Tuesday Reads
Posted: January 11, 2022 Filed under: just because 34 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
By German cartoonist Gerhard Gluck
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are heading to Atlanta today to give speeches on voting rights, but activist groups in Georgia are boycotting the event. Stacey Abrams says she won’t be there because of a scheduling conflict.
According to The New York Times: Biden Will Endorse Changing Senate Rules to Pass Voting Rights Legislation.
President Biden will endorse changing Senate rules to pass new voting rights protections during a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, the most significant step he will have taken to pressure lawmakers to act on an issue he has called the biggest test of America’s democracy since the Civil War.
Mr. Biden will not go so far as to call for full-scale elimination of the filibuster, a Senate tradition that allows the minority party to kill legislation that fails to garner 60 votes, according to a senior administration official who previewed the speech. But Mr. Biden will say he supports a filibuster “carve-out” in the case of voting rights, the official said.
Citing “repeated obstruction” by Republicans, Mr. Biden will endorse changing the Senate rules, the official said. The president will contend that the filibuster has protected “extreme attacks on the most basic constitutional right.”
“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Mr. Biden will say on Tuesday, according to a preview of his remarks provided by the White House. “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand.”
That’s apparently not enough for a number of Georgia voting rights groups.
The Guardian: Georgia activists warn Biden against a ‘photo-op’ visit that lacks voting rights plan.
A coalition of influential political activists in Georgia that boosted turnout in a state crucial to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 is refusing to attend the visit planned on Tuesday by the US president and Kamala Harris to speak on voting rights.
The group had warned the president and vice-president that they needed to announce a specific plan to get national voting rights legislation passed or risk their high-profile trip to Atlanta being dismissed as “a waste of time”….
…[O]n Monday evening, the coalition of activist groups – Black Voters Matter, Galeo Impact Fund, New Georgia Project Action Fund, Asian American Advocacy Fund, Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council – along with James Woodall, the Georgia NAACP president, announced that “we will not be attending” when Biden and Harris speak.
“Instead of giving a speech tomorrow, the US Senate should be voting tomorrow. What we need now, rather than a visit from the president, vice-president and legislators is for the White House and Senate to remain in DC and act immediately to pass federal legislation to protect our freedom to vote,” the groups said in joint statement.
Illustration by Alessia Turchie
More from CNN: Georgia voting rights groups boycott Biden’s Atlanta speech: ‘We don’t need even more photo ops. We need action.’
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, and representatives of several voting rights groups urged Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to remain in Washington on Tuesday if they don’t have a clear plan to advance voting rights legislation. Some of the groups that urged Biden to skip his Atlanta trip are the Asian American Advocacy Fund, GALEO Impact Fund Inc. and New Georgia Project Action Fund.
“We don’t need even more photo ops. We need action, and that action is in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights (Advancement) Act as well as the Freedom to Vote Act, and we need that immediately,” Albright told reporters on Monday.
Several major civil rights leaders are scheduled to attend Biden and Harris’ speeches in Atlanta on Tuesday, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League; Derrick Johnson, the head of the NAACP; Melanie Campbell, the chief executive of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and many other civil rights and voting rights leaders will also be attending.
At The Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart argues: Opinion: Georgia voting activists want to turn Biden away. They’ve got the wrong guy.
After months of justified complaints that the White House was prioritizing everything except preserving voting rights, President Biden and Vice President Harris will head to Georgia on Tuesday to bring their spotlight to the fight. But a high-profile group of Peach State voting rights organizations is saying, “Don’t come.”
Lazy Caturday Reads: SCOTUS, Covid, and the Right Wing Agenda
Posted: January 8, 2022 Filed under: just because 22 Comments
By Chris Miles
Good Afternoon!!
There’s not a lot of breaking news today, but there are plenty of articles about the the Supreme Court and the pandemic; at the moment those topics are interrelated because of yesterday’s SCOTUS argument on President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The conservative majority on the Court is apparently working to kill Americans in the service of weakening the Federal government.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: COVID Is an Emergency. To SCOTUS’s Conservatives, It’s Also an Opportunity.
A majority of the justices on the Supreme Court may not see COVID-19 as an emergency. But they do see it as an opportunity. This unprecedented pandemic, the deadliest in American history, has forced the executive branch to act swiftly and creatively at each stage of the crisis. Facing an often-deadlocked Congress, President Joe Biden has drawn on old statutes to establish new regulations to stop the coronavirus from spreading and killing more people. Yet in so doing, he has given the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices a chance to hobble his whole agenda. And during oral arguments over Biden’s vaccine mandates on Friday, these justices made it painfully clear that they will also seize this moment to grind down the federal government’s ability to perform even its most basic functions as well.
Friday’s arguments revolved around two rules issued by the Biden administration. The first, which we’ll call the employer mandate, was issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It imposes a requirement on companies with 100 or more employees: Workers must either get vaccinated against COVID-19 or wear a mask at work and undergo weekly testing. The second, which we’ll call the health care mandate, was issued by the Department of Health and Human Services. It obligates hospitals and other care facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid funds, which is most hospitals, to issue a vaccine mandate for workers. This mandate includes medical and religious exemptions. A coalition of red-state attorneys general challenged both rules, and after the lower courts divided, the Supreme Court scheduled a special Friday session to decide their fate.
