Category: Justice

バカにつける薬はない*

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In response to raucus partying and a refusal to engage in proper social distancing, Miami Beach has announced a curfew.

Who could have possibly known that a bunch of drunk college students on spring break would take of their masks and swap bodily fluids?

The answer to this question is, “Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together.” 

One day after the spring break oasis of South Beach descended into chaos, with the police struggling to control overwhelming crowds and making scores of arrests, officials in Miami Beach decided on Sunday to extend an emergency curfew for up to three weeks.

The officials there went so far as to approve closing the famed Ocean Drive to all vehicular and pedestrian traffic from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. — the hours of the curfew — for four nights a week through April 12. Residents, hotel guests and employees of local businesses are exempt from the closure.

The strip, frequented by celebrities and tourists alike, was the scene of a much-criticized skirmish on Saturday night between at-times unruly spring breakers who ignored social distancing and masking guidelines, and police officers who used pepper balls to disperse a large crowd just hours after the curfew had been introduced.

The restrictions were a stunning concession to the city’s inability to control unwieldy crowds of revelers that the city and the state of Florida aggressively courted amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic.

Florida, man.

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

This is Kind of Horrifying

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In a story about how a candidate for Erie County Sheriff (Buffalo, NY), completely screwed up a drug raid and the warrant he swore out to allow it, we have the following testimony from another member of his team:

[Detective Joseph M.] Cook had shot other dogs in drug raids. He did not dispute during the deposition that he had shot 26 dogs over roughly a three-year period.

So, he shot a dog about once every six weeks.

The owner of the job got a $110,000 settlement.  Nothing wrong here, I guess. 

Support your local police.

This Reminds Me of Bush and Hurricane Katrina

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By August of 2005, Karl Rove had managed to manipulate the public discourse in such a way as to make meaningful criticisms of George W. Bush almost unthinkable.

Then came Katrina, and much like New Orleans and its levees, the ensuing backlash washed away Rove’s carefully constructed barriers intended to protect bush, and everything started coming out.

The same is going on with Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo right now, and here is an update:

  • We have another claim of sexual harassment, this one from a current aide, “He called her and her co-worker “mingle mamas.” He inquired about her lack of a wedding ring, she said, and the status of her divorce. She recalled him telling her she was beautiful — in Italian — and, as she sat alone with him in his office awaiting dictation, he gazed down her shirt and commented on a necklace hanging there.“
  • Also, we have reports that the  FBI is investigating ties between campaign donations from nursing homes and his inserting immunity provisions in legislation, “FBI investigators probing the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic last spring are seeking information about a state budget provision that gave operators legal immunity, THE CITY has learned. ……… FBI officials started to make house calls this month, showing up at people’s residences and leaving business cards, according to the three sources.“

FWIW, I don’t think that “Rat Faced Andy” is going to resign except perhaps as part of a plea deal, because he wants to make sure that he has this chip in his pocket until it is certain that he won’t be going to jail.

I so hope that he goes to jail.

This Should Get Interesting

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Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has specifically asked Merrick Garland to investigate allegations that the FBI refused to conduct a full investigation of Brett Kavanaugh following his 2018 nomination to the Supreme Court. 

Given that something in excess of $90,000.00 of Kavanaugh’s debts mysteriously vanished in the months prior to his nomination, this should have been investigated, and it wasn’t.

In fact, as Whitehouse notes, the FBI refused to even call people back who contacted the agency with concerns regarding the now Supreme Court Justice:

The FBI is facing new scrutiny for its 2018 background check of Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justice, after a lawmaker suggested that the investigation may have been “fake”.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

………

The FBI was called to investigate the allegations during the Senate confirmation process but was later accused by some Democratic senators of conducting an incomplete background check. For example, two key witnesses – Ford and Kavanaugh – were never interviewed as part of the inquiry.

Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.

………

He added that, once the FBI decided to create a “tip line”, senators were not given any information on how or whether new allegations were processed and evaluated. While senators’ brief review of the allegations gathered by the tip line showed a “stack” of information had come in, there was no further explanation on the steps that had been taken to review the information, Whitehouse said.

