James.galbraith

Karina Ruiz, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and leader who volunteered to help elect Kyrsten Sinema in 2018, had a very straightforward question for the Arizona senator during a flight on Monday: Can you commit to passing a reconciliation package that contains a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants? 

Sinema ignored her, refusing to even look up. Sinema continued to refuse to respond to the Arizona Dream Act Coalition executive director even after numerous prompts, looking up only after Ruiz said she was being “vulnerable” to her right now. Ruiz said that her father had died last year and she’d been unable to reunite with her family. “This is my life and the life of millions,” Ruiz said. But by then, Sinema had resumed ignoring her.

Constituents and advocates like Ruiz have been forced to question Sinema in these settings because the Arizona senator “hasn’t had a public event or town hall in years," Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) said according to Arizona Republic. Sinema has "denied our requests, ignored our phone calls, and closed her office to her constituents,” LUCHA continued.

Wealthy donors have not had this experience: “Sinema leaves DC for high-end corporate fundraiser as she blocks Biden spending bill,” Mother Jones reported on Friday. “It’s the second time in a week Sinema will have fundraised with corporate interests who oppose Biden’s spending bill.” 

When it comes to the everyday person—and one who is in pain—Sinema made it clear she just doesn’t give a shit. "I don't want disturb you, but at the same time I just want see if I can get a commitment from you senator," Ruiz said in the video. "This is my life, and the life of millions in the line. I just need to hear from you. Can we get a commitment from you, to get a pathway to citizenship … to protect me and millions like me. Can I get a commitment from you?" Silence.

"Alright senator, I see that you don't want to respond to me,” Ruiz said. “Thank you for your time."

When it comes to people who do get acknowledgment from Sinema, Mother Jones reported that “[o]n Tuesday, at an undisclosed location at Capitol Hill, she held a fundraiser with five business lobbying groups who agreed to write checks between $1,000 and $5,800 after spending 45 minutes with her.” Constituents and activists also attempted to confront Sinema outside her Arizona fundraiser over the weekend, but they were escorted out by police:

Ruiz was among the young immigrants and allies who last month held an overnight action outside the Capitol, where they called continued attention to the need for permanent relief in the budget reconciliation package. The 11-hour-long vigil continued even as it rained on their heads. “I traveled here all the way from Arizona with a clear message for my Senators Sinema and Kelly: we need you to do your job and deliver for the people of Arizona,” Ruiz said at the time.

“I joined this overnight sustained action to highlight the urgency of this moment,” she continued. “DACA recipients like me, and undocumented people like my mom, live each day with the fear of detention and deportation. Democrats have long said they want to make a difference in the lives of immigrants, and now is their moment to deliver.” 

“With all eyes on Arizona and Senator Sinema right now, many Arizonans are asking, is Sinema doing her job?” LUCHA said in a statement. “The millions of Arizonans that include, Black, brown, and indigenous communities who elected her do not think she is. Sinema has shown zero interest to engage with her constituents, or meet her colleagues halfway on critical legislation … This is Sinema’s moment to do the right thing and stop blocking the Build Back Better Act.”

Former President Donald Trump truly is his own worst enemy. All he has to do is open his mouth, and laws get broken, indictments start flowing, evidence builds, and criminal cases are shored up.

His most recent gaffe took place in Perry, Georgia, last month, when during a rally, he went after his arch-nemesis Gov. Brian Kemp for refusing to overturn his presidential loss to President Joe Biden. Now the Brookings Institution has updated its report to include some extremely damning comments Trump made in his vitriolic speech.

During the rally, Trump twice said he’d asked Kemp to call a “special election” in order to decertify his defeat in Georgia. 

“I said, ‘Brian, listen, you have a big election integrity problem in Georgia. I hope you can help us out and call a special election and let’s get to the bottom of it for the good of the country,’” Trump said.

The report highlights Trump’s “special election” comments as a new piece of evidence for investigators, one that according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution could reflect the concept that Trump could have declared martial law in order to strong-arm states to hold new elections. 

Trump’s comments are just another piece of evidence in the Fulton County’s district attorney’s office arsenal, as they build their criminal probe to prove election fraud. 

“If he’s prosecuted, I’d be very surprised if that tape of him talking about the Kemp conversation does not end up being played at trial,” Norman Eisen, special counsel to House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment trial, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 

The new report lists Trump’s possible charges as criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; interference with an election; racketeering; making a false statement, and destroying, defacing, or removing ballots. 

Additionally, the report focuses on the infamous phone call between Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where the president tried to bully Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to turn over his loss to Biden, as first reported by The Washington Post. 

Trump’s camp is attempting to defend the former president, saying that he didn’t mean what he said at the Perry rally. He meant “special session,” not “special election.” (Trump said “special election” not once, but twice.)

“I’ve been doing criminal law now for over 30 years. I’ve gone after the bad guys and defended the wrongly accused,” Eisen told the AJC. “And the No. 1 rule is if you’re under investigation keep your mouth shut. By coming to Georgia and talking about these events, the former president has deepened his potential risk.”

Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina just can’t stop calling for violence, can he? This time, though, how is Cawthorn going to claim his words were taken out of context and misheard? He declared a holy war—or a “spiritual battle,” to be exact.

“Now is the time for our pastors and our congregations, like this one here, like many that you represent. It's time for us to stand up and declare boldly that as men and women of faith, we have a duty to stand against tyranny, we have a duty to be civically involved, we have a duty to save this country for the next generation.” Cawthorn said in a speech delivered at the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light Conference."

Cawthorn posted the week-old speech’s clip to Twitter Sunday, calling on people “of faith.”

In it, he referenced his botched knowledge of religion to call on Christians to declare a holy war.

“Look back at the Old Testament. Look at David, look at Daniel, look at Esther, look at all of these people who influenced the governments of their day to uphold Christian principles. It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows, to say ‘No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in! We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inerrant truths that predate any version of government.' Because my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is,” Cawthorn said.

He continued: “It's our duty to stand up. Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country!”

There’s a lot to question in Cawthorn’s speech. Firstly, what principles are being threatened? Is he referring to vaccines? Given the increased violence Republicans are invoking at school board meetings over children wearing masks and some being eligible for the vaccine, it would be no surprise that Cawthorn believes vaccines are violating freedom.

Second, how is Cawthorn even coming posing as a religious authority? I mean he has been accused of sexual harassment by various women. Also, the notion that Christians have remained "in the shadows" is a rather humorous one. 

The most noteworthy aspect of his clip is his references to religious scriptures. I mean, even one who isn’t Christian knows that no one in the Old Testament was fighting to uphold Christian principles. Christ wasn’t even born at the time of the Old Testament—which is based on the Hebrew Bible, or the Torah.

Of course, Twitter had something to say about Cawthorn’s little speech.

Clearly, Cawthorn needs some help. 

Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee appeared “exclusively” on Fox Business’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo this week to weigh in on Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better human infrastructure plan. I guess the interview was “exclusive” because no one else was talking to her at that very moment, other than the tiny right-wing, Harley-riding Jesus who lives in the part of her brain they scooped out to stop her from eating airplane glue.

