Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A titan on values and the 2020 election risks

I learned of the death of Associate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from my Rabbi.

It was in the middle of Friday night’s “virtual – live-streaming” service to celebrate the Jewish New Year that the Rabbi announced the passing of the most celebrated member of our Adas Israel, Washington, D.C., congregation.

A deeply emotional event

It is rare that one experiences a deeply emotional and spiritual event. Learning the news of “RBG’s” passing in the midst of celebrating the New Year was just such a moment for me.

I was not alone. Late on Friday night, many people spontaneously gathered in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to console each other and to reflect on the meaning of her death just a few weeks before a most consequential U.S. presidential election.

An eloquent spokeswoman for equality

In recent decades, no single Jew in the United States spoke so eloquently and, more importantly, did so much as “RBG” to promote equality for all Americans.

She was forever sensitive that the U.S. Constitution, which the Supreme Court is called upon to interpret, did not consider the rights of women when it was drafted, while declaring that people of black color were considered as three-fifths citizens.

Ginsburg’s Jewish roots were a major influence in her life. She once said that “My heritage as a Jew and my occupation as a judge fit together symmetrically. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition.”

Anti-Semitism in America

Her values, I hope, will be an inspiration to all American voters. In this personal column, let me add that I hope her values will convince many Jews in the United States to set aside partisan matters of daily public policies and to vote in November to secure this fragile U.S. democracy at a time when racial hatred stalks the land.

Back in August 2017, neo-Nazis — screaming “Jews will not replace us! You will not replace us!” — marched through the town of Charlottesville, Virginia. They were opposed by peaceful, decent people.

President Trump’s first reaction to the situation was to declare that there were “very fine people on both sides.” After a public uproar, he issued a White House statement condemning anti-Semitism and the thugs in Charlottesville.

However, his initial statement and his constant unwillingness to condemn far-right militant groups across the country have had major consequences. Trump’s sentiments reverberate among his followers

In October 2018, a man called Robert Bowers, who claimed to be an ardent follower of President Trump, entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. He screamed, “All Jews must die!” Then he killed 11 people.

In its 2019 annual report, the Anti-Defamation League reported: “The American Jewish community experienced the highest level of anti-Semitic incidents last year since tracking began in 1979, with more than 2,100 acts of assault, vandalism and harassment reported across the United States.”

Calling out a racist

The many statements and actions made and taken by Trump convinced the late Congressman John Lewis to call Trump a racist. As the nation mourned Lewis and as leading Democrats and Republicans sang his praises, Trump had nothing good to say about this legendary civil rights leader.

Trump has shown a similar lack of sympathy and empathy for black Americans who have been killed by the police in recent times.

Ominous warnings

I have recently been reading an extraordinary book about the rise of Hitler, “The Unfathomable Ascent: How Hitler Came to Power.” Author Peter Ross-Range describes Hitler as a man solely driven by the quest for power and as a ceaseless campaigner. He could have been describing Trump.

Time and again, the book provides descriptions of Hitler’s extraordinary ego, vanity and ruthlessness in the years before he took power, descriptions that mirror those of today’s United States President.

1930’s Jews discounted the danger

There is a more profound parallel. Almost exactly 90 years ago, on September 14, 1930, when the Nazis secured a huge vote in elections that provided them with a powerful presence in the Reichstag, there were many Jews in Germany who were quick to discount the dangers.

Many of them, as Ross-Range notes, had fought for Germany in World War I and rightfully regarded themselves as patriots. They believed they would be respected for their service.

I have a photograph of one of my relatives wearing a helmet with the Kaiser’s signatory spike, sitting on a white horse in World War I as part of the German cavalry.

Many of the friends and relatives of my parents left Germany too late to escape. I have a letter from my mother, written to her friends back in Germany in February 1939, just after she had arrived safely in the UK.

It is a letter of joy at having found an escape route so late, and a letter of sadness that so many others were not so lucky.

Leading to tragic outcomes

I turn the pages of my late cousin Zuzana Ruzickova’s memoir — “One Hundred Miracles” — to read of how her father could never believe that any harm could come to him and his family as he was such a fervent Czechoslovak patriot. He died in the Terezin concentration camp.

Zuzana describes her teenage years in that camp, in Auschwitz, in slave labor in Hamburg and, worst of all, in Bergen-Belsen. She describes her survival together with her mother and how almost all the members of her large family were assassinated by the Nazis.

Civilized values

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, and my learning of it during the New Years’ service, lead me to suggest that this coming election is, above all, a decision about human rights.

It is a contest of democracy against authoritarianism. Americans are choosing between a United States government that guarantees equal protection for all citizens under the law, irrespective of their color or religion, versus a United States government that promotes the opposite policies.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said: “Donald Trump wants to make America white again.”

Threatened reversal of social justice and civil rights

Many people may disagree with the parallel that I have drawn. However, I am convinced that as Jews in America today, as we prepare to vote, so we dare not forget that millions of Jews in Europe underestimated the threat in the 1930s.

Let me be blunt: If Trump wins this election, then so much that John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg achieved for civil rights and social justice will be reversed swiftly.

After all, the U.S. Justice Department is headed by an Attorney General who believes that the President should be above the law. Plus, we already have the most right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court in generations.

I fear that the United States is in danger of ignoring the lessons of a dark past. I trust many Americans will be inspired as they now go to vote by “RBG’s” values and her leadership.

In 2004, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Justice Ginsburg spoke at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and noted:

I was fortunate to be a child, a Jewish child, safely in America during the Holocaust. Our nation learned from Hitler’s racism and, in time, embarked on a mission to end law-sanctioned discrimination in our own country. In the aftermath of World War II, in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the burgeoning Women’s Rights movement of the 1970s, “We the People” expanded to include all of humankind, to embrace all the people of this great nation. Our motto, E Pluribus Unum, of many one, signals our appreciation that we are the richer for the religious, ethnic, and racial diversity of our citizens.

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together. Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. And sign up for our highlights email here.

The Supreme Court is finished: Republicans have killed it. Now it’s time to fight back

Call it what it already is: Donald Trump’s Supreme Court, and it’s as corrupt as he is, as cynical as he is, as outright stupid as he is, as racist as he is, as fascist as he is. The Republican Party killed it, and Trump is driving another nail in its coffin with the nomination of arch-conservative Catholic Amy Coney Barrett. RBG is gone, and look at who Barrett will join: Clarence Thomas? A clown. Samuel Alito? A rubber-stamp hack. Neil Gorsuch? A replacement bell-ringer for racism. Brett Kavanaugh? A weepy beer-swilling prep-monster. John Roberts? He wrote the brilliant line, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Tell that to George Floyd, Johnny boy.

But they know the job they’ve been put there to do. Trump as much as told them this week when he said, “I think it’s very important that we have nine justices. It’s better if you go before the election, because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam — the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court.”

There it is, folks, right out in the open. The “scam” Trump is referring to is voting for Joe Biden. He may look like he’s contesting the election on the campaign trail, screeching and hissing and sniffling at his rallies, thumbing out his endless apocalyptic fascist tweets, threatening to jail his opponents and throwing other chunks of red meat to his ravenous racist hordes. But don’t be fooled. The Republican Party has been counting on the courts to win their elections for decades. Trump’s real “base” is his five, and soon six, voters on the Supreme Court.

These cynical bastards have been playing the long game. They have been looking out there on their golf fairways, and they’ve seen who’s riding the mowers and trimming the bushes and grooming the greens. They have looked at the workers on the floors of their chicken factories, and manning the counters of their fast food empires, and they have walked past their own housekeepers and nannies who are watching over their own children. They are surrounded by brown people and Black people, even in their own homes and in their own businesses. They know what’s coming. The Republican Party is out of the closet as the White Party in a country that is inexorably turning browner and blacker and more Asian, peopled with more, not fewer, immigrants. How else do you account for the rise to power of Stephen Miller and Ken Cuccinelli and their ilk? They’re in government to do the bidding of their masters, to slow down the brown horde, to throw sand in the gears of a demographic machine that is slowly grinding their political future into electoral hamburger.

They know it’s getting harder and harder for them to win at the ballot box. Look at what happened to them in 2018. The last two Republican presidents lost the popular vote and yet attained the White House by way of narrow wins in the Electoral College. Why do you think they established the Federalist Society, the right-wing finishing school for judgeships that has provided the Republicans with virtually every one of its 300 appointments to the federal bench under McConnell and Trump? Why do you think they consciously defenestrated the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts’ gift to his Republican masters? Because they were looking for more fairness in the nation’s electoral process? Please. That decision threw the door open to the greatest racist fiddling with the electoral process since Jim Crow. It’s the reason we’re going into the election of 2020 with such uncertainty about who is eligible to vote and where, what the rules are for voting by mail, which polling places will be open, and whether or not the voting machines will even work. They don’t want voting. They want chaos.

They’ve turned the courts into a kennel for right-wing puppies, willing to sit there with floppy ears and their tongues out, panting and waiting to decide cases in favor of the billionaires who put them there. That’s why there is a cottage industry of right-wing legal groups like Judicial Watch, Alliance Defending Freedom, Claremont Institute and the Center for Individual Rights, all of them funded by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions in right-wing money. They make no bones about the fact that their job is to go out looking for plaintiffs to sue on behalf of big business and right-wing political interests to overturn laws they don’t like. They have been behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act and every anti-abortion lawsuit ever filed, not to mention suits against immigrant rights, civil rights, LGBT rights — you name it. And waiting in federal courthouses all over the country are Trump and Mitch McConnell’s judicial poodles.

Trump and McConnell and the rest of them have packed the Supreme Court and every level of federal bench beneath it with unqualified goofs and loons and dominionists and members of religious secret societies and misogynists and drooling, ignorant losers. Hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee over the last three years have been overwhelmed by inexperienced hacks who couldn’t answer simple questions from Democratic senators that pointed straight to their lack of qualifications for the federal bench. Every one of them was approved on party-line votes. The amazing thing is that even with all of his goofs on the court, whenever he sees a verdict or judge’s sentence he doesn’t like, he issues a pardon, commutes a sentence, or sics his chief attack dog, William Barr, on it.

You don’t need to hear from me about the travesty of McConnell’s treatment of the Merrick Garland nomination, and I’m so tired of typing the word “hypocrisy” I’ve got carpal-tunnel syndrome. Suffice to say the Republican Party has trashed political norms, broken promises, lied, cheated and stolen to get control of the judicial branch of government. They have turned the federal courts into an outpost of their party, and like their party, they want it all white, or nearly so. Eighty-five percent of Trump’s appointments have been white.

We’re at a point in our political history as a nation where the only outrage left to commit in pursuit of winning at all costs by the Republican Party is murder. With Trump’s outright worship of Putin visible on a daily basis, and his celebration of violence against protesters and journalists at his rallies, we don’t have long to wait.

All you have to do is recall any individual 60 seconds of the hearing to confirm their last nominee for the Supreme Court, Squi’s best friend Brett Kavanaugh, to know that the Republican Party has engaged in a scorched-earth strategy when it comes to the federal judiciary.

It’s time for Democrats to grab a proverbial can of gasoline and a pack of matches. McConnell and Trump want to pack the courts with obedient little Republican replicants? OK, let’s put them to work. The Constitution won’t allow the Congress to cut the pay of judges, but a Democratic House and Senate and a Democrat in the White House can reduce the pay of everyone else on the federal payroll in a courthouse. Most federal district court judges have one or two clerks. How about this: How about zero money for zero clerks? Let Trump’s 300 judges do some work for a change. Same thing for the Supreme Court. Each justice currently has four clerks. How does providing pay for one clerk sound? And how about that Supreme Court gym? Close it. Write some rules constraining the justices’ ability to accept gifts like invitations to private golf clubs and lunches at country clubs, invitations to give speeches or to accept rides on private jets. Supreme Court justices make $255,300 a year, but they live the lifestyles of corporate CEOs who make millions. Make them live within their means.

But just because we’re nice, let’s give them less work to do. Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, enumerating the powers of the judiciary, contains this little gem: “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” That gives the Congress the power to limit which laws are subject to judicial review, and “under such regulations,” how they are reviewed. I personally see a lot of opportunity for congressional meddling in the powers of the judiciary — as in, stripping away its powers.

Here’s the fallacy of the Republican Party’s strategy of converting the courts into a political battleground. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court and every other court depends on its decisions being respected by the Congress, the president and the people. Let’s try withholding our respect for a change.

Presidential campaigns take flight in the age of the coronavirus

The coronavirus pandemic has reshaped the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, limiting the number of rallies and in-person appearances of the candidates.

