;)
July 18, 2022
Afternoon Update:
Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post: "Jury selection is underway in the federal trial of Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser and right-wing podcaster charged with two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with an order from the House Jan. 6 committee to turn over records and testify about his actions ahead of the attack on the U.S. Capitol." The story will be updated.
David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement: 'Legal and government experts are responding to a [Rolling Stone] report that reveals Donald Trump has told advisors he will run for president to protect himself from being prosecuted. 'Trump has spoken about how when you are the president of the United States, it is tough for politically motivated prosecutors to "get to you," says one of the sources, who has discussed the issue with Trump this summer,' Rolling Stone's Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley report, citing four individuals with knowledge of the situation they spoke with.... Retired Harvard Law School law professor Laurence Tribe ... is urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to act. 'Mr. Trump is counting on your concerns about not "appearing" political when he makes clear his belief that you wouldn't dare approve his indictment once he announces,' Tribe says in a tweet directed at Garland. 'You MUST prove him wrong. Make him a TARGET now. No time to lose.'" MB: Garland was a student of Tribe's.
Marie: I don't know id this guy is the real deal or a good actor (and linguist), but as Rocky Girl writes, the people who need to hear him probably won't:
Louisiana. Katie Shepherd of the Washington Post: "A Louisiana judge on Monday temporarily extended an order blocking the state's trigger law, but did not yet grant a preliminary injunction that would keep abortion available until a district court determines whether the state's near-total abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest, violates Louisiana's Constitution. The legality of abortion in Louisiana has changed rapidly in the weeks since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and gave states the power to enact restrictions. The ensuing confusion has left patients and abortion providers scrambling as the courts have blocked, unblocked and the reblocked the ban"
AND Finally ... Connecticut. Peter Yankowski of the New Haven Register: "Police arrested a New Haven man after they say he was reported to have drawn a gun Saturday over two women not thanking him for holding a door open for them. Hamden police said 25-year-old Joshua Murray was charged with carrying a pistol without a permit, a felony; along with misdemeanor charges of interfering with an officer and two counts of second-degree breach of peace." ~~~
~~~ MB's Etiquette Notes for the Modern Young Man About Town (in this case, at a Family Dollar Store): Yo, Josh. Many of today's women find it demeaning when men open doors for them. Rather than perceiving they are on the receiving end of a display of old-fashioned gentlemanly manners, they are offended that the doorholder seems to think they're too feeble to open their own damned doors. Second, Josh, it doesn't count as a good deed if you demand reciprocity for it, and especially if you demand reciprocity at gunpoint.
~~~~~~~~~~
Kelly Hooper of Politico: "Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday blasted Sen. Joe Manchin for what he called 'sabotaging' President Joe Biden's agenda by rejecting Democrats' party-line spending bill last week.... Last week, Manchin shot down Democrats' proposed energy and climate investments being part of the budget reconciliation bill.... Sanders on Sunday did not hold back his frustration, claiming that 'people like Manchin' are 'intentionally sabotaging the president's agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want.... The problem was that we continued to talk to Manchin like he was serious; he was not,' Sanders said. 'This is a guy who's a major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires.... In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America,' Sanders said." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Senators know they have to vote for bills they don't like, and Bernie does it all the time. Hardly any bill that gets through the Senate has the policies he would prefer. So no wonder he is super-angry & speaking out against Manchin. I have been wondering if there were one or two GOP senators -- like maybe some that are retiring -- who would vote for the now-watered-down climate budget bill. Because it's a budget bill, it takes only 50 senators (plus Vice President Harris) to pass. They don't all have to be Democrats. Chuck Schumer (and perhaps Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse or others) know what Republican senators might be approachable. I suggest they approach. But of course they can't afford to engage in long, drawn-out engagement with such senators as they did with Joe. ~~~
~~~ E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post: "Democrats don't control Congress. Joe Manchin does. Yes, Manchin is nominally a Democratic senator from West Virginia. But for two years, he has effectively set up shop as a party of his own. Repeatedly, he engaged in protracted negotiations with Democratic leaders, seemed to agree to a series of specific proposals, and then walked away.... After a year of holding up Biden's program and shrinking it almost beyond recognition, Manchin owes his colleagues and the country more than another dose of dilatory vagueness.... Without mentioning Manchin in a statement issued on Friday, Biden was quick to make clear that he viewed any further discussions with the Senate's leading goalpost-mover as a dead end.... With Republicans determined to block most of what Biden wanted, the Party of Manchin ruled. Or, rather, it was content to negotiate and negotiate until almost everything on the table disappeared."
Amy Wang of the Washington Post: "... Donald Trump did 'nothing' to stop the riot at the Capitol as it was unfolding on Jan. 6, 2021, and new witnesses will fill in the gaps in Trump's activities that day when the House select committee investigating the attack holds its next hearing, members of the bipartisan panel said Sunday. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who is scheduled to lead the prime-time hearing on Thursday, said the session 'is going to open people's eyes in a big way' as they examine Trump's actions in detail over the hours the Capitol was overrun by a mob seeking to stop the certification of Joe Biden's electoral college win. 'We have filled in the blanks,' Kinzinger said on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday. Trump 'didn't do very much but gleefully watch television during this time frame.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Julia Mueller of the Hill: "Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on Sunday said he saw little value in attempting to have Donald Trump testify before the committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol because he did not trust the former president would tell the truth, even under oath. 'Donald Trump has made it clear that he doesn't mind not telling the truth. Let's just put that mildly. He lies all the time. I wouldn't put it past him to even lie under oath, so I'm not sure what the value is there,' Kinzinger said Sunday on CBS 'Face the Nation.'"
Anthony Izaguirre & Christina Cassidy of the AP: "The expanded use of drop boxes for mailed ballots during the 2020 election did not lead to any widespread problems, according to an Associated Press survey of state election officials across the U.S. that revealed no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft that could have affected the results. The findings from both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states run contrary to claims made by ... Donald Trump and his allies who have intensely criticized their use and falsely claimed they were a target for fraud. Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure, and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum. Yet conspiracy theories and efforts by Republicans to eliminate or restrict them since the 2020 election persist."
Azi Paybarah of the New York Times: "Relatives of people killed on Sept. 11 are urging ... Donald J. Trump to cancel a Saudi-backed golf tournament set to be held this month at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. In a letter dated Sunday, members of the group 9/11 Justice asked to mee with Mr. Trump and urged him not to host the event, set for July 29 to 31, noting that Mr. Trump has blamed Saudi Arabia for the attack. 'We simply cannot understand how you could agree to accept money from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's golf league to host their tournament at your golf course, and to do so in the shadows of ground zero in New Jersey, which lost over 700 residents during the attacks,' they wrote in the letter." ~~~
~~~ CNBC reported last week, "The series closes in October with a $50 million purse at Trump's signature Florida course, Trump National Doral Miami, promising an infusion of unknown millions into Trump's golf empire, which began to noticeably struggle after he began his run for president in 2016." MB: IOW, the Saudis scored a Trumpopalooza.
Pence Gets Ever So Bold. Alex Isenstadt of Politico: "Former Vice President Mike Pence is endorsing Republican Karrin Taylor Robson in the Arizona governor's race, pitting himself against Donald Trump in a primary that is emerging as a proxy fight between the former president and Republicans who resisted his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. It represents the latest breach in the relationship between Trump and Pence, and it's the second time the two have collided in a primary. And Pence is slated to campaign for Robson on Friday -- creating a dramatic split-screen moment opposite Trump, who is set to hold a rally for his endorsed candidate, former local TV news anchor Kari Lake, the same day. Pence, whose relationship with Trump ruptured after he defied the former president's pressure campaign to not certify the 2020 election results, also endorsed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for reelection earlier this year. Kemp, who Trump relentlessly attacked for refusing to intervene in Georgia's vote count, successfully held off a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate, former Republican Sen. David Perdue."
And So It Begins, Not with a Bang but a Temporary Injunction. Ava Sasani of the New York Times: "A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Biden administration from enforcing directives that extended civil rights protections to L.G.B.T.Q. students and workers. The ruling comes roughly one year after a group of 20 conservative state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against two federal agencies for their interpretation of the 1972 landmark civil rights statute known as Title IX, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employers from discriminating against workers based on race, religion or sex. Last year, those agencies, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, following guidance from President Biden, said the protections afforded under Title IX and Title VII extended to gay and transgender individuals and would be enforced in workplaces and in schools.... The judge, Charles E. Atchley Jr. of Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, an appointee of ... Donald J. Trump, sided with the plaintiffs and denied the request to dismiss the suit, issuing a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the directives until courts could decide the matter." A CNN report is here.
Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post: "... as many as 200 artifacts ... were stolen from the bodies of the 250 Lakota men, women and children slaughtered by the U.S. Army in 1890 during the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota. They'd ended up in an obscure museum attached to a [Barre, Mass.,] public library in a rural town 70 miles from Boston.... Some of the items were sold by gravediggers to Frank Root, a traveling shoe salesman from Barre, who used them as part of his Wild West roadshow before he donated them in 1892 to the town's museum, where they've stayed for more than a century.... [A group calling itself] HAWK 1890 -- which stands for Heartbeat at Wounded Knee and includes American Indians whose relatives were slain in or survived the massacre -- have launched an effort to have the items returned to their tribes, the Oglala Lakota and Cheyenne River Sioux." Negotiations between the group & the Barre Museum Association have stalled.
