James.galbraith

Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s spokesman denies that Cawthorn was threatening a repeat of January 6 when he said of the January insurrectionists that he was trying to “bust them out.” And when he said, “We are actively working on that one,” in response to the question, “When are you gonna call us to Washington again?” The big question now is whether Cawthorn’s comments will lure House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy out of his hiding hole to issue a weak condemnation, or if McCarthy will maintain his customary silence in the face of outrages from his members.

Cawthorn, according to his spokesman, was “referring to actively working on getting answers about political prisoners following January 6,” not “actively working on any ‘protest.’” Naturally, this denial came with a claim that Cawthorn was being taken out of context. But literally, an attendee at the Republican event where Cawthorn was taking questions asked, “When are you gonna call us to Washington again?” and Cawthorn kinda sorta chuckled and faltered a little and then said, “We are actively working on that one. We have a few plans in motion I can’t make public right now.” That’s it. That’s the context.

Cawthorn also repeatedly described the people arrested for breaking down windows and doors at the U.S. Capitol, breaking into and stealing from the offices of key congressional leaders, and viciously assaulting the police officers who tried to defend the Capitol as “political prisoners” and “political hostages.”

“There are some criminal activities going on” in the federal government, Cawthorn claimed, because “when we are seeking answers, they are giving us the biggest runaround you possibly could imagine.” As a result, ”The big problem is we don’t actually know who all the political prisoners are, and so if we were actually to go and try to bust them out—and let me tell you, the reason why they have taken these political prisoners is they’re trying to make an example because they don’t want to see the mass protest going on in Washington,” Cawthorn said.

Well, if the “mass protest” involves a violent mob breaking into the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transition of power because they can’t admit their guy lost, then, no, the government does not want to see that going on.

“The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count,” Cawthorn also said. “Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed.” The lies Cawthorn is spreading here about the 2020 election having been stolen have already led to bloodshed, and he’s trying to make it happen again.

But Cawthorn’s gonna Cawthorn. He’s a liar and a sexual predator and anti-immigrant racist who took an early lead among first-term House members for most missed votes. The interesting question, as always, is what Republican leaders are going to do about him—or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert, or Paul Gosar, or Andy Biggs. And the answer is usually nothing. Kevin McCarthy is a pathetically weak “leader” who is following the far-far-far-right of his conference, the people who might as well go ahead and call themselves the troll caucus, ever further to the fringe. Because Kevin McCarthy wants to be speaker of the House, and he thinks he needs the die-hard Trump loyalists and the Q-curious and the not-so-subtly-racist and the violent-insurrectionist Republican base to get there.

That’s why it took serious pressure to get McCarthy to condemn Greene for her comparison of public health measures to Nazi atrocities and why he’s stayed silent on so many other things that once would have come only from the fringiest of the fringe Republicans. Donald Trump took the Republican Party’s core of ruthless pursuit of power above all else, the thinly veiled racism at the heart of so many Republican messages and policies, and the base’s raging sense of entitlement, and lifted them all to the surface of what the Republican Party is all about. Cawthorn, Greene, and a growing number of others are making sure it stays that way—and, because it was already there at the core, so-called leaders like McCarthy are along for the ride. Maybe Cawthorn’s suggestion that he’s getting ready to call for another January 6 will force McCarthy’s hand if the media pays enough attention. But either way, McCarthy’s capitulation to Cawthorn and his crew will continue.

(203): We were playing fuck marry kill and he was eavesdropping so I said I would fuck him
(203): It was like catching dick in a barrel.

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Shang-Chi and the Eternals are entering a much more dimensional world.

After a year of pauses and false starts, the Marvel machine is humming again.

When we last saw the Avengers, in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, they had just defeated Thanos. Empowered by the Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos had snapped away half the galaxy’s population — but in a mortal sacrifice, Iron Man brought all those lives back. At the end of the movie, the remaining Avengers mourned the deaths of Iron Man, Black Widow, and Vision, and said goodbye to Captain America as he went into retirement. The remainders have since gone their separate ways, but this is Marvel; we’ll surely be catching up with our heroes sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, the entertainment titan is set to release Shang-Chi over Labor Day weekend, marking the first Marvel movie that chronologically takes place after Endgame. (Spider-Man: Far From Home, which came out a couple months after Endgame, was a Sony and Marvel collaboration; this year’s long-delayed Black Widow was a prequel.) Post-Snapback, as Iron Man’s heroic final act is called, both the Avengers and Marvel itself are dealing with a much different universe. Shang-Chi is the film that will set the next phase of Marvel’s grand design into motion.

That means learning the origin story of Shang-Chi, the first Asian-American superhero in Marvel’s history to get his own movie. Then, in November, we’ll meet the Eternals, a group of powerful immortal beings who have decided to finally come forward and protect Earth from villains who threaten it. Noticeably absent this year are movies starring any of the Avengers’ current roster — Captain Marvel, Thor, Doctor Strange, the Guardians of the Galaxy, et al. are nowhere to be found on Marvel’s 2021 slate. But don’t blame the pandemic: Introducing new characters ahead of established heroes’ next adventures was always part of Marvel’s plan.

Heading into Marvel’s next phase, the company’s new strategy is to simultaneously bolster its tentpole movies and build out the Marvel Cinematic Universe with television shows on its parent company’s streaming service, Disney+.

WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki spotlighted supporting characters and gave us deeper looks into their lives in ways that previous movies had not. In keeping with Marvel’s signature style, all three series contained enough juicy teases about the future to turn them into must-see events. Sometimes it was a promise of the multiverse. Maybe it was a new villain or a potential crossover. Sit one out, and you might be missing a huge chunk of the backstory for an upcoming movie.

Pushing its streaming titles in the downtime between tentpole blockbusters has been a successful content and business strategy for Marvel. It allows the company to fully mine its comic book source material, embrace multiple levels of storytelling, and always keep the mythology alive for fans who can’t get enough.

Unlike previous efforts to make TV out of Marvel properties (think Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Daredevil, or, to some extent, ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), what happens on these Disney+ shows is explicitly connected to the events of Marvel’s films. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier addressed the fallout of the Snap and Snapback, showing how these universe-changing events specifically impacted Earth’s governments, refugees, and terrorism.

Loki and WandaVision, meanwhile, aimed to tell more ambitious stories about alternate dimensions. If Thanos was powerful enough to change reality and the Avengers were smart enough to time travel, then surely alternate universes and variant timelines have to be a possibility.

Marvel’s venture into streaming has expanded the MCU and the overall number of stories Marvel can tell, but it also signals a bigger, bolder world. While the Avengers are engaged in a more ambitious set of adventures, possibly involving multiple dimensions and inverted realities, there’s plenty of other action happening on a smaller scale.

To deal with all these hijinks, the movies and shows will need more heroes, villains, side characters — all of which Marvel has in its comic books. Not every hero in the company’s vast catalog is a demigod or a cosmic space force, and not every villain is a titan who wants to conquer the universe. In the end, it’s just not good or evil prevailing. It’s Marvel, too.

WandaVision and Loki hinted at a bigger, intimidating, and maybe slightly confusing multiverse

Marvel/Wandavision

WandaVision and Loki told two completely different stories, but both were engineered to set up Marvel’s big picture. The former was a stylish puzzle box that followed Wanda Maximoff’s descent into grief while the latter sent Marvel’s most charming villain into an existential crisis. Both established the idea of parallel timelines in the MCU. In Loki’s final episode especially, we got a glimpse of why the timelines that make up the multiverse all matter.

