nodynasty4us

[nodynasty4us]

From the April 25, 2024 opinion piece:

Most people who have turned Columbia into a national lightning rod couldn’t care less about the human beings who live and work there or the very real challenges of making everyone on campus feel safe, heard, and free. They are heaping scorn on the encampment not because they oppose civil disobedience but because the protestors represent the leading edge of a generational change in attitudes about Israel. And I can guarantee that most critics calling for the heads of Columbia students for the terrible crime of camping out on their own university’s lawn were enthusiastically in favor of, for example, trucker convoys laying siege to major cities in 2021 to protest vaccine mandates. The bottom line is that to forestall the coming reckoning with 40 years of failed, unjust policy, Israel’s defenders want to criminalize it, to cast Palestinians out of the public sphere and hound them until—despairing of the impact of their activism on their life and career prospects—they give up.

#freedom of speech #palestine #israel

[nodynasty4us]

Post from @ petridishes:

love to listen to Supreme Court oral arguments about fun hypotheticals like "if you have a womb is it possible you aren't a person" and "should we have a king"

The conservative justices have caused the court to hear cases it never would otherwise.

Vote for Biden. He will have to do something with the court.

#supreme court #reproductive rights #presidential immunity

[nodynasty4us]

“The conservative justices had an opportunity to rally to the defense of democracy, to gird the system against further attack, to righteously defend the rule of law, and to protect its own prerogatives and powers against a wannabe tyrant who is counting on them to be his supplicants. They could have drawn a sharp line. They could have summoned indignation and outrage. They could have overlooked their partisan priors in favor of principle – or more cravenly in favor of self-preservation. With the possible and limited exception of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, they did none of that. They failed in the worst possible way at the most crucial time.”

—

Rogue SCOTUS Abandons Democracy In Her Hour Of Greatest Need

Say this with me: This SCOTUS majority is not an impartial arbiter of law. This SCOTUS majority has no respect for precedent, the will of the people, or its fundamental role in government.

This SCOTUS majority is doing through force what the other members of their movement could not achieve through elections: change laws to take equality and freedoms away from as many people as possible, to completely remake America into something we don’t recognize.

Donald Trump and his cult are the greatest threat America has ever faced in its history, with this corrupt, venal, activist group of unelected liars (and at least two rapists) enabling him.

Democrats absolutely have to expand the court and begin an impeachment inquiry into Thomas and Kavanaugh the instant they have congressional majorities. 

I don’t think it’s too late, but it’s about five seconds away from being too late. If Congress doesn’t act hard and fast, these seven people will turn America over to corporations and megachurches.

We have to stop this, and the only way we have any chance at all is to turn out in massive numbers this November to overwhelmingly defeat the people who will put Project 2025 into action.

#supreme court

[nodynasty4us]

#kristi noem #animal cruelty

[nodynasty4us]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Samuel Alito theory of constitutional interpretation is, “if I want it, it’s constitutional. If I don’t want it, it’s not constitutional.” Now we just have to see how many fellow “Justices” agree with his powerful “analysis.”

#samuel alito

[nodynasty4us]

An explainer about the new law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app to someone else.

#tiktok #china

[nodynasty4us]

What happened in Portugal in 1974 needs to happen in Russia.

Today, April 25th, is the 48th anniversary of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution. A group of junior and middle ranking officers in the Portuguese military overthrew a fascist dictatorship which had been in power over 40 years.

The Estado Novo régime came to power in the same era as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. However it had been less heavy handed than those other dictatorships; its first and longest lasting leader, António Salazar, was a fervent Catholic who was turned off by the “paganism” of his fellow pre-war dictators and ruled accordingly. Still there were secret police, limits on free speech and the press, and no genuinely fair elections.

By the mid 1970s, Portugal was the last European country to have a colonial empire. A non-stop series of wars in the colonies had taken a large toll on the country. Younger and more clear-thinking officers decided that a change in the country was long overdue.

BBC History Extra describes what happened.

In March 1974, General António de Spínola was dismissed from his position as deputy minister of the armed forces.

He had written a book in which he suggested that the Portuguese colonial wars should come to an end. He was critical of the current Portuguese regime, something that was regarded as heretical by Portugal’s right-wing establishment.

