There’s always been a debate within the belief communities that embrace karma concerning its application to a group of people, a nation-state, or perhaps, even a global community. I’ve always been on the side that embraces something akin to the psychological concept of gestalt. That is the idea that “an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.”
Sometimes, you have to make the parts matter.
While mainstream America was complacent and asleep, a group of radical right Republicans began scheming a way to shape the courts and state government bodies into entities where they could capture American Laws. It took a manic form in the 90s. Now, just as the states began sending lawsuits up to courts packed with their minions, it appears other states are using means to put their states back on track to normalcy and constitutional law.
You can see the struggles clearly if you watch the headlines from state to state. It’s clearest in the so-called culture war issues. Blue state governors and citizens are finding legal ways to bypass the Supreme Court by changing their state laws or using the tools they’ve already been given. This is driving the right-wingers crazy, so they are now looking for more Federal intervention to save their crusades.
“The Republican budgets were a complete mess, and today I used my executive powers to clean them up to protect Michiganders,” said Governor Whitmer. “The state’s budget is a reflection of our values, and make no mistake that public health and safety, access to health care, and protecting classroom spending is more important than handouts to lobbyists and vendors.”
This week, Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers made key changes to the state budget passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, slashing GOP tax cuts and guaranteeing education funding increases for the next 402 years. It was a staggering maneuver that follows years of battles between Evers and GOP lawmakers. And it’s one that highlights how a Democratic state leader can use singular executive powers to combat a legislature dominated by Republicans.
Evers pulled these changes off by leveraging a tool known as the line-item veto, a power granted to governors in 44 states, which allows them to veto parts of a budget bill instead of the entire measure. Wisconsin, in particular, gives governors “uniquely powerful” line-item veto authorities for appropriations bills that allow them to target “sentences, words or in some cases even a single character or digit,” according to WisContext’s Will Cushman.
Evers made full use of this power when changing a phrase that increased funding for the “2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year” to the “2023–2425” school years by vetoing parts of that sentence. On Wednesday, Evers signed the new $99 billion budget, which will span the next two years, into law.
Gov. Josh Shapiro says he plans to scrap his push for private school vouchers in Pennsylvania’s state budget in order to close a deal with the commonwealth’s divided legislature five days after the deadline.
The Democrat issued a statement Wednesday acknowledging that talks had deadlocked over a $100 million voucher program, which he had supported and which state Senate Republicans passed as part of their budget proposal last week. Pennsylvania House Democratic leaders oppose vouchers and had refused to act on the Senate’s bill.
Shapiro’s solution, he said, was to promise state House Democrats that if they pass the Senate’s budget, he will then line-item veto the vouchers from the $45.5 billion spending plan.
“Our Commonwealth should not be plunged into a painful, protracted budget impasse while our communities wait for the help and resources this commonsense budget will deliver,” Shapiro said in a statement.
See, elected officials from the Democratic Party can hold up a budget too.
Adults in Arizona can now obtain contraceptive medications over the counter at a pharmacy without a doctor’s prescription under a governor’s order announced Thursday.
Gov. Katie Hobbs said the rule will go into effect immediately. It applies to self-administered birth control such as hormonal and oral contraceptives, and patients 18 or older need only complete a screening and a blood pressure test.
“We are building an Arizona for everyone, which means ensuring people across the state have what they need to live a free and healthy life,” the Democratic governor said in a statement.
Over 20 states have statutes that let pharmacists dispense FDA-approved hormonal contraceptives without a prescription, according to a statement from the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Hobbs has used her executive powers in recent weeks to promote reproductive freedom. In June she issued a sweeping executive order effectively stripping prosecutors of their ability to pursue charges against anyone involved with a legally obtained abortion.
Ohio moved one step closer to becoming the next big test case in the nation’s fight over abortion, after supporters of a measure that would ask voters to establish a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution this week said they had filed more than enough signatures to put it on the ballot in November.
Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights said on Wednesday that it had collected roughly 710,000 signatures across all of the state’s 88 counties over the last 12 weeks. Under state law, the coalition needed 413,466 to qualify for the ballot. State election officials now have until July 25 to verify the signatures.
Supporters of abortion rights are turning to ballot measures in the aftermath of the ruling last year by the United States Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which for 50 years had guaranteed a right to abortion in the federal Constitution. They are betting on polls showing that public opinion increasingly supports some right to abortion, and opposes the bans and stricter laws that conservative state legislatures have enacted since the court’s decision.
Voters in six states, including conservative ones such as Kentucky and Kansas, voted to protect or establish a right to abortion in their constitutions in last year’s elections, and abortion rights advocates in about 10 other states are considering similar plans.
Far-right Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters suggested at a public hearing in Norman that lessons about the infamous racial massacre that destroyed the most prosperous Black community in Oklahoma don’t have to mention race, reported Fox 25 News.
“The Cleveland County Republican Party invited him to speak at the Norman Central Library. The room was packed with many unhappy Oklahomans, making for an hour of chaos,” reported David Chasanov.
“It doesn’t matter how much the radical left attacks me,” Walters told the crowd. ‘It doesn’t matter how much the teachers union spends against me. I will never stop speaking truth.”
However, things got tricky for Walters when someone asked him if teaching about the infamous “Black Wall Street” massacre in the city of Tulsa would be banned under his restrictions on teaching “Critical Race Theory.”
“Let’s not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that,” Walters replied.
The Tulsa massacre was an act of racial mass terrorism in 1921 that destroyed the Greenwood District of Tulsa, a nationally-renowned prosperous community nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” After a 19-year-old Black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland was arrested on trumped-up charges for allegedly assaulting a white elevator operator named Sarah Page, white residents of Tulsa rioted, looting and burning down the Greenwood District. Roughly 300 people were killed, and when the National Guard was sent in, the Black residents were arrested by the thousands.
