James.galbraith

Carson v. Makin appears likely to end in another transformative victory for the religious right.

At an oral argument held Wednesday morning, all six members of the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority appeared likely to blow a significant new hole in the wall separating church and state.

The case is Carson v. Makin; the question is whether the state of Maine is required to subsidize religious education; and the majority’s answer appears, at least under certain circumstances, to be yes.

Under current law, as Justice Elena Kagan noted during Wednesday’s argument, the question of whether to fund religious education is typically left up to elected officials. Maine’s legislators decided not to do so when they drafted the state’s unusual tuition voucher program that’s at issue in Carson, and is meant to ensure that children in sparsely populated areas still receive a free education.

The overwhelming majority of Maine schoolchildren attend a school designated by their local school district. But a small minority — fewer than 5,000 students, according to the state — live in rural areas where it is not cost-effective for the state to either operate its own public school or contract with a nearby school to educate local students. In these areas, students are provided a subsidy, which helps them pay tuition at the private school of their family’s choice.

The issue in Carson is that only “nonsectarian” schools are eligible for this subsidy. Families may still send their children to religious schools, but the state will not pay for children to attend schools that seek to inculcate their students into a religious faith.

All six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared to think that this exclusion for religious schools is unconstitutional — meaning that Maine would be required to pay for tuition at pervasively religious schools. Notably, that could include schools that espouse hateful worldviews. According to the state, one of the plaintiff families in Carson wants the state to pay for a school that requires teachers to sign a contract stating that “the Bible says that ‘God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted’” and that “[s]uch deviation from Scriptural standards is grounds for termination.’”

In the likely event that these plaintiffs’ families prevail, that will mark a significant escalation in the Court’s decisions benefiting the religious right — even if the Court limits the decision narrowly to Maine’s situation. Shortly after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave Republicans a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, the Court handed down a revolutionary decision holding that people of faith may seek broad exemptions from the laws that apply to anyone else. But the Court has historically been more reluctant to require the government to tax its citizens and spend that money on religion.

That reluctance may very well be gone.

The Court’s conservative majority wants to redefine what constitutes religious “discrimination”

The purpose of Maine’s exclusion for sectarian schools, according to Christopher Taub, the lawyer given the unfortunate task of defending that exclusion against a hostile Supreme Court, is to ensure that the state remains “neutral and silent” on questions of religion.

For many years, the Constitution was understood to require this kind of neutrality. As the Court held in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”

Everson was effectively abandoned by the Court’s decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), in which a 5-4 Court upheld a pilot program in Ohio that provided tuition vouchers funding private education — including at religious schools. But Zelman, as Kagan pointed out today, merely held that states “could” fund religious education if they chose to do so. Nothing in that decision prevents states from adopting the same neutral posture toward religion that was once required by cases like Everson.

On Wednesday, however, several members of the Court’s Republican-appointed majority questioned whether religious neutrality is even possible, and suggested that Maine’s efforts to remain neutral on questions of religion are themselves a form of discrimination against people of faith.

Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, proposed a hypothetical involving two private schools. One of these schools teaches its religious beliefs openly and explicitly, and it also teaches a particular set of religious values in the process. The other school might eschew explicit references to God or to a holy text, but it teaches a different value system that is motivated by religious beliefs. If the state funds the latter school but not the former one, Roberts asked, why is it not drawing “distinctions based on doctrine”?

Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, offered the Fox News version of Roberts’s argument. Maine’s law, Alito noted, does not contain explicit exemptions for private schools that teach white supremacy or critical race theory, but it does explicitly exempt religious schools from its tuition program. The implication was that Maine is discriminating against religion and in favor of critical race theory.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, offered the most direct version of this argument that neutrality toward religion is the same thing as discrimination. “Discriminating against all religions” is still unlawful discrimination, Kavanaugh told Taub — a position that is difficult to square with the text of the First Amendment, which prohibits laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”

It should be noted that Roberts and Kavanaugh are, while both very conservative, the most moderate members of the Court’s six-justice conservative bloc. So if both of these justices vote against Maine, it’s hard to imagine how the state finds five votes to sustain its law.

That said, there is an off chance that the Court will dismiss this case. Early in the oral argument, Justice Clarence Thomas pointed to the fact that his Court may not have jurisdiction to hear the Carson case.

Under Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), federal courts may not hear a lawsuit unless the injury alleged by the plaintiffs can be “redressed by a favorable decision.” But, according to Maine, both of the plaintiff families want to send their children to schools that might refuse state funds even if such funds are offered to them — because Maine forbids all entities that receive state subsidies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

Even if the Court were to order Maine to provide tuition subsidies to religious schools, in other words, the plaintiffs in Carson might wind up with nothing, because their preferred schools could choose to keep their anti-LGBTQ policies intact instead of receiving state subsidies.

Nevertheless, even if the Court does ultimately decide to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction, that will only delay a reckoning over public funding for religious institutions. Eventually, some lawyer will find a school that is willing to accept state funding. And when that happens, there will likely be at least five votes on the Supreme Court to hand that lawyer a victory.

The justices are likely to place some limits on its decision in Carson, but it’s not yet clear how they will justify those limits

Although the six conservative justices showed little sympathy for Maine’s position — or for existing law — on Wednesday, some of them did suggest that there should be some limits on a decision forcing states to fund religion.

Roberts, for example, suggested that he might strike down a program that gave money directly to religious institutions in order to fund religious programs, rather than providing tuition grants to parents who then turn that money over to a religious school. Suppose that a state has a program that funds building construction at private schools, Roberts suggested at one point, but that also provides that the money cannot be used to build a chapel. He appeared to be suggesting that such an exclusion for chapel construction is permissible.

Similarly, Kavanaugh asked Michael Bindas, the lawyer challenging Maine’s program, whether religious families are entitled to tuition vouchers merely because their state funds ordinary public schools. Bindas denied that tuition vouchers are required under these circumstances, pointing to a line in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) stating that “a State need not subsidize private education.”

But it’s hard to draw a principled line between a Court decision requiring Maine to fund religious education as part of its existing private school tuition program and a decision requiring all states with a public school system to fund religious education.

In his brief, Bindas argues that policies that require religious families to “choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit” are unconstitutional. But if the Constitution does not permit states to force families to choose between receiving a free education and a religious one, then then it’s unclear why this rule wouldn’t threaten any public school system.

Traditional public education, where students attend a government-run school for free, is a government benefit. All families who send their children to private, religious schools choose to forgo this government benefit. So, under the rule articulated in Bindas’s brief, every state may be required to pay for private tuition at religious schools.

In any event, the Court has previously drawn unprincipled lines that are difficult to square with legal texts and existing doctrines. So if five justices are bothered by the possibility that ordinary public school districts may be required to fund religious education, they could simply declare that such a thing is not required and leave it at that. Proponents of a wall of separation between church and state can take some minor comfort in that fact.

At the very least, however, the Court appears likely to hand down a transformative decision rethinking much of its approach to religion — and to force at least some states to fund religious education in the process.

From the dangers of pregnancy to the trauma of adoption, there’s a lot the Supreme Court didn’t acknowledge last week as Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance.