The Armed Forces Movement (MFA) was soon formed by dissident and low- ranking officers who supported Spínola. Captains within the armed forces were also unhappy with a law which would grant privileges to conscripted officers, to the resentment of professionally trained officers. The armed forces’ support for the government was rapidly deteriorating.

Just before midnight on 24 April, Portugal’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest – ‘E Depois do Adeus’ (And After The Farewell) – was played by the radio station Emissores Associados de Lisboa, as had been arranged by the rebels. This was the first of two secret signals that the army was waiting for.

Tanks entered the centre of Lisbon in the early hours of 25 April and soon the airport, television and radio centres were taken over, as well as the Salazar Bridge over the river Tagus. Prime Minister Marcello Caetano, along with other ministers, had taken refuge in the Carmo barracks, which housed the National Republican Guard, and these were stormed by troops, armed with machine guns. With little resistance, Caetano surrendered to Spínola.

[ … ]

Radio appeals by the revolutionaries asked people to stay inside, but many flooded the streets and joined in, supporting the troops. By the time the sun had risen on 26 April, the MFA was in charge and promised to hold democratic elections for a national assembly as soon as they could.

In 2014 for the 40th anniversary, NBC News did a piece on it.

Portugal Honors April 25 Revolution, the World’s Coolest Coup

They took less than 24 hours to bring down Europe’s longest-lived dictatorship and signal the end of the last colonial empire in Africa.

“It was a coup like no other,” recalled Swiss journalist Werner Herzog, who reported on the revolution.

“The atmosphere was more like a party,” he joked at a conference on Wednesday. “None of us had ever heard of an army intervening to bring democracy, surely it’s normally the other way round.”

It certainly did turn out to be cool. By June of 1976 Portugal had drafted a constitution, elected a parliament, and installed a president – all peacefully and democratically. In just 26 months, Portugal had gone from a fascist dictatorship to a fully functioning Western liberal democracy. And it’s still doing fine today.

Portugal is one of the most stable and resilient truly democratic countries on the planet. It’s amazing what a success story it has been. It is proof that a difficult history doesn’t have to be a drag on a country’s present and future.

As for Russia, we can only hope that there are middle ranking officers currently plotting to remove their own fascist régime. They do have a much more difficult job than their Portuguese counterparts in 1974. The Estado Novo régime was fascism lite while Putin is a lot more like the hardcore Nazis of the late 1930s in Germany.

Anyway, the BBC excerpt above alluded to “the first of two secret signals” which were played on Lisbon radio stations to give the go-ahead for the revolution. The second was more important and is now a revered patriotic song in Portugal. Grândola, Vila Morena had been banned on radio by the government. So when it was played just after midnight on Rádio Renascença on April 25th, everyone involved knew there was no turning back.

#portugal #russia #democracy #long post

[nodynasty4us]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:

A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested. Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested. So how can Abbott justify such a reversal to his call for free speech? The protestors are anti-semitic, he says. Really? How does Abbott and the police wading through the crowd know the students are anti-semitic? Because, as Dave Weigel points out, Abbott has broadened the definition of anti-semitism to incorporate support for a Palestinian state. Any protest for this cause is, therefore, anti-semitic, and therefore worth contravening his commitment to free speech, which, lets face it, was never meant to be especially binding.1

The absurdities that follow are almost funny. The University of Austin, the pretend university launched by IDW types like Bari Weiss, is preparing its “Forbidden Courses” for the summer. It stands silently by as the actual University of Texas at Austin is censored, safe in the knowledge that they are regime-approved. You don’t have to be blind to the real cases of anti-semitism in America to be troubled by accusations of anti-semitism to shut down the most visible protests to a military response that has become increasingly unpopular.

[...] There are the protests, and what the people off campus want to turn the protests into: sites of disorder and violence, a basis by which to discredit and control campuses, a reason to fear leftists radicals, and a campaign issue in the presidential election. For them, the George Floyd protests of 2020 were events of failure, of an insufficient will to crack down on dissent. (Though police did indeed crack down). They want the police to intervene aggressively, and with a sense of righteousness that comes from claiming to be on the right side of history. It does not matter if students are not engaged in meaningful violence or property damage. It does not matter if the worst forms of anti-semitism are occurring off campus, by non-students.

[...] These critiques serve two purposes. First, they erase the subject of the protest. The fundamental question of whether the protestors have a point is elided. Next time you read an opinion piece about protests on campus, ask yourself, did the author engage in the basic question of whether the war should continue, and whether the US government should continue to provide arms for it. It says something truly profound about the blinkered view of the American pundit class that they only way they can understand a real war is through their own worn culture war framings. They squint just enough to be outraged by the fact that students are protesting but refuse to engage in a discussion of what the students are protesting about.

Second, they serve to delegitimize the university itself. I’ve written about the tactics of delegitimzaiton, deconstruction and control before in the context of the administrative state, but it applies just as well to universities. As the work of political scientist Dan Carpenter points out, public organizations win autonomy based on building positive reputations; they lose that autonomy when they become viewed as incompetent or immoral. Creating reputational damage is a necessary precondition to justify removing autonomy from institutions. The narrative of a woke or disorderly campus justifies removing faculty or student input on who leads the institution, of legislators or donors establishing the contents of the curriculum. Those pushing that narrative will use any campus event to further it. Far too many people who should know better have gone along with it. This is one of the ways that what is happening on campuses now links to the campus speech wars, the censorship of speech related to race and gender, and removal of DEI offices, and the erosion of faculty and student governance. Universities, as a community, are permitted less and less to manage themselves based on their values. They will not be trusted to find the right balance. Ask yourself, is society better off with Elise Stefanik’s vision of higher education?

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the people who are habitually up in arms about campus free speech and antisemitism are themselves eroding campus free speech and enabling antisemitism by their actions supporting the removal of pro-Palestinian protesters from college campuses.

#freedom of speech #greg abbott #education #long post

[nodynasty4us]

Right wing Republican politicians and even some Democrats are frothing at the mouth in outrage over pro-Palestinian student protests. Some are calling for arrest, others for the National Guard to suppress these protests. The central rationale is equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, a false equivalence intended to shut down the protests.

But where was the outrage on the right over decades of christofascist demonstrations at Planned Parenthood clinics? Why was no one calling for the arrest of the mobs of hateful, screaming zealots who inspired bombings and murder? Why today are LGBTQ event organizers forced to arrange their own security as protection from actual Nazis threatening their existence?

Hate speech is hate speech no matter if the target is black or gay or Jewish or fat or trans. No one of these groups deserves more protection than the others.

Protesting for changes in government policies is NOT hate speech. Policies don’t have feelings. Policies can’t be traumatized. In the USA we have a right to protest peacefully.

#freedom of speech #israel #palestine

[nodynasty4us]

Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh focused more on the spending power of the federal government than they did life-saving emergency abortion care.

The Supreme Court heard heated arguments on Wednesday over whether states can criminalize life-saving, stabilizing abortion care in emergency medical situations. 

The arguments, a consolidation of Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, focused on Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, which first went into effect in August 2022. The justices debated whether the narrow exceptions in Idaho’s ban override federally mandated requirements for physicians under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. EMTALA requires hospitals that participate in Medicare — the majority of hospitals in the country — to offer abortion care if it’s necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they’re experiencing a medical emergency.

The arguments highlighted the debate happening across the country since the Dobbs decision repealed Roe v. Wade: Are post-Dobbs abortion bans operating smoothly, or have they turned reproductive health upside down, forcing physicians and patients into impossible, often deadly, situations? 

#supreme court #reproductive rights

[nodynasty4us]

On Thursday, as justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard extensive oral arguments over whether Donald Trump, as a former president, is totally immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken while he was in office, it began with a series of questions to special counsel attorney Michael Dreeben from Justice Samuel Alito.

Alito, more than an hour into proceedings, started to press Dreeben about whether the prosecution of a president would undermine the stability of a country’s governance. It would seem easily agreeable, the justice argued, that a “stable, democratic society” required a defeated candidate to leave office peacefully if he lost an election.

“Even a close one,” Alito said. “Even a hotly contested one.”

#supreme court #presidential immunity

[nodynasty4us]

Direct link to the article.

Thomas referenced Operation Mongoose, a project under president Kennedy that attempted to overthrow the government of Cuba.

I'm not sure if he's against foreign intervention or if he's just confused.

#clarence thomas #supreme court #presidential immunity

[nodynasty4us]

This is complete and utter BS!!!

#clarence thomas #conflict of interest

[nodynasty4us]

The image in the original post is text reading:

"Why not take it a step further and tell the court that if Trump has the sort of broad immunity he claims he does, a president would be free to order the assassination of Supreme Court justices who disagree with him, and could not be prosecuted for doing that. Make the impact of Trump's argument unmistakable."

