How RWNJ ‘Court Shopping’ Works In Real-Time. We’re talking the 5th Circuit Court Of Appeals in Texas:
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas just ruled that law enforcement cannot temporarily remove firearms from a person subject to a domestic violence-related restraining order. They reached that decision because the founders would have rejected domestic violence as a concern. The defendant in this case was under a protective order for assaulting his girlfriend, and “over the next year, he was involved in five separate shootings, including a road rage incident and at a Whataburger after his friend’s card was declined.” He gets to keep his guns.
That case will be appealed to the Supreme Court and it’s pretty clear what the Roberts majority is going to do with it. Even more people will be killed by their abusers, sanctioned by United States courts.
Here’s the thing with the 5th Circuit and the district courts in it: that’s the venue were all the extremists go court shopping to get their radical and dangerous cases into the Supreme Court pipeline. Trump was able to pack that court with six judges in part because of vacancies the Obama administration abandoned because of GOP obstruction.
By contrast, the wimpy D senators do nothing. They support the continuation of the withholding of the ‘blue slip’ by obstructionist senators. As if the Rethugs would ever extend the same courtesy to D’s when given the chance.
Georgia Governor: “We’ll Always Back The Blue” When They Shoot Environmental Protestors. Especially when the protestors stand in the way of a proposed ‘Cop City’:
The past two weeks have marked a significant escalation in the years-long struggle over the proposed construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), a $90 million project that would be built on nearly 100 acres of city-owned land in an unincorporated section of DeKalb County—Georgia’s fourth largest county that encompasses a sliver of southeast Atlanta. The forest—once the homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, then the site of a slave plantation and notorious prison camp—for at least a year has been occupied by activists who call themselves “forest defenders.” They have camped among the trees with the goal of blocking the construction of the PSTC, a massive complex for law enforcement that would include training and recreational facilities. For them and other opponents of the project, PSTC is known instead as “Cop City.”
On January 18, a multi-agency task force that included Atlanta police, the Georgia State Patrol, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided what they estimated to be about 25 campsites throughout the forest. During the operation, a Georgia state patrol trooper shot and killed a 26-year-old activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by the nickname “Tortuguita.” The state’s Bureau of Investigation released a statement claiming that officers approached Terán in a tent, and then Terán shot at a state trooper first, wounding him, before officers returned fire. Law enforcement has said there is no body camera footage.
In his State of the State address the day before the state of emergency was declared, Kemp decried the violence of “out-of-state rioters” and applauded the police response to the protests. “That’s just the latest example of why here in Georgia, we’ll always back the blue!” he said.
Of course, Democrats played a key role in supporting ‘Cop City’, even though it wasn’t the original plan for the land:
In a 2017 proposal commissioned by the city of Atlanta, the land proposed for “Cop City,” one of the largest remaining green spaces in the Atlanta metro area, was slotted for conservation, not for new development. Indeed the document described the forest as one of the four “lungs of Atlanta”—a reference to its tree canopy. Soon after the city adopted the proposal into its charter, urban planner Ryan Gravel, an author of the report, began to work on the overall conservation plan with The Nature Conservancy.
But in March 2021, then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced that the PSTC would be built on the same swath of land. Among many amenities, the sprawling compound would include a “mock city for real-world training,” complete with a “faux nightclub and convenience store,” earning the nickname “Cop City.” The Atlanta Police Foundation—a private non-profit that lobbies and fundraises on behalf of the Atlanta Police Department— is behind the proposal for the facility. In a promotional video, it is described as “A World Class Training Campus For A World Class City.” The group plans to pay $60 million for the PSTC, while the other $30 million would be from public funds. If built, it would be one of the largest police training centers in the country.
Read the whole thing–especially the part about how the project is essential for the ‘morale’ of the Atlanta cops.
Could Mothballed Agency Under Trump Jump-Start Green Energy Projects?:
Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of Energy, down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away from fossil fuels and help the world stave off disastrous global heating.
The department’s loan programs office (LPO) was “essentially dormant” under Donald Trump, according to its head, Jigar Shah, but has now come roaring back with a huge war chest to bankroll emerging clean energy projects and technology.
Last year’s vast Inflation Reduction Act grew the previously moribund office’s loan authority to $140bn, while adding a new program worth another $250bn in loan guarantees to retool projects that help cut planet-heating emissions.
Vincent White Chosen For Wilmington’s 1st District ‘Counsel’ Seat. I’ve now read a few articles by this new WDEL reporter. And I understand that there’s a learning curve. But proper use of language and terminology should already have been baked in. They weren’t. ‘Well fare’? ‘Counsel’?
Speaking of Ill-Qualified ‘Journalists’–Meet The New Publisher For The Delaware State News. When you’re a graduate of Hillsdale College, a RWNJ Propaganda Factory masquerading as an institution of higher learning, nothing you write can be trusted. Check out a selective history of Hillsdale for yourself (read it, you’ll enjoy it):
Some twenty-+ years later, Hillsdale is embroiled in a controversy of a different sort: COVID denial, and peddling disinformation about the pandemic and its variants. To pursue these aims, the institute is establishing an Academy for Science and Freedom, that will operate out of Hillsdale’s campus in Washington, D.C. According to the Hillsdale website, the Academy aims “To educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”
The three men appointed to spearhead the operation, Scott W. Atlas, M.D., of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, also known as Trump’s guy, Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., of the Brownstone Institute, “are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures,” according to Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch, writing for The Center For Media and Democracy, in partnership with The Daily Poster.
I still get unsolicited mailings from Hillsdale College, apparently a carryover from my Dover years, where legislators were routinely bombarded with Hillsdale propaganda. Some of it likely found its way into bad law. We can now look forward to slanted journalism.
What do you want to talk about?