It’s another big news day today. Here’s what’s happening.
Big media is focused on the missing submersible with billionaires on board and there’s breaking news at doesn’t sound good.
UPDATE: I just saw on CNN that the debris appears to be from the submersible.
BREAKING: The U.S. Coast Guard says it has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough. https://t.co/4d80aCKXpw
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that an underwater vessel has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough in an increasingly urgent around-the-clock effort.
The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter gave no details, such as whether officials believe the debris is connected to the Titan, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic. The search passed the critical 96-hour mark Thursday when breathable air could have run out.
The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.
It’s interesting to watch the national fascination with this story [the missing submersible], especially compared to, say, the attention paid to the sinking of another boat, this one full of desperate migrants in the Mediterranean last week; dozens were killed, and hundreds of men, women and children are still missing. Many migrants, mostly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, may be dead.
And the Greek Coast Guard, despite indications that the boat was in distress, did not intervene, blaming the smuggled migrants who they say didn’t want help. Widespread outrage and anguish for the hundreds of souls taking an extraordinary risk in search of a better life, and those who failed them along the way, seems much more justifiable than the frenzy over a small, lost group of hyper-niche tourists, tragic as both circumstances may turn out to be. And yet, while the migrant story is far from being ignored, it’s not receiving the same breathless moment-by-moment updates accorded the lost Titanic hunters.
But human interest, we know, does not at all run proportional to human suffering, and often has little to do with who or what is deserving of significant attention. And the story of a vessel occupied by wealthy curiosity-seekers, lost in the depths of the ocean in its search to find a vessel occupied by wealthy curiosity-seekers lost in the depths of the ocean, has all the component parts of an addictive story: irony, suspense, potential tragedy, potential glory, lifestyles of the rich, aspiration and hubris.
Read more at at the CNN link.
It’s now coming out that there were many safety issues with the submersible.
They learned that the viewport of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, even though the Titanic shipwreck lies nearly 4,000 meters below sea level.
Experts from within and outside OceanGate raised concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible as far back as 2018, years before it went missing during a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck site.
Several of those complaints have resurfaced this week, as the frantic search for the vessel — and its five passengers — continues.
“It hasn’t surprised us,” said Will Kohnen, the chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Submarine Committee (formerly the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee), about the Titan’s disappearance. “We’ve been aware of this project for some time and have had some concerns.”
In March 2018, after one of the international industry group’s annual conferences, Kohnen drafted a letter to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush — the pilot of the missing vessel — expressing “unanimous concern” on behalf of its members about the development of the Titan and its planned Titanic expeditions.
“Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by Oceangate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry,” he wrote, according to a copy obtained by the New York Times….
Kohnen told Morning Edition‘s A Martínez on Wednesday that the group’s main concern was a lack of oversight and adherence to industry-accepted safety guidelines.
“Most of the companies in this industry that are building submersibles and deep submersibles follow a fairly well-established framework of certification and verification and oversight, through classification societies,” he said. “And that was at the root of OceanGate’s project, is that they were going to go solo, going without that type of official oversight, and that brought a lot of concerns.”
The director of marine operations at OceanGate, the company whose submersible went missing Sunday on an expedition to the Titanic in the North Atlantic, was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems before its maiden voyage, according to a filing in a 2018 lawsuit first reported by Insider and New Republic.
David Lochridge was terminated in January 2018 after presenting a scathing quality control report on the vessel to OceanGate’s senior management, including founder and CEO Stockton Rush, who is on board the missing vessel.
According to a court filing by Lochridge, the preamble to his report read: “Now is the time to properly address items that may pose a safety risk to personnel. Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place.”
The report detailed “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns,” according to the filing. These included Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.” These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had “prevalent flaws.”
More details at the link.
Samuel Alito has temporarily taken the pressure off Clarence Thomas.
A couple of days ago, ProPublica published a story about a luxury fishing trip to that Samuel Alito took with Leonard Leo. They were accompanied by billionaire Paul Singer, who flew both men on his private plane.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska with billionaire Paul Singer, whose hedge fund then had repeated business before SCOTUS over the years that followed.
Alito never disclosed the trip or recused himself from Singer's cases. (THREAD) pic.twitter.com/mVWEInOUfa
In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.
Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.
Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.
“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.
ProPublica sent a series of questions to Alito before publishing the story. Instead of answering them, Alito got his pals at the Wall Street Journal to publish a whiny defense–before the ProPublica article came out.
Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step Tuesday of using the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend his travel with a billionaire who often has cases before the Supreme Court, hours before ProPublica published a story detailing their ties. https://t.co/WuQpce4Q6K
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of responding to questions about his travel with a billionaire who frequently has cases before the Supreme Court hours before an article detailing their ties had even been published.
In an extraordinary salvo in a favored forum, Justice Alito defended himself in a pre-emptive article in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a luxury fishing trip in 2008….
Justice Alito said he had spoken to Mr. [Paul] Singer [who flew Alito to Alaska on his private plane] only a handful of times, including on two occasions when Mr. Singer introduced the justice before speeches. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially,” Justice Alito wrote.
He added that he did not know of Mr. Singer’s connection to the cases before the court, including one in which the court issued a 7-to-1 decision in favor of one of Mr. Singer’s businesses, with Justice Alito in the majority.
But Mr. Singer’s connection to the case, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, was widely reported. A Forbes article covering the decision bore the headline “Supreme Court Hands Billionaire Paul Singer a Victory Over Argentina.” An article in The New York Times noted that the parties to the case included “NML Capital, an affiliate of Elliott Management, the hedge fund founded by Paul Singer.”
Alito’s justification for taking the free private plane flight was ludicrous and got him mocked all day long on Twitter.
Justice Alito said he was not required to disclose the trip on Mr. Singer’s private jet in “a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.”
