MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

I’ve been too busy to blog about the Mueller report, which is probably just as well since it’s one of those potboilers that is going to be unfolding for quite awhile.

And I’m not sure what I could add, but I’ll give it a shot.

1. It’s hard to comment more on the report until we see it – which it seems every Republican in America does not want to happen. Which should tell you something about their “total exoneration” nonsense. It’s safe to assume there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s damaging to Trump, even if he can’t be actually prosecuted for any of it.

2. And in fact, we don’t really know that he can’t be, at least as far as the Obstruction of Justice part. Mueller left it open, possibly because he’d decided he went as far as he could go with it and wanted to make sure the work continued – perhaps with Congress.

3. Predictable MAGA hysteria notwithstanding, there’s now a lot of hand-wringing, soul-searching and fingerpointing about how the media got the Trump-Russia story wrong. Or did they?

Matt Taibbi certainly thinks so. Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg thinks Matt is kinda nuts.

As usual, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think Taibbi is cherrypicking radical examples (Maddow, MSNBC in general, Daily Beast, Jonathan Chait’s New Yorker story, etc) to paint the entire media with the same brush, but I do agree with his overall concern – that the media had to be really careful how they treated the Mueller investigation, especially at a time when Trump is actively stoking up anti-media fervor and labelling all critical stories of him as one-sided Fake News. And in the end, many of them gave in to their sensationalist tendencies that turned out to play right into his hands.

On the other hand, the build-up of the Mueller case was as much the product of people on Twitter and social media who passed around otherwise sober stories as though they were smoking guns. Liberals and other anti-Trumpers were reading more into what was there, conflated allegations with proof, and were banking on Mueller to nail the bastard, put him in jail and save the country, even though anyone who paid the slightest attention knew that Mueller was never going to do that. His job wasn’t to arrest Trump (which he probably can’t do anyway) – it was to look into specific allegations and report his findings to the AG, who would then decide what to do with them. And even if the AG wasn’t a pro-Trump appointee, the most he/she would likely do is hand over to Congress for impeachment proceedings – which, as I mentioned earlier, isn’t going to happen.

So I think media coverage was only part of the problem.

Also, I don’t agree with Taibbi’s claim that RussiaGate was a myth that the media clung to because it was the perfect explanation for why they totally failed to see Trump’s election victory coming. It may well be the case that Trump didn’t actively conspire with Russia to win the election, but it’s already well established that (1) Russian hackers did in fact attempt to influence the outcome of the election, (2) they succeeded, and (3) there was some sort of oddball connection between Trump and Russia that Trump and his associates did not want revealed to the point that they were willing to lie to the FBI and Congress about it. Indeed, five Trump associates are now in jail precisely for doing that, and a sixth one has been arrested. You can thank Mueller for all of those, as well as the 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer who have also been indicted.

Some myth.

I take Taibbi’s point that the media is supposed to respect the “innocent until proven guilty” tenet of due process, and it’s true that the media’s sensationalist tendencies tend to blur those lines, especially with TV news. But let’s not pretend there was no basis for the Trump-Russia stories, or that the Mueller report proves the entire mass media industry got it wrong.

4. Meanwhile, as you might imagine, I am not at all impressed with Team MAGA’s “Total Exoneration b/w Democrats and Fake News Media Colluded to Destroy Trump” line, complete with the authoritarian schtick of naming names, accusations of treason and making “recommendations” that TV producers think twice about booking anyone on their list.

But then I’m not the target consumer – the MAGA base is. They’ll be screaming the “baseless witch hunt” conspiracy between now and the next election, and every effort by Demos to investigate further (and the media’s coverage of it) will be presented as evidence of that – and their base will devour every word.

Taibbi argues that’s why Demos and the media really need to move on from Mueller (at least until the report is released) if they want to maintain credibility – why hand them ammo if you don’t have to? That might be true, but it’s also true that Team MAGA manufactures its own ammo, so they’d be screaming “baseless witch hunt” even if Mueller had produced smoking guns.

