Glenn Kirschner – In his recent post, Donald Trump admits to not one but two crimes. Can indictments be far off?
Ring of Fire – Crazed Capitol Rioters Head To Prison
Robert Reich – Does Elon Musk Have a Right to Destroy Twitter?
Real Subtitles? What can you do when your country is out of hamburgers?
Puppy Born Without Front Legs Brings Life To Senior Dogs
Beau – Let’s talk about Arizona, water, and a new market….
Yesterday, we did indeed have snow as predicted, but the sun was out a couple of hours before is was supposed to slow down to a trickle. (the prediction also suggested it would continue to trickle throug the night, which it may – or may not.) It was also Giving Tuesday, so my inbox was about twice its usual size. And one more notable thng – the Senate passed the law upholding same-sex marriage 61-36 At this link you can see the 12 Republicans who voted yes, and I guarantee some will surprise you. Now, this doesn’t mean some (*)hole state will not challenge the law, but it does make it harder.
Cartoon – 3
Short Takes –
Mother Jones – How Did a State Known for Its War on Immigrants Approve In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students?
Quote – Proposition 300, [passed in 2006, was] a successful ballot measure that made university students in Arizona who were not US citizens or permanent residents and those lacking legal status ineligible for in-state tuition and federal and state financial aid…. Sixteen years later, that could change. The majority of voters in Arizona during the recent midterm elections were in favor of Proposition 308, a ballot measure that repealed provisions from Proposition 300 and opened the way for any high school graduate, regardless of immigration status, living in Arizona for at least two years, to access in-state tuition rates at state universities and community colleges.
Click through for analysis. It makes sense to me. If you don’t like a groups of people, at least in part because they are uneducated, then educate them. but then, I’m a flaming liberal.
Crooks & Liars – Russian Mothers ‘Rewarded’ With A Set Of Towels For Fallen Sons
Quote – On the occasion of Mother’s Day, one of the leaders of the Kursk region in Russia made a grotesque gesture, presenting a set of towels to mothers who lost their sons on the Ukrainian front. Outrageous news came to light in the Russian media: one of the district leaders of the Kursk region, Sergey Korostyev, gave a set of towels to mothers who lost their sons on the Ukrainian front, reports the Russian newspaper Vesma.
Click through for story and sources. Mothers Day in Russia is celebrated on the last Sunday in November. I don’t know about the “Dollar store” part. I expect the government is hurting for funding.
Food For Thought
Glenn Kirschner – Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Thanksgiving Day court filing that destroys Trump’s legal argument
Farron Balanced – Court Filing Reveals Lawyer’s Anger Over Matt Gaetz Not Being Indicted
Robert Reich – How a Billionaire Bought a Senate Seat in Ohio
Brent Terhune – Elon’s Saving Twitter
Security Guard Brings Home A Pregnant Stray Cat
Beau – Let’s talk about ignoring Trump tantrums….
Yesterday, the weather prediction was for snow today – and very cold – with a high below 32°F. Since I start shivering and my teeth chatter at 72°F, I’ll be staying in (not that I don’t anyway.) I also received confirmation to visit Virgil Sunday (and snow is NOT predicted for Sunday.) Also too, I learned that last Saturday was the 100th birthday og Charles M. Schulz. Here’s a link to a page of cartoons, which starts with political ones, but also includes more birthday tributes to the creator of “Peanuts” than you would probably think possible (and one or two are conspicuous, to me at least, by their absence.)
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Axios – World’s largest active volcano starts to erupt in Hawaii
Quote – Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano — located on the Big Island — began erupting late Sunday night, the U.S. Geological Survey said…. “Based on past events, the early stages of a Mauna Loa eruption can be very dynamic and the location and advance of lava flows can change rapidly,” USGS said…. Webcams for the volcano can be found at https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mauna-loa/webcams
Click through for developing story. It appers when that say “largest,” they are talking about its perceived height, not the amount of damage it can do world wide. The latter would probably be Krakatoa. And the danger isn’t lava, but volcanic ash particles released into the air, whoch can block sunlight for years, sort of like a “nuclear winter.” Look up the year 536 CE (or “Worst year to be alive.”) Also, I don’t remember the year, but it wasn’t that long ago, when an eruption caused enough particles in the air over Europe that planes couldn’t fly for weeks. You may remember that too.