In that finale, Loki and a variant of Loki known as Sylvie (variants are alternate versions of a person who originated in a different timeline) come face to face with a character known as “He Who Remains.” This meeting is the culmination of a rather complex story, as He Who Remains (played by Jonathan Majors) explains that he has been keeping the master timeline sacred. He Who Remains then intimates that there could be a future in which one of his variants is less benevolent — a clue to Kang the Conqueror (also played by Majors), the upcoming villain in 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and an iconic antagonist in Marvel’s comic books. He then gives Loki and Sylvie a choice: Take over his work and continue to pare down alternate timelines as they arise, or kill him and let the multiverse grow. Sylvie makes the final decision, killing He Who Remains and allowing more and more timelines to sprout.

This all sounds complicated; it is complicated. Another way to understand the multiverse-variant concept is to look toward one of Marvel’s best examples to date: Miles Morales, the popular comic book hero and web-slinging protagonist of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Morales and an alternate version of Peter Parker live in a parallel timeline to the MCU’s Peter Parker (played by Tom Holland). If their timelines were to hypothetically merge, you could theoretically see Morales’s Spider-Man meet up with Holland’s Spider-Man.

But back to the MCU. Though she is never mentioned by name on Loki, WandaVision’s Wanda Maximoff was also a looming figure on the show.

At the culmination of WandaVision, Wanda was revealed to be a powerful entity known as the Scarlet Witch. She can bend reality to her will, and throughout the series, we saw her manipulating objects at the atomic level, refiguring people’s anatomies, and even granting Monica Rambeau a new set of powers. It was hinted that Wanda is considered a Nexus Being, someone who’s powerful enough to disrupt the way reality and time usually work — someone who would be a significant person of interest on a show like Loki that’s all about time-hopping and alternate realities.

In WandaVision’s eerie post-credits scene, Wanda heard her twin boys’ cries for help even though they never existed in the first place — she created them by warping reality. The popular theory is that her children’s cries for help exist because she placed them in an alternate dimension when she dissolved her spell on the town of Westview. The important takeaway is that Wanda is powerful enough to do such a thing.

With WandaVision disrupting universes on one plane of reality and Loki sprouting alternate dimensions, variants, and Kang the Conqueror on another, the two shows laid the foundation for what feels like the next big Marvel battlefield: what’s left of the Avengers joining up with a few new recruits like Shang-Chi or the Eternals and fighting against interdimensional threats in an ever-expanding multiverse. Both shows also seem poised to dovetail into 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

What’s especially fascinating about this approach is that while Marvel set about establishing a titanic concept — that there may be multiple dimensions full of heroes and villains, some of whom may be variants of ones who already exist — it began building out some smaller stakes stories, too.

Black Widow and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier began to fill in the details of a post-Snap world

Despite Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan’s charms, not many were especially thrilled by how The Falcon and the Winter Soldier concluded. The show was too often derailed by clunkiness, especially when it ambitiously tried to tackle the implications of racism in the MCU. It’s difficult enough to make a TV show that offers intelligent commentary on the effects of race and racism in America (though HBO’s Watchmen adaptation comes to mind as a successful example). Trying to confront those ideas within the context of the MCU, where bias and racism have rarely been addressed — and doing it while incorporating real-life allegory and cultural commentary — seems impossible.

That said, one of the brighter spots of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the way it explored the worldwide repercussions of Thanos’s Snap in Avengers: Infinity War and the Snapback in Endgame. Apparently, one of the silver linings when half the world’s population disappeared was that the world became more sustainable for the people who remained, including those who were previously struggling to get by.

Conversely, the problem with Endgame bringing back all the snapped folks was that in the five years that elapsed post-Snap, the world moved on without them. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier detailed how, after a period of instability and power grabs when government officials varnished, new authorities rose. The series also looked at how people returning en masse created a refugee crisis. The resulting displacement created social and political unrest.

This unrest opened the door for one Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine to be sneaky and broker deals with characters like John Walker, a.k.a. the replacement Captain America, and Yelena, Natasha Romanoff’s sister. Though we don’t fully know her plans, Valentina (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has a nefarious comic book background and seems to be setting up a team of rogue or misguided heroes.

Valentina’s actions so far seem to indicate that she’s bad but doesn’t care about the multiverse, or reality warping, or becoming a villain more powerful than Thanos. She also doesn’t seem to care about any of the heavy-hitting Avengers like Thor or Captain Marvel coming after her. We haven’t had that much insight into her plans, but it feels very possible that Valentina is purposely slipping through the cracks because she knows the Avengers might be preoccupied with much more powerful villains and much more cosmic tasks.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if Valentina becomes the throughline for Marvel’s upcoming Disney+ shows — Hawkeye (scheduled for release later this year) and 2022’s Moon Knight and She-Hulk — which all happen to focus on street-level characters. Based on the comic book source material, where they are usually on Earth fighting crime, and considering the Disney+ storytelling so far, it seems likely that these new characters will take on a villain like Valentina or deal with the repercussions of big multiverse stuff in an acute way (e.g. the effects of a multiverse collapse on New York City) rather than meeting up with the Avengers in a battle to save the universe. It’s more or less what Netflix attempted to do with characters like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, despite not having clearance from Marvel to connect them to the MCU.

The future of Marvel might be very crowded and confusing, but the studio trusts its loyal fans to show up

In 2019, Marvel acquired film rights that had previously been sold off to Fox, thereby expanding its ability to bring even more of its huge roster of characters to the screen. So it makes a lot of sense that the company is deploying its intellectual property in Disney+ shows that can serve as bridges to future movies while presenting smaller-scale adventures for some of its newer heroes. Audiences clearly love Marvel — we don’t have much streaming data, but Black Widow has hauled in $370 million during a pandemic and is the 2021’s fifth-biggest movie so far — and Marvel can’t make shows and movies fast enough. Taking advantage of that demand by creating a bigger onscreen world is low-hanging fruit.

The looming question now is whether there’s a point where so many different characters and teams coupled with an expansive multiverse might trigger superhero fatigue, which more casual fans may already be experiencing.

There’s historical precedent for this concern: Splitting the MCU and its heroes into larger- and smaller-scale teams is taking a page out of Marvel’s comic books. For example, in the 2013 comic book event called Infinity — which saw Thanos invade Earth in a manner similar to his onslaught in Infinity War — a group of heroes called the Mighty Avengers dealt with the invasion in New York City while the heavy-hitting Avengers were off in space. (This group included Monica Rambeau, who made her onscreen debut on WandaVision.)

There also used to be an alternate Earth, known as Earth 1610, that existed in a line of comics that was separate from the “main” line. Called Ultimate Marvel, these comics had a grittier, more mature tone than the main comics, and were full of variant versions of Marvel’s superheroes like Captain America, Nick Fury, and Tony Stark.

Marvel stopped publishing the Ultimate Comics line in 2015.

As Vulture’s Abe Riesman reported, Ultimate Marvel had initially been a success but slowly fell victim to confusion and overcrowding across all of Marvel’s properties. As Marvel’s movies got bigger and more popular in the years following Iron Man’s launch in 2008 and the Avengers’ first team-up in 2012, the main comic book timeline did too — which made the variant stories of the Ultimate Marvel spinoffs confusing. The main comic books also began mimicking the hallmarks and themes (realism, grittiness, antiheroes) that originated in Ultimate Marvel, which made both comics lines feel interchangeable and disorienting.

Marvel eventually decided to eliminate the line, save its most popular heroes, and focus on the main timeline.

Could a similar fate befall Marvel’s onscreen projects? Certainly.

