James.galbraith

In 1968, in the wake of racism-sparked uprisings by African Americans and the government response in some 150 cities, the Johnson administration issued its 426-page Kerner Commission report, formally known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Two million copies were sold.

This week, outgoing Attorney General William Barr released the 332-page report of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in the wake of police killings that have kindled unprecedented multiracial protests. The queue to buy copies is likely to be short. The chasm between the quality of analysis and conclusions in these two reports published a half-century apart is deep and wide. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times editorial board labeled the latest report “illegitimate and self-serving.” 

The 11 members appointed to the Kerner Commission by President Lyndon Johnson in mid-summer 1967 while urban riots were still taking place in several U.S. cities included four elected members of Congress, two from each party, New York City Mayor John Lindsay, the police chief of Atlanta, two African Americans, representatives of labor and business, and broadcasting executive Katherine Peden, the sole woman. No young people, nobody who could by any stretch be considered radical. Johnson had proposed the commission in hopes that by the time a mild report was issued widespread racial unrest that had begun in 1965 would have faded away and he would be on his way to reelection.

The Kerner Commission proved to be more independent than LBJ had anticipated, producing a best-selling report that labeled the ongoing violence in the streets a product of African American frustration over suffering severe economic and social disadvantages compared to whites. That frustration was fueled, the commission stated, by deeply entrenched racism that had created chronic poverty and joblessness, bad schools and housing, a lack of access to good health care, and systematic police bias and brutality.

It concluded that the “nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” That would have been better stated as the “nation remains two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” but it called out the underlying problem: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

To fix this, the commission recommended federal action to end discriminatory practices in employment, education, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system, while improving housing, job opportunities, and social services for Black people. Many of these recommendations were excellent and had long been needed, but the report missed the boat in key ways. Despite the starkly accurate  language about racism, the analysis fell short when specifically addressing how Blacks were oppressed. The commission depicted the uprisings as spontaneous acting-out because of the rotten social conditions rather than as rebellions against broader injustice. It took a “both sides” approach by condemning both white supremacists and Black Power leaders for a “climate of violence” that led to riots, and failed to adequately address violence perpetrated by the state.

For instance, although policing was criticized in ways never before seen in a government report, most of the destructiveness and lawlessness of the riots came from the police. Cops and National Guardsmen were responsible for most of the deaths and injuries that occurred. 

Johnson accepted the report, but in his remaining year in office did little to promote any of its recommendations, and Richard Nixon ignored them altogether when he stepped into the White House 11 months after the report was released. Instead, he launched a law-and-order campaign that called for arming police officers like soldiers and taking a tougher approach in “inner cities.”

The Trump commission is a different animal. The ratio of good to bad recommendations falls far short in comparison to the Kerner Commission’s. Its 18 members—three Black people, six women—all come from law enforcement. Even before its report appeared, the commission caught flak.

John Choi, the elected prosecutor for Ramsey County, Minnesota, which encompasses the city of St. Paul, wrote a letter to Barr in September saying he was quitting one of the 17 working groups he was part of because he was afraid the final report “will vilify local prosecutors who exercise their well settled prosecutorial discretion consistent with their community’s values and the interests of justice.” He complained that commissioners “needed to listen to those who have been negatively impacted by policing and the criminal justice system” adding that closing the divide between communities of color and police “was never the intended goal.” Instead, he wrote, “Rather than examine how decades of over-policing in communities of color have created that deficit of trust, the Commission was instead encouraged to study ‘underenforcement’ of criminal laws and ‘refusals by State and local prosecutors to enforce laws or prosecute categories of crimes’.”

The ACLU also took aim in a May 27 letter:

As the ACLU and coalition organizations have previously conveyed, we are extremely concerned that this body is little more than a sham commission formed only for the purposes of advancing a “Thin Blue Line”law and order agenda. Upon the Commission’s establishment, Attorney General William Barr said, “[a]t its core, this Commission is for law enforcement” and cited “a continued lack of trust and respect for law enforcement” as a Commission focal point. [...]

Attorney General William Barr said communities “have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don’t give that support and respect, they may find themselves without the police protection they need.” 

This rhetoric from the Administration is consistent with DOJ’s refusal to investigate misconduct and systemic unconstitutional policing by departments. The Commission must suggest that the Administration and DOJ reverse course here and actively enforce federal laws providing for police oversight and accountability.

No surprise that this suggestion is something the commissioners did not follow through on.

Indeed, a scathing Los Angeles Times editorial published today notes that there are two ways to look at the report:

The first is to see it as the completely illegitimate, politically self-serving defense of retrograde policing practices that it is. It reflects the commission’s unbalanced membership (it consisted only of law enforcement officials), its lack of civil rights or racial justice perspectives, and its unlawful proceedings held with insufficient public notice or public input. The rogue panel’s work was so legally out of bounds that a federal judge ordered the final product to be emblazoned with a prominent disclaimer or withheld altogether. The mandated wording appears on the report’s inside front cover, and the court’s order is attached.

Working against a backdrop of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, the nationwide protests that followed and the accompanying discussions of anti-Black racism throughout society and in policing in particular, the 332-page report is stunning in its omission of any acknowledgment of racial disparities or indeed any but the most cursory mentions of race or racism. In the commission’s blinkered view, the increases in crime and disrespect for the law were caused by anti-police protests, apparently not by brutal police killings. [...]

The report reflects President Trump’s desire to burnish his law-and order credentials, support his allies in the Fraternal Order of Police and other traditional policing groups and one-up the Obama administration’s Commission on 21st-Century Policing, which angered the FOP with its calls for more responsible police practices, better oversight and more cognizance of racial disparities in arrests and uses of force. By flouting the law that requires balance and transparency in such commissions, Trump and Barr made certain that their report would ratify their positions on crime, police and public safety.

It’s not that there is nothing worthwhile to glean from the report. Activists and police reformers already agree on one key item in it: police are often tasked with jobs that social workers, mental health experts, and others who aren’t police should handle. But separating the gobs of chaff from the handful of kernels in the report is frankly not worth the time.

As the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Open Society Policy Center, and the Center for Policing Equity said in their joint statement Tuesday:

We urge the incoming Biden Administration to disavow and rescind the Commission and its report, which completely failed to consider the rights of the communities that law enforcement officers and agencies serve. Any law enforcement agency that attempts to rely on information in the report, which was developed through illegitimate means, risks further damage to its own legitimacy and credibility.

The issues plaguing policing in America are no secret. They have been studied extensively and do not require additional commissions. It is time for the nation to pivot to implementing comprehensive policies that will hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct, create new public safety systems that reduce the footprint of law enforcement officers in Black and Brown communities, and increase investments in other services and programs that will keep all communities safe.

Wise counsel.

With his pardons of his cronies Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, Trump closes the door on accountability.

An anonymous reader shares a report (alternative source): "2020 has been a record year for GoDaddy, thanks to you!" the email read. Sent by Happyholiday@Godaddy.com, tucked underneath a glittering banner of a snowflake and stamped with the words "GoDaddy Holiday Party," the Dec. 14 email to hundreds of GoDaddy employees promised some welcome financial relief during an otherwise stressful year. "Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one-time Holiday bonus!" the email read. "To ensure that you receive your one-time bonus in time for the Holidays, please select your location and fill in the details by Friday, December 18th." But, two days later, the company sent another email. "You're getting this email because you failed our recent phishing test," the company's chief security officer Demetrius Comes wrote. "You will need to retake the Security Awareness Social Engineering training." The follow-up email from Comes said that roughly 500 GoDaddy employees clicked on the holiday bonus email and failed the test. Scottsdale-based GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar and web-hosting company, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the emails. The emails were forwarded to The Copper Courier by three GoDaddy employees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[New Orleans Supreme Court removes statue of first Louisianan on U.S. Supreme Court.]

Most people have never heard of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White. In 1894, President Cleveland appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he served as an Associate Justice until 1910. And, after Chief Justice Fuller's death, President Taft nominated White as Chief Justice in 1910. (Justice Harlan was quite miffed that he was passed over). White would serve as Chief until 1921 when he was replaced by, fittingly, Chief Justice Taft.