5. Meanwhile, there is of course also the matter of all those other federal and state investigations into a wide range of shenanigans allegedly committed by Trump and/or his minions, as well as the question of whether Trump colluded with Russia in a different way (i.e. by giving them sanctions relief for the express purpose of enriching himself even though he knew at the time Russia was attempting to hack the election).

Those should continue to be investigated and reported, of course, but as far as impeaching Trump or convincing the GOP to abandon him, you can pretty much forget it. The witch-hunt narrative is pretty much set in stone, and the GOP is all-in with Trump at this stage. In terms of election strategy, it’s probably time to stop using scandals as a weapon – Trump has essentially immunized himself from that (and it certainly didn’t stop him from getting elected in the first place).

Going nowhere,

This is dF

I started writing this post back when Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and the big concern then was (1) Trump forced him to retire because Kennedy’s son is tied to Russia somehow (which might be true but there's no hard evidence of this) and (2) Trump’s nominated replacement, Brett Kavanaugh, is a radical Trump conservative whose sole qualification for Republicans is his ability to overturn Roe v Wade and affirm the legal power of Trump to pardon himself for whatever crimes Robert Mueller eventually charges him with.

Obviously the concerns have piled on since then, thanks to Dr Christine Blasey Ford informing us what young teenage Brett used to get up to.

So, okay, a few things:

1. Roe v Wade: personally I think Kavanaugh’s political opinions may not necessarily be an indicator of how he would rule, if only because (1) it depends on the specific case brought before SCOTUS and the legal decisions that brought it to them, etc and so on, because that’s what they tend to rule on, and (2) my experience with the Supremes has been that they don’t always vote along predictable party lines (Kennedy being a case in point – he’s a staunch conservative who legalized gay marriage nationwide). So I don’t know that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would automatically spell the end of Roe v Wade. But obviously I can’t rule it out either.

2. Self pardons: Trump has been declaring loudly that he can totally pardon himself, and that sitting POTUSes can’t be indicted anyway. The thing is, he might technically be right. We don't really know for sure because it’s never really been tested. This Snopes article has a good breakdown of the legal arguments, but the upshot is that the Constitution grants the POTUS virtually unlimited power to pardon people, and there’s nothing in there that says he CAN’T pardon himself, with the exception of impeachment charges, which the Founding Fathers™ ultimately decided was the best remedy for a corrupt, criminal president. There may be a case of applying common law (i.e. you can’t be the judge at yr own trial), but there’s no guarantee any judge will rule that way, whether it’s Kavanaugh, Kennedy or anyone else on the bench.

3. Boys will be boys: All I can really say about Dr Ford’s allegations for now is that it’s helped shine a spotlight (again) on the fact that many Republican men are really, really, REALLY bad at talking about rape and sexual assault/harassment – which is especially egregious in the wake of #MeToo, which evidently convinced Republicans that the proper response to rape/sexual assault/harassment allegations is to double down on insisting it must be the victim’s fault somehow, or boys will be boys, or the perp has suffered enough and we don't want to ruin his entire life over one transgression, and we’re sure he’s sorry about it and it won't happen again – all of which basically add up to the message that the feelings of the accused man always matter more than the feelings of his female victim. (Unless the accused man is Al Franken or Anthony Weiner, in which case by all means, ruin his life and make an example of him.)

So yeah, obviously my sympathies lie more with Dr Ford at this moment, and the conservatives defending Kavanaugh have pretty much zero credibility with me.

4. The Return Of Anita Hill: We’ve sort of been here before with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, which some fear will be a precedent for both how Dr Ford will be treated by the Senate Judiciary and Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation despite her allegations.

On the bright side, according to this article, two key differences are (1) there were no women on the Senate Judiciary committee in 1991, but there are several today, and (2) #MeToo has changed the conversation we usually have about these kinds of things (except for Republican men, of course).

