The Fort Dix five
I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t believe any of these FBI-provoked terror plots. This one, prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, was particularly egregious:
Tony, Shain and Eljvir spent the night wondering how they were going to get out of what they assumed would be gun charges.
The next morning, the brothers, along with Tatar and Shnewer, who had been seized in separate raids, were driven in a black-tinted police van past throngs of reporters and cameramen to the federal courthouse in Camden, New Jersey.
Inside, they were presented with a criminal complaint accusing them of conspiracy to murder U.S. military personnel. “I was confused at first, but for the most part I breathed easy when I saw that,” Shain says. “I figured they mixed us up with someone else and we’d be out of here as soon as we cleared things up.”
As Shain remembers, the boys were taken to a holding cell and instructed to read through the complaint in its entirety. Shain read aloud to the group. The complaint consisted almost entirely of Mohamad Shnewer’s private conversations with Mahmoud Omar. “After reading it we all turned to Shnewer,” Shain says. “Is this really true!? You went to a military base, you said this and that!? Who the hell is Confidential Witness #1?! Mahmoud Omar was an informant? Unbelievable! We were all pissed at Shnewer.”
It became clear to the brothers that Shnewer, in his conversations with Omar, had committed them to taking part in a “plot” to attack Fort Dix without their knowledge.
The five men were charged with conspiracy to attack military personnel, as well as with weapons offenses for the guns they had attempted to purchase from Mahmoud Omar.
At a press conference announcing the indictments, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie praised law enforcement for stopping an impending threat, painting a dark portrait of the alleged plotters. “Believe me, too,” he said. “These people were ready for martyrdom. They spoke about martyrdom extensively in the tapes. They said they were to do this in the service of Allah.”
Bashing Bernie
A friend sent me this video this morning, telling me she was informed by male progressive activists that it was definitely Hillary Clinton behind it. (Because vaginas?) Even though it’s connected to a PAC run by Martin O’Malley supporters.
Now, that isn’t how campaigns work, and I’ve been saying this for weeks. Hillary Clinton is WAY out in front; you don’t go after another popular candidate if you still have something to lose, and the only person who has anything to gain by trying to dirty up Sanders is Martin O’Malley.
The theory is that he is her attack dog and future VP — even though most people believe it will be Julian Castro. But that would be too inconvenient for the conspiracy theorists, so.
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
I’m having a bad week
How about you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJye229QbVs
Shades of gray
I was surprised to notice a few weeks ago that a lot of black people on Twitter really hate Bernie Sanders. Turns out they resent him leading the charge against trusting Obama with fast-track authority. This is a big problem, since black Democrats make up the bulk of our base:
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is climbing in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has drawn thousands of people to rallies for his presidential campaign recently in Denver and Minneapolis. But the shooting last week in Charleston, S.C., has highlighted a daunting obstacle he faces in the Democratic primary contest: Black voters have shown little interest in him.
Even his own campaign advisers acknowledge that Mr. Sanders is virtually unknown to many African-Americans, an enormously important Democratic constituency.
Though he led sit-ins as a civil rights activist in the 1960s, helped the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. pull off a surprising campaign victory in Vermont in 1988, and espouses liberal policy ideas broadly popular with many Democrats, Mr. Sanders has had little direct experience with black voters as a politician in a state that is 95 percent white. And they have been largely absent from his campaign events so far.
Mr. Sanders, 73, had planned to start introducing himself to larger numbers of African-Americans last Sunday at a large gathering in Charleston, but he quickly postponed the event after the church killings. The massacre also revived debate over a highly charged issue on which Mr. Sanders has a mixed record: gun control.
Justice
A little over a week ago, a 23-year-old construction worker in the Bronx named Jeff Rivera got in an argument with his wife, from whom he is separated. During the argument, he struck her door, pushing in the screen.
Rivera was arrested and brought to court, where he was charged with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, for pushing in the screen door. Though the sentence for being convicted of a misdemeanor offense like criminal mischief is hard to predict, the more immediate question for Rivera was whether or not he’d be jailed before trial.
Rivera had no reason to expect that he’d have to post bail to stay out of jail. Not only was the offense relatively minor, but he has no criminal history, is employed, and has a child and every reason in the world to show up for his trial. Judges are only supposed to set bail for two main reasons: if the defendant is a flight risk, or if he or she is a danger to the community.
“Bail is for guaranteeing that a person appears at trial. It’s not a punishment,” says Rivera’s lawyer, Alexandra Bonacarti of New York County Defender Services. “There’s absolutely no reason to set bail on someone like Jeff who has a job, a child, no criminal history, no history of missing a court date, and is not charged with a violent crime.”
But Rivera was unlucky. He went to court and stood before a judge who decided to set bail of $500 in his case.
Rivera didn’t have the money, which means he’d essentially committed two crimes, the second more serious than the first: he’d pushed in a screen door, and he didn’t have $500.
Continue reading “Justice”
Fair Housing Act claims
SCOTUS rules you don’t have to prove intentional discrimination in a housing claim, only the effect. That used to be the legal standard, but not so much lately with this majority-wingnut court. So this ruling is a pleasant surprise.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Thursday that housing policies and practices with discriminatory outcomes can be challenged under the Fair Housing Act, even if there was no intent to discriminate.
At issue in the case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, was the validity of a theory known as disparate impact, and specifically its application under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, passed just a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Though the FHA protects against many forms of discrimination, disparate impact is seen by fair housing advocates as a particularly vital tool for fighting racial inequality, as it permits lawsuits to be brought against policies that disproportionately affect people of color, even when no overt racial motive can be proven.
The case stemmed from a disparate impact claim filed by the ICP, a Dallas-area nonprofit that promotes racially and economically diverse communities. The group discovered that between 1995 and 2009 the TDHCA had been allocating almost all affordable-housing tax credits to developments in poorer minority neighborhoods, while denying credits to those in wealthier white neighborhoods. The ICP argued that this had the effect of preserving racial segregation by preventing low-income, largely minority residents from moving to white communities.
Continue reading “Fair Housing Act claims”
Obamacare subsidies upheld, 6-3
So we’re going to have more affordable insurance for the foreseeable future. Yay!
WASHINGTON — The latest and possibly the last serious effort to cripple Obamacare through the courts has just failed.
On Thursday, for the second time in three years, the Supreme Court rejected a major lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — thereby preserving the largest expansion in health coverage since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid half a century ago.
The stakes of the case, King v. Burwell, were enormous. Had the plaintiffs prevailed, millions of people who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for insurance would have lost financial assistance from the federal government. Without that money, most of them would have had to give up coverage altogether. But two of the court’s conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the court’s four liberals in rejecting the lawsuit in a 6-3 decision. Roberts delivered the opinion for the majority.
The decision is a major defeat for conservatives, who have been trying to wipe Obamacare off the books ever since its enactment in 2010. The sweeping reform law, a key component of President Barack Obama’s legacy, now appears to be secure at least through the 2016 elections. Its fate beyond that will depend on who becomes president next year — and whether Republicans in Congress are willing to keep fighting for repeal.
Your librul media
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Dean Baquet announced Alessandra Stanley is no longer TV critic (she’ll be covering “the richest of the rich”). Memo: pic.twitter.com/v8ChKaKHR7
— Kate Aurthur (@KateAurthur) June 24, 2015