Cat and Mouse, by Janet Hill
And what a session it was. The nihilism, hypocrisy, and armchair epidemiology on display at times bled into rank anti-vax-ism. The conservative supermajority did not bother to conceal its contempt for the Biden administration’s effort to root new policies in old statutes. As the basis for its employer mandate OSHA cited a federal law that permits it to issue an “emergency temporary standard” when it determines that it’s “necessary” to protect employees from a “grave danger” resulting from “physically harmful” “agents” or “new hazards.” The coronavirus is both an infectious “agent” and a “new hazard” that poses a “grave danger.” So OSHA’s vaccinate-or-test regime fits pretty neatly into Congress’ mandate. But the Republican-appointed justices appeared to begin with the premise that existing law could not possibly authorize this rule, then worked backward to justify their skepticism.
That’s because these justices emerged from a conservative legal movement that has grown obsessed with obliterating “the administrative state”—the hundreds of federal agencies that actually implement laws passed by Congress. Because Congress cannot anticipate every future problem, it has long given these agencies broad mandates to accomplish some overarching goal however their experts see fit. For instance, lawmakers charged the public health experts at OSHA with determining how best to protect Americans from dangers in the workplace. They did not try to predict every hazard that might arise; instead, they simply tasked the agency with deciding how best to confront the most catastrophic risks to American workers.
Please go read the rest at Slate.
Ian Millhiser at Vox: The Supreme Court appears ready to slash Biden’s vaccine mandate for workers.
Benjamin Flowers is Ohio’s solicitor general, and he was supposed to be at the Supreme Court on Friday to ask the justices to nullify a Biden administration rule requiring most workers to either be vaccinated against Covid-19 or to be regularly tested for the disease.
But Flowers had to argue his case over the phone. The reason why? He himself has Covid, and therefore could not enter the justices’ workplace and risk endangering them and their staff.
It’s an elegant metaphor for the kind of see-no-evil approach to Covid-19 that Flowers, and several other lawyers arguing against policies from President Joe Biden’s administration, would impose on the nation. Flowers would have the justices block one of Biden’s most significant efforts to halt a potentially deadly disease that, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted multiple times during Friday’s arguments, is infecting about three-quarters of a million Americans every day this week.
And yet, if Friday’s argument in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor is any sign, there will almost certainly be at least five votes on the Supreme Court to block the workplace Covid rule, which applies to employers with 100 or more employees.
By Catherine Chauloux
Meanwhile, in separate case Biden v. Missouri, the Court considered a rule requiring health providers that accept Medicare and Medicaid funds to be vaccinated. This oral argument was less of a bloodbath for the government, and it seems possible that this more limited rule for health providers will be upheld.
But the oral argument in the first case, NFIB, suggests that the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority is inclined to hand down a very broad decision — one that won’t simply hobble many of the Biden administration’s efforts to quell a pandemic that has killed nearly 830,000 Americans, but that could also fundamentally rework the balance of power between elected federal officials and an unelected judiciary….
Multiple justices appeared eager to impose new restrictions on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to federal agencies. Indeed, the Court could easily give itself a sweeping new power to veto agency regulations that a majority of the justices disapprove of.
A majority of the Court, in other words, appeared much more bothered by the implications of letting the Biden administration fight the pandemic than they are bothered by the many deaths caused by the pandemic itself.
Ironically, Covid is killing off right wing Republicans who refuse to get vaccinated and wear masks. Kent Sepkowitz at The Daily Beast on January 3: Omicron Shows the Unvaccinated Will Never Be Safe.
The Omicron variant of SARS CoV2 has quickly upended at least three facts we thought we had established about the COVID-19 pandemic.
First, the transmissibility of Omicron has shattered all previous records, including those set by the Delta variant, which briefly had been considered just about worst-in-class due its extreme contagiousness. Second, it has shown us that COVID-19 can be a mild disease—if one considers a three- or four-day bout of fatigue, aches, and fever to be mild.
But it is the third revelation that’s the most alarming. Omicron has scrambled a great deal of what we thought we knew about immunity to the infection in the first place. Witness the ease with which it has infected those with one or two—or even three—vaccinations, a phenomenon referred to as vaccine evasion, or VE. Thankfully, the current vaccines still prevent most lethal infections, despite being less effective at preventing infection itself.
By Emily Olson
However, it is not vaccinated people with breakthrough infections who comprise the most unsettling part of the immunity story, even as that makes headlines and dominates social media. Rather, it is the ease with which Omicron has evaded the immunity provoked by previous infection with the Delta or the Alpha (aka the British or B-117) variants that has ominous implications for what’s ahead—and raises the specter of more mass death.
For those willing to accept vaccines, this type of evasion less than a year after the mRNA products entered widespread use is a serious but surmountable scientific challenge. We have long known we may need to develop just-in-time vaccines for a newly—and suddenly—dominant variant. MRNA technology lends itself to exactly that. The technology is available, and though the product will always lag behind the latest pandemic variants, tricks (like third doses and fourth doses of the old, less-finely tuned vaccine) to buy time or innovative technologic shortcuts surely will be developed.
Vaccinated people will—sooner or later—be able to keep up with the always-changing virus.
But the implacable millions for whom vaccination represents some intolerable intrusion on their personal space—call them the Never Vaxxers—represent a very different problem, one that science, persuasion, or even harsh threats seem unable to resolve. We knew there were anti-vaxxers, and we knew the pandemic would not end easily, but these people will not stop dying any time soon.
One more on yesterday’s SCOTUS session from The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus: Opinion: Where was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mask?
Where was Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s mask? If you think this sounds like a trivial question, I dissent. I believe it goes to the heart of our fraying social fabric.
When the Supreme Court justices took their seats Friday morning to hear oral arguments in two cases challenging the Biden administration’s covid rules, seven of the justices wore masks — a change in their previous behavior prompted, no doubt, by the emergence of an new infectious strain.
