makes me very sad because that means a lot of people are aiming a lot of hate at her. She's a young woman. She doesn't need this sort of grief. She was very gracious and graceful in her interview with Rosie O'Donnell above. (And Rosie did a great job interviewing her.)

And let me note this from Evan Blake and Benjamin Mateus (WSWS):

On Monday, US President Joe Biden signed into law a bill officially ending the COVID-19 national emergency declaration, despite the fact that the pandemic continues to rage across the US and internationally.

Each week, nearly 2,000 Americans continue to die from COVID-19 and thousands more are debilitated with Long COVID. Globally, each day there continue to be an estimated 10,000 excess deaths attributable to the pandemic. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to mutate and evolve into new and potentially more dangerous variants, with the Omicron XBB.1.16 subvariant quickly becoming dominant in a growing number of countries.

The bill signed on Monday, H.J.Res.7, was introduced by fascistic Arizona Republican Congressman Paul Gosar on January 9 and adopted by the House with bipartisan support in February. After Biden initially postured as being opposed to the rushed ending of the national emergency declaration, following its passage in the House he changed tack and said that he would sign the bill if it arrived on his desk. This prompted several Democratic senators to join their Republican colleagues in adopting the legislation by a vote of 68 to 23 on March 29.

Underscoring Biden’s contempt for the American population, the signing of the bill into law was accompanied by a brief 20-word statement from the White House. There was no reference to the over 1.1 million Americans killed by COVID-19, nor the estimated 20 million suffering from Long COVID, nor the ongoing death and debilitation caused by the unchecked spread of COVID-19. Evidently, Biden’s offhand remark in January regarding the death toll from the pandemic, “I sometimes underestimate it because I stopped thinking about it,” remains in effect.

The ending of the national emergency declaration is the second of three major legal shifts which will privatize all aspects of the US government’s response to the pandemic and make millions of Americans increasingly vulnerable to the virus and its devastating impacts.

The first and most consequential shift took place on April 1, when Medicaid disenrollment restrictions associated with the pandemic public emergency measures were lifted. This has initiated what is being referred to euphemistically as the great “unwinding” of Medicaid. As a result, upwards of 22 million people (including 7.3 million children) are at risk of losing their health coverage by next year.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Wednesday:

Wednesday, April 12, 2023. Corruption dances across the American landscape while THE ATLANTIC rushes to minimize it, 42-year-old member of Congress 'forgets' that she's not married (and has never been married), and much more.

Will Crooked Clarence Thomas be punished? Will he be removed from the Supreme Court to restore some legitimacy to the body? Or is the whole system so corrupt that he'll be allowed to remain on the bench and pretend like nothing happened? Barry Grey's WSWS report would argue for the latter since the whole system has become corrupt:

A common feature of the pervasive corruption of capitalist politics and politicians in America is the practice of using privileged information to make stock trades, particularly in the midst of the recurring crises that beset Wall Street. In such matters, as in passing laws to ban strikes by rail workers and impose contracts rejected by the workers, bipartisanship prevails.

Last month’s government bailout of rich depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the second and third biggest bank failures in US history, is no exception.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal, citing recent legally required disclosures, reported that three House members, two Republicans and one Democrat, two of whom were directly involved in secret bailout talks, made substantial trades in bank stocks in the initial days of the crisis. According to the Journal’s own investigation, New York Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis and Oregon Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer made trades that marked “the latest instance of congressional stock trading intersecting with official business.”

Malliotakis bought stock in New York Community Bankcorp (NYCB) on March 17, two days before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. announced that Flagstar Bank, a subsidiary of NYCB, would take on Signature’s deposits. Signature, headquartered in New York City, had been placed in receivership by New York regulators on March 12.

Just days before she bought the stock, Malliotakis issued a statement (March 13) on her Twitter account in which she boasted of working closely with federal and state officials to address the failure of Signature.

“Both last night and this morning I have been meeting with the Federal Reserve, U.S. Department of Treasury, Governor [Kathy] Hochul and New York State Department of Financial Services Superintendent Adrienne Harris to discuss the closure of Signature Bank,” she wrote, adding, “I have been assured all depositors will be made whole through the Deposit Insurance Fund which is made up of contributions from all member banks, not taxpayer funds.”

Malliotakis bought $1,001 to $15,000 in NYBC stock on March 17. The day after the March 19 announcement that NYBC’s Flagstar subsidiary would acquire Signature’s deposits, NYBC stock rose 32 percent, landing the congresswoman a tidy profit.

Rep. Malliotakis’s disclosure said the stock purchase was made by her spouse, a common excuse given by politicians who are involved in insider trading. Unfortunately for the congresswoman, she is unmarried.

She forgot. She forgot she wasn't married. Just slipped her mind. A Greek Orthodox, 42-year-old woman and she 'just forgot.' Kind of hard to believe that, kind of hard to believe it hasn't been a topic of conversation in her own Greek Orthodox family.

Madeline Halpert (BBC NEWS) reports:

Democratic senators are calling for the Supreme Court to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas for failing to disclose reported luxury trips funded by a billionaire Republican donor.

The Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have announced they will hold a hearing on Supreme Court ethics.

The panel also warned of legislation, if the court does not resolve this issue on its own.

Heather Mallick (TORONTO STAR) offers:

Clarence Thomas is the dumbest U.S. Supreme Court Justice as well as the longest serving and the most sexually creepy, I always thought, although the limber Brett Kavanaugh bounced far ahead of him in the last category.

In 2016, Thomas asked a question in court, breaking a 10-year silence. For a decade, the man had nothing to say. Was he shy? He’s no longer shy, his confidence built up from hanging with billionaire Harlan Crow.

“What first attracted you to the billionaire Harlan Crow?” I’d ask Thomas. “What first attracted you to the non-bright and biddable Justice Thomas?” I’d ask Crow.

They’re a pairing made in American hell, a bad influence on each other and a terror to fellow citizens, particularly women. For 20 years, Crow has treated Thomas and his family to luxury cruises on his yacht, flights on his private jet, and stays at his East Texas ranch and his private Adirondacks resort, ProPublica reveals. His gifts, including portraits, have been lavish. Thomas keeps them secret.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern (SLATE) note:

ProPublica’s scrupulously reported new piece on Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong luxury travel on the dime of a single GOP megadonor will probably not shock you at all. Sure, the dollar amounts spent are astronomical, and of course the justice failed to report any of it, and of course the megadonor insists that he and Thomas are dear old friends, so of course the superyacht and the flights on the Bombardier Global 5000 jet and the resorts are all perfectly benign. So while the details are shocking, the pattern here is hardly a new one. This is a longstanding ethics loophole that has been exploited by parties with political interests in cases before the court to curry favor in exchange for astonishing junkets and perks. It is allowed to happen.

We will doubtless spend a few news cycles expressing outrage that Harlan Crow has spent millions of dollars lavishing the Thomases with lux vacations and high-end travel and barely pretended to separate business and pleasure, giving half a million dollars to a Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas in 2011 (which funded her own $120,000 salary). But because the justices are left to police themselves and opt not to do so, we will turn to other matters in due time. Before the outrage dries up, however, it is worth zeroing in on two aspects of the ProPublica report that do have lasting legal implications. First, the same people who benefited from the lax status quo continue to fight against any meaningful reforms that might curb the justices’ gravy train. Second, the rules governing Thomas’ conduct over these years, while terribly insufficient, actually did require him to disclose at least some of these extravagant gifts. The fact that he ignored the rules anyway illustrates just how difficult it will be to force the justices to obey the law: Without the strong threat of enforcement, a putative public servant like Thomas will thumb his nose at the law.

If there is a single image that captures this seedy state of affairs, it is a painting of Thomas hanging out with Leonard Leo (Federalist Society co-chair and judicial power broker) and Mark Paoletta (who has served as chief counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence and general counsel of Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget). Both are political operatives, though Crow assures us that they would never dare talk about Thomas’ work. This image should be enough to shock anyone into taking action against the spigot of dark money that flows directly from billionaire donors into the court, its justices, and their spouses’ pockets. Continuing to live as though there is nothing to be done about any of this is a choice. We make it every day.

It is a horror show. And note the silence -- still -- from so many 'left' YOUTUBERS. And note the shameful whores rushing in to defend Clarence and/or his sugar daddy. The always embarrassing ATLANTIC offers garbage from Graeme Wood who rushes to defend Nazi Harlan Crow -- Clarence's sugar daddy:

Recent reporting by ProPublica has suggested that that is what Harlan Crow in fact is: a sinister Croesus meddling in world affairs, chiefly by corrupting Clarence Thomas with gifts of private-jet flights and bottles of pricey French wine.

Crow also owns Nazi memorabilia, including paintings by Adolf Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and a set of swastika-emblazoned napkins.

But, please note, Graeme insists that doesn't make him a Nazi. After you question Graeme's sanity, the next one is to ask if Harlan is also Graeme's sugar daddy?

No, you don't own a signed copy of MEIN KAMPF unless you're a fan boi. If you're disturbed -- the natural reaction -- by Hitler crimes and you somehow end up with a signed copy, you throw it in the trash. You discontinue it as a collector's item in the interest of the millions who suffered because of Hitler. That's before we get to the paintings and the "swastika-emblazoned napkins."

Hon, Happy April 20th. Clarence and Ginni are coming over, where do we keep the swastika-emblazoned napkins?

I've already placed them on the sideboard, right next to our commemorative Heinrich Himmler plates. Happy April 20th.

