Monday Reads: Strangers in a Strange Land
Posted: June 21, 2021 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: A Turning Point for our Country 18 Comments
Open Window, Collioure (1905) by Henri Matisse
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It is becoming more apparent every day that both the Trump Regime and the botched response to the pandemic have sent our country on a different trajectory. President Biden may try to return us to a sense of normal but there are factors and barriers–many coming from the Republican Party–that will make our new normal different from the one we had in 2016.
Our country has committed War Crimes. I’m old enough to remember the Mỹ Lai massacre, Henry Kissinger, and then later Bush/Cheney war crimes that came before the World Court at the Hague. There were also the Reagan/Bush atrocities in Southern and Central America. It’s nothing new. The previous guy seemed to find new ways to commit atrocities. There are some new ones that were attempted outlined in a new book that I’d rather not have to read. This is at WAPO: “New book offers fresh details about chaos, conflicts inside Trump’s pandemic response. At one point, the president mused about transferring infected American citizens in Asia to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.”
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil.
“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”
“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.”
Aides were stunned, and when Trump brought it up a second time, they quickly scuttled the idea, worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects.
Such insider conversations are among the revelations in “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” a new book by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta that captures the dysfunctional response to the unfolding pandemic.
Group X, No. 1 Altarpiece Hilma af Klint, 1915, via Guggenheim Museum, New York
There’s a lot about right now that still feels more like a banana republic than a developed nation. However, Heather Long writes this for WAPO: “The economy isn’t going back to February 2020. Fundamental shifts have occurred. A new era has arrived of greater worker power, higher housing costs and very different ways of doing business.” This change is welcome.
The pandemic disrupted everything, damaging some parts of the economy much more than others. But a mass vaccination effort and the virus’s steady retreat this year has allowed many businesses and communities to reopen.
What Americans are encountering, though, is almost unrecognizable from just 16 months ago. Prices are up. Housing is scarce. It takes months longer than normal to get furniture, appliances and numerous parts delivered. And there is a great dislocation between millions of unemployed workers and millions of vacant jobs.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell acknowledged all the uncertainty this week, saying that policymakers had misjudged parts of the recovery and that they aren’t certain what exactly will happen next.
“This is an extraordinarily unusual time. And we really don’t have a template or any experience of a situation like this,” Powell said Wednesday. “We have to be humble about our ability to understand the data.”
There’s dispute, among other things, about how many of these changes are temporary and how many are true fundamental shifts that will stick around for years and reshape behaviors. But many people agree, at least, the changes are proving very disruptive.
There are obvious changes, like the realization that working from home is possible for a sizable part of the labor force and the widespread adoption of online ordering for daily necessities like groceries. These will remain significant parts of work and commerce going forward. Nearly a quarter of workers are likely to work at least a day or two from home each week, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts. And e-commerce, which grew three times faster last year than in prior years, shows few signs of ebbing
Then there are new dynamics emerging as home prices soar in many parts of the country that are unaccustomed to seeing such extremes. While millions of American homeowners suddenly find themselves “house rich,” the surge in prices is exacerbating the affordability crisis as first-time buyers are getting priced out. Experts fear a rental crisis could be next.
The Chess Game, Marcel Duchamp,1910
Concerns about redistricting/gerrymandering and voter suppression continue. This is from Politico: “How Democrats are ‘unilaterally disarming’ in the redistricting wars. Democrats have greater control of state legislatures than in the last round of redistricting but have turned over map-making powers in some states to independent commissions.”
Oregon Democrats had finally secured total control of redistricting for the first time in decades.
Then, just months before they were set to draw new maps, they gave it away.
In a surprise that left Democrats from Salem to Washington baffled and angry, the state House speaker handed the GOP an effective veto over the districts in exchange for a pledge to stop stymieing her legislative agenda with delay tactics. The reaction from some of Oregon’s Democratic House delegation was unsparing: “That was like shooting yourself in the head,” Rep. Kurt Schrader told POLITICO. Rep. Peter DeFazio seethed: “It was just an abysmally stupid move on her part.”
Yet what happened this spring in Oregon is just one example, though perhaps the most extreme one, of a larger trend vexing Democratic strategists and lawmakers focused on maximizing the party’s gains in redistricting. In key states over the past decade, Democrats have gained control of state legislatures and governorships that have long been in charge of drawing new maps — only to cede that authority, often to independent commissions tasked with drawing political boundaries free of partisan interference.
Supporters of these initiatives say it’s good governance to bar politicians from drawing districts for themselves and their party. But exasperated Democrats counter that it has left them hamstrung in the battle to hold the House, by diluting or negating their ability to gerrymander in the way Republicans plan to do in many red states. And with the House so closely divided, Democrats will need every last advantage to cling to their majority in 2022.
“We Democrats are cursed with this blindness about good government,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, a Democratic state that will nonetheless see its congressional map drawn by a newly created independent commission.
“In rabid partisan states that are controlled by Republicans, they’re carving up left and right. And we’re kind of unilaterally disarming,” Connelly conceded, before adding:“But having said that, I still come down on the side of reforming this process because it’s got to start somewhere.”