Anyway, she’s not a fan of the 10-year, $3.5 trillion plan—probably because it would help people other than oil company executives and apoplectic ex-presidents. The individual provisions of the bill—in addition to the bill as a whole—are so popular, the only thing Republicans can do at this point is lie about it. Fortunately for them, they’ve had lots of practice.

That said, this take is just a rootin’, tootin’, Jethro Tull-flutin’ cornucopia of unhinged crackpottery:

BLACKBURN: “Maria, we know that the Build Back Better agenda has become the Biden Build Back Broke agenda, and the American people have figured out that what they’re trying to do is institutionalize socialism. They’re trying to do a takeover of the country in one vote. They want government control of your kids, they want to look at your bank account for every transaction over $600. Anything that you do on Venmo or PayPal, they want a part of that transaction. They want government control of health care, they want to demoralize the military, close the churches, destroy your faith in the American system, and then here they’re going to come with the socialist program to run your life from cradle to grave, daylight to dark.”

BARTIROMO: “Unbelievable ...”

Yes, it is unbelievable, Maria—though more in the literal sense of “that which cannot be believed.”

Not sure that the government ensuring reliable and affordable child care so Americans can afford to go back to work is an example of “running your life from cradle to grave,” but we can agree to disagree on some of the particulars.

The point is, the Build Back Better plan—which provides help paying for child care, establishes universal pre-K education, extends the child tax credit, expands Medicare, provides paid family and medical leave, boldly addresses climate change, and much more—is total jazz pants.* Republicans simply can’t let you know that or the jig is up.

(*I’m trying to get “jazz pants” going as a saying/interjection. I’ve wasted most of my life eating expired Funyuns, and I just want to be remembered for something. The other day I got a senior discount at my weed dispensary. I was so depressed I skipped my regular early bird special at Perkins, went home, and nodded off at 7:30 in the middle of my programs. So, please, drop “jazz pants” into your everyday conversations.)

Anyway, Donald Trump campaigned as a populist who would fight on behalf of the forgotten working class, but his one big legislative “victory” was a tax plan that larded the coffers of his billionaire friends. And then, of course, he lied about it. 

Blackburn and the rest of the GOP are now panicking at the thought that Biden will get a substantial portion of his plan through Congress. Then Americans will actually see the benefits—which would be a disaster for Republicans, who have become accustomed to Democrats going small and nibbling around the edges. At the same time, Republicans continually swing their arms and break things.

A big Democratic victory here would expose the GOP as the phony populists they are, and Blackburn simply can’t have that—so they need to scaremonger about Venezuela and communist takeovers and widespread church shutdowns as much as possible.

Because they’re simply brimming with bullshit, and more than anyone else, they fucking know it.

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.

Supreme Court gay rights watchers have their short list of potentially difficult cases in light of the conservative court, but all argue this is neither all the danger nor all that should be of great interest to LGBTQ people.

First in the spotlight as the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new session Monday (October 4) is the seemingly precarious state of the right to abortion, an issue LGBT groups have long considered to be of “vital importance” to LGBT people. But there are also several LGBT-related cases petitioning for review and several other cases that involve LGBT issues in some way.

Off Docket Concerns

Add to this two important off-the-docket concerns: One is the growing anxiety over when 83-year-old liberal Justice Stephen Breyer might vacate his seat; and the other is the unusual step by conservative Justice Samuel Alito to defend publicly the court’s conservative majority increasing use of preliminary procedures to shore up conservative positions on highly controversial issues.

Precarious Abortion Rights; LGBTQ Responses and Relevance

Most discussions of the court’s new session are focused on abortion cases. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in December about the constitutionality of a new Mississippi law that bans abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy. In that case, Dobbs v. Jackson, U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin and Kyrsten Sinema, along with all nine LGBT House members, signed onto a brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Mississippi’s ban. Two dozen LGBT groups —including Lambda Legal, GLAD, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Human Rights Campaign, Equality California, Equality North Carolina, LPAC, and longtime marriage equality activist Evan Wolfson— also filed a brief arguing against the Mississippi ban. The groups’ brief states that the Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey decisions, upholding the right of women to have an abortion, are of “vital importance” to sexual minority women, adding that federal statistics estimates one in 12 women between 18 and 44 is a sexual minority.

A law firm dedicated to undermining laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people, has asked the Supreme Court to review five cases… seeking the right to discriminate

“Overruling Roe and Casey would have catastrophic effects on sexual minority women,” states the groups’ brief. It notes that, “Lesbian, bisexual, and other non-heterosexual women are at least as likely as other women to experience unintended pregnancies and to require abortion care. Sexual minority women are more likely to experience unintended pregnancies as a result of sexual violence….”

In a separate appeal involving an even more restrictive state abortion ban, in Texas, the LGBTQ legal group GLAD issued a press release, criticizing the Supreme Court’s vote in September to deny an injunction to stop the law from taking effect until the court could rule on its constitutionality. GLAD said allowing the Texas ban on abortion to go into effect would “hurt women, LGBTQ people, and families….”

“Safe, accessible reproductive healthcare – including abortion care – is a matter of racial, economic, and gender justice,” said GLAD, “and we must all be in the fight to repeal or reverse this ban and stop the erosion of the constitutionally protected human right to reproductive choice.”

Steady Wave of Appeals For Right To Discriminate

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm dedicated primarily to undermining laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people, has, so far this session, asked the Supreme Court to review five cases in which people are seeking the right to discriminate against LGBT people by claiming a free exercise right to do so. The court could announce any day now whether it will take up these cases:

• Seattle’s Union Gospel v. Woods –Seattle’s Union of Gospel Mission, an evangelical group that provides food, shelter, and religious guidance to people in need, asks the high court to affirm a part of the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD) that allows “any” non-profit religious organization an exemption to the law’s prohibition on sexual orientation discrimination in employment. The Mission appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court after the Washington Supreme Court ruled in March that the exemption was unconstitutional as applied to one gay man who applied for a job at the Mission, after first serving there as a volunteer.
• Gordon College v. DeWeese-Boyd—This appeal brings a question similar to that in Seattle’s Union Gospel case. Gordon College, a private Christian missionary school in Massachusetts, was sued by one of its associate professors after the college refused her a full professorship. The school claimed the teacher failed to subscribe to its statement of religious faith; the teacher said it was because she criticized the school’s policies on LGBT people and same-sex marriage.
• Dignity Health v. Minton—In this case, a Catholic-run hospital in California refused to perform a hysterectomy for a female-to-male transgender patient. The hospital said that to do so would violate the ethical and religious directives that govern Catholic health care institutions. The patient sued, saying the hospital’s refusal violated the state’s human rights law. So far, the patient has won, but the case has gone only as far as an intermediate state appeals court. The appeal has been on the U.S. Supreme Court’s conference list for more than a year.
• Arlene’s Flowers v. Washington – This case has been at the Supreme Court since 2018 and involves a florist who refuses to sell wedding arrangements to same-sex couples, claiming a religious belief necessitates the discrimination. The Washington Supreme Court has ruled against the florist twice, and her petition to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected in July this year. The Alliance has asked the Supreme Court to rehear that appeal, saying it is very similar to another case arriving at the court from Colorado (see below).
• 303 Creative v. Elenis –This is a variation on the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. In this case, a graphic artist who creates websites for couples getting married, refused to create one for a same-sex couple, claiming it was against her religious beliefs. The couple sued, saying the artist violated a state law prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations; the artist appealed and the 10^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against her. On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Alliance argues that Colorado’s law violates the artist’s right to free exercise of her religious beliefs.

