Rick67
Well-Known Angler
So do I, and kind of hard to compare a five minute rant about supporting the man over the goof of blurting out the wrong name. Complications of the jab maybe.
Last edited:
the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread
- Thread starter wader
- Start date
Blurting out multiple times. You love to chide Biden when he does that.So do I, and kind of hard to compare a five minute rant about supporting the man over the goof of blurting out the wrong name. Complications of the jab maybe.
When the shoe fits, wear it…
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
Well why wouldn’t I? He’s retarded and supposedly 80 million think he’s just kosher
Follow the science, notice how he ducked out of the competency test they forced Trump to take?
All I know is I’m paying close to a grand a month for less then I bought a month three years ago. I’m a racist for being white and I’m a bigot for not pounding another man’s poop shooter. I’m going to attack him every chance I get verbally.
wader
Well-Known Angler
460K views · 26K reactions | Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley questioned Donald Trump’s mental fitness after he appeared to confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when talking about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Ta
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley questioned Donald Trump’s mental fitness after he appeared to confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when talking about the January 6 attack...
www.facebook.com
JackPrintMD
Well-Known Angler
Is she an alien?460K views · 26K reactions | Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley questioned Donald Trump’s mental fitness after he appeared to confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when talking about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Ta
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley questioned Donald Trump’s mental fitness after he appeared to confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when talking about the January 6 attack...
what with those hands and fingers?
CEO killed when elaborate entrance to company party goes wrong - NewsBreak
The two were hoisted in a metal cage above a stage when a cable broke causing the pair to fall to the stage below.
share.newsbreak.com
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
Black national anthem to be performed at Super Bowl LVIII, stirs debate on social media | Fox News
The Black national anthem will be played at Super Bowl LVIII in February and not everyone on social media was happy about it. Andra Day to perform the song.
www.foxnews.com
The White one should be first?
wader
Well-Known Angler
What the.............................
Something doesn't sound right here.
www.yahoo.com
Something doesn't sound right here.
Three Chiefs Fans Found Dead In Backyard Of Friend’s Home After Watch Party
Three Kansas City Chiefs fans were found dead in their friend’s backyard after the owner of the home hosted a watch party for the Chiefs vs Chargers game. On January 7, the Chiefs took on the Los Angeles Chargers, a game in which the Chiefs won 13-12. Jordan Willis hosted a watch party for his […]
wader
Well-Known Angler
WTF?
www.yahoo.com
Excessively Farting Passenger Reportedly Causes American Airlines Flight to Turn Around
“We all breathed a sigh of relief when he was removed,” a witness to the gassy passenger wrote on Reddit
Maine better not get any funny ideas!!!
Vermont Becomes Latest State to Propose Wealth Taxes
Seven states tried but failed in 2023 to add new taxes on assets and income. Attempts are underway in at least 10 states this year, and proponents are optimistic about their chances.Lawmakers in Vermont are introducing legislation this week that would impose new taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents, joining a growing national campaign being pushed by Democrats who believe that the measures will gain traction as states reckon with post-pandemic budget squeezes.
One proposal in Vermont would tax people with more than $10 million in net worth on their capital gains, even if the gains have not yet been realized. Another would add a 3 percent marginal tax on individual incomes exceeding $500,000 a year — a measure that supporters contend could pump $98 million, or almost 5 percent of the annual budget, into the state’s coffers.
To underscore the bills’ importance to the Democratic leaders who control the legislature, both are being sponsored by State Representative Emilie Kornheiser of Brattleboro, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee.
“The way our tax structure is set up, our middle class is carrying an undue burden, compared to folks at the top,” said Ms. Kornheiser, who was presenting the legislation at a committee hearing on Tuesday and a news conference on Wednesday. “We want to make sure that all Vermonters are paying their fair share.”
The package of bills is part of a broader push across the country by progressive groups who hope that the political moment has arrived to shake up the tax system to address income inequality.
Called the Tax Justice Initiative, the campaign began in earnest a year ago, when legislators in seven states, including California, New York and Washington, coordinated the introduction of bills mirroring the federal wealth tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts during her 2020 presidential campaign.
