Fourth of July Reads

Happy July Fourth!!

I don’t feel comfortable calling this “Independence Day,” since we are in the process of losing our freedom and autonomy, thanks to the ultra-right Supreme Court.

Jill Lawrence at MSNBC.com

Despite the promises of America’s founding documents, on Independence Day 2023, justice, the “general welfare,” “equal protection of the laws” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are all at risk. The Supreme Court, conservative governors and gerrymandered state legislatures are racing to shrink fundamental rights and freedoms, enabled and empowered by structural inequities built into the Constitution. The result is that tens of millions of Americans are being deprived of rights that other Americans have.

The scale of the disparity is frightening and growing, taking us ever further from America’s founding ideal that “all men are created equal” and its continuing journey toward equal rights for all.

The marquee setback came last year with the high court’s Dobbs decision, which erased a constitutional right that had been in place for nearly half a century. A year later, free to do as they pleased, 14 states fully banned abortion, and a 15th, Georgia, banned it after six weeks of pregnancy (before many women know they are pregnant). At the same time, 20 states where abortion is legal added protections over the past year.

While abortion is a particularly stark example of the democracy divide, U.S. courts and state legislatures are advancing inequality of rights in countless other ways: from last week’s Supreme Court decisions allowing a prospective wedding website designer to refuse services to hypothetical same-sex couples and removing race from the many factors colleges and universities use to assemble diverse student bodies to states’ trying to restrict and ban medical care for transgender people, discussions of gay issues in classrooms and which books can be accessed in libraries.

The solution in many cases is federal legislation, which would require, at minimum, Democrats to reclaim a House majority next year. The party would also have to elect 50 or more senators willing to abolish the filibuster, at least in cases when America’s most sacred promises are threatened.

Read the rest at the MSNBC link.

The one “freedom” the right wingers are leaving untouched is the so-called Second Amendment right to own weapons of war, and there were two more mass shootings overnight.

From CNN:

A shooting that erupted just before midnight Monday in Fort Worth, Texas, left at least three dead and eight others wounded, police said.

Ten of the victims are adults and one a minor, according to a news release from the Fort Worth Police Department’s homicide unit.

Officers discovered multiple people shot in a parking lot in the Horne Street area of the Como neighborhood, police said. Several victims were brought to local hospitals by private vehicles, while others were transported by ambulance, authorities said. One victim was pronounced dead at the scene….

It’s too early to tell if the shooting was gang related, a domestic dispute, or something else, police said.

There was a large crowd in the neighborhood when police responded, Murray said.

“Traditionally, the Como neighborhood, July 3 is their big celebration,” Murray said. “They have their parade, and July 3 in the evening, they gather up as a neighborhood and come together.” [….]

The deadly gunfire in Fort Worth is one of at least six mass shootings in the first three days of July and one at least 341 mass shootings in the nation this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter.

From Vanity Fair:

Five people were killed and two children injured Monday evening after a heavily-armed gunman opened fire in a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, police said. The suspect, who has been taken into custody, was clad in a bulletproof vest and had an “AR-type rifle,” multiple magazines, a handgun and a police scanner, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said in a press conference at the scene.

Speaking Tuesday before a Fourth of July ceremony, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said that the dealer who sold firearms to the alleged shooter “should be sued until they’re out of business.” Kenney called on the family members of the shooting victims to find a law firm and “take these gun dealers down.

“They don’t care, all they care about is money,” he said. “The carnage that they allow to happen is just ridiculous.”

President Joe Biden addressed the shooting—the latest in a spree of mass killings over the past few days—late Tuesday morning. “ Today, Jill and I grieve for those who have lost their lives and, as our nation celebrates Independence Day, we pray for the day when our communities will be free from gun violence,” Biden said in a statement, which called on state governments and Congressional leaders to “address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing our communities apart. ”

“It is within our power to once again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and to enact universal background checks,” he said.

The Philadelphia shooting spree unfolded over multiple streets at around 8:30 p.m. As officers were assessing the initial victims, they heard additional gunshots, which led them to the shooter, a 40-year-old man. One of the victims was chased into his home and shot to death in his living room; police found bullet casings outside the home.

There was a little bit of excitement at the White House on Sunday night.

From The Washington Post:

A preliminary test indicated that the white powder found inside the White House Sunday evening, prompting a brief evacuation, was cocaine, according to two officials familiar with the matter and the recording of a dispatch from a D.C. fire crew that responded to the incident.

A spokesman for the Secret Service, Anthony Guglielmi, said the substance is undergoingfurthertesting to determine what it is, and authorities are looking into how it got into the White House. He said the D.C. fire department determined the substance did not present a threat.

The discovery prompted an elevated security alert and a brief evacuation of the executive mansion, Guglielmi said. He said President Biden was not in the White House at the time. Guglielmi said there is “an investigation into the cause and manner” of how the substance entered the White House.

Guglielmi declined to say specifically where in the White House the substance was found or how it was packaged. He said it was found by members of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service conducting routine rounds through the building.

In a dispatch with an 8:49 p.m. timestamp, a firefighter with the D.C. department’s hazardous materials team radioed the results of a test: “We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride.”

The brief broadcast is logged on a website called openmhz.com, which allows people to listen to live and archived radio transmission from police and fire departments. One of the officials familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open case, said the 8:49 transmission was from the White House call Sunday night. The official described the amount of the substance as small.

From Gizmodo:

The hits don’t stop coming for Twitter users. This weekend, the platform’s owner Elon Musk claimed he’s imposing a limit to the number of tweets an average non-Blue user can read. In the aftermath, Twitter’s dashboard application Tweetdeck failed spectacularly.

In what he said was a bid to address the vague concepts of “data scraping” and “system manipulation,” Musk announced on the afternoon of July 1 that Twitter would be limiting the number of tweets users could read in a single day. According to his announcement, accounts that pay for Twitter Blue could read 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts could read 600 posts per day, and newer unverified accounts were limited to just 300 posts per day. About an hour and a half later, he updated that those limits increased to 8,000, 600, and 300 tweets per day, respectively. Later that evening, Musk tweeted that those limits were once again raised to 10,000, 1,000, and 500 tweets, respectively.

TechCrunch reported this morning that this limiting was not without consequences. Aside from pissing off users, Twitter’s own Tweetdeck suffered outages. Tweetdeck allows a user to load tweets, notifications, messages, and likes all on one dashboard via multiple columns, and it’s likely that calls from Tweetdeck to Twitter were mangled as the platform’s backend limited users’ visibility. As the outlet notes, some Tweetdeck users reported that their home timeline loaded without fail while columns responsible for notifications and mentions were busted.

When asked for comment on the Tweetdeck outages, Twitter told Gizmodo “💩.”

Now Mark Zuckerberg is planning to launch a Twitter clone; but I can’t read the Wall Street Journal article, because it’s behind the paywall. I don’t think I’d want to join that one anyway.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope your holiday is safe and happy.