The Stanford Internet Observatory, which published some of the most influential analysis of the spread of false information on social media during elections, has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation.
Just three staffers remain at the Observatory, and they will either leave or find roles at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which is absorbing what remains of the program, according to eight people familiar with the developments, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The Election Integrity Partnership, a prominent consortium run by the Observatory and a University of Washington team to identify viral falsehoods about election procedures and outcomes in real time, has updated its webpage to say its work has concluded.
Two ongoing lawsuits and two congressional inquiries into the Observatory have cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees, one of the people told The Washington Post. Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.
Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who founded the Observatory five years ago, moved into an advisory role in November. Observatory research manager Renée DiResta’s contract was not renewed in recent weeks.
The collapse of the Observatory is the latest and largest in a series of setbacks for the community of researchers who try to detect propaganda and explain how false narratives are manufactured, gather momentum and become accepted by various groups. It follows Harvard’s dismissal of misinformation expert Joan Donovan, who in a December whistleblower complaint alleged that the university’s close and lucrative ties with Facebook parent Meta led the university to clamp down on her work, which was highly critical of the social media giant’s practices.
“The Stanford Internet Observatory has played a critical role in understanding a range of digital harms,” said Kate Starbird, who led the University of Washington’s work on the Election Integrity Partnership and continues to publish on election misinformation.
Starbird said that while most academic studies of online manipulation look backward from much later, the Observatory’s “rapid analysis” helped people around the world understand what they were seeing on platforms as it happened.
Brown University professor Claire Wardle said the Observatory had created innovative methodology and trained the next generation of experts.
“Closing down a lab like this would always be a huge loss, but doing so now, during a year of global elections, makes absolutely no sense,” said Wardle, who previously led research at the anti-misinformation nonprofit First Draft. “We need universities to use their resources and standing in the community to stand up to criticism and headlines.”
Mostly Monday Reads: Mass Shooting Mania
Posted: September 29, 2025 Filed under: mass shootings, Power to the people | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social, @repeat1968. John Buss, GLBT News, immigration horror stories, mass shootings, Trump's Troops in US Cities 11 Comments
“Eagle eye Kash solves another one!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My kids were Quarter Rats. We lived in the lower quarter for five years before settling about a mile downriver in a small, single, pre-Civil War house near the Mississippi. Prior to COVID-19, I still gigged there consistently. My last gig was on Bourbon Street, accompanying and DJing for two talented Drag Queens doing Drag Queen Cabaret. It ended in a very Bourbon Street way.
The club finally got to return to its strip club days when its permit got approved, and like me, all good things move downriver where the local talent can shine, and up until Airbnb forced tourists on us, we could just be New Orleans. I keep meaning to go back to the one activity that truly relaxes me, but like most of my neighbors, I fear the people who come from other cities that scream and yell biblical obscenities at my GLBTQ friends whenever they dare to have a public celebration. We’ve had all the local versions of piety performing bible bangers and right-wing white boy droogies. We’ve been safe from them to date, but we know it’s just a matter of time before they show up anywhere they’re not wanted.
Since then, I admit, I rarely head to the Quarter, let alone Bourbon Street. I’m generally only in the vicinity when the small, early Holiday parades fire up. This year, there have been two violent events on Bourbon Street, which were–as usual–a combination of plenty of alcohol and rage. Our law enforcement officials have begged the state, to no end, to set up a gun-free zone there. The Louisiana outback, with its constant gun violence, never puts the state on the map quite like an attack on Bourbon Street. The state determined the best defense was just a bunch of ugly,out-of-place barricades that did no good at all on Saturday night. No city has a fighting chance unless their states have sensible gun laws.
Over the weekend, Bourbon Street was one of three American locations that suffered a mass shooting. The first to hit the headlines created a war zone at a Latter-day Saints Church. I grew up with a Latter-day Saints Temple–the winter stakes one–on the same block as my home. My mother was over there doing so much work on the family genealogy that they even called her Sister Whittaker. I’m quite familiar with the religion and people. I could hardly stop my imagination from jumping from the Temple that is now burnt to the ground in Michigan, to the one sitting next to my cul-de-sac in Omaha.
For some reason, attacking a religious building appears to get more media hand-wringing than attacking a school of children or a mall full of tourists and service workers. This attack was huge, but had all the footprints of the uniquely American tragedy of a white guy, mad at the world, finding a way to commit suicide while bringing a lot of innocents with him. I’m waiting for the lies about this guy to start like a volcanic eruption from President Evil and his incompetent loyalists. You really have to be dumb to try to see this for what it was and what it was not.
This first read is from The New Republic. “Mormon Church Gunman Had Trump Sign Outside His Home. Thomas Jacob Sanford drove his car into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and opened fire.” Again, let’s see them spin this one.
Thomas Jacob Sanford, the 40-year-old Iraq War veteran identified as the suspect in a fatal Sunday attack on a Mormon church in Grand Blanc, Michigan, seemed to own Donald Trump memorabilia, with a campaign sign on display outside his house.
His reported home on East Atherton Road in Burton, Michigan, according to public records, is located less than 20 minutes by car from the church into which he ran his truck, before opening fire—killing at least four people—and setting the building ablaze.
As of June 2025, the house had a Trump campaign sign posted on its fence, per a Google Maps image. A picture posted to Facebook in September 2019, of Sanford with his wife and son, shows him wearing a camo shirt that reads “Re-elect Trump 2020,” and “Make liberals cry again.”
Mark Grebner, a Michigan Democratic consultant and data expert, told local outlet Bridge Michigan that Sanford signed two petitions a few years ago, both of which seemingly aligned with right-wing causes: one for Unlock Michigan, against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions, and an anti-abortion petition by Right to Life Michigan.
Local authorities and the FBI have not yet identified a motive for the attack.
Undoubtedly, everyone is waiting for the Director to pull something stupid out of his ass that will please Yam Tits and no one else.
Oh, right, I’m not being politically correct here. Now’s the time for useless thoughts and prayers, and not looking to solve this uniquely American and preventable tragedy. Sensible Gun Laws are cancel culture. Sending Troops to terrorize immigrants and protestors exercising their First Amendment rights is some kind of take back of America. I’ve purposefully kept the TV news off because frankly, I’m tired of the ritual dance they perform that includes the ‘Both Sides Do it’ Shuffle’ and the ‘What can be done about this?’ Mambo. Definitely don’t mention that the Secretary of War and FARTUS want cities to look like war zones. It’s part of the Macho, Macho, Man disco punch shuffle we get to view daily when FARTUS is trying to look all Village People.
This is from the Chicago Sun-Times. “Feds march into downtown Chicago; top border agent says people are arrested based on ‘how they look’. U.S. Border Patrol agents wearing tactical gear and carrying long guns made arrests in downtown Chicago and the River North neighborhood Sunday. “This is not making anybody safer — it’s a show of intimidation,” Gov. JB Pritzker said.”