“This ‘tip line’ appears to have operated more like a garbage chute, with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster,” he said.

………

Whitehouse said he is seeking answers about “how, why, and at whose behest” the FBI conducted a “fake” investigation if standard procedures were violated, including standards for following allegations gathered through FBI “tip lines”.

The allegations of sexual assault are concerning, but the financial irregularities, which are job one of any background investigation, and it appears that the FBI did not do this.

We already knew that Kavanaugh was the Federalist Society’s, “Made Man,” in a political sense, but it now appears that he was a, “Made Man,” in a way that is more akin to its original meaning of a fully initiated Mafiosi.

He’s in, and they pay his debts, bury his bodies, and make everything go away.

First Court Ordered Antitrust Breakup in Decades

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And it was the result of private litigation, not any action of the agencies that are actually supposed to protect us from monopolists.

The case involved “Door Skins” which are the inside and outside surfaces of residential doors, which over the years, through buyouts and mergers, has become a completely uncompetitive market.

After buying its biggest competitor, Jeld Wen, which also makes complete doors, cut off door manufactures from its supplies of door skins, and court has ruled that it must sell off one of its factories:

Federal antitrust enforcers have long succeeded at unwinding consummated mergers. By contrast, private antitrust plaintiffs have not successfully forced companies to break up a completed acquisition. Until now.

On February 18, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a historic decision in Steves and Sons, Inc. v. JELD-WEN, Inc., affirming a district court’s remedy of divestiture after a jury found a violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act in the door manufacturing industry. To the Fourth Circuit’s knowledge (and the consensus of the antitrust bar), the Steves and Sons case is the first time a private plaintiff has secured a federal court order compelling a defendant to divest assets acquired through a past merger.

Absent further appellate relief, the Fourth Circuit’s opinion will require that the defendant unwind a 2012 acquisition of a doorskin manufacturing plant through an auction process supervised by a court-appointed special master. The decision has put parties to corporate merger and acquisition activity firmly on notice that private antitrust litigation may lead to unscrambling the eggs of a merger years after consummation, even when federal and state antitrust enforcers do not move to block the transaction as anticompetitive.

 This is likely going to end up at the Supreme Court, given the literally unprecedented nature of the ruling.

In 2012, JELD-WEN, Inc., one of the world’s largest door and window manufacturers, acquired Craftmaster International (CMI), a competing manufacturer. Before the combination, JELD-WEN and CMI each manufactured both interior molded doors and doorskins, which are veneers that are glued to the front and back of a frame to make a molded door. CMI produced doorskins at its plants in Towanda, Pennsylvania. Before the merger was consummated, it was investigated, but not challenged, by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). After the transaction closed, only two doorskin manufacturers remained in the U.S. market (JELD-WEN and Masonite). A JELD-WEN investor later noted that this duopoly “over time will improve our pricing power.”

Based on a long-term supply contract, JELD-WEN sold doorskins to Steves and Sons (Steves), an independent door manufacturer owned and operated by the same family for 150 years. In 2014, Masonite announced it would stop selling doorskins to independent door manufacturers like Steves. Shortly thereafter, JELD-WEN exercised its right to terminate the supply contract with Steves, effective in September 2021. As JELD-WEN’s prices increased and quality issues arose, Steves asked the DOJ to reexamine JELD-WEN’s merger with CMI. In 2016, the DOJ closed its investigation. Unable to secure any enforcement action, Steves filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging, among other things, that the JELD-WEN/CMI acquisition violated Section 7 of the Clayton Act. Steves asked for equitable relief to unravel the CMI acquisition and to divest JELD-WEN’s doorskin plant in Towanda.

………

On appeal, the Fourth Circuit vacated much of the antitrust damages award, but rejected JELD-WEN’s numerous arguments related to antitrust injury, “antitrust impact,” evidentiary rulings, and the propriety of divestiture as a remedy, and held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by ordering divestiture of the Towanda plant. The appeals court noted that private lawsuits under the Clayton Act “seeking divestiture are rare and, to our knowledge, no court had ever ordered divestiture in a private suit before this case,” but that divestitures in private Clayton Act actions are based on well-established U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Ultimately, the court concluded that the Steves case “is a poster child for divestiture” given that the 2012 CMI merger had created a duopoly and the remaining suppliers “used their market power to threaten [the] survival” of independent door manufacturers like Steves.

