James.galbraith

Broadcom has announced it is acquiring VMware in a massive $61 billion deal. From a report: The deal is a combination of cash and stock, with Broadcom assuming $8 billion in VMware debt. With VMware, Broadcom gets more than the core virtualization, which the company was built on. It also gets other pieces it acquired along the way to diversify, like Heptio for containerization, and Pivotal, which helps provide support services for companies transitioning to modern technology. At the same time it bought Pivotal, it also acquired security company Carbon Black. That touches upon a lot of technology, but it begs the question, where does it all fit with Broadcom (which has spent a fair amount of money in recent years buying up a couple of key software pieces prior to today's announcement)?

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Rubio's anger at the NBA for speaking about the Texas shooting is unintentionally revealing.

While the families gathered together in Uvalde, Texas, to grieve their murdered children, Republican politicians continue to claim the incident is not political—the same politicians who refuse to acknowledge that their votes and policies are responsible for thousands of gun deaths in this nation. But as my mother used to say: “Denial. It ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

Wednesday night, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his right-hand lap dog, Sen. Ted Cruz, joined the grieving Uvalde community. But Cruz appeared stunned when a Sky News crew confronted him about his pitiful stance on reforming gun legislation.

"There are 19 sets of parents who are never going to get to kiss their child goodnight again,” Cruz told Sky News reporter Mark Stone.  But when Stone asked him about gun laws, Cruz tried to hold it together amidst the growing tension and responded with, “You know, it's easy to go to politics." Stone kept up the pressure on Cruz, saying, “It’s important … it’s at the heart of the issue.”

RELATED STORY: Read the flaccid comments from Republican lawmakers after 19 children are slaughtered at school

Cruz then switched into attack mode, saying that the issue of gun reform is “where the media likes to go.” Stone answered Cruz saying, “It’s not. It’s where many of the people we’ve talked to here like to go.”

"The proposals from Democrats and the media? Inevitably, when some violent psychopath murders people,” Cruz alleged.

But Stone quickly pointed out that this time of mass shooting is caused by a “violent psychopath who’s able to get a weapon so easily,” and reminded Cruz that the shooting in Uvalde that killed 21, including 19 children, was committed by “an 18-year-old with two AR-15s.”

Cruz’s answer? “If you want to stop violent crime, the proposals the Democrats have? None of them would have stopped this.”

So Stone followed up with the most obvious question: “Why does this only happen in your country? I really think that’s what many people around the world just … cannot fathom. Why only in America? Why is this American exceptionalism so awful?”

"You know, I'm sorry you think American exceptionalism is awful,” Cruz responded. “You've got your political agenda. God love you," he replied and started to make a run for it.

There were 27 school shootings in 2022 leading to injuries or deaths, NPR reports. According to a database from Education Week, there’ve been 119 school shootings since 2018.

Stone continued to pursue Cruz as he attempted to skitter away, slamming him again and again with, “Why is this just an American problem?” and, “You can't answer that, can you?”

Cruz finally turned to Stone, angry and exasperated, and said: "Why is it that people come from all over the world to America? Because it's the freest, most prosperous, safest country on Earth. Stop being a propagandist."

Just after the school shooting happened, Cruz told MSNBC that he thought the best solution to mass shootings was “armed enforcement on the campus,” accusing “Democrats and a lot of folks in the media” of trying to use these mass killings to “restrict the Constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.”

But we know how Cruz’s bread is buttered: by the gun lobby. Cruz received $176,274 from the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 2019. In 2015, Cruz was so enamored with guns that he took time out of his busy schedule to make a video about cooking bacon on a machine gun—the same AR-15 assault-style rifle used by 18-year-old Salvador Ramos to slaughter the 19 children and two adults Cruz said he and his wife were ​​”fervently lifting up in prayer” just days ago.

Defending the Second Amendment is the Republicans’ go-to move. But when asked why they care more about protecting guns and banning abortions than giving a shit about actual live humans, they’re left babbling.

Wednesday, Texas Rep. James White gave an interview to CNN where he adamantly defended the Constitution and deflected with the old “it’s not the guns, it’s the people” shtick.

“We’ve all seen how quickly and creatively Texas—your local legislature—can act when it wants to, say, protect the unborn embryo. Why not act with that alacrity to protect living, breathing 10-year-olds in this school behind me?” CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked White. “Use that same blueprint you use for your abortion laws,” Camerota added.

White immediately jumped into the protection of the Second Amendment and blamed shootings on people with mental health issues.

“What we really need to be looking at is—whether it’s in Buffalo, whether it’s in Uvalde—is these young men, for some reason, that have some very disturbed emotional state,” White responded. “We need to look at our mental health system.”

CNN host Victor Blackwell quickly slammed White’s rhetoric, telling him that even Abbott himself has said that Ramos has no known mental health issues.

It might seem that a story involving the death of 19 children and two adults, and the wounding of at least 17 others—a story where police had to use DNA swabs to identify children repeatedly shot with an assault weapon—could not get any worse. But with every detail coming out of Uvalde, Texas, a new level of horror and outrage seems to be revealed. That’s especially true when looking at the police response to the event—a response best summed up as locking the killer in with the kids and waiting until someone else came along to deal with it.

As the Associated Press reports, response to the mass shooting was so slow that even though police had been on the scene since the beginning of the incident, parents who heard about the shooting arrived at the school to find that the killer was still in the classroom. Shots were still being fired. Police were still waiting outside, making no apparent effort to end the ongoing murders.

Parents looked on in frustration as police refused to go in to save the children. That frustration reached the level where it seemed that parents were attempting to rush the classroom themselves. At which point police did respond—by confronting and tackling at least one of the parents.

Arriving parents could still clearly hear the sound of high speed gunfire inside the classroom where their children were dying. Police seemed perfectly capable of being aggressive … to the parents, not the shooter.

A police spokesperson reported that the shooter “barricaded” himself in the classroom. Which appears to mean that he stepped inside and locked the door. Then he began executing children and teachers.

Before going into the classroom, the shooter exchanged gunfire with two police officers, injuring them. He also had an “encounter” with a school safety officer, though it’s not clear any shooting was involved. Then the shooter stepped into a classroom, locked the door behind him, and began killing kids. And the police waited outside.

There may be no better way to sum it up than the statement from the director of public works.

“The bottom line is law enforcement was there,” McCraw said. “They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”

That’s accurate. They were there from the beginning, but they didn’t stop the shooter. After that first exchange, they stopped attempting to stop him. They “contained” him in the classroom. With the children. And the teacher. 

About “40 minutes to an hour” later, a tactical team from the Border Patrol arrived, found the door still locked, and took extraordinary action: They asked another school staff member for a key. Then they unlocked the door and went in.

For everyone claiming that “more armed officers” at schools is the solution, a reminder that this is far from the first time children have died while police stood by. At the Parkland, Florida, shooting in 2018, a police officer on scene was charged with negligence after hiding rather than confronting the shooter in a mass murder that left 17 people dead.

Australian comedian Jim Jefferies was a big deal in Australia when he released his stand-up set entitled BARE in 2014. One of the chunks of comedy in Jefferies’ BARE routine is about guns. Specifically, it’s about the differences between how Australia and America responded to massacre-level gun violence in their countries. In April 1996, 35 people were killed and 23 others seriously injured when a man opened fire with an AR-15 rifle in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Australia’s government, under threat of losing their political positions, passed sweeping gun reforms.

