Joe Biden is politely asking a group of cyborg T-1000 Terminators to follow their conscience https://t.co/DJggvsrUeX
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 20, 2020
This critique applies not only to Joe Biden, but to the whole of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), who have spent their time on the Sunday shows explaining how they are powerless to offer meaningful opposition to Trump’s and McConnell’s court packing.
As promosed, Donald Trump has nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg. This woman is a serious right wing nut-job.
Donald Trump’s pick for America’s highest court, Amy Coney Barrett, is an “ideological fanatic” who threatens abortion rights, healthcare and the environment, activists warned on Saturday, before Trump unveiled his third supreme court nominee in the White House Rose Garden.
Barrett is the ideological opposite of the woman she will succeed if confirmed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died earlier this month aged 87.
She’s a member of a group called People of Praise, whose ideas of gender roles is exemplified by the fact the highest role for a woman in the group was called for a long time called a “Handmaids”.
As Anna Russel would say, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
Just when I think that I have been inured to the vacuous evil of the Trump administration, they take it up a notch.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that prosecutors must tell prosecutors how often specific police officers lie on the stand.
I’m not surprised the prosecutors refuse to tell defense attorneys about cops who lie, but I am surprised that the courts have let it slide so long.
Cops lie. Cops lie enough there’s a term for it: testilying. Honest prosecutors don’t want lying cops on the stand dirtying up their case with their impeachable testimony. Unfortunately, police unions are powerful enough to thwart this small bit of accountability. “Brady lists” are compiled by prosecutors. They contain the names of officers whose track record for telling the truth is so terrible prosecutors don’t want to have to rely on their… shall we say… misstatements in court.
Unfortunately, these lists are often closely-guarded secrets. Judges aren’t made aware of officers’ penchant for lying. Neither are defendants in many cases. But they’re called “Brady” lists because they’re supposed to be disclosed to defendants. The “Brady” refers to Brady v. Maryland, where it was decided prosecutors are obligated to turn over possibly exculpatory information to defendants to ensure their right to a fair trial. This includes anything that might indicate the cop offering testimony might not be telling the truth.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled [PDF] prosecutors have an obligation to inform defendants of officers who have made their “Brady” lists. Two cops who made false statements in a use-of-force report were granted immunity for their testimony in front of a grand jury. The district attorney prosecuting a different criminal case handed this information over to the defendant. The cops challenged this move, claiming their grand jury immunity should have prevented this exculpatory information from being given to the defendant and discussed in open court. (h/t Matthew Segal)
The cops argued there’s no constitutional duty to disclose this information (under the US Constitution or the Commonwealth’s) unless failing to do so would alter the outcome of the trial by creating reasonable doubt where none previously existed. The Supreme Judicial Court says that argument is wrong under both Constitutions.
First, prosecutors have more than a constitutional duty to disclose exculpatory information; they also have a broad duty under Mass. R. Crim. P. 14 (a)(1)(iii) to disclose “[a]ny facts of an exculpatory nature.” This duty is not limited to information so important that its disclosure would create a reasonable doubt that otherwise would not exist; it includes all information that would “tend to” indicate that the defendant might not be guilty or “tend to” show that a lesser conviction or sentence would be appropriate.
[…]
Second, even if prosecutors had only their constitutional obligation to disclose, and not the broad duty under our rules, we would not want prosecutors to withhold exculpatory information if they thought they could do so without crossing the line into a violation of the defendant’s right to a fair trial.
This is a SIGNIFICANT expansion to the Brady rule. The SJC is saying that the information does not have to show innocence, but something that might lead to some reasonable doubt with some jurors, or even that it might result in a more lenient sentence.
This is a big change.
………
The cops also argued their immunity from prosecution during their grand jury testimony should shield them from any adverse consequences. Wrong again, says the court. The immunity only covers prosecution for the admitted crimes. It is not a shield against reputational damage that may result from this information being made public or handed over to defendants.
………
The Court wraps this up by laying down the law: this is Brady info and it needs to be disclosed to defendants. The SJC is not f%$#ing around.
[W]e conclude, as did the district attorney, that the prosecutors here have a Brady obligation to disclose the exculpatory information at issue to unrelated criminal defendants in cases where a petitioner is a potential witness or prepared a report in the criminal investigation. That obligation remains even though that information was obtained in grand jury testimony compelled by an immunity order. And the district attorney may fulfill that obligation without prior judicial approval; a judge’s order is needed only for issuance of a protective order limiting the dissemination of grand jury information.
More broadly, we conclude that where a prosecutor determines from information in his or her possession that a police officer lied to conceal the unlawful use of excessive force, whether by him or herself or another officer, or lied about a defendant’s conduct and thereby allowed a false or inflated criminal charge to be prosecuted, the prosecutor’s obligation to disclose exculpatory information requires that the information be disclosed to defense counsel in any criminal case where the officer is a potential witness or prepared a report in the criminal investigation.