A federal law requires disclosures of gifts over a certain value but makes exceptions for “personal hospitality of any individual” at “the personal residence of that individual or his family or on property or facilities owned by that individual or his family.” Justice Alito wrote that a jet is such a facility, quoting from dictionary definitions.
In March, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, issued new guidelines requiring disclosure of travel by private jet and stays in commercial properties like resorts.
This morning, CNN published another embarrassing story for Alito.
Alito in the hot seat over trips to Alaska and Rome he accepted from groups and individuals who lobby the Supreme Court – CNN Politics https://t.co/hq2PUABuiK
Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.
After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.
At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”
During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”
Justices are often known for usually maintaining a low profile, and the court’s public information office in recent years has been less forthcoming about their public appearances. But the court’s ruling last year in the abortion case propelled the nine jurists and their rulings to new heights and fueled new questions about the justices’ behavior both on and off the bench.
Alito joined the majority in ruling in favor of the Religious Liberty Initiative’s position in several of the cases for which it submitted briefs, including the one that reversed Roe, which he authored, and a 2022 decision that said a high school football coach had the right to pray on the 50-yard line after games.
I wonder which right wing justice will be next? I hope some investigative journalist is looking into which billionaire(s) have given gifts to Brett Kavanaugh. It’s also notable that the introductions to the billionaire sugar daddies came from former Federalist Society head Leonard Leo. Check out this piece from Josh Marshall at TPM: Leonard Leo’s SCOTUS-FedSoc Sponsor Family Program.
There’s big news today on the Trump stolen documents case.
Last night, Jack Smith sent the first installment of discovery to Trump’s lawyers.
Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing https://t.co/OdyBjcTGD8
Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.
Prosecutors in the filing used the plural “interviews” to describe recordings of Trump – made with his consent – obtained by the special counsel that have now been turned over to his defense team. It is unclear what the additional recordings may be of or how relevant they will be to the Justice Department’s case against the former president, though the recordings include the Bedminster tape where Trump speaks about a secret military document to a writer and others, the prosecutors said in the filing.
he prosecutors’ update to the court on Wednesday night marks another swift move toward trial, which the Justice Department has said should happen quickly, and captures at least some of the extent of the evidence investigators secured to build their historic case against Trump.
The first batch of discovery production – made up of unclassified materials – includes transcripts of witness testimony in front of the grand juries in Washington, DC, and Florida that were probing the mishandling of government documents from Trump’s White House. It also includes materials collected via subpoenas and search warrants; memos detailing other witness interviews given through mid-May in the investigation; and copies of the surveillance footage investigators obtained in the probe.
The first batch of evidence, provided on Wednesday, “includes the grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case,” the special counsel’s office wrote.
More from Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:
New: Justice Dept was examining evidence within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last year that he might have handled classified documents at his Bedminster club — and was adamant that Trump legal search there. @guardian exclusive https://t.co/arnBsLmo6V
Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s retention of national security material were examining evidence within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last year that he might have handled classified documents at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, according to two people close to the matter.
The indications of classified documents at Bedminster so alarmed prosecutors that they focused part of the investigation on whether Trump might have transported the materials or disclosed their contents there in addition to refusing to return them to the government, the people said….
The suspicion that Trump travelled with classified documents between Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence, and Bedminster, his summer residence, started early in the criminal investigation that intensified after the FBI search and culminated in Trump being accused of violating the Espionage Act….
Within weeks of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, the justice department sought to act on the indications of classified documents at Bedminster when it told the Trump legal team that prosecutors believed the former president still possessed classified materials, the people said.
The message in the letter, which became a formal court motion filed under seal weeks later, was clear: arrange for new searches of all of the Trump properties because, as of that time, the only place that had been combed for classified documents was the Mar-a-Lago resort.
Whether to acquiesce with the request split the Trump legal team. Trump in-house counsel Boris Epshteyn and Trump lawyer Chris Kise were uneasy about being ordered around by the government, while the other Trump lawyers Tim Parlatore and Jim Trusty suggested a cooperative approach.
The legal team ultimately decided on working with the justice department and, in one exchange, asked prosecutors which Trump properties and where at the Trump properties they wanted them to search.
A few more details at the link.
Trump now knows who has testified in the grand jury and what secrets they have revealed. He must be throwing ketchup around at Bedminster. He has posted several insane messages on Truth Social. Here’s a sample:
Translation: He got his discovery yesterday, he knows who is testifying against him and mostly what they are going to say, he knows he’s screwed, so he’s panicking and begging Kevin McCarthy to save him somehow. pic.twitter.com/Dw6CHLZ12g
Now that the long weekend is over, there is quite a bit of news breaking. These are the three biggest stories of the day so far: a tentative date has been set for Trump’s trial in the stolen documents case; yesterday, Trump gave an interview to Brett Baier of Fox News in which he confessed to multiple crimes; and today, Hunter Biden reached an agreement with the Feds.
I reviewed Cannon’s entire criminal case history, she has always set a super fast trial date, as a matter of practice, and then repeatedly continued it as trial matters arose. In every single case, big and small, save for a few quick plea deals. https://t.co/cDh4eLrl00
Donald Trump’s criminal trial for hoarding military secrets at Mar-a-Lago has a starting date — Aug. 14 — but don’t expect it to hold.
U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon bookmarked the last two weeks in August for the historic trial, part of an omnibus order setting some early ground rules and deadlines for the case. That would represent a startlingly rapid pace for a case that is expected to be complicated and require lengthy pretrial wrangling over extraordinarily sensitive classified secrets.
But a review of Cannon’s criminal cases since she took the bench in late 2020 suggests this is standard practice for the Florida-based judge. She typically sets trial dates six to eight weeks from the start of a case, only to allow weeks- or months-long delays as issues arise and the parties demand more time to prepare. While her order on Tuesday starts the clock on a slew of important pretrial matters in the Trump case, it’s not likely to resemble anything close to the timeframe that will ultimately govern the case.
Aileen Cannon, the federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s latest criminal case, has run just four, relatively routine criminal trials in her short tenure on the bench — a stark contrast to the historic and complex proceedings she’s about to undertake related to the former president.