The Louisiana Supreme Court has long featured a prominent statue of Chief Justice White. If you walk through the French Quarter, you can't miss it. Well, it did at least. Now, the Court has removed the statue.

Why? Well, the Court would not say, exactly.

The exact reason for its removal — whether the justice's ties to White supremacy, official concern that the statue would be vandalized or something else — was not stated by the court.

"After consultation with the [Louisiana] commissioner of administration and discussions among the Louisiana Supreme Court justices, it was unanimously decided that the statue should be relocated to the interior of the courthouse near the court museum," said Robert Gunn, a spokesman for the court.

Earlier in his career, White served in the confederate army, and participated in a white supremacist uprising. And, of course, White joined the majority opinion in Plessy:

White, a Louisiana native who died in 1921, fought as a teenager for the South in the Civil War and afterward took part in the Battle of Liberty Place, an armed White supremacist uprising that in 1874 briefly wrested control of New Orleans from the Reconstruction-era government. His tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, from 1894 until his death, saw him vote in the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson and several other infamous decisions upholding Jim Crow racial segregation and stripping Black Americans of civil rights.

These cancellation will not stop with Chief Justice White.

See my previous posts on cancelling John Marshall, Melville Fuller, James Birney, Robert Jackson, John Marshall again, Dianne Feinstein, all slavery-related decisions, and white judges in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Have you noticed that we're afraid that anything smarter than us would feel obligated to kill us?

Today's News:

Adding trained staff is much more difficult than making a physical ICU bed, especially deep into a pandemic.

As of mid-December, hospitals on average had just 22 percent of their intensive care unit (ICU) beds available across the country, and many were completely full. As the Covid-19 surge continues to intensify, lack of ICU beds can have dire consequences, including not being able to properly care for the sickest patients, potentially rationing lifesaving care.

But even these bed capacity numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Adding extra critical-care beds in other departments or buildings takes precious time, resources, and space. But adding trained staff is much more difficult, especially deep into a pandemic.

When trained staff are in short supply, it’s even harder for hospitals to best meet the needs of critical-care patients. These patients include people very sick with Covid-19, but also many who need to be in the ICU for other reasons, such as those who have had a heart attack or stroke, are recovering from major surgery, or are sick with the flu, among others.

Our World in Data, with data from COVID Tracking Project and COVID19 Tracker

Only about a dozen states had more than 30 percent ICU capacity left on December 15, and coronavirus case numbers have only accelerated since then. And the reality on the ground in many areas is much worse, as reporting by the New York Times has shown.

From the Times’s data, gathered from the US Department of Health and Human Services, of about 100 hospitals in the Los Angeles area, more than 65 reported ICU occupancy at 90 percent or higher. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center had an occupancy at 112 percent of its capacity.

In Dallas, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country, of the 47 hospitals with more than 20 Covid-19 patients, 80 percent of them had zero or just one ICU bed left. The most open beds any hospital had was five.

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, half of the hospitals with more than 20 Covid-19 patients were at more than 95 percent ICU bed capacity.

In Oklahoma, which has the third-highest per capita new case rate in the country, of the hospitals with more than 20 Covid-19 cases, the majority were at more than 90 percent ICU bed occupancy.

Nancy Nagle, a pulmonologist and critical-care physician at Integris health system in Oklahoma City, which reported full ICU occupancy in the most recent data to the HHS, says they have turned regular patient rooms into ICU rooms to try to handle the rush of severely ill people. Even so, she said, “occasionally Covid-19 patients must remain in the emergency department for several hours waiting for a bed to become available.”

And there is little sign of relief in many places around the country, with an average of more than 200,000 new Covid-19 cases reported daily since early December.

“Patients keep coming, and we have to take care of them regardless of our staffing levels,” Gisella Thomas, a respiratory therapist at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, California, wrote to Vox in an email. “I worry that there is only so long staff can hold up before breaking, which ultimately, in itself, could limit capacity” further.

Covid-19 can be a long, unpredictable, complicated illness

The sickest Covid-19 patients can linger in the ICU for weeks — or longer. And although we have learned a lot since the spring about how to better treat severely ill Covid-19 patients, the disease itself is still challenging to address, and we don’t have a cure for it. Which means the 2 percent of people who get Covid-19 and end up needing critical care are often in ICUs until either they are able to recover — which often includes invasive intubation treatment — or die.

One of the reasons ICUs have been filling up is that once a patient with Covid-19 gets that sick, they are not likely to stabilize very quickly. A September study found that an average ICU stay for a Covid-19 patient was about a week — almost double the typical stay of 3.8 days for other ICU patients. Other anecdotal reports show that many patients can be in the ICU for weeks or even months. And pinning down this number is crucial for projecting how many beds might be available in the future if cases continue to climb.

As an October study pointed out, if an average length of stay in the ICU is 10 days, that means that every day there is only a 10 percent chance of a new bed opening up. So when admissions exceed that rate, ICUs are likely to get overwhelmed.

This is something those working with critically ill coronavirus patients have to contend with every day. “Covid-19 patients unfortunately stay in the ICU for a long time,” Nagle said. “The course of the disease is very slow, and this contributes to the shortage of available beds.”

And while Covid patients are there, meeting their needs can be extremely labor-intensive. “Covid-19 patients can be incredibly ill, with multiple machines to watch and adjust, multiple medications to give, and lab results to draw and results to watch,” Nagle said. And although we now have a better understanding of possible treatments for seriously ill patients, “patients still respond in varying ways, and their progress and possible outcome is always unpredictable.” This is another reason hospitals don’t always have a good projection for how many ICU beds they might have in the coming weeks or days.

Caring for Covid-19 patients also requires many more steps and precautions than when ICU staff work with other patients, further jamming units. All staff entering an ICU Covid-19 room must don full gowns and PPE each time, which is resource-intensive. “This also creates real difficulties if someone crashes because it slows down our response,” Thomas said. “The need to more thoroughly clean all equipment also creates delays and makes normal staffing levels inadequate for the pandemic.”

In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and other health care workers are struggling to provide the best care they can while being asked to handle more and more patients. “Critically ill patients are very complex,” said Orlando Garner, a pulmonary critical-care physician at Baylor College of Medicine. “There are a lot of moving parts at the same time that require the same amount of priority.” But, he said, “when you are stretched out beyond capacity, you can’t deliver the same quality care unless you create more skilled health care workers, and as we have found out, these are a scarce resource.”

Staff are even scarcer than ICU beds

Although hospitals can often somewhat expand the number of beds and amount of supplies, staff are in much shorter supply. “The most precious resource in any hospital are the human beings who are knowledgable and capable of caring for patients,” Sarah Delgado, an acute care nurse practitioner and clinical practice specialist with the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, wrote to Vox in an email. “It is the limiting factor.” Without enough of these people to care for all of those who are very sick, “patient outcomes are likely to suffer,” she said.

And it is not just ICU physicians and nurses who are in short supply. “Critical care is more of a team sport,” Garner said. “This means physician-delivered care and interventions, but also careful medication selection dosage with pharmacists, skilled nursing care, respiratory therapists, midlevel providers, nutritionists, early mobilization with physical therapists.” To that list, Nagle also adds all of the other hospital staff needed to perform other essential tasks in ICUs, including bathing patients, changing linens, and other functions.

To accommodate surges of very ill Covid-19 patients, many hospitals have had to rework their staffing structure. At Christiana Hospital in Delaware, critical-care nurse Lauren Esposito and her colleagues typically work with critical cardiac patients. But this year, her unit has served as overflow for critical Covid-19 cases. “At first it was a little uneasy,” she wrote for the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

Their hospital implemented a tiered staffing strategy in which cardiac nurses would work under trained ICU nurses. “During the shift, if a patient was crashing, we were able to flex and have the ICU nurse go to that patient to provide care,” she wrote. They were also able to provide quick training to nursing staff, for example, on working with intubated patients. Still, the overflow duties were straining, and they weren’t made easier given the intensive isolation these patients are in to stop the spread of infection. “I remember the first time I walked into a patient’s room, it really hits you that you are the primary caregiver and no one else can come in.”

Also, staff now often have to attend to more patients at a time. In California, where last week an average of more than 44,600 people each day tested positive for the coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom dropped the state’s nurse-to-patient ratio from 1:2 to 1:3 in an effort to meet the surging numbers of Covid-19 hospitalizations.