None of those proposals got out of committee. But this year, with Vermont, Pennsylvania and possibly other states joining the fold, organizers are redoubling their efforts to advance the bills to floor votes and then to passage. They hope that frustration over the escalating cost of living and resentment over the many breaks afforded to the ultrawealthy will coalesce into a political groundswell.
“We know it takes more than one single session for big ideas to take root,” said Jessie Ulibarri, a former Colorado state senator who is now co-executive director of the State Innovation Exchange, one of the groups pushing for the new bills along with the State Revenue Alliance. “Policymaking is the act of taking the impossible to the inevitable,” Mr. Ulibarri said.
Many Republicans and Democrats have long resisted expanding the state taxation of individuals beyond income to include assets as well, as some of the new bills propose. Doing so in an election year may be even less appealing.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California recently rejected the idea of plugging the state’s $37.9 billion budget deficit with a wealth tax. Republicans say California’s progressive income tax system is already too onerous for high earners, and Mr. Newsom, who fashions himself a fiscal centrist and is widely believed to have presidential aspirations, has resisted adding new state taxes.
Texas voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment in November that would preemptively bar any future efforts by the state to tax wealth or net worth.
Democrats in Vermont have a supermajority in the state legislature, but even so, they also face a difficult sales job. The governor, Phil Scott, is a moderate Republican who voted for President Biden in 2020 and delivered his budget address on Tuesday; though the state is likely to face a tightening budget, Mr. Scott has been cool to suggestions that the wealthy be taxed more.
“We have a pretty progressive tax policy in the state here already,” he told reporters in November. “I’m not sure how many more of the wealthy there are, and how much more we’re going to reap from them without them moving.”
Still, when it comes to taxes, the biggest frustration many Americans have is the sense that the wealthiest aren’t paying their fair share: 82 percent of respondents in an April 2023 Pew Research poll said it bothered them, including 60 percent who said it bothered them “a lot.”
Some of the ultrawealthy agree: More than 250 billionaires and millionaires, including heirs to the Rockefeller and Disney fortunes, recently signed an open letter, coinciding with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that urged world leaders to tax them more.
The vast majority of state and local tax systems taken as a whole, including property, sales and excise taxes as well as income tax, are regressive, and the poorest 20 percent of taxpayers pay effective tax rates that are nearly 60 percent higher than those paid by the top 1 percent of households, according to new research from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan research organization that equates fairness with a progressive tax system.
So far in 2024, lawmakers in 10 states have introduced wealth-tax bills or are working on introducing them, according to Amber Wallin, senior policy and outreach director at the State Revenue Alliance. They are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington.
No states currently assess any taxes on a living individual’s net worth or unrealized capital gains. If Vermont’s bill were to become law, it would basically do that, Ms. Kornheiser explained: Someone whose assets, after exemptions, started the year worth $10 million and finished the year worth $11 million, for example, would have $1 million in unrealized gains that would be counted as income, and therefore subject to Vermont’s top income tax rate of 8.75 percent, even though nothing was sold and the gains were all on paper.
Whether any of these state proposals, if enacted, would withstand legal scrutiny remains to be seen. The Supreme Court is now weighing a case that could redefine what constitutes income, and potentially complicate efforts by lawmakers to impose levies on billionaires’ wealth.
Proponents in Maryland spent $250,000 in ad campaigns at the end of last year to bolster support for proposals that they contend could produce $1.6 billion in annual revenue.
In Connecticut, whose legislative session does not start until Feb. 7, lawmakers are preparing to unveil updated proposals, said State Representative Kate C. Farrar, the deputy leader of the Democratic majority in the House, who represents the West Hartford and Newington areas. One new proposal tackles something that federal lawmakers have failed to do: closing the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge-fund and private equity executives to pay tax rates that are lower in some cases than those paid by entry-level employees.
Some legislators and taxpayers are pushing back.