Dozens of federal agents took individuals into custody during a winding patrol Sunday through downtown Chicago, and a top U.S. Border Patrol official told WBEZ the agents were arresting people based on “how they look.”
The agents, clad in military-style fatigues, roamed past some of Chicago’s most well-known landmarks on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The highly visible show of force came just three days after Border Patrol boats carrying armed officers appeared on the Chicago River.
Gregory Bovino, commander at large of the border force, contrasted the people being arrested with a white WBEZ reporter, saying agents consider a person’s appearance before taking them into custody.
“You know, there’s many different factors that go into something like that,” Bovino said. “It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location.
“Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
Bovino, who brought his “Operation At Large” deportation campaign from California to Illinois this month, made the comments about three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court said federal agents could continue stopping people based on factors including race and language during the campaign in California. The court’s majority did not explain itself.
Chicago has been on edge ever since President Donald Trump floated the idea of sending National Guard troops into the city in August. Though he never followed through, Sunday’s immigration patrols may have given him the photo opportunity he’s been looking for.
Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker responded on social media by noting the officers appeared “to be carrying large weapons around downtown Chicago in camouflage and masks.
“This is not making anybody safer — it’s a show of intimidation, instilling fear in our communities and hurting our businesses,” Pritzker said.
Immigration agents were patrolling several other neighborhoods, Bovino added.
“Chicago’s got a lot of murders,” Bovino said. “We’re going to make the city a safer place.”
The city’s murder numbers have been falling fast in recent years, and studies show the vast majority are committed by U.S. citizens. Violent crime overall is down too.
Bovino said the deportation blitz also extends beyond Chicago’s borders: “It could be Cicero. It could be South Chicago. It could be anywhere in Illinois.”
As the immigration patrol continued through River North, people on a double-decker tour bus craned their necks to get a look at the commotion.
At one point, agents ran after a bicyclist who’d yelled at them. He got away.
I can tell you that it is the most intimidating, awful experience from all my friends in the service industry who had to deal with that situation in the French Quarter during the Super Bowl. It is fucking scary and intimidating. That was only a week or so compared to what L.A. went through.
I heard this directly from my grocery shopper this week. He’s a young black man with this for a side gig. He told me the same thing I would’ve told him as I left him with the old TV, saying, “Be Safe Out there.” He told me his idea of fun these days is staying at home.
Other than trips to the doctor, I pretty much stay within the confines of a few blocks in my neighborhood. I’m lucky I have all the friends and music venues, and a library within those confines. I’m just peachy. Meanwhile, I’m exercising like a marine. The saying on the avenue is that they will be coming for us. As a professor, that’s what I hear from colleagues, too. It’s also why I’ve been happily teaching online and off-campus for two years. We had a shooter at the Lake Front campus in the Library not that long ago, and I’m glad to share office space with two cats and a dog.
I will be testing the waters on October 18th, but luckily, the 9th ward is hosting the second “No Presidents’ protest and I’ll be blocks from home.
So, with cash incentives and the ‘do whatever’ set of orders, this headline from the New York Times is not surprising. (Shared link.) “‘I’m From Here!’: U.S. Citizens Are Ending Up in Trump’s Dragnet. As immigration agents take a more aggressive approach, they have stopped and in some cases detained American citizens.” How long before the arrest orders include other identifiers, like looking too much like a professor, a potential protester, or someone who is part of or supports the GLBTQ community?
U.S. citizens, many of them Latino men, have been stopped and in some cases taken into custody by law enforcement officers who are carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown and who suspect the men are living in the country illegally.
While many of those detained have immediately declared their U.S. citizenship to officers, they have routinely been ignored, according to interviews with the men, their lawyers and court documents. In some cases they have been handcuffed, kept in holding cells and immigration facilities overnight, and in at least two cases held without access to a lawyer or even a phone call.
How many U.S. citizens have been swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps is difficult to say. No comprehensive log of such encounters is available from the federal government, and immigration agents are not required to document stops of citizens.
A review by The New York Times of publicly reported cases and court records found that since January, at least 15 U.S. citizens have been arrested or detained and questioned about their citizenship by immigration agents or local law enforcement officers enlisted to work with the federal authorities.
In late January, Julio Noriega, 54, of Chicago, had been handing out copies of his résumé to local businesses in Berwyn, Ill., when ICE officers approached him as he walked out of a Jiffy Lube auto service shop.
They handcuffed him and loaded him into a van, without allowing him to explain he was a citizen, according to a motion filed in the Federal District Court for Northern Illinois. He was released about 10 hours later, the court filing states.
School budgets and government programs are already being targeted by right-wing machinations in Yam Tit’s administration. We may have a government shutdown just because a few specific religious folks can’t take anyone not being exactly like them
From the link embedded above from Pink News. “Trump threatens to shut down US government unless Democrats agree to ban all trans health care. Proposed legislation behind the impending US government shutdown contains provisions that would ban federal funding for transgender adults, as well as youngsters.” This is reported by Amelian Hansford.
The bill has kept congress at a stand-still over the past few days after Democrats refused to provide the necessary votes for it to go through. Unless agreement is reached by 12.01am (Eastern) on Wednesday (1 October), sections of the government will be unable to function.
Donald Trump initially refused to meet with Democrats to avoid the shutdown, accusing minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer of making “unserious and ridiculous demands”. The Republicans control both the senate and house of representatives.
If passed, the law would prohibit trans surgeries, strip [health insurance] Medicaid coverage from transgender people and ban Pride flags from public buildings, such as schools and universities.
While Trump has since agreed to meet with Democrats, trans men and women have urged them not to bow to any pressure from the president.
One person on Reddit, whose post has gone viral, called on members of the public to “contact your senators and house reps asap”, urging them to protect “the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ Americans”.
They went on to say: “These are not budgetary measures, they are ideological attacks [that] would erase protections, endanger lives and weaponise federal funding to coerce institutions into abandoning care. For many, access to HRT and affirming care is not optional, it’s life-saving.
“Democrats have the power to stop all this happening if they hold the line in the senate.”
This news via The Guardian is probably the most prescient window into the dark hearts of the Republicans sitting on the SCOTUS bench. Read it and weep. “Clarence Thomas says precedent might not determine cases on upcoming supreme court docket. The court is expected to weigh in next session on same-sex marriage, which it legalized in 2015.” Women’s rights were the first to be destroyed. Now, we’re moving on to the Old Testament version of GLBTQ rights.
Settled legal precedent in the US is not “gospel” and in some instances may have been “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with”, the US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said.
Thomas – part of the conservative supermajority that has taken hold of the Supreme Court over Donald Trump’s two presidencies – delivered those comments Thursday at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, DC, ABC News and other outlets reported. His remarks preceded the nine-month term that the Supreme Court is scheduled to begin on 6 October.
“I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel,” Thomas said during the rare public appearance, invoking a term which in a religious context is often used to refer to the word of God. “And I do give perspective to the precedent. But … the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
Among the various cases Thomas and his colleagues are expected to weigh in on is a request to overturn the 2015 Obergefell supreme court decision that legalized marriage for same-sex couples nationwide. Other cases being mulled by the Supreme Court for its 2025-2026 term involve tariffs, trans rights, campaign finance law, religious rights, and capital punishment.