In Oklahoma, Nagle notes that although the ICU nurses she works with usually take care of one to two patients during a shift, “with the shortage of critical-care nurses, each nurse may have three, and under very extreme conditions, even four patients to care for.”

This increase in patients each nurse is seeing — especially in a complex illness like Covid-19 — is a major adjustment. “Nurses are at the patient’s side every hour of every day, administering lifesaving medications, collaborating with other health care team members, translating information to families, and providing end-of-life presence when those families cannot visit due to strict isolation requirements,” Delgado said. “This work cannot be done when the number of patients exceeds staffing capacity.”

And staff themselves often fall ill with the virus. According to a November report, as many as a quarter of Covid-19 infections in some states are among health care workers.

“It could have been me”

Garner, whose whole family got sick with Covid-19 earlier this year, including his 4-month-old daughter, says getting the illness himself gave him a new perspective on the patients now flooding into local Texas ICUs.

“It could have been me, my wife, or one of my kids on that ICU bed,” he said. “It’s easy to rationalize the amount of sick patients by thinking, ‘oh, well they weren’t distancing,’ or, ‘they weren’t wearing masks,’ but the fact is that nobody deserves to catch this virus and get sick from it, not even the people who doubt it. As the spike continues to grow, compassion is the only thing that can keep us from becoming jaded and burned out.”

The flip side of that is remembering compassion for the health care workers caring for these patients, especially as the holidays approach. Not only will many of these workers continue long shifts through the holidays, they will do so knowing that many people are disregarding public health warnings to avoid gatherings.

“We need the public to do its part,” Delgado said. “Stop nonessential travel, adhere strictly to mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines, and limit gatherings with those outside your household,” Delgado said.

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance science journalist and author of Cultured and and Octopus! Find her on Twitter at @KHCourage.

BMW has told Motoring Research its targeted billboard warranty adverts -- which are claimed to use number plate registration technology to tailor public adverts to BMW drivers -- do not actually draw upon vehicle warranty status. From a report: Rather, only publically available information is used. "There is no personalisation visible on the advert and no vehicle or customer data is stored or retained." The new initiative was originally claimed to focus on BMW drivers with an expired new or Approved Used warranty. Owners will receive personalised messages on electronic roadside billboards highlighting the fact they no longer have a valid warranty. They will be warned their vehicle is not covered for the cost of repairs, and invited to 'consider purchasing a BMW Insured warranty online.' The electronic billboards use Vehicle Detection Technology to pick out BMW owners with expired warranties.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the Georgia runoff elections near, Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger continues to be blamed by conspiracy-peddling Republicans like Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue, the state's two insider-trading senators who remain desperate after not getting quite enough votes to dodge a runoff with their Democratic opponents. He has also been targeted by Donald Trump, who similarly claims that the only possible reason he could have lost the state is because something something massive fraud.

Raffensperger has vigorously batted down those theories, presumably because he still wants to maintain a political career and isn't interested in being a fake fall guy for a trio of losers. But he has also continued to actually support Loeffler and Perdue's election bids even as he himself acknowledges that they are damaging America's democracy by undermining faith in free and fair elections, because he is a Republican and, at this point, Literally All Republicans are willing to abide by other people in their party sabotaging democracy, and the dividing line between moderate and extremist consists of whether you're willing to do the sabotage yourself or just support the others doing it on the party's behalf.

Now, though, Raffensperger appears to believe his position in the Republican Party is so precarious that he needs to shore things up a bit. How is that done, if you are a Republican elected official who needs a quick popularity boost? You announce a new plan to keep people from voting.

Raffensperger is shifting from defending the integrity of his office to a new initiative, calling on Georgia lawmakers to end no-excuse absentee voting in the state. The reasons are straightforward. Trump and other conspiracy-minded Republicans blame mail-in votes for their loss; the answer to future Republican success therefore lies in removing those votes from the voting pool.

This, after the state's Republicans themselves championed absentee voting—because absentee voters tend to be older Americans, which tend to be more Republican in their voting trends. The pandemic fouled those assumptions, so now absentee voting has to go.

Now, none of this makes particular sense. Raffensperger's new claims that Georgia must now end fifteen years of no-excuse mail-in voting because all of a sudden he and the party think it's a path to, quote, "illegal voting" is ridiculous and transparent. It is quite obviously a reaction to false conspiracy claims and to Republican chagrin that a method of making voting easier for their own voters is now being used by other voters in unexpected proportions.

By curtailing mail-in voting, it will become easier for Republican officials to tailor in-person voting suppression efforts in the now-standard ways. They can reduce access to in-person polling places in Democratic areas of the state, while boosting it in Republican areas. Mail-in ballots sabotage such plans by allowing voters in any part of the state to dodge long polling lines.

There is no pattern of fraud or illegal voting, not in person or by mail, anywhere in the country. Would-be hero Brad knows this, and has repeatedly said this in no uncertain terms when those conspiracy theories were launched at his office and threatened to undermine his political future. It is a hoax. But it also seems that Raffensperger knows he will not have a future in the party if he goes against those conspiracies, and so is willing to lend his name to them if that is what it takes to keep state conservatives from kneecapping his career whether Loeffler and Perdue eek out a win or not.

Perdue airs an ad proclaiming he "delivered" on the stimulus, right before Trump trashes it.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google chief Sundar Pichai has warned that "regulation can get it wrong" as his firm is increasingly targeted by antitrust moves. From a report: Last week, the European Commission set out new regulation to curb the power of big tech. The Digital Services Act hopes to increase transparency and competition for tech firms. The legislation will force firms, such as Google, to publish the algorithms used for rankings, as well as to police their own content. Big firms could be fined between six per cent and 10 per cent of global annual turnover if they fail to comply. In the interview with the FT, Pichai gave a guarded welcome to the regulation. He said: "I think it's an important regulation to think through and get right." However, he warns that "Governments need to think through these important principles. Sometimes we can design very open ecosystems, they can have security implications." He added that the failure of GDPR to break down the monopoly of big tech "shows that for a lot of these things, the answers are nuanced, and regulation can get it wrong."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three criminal former congressmen get Trump's mercy, for no reason other than their party affiliation.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Trump’s pardons continue his use of presidential powers to benefit his friends and allies.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a flurry of pardons and commutations — largely to a mix of political cronies and allies, from people caught in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to corrupt ex-members of Congress.

Among the pardons are former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, both of whom were caught in the Russia investigation. They also include former Republican Congress members Chris Collins of New York, Duncan Hunter of California, and Steve Stockman of Texas, each of whom pleaded guilty to or was convicted of corruption charges.

Trump also pardoned four men who, working as private military contractors with the firm Blackwater, participated in a massacre of Iraqi civilians in 2007, as well as two Border Patrol agents who in 2006 killed an unarmed, undocumented immigrant. (Former President George W. Bush had commuted, but not pardoned, the sentences of the Border Patrol agents.)

Nonviolent drug offenders recommended by Alice Johnson, who was granted a reprieve from her own drug-related conviction in 2018 following intense lobbying by Kim Kardashian, were also included in the pardon and commutation blitz.

The wave of forgiveness is potentially only the beginning of the pardons and commutations Trump may issue as his time in the White House comes to an end. This most recent wave, the White House acknowledged, came under the recommendation of conservative media and members of Congress.

According to the New York Times, Trump’s move also appeared to bypass the usual process that involves review by the Department of Justice.

The president has used his pardon powers to the benefit of political allies before. He recently pardoned his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Prior to that, Trump granted reprieves to adviser Roger Stone and former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who endorsed and campaigned for Trump.

Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith estimated 88 percent of Trump’s pardons and commutations have gone to people with personal or political ties to Trump. The latest pardons “continue Trump’s unprecedented pattern of issuing self-serving pardons and commutations that advance his personal interests, reward friends, seek retribution against enemies, or gratify political constituencies,” Goldsmith told the Times.

The president’s pardon powers are nearly limitless and face almost no constraints, letting the person in the Oval Office grant nearly unchecked relief for anyone facing or convicted of federal charges.

