Open Thread | Supreme Court Rejects Alabama’s Attempt to Defy Their 2 month old Decision About Additional Majority Black District

Tired of these arrogant muthaphuckas.

They should have no choice. The design of the districts should be completely out of their hands.

Supreme Court rejects Alabama’s attempt to avoid creating a second Black majority congressional district
Ariane de Vogue Fredreka Schouten
By Ariane de Vogue and Fredreka Schouten, CNN
Updated 11:39 AM EDT, Tue September 26, 2023

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an emergency bid from Alabama, setting the stage for a new congressional map likely to include a second Black majority district to account for the state’s 27% Black population.

The one-line order reflects that the feelings on the court haven’t changed since June when a 5-4 Supreme Court affirmed a lower court that had ordered the state to redraw its seven-seat congressional map to include a second majority-Black district or “something quite close to it.”

The justices’ action will have immediate consequences in Alabama and perhaps nationwide in the 2024 elections. There are currently six Republicans and one Democratic member of Congress from Alabama, but the changing makeup of the districts is likely to mean the state will pick up a new Democratic member of Congress.

Black voters lean Democratic in other states with redistricting battles underway as well.

Attempt to go around June ruling
The case has been closely watched because after the court’s June ruling, Alabama GOP lawmakers again approved a congressional map with only one majority-Black district, seemingly flouting the Supreme Court’s decision that they provide more political representation for the state’s Black residents.

The 5-4 opinion in June was penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, who drew the votes of fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh as well as the court’s three liberal justices.
……………….

Alabama raced to the Supreme Court and asked the court to freeze the lower-court ruling, arguing that its 2023 map passed legal muster even if it didn’t include a second majority-Black district.

………………………..

Challengers to the map, represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU and others, had urged the justices to reject the state’s bid arguing that the map in question dilutes the power of Black voters.

They charged the state with “unabashedly” defying an opinion the justices issued just three months ago.

The lawyers likened the actions of the state to “our unfortunate history of States resisting civil rights remedies through laws and practices which, though neutral on their face, serve to maintain the status quo.”

REDRAW THOSE DISTRICTS AND ADD THAT NEW MAJORITY BLACK DISTRICT.

Stop diluting the votes of Black Voters.

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Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Breaking News, Current Events, Justice, Open Thread, Politics, Supreme Court | Tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Open Thread | WHY is Joe Biden Running?

Sometimes, our President can speak for himself, and speaks it plain.

I will continue to repeat:

2024: DEMOCRACY VS. FASCISM

Plain and simple.
We don’t have two functioning political parties.

We have one political party who is interested in governing. And, interested in doing the most for the widest swath of the American population possible.

And, the other political party are Republicans : pro-fascism from top to bottom.

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1705762653342429372?s=20

Book banning.
Loss of body autonomy
Trafficking migrants
Stripping duly elected authorities of their positions (from school boards in Houston, to duly elected prosecutors in Florida)
Pro -child labor
Anti Public Education
Anti Little d DEMOCRACY
Stripping of Voting Rights
Voter Suppression everywhere

The fight for 2024 is for DEMOCRACY.

DEMOCRACY for everyone other than a White Heterosexual Male.

Look at what President Biden has been able to achieve. All the people that he has helped. He is rebuilding the reputation of the United States around the world. He is always working for the little guy. Bidenomics is the opposite of Reaganomics. I’m so happy that President Biden calls it out for what it is, and how everything bad in this country has its roots in Reaganomics.

I have thought from the beginning that Joe Biden is the President needed FOR THESE TIMES.

Any other time, and a Joe Biden Presidency wouldn’t pack as much a punch as it does now. It wouldn’t MEAN as much as it does now. Because President Biden knows what he is fighting for. He’s fighting for the United States of America. For it to continue to have its promise. To be able to be held out as a beacon. To be able to stand up for its creed , what while we fall short, is ALWAYS worth striving towards.