Thomas was in the 5-4 minority that voted against the Obergefell decision.
Trump’s first presidency yielded him three supreme court picks that gave the panel a conservative supermajority which has frequently ruled in his favor after he returned to the White House in January.
In June 2022, as Joe Biden’s presidency interrupted Trump’s terms, that conservative supermajority also struck down the federal abortion rights which had been established decades earlier by the Roe v Wade supreme court precedent. Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in which he urged the court to “reconsider all … substantive due process precedents”, including in Obergefell as well as cases involving rights to contraception and same-sex intimacy.
Thomas reportedly told those listening to him at the Catholic University that he feels no obligation to hew to precedent “if I find it doesn’t make any sense”.
“I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis,” Thomas said. If it’s “totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided”.
Down here, we have Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, which originally sprang up to ensure folks could get a good send-off with a second line when they exited the earthly door. It’s morphed into a lot more than that now. It’s basically a tribe of neighbors looking out for each other. You may want to consider setting up some networks like this, as food and services for the elderly and children disappear. You may need it for more than that later.
I don’t think I need to remind you of German history and what happened when NAZIs went door to door. Oregon is now suing the Trump administration to keep troops out of Portland. This is from Politico. “Oregon sues to block Trump from deploying state’s National Guard in Portland. ”Local law enforcement has this under control,” the governor said.” Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney share the headline.
Oregon and its largest city, Portland, are suing to block President Donald Trump from deploying the state’s National Guard, calling it an unconstitutional abuse of power.
“Far from promoting public safety, Defendants’ provocative and arbitrary actions threaten to undermine public safety by inciting a public outcry,” the state and city contend in the lawsuit filed Sunday in federal court in Portland.
“I think this is a sad day for our country, a sad day for Oregon that the president of the United States does not listen to local leaders about what they need,” Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, told reporters during a videoconference shortly after the suit was filed.
“When the president and I spoke yesterday, I told him in very plain language there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state,” Kotek said. “Putting our own military on our streets is an abuse of power … Local law enforcement has this under control.”
“It’s actually un-American, if you think about it, to use the military against our own citizens but that’s exactly what’s happening right now, across our country,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, a Democrat, told the press conference. He said his office plans to file within the next day for a temporary restraining order against the deployment.
The lawsuit follows Trump’s announcement on social media Saturday that he was ordering the Defense Department to send troops to Portland to use “full force, if necessary,” to combat protests that he said were interfering with immigration enforcement. Trump described the decision as the result of a request from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Oregon officials say the Pentagon followed through on Trump’s order on Sunday morning, calling up 200 members of the state’s 6,500-member National Guard contingent. State officials say even the relatively small call-up could damage the state’s ability to respond to emergencies.
Lawyers for the state say protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been small and relatively subdued, routinely featuring fewer than 30 people, and that there have been no arrests related to those protests from June until earlier this week.
One last read via PBUMP.Net. “How Trumpworld inflates the perceived danger of the left.”
It is stipulated at the outset that there have been gruesome acts of political violence in recent months that appear to have been motivated by hostility to right-wing politics or the administration. This is not really contestable and rarely seriously contested. There is, in fact, violence on the political left.
It is also the case, though, that right-wing political violence has been much more common in recent years. This is not a useful bit of information to the Trump administration, which actively seeks to ignore or bury it. It, like Trump himself, is committed to presenting political violence as centrally if not entirely a function of the left — obviously in part because doing so provides a rationalization for the administration to crack down on the president’s political opponents. Trump’s been champing at the bit to deploy the military against protesters, a desire so obvious that questions about his doing so were part of Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings to serve as Defense Secretary.
Over the weekend, Trump announced on social media that he would be directing the (since-confirmed) Hegseth to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” He further “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary” — apparently giving the military a green light to shoot at the purported “terrorists”.
Why Portland? Well, that’s an interesting story that reflects one of the central ways that Trump and his allies convince the right that there’s an imminent threat — a tactic so convincing that it apparently convinced Trump, too.
The next section is my favorite.
In mid-June 2020, I noticed something weird about Fox News’s coverage of the racial-justice protests that had emerged in response to the killing of George Floyd: they were often accompanied by footage of violence or vandalism that had actually occurred more than a week prior. Tucker Carlson (then still a Fox host), Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were incorporating footage into their shows that had been recorded in late May. The reason for doing so wasn’t subtle; they (and Trump, who was president) hoped to suggest that a firm hand was needed to keep the lunatic left under control.
It didn’t work. But what I couldn’t have anticipated then was that Fox would still be using that footage five years later.
Trump eventually backtracked on his threat to send troops to Portland. In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.
“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’ ” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”
Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.
So what had Trump seen? Given his tendency to stay tuned to Fox News we can make some educated guesses.
Trump made his pledge to send troops to Portland on Saturday morning. On Friday, Fox News had several segments in which purported violence in the city was shown.
One featured Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security official who often appears on cable shows. As she was discussing an executive order Trump signed, the channel showed b-roll of events in Portland.
You will notice, though, that the footage was not timestamped for any date in September. Instead, they showed an encounter apparently involving tear gas that occurred back in June … and footage from protests in July 2020.
In the next hour, they ran the same playbook. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on, talking about how dangerous the left was next to footage of Portland violence from July 2020.
You’re POTUS, you have thousands of intelligence reports and agencies at your beck and call, so who are you gonna call? Forget calling, just watch whatever crap Fox News or some other right-wing propaganda channel, and there you go! So this is obviously Philip Bump’s personal site, and it’s also quite the long-form read. Take some time and read the rest. Buckle up! Find your safe word! Collaborate with like-minded neighbors! You may need each other soon! More specifically, be safe out there!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 15, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden | Tags: Anthony Fauci, bump stocks, disinformation, doctored video, gun violence, intersex cats, mass shootings, Supreme Court, tortoiseshell cats, Trump's dementia 4 Comments
Cinder, previously Cindi
Happy Caturday!!
I read an interesting cat news story yesterday about a “rare” male tortoiseshell kitten. From The Oregonian: ‘Unicorn’ kitten, born intersex, adopted from central Oregon shelter.
Central Oregon veterinarians are excited about a rare tortoiseshell kitten that was brought into a shelter earlier this spring, and adopted into a new family last Friday.
That’s because the kitten, Cinder, was born intersex, with both male and female genitals.
The Central Oregon Humane Society announced the news about about the kitten on Friday, saying it was like “spotting a unicorn.”
“Even though I’ve only been in the veterinary field for nine years, this very well could be a once-in-a-career moment,” Bailey Shelton, clinic manager at the shelter, said in a news release. “They always talked about how rare male tortoiseshells are back in school, but seeing one in person is something else.”
Due to a stroke of genetics, tortoiseshell colored cats, known for their swirling coats of black and orange, are almost always female. And while Cinder does have some female genitals, including what appears to be a vulva, the shelter said, it does not have a uterus or ovaries, born instead with a pair of testicles (which have since been removed).