Trying to explain WandaVision and Loki to casual viewers who haven’t kept up with each new MCU entry can be a frustrating experience for more dedicated Marvel fans. The same is true when attempting to explain rumors that Tobey Maguire (who played Spider-Man in Sony’s early 2000s trilogy of Spidey films) and Andrew Garfield (who played the character in two more Sony films in the 2010s) will both show up alongside Tom Holland (who plays the web-slinger in Sony and Marvel’s recent Spider-Man co-productions) when Spider-Man: No Way Home comes out in December. And that’s without considering how such a possibility may or may not connect to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. There’s definitely a risk of alienating some audiences.

That risk will likely be balanced out by the fact that Avengers: Endgame is the second-highest-grossing movie of all time, worldwide, and that Marvel has transcended its more niche past to become mainstream entertainment. The company doesn’t have to worry about casual fans if it’s made the second-biggest movie in history.

Plus, the MCU has another important thing going for it: While we’re over a decade of stories in, it’s still nowhere near as crowded as the comic books were. Though it may be difficult to believe, Marvel is still in the early stages of building out its onscreen world. The Avengers roster might even feel smaller for the next few years, as fans adjust to the departures of Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson.

Meanwhile, there’s no pressure (yet) to keep every plate spinning. If a show doesn’t catch fire the way Marvel may have hoped, there’s no obligation to keep it going for multiple seasons. Of Marvel’s three Disney+ shows to date, Loki is the only one whose second season has been announced.

Upcoming Disney+ shows like She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel may ultimately be used as trial balloons to see just how well they win over an audience. The former is a mainstay in the comic books; the latter may not just have her own show but is rumored to also appear in the Captain Marvel sequel that’s slated for 2022.

With all that in mind, it seems like Marvel’s two big upcoming movies will be launching pads for new heroes to join up with the existing Avengers and participate in big battle stuff like Endgame.

Shang-Chi’s immortality-granting weapons (the rings) and the Eternals’ wide array of superpowers seemingly make them more equipped to trade blows with a cataclysmic threat like the late Thanos and his ilk than to trade quips with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Disney+. Either way, the fans will be watching — at the movies, at home, or most likely, both and often.

The state embraces a reform proposed by Justice Thurgood Marshall more than three decades ago.

Arizona’s conservative state Supreme Court took a surprising step last week that could lead to juries in that state being more racially diverse, and thus less likely to treat racial minorities more harshly.

It announced that it will eliminate “peremptory challenges” in Arizona — a practice that allows trial lawyers to remove jurors from a case, often for arbitrary or ill-defined reasons.

Although criminal justice reformers, including some who sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, have warned for decades that peremptory challenges are often used to exclude jurors because of their race, the practice remains widespread in the United States. Arizona will be the first state to eliminate peremptory challenges entirely; the state’s new rules will take effect in January.

People of color are less likely to serve on juries for a wide range of reasons — racial minorities are less likely than white people, for example, to appear on voter registration lists and vehicle registration lists, which many jurisdictions use to develop a pool of potential jurors. But multiple studies suggest that peremptory strikes play a major role in producing juries that are whiter than the population as a whole.

Typically, in both criminal and civil jury trials, a court will assemble a panel of potential jurors that is much larger than the actual number of jurors needed to hear the case. Though the rules vary from state to state (and the federal system has its own set of rules), lawyers on both sides of a case may ask the judge to remove a juror “for cause” if there is reason to doubt that juror’s impartiality. (A prosecutor, for example, may wish to exclude a juror who is related to the defendant.)

Peremptory challenges, meanwhile, allow lawyers to strike jurors even if they are unable to convince the judge to do so for cause. Typically, a lawyer who uses a peremptory challenge to remove a juror does not have to explain why they decided to do so, and is allowed to remove a juror for arbitrary reasons. A lawyer may, for example, use a peremptory challenge to remove a juror because they do not like the juror’s haircut.

The number of peremptory challenges available to lawyers varies depending on the type of case and which court is hearing the case. In most federal felony trials, for example, the prosecution may strike up to six jurors, while the defense may strike 10.

There are a few constitutional limits on peremptory strikes. Most notably, in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Court held that lawyers may not remove a juror because of that juror’s race, and it laid out a three-part test that judges should use to sniff out whether a particular juror was removed for racist reasons.

In practice, however, Batson is difficult for judges to apply, and it rarely leads to convictions being tossed out because a juror was struck for racist reasons — even though data suggests that racial jury discrimination is quite widespread. As a pair of Arizona judges explained in a petition asking the state supreme court to abolish peremptory challenges, “decades of litigation over Batson challenges have consumed countless hours of attorney time and judicial resources. Yet in Arizona, only five cases have been reversed over a Batson challenge.”

The stakes are very high if racial minorities are less likely to serve on a jury than white Americans. A 2012 study of felony trials in Florida, for example, found that Black defendants are 16 percent more likely to be convicted than white defendants when no Black person serves on the jury. This gap disappears if the jury has a single Black member.

The upshot of the Arizona Supreme Court’s new rules is that racial discrimination through peremptory strikes will cease to exist in Arizona because peremptory strikes will themselves cease to exist. But the new rules were also criticized by prosecutors and at least some defense lawyers because they will take away a tool that can potentially be used to screen out biased jurors.

Ultimately, the state supreme court appears to have decided that the benefits of eliminating peremptory challenges, including the benefit of eliminating a frequent vehicle for race discrimination, outweigh the risk of having some bad jurors remain on juries.

The case against peremptory challenges

Peremptory challenges have a long pedigree that predates the United States. Yet while the practice existed in English courts for many centuries, English prosecutors were stripped of their ability to exercise peremptory strikes as far back as 1305.

It was, instead, a protection afforded to defendants. As William Blackstone, a famous chronicler of English law, wrote in 1769, criminal defendants retained an “arbitrary and capricious species of challenge to a certain number of jurors” out of respect for the principle of “in favorem vitae,” a Latin phrase meaning “in favor of life.” The idea was that, if the life or liberty of a criminal defendant could be placed in the hands of a jury, the defendant should have some ability to exclude jurors who might be biased against them.

American courts, however, largely have not followed the centuries-old English practice of only giving peremptory strikes to defense counsel. Typically, federal and state courts within the United States permit prosecutors and defense lawyers to exercise some peremptory challenges — although some jurisdictions do give extra challenges to the defense.

Indeed, peremptory strikes are so widely used by prosecutors and defense attorneys that, when assembling a pool of potential jurors, courts typically summon far more potential jurors to serve jury duty than they actually need — because the courts assume that many of these potential jurors will either be removed for cause or removed by a peremptory challenge.

Batson recognized that peremptory strikes may be used to remove jurors for unconstitutional reasons. “Purposeful racial discrimination in selection of [potential jurors] violates a defendant’s right to equal protection,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote for the Court in Batson. It also violates the rights of the jurors themselves, who should have an equal opportunity to decide the fate of their peers, regardless of their race.

Yet, while racially motivated peremptory strikes are unconstitutional in theory under Batson, Justice Powell’s decision also made it very difficult for courts to sniff out discrimination.

Under Batson, if the defendant raises a credible claim that a juror was excluded because of the juror’s race, the prosecution must “come forward with a neutral explanation” for why it decided to exclude a particular juror. At that point, it’s up to the judge to determine whom to believe.

One problem with this system is that there are all kinds of lawful reasons a prosecutor may wish to strike a juror who happens to be a person of color. The prosecutor may legitimately believe that the juror expressed a bias against police, for example. Or they may simply feel that the juror seemed inattentive during the juror screening process. The Constitution forbids excluding a juror because the juror is of a particular race, but it doesn’t forbid a prosecutor from striking a juror for being inattentive or a skeptic of police, even if that juror is also a person of color.

Peremptory strikes may be used to remove a juror for completely arbitrary reasons. In Purkett v. Elem (1995), for example, the Supreme Court permitted a prosecutor to strike two Black jurors because the prosecutor disapproved of one juror’s “long hair” and thought that both jurors’ “mustaches and the beards look suspicious to me.”

Judges are not mind readers. So, when faced with a prosecutor’s race-neutral explanation for why they struck a particular juror, a judge will often have no way to determine that the prosecution’s real motive was racism.

Many prosecutors are even trained on how to devise pretextual reasons to exclude jurors. In 2004, Texas prosecutors were advised to tell judges that they excluded jurors not because of a particular juror’s race, but because the juror “agreed with O. J. Simpson verdict” or “watched gospel TV programs.”

Data suggest that racial jury discrimination is widespread, even after Batson. The Arizona Supreme Court decided to eliminate peremptory challenges after two of the state’s appellate judges petitioned them to do so. That petition, co-authored by Judges Peter B. Swann and Paul J. McMurdie, cites several studies suggesting that people of color are unusually likely to be excluded from juries.

A study of capital cases in North Carolina, for example, found that prosecutors “were responsible for eliminating 12% of whites who went through the [jury selection] process without being removed [for cause], and 35% of blacks who did so,” while “the defense’s strikes eliminated 35% of whites who were not removed [for cause], and 3% of blacks.”

A study in Mississippi found that “Black venire members are 4.51 times as likely to be excluded from a jury due to peremptory challenges from the prosecution in comparison to White venire members.” And federal data shows that “in criminal cases, the proportion of white jurors seated varied only 3% from their representation in the population.” Meanwhile, “black jurors were underrepresented by 16%, Native American jurors were underrepresented by 51% and Hispanic jurors were underrepresented by 21%.”

Courts, moreover, have been aware of similar data for at least the past several decades. In Batson, which was decided in 1986, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the goal of ending race discrimination in jury selection “can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.”

Marshall cited a raft of studies arguing that race discrimination in the use of peremptory strikes was pervasive, including a study of prosecutions in Dallas that found that “the chance of a qualified black sitting on a jury was 1 in 10, compared to 1 in 2 for a white.”

Thirty-five years after Batson, it appears that Marshall was correct that Justice Powell’s decision did not go far enough, if the goal was to prevent race discrimination in jury selection. The disparities Marshall warned about in Batson remain widespread.

Arizona’s new rules do add some uncertainty to criminal trials

The primary argument for retaining peremptory challenges is that eliminating them will prevent trial attorneys from removing jurors who they correctly believe might be biased, even if the juror doesn’t do anything suspicious enough to justify removing them for cause.

Several prosecutors criticized the Arizona Supreme Court’s move, arguing that, in the words of Maricopa County prosecutor Kenneth Vick, “expecting a prospective juror to candidly admit that they cannot be fair is not realistic.” Trial lawyers often pay close attention to a potential juror’s body language or other subtle signals when determining whether to exercise a peremptory strike, rather than relying solely on how the juror responds to lawyers’ questions.

Scott Greenfield, a criminal defense lawyer in New York, offered a similar criticism of the new Arizona rules on his personal blog. Greenfield warned of a situation where a criminal defense attorney spots “a glint of hatred as [a potential juror] stares at the defendant,” but the lawyer is unable to remove that juror because they can no longer exercise peremptory strikes.

There are two reasons, however, to be hopeful that Arizona’s experiment with eliminating peremptory challenges will not lead to systemic injustices against a defendant. One is the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ramos v. Louisiana (2020), which held that “the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial requires a unanimous verdict.”

That’s not a perfect safeguard against biased jurors — as Greenfield argues, there is a risk that the “juror with the killer eyes” will convince a juror who is inclined to vote for acquittal to flip their vote. But the requirement that convictions must be unanimous does diminish the ability of a biased juror to sway a verdict toward conviction.

The other reason to be optimistic that Arizona’s new rules might succeed is that, while they are novel within the United States, they are in line with the rules in other democracies. Great Britain, for example, eliminated peremptory challenges in 1988, and Canada did so in 2019.

Realistically, we cannot know what the full impact of Arizona’s new rules will be until the rules have been in place for some time. But, at the very least, Arizona’s experiment could teach us whether Justice Marshall was right when he warned that we cannot abolish discrimination in jury selection until we get rid of peremptory challenges.

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TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of Education on Monday defied a recent ruling from a state judge and leveled its first sanctions against school board members who rejected the DeSantis administration’s orders on local mask mandates.

State officials withheld monthly salaries from board members in Alachua and Broward counties who supported the mask requirements, marking a major turning point in the weekslong fight over face coverings in schools.

“We’re going to fight to protect parents' rights to make health care decisions for their children,” Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran said in a statement. "What’s unacceptable is the politicians who have raised their right hands and pledged, under oath, to uphold the Constitution but are not doing so.”

The fines come even as a circuit court judge on Friday ruled the DeSantis administration lacked authority to punish schools for implementing up mask mandates. DeSantis had vowed to appeal the decision, but the sanctions leveled Monday from the education department appears to be a repudiation of the judge’s ruling. The judge in that case, Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper, ruled from the bench on Friday and an official order has yet to be posted by the court.

The move by the state department of education is the latest development in the weekslong fight over masking students in Florida amid the surge in coronavirus cases. Already, 11 counties have rejected the governor’s rules preventing schools from mandating masks, including school districts in three Republican-leaning counties.

The battle has also roped in the Biden administration, which has pledged to financially support local school boards that are punished, igniting a clash between Washington and the GOP governor.

Even before the state announced it was taking away salaries, Republican-leaning Brevard County on Monday approved a mask mandate for students after striking down the idea just two weeks ago.

Alachua and Broward were the first two school boards to pass mask mandates in the face of an executive order and emergency rules from the DeSantis administration that sought to block local Covid-19 measures. In Broward county, the monthly pay for a school board member is about $3,897.

The DeSantis administration argues that the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” measure, approved by the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature and signed into law earlier this year, prohibits schools from mandating masks.

goddamnit May

Today, Apple announced that it has acquired Primephonic, a service that specializes in streaming the classical genre, and will incorporate the app's functionality and playlists into Apple Music. The result will be "a significantly improved classical music experience," Apple said in a press release. There will also be a standalone Apple Music classical app coming sometime in 2022. The Verge reports: Effective immediately, Primephonic is no longer accepting new customers, and the service as it exists today will shut down on September 7th. Apple says Primephonic's playlists and "exclusive audio content" will be first to be integrated into Apple Music. Down the line, it'll add "the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits." In a show of how serious Apple is about appealing to classical fans, the company says "a dedicated classical music app" will launch next year that will use Primephonic's "classical user interface that fans have grown to love."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Evangelical Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, has been having a tough couple of years. Not unlike the rest of the MAGA-supporting crowd, the COVID-19 pandemic has embodied the untenable communal experience of being led by morally hypocritical and preternaturally corrupt people. In March of last year, Liberty officials threw caution to the wind and opened up their campuses to returning spring session students. Very quickly, the Bible-based school faced the rough realities of science as the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading among students very quickly. The school closed down, like the rest of the country.

One might think an institution celebrating the pursuit of knowledge and critical thinking might learn from their experiences. One might, in this case, be wrong. Starting Monday, Liberty University will begin a campus-wide quarantine. NBC reports that the quarantine is the result of a spike in COVID-19 cases among “students and staff.” The quarantine is scheduled to end on Sept. 10 … for now. “The university changed its protocol late Thursday to enact the campus-wide quarantine, move classes online and suspend large, indoor gatherings.” Shockingly* the evangelical institution began the year by having absolutely no social distancing, capacity restrictions, mask requirements, or vaccine requirements. It is almost like virtually anyone with a reading comprehension above the age of zero years old could have predicted this outcome.

*Read: “Not shockingly.”

The school, which was started by the morally corrupt Jerry Falwell Sr.* and is now led by his watered down (but equally morally bankrupt) son, had to quickly shut down. This led to a lawsuit by Liberty students who accused the school of misrepresenting how safe the campus was, and then taking their money and freezing them out of the college experience they were promised. And guess what: any of these students are angry once again, though some of them don’t seem to understand how any of this works.

Kendall Covington, a senior at the school, told NBC local 10 news: “I’m upset. I mean, of course, I’m glad that steps are being taken to protect the students’ welfare; but to be honest, this is a slapstick measure.” Junior Nathan Grimes added: “If we had just taken some really simple steps, we could’ve avoided this whole issue.” Grimes went on to say that the irresponsibility shown here “kind of feels like you’re wasting you’re your money.”

Of course, some students are angry but are also at an age that predatory loan companies love to take advantage of. Freshman Landon Nesbitt told the news outlet that he’s angry that Liberty University is trying to mitigate this COVID-19 virus thing at all. He’s super pissed off because he says the main reason he came to the school was because there wasn’t going to be any of these anti-freedom mask mandates or vaccination requirements. 

“Even though COVID is still going on, it’s still a thing, it’s very real; each student, individually, knew the risks when they chose Liberty,” Nesbitt explained. He’s also started a petition and says that if the quarantine isn’t lifted, we might see a “peaceful protest” in our near future. As of the writing of this story, Nesbitt’s petition has received over 1,100 signatures. I guess Nesbitt didn’t see that the Liberty University indoor skatepark was closed by the school a couple of months ago.

This is just the latest blow to a school that has been embroiled in scandal, both because of the pandemic closures last March and because of the ongoing moral deceit being practiced by their now-former figurehead at the university, Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell Jr. is entangled in a lawsuit with the school his father founded after it was discovered that the expensive glass house he lives in was created by throwing bricks of shame at other people for the exact kinds of sexual proclivities that he and his wife enjoy in their own private lives.

*This is a man who called South African Bishop Desmond Tutu a “phony,” and then went on to campaign to block economic sanctions against South African white supremacists.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seattle Times, written by Katherine Anne Long: Amazon systematically attempts to channel 6% of its office employees out of the company each year, using processes embedded in proprietary software to help meet a target for turnover among low-ranked office workers, a metric Amazon calls "unregretted attrition," according to internal company documents seen by The Seattle Times. The documents underscore the extent to which Amazon's processes closely resemble the controversial management practice of stack ranking -- in which employees are graded by comparison with each other rather than against a job description or performance goals -- despite Amazon's insistence that it does not engage in stack ranking. The documents also highlight how much of Amazon's human resources processes are reliant on apps and algorithms, even among the company's office workforce. And they provide the most detailed picture yet of how Amazon uses performance improvement plans to funnel low-ranked employees out of the company. The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show. Amazon has previously said that its performance improvement plans aren't meant to punish employees. The policies described in the documents reviewed by The Seattle Times apply to the company's office workforce, who comprise a minority of Amazon's roughly 950,000 U.S. employees. Amazon's warehouses replace workers much more frequently, The New York Times has reported: Before the pandemic, annual turnover rates at Amazon warehouses reached 150%. Amazon said some of the documentation reviewed by The Seattle Times was not created by the company's central human resources team and contains outdated terminology. But it did not dispute that the documents describe Amazon's internal policies. An Amazon spokesperson also said characterizing its performance management system as stack ranking is inaccurate. "We do not, nor have we ever, stack ranked our employees. This is not a practice that Amazon uses," said spokesperson Jaci Anderson, in an email. She said the goal of the company's performance review process is to "give employees more information and insights to continue to grow in their careers at Amazon." Experts familiar with Amazon's processes disagreed with the company's stance that it does not stack-rank employees. Previous reporting by Business Insider has also found that Amazon grades employees on a curve. Amazon's performance-review system "forces [the company] to find the flaws in people as opposed to looking at their strengths," said longtime tech industry recruiter Chris Bloomquist, co-founder of Seattle's The Talent Mine. "If I have 10 brilliant people, but the least-brilliant person is fireable? That's stupid." The company's insistence that it does not practice stack ranking is "a bold-faced lie," Bloomquist said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China kicked off a two-month campaign to crack down on commercial platforms and social media accounts that post finance-related information that's deemed harmful to its economy. From a report: The initiative will focus on rectifying violations including those that "maliciously" bad-mouth China's financial markets and falsely interpret domestic policies and economic data, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement late Friday. Those who republish foreign media reports or commentaries that falsely interpret domestic financial topics "without taking a stance or making a judgment" will also be targeted, it added. The move is aimed at cultivating a "benign" online environment for public opinion that can facilitate "sustainable and healthy development" of China's economy and its society, according to the statement. It followed a draft proposal issued earlier Friday by the cyberspace regulator to regulate algorithms that technology firms use to recommend videos and other content. Commercial websites and platforms will be ordered to clean up financial information posts and shut accounts deemed in violation, under the supervision of authorities including the cyberspace administrator, the finance ministry, central bank as well as securities, banking and insurance regulators.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unvaccinated U.S. travelers could once again face restrictions on nonessential trips to Europe.

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Democrats in Congress are considering a policy that was long unthinkable: a federal requirement that every American show identification before casting a ballot. But as the party tries to pass voting-rights legislation before the next election, it is ignoring a companion proposal that could ensure that a voter-ID law leaves no one behind—an idea that is as obvious as it is historically controversial. What if the government simply gave an ID card to every voting-age citizen in the country?

Voter-ID requirements are the norm in many countries, as Republicans are fond of pointing out. But so are national ID cards. In places such as France and Germany, citizens pick up their identity card when they turn 16 and present it once they’re eligible to vote. Out of nearly 200 countries across the world, at least 170 have some form of national ID or are implementing one, according to the political scientist Magdalena Krajewska.

In the American psyche, however, a national ID card conjures images of an all-knowing government, its agents stopping people on the street and demanding to see their papers. Or at least that’s what leaders of both parties believe. The idea is presumed to be so toxic that not a single member of Congress is currently carrying its banner. Even those advocates who like the concept in theory will discuss its political prospects only with a knowing chuckle, the kind that signals that the questioner is a bit crazy. “There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it,” says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Admittedly, this is probably not the best time to propose a new national ID. A large minority of the country is rebelling against vaccine “passports” as a form of government coercion. Yet public opposition to a national ID has never been as strong as political leaders assume. The idea has won majority support in polls for much of the past 40 years and spiked to nearly 70 percent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In a nationwide survey conducted this summer by Leger for The Atlantic, 51 percent of respondents favored a national ID that could be used for voting, while 49 percent agreed with an opposing statement that a national ID would represent “an unnecessary expansion of government power and would be misused to infringe on Americans’ privacy and personal freedoms.” Support was far higher—63 percent—among respondents who said they had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than it was among those who said they had voted for Donald Trump (39 percent).

The best argument for a national ID is that the nation’s current hodgepodge of identifiers stuffs the wallets of some people but leaves millions of Americans empty-handed and disenfranchised. Studies over the years have found that as many as one in 10 citizens lacks the documentation needed to vote. Those who do are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, poor, or over the age of 65. The Atlantic poll suggests that the gap remains: 9 percent of respondents said they lacked a government-issued ID, although a much smaller share (2 percent) said that was the reason they did not vote in 2020. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans do have IDs, “we don’t realize there’s this whole other side of the country that’s facing this massive crisis,” says Kat Calvin, who launched the nonprofit Spread the Vote, which helps people obtain IDs.

[Read: How voter-ID laws discriminate]

The United States gives every citizen a Social Security card with a unique nine-digit number, but the paper cards lack a photograph. Passports have photos, but barely more than one-third of Americans currently have one that’s not expired. By far the most common form of photo ID is a state-issued driver’s license, but many elderly and poor citizens don’t drive, nor do a significant number of Americans who live in large cities and rely on mass transit.

Opposition to national ID remains among groups on the libertarian right, such as the Cato Institute, as well as civil-liberties advocates on the left, such as the ACLU. But even they acknowledge that the fears of an all-knowing government sound a bit ridiculous in an era when Americans freely hand over so much of themselves to companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. “We do have a national ID,” Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, told me. “It’s operated by giant tech companies, where every place you are, everything you do, everything you search for is recorded in some fashion and integrated as a matter of managing your data. We’re locking the window, and we’ve got the front door wide open.”

The idea of linking voting to a single ID card was not always so far-fetched. In 2005, a bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker endorsed a federal voter-ID requirement. The panel recommended that the emerging Real ID, a product of one of many security reforms Congress passed after September 11, be used for voting. The Real ID Act set minimum security standards for driver’s licenses and other IDs that are used to board flights and enter federal buildings. It was—and is, as the federal government makes clear 16 years later—explicitly not a national ID. Even in the security-at-any-cost posture of the years following 9/11, “there was a general recognition that there was an allergy to a national ID,” Chertoff told me.

Some of the Democrats on the commission believed that a national ID was inevitable. “The United States is moving toward a national ID, for reasons of homeland security,” Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana representative and a member of the commission, wrote to his colleagues in a memo obtained by The Atlantic. That moment was the closest the two parties have come to a consensus on voter ID in the past 20 years. But despite a push by Carter for a unanimous endorsement, three Democrats on the commission—including former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle—dissented from its headline recommendation.

Democrats in Congress ensured that the idea went nowhere. The day after the commission released its recommendations, Barack Obama, then in his ninth month as a senator, stood alongside Representative John Lewis of Georgia to denounce the ID proposal as “a mistake” and a “solution in search of a problem.” The commission had called for voter ID even as it acknowledged within its report that the issue the requirement purports to solve—voter fraud—was extremely rare. Carter defended the proposal as a corrective to the restrictive ID laws that Republican-led states had already begun to pass. Other Democrats, though, now see a damaging legacy for the Carter-Baker commission: It coated the idea of voter-ID laws with a bipartisan gloss, allowing Republican-led states “to justify unnecessary restrictions on the liberty of many Americans to cast a ballot,” Spencer Overton, one of the panel’s Democratic dissenters, told me.

The goal of the Carter-Baker commission’s recommendation was to endorse a federal ID standard for voting while requiring states—and perhaps, eventually, the federal government—to make secure IDs available to every citizen free of charge. But that’s not what happened. In 2001, just 11 states required ID to vote. The movement has exploded in the two decades since, aided by a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 upholding a voter-ID law in Indiana, the 2010 wave election that empowered Republicans across the country, and the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now 36 states have voter-ID laws on the books.

To understand why Democrats have so strenuously opposed voter-ID laws over the past two decades, consider the experience of Spread the Vote. With a staff of 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, the organization now operates in 17 states that require an ID to vote. Calvin’s staff and volunteers work with people—many of whom are homeless or were recently incarcerated—to assemble and pay for the necessary documents. Securing just a single valid ID can take days or weeks. In its four years of existence, Spread the Vote has been able to get IDs for about 7,000 people. The organization estimates that the number of eligible voters in the U.S. who lack the IDs they need to cast a ballot is at least 21 million.

[Read: How the government learned to waste your time]

Generally, Democrats have long believed that negotiating with Republicans over ID laws was pointless because the GOP’s insistence on them was less about protecting ballot integrity than about shaping the electorate to its advantage by suppressing the votes of people likely to back its opponents. “It’s hard not to see it as a part of a comprehensive strategy to engineer outcomes,” Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor (and, briefly, a 2020 presidential contender), told me.

The Democratic Party is taking a new look at a federal ID standard this year out of desperation. Democrats in the Senate need Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support their push for voting-rights legislation, and in June, he circulated a set of policies he wanted to see in a revised bill. One would “require voter ID with allowable alternatives (utility bill, e.g.) to prove identity to vote.” His single-line proposal makes no mention of requiring a photo. Many states, including Texas, already allow alternatives to presenting a photo ID, although the exceptions vary widely.

[Read: The strange elegance of Joe Manchin’s voter-ID deal]

The most surprising aspect of Manchin’s floated idea was the reaction of Democratic leaders. None of them shot it down. Stacey Abrams, who has fought restrictive voting laws nationwide since narrowly losing her 2018 bid to become Georgia’s governor, said she could “absolutely” support that provision. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the House’s third-ranking Democrat and a close ally of President Joe Biden, was also okay with it. “I’ve never, ever said I was opposed to voters IDing themselves,” Clyburn told me. “A guy can’t just walk off an airplane from a foreign country and walk into a voting booth and say, ‘I want to vote.’ You have to ID yourself.” Clyburn said an ID law just has to be equitable: The government can’t, as some red states do, accept a hunting license as a form of ID for voting but not a student ID.

To Calvin, however, the initial acquiescence of Democrats such as Abrams and Clyburn to an ID proposal was a betrayal. “My reaction was blinding rage followed by massive heartbreak and disappointment,” she told me. A utility bill, she said, was a meaningless alternative for most of the people she tries to assist. “My whole job is helping people who don’t have utility bills get IDs,” she said. “What they were saying is: If you don’t have a home or an apartment or if your name isn’t on the lease on that home or apartment, you don’t deserve to vote, you don’t deserve to participate in democracy.”

Calvin told me she would enthusiastically support a national voter-ID law on one condition: if it followed immediately after the creation of a national ID for everybody, “with a plan and a budget to implement it.” She suffers no illusions about the likelihood of that happening, however. “It’s a pipe dream,” she said. Calvin’s right. Democrats may be open to requiring voter ID, but the prospect of a national ID is still too hot to touch.

After Clyburn spent several minutes explaining the kind of ID law he could support, I asked him whether the solution was simply to create an ID for everyone. The lawmaker responsible for counting votes in the House stopped me immediately. “I’m not into that,” he said. I pressed him, bringing up the Carter-Baker commission, the use of national ID in other countries. “I know where you’re going with this,” Clyburn replied. “I’m not there.”

A conservative Florida radio host who spoke out against Covid-19 vaccines died after a weekslong fight with the virus, marking the third radio personality to die from coronavirus who publicly rejected vaccines.

The death of Marc Bernier, 65, who was a mainstay on talk radio in Daytona Beach, was announced Saturday night by WNDB, the radio station he was affiliated with for three decades.

“It’s with great sadness that WNDB and Southern Stone Communications announce the passing of Marc Bernier, who informed and entertained listeners on WNDB for over 30 years. We kindly ask that privacy is given to Marc’s family during this time of grief,” WNDB stated on Twitter.

Bernier was known for inviting differing viewpoints on his show, including Democrats, but had publicly railed against vaccines. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that Bernier had been hospitalized since Aug. 7.

When Florida’s Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in July urged people to get vaccines on Twitter by saying the “greatest generation had to defeat the Nazis to preserve our way of life, you’re only being asked to get a shot. So be a patriot,” Bernier replied on the platform: “Should say, ‘Now the US Government is acting like Nazi's. Get the shot!’”

Fried, who is challenging Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, on Sunday said in a statement that “My heart goes out to his family and friends.”

On Aug. 4, another Florida conservative radio host who had criticized the coronavirus vaccine, Dick Farrel, died from Covid-19 complications. Farrel, whose given name was Farrel Austin Levitt, had worked at several radio stations in Florida, including WIOD in Miami and WPBR in Palm Beach, and had served as a fill-in anchor on Newsmax.

He had strongly condemned the coronavirus vaccine, posting on Facebook on July 3, “why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks, where the virus came from and the death toll?” He also criticized Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infection disease doctor, calling him a “power tripping lying freak,” according to The Washington Post, which reported on his death.

But the Post also reports that Farrel had changed his stance on vaccines after he became infected with Covid-19. He had reportedly urged a longtime friend to get the vaccine and regretted not getting it himself.

Florida has become one of the nation’s hot spots for the virus amid the Delta variant surge. Last week, the state had more than 151,000 new infections and over 170 deaths. There are more than 16,000 people hospitalized in Florida due to the virus.

DeSantis has also maintained a hands-off approach to the virus, fighting against any attempts to require students to wear masks or businesses to require proof of vaccinations, though the governor has urged people to get the vaccine.

Last week, Phil Valentine, a 62-year-old conservative radio host in Nashville, Tenn., who had questioned the necessity of vaccines, also died from the virus. Valentine, the son of former six-term Rep. Tim Valentine (D-N.C.), had a nationally syndicated show.

“The people who instinctively believe that the government is the solution to everything are already talking vaccination mandates. This should be a personal choice,” he wrote on his blog in December. “I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m just using common sense.”

But like Farrel, he had reportedly changed his position on vaccines after contracting Covid-19. The radio station he was affiliated with, 99.7 WTN, posted a statement on July 23 that Valentine had been hospitalized and “regrets not being more vehemently ‘Pro-Vaccine.’”

By Cezary Jan Strusiewicz Published: August 28th, 2021

Here’s the state of public discourse these days, in case you haven’t been paying close attention: The benighted pro-science Americans who are rushing to take a vaccine that a mere 200 million Americans have taken with vanishingly rare complications are sheep, whereas the enlightened refusers—who are taking literal sheep medicine hand over fist to beat COVID-19—are … erm … well, obviously some other kind of animal. Wise owls, perhaps?

They’re certainly not dumbasses, according to eternally braying conspiracy donkey Alex Jones. Oh, no. That’s an epithet now reserved for (cleans glasses, double-checks notes) … The Dumbfuck Formerly Known as Pr*sident Donald Trump.

As you’ve probably seen, at his recent pandemic pep rally in Alabama, Trump encouraged his pestilent orc horde to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and it didn’t go well. He may as well have recommended George Soros’ bespoke nipple clamp Etsy store for all their Ramadan shopping needs. 

In other words, the MAGA god-man himself was booed by his own flock of … owls.

See for yourself.

What? What is that guy saying? Heresy!

I suspect that some of Trump’s fans are just now noticing that his face and hair look like an $8 mask from the Spirit Halloween store and have convinced themselves that the dude was an imposter.

Luckily, though, kooky-conspiracy maven and InfoWars host Alex Jones is not that dumb. He knows Trump really said what he said, and he’s apoplectic over it. Admittedly, Jones is always apoplectic over something, but this turn of events is pretty out of the ordinary.

The Hill:

A clip from the Aug. 22 taping of InfoWars appears to show Jones accusing the former president of heralding the vaccine for political gain and bowing to media pressure.

“Shame on you, Trump. Seriously. Hey, if you don’t have the good sense to save yourself and your political career, that’s OK,” the InfoWars host said.

“At least you’re going to get some good Republicans elected, and we like you,” Jones added. “But, my God, maybe you’re not that bright. Maybe Trump’s actually a dumbass.”

Hey, at least Jones still thinks he’s “a good person.”

Here’s a transcript of Jones’ Sunday shrieks of lies and harmful nonsense.

ALEX JONES (HOST): … but first, let’s take President Trump, who I believe is a good person, and who I really care about, and who I want to see a lot of good Republicans get elected in the midterms, and who I would love to see run again, we gotta take him to the woodshed though. ‘Cause he came out last week on Fox and Friends and said “I really am suspicious of this booster shot and this supposedly works so well, why do we need a booster shot?”

Because you got lied to, Trump! It didn’t have 98% efficacy, we knew day one it wouldn’t work, period, it’s a fraud, it’ll create mutants! You got chumped! You got signed onto a fraud to restart the economy! I understand why you did it, you believe in science! Except these are bad actors, sir! You believed America could produce a good vaccine, of course they could’ve! They didn’t want to. They didn’t create a vaccine, they created a Frankenshot! And now they’ve got you signed up to it.

Now the Left’s saying you better get out there and push it, and you are! CNN comes out and says, “we need to see Trump come out and tell people to take the shots.” And within weeks of them saying it over and over again, CNN snaps their fingers, [CNN President] Jeff Zucker snaps his fingers, and Trump clicks his heels and hops up there at attention and says, “How high do you want me to jump, boss?” Here’s Trump in Alabama yesterday.

[CLIP BEGINS]

DONALD TRUMP (FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT): I believe totally in your freedoms, I do. You got to do what you have to do. But I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines. But you got --

[BOOS]

TRUMP: Now, that’s OK. That’s all right. You got your freedoms. But I happen to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know. OK? I’ll call up Alabama and say, “Hey, you know what?” But it is working.

[CLIP ENDS]

JONES: BS. Trump: That’s a lie, you’re not stupid. Just two weeks ago they said it was 65%, then 40%, saw a number put out about Pfizer shots, 30-something percent. Because they just want to tell you it doesn’t work so you run and get the new damn shot. And then they’ll tell you in six months that one doesn't work. It’s called rope-a-dope.

Shame on you, Trump. Seriously. Hey, if you don’t have the good sense to save yourself and your political career, that’s OK. At least you’re going to get some good Republicans elected, and we like you. But, my God, maybe you’re not that bright. Maybe Trump’s actually a dumbass.

And, yes, it’s pretty ironic that the roughly 10 seconds in the past five years when Trump was not aggressively being a dumbass are what apparently broke Jones’ brain.

Of course, Trump has actively courted Jones and his bonkers brigade since launching his presidential campaign. During a December 2015 interview, Trump told Jones, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” Jones replied that “my audience, 90% of them, they support you.”

Is it possible the man who’s gravely concerned about the sexual orientation of frogs and thinks President Barack Obama had secret weather machines will have to find an even fringier candidate? Doubtful. He’s been all-in on Trump for some time, and this little hiccup is unlikely to dissuade him.

More likely, Trump will appease Jones, et al., by never bringing the vaccines up again because if he doesn’t have grotesquely misinformed Americans in his camp, who’s left, really?

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. Just $12.96 for the pack of 4! Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

There are some moments in global history that are remembered, whether they are world wars, scientific discoveries, the moon landing, or the collapse of the Berlin wall. If you were alive during these events, you will never forget them. When vaccines for illnesses like typhoid, polio, and others came about, the world began to change for the better. We celebrated the doctors who were part of the development, while the people who seemed to spread the disease—even unknowingly—have been castigated.

This is something that Martin Kulldorf, a professor in Harvard Medical College, seems to be completely oblivious to in an ill-considered tweet that mirrors so much of conservative thought:

First of all, on several levels I agree with this. Blaming people for spreading disease has often resulted in direct harm to communities and does not work out well. However, the statement above is an absolute falsehood: “Never before have carriers been blamed for infecting the next sick person.”

Can I introduce you to Typhoid Mary?

The perception of people being responsible for spreading illness has always been built into our culture. Gay men in the 1980s saw it firsthand with harmful responses toward treating HIV, which Gallup documents:

AIDS predominantly affected men who had sex with men and, as a result, severely hindered the U.S. gay rights movement, which was still in its infancy. Among Americans who reported knowing a gay person, more than one in five (21%) said they had become less comfortable around that person since learning about AIDS.

In 1985, the vast majority of Americans (80%) said it was "probably true" that most people with AIDS were homosexual men. More than a quarter of Americans (28%) reported that they or someone they knew had avoided places where homosexuals might be present as a precaution to avoid contracting AIDS -- and this number grew to 44% by 1986.

In 2015—long before COVID-19—I wrote a diary here at Daily Kos on why you should get vaccinated.  In cases where people had no ability to get a vaccine or to quarantine, an illness can face the blame. However, when you’re provided the opportunity to prevent the spread of an illness and knowingly refuse to do so, then I’m sorry Dr. Kulldorf, but your continued bashing of containment strategies, vaccine distribution policies, and your terrible understanding of even recent history are a grave disservice to the institution you serve.

Once again, we’ve reached the part of the pandemic where people ingest random chemicals to treat COVID-19 at home. The overwhelming majority of such people have decided COVID-19 vaccines are too risky or otherwise dangerous. While it may seem obvious to most of us, this is not a good idea. However, many conservatives seem to think otherwise and are willing to die trying to prove themselves right. Despite warnings from the FDA not to take it, anti-vaxxers nationwide have been taking ivermectin, a livestock dewormer. There is no evidence that this drug works as an effective treatment for COVID-19. Despite this, conservative media outlets, including Fox News, have pushed for it.

As a result, calls to poison control centers nationwide have increased at alarming rates. In some states, data has found over 100% increases in calls from last year to this. Sadly, it has come to this. Still, as COVID-19 cases increase among the unvaccinated nationwide, officials are urging individuals who are infected to stay home and isolate and not take these unauthorized medications.

Last week in a public tweet, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued another public warning about taking these medications with a link to an FDA information page titled “Why you should not use Ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.”

“Seriously, y'all. Stop it,” the tweet said.

While bottles of the chemical note that it is “not for human consumption,” it’s for deworming cattle and horses, people seem to still not understand until after they have taken it. According to Texas Public Radio (TPR), people call poison control facilities after experiencing severe symptoms and pain.

“Nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. However, you can have further problems, including mental status changes, coma, even seizures. And there have been deaths reported. No, I haven't seen any deaths here in Texas, but these are things that are reported by the manufacturer with people who use large doses," Dr. Shawn Varney, Medical Director of Texas Poison Center, told TPR.

Within a year, Texas reported an increase of 552% of cases reported of ivermectin poisoning statewide,” ABC News affiliate WFAA reported. Health care professionals believe the number is likely underreported because it’s self-reported.

Mississippi faces a similar dilemma. With the highest number of new cases of COVID-19 across the country, Mississippi is also battling a surge in calls to poison control.

“At least 70% of the recent [poison control] calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers,” a letter from the Mississippi Department of Health to the MS Health Alert Network on Friday said. It also warned health professionals of the spike in poisonings from individuals digesting ivermectin in the state.

“Animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans,” the letter continued. “Patients should be advised to not take any medications intended to treat animals and should be instructed to only take ivermectin as prescribed by their physician.”

But Texas and Mississippi are not alone. According to Illinois state’s public health director, Ngozi Ezike, the state’s poison control center also received numerous calls for other unsafe self-treatments unrelated to COVID-19. Residents reported using a detergent solution for a sinus rinse, for example, or gargling with bleach a substitute for mouthwash, NBC News reported.

In Alabama, people are also calling about ivermectin in fear of overdoses. According to the Alabama Poison Information Center at Children’s of Alabama, there have been over 24 ivermectin exposure cases this year, 15 of which were connected to COVID-19 prevention and treatment, WTVA reported. Other calls have also been reported seeking information about ivermectin. The number of calls inquiring about the drug has more than doubled since 2019.

According to WTVA, while federal regulators have approved ivermectin to treat people and animals for some parasitic worms, head lice, and skin conditions, it's not an approved COVID-19 treatment. Human and animal formulations of the drug are not the same; thus, self-dosing is beyond dangerous.

Daily Kos reported that calls to poison control facilities nationwide first increased last year following Donald Trump’s suggestion that disinfectants be considered a possible treatment for the novel coronavirus. While he later claimed his comment was sarcastic, it wasn’t before thousands of people ingested Clorox bleach and other harmful chemicals used for cleaning. In at least five states, poison centers reported they had an increase in calls within 18 hours of Trump’s broadcasted stupidity. Imagine if Trump advocated for wearing masks or getting the vaccine; maybe things would be different then.

Slashdot has confirmed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that after 18 years of legal maneuvering, SCO's bankruptcy case (first filed in 2007) is now "awaiting discharge." Long-time Slashdot reader rkhalloran says they know the reason: Papers filed 26 Aug by IBM & SCOXQ in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for a proposed settlement, Case 07-11337-BLS Doc 1501: By the Settlement Agreement, the Trustee has reached a settlement with IBM that resolves all of the remaining claims at issue in the Utah Litigation (defined below). The Settlement Agreement is the culmination of extensive arm's length negotiation between the Trustee and IBM. Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee, on behalf of the Estates, of $14,250,000. For the reasons set forth more fully below, the Trustee submits the Settlement Agreement and the settlement with IBM are in the best interests of the Estates and creditors, are well within the range of reasonableness, and should be approved. The proposed order would include "the release of the Estates' claims against IBM and vice versa" (according to this PDF attributed to SCO Group and IBM uploaded to scribd.com). And one of the reasons given for the proposed settlement? "The probability of the ultimate success of the Trustee's claims against IBM is uncertain," according to an IBM/SCO document on Scribd.com titled Trustee's motion: For example, succeeding on the unfair competition claims will require proving to a jury that events occurring many years ago constituted unfair competition and caused SCO harm. Even if SCO were to succeed in that effort, the amount of damages it would recover is uncertain and could be significantly less than provided by the Settlement Agreement. Such could be the case should a jury find that (1) the amount of damage SCO sustained as a result of IBM's conduct is less than SCO has alleged, (2) SCO's damages are limited by a $5 million damage limitation provision in the Project Monterey agreement, or (3) some or all of IBM's Counterclaims, alleging millions of dollars in damages related to IBM's Linux activities and alleged interference by SCO, are meritorious. Although the Trustee believes the Estates would ultimately prevail on claims against IBM, a not insignificant risk remains that IBM could succeed with its defenses and/or Counterclaims The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware told Slashdot that the first meeting of the creditors will be held on September 22nd, 2021.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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