Mostly Monday Reads: A Place to Call Home

I took this picture of Little Amal resting at a neighbor’s house. The stop showed her taking time to think and pray for a safe home and for her family.

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The world continues to create refugees today. Last night, I saw a performance of “Little Amal” as she led a parade of refugees living in New Orleans in front of my home.    Little Amal is a 12-foot puppet. She is based on a real girl who is a refugee from Syria who lost her mother. She is a world Human Rights symbol. She travels the world looking for her mother and praying for a safe home. Her name, in Arabic, means hope. She has visited 35 cities in the United States. Her original performances were around Europe. This is from an interview before her performance in Boston.

Amal was created with Syrian refugee children in mind, but her message resonated in the U.S., too, prompting her creators to launch a month-long tour of 35 U.S. towns and cities this fall. At each stop from Boston to San Diego, Little Amal will be greeted by local artists and performers who will celebrate her arrival and “welcome” her into their communities.

David Lan, one of the founding producers of the Little Amal project along with Tracy Seaward, explained that the giant puppet is meant to humanize refugees and migrants by inviting people to imagine what it would be like for a young child to arrive in an unfamiliar new place.

“She’s not a campaigner, she’s not got any political affiliation,” Lan told Boston.com. “She’s a 10-year old. What she’s interested in is meeting people, and seeing new things, and having a good time.”

Although refugees and asylum-seekers often encounter hardships and even misery, Lan said, “misery is not our subject. Our subject is welcome, and potential. One of the reasons why Amal is a 10-year-old child is because we wanted to focus on the potential that refugees bring — in their imaginations, in their experiences, in their intelligence.”

“What we want to focus on,” Lan continued, “is the ways in which newcomers into a community can enhance everybody’s experience by bringing the particularity of their experience.”

Little Amal in Boston

Our neighborhood needed this lesson in kindness and the importance of community on a bleak day. We had an election on Saturday. Nineteen percent of Louisiana Voters gave us a new Governor who will rival the cruelty of Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis in cruelty and denial of human rights.   The Democratic Party in the State failed us on many levels. Attorney General and soon-to-be Governor Jeff Landry is a White Christian Nationalist and a Trump-endorsed Maggot who has a history of outrageous violations into people’s lives. He has focused on attacking the African-American citizens in our state. I have no idea why more did not come out to vote to save women, the GLBT, children, and people of color in our state.

This is from Big John Stanton writing in The Gambit, the local newspaper in edits, in June. “A brief history of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry mixing racism with criminal justice.” Landry will make the Jindal years look like one long picnic.

Last week Landry was called out for his loathsome and completely racist criminal justice themed campaign ads last week by civil rights activists and Gambit’s own Clancy DuBos. Days later, Landry, who is sadly the state’s top — and arguably least competent — law enforcement official, got the negative campaign ad treatment himself, this time from fellow Republicans.

Of course, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with Landry knows, this isn’t the first time he’s said or done something openly racist. And this also isn’t the first time his record as attorney general has come under scrutiny. After all, who could forget when Landry was accused of not prosecuting an alleged pedophile because of family connections? Or when he protected a friend — who worked for Landry — accused of sexual harassment and then came after the Times-Picayune for reporting on it?

So in honor of Landry’s very bad couple of weeks, here’s a small sampling of the many times he has shown his racism while attorney general!

A lot are listed there, but this one is especially abhorrent to me.

Let’s start with a recent one! Earlier this year, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a bill that would make public criminal records for juveniles in certain cases — even before they’ve had their day in court. While a bad idea generally since those records would end up haunting kids well into adulthood even if they were innocent, supporters made sure to put an added racist spin on it by limiting it to only East Baton Rouge, Orleans and Caddo parishes, which happen to be home to majority Black populations.

In a May 1 Letter to the Editor published in the Times-Picayune, Landry railed against the media for correctly pointing out the law was, by definition, racist. Hilariously, Landry seemed to confirm the Republican Party is also, by definition, the party of racists, when he noted an opinion piece in the paper “called this legislation ‘racist,’ yet failed to mention it was supported by both Democrats and Republicans.”

Here’s what Landry Considers Child abuse. This is from The Louisiana Illuminator. It was written in July by Piper Hutchison. “Louisiana AG Jeff Landry wants info on out-of-state abortions, gender-affirming care. Spokesman says it’s needed to ‘investigate the sexual abuse of children’ “Yes. Jeff Landry is coming for bodily autonomy like an unleashed Kracken, as demanded by 19% of our voting population. He’s also coming for New Orleans and our money.

