#Judiciary Square 2018 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

capybaracorn · 3 months

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Israel holds municipal elections; war on Gaza affects turnout and mood

Israelis are divided over the war and their opinions of the government, resulting in a low turnout and higher tensions.

Tel Aviv, Israel – Israelis voted on Tuesday to elect mayors and local council members in 197 towns and cities and 45 regional council representatives.

Voting started at 7 am, and will carry on until 10 pm, in elections that have been delayed twice, from October 31 to January 31 then to Tuesday, due to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.

Seven million Israelis are eligible to vote, including tens of thousands who voted from active military duty in Gaza or the Israeli bases where they are stationed.

Turnout has been lower than in the last elections in 2018, according to estimates by the Ministry of Interior throughout the day.

Protests continue

The months leading up to the elections have been tumultuous ones for Israelis with mass protests throughout 2023 against changes to the judiciary that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was trying to push through.

Different protest movements have continued throughout the war: Families of Israelis taken captive by Palestinian fighters on October 7 have protested to demand the government negotiate for their return, merging at times with antiwar protests and antigovernment protesters.

Antiwar protesters hold up a banner with the number of people killed in Gaza since October 7 [Mat Nashed/Al Jazeera]

Among the most closely watched races is the one for Jerusalem’s mayor, in which incumbent Moshe Lion is widely expected to beat his challenger Ofer Berkovitch.

On HaBima Square in Tel Aviv, Al Jazeera spoke to several liberal activists protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Israeli American protester Addam said liberals like him face a lot of hostility, which was the reason he chose not to disclose his last name, fearing vigilantes and Israeli authorities who have repressed antiwar protests recently.

Dozens of protesters marched with signs reading: “War is a crime and nationalism kills” and “Stop the ethnic cleansing.”

A large banner just had “30,000” written on it, referencing the number of people Israel has killed in the latest war in Gaza.

“This war is a choice we [as Israelis] are making,” Addam said.

“There has been a weaponisation of people’s grief after October 7,” he added, describing being confronted during a protest by a young Israeli woman who shouted: “Soldiers are dying for you all. Shame on all of you.”

Antiwar protesters in Tel Aviv on February 27, 2024 [Mat Nashed/Al Jazeera]

Tamy Pollak, an activist and socialist who lives in the mixed Palestinian-Israeli city of Yafa (Jaffa), says the outcome of these elections will be important in determining whether calm is restored in mixed cities.

She worries about far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who she said has been weaponising Jewish civilians in mixed cities.

Fear of right-wing gains

In downtown Tel Aviv, Deputy Mayor Meital Lehavi held a megaphone, rallying voters to ensure that a far-right party does not take more seats on the local council.

Security officials stand guard in Tel Aviv during a protest to mourn the dead in Gaza on February 27, 2024, [Dylan Martinez/Reuters]

“Right now, [Tel Aviv] has an open society, but [if the right wing does well], then things can be different here,” she told Al Jazeera.

Plia Kettner, a 39-year-old former member of the local council in Kfar Saba in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, believes the war is distracting – even discouraging – people from voting.

“Some of the national rhetoric has filtered into the local election campaigns”, polarising people, she said

“At the beginning, nobody was against the war,” she told Al Jazeera.

“But if you ask people on the street, 50 percent of people will say that they want to [get a deal with Hamas] to get the hostages back, and 50 percent will say that Israel must keep going to destroy Hamas.”

Results are expected a few days later.

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xtruss · 1 year

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A Coup Would Put Pakistan Squarely in China’s Bloc! An Isolated Junta Would Be Cripplingly Dependent on Beijing.

— Ibrahim-Azeem | Foreign Policy | March 20, 2023

Supporters carry placards displaying a portrait of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan during a protest in Karachi on March 19. Rizwan Tabassum/AFP Via Getty Images

March 14 was a dramatic day for Pakistan. This was the day, the country’s military said, that it would arrest Imran Khan. He was once an international cricketer, then a politician, then prime minister, and is now, after being deposed as PM by a no-confidence motion last year, a tub-thumping campaigner against what he describes as a corrupt system tying the Pakistani military and the rest of the country’s political parties together. (I was a policy adviser to Khan between 2012 and 2014 but have no professional contact with him at present.)

But the day turned into a triumph for Khan after the police were unable to arrest him. The aftermath has been unlike anything in contemporary Pakistani history. The military, which has governed the country alongside chosen cooperative politicians since independence from Britain 75 years ago, now faces a serious threat from an insurgent who uses the language of democracy and the rule of law. And in response, it’s increasingly possible that the military, tired of playing chess against Khan, will simply sweep the pieces from the board.

In recent months, Khan has led his supporters in a series of mass rallies and mass marches. He has been shot at and wounded. His political supporters have clashed with police; they say they were attacked, while the police say the opposite. And members of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party have been arrested and, they allege, tortured in police custody. One supporter was allegedly tortured to death last week.

This all came to a head on March 14, when Khan was due to be arrested on what his supporters say are trumped-up terrorism charges. Large numbers of Khan’s supporters gathered outside his home in Lahore, Pakistan, to contest the arrest. Police used tear gas, water cannons and batons to attempt to clear a path into Khan’s home. They were repulsed by the crowds. Khan remains free.

In a video message posted to Twitter, Khan remained defiant. If he is arrested, he said, his allies must fight for “true freedom” and the rule of law. Khan maintains that he and his party have been set up: that the charges against him are malicious and false, and that the intention of any arrest would be to disqualify and deprive him of the ability to take his months-long campaign into a forthcoming general election.

As I reported last year, after Khan lost power in a close no-confidence vote in April 2022, he began a barn-burning campaign of rallies and speeches contesting the legitimacy of power in the country. He accused the military of having received its orders to remove him from the United States; he said that the judiciary in the country was hopelessly corrupt; and he launched a serious assault against the military’s place in Pakistani society, including its stranglehold over the country’s economy.

Throughout Khan’s campaign, the military and other politicians have attempted to defer what increasingly looks like a grassroots political revolution: Khan was charged with terrorism offenses for “threatening” a judge and officials; he was also accused of corruption for accepting gifts while in office. His rallies have been broken up. His broadcasts have been subject to restrictions. And he has been shot.

But now, those in office in Pakistan are facing a solid deadline: The politicians and military have only until October this year to call elections under the country’s electoral term limits. Khan’s PTI party has won several local and regional contests since he was removed from power. Khan’s party won a plurality of the vote in the last election, in 2018; followed by the PTI taking 15 of the 20 contested seats in the legislative assembly of Punjab state—the most populous province of Pakistan and a former stronghold of Shehbaz Sharif, current prime minister and Pakistan Muslim League party leader—in the 2022 local elections.

If another election is held and the polls are accurate, it is likely Khan would win with an overwhelming majority. This is a threat to the military and the parties currently in government alike: If Khan were to win, he would do so on a platform explicitly oriented around reining in the military and clearing out the current politico-legal system, including a reform of the country’s judiciary.

Khan’s supporters appreciate they are in a difficult position: Their leader was almost arrested today, and his allies had to hold back the police with their bodies. But they are confident that a revolution might be coming. They say that Khan has created a pro-democracy movement that now transcends party. For the first time in Pakistani history, they say, rich and poor are united in opposition to the military’s chosen government.

Elections in Pakistan have in the past been contests in which patronage often carried great weight. In most elections, powerful and wealthy candidates, called “electables,” are put up by any and all parties. These are often landlords or powerful local businessmen. Perhaps they have a useful tribal, clan, or caste affiliation, or have done a favour for the army or a ministry; they can be safely placed before the electorate, who can be counted upon to signal assent to the individual regardless of party. Thus goes the stereotype.

The electables are notorious floating voters within the legislative branch, switching loyalty and party after cutting deals to get good positions in office. There are some who have been candidates for all the major parties without breaking step.

This system re-emerges at every Pakistani election; it is a consistent theme. But now, it is being challenged. If polling is accurate, the public is increasingly interested not in individuals, or their betters, but in party politics, especially those represented by Khan. The PTI endorsement is a hot ticket. Those who get it are likely to win against the electables sporting the banners of political convenience.

All of this is a challenge not only to the ordinary nature of Pakistani politics, but also to the military, whose hand can be felt behind all votes and government formations.

Khan has not been arrested today, so he cannot be disqualified from running in the coming elections. He is still a threat to the status quo, and gunning for those in power whom he believes have slighted him.

