#slate
Trump Should Be Very Nervous About This Part of Kamala Harris’ DNC Speech
She could have mentioned that she has since met with the Ukrainian president, one on one, a half-dozen times. She could have also mentioned her crucial meetings with Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., around the time that he was moving back into America’s orbit and away from China’s—and her leading role in coordinating renewed diplomacy between the Philippines and Japan. She could have mentioned that, when U.S.-French relations were on the verge of rupturing after Biden sold Australia a nuclear-powered submarine, preempting a sub deal that Australia had signed with Paris, Harris proposed a face-to-face meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, made the trip, and smoothed over the tensions.
More important than her 17 foreign trips to 21 countries or her meetings with more than 150 leaders (many of which were pro forma), she could also have mentioned that, as vice president, she has attended almost every National Security Council meeting and almost all of the president’s intelligence briefings (Biden typically received at least five a week)—not just listening in, but often, according to several officials I interviewed, taking part, asking crucial questions and suggesting policy plans.
“It Was the Most Violent Thing I’ve Ever Seen”
And then he was scheduled for execution by lethal injection in 2022, and the lethal injection failed. It adds these layers of complication to his story.
He compared that botched execution to being under a sewing machine.
Because they were looking for a vein with a needle
They were looking for a vein and just consistently being poked and cut. Kenny’s story represents all of the things that are wrong with not just the death penalty but the criminal justice system in Alabama. Everybody called this execution an experiment, but in a lot of ways, the criminal justice system down there itself is an experiment. And it’s no mistake that Kenny embarrassed the state by surviving, and he was the first person executed by nitrogen hypoxia. They were going to figure out a way to kill him no matter what.
[I]t looks like someone, like you said, has a bag over their head, and they’re suffocating to death. But an even better comparison is it looks like someone puts their hands around your neck and chokes you out with their bare hands, because that’s what the resistance looks like. I’ve said that it looked like a fish out of water, just on a dock, suffocating to death. But now I’m beginning to think it’s even more violent than that. It feels like it’s someone putting their hands around someone’s neck and choking them out. That’s how he moved, as if someone was physically killing him with their bare hands.
[Y]ou can’t be a part of that and walk out clean. The greatest evil of the death penalty is that it makes us all murderers.
#Slate #Jurisdiction #Justice #DeathPenalty
#Literature #1920s #Dreiser
Here’s the Thing About that “New” Supreme Court Ethics Code
[T]he new/old rules are not precisely binding on the justices. That’s because the old rules, like the new ones, lack any sort of enforcement mechanism. So if the old rules were advisory principles, to which the old justices could look for guidance in deciding whether or not to adhere to them, so too the new rules, which are binding, will mainly serve as guidance to which the justices may newly look for guidance.
[I]t is not the justices who have misunderstood the various sources, canons, common law provisions, etc. […] The confusion, in reading the old rules, was evidently ours and ours alone. In order to dispel a public misunderstanding of the old rules—and why some members of the court declined to abide by them—the court is repromulgating virtually the same rules, which they themselves will enforce, but this time assuring us that we got it wrong the first time when we didn’t think they alone should enforce them. Trust the same justices who declined to follow the old rules to better adhere to the new ones, they urge. This time they really will unilaterally and in secret make better choices. Then and only then will your confusion desist.
Surely yet to come will be the graphic novel version of the old rules, the Netflix version, and the collectors’ edition action figurines, each of which will affirm that the rules—once confusing to the public but always crystal clear to the justices—are now crystal clear to everyone.
No Wonder Donald Trump Loves Mike Johnson
There is also the fact that Johnson is a zealous homophobe and anti-abortion crusader who has said that physicians who offer abortion care should be “imprisoned at hard labor” and who has co-sponsored federal legislation that would ban abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat. In 2015 Johnson told Irin Carmon of New York magazine, “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control.” He has, in speeches, suggested that school shootings are the natural consequence of teaching evolution. He co-sponsored legislation introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that would make it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to people under 18 years of age. The list goes on and on.
Boris Johnson’s Terrible, Good Column
The thing is, Johnson can write. He’s no worse, and in fact often better at the sentence level, than most other people who have columns in broadsheet newspapers in this country. The reason he shouldn’t have a column isn’t because he can’t write: It’s because he can. And he has always used those powers for evil. His way with words and ability to crack a joke is what led him to television. It’s arguably the skill that allowed him to weasel all the way into Number 10, with disastrous consequences.
This is a man who has proved, time and again, that he can’t be trusted, that his primary drive is for personal glory and self-preservation. So the fact that he once again has a platform through which he can try to convince the public that he is a good bloke is regrettable.
