James.galbraith

[The Biden Administration went 0-2 in 48 hours at the Supreme Court.]

On Tuesday, the Biden Administration lost its emergency appeal in the Remain in Mexico case. On Thursday, the Biden Administration lost in the eviction moratorium case. This span may be the toughest two-day stretch for an administration before the Supreme Court since Blue June. The Supreme Court's conservatives didn't split: immigrants must remain in Mexico, but tenants must vacate their apartments.

I'll have much more to say about the eviction case in another post.

An already perilous withdrawal of U.S. personnel and allies from Afghanistan turned into something much darker on Thursday as the kind of catastrophe President Joe Biden had been warning about took place outside Kabul’s main airport.

A series of terrorist attacks left at least 13 U.S. service people dead and 15 wounded — the deadliest U.S. casualty event in Afghanistan since 2011.

It was the most devastating moment in Biden’s young presidency.

In its wake, U.S. officials remained steadfast that they would conclude the evacuation mission from the 20-year war, raising additional questions about Biden’s handling of the end of America’s longest war.

For those in the White House, Thursday was one of the most emotionally trying and frenetic days since taking office. As the first reports came in about explosions around Kabul, officials were confronted with a deluge of information, prompting senior officials to remind staffers to ferret out facts from the speculation and chatter. During one staff meeting, sniffles could be heard as various staffers fought back tears when they learned of the U.S. deaths, according to a person close to the situation. One White House official described the pace of the day's events as overwhelming.

Biden himself hunkered down for hours with his national security team in the Situation Room and the Oval Office. He was in the latter, getting briefed around 2 p.m., as the phrase “Where is Joe Biden?” began trending on Twitter.

Along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, the president received continuous updates on the situation throughout the day. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is traveling through Asia, was streamed into the Situation Room for the president’s morning meeting with his national security team. Later, one of her top aides announced that she’d be scuttling plans to make a campaign-related stop in California and instead return directly to D.C.

The White House was also in constant contact with Afghan commanders on the ground, according to an official, as it gamed out how the deadly attacks would impact the president’s Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal.

On Thursday evening, Biden delivered an address in the East Room that was at times somber and tearful and, at others, calm and reflective. He honored the U.S. service people killed in action and conveyed two main goals: finishing the mission to evacuate all the Americans who want to leave and as many allies as possible within the time constraints and retaliating against those responsible for the attacks.

“We will not forgive. We will not forget,” Biden proclaimed. “We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

The day had initially been geared around other priorities. Biden was supposed to meet with newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He was slated to hold a conference call with governors to talk about refugee resettlements. The Covid-19 task force was scheduled to brief reporters about the status of the pandemic fight.

But any attempt to look as if the White House was operating on multiple issues at the same time was overtaken by events on the other side of the globe. New guidance was sent to the press corps saying that the meeting with Bennett had been delayed. Then additional guidance said it was postponed until Friday. Outside the White House, roads were still blocked for Bennett’s arrival and a family of three waved a tiny Israeli flag, even as the prime minister remained in his hotel room.

Press secretary Jen Psaki and other press officials, who had been scheduled to brief the press, pushed off her briefing too, concluding that the best way to communicate the unfolding crisis was through frontline agencies and experts. The Pentagon was given the task of communicating an updated casualty count, with Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the commander of U.S. Central Command, directly addressing reporters in the early afternoon. Biden spoke after him, at roughly 5:30 p.m. He clutched a black briefing book as he took questions, looking flushed at some points, battling tears at others and as he took the final press question, resting his chin on microphones. At one point he told members of the press — who were jumping out of their seats to ask him questions — that he had “another meeting, for real.”

Throughout the day, efforts had been unfolding to try and identify and evacuate those Americans left behind in Kabul. Psaki’s assistant, Amanda Finney, managed an expansive spreadsheet of people they were still trying to help evacuate. A green checkmark was flagged for those who got out.

Those evacuation numbers had provided a bit of optimism in the White House against the backdrop of the somber news coming out of Kabul. They’d helped airlift more than 100,000 people out of Afghanistan since the end of July — an historic operation that aides believed they deserved more credit for. After Thursday’s attacks, officials said, the evacuation efforts would continue.

"We will not let them stop our mission,” Biden said on Thursday, “we will continue the evacuation.”

Losing U.S. service people had been the exact scenario Biden had been desperate to avoid as he sought to end the Afghanistan war. The administration had warned for days of the looming threat of terrorist attacks. Lawmakers earlier this week were briefed in detail about the possibility of an ISIS-K attack. On Wednesday, the U.S. embassy issued a warning to Americans to avoid traveling to the airport or gathering near the airport gates.

As the news of service members killed in action came in, longtime Biden confidantes said they believed the president was feeling the impact on a personal level. As vice president, Biden had worked closely with military families.

The president has repeatedly brought up his kinship to the families of servicemen after his late son, Beau’s, service in Iraq. On Thursday, Biden brought up Beau again, telling the families who lost someone in combat today that he understood their intense grief.

“I have some sense like many of you do, what the families of these brave heroes are feeling today,” Biden said. “You get this feeling like you've been sucked into a black hole, the middle of your chest.”

The president keeps a card in his pocket with the precise number of troops who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 12 years — numbers that would now jump substantially under his watch.

“The fact that his son served in Iraq means a great deal to him; I think he relates on a different level than people who have not had that experience,” said Biden’s longtime friend and former Sen. Chris Dodd, who said the pain of Beau’s death from cancer in 2015 was still “raw.”

“In Joe’s case,” Dodd said, “it adds another emotional dimension because of his personal experience.”

South Dakota’s Republican Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg pleaded no contest to two of three misdemeanor charges in connection to a car crash last September that killed 55-year-old Joseph Boever. Boever had been walking down the side of the highway when Ravnsborg, distracted, drifted onto the shoulder and struck and killed him. At the time, Ravnsborg called 911 and reported having “hit something.” A sheriff came out and did a quick survey of Ravnsborg’s car before giving him a ride and then loaning him a car for the night to get home. Boever’s body was discovered the following day by Ravnsborg himself.

On Thursday, Ravnsborg, after a long and drawn out investigation, was able to cut a plea deal that keeps him out of jail. Circuit Judge John Brown fined Ravnsborg $500 for each count and ordered him to cover the $3,742 court costs. While Brown also ordered him to "do a significant public service event" every year on the anniversary of Boever’s death, the Star Tribune reports that objections from Ravnsborg’s attorney led to this condition being tabled until later arguments are heard. Boever’s sister Jane told the news: “We have waited 349 long days for this case to come to an end, and this is not the ending we hoped for. Our brother laid in the ditch for almost twelve hours.”

According to investigators and prosecutors, Ravnsborg, while not impaired by any substances like alcohol or drugs at the time, seems to have been looking at his phone while driving at 67 mph on the highway. The speed limit in the area is 65 mph. Law & Crime reported that while Ravnsborg denied he was still on his phone when he drifted across his lane and killed Boever, investigators were able to piece together that the attorney general had been reading some kind of “conspiracy” article about Joe Biden and China. “A minute later you were on the RealClearPolitics website. And then, about a minute later, um, this article was pulled up through the Just the News—which could have been something that, you were on this and it had a link to click to get you to this one. Regarding this, it’s an article about Joe Biden and something with China. You were on that at up to about, we’re going to estimate, probably a minute before the accident, you were on that.”

Investigators tried to question the veracity of Ravnsborg’s claim that he had set down his phone (conveniently) about a minute before hitting Boever. The embattled South Dakota Republican steadfastly denied having been distracted by his phone at the time. He also claimed that he mostly just looks at headlines and not the actual body of the articles “when I’m driving.” His 911 call to the dispatcher also supported his claims that he had not seen what he had hit when he drifted onto the shoulder, and the “something” he hit “smashed my windshield.”

Of course, if Ravnsborg wasn’t on his phone and was just somehow drifting onto the shoulder, the fact that Boever’s glasses were found inside of Ravnsborg’s car means that the “something” that “smashed” his “windshield” was Boever’s face. As one of the investigators said to him during a Sept. 30 interrogation: “That means his face came through your windshield … His face is in your windshield. Think about it.” Ravnsborg has been consistent in saying he did not know he had hit a man, telling the agents: “I did not know it was a man until the next day. I’ll go to my grave saying that.”

When Hyde County Sheriff Mike Volek came out to speak with Ravnsborg by the side of the highway that night, he reportedly spent about 20 minutes there and then gave him a lift to the sheriff’s home nearby, where Ravnsborg borrowed a car to get home. The day after the accident, Ravnsborg and his chief of staff, Tim Bormann, drove Volek’s car back to Volek’s place, but first went to gas the car up as a courtesy. On the way back, they stopped to check out the accident scene. it was at that point that Ravnsborg discovered Boever’s body. The two men proceeded on to Volek’s home less than half a mile from the crash site to report the finding.

Ravnsborg’s lawyers had already began to create a story that Boever was depressed and suicidal and may have recently separated from his wife Jenny. Family spokesperson Nick Nemec said that while the family was very worried about Joe’s reputation being attacked if a trial went forward against Ravnsborg, his widow was more than disappointed in the plea deal. “She thinks it’s a coward’s way out. It’s cowardly on the part of Ravnsborg and the prosecutor. She’s disappointed the state’s attorney did not go ahead with [the trial].”

According to Nemec, Ravnsborg has never reached out to the family to apologize for what happened on that terrible night. And while this concludes the criminal justice actions against Ravnsborg, Boever’s window is reportedly looking into filing a civil lawsuit against Ravnsborg. Rapid City attorney Greg Eiesland told Vanity Fair that the Boevers have a case. “You might find that the investigation and criminal prosecution may have been handled much differently had the driver been a Native American rather than the attorney general. Just saying.”

Gov. Kristi Noem was criticized by some for her eagerness to throw fellow Trump supporter Ravnsborg under the bus by having his investigation videos released to the press and calling on him to resign. Republican state House Rep. Phil Jensen told Vanity Fair : “In my opinion, Gov. Noem was working behind the scenes to get rid of the AG so she could put her own person in there.”

Ravnsborg has not resigned and is still facing impeachment in the state legislature. On Thursday, after not showing up to the sentencing hearing, Ravnsborg released a statement apologizing to Boever’s family and then attacking the media and “partisan opportunists” for creating a false narrative of what happened.

Now Ravnsborg and his GOP allies in South Dakota are facing off against Noem’s South Dakota wing of the Republican Party. According to the Tribune, Marty Jackley—Ravnsborg’s predecessor—has thrown his hat back into the ring. 

Here is the transcript of Ravnsborg’s statement.

On September 12, 2020, two families were changed forever.

First and foremost, I am very sorry Joe Boever lost his life in this accident.

I am sorry to the entire family for the loss of their loved one. They have had to deal with the pain, anger, and sadness of this accident. With respect for Joe, his family, and the judicial process, I have fully cooperated with the investigation from the beginning and refrained from making statements to the media.

While nothing I say will bring Joe back, I believe it’s appropriate to share a few of my thoughts at this time.

Joe’s death weighs heavily on me and always will. I’ve often wondered why the accident occurred and all the things that had to have happened to make our lives intersect. I’ve wished thousands of times our paths would have crossed under different circumstances.

The media has reported many untrue, and misleading things they want you to believe are facts. Partisan opportunists from both sides of the aisle have manufactured rumors, conspiracy theories and made statements in direct contradiction to the evidence all sides agreed upon. These are the same people who try to take others down at any cost.

I ran to be your attorney general because I believe in the law; I believe in fairness, due process, and doing what’s right. Now, having experienced the legal system from both sides, I renew my commitment to be transparent and responsive to the needs of the people of South Dakota.

We have built an incredible team of hard-working professionals who seek to serve you in the Attorney General’s office each day. We’ve made significant accomplishments in record time.

We still face challenges. We will continue the dialogue about marijuana and how to regulate it. We’re finalizing the terms of the $26 billion opioid settlement to address opioids and fentanyl and still battling the meth epidemic.

I do not know all the Lord has in store for me, but I trust in Him. As I continue my service as your attorney general, I’ll keep fighting for you, just as I have since the day I took office. May God bless each of you, and may God continue to bless South Dakota.

Unvaccinated Delta Air Lines employees will soon be forced to pay an additional $200 per month for the company's health care plan, making the Georgia-based airline the first such major U.S. company to tie vaccination status to health care costs, a move other industries could soon follow.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian, in a memo to employees published online Wednesday, said the $200 surcharge for unvaccinated Delta employees is meant to offset medical costs from a coronavirus infection, which is more likely to occur in unvaccinated individuals. Health care costs for Covid, especially those who need to be hospitalized, can be steep; Delta said the average hospital stay for Covid has cost the airline $50,000 per person.

“This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company,” the memo read. “In recent weeks since the rise of the B.1.617.2 [Delta] variant, all Delta employees who have been hospitalized with COVID were not fully vaccinated.” According to Delta, about 75 percent of its workforce is vaccinated.

The airline stopped short of requiring vaccination for its employees. But the move to attach a health premium to unvaccinated employees isn't without risk, especially with unions involved.

Indeed, the Air Line Pilots Association's Delta Master Executive Council, which represents nearly 13,000 pilots at the airline, almost immediately voiced concerns about the surcharge, saying in a statement that it has advocated "to maintain the right of each individual pilot to consult with his or her medical provider regarding COVID-19 vaccinations or booster doses." It went on to say that Delta needs to "bargain with the Delta MEC over any employer-mandated vaccination for pilots."

Vaccine approval floodgates opening

A tidal wave of employers rolled out pro-vaccine policies in the wake of FDA approval earlier this week, a sharp pivot from earlier in the pandemic when companies were plagued by concerns over the associated legal liabilities. Attorney Devjani Mishra, who represents employers for law firm Littler Mendelson, attributes the shift to “everything that’s happened over the last eight months” in addition to the agency’s sign-off.

“Between people getting comfortable with having firsthand experience with the vaccine, and confirmation from a number of different sources, the different public mandates that have come into play for certain industries — everything has made it much more conceivable that you could have an employer imposing a mandate,” Mishra said.

But implementing a health insurance surcharge is legally much more complex than mandating the vaccine, Mishra said: “There’s a reason there’s a lot of fine print in insurance plans.”

“Employers have tried that in a number of different areas in the past — you see it with different premiums for smoking and nonsmoking — but the rules around changing insurance premiums are complicated,” Mishra said. “It's not something that you can kind of undertake lightly; you really need benefits counsel to make sure that you do it correctly and that you follow the appropriate rules.”

“But there were also a lot of exceptions to those rules,” she added. So “whether it actually manages to achieve the result you want is dubious.” She pointed to individuals who have medical conditions preventing them from receiving the vaccine as an example. “There are rules about not discriminating against those individuals.”

Experts say that the decision to pressure workers to vaccinate by upping their health care costs — rather than requiring they get the vaccine — makes it easier for employers to rationalize the policy to employees who are reluctant to get a shot.

“The fact that they didn’t choose a mandate might speak more to their employee base’s sentiment about vaccination and possibly their customer sentiment,” said Laura Boudreau, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia Business School who studies working conditions. “If you look at the policy itself, they’re basically trying to not employ a de jure mandate but a de facto one by making it difficult for employees to maintain a non-vaccinated statement. Some companies, like Delta, are reluctant to go so far as to mandate formally, but reading these memos, these are de facto mandates.”

It’s likely that additional employers will adopt a similar policy as an easily defensible, middle-of-the-road approach to getting their workforce vaccinated in the throes of the Delta variant, not to mention additional ones.

“I do think we’ll see more companies adopting this kind of policy,” Boudreau said. “It’s a very clear rationale that companies can use to explain this type of policy to their employees: As with choices like smoking, especially now that the vaccine is fully FDA approved, it’s possible for the employer to say that these employees are imposing a cost by maintaining a non-vaccinated status.”

Richard Aboulafia, an aviation industry expert, agreed that Delta's decision is an effective compromise.

"Mandates are politically fraught, and airlines are having a difficult time with staffing as it is," said Aboulafia, vice president and analyst at the Teal Group. "But this is a market solution, one that tells airline employees that the costs associated with having unvaccinated workers shouldn’t be borne by businesses."

Other steps announced Wednesday by Bastian include a mask requirement for all employees in indoor settings and an end to Covid-19 pay protections for unvaccinated Delta staffers. Unvaccinated employees will also be required to undergo weekly Covid-19 tests.

Vaccine mandates are popular with a majority of voters, according to a Morning Consult/POLITICO poll.

