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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Before women could Vote. On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed. It took more legal effort to enfranchise indigenous women and women of color.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My daughters say “Oh Boomer” to me a lot. It used to be “Oh, Mutherrrr.” Their perpetual disappointment in me has morphed as much as their Grandfather’s Republican party and its adherents have morphed into something quite monstrous. I tell them not to blame me for this mess.
In utero and baby Jean attended ERA rallies all around the Midwest. In utero, developing fetus Jean was blessed by Maya Angelou, Kate Millett, and Bette Friedan. I worked hard in high school and college to change the sexual assault laws in my state and also tried to find ways to bring women of color together with the primarily white feminist movement to ensure we supported all women. (1982-83).
I’ve demonstrated against caging babies, shock and awing Iraq, and for Black Lives Matter. I quit the Republican Party in the 90s, having seen the racist/sexist Pats turn me into a talking point in their culture war. That 1992 Pat Buchanan speech at the Republican convention caused me to register Independent even as I was running as a Republican to stop the future we now have.
Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
This is Jim Crow segregation on Independence Day. Free to be you and me separately. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned the remaining Jim Crow laws.
By the time I met Hillary in Minneapolis in 1994, and ever since then, I can say proudly that Hillary speaks for me. Nothing about this Republican Party speaks for most Americans in this country; all you have to do is check any poll on any topic. And yet, they persist by rewriting the laws that used to make us a democratic Republic.
Guys like Robertson and Buchanan also led me to Buddhism, where I could practice compassion. I’m a proud footsoldier in the backlash against the theocratic fascism the Republican party stands for. Communism never has been confirmed or real. Fascism has. “My dad bombed them back to Germany in World War 2. Remember, the last guy in the White House said they were the “very good people” on both sides. He still aspires to be the American Putin.
I listened to an interview with President Biden conducted by Nicole Wallace yesterday on MSNBC. The institutionalist Biden was full of lowkey descriptions of how the Republican Party today is “not the Republican Party of your father.” Today’s Republicans include Congressional inquisitors and corrupt law inventors in the Roberts’ Court. They’re a cult of a wannabe dictator.
— John (repeat1968) Buss (@repeat1968) June 29, 2023
We’re watching a rollback of America’s 20th century. We finally get to celebrate both of our Independence Days, and I’m starting to think the Supreme Court will let the South have its Jim Crow laws back by next year. Last year gave women the status of state chattel, and they’re working on making us federal chattel. The states are working hard on erasing the GLBT community. Obergefell is likely on the SCOTUS agenda too. They’re coming for birth control, also.
Much of this backward motion is based on obliterating stare decisis and wrongly interpreting post-Civil War American Constitutional amendments. These amendments, you might remember, were penned by the nascent Republican Party. This isn’t your great-great-grandfather’s Republican Party, either. Having served in the Dubya administration, Nicole Wallace probably knew most of this better than anyone. She reinforced the Biden interpretation of our “not normal” Supreme Court and the Maga Republicans who are into performative running amok but never actually govern.
Alaska wasn’t a state until 1959. The U.S. government actively removed Indigenous children from their tribes until the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. SCOTUS barely saved the ICWA this year. One of the nine flipped.
For decades, conservatives have railed against judicial activism, but Thursday’s decision striking down affirmative action by colleges and universities in admissions was the height of conservative judicial activism. The court rejected almost half a century of precedents, overturned decisions made by public and private universities across the country, and ignored the history of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.The experience of California — where affirmative action was eliminated by Proposition 209 in 1996 — shows that it still will be possible to have diversity in higher education, but it will take sustained effort and it will be difficult.
In 1978, in University of California vs. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell wrote the pivotal opinion and explained that colleges and universities have a compelling interest in having a diverse student body and may use race as one of many factors in admissions decisions to benefit minorities and enhance diversity. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in 2003 in Grutter vs. Bollinger and again, most recently, in 2016, in Fisher vs. University of Texas, Austin. For decades, universities across the country have based their admissions policies on these holdings.
What changed in a mere seven years? Donald Trump appointed three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They joined the three conservative dissenters in the Fisher case — John G. Roberts Jr., Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — to overturn 45 years of precedents allowing affirmative action. As they did last year in overruling Roe vs. Wade, the conservatives on the court paid no attention to the principle of stare decisis and following precedent.
Nor did the conservatives on the court pay attention to the judgment of university educators that diversity in the classroom matters in education. I have been a law professor for 43 years and have taught classes that are overwhelmingly white and those with a significant number of minority students. The discussions in the classrooms are vastly different and the educational experience for all students is enhanced when there is diversity.
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained in the Grutter decision, preparing students for our diverse society requires that they experience diversity. But the six conservative justices have now substituted their views and flatly rejected decades of experience of those in higher education.
In 1965, Women got the right to access Birth Control. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973 when I was in high school. However, it took a while longer to wrest my personal credit score back after I got married. I lost mine in 1975, and it would not be restored to me until 1976. Women’s Sports were put on the map with Title 9 in 1972. This enabled me to play on the university men’s soccer team because they had no women’s equivalent at the time. Yup, I played Triple-A men’s soccer in 1975. It was that, or my university lost its funding, and football is a religion in Nebraska.
Women got many civil liberties and rights in the 1970s. My mother got her form of birth control from my aunt, taking her to her doctor while saying you’re not going to get pregnant on your Honeymoon like me. Since Mother was about to be married, she got her first diaphragm. It was a process to make family planning inaccessible to most women. All I had to do was walk into the Student Health building at my University, where birth control pills were readily available to any woman. Will that be the case in 5 years? Justice Thomas is eager to revisit Griswold v Connecticut (1965).
We’re also on our way to removing hard-fought civil liberties for the GLBT Community. We just celebrated Pride Week. The anniversary of Stonewall was also this week. On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots started the movement to bring civil liberties and rights to the GLBT community.
Today’s two SCOTUS decision show just how far back in time and how poor six justices are prepared to make us by not letting the President forgive some Student Loans. Today we also saw the rollback of the strides made by the GLBT community and its allies. It’s why polls show people think there’s something wrong with them. There is something very wrong with 6 of them, and I feel for the other 3.
There are live breaking updates today on CNN “SCOTUS blocks Biden’s student loan plan and limits LGBTQ protections in major rulings.” Chief Justice Roberts is on the defensive. He should quit whining.
Recent rulings by the newly composed Roberts court have sent a resounding message about its role and the separation of powers. This comes at a time when the Supreme Court has been under intense scrutiny by critics who argue that it is moving the law to the right and overturning precedent simply because of the addition of three justices nominated by a Republican president.
During the last week of the term, the conservative court — bolstered by three nominees of President Donald Trump — issued sweeping 6-3 decisions defining how the country lives its daily life.
In striking down affirmative action, the court overturned another decades-old precedent a year after reversing Roe v. Wade — without explicitly saying so.
In the very last opinion of the term, Chief Justice John Roberts discussed the student loan case at hand, but seemed to be sending a broader message to address recent criticism of the court as going beyond “the proper role of the judiciary.”
He noted that “reasonable minds,” including the three liberals on the bench, could disagree with the analysis of the student loan decision, but he cautioned that “plainly heartfelt disagreement” should not be mistaken as “disparagement.”
“Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he said.
This Supreme Court terms has re-consolidated power into the white, Christian, and monied interests more than it has been since at least the 1940s. If you include last SCOTUS term, you can add male. It's retrograde in the worst possible sense.
— eugenefreedman.bsky.social (@EugeneFreedman) June 30, 2023
Those of you writing up 303 Creative will want to be sure to note that the alleged request was made up.
Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)
“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allows homophobic web designer not to do business with gay customers.
For Homophobic Web Designer Gorsuch Roberts Thomas Alito Kavanaugh Barrett
I’m giving two Justices and their dissents the last word for this very long post. You can see Justice Sotomayer’s response to the broadening of protecting Christians from being civil and polite human beings up top.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, one of two cases decided Thursday that centered on affirmative action.
Jackson recused herself from the other, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, because of her ties to Harvard. Both cases were decided on ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices voting in the majority. But Jackson’s dissent received particular attention Thursday for its blistering paragraphs and for its sharp rebuttals from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s other Black justice.
It is important to say this. Three women stand between us and the past we do not want to repeat. There needs to be a change because there are not enough of them. An African-American woman. A Jewish Woman, An Hispanic Woman. They are on team justice and democracy. They need backup.
“Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and the lives of LGBT people. SCOTUS declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class." SOTOMAYOR DISSENThttps://t.co/n1yAXj77Dkpic.twitter.com/NssdscOzat
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday bolstered the ability of employees to obtain accommodations at work for their religious practices, reviving a lawsuit by an evangelical Christian former mail carrier accusing the Postal Service of discrimination after being disciplined for refusing to show up for work on Sundays.
The 9-0 ruling threw out a lower court’s decision rejecting a claim by Gerald Groff, a former mail carrier in Pennsylvania, that the Postal Service’s actions refusing to exempt him from working on Sundays, when he observes the Sabbath, violated federal anti-discrimination law.
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has a track record of expanding religious rights, often siding with Christian plaintiffs.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had found that Groff’s absences placed too much of a hardship on his co-workers and employer. The Supreme Court ordered the 3rd Circuit to reconsider the matter.
Groff’s case centered on a federal anti-discrimination law called Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on religion and other factors including race, sex and national origin.
If we have to endure blue laws again because of these folks, I am absolutely going to have a hissy fit. Well, it looks like I’m having one now, so it will have to be a much bigger one. One of these days, the ACLU will have a case on its hands, and I will be the complainant.
I’m not sure if celebrating Independence Day is in order this year. Maybe we need a Remembrance Day for democracy. I sometimes see this social media question about which band you’d love to go on the road with. There’s my answer. Parliament. I’d love to sit in front of the Supreme Court Building or, better yet, in a few justices’ neighborhoods and sing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” with Bootsy and George.
“bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. education & free discussion are the antidotes of both.”
Summer Day or Embrace on the beach, (1904), by Edvard Munch
Good Day!!
There is some Trump investigation news this morning, plus, news just broke that the Supreme Court has gutted Affirmative Action in college admissions.
But before I get to those stories, a few articles about the awful summer weather we are having. Here in New England and across much of the Midwest, we’re having poor air quality because of the Canadian wildfires; and in much of the Southern U.S. people are suffering greatly from excessive heat.
Dangerous air quality and hazy skies persist as smoke from Canada’s raging wildfires drifts south, leaving more than 100 million people under air quality alerts across a dozen states from Minnesota to New York and down to the Carolinas.
Chicago had the worst air quality among major cities in the world early Thursday, according to IQAir. The air in Washington, DC, Minneapolis, Detroit and New York City was among the top 10 most polluted.
Smoke will continue to drift across the Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Thursday. Forecast models predict a slow improvement beginning Thursday and additional decreases by Friday.
The worst air quality is likely to remain over the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, with some increase in smoke in states including Washington and New York, but levels are not expected to reach those seen a few weeks ago.
“With no end in sight to the Canadian wildfires and west to northwesterly winds expected to persist from south central Canada into the north central to northeast U.S., poor air quality conditions are likely to continue,” the National Weather Service warned.
The New York Times is providing live updates on the smoke as it works it’s way toward NYC.
Even for Southerners used to spending a lot of time outside, this week’s brutal heat and humidity — which spread from Texas across the Gulf Coast and north into Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas on Wednesday — are a little much….
An oppressive heat wave that baked Texas and Oklahoma last week, contributing to several deaths, has engulfed much of the southern and central United States, raising the heat index to dangerously high levels from Kansas City to the Florida Keys.
High Summer, 1915, by Edvard Munch
Temperatures will climb up to 20 degrees above normal for much of the region through at least the weekend, reaching the upper 90s or low 100s in many places, with the heat index — a measure of how heat and humidity make the air feel — soaring even higher….
Major cities where the heat index could reach between 110 to 120 degrees over the next few days include Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans and Nashville, as well as Little Rock, Ark.; Jackson, Miss.; and Montgomery, Ala. “Many areas outside of Texas will experience their most significant heat of the season so far,” a forecast from the National Weather Service said.
Health experts consider a heat index of over 103 degrees dangerous, with a higher risk of cramps, exhaustion and heat stroke, particularly after exercise or long stretches in the sun.
High humidity will continue to produce “potentially life-threatening” heat through the rest of the week, the Weather Service said, and nighttime temperatures will offer little respite, staying unseasonably high even while the sun is down.
“That’s substantial because your house isn’t cooling off as much at night,” said Rob Perillo, the chief meteorologist at KATC-TV in Lafayette, La. “When you’re shooting 95 at noon, and it’s above 95 until 7 at night,” he added, “it’s not only hotter, but it’s hotter longer.”
Scientists say a closely watched atmospheric pattern — the jet stream — is behind both the Canadian wildfires and the scorching heat in Texas, raising questions about how it shapes extreme weather events and whether climate change is disrupting its flow.
The jet stream, a ribbon of air that encircles the Northern Hemisphere at high altitudes, drives pressure changes that determine weather across North America. The jet stream’s wavy pattern creates areas of high and low pressure.
Summer Night’s Dream/The Voice, by Edvard Munch, 1893
More than 100 million people in the U.S. faced either blistering heat or unhealthy air quality Wednesday.
In recent weeks, the jet stream has appeared unusual and disjointed, scientists say. Some researchers think climate change is disrupting its flow and causing it to bake regions in heat longer. They are concerned that changes in the patterns could cause extremes to increase more rapidly than climate models have projected as the world warms.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, likened visualizations of the jet stream’s appearance in recent weeks to the swirling brushstrokes of a post-impressionist painter.
“I’m honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern,” Mann tweeted this month. “Frankly, it looks like a Van Gogh.”
Now that’s an interesting interpretation!
In other news, the right wing Supreme Court has struck again.
In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.
Universities can consider how race has affected an applicant’s life, but he emphasized that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said in her scorching dissent.
The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.
One of the top advisers on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is among the individuals identified but not named by special counsel Jack Smith in his indictment against the former president for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The Mystery of a Summer Night, 1892, by Edvard Munch
Susie Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers leading his second reelection effort, is the individual singled out in Smith’s indictment as the “PAC Representative” who Trump is alleged to have shown a classified map to in August or September of 2021, sources said.
Trump, in the indictment, is alleged to have shown the classified map of an unidentified country to Wiles while discussing a military operation that Trump said “was not going well,” while adding that he “should not be showing the map” to her and “not to get too close.”
The alleged exchange between Trump and Wiles is the second of two instances detailed by prosecutors in the indictment showing how Trump allegedly disclosed classified information in private meetings after leaving the White House. The first was a July 2021 audio recording, obtained by ABC News earlier this week, in which Trump is heard showing people what he describes as a “secret” and “highly confidential” document relating to Iran.
ABC News has reported the meeting involved people who were helping Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with his memoir, according to sources. Smith’s team has spoken to the meeting’s attendees, which included the writers helping Meadows with his book and at least two aides to Trump, according to sources….
It does not appear, based on the indictment, that Trump was charged specifically for his retention of either the Iran document or the classified map shown to the person identified as Wiles. Rather, the two instances speak to what Smith’s prosecutors see as Trump’s state of mind in how he handled and sometimes shared classified materials in his possession after leaving the White House, sources said, as well as his alleged efforts to subvert the government’s efforts to get the documents back.
LAST MONTH, DONALD Trump’s lawyers told him he was on the cusp of a federal indictment in the classified documents case. But the former president still wanted “my documents” and “my boxes” back, asking some of his lawyers if they could get them from the federal government, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter and two other people briefed on it.
It’s one of many such conversations Trump has had over the past few months, the sources say. In these conversations, Trump also claimed it was “illegal” that he could no longer have the documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid. Those materials, Trump insisted, belonged to “me.” Trump has also asked if there are any other possible legal maneuvers or court filings they could try to accomplish this that they hadn’t thought of yet.
For much of his post-presidency, Trump has incorrectly insisted to various aides and confidants that the highly classified documents he continued to hoard were “mine.” In some of these conversations, according to the source with knowledge of the matter, Trump has also mentioned that he’ll get the documents back in 2025 — because he predicts he’ll be president again, and therefore regain unfettered access to the government’s most sensitive secrets.
Summer Night – Inger on the Shore, 1899, by Edvard Munch
Apparently some of Trump’s lawyers have gone along with his claims.
Two sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that several lawyers — some retained by Trump and others politically aligned with him — have briefed Trump that he is, in their view, entitled to the return of government documents under an obscure part of the Presidential Records Act, specifically 44 USC 2205(3), which asserts that “Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative.”
But experts on classification rules disagree. “Whatever one might say about his Presidential Records Act argument, there’s no argument that it immunizes him from criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act,” Brian Greer, an attorney who served in the CIA’s office of general counsel from 2010 to 2018, tells Rolling Stone. Nor does the act allow a former president to defy a lawful court-ordered subpoena for documents and obstruct justice, as the special counsel alleges Trump did in the indictment, Greer adds.
Donald Trump’s valet charged in the classified documents case had his arraignment on Tuesday delayed for a second time to July by a magistrate judge, after he was forced to abandon his top choice Florida lawyer over a dispute about legal fees, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The valet, Walt Nauta, appeared alongside Trump when the former president pleaded not guilty to 37 criminal charges in federal district court in Miami this month but could not himself enter a plea – a necessary step to start trial preparation – because he lacked local counsel.
Two weeks later, Nauta remains without a lawyer admitted to practice in the southern district of Florida after the person at the top of the shortlist drawn up by Nauta’s defense team decided he needed to charge higher fees to represent him the night before the arraignment, the people said.
The previously unreported dispute over fees in effect meant Nauta could not retain the person as his Florida lawyer, the people said, even though he would be paid by Trump’s political action committee Save America, which has also been paying the fees of his lead lawyer, Stanley Woodward.
The reason for the rate hike was not clear, but at least one Florida lawyer who had seriously considered representing Nauta decided several days ago that the reputational and legal risks of working with Trump’s co-defendant in the documents case were too great.
With the sounds of papers rustling in the background, Trump is heard complaining about General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He said that I wanted to attack Iran—isn’t it amazing?” Trump told his visitors, who included book advisers to his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. A few days earlier, I had reported about Milley’s concerns in the final months of Trump’s Presidency that Trump might provoke a military conflict with Iran as part of his effort to remain in power, despite losing the 2020 election. This, Milley told others, was one of the “nightmare scenarios” that he was working to prevent. At Bedminster, Trump apparently brandished the Pentagon’s attack plan—which he claimed had been presented to him by Milley. “This totally wins my case,” Trump said. “You know, except, like, it is highly confidential.” He added, “See, as President, I could have declassified it; now I can’t, but this is classified. . . . it’s so cool.” The tape ends with a line that was not included in the federal indictment: Trump asking, “Bring some Cokes in, please?” The whole exchange was happening, in other words, not in some top-secret facility, but with someone standing by to fetch drinks, in Trump’s office, right near the pool at his country club.
Summer Night on the Beach, Edvard Munch
To legal observers and, indeed, to pretty much anyone who could hear, the audiotape sounded like an admission of guilt. But this is Trump, a serial liar for whom an obvious defense presents itself: that he was not telling the truth to his visitors when he claimed to be showing them secret papers. And, sure enough, by Tuesday, Trump told reporters on his way back from a New Hampshire campaign appearance, “It was bravado, if you want to know the truth”—bravado here being a Trump synonym for “bullshitting.” This is the 2023 equivalent of dismissing the “Access Hollywood” tape as mere “locker-room talk” that had nothing to do with Trump’s actual behavior toward women. He even suggested that the papers he is heard shuffling through were just “building plans.” For Trump, it’s better to be a liar than a convict.
The damning evidence against Trump would not exist if not for his rift with Mark Milley, a remarkable feud between the Commander-in-Chief and the nation’s top general that had been a secret backdrop to the public drama that played out after the 2020 election. At the time the tape was made, in the summer of 2021, Trump was apoplectic that Milley’s fears about him were becoming public. Two recently published books—one by the journalists Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of the Post, and the other by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal—had reported new details about Milley’s efforts, including regular “land the plane” phone calls with Meadows, the White House chief of staff, to prevent Trump from drawing the military into his quest to overturn the 2020 election. Milley was even quoted fretting about Trump and his supporters staging a “Reichstag moment”—a fear that seemed eerily prescient on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block congressional certification of Trump’s defeat. Trump, in turn, publicly denounced Milley and said that he had only picked him as chairman in 2018 to spite James Mattis, his soon-to-quit Defense Secretary at the time.
Glasser, as always, is long-winded, so you’ll need to read more at The New Yorker to get the full story about Trump’s rage at Milley. Milley was afraid that Trump might try to attack Iran after he lost the election. Basically, Milley told the truth about him, and Trump never likes people who do that.
Legendary journalist Bob Woodward tore into former President Donald Trump in an interview on CNN Wednesday evening, calling him the largest threat to national security he had ever seen from any U.S. government official.
This comes amid the release of an audio tape of Trump boasting to patrons of his New Jersey golf club about possessing highly classified defense information about an attack on Iran — which he now denies — and reporting that he was motivated to do so by anger at Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley for working to constrain his post-2020 election impulses.
“Bob, you’ve interviewed the former president a lot,” said anchor Anderson Cooper. “We’ve discussed your own tape of him. What stands out to you about this latest recording?”
“Well, it really shows that Donald Trump is an alarming, dangerous threat to national security,” said Woodward, who helped expose the Watergate scandal decades ago and has recently been caught up in a legal battle with Trump over White House transcripts. “In the book, ‘Peril’ that I did with Robert Costa, we recount two National Security Council meetings where Trump, not General Milley or the Defense Department, was agitating for a possible attack on Iran. And he is pushing it. And General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the number one military man in the country, is telling Trump, you don’t want a war. If you start a war, you’re going to get into a conflict that you can’t get out of.”
“You see him in this reporting that we did from these meetings from notes, that it is the generals who say, no, no, no,” Woodward continued. “And Trump says, well — in one of the meetings the Iranians have enough to make two nuclear bombs, and he’s worried about that and thinking that maybe they should consider an attack. And these contingency plans are most sensitive documents in the government because what they do is they outline in a crisis how we might attack Iran, what the casualties would be, how many ships would be sunk, how long it might take. And that’s something you can’t treat casually, as Trump has.”
That’s it for me. What stories have caught your interest today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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.
I’m not sure if celebrating Independence Day is in order this year. Maybe we need a Remembrance Day for democracy. I sometimes see this social media question about which band you’d love to go on the road with. There’s my answer. Parliament. I’d love to sit in front of the Supreme Court Building or, better yet, in a few justices’ neighborhoods and sing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” with Bootsy and George.
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