Americans don’t need abortion because adoption exists.

That, at least, was the implication of comments made by Justice Amy Coney Barrett last week, as the Supreme Court appeared to edge closer than ever to overturning the landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade and stripping Americans of the right to an abortion before viability.

During oral arguments December 1 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which concerns Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, Barrett noted that all 50 states have safe haven laws, allowing a baby to be surrendered for adoption shortly after birth without criminal consequences for the parent. If abortion rights advocates are worried about the burdens of forced parenthood, she asked, “Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?”

The idea that adoption is a panacea for unplanned pregnancy and a substitute for abortion is far from new. Anti-abortion activists “have been making this argument for decades,” says Marcela Howell, president of the nonprofit partnership In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda. According to researchers and people who work with parents and adoptees, it’s always been wrong.

The argument that adoption can effectively replace abortion assumes that people who choose the former are able to simply sidestep all the challenges associated with parenthood. But people who choose adoption still become parents — they just don’t raise their children. They often experience significant grief and loss, for which they struggle to get support in a culture that views adoption through rose-colored glasses. Barrett seemed to be “assuming that people who terminate their rights are moving quickly past this termination,” says Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a group at the University of California San Francisco. But “that is not something that I have ever seen in my research.”

Thinking of adoption as a stand-in for abortion also ignores the very real dangers people face when they carry any pregnancy to term. Maternal mortality has been rising in the US for 20 years, and the most recent data places the country a dismal 55th in the world when it comes to the safety of childbirth.

All of this, reproductive justice and adoptee advocates say, makes the argument that adoption can replace abortion at best a distraction, and at worst a willful misrepresentation of the facts. “As an adoptee, it’s infuriating,” says Joanne Bagshaw, a psychology professor at Montgomery College in Maryland who also works as a therapist with other adoptees.

Adoption is often difficult and traumatic for birth parents

Promoting adoption has long been a mainstay of the anti-abortion movement, with conservative groups like Focus on the Family providing resources on adoption and anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” sometimes steering pregnant people toward the practice. It’s not just conservatives, however, who support adoption as a good alternative to abortion — “adoption has been understood as this common ground in the abortion debate by both parties for a very long time,” Sisson said.

Both Democrats and Republicans have embraced the view that even if they can’t agree on whether abortion should be legal, they can agree that more people should choose adoption instead. There are multiple problems with thinking of adoption as a substitute for abortion, however, researchers and advocates say.

In order to choose adoption for a child, someone still has to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth. Both are risky propositions in America, which ranked 10th out of 10 comparable countries in a 2018 study of maternal deaths. Black people are at especially high risk, dying in childbirth at three to four times the rate of white patients. “For Black women, carrying pregnancies to term is very dangerous in this country,” Howell said.

Beyond the medical risks, there are social consequences to consider, from fielding unwanted questions to potential abuse from family members or partners who find out about the pregnancy. Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people, with Black women and women and girls under 25 at the highest risk, according to a study published last month by researchers at Tulane University.

Though pregnancy discrimination is illegal, it also remains widespread — “many of the country’s largest and most prestigious companies still systematically sideline pregnant women,” Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg wrote in a 2018 New York Times investigation.

Then there’s “the emotional toll that goes on if someone is forced to carry a pregnancy to term that they didn’t want in the first place,” Howell said.

“I felt as if I were carrying my son for them, for everyone else,” Merritt Tierce wrote in the New York Times Magazine of her unplanned pregnancy when she was 19 years old. “I was afraid, and I was estranged from myself, and I felt an unbearable load of guilt for being the mother my son had to have. He didn’t get to choose, either.”

Barrett did seem to acknowledge some of the burdens of unwanted pregnancy last week, calling it “an infringement on bodily autonomy, for which we have another context like vaccines” (never mind that the side effects of vaccines, for most people, last a mere few hours). She did not acknowledge, however, that any sort of burden might continue after a person gives birth. Just give up the baby for adoption, her questions seemed to suggest, and everything will be fine.

That’s far from the case, many experts and advocates say. Surrendering a baby for adoption can be traumatic, Sisson says. “A lot of birth mothers feel pretty intense grief and mourning right after their adoption.”

As the years go by, that initial grief can be compounded by a sense of alienation. On the one hand, “there’s a lot of politicized and religious messaging around adoption that tells birth mothers that they have made a very courageous, brave, and loving decision,” Sisson says. But those messages don’t come with support for birth parents when it comes to negotiating and managing contact with their biological children (increasingly common as open adoptions become the norm), or in understanding and dealing with their ongoing sense of loss. Many birth parents “feel very alone,” Sisson said.

Pregnant people often anticipate some of this, which is why adoption is a relatively rare choice in America. They may know, too, that their child may not find a home quickly — there are more than 400,000 children in foster care in the US, and the average child spends nearly two years in the system. In one study of people who wanted an abortion but were turned away, just 9 percent chose to place the baby for adoption, Sisson and her team found. The other 91 percent chose to parent the child. “There were a lot of women who said, ‘If I couldn’t have an abortion, I was going to parent; there was no way I was going to give up my child,’” Sisson said.

In general, “Women are not often choosing between abortion and adoption,” Sisson said. “Adoption is always the second choice to either parenting or abortion.”

It’s not a panacea for children, either

In addition to grief and loss for birth parents, adoption has an impact on children as well. “Relinquishment is traumatic for adoptees, even for adoptees who had a good adoption experience,” Bagshaw said. Adoptee clients who come to her often deal with “lifelong issues of feeling abandoned,” as well as “a lifelong search for identity.”

And the question of whether and when a child is adopted at all is influenced by systemic racism. Research shows that Black children take longer to be adopted than white children, and dark-skinned Black children take longer than children with lighter skin, Howell said. Choosing adoption, then, is no guarantee that a child will soon find a permanent home.

There will likely always be a need for adoption, advocates say. They argue that what’s needed is not a blanket promotion of adoption over abortion but reforms to make adoption itself more just. That would include a requirement that adoptees be able to access their original birth certificate and information about family history for medical and other purposes. “All information about an adoptee’s identity should always be available,” Bagshaw says. “This is a human rights issue.” (Safe haven laws, which allow people to relinquish a baby anonymously, can make it harder for adoptees to access this information.)

Beyond that, what’s needed is “transparency about how a person gets in a situation where they’re deciding adoption,” Bagshaw said. “Why are we not assisting that person to keep their baby if they can and want to?”

These are complicated questions that will require a hard look at America’s social safety net and the politics and economics of adoption. But Dobbs v. Jackson isn’t about any of those things. It’s about abortion, and whether a state has the right to ban it prior to viability, usually dated at about 24 weeks.

According to Vox’s Ian Millhiser, all signs currently suggest that next year, when the Court hands down a decision in Dobbs, it will rule that a state does have that right, at least in certain circumstances. Shortly thereafter, it’s likely that states across the South and Midwest, armed with the decision, will so heavily restrict abortion access that their residents will no longer be able to get a legal abortion unless they have the money and time to travel out of state, perhaps thousands of miles, to a place where abortion is still allowed.

Many abortion opponents argue — and Barrett, with her questioning, has implied — that it won’t really matter because anyone who doesn’t want to have a child can simply give that child up.