On the other hand, a number of Republican women have stepped up to defend Kavanaugh (not counting those 65 high-school “friends”), and one even said that even if Ford isn’t lying, so what?:


Well, sure. Every teenage boy goes through that period where he corners a girl at a party, turns up the music so no one can hear her protest and then covering up her mouth as he tries to force her to have sex with him. Everyone knows that.

So yeah, there’s a good chance that Christine Ford is going to be the new Anita Hill in the sense that the Senators are going to do their damnedest to badger, humiliate and discredit her, and the result is likely to be that Kavanaugh gets to be the new Clarence Thomas – because it does seem as though the current stance of the GOP is: “You know what? We honestly couldn’t care less if Kavanaugh rapes every woman he meets, films them all and posts them on YouTube so long as we get a guy on the SCOTUS bench who will rule in our favor.”

I might be wrong about Kavanaugh’s chances, but to be honest I think the only way he’s not getting this job at this stage is if he drops out voluntarily.

5. For the record, even before Christine Ford came into play, I personally didn’t think Kavanaugh should be confirmed – at least not with 100,000 pages of his judicial records being withheld. The fact that they are being withheld – and by Trump’s insistence – is in itself suspicious.

Redacted,

This is dF

As a blogger I’m expected to express my opinion about #AltonSterling, #PhilandoCastile, the Dallas shootings and the subsequent aftermath. And I’m way late on this, I know, but I’ve been busy.

And to be honest, there’s not much I can add to what I’ve posted before about #BlackLivesMatters. So much of the rhetoric on my Facebook feed and elsewhere is the same recycled talking points we’ve heard since Ferguson (which was, believe it or not, two years ago) – the #AllLivesMatter crowd are repeating themselves because they refuse to listen to what #BLM is trying to tell them, and #BLM are repeating themselves because #ALM isn’t listening.

You see the problem.

Anyway, here’s a few things to add to the “conversation”, such as it is, about the specific events last week.

1. One of the takeaways from Dallas is that when Micah Johnson started shooting, the cops did what they could to protect the protesters, and protesters did what they could to help the police. Also, considering that some of the protesters were openly armed, it says a lot that not a single cop shot anyone they saw carrying a gun. Both of these factoids do not slot in neatly with the stereotypical rhetoric that gets thrown around on TwitBook in related political memes.

2. All three incidents raise serious questions about Open Carry and the general belief of the NRA that everyone is entitled to carry guns openly because it makes us all safer.

For a start, Open Carry clearly didn’t make a difference in the outcome of the Dallas shooting, although it did make it more difficult for the police to determine who the actual shooter was (and that there was only one).

Also – and more to the point – both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were legally carrying firearms in Open Carry states. Yet the fact that they had guns alarmed police enough to use deadly force in the same way that white people with guns generally don’t alarm them. The NRA – which normally leaps at the chance to defend the right of everyone to carry a gun without being hassled by the police about it – hasn’t had a blessed thing to say about either case. And their own members are starting to call them on it (at least about Castile).

The NRA eventually released a statement about the Castile shooting (without mentioning his name), saying they don’t comment on ongoing investigations – which is possibly wise, but does come across as a blatant media-management trick to avoid saying something that people are going to use against you on Twitter for the rest of yr life.

3. There’s also the fact that the Dallas police took out Johnson with a suicide bomber robot. Which is a flashy way of describing what was the equivalent of a telepresence drone attack on a suspect, which raises all kinds of legal and ethical questions regarding due process, lethal force, militarization of the police, etc.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the Dallas police were wrong to use a robot in this specific situation – and there is actually precedent for using weaponized robots, although not with the specific intention to kill. And if we agree that the police have a legal right to kill someone in a situation like this, it arguably doesn't matter if they use robot bombs, guns, 16-ton weights or their bare hands.

Still, we’re headed into unknown territory here, especially when you remember (1) the current advances being made in robot technology regarding automation and artificial intelligence, and (2) the continuing trend of police militarization, and what it means to give cops the ability to send in a robot or drone to deal with suspects.