This leaves the military with few options. It can try once again to arrest the opposition leader. In prison he might not, they might bet, be as visible—although Pakistan’s history is full of leaders who kept movements going from jail. But if imprisonment continues to prove impossible, Khan’s supporters claim, the military has only two options left: assassinate Khan and hope his movement dies with him, or undertake a coup.

The press in both Pakistan and India increasingly believe a coup is possible. Pakistan suffered four coups in its first fifty years of independence. The current conditions in the country are not auspicious. They include economic decline and a crackdown on political opposition.

Previous military coups have always had specific framing: They have been about restoring order and removing corrupt politicians.

Perversely, this is a situation Khan’s campaign may have helped; his criticising the government coalition as corrupt helps create a sense of general dysfunction. But Khan has also rubbished and undermined the army. The situation has changed. As Khan’s supporters successfully fight off militarized police, people are no longer afraid of the military. Any coup, rather than meeting with acquiescence, could result in chaos, even civil war.

This is a prospect which ought to merit international attention and planning. Unpopularity has rarely phased Pakistan’s army. If it wishes to overthrow the country’s elected rulers, it will try to do so, regardless of how it looks. If Pakistan’s unsteady democracy is threatened, the West is likely to respond.

For Pakistan, the consequences could be significant. They might include sanctions, travel restrictions, seizure of assets, the possible ignominy of Pakistan losing its membership of the Commonwealth, and the certainty that Pakistan will receive no further support from financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Pakistan will then have few friends. The military, if it does successfully take power, is likely to look to China to bail it out. China does not want instability in Pakistan, a country heavily indebted to Beijing (Pakistan is the biggest recipient of loans from China’s Belt and Road initiative). And it has long-standing ties with the Pakistan military, going back to mutual antagonism toward India and the funding of the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has been within the Chinese sphere for years, with the Pakistani military underwriting this relationship. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor is a signature project of the Belt and Road view of the world. But if the army were to launch a coup, things would become dramatically worse for Pakistan’s economy and, likewise, its citizens.

Pakistan would be desperate—ensuring that it would be truly within China’s sphere of influence, in time to take its place amid the autocracies forming part of the world’s growing, authoritarian, Beijing-led bloc.

— Azeem Ibrahim is a Columnist at Foreign Policy, a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, and a director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Radical Origins: Why We Are Losing the Battle Against Islamic Extremism and The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide.

— Argument: An expert's point of view on a current event.

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albreehyde · 4 years

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You know what the coronavirus pandemic hasn't stopped? The Hong Kong protests.

In fact, the protests have ramped up bc the CCP has passed on today, May 28th 2020 (HKT), the death sentence for Hong Kong, i.e. the most sinister plan to take away Hongkongers’ freedoms while we're all busy dealing with the coronavirus. Remember the now-withdrawn extradition law amendment bill (ELAB) that sparked the anti-ELAB protests last year? This new plan not only does that, but it even unleashes a whole new range of assault power.

No, the CCP isn't gonna crack down on Hongkongers with visible violence. They've learnt from the disastrous PR management of the June 4th / Tiananmen Massacre. Also, they need a better excuse for interfering in Hong Kong, 1 of the largest international financial centres and the gateway for the CCP to gain foreign currency and break into global financial markets.

Instead, the CCP’s plan is to force a "national security law" in Hong Kong like what they've been using in mainland China, bypassing Hong Kong’s legislature. The CCP leadership has already passed this law today, May 28th (HKT) and can sign it into effect as soon as early June.

We don’t know how much longer we can continue accessing international communication sites, which are banned in mainland China but freely accessible in Hong Kong, especially Google, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. If we suddenly go silent about our fight for democracy, you can assume the censorship resulting from the "national security law" has taken effect.

Who’s gonna define that "national security law"? Most likely the CCP. They have their own legal system, instead of the common law system that HK uses based on the UK system. The CCP has an abominable track record of arbitrarily defining the law to persecute dissidents, violating human rights in the process. They have various means of silencing dissidents even if they manage to escape China. Well known dissidents include:

LIU Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

HUANG Qi and TAN Zuoren, who advocated for an investigation into corruption in school construction following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

LI Wangyang, who took part in Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, tortured while in jail for 22 years and even still kept under surveillance after being released from prison.

WANG Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer who defends political activists and victims of police torture.

LEE Ming-che, a Taiwanese rights activist who promotes human rights and democracy online.

HU Jia, who posted articles on social issues which criticises the CCP.

WANG Yi (pen name: WANG Shuya), a Christian pastor who founded and led one of the well known underground churches in mainland China.

Tashi WANGCHUK, a Tibetan language education activist.

Currently, Hong Kong is the only city among all technically CCP-ruled regions where your freedoms and human rights are protected in practice (though fast eroding) with judicial independence (also starting to skew) following international law.

After the "national security law" passes, Hongkongers will lose all our fundamental freedoms and rights, including but not limited to:

Freedom of expression.

The right to peaceful assembly.

Freedom of the press.

Freedom of thought.

Rights against arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

The right against torture; and even,

The right to life, liberty and security of person.

Our fight against the CCP will become illegal, since we'll no longer be able to monitor and speak out against the CCP and CCP-backed HK government. Our very existence as Hongkongers could be seen as a rebellion. Hong Kong today, the world tomorrow.

Everyone, no matter your nationality, will no longer be safe from the CCP. The CCP threatens international law. The proposed law plans to allow CCP agents to work in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the largest international travel hubs. Whoever lives in, or simply passing through Hong Kong, could be kidnapped and transported to mainland China if the CCP thinks you’re a threat. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, bc that’s the exact potential loophole we criticised during the anti-ELAB protests. In fact, this kind of abduction already happened in 2015, in the Causeway Bay Books disappearances which include LAM Wing-kee and GUI Minhai. The booksellers were persecuted for selling books on politics, human rights, criticism of the CCP leadership, and any subject that the CCP leadership didn’t like.

After the "national security law" passes, we'll no longer have the freedom to raise the alarm to the world about new epidemics first popping up in mainland China, like the coronavirus now and SARS in 2003 (more from the WHO archive). Fun fact: Hongkongers have been managing the coronavirus relatively well precisely bc we don't trust the CCP-backed HK gov and we’ve been taking preventive measures way before it advises us to, based on previous experience with SARS.

We’ll no longer have the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty in the court, not even the right to fair trial and equality under the law, since HK will no longer have an independent judicial system under the separation of powers. Hong Kong is run on the rule of law but the CCP runs on the rule by law, and the CCP has increasingly pressured HK’s judges. Foreign judges will be banned from national security cases, likely bc they are more likely to uphold the rule of law and independent judiciary.

We'll no longer have the freedom to talk about the truth. Instead, we’ll be forced to censor ourselves and substitute the truth with CCP approved propaganda. The CCP knows who controls the truth controls society. The coronavirus? “No, it's spread to China by the US armed forces. It's a part of their plan to frame the CCP.” Banning TikTok and Huawei? “They don't cause security or privacy issues. There's no censorship on the platforms provided through these technologies. The ‘accusations’ are a part of an international plan to frame the CCP.” (Notice a pattern here?) Just 3 days ago (May 25, 2020), the Hong Kong exam board, which is independent from the Education Bureau, was forced to cancel a public exam question about Japan’s roles in the development of China from 1900 up to WWII bc it “hurts Chinese people’s” (aka CCP’s) “esteem and feelings”.

We'll no longer have the freedom to connect with the international community (Joshua WONG, Hong Kong activist) and different cultures with open minds, as the CCP looks down on the values and impacts of non-CCP-approved-Chinese cultures. It has an insatiable need to dominate the world through homogeneity, seizing natural resources, and economic expansion. Just look at how the CCP treats Uyghurs and Tibetans. Read about the Belt and Road Initiative especially in Africa - it's practically CCP colonialism. Then look at how the CCP, by building dams in upstream Mekong River, has caused a drought in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The CCP keeps claiming without proof that Hongkongers who want democracy are a minority (Spoiler: We aren't. At least 2 million residents out of 7.5 million, i.e. over 1 in 4 residents, marched for democracy on June 16, 2019. Remember?) are influenced by Western chaos agents, bc the CCP can't afford citizens thinking critically, criticizing and holding them accountable for their actions. Case in point: the June 4th / Tiananmen Massacre. The CCP-backed HK gov has extended the ban on social gatherings until (you guessed it) June 4th, which is rumoured to stop people from holding vigils, even though daily new coronavirus cases are in single digits and schools are reopening a week before.