I'm not sure that would even make Trump's justices flinch. SCOTUS justices shouldn't have life time appointments. Let American's vote on that!

#presidential immunity #supreme court

[nodynasty4us]

This is an analysis of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the question of whether former president Trump is immune to criminal prosecution for trying to subvert the 2020 election. Some excerpts:

This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

...

Justice Samuel Alito best captured the spirit of arguments when he asked gravely “what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society” (good start!), then answered his own question: total immunity for criminal presidents (oh, dear). Indeed, anything but immunity would, he suggested, encourage presidents to commit more crimes to stay in office: “Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Never mind that the president in question did not leave office peacefully and is not sitting quietly in retirement but is instead running for presidential office once again. No, if we want criminal presidents to leave office when they lose, we have to let them commit crimes scot-free. If ever a better articulation of the legal principle “Don’t make me hit you again” has been proffered at an oral argument, it’s hard to imagine it.

...

The conservative justices are so in love with their own voices and so convinced of their own rectitude that they monologued about how improper it was for Dreeben to keep talking about the facts of this case, as opposed to the “abstract” principles at play. “I’m talking about the future!” Kavanaugh declared at one point to Dreeben, pitching himself not as Trump’s human shield but as a principled defender of the treasured constitutional right of all presidents to do crime. (We’re sure whatever rule he cooks up will apply equally to Democratic presidents, right?) Kavanaugh eventually landed on the proposition that prosecutors may charge presidents only under criminal statutes that explicitly state they can be applied to the president. Which, as Sotomayor pointed out, would mean no charges everywhere, because just a tiny handful of statutes are stamped with the label “CAN BE APPLIED TO PRESIDENT.”

#supreme court #presidential immunity #election subversion

[nodynasty4us]

Tweet from Liz Cheney:

This tells you all you need to know about today's Republican National Committee. The person in charge of election integrity for the @GOP was just indicted in Arizona for lack of election integrity.

Fox/henhouse

#christina bobb #fake electors #republican national committee #hypocrisy

[nodynasty4us]

Aldous J Pennyfarthing at Daily Kos:

Following Donald Trump’s example is typically a very bad idea. This is the same guy who stared at an eclipse, thought it might be a good idea to inject disinfectant, and insists on flushing toilets 10 to 15 times, even though the government recommends stolen top secret nuclear documents be flushed no more than three times in order to conserve water. And while listening to Trump is equally as bad—Truth Social investors are discovering that now—it might, ironically, end up saving the country. You may recall when several starry-eyed Republicans ran for president based largely on the notion that a guy with a fraudulent business who’d literally attempted to end America and faced dozens of felony charges might have some vulnerabilities in the general election. Well, one of those candidates—former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—stuck around a bit longer than Trump would have liked and it’s still having an impact.

[...] On Tuesday night in the GOP’s closed Pennsylvania primary, Haley got more than 155,000 votes, or roughly 16.6% of the total. This is a pretty significant number for someone who’s no longer campaigning, and whose opponent is a universally known figure running as a quasi-incumbent.

The Hill reports that Haley got close to 20% in several Pennsylvania counties. And this could be reason for concern with “polling average of the state from Decision Desk HQ/The Hill has Trump ahead of President Biden in the state by just 0.4 percent, meaning every vote may have added importance there compared to many other states.”  And it’s not just in Pennsylvania. According to The Hill Haley “received more than 77,000 votes in the Georgia primary in March in March a few days after she dropped out, more than 150,000 votes, or almost 20 percent, in the Washington primary and more than 110,000 votes in the Arizona primary.” Clearly, Trump remains a polarizing figure within the GOP. And since telling Haley supporters to go screw, they’ve pretty much obeyed. The good news for Trump is that, as a wannabe dictator, he demands slavish obedience to all his dictates—and people are falling in line. The bad news for Trump is that if people actually listen to him, it could cost him the election.

As Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake notes, the results in closed GOP-only primaries since Haley dropped out appear to show her momentum has barely slowed. 

In closed primary states so far, Nikki Haley continues to nab around 15%-25% of the GOP primary vote despite dropping out in March. That would be a bad omen for Trump come fall.

#donald trump #nikki haley #2024