Miss Mink The Cat Countess. Lesson One, Janet Hill
One justice, Sonia Sotomayor, who had previously been the only justice to wear a mask on the bench, participated remotely from her chambers. Sotomayor has diabetes, which is a risk factor for more severe illness with covid. She also is, or would have been, Gorsuch’s seat mate for the nearly four-hour-long argument session.
The court, having resumed in-person arguments, retains strict limits on who can attend and strict rules for those allowed inside the chamber. Reporters and lawyers must wear masks — N95 masks, not the less-effective cloth variety — and test negative for covid. In fact, two of the lawyers who argued against the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates had to do so remotely after testing positive. And instead of being crammed cheek by jowl in the press section, reporters, along with the justices’ law clerks, are spaced throughout the otherwise-empty chamber.
These rules and practices all make sense for the court (where five justices, including Sotomayor, are over 65) and for the public. Indeed, they offer a model for responsible workplace behavior in an age of omicron.
Which brings me to the question: Where was Gorsuch’s mask?
I put that question to the court’s public information office. No response to that, or to a question about whether Gorsuch’s masklessness had something to do with Sotomayor’s decision to absent herself.
There’s more at the WaPo link.
While we’re discussing the Supreme Court, I want to highlight another article at Slate by Mark Joseph Stern from one year ago: Ginni Thomas, Wife of Clarence, Cheered On the Rally That Turned Into the Capitol Riot.
On Wednesday morning, Ginni Thomas—wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—endorsed the rally in Washington demanding that Congress overturn the election. She then sent her “LOVE” to the demonstrators, who violently overtook the Capitol several hours later. Two days later, Thomas amended her post with the addendum: “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol].” By that point, five people involved in the insurrection, including a Capitol Police officer, had died.
Thomas, a conservative lobbyist and zealous supporter of Donald Trump, has fervently defended the president over the last four years. On her Facebook page, she frequently promotes baseless conspiracy theories about a “coup” against Trump led by Jewish philanthropist George Soros, a frequent target of anti-Semitic hate. Thomas draws many of these theories from fringe corners of the internet, including an anti-vax Facebook group that claimed Bill Gates would use the COVID vaccine to kill people. In recent months, she also amplified unsubstantiated corruption claims against Joe Biden while insisting, falsely, that the Obama administration illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, then tried to rig the election against him.
By Yana Movchan, 1971
In turn, Trump has rewarded Thomas with an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office. Her advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019. According to the New York Times, the meeting was arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps. (Clarence Thomas and Trump appear to be quite friendly: The justice took his clerks to meet with the president in the Oval Office at least once; Ginni attended as well.) At the White House, Groundswell’s members lobbied Trump against transgender service in the military, which he already prohibited in 2017. The ban took effect in 2019, around the time of Groundswell’s meeting, after the Supreme Court lifted lower court orders blocking it by a 5–4 vote. (Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from the case; he has never recused from any case because of his wife’s lobbying activities.) The New York Times also reported that Ginni Thomas compiled lists of federal employees whom she deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. She sent her lists to Trump, urging him to fire the disloyal employees, though he seems to have largely ignored her. He has, however, stacked his administration with former Thomas clerks.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Thomas remained active on Facebook, condemning Black Lives Matter, opposing COVID-19 shutdowns, and touting the “Walk Away” movement, which purports to spotlight Democrats who became Republicans under Trump. (At least two individuals featured in the “Walk Away” series, both Black, were actually models from royalty-free stock photos.) She also campaigned for Trump in person—and, according to the Intercept, spearheaded a dark-money operation to support the president. Cleta Mitchell, the Republican lawyer who participated in Trump’s shakedown of the Georgia secretary of state, led the project.
Chief Justice Roberts claims to be concerned about conflicts of interest in the judiciary. Why isn’t he doing anything about this obvious conflict for Clarence Thomas?
I’ll add more links in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads: We’re Approaching the Anniversary of the Capitol Insurrection.
Posted: January 4, 2022 Filed under: just because 16 Comments
Woman Reading, August Macke
Good Morning!!
This Thursday marks one year since the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and today’s top news stories reflect the seriousness of the upcoming anniversary. There is also a new book out today that looks interesting.
The Guardian: The Steal review: stethoscope for a democracy close to cardiac arrest.
In their terrific new book, the veteran reporters Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague argue that the mob that invaded the Capitol in Washington almost exactly a year ago “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.
The “real insurrection” was the one “led by Trump and his coterie of sycophants” in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona. It “was only slightly better organized than the mob but considerably more calculated and dangerous”.
That real insurrection is the subject of this timely and important volume. The authors have used a stethoscope to examine the minutia of the American election process. The result is a thrilling and suspenseful celebration of the survival of democracy.
The attempted coup was led by Donald Trump. Its intended denouement, in which the vice-president, Mike Pence, would ignore the votes of the six states above plus Washington DC in order to swing the election to Trump, was outlined in an insane memo written by the lawyer John Eastman, described here as “surely the most seditious document to emerge from the White House in American history”.
That final act, of course, never happened. Not even Pence, the most sycophantic vice-president of modern times, could bring himself to violate the constitution so blatantly to keep his boss in the White House.
But the genuine heroes, brought to life here, were the “hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them were Republicans, some were Trump supporters. They refused to accept his slander of themselves, their communities and their workers, and they refused to betray their sworn duty to their office and their country. They were the real patriots.”.
The New Republic has a lengthier review that is worth reading: The Next Coup Attempt Will Be More Dangerous. Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague’s book shows how scattershot January 6 was—and why a repeat could be harder to stop.
Poul Friis Nybo (Danish 1868-1929) A young woman reading while enjoying a cup of tea in the sunroom by the sea.
Tomorrow Merrick Garland will give a speech on the January 6 investigation. The Washington Post: Attorney general Garland plans speech on Jan. 6 investigation for Wednesday.
Rockin’ New Year’s Eve Reads: Goodbye to a Year of Silencing Women
Posted: December 31, 2021 Filed under: just because | Tags: I am Speaking, New Year's Eve 2021, Silencing women 22 Comments
Happy Friday Sky Dancers!
I’ve had to adult during my one solid week off a year and it’s been a series of having to do some training, pay bills, and work with FEMA. I had a great experience with my FEMA inspector yesterday and hopefully can get enough to get this very old kathouse an electrician to figure out why I have what seems like random electricity. I’d really like a functional laundry room again for one. I should get a response within 10 days and I’m crossing everything possible.
The Guardian has the story of Julie K. Brown and the work she did to “bring down Jeffrey Epstein”. It’s a great read.
The town of Palm Beach in Florida, the crime writer Carl Hiaasen has observed, “is one of the few places left in America where you can still drive around in a Rolls-Royce convertible and not get laughed at.” It’s an unironic island, filled with the super-rich and famous, plastic surgeons and, of course, the former US president, Donald Trump, who holds court at his ostentatious Mar-a-Lago resort.
A satellite of Miami, the island prides itself on its many flamboyant charity balls, but no amount of good-cause fundraising can remove the whiff of corruption that hangs heavy in the subtropical air. If money talks in most places, in Palm Beach it speaks with a confident authority that’s seldom questioned. Never has that understanding been more egregiously demonstrated than in the case of the inscrutable financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
n 2008 Epstein was sent to prison, having pleaded guilty to the charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18. It was the culmination of a three-year investigation, involving first state and then federal authorities. The local police had uncovered evidence that Epstein had sexually coerced and abused scores of young women and girls, some as young as 13 or 14. There were also a number of testaments to rape.
But all throughout the prosecution seemed reluctant to take Epstein to court and the police were always one step behind their target. For a start, Epstein appeared to be tipped off that he was going to be arrested. When the police arrived at his Palm Beach mansion, six computer hard drives had been removed, along with video recordings from his internal closed circuit system. The police were never able to gain access to this potential evidence.
Florida is notorious for its harsh prison system and lengthy sentencing. Someone accused of Epstein’s alleged crimes might have been looking at 20 years in a gang-dominated penitentiary. Instead he received an 18-month sentence, of which he served less than 13 months in a private wing of the county jail. He was granted immunity for himself and four assistants for any related charges, was awarded daily work release, in which he was driven to his office by his own driver, and at night he was allowed to sleep with his jail door open. He also had access to another room where a television had been installed for him.
How did he get off so lightly? And how was he able to return to his gilded world of billionaire friends and celebrity playmates without any real stigma attached to his name? These were the questions that Julie Brown, an overworked and underpaid investigative journalist at the Miami Herald, kept asking herself towards the end of 2016.
“I wanted to do a story on sex trafficking,” she recalls on a Zoom call from New York, “but every time I googled Florida and sex trafficking, a story about Jeffrey Epstein came up.”
As she delved deeper, she realised just how far the authorities had bent over backwards to accommodate Epstein and his battery of well-paid lawyers. Although they seemingly had enough evidence to support his prosecution for much more serious crimes, they offered him a “sweetheart deal” on a relatively minor charge. Brown’s intrepid work led to a three-part Herald series in 2018 on Epstein that would encourage federal authorities to reopen the investigation and to arrest the financier.
Along with the three-part Herald series, Brown delves into how Epstein kept getting away with rape and sex trafficking. Brown published a book this year that’s a compilation of her research. Here’s the NYT review of Perversion of Justice.
Epstein today is so universally reviled that it is easy to forget that things were not always so. Less than a year before he died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, the self-proclaimed financier had many of the world’s richest, smartest and most powerful men on speed dial. He hopscotched the planet on his private Gulfstream. He owned an island in the Caribbean. He bankrolled pie-in-the-sky science projects, longing for immortality.
Journalists were among those who allowed themselves to be snookered. Epstein was a savvy manipulator, and many of us (including at The New York Times) were wowed by access to him and blinded by the cadre of famous men who encircled him. Too often, we viewed Epstein as a source to cultivate rather than as a predator to investigate. It was a big mistake.
Thankfully, there were exceptions. In November 2018, Julie K. Brown, a reporter at The Miami Herald, published an explosive three-part investigation into Epstein. Brown focused on how, a decade earlier, Epstein had wriggled out of a federal criminal investigation by pleading guilty to two state charges of soliciting prostitution. Florida and federal authorities, Brown reported, delivered one favor after another to the politically connected suspect and his politically connected lawyers, overruling investigators and keeping victims in the dark.
Brown’s bombshell shook prosecutors and politicians out of their yearslong stupor. Federal prosecutors in New York opened a new criminal investigation, which culminated in Epstein being arrested and charged the following summer. R. Alexander Acosta, who as the U.S. attorney in Miami had helped cut the sweetheart deal with Epstein in 2008, resigned as labor secretary.
Now, nearly two years after Epstein was found hanging in his cell in what authorities concluded was a suicide, Brown is revealing how she landed the story of a lifetime. Her book, “Perversion of Justice,” is a warts-and-all retelling of what it took to expose not just Epstein but also a badly broken justice system.
Having read the Miami Herald series, I already knew the basic plotline, but that didn’t make it any less maddening to see how Epstein’s fixers — including lawyers like Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz — worked the system to catastrophic effect.