When candidates do venture out, a familiar form of campaign transportation, the campaign bus, is likely to remain grounded, as tight quarters make social distancing nearly impossible.

Until recently, candidates have relied primarily on social media to reach voters. But this medium and campaigning from home — or from your front porch, as Warren Harding did in 1920 at the end of another pandemic — cannot sufficiently substitute for in-person contact with voters.

Aircraft have played a role in U.S. presidential campaigns for decades. As an aviation historian attentive to the evolution of the general aviation sector, I think the pandemic has increased their importance in 2020, forcing candidates to make more strategic use of aircraft as the quickest and safest way to campaign.

Campaigns take flight

The use of airplanes in presidential campaigns has evolved from something so daring — even death-defying — that it made headlines, to a convenient, necessary tool.

Today it’s the safest way for candidates to travel — not simply because of aviation’s safety record but due to the dangers candidates face amid the pandemic.

With the Great Depression hanging over the 1932 presidential election, New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt believed the country would respond to bold leadership. His campaign hatched a plan to break with protocol and accept the Democratic presidential nomination in person — and in dramatic fashion.

Working with American Airways, Roosevelt’s secretary, Guernsey Cross, arranged to charter a Ford Tri-Motor, a standard commercial aircraft of the early 1930s, to fly the governor from Albany to Chicago. During a year when only 474,000 Americans traveled via commercial aircraft, the flight captured media attention.

The plane took off at about 8:30 a.m. on July 2, 1932, and after stops in Buffalo and Cleveland arrived in Chicago at 4:30 p.m., two hours behind schedule due to bad weather. Roosevelt used the time to work on his speech. That evening he accepted the nomination in person and promised Americans a “new deal.”

Roosevelt’s flight, however, did not immediately lead to more presidential air travel. Although First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt would use aircraft extensively, air travel was considered too risky for the president. FDR would not fly as president until 1943, when he used a military aircraft to travel to the Casablanca Conference in Morocco, to attend a crucial strategy meeting with Winston Churchill.

Private planes gain prominence, come under fire

Presidential air travel was well established when, during the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy became the first candidate to use his own private aircraft — a Convair CV-240 — to campaign.

It’s probably an exaggeration to argue that the plane — dubbed “Caroline” for his young daughter — provided Kennedy with his margin of victory in the hotly contested race, as claimed by The Smithsonian.

But it did allow Kennedy to travel more than 225,000 miles and campaign more efficiently. And since then, presidential candidates have made extensive use of private aircraft during their campaigns. Most campaign aircraft are chartered or owned by the campaign.

There was nothing particularly controversial about campaigning with private aircraft until the 2008 financial crisis. As the nation plunged into the Great Recession, automobile industry CEOs came under fire for using corporate aircraft to fly to Washington, D.C. for congressional hearings focused on the huge bailout packages the industry had received from the government. Intense public backlash led to a drastic market downtown for corporate jets. That backlash might explain Sen. Barack Obama’s 2008 Whistle-Stop campaign train tour, where he chose an historic mode of presidential transportation over the newly controversial one.

By 2012, however, memories of the 2008 controversy had faded and candidates again used private jets for campaign travel. Mitt Romney leased a 1990 MD-83, while his running mate, Paul Ryan, utilized a 1970 DC-9-32. Both aircraft, bearing the slogan “Believe in America,” debuted at a campaign rally in Lakeland, Florida.

But perhaps the most visible use of a private aircraft in a presidential campaign came with Donald Trump’s use of his own Boeing 757 in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump used the plane, emblazoned with his name, as a backdrop at campaign rallies. The plane, thus, not only allowed him to travel easily and extensively, but it also helped him promote his personal Trump brand at every campaign stop.

Safety during the pandemic

Though commercial aviation has witnessed a small recovery since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, private aircraft have reemerged as the safest way to travel. They permit greater control over passengers and make social distancing easier. Both Air Force One and private aircraft have featured prominently in the 2020 presidential election.

Both candidates are in their seventies and at greater risk from infection. The Secret Service will continue to take precautions to keep President Trump safe on Air Force One. And Biden’s campaign can more easily enforce health guidelines on a private plane, especially protocols on masks and social distancing. Although the Biden campaign has decided against leasing a dedicated campaign plane, when necessary — such as for his recent trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin — Biden can and undoubtedly will make use of private aircraft.

The 2020 presidential election began amid stay-at-home orders, with President Trump and Joe Biden largely confined during the first few months. As Trump and Biden seek to get their messages out in the final weeks of the campaign, both will use aircraft when necessary and in what they determine to be the best interests of their respective races for the White House.

Janet Bednarek, Professor of History, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Psychologist Stephen Soldz: With Trump’s coup threat, America now faces a “defining crisis”

A prominent psychologist who has sounded the alarm of the danger posed by President Trump’s administration for years warns that Americans should take seriously threats of violence by Trump’s supporters or risk being unprepared for a defining crisis.

Dr. Stephen Soldz, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Massachusetts and a professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, told Salon that he was “surprised” by the degree to which the Republican Party has become an “overtly anti-democratic party” under Trump and said that “propaganda” outlets like Fox News help prop up his presidency by feeding his supporters’ “illusions.”

Soldz, who has led efforts to end the use of torture by the U.S. government and to prevent psychologists from participating in torture and similar abuses, also warned that Americans should take heed of the authoritarian threats of a “coup” by Trump associates like Roger Stone.

Soldz, who is the former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, previously joined dozens of other mental health professionals to warn of the dangers posed by the president’s mental health in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a book edited by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee.

Soldz spoke to Salon about Trump’s “authoritarian” tendencies and mental health professionals’ responsibility to speak out ahead of the election.

Why did you decide to speak out about Trump, particularly after the American Psychiatric Association warned mental health professionals to avoid publicly discussing the president’s mental health?

Because I strongly believe that mental health professionals should speak about important social issues. That we have this dual role: We are members of the public and we’re relevant as mental health professionals. So I found the American Psychiatric Association’s attempt to silence this discussion to be very disturbing, and also felt that when we have a situation where there’s so much danger to the public, any attempt to silence or reduce discussion is extremely dangerous.

I’m a psychologist. The American Psychological Association issued an internal statement, which was somewhat weaker, and then basically let the whole issue drop. I’ve been very careful. I don’t diagnose Trump. I say that there may be some issues that should be considered. I don’t see how that’s problematic in the slightest.

There’s a duplicity on the part of the American Psychiatric Association because a number of their members have participated in intelligence agencies profiling foreign leaders, say, Saddam Hussein, including at times, I believe, diagnoses. And they never spoke out on that. So unless you’re going to say that American presidents are uniquely exempt from what everyone else in the world is subject to, there’s a deep hypocrisy there.

What were some of your biggest concerns before Trump took office or early in his presidency, and have those changed over the nearly four years that he’s been in office?

Well, he’s obviously turned out to be much worse than we anticipated, but I mean, not enormously. I will say one thing is that since I don’t watch TV, when he first ran, I had very little sense of who Trump was. I mean, I don’t pay much attention to celebrities. So all I knew was he was some idiot celebrity on TV. But as you sort of heard him and realized that his campaign was founded on racism at its core and trying to divide people and attack people, yeah, it was very disturbing.

There was some hope — I didn’t believe it — but I thought there was some possibility that the accounts that he would temper some of it when he got into office could be true, and they certainly have not been true. So, if anything, the concerns are far greater now, as I openly call him a fascist. I believe his instincts are totally anti-democratic, and sort of a classical fascism of combining authoritarian anti-democracy with populist rhetoric, and moving people to oppose democracy.

Given your efforts in fighting abusive tactics by the government, what was your reaction to the administration’s crackdown on protests this year in places like Washington, D.C., and Portland? There was a report earlier this month that the administration considered using a heat ray against protesters, which makes people feel as if their skin is on fire.

Well, I have a long history of activism so I was generally with the protesters. I support nonviolent activism. So the crackdowns, I was very disturbed by. On the other hand, I will say there’s a bit of lack of history in people. The federal government and local government have a long history of suppressing protest movements. It’s been done throughout history. A lot of what we’ve seen is not that atypical of what has been done by Republican and Democratic administrations throughout our history. So there was a bit of, “This is unique, it’s never happened before,” that I thought was a bit silly. We didn’t have, for example, people being gunned down by police, but we did have repeated attacks, including attacks by police and others, in parts of the country.

Certainly, the heat ray is a new thing. Along with that was the report that they brought a lot of ammunition, 7,000 rounds of ammunition into the city. And we don’t know what they were thinking about doing with that. So that is deeply concerning. Repression is what governments, unfortunately, do to protest. I mean, remember a lot of the protests were attacked by police who work for Democratic mayors. And I find that deeply disturbing. So it’s not unique to Trump. Certainly he has stirred up the concerns about right-wing militants potentially attacking and making matters much worse.

Are you surprised by how much longtime Republican officials like Attorney General Bill Barr, and even nonpartisan health officials like CDC head Robert Redfield or FDA chief Stephen Hahn, have embraced and enabled his actions?

I’m surprised at the degree to which the Republican Party has become an overtly anti-democratic party. But it’s not just Trump. I mean, it’s the actions that they’ve taken with the radical gerrymandering in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, the attempts to remove powers from Democratic governors. The entire party seems committed to basically abolishing democracy and establishing a form of one-party authoritarian rule.

Whether they’ll get away with it remains to be seen, but there don’t seem to be many people [pushing back]. Mitt Romney seems to be virtually the only one who seems to have qualms about it who’s in office. I mean, one of the things that’s happened is that Trump has been amazingly successful, like no other administration I can think of, at suppressing intra-party criticism, because he has riled up and gotten the support of the Republican base. There’s traditionally been a sort of deal the Republicans have had where basically they run on racism and then they govern in the interests of the ultra-wealthy. Trump has taken that to its extreme. And I think, as we’ve seen, has made any dissent by elected Republican officials extremely unlikely in most cases.

I had not anticipated the extent to which that would be the case. But, on the other hand, I will say that in some ways, Trump is a continuation, for example, of the Bush administration. I think people forget how bad the Bush administration was. We had [former Bush adviser] Karl Rove talk about, “You believe in reality and we create reality.” Their attempts to get us into the Iraq war with what they knew was questionable intelligence, at best, about weapons of mass destruction. And their use of 9/11 to give large tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, etc. So in some sense Trump is an exacerbation of previous tendencies that were obviously there.

It seems like Trump’s base is pretty entrenched. No matter what he does he seems to keep around 40% support in the polls. Why do you think that is?

His support is probably fervent loyalty among hardcore supporters, probably only 20% of voters, and then another 20% or so, these are just estimates, are people who take the attitude of, “Well, I don’t really like how he talks, but he’s only one who’s for us.” I think that is the great question. In preliminary answers, I think there’s a profound alienation in our country in not just the 40% — it’s much broader than that — the sense that the government and the powerful don’t have our interests at heart. And he’s been able to voice that.

I mean, in somewhat an amazing way, authoritarian leaders elsewhere are also good at that. I also think that people experience it as liberating to have him say things that they don’t dare say. In psychoanalytic jargon, he sort of speaks the ego: “Beat that guy up.” He says things that people feel and feel ashamed of sometimes, or feel that they don’t dare say, that the politically correct climate won’t let them say. He says them, and I think it excites people. They identify with this person who can get away with breaking all the rules, the rules that they can’t break in their life. It also makes life much more exciting. And sometimes he is a TV personality still.

Do you think a lot of that support is driven by this backlash towards “political correctness”?

Well, I think some of it. A lot of it is a basic alienation that goes back at least to 2008 and the economic crisis, and the sense that the government bailed out the banks and left everyone else to suffer. Even though the economy has improved since then, I think that we’ve never recovered from that. That provides a basis for people’s other concerns, in the sense that they believe this guy who breaks all the rules will change things.

Most people don’t think very deeply about policy, unfortunately. They’re busy living their lives. And then there’s also the other factor that we have a propaganda television network, Maybe two, I don’t know how big the One America [News] Network is, but Fox News has basically been a propaganda network in which the big lie can be repeated over and over again. I mean, they spread, for example, this myth that only 9,000 have people died from COVID-19, and they repeat it over and over again. So people who watch believe it. So in a way that there’s never been before, that I’m aware of, there’s this total alternative world in which people can maintain their illusions.

What do you think the role of mental health professionals should be in highlighting the issues that you’ve discussed ahead of the election?

Well, I think, first of all, mental health professionals are members of the public. They have every right and every responsibility, like other members of the public, to speak out. But we also have knowledge and like other people with knowledge, we have a responsibility to try and use that knowledge. But we also have a responsibility to be careful.

