Everyone could hear the men on the street. The car, a black Dodge Challenger with gold rims, sped down the block, just past the congresswoman’s house. Two voices shot through the dark. “HEY, PRAMILA,” the first man shouted. “F— YOUUUUU.” Then came the second: “F— you, c—!”
The neighbors knew the car. It was the same Dodge Challenger they had seen several times that summer. But Pramila Jayapal didn’t know this yet.
She was on the couch, watching the psychological thriller “Mindhunter” with her husband, Steve Williamson. It was July 9 in Arbor Heights, a West Seattle neighborhood laid out in neat sweeps of grass and pavement. They paused the show. Williamson got up and went outside. The items on the porch sat undisturbed: sneakers, turquoise Crocs, a dog leash, two hanging plants swaying in the night air. Then they heard the men again. Security footage picked up what the men said and the sound of heavy-metal music coming from the car. One shouted something about “India,” the country where Jayapal was born. The voices were hard and clear. “F—ing c—,” one of them said.
“Tell Pramila to kill herself — then we’ll stop, motherf—er.” Then came a honk. Then another long “F— YOUUUUU.” On the porch, Williamson waved an index finger and went back inside. The men drove off.
Inside, Jayapal picked up her phone and dialed 911. But when she saw the car leave, she hung up before it could connect. Maybe she should contact the Capitol Police, the D.C. agency that protects members of Congress. She wasn’t sure. Maybe she had been doxed. There had been instances of obscene yelling at the house that summer, this she knew. She had reported those to Capitol Police. But she didn’t know then what dozens of pages of police reports and court filings would later reveal — that one of her visitors that night had been there before, in the same Dodge Challenger. She didn’t know that he had driven by her house between three and seven times since late June, or that the other male voice that night belonged to his adult son, as he would later tell investigators. She didn’t know that from the house across the street, her neighbor had seen the Dodge earlier that same evening, or that down the block, another neighbor had seen it, too, just a week before. She didn’t know that the man in the Dodge had emailed her congressional office back in January, to express his distaste for her political party, and for her, the 56-year-old three-term Democrat from Seattle, the chair of the House Progressive Caucus and a high-profile antagonist to Donald Trump.
“I am a freedom loving nonregistered libertarian who votes in every election no matter how big or small,” the man wrote in his email.
“You, Pramila, are an anti-American s—pit creating Marxist.”
“We are incompatible.”
Jayapal didn’t know that his distaste would mutate into action. When she heard the yelling stop, when the men drove off into the night, she had no idea that one of them would be back a half-hour later to yell some more, and that he’d have a loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol on his hip, later seized by police.
On paper, at least, the whole thing was over in 47 minutes. But the anatomy of political violence is more tangled than the events of a single case. Threats against members of Congress have risen year after year, according to data from the Capitol Police: 9,625 in 2021, up from 3,939 in 2017. Officers logged nearly 2,000 cases in the first three months of this year alone. Among the statistics, there are thousands of stories like Jayapal’s, each one unraveling with its own special complexity in the lives and homes of elected officials.
“We sign up for a lot of things,” Jayapal said, sitting in her backyard. “It should not be that you get this kind of abuse and racism and sexism directed at you. But you have to accept it if you want to do this job.”
Talking about that night now, five weeks later, in the house where Jayapal and Williamson have lived for almost six years, those 47 minutes take on new life. They have shown Jayapal just how many gaps exist in congressional security. The system is like a “black box,” she said, and she is lobbying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to fix it.
They have changed the way she goes about her work as a public official, physically and psychologically — the routes she drives, the tracking device she keeps on her phone, the alarm it sounds when she unwittingly comes within 1,000 feet of the man with the Dodge. It already happened once, on her way to an appointment on a Sunday in August. They have changed the way she thinks about her home, too. The house looks different now — she and Williamson see all the ways it needs to be “hardened.” So did the neighborhood. The block “had been such a safe space,” Jayapal said. Now it was “tainted.”
“We felt threatened,” she said. “We still do.”
The man, identified by police as 49-year-old Brett Forsell, is out on bail. He lives seven blocks away.
At 11:23 p.m., just before Forsell was detained, a security camera captured him saying, “I’m setting up camp. It’s my right as an American.” He informed police he had a gun on his right hip. It was a registered .40-caliber Glock with a round in the chamber, according to the police report. Forsell was taken into custody. In the back of the car, he told police he had been “peacefully protesting.”
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
I read the whole article. This is a horrible threat!
With eight weeks to go until the midterm elections, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, called on physicians on Friday to weigh in on the threat his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, poses to reproductive rights if he wins a Senate seat.
In Fetterman’s latest ad, obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Lisa Perriera is seen speaking at a podium about Oz’s pro-forced pregnancy beliefs.