We'll no longer have the freedom to maintain our identity of being Hongkongers, since according to CCP logic, being local / Hongkongers means identifying against CCP-controlled China → challenging and rebelling against the CCP → directly threatening CCP’s authority → enemy of CCP. The most conspicuous symbols? The Hong Kong anthem, Glory to Hong Kong. And Cantonese, the native language of over 90% of Hongkongers. A similar case has already happened with Tibetan culture and language: Tashi WANGCHUK, a Tibetan language education activist, was persecuted in 2018 simply for advocating to preserve his own heritage.

(Side note: If you ask if somebody speaks Chinese, it's like asking if they speak Asian or European. “Chinese” encompasses a group of languages which include Cantonese, Taiwanese and Mandarin, which currently many people refer to as “Chinese”. If you start talking in mainland-Chinese accented Mandarin to Hongkongers without asking, you'll get responses ranging from confused / pained replies in most likely English, often Cantonese, or rarely, Mandarin; the side eye; the silent treatment; or even a glare. We’re far more welcoming if you speak Taiwanese-accented Mandarin though.)

Hongkongers will keep fighting for our rights, and we need reinforced international support in our most urgent battle. So what can you do to stand with us?

1. Chris PATTEN, the last governor of Hong Kong under British rule, has led a joint statement to protest against the CCP’s move to force the "national security law" in Hong Kong. As of writing on May 28th, the day of passing the law, the joint statement's been co-signed by over 618 political representatives and academics from 33 countries, including the UK, the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, Russia and the rest of Asia. Please write to encourage your local policymaker to cosign the letter (template linked in-text).

2. Sign petitions that support our fight for freedom, e.g. international sanctions against the CCP, the CCP-backed Hong Kong government, and the Hong Kong Police Force.

3. Continue making posts in support of Hongkongers on your regular social media sites, esp Twitter, where there's a higher chance of politicians seeing your posts.

Yeah, like Matan EVENOFF, who tricked the NBA dance cam into streaming support for Hong Kong.

4. Report content spreading pro-CCP propaganda about the Hong Kong democracy movement; report both the comment / post and the account. Some common insults pro-CCP trolls use: “cockr**ch” (dehumanizing Hong Kong protestors); “sb” (initials of “d**chebag” in Mandarin); “nmsl” (initials of “Your mum is dead” in Mandarin); “biss” (a contraction of “must d*e” in Mandarin); and insinuating in any way that anyone in support of the protests is a “servant” or a “pet” of foreign politicians. People have mentioned that on Twitter, reports on pro-CCP troll content are more thoroughly followed up on and the content more likely to be removed. I've found that on Instagram, reporting as spam has a higher removal rate than reporting to other relevant categories.

5. Stay updated with the situation on HK by following independent and/or pro-democracy journalists in HK:

Hong Kong Free Press (In English. Official website / Twitter @hongkongfp / Instagram @hongkongfp / Youtube @hongkongfp / Facebook @hongkongfp)

The Stand News (Mostly in Chinese, but you don’t need to know Chinese to understand their infographics. Official website / Twitter @standnewshk / Instagram @thestandnews / Youtube @standnewshk / Facebook @standnewshk)

RTHK News (In both English and Chinese news; publicly funded. As of May 28th 2020, it has still maintained objective reporting, but this could change for the worse quickly bc the CCP-backed HK government has plans to interfere in its editorial independence. Official website / Twitter @rthk_enews / Facebook @RTHKEnglishNews)

Guardians of Hong Kong / Be Water Hong Kong (a volunteer page that translates news from Chinese to English; it updates quickly. Official website / Twitter @BeWaterHKG / Instagram @guardiansofhk / Facebook @BeWaterHongKong)

No matter what ultimately happens to Hongkongers, you're helping us make history. And even if Hongkongers still lose in the end, promise us that you'll continue fighting for us.

Remember us for centuries.

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 4 years

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supreme dysfunction

A lot of the politics around the Supreme Court has a kind of soft-focus, sepia-toned Before Times deceptiveness about it. The obfuscation is as thick and persistent as it is because the situation is extremely simple. Several decades ago, Republicans realized they could not win fair and square, so they put a lot of institutional focus and an obscene amount of money into rigging the courts. Cheating is the secret sauce. I realize that’s not a satisfying explanation for years of political dysfunction, but it is what it is.

And yet here we are, six weeks from Election Day, facing the prospect of a Trump-brand replacement for the irreplaceable Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What you need to do is keep your head for the next few weeks. If that means putting this out of your mind as soon as possible, fine. All you need to know is that anyone this criminal would nominate to the court will be a disaster and anyone who would accept a nomination under these circumstances is wildly unfit to judge a dog and pony show. Republicans really did tell loud and insulting lies all throughout 2016 about why they wouldn’t confirm the replacement for a Supreme Court justice who passed away nearly a year before an election, and they really are out here now mocking the idea that anyone might have had to pretend to believe them then. They will probably succeed in pushing through a sentient garbage fire before the election, but we have to try to make it hurt. All you need to do is call your senators and tell them to honor Justice Ginsburg’s wish by refusing to confirm anyone Trump nominates. Either you’ll hear that they’re trying to do the right thing, which might make you feel better, or you’ll get an opportunity to call a Republican a fascist pig, which always makes me feel better.

If you are going to be following this farce, out of interest or because you can’t block it out, let me help you prepare for some of the bullshit that’s coming at you.

One of the foundational assumptions commentators make is that Democrats don’t “care” about the courts in the way Republicans do. Whenever you hit that assumption, think of this article:

Hillary Clinton Just Delivered the Strongest Speech of Her Campaign—and the Media Barely Noticed

Madison, Wisconsin—Hillary Clinton delivered the strongest speech of her 2016 campaign in Wisconsin this week, and the media barely noticed.

At the time (March 31, 2016) this article was just one of the many passive-aggressive subtweets from responsible commentators that their colleagues were ignoring policy for spectacle. After 2016, when Clinton’s supposed failure to go to Wisconsin has been waved like a talisman against any retrospective concern about whether the presidential election was even free (questionable) and fair (definitely not), it’s the fact that the press ignored a campaign event in Wisconsin which gives it that twist of dramatic irony. But it is also relevant because Clinton’s speech was about why anyone who truly cares about a progressive agenda must prioritize the federal courts as an issue. Since then, the press – who were called out AT THE TIME for ignoring substance generally and this speech specifically – have settled on “Republicans have seized the federal courts because Democrats don’t talk about the courts” as their new just-so rationalization for Moscow Mitch’s latest crime against democracy.

It’s bad enough that influential commentators ignore the substance of Democratic campaigns in favor of airing Trump’s empty podium and then use their own failures as an excuse to lie about whether or not Democratic politicians talk about the courts or any other issue. But the reality is even worse: in 2016 the Democratic candidate gave a brutally prescient speech about the courts, and our blue-check betters collectively decided to lie about WHETHER SHE WAS EVEN PRESENT AT HER OWN SPEECH. Then they used that lie to derail any chance of accountability for the MULTIPLE CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES her opponent’s campaign committed, or even the slightest hint that they probably shouldn’t have allowed an autocratic regime that regularly murders actual journalists to be their assignment editor at the most important moment of their careers. “I wouldn’t have spent four months helping Russian intelligence dox Clinton campaign employees if only they’d gone to Wisconsin!” is a thing you can say without losing an ounce of standing in the pundit-industrial complex; of course lying about Democratic campaign messaging on the justice system carries even less of a penalty.

I’m ranting a little because RBG deserved to live three hundred years and these gaslighting bootlickers deserved to be flayed alive, boiled in oil, and fed to rabid vampire squirrels. But I also think people should absorb my point about just how rotten the information environment is. There is every political incentive for Democrats not to bother talking about they courts. They do it anyway because they know it’s important.

That terrible information environment has the predictable consequence of misinforming people. Even if you are trying to encourage people to act on this issue because you sincerely care about it, you end up saying ridiculous things sometimes.

Senate Democrats could have stopped Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation by sacrificing a virgin basilisk under a harvest moon to summon the wrath of the Old Ones, but they didn’t even try!

This is, to put it kindly, rewriting history. Senate Democrats made a herculean effort against Kavanaugh. Even before Christine Blasey Ford’s and Deborah Ramirez’s stories came out, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the best case possible for the Senate to reject his confirmation.* After Dr. Ford was outed against her wishes, Democrats used every tool they had to force as much of an investigation as they could get, which drew maximum blood from Republicans, who were always going to do the wrong thing no matter what. Because Democrats did the work, voters got the point in the 2018 midterms. The Kavanaugh spectacle kept Republicans from gaining too much ground in the Senate in a year they should have cleaned up, and it radicalized the educated suburban voters who gave Democrats an unprecedented victory in the House.