I am not an advocate of people trying to diagnose Trump. I mean, one of the complexities with public personalities, which I think we have a better sense of now, but only somewhat, is that it’s very hard to know what’s real and what’s an act. Trump has some mixture of that. He’s a showman and he’s always been a showman. There does seem to be something else going on, and sometimes you have a feeling that he really gets confused, but I don’t believe there’s enough information to give a definitive diagnosis. So I don’t believe that that’s what we need to do, but we also have to use our expertise to try and answer that question you raised about why his support is so high, and try to use it in whatever way we can.

I will say I’m very concerned about all the signs that he’s not going to leave office willingly. I think that within less than two months, we’re going to have a defining crisis for the country, as to whether we’re going to be able to keep it a republic, as one founding father said. Because I don’t know what form it’s going to take, whether it’s going to be cheating with the election or refusing to leave office or fomenting civil unrest, but I don’t think he’s going to leave office. Maybe if there’s an absolute landslide, but every indication we have is he won’t, and that administration officials like Bill Barr and several others — [top HHS spokesman Michael] Caputo, for example, and Roger Stone — are calling for [Trump] to launch a coup if he loses. I think we should listen to them. When leaders talk about coups, or Trump talks about 12 years in office, we should listen. I’d rather take him seriously and be wrong, then not do so and be unprepared.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Outrage follows as Pentagon funnels millions meant for COVID supplies to private defense contractors

Instead of adhering to congressional intent by building up the nation’s inadequate supply of N95 masks and other equipment to combat the Covid-19 crisis, the Pentagon has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in appropriated taxpayer funds to private defense contractors for drone technology, jet engine parts, Army uniform material, body armor, and other purposes not directly related to the pandemic.

As the Washington Post reported Tuesday morning, the Department of Defense—headed by former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper—”began reshaping how it would award the money” just weeks after Congress in March approved a $1 billion fund under the Defense Production Act to help the nation “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.”

“The Trump administration has done little to limit the defense firms from accessing multiple bailout funds at once and is not requiring the companies to refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the awards,” the Post noted. “Some defense contractors were given the Pentagon money even though they had already dipped into another pot of bailout funds, the Paycheck Protection Program.”

As the U.S. still faces major shortages of testing supplies and N95 masks six months into the pandemic, the Post reported that the Pentagon has used congressionally approved funds to dish out $183 million to luxury carmaker Rolls-Royce and other companies to help “maintain the shipbuilding industry,” tens of millions for “drone and space surveillance technology,” and $80 million to “a Kansas aircraft parts business.”

A subsidiary of Rolls-Royce also received $22 million from the Pentagon “to upgrade a Mississippi plant,” according to the Post.

If you can’t get a COVID test or find an N95, it’s because these contractors stole from the American people to make faster jets and fancy uniforms. After all, Trump did say we were “at war.”https://t.co/a1wth7pvKV

— Emily Porter, M.D. (@dremilyportermd) September 22, 2020

Mandy Smithberger, a weapons industry analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, told the Post, “This is part and parcel of whether we have budget priorities that actually serve our public safety or whether we have a government that is captured by special interests.”

The Pentagon’s misuse of taxpayer funds aimed at addressing the Covid-19 pandemic has drawn a rebuke from the Democrat-controlled House Appropriations Committee, which characterized the Defense Department’s rewards to defense contractors as a clear violation of congressional intent.

“While the Department plans to execute a portion of that funding for personal protective equipment (PPE) as intended by Congress, most of the funds will be used to address the impact of Covid–19 on the [defense industrial base], which was not the original intent of the funds,” the committee said in a July report (pdf).

Pentagon officials insisted to the Post that the funds were allocated appropriately, citing the need to “protect key defense capabilities from the consequences of Covid,” but Slate’s Elliot Hannon argued the Defense Department’s generous taxpayer-funded gifts to private corporations amount to little more than “a colossal backdoor bailout for the defense industry.”

Pointing to the Pentagon’s handouts to Rolls-Royce and other major companies, Hannon wrote, “That doesn’t exactly sound like PPE.”

Why Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court would be a climate disaster

When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away a week ago, commentators were quick to lament the implications of her empty Supreme Court seat for abortion rights and gender equality. But there’s another concern: our overheating planet.

On Saturday, Trump is expected to nominate Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett for Ginsburg’s old spot. And some worry that a 6-3 conservative supermajority might mean that any policy to protect our planet from climate change will be struck down — before it even gets started.

To state the obvious, a SCOTUS with a 6-3 conservative majority is going to strike down federal climate legislation of any ambition. It will probably also undercut several precedents that support *current* environmental laws & regulations.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) September 21, 2020

“Environmentalists are facing a real minefield ahead,” said Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland. “I have just been so depressed.”

First, some facts: The Supreme Court can’t just go around striking down legislation and a president’s executive orders left and right, but the court can make it much more difficult to implement laws or limit greenhouse gas emissions — by interpreting law narrowly, refusing to defer to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, and otherwise restricting presidential and Congressional power. And now, with the potential for more conservative justices on the court than anytime in recent history, the odds that government actions survive Supreme Court scrutiny appear lower than ever.

Barrett is a staunch conservative and and popular on the religious right. Not much is known about her environmental record, but if she follows in the footsteps of Trump’s earlier appointments, she would join the conservative wing of the court in undermining existing environmental laws and blocking others.

Here are two ways a super-conservative court with Barrett could sideline climate progress. And one potential path to success.

No standing in court

One of the most important issues in environmental law is whether groups — cities, states, and even young children — have the right to sue the government to take action on climate change. To have “standing” to sue, plaintiffs have to be able to prove a) that they have suffered some sort of harm; b) that injury is traceable to the action (or inaction) of the defendant; and c) that the result of the lawsuit would somehow rectify the damage done.

That poses a few problems for taking on the giant, global problem of climate change, A court tilted so far to the right might say that since climate change affects everyone, and global CO2 emissions are hard to track and trace to particular defendants, a single state or city doesn’t have standing to sue. Moreover, since no single action can truly “solve” climate change, conservative justices could argue that any lawsuit wouldn’t rectify the harm caused — again, demolishing plaintiffs’ standing.

“I call it the Goldilocks theory of standing,” said Percival. “If the harms aren’t big enough, then you can’t sue; but if the harms are so big, then you can’t sue because it affects everyone!”

Some justices on the court, like John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, are already skeptical of whether groups have the right to sue the government over climate change. In Massachusetts v. EPA, a 2007 Supreme Court case in which 12 states and several cities called on the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, a 5-4 majority found that the plaintiffs did have standing — but only two of the justices in that majority are still serving on the court. Chief Justice John Roberts, currently the Court’s swing vote, wrote a scathing dissent, arguing that global warming was “harmful to humanity at large” and that EPA regulation of greenhouse gases was unlikely to make a dent in the problem.

If Barrett and other conservative justices follow in Roberts’ footsteps, the outcome could be catastrophic. “Litigation brought by states and by environmental groups is very important — for instance, in holding Trump’s feet to the fire,” said Michael Gerrard, a professor of law at Columbia University. If these groups don’t have the right to sue, then a hostile White House could gut more environmental laws and continue to ignore climate change — with nothing standing in its way.

Blocking executive action

Back in 2014, foiled by Congress in his attempts to pass a sweeping climate change law, President Barack Obama turned to the EPA. The agency proposed the Clean Power Plan, which would have cut greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s power plants by 30 percent in 15 years.

It should have worked: The EPA’s right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions had been confirmed in Massachusetts v. EPA. But the Clean Power Plan got held up in the courts, as over two dozen (mostly red) states sued to block it. The Supreme Court, in a highly unusual move, supported those states — halting the enforcement of the plan while the lawsuit worked its way through the courts, and effectively hamstringing the regulation until the end of President Obama’s term. (President Trump later replaced the rule entirely.)

A super-conservative court with Barrett on board would likely give any executive action to take on climate change similar treatment, ruling that large-scale regulations on greenhouse gas emissions is a step too far under the EPA’s authority. That could pose a huge problem for the Democrat’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who has promised to make the climate a centerpiece of his term if elected. Biden has pledged to get America’s electricity grid running purely on clean energy by 2035 — basically triple the ambition of Obama’s plan. If Democrats don’t take control of the Senate (a toss-up at the moment), he would have to try to muscle regulation through the EPA. And that probably wouldn’t end well.

It’s up to Congress

There’s at least one path to sweeping, Green New Deal-esque climate action. The best-case scenario for climate action starts with Congress actually passing a bill, Gerrard said. “Most of the litigation about climate change law that gets to the Supreme Court is on interpreting ambiguous statutes,” he said. But if Congress and the president adopt climate legislation — and leave little room for interpretation — that won’t leave much space for the Supreme Court to strike it down.

Even that comes with caveats. According to Percival there’s a growing movement among conservative justices for expanding what is known as the “non-delegation doctrine,” in which laws can be struck down if they seem to hand too much power to executive agencies. That means that if, say, Congress passes a law regulating greenhouse gas emissions — but leaves it up to the EPA to parse out some of the details — the court could quash it. “You could see the court basically striking down some major environmental statutes,” Percival said.

So if the Biden administration gets a clean energy law through Congress, it would have to be extremely detailed and avoid leaving too much for agencies to decide; otherwise, it likely wouldn’t survive a challenge that winds up in front of the Supreme Court.

Gerrard is still hopeful that, given the right conditions, legislation that passes the Senate and the House could hold up even under superconservative court scrutiny. “If the laws are clear and unambiguous and specific enough,” he said, “Congress ties the hands of the courts.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer pays tribute by doing 3 pushups in front of her casket

This week, one of the admirers who paid tribute to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Washington, D.C. was fitness expert Bryant Johnson. In front of her casket, Johnson got down on the floor and did three pushups — and there was a reason for those pushups: Johnson was Ginsburg’s personal trainer.

Ginsburg, who joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 under President Bill Clinton, was 87 when she died of cancer on Friday, September 18 after spending 27 years as a justice. Johnson’s pushups were in honor of her memory.

Bryant Johnson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer, does push-ups as Justice Ginsburg lies in state in the U.S. Capitol.

Full video: https://t.co/vri1sJcUV6 pic.twitter.com/C11uVFeQlQ

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 25, 2020

The man who did pushups in front of RBG’s casket was her trainer, your Capitol Hill pool is told.

— Emily Cochrane (@ESCochrane) September 25, 2020

Ginsburg was known for her workout routine, which she described in her 2017 book, “The RBG Workout: How She Stays Strong…And You Can Too!”

Here are some responses to Johnson’s affectionate tribute to Ginsburg:

We all said we would donate our hearts and lungs if we needed to, but we didn't really mean it.

That man kept her alive longer. Love him so much.

— Joe F Spaulding 🦉 (@beyond_process) September 25, 2020

Wow, q hermoso hombre, qué sentimientos de lealtad despertó ella en él..descanse en paz esa gran mujer

— Angelic (@lachicabonden3d) September 25, 2020

Lindsey Graham: We need a ninth Supreme Court justice, because “the courts will decide” the election

Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a Thursday appearance on “Fox & Friends” that the Supreme Court needs a ninth justice before the election, because the votes will be contested — and “the courts will decide” the winner.

“A four-to-four Supreme Court is not a good deal for America,” Graham said. “We need a nine-person Supreme Court. And people wonder about the peaceful transfer of power — I can assure you it will be peaceful. Now, we may have litigation about who won the election, but the court will decide. And, if the Republicans lose, we will accept that result. But we need a full court, and I think that’s possible before the election.”

With only weeks to go, Graham seemed to suggest that the upcoming election would not be decided by the votes of the people but rather the decisions of nine Supreme Court justices.

“If you believe ballots were improperly given to people, if you believe they were improperly counted, you have a legal process. This is why we need a nine-member Supreme Court,” he said. “We have the right in this country to challenge the election in the court. But here is what’s going to happen: No matter who challenges the results of the election, eventually the Supreme Court is likely to hear that challenge. And, when they rule, that is the end of it.”

Graham pointed to former Vice President Al Gore’s concession after the Supreme Court weighed in on the 2000 election against George W. Bush as the example to follow.

“I want the American people to know that this will be a contest. There is a lot of shady things going on, but the courts will hear all of our complaints,” Graham said. “The courts will decide, and we will accept the court’s decision — Republican and Democrat.”

“I promise you as a Republican,” the senator continued, “if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Joe Biden, I will accept that result.”

Graham added that his “hope” was for Trump to have “such an overwhelming victory, we don’t have to worry about the courts.”