Unions coming around on mandates

Once divided on vaccine mandates, unions are now mostly united in their support for the policy. The nation’s two largest teachers unions, AFT and NEA, have backed the idea after initially declining to endorse it. And earlier this week, the union that represented Walt Disney World employees reached an agreement with Disney to require all unionized workers be fully vaccinated by October.

Unions are requesting that employers bargain with their workers to reach agreement on the shape of the policy. Several have successfully secured perks for their members by doing so: The Association of Flight Attendants negotiated an optional program providing three extra vacation days to United Airlines flight attendants who received the vaccine.

“My sense is that unions were in a wait-and-see mode, but more on the legal precedent side,” Boudreau said. “But it’s very clear for fully approved vaccines that employers can mandate vaccines. So I think from a union’s perspective at this stage, it’s more about how to push the employer to engage to craft those policies in a way that’s best for their members.”

[Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, Howard Kleinhendler must pay legal fees, attend CLEs, and face potential further punishment.]

U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker has granted the motion for sanctions against the so-called "Kraken" lawyers who sought to challenge the 2020 election results in Michigan: : Sidney Powell, L. Lin Wood, Emily Newman, Julia Z. Haller. Brandon Johnson, Scott Hagerstrom, Howard Kleinhendler, Gregory Rohl, and Stefanie Lynn Junttila. This follows another sanctions decision issued in Colorado earlier this month.

In a 110-page opinion, Judge Parker details the attorneys' bad faith and irresponsible conduct, and grants the state of Michigan's and city of Detroit's motion for sanctions. Judge Parker's order provides that the named attorneys are jointly and severally liable for the costs incurred by the defendants. She further orders that each sanctioned attorney must "complete at least twelve (12) hours of continuing legal education in the subjects of pleading standards (at least six hours total) and election law (at least six hours total) within six months," at the attorneys own expense. Judge Parker is also referring all of the named attorneys to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission and the "the appropriate disciplinary authority for the jurisdiction(s) where each attorney is admitted, referring the matter for investigation and possible suspension or
disbarment."

In short, the Kraken attorneys have had a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good day.

Judge Parker's opinion begins:

This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process. It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.

Individuals may have a right (within certain bounds) to disseminate allegations of fraud unsupported by law or fact in the public sphere. But attorneys cannot exploit their privilege and access to the judicial process to do the same. And when an attorney has done so, sanctions are in order.

Here's why. America's civil litigation system affords individuals the privilege to file a lawsuit to allege a violation of law. Individuals, however, must litigate within the established parameters for filing a claim. Such parameters are set forth in statutes, rules of civil procedure, local court rules, and professional rules of responsibility and ethics. Every attorney who files a claim on behalf of a client is charged with the obligation to know these statutes and rules, as well as the law allegedly violated.

Specifically, attorneys have an obligation to the judiciary, their profession, and the public (i) to conduct some degree of due diligence before presenting allegations as truth; (ii) to advance only tenable claims; and (iii) to proceed with a lawsuit in good faith and based on a proper purpose. Attorneys also have an obligation to dismiss a lawsuit when it becomes clear that the requested relief is unavailable.

This matter comes before the Court upon allegations that Plaintiffs' counsel did none of these things. To be clear, for the purpose of the pending sanctions motions, the Court is neither being asked to decide nor has it decided whether there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election in the State of Michigan. Rather, the question before the Court is whether Plaintiffs' attorneys engaged in litigation practices that are abusive and, in turn, sanctionable. The short answer is yes.

The attorneys who filed the instant lawsuit abused the well-established rules applicable to the litigation process by proffering claims not backed by law; proffering claims not backed by evidence (but instead, speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion); proffering factual allegations and claims without engaging in the required prefiling inquiry; and dragging out these proceedings even after they acknowledged that it was too late to attain the relief sought.

And this case was never about fraud—it was about undermining the People's faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.

While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced, such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law. And while we as a country pride ourselves on the freedoms embodied within the First Amendment, it is well-established that an attorney's freedom of speech is circumscribed upon "entering" the courtroom.

Indeed, attorneys take an oath to uphold and honor our legal system. The sanctity of both the courtroom and the litigation process are preserved only when attorneys adhere to this oath and follow the rules, and only when courts impose sanctions when attorneys do not. And despite the haze of confusion, commotion, and chaos counsel intentionally attempted to create by filing this lawsuit, one thing is perfectly clear: Plaintiffs' attorneys have scorned their oath, flouted the rules, and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary along the way. As such the Court is duty-bound to grant the motions for sanctions filed by Defendants and Intervenor-Defendants and is imposing sanctions pursuant to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, 28 U.S.C. § 1927, and its own inherent authority.

I suspect the sanctioned attorneys will appeal, and some are still facing defamation suits arising out of their false and reckless election claims.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Throughout the pandemic, the media have often been hamstrung in efforts to convey the severe medical effects of COVID-19 by their inability to film actual patients in the last stages of infection. One of the barriers has been the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability  Act (HIPAA),the national standard ensuring privacy of personal health information.

Nevertheless, some patients have provided the necessary permission to be videoed while still in the hospital. As a result we have seen some some dramatic patient care stories produced by news organizations intent on communicating to their readers and viewers the serious and potentially lethal nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its subsequent mutations, even in its final stages.

Along those lines, The New York Times opinion video producer Alexander Stockton and senior video journalist Lucy King have created a short film. Titled “Dying in the Name of Vaccine Freedom,“ it explores how and why vaccine refusal and denialism have overwhelmed one area of the country. The Ozarks region of Arkansas has vaccination rates hovering around 36%, even as local hospitals fill up with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. Stockton, who narrates the video, says he doesn’t feel that the vaccine refusal in the Ozarks region is being driven by conspiracy-addled QAnon theories. Rather, as demonstrated over and over in the video, he shows that the objections are invariably wedded to the rhetoric of personal “freedom” and “choice.”  

The video is available on the Times’ Twitter, and has been posted on YouTube as well.

The seven-minute film profiles, among others, 53-year-old Christopher Green, who (between coughing spells) describes himself as “more of a libertarian” who doesn’t like being “told what I have to do.” At the time he was initially filmed, Green had not yet been attached to a ventilator. Green’s doctor candidly admits that if he received ventilator support she did not expect him to survive. Green died in the hospital, nine days after being interviewed.  

Stockton and King also highlight the reasons used by residents of Arkansas towns like Mountain Home (pop. 12,500) to justify their vaccine refusal, despite the fact that nearly everyone who lives there knows someone who has died of COVID-19. While Stockton acknowledges that “misinformation certainly exists” and is influencing the residents of this region, the film attributes the main reason for vaccine refusal to individualistic “freedom” rhetoric.

The film also explores how the voices of pro-vaccine residents tend to be drowned out by that rhetoric, particularly when it is echoed by Republican political leaders such as Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and others who emphasize, again and again, the voluntary nature of getting the vaccine. Leaders then compound the problem by signing laws banning local mask mandates and preemptively banning bogeymen like “vaccine passports.” Of course, this simply reinforces the inclination on the part of residents to refuse the vaccines. Stockton concludes, rather despairingly, that the best motivation for many of these people is being hospitalized themselves; several are depicted in hospital beds, expressing their sincere regrets about remaining unvaccinated.

One significant omission is the unmistakable role that social media, particularly Facebook, has played in fostering this deadly phenomenon of vaccine refusal, and thus prolonging the pandemic. The film begins with clips of adamant vaccine opponents loudly and boldly parroting false assertions that COVID-19 vaccines are “unproven,” “untested,” or otherwise ineffective, that they amount to a “poison” being forced into people, and that requiring children to wear masks in school is “detrimental to their health.” Nowhere is it suggested or even implied that any of these people have any scientific or medical expertise. It is clear that most have been inculcated into their anti-vaccine positions by conservative media—where this disinformation breeds and metastasizes—and most of them get that disinformation from Facebook and other social media, where feeds are conveniently, even automatically, tailored to their political and social interests. To the extent people really believe their freedoms and choice are impacted by getting vaccinated, it’s frankly hard to accept that these aren’t simply viewpoints they’ve been fed through social media, rather than having germinated in their own heads.

The COVID-19 pandemic, unlike prior pandemics, has the unique distinction of occurring in the era where people gravitate not to traditional news sources, but to social media for most of their information. Such alternative sources of “competing” facts simply weren’t available to prior generations at anywhere near the level that exists in the ubiquitous world of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter today. In decades past, there was no easy way for such dangerous and inaccurate health information to propagate so freely and quickly, so you wouldn’t see whole swaths of the country being taken in by it. Now, all that’s required is a cleverly worded meme, a pseudo-scientific paper, or some cynical political stooge’s bloviation for millions of people of wildly varying degrees of intelligence to grow eager to believe, validate, and spread misinformation.

Had this country’s citizens evolved in terms of innate brainpower and critical thinking skills at the same speed as digital media have evolved, this wouldn’t be a problem. But when Americans rely on information from dubious, unverifiable sources—based mostly on what their close friends and neighbors “like” or “share” on Facebook or other platforms—the channels and outlets that have traditionally conveyed accurate and truthful information tend to be drowned out. When Green in the Times film refers to himself as “more of a libertarian,” for example, it’s more than likely he’s basing that assessment on something he saw on social media equating libertarianism with vaccine refusal. When a woman declaring that vaccines simply make people sicker makes her righteous, self-assured statements, she is echoing something she read, probably on Facebook, that was in turn read, approved, and urged on her by a friend. It made sense to her limited worldview, so it must be true. 

The effect of this type of constant self-reinforcement through social media is to create a huge, bubble population of fairly ignorant people convinced of their own expertise in areas where they have no real knowledge or experience, based on sources that are created by people motivated by specific agendas but likewise with no real expertise. What social media (particularly Facebook) does is to reinforce—through “likes,” “shares,” and other reactions—a specific point of view or interpretation whose worth is not measured by its actual truth, but by the degree to catches on with like-minded individuals. In a population of Americans that, for the most part, has no more critical analytical skills than it did in 1918, for example, a constant reinforcement of one’s own “rightness” and “correctness” on any matter is practically irresistible. It caters to the most common human instinct—to be approved and validated by others—even when the information is intended only to feed into their political and social preconceptions. In reality, people absolutely crave that feeling of superiority to others; Facebook and social media provide millions of this country’s most undiscerning folks that opportunity. If it weren’t for Facebook and the feedback loop it and its competitors promote, there would be anti-vaxxers, but their numbers wouldn’t be close to what they are now.

Over the past few months we’ve seen story after story about vaccine refusers dying of COVID-19. Many of these stories include pictures of people before they contracted the virus, all with smug expressions on their faces. We know it all, those faces seemed to say, before they were whisked away into hospitals and placed on ventilators, just like Green in the Times video. As Stockton and King’s film shows, many think they do know it all, literally until their dying breaths. They can’t accept that their contrived notions of “freedom” and “choice” aren’t their own, but rather words that have been carefully drilled into their heads by people with political agendas who couldn’t care less about the real-life consequences, people who are amplified by social media platforms.

So contrary to Stockton and King’s title, these people aren’t getting sick and dying “in the name of freedom,” and least of all in the name of “choice.” They’re getting sick and dying in the name of something they read and liked on Facebook or some other social media platform because it made them feel good, and made them feel smart … even though what they read and “liked” happened to be totally, grievously, and even fatally wrong. 

The Florida surge is a microcosm of a summer gone wrong.

It’s no mystery what’s happening in Florida right now — or why.

The state is experiencing its worst surge of the pandemic. Last week, it was averaging nearly 25,000 new cases every day. The previous high, in January, was about 18,000. More than 17,000 Floridians are hospitalized with Covid-19, another record; around 230 people are dying every day. Florida leads all states in the number of hospitalizations and deaths per capita.

The city of Orlando has urged residents to limit their water use, because the same liquid oxygen used to treat the water supply is being used to provide air to Covid-19 patients. The Florida health department asked the federal government to send more ventilators as the number of hospitalized patients spiked — a request Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has staked his political reputation on his laissez-faire response to the pandemic, claimed to know nothing about.

In recent days, cases may have started to plateau, increasing “only” 11 percent in the past two weeks. But it’s hard to be sure because testing is inadequate: Nearly 20 percent of tests are coming back positive in the state. Experts say that number should be at 5 percent or lower in order to be confident most cases are being caught.

Lynne Sladky/AP

For most of last year, Florida looked like a success story for the people who advocated for a less restrictive response to Covid-19. Its case and death rates weren’t noticeably worse than other states that were more aggressive about mandating masks or closing businesses.

So why is Florida is experiencing its worst surge now, 18 months into the pandemic, when the vaccines are widely available?

In some ways, what’s happening in Florida is a microcosm of the current surge across America: A middling vaccination rate has collided with a more contagious version of the virus. And it’s doing so in a state where political leaders continue to insist people should act as though the pandemic is over — even as more people are dying every day than at any point in the past year.

Florida is overwhelmed with new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations

About half of Florida residents, 52 percent, are fully vaccinated, according to the Times’s data. That’s not terrible — Mississippi and Alabama currently rank last, with less than 38 percent — but it’s not great either. The Sunshine State is 25th among states in vaccination rate.

Florida is not a monolith; some communities have much higher levels of protection than others. Case levels trend accordingly, with the less vaccinated areas seeing more spread. In counties with more than 1,000 new cases per 100,000 people, vaccination rates are stuck in the 30s and 40s.

Counties with vaccination rates of 60 percent or above are still seeing a significant amount of spread. But it’s substantially less, sometimes by more than half, than the worst-off areas, according to the state’s data. Less vaccinated counties have been driving the current wave.

“Insufficient vaccine coverage is contributing a lot,” Cindy Prins, a University of Florida epidemiologist, told me.

Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

The now-dominant delta variant has also made the situation worse because it spreads more efficiently than the previous iterations. It also seems to cause more virulent disease, which is likely contributing to the record number of hospitalizations.

Different age groups also have different degrees of protection against the delta variant. Nearly nine in 10 Floridians over the age of 65 are vaccinated, giving a high level of protection to the people most vulnerable to getting severely ill from Covid-19.

But less than 60 percent of people ages 30 to 39 are vaccinated, as are less than 50 percent of those ages 12 to 29, according to state data. Large numbers of young people in Florida are fully vulnerable to the delta variant, and some of them are getting very sick. One hospital system serving central Florida reported last week that half of its patients currently hospitalized with Covid-19 are under 40.

Hospitals are feeling the strain of the current surge. Just 7 percent of the state’s ICU beds are currently available, according to the Florida Hospital Association, and more than half of the people currently in ICUs statewide have Covid-19.

“Several hospitals have had to procure and request more [ventilators], and oxygen deliveries continue to be a challenge,” Savannah Kelly, an FHA spokesperson, said in an email.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s pandemic strategy is being put to the test

DeSantis, who has clear presidential aspirations in 2024, has positioned himself and his state’s Covid-19 response against the public health establishment and, more recently, the Biden administration.

Though he, like most governors, closed many businesses last spring, they were allowed to reopen in May of 2020; DeSantis steadfastly refused to consider any new closures during following waves in the summer and winter. He ended the state’s mask mandates on May 4, 2021, before the CDC changed its own masking guidance, and he has resisted calls to reimpose them even as cases surged again.

The governor tried to block local school districts from setting their own mask mandates for the new school year and threatened to withhold the salaries of any officials who implement a masking policy. Some school districts are pushing ahead anyway. He also has opposed businesses requiring vaccines for their employees or customers.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Experts said the state’s policies, which have signaled to the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike that it’s okay to go about their normal lives, are making it easier for the virus to spread.

“There are still a large absolute number of unvaccinated people, relatively few people practicing social distancing or masking, by choice and also due to the absence of policies requiring them,” Joshua Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “Schools and universities going back into session, and lots of delta introductions in the state all happening at the same time.”

The situation has led to a sort of theater of the absurd, with DeSantis fighting local mitigation measures while at the same time promoting new treatments for people who get so sick they need to be hospitalized because of Covid-19.

Florida’s pandemic failures are a microcosm of America’s struggles

Florida, like much of America, was betting the pandemic was behind it — and was wrong. Prior experience may have lulled the state into a false sense of security, unprepared for how much more aggressive the delta variant would be.

As I reported last year, Florida has enjoyed structural advantages in slowing down Covid-19’s spread. It is less densely populated than a state like New York, with more single-family homes, which reduces the opportunities for people to have contact with others and potentially spread the virus. The weather is warmer, which makes it easier for people to stay outside, where the virus doesn’t transmit as easily.

By the end of last year, there was not much of a discernible difference between the case and death numbers in a state like Florida, with its relaxed approach to Covid-19, and a state like California that was much more proactive. It lent some credence to the case DeSantis and other conservatives were making, that public health experts were being too aggressive in trying to regulate people’s behavior, with little evident benefit.

But then Florida’s vaccination rates lagged and the virus evolved to be more infectious. The stage was set for another devastating wave.

It’s the same story all over the country. Florida is surrounded by states — Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina — with below-average vaccinations and few official restrictions that are currently enduring some of their worst weeks of Covid-19.

Emily Kask/AFP via Getty Images

People are also going back to their lives. Walking and driving activity has risen above the pre-pandemic baseline in Florida, according to Apple mobility data, and transit has returned close to normal levels after a big drop last spring.

It’s not hard to understand why. The federal government had appeared to be signaling the end of the pandemic a few months ago, with more relaxed masking guidance and the Biden White House embracing July 4 as a national reopening of sorts, before the delta variant came surging back.

The new wave of cases across the country has forced many state and national leaders to revise their public messages. The vaccines do still provide strong protection against the most severe Covid-19 symptoms, but more caution may be warranted given the high level of spread in the US. Experts are urging people to wear masks in public again and to consider avoiding large gatherings, especially indoors.

DeSantis has been holding fast against new interventions, despite the record cases and hospitalizations, following the same playbook he’s stuck to throughout the pandemic. Still, Florida is paying a steep price for its struggles to vaccinate people and maintain vigilance against the virus. Nearly 43,000 Floridians have died in the pandemic altogether.

Even if the latest wave is plateauing, there are still difficult weeks ahead — in Florida and across America.

Democrats are thanking their lucky stars for the likes of Herschel Walker.

The Democrats' big new voting rights push crosses an important threshold.

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Game devs of all sizes and scopes respond to the question: "What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard to make?" From a report: Earlier this year, game developers across the industry weighed in on Twitter on a seemingly innocuous question: What's the problem with doors in video games? It turns out, a lot. A seemingly boring feature such as usable doors can be absolute hell for developers to put in their games for numerous reasons. Everything from physics to functionality, from AI to sound, comes into play while making a single door in a single video game work. And not just work, but work in such a way where the player never has to think about it. Building a working, forgettable door is an incredible game development undertaking. But it will probably not surprise you to learn that doors are far from the only seemingly simple feature that prove to be unexpectedly challenging in the development process. A few months ago, I asked developers across the industry the question, "What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard for game developers to make?" I received nearly 100 responses representing a wide breadth of industry experience, ranging from solo developers to those who had tackled issues within teams of hundreds. The pool of responses similarly included a number of varied problems, but also a number of similar issues popping up among many projects. Those I spoke to described challenges in making games look and sound good, storytelling, movement and interaction with objects, menus, save systems, multiplayer, and all sorts of intricacies of design that are so rarely discussed outside of studios themselves. Many noted that they've received angry player feedback about the topics they mentioned, with their audiences asking, "Why don't you just do X?" The answer is, almost always: because it's really, really hard. So if you've ever wondered why the maker of your favorite game didn't simply fix one of the myriad issues developers mentioned below, here's why those seemingly simple problems are hardly simple at all. As the original topic of game development headaches focused on doors, it made sense that many of the developers I spoke to had issues with other methods used to connect a person from one place to another. For instance, elevators. Multiple developers told me about the frustrations of elevators, whether they're taking players up a single floor in a building or serving as pseudo-loading screens between two major game areas. [...]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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schwit1 writes: Jeff Bezos might have felt triumphant when he rocketed toward the edge of space last month, but apparently the same can't be said about other employees at Blue Origin. On Friday, CNBC was first to report that over a dozen engineers had left Bezos's company in recent weeks, with some departing for high-ranking roles at rival spaceflight outfits. Among the major names that departed Blue Origin were Nitin Arora -- the lead engineer on Blue Origin's lunar lander program -- and Lauren Lyons, who announced earlier this month that she'd taken on a role as the Chief Operating Officer at Firefly Aerospace. Arora, meanwhile, said in a LinkedIn post last week that he'd taken a role at SpaceX. Fox Business confirmed that other prominent exits from the company included ex-NASA astronaut Jeff Ashby, along with Steve Bennet, who helped helm the New Shepard launch program.

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It’s long been difficult for Americans with disabilities to vote. Inaccessible paths are an obstacle to people who use wheelchairs. Long lines are a huge hurdle to people with chronic pain. Voting machines without audio or large-print ballots are an impediment to those who are blind or who have low vision. But last year, something different happened: As states passed pandemic-driven reforms to make voting easier for everyone, they inadvertently made voting a lot easier for most people with disabilities.

And vote, they did. Nearly 62 percent of Americans with disabilities voted in 2020, a surge of nearly 6 percentage points over 2016, or 1.7 million more voters. The number of disabled voters reporting difficulties while voting also dropped significantly; in 2020, 11 percent of disabled voters reported having problems, down from 26 percent in 2012, according to an Election Assistance Commission report. That’s not to say voting was suddenly simple: Mail-in ballots aren’t easier for everyone, including those with visual or cognitive disabilities. And in 2020, disabled Americans were still roughly 7 percent less likely to vote than nondisabled Americans. But the changes made a real difference.

Now state policy makers want to turn back the clock. Citing exaggerated concerns about voter fraud, state legislators have passed a wave of new bills that will make it harder for disabled people to vote in future elections. Overall, lawmakers have introduced more than 400 bills in 49 states this year that would restrict access to voting for people with disabilities. At least 18 states have already passed such laws. These laws either target mail-in ballots, reduce the amount of time voters have to request or mail in a ballot, restrict the availability of drop-off locations, impose stricter signature requirements for mail-in voting, or enact new and stricter voter-ID requirements.

[Read: Watch what’s happening in red states]

Are the authors of these bills intentionally attempting to disenfranchise disabled voters? The truth is more nuanced, and perhaps grimmer: People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether. “These types of laws are written without even thinking about how they’re going to impact people with disabilities—until we come forth and start talking about our experiences and how legislation like this is going to impact us,” Michelle Bishop, the manager of voter access and engagement at the National Disability Rights Network, told me. “People with disabilities are very often collateral damage in these conversations.”

For example, S.B. 7 in Texas would ban drive-through voting, which would create difficulty for immunocompromised people who are unable to enter a polling place without risking their health. Likewise, S.F. 173 in Minnesota would require voters to provide an ID to vote in person, which would increase the burden for people who don’t drive; in addition to finding transportation to the voting booth, they would first need to get to a government office—that may or may not be accessible—to obtain the necessary identification. And in Wisconsin, A.B. 201 would prevent nonmilitary voters from automatically receiving an absentee ballot, which would make voting more challenging for those who can’t physically vote in person, whether because of being immunocompromised or having chronic pain.

Lawmakers’ intentions are irrelevant, Andrés Gallegos, the chair of the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency, told me: “Regardless of intention, any law which reduces the ability of individuals to vote by mail and/or lessens the amount of ballot drop-off sites will disproportionately impact the ability of people with disabilities to cast a ballot.”

Some of these voter-integrity bills and laws do intentionally target people with disabilities. These measures are based on long-standing prejudices, Bishop told me: “That those people are not intelligent, or they’re not with the times, or they don’t have a firm grip on reality and that someone is just going to try to influence them … If you know enough people with disabilities, you know that’s simply not true.”

For example, a Texas law, H.B. 3920, requires disabled voters to sign a statement declaring their inability to vote in person so they can receive a mail-in ballot, but it explicitly rejects illness as a basis for that declaration. As a result, immunocompromised people may have to risk endangering their health by voting in person, says Dominic Kelly, a senior manager of fundraising at Fair Fight Action, a national voting-rights organization based in Georgia.

[Read: The tool that Joe Biden refuses to use]

Many argue that the intended effect of these bills is to suppress the votes of people of color. But when you reduce access for voters of color, voters with disabilities are shut out too. Statistically, a higher proportion of Black Americans (one in four) and Native Americans and Alaska Natives (three in 10) are disabled than the proportion of white Americans (one in five).

Others argue that although these bills might introduce inconveniences, that’s a small price to pay for stronger election integrity. But what might seem trivial to some could be insurmountable for people with disabilities, Gallegos told me.

Congress could enact federal laws that would mitigate the effects of these state laws. Some provisions in the For the People Act would increase accessibility requirements at polling places and expand access to early voting and same-day voter registration. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would protect voters by preventing states from enacting restrictive laws. So far, though, neither bill appears close to passage.

Some changes that aided disabled voters in 2020 will stick. At least 54 bills that will expand voting access have been signed into law in 25 states. One of those states, North Carolina, has made absentee voting via an online system permanent for voters with disabilities after experimenting with the measure during the 2020 election. And more than 900 bills that would expand voting access have been introduced in 49 states. But absent congressional action, disabled Americans’ access to the vote will continue to depend on where they live.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Google employees have no legal right to protest the company's choice of clients, the internet giant told a judge weighing the U.S. government's allegations that its firings of activists violated the National Labor Relations Act. "Even if Google had, for the sake of argument, terminated the employees for their protest activities -- for protesting their choice of customers -- this would not violate the Act," Google's attorney Al Latham said in his opening statement Tuesday at a labor board trial. National Labor Relations Board prosecutors have accused the Alphabet Inc. unit of violating federal law by illegally firing five employees for their activism. Three of those workers' claims had originally been dismissed under President Donald Trump, because agency prosecutors concluded that their opposition to the company collaborating with immigration enforcement wasn't legally protected, according to their lawyer. But that decision was reversed after President Joe Biden fired and replaced the labor board's general counsel. Google has been roiled over the past four years by a wave of activism by employees challenging management over issues including treatment of sub-contracted staff, handling of sexual harassment, and a contract with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which some of the fired workers accessed internal information about and circulated a petition against. Google has denied wrongdoing, saying in a Monday statement that it encourages "open discussion and debate" but terminated staff in response to violations of its data security policies. "Google terminated these employees not because of their protest as such, but because in the pursuit of their protest, they accessed highly confidential information that they had no right to access," its attorney told the judge Tuesday. Federal labor law prohibits retaliating against employees for collective action related to their working conditions, but the exact scope of that protection has been debated for decades. Biden's appointees have signaled they interpret the scope of what that covers much more broadly than their Trump-era predecessors. Latham said he isn't aware of any case in the labor board's eight decades of existence in which it has held "an employer's choice of customer" to be an issue workers have a right to protest. "What we have here is a protest that does not seek to improve employees' terms and conditions of employment," but rather "a purely political protest that sought to use Google's government contracts, or potential government contracts, as leverage," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Court’s decision on Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy upends decades of precedent warning that judges shouldn’t mess with foreign affairs.

The Supreme Court handed down an order Tuesday evening that makes no sense.

It is not at all clear what the Biden administration is supposed to do in order to comply with the Court’s decision in Biden v. Texas. That decision suggests that the Department of Homeland Security committed some legal violation when it rescinded a Trump-era immigration policy, but it does not identify what that violation is. And it forces the administration to engage in sensitive negotiations with at least one foreign government without specifying what it needs to secure in those negotiations.

One of the most foundational principles of court decisions involving foreign policy is that judges should be extraordinarily reluctant to mess around with foreign affairs. The decision in Texas defies this principle, fundamentally reshaping the balance of power between judges and elected officials in the process.

The central issue in Texas is the Biden administration’s decision to terminate former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required many asylum seekers arriving at the United States’ southern border to stay in Mexico while they awaited a hearing on their asylum claim. Although the policy was formally ended under Biden, it hasn’t been in effect since March 2020, when the federal government imposed heightened restrictions on border crossings due to Covid-19.

Nevertheless, a Trump-appointed federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the policy, and he gave the administration exactly one week to do so. The Supreme Court’s order effectively requires the administration to comply with Kacsmaryk’s order, at least for now, with one vague and confusing modification.

Technically, this case is still on appeal. The Biden administration requested a stay of Kacsmaryk’s order while its appeal is pending. But the administration is now under an immediate obligation to comply with that order.

And the Supreme Court’s decision to deny the stay bodes very ill for the ultimate outcome of that appeal. The Court did not disclose every justice’s vote, but liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan did disclose that they dissent.

The Biden administration can’t possibly know how to comply with this order

Kacsmaryk’s opinion, it should be noted, was dead wrong. It effectively claimed that a 1996 law required the federal government to implement the Remain in Mexico policy permanently. That policy didn’t even exist until 2019, so the upshot of Kacsmaryk’s opinion is that the government violated the law for nearly a quarter-century and no one noticed.

The Supreme Court does not go that far. Instead, it suggests that the Biden administration did not adequately explain why it chose to end the Remain in Mexico policy. In theory, that’s a solvable problem. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas could comply with the Supreme Court’s decision by issuing a new memo providing a more fleshed-out explanation.

Except that the Supreme Court does not even offer a hint as to why it deemed the Biden administration’s original explanation insufficient. Here is the entire text of the Court’s order:

And so, without an explanation as to how it could comply with the conservative justices’ understanding of the law, the administration is left with two untenable choices. The first is that it can try to guess what, exactly, the justices want them to say in a new memo explaining its policy. The second is to make what could be a futile effort to reinstate Trump’s policy.

It should go without saying that Mexico is likely to have strong opinions about this abrupt policy shift. The original Remain in Mexico policy came about only after the United States secured Mexico’s cooperation, and it is unlikely that the United States could successfully reimplement this policy without Mexico’s permission.

So one of the upshots of the Supreme Court’s order is that the administration must now go, hat in hand, to the Mexican government and beg them to cooperate again.

For decades, the Supreme Court warned the judiciary to avoid “unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy.” Judges, the Court explained in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. (2013), should be “particularly wary of impinging on the discretion of the Legislative and Executive Branches in managing foreign affairs.”

Apparently that’s all out the window now: Unless the Biden administration can figure out what it needs to put in a new memo explaining its policy, it must reopen diplomatic negotiations with Mexico (and possibly with Central American nations whose citizens are seeking asylum in the United States) in order to reinstate a policy that it does not agree with, and that it believes, in Mayorkas’s words, will leave untold numbers of immigrants without “stable access to housing, income, and safety.”

The one mitigating factor is that the Court also left in place an appeals court decision holding that the administration will not violate the court order against it so long as it tries in “good faith” to reinstate the Trump-era policy. But this “good faith” requirement raises more questions than it answers.

As the Court held in Schmidt v. Lessard (1974), because “an injunctive order prohibits conduct under threat of judicial punishment, basic fairness requires that those enjoined receive explicit notice of precisely what conduct is outlawed.” But the court order against the Biden administration doesn’t provide any such notice.

Suppose, for example, that Mexico agrees to work with the United States to reinstate Trump’s policy, but only if the United States agrees to turn over its entire supply of Covid-19 vaccines. Or only if the United States agrees to fork over a trillion dollars. Or only if the United States agrees to execute a US resident who is despised by the Mexican government.

If the Biden administration refuses such demands, has it acted in good faith? Who knows? The Court hasn’t told us. And Judge Kacsmaryk now has the power to hold the Biden administration in contempt if he determines that they haven’t acted in good faith.

The decision upends the balance of power between the elected branches and the judiciary. It gives a right-wing judge extraordinary power to supervise sensitive diplomatic negotiations. And it most likely forces the administration to open negotiations with Mexico, while the Mexican government knows full well that the administration can’t walk away from those negotiations without risking a contempt order.

With this order, Republican-appointed judges are claiming the power to direct US foreign policy — and don’t even feel obligated to explain themselves.

The Supreme Court has issued an order effectively forcing the Biden administration to restore the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while they await hearings on their requests for safe haven in the U.S.

The high court’s order, issued on Tuesday evening over the dissent of the court’s three Democratic appointees, rejected the Justice Department’s request for a stay that would have allowed the controversial policy to remain on ice while litigation over President Joe Biden’s effort to rescind it continues.

The ruling is a victory for the states of Texas and Missouri, which sued over the repeal of the policy and won a ruling from a federal judge in Texas earlier this month requiring that the Biden administration return to the practice President Donald Trump instituted in January 2019.

U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in Amarillo, Texas, ordered on Aug. 13 that the Biden administration reinstate the policy within seven days. The judge accepted arguments from the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Missouri that the Biden administration had failed to comply with legal requirements to consider all relevant factors before halting the Trump-era policy.

Critics of the Trump policy said it risked the lives of migrants by requiring them to wait in Mexico, including in border cities that are plagued by gangs, drugs and violence. Trump aides said it averted the problem of immigrants failing to show up at immigration hearings after being released to live in the U.S.

Immigrant rights advocates expressed disappointment in the high court’s action, but stressed that Biden still had authority to repeal the Trump-era policy through a new process that courts would approve.

“The Biden administration was correct to rescind the Trump return-to-Mexico policy, the whole point of which was to punish people for seeking asylum by trapping them in miserable and dangerous conditions,” said Omar Jadwat of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The government must take all steps available to fully end this illegal program, including by re-terminating it with a fuller explanation. What it must not do is use this decision as cover for abandoning its commitment to restore a fair asylum system.”

Paola Luisi of Families Belong Together, a coalition of immigrant rights groups, said: “Many people waiting in Mexico for their asylum cases have been kidnapped, raped and even killed as a direct result of this policy. They came to our doorstep with a belief in America — and our government sent them into danger. We cannot accept any policy — even temporary — that separates families. We urge the Biden administration to do everything within their means to put an end to this cruel ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy once and for all.”

While immigrant advocates focused particular anger at the “Remain in Mexico” policy, pandemic-related policies instituted under Trump and largely retained under Biden have also resulted in many asylum seekers being quickly expelled to Mexico.

The legal drive to force the Biden administration to restore the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy is part of an effort by conservatives to leverage legal precedents set during the Trump presidency to unwind Biden’s initiatives on immigration and other issues. The Supreme Court’s brief order on Tuesday night cited the court’s ruling last year blocking Trump’s repeal of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, policy, which gave work permits and some protection against deportation to immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children.

In that decision, the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to consider important factors in the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts angered Trump and some conservatives by joining the court’s Democratic appointees to block Trump’s wind-down of DACA.

After failing to win a stay from a federal appeals court last week, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to step in. On Friday night, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily stayed the lower-court order requiring a return to the “Remain in Mexico” policy. That stay was lifted by the court’s order Tuesday.

Justice Department lawyers argued that reinstating the policy would be highly disruptive and could roil U.S. relations with Mexico.

One glimmer of hope for the Biden administration in the Supreme Court’s order Tuesday night was language indicating that justices were not blessing the details of the injunction Kacsmaryk issued and holding open the possibility that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could modify it.

Sabrina Rodriguez contributed to this report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Los Angeles Times: A Los Angeles County man broke into thousands of Apple iCloud accounts and collected more than 620,000 private photos and videos in a plot to steal and share images of nude young women, federal authorities say. Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, has agreed to plead guilty to four felonies, including conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer, court records show. Chi, who goes by David, admitted that he impersonated Apple customer support staff in emails that tricked unsuspecting victims into providing him with their Apple IDs and passwords, according to court records. He gained unauthorized access to photos and videos of at least 306 victims across the nation, most of them young women, he acknowledged in his plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Tampa, Fla. Chi said he hacked into the accounts of about 200 of the victims at the request of people he met online. Using the moniker "icloudripper4you," Chi marketed himself as capable of breaking into iCloud accounts to steal photos and videos, he admitted in court papers. Chi acknowledged in court papers that he and his unnamed co-conspirators used a foreign encrypted email service to communicate with each other anonymously. When they came across nude photos and videos stored in victims' iCloud accounts, they called them "wins," which they collected and shared with one another. "I don't even know who was involved," Chi said Thursday in a brief phone conversation. He expressed fear that public exposure of his crimes would "ruin my whole life." The scam started to unravel In March 2018. A California company that specializes in removing celebrity photos from the internet notified an unnamed public figure in Tampa, Fla., that nude photos of the person had been posted on pornographic websites, according to [FBI agent Anthony Bossone]. The victim had stored the nude photos on an iPhone and backed them up to iCloud. Investigators soon discovered that a log-in to the victim's iCloud account had come from an internet address at Chi's house in La Puente, Bossone said. The FBI got a search warrant and raided the house May 19. By then, agents had already gathered a clear picture of Chi's online life from a vast trove of records that they obtained from Dropbox, Google, Apple, Facebook and Charter Communications. On Aug. 5, Chi agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer. He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four crimes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve been waiting for this day. This is the day social media users finally unite against homeowners associations (HOAs) for the elitist—and often racist—practices they uphold. It started with a Reddit post on Sunday from a homeowner targeted by a neighbor for having three dogs instead of the allowed two. “My parents moved to a retirement neighborhood, so I moved into their neighborhood after my job required me to move to their state,” a Reddit user posted to the site’s AITA (Am I the A—hole) forum. The user explained that although the family has three dogs, two of them look identical, so many residents were never the wiser. “It worked for 2 years. Well my [busy]body neighbor has been telling everyone we have 3 dogs and b----ing about it on Nextdoor,” the dog-owner said.

The HOA asked to investigate when one of the look-alike canines was at the veterinarian, so the homeowner was still able to sneak by undetected—much to the dismay of the neighbor who kept complaining. The dog owner didn’t say how the situation ended in the post, but more importantly, when the story trended on Twitter, social media users began focusing on how HOAs began.

Warning: This post contains profanity and other language that may be offensive to some readers.

“Fun fact abt HOAs,” wrote author and poet Faylita Hicks in a Twitter thread. “They were started in L.A. County around the time the Supreme Court ruled that housing covenants preventing Black families from gaining access to better single-family homes were illegal.

”They literally exist to prevent the upward mobility of Black folx.”

Hicks, posting a series of news articles and context, then went on to dispel the myth that “HOAs today are no longer racist and are merely about uncut lawns, trash cans, parking, and whatnot.”

For Business Insider’s “Inside the Racial Wealth Gap” series, Mariette Williams wrote in September 2020 that HOAs created in the mid-19th century increased in popularity in the 1960s. When white people were looking for a means of legally keeping Black buyers from accessing homes in white neighborhoods, they founded more HOAs. Decades later, Black people are still excluded from many of those communities. About 60% of new-build homes and 80% of new subdivisions are part of homeowners associations, and those neighborhoods on average contain primarily white and Asian residents.

"There is plenty of evidence from historic records and housing policy discussions that anti-Black racism motivated some of the strategies used by homeowner associations, such as deed restrictions and covenants that explicitly discriminated against Black people by compelling other owners to avoid selling to them,” Jonathan Rothwell, author of A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society, told the news site. “HOAs perpetuate racial and economic segregation by blocking fair participation in housing markets, thus denying wealth-generating opportunities and upward mobility for many Black people and lower-income families."

Melchior Julie, a Black homeowner in Simpsonville, South Carolina, faced jail time when he refused to pay $3,600 in attorney fees resulting from a dispute with his HOA regarding a shed in the back of his property. Julien told Greenville News he believed he was targeted and harassed because of his race. “There’s no way of justifying it when they are not enforcing the rules on neighbors who are white,” he said.

Homeowners associations were just one tool in a toolbox of ways white people sought to cap upward mobility for Black people. In Detroit, Teresa Moon, president of the 8 Mile Community Organization and a community resident for 59 years, said she learned in school that a wall she could see from her childhood home was built to keep Black people outside of a neighboring all-white community. She told WBUR the wall was built when a developer seeking to build houses couldn't access the capital he needed because Black people lived near the area he targeted. "Our parents didn't talk about it," Moon said. "I guess it was taboo to say what it was. When I was about 12 or 13, I found out. ... We found out it was a segregation wall. And why it was put up, you know, to separate Black people from white people."

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made discriminatory housing practices like redlining illegal. The law didn’t fix the underlying problem, though. It just forced racists to use other tactics. In California, Black residents of the noted and affluent Sugar Hill community successfully staved off "racially restrictive covenants" for years, only to have a freeway built through their community, effectively erasing it, NPR reported. "I watched the tractor bulldoze these homes down," Van Nickerson said, later seeing his family home replaced with a traffic lane. Rha, Van’s sister, told NPR her family home was seized through eminent domain. "I remember my father telling me about eminent domain and how there was no option to stop this,” she said. “The valuation for our home was quite low; it was not market value that we were compensated for. And so it was quite an upheaval."

Mark Alston, a real estate broker, told NPR while some argue that "risk-based pricing" is fair, "'fair' is an interesting concept" when it rides the coattails of 350 years of exclusionary zoning laws. "I could[n’t] care less about Black Lives Matter being painted on [a] basketball court," he said. "How about an affirmative program to lower the gap between white and Black homeownership? How about actual public policy that moves the needle, for real? How about a change in employment and pay that narrows the gap, the inequities between white and black pay? How about those types of things that will make a difference for future generations?"

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Large majorities are rejecting just about every one of the Florida governor's covid-19 stances.

Anybody can be independent; the value of a shameless panderer shouldn't be underestimated.

The whole Republican Party should feel shame at what it has been doing.

Since a handful of ‘centrist’ Democrats are threatening to torpedo the core of President Joe Biden's domestic agenda over unspecified concerns, perhaps now is an excellent time to remind them how popular it is for a party to fail. 

Happily, Republicans very recently offered up an example of a bruising political defeat when the GOP enjoyed unilateral control of Congress and the White House. When Donald Trump first took office in 2017, congressional Republicans quickly turned to make good on their decade-long promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act "root and branch," as GOP Leader Mitch McConnell liked to say.

It was a mess from Day One because Republicans are all-around terrible legislators, extra burdened at the time with the dead weight of Trump. Try as they might, they couldn't even agree on the terms for repeal, much less a way to provide replacement insurance for the millions of Americans they planned to strip of coverage. 

So after several months of fruitless wrangling, House GOP leaders finally pulled the flailing bill from the floor on March 24, 2017, rather than suffer the defeat. But that wasn't the last of it. 

Republicans made a second try with a so-called "skinny" repeal, devoting another four months to the effort. The Republican who ultimately put an end to the madness was the late GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose satisfying thumbs-down vote on July 28 narrowly saved the nation from hitting a health care iceberg. 

But for Republican lawmakers and all those GOP voters who had been promised the first order of business would be obliterating Obamacare, the whole episode was a colossal failure. 

The Civiqs tracking poll of the Republican Party captures perfectly how that played for a party that was already incredibly unpopular (and remains so to this day).

Among the general public, the initial March failure triggered a 7-point rise in unpopularity from 59% unfavorable to 66% unfavorable—its least popular moment in the entirety of Trump's tenure. The GOP's favorables didn't really start to tick up again until the House passed its tax bill in mid-November, setting up final passage by the Senate in December.

But the main reason the GOP's overall favorables took a hit was that their favorability rating among Republican voters plummeted in the wake of the defeat, dropping from about 58% favorability when the first bill was pulled to a nadir of 43% around mid-September.

Republicans recovered only because they ultimately passed their tax cuts for the mega rich and U.S. corporations by the end of 2017. It was a vastly unpopular bill that grew even more unpopular over time. Still, it’s also proof positive that—even when a bill is unpopular—notching legislative successes is far better for a party in power than logging legislative defeats. 

That’s a lesson these so-called centrist Democrats might want to consider if they want any chance at keeping their seats in 2022.

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Earlier this month, right before senators departed for their summer recess, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York made an 11th-hour plea to his colleagues to take up the omnibus voting rights bill, the For the People Act. But Republicans once again stopped that from happening. They also blocked two other provisions Schumer tried to put forward on voting rights — one bill that would have addressed partisan gerrymandering and another bill that tackled campaign finance.

At this point, Democrats know that Republicans are unlikely to support sweeping voting rights legislation. After all, Republicans in the last few months have twice blocked consideration of the For the People Act and have shown little appetite for negotiation, even scuttling West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s compromise bill. But that won’t stop Democrats from trying to take up voting legislation again in September.

The text of this newest bill isn’t public yet, but it will reportedly be a scaled-down version of the For the People Act and modeled after Manchin’s bill. It’s likely, though, that this bill will also fail. That’s in part because voting rights have become an intractable fight between the two parties: Democratic and Republican lawmakers view voting access fundamentally differently. Polls do suggest that there is at least some appetite among Americans to make certain aspects of voting easier, but whether Democrats can use that to their advantage and make a moral argument in favor of the government working to uphold democratic values, like voting rights, remains an open question.

It’s also a risky strategy for Democrats because there is no fail-safe plan if they fail to win over their Republican colleagues on this new bill. One final option might be to modify or eliminate the filibuster, but that, too, is a tall task for Democrats. That’s because while a majority of Democratic senators are in favor of changes to the filibuster to pass something on voting rights, not all members are. Notably, Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are staunchly opposed to eliminating the filibuster and also hesitant to make any tweaks to it. Manchin at one point said he was open to a so-called “talking filibuster,” where senators wanting to block legislation would have to speak continuously on the Senate floor in order to maintain a filibuster, but it’s unclear whether that change would be taken up. More tellingly, Manchin shut down several ideas floated by proponents of filibuster reform in March.

But it’s not just Democratic holdouts in the Senate. Polls also show that Americans are largely opposed to abolishing the filibuster outright. According to an April Monmouth University poll, just 19 percent of U.S. adults said Congress should get rid of the filibuster entirely versus 38 percent who said Congress should keep it as is. Voters were open to tweaks, with 38 percent of respondents telling Monmouth they were open to keeping but reforming the filibuster. Similarly, when a group of voters in Morning Consult’s June survey were given a choice between passing legislation with a simple majority or with a 60-vote threshold, 45 percent favored tweaking the filibuster to a simple majority.

What’s troubling for Democrats is that those attitudes on filibuster reform barely shifted when respondents were asked about voting rights specifically, despite the fact that the filibuster has long been used to block civil rights legislation. That April Monmouth poll found, for instance, that Americans were evenly split on amending the filibuster specifically for voting legislation: Forty-six percent of respondents said they supported using the filibuster to block federal bills on election rules and voting rights, while another 46 percent said they were opposed. Another Vox/Data for Progress poll found pretty much the same thing: Fifty-two percent of likely voters either strongly or somewhat supported a change in Senate rules to pass the For the People Act. 

But while gutting the filibuster entirely or even tweaking it might be a hard sell for Democrats, Americans are broadly in favor of certain other measures that would make it easier to vote. And according to The New York Times, the newest voting bill is expected to include several of these provisions, such as mandating 15 days of early, in-person voting, including at least two Sundays; expanding vote-by-mail; ending partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts; and creating a national voter ID requirement. According to an April survey from the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, as well as 91 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, supported making early, in-person voting available to voters at least two weeks prior to Election Day. A June Monmouth University poll also found bipartisan support for making early voting easier, with 89 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans in favor. And according to that Pew survey, voter ID laws were also incredibly popular among both Democrats and Republicans, with 61 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners and 93 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners supporting requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot.

But, of course, just because something is popular with Republican voters doesn’t mean Republicans in Congress will back it — after all, we saw that happen with the COVID-19 stimulus package earlier this year. And Republicans so far have shown little interest in passing any type of voting legislation at the federal level. In fact, when Schumer tried to get the chamber to debate voting rights proposals earlier this month, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accused Democrats of trying to “strike down virtually every reasonable voter integrity law in the country.”

Indeed, GOP politicians appear more focused on ensuring no one who is not eligible to vote votes rather than expanding access to the ballot. Just consider the number of restrictive voting bills being passed by GOP-controlled legislatures at the state level. This, though, could be dangerous for Republicans. They gained among Black men and Hispanic Americans in 2020, but if the perception among these voters that Republicans don’t want people like them to vote grows, that could negatively impact their overall opinion of the GOP. Moreover, Black and Hispanic voters are the two groups of voters most likely to be adversely affected by restrictive voting bills at the state level.

Ultimately, though, one of the biggest reasons why compromise between the two parties is so unlikely is because Republicans and Democrats view voting rights differently. And polls show a huge partisan split on whether voting is a privilege or a fundamental right. 

According to a July report from Pew, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (78 percent) said that they view voting as a “fundamental right” for every U.S. citizen, while only 32 percent of Republican and Republican leaners felt the same. Instead, Republicans are more likely to view voting as a privilege that can be limited (67 percent of Republican and Republican leaners felt this way, versus 21 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners). There’s a racial divide here, too, with Black (77 percent), Hispanic (63 percent) and Asian Americans (66 percent) being far more likely than white Americans (51 percent) to say voting is a fundamental right.⁴⁸ Bottom line: Democrats are much more likely than Republicans (70 percent to 32 percent, according to a June Morning Consult/Politico poll) to think restricting voting access is a major threat to American democracy.

So because of all this, it’s highly unlikely Republicans and Democrats will meet in the middle on voting rights legislation this fall. Of course, if Republicans again stymie Democratic efforts to debate a voting rights bill next month, Democrats might have enough ammo to tweak the filibuster. But even that might have negative political repercussions for Democrats. That’s because both Democratic voters and elected officials don’t yet have a huge appetite for changing the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. All of this means that Democrats are likely to keep facing an uphill climb in enacting legislation to protect and expand voting access.