Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “How can you be so obtuse?” That question to the sadistic warden got Tim Robbins’ character, Andy, an extra 30 days in solitary confinement in Frank Darabont’s 1994 Stephen King vehicle, The Shawshank Redemption. Now I ask of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), “How can you employ […]
( Middle East Monitor) – Israel’s raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp killed 274 Palestinians and wounded 700 more in order to free four healthy-looking Israeli hostages. The discrepancy was stark. However, what stands out in the murderous Israeli operation is the weaponising of aid to provide cover for the massacre. Denied by both the […]
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, I attended a demonstration called by groups opposing the carnage in Gaza, where eight months of air, ground, and sea attacks by the Israeli Defense Forces have leveled entire quadrants of cities and killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. Many of the participants, justly outraged by the ongoing mass murder triggered […]
Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “How can you be so obtuse?” That question to the sadistic warden got Tim Robbins’ character, Andy, an extra 30 days in solitary confinement in Frank Darabont’s 1994 Stephen King vehicle, The Shawshank Redemption. Now I ask of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), “How can you employ such obtuse, tortured logic to argue that a bump stock does not technically make a weapon an automatic weapon; when the purpose of it is to enable rapid firing of multiple rounds?” It turns a single-shot firearm into an automatic weapon, in no uncertain terms. How was this adjudicated? By using a series of charts, graphics, animation and semantic Voodoo, to toe the party line of the National Rifle Association.
For all the so-called “conservative” apoplexy about liberals “coddling” criminals, the SCOTUS is promoting and enabling more mass murders. What’s worse, going easy on non-violent offenders with rehabilitation programs, or enabling mass murder? The six “conservative” justices have employed a tortured brand of logic to arrive at the conclusion: that is unlawful to prevent a psychotic monster from enhancing a gun so he can kill more people more quickly. They don’t parse the language to decide this; they torture it.
Can we please stop calling these people “conservative?” When I served as a congressional intern for Rep. Robin Beard (R-TN) in 1973, I disagreed with him on almost everything. So, he assigned me to do research at the Library of Congress to develop position papers from a liberal POV, so he could construct countering arguments on topics such as school vouchers. But Beard was an honorable conservative; protecting and defending the Constitution, though he was one of Richard Nixon’s last defenders. He promoted a strong US military, and supported NATO and other alliances. He defended Medicare and other social programs up to a limit. He valued life over firearms, though we both enjoyed target practice. He was fervently anti-Communist, though not an isolationist. Conservatism used to mean being a stickler about a balanced budget, but maintaining a strong tax base to do so. The Republican anti-tax fever arose under Ronald Reagan, abetted by Proposition 13 in California, and the Headley-Tisch amendment in Michigan in 1978. The six justices who voted to allow bump stocks are not conservative by any measure or metric; they are far-right wing ideologues, with an agenda to remake this country in alignment with the increasingly ascendant GOP Fascist model.
Don’t look now, but the Supreme Court of the United States is now officially to the right even of Donald Trump, and that is saying something. Golden State Warriors basketball Coach Steve Kerr is one of the nation’s most fervent anti-gun spokesmen. Kerr lost his father, Prof. Malcom Kerr, to a political assassination in Lebanon in 1984, where he had been president of American University-Beirut. Yet, he agreed with Trump ONCE, on the need to banish the bump-stock.
Even Trump recognized the sense behind banishing bump stocks from firearms, in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas concert massacre; and offered an unusually lucid statement, “There’s a great appetite, and I mean a very strong appetite, for background checks. … I think background checks are important. I don’t want to put guns into the hands of mentally unstable people, or people with rage or hate, sick people. I’m all in favor of it.” As SF Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler noted, “That passionate support for gun-safety legislation lasted as long as a cheeseburger on Trump’s lunch plate,” and Kerr formally endorsed Joe Biden this week. No major league sports coach has ever publically endorsed a presidential candidate before, though Kerr’s mentor San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich, has been equally outspoken on gun control and many political issues. Can I get a hizzah for Popovich-Kerr in 2028?
Republicans began trying to cripple the functions of government under President Ronald Reagan. He popularized the notion that government is the problem, not the solution.Regulatory agencies exist to keep people safe, to assure clean water and air, to restrain monopolistic corporate behavior, to assure a safe food supply. Under Reagan, the Republican ideology began evolving away from the classic “conservatism,” to Trump’s ideology of chaos and cruelty. He was the first president to appoint people to cabinet positions and agency directorships, whose purpose was not to steward those agencies and departments, but to sabotage their basic functions and missions.
The SCOTUS reasoning was articulated by Clarence Thomas: The bump stock makes guns fire more rounds faster, but the court held that it’s still technically not a machine gun. They are wrong on the facts here.. Machine guns were originally banned in the US in 1934, but AR-15’s are the gun of choice for mass murderers. The Court struck down a 2018 ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms) ruling to arrive at this tortured conclusion.
It’s interesting that this case didn’t arise in a 2nd Amendment challenge, but, “rather, it is one of several cases this term seeking to undercut the power of administrative agencies.” It’s an attack on the ability of government to govern effectively, to not only limit government, but cripple its basic functions. Their aim is to limit the protective reach of US government agencies, yet they say this is not ideologically driven. The case was brought by Texas gun store owner Michael Cargill, after he was forced to surrender two bump stocks in 2019. The issue was whether the Trump administration, through the ATF stretched the statutory definition of machine guns too far to cover bump stocks.
Chief Justice John Roberts has set the stage for this ideological tilt, and “done everything he can to try to manipulate the process to avoid and block efforts by the Senate to hold the court accountable, to insist that it abide by just commonsense ethical rules that every other court in the country has to follow.” Sondra Sotomayor articulated the objections in a rare public dissent from the Bench. She summarized saying, “This is not a hard case. All of the textual evidence points to the same interpretation. Its interpretation requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text, and enables gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law.”
A view of San Francisco's famed Painted Ladies Victorian houses. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
STICKER SHOCK — By nearly every metric, it’s never been more expensive to buy a home in America.
The average sale price for a home in 2024 is a record high $513,100 , the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is near 7 percent and the ratio of the median single-family home sale price to household income — a good proxy for tracking nationwide home affordability — is 7.68 to 1 , an all-time record.
Naturally, housing concerns loom large in the race for the White House: An April Michigan Ross/Financial Times poll showed that 27 percent of Americans assess housing costs as one of their top three economic issues as they make their vote for president, ranking higher than government spending, the national debt, wages or even interest rates.
Younger voters are especially energized around housing issues, the poll showed, with 31 percent of all voters 18-44 marking it as a top economic issue, tied with gas prices and wages.
Yet so far, neither national Republicans nor Democrats have made housing central to their political platform — even while their state-level counterparts on both sides of the aisle pursue policies to alleviate the situation.
And while some typical economic indicators point to a strong economy, housing costs spiking across the country paint a different picture — that of a country in which freedom is curtailed by a lack of housing.
“This is the most challenging home buying market we’ve ever seen, in terms of affordability, interest rates and the lack of inventory of homes we have across the country,” said Alexander Hermann, a senior research associate for the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University who has built a model to geographically track where and when housing price to income ratios have spiked most.
“It can really limit people’s choices,” he added. “Not just your ability to move, but also if you can move, where.”
For decades homeownership has been a point of pride, a key step on the path to the American Dream and a goal within reach for the average American. According to research on median home sale price to median household income ratios done by Hermann, most metros across the country had sale price to income ratios under three to one throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a golden period for American homeownership.
But recent years have created a completely different picture, as home prices ballooned across the country in the wake of the pandemic and incomes struggled to keep up. On top of that, rising interest rates — which price-to-income ratios don’t take into account — have made buying a home even more difficult for most Americans. Today, the national sale price to median household income ratio is closer to eight to one, and some metro areas on the West Coast sport a ratio that’s over 10 to one.
While Hermann said that increasing interest rates had leveled off home prices somewhat, bringing the home price to income ratio down in recent years, overall home affordability has fallen remarkably in recent decades — and the increases aren’t located just in the urban coastal areas where much of the news coverage of the housing crisis has focused.
At the state-level at least, elected officials and policymakers in both parties are trying to address the housing crisis. Both Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte in Montana and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in California have gotten behind remarkably similar housing platforms — mostly easing restrictions on housing supply by changing zoning controls or allowing for the construction of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, on properties.
And while housing issues have typically been understood as the purview of local and state governments, where most zoning authority is located, Brian Connolly, an assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan, said there is much more the federal government could do to incentivize states to increase supply — if national politicians wanted to take up the issue.
Connolly said that if he were advising President Joe Biden or Donald Trump on creating a national federal housing policy, he’d propose a “Housing New Deal” with a focus on increasing supply. That would mean providing grant money to local governments to ease regulatory and zoning barriers to new construction, expanding existing housing voucher programs and increasing tax credits to developers to incentivize the construction of more affordable housing. (Private housing starts — that is, when excavation begins for a new unit of housing — have stayed flat when compared to the 1960s , even though the population of the U.S. has nearly doubled in the same time period.)
Connolly said that the rapid price increases, nationwide scope of the challenge and early attempts at policy fixes by the states is a sign the issue is ripe to bring to the national stage.
“I think there might be a little bit of discomfort with the federal government taking a bigger role in housing,” he said. “But it does seem like there is space for one of the major parties to take on housing as an issue to focus on.”
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WHAT'D I MISS?
— Supreme Court nixes ban on bump stocks for guns: The Supreme Court has overturned a Trump administration rule that sought to ban so-called bump stocks , which allow semi-automatic rifles to be fired like fully automatic machine guns. In a 6-3 decision today that split the justices along ideological lines, the court said the definition federal regulators sought to adopt went beyond the words Congress wrote into law nearly nine decades ago. In a ruling replete with diagrams of firing mechanisms, Justice Clarence Thomas said bump stock devices don’t convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones, but simply reduce the time between shots.
— House Republicans narrowly pass defense bill loaded with culture war issues: The House narrowly cleared defense policy legislation today after Republicans tacked on divisive provisions restricting abortion access, medical treatment for transgender troops and efforts to combat climate change. Speaker Mike Johnson’s move to permit culture war amendments to the annual National Defense Authorization Act turned a widely bipartisan bill into a measure supported almost entirely by Republicans. The tactic represented a gamble for Johnson, who could have pushed to pass a more bipartisan version with the help of Democrats, but instead catered to a sliver of his right flank.
— GOP lawsuits could wipe out Biden’s education agenda: A cascade of lawsuits from Republican states could dismantle much of President Joe Biden’s education agenda months before the election. Dozens of states are targeting the president’s new student loan repayment plan and expanded sex discrimination protections in schools — signature White House policies aimed at younger voters. The challenges threaten to unravel Biden’s few major education successes after a bungled federal aid rollout and legal setbacks to debt relief. Republican attorneys general accuse the president of overstepping his legal authority and attempting to buy votes with a more generous student loan repayment plan, known as SAVE. They also say Biden is forcing their states to enact policies on gender identity that their constituents don’t support. Some landed their first victory on Thursday when a judge agreed to block the administration’s gender identity protections in their states.
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NIGHTLY ROAD TO 2024
ABORTION
MUDDLED MESSAGE — Donald Trump on Thursday told Republicans to talk more about abortion. But earlier this week, at a gathering of staunchly anti-abortion Southern Baptists, Trump didn’t mention the word — opting instead to talk of defending “innocent life.” The contrast is indicative of how Republicans have often struggled to find a coherent message on the issue — eager to placate their base without alienating the middle. The former president’s remarks capped a tumultuous week that showed just how much reproductive rights remain an electoral millstone for Republicans.
GARBLED, RAMBLING, INCOHERENT GIBBERISH
COGNITIVE DECLINE
DEMENTIA DON
UNIMPRESSED — Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting , multiple attendees told CNBC. “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said. Among the topics on which Trump offered scant details were how he would reduce taxes and cut back on business regulations.
WHY WOULD PRESIDENT BIDEN APPEAR ON A MINDLESS PROGRAM WHEN HE ATTENDED THE G7 SUMMIT & ACCOMPLISHED SOME IMPRESSIVE AGREEMENTS THAT MINDLESS LOGAN PAUL IGNORED? MURDOCH TABLOID NY POST WAS SO DESPERATE TO TRASH PRESIDENT BIDEN, THEY DOCTORED A VIDEO!
NOT EVERY YOUNG PERSON IS AS MINDLESS & SUPERFICIAL AS TABLOID VIEWERS - SOME MAY EVEN REMEMBER THE REFRIGERATED TRAILERS FILLED WITH COVID DEAD WHEN DEMENTIA DON LEFT OFFICE
CHASING THE YOUTH VOTE — Former President Donald Trump made an unexpected campaign stop Thursday, appearing on controversial YouTuber and professional wrestler Logan Paul’s “Impaulsive” podcast , reports NBC News. During the episode, which contained a roughly 45-minute interview, Trump urged young voters like Paul’s followers to vote for him over President Joe Biden, who he said had a “less than 1% chance” of joining Paul’s podcast. Paul has extended an invitation to Biden to come on the show, too.
DEBATE PREP — Former President Donald Trump’s aides often downplay his preparations for events like debates. But Trump used part of his Thursday afternoon in Washington to participate in what passes for debate prep in his world — a policy session with Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Eric Schmitt of Missouri, reports the New York Times. The session, which also included members of Trump’s staff, was held at the Republican National Committee headquarters near Capitol Hill, the area where Trump had held other meetings with lawmakers earlier in the day.
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AROUND THE WORLD
French President Emmanuel Macron is welcomed by Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni upon arrival at the Borgo Egnazia resort for the G7 summit hosted by Italy. | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
NO LOVE LOST — French President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni traded barbs at the G7 summit in southern Italy in the wake of a European election that left the Italian prime minister strengthened and Macron’s camp weakened.
Meloni accused the French president of using the G7 forum for electioneering when Macron criticized Italy for reportedly watering down language on abortion rights in the draft statement.
“I believe it is profoundly wrong, in difficult times like these, to campaign using a precious forum like the G7,” Meloni said on Thursday evening according to Italian media.
According to several diplomats, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, Meloni requested removal of a reference to “safe and legal” abortion in the final statement, instead settling on referring to a previous G7 statement.
On Thursday, Macron needled Meloni over abortion rights on the sidelines of talks, telling reporters he “regretted” removal of the abortion language. “You don’t have the same sensibilities in your country,” Macron told an Italian journalist. “France has a vision of equality between women and men, but it’s not a vision shared by all the political spectrum.”
Macron hinted at the French election, saying that the clash on women’s rights takes place at a time “when French voters are asking themselves questions.”
LOOSENING RESTRICTIONS — European allies are ramping up pressure on the Biden administration to further loosen restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons to strike inside Russia, arguing that the limits still in place hurt Kyiv’s ability to defend itself. Publicly, the U.S. administration says it has not changed its policy, which currently restricts the use of U.S.-provided weapons to Ukrainian soil and the immediate region across the border from the besieged city of Kharkiv. But U.S. officials acknowledge that at multiple points in the conflict, Washington has been reluctant to give Ukraine something it wants — only to give in at the last minute.
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NIGHTLY NUMBER
€1 billion
The amount of money in tourism ($1.07 billion) that Germany will bring in thanks to foreign visitors there for the Euro 2024 soccer tournament. That will boost the country’s economic output by around 0.1 percent in the second quarter, according to the study conducted by the Ifo Institute in Munich.
RADAR SWEEP
PEST PREVENTION — In the United Kingdom, animals like wild boars, pigeons and gray squirrels cost the country millions of dollars (or pounds) a year by destroying property and natural resources. The situation has been made worse by their expansion in population. So, wildlife experts are trying something new — using contraceptive tools on these animals . If they can keep their populations in check, the theory goes, the natural environment will be more pleasant and they’ll save some money. The new pilot program is also attempting to be a humane alternative to practices like culling, in which many of these animals were simply killed on the spot. Early signs show that it’s working — and there’s interest in expansion. Phoebe Weston reports on the idea for The Guardian.
PARTING IMAGE
On this date in 1987: Anti-government protesters staged a sit-in strike in the center of Seoul, South Korea. They scattered in panic as tear gas grenades hurled by police exploded. Police repeatedly broke up demonstrations in the city center. | AP
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