Someone wrote on another blog that President Biden’s age is his superpower.
I agree. His age, combined with his decades in Washington, and actually WANTING TO HELP PEOPLE. His strength is the ability to inform his staff to get into the weeds of government and find the levers to help the average person. There’s a talent there. A skillset – from those who learn the ins and outs of government. Joe Biden is one of those people , and he staffed his Administration with them.

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Posted in 2024 Elections, Abortion, Abortion Rights, Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Body Autonomy, Book Banning, Breaking News, Corruption, Current Events, Democratic Party, Economics, Economy, Education, Elections, GOP, Healthcare, Justice, Labor, Open Thread, Politics, President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala D. Harris, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights, Voting Rights Act | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Weekend Open Thread

Good Morning. I hope that you are enjoying this weekend, fully vaccinated and boosted, with family and friends. That new booster shot is out…be sure to get it.

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Open Thread | Illinois Eliminates Cash Bond

This is a sea change.People will be watching the ramifications of this.

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Open Thread | Make No Mistake – Project 2025 Is the Republican Plan For Fascism No Matter Who the Republican Nominee Is

Period.

How Right-Wing Groups Are Plotting To Implement Trump’s Authoritarianism
Project 2025 is an out-in-the-open scheme to steer the US toward far-right autocracy.
DAVID CORN
Washington, DC, Bureau Chief

There is an authoritarian danger that threatens American democracy. It is a separate peril from Donald Trump and his tens of millions of rabid supports. It is the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy.

Trump’s desire to be a strongman ruler are no secret. He has repeatedly uttered statements that reveal a craving to be in total control of the US government. As he mounts a second campaign for the White House, his team has openly discussed his plans to consolidate government power in the White House should he win. The New York Times recently reported that his crew aims “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” The Washington Post ran a story in April headlined, “Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term.”

These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives. Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.

Yet this effort to reshape the US government extends far beyond the fevered fantasies of one failed casino owner and his henchmen and henchwomen. Much of the right-wing establishment—including its leading think tanks and policy shops—are part of the attempt to concentrate federal power in the hands of Trump or another Republican president.

…………………………………….

The Center for Renewing America is merely a small piece of the right’s let’s-go-authoritarian operation. Dozens of conservative outfits—led by the Heritage Foundation—have banded together to produce what they call Project 2025, which has released a 1,000-page report, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which provides a blueprint for a wannabe-White-House-autocrat. Their proposals include removing protections for federal employees so perhaps as many as 50,000 could be fired and replaced with Trump (or Republican) loyalists. This would be done under the banner of annihilating the supposed “deep state” bureaucracy and smashing the “administrative state.”

As noted above, this would destroy the civil service, booting out of federal agencies employees with expertise and experience and replacing them with political hacks. We’re talking about EPA lawyers who might inform a White House that its proposal to sell oil leases off environmentally sensitive coastlands would violate the law. Or perhaps a CIA analyst who produces an assessment saying that a presidential policy might yield negative consequences (for instance, a report noting that bombing Mexico could cause an immigration crisis).

There’s much more in Project 2025 than eviscerating the civil service. It, too, calls for curbing the independence of the Justice Department and proposes revved-up prosecutions of persons providing or distributing abortion pills by mail. The project urges rolling back environmental regulations, reversing actions to address climate change, and abolishing the Pentagon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. One chapter that focuses on the Department of Health and Human Services calls on the next president to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” In other words, the next chief executive should wage a war on marriage equality.

Make no mistake. They want to take us back to where anyone not-White has no rights in this country. Where women would lose all body autonomy. Where our LGBTQIA+ Citizens would have absolutely no rights. They want us to live in a fascist state. And, this has nothing to do with Trump. They want this plan NO MATTER WHO THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE IS.

THE 2024 ELECTIONS ARE ABOUT DEMOCRACY VS FASCISM.

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Posted in 2024 Elections, Abortion, Abortion Rights, Body Autonomy, Book Banning, Breaking News, Current Events, Democracy, Department of Justice, Economics, Economy, Education, Elections, GOP | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Open Thread | Cannon Was Corrupt and Incompetent from the word GO!

Jack Smith should file to get her removed from the case.

