Author Archives: BrandieRitz

Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Alive and Well

by BrandieRitz Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Memories:

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that top aides to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about her use of a private email server as secretary of state, raising new political and legal complications for Clinton as she tries to maintain momentum for her campaign.

….The judge said that months of piecemeal revelations to date about Clinton and the State Department’s handling of the email controversy created “at least a ‘reasonable suspicion’ ” that public access to official government records under the federal Freedom of Information Act was undermined. “There has been a constant drip, drip, drip of declarations. When does it stop?” said Sullivan, a 1994 Bill Clinton appointee who has overseen several politically sensitive FOIA cases. “This case is about the public’s right to know,” he said.

This is all courtesy of Judicial Watch, the Scaife-funded outfit that brought us so much endless Clinton paranoia in the 90s. To this day, most people—including an awful lot of reporters who ought to know better—still don’t realize just how deliberate and manufactured the effort to destroy Bill Clinton was back then. Despite thousands of hours and millions of dollars of investigation, virtually none of the “scandals” turned out to be real. They were just an extended effort to throw mud at the wall and see if something stuck. Ironically, the only one that did stick had nothing to do with any of the mud. It was just an old-fashioned sex scandal.

And now we’re back where we started. Hillary obviously blew it when she set up her own email server, but once again, thousands of hours of investigation have turned up nothing. It was dumb, but there’s no scandal, no national security threat, and no cabal of silence. Hillary Clinton has been required to make her entire email record public, something that’s never happened before to a secretary of state, and still there’s nothing. She’s undergone hours of House questioning, and still nothing. But the mud keeps coming. Maybe Huma Abedin will finally provide the smoking gun! Maybe if we demand to see her personal emails! Maybe if we recover bits and pieces from the server! There just has to be something there.

There isn’t. Hillary didn’t order the assassination of Vince Foster and she didn’t set up a personal email account so she could conceal her orders to stand down the rescue effort in Benghazi. But thanks to the obsessive Clinton hatred of Judicial Watch and the assistance of credulous judges like Emmet Sullivan, the “drip drip drip” will keep on coming. We never learn.

Continued here:  

Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Alive and Well

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Is the Supreme Court About to Gut Another Civil Rights Law?

by BrandieRitz Posted on January 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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In June of 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, making it more difficult to enforce that landmark civil rights law. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about another 1960s law combating racial discrimination—and civil rights advocates fear the Court is poised to gut it as well.

The question before the court is whether the Fair Housing Act of 1968, intended to fight pervasive residential segregation, bans practices that unintentionally discriminate against minorities. For decades, the law has been used not only to fight intentional discrimination but any other practices that have a “disparate impact” on racial and other minority groups.

Under the FHA, it is illegal to “refuse to sell or rent… to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.” Civil rights advocates believe this language is broad enough to include disparate-impact claims, and the courts have historically agreed. In 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued guidelines also supporting this view.

But now, the case Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., represents the third time in as many years that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the issue of how broadly, or not, the Fair Housing Act rules can be applied. Less than four years ago, the court agreed to hear a case out of Minnesota on disparate-impact claims; the following year it agreed to take up a New Jersey case on the same issue. Both cases were resolved before oral arguments, in part because civil rights advocates were afraid of what the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts might decide.

“There’s no disagreement among the lower courts, it’s always been the law since the late ’60s that you could have disparate impact,” says Deepak Gupta, a Washington lawyer who filed an amicus brief on behalf of current and former members of Congress urging the court to uphold the broad interpretation of the housing law. The court’s taking up the issue repeatedly, Gupta says, signals that “at least some of the justices are very interested in changing the law in this area.”

Joe Rich, an attorney with The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, agrees that the latest case “is of concern, because there is an interest in something that seemed to be settled.” He is more upbeat about the possible outcome, however. “I think if they give it a fair look, and look at the law and the unanimity that surrounded it, there’s a decent chance they’ll uphold it.”

The Texas case involves a fair-housing advocacy group that alleged state officials were perpetuating racial segregation in the Dallas region by making federal low-income housing vouchers available primarily in minority neighborhoods. A district court agreed that state officials were violating the FHA—whether intentionally or not. Texas appealed, urging the courts to find that the law only applies to intentional discrimination. “The text of the Fair Housing Act unambiguously precludes the ‘disparate impact’ interpretation adopted by HUD and the court of appeals,” the brief from the state says. “There is no language anywhere in the Fair Housing Act’s anti-discrimination rules that refers to ‘effects’ or actions that ‘adversely affect’ others.”

The nation’s highest court often declines to take on cases unless lower courts have split on the issue, creating a problem for the top justices to resolve. But in the more than 40-year history of the FHA, every circuit court has agreed that disparate-impact claims are covered by the law. Based on the track record of the Roberts court, including how it handled the Voting Rights Act, the conservative justices are expected to side with Texas.

Liberals say their hopes rest with an unlikely figure: Justice Antonin Scalia. While Justice Anthony Kennedy is generally regarded as the key swing vote on the current court, Scalia has been a proponent of deferring to government agencies when the text of a law is ambiguous. In this case, the Department of Housing and Urban Development interprets the FHA as applying to unintentionally discriminatory practices. In order for Texas to win over Scalia, it may need to demonstrate that the text of the law is not just ambiguous but that it clearly excludes unintentionally discriminatory practices.

But if Texas prevails, Gupta fears the damage could go beyond the Fair Housing Act itself. In its ruling, the court might throw into question the constitutionality of disparate-impact claims more broadly, from bank lending practices to employment discrimination. Potentially “all of this is on the chopping block at the Supreme Court,” he says.

Link:

Is the Supreme Court About to Gut Another Civil Rights Law?

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One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

by BrandieRitz Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Rubble. That’s been the one constant for the Awajah family for as long as I’ve known them.

Four months ago, their home was demolished by the Israeli military—and it wasn’t the first time that Kamal, Wafaa, and their children had been through this. For the last six years, the family has found itself trapped in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction; their home either a tangle of shattered concrete and twisted rebar or about to become one.

I first met the Awajah family in August 2009, in the tent where they were living. I filmed them as they told me what had happened to them eight months earlier during the military invasion that Israel called Operation Cast Lead and said was a response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

Continue Reading »

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One Gaza Family’s Heartbreaking Story

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

by BrandieRitz Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at 538, Benjamin Morris asks “Just How Bad Were the Bad Boys?” The bad boys in question are the Detroit Pistons basketball team of the late 80s, who had a reputation for being unusually aggressive on the court. Did they deserve their reputation? To test this, Morris looks at how many technical fouls they racked up, a good measure of unsportsmanlike conduct. In fact, he takes a look at the total number of technical fouls for the entire league, and finds that the number rose steadily until 1995 and then started a long-term decline.

I promise this is just for fun, but I’ve overlaid another line against Morris’s chart. Not a perfect fit, granted, but not too far off, either. I’m sure a few of you can guess what it is, can’t you?

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

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