A review of the Southern District of Florida dockets show Cannon’s criminal work has consisted almost entirely of a few categories of cases: distribution of a controlled substance, illegal reentry of people who had previously been deported, felons in possession of firearms and child pornography or trafficking. Nearly all have resulted in plea agreements, and the four that did not were handled in brief trials that lasted no more than three days apiece in court.
Those cases have featured few significant opinions or rulings of note on complex issues of law. And Cannon, 42, has almost always sided with prosecutors on routine challenges to evidence, motions to suppress evidence by defendants and efforts to dismiss various cases.
Cannon’s thin resume, combined with her surprisingly deferential rulings to Trump — who appointed her in November 2020 — in a civil lawsuit challenging the FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago estate last year, have raised questions about her readiness for the complexities of the first-ever federal prosecution of a former president. Prosecutors say he hoarded national military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and concealed them from government officials seeking to recover them.
There’s one exception, however, to Cannon’s judicial history that has largely escaped scrutiny. For nearly one-and-a-half years, she’s shepherded a complex, 10-defendant health care fraud case to the verge of trial, and in the course has litigated tangled and fraught issues of attorney-client privilege and motions to suppress — some of which could be precursors to battles in the upcoming Trump case.
Read more details at Politico.
If you are a Twitter denizen, you may have seen some clips from Trump’s weird interview with Fox News’s Brett Baier. I can just imagine how his defense attorneys reacted. But they already know he can’t be controlled–even when it’s for his own good. Here are some media and expert reactions.
Former President Donald J. Trump claimed to a Fox News anchor in an interview on Monday that he did not have a classified document with him in a meeting with a book publisher even though he referred during that meeting to “secret” information in his possession.
The July 2021 meeting — at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — was recorded by at least two people in attendance, and a transcript describes the former president pointing to a pile of papers and then saying of Gen. Mark A. Milley, whom he had been criticizing: “Look. This was him. They presented me this — this is off the record, but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”
On the recording, according to two people familiar with its contents, Mr. Trump can be heard flipping through papers as he talks to a publisher and writer working on a book by his final White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Mr. Trump and the people in the meeting do not explicitly say what document the former president is holding.
According to the transcript, Mr. Trump describes the document, which he claims shows General Milley’s desire to attack Iran, as “secret” and “like, highly confidential.” He also declares that “as president, I could have declassified it,” adding, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
But in the interview on Monday, with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Mr. Trump denied that he had been referring to an actual document and claimed to have simply been referring to news clippings and magazine pieces.
“There was no document,” Mr. Trump insisted. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
Donald Trump essentially confessed to the crime of which he’s accused: stealing and sharing top-secret government information.https://t.co/Dz48ud4mnt
A WEEK AFTER his second post-presidential arrest, this one for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, Donald Trump turned to Fox News host Bret Baier on Monday to make the case for why he should lead the country again. But he ended up essentially confessing to the crime of which he’s accused: stealing and sharing top-secret government information.
Before that, however, Baier pressed Trump to explain why he kept the boxes of classified materials at Mar-a-Lago and refused to comply with government requests to return them, as described in his new felony indictment. In between dismissing the case as “the document hoax” or accusing other presidents of illegally hoarding their own sensitive documents, Trump offered the bizarre explanation that he couldn’t give up the boxes to authorities because they also contained… his clothes.
“Like every other president I take things out,” Trump said. “In my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry. People packed it up and left. I had clothing in there, I had all sorts of personal items in there. Much, much stuff.” After a brief digression to call his former attorney general Bill Barr a “coward,” Trump reiterated, “I have got a lot of things in there. I will go through those boxes. I have to go through those boxes. I take out personal things.” Finally, he clarified what those items were: “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things: golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things,” he said.
That really isn’t a good excuse, since government documents are not supposed to be mixed with other papers, much less clothing. More from the RS piece:
Later on in the interview, Trump and Baier got into a debate on the results of the 2020 election, with the Fox anchor trying in vain to remind the former president that he lost while Trump rambled on about fake ballots. The rest of the conversation involved Trump bashing Biden’s international diplomacy, from Ukraine to the Middle East to China, and musing about how much better things were with him in office.
Afterward, Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said that Trump’s answers regarding matters of the law were “on the verge on incoherent,” and specifically mentioned the bizarre detail of not returning the boxes of classified documents because they hadn’t been “separated from his golf shirts or whatever he was saying.” Overall, Hume said, it sounded as if Trump was making the argument that the papers were his to do with as he liked, “which I don’t think is going to hold up in court.”
Trump also claimed he was “too busy” to go through the documents and take out his personal stuff. He claimed that justifies his having one of his lawyers certify to the Feds that there were no more documents at Mar-a-Lago, ordering Walt Nauta to move the documents around to hide them from his lawyers, and refusing to obey a subpoena.
Finally, Hunter Biden has reached a deal with the Trump-appointed prosecutor investigating his case.
The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case. https://t.co/KZ4fsv8taw
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 20, 2023
President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.
The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case.The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration — are likely to face similar scrutiny.
The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the plea deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed.
It’s a busy news day. I’ll add a few more stories in the comment thread. Have a tremendous Tuesday everyone!
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June is rapidly becoming my favorite month. We’ve been celebrating Pride all month and are doing Juneteenth. You can smell the white beans, andouille, and rice coming down the hall. I realized so many things in the last two days about this neighborhood which was developed after the Louisiana Purchase in 1812. Enjoyment was mostly possible because the tourists have gone. Temple and I danced in the streets for the third Sunday of Pride Tea. I am now a fan of Dancing Queen which I used to flip the channel to avoid back in the day.
My Dentist office defines the magic of the gumbo pot of our country. My hygienist and dentist are second generation from the South Vietnam Diaspora. The office area and the patients are racially diverse. This would have been impossible not that long ago. The second thing is I thank all of the Congress and administrations that continue to support Medicare. I do not know what I would do with out it.