In the state of Washington, conservatives hope they have collected enough valid signatures to ask voters in November whether the state’s capital gains tax should be repealed. The tax, which was approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature in 2021, assesses a 7 percent excise tax on realized capital gains of more than $250,000, excluding real estate, and generated $900 million in revenues in 2023.
“There’s still a lot of economic unease across the country, and there’s a populist mood in the U.S. right now on both the right and the left that can help drive some of these conversations,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax policy group which has criticized wealth tax proposals.
“The problem is that feelings can make for very bad policy,” he said. “It may feel good to increase taxes on the very wealthy, but that may mean they no longer have the capacity to invest in growing companies that generate employment and create opportunity in this country.”
Cripe, seems that San Francisco and "the other" Portland take pleasure in wearing "KICK ME" signs. Bespoke garbage cans, DAFQ????
You could say San Francisco’s charming Noe Valley neighborhood has it all.
A thriving commercial corridor brimming with restaurants, bookstores and artisan coffee shops. So many throngs of young families that it has the moniker “Stroller Valley.” A town square with yoga classes and a farmer’s market.
But what Noe Valley still needs is a toilet.
Fifteen months after city officials were ready to throw a party in the Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate funding for a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place.
The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms.
Even more confounding was the explanation that the tiny bathroom would take two to three years to install because of the city’s labyrinthine permitting and building process. City leaders quickly canceled their potty party, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California took back the funds.
Late-night comedians skewered the city. Residents dubbed the saga “Toiletgate,” and the $1.7 million toilet soon became the “it” costume at local Halloween parties that year.
For many residents, the episode has illustrated why San Francisco so often gets bogged down by inefficiency. If an army of more than 30,000 city employees with a $14 billion annual budget cannot build a simple bathroom in a reasonable way, what hope is there that San Francisco can solve its housing shortage and fentanyl crisis?
“Why isn’t there a toilet here? I just don’t get it. Nobody does,” Ted Weinstein, a literary agent who lives in Noe Valley and passes by the Town Square daily, said on a recent weekday. “It’s yet another example of the city that can’t.”
Noe Valley neighbors had been pleading for a public toilet in the town square since it was converted from a parking lot in 2016. The makeover included plumbing for a bathroom, but no actual bathroom because money ran out. Children enjoying the playground and adults chatting over coffee at bright red tables have simply had to hold it.
City officials have tried to explain why $1.7 million was the normal price tag for a small public bathroom: the high cost of everything in San Francisco, including construction materials. Hiring an architect who would draw up plans. Soliciting community feedback on the design.
The difficulty of building a bathroom in San Francisco has shed light on why many projects face cost overruns and delays. A recent state report found it takes longer and costs more to build housing in San Francisco than anywhere else in California. It takes 523 days, on average, for a developer to get the initial go-ahead to construct housing — and another 605 days to get building permits.
And after spending five years and more than $500,000 to design bespoke trash cans — with the prototypes costing more than $12,000 apiece — the city has shelved a plan to put 3,000 of them on street corners because of a budget deficit.
Mayor London Breed has repeatedly vowed to slash the city’s red tape and has made it faster and easier for small business owners to get permission to open, and has backed local and state laws to speed housing construction. Her spokesman, Jeff Cretan, pointed to a quick overhaul last year of the decrepit United Nations Plaza into a skate park and a project planned nearby to turn office space into housing.
Still, he acknowledged, public projects take a lot of time and money.
“It’s worth changing the laws that are in place around construction projects like the restroom that slow things down,” he said.
In the case of the Noe Valley toilet, the bad publicity was enough to attract donors seeking good publicity. In November 2022, a month after the kerfuffle began, two businessmen in the toilet industry agreed to donate a modular bathroom and pay the installation costs, cutting the price tag by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Chad Kaufman, president of the Public Restroom Company, offered to donate a modular toilet to the town square. His friend Vaughn Buckley, the chief executive of Volumetric Building Companies, vowed to provide free architecture and engineering work to get the site ready. The pair also said they would pay local union workers to install the commode.
The project seemed to gain steam once the city and Mr. Buckley’s company finalized an agreement in April 2023. But months have gone by with only weeds and mulch sitting where the toilet was supposed to go.