4. Inevitably there are idiots who were hoping Dallas would spark some kind of race war – including this guy. Possibly. I’m not entirely sure what exactly Joe Walsh wants, and it’s possible he doesn’t, either, apart from something that will make BLM protesters and Obama – and thus (in his mind) America’s race problem – go away, or at least make them look as evil and terrible and violent as he imagines they are.

I’d like to think the Joe Walshes of America are in the minority, but he’s not without support. Even my Facebook feed, sadly, makes that clear – many white people I know see BLM (and Obama) as the cause of racial tension in America: “Hey, I’m not racist, THEY started it, everything was fine until they saying white lives don’t matter and started shooting white cops!”

And while that’s not the same as openly advocating a race war, it seems pretty obvious that Walsh et al would welcome any excuse to crack down on the entire movement – like, say, a couple of violent psychopaths killing cops. It seems likely they’re going to milk Dallas (and now Baton Rouge) as “evidence” BLM is a terrorist group like ISIS and was all along and needs to be neutralized before they take over the country and enslave all the white people, or whatever it is they think BLM wants.

Good thing they’re only a fringe minority that won’t be emboldened by the success of a major Presidential candidate whose campaign has been built on white xenophobic … oh, wait.

It’s all sad and stupid, really. If a race war does happen, historians 100 years from now will shake their heads sadly at how easy it was to start one.

It never ends,

This is dF

ITEM: You know that Mississippi law passed in April that basically said you can legally discriminate against LBGTs and even unmarried hetero couples as long as it contravenes yr religious beliefs (provided those religious beliefs are Christian?

A federal judge just ruled it unconstitutional. Twice.

Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves ruled on a specific provision of the law that allowed clerks to recuse themselves from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He struck that one down.

Then, minutes before the law was to go into effect on July 1, Reeves struck down the rest of it for violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

I’m not surprised by the ruling. You can’t really call it a “religious freedom” bill if it takes just three specific religious beliefs from one specific religion (well, two if you include Islam, which no one who wrote and supported the bill had in mind, I can pretty much guarantee) and encode them into law – especially in a way that violates another amendment (in this case, the 14th one). The 1A has never guaranteed religious freedom to the point that yr religious beliefs legally supersede everyone else’s rights or beliefs.

But then, as I’ve said before, part of the purpose of bills like this – and many of them have been proposed to varying degrees of severity – isn’t to succeed, but to be seen by yr constituents voting in favor of them. So the politicians who backed this law will get the political mileage they wanted with their base either way, and they get to trot out the old “liberal activist judge” meme for good measure.

Still, it’s nice the law was rejected, though of course it might be reinstated on appeal. No word yet on an appeal will actually happen, although Gov Phil Bryant has said he would very much desire it. And bear in mind that LGBTs are still not covered by the state's existing anti-discrimination law anyway. Still, in times like these you take what you can get.

Case dismissed,

This is dF

The FaceTwitterverse is in full rage mode over the news that Brock Turner – the affluent Stanford student and champion swimmer who was facing a 14-year jail sentence for raping a woman – got six months because the judge figured hey, Brock feels really bad about it, and is it really fair to ruin his life over “20 minutes of action” and a little excess drinking?

Honestly, most of what I could say about this, I’ve said before regarding the Steubenville case three years ago.

If I could add anything else, it’s this:

Look, either rape is a serious and heinous crime or it’s not. There’s really no middle ground here. If society is going to designate rape as a terrible crime (which it should, because it is), then the punishment needs to reflect that, and it must do so consistently. You can’t say rape is a serious crime and then make excuses and exceptions for people with promising futures who don’t fit yr stereotypical (and highly inaccurate) profile of leering strangers in dark alleys. That undermines the seriousness of the offense and trivializes its effects on the victim.

Also, the argument that we should go easy on him because he feels really bad about it is just weird. Turner’s official statement of lament, sincere as it may or may not be, comes across as the equivalent of: “Look, I’m sure the girl feels victimized and all, but can we talk about how I feel for a minute?”

