Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’ – The New York Times
Dayum…
Category: Domestic Affairs,
Why Sen. Chuck Schumer Wants To Rename A Senate Building After John McCain
…Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed honoring the late Sen. John McCain by renaming the Russell Senate Office Building after him.
…It might seem like an odd proposal — after all, Richard Russell was a Democrat who represented Georgia in the Senate for 38 years and who was dubbed a “senators’ senator” for his mastery of the chamber’s arcane rules and procedures. Schumer’s proposal would replace a fellow Democrat’s name with a Republican’s.
…Russell was a staunch segregationist, and he used his same mastery of the Senate rules to block civil rights legislation, even keeping an anti-lynching statute from becoming law.
He fought integration in the nation’s military and at federal government agencies. In 1956, Russell was a co-author of the “Southern Manifesto,” which opposed desegregation of public places, and he led the Southern bloc of senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, calling it “shortsighted and disastrous.”
Who Was Sen. Richard Russell? : NPR
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Federal Court: First Amendment Protects Sharing Food With Homeless People
In a colorful decision that managed to invoke the Boston Tea Party, Lady Macbeth and Jesus of Nazareth, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that feeding the homeless is “expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.” The decision revives a challenge brought by a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, which sued Fort Lauderdale, Florida for requiring a permit to share food in public parks.
…“The court’s opinion recognized sharing food with another human being is one of the oldest forms of human expression,” said Kirsten Anderson, litigation director at the Southern Legal Counsel and lead attorney on the case. “We think this decision strengthens our message to cities across the country that they need to invest in constructive solutions to homelessness instead of wasting government resources on punishing people who seek to offer aid.”
Federal Court: First Amendment Protects Sharing Food With Homeless People
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Unite the Right 2018: The psychology of the alt-right
Dehumanization is scary. It’s the psychological trick we engage in that allows us to harm other people (because it’s easier to inflict pain on people who are not people). Historically it’s been the fuel of mass atrocities and genocide.
…The alt-right wants and supports organizations that look out for the rights and well-being of white people. Historically, such groups have done so by striking fear in the hearts of immigrants, Jews, and minorities.
…The survey also asked participants to state how often they engaged in aggressive behaviors, like doxxing, the releasing of private information without a person’s permission. They also asked about how often respondents physically threatened another online, or made offensive statements just to get a rise out of people.
Here, too, the alt-righters were much more likely to admit to engaging in these behaviors.
…Alt-righters in the survey scored higher on social dominance orientation (the preference that society maintains social order), right-wing authoritarianism (a preference for strong rulers), and somewhat higher levels of the “dark triad” of personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.)
Unite the Right 2018: The psychology of the alt-right – Vox
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She warned America that Russia hacked our voting rolls. Why is she in jail?
It was a Democrat, Barack Obama, who ran in 2008 with a promise to extend protections to whistle-blowers, only to betray those words as president. Under Obama, eight whistle-blowers were prosecuted, initially, under the Espionage Act, far more than any commander-in-chief who came before him. Most of the persecuted made the same difficult choice as Winner, pleading guilty to lesser charges because of the Kafkaesque nature of the Espionage Act.
…Timm said any solution would start with rewriting the Espionage Act, to make it clear that the law is targeting treasonous spies, not patriotic whistle-blowers. Likewise, he said federal law could also be reformed to allow whistle-blowers like Winner or Kiriakou to present evidence on whether their leak was motivated by the public interest or whether national security was, in fact, harmed.
What’s more, we need more big shots in Big Media with the biggest megaphones to help remind people that it was leaked information that let the public know about the depths of Watergate, the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, and the Vietnam War lying that was laid bare in the Pentagon Papers. In fact, it’s a little crazy — and maybe revealing — that while the journalism world was going ga-ga over the Pentagon Papers-era defiance in the movie The Post, very little ink was spilled in defense of Reality Winner.
She warned America that Russia hacked our voting rolls. Why is she in jail? | Will Bunch
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Cost of New E.P.A. Coal Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year – The New York Times
The Trump administration on Tuesday made public the details of its new pollution rules governing coal-burning power plants, and the fine print includes an acknowledgment that the plan would increase carbon emissions and lead to up to 1,400 premature deaths annually.
…The new proposal …would also let states relax pollution rules for power plants that need upgrades, keeping them active longer.
…Compared to the Obama-era plan, the analysis says, “implementing the proposed rule is expected to increase emissions of carbon dioxide and the level of emissions of certain pollutants in the atmosphere that adversely affect human health.”
…The [Obama era] Clean Power Plan aimed to curb planet-warming greenhouse gases by steering the energy sector away from coal and toward cleaner energy sources like wind and solar. According to its calculations, the decreased coal burning also would reduce other pollutants like sulfur dioxide, which poses respiratory risk, and nitrogen oxides that create ozone, which, in the form of smog, can damage lung tissue.
Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. also estimated that, by 2030, the Clean Power Plan would result in 180,000 fewer missed school days per year by children because of ozone-related illnesses. Asthma instances would also drop significantly, according to the analysis.
By contrast, the Trump administration analysis finds that own its plan would see 48,000 new cases of exacerbated asthma and at least 21,000 new missed days of school annually by 2030 because those pollutants would increase in the atmosphere rather than decrease.
Cost of New E.P.A. Coal Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year – The New York Times
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Michael Cohen plea deal
Michael Cohen said in a plea deal that “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” he kept information that would have been harmful to the candidate and the campaign from becoming public.
…As part of the plea deal with federal prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Cohen is expected to plead guilty to multiple counts of campaign finance violations, tax fraud and bank fraud, according to three sources. The deal would include jail time and a substantial monetary fine.
…Prosecutors said in court their investigation is into Cohen’s personal financial dealings. The search warrant authorizing the FBI raid referenced Cohen’s taxi medallion business, the identity of banks that loaned him money and payments made to suppress negative information during the presidential campaign.
Michael Cohen plea deal – CNNPolitics
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Paul Manafort found guilty on eight counts
Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes, a major victory for special counsel Robert Mueller.
But jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 charges, and Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those counts.
Manafort was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud.
…He still faces a second set of criminal charges in a Washington, DC, federal court, of failure to register his foreign lobbying and of money laundering conspiracy related to the same Ukrainian political work that was central to the Virginia case.
Paul Manafort found guilty on eight counts – CNNPolitics
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John Legend wants Louisiana to remove ‘white supremacy’ from its constitution
Voters in Louisiana will be asked in November if they want to amend the state’s constitution to remove the clause that allows non-unanimous jury decisions.
“During Louisiana’s all-white constitutional convention in 1898, delegates passed a series of measures specifically designed to ‘perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana,'” the piece states. “Non-unanimous juries were one of those measures, and the intent was clear: If the federal Constitution required that African Americans be allowed to serve on juries, the state constitution would make sure that minority votes could be discounted.”
John Legend wants Louisiana to remove ‘white supremacy’ from its constitution
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One of the Strongest Progressives in Congress Is Facing a Primary Challenger Invoking Identity and Change.
“Congressman Mike Capuano has been a fine, progressive member of Congress, but having an experienced progressive like Ayanna Pressley on the ballot is an unmissable opportunity for Massachusetts to both ensure a leading woman of color represents its only majority-minority district and add the voice of just one person of color to New England’s currently all-white congressional delegation,” said Jim Dean, chair for Democracy for America, in a statement.
…Capuano suggested in a one debate that his identity was less important than his track record of working on behalf of a diverse community. “There is a majority of no one in this district,” said Capuano. “No race, no ethnicity, no religion, nothing. So anybody who sits in this seat has to be able to work with people that don’t look like them, people that don’t think like them, people that don’t worship like them — and has to be able to bring people together.”
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Op-Ed: The Slippery Slope of Complicity in the Age of Trump
The real news of the past few weeks isn’t that Trump is a wannabe Mussolini who can’t even make the trains run on time. It’s the absence of any meaningful pushback from Congressional Republicans. Indeed, not only are they acquiescing in Trump’s corruption, his incitements to violence, and his abuse of power, up to and including using the power of office to punish critics, they’re increasingly vocal in cheering him on.
Make no mistake: if Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists on, er, trumped-up charges, and more — and he’ll do it with full support from his party.
…The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.
…Republicans who defended Trump over the Muslim ban, his early attacks on the press, the initial evidence of collusion with Russia, have in effect burned their bridges. It would be deeply embarrassing to admit that the elitist liberals they mocked were right when they were wrong; also, nobody who doesn’t support Trump will ever trust their judgment or patriotism again.
Opinion | The Slippery Slope of Complicity – The New York Times
Trump Says He Has ‘Obliterated’ ISIS. The Terror Group Seems Not To Have Noticed.
Trump claims he has “eradicated,” “wiped out” and even “absolutely obliterated” ISIS, there is one group that has ignored the president’s words: the terrorists themselves.
According to recent estimates by the United Nations and the U.S. Defense Department’s inspector general, the self-described Islamic State has between 20,000 and 31,100 fighters ― figures nearly identical to CIA estimates of the terror group’s strength in 2014 when it was near its zenith.
What’s more, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ― or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as it is also known ― actually regrouped somewhat earlier this year. Foreign affairs experts suggest it will concentrate on overseas attacks now that it has lost most of the territory it used to control in Iraq and Syria.
Trump Says He Has ‘Obliterated’ ISIS. The Terror Group Seems Not To Have Noticed. | HuffPost
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Liberty Utilities still looking to sell Concord gasholder building
The future of the Concord gasholder building is still up in the air despite its listing this week on the National Register of Historic Places.
The new listing makes the building eligible for certain grants and tax breaks, but does not offer legal protection: Privately owned buildings on the register can still be torn down and replaced.
…Gasholder buildings existing in most American cities before natural gas become popular and while many still exist, Concord’s may be the only one in the country that still holds the huge machinery that was used to contain the gas. This is why it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Liberty has said that it could cost $500,000 to stabilize the building, which has suffered some damage over the years, and perhaps a million dollars to make it usable.
Liberty Utilities still looking to sell Concord gasholder building
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Despite rain, nearly half of New Hampshire is abnormally dry
According to the latest drought map, 48 percent of New Hampshire is abnormally dry, meaning there’s a fine line between being in the clear and a drought.
“We’re predicted to get more rain all the way through August, without getting dry hot conditions, which the big issue there is people using a lot of water when it’s dry and hot,” said Stacey Herbold, of the NH Drought Management Team.
Despite rain, nearly half of New Hampshire is abnormally dry
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Border Fence Firm Snared for Hiring Illegal Workers
A fence-building company in Southern California agrees to pay nearly $5 million in fines for hiring illegal immigrants. Two executives from the company may also serve jail time. The Golden State Fence Company’s work includes some of the border fence between San Diego and Mexico.
Border Fence Firm Snared for Hiring Illegal Workers : NPR
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