Discussions appeared to break down last year, according to a Dec. 22 letter from the city’s Recreation and Parks Department to Mr. Buckley.
“Your team was unresponsive to our repeated attempts to engage,” the letter declares. “We are receiving inquiries from citizens, journalists and local lawmakers on the status of this highly publicized project. We will need to answer questions.”
One of the sticking points, the letter states, was Mr. Buckley’s concern over high costs to hire local workers to complete his portion of the work. Mr. Buckley said this week that the city’s construction costs “continue to be a challenge” and contended that the city’s permitting process contributed to the delay. The toilet has now cleared those hurdles, and he said he hopes physical work can begin next month.
But Mr. Buckley said the bathroom should be ready for use by April — for less money and sooner than under the original time frame. Mr. Kaufman, the one donating the actual toilet, is still fully on board, too.
“My portion is done,” he said, noting the toilet is ready and waiting in the yard of his bathroom factory in Minden, Nev. He said he will pay for traffic control when a truck carrying the shrink-wrapped toilet eventually makes its way down 24th Street, and for a crane that will lift the loo into place.
Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco supervisor who represents Noe Valley, said he has been trying to chip away at the city’s web of regulations that make projects so costly and time consuming. He is crafting a charter amendment to slim the city’s government structure, which includes 56 commissions and 74 oversight bodies.
Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet — even the free one — requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.
“To unravel everything that needs to be unraveled to make government work, a lot of people have to focus on that as a very high priority,” said Mr. Mandelman. “It’s easy to push that aside as you run from crisis to crisis.”
In the meantime, Governor Newsom has released the $1.7 million back to San Francisco after city officials promised to use it to install two or three public toilets, not just one.
No progress has been made on those either.
San Francisco Tried to Build a $1.7 Million Toilet. It’s Still Not Done.
An expensive public bathroom project has come to symbolize the city’s bureaucratic inefficiencies.You could say San Francisco’s charming Noe Valley neighborhood has it all.
A thriving commercial corridor brimming with restaurants, bookstores and artisan coffee shops. So many throngs of young families that it has the moniker “Stroller Valley.” A town square with yoga classes and a farmer’s market.
But what Noe Valley still needs is a toilet.
Fifteen months after city officials were ready to throw a party in the Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate funding for a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place.
The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms.
Even more confounding was the explanation that the tiny bathroom would take two to three years to install because of the city’s labyrinthine permitting and building process. City leaders quickly canceled their potty party, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California took back the funds.
Late-night comedians skewered the city. Residents dubbed the saga “Toiletgate,” and the $1.7 million toilet soon became the “it” costume at local Halloween parties that year.
For many residents, the episode has illustrated why San Francisco so often gets bogged down by inefficiency. If an army of more than 30,000 city employees with a $14 billion annual budget cannot build a simple bathroom in a reasonable way, what hope is there that San Francisco can solve its housing shortage and fentanyl crisis?
“Why isn’t there a toilet here? I just don’t get it. Nobody does,” Ted Weinstein, a literary agent who lives in Noe Valley and passes by the Town Square daily, said on a recent weekday. “It’s yet another example of the city that can’t.”
Noe Valley neighbors had been pleading for a public toilet in the town square since it was converted from a parking lot in 2016. The makeover included plumbing for a bathroom, but no actual bathroom because money ran out. Children enjoying the playground and adults chatting over coffee at bright red tables have simply had to hold it.
City officials have tried to explain why $1.7 million was the normal price tag for a small public bathroom: the high cost of everything in San Francisco, including construction materials. Hiring an architect who would draw up plans. Soliciting community feedback on the design.
The difficulty of building a bathroom in San Francisco has shed light on why many projects face cost overruns and delays. A recent state report found it takes longer and costs more to build housing in San Francisco than anywhere else in California. It takes 523 days, on average, for a developer to get the initial go-ahead to construct housing — and another 605 days to get building permits.
And after spending five years and more than $500,000 to design bespoke trash cans — with the prototypes costing more than $12,000 apiece — the city has shelved a plan to put 3,000 of them on street corners because of a budget deficit.