“Oz has extreme anti-choice views and has said he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest,” Perriera says, warning that if he is allowed to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate, he “would only make the struggle for my patients harder” as pregnant people across the nation face more limited access to abortion care.
Oz said at an event in May that he believes abortion is “murder” at any stage of pregnancy, and suggested he would not support the right to abortion care for patients whose pregnancies result from rape or incest.
Three months later the celebrity doctor claimed he supports exceptions to abortion bans including when a patient is a survivor of rape or incest or faces life-threatening complications—but as cases in Texas and Louisiana have shown, even such exceptions can put pregnant patients in danger as doctors and hospitals weigh whether they can provide medically ncessary care without breaking state laws.
“Dr. Oz’s far-right position tearing away the right to safe, legal abortion care puts him in the radical right wing of our politics and woefully out of step with Pennsylvania voters,” Perriera says in Fetterman’s ad.
A poll taken by Franklin & Marshall University last month found that 9 in 10 Pennsylvanians support abortion rights in at least some circumstances.
The ad also features Debbie Fickes, a retired OB-GYN nurse.
“No state, no government, no church has the right to force a woman to give birth against her will,” Fickes says.
Republicans have indicated that they plan to pass a nationwide ban on abortion care if they win back control of Congress and eventually the White House.
Dr. Oz, literally: AbOrTiOn Is MuRdEr 🚨
He will try to take away women's reproductive freedom I can’t stress this enough pic.twitter.com/3BMWxZsjLh
The Clintons’ corrupt ways and backstabbing made them many enemies in Arkansas who saw through their phony veneer.
In his memoir, Jim McDougal, who took the fall for the Whitewater scandal and died of a heart attack in prison, wrote that the Clintons were “like a tornado who came into people’s lives” and “destroyed them;” they “took without giving back in return.”
These comments should be borne in mind by voters if Hillary vies one last time to achieve her dream of the presidency.
Like a tornado, she will come into people’s lives, conning them into a vote, and then betray and destroy them, as she and her husband have always done.
Dave Luoma, Don Zapp, and Dave Morrison had never seen anything like it. It was just past noon on May 29, 1990, and the three British Columbian loggers had wandered into a twenty-five-acre grove of inconceivably large trees hidden on the northern bank of Vancouver Island’s White River. Every major species of Northwest conifer was here — western red cedar, spruce, and Douglas fir — and most were so tall that their tops disappeared into the hanging mists above, making this entire place feel as if it belonged as much to the heavens as it did the Earth. The tallest trees gave off a sweet scent and were covered in thick, almost ironlike bark speckled with the bluish-green hues of forest lichens, which Luoma, Zapp, and Morrison knew were all signs of exceptional age. The largest conifers on the northern coast of Vancouver Island typically grow to a height of about 150 feet, with an occasional specimen reaching 200 feet. Many trees in this grove stretched more than 250 feet into the air, and the largest would later be measured at more than 285 feet tall.
The only thing more remarkable than the size of the timber was that until Luoma, Zapp, and Morrison discovered it, no one knew this grove existed. Or, at the very least, it wasn’t identified on any maps or catalogued in any land surveys, despite the fact that all the surrounding woods had been intensely logged during the preceding century. Foresters and wildlife biologists would later hypothesize that the grove’s secrecy was a product of the same topographic and geographic conditions that allowed its trees to grow so tall. The grove sits in a small depression carved out by the nearby river that shielded its trees from winds — and human eyes — for centuries. These were the realities of life and labor in the late twentieth-century Northwest woods. And yet, when Luoma, Zapp, and Morrison discovered the grove roughly halfway through their workday, they didn’t even have to talk amongst themselves before they knew what they were going to do. “As soon as we walked back in there and saw that stand,” Zapp later said, “we just couldn’t do it. That was it, right then and there.” After spending an hour wandering the elk trails that wound through the stand, the men hoisted their saws on their shoulders, checked that the laces on their boots were still tight, and began ascending the muddy slope to their pickup waiting on the ridgeline above. They intended to return to town, tell their employer about the grove, and then say in no uncertain terms that they refused to cut it.
I bet the three have families who would love to see the grove. You would not believe the heartbreak being expressed in comments, etc. now cos of ecological damage. The giant CA sequoias are an excellent example.
I have been spending far too much time on moonofalabama.org on the war in Ukraine. I agree that the US/NATO were pushing Russia and Russia is pushing back. It looks like this will hasten a multipolar world.
The propaganda on my two main issues: Covid and mRNA vaccines and Ukraine is totally out of site.
The climate crisis has driven the world to the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points, according to a major study.
It shows five dangerous tipping points may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating caused by humanity to date.
These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.