To many reproductive justice advocates and people who study adoption, that argument is a red herring. It ignores, they say, a simple truth: that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term irrevocably alters the course of a person’s life. Banning abortion will take some of the power to determine that course away from pregnant people and give it to the state, and the availability of adoption does nothing to change that.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pfizer and BioNTech said initial lab studies show a third dose of their Covid-19 vaccine neutralizes the omicron variant, results that will accelerate booster shot drives around the world. From a report: A booster with the current version of the vaccine increased antibodies 25-fold, providing a similar level as observed after two doses against the original virus and other variants, the companies said Wednesday. Blood plasma from people immunized with two doses of the vaccine has neutralizing antibody levels more than 25-fold less versus omicron than against the original strain of the virus, the companies said. "It's clear from these preliminary data that protection is improved with a third dose," Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in a statement. The initial data show a third dose could offer still offer enough protection from disease, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shortlife is a clock by artist Dries Depoorter that simply shows the percentage of your life lived, based on life expectancy from the World Health Organization. It has a warranty of six months.

I kind of want this? Please note: Results may vary.

Tags: clock, Dries Depoorter, mortality

A Black couple in Northern California is rightfully suing the shit out of an appraisal company after getting a low-ball price for their property. 

Since buying their four-bedroom, two-bath house in Marin City, a neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay area, in 2016 for $550,000, Paul Austin, 45, and his wife Tenisha Tate-Austin, 42, have made nearly $400,000 worth of renovations—which the obviously biased appraiser noted when visiting the house.

The Austins have added a new fireplace, a separate unit with its own kitchen and bathroom, a deck, refinished the floors, painted, added new fixtures in the kitchen and bathrooms, added a new foundation and retaining wall, replaced all of the windows, and doubled the square footage from its original 1,248 square feet.  

So when the appraiser fixed the price of the house at $995,000, which was lower than previous appraisals in 2018 and 2019, the Austins were pissed. 

“It was a slap in the face,” Paul Austin told KGO-TV in February.

“I read the appraisal, I looked at the number I was like, 'This is unbelievable,’” Tenisha Tate-Austin told ABC-7.

So the Austins opted for a second opinion—only this time, they had their white friend Jan help them out. Jan pretended to be the owner while the Austins “white-washed” their house, according to the lawsuit. They removed family photos, replacing them with photos of Jan’s family, and removed all the Africa-themed artwork from the walls—in a very real way, erasing themselves from their own home in the hopes of leveling the playing field. 

The house was appraised three weeks later by a new appraiser, and guess what? The house was now pegged at $1.48 million—almost $500,000 more than the first appraisal done by Janette “Karen” Miller and her company, Miller & Perotti Real Estate Appraisals in San Rafael.

Now Miller and her company are being sued by the Austins and the nonprofit Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California for damages and demanding that the defendants not discriminate against Black folks in the future. 

Austin told the California Reparations Task Force he believes the house was undervalued because the couple is Black and because the house is in a traditionally Black neighborhood. 

The history of Black homeowners being forced to deal with racist appraisal companies isn’t new. 

In November, a Maryland realtors' association began investigating after homeowners in a majority Black community reported multiple cases of alleged appraisal discrimination, leaving home values in the area thousands of dollars lower than what similar properties in nearby communities are worth.

These are just some of the multiple incidents reported over the years in which Black homeowners are discriminated against and given significantly lower appraisals than their white counterparts.

Studies have found that homes in neighborhoods where there is a higher population of Black people are valued at about half the price of neighborhoods with no Black residents, according to Brookings Institution.

"It's almost when people see Black neighborhoods, they see twice as much crime than there actually is. They see worse education than there actually is," said Andre Perry, a senior fellow for the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. "I think this is what's happening when appraisers, lenders, real estate agents see Blackness. They devalue the asset. They devalue the property."

Compromise defense policy legislation set to be filed Monday will not require women to register for a military draft, according to two people with knowledge of the negotiations, a stunning turnaround after the proposal gained bipartisan support in both the House and Senate this year.

Leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees left the provision out of the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act, despite the fact that both chambers' bills would have expanded the Selective Service System beyond men.

The move is a victory for conservatives who fought to strip the provision. Earlier attempts to kill the proposal came up short because lawmakers from both parties supported including women in the draft. Expanding Selective Service has gained momentum since all combat roles in the military were opened to women.

It's also likely to upset Democrats who are already on edge over what may not make the cut. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are threatening to oppose the bill in the House this week if it doesn't include a major overhaul in how the military prosecutes felonies as well provisions to combat extremism in the ranks.

The defense bill, which has become law each year for six decades, may also become a vehicle for Democratic leaders to address the impending debt limit. Linking the military policy bill to the federal borrowing limit, or other unrelated issues, may jeopardize GOP support for the legislation, however.

Typically provisions that pass in both chambers are almost guaranteed to become law in the final bill lawmakers iron out. The military draft expansion is one of the rare exceptions, but may have been sacrificed to secure other provisions in the bill.

One of the people with knowledge of the move said the provision was stripped as a trade-off so Republicans would accept reforms to the military justice system.

The move to include women in the draft was opposed by the top House and Senate Armed Services Republicans, Rep. Mike Rogers and Sen. Jim Inhofe.

Conservative Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who opposed the bill in the Armed Services Committee over the expansion, pushed for an amendment to strip the provision from the Senate bill. Though Democrats were prepared to give Hawley the vote, an impasse over amendments forced the Senate to scrap efforts to amend and pass its own version of the bill.

Hawley wrote on Twitter on Monday that, if the provision remains in the final bill, he "will continue to insist on a vote on the Senate floor to strike the provision."

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), a social conservative who opposes requiring women to register, celebrated its removal from the bill. She criticized the move as "imposing a woke ideology on our troops rather than meeting the current needs of our military."

"Women are not chess pieces in a political game. They are doctors, lawyers, engineers and already valuable members of our all-volunteer force," Hartzler said. "I applaud the removal of this unnecessary provision and am grateful to see reasonable minds come together to join me in resisting this effort."

Calls to expand the draft beyond men have grown recently, particularly after the Pentagon opened all combat roles to women in 2015. An 11-member independent commission that reviewed the draft also backed the change last year in its final report to Congress.

Advocates of reining in presidential war powers also came up short in the defense bill.

Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said Monday the bill won't include repeals of the 2002 Iraq War or 1991 Gulf War authorizations. The Senate had tried, and failed, to secure a vote on the bipartisan repeals, but may still revisit the issue as standalone legislation.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised a war powers vote on the floor this year, but time is tight for the Senate to slot in a vote on the measure, offered by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.).

Democratic leaders, meanwhile, are mulling whether to tie the defense bill with efforts to address the debt limit.

That's a risky proposition, as Republicans could jump ship on the NDAA over the debt limit. GOP lawmakers have been loathe to support efforts to increase the country's borrowing limit with Democrats in charge of the House, Senate and White House.

Senate GOP leaders largely poured cold water on the defense-for-debt gambit on Monday.

Andrew Desiderio contributed to this report.

The Biden administration makes a persuasive case that Texas violated the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court hates the Voting Rights Act.

