Frantic Friday Reads: Tales of the Strange and Deranged

“Wake up call Sleepy Don”. John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I thought I’d spend most of today’s post covering the antics and jury selection process in Trump’s Hush Money Case. However, there are also a lot of awful things coming out of the block of MAGA states down here on the Gulf Coast. Louisiana has joined the backwards-in-time parade, and it’s looking like we may soon be worthy of a Dickens novel.  Texas continues to prove that its women are chattel. But let’s start with The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Today is the 4th day, and things are just weird.

First, we found out today that Donald has a babysitter who is paid $105k annually. She’s been sitting in court with a wireless printer, printing stories that will make him more optimistic and upbeat. She was sitting close to him, but the Judge made her move to the back. So, he wears diapers, takes naps, and has a nanny.  I wonder if she’s solved his ketchup tantrums yet.  I firmly believe a jury of his peers would likely be found in the toddler section of daycare.

Last night, the Judge’s fears of juror intimidation became real as Fox News broadcasted the workplace of the nurse that had been selected to serve earlier this week. The big complaint about her was that she had a master’s and lived on the east side with her boyfriend. That supposedly made her likely to be a liberal activist.  This is from The Daily Beast. “Jesse Watters Goes Juror by Juror to Sow Doubt in Trump Hush-Money Case. “I think at this point we can say: It’s not going to be an acquittal,” the Fox host reacted mere hours after seven jurors were selected.” This is reported by William Vaillancourt. The bottom line is that Fox News continues to be the flagship of the insurrection.

It didn’t take long after the general outlines of seven jurors in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial were made public Tuesday for Fox News host Jesse Watters to suggest that, based on that information alone, Trump wouldn’t be acquitted.

While on air Tuesday night, Watters went through each juror, whose identities will remain anonymous in light of the potential for threats directed at them.

The second juror, Watters described, is “a nurse from the Upper East Side with a Masters degree.”

“She’s not married, has no kids and lives with her fiancé who works in finance,” Watters said, chuckling for some reason. “She gets her news from The New York Times, Google and CNN.”

Two items in this juror’s questionnaire “really stuck out,” according to Watters: “‘I don’t really have an opinion of Trump,’ and ‘No one is above the law.’ I’m not so sure about juror No. 2,” Watters reacted, stopping short of explaining why. Watters later said vaguely that he found her to be “concerning.”

The Fox host then made a point to note that juror 3’s law firm “features DEI on its home page.” DEI, an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion, has been a boogeyman for some on the right. Watters would make the same observation regarding the seventh juror, a lawyer whose firm, he claimed, “is big into DEI and ESG.” ESG, which relates to how companies score on environmental, social and governance metrics, has also been fodder for conservative criticisms.

“So that’s the jury of Trump’s peers so far,” Watters scoffed. “The fate of a billionaire real estate tycoon, TV celebrity-turned-45th president of the United States is in the hands of New York City lawyers, teachers and Disney workers who like to dance and get their news from the Times, but swear they can be impartial.”

When Watters introduced Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt, he began by blatantly sowing doubt over the jury pool.

The AP reported this last night after the Judge spoke to Ms Watters, who expressed concern when family and friends began to text her to ask if she was on the jury. “Judge in Trump case orders media not to report where potential jurors work.”

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial ordered the media on Thursday not to report on where potential jurors have worked and to be careful about revealing information about those who will sit in judgment of the former president.

Judge Juan Merchan acted after one juror was dismissed when she expressed concerns about participating in the trial after details about her became publicly known.

The names of the jurors are supposed to be a secret, but the dismissed juror told Merchan she had friends, colleagues and family members contacting her to ask whether she was on the case. “I don’t believe at this point I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision-making in the courtroom,” she said.

Merchan then directed journalists present in the courthouse not to report it when potential jurors told the court their specific workplaces, past or present. That put journalists in the difficult position of not reporting something they heard in open court.

The jury has been seated with a replacement.  The last of the alternative jurors are being processed today. We could see opening arguments on Monday.

The most disturbing news of the week is coming from Republican Governors and legislatures who continue to push a White Nationalist Agenda.  We’ll get to the frightening examples in the news shortly.  I want to introduce the topic for those of you that we can mark safe from Republican Governors. Hence, you get an idea of the deranged laws becoming laws that are aimed at eliminating rights for the majority of people.  This is an Op-Ed by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times today.

The U.A.W. is targeting 13 automakers — including Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Nissan, Volvo and Tesla — employing around 150,000 workers in 36 nonunion plants across the South. It faced the first major test of its strategy on Wednesday, when 4,300 workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., began voting on whether to unionize. The vote ends on Friday. If it’s successful, it will be a breakthrough for a labor movement that has struggled to build a footing in the South.