Lots of footnotes at the link, but the this is, to quote President Biden, “A big f%$#ing deal,” at least as long as the ruling stands.

It has the potential for tying up mergers and acquisitions for months through private litigation by competitors, particularly if some well heeled groups arrange for pro bono, or at least subsidized legal action.

This is why I expect the Supreme Court to rule on this, and I’m not optimistic about the outcome there.

H/t Matt Stoller’s Big.

It’s Called Pleading the Belly, and it is Bullsh%$

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In the latest twist in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes efforts to evade justice, she is now trying to delay the trial because she is pregnant.

Tis is not an uncommon legal strategy, it’s called “Pleading the Belly”, which has its own Wikipedia page. 

I rather fear that her privilege is going to win out again.

The alleged Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is pregnant, according to a new court filing, potentially delaying her trial by several weeks.

Holmes is being charged with fraud for her role at the helm of Theranos, a blood-testing startup that was a rising star in Silicon Valley before it emerged it had misrepresented the effectiveness of its technology.

Lawyers for Holmes asked the judge on 2 March to delay the start of jury selection to 31 August, after her due date.

“The parties have met and conferred, and both parties agree that, in light of this development, it is not feasible to begin the trial on July 13, 2021, as currently scheduled,” said the filing.

There is no reason to delay jury selection.

Absent her being in active labor, pregnancy does not prevent a defendant from participating in jury selection or in the pretrial motions.

Were she not white or rich (her parents come from money), she’d be waiting in jail for the trial to start.

Bolivia’s ex-interim president arrested in opposition crackdown | Bolivia | The Guardian

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There have been arrests in Bolivia of the former interim President as well as other participants in the coup over the past few days.

Good.

Their first actions when they seized power were to unleash lethal force against protesters, and they did their level best to suppress all political activities from both the poor and indigenous communities. 

When someone comes after you with lethal force, if your response is to suggest tea and crumpets, you are inviting more of the same.

Another CIA Operation Goes Pear Shaped

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A court has overturned the patently bogus conviction of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which means that he can run for the Presidency of Brazil in the next election.

Given that he is the most popular politician in Brazil by a lot, he is very likely to win. 

The short version of the story is that the judge overseeing the trials colluded with prosecutors to convict da Silva of taking bribes to refurbish an apartment that he never lived in, and probably never owned.

One hopes that Lula has learned his lesson, and understands that so long as they remain in positions of power, his opponents will stop at nothing to destroy him, up to, and probably including violence and assassination against him, his family and his supporters.

They need to be turfed out, sooner rather than later:

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could be set for a sensational comeback attempt after a supreme court judge annulled a series of criminal convictions against the leftist icon and restored his political rights.

The ruling, which analysts called a political bombshell, means Lula is almost certain to challenge Brazil’s incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, in the 2022 presidential election.

………

Lula was president of Latin America’s largest economy for two terms, between 2003 and 2011, and oversaw a historic period of commodity-fuelled growth and poverty reduction. The Workers’ party (PT) politician, who is now 75, had hoped to seek a third term in 2018 but was sidelined after being jailed on disputed corruption charges, paving the way for Bolsonaro’s landslide victory.

Lula was released from prison in November 2019 after 580 days behind bars but remained unable to seek election after being stripped of his political rights.

The entire “Car Wash” affair, and the ascension of Bolsonaro that followed, is yet another indication of just how toxic US meddling in Latin America has been over the past 250 years.

Not Surprised, but Amused

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Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been found guilty of corruption, and sentenced to prison.

It’s always been clear that he was pond scum, and now he is convicted pond scum:

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling on Monday and sentenced to one year in prison, marking a historic defeat for the 66-year-old, who has remained popular among conservative voters even as his legal woes mount.

The verdict included a two-year suspended sentence, but Sarkozy’s attorney said her client would appeal, delaying the sentence from taking effect. Given that short prison sentences in France can typically be waived, it is unclear whether Sarkozy would have to spend any time in prison even if the appeal were to fail. He could also request to serve the sentence at home, subject to electronic monitoring.