We’re in the midst of an extremely long and dangerous heatwave. We cannot stop using fossil fuels fast enough. This is the second year of this and it’s not normal at all. There are so many things you can experience if you just take time to look around you and see the daily sites and people that are part of your neighborhood. I guess I should’ve spent more time reading Golden Books and watching Mister Rogers and Sesame Street. It’s all here.
Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.
The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.
She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”
“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”
Tempie Cummins, who was formerly enslaved, shared her story with a historian who recorded it for a New Deal writers’ project.
That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.
Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.
One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”
“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.
“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”
Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.
“The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”
So many events in our Country’s history are shameful. Covering them up only serves the same masters who want to keep every one who is not like them oppressed and worse off or in a form of servitude.
In 1838 Cherokee people were forcibly moved from their homeland and relocated to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. They resisted their Removal by creating their own newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, as a platform for their views. They sent their educated young men on speaking tours throughout the United States. They lobbied Congress, and created a petition with more than 15,000 Cherokee signatures against Removal. They took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that they were a sovereign nation n Worcester vs. Georgia (1832). President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court decision, enforced his Indian Removal Act of 1830, and pushed through the Treaty of New Echota.
In 1838 Cherokee people were forcibly taken from their homes, incarcerated in stockades, forced to walk more than a thousand miles, and removed to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died and many are buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried.”
Vanessa Carr Kennedy (My Dear Friend) Drag Queen Story Time at Longview Gardens Family Day. Note, no children, or parents were harmed in the filming of this movie.
Looking for a federal law to be declared unconstitutional? Religion may well be your best bet — and that’s true regardless of how “real” your religious beliefs are.
That’s part of the thinking behind one case the Supreme Court heard this session and will resolve soon. In 303 Creative vs. Elenis, the court is considering the constitutionality of a Colorado statute prohibiting most businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers. Lori Smith, a Christian webpage designer, had wanted to expand into the wedding website business — but only for opposite-sex couples, a plan that would have violated the Colorado law at issue. Her lawyers made the case on free speech grounds, but given Smith’s religious beliefs, “religious freedom” represents an undeniable backdrop to the suit.
The 303 Creative case is no outlier. Religion-based claims have proliferated in recent years, and plaintiffs have often won because courts have almost invariably found their religious beliefs to be sincerely held. Meanwhile, the burden of proof for the government — that it is not unduly interfering in religious practice — has become much harder to prove.
A string of recent Supreme Court cases demonstrates how religion offers litigants a ready path to disobey laws without consequence. In the 2021-22 term alone, the Supreme Court decided several high-profile cases that affirmed religion’s supremacy.
In Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, the justices determined that a high school football coach could not be placed on leave for violating a rule against public prayer. In Carson vs. Makin, it held that Maine was constitutionally required to subsidize religious schools. And in Ramirez vs. Collier, it postponed the execution of an inmate after he asked, at the 11th hour, that his pastor lay hands on him — despite having previously explicitly disclaimed the same form of relief.
Then, in a narrow 5-4 decision last September, the court left in place a New York state court decision requiring Yeshiva University to recognize an LGBTQ+ student group over the school’s purported religious objections. Ruling on technical grounds, the majority directed the university to first seek relief in state court. But four dissenting justices would have granted review to vindicate the university’s 1st Amendment rights — and those justices say that the university would “surely” win if the case comes back up, after state proceedings conclude.
How did these results come to be?
In the conventional understanding, religious exercise was cast off as an almost disfavored right. Courts were, historically, generally willing to let the government prevail whenever public policy and religion came into conflict. Now though, when the court says that government action affecting religious exercise must satisfy “strict scrutiny” — a notoriously difficult burden — it actually means it.
But that’s not the full story. Courts aren’t just making it harder for the government in these cases; they’re also making things easier for plaintiffs.
Plaintiffs must in theory show that their religious beliefs are sincerely held before strict scrutiny can kick in. This requirement dates to a 1944 decision, United States vs. Ballard, which for many years served as an effective gatekeeper against cries of “religion” casually trumping the law.
How is it that so many of us–to include women–so definitely way up over 50% are now being subjected to disenfranchisement and not included. Meanwhile, we’re stuck in this Rule of Law Soap Opera because a bunch of idiots who voted for this man and set up laws to disenfranchise us. They also stacked courts so that the government has more say in what happens with women’s bodies than we do. How is this the land of the Free?
A federal magistrate judge Monday agreed to a motion from the Justice Department to block former President Trump from disclosing information relating to the Mar-a-Lago case, after prosecutors said the investigation remains ongoing.
The order sides with the Justice Department in allowing Trump to see evidence collected in the case — including classified documents — but only in the presence of his attorneys.
It also blocks him from disseminating any information from the case with reporters or on social media, mirroring a similar order agreed to in the hush money case being prosecuted by authorities in New York.
“Defendants shall only have access to Discovery Materials under the direct supervision of Defense Counsel or a member of Defense Counsel’s staff. Defendants shall not retain copies of Discovery Material,” Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, wrote in the order.
The Justice Department in its Friday request said that restrictions were required, as its investigation could yield additional arrests.
“The materials also include information pertaining to ongoing investigations, the disclosure of which could compromise those investigations and identify uncharged individuals,” the department wrote.
After all the excitement the last two weeks, today feels like a somewhat slow news day. It’s a long weekend, so that might have something to do with it. Anyway, I have found several interesting stories to share with you.
Sitting at her bedroom desk, nursing a cup of coffee on a quiet Tuesday morning, Lauren Davila scoured digitized old newspapers for slave auction ads. A graduate history student at the College of Charleston, she logged them on a spreadsheet for an internship assignment. It was often tedious work.
She clicked on Feb. 24, 1835, another in a litany of days on which slave trading fueled her home city of Charleston, South Carolina. But on this day, buried in a sea of classified ads for sales of everything from fruit knives and candlesticks to enslaved human beings, Davila made a shocking discovery.