The press continues to be snookered on many accounts for this and other cases involving rich old white men. I was horrified to hear that Alan Dershowitz was party to a BBC interview as an “impartial observer”. How do these things happen? Here’s the coverage from WAPO of that journalistic sin. Capturing Epstein’s powerful friends may be next on the agenda.
The BBC says it is investigating how Alan Dershowitz was allowed on its airwaves to talk about the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell without mentioning that the constitutional lawyer is implicated in the case and accused of having sex with an alleged victim of financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Shortly after Maxwell was convicted Wednesday of sex-trafficking charges for assisting Epstein in abusing young girls, BBC News brought on Dershowitz to analyze the guilty verdict of Epstein’s longtime paramour. But the network failed to mention that Dershowitz not only previously served as Epstein’s attorney but that he is accused of having sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre when she was as young as 16. Dershowitz has denied the allegations.
Dershowitz used his time on the “BBC World News” to slam Giuffre for supposedly not being a credible witness in the Maxwell case — claims that went unchallenged by the show’s anchor. He also claimed the case from Giuffre against him and Britain’s Prince Andrew, who has also been accused of sexual assault and has denied the allegations, was somehow weakened after Maxwell’s guilty verdict.
“The government did not use as a witness the woman who accused Prince Andrew, who accused me, accused many other people because the government didn’t believe she was telling the truth,” he said. “In fact she, Virginia Giuffre, was mentioned in the trial as somebody who brought young people to Epstein for him to abuse. And so this case does nothing at all to strengthen in any way the case against Prince Andrew.”
Even Fox News acknowledges the connections between Dershowitz and Epstein. This New York Magazine article written by Joshua Kendall shows once again, how rich white guys can silence women. “She Tweeted That Alan Dershowitz Might Be Acting Crazy. So Yale Fired Her. The strange free-speech case of Bandy Lee.”
“I think I’ll order only a bowl of the New England clam chowder,” Bandy Lee said to me one afternoon several months ago, as we settled in at a restaurant overlooking the Boston Common. “I have just completed a 40-day fast when all I consumed was water and powdered electrolytes. So it will take a couple of days before I am ready to eat a full meal.”
When I asked her if fasting was a regular part of her dietary regimen, she said, “I’ve fasted a few times before for various reasons. On this occasion, I wanted to think through the direction of my life.”
The trajectory of Lee’s life had indeed taken a strange turn of late. A widely respected scholar who has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and either written or edited a dozen academic books on violence, Lee was an assistant clinical professor in the law and psychiatry department at Yale for 17 years until the summer of 2020, when Yale declined to renew her contract. The precipitating offense? Tweeting about the retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Lee claims it was all Dershowitz’s doing: “Dershowitz’s pressure seems to be the reason why everything changed.” But Lee had long been one of her department’s most controversial members, thanks to her outspoken, boundary-pushing commentary about Donald Trump. Still, while her department chair, John Krystal, had never liked the public attention her comments attracted, he had tolerated them as long as she made it clear that she was not speaking on behalf of the department. As he noted in a 2018 talk: “We are an academic institution which respects free speech, but the department and the medical school do not issue statements regarding the mental status of public officials. We are committed to living with this tension.”
Lee has always been driven, she says, by a “sense of social mission,” reflected in her years of work on violence prevention. She strongly identifies with Greta Thunberg and other social-justice advocates. But Lee paid little attention to domestic politics until 2016. “The morning after Trump was elected president, I decided to do something because I was convinced that his administration was likely to increase violence,” she said. The following spring, Lee organized a conference at Yale titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” on the subject of Trump’s mental state and the ethics of psychiatrists diagnosing him from afar. She respected the Goldwater Rule — the ethical guideline designed to prevent psychiatrists from rendering a professional opinion of a public figure without first receiving permission and conducting an examination — but she also worried about “the risk of remaining silent.”
The conference led to a 2017 book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which argued that Trump’s lack of “mental fitness” made him a threat to the nation. As Lee and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Judith Herman put it in their introduction: “Delusional levels of grandiosity, impulsivity, and the compulsions of mental impairment, when combined with an authoritarian cult of personality and a contempt for the rule of law, are a toxic mix.” With contributions from 27 mental-health experts, the book, which sold more than 100,000 copies, claims that Trump likely suffers from a grave personality disorder such as malignant narcissism. Lee then began writing op-eds and emerged as a nationally prominent Trump critic. Being a Trump critic at Yale was not unusual, of course, but what raised eyebrows was the assertion that her critique had the weight of medical expertise behind it.
I’d like to point to another woman denied tenure at UNC because her research became a right-wing hysteria misadventure. Remember Nikole Hannahah-Jones? “Nikole Hannah-Jones’ delayed UNC tenure offer highlights political battle over critical race theory. Her 1619 Project is at the center of a debate about what public-school students can learn about race in America.” If anything, we should characterize 2021 as the year of silencing women. This is especially true of women of color.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s board of trustees voted on Wednesday to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones after initially delaying the customary job protection for the incoming journalism professor, who is best known for her award-winning work reexamining how slavery shaped the United States’ founding.
The board’s vice chair, R. Gene Davis Jr., who was among those who voted to offer tenure to Hannah-Jones, said that UNC “is not a place to cancel people or ideas. Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names, like woke or racist.”
“In this moment at our university, in our state, and in our nation, we need more debate, not less. We need more open inquiry, not less. We need more viewpoint diversity, not less. We need to listen to each other and not cancel each other, or call each other names. If not us, who?” Davis added in remarks after the 9-4 vote.