Julie Bosman, et al., of the New York Times: "Covid-19 is surging around the United States again in what experts consider the most transmissible variant of the pandemic yet. But ... the public health authorities are holding back.... The latest surge, driven by a spike of BA.5 subvariant cases in this country since May, has sent infections rising in at least 40 states, particularly in the Great Plains, West and South. Hospitalizations have climbed by 20 percent in the last two weeks, leaving more than 40,000 people in American hospitals with the coronavirus on an average day.... Deaths are rising, but only modestly so far in this new wave.... Complicating the country's understanding of this BA.5 wave is a dearth of data."
Beyond the Beltway
Texas. Three-hundred-seventy-six Cops v. One Punk with an Assault Rifle.
David Goodman & Edgar Sandoval of the New York Times: "The first comprehensive assessment of the law enforcement response to the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, found that officers from local, state and federal agencies collectively failed to take swift action, a broad indictment of police action at Robb Elementary School. The 77-page report, released Sunday by a special Texas House committee, spread responsibility for 'systemic failures' broadly among the scores of officers who responded and those who waited outside a pair of connected classrooms where the gunman killed 19 children and two teachers. The decision to finally confront the gunman was made by a small group of officers, including specially trained Border Patrol agents and a deputy sheriff from a neighboring county, the report found, concluding that the order could have been issued far earlier by other officers at the scene.... But a flawless police response would not have saved most of the victims, the report found.... The report did serve to clarify and solidify what had been a frequently shifting official account of events at the school.... The report found the 'egregious poor decision making' went beyond [Uvalde Schools police chief Pete] Arredondo and included the dozens of well-armed officers from [state police director Steven] McCraw's own agency, the Department of Public Safety, as well as the scores from the U.S. Border Patrol." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post report, which is here, presents a slightly difference picture of the report's findings. The Texas Tribune's report is here. It includes this link to a pdf of the report. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: There are a few arguments that should also die in this Great American Tragedy (that's what it is: a self-inflicted disaster): (1) that "what stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Here you had nearly 400 hundred well-armed, well-trained officers who dared not or did confront a gunman who had killed children and teachers with an assault rifle. (2) that arming schoolteachers will protect children from gun violence. If hundreds of officers couldn't do it, how do you expect a single, relatively inexperienced schoolteacher to save the children? (3) hat Americans should own assault weapons (perhaps for shooting prairie dogs). Had those officers been confronting "a bad guy with a six-shooter," it stands to reason they would not have waited more than an hour to take him on.
Way Beyond
Ukraine, et al.
The New York Times' live updates of developments Monday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here. The Guardian's live updates for Monday are here. The Guardian's summary report is here. ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's "latest updates" for Monday are here: "President Volodymyr Zelensky has removed the head of Ukraine's security services, Ivan Bakanov, and Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, and announced that hundreds of criminal investigations for suspected'treason and collaboration activities' were underway. The deputy head of the presidential office clarified Monday that pair had been suspended, and Zelensky would decide whether to formally dismiss them after further investigation.... Moscow has 'almost certainly' hired the Wagner group for recent fighting in eastern Ukraine...."
Reuters, in the Guardian: "Volodymyr Zelenskiy has fired the head of Ukraine's powerful domestic security agency, the SBU, and the state prosecutor general, citing dozens of cases of collaboration with Russia by officials in their agencies. Sunday's abrupt sackings of SBU chief Ivan Bakanov, a childhood friend of Zelenskiy, and the prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, who played a key role in the prosecution of Russian war crimes, were announced in executive orders on the president's website. In a Telegram post, Zelenskiy said he had fired the top officials because it had come to light that many members of their agencies had collaborated with Russia, a problem that he said had touched other agencies as well."
News Ledes
AP: "A heat wave broiling Europe spilled northward Monday to Britain and fueled ferocious wildfires in Spain and France, which evacuated thousands of people and scrambled water-bombing planes and firefighters to battle flames in tinder-dry forests. Two people were killed in the blazes in Spain that its prime minister linked to global warming, saying, 'Climate change kills.'" MB: He's talkin' to you, Joe Manchin, & your GOP pals.
New York Times: "Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American Pop artist known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects, died on Monday at his home and studio in the Soho section of Manhattan. He was 93."
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Reader Comments (7)
Even living in a country so strange that mass shootings seem to have become de rigueur, this morning headlines (I've seen more than one) praising the "good Samaritan with a gun" who killed the latest shooter, seemed even more conceptually outre.
A far cry isn't it from stopping by the roadside to help the helpless?
@Ken Winkes: Apparently the people who came up with the idea of calling the guy who killed the mass murderer a "Good Samaritan" were the local police. I'd guess they're not divinity students. If there were any good Samaritans on they scene, they would be people who helped the wounded victims.
In the parable, we don't find out what happened to the thugs who beat up the man & left him to die on the side of the road, because that's not the point of the parable. But it is these thugs who would be analogous to the Indiana mass murderer. Whether or not the thugs ever paid for their crime, the "heroes" who brought them to justice do not feature in the parable at all.
Having said that, the lesson of the parable is that everyone is your neighbor. (The reason the parable features a Samaritan as the good guy is that the Jews -- i.e., the listening audience -- despised the Samaritans, and they would have been shocked by the idea that a Samaritan was the hero of the story.) So to the extent that the young man who shot the mass killer helped his "neighbors" without regard to their backgrounds, maybe there is a bit of a fit there.
And this to greet us on this fine Skagit County summer morning:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/late-night-shooting-inside-mount-vernon-walmart-injures-five-people/ar-AAZHuNn
Another reason not to shop at Walmart.
I believe "Good Samaritan" is a term of art used by cops, prosecutors, responders, etc., because of the existance of "Good Samaritan Laws" that exonerate people who help at an incident so they can't be held liable for outcomes. A quickie quote from the top of the Googlefind:
"Good Samaritan laws are written to encourage bystanders to get involved in these and other emergency situations without fear that they will be sued if their actions inadvertently contribute to a person's injury or death."
So when Joe Citizen gets involved in an incident in a helpful way, cops and others refer to them as GSs.
When I was taking (way back when) the Army's AMEDDS course (EMT training for Army Air Evacuation Pilots) we were told the sad story of a crew that was flying somewhere in Texas and observed an accident below. Recently trained in EMT basics, the pilots sat down at the scene and revived the near-death driver. which required a cricothyrotomy. (Crikes were taught at AMEDDS as they would be administered by a medic in combat: the victim suffocates without it, you don't have better tools, so slice the membrane "window" just below the Adam's Apple and shove in the best air tube you can find -- like a pen barrel.)
So these apocryphal guys saved the driver and flew him to the hospital, saving him twice!
And when the driver recovered he sued the bejeezus out of the Army because his voice was all raspy due to (vocal cord damage? I don't remember.)
Anyway, the instructor's point was that if you played Good Samaritan in the U.S., no good deed goes unpunished.
And I expect the story is made up. But at the time we were credulous yoots.
In response to questions, the instructor said that the USG would be the defendant in a tort claim, after learning which we figured "what the heck." If Uncle takes the tort, do the right thing, what's your point?
That relief would not apply to Joe Citizen, hence your GS laws which seek to limit Joe's liability, hence the use of the term by people who get involved in disaster events.
Doubt that this will reach the folks who really need to hear it, but is great anyway
https://youtu.be/WW7GXZLMYJo
@Patrick: You must be right. You remind me that the parable was "named" several centuries after it first showed up in Christian writings. The "namers" were not Jews, and they didn't understand that the character the Jewish listeners would have identified with was the (Jewish) man left by the side of the road, not the Samaritan. So the parable, partly because of its later name, has come to exemplify the Christian believe in charity & selfless acts for the benefit of others. And those so-called Good Samaritan laws do indeed indemnify (or partially indemnity) well-meaning helpers against suits brought by those they helped (or tried to help).
It could be that by calling the Indiana "good guy with a gun" a Good Samaritan, the police meant to subtly "notify" the family of the dead mass killer that their loved one got what he had coming.
"Americans have a rich tradition of avoiding discomfiting facts through denial, euphemism and obfuscation. Especially those facts that upset the soft-focused, Hallmark version of American history we teach in schools and celebrate each July Fourth.
They reimposed slavery by other means and deployed propaganda to rehabilitate treason as the noble-sounding “Lost Cause.” Jim Crow laws, racial terror and over 4,000 lynchings reduced black citizens to effective serfdom that lasted another century.
Long before reputation repair was a marketable service, Southerners rebranded white supremacism “Redemption.” It’s a thing Americans do.
Basically, history must never make white people uncomfortable. Germans had to reckon with their country’s crimes in the first half of the 20th century. American exceptionalism makes reckoning with past sins a rude imposition on these shores."
Match made in hell, Conservatives and the South.