06 August 20
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Trump Collapses Under Pressure of Extremely Basic Follow-Up Questions About COVID-19
Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
Bort writes: "President Donald Trump has largely avoided subjecting himself to the scrutiny of one-on-one interviews with actual journalists."
A new interview with Axios exposes the president’s cluelessness about the pandemic that has killed over 150,000 Americans
There’s a good reason for this. We caught a glimpse of it last month when Chris Wallace of Fox News dismantled Trump’s argument that Joe Biden wants to defund the police. But we saw the complete picture on Monday night when with the help of a few color-coordinated charts the president hopelessly stumbled and bumbled his way through a train wreck of an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, which aired on HBO.
While most interviewers nod along as Trump bullshits his way from topic to topic, Swan took a novel approach. Whenever the president lied or said something that didn’t make sense, Swan simply asked him to explain. Because the president didn’t have the luxury of calling on another reporter, he was forced to at least attempt to clarify his nonsensical arguments, like why the percentage of the American population that has died due to COVID-19 complications isn’t really that important. He could not do this, of course, and the result was one of the most incoherent, depressing, and flat-out embarrassing interviews of Trump’s presidency.
I mean, just watch this:
Trump genuinely seems to think at the top of this clip that he’s about to put the idea that he’s mismanaged the pandemic to rest by showing Swan a few charts his aides printed out for him. As Swan soon realizes, Trump is touting that the death rate by the case is lower than in other countries. Far more pertinent, obviously, is the percentage of the American population Trump has let die from COVID-19, as Swan quickly points out.
“You can’t do that?” Trump says.
“Why can’t I do that?” Swan asks.
“You have to go by… you have to go by…” Trump begins before shuffling some papers and trailing off.
The back-and-forth — and the paper rustling — continues as a visibly confused Trump grasps for some sort of toe hold to counter Swan’s extremely basic follow-up questions about why he thinks it’s not really a big deal that over 1,000 American are dying every day from the coronavirus. In the end, the president’s only recourse is to lie or cast doubt on empirical data. When Swan points out that only 300 people in South Korea have died, out of a population of over 50 million, Trump says, “You don’t know that,” implying the nation is lying about its death rate.
At other points in the interview, Swan barely had to do anything to lead Trump into a damning statement. When Swan asks Trump about how the late Rep. John Lewis will be remembered, maybe the fattest softball question a reporter could ask of a president, Trump said, “I don’t know,” before griping that Lewis didn’t attend his inauguration. When Swan asked if Trump found Lewis impressive, Trump couldn’t say, once again complaining that he should have come to his inauguration.
It might be time to do away with the idea that President Trump is a master media tactician and fully embrace the idea that he is an abject moron who stumbled ass-backwards into the White House.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a news conference at her office in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2019. (photo: Richard Drew/AP)
New York Prosecutors Subpoena Trump's Bank as Part of Criminal Inquiry: Report
Rebecca Klar, The Hill
Klar writes: "New York prosecutors have subpoenaed President Trump's longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, as part of the criminal investigation into the president's business practices, The New York Times reported Wednesday."
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Deputy Solicitor General Michelle Ghetti rebuttals in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court Justices at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in New Orleans. (photo: Sophia Germer)
He Got Life for Stealing Hedge Clippers. The Louisiana Supreme Court Says It's a Fair Sentence.
Teo Armus, MSN
Armus writes: "More than two decades ago, police in Shreveport, La. stopped Fair Wayne Bryant on the side of the road for allegedly stealing a pair of hedge clippers. His vehicle looked like one that had been used in a recent home burglary, they told the Black 38-year-old moments before arresting him."
His vehicle looked like one that had been used in a recent home burglary, they told the Black 38-year-old moments before arresting him.
Bryant insisted the clippers police found in the van belonged to his wife, but he did make a confession to the officers: After his vehicle had broken down on an unfamiliar road, he had entered a carport in search of a tank of gas.
That disclosure would eventually land Bryant life in prison, a sentence that has now effectively been rubber-stamped by the state’s highest legal authority.