On Monday, the Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Texas’s new state house and congressional district maps violate the Voting Rights Act, which forbids gerrymanders that have the purpose or effect of abridging “the right to vote on account of race, color, or language minority status.”

The Justice Department’s complaint in United States v. Texas is a fine, workmanlike legal document that makes a strong case that Texas drew its maps in order to maximize white power within the state and minimize the impact of Black and Latino voters. It’s the sort of lawsuit that would have a good shot at prevailing — if the Supreme Court hadn’t spent the past decade dismantling nearly all of the Voting Rights Act.

As the complaint notes, between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, “Texas grew by nearly 4 million residents, and the minority population represents 95% of that growth.” Because of this population growth, Texas’s US House delegation expanded from 36 seats to 38 seats in the decennial redistricting process. Yet Texas drew its new maps so that both of the new districts will have white majorities, and it also allegedly redrew a third district to prevent Latinos from electing their preferred candidate.

The result is that white voters will gain the ability to elect two additional congressional representatives, even though Texas owes its two new seats almost entirely to Black, Asian, and Latino voters.

The Justice Department also alleges that both the new congressional maps and the new state house maps drastically underrepresent voters of color. If Latinos controlled seats proportional to their population, the complaint claims, they would control “11 Congressional seats and 45 Texas House seats.” Black voters, meanwhile, would control “5 Congressional seats and 20 Texas House seats.”

Instead, under the new maps, “Latino voters have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates in 7 Congressional seats and 29 Texas House seats,” and “Black voters have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates in roughly 3 Congressional seats and 13 Texas House seats.” (There is one additional congressional seat and five additional state house seats that might elect candidates preferred by a coalition of Black, Latino, and other nonwhite voters.)

Yet it’s uncertain whether the Justice Department is capable of prevailing in this lawsuit, no matter what evidence it presents at trial. That’s how hostile the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are toward the Voting Rights Act.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the Court “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act. The Court has also shielded states from federal lawsuits alleging partisan gerrymandering — a decision that potentially gives Texas a powerful weapon it can use against the Justice Department’s allegation that its new maps are an unlawful racial gerrymander.

The Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove that maps were enacted with racist intent

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Supreme Court held that federal courts may not hear lawsuits alleging that a state’s legislative maps are an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander — meaning that the lines were drawn to benefit one party at the expense of another. The Court’s precedents, however, do permit lawsuits challenging racial gerrymanders — meaning that the lines were drawn to diminish the power of one or more racial groups.

In practice, however, Rucho creates a potentially serious problem for anyone alleging racial gerrymandering.

Recall that the Voting Rights Act prohibits election laws enacted for the purpose of limiting a racial group’s voting power, or that have the effect of doing so. Suppose that the Justice Department leans into the first of these two prongs: the prohibition on laws that are enacted with racist intent.

In that case, Texas is likely to argue, as it has in previous cases accusing it of racial gerrymandering, that its new maps weren’t drawn in order to reduce the power of Black and Latino voters. It will most likely argue that the maps were drawn for the purpose of reducing the power of Democratic voters.

Such an argument might even be superficially plausible. As the Justice Department argues in its complaint, “voting in Texas continues to be racially polarized throughout much of the State” — meaning that white voters tend to vote for Republicans and Black and Latino voters tend to vote for Democrats. So it’s fairly difficult to prove conclusively that the new maps were drawn with racist intent. A set of maps drawn to maximize the power of white Texans, and a set of maps drawn to maximize the power of Texas Republicans, are likely to closely resemble each other because race is a good proxy for partisan affiliation in Texas — as it is in much of the United States.

Of course, this argument that partisan gerrymandering is distinct from racial gerrymandering could fail — and, in a fair court, it probably would fail. If state lawmakers intentionally minimized the influence of Black and Latino voters because they knew those voters were likely to be Democrats, that’s still intentional race discrimination.

But if the Justice Department wants to show that Texas’s new maps were drawn with invidious racial intent, it still must overcome another of the Court’s decisions: Abbott v. Perez (2018).

Perez held that lawmakers enjoy a high presumption of racial innocence when they are accused of drawing racially gerrymandered maps. In that case, the Court considered legislative maps that Texas’s Republican legislature drew in 2011, and then altered in 2013.

The 2011 maps never took effect because of litigation alleging that they were an unlawful racial gerrymander. Yet in 2012, while this litigation was ongoing, a federal court drew interim maps that closely resembled the racially gerrymandered 2011 maps, so that Texas had something it could use to hold an election in 2012. The purpose of these stopgap maps wasn’t to declare any portion of the 2011 maps legally valid. It was just to ensure that the 2012 election could still move forward in Texas.

Then, in 2013, the Texas legislature adopted these stopgap maps as its own — including several districts that were still being challenged as unlawful racial gerrymanders.

In upholding these 2013 maps, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Perez emphasizes that “whenever a challenger claims that a state law was enacted with discriminatory intent, the burden of proof lies with the challenger, not the State.” Alito then explained that this burden is quite high.

He deemed the 2013 maps legitimate because, he claimed, the evidence showed that Texas enacted them because it “wanted to bring the litigation about the State’s districting plans to an end as expeditiously as possible.”

Alito’s argument, in other words, was that the 2013 maps weren’t enacted to preserve a racial gerrymander; they were enacted to shut down litigation challenging a racial gerrymander. And this distinction was sufficient to absolve the state legislature of any allegation of racism.

Needless to say, the sort of Court that would rely on such a meaningless distinction is unlikely to be sympathetic to DOJ’s new lawsuit against Texas — and the Court has grown significantly more conservative since Perez was decided. Perez will also shape lower court decisions applying the Voting Rights Act, because lower courts are obligated to follow Supreme Court decisions.

The Supreme Court does not care about what the Voting Rights Act actually says

Alternatively, the Justice Department can argue that Texas’s maps are illegal because they have the effect of diminishing minority voting power, even if they were not enacted with racist intent. The Voting Rights Act does not simply bar intentional discrimination, it also prohibits any election law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right ... to vote on account of race or color.”

But in Brnovich, the Court imposed a number of novel and completely atextual limits on this provision of the Voting Rights Act. Among other things, Brnovich held that there is a strong presumption that voting restrictions that were commonplace in 1982 are valid — even though the text of the law says nothing about the year 1982. Brnovich also applied a similar presumption to laws that purport to combat fraud at the polls — even though there’s nothing in the law’s text supporting this presumption either.

One of the few silver linings of the Brnovich decision is that its holding is limited to only certain kinds of cases. The Court distinguished between cases alleging “vote-dilution” — and gerrymandering cases are considered vote-dilution cases — and cases challenging laws regulating the “time, place, or manner” in which elections are conducted. The specific extratextual limits on the Voting Rights Act that were fabricated by the Brnovich opinion do not apply to vote-dilution cases.

But the Justice Department should take no comfort in that fact. Brnovich is a troubling case not only because it imposes novel and entirely made-up new limits on certain Voting Rights Act cases. It is also troubling because of what it says about the Court’s overarching approach to the Voting Rights Act.