At 1.5C of heating, the minimum rise now expected, four of the five tipping points move from being possible to likely, the analysis said. Also at 1.5C, an additional five tipping points become possible, including changes to vast northern forests and the loss of almost all mountain glaciers.
In total, the researchers found evidence for 16 tipping points, with the final six requiring global heating of at least 2C to be triggered, according to the scientists’ estimations. The tipping points would take effect on timescales varying from a few years to centuries.
“The Earth may have left a ‘safe’ climate state beyond 1C global warming,” the researchers concluded, with the whole of human civilisation having developed in temperatures below this level. Passing one tipping point is often likely to help trigger others, producing cascades. But this is still being studied and was not included, meaning the analysis may present the minimum danger.
Prof Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was part of the study team, said: “The world is heading towards 2-3C of global warming.
“This sets Earth on course to cross multiple dangerous tipping points that will be disastrous for people across the world. To maintain liveable conditions on Earth and enable stable societies, we must do everything possible to prevent crossing tipping points.”
The nine global tipping points identified are: the collapse of the Greenland, west Antarctic and two parts of the east Antarctic ice sheets, the partial and total collapse of Amoc, Amazon dieback, permafrost collapse and winter sea ice loss in the Arctic.
The assessment of the Amazon tipping point did not include the effects of deforestation. “The combination of the warming and the deforestation could bring that a lot sooner,” said Armstrong McKay.
A further seven tipping points would have severe regional effects, including the die-off of tropical coral reefs and changes to the west African monsoon. Other potential tipping points still being studied include the loss of ocean oxygen and major shifts in the Indian summer monsoon.
Today is 9/11 down here. So far, east central FL has not been threatened by either a tropical storm or a hurricane. We know climate chaos is worldwide. The damage to the west African monsoon is a factor. Our daily t-storms are more intense as is the heat and humidity. Not good.
A thankful T and R, jcb!! 🙂 Well, gee whiz, since there is no gun control in this 3rd or 4th (choose one) world country, what do you expect? People can even take loaded weapons into bars! Talk about the height of dangerous stupidity! 🙁
"Forensic nurses who care for sexual assault victims in the emergency room said they would no longer provide morning-after contraception for fear it would be considered an abortion drug." https://t.co/AryP5quqMl
wpDiscuz
The abuse progressive politicians get (especially women of color) is frightening.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/08/congress-pramila-jayapal-threats-stalking/
I read the whole article. This is a horrible threat!
“peacefully protesting,” my arse! Crap like that white trash yahoo would shoot a genuine peaceful, anti-war protester in a nanosecond!
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/09/09/ob-gyns-warn-abortion-threat-dr-oz-poses-latest-fetterman-ad
This is a Horror story that I hope never happens. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/09/what-if-the-2024-whispers-are-right/ Queen of Chaos: Her record, and her own words, show us exactly what we can expect from a Hillary Clinton presidency, write Jeremy Kuzmarov and Steve Brown‘Like a Tornado’
Hopefully telling the truth
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3631601-hillary-clinton-says-she-will-never-run-for-president-again/
I didn’t vote for her in 2016, and I won’t vote for her or anything similar now.
The DNC would pull a “Reserve activation clause” on her or an in case of emergency break glass scenario.
Now for something more upbeat https://inthesetimes.com/article/timber-wars-workers-northwest-old-growth-forests-working-class-environmentalism
I bet the three have families who would love to see the grove. You would not believe the heartbreak being expressed in comments, etc. now cos of ecological damage. The giant CA sequoias are an excellent example.
I think it’s really a promotion…but the humor is nice and light.
The image isn’t showing on my desktop.
Along with great compensation package😁
Have not been here for a while, so these may be repeats.
Michael Hudson on Student Debt Relief, Inflation, Ukraine Disaster Capitalism, Petrodollar Challenge
I have been spending far too much time on moonofalabama.org
on the war in Ukraine. I agree that the US/NATO were pushing Russia and Russia is pushing back. It looks like this will hasten a multipolar world.
The propaganda on my two main issues: Covid and mRNA vaccines and Ukraine is totally out of site.
I read the transcript of that interview. It was excellent. I avoid video/the boob tube cos of the propaganda. It’s hysterical screaming now.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on-brink-five-climate-tipping-points-study-finds
Today is 9/11 down here. So far, east central FL has not been threatened by either a tropical storm or a hurricane. We know climate chaos is worldwide. The damage to the west African monsoon is a factor. Our daily t-storms are more intense as is the heat and humidity. Not good.
A thankful T and R, jcb!! 🙂 Well, gee whiz, since there is no gun control in this 3rd or 4th (choose one) world country, what do you expect? People can even take loaded weapons into bars! Talk about the height of dangerous stupidity! 🙁