Australia doesn’t have the issues of gun violence we have today. Jefferies’ piece on gun control in the United States synthesizes the incomprehensible selfishness and the logical fallacies at play in our country, created as a narrative by the well-funded gun lobby in our country and adopted as an identity by conservatives everywhere. Jefferies’ take on gun control went viral years ago, and sadly goes viral perennially at this point in American history.

We have played this once, and we will play it again, and again, and again.

You can argue about the history of the Second Amendment. You can argue what a “well-regulated militia” means. You can argue about what kinds of firearms do what kinds of things. The fact remains the United States is an outlier in two things: the number of guns we have, and the number of people we put into prisons. That’s it. Conservative lip service to “mental health” issues in our country have long been proven empty, and “good guys with guns” have yet to affect the fact that our country has more mass murders and firearm issues than any “developed” nation.

Here’s the start of Jeffries’ standup section on firearms where he makes the point that he pays taxes in the United States, which gives him the right to have an opinion on our country’s laws. He also gives out the important fact that while he has been accosted in parking lots after his shows by people yelling at him that “You can’t change the Second Amendment!” His response to that is pretty simple: “Yes you can. It’s called an ‘amendment.’”

I'm going to say some things that are just facts. In Australia, we had guns. Right up until 1996. In 1996, Australia had the biggest massacre on earth. Still hasn't been beaten. Now, after that they banned guns. In the 10 years before Port Arthur, there was 10 massacres. Since the gun ban in 1996, there hasn't been a single massacre since. I don't know how or why this happened … maybe it was a coincidence, right? Now, please understand, I understand that America and Australia are two vastly different cultures with different people, right? I get it. In Australia we had the biggest massacre on earth and the Australian government went, “That's it! No more guns!” And we all went, “Yeah, right then, that seems fair enough.” Now, in America you have the Sandy Hook massacre, which little, tiny children died and your government went, “Maybe we'll get rid of the big guns?” And 50% of you went, “Fuck you, don’t take my guns!”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: For five years, Foxconn promised and spectacularly failed to build a much-hyped sprawling factory near Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Now, the area's leaders may be saddled with $300 million in bond repayments that the Taiwanese iPhone maker had promised to repay. According to the Wall Street Journal, Foxconn agreed to pay $36 million annually across a 20-year term to pay for the surrounding infrastructure supporting the now-abandoned 3,000-acre site. Those payments are scheduled to start next tax year, and local leaders told the newspaper they're counting on Foxconn's cash to maintain the site while they try to attract another occupant. Finding an occupant hasn't been easy. Intel, which announced a $20 billion investment in two chip factories in Ohio in January, was also considering Wisconsin for the project, with its focus on Racine, the nearest large city to the proposed Foxconn plant. The other option to cover the costs would be a total Foxconn pullout, which state officials said would let the government sell the land, assessed at a value of over $500 million. Ultimately, we're told, Foxconn promised to cough up $300 million to cover bonds for the infrastructure, whether the plant went ahead or not, but with that deal in tatters, it's now not clear if the money will be paid.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Does Netflix even care that Ricky Gervais’s SuperNature is rife with transphobic TERF ideology?

Who knows exactly what response Netflix expected for SuperNature, Ricky Gervais’s transphobic new standup special, but pardon us while we refrain from clapping.

After the backlash to Dave Chappelle’s transphobic 2021 Netflix special The Closer, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he believed in “artistic expression,” and that his stance toward Chappelle’s comedy hadn’t changed — implying that trans people would just have to get over it. That seems to be the platform’s party line on transphobia. The company’s long-term investment in Gervais includes releasing shows he stars in, like Derek and After Life, and reportedly paying him $40 million in total for his most recent pair of comedy specials. Humanity, released to Netflix in 2018, likewise reeked of transphobia. In SuperNature, the level of transphobia goes several degrees further than Humanity and even further than Chappelle’s seeming fixation on pronouns and genitalia. Gervais parrots numerous ideas that form the backbone of transphobic TERF ideology, then blames transgender audiences for being mad.

Gervais, like many other comedians of late, has spent his last several cycles on the comedy circuit reacting over and over again to so-called “woke” culture and comedy, as if the concept of comedy that refuses to punch down is so egregious all he can do is continually react to it, then react to the reactions to his reactions.

This time around, having been through repeated backlash over his previous offenses, he’s at pains to explain the structure of his comedy — to explain to us why he holds the comedic high ground over his invisible future catcallers. See, he stops to inform his audience, the joke he’s about to tell isn’t offensive because he’s being ironic. Now he’s being metaphorical. Now he’s using figurative language to illustrate that words aren’t violence.

Gervais, predictably, given his overt approval of TERF talking points, builds his entire indignant anti-woke stance specifically around transgender people: their anatomies, their pronouns, their existence. It takes him all of two minutes to make his first trans joke: A mention of fellow British comic Eddie Izzard, who has long identified as transgender and began using she/her pronouns two years ago. The “joke” isn’t actually a joke, because Eddie Izzard merely existing isn’t inherently funny; but the audience laughs at Izzard’s name, right on cue, because Gervais, having already condescended to explain irony to us, expects us to laugh at the whole concept of Izzard, or maybe the concept of finding Izzard funny, or an uncomfortable mix of both.

It doesn’t matter which of these jokes is intended, because Gervais has already rejected the counterargument that a hateful joke is only “ironic” when everyone is in on it and when no one is secretly having their actual bigotry reinforced by the cruelty at the center of said irony. Toward the end of the show, he drags out an appalling sketch full of racist Sinophobic stereotypes, which he insists isn’t racist because it’s “ironic.” Doesn’t matter that this kind of “irony” is what allows white supremacists to operate in plain sight. Doesn’t matter that five minutes into SuperNature an audience member audibly laughs at a mention of rape, which might indicate that perhaps Gervais’s audience isn’t as ironically humorous as he wants them to be. No, Gervais seems to have decided that because words aren’t literal physical violence, nothing he says can cause harm.

And once establishing this up front, he proceeds to use trans people as a (metaphorical) punching bag.

Gervais has said repeatedly that he doesn’t disrespect “real” trans people; rather, he only mocks specific people he sees as male sexual predators who’ve usurped “real” trans identity in order to prey on women by pretending to be women. This is pure TERF rhetoric divorced from reality.

Gervais has spent years making fun of trans women onstage; on social media, he’s spent the past few years amplifying transphobic TERF talking points about how trans people (usually women) are rapists, perverts, liars, and linguistic terrorists. Much like J.K. Rowling, Gervais claims to be very concerned with the state of cis men pretending to be women in order to rape them, while insisting that “real” trans people should be respected; but if you look for examples of Gervais actually embracing, supporting, or affirming “real” trans women, you won’t find any. Trans people seem to only interest Gervais when he has an excuse to dismiss or dehumanize them — or joke about beating them up or compare them to rodents.

Onstage, his obsession with trans people includes a vile fixation on anatomy. He expects his audience to laugh at the idea of a trans woman having male anatomy; he expects us to ridicule the idea that anyone wouldn’t laugh. Over and over again he “jokes” about trans women having penises. He says he personally supports trans rights, then talks about trans women raping other women, implies that trans people are “mental,” and implies that trans people invented “self-identification” sometime after the ’60s in order to exploit their marginalized status. Woe for today’s kids, he suggests, whose too-woke parents might force them into a “trendy” trans lifestyle.

Any trans person who complains about his comedy is “virtue signaling.” Such trans people are, he tells us, motivated by superiority and a wish to tear other people down. It surely has nothing to do with the astronomically high levels of violence against trans people, nor the equally high levels of trans mental health issues and suicidal ideation — all of which are directly linked to harmful transphobic rhetoric. Of course Gervais makes no mention of this; it’s not funny, after all, and it undercuts his ultimate thesis that insensitive or deliberately offensive humor should be seen as a form of affection and caring. We’re expected to speak his lingua franca of bad jokes and meet him halfway by agreeing that “identity politics” should be just as susceptible to mockery as everything else.

Given the TERF-y interludes, SuperNature is an unnecessarily cruel piece of transphobic rhetoric. But without the TERF-y parts, it just feels superfluous; there’s no real reason for it to exist. Gervais needs transphobia to have something to say, and apparently Netflix does too. The streaming service surely understood that by releasing this special, it would get more of the backlash it received after The Closer. During that backlash, Sarandos first said that he didn’t believe The Closer could cause any real-world harm, then recanted that statement, possibly after trans activists and allies pointed out horrifying trans suicide statistics. (It’s worth noting that Netflix has also made a significant financial investment in Chappelle.) Netflix went through all this once, yet still chose to release SuperNature at a moment when vulnerable trans people are already getting hit with wave after wave of unnecessary cruelty.

The implication seems clear: Netflix is just fine suffering transphobic fools for views. It’s just fine inflicting bigoted hateful rhetoric on its subscribers. It’s just fine with the subsequent real-world harm that comes from amplifying such views. The platform’s choice to release this special now, during a wave of unprecedented anti-trans legislation, is unconscionable. It’s not just that Gervais, his fellow contrarian comedians, and his large audience may feel validated and affirmed in their hatred of trans people and will pay that forward in the form of more cruelty and discrimination. It’s not just that actual trans people may be hurt, may internalize harmful messages and shame because of SuperNature’s existence. It’s that Netflix is an influencer; its decisions make waves. By openly signaling that trans people and their allies are disposable within its business model, Netflix sets a precedent that many other companies in the tech and entertainment industries are likely to follow.

And, sure, this is nothing new — but that doesn’t make it hurt less. If trans people are to be thrown to the wolves of comedy, one would hope the wolves would at least be funnier.

We won't solve gun violence by looking for the goodness in our national heart.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer almost set the Senate up to respond to Tuesday’s nightmare slaughter of school children in Uvalde, Texas. In the hours after the news broke of the horrific massacre, he came to the floor to set up the procedure for the Senate to vote on the already House-passed bill to strengthen background checks on guns.

By Wednesday morning, that momentum had already fizzled. The Senate’s about to go on recess, you see, ironically for Memorial Day. The holiday that is supposed to be a day of mourning in the U.S. On the floor Wednesday morning, Schumer backed off. “There are some who want this body to quickly vote on sensible gun safety legislation,” he said, pointing out that the majority of Americans in every party wants to see strengthened background checks. He says people want to see their senators have to take this vote “so the American people can know which side each senator is on.”

“But sadly,” he continued, “this isn’t a case of the American people not knowing where their senators stand. They know.” So he’s letting them off the hook of having to vote right now, in front of God and everybody, to endorse the continued slaughter of innocent Americans. He’s also letting Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema off the hook. He could use this horrible tragedy to finally make them take their stand: with American lives or with Mitch McConnell and the filibuster. He won’t.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), chair of the Judiciary Committee confirmed that, saying the Senate probably wouldn’t vote on anything until after the recess. A recess that does not have to happen. It can be canceled. At least one senator—freaking Jon Tester from freaking Montana!—wants to stay and act.

Yes. Kids got killed yesterday and there are 50 very powerful people who have the ability to do a goddamned thing about it. But instead are just going to go on recess and, once again, let a bloody massacre of children recede into the background. While some of their Republican colleagues are actually going to Texas to celebrate gun rights with the NRA this very weekend.

Tester isn’t the only moderate Democrat to demand something be done. 

That’s the Sen. Mark Kelly who is running for reelection in Arizona right now. The Mark Kelly who became a political actor in the fight for gun laws when his wife, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, was shot and nearly killed in 2011.

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His fellow ostensibly Democratic Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema, though, won’t even discuss the issue with reporters, instead referring them to her statement following the attack in which she—literally—parroted Republican talking points. She is making it crystal clear that she will not support ending the filibuster to consider legislation that would stop the slaughter of children.

Nor will Joe Manchin, the person to whom Democratic leadership has apparently handed the reins of government.

He also said, “I’m just hoping we don’t throw things out again and politicize things to make a political point, ‘we’re for this and you’re for that.’ That’s crazy.” As if this wasn’t a political issue. As if the Republicans he’s enabling were not objectively a death cult, indifferent to the premature death of any human being once it has emerged from the womb.

It really looks like Schumer and Durbin have decided that protecting Manchin and Sinema from having to stand on the floor and once again vote to uphold the made-up and unnecessary Senate procedure, that lasting artifact of Jim Crow, instead of doing the minimum to try to stem the flow of blood.

RELATED STORIES

This chart from The New York Times, based on estimates from Our World In Data and World Bank, shows GDP per capita against gun homicide rates. The United States stands alone. Why.

Tags: guns, homicide

After each of the repeated mass shootings that now provide a tragic backbeat to American life, the same doomed dance of legislation quickly begins. As the outraged demands for action are inevitably derailed in Congress, disappointed gun-control advocates, and perplexed ordinary citizens, point their fingers at the influence of the National Rifle Association or the intransigent opposition of congressional Republicans. Those are both legitimate factors, but the stalemate over gun-control legislation since Bill Clinton’s first presidential term ultimately rests on a much deeper problem: the growing crisis of majority rule in American politics.

Polls are clear that while Americans don’t believe gun control would solve all of the problems associated with gun violence, a commanding majority supports the central priorities of gun-control advocates, including universal background checks and an assault-weapons ban. Yet despite this overwhelming consensus, it’s highly unlikely that the massacre of at least 19 schoolchildren and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday, or President Joe Biden’s emotional plea for action last night, will result in legislative action.

That’s because gun control is one of many issues in which majority opinion in the nation runs into the brick wall of a Senate rule—the filibuster—that provides a veto over national policy to a minority of the states, most of them small, largely rural, preponderantly white, and dominated by Republicans.

[David Frum: America’s hands are full of blood]

The disproportionate influence of small states has come to shape the competition for national power in America. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party had done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. Yet Republicans have controlled the White House after three of those elections instead of one, twice winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The Senate imbalance has been even more striking. According to calculations by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America, a center-left think tank, Senate Republicans have represented a majority of the U.S. population for only two years since 1980, if you assign half of each state’s population to each of its senators. But largely because of its commanding hold on smaller states, the GOP has controlled the Senate majority for 22 of those 42 years.

The practical implications of these imbalances were dramatized by the last full-scale Senate debate over gun control. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, the Senate in 2013 voted on a measure backed by President Barack Obama to impose background checks on all gun sales. Again assigning half of each state’s population to each of its senators, the 54 senators who supported the bill (plus then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opposed it only for procedural reasons) represented 194 million Americans. The remaining senators who opposed the bill represented 118 million people. But because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires the backing of 60 senators to move legislation to a vote, the 118 million prevailed.

The outcome likely would not differ today. Last year, the House passed legislation to expand and strengthen background checks. But it, too, has been blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

That impassable opposition reflects the GOP’s reliance on the places and voters most deeply devoted to gun culture. Polling last year by the Pew Research Center found that the share of Republicans who live in a household with a gun (54 percent) far exceeds the share of Democrats who do (31 percent). (In all, Pew found that four in 10 adults live in a house with a gun and only three in 10 own one.) A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that the 20 states with the highest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Republican lawmakers (32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states that President Donald Trump carried in the 2020 election (17 of 25). In an almost mirror image, the 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership had elected almost two-thirds of the Senate’s Democratic lawmakers (also 32 of 50) and comprised about two-thirds of the states Biden won (16 of 25). The 20 states with the lowest rates of gun ownership have more than two and half times as many residents (about 192 million) as the states with the highest gun-ownership rates (about 69 million). But in the Senate, these two sets of states carry equal weight.

In their opposition to gun control, Republicans in Congress clearly are prioritizing the sentiments of gun owners in their party over any other perspective, even that of other Republican voters. The Pew polling found that significant majorities of Americans support background checks (81 percent), an assault-weapons ban (63 percent), and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines (64 percent); a majority also opposes concealed carry of weapons without a permit. Majorities of Republicans who don’t own guns shared those opinions, as did Democratic gun owners, by even more lopsided margins. Even most Republicans who do own guns said in the polling that they support background checks and oppose permitless concealed carry (which more red states, including Texas, are authorizing). Despite all of this, Republican elected officials, in their near-lockstep opposition to gun control, have bent to groups like the NRA in equating almost any restrictions as a sign of disrespect to the values of red America.

Even though the NRA has weakened institutionally, its influence inside the GOP has been magnified by the reconfiguration of American politics along geographic lines. When Congress, during Clinton’s first term, created the national background-check system through the Brady Bill and later approved a ban on assault weapons (which has since expired), significant numbers of congressional Democrats representing rural constituencies opposed the legislation, while significant numbers of Republicans with big suburban constituencies supported it. But three decades of electoral re-sorting has significantly shrunk both of those groups. As a result, when the House passed its universal-background-check bill in 2021, only eight Republicans voted for it, while just a single Democrat voted against it.

[Clint Smith: No parent should have to live like this]

The Senate’s small-state bias is impeding legislative action on other issues on which Americans broadly agree, including climate change, abortion, and immigration. As with gun control, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support acting on climate change, oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, and back comprehensive immigration reform, including offering legal status to undocumented immigrants (especially young people brought into the country by their parents). The House has passed legislation reflecting each of those perspectives. The Senate’s inaction on these issues again reflects the outsize influence of those states with the highest gun-ownership rates—which also tend to be those enmeshed in the fossil-fuel economy, with high shares of culturally conservative white Christians and low shares of immigrants.

If there is any hope for congressional action on gun control in the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy—or another mass shooting in the future—it almost certainly will require reform or elimination of the filibuster. Otherwise, the basic rules of American politics will continue to allow Republicans to impose their priorities even when a clear majority of Americans disagree. The hard truth is that there’s no way to confront America’s accelerating epidemic of gun violence without first addressing its systemic erosion of majority rule.

Nineteen students and two adults are dead after a South Texas elementary school shooting. Parents and families are grieving an unspeakable loss. But this Friday, less than 300 miles from the site of that rampage, former President Donald Trump, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and other Republican lawmakers and officials will “celebrate the Second Amendment” at a conference hosted by the National Rifle Association. 

According to an announcement by the NRA unveiling the event—known as the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) Leadership Forum—it will be a “freedom-filled” weekend-long forum for “patriots” to “ celebrate freedom, firearms, and the Second Amendment.” 

Trump is scheduled to speak at the event. Firearms will be prohibited because of his attendance, per the Secret Service. In addition to Cruz, Crenshaw, and Abbott, the NRA also notes that Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem are slated to appear. 

Cornyn, however, has since backed out, according to Politico. He cited “an unexpected change in his schedule” that happened prior to the shooting in Uvalde. When Daily Kos contacted Cornyn’s office Wednesday, a staffer was unable to confirm independently if he will forgo the conference. 

Daily Kos also reached out to other officials slated to attend. Senator Cruz’s office said the lawmaker was “undecided.” Crenshaw did not immediately respond to a request for comment but a member of his staff said that he was “traveling.” Politico reported just before noon on Wednesday that he would not attend since he was traveling in Ukraine. Governor Abbott and North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson did not immediately return a request for comment. Nor did South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. 

RELATED STORY: Here’s a reminder of the GOP senators taking the most NRA money to turn a blind eye to dead children

Beto O’Roure, who hopes to oust Abbott from the gubernatorial spot, called on the incumbent to skip the money-making event for the NRA.

“Gov. Abbott, if you have any decency, you will immediately withdraw from this weekend’s NRA convention and urge them to hold it anywhere but Texas,” O’Rourke said on Wednesday. 

It all seems like a bit of horrible deja vu. After all, the U.S. has seen no less than 27 school shootings since Jan. 1 and the Gun Violence Archive reported on Thursday that there have been 213 mass shootings in America so far this year, including the one at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. (For context, a mass shooting is defined as an event where four or more people are shot or killed. The shooter is not factored into that equation.)

And yet, here America finds itself once again.

The NRA conference this weekend is still on. A representative for the association did not immediately return a request for comment to Daily Kos. 

This is an unsurprising sequence of events given the immovable stance that the NRA has taken since 1999, at least, when 13 students and one teacher were killed by two teenage shooters at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Several others were badly injured during that event. 

NPR last year obtained recordings of phone calls where NRA leaders and other association officials were heard scrambling to figure out how they could hold their annual convention with the Columbine tragedy then just a day old.

“Everything we do here has a downside. Don’t anybody kid yourself about this great macho thing of going down there and showing our chest and showing how damn tough we are… We are in deep shit on this deal… and so anything we do here is going to be a matter of trying to decide the best of a whole bunch of very, very bad choices,” NRA official Kayne Robinson, said on the 1999 call. 

The NRA did not exactly dispute the call, but told NPR in November 2021 that it was “disappointing that anyone would promote an editorial agenda against the NRA by using shadowy resources and ‘mystery tapes’ in order to conjure up the tragic events of over 20 years ago.” 

Notably, according to the tapes, NRA officials also effectively described lawmakers in Washington as their pawns. They will “do whatever the NRA proposes,” NPR reported, and according to at least one person heard strategizing on the conference call, the NRA would also “secretly provide [lawmakers] with talking points” in the wake of Columbine to help them spin the story. 

Jim Baker, an NRA lobbyist heard on the 1999 strategy call lamented the media coverage. 

“At the same period where they’re going to be burying these children, we’re going to be having media… trying to run through the exhibit hall, looking at kids fondling firearms, which is going to be a horrible, horrible, horrible juxtaposition,” he said.

Another NRA official, Jim Land, insisted that the show must go on. 

“I got to tell you, we got to think this thing through because if we tuck tail and run, we’re going to be accepting responsibility for what happened out there,” Land said.

A consultant for the association, Tony Makris, agreed with Land at the time. But, there was another side to that coin, he said. “If you don’t appear to be deferential in honoring the dead, you end up being a tremendous shithead who wouldn’t tuck tail and run, you know? So it's a double-edged sword.”

The 1999 convention in Denver ended up going forward. 

The same NRA playbook has been in place for years and appears to be firmly couched now as the NRA’s convention for 2022 kicks off Friday. 

Governor Abbott is slated to hold a press conference on Thursday afternoon where he will be joined by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and others, including Senators Cornyn and Cruz. Abbott is expected to provide information on the state’s “coordinated response” to the killings at Robb Elementary School.

This story is developing.

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A proposal by the founder of the troubled Terra ecosystem to salvage the project was approved, averting a total collapse of one of the most-watched experiments in decentralized finance. From a report: Under the newly approved structure, the original blockchain will be known as Terra Classic, while its native token Luna, which plunged close to zero this month, will be renamed Luna Classic with the ticker LUNC. The new Terra blockchain will start running a coin under the existing Luna name and ticker, and won't include the TerraUSD stablecoin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least 17 people are now dead, 14 of them elementary school children, after another mass shooter targeted an American school.

Let’s start this post off with a small bit of objective truth: There is no such thing as the widespread use of sexual education curriculum to groom young children. None. It doesn’t exist. It’s not happening, nor has it ever happened. It’s a right-wing fever dream used as a vehicle for the airing of grievances and imposing the will of the few on the many. It’s how the right has decided they can influence the conversation. Purposely misinterpret vague curriculum guidelines and use the ensuing manufactured rage to gain a seat at the table in the name of parental choice. It’s nonsense and it’s tim…

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a Republican. If his generic awfulness—or the fact that he sued to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election—weren’t enough to clue you in, you’d know it instantly based on this fact alone: He was charged with a felony seven years ago and still hasn’t stood trial. 

We need some sort of Republican-to-Democrat crime conversion chart just to know where we stand when GOPsters flout the rule of law and common decency. Because the Republican Party is starting to look like an organized crime syndicate where you have to do something egregiously evil and illegal before they teach you the secret handshake. (The secret being that at least one of the parties has tested positive for COVID-19 and/or monkeypox but decided not to tell anyone.)

I’m no legal expert, but I assume, for media scandal purposes anyway, the baseline GOP conversion rate would be: “one tan suit at a presidential press conference = one secret $130,000 hush-money payoff to a porn star + one months-long campaign to permanently end American democracy.” Though to be honest, you may need to toss in a baker’s dozen of sexual assault accusations to the right side of that equation to further balance it out. The media’s attention span is kind of, well, short.

That said, the Associated Press is resurrecting some of Paxton’s greatest hits as he appears poised to defeat Bush family scion George P. Bumbles in Tuesday’s primary to determine the GOP’s nominee for Texas attorney general.

Associated Press:

The twists and turns of how the Republican, who is on the cusp of winning the GOP nomination for a third term Tuesday, has yet to have his day in court after being indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015 has little comparison in American politics. And along the way, it has upended what it means to be a compromised officeholder in Texas.

Four different judges have overseen his case at some point. Where a trial would happen — if it ever does — has ping-ponged from Dallas to Houston to Dallas again. All the while, other clouds have gathered over Paxton: the FBI is investigating him over separate accusations of corruption, and the State Bar of Texas is weighing possible reprimands over his attempts to baselessly overturn the 2020 election.

Well, that’s okay. These days, all a Republican needs to do to defuse a scandal is mumble something about critical race theory or “wokeness” and they’re pretty much in the clear in the eyes of the base. And trying to end American democracy to install a venal orange Jell-O mold for another four years is practically a prerequisite for electoral success in red states now (except for Georgia—maybe).

Andrew Wheat, the research director for Texans for Public Justice, which filed a complaint against Paxton in 2014, told the AP that he wondered if the trial would ever happen. “And by the time it does, if it ever does, will it have any significance left to it?” he asked. Well, it could for Paxton, who would face five to 99 years in prison if he were ever convicted. But it should matter to Texas voters, who returned Paxton to office in 2018 despite these charges hanging over him like the Pewter Cheese Knife of Damocles.

Obviously it doesn’t, despite the seriousness of the accusations:

The indictments accuse Paxton of defrauding investors in a Dallas-area tech startup by not disclosing he was being paid by the company, called Servergy, to recruit them. The indictments were handed up just months after Paxton was sworn in as Texas’ top law enforcement officer.

Nothing like having a likely felon as your top law enforcement official. What’s next? Sending a corrupt and compromised Russian agent to the White House? Come on now.

The Associated Press reports that “no single reason” can explain the delays, but notes that Paxton is an example of “how powerful allies and acts of God can drag out career-threatening criminal charges” while allowing seemingly tainted politicians to continue winning elections.

Meanwhile, the primary for the Lone Star State’s top cop itself is an indication of how much political clout the Bush family has lost to the mouth-breathing MAGA mites, even in Texas. George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jebsclamation Point Bush, has been furiously running attack ads against Paxton in an attempt to reverse his flagging fortunes, but Paxton nevertheless appears poised to win. Bush even groveled for Donald Trump’s endorsement despite the latter’s ugly attacks on Bush’s own father. Trump ultimately backed Paxton—because all else being equal, why not back the Republican with the long-festering felony indictment? Paxton also tried to improperly overturn the election on Trump’s behalf, and that kind of disloyalty to the nation sends a frisson of delight up Trump’s leg.

Meanwhile, Democrats such as state Rep. Gene Wu, who served three years as a prosecutor, appear alarmed by these delays. Wu noted that even high-level cases tend to go to trial in at least two or three years.

“There is a legitimate criminal violation and justice is not being served because the people being charged have money and they have power,” Wu said.

Yeah. Welcome to America, circa 2022, Wu. This is par for the course in Republican circles now—which is an appropriate turn of phrase, I suppose, since we all know how much Donald Trump and his ilk like to cheat at golf.

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

We need a better understanding of what exactly some Americans are afraid of.

Republican politicians and QAnon are more interested in imaginary sexual abuse than the real kind.

Trailing badly in polls in the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary, David Perdue apparently decided that the way to own his status as Donald Trump’s chosen candidate was racism directed at the Democratic candidate he’s unlikely to have a chance to run against. In just a few short sentences, Perdue told on himself again and again: Dude is extremely racist.

“Did you all see what Stacey said this weekend? She said that Georgia is the worst place in the country to live. Hey, she ain’t from here. Let her go back where she came from,” Perdue said at a Monday campaign event. Note first the calculated disrespect of calling Stacey Abrams by her first name. Then, “She ain’t from here. Let her go back where she came from.”

RELATED STORY: Trump bitter as his revenge play against Georgia Gov. Kemp turns into epic failure

Abrams was born in Wisconsin, spent her childhood in Mississippi, and went to high school in Georgia—it’s not like she arrived in the state a year before she started running for office—but of course that’s not how “Let her go back where she came from” lands as part of an attack on a candidate of color. There are two contexts for that language, one being the implication that only white people are really American, an attack more commonly directed at people from groups that have immigrated in recent decades, telling them to “go back” to countries their parents or grandparents came from. Of course we know how and why the ancestors of most Black Americans got to this country, and the history of slavery emphasizes how deeply offensive Perdue’s comment is. But his comment had another context: The history of white southerners claiming that civil rights activists were outsiders stirring up trouble among supposedly contented Black southerners. That was always a false narrative, as the rich history of civil rights leaders and rank-and-file movement participants from the South shows, and it was used as an excuse for further violence and oppression.

But Perdue wasn’t done.

“The only thing she wants is to be president of the United States; she doesn’t care about the people of Georgia. That’s clear,” Perdue said, going with a classic insinuation that Abrams is too ambitious, maybe … you know … uppity. “You know, when we saw in ‘18 what she did and what she said, that we’re going to have a blue wave and we’re going to do it with documented and undocumented workers. You know, I don’t think a lot of people in Georgia understood that when she told Black farmers, ‘You don’t need to be on the farm,’ and she told Black workers in hospitality and all this, ‘You don’t need to be,’ she is demeaning her own race when it comes to that.”

The New York Times linked this to a 2018 statement by Abrams that said, “People shouldn’t have to go into agriculture or hospitality to make a living in Georgia. Why not create renewable energy jobs?” What she didn’t say there: Black people. Just people. If that’s the quote he’s thinking of, Perdue was jumping from “people in agriculture or hospitality” to “Black people.” Again, telling on himself.

But whatever she said, Perdue’s claim that Abrams is “demeaning her own race” to suggest that Black people should not be restricted to jobs that have historically had low wages and poor working conditions is also extremely special. Hey Black people, stick to the jobs white people have kept you in for the purposes of exploitation for generations. Wanting more is demeaning your race.

Did Perdue make the calculated decision that a racist attack on Abrams was his best chance for a come-from-behind victory in his primary? Did he want to signal to Georgia Republicans that he was one of them in his thinking about Abrams, or show them that he, not Kemp, was best suited to take her on? Or is he just a loser flailing as he loses who accidentally showed the world the smug, contemptuous, dismissive way he thinks about even the most impressive and formidable Black woman he’s likely to encounter, along with several ways racism is deeply embedded in his understanding of who belongs in Georgia and what jobs Black people can appropriately have? Calculated appeal to Republican primary voters or desperate loser letting slip what he really thinks, it was gross either way.

RELATED STORIES:

Don't look now, but Stacey Abrams is mowing down Gov. Kemp's financial lead

If elections are about the future, Georgia's gubernatorial race suggests Republicans are screwed

Assuming the Supreme Court guts Roe v. Wade this summer as expected, the only thing standing between Pennsylvania's GOP-led legislature and an all-out ban on abortions will be the state's governor.

Unless Keystone State voters elevate Christian nationalist and MAGA extremist Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator, to the governor's mansion. Mastriano, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, has pledged to ban all abortions in the state with no exceptions.

“I Want Abortion To End, Period," Mastriano said in a Facebook Live chat on May 3, the day after the high court’s draft ruling on Roe was leaked.

In a radio interview the next day, Mastriano added, “My goal ultimately is to get it down to conception in the end.”

With that clearly in mind, several Democrat-aligned groups are launching a $6 million campaign that will use a combination of digital, television, and grassroots mobilization to highlight Mastriano's fervent promises to criminalize abortion, according to Politico.

The first TV ad of the campaign started airing Monday—the beginning of an effort to expose Mastriano's radical views and antiquated misogyny.

"For 50 years, women have had the right to make their own healthcare decisions, the freedom to control their own bodies," begins a female narrator. "But now the Supreme Court wants to set women's rights back a half century."

Then comes a Mastriano soundbite: "My body, my choice is ridiculous nonsense," he says.

The narrator warns Mastriano would make all abortions illegal, criminalize doctors, and force pregnancies even in instances of rape and incest.

Mastriano chimes in again, saying, “I don’t give a way for exceptions.”

The narrator concludes: "Doug Mastriano: Taking Pennsylvania backwards.”

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Attorney General Josh Shapiro has already been out front on the abortion issue, promising to veto any abortion ban or other restrictions that reach his desk as governor.

On Monday, Shapiro tweeted out a picture of himself with two women, presumably at an abortion rights rally—both were wearing “Bans off my body” T-shirts. "I've got your back, Pennsylvania — and when they come for your rights, I'll be there to defend them," Shapiro wrote.

In another tweet Monday, Shapiro wrote: "Doug Mastriano is focused on wrongfully throwing doctors behind bars for performing an abortion. As Attorney General, I’m focused on putting drug dealers, criminals, and those looking to screw over Pennsylvanians behind bars to make our communities safer. That’s the difference."

Shapiro's high-contrast, no-compromise posture on reproductive rights is pitch perfect. Not only do roughly two-thirds or more of the electorate support keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, but just 5% of Americans in a recent NBC News poll said abortions should be illegal without exceptions—Mastriano's position.

Here’s the ad from Put Pennsylvania First, an affiliate of the Democratic Governors Association.

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"AMD's Computex 2022 keynote marks the first appearance of company's new Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 desktop chip in the flesh," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid. "And in its first quick benchmark tease, it's looking pretty buff." Here's an excerpt from a report via HotHardware: AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors that will be the first to ship with Zen 4 cores will include one or two 5nm Zen 4 CCDs -- topping out at 16 cores, just like Zen 3 -- as well as a new cIOD fabricated on 6nm chip process technology. The new cIOD will include PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, as well as an RDNA 2-based GPU for basic display support. [...] Initial performance claims regarding solid state storage weren't the only ones made during AMD's Computex keynote, however. As the keynote was wrapping up, Dr. Su showed two demos powered by a Ryzen 7000 series processor. AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors that will be the first to ship with Zen 4 cores will include one or two 5nm Zen 4 CCDs -- topping out at 16 cores, just like Zen 3 -- as well as a new cIOD fabricated on 6nm chip process technology. The new cIOD will include PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support, as well as an RDNA 2-based GPU for basic display support. In the second demo, a custom Ryzen 7000 3D image was being rendered in Blender, with an Intel Core i9-12900K 16-core / 24-thread processor running alongside an AMD Ryzen 7000 series 16-core / 32-thread processor. In the time-lapsed demo, the Ryzen 7000-based system finished the render 31% faster than the Intel system. While AMD wasn't willing to commit to any specific date, the company did confirm that Zen 4 will be here this year, and well before the holiday shopping season. Dr. Su set a timeframe of "Fall" for availability of the new Ryzen 7000 CPUs, as well as the motherboards that will help enable the entire platform. Slashdot reader UnknowingFool also shared the news (via AnandTech). You can watch the entire AMD Computex 2022 Keynote presentation here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Court effectively overruled two of its previous decisions, and it is likely an innocent man will die as a result.

In 1995, Barry Jones was convicted of murdering Rachel Gray, his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, and sentenced to die. Since then, the case against him has shattered.

Gray died of a laceration of her small intestine, an extremely painful injury that slowly floods the victim with poisonous fluids. The prosecution’s theory was that Jones must have inflicted this injury on Gray during a four-hour period when he was taking care of her on May 1, 1994. Gray died about 12 hours later.

But this theory does not make sense medically. Gray’s injury would have killed her slowly, and should not have proved fatal in only 12 hours. In a comprehensive article reviewing the evidence against Jones, the Intercept’s Liliana Segura quotes three physicians who say that the prosecution’s theory is wrong.

One, who Segura describes as a “renowned pediatric forensic pathologist,” said that Gray’s injury “could not possibly have been inflicted on the day prior to her death.”

There are also several other potential suspects. Gray’s mother Angela, for starters, was eventually convicted of child abuse and sentenced to eight years in prison. There’s evidence that Gray’s brother sexually preyed on young girls. And, on top of all of that, Gray reportedly said shortly before her death that a boy had hit her in the stomach with a metal bar.

Simply put, no sensible jury confronted with all of this evidence would have concluded that Jones was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But Jones’s lawyers failed to present crucial evidence at his trial. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an opinion released on Monday, “Jones’ trial counsel failed to undertake even a cursory investigation and, as a result, did not uncover readily available medical evidence that could have shown that Rachel sustained her injuries when she was not in Jones’ care.” Then, after Jones challenged his conviction in a state court proceeding, he was met with, as Sotomayor put it, “another egregious failure of counsel.”

In the words of the law, Jones was denied his constitutionally required right to effective assistance of counsel — twice.

Sotomayor, however, wrote these words in a dissenting opinion. On a party line vote in Shinn v. Ramirez, the Court held that Jones will not receive a fair trial despite his lawyers’ poor performance.

(The Ramirez case is called “Ramirez” and not “Jones” because the Court simultaneously decided a similar case involving David Ramirez, who was sentenced to die despite strong evidence that he is intellectually disabled and thus cannot receive a death sentence under the Court’s decision in Atkins v. Virginia (2002). Monday’s decision most likely ensures that Ramirez will not receive a new sentencing proceeding to determine whether he is intellectually disabled.)

Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion claimed that a law restricting the power of federal courts to toss out convictions in state courts prevents Jones from seeking relief. But Thomas’s reading of this law is novel — his opinion had to gut two fairly recent Supreme Court decisions to deny relief to Jones.

Jones would have received a new trial if the Supreme Court hadn’t changed the law

Before Monday, the Supreme Court’s decisions in Martinez v. Ryan (2012) and Trevino v. Thaler (2013) should have guaranteed Jones a new trial. Both decisions deal with what should happen in the unusual circumstance when someone accused of a crime receives ineffective assistance of counsel, twice.

In Strickland v. Washington (1984), the Supreme Court held that a conviction must be tossed out if defense “counsel’s performance was deficient” and if this “deficient performance prejudiced the defense.” This safeguard against constitutionally inadequate lawyering would be meaningless if people who received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial could not challenge that conviction, either on appeal or in some other proceeding.

Martinez and Trevino established that someone convicted of a crime must have at least one shot at challenging their conviction on the grounds that they received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial. States have a fair amount of leeway to decide what sort of process will be used to adjudicate ineffective assistance claims, but they cannot deny any sort of process altogether.

If a state fails to provide convicted individuals with a way to challenge their conviction on ineffective assistance grounds, federal courts may step in and provide a forum to hear this challenge in what is known as a “habeas” proceeding. Martinez, moreover, established that federal courts may step in when a criminal defendant receives inadequate assistance of counsel both at their trial and in a state proceeding permitting them to challenge their conviction.

Both a federal trial court and an appeals court determined that this is exactly what happened to Jones — that is, neither his state trial attorneys nor the lawyers who represented him in his postconviction challenge adequately investigated his case. And, without seeing all the evidence suggesting that Jones is innocent, the state court judge presiding over this postconviction proceeding had no way to know that Jones’s conviction should be tossed out.

The federal trial court held its own evidentiary hearing, considered the evidence against Jones and the evidence that his lawyers botched his case, and ordered the state of Arizona to give him a new trial.

In that court’s words, there was a “reasonable probability that the jury would not have unanimously convicted [Jones] of any of the counts” if Jones’s defense counsel had “adequately investigated and presented medical and other expert testimony to rebut the State’s theory.”

Monday’s decision in Ramirez does not explicitly abandon Martinez and Trevino, but, as Sotomayor explains in dissent, “the Court all but overrules” these two decisions “that recognized a critical exception to the general rule that federal courts may not consider claims on habeas review that were not raised in state court.”

Under Justice Thomas’s majority opinion, federal courts may still conduct habeas proceedings when a criminal defendant alleges that they received inadequate assistance of counsel twice, but the federal court may not consider any evidence that wasn’t presented in earlier proceedings. As Thomas writes, “if a prisoner has ‘failed to develop the factual basis of a claim in State court proceedings,’ a federal court ‘shall not hold an evidentiary hearing on the claim’ unless the prisoner satisfies one of two narrow exceptions” that are not present in Jones’s case.

The problem with this rule should be obvious. The whole point of Jones’s federal case is that his state court lawyers performed so poorly that they failed to uncover evidence that should have exonerated him. If a federal habeas court may only consider evidence that was presented by feckless lawyers to state courts, then there is no point in having a federal habeas proceeding in the first place.

Thomas and Sotomayor have wildly different views of why criminal trials exist

“The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to the effective assistance of counsel at trial,” Sotomayor writes in the first line of her dissent. She continues that “this Court has recognized that right as ‘a bedrock principle’ that constitutes the very ‘foundation for our adversary system’ of criminal justice.”

Thus in Sotomayor’s mind, and in the minds of the two other justices appointed by Democratic presidents who joined her opinion, the purpose of a criminal trial is to determine whether or not someone is actually guilty of a crime — and to do so through an adversarial process where both sides are represented by lawyers who can present the best possible legal and factual case for the prosecution and the defense.

Thomas, writing for the Court’s Republican majority, offers a different view of why trials exist. He deems federal habeas proceedings problematic because they “override[] the States’ core power to enforce criminal law.” When a federal court deems someone’s conviction constitutionally inadequate, Thomas complains, it “overrides the State’s sovereign power to enforce ‘societal norms through criminal law,’” and “disturbs the State’s significant interest in repose for concluded litigation.”

Thus, in Thomas’s view, the purpose of a state-conducted trial is to give criminal defendants a procedure in state court. But once that process is concluded, the state court’s decision generally should remain final — even if that means executing an innocent person or condemning someone in violation of the Constitution.

This is consistent with Thomas’s longtime position. As far back as Herrera v. Collins (1993), Thomas joined an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, which claimed that there is “no basis” in the Constitution for “a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.” At the time, however, Thomas was the only justice who joined Scalia in this view.

Now, however, Thomas has the votes to prevail on an exceedingly conservative Court, so the considerable evidence that Barry Jones is innocent was declared irrelevant. In his initial trial, Jones faced a tribunal that bore at least some superficial resemblance to a fair proceeding. And, under Thomas’s approach, the fact that Jones most likely never killed anyone is irrelevant.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While not every user is actively monitoring hardware resource usage when gaming, enthusiasts and reviewers often turn the stats on to see how certain games and other applications are being handled by the hardware. During such a test run, CapFrameX, which developed a useful frametime analysis tool, noticed a weird anomaly when gauging the performance of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on Lara Croft Shadow of the Tomb Raider (SotTR). The processor usage reported on Windows 11 is seemingly unusually low in one of the scenes in the game which is typically known to be quite intense on the CPU. Only one out the 16 threads seem to be reporting the correct usage whereas all the other threads are under 10% utilization. CapFrameX notes the issue though it isn't sure what could be causing it: " The core usage reporting on Window 11 is completely broken. Should be >80% for SotTR + this particular scene and settings. What happened? Did the recent update change the timer behavior?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Binance promoted terraUSD as a "safe" investment just weeks before the stablecoin and its counterpart luna collapsed in a $40bn wipeout that shook the crypto industry. From a report: The world's biggest crypto exchange advertised on April 6 an investment scheme in which clients lend out their terra to earn a yield of almost 20 per cent as a "safe and happy" opportunity, according to a message Binance sent on its official channel on the Telegram messaging app. Terra and luna, a set of linked digital tokens, were popular with crypto traders seeking to earn high returns through lending programmes known as "staking," but lost nearly all of their value earlier this month in one of the crypto industry's biggest-ever crashes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To the GOP, integrity is "corruption" and Trump and his self-dealing cronies are innocent. But it didn't start with him.

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution is the latest casualty of a rogue U.S. Supreme Court, with the radical extremists deciding that no, not everyone really is entitled to competent legal defense and once again overturning Supreme Court precedent to do it. The court, 6-3, ruled that federal judges cannot hear new evidence from death row inmates arguing that their state-appointed lawyers did not provide constitutionally adequate defense.

This, as University of Texas law professor Lee Kovarsky argues in this thread on Twitter, will particularly hurt indigent defendants—those who have to rely on public defenders and state-appointed lawyers in appeal. It also reverses precedent from just a decade ago from the Supreme Court in Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler, decisions that gave defendants the right to appeal to a federal judge if state-appointed defense and post-conviction lawyers failed to provide a competent defense.

RELATED STORY:  The Republican malignancy in America demands a response: Expand the court

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This means that innocent people are going to be put to death. One of them is likely to be Barry Jones, one of the petitioners in this case whose conviction came after shoddy police work and inadequate defense. David Ramirez, the second petitioner, is severely mentally disabled. That fact was never raised by his defense attorney, even though federal law would exempt Ramirez from the death penalty.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent. “The Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to the effective assistance of counsel at trial. This Court [in Martinez] has recognized that right as ‘a bedrock principle’ that constitutes the very ‘foundation for our adversary system’ of criminal justice,” she wrote. “Today, however, the Court hamstrings the federal courts’ authority to safeguard that right. The Court’s decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”

“In reaching its decision, the Court all but overrules two recent precedents that recognized a critical exception to the general rule that federal courts may not consider claims on habeas review that were not raised in state court,” she continued.

This decision is perverse. It is illogical: It makes no sense to excuse a habeas petitioner’s counsel’s failure to raise a claim altogether because of ineffective assistance in postconviction proceedings, as Martinez and Trevino did, but to fault the same petitioner for that postconviction counsel’s failure to develop evidence in support of the trial-ineffectiveness claim. In so doing, the Court guts Martinez’s and Trevino’s core reasoning. The Court also arrogates power from Congress: The Court’s analysis improperly reconfigures the balance Congress struck in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) between state interests and individual constitutional rights.  

By the Court’s telling, its holding (however implausible) is compelled by statute. Make no mistake. Neither AEDPA nor this Court’s precedents require this result. I respectfully dissent.

The same Supreme Court extremists who are poised to toss federal abortion rights presumably in respect to the sanctity of life have just ensured that more people—some of whom are innocent—will be put to death by the state. It’s enough make you think what’s going on here among the conservatives really haas nothing to do with the preservation of life at all.

Perverse. Illogical. Dangerous. This is a bunch of extremists hell-bent on remaking American society under their Christian white supremacist vision, and they’ve got the power to do it. Only Congress can do something about it, by expanding the court. That solution is looking less and less radical by the day.

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Biden hasn’t discarded longtime policy toward Taiwan, but it sounds like he has.

President Joe Biden had sought to make his first Asia tour about forging a new economic framework for the region, deepening relations with the heads of state of Japan and South Korea, and advancing diplomacy among countries in the Indo-Pacific. But one off-script comment derailed those goals.

On Monday at a news conference in Tokyo, Biden was asked by a journalist: “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”

“Yes,” said Biden. “That’s the commitment we made.”

Biden’s remark might be a big deal. US policy toward Taiwan has been one of “strategic ambiguity” for four decades — supporting Taiwan’s independence without quite saying so. As part of the “One China” policy, the US does not recognize the democratic island nation of Taiwan, but maintains “a robust unofficial relationship” with it, according to the State Department. (The US supports Taiwan with weapons and has deep economic ties with the country.) In a phrase, Biden broke down that convention.

At the same time, it wasn’t a particularly revelatory moment. It was actually the third time that Biden has said something along these lines. In October 2021, Biden stated a similar “commitment” to Taiwan. In August 2021, Biden compared the US approach to Taiwan to its pledge to defend NATO countries. (An official then walked back those remarks).

All of those comments reveal a lot about Biden’s tendency for undisciplined, off-the-cuff responses — another example is his remark in late March that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” — but don’t necessarily represent major policy shifts.

Today, once again, the White House quickly disavowed Biden’s statement. “As the president said, our policy has not changed,” a White House official said.

Before his takeoff to Asia, Biden’s team didn’t want to concede that the trip was really all about responding to China’s global influence. Now, Biden has said, in as many words, that the trip is really all about countering China.

How dangerous is Biden’s Taiwan comment?

The diplomatic gymnastics of the “One China” policy may seem absurd. The US doesn’t officially recognize the country of Taiwan, and yet it sells the country lots of weapons to defend itself, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.

But Asia experts say that the “One China” policy remains the best approach to East Asia.

The “One China” policy is imperfect, but any changes to the status quo could lead to an even more intensive arms race or escalation of threats, says Van Jackson, a scholar of international relations at the University of Wellington in New Zealand.

“The ‘One China’ policy is a terrible interim solution, and it’s the best we got,” he told me. “If you’re going to clarify strategic ambiguity, if you’re going to try to declare two nations, if you’re going to give up on ‘One China’ policy, you’re just asking for conflict.”

There is no immediate resolution to the conflict between China and Taiwan, but saying that the US would back Taiwan militarily in essence is poking China. A comment like this from Biden could lead to the Chinese government drawing the worst-case conclusions about what US security interests are in Taiwan: that the US, in contradiction of its stated diplomatic policy, is reinforcing a military commitment to Taiwan. It’s something the US has historically avoided saying aloud.

Meanwhile the Biden administration has not said enough about the need for an effective level of diplomacy that will revitalize the “One China” policy in ways that could avoid escalations. “To my mind, the United States needs to be clear that we’re not engaged in an effort to create a strategic ally in Taiwan, because that’ll be the shortest path to conflict with the Chinese,” said Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “And the United States is not in a position where it can assume that that conflict will go in its direction.”

Swaine has pointed out that the Biden Pentagon’s top Asia official, Ely Ratner, made an unprecedented comment last year about Taiwan’s strategic importance to the US. Ratner testified to Congress and said that Taiwan is “critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital US interests in the Indo-Pacific.” The comment was “reckless,” according to Swaine, a clear indication that Biden’s team was going to take risks surrounding the long-standing “One China” policy.

As a Financial Times correspondent wrote at the time, “This may well be remembered as the moment Washington came clean on its intentions regarding Taiwan.”

Biden’s one-liner in Japan could take its place as a new, more important turning point.

Many national-security observers in Washington have noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been an opportunity for the Chinese government to study what the US does when a country that is not quite a US or NATO ally is threatened.

The entire US playbook is on display, from comprehensive sanctions that severed much of Russia from the world economy to the rapid arming of Ukraine.

Biden’s remark fortifies the notion that official Washington sees conflict with China as a real possibility — and would be ready to back Taiwan in the event of a war that, without doubt, would have no winners.

Biden is a gaffe machine, in contrast to his very disciplined team

It’s hardly news that Biden puts his foot in his mouth. Throughout his career, he has been known for his gaffes. His verbal slippages have been a recurring trend as the US has played a delicate role in the Ukraine war.

In pushing back against Russia, the Biden administration has been carefully navigating a role on the sidelines — supporting Ukraine against Russia assault with billions of dollars of weapons, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic assurances, but being careful not to come into direct conflict with Russia, a nuclear power.

Yet Biden himself has often said the things that you’re not supposed to say, and in the process become the administration’s id.

In the days before the war, Biden said that if Russia pursued a “minor incursion” of Ukraine it would shape the US response — which outraged many observers, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said there was no such thing as a minor incursion.

Biden called Putin a “war criminal,” before such a statement was the official policy of the administration, leading spokesperson Jen Psaki to say that Biden was “speaking from his heart.”

Visiting Poland at the end of March, Biden said of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” — too close to saying that the US is in the business of regime change in the Ukraine war. Like all of the Biden statements, there was a White House walk-back.

The president has a way of cutting through the diplo-speak of a press conference and dispensing with nuance.

Biden’s persistent oratory missteps contrast with the unusually disciplined nature of the rest of the administration. Biden administration officials exhibit incredible cool and control, often in complete paragraphs that might as well have been torn from the page of a presidential briefing book.

“Our view, as we’ve expressed many times, is that we are concerned about peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and the ratcheting up of tensions. And we believe that China is contributing to the ratcheting up of those tensions through provocative military activities around Taiwan and around the Strait,” Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said in a press briefing in Anchorage last week, en route to Asia.

“From our perspective, our position has been clear and consistent,” he added.

That is, until his boss, the president, chimes in.