The Maine Course.  Trump off Maine ballot–for now.  Either the Constitution means something, or it doesn’t.  El Supremos will decide:

“I do not reach this conclusion lightly,” said Bellows, a Democrat, in the decision. “I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

Both the Maine and Colorado decision are based on section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bans from office those who “engaged in insurrection”. The provision, which came after the civil war, was intended to prevent Confederates from retaking power.

Legal scholars have argued that the clause should apply to Trump because of his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. The clause has rarely been used and has not previously been tested on the office of the presidency.

FWIW (aka “what you’re paying to read this”), I think Michigan will also bar Trump.  The Michigan court only permitted his name to be on the primary ballot b/c the primaries are conducted by the political parties, not the state.

Trump Team Flew Fake Electors’ Ballots To DC.  Because they were stuck in the DeJoy-created post office quagmire:

Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

These details largely come from pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who was an architect of the fake electors plot and is now a key cooperator in several state probes into the scheme. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October to a felony conspiracy charge in Georgia in connection with the electors’ plan, and has met with prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, who are investigating the sham GOP electors in their own states.

The rush to get the fake electors’ ballots to Pence has Keystone Kops’ levels of absurdity.  Would kinda be funny if we weren’t talking about stealing the election.  A good read.

Nikki Haley ‘Blowed Herself Up REAL Good’.  Guess she must have been edjimicated in South Carolina schools:

Prominent Democratic donors, anxious about the increasingly authoritarian language of Donald J. Trump, have been calling on Democratic voters and independents to thwart the former president’s comeback by voting for Nikki Haley in open Republican primary elections.

But Ms. Haley’s political gaffe on Wednesday night, when the presidential hopeful and former governor of South Carolina stumbled through the causes of the Civil War with no mention of slavery, may make that appeal considerably harder just as she is edging closer to striking distance of Mr. Trump in New Hampshire.

Ms. Haley on Thursday walked back her answer about the causes of the Civil War, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”

Her retreat came about 12 hours after a town-hall meeting in Berlin, N.H., a state that is central to her presidential ambitions, where she was asked about the Civil War’s origins. Her answer focused on government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” after she jokingly told the questioner he had posed a tough one. He then noted that she had not uttered the word “slavery.”

Were Haley a caffeinated beverage, Tom Waits would say, “Coffee wasn’t strong enough to defend itself.”

Yet Another Parental Rights Warrior Sets Yet Another Good Example.  A former Rethug candidate for Lt. Governor at that:

A former GOP candidate for Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and leader of a political action committee that fueled conservative opposition to school boards has been charged with assault after allegedly punching a teenager at a boozy birthday party she threw for her 17-year-old daughter.

Multiple teenagers were assaulted by intoxicated adults during the Sept. 29 party at Clarice Schillinger’s Doylestown home, according to a police affidavit. Police say that Schillinger’s intoxicated boyfriend punched one teen in the face and assaulted another. That teen also was punched in the eye by Schillinger’s intoxicated mother, who also chased that teen around the kitchen, the affidavit said.

As teenagers tried to leave the home on Liz Circle, Schillinger — who police said had supplied the more than 15 minors at the party with a basement bar stocked with vodka and rum, played beer pong with them and encouraged them to take shots with her — ordered them to stay.

She then punched one young man in the face three times, according to the affidavit, which said video footage showed Schillinger lunging toward a group of teenagers in the foyer and having to be restrained.

Any surprise that this floozy was wined and dined by the Rethuglican elite?:

Schillinger, 36, rose to prominence amid a burgeoning conservative movement opposed to pandemic safety measures, which has since shifted to accusing the public education system of indoctrinating students with liberal ideals.

She was tapped by Bucks County venture capitalist Paul Martino in 2021 to lead a political action committee, Back to School PA, that poured more than $500,000 of Martino’s money into school board races. While the PAC billed itself as bipartisan, most candidates who received its donations were Republicans, at a time when conservatives were marshaling opposition to public schools over so-called critical race theory.

Schillinger then became executive director of a federal PAC started by Martino, Back to School USA, which pledged to combat “liberal teachers’ unions and special interest groups that are responsible for indoctrinating our children.