Crystal Bloodworth, medical director for the shelter, said now that Cinder has been neutered, it will grow up appearing to be female. However, given its anatomy at birth, the shelter has opted to label the kitten as male.
“To call it a male is tough, but with the binary nature of animals and people’s perception of animals, we chose male,” Bloodworth said.
While rare, incidents of hermaphroditism in cats is not unheard of, the shelter said. Like humans, intersex cats can be born with many variations of both male and female genitalia. This cat likely has three chromosomes, XXY, with two Xs that allow for the tortoiseshell coloring and a Y that allows for the testicles.
Cinder was brought into the central Oregon shelter in April, part of a litter relinquished by a local cat owner. The kitten, presumed to be female, was taken into a foster home and named Cindi. Veterinarians discovered the male genitals during a routine spay surgery, after which the cat was renamed Cinder.
More cute photos at the link.
Here are some of the stories topping the news today.
As I’m sure you know, yesterday the corrupt Supreme Court struck down the Trump era ban on bump stocks, thus making it easier for angry men with guns to murder huge numbers of people quickly. NBC News: Supreme Court rules ban on gun bump stocks is unlawful.
In a 6-3 ruling on ideological lines, with the court’s conservatives in the majority, the court held that an almost 100-year-old law aimed at banning machine guns cannot legitimately be interpreted to include bump stocks.
The Trump administration imposed the prohibition after the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, in which Stephen Paddock used bump stock-equipped firearms to open fire on a country music festival, initially killing 58 people. Then-President Donald Trump personally called for the accessory to be banned.
Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a firearm equipped with the accessory does not meet the definition of “machinegun” under federal law.
The ruling prompted a vigorous dissent from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote in reference to bump stocks enabling semiautomatic rifles to operate like machine guns. Sotomayor also took the rare step of reading a summary of her dissent in court.
Even with the federal ban out of the picture, bump stocks will still not be readily available nationwide. More than a dozen states have already banned them, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun-control group. Congress could also act.
A response to the decision from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: Clarence Thomas’ Opinion Legalizing Bump Stocks Is Indefensible.
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority carved a huge loophole into the federal prohibition against machine guns on Friday, striking down a bump stock ban first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6–3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. One might hope a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not. Far from it: To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion for the court tortures statutory text beyond all recognition, defying Congress’ clear and (until now) well-established commands. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in dissent, the supermajority flouts the “ordinary meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will be squarely at fault for the next mass shooting enabled by a legal bump stock.
A Boy with a Cat, by Pierre Auguste Renoir
Friday’s decision, Garland v. Cargill, is not a Second Amendment case. The plaintiffs do not (yet) argue that the Constitution guarantees a right to own bump stocks. Rather, they claim that the Trump administration stretched existing law too far when it outlawed bump stocks following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The gunman committed that massacre with the assistance of a bump stock, allowing him to murder 60 people in 10 minutes from 490 yards away, the deadliest single-gunman mass shooting in U.S. history. To use this device, a gunman attaches it to his AR-15, then holds his finger on the trigger and leans forward to maintain pressure on the bump stock. A semiautomatic requires the shooter to pull the trigger to fire each round. When done correctly, by contrast, “bump firing” can then unleash a spray of bullets without repeated pulls of the trigger, and at the rate of an automatic weapon. This barrage is audible in many videos of the Las Vegas shooting; victims were mowed down in rapid succession because the bump stock enabled nonstop fire.
For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had been monitoring these devices; the agency found some unlawful, depending on their precise mechanisms, but did not take a formal position overall. The Las Vegas shooting prompted ATF to conclude that bump stocks transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, rendering them illegal under a long-standing federal statute. That’s because this law bans “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively” for “converting a weapon into a machinegun.” And a “machinegun” is defined as any firearm that fires “automatically” by “a single function of the trigger.” After extensive deliberation, ATF found that bump stock–equipped rifles do exactly that.
Now the Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF. Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a GIF. The justice, who worships at the altar of the firearm, plainly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished tools of slaughter. (It’s no surprise that he borrowed the images from the avidly pro-gun Firearms Policy Foundation.) To reach his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused ATF of taking the “position” that bump stocks were legal, then “abruptly” reversing course after the Las Vegas shooting. This account is dead wrong: ATF took a careful, case-by-case view of different bump stock–like devices as gunmakers developed them, deeming some permissible and others unlawful. The gun industry pushed these devices into the mainstream by deceiving ATF about their purpose; in one case, for instance, a manufacturer won approval from the agency by claiming a bump stock was designed to accommodate people with limited hand strength—then turned around and marketed it as the next best thing to a machine gun.
Read the rest at Slate.
The Supreme Court still has a large number of cases to decide before they wrap up this session. One of those decisions will be on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from anything he did as “president.” Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court’s Leisurely Pace Will Produce Pileup of Late June Rulings.
The Supreme Court has been moving at a sluggish pace in issuing decisions this term, entering the second half of June with more than 20 left to go. That is not terribly different from the last two terms, when the pace at which the court issued decisions started to slow….
There are two main theories for why the court has started moving slowly, and they reinforce each other. The first is that the proportion of blockbusters is high, in this term in particular. In the coming weeks, the justices will weigh in on criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, abortion, guns, social media, homelessness, the opioid crisis and the power of executive agencies.
Morning Kiss, by Raphael Vavasseur
Of the 23 remaining cases, perhaps a dozen of them have the potential to reshape significant parts of American society.
The second theory is that the justices are not getting along very well in the aftermath of the leak of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the decision itself, the drumbeat of ethics scandals, the announcement of an ethics code that seems toothless and the drop in public respect for the court.
The justices themselves, whose party line has long been that they are a collegial bunch, have let slip a darker view in public appearances.
Soon after the leak, Justice Clarence Thomas said it was “like kind of an infidelity.”
“Look where we are, where that trust or that belief is gone forever,” he said. “And when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder.”
In her own remarks last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court’s direction has reduced her to tears.
“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” she said. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”
On Friday, Justice Sotomayor announced a dissent in a case on a firearms law from the bench, a rare move that signals profound disagreement.
The court has said that it will not issue more decisions until Thursday. It will doubtless add days for decision announcements the last week of June, the court’s self-imposed deadline for finishing its work before the justices’ summer break. But it will be a challenge to issue all of the remaining decisions by then.
Maybe Thomas and Alito are getting too old to keep up? That’s another important reason why Biden just has to win in November. If Trump is elected, those two will step down and be replaced by even worse people, if that is possible.
Speaking of old people, Donald Trump turned 78 yesterday. Yes, President Biden is a few years older, but he kept up an amazing pace during his two recent trips to Europe. In fact, the Biden-Harris campaign Twitter account noted that in a speech in Palm Beach yesterday, “Trump attack[ed] President Biden for being too energetic: He flies back and forth and back and forth between countries.” Meanwhile, Trump has been playing golf more than campaigning.