I still remember the women denied jobs in the Biden administration and treated horribly including one of my senators from the gret swampland of Republican Lousyanna. This was just a month ago! This wasn’t back in the McCarthy Era. But wait, another McCarthy and another McCarthy Era. This coverage is from Politico.
Saule Omarova, tapped to be comptroller of the currency, was met with resistance from Republicans over her advocacy for a dominant role for government in finance. One GOP lawmaker questioned the Cornell law professor, who was born in the former Soviet state of Kazakhstan, about her previous affiliation with a communist youth organization and asked if he should refer to her as “comrade.” Omarova vigorously denied having any sympathy with communist views.
This is from Roll Call published in early August. “Sexist comments followed by silence mar Alabama Senate race. Trump, congressman belittle female former Senate chief of staff.”
While Republicans are still celebrating electing a record number of women to the House in 2020, former President Donald Trump and a sitting member of Congress have resorted to sexist attacks in a Senate primary that won’t take place for another 10 months. Yet no one seems to care enough to condemn the comments publicly.
Katie Britt is one of a handful of Alabama Republicans running to replace GOP Sen. Richard C. Shelby, her former boss, who is not seeking reelection. Britt clearly touched a nerve among her competitors when she raised $2.2 million in less than a month after entering the race.
“I see that the RINO Senator from Alabama, close friend of Old Crow Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby, is pushing hard to have his ‘assistant’ fight the great Mo Brooks for his Senate seat,” Trump said in a July 10 release, just a few days after Britt announced her second-quarter fundraising. “She is not in any way qualified and is certainly not what our Country needs or not what Alabama wants.”
Britt has compiled a serious résumé on and off Capitol Hill. The 37-year-old progressed from Shelby’s deputy press secretary to press secretary, earned her law degree and practiced law, then returned to the Hill as Shelby’s communications director and finally his chief of staff from 2016 to 2018. She was subsequently president and CEO of the Alabama Business Council before joining the Senate race. Calling Britt an “assistant” was clearly meant to belittle her.
“I was called that and assumed to be that more times than I can count,” said former chief of staff Kristin Nicholson, who ascended to the top job with Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin of Rhode Island at age 28. “But I never heard one of my male counterparts mistaken for a secretary.”
This warning was published in April of this year by The Centre for International Governance Innovation. It’s written by Marie Lamensch. “When Women Are Silenced Online, Democracy Suffers.”
“I would never ever, ever subject myself to that again. It has damaged my mental health. It has made me fear for the safety of my family. It has made me fear for my safety,” says former television anchor and political candidate Tamara Taggart.
In April, during a virtual discussion on cyber harassment of journalists and politicians, Taggart recounted the avalanche of online insults and disparaging comments she received during the 2019 federal elections. As a former journalist, she was not a stranger to working in a toxic environment, but the situation worsened dramatically when she decided to run for office. “If I had known how much abuse I would face, I would not have run,” she stated.
Taggart’s experience online is not an exception. Around the world, online violence against women is pervasive and endemic. Understanding its impact on women is fundamental to our understanding of the consequences for democracy.
We know that technologies are double-edged swords. Social media platforms such as Twitter have become de facto tools for politicians, journalists and activists, and there is no denying that participation in these spaces has many benefits, for women in particular. A global report by #ShePersisted, an organization that seeks to tackle gendered disinformation and online attacks against women in politics, shows that women involved in politics benefit from an online presence, particularly since traditional media remains biased toward them. Female politicians use these platforms to connect with communities, build an identity, and shape policies and political discourse.
However, social media platforms can also silence and delegitimize women who speak out. Whether in Canada, India and Pakistan, the Philippines, or the United Kingdom and the United States, it is well documented that women, particularly those in positions of leadership or activism, are subject to more online abuse than men. In 2018, a project by Amnesty and Element AI titled “Troll Patrol” found that female politicians and journalists in Britain and the United States are abused on Twitter every 30 seconds.
I’ve not even discussed violence or threats of violence here. We may see the end of access to the full constitutional rights of reproductive rights by mostly old white men on the Supreme Court. State Regulation of our bodies and choices and when and how to give birth is the ultimate silence of women’s moral agency. Suppression and silencing of women continue. This is an example from Australia
It is widely understood that gender-based violence disproportionately impacts Indigenous populations compared to other population groups. Why are their lives not honoured or mourned or valued in the same way?
This is from Ms. Magazine from last month. “Obstructing Black Women’s Voices Is a Form of Race-Based Violence” and was written by Michelle Duster. “Two murals commemorating suffrage are underway in Chicago. But they’re being met with resistance from—you guessed it—white men. For centuries, white men have wielded power over Black women’s ability to be respected as equals.”
Last year, a group of six women formed the Chicago Womxn’s Suffrage Tribute Committee to celebrate local suffragists and tell the unique suffrage history of the state of Illinois, which granted women restricted suffrage in 1913—seven years before the 19th Amendment was passed. It was the first state east of the Mississippi to do so.
The group secured two walls for murals through the Wabash Arts Corridor, that are perpendicular to each other. One piece by Diosa (Jasmina Cazacu) would feature portraits of seven white and three Black women leaders; the other large horizontal piece by Dorian Sylvain to accompany would have text-based wording of “I’m Speaking” with attribution to Vice President Kamala Harris. Substantial funding was secured from a few large organizations and smaller donations came from individuals. The owners of the buildings approved of the artwork to grace their walls and October 2021 installation dates were set.
Unfortunately, the white male owner of the parking lot adjacent to the building where the text-based artwork was to be painted took issue with the work and aggressively refused to rent spaces that were needed for installation equipment. This obstruction of “I’m Speaking” was reminiscent of the centuries-long dynamic of white men wielding power over Black women’s ability to be heard and respected as equals. It illustrated an attitude some white men still believe: that they have a right to determine when and where a Black woman can speak and need to approve of what she says.