Four years ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blocked confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama’s pick to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Graham said if the same scenario were repeated in 2020 with a Republican president, he would not want that nominee to go through before the election.

“I want you to use my words against me,” he said at the time. “If there’s a Republican president in 2016, and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say, ‘Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

Graham was asked later Thursday by CNN about Democratic concerns that Republicans were rushing a confirmation ahead of the election in order to influence the outcome of a court challenge to the results. He only said, “We need a full court.”

twitter.com/mkraju/status/1309143285718487041

The eight justices on the bench today already reflect a 5-3 conservative majority. If Trump’s nominee goes through, and a challenge to the election lands in the Supreme Court, the president will have appointed one-third of the justices potentially deciding the result of his own election.

Graham has also used his recent media appearances about confirmation hearings to complain that he is “getting killed financially” by Democratic rival Jaime Harrison. This week, top election expert Larry Sabato nudged that race closer towards Harrison.

Tucker Carlson: “Every story” about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor has “at its core” been “a lie”

In the latest in a series of ongoing race-baiting screeds, Fox News host Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson claimed to his viewers Thursday evening that “every story” about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake had “at its core” been a lie.”

“It’s hard to think clearly when things are on fire,” Carlson began.

“If you wanted to keep the public from thinking clearly about what you plan to do with their country, you might riot and no one would notice that you’re lying,” he added. “They definitely have been lying. Every story we’ve been told for the past three months has been, at its core, a lie. All of them — from the first day.”

Earlier that day, a Trump-appointed federal judge in New York issued a verdict absolving Carlson of wrongdoing in a defamation case after Fox News admitted that its star host is not always accurate when he discusses the news on TV.

The “general tenor of [Carlson’s] show should then inform a viewer that he is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary,'” Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil wrote. “Whether the court frames Mr. Carlson’s statements as ‘exaggeration,’ ‘non-literal commentary’ or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same — the statements are not actionable.'”

Carlson went on to falsely deconstruct the deaths of Floyd and Taylor at the hands of police, as well as the shooting of Blake.

“‘George Floyd was executed by racist cops on the street.’ That’s what they told us. That’s what everyone believed. Yet, when the autopsy became public, it showed that George Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his system among other drugs,” Carlson said. “Floyd said he couldn’t breathe long before police landed on him as he was, in fact, sitting untouched in the back of a patrol car. But the mob wasn’t interested in hearing those details. They torched Minneapolis.”

Two autopsy reports ruled Floyd’s death a “homicide” — an independent report listed his cause of death as asphyxiation; an official coroner report listed his cause of death as cardiac arrest. Minnesota authorities have charged the police officer who was captured on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for several minutes with second-degree murder. Three other officers who were on the scene face charges of accessory to murder.

“In Kenosha,” Carlson continued, “Democrats told us that bloodthirsty cops just walked up and shot Jacob Blake as he was trying to break up a fight between two women.” (Carlson did not state which “Democrats” had made the alleged claim.)

“It was horrifying, but that’s not what happened,” the Fox News host added. “Police arrived there after a woman called 911 to say Blake was at her home in violation of a restraining order. That woman had previously accused Blake of sexual assault. Blake fought with the responding officers. At first, cops tried non-lethal force to subdue him. They tased Blake, and that didn’t work. When they saw him reach for a knife, they shot him.”

Carlson elides the portion of the narrative where officers followed Blake to his car after tasing him. As Blake opened the door and leaned inside, he was shot in the back by police at point blank range in front of three of his children, according to bystander video and statements from his family.

“What else were they supposed to do exactly? But Kamala Harris wasn’t interested in knowing what actually happened,” Carlson said. “She declared that she was proud of Jacob Blake, and then her voters burned Kenosha.” (Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, met with Blake’s family in Wisconsin.)

Two protesters were shot and killed in Kenosha, Wis., in the aftermath of Blake’s death. Authorities subsequently charged a 17-year-old Trump supporter and law enforcement advocate with first-degree murder. President Donald Trump and a number of his right-wing backers justified the shootings as self-defense. Carlson was among those who defended the teen vigilante:

So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? Everyone could see what was happening in Kenosha. It was getting crazier by the hour.

After those remarks, members of the public and the media called on Fox News to fire Carlson, with one journalist calling the screed “the closest thing I think I’ve ever seen to pure, unfiltered fascism in American public life. Going out to the largest cable news audience ever. Fox News hosts are able to do this because the Murdochs want them to.”

On Thursday, Carlson next turned to Taylor, who was killed by police serving a warrant for her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover at her home. Nationwide protests erupted this week after no charges were filed against any of the three officers who fired their weapons.

“Tonight, the mob is in Louisville to protest the death of Breonna Taylor,” Carlson said. “News organizations told us that Taylor was in bed when police shot her, but she wasn’t. She was in her hallway.”

Taylor had, in fact, been in her bed with her boyfriend when police pounded on her door. She later left the room and entered a hallway, where she was shot.

“They told us that Taylor had nothing to do with her drug dealing ex-boyfriend, who police were investigating,” Carlson said. “That’s why they were there. In fact, intercepted jailhouse communications suggest that Taylor was warehousing that man’s drug money.”

Glover, the ex-boyfriend, was arrested on Aug. 27 in possession of drugs. Glover told The Courier Journal that Taylor, an EMT and emergency room technician, was not involved in selling drugs.

“The police are trying to make it out to be my fault . . . making it look like I brought this to Breonna’s door,” he said.

Carlson went on:

They told us that police shot first, and that’s not true. Taylor’s boyfriend shot a cop first. Then they told us over and over again that police surprised Taylor in the middle of the night. They barged into her apartment in a so-called no-knock raid. Then, yesterday, the attorney general of Kentucky exposed that as yet another lie. The police did, in fact, knock on Taylor’s door. They identified themselves as police. There’s a witness to it, but it didn’t matter. They kept lying to us.

Kamala Harris issued a statement attacking “no-knock” raids. Amazingly, so did Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican. Tim Scott should know better.

In response to the shooting, Louisville banned the use of “no-knock” warrants.

The department’s original “no-knock” warrant was changed just before the raid to “knock and announce,” meaning police had to identify themselves at the door. The Louisville officers have claimed that they announced themselves, but Walker has claimed that he did not hear them.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” he said on a recorded 911 call. “Someone kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.”

“A grand jury did know better,” Carlson continued. “The jurors considered all of the available evidence in the Breonna Taylor case, and yesterday, they declined to charge the officers with murder. There wasn’t any evidence that a murder took place. That is how our system is supposed to work. We don’t indict the innocents.”

The error-riddled police incident report listed Taylor’s injuries as “none,” even though she died of multiple gunshot wounds.

You can watch the video below via Media Matters:

Ted Cruz blocks a U.S. Senate resolution to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg

WASHINGTON — A ceremonial resolution honoring the life of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg failed in the Senate on Tuesday after U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz objected to language his Democratic counterparts added noting her dying wish that a successor not be chosen until after the presidential inauguration early next year.

The war of words on the Senate floor is likely a preamble to a coming brawl to replace Ginsburg. The liberal justice died Friday, leaving a vacancy that, if filled by a conservative, could have sweeping ramifications on several American policies and civil liberties.

“Unfortunately, the Democratic leader has put forth an amendment to turn that bipartisan resolution into a partisan resolution,” Cruz said in his floor remarks, referring to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer.

“Specifically, the Democratic leader wants to add a statement that Justice Ginsburg’s position should not be filled until a new president is installed, purportedly based on a comment Justice Ginsburg made to family members shortly before she passed.

“That, of course, is not the standard,” he added. “Under the Constitution, members of the judiciary do not appoint their own successors.”

Schumer took to the floor immediately after Cruz spoke, stating that he believed “Justice Ginsburg would easily see through the legal sophistry” of Cruz’s argument. He said Cruz turned the late justice’s “dying words” against her, which Schumer said is “so, so beneath the dignity of this body. I do not modify.”

Cruz then objected to the resolution, and it did not pass.

Capitol Hill observers are bracing for the nastiest fight in at least a generation in the Senate over Ginsburg’s successor. President Donald Trump is expected to announce his nominee late this week, and Cruz is urging his colleagues to confirm that person before the November election.

This is a change in sentiment from four years ago. When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Cruz and other Republicans successfully blocked then-President Barack Obama’s appointee, Judge Merrick Garland, from serving on the court. They argued at the time that it is inappropriate for a Supreme Court nomination to move forward so close to a presidential election.

The Houston Chronicle reported on the exchange earlier Tuesday.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Federal judge delivers a blow to AG Barr in the battle against former FBI deputy director McCabe

U.S. Attorney General William Barr has insisted that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now a CNN contributor, was not fired for political reasons, but McCabe has maintained that the firing was, in fact, politically motivated. And a federal judge has ruled that McCabe’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice can continue.

McCabe, in the lawsuit, has argued that his constitutional rights were violated when, in 2018, he was fired as deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Barr filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but this week, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss denied Barr’s request — allowing McCabe’s lawsuit to proceed. And Moss, a Barack Obama appointee, set a schedule for discovery.

In civil and criminal cases, “discovery” is the process in which opposing sides must share evidence. So, under discovery rules, Barr has a right to know what evidence McCabe is presenting, and McCabe and his attorneys have a right to know what evidence Barr is presenting.

Reporter Matt Naham, in Law & Crime, explains, “McCabe, the judge noted, argued he was demoted as deputy director of the FBI in January 2018 and then ‘fired from his career civil service position in March 2018 — on the night of his planned retirement.’ McCabe maintained that this decision was ‘based on his perceived political affiliation, decision not to vote for then-candidate (Donald) Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and unwillingness to pledge his personal loyalty to President Trump’ — a violation of his First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights.”

In his lawsuit, McCabe has also argued that Trump was out of line when he railed against him on Twitter. And Moss, in his ruling, said that discovery was needed in order to determine whether or not former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was under political pressure from Trump to act against McCabe in 2018.

Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

Remember this, Andrew McCabe didn’t go to the bathroom without the approval of Leakin’ James Comey!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2019

According to Naham, the DOJ has “argued, among other things, that McCabe was not fired for political reasons, but because he lied under oath when he said he didn’t authorize and didn’t know who authorized the disclosure of the Clinton Foundation investigation to the press.”

In FX’s “Wilderness of Error,” Errol Morris revisits a 50-year-old murder that’s still controversial

The story of Jeffrey MacDonald has been told over and over again since he was convicted of killing his family 50 years ago. The Green Beret Army Surgeon claimed that a group of four “hippie” intruders broke into his home and murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters, but he was ultimately sent to prison for three life sentences for their killings.

For years, there were a number of competing narratives that called into question both MacDonald’s guilt and innocence — including documentarian Errol Morris’ bestselling novel “A Wilderness of Error.”

That book is now being brought to the small screen by FX as a five-part true crime series that is as much about how the facts of the case have been presented as the crime itself. Jason Blum, the founder and CEO of the eponymous Blumhouse Productions, produced the series, alongside “The Jinx” director Marc Smerling.

Blum spoke with Salon about wanting to collaborate with Smerling, what it was like to see Errol Morris in front of the camera, and how this series consciously interrogates the concept of “fake news.”

This is a case that has captured the attention of a lot of high-profile journalists and investigators — Joe McGinnis, Janet Malcolm, Errol Morris, obviously — why do you think that is?

I’m sad to say because of the gruesome nature of it, because it’s so unexpected. And because there are very few cases — ever — where there is such a clear path to guilt and such a clear path to innocence. Time has not made that path come into focus anymore and that is very, very unusual.

So, I think for the modern viewer who is potentially fresh to the case, MacDonald’s claims that he was awoken by four “hippie” intruders definitely sounds a little suspect, but could you talk a little bit about the societal view of the counterculture at the time?

So, I think it was 1970 when it took place and “hippies” were definitely the enemy to a lot of people and people were threatened by them. They were threatened by the counterculture and threatened by this new sexual revolution and all these things that were thought to be the cousin of communism. When people are threatened by something, they demonize it. And him saying that was a direct result of that. Now it may have been [true], we don’t know, but the statement caught fire because a lot of the country was threatened and scared of hippies.

You were the one who slipped the book “A Wilderness of Error” to director Marc Smerling. Did you know at that point you would want to collaborate with him on this project?

You know, I was very eager to collaborate with him after “The Jinx,” His work on “The Jinx” was extraordinary. I ran a bunch of things by him just hoping he would bite on something. And he did. It was a long time ago. It took a long time to get this done the proper way, but I was lucky enough that “Wilderness of Error” was the one that caught his attention.