That’s the standard in Massachusetts. And bad cops are on notice there’s pretty much nothing they can do to escape the consequences of their own actions. This is as it should be. Now, if the courts could just make sure prosecutors and police departments are actually compiling Brady lists, we’d be set. At least in this Commonwealth.
Having cops revealed to be liars in open court is a good thing, because those cops are going to get torn up on the stands by defense attorneys, and so will be an embarrassment to the force, and not get promoted.
It’s more long-overdue accountability.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Supreme Court Justice, has died at age 87.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, who in her ninth decade became a much younger generation’s unlikely cultural icon, died at her home in Washington on Friday. She was 87.
The cause was complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, the Supreme Court said.
By the time two small tumors were found in one of her lungs in December 2018, during a follow-up scan for broken ribs suffered in a recent fall, Justice Ginsburg had beaten colon cancer in 1999 and early-stage pancreatic cancer 10 years later. She received a coronary stent to clear a blocked artery in 2014.
Needless to say, Mitch McConnell is studiously ignoring what he did when he blocked Obama’s nominee in 2016, because he is an evil man who has no ideology beyond a quest for power.
Also, we have reports that Trump will be nominating a replacement, which is not a surprise.
Both stacking the court, and violating the norms of governance are core branding for Trump and his administration, so I would expect to see a nomination in the next few weeks, with an actual vote on the candidate in the lame duck session, where the Senators, particularly those who have lost their bid for reelection, will be able to vote with little, if any repercussions.
A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s attempt to cripple the Post Office in an attempt to suppress Democratic vote.
Now, the only question is whether or not they go full Andrew Jackson on this:*
A federal judge in Washington state on Thursday granted a request from 14 states to temporarily block operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service that have been blamed for a slowdown in mail delivery, saying President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are “involved in a politically motivated attack” on the agency that could disrupt the 2020 election.
Stanley A. Bastian, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, said policies put in place under DeJoy “likely will slow down delivery of ballots” this fall, creating a “substantial possibility that many voters will be disenfranchised and the states may not be able to effectively, timely, accurately determine election outcomes.”
“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service,” Bastian said in brief remarks after a 2½-hour hearing in Yakima. “They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.”
The ruling — the first major decision to come out of several lawsuits filed by states against the Postal Service — was a victory for Democratic state officials who view Trump’s persistent attacks on mail voting and DeJoy’s operational changes as part of a concerted effort to impede the vote on Nov. 3. Partisan tensions are running high as millions of Americans prepare to cast mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic, and mail delays have heightened concerns that voters unfamiliar with the process will be disenfranchised.
………
“It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services’ changes is an intentional effort on the part the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections,” he wrote.
Hopefully, this ruling will be followed.
*In case you are wondering, after the Supreme Court ruled against his Indian policies, Jackson is reported to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
This is literally subordinating the entire machinery of justice to the personal service of Donald Trump:
Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition, according to two people familiar with the call.
The highly unusual suggestion to charge people with insurrection against lawful authority alarmed some on the call, which included U.S. attorneys around the country, said the people, who described Mr. Barr’s comments on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The attorney general has also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer, according to two people briefed on those discussions.
………
During a speech on Wednesday night, Mr. Barr noted that the Supreme Court had determined that the executive branch had “virtually unchecked discretion” in deciding whether to prosecute cases. He did not mention Ms. Durkan or the sedition statute.
“The power to execute and enforce the law is an executive function altogether,” Mr. Barr said in remarks at an event in suburban Washington celebrating the Constitution. “That means discretion is invested in the executive to determine when to exercise the prosecutorial power.”
The disclosures came as Mr. Barr directly inserted himself into the presidential race in recent days to warn that the United States would be on the brink of destruction if Mr. Trump lost. He told a Chicago Tribune columnist that the nation could find itself “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if Mr. Trump lost and that the country faced “a clear fork in the road.”
………
The attorney general’s question about whether Ms. Durkan, the former U.S. attorney in Seattle, had violated any federal statutes by allowing the protest zone was highly unusual, former law enforcement officials said.
“The attorney general seems personally, deeply offended by the autonomous zone and wants someone to pay for it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. “If the people of Seattle are personally offended, they have political recourse. There is no reason to try to stretch a criminal statute to cover the conduct.”
………
Mr. Barr mentioned sedition as part of a list of possible federal statutes that prosecutors could use to bring charges, including assaulting a federal officer, rioting, use of explosives and racketeering, according to the people familiar with the call. Justice Department officials included sedition on a list of such charges in a follow-up email.
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The most extreme form of the federal sedition law, which is rarely invoked, criminalizes conspiracies to overthrow the government of the United States — an extraordinary situation that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the protests and unrest in places like Portland, Ore., and elsewhere in response to police killings of Black men.
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Congress has stipulated that a conviction on a charge of seditious conspiracy can carry up to 20 years in prison.