None of this worked because Senate Democrats are in the minority, but they did try everything they could possibly have done. It’s true that they did not invent time travel and go back to re-run the 2014 midterms or rewrite the laws of mathematics to make 48 more than 52, because those things are impossible.

When people do the thing you supposedly want them to do, and you respond by stubbornly insisting they never did it, you’re not motivating them to do a better job. You’re telling them they should ignore you because you don’t actually care what they do.

I’m using this tweet as an example of a problem I see a lot, but my point isn’t to dunk too hard on this rando. We’re all a little emotional right now and who amongst us has never responded to stress by being Wrong Online; more importantly, it’s not entirely this person’s fault that they’re misinformed. You’re not supposed to have to be a huge nerd that actually watches Senate committee hearings! You’re supposed to be able to rely on the news to give you a reliable idea of what’s happening!! That’s literally their job!!!

AAAArgh. Okay. I’m back.

So. Okay. There are pervasive failings in news coverage of the politics around the federal courts, which leads to a lot of silly misunderstandings in the public more generally. Even if you work your way through all that nonsense and get to a reasonable understanding, you will find a fairly persistent asymmetry. The Republican establishment really does put a wildly disproportionate amount of effort into building conservative movement infrastructure for right wing lawyers and judges, and until recently, Republican voters really were much more likely than Democratic voters to tell pollsters that they were highly motivated by judicial nominations. Taking these things on face value and saying “oh, well, Republicans care more about the courts” obscures some really important, though disturbing, underlying dynamics.

The professional and intellectual ecosystem behind the conservative legal establishment is one of those situations where you really have to apply the Trunchbull principle. There really are millions and millions of dollars pumped into think tanks which invent bizarre excuses for radical right-wing subversion of the public interest by judicial fiat, extravagant “retreats” where sitting judges are alternatively pampered and bombarded with the resulting propaganda, and clubs which indoctrinate young conservative law students and vet them for career advancement based on their fealty to right-wing dogma. Describing what the Republican establishment is doing sounds fevered, conspiratorial hyperbole. I wish it were! If you don’t want to take my word for it – and I really wouldn’t blame you – you can get a lot of gory details from Vox.com’s courts and justice editor Ian Millhiser and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Senator Whitehouse’s main thesis is that these radical right-wing interests understand that a hostile takeover of the federal judiciary is in their financial interests, and that’s definitely sufficient to explain it. My personal sense is that there’s a second, even more unsettling, dimension to this. Article III of the Constitution deliberately insulates the federal judiciary from political pressure as much as possible. Another way of saying that, of course, is that the federal judiciary is removed from democratic accountability. I don’t think it’s just that the economic policies they want are unpopular. I think the investment in this judicial takeover project is motivated in part by the American right wing’s dark authoritarian streak. They value the judiciary because it’s the most leverage they can get against the electorate. “Judges!” is anti-democratic and that’s why they like it. It’s not just that they want things the voters don’t want so they have to get creative; it’s that they resent the voters for even having the ability to get in their way.

It’s not just the dedication to getting judges they agree with on the courts. It’s also the degree to which they expect those judges to humiliate themselves. They’ve had ten years and roughly the GDP of a small country at their disposal to come up with a challenge to the Affordable Care Act which did not sound like unhinged gibberish. Instead, they came up with the legal equivalent of a drunk guy trying to write a sonnet in Dothraki with a yellow crayon. (Actually that might be an improvement, so NOBODY TELL THEM ABOUT DRUNK DOTHRAKI CRAYON SONNET GUY.) It’s such a stinker that you hav to wonder if it isn’t the same phenomenon as what drives Trump and other autocrats to tell such blatant and ridiculous lies: it’s a power trip that shows off how they don’t even have to care about what “is true” or “makes sense,” because fuck you, that’s why. So what if an overwhelming majority of the American people have successfully convinced their elected representatives that health care costs were too much of a driver of economic inequality and limits on that are a good thing? We can still wreck it, because [*long fart noise*].

And if you listen to what Republicans say about the Supreme Court with that in mind, it starts to make a lot more sense. Under cover of mainstream apathy or even approval, the court gives conservatives unearned victory after unearned victory. If you’re a conservative, you’ll want to avoid killing that golden goose by making the court’s bias toward you completely undeniable. But if you’re a fascist, your priority is getting the court to commit. Any concession to truth or democracy, even if it’s just lip service, seems like a crack in the wall that your enemies can exploit, because it is.** As funny as it is to watch their little Pravda knockoff cry about John Roberts, Leftist Judas, this is what they mean: sometimes he tries to preserve the fiction that he hasn’t turned the Supreme Court into an arm of the radical right, which means they don’t win 100% of what they want immediately. Even Neil Gorsuch – hack, sadist, full-time Mayor Wilkins impersonator – can actually be cajoled into doing the right thing occasionally by lawyers who can craft an argument that fits into his crimped, cherry-picked definition of logic.

Like I said. Dark. I don’t want to overwhelm and discourage you. I think their absolutism and desperation is because even they know the victories they’ve won can slip away fast. But deluding ourselves hasn’t been constructive.

For their part, rank-and-file Republicans say they care about the courts. Fine. Republicans say a lot of things. They don’t think saying true things is important; if they did, they wouldn’t be Trump voters. Years before Trump, Republican voters learned how to give reporters and pollsters certain buzzwords to make their worst views sound more palatable. People are starting to grasp this with the “pro-life” white evangelicals who say they care about abortion on religious grounds. They support Trump as strongly as ever, despite the babies in cages, forced hysterectomies, and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths proving that neither he nor his party are in any way “pro-life.” It’s because “abortion” is the way they can get away with saying they support white patriarchy. Trump isn’t their guy despite his sleaziness, it’s because “grab ‘em by the pussy” has always been their actual preferred policy. “Law and order” is their dogwhistle for anti-Black racism. “Immigration” is the world they use when they mean they want more racism generally; pre-Obama, the preferred code phrase was “national security” but we’ve all seen how much of a shit they give about that.

As code words go, “judges” is less direct. Some commentators who try to parse it say it’s really about Roe v. Wade, but as we just went over, they don’t actually give a shit about that either. For some of them, “judges” is a sufficiently abstract rationalization for supporting Republicans when they know it is morally indefensible. This was probably a more pronounced issue than usual in 2016, both because it was so much harder to defend a vote for Trump and because of his inconvenient habit of giving the game away on the usual shibboleths. For others, “judges” represents the same thing it does for Republican elites.

I don’t know how conscious any of this is. I’m sure plenty of them have convinced themselves of whatever rationalization they give. Because we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves, what people say in opinion polls doesn’t necessarily tell us more than what they do when they’re not being prompted by pollsters. When Justice Scalia died four years ago, you didn’t thousands of people coming out to grieve for days on end. Little kids don’t dress up on Halloween as Chief Justice Roberts. RBG didn’t inspire that devotion by being a warm and gracious soul, although by all accounts she was. Liberals and progressives developed our sincere admiration of her because of her work on the bench. That is to say, Democratic voters care a great deal about the court. We just have to get our act together and do something about it.

The bad news is that winning in November is going to be the easy part. The good news is, we are getting organized behind some reforms that have been needed for many years. It’s not just Extremely Online progressives who are pushing for this. Even cool-headed institutionalist Democrats are openly advocating radical action. Democratic leadership are unlikely to get too specific right now – and they probably shouldn’t – but if voters do our job in November, some big and important changes are on the table.

*Footnoted because it isn’t really relevant, but Senate Democrats flawlessly executed a precise and coordinated strategy against Kavanaugh. The first few members to question Kavanaugh each focused on a specific issue tailor-made to give one or two of their Republican colleagues a reason to do the right thing. Then, boom, sucker-punch, Cory Booker started releasing the embarrassing emails Republicans were abusing committee rules to hide. Then, bam, left hook, Kamala Harris tripped him up by making him try to deny having been asked for assurances on the Mueller investigation. They did a great job, which everyone forgot about when someone threw Dr. Ford to the wolves.

**This is also a big part of why conservatives feel so instinctively victimized by the existence of a “liberal media” no matter how hard the political press bends over backwards to pound both thumbs on the scale for them. A free press actually is necessary for the functioning of the whole post-Enlightenment idea that people should have some say in how they are governed. If you’re an authoritarian who genuinely does feel that might makes right, then a somewhat functioning news media does at least pose a hypothetical threat to your power and even your worldview.