Meanwhile, Trump met with a group of CEO’s on Thursday, and it did not go well for him. Christina Wilke and Brian Schwartz at CNBC:
Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.
“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.
A girl with her cat, by Emile Vernon
Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Among the topics on which Trump offered scant details were how he would reduce taxes and cut back on business regulations, according to two other people in the room who spoke to CNBC….
The same CEOs who were struck by Trump’s lack of focus “walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish or thinking that they might be leaning that direction,” Sorkin reported.
“These were people who I think might have been actually predisposed to [Trump but] actually walked out of the room less predisposed” to him, Sorkin said….
Trump’s energy in the meeting was also noticeably subdued, according to two people who were in the room. At no time during his remarks was there any noticeable applause for Trump, two attendees told CNBC.
It’s difficult to understand why anyone is surprised by Trump’s idiocy at this point. I guess they must only watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal.
This week, the New York Post doctored a video to make President Biden look spaced out like Trump often is. William Vaillancourt at The Daily Beast: White House Rips ‘Desperate’ Murdoch Press Over Deceptive Biden Video.
A member of the White House communications team went after The New York Post on Thursday after it posted on social media a deceptively edited video of President Joe Biden at the G7 economic summit in Italy.
White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded to a post by the publication on X that had the caption, “President Biden appeared to wander off at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials needing to pull him back to focus.”
“The Murdoch outlets are so desperate to distract from @POTUS’s record that they just lie,” Bates wrote….
The fake video showed Biden walking away from the other people to talk to some skydivers who had just landed nearby. The Post cut out the skydivers and show Biden appear to be walking away for no reason.
“Here, they use an artificially narrow frame to hide from viewers that he just saw a skydiving demonstration,” Bates continued. “He’s saying congratulations to one of the divers and giving a thumbs up.”
Bates included a wider version of the same clip which shows Biden walking over toward one of the skydivers, who could not be seen in the Post’s video.
The Post isn’t the only Murdoch-owned paper that the White House’s press team has criticized lately. In taking issue with a report in The Wall Street Journal claiming that Biden’s mental acuity was “slipping,” Bates called attention to how some Democrats in Congress said their quotes to the contrary were cut from the article.
A girl with a cat, by Pierre Bonnard
Disinformation is very serious problem in the presidential campaign, particularly because of Trump’s stochastic terrorism and his followers’ responses. Check out this story by Joseph Menn at The Washington Post: Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure.
One more story, before I wrap this post up. Anthony Fauci has a tell-all book coming out, and Martin Pengally writes about it at The Daily Beast: Anthony Fauci: Volcanic Donald Trump Screamed F-Bombs, Then Said He Loved Me.
Donald Trump shouted foul-mouthed abuse at Anthony Fauci, then lurched into telling him he loved him—and claimed he would win the 2020 election in a “fucking landslide,” the top medical adviser reveals in his new memoir.
In the eagerly awaited book, Fauci describes conversations with Trump during the COVID-19 pandemic in which the then-president would “announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone.”
By Edouard Vuillard
“Let’s just say, I found this to be out of the ordinary,” Fauci writes, of conversations peppered with f-bombs, including the claim Fauci had cost the U.S. economy “one trillion fucking dollars.”
The book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, will be published in the U.S. next week—as Trump and President Joe Biden’s rematch gathers pace. The Daily Beast obtained a copy.
On the page, Fauci describes interactions with Trump as the administration wrestled with the president’s opposition to public health measures including masking; Trump’s desire to reopen the country; his indulgence of advisers with dubious qualifications pushing untested treatments; his bizarre suggestion that bleach might kill the virus; and, ultimately, his own hospitalization with COVID….
In 2020, within weeks of the first COVID cases, Fauci became a Republican punching bag. Enemies saw him as an avatar of the medical establishment when he relentlessly urged COVID precautions, starting with social distancing, moving to lockdowns, then masking and vaccines.
He told Congress this month that he, his wife, and his adult daughter were the subjects of death threats. During the pandemic he received a full-scale security detail.
In his book, Fauci reports his last conversation with Trump, in which Trump said he would win re-election “by a fucking landslide” against Biden, whom he deemed “fucking stupid.”
Those are my offerings for today. I hope you find something of interest to you here.
Fourth of July Reads
Posted: July 4, 2023 Filed under: just because | Tags: cocaine in White House, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, mass shootings, Tweetdeck, Twitter 16 CommentsHappy July Fourth!!
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.
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.
While abortion is a particularly stark example of the democracy divide, U.S. courts and state legislatures are advancing inequality of rights in countless other ways: from last week’s Supreme Court decisions allowing a prospective wedding website designer to refuse services to hypothetical same-sex couples and removing race from the many factors colleges and universities use to assemble diverse student bodies to states’ trying to restrict and ban medical care for transgender people, discussions of gay issues in classrooms and which books can be accessed in libraries.
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.
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.
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.
From The Washington Post:
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.
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.
When asked for comment on the Tweetdeck outages, Twitter told Gizmodo “💩.”
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.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope your holiday is safe and happy.
Tuesday Reads
Posted: May 9, 2023 Filed under: just because | Tags: Allen, AR-15, Barack Obama, E. Jean Carroll, gun violence, guns, mass shootings, NRA, Trump rape trial 18 CommentsGood Morning!!
What is happening to our country? Right now, we are headed in a very wrong direction. As Dakinikat wrote yesterday, we are seeing mass shootings at a rate that is hard to believe. But it’s true. We’ve become a country dominated by guns. Republicans have developed a sickness that can’t be explained just by the NRA and its donations to politicians. Awhile back, I read this piece by Noah Berlatsky and Aaron Rupar at Public Notice, and I hope you’ll check it out. Berlatsky argues that Republicans have development an obsession with guns and violence that goes far beyond a money motive.
The GOP has not been corrupted by capitalism. It would be more accurate to say it’s been corrupted by fascism. Guns are part of white Christofascist identity politics. The GOP supports guns as part of a principled commitment to a death cult, not because they need NRA money to win elections.
Focusing on NRA money obscures the real danger from the GOP. It also can lead gun control proponents to pursue confused and ineffective tactics. We need to understand why the GOP embraces guns if we’re ever going to have a hope of opposing them.
Rep. Thomas Massie and his family at Christmas
The first sign that the NRA is not driving gun policy with its political contributions is the fact that it simply doesn’t spend that much money in political races. That $1.3 million Blackburn received is, again, money taken in over the course of her entire political career, which stretches back to her first election as a Tennessee state senator in 1999, almost 25 years ago. In comparison, in the 2018 campaign in which Blackburn first won her Senate seat, her campaign and outside groups spent $30 million. Even if the NRA had donated that $1.3 million all at once, Blackburn would barely have noticed it in the blizzard of cash.
Blackburn isn’t unusual; NRA contributions are typically a tiny fraction of candidate contributions, as Philip Bump at the Washington Post explained back in 2016. He found that for most candidates, NRA donations were less than .5 percent of direct donations to campaigns. Even if you look at the category of independent outside expenditures, which cannot be coordinated with the campaign, the NRA gives only about 15 percent of donations, coming behind organizations like the Republican senatorial committee and the Chamber of Commerce….
The small size of the NRA’s donations makes it unlikely they’re meaningfully bribing politicians. Nor do GOP politicians behave as if they’ve been bribed. When politicians vote their donors over their constituents, they don’t tend to boast about it.
GOP politicians don’t treat guns like dirty stock trades, and don’t try to hide from constituents after gun votes. On the contrary, they tout their pro-gun credentials every chance they get. Rep. Andy Ogles, who represents the district where the Nashville shooting took place, sent out a Christmas card showing himself with his wife and children standing in front of a tree. They’re all grinning and holding assault weapons.
As communications professor Ryan Neville-Shepard explains at the Milwaukee Independent, guns on the right have increasingly become a symbol of white masculinity — and I’d argue of white Christian masculinity. Guns stand for defending home and family against “criminals” — a term which, in the dogwhistle rich environment of the right, means “non-white people.” In addition, Neville-Shepard notes, guns in right-wing political ads during the Obama administration became a symbol of (violent) opposition to Democratic government. Marjorie Taylor Greene ran an ad touting a gun giveaway in 2021 in which she promised to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”
I found Berlatsky’s argument convincing. It really seems to me at this point that Republicans simply see guns–and specifically assault rifles–as part of their identities. I think the gun obsession began after Obama was elected. The notion of a Black president was just too much for these people. Then came Trump, who gave them permission to be overtly act out the racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and misogynistic feelings they previously felt the need to hide in public. I’d be interested to know what you guys thing about this argument.
There have been more mass shootings since this article was written–after the Nashville school shooting, which happened in late March.
There is quite a bit of information available about the latest mass shooter, who mowed down people at an Allen, Texas outlet mall. There’s no doubt at this point that he was a white supremacist, despite being Hispanic, and a Nazi. He had large Nazi symbols tattooed on his body.
This article is by , , and
A social media page appearing to belong to a gunman who killed eight people at a Dallas-area outlet mall had shared extremist beliefs with rants against Jews, women and racial minorities posted since September, as well as posts about struggling with mental health.
Mauricio Garcia, 33, maintained a profile on the Russian social networking platform OK.ru, including posts referring to extremist online forums, such as 4chan, and content from white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic white nationalist provocateur.
In the weeks before the attack, Garcia posted more than two dozen photos of Allen Premium Outlets, where an officer killed him after the shooting Saturday, and surrounding areas, including several screenshots of Google location information, seemingly monitoring the mall at its busiest times.
Many of his posts referred to his mental health. In his final post, he lamented what his family might say and wrote that no psychologist would have been able to fix him.
In another post, he made disturbing comments about what makes a mass shooting “important” and praised a person who opened fire at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, this year, killing six people, including three children.
The shooter also posted a series of links to other sites, including a YouTube account that featured a video published the day of the shooting. In it he removed a “Scream” mask and said, “Not quite what you were expecting, huh?”
He also posted photos of a flak vest emblazoned with patches, one of them with the initialism for “Right Wing Death Squad,” a popular meme among far-right extremist groups. Another post included a series of shirtless pictures with visible white power tattoos, including SS lightning bolts and a swastika.
I don’t want to spend too much time on Garcia; but if you’re interested, you might want to read this Twitter thread by Aric Toler:
Garcia used a Hitler emoji
A few more interesting articles:
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: Timothy McVeigh’s Dreams Are Coming True.
Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Incel nation.
The Washington Post: Texas gunman fantasized over race wars on social media before mass killing.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post: Why non-White people might advocate white supremacy.
Men like Garcia are frightening, but now–thanks to Trump–their horrifying ideologies have infiltrated Republican political culture.
From Media Matters: Hitler-promoting antisemites will speak at Trump’s Miami hotel alongside Eric Trump, Lara Trump, and other Trump personalities.
The Trump National Doral resort will host two antisemites who have promoted pro-Adolf Hitler propaganda and spread virulently antisemitic conspiracy theories. They will be speaking at an event in Miami alongside numerous Team Trump personalities, including Eric Trump, Lara Trump, and Devin Nunes.
Trump Doral speaker Scott McKay, who has a streaming show on Rumble, has claimed that Jewish people orchestrated 9/11 and were responsible for the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William McKinley. He has also said that Jewish people routinely torture children and eat their hearts.
He has praised Hitler for supposedly trying to take down a Jewish banking system and said, “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today.”
Trump Doral speaker Charlie Ward, who also streams a show on Rumble, has shared posts praising Hitler for supposedly “warning us” about Judaism; claiming that “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made”; and attacking the alleged Jewish media for supposedly lying about the Holocaust.
The two are featured speakers in the “ReAwaken America” tour, which is set to stop at Trump’s Miami hotel on May 12 and 13. Scheduled to speak alongside McKay and Ward are numerous members of Trump’s orbit, including: Eric Trump, Lara Trump, former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former senior Department of Defense official Kash Patel, former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes, and Trump ally Roger Stone.
Numerous other far-right conspiracy theorists will be speaking, including Stella Immanuel, Mel K, Liz Crokin, Ann Vandersteel, Mike Lindell, and Patrick Byrne.
Media outlets have previously noted that the tour, which has been holding events across the country, has also featured QAnon supporters, conspiracy theories, and Christian nationalist rhetoric.
The tour was initiated by Michael Flynn.
Rachel Maddow talked about this on her MSNBC show last night. Watch the segment at Yahoo News: Rachel Maddow Names Pro-Hitler Speakers Appearing At Same Event As Eric Trump.
The E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald Trump rape trial will go to the jury today. A few stories on that:
Erica Orden at Politico: The Trump rape trial is headed to the jury. Here are the questions jurors will weigh.
In more than four hours of closing arguments, lawyers for both sides offered a series of questions for the jury to consider. Here are some of the most critical. [NOTE: I’ll provide a couple of paragraphs from each question. Read the rest at the link.
Is Carroll credible?
Carroll’s attorneys made their client’s three–day appearance on the witness stand the centerpiece of their case, and during closing arguments her lawyer Roberta Kaplan said her client’s testimony was “credible, it was consistent and it was powerful.” Kaplan told the jury that “every single aspect of what she said is backed up or corroborated by other evidence,” including not just the alleged incident at Bergdorf Goodman, but also Carroll’s account that she told two friends about it contemporaneously.
Kaplan pointed to the testimony of those two friends, saying details from their testimony rang true. One of the friends, Lisa Birnbach, testified that when Carroll called her and told her of the attack, Birnbach was busy feeding dinner to her two young children and went into another room to avoid uttering “rape” in front of them. “The fact that she left the kitchen, by the way, is a very telling detail,” Kaplan said. “It’s the kind of detail you don’t make up.” [….]
Is the “Access Hollywood” tape a confession of sexual assault or “locker room talk”?
Carroll’s attorneys showed, referenced or described parts of this tape at least five separate times during their closing arguments. Kaplan argued that Trump’s infamous commentary captured on a hot mic constitutes a roadmap he has used to repeatedly commit sexual assault. The tape is from 2005 and resurfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign….
“What is Donald Trump doing here? Telling you in his very own words how he treats women,” Kaplan said to the jury. “It’s his modus operandi, M.O.” Or as Ferrara put it: “It was a confession.” [….]
Do other Trump accusers prove a pattern, or are they unrelated?
Kaplan told the jury that the accounts of two other women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who testified that Trump sexually assaulted them, demonstrate that Trump’s actions are part of a pattern of sexual assault.
“Three different women, decades apart, but one single pattern of behavior,” Kaplan said. She displayed a chart with photographs of Leeds, Stoynoff and Carroll accompanied by columns titled “semi-public place,” “grab suddenly” and “‘not my type,’” along with checkmarks. Trump has suggested all three women are not the sort to which he would typically be attracted….
How should Trump’s decision not to attend the trial reflect on him?
Carroll’s lawyers seized on Trump’s decision not to attend the trial, testify or put on a defense case.
Trump, Kaplan said, offered “no one to back up a single thing he said.”
“You only saw him on video,” she added. “He didn’t even bother to show up here in person.” [….]
Tacopina used what he described as Carroll’s vagaries about the date of the alleged incident to help explain why Trump didn’t offer any witnesses. “Who are we going to call, someone who wasn’t in Bergdorf Goodman at some unknown date?” Tacopina asked….
Tacopina also told the jury that Carroll could have called his client as a witness, but chose not to. “Instead, what they want is for you to hate him enough to ignore the facts,” he said.
Two more stories on the rape trial:
CNN: What E. Jean Carroll has to prove to win her case against Donald Trump.
Judge Juan Merchan
One more Trump legal story, before I wrap this up. From NBC News: Trump prohibited from posting evidence in hush money case to social media, judge rules.
The New York state judge presiding over the criminal hush money case against Donald Trump issued an order Monday restricting the former president from posting about some evidence in the case on social media.
Judge Juan Merchan largely sided with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg by limiting what Trump can publicly disclose about new evidence from the prosecution before the case goes to trial.
The order says that “any materials and information provided by the People to the Defense in accordance with their discovery obligations … shall be used solely for the purposes of preparing a defense in this matter.”
Merchan’s order said anyone with access to the evidence being turned over to Trump’s team by state prosecutors “shall not copy, disseminate or disclose” the material to third parties, including social media platforms, “without prior approval from the court.”
It also singles out Trump, saying he is allowed to review sensitive “Limited Dissemination Materials” from prosecutors only in the presence of his lawyers and “shall not be permitted to copy, photograph, transcribe, or otherwise independently possess the Limited Dissemination Materials.”
In addition, the order restricts Trump from reviewing “forensic images of witness cell phones,” although his lawyers can show him “approved portions” of the images after they get permission from the judge.
That’s all I have for you today. Please feel free to discuss any these or any other topics in the comment thread.
Extra Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: April 29, 2023 Filed under: American Gun Fetish, Cats, caturday, Criminal Justice System, Donald Trump, ethics, SCOTUS | Tags: abortion, AR-15, Dobbs decision, Jane Roberts, John Roberts, mass shootings, nuclear weapons, Samuel Alito, stolen classified documents case, Texas, Trump fund-raising, Ukraine, Wire fraud 14 Comments
Happy Caturday!!
I’m getting a very slow start this morning. It feels like everything is kind of awful today, as it often is lately. The politics news is bad enough, but sadly there’s been another mass shooting and the perpetrator is still at large. Not surprisingly, it’s in Texas, and of course the weapon was an AR-15.
ABC News: 5 dead in Texas ‘execution-style’ shooting, suspect armed with AR-15 is on the loose.
Five people are dead after being shot in a Texas home by a suspect armed with an AR-15 style rifle in a horrific series of “execution style” shootings, police said.
A manhunt is currently underway for the suspect, identified by police as 39-year-old Francisco Oropeza, according to ABC station KTRK in Houston.
A judge has issued an arrest warrant for Oropeza and assigned a $5 million bond. Authorities believe Oropeza left by walking or on a bicycle and is currently within a two mile radius of the scene, KTRK reported.
Police said the incident occurred at 11:31 p.m. local time on Friday when officials from the San Jacinto County Sheriff’s Office received a call about harassment in the town of Cleveland, about 55 miles north of Houston.
When authorities arrived at the location, they found several victims shot at the property, police said. Three of the deceased were females and two were males, including the youngest, an 8-year-old boy.
Two female victims were discovered in the bedroom lying on top of two surviving children, authorities told ABC News.
Three minors were located uninjured, but covered in blood. They were transported to a local hospital.
Police said they believe the massacre occurred after neighbors asked the suspect to stop shooting his gun in the front yard because there was a baby trying to sleep.
“My understanding is that the victims, they came over to the fence and said ‘Hey could [you not do your] shooting out in the yard? We have a young baby that’s trying to go to sleep,” and he had been drinking and he says ‘I’ll do what I want to in my front yard,'” San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told KTRK.
WTF?! I’m at a complete loss for words. There’s more insanity at the link.
Yesterday we got more shocking news about our out-of-control Supreme Court.
Sammy Alito gave a pathetic, whiny interview to James Taranto and David Rivkin of The Wall Street Journal: Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination.’
Justice Samuel Alito was supposed to speak to law students at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., but when they showed up, he wasn’t there….
It wasn’t a lingering fear of Covid-19. In a mid-April interview in his chambers, Justice Alito fills us in on the May 12, 2022, event: “Our police conferred with the George Mason Police and the Arlington Police and they said, ‘It’s not a good idea. He shouldn’t come here. . . . The security problems will be severe.’ So I ended up giving the speech by Zoom,” he says. “Still, there were so many protesters and they were so loud that you could hear them.”
By now a noisy mob of law students may sound like any other school day, but last May also was a tumultuous time for the court. The preceding week, someone had leaked a draft of Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a landmark abortion case that wouldn’t be decided until late June….
He now says that the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. We worked through it, and last year we got our work done. This year, I think, we’re trying to get back to normal operations as much as we can. . . . But it was damaging.”
It was damaging for millions of American women and for doctors too, but Sammy is oblivious to that. Alito also believes he knows who the leaker is.
“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” he says. He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”
That campaign included unlawful assemblies outside justices’ homes, and that wasn’t the worst of it. “Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Justice Alito says. “It was rational for people to believe that they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.” On June 8, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the suspect was later charged with attempted assassination and has pleaded not guilty.
This man is delusional. No one suggested preventing the decision by murdering one of the justices. People peacefully demonstrated outside their homes. One crazy guy showed up outside Kavanaugh’s house and then turned himself into to police without doing anything.
He adds that “I don’t feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection.” He is “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.” Deputy U.S. marshals guard the justices’ homes 24/7. (The U.S. Marshals Service, a bureau of the Justice Department, is distinct from the marshal of the court, who reports to the justices and oversees the Supreme Court Police.)
He’s a lot safer than women who are refused care after miscarriages until they are at death’s door, but Sammy couldn’t care less about them. He is also ignorant of the history of protests against Supreme Court justices.
Anyway, read the interview at the the WSJ if you can stomach it.
Yesterday, Insider’s Mattathias Schwartz broke a story about John Roberts ethical problems: Jane Roberts, who is married to Chief Justice John Roberts, made $10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms, whistleblower documents show.
Two years after John Roberts’ confirmation as the Supreme Court’s chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot. After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.
Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was now the highest-ranking judge in the country. “There are many paths to the good life,” she said. “There are so many things to do if you’re open to change and opportunity.”
And life was indeed good for the Robertses, at least for the years 2007 to 2014. During that eight-year stretch, according to internal records from her employer, Jane Roberts generated a whopping $10.3 million in commissions, paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.
That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistleblower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts, who says that as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms who practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.
“When I found out that the spouse of the chief justice was soliciting business from law firms, I knew immediately that it was wrong,” the whistleblower, Kendal B. Price, who worked alongside Jane Roberts at the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, told Insider in an interview. “During the time I was there, I was discouraged from ever raising the issue. And I realized that even the law firms who were Jane’s clients had nowhere to go. They were being asked by the spouse of the chief justice for business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was no one to complain to. Most of these firms were likely appearing or seeking to appear before the Supreme Court. It’s natural that they’d do anything they felt was necessary to be competitive.”
Roberts’ apparent $10.3 million in compensation puts her toward the top of the payscale for legal headhunters. Price’s disclosures, which were filed under federal whistleblower-protection laws and are now in the hands of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, add to the mounting questions about how Supreme Court justices and their families financially benefit from their special status, an area that Senate Democrats are vowing to investigate after a series of disclosure lapses by the justices themselves.
No wonder Roberts is resisting any serious ethics rules for his powerful court. Unfortunately he’s not alone. Even the liberal justices don’t want ethics rules. The three branches of government are supposed to be equal, but the Supremes are behaving as if their branch is more equal than the other two.
ABC News: All 9 Supreme Court justices push back on oversight: ‘Raises more questions,’ Senate chair says.
There’s no conservative-liberal divide on the U.S. Supreme Court when it comes to calls for a new, enforceable ethics code.
All nine justices, in a rare step, on Tuesday released a joint statement reaffirming their voluntary adherence to a general code of conduct but rebutting proposals for independent oversight, mandatory compliance with ethics rules and greater transparency in cases of recusal.
The implication, though not expressly stated, is that the court unanimously rejects legislation proposed by Democrats seeking to impose on the justices the same ethics obligations applied to all other federal judges.
“The justices … consult a wide variety of authorities to address specific ethical issues,” the members of the high court said in a document titled “Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices.”
It appears to be the first time an entire court has publicly explained its approach to ethics issues and attested to specific parts of federal law governing their conduct.
The justices’ statement, appended to a letter from Chief Justice John Roberts to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., appears squarely aimed at answering critics’ concerns and demands from some for outside oversight.
“Without a formal code of conduct, without a way to receive ethics complaints and without a way to investigate them, the Supreme Court has set itself apart from all other federal institutions,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a left-leaning judicial watchdog group that has been lobbying Congress to mandate a high court code.
Durbin said Thursday in a statement that the justices’ explanation of their approach to ethics “raises more questions than it resolves.”
“Make no mistake,” he said, “Supreme Court ethics reform must happen whether the Court participates in the process or not.”
I hope Durbin is prepared to keep pushing this.
Two stories on Trump’s crimes:
The New York Times: Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Step up Inquiry Into Trump Fund-Raising.
As they investigate former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors have also been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.
The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory.
In the past several months, prosecutors have issued multiple batches of subpoenas in a wide-ranging effort to understand Save America, which was set up shortly after the election as Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising entity. An initial round of subpoenas, which started going out before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy in the 2024 race and Mr. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November, focused on various Republican officials and vendors that had received payments from Save America.
But more recently, investigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.
Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Dennis Aftergut at Justia: Trump’s Nonsensical Letter to Congress Attacking the DOJ’s Mar-a-Lago Case Shows He Has No Defense.
On Wednesday, former President Donald Trump’s lawyers sent a desperate, 10-page letter to Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The punch line comes in its conclusion: “DOJ should be ordered to stand down” in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for obstructing justice in his 18 months of stonewalling the return of classified documents improperly held at Mar-a-Lago.
Of course, Congress has no such power. Ironically, the letter achieved something completely unintended. It effectively confirmed that Trump has no viable defense against the likely Justice Department charges for Trump’s obstruction.
The letter also revealed for the first time that the classified documents recovered in the August 7, court-approved search of Trump’s country club home may include briefings of foreign leaders.
It’s hard to know what Trump was trying to achieve beyond “spin.” No crimes to see here, the letter lamely contends.
His lawyers assert that Trump didn’t knowingly possess or retain top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago. His aides were just sloppy, the letter says, in the rushed process of leaving the White House, and Trump didn’t even know the classified documents were there. Even Vice Presidents Mike Pence and Joe Biden inadvertently took classified documents after their time in office.
If these contentions are a preview of Trump’s defenses to an indictment from Smith’s grand jury, Jack Smith can rest easy. The arguments are so abysmally weak that they leave any knowledgeable observer with a simple inference: Trump and his lawyers know an indictment is coming soon and there’s nothing they can do about it but offer smoke and mirrors.
Like asking Congressman Turner to investigate the need for legislation to address the lack of controls on classified documents that elected officials unintentionally take when leaving public service. Here’s the problem for the former president and his letter: Jack Smith has mountains of evidence that contradict Trump’s claim that his improper possession and retention of those classified documents was inadvertent.
Read more at the link.
I haven’t been following the war in Ukraine very closely, but this NYT headline caught my attention: U.S. Wires Ukraine With Radiation Sensors to Detect Nuclear Blasts.
The United States is wiring Ukraine with sensors that can detect bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker.
In part, the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine 14 months ago, experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The preparations, mentioned last month in a House hearing and detailed Wednesday by the National Nuclear Security Administration, a federal agency that is part of the Energy Department, seem to constitute the hardest evidence to date that Washington is taking concrete steps to prepare for the worst possible outcomes of the invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s second largest nation.
The Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST, a shadowy unit of atomic experts run by the security agency, is working with Ukraine to deploy the radiation sensors, train personnel, monitor data and warn of deadly radiation.
In a statement sent to The New York Times in response to a reporter’s question, the agency said the network of atomic sensors was being deployed “throughout the region” and would have the ability “to characterize the size, location and effects of any nuclear explosion.” Additionally, it said the deployed sensors would deny Russia “any opportunity to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine without attribution.”
Read more details at the NYT.
I’m going to end there. What else is happening? What stories have captured your interest today?
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