Mayor London Breed has repeatedly vowed to slash the city’s red tape and has made it faster and easier for small business owners to get permission to open, and has backed local and state laws to speed housing construction. Her spokesman, Jeff Cretan, pointed to a quick overhaul last year of the decrepit United Nations Plaza into a skate park and a project planned nearby to turn office space into housing.
Still, he acknowledged, public projects take a lot of time and money.
“It’s worth changing the laws that are in place around construction projects like the restroom that slow things down,” he said.
In the case of the Noe Valley toilet, the bad publicity was enough to attract donors seeking good publicity. In November 2022, a month after the kerfuffle began, two businessmen in the toilet industry agreed to donate a modular bathroom and pay the installation costs, cutting the price tag by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Chad Kaufman, president of the Public Restroom Company, offered to donate a modular toilet to the town square. His friend Vaughn Buckley, the chief executive of Volumetric Building Companies, vowed to provide free architecture and engineering work to get the site ready. The pair also said they would pay local union workers to install the commode.
The project seemed to gain steam once the city and Mr. Buckley’s company finalized an agreement in April 2023. But months have gone by with only weeds and mulch sitting where the toilet was supposed to go.
Discussions appeared to break down last year, according to a Dec. 22 letter from the city’s Recreation and Parks Department to Mr. Buckley.
“Your team was unresponsive to our repeated attempts to engage,” the letter declares. “We are receiving inquiries from citizens, journalists and local lawmakers on the status of this highly publicized project. We will need to answer questions.”
One of the sticking points, the letter states, was Mr. Buckley’s concern over high costs to hire local workers to complete his portion of the work. Mr. Buckley said this week that the city’s construction costs “continue to be a challenge” and contended that the city’s permitting process contributed to the delay. The toilet has now cleared those hurdles, and he said he hopes physical work can begin next month.
But Mr. Buckley said the bathroom should be ready for use by April — for less money and sooner than under the original time frame. Mr. Kaufman, the one donating the actual toilet, is still fully on board, too.
“My portion is done,” he said, noting the toilet is ready and waiting in the yard of his bathroom factory in Minden, Nev. He said he will pay for traffic control when a truck carrying the shrink-wrapped toilet eventually makes its way down 24th Street, and for a crane that will lift the loo into place.
Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco supervisor who represents Noe Valley, said he has been trying to chip away at the city’s web of regulations that make projects so costly and time consuming. He is crafting a charter amendment to slim the city’s government structure, which includes 56 commissions and 74 oversight bodies.
Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet — even the free one — requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.
“To unravel everything that needs to be unraveled to make government work, a lot of people have to focus on that as a very high priority,” said Mr. Mandelman. “It’s easy to push that aside as you run from crisis to crisis.”
In the meantime, Governor Newsom has released the $1.7 million back to San Francisco after city officials promised to use it to install two or three public toilets, not just one.
No progress has been made on those either.
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
I’d watch every game just to hear his name called.
“Knigga Please”
www.foxnews.com
“Knigga Please”
Indiana HS sports star Noah Knigga clears up name pronunciation as he goes viral on social media | Fox News
Knigga talked to Robert Griffin III about his name
www.foxnews.com
Rick67
Well-Known Angler
Naked photo shows Joe Biden's younger brother Frank
DailyMail.com has obtained a naked selfie posted on a gay dating site showing Frank Biden, President Joe Biden's younger brother.
What a family circus.
Avenger
Well-Known Angler
Looks like there's been some pushback:
Feds to allow some humor in highway safety messages
Federal highway officials appear to have relaxed on the use of humor and pop culture references on video highway safety signs.
www.nj.com
This world has some serious issues...no wonder they put instructions like remove plastic before eating...
nypost.com
Deep-fried toothpicks are the latest TikTok food trend – here’s why people can’t get enough
South Korean health officials are warning the public not to eat deep-fried toothpicks after videos of the disturbing practice started blowing up on social media.
nypost.com
wader
Well-Known Angler
just read that & was about to post it...................This world has some serious issues...no wonder they put instructions like remove plastic before eating...