Is Judge Cannon preparing to kneecap Trump’s Florida documents case?
Spoiler alert: Yes.

LIZ DYE
AUG 30, 2023

Last year, Judge Aileen Cannon tried valiantly to derail the Justice Department’s investigation of Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida country club. The unanimous conclusion among court watchers was that Judge Cannon, who was confirmed after Trump had already lost the 2020 election, put both thumbs and all eight fingers on the scale for the man who nominated her to the federal bench. She was only stopped by the intervention of the 11th Circuit, which reversed her in humiliating fashion.

And so liberals looked on in horror as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 42-count indictment arising out of that same documents investigation landed on Judge Cannon’s docket in the Southern District of Florida. It seemed inevitable that the jurist would seek to undermine the prosecution of Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, for their scheme to keep the FBI from discovering and reclaiming documents belonging to the American people.

A series of little-noticed filings in past two weeks demonstrates that Judge Cannon has been working behind the scenes to do exactly that, providing a playbook for Trump’s legal team to accuse Smith’s office of misconduct and potentially paving the way to exclude critical evidence and witnesses in the case.

Cannon takes aim at Jack Smith
The issue broke through the surface on August 2 when the government filed a motion for a hearing on potential attorney conflicts, which is known in the 11th Circuit as Garcia hearing. The purpose of this hearing is for the court to determine if the alleged conflict is waivable (some are not), and if so, whether the client has knowingly and voluntarily waived it. This is primarily to protect the client’s interest, and secondarily to protect the court itself so that a judgment can’t be reversed on appeal based on a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.

Here prosecutors allege that Walt Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., “has represented at least seven other individuals who have been questioned in connection with the investigation.” This is hardly surprising, since Trump’s Save America PAC pays a handful of lawyers, including Woodward and John Irving, to represent various MAGAworld figures. According to the most recent filings, the PAC dispensed $21 million in legal fees during the first half of 2023 alone.

………………….
Judges have an affirmative obligation to ensure that parties appearing before them are aware of any potential conflicts their lawyers may have — that is the whole purpose of a Garcia hearing. And in their motion, prosecutors strongly hinted but did not explicitly state that Taveras only felt free to implicate Trump when he got a lawyer who wasn’t being paid by Trump’s Save America PAC, as Woodward is. But instead of scheduling the Garcia hearing, Judge Cannon ordered Nauta to respond to the Garcia motion by addressing “the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate and/or to seek post-indictment hearings on matters pertinent to the [indictments] in this district.”

In plain English, she suggested that Nauta should argue that the government was contravening her authority by using a grand jury in DC to investigate crimes which took place in Florida. She also refused to accept two pieces of sealed evidence submitted by prosecutors which had been visible to the judge and the parties but not the public.

…………………..

Last week, prosecutors came out with a blistering response to Woodward’s claims. But for the purpose of understanding Judge Cannon’s exercise of profound bad faith, these are the two most important sentences in the document:

On June 27, 2023, consistent with its responsibility to promptly notify courts of potential conflicts, and given the prospective charges [Taveras] faced in the District of Columbia, the Government filed a motion for a conflicts hearing with the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for District of Columbia (Boasberg, C.J.), who presides over grand jury matters in that district. The Government notified [Cannon’s] Court on the same day, by sealed notice, of the filing in the District of Columbia.

It was fundamentally dishonest of Judge Cannon to imply that prosecutors did something underhanded here, when they told her exactly what they were doing two whole months ago. They were investigating Taveras’s perjurious testimony to the grand jury in DC. And the only appropriate venue to investigate that crime was in DC where it occurred, as Woodward and Cannon have both known all along.

Read the entire piece.
She’s an unqualified hack.
Jack Smith needs to call for her removal from this case.

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Weekend Open Thread

Good Morning. I hope that you are enjoying this weekend, fully vaccinated and boosted, with family and friends.

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Open Thread | No, The Vice President IS NOT Going To Be Dumped From the Ticket. And no, the President is NOT Too Old

BIDEN/HARRIS 2024!

To the haters:

We see you. We see that though you had the chance to vote for White Woman in 2016. A qualified White Woman in 2016.
You all came up with eleven billionty reasons why you couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

And now, here we are.
With all this nonsense about Joe Biden needs to step down. Joe Biden is too old to run again.
Phuck outta here.

All the nonsense about Joe Biden’s Age is about Kamala Harris as Vice President. Too many of you are scare to admit that you’re nervous about having this Black woman as the #2 Political Person in this country. You are scared that she’s a heartbeat away. All this nonsense about polls about a Vice-President – something I’ve never heard of before the Black woman got the job….

Uh uh
Nope.
You all are transparent as glass.

How do you think you would possible sell to the Democratic Party BASE the dumping of the Vice-President from the ticket?

Uh huh

No experience?
DA in San Francisco
Attorney General of the State of California
Senator from the State of California
Vice President of the United States

You don’t think that gives Kamala Harris a resume from which to run on in 2028, if she so chooses?

Uh huh

https://x.com/notcapnamerica/status/1702756288600400283?t=YsNlp9cRYFWzbctKN-YYiA&s=03

https://x.com/PettyLupone/status/1702741045510021344?t=PrW2NoXXMrgAUPO_WO9gvg&s=03

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Open Thread | So, McCarthy Is Going Through With the Sham Impeachment of President Biden

What a clown.
A clown beholden to the craziest portion of his crazy caucus.

Impeach President Biden.
For what?
No. Seriously.

What are the charges.
All this time, and they haven’t come up with anything.
All the lies that they’ve come up with have blown up in their faces.

But, McCarthy is beholden to the craziest of the right wing. So, he will go through with this farce.

The MSM won’t actually demand to be shown what proof of any charges. Hell ask for what the charges are. Because, they are so desperate for their HORSE RACE. And, for them to be able to declare ‘ BOTH SIDES’.

When it’s not both sides.

One party has a 4 time indicted, with 91 felony charges.

The other party has the President of the United States of America.

These two are not equal.

The complete and utter farce of this bullshyt.

😠😠😠

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Posted in 2023 Elections, 2024 Elections, Breaking News, Current Events, Democracy, Democratic Party, Elections, GOP, House of Representatives, Open Thread, Politics, President Joe Biden, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, U.S. House of Representatives | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Open Thread | Twitter Accused of Helping Saudi Arabia Commit Human Rights Abuses

From The Guardian:

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses
Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and Canada

The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada.

The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Ethiopian migrants walk on foot along a highway to Saadah province to cross into Saudi Arabia, on 23 August, 2023 on the outskirts of Sana’a, Yemen
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It centers on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan’s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent.

Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government’s campaign to ferret out critics but – because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company – provided assistance to the kingdom.

The new lawsuit details how X had originally been seen seen as a critical vehicle for democratic movements during the Arab spring, and therefore became a source of concern for the Saudi government as early as 2013.

The new legal filing comes days after Human Rights Watch condemned a Saudi court for sentencing a man to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, which it called an “escalation” of the government’s crackdown on freedom of expression.

The convicted man, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, is the brother of a Saudi scholar and government critic living in exile in the UK. Saudi court records examined by HRW showed that al-Ghamdi was accused of having two accounts, which had a total of 10 followers combined. Both accounts had fewer than 1,000 tweets combined, and contained retweets of well-known critics of the government.

The Saudi crackdown can be traced back to December 2014, as Ahmad Abouammo – who was later convicted in the US for secretly acting as a Saudi agent and lying to the FBI – began accessing and sending confidential user data to Saudi Arabian officials. In the new lawsuit, it is claimed that he sent a message to Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to Mohammed bin Salman, via the social media company’s messaging system, saying “proactively and reactively we will delete evil, my brother”. It was a reference, the lawsuit claims, to the identification and harming of perceived Saudi dissidents who were using the platform. Al-Qahtani was later accused by the US of being a mastermind behind the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

“Twitter was either aware of this message – brazenly sent on its own platform – or was deliberately ignorant to it,” the revised lawsuit states.

You can read the rest of the article at the link.

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