Wonkette – Buffalo Gunman Pleads Guilty To Hate Crimes, Will Spend Rest Of Life In Prison
Quote – This theory, whether it’s been called that or not, has been around for decades. Most people will date it back to the work of French crackpot Renaud Camus’s 2011 essay “Le Grand Remplacement,” in which he claimed that white citizens of European countries were being replaced by Black and Middle Eastern immigrants, or back to the “White Genocide” nonsense of 1990s white supremacists, but it’s always been there. A major feature of early 1900s antisemitism and racism in the United States was that Jewish people were supporting Black civil rights struggles because they wanted to replace WASPs with Black people and then take over the world.
Click through for more information. Today’s FFT summarizes my thoughts on this pretty well (it ain’t just Mexicans).
Food For Thought
Glenn Kirschner – Donald Trump’s attack on wife of Special Counsel Jack Smith is a sign of Trump’s desperation
Ukrainian Canadian Congress – Holodomor Information Video 2022 (It was on Saturday the 26th. Better, I hope, late than never)
Ring of Fire – Matt Gaetz Goes On Thanksgiving Rampage Against Everyone And Everything
Real Subtitles? Wartime infomercial.
Tropical Bird Walks Into Family’s House
Beau – Let’s talk about Trump, Evangelicals, and numbers….
Yesterday, I finished knitting a sweater, finished knitting a collar extention onto a sweatshirt, started a new sweater – and took a fairly deep dive into Joyce Vance’s newsletter, which was in the category of “The Week Ahead” – she doesn’t do one of those every weekend, but she often does. For this coming eeek, she is anticipating the circus (not her term, my interpretatin only) than can be expected in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals pursuant to Jack Smith’s demolition of Judge Cannon. It’s long and nerdy (she says so herself), and I’ll not try to boil it down further here, but I do provide a link. I do hope she is 100% correct – and I feel there is a good chance of it. ALso, I did a few December cartoons – just enough to take me several days past my next visit to Virgil (this Sunday).
Cartoon – 28 Blackbeard loaded
Short Takes –
Democratic Underground (multigraincracker) – Her mother was also her uncle, DNA test.
Quote – The mother had XY chromosomes in her blood and saliva, but her hair and cheek cells had XX chromosomes. Parts of the daughter’s genome matched each kind of her mother’s mismatched DNA. The daughter had inherited some DNA from her mother which originally belonged to her mother’s fraternal twin brother, who was never born. That makes the mother a chimera, the result of an embryo that had absorbed and incorporated cells from a twin who had vanished before anyone knew he had existed.
Click through for article, and don’t neglest the comments, which include more links to other anomalies. We are constantly learning so much more about genetics – and all of it makes the arrogance of people who insist there are two sexes, period, more outrageous.
Mother Jones – Hundreds of New York Women Are About to Sue Alleged Rapists (and Enablers) Under a Revolutionary New Law
Quote – Now, Carroll and thousands of other sexual assault survivors in New York state are getting a new chance to seek legal accountability against people who harmed them years or decades ago. Under the Adult Survivors Act, New Yorkers who were sexually assaulted as adults but who have run out of time to seek accountability in court will have a one-year “lookback window” to sue their abusers, as well as institutions that were negligent in responding to the assault.
Click through for details. To me, in a kind of rarefied way, this is analogous to the Federal statute of limitations’ exception for availability. But here, its society’s contempt for and distrust of women which conctitutes the unavailability.
DNYUX (also the NY Times, which is paywalled) – At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking
Quote – Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s…. Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.