Deep-fried toothpicks are the latest TikTok food trend – here’s why people can’t get enough
South Korean health officials are warning the public not to eat deep-fried toothpicks after videos of the disturbing practice started blowing up on social media.
Sickening
share.newsbreak.com
Parents on Long Island charged in 14-month-old baby's suspected overdose death - NewsBreak
The Suffolk County district attorney says toxicology tests revealed the baby had cocaine, fentanyl and morphine in his system.
share.newsbreak.com
Uggghhhh, this got me going. I am totally disgusted and ashamed with the way the Native Americans have been treated since Europeans found the New World. If any group deserves abject apologies for their treatment this is the group, BUT how can the enormity of their mistreatment even begin to be assessed if folks can't be educated on the culture of each tribe??? This ridiculous "idea" from the WH is a great example of the "cancel culture and/or PC Nazis" effectively doing exactly what they shouldn't be doing!!!
SMFH...
The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.
“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”
The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month. That will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space in the storied museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”
Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.
The changes are the result of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to speed up the repatriation of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred items. The process started in 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. But as those efforts have dragged on for decades, the law was criticized by tribal representatives as being too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.
This month, new federal regulations went into effect that were designed to hasten returns, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and related funerary objects for repatriation and giving more authority to tribes throughout the process.
“We’re finally being heard — and it’s not a fight, it’s a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, an archaeologist and curator with the Pechanga Band of Indians.
Even in the two weeks since the new regulations took effect, she said, she has felt the tenor of talks shift. In the past, institutions often viewed Native oral histories as less persuasive than academic studies when determining which modern-day tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
“We can say, ‘This needs to come home,’ and I’m hoping there will not be pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.
Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting lawyers and curators and holding lengthy meetings to discuss what might need to be covered up or removed. Many institutions are planning to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which can involve extensive consultations with tribal representatives.
The result has been a major shift in practices around Native American exhibitions at some of the country’s leading museums — one that will be noticeable to visitors.
At the American Museum of Natural History, segments of the collection once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large objects, like the birchbark canoe of Menominee origin in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and smaller ones, including darts that date as far back as 10,000 B.C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Field trips for students to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being rethought now that they will not have access to those galleries.
“What might seem out of alignment for some people is because of a notion that museums affix in amber descriptions of the world,” Decatur said. “But museums are at their best when they reflect changing ideas.”
Exhibiting Native American human remains is generally prohibited at museums, so the collections being reassessed include sacred objects, burial belongings and other items of cultural patrimony. As the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year or so, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concern that the rules were reaching too far into museums’ collection management practices. But since the regulations went into effect on Jan. 12, there has been little public pushback from museums.
Much of the holdings of human remains and Native cultural items were collected through practices that are now considered antiquated and even odious, including through donations by grave robbers and archaeological digs that cleared out Indigenous burial grounds.
“This is human rights work, and we need to think about it as that and not as science,” said Candace Sall, the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of Missouri, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 Native American individuals. Sall said she added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations and hopes to add more.
Criticism of the pace of repatriation had put institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History under public pressure. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals to tribal groups; it still holds the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would overhaul practices that extended to its larger collection of some 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)
A top priority of the new regulations, which are administered by the Interior Department, is to finish the work of repatriating the Native human remains in institutional holdings, which amount to more than 96,000 individuals, according to federal data published in the fall.
The government has given institutions a deadline, giving them until 2029 to prepare human remains and their burial belongings for repatriation.
In many cases, human remains and cultural objects have little information attached to them, which has slowed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought exacting anthropological and ethnographic evidence of links to a modern Native group.
Now the government is urging institutions to push forward with the information they have, in some cases relying solely on geographical information — such as what county the remains were discovered in.
There have been concerns among some tribal officials that the new rules will result in a deluge of requests from museums that may be beyond their capacities and could create a financial burden.
Speaking in June to a committee that reviews the implementation of the law, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that the rhetoric around the new regulations sometimes made it sound as if Native ancestors were “throwaway items.”
“This garage sale mentality of ‘give it all away right now’ is very offensive to us,” Willard said.
The officials who drew up the new regulations have said that institutions can get extensions to their deadlines as long as the tribes that they are consulting with agree, emphasizing the need to hold institutions accountable without overburdening tribes. If museums are found to have violated the regulations, they could be subject to fines.
Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and a former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were drawn up in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to recover dignity in death.
“Repatriation isn’t just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it brings real meaningful healing and closure to people.”
SMFH...
Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules
The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.
“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”
The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month. That will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space in the storied museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”
Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.
The changes are the result of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to speed up the repatriation of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred items. The process started in 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. But as those efforts have dragged on for decades, the law was criticized by tribal representatives as being too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.
This month, new federal regulations went into effect that were designed to hasten returns, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and related funerary objects for repatriation and giving more authority to tribes throughout the process.
“We’re finally being heard — and it’s not a fight, it’s a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, an archaeologist and curator with the Pechanga Band of Indians.
Even in the two weeks since the new regulations took effect, she said, she has felt the tenor of talks shift. In the past, institutions often viewed Native oral histories as less persuasive than academic studies when determining which modern-day tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
“We can say, ‘This needs to come home,’ and I’m hoping there will not be pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.
Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting lawyers and curators and holding lengthy meetings to discuss what might need to be covered up or removed. Many institutions are planning to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which can involve extensive consultations with tribal representatives.
The result has been a major shift in practices around Native American exhibitions at some of the country’s leading museums — one that will be noticeable to visitors.
At the American Museum of Natural History, segments of the collection once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large objects, like the birchbark canoe of Menominee origin in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and smaller ones, including darts that date as far back as 10,000 B.C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Field trips for students to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being rethought now that they will not have access to those galleries.
“What might seem out of alignment for some people is because of a notion that museums affix in amber descriptions of the world,” Decatur said. “But museums are at their best when they reflect changing ideas.”
Exhibiting Native American human remains is generally prohibited at museums, so the collections being reassessed include sacred objects, burial belongings and other items of cultural patrimony. As the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year or so, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concern that the rules were reaching too far into museums’ collection management practices. But since the regulations went into effect on Jan. 12, there has been little public pushback from museums.
Much of the holdings of human remains and Native cultural items were collected through practices that are now considered antiquated and even odious, including through donations by grave robbers and archaeological digs that cleared out Indigenous burial grounds.
“This is human rights work, and we need to think about it as that and not as science,” said Candace Sall, the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of Missouri, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 Native American individuals. Sall said she added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations and hopes to add more.
Criticism of the pace of repatriation had put institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History under public pressure. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals to tribal groups; it still holds the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would overhaul practices that extended to its larger collection of some 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)
A top priority of the new regulations, which are administered by the Interior Department, is to finish the work of repatriating the Native human remains in institutional holdings, which amount to more than 96,000 individuals, according to federal data published in the fall.
The government has given institutions a deadline, giving them until 2029 to prepare human remains and their burial belongings for repatriation.
In many cases, human remains and cultural objects have little information attached to them, which has slowed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought exacting anthropological and ethnographic evidence of links to a modern Native group.
Now the government is urging institutions to push forward with the information they have, in some cases relying solely on geographical information — such as what county the remains were discovered in.
There have been concerns among some tribal officials that the new rules will result in a deluge of requests from museums that may be beyond their capacities and could create a financial burden.
Speaking in June to a committee that reviews the implementation of the law, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that the rhetoric around the new regulations sometimes made it sound as if Native ancestors were “throwaway items.”
“This garage sale mentality of ‘give it all away right now’ is very offensive to us,” Willard said.
The officials who drew up the new regulations have said that institutions can get extensions to their deadlines as long as the tribes that they are consulting with agree, emphasizing the need to hold institutions accountable without overburdening tribes. If museums are found to have violated the regulations, they could be subject to fines.
Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and a former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were drawn up in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to recover dignity in death.
“Repatriation isn’t just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it brings real meaningful healing and closure to people.”
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