Past presidents have also used their pardon powers for friends and allies. Former President Bill Clinton triggered controversy when he issued more than 100 pardons on his last day in office, including to his half-brother and to Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a Clinton donor.

These longstanding problems have led some activists to call for reform of the pardon process, fashioning it to be less a tool of political and personal favors and instead a means to criminal justice reform.

For example, during their presidential campaigns, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) separately proposed establishing independent boards, made up of a variety of stakeholders throughout the criminal justice system, who would advise the president on his or her use of the pardon powers. The focus would be to empty federal jails and prisons of people charged for low-level offenses — or perhaps others who simply face sentences that are too harsh relative to the crime.

President-elect Joe Biden seems receptive to such measures, although his own plans for the president’s pardon powers are vague so far.

Trump, however, wasn’t receptive to such reforms, continuing to use his powers in a way that benefits his friends and allies rather than institutes broader reforms. Tuesday’s latest wave of pardons only affirms that.

Three weeks after a county sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Casey Goodson Jr. in Columbus, Ohio, a police officer has shot and killed another Black man in the same city. The latest victim, whose name has not yet been released, was unarmed. Goodson’s family has said that he was carrying just his mask and some Subway sandwiches when he was shot, while sheriff’s deputies have insisted he was armed. (It is an established fact that police routinely lie about these things.)

In the Tuesday killing, which happened around 1:37 AM, the police officer did not turn on his body camera until after he was done shooting. A feature on the cameras shows what happened in the 60 seconds before it was turned on, but without audio, so the police remain free to lie about what the victim said.

Police were called because a man was in a garage turning an SUV on and off, they said. “In the body camera footage, the police said, it appears that the man walked toward the officers with a cellphone in his left hand,” The New York Times reports. “An officer then opened fire.”

Then there was “a delay” in giving the victim first aid—a frequent occurrence, as The Marshall Project has found—and he died at a hospital.

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said that the police officer having his body camera off until after the shooting, in violation of department policy, “disturbs me greatly.” Yeah. Well. Maybe if there were serious penalties attached to things like that it wouldn’t happen so often. For that matter, maybe if there were serious penalties attached to the killing of unarmed people it wouldn’t happen so often. But as we well know, there’s no accountability when it comes to police and Black lives.

Nothing about the beloved Christmas rom-com comes off as romantic — at least, not in a way that doesn’t feel cheap. 

I will not stay silent on this, my hottest take, any longer: Love Actually, the “classic” holiday rom-com that is very dear to at least one person in your life, is actually a very bad movie.

Now, I know a lot of you are likely clutching your pearls in disbelief. Maybe you yourself have been fond of this film since its November 2003 release, more than 17 years ago. Even after all these years, Love Actually still prevails for some as the quintessential Christmas film. It has been lauded for its heartwarming clichés and general cutesy-ness, neatly wrapped up in a rom-com package.

Here’s the gist: The movie introduces us to several different couples, living out their ideas of “love” a few weeks before Christmas. They take big chances in the name of love, suffer heartbreaks, isolate themselves, surround themselves with friends and family, and pursue love, all in the name of the holidays. Each relationship is angled as a way to make a statement about the nature of love. The characters are imperfect, and maybe that’s what the movie attempts to say about love, but it also fails to articulate this clearly. Some of the relationships feel flimsy; others are so underdeveloped that they don’t give me a chance to feel anything at all. Nothing about the movie comes off as romantic at all — at least, not in a way that doesn’t feel cheap.

I know this is the kind of opinion that makes people salivate at the opportunity to send hate mail. But in the spirit of Christmastime, I ask that you be kind and allow me to make my case that Love Actually is bad actually.

This is where the scene is set: Christmastime, in England, with a star-studded cast that does very little to impress. There are nine — nine! — main storylines, and each one attempts to depict a tale of love. But English accents, the holiday season, and celebrities barely masquerading as normal people feel like a failed insurance policy of a movie. The combination of all these pieces is an insult to the viewer’s imagination. Surely, writer-director Richard Curtis seems to be thinking as the movie drags itself deeper and deeper into a tedious hole, this will be a success. I’ve slapped all of British Hollywood into a supposed “rom-com” that grasps for straws when it comes to romance and comedy, but hey, they’ll love it — it is Christmastime, after all.

Love Actually’s obsession with Christmas is one of its main problems. It has nothing to do with Christmas, beyond its backdrop, yet it also attempts to promote the juvenile-but-lasting idea that Christmas is inherently romantic. I don’t know why this sentiment is so popular. Does a budding relationship need snowy scenery, gingerbread cookies, and lurking relatives to spark intimacy? Do couples automatically yearn for each other just because Santa is on the way? In a movie where the characters and their relationships are so flimsy, perhaps the forthcoming of Kris Kringle is a potent-enough aphrodisiac on its own.

The celebrity cast only emphasizes the two-dimensionality of these characters. Liam Neeson plays a grieving father overinvested in his son’s love life. Cute, I guess, but Neeson’s character spends the film acting like his son’s crush is a life or death situation. (The Taken franchise, although clearly inspired by Neeson’s overprotective father role here, doesn’t kick off for five more years.) Keira Knightley stars as a newlywed who serves the plot only as a cardboard character for Andrew Lincoln’s character to project a creepy crush onto. A last-minute Denise Richards cameo? Sure, why not! Rowan Atkinson as an enthusiastic jewelry counter employee isn’t enjoyable, it’s disconcerting — what on earth is Mr. Bean doing here?

The endless onslaught of instantly recognizable actors is as head-spinning as the plot points, which wind and weave together without an ounce of dexterity. The moment a particular plot seems all but forgotten, the film yanks us back to it, and the viewer has to fight to recall the context. I confused characters constantly, too — there are just so many boring white people, all tangled up in each other’s lives, sometimes even without knowing. This could be cute and fun if it had managed to be coherent. Watching Love Actually is like running a marathon, and it’s impossible to keep up without proper training, which is why I assume the stans can recite its intricacies so easily. For the rest of us, the mental gymnastics leave us winded.

Messy plots, messier characters

Love Actually fails to make viewers have a personal stake in the success of any of its overwrought romantic pairings, of which there are almost too many to count. The movie is far more concerned with shoving as many stories together as possible instead of developing people or their plot lines.

Let’s briefly run through the major characters, for those who have not seen the film. Spoiler: Almost all of them are terrible.

There’s Daniel (Liam Neeson) and his son Sam (Thomas Sangster), who is “in love” with a classmate, and that’s why he’s been moping around. This is totally unrelated to his mother’s recent death, although somehow, the girl of his dreams shares his mother’s first name, Joanna. Uh, weird, but okay! Daniel helps his son go so far as to stalk his classmate to the airport and tells the attendant that the child needs to enter without a boarding pass to “say goodbye to the love of his life.” We’re just going to pretend that’s normal or healthy, even for the realm of make-believe that is romantic movies? And yet, Love Actually wants us to root for father and son, to embrace and encourage this nearly criminal behavior, regardless of how poor Joanna might feel about it.

Juliet (Keira Knightley) is at the center of a love triangle between herself, her husband Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his best man, Mark (Andrew Lincoln). That is, if you can even call it a love triangle because Peter is completely unaware that his best friend is “in love” with his new bride, despite him never saying more than a few words to her in his life. A proper love triangle usually involves some form of awareness from all parties involved, but oh well! In what is arguably the movie’s most iconic scene, Mark shows up at Juliet’s house out of the blue to hold up some weird signs that proclaim his love. Though he waits until after Juliet and Peter’s wedding to make his feelings known, we viewers are supposed to find the confession, and subsequent kiss, worthy of our adoration.

Let me remind you that this is Mark’s best friend’s wife that he’s trying to get with, a woman he knows nothing about. There is no build-up — we are just meant to agree that, yes, Mark has a very normal obsession with Juliet, and that obsession is a remarkable “love.” Peter never finds out about the beginnings of this emotional affair, leaving the future of his marriage in doubt.

The other couples vary in how loathsome they are. The good: Jamie (Colin Firth) and Aurélia (Lúcia Moniz) fall for each other in the typical-but-believable way of romantic comedies. Neither of them speaks the other’s language, yet the attraction is there, born from the intangibles of love. The same goes for the pair of pornographic stunt doubles, John and Judy, played by Martin Freeman and Joanna Page, respectively. But those couples deserve large storylines, real arcs that can’t be found within the confines of this film.

Then, the bad: coworkers Karl and Sarah (Rodrigo Santoro and Laura Linney), who basically just hook up and nothing more. Nothing comes of it due to Sarah’s responsibilities with her mentally ill brother, but this is a ridiculously surface-level plot that just leaves us with more questions, so much so that the couple may as well have been edited out of the movie. Maybe the budding romance between the prime minister, charmingly played by Hugh Grant, and his staffer, Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), could function better elsewhere, too, but it certainly doesn’t work here. What gives the prime minister the eventual courage to pursue Natalie is watching her be sexually harassed by the president of the United States, played by Billy Bob Thornton. For some reason, the occurrence provokes a strange jealousy in the prime minister, but the film angles this as heartbreak. Natalie and the prime minister are clearly attracted to each other, but it goes no further until the end of their arc, motivated by a desire to stick it to the POTUS and, of course, by the spirit of Christmas.

Their romance is also wildly inappropriate, as is the relationship between Harry (Alan Rickman) and Mia (Heike Makatsch), a boss and his assistant. To make matters worse, Harry is married. He and Mia make eyes at each other from the start of their interactions, but the movie never actually makes it clear if they’re sleeping together or not. Inexplicably, Mia wears bedazzled devil ears to the holiday party. We get it, Love Actually: She’s a temptress, and he’s an idiot who wants to “dance with the devil” in front of his wife at a work function. His wife Karen (Emma Thompson) discovers the emotional infidelity and breaks down in private but returns stoically to her family, one of the film’s only legitimately moving scenes. But the fate of their broken marriage is never really resolved. The movie is full of dangling storylines like this; instead of following through on the plot, Love Actually lives and dies by its characters, and hangs viewers out to dry.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter why these characters fall for each other — love is blind, random, whatever, yes, I wholeheartedly agree — but that sentiment alone doesn’t give a movie of this nature lasting allure. The chemistry between the two stunt doubles, for example, has palpable reasoning. These people see each other naked at work every day, where they imitate sex acts! They are both shy people, sharing an intimate part of themselves with each other. They spend real time together — something that can’t be said for many of the pairings in the film.

Familiarity makes a fool of us

I am not trying to suggest in that snide, media-academic way that “We need to talk about Love Actually” or that the film’s central problem is that it is problematic. Its central problem is that it is not good. The film is a structural mess, at turns cringe-y and painful, and it lacks adequate closure or any meaningful lessons or clues about its characters. Is the prime minister not fearful of the optics of dating a staffer? Do Harry and his wife have past issues that led to the cheating? We’ll never know, even though Love Actually is about the length of a Lord of the Rings film. I guess there, somehow, just wasn’t enough time.

I am not the first to condemn Love Actually. People have been pointing out its flaws for years. Love Actually received overall mixed reviews from critics upon its release. There’s one review of Love Actually in the Atlantic from 10 years after the movie’s release, in 2013, which absolutely drags the film with the fury it deserves. “Love Actually is a considerable outlier among romantic comedies in its rigorous conviction not only that people fall in love without really knowing one another,” writes Christopher Orr, “but that they don’t even need to learn anything about each other to confirm their initial attraction.”

But I’m not the type to get stuffy about critical reception, and I believe that some critics do like sitting on high horses to turn up their noses at things that people generally like. But when it comes to Love Actually, I am sorry to say that many of us have been duped.

Andrew Selepak, a media professor at the University of Florida, told Vox that the film might not resonate with some people because of how poorly its characters act. The male cast is mostly deplorable; they don’t need to have redeemable qualities for the film to be enjoyable, but it’s hard to even want them to succeed when they’re so annoying. “The love of [Liam Neeson’s] life has died, and pretty quickly he’s looking into dating other women, and does date a woman simply because she looks like a supermodel that he’s infatuated with,” said Selepak. “Alan Rickman buys a more expensive gift for his secretary because she’s young and attractive, and only gets his wife a CD.” And these are hardly the worst of the many terrible things the men of Love Actually do.

Selepak says that the film’s age also might be a reason for the disconnect I’m experiencing now, many years after the fact. “Because it’s 17 years old, and there’s a lot of aspects to the movie that seem a bit dated at this point, particularly after things like the Me Too movement, where you have the prime minister of England who essentially starts a romantic relationship with his employee. It’s obviously a huge problem with the power difference,” he said.

Yet Love Actually continues to have a strong fanbase. It’s the Christmas theme and the familiarity of those actors that help the film go down easy for its many advocates, suggests Selepak. “With Christmas movies, we don’t want the unexpected. Having actors in there that we know and we love makes the movie a little bit easier to connect with,” Selepak said. Hallmark, for example, does the same thing in their holiday movies. They often use the same actors and actresses, which creates a kind of intimacy between fans and the Hallmark movie catalog.

While the movie is highly unrealistic, some parts of it also provide escapism for the dreamiest of viewers. “Most of us would never take that kind of leap in terms of taking these actions,” said Selepak. “Whereas we could look at [Love Actually] now and see Andrew Lincoln going to his best friend’s apartment and professing his love. That’s kind of like John Cusack standing outside of a girl’s house holding up a boombox [in Say Anything],” Selepak said. “It’s just not the type of thing that we would do in real life, as much as we may want to.”

When it comes down to it, though, this film exploits the commercialized romance of the holidays to tell us we must support these haphazard romances. Because the central characters are lonely during Christmastime, fate has intervened to make sure they never have to spend another holiday alone or overwhelmingly horny. This is a clear implausibility, and the film will never win me onto its side — and I am not some bitter, soulless woman; I am simply a person who hates to see the world fooled.

I think of the film this way, in terms of its longest-lasting legacy: Love Actually begat the quick and dirty catalog of holiday rom-coms that roll their way onto streaming platforms every year. If Love Actually were released today, it would probably go straight to Netflix. It would be something we would collectively watch and publicly disdain, all of us in on the same joke. At best, we’d profess a fondness for it in spite of our better judgment, not out of sincere affection.

I’m telling you all this for your own benefit, reader. Ask yourself: If this movie took place in the middle of summer, would it be that romantic? Or would the heat expose the sweaty, hurried flaws in this film? Does it only draw us in because of its cozy winter siren call?

I vote yes: Love Actually is smoke and mirrors and snow, nothing more.

Idaho once again proved itself as one of the reddest states in the nation this year: As in 2016, it gave Donald Trump his fifth-best margin in the country in November. But without the presence of conservative independent Evan McMullin on the ballot this time, the contours of the 2020 elections looked different, especially when drilling down to the congressional district level.

McMullin's impact was considerably smaller in the 1st District, which runs along Idaho's western border all the up through the northern panhandle. In 2016, Trump won the 1st 64-25, while McMullin and Johnson won 4% apiece; this year, Trump dominated the district 67-30. Needless to say, both of the state's Republican members of the House easily won reelection. (Click here for our full-size map.)

Idaho’s district boundaries have remained remarkably stable for a long time, and there’s no sign that they’ll shift much as we head into the next round of redistricting. Though Republicans control every branch of state government, they won’t be in charge of producing new maps. Instead, the constitution hands authority to an independent bipartisan commission evenly divided between the two parties, with a two-thirds majority required to pass any plans. Naturally, Republicans have tried to pass an amendment that would stack the commission in their favor, but they haven’t been successful yet.

P.S. If you haven’t done so yet, you’ll want to bookmark our complete data set with presidential results by congressional district for all 50 states, which we're updating continuously.

The Warehouse on Ivy, a wedding venue in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told Kasey Mayfield and Brianna May to get lost when they inquired about renting the space for their wedding.

The Warehouse on Ivy explained their rejection in a statement to Fox8 News: “Although we love and respect everyone in our community, their own decision making and beliefs, we also strongly believe in our Christian values.”

Said Mayfield: “It’s really hurtful, getting denied just because of who you are. We’re still going to get married in Winston-Salem and it’s still going to be amazing, even if it’s not at this one venue.”