Meanwhile, down here in Lousyana, our Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards put his personal religion above the health of women. My tax dollars will support pregnancy propaganda centers. This is from the Louisiana Illuminator and was reported by Julie O’Donohue. “Tax credit approved for donors to Louisiana anti-abortion centers.” I’d like to challenge this one as going against many of our religious views. Wonder if the ACLU is up to it?
Donors to the organizations, which have been renamed maternal wellness centers in the state law, will be able to benefit from $30 million worth of income tax breaks that will be issued from 2025 through 2030.
A donor will be able to claim an income tax credit equal to 50% of their contribution to a center or 50% of their total state income tax liability in the year the contribution was made, whichever is lower.
The total amount of tax credits that can be given out will be generally limited to $5 million per year, except that credits from years where the $5 million maximum is not reached can be rolled forward and made available in subsequent years.
If the $5 million is maxed out early in a given year, then donors who weren’t able to receive a credit that year are put to the front of the line for getting the tax break in the following year. No one center is allowed to benefit from more than 20% of the tax credits made available, according to the law.
Anti-abortion groups pushed for the law sponsored by Senate President Pro Tempore Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton.
“It is critical for the pro-life movement to find every avenue to support Louisiana mothers, whether that be through private or public resources,” said Ben Clapper, executive director of Louisiana Right to Life, one of the state’s large anti-abortion advocacy organizations.
“We believe this important law permitting Louisiana citizens to receive a tax credit when they donate to a maternal wellness center will strengthen resources for families,” he said.”
Mizell, in hearings during the legislative session, said she thought the centers could help improve women’s health in Louisiana.
Here’s the deception. This will undoubtedly include child trafficking (i.e., coerced letting babies go up for adoption).
Donors to the organizations, which have been renamed maternal wellness centers in the state law, will be able to benefit from $30 million worth of income tax breaks that will be issued from 2025 through 2030…
Everyone is waiting to see if it is possible for the AG of Colorado to take on the Supreme Court in that Fake Wedding Planner Case. Neal Katyal suggested it was possible. Other Legal Scholars do not think it is possible. This is from Salon. “Legal scholars: SCOTUS can’t be forced to reconsider “made-up” case — but lawyers can be punished. Professors push back on ex-solicitor general’s claim that SCOTUS can be compelled to reexamine 303 Creative cases”
But legal scholars pushed back on Katyal’s argument.
“I think this is a nonstarter,” former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, told Salon. “The Court glossed over standing in this case because a plaintiff is permitted to make a facial challenge to a law on the ground that yet violates the First Amendment.”
“If the allegations about fabrication are true, then the lawyers may have an ethics problem to address with their state bar, but it will not affect the outcome of the case,” McQuade added.
Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, told Salon that parties are “free to file a motion for reconsideration or rehearing,” but ultimately, it will be up to the court to decide whether to do anything about it.
“Attorneys are subject to judicial discipline & discipline from bar organizations if they lie to the court,” Litman said.
Longtime Harvard Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told Salon that Katyal “certainly knows that no state attorney general has any such authority,” adding that he doesn’t take Katyal literally when he suggests that.
“But it would be a mistake to let that obscure the central fact that the entire case was based on entirely hypothetical ‘worries’ that the web designer claimed to have about how the state’s officers might come after her under the state anti-discrimination laws if a same-sex couple were to ask her to design a wedding site for them and if she were to refuse,” Tribe said. “In my view, the disgraceful fact, which in no way depends on the falsity of the allegations about the fellow who supposedly asked Lorie Smith to design a website for a same-sex wedding, is the very fact that the Supreme Court’s majority was willing to render what amounted to an advisory opinion that it would never have done but for its eagerness to denigrate same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights generally and that, under Article III, it had no business doing.”
There are 486 days to the next President Election. Be sure to check your state’s primaries, and carefully choose all the candidates from POTUS to your dog catcher. It can make a difference.
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It has been unseasonably cool here in the Boston area for much of this spring and early summer, but now we’re going into a heat wave like most of the rest of the country.
Thank goodness my heat pump is working very well. It was 90 degrees yesterday, and my apartment stayed cool. Today it is already 90 degrees and it’s not 11AM yet. I feel so fortunate to be living here in my nice subsidized elderly apartment.
When I think back to the summers in my old unairconditioned house, I wonder how I managed. On 90 degree days, I basically just had to sit in front of my fans until the sun stopped beating down on the roof after about 4:30PM. I really feel for Dakinikat, who has been experiencing day after day like that.
It’s still sort of a slow news week, because of the holiday, but it’s beginning to get busier.
For those of us who have been long-time Twitter addicts, this has been an unsettling week. It really looks like Elon Musk has managed to kill Twitter this time, and many alternatives are popping up. Last night I signed up for Threads by Instagram. I’m hoping it will approach being what Twitter used to be, although I don’t really trust Mark Zuckerberg. But I trust Jack Dorsey even less. So far, he’s not letting me get into Bluesky, and I’ve decided I don’t want to use his new app, since he’ll probably end up selling it to another billionaire idiot.
After months of speculation and secrecy, Mark Zuckerberg’s long-rumored competitor app to Twitter is here.
The new app, Threads, was unveiled on Wednesday as a companion to Instagram, the popular photo-sharing network that Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, bought more than a decade ago. If Instagram executives get their way, Threads will also replace rival Twitter, with some techies referring to it as a “Twitter killer.”
Many tech companies have tried capitalizing on Twitter’s turmoil in recent months. But Threads has a leg up, backed by Meta’s deep pockets and Instagram’s enormous user base of more than two billion monthly active users around the world.
In a post to his Threads account on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said: “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.” He later said that Threads achieved 10 million sign-ups within seven hours of its launch.
Mr. Musk weighed in, saying he was not impressed by Threads and claiming he had canceled his Instagram account. “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he wrote on Twitter.
Instagram’s Threads app, a text-based social media platform poised to become Twitter’s latest competitor, is now available to users in more than 100 countries.