Landscape Near Cassis (Pinède à Cassis; 1907) by André Derain
Is the rise in violent crime post-pandemic standing in the way of Justice Reform? This is from TNR and John Pfaff: “Wave of Violent Crime? An uptick in homicides across the country is getting blamed on reforms. That argument gets the data all wrong.”
Last year was a disturbingly violent one for New York City, which suffered nearly 150 more homicides and around 750 more shootings than in 2019. The killings have been heartbreaking: a man on a handball court struck by a stray bullet, a one-year-old shot at a cookout. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department was quick to blame the violence on reform efforts that it has opposed for years. Patrick Lynch, the vitriolic head of the Police Benevolent Association, the union for rank-and-file police officers, called reformers “pro-criminal advocates” who have “hijacked our city and state.” Dermot Shea, the NYPD commissioner, complained that civilian leaders were “literally cowards who won’t stand up for what is right.” Later, he insisted that the state’s recent bail reforms were driving up shootings and homicides—despite clear evidence to the contrary.
The uptick in murders is not unique to New York, nor is the attempt to exploit it to undermine reforms. Even as the pandemic lockdown helped push down many crimes, last year saw an unprecedented spike in homicides nationwide, likely more than twice the largest previous one-year rise. And given the retaliatory nature of lethal violence and the ongoing disruption from the pandemic, we should expect homicides to remain high in 2021 as well. One study in Chicago, for example, found evidence that cycles of retaliation and counterretaliation meant that a single shooting was often the root cause of three, or sometimes 60, or once almost 500 subsequent shootings over the next few years.
How to stop this wave of violence is thus one of the most important policy questions for 2021, but asking it has rarely felt more fraught. The surge in homicide comes at a moment when conventional responses to crime face more intense criticism than any time since the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Reformers and activists across the country have spent the past decade campaigning to reduce our reliance on prisons, jail, probation, and even the police. The changes we’ve seen may be less dramatic than what many advocates have hoped for, and certainly less dramatic than how many of their detractors describe them, but they both reflect and have nurtured a growing shift in popular views on crime control. Just observe how quickly calls to “defund” the police entered mainstream debates in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Considering this trend, it’s unsurprising that those who favor the status quo are trying to use the rise in homicides as grist for rolling back policies they dislike. Some residents in San Francisco, for example, are urging the recall of the city’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, even though the city’s homicide rate barely budged and remains lower than that of almost any year but 2019. And the police union in Philadelphia had invoked the rise in homicides to try to unseat that city’s progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner—although that effort fell flat, as Krasner easily won the Democratic primary in May (a victory that all but ensures his reelection in solidly Democratic Philadelphia).
To be clear, the defenders of the status quo are mistaken. Not only have reforms been less extreme than they often claim, but the rise in homicides has occurred more or less equally in places that adopted reforms and those that rejected them. And given how few places have significantly altered their approach to crime, the homicide spike by and large took place on the status quo’s watch. Those who want policy to remain more punitive are thus arguing for more of what has mostly failed us this past year, and they are trying to blame reforms that appear to be uncorrelated with the surge.
This is from E.J Dionne Jr writing for WAPO at the link above.
Concerns about crime cross party lines. In New York City, which holds its mayoral primary on Tuesday, a recent NY1/Ipsos poll of likely Democratic primary voters found that crime/public safety should be the top priority for the next mayor, listed by 46 percent. Reopening the economy and affordable housing followed well behind at 30 percent each; stopping the spread of covid-19 drew 24 percent, and battling racial injustice 20 percent.
When you talk to Democratic politicians searching for a principled path forward, one name pops up again and again. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, has both personal and political reasons to push for police reform as part of a strategy for restoring order.
“In the communities that I represent, no one wants to go back to the days of 2,000-plus homicides, which we all lived through in the midst of the crack-cocaine epidemic,” Jeffries told me. “Nobody that I know in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in East New York . . . into Coney Island, Brownsville and certainly in other traditionally African American neighborhoods across New York City wants to go back to those days or anything close to it.”
The core of his argument: “Public safety and justice in policing are not mutually exclusive. We can do both, and we must do both.”“The fundamental objective of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is to try and shift the mind-set of policing from a warrior mentality to a guardian mentality,” said Jeffries, a champion of the bill who has endorsed police reformer Maya Wiley in the New York mayor’s race. “When members of law enforcement engage with communities of color, having adopted a warrior mentality, then some individuals they encounter tend to be viewed as enemy combatants. And when that occurs, things can go wrong, as was the case in the death of George Floyd.”
The guardian vocation that Jeffries preaches stresses community collaboration and would “lift up public safety for the good of everyone involved.”
Even though we saw a glimpse of Post World War 2 and cold war USA at the G-7 Summit, I seriously doubt we’re ever going to return to those days. Those days weren’t even halcyon for women, people of color, and the GLBT community. We were disenfranchised and held back by systemic discrimination built into white patriarchal hegemony. It took decades just to break through some of the barriers only to find that the Republicans want to snatch them all back. Stacking the courts is going to create a new battleground. Right-wing Extremists have already laid down their Maginot line.
Georges Braque, L’Olivier Près De L’Estaque (The Olive Tree near L’Estaque), 1906
Jack Rosen and Denver Riggleman write this Op-Ed at Newsweek: “We Need to Stop Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Online Extremism Before It Gets Violent.”