Simply put, if the Court is willing to make up new limits on a federal statute that appear nowhere in the text of the law, and apply those limits in “time, place, or manner” lawsuits, there’s no reason to believe that it won’t invent similarly atextual limits and impose them on vote-dilution cases. As Justice Kagan wrote in her Brnovich dissent, “the majority’s opinion mostly inhabits a law-free zone.” Once a court enters that zone, there are no longer any constraints on its judges.

Brnovich doesn’t necessarily mean that the Court will never rule in favor of a voting rights plaintiff — in this case, the Justice Department. But it does suggest that the Court will do whatever the hell it wants in voting rights cases, regardless of what the law actually says.

Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet. Insider reports: The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed. "The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality," the authors wrote. The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will "trickle down" to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. They argue in the new report that the last two decades of wealth data show that "inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability." For instance, when it comes to wealth, which accounts for the values of assets people hold, researchers found that the "poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all." That bottom half owns just 2% of total wealth. That means that the top half of the world holds 98% of the world's wealth, and that gets even more concentrated the wealthier you get. Indeed, the richest 10% of the world's population hold 76%, or two-thirds of all wealth. That means the 517 million people who make up the top hold vastly more than the 2.5 billion who make up the bottom. The world's policy choices have led to wealth trickling up rather than down. One group in particular has seen its share of global wealth swell. The report notes that "2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires' share of wealth on record." Broadly, the number of billionaires rose to a record-number in 2020, with Wealth-X finding that there are now over 3,000 members of the three-comma club. Billionaire gains are a well-documented trend: The left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that Americans added $2.1 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, a 70% increase. Some of the solutions that the authors propose to help alleviate this disparity center around taxation. "It would be completely unreasonable not to ask more to top wealth-holders in the future, especially in light of the social, developmental and environmental challenges ahead," they write. That means expanding wealth taxes like property taxes to all different types of wealth, and to make taxes progressive -- meaning they increase with net worth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Usage of the medication sildenafil -- better known to most as the brand-name drug Viagra -- is associated with dramatically reduced incidence of Alzheimer's disease, new research suggests. According to a study led by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, taking sildenafil is tied to a nearly 70 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer's compared to non-users. That's based on an analysis of health insurance claim data from over 7.2 million people, in which records showed that claimants who took the medication were much less likely to develop Alzheimer's over the next six years of follow up, compared to matched control patients who didn't use sildenafil. It's important to note that observed associations like this -- even on a huge scale -- are not the same as proof of a causative effect. For example, it's possible that the people in the cohort who took sildenafil might have something else to thank for their improved chances of not developing Alzheimer's. Nonetheless, the researchers say the correlation shown here -- in addition to other indicators in the study -- is enough to identify sildenafil as a promising candidate drug for Alzheimer's disease, the viability of which can be explored in future randomized clinical trials designed to test whether causality does indeed exist.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Wine mom

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses God, COVID-19 and the 2022 midterms.

Start with some race panic, add in some sex panic, and you've got yourself a formula for victory.

Many in the party are balancing being pro-vaccine but anti-mandate.

NBC News tells the hair-raising tale of Black Oxygen Organics (or "BOO" for short). Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. "A gift from the Ground," it reads. "Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it." BOO, which "can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals," according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites. By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet subcultures that embrace fringe supplements, including the mixed martial arts community, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure spaces.... "Who would have thought drinking dirt would make me feel so so good?" one person in a 27,000-member private Facebook group posted, her face nuzzling a jar of black liquid.... Teams of sellers in these private Facebook groups claim that, beyond cosmetic applications, BOO can cure everything from autism to cancer to Alzheimer's disease.... But there may be an incentive for the hyperbole... Participation in multi-level marketing (MLM) boomed during the pandemic with 7.7 million Americans working for one in 2020, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Direct Selling Association, the trade and lobbying group for the MLM industry. Wellness products make up the majority of MLM products, and, as the Federal Trade Commission noted, some direct sellers took advantage of a rush toward so-called natural remedies during the pandemic to boost sales. More than 99 percent of MLM sellers lose money, according to the Consumer Awareness Institute, an industry watchdog group... The secret to dealing dirt seems to be Facebook, where sellers have created dozens of individual groups that have attracted a hodgepodge of hundreds of thousands of members. NBC News had a bag analyzed by a professor of soil and environmental science at Ohio State University. It found two doses per day "exceeded Health Canada's limit for lead, and three doses for daily arsenic amounts." Growing concern among BOO sellers about the product — precipitated by an anti-MLM activist who noticed on Google Earth that the bog that sourced BOO's peat appeared to share a border with a landfill — pushed several to take matters into their own hands, sending bags of BOO to labs for testing. The results of three of these tests, viewed by NBC News and confirmed as seemingly reliable by two soil scientists at U.S. universities, again showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic. Those results are the backbone of a federal lawsuit seeking class action status filed in November in Georgia's Northern District court. The complaint, filed on behalf of four Georgia residents who purchased BOO, claims that the company negligently sold a product with "dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals," which led to physical and economic harm. Black Oxygen Organics did not respond to requests for comment concerning the complaint. The anti-MLM forces also formed Facebook groups, monitoring Facebook's pro-Boo sales groups and even documenting sales and company meetings — then filed official complaints with Amreica's product-regulating Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. And it all ended badly for Boo... According to BOO President Carlo Garibaldi, they had weathered the FTC complaints, the FDA seizures, the Health Canada recalls and the online mob. But the "fatal blow" came when their online merchant dropped them as clients.... Members of anti-BOO groups celebrated. "WE DID IT!!!!!!" Ceara Manchester, the group administrator, posted to the "Boo is Woo" Facebook group. "I hope this is proof positive that if the anti-MLM community bans together we can take these companies down. We won't stop with just BOO. A new age of anti-MLM activism has just begun." In a separate Zoom meeting unattended by executives and shared with NBC News, lower-rung sellers grappled with the sudden closure and the reality that they were out hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What else might people do to prevent COVID-19—aside from taking a free, safe, effective, FDA-approved vaccine? Horse paste was all the rage for a while. Bleach injections never really took off, despite the ocher abomination’s imprimatur. Oh, I know, maybe we can prank them into eating handfuls of dirt!

Nah, too ridiculous. Even MAGAs have a limit, right? Right? Oh, dear God, tell me I’m right.

Looks like we’ve crossed the Rubicon for about the 832nd time since the Trump era began, and on the opposite bank they’re scarfing dirt like popcorn shrimp at an Old Country Buffet. What the hell, anti-vaxxers? Did you think Jesus handed out loam and fishes to the hungry masses? 

I’d say we should all try to fool anti-vaxxers into sticking their tongues to metal poles this winter, but I’m actually a little afraid they might do it.

I seem to remember “don’t eat dirt” being one of those early lessons I internalized and never really took the time to question—along with “don’t eat paint chips,” “three bags of Funyuns is definitely too many,” and “never climb into a windowless white van with Ted Cruz.”

But that’s just me.

Anyway, according to a recent NBC News exposé, a company called Black Oxygen Organics (BOO) has been selling dirt to people and marketing it as a panacea. And it’s not cheap. Because if you’re going to fill bags with dirt and sell them to fuckwits, you might as well swing for the fences. After all, no one’s gonna buy a 75-cent bag of miracle muck.

Put more simply, the product is dirt—four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.”

BOO, which “can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals,” according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides, and parasites.

Yeah, that’s just bonkers. But it gets worse.

Teams of sellers in these private Facebook groups claim that, beyond cosmetic applications, BOO can cure everything from autism to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Conveniently in these times, BOO proponents say it also protects against and treats Covid-19, and can be used to “detox” the newly vaccinated, according to posts viewed by NBC News.

Oh, of course it can. I mean, have you ever eaten a pile of dirt merely on the off chance it would cure cancer and COVID-19? If you’re gonna masticate some mud, you must be pretty confident in your research, huh? That’s just common sense.

Naturally, Black Oxygen Organics is sold via a multilevel marketing scheme, because there weren’t already enough red flags slapping these gormless gooberoos upside the head … warning them that a $110 literal dirtbag may not be the holy grail they think it is.

As you probably expected, magic dirt groups have proliferated on Facebook, helping to boost BOO’s fortunes among the already credulous. According to NBC’s reporting, the groups have become inundated with anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers, “including prominent activists who sell the product to raise funds for anti-vaccine efforts.” In fact, one top BOO seller recently noted that COVID has “been kind of a blessing” for their business.

So what quack cure will be next? One can only imagine. I’m afraid to even speculate, because I might conjure it into existence. I mean, what could be so outlandish that MAGAs wouldn’t embrace it as a cure? Licking frogs? Keeping a woozy fruit bat in one’s Underoos 24/7?

The mind reels.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, 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.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Just registering that I was siding with the robots decades before the Glorious Overthrowing.

Today's News:

Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.

Today’s cautionary tale is 51-year-old Bobby Sue, who was a longtime anti-vaxxer.

Bobby-Sue was no anti-science Johnny-come-lately. She had been singing from the anti-vaxx hymnal for years, like here in 2017. 

And if you’re curious, no, 98 million Americans were not given cancer virus via the polio shot. I bet you’re so shocked. 

She got COVID in December 2020, before vaccines were available to the broader public. We don’t know if she was being properly careful, masking, and social distancing. But we do know, as you’ll see, that she never fully recovered from her first bout. 

Weirdly enough, that one is true: 

Last month, the popular Tamil actor Vivek died two days after receiving his COVID-19 vaccination. The hospital where he died said Vivek had advanced heart disease, but his death has been seized on by vaccine opponents as evidence that the government is hiding side effects.

Billions of people are being vaccinated. It was inevitable that something like this would happen. But this actor was very public in his support of the jab, and  even took it in front of cameras and happy government officials: 

On Thursday, when he took the jab, Vivek in the company of Health Secretary Radhakrishnan and other officials, gave long and strong arguments in favour of the vaccine. He was roped in for his obvious reputation as an effective and popular communicator.

He collapsed the very next morning and was brought unconscious to SIMS hospital. He passed after midnight.

Jesus, that is the worst luck. 

And of course, that one unfortunate coincidence now overrides the billions of people who have taken the vaccine with nothing more than mild side effects. 

Six months after she had COVID, she was still suffering from associated health issues. D-dimer is the test for blood clots. “You can get high levels of D-dimer in your blood if you have a major clot like with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) [...] With DVT, you have a clot deep in one of your veins, usually in your legs, and it can lead to serious problems.” Those serious problems include death, if a blood clot breaks free and lodges in the lungs (a pulmonary embolism). 

Now would’ve been a good time to vaccinate. 

#CovidSucks. So, did Bobby-Sue use this first-hand experience to advocate for COVID countermeasures like vaccination, masking, and social distancing? 

Oh.

Oh boy, that was her hero. 

Suffering from long-haul COVID, she still wasn’t going to vaccinate. 

Uh oh. 

She wanted to die on that hill. 

Ugh.

That crying background … COVID really made her last year of life hell. 

Her last post. 

Gutting. Poor mom. 

She speaks of her daughter as if she was lost to drugs, which in a way, she was—the Facebook-conservative opiate. It’s an addiction to propaganda. I can’t imagine doing everything you need to do to raise a child, and then see her needlessly die because of stupidity and ignorance. She probably begged her daughter to get vaccinated, and was completely rebuffed. I can’t fathom the pain, anger, and frustration. 

But this was the hill Bobby-Sue was going to proudly die on, celebrating those who refused to let reality change their behaviors and belief system. What an utter waste. 

Inaction normalizes anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment.

Congressional leaders are struggling to respond to anti-Muslim comments made by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), an uncomfortable reminder of how accepted Islamophobia has become among Republican lawmakers, who’ve broadly been silent in the wake of these statements.

Two weeks ago during a floor speech, Boebert referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of three Muslim House lawmakers and the only one to wear a hijab, as a member of the “jihad squad.”

“The Jihad Squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband, and not her brother husband, the other one, over a million dollars in campaign funds,” she said in her remarks.

Over the Thanksgiving recess, Boebert again made anti-Muslim remarks in a speech, claiming that once while riding an elevator Omar was on, she saw a worried Capitol Police officer approaching. In her comments at the November event, Boebert said they had nothing to fear from the Democrat because she wasn’t wearing a backpack, insinuating that Omar could have been a suicide bomber.

This week, it was reported that Boebert has told this story in public more than once. (Omar has said she never witnessed Boebert have this exchange with an officer.)

Boebert later apologized to “anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment,” but has yet to publicly apologize to Omar, and went on to accuse Omar of anti-American rhetoric in a phone call the two had earlier this week, according to a statement she later made.

Boebert’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Thus far, Republican leadership has been quiet on the matter, issuing no public condemnation of Boebert’s comments. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Friday that Boebert had already apologized for her comments and reached out to Omar, even though the call they had didn’t have a resolution. “This party is for anyone and everyone who craves freedom and supports religious liberty,” McCarthy said of the GOP.

House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have condemned Boebert’s Islamophobic remarks but have yet to put forth a formal resolution or penalty regarding her statements. Beyond a statement condemning Boebert, Democrats and Republicans have a couple of options for punishment, including a resolution denouncing these comments, a formal reprimand or censure, or the stripping of committee assignments. At this point, neither party has publicly announced further action they would take.

Pressure for a more serious punishment is building: On Thursday, five Democratic House caucus chairs called for Boebert to be stripped of her committee assignments, much like Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene were in the wake of posts they made seeming to promote political violence. The caucus chairs argue that inaction in the face of Boebert’s comments effectively condones Islamophobia and sends a message about what types of extremist comments Congress is willing to accept.

“There must be consequences for elected representatives who traffic in anti-Muslim and racist tropes that make all Muslims across the country less safe,” the lawmakers write.

Researchers have indeed found that Islamophobic rhetoric by politicians has real-world consequences and has been directly linked with hate speech targeted toward Muslim Americans. If Congress doesn’t impose more penalties regarding this incident, lawmakers could — whether they mean to or not — further normalize anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment, affecting not only Muslim lawmakers but millions of Muslim Americans as well.

In their lack of response, Republicans, in particular, have shown that their party isn’t willing to denounce such Islamophobic statements. And this creates the appearance that the party is open to embracing the hateful rhetoric that former President Donald Trump and others have used.

“The truth is that Islamophobia pervades our culture, our politics, and even policy decisions,” Omar said at a press conference on Wednesday. “The most pervasive is the constant suggestion that all Muslims are terrorists and should be feared. So when a sitting member of Congress calls a colleague a member of the ‘jihad squad’ and falsifies a story to suggest that I will blow up the Capitol, it is not just an attack on me, but on millions of American Muslims across this country.”

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

How Congress acts in response to this incident — and others like it — sets a tone that extends far beyond its halls.

Congressional inaction condones Islamophobia

Congressional inaction toward Boebert’s comments only helps normalize them, and the fact that Boebert hasn’t faced more immediate consequences from either party makes it seem as though expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment are acceptable to both Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats’ outright condemnation was important, but the delay in additional disciplinary action has been surprising to Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“I believe that so far the response from the Democratic leadership is weak and late and doesn’t meet the seriousness of these attacks,” Awad told Vox. “Islamophobia has unfortunately become a reality of our life as American Muslims. It has not been tackled with the vigor and the swiftness it needs to be dealt with.”

Meanwhile, the Republican response to Boebert’s comments further reaffirms leadership’s seeming willingness to accept or look past the bigotry and rhetoric of its members.

The decision to stay silent on this front follows Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s treatment of a video posted by Gosar that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and drawing weapons against President Joe Biden. At the time, McCarthy did not publicly condemn Gosar. As the Washington Post reported on Thursday, Republican leadership has sought to address internal conflicts, but focused less on the issue of Islamophobia.

McCarthy has spoken out about other discriminatory statements caucus members have made in the past. Though he did not do so immediately after they came to light, he did publicly denounce several anti-Semitic and violent statements Greene had made. More recently, McCarthy responded to her comments comparing being required to wear masks to the Holocaust by saying, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.”

As the Post notes, however, his approach to colleagues making extremist comments seems to have shifted since his statements about Greene in May, with some speculating that he’s now focused on building support for winning the House speakership — and keeping the base satisfied to do so.

McCarthy’s approach, when it comes to Boebert’s remarks, has been indicative of many rank-and-file Republicans’ reactions to her statements as well. While Reps. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) are among those who have spoken out and criticized Boebert’s comments, many others in the caucus have shied away from confronting them directly. Greene, meanwhile, echoed Boebert’s “jihad squad” rhetoric in her own tweet this week.

It’s another sign that many Republicans are willing to stay quiet when it comes to criticizing bigotry and extremism by their members, putting Democrats in a position where they have to be the ones to act. Republicans have been quick to decry certain forms of bigotry they have said they’ve seen in the Democratic caucus, for instance attempting to censure progressive lawmakers — including Omar — for criticisms of Israel that some perceived as anti-Semitic. Democrats have also criticized Omar for similar reasons.

“Republicans have long been critical of Omar for her criticisms of Israel, and members of both parties have denounced some of her statements as antisemitic,” the Washington Post’s Jacqueline Alemany and Marianna Sotomayor write. “In 2019, House Democratic leaders swiftly condemned Omar’s suggestion that Israel’s allies in American politics were motivated by money rather than principle. Omar apologized later that day.”

Congress is known for moving slowly in general, though the response to the Boebert comments has taken a while. Democrats responded after a week and a half regarding the video Gosar posted depicting violence toward Ocasio-Cortez. Gosar had posted that video around November 7 and was censured by the House on November 17. Boebert first made her floor speech using the term “jihad squad” on November 17 and then used the term at another event, video of which was posted on November 25.

Democrats have argued that there could be downsides to punishing Boebert; they worry that doing so could further raise her profile and boost her ability to fundraise from conservative voters. Greene brought in more than $3 million in fundraising in the first quarter of this year after her committee assignments were stripped. Some Democrats have also said they don’t want to be in a position of constantly disciplining Republicans who make extremist and racist statements, according to Politico.

Still, as was evident in the punishments levied on Gosar and Greene, Democrats act when they feel it is necessary. As the Hill reported, Democrats considered a resolution to condemn Islamophobia earlier this week but were focused on putting pressure on House Republicans to act. In an MSNBC interview Thursday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Democrats were still discussing what the “appropriate action” is.

“It’s not an option to ignore it because it might help her raise money,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) stressed at a press conference earlier this week. Punishment “sends a message to the rest of our colleagues that this is unacceptable.”

Political statements can be tied to real-life violence

In the wake of Boebert’s latest statements, Omar has been the target of anti-Muslim vitriol and death threats, an apparent consequence of the recent Islamophobic remarks. Researchers have found that the rhetoric used by public officials could have an impact on the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence — a major reason it’s important for House leadership to push back against it.

“There’s a through line between what is said about me ... what my colleagues have said ... and the death threats I receive,” Omar said this week.

At the Wednesday press conference, Omar played one of the threatening voicemails — a message filled with racist and Islamophobic slurs — she’s received following her call with Boebert. Omar and other progressive women of color including Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib have long faced numerous death threats since they’ve been elected.

There have also been several recent examples of political speech being tied to actual violence. Participants in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol have referenced comments by Trump and said he instructed them to go to the building. Trump had called on a crowd to “fight like hell” prior to the storming of the Capitol, telling attendees “we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue ... and we are going to the Capitol.”

Research has indicated that anti-Muslim rhetoric can be linked to hate crimes, based on the limited data that law enforcement sources currently have. A 2016 study from California State University San Bernardino, for example, found an 87.5 percent increase in hate crimes toward Muslim Americans after Trump called for a ban on Muslim people entering the country.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Awad notes that anti-Muslim rhetoric has been normalized by many politicians, who’ve leveraged Islamophobia to energize members of their base. A 2021 CAIR survey found that 69 percent of Muslim Americans said they’d experienced an instance of anti-Muslim bigotry since the 9/11 attacks, and 95 percent said they’d speak out if they heard negative comments about Muslims and Islam.

“We have been fighting — as an institution and as a community — Islamophobia for the past 20 years,” Awad said. “Over the years, it’s been elevated, normalized, and legislated. We have the most influential people in our lives trafficking in Islamophobia believing that it will get them somewhere with their base.”

Tlaib echoed this point this week, emphasizing the effect Congress’s actions in this case could have.

“I’m also here today in support of the 3.45 million Muslim neighbors in our country, because it’s also their lives that are put in grave danger when people like Rep. Boebert are allowed to use their national platform and elected office to spread hate and dangerous racist rhetoric that enables violence toward Muslims,” Tlaib said.

Lawmakers would be making a mistake if they weigh nullifying the political benefits Boebert could extract from any punishment more heavily than making a decisive statement against Islamophobia.

Last week researchers at Northwestern University calculated that one week after a Covid-19 booster shot, median antibody levels were 23 times higher than before the shot. This Thursday the Times of London reported that another study found similar results: Booster jabs "massively" strengthen the body's defences against Covid, according to key results that have raised hopes of strong protection from the Omicron variant. A third dose not only increased antibody levels thirtyfold, but roughly tripled levels of T-cells, a part of the immune system that experts believe could be the critical weapon against the heavily mutated Omicron strain. Professor Saul Faust, who led the study, emphasized to the Guardian that "These are remarkably effective immunological boosters, way above what is needed to prevent hospitalisation and death." And speaking to The Week, Faust also added that "This T-cell response gives us hope," because although Omicron was not specifically analysed during the research, their data suggested the triggered T-cells "are recognising a much broader range of antigens that might... be common to all of the variants." And earlier this week long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shared more booster/Omicron news from The Hill: On Sunday, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who sits on Pfizer's board of directors, said vaccine developers have "a pretty good degree of confidence" that people who have received booster doses on top of their initial COVID-19 vaccinations are protected against omicron. "If you talk to people in vaccine circles, people who are working on a vaccine, they have a pretty good degree of confidence that a boosted vaccine, so three full doses of vaccine, is going to be fairly protective against this new variant," he said. Meanwhile, new Omicron-specific vaccines are also just months away, Business Insider reports: Pfizer said it will be able to manufacture and distribute an updated version of its COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days if the new variant Omicron is found to be resistant to its current vaccine... "Pfizer and BioNTech have taken actions months ago to be able to adapt the mRNA vaccine within six weeks and ship initial batches within 100 days in the event of an escape variant," the company said in a statement... "We expect more data from the laboratory tests in two weeks at the latest. These data will provide more information about whether B.1.1.529 could be an escape variant that may require an adjustment of our vaccine if the variant spreads globally," a spokesperson told Reuters. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are also preparing to respond to the Omicron's possible threat. Moderna on Friday said it plans to test a variant-specific booster in the event that its current vaccine is found to be ineffective against the Omicron. And The Hill also reports: Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Monday he has "a very high level of confidence" that his company's COVID-19 treatment pills are effective against the omicron variant... Bourla said Paxlovid was designed in anticipation of future possible mutations. "So that gives me very, very high level of confidence that the treatment will not be effected, our oral treatment will not be effected by this virus."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 Across the country, Americans are once again grieving the loss of young lives due to gun violence after a 15-year-old brought a gun to his Michigan high school and opened fire and killed at least four people. The teenager identified as Ethan Crumbley has been charged with 24 crimes, including terrorism and first-degree murder, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald announced Wednesday.

The Oxford High School sophomore faces one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first-degree murder, seven counts of assault with intent to murder, and 12 counts of possession of a firearm in commitment of a felony. According to CNN, he will be tried as an adult and could be sentenced to life in prison.

McDonald noted that the terrorism charges were appropriate in this case because of the number of people who have been affected by the crime. Alongside the four deaths, at least seven others were injured.

"What about the children who ran, screaming, hiding under desks?" McDonald said. "What about all the children at home right now who can’t eat and can’t sleep and can’t imagine a world where they could ever set foot back in that school? Those are victims, too, and so are their families, and so is the community—and the charge of terrorism reflects that.”

McDonald and law enforcement officials said Wednesday that they found evidence that Crumbley both planned the attack and purposefully set out to kill students. In an arraignment hearing, Oakland County Sheriff's Lt. Tim Willis shared that evidence from the suspected shooter's cellphone includes two separate videos the teenager made the night before the incident "wherein he talked about shooting and killing students the next day at Oxford High School.”

Additionally, a journal was recovered from the suspect's backpack, which detailed his desire to "shoot up the school, to include murdering students."

"There are facts leading up to the shooting that suggest this was not an impulsive act," McDonald said. "We have charged four counts of first-degree murder, which require premeditation. And I am absolutely sure after reviewing the evidence that it isn’t even a close call. It was absolutely premeditated."

A press conference was held Friday to provide updates on the case and present charges against the shooter's parents, who McDonald had previously said acted “far beyond negligence.” At the start of the press conference, McDonald noted that, while the shooter was the one who entered the school and pulled the trigger, "there are other individuals who contributed to this.” She said: "It's my intention to hold them accountable.”

The gun used in the attack was purchased by Crumbley's father four days beforehand, on Nov. 26, the Associated Press reported. After investigations into the parents, charges were also brought upon them.

The parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, each face four counts of involuntary manslaughter, USA Today reported.

The gun “seems to have been just freely available” to Crumbley, McDonald told WJR-AM on Thursday. She noted that the gun was left in an unlocked space. “The parents were the only individuals in the position to know the access to weapons.”

According to CNN, Ethan Crumbley posted about his gun on social media, and his mother also created a post noting that her son was “testing out his new Christmas present.” Jennifer Crumbley was found to be aware that her son may use the gun in school. When the news of the active shooter had been made public, Jennifer Crumbley texted her son, "Ethan, don't do it," McDonald said. "James Crumbley called 911 reporting that a gun was missing from his house, and he believed his son may be the shooter," McDonald added.

Additionally, a teacher also reported that Crumbley was found searching for ammunition on his phone during class on Nov. 21. His mother was contacted by school officials then.

"Jennifer Crumbley was contacted via voicemail by school personnel regarding the son's inappropriate internet search. School personnel indicate they followed that voicemail up with an e-mail, but received no response from either parent," McDonald said.

"Thereafter, Jennifer Crumbley exchanged text messages about the incident with her son on that day, stating, 'lol, I'm not mad at you, you have to learn not to get caught,'" McDonald added.

​​A lot has been revealed in the last few days in regards to the case, officials found that Crumbley also met with school officials the day before and day of the shooting for "behavior in the classroom that they felt was concerning.” While details were not released on what exactly the behavior was, the gun he used to shoot his peers was in his custody at the time of the Nov. 30 meeting.

Superintendent of Oxford Community Schools, Tim Throne, said no disciplinary action was necessary for the alleged shooter prior to the shooting. Throne released a video message Thursday night.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the student who was apprehended, that he was called up to the office and all that kind of stuff. No discipline was warranted. [...] There are no discipline records at the high school. Yes, this student did have contact with our front office and yes, his parents were on campus Nov. 30.”

Since the shooting, multiple copycat threats have been presented across the state of Michigan. According to the Detroit Free Press, a 17-year-old student in Southfield, about 30 miles from Oxford High School, was arrested Thursday with a semi-automatic pistol. At another school in the state, a bomb threat was made.

“If you’re making threats, we’re going to find you,” Bouchard said during a news conference Thursday. “It is ridiculous you’re inflaming the fears and passion of parents, teachers, and the community in the midst of a real tragedy.”

The FBI and Secret Service are also investigating threats across the state of Michigan.  

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued to block Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of a fellow chip company, Arm, halting one of the biggest semiconductor industry deals in history. From a report: The F.T.C. said the deal between Nvidia, which is based in California and makes chips, and Arm, a British company that designs chips, would stifle competition and harm consumers. The proposed deal would give Nvidia control over computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop competing chips. "Tomorrow's technologies depend on preserving today's competitive, cutting-edge chip markets," said Holly Vedova, the director of the F.T.C.'s competition bureau. "This proposed deal would distort Arm's incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia's rivals." The companies announced the merger in September 2020 and said the merger would position the companies as leaders in semiconductors for artificial intelligence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I'm just here in the hopes that the standard college explainer comic on adverse selection involves clown murder.

Today's News:

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If you hear someone try to save before attacking you, run.

Today's News: