It's raining lawsuits! ☂️

Trump sues NY attorney general

The BBC writes:

Trump sues NY Attorney General Letitia James for 'intimidation'

Donald Trump has sued New York Attorney General Letitia James, accusing her of conducting a "war of intimidation and harassment" against him.

It follows a lawsuit that Ms James launched against Mr Trump and three of his children last September, accusing them of fraud committed over a decade.

"We sued Donald Trump because he committed extensive financial fraud," the statement said. "That fact hasn't changed, and neither will our resolve to ensure that no matter how powerful or political one might be, no one is above the law."

Mr Trump's lawsuit is the latest twist in a long-running feud between Mr Trump and Ms James, who - on the night she was elected in 2018 - vowed to shine "a bright light" on his real estate dealings.

Mr Trump, for his part, has accused her of conducting a "witch hunt" and branded Ms James - the first black woman to be New York's attorney general - a "racist".

Ms James made a gigantic mistake by saying that Trump committed extensive financial fraud. She should have said there is solid evidence that Trump committed extensive financial fraud. Oh well. Now Trump can file a motion to get her off the case for saying that.

Doctor sues Indiana attorney general

CBS News writes:

Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who provided an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, is suing Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, alleging he has relied on "baseless" consumer complaints to launch "overbroad" investigations into physicians who provide abortion care, and issued subpoenas seeking the confidential medical records of their patients.  

The lawsuit, filed by lawyer Kathleen DeLaney on behalf of Bernard and her medical partner Dr. Amy Caldwell in Indiana Commercial Court in Marion County, claims Rokita opened investigations into seven consumer complaints filed against Bernard after she came under scrutiny for performing the medication-induced abortion on June 30, days after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.

Parents sue police

ABC News writes:

The parents of Gabby Petito have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the police department in Moab, Utah, where the slain travel blogger and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie were questioned about a possible domestic dispute weeks before she was reported missing.

The lawsuit, which was initially announced in August in a notice of claim before being filed Thursday, is seeking at least $50 million in damages.

"We feel the need to bring justice because she could have been protected that day," Petito's mother, Nichole Schmidt, said during a press conference Thursday. "There are laws put in place to protect victims, and those laws were not followed. And we don't want this to happen to anybody else."

The suit alleges that if the Moab police had followed a Utah law on domestic violence, "Gabby would still be alive today," James McConkie, one of the attorneys representing the family, said during the briefing.

Twitter employees sue Musk

Axios writes:

Twitter was sued on Thursday over Elon Musk's plan to cut as many as 3,700 jobs at the company.

Driving the news: The class-action lawsuit, filed by five current or former employees, alleges that Twitter violated federal and state laws that require at least 60-day notice of a mass layoff.

Federal judge would like to sue the Supreme Court?

This one is a total hoot! In a burst of both frustration and refreshing sanity, a federal judge rhetorically spit in the Supreme Court’s face. MSN writes:

In his Bruen decision last June, Justice Clarence Thomas ordered courts to assess the constitutionality of modern-day gun restrictions by searching for “historical analogues” from 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Ever since, judges have struggled mightily with this task—in part because most have no training in real historical analysis, but also because the record is often spotty and contradictory. In light of Bruen’s maximalist language, they have erred on the side of gun owners, finding a constitutional right to buy a gun while under indictment for a violent crime, to carry a gun into airports, and to scratch out the serial number on a firearm, rendering it untraceable.

Last Thursday, Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi charted a different course: He proposed appointing a historian to help him “identify and sift through authoritative sources on founding-era firearms restrictions” to decide the constitutionality of a federal law barring felons from possessing firearms. His proposal is the first positive development in Second Amendment law since the Bruen revolution. At worst, it will demonstrate the absurdity and impossibility of Thomas’ command. At best, it will restore sanity to an area of jurisprudence that is going completely off the rails.

Reeves’ order is bracingly honest about the sorry state of Second Amendment jurisprudence today. “The justices of the Supreme Court, distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he wrote. Federal judges “lack both the methodological and substantive knowledge that historians possess. The sifting of evidence that judges perform is different than the sifting of sources and methodologies that historians perform. And we are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791.” Putting oneself in the mindset of a rich, white men in the 18th century requiring training and practice. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

To illustrate his point, Reeves wrote that while historians still fiercely contest the theory of an individual right to bear arms, that right remains the law. He quoted the academic Patrick J. Charles, who wrote that advocates of this theory “broke, and continue to break, virtually every norm of historical objectivity and methodology accepted within academia.” Charles’ complaint could be applied to a huge amount of pseudo-originalist legal theory. As he explained: “Minority viewpoints are cast as majority viewpoints. Historical speakers’ and writers’ words are cast in terms outside the bounds of their intended context or audience. The intellectual and political thoughts of different historical eras are explained from modern vantage point. Historical presumptions or inferences are sold as historical facts.”

By appointing a trained historian, Reeves could avoid these pitfalls. He would, indeed, stand a better chance of lighting upon the truth. Even as it may be mandated by Thomas’ Bruen opinion, any such undertaking remains fundamentally misguided: Renowned historian Eric Foner recently dismissed the “foolish” belief that the Constitution has “one original meaning,” since it always meant “different things to a lot of different people” who were involved in its ratification. But a historian will at least get closer to a plausible interpretation than Thomas. And if the whole undertaking fails to produce a good answer, it will have demonstrated the absurdity of defining rights on the basis of history alone.

It warms my little heart to see so much work going to the lawyers. And now maybe some will go to historians too! Lawyers and historians need work so they can make money to pay for groceries.

A corollary is that lots of people will be packing heat (carrying a gun(s)). It will be just like 1791 all over again! MAGA!!

News digest: Free speech, etc.

Free speech under attack

The Verge writes:

Virtually every American politician professes to love the First Amendment. Many of them profess to hate another law: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But the more they say about 230, the clearer it becomes that they actually hate the First Amendment and think Section 230 is just fine.

The heart of Section 230 is famously just 26 words: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.  

Threatening to repeal 230 is a shakedown racket, a way for lawmakers to quietly put their thumb on the scale — a back door to imposing government speech regulations.  

The thing is, these complaints get a big thing right: in an era of unprecedented mass communication, it’s easier than ever to hurt people with illegal and legal speech. But the issue is far bigger and more complicated than encouraging more people to sue Facebook — because, in fact, the legal system has become part of the problem. 

The legal system wasn’t built for bad faith at scale. The First Amendment doesn’t work if the legal system doesn’t work. Republican-proposed speech reforms are ludicrously, bizarrely bad. The rules are transparently rigged to punish political targets at the expense of basic consistency.

In other words: 

• Our legal system cannot handle all the bad faith that has completely taken over the rhetoric of America’s fascist radical right and is now starting to poison the left
• There is not yet equivalence between America’s fascist radical right and the left, but the gap is probably narrowing

Section 230 shields web hosts from liability for illegal speech that a third party posts or reposts. The problem is that the scope of illegal speech is so narrow that online hate speech, blatant lies, crackpot conspiracy theories, harassment and etc., are not illegal. 

What some anti-free speech politicians want to do is repeal the Sec. 230 shield for certain kinds of online disinformation, e.g., lies about COVID vaccines killing many people or being ineffective. Republicans want that to apply to giant social media sites, while leaving small radical right crackpot sites untouched and free to spew lies, slanders,[1] disinformation, etc.

Republican plans for domestic spending once 

they are back in power 

The NYT writes:

Congressional Republicans, eyeing a midterm election victory that could hand them control of the House and the Senate, have embraced plans to reduce federal spending on Social Security and Medicare, including cutting benefits for some retirees and raising the retirement age for both safety net programs.

.... several influential Republicans have signaled a new willingness to push for Medicare and Social Security spending cuts as part of future budget negotiations with President Biden. Their ideas include raising the age for collecting Social Security benefits to 70 from 67 and requiring many older Americans to pay higher premiums for their health coverage. The ideas are being floated as a way to narrow government spending on programs that are set to consume a growing share of the federal budget in the decades ahead.

Of course radical right Republicans are not saying exactly what they would do before the elections next week. Only after they are in power will we find out what fun plans they have to screw us. Once back in power, the radical right will continue its relentless assault on government’s ability to protect citizens from enraged Christian fundamentalists, ruthless brass knuckles capitalists and power mad, fascist Republican Party elites.

From the too little, too late files: 

Biden feebly tries to defend democracy

The NYT writes: 

President Biden issued an impassioned condemnation of his predecessor and other Republicans on Wednesday night for encouraging political violence, voter intimidation and “the Big Lie,” framing next week’s elections as a pivotal test of American democracy.

“As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America — for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state — who won’t commit, they will not commit to accepting the results of the elections that they’re running in,” Mr. Biden said at Union Station, just blocks from where a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to disrupt the transfer of power. “This is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.”

No Joe, it is not a path to chaos and so far it has not been illegal, except for the Republican’s 1/6 coup attempt. It is a path to things like Christian Sharia law under a brutal, enraged Christian Taliban, ruthless, unregulated brass knuckles capitalist kleptocracy and American-style fascism served up by Republican Party grifter elites. That is the path we are on right now.

In my humble opinion, Joe still doesn’t get it. Regardless, it’s probably too late for Joe’s speech to make much difference in the elections next week. 

Hear that hammering sound? It is nails starting to be pounded into the coffin of democracy, civil liberties, secularism, respect for fact and truth, and the rule of law.

Footnote: 

1. When I use slanders in this context, which I do a lot now, I do not mean slander in the sense of what is needed to win a defamation case in court. That is usually impossible or almost impossible to do. What I mean is defamatory insults that are rarely prosecuted. An current example is the lies America’s fascist radical right put out that Paul Pelosi (Nancy's husband) had hired a male prostitute, wound up in a drunken fight with him, and got hit in the head with a hammer. Those lies are obviously insulting to Paul. But they’re the kind of insults that rarely go to court, and rarely lead to a finding of defamation for the few lawsuits that are filed.

Climate change non-education

An effective way to keep people from opposing or supporting something that elites want or don’t want is to keep the public as ignorant, deceived, disinformed, confused and/or distracted as much as possible. A great way to foster ignorance and disinformation is to simply not teach subjects that elites want the public to remain ignorant and disinformed about. The NYT writes:

Many States Omit Climate Education. These Teachers Are Trying to Slip It In.

Around the United States, middle school science standards have minimal references to climate change and teachers on average spend just a few hours a year teaching it.

In mid-October, just two weeks after Hurricane Ian struck her state, Bertha Vazquez asked her class of seventh graders to go online and search for information about climate change. Specifically, she tasked them to find sites that cast doubt on its human causes and who paid for them.

It was a sophisticated exercise for the 12-year-olds, Ms. Vazquez said, teaching them to discern climate facts from a mass of online disinformation. But she also thought it an important capstone to the end of two weeks she dedicates to teaching her Miami students about climate change, possible solutions and the barriers to progress.

.... in Florida, where Ms. Vazquez has taught for more than 30 years, and where her students are already seeing the dramatic impacts of a warming planet, the words “climate change” do not appear in the state’s middle or elementary school education standards.

“Middle school is where these kids are starting to get their moral compass and to back that compass up with logic,” said Michael Padilla, a professor emeritus at Clemson University and a former president of the National Science Teachers Association. “So middle school is a classic opportunity to have more focus on climate change.”

For those who do receive formal instruction on climate change, it will most likely happen in middle school science classrooms. But many middle school standards don’t explicitly mention climate change, so it falls largely on teachers and individual school districts to find ways to integrate it into lessons, often working against the dual hurdles of limited time and inadequate support.

Ms. Vazquez really went out on a limb to admit she teaches climate change in Florida, which politically is anti-climate change science. She has moral courage, but maybe not a job for much longer. A way to fire her will probably be found soon. And, radical right Republican climate science deniers like Rick DeSantis will look into ways to get laws passed in Florida to stop the teaching about climate change and science. DeSantis will attack it as socialist lies, groomer indoctrination and whatever other crackpottery seems good enough to keep the base angry, fearful, distracted, deceived and ignorant.

An ignorant public is a much more gullible and deceivable public than a well-informed public. The Republican Party understands this. That underpins ruthless Republican efforts to maintain ignorance and deceit about climate change.

News Snippet: How Republicans are slowly killing democracy

We're in a period of death of democracy the rule of law and civil liberties by thousands of cuts coming over at least several decades. Attacks on government, secularism and inconvenient truth are all intensifying. Here is another example.

NBC News writes: 

Chief Justice Roberts temporarily blocks release of Trump's tax records to House Democrats

Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday [that is today folks] temporarily blocked a congressional committee from accessing former President Donald Trump’s tax records.

Trump, unlike other recent presidents, has refused to make his tax returns public amid scrutiny of his business affairs, and turned to the justices after an appeals court in Washington refused to intervene on the release of the records. The high court has recently rejected similar requests made by Trump.

Trump’s lawyers say the House Ways and Means Committee’s assertion that it needs the information to probe how the IRS conducts the auditing process for presidents does not stand up to scrutiny.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined Thursday to reconsider a three-judge panel’s ruling in August that the committee could obtain the tax returns.

As usual, the MSM does not get it, or if it does, it is incompetent. That's normal these days and has been for years.

What NBC fails to point out is that (i) Roberts blocked release until after the election, (ii) Trump is not running for any office so there is no reason for timing it to the election, and (iii) if the Republicans retake the House, as some polling indicates is likely, that temporary block will be permanent. Once the Repubs retake the House, that is the end of all House investigation into Trump's treason and crimes. That leaves the DoJ and Garland. There is little or no hope for justice emanating from the clueless paralyzed Garland.

Once again, a Republican judge on the Supreme Court protects a corrupt Republican elite. And by delaying as much as possible, Trump once again gets away with treason and/or crimes.

The rule of law has fallen. The rest of democracy is next. Our freedoms come right after that.

My grade for the MSM: Rock solid F (failure).

My grade for the Republican Party, the enemy of the people and democracy: F--- (triple minus F).

What the radical right rank and file thinks

New poll data by PRRI is published and it sheds light on support for Republican extremists. A WaPo opinion piece comments:

For answers, turn to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.

A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”

Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.

On race, only 19 percent of the group agrees that “the legacy of slavery and discrimination have limited Black Americans’ upward mobility.” They are the least likely to accept that African Americans disproportionately receive the death penalty. And here’s the kicker: Unlike a majority of Americans, “six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) agree that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”

Given these figures, it shouldn’t be surprising that while 58 percent of Americans think white supremacy is still a major problem, only 33 percent of White evangelical Protestants do, the lowest among religious groups. Similarly, 51 percent of the group believe that public teachers and librarians are “indoctrinating students with inappropriate curricula and books that wrongly portray America as a racist country,” compared with only 29 percent of Americans broadly.  

And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”  

In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.

It makes little sense to debate whether the MAGA movement radicalized White evangelical Protestants or the other way around. They are essentially one and the same.  

Last year, Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge wrote for the New York Times, “In essence, many Americans are coming to the understanding that to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical, even if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” In other words, Burge explained, more people are “conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.” (This helps explain how evangelicals can embrace views that fly in the face of Christian theology; it’s not about the religion.)

From what I can tell, White evangelical Protestants were radicalized decades before Trump came on the scene. He just normalized bad things like Christian radicalism, bigotry, rage-mongering and acceptance of lies and slanders. For the radical right, religion has merged into politics. God's dogma is actually Republican Party dogma. The rank and file just cannot see this. Decades of toxic Republican Party propaganda has done its job quite well.

News digest

A court grows a pair? 

The Texas Tribune writes:

Two leaders of True the Vote jailed by federal judge for contempt of court

Federal marshals escorted the leaders of True the Vote out of a Houston courtroom on Monday morning and into a holding cell. Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips have been held in contempt of court for refusing to release the name of a person of interest in the defamation and computer hacking case against them, who they claim, without proof, is a confidential FBI informant.

They will remain in jail until they release the name of the man.

Election software company Konnech is suing Engelbrecht and Phillips for defamation. Konnech claims that a right-wing election denier group, True the Vote, defamed the technology company. Engelbrecht and Phillips claim the technology company’s software had security flaws and they were just innocent patriots exposing bad election-related things.

Occasionally courts will jail a journalist for refusing to disclose the names of their anonymous sources. But that is journalism protected by the Constitution’s freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment. As far as I know, courts rarely jail people for contempt, especially in politics-related cases. This is a politics-related civil lawsuit. Without evidence of the source of the defamatory information, it will be impossible to prove intent (“degree of fault” in some states).

Under Texas law, a plaintiff, Konnech in this case, must show or prove (1) the publication of a false statement of fact to a third party, (2) that was defamatory concerning the plaintiff, (3) with the requisite degree of fault, at least amounting to negligence, and (4) damages, in some cases. If Engelbrecht and Phillips really believed the information was from an FBI informant, that might get them off the hook for intent or degree of fault, and thus for liability for defamation. 

Clarence Thomas is clueless (Alito is too)

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case about affirmative action in college admissions. Given decades of radical right animosity to affirmative action, one can reasonably expect the last vestiges of it to be obliterated. Law and Crime summarizes Thomas’ confusion in an article entitled:

Justice Thomas Says He Does Not ‘Have a Clue’ What Diversity Means at Oral Arguments in College Affirmative Action Case.

 

Apparently, it does not occur to Thomas to simply ask the parties what diversity means. Actually, he knows what it means. By making his arrogant, snarky comment, Thomas signals what is his vote is going to be. Alito made similar comments. Thomas and Alito have decided the outcome before all the evidence in the case was heard and considered. That is the opposite of how judges are supposed to judge. But it is how radical right Republican judges judge.

It will be interesting to see what the Republicans on the court come up with as their reasoning to kill affirmative action. The NYT comments on the impact of affirmative action’s death: “Such a decision would jeopardize affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, particularly elite institutions, decreasing the representation of Black and Latino students and bolstering the number of white and Asian ones.” That result has been a cherished long-term goal of Christian nationalists. They will very likely get their wish soon.

In the oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson framed the issue by asking whether America’s history of racial discrimination still matters. Apparently, it does not to the Republicans. The past is past, racism is dead and no more needs to be done. That is core Christian nationalist dogma.