The American political system is under attack from far-right extremists and white supremacists. This battle for the democracy and diversity that define America has already spilled into violence and insurrection. It begins not in the streets but in the shadows of online chat rooms and social networking sites that spread lies and disinformation, foment anger and hatred, and coordinate dangerous action.
How our country deals with this challenge will have a direct impact on our political process, as divisive politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are actively leveraging these networks to build their political power.
It’s worth remembering that the FBI says that domestic extremism represents a worse terrorist threat to Americans than ISIS and Al Qaeda, which is why the Biden Administration’s decision to join the “Christchurch call” to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online is a good first step. Among the first targets should be the far-right social networking site called “Gab.”
Gab grew to notoriety in 2018, when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter posted antisemitic messages there just before committing the worst killing of Jews in the history of our country. Unchecked, this platform still provides space for users to espouse and consume white nationalist, antisemitic, neo-Nazi and other extreme content.
For example, law enforcement officials have documented that the planning and rhetoric leading up to the January 6th Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were massive mobilizing efforts and recruitment campaigns for Gab.
Yet instead of taking responsible action to tone down the dangerous content on his platform, Gab leader Andrew Torba revels in it, claiming the Constitutional right to do so.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact for American democracy.
We have the chance to form the current trajectory into something that respects our constitution, our democracy, and the idea that there is justice for all. This is going to be difficult. It will take diligence and activism. We sit on a turning point for climate change and using technology to provide energy and life sustainable for all life forms and the planet. We sit on the turning point of democracy. We must rise to the occasion.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 19, 2021 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, just because, U.S. Politics | Tags: Christopher Rufo, communion, Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Juneteenth, systemic racism, the Eucharist, U.S. Catholic Bishops 22 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Two Cats and a Woman, by Peter Harskamp
Today is Juneteenth, and for the first time it is being celebrated as a national holiday and in some states as a state holiday. While this is a victory for anti-racists, it’s obviously a symbolic and cosmetic one. It’s certainly significant that a large majority of Republicans in the house supported the bill. But at the same time Republicans are making a phony issue of an academic approach to systemic racism–“critical race theory.”
At The Atlantic, Kellie Carter Jackson, a Black historian at Wellesley College, writes: What the Push to Celebrate Juneteenth Conceals.
When you are Black in America, how do you celebrate progress? How do you honor the history and memory of emancipation, liberation, and advancement? How do Black people mark a moment when a positive change transformed the trajectory of their lives, their nation? For many Black Americans that moment has been Juneteenth, or June 19, the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, received word that they were free, some two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. But when I think about Juneteenth, I am mostly stuck on that delay: the time it took for more than 250,000 enslaved Texans to experience what some 3 million other formerly enslaved Americans already had. Though Texan planters had long known the Civil War was over, they had hoped to get one more harvest out of their human property. In this country, hiding history has always been about maintaining control, denying concession, and delaying justice.
This spring, I have been perplexed by anniversaries meant to honor history. Memorial Day, a holiday created by Black people to honor Black veterans in Charleston, South Carolina, seemed this year to focus more on remembering George Floyd and commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. This Juneteenth also feels different, as more non-Black Americans are now incorporating it into their summer celebrations and lawmakers have pushed to observe the holiday at a federal level. Yet it seems the memory of Juneteenth is being shaped by symbolic rather than substantive gains. Moreover, the proliferation of Juneteenth events is taking place at the same time as the banning of critical race theory and curricula focused on slavery’s lasting effects. It is impossible to celebrate Juneteenth and simultaneously deny the teaching of America’s foundational legacy….
Holidays, like memories, are chosen. They are collective social agreements employed to acknowledge an event or a person. Often composed of parades, barbecues, and corporate sponsorships, the observation of a holiday is relatively low-stakes and usually distanced from the full history that compelled it. Though Black folks have honored their ancestors in meaningful ways on Juneteenth for more than a century, to many non-Black citizens it marks a day off from work and little else. But holidays cannot be divorced from history. Americans cannot discuss freedom and the Fourth of July without invoking slavery. Americans cannot celebrate Memorial Day without paying homage to those who died in service of their country. Americans cannot recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day without confronting the violence of white supremacy. Choosing to remember palatable histories over painful histories serves no one—it merely fosters fantasy.
Critical race theory, an examination of the social, political, and economic impact of racism and white supremacy in America, counters that fantasy. This is the charge of historians and educators: to make sense of the past and grapple with its implications.
Read more about the significance of critical race theory at the link.
La robe Verte, Jean Metzinger
I have to admit, I had never heard of critical race theory until Republicans started obsessing about it. Here’s a brief definition from Education Week:
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
This article at The Atlantic that explains the history and development of CRT: The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession.
The late harvard law professor Derrick Bell is credited as the father of critical race theory. He began conceptualizing the idea in the 1970s as a way to understand how race and American law interact, and developed a course on the subject. In 1980, Bell resigned his position at Harvard because of what he viewed as the institution’s discriminatory hiring practices, especially its failure to hire an Asian American woman he’d recommended.