The post North Carolina Wedding Venue Tells Gay Couple to Find Somewhere Else to Get Married: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

"I'm looking forward to making sure there’s a Black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we, in fact, get every representation," then-candidate Joe Biden promised. That was way back in the before times, in the South Carolina debate last February. Now poised to fulfill that promise as president-elect (when a vacancy opens), Biden needs a Senate that will do it. One that doesn't have Mitch McConnell as majority leader.

That means getting Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate and ending McConnell's stranglehold on that body. Certainly if there is any hope at all of expanding the courts to dilute the polluting effects of Trump and McConnell—admittedly a real long shot now—the Democrats must have the majority. But even for a Supreme Court that finally looks a little like America, the Court Biden says he wants, Georgia is the key. "The lesson that we learned from the recent Supreme Court nominations is that Mitch McConnell's rule around judges is power," National Women’s Law Center President Fatima Goss Graves told Irin Carmon at New York magazine. "That is the only operating theory. And that is terrible for the country."

Ready to reach voters in Georgia, whether by phonebanking or textbanking, for the Jan. 5 runoff? Click to sign up for a training with Fair Fight—the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams—and they will set you up with what you need to start effectively reaching out to Georgia voters.

We've got one last shot at taking McConnell's Senate Republican majority away in January. Please give $3 right now to send the GOP packing.

But did Biden really mean it? By all accounts, yes. His shortlist is already in the works to be ready by Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2021. There are two candidates whose names are circulating most among the legal insiders Carmon spoke with: "California State Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger and federal district court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former clerk to the oldest current Supreme Court justice, Stephen Breyer." They are both young in their mid-40s, and have exemplary experience and credentials.

"When you think about the African American community and communities of color, we are fighting for our lives," says Kim Tignor, who advises the advocacy group Demand Justice. She's also a co-founder of the She Will Rise initiative for the group. "Part of it is about capacity. There's a barrier to understanding just how close the Supreme Court is to our lives," she says about the group's work and the criticality of a Black woman on the highest court of the land. "It's understandable that the Supreme Court just feels like a long game," Tignor says. "One of the things I wanted to do with She Will Rise is to make these connections with Black communities. You want to have a conversation about police reform? Let's talk about the doctrine of qualified immunity."

That means taking the discussion about control of the Senate in the Georgia run-off elections beyond the Democrats vs. Republicans political frame to what it means for Black lives. Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter in Atlanta, told The Guardian that the court is particularly salient in this race. "It can't just be about we want to control the Senate. Somebody who's not engaged is going to ask why they should care about that. We have got to say we've got to control the Senate because healthcare is on the line, because the Voting Rights Act is on the line, because racial justice and whether or not police officers and district attorneys are able to continue to get qualified immunity when they kill black folks, that's on the line," he said.

The first Black woman Supreme Court justice is on the line, and with that Black lives. Literally. Which of course brings us back to control of the Senate and the Ossoff and Warnock races. Who controls the Senate means everything for the country.

The Star Wars spinoff series hides an obsession with spectacle in its stripped-down storytelling.

For most of the second season of The Mandalorian, Disney+’s hugely popular Star Wars series about a bounty hunter and the Baby Yoda who loves him, I caught up with episodes a few days after they dropped each week. By the time I got around to watching, I typically knew almost everything that happened in the episode, thanks to my perpetual Twitter scrolling.

I rarely found my enjoyment of the episodes affected by this. For me, The Mandalorian is all about escaping into a very specific presentation of a famous fictional world; I’m not particularly excited to watch the plot unfold. But I always found it interesting how quickly each episode’s one or two biggest moments would filter out into the pop culture consciousness writ large. Spoilers for the show’s second season follow from here.

Often, I would find, the episode really was its one or two biggest moments, with most other elements taking a back seat to a major action sequence or a guest star appearance from a well-known Star Wars character. The Mandalorian is more concerned with creating a sense of atmosphere than finely tuning its plot or character arcs, so it uses its standout sequences and guest stars to keep from becoming an endless download of Star Wars lore. It’s easier to remember an episode where Boba Fett is at the center of an amazing fight sequence than if it were just an episode of the Mandalorian wandering around, hearing people talk about Star Wars stuff.

Structurally, “big moments” storytelling also befits the genres The Mandalorian tends to operate within. The show is most similar to the six-film samurai epic Lone Wolf and Cub, which is also about an expert warrior who fights his battles alongside an adorable child. And like many samurai films (and Westerns, an American genre with a lot in common with the samurai film), The Mandalorian builds itself around those battles. There’s typically one per episode, to give the series a sense of momentum.

The Mandalorian also bears a number of similarities with American animated shows aimed at slightly older kids. Think of, say, Batman: The Animated Series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or Star Wars: The Clone Wars — where Dave Filoni, one of the two masterminds of everything Mandalorian, first overlapped with the Star Wars universe. These series tend to run 22 minutes per episode, and as such, have to be incredibly economical with their storytelling, making every beat count. Characters reveal who they are not just through their own actions but through action itself — fighting styles, strategic decisions in battle, etc. — and the storytelling follows those reveals.

The Mandalorian’s episodes run a bit longer than an average Clone Wars episode — most are in the 35- to 40-minute range before the (extremely long) credits roll. But Filoni and creator Jon Favreau haven’t really chosen to use that extra space to add more plot. Instead, they’ve added more arresting glimpses at forgotten corners of the Star Wars universe and weird little grace notes that fill in the world of the show. (My favorite of these was a long, amusing argument between two Stormtroopers that opened the first season finale.)

These choices are what make The Mandalorian so compulsive a watch. Each episode features a single mission the characters have to complete (similar to the aforementioned animated shows), and the storytelling is never overcomplicated. It proceeds from point A to point B to point C in more or less the manner you’d expect. When the end of the episode approaches, a new problem presents itself (the Mandalorian’s ship is in disrepair!) that leads immediately to the mission for the next episode (he has to get it fixed!). It’s solid, meat-and-potatoes TV serialization.

The Mandalorian’s narrative sparseness and emphasis on luxuriating in the world it has built sets it apart from many other TV shows, ones that are frantic and over-plotted in the hope you won’t turn them off if they keep throwing new things at you. But relying on a single exciting event per episode ties into a TV storytelling trend I’m increasingly wary of when I see it start to pop up, over and over again, on the shows I enjoy. And in a series set in a popular, well-known fictional universe, as The Mandalorian is, that storytelling trend seems particularly hard to resist.

Disney+

I first started trying to define this trend as it related to HBO’s Game of Thrones, a series I had greatly enjoyed until the second half of its run. At that point, Game of Thrones’ storytelling became so entwined with its biggest, most brutal twists that it eventually abandoned the things that made it so good in the early going in an effort to chase after the next surprise. By its end, it was working so hard to make everything so spectacular that it largely avoided coming up with connective tissue to make sense of its spectacle, to its detriment.

The 2010s were littered with shows caught up in a search for the spectacular, from American Horror Story to Stranger Things. When it’s harder than ever to stand out from a massive glut of TV series to choose from, having some water-cooler-ready moments to lean on creates instant audience engagement. These moments even offer free promotional opportunities thanks to all the excited tweets and social media posts that are sure to result.

And increasingly, we tend to treat all TV shows as products of this kind of storytelling, even when they aren’t that. The Queen’s Gambit, for instance, has been reduced to “that show about chess” with lots of Anya Taylor-Joy gifs popping up on Twitter, when it’s just about the opposite of a big, moment-based spectacle. (It’s a show about a young woman playing chess, for goodness sake!)

So far, The Mandalorian hasn’t fallen into the worst tendencies of this sort of storytelling, the ones that felled Game of Thrones. It doesn’t try to hide its characters’ motivations in the name of a big twist, nor does it sacrifice logic in favor of getting to a big moment. Its stripped-down style gives it plenty of room to build to its big moments properly.

But across season two’s second half, I found myself increasingly disconcerted by the series’ reliance on Star Wars favorites, culminating in a cameo by Luke Skywalker himself (played by a badly digitally de-aged Mark Hamill) in the season finale. What does our investment in the relationship between the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda (who is technically named Grogu, but c’mon) matter if the show gets almost even more audience excitement from having Boba Fett pop up for a few episodes?

To be clear, I’m talking about a saturation problem that hasn’t yet overwhelmed The Mandalorian, just one that seems inevitable to me, as someone who has seen lots of series chase their biggest, most promotable moments over a cliff. It’s really not hard to imagine the series gradually becoming taken over by these servicing impulses, instead of using them to offer a sprinkling of cool cameos for the fans. I’d even argue that the second half of season two already succumbed to these desires.

Even if The Mandalorian ultimately makes it work, prioritizing moments over the big picture also diminishes some of what made the show so arresting in the first place. Where once it seemed to take place in a backwater, under-explored corner of the Star Wars universe, by the end of season two, the show has featured some of the franchise’s most familiar characters, right up to Luke Skywalker himself. It only enhances the sense that the entire Star Wars franchise has become a closed ecosystem, with little room for new growth.

It’s becoming a lot harder to watch The Mandalorian as its own thing instead of a central hub for much of the Star Wars television universe, especially since Disney has already revealed plans for spinoff series for several fan-favorite heroes, like Boba Fett and Ahsoka Tano. If the second half of season two felt like a collection of backdoor pilots — an episode of a show that introduces new characters in the hope of spinning them off into their own show — that’s because it basically was. Indeed, upcoming spinoff The Book of Boba Fett will take The Mandalorian’s place in the Disney+ schedule in December 2021, though Mandalorian season three will likely follow sometime in 2022; the season two finale even ended up with a teaser for the Boba Fett show likely designed to get fans chattering.

There are plenty of good reasons to keep watching this show. Pedro Pascal has managed to use only his voice to make the Mandalorian a compelling protagonist, Baby Yoda is still the cutest, Ludwig Göransson’s score is among TV’s best, and the atmosphere remains impeccable. If you just want to hang out in Star Wars land for a few weeks every year, this show is really, really good at giving you that experience.

But its increasing reliance on cameos from all your favs is a reminder that the gigantic, franchise-based cinematic universes that have come to define too much of big-budget filmmaking are increasingly taking over TV as well. We haven’t even gotten to Disney+’s Marvel TV series yet, which will begin debuting in 2021 and will surely feature many, many cameos of their own. The Mandalorian — like most shows — is at its best when it charts its own course. Unfortunately, it’s so much harder to take the backroads when you could just get on familiar highways and go all of the places you’ve already been.

Follow me on Twitter at @MattBors.

Chris Coomer, and employee of Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of baseless Trumpist conspiracy theories citing election fraud and vote-changing, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, far-right blogger Michelle Malkin OANN and Newsmax networks, and OANN reporter Chanel Rion.

Colorado Public Radio reports: “Coomer’s suit, filed Tuesday in Colorado state district court in Denver, accuses those responsible of spreading the falsehoods of intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The lawsuit says the claims made about Coomer have led to death threats, constant harassment and ‘untold damage to his reputation as a national expert on voting systems.’ Coomer was forced to leave his home one week after the presidential election ended and move to a safe undisclosed location where he remains.”

Much more about the suit here.

The post Dominion Voting Systems Employee Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Newsmax, OANN, Michelle Malkin and More appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

[Chrome now blocks download links on How Appealing from insecure court sites. ]

Much like people, web sites can be insecure. Unlike people, you can easily determine whether a web site is insecure. In the address bar of your browser, you should see a lock icon next to "reason.com/volokh/". Click that lock. A box will popup showing that the connection is secure. All responsible web sites have security certificates. These simple licenses tell users that information can be securely uploaded and downloaded.

SupremeCourt.gov, a responsible web site, is secure.

And most of federal courts of appeals are secure. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits are secure.

Other courts of appeal are not secure. The Fifth Circuit is insecure.

The Seventh Circuit is also insecure.

And the Federal Circuit–the so-called tech court!–is not secure. No wonder the Supreme Court reverses them all the time!

Some state courts are also insecure. For example, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Perhaps the independent state legislature can remedy this problem. (Kidding, kidding).

Regrettably, my home state is no better. Hackers can mess with Texas. We defended the Alamo. Certainly we can defend a web site.

Going forward, these insecure courts, and many others, should become secure. Why? The latest version of the Google Chrome browser is blocking downloads on a secure page to an insecure site. If I include a link to a PDF from any of these insecure sites, it would be blocked. Far worse, How Appealing (a secure site) can no longer link to PDFs on any of these insecure sites. Howard Bashman is a national treasure. I know judges routinely check his site. Now, Howard's links will not work.

I stumbled across this problem today by accident. I tried to download a recent Fifth Circuit opinion, but I couldn't. But when I visited the Fifth Circuit's site, I was able to download the opinion from the Opinions page. With all due respect, Court web sites should be secure. These certificates are not difficult to install. And the failure to fortify these sites will make it tougher for people to access the law.

I will report back in due course to see if these sites become secure. For now, there is an easy workaround: (1) Right click on the link, (2) click "Copy Link Address," (3) paste that link into your address bar. The file will download since the request is not coming from a secured page.

The impeached two-time popular vote loser took enough of a break from plotting his coup to realize that the Congress will send him a stingy coronavirus relief package. He released a video on Twitter calling on Congress to redo the bill and increase the “ridiculously low” $600 stimulus checks to $2,000 per person. He also assailed the “wasteful” spending in the bill, apparently conflating the COVID-19 relief bill with the seven-day continuing resolution for government funding Congress passed while it finalizes work on the omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2021. 

Democrats immediate took him up on his offer.

There will be that vote, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer tweeted, confirming reports that “Now that the President has agreed to direct payments of $2000, we will ask for unanimous consent to pass a bill this week to give Americans this assistance.” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer chimed in, urging Trump to go ahead and sign this bill then make Republicans work with him and Pelosi to pass more relief.

President Donald Trump issued a raft of pre-Christmas pardons and commutations Tuesday, favoring the well-connected and those with A-list advocates, while appearing to shunt aside — at least for now — more than 14,000 people who have applied for clemency through a small Justice Department office that handles such requests.

Some of Trump’s actions seemed intended to send clear messages, such as grants of clemency for the former campaign operative whose 2016 activities triggered the FBI probe that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and to four security contractors convicted for massacring Iraqi civilians in 2008, including one serving a life-sentence for first-degree murder.

The signal of Trump’s disapproval of Mueller’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia was unmistakable. His pardons for the contractors and for two Border Patrol agents also fit a pattern of Trump using his constitutional clemency power to rein in efforts to police the conduct of front-line military and security personnel. That has prompted pushback from military leaders who fear a loss of discipline among those who routinely use deadly force.

Trump’s holiday pardon list also fulfilled a longstanding tradition followed by many presidents of favoring their political allies. Recipients of Trump’s newest pardons included his first two congressional endorsers, former Rep. Chris Collins (N.Y.) — convicted on charges related to insider trading — and former Rep. Duncan Hunter (Calif.), who pleaded guilty to flagrant campaign finance abuses, including some to support extramarital affairs. Collins was already serving a 26-month sentence. Hunter had yet to begin his 11-month term.

Trump also commuted the sentence of former Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas), who was convicted in 2018 on a variety of fraud and money laundering charges. Stockman had served two years of a 10-year sentence.

A few of Tuesday’s grants are part of a modest number of pardons and commutations Trump has offered to convicts whose cases were pursued by prominent criminal justice reform advocates. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, issued far more in those sorts of cases and actively solicited clemency applications.

Some advocates for greater use of presidential pardon and commutation powers expressed disappointment that Tuesday’s list did not include a batch of applicants who came through the Justice Department office that fields such requests.

“It looks as if the president is relying very heavily on recommendations from members of Congress and people he knows personally and not on the Justice Department pardon process that’s served presidents well for 150 years,” said Margaret Love, who served as pardon attorney under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Love said she hopes more pardons to those without high-level connections will emerge between now and when President-elect Joe Biden is sworn on Jan. 20.

“I am optimistic there will be further grants soon that go to ordinary people that applied in the regular order through the established process and have been patiently waiting, sometimes for years,” she said.

Trump’s decision to pardon George Papadopoulos, whose early-2016 interactions with a Russia-linked professor led the FBI to launch the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s campaign, follows a roller coaster for the young operative.

Papadopoulos initially cooperated with investigators and hinted he would play a whistleblower-type role. He pleaded guilty in 2017 to a false-statement charge and wound up serving 12 days in prison.

Later, he very publicly broke with investigators, alleging he was the target of an anti-Trump operation. He wrote a book called “Deep State Target” that turned him into a Trump-world darling.

“We are both very happy!” Papadopoulous said in a brief message to POLITICO when asked about his pardon, a reference to him and his wife Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos, who also played a brief role in the Mueller probe.

Trump had once dismissed Papadopoulos as a “low level volunteer” who had “proven to be a liar.” But Papadopoulos’ conversion into Trump acolyte changed his fortunes. Trump also pardoned a bit player in the Mueller investigation, Alex van der Zwaan, whose interactions with Trump advisers Paul Manafort and Rick Gates became of interest to investigators.

Van der Zwaan, a Skadden Arps attorney, pleaded guilty in 2018 to a felony false-statement charge. He admitted that he lied to the FBI and lawyers for Mueller’s office during questioning about his involvement with a report the firm prepared in 2012 at the request of the Ukrainian government. Van der Zwaan served a 30-day sentence in 2018 before leaving the country.

The pardons come less than two weeks after Trump pardoned another central figure in the Russia probe, former national security adviser MIchael Flynn.

Trump’s pardons of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean rewards two former border patrol agents who were convicted of assault and gun crimes against an undocumented drug trafficker who was fleeing back across the southern border. Rather than report the shooting, they took steps to cover up the incident and failed to make required reports, resulting in a conviction for evidence tampering as well. The two men, whose sentences were commuted by President George W. Bush in 2009, became a cause among immigration hardliners like Fox News host Lou Dobbs, who has outsized influence in Trump’s orbit.

One set of Trump pardons released Tuesday could result in significant fallout overseas. Trump effectively wiped out the convictions of four contractors for the former Blackwater Worldwide security firm in connection with a shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that left 17 Iraqis dead and 20 wounded.

One of the former Blackwater contractors granted a full pardon Tuesday by Trump, Nicholas Slatten, was serving a sentence of life in prison for first-degree murder. The three others, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough, were serving terms of between 12 and 15 years in prison for manslaughter.

Iraqi anger over the massacre and the perceived impunity of security contractors led the country to attempt to ban armed private contractors altogether and to demands for the four men and a colleague--collectively known as the Blackwater 5--to be returned to Iraq for trial.

President George W. Bush eventually brokered a deal that promised the contractors would face justice in the U.S. and allowed security contractors to continue operating in Iraq.

After an early legal stumble led to dismissal of the first indictment in the case, then-Vice President Biden visited Iraq in 2010, expressed “personal regret” for the killings and promised to appeal. The case was eventually reinstated but has been a complex legal wrangle.

Trump could have simply commuted the sentences of the four men, but he granted them full pardons, suggesting he viewed their convictions as unjust.

One Blackwater contractor, Jeremy Ridgeway, cooperated with prosecutors and testified against his colleagues at trial. He received a sentence of a year and a day in prison and was released in 2016. His felony convictions on manslaughter and attempted manslaughter charges remain in place, although the convictions of the men he testified against have now been effectively wiped out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of scientists at Freie Universitat Berlin has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) method for calculating the ground state of the Schrodinger equation in quantum chemistry. The goal of quantum chemistry is to predict chemical and physical properties of molecules based solely on the arrangement of their atoms in space, avoiding the need for resource-intensive and time-consuming laboratory experiments. In principle, this can be achieved by solving the Schrodinger equation, but in practice this is extremely difficult. Up to now, it has been impossible to find an exact solution for arbitrary molecules that can be efficiently computed. But the team at Freie Universitat has developed a deep learning method that can achieve an unprecedented combination of accuracy and computational efficiency. The deep neural network designed by [the] team is a new way of representing the wave functions of electrons. "Instead of the standard approach of composing the wave function from relatively simple mathematical components, we designed an artificial neural network capable of learning the complex patterns of how electrons are located around the nuclei," [Professor Frank Noe, who led the team effort] explains. "One peculiar feature of electronic wave functions is their antisymmetry. When two electrons are exchanged, the wave function must change its sign. We had to build this property into the neural network architecture for the approach to work," adds [Dr. Jan Hermann of Freie Universitat Berlin, who designed the key features of the method in the study]. This feature, known as 'Pauli's exclusion principle,' is why the authors called their method 'PauliNet.' Besides the Pauli exclusion principle, electronic wave functions also have other fundamental physical properties, and much of the innovative success of PauliNet is that it integrates these properties into the deep neural network, rather than letting deep learning figure them out by just observing the data. "Building the fundamental physics into the AI is essential for its ability to make meaningful predictions in the field," says Noe. "This is really where scientists can make a substantial contribution to AI, and exactly what my group is focused on." The results were published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced plans to appoint another slate of top allies to various government boards, yet another sign that his time in office is winding to a close.

The president named Hope Hicks to be a member of the board overseeing the prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Hicks has long been one of Trump’s closest confidants outside of members of his own family and returned to the White House this year after leaving earlier in his presidency. Her Covid-19 diagnosis this fall touched off a deluge of positive tests throughout Trump’s orbit, including the president himself.

The president also nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to serve on the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, who notified Trump of his plans to leave the job earlier this month.

Trump also tapped Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the acting undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security, to chair the Public Interest Declassification Board.

Other administration hands include Russ Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, who was nominated for a spot on the U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors. Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary who never held a formal public media briefing during her tenure, was nominated to the National Board for Education Sciences. And Ric Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence who later advised Trump’s reelection campaign from a post at the Republican National Committee, was nominated to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Those individuals were among the more than 40 people named to various “key positions” on panels such as the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Museum and Library Services Board, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

The list includes people who have contributed to Trump's political campaigns, as well as Paolo Zampolli, who has boasted of introducing Trump to now-first lady Melania Trump. Zampolli was nominated for a position on the Kennedy Center board.

Trump has rolled out a handful of other appointment lists in recent weeks, awarding posts to people such as Kellyanne Conway, a 2016 campaign manager and former counselor to the president, and Brian Hook, the Trump administration's former U.S. special representative for Iran.

Officials at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative appointed by President Donald Trump are delaying the transition to President-elect Joe Biden’s team by refusing to schedule meetings, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

No meetings yet: USTR political staff members are still rebuffing efforts from Biden's transition landing team to meet with career staff at the agency, said one former trade official familiar with the situation.

If meetings are scheduled in the future, USTR has made clear that a Trump political appointee will have to be present with the career staffers, the former official said.

Smooth handoff threatened: Meetings between career staff and transition officials are typically used to ensure that an incoming administration is up to date on an agency's plans and actions. If the freeze continues, it could mean Biden's USTR team will come into office without the latest information on the agency's pending tariff investigations or negotiations with foreign countries, like ongoing trade talks with the U.K. and Kenya.

Hopes for thaw: The Biden transition did not comment, but another source with knowledge of transition planning said the president-elect’s team is hopeful USTR will soon relent and allow consultations with staff.

“On their abbreviated timeline, the USTR agency review team continues to do everything it can to make progress,” the source said. “We are hopeful for increased collaboration.”

Lighthizer ignores election result: The struggle comes as USTR Robert Lighthizer has refused to publicly acknowledge Biden’s win while he seeks to wrap up a number of policy initiatives, like an inquiry into Vietnam’s currency practices that could bring new tariffs before he leaves office Jan 20.

In an interview with the BBC last week, Lighthizer evaded a question about accepting Biden’s victory, instead claiming ignorance about the state of Trump’s legal appeals to overturn the election.

“One thing I don’t know a lot about is all the litigation and all the stuff that’s surrounding the election. That’s just not something I’m an expert on,” he said in the rare media appearance. “I have my own feelings that it was amazing that President Trump got 74 million votes and I’m very proud of that.”

The agency did not respond to a request for comment on the transition, the election, or whether Lighthizer has congratulated Biden’s pick to be the next USTR, staff attorney at House Ways and Means Katherine Tai.

DoD transition also stalled: The delay at USTR comes after Trump’s officials at the Department of Defense clashed over meetings late last week with the Biden transition. In that case, the DoD team claimed the sides had agreed to halt meetings for the holidays, while Biden’s team said there was no such deal.

Doug Palmer contributed to this report.

www.patreon.com/keefknight