#supreme court #ruth bader ginsburg

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fatehbaz · 5 years

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The thing that people get most consistently wrong about Seattle is the rain. [...] The truth, though, is that the rain hardly even falls. It just hangs in a slow drizzle, heavier in some areas, lighter in others, disappearing and reappearing at a moment’s notice as the whim of the many microclimates shifts unpredictably. In most seasons, it’s simply ambient -- a thin atmosphere of mist plummeting in slow motion. It doesn’t soak you in one large, catastrophic wave, like the torrential downpours of our sister rainforests in the tropics. Instead, it joins with the darkness of the northern winter to grind you down with a miserable, slow indifference. Your clothes don’t soak through in a single storm, but after a month or two, nothing seems capable of fully drying, and you’ve forgotten when it got wet in the first place. Then the mold comes, and that deep, bone-cold you get from a winter that hangs just above the edge of freezing. [...]

The last time I needed an umbrella was in the fall and winter of 2011 when Occupy Seattle was still Occupying something. At first the camp was in Westlake Park, in the middle of a “public square” that was neither public nor square. [...] The umbrellas were as much for the pepper spray as for the rain, and between the evictions, the police started confiscating them en masse. Alongside the revival of obscure anti-mask laws to prosecute protestors in places like New York, the Seattle umbrella ban was justified in terms of vague wording about the erection of “structures” within the park. The umbrellas were technically “structures,” claimed the police, and thereby subject to confiscation. This was part of a good cop, bad cop game played by the city government, in which the mayor’s office and a whole array of liberal NGOs would flock to the camp in the morning, handing out leaflets and offering to “host” the camp at City Hall, where it could “speak truth to power” directly and “begin the dialogue.” Then, at night, the police would move in, also under orders from the mayor.

This is Seattle politics in a nutshell, and it is remarkably effective. Most unrest in the city is easily contained through continual police presence paired with abysmally long periods of “process” and “dialogue” that function like a war of attrition, similar to the way the judiciary process operates for the poor. [...] In Seattle, defeat also came like the rain. After the camp moved from downtown to Capitol Hill, it was slowly ground down. [...] Here the police never came in torrents. They just hovered [...] like a light, drizzling mist that slowly soaked through everything.

Phil A. Neel. Hinterland. 2018.

#sorry for many Hinterland quotes im just currently re-reading the book

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political-fluffle · 5 years

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https://twitter.com/j2dumfounded/status/1185793052838744065

Wow, Gabbard’s PR guy also worked for Veselnitskaya. Small world!

And Rinat Akhmetshin, too. What are the odds?

(...)

https://twitter.com/realchrissyg/status/1095519123478478849

Tulsi Gabbard claims she's the victim of a conspiracy of war-mongering corporate journalists. But that wouldn't explain why she hired DC fixer Chris Cooper of Potomac Square Group to discredit me, an independent journalist & special ed teacher in HI.

Oddly enough, Chris Cooper is in trouble now, because he also worked for Kremlin informant and attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. Huh. Now the Senate Judiciary Committee wants info on him from Fusion GPS, per Politico. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/trump-russia-investigation-ties/ …

There are no coincidences

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weil-lisa-vagyok · 5 years

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Protests in Budapest

December 12, 2018: first day of mass protests in Budapest after ruling party Fidesz passed the so-called slavelabour law and tightened control over judiciary with a new court system of administrative courts.

This is what happened that night:

18:49: “Constitutional law is invalid” (Kossuth tér, in front of the Hungarian parliament)

19:54: protesters with and without smoke torches, Hungarian, anarchist and EU flags have marched toward Budapest’s chain bridge (Pest side).

20:48: protesters in front of the Hungarian parliament on Kossuth square. Police protect the main entrance.

21:25: Policemen protecting the gigantic Christmas tree, which is traditionally erected on Kossuth tér, because protesters teared down some of its lights and destroyed and stole some of the sleds surrounding it. One day later, Gergely Gulyás, the current Minister of the Prime Minister's Office said that protesters ‘openly showed their hate and scorn towards Christianity and Christmas’.

21:46: protesters left the main entrance of the parliament to go over to the Southern entrance. Ca. two dozen protesters engaged in a sit-in, which lasted around 30 mins, before they were (mainly) carried away by police.

#Budapest #Hungary #Fidesz #slave labour #rabszolgatörvény #protests #tüntetés #közigazgatási bíróság #Kossuth tér #országház

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dragoni · 5 years

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Don Jr. is the deer in the headlights

During his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, Donald Trump Jr. claimed he “wasn’t involved” in the Trump Organization’s efforts to build a tower in Moscow, “was not” aware that Michael Cohen directly reached out to the Kremlin about it, and suggested Cohen’s efforts to work with Russian-born developer Felix Sater on the project ended prior to 2016.

👮 Eric and 👮 Trump Jr. #MuellerIsComingForYou

But Trump Jr.’s sworn testimony is difficult to square with details contained in court filings pertaining to Cohen’s new plea agreement, which assert that the effort to get Trump Tower Moscow off the ground continued well into 2016 and happened with the Trump family’s knowledge.

From Mueller’s Court Filing

Was Ivanka briefed?

COHEN discussed the status and progress of the Moscow Project with Individual 1 [Trump] on more than the three occasions COHEN claimed to the Committee, and he briefed family members of Individual 1 within the Company about the project.

Continue reading: “Trump Jr.’s testimony hasn’t aged well in more ways than one”

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bikerlovertexas · 3 years

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flickr

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rapeculturerealities · 6 years

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It is difficult to overstate the visceral impact—and rarity—of seeing a black man, one as statuesque and imposing as Crews, step forward to identify himself as a survivor of sexual assault and reject external demands that he bury his shame. Crews has spoken at length about the tenacity of shame, the way it embeds itself more deeply in survivors’ psyches with each dismissal of their accounts. He has acknowledged that his race and size render his story unbelievable to some, that those same factors kept him from responding to his alleged assailant with violence for fear of being stereotyped as a “thug”—or facing violence at the hands of police.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the days since Crews shared his Senate testimony, a number of his peers have taken to the internet to discredit his experiences—and his manhood. Most notably, rapper and actor 50 Cent (née Curtis Jackson) posted (and then deleted) a bizarre meme featuring Crews shirtless, with the words I got raped / My wife just watched superimposed onto the image, as well as another photo of Crews with a rose in his mouth, with the words Gym timeinexplicably in the top right corner. The photos also included a strange, tone-deaf caption in which 50 Cent suggested he would have responded to a similar situation with gun violence rather than the trepidation Crews recounted: “👀LOL,What the fuck is going on out here man? Terry: I froze in fear,😆they would have had to take me to jail. 🤨get the strap.” Both in the comments of 50 Cent’s post, and on Twitter, men insisted they could never stand silent or motionless in the face of another man’s unwanted provocations. Some, like Russell Simmons, who has been accused of rape or sexual assault by more than a dozen women, responded to Jackson’s post with all the concern of a laughing emoji.

Jackson, and the many others who mocked Crews, communicated their allegiance to an idealized masculinity that they imagine as impervious to assault. (Jackson has since insisted his post was a joke, but even so, its purported humor would only stem from the “surprise” of a strong man’s victimhood.) Crews imparting his experience of assault placed him squarely outside that moving goal post, rendering him “weak” and “emasculated” in the eyes of people—most often men—who refuse to untether masculinity from displays of Herculean strength or aggression. For his part, Crews respondedfirst with love for 50 Cent’s music, then by saying he “proved that size doesn’t matter when it comes to sexual assault.” Friday morning, Crews tweeted a response to the misguided questions he’d received in the wake of sharing his story: “Why did you just let it happen? I didn’t. Why didn’t you beat him up? (Sigh),” the tweet ended.

There is a seductive allure to Jackson’s logic, the idea that only “weak” men “allow” themselves to be victimized. It is the same logic that animates victim-blaming rhetoric most often directed at women, but with an added valence of patriarchal posturing. When Jackson (or any other man) suggests that Crews only froze in fear when targeted by a predator because Crews is uniquely weak-willed, the detractor is insisting on his own imperviousness to harm. Because he is a man, he is strong. Because he is strong, he cannot be overpowered. But victimhood is not just the domain of the weak. Sexual violence does not select against “strong” people (and even if it did, Jackson’s comments would still be reprehensible).

Jackson is far from the first to mock Crews for speaking out. In a March interview with BuzzFeed News, Crews noted the controversy that now surrounds him in Hollywood: “I walk in the room, and the room is split right down the middle,” he said. “It just divides right there. It’s kind of like lightning.” While not everyone in the camp Crews identifies as unsupportive speaks of the actor in terms that are as vulgar as Jackson’s, their irritation with Crews’s accounts still functions to discredit both his stories and his masculinity.

The logic of male imperviousness also serves to distance Strong Men(™) from the “weaker” sex. If strength is a hallmark of masculinity, then Jackson’s insistence on his own immunity to harm is also a feverish attempt at denouncing femininity. It is common, when naming sexual assault as an issue that disproportionately affects women, to be met with a barrage of trolls lambasting female advocates for supposedly overlooking male survivors. And so often, the men who decry female advocates’ efforts do not support male survivors when the time comes to do so. The invocation of the male survivor is more often rooted in disdain for women’s organizing than it is in any real concern for the livelihood of the boys and men who must contend with the effects of sexual violence on their lives.

In the days since Crews’ testimony, the silence from other men—men whom Crews has explicitly said he hopes to comfort and embolden with his actions—has been deafening. Meanwhile, the men who mock Crews are participating in the theater of masculine performance to the detriment of their own—and other men’s—healing.

Crews’s testimony also comes in the same week that celebrities in the worlds that he and Jackson both inhabit have thrown their support behind a man whose life represented a far different model of (black) masculinity. Just hours after Crews spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 23-year-old Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert tweeted his plans to establish a foundation for the family of the slain rapper XXXTentacion, whose list of alleged abuses included beating his pregnant ex-girlfriend so badly that she may still be in danger of losing vision in one eye. Uzi’s tweet also included a call for other celebrities to assist his endeavors; thus far, Nicki Minaj, Lil Yachty, and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie have all pledged their support. XXXTentacion, who brought his fans tremendous comfort and his alleged victim deep pain during his short life, attracts sympathy from his peers with ease. To rally behind a “controversial” dead man, even one accused of heinous abuses, may be shocking to some, but it is hardly without precedent. To support Crews, however, a man forsaking the comfortable façade of patriarchal force for a revealing vulnerability, would be to admit complicity in valuing the masculine veneer.

In his testimony, Crews deftly noted that part of the appeal of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights is the distance it gives victims from the immediate trauma they have faced. “It gives survivors the right to receive information, including access to police reports, rape-kit results, and access to sexual assault counselors,” he said. “And by requiring that rape kits and forensic DNA evidence be retained for the duration of the statute of limitations, this bill gives survivors the right to have time to distance themselves from the immediate trauma before making the difficult decision to report the assault to law enforcement.”

While law enforcement has an unfavorable track record with addressing (even perpetrating) sexual assault—and a worse one yet with treating black people as humans—the core of Crews’s concern still rings true. To acknowledge the fact that survivors deserve to process their traumas on their own terms is to recognize that sexual violence affects those who experience it differently. Crews’s process may not be the same as that of every person he testifies alongside, but his efforts add depth to the chorus. “I have to say, the silence is deafening when it comes to men talking about this issue,” he noted in his testimony. Amid that absence, Crews’s voice is as valuable as it is clear.

#Crews #victim blaming #50 cent #toxic masculinity #gender essentialism

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phroyd · 6 years

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Joe Manchin is shouting in the middle of a job fair. It’s in an exhibition space at a community college in Parkersburg, West Virginia, an industrial town on the Ohio river. He is going booth to booth to booth, making conversation and taking selfies.

Manchin has come to one table that provides office workers to companies on a provisional basis and is convinced that someone he just met is a perfect fit. He starts asking his staffers to find the young man who was looking for an accounting job and direct him over to the booth.

The Democratic senator could have come out of a lab for politicians. The 71-year-old Manchin has salt and pepper hair and just the right amount of twang. He comes across as one of God’s natural retail politicians, treats every voter like a friend. Most return the adoration, although there are a few rolled eyes. High schoolers ask him to come to their football game and grown men excitedly pile next to him to pose for a photograph.

However, less than 24 hours after Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate judiciary committee, he kept getting asked about Brett Kavanaugh – the conservative supreme court pick whom Manchin would eventually vote for.

West Virginia was a traditionally Democratic state for generations. However, it has pivoted on a dime. A former bastion of blue-collar New Deal Democrats it has become a Republican stronghold based on issues like guns, abortion and the “war on coal”. Although West Virginia has long been economically populist, it is socially conservative and the coal industry occupies a key place in the state’s psyche.

West Virginia is one of two races – alongside one in Tennessee – that are crucial to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the Senate in next month’s midterm elections. Democrats probably need to win in both West Virginia and Tennessee to have a chance of flipping the slim 51-49 Republican majority in the Senate. Democratic control of the upper chamber would mean that they could block not just legislation but Trump appointees to office, including the courts, as well.

Manchin and Bredesen are both willing to embrace Trump at times and practice a Clintonian brand of politics

Thus Democratic fortunes in the Senate rest on the unlikely shoulders of two septuagenarian white men in states that Donald Trump won overwhelmingly. These two older white men are a world away from the slate of diverse candidates that the Democrats are running across America for the House.

Although much has been made of the so-called “blue wave” that Democrats are counting on in the midterms to win control of the House of Representatives, their task in taking back the Senate is a much stiffer challenge. And in the centre of that challenge are Manchin in West Virginia and Phil Bredesen in Tennessee.

These two candidates differ markedly from the new slate of Democratic candidates who are rushing to embrace progressive causes like Medicare for All, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and flirt with the concept of abolishing Ice (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Manchin and Bredesen are from a different school of centrist Democrats. They are also both willing to embrace Trump at times and practice a Clintonian brand of politics where they look at both political parties in Washington and proclaim “a plague upon both your houses”.

Both men supported the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the supreme court – the two most prominent Democrats to do so.

A clear sign of why Manchin eventually backed Kavanaugh was evident in Parkersburg where attendees were invariably coming up to Manchin to urge him to support the embattled nominee – while the West Virginia senator was staying perched precariously on the fence. To one woman, he simply laid out the recent history of judicial nomination fights on Capitol Hill. He said Democratic anger on the issue was rooted in the showdown over Merrick Garland that Republicans “wouldn’t even meet him and that’s what makes ’em mad”. Manchin went on to point to fault on “both sides” and insisted “we want to get everyone back together”.

Speaking to the Guardian afterwards in a public park before a veterans event, Manchin pointed out “there’s still more Democrats than there are anything else in West Virginia. The bottom line is they got upset after it got to the point that the Washington Democrats forgot about the rural Democrats.” Manchin, who is the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, instead tried to emphasize his independence. “I don’t care whether [you’re a Democrat or a Republican] … it’s about West Virginia first and that’s where I’ve always been.”

His Republican opponent, Patrick Morrisey, is almost the antithesis of Manchin. While Manchin is a native West Virginian who grew up as the star high school quarterback, Morrisey is a New Jersey native who worked as staffer and lobbyist on Capitol Hill before moving to the Mountain State and beating a five-term incumbent to become the first Republican state attorney general since before the New Deal.

The Republican regularly branded his opponent as “dishonest Washington liberal” and painted him as a pawn of the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. Trump has appeared regularly with Morrisey and the West Virginia Republican could not name one area of disagreement with him.

“I want to emphasize my areas of commonality with the president because the body of his work has been very impressive for the people of West Virginia,” insisted the Republican Senate candidate. “No one is an ideological twin of another person. President Trump has been a strong ally for West Virginia and we’re going to keep emphasizing that.”

The message may not be cutting through in polls. Manchin has maintained a steady lead in West Virginia and has consistently been hitting Morrisey on his past as a pharmaceutical lobbyist, an important issue in a state that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic as well on the Republican’s opposition to Obamacare and the effect that would have on West Virginians with pre-existing conditions.

However, while that message and approach may be working for Manchin in West Virginia, it may not be as successful in Tennessee.

As a fellow centrist Democrat, or blue dog, Bredesen is running a similar race to Manchin. However, although his Republican opponent, Marsha Blackburn, is just as ardent a Trump fan as Morrisey, the state has surprisingly little in common with West Virginia save the Appalachian mountains and a blowout margin for Trump in 2016.

Tennessee is divided into three parts by the swoop of the Tennessee river, which rises in the eastern part of the state, descends into Alabama before emerging to flow northward into the Ohio river in Paducah, Kentucky. The key battlefield is middle Tennessee, the central part of the state penned inside the river.