Other cases of LGBT interest

In other cases of interest to the LGBT community, the Supreme Court announced on September 30 that it would review a lower court decision from the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. That court held that the City of Boston’s right to allow some groups, but not a Christian civic group, to raise their flag over City Hall was a legal exercise of “government speech.”

According to Liberty Counsel, a legal group promoting religious liberty, Boston allows secular flags, including the LGBT Pride flag, to fly over City Hall but won’t allow a “religious flag.” The city said its policy is “consistent with the well-established First Amendment jurisprudence” against the “establishment of religion.” Liberty Counsel, representing Harold Shurtleff whose camp sought to raise a flag prominently displaying a white Christian cross, says the city’s action violates the First Amendment.

The court has scheduled for argument December 8 Carson v. Makin, which is not an LGBT-related case but is yet another case in which religious entities are seeking special dispensation under ordinary law. It’s also a case that echoes the arguments religious entities have been making to avoid complying with non-discrimination laws: that the religious person isn’t discriminating against a gay person, but discriminating against a person because his or her partner is of the same-sex.

In Carson, the parents of five children in Maine are fighting a state policy of providing public funding for parents to send their children to private schools that are willing to provide “nonsectarian education.” Maine does not provide funding for parents to send their children to schools providing religious education. The First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said Maine could withhold funding to sectarian schools because the exclusion was not based on any school’s religious affiliation but on “on what the school teaches through its curriculum and related activities, and how the material is presented.”

© 2021 Keen News Service. All rights reserved.

Image by Adam Zuscik

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
AI are gonna be so bored with us.

Today's News:

Detained asylum-seekers and migrants and their advocates won a huge court victory against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week when a federal judge on Tuesday ordered the release of hundreds of men who had been jailed without any charges at all under his “legally dubious” Operation Lone Star scheme. That should’ve included asylum-seekers Ivan Nava and David Muñoz. While the two had been facing trespassing charges, they were dismissed when attorneys challenged their unlawful arrests.

But advocates said Friday that the jail refused to release the two men even after their charges were dropped and an immigration detainer had expired. “By Friday afternoon, an attorney for the men was chasing a bus to Val Verde County, about three hours from the prison,” NBC News reported. “By the time she reached the county, she learned they had been turned over to Customs and Border Protection.”

NBC News reported that the two men “should have been released from the Dolph Briscoe Unit state prison in Dilley by Thursday afternoon when a federal immigration detainer, good for 48 hours, expired at 1:47 p.m., attorneys said.” Grassroots Leadership said that Just Futures Law had on Thursday written to Dolph Briscoe Unit’s warden about the expiration. But “[w]hen advocates inquired in person about the release of Mr. Nava and Mr. Muñoz, they were told the men would not be released despite the illegal nature of their further detention.”

The Texas Tribune reported last week that about 1,000 mostly Latino men have been jailed under the “abusive, dangerous, and unlawful” Operation Lone Star scheme. Nava and Muñoz, for example, “were forced to sign pre-filled legal forms in English they could not understand,” Grassroots Leadership and Just Futures Law said. Charges were not filed against the two men until they’d already spend 45 days in detention. By the time advocates made it to court, they’d been detained more than 50 days.

Nearly 250 men detained under the Operation Lone Star scheme have subsequently been ordered released after legal advocates challenged “widespread violations of state law and constitutional rights to due process,” The Texas Tribune said. That should’ve included Nava and Muñoz. “Despite the court’s ruling ordering their release, the jail is illegally holding both men on an immigration detainer request that expired yesterday,” Grassroots Leadership said on Friday. Yet Abbott will have the gall to claim that his scheme is all about law and order, right?

“Lone Star echoes the decades-old racist tactics of Arizona’s Maricopa County former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and county attorney Bill Montgomery in which thousands of immigrants were prosecuted for employment irregularities to trigger deportation,” Just Futures Law, Grassroots Leadership, Texas Fair Defense Project, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF said. “However, Governor Abbott has gone far beyond Sheriff Arpaio,” by bringing in out-of-state law enforcement and using a “massive arsenal of state resources,” they continued. “Basically, Greg Abbott has taken on the task of holding the line for Trump-era immigration practices,” Grassroots Leadership Co-Executive Director Claudia Muñoz told Prism. 

“I’ve seen a lot in my time doing this work, but I have never seen something on this scale,” Muñoz continued. “I don’t want to call what Abbott is doing ‘organizing,’ but it kind of is. He has orchestrated this entire enforcement operation in Texas and it’s been really effective. I keep telling people that if we don’t get a grip on this soon, it’s going to be really, really bad.” This refusal to release Nava and Muñoz when they should have been released could be just a preview of what’s to come.

This sounds like something the investigations of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol should be taking a very close look at: Most of the ground-floor windows and doors in the Capitol had been reinforced just a couple years ago. But the insurrectionists were in several cases able to zero in on the dozen or so ground-floor windows and doors that hadn’t been reinforced, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Most of the building’s ground floor had been strengthened in a 2017-2019 renovation, with the view that the biggest threat the Capitol was likely to face came from a bomb outside of the building, and a large risk to human life would come from flying glass. A few windows weren’t reinforced either because they were seen as unlikely to pose an implosion risk or because the heavier frames of bomb-proof glass couldn’t be supported by specific parts of the old building. They were left reinforced only by thin Kevlar film added after 9/11.

The reasons for the choices about reinforcing or not reinforcing any given window are worth revisiting, and maybe the security improvements made to the Capitol in the wake of Jan. 6 will bring shifts. But here’s the most interesting part: How did the insurrectionists find the windows and doors they could batter their way through?

“Video shows some of the first rioters to break through the police line running past 15 reinforced windows, making a beeline for a recessed area on the Senate side of the building, where two unreinforced windows and two doors with unreinforced glass were all that stood between them and hallways leading to lawmakers inside who had not begun to evacuate,” the L.A. Times reports. 

That took effort: “The four unreinforced windows and doors that were the first points of entry on Jan. 6 are all in a recessed alcove, shielded by exterior walls on three sides. They were not the first windows, nor the easiest to reach for rioters storming up the Capitol steps. Attackers ran more than 100 feet across a courtyard to reach the covered outdoor entryway, where two unreinforced windows and one of the doors are.”