The ruling followed years of parallel investigations against the former president, and some others are ongoing. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, will face another trial later this month over accusations that his party falsified accounts during his unsuccessful reelection bid in 2012.

The charges over which Sarkozy was sentenced Monday were centered on whether he was behind a deal with a magistrate to illegally receive information on an inquiry linked to him, using false names and unofficial phone lines.

According to the prosecution, Sarkozy and his then-attorney and longtime friend Thierry Herzog attempted to bribe the magistrate, Gilbert Azibert, by offering him a high-profile position in return for information. The incident occurred after Sarkozy had left office.

The inquiry related to claims that Sarkozy and others had accepted illegal contributions from business executive Liliane Bettencourt, the late heiress of French cosmetics giant L’Oréal, ahead of the 2007 presidential campaign. Sarkozy was later cleared of those illegal-funding charges.

………

Sarkozy is the second former French president in a decade to be sentenced. Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy’s predecessor and initial patron, was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for handing nonexistent jobs to political allies during his time as Paris mayor. 

It comes as no surprise that the Gaullists are rife with corruption.

I Hope That This Is Illegal

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Not that anyone will be prosecuted for it, because it is Alabama, but Amazon offering $2,000 “Resignation Bonuses” so that it can replace potentially pro-union workers with scabs ahead of the vote is skeevy as hell.

Bribes in union elections are expressly forbidden under the NLRA, and I am pretty sure that this is a bribe not to vote, particularly since they are giving the impression that they will hiring folks back after the union election: (Yeah, sure)

As the historic union election at Amazon in Alabama heats up, Amazon is pulling all the tricks to stop the union.

In violation of Amazon’s social distancing policy, Amazon has forced workers to attend anti-union meetings and sent workers constant text messages daily, hinting that a union could possibly lead to the warehouse closing. Amazon has even gotten the local authorities to shorten the time of stoplights outside of the plant so that union organizers can’t hand out pro-union literature to workers passing in their cars.

Now, Amazon is doing something that labor observers have never seen before in a union election; they are offering $2,000 “resignation bonuses” to quit.

Last night, workers throughout the plant received emails offering them bonuses if they simply quit their jobs. The emails offer workers, who worked for 2 peak seasons, at least $2,000 to quit. If workers have been there at least 3 peak seasons, they are offering them $3,000.

Some Amazon workers, who dislike their job at the warehouse, may find the bonuses a tempting bridge to quit their job and seek something better. Workers are even being told that if they quit now that they could regain their jobs later after the union election.

However, if workers quit now, they won’t be eligible to vote in the ongoing union election. In the meantime, many labor observers expect that Amazon will seek to hire replacements that will vote solidly anti-union.

“That should be illegal, how can you pay someone to resign,” says 48-year-old Black Amazon worker Jennifer Bates “They are going all the way, they are pulling out all the stops”.

Under federal labor law, the bonuses could be considered a bribe and could lead to the union election being thrown out. Employers are strictly forbidden from improving the material conditions of workers in the lead up to elections and the “resignation bonuses” could be grounds for the union to petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order a new union election if RWDSU loses this round.

Keeping this in litigation for the next decade is a part of Amazon’s strategy.

You won’t stop this without frog marching senior executives out of corporate offices in handcuffs.

Pass the Popcorn

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Without comment, the Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to conceal his tax returns from the Manhattan prosecutor:

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected former president Donald Trump’s last-chance effort to keep his private financial records from the Manhattan district attorney, ending a long and drawn-out legal battle.

After a four-month delay, the court denied Trump’s motion in a one-sentence order with no recorded dissents.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has won every stage of the legal fight — including the first round at the Supreme Court — but has yet to receive the records he says are necessary for a grand jury investigation into whether the president’s companies violated state law.

Vance responded to the court decision with a three-word tweet: “The work continues.”

………

Vance’s inquiry is one of two known criminal investigations involving the former president. The other, led by the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, focuses on Trump’s controversial coversations with state officials amid his failed effort to overturn that state’s election result.