Insert your own punchline here.

What do you want to talk about?

More Delaware Corruption–Courtesy Of Our Lax LLC Laws.  I could muster up more sympathy for the victims were they not using this scheme as a tax dodge:

Court-appointed receiver Kelly Campbell had been overseeing this depleted storage facility of First State Depository Co. LLC for the past year, arriving the previous fall with U.S. marshals and a judge’s order. He and auditors from Baker Tilly checked the coins against records showing around $140 million in gold and silver. Much was missing.

Around 2,100 customers stored gold or silver at First State in labeled boxes, like a bank deposit box. Many were retirees who had been persuaded to include precious metalsin their IRA or 401K accounts. For tax reasons, they needed to store the metals in a secure place away from home, which First State claimed to offer.

“Most of these investors were elderly people,” Campbell said. “They were investing their savings. It’s tragic.”

Campbell’s team recovered $64 million of precious metals from nearly 1,000 boxes and sent it back to the owners.

The rest of the boxes were missing gold and silver worth $76 million. Some were empty; some had silver but none of the listed gold;some were stuffed with paper IOUs. Another 140 customers the receiver identified haven’t filed claims.

Precious-metals storage is one of the niche industries in “America’s Corporate Capital,” Wilmington, Del. Starting in the 1970s, the former Wilmington Trust Co. piled gold bars and 55-gallon drums of silver coins on skids in vaults below its high-rise headquarters on Wilmington’s Rodney Square and tracked them for futures and options traders at the New York Mercantile Exchange and other markets.

Such traders can buy and sell fortunes daily — free of state taxes in Delaware. In the early 1990s, Wilmington Trust boasted it ran the largest private gold and silver depository in the U.S.

First State focused on smaller clients — often individual retirement savers dazzled by pitchmen touting gold as a shelter against inflation and unreliable national currencies. The company got its name onto lists circulated by retirement account custodians who urged savers to consider buying precious metals.

I’m pushing fair use boundaries, so I’ll cut to the chase:

“I know the case very well,” said Doug Davis, executive director of the Numismatic Anti Counterfeiting Association. “Depositories ought to be regulated by the state they are located in.”

He notes that Texas in 2015 passed a law setting up a privately run but state-regulated and -staffed bullion depository.

“There needs to be state-level regulation,” said Campbell, the receiver.

The Phony ‘Research’ Behind Home-Schooling:

Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of the nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these students soar high above their peers in what he calls “institutional schools.” At home, he and his wife educated their eight children on their Oregon farm.

His influence is beyond doubt. He has testified before state legislators looking to roll back regulations. Judges cite his work in child custody cases where parents disagree about home schooling. His voice resounds frequently in the press, from niche Christian newsletters to NPR and the New York Times. As president of the National Home Education Research Institute, he is the go-to expert for home-school advocates looking to influence public opinion and public policy, presenting himself as a dispassionate academic seeking the truth.

But Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. When talking to legislators, reporters and the general public, he typically dispenses with essential cautions and overstates the success of the instruction he champions. Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment.

Ray comes from a conservative Christian movement that sees home schooling as a biblically mandated counterweight to secular modernity.

A community of home-school alumni has arisen in recent years to forcefully reject this form of education. They say their parents ignored entire subjects, focused on faith over academics and were physically abusive. Among these critics is someone Ray knows well: his oldest daughter, Hallie Ray Ziebart, 43.

Cris Barrish Chronicles Horror Story Of A Serial Abuser.   Despite having been repeatedly beaten and having the tip of her finger bitten off, his wife begs judge not to send him to jail:

Police and prosecutors still have not solved the 2019 murder of former Delaware banking executive Benjamin Ledyard’s second wife, but on Friday, a judge sentenced him to two years behind bars for battering his third wife and using what a prosecutor called “enough force to cause a gaping wound that exposed her skull.”

Superior Court Judge Danielle Brennan put Ledyard, 56, into prison for the crime of felony second-degree assault against Stephanie Ledyard on New Year’s Day.

The judge said she took into consideration the prosecutor’s memo that documented several prior acts of violence against Stephanie Ledyard that sent her to the hospital more than once.

Yet both Ledyards, who married in September 2021, cried openly in court as they beseeched the judge to give him a sentence of only probation.

“Please don’t incarcerate him. I beg you, I beg you,’’ Stephanie Ledyard, 55, said. “Please give us a chance. I forgive him. I believe God forgives him. If I forgive him, why can’t anybody else?”

Benjamin Ledyard, a former investment consultant with Wilmington Trust and Bank of America, told the judge his alcoholism fueled the attack, said he’s received treatment and is committed to being sober and non-violent.

“I’m so sorry for what I did to her,’’ he told the judge. “Please, please don’t send me to jail, I’ll do anything you ask.”

Hmmm, so if, if, he just might have had something to do with his second wife’s murder, he should be forgiven because the booze made him do it?  I’ve never understood, and please help me out, why people stay in such dangerous situations.  Is it Stockholm Syndrome?  OK, I’ll do my own research.  Here’s what the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence says:

A victim’s reasons for staying with their abusers are extremely complex and, in most cases, are based on the reality that their abuser will follow through with the threats they have used to keep them trapped: the abuser will hurt or kill them, they will hurt or kill the kids, they will win custody of the children, they will harm or kill pets or others, they will ruin their victim financially — the list goes on. The victim in violent relationships knows their abuser best and fully knows the extent to which they will go to make sure they have and can maintain control over the victim. The victim literally may not be able to safely escape or protect those they love. A recent study of intimate partner homicides found 20% of homicide victims were not the domestic violence victims themselves, but family members, friends, neighbors, persons who intervened, law enforcement responders, or bystanders.

Additional barriers to escaping a violence relationship include by are not limited to:

• The fear that the abuser’s actions will become more violent and may become lethal if the victim attempts to leave.
• Unsupportive friends and family
• Knowledge of the difficulties of single parenting and reduced financial circumstances
• The victim feeling that the relationship is a mix of good times, love and hope along with the manipulation, intimidation and fear.
• The victim’s lack of knowledge of or access to safety and support
• Fear of losing custody of any children if they leave or divorce their abuser or fear the abuser will hurt, or even kill, their children
• Lack of means to support themselves and/or their children financially or lack of access to cash, bank accounts, or assets
• Lack of having somewhere to go (e.g. no friends or family to help, no money for hotel, shelter programs are full or limited by length of stay)
• Fear that homelessness may be their only option if they leave
• Religious or cultural beliefs and practices may not support divorce or may dictate outdated gender roles and keep the victim trapped in the relationship
• Belief that two parent households are better for children, despite abuse

P-U-TUS:  Does Trump literally stink?  Look how he stands.  Sure looks like a guy with a loaded diaper:

Adam Kinzinger says, “I’m genuinely surprised how people close to Trump haven’t talked about the odor.  It’s truly something to behold. Wear a mask if you can.”

Noel Casler, a former staffer on The Apprentice, claimed in a video that Donald Trump’s incontinence and foul odor was a frequent issue on the set of the ex-president’s reality show.

“The diapers is not a joke,” Casler began.

“He would often soil himself on The Apprentice set. He’s incontinent from all the speed, all the Adderall he does, all the cocaine that he’s done for decades…His [bowels] are uncontrollable.”

Casler claimed that Trump has been wearing diapers since the 1990s and the he had a chance to witness it firsthand in the late 2000s, while working on the set of The Apprentice.

“We’d have to stop the show and change him and that was Keith Schiller’s job. He would take him off set, he would wipe him down. Our nickname for Keith was ‘Wet Wipes.’ It’s not a joke. It’s happened several times,” alleged Casler.

Casler also described an alleged incident in which Trump became so full of rage at being unable to read the word “arbitrage” on a cue card during a recording session and “very loudly evacuated his bowels” while screaming on set. Casler claimed he was holding the boom microphone at the time and was able to smell it. He also noted that the crew’s nickname for Celebrity Apprentice was “The Shitshow” due to these frequent incidents.

You don’t expect me to top that, do you?  I won’t. I can’t.

What do you want to talk about?

Wisconsin Supreme Court Restores Democracy, Overturns Blatantly-Gerrymandered Legislative Maps:

MADISON – The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday ordered the Republican-controlled state Legislature to draw new legislative boundaries ahead of the 2024 election, arguing their GOP advantage is unconstitutional — delivering a long-sought win for Democrats who have stayed deep in the Legislature’s minority for more than a decade.

The court in a 4-3 decision said the court is also prepared to replace the state’s heavily gerrymandered maps if the Legislature and Democratic governor cannot agree on a new plan.

“Wisconsin is a purple state, and I look forward to submitting maps to the Court to consider and review that reflect and represent the makeup of our state,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement.Law Forward, a Madison-based liberal-leaning law firm focused on voting issues, brought the legal challenge straight to the Supreme Court in August — bypassing lower courts in an expedited effort to put new maps in place before the fall.

US Supreme Court Does Trump A Solid.  Just when you think they won’t go any lower:

The Supreme Court has denied special counsel Jack Smith’s bid to fast-track a dispute about whether former President Donald Trump should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for misconduct during his time in the White House.

The court did not offer a reason for its decision. The action now turns to the federal appeals court in Washington, which is set to hear argument in the matter on Jan. 9.

The question of immunity is still expected to reach the court,  just on a longer timeline.

In other words, regardless of how the Court of Appeals rules, it is inevitable that the case winds up in the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court has effectively enabled Trump’s delaydelaydelay plan.

Cops Knew Maine Man Was A Threat, Were Too A-Scared To Confront Him.  Until after he went out and killed 18 people:

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Police who declined to confront an Army reservist in the weeks before he killed 18 people in Maine’s deadliest mass shooting feared that doing so would “throw a stick of dynamite on a pool of gas,” according to video released Friday by law enforcement.

Military officials alerted police in September that Card had been hospitalized in July after exhibiting erratic behavior while training, that he still had access to weapons and that he had threatened to “shoot up” an Army reserve center in Saco, a city in southern Maine. The sheriff’s department responded by briefly staking out the Saco facility and going to Card’s home in Bowdoin for what Reamer described as a “welfare check.”

Auburn City Councilor Leroy Walker, Sr., whose son Joseph Walker was killed in the shootings expressed frustration with police after seeing the video. Joseph Walker was the manager of Schemengees Bar & Grill, where part of the attack took place.

“I would like to know what we train these people to do. Is it just to deliver mail? Or stop innocent people that may be driving 11 miles (per hour) over the speed limit?” Walker said in a text message, noting that watching the video made him “sick.”

What do you want to talk about?

A Preview Of Our Holiday Programming:

Dec. 26:  DL’s MVP’s Of 2023

Dec. 26-30:  ‘Bulo’s 50 Fave Tunes Of The Year.  10 each day.

Dec. 31:  2023: The Good, The Bad, The Ridiculous.  The only look-back on the year in Delaware you will ever need that you’ll want to read.  It’s epic(ally long), or will be, once I’ve finished it.

The Only Article You Need To Read About Bethany Hall-Long.  Great reporting doesn’t rely solely on uncovering the facts–it means presenting those facts in a manner that makes a complicated story easy to understand.  That’s what Cris Barrish has done here.  Read it and we’ll all be on the same page.

Israel Bombed Areas Where It Had Ordered Gazans To Go.  John Sigler couldn’t have done it any better.  None dare call it genocide, though.  Even though 20,000 are now dead in Gaza.  OK, I will. The Israeli Defense Force is committing genocide in Gaza:

The number of deaths is far higher than in any conflict in Gaza in recent history. And it is higher than the estimated 15,000 Palestinians killed in the violence that followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians call that mass displacement the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.”

Neta C. Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which tracks the toll of conflicts, said the rate of death among the population was similar to that of 20th-century wars.

“This is, in the 21st century, a significant and out-of-the-norm level of destruction,” she said.

“Hey, hey

ho, ho

Feckless Joe

has gotta go.”

Just reliving the Vietnam War protests of my youth.  I needed that.

Mike Johnson And His Daughter At The Purity Ball. “Eternal girlhood” is the best descriptor I’ve seen:

“This looks like a wedding,” a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment that was unearthed by ABC News. “But they are not bride and groom — but rather father and … daughter,” the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah.

The German news segment documented Johnson and his family preparing for and then attending a purity ball, a controversial formal dance event, popular among some conservative Christians, that gained notoriety in the early 2000s. At a typical event, fathers and their teenage daughters dress in formal ball attire for a night that involves dinner and dancing and culminates with the daughter signing a pledge to her father to abstain from dating and to remain sexually abstinent until marriage.

In one brief interview clip, Johnson’s wife Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, told the German news outlet, “We don’t talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question.”

Since growing in popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, purity balls and purity pledges have faced increased scrutiny from both inside and outside the Christian community, ranging from criticism that the practice places too much of a burden on young women to accusations that the balls themselves objectify young girls.

Linda Kay Klein, author of the book “Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free,” told ABC News that purity balls are not as common as other hallmarks of the purity movement, like purity rings, and that they tend to be more popular among more conservative Christian factions.

“In my book I talk about eternal girlhood,” Klein said. “There’s this way in which purity culture attempts to create this eternal girlhood among girls — you never really grow up, you never really have headship over your own life. You ultimately are there to be guided by and to support and to champion and to be led by somebody greater than you: a man.”

And here I just thought they were keeping ’em pure to serve as prey for the religious leaders who minister to the flocks.  Still do.

ChristianaCare To Pay Out $47 Mill To Settle Whistleblower Lawsuit.  They were engaged in some sneaky shit:

This is believed to be the largest False Claims Act settlement in Delaware history and the first in a series of cases that are likely to be brought against other hospitals across the nation.

“This case involves a revolutionary legal theory,” said Dan Miller of Walden Macht & Haran — the law firm representing the whistleblower, Ronald Sherman. “To my knowledge, this is the first FCA settlement — ever —based on a hospital allegedly providing private physicians with free services in the form of hospital-employed nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Any other hospital in the country which operates under that model that led to this settlement should consider changing its practices immediately, or risk a whistleblower lawsuit.”

Sherman’s suit, which was unsealed more than a year after it was filed, charges that between 2010 and 2014 the hospital system engaged in a “kickback scheme,” by allowing doctors from a private practice called Neonatology Associates to bill insurances, primarily Medicaid, for care that had been provided by the hospital’s own staff.

In exchange, Christiana Care received lucrative patient referrals from those physicians, the suit claims.

“To fill the gap left behind by residents, many hospitals hired mid-level providers such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants,” Miller said. “At ChristianaCare, we alleged that services performed by mid-level providers were billed for by private attending physicians who were in a position to make future referrals to the hospital.

“Put differently, we alleged that ChristianaCare paid kickbacks to the private physicians in the form of free employees.“

What do you want to talk about?

Judge To Rudy:  Pay Up Now!: For a guy who’s supposedly destitute, he’s still livin’ large.  Time for that liquidation sale:

Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote that there is a strong danger Giuliani is likely to hide his assets from plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss and is unlikely to succeed in having last week’s jury verdict overturned or cut down on appeal.

“Giuliani has never denied that he has taken steps to hide his assets from judgment creditors, and has offered no affirmative pledge that he will take no steps to do so,” Howell wrote.

As Howell noted, it is unclear how much money Giuliani has because he ignored court orders that would have offered insight into his finances. But she said he has failed to “contend, let alone demonstrate with documentary or other proof,” that he can’t pay at least some chunk of the hefty penalty. He owns property in New York and Florida and has multiple bank accounts, she pointed out. And, she added, his claims of penury “are difficult to square with the fact that Giuliani affords a spokesperson, who accompanied him daily to trial.”

When the Biden administration said it had reached a “historic” legal deal with Northwest Indigenous tribes last week to save endangered salmon, no one could agree on what it meant for the tribes’ costliest and most controversial demand: the removal of four hydroelectric dams that hinder fish from their migration out to sea and home to reproduce.

Some said the deal, in promoting renewable energy that can replace hydropower, virtually ensures the dams on Washington’s Snake River will come down. Others said the White House did little for dam removal because it punted the question to Congress.

Largely overlooked in the debate was one seemingly technical provision that is far less open to interpretation and of great importance to the tribes. Not only does the deal offer $1 billion in new funding for Columbia River salmon restoration, but for the first time it also grants states and tribes control — not the Bonneville Power Administration, which sells hydropower from Northwest dams — over how that money gets spent.

The Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica investigation found that Bonneville time and again prioritized its business interests over efforts to restore salmon populations. It actively pushed back on tribal initiatives and flatlined budgets in ways advocates said starved recovery efforts, even as the agency raked in record revenues.

Under the new agreement, Bonneville will invest $300 million over 10 years into salmon programs, including habitat restoration and much-needed upgrades to fish hatcheries, overseen by tribes and the states of Oregon and Washington. Companies and families that buy power from Bonneville will pay some of the cost in the form of an estimated rate increase averaging 0.7 %, and the agency will recoup the rest by selling more power to California.

Yes, Black Women Disproportionately Targeted For Prosecution Post-Dobbs.  The story of Brittany Watts defies belief:

Ohio was in the throes of a bitter debate over abortion rights this fall when Brittany Watts, 21 weeks and 5 days pregnant, began passing thick blood clots.

The 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.

The doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face “significant risk” of death, according to records of her case.

That was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse.

This is not the story of just one person, though:

It has touched off a national firestorm over the treatment of pregnant women, and especially Black women, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump elevated Watts’ plight in a post to X, formerly Twitter, and supporters have donated more than $100,000 through GoFundMe for her legal defense, medical bills and trauma counseling.

Whether abortion-seekers should face criminal charges is a matter of debate within the anti-abortion community, but, post-Dobbs, pregnant women like Watts, who was not even trying to get an abortion, have increasingly found themselves charged with “crimes against their own pregnancies,” said Grace Howard, assistant justice studies professor at San José State University.

“Roe was a clear legal roadblock to charging felonies for unintentionally harming pregnancies, when women were legally allowed to end their pregnancies through abortion,” she said. “Now that Roe is gone, that roadblock is entirely gone.”

Even before Roe was overturned, studies show that Black women who visited hospitals for prenatal care were 10 times more likely than white women to have child protective services and law enforcement called on them, even when their cases were similar, she said.

“Post-Dobbs, what we see is kind of a wild, wild West,” said Goodwin. “You see this kind of muscle-flexing by district attorneys and prosecutors wanting to show that they are going to be vigilant, they’re going to take down women who violate the ethos coming out of the state’s legislature.” She called Black women “canaries in the coal mine” for the “hyper-vigilant type of policing” women of all races might expect from the nation’s network of health-care providers, law enforcers and courts now that abortion isn’t federally protected.

The One About Mike Johnson And The Creationist Museum:

Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.

In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”

While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.

The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”

As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.

Read the whole piece.  This guy is dangerous, real dangerous.

“Why Trump Won’t Win.”  I’m not persuaded, perhaps you will be.

What do you want to talk about?

How My Daughter Observed Hanukkah In Portland:

Image Credit: Jewish Voice for Peace

Bibi Should Pay Attention As Israeli Troops Kill Three Israeli Hostages:

The three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were carrying a makeshift white flag when a soldier “felt threatened and opened fire,” (well, cops everywhere use that rationale whenever they gun down someone who poses no threat) a senior Israeli military official said Saturday, adding that an investigation was underway and the killings were “against our rules of engagement.” The deaths have sparked outrage and protests in Israel, with a group representing families of hostages meeting urgently to discuss ways to raise pressure on Israeli leaders to secure the release of all hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

“Against our rules of engagement” means they’re only supposed to gun down Palestinians with white flags. This looks more like a war of obsession for Netanyahu every day.  Jewish Voices For Peace (‘Not In Our Name’) are my kind of activists as they put the lie to the meme that opposing this war should brand anybody as anti-semitic.  In other words, Val, they’re not part of your ‘Jew Cult’ which, BTW, doesn’t exist.

Guess this is against Bibi’s rules of engagement as well:

Israel has said it is opening a military police investigation into the killing of two Palestinians in the West Bank after an Israeli human rights group posted videos that appeared to show Israeli troops killing the men – one who was incapacitated and the second unarmed – during a military raid in a West Bank refugee camp.

The B’Tselem human rights group accused the army of carrying out a pair of “illegal executions.”

Who Will Whip Out Their Big Ten-Inch–Binder?

Washington (CNN) — A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.

Feckless Joe: Bibi, You Need To Dial It Back.  Bibi:  Kiss My Tucchus:

Almost half of the munitions Israel has used in Gaza since the war began have been unguided bombs, a U.S. intelligence assessment has found, a ratio that some arms experts say helps explain the conflict’s enormous civilian death toll. The revelation comes as U.S. and Israeli officials engage in intensifying conversations about the sequencing of military operations in the two-month conflict.

The Israel Defense Forces has fired more than 29,000 air-to-ground munitions into the Palestinian enclave since Oct. 7, and only 55 to 60 percent of them have been precision-guided, according to a new assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The rest were what are known as “dumb bombs,” said two people familiar with the assessment who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.

My back-of-the-envelope math suggests that at least 11,600 ‘dumb’ bombs have been dropped on Gaza. But, I digress:

The use of so many unguided bombs, first reported by CNN, is a concern among humanitarian groups and others amid growing calls inside and outside the United States for Washington to condition any further military aid to Israel on the immediate reduction of civilian deaths.

The Biden administration has thus far rejected such calls, fearing a backlash by Republicans and political attacks from powerful pro-Israel lobbying organizations. Instead, it has attempted to influence the Israeli government to sharpen the focus of its military campaign using high-level visits, including meetings in Tel Aviv on Thursday between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Under international law, weapons are considered indiscriminate if they cannot be directed at military targets.

By his actions, Bibi is now a war criminal.  Biden is his feckless lackey.

Supreme Court Upholds Assault Weapons Ban.  Could the tide be turning on Second Amendment absolutism?:

With less than three weeks to go before the registration deadline for guns restricted under the Protect Illinois Communities Act, the U.S. Supreme Court has again declined to block enforcement of the law banning the sale and most unregistered possession of semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 and AK-47.

The nation’s highest court on Thursday issued an order denying an application from the National Association for Gun Rights and a Naperville gun dealer for a preliminary injunction to the statewide gun and magazine ban, as well as the suburb’s municipal ban.

There were no dissents noted in the order, marking the second time the justices have passed up an opportunity to intervene in the Illinois ban.

Hey, it’s understandable.  This will be model legislation under an authoritarian regime.

Convicted By A Hair. The Folly Of Follicles:

In courtrooms across America, “scientific evidence” used to imprison people for heinous crimes has been increasingly discredited. Blood-spatter patterns, arson analysis, bite-mark comparisons, even some fingerprint evidence have all turned out to be unreliable.

A quarter of the 3,439 exonerations tracked by the National Registry of Exonerations involved false or misleading forensic evidence.

But these exonerations are only the tip of the iceberg, some experts say. Many more people remain incarcerated despite questions about the forensic analysis of evidence used against them. Cases are not automatically reopened when a field of forensics is questioned or even discredited. That’s true of hair analysis, which has been under scrutiny for decades: Government studies have found that in hundreds of cases, hair analysts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation exaggerated their findings in reports and court testimony. 

A new report by the exoneration registry found 128 cases in which people were falsely convicted at least partly because of flawed hair analysis and testimony. Fifteen of the defendants were sentenced to die. Exonerees lost almost 2,000 years of their lives in prison and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. And there may be many more people behind bars who were convicted because of bad hair evidence.

“I am willing to speculate that—because the process of exoneration is so difficult—those 128 exonerees could represent between two and 10 times as many wrongly convicted people,” said Simon Cole, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is the director of the registry and an author of the study. Many of them “aren’t ever going to be able to prove their innocence to the state’s satisfaction and become exonerated,” he said, noting that overturning a verdict requires very persuasive evidence, such as DNA, and a lot of time, money, and legal help.

I may never watch ‘Forensic Files’ again now that the bubble of forensic certitude has been burst.

Q: What is unusual about this photo?:

DAILY STATE NEWS/BENJAMIN ROTHSTEIN

Milford Police Chief Cecilia Ashe, Mayor Archie Campbell and Vice Mayor Jason James prepare for the ribbon cutting Tuesday.

What do you want to talk about?