A former senior FBI official who oversaw the bureau’s politically sensitive investigations in 2016 into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and Donald Trump’s ties to Russia had “extensive contacts” with the news media in violation of FBI policy, a Justice Department watchdog report found.
A Justice Department Inspector General review released in 2018 and an investigative summary issued last year did not name the former official, but the report made public Monday identified him as Michael Steinbach, who served as the executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Bureau.
“Steinbach had hundreds of contacts with the media for several years” while heading up the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division and then continued such interactions in 2016 when he took up the senior national security role, according to the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “This media contact included social engagements outside of FBI headquarters without any coordination from Office of Public Affairs (OPA), involving drinks, lunches and dinners.”
The heavily redacted 27-page report, released to POLITICO under the Freedom of Information Act and dated July 2021, does not accuse Steinbach of unauthorized disclosures to the media. However, Horowitz’s office has expressed concerns that extensive, unsupervised contacts between FBI officials and the media can lead to such leaks and make them harder to investigate.
The OIG's 2018 report looking at the Bureau's actions during the 2016 presidential election said the FBI’s policy on media contacts was being “widely ignored” and said violations of that policy appeared to emanate from a “cultural attitude.”
One passage in the newly released report says that “prosecution was declined,” but the remainder of that line is redacted from the copy made public Monday.
Steinbach, who retired from the FBI in February 2017 after a 22-year career at the law enforcement agency, did not respond to email and social media messages seeking comment on the report.
The inspector general report also faults Steinbach for accepting free tickets to two big Washington media galas: the Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner in 2015 and the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in 2016. The report says he was obliged to get approval from ethics officials at the FBI and failed to do so. He also failed to report the tickets on his annual financial disclosure form, the report says.
The report says Steinbach had at least 27 in-person meetings with seven reporters from 2014 through his retirement three years later. They frequented various restaurants near FBi headquarters, including Capital Grille, Gordon Biersch, Asia Nine, and Central, according to the report, which says investigators “were unable to determine who paid for the drinks or meals during these social engagements.”
The report concedes that Steinbach did engage with FBI public affairs officials about a "limited" number of the interactions, but said that in many instances there were no records of any such coordination.
Steinbach declined to be interviewed by the inspector general’s office, which has no way to compel such an interview after an official retires or resigns. However, he did answer questions in another FBI inquiry a few months after his retirement and maintained that his interactions with journalists were approved.
“Steinbach stated that he was authorized, while EAD of NSB, to provide non-case related information to the media as background,” the report says. “Steinbach said he was frequently contacted by the media for comment and questions relative to a variety of national security issues, and the media was ‘relentless’ and ‘aggressive’ in their attempts to get a story.”
While the inspector general report called the FBI’s media policy “unambiguous,” some FBI officials interviewed during the investigation disagreed.
“The policy was not clear on what was required or considered approved and that ‘coordination with OPA’ was completely undefined,” said one official whose name was deleted from the report.
One official said Steinbach told him that former FBI Director James Comey urged top officials to be more engaged with the press.
“Comey’s approach entailed proactively trying to find media sources that the FBI could trust to get stories right and to protect the brand of the FBI,” one unnamed official said.
The report includes numerous text and email exchanges between Steinbach and various reporters, whose names and news organizations were blacked-out in nearly all instances.
However, the report quotes one unnamed CNN reporter ribbing Steinbach by text about attending the White House Correspondents' Dinner with another journalist.
“I put you on the map and now you’re cheating on me with” another reporter, the CNN journalist wrote.
“I kept waiting for my invite from you,” Steinbach replied, according to the report.
A CNN spokesperson had no immediate comment Monday night.
FBI Director Christopher Wray — who was confirmed in August 2017 following Trump’s firing of Comey — stressed following the release of the 2018 inspector general report that the FBI had become too relaxed in its dealings with the media.
“We issued a new media policy that’s much stricter and much more clear than has been in place before,” Wray said then. “We will make painfully clear to everybody that we won’t tolerate non-compliance.”
FBI spokespeople did not have any immediate response to a request for comment Monday, but on Wednesday issued a statement deploring Steinbach's actions and downplaying any ambiguity in the agency's policies in effect at the time.
"The FBI expects all our employees to adhere to the highest standards of honesty and integrity and when one of our own fails to adhere to these standards, we take those allegations very seriously," the statement said. "As noted in the report, in 2016, the FBI referred this former employee's activities to the DOJ Office of the Inspector General for an investigation. To be clear, the former employee was in violation of our media policy then, just as he would be now, and his conduct was completely unacceptable."
Yeah this is only going to get worse for Starbucks
Starbucks is continuing its vicious anti-union campaign, even as the failure of that campaign to keep workers from voting to unionize becomes more clear by the day. Speaking to The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin late last week, Starbucks interim CEO Howard Schultz made clear that, under his leadership, the company will not bargain in good faith with its union.
Asked if he could imagine “embracing the union,” Schultz simply said “No,” in a “why are you asking me this ridiculous question” tone. Starbucks Workers United has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over that statement, which is in direct conflict with the company’s claim that “We will bargain in good faith for those seeking third-party representation.” In fact, Starbucks is required by law to bargain in good faith. If the NLRB finds merit to the charge (and Schultz is on video here), it will try to get Starbucks to settle, and if the company refuses, the NLRB can take the charge to court.
Starbucks recently closed one of the three Ithaca stores that has unionized, and the one where workers held a one-day strike over an overflowing grease trap. It’s true that Starbucks has a lot of stores and sometimes it closes them. But this is an extremely busy store near the Cornell University campus, and it’s been there for 17 years. It’s a suspicious closure coming in the middle of such an extreme anti-union campaign by the company, and workers there were not guaranteed jobs at other stores. In response, the union is calling for a boycott of the remaining Starbucks stores in Ithaca.
With Starbucks stock dropping, one major investor, Trillium Asset Management, is calling on the company to end its union-busting campaign. “In the last 10 months, Trillium has been actively pressing Starbucks to respect worker rights to organize,” the firm’s chief advocacy officer said in a video released by More Perfect Union, adding that the company “should not put [its] reputation in jeopardy with behavior that the NLRB regards as union busting.”
Despite the ferocity of the company’s efforts to prevent its workers from joining the union, though, the workers are overwhelmingly voting to do just that. There are now more than 140 unionized Starbucks stores, the vast majority of the stores that have voted on union representation.
Donald Trump set a very high bar for distinction as a liar and spewer of willful ignorance. One of his most prominent 2022 endorsees clears that bar with ease, and has done so going back decades. That would be Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia.
The latest Walker lie to be uncovered, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is that he worked in law enforcement. Walker made various versions of this claim over a period of years, but what all the versions have in common is that they were false.
In 2000, a police report in Irving, Texas, “involving a conflict with an intoxicated man” had Walker telling police he was a “certified peace officer.”
In 2013, at a U.S. Army suicide prevention event, Walker said, “I worked in law enforcement,so I had a gun. I put this gun in my holster, and I said, ‘I’m gonna kill this dude.’” He was describing a 2001 incident that prompted him to seek mental health care.
In a 2017 speech, he said, “I work with the Cobb County Police Department, and I’ve been in criminal justice all my life.”
In a 2019 speech at a military installation, Walker claimed, “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?”
That’s four different times over 19 years when Walker claimed law enforcement credentials he did not have. Because here’s the reality: Walker majored in criminal justice at the University of Georgia, but he did not graduate (though he lied about having done so). He rather famously spent his career in football, not law enforcement. His campaign told the AJC he was an honorary deputy in Cobb County and three other unnamed counties. And a 1989 Associated Press story recounts his single week in a program at Quantico.
”They had an obstacle course, and you shoot at targets to protect your partner as you advanced up the course,” he told the AP at the time. “I had fun. There were about 200 recruits there.” In other words, he went to FBI camp. It takes a college degree and 20 weeks of training at Quantico to be an FBI agent.
Similarly, being an honorary deputy does not mean you “worked in law enforcement” or have “been in criminal justice” for any period of time. Additionally, the Cobb County Police Department said Walker had not been associated with them, and the Cobb County sheriff’s office could not confirm any such association.
In any case, being an honorary deputy is “like a junior ranger badge,” according to former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan.
Walker lied. He didn’t even lie in a single consistent way. He blurted out claims about his supposed law enforcement experience in different ways at different moments—showing that another thing he has in common with his highest-profile supporter is liking to hear how macho and impressive he is, even if he has to be the one to say it and has to lie to do so.
This string of lies from Walker is of a piece with some of his other greatest hits. He claimed he started a program to provide health care to service members, veterans, and their families, but he didn’t start the program—he was a paid mouthpiece—and the Justice Department sued the program for “billing for medically unnecessary inpatient behavioral health services, failing to provide adequate and appropriate services, and paying illegal inducements to federal health care beneficiaries,” leading to a $122 million settlement. So maybe nothing to brag about. He claimed to have a spray that could ”clean you of COVID, as you walk through this, this dry mist,” and that it was FDA-approved. Needless to say, no such thing exists, let alone in the sole possession of Herschel Walker. Walker’s financial disclosures are also eyebrow-raising.
So claiming that he was a certified peace officer, worked in law enforcement, worked with the Cobb County Police Department, had been in criminal justice all his life, and spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school is no big surprise coming from Walker. It probably sounded nice in his head in the split second he thought about it before saying it. But he sure doesn’t belong in the United States Senate.
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho—For most of the day Saturday, a crowd of several hundred people joyously celebrated the city’s annual Pride festival—music and dancing, food and display booths, with a rainbow of colors and children romping amid blown bubbles.
But there was a dark cloud over the whole affair, hovering around the fringes. Drawn by a loud campaign of vicious rhetoric by far-right extremists depicting the organizers as “groomers,” pedophiles, and satanists, a motley crew of white supremacists, “Patriots,” Christian nationalists, and hate preachers circulated around the lakeside city park where the event was held. Some entered the event and mingled menacingly. At least three of them carried AR-15s.
Their intentions weren’t entirely clear until late in the day, when police, a block away from the park entrance, pulled over a U-Haul van full of men—all 31 of them members of the explicitly fascist Patriot Front organization from around the country, faces covered with white masks and dressed in the group’s uniform. According to Coeur d’Alene police, the men planned to start a riot at the Pride event and then continue the rampage into the city’s downtown.
Police swarmed the van and ordered the men into custody, binding them with flex cuffs and ordering them to sit or kneel on a grassy swath next to Northwest Boulevard just above a skate park. Then they processed all 31 of them in public view, unmasking them as they did so.
“They came to riot downtown,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White told reporters Sunday at a press conference. He said evidence collected and other documents demonstrate that they intended to begin the riot among the Pride crowd, but then fan out to other parts of downtown. The men all face misdemeanor charges of conspiracy to riot, though White indicated that other charges could be pending for some of them.
Among the men arrested was 23-year-old Thomas Rousseau of Grapevine, Texas, the youthful founder of Patriot Front, which itself is the offspring of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America whose contingent Rousseau helped organize for the August 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Among the men he admitted to the group was James Alex Fields, who subsequently plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and maiming dozens.
Only two of the 31 men arrested are from Idaho, though a number are from the Pacific Northwest. Men from as far away as Alabama, Texas, and Illinois came out to Idaho to participate.
They were spotted by a local resident who saw them piling into the van near the intersection of Interstate 90 and Northwest Boulevard, about two miles from the park. He alerted Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris, but it was Coeur d’Alene police—who had been out in force all weekend—who provided the bulk of the response, intercepting the van about 500 yards from the park entrance.
Coeur d’Alene police forced the would-be rioters from Patriot Front to await processing on Northwest Boulevard.
“And they were all dressed like a small army,” Norris said. “We had units in their area, and we were able to intercept them pretty quickly.”
White denied rumors that the arrests were made possible because of informants within the Patriot Front ranks. “This all came from a concerned citizen,” he said.
The Coeur d’Alene Pride event had been targeted by right-wing extremists for several weeks, thanks to a campaign of intimidation first organized by a number of Christian nationalists in the Idaho Panhandle, but then spearheaded by a regional far-right bikers club, the Panhandle Patriots. The club announced it was holding an event called Gun d’Alene at a park less than a mile from the lakeside City Park. Spouting “groomer” rhetoric accusing the LGBTQ community of fostering pedophilia, two members of the club promised there would be a confrontation.
The far-right organizing developed into an intense right-wing media scrum when white nationalist Dave Reilly of Post Falls began writing about the event in his propaganda outlet, the Idaho Tribune, and his neo-Nazi cohort, Vincent James Foxx, began doing the same on his YouTube channel. Notably, Reilly happened to notice that one of the sponsors listed for the event was the Satanic Temple of Idaho, which became fodder for the national far-right ecosystem, including the Libs of TikTok account on Twitter, which began retweeting Reilly’s posts; they were apparently in such close contact with Reilly that one of the account’s tweets promoted a Tribune story about 20 minutes after it was published.
The Satanic Temple dropped out of the event after Reilly’s posts began circulating widely. But the damage was done, and the Coeur d’Alene Pride gathering became a national far-right lightning rod. The Panhandle Patriots rebranded their event a “day of prayer” march, which meant that it attracted a variety of Christian-nationalist groups; but its rhetoric connecting the LGBTQ community to pedophilia ramped up.
One of the leading Christian nationalists drawn to Coeur d’Alene on Saturday was Matt Shea, the former Washington state Republican legislator who is deeply connected to the secessionist “American Redoubt” movement in the interior Northwest, and currently leads a Christian nationalist church in the Spokane Valley, about 20 miles from Idaho.
North Idaho Pride Alliance coordinator Jessica Mahuron explained that they accepted the Satanic Temple’s application to join the list of sponsors and to have a booth there was a product of their own non-discrimination policies.
“We have several inclusive churches that are present,” she told Daily Kos. “We have several policies in our bylaws that we do not discriminate on any basis, from gender identity to sexual orientation to race, and one big one is creed. If we denied one application from a faith group, and accepted others, not only is that a potential legal liability, but that also goes against the very civil and human rights that govern our organization.
“I do think that while that name sounds scary, I would encourage people to dig deeper and use critical thinking. This group—what are they really about? They don’t actually worship the deity of Satan at all. If someone looks into what they’re for, they stand up for the religious pluralism that all faiths have a place in this country.”
When a brief rainstorm hit the Pride gathering, participants grabbed umbrellas and marched around City Park.
Yet for nearly the entire day, the Pride gathering went on unmolested and uninterrupted. At one point, a brief heavy rainstorm swept over the park, but participants simply got out their umbrellas and walked in a mini-parade around the grounds.
Drag performers danced and sang onstage, and the crowd joined with them on the grass. People milled at the booths and gathered information, bought food and jewelry items, and generally conversed as they would have any other year.
At the same time, the threatening presence of the far right hovered nearby. One large man with camouflage gear, body armor, and a mask wandered around on the eastern side of the park while toting an AR-15. Another man with a cowboy hat actually stalked through the crowd several times while toting not just an AR-15 but a revolver stuck in his body armor and a large hunting knife. A third man with an AR-15 but wearing all black, including a face-concealing balaclava, hung out for much of the day at the park’s entrance.
A man who spent the day lurking near the Pride event.
A couple of men who had arrived at the park in a fire truck festooned with a banner mocking the LGBT acronym wandered through the crowd all day. So did Christian nationalists wearing shirts denouncing homosexuality, and “Patriots” mingled while wearing shirts with threatening slogans and depictions of guns firing. A couple of men held signs on the edge of the event citing the Leviticus verse that recommends homosexuals be put to death.
A group of men—one wearing a neo-Nazi “Skull” mask, another wearing Patriot Front colors with the trademark white mask pulled down around his neck—gathered at the walkway on the park’s southern lakeshore edge and unfurled a banner: “Groomers Are Not Welcome in Idaho.” About an hour later, joined by the two men with AR-15s, they again unfurled it on the lawn across the interior walkway from the Pride gathering.
The intent to menace was clear, but no one could see any particular strategy unfolding. But the presence of unmistakable neo-Nazis suggested that something else was afoot—which became much clearer at about 2 p.m., when Coeur d’Alene police stopped the Patriot Front would-be rioters in their tracks.
While police have been mum about any weaponry carried by Patriot Front—which were reported to only consist of shields and sticks—but it’s not difficult to envision how the scenario would have played out inside the park had they arrived unimpeded and created a scene of violence at the gathering while men with AR-15s who were clearly part of their camp stood on the periphery.
Their strategy, reportedly laid out in a seven-page planning document police found inside the U-Haul van, included moving into downtown Coeur d’Alene after they were done inside the park and wreaking havoc there as well. It’s a marked shift upwards in aggressive tactics for Patriot Front, who primarily have attempted to troll the media and public officials by staging marches in Washington, D.C., at which they mainly paraded their fasces-bearing banners in scenes eerily reminiscent of Nazi Brownshirt marches in 1920s Germany.
But this kind of gradual escalation reflects the planning by white nationalists and other extremists for expanding their movements in the post-Trump era. Leaked data about Patriot Front has revealed how this looks: A weird combination of violent eliminationist rhetoric as their primary appeal and clownish and often hapless male posturing as part of their would-be paramilitary training.
Choosing Coeur d’Alene as the place to kick off this escalation in tactics was probably less than astute: While Idaho police are notoriously right-wing generally, police in Kootenai County have been wrestling with neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists and the inevitable criminal behavior that accompanies them since the 1970s, when the Aryan Nations moved to Hayden Lake—a few miles up the U.S. 95 from Coeur d’Alene—and created their notorious compound that was not extirpated until 2001.
The end result was the arrest these 31 white men:
Thomas Ryan Rousseau of Grapevine, Texas
Mishael Joshua Buster of Spokane, Washington
Josiah Daniel Buster of Watauga, Texas
Dylan Carter Corio of Cheyenne, Wyoming
Kieran Padraig Morris of Haslet, Texas
Derek Joseph Smith of Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Dakota Ray Tabler of West Valley, Utah
Steven Derrick Tucker of Lexington, Alabama
Robert Benjamin Whitted of Conroe, Texas
Brandon Mitchel Haney of Kaysville, Utah
James Michael Johnson of Sioux Falls, South Dakota
James Julius Johnson of Concrete, Washington
Justin Michael Oleary of Des Moines, Iowa
Forrest Clark Rankin of Wheat Ridge, Colorado
Spencer Thomas Simpson of Ellensburg, Washington
Devin Wayne Center of Fayetteville, Arkansas
Winston Worth Durham of Genesee, Idaho
Garret Joseph Garland of Freeburg, Illinois
Nathaniel Taylor Whitfield of Elk Ridge, Utah
Nathan David Brenner of Louisville, Colorado
Richard Jacob Jessop of Idaho Falls, Idaho
Cameron Kathan Pruitt of Midway, Utah
Conor James Ryan of Thornton, Colorado
Mitchell Frederick Wagner of Florissant, Missouri
Colton Michael Brown of Ravensdale, Washington
Connor Patrick Moran of Watauga, Texas
Alexander Nicholai Sisenstein of Midvale, Utah
Graham Jones Whitsom of Haslet, Texas
Lawrence Alexander Norman of Prospect, Oregon
Jared Michael Boyce of Springville, Utah
Wesley Evan Van Horn of Lexington, Alabama
As it happens, Mishah and Josiah Buster are both the sons of longtime Matt Shea associate Matt Buster. It appears that a number of the Patriot Front marchers parked their cars at the Buster residence in Spokane Valley. Shea and his Christian nationalist associates constantly proclaim their innocence about the connections of the region’s neo-Nazi elements to his Redoubt project.
A number of Saturday’s detainees were released on bail on Sunday. According to @Johnthelefty, they then proceeded to wander around downtown Coeur d’Alene, proselytizing their innocence of the accusation (made by far-right conspiracy theorists and denialists) that they secretly are federal agents performing psychological operations. They were also panhandling for money to get home with.
Nick Martin at The Informant reports that the fascists’ fury at Coeur d’Alene police for what they see as a betrayal has been raging:
If you're wondering how things are going in the aftermath of the Patriot Front arrests in Idaho, neo-Nazis on other social media platforms have started doxxing members of law enforcement in Coeur d'Alene. Names, home addresses, phone numbers and photos are being circulated.
One of the members of the Coeur d'Alene Police Department is being described by neo-Nazis as an "Anti-American and Pedophile Apologist" because the arrests prevented the Patriot Front members from allegedly planning to disrupt a Pride event.
Chief White reported that his department’s tipline has “blown up” with people voicing support, but not all of them: “Conversely, we’re also hearing from a lot of people who are mad at us for arresting a hate group who wanted to riot,” White said.
Mahuron just voice her gratitude that, despite the threatening behavior, this year’s Pride gathering was one of their largest ever, reflecting how the Coeur d’Alene community responds to the defense of people’s civil rights.
“I am overwhelmingly happy with the turnout and the positivity that is in this space,” she said. “It’s felt great all day long. All the scenarios that could have turned out bad just did not.”
One of the veterans of the anti-Nazi battles of the 1980s in Coeur d’Alene, Tony Stewart, praised the zero-tolerance message sent by Saturday’s arrests. Stewart was a cofounder of the local Human Rights Task Force that responded to the Aryan Nations menace.
“I hope the message going out today is, ‘If you’re going to commit a crime as a hate group, don’t come here. You’re not going to find a receptive audience here,’” Stewart said.
“We found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said in a closing statement for the hearing. “So not only was there the big lie, there was the big ripoff.”
As video testimony from former Trump campaign officials revealed, small-dollar donors were bombarded with emails to donate to an official “Election Defense Fund” in the wake of the 2020 election. Those donors were told that fund was aimed at combating (nonexistent) election fraud. In reality, however, no such fund existed, according to the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“I don’t believe there was actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund,” Hanna Allred, a former Trump campaign staffer, testified to the committee. Ultimately, the fund was what another staffer categorized as a “marketing tactic” to bring in more money, most of which did not go to election-related litigation.
Instead, many of the funds were directed to a newly created Save America PAC, which has contributed millions to other pro-Trump groups. That includes $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute, a charity foundation helmed by Meadows, $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., the vendor that put on Trump’s January 6 rally, and $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection.
“Donors deserve to know where their funds are really going,” Lofgren emphasized. During Monday’s hearing, House lawmakers made the case that Trump not only pushed election claims after being told repeatedly that they were false, but that he also used these claims to swindle people of their money.
According to the Washington Post, the House committee is focused on these misleading solicitations because it points to how fundraising emails were a source of spreading misinformation about the election, and because there are potential laws related to fraud that could have been broken.
A piece of the January 6 investigation, for example, centers on whether the campaign asked for donations to mount legal contests even when staffers knew that these lawsuits had no basis to move forward. While the committee can’t directly charge Trump itself, it is able to send recommendations to the Justice Department if there’s evidence that he broke any laws.
Monday’s hearing was the latest in a series of public panels that the committee is holding this month to lay out the events that led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6 last year. Two more hearings are scheduled to take place this week and focus on Trump’s attempts to pressure members of his administration to overturn the 2020 election, despite experts repeatedly telling him he didn’t have the grounds to do so.
Intel's chip manufacturing technology has been outpaced by rivals like TSMC and Samsung in recent years, but the company is looking to put its troubles behind it. From a report: The first step forward will be the Intel 4 manufacturing process, which Intel has shared more details about at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' annual VLSI Technology Symposium (as reported by AnandTech and Tom's Hardware). The new manufacturing tech is on track to be used in consumer chips starting in 2023, starting with Intel's "Meteor Lake" CPU architecture. Meteor Lake will likely come to market as Intel's 14th-generation Core CPU sometime next year. Intel 4's biggest improvement is its integration of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which uses short-wavelength ultraviolet light to etch tiny patterns into silicon wafers. TSMC and Samsung use EUV technology in their most advanced manufacturing processes. Intel says that compared to the Intel 7 process, Intel 4 will enable either 21.5 percent better clock speeds using the same amount of power or the same speeds using 40 percent less power.
After Intel 4, Intel will move on to Intel 3, which is a higher-density iteration of Intel 4 using the same EUV technology. Notably, chipmakers will be able to port designs made for Intel 4 directly to Intel 3 without having to make changes, which will hopefully allow both Intel and third-party chip designers to start using it quickly (Intel 3 will be offered to third parties through Intel Foundry Services). By making smaller jumps between process technologies -- introducing EUV lithography in Intel 4 and then optimizing for maximum density in Intel 3, rather than trying to do both at once -- Intel hopes to avoid the delays and yield problems that held the 10nm/Intel 7 process back for so many years.
Nothing is too gross for a coverup. TX at its finest.
Texas law enforcement officials appear to be quite sure that they don't want the public to see or hear any further details of how law enforcement responded to the Uvalde, Texas murder of 19 elementary school children and two teachers, but it appears the justifications for hiding that evidence are still a bit up in the air. From the Associated Press we hear talk that a Texas "legal loophole" could be used to block nearly all future information about the murders from being publicly released, indefinitely. Currently, law enforcement is refusing to answer basic questions about why police delayed engaging the gunman even as children bled out on a classroom floor, after initial law enforcement statements on what unfolded proved to be utterly false in nearly every detail, out of deference to the ongoing "investigation."
So what happens when that investigation is over and the case is closed? The Associated Press reports that those representing the victims' families are concerned that nothing will happen, due to an exception in the Texas Public Information law that blocks information from being released in cases where no conviction has been made. It's meant to protect wrongly accused Texans from having the details of their failed prosecutions released, but the Texas Attorney General's Office—currently under the thumb of still-indicted Ken Paxton, go figure—has ruled that it also applies to cases in which there's no conviction because the accused criminal is dead.
Since the 18-year-old gunman who used an assault rifle to systemically execute Texas grade school children is himself now quite dead, that means the state can (1) claim they can't answer public questions about Texas law enforcement's lack of response until the investigation concludes, then (2) claim public records law forbids them from informing the public about what happened on that day after the investigation does conclude. A neat trick, and one that could allow the Texas government to refuse to answer parents' questions about why police didn't have the equipment they said they needed before they could engage the shooter, why police allegedly were carrying radio equipment that wasn't able to get a signal inside the school building, why school district police head Pete Arredondo was allegedly under the belief that no prompt action needed to be taken despite 911 calls being relayed to officers indicating the presence of living, hiding children trapped inside the school with the shooter and indicating that children had been shot and were in need of immediate medical attention.
There's a muttering from the AP report about the Republican Speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, voicing support for closing that records loophole so that the families of murdered children can hear the answers to those questions, and a contradicting muttering from a Texas law enforcement hack grumbling that law enforcement officials continue to be "always" opposed to closing the loophole in a way that allows the public to see more about law enforcement's role in these cases, and since the Texas attorney general is himself under apparently-eternal indictment for federal crimes you can bet your own children's lives that office will be working furiously to block public records requests here. If Texans don't like this they're free to not vote indicted criminals into office. And if Texans have questions about why spending 40% of a small town's entire government budget on policing still doesn't buy them the right to get basic questions answered about how 19 of their children were left to bleed out on classroom floors, they have every ability to decide for themselves whether that means the next police budget needs to be even higher or slightly lower.
In the meantime, it's becoming more and more difficult to come to any conclusion about the Uvalde law enforcement community that does not involve the words "crooked as hell." Nothing about the local police behavior makes any sense, from the inability of the town's high-budget alleged SWAT team to engage in any capacity to the school district's chief of police's refusal to cooperate with investigations of the police response. The extremely charitable interpretation of all of this remains the same; despite hoovering up 40% of the community's entire budget, the town's police proved incompetent when crisis struck.
But that kind of funding coupled with that level of apparent incompetence continues to give off a slightly "Putin's Missing Army" vibe, in that it's not exactly clear how that much money can be spent to achieve results that uniformly incompetent unless somebody, somewhere, is pulling a grift. A bungled police response in a moment of crisis is one thing, but the sheer aggressiveness of law enforcement efforts to conceal just what happened on that day is bizarre even in the context of U.S. law enforcement at large, which is saying something.
The Texas law enforcement claim, reports Vice, is that releasing the footage will allow other potential mass murderers to find "weaknesses" in how Texas police respond. The public isn't allowed to know what the weaknesses in the police response were because, sorry, wee have to keep that information secret from the next mass shooters.
"Knowing the intelligence and response capabilities of Department personnel and where those employees focus their attention will compromise law enforcement purposes by enabling criminals to anticipate weakness in law enforcement procedures and alter their methods of operation," says the Department of Public Safety.
Now, there are a whole lot of things to say about this very convenient assertion that the public shouldn't see what their gargantuan funding of Texas policing is actually buying because we can't expose "weakness" to future criminals, but what might be most striking about the claim is that it suggests that this complete bunglefuck of a police response is close enough to the norm that future mass murderers can take it as evidence of how typical Texas law enforcement procedures work.
Prior news reports indicate that 911 operators can be clearly heard advising officers that children are hiding in the building, during the nearly hour-long period in which incident command held off taking action. We already know that the police response was wildly out of sync with what law enforcement officers are trained to do, in the case of an active shooter. Media reports have already indicated that unreleased footage contradicts early law enforcement claims about what happened.
If the Texas law enforcement community is rallying around a demand that the footage of these myriad errors and falsehoods be hidden lest it give new criminals ideas of how they operate, that suggests that the Uvalde police response is close enough to what it would have been in the rest of Texas that there's something future mass murderers can glean from it. Isn't that, ahem, even more of a reason to think that there's something inherent to Texas law enforcement training that needs immediate public attention? Something that we shouldn't be letting law enforcement officials hide under a vague insinuation of "unless you want even more dead kids, that is?"
We've all been operating under the assumption that the Uvalde law enforcement response was an outlier, in the state. A well funded force that finds itself, in a moment of crisis, too paralyzed to respond as trained. If we've got the whole of Texas law enforcement now asking that evidence be hidden in one of the worst mass shootings the state has ever seen, the "outlier" premise doesn't look as likely as we assumed.
So there you go; that's what we next are tasked with chewing on, in the nation's gun and law enforcement debates. There are a lot of forces at work in Texas all gathering to make sure the parents of nineteen dead children are never given even basic evidence about what happened, how it happened, and what might have kept their children alive on that day. We started with the Uvalde school district's chief of police clamming up and refusing to talk to investigators about his role as incident commander, but now the (indicted) Texas attorney general and state law enforcement groups at multiple levels are weighing in to indicate that the public won't be seeing evidence or even the final investigative conclusions on what happened because Reasons, that's why.
With every passing day that goes by, Texas officials ratchet down what they're willing to let the town of Uvalde know about the catastrophe that happened there. Nothing here feels like Texas leaders have any intention of changing anything, in the wake of the murders. Instead the focus now is on burying whatever remaining evidence exists while top leaders vaguely promise to issue new rules about school doors, at some point, eventually.
Behold the GOP hacks' "respect for precedent". They don't give a fuck if it stands in the way of their goals.
Activists hold signs with the names of people executed in the United States since 1977, during a protest opposing the death penalty in front of the Supreme Court, in January 2017. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
In Andrus v. Texas, the Supreme Court’s new majority shows that it doesn’t care what the old majority had to say.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court determined that Terence Andrus, a death row inmate in Texas, received unconstitutionally ineffective legal counsel at his murder trial. On Monday, the Court effectively disregarded this decision — permitting a Texas court that openly defied the Supreme Court’s 2020 opinion to reinstate Andrus’s death sentence.
The Court’s 2020 decision in Andrus v. Texas explained, in great detail, that Andrus grew up in an abusive household. His mother sold drugs out of their home and also engaged in sex work. She was sometimes absent for weeks while she binged on drugs, and she would bring home boyfriends who were physically violent — one of whom raped Andrus’s half-sister when she was just a child.
Andrus also has a serious mental health condition. As the Supreme Court laid out in its 2020 opinion, “Andrus had been ‘diagnosed with affective psychosis,’ a mental-health condition marked by symptoms such as depression, mood lability, and emotional dysregulation.”
And yet, Andrus’s trial counsel presented hardly any evidence that could have humanized Andrus and clarified to the jury that he deserved a sentence other than death. Indeed, his lawyer’s performance was so deficient that the Court voted 6-3 in 2020 to strike down his death sentence and send the case back to Texas’s highest criminal appeals court to reconsider the case.
It did so using an unusual process known as “summary reversal,” which the Court typically saves for the most outlandish errors by lower courts.
In response to the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, the Texas criminal court released a defiant opinion that explicitly contradicted the Supreme Court’s analysis. The Texas court, for example, suggested that living through the rape of his half-sister did not significantly impact Andrus because “there was no evidence that [Andrus] suffered sexual abuse himself.” Similarly, the Texas court claimed that Andrus’s mental health issues must not have been “severe” because, as a child and teenager, he frequently cared for his siblings.
And yet, by deciding not to take up Andrus’s case Monday, the Supreme Court effectively blessed the Texas court’s insubordination.
Andrus’s trial counsel performed horribly
To understand the Supreme Court’s contradictory decisions in Andrus, it’s helpful to understand how states must conduct death penalty trials.
In 1972, the Supreme Court briefly abolished the death penalty in the United States. It reinstated it four years later in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). But Gregg also endorsed a two-step process that states should use to determine whether a particular individual may be sentenced to death.
Typically, capital cases are divided into a “guilt” phase and a “penalty” phase — the first of which determines whether the defendant actually committed a capital offense, and the second determines what sentence is appropriate. In the penalty phase, prosecutors argue that certain “aggravating circumstances” are present that justify a death sentence, such as if the offender had a history of serious violent crime. Defense lawyers then present evidence of “mitigating circumstances” that justify a lesser penalty.
Competent defense attorneys often present evidence that the defendant had a mental illness or was abused as a child during the penalty phase of a capital trial.
A death sentence is only warranted if the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors. The idea is that death should be reserved for the most egregious offenders, and not for someone who, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor described Andrus, “was battling inner turmoil far beyond what he was able to vocalize.”
But Andrus’s trial counsel presented virtually none of the evidence that could have humanized Andrus and shown him to be deserving of mercy. The jury heard little about the horridly abusive and neglectful environment Andrus grew up in, or about his struggles with mental illness. It never heard that, when a young Andrus was incarcerated in a juvenile facility for 18 months, he was frequently given high doses of psychotropic drugs and spent extended periods — as much as 90 days — in isolation. It never learned that Andrus struggled with suicidal urges.
Andrus’s trial counsel also never rebutted key prongs of the prosecution’s aggravating evidence. Among other things, the prosecution presented evidence that Andrus once robbed a dry-cleaning business. But Andrus was never charged with this crime. And, as the Court’s 2020 opinion explained, Andrus’s trial counsel never told the jury that “the only evidence originally tying Andrus to the [dry-cleaning robbery] was a lone witness statement, later recanted by the witness.”
Indeed, as the 2020 Supreme Court decision determined, Andrus’s trial counsel didn’t even investigate many crucial parts of Andrus’s background, or many of the prosecution’s claims — including the weak evidence linking Andrus to the dry-cleaner robbery. The jury remained ignorant of the many reasons to give Andrus a sentence other than death because Andrus’s counsel was ignorant of this evidence.
The Texas court claimed that none of these errors by Andrus’s counsel mattered
Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Strickland v. Washington (1984), someone alleging that they received ineffective assistance of counsel during their criminal trial must prove two things in order to receive a new trial. They must show that defense “counsel’s performance was deficient” and that this “deficient performance prejudiced the defense.”
That is, it’s not enough to show that the lawyers screwed up; someone seeking a new trial must also show that their lawyers screwed up in a way that is “reasonably” likely to have led to a worse outcome than if the lawyer had performed adequately.
This can be a difficult bar to surmount, but it is not supposed to be an impossible one. In a death penalty case, the Court held in its 2020 Andrus decision, Andrus only needed to show that there was “a reasonable probability that at least one juror would have struck a different balance” during the penalty phase of his trial if Andrus’s lawyer had performed adequately.
The Supreme Court’s 2020 decision held that Andrus’s trial counsel’s performance was deficient. And it criticized Texas’s highest criminal court because it “did not analyze Strickland prejudice or engage with the effect the additional mitigating evidence highlighted by Andrus would have had on the jury.” It sent the case back down to that Texas court to determine whether, had Andrus’s counsel performed adequately, it was reasonably likely that at least one juror would have voted not to sentence him to die.
Rather than conduct this inquiry in good faith, however, the Texas court spent the bulk of its opinion criticizing the Supreme Court’s analysis in its 2020 decision, and disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s characterization of the mitigating evidence Andrus’s counsel should have presented — hence the Texas court’s language downplaying the impact of living in the same home where your sibling was raped as a child, or the severity of Andrus’s mental illness.
Then, after replacing the Supreme Court’s characterization of the evidence in Andrus’s case with its own, the Texas court concluded that this mischaracterized evidence does not justify granting Andrus a new trial.
The one silver lining for Andrus is that, as Sotomayor explains in the dissenting opinion she handed down on Monday, he should have one more opportunity to challenge his death sentence. Andrus, Sotomayor writes, “may seek federal habeas review,” a process where a federal court steps in to review a state court’s conviction or sentencing process to make sure it was constitutionally adequate.
But the Court’s six Republican appointees are also aggressively rolling back the federal judiciary’s power to rescue people who are unconstitutionally convicted or who receive an unconstitutional sentence. Just last month, in Shinn v. Ramirez, the Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence of a man who is almost certainly innocent of the crime he was convicted of, after a federal habeas court ruled that this man must receive a new trial.
Just as significantly, the Court’s decision to let the Texas criminal court’s open defiance of the 2020 Andrus decision stand sends an alarming message to lower courts throughout the country. It tells them that the Court’s current majority won’t necessarily honor past decisions handed down before former President Donald Trump remade the Supreme Court.
So, if you are a lower court judge and you don’t like one of the Supreme Court’s past decisions, the Court just gave you good reason to thumb your nose at that decision.
Bonds are in the midst of a full-blown capitulation move with 10yr yields currently up over 16bps at 3.32%. MBS are down roughly a full point. These aren't the biggest losses we've ever seen in a day, but they're extraordinarily big losses to be experiencing at the top of trend that has already covered as much ground as the one seen so far in 2022. ... Long story short, the market is freaked out about what Friday means for the policy outlook. Wednesday continues to be one of the biggest flashpoints for bond volatility we've seen in a long time.
Click on graph for larger image.
This is a graph from Mortgage News Daily (MND) showing 30-year fixed rates from three sources (MND, MBA, Freddie Mac) over the last year.
The 30-year fixed rate for top tier scenarios was 6.13% today, up from 5.55% last Thursday.
Go to MND and you can adjust the graph for different time periods.
Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time when they got hurt or upset; some cite the day their younger sibling was born.
Despite vast differences in the details, these memories do have a couple of things in common: They’re all autobiographical, or memories of significant experiences in a person’s life, and they typically didn’t happen before the age of 2 or 3. In fact, most people can’t remember events from the first few years of their lives—a phenomenon researchers have dubbed infantile amnesia. But why can’t we remember the things that happened to us when we were infants? Does memory start to work only at a certain age?
Here’s what researchers know about babies and memory.
It's difficult to keep track of all the studies and internal documents that suggest Facebook's 2018 "algorithm" change specifically boosted far-right influence and conspiracy peddling, but throw this one on the pile, too. A new study again concludes that Facebook's supposed 2018 emphasis on "meaningful social interactions" disproportionately elevated Republican content over Democratic content, and in a way that wasn't matched on rival platform Twitter.
The NBC News writeup of the conclusions, reached by researchers at Miami University and Wright State University, found that the roughly-equal rates of interactions on posts from local Democratic and Republican party Facebook pages shifted to a more than three to one Republican advantage by July of 2019—again, a result not matched on Twitter—and that the results are first to show that the 2018 Facebook changes "amplified Republican causes at a hyperlocal level." The difference between engagement levels for the two parties has narrowed since then, but slowly.
So we have here yet another study providing evidence that Facebook's algorithm efficiently inflated radical conservative causes in a disproportionate fashion, compared to other platforms, and which provides yet more backup for Facebook whistleblowers that came forward with internal evidence showing Facebook knew full well its new focus on boosting on-platform "interactions" was rewarding extremist content and conspiracy theories.
Facebook has been blowing smoke about its changes ever since, insisting that, by gum, the rise of QAnon, election hoaxes, white nationalist content, and other froth just happens to have come along independently of their corporate efforts to reward viral content over trustable content—and they'll be insisting that as long as a single lawyer remains in the building. They'd be better off attempting to pin at least some of the blame on Fox News, which has itself steadily radicalized in the past decade and now freely amplifies Facebook-launched conspiracy content, but the Fox News slide happened much earlier—even “new voice” Tucker Carlson got his current white nationalism power-hour from Fox in 2016—but that still doesn't explain why only Facebook saw a rise in Facebook extremism that exactly coincides with an internal Facebook change highlighting Facebook extremists.
Facebook's stream of vacuous denials has already veered into Cigarette Company Lawyer territory, and doesn't look any more credible with this new research. The theory that Facebook's algorithm changes are not directly responsible for a rise in extremist content on their platform is, at this point, barely more than a conspiracy theory itself.
The central problem remains what it always was: Facebook, forever in pursuit of "engagement," continues to show little to no interest in policing dangerous content on its own platform. It is the world's democracies that will have to suck it up and deal with the social chaos resulting from Zuckerberg and company's obsession with riding the revenue train as far as the tracks can be made to go, because installing the sort of safeguards that would put a true dent in conspiracy peddling and dangerous hoax promotion would lower "engagement," and thus revenue, and thus executive boat sizes.
Or, more to the point: They just do not care.
That would be the only possible conclusion from the news that, despite Facebook's alleged 2016 ban on gun sales on their platform, internal guidelines allow gun sellers to ignore those rules ten times before being booted, with The Washington Post reporting that "a separate five-strikes policy extends even to gun sellers and purchasers who actively call for violence or praise a known dangerous organization, according to the documents."
Got that? You can offer a gun for sale on Facebook while advocating that it be used to topple the government or promote white supremacy, and as long as you do it only four times instead of five, Facebook will look the other way.
Similarly, recent research by Media Matters showed that Facebook claims that it was working to address climate change denialism and "energy independence"-themed hoaxes boosted by its own algorithms resulted in a whopping two of the top 100 such posts being dinged with a fact-checking label. Everything else sailed right by.
Now, we can all agree that purging any media platform of all misinformation is likely an impossible task. But if an internal Facebook effort can't even tick down the list of the 100 most shared posts violating their standards, that doesn't speak to much of an effort. Even a single in-house moderator could make it through 100 such posts.
That suggests that whatever Facebook's actual misinformation policies are, there's not even one guy with a laptop inside the company who's been assigned to actually look for it.
As for "you can advocate for extremist violence while selling guns up to five times on our platform, but no more than that," that's just a straight-up policy botch. If you're already tracking how many times individual gun sellers are promoting violence, you ... have the necessary information already. I'm surprised the in-house legal teams didn't throw an absolute fit at the implications of that one.
So there you go. We've got more evidence that a single Facebook algorithm change in 2018, one bent on promoting viral content over news content, is responsible for the platform's descent into distinctly Republican-leaning extremism and hoaxes. We've got yet more reports suggesting that whatever Facebook claims to be doing about its violence and misinformation problems, little to none of it is actually trickling down into actual action.
Facebook refuses to moderate its platform to curb the conspiracy theorists and recruiters for extremism because it costs money Facebook doesn't want to spend and will reduce revenues it doesn't want to reduce. There's no great mystery here: It’s just another case of near-monopolistic tech power looking to wring money out of the nation while relying on corporate lobbying efforts to pave over evidence of large-scale public damage. Again.
A 29% rate hike for hydroelectric power in Chelan County, created specifically for cryptocurrency miners, went into effect on June 1. Decrypt reports: The miners used to pay a lower, high-density load rate for their electricity. Now they'll pay a newly-created cryptocurrency rate, known as Rate 36. Washington state accounted for about two-thirds of all hydroelectric power generated in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. The state's Grand Coulee Dam, located on the Columbia River in Grant and Okanogan counties, powers a 6,809-megawatt. The cheap and renewable hydropower has made Washington state a popular destination for Bitcoin miners too. Washington state accounted for 4% of the total U.S. hashrate in December, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. [...]
KPQ also reported that nearby Douglas County has stopped allowing new Bitcoin miners to set up operations there because they already consume 25% of the county's available energy. Still, the Chelan County rate hike won't ban crypto miners. For companies that have made substantial investments in their mining facilities, officials have approved transition plans to gradually increase energy rates over the next two years. "We need to have some sort of transition. That's important for business," PUD Commissioner Ann Congdon told the Wenatchee World on Tuesday. "I understand how businesses need that in order to plan."
Malachi Salcido, CEO of Salcido Enterprises, told the local news outlet that the new rate will force him to reconfigure his three Chelan County crypto mining facilities into data farms. He has four other crypto mining facilities, two in Douglas County and two in Grant County. Under the new pricing plan, Salcido can keep his Chelan facility on the lower, high-density energy rate if he processes data instead of mining crypto. The data processing uses the same amount of power as crypto mining, he told the Wenatchee World. "Do you really want to be in the business of regulating what kind of processing happens on servers in your territory," Salcido said.
Like many bodies of water in the U.S. West, the Great Salt Lake is in critical condition. What’s unique about the Western Hemisphere’s largest saltwater lake dwindling compared with, say, Lake Powell’s demise, is what the Great Salt Lake could unleash as it continues to dry up. EcoWatch reports that the lake has decreased by two-thirds of its size over the past four decades, priming it for disaster as the region continues to face drought conditions.
A lack of water leads to an increase of salinity in what’s left of the lake, decimating the lake’s algae and thereby threatening the brine shrimp that feed off of it. The Great Salt Lake is considered an “avian oasis,” bringing hundreds of species of birds to feast on its marine life. Those millions of migratory birds will likely leave the region as conditions worsen.
The threat to humans is also alarming. Three-quarters of Utah’s population lives around the Great Salt Lake—all of whom could be threatened by toxic dust clouds kicked as the lake further dries and fragments of the lake bed itself containing high levels of arsenic break down and break away into the air. The New York Times notes that, in addition to the Great Salt Lake’s bed containing high levels of arsenic, it also contains antimony, copper, and zirconium. Dust clouds containing small particulates from the lake bed threaten human health and are especially dangerous to those with respiratory conditions. Lawmakers are so concerned about this very real threat looming over the Salt Lake City metro they’ve even considered piping in water from the Pacific Ocean to replenish the lake.
In a recent appearance on PBS Utah’s Hinckley Report, Rep. Tim Hawkes listed examples of lakes that have met disastrous fates from climate change, cautioning that the alarmism surrounding the Great Salt Lake drying up is “not just fear-mongering.”
“The effects have been catastrophic,” Hawkes said. “So if you look at the Aral Sea, which was a very large lake in Central Asia, when that was lost, it just devastated the local economy. You had some of the highest rates of respiratory illness and death in the world. That’s been repeated in Lake Urmia in Iran, and then much closer to home. Just a much smaller terminal lake, Owens Lake in California, became the largest source of dust pollution in North America, and that’s a lake that’s maybe a seventeenth of the size of the Great Salt Lake.”
Experts have pointed to the Owens Lake disaster in California as a possible sign of what’s to come if Utah can’t adequately balance the water needs of a booming population with the crisis in the Great Salt Lake. A 2018 report in Naturesuccinctly sums up Owens Lake’s demise: “At the start of the 20th century, Owens Lake in Southern California was one of the largest inland bodies of water in the United States. By the mid-1920s, it was gone, drained to provide water to a mushrooming Los Angeles. Over the past 30 years, the city has spent around US$2 billion to undo the damage. It has failed to restore the lake.”
The report highlights what’s happened since Owens Lake was drained and dust pollution all but emptied nearby towns, pointing to a potential silver lining in how California moves forward with what is now largely regarded as a massive salt flat. The stakes are far higher with the Great Salt Lake, and the clock is ticking as large swaths of the U.S. West face water shortages and restrictions.
The Washington Postreported this week that Tae Johnson, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official who has continued to serve under the Biden administration, used the word “fiasco.” But he wasn’t saying the separations, lack of central tracking system, or the delays were a fiasco, but that reunifications were happening much too quickly. And, he’s still serving in the federal government today.
As The Washington Post notes, officials including former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III claimed the policy was all about law and order when, in fact, it was about cruelty. As asylum-seeking parents were sent to court for criminal penalties in relation to crossing the border, their kids were forcibly sent to an Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) contracted facility.
But the report said that officials, including Johnson, complained about swift reunifications. Matthew Albence, a former official who once claimed ICE’s migrant family jails are like “summer camps,” expressed worry that court proceedings for parents would go so fast that they’d return to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility before their children could be sent off to ORR.
“Albence said CBP should work with ICE ‘to prevent this from happening,’ such as by taking the children themselves to ORR ‘at an accelerated pace’ or bringing the adults directly to ICE from criminal court, instead of returning them to their children,” the report continued. That’s right—get ‘em outta here faster, is what he really said. The Washington Post said that another official, David Jennings, complained about ORR not accepting children because parents were returning from court. “No consequence at this point,” he said in the report. “ORR needs arm twisted.”
“[M]igrants’ lawyers argue that the new disclosures show the government intended to separate families and deter others, and they say that bolsters their claim that the government intended to inflict harm,” the report continued.
This has always been obvious. A two-year investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general showed Sessions wanted to show no mercy to asylum-seeking families. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly said. His deputy, Rod Rosenstein, ”went even further,” “telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were.”
Sessions, who could barely hide his glee when he walked out to announce the rescission of the popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017, refused to testify in the inspector general’s investigation. Sessions did talk to Reuters, where he falsely claimed it “was unfortunate, very unfortunate” that children couldn’t be quickly reunited with their parents. But it was exactly what they wanted. Sessions openly said on right-wing programming that he hoped the cruelty scared away other families. Friendly reminder: Asylum is legal immigration.
Further findings from the Department of Homeland Security watchdog confirmed that when officials were under court order to reunite families, they so badly botched the process that some kids were forced to wait in vans overnight to be reunited with their parents. In one child’s case, they were forced to wait in a van for nearly two days.
Physicians for Human Rights said in a study last year that children who were kidnapped from their parents continued to meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder a year after reunification. One child, an 8-year-old boy, continued to meet criteria for PTSD, as well as separation anxiety disorder, two years after reunification. Despite this state-sanctioned cruelty, “[n]o official who designed, implemented, or defended it has been held accountable or barred from federal employment,” tweeted Florence Project’s Kari Hong.
“The decision, by a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, stopped just short of overruling a 1971 precedent, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, that allowed federal courts, rather than Congress, to authorize at least some kinds of lawsuits seeking money from federal officials accused of violating constitutional rights,” The New York Timesreports. “But the basic message of Wednesday’s decision, Egbert v. Boule, No. 21-147, was that only Congress can authorize such suits.”
This week’s case involved a Washington state innkeeper who both colluded with border agents in reporting people who had unlawfully crossed into the U.S., and providing migrants with lodging and transportation, The Washington Postreported. Robert Boule ended up launching a lawsuit in 2017, accusing agent Erik Egbert of entering his property without a warrant, assaulting him, and prompting a tax audit into his business. While a federal judge dismissed the case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed it to continue.
But on Wednesday, the court’s right-wing justices “reinforced protections for government officials who are generally immune from civil lawsuits when it is determined they have acted in good faith while carrying out their duties,” The Washington Postcontinued, claiming it was Congress’ job. Good luck with that.
“Because Congress will never do this, what this means is that, basically, if the federal government violates your rights in anything but a narrow set of circumstances, if the government doesn’t want to make amends on its own, well, tough shit, bucko,” responded American Immigration Council senior policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Clarence Thomas, whose spouse Ginny was an active participant in the effort to overthrown the 2020 presidential election, authored the decision. Thomas was also the lone justice to side with the insurrectionist former president’s effort to block the release of documents requested by the January 6 commission probing the coup attempt.
Sonia Sotomayor authored the dissent. She “wrote that the court had ‘absolutely immunized from liability’ thousands of Border Patrol agents ‘no matter how egregious the misconduct or resultant injury,’” The Washington Post said.
Why should this case, as well as other cases involving abusive border agents, be a national security concern? Why should you care? Because roughly 200 million Americans live within the 100-mile zone where border agents claim they have the right to harass you. “Legislation from 1946 gives agents the authority to search any vehicle near an ‘external boundary’ of the United States, and subsequent regulations defined that area as within 100 air miles of a land or sea boundary,” Mother Jones reported in 2018.
”Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area,” the American Civil Liberties Union said. Some of the largest cities in the nation are within this zone, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia.
If you speak, that may be cause enough for border agents to harass you. In 2018, two U.S. citizen Latinas were harassed by a border agent while shopping at a Montana convenience store after he overheard them speaking Spanish. “When Ana and Mimi asked why they were being held, he answered unequivocally: Because they were speaking Spanish,” the ACLU said at the time. While Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regularly receives its funding without question, legislation enacting critical accountability reforms within Border Patrol has repeatedly stalled.
“In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that border agents may unconstitutionally enter a person's home without a warrant and assault him and ... federal courts are powerless to do anything about it,” tweeted attorney Cristian Farias.
Carl Paladino is a former Republican gubernatorial candidate for New York. Every foray into his campaign history has led to new revelations of what a racist, sexist, piece of work Paladino is. He is currently running for a congressional seat in the Empire State and is endorsed by none other than the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, Elise Stefanik. The Buffalo businessman has been making some headlines lately for a slew of hot takes he’s had over the past couple of days.
After more pressure was put on him to “cowboy up,” as the gun enthusiasts love to say, like a true coward, Paladino offered up this backward-crawling explanation: "I just didn't remember the fact that I published it; I couldn't remember. It was written by Jeff Briggs, a good friend from Rochester. I published it because he is a friend."
But we can’t blame all of Paladino’s racist, ignorant ideas on his “good friend from Rochester.” In fact, Paladino has a new offensive set of remarks and ideas, first uncovered by Media Matters.
According to the report, Paladino appeared last year on a weekly Buffalo radio show, called The r-House Radio Show, hosted by real estate executive Peter Hunt. Hunt was asking Paladino about how conservatives could get “roused” up in a state that votes predominantly blue. “How do you get people thinking about the possibility of change here in New York state and what that might mean ... for everyone here?”
Paladino begins by telling Hunt he was just thinking about this very topic “the other day.” Well, not exactly. See, according to Paladino, he was hanging out with some other good friends, and “somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler, and how he aroused the crowds.”
Okaaaaaaay. Weird soundtrack for a group hangout, but let’s see where this is going.
Paladino sort of laughs with this worn-out white supremacist trope of a talking point. “And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational.”
Someone inspirational. Like Hitler.
Paladino then makes a vague and somewhat rambling attack on “RINO-ism,” (RINO stands for Republican In Name Only) and Hunt quickly changes the subject to “deficit spending” in New York State.
It isn’t shocking that people like Paladino, and Trump before him, look up to Hitler and his supposed charisma. Decades ago, Ivana Trump did an interview with Vanity Fairand let the antisemitic cat out of the bag when she revealed that a book of Hitler’s speeches was the only book on Trump’s nightstand.
Carl Paladino, whose House bid is backed by third-ranked House GOPer Elise Stefanik, said on radio last year that Hitler is "the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer, has been there and done it.” https://t.co/pg24M23DNApic.twitter.com/O1xgoeAEbX
This new news story comes less than a week after Elise Stefanik and her “great replacement theory” white supremacist campaign released her official endorsement of Paladino, writing:
I am proud to announce my endorsement of my friend Carl Paladino in NY-23.
Carl is a job creator and conservative outsider who will be a tireless fighter for the people of New York in our fight to put America First to save the country.
Oh. The best part? The campaign photo she released, with her in the front and a de-aged by about 1,000 years Paladino is next-level The Commissar Vanishes kind of stuff.
This photo is … maybe from the cutting room floor of Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman?”
For a comparison:
This photo is from 6 years ago!
The endorsement came just two days after Paladino posted his false flag gun control conspiracy theory—on the exact same social media platform.
People who buy or sell guns on Facebook can violate the social network's ban on gun purchases 10 times before they're kicked off the service, The Washington Post reported Thursday. Facebook's 10-strikes rule is detailed in "internal guidance obtained by The Washington Post," the article said:
The policy, which has not previously been reported, is much more lenient than for users who post child pornography, which is illegal, or a terrorist image on Facebook, which prompts immediate removal from the platform.
A separate five-strikes policy extends even to gun sellers and purchasers who actively call for violence or praise a known dangerous organization, according to the documents.
The policy apparently used to be even more lenient. "Until 2020, the strike threshold for guns was more than 10," the Post wrote, citing anonymous sources. "That threshold seemed 'too high' to many employees, who argued to reduce it to 10 strikes or lower."
Facebook banned gun sales in 2016. Its gun policy says the "purchase, sale, or trade of firearms, ammunition, and explosives between private individuals isn't allowed on Facebook."
This was utterly predictable. When vaccine uptake slowed down after the first few months of 2021, newspapers and broadcasters were quick to talk about supposed fears of vaccination among Black Americans, or poor acceptance by immigrant communities. Only that’s not what was happening. What was happening was a politicization of the vaccine that saw Republicans—overwhelmingly white Republicans—rejecting the vaccine due to what seemed like an unending list of ridiculous conspiracy theories.
And now no one should be able to say that they didn’t see this New York Times article coming: “Over the past year, the COVID-19 death rate for white Americans has been 14% higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72% higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.”
With the influx of the omicron family of variants and subvariants mixed with desperate efforts to return to normal—which, in Republican-led states have generally included regulations against masks, social distancing, or vaccine requirements—it’s impossible to say just how many cases of COVID-19 the U.S. is experiencing at the moment. Testing rates are low, but positive results are high. That’s not good.
I argued on several occasions that COVID-19 could not be allowed to become endemic. It turns out that it certainly can ... so long as America is willing to accept hundreds of deaths each day and a legacy of lasting health effects that will disrupt life over decades. Welcome to the new normal.
Right now, in spite of an abundance of at-home testing, almost none of which gets reported to any health officials, the U.S. is averaging over 100,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day. New hospital admissions are up to over 4,000 cases a day. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Florida continues to top the charts, with over 11,000 cases on Wednesday. U.S. deaths from COVID-19 are currently running around 300 a day, That’s not the unbelievable 4,000 a day that we hit in early 2021. But it’s more than the number of Americans killed by guns or in highway accidents combined. Move along, nothing to see here.
But the most shocking/not shocking part of the latest numbers is the way that white Americans have moved to the top of the death charts.
That wasn’t true early on. Black communities had much higher death rates early on, in the pre-vaccine days, for the reasons that Black communities always have higher death rates: poor health care availability and quality. The same was true of immigrant communities in many areas, and in Native American nations. The Navajo Nation in particular was ravaged by COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic. When treatment for COVID-19 pre-vaccine meant availability of high-quality care and equipment such as ventilators, the advantage that the white community had was simply huge.
As vaccines became available, the gap between these communities closed. Community organizers in Black neighborhoods worked tirelessly to obtain more vaccine and to make it available to people who normally had little access to healthcare. The same thing happened in the Navajo Nation, where dedicated volunteers and community leaders brought their community to one of the highest vaccination levels in the U.S.
But even as these communities were working harder and harder to get vaccines to everyone, Republican leaders and right-wing media were working harder and harder to stop vaccines from becoming universal.
Only about 60 percent of Republican adults are vaccinated, compared with about 75 percent of independents and more than 90 percent of Democrats, according to Kaiser. And Republicans are both disproportionately white and older. Together, these facts help explain why the white death rate has recently been higher than the Asian, Black or Latino rate.
To reach the point where the white death rate from COVID-19 is higher than that in the Black and Latino communities, the vaccination rate among white Americans had to be so poor that it more than overcame the quality of care available to those communities. Republicans are so dedicated to the idea of using the vaccine as a means of showing their distrust of government that they literally threw away all the advantages that were inherent in the health care system.
White Republicans have been worrying about some kind of conspiracy to replace them with Black people or immigrants. It turns out there is such a conspiracy. And white Republicans are running it.
It never fails. Start any online conversation about the issue of gun violence, and it won’t take five minutes before someone rushes in to ask, “What about Chicago?” That's because right-wing media has long been selling the idea that America’s cities are hellscapes, overrun with violent drug gangs, gunning people down by the score. That is, those cities that were not burned to the ground by violent Black Lives Matter and Antifa mobs, which is also a thing that right-wing media pushes and right-wing social media constantly repeats. Chicago in particular is the go-to case for anyone who is in a hurry to tell you that “gun control doesn’t work.”
Gun violence is so often associated with cities that the term “urban gun violence” is often passed off as the only kind there is. But the truth is that cities are much safer than rural areas when it comes to gun violence, and the states pro-gun fanatics like to finger are actually much safer than the rural states where guns are more common.
It’s not the cities that are hotspots for either gun violence in general, or for mass shootings. Looking at the school shootings that have happened since Columbine:
The firearm mortality in New York state is 5.3 people per 100,000. Even that number is very high compared to nations around the world. Still, it’s lower than the 10.8 rate in Illinois. So that claim about Chicago is … completely wrong. Not when states like Louisiana and Mississippi have death rates from guns over 25. Just to hammer that home, the rate of firearm mortality in these states is five times that in New York and over twice that of Illinois. No wonder these are considered “deep red states.”
Why would that be? Because the rate of gun ownership in New York is 20%, while in both Louisiana and Mississippi, the number is greater than 50%. Illinois is in the middle with 28%.
More guns, more deaths by gun.
Yes, it’s easy to point at cities like Chicago and make a weak argument about gun control laws not working, but the fact is that Chicago is directly adjacent to Indiana. What’s in those little blocks just across the line? Gun shops. Lots of them. Proving nothing more than if you make it dead simple to get deadly weapons people will still end up … dead. New York, where state law is more comprehensive and neighboring states are less willing to make a quick profit from selling murder machines to out-of-state residents, has fewer guns and many fewer deaths.
But even in Illinois, Chicago is not the hotspot for gun deaths. The numbers out of Chicago are waved around by pro-gun forces because: 1) That false perception that it has some very tough restrictions, and 2) the pervasive idea that it’s a hotbed of gang violence (an idea reinforced not just by right-wing media but by the genuinely pervasive cop TV that fills broadcast airwaves). But the truth is the only thing that makes Chicago seem to stand out is that it’s large. With 9.5 million people in the Chicago metropolitan area, it contains by far the greatest bulk of Illinois’ 12.7 million population.
Even so, notorious Cook County has a rate of 13 deaths per 100,000—that’s higher than the state average, but a lot less than smaller counties like Vermillion, which tops 15. Or the downstate county of St. Clair that touches 20. Tiny Massic county, with a total population of 14,041 and a statue of Superman in its capital city of Metropolis, has a rate of firearm mortality that is well above that of Chicago.
As Bloomberg reports, the situation with Chicago and the rest of Illinois is far from unique. In fact, when it comes to a measure of death from “external causes” (a measure that excludes factors such as accidental self-poisoning and health risks associated with weight), “the more urban your surroundings, the less danger you face.” In some cities, the surrounding ring of suburban counties was less dangerous than the core urban county. However, the overall risk of death from external causes is “three times higher in rural and small-town America than in the country’s largest city.”
Why are cities so associated with violent crime? Part of it is that movies and television shows set in cities often focus on stories about crime. Part of it is that when violence does occur in a dense, urban area, it’s more likely to be witnessed by a number of people.
Here are two additional reasons: The kind of gun violence most likely to affect people in rural and urban areas is different. For people in urban areas, homicide is the biggest threat, with a rate of just under 6 per 100,000. That is genuinely higher than the rate of homicides in rural areas. For rural areas, it’s suicide that is the much larger threat, averaging 11 per 100,000 people.
There’s one more reason cities are so tied to gun violence in the mind of much of the public: Racism. There’s a reason that “urban” slips into the conversation so often when Republicans are talking about gun violence. It not only reassures their rural base that they have nothing to worry about, but also points a finger at the constantly referenced “Black on Black” crime. And, of course, some Republicans are not so subtle.
As Rebekah Sager reported on Monday, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters admitted that there was a problem with gun violence in America, but he knew exactly where to find it. “It’s people in Chicago and St. Louis shooting each other,” said Masters, “very often, Black people, frankly.”
Masters was right about one thing: At 23.9 per 100,000, Missouri has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the nation. However, his explanation falls a bit short when looking at the state with the third-highest rate of firearm mortality overall: Wyoming. Wyoming has a rate of 25.9 gun deaths per 100,000. it also has a population that is 92% white. A resident of Caspar, Wyoming, is more likely to die from gun violence than a resident of Chicago. In fact, so is a resident of Phoenix, Arizona. Which seems like something that Masters should know.
Republicans don’t just want to “other” the people of cities, they want to other the victims of gun violence, too. That way they can protect what matters most to them … gun money.
Enlarge / Jurassic World Dominion, out this week exclusively in theaters, brings the gang back together—but that's maybe not a good thing. (credit: Universal)
How low can you set your expectations for Jurassic World Dominion?
If you can burrow those expectations deep into the earth, perhaps so far that researchers don't discover them for thousands of years, you may have a good time. That goes double for parents who are looking for a movie to watch with amped-up, pre-teen dinosaur aficionados. The film's ideal audience agrees with its filmmakers about what matters here: the dinosaurs, not the humans.
This is the kind of film in which a Quetzalcoatlus appears on the horizon, and a character responds by saying its name briskly yet accurately, just before the majestic flying dino emerges in terrifying and detailed fashion. This creature gets better and fuller justification for its actions than pretty much any actor in the film—which might have been fine, had Dominion's writers not spent so much time trying, and failing, to stitch its characters' motivations together.
fuck, please no. I like having independent x.265 hardware
An anonymous reader shares a report: At Roku, a video-streaming platform operator that's suffered a punishing stock plunge, employees are buzzing about the possibility of an acquisition -- and their talk and hopes are pinned on Netflix. Employees at Roku have been discussing the possibility of a Netflix acquisition in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The chatter comes as Roku's stock has dropped about 80% since late July on weaker demand for video streaming and lower set-top-box sales.
Roku competes with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung in the market for streaming devices, and some of those industry titans are battling with the smaller company for lucrative video-ad dollars. The collapse in Roku's stock made it hard to compete with its larger tech rivals on pay in a tight labor market. The result has been a staggering increase in equity grants to employees, leaving Roku well underwater on stock-based compensation. Roku has been seen as an acquisition target before -- including last year, when, according to The Wall Street Journal, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts considered purchasing the company. In January, the departure of a top Roku executive stoked questions about the company's future.
The House is in full swing Wednesday, with gun safety bill votes that will put some pressure on Senate Republicans. They are not taking multiple votes on each provision in the package of eight bills, as many members wanted, but instead will go for swift passage and pressure on the Senate.
Where Republicans are continuing to succeed in dragging Democrats along in their slow walk to ultimately doing nothing. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer backed down from pressing a vote in the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde massacre, instead promising that as soon as the Senate came back from Memorial Day recess this week, they’d have their votes. This week? Spoiler alert: he’s not pressing that vote. On the floor Wednesday, Schumer left the schedule open-ended. “I hope my colleagues continue to make progress towards an effective agreement, hopefully by the end of the week,” he said.
Meanwhile, the American people want action. The brand new Daily Kos/Civiqs survey shows a very real thirst among voters for concrete action. The survey found that 83% of Americans consider gun violence to be a national problem (67% a big problem, 16% a small problem). But what was striking was the bipartisan 86% support for universal background checks of would-be gun purchasers—that included a majority of Republicans at 75%. There is majority support—52% (45% strongly support, 7% somewhat support)—for a ban on assault-style weapons.
That backs up polling conducted immediately after Uvalde by Morning Consult for Politico. It found 88% approval for background checks on all gun sales; 75% support for a national database tracking gun sales; a 67% approval for banning assault-style guns; 84% approval for red flag laws; and 77% approval for requiring gun owners to put their guns in safe storage units.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats seem to think that Republicans are actually conducting negotiations on guns in good faith, while Republicans have repeatedly said they’re not talking about guns, but about mental illness and school security. There’s one set of talks between two senators—Democrat Dick Blumenthal and Republican Lindsey Graham—on red flag laws, but no progress there has been reported.
What they’re talking about with red flags is actually not so much a law as providing incentives in the form of federal grants to states that pass their own laws. Federal grant funding that Republicans will likely try to steal from other spending priorities, mostly like COVID-19 money to states.
“This issue is too important not to do everything we can to find a bipartisan way forward,” Schumer told reporters Tuesday. “We’re giving [Republicans] the opportunity, the chance, to say yes—we’re ready and eager to find common ground on something that can actually help address gun violence.”
That way forward is definitely not going to include more restrictive gun laws, according to Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican Mitch McConnell put in charge of making sure the Senate takes as long as possible to make nothing meaningful happen.
“I want to be clear, though: We are not talking about restricting the rights of current law-abiding gun owners or citizens,” Cornyn said Monday in a floor speech. “What I’m interested in is keeping guns out of the hands of those who, by current law, are not supposed to have them: people with mental health problems, people who have criminal records.”
“I’m a proud supporter of the Second Amendment,” Cornyn said. His counterpart, Sen. Chris Murphy (CT) who is the lead for Democrats, meantime, says this time is different. “Parents are scared to death we’re going to do nothing. Ultimately, the vast majority of Americans are demanding we step up and do something,” he said.
Ultimately, the Senate will do next to nothing that would keep schoolchildren—or churchgoers, or grocery store shoppers, or nightclub revelers, or people with disgruntled coworkers, or people living with domestic violence—safe. American voters know that, too. That Morning Consult/Politico poll found that just 37% think that Congress might act on gun restrictions in the next year, and 88% say there will be at least as many or more incidents of gun violence in the next year.
Which is as depressing as hell, and a fact that the nihilistic Republicans will exploit by making sure nothing happens. It doesn’t actually hurt them in their individual races in their very rural, Republican states.
Migrants are pictured after being detained by US Border Patrol near Mount Cristo Rey in New Mexico, on June 3, 2022. | Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images
Egbert v. Bouleis a severe blow to the proposition that law enforcement must obey the Constitution.
The Supreme Court handed down a decision on Wednesday which effectively gives Border Patrol agents who violate the Constitution total immunity from lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in Egbert v. Boule, moreover, has implications that stretch far beyond the border. Egbert guts a seminal Supreme Court precedent, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents(1971), which established that federal law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution may be individually sued — and potentially be required to compensate their victims for their illegal actions.
Egbert is a severe blow to the broader project of police accountability. While it does not target lawsuits against state law enforcement officers who violate the Constitution, it all but eliminates the public’s ability to sue Border Patrol officers — and possibly all federal officers — who commit similar violations.
In fairness, Egbert does indicate that people who believe their rights were violated by federal law enforcement may file a grievance with the law enforcement agency that employs the officer who allegedly violated the Constitution. But such grievances will be investigated by other law enforcement officers, and no court or other agency can review a law enforcement officer’s decision to exonerate a fellow officer.
And, perhaps most importantly, Egbert most likely shuts down a civil rights plaintiff’s ability to be compensated if their rights are violated.
The plaintiff in Egbert alleged a very straightforward violation of the Fourth Amendment
The plaintiff in this case, Robert Boule, is, admittedly, a somewhat shady figure. Boule operates a bed and breakfast along the border between Washington state and Canada, one cheekily named the Smuggler’s Inn.
Though Boule has, at times, acted as a paid confidential informant for immigration officials, his “guests” sometimes use his property to illegally cross the border. According to Thomas’s opinion, “federal agents also have seized from the Inn shipments of cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and other narcotics.”
Nevertheless, Boule alleges that he was the victim of a fairly straightforward Fourth Amendment violation: the use of excessive force by a law enforcement officer.
In March of 2014, Boule welcomed a guest who had recently arrived in the United States from Turkey. The guest was lawfully present in the United States but federal border patrol agent Erik Egbert decided to confront this guest when he arrived at the Smuggler’s Inn.
Upon the guest’s arrival, Egbert drove onto Boule’s property and approached the car containing the guest. Egbert refused to leave after Boule asked him to do so, and then Boule stepped between the border patrol agent and his guest. Egbert then allegedly shoved Boule against the car, grabbed him, and pushed him to the ground.
Boule sued, claiming that he should be compensated for this alleged violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be free of excessive force.
These facts, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor notes in dissent, closely track the facts of the Bivens case. In that case, Sotomayor explains, “the plaintiff alleged that Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents unlawfully entered his apartment in New York City and used constitutionally unreasonable force to arrest him.” And Bivens determined that this plaintiff could sue the officer who allegedly used excessive force.
Before Wednesday’s decision in Egbert, in other words, it was well-established that federal law enforcement officers who use unconstitutionally excessive force may be sued in federal court. Egbert explicitly exempts all Border Patrol agents from this rule, and it could be read to exempt nearly all — if not all — federal law enforcement officers from Bivens suits.
Bivens, explained
While the Constitution places numerous limits on law enforcement officers, including the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against excessive force, it is silent about what the proper remedy is against an officer who violates these limits. A federal law explicitly authorizes suits against state and local officers who violate “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws,” but there is no similar statute that explicitly authorizes suits against federal agents.
Nevertheless, the Court held in Bivens that a right to sue federal law enforcement officers is implicit in the Constitution. “Power,” Justice William Brennan wrote in Bivens, “once granted, does not disappear like a magic gift when it is wrongfully used.” An officer who acts unlawfully “in the name of the United States possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual trespasser exercising no authority other than his own.” And thus there must be a meaningful remedy to ensure that officers do not abuse this power.
Shortly after Bivens was decided, however, President Richard Nixon made two appointments to the Supreme Court, giving the Court a new majority that was far less sympathetic to the rights of criminal defendants. And, in large part due to the Electoral College and a malapportioned Senate that gives Republicans an unfair advantage in the fight for control over the judiciary, the Court has marched steadily rightward ever since.
As a result, the Court’s most recent decisions, including Egbert, describe Bivens suits as a “disfavored judicial activity.” Indeed, the Court has signaled that it is eager to overrule Bivens — although Egbert doesn’t go quite that far.
In Hernández v. Mesa (2020), the Supreme Court held that the family of a Mexican child could not sue a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed their 15-year-old son — even if they could prove that the officer shot the child in cold blood and without provocation. The five justices who joined the majority opinion in Hernández concluded that it is “doubtful that we would have reached the same result” if Bivens were “decided today.”
Egbert echoes this view, stating that “we have indicated that if we were called to decide Bivens today, we would decline to discover any implied causes of action in the Constitution.” Thus, while Egbert puts off until another day the question of whether to overrule Bivens in its entirety, it’s not hard to see where this train is headed.
Egbert also makes explicit what was probably implicit in the Hernández decision — that Border Patrol agents in particular have total immunity from Bivens suits, and thus may not be sued for constitutional violations. “We ask here whether a court is competent to authorize a damages action not just against Agent Egbert but against Border Patrol agents generally,” Thomas writes, adding, “the answer, plainly, is no.”
More than that, Thomas announces a new rule that federal courts must apply in all Bivens lawsuits moving forward. The Court should reject the lawsuit if there is “any rational reason (even one)” to deny the claim.
In the past, the Court has looked to whether a new Bivens lawsuit “is different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens cases decided by this Court” to determine whether a good reason exists to deny the claim. Egbert suggests that if there are any differences between a new lawsuit and a previous one, that is a “rational reason” to toss out the new lawsuit.
As Sotomayor notes in dissent, both Bivens and Egbert involved similar excessive force claims brought against law enforcement. And the holding of Bivens was that any “federal agent acting under color of his authority” may be sued if they violate the Fourth Amendment. But Egbert denies Boule’s Bivens claim, largely because Boule’s claim involves a Border Patrol agent, while Bivens involved a claim against officers from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an agency that ceased to exist in 1968.
Egbert, in other words, can plausibly be read to forbid all Fourth Amendment lawsuits against federal officers who do not work for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — which no longer exists! At the very least, Egbert means that federal judges must go hunting for any possible reason to deny a Bivens suit.
The Republican Party, resigned to never doing anything about gun violence as long as the money keeps pouring into their campaigns, have gotten lazier in their defense of assault-style, high-powered weaponry. At issue is the fact that there really isn’t any meaningful need to allow citizens unfettered access to military-style weapons. Even if one is under the misconception that keeping a firearm in the home offers up real protection from invaders, and makes one safer, it is hard to defend the idea that having an unwieldy rifle just lying next to your bed at night is a logistically viable way to handle close proximity conflicts.
But banning assault weapons or assault-style rifles is a blow to the big business of death. And since the GOP is a death cult focused almost entirely on consolidating money and power, they need to scuttle any legislation that might help make American safer from guns. So what’s the defense coming out of the mouths of GOP officials? Varmint. Prairie dogs. Excuse me? Excuse you!
During a Congressional hearing on gun violence, Rep. Buck used some of his time to zoom in from his kitchen and say that AR-15s were needed to stop raccoons “before they get to our chickens.” He wasn’t making a joke. This poorly written script, possibly jotted down with bloody hands by some whiskey-soaked gun lobbyist for Buck to read, was his excuse for how AR-15s—a gun that was manufactured with the military in mind—is a normal civilian firearm. Buck’s position, like most NRA stoolies’, is not shocking.
I wonder if he is just perpetually pissing himself all day every day
Sen. John Thune, probably sprinting to the safety of his office through those very same vermin-haunted hallways, was asked a series of questions about what the state of gun safety legislation was by CNN. Here’s his response:
Sen. John Thune on AR-15s: "In my state, they use them to shoot prairie dogs and, you know, other types of varmints. And so I think there are legitimate reasons why people would want to have them." pic.twitter.com/BUJkLf3Apv
Did you catch that? “Varmints.” Prairie dogs. The last part is the addendum excuse the anti-gun legislation crowd always add in: There are already too many guns in circulation, so doing anything won’t matter, so let’s continue to do nothing. While Thune didn’t have a specific number at hand, Rep. Buck offered up “something like 20 million,” when he was sitting in his kitchen, likely holding his feet off of the floor because of how many varmints might be attacking his homestead during that hearing. The AR-15 is called the “most popular rifle sold in America" by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and they should know as they make all of their money promoting guns.
Semiautomatic rifles don’t shoot the largest bullets on the market. In fact, the .223 projectile, a common round for the AR-15, is not much larger than many .22 rounds like the Hornet, typically used for youth shooting sports, target shooting, and hunting varmints. The .223 weighs in at 55 grains, while the .22 is usually 45 grains or smaller.
What makes the .223 potentially deadlier than the .22 is its velocity. When the .223 exits the barrel of a gun, it flies at more than 3,200 feet per second, and is still going 1,660 feet per second after traveling 500 yards. The .22, meanwhile, leaves the muzzle at 2,690 feet per second, and slows to 840 feet per second at 500 yards. At that long distance, the .223 will slam into its target with almost twice the speed of the .22. The .223 is carrying 335 foot-pounds of force, while the .22 carries 70 foot-pounds.
Putting feelings about animals and hunting aside, I totally get why some people like using the AR-15 to kill raccoons and pigs and other varmints that may be wreaking havoc on their land. It’s an easy and reliable way to kill those rodentia. But there are other guns, that take more skill, and can also kill animals. And while there are times when large-scale hunts of wild hogs and the like are sanctioned by conservationists, the majority of AR-15 users aren’t facing off against hoards of small game overrunning their castle walls.
Cowboy up! As they say, get a backbone. Think of the children.
Hovertext: Here, let me take you under my shitty wing.
Today's News:
I like to think that when humanity are all ultra-intelligent cyborgs, they will look back and see the differences between me and Albert Einstein as a rounding error.
From Matthew Graham at MortgageNewsDaily: MBS Live Morning: From Bad to Worse as CPI Reaction Continues
Click on graph for larger image.
From Matthew Graham at MortgageNewsDaily: MBS Live Morning: From Bad to Worse as CPI Reaction Continues
Click on graph for larger image.