CNN's Joan Biskupic observes:

The incident reflects the broader lack of accountability at the high court regarding off-bench behavior. Justices regularly brush aside reporters’ queries for specifics on travel and gifts, book advances and other extracurricular activities.

They have repeatedly spurned calls by members of Congress that they adopt a formal ethics code. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin made another such plea to Roberts this week as he also urged the chief justice to open an investigation into Thomas’ conduct.

At the same time, the high court has long benefited from a certain degree of good will, free of the scrutiny watchdog groups and news media have given the legislative and executive branches of government.

They may have squandered that good will.

Polls show the public approval of the court – now controlled by a conservative supermajority – plunging. The pattern was accelerated after last summer’s reversal of longstanding precedent in multiple cases, most notably the decision dissolving nearly a half century of abortion rights precedent.

It's an illegitimate court and its image is in tatters. This cannot stand.

Fabiola Santiago (MIAMI HERALD) observes:

There’s no need to demonize and dehumanize any group of people in a legislative process stacked in Republicans state lawmakers’ favor from the get-go. Those are the spoils of 20 years of gerrymandering, packing courts with partisans and voter suppression.

Florida Republicans hold a super-majority and have all the votes in the Legislature necessary to pass whatever bill they and their autocratic agenda-setting leader, Gov. DeSantis, could possibly desire.

But they carry the bully gene in their souls.

They’ve now advanced to quash the most vulnerable among us with evil verbal attacks that have no place in society, much less the Florida House.

At a committee hearing Monday, Rep. Webster Barnaby, a Deltona Republican, railed against transgender people, calling them “demons and imps” and “mutants from another planet.”

Disgusting behavior on many levels, but the lack of decorum and civility is especially galling because he’s targeting vulnerable people — misunderstood transgender people, who have the highest suicide rates in the country.

At CBS NEWS, Roman Feeser reports:

Last month in Nashville, widely regarded as the entertainment capital of the South, Tennessee lawmakers passed a law that bans one class of entertainer: "male and female impersonators," otherwise known as drag performers. However, a day before the nation's first anti-drag law was set to take effect, a federal judge temporarily blocked it for violating the First Amendment.

That is right. It's a free speech issue. You wouldn't know that from watching the endlessly pontificating Jonathan Turley as he climbed the cross for every right winger who got what was coming to them -- booed. Booing is not free speech, he Tweets endlessly and he write over and over in bad columns for FOX "NEWS" and THE NEW YORK POST. Once upon a time, before he became so disgusting, other newspapers would carry him. Not now. So Swirley shows up to whine of how uncivil and mean and wrong it is when a hate merchant gets booed (or claims that they were 'assaulted' when there's no evidence to back that claim up) but when lawmakers try to strip performers of their First Amendment right, that doesn't warrant a column -- after over a year of this, he will do a blog post -- where he pretends he just stop breast feeding his own children and -- having birthed children (and nearly gotten back that figure) -- he knows how disgusting drag queens are but . . . maybe even they have some rights too? Such is the decaying mind of what once the country's leading legal light.

Back to Roman Feeser:

How did drag queens get dragged into politics? For that, we turn to the city of Jackson, Tennessee.

In March, Tennessee state Rep. Chris Todd, a Republican, indicated to the state Senate that it was his constituents who requested he take up the bill: "This past year in my community, we had a local group decide to do a, quote, family-friendly drag show. When they listed this as family-friendly, my community rose up."

The community of Jackson never even saw the scheduled Pride performance before opponents raised thousands of dollars in donations and filed an injunction to prevent it from taking place. Todd then introduced the new bill as an obscenity statute to prevent "adult cabaret performers like drag queens from performing in public spaces where children could be present."

Critics of the bill say an obscenity law is already on the books, and that this is specifically targeting the LGBTQIA+ community.

And it does target them. That's why these laws are being proposed. But that doesn't concern Jonathan Turley. He's too busy throwing his lot in with Lorie Smith -- the web 'designer' who insists her free speech rights would be abused and denied if she were forced to design a website for a same-sex couple. Jonathan's so deep in his homophobia that he can't even note that the woman has no standing. She's not been asked to do this and said "no." But, you know, maybe someday, it might come up, possibly. So by all means let's waste the Supreme Court's time. Once upon a time, law professors grasped standing, taught standing and questioned it when a case moved forward when the person bringing it did not have standing.

But when, like Jonathan Turley, you now drop to all fours and beg the bigotry to take you from behind, you can't be bothered with legal concepts.

If he didn't also agree to a ball-gag, maybe he could explain to us all how Lorie Smith has been injured? She thinks she will. She thinks someday a same-sex couple is going to come to her for a website -- they'd have to be really self-loathing to pay her any money -- and that, when that happens, she will be damaged. Where's the injury right now? There is none.