It was initially given to me by [British producers] Michael Jackson and Rachael Horovitz. Rachael and I have been friends for 30 years and I loved it and said, “Let’s do it with them.” Then I got it to Marc, but it wasn’t the first thing I gave him. I tried a bunch of different things. He said no to everything, and then finally said “yes” to this book.

Not to have you speak on his behalf, but did you have discussions about what about this story so appealed to him?

My guess is what I spoke about before — the mysteriousness of it and the sustained mystery of it over so many years. I think he was intrigued by the same thing that Errol was intrigued by, and Errol only added to this, which is the way in which public opinion was so swayed by narratives in the movie, in the book, in articles. Public opinion really turned 180-degrees several times. I think that was something Marc was interested in exploring, as well.

Speaking of Errol Morris, it was so interesting for me to see him in front of the camera from the jump. Did you and Marc know from the beginning that you wanted him to serve as a character? If so, how did that help shape the series?

Initially, no. I met with Errol about it and the first question I asked was, “Why don’t you do this?” I mean, he’s a great documentary filmmaker, especially with “Thin Blue Line.” He’s done amazing documentaries about crime and he kind of indicated to me that he had done a book about it and gotten it out of his system. For whatever reason, he never saw it — people weren’t really doing multi-parts when he wrote the book, but it also seemed too big for a movie.

So, he wrote his book and felt like he had told his story. He was obviously a brilliant, brilliant fellow and an incredibly talented artist and very articulate about the case. So once Marc was interested, I said, “Marc, you’ve got to talk to Errol about this because he’s got a lot more information than what was put in the book.” Marc began talking to Errol, and I think it was Marc’s idea because Errol was so fascinating on the topic.

So true crime as a genre has changed a lot since the MacDonald case first transpired and since “Wilderness of Error,” the book, was first released. Who do you think the audience for this story is now and what do you hope they learn from it?

I think the audience for true crime tends to skew a little more female and perhaps a little older, and I don’t think this will be any different than the general norms for true crime. What I hope people take away is the old saying: consider the source. In a funny way, it’s like another take on fake news, right? It’s another take on how the way in which a story is presented — even if you use the facts — but the way you present the facts can very much change public opinion.

I think ultimately that is what this documentary is about, as much as it’s about the actual events that took place. I think there’ll be a new audience who has never heard about this crime, never heard of anything to do with it, and they’ll learn about how the story of that crime was told over the years by different people in different forms: books, articles, movies, documentaries. And how each time the story is told, public opinion has shifted a certain degree. My guess is it’ll shift again after this documentary. That’s kind of the point, that’s the message we’re trying to get across.

“A Wilderness of Error” premieres Friday, Sept. 25 at 8 p.m. on FX, with new episodes on Hulu on FX the following day.

Which of Trump’s Supreme Court choices might be most reliably conservative?

As President Donald Trump looks to fill the Supreme Court seat left open by the death of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he and other Republicans want to secure a reliable conservative majority on the nation’s highest court for many years to come.

They have tried to do this in the past, but it hasn’t worked out, because Republicans have repeatedly nominated justices who have drifted to the left after they were confirmed.

My analysis of the judicial records of 26 people currently serving as judges on Trump’s list of proposed nominees suggests that this time will be different.

What predicts ideological drift

Psychologists have devised a way to quantify a person’s flexibility and tendency to change, and previous political science research has shown that this type of measurement can accurately predict a justice’s future ideological shift on the Supreme Court.

In short, this predictive relationship exists because some people are more rigid in their thinking and find it hard to adjust their worldviews, whereas other people have more flexible outlooks and are more open to revision.

To measure this among the potential nominees, I collected every concurring and dissenting opinion written by the 26 people on Trump’s list who are currently serving as an appeals court judge or a state supreme court justice. Then I used a research-based piece of software to evaluate the language the judges used in these 1,723 opinions – over 3 million words.

Finally, following the methodology of political scientists Ryan J. Owens and Justin Wedeking, I translated those opinions’ use of language into a score of each nominee’s psychological flexibility, which political psychologists call their “cognitive consistency.”

Trump’s choices’ cognitive consistencies

For comparison, I plotted these scores alongside the known prenomination scores for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas and retired Associate Justice David Souter. Thomas is widely regarded as being the most ideologically rigid person on the current court. Souter, by contrast, was originally hailed as a “home run for conservatives” when he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, but he later drifted left and became a dependable liberal vote instead.

Trump’s prospective nominees are all more likely to drift than Thomas, but less likely than Souter, suggesting that they will all be reliably conservative.

The person least likely to drift is Barbara Lagoa. The 52-year-old Cuban American now serves on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and is reportedly one of Trump’s front-runners. Based on this analysis, her decisions so far indicate that she has a relatively rigid thought process that would not yield to opposing arguments.

William H. Pryor Jr. is the 58-year-old chief judge of the 11th Circuit. His prior decisions indicate he would be the potential nominee most open to change in the future, no matter his conservative bona fides now.

Why drift may not matter

Regardless of whom Trump picks, Republicans can afford some drift by their nominee.

To show why, I plotted the maximum potential drift over the next 10 years for each potential nominee whose current ideological position can be estimated based on who appointed them to the U.S. Courts of Appeals.

Even assuming that Trump’s nominee drifts only leftward and never rightward, all but one of Trump’s possible picks is likely to remain more conservative than the moderate Chief Justice John Roberts, ensuring the Republicans maintain at least a 5-4 majority no matter what.

This could guarantee additional support for conservative outcomes, even if certain conservative judges sometimes decide to flip sides – like Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, who infuriated Republicans with a June vote to uphold employment protections for gay and transgender workers. A new appointee from Trump’s list will likely shift the court’s balance so much further to the right that one justice flipping will have much less of an effect on any case’s outcome.

Matthew Dahl, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Whither the middle class? Biden, Trump have wildly different ideas about what “middle class” means

One of the main issues in this fall’s presidential election will be how best to revive the middle class, which made up 60% of households in 1971 (as measured by income) but only around half today. That already daunting challenge has become even greater due to the economic turmoil brought by the pandemic.

When Donald Trump ran in 2016, he made clear that his preferred route to increasing the size, prosperity and security of the middle class was essentially a “back-to-the-future” route. Trump’s catchphrase, “Make America Great Again,” means make the country like it was when he was growing up, during the twenty-five years after World War II. At that time, the middle class was dominant at home, middle-class men were dominant seemingly everywhere, and the country was dominant abroad.

Trump’s nostalgia for that period (he was born in 1946, the first year of the baby boom) does not, however, stem from having been a member of the rising middle class. His parents were affluent, drove Cadillacs, and sent him to private schools. Trump’s enthusiasm for that time seems to be more of a result of his father, Fred, having greatly expanded the family construction business that he had created from scratch in the 1920s by constructing apartment buildings for the families of returning World War II veterans in places like Queens, where the Trumps lived. That virtually all of those tenants (and most of the construction crews) were white and native-born doesn’t seem to have bothered Trump’s father or his son. As manufacturing jobs left the city for elsewhere, immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America grew, and support for ending discrimination based on race and gender did, too, the Trumps — like some of the other residents of Queens — tended to resent and resist those changes.

Trump’s seemingly genuine desire to go back to that earlier kind of America has contributed to his fondness for raising barriers to trade and immigration (which were high when he was growing up), as well as his endless pledges to revive basic manufacturing and coal-fired power plants (despite the environmental drawbacks), and the Fifties’ family model. But conditions in the country have changed so much since then as to make recreating that life just as it was neither possible – because it would arouse so much resistance – nor desirable, in part because the problems that system created ultimately undermined the process of middle-class expansion.

Joe Biden is of the same generation as Donald Trump, but Biden’s approach to reviving the middle class isn’t nearly so backward-looking. Biden, who was born in 1942, rose with the middle class, of which he was a part, over the first thirty years of his life. And then, just as the middle class began to sink, he narrowly won election to high public office, the U.S. Senate, where his colleagues soon dubbed him “middle-class Joe,” a moniker that stuck as ever fewer senators came to fit that description. Biden’s sense of himself has remained rooted in the middle class even as it has steadily declined and his own personal fortunes improved. But the Amtrak-riding, unpretentious Biden, whose biggest single financial asset is his one house (one of the hallmarks of middle-class status), was never in any of his leadership positions able to help reverse the overall trend of middle-class decline, and had to settle for working on ways to mitigate some of its worst effects.

What Biden seems to be after now is one more chance, this time as President, to help turn things around for the middle class, but not in the way Trump wants to. Biden is more attuned to the drawbacks of the post-World-War-II system such as racial segregation, gender-based discrimination, and overly militaristic foreign policies, and how they ultimately combined to destabilize it. He appears to be seeking an updated and more inclusive version of the middle-class life that flourished when he was young, which seems to be a more viable way forward than Trump’s because this new and improved vision of a predominantly middle-class America would arouse much less resistance and would likely prove much more durable.

But if Trump’s vision seems unworkable because the world he wants to recreate cannot come back just as it was (and wouldn’t last if it did), Biden’s vision can be faulted for being unrealistic in a different way. One cannot simply pick the parts of the earlier era of middle-class dominance that one likes and ignore the rest. For example, Biden spoke at the convention of his desire to increase wages for workers, and to encourage the growth of unions, two things that helped blue-collar people and their families become middle class during the post-World-War-II era. But doing that will likely require changes in the country’s trade policies, lest better-compensated American workers simply invite in more low-wage-based foreign competition.

The most thoughtful and articulate spokesperson for that point of view in the Democratic Party today is probably Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, the leading liberal advocate in Congress for trade policies that encourage employers to treat American workers well, but he made only a low-profile appearance at his party’s convention. And Biden, who said nothing about trade policy in his convention speech, has in the past voted for trade deals of the sort that contributed to the middle class’s decline. And so the burden will be on him in the fall to be clearer about where he stands now on the trade issue, and on immigration and taxes, in order to have a chance to win the industrial states in the heartland that will ultimately decide the election.

In fairness to Biden, taking overly clear stands on such controversial issues could divide his party so much as to undermine his electoral chances in a different way. Biden appears to be hoping that not being Trump will be enough for so many voters as to allow him to keep his stances on the most controversial issues somewhat vague. That strategy worked well for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, when angry voters tossed Herbert Hoover out of the White House for having mishandled the government’s response to the Great Depression. FDR did offer some clues as to where he planned to go, but not so many as to divide his fragile Democratic party base. If history is any guide, Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic could offer Biden the same kind of opportunity.

Trump will nominate Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Supreme Court: report

President Donald Trump will nominate Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, according to a new report.

The White House has indicated that “Barrett is the intended nominee” in “conversations with some senior Republican allies” on Capitol Hill, CNN reported.

While there is always a chance that Trump may change his mind, multiple senior Republican sources told CNN that the president planned to choose Barrett. Trump is slated to unveil his pick on Saturday.

Barrett, who quickly emerged this week as the rumored top candidate, is the only potential nominee known to have met Trump in person, according to CNN.

Trump met with Barrett when she made his short list the last time there was a vacancy on the high court, which ultimately was filled by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The president has reportedly said privately of Barrett that he was “saving her for Ginsburg.”

“She was the plan all along. She’s the most distinguished and qualified by traditional measures,” a former senior administration official familiar with the process told CNN. “She has the strongest support among the legal conservatives who have dedicated their lives to the court. She will contribute most to the court’s jurisprudence in the years and decades to come.”

Barrett, 48, has served on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago since she was appointed by Trump in 2017. She is a former clerk to conservative late Justice Antonin Scalia and a longtime law professor at Notre Dame.

Barrett is a favorite of conservatives. Politico noted that her ascension to the Supreme Court would be a “a coup for Catholic culture warriors 25 years in the making and a high point in the right’s decades-long project of reshaping the judiciary.”

Democrats have raised concerns over Barrett’s past criticism of Supreme Court precedents, including Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case one week after the election which could decide the fate of Obamacare.

Barrett argued in 2017 that “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute” when the court upheld the law in 2012.

Barrett has also criticized the Roe v. Wade decision, though she acknowledged that the Supreme Court would “probably” let the precedent stand. She later said in 2016 that the court was likely to chip away at some abortion protections which had previously been upheld.

“I think the question of whether people can get very late-term abortions — you know, how many restrictions can be put on clinics — I think that would change,” she said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., raised concerns about whether Barrett could separate her legal opinions from her Catholic beliefs during her 2017 confirmation hearing.

“You have a long history of believing that your religious beliefs should prevail,” Feinstein told Barrett. “The dogma lives loudly within you.”

“It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions — whether they arise from faith or anywhere else — on the law,” Barrett replied.