On page 3, fifth column over, 10th advertisement down, she read:
“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, a very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.”
She stared at the number: 600.
A sale of 600 people would mark a grim new record — by far.
Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the U.S. was one that was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles down the Atlantic coast from Davila’s home. At a racetrack just outside the city, an indebted plantation heir sold hundreds of enslaved people. The horrors of that auction have been chronicled in books and articles, including The New York Times’ 1619 Project and “The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History.” Davila grabbed her copy of the latter to double-check the number of people auctioned then.
It was 436, far fewer than the 600 in the ad glowing on her computer screen.
She fired off an email to a mentor, Bernard Powers, the city’s premier Black history expert. Now professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston, he is founding director of its Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston and board member of the International African American Museum, which will open in Charleston on June 27.
If anyone would know about this sale, she figured, it was Powers.
Yet he too was shocked. He had never heard of it. He knew of no newspaper accounts, no letters written about it between the city’s white denizens.
“The silence of the archives is deafening on this,” he said. “What does that silence tell you? It reinforces how routine this was.”
Davila eventually approached ProPublica with her find. A reporter did further research, and eventually learned the source of the ad.
A ProPublica reporter found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks before the one Davila spotted. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year, and now five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.
The Ball family might not be a household name outside of South Carolina, but it is widely known within the state thanks to a descendant named Edward Ball who wrote a bestselling book in 1998 that bared the family’s skeletons — and, with them, those of other Southern slave owners.
“Slaves in the Family” drew considerable acclaim outside of Charleston, including a National Book Award. Black readers, North and South, praised it. But as Ball explained, “It was in white society that the book was controversial.” Among some white Southerners, the horrors of slavery had long gone minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of northern aggression and benevolent slave owners.
Based on his family’s records, Edward Ball described his ancestors as wealthy “rice landlords” who operated a “slave dynasty.” He estimated they enslaved about 4,000 people on their properties over 167 years, placing them among the “oldest and longest” plantation operators in the American South.
Read the rest at ProPublica, if you’re interested in this history.
Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, was convicted by a federal jury Friday on all 63 charges against him.
Bowers, 50, now faces the possibility of the death sentence at the hands of the same jury for the deadliest attack ever on Jewish people in the US.
Asked to individually confirm their verdicts, each juror answered “yes” without hesitation. Some were forceful in their replies. They deliberated for about five hours over two days.
Bowers was convicted of 11 capital counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death and 11 capital counts of use of a firearm to commit murder during and in relation to a crime of violence, among other charges.
Bowers was also convicted of 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death.
The convictions mean the trial will move to a separate penalty phase, with the jury weighing further evidence to decide whether to sentence him to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
For much of the past two-plus weeks, many of the federal government’s 60 witnesses described the horror when a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and killed 11 worshippers – the deadliest attack ever on Jewish people in the United States.
A federal jury convicted the gunman Friday on all 63 charges against him, including 22 capital charges. On June 26, the same jury will again hear horrible details of the massacre and what those losses mean to families, as it decides the fate of Robert Bowers….
Other witnesses included medical, firearms and computer experts….
The president of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh said Friday that survivors have taken the witness stand to provide important testimony despite the immense difficulty of that task. They will continue to do so in the next phase of the trial, Brian Schreiber said.
“We look forward to hearing the direct victim-impact testimony. They will be able to tell, in their own words, what that loss feels like,” said Schreiber, who lost friends in the attack.
Schreiber did not take an official stance on a potential death sentence for the gunman.
“It’s going to be gut-wrenching,” said Jeff Finkelstein, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. “It’s going to reopen wounds that keep getting reopened for us here in our Pittsburgh community – not just the Jewish community, but this greater Pittsburgh region. And I just encourage everyone to seek the support that they might need.”
The Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh has been providing support for those affected by the shooting through its 10.27 Healing Partnership program, which Schreiber said will continue to offer resources. The name of the program is a nod to the date, October 27, 2018, when the attack took place.
The Justice Department on Friday released a damning account of systemic abuses and discrimination by the police in Minneapolis, the result of a multiyear investigation that began after the murder of George Floyd in police custody ignited protests across the country.
In an 89-page report, investigators laid out repeated instances of the police engaging in unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people, as well routinely failing to take arrestees’ health complaints seriously and violating the First Amendment rights of demonstrators and journalists at protests.
“The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who ordered the investigation in April 2021.
The Justice Department found there was “reasonable cause to believe” that police officers engaged in a “pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law.”
Among many other examples of discrimination by officers, investigators outlined an episode in which an officer said his goal was to wipe the Black Lives Matter movement “off the face of the earth.” Mr. Garland added that officers often used some version of the line, “You can breathe, you’re talking right now,” when placing citizens in chokeholds.
The city has agreed to negotiate a court-enforced agreement that, if enacted, would require a sweeping overhaul of the city’s police force, which has faced an exodus of officers and a lack of community support since the death of Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, in May 2020.
Read details of the agreement and reactions to the report in Minneapolis at the NYT link.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is asking the judge in the classified documents case against Donald Trump to bar the former president and his defense team from publicly disclosing some of the materials shared in the criminal case as part of the discovery process.
In a new filing on Friday, Smith’s team said that among the unclassified materials that prosecutors are set to turn over to the defense is “information pertaining to ongoing investigations, the disclosure of which could compromise those investigations and identify uncharged individuals.”
The filing, which includes a proposed protective order, is an expected, procedural step now that Trump has entered his not guilty plea and the proceedings are moving forward. Lawyers for Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta do not oppose the requested protective order, according to the filing.
US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, citing local court rules. Reinhart approved the search warrant the FBI executed at Mar-a-Lago last year.
Smith’s team said in the filing that the “government is ready to provide unclassified discovery to the defense.”