Last week, the Louisiana Supreme Court denied a request from Bryant to hear a review of his life sentence. Six of the seven justices backed the decision, which was first reported by The Lens NOLA, a nonprofit news site based in New Orleans.
The lone Black judge on the bench was the only one to disagree. In a searing dissent, Chief Justice Bernette Johnson said Bryant’s sentence was only due to Louisiana’s harsh habitual offender laws, a “modern manifestation” of the so-called “Pig Laws” designed to keep Black people in poverty during Reconstruction.
“Mr. Bryant has already spent nearly 23 years in prison and is now over 60 years old,” she wrote. “If he lives another 20 years, Louisiana taxpayers will have paid almost one million dollars to punish Mr. Bryant for his failed effort to steal a set of hedge clippers.”
The decision from the state supreme court gives Bryant few, if any, options for recourse to leave Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the country’s largest maximum-security prison, which is also the site of a former slave plantation.
In her dissent, Johnson — the court’s first Black chief justice — drew a straight line from slavery to the laws that she said enabled Louisiana prosecutors to send Bryant to Angola for the rest of his life.
In the years following Reconstruction, she wrote, Southern states introduced extreme sentences for petty theft, such as stealing cattle and swine, that criminalized recently freed African Americans who were still struggling to come out of poverty.
Much like Black Codes before them, they allowed states to sentence people to forced labor. Under these laws, the Black prison population in the Deep South exploded starting in the 1870s.
“Pig Laws were largely designed to re-enslave African Americans,” Johnson wrote.
Those same laws, she argued, evolved into Louisiana’s habitual offender laws, which allows prosecutors to seek harsher sentences for lesser crimes if a defendant has previous convictions.
Those laws have drawn heavy scrutiny for allowing excessively harsh sentences and driving mass incarceration. Almost 80 percent of people incarcerated in Louisiana prisons under the habitual offender laws are Black, the Lens reported.
Bryant is one of them. He was first convicted in 1979, serving 10 years for the attempted armed robbery of a cabdriver. Johnson pointed out that the rest of his three convictions were nonviolent: possessing some stolen goods from a Radio Shack; trying to forge a $150 check; and then in 1992 breaking into a home and stealing personal property, for which he served another four years in prison.
When a jury convicted him of attempted simple burglary five years later over the hedge clippers, prosecutors invoked the habitual offender laws to obtain a sentence of life without parole. Because Bryant had four prior felony convictions, the sentence was legal at the time under Louisiana statutes, they said.
Although Bryant challenged the sentence as unconstitutionally excessive, the judges he appealed to disagreed.
In 2000, Louisiana’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal said that a life sentence was an appropriate punishment because Bryant had already spent so long in prison as an adult.
The “litany of convictions and the brevity of the periods during which defendant was not in custody for a new offense,” that court wrote, “is ample support for the sentence imposed in this case.”
Following two appeals, Bryant was given the possibility of parole. He argued that he had received an illegal sentence and should have been appointed a lawyer during a resentencing hearing. But his motions were denied by higher courts — and last week, the Louisiana Supreme Court agreed.
Except for Johnson, who argued that the sentence constituted a cruel and excessively harsh punishment.
“This man’s life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of 3 hedge clippers,” she wrote, “is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci. (photo: Getty)
The US Has the Worst Coronavirus Outbreak in the World: 'The Numbers Don't Lie,' Dr. Fauci Says
Noah Higgins-Dunn, CNBC
Higgins-Dunn writes: "White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed on Wednesday that the United States has the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world, pointing to the nation's high number of Covid-19 infections and deaths."
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Matthew Bruce of Des Moines, Iowa, signs a note during a Black Lives Matter demonstration outside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds' office in June. The Republican governor has signed an executive order restoring voting rights to people convicted of a felony. (photo: Charlie Nelbergall/AP)
In Latest Victory Over Disenfranchisement, Iowa Governor Signs Order Restoring Felon Voting Rights
Kira Lerner, The Appeal
Lerner writes: "Governor Kim Reynolds' executive order restores the voting rights of tens of thousands of people. But the order will also leave many Iowans disenfranchised, and little time remains before the November election."
n the latest victory in the movement against criminal disenfranchisement, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds issued an executive order Wednesday restoring voting rights to most people convicted of felonies who have completed their sentences. The order will enable tens of thousands of disenfranchised Iowans to register to vote by the November elections.
State advocates have long called for Iowa to expand voting rights. In recent months, Black Lives Matter activists protested in the state capitol, urging Reynolds to take action.
The order is a temporary fix since a future governor could rescind it. Reynolds has called on the legislature to adopt a constitutional amendment to expand voting rights, to no avail.
It is also a partial one. The order keeps people convicted of certain crimes disenfranchised for life, a practice the vast majority of states have ended, and it requires people to finish all terms of their sentence, including incarceration, probation and parole, before their rights can be restored.
“When someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored automatically,” Reynolds, a Republican, said in her announcement Wednesday.
Before Reynolds’s order, Iowa was the only state in the country that enforced a permanent voting ban on all people with felony convictions. (Other states have lifetime voting bans for people convicted of some, but not all, felonies and disenfranchise large numbers of people.)
The rule disproportionately impacted Black Iowans. Just 4 percent of Iowa’s population is Black, but Black people made up 13 percent of the state’s disenfranchised population in the 2016 presidential election, according to a report by the Sentencing Project.
Wednesday’s order also sets up a process for restoring voting rights to people who meet the requirements moving forward. But the order excludes those convicted under Iowa’s Chapter 707 homicide criminal code section, including manslaughter and voluntary manslaughter, or those with special lifetime sentences for sexual crimes.
Most states have ended all lifetime disenfranchisement rules, but some have exemptions. Reynolds’s carve-outs are considerably narrower than those implemented by Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, who issued an otherwise comparable executive order in December. (Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former Democratic governor, had no carve-outs at all in the executive order he issued restoring people’s rights post-sentence in 2015.)
Other states have taken bolder steps to expand their electorate over the past year. Washington D.C. has abolished felony disenfranchisement altogether, including for people who are in prison, and Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey have restored the voting rights of anyone who is not in prison, including if they are on probation and parole.
Still, Iowa drew special attention because of its exceptionally punitive statutes.
Previously, all Iowans with felony convictions had to petition for individual restoration from the governor. “That creates the potential for uneven justice,” Reynolds said Wednesday. Moving forward, only those convicted of the crimes excluded in the executive order — homicide, manslaughter, and sexual crimes — will be required to petition for their rights to be restored.
The executive order notably does not require people with felony convictions to pay off their restitution before they can vote.
A bill introduced by the Senate GOP last year would have required that people pay off those sometimes massive bills before regaining their rights. Rick Sattler, an Iowa resident who was ordered to pay $150,000 in restitution for a vehicular homicide, told The Appeal at the time that he would never be able to pay that off, meaning that even under that bill, he would effectively be disenfranchised for life.
In 2019, Florida Republicans adopted such requirements that voters pay off all fines and fees associated with their sentence before they can vote. This significantly shrunk the impact of Amendment 4, a constitutional amendment approved by Florida voters in 2018 that automatically restored voting rights to most people convicted of felonies. That law has been the subject of intense legal battles, and a federal appeals court will hear arguments over its constitutionality on Aug. 18, the same day as the state primary.
In signing the executive order, Reynolds noted that it is not a permanent solution, as a future governor could also change the state’s policy “with the stroke of a pen,” she said. To make the fix permanent, the state House and Senate would have to pass legislation to start the process toward amending the state constitution.
Reynolds’s predecessor, Republican Terry Branstad, did just that in 2011, when he rescinded Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack’s 2005 executive order restoring voting rights to roughly 80,000 Iowans. Advocates have urged Reynolds to reinstate Vilsack’s order for years.
Her order came just 3 months before the November presidential election and more than three years after Reynolds took office, leaving little time for advocates to reach out to newly-enfranchised voters, especially given the pandemic circumstances.
Just last week, Iowa’s county auditors called on Reynolds to act, arguing that the election is approaching and they would need time to put policies and procedures in place to give people with felony convictions the right to vote.
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe bows in front of a memorial to people who were killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (photo: Philip Fong/Getty)
75 Years After the Bombing of Hiroshima, Experts Say the Attack Would Be Considered a War Crime Today
David Welna, NPR
Welna writes: "The dawn of the nuclear age began with a blinding, flesh-melting blast directly above the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. It was 8:16 a.m. on a Monday, the start of another work day in a city of nearly 300,000 inhabitants. An estimated two-thirds of that population - nearly all civilians - would soon be dead."
The dropping by American warplanes of that first atomic bomb, code-named Little Boy -- and another, code-named Fat Man, three days later in Nagasaki — led to Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, and the end of World War II.
At the time, the morality and legality of those nuclear attacks was hardly the subject of public debate.
"Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war," President Harry Truman, who ordered the attacks, declared in a speech to the nation hours after the bombing of Hiroshima. "If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."
The last surviving member of the crew that flew over Hiroshima that day died in November. Before then, he recalled what he thought while aboard a B-29 named Necessary Evil as the bomb dropped from another warplane, the Enola Gay.
"We had to go out and kill every one of them," former Army 2nd Lt. Russell Gackenbach, who flew as a navigator on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, told the Voices of the Manhattan Project in 2016.
In a 2018 NPR interview, Gackenbach expressed no second thoughts about the annihilation of most of Hiroshima's inhabitants.
"I do not regret what we did that day," he said. "All war is hell. The Japanese started the war. It was our turn to finish it."
But another witness to the 900-foot-wide fireball that heated the air above Hiroshima to 500,000 degrees Fahrenheit has made it her life's mission to eliminate nuclear weapons.
"We atomic bomb survivors are greatly disturbed by the continued modernization of nuclear weapons by the United States and other countries, and your stated willingness to use these instruments of genocide," 88-year-old Setsuko Thurlow wrote to President Trump in a letter published Monday in The Daily Hampshire Gazette. "Nuclear weapons are not a necessary evil, they are the ultimate evil. It is unacceptable for any state to possess them."
Thurlow was a 13-year-old a mile from ground zero in Hiroshima the day the bomb fell there.
"Although that happened in the morning, it was already very dark, like twilight," she told NPR's Kelly McEvers in 2016. "I could see some dark moving object approaching to me. They happened to be human beings. They just didn't look like human beings. I called them ghosts."
"They were covered with blood and burned and blackened and swollen, and the flesh was hanging from the bones," the atomic blast survivor added. "Parts of their bodies were missing, and some were carrying their own eyeballs in their hands. And as they collapsed, their stomach burst open."
Four years ago, President Barack Obama became the first American head of state to visit Hiroshima's Peace Memorial. He offered condolences, but pointedly did not offer apologies.
"The morning of August 6, 1945 must never fade," Obama told a crowd gathered near the shell of the sole building left standing where the bomb exploded. "That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change."
Pope Francis took a more critical stance during a November visit to that same peace memorial in Hiroshima.
"Using nuclear power to wage war is today, more than ever, a crime," the pontiff declared, adding it was immoral even to possess nuclear weapons.
Some prominent experts in the law of war are also reexamining the Hiroshima attack.
"There is no question that a dropping of a large nuclear weapon amongst the civilian population is a war crime," says Harvard Law School professor Gabriella Blum. "Under the current laws of war, if you know you are going to impact civilians, you must provide warning and you must take precautions to avoid harming civilians to the extent possible. There is no doubt none of that was considered and none of that was seriously weighed in reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
In a similar critical vein, the cover story for the current issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is titled, "Why the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima Would Be Illegal Today."
"We know that one of the main objectives was to cause as much civilian harm as possible, to create a shock among the civilians," says Stanford law professor Allen Weiner, one of the cover story's three authors.
"The bomb in Hiroshima was dropped quite far away from the edge of town where the factories and worker housing was located," Weiner notes, "and one of the great ironies is that those factories and worker housing that were [cited by U.S. officials] in selecting Hiroshima as a target survived the atomic bombing. They were not destroyed."
But Weiner also points out that in 1945 no nations had signed a treaty barring the kind of aerial bombardment of civilians that the U.S. carried out in Hiroshima.
"I'm prepared to really give a quite hardcore hedge and say that in 1945, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not clearly illegal," says Weiner. "Today, it would clearly be illegal."
In this October 2016 file photo, construction continues on the Dakota Access pipeline. (photo: Tom Stromme/AP)
Court Reverses Order to Shut Down Dakota Access Pipeline
James MacPherson, Associated Press
MacPherson writes: "A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed a judge's order that shut down the Dakota Access pipeline pending a full environmental review."
A federal appeals court panel has reversed an order to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline pending a full environmental review.
federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed a judge’s order that shut down the Dakota Access pipeline pending a full environmental review.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with pipeline owner Energy Transfer to keep the oil flowing, saying a lower-court judge “did not make the findings necessary for injunctive relief.”
But the appellate court declined to grant Energy Transfer's motion to block the review, saying the company had “failed to make a strong showing of likely success.”
The appeals court said it expects the parties to “clarify their positions” in the lower court.
On July 6, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the pipeline closed within 30 days while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fulfills his demand to conduct a more extensive environmental review than the one that allowed the pipeline to start moving oil near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation three years ago. This process could take more than a year.
Boasberg cited the “potential harm” that the pipeline could cause before the Corps finishes its survey. He rejected the company’s request to halt the order, sending the case to the three-judge appeals panel. The appellate court paused Boasberg’s order in mid-July to give it time to consider the case.
Jan Hasselman, the EarthJustice attorney representing Standing Rock and other tribes who have signed onto the lawsuit, said the appeals court ruling Thursday was not a setback.
“There is more to like than dislike in this ruling,” he said. “There will be a review and a new permit during the next administration.”
Standing Rock Tribe Chairman Mike Faith said the tribe was committed to continuing its fight.
“As the environmental review process gets underway in the months ahead, we look forward to showing why the Dakota Access Pipeline is too dangerous to operate.”
Energy Transfer spokeswoman Vicki Granado said the ruling “allows this important pipeline to continue to operate” and that the company looks forward to “continuing to work through the legal process to resolve all matters related to this pipeline.”
North Dakota state officials had lamented the shutdown order as damaging to the state's economy, and Gov. Doug Burgum welcomed Wednesday's appellate ruling. He said it cleared the way for “continued safe pipeline operations.”
In arguing against the closure, Energy Transfer said the line couldn’t be shut off by the judge’s Aug. 5 deadline. The company said it would take three months to empty the pipe of oil and perform the time-consuming and expensive steps to keep the line from corroding without the flow of oil.
Texas-based Energy Transfer estimated it would cost $24 million to empty the oil and take steps to preserve the pipe. The company said it would have to spend another $67.5 million each year to maintain the line while it’s inoperable.
The pipeline holds about 5 million barrels of oil when full.
It was the subject of months of protests in 2016 and 2017, sometimes violent, during its construction near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The tribe took legal action against the pipeline even after it began carrying oil from North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois in June 2017.
The $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile (1,886-kilometer) pipeline crosses beneath the Missouri River, just north of the reservation. The tribe draws its water from the river and has concerns about pollution. The company maintains the line is safe.
Permits for the project were originally rejected by the Obama administration, and the Army Corps of Engineers prepared to conduct a full environmental review. In February 2017, after President Donald Trump took office, the Corps scrapped the review and granted permits, concluding that running the pipeline under the Missouri River posed no significant environmental issues.
The Corps said that opinion was validated after an additional year of review, as ordered by Boasberg, an Obama appointee, in 2017.
Boasberg ruled then that the Corps had “largely complied” with environmental law when permitting the pipeline but ordered more review because he said the agency did not adequately consider how an oil spill under the Missouri River might affect the Standing Rock Sioux’s fishing and hunting rights, or whether it might disproportionately affect the tribal community.
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