Trump has waged an extraordinary battle to keep private his tax records, which every other modern president has released as an expected part of seeking the presidency. The court’s action does not mean Trump’s tax records are to become public — Vance has said they will be protected by grand jury secrecy rules — but is likely to accelerate an investigation that might be Trump’s biggest legal threat.

………

Forensic accounting experts from FTI Consulting are expected to assist prosecutors in assessing whether the Trump Organization manipulated property values for tax breaks, or to obtain favorable loan rates, The Washington Post previously reported.

The investigation is fairly developed, but the tax returns are an integral part of the picture. The Supreme Court order — allowing Vance to execute the subpoena — could mean a lot of work is ahead for investigators as the records are voluminous, spanning eight years.

………

The current fight is a follow-up to a July decision by the high court that the president is not immune from a criminal investigation while he holds office.

………

Vance is seeking eight years of the former president’s tax returns and related documents as part of what was initially an investigation into alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years before — claims Trump denies. Investigators have indicated they want to determine whether efforts were made to conceal the payments on tax documents by labeling them as legal expenses.

I’m expecting the investigations to reveal that Trump is basically broke, despite the millions that he managed to extract from the government and government supplicants.

I will love to see him broken like a yearling horse, and I know that he’s going to whine about conspiracies, but, “That’s what I thought you’d say, you dumb f%$#ing horse.“*

*Credit where credit is due, I am quoting comedian John Mullaney.

Yeah, This Might Work Better Than a Congressional Commission

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The N.A.A.C.P. and Representative Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) are suing Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

This might get some action, and it will definitely have the defendants compelled to testify under oath about what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did:

The N.A.A.C.P. on Tuesday morning filed a federal lawsuit against former President Donald J. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, claiming that they violated a 19th century statute when they tried to prevent the certification of the election on Jan. 6.

The civil rights organization brought the suit on behalf of Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi. Other Democrats in Congress — including Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey — are expected to join as plaintiffs in the coming weeks, according to the N.A.A.C.P.

The lawsuit contends that Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 statute that includes protections against violent conspiracies that interfered with Congress’s constitutional duties; the suit also names the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, and the Oath Keepers militia group. The legal action accuses Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and the two groups of conspiring to incite a violent riot at the Capitol, with the goal of preventing Congress from certifying the election.

………

Mr. Thompson is seeking compensatory and punitive damages in the lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington. The suit does not include a specific financial amount.

Mr. Thompson, 72, claims he was put at an increased health risk by later being required to shelter in place in a cramped area that did not allow for social distancing. The lawsuit notes that Mr. Thompson shared confined space with two members of Congress who tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after the attack at the Capitol.

………

Derrick Johnson, president of the N.A.A.C.P., said the decision to seek compensatory and punitive damages was rooted in a history of tools that have worked to fight back against white supremacy.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the Ku Klux Klan that bankrupted a chapter,” he said, referring to a 2008 judgment against a Kentucky-based Klan outfit that ordered the group to pay $2.5 million in damages. “This is very similar. If we do nothing, we can be ensured these groups will continue to spread and grow in their boldness. We must curb the spread of white supremacy.”

The short version of the 1871 Klu Klux Klan act is that an individual can be held liable both criminally and civilly for depriving a citizen of their Constitutional rights.

Preventing a member of Congress from approving the Electoral Vote count seems to be messing with the Constitution.

Once Again, Scalia Makes the World a Better Place by His Absence

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The Supreme Court will not allow North Carolina’s voter suppression law to be in force for election day. It was a 4-4 tie:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law. The court’s brief order included no reasoning.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

Challenges to the laws have met with considerable success in recent months, and Wednesday’s development suggested that the current eight-member Supreme Court is not likely to undo those victories.

If Scalia were still on the court, it would be gleefully reinventing Jim Crow.

Oops!

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It turns out that because of sloppy law writing in Missouri, theft is no longer a felony in the Show Me State:

On an opinion that went largely unnoticed, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that had the effect of making most stealing offenses no longer felonies thanks to an apparently inadvertent change to state law way back in 2002. The far-reaching decision sent criminal defense attorneys across the state scrambling.

The case – State v. Bazell – was brought by a woman who had been convicted of multiples felonies for stealing firearms, among other things, in a burglary case. The court said the firearm felonies should be knocked down to misdemeanors because a portion of the state’s criminal code designating certain types of offenses as felonies is written in a way that doesn’t make it applicable to the state’s definition of stealing itself.

“If the words are clear, the Court must apply the plain meaning of the law,” the opinion said. “When the meaning of a statute is clear, the Court should not employ canons of construction to achieve a desired result.”

………

Subparagraph 3 covers a whole assortment of stealing crimes, including the stealing of explosives, credit cards, motor vehicles, property deeds, anything worth between $500-$25,000 and in any case in which the suspect physically takes something from the victim’s person. Additionally, subparagraph 8 – which designates stealing anything worth more than $25,000 as a Class B felony – has similar language, and thus is no longer applicable as well, public defenders believe.

Because of Tuesday’s ruling, anyone who was charged with a felony for those kinds of crimes has a chance to get it brought down to a misdemeanor, as long as it’s for a crime after 2002, when the language was added, Flottman said.

Son of Missouri Harry S Truman must be spinning in his grave.

Son of Missouri Mark Twain must be laughing somewhere.

Teacher Tenure Survives is California

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The California State Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal on the Vergara case, where a Silicon Valley venture capitalist tried to eliminate teacher tenure.  

It’s not surprising.  Their original opinion by  Los Angeles Superior Court judge Rolf Treu was well nigh incoherent, and the appellant court vacated it pretty much as soon as it hit their desk:

Over four years ago — May 2012 — a group of nine public school students filed a lawsuit, Vergara v. California, challenging five laws that govern how teachers can be fired in California, including the teacher tenure law and the “last in, first out” law that says teacher layoffs must be done in reverse order of seniority.

The suit was paid for by the nonprofit Students Matter, founded (and largely funded) by telecom millionaire David Welch.

The plaintiffs argued that the laws allowed “grossly ineffective” teachers to keep their jobs, and violated the California Constitution by having a disproportionate effect on poor and minority students. Judge Rolf Treu agreed. In his August 2014 decision, Treu wrote, “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

But in April of this year, the court of appeals overturned the decision. The three-judge panel ruled that it was up to the individual schools and school districts to assign teachers.

“Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students,” the court wrote. “The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are ‘a good idea.'”

That last bit is legalese from the appellate court for, “What the f%$# are you smoking?”

From what I’ve seen, I tend to agree with the basic thesis that teacher tenure in needs some reforms, but people like Welch are looking at privatizing schools (charters) and damaging labor unions, and any consideration of education is either deception or self delusion.

As an aside, I would note that tenure in public school teaching is an artifact of a broken management system, where principals are given free reign to be arbitrary and capricious, with very little in the way of other meaningful protections.

About F%$#ing Time

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A federal judge has referred Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to federal prosecutors for a criminal invistagation:

A federal judge on Friday referred Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his second-in-command for criminal prosecution, finding that they ignored and misrepresented to subordinates court orders designed to keep the sheriff’s office from racially profiling Latinos.

In making the referral to the United States attorney’s office for criminal contempt charges, Judge G. Murray Snow of Federal District Court in Phoenix delivered the sharpest rebuke against Mr. Arpaio, who as the long-serving sheriff in Maricopa County made a name for himself as an unrelenting pursuer of undocumented immigrants.

Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan “have a history of obfuscation and subversion of this court’s orders that is as old as this case,” Judge Snow wrote in his order.

Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Sheridan had also made numerous false statements under oath, Judge Snow wrote, and “there is also probable cause to believe that many if not all of the statements were made in an attempt to obstruct any inquiry into their further wrongdoing or negligence.”

The referral does not mean the sheriff will face criminal charges; it is up to federal prosecutors to decide whether to pursue the case. Still, if the prosecutors do not take the case, the judge could appoint a special prosecutor.

He needs to be tried, and given his record, he needs to held without bail while the case is adjudicated, because it’s clear based on his record that he will do everything within his power to obstruct any investigation of his activities.

If there any justice in the world, he would be kept in his own jail.

A Good Start

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The Department of Justice has announced that it will be ending its use of private prisons:

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

 Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

 “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

Note that this only applies to federal prisons run by the DoJ, not state and local prisons or immigrant detention facilities maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

As to whether this policy will move quickly enough, my guess is that we’ll have to wait for the next President.
Memo after the break.

Factoid of the Day

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I always knew the people who you know are the ones most likely to kill you.

I did not know this: (BTW, kickass discussion of statistics of incomplete data here)

Americans are afraid of many threats to their lives – serial killers, crazed gunmen, gang bangers, and above all terrorists – but these threats are surprisingly unlikely. Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.

Our law enforcement system is broken.

OK, that bit I knew.

Damn

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The Labour Executive Council won its appeal, so 130,000 new Labour members will not be able to vote in the next leadership election:

Labour’s ruling body has won its bid to overturn a high court decision allowing new party members to vote in the forthcoming leadership election, a ruling that could bar tens of thousands of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn from voting in the ballot.

The ruling by three court of appeal judges, Lord Justice Beatson, Lady Justice Macur and Lord Justice Sales, will mean 130,000 new members who joined less than six months ago will not be able to vote in the forthcoming poll between Corbyn and Owen Smith for the Labour leadership.

Corbyn’s campaign condemned the decision as wrong “both legally and democratically”, warning that it threatened to disenfranchise members who were explicitly told upon joining the party that they would have a vote in any leadership election.

“Crucial to the outcome today was the introduction of a new argument by the Labour party HQ’s lawyers, who invoked an obscure clause in the Labour party rules (chapter 4, clause II, 1A), which could be read as giving the NEC the right to ignore all of the rules laid out for leadership elections,” a campaign spokesman said.

“In other words, this is a ‘make it up as you go along’ rule. We do not think that making it up as you go along is a reasonable way to conduct democracy in our party.”

I still think that Corbyn will win, but I think that it will be a much closer thing.

The Reality of Private Internet Service Providers

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The DC Court of appeals just overturned the FCC ruling invalidating state bans on municipally owned internet service providers:

Federal regulators just suffered a major setback in their efforts to help cities build Internet services that compete with large providers such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

 In a federal-court decision Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission was told that it doesn’t have the power to block state laws that critics say hinder the spread of cheap, publicly run broadband service.

Rather ironically, the feel good story of the day is how a cooperative of rural communities in Minnesota jsut put together their own high speed internet services.

These services are both better and cheaper than the commercial alternatives:

Seven years ago, Winthrop, Minnesota, population 1,400, decided it needed an internet upgrade.

Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it.

Fourteen miles from Winthrop, in Moltke Township, population 330, one soybean- and wheat-farming family reported its sluggish DSL connection often made it impossible to upload reports to business partners.

Organizers in Winthrop knew they were too small to fund a major internet infrastructure-building project on their own, so they reached out to other neighbors, the town of Gaylord, population 2,305.

And the towns attracted 25 more municipal allies.

Today, in this sparsely populated swath of Minnesota, a grassroots, member-owned cooperative spanning more than 700 square miles and four counties is poised to expand high-speed broadband access — without relying on federal funding. After seven years of development led by local leaders and volunteers, RS Fiber, now in its first phase of construction, is expected to deliver high-speed broadband internet to more than 6,000 rural households by 2021. And unlike companies like Mediacom, the co-op is owned by local customers who have a say in rates and how it’s operated.

………

Once complete, the RS Fiber network is expected to match the 1 gigabit top speeds of cities like Cedar Falls, a milestone that would make southern Minnesota the envy of rural America. According to recent data, only 55 percent of rural residents have access to broadband internet faster than even 25 Mbps (compared to 94 percent of urbanites). Moreover, the investment already holds promise for boosting the local economy. In May 2015, the Minnesota College of Osteopathic Medicine announced plans to set up services in an old school building in Gaylord — a decision officials said was because of RS Fiber’s infrastructure investment.

US internet performance has been lagging since the 1990s because the mantra of unleashing the market has led to monopoly providers and monopoly rents, which in turn leads to higher prices and lack of investment in infrastructure.

From a business perspective, it makes sense for the ISPs to suck wet farts from dead pigeons.

From a societal perspective it is a disaster.