Despite Barrett’s claim to the senator, she previously told students at Notre Dame that a “legal career is but a means to an end . . . and that end is building the Kingdom of God.”

Democrats have raised concerns about some of Barrett’s other affiliations. She is a former member of the Federalist Society, the shadowy conservative group driving Trump’s judicial nominations. She and her husband, who are parents to seven children, are also members of an obscure “charismatic Christian” group called People of Praise.

“Members of the group swear a lifelong oath of loyalty, called a covenant, to one another, and are assigned and are accountable to a personal adviser, called a ‘head’ for men and a ‘handmaid’ for women,” The New York Times reported. “The group teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority over the family.”

Trump, who had vowed to choose a woman after nominating two white men, was reportedly also considering federal appellate judge Barbara Lagoa, whom he had appointed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals less than one year ago. Lagoa is one of two Trump appointees on a three-judge panel currently deciding whether to dismiss the effort by the president’s top campaign strategist Jason Miller to revive his $100 million defamation suit against Gizmodo. She recently ruled in support of a controversial Florida law banning felons from voting until they paid all fines, fees and restitution.

“The Boys”: With new superhero Stormfront, fascism dons a mask and cape of female empowerment

Costume is key to the superhero’s identity in that it renders them distinct from their alter egos and the squishy, vulnerable humans they’re supposed to protect. Many are also ridiculous builds out of rubber or spandex highlighting impossibly pumped muscle, chest plates and codpieces drawing attention to implied virility or sex appeal.

“The Boys,” Amazon’s sinister flip on the comic book genre, punctuates all of that by clothing its superheroes in visual signifiers.

Homelander (Antony Starr) is the title’s jingoistic answer to Superman, the sneering Übermensch who leads the top-tier hero team known as The Seven. He’s never seen wearing anything other than his blue uniform, including a version of an American flag cascading down his back and golden eagle heads armoring his shoulders.

Starlight (Erin Moriarty), the team’s representative of righteousness and purity, is kitted out in a white and yellow gold leotard that bares her cleavage and, as she laments, is too tight to accommodate pockets. Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), the title’s Wonder Woman send-up, sports a bustier as armor over a Roman centurion-style skirt.

Each hero’s image – indeed, their lives – is shaped and run by a multibillion dollar corporation called Vought, which has insinuated itself into every aspect of America. Vought is a version of an “everything” company that sells toys, frozen foods, snacks, pharmaceuticals, you name it. It also contractually controls the lives of each member of The Seven. Everything they say, do, and wear in public is filtered through teams of stylists and marketing specialists.

This brings us to Stormfront (Aya Cash), the second season’s newcomer, a catsuit-clad oppositionist. (Cash’s casting also is conscientious in this regard – she’s best known for her role on FX’s comedy “You’re the Worst,” where she plays a snarky, cynical PR rep.)

Stormfront is introduced as a social media savant whose acerbic commentary and outward refusal to follow Vought’s rules scream “girl power.” That’s exactly the role the company writes for her, a take-no-prisoners, tell-it-like-it-is, commercially palatable white feminist.

Stormfront’s suit is a dark twin to Homelander’s Aryan jingoist get-up, a work in charcoal and blood scarlet, her stars and stripes rendered in inky metal armbands. It all but announces her as some maverick version of Homelander.

Stormfront’s cleverly disguised truth is a few shades more menacing than what she’s wearing, though. She’s hiding her true identity within her name – the one she uses now and a past moniker too.

That Cash’s character shares her name with an infamous white supremacist website isn’t accidental. Nor, for that matter, is the series creator Eric Kripke’s choice to make Stormfront a woman instead of a man, as the comic’s creators Darick Robertson and Garth Ennis (the co-creator of “Preacher”) originally drew the character.

In decades past, Stormfront went by the name Liberty, a post-war crusader belle hooded in red, white and blue and a popular spokeswoman for an array of products, including the American concept of freedom. The irony is that before she put on a cape for America, she worked for a cause and a nation antithetical to everything for which the United States supposedly stands. Here’s another hint: to call her a neo-Nazi isn’t entirely accurate.

“The Boys” is an adrenalized critique of our culture’s worship of comic book heroes, an entertainment genre molded by companies and studios into something akin to a secular religion. Robertson and Ennis make their supes the villains in this story while its heroes are a band of very human outlaws driven by revenge. Each member of the titular team has been wronged by Vought and its superheroes in some way, as has the chemically created super in their midst, a fugitive named Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara).

And this second season “The Boys” is doing a fantastic job of skewering corporate entities like Vought for the role they play in ushering in fascism. Vought’s tactic is as American as cloth fluttering on Homelander’s shoulders, which is to constantly brand and rebrand itself and its properties until nobody can recall the origin of whatever it is that they’re selling. This storyline has a basis in reality – look up the history of Bayer, a common aspirin brand. It, like Vought, traces its backstory to Nazi Germany.

Stormfront, for all of her hipster cloaking and rousing, power-to-the-people protests, is nothing more than a bigot in a superhero’s uniform. This was revealed in the third episode during a mission to capture a “super” terrorist (Kimiko’s brother, in reality) that resulted in a chase through a rundown apartment occupied by Black families.

Once she’s beyond the range of cameras, Stormfront goes off script.

She suddenly decides everyone’s a target and fries a father in front of his children, disintegrates their apartment, kills another man who has the misfortune of coming down the same stairs her quarry is ascending, blows up an entire floor. Finally she corners her man on the roof, nearly tearing off his hands and whispering a racist epithet to him as she crushes the life out of him.

Hours later, having pinned the blame on the foreign threat and with the news cameras rolling, she helps an aid organization comfort the people she didn’t murder outright and accepts the thanks of a grateful public.

In keeping with the spirit of Vought using The Seven as symbols that speak to a culture that is convinced of its out righteousness, Kripke and the series’ other producers use Stormfront, Starlight and Maeve to speak to our susceptibility when it comes to commodifying causes into product lines and repainting villains into heroes.

In the first season, Starlight went public about being sexually assaulted by a team member, The Deep (Chace Crawford), and her trauma was transformed into an image boost that made her a symbol for survivors.

A major subplot this season involves Homelander forcing Maeve to come out as a lesbian; although she’s actually bisexual, the Vought branding gurus explain the public finds it easier to accept binary sexual identities. Shortly afterward and very much against her will she becomes the face of all kinds of rainbow-branded products, including a power bar targeted at the LGBTQ demographic.

Stormfront is more troubling given Vought’s effort to alloy her image with feminist power, agency and gender when behind the scenes she has a history of terrorizing men and women of color and creating misinformation memes and propaganda designed to woo a pliant public to her own fascistic aims.

This should seem familiar to every viewer because it’s the America we’re living in right now, a democracy brought to the brink because a failed businessman that a game show producer revamped to look like a corporate titan decided he wants to be strongman. Ours is a culture that loves that praises feminism as long as it only helps a certain type of woman. That’s proven time and again within all sorts of systems, from the publishing industry to politics and all ports in between.

But it’s even there in supposedly noble efforts, including the unveiling of a statue in New York City to mark Women’s Equality Day that features Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton sitting at a table with Sojourner Truth. The pedestal identifying them as Women’s Right Pioneers neglects to include the part of history where Stanton and other white suffragists used racist rhetoric to argue for the white woman’s right to vote at the expense of Black men and women.

Through Stormfront, “The Boys” takes the additional step of linking white feminism to the aims of white male patriarchy. Vought’s superhero story rests on the foundational myth that superheroes are born, not made, and that their purpose is to protect and save humanity.

The truth that eventually leaks to the public is that Vought’s “supes” are the product of a formula known as Compound V, and that in order to protect America from the threat posed to them from “terrorists” trying to immigrate illegally it should be made widely available. Stormfront vocally advocates for that cause at fan rallies and via histrionic social media memes.

But the average person doesn’t need heightened strength or senses to take justice into their own hands. In the show’s world and ours, guns are as prevalent as fantasies about using them heroically.

“The Boys” makes no effort to downplay its intensity. Every episode choreographs explosions and outlandish gore into the action. Nearly every member of The Seven is some version of an extreme hypocrite. But the violence Stormfront commits is bloodless, a poison seeping into ears and invading hearts and minds by way of memes.

It’s a familiar story of how violence, and bigotry can be spun and restyled as greatness, how authoritarianism rides in on a carpet made of the stars and bars. The American dream, the show says, is itself a costume disguising its bigotry behind a mask of supposed equality. And the only way to overpower that villainy is by shredding it.

Season 2 of “The Boys” is currently streaming on Amazon. New episodes debut on Fridays.

Has the media woken up at last? Finally, alarm bells on Trump go off in top newsrooms

I am happy to report that some of the leaders of our top newsrooms seem to have finally realized, at least for the moment, that Donald Trump presents a grave danger to our democracy.

It took arguably the most outrageously anti-democratic statement by an American president ever — and nearly a whole news cycle, during which many of us gnashed our teeth — but some major news organizations are finally responding with the strong headlines and alarming rhetoric that the moment requires.

I was particularly impressed with Lester Holt, who led the “NBC Nightly News” with this unstinting language:

Tonight: President Trump’s unprecedented attack on America’s election; the president again today casting doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming vote after refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses to Joe Biden.

And Holt led off one of several related news segments like this:

In a year and a season where shock is hardly in short supply, what may be among the most stunning words spoken by an American president are loudly resonating tonight: President Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election — the president dangling doubt over one of the most powerful rights of American democracy.

NBC White House correspondent Peter Alexander proceeded to report that “with the election just 40 days away, President Trump, trailing Joe Biden in most polls, is bulldozing one of the fundamental principles of American democracy, refusing to commit to the peaceful transfer of power.”

Holt also introduced a report about early voters in Michigan, calling “the president’s comments on the transfer of power very much in the minds of voters.”

This is huge, because network news is one of the last, best vectors when it comes to getting the truth to low-information voters.

Sadly, the other broadcast networks were considerably more muted.

Norah O’Donnell, on the “CBS Evening News,” led off with much less strident language: “Down in battleground state polls, tonight President Trump says he’s not sure this year’s election will be honest, and he’s falsely claiming tonight that mail-in voting is a whole big scam.”

And on the most-watched show on television, ABC’s “World News Tonight,” David Muir only briefly noted Trump’s “stunning claim” at the top. White House correspondent Jonathan Karl reported that Trump had “sparked outrage.”

The boldest Karl got was when, after airing White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s assertion that “the president will accept the results of a free and fair election,” he noted that “it’s not clear that assurance means anything; the president has gone from warning about possible voter fraud to effectively declaring — without evidence — the election is already rigged.”

In another significant shift, our two major national newspapers finally roused themselves from their slumber. After burying their initial stories on A15 and A4, here’s what their front pages looked like on Friday:

The Post in particular redeemed itself with a no-holds-barred opening salvo. Philip Rucker, Amy Gardner and Annie Linskey wrote:

President Trump reiterated Thursday that he may not honor the results should he lose reelection, reaffirming his extraordinary refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power and prompting election and law enforcement authorities nationwide to prepare for an unprecedented constitutional crisis.

Trump escalated his months-long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Nov. 3 election with comments Wednesday that, taken together and at face value, pose his most substantial threat yet to the nation’s history of free and fair elections.

I appreciate that they made clear this was not an isolated incident:

In recent days, the president cast doubt on the integrity of vote totals. He said he might not accept the results if they show him losing to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. He said it was imperative to quickly fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg because the nation’s high court could determine the winner of the election.

And they included appropriately alarming quotes — not from “critics” but from experts:

“For the first time in my life, and maybe for the first time since the Civil War, the fate of constitutional democracy in the United States is on the line, and it’s on the line because the president has put it there,” said William A. Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program. “It is a clear and present danger.”

In the New York Times, Reid J. Epstein, Emily Cochrane and Glenn Thrush‘s story started with a strong opening paragraph:

President Trump declined for a second straight day to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the election, repeating baseless assertions that the voting would be a “big scam,” even as leading Republicans scrambled to assure the public that their party would respect the Constitution.

Sadly, they quickly attributed the essential context to “Democrats”:

Democrats were far less restrained, comparing Mr. Trump’s comments to those of an authoritarian leader and warning Americans to take his stance seriously.

At least they quoted experts as well as “critics”:

Chris Edelson, an American University professor who has studied the expansion of presidential power during national emergencies, said Mr. Trump’s comments represented a unique threat to a central pillar of democracy. “It’s impossible to underscore how absolutely extraordinary this situation is — there are really no precedents in our country,” he said. “This is a president who has threatened to jail his political opponents. Now he is suggesting he would not respect the results of an election. These are serious warning signs.”

Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian, said, “This may be the most damaging thing he has ever done to American democracy.”

At the Los Angeles Times, Evan Halper, Eli Stokols and David G. Savage‘s newspaper-leading story tied Trump’s comments into his longstanding, concerted attempts to steal the election.

They wrote:

As President Trump, backed by his army of attorneys, has laid groundwork to undermine an election result that does not cast him as victor, Republican lawmakers found themselves in the astonishing position Thursday of having to reassure Americans there would be a peaceful transition of power should he lose.

They offered crucial background:

Already, the campaign has challenged election plans in a number of states and fought aggressively to curtail voter turnout. It has fought to reduce eligibility to vote by mail, purge voters from the rolls, tighten voter ID requirements, reduce or ban the use of drop boxes, and discard mail-in ballots that have technical flaws or arrive after election day.

They also noted Trump’s heavy spending on “in-house lawyers as well as attorneys from law firm Jones Day in Washington and the Los Angeles firm of Charles Harder, which specializes in media defamation suits.”

The Associated Press, which is hit-or-miss on holding Trump accountable, mostly failed to capture the gravity of the situation, focusing instead on the (admittedly dramatic) reaction.

Lisa Mascaro, Aamer Madhani and Kevin Freking wrote:

President Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses drew swift blowback Thursday from both parties in Congress, and lawmakers turned to unprecedented steps to ensure he can’t ignore the vote of the people. Amid the uproar, Trump said anew he’s not sure the election will be “honest.”

But the AP story — especially with a blunt headline — still packed a punch by the time it made it to many American doorsteps. (See below.)

How it played across the country

It wasn’t just the major news organizations that finally took notice of the danger. Many regional and local ones did, too. Consider the front pages of the Miami Herald:

The Orlando Sentinel:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The Seattle Times:

And the particularly blunt Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The Hartford Courant, in Connecticut, supplemented a wire story with its own reporting by Michael Hamad that the state’s top elected Republican was critical of Trump’s comments — but that Connecticut GOP leader J.R. Romano instead responded with nonsense about how “The Courant ignores comments like ‘You ain’t Black’ from Joe Biden.”

And consider also small newspapers like the Milford (Massachusetts) Daily News:

Several newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises and Capital Newspapers led with that AP story, with the same punchy headline, including Iowa’s Sioux City Journal:

And Wisconsin’s Baraboo News Republic:

Before you get too excited

None of this means that our top news editors have actually gone into panic mode — as they should.

Indeed, the primary focus of these stories — Trump’s refusal to make an easy, specific promise — leaves open the distinct possibility that he will, at some point, dutifully say the necessary words and news editors will decide the issue has been resolved. (As if he doesn’t lie all the time.)

But what matters about the words — the reason they deserve so much attention — is not just that he said them, it’s what he revealed, and all the evidence that supports it. As media critic Eric Boehlert wrote in his Press Run newsletter on Friday: “Trump is trying to steal an election, and the press should say so, every day until Election Day.”

The other possible downside is that the coverage of Trump’s attempts to steal the election drown out — rather than supplement — the coverage of the ongoing national crisis that remains the single most important news story in this country and in the election.

On that front, even as the Washington Post distinguished itself with its coverage of Trump’s threat to democracy on Thursday, it embarrassed itself with this absolutely horrible take by Josh Dawsey and Michael Scherer headlined “As Trump exudes pandemic optimism, Democrats still see worry — and an advantage.”

The authors wrote:

The president is betting his political future on convincing voters that a recent dip in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths signals a coming end to the national nightmare — and is a reason to reassess his handling of the pandemic and vote for him.

They called that “a risky strategy” — in political terms alone. And they included astonishingly normalizing language, as when they wrote that “several campaign and White House officials say Trump has not helped himself as much as he might have.” (See my July 21 post, “Reporters on Trump’s failing, racist campaign: He’s not doing it right.”)

The fact is that Trump’s “optimism” is hardly sincere — it’s contrived lunacy — and it’s killing scores of Americans every day.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, for example, forecasts a dramatically increasing death rate in the U.S. over the next several months, which could of course be significantly slowed by precisely the kind of mask use that Trump’s “optimism” discourages.

Yes, Trump’s lies about the pandemic — like his refusal to pledge a peaceful transition — are relevant to the campaign. But they are first and foremost gravely dangerous to the republic and the people who live in it.

Lester Holt, the Washington Post, and the others finally seem to have grasped this. Let’s hope they don’t let go.

Democrats have no plan: Trump is bulldozing democracy — and nobody’s ready to stop him

Democrats in Congress have done little more than pay lip service to bipartisanship in the week since the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even as the high court’s ideological balance is up for grabs for the third time in four years — and as the president of the United States refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power — prominent Senate Democrats have rushed to tamp down talk of retaliatory action. This leaves little doubt that the opposition party is unequipped to handle the threat posed to democracy by Donald Trump and the Republicans.

The same Senate Republican leadership who refused to vote on Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland four years ago, denying liberals their first court majority since the 1960s, has made clear they intend to ram through a new Supreme Court justice, most likely in the final week before Election Day. By his own admission, Trump wants a new justice seated by then because he intends to use the federal judiciary to nullify enough absentee ballots to hand him a second term.

While officially attempting to assuage concern about Trump’s plans, prominent Republicans have essentially admitted that the plan is to have the Supreme Court, not the voters, decide this election. “I promise you as a Republican, if the Supreme Court decides that Joe Biden wins, I will accept the result,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the New York Times. “The court will decide, and if Republicans lose, we’ll accept the result.”

Graham reportedly wants to schedule confirmation hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee for the week of Oct. 12. That would mean a party-line committee vote near the end of the following week, and a vote on the Senate floor before Halloween, making it the fastest confirmation process in recent history. In addition to Trump’s pick potentially ruling on an election dispute, Republicans are eager to have another ultraconservative justice seated in time for a case on the Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court will hear only a week after Election Day.

The Democrats’ response to such threats this week can fairly be described as pitiful.

“I think Democrats are gonna continue to appeal to the sense of honor that when someone gives their word, as Lindsey Graham did, that they can’t just break it,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said on Thursday, calling it “folly” to even discuss potential Democratic responses like expanding the Supreme Court. “This is a moment that I would say to any Republican of good conscience working in the administration, it is time for you to resign,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., appealed.

To be clear, Democrats have little hope of actually stopping Trump’s nominee — whom he plans to announce on Saturday — from eventually taking the bench. The opposition party’s best bet is to slow down the process until after the election, and use the fight as a means to rally their voters to take control of all three branches of government, by defeating Trump and seizing a Senate majority. The ultimate goal, which remains unlikely, would be to draw out the confirmation process until after Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. But simply opposing his nominee won’t be even close to enough — not when Trump has made no secret of his plans to use the courts to his electoral advantage. So far, Democrats have shown no real appetite for a fight.

“We need to de-escalate, not escalate,” Democratic nominee Joe Biden said during a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend. Biden has expressed a reluctance to eliminate the Senate filibuster — which requires the consent of 60 members to advance most legislation to a floor vote — and is outright opposed to increasing the number of Supreme Court justices. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who would become the Judiciary Committee chair if Democrats take the Senate, has also expressed reluctance to change the rules in response to the GOP’s ruthless power play.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., even took to the Senate floor this week to seek forgiveness for former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision to fight GOP obstructionism during the Obama era by eliminating the filibuster on judicial confirmations. In a near-unanimous vote, the Senate approved a Trump-appointed federal judge recommended by the arch-conservative Federalist Society this week. The House then approved a continuing resolution to keep the government open until Dec. 11, giving away one of its major avenues of leverage.

It’s been a near-universal show of surrender from Democrats — even as their voters have sent more $200 million in donations to Democratic candidates and causes since Ginsburg’s passing. If they want to rally and sustain public support, Democrats might want to fight as if they believed they could win.

Republicans lie, cheat and steal. Democrats pretend to “resist” with weak appeals to the nonexistent conscience of Republicans who long ago sold their supposed principles down the river. Meanwhile, mainstream media responds with a outdated frame of evenhandedness, seeming to imply that issues like election integrity are even up for debate. Fox News’ Chris Wallace, who will moderate the first presidential debate next week, has literally selected “the integrity of the election” as one of the debate topics. This kind of false equivalency between Trump’s unfounded accusations of mail fraud and the Republicans’ longstanding history of voter suppression may be all the authoritarians need to succeed.

Appeals to get out and vote, which Nancy Pelosi presented this week as the last and most effective remedy, don’t take into account that Trump’s plan to steal the election will kick in after Americans have voted, but before all those votes have been counted. Even if Democrats take back the Senate, they won’t be allowed to govern in the face of relentless obstructionism and the stolen Supreme Court. They have to know that.

Republicans have handed Democrats a legitimate rationale for expanding the court — to 11 or 15 or possibly 19 seats. Those Democrats who are willing to engage the idea are the only ones who should be taken seriously during this moment, as odd a coalition as they might make.

“When Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court,” Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts tweeted over the weekend, a call supported by House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York.

https://twitter.com/RepJerryNadler/status/1307379171354652673

Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed receptive: “Nothing is off the table next year” if the GOP tries to fill Ginsburg’s seat, he said. “We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now, but the fact is, we have a big challenge in our country,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added this week.

Whether they boycott hearings, bring impeachment articles against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, or use Senate rules to slow down normal business, Democrats have more than a few arrows in their quiver. But despite Pelosi’s brave words, Democrats’ actions this week suggest they have no real intention to pull them out to save our democracy.

Federal judge rules that Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s viewers don’t expect him to tell facts

Fox News got to claim victory on Thursday after a new ruling in a lawsuit brought against the company came out in its favor, but the win arrived at a steep cost. To deflect an allegation of defamation, the network was forced to claim that one of its highest-profile personalities can’t reasonably be expected to consistently provide accurate information to viewers.

Here’s the background. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, was paid for her silence about an affair she said she had with Donald Trump during the 2016 election by America Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, on the Republican campaign’s behalf these details were exposed and confirmed in the case against former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to participating in the illegal campaign finance scheme. The story became national news, so leading Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed the case.

But he didn’t present it accurately. Discussing the McDougal case alongside the similar story of Stormy Daniels, Carlson said:

Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed. Two women approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money. Now, that sounds like a classic case of extortion.

McDougal decided to sue Fox News because these facts are not correct. She did not approach Trump, threaten him, or extort him for money. She sold her story to AMI, which promptly buried it. Carlson grossly misrepresented the facts, a point that Fox News did not dispute in the case. McDougal said since Carlson willfully distorted the factual record, he defamed her.

To defend Carlson, however, Fox News had to make a damning claim. The host with the highest-rated show on cable news cannot be trusted, his own network said.

In fact, it’s even worse than that. Federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found:

This “general tenor” of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.” . . . Fox persuasively argues . . . that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer “arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism” about the statements he makes.

So the top-rated program on a news station cannot be reasonably expected to be taken seriously and “reasonable” viewers will be skeptical that his claims are not “actual facts.” Perhaps this is a good legal argument to make, but it’s a dreadful position to be in as a news organization.

The judge argued that Carlson’s defense is bolstered because he started out saying: “We’re going to start by stipulating that everything Michael Cohen has told the feds is absolutely true. Now, assuming honesty isn’t usually a wise idea with Michael Cohen, but for the sake of argument, let’s do it in this case, everything he says is true[.]”

But this actually should cut against Carlson’s defense. His point is that the account he’s giving is based off the claims in the Cohen case. That’s a perfectly reasonable stance to take in an argument. But then he goes on to misrepresent those claims — claims which are a matter of the factual record. So this isn’t a part of his show where he’s clearly being non-literal — it’s a part when he’s explicitly said he’s trying to convey the facts as the Cohen case presents them. And he patently failed to do that. This failure arguably, from McDougal’s point of view, arose out of actual malice. Given that Carlson’s show doubtless has the resources to do basic fact-checking and that his commentary displayed open contempt for McDougal, her legal claim seems eminently plausible.

And in the portion of the monologue that McDougal alleged is defamatory, Carlson explicitly said: “Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.” Again, the remarks were clearly couched to make it clear they were not opinion, but facts.

Carlson even repeated his remarks about the extortion later in the show, but the judge found these considerations unpersuasive:

It is true that Mr. Carlson repeatedly asserted that the conduct was extortion during a debate with a guest commentator in which Mr. Carlson also described the payment from Cohen to McDougal as “paying off someone who is extorting you, threatening to make public details of your personal life, if she doesn’t get paid.” See Episode Transcript. But there can be no doubt that Mr. Carlson did so as hyperbole to promote debate on a matter of public concern.