“The discovery materials include sensitive and confidential information,” including personal and financial data, information that reveals “sensitive” investigative techniques and information about potential witnesses, according to the filing. Some of that information could be in grand jury transcripts or recordings of witness interviews.
“The materials also include information pertaining to ongoing investigations, the disclosure of which could compromise those investigations and identify uncharged individuals,” the filing said.
The federal prosecutors overseeing the classified documents case against former President Donald J. Trump said in court papers on Friday that the evidence they are poised to give the defense as part of the normal process of discovery contained information about “ongoing investigations” that could “identify uncharged individuals.”
The court papers — a standard request to place a protective order on the discovery material — contained no explanation about what those other inquiries might be or whether they were related to the indictment detailing charges against Mr. Trump of illegally retaining dozens of national defense documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to get them back. The papers also did not identify who the uncharged people were.
Still, the reference to continuing investigations was the first overt suggestion — however vague — that other criminal cases could emerge from the work that the special counsel Jack Smith has done in bringing the Espionage Act and obstruction indictment against Mr. Trump in Miami last week.
Mr. Smith is also overseeing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss in 2020 and the ensuing assault on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Some witnesses close to Mr. Trump have been questioned by Mr. Smith’s team in connection with the both the documents and election interference inquiries.
An active duty U.S. Marine is in federal custody after being arrested for allegedly firebombing a [Costa Mesa, CA] Planned Parenthood clinic in 2022.
Chance Brannon, 23, a Marine corporal, and Tibet Ergul, 21, were arrested Wednesday in the April 2022 attack, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in a press release. They are each charged with using an explosive or fire to cause property damage.
According to the criminal complaint, Brannon and Ergul attacked the clinic in the early morning hours of March 13, 2022. Prosecutors say they threw a Molotov cocktail — an incendiary device made up of a glass bottle containing a flammable substance, such as liquid gasoline, that is lit and then thrown, shattering on impact and igniting the liquid — at the clinic entrance. The fire damaged the building and, according to the Justice Department, caused the healthcare clinic to close the next day and cancel some 30 appointments.
Prosecutors say that a witness called in a tip to the FBI that Ergul had sent a text message describing the attack.
“BOOM [fire emoji],” the message from Ergul to the witness said in describing the impact of the Molotov cocktail on the building of the “Costa Mesa health center/Planned Parenthood clinic,” according to the complaint. Ergul allegedly told the witness that he wished he “could’ve recorded the combustion.”
The witness also identified Brannon to the FBI, in part through a picture Ergul sent the witness on March 14, 2022, appearing to depict the Molotov cocktail. The witness said the picture looked like it was taken inside Brannon’s car.
Both defendants are scheduled to be arraigned on July 24.
I’ll end with a little comic relief about the endless efforts of Republicans to prove that President Biden is corrupt.
There’s a new wrinkle in the Republicans’ totally legitimate investigation into Joe Biden: One of their informants is apparently dead, according to Rudy Giuliani.
Republicans have spent all week accusing the president of accepting a massive bribe from Ukraine (conveniently at the same time that Donald Trump was arrested for allegedly stealing and hiding classified documents), and have referred a number of times to a set of recordings that they claim prove his guilt. The GOP learned about these supposed recordings as part of the House Oversight Committee’s months-long investigation into the Biden family, which has yet to produce any actual evidence linking the president to wrongdoing.
House members were allowed last week to see a redacted version of an FD 10-23, a form the FBI uses to note unverified information from confidential sources. Several Republican lawmakers say that not only does the FBI form they saw last week mention this bribe but that a Burisma executive has audio recordings of Biden and Hunter Biden accepting the money. Both Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the executive is Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
But according to Rudy Giuliani, the executive is actually the wife of Burisma co-founder Mykola Lisin. Giuliani told Newsmax over the weekend that Lisin died under suspicious circumstances. He seemed to imply the businessman left the recordings to his wife, but she died before the FBI could interview her.
The FBI “followed up on none of the evidence I gave them,” Giuliani said. “I gave them one witness that any investigator would jump through hoops to go to. Gave them a witness who is a woman, who is the chief accountant at this crooked company Burisma.”
“She was the wife of the former owner, who died under suspicious circumstances. And she was willing to give up all of the offshore bank accounts, including the Bidens’!”
Oh my goodness me! How very incriminating. Except there is simply no evidence that any tapes involving Biden actually exist.
Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan pointed out “we don’t know” if the tapes Republicans claim implicate President Joe Biden “exist” when he was asked about impeaching the president.
Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. James Comer (R-KY) are having a rough time with the media in their promotion of an FBI form they say details allegations against Biden and his son Hunter Biden — the latest wrinkle being the claim that an informant’s source claims to have over a dozen audiotapes implicating Biden.
Several Republicans have pumped the brakes by pointing out the tapes may not even exist, including Grassley, Comer, and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson.
On a recent edition of The Chris Salcedo Show, Jordan pointedly brought up the uncertainty in the context of impeaching Biden over the tapes, telling host Chris Salcedo that “we don’t know for sure if these tapes exist.” [….]
When reached for comment, White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams told Mediaite, “Everything in their so-called investigation seems to be mysteriously missing: informants, audio tapes, and most importantly of all – any credible evidence. Maybe it’s time for House Republicans to join the President to focus on real issues that matter to the American people like fighting inflation and creating jobs instead of these sad sideshow stunts.”
That’s it for me today. I hope you are all having a nice long weekend.
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We continue to celebrate our newest Federal Holiday this long weekend. It is Juneteenth, also called Freedom Day. The first Juneteenth was on the 19th.
On June 19, 1865, nearly two years after President Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved Africans in America, Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas with news of freedom. More than 250,000 African Americans embraced freedom by executive decree in what became known as Juneteenth or Freedom Day. With the principles of self-determination, citizenship, and democracy magnifying their hopes and dreams, those Texans held fast to the promise of true liberty for all.
If you’re a James Joyce fan, then today is Bloomsday! And, of course, we’re still celebrating Pride Month.