I do wonder what he thought when the victim read her statement to him directly in court. Was he moved? Ashamed? Bored? Was he even listening?

I have no idea. But assuming her letter was read aloud after he handed in his statement, maybe it helped him finally get it. Maybe he’ll decide to speak out against rape culture instead of party culture. Maybe he’ll tell other students the real life lesson here is this: “When yr alone with a woman who is incapacitated from drinking too much, the one thing you DO NOT do EVER EVER EVER is stick yr penis inside her – not because it’s illegal, but because it’s just so wrong that I can’t believe this has to be explained to you.”

I hope so. If he’s not going to spend more than a few months in jail, it's the very least he can do.

By the way, I don’t mind if he throws college party culture in as part of his lecture. I’m not a fan of either binge-drinking or peer pressure, and young people should be encouraged to avoid both. But it’s not the primary problem in this case. We know this because most guys who get drunk at parties DON’T sexually assault incapacitated women behind dumpsters. So I’m not having this whole “I didn’t rape that girl, party culture did” meme.

Sober up,

This is dF

DISCLAIMER: I’m not very familiar with the transgender issue in general (see Point 8, below). I mean, yes, I’m aware that transgenders exist and face discrimination issues, etc. But I don’t know a lot about gender identity or understand how it works. So if this disqualifies me from commenting on this, you can stop reading now.

1. Transgenders in the US comprise somewhere around 0.3% of the population. So the scale of the “problem” the NC HB2 bill claims to be addressing is pretty small. (Put another way, it’s not like there’s going to be some massive transgender invasion of America’s washrooms.)

2. As near as I can tell, the NC law applies only to publicly funded facilities (i.e. government buildings, public schools, etc). Private businesses (such as, oh, say, Target) can legally set their own policies on washroom usage if they want.

3. Even so, the Justice Department has decided the law violates Title IX (which bars discrimination in education based on sex) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bans employment discrimination.

4. Apparently that’s partly thanks to Antonin Scalia (albeit unintentionally).

5. For the life of me I have no idea what HB2 supporters think they’re accomplishing with this law. I’m not sure which washrooms transgenders were using before, but I’m pretty sure hardly anyone noticed or cared until a group of conservative lawyers decided to make it an issue.

Many (if not all) transgenders tend to look and dress like the gender they identify with (or so I assume), which means the law basically requires trans guys who look/dress like ladies to use the men’s room and vice versa. If yr the kind of person who gets freaked out easily by transgenders, I don’t see how making them 100x more noticeable in a washroom setting is supposed to make you feel more at ease.

And of course, plenty of people who are not transgender don’t always conform with the physical appearance or dress codes associated with a specific gender. I predict a lot of false alarms and general embarrassment for everyone involved.

6. One justification I’ve heard for HB2 is that straight guys and/or child molesters will use the law as an excuse to go into the ladies room and rape them and their children or something.

A few points here: (1) that’s never happened in any other city or state with the same transgender washroom provisions, (2) if it ever does happen, it would still be illegal under such laws and (3) the only guys infiltrating ladies’ rooms at the moment seem to be from right-wing conservative groups trying to make some half-assed point that technically it can be done.

7. Police forces in NC have already stated for the record that they really have no game plan for enforcing HB2. And even if they bothered to try, HB2 contains no enforcement provisions or penalties.

Yes, there are a few reports in circulation of cops arresting people in NC, but one of them is an outright fake and the other one not only didn’t happen in NC, it apparently happened at least six months before the NC law was passed. I’m sure we will start seeing some real incidents like this sooner or later. But I think they’ll be the exception to the rule, though I’m sure the magic of social media will blow them way the hell out of proportion – just like it does with everything else.

8. One key caveat: my above comments pertain mainly to washrooms. Locker rooms are a different matter, because some level of socially acceptable public nudity is involved, which lowers the privacy bar, and makes it more difficult for transgenders to blend in mainly unnoticed.

NOTE: This may not be the problem I imagine it might be. If any readers know otherwise, feel free to comment. And I'll stress here that I'm not personally afraid of encountering transgenders in the changing room. But I'll admit, I would be doing a double take and wondering if I'm in the wrong room, if you see what I'm saying. 

To my mind, that's not transphobia – that's the product of cultural mores about gender identities and roles that have been deeply embedded into our social and psychological DNA, which means that sharing locker room space with someone who is not the same biological gender is going to feel odd (at first), and it’s going to take at least several generations for cisgender people to get over that.

The same is true of transgenderism in general. Gender identity is a concept a lot of cisgender people don’t fully grasp (including me – I didn’t even know what “cisgender” meant until I did some research for this post).  That’s no reason not to pass anti-discrimination laws addressing it, of course. My point is that there’s a lot of cultural baggage for most people to overcome, and it will take a long time for them to achieve that.

I don’t think this can be understated, because some people think the way to help them overcome that baggage is to scream “FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING BIGOT!” at them until they just shut up. That’s counterproductive, IMO – a lot of “tranphobes” are really just people who just need to be better educated about transgenderism and given time to process it. Screaming insults at them won’t make them wiser or sympathetic. It will arguably make things worse.

Who’s the woman who’s the man,

This is dF

There’s a quote by John Erlichman making the rounds in which he explains the real reason President Nixon declared the first shot in the American War On Drugs:


The quote is included in Dan Baum’s recent Harper’s article advocating full-on drug legalization. But for all the current social-media dithering about what sounds like a shocking revelation, it’s actually an old quote. Baum got that quote from Erlichman during an interview in 1994. And it’s been public since at least 2012, when Baum recounted the story in an anthology called The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure.

The big question, of course, isn’t whether Erlichman really said it, but is what he said true? And did he know (or at least believe) it was true when he said it?

Well, who can say? Given what we’ve learned about Nixon from the Watergate tapes, it’s certainly plausible.

Does it mean the War On Drugs as we know today it is inherently racist? Perhaps unwittingly. I doubt every presidential admin since Nixon who took over the WoD were handed a memo from the outgoing team saying: “Remember: the object of the WoD is to put black people in jail.”

But I don’t think that matters. Whatever the intentions and motivations of the WoD in the 21st Century, the results speak for themselves, says German Lopez at Vox:
So I do think the Erlichman quote deserves to be circulated more widely than it has been.

Is the quote in itself justification for legalization? Not really, if only because there is plenty of evidence that the WoD is one of the most disastrous and expensive boondoggles in US govt history, and has been for years, regardless of how racially motivated it may have been at the start, and regardless of the racial impact now.

So the argument for legalization is already sound, IMO. But then the question becomes: to what extent do you legalize?

As Lopez at Vox points out, Baum’s call for full-on legalization ignores the possibility that drug prohibition has been effective to a point, mainly by making harder drugs too expensive for most people. Case in point: in the last couple of decades, painkiller addiction has skyrocketed mainly because doctors have been making them more accessible.

Basically you have people arguing for full-on prohibition or full-on legalization, but there are middle-ground options as well. For my money, the biggest problem with the WoD has been the zero-tolerance policy that treats drug use as a criminal issue rather than a public health issue. I’d like to see a policy that reverses that and keeps the prohibition focused on the cartels and suppliers for the truly dangerous drugs.

In any case, the US has been long overdue for a serious conversation about this. Sadly, we are not about serious conversations right now, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

War all the time,

This is dF

You don’t need me to tell you that Justice Antonin Scalia is gone.

You also don’t need me to tell you his death is already being tastelessly and heavily politicized by people who either loved or loathed him.

And you certainly don’t need me to tell you that the political ramifications of a Supreme Court vacancy during an election year are already shaping up to be epic.

Here are some comments from me to fulfill my bloggery/1st Amendment obligations:

1. I don’t have a lot to say about Scalia himself, except that (1) obviously I disagreed with many of his opinions (in terms of both his judicial rulings and his off-the-bench comments), and (2) love him or hate him, his judicial legacy has made the modern SCOTUS what it is today. History will decide whether his impact was for better or worse. 

2. For all that, Justice Scalia was living proof that when Republicans complain about “activist judges”, they mean “judges who don’t rule the way we wanted them to on politicized cases”. Because let’s not kid ourselves – Scalia’s SCOTUS decisions were often very rooted in conservative ideology, and he made it clear in his opinions – and especially his dissents – when his concerns were informed as much by the potential impact on the sociopolitical landscape and policies as the specific wording of the Constitution or a given law.

3. Whatever you may think about him personally, it’s worth mentioning that he and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – his ideological opposite – were BFFs. Let that be a lesson to us all.

4. I’m not surprised that Mitch McConnell and Charles Grassley don't want Presidente Obama to appoint a new justice before he leaves office. Yes, it’s a blatant stalling tactic in the hopes that the GOP will win the White House. But if it were (say) Mitt Romney wrapping up his final term right now, the Democrats would be saying pretty much the same thing.

However, Grassley’s claims that “it’s been standard practice over the last nearly 80 years that Supreme Court nominees are not nominated and confirmed during a presidential election year” isn’t actually true. So between that and the fact that we’ve got 11 months until the new POTUS is sworn in (and it will take at least a few more months to get a new Supreme nominated and approved), I’m thinking that’s probably too long to have a vacancy on the bench.

5. At the same time, it's possible this particular Senate would reject every single Obama appointee even if Obama still had another three years to go. So the outcome might be the same anyway. On the other hand, it's also worth mentioning that the GOP's current "no replacement under Obama" strategy could backfire on them – badly, and in multiple ways. That may not be a deterrent. But frankly there are very few upsides to taking the hardline on this. 

6. While all the POTUS candidates and/or their super PACs will certainly make SCOTUS balance of power an election issue, I’m not overly concerned with it for a couple of reasons: (1) three sitting Supremes are over the age of 75, so the replacement issue will probably come up during the next term anyway, either via death (God forbid) or retirement, and (2) liberals who have complained about the current bench being 5-4 in favor of Republican appointees up to Scalia’s death tend to forget that this is the same conservative-controlled SCOTUS that legalized gay marriage and Obamacare. So the Democrat vs Republican appointee ratio doesn’t always guarantee a predictable party-sanctioned outcome, is what I’m saying.

7. For the record, the odds of a recess appointment, in which Obama could constitutionally fill a SCOTUS vacancy temporarily without Senate approval (and which is how William J. Brennan got his start in SCOTUS), are not high – thanks, ironically, to a 2014 SCOTUS ruling that makes it more difficult for a POTUS to do that, or at least gives the Senate more control over the situation.

8. Vox has a list of who is most likely to be on Obama’s SCOTUS appointee shortlist.

9. Inevitably, there are conspiracy theories. Alex Jones – and everyone who takes him seriously – suspects that Scalia was actually assassinated, probably by Obama, because obviously.

Another suspect is Leonard Nimoy.

Okay, that one’s satire. BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT TRUE, MAN!

Court is adjourned,

This is dF

ITEM: Tatiana Duva-Rodriguez – a concealed-carry permit holder who was charged with misdemeanor reckless use of a handgun after she opened fire on a pair of shoplifters as they fled from a Home Depot store near Detroit – was sentenced to 18 months of probation and stripped of her concealed gun permit.

"I tried to help," she told WJBK television after her sentencing. "And I learned my lesson that I will never help anybody again."

Translation: "Hey I tried to help stop a crime and this is the thanks I get? Well, fine. You don’t want my help? Then I just won’t help anybody else ever. Next time you get shoplifted don't come crying to me. Fuck all y'all."

I like this part:


Yes. We need more people willing to use deadly force to stop shoplifters.