Putting aside the merits of the lawsuit, however, it’s worth dwelling on the fact that Fox News’ official position is that its lead commentator cannot be counted on to be accurate when discussing the news of the day, even when he says he’s simply stating the facts of a case.

The fact is, Carlson is a liar, and from all appearances, he often intentionally lies to his audience to get them to buy into his warped ideological view of the world. For example, he recently misrepresented a government report suggesting it helped cast doubt on climate change, when in fact it reached precisely the opposite conclusion. But of course, people like me are always accusing Carlson of being a liar, and his viewers surely don’t care what I think. How would his viewers feel, though, if they knew Carlson’s own network thought he couldn’t reasonably be trusted?

Perhaps the worst thing for the outlet is that not only did it have to make this damning admission in a legal case, but a judge agreed.

Maine voters want Susan Collins to stand up to the GOP: “You can no longer trust anything she says”

According to in-depth interviews with Maine voters, Sen. Susan Collins (R) has a lot of damage control to do in her home state if she has any hope of hanging on to her seat on Nov. 3.

With Collins trailing in the polls to Democrat Sara Gideon, Politico dispatched Kathryn Miles to the state to interview voters and what she found was an assortment of voters who have become disenchanted with the formerly popular senator — mainly due to her bowing to the whims of President Donald Trump.

According to Merlene Sanborn of Skowhegan, who has voted for Collins in the past, “There’s such an atmosphere of disrespect in the campaigning. I feel like both candidates have forgotten about what matters to Maine.”

Sanborn pointed to the Republican rush to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — while noting Collins has given no assurances about a vote after the election but before a new Senate is seated — saying, “It’s just too important to rush the process. The Senate needs to take the appropriate amount of time to really consider the candidates. I want to see Susan Collins be a true leader and publicly advocate for that.”

One-time Collins voter Cheryl Staples, 63, echoed Sanborn’s comments about the Supreme Court vacancy, stating: “We expect Collins to go with her conscience — not her party. It’s going to take more than saying she won’t vote until the election to demonstrate that.”

The Politico report notes that a recent polls shows that 59% of Maine voters want Collins to “delay voting on the nomination and approval process until a new president is sworn in in January,” with one Maine resident saying he doesn’t trust her after she voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

“He’s a bad person and not fit for the court. I trusted her to take a stand on his fitness,” explained retired Air Force medic Dick Enright who said he supported Collins until the Kavanaugh vote.

As for the push to replace Ginsburg, Enright wants it held off until after Inauguration Day, explaining, “Fair is fair. [Mitch] McConnell blocked Obama when he had the reins. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

As for Collins, he stated, “She’s just playing a game and trying to gain votes by saying as little as possible. If there was a chance she’d really turn around and take a real stand on this issue, I’d be happy. But I don’t see her doing that.”

According to one voter who would only identify himself as Mike, Collins is “. . . screwing us up with all of her flip-flopping. You can no longer trust anything she says. She needs to smarten up and correct herself. If she got a spine and proved she’s really going to do what she says, then maybe I’d vote for her.”

Dan Shea, author of the local poll on Collins said the responses should come as no surprise.

“A lot of Mainers think the senator works too hard to be on both sides. They want some clarity; they want Susan to take a side. If she is too calculating on the nomination question, she’ll threaten her brand as a moderate, lose independents and swing Democrats, and maybe even end her career in the Senate,” he remarked.

You can read more here.

Breonna’s Law author charged with same level felony as cop who “blindly” fired into Taylor’s home

The lone Black woman in the Kentucky legislature was arrested among dozens of other demonstrators who marched on Thursday in protest of the grand jury decision not to charge any officers in the police killing of Breonna Taylor.

State Rep. Attica Scott, the author of Breonna’s Law, which would ban “no-knock” warrants statewide in the wake of Taylor’s death, was charged with first-degree rioting, failure to disperse and unlawful assembly, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

First-degree rioting is a Class D felony, according to WDRB-TV, the same level as the charges brought against former Louisville Police Officer Brett Hankison for “blindly” firing into Taylor’s apartment.

Hankison was the lone officer charged in the shooting, though he was charged with wantonly endangering Taylor’s neighbors after bullets struck the wall between Taylor’s apartment and the neighbors. None of the three officers who fired their weapons were charged in Taylor’s death.

Scott was arrested alongside her daughter, Ashanti, activist Shameka Parrish-Wright and about two dozen other protesters near the Louisville Free Public Library after someone broke a window and tossed a flare inside the building, according to the Courier-Journal.

Scott was accused of being part of the group who caused the damage, according to WDRB. The outlet noted that a lone individual was responsible for the damage, and nearby protesters “condemned the individual’s actions.”

Ted Shouse, an attorney for Parrish-Wright, told the outlet that “it appears LMPD is targeting protest organizers.”

Both Scott and Parrish-Wright were released on Friday on personal recognizance bonds and are scheduled to be arraigned on Oct. 6.

Parrish-Wright, the co-chair of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the operations manager of The Bail Project Louisville, was hit with the same charges as Scott.

“This arrest and these charges are outrageous,” Shouse said in a statement. “Shameka Parrish-Wright is a pillar of this community. She was arrested alongside a sitting member of our legislature for exercising her First Amendment rights.”

Officials with the library workers’ union published a statement on Facebook defending Scott and “other peaceful protestors.”

“Representative Scott has consistently been a vocal supporter of libraries and library workers and has been an ally specifically to our union through many battles,” the statement said. “We have seen no proof that the flare thrown into the library has done any major damage — nor that Representative Scott had anything to do with it — and find these accusations inconsistent with her character and the constant support we have received from her.”

State Rep. Josie Raymond also condemned the arrest.

“If you arrest the loudest voices fighting racial injustice in Louisville,” she tweeted, “we have to believe you want to silence the fight against racial injustice.”

Raymond noted that Hankison was released within 30 minutes after his arrest, while Taylor was detained overnight.

Scott joined the protests after a grand jury declined to bring charges against the three officers who fired their weapons while serving a warrant for Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover at her home. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron argued that two of the officers were “justified” in their use of force, because Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired his legally owned gun when they entered the apartment. Cameron said a single neighbor corroborated the officers’ claims that they announced themselves, even though 11 other neighbors said they did not hear any announcement.

Cameron’s press conference after the grand jury decision has sparked widespread allegations that he made false characterizations about the shooting.

Scott recently filed a complaint against an Louisville police officer who allegedly shoved her and sprayed her with tear gas without warning during another protest in May, according to WFPL.

She told NPR earlier this week that justice “is hardly ever served when it’s police officers murdering Black people.”

“Our call to action is to continue to make sure that the city of Louisville understands that we will not go away, that we will continue to demand the defunding of police and the dismantling of this police department because it’s corrupt from the inside out, from the bottom to the top,” she said. “And it cannot continue to function in the way that it does.”

It is unclear whether the state legislature will take up the “Breonna’s Law” bill, which would also require officers to turn on their body cameras when serving a warrant and be screened for drugs and alcohol if they are involved in a deadly incident or shooting.

The Louisville Metro Council already approved a similar bill banning no-knock warrants.

“The bill that I have filed, Breonna’s Law for Kentucky, has to pass,” Scott told NPR. “It has to pass so that what happened in the case of Breonna Taylor does not happen again — that we have to get policy change because this system will not change unless the policies reflect what the people are demanding.”

“A psychopath”: Psychologists call Trump the “most psychiatrically disordered president in history”

President Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, has had a lot to say about his mental health this summer, telling CNN, for example, that her uncle is a “psychologically deeply damaged man.” But psychologists Alan D. Blotcky and Seth D. Norrholm are even more blunt in an op-ed published by the New York Daily News this week: they describe him as a “psychopath” and “the most psychiatrically disordered president in history.”

“It is time to stop relying on political pundits to weigh in on Trump’s behavior, which they often soften and even normalize,” Blotcky and Norrholm write. “We are psychologists, and we are convinced Donald Trump is a psychopath. His malignant behavior over the past four years is growing and escalating right before our eyes. Trump’s psychopathy will change us forever if he is not stopped.”

Blotcky is a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Alabama, while Norrholm is on the faculty at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

The psychologists offer a long list of reasons why they believe that Trump “may well destroy our 244-year-old democracy” if he isn’t voted out of office in November and why they believe his “mental health” is in such a terrible state. Trump, they write, not only “breaks norms, rules and laws with impunity” and “peddles fake conspiracy theories and irrational magical thinking” — he also “blames, scapegoats and gaslights as easily as he breathes” and “undermines the vital role of the free press, because he abhors oversight and accountability.”

In addition to those things, the psychologists write in their op-ed, Trump “has no conscience” and “denigrates and humiliates anyone and everyone in his path.”

“He has no respect for military heroes or renowned experts,” Blotcky and Norrholm say of Trump. “He is racist and xenophobic. He incites violence and culture wars. He is obsessed with power and adoration. He is a greedy opportunist. He is corrupt to the core.”

The psychologists add that because Trump is “desperate to win re-election,” he has gone to a variety of dangerous extremes to accomplish that — for example, he “compromised the Postal Service” and “is letting the Russians intervene on his behalf in this election.”

“Donald Trump is dishonest and destructive and evil,” Blotcky and Norrholm warn. “He has become (emboldened) and empowered by the complicity of his Republican sycophants. Sadly, he now believes he is destined to carry on his mission. He feels unstoppable. And he must be stopped before it is too late.”

Trump unloads on Fox News after network polls shows Biden ahead in key swing states

President Donald Trump is not pleased with Fox News’ latest poll projections for Pennsylvania and Ohio. According to the latest poll, Trump is trailing in the two, key battleground states that could be determining factors in the upcoming presidential election and he is refusing to accept even the possibility of an uphill battle to retain control of the Oval Office.

The poll featured an analysis of Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The results show a sizable lead for Biden in all three states, which is a significantly strongly Democratic lead compared to the 2016 election. In fact, the report also indicates that Biden’s lead in Nevada and Pennsylvania is already considered “outside the margin of error.” Ultimately, if today was Election Day, it would be relatively difficult for Trump to contest a loss.

New Fox polls:

NEVADA
Biden: 52%
Trump: 41%

OHIO
Biden: 50%
Trump: 45%

PENNSYLVANIA
Biden: 51%
Trump: 44%

In each state, voters prefer Biden to Trump on SCOTUS.https://t.co/oLy9VUQAQF

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) September 24, 2020

Biden’s projected edge reportedly comes mainly from “women, non-whites, voters under age 35, and those ages 65 and over” across all three states, per the network’s report. It was also noted that all of the interviews that contributed to the poll results were conducted after the death of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The information did not go over well with Trump. So, he took to Twitter with an early morning rant on Friday as he fired off aim at Fox News.

He tweeted, “One of the worst polls in 2016 was the @FoxNews Poll. They were so ridiculously wrong. Fox said they were going to change pollsters, but they didn’t. They totally over sample Democrats to a point that a child could see what is going on. Rasmussen, which was accurate, at 52%.”

One of the worst polls in 2016 was the @FoxNews Poll. They were so ridiculously wrong. Fox said they were going to change pollsters, but they didn’t. They totally over sample Democrats to a point that a child could see what is going on. Rasmussen, which was accurate, at 52%.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2020

The latest poll results come just days after Trump found himself at the center of controversy over his refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the November election. For weeks now, Trump has been setting the stage to dispute the results of the election. From fanning the flames of racial division in the United States to the politicization of the coronavirus, mask-wearing, a COVID-19 vaccine, mail-in voting, Trump has contributed to ongoing chaos and confusion that will likely boil over with the election.

Despite polls indicating that he is trailing in multiple battleground states, Trump has repeatedly suggested to his supporters that the only way he can lose the election is if Democrats cheat. By disregarding the possibility of losing the election, Trump is setting the stage to challenge the election regardless of the outcome.

Trump calls on Joe Biden to drop out over allegations his own GOP Senate allies failed to prove

On Thursday, in a radio interview, President Donald Trump once again promoted unsubstantiated corruption allegations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine — and urged Joe Biden to “leave the campaign” because he “was in on it.”

Trump’s remarks come just after his allies in the Senate, led by Homeland Security chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI), released the results of a highly partisan investigation into the Hunter Biden allegations. That report claimed the business dealings were “problematic” but failed to find any evidence that they influenced U.S. foreign policy.

The president and his allies have been fixated on trying to link the Biden family to wrongdoing in Ukraine for over a year. A plot by Trump and Rudy Giuliani to dangle military aid in exchange for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Bidens ultimately led to the president’s impeachment.

You can listen to Trump’s comments below: