[Update on 27 June: Anthony McLeod Kennedy has announced his retirement as Senior Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In light of this retirement, I’ve added two additional cases to this post—NIFLA v Becerra and Janus v AFSCME—below.]

The 5-4 court split on Carpenter v United States, surprised me. Kennedy was in the minority in this case. Joining with Roberts in favor of Timothy Carpenter were associate justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg,, Stephen Gerald Breyer, Sonia Maria Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. I was surprised because I thought the rational would be driven by protecting powerful people from scrutiny and not protecting civil rights. I can be too cynical for my own good.

Alex Emmons, reporting in Supreme Court Rules That the U.S. Government Must Get a Warrant Before Accessing Cellphone Location Data for The Intercept, writes:

In a landmark privacy decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Friday that police must get a warrant in order to obtain your cellphone’s location data over an extended period of time.

The decision is a major victory for privacy advocates, who have long argued that the law has failed to keep pace with the amount of intrusive data we voluntarily hand over to private companies.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices on the court, declaring that even though the data is held by a third party, the government still needs a warrant to obtain it.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” said Roberts, writing for the majority. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of [cell-site location information], its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”

The court made the ruling in the case of Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted in 2013 of robbing Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio. In order to build their case, the FBI obtained 127 days’ worth of location information for Carpenter’s cellphone – almost 12,900 location points – which they used to place him at the scene of the robberies.

While Carpenter is important case on police intrusion, the court’s ruling is also vital because the decision hinges on a matter of privacy. Privacy, of course, is the linchpin of Roe v Wade, possibly the single most pivotal court decision since Brown v Board of Education. Which is why Planned Parenthood has payed close attention to two other rulings handed down in Kennedy’s final days. Kennedy was in the majority ins the first case, NIFLA v Becerra, which:

challenged a 2015 California law that requires crisis pregnancy centers to disclose all available medical options and services to pregnant women. Also known as the Reproductive FACT Act, it requires state-licensed crisis pregnancy centers to inform women of the availability of free and low-cost comprehensive family planning, prenatal care, and abortion services. Unlicensed CPCs, including those that offer pregnancy testing or ultrasound imaging, are required to disclose to all clients that their facilities are not a state-licensed medical facility and have no licensed medical providers who provide or directly supervise the provision of services. Lower courts preliminarily upheld the law in three separate challenges, ruling that the disclosures that CPCs must make do not violate the First Amendment.

On June 26, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court ruling. In an 5-4 opinion written by Justice Thomas, the Court ruled that both the disclosures for licensed and unlicensed centers likely violate their First Amendment rights. Notably, the five-justice majority did so regardless of whether these fake women’s clinics lie to and deceive women.

Kennedy was also in the majority on the second case, Janus v AFSCME, where:

Reversing a decades-old precedent, the Supreme Court yet again ruled in a 5-4 decision that public sector workers who opt out of union membership cannot legally be charged any fees for the cost of collective bargaining. For years, many states protected collective bargaining by charging a lower fee to those who opt out of union membership but still benefit from the union’s bargaining activity on behalf of all employees of an organization. Since unions cannot collectively bargain for only some of an organization’s workers, this type of safeguard helped offset the costs of fighting for all worker’s rights, not just those who choose to join a union. Decided along the same lines of the other cases from the last week of the Supreme Court’s term, Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, and Justice Kagan dissented.

The political battle for the soul of the United States of America is on. What happens between now and 6 November is vital.

In 1729, Dr. Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal, For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. Swift’s would be lost on our president.

Mano Singham has the story…

I find myself in agreement with Robert Latzer of Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote in a letter to 25 June issue of The New Yorker:

For years, I have been making the argument that we need to stop calling people “white.” Finally, someone agrees with me! Hamid, who is Pakistani, describes the mother of a friend as “what I suppose should be called European-American.” Calling a group of people “white” gives them an edge over many other Americans. Except for Native Americans, all of us are either immigrants or descended from immigrants. Every American has a hyphenated identity, not just nonwhite people.

The census bureau should make the change immediately. If they don’t make the change, I’ll be checking other on my form. You should too.

Why?

Because I’m really, really tired of this shit. Breanna Edwards, reporting in ‘Racial Profiling at Its Finest’: White Man Uses SUV to Block Black Doctor From Entering Gated Community Where She Lives for The Root, writes:

A black doctor coming home from a late-night shift was greeted by the ugly face of racism after a white man used his SUV to block her from entering the gated community where she has lived for about eight years.

Dr. Nnenna Aguocha captured some of the encounter on camera. According to WXIA-TV, the good doctor was trying to enter the Buckhead Townhome community in Atlanta when another property owner blocked her at the gate entrance, parking his vehicle under the gate arm and refusing to move forward to let her in despite her requests, a police report shows.

“He got out of the car and threatened to call the police on me because I was trespassing,” Aguocha narrated in the recording of the incident. “This is racial profiling at its finest.”

The man had the nerve to call the police on Aguocha, who turned around and called the police on him in return. The doctor explained the situation to officers, adding that she had been accused of tailgating his car.

“This gentleman refuses to move his car because he supposedly does not think that I live here,” Aguocha could be heard saying in disbelief in the video.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Do you know what you are doing? You are racially profiling.”

The man apparently told officers that he was trying to protect his community after the theft of some air conditioners in the area. But Aguocha isn’t buying that (and neither am I).

I lay all of this firmly on the table before our president because he has made hate great again.

At a press conference in Singapore for the Kim Jong-un summit last week, Trump called out to Time magazine reporter Brian Bennett. “Am I on the cover again this week?” Trump asked rhetorically. “Boy, have I … so many covers.”

—Hannah Ellis-Petersen reporting in Time magazine puts Trump opposite sobbing child on cover for The Guardian.

After I graduated from the Journalism School at Ohio University in 1984, I had a couple of beers with my advisor. As part of a long, rambling conversation, he told me that he’d accepted a position at another, more prestigious, j-school. A few minutes later he paused, did a rewind in his head, and said:

I know that I’ve told you that everything is on the record unless you agree that what someone tells you is off the record, but what I told you is off-the-record, OK?

Of course I agreed, but I am reminded this morning of his point. The principle is sound: everything is on the record unless the writer agrees that what a person says can be off-the-record.

Another advisor, mentor and Jimmy Cricket with a great mustache, Roldo Bartimole sent me a link this morning about how that principle—arguably the rock of all journalism principles—is being worn down.

Mathew Ingram, reporting in Times under fire for agreeing to White House terms on Miller interview for the Columbia Journalism Review, writes:

Given the president’s repeated attacks on the media, it’s not surprising to see the Trump administration pushing back on almost all aspects of the traditional relationship with the press. But what was surprising to many journalists on Tuesday was how quickly The New York Times seemed to accede to the demands of the White House around a recent interview with policy adviser Stephen Miller, [This Stephen Miller, JH] the man responsible for the administration’s aggressive stance on separating immigrant families and running what amount to child internment camps.

Michael Barbaro, the host of the newspaper’s podcast, The Daily, said at the beginning of the broadcast Tuesday that he would be talking with a reporter about the recent story on Trump’s border policies, but wouldn’t be using audio of the interview with Miller, because the White House objected. Immediately, the questions started flying: Wasn’t this an on-the-record interview? (Yes, it was.) So why would it matter whether the Times quoted Miller’s words in a text article or used the audio of those words on a podcast, or both?

Here’s what I think should happen. In the Information Age there’s no reason why the full recording of any interview ought not to be available to anyone who wants to listen. Reporters and writers should still craft their pieces and pull the best quotes from an interview, but the entire interview ought to be available.

I’ve pissed off one or two sources over the years by telling them that, Sorry, on-the-record means on-the-record or Sorry, no, you can’t review the article before publication but, hey, principles are principles. Right Scotty?

Instead, the flaks at the Times flaked. Ingram continues:

That question hung in the air until the paper’s PR department released a statement saying: “We conducted an extended White House interview with Stephen Miller for a weekend story about the Trump administration’s border policy. After the original story was published, producers of The Daily planned to talk with the reporter and use audio excerpts from the Miller interview. White House officials objected, saying that they had not agreed to a podcast interview. While Miller’s comments were on the record, we realized that the ground rules for the original interview were not clear, and so we made a decision not to run the audio.”

No. No. No. Scotty’s principle IS the ground rule and the onus for any and all changes for that ground rule is on the person being interviewed, before they open their mouth. Other journalists agreed:

This explanation was not received warmly. “New York Times Caves To White House On Stephen Miller Interview,” blared a headline from HuffPost. Others bombarded the paper on Twitter. “Come on, @nytimes,” said one such criticism. “Release the on-the-record audio of the Stephen Miller interview. It is news, it is fit to print, and we deserve to hear it. Are you journalists or jellyfish? If you need backbone, maybe borrow some from The Washington Post.” Sarah Kenzior said the decision implied that “it’s more important to NYT to placate white supremacists than to speak the truth about the abuse of children.” The Times declined to elaborate to CJR on the statement it made.