Click through for more – examples and analysis. This is what happens when people (I’m looking at you, SCOTUS) are allowed to conflate speech with something which isn’t speech at all.
Food For Thought
(Just till after the runoff)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
In the light of the Q-Club massacre, and since Colorado does have a red flag law (which appears to have been violated), I thought it was time for this article. I’ll just highlight (using color, bold, and italic, since I don’t have an actual “highlight” tool) a couple of parts which I think deserve particular attention, and, at the end, I’ll make my case to the Furies.
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Alex McCourt, Johns Hopkins University
The killing of five patrons in a Colorado LGBTQ bar on Nov. 19, 2022, is the latest mass shooting to garner headlines in the U.S.
Police have said they have yet to determine a motive. But one thing that has emerged is that the suspect had a history of violent plans, having allegedly threatened to attack his mother with a homemade bomb more than a year before the attack at Club Q.
It has led to questions over why that earlier alleged incident did not trigger Colorado’s “red flag” law – something that may have prevented him from acquiring the AR-15-style semi-automatic weapon that police say was used in the Club Q attack. The Conversation asked Alex McCourt, an expert on gun laws at Johns Hopkins University, to explain how red flag laws are supposed to work – and why they weren’t triggered in this case.
Red flag laws – also know as extreme risk protection orders – allow for judges to make a ruling that results in firearms being taken away temporarily from a person who is deemed to be at high risk of harming themselves or others. They also prevent that person from purchasing guns for a set period of time.
They are aimed at protecting against the actions of individuals who have made violent threats or may be going through some sort of crisis.
The way they work is that specific people can petition a court to issue an order when someone is deemed to be behaving dangerously or making violent threats.
The categories of individuals who can petition in this way vary from state to state. But all the states that have enacted such laws – 19 plus the District of Columbia – include law enforcement officers among those who can petition the court to have a red flag order imposed.
Household and family members are also commonly listed. And in Maryland, Hawaii and the District of Columbia, health care officials can petition the court should they be concerned over the behavior of a patient. In California, Hawaii and New York, teachers or school administrators are included in the list of people who can petition the court.
Typically, if the court finds there is sufficient evidence of risk of violence, a judge will issues an ex parte – or temporary – order. These cover a very short period until a hearing can take place. At that subsequent hearing the potential subject of the order can provide an argument that they aren’t dangerous.
If the court decides there is indeed a risk, it will deliver a longer-term order. In most cases it covers a period of up to a year. The subject of the gun ban may be able to petition for the order to be ended early, should they be able to prove, for example, that their moment of mental crisis is over or that they have sought sufficient treatment. The petitioner can also ask for the order to be renewed at the end of the year.
The first thing to note is that the laws are relatively new – most have come in over the past decade. So researchers are still evaluating the data. But studies have shown that they can be effective in preventing mass shooting events and possibly suicides.
Research from 2019 found that, among a group of cases in which guns were removed from individuals who made threats of mass shootings in California, none of the individuals went on to carry out mass shootings. A 2022 study evaluated extreme risk protection orders in six states. It found that all the states being observed were issuing orders on the basis of mass shooting threats – 20% of these cases involved threats toward schools and 15% toward intimate partners or family members.
Though these laws are relatively new, research analyzing the legislation suggests that they may help prevent suicide.
So there is enough evidence to say they can be used to prevent deaths. But these measures are so new, we need to know more about how well they are being implemented by states. So far, research suggests that public awareness of extreme risk protection orders is low and that efforts to educate the public and facilitate filing of petitions might help.
Connecticut and Indiana both had early versions of red flags laws, in place in 1999 and 2006 respectively, but the policy was really developed after the Sandy Hook shooting of 2012. Since that incident – in which 20 children and six adults were killed by a gunman – a further 17 states and Washington, D.C., have added extreme risk protection orders to their statutes. Most have come in since the Parkland school shooting of 2018.
One of the areas in which more research is needed is on implementation of red flag laws. There appears to be wide variation – both state by state, but also within states that have laws in place.
Spotty implementation might be the result of a combination of factors. As they are quite new, there is a knowledge gap – that is, would-be petitioners might not know that a red flag order is an option, or how to go about filing for an order.
But it is also true that there has been a fair amount of pushback from certain counties and sheriffs who have said that they won’t enforce these laws out of Second Amendment concerns. This appears to be the case more in rural areas. But that has not been systemically studied to date.
There has been some discussion among advocates about trying to pass federal legislation. But to date, the main actions taken at the federal level are to make it easier for individual states to adopt red flag laws. The Biden administration has pushed for their adoption, and the Justice Department has issued model legislation that states can use.
Meanwhile, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed in June 2022 allows for the distribution of funds to states for crisis intervention programs, including the rollout of extreme risk protection orders.
Colorado’s red flag law was enacted 2019. It allows for law enforcement and family or household members to file a petition to a court. If it is approved, a court can order that an individual’s guns be removed for up to one year.
A 2021 study of the first year of implementation of Colorado’s law found that in 85% of cases it was law enforcement that initiated proceedings, and in 15% of cases it was household or family members that petitioned.
There has been slower uptake in Colorado than in some other states. But there have been some questions over whether that is over the timing of the law – it was implemented just before COVID-19 pandemic began, so for a large chunk of the first year it has been in operation, people were under stay-at-home orders.
Nonetheless, the study found there were a significant number of sheriffs and counties that said they would not enforce the law. There is no real legal basis for them to do this; it is more of a symbolic or political stance. But it does have implications for red flag laws, as law enforcement officers may not have the training or inclination to pursue red flag orders.
There hasn’t been an awful lot of detail released on why a red flag order was not imposed on the Colorado shooter. Early reporting suggests that this appears to be a classic example of someone who made a threat, in this case threatening his mother with a homemade bomb – and as such would qualify for an order. But there is reportedly no public record indicating that law enforcement or any family member acted on that threat and petitioned the court.
Experts can only speculate about why this might be the case. But one point of note is that it occurred in a county where the sheriff has expressed opposition to Colorado’s law and has previously said that his officers will not petition for an order except under “exigent circumstances.”
Alex McCourt, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, of course our county Sheriff is an elected official – elected by the same people who have been electing Doug Lamebrain Lamborn to Congress for the last sixteen years and just re-elected him again. They are unlikely to vote Sheriff Bill Elder out, or to replace him with anyone who doesn’t have the same character flaw. Yes, the Colorado Oath of Office includes the phrase “I will support the constitution of the United States, the constitution of the state of Colorado, and the laws of the state of Colorado.” And, yes, there is a penalty for breaking that oath (since perjury is presumed.) But I would think charges would have to be brought by the District Attorney (of the Fourth Judicial District, which comprises El Paso and Teller Counties), and, although I cannot find what party he belongs to (I even tried Ballotpedia), I assume he is also a Republican, since it’s essentially the same territory as the Sheriff’s territory. Teller Country isn’t as red as El Paso, but it also doesn’t contain enough people to overrule El Paso’s redness. Maybe you ladies would help me write a letter to the Governor? I don’t know whether there is anything he can do, but I’ve met him, and I’m confident that he will at least be willing to listen.
The Furies and I will be back.
Glenn Kirschner – Kevin McCarthy’s latest legislative thuggery: tells DHS Secretary Mayorkas, “resign or be impeached”
Meidas Touch – Herschel Walker’s former coach shakes up Georgia Senate race with HUGE announcement
Farron Balanced – Republicans Fear Trump Has Taken Their Party Hostage
Armageddon Update – I Give You The Bird!
Cat Who Spent 18 Years As His Dad’s Only Child Gets A Human Brother
Beau – Let’s talk about the Klamath River running free….