The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. “We the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the U.A.W. has brought into our states,” their joint statement reads. “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”

It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society.

The history of Southern political economy is to a great extent a history of the unbreakable addiction of Southern political and economic elites to no-wage and low-wage labor. Before the Civil War, of course, this meant slavery. And where the peculiar institution was most lucrative, an ideology grew from the soil of the cotton fields and rice paddies and sugar plantations, one that elevated human bondage as the only solid foundation of a stable society.

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared in an 1858 speech. “It constitutes the very mudsill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mudsill.”

A decade later and the slave system was dead, crushed underfoot by the armies of emancipation. The landowning Southern elites had lost their greatest asset — a seemingly inexhaustible supply of free labor. They would never regain it, but they would fight as hard as they could to approximate it.

With that, I give you the ClownFish of Lousiana’s latest workforce law.  “Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits. A House committee approved the bill along with others to reduce unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation wages.”  As BB said yesterday when I texted her this article,  this is positively Dickensian.

A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans to remove constraints on employers and reduce aid for injured and unemployed workers.

The House Labor and Industrial Relations panel advanced the child labor legislation, House Bill 156, along with House Bill 119, which would slash the amount of time for which people can collect unemployment aid. A third bill the committee approved, House Bill 529, would change how workers’ compensation wages are calculated in ways that could reduce benefits received by some injured laborers.

The bills, which head to the full House, are part of a broad effort by Republicans to weaken labor unions and strengthen employers’ hands in Louisiana. They are aligned with steps other Republican-led legislatures have taken in recent years, and on Thursday, GOP lawmakers attributed the moves to Gov. Jeff Landry’s directive to “reform” the business environment and remove bureaucratic red tape.

First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks. He questioned why Louisiana has the requirement while other states where he owns Smoothie King locations, such as Mississippi, don’t have them, and criticized people who have questioned the bill’s purpose.

Evidently Louisiana Republicans do not want children to eat for some reason.  “The Breakdown: Summer meal options for kids, after Landry refuses EBT program.  In your Breakdown: what options are out there for summer meals for kids in need?”

Governor Jeff Landry just declined more than 70-million dollars in federal funding for the Summer EBT program. It’s a pandemic-era program that would have provided extra grocery money to the families of 600-thousand kids out of school for the summer.

Census data shows more than one in four Louisiana kids live in poverty.

And, Kentucky and Florida are now relaxing laws so that children work instead of going to school too.

The only thing these state Republicans accomplish is setting free Robber Barons to do the worst and making the lives of the rest of us intolerable. “Top employees at Louisiana environmental agency resign in clash with leader, an ex-Trump official. New top DEQ employees are resigning or transferring under Jeff Landry-appointed leader.”  They are also after a tenured professor who is an expert on Climate Change.

Four officials named to prominent positions at the state Department of Environmental Quality by Gov. Jeff Landry’s nascent administration have already left after clashing with Landry’s appointee to the agency’s top job, Aurelia Giacometto, according to interviews with senior aides and documents obtained by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate.

Senior officials who remain at the DEQ and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal said the agency is also in turmoil over Giacometto’s insistence on pre-approving any contact made by employees with individuals in other state agencies, federal agencies, businesses and industries, and non-governmental organizations.

Giacometto’s actions may have caused delays in applying for and approval of federal grants worth millions of dollars, delayed routine inspections of numerous businesses for weeks, and may have violated employees’ rights to request leave under the federal Family Medical Leave Act, the aides said.

“During my two-week tenure, I witnessed numerous atrocities, with the most egregious being the harassment of longtime employees,” Chandra Pidgeon, who was undersecretary of the DEQ’s Office of Management and Finance, wrote in a March 1 resignation letter to Landry obtained by the news organization. Pidgeon did not respond to a request for comments on her letter.

Then, there’s Texas, again and Florida and North Carolina. “Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant women, leaving one to miscarry in a lobby restroom.”  

One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

Complaints that pregnant women were turned away from U.S. emergency rooms spiked in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, federal documents obtained by The Associated Press reveal.

The cases raise alarms about the state of emergency pregnancy care in the U.S., especially in states that enacted strict abortion laws and sparked confusion around the treatment doctors can provide.

The more you read about these states, the more frightening it gets.  Also, you should not think yourselves safe either because if they get back in control of the National agenda they will make these laws go national and there will be no reasonable Supreme Court to block them.   Think and vote local and encourage your friends and relatives to do the same.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?