The app, which was released Wednesday evening, a day ahead of its scheduled debut, enables users to sign up straight from their Instagram accounts. That means that once it is launched worldwide, more than 2 billion monthly active users may import their accounts into Threads….
The app opens up to a scrollable feed of short-form text limited to 500 characters a post, with the ability to add individual or carousel photos and videos. Posts will include content from accounts users follow, as well as from creators suggested by the platform’s recommendation algorithm. Viewers can engage by liking, commenting, reposting — including quoting a post — and sharing to their Instagram story or feed.
While most features mimic those of Twitter, its user interface design resembles Instagram’s, with the same heart, comment and share buttons and similarly placed tabs.
Once logged in, new users who have Instagram accounts are told their account must retain the same usernames, but are able to a different bio and link to their profiles. Verified Instagram users will take their check marks to Threads, as well. Users can then choose to follow in bulk all accounts they already follow on Instagram, which includes pre-following anyone who has not yet joined Threads….
Accounts that users have already blocked on Instagram will also be automatically blocked on Threads. Those who wish to limit interactions can choose whether to allow replies from everyone, accounts they follow or mentions — users whom they directly tagged in a thread — only. They can also choose to restrict mentions of themselves to just accounts they follow or to disallow them entirely.
More details at the link.
There’s new information about the Trump stolen documents case; the DOJ has unsealed previously unseen parts of the affidavit for the search of Mar-a-Lago.
The Justice Department has made public more about the significant photographic and video evidence they collected last summer from Mar-a-Lago after the Trump presidency, in a newly released version of the investigative record that supported the FBI search of the resort.
While the details match much of what was included in last month’s indictment of Donald Trump and his co-defendant Walt Nauta, the less-redacted search warrant affidavit reveals the extent of what prosecutors knew before asking to search the Florida property for documents or other evidence last summer.
Summer in the City, by Olena Maksymova
The search affidavit, which still has several pages of redactions, describes with more public detail what prosecutors could see on spring 2022 surveillance footage from multiple angles outside a basement storage room where classified documents were kept in boxes at Mar-a-Lago.
The affidavit also includes at least one photo of boxes stacked in a room and captures how investigators believed boxes from Trump’s presidency were “relocated” or had been moved around.
“Video footage reflects that evidence has been moved recently,” prosecutors wrote in the court record. “It cannot be seen on the video footage where the boxes were moved when they were taken from the storage room area, and accordingly, the current location of the boxes that were removed from the storage room area but not returned to it is unknown.”
The affidavit said that the FBI’s review of security footage provided by the Trump Organization showed a person identified as “witness 5” moving boxes of documents around the estate throughout 2022, including on June 1, 2022, when he’s “observed carrying eleven brown cardboard boxes out the ANTEROOM entrance. One box did not have a lid on it and appeared to contain papers.”
Witness 5 is not named in the document. Nauta was accused in the indictment of obstruction and lying to investigators. Nauta is expected to plead not guilty in federal court in Miami on Thursday. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
“The day after that, on June 2, 2022, WITNESS 5 is observed moving twenty-five to thirty boxes, some of which were brown cardboard boxes and others of which were Bankers boxes consistent with the description of the FPOTUS BOXES, into the entrance of the ANTEROOM,” the filing said.
That seems pretty incriminating.
Remember how the press reacted when there were peaceful demonstrations outside the homes of SCOTUS justices? And when a troubled man showed up near Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a gun and then turned himself in to police without doing anything, the outrage was loud and long. I’ve been wondering why there hasn’t been more reporting on the crazy guy who showed up outside the Obamas’ home in DC with lots of guns and bombs. And even more creepy, he knew the address because it was posted on line by Donald Trump! Well finally, this event is getting a bit of attention.
A Navy veteran arrested with guns near former president Barack Obama’s house in Washington had recently recorded himself making threatening statements regarding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and a federal facility housing a nuclear research reactor in suburban Maryland, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Summer in the City (NY), by Julian Barrow
U.S. prosecutors asked a judge to jail Taylor Taranto, 37, pending trial, saying that the QAnon conspiracy theorist showed up near Obama’s home shortly after Donald Trump posted on his social media platform what he claimed was Obama’s address. Tarantowas armed, dangerous and in the grip of delusional thinking, prosecutors said, and had successfully eluded law enforcement for nearly a day before his arrest June 29 in a wooded area near Washington’s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood.
“Taranto is a direct and serious threat to the public. Taranto’s own words and actions demonstrate that he is a direct threat to multiple political figures as well as the public at large,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Allison K. Ethen and Colin Cloherty wrote in a 26-page detention memo. “The risk that Taranto poses if released is high, and the severity of the consequences that could result are catastrophic.”
Authorities searched for Taranto before June 28, but he was living in his van, and his lack of a fixed address frustrated efforts to find him, prosecutors said. Law enforcement “escalated efforts to locate Taranto and increased resources to assist in the search” after his alleged threats that day, but were unsuccessful before he turned up near Obama’s residence.
Read more at the WaPo. It’s quite a long and detailed story.
Finally, the strange decision by a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana is getting quite a bit of attention in the media.
An order limiting the Biden administration’s communication with social media companies could make it harder to curb disinformation as the 2024 election nears.
A federal judge Tuesday curtailed communication between certain Biden administration agencies and social media companies after a GOP-led challenge to efforts to combat disinformation, arguing attempts to do so violated protected speech.
The ruling left experts concerned about a “chilling effect” on attempts to moderate false information online.
“If we end up with basically no meaningful content moderation, then it is going to be a Wild West of disinformation,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation.
Summer in the City, Edward Hopper
Two Republican state attorneys general argued that the Biden administration “coordinated and colluded with social-media platforms to identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.” The result, they said, was a “campaign of censorship” executed by the administration.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, ruled in their favor, ordering that Biden administration officials cannot contact social media companies relating to “in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms.”
Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Justice, the State Department and the FBI were told to cut those communications with the companies.