It sounds like at least some people in that mob knew where they were going and what they were doing in targeting those specific entries. So … if that’s the case, how did they know? This is something to investigate.

Did the mob just get really lucky? 

Or had some part of the mob—say, some Proud Boys or Oath Keepers—carefully observed the Capitol’s defenses in advance, then led the rest of the crowd to those places? That could really juice the level of conspiracy understood to have been at play.

Or, worse, did they have inside information? And if so, who provided it?

This week will bring two big deadlines in the face-off between the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Team Trump. The committee appears to be coming loaded for bear.

If Trump is going to officially ask President Joe Biden to assert executive privilege over Trump-era White House records, that’s going to happen this week. But the “officially ask President Joe Biden” part is important in two ways. For one thing, Trump will have to ask the guy who beat him for a favor, rather than just sending out fundraising messages to his supporters claiming that executive privilege applies. That is not going to be easy for Mr. Ego. For another thing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said it won’t happen; “The president has already concluded that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege.”

Trump can try to fight this one, but he will no longer have the Justice Department acting as his personal law firm, so he’ll have to hire lawyers (who would be well advised to demand payment upfront). Whatever precedent would say about a president trying to claim executive privilege under these circumstances, the big thing here is that Donald Trump is not the president of the United States of America. Joe Biden is, and he gets a lot of leeway to decide.

So that’s one big development slated for this week. The other is the Thursday deadline for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump aide Dan Scavino, former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and Trump diehard and former administration staffer Kash Patel to comply with the committee’s subpoenas and turn over documents. It’s hard to imagine any of them complying, and rather than get into lengthy civil court proceedings, committee Chair Bennie Thompson said Friday, “for those who don’t agree to come in voluntarily, we’ll do criminal referrals and let that process work out.”

A criminal referral calls on the Justice Department to investigate the possible crime. Hopefully, the Justice Department, which is engaged in hundreds of prosecutions of January 6 insurrectionists, would move quickly on that. However, it would be even nicer if Thompson was ready to have the sergeant-at-arms detain any subpoena-defiers right off the bat.

The committee is also engaged in interviews with willing witnesses and is trying to get cooperation from people who have already pleaded guilty to crimes in the Capitol attack but await sentencing. Thompson described the committee investigation as involving “five teams,” and, Politico reports, “A source familiar with the breakdown said those teams are pursuing distinct aspects of the Jan. 6 narrative. They include the campaign by Trump and his allies to pressure Pence to overturn Biden’s Electoral College victory and the mobilization of extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to descend on Washington for the Jan. 6 event.”

This week will show us whether the January 6 committee is ready to play hardball or if it’s going to follow the too-familiar pattern of the Trump years where Team Trump plays out the clock every time Congress demands information.

By Carly Tennes Published: October 04th, 2021

Very soon, Republicans may face an incredibly stark choice.

The Supreme Court starts a new term, and the 6-3 conservative majority is unleashed.

Read 164 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. From a report: The company, Syniverse, revealed in a filing dated September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that an unknown "individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers." A former Syniverse employee who worked on the EDT systems told Motherboard that those systems have information on all types of call records. [...] The company wrote that it discovered the breach in May 2021, but that the hack began in May of 2016.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The really weird thing is the blue-haired person hadn't heard any of the previous conversation.

Today's News:

By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz Published: October 02nd, 2021

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The latest investing trend is buying tiny pieces of houses, cars, and Playboy memorabilia.

Bret Raybould is a 29-year-old comedian in New York City. He’s also a publicly traded security, known on markets as bretcoin.

“The world’s first publicly traded comedian,” Raybould says. And unlike many of bretcoin’s board members — who include “Mark Cuban,” a.k.a. Bret’s Cuban friend Mark — bretcoin is not a gag. It’s a real asset with 100,000 available tokens currently priced at around $17,500, or about 18 cents a coin, on the cryptocurrency exchange Uniswap.

Raybould is betting that when his comedic star rises, so too will the value of bretcoin, rewarding early believers with more than just bragging rights as additional investors buy in and the price increases. He’s currently hoping to use proceeds from bretcoin to finance a film project.

“Never before has a comedian asked for fans to invest,” Raybould says. “They’ve asked for fans to send them money, and they send them back a T-shirt or put their name in the credits [of a movie]. But do you want that, or do you want cold, hard cash?”

Raybould created and listed bretcoin with the help of 17-year-old high school student Matthew Garchik, who sought him out on Twitter. When the comedian mentioned his desire to start a cryptocurrency, Garchik — a fan of Raybould’s standup — told him, “Say no more.” The pair brought the token to Uniswap, a decentralized crypto platform that operates on the ethereum blockchain.

While bretcoin is a bit of an anomaly in the finance world, the publicly traded comedian is part of a larger movement that is changing the way the world invests its money.

With emerging technologies such as blockchain, the increasing power and importance of retail traders, and a growing appetite for new assets, everything from shoes to artwork to classic cars is being broken up into pieces and offered to investors in bite-sized portions through a process called fractionalization.

These new investments, which include non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency, are also growing as the result of another phenomenon: a heightened distrust of traditional institutions.

Investing is garnering more interest than ever before, but surveys show that in addition to a loss of faith in entities such as government, law enforcement, and the Federal Reserve, a fast-growing swath of Americans are losing trust in financial institutions like banks.

Sophisticated Wall Street investors have been using fractionalization for years to mix and match intricate securities from commercial real estate to agriculture futures. Now, fractionalization is making its way to the general public in just about every way imaginable.

One interesting caveat to most fractional investments aimed at retail investors is that buyers don’t actually own the things they buy. They’re simply buying a stake in the asset, betting that it will rise in value and they’ll be able to sell their portion at a higher price than what they paid.

Companies like Rally Rd., which lets users buy small shares of assets like classic cars and wines; Masterworks, which offers fractional ownership in fine art and other collectibles; and Otis, which provides fractional investment in goods such as sneakers and comic books, all allow access to investment but not to the pricey assets themselves.

Playboy, which has rebranded as PLBY Group under new leadership, became a stock market darling early in 2021 when it began selling fractional ownership in the company’s original artwork. Examples include legendary centerfold photographs of actresses such as Marilyn Monroe and memorabilia from the Playboy Mansion, like a Matisse painting that features a cigarette burn from the Beatles’ John Lennon, PLBY Group CEO Ben Kohn told me in April.

Divvying up and selling digital rights while still holding on to the physical versions and the copyrights to the works helped Playboy’s stock jump almost sixfold in a matter of months and its enterprise value nearly triple to more than $2 billion.

One of the only speed bumps to the fractionalization of literally everything has been the fear of possible action by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has recently begun exploring the question of what qualifies as a security and what does not. The answer to that question will be incredibly important, says Guy Hirsch, USA managing director at the online investment brokerage eToro.

When companies break up an asset and allow investors to buy and sell pieces of it, they “run the risk of that thing being a security,” Hirsch says. That’s especially true for smaller players who may not have the lawyers, business advisers, or market savvy to avoid running afoul of SEC regulations.

“The SEC would tell you [that] you have to go register not just the company or the actual asset but also the exchange on which these assets are going to be trading on the secondary market,” he explains. “Because of that, you have a lot of things that are not being fractionalized because people don’t want to break the law.”

Registering with the SEC is a potentially long and expensive process that comes with significant reporting requirements. The commission’s goal is to ensure that anything sold as a security to the public has ample safeguards for investors, opens itself up to monitoring, and can be reined in if it doesn’t meet the SEC’s standards.

That has kept many investments from being offered through brokerage firms that cater to retail clients, but it has opened up unique opportunities for shrewd investment professionals and their well-heeled clients.

Ben Tsai, president and managing partner at Wave Financial Group, decided to create a real asset fund investing in roughly 2,700 barrels of whiskey. The investment thesis for the Wave Kentucky Whiskey 2020 Digital Fund is simple: Purchase thousands of barrels of whiskey wholesale and let them age for three to five years, at which point the barrels, originally purchased for around $1,000 each, would be worth $3,000 to $5,000 apiece.

Wave then breaks the investment into fractional shares, offering clients the option to sell their shares in the whiskey business on a secondary market.

Tsai, an investment veteran who, prior to joining Wave, cut his teeth at firms like Merrill Lynch, AllianceBernstein, and Bank of America, initially considered fractionalizing things such as Japanese racehorses, clean water, real estate, and even carbon credits, but eventually settled on whiskey.

“We like the simplicity of it, and discussion around being able to insure it, being able to store it. We’re not playing with it much,” Tsai says. “And people like whiskey.”

Currently, the whiskey investment is available only to high-net-worth investors who do business with Wave. Tsai thought about making it available to retail investors but noted there were “a lot of hurdles built around that,” including SEC exemptions and possible reporting requirements.

So, even as fractionalization has allowed for a more democratized investing landscape, investing in many fractional assets remains available only to those who can easily part with hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single investment.

But that’s changing, albeit slowly. Peter Krull, CEO and director of Investments at Earth Equity Advisors, has started offering fractionalization of sustainable investment portfolios to everyday investors. Like many wealth advisers, in recent years Krull had turned away from retail clients because, in his words, “The economics simply don’t work.”

“At the same time,” he tells me, “our mission is sustainable investing for all, so we had a disconnect between what our mission was and what we could offer.”

While many players are pushing the envelope on fractionalized investments, there has also been opposition. Washington Wizards guard Spencer Dinwiddie’s attempt to fractionalize and trade shares of his contract was rebuffed by the NBA, and similar attempts to sell shares of intellectual property or patents have been met with resistance from regulators and exchanges wary of becoming government targets for investigation.

This has also kept fractionalized assets from being listed on most well-known brokerage firms, like Robinhood or Schwab. It’s why bretcoin exists on the smaller, niche Uniswap, which allows most anyone to list tokens, provided they’ve got the cash to back it with enough liquidity that investors can freely buy and sell as needed. In fact, eToro’s Hirsch, who also leads the company’s NFT arm, says most of the ideas he hears for fractionalization are not pursued.

For now, most fractionalized securities are operating in what SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler has called the “wild west,” an unregulated environment where — for now at least — most anything goes, and where buyers with the funding and access can put their money in everything from digital whiskey funds to bretcoin.

But the big question is what comes next. Gensler, who was confirmed and sworn into office in April 2021, has made a point of talking up the SEC’s plans for regulating cryptocurrencies and NFTs, and any decisions on those could be seen as applicable to all fractional assets.

How the commission decides to regulate and enforce those rules could mean a lot more publicly traded comedians or whiskey barrels, and a lot more people investing in them. Or it could mean a lot less.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is quickly headed to a very dark place as she flits around Washington with "secret spreadsheets" leaving a trail of bewilderment among people who should be her political allies.

By all accounts but her own, Sinema has left Democratic leaders in the dark as they scramble to broker a deal on a multi-trillion investment in America's future that could be their last best chance to reshape public policy for a decade or more. The Build Back Better bill, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed Thursday as the "culmination" of her career, holds the key to President Joe Biden's legacy along with Democrats' ability to keep their slim majorities in next year's midterms.

Yet on Friday—amid a frenzy of Democratic activity—she reportedly skips town?

It's precisely the type of antic that has earned her the ire of her colleagues and Arizona Democrats alike.

On Thursday, after Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia revealed that he had offered $1.5 trillion as a topline number for the Democrats-only bill, a progressive member of the House welcomed the clarity and chided Sinema's lack thereof.

“Half of Manchinema has now shown us something. Waiting for the other half to show us something other than a designer purse,” quipped Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin.

White House aides actually huddled with Sinema this week at least four times in two days—not exactly the sign of someone being clear about their priorities with their negotiating partners.

In a testy exchange with Capitol Hill reporters, Sinema mocked the concerns of her liberal Democratic counterparts with a dash of adolescent Mean Girls flare.

Asked what she would say to progressives who are "frustrated they don’t know where you are," Sinema responded, "I’m in the Senate.”

The reporter offered, "There are progressives in the Senate that are also frustrated they don’t know where you are either."

Sinema offered, “I’m clearly right in front of the elevator.”

But if things have soured in Washington for Sinema, they are practically rancid back home.

The Senator's Phoenix offices are now home to regular protests by progressive voters who feel betrayed by Sinema, a former social worker and erstwhile Green Party activist.

“It really feels like she does not care about her voters,” Jade Duran, 33, told The New York Times. Duran, who knocked doors for Sinema in 2018, sat for arrest at a July protest of Sinema. “I will never vote for her again,” she said.

This week alone, liberal activists and donors launched several efforts to deliver a primary to Sinema, whose seat is up in 2024. No time like the present. Recent polls have found Sinema's approval ratings sagging among Democrats, in some cases to disastrous levels.

SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that California will mandate student vaccines for Covid-19 once federal officials fully approve the immunizations, becoming the first state to declare that requirement, though it likely will not take effect until next school year.

Under the plan, California will add Covid-19 vaccines to its list of immunizations required for school attendance in the first academic term after the Food and Drug Administration approves the shots for students in a given age band, split between grades 7-12 and K-6. The governor's office estimates that middle- and high-schoolers will need to get vaccinated before the 2022-23 school year starts.

California would likewise issue a hard mandate that all education staff be vaccinated at that time, eliminating an option for non-vaccinated employees to show a negative test in lieu of getting the shot.

Newsom's order bolsters California’s already robust mandates intended to stymie the contagious Delta variant, including a mask requirement for students this year. The governor had already ordered state employees, health care workers and educators to get vaccinated or test negative. Newsom touted California’s tougher rules en route to defeating a September recall vote that was initially spurred by frustration with lockdowns and school closures.

The Democratic governor has urged as many people as possible to get vaccinated, framing it as the only way to ensure that schools and businesses can remain open as the virus continues to circulate and mutate.

"If that's the intention, to keep us healthy and safe and get our economy moving and get our kids back with all the benefits of being in-person for instruction, then all I say is, 'Let's get this done and let's get others to follow suit,'" Newsom said Friday at James Denman Middle School in San Francisco.

The student vaccine announcement comes as a growing number of California school districts have already passed student Covid-19 vaccine mandates as a condition of in-person instruction. Los Angeles Unified last month became the first major school district in the country to require students ages 12 and older to get vaccinated, a move that followed the much smaller Culver City Unified in the same county.

The FDA has only formally approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for people ages 16 and older. Other vaccines are available on emergency use authorizations, as is the Pfizer-BioNTech shot for children 12 to 15.

Newsom said 63.5 percent of California children ages 12 to 17 have received at least one dose of the vaccine, a rate well below the 84 percent of all eligible Californians who have gotten one shot.

"For 12 to 17, we're not where we need to be," he said. "And so we hope this encourages folks to get vaccinated. We have no trepidation. We have no hesitancy in encouraging local districts to move forward more expeditiously."

California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas said in a statement that 79 percent of members back a school staff vaccine mandate, while 75 percent support a student mandate. He pledged to work with Newsom and other government officials on the policy, calling vaccines "the most important safeguard to prevent serious illness from COVID-19 infection."

The state's largest teachers union, the California Teachers Association, said the latest mandate is "the next step toward ensuring the health and safety of our schools and communities consistent with other vaccine requirements in schools." The group added, "Phasing in the implementation timeline will allow local districts to prepare with families and educators and offer schools a vaccination site."

K-12 students returned to California classrooms full time in August after enduring some of the longest closures in the U.S. since coronavirus took hold in March 2020. The Delta variant has posed some quarantine challenges since the school year began, but California has avoided broad closures so far this school year.

California has one of the lowest rates of Covid-19 in the nation, and Newsom has repeatedly contrasted the blue state with Republican-led ones like Florida and Texas that have been hit harder during the Delta variant surge.

Under the Newsom requirements, students could seek exemptions from the Covid-19 vaccine for medical, religious and personal beliefs because the rule is being enacted through regulation, rather than under a stricter 2015 law that eliminated most exemptions. State lawmakers could pursue legislation next year that would close exemptions for the Covid-19 vaccine as well, and Newsom said "one can anticipate" that the Legislature will get involved based on past inclinations. He said he would "work with them to strengthen" his student vaccine plan.

Democratic state lawmakers praised Newsom's announcement on Twitter, while Republicans criticized the governor for overreach. Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) hailed it as "an important development that will keep our kids learning on campus, and ensure their safety and that of school staff." Assemblymember James Gallagher (R-Nicolaus) argued that "kids don't need to be vaccinated" based on data and took issue with Newsom using his executive powers to pursue the student mandate.

Besides Los Angeles Unified, school districts elsewhere in California have taken similar action, including Oakland, Piedmont, Hayward and, most recently, San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district. San Diego’s mandate, however, is limited to students ages 16 and up and goes into effect on Dec. 20.

The San Diego decision highlights the fact that federal regulators have formally approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine only for those who are 16 and older. Children ages 12-15 can get vaccinated under an emergency use authorization, but governments and school agencies have been hesitant to mandate shots until they are formally approved.

While federal regulators have not approved shots for children under 12, Pfizer and BioNTech this week submitted data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from trials of youths ages 5-11.

California school districts are setting implementation dates often into early next year to allow time for federal regulators to fully approve the vaccinations for these age groups and for students to get vaccinated. Los Angeles, for example, is requiring students participating in extracurricular activities to be fully vaccinated by the end of this month, but the deadline for all other students is Dec. 19. Proof of vaccination must be uploaded into the district’s system by Jan. 10.

Newsom suggested Friday that awaiting full FDA approval was as much an acknowledgment of the political realities as of legal and scientific ones. The governor is hoping that months of lead time will help him build support from school districts, families and labor unions affected by the order.

"You know, we've got 1,050 school districts, we've had a lot of different points of views and opinions, a lot of distinctions," he said. "We thought this was the best and most appropriate next step for the state of California."

Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Republicans did not go all the way to the mat to try to cause a government shutdown this week, but that’s about the best you can say for them—and the media seems to be taking that for granted.

Senate Republicans were the ones who pushed the U.S. to the brink of a possible shutdown when they spent the early days of the week repeatedly blocking a measure to fund the government into December because the same bill would also suspend the debt limit until December 2022. The House had already passed that bill because Democrats can pass things in the House without Republican obstruction.

That set the stage for an emergency vote on Thursday, with Democrats agreeing to a stand-alone continuing resolution to keep the government open—even though Senate Republicans were being absolutely unreasonable hostage-takers to refuse to suspend the debt ceiling to pay debts incurred under Donald Trump, after they voted to suspend it three different times during Trump’s four years in the White House.

Once the emergency had been set up—again, thank you, Republicans!—first, the Senate and then the House voted to keep the government open. And again, Republicans basically got a pass from the media. Just 15 Republican senators and 34 Republican House members voted to keep the government from shutting down within hours.

Those numbers are a statement about how enthusiastically Republicans are rooting for the United States to suffer and fail. But in most traditional media coverage of the vote, they were a shrug.

As reported by CBS News: “The stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, passed the Senate in a bipartisan vote of 65 to 35, overcoming the 60-vote threshold needed for approval. It was then swiftly taken up by the House, which cleared the bill with a vote of 254 to 175.”

”The House vote was 254-175. The Senate OK'd the legislation, 65-35, about two hours before House passage,” NPR reported. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had said she expected strong support from both parties. A few dozen Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats.”

And so on. A majority of Republicans voted against keeping the government from shutting down—and why wouldn’t they, knowing they were going to get a pass like that? Now they’re back to continuing to blockade a debt limit suspension or increase, knowing they’ll get the same benefit from the media.

During the evacuation of Afghanistan, Republicans practically wore a hole in their shirts from all the chest-pounding over the need to rescue every last possible person who wanted to leave the nation. Every U.S. citizen, everyone who had ever worked with U.S. forces or diplomats, every person who simply didn’t want to stay under Taliban rule—they all became a sacred trust that Republicans were absolutely certain was being broken by President Joe Biden.

But even as the Republicans were mopping away crocodile tears over the thousands they were sure Biden was leaving behind, they were also reassuring their constituents that those scary Afghan refugees would not be coming to their districts. And in case they didn’t get the message, the white nationalist Republican base spoke up loud and clear: They were happy with the Biden-bashing, but that didn’t mean they were willing to accept a single refugee in their town. Notable exception: Utah. Thank you, Utah.

That gave Republicans their final script: Complain that Biden failed to get everyone possible out, and at the same time insist that, surely, there had to be better places to put those people than the United States. After all, said both right-wing pundits and politicians, wouldn’t they be better off someplace more “culturally similar” like … well, anywhere that’s not here?

On Thursday, Republicans executed the next step in this attack against Biden for not doing more to help refugees, then attack refugees strategy. In a last-minute effort, Republicans attempted to hijack the bill to keep the government running until December and use it to cut off all assistance to Afghans evacuated to the United States. That includes the same translators and others who Republicans were pretending to be concerned about just last month.

Republicans pretend to care about Afghans before they arrive. But a real, live person? No so much. Why does that seem so familiar?

As The New York Times reports, the amendment was offered by the reliably xenophobic Sen. Tom Cotton, but it wasn’t Cotton alone. Every single Republican—every one, including Utah’s own Mitt Romney—voted for Cotton’s amendment.

Not only would Cotton’s bill have cut off all funds intended to help Afghans resettle in America, it also would have made it harder for the incoming Afghans to get driver’s licenses or other IDs. By putting people who were just cut off from all official records under strict guidelines, it likely would have left many of them incapable of meeting the tough REAL ID requirements. So not only would it would have left Afghans with no funds, it would have made it almost impossible for them to find employment.

And again, every single Republican voted for this.

As The Washington Post makes clear, the amendment would have halted housing assistance, food and medical aid, and every other form of payment for Afghans evacuated to the U.S. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some funds related to Afghan refugees: The amendment also played on fears that those being resettled in the U.S. are secretly Taliban militants by accelerating the time table for additional vetting by the Department of Homeland Security.

So … Republicans spent weeks spraying vitriol about how every single Afghan who ever assisted the U.S. simply had to be saved. But once they were out, they refused to help them with housing, food, or medical care. And they made it extra hard for them to get IDs or integrate into society in a way that would ever allow them to become citizens.

Where have we heard that before?

Americans support letting the government negotiate drug prices above all the other major priorities in the infrastructure and social spending packages now before Congress, according to a new POLITICO-Harvard poll that suggests health care is at the top of most respondents' minds.

But the drug pricing plan could be in peril as some centrist Democrats spar with Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the scope and details. Democratic leaders are now considering scaling back a House leadership-backed proposal or dropping it entirely from the $3.5 trillion social spending package.

The poll signals that despite President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda and weekslong debates about the economic recovery, Americans are still most concerned about issues that impact them directly, said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who designed the poll. “I think a lot of people who were interviewed here are just thinking about their own life experience.”

Asked to chose among 20 policy priorities, 39 percent of respondents picked direct government price negotiations with drug manufacturers first. That was followed in order of preference by increased federal spending to prepare for pandemics, more resources for long-term and home-based care and expanding Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing care. All of the proposals are included in the sweeping $3.5 trillion social spending package, but have been hotly contested as the Democratic caucus splits over ways to lower the overall price tag and garner enough votes.

Only 23 percent of poll respondents rank rebuilding roads, bridges and airports “extremely important,” and just 15 percent said high-speed internet in rural communities was vital, despite those issues being cornerstones of Biden’s agenda and key provisions in the $500 billion infrastructure package.

“When I looked at the priorities, I was actually quite surprised because I thought infrastructure was supposed to be number one. A lot of these are very personal things that came out,” Blendon said. “Long-term care doesn’t usually rank that high, but thousands have just died in nursing homes.”

The health priorities also cut across party lines, with Democrats and Republicans alike ranking drug price negotiation high.

A House-leadership drug pricing plan was projected to save as much as $700 billion over a decade by allowing the government to directly negotiate prices on some of the highest-priced drugs in Medicare. But lawmakers are now discussing narrowing the list of drugs covered by the plan and dropping language that would have made the negotiated prices apply to private insurance.

Despite the feverish negotiations and the stakes involved, more than half of Americans are not closely watching the debate in Congress, according to the poll. Just 16 percent of people are ‘very closely’ following the process, most of them Republicans.

“Half of the public is not following this great debate at all,” Blendon said. “And that’s important because when I looked at the priorities, I see people picking things that relate to their own lives.”

The poll surveyed 1,006 adults from Sept. 14-19. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

Justice Samuel Alito leapt into a political fray over the Supreme Court on Thursday, lashing back at critics who have accused the justices of increasingly issuing momentous decisions on its emergency docket without the benefit of a full briefing or oral arguments.

Alito said complaints about the court’s “shadow docket” are misplaced and intended to conjure up images of justices conspiring to advance their ideological agendas under the cover of darkness.

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” Alito said during a speech at the University of Notre Dame. “This portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution."

One measure of how directly Alito was stepping into the political battle: As he acknowledged during his speech, just yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to air criticism of the high court for its use of the so-called “shadow docket” in high-profile cases.

In his address, Alito repeatedly railed against the media for propagating what he called “unfair and damaging attacks” on the court, but also accused “political figures” of doing the same.

“The media and political talk about the shadow docket is not serious criticism,” Alito insisted. At another point, he snarked at the press: “Journalists may think we can dash off an opinion the way they dash off articles.”

In defending the high court against its critics, the George W. Bush appointee discussed in some detail three recent, high-profile emergency rulings. They include a decision earlier this month allowing a controversial Texas abortion ban to go into effect, a ruling last month requiring the Biden administration to reinstate the Trump-era Remain-in-Mexico policy for many who are present at the border seeking asylum, and another decision from August blocking enforcement of a coronavirus-related, federal ban on evictions.

Alito denounced what he called “false and inflammatory claims” that the court had overruled Roe v. Wade in its emergency order refusing to block the Texas abortion ban. “We did no such thing and we said that expressly,” the conservative justice declared.

Alito noted that the urgency in the Texas case came not from the justices, but from abortion providers who sought relief from the justices about 36 hours before the law was to kick in. He said that while some critics fault the court for not holding oral arguments on emergency matters, abortion-rights advocates did not seek them in that instance. “They asked us to rule within hours on the papers,” he said.

The substance of Alito’s defense of the three decisions was not extraordinary, but his commentary on decisions so recently issued by the court was rather unusual. In addition, at least two of the disputes seem likely to come before the court in some form again in the coming months.

Alito insisted that the court’s practices around emergency decisions haven’t actually changed much and that there is no effort on the justices’ part to hide what they are doing. He dismissed as “rank nonsense” some of the attacks.

“This picture is very sinister and threatening, but it is also very misleading,” he said. “There’s nothing — absolutely nothing new about emergency applications… There is nothing new or shadowy about the procedure we followed in those cases.”

Alito acknowledged that the court is seeing more emergency applications and therefore issuing more decisions on that basis, but said that isn’t the justices’ fault.

“It’s like complaining about the emergency room for treating too many accident victims who come in,” he said. “What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to decline to adjudicate them? Are we supposed to impose a quota? … It’s a silly criticism.”

Alito didn’t single out any media figures or politicians by name and he seemed to intentionally avoid identifying the academic who coined the term shadow docket in 2015: William Baude of the University of Chicago.

However, Alito did mention one of the most strident critics of the court’s emergency actions: Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas. The jurist said a proposal Vladeck has made to speed up lower court action could have unwelcome effects.

For his part, Vladeck said Alito distorted many of the criticisms he and others have offered. “It's easy for a speaker to appear convincing when he responds to how *he* chooses to describe the criticisms, versus what the criticisms actually are,” Vladeck wrote on Twitter.

Alito insisted that the court never makes precedent through its emergency rulings. However, lower courts routinely use the decisions that way, especially when deciding whether they should grant emergency relief.

Alito also claimed that the court’s handling of emergency applications “could not be more transparent,” although — despite the short timelines — it can often take as much as a day for applications to appear on the court’s website.

In addition, for many years, the court almost never issued a majority opinion or order in emergency cases, although dissenting justices were free to publish their dissents. This led to confusion as journalists and others seeking to interpret the court’s action were left with no definitive account of the majority’s reasoning and only the potentially biased assessment of the dissenting justices.

In recent years, the court has moved toward issuing some explanation of its reason for acting or not acting on high-profile emergency applications.

In his remarks Thursday, Alito conceded some of the court’s public justification for its handling of emergency matters in the past may have fallen short. “Maybe we could have said more. Maybe we could have provided a better explanation,” he said.

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case over local officials' refusal to fly a Christian group's pennant outside Boston City Hall.

In a brief order list addressing cases that accumulated over the summer, the justices indicated they will review an appeals court ruling issued in January that found the city did not violate the Constitution by turning down the flag-flying request from a Christian organization called "Camp Constitution."

The case could provide an opportunity for the court's relatively new, six-justice conservative majority to expand the rights of religious groups and individuals to use public facilities to advance their views.

The dispute involves the Christian group's desire to fly a white flag bearing a red cross over a blue square in the upper left corner from an 83-foot flagpole outside the seat of Boston's city government. Two of the three flagpoles at City Hall are used to fly the U.S. flag (along with a POW/MIA flag) and the Massachusetts state flag.

However, the City of Boston flag that customarily flies from the third flagpole has been lowered on numerous occasions and replaced with flags of various groups or causes, including gay pride, and foreign countries, including Albania, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, China, Cuba and Turkey. Some of those flags contain religious symbols.

The alternate flags flew on at least 284 occasions over the 12-year period, often in connection with events groups held at City Hall, according to the decision from the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

But city officials rejected the Christian group's flag on the basis it would appear to convey an endorsement of particular religious views.

Despite the frequent substitution of the city flag with others, a three-judge appeals court panel unanimously ruled that rejecting the Christian group's flag did not violate the organization's free-speech rights or amount to a violation of the First Amendment's prohibition on establishment of a religion.

"The City has never before displayed such a flag and, as such, this pioneering elevation of an 'important symbol' of the Christian heritage would come without the secular context or importance that the passage of time may have afforded other displays," Judge Bruce Selya wrote in the 1st Circuit opinion.

"The raising of the Christian Flag thus would threaten to communicate and endorse a purely religious message on behalf of the City. Where that endorsement is as widely visible and accessible as it is here, and where the City could run the risk of repeatedly coordinating the use of government property with hierarchs of all religions, the City's establishment concerns are legitimate."

The Christian group is represented by a religious-freedom advocacy organization, Liberty Counsel.

The Supreme Court is likely to hear arguments in the case early next year and issue a ruling by early July.

A Colorado man who is deaf in both ears is suing two officers after they accosted him in a laundromat parking lot when he couldn't hear the demands they screamed. The grave offense Brady Mistic allegedly committed that led to his being thrown to the ground and shocked with a Taser was running a stop sign, NPR reported of the lawsuit on Wednesday. “They went to force unreasonably fast, unreasonably rashly, without any legitimate justification for using force, which is particularly problematic for a person who’s disabled like Mr. Mistic was,” Raymond Bryant, Mistic’s attorney, told the news nonprofit. 

Bryant and attorney Rachel Maxam detailed in the lawsuit that their client was ”confused, blinded by police lights, and unable to hear or know what was going on,” when officers attempted to stop him. Attorneys wrote in the suit that Mistic “stopped walking, attempted to communicate with his hands, and then put his hands up in a non-threatening manner … Without providing any warning, commands, or reasonable opportunity for communication, the Defendant Officers quickly grabbed Mr. Mistic, slammed him to the ground, and repeatedly tasered him despite him saying ‘no ears’ to communicate he was deaf,” attorneys stated in the lawsuit.

Warning: This video contains violent footage that may be triggering for some viewers.

Former Idaho Springs Police Officer Nicholas Hanning and Officer Ellie Summers, who was in training during the encounter, stopped Mistic after they allegedly saw him run a stop sign on Sept. 17, 2019 and followed him into the laundromat’s parking lot, the Idaho Springs Police Department said in a statement released on Sept. 17. 

Officials said when officers stopped Mistic, he "immediately got out of his vehicle and quickly approached a clearly marked patrol car with the emergency lights activated."

"Sit back in your car! Sit back in your car," Summers can be heard shouting in officer body camera footage CBS-affiliated 9News obtained of the incident.

Hanning could be heard asking Mistic: “Run up on us like that? Excuse me, who do you think you are?”

A scuffle and shaky camera footage followed.

In the police department’s version of what happened, officials said: 

“The officers gave verbal commands for Mr. Mistic to get back in  his vehicle.  It was later determined Mr. Mistic was deaf, but this fact was not known to the officers during the initial encounter.  

Officers then directed Mr. Mistic to sit down.  At one point officers attempted to gain control of Mr.  Mistic by placing him into handcuffs due to his unexplained actions.   Mr. Mistic resisted the officers,  and a physical altercation took place.  One of the ISPD officers was injured (broken leg) due to the  resistive actions of Mr. Mistic.  

Mr. Mistic was transported to a local hospital for evaluation.  A short time later, he was cleared for detention and transported to the Clear Creek County Detention Facility where the officers charged him with Assault on a First Responder, Obstructing a Peace Officer, and Resisting Arrest.” 

Summers and Hanning, who reportedly suffered a broken leg in the incident, also accused Mistic of possessing forged currency in the form of a movie prop discovered in his wallet, according to the lawsuit. All charges against Mistic have since been dropped. And while Summers is still employed with Idaho Springs Police, Hanning was fired in July after using a Taser on a 75-year-old man in an unrelated incident, CBS Denver reported.

The incident involving Mistic was reviewed by former Chief Christian Malanka and “the officers’ actions were deemed to be appropriate,” Idaho Springs police said in the department’s statement. “The District Attorney’s Office for the 5th Judicial District ultimately allowed Mr. Mistic to participate in a Diversion Program in lieu of formal charges being filed,” police officials said in the statement.

Mistic’s attorney wrote in the lawsuit:

”This is a civil rights action seeking justice for the shocking use of unnecessary police force and wrongful incarceration of a deaf man whom the Defendant officers rashly attacked after failing to recognize his disability and misinterpreting his non-threatening attempts to see and communicate as challenges to police authority. When one of the officers hurt himself in the course of the attack, the Defendant officers falsely charged the deaf man with assault on a police officer in an illusory attempt to cover up their misconduct – which caused the man to unjustifiably spend months in jail without appropriate accommodations to help him communicate that he was, in fact, the victim.”