She was resolute in her determination to uphold liberal and humane values on the US Supreme Court and her death today will be felt keenly. There is really nothing that I can say in praise of this magnificent jurist that will not be said much better by people who knew her well and have studied her career closely.
The only thing I can say is how saddened I am by the news.
The president gets to appoint his cabinet, subject to Senate approval, and so it is not a surprise when he picks people who favor his policies. But of all the cabinet positions, the attorney general is the one who is expected to be most independent of the president. This is reasonable, since the AG is responsible for the impartial application of the laws and the Department of Justice has immense power over individuals. Unfortunately, it is not unusual for AGs to seek to please the president at the expense of justice but the current AG Bill Barr has been extraordinarily brazen in his efforts to advance Trump’s agenda and to avoid criticizing him even when he advocates illegal actions, such as when Trump recently urged people to vote twice. Trump was supposedly suggesting this to expose the weaknesses of the election system, laying the groundwork for challenging his defeat in November.
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It seems that the National Rifle Association may be in greater trouble than we thought. New York states attorney general had brought charges against the organization that its top executives , especially Wayne LaPierre had been using its funds as their personal piggy bank to live high on the hog. This at a time when the organization had been losing revenue because of declining membership and had had to make cutbacks to staff benefits.
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He shows that thanks to a mixture of incompetence and outright racism, people of color are much more likely to not make it into the pool of potential jurors and even if they do get there, are less likely to be actually allowed to serve as jurors. Prosecutors especially find ingenious ways to circumvent the prohibition that people cannot be excluded on the basis of race by finding other reasons, even though studies suggest that diverse juries are more thorough, thoughtful, and arrive at more just verdicts.
It is a safe assumption that anything associated with Donald Trump and his associates is a grift whose main purpose is to line the pockets of the well-connected. The arrest today of Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and former close associate, and three others exposes the fraud behind the allegedly non-profit, “fully volunteer” organization called We Build the Wall that raked in millions of donations from the rubes supposedly to help build the border wall that has become the great white whale of Trump and his supporters.
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Remember the case of the teenager who was jailed for not doing her homework? After ProPublica publicized the case leading to calls for her release, the judge still refused to do so. But now an appeals court has overruled the judge and ordered her immediate release after spending 78 days in custody.
A Michigan teenager who has been detained since mid-May after not doing her online schoolwork was set free on Friday, after the Michigan Court of Appeals ordered her immediate release from a juvenile facility in suburban Detroit.
Grace, a high school sophomore, spent 78 days at the Children’s Village after an Oakland County family court judge found she had violated her probation on earlier charges of assault and theft. Friday’s decision comes a week after that judge denied her lawyer’s request to set her free. The lawyer then asked the appellate court to release her.
Within two hours of the court order, shortly after 5 p.m., Grace left the facility after her mother arrived to get her. She “had her bags ready to go, they jumped in the car and they were gone,” said one of Grace’s attorneys, Saima Khalil. “They were definitely emotional and happy.”
The case involving Grace, who is Black, was detailed in a ProPublica Illinois investigation this month and has drawn national scrutiny over concerns about the juvenile justice system, systemic racism and holding a teenager accountable for schoolwork during the pandemic.
The history of suppressing the vote in the US is a long one. Initially these measures were aimed at preventing poor people from voting (since slaves could not vote anyway) but after emancipation, the Civil War, and the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 that said simply “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, the ruling class tried to find other ways to prevent poor people and now blacks from voting. Women were of course barred from voting in the US until 1920.
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Every state in the US has its own flag. The flag of Mississippi, adopted in 1894, was the only one that incorporated the confederate battle flag within it, in the top left. This has been a source of contention with many attempts to remove it, all meeting with failure. Mississippi is a deeply conservative Republican state. That party currently has supermajorities in both its house of representatives and the senate plus the governor is a Republican, all of whom strongly opposed any attempt to remove the confederate symbol. The people of Mississippi voted in a referendum 2001 to keep the flag as it was and the current governor Tate Reeves said that the only way to change it would be through another referendum. So proud were they of their confederate association that in just April of this year, the governor Tate Reeves proclaimed it as Confederate Heritage Month.
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In his blatant attempt to ramp up the ‘law and order’ issue for the election, Trump has sent in federal security forces to trigger confrontations with protestors. These forces, who wear camouflage outfits that make it almost impossible to identify which government agency the belong to or who they are, have been driving around in unmarked vehicles, picking up people on the street and taking them to undisclosed locations and refusing, when asked, to say which agency they are from. This has started in Portland, OR and Trump said that he wants to send in forces to other cities like Chicago and Albuquerque, claiming that the Democratic mayors of those cities are not doing enough to stop violence and crime.
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Some time ago, I had a post about how I was surprised that my new doctor in California had to have my old medical records transferred from Ohio by fax and not by any other more efficient electronic means. In the comments, lochaber suggested that this may be due to HIPAA and they were right.
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