The case had primarily taken aim at attempts to curtail disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Republicans decried as a violation of the First Amendment.
Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman tweeted that a Trump-appointed federal judge’s injunction that blocks the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies was crazy “in substance and breadth,” noting the DOJ didn’t waste any time in filing its “lightning fast” appeal.
Judge Terry A. Doughty issued the injunction in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, who argued that the government overreached in efforts to stop the spread of vaccine disinformation and baseless allegations of election fraud.
The ruling is widely viewed as a legal win for conservatives.
Summer in the City, by Aniko Hencz
The attorneys general behind the lawsuit that prompted the injunction contend that the Biden administration is behind a “sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise’” that aims to pressure social media companies to censor posts expressing controversial political views and conservatives in particular, the report said.
The Biden administration argued that such communications were needed for public health and safety reasons, noting that the social media platforms have been used to propagate disinformation about COVID vaccines and the 2020 election.
The administration sought “necessary and responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security” amid the pandemic and the conspiracy-fueled election dispute, Bloomberg News reports, noting that the DOJ plans to request that the judge’s order be put on hold during the appeal.
The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski describes the injunction as an “extraordinary” ruling that “could upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.
The Biden administration’s battle with Republican-led states over free-speech limits escalated with its appeal of a judge’s sweeping order barring federal officials and agencies from communicating with social media companies over postings they deem objectionable. It’s the latest example of the judiciary flexing its muscles in cases testing the bounds of the First Amendment online.
The US Justice Department filed a notice of appeal in federal court in Louisiana on Wednesday, signaling its intent to take the fight to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
The DOJ also plans to ask the court to put the judge’s order on hold during the appeal, according to a person familiar with the case. The case could swiftly land before the US Supreme Court if the government’s request is rejected.
Courts have played a star role mediating fights in recent years over how tech giants moderate what goes on their platforms. With federal law largely shielding companiesagainst being sued over what’s posted online, challengers have increasingly shifted the legal fight to the constitutional arena, probing the relationship between the government and the private sector.
US District Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction on Tuesday represents a break with judges who have been wary of extending the First Amendment’s speech protections to content decisions made by companies, even in situations where government officials tried to exert influence, said Genevieve Lakier, a constitutional law expert at the University of Chicago Law School.
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.
This is a chilling, heart-breaking, infuriating and dead-on accurate accounting of the freedoms we are losing thanks to SCOTUS and the MAGA GOP from @JillDLawrence. An excellent read for July 4th.https://t.co/imLwSrFJ6m via @msnbc
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.
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.
NEW: A shooting that erupted at a Fourth of July celebration just before midnight Monday in Fort Worth left at least three dead and eight others wounded. Ten of the victims are adults and one is a minor. https://t.co/KS4U2jwZsU
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.
“A person like that walking down a city street with an [AR-style gun] and shooting randomly at people is a disgraceful situation in the United States of America, whether it’s July 4th or any other day,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said Tuesday. https://t.co/3aG9VBwytx
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.
WaPo overnight: A suspicious substance identified later as cocaine was found by USSS in the WH Sunday evening Biden was not there WH was briefly evacuated SS is investigating how it got into the building Article is gifted, free read here:https://t.co/dagA9el2LM
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.
I expect right wingers with now have a field day with Hunter Biden jokes.
It looks like Elon Musk has really broken Twitter this time. He apparently failed to pay his bill to Google for this month, and now he has begun to limit how many tweets people can view. He’s also requiring people to log in before they can look at tweets. In response, Google has begun removing all links to Titter posts. Of course, all of this will drive away advertisers, who base their decisions on the number of views their ads get. Now he is trying to make users pay for Tweetdeck.
After several updates, non-Twitter Blue users are limited to 1,000 tweets per day before their timelines are locked. https://t.co/qHAMeynSyP
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.
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.
Mark Zuckerberg Looks to Deliver Hit to El on M usk With Upcoming Twitter Clone – The Wall Street Journal https://t.co/WrHLIeNu4t
Incantation for America Incantation: a series of words said as a magic spell or charm. “Make America safe again. America, save us from ourselves. America, I elect to love you in this moment of extraordinary need. America, absolve us of our uncertainty and fears. America, make us safe again and indivisible, united, under myriad beliefs, with liberty and justice for all.” IVIVA OLENICK artist
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m moving slowly today. The heat and the humidity are really wearing on me. I’m waiting for the rain that’s supposed to cool us down for a few hours. The thing that frightens me is that I think this is the new normal.
Today’s textile art comes from Polish American Iviva Olenick. Wonk the Vote actually turned me on to her, so shout out to Wonk if she’s reading this! She calls her art.”Stitchcraft – envisioning matriarchal social systems through “women’s crafts” of oral narratives, textile handcrafts, and plant-based knowledge.”
Based upon new evidence that a landmark Supreme Court case on religious and 1st Amendment rights was based upon a bogus claim, former Solicitor General Neal Katyal claimed that Colorado’s attorney general has a duty to ask the court to rehear the case and that a justice on the court could also ask the court to review the new information.
Speaking with fill-in host Michael Steele, the legal expert cited a report from the New Republic that website designer Lorie Smith made the claim that, “I will not be able to create websites for same-sex marriages or any other marriage that is not between one man and one woman. Doing that would compromise my Christian witness and tell a story about marriage that contradicts God’s true story of marriage—the very story He is calling me to promote,” which she bolstered by claiming she had received an inquiry from a same-sex couple named Stewart and Mike.
However, upon being contacted by the New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant, Stewart stated no such thing had happened and that he was not gay, was married to a woman and happens to be a website designer himself.
With that in mind, and after host Steele said everything about the case and how the conservative majority handled it “reeks,” Katyal suggested there is a legitimate reason for the court to revisit their controversial ruling.
“The Supreme Court has a procedure to seek a rehearing, so to say, ‘Hey Supreme Court, there’s a new fact that emerged and we need you to revisit your ruling,’ so that’s possible,” he explained. “The Supreme Court can also on its own ask for a briefing on this new question on whether this case is made up.”
