Wertheimer

I pitched Mother Jones back in the day. It's in the book, but I obtained evidence that the former governor of Michigan and his top officials just deleted their phones right before the launch of the Flint criminal investigation—kind of a big deal—and they asked me, is there a Trump angle to this?

...

When I say it's a disaster, that's not to be dramatic. I'm telling you, the water is still bad. It's not as bad as it was in 2016, but you have brown water coming out, you have smelly water in many homes. Residents are showing rashes they're still getting. Residents are still losing hair. And from a just a plumbing and engineering perspective, it's common sense. Ten years later, they have not replaced all the damaged pipes. If you haven't replaced the damaged infrastructure that was badly corroded by essentially acid water, it doesn't matter if the water coming through is as clean as if Jesus blessed the water from the plant. If it's going through busted pipes, shit's going to peel off.

...

With that said, the people of Flint were overjoyed to vote for Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel because those two ran on Justice for Flint. Gretchen Whitmer ran on opening up the water stations that the Republican governor had shut down. That's where the residents got free water. The Attorney General said that the investigation before her was basically incompetent. Well, my reporting shows she fired those prosecutors. They were building a case against the Republican governor for involuntary manslaughter. You mentioned murder. They were building a case against a governor—this would have been a historic event for involuntary manslaughter, because he knew about the deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak and did not notify the public. She fired them, and she sabotaged the investigation, I believe, so they couldn’t follow the money.

But the bottom line is, Republicans caused this, and Democrats, it seems, are helping to sweep it under the rug.

A metaphor that I've been using in Covid arguments with types is that the Republicans may have poisoned the well, but the Democrats are still insisting that we drink from that poisoned well. I forgot it's not always a metaphor!

https://theonion.com/hurripain-in-the-ass/

https://theonion.com/unloading-at-college/

Judge Delays Trump’s Sentencing Until Nov. 26, After Election Day

The decision by Justice Juan M. Merchan means voters will be left in the dark about whether the former president will face time behind bars.

. . .

“This is not a decision this court makes lightly but it is the decision which in this court’s view, best advances the interests of justice,” Justice Merchan wrote in the four-page ruling, which noted that “this matter is one that stands alone, in a unique place in this nation’s history.”

The judge appeared eager to skirt a swirl of partisan second-guessing in the campaign’s final stretch. A delay, he wrote, “should dispel any suggestion that the court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or create a disadvantage for, any political party.”

Electing Judges in Mexico? It’s a Bad Idea.

But, consistent with his systematic attacks on checks and balances, his project to elect judges could lead to the death of democracy in Mexico.

. . .

Ms. Singh is a professor at Stanford Law School and the executive director of the school’s Rule of Law Impact Lab. Ms. Garcia is an expert adviser to the lab.

https://law.stanford.edu/rule-of-law-impact-lab/#slsnav-our-focus :

Democracy is in decline around the world. Governments elected to power with populist agendas are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics. There are striking similarities in the methods deployed to subvert democracy. These methods typically include compromising electoral integrity, undermining judicial independence, and quashing free expression and dissent. The Stanford Law School Rule of Law Impact Lab studies and uses legal tools to counter core threats to democracy and to promote democratic renewal worldwide.

Incredible

Dies of phytohemagglutinin poisoning in every movie

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410

This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.

UPDATE: They're back!

https://theonion.com/yahweh-or-the-highway/

Adams is saying this a false allegation because the plaintiff "has a history of filing lawsuits." Imagine trying this as a criminal defendant. "Your honor, I don't remember assaulting this particular person, and in any case the District Attorney has a history of prosecuting people."

Wishing a very to Eric Adams and his bootlickers at the New York Times.

Five tenants unions from around the country convened Tuesday to announce the launch of a new national organization to take on the power of multistate real-estate capital. The Tenant Union Federation marks the first major national effort at tenant organizing in 40 years.

. . .

Billing itself as a ​“union of unions,” the federation is seeding a movement that hopes to turn tenants into a political force that can’t be ignored.

At the local level, the group’s five founding unions have already racked up an impressive streak of wins spanning a wide range of organizing tactics.

In the last year, the Louisville Tenants Union passed far-reaching restrictions on public funding contributing to gentrification in Louisville; KC Tenants defeated a billionaire-backed stadium tax in Kansas City; Bozeman Tenants United banned new short-term rentals and elected one of their own as mayor in the Montana tourism hotspot; the Connecticut Tenants Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement with one of New Haven’s largest landlords and Chicago’s Not Me We won ballot referenda backing a landmark anti-displacement ordinance covering the area surrounding the new Obama Presidential Center.

I hate Adam Gopnik.

Championed most effectively by Angela Y. Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), the cause may seem no more realistic than the defund-the-police movement that sang so loudly four years ago, at a cost to progressive candidates.

This is a lie: "There’s only one problem with this: there is no empirical basis for this claim in any of the above comments or reports. No studies, no evidence, not even [anecdotes are] ever provided."

Indeed, in a political moment like this one, worrying about the niceties of progressive reform at all may appear as self-distracting as a beachgoer worrying about sandcastle architecture as the sea pulls back on the brink of a tsunami.

Oh, fuck you.

It is also Du Boisian, it must be said, in the way that it gravitates toward class and economic explanations for phenomena not always well suited to them. Davis and others insist that the real villain of mass incarceration in the U.S. must be late capitalism or neoliberalism. In truth, we could empty our prisons tomorrow, and Apple and Google and Amazon and the rest atop the high heap of American enterprise would scarcely notice.

Writer for magazine whose logo is a fop with a monocle really hates class reductionism for some reason

Products from prison labor may slip into the supply lines, but corporations, as a rule, would prefer that they didn’t, since this results in more bad publicity than profit. Inmate labor tends to be done in the service of prisons themselves or government clients like state D.M.V.s. (There’s also the private-prison business, but it’s a shrinking one and houses a small fraction of the incarcerated population.)

The free market would never allow slave labor! And, hey, did you know that private prisons are irrelevant because they don't have the market valuation that Apple does?

There are, in any event, a great many free-market countries in the world, and very few are marked by overstuffed prisons. Mass incarceration remains a distinctively American problem. On the other hand, plenty of anti-capitalist societies have turned to mass incarceration—we speak of the “American Gulag” in honor of another, and nobody looks to Pyongyang for models of penal enlightenment.

There are more incarcerated people per capita in the United States than there were in any non-WWII portion of the gulag's existence. And those incarcerated have a lower life expectancy. (Right? I need help verifying this; I think it's a combination of two studies rather than a single unified study.) EDIT: See this post by @[email protected]

Pre-capitalist societies lacked mass imprisonment, but then—what with all the beheadings, beatings, and banishments—the people they considered criminals weren’t around long enough to be imprisoned.

As usual, the experiences and practices in indigenous cultures are ignored, because the arc of history is a semicircle that only includes Europe.

Sered’s points are sometimes vitiated by the weight of her pieties; her prose suggests someone constantly looking over her shoulder, like a driver going well below the speed limit but still glancing back nervously in fear of a traffic stop, or, anyway, reproach from a captious political ally. What sin might this next sentence commit?

Any problems with the prose of this book must be because of cancel culture!

. . .

Reminder that Adam Gopnik wrote a book about how sad he is that his daughter has better politics than he does. : "A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, is a manual for the dad side, a work of rousing reassurance for open-minded men who are nonetheless sick of losing political debates to teenagers whose meals they buy."