But that's what we have that no one wants to get honest about: A crazed right-wing, motivated by hate, working to overturn the rights of everyone. They plot in secret, they seek out idiots like Lorie Smith to pursue cases and they try to get those cases with the judges they want. I'd argue the whole thing is a criminal conspiracy that is abusing the courts and is a threat to democracy. As Nazi worshipper Harlan Crow demonstrates, big money gives you access. Clarence Thomas' sugar daddy is all about pay-to-play and democracy and the law are destroyed as a result.

But don't look to Turley to weigh in on that, he's too busy gazing up at the hate merchants as he kneels before them, ready to service their every need.

It's really sad when someone's kink is so out of control that they let it destroy their reputation but, boys and girls, that's how low Turley's sunk.

Ken Meyer (MEDIAITE) observes:

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro visibly stumbled as he attempted to defend Republican billionaire donor Harlan Crow’s ownership of Nazi memorabilia and remnants from totalitarian regimes.

The Daily Wire founder used his latest podcast to defend Clarence Thomas’ from ProPublica’s report that the Supreme Court justice accepted luxurious gifts and vacations paid for by Crow, and Thomas never marked any of this down in his financial disclosures. This led to Shapiro fuming over the scrutiny Crow has received for his collection of historical pieces from toppled autocracies.

How sad, how very sad. Billy on the "Unplugged" episode of DIFFICULT PEOPLE (Billy Eichner's character) was tempted by Cecil Jefford until he saw the man's collection of Nazi artifacts. That was all it took for Billy. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Ben Shapiro and, Ben, John Mulaney is not playing the part of Harlan Crow. So exactly what is it that has turned your head?

(John Mulaney's next comedy special debuts on NETFLIX, April 25th, FYI.)

Ben Shapiro can take comfort in the fact that he's still young. John Stauber can't claim to be young. Or good looking.

@JohnStauber

·

Maybe ⁦@HRC
⁩ can help!

foxbusiness.com
Bud Light suffers bloodbath as longtime and loyal consumers revolt

against transgender campaign
Bud Light suffered a bloodbath as consumers revolted against its new transgender social-media campaign that appears to exclude longtime

For those who don't know, George Sorors has given to Human Rights Watch so John's furious. I don't like George Soros. I'm on record and that goes back to the '00s. I had to go on record because Ava and I were accused of taking Soros money. I don't take blood money. And I'm not a whore. I can't be bought. Why did the rumor start? Ava and I wrote a piece that numerous sites reposted (without our permission, which is fine) and many were, like Danny Schechter's MEDIA CHANNEL, sites that took money from Soros. We did not take money from him. We did not take money from anyone. We were not asked by anyone if they could reprint and we were not told by anyone that they had reposted us. I knew Danny offline. When I found out that the Soros claim was because of Danny's reposting, I asked him if he realized that he had damaged our reputation and he replied with a list of other sites that had reposted Ava and my piece. Those people may have received money from Soros (I know Danny did) but Ava and I didn't. And we made clear of that and that we found the assertion offensive because George Soros has made his money off the blood of others. That is his line of work. Others have to suffer for him to profit.

Unlike John Stauber, I reject George Soros. John kind of does. He pretends he's enraged by everyone who takes Soros money and but then he reTweets Susan "Medea" Benjamin, for example. Does he really not know how much money Soros has given Global Exchange?

He's deranged. (Actually both are, John and George.)

How stupid is John? I mean, I know he's stupid. Rebecca's rightly pointed out "john stauber is the 21st century david horowitz." He's gone over to the right and offers his homophobia and his transphobia and reTweets the most objectionable people -- as Rebecca and Ruth have repeatedly documented. (He also blocked me when I objected to his lying about a friend of mine in a Tweet. John just makes up garbage these days.) But has he lost all his marbles (Ruth was just saying he was senile with dementia.) The reason I ask is it was last week that the new spokesperson was noted. And yet FOX BUSINESS NEWS knows the immediate impact. From looking at sales records? No, from cherry picking a few bars. Is it even five? Bad writing bores me and I didn't make it through the whole article.

Imagine that, FOX BUSINESS "NEWS" -- from the network trying to demonize trans people -- publishes an article with no real figures or, for that matter, data and former media critic John Stauber swallows it down to the hairy root. Well, at least he's found a calling. He's kind of like a priest . . . with too much time on his hands and unlimited access to minors.

On Iraq, MEMO notes:

The Iraqi government has called on Turkiye to apologise for an attack on an airport in the country's northern Kurdish region, Reuters news agency reports.

According to the report, the Iraqi demand on Saturday came as a Turkish Defence Ministry official told the Reuters news agency that no Turkish Armed Forces operation had taken place in that region in recent days.

Iraq's presidency said the attack on Friday took place in the vicinity of the Sulaimaniyah Airport in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, denouncing it as a "flagrant aggression" against its sovereignty.

The US press that has ignored this attack continue to ignore it.

The following sites updated: