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06 August 20
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Reader Supported News
New York Attorney General Moves to Dissolve the NRA After Fraud Investigation
Tim Mak, NPR
Mak writes: "The attorney general of New York took action Thursday to dissolve the National Rifle Association following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is 'fraught with fraud and abuse.'"
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Donald Trump's tweet. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Facebook and Twitter Remove Trump Video Post Where He Falsely Claims Children Are Immune to COVID-19
Elliot Hannon, Slate
Hannon writes: "Donald Trump, the president of the United States, says half-cocked things, ignorant things, insidious things, threatening things, irresponsible things, outright dangerous things, and demonstrably false things, among a near-constant string of generally awful utterances."
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Fighters in Libya wear masks. (photo: AFP)
Patrick Cockburn | War and Pandemic Journalism: The Truth Can Disappear Fast
Patrick Cockburn, TomDispatch
Cockburn writes: "The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough."
EXCERPT:
Of course, there is little new about propaganda, controlling the news, or spreading “false facts.” Ancient Egyptian pharaohs inscribed self-glorifying and mendacious accounts of their battles on monuments, now thousands of years old, in which their defeats are lauded as heroic victories. What is new about war reporting in recent decades is the far greater sophistication and resources that governments can deploy in shaping the news. With opponents like longtime Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, demonization was never too difficult a task because he was a genuinely demonic autocrat.
Yet the most influential news story about the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S.-led counter-invasion proved to be a fake. This was a report that, in August 1990, invading Iraqi soldiers had tipped babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die on the floor. A Kuwaiti girl reported to have been working as a volunteer in the hospital swore before a U.S. congressional committee that she had witnessed that very atrocity. Her story was hugely influential in mobilizing international support for the war effort of the administration of President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. allies he teamed up with.
In reality it proved purely fictional. The supposed hospital volunteer turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. Several journalists and human rights specialists expressed skepticism at the time, but their voices were drowned out by the outrage the tale provoked. It was a classic example of a successful propaganda coup: instantly newsworthy, not easy to disprove, and when it was -- long after the war -- it had already had the necessary impact, creating support for the U.S.-led coalition going to war with Iraq.
In a similar fashion, I reported on the American war in Afghanistan in 2001-2002 at a time when coverage in the international media had left the impression that the Taliban had been decisively defeated by the U.S. military and its Afghan allies. Television showed dramatic shots of bombs and missiles exploding on the Taliban front lines and Northern Alliance opposition forces advancing unopposed to “liberate” the Afghan capital, Kabul.
When, however, I followed the Taliban retreating south to Kandahar Province, it became clear to me that they were not by any normal definition a beaten force, that their units were simply under orders to disperse and go home. Their leaders had clearly grasped that they were over-matched and that it would be better to wait until conditions changed in their favor, something that had distinctly happened by 2006, when they went back to war in a big way. They then continued to fight in a determined fashion to the present day. By 2009, it was already dangerous to drive beyond the southernmost police station in Kabul due to the risk that Taliban patrols might create pop-up checkpoints anywhere along the road.
None of the wars I covered then have ever really ended. What has happened, however, is that they have largely ended up receding, if not disappearing, from the news agenda. I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19 isn’t found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with the coronavirus pandemic as well. Given the way news about it now dominates, even overwhelms, the present news agenda, this may seem unlikely, but there are precedents. In 1918, with World War I in progress, governments dealt with what came to be called the Spanish Flu by simply suppressing information about it. Spain, as a non-combatant in that war, did not censor the news of the outbreak in the same fashion and so the disease was most unfairly named “the Spanish Flu,” though it probably began in the United States.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a news conference. (photo: Elizabeth Frantz/AP)
Elizabeth Warren Wants to Know Why the Data Mining Firm Mobilewalla Was Spying on Black Lives Matter Protesters
Caroline Haskins, BuzzFeed
Haskins writes: "Four lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, said Tuesday that they have 'serious concerns' about data-mining company Mobilewalla following a BuzzFeed News story in June that showed the company had used cellphone location data to predict the race, age, gender, and home location of more than 17,000 Black Lives Matter protesters."
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Signs direct people to the entrance of the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas, on June 9. (photo: Ethan Miller/Getty)
Trump's Radical Lawsuit Against Nevada's Vote-by-Mail Law, Explained
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "On Monday, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) signed legislation intended to ensure that voters in his state can still cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic."
It’s Bush v. Gore all over again.
n Monday, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) signed legislation intended to ensure that voters in his state can still cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Among other things, the new law (known as AB4) provides that registered Nevada voters will automatically receive a ballot in the mail, a common practice in Western states. It also requires the state to provide a minimum number of polling places for in-person voters, both on Election Day and for early voting.
President Trump’s response to this new law was apoplectic.
On Tuesday, one day after AB4 became law, Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party, seeking to block it.
Their legal complaint in Donald J. Trump for President v. Cegavske is not a model of careful legal argumentation. It claims, for example, that AB4 changed Nevada law to allow mailed-in ballots without postmarks to be counted so long as they arrive within three days of Election Day. In fact, Nevada law already allowed such ballots to be counted. An entire section of the complaint focuses on the fact that AB4 was enacted “on a weekend vote” — the state House approved the bill on a Friday, but the Senate passed it on a Sunday — without explaining how the day of the bill’s passage was relevant to its legality.
Though Trump for President v. Cegavske (the named defendant is Barbara Cegavske, Nevada’s secretary of state) targets several provisions of Nevada’s election law, its most significant attacks focus on two provisions: the provision allowing some late-arriving ballots to be counted and a provision requiring the state’s two most populous counties to have a higher minimum number of polling places than less populous counties.
It’s not hard to guess why Trump wants late-arriving mail-in ballots to be tossed out. Multiple polls have shown that Biden voters prefer to vote by mail, while Trump voters are much more likely to vote in person.
Trump has spent the past several months attacking states that try to make it easier to vote by mail — though he recently claimed that mail-in ballots in Florida are fine because “Florida’s got a great Republican governor.”
In any event, Trump’s lawsuit suffers from several fundamental flaws. Some of its arguments rely on federal statutes that most likely cannot be enforced through a lawsuit brought by a private party. Others rest on speculation about how certain provisions of AB4 will be implemented. Important prongs of Trump’s legal arguments rest on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore (2000), an opinion that explicitly states its decision is “limited to the present circumstances” and therefore should not be relied on by future courts.
And beyond that, at least some of Trump’s arguments would lead to sweeping progressive results that he probably would not like if they were embraced by federal courts.
Trump would not like the implications of his own legal arguments
AB4 requires all Nevada counties to have at least one in-person early voting site in every county and at least one in-person polling place on Election Day. Only two Nevada counties have more than 60,000 residents, and those two counties are required to have additional polling sites. Washoe County (Reno), with nearly 500,000 residents, must have at least 15 early voting sites and 25 sites on the day of the election. Clark County (Las Vegas), with more than 2.2 million residents, must have at least 35 early sites and at least 100 on Election Day.
The Trump team claims this arrangement is unconstitutional and relies heavily on Bush v. Gore to make its case.
One of the ironies of Bush v. Gore is that if the Supreme Court actually took its own holding in that case seriously, Bush would have been one of the most progressive election law decisions in American history.
The specific issue in Bush, which effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush, concerned a recount of the ballots cast in Florida’s extraordinarily close 2000 presidential contest between Bush and Democrat Al Gore. The majority in Bush faulted Florida election officials for failing to apply “uniform rules” to this recount — an unclearly marked ballot might be counted in one Florida county while a ballot with the same unclear marking might be rejected in another. This lack of one statewide standard, according to a majority of the justices, injected too much arbitrariness into the recount.
But Bush also contains sweeping language suggesting that any disparate treatment of voters within a state may be constitutionally suspect. “Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms,” the majority concluded in Bush, “the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”
One reason Bush was widely criticized by legal scholars is because this expansive approach to voter equality was hard to square with prior, more parsimonious voting rights decisions handed down by conservative justices who joined the Bush majority. As Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and a member of Gore’s legal team in Bush, wrote in 2003, “the ‘right’ ostensibly protected by the majority in Bush v. Gore seems characteristic of a class of entitlements that has received only reluctant federal protection from the Rehnquist Court.”
The conservative justices’ departure from their ordinary practices, their decision to restrict their holding to a single election, and the fact that Bush placed a Republican in the White House all gave a fairly clear impression that Bush v. Gore was an exercise of partisanship and not of legal reasoning.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has since been fairly clear that it doesn’t take Bush’s approach to voter equality seriously. In the nearly two decades since Bush was decided, only one Supreme Court opinion has so much as cited Bush v. Gore, according to the legal database Lexis Advance. And that single citation appears in a footnote to a dissenting opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that was joined by no other justice.
Nevertheless, Trump’s lawyers ask the courts to take Bush’s expansive approach to voter equality very seriously.
Relying on the strong language in Bush calling for all voters to be treated on “equal terms,” Trump’s lawyers argue that Nevada’s formula for setting the minimum number of polling places in each county is unconstitutional. “Several rural counties — where AB4 authorizes only 1 polling place each — have substantially higher numbers of registered voters per polling place” than the two most populous counties, they claim.
As a threshold matter, this claim is premature. As the Supreme Court held in Texas v. United States (1998), “a claim is not ripe for adjudication if it rests upon ‘contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.’” AB4 does not require Nevada’s smaller counties to have only one polling place — it provides that those counties must have at least one polling place. It’s possible that once AB4 is actually implemented, rural counties will have roughly the same number of registered voters per polling place as urban counties.
But if Trump is truly serious about implementing a voting rights standard that requires all voters to have equal access to polling sites, Democrats should agree to that deal with enthusiasm. After the Supreme Court struck down much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, many states started closing polling places — and these closures disproportionately impact voters of color who tend to prefer Democrats over Republicans. As a result, voters in large Democratic cities within red states sometimes have to wait hours to cast a ballot.
It’s unlikely, however, that Trump really wants Democrats of color in urban centers to be able to vote with ease on Election Day. It’s more likely that he is looking for another decision like Bush v. Gore — a one-off opinion that lifts up a Republican presidential candidate without providing any benefits to future voters.
Trump wants to force Nevada to toss out many ballots
AB4 provides that mall-in ballots will be counted so long as they are postmarked by the day of the election and received by the seventh day following the election. But not all mail is postmarked, and sometimes the date on a postmark is illegible. Thus, there is a risk that voters will be disenfranchised for completely arbitrary reasons — such as the postmark on their ballot getting smudged while the ballot was being delivered.
Nevada addresses this problem by creating a safe harbor for some ballots that arrive without postmarks. Under a provision of Nevada law that took effect last January, mailed ballots will be counted if they are “received not more than 3 days after the day of the election and the date of the postmark cannot be determined.” (AB4 actually makes this provision marginally stricter, by requiring such ballots to arrive by 5 pm on the third day after the election.)
Trump’s lawyers argue that this provision is illegal because it conflicts with a federal law providing that “the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” At least in theory, a ballot mailed after Election Day might arrive within three days of the election, and it might bear an illegible postmark. Thus, Trump’s lawyers claim, by accepting some late ballots, Nevada could wind up counting ballots mailed after the federally mandated Election Day has passed.
It’s a clever argument. And it is true that, at least before the Covid-19 pandemic, few states explicitly allowed ballots that arrived late and without postmarks to be counted. But there are a number of reasons to suspect that courts will reject this argument.
One problem with Trump’s argument is that it is difficult to square with the expansive theory of voter equality that Trump uses to challenge the state’s allocation of polling places. If it is unconstitutionally arbitrary for some counties to have more polling places per voter than others — or, for that matter, if it is unconstitutionally arbitrary for some Florida counties to use different standards to evaluate unclearly marked ballots than others — then surely it is also unconstitutional to toss out some ballots and accept others based on whether the post office smudged a postmark while the ballot was being delivered.
It’s also far from clear that Trump’s campaign — or, for that matter, any other private party — is allowed to sue because a state decides to count ballots that are cast after Election Day. Not all federal laws create a “private right of action,” meaning that private plaintiffs are allowed to bring a lawsuit challenging alleged violations of those laws.
As the Supreme Court explained in Gonzaga University v. Doe (2002), “for a statute to create such private rights, its text must be ‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited.’” Thus, for example, a statute that reads “eligible voters shall receive a ballot by mail” would create a private right of action because the text of this hypothetical statute centers “eligible voters” — the people who would benefit from that statute. A different statute that provides that “the state shall provide for a system of voting by mail” most likely could not be enforced in court because that statute does not even mention the people who would benefit from it.
In any event, the federal statute setting the date of presidential elections (“the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November”) is not phrased in terms of the persons benefited — it conveys no rights that apply to individual voters, political candidates, or their campaigns. So it most likely cannot be enforced by private plaintiffs in federal court.
There’s also a third reason to doubt that Trump will prevail in his effort to toss out late-arriving Nevada ballots. Though Chief Justice John Roberts, frequently the median vote on the Supreme Court, is often hostile to voting rights claims, he’s also signaled that state officials struggling to control the pandemic should be given an unusual amount of deference by courts.
In South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), for example, Roberts sided against a church that challenged a state public health order that only allowed places of worship to reopen at limited capacity.
“The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement,” Roberts wrote in his South Bay opinion. He added that “our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.’”
The same logic that led Roberts to defer to state officials who want to prevent Covid-19 from spreading at churches in South Bay may also lead him to defer to Nevada officials who want to prevent Covid-19 from spreading at polling places.
That said, there is never any certainty in this kind of highly political litigation — especially when a Republican president seeks relief from courts dominated by Republicans. In the short term, the case is assigned to Judge James Mahan, a George W. Bush appointee. However Mahan rules, the losing party will likely appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which is closely divided between Democrats and Republicans. And the case may very well be heard by a very conservative Supreme Court.
Family members gather with a portrait of their wife, mother, and grandmother, Sharon Taylor, in the photo frame, at their home in Mississippi. (photo: Rogelio V. Solia/AP)
Choctaw Tribe Hardest-Hit by Mississippi Coronavirus Crisis
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "When Sharon Taylor died of coronavirus, her family - standing apart, wearing masks - sang her favorite hymns at her graveside, next to a tiny headstone for her stillborn daughter, buried 26 years ago. Fresh flowers marked row after row of new graves."
About 10 percent of the tribe has tested positive for the virus, more than 75 died as the virus spreads in Mississippi.
hen Sharon Taylor died of coronavirus, her family - standing apart, wearing masks - sang her favourite hymns at her graveside, next to a tiny headstone for her stillborn daughter, buried 26 years ago. Fresh flowers marked row after row of new graves.
Holy Rosary is one of the only cemeteries in this Choctaw family's community, and it is running out of space - a sign of the virus's enormous toll on the Choctaw people.
As confirmed coronavirus cases skyrocket in Mississippi, the state's only federally recognised American Indian tribe has been devastated. COVID-19 has ripped through Choctaw families, many of whom live together in multigenerational homes.
Almost 10 percent of the tribe's roughly 11,000 members have tested positive for the virus. More than 75 have died.
The once-flourishing Choctaw economy is stagnant, as the tribal government put in place tighter restrictions than those imposed by the state, which mandated face masks and delayed the start date for schools in certain counties on Tuesday.
July brought a glimmer of hope, with some numbers dropping among Choctaws, but health officials worry that with cases rising elsewhere in the state, the reprieve is only temporary.
On Friday, Mississippi recorded its highest single-day coronavirus-related fatality count, 52.
As a community health technician, Taylor, 53, took the virus seriously from the start. She answered calls from tribe members with symptoms and delivered medicine. In June, she fell ill herself.
Kristina Taylor, 18, one of Sharon's five children, learned just before her mother was admitted to the hospital that she had been named valedictorian of the tribal high school.
Sharon had predicted the accomplishment for years. In some of their last moments together, Kristina showed her mom the speech she had prepared for graduation and the Choctaw beadwork her sister used to decorate her cap.
"We were just in tears. Usually, if I started crying, she started crying, too," she told The Associated Press. "She always had that faith in me, that I could do it, even when I doubted myself. She knew I could do it before I did."
That day, Sharon Taylor took her daughter to the family plot at Holy Rosary. It was always special: a place to mark important events, to be together, to visit the grave of baby Kerri. Other relatives are buried there, too, and it is where Sharon wanted her final resting place.
But the Reverend Bob Goodyear said there is not much more room to expand, in part because of another pandemic.
The Spanish flu of 1918 took lives so quickly residents did not even have time to put up markers, and 400 victims are buried in an open field on cemetery grounds.
"I pray it doesn't come to that this time," said Goodyear, whose Catholic church has always buried Choctaws, regardless of faith. The tribe recently voted to establish a community cemetery nearby, which will ease the burden, said Goodyear, who is not a Choctaw but has ministered in the reservation community for decades.
Dr Thomas Dobbs, the state health officer, said that like other Native American communities, coronavirus deaths among the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians have been driven by underlying conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure, present in more than 80 percent of deadly Mississippi cases.
The reservation hospital, where Taylor worked, cannot handle severe coronavirus cases. They are sent to facilities elsewhere in the state - Taylor died 129km (80 miles) from home, in Jackson.
In Neshoba County, named for the Choctaw word for wolf, more than 25 percent of residents live under the poverty line. It is a rural area, characterised by dusty red clay and rolling pine-filled hills.
The Golden Moon Casino on Highway 16, with a glittering moon on its roof, serves as a welcome to Choctaw land. From there, the reservation spreads out across 14,164 hectares (35,000 hectares).
Choctaw Indians used to live across millions of acres in southeastern Mississippi but were forced off the land.
Under an 1830 treaty, the Choctaws were to move to Oklahoma. Those who remained in Mississippi endured segregation, racism and poverty.
In the 1990s, the Choctaws started building what became a strong tribal economy. They own a family-style resort with a water park and two casinos; the tribe is a leading employer in eastern Mississippi.
But the tribal government has been more conservative in reopening efforts during the pandemic than Republican Governor Tate Reeves and other Mississippi officials.
The tribe passed a mask requirement July 1, a month before Reeves.
Choctaw casinos remain closed, more than two months after the state allowed casinos to reopen. About 2,000 employees are furloughed, the tribal chief said. The annual Choctaw Indian Fair, which draws thousands, was cancelled.
The tribe has long been a target of hate, members said, and the virus has only made things worse. On social media, people blame Choctaws for high case numbers. Choctaw employees have been harassed at their jobs, and others are called names in stores.
"We've heard so many bad things about ourselves and our people; the first thing people turn to is blame and hate," said Marsha Berry, a tribe member who helped form a group that delivers food and other necessities to people self-isolating.
"It seemed like in Choctaw families, that's all that was in front of us: You're going to get sick, you're going to get the fever, you're going to end up going to the hospital, and you're going to die," she said.
Restrictions prevented Taylor's family from grieving according to their customs. Instead, at her graveside, her family shared stories of the woman who valued their tight-knit family and community above all else, who never missed a gathering and always had a grandchild on her lap.
They sang the hymns she loved, the ones she'd sung to her kids, and then her grandkids.
Her 25-year-old daughter, Kristi, is pregnant, and she would like to name her baby girl for Sharon.
"She was always looking out for other people," Kristina Taylor said. "Now, she's watching over us."
Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem, New York City. (photo: Alamy)
US Parks in Minority Neighborhoods Half the Size of Those in White Areas
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "Communities of color in the US must make do with smaller, more overcrowded public parks compared with white Americans, as the country struggles to cope with record-breaking heatwaves and Covid-19 restrictions on swimming pools, beaches and communal cooling centres."
The smaller parks are also almost five times as crowded, study shows, as the country struggles with record-breaking heatwave
Public parks in majority black and brown neighborhoods are half the size and almost five times as crowded, according to new research by the Trust for Public Land.
Spending time in green spaces reduces stress and improves physical and psychological wellbeing for adults and children, but shady spots can also protect people from deadly extreme heat.
In addition, the study of 14,000 towns and cities around America found that parks serving majority low-income households are on average four times smaller and four times more crowded than parks that serve mostly high-income households.
The findings support a mounting body of evidence linking environmental injustice to longstanding racial and income inequalities that are being further exacerbated by the climate crisis.
Extreme heat is among the deadliest weather hazards humanity faces due to the climate crisis, which contributes to more than 5,000 prematures deaths in the US every year. Counties with large black and brown populations already endure significantly more dangerously hot days than white communities, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
This year is on track to be at least the second hottest on record, but access to cool places which mitigate the impact of extreme heat such as beaches, pools and malls are restricted in many parts of the country due to the pandemic.
The Covid-19 crisis has shone a light on years of patchy investment which has left 100 million Americans – including 27 million children – without access to a park close to home.
The study found that neighborhoods within a 10-minute walk of a park are up to 6F cooler than those further away.
“As cities struggle with extreme heat this summer, parks are one of the best ways for residents to find relief,” said Diane Regas, CEO and president of The Trust for Public Land, a national organization that has built thousands of parks and protected millions of acres of land.
“We all need and deserve parks – and all of the benefits they provide – all of the time. But during this period of compounded public health emergencies, unequal access to quality parks can be downright dangerous,” Regas added.
Heatwaves have been occurring more frequently since the mid-20th century, and there’s mounting consensus among climate scientists that dangerous bouts of high temperatures and humidity will become substantially more common, more severe, and longer-lasting without adequate action to curb global heating.
Surfaces in shade can be up to 45F cooler than those in the sun – and trees can also lower indoor temperatures, especially when shade covers parts of rooftops and windows.
In 2018, a landmark citizen-science project found large parks in Washington and Baltimore – especially those with dense trees and dark green vegetation – were up to 17F cooler than neighborhoods dominated by densely packed buildings and concrete which trap heat to create urban heat islands.
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