Others pointed out that Trump has not exactly been friendly towards the Times—in fact, he has repeatedly singled the newspaper out as “the failing New York Times” and accused it of being “fake news.” Given that, why would the Times be so eager to agree to the White House’s demands, especially when the interview was clearly on the record? Perhaps because the paper is worried about losing access to the Trump administration, and so is willing to eat a little crow. Is that a deal worth making? At this point, it’s speculation. If the Times still had a public editor, that might make an interesting column, but the paper killed the job last year.

I didn’t know that the Times had ceased to have a public editor.

Everyone needs that cricket on their shoulder.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying: the four words that must be at the top of the mind of every voter when they hear the word impeachment are: President Michael Richard Pence.

Tom Steyer is wrong, very, very wrong.

I have long been a champion of independent bookstores and I avoided spending money at Borders and Barnes & Noble whenever I could.

Looking back to the Internet bronze age of 1995, my reaction to a new threat to book sellers, Cadabra* Amazon, is beyond quaint now; kind of link someone looking at baby Godzilla and cooing at how cute he was.

Ralph Nader, writing in The Unsurpassed Power trip by an Insuperable Control Freak, explains:

An open letter to Jeff Bezos:
June 21, 2018

Jeff Bezos, CEO
Amazon.com, Inc.
410 Terry Ave N
Seattle, WA 98109

Dear Mr. Bezos:

You’ve come a long way from being a restless electrical engineering and computer science dual major at our alma mater, Princeton University. By heeding your own advice, your own hunches and visions, you’ve become the world’s richest person–at $141 billion and counting. You must feel you are on top of the world.

You are crushing your competition—those little stores on Main Street, USA, and other large companies that are still in business.

Your early clever minimizing of sales taxes gave you a big unfair advantage over brick and mortar stores that have had to pay 6, 7, 8 percent in sales taxes. Your tax-lawyers and accountants are using the anarchic global tax avoidance jurisdictions to drive your company’s tax burden to zero on a $5.6 billion profit in 2017, plus Continue Reading »

Remember when President Donald John Trump spent more than $$60 million to launch missiles at Syria because children were being harmed?

Chemical weapons bad! Tender-Age Concentration Camps good!

Hours after President Donald John Trump signed an all-but-worthless executive order praying that the move will be sufficient to quell the outrage over his policy of ripping children away from their parents and tossing them into baby gulags, bigger news broke when Michael Cohen’s resignation letter from the Republican National Committee was leaked.

Monique Judge, reporting in Is Michael Cohen About to Flip on Trump? for The Root, writes:

With all the theatrics surrounding Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order to end family separations at the border, you may have missed out on a pretty big news nugget earlier Wednesday. Michael Cohen—Trump’s personal attorney and longtime confidant who has become one of the bigger fish caught in the Robert Mueller investigation web—submitted a letter resigning from his post with the Republican National Committee, citing the ongoing investigation as well as his disagreement with the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families at the border.

Cohen disagreed with his Godfather? That never ends well.

Sources provided ABC News with a copy of Cohen’s email to RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, in which he noted that he’s leaving his post as deputy finance chair of the RNC’s finance committee.

“This important role requires the full-time attention and dedication of each member. Given the ongoing Mueller and SDNY investigations, that simply is impossible for me to do,” Cohen wrote.

He added his disagreement with the family separations that have happened as a result of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and wrote: “As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching. While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips.”

Let me be crystal clear here. Cohen does not give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut about the children on the border. The children he does care about are his own, and taking a bullet for his godfather president could mean seeing is accumulated wealth go down the drain.

Meanwhile, expect to see Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Session III and Director of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsenfall—I wonder what country her ancestors emigrated from?—on their swords for embarrassing Trump.

From the Associated Press:

Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in south Texas, it has emerged.

In our names, people. In our names.

[Update at 1114 on 20 June: Mano Singham is also outraged.

Update at 1008 on 20 June: Trevor Noah has a great idea, call the real policy makers: Fox News at 1.888.369.4762

Update at 0932 on 20 June: Mike McIntyre is on the case this morning.]

Self-inflicted mental and physical exhaustion, sometimes to death, are nothing new in human history. In the 21st century we complain of conditions that would be called luxurious in past centuries. All adversity is relative, but that does not give us permission to slack off and chill. We do not have permission not to try.

I am reminded of this by an essay written by The Root’s Michael Harriot: White People Are Cowards. Of course Harriot is being intentionally provocative, but with good reason. There are times when we must be pissed off enough to get up off our couches and act. Harriot ledes:

I thought white people were evil. I was wrong.

Read the rest.

When I was a young journalist just out of school I would stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to work and buy doughnut holes because they were less likely to get crumbs in my keyboard while I worked. I haven’t stopped at a DD in years because I discovered far better doughnuts at places like Presti’s Bakery & Cafe in Little Italy and my new (since moving to North Royalton and all time favorite) go-to bakery: Becker’s. Their old-fashion (sour cream) doughnuts are so good that I routinely buy dozens to take to students, colleagues and family. But I digress.

Breanna Edwards, reporting in Dunkin’ Donuts Sign Asks Customers to Report Employees Heard Shouting in Languages Other Than English for The Root, writes:

A Baltimore Dunkin’ Donuts is the latest coffee shop to come under scrutiny after a sign was seen requesting that customers report staff heard shouting in any language besides English.

According to WBAL-TV, the general manager of the store posted the sign at the Dunkin’ Donuts on 41st Street, where it drew widespread attention on Monday.

The reports even came with the offer of an award.

I really am trying to figure out if this is actually the 21st century in this, the year of Beyoncé, 2018.

WBAL-TV’s team called the phone number on hand, and the man who answered it claimed that it was an old sign and that he was no longer the general manager at that store. The unidentified man did, however, admit to putting up a similar sign in the past.

According to HuffPost, a corporate spokesperson at Dunkin’ confirmed that the sign was posted by the location’s current general manager “based on her own personal judgment” to uphold the company’s goal “of creating a welcoming and hospitable environment for all guests.”

Welcoming to what kinds of guests, exactly? Only the ones who speak English, I presume?

DD needs to get behind this story like last week and every store owner and franchiser needs to nip this in the bud.

Could only Nixon go to China? Maybe.

Senator Rafael Edward Cruz (R-Texas) has a solution to our current lock-up-the-children crisis: The Protect Kids and Parents Act.

While I was initially enthusiastic, I’m now more cautious because after a few minutes on line—and a later check Tuesday morning—I can’t find the full text of the act and, as is true of any legislation, the devil is in the details. All that I’ve been about to find so far are these four bullet points:

Double the number of federal immigration judges, from roughly 375 to 750.
Authorize new temporary shelters, with accommodations to keep families together.
Mandate that illegal immigrant families must be kept together, absent aggravated criminal conduct or threat of harm to the children.
Provide for expedited processing and review of asylum cases, so that—within 14 days—those who meet the legal standards will be granted asylum, and those who do not will be immediately returned to their home countries.

The last will be a sticking point, and has concerned other as well. In writing about the proposed legislation, David French, in Ted Cruz Introduces Emergency Legislation to End Family Separation – It Looks Solid for The Nation, writes:

The primary critique I’m seeing online is aimed at the 14 day asylum processing provision. Constructing a solid asylum case often takes time, and I’d be concerned about that provision as well if it didn’t ultimately allow for generous extensions when good cause is shown. But that seems like a point that can and should be quickly negotiated with input from experienced asylum attorneys.

If Cruz sees fit to change, or allow amendments to the bill making the change, then I think Democrats in in the Senate will get behind the bill. The House, of course, is another country.

How this story plays out on Tuesday and how the White House reacts to the rising, non-global-warming, tide will be critical.

Three years before he would write For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day Walter Mosley wrote the sixth book in his Easy Rawlins series. Gone Fishin’ is something of an origin tale, putting into novel length an event what Easy refers to in nearly all of the other books: Raymond Alexander’s murder of this father. The book is very good, as are all of Mosley’s books, but I was struck by how he opened the second chapter. Mosley wrote:

Early morning is the best time. You’re fully rested but not awake enough to remember how hard it all is. Morning is like being a child again, and morning before the sun is out is like those magic times that you hid under the bed and between the clothes hanging in your mother’s closet. Times when any kind of miracle could come about just as normal as a spider making her web.

I remember waking up in the dark once when I was very small. I jumped right out of bed and went up next to the screen door on the back porch to see what kind of fantastic thing was going on outside. At first I couldn’t see anything, but there was a clopping sound, nickering, and a deep voice that made me feel calm and wondering. Slowly, coming out of from the darkness, I saw a gray shimmering next to a tall black pillar. The shimmer turned into a big horse and the pillar became my father holding out and apple and cooing in his bass voice, “Ho! Yeah, boy,” even though the horse was tame and eating from his hand.

I drifted into sleep thinking that we were poor and didn’t own a horse. When I woke up it was light and there was no horse to be seen. I asked my father about it but he told me that I was dreaming—where were poor people like us going to find big gray stallions?

But there were horse chips behind the barn and hoof prints too.

I decided that it was a magic horse and man that I’d seen. From that day on I believed that magic hides in the early morning. If you get up early enough you find something so beautiful that it would be all right if you just died right then because nothing else in life could ever be better.

Like Easy, Mosley believes that magic hides in the early morning. In the aforementioned essay, he concludes:

The act of writing is a kind of guerrilla warfare; there is no vacation, no leave, no relief. In actuality there is very little chance of victory. I am, I fear, like that homeless man, likely to be defeated by my fondest dreams.

But then the next day comes, and the words are waiting. I pick up where I left off, in the cool and shifting mists of morning.

I do live for those mists and to see what will come shimmering out from them.

*Australia has a history with this sort of thing…

My solution would be to put a bounty—$5 a head or so—on cats (an invasive and destructive species) and turn the Aussies loose on the problem. To protect pets, declare a hunting season when all pet owners are required to 1.) license their pet to help pay for the bounty and 2.) keep their pet indoors for the duration of the hunting season.

Here in the United States wildlife officials estimate that feral (and domestic) cats, doing what cats do, kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds each year. That 3.6 million birds a day. Since moving to Cleveland back in 1984 I’ve owned/cared for four cats, all of which were strictly indoor animals.

Let the purge begin!

Before there was NCIS (2003-present) and Marine Gunnery Sergeant Leroy Jethro Gibbs there was JAG (1995-2005) and Navy Captain Harmon Rabb. I like both shows, but I also put them into what I’m now calling MAGA Porn, entertainment intended to appeal to prurient interests for unhampered violence and revenge.

During my own military career (1975-1986) I had two brief brushes with the Uniform Code of Military Justice—once in bringing a charge and once speaking on behalf of the charged—and I understand why the UCMJ exists and how the system works. Because of the nature of my assignments, I had little experience of serving with women, but I’ve followed the changes since 1986 and I’m in full agreement with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and her Military Justice Improvement Act.

M. E. Johnson, reporting in Congress: Here’s Why You Should Pass The Military Justice Improvement Act for Task & Purpose, writes:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposed Military Justice Improvement Act of 2017 would attack the scourge of military sexual violence by removing prosecution authority over sexual assault from commanders. Congress should pass her bill.

Sexual violence is pervasive in our military. In 2016, DoD received 6,172 reports. Yet most victims do not report, leading DoD to estimate the actual number at 14,900. Despite DoD claiming success in this fight, reported sexual assaults rose almost 10% in 2017 to 6,796. Include those not reporting, and over 16,000 service men and women were victims last year.

Why would victims come forward? 58 percent of women and 60 percent of men who did faced retaliation, in most cases from their chains of command.

Why indeed. Military units no longer operate far from access to legal professionals. Drumhead court-martials are no longer necessary. There is no longer a need for military commanders in the field to have jurisdiction over serious crimes. Gillibrand is right. The time is past for putting the legal professionals in charge.

The legal battle may be turning on President Donald John Trump. In recent days, stories about two lawsuits—Judge in Emoluments Case Questions Defense of Trump’s Hotel Profits and New York Attorney General Sues Trump Foundation After 2-Year Investigation—must have President Trump’s legal team circus piling out of the clown car.

That Michael Cohen appears ready to turn state’s evidence can’t help. Ralph Nader, however, must see these as appetizers. He’s looking toward the main course.

Nader, in The Constitution and the Lawmen are Coming for Trump—He Laughs!, writes:

The law has never caught up with Trump. In his bullying and bankrupting business career, he laughed at the law–hiding behind corporations; tying up plaintiffs, workers, creditors, consumers and shareholders–with court battles of attrition. His snarling lawyers either wore down Trump’s pursuers or settled disputes for less than the legitimate claims by those harmed. Trump’s lawyers pushed for gag orders to hide the settlements.

Trump always emerged with the gold by profiting at the expense of those around him. Trump made a profit out of the ruins of his companies, flouted the law by hiring undocumented Polish workers, cheated the students who were Continue Reading »