Centered around Nashville, the region is economically thriving. Nashville is a tourist hub that has attracted Fortune 500 companies and the population of the metro area has doubled since 1990. One of the key figures in this process was Bredesen. First as mayor of Nashville and then as Tennessee’s governor, the 74-year-old played a key role in reviving the city, attracting pro sports teams and reviving Tennessee’s once sleepy capital city.

A wealthy former CEO of a healthcare company and transplant from the north, Bredesen long cut an almost disconcertingly moderate figure in the state.

He has tried to run a campaign that avoids national politics as much as possible. In one television ad, Bredesen looks squarely at the camera and says: “Look, I’m not running against Donald Trump.” Instead, he paints himself as a bipartisan problem solver and deflects any talk of the Democrats taking control of the Senate. “The chances of my party of being in the majority are minuscule,” he said in a debate.

Instead of making it about party labels or national figures, Bredesen has tried to keep things local in a state that has been strongly Republican in recent decades. In an interview with Politico, the former governor said if the race is about, “‘do you want to send a Democrat or Republican to Washington?’ I would lose. If it’s, ‘Do you want to send Phil Bredesen or Marsha Blackburn to Washington?’ I think I can win that.”

In contrast, his opponent Marsha Blackburn, a 16-year-veteran of Capitol Hill, is fully embracing Trump. Blackburn, who uses the masculine title ofcongressman, is a bomb thrower who long irritated many establishment Republicans in Tennessee dating back to her time in the state legislature.

Blackburn, who has been a frequent cable television presence, is a fervent social conservative. She has been an implacable opponent of abortion and even co-sponsored legislation, prompted by conspiracy theories about then President Barack Obama, to force presidential candidates to disclose their birth certificates.

During the campaign, she has consistently echoed Trump’s rhetoric. On television, she slams Bredesen for opposing the Trump travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries and for his skepticism about the efficacy of a wall on the US-Mexico border.

Blackburn’s hard-right policies even prompted an intervention by Taylor Swift, a Tennessee resident in the race. Swift endorsed Bredesen in an Instagram post and cited the Republican’s record on gay rights and women’s issues in doing so

However, demographic changes in the state and not its pop singers represent her key vulnerability. Her home base, the well-to-do Nashville suburb of Williamson, was one of only four in the state where Hillary Clinton did better than Barack Obama in the general election and was the sole holdout from Trump in the primary, when it went for Marco Rubio.

Although Nashville suburbs are still solidly Republican, that is starting to change ever so modestly and in the long term are trending towards Democrats. This combined with Blackburn’s weak personal poll numbers has given Democrats hope.

Scott Golden, the chair of the Tennessee Republican party told the Guardian, “there are no moderates left in Washington DC … it is a partisan team sport.” He cited the divisive vote over Kavanaugh.

In recent weeks Tennessee voters have seen the race through the same lens. In the aftermath of the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, Blackburn has surged while before the showdown, Bredesen held a narrow lead.

For Republicans, the hope is these highly charged and highly partisan national issues can trump the brands carefully built by both Bredesen and Manchin over decades in public office. The two men both came out in support of Kavanaugh’s nomination, trying to thwart one potential line of attack and cool the partisan enthusiasm of the Trump voters whom they will be relying on in November. The result was that one major Democratic Super Pac, Priorities USA, announced that it would no longer be supporting the two Senate candidates in November. The decision is simply another indication that their politics as moderate, red state Democrats may increasingly be outliers in a party that is moving leftwards.

Many liberal activists have argued that leftwing candidates in diverse states like Andrew Gillum in Florida or Beto O’Rourke in Texas are their party’s future. But for now, in a Senate map that is tilted towards red states, Democrats have no other options but to embrace throwbacks to a moderate past if they have any hopes of regaining the majority.

Phroyd

#us midterms 2018 #west virginia #tennessee #republicans #democrats

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newstfionline · 5 years

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Protesters in Hungary call on lawmakers to end ‘slave law’

Catherine Garcia, The Week, Dec. 16, 2018

Since Wednesday, thousands of demonstrators have filled the streets of Budapest at night, protesting against Viktor Orban, the country’s right-wing prime minister, and new laws ushered in by his Fidesz party.

Sunday’s protest was the largest, with at least 10,000 people gathering to walk from Heroes’ Square to parliament. During the spring election, Fidesz received 49 percent of the popular vote, but the party changed the rules so its lawmakers control two-thirds of the parliament. On Wednesday, Fidesz lawmakers approved a measure that critics have dubbed the “slave law,” which lets employers ask staffers to work up to 400 hours in overtime every year. Under the law, the overtime payments could be postponed for up to three years.

Even Orban’s own supporters don’t agree with the law, with a new Republikon Institute poll showing that 63 percent disapprove. The protests are being organized by unions, students, and opposition parties. In addition to the law being changed, these demonstrators are calling for a free press and an independent judiciary. The protesters have been peaceful, Reuters reports, but police officers still fired tear gas into the crowd on Sunday night.

#Hungary #Viktor Orban

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dharman19ahsgov-blog · 5 years

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Legislative Action

1a. Senator Harris focus most of protecting the rights of incarcerated women and immigrant mothers who have been separated from their families. After visiting Otay Mesa Detention Facility, Harris describes how the halls and the doors clink shut and there are bars on the windows. The prisoners get time to have recreation for a certain number of hours a day in a 500 square-foot cell and are charged 85 cents a minute for phone calls to their children when they only receive one dollar a day for working. Harris believes that we have to fight against this system and Americans have no reason to be proud.

Congressman Mark DeSaulnier urges Contra Costa County to end ICE detentions because after touring the Richmond jail that the county leases to the federal government for detention of undocumented immigrants, he said that the Contra Costa County sheriff's office’s move to ban volunteers from visiting immigrants inside the jail — to check on their well-being — was the last straw.

Dianne Feinstein recognizes that longer sentences don’t always lead to safer communities or less crime, and believes that the toughest penalties should be aimed at the worst offenders. She also supports preparing inmates for life after prison.

b. DeSaulnier supported the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act. Harris introduced the Detention Oversight Not Expansion (DONE) Act on May 15 of 2018, which would increase oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, and halt funds for construction or expansion of new facilities. Feinstein reintroduced the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017.

2a. Yes, there are 3

b. House Bill 613

c. The bill amends the federal criminal code to require the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to allow a correctional officer at a federal prison store firearms on BOP premises in a secure storage area outside the security perimeter of the institution or in a vehicle lockbox, and carry a concealed firearm on BOP premises outside the security perimeter of the institution.

d. It will allow correction officers to be safer and defend themselves better if there is an altercation with an inmate that threatens the officers safety. However, the bill would also increase the force used in the prison system, which can result in unnecessary deaths.

e. I would vote yea because it’s better to be safe than sorry. There are instances where inmates will attack officers and put their life in danger and I think it is useful to have a gun in a time like that. However, I believe this is the only instance when a gun should be fired,The bill also only mentions carrying a firearm when they are on their way in and out from work, not while they are on duty.

f. The bill originated in the House and the Committee on the Judiciary Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations have reviewed it. It has currently passed in the House and the Senate has not yet voted on it.

g. I am only somewhat satisfied with the current Federal legislation regarding prisoner rights because most Acts and Bills don’t directly target the specific rights of the prisoners and how they should be treated on a daily basis, but rather discuss broader topics such as decreasing incarceration overall, providing more opportunities upon release, and shortening sentences.

3. S- President Trump doesn’t seem to make time for a bill that aims at rationalizing federal sentencing as well as improving conditions for inmates and helping ease them back into society after prison.

A- Michelle Cottle

C- The bill has gained strong support in both chambers and has been endorsed by a broad spectrum of interest groups and President Trump announced his support on the plan of the crucial issue. Soon, Mitch McConnell began to bring up the pressing business the Senate faced and how there most likely wouldn’t be time to tackle this issue after all. Those involved with the reform push say they’ve seen little sign that Mr. Trump is exerting himself or willing to burn any political capital on this issue.

A- People who support criminal justice reform

P- The author supports the bill and makes Trump look bad for not putting more effort into the reform. She is in favor of making the bill a priority and disapproves of the little attention Trump has given to the issue.

S- The significance of the article is to bring awareness to our failing criminal justice system and how even our President isn’t making it one of the country’s top priorities. I agree with the article’s claim because I think the system is often overlooked and changes are not being out into effect as much as they should be.

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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 4 years

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the voting ends today but the fight almost certainly does not

Republicans are filing increasingly desperate and ridiculous lawsuits trying – emphasis on TRYING – to have votes thrown out because they’re big old losers who know they can’t win legitimately.

If you’re the kind of person who can get into the weeds of federal court filings on elections, you probably already have your hair on fire. If you’re not, I don’t recommend picking up the habit right now. It’s just going to make your head swim. These are so incoherent and meritless that even our corrupt federal judiciary and plenty of conservative state judges have frequently brushed them off. I get the sense that Trump’s lawyers are more hoping to win those cases than trying to win them. What they seem to be trying to do with these lawsuits is some mix of the following dishonest things:

depress turnout by making people feel like he can just have their votes thrown out so why bother;

set something, anything, up on track for the Supreme Court, which Trumpworld is (not unreasonably) confident they have sufficiently corrupted;

create a general sense that there’s some authority other than the voters who get to decide this election.

That is what makes me think Trump’s plan to barricade himself in the White House and tweet out a declaration of victory the first moment Fox News reports a good exit poll for him is only mostly about his pathetic need to self-soothe with an autocratic display. He’s also making one last go-for-broke play for the public narrative. He thinks – again, not unreasonably – that if he says he won, then he’ll get a bunch of “Trump Declares Victory” headlines and chyrons, which puts a thumb on the scale in terms of how people frame any resulting developments in their own minds. It’s not a good strategy, it’s more of a hail Mary, but it’s the only potentially helpful option he’s left for himself.

All of this has, once again, summoned the specter of the 2000 election.

We can’t look one day into the future. But we might be able to prepare ourselves for it if we look about twenty years into the past.

There’s kind of a fable that’s built up around the 2000 Florida recount that Republicans were just tougher and savvier and wanted it more, while Democrats clumsily Ned Starked everything up. It’s important to reject that premise as fundamentally abhorrent. In a functioning democracy, campaign strategy is irrelevant after Election Day, because voters are in charge. The Gore campaign, to its credit, was buying into the basic premise of democracy, and had therefore planned their campaign around trying to win an election fair and square. When you punish or condemn people for that, you are ceding ground to the fascists and agreeing to fight on their terms.

The Bush campaign was just fundamentally not operating from the premise of democracy, but from the premise that elections are merely a weak opening bid from the electorate. Before anyone even knew there would be a recount, they had already gamed out a scenario where they could win even if they lost. The contingency they’d planned for, that struck them as most likely, was actually that Gore would win the Electoral College but Bush would win the popular vote. They planned out a whole pressure campaign to create enough of an uproar to give some friendly Republican state legislatures somewhere just enough of an excuse to award electors to Bush even if their constituents had voted for Gore. That wasn’t the scenario they ended up facing, of course. But when you do those kind of war games, you have to think about what your opponent would do, which means the Bush team was ready to hit the ground running with a whole bunch of things they had been expecting Gore’s campaign to do. The core point of whatever they were going to do was always to create an excuse for the nuclear option of having Republican state legislators send Republican electors to install George W. Bush no matter what their voters wanted.

One major difference between then and now is that generation of Republicans knew what they were doing was abnormal and wrong, so they kept it under wraps. Now they’re so high on their own supply that they brag about it to The Atlantic, because they genuinely don’t realize that people will object and try to stop them if they give up the element of surprise.

In 2000, the nuclear option of state legislatures just ignoring their voters to install Bush was not something the Gore campaign could have reasonably foreseen, and even if they did have an in-house psychic to warn them about it, it’s not something they could have realistically stopped except by winning with the biggest margin possible, which they were already trying to do. In 2020, Republicans are basically trying to run the same play, but against Democrats who very much are as prepared as they could possibly be, and by “Democrats,” I mean Democrats at every level. Inside the campaign, Biden campaign senior adviser Ron Klain ran Gore’s recount effort in Florida, and is therefore the last person to have any illusions about the opposition. Their lawyers are fucking beasts. Outside the campaign, Democratic voters have already voted, dragged their friends out to vote, and are amped for whatever fight tomorrow brings.

And, unlike 2000, any formal government processes are going to have to go through House Speaker Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, and honey, she is not having it. Remember, Pelosi has already thwarted not one but two Trump regime connivances to steal elections. In 2018, she successfully deterred any attempt to undermine Democrats’ midterm victory. And with her crisp, digestible, precision strike impeachment strategy, she neutered the HUNTERGAZI plot that Trump had every intention of using to sabotage the election this year. (God only knows what other schemes she headed off by making an example out of the pressure campaign against Zelensky. Any foreign leader or official who might have been tempted to cave under similar pressure by Trump got put on notice that trying to appease him quietly was not going to make their lives any less complicated.) No wonder she felt emboldened to tell the Trumpist wing of the Supreme Court to sit their asses down if they know what’s good for them.

What Democrats – and other small-d democrats and progressives – can do, we’re doing. You need to take heart from that, and brace yourself for a couple of stressful weeks.

Unfortunately, we can’t control everything. We can’t control what Trump will do to seize the narrative, and we can’t do much about how the press responds. And again, I’d point back to 2000 as a cautionary tale. Did you know that most of the networks actually called the race right, and they did it pretty fast? It’s true! Early-ish that night, they called Florida for Gore. And, as a subsequent investigation showed, Gore got more votes in Florida! But the ballot count was tighter than it should have been – a lot of registered voters who were likely to have preferred Gore were kicked off the rolls in a racist purge – so they did a reasonable thing and retracted the initial analysis to say the state was too close to call.

I did say most of the networks. I’ll give you one guess which was the outlier. John Ellis – head of the decision desk (ie, the decision of when to call a race for one candidate or the other) at Fox News and first cousin of candidate George Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush – somehow knew something about the Florida vote count that the Associated Press didn’t. Late that night, as Gore’s numbers were actually ticking up, Ellis called Florida for Bush. (I might’ve been more circumspect making those implications five years ago, but these people have forcefully rejected the benefit of the doubt.) The other networks, embarrassed by the earlier retraction and exhausted after a long night, leapt after Ellis like lemmings in five minutes flat.

This created a narrative that seamlessly dovetailed with the Bush campaign’s evolving strategy: a Bush win was a fait accompli, so why was sore loser Gore insisting on this recount, wasn’t it taking way too long? Of course, the truth was that nobody actually wins an election before the votes are counted, so if Bush really wanted to get this over with, why was he so resistant to having so many votes counted even once?

Because, of course, while Bush’s top campaign people were out in front of the press loftily insisting that this recount was an irrelevant waste of the country’s time and attention, Republican lawyers were down in Florida doing everything they could to run out the clock. Deadline after deadline loomed and then passed with a bunch of Federalist Society hacks badgering and haggling over every single ballot. Said Federalist Society hacks included John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

So legal correspondents and voting rights advocates, unfortunately, aren’t crazy to have their hair on fire about the Supreme Court once again doing what happened next in 2000: the court ordered all the counts to stop until arguments that it scheduled for the day before an arbitrary deadline. Then they handed down a decision that even they knew was so incoherent and indefensible that they said it wasn’t supposed to be used as precedent in any other case, even though the Supreme Court’s job for over two hundred years had been to hand down rulings that lower courts could use as precedent.

(Seriously. Guys. If Doc Brown ever tosses you the keys to his DeLorean, your mission is to go back to 1999 and run Chief Justice Rehnquist over with it. Then – and this is important – back up and run over him again. Twice. Then you can go buy stock in Google or feed Trump to zombie vampire bats or hit up a Borders or whatever.)

If you’re not really familiar with this story, you’re saying “wait, what? Why did people stand for this bullshit?” FAIR QUESTION. There are a lot of reasons, though no excuses. One reason that’s been previously underrated, I guess, is that Bush hadn’t spent the week before the election running around telling everyone who would listen that “what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna make ourselves a huge pain in the ass while people are trying to count votes, and then we’re gonna whine about, ‘why is it taking so long to count all these votes?’ Heh heh heh.”

If he had … well, I’m pretty sure at least 538 Floridians would have been alarmed enough to make a better choice than they ultimately did.

I always want to be able to share an action item. This time, I can’t. (Unless you can vote but haven’t yet, in which case, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ON TUMBLR, GET YOUR ASS IN LINE AND STAY THERE.) I don’t know what the world is going to look like six hours from now. It’s entirely possible that there’s a Biden blowout big enough that Trump just gives up and flees the country. But assume we’re not going to get to take the easy way out of this. Get organized and stay fired up. WE RIDE AT DAWN, unless Florida and/or Texas breaks our way by 10:30, in which case, WE DRINK AT 10:31.

#2020 election #2000 election

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