“I am speaking”–when said by a black woman of power–is evidently quite threatening to some men.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) are victims of pervasive violence that began centuries ago, one that has gone unrecognized by governments, institutions, and society as a whole. To fight this silencing, Native communities have come together to decolonize the narrative, advocate for MMIWG, and honor the lost lives of their daughters, sisters, and matriarchs. We provide an overview of the history of MMIWG, the lack of response by the US government, and the decolonial action and advocacy by Native communities. However, we also go far beyond the typical academic article, in that we present both the factual information behind MMIWG and the emotional weight that each of the authors and those we know carry. We have incorporated stories, pictures, art, and the names of MMIWG to illustrate the ongoing reality of the attempted genocide of Native women and girls. We pray that this article aids in the honoring of our lost sisters and their families while bringing awareness of this tragedy to the eyes of those who can join us in fighting the silence.
So you might be able to guess what one of my New Year’s Eve resolutions is: Listen when Women Speak!
Happy New Year!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: December 30, 2021 Filed under: just because 18 Comments
In a Deep Dark December, by Stephen Keller
Good Afternoon!!
We can soon bid farewell to 2021. The past two years have been awful, thanks to Trump and Covid-19. Will 2022 be any better? We can only hope. For now, the new Omicron variant is infecting more people than ever before.
The New York Times: The U.S. breaks its single-day case record, nearly doubling the highest numbers from last winter.
With a caseload nearly twice that of the worst days last winter, the United States shattered its record for new daily coronavirus cases, a milestone that may not adequately illustrate the rapid spread of the Delta and Omicron variants because testing has slowed over the holidays.
As a second year of living with the pandemic was drawing to a close, the new daily case total topped 488,000 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database. (The total was higher on Monday, but that number should not be considered a record because it included data from the long holiday weekend.)
Wednesday’s seven-day average of new daily cases, 301,000, was also a record, compared with 267,000 the day before, according to the database. In the past week, more than two million cases have been reported nationally, and 15 states and territories reported more cases than in any other seven-day period.
The rise in cases has been driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant, which became dominant in the United States as of last week. So far, however, those increased cases have not resulted in more severe disease, as hospitalizations have increased only 11 percent and deaths have decreased slightly in the past two weeks.
Because Covid tests have been in short supply over the holidays, Wednesday’s numbers still may not fully illustrate the havoc caused by the two variants, which have sent caseloads soaring and have worsened a labor shortage, upending the hospitality, medical and travel industries, among others.
December, by Hans Baluschek
Demand for tests has outstripped supply, particularly in the last month as the Omicron variant has spread at an astonishing speed. And the holiday season offers its own disruptions to the U.S. case curve, with many testing sites offering limited hours and labs and government offices not open to report test results.
Last year, the national case curve showed pronounced declines after Thanksgiving and Christmas that did not reflect real decreases in new infections. The impact of holidays may be even more noticeable this time around, as illustrated by the Labor Day holiday in September, because states are reporting data less consistently than they did a year ago.
Head over to the NYT if you want more details.
Massachusetts is one of the most highly vaccinated states, but case numbers here are hitting record highs. CBS Boston: Massachusetts Reports New Single Day Record Of 15,163 COVID Cases, Positivity Rate Also Hits New High.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported 15,163 new confirmed COVID cases on Wednesday, a new single day record. The previous record was set last week when the state reported 10,040 new cases on Christmas Eve.
As of Wednesday, the seven-day weighted average of positive tests in Massachusetts had also increased to 13.58%, also a new record high.
There were also 45 additional deaths reported Wednesday.
Health officials said the total number of confirmed cases in the state is now 1,017,429. The total number of confirmed deaths is now 19,737.
There were 91,974 total new tests reported.
There are 1,711 people currently hospitalized for a coronavirus-related illness.
There are also 392 patients currently in intensive care.
Governor Baker plans to speak about the crisis later today. It’s happening everywhere.
According to an expert quoted in this article at The Washington Post, most people are probably going to get the virus eventually. We just have to hope the vaccinations protect us from serious illness and death.
Across the nation and the world, people who thought they knew how to avoid covid are getting a rude surprise. Safety precautions that had for so long felt talismanic ― get vaccinated, mask up, avoid large indoor gatherings — have in the past week or two collapsed under the weight of omicron, a much more highly transmissible variant than the ones before it.
Dark December Day, Eileen Ziegler
Schools and colleges returned to virtual learning. Flights were canceled as airline staff caught the virus. Long-anticipated holiday plans fell apart as people — young and old, vaccinated and unvaccinated — tested positive right and left. Those with negative tests worried it was only a matter of time.
They are likely right, according to Robert Frenck, professor of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Research Center at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “You know what? You’re probably going to get covid,” he said, but if you have been vaccinated you are unlikely to become seriously ill.
Instead of thinking they lost the race against the virus, Frenck encouraged people to redefine their concept of winning. “It’s not that you failed,” he said. “You actually succeeded. You dodged the bullet. … What are people trying to prevent? Are we trying to prevent the common cold? Nobody’s going to do that. You’ve gotten your booster, you’ve done everything, and you still get covid, but how sick did you get?”
For most infected people with vaccines, he said, “What they’re having is a cold.”
People misunderstand what the vaccine is designed to do, Frenck said, adding that unvaccinated people are dying at a rate 20 times higher than people who are vaccinated and boosted. “Vaccines are going to stop people from being hospitalized and from ending up in the ICU and from dying,” he said. “This is nature saying, it hasn’t gone away now, and we need to go out and get vaccinated.”
Vaccinated people are dying from breakthrough cases though. Here are the latest numbers from Massachusetts: 20,247 New Breakthrough Cases in Mass., 70 More Deaths in Vaccinated People.
Massachusetts health officials on Tuesday reported more than 20,000 new breakthrough COVID cases over the past week and 70 more deaths.
In the last week, 20,247 new breakthrough cases — infections in people who have been vaccinated — were reported, with 353 more vaccinated people hospitalized, Massachusetts Department of Public Health officials said Tuesday. It’s a 45% increase in the rate of new breakthrough cases in Massachusetts — last week saw 13,919 new COVID infections in vaccinated people — but a decrease in the number of deaths among vaccinated people.
The new report brings the total number of breakthrough cases to 134,565, and the death toll among people with breakthrough infections to 854.
Both figures remain a tiny percentage of the total number of all people who have been vaccinated.
Yes, the numbers are relatively small, but I wonder how many people who died are in my elderly age group?
The Washington Post reports that Coronavirus risk calculations get harder as a study suggests rapid tests may be less effective at detecting omicron.
As the coronavirus spawns a record-breaking wave of infections, new research suggests that rapid tests widely used to identify potential covid-19 cases might be less effective at identifying illness caused by the swiftly spreading omicron variant.
Unfortunately, the truth is that we still don’t know very much about the Omicron variant. I just hope the reports that it is milder than previous versions of the virus hold true.
In other news, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty yesterday. NBC News: Ghislaine Maxwell convicted of federal sex trafficking charges for role in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses.
British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted Wednesday of five federal sex trafficking charges after a jury concluded that she played a pivotal part in recruiting and grooming teenage girls to be sexually abused by her close confidant, the wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Maxwell was found guilty of five of the six federal counts she was charged with and faces up to 65 years in prison. The judge has not set a sentencing date.
The jury of six men and six women reached the verdict in the federal sex trafficking trial in New York City after six days of deliberations that bookended the holiday weekend. As deliberations dragged on, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who oversaw the case, worried that the omicron variant of the coronavirus and rising case numbers in the city could lead to a mistrial, and she had told the jury that if no verdict were reached, it would have to deliberate through the holiday weekend.
Caspar David Friedrich, Winterlandschaft (1811)
Late Wednesday, however, the jury came to its conclusion.
Maxwell was convicted of conspiracy to entice a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors and sex trafficking of minors.
She was not found guilty of enticing a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, which carried a five-year sentence.
According to Insider, Maxwell can either appeal or turn on other people who were involved with Epstein: After her guilty verdict, Ghislaine Maxwell has two options: Cooperate with investigators and start naming names or appeal the decision. Either way, she may face decades in prison.
In light of the conviction, she has two paths forward, and neither one may keep her from spending significant time behind bars.
“Maxwell truly has two options: She can fight this case and take it up on appeal, where she will likely face a 65-year sentence, or she can start issuing some names of who else was involved for a substantially lighter sentence,” said Matthew Barhoma, a criminal-appeals lawyer in Los Angeles….
Neama Rahmani, the president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, told Insider that he didn’t believe Maxwell had a legal basis to appeal, but that he expected she would anyway.
“She’s going to appeal because otherwise, she’s going to die in federal prison,” Rahmani said. He added that he believed the prosecution’s case against Maxwell was strong.
Barhoma agreed, but said he thought Maxwell could have some strong claims in an appeals process….
Even if Maxwell had some success in the appeals process and the case was retried, prosecutors would still likely get a conviction, based on the strength of their case and the other accusers’ testimonies, Barhoma said. It was extremely unlikely, he said, that the conviction would be thrown out entirely.
Read more at the link.
In politics news, this is a scary piece by Nicholas Riccardi at AP: ‘Slow-motion insurrection’: How GOP seizes election power.
In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans — well-known politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block then-President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.
In the year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time.
Claude Monet, Snow Scene at Argenteuil
In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.
They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.
All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support. Trump has praised the Jan. 6 rioters and backed primaries aimed at purging lawmakers who have crossed him. Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.
“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”
Republicans who sound alarms are struggling to be heard by their own party. GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, members of a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, are often dismissed as party apostates.
One more before I wrap up this depressing post. NPR: As the Jan. 6 attack anniversary nears, one Capitol officer fears a violent repeat.
“This is how I’m going to die.”
That’s what U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell thought on Jan. 6, 2021 as an angry mob stormed the Capitol and dragged him by the leg.
“I could feel myself losing oxygen and recall thinking to myself, ‘This is how I’m going to die, trampled defending this entrance,'” he said last July before a House Select Committee investigating the riot that disrupted a joint session of Congress as it affirmed the results of the presidential election.
On that January day, Gonell was assigned to guard the west entrance to the Capitol, which he’s described as a “medieval battleground”.
Nearly a year later, the emigrant from the Dominican Republic still can’t raise his left arm due to injuries he sustained during the attack, and the psychological wounds have also not healed for him or his family.
Gunnell says he and some fellow officers believe it will happen again.
“A lot of the officers have in mind the possibility of this being a recurring annual or every four year thing, which is why officers like myself are being outspoken about it, because we don’t want to go through this again,” Gonell said.
Nevertheless, he says he would, if it’s required of him.
“It’s mind boggling to hear some of the things that are coming from some of these elected officials. But at the end of the day, our job is to make them safe and make their work environment safer, regardless of our opinion or political affiliation,” Gonell said.
Read more at NPR.
I hope you all have a peaceful Thursday and a relaxing long weekend. Take care Sky Dancers!
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