Black students—including the future legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who enrolled at Harvard Law in 1981—felt the void created by his departure. Bell had been the only Black law professor among the faculty, and in his absence, the school no longer offered a course explicitly addressing race. When students asked administrators what could be done, Crenshaw says they received a terse response. “What is it that is so special about race and law that you have to have a course that examines it?” Crenshaw has recalled administrators asking. The administration’s inability to see the importance of understanding race and the law, she says, “got us thinking about how do we articulate that this is important and that law schools should include” the subject in their curricula.
Crenshaw and her classmates asked 12 scholars of color to come to campus and lead discussions about Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law. With that, critical race theory began in earnest. The approach “is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures,” Bell explained in 1995. The theory’s proponents argue that the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws, and continues to play a central role in preventing Black Americans and other marginalized groups from living lives untouched by racism.
Now Republicans have suddenly decided to attack this 40-year-old academic theory even though they likely have no idea what it is all about. The same Republicans who voted for the largely symbolic Juneteenth national holiday are spending lots of energy trying to prevent children from learning about America’s ugly history of slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism.
Cat Behind a Tree, by Franz Marc
The Washington Post: Republicans, spurred by an unlikely figure, see political promise in critical race theory.
The decision, made public on Friday afternoon, is aimed at the nation’s second Catholic president, perhaps the 
Friday Reads: Supreme Court Mambo
Posted: June 18, 2021 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Afghanistan, Junteenth, SCOTUS 6 Comments
Joaquin Sorollo, Bailaora Flemenco, 1923
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Tropical Storm Claudette is making its way towards New Orleans today. We’re fortunate to be on the dry side of it so mostly we’ve got cooler temperatures and light rain ever so often. I’m actually happy to see the change since the heat was getting pretty relentless.
I was a bit out of it most of yesterday having spent part of the day Wednesday under anesthesia. The polyp is gone off to the lab so now I have to see if it’s worrisome or not. I haven’t read much but I did tune in to see the President sign the bill making Juneteenth a Federal Holiday which was a joy. We’ve recognized Juneteenth here annually. Here’s the link to last year’s edition written by me. BB gets the pleasure tomorrow. However, I had to write about one thing.
I got all teary-eyed watching 94 year old Opal Lee’s excitement during the ceremony. President Biden took a knee for her too. I wept again when I heard her story told by Rachel Maddow later that night. The youtube below has that bit of her show. Her story and her fight to get Juneteenth recognized as a federal holiday demostrate her greatness. This is from CNN.
As a little girl, Lee was the victim of a traumatic event, her first undeniable experience with racism.
One week after nine-year-old Lee moved with her family to an all-White neighborhood, a mob surrounded their home and threatened their lives.
“My dad came with a gun and the police told him if he busted a cap, they would let the mob have us,” she recalls.
Lee’s parents sent her to friends several blocks away “under the cover of darkness,” she tells CNN.”They burned furniture. They set the house on fire. It was terrible. It really was.”
Lee says outside newspapers in Texas reported the crime — but local papers from the community where the violence took place ignored it,
The date of the attack was Juneteenth.
Lee says her parents never spoke of the incident again.
“They buckled down, they worked hard. They bought another home, but we never discussed it,” she explains.
“I just know if we had had an opportunity to stay awhile they would have found out … we were just like them.”
“We wanted the same thing they wanted. A place to live,” she recalls.
“We wanted food, jobs that would pay a wage.”
Dance at Bougival by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1883, via The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
So, about the supreme court and its two decisions yesterday which were extremely narrow. Here’s a little on that including the divine hissy fit that was Alito’s criticism of both. This is from Politico: “‘Alito was just pissed’: Trump’s Supreme Court breaks down along surprising lines. Thursday’s decisions laid bare an emerging rift within the court’s conservative majority.”
The key fault line in the Supreme Court that Donald Trump built is not the ideological clash between right and left — it’s the increasingly acrimonious conflict within the court’s now-dominant conservative wing.
Those rifts burst wide open on Thursday with two of the highest-profile decisions of the court’s current term. In both the big cases — involving Obamacare and a Catholic group refusing to vet same-sex couples as foster parents in Philadelphia — conservative justices unleashed sharp attacks that seemed aimed at their fellow GOP appointees for failing to grapple with the core issues the cases presented.
Some liberal legal commentators noted that the most carefully dissected rhetorical sparring is now taking place among members of the new six-justice conservative majority, with the three remaining liberal justices often left as mere spectators.
“We’re arguing about the battles among the conservatives and when that coalition breaks and where it goes,” lamented Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge. “It’s a dramatic difference from only two or three years ago.”
Leading the charge from the right in both cases Thursday was Justice Samuel Alito, who penned caustic opinions taking his colleagues to task for issuing narrow rulings that seemed to him to be aimed at defusing political tensions rather than interpreting the law.
“After receiving more than 2,500 pages of briefing and after more than a half-year of post-argument cogitation, the Court has emitted a wisp of a decision that leaves religious liberty in a confused and vulnerable state. Those who count on this Court to stand up for the First Amendment have every right to be disappointed—as am I,” Alito wrote in the foster-care case, notwithstanding the Catholic charity’s unanimous victory.
In the Obamacare dispute, Alito sarcastically accused the majority of repeatedly indulging in flights of legal sophistry to avoid the politically unpalatable step of striking down the landmark health care law.
“No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats,” Alito wrote. “A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again. But I must respectfully dissent.”
Dance in Baden-Baden Painting Max Beckmann
Well, that’s interesting. Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett have seized the Supreme Court for now.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrated their collective power at America’s highest court on Thursday.
They fueled the Supreme Court’s limited opinions on Obamacare and religious liberty, in action that marks a twist for the conservative-dominated bench and adds to the suspense of the next two weeks as the court finishes its annual term.
An overriding question going into the session that began last October was whether Roberts would still wield significant control, after former President Donald Trump appointed Barrett to succeed the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and created a 6-3 conservative-liberal bench.
But the latest developments suggest a possible 3-3-3 pattern, with Roberts, Barrett and Kavanaugh at the center-right, putting a check on their more conservative brethren who regularly push to overturn precedent.
I’ll believe this when I see it continue. My guess is they will not be so kind to anything dealing with women’s moral agency.
Tommervik Abstract Ballroom Dancers
Still, many see a tendency to give people’s bigotry a pass when it comes to supposed “religious beliefs.” This is an Op-Ed at the LA Times by Erwin Chemerinsky.
Under long-standing constitutional law, religious beliefs do not provide an exemption from civil rights laws and cannot be used as an excuse for discrimination.
Yet the Supreme Court on Thursday in Fulton vs. City of Philadelphiaruled in favor of the ability of Catholic Social Services to participate in the city’s foster care program even though that organization discriminates based on sexual orientation. Although the grounds for the court’s unanimous ruling were narrow, the implications are broad and indicate a court that is inclined to allow discrimination based on religious beliefs.
The Fulton case involves the city’s decision to refuse to contract with organizations that engage in forbidden discrimination. Philadelphia routinely contracts with private social service agencies to help place children in foster homes. Those agencies are “delegated” the power of the government in determining whether individuals satisfy state requirements for becoming foster parents. Every contract is explicit in prohibiting these agencies from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, religion and sexual orientation.
Catholic Social Services has long participated in this program, but in recent years has declined to do so because of the contractual requirement that it not discriminate based on sexual orientation. It says that its religious beliefs prevent it from providing inspections of same-sex couples or placing children with those couples.
The organization challenged the nondiscrimination requirement as violating its 1st Amendment rights. The federal district court and the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected these arguments, but the Supreme Court reversed those decisions and ruled in the agency’s favor.
In 1990, the court in Employment Division vs. Smith ruled that free exercise of religion does not provide an exemption from a generally applied law. In that case, the court rejected a claim by Native Americans — based on their religious beliefs — for an exemption from a state law prohibiting use of peyote. But the court also said that laws cannot discriminate against religion.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing in the Fulton case, said that the Philadelphia law allowed for exceptions and this discretion meant it was not a sufficiently general law. The possibility of discrimination in exercising this discretion, he wrote, made Philadelphia’s requirement a violation of the free exercise of religion.
But there was no evidence that Philadelphia actually treated Catholic Social Services differently from other social service agencies or used its discretion in an impermissible way. And it is interesting that even the liberal justices — Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — did not raise this point. Perhaps they were glad to go along with a narrow ruling rather than risk one that changed the law and opened the door even more to discrimination based on religious beliefs.
The Dance Hall in Arles Painting Vincent van Gogh
Read his concerns about the findings at the link.
I have on last thing from The Atlantic and writer George Packer. I’ve known a lot of people that came here as part of a War Diaspora. I had childhood friends whose parents came from the Korean War Diaspora. My mother-in-law was a Japanese War Bride. Many of my students are children of the Vietnamese War Diaspora. We also have a lot of folks from Somalia and other engagements that never quite made it to the official War title too. I think this article is timely and correct. It’s Not Too Late to Avert a Historic Shame. As the U.S. military prepares to leave Afghanistan, it’s running out of time to evacuate the Afghans who have helped the United States.”
We do way too many war dances that leave way too many victims.
In the past few weeks, the outlook for Afghans who helped the United States in Afghanistan has gone from worrying to critical. As U.S. and NATO troops leave the country with breathtaking speed, the Taliban are attacking districts that had long been in the Afghan government’s hands, setting up checkpoints on major roads, and threatening provincial capitals. Many of the 18,000 Afghans who, along with their families, have applied for Special Immigrant Visas will soon have nowhere to hide, no armed force standing between them and their pursuers.
Think on that and read the rest at the link.
I’m going to try to get Temple out for one good walk in this weather before we get the bigger soaking so I’ll leave this space to you now. Enjoy listening to Mambo by Leonard Bernstein from Westside Story too! Oh, enjoy watching it too because the orchestra gets all into it completely shouting, dancing and grooving while they play. Plus, it includes cute little girls throwing flowers from a balcony. You need this in your life today!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: June 17, 2021 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, Juneteenth, SCOTUS, slavery, Vladimir Putin, voting rights bills 9 CommentsGood Morning!!
Tea break, by Sylvie Vanlerberghe
Yesterday President Biden wrapped up his European trip by meeting with Vladimir Putin. It was a very different spectacle than the one in 2018 in Helsinki when the former guy humiliated himself and our country by rolling over for the Russian president.
The New York Times: A tale of two summits: Trump at Helsinki, and Biden at Geneva.
Helsinki, Finland, was where President Donald J. Trump had his own first face-to-face meeting with the Russian president, and the moment was highly anticipated, given the investigations then taking place into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its reported ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign.