Another appropriate reference to June 16 is what happened at the Illinois Republican State Convention, in Springfield, Illinois, on June 16, 1858. It’s challenging to think the same speech would be given by any future Republican President, but this is the day Lincoln spoke up against slavery “agitation.” It is the source of one of his most famous speeches and lines. The future president was running for the U.S. Senate against Senator Steven A. Douglas.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Can you imagine American history being taught without learning about this pivotal speech? It clearly shows that slavery in the South was a root cause of the Civil War that followed. Today’s Republicans are doing everything they can to erase that kind of history.
Martha Yates Jones (left) and Pinkie Yates (right), daughters of Rev. Jack Yates, in a decorated carriage parked in front of the Antioch Baptist Church located in Houston’s Fourth Ward, 1908 — Source
Donald Trump could not have asked for a nicer arraignment-day celebration.
During the very same hour in which the former president surrendered to federal authorities in Miami, his Republican allies in the House were, in their most visible and official way yet, embracing as heroes and martyrs the people who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in hopes of overturning Trump’s election defeat.
In the Capitol complex, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), with sidekick Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and four other far-right lawmakers, held a “hearing” that honored participants in the riot, family members of Jan. 6 rioters and organizers of the attempted overthrow of the 2020 vote.
Technically, Gaetz couldn’t call such a hearing, because he isn’t a committee chairman. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is trying to win back the support of extremists such as Gaetz, let it happen anyway.
Gaetz did his all to make the proceedings look official. There were congressional seals on his nameplate and on the big screen behind him. A meeting room in the Capitol visitor center was arranged to appear like a committee room, with lawmakers facing the witnesses. Gaetz advertised the “field hearing” as part of how “the 118th Congress is investigating the weaponization of the federal government.”
And then there’s Ted Cruz. The Senator from Texas always seems to set the bottommost tone for public discussion.
Ted Cruz: “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.” pic.twitter.com/ysYei6Rr3E
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) June 15, 2023
I love Pat Benatar. What exactly has she done besides write and perform songs empowering women? Let’s pause for a bit of mood music.
You may read the retorts from Twitter at Salon. “Ted Cruz weaves a bizarre scenario about Biden murdering children while listening to Pat Benatar. While discussing President Biden on the Joe Pags show, Cruz succumbed to a Satanic flight of fancy.”
JJ sent me more stuff than just the Pat Benatar on Ted Cruz. Perhaps he has to get all hellfire and brimstone because of this. “Ted Cruz Says Uganda Shouldn’t Kill Gays, And Christian Extremist MAGAs Are SO MAD (At Him).” This story comes via Wonkette.
Without near enough fanfare or attention from the West, the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has signed a “kill the gays” bill into law. It calls for a life sentence for anyone who has gay sex, and seven years for trying to, whatever that means. The death penalty would be for those who commit “aggravated homosexuality,” which the New York Times says includes “homosexual acts committed by anyone infected with H.I.V. or involving children, disabled people or anyone drugged against their will.” If they say you did “attempted aggravated homosexuality,” you could go to prison for 14 years. We are sure the processes for determining whether people have violated the law will totally be on the up-and-up.
Oh, and you could go to jail for 20 years for “promoting” homosexuality, which reminds us a bit of Russia, and also the spirit of Ron DeSantis’s Florida, even if they haven’t quite made it to calling for imprisonment yet.
This Uganda law is horrific & wrong.
Any law criminalizing homosexuality or imposing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” is grotesque & an abomination.
So, Ted finally says something that makes him seem human. The Christoban are after him now.
In response, some of Cruz’s conservative fans were absolutely horrified that Cruz would interfere in another country’s Christian fascist genocide in such a way. RawStory collected some responses:
“Ted, seems to me your focus should be here at home working to get the unjustly punished J6 prisoners out of jail,” wrote one user in response. “I’m disappointed in you.”
Echoing to this theme, one Twitter user replied to Cruz and said they wanted to “make homosexuality shameful again.”OK, psychos.
Take a gander through Ted’s replies at your own risk. Because Elon Musk’s paid blue checkmark system promotes replies from the vilest and stupidest people humanity has to offer to the top, you won’t have to look hard for Americans just openly supporting genocide.
So let’s look at the things the bottomless basement of the hate section of our divided house thinks are okay.
Louisiana can't have nice things because of ghouls like David Larose of Bush, Louisiana, and the editors of The Advocate. Newspaper publishes, then retracts, piece bashing dead teen’s pronouns https://t.co/juedpkkxTI
— Dayne Sherman, Louisiana Man (@TweettheSouth) June 16, 2023
The Southern Baptist Convention has issues that won’t be solved by booting all women pastors.
"The SBC is a denomination on fire. It's reeling from scandal…The denomination's demise shows no sign of slowing, & after New Orleans, we have no reason to believe it will reverse course in the foreseeable future." – @JonathanMerritt#ThisistheSBC#SBC23https://t.co/DrMFMO5wxa
Let me remind you of Christa’s experience with that denomination.
"Using just her legal expertise, a Blogspot website & a Twitter account, she was fighting an institution…with what was then a $1.2 billion operating budget."@sarahstankorb tells my story with power & sensitivity. Lots of trauma here. #SBCtoo#ChurchToohttps://t.co/ff8kES3GJW
Juneteenth band. Photograph by Grace Murray Stephenson of celebrations in Eastwoods Park, Austin, 1900. — Source
Here’s another story from the Washington Post that makes the celebration of Juneteenth bitter-sweet. “Black Americans more upbeat but fear worsening racism, poll finds.”
An overwhelming share of Black Americans think the U.S. economic system is stacked against them and a slim majority believe the problem of racism will worsen during their lives, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that explored the attitudes of the country’s second-largest minority group.
The poll finds that Black adults worry they are marginalized and under threat by acts of hate and discrimination in their day-to-day lives. Most also say it is more dangerous to be a Black teenager now than when they were teens.
There is good news about how indigenous children were shuttled to adoptive white parents so they could “save the man and kill the Indian.” That was actually the rationale for the Indian Adoption Project prior to the 1978 act–The Indian Child Welfare Act–existed. A challenge to that Law was just heard before the Supreme Court. A group of White Evangelicals would like to return to the good old days of kidnapping indigenous children from the tribes and screamed the act was racist. This decision is likely temporary as the beer and sexual assault connoisseur on the Court invited a future challenge from somebody with “standing,” which is why the court upheld the decision.
The Indiginous Nations have an odd advocate on SCOTUS. This is from NBC News. “Conservative Justice Gorsuch echoes ‘woke’ historians in railing against historical injustices. Gorsuch, appointed by former President Donald Trump, differs from his conservative colleagues on some key issues, including Native American rights.” This reminds me of the saying that even a broken clock is right two times a day. This is written by Lawrence Hurley.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump, but in a series of recent cases, he has spoken up about historical injustice in a way that seems at odds with Republican attacks on “woke” history’s being taught in schools.
That included his opinion Thursday when the court rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law intended to keep Native American families and communities together when children are in the adoption or foster care process.
Gorsuch’s concurring opinion was part history lesson and part explanation of his full-throated support for Native Americans.
He wrote about how Native American families were torn apart by federal and state officials’ attempts to assimilate them into Anglo-centric American society by eliminating their cultural ties to their tribes.
“In all of its many forms, the dissolution of the Indian family has had devastating effects on children and parents alike,” he wrote.
“It has also presented an existential threat to the continued vitality of tribes — something many federal state officials over the years saw as a feature, not as a flaw,” he added. His opinion was joined by two of his liberal colleagues: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Chuck Hoskin, principal chief of Cherokee Nation, one of the tribes that defended the adoption law at the Supreme Court, said Gorsuch is “going to loom large over Indian Country cases for a long time” in part because he understands the complexities of Indian law.
“While he may possess a great range of views on a lot of legal issues, he seems to have the most solid understanding of federal Indian law of any justice of the modern era,” Hoskin added.
In other cases, Gorsuch has lambasted the Supreme Court’s own rulings that treat people living in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories as second-class citizens and called out the torture of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has repeatedly voted in favor of Native American tribes in a series of different legal questions.
Detail from a photograph of celebrations in Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1905 — Source
A 24-year-old moved to Maryland to work for the National Security Agency six months before joining the attack on the U.S. Capitol with followers of a movement whose founder is known for espousing white supremacist views, according to court filings.
Paul Lovley was sentenced Tuesday to two weeks incarceration for illegally demonstrating in the Capitol.
“All I can do is take responsibility for my actions, learn from this experience, and move on with my life,” Lovley said in a letter to the court. “This entire situation has served as a wake-up call—something that forced me to truly reflect on what is important in life, what types of things to avoid engaging with going forward, and the dangers of cognitive dissonance.”
According to prosecutors, Lovley was working in information technology for the NSA before Jan. 6. The NSA referred questions about his employment to the Justice Department, which did not return a request for comment.
The night before the riot, the government said, Lovley hosted at his Maryland home four friends he met at an event for “America First,” a movement founded by Nick Fuentes, who has been banned from most social media platforms for repeated racist and antisemitic remarks. The Justice Department in other cases has described Fuentes, who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 but is not charged in the attack, as “a public figure known for making racist statements, celebrating fascism, and promoting white supremacy.” He gained national prominence after dining with former president Donald Trump in late 2022.
The five young men including Lovley entered the Capitol building a few minutes after the first breach, according to court records. Along with other rioters, they went into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and onto the Senate floor. After about 40 minutes, they left the building; prosecutors say one of Lovley’s friends then assaulted a police officer with a metal barricade and helped destroy reporters’ equipment.
He said he came to the area from California for his “first-ever serious job” and did not know anyone.
Alright, one more thing, and then we’ll take this all down thread. Who just got indicted by a Grand Jury for taking and decimating classified documents and didn’t get to go to a private golf club and rally a group of fascists?
The accused leaker of classified Pentagon documents has been indicted, per DOJ. "Jack Douglas Teixeira, 21, of North Dighton, Mass., was indicted on six counts of willful retention & transmission of classified information relating to the national defense" https://t.co/C1zKqSvuZS
She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal.
In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale: “She’s 7 years old! She will be a good mare!”
She was felt, naked, by many hands.
At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.
She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some messages from the Bible, and she also had to swèar that the poems she had written were not plagiarized. From a chair, she gave her long examination, until the court accepted her: she was a woman, she was Black, she was enslaved, but she was a poet.
Phillis Wheatley, was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.
What’s on Your Reading and Blogging list today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Good Day, Sky Dancers, and Happy Juneteenth!
John Blake from CNN has this to say about the history of slavery that formed our country. 
So many events in our Country’s history are shameful. Covering them up only serves the same masters who want to keep every one who is not like them oppressed and worse off or in a form of servitude.
How is it that so many of us–to include women–so definitely way up over 50% are now being subjected to disenfranchisement and not included. Meanwhile, we’re stuck in this Rule of Law Soap Opera because a bunch of idiots who voted for this man and set up laws to disenfranchise us. They also stacked courts so that the government has more say in what happens with women’s bodies than we do. How is this the land of the Free?
Davila eventually approached ProPublica with her find. A reporter did further research, and eventually learned the source of the ad.
Steve Almasy at CNN: 
“The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who ordered the investigation in April 2021.
The court papers — a standard request to place a protective order on the discovery material — contained no explanation about what those other inquiries might be or whether they were related to the indictment detailing charges against Mr. Trump of 
House members were allowed last week to see a redacted version of an FD 10-23, a form the FBI uses to note unverified information from confidential sources. Several Republican lawmakers say that not only does the FBI form they saw last week mention this bribe but that a Burisma executive has audio recordings of Biden and Hunter Biden accepting the money. Both Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene 
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