Louisiana’s Jeff Landry joined 17 other state attorneys general in signing a letter Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Finch sent last month to the Biden administration saying those states need access to information about residents who obtain abortions or gender-affirming care in other states.

The letter calls on U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to drop a proposed rule change prohibiting states from obtaining data about its residents accessing abortion or gender-affirming healthcare in states where it is legal. The information could be used for criminal, civil or administrative investigations, according to the AGs’ letter

Most of the attorneys general that signed the letter are from states with strict abortion restrictions.

More states, including Louisiana, are seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare, particularly for transgender youth.

​​Gender-affirming care is a catch-all term for medical treatments given to people to align their physical bodies with their identified gender. Gender-affirming care is used by transgender people, who identify as a gender different from their assigned sex at birth, as well as cisgender people who identify as their assigned sex.

Treatments are individualized to the patient. Some young patients will be prescribed fully reversible puberty blockers, giving the patient time to consider their options. Later, a patient may be given hormone treatments that can help young people go through puberty in a way that allows their body to change in ways that align with their gender identity. These treatments are partially reversible.

“The Louisiana Department of Justice is opposed to this radical proposal which would block information necessary to investigate the sexual abuse of children,” Landry spokesperson Millard Mule said in a statement to the Illuminator.

Mule has yet to respond to a follow-up request for an explanation on why the information is necessary for child sexual abuse investigations.

Little Amal in Cinncinati

Little Amal loves New Orleans. But soon-to-be MagRat Governor of Louisiana, he will come for us. This is by Piper French. “Jeff Landry’s Bid for Louisiana Governor Has Been a Crusade Against Its Cities.” I would just like to say I have quit going outside Orleans parish. It’s scary out there. 

As attorney general, Landry has relentlessly targeted New Orleans and other largely Black cities, and shielded its police from reforms. Now he’s bringing that message to his campaign.

In his announcement video, the candidate blasted Louisiana’s “incompetent mayors and woke District Attorneys” for what he sees as their role in allowing crime to proliferate.He doubled down in a series of campaign videos that called out the DAs of Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans for the three parishes’ crime rates, highlighting images of the two Black prosecutors but omitting any footage of East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore, who is white. “When DAs fail to prosecute—when judges fail to act – when police are handcuffed instead of the criminals—enough is enough,” he announces.

In 2022, he assisted a Republican lawmaker in unveiling a bill, House Bill 321, that would have made public the criminal records of young people between ages 13 and 18 who are accused of a violent crime—but only in Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans, all parishes with some of the highest concentrations of Black residents in the state. Landry made news appearances advocating for the bill and spoke at the press conference announcing it, later using portions of his speech for campaign ads attacking those three parishes’ DAs.

Bruce Reilly, a formerly incarcerated criminal justice reform advocate who testified against the bill at the Capitol, sat behind Landry as he spoke in favor of HB321. “If you think this is a good thing, why wouldn’t you do it in your own town?” he wondered.

It’s not uncommon for Republican candidates to blame Democrats for crime rates in the cities they control as a way of establishing conservative bona fides. But Landry’s campaign rhetoric isn’t just bluster. During his seven-plusyears as attorney general, he has used the power of his office in standard, unorthodox, and at times highly controversial ways to single out New Orleans and the state’s other big cities.

Landry’s actions have ranged from creating a short-lived anti-crime task force that made arrests in New Orleans without clear jurisdiction to to spearheading punitive legislation that only applied to Louisiana’s three major cities. He also tried to strike down a federal consent decree ensuring a majority-Black state supreme court district in Orleans Parish. And he even recently triedto withhold flood protection funds after city officials suggested they wouldn’t prioritize enforcing abortion crimes.

Little Amal in Atlanta

Here’s an analysis of him from the New York Times by Emily Cochran. “Jeff Landry, a Hard-Line Republican, Is Elected Governor of Louisiana. The victory by Mr. Landry, the state’s attorney general, secures Republican control of Louisiana after eight years of divided government..” We are so fucked.

Mr. Landry, a confrontational litigator and politician, had won over much of the Republican base by battling Mr. Edwards and the Biden administration in court over pandemic vaccine mandates, efforts to work with social media companies to limit the spread of misleading or false theories, and environmental regulations.

He served as a sheriff’s deputy and two-term lawmaker in the House of Representatives as the Tea Party took hold in American government. But it was over the last eight years as attorney general where Mr. Landry flexed the power of a political office and his particular style of combative conservatism.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he challenged vaccine and mask mandates on the local and national level for health care workers, students and federal workers, voicing skepticism even as the vaccines were proven to help stem the spread and toll of the virus.

He has also helped lead lawsuits that resulted in a federal judge restricting the Biden administration from speaking with social media companies and saw the Supreme Court rein in the administration’s ability to reduce carbon emissions.

And he has defended some of Louisiana’s more controversial decisions, including a congressional map that Black voters have challenged as a violation of a landmark civil rights law and its abortion law, one of the strictest in the nation. (At one point, Mr. Landry openly said that critics could leave the state.)

During his campaign for governor, Mr. Landry vowed to address crime in the state, though critics observed that countering crime fell under the jurisdiction of the attorney general. He also pledged to stop the “woke agenda” in Louisiana schools and to support the rights of parents to make decisions for their children, a nod to a push he championed to restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender children and literature deemed to be sexually explicit.

Today’s best thing is that Judge Chutken. is laying down the law for Trump and his feckless lawyers. This is from CNN. “Trump ‘does not have the right to say and do exactly what he pleases,’ Judge Chutkan says.”   

A federal judge is considering whether to issue a gag order against former President Donald Trump in an intense hearing Monday in Washington, DC, that’s included warnings about the limits of Trump’s speech.

Following the two federal indictments against the former president, Trump has lashed out against prosecutors, potential witnesses and the judge overseeing the election subversion case in Washington. Prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s office say these comments are enough to warrant a narrow restriction on Trump’s speech around the case.

District Judge Tanya Chutkan, often the target of Trump’s attacks, warned the former president that comments he or his attorneys make could threaten the case.

“Mr. Trump is a criminal defendant. He is facing four felony charges. He is under the supervision of the criminal justice system and he must follow his conditions of release,” Chutkan said Monday.

“He does not have the right to say and do exactly what he pleases. Do you agree with that?” she asked Trump attorney John Lauro, who responded: “100%.”

Trump’s attorneys have attacked the proposed order as fundamentally antithetical to his First Amendment rights and suggested the order is simply a way for President Joe Biden and the Justice Department to hurt Trump’s ability to campaign.

Lauro accused the special counsel’s office of trying “to prevent President Trump from speaking out about the issues of the day,” adding, “Every single issue that relates to this case also has political issues.”

In social media posts, Trump has attacked Chutkan as a “biased, Trump Hating Judge” and called Smith “deranged” and a “thug” as well as attacked individual members of his team.

“When you start to use a word like ‘thug’ to describe a prosecutor doing their job, that wouldn’t be allowed by any other criminal defendant,” Chutkan said. “Just because the defendant is running a political campaign does not allow him to do whatever he wants.”

Little Amal in NYC

Spot on, Judge Chutkan! Throw the gavel and the book and him! This is from NPR. “Judge imposes partial gag order against Trump in election-interference case.”

The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s election interference case imposed a partial gag order Monday against the former president, barring him and all other parties in the case from making statements targeting prosecutors and court personnel as well as inflammatory statements about likely witnesses.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan marked a partial victory for the Justice Department in its bid to impose additional restrictions on Trump’s extra-judicial statements in the federal election interference case in Washington.

“This is not about whether I like the language Mr. Trump uses. This is about language that presents a danger to the administration of justice,” Chutkan said as she announced her decision from the bench.

Trump’s presidential candidacy, Chutkan said, “does not give him carte blanche” to threaten or vilify “public servants simply doing their job.”

The government was asking the court for a partial gag order because Trump’s comments, prosecutors said, threatened to intimidate witnesses and taint the jury pool.

At Monday’s hearing, Trump’s attorneys vigorously denied any need to place restrictions on the former president’s public comments about the case, and said the effort to do amounted to the Biden administration attempting to silence the president’s chief political rival.

My last story is from NBC News about migrants coming to the US. “Biden admin reaches deal with migrants separated from their families under Trump. The families also sought financial compensation from the U.S. government, but the Biden DOJ walked away from those negotiations two years ago.”

The Biden administration and more than 4,000 migrants who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration reached a legal settlement Monday that allows the families to live and work in the U.S. for three years while receiving housing, mental health and legal assistance to apply for asylum.

The settlement also prohibits the federal government from separating any migrant families crossing the border for eight years, unless the parents are considered a danger to their children or the public or they have previously entered the country illegally more than twice.

The deal, announced by the Justice Department, may end one of the darkest chapters in U.S. immigration policy, in which families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2017 and 2018 were systematically separated. Children younger than 18 were sent to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, while parents were prosecuted by U.S. attorneys in federal court.

But the settlement could be derailed by Republicans in Congress if they challenge the court’s mandate to appropriate money to reunify and provide services to separated families.

Have a good week, SkyDancers Don’t let Nineteen percent of the population enslave you  Vote!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?