The meeting offered the American president a ripe opportunity to denounce the Kremlin on a public stage. He did not.
Instead, standing by Mr. Putin’s side, Mr. Trump dismissed the conclusions by U.S. intelligence agencies about Russian meddling and said, in essence, that he believed the Russian president’s denials as much as he believed his own intelligence advisers.
“They said they think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.” For good measure, he said, “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
Trump met alone with Russian president for 2 hours, and we still don’t know what happened between the two men. In contrast, Biden was open about his meeting with Putin.
“Where we have differences,” he said just moments into the news conference, “I wanted President Putin to understand why I say what I say, and why I do what I do, and how we’ll respond to specific kinds of actions that harm America’s interests.”
Mr. Biden said, “I told President Putin my agenda is not against Russia or anyone else. It’s for the American people.”
The Japanese Mask (1884), painted by Gustave Claude Etienne Courtois
And he declared: “I also told him that no president of the United States could keep faith with the American people if they did not speak out to defend our democratic values, to stand up for the universal and fundamental freedoms that all men and women have in our view. That’s just part of the DNA of our country.”
To that end, he cited the jailing of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, and the detentions of two Americans in Russia.
Mr. Biden also offered a warning on cyberattacks.
“I pointed out to him: We have significant cyber-capabilities — and he knows it,” the president said.
Edward Luce at The Financial Times: Biden politely reads riot act to Putin.
Summitry, contrary to a former British prime minister, is nothing like tennis. The outcome is rarely “game, set and match”. By the wide-eyed standards of Joe Biden’s last four predecessors, all of whom held ill-fated summits with Vladimir Putin, Biden went into this one with low expectations.
There were no illusions about his meeting of minds with the Russian leader, let alone souls. The modesty of Biden’s goal — to stabilise relations with America’s chief military adversary — conveyed a realism that eluded earlier presidents.
All of which is far less exciting for the world media. Biden did not praise Putin’s ability to restore Russian freedom and prosperity, as Bill Clinton did in 2000 shortly after Putin was elected president. Nor did he get a sense of Putin’s soul, as George W Bush claimed in 2001, and trust what he saw. He did not aim for an ambitious “reset” of US-Russia relations, as Barack Obama fatefully did in 2009. Most notoriously Biden’s tone was a million miles from the one-man admiration society Donald Trump brought to Helsinki when he met Putin alone in 2018.
After more than two decades in power, this Russian bear was unlikely to change its habits. Biden’s aim is to coax and cajole Putin into a moderately less dangerous stance. That goal is more difficult than it sounds. At home, Biden faces derision from Republican and some foreign policy specialists for even meeting Putin. The act of sharing a stage with America’s president is seen as an unearned reward for an adversary who sponsors regular cyber attacks on the US, not to mention waging information warfare on western democracy.
Read the rest at FT.
Woman with a book, Pablo Picasso
Max Boot at The Washington Post: Opinion: Biden wiped the smirk off Putin’s face.
Biden established an easy rapport with his fellow democratic leaders at meetings with the Group of Seven, the European Union and NATO. “I think it’s great to have the U.S. president part of the club and very willing to cooperate,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. As a congenial insider, Biden was able to accomplish far more than a testy outsider such as Donald Trump ever could. Biden got fellow leaders to agree on a 15 percent global corporate minimum tax, on sending 1 billion doses of covid-19 vaccines to the developing world (not enough, but a start), on speaking out about the challenge posed by China, and on settling a long-festering European-American trade dispute over aircraft subsidies….
The meetings with allies were, in some sense, merely a prelude for meeting with one of the United States’ most effective foes — Vladimir Putin. One cannot imagine a starker contrast between Biden and his predecessor than in their handling of the Russian strongman. At Helsinki in July 2018, then-President Trump simpered and cowered. In a low point of a presidency with more low points than Death Valley, Trump accepted at face value Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denials of complicity in the 2016 election attack. Putin emerged from that meeting smirking like the cat that swallowed the canary.
As the historian Michael Beschloss noted, there was no such grin on Putin’s lips when he did his solo press conference after meeting with Biden on Wednesday. While Putin engaged in his usual dishonesty and whataboutism — he compared his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the prosecution of the Capitol rioters — his manner was subdued and far from triumphant. He attacked the United States but was careful not to insult Biden personally. He even compared the current president favorably to his predecessor: “President Biden is an experienced statesman. He is very different from President Trump.” (Ouch. That’s got to sting for Putin’s biggest fanboy in the United States.)
In his own remarks, Biden struck all the right notes. He made clear that he raised human-rights concerns with Putin. “How could I be the president of the United States of America and not speak out against the violation of human rights?” he asked. It is almost unimaginable — had we not just witnessed the Trump presidency. Biden said he told Putin that, if Navalny dies in a Russian prison, the consequences would be “devastating for Russia.” He said he also raised Russia’s complicity in cyberattacks, its interference with humanitarian aid in Syria, and its invasion of Ukraine (he expressed support for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”), while holding out the hope of cooperation on the Iranian nuclear program, stability in Afghanistan, nuclear arms control and other issues.
Takehisa Yumeji, Woman reading a book on the sofa
Now that he’s back home, Biden will sign a bill to create a new national holiday. The Washington Post: Congress votes overwhelmingly to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. The day commemorates the end of slavery in Texas in 1865.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: June 15, 2021 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: 2020 presidential election, Arizona, Biden plan to counter domestic terrorism, Department of Justice, Donald Trump, G7, Georgia, Jeffrey Rosen, Joe Biden, NATO, Rudy Giuliani, Vladimir Putin 23 Comments
House by the Railroad, Edward Hopper.
Good Morning!!
Revelations just keep on coming about Trump’s crazy efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The New York Times and CNN have obtained emails that show how the White House tried to get the Justice Department to investigate insane claims about election conspiracy theories, including a baseless theory about Italian satellites changing votes.
Katie Benner at The New York Times: Trump Pressed Official to Wield Justice Dept. to Back Election Claims.
An hour before President Donald J. Trump announced in December that William P. Barr would step down as attorney general, the president began pressuring Mr. Barr’s eventual replacement to have the Justice Department take up his false claims of election fraud.
Mr. Trump sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.
Another email from Mr. Trump to Mr. Rosen followed two weeks later, again via the president’s assistant, that included a draft of a brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court. It argued, among other things, that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.
The draft echoed claims in a lawsuit in Texas by the Trump-allied state attorney general that the justices had thrown out, and a lawyer who had helped on that effort later tried with increasing urgency to track down Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, saying he had been dispatched by Mr. Trump to speak with him.
The emails, turned over by the Justice Department to investigators on the House Oversight Committee and obtained by The New York Times, show how Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Rosen to put the power of the Justice Department behind lawsuits that had already failed to try to prove his false claims that extensive voter fraud had affected the election results….
The documents dovetail with emails around the same time from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, asking Mr. Rosen to examine unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, including one that claimed people associated with an Italian defense contractor were able to use satellite technology to tamper with U.S. voting equipment from Europe.
Yellow House in Arles, Vincent Van Gogh
Benner reports much more insanity in this article. Here’s just a bit more:
Much of the correspondence also occurred during a tense week within the Justice Department, when Mr. Rosen and his top deputies realized that one of their peers had plotted with Mr. Trump to first oust Mr. Rosen and then to try to use federal law enforcement to force Georgia to overturn its election results. Mr. Trump nearly replaced Mr. Rosen with that colleague, Jeffrey Clark, then the acting head of the civil division.
Mr. Rosen made clear to his top deputy in one message that he would have nothing to do with the Italy conspiracy theory, arrange a meeting between the F.B.I. and one of the proponents of the conspiracy, Brad Johnson, or speak about it with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.
“I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as an ‘insult,’” Mr. Rosen wrote in the email. “Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”
More details from CNN: New emails show how Trump and his allies pressured Justice Department to try to challenge 2020 election results.
The emails also provide new detail into how Mark Meadows, then-White House chief of staff, directed Rosen to have then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark — who reportedly urged Trump to make him acting attorney general instead of Rosen — investigate voter fraud issues in Georgia before the US attorney there resigned in January.
Amid the pressure, Rosen said he refused to speak to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani about his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
When Meadows sought to have Rosen arrange an FBI meeting with a Giuliani ally pushing a conspiracy theory that Italy was using military technology and satellites to somehow change votes to Joe Biden, Rosen said he would not help Giuliani.
Weatherside, 1965, by Andrew Wyeth
“I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses,’ and re-affirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this,” Rosen wrote to Donoghue.\The new emails provide additional detail to reports earlier this month from CNN, The New York Times and others on Meadows’ emails to Rosen after the election, which revealed how the top White House aide had urged the Justice Department to take action for Trump’s benefit. The emails included a list of complaints about voting procedures in New Mexico, alleged “anomalies” in a Georgia county and the claims about Italian satellites.
The emails also show how Trump directed allies toward Rosen, who had been named acting attorney general following Barr’s December 2020 resignation after Barr had publicly said there had not been widespread fraud in the election.
Kurt Olsen, a private attorney, reached out to John Moran at the Justice Department on December 29 requesting a meeting with Rosen, promising he could meet at the Justice Department with an hour’s notice. He attached a draft complaint modeled after the Texas Supreme Court lawsuit unsuccessfully challenging the election results in four states, and wrote in a follow-up email that Trump directed him to meet with Rosen to discuss the US bringing a similar action.
“The President of the United States has seen this complaint, and he directed me last night to brief AG Rosen in person today to discuss bringing this action,” Olsen wrote. “I have been instructed to report back to the President this afternoon after the meeting.”
The same day, Trump’s White House assistant also forwarded the draft complaint to Rosen and Donoghue to review, saying it had also been shared with Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
By the end of the year, it was clear Rosen and Donoghue had tired of the pressure campaign from the White House.
At least it’s good to know there was pushback from some Trump appointees.
The insanity continues in Arizona and elsewhere. Will Sommer at The Daily Beast: Republicans Now Want to ‘Audit’ Election Results in States That Trump Won.
In the wake of the Arizona audit’s success at grabbing publicity across right-wing media, Republican lawmakers in states that Trump won are demanding Arizona-style audits or other election inspections of their own.
The Republican hunt for voter-fraud evidence even in states that voted for Trump reveals how far inside the party the idea has spread that the election was stolen.
Houses at Falaise in the Fog, Claude Monet
Focusing on fraud claims allows Republican officials to raise money and attention from devoted Trump supporters, according to former Republican National Committee communications director Doug Heye. It also helps lawmakers align themselves with Trump’s claims of widespread fraud, ingratiating themselves with the energized Trump grassroots as they try to claim more power in the party.“
This is about two things, and these are symbiotic,” Heye said. “The continued fealty for all things Trump, and placating the base or the portion of the base that still can’t accept a clear loss.” [….]
The prospect of audits that could somehow dispute Biden’s electoral college win have become articles of faith for Trump supporters unable to get over the former president’s defeat, as Republican-held legislatures across the country use a sense that the election was stolen to push voting restrictions across the country. Some Republican voters have also become fixated on a “domino theory” about the election, which holds that if Arizona’s audit finds fraud in their election, other states that voted for Biden will fall like dominos.
In other news, today the Biden administration released a “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” You can read the White House statement at that link.
The New York Times: Biden Administration Forms Blueprint to Combat Domestic Extremism.
The Biden administration is aiming to bolster information sharing with technology companies, potentially expand hiring of intelligence analysts and improve screening of government employees for ties to domestic terrorism as part of a much-anticipated plan expected to be released on Tuesday detailing how the federal government should combat extremism.
President Biden ordered the review of how federal agencies addressed domestic extremism soon after coming into office, part of an effort to more aggressively acknowledge a national security threat that has grown since the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
Changing a Flat, Norman Rockwell
The 32-page plan synthesizes steps that have been recommended by national security officials — including bolstering relationships with social media companies and improving information sharing among law enforcement agencies — into one blueprint on how to more effectively identify extremists in the country after years of heightened focus on foreign terrorists.
“We cannot ignore this threat or wish it away,” Mr. Biden wrote in the strategy document. “Preventing domestic terrorism and reducing the factors that fuel it demand a multifaceted response across the federal government and beyond.”
The new strategy was widely expected to detail a position on whether the government should establish a domestic terrorism law that prosecutors could use to investigate and charge homegrown extremists instead of relying on assault, murder and hate crime charges. The strategy instead indicates that the administration is focused for now on bolstering methods of combating extremism already used by the government, despite Mr. Biden calling for such a law during the presidential campaign.
The Guardian: White House unveils first national strategy to fight domestic terrorism.
The White House has published its first ever national strategy for countering domestic terrorism five months after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol in Washington.
The framework released on Tuesday by the national security council describes the threat as now more serious than potential attacks from overseas but emphasises the need to protect civil liberties.
Anticipating Republican objections that Joe Biden could use counterterrorism tools to persecute supporters of Donald Trump, the strategy is also careful to state that domestic terrorism must be tackled in an “ideologically neutral” manner.
Houses in Munich, 1908, Wassily Kandinsky
It cites examples such as “an anti-authority extremist” ambushing, shooting and killing five police officers in Dallas In 2016; a lone gunman (and leftwing activist) wounding four people at a congressional baseball practice in 2017; and an “unprecedented attack” on Congress on 6 January.
“They come across the political spectrum,” a senior administration said on a media conference call. “We acknowledge the shooting at the congressional baseball, the attack on police officers in Dallas, just as we acknowledge the attack in Charlottesville and the attack on the Capitol on January 6.
“So it’s not motivating politics or ideology that matters for us or, more importantly for the strategy and its implementation. It’s when political grievances become acts of violence and we remain laser focused on that.”
Of course Biden is in Europe right now, and he will meet with Vladimir Putin soon. David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Here’s What Biden’s Team Expects From His Meeting With Putin.
The political world and the media have zeroed in on President Joe Biden’s meeting this week with Vladimir Putin as the most important diplomatic event in which this young administration has participated. But the truth is that the heaviest diplomatic lifting with regard to the US-Russia relationship, and American national security, will have already taken place before the meeting in Geneva begins—or it will come in its wake.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Biden would be arriving at the Geneva meeting “with the wind at his back.” What he meant by that, according to a senior official traveling with the president, is that “in many respects, the most important part of the president’s message to Putin will have been made in the days before the meeting.” The official cited the achievements associated with Biden’s meetings with the U.K. leadership, G7 leaders, his NATO counterparts and top officials from the EU.
House in Provence, 1867, Paul Cezanne
Trump not only distinguished himself from all previous American presidents by publicly bending the knee before his political sponsor Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, on Twitter and whenever he had the chance, the only coherent part of Trump foreign policy was that he effectively rejected three-quarters of a century of U.S. history by seeking to dismantle the international order America had tried to build since World War II. He attacked our allies. He condemned NATO. He disparaged the EU. And whenever he was given a chance, he rewarded Putin despite his invasion of Ukraine, his murder of his opponents (including on foreign soil), his freelancing in Syria, his efforts to erode the west’s relationship with Turkey and more.
Biden has been one of those who helped build the international system Trump attacked. He has been committed to undoing the damage Trump did. Just in the last week, Biden announced an effort to revitalize the Atlantic Charter, mended ties within the G7, made an unprecedented pledge of 500 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine as part of the G7’s commitment to provide 1 billion doses to needy nations worldwide, and re-engaged with our allies on terms more consistent with the pro-democracy, anti-autocracy message of our past.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
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