As you can imagine, I’m not impressed. The argument that Duva-Rodriguez may have had good intentions and was aiming for the tires and all that is really beside the point. Whatever her intentions were, the fact remains that she made the snap decision that shoplifting was a crime that warranted whipping out a deadly weapon and firing it. It doesn't matter to me that she was aiming for the tires. No one who sees their gun as an all-purpose tool for stopping criminals should be allowed to carry one around.

This is the big flaw in the Good Guys With Guns meme currently being pushed by the NRA and its supporters – the assumption that Good Guys With Guns will respond appropriately in situations like these or ones like San Bernadino et al. Some will. Many won’t. Which is why the NRA Bullshit Fantasy World where every American is walking around armed is a disaster waiting to happen.

The more people you enable to carry guns (concealed or openly) – and the more you inflate them with Good Guys With Guns rhetoric along with a healthy dose of general xenophobia – the more yr going to see incidents like this. And they’re not all going to end with no one getting hurt.

So if Duva-Rodriguez wants to "go Galt" on this specific issue, that's fine by me. 

No help coming,

This is dF

This one can be broken down into ten (10) simple bullet points.

1. Yes it was stupid and wrong and arguably prejudiced.

2. This is not an isolated incident, and hasn’t been for years.

3. That’s what happens when you respond to terrorism the way the Bush II Admin, its supporters and a lot of influential media pundits did after 9/11 (and continue to do today).

4. You can see the results of America’s post-9/11 response not only in Ahmed’s arrest, but also in this letter from the school principal which essentially says (paraphrased) that (1) that the arrest was Ahmed’s fault for violating the student code of conduct, (2) that code is keeping yr children safe from ISIS and (3) we’ll do this every single time something like this happens.

No apology, no “we could have handled that better”, not even a “we’ll review our policy to see if it can be implemented more effectively”. Just “we have a policy, we enforced it, yr welcome”.

5. See also: the mayor of Irving, TX, who thinks apologizing to Ahmed and his family is equivalent to second-guessing the police, which would undermine their authority. And we wouldn’t want that. (<tangent>This is the same logic many people have used to post those “I stand with America’s law enforcement officers” in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter. What they’re actually saying – perhaps without realizing it – is: “I stand with America’s law enforcement officers, no matter how corrupt some of them are and no matter many unarmed people they kill.</tangent>)

6. This is especially galling when you read the details about the actions that the teachers and the police when faced with what they claim they thought was a potential bomb situation. Short version: no one acted like they seriously thought it was a bomb. Ahmed ended up in handcuffs anyway.

7. Possibly the only thing more depressing than the way the school handled it is the way GOP candidates responded to it during last night’s Air Force One debate on CNN. Asked if it was a sign that anti-Muslim discrimination has gone too far, no one wanted to touch that question, and the few who did either changed the subject to ISIS, blamed innocent Muslims for not speaking out enough against ISIS, or said, “You want to talk about real religious discrimination? Let's talk about poor Kim Davis.”

8. One of my first thoughts on hearing the news was the psychological impact this would have on a 14-year-old minority, and what it would mean for his future development. So one good thing about all this is that Ahmed has handled it pretty well. The fact that he got so much support from the Twitterverse is probably a good sign.

He’s also changing schools, BTW. Cos, you know, it’d be awkward for everyone after this.

9. Bruce Schneier has the best headline describing the whole incident:


Choice quote: “We simply have to stop terrorizing ourselves. We just look stupid when we do it.”

10. All of the hoopla over this won’t really change much in terms of the ongoing Fear of Islams – not least because it’s an election year, and most GOP candidates are milking the OMG ISISTERRORSLAM card (and/or the OMG MEXICANZ card) for everything they’re worth. And they’re doing it because they know there’s an audience to pander to with it. The intention may not be to demonize Muslim kids making homemade clocks, but that’s going to be an ongoing consequence.

Tick tick boom,

This is dF