“Conservatives right now are defending the decision saying that Roe versus Wade, Roe wasn’t pregnant at the time of the decision and that’s different,” he elaborated. “Roe was pregnant at the time of the filing of the complaint so she was having the exact problem that she was trying to remedy, namely seeking an abortion because she was pregnant. Here, this web designer has never once done a website for an LGBT couple. It’s the exact opposite situation it’s totally hypothetical and made up. I think the Colorado attorney general should consider bringing a rehearing petition before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Mourning the Legal Death of Choice. 2022. Embroidery on fabric. Iviva Olenick
The effective end of the Supreme Court’s term on Friday touched off what has become an annual tradition: hot takes summarizing the justices’ work over the preceding nine months based upon data aggregated from the justices’ decisions. These accounts typically focus on surprising-sounding results (50% of the decisions were unanimous!) in service of pushing back against the most obvious summary of the current court: that it is sharply divided between the six justices appointed by Republican presidents and the three justices appointed by Democrats. You can spin the data however you want, but the reality is actually simple. The conservative majority is pushing American law decisively to the right.
Statisticians call this phenomenon the “tyranny of averages” — the fact that averaging a data set tells us nothing about the size, distribution or skew of the data. But these kinds of “judge the Supreme Court by its data” assessments are even worse than just ordinary statistical errors.
First, they fail to account for the Supreme Court’s own role in choosing the cases it decides — so that the data isn’t random to begin with. Second, they ignore all of the Supreme Court’s significant rulings in other cases — those that don’t receive full briefings and arguments. Finally, even within the carefully cultivated subset of cases on which these claims generally focus, these commentaries both miscount the divisions and treat as equal disputes that bear no resemblance to each other. It’s not that this data is completely irrelevant, but anyone relying upon it should take it with a very substantial grain of salt.
Let’s start with the court’s docket. With one tiny exception (which accounted for exactly one case during the justices’ current term), the court chooses each and every one of its cases (and, even within those cases, which specific issues it wants to decide). This docket control, which is entirely a modern phenomenon, means the justices are pre-selecting the cases they decide — including technical disputes on which they may be likely to agree (or, at least, not disagree along conventional ideological lines). Thus, from the get-go, the entire data set on which too many commentators rely is biased toward the justices’ own behavior.
Women Birth Whole Communities (so keep your laws off our uteruses). 2022. Embroidery on fabric. 7.5 x 7.25 inches. B&W pattern inspired by Polish folk art. Iviva Oleniick
A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.
It’s the latest effort in a growing push against legacy admissions, the practice of giving admissions priority to the children of alumni. Backlash against the practice has been building in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in college admissions.
Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, filed the civil rights complaint Monday on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights
“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group’s executive director. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”
The Culture Crusaders of White Republican Christian Nationalism are not backing off. Here are a few clues. We’re hosting part of the party of hate down here. Maybe that is why it’s hot as hell here. This is from Politico‘s Politics Editor, David Siders. “The ‘Shrinking Baptist Convention’ Is Doubling Down on the Culture Wars. The challenges facing the nation’s largest Protestant denomination mirror those facing the GOP — and both would rather stick to their guns than shift course.”
NEW ORLEANS — No one could accuse the Baptists of excessive cheeriness. Or underplaying their challenges.
Over the clanking of silverware and the smell of breakfast sausages on the sidelines of a major gathering of Southern Baptists here, several hundred pastors and other churchgoers welcomed a roster of speakers ruminating on a “teetering” nation, “sexual insanity,” “all this trans stuff” and the specter that the country’s largest Protestant denomination was on a “road to insignificance.”
At the evening get-together in the same hotel ballroom — where attendees sipped on bottles of water in this humid city better known for imbibing more intoxicating beverages — they used even more apocalyptic language.
“One of the things about President Trump’s administration, there were so many Christians involved,” an influential Texas pastor named Jack Graham told the crowd. “In the West Wing, you couldn’t walk very far without bumping into bona fide, born-again believers and followers of Jesus.”
Yeah. Good Ol’ Republican Jesus. Who preaches only love neighbors that look and believe like you and don’t you dare feed the hungry and shelter strangers and, as for those kids. Don’t let them near me! Put them in cages or off to work! Who said slavery is bad for the American Economy?
Joy Reid: The U.S. saw a revival of indentured servitude using migrant children. We’re all implicated in this story. (via The ReidOut Blog) https://t.co/uO8FTwZwN8
“America is leaning on migrant children as indentured servants. Sickening reports on the prevalence of child labor in the U.S. cannot be ignored — and are reminiscent of a horror story from before the 20th century.” This is straight from Joy Reid.
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a stunning account of more than 100 migrant children, largely from Central America, who, according to the Times’ reporting, were working overnight shifts and dangerous jobs for companies large and small throughout the U.S.
In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J.Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
In other words, nearly all of us are likely buying and using goods fabricated by children’s hands. We’re all implicated in this story. These migrant children, who have traveled thousands of miles, are under intense pressure to send money home to their families or to the people who sponsor them in the United States. Many of them are extorting the children for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses.
These children are ostensibly under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services, which assigns them caseworkers to make sure they’re cared for while they are in this country.
The New York Times reports that “in interviews with more than 60 caseworkers, most independently estimated that about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time.”
Home Brew Healthcare. 2022. Embroidery and beading on fabric dyed and printed with marigolds and indigo leaves.
At least, this is the part at the end of all these gruesome descriptions.
And on Monday, the Biden administration announced that it was creating a new task force to crack down on the illegal exploitation of migrant children for labor in the United States.
Enforcement of child labor laws will most likely be a top issue for Julie Su, President Biden’s newly announced nominee for secretary of labor.
If confirmed, Su would be the Biden administration’s first AAPI Cabinet secretary.