He is also excoriating professional staff for resisting the politicization of the Department of Justice, ignoring the obvious, even the most junior associate at a law firm is required to speak out if they think that what is proposed is illegal or unethical.
If Barr has his law license a year after he leaves office, they system will have failed:
Attorney General William P. Barr delivered a scathing critique of his own Justice Department on Wednesday night, insisting on his absolute authority to overrule career staffers, who he said too often injected themselves into politics and went “headhunting” for high-profile targets.
Speaking at an event hosted by Hillsdale College, a school with deep ties to conservative politics, Barr directly addressed the criticism that has been building for months inside the department toward his heavy hand in politically sensitive cases, particularly those involving associates of President Trump.
“What exactly am I interfering with?” he asked. “Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general.”
………
Barr said that argument, in essence, means “the will of the most junior member of the organization” would determine decisions, but he insisted he would not “blindly” defer to “whatever those subordinates want to do.”
“Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency,” he said.
The attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement official, spent much of the speech eviscerating the idea of the Justice Department as a place where nonpolitical career prosecutors should be left to decide how sensitive cases are resolved.
Andrey Vyshinsky wishes that he was William Barr.
In it he calls the decision a, “Corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system,” in addition to noting that it is, “A gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”
It’s nice that someone has finally called William Barr corrupt.
Barr makes Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell look like Perry Mason:
A retired federal judge accused the Justice Department on Friday of yielding to a pressure campaign led by President Trump in its bid to dismiss the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to federal investigators.
In a 30-page court filing in Washington, former New York federal judge John Gleeson called Attorney General William P. Barr’s request to drop Flynn’s case a “corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system.”
“In the United States, Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty — twice, before two different judges — and whose guilt is obvious,” said Gleeson, who was appointed by the court to argue against the government’s request to dismiss the case.
Gleeson’s filing set the stage for a potentially dramatic courtroom confrontation Sept. 29 with the Justice Department and Flynn’s defense over the fate of the highest-ranking Trump adviser to plead guilty in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation. Friday’s filings echo earlier arguments from Gleeson, who called the Justice Department’s attempt to undo Flynn’s conviction a politically motivated and “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia set the hearing date after a federal appeals court upheld his authority to review and rule on the government’s dismissal request on Aug. 31. The hearing before Sullivan was selected from three dates proposed by the parties and is scheduled the same day as the first presidential debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell on Friday called Gleeson’s filing “predictable and meaningless,” saying again that Flynn’s investigation was “corrupt from its inception.”
Sidney Powell is complete nutjob, by the way, less than a half step away from Q-Anon.
………
Although Flynn cooperated with the Mueller probe and was prepared to be sentenced December 2018, he switched course after Mueller’s investigation ended and Barr took office last year. Flynn then accused prosecutors and his former attorneys of coercing him into pleading guilty and concealing FBI misconduct, claims that the department and Sullivan rejected.
When Barr came in, someone told Flynn that the fix was in.
………
“Pursuant to an active investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign officials coordinated activities with the Government of Russia, one of those officials lied to the FBI about coordinating activities with the Government of Russia,” Gleeson said earlier in the case.
“That is about as straightforward a case of materiality as a prosecutor, court, or jury will ever see,” he wrote.
Of all the people who need to go to jail, and be disbarred in the Trump administration, Billy Barr needs it the worst.
He is right.
One of the most corrosive forces in our society today is the (Completely Accurate) perception that our elites are never subject to consequences when they break the law.
It’s been getting worse for years, but I believe that it took a definitive turn for the worse when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon before he was even tried.
Since then, the perception is that if your are one of the powerful, you should not be subjected to the same laws as the rest of us.
It needs to end:
If Democrats do hold their House majority and retake the Senate and the White House, pressure will be intense to avoid looking backward and focus solely on solving the problems in front of them. This is understandable: the wreckage the Trump administration would leave behind after just four short years is immense, the policy challenges dire. If successful in November (and if Trump doesn’t create irredeemable chaos in the transition), Biden and Congressional Democrats will have to deal with a raging pandemic, a collapsing small business and renter economy, a climate crisis and continuing unrest over racist police violence—as well as the myriad ongoing policy challenges related to healthcare, tuition, inequality, tech giant accountability and so much more. It’s easy to foresee a scenario where, coupled with pressure from Republicans and centrists, Democrats decide that the public is sick of even thinking about Trump and bygones are allowed to be bygones.
But that would be a huge mistake. If Trump and his enablers are allowed to get away with the misdeeds of the last four years unscathed, it may mean the end of the American experiment.
The American system of government has proven to be far more fragile and norms-dependent than most public policy professionals and politics nerds had thought possible. It may only take one more president of limited moral constraints to topple it entirely. And given that impeachment and removal have proven to be an empty threat, the only deterrent to a future Trumplike president and their enablers will be the fear of being held legally and financially accountable for wrongdoing after leaving office.
………
What else is to prevent a future Michael Caputo from rigging scientific findings in a pandemic to make his boss look good while endangering millions? What else is to prevent a future Louis DeJoy from sabotaging the Postal Service again? What else would stop a future Bill Barr from using the Justice Department as the president’s private legal firm? What else would stop a future Donald Trump from…well, everything?
Certainly not shame or normative pressure. Not the balance of powers in the Senate envisioned by the framers. Only the fear of subpoenas, jail and penury stands in the way.
So as much as Democrats will have their work cut out for them next year, and as much as Republicans will howl about it, they cannot avoid the necessity of full investigations and inquiries into this administration’s abuses. People have to go to jail for what has happened, or there probably won’t be a democracy worth saving for long.
Yes.
This has been black letter law since the 3⁄5 compromise was overturned by the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution in 1868:
A federal court on Thursday rejected President Trump’s order to exclude unauthorized immigrants from population counts that will be used next year to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives, ruling that it was so obviously illegal that a lawsuit challenging the order need not go to a trial.
The court, a three-judge panel in Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Mr. Trump’s proposal exceeded his authority under federal laws governing the census and reapportionment. The specially convened panel said there was no need to consider a second claim in the lawsuit that the president’s order violated the Constitution’s requirement to base apportionment of the House on “the whole number of persons in each state.”
“The merits of the parties’ dispute are not particularly close or complicated,” the judges wrote in granting summary judgment to the plaintiffs, a view that was broadly shared by legal scholars. Two of the judges, Richard C. Wesley and Peter W. Hall, were named to the bench by President George W. Bush. The third, Jesse M. Furman, was nominated by President Barack Obama.
The case involved lawsuits brought by two sets of plaintiffs, one a group of state and local governments and the United States Conference of Mayors, and the second a coalition of advocacy groups and other nongovernmental organizations. The groups argued that Mr. Trump’s order would cause some of them to lose representation in the House and would damage all of them by leading to a less accurate census.
Since the first census was taken in 1790, the number of seats each state holds in the House of Representatives has been based on counts of everyone living in the United States regardless of citizenship or legal status, except for slaves and “Indians not taxed” during the nation’s early years. Former slaves gained citizenship in 1866; all Native Americans did in 1924, although they were counted in regular censuses beginning in 1900.
Mr. Trump tried to scrap that process in July, telling the Commerce Department in a memorandum that the Census Bureau should produce two population counts — one the same as those taken every decade, and the other an estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in each state.
I do not expect that the Supreme Court to rule on this before on the election.
What can I say but, “Pass the Popcorn.”
The four former Minneapolis police officers charged in George Floyd’s killing appear to be turning on one another, with each offering significantly different versions of the infamous arrest that acknowledge Floyd should not have been allowed to die that day but also deflect the blame to others.
The four men have said in court documents that they all thought someone else was in charge of the scene on May 25 — with rookie officers arguing they were deferring to a veteran, and the veteran saying he was simply assisting in an arrest that was in progress. All have said in court documents that the relationship between the veteran officer — Derek Chauvin — and the others is at the heart of the issue, as each officer perceived their role, and who was in charge, quite differently. Chauvin was the officer shown with his knee on Floyd’s neck as he struggled to breathe in videos of the ill-fated arrest.
“There are very likely going to be antagonistic defenses presented at the trial,” Earl Gray, a lawyer for Thomas K. Lane, wrote in a legal motion filed here this week. “It is plausible that all officers have a different version of what happened and officers place blame on one another.”
It’s nice when people who are ordinarily beneficiaries of the corrupt “Thin Blue Line” start turning against each other.
Here’s hoping that they all screw each other into a jail cell.
This is pretty clearly an Affluenza defense, “I’m to young, too pretty, and too white to go to jail.”
She has a right to this defense, but the judge has made what is a routine ruling, that the prosecution has the right to conduct a psychological examination as well, and that they can tape her sessions, and if the prosecution is not playing to lose, a big if will a well connected white defendant, then they should be able blow this defense out of the water.
Holmes spending at least 5 years, and better yet a decade, behind bars is the singles best thing that should ever do for society: Be an abject lesson to others who would rely on privilege to defraud people:
Elizabeth Holmes—the disgraced founder and ex-CEO of the now-defunct blood-testing startup, Theranos—may use a mental condition as a defense against a slew of federal fraud charges, according to a court document filed this week. Holmes and Theranos’ former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were charged in June 2018 with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Federal prosecutors allege the pair—who were romantically involved during the alleged crimes—engaged in conspiracy to defraud Theranos investors out of more than $100 million and defraud doctors and patients into falsely believing the company’s faulty blood-testing technology could reliably perform accurate health tests with just drops of blood from a finger-prick.
According to the court document filed this week, Holmes—who is now being tried separately from Balwani—notified the court last December that she plans to submit “expert evidence relating to a mental disease or defect or any other mental condition” that has bearing on the issue of guilt. The expert providing such evidence was named in the document as psychologist Mindy Mechanic, of California State University, Fullerton.
According to Mechanic’s faculty website, she focuses on “psychosocial consequences of violence, trauma, and victimization with an emphasis on violence against women and other forms of interpersonal violence.” The site also notes that Mechanic “frequently provides expert testimony in complex legal cases involving interpersonal violence.”
The strategy here is clear, her legal team will assert that her former business partner, and former personal partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani is a darkly complected man of South Asian extraction, who worked some sort of “Voodoo” over an innocent white girl, and made her defraud stupid rich folks.
………
In response to Holmes’ plans to provide mental health evidence, federal prosecutors requested that they should also be able to examine Holmes’ mental state and provide their own psychiatric evidence in court as a fair rebuttal.
The judge in the case, US District Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California, agreed with the prosecutors. As such, he ordered Holmes to undergo up to 14 hours of psychological testing and psychiatric evaluation by two government-appointed doctors over the course of two consecutive days. Davila also ordered that the government’s evaluation of Holmes be recorded on video—over Holmes’ objections.
It’s nice that the judge made this ruling, and I really hope that the prosecution is serious about calling bullsh%$ on this strategy.
As you may, or may not, be aware, there is a segment of fan-fiction called “The Omegaverse”, which is one part Supernatural fandom, and two (or maybe three) parts bad wolf science.
What you may not be aware of, unless you read the rather incomplete New York Times story, which tended to focus on a genre of literature that features, estrus, involuntary impregnation, involuntary sex, male pregnancy, and a lot of other stuff that makes Furries look like Mike Pence.
I understand why the Times focused on this, it’s salacious, and salacious sells.
It’s also kind of dull, unless it’s your thing, at least to me.
I am a cat person, thank you very much.*
What I find interesting is the use, and in this case abuse, of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) take-down provisions for a clearly unlawful purpose.
Well, that, and one the principals in the dispute committing perjury and lying to her fans, but again that is simply salacious, and does not address the larger issues here.
As many of you (OK, both of you) are are aware, the DMCA contains a safe harbor provision which says that so long as a platform responds promptly in response to a take down notice to material posted by a user, they cannot be held liable, much in the same way that you cannot sue a bookstore for a book that is defamatory, just the author and publisher.
What the process means is that there is very little upside for platforms to investigate whether or not an actual copyright violation occurs. They will simply take the material down when a DMCA complaint, and if the complaint is in error, or maliciously wrong, it is no skin off of their nose.
What this has resulted in is DMCA take down notices being issued to coverup evidence of anti-union activity, corrupt politicians covering up their behavior, to extort YouTube channels, for profit academic journals moving against professors who posting their own research, and, of course, Dr. Who fan Ood Knitters.
What happened in this case was that the author, whose innovation appears to be bringing heterosexual relationships into the Omgaverse, and her publisher, went after another author for literary features of the genre, rather than any actual plagiarism, and sent out dozens of DMCA take-down notices to attack a rival in the genre.
It’s a classic case of misusing the DMCA for non-IP purposes.
Well, Lindsay Ellis gives a hysterically funny description of what went down here, and why what happened was wrong, and why the DMCA needs to be fixed.
It’s an hour long, but it’s well worth the watch.
*No, not THAT sort of cat person, NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT, at least not from a literary perspective.
A federal judge has issued an injunction preventing the Census Bureau from terminating operations while a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attempt to sabotage the decennial count.
This is not a victory, it’s just a hold until the suit can progress, but it does imply that there is a reasonable chance of their prevailing:
A federal judge has ordered the US Census Bureau for the time being to stop following a plan that would have had it winding down operations in order to finish the 2020 census at the end of September.
The federal judge in San Jose issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency.
The order stops the Census Bureau from winding down operations until a court hearing is held on 17 September. The once-a-decade head count of every US resident helps determine how $1.5tn in federal funding is distributed and how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment.
The temporary restraining order was requested by a coalition of cities, counties and civil rights groups that had sued the Census Bureau, demanding it restore its previous plan for finishing the census at the end of October, instead of using a revised plan to end operations at the end of September. The coalition had argued the earlier deadline would cause the Census Bureau to overlook minority communities in the census, leading to an inaccurate count.
The September hearing should be interesting.
In response to stories noting irregularities at the now shuttered German credit card transaction firm Wirecard, regulators went to Prosecutors initiated an investigation ……… of the journalists.
Now that the firm has collapsed in an orgy of fraud, prosecutors are calling backsies:
The Munich prosecutor has dropped its investigation into two Financial Times journalists, who were accused by the German financial watchdog of potential market manipulation over their reports about accounting irregularities at payments processor Wirecard.
The criminal prosecution office in Munich said on Thursday it had “suspended the investigative proceedings” against the two FT journalists after they “did not reveal sufficient evidence to support the suspicious facts” raised by BaFin, the German watchdog.
BaFin said on Thursday that it had “no objection” to the prosecutor dropping its investigation into the FT journalists. It added that its parallel criminal complaint against short-sellers alleging market manipulation on Wirecard shares was still ongoing.
The move comes 10 weeks after Wirecard declared insolvency, having admitted that about €1.9bn in cash was missing from its accounts. Its collapse, which has turned into one of Germany’s biggest financial scandals, followed years of reports by the FT that Wirecard’s accounts were misleading.
The Munich prosecutor said its investigations found that the FT’s reports “are basically correct and at least from the point of view of the information available at the time, it was neither false nor misleading. There were no direct, concrete contacts with short-sellers.”
The criminal complaint against Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma was filed by BaFin in April 2019 after the FT published articles by the two earlier that year alleging that Wirecard had been inflating its revenues by using forged and backdated contracts that raised questions over the company’s accounting.
In case your are wondering, bank fraud, and regulatory capture are not exclusive to the “Anglo-Saxon” nations.
Authorities in Kentucky have still not arrested the police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor on March 13. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is now in charge of the case, had time to speak at the Republican National Convention last week, but he has not found the time to bring to justice the three cops who shot Taylor in her own apartment.
What have the authorities been doing for the past five and a half months?
Earlier this week, we learned the answer: The authorities have been busy harassing the Black men who knew Taylor, while trying to name Taylor, posthumously, as a criminal defendant. Instead of building a case against the police officers who killed her, it would appear that Kentucky prosecutors have been doing everything they can to build a case against Taylor, in a desperate yet classic attempt to blame a Black person for “forcing” the cops to kill them.
………
Now the two men who have been hounded by the authorities while Taylor’s killers march around free are starting to speak out through their attorneys and legal action. On Tuesday, attorneys filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, against Louisville police, the city, and other officials. The suit is comprehensive: It alleges serious police misconduct and intimidation, gives new details on Taylor’s murder, and seeks to protect Walker from future harassment through a novel use of Kentucky’s “stand your ground” law.
………
But Walker’s case doesn’t stop there. In addition to the delicious legal jujitsu of using this white supremacist law against the forces of white supremacy, Walker’s complaint also focuses on the behavior of the cops once the shooting stopped. I am drawn to the allegations of police intimidation that Walker has suffered from the moment cops finished murdering his girlfriend. In his lawsuit, Walker claims that cops on the scene expressed disappointment when they found that Walker had not been shot. He claims the cops threatened to sic their dogs on him while they were marching him out of the apartment. And prosecutors charged Walker initially with murder of a police officer, a factual impossibility (because Jon Mattingly, the one officer who was wounded, was very much alive the whole time) that prosecutors must have been well aware of.
All of those tactics are part of a very big problem. They represent attempts by the police to make innocent people accept responsibility for things they did not do or implicate other innocent people in crimes. Killing a cop can get you a death sentence in Kentucky. A person might falsely plead to all sorts of things to avoid such a charge, especially when the police have already established that they are sorry they didn’t kill you during the initial confrontation and have threatened to let their dogs maul you like they’re a bunch of Ramsay Boltons with badges.
Unfortunately, Walker isn’t the only acquaintance of Breonna Taylor who has been subjected to this kind of witness intimidation after her death. Jamarcus Glover, Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who is ostensibly the person the police were actually going after on the night they murdered Taylor, missed a court appearance this week. As that began to make news, his lawyers released documents showing the lengths to which prosecutors have gone to get Glover to implicate Taylor in crimes she did not commit.
………
The local prosecutor, Tom Wine, denies that such a plea deal was “offered” to Glover, but he admits that the concession was part of a “draft” plea sheet ahead of plea negotiations. Wine also said that Taylor’s name was removed “out of respect for Ms. Taylor.” Notice the wording there: Wine isn’t saying that the allegations about Taylor aren’t true; he’s saying he didn’t include them in the official plea negotiation “out of respect.”
Everything that is happening to the men who knew Taylor is happening because prosecutors do not want to hold Taylor’s murderers accountable. This is what the system does when it does not want to secure a conviction. Prosecutors themselves try to poison the jury pool against their own case, creating avenues of doubt before any trial process gets going. They try to impugn the character of people who will have to be witnesses for the prosecution. They try to avoid doing forensic research so that they have no “hard” evidence to present to the jury, should it come to that. And they try, desperately, to get anybody to speak out against the victim so the defense can use those statements against the prosecution at trial.
The cops shot Taylor under the cover of darkness, but prosecutors are trying to lose the case in broad daylight.
This is aggressively and brazenly corrupt, and everyone in the various prosecutors’ offices who are a part of this should prosecuted and disbarred.
@whatchugotforme How to tiktok
♬ original sound – whatchugotforme
The reason Trump wants to shut down TikTok
The video sharing site TikTok has filed a lawsuit against Trump’s executive order shutting it down.
Trump claims that it’s a security risk, because its parent company is Chinese owned, but the reality is that he’s chuffed about how Sarah Cooper has gone viral doing satirical lip syncing of him.
In any case, this court case will almost certainly result in an injunction that will last well beyond election day:
Made-in-China social network TikTok has decided to challenge the Trump administration’s looming ban on its service by taking the matter to the USA’s courts.
On its qq account and in a statement, TikTok owner Byte Dance offered a two-pronged rationale for its actions.
The first disagrees with the Trump administration’s suggestion that TikTok shares data with China’s government and is therefore a threat to national security. ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, said it has tried to explain itself to the administration and find a solution that would satisfy US authorities its service is safe.
The second strand is an alleged “lack of due process” during those talks. TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner said the Trump administration “paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses”.
………
The ban on TikTok was enacted with an Executive Order that relies on powers designed to let a US president act during a national emergency. The power has not previously been applied to an entity like TikTok so the case may well rest on some gnarly legal issues rather than the nature of TikTok’s activities.
TikTok allows people to share short videos.
The idea that it could be a threat to anything than it’s users’ or Donald Trump’s dignity is simply ludicrous.
At the time, it they were accused of pandering in order to get prestigious federal and Supreme Court clerk positions.
Both of them, particularly Chua, were prominent in part for their ability to get these clerkships, and The Guardian reported that Chua told applicants to Kavanaugh to, “Dress to exude a “model-like” femininity to help them win a post in Kavanaugh’s chambers.” (Chua’s daughter ended up clerking for Kavanaugh shortly after the Op/Ed.)
There were also allegations that Rubenfeld, one of the most prominent critics of Title IX sexual harassment protections, routinely sexually harassed female students.
Well, the investigation is completed, and Jed Rubenfeld, a tenured professor, has been suspended for 2 years, and after he returns, he will be forbidden from teaching small group or required classes.
I’m kind of surprised that he has not been fired, but tenure provides an enormous amount of protection to professors.
My guess is that Rubenfeld will not be returning to Yale after his suspension ends:
On Monday morning, members of the Yale Law School faculty received a terse message from their provost informing them that Professor Jed Rubenfeld “will leave his position as a member of the YLS faculty for a two-year period, effective immediately,” and that upon his return, Rubenfeld would be barred from teaching “small group or required courses. He will be restricted in social gatherings with students.” As of Tuesday morning, he was no longer listed on the Yale Law faculty site.
Three people familiar with the investigation that led to Rubenfeld’s suspension said it stemmed from the university finding a pattern of sexual harassment of several students. The allegations, which spanned decades, included verbal harassment, unwanted touching, and attempted kissing, both in the classroom and at parties at Rubenfeld’s home.
In a phone conversation Tuesday, Rubenfeld told me, “I absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent deny that I ever sexually harassed anyone, whether verbally or otherwise. Yes, I’ve said stupid things that I regret over the course of my 30 years as professor, and no professor who’s taught as long as I have that I know doesn’t have things that they regret that they said.”
He added, “Ironically, I have written about the unreliability of the campus Title IX procedures. I never expected to go through one of them myself.”
In 2014, for example, Rubenfeld wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that said that the university that puts in place affirmative-consent standards “encourages people to think of themselves as sexual assault victims when there was no assault” and that it is “illogical” to claim “intercourse with someone ‘under the influence’ of alcohol is always rape.”
Lovely fellow.
Also a liar:
That’s not true, according to Yale’s stated policies — and one of the complainants. “License to write about sexual harassment is not license to sexually harass,” she told me. “I reported because I was sexually harassed. Now he’s being dishonest about even this aspect of the Title IX process. For example, as Yale’s policy requires, I identified myself to him. I had to, and I did so at considerable risk given his influence in the legal community.”
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Multiple women told me that a whisper network about Rubenfeld operated on campus, and that as law-school students, they were warned by peers to be careful around him. One said she was told by a male alum, “You’ve not scraped the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Rubenfeld’s behavior. Stay away.”
Rubenfeld is married to fellow Yale Law professor Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, [a paean to abusive parenting] and both wield power in the high-stakes race for judicial clerkships. In the summer of 2018, it was Chua who took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to vouch for then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a “mentor for young lawyers, particularly women.” (That was before allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh were made public.) The op-ed noted that the couple’s daughter had been about to clerk for Kavanaugh on the appeals court, and a year later, the Supreme Court acknowledged Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld would clerk for Justice Kavanaugh on the Court instead.
The Guardian first reported on the existence of the investigation into Rubenfeld’s conduct in the fall of 2018. He told the paper that he hadn’t been informed of the specifics but that he had been “advised that the allegations were not of the kind that would jeopardize my position as a long-tenured member of the faculty.” Female students also said that Rubenfeld and Chua discussed with students hoping to work for Kavanaugh the importance of their physical appearance. Chua denied telling students that Kavanaugh preferred attractive female clerks or coaching them on how to dress in “outgoing” fashion for interviews, though a Slate story subsequently reported it had “confirmed the Guardian’s reporting with students who were present at the time.”
August 2020 does seem to be a bountiful harvest for schadenfreude.
H/t Atrios
I’m kind of surprised. I knew that the DeSantis order was terminally stupid, but I did not think that it was illegal:
Florida’s state government cannot force schools to reopen this month, a judge ruled yesterday. The state’s order to reopen K-12 schools disregarded safety risks posed by COVID-19 and gave schools no meaningful alternative, according to the ruling issued by Judge Charles Dodson of the Second Judicial Circuit in Leon County.
On July 6, Florida Department of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran issued an emergency order stating, “Upon reopening in August, all school boards and charter school governing boards must open brick and mortar schools at least five days per week for all students.” Schools that don’t meet this requirement could lose state funding. Corcoran, Governor Ron DeSantis, and other state officials were then sued by the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union; the NAACP; and several individual teachers and parents.
After summarizing the health risks of reopening schools during the pandemic, the judge wrote that the state’s order to reopen schools “takes none of that into consideration. It fails to mention consideration of community transmission rates, varying ages of students, or proper precautions. What has been clearly established is there is no easy decision and opening schools will most likely increase COVID‐19 cases in Florida. Thus, Plaintiffs have demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success in procuring a judgment declaring the Order is being applied arbitrarily across Florida.”
Dodson concluded that the state’s order violates the Florida state constitution “to the extent it arbitrarily disregards safety, denies local school boards decision making with respect to reopening brick and mortar schools, and conditions funding on an approved reopening plan with a start date in August.” Having found that the plaintiffs are likely to win at trial, the judge issued a temporary injunction that strikes down the controversial portions of the state’s school-reopening order.
Gee, guv, I think that this ruling will leave a mark.
It appears that the Mayor of Danbury, Connecticut is VERY angry about a recent bit that John Oliver did on juries.
Specifically, he’s angry that John Oliver had the throw-away line, “F%$# Danbury,” when he was discussing disparities in jury selections, and highlighted specific circumstances in Hartford and New Britain, Connecticut where the residents of those cities (about ⅔ of the minority population in those judicial districts) were excluded.
The Mayor of Danbury will not allow this to stand, and so will rename the local sewage treatment plant after the comedian, because, and this is a quote, “Why? Because it’s full of crap just like you, John.”
I get that the Mayor of Danbury is offended, but I’ve seen what Oliver did to killer coal baron Bob Murray (Also here), and you ain’t gonna win this fight.
Picking a fight with John Oliver is like wrestling with a pig, you both get dirty, and the pig loves:
Officials in Danbury, Connecticut, say they will name their sewage plant after the comedian John Oliver, in retaliation for an expletive-filled rant about the city on his HBO show.
Mayor Mark Boughton announced the move on his Facebook page.
“We are going to rename it the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant,” the Republican mayor said. “Why? Because it’s full of crap just like you, John.”
In a recent episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the British-born comic explored racial disparities in the jury selection process, citing problems in Hartford and New Britain.
“If you’re going to forget a town in Connecticut,” he said, “why not forget Danbury? Because, and this is true, f%$# Danbury!”
Noting Danbury’s “charming railway museum” and its “historic Hearthstone Castle”, he said: “Danbury, Connecticut can eat my whole ass.”
Oliver added that he knew “exactly three things about Danbury. USA Today ranked it the second-best city to live in 2015, it was once the center of the American hat industry and if you’re from there, you have a standing invite to come get a thrashing from John Oliver, children included, f%$# you.”
(%$# Mine)
I know very little about Danbury. I’ve never been there, even when I was living in Connecticut, though I might have driven through it on the way to New York City, but I do know this: Don’t pick a fight with John Oliver.
You have introduced yourself as a world of hurt.
They have been fighting this for years, and now that they are claiming that they are unprepared.
Seriously, they could outsource this to ADT and the like in a New York minute.
Let them pull the trigger on their threat:
A California appeals court judge blocked an order requiring Uber and Lyft to classify drivers as employees, averting an expected shutdown of the ride-sharing services in California at midnight tonight. The court granted Uber and Lyft a temporary stay while their appeals process play out.
Lyft had already announced it was planning to temporarily cease operations in the state earlier today, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had said the same about his company in an interview yesterday.
But the companies won an 11th hour reprieve from the California Court of Appeals hours before the shutdown was expected to go into effect. Uber and Lyft will now have until October to convince the court to throw out the order that it employ its drivers. If they are unsuccessful, the companies will be back where they started, and may again decide to shutdown.
They should be ready now, and there is no reason that they couldn’t be ready in October, but they won’t because they think that too many judges rely on the ride-sharing services, so the threat of a shut-down would be too disruptive to them.
F%$# that. The drivers should be in contact with Ride Austin about creating a drivers’ cooperative.