Just before spring in Iowa, Merle Miller’s fellow Washington County Republicans said they wanted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or even South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott to run for president. They didn’t want Donald Trump.
Then Trump was indicted in New York City on state charges.
Then he was indicted a second time in Miami, on federal charges.
“Now you don’t hear those names brought up like before. The majority of Republicans here are for Trump after this frickin’ legal lynching. That’s all it is,” said Miller, explaining and channeling conservative sentiment in this rural county where he’s the GOP chairman.
“People here take the indictment personally,” Miller said. “I think if they wouldn’t have done this thing and try to prosecute and persecute him and drag this guy through the mud like they’ve been doing for seven years that it would be different. But people are mad.”
And Republicans aren’t just stirred up and rallying to Trump in Miller’s county outside Iowa City.
From Iowa’s Mississippi River border in the east to its western edge at the Missouri River, nearly two dozen Republican county chairs, consultants and activists who have not picked a side in the race told The Messenger that the New York and federal indictments gave Trump a crucial edge by intensifying the devotion of his backers and consolidating support among former doubters.
The shifting sentiment carries outsized significance because Iowa is on pace to be the most important state in the Republican presidential primary. Most GOP insiders and political pros believe a Trump loss in the Iowa caucuses in January would likely prolong the primary fight. A convincing Trump victory would trigger a domino effect of cascading wins in each of the next four early states, all but assuring his nomination.
He also has a “commanding lead” in the polls in Iowa. Let’s hope this surge lets up by the Labor Day Weekend. It sure is depressing to know that tomorrow is Independence Day, and a helluva lot of Republicans want to be dependent on a Putin-wannabe.
But, then, Moms for Liberty has similarly triggered warnings from the SPLC.
“Moms for Liberty and its nationwide chapters combat what they consider the ‘woke indoctrination’ of children by advocating for book bans in school libraries and endorsing candidates for public office that align with the group’s views,” the SPLC explains. “They also use their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials, advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education, advance a conspiracy propaganda, and spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.”
The group’s genesis overlaps with two recent trends. The first was school closures during the pandemic, a move intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus that quickly became intertwined with partisan politics, just like everything else pandemic-related. The other was the backlash against including instruction about race in school curriculums, the “critical race theory” scare amplified by Fox News. That proved to be an effective organizing vehicle, particularly for parents on the right. In short order, LGBTQ issues were folded into the mix in an effort to use social issues as a political wedge.
This movement depends on an exaggerated sense of innocence. These are just parents worried about their kids! They simply want schools to focus on fundamentals, like reading and arithmetic, instead of teaching about systemic racism or oral sex! Why, even the government is trying to oppress them, what with its calling upset parents “domestic terrorists!”
That’s not what the government did, of course. Hearing concerns about increasingly aggressive threats to school officials and administrators, the Justice Department released a statement insisting it would crack down on threats of violence. The other assertions in the paragraph above are similarly misleading. There was no widespread effort to teach critical race theory to kids in schools, though there was an effort to use that term to broadly attack discussions of race. The criticisms of discussion of same-sex relationships is similarly overblown and often dependent upon the argument that there’s something inherently sexual about people of the same gender being in love.
There’s quite a bit happening in politics news today, even though it is kind of a long holiday weekend with a Monday in between. I’ll bet plenty of working people are taking Monday off. I’m retired now; but whenever there’s a holiday weekend, I get the same feelings I used to when I was working. It feels like a time to goof off–maybe laze around reading a good book or binge watching something on TV. It’s a time to relax in the peaceful knowledge that you’re not required to be anywhere or do anything in particular.
Here in Boston, the Fourth of July weekend means lots of folks will be headed for Cape Cod or New Hampshire, and the city will be eerily quiet in the daytime. When I first moved to Boston from Indiana, I dutifully got a Massachusetts driver’s license; but I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t have to brave the insane Boston traffic. Eventually, I decided I wanted to learn to handle Boston driving even though I was terrified. I waited until the Fourth of July weekend, and drove all over downtown on empty streets to practice and build my confidence.
Yesterday, I started getting that holiday weekend feeling again. I can’t explain it any more than I can explain how I get that back to school feeling in the fall. I guess repeated experiences have formed pathways in my brain that are triggered by certain times of the year.
I feels like there should be a dearth of political news, too, but that’s not the case. It’s another very busy news day. There’s news of another “perfect” phone call by Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election. And of course, there are plenty of reactions to the most recent Supreme Court decisions.
In a phone call in late 2020,President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’spresidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the call.
Trump also repeatedly asked Vice President Mike Pence to call Ducey and prod him to find the evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, according to two of these people. Pence called Ducey several times to discuss the election, they said, though he did not follow Trump’s directions to pressure the governor.
The extent of Trump’s efforts to cajole Ducey into helping him stay in power have not before been reported, even as other efforts by Trump’s lawyer and allies to pressure Arizona officials have been made public….
By Indira Baldano
Trump phoned the governor’s cellphone on Nov. 30,2020, as Ducey was in the middle of signing documents certifying President Biden’s win in the state during a live-streamed video ceremony. Trump’s outreach was immediately clear to those watching. They heard “Hail to the Chief” play on the governor’s ringtone. Ducey pulled his phone from out of his suit jacket, muted the incoming call and put his phone aside. On Dec. 2,he told reporters he spoke to the president after the ceremony,buthe declined to fully detail the nature of the conversation. Ducey said the president had “an inquisitive mind”but did not ask the governor to withhold his signature certifying the election results.
But four people familiar with the call said Trump spoke specifically about his shortfall of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona and then espoused a range of false claims that would show he overwhelmingly won the election in the state and encouraged Ducey to study them. At the time, Trump’s attorneys and allies spread false claims to explain his loss, including that voters who had died and noncitizens had cast ballots.
After Trump’s call to Ducey, Trump directed Pence, a former governor who had known Ducey for years, to frequently check in with the governor for any progress on uncovering claims of voting improprieties, according to two people with knowledge of the effort.
Pence was expected to report back his findings and was peppered with conspiracy theories from Trump and his team,the person said. Pence did not pressure Ducey, but told him to please call if he found anything because Trump was looking for evidence, according to those familiar with the calls.
Like officials in Georgia, Ducey told Trump there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in his state. Trump then began attacking Ducey publicly and shifted his efforts to using Rudy Giuliani to convince the Arizona legislature to find the “fraud” for him.
The article says that Ducey has not been contacted by the Special Counsel’s team, but he has interviewed other Arizona officials.
More than half a dozen past and current officials in Arizona contacted by Trump or his allies after his defeat have either been interviewed by Smith’s team or have received grand jury subpoenas seeking records,according to four people familiar with the interviews.Those interviewed include Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, and three current members of the governing board of Maricopa County, the largest voting jurisdiction in the state that affirmed that Biden won.
Spokespeople for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), told The Post this week that their offices have not received correspondence from Smith’s team seeking records about the 2020 election. The Arizona Secretary of State’s office received a grand jury subpoena dated Nov. 22, 2022, that sought information about communications with Trump, his campaign and his representatives, according to an official familiar with the document but not authorized to publicly speak about it.
Reactions to Recent SCOTUS Rulings
There is a massive amount of discussion of the garbage rulings the Supreme Court issued this week. The student loan forgiveness case is getting a great deal of attention, as is the case of the web designer who used a fake customer and a non-existent wedding website to get the court to decide she could discriminate against gay couples. Dakinikat wrote a terrific post yesterday about several of the latest decisions, so I’m just going to follow that with some of the latest reactions from Court observers. If you haven’t read Dakinikat’s post, I highly recommend it.
When five conservative justices on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the right to an abortion in 2022, it signaled a new era for the court’s conservatism, one in which none of the rights and policies that emerged from the 20th century appeared safe.
By Valentin Gubarev
It also spawned a debate over the internal dynamics of that conservative supermajority. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join his fellow conservatives in overturning Roe. Had Roberts lost control of the court to the conservative ultras like Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito? Would he regain control in the next term?
The decisions released at the close of the court’s most recent term in June ― ending affirmative action in higher education, declaring a new right to discriminate against gay couples and voiding President Joe Biden’s plan for student loan debt relief ― present a different question: Does it even matter if Roberts is in the driver’s seat?
The conservative movement that built this court has long sought to roll back the legal and policy advances meant to blunt historic bigotries and discrimination, as well as the ability of the federal government to aid people harmed by the power of private capital. And they are continuing on that path whether Roberts or the ultra cohort runs the court.
At first, the conservative movement hoped that Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 would allow them to sweep away the policies of both the New Deal and the 1960s and 1970s, but they could not consolidate political power to do so through the legislative and executive branches. Instead, they launched a legal movement to win control of the judiciary and enact their policies outside of the political process.
That is what they have done over the last decade. They gutted the Voting Rights Act, first in 2013 and again in 2021. They blew a hole in restrictions on religious prayer in schools in 2022. And, of course, ended protections for reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Their progress continued this term.
Blumenthal addresses how each of the recent decisions of this illegitimate court have continued the work of erasing the gains of the last century. Read the rest of his arguments at HuffPo.
On Thursday, Justice Neil Gorsuch released a 26-page opinion venting outrage about a legal dispute that does not exist, involving websites that do not exist. Yet this case, built on imaginary grounds, will have very real consequences for LGBTQ consumers, and for anti-discrimination laws more broadly. All of the Court’s Republican appointees joined Gorsuch’s opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis.
That said, the fake dispute that Gorsuch imagines in his 303 Creative opinion involves a reasonably narrow legal question….
The case centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who wishes to expand her business into designing wedding websites — something she has never done before. She says she’s reluctant to do so, however, because she fears that if she designs such a website for an opposite-sex couple, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law will compel her to also design wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Smith objects to same-sex marriages.
As Gorsuch summarizes her claim, Smith “worries that, if she [starts designing wedding websites,] Colorado will force her to express views with which she disagrees.”
This is not a religious liberty claim, it is a free speech claim, rooted in well-established law, which says that the First Amendment forbids the government from compelling people to say something that they would rather not say. In ruling in Smith’s favor, the Court does not say that any religious conservative can defy any anti-discrimination law. It simply holds that someone like Smith, who publishes words for a living, may refuse to say something they don’t want to say.
The problem is that Smith brought her case using a fake customer who never requested a service she never offered. Back to the Millhiser piece:
Before this case was argued, I wrote that if Lorie Smith had been approached by a same-sex couple and refused to design a wedding website for them, and if she had then been sued for refusing to do so, then she would have a very strong First Amendment defense against such a suit. As the Supreme Court said in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And that includes the right of a web designer to refuse to write words on a website that they do not wish to write.
But none of these events have actually happened. And, for that reason, the Supreme Court should have dismissed the case.
The frustrating thing about this case is that it involves an entirely fabricated legal dispute. Again, Lorie Smith has never actually made a wedding website for a paying customer. Nor has Colorado ever attempted to enforce its civil rights law against Ms. Smith. Indeed, in its brief to the Supreme Court, Colorado expressed doubt that its anti-discrimination law would even apply to Smith.
Is this Gorsuch’s effort to set up a precedent for allowing businesses to discriminate against protected classes? And isn’t this decision based on fraud, since we now know that the customer Smith identified never contacted her and is already married and not gay?
Consequences for fabricating a court case: DOJ: It’s a crime to lie to a court. Roberts: litigants who file false filings can be removed from SCT bar and disbarred. https://t.co/TueVHfD9fM
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) July 1, 2023
Approximately 43 million Americans were made between $10,000 and $20,000 poorer today (plus interest) thanks to six Republican lawyers from Harvard and Yale. They decided that a program based on a statute intended to modify student loan balances in the event of an emergency could not modify student loan balances in the event of the COVID-19 emergency. And they did it by claiming that a plaintiff was injured by this program, when that plaintiff did not petition the Court over its injury, had no involvement in the case, and would likely not be injured by the program.
This is the upside-down world in which the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program. Advocates and members of Congress are now calling for a Plan B, to enact debt relief by some other means; for various reasons, I doubt that the administration will take that opportunity. But what should not be ignored is the way in which the nation’s highest court relies on dodgy theories and facts not in evidence to make the pronouncements it wants….
By Susan Visser
The plaintiffs in the two student loan cases, one of which was so preposterous that it was thrown out unanimously for lack of standing (that was the one where two borrowers said they didn’t have a chance to make public comment to get more debt relief, and that the remedy should be that nobody gets debt relief), simply didn’t like that borrowers would have some debt canceled, on ideological grounds. Nobody seriously contests this as their aim. But in American law, at least in theory, you have to have standing to sue: A party would have to be harmed by 43 million people getting debt relief, and eliminating the debt relief would have to redress this harm.
The Roberts Court, with the chief justice writing for the majority, believes they found one in the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a student loan servicer that stands to lose $44 million in servicing fees from debts that would be wholly canceled, according to the state of Missouri’s calculations. There’s one problem: MOHELA is not a plaintiff in the case. MOHELA in fact didn’t know about the case until hearing news reports, played no role in the case, opposed the case from being brought, and would not give the state of Missouri evidence for the case until required by state sunshine laws. We know all this from internal documents and public statements by MOHELA.
Even if MOHELA went ahead and sued, the contract they signed to accept federal student loans for servicing stipulates explicitly that the government has “sole discretion” to remove contracts from servicers, that the contractor cannot “object or protest,” and that the contractor “waives and releases all current or future claims” related to this. Perhaps this is why MOHELA did not sue in this case. Moreover, MOHELA stood to gain from debt cancellation on net, because it would get an estimated $61 million in fees to process forgiveness (more than Missouri said they would lose), and it would eliminate legal liability from botching Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) claims, and many of those loans would have been extinguished in debt cancellation.
The Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan in a 6–3 decision on Friday that rewrites federal law to create a bespoke, extra-textual prohibition on the large-scale cancellation of student debt. Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision in Biden v. Nebraska blazed past a clearly insurmountable standing problem to scold the president for even trying to use the law according to its own plain terms in order to offer mass debt relief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also chastised Justice Elena Kagan for her “disturbing” suggestion, in dissent, that the majority had gone “beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” The decision boils down to the chief justice’s obvious disdain for student debt relief—which is perhaps why he interpreted Kagan’s criticism as, in his words, a “personal” affront….
By Indira Baldano
The biggest question in the case was whether anyone could establish standing to challenge the program in the first place. After all, the federal government itself holds this debt, and no one is obviously “injured” by the government helping somebody else by erasing their debt. (In a separate case decided on Friday, the court unanimously held that two people who oppose the plan had no standing to sue.) Missouri tried to get around this problem by fixating on MOHELA, a corporation created by the state that services student loans. The Missouri attorney general asserted that MOHELA would suffer financially because of Biden’s plan—which turns out to be false—and that the state itself could represent its interests in court. A key flaw in this reasoning is that MOHELA is an independent entity from Missouri that could have sued to defend its own interests, but refused to do so, and even refused to help Missouri “represent” it in court. (State officials had to file public records requests to obtain key information because MOHELA did not want to participate in this case at all.)
Roberts didn’t care about any of that. MOHELA is “an instrumentality of Missouri,” he wrote, and Biden’s plan “will cut MOHELA’s revenues.” (Again: provably false!) So, according to Roberts and the court’s five other hard-line conservatives, the state had established standing.
This is so similar to what Gorsuch did in the fake marriage website case! The right wing justices can’t wait for legitimate cases to be brought; they have to search for fake ones, because they are desperate to return our country to the bad old days of Jim Crow and white male dominance.
Elena Kagan wasn’t having it.
Kagan pulled no punches in response. “From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” she wrote. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.” She skewered the idea that Missouri and MOHELA are interchangeable, citing the Missouri Supreme Court’s own declaration that they are not. And she eviscerated the majority for “wielding the major-questions sword” to overrule “legislative judgments” that belong to the political branches.
Congress had better watch out, because the Court is working to displace them. Just wait until they get control of the power of the purse!
The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.
Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit. “We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.
By Tara Dougans
It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen per cent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.
Challengers to the law argued that the policy was unconstitutional because it bore the “discriminatory taint” from the 1890 constitution. One of the plaintiffs was Roy Harness, a social worker in his late 60s who is permanently barred from voting because he was convicted of forgery decades ago. Forgery was one of the original crimes included in the list of disenfranchising offenses.
“It makes me feel bad. I’ve served my country, nation … got a degree and [I] still can’t vote, no matter what you do to prove yourself,” Harness told the Guardian in 2022.
Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back. To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications, and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.
Read more details at The Guardian.
I’ll end there and share a few more stories in the comments. Have a great Fourth of July sort of weekend!
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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 Dancer!
A similar move happened in Pennslyvania. This is from 
Catch this move by Arizona’s governor Katie Hobbs. 
Meanwhile, Ohio voters take matters into their own hands just like Kansas did last year. This is from the New York Times. 
Meanwhile, we have to remember that School Boards and the State Superintendent of Schools’ position is crucial. Checking down-ballot in your state is as important as voting for President. T
Meanwhile, down here in Lousyana, our Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards put his personal religion above the health of women. My tax dollars will support pregnancy propaganda centers. 
Everyone is waiting to see if it is possible for the AG of Colorado to take on the Supreme Court in that Fake Wedding Planner Case. 
The case centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who wishes to expand her business into designing wedding websites — something she has never done before. She says she’s reluctant to do so, however, because she fears that if she designs such a website for an opposite-sex couple, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law will compel her to also design wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Smith objects to same-sex marriages.
peej
Carissa
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