What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.
"The official toll of the war is staggering — roughly one person killed for every 73 Palestinians in Gaza — though experts say it is likely an undercount.
Rubble around Al-Farouk Mosque after an airstrike in Rafah in southern Gaza last week.Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The death toll in Gaza passed a somber milestone on Thursday as the local health ministry reported that more than 30,000 people had been killed in the war since Oct. 7.
The number of deaths since Israel launched its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza had already surpassed the tolls of any previous Arab conflict with Israel when it rose above 20,000 in December. Many experts say the official toll is very likely an undercount, given the difficulty of accurately tallying deaths amid unrelenting fighting, communications disruptions, a collapsing medical system and people still believed to be under rubble.
Still, the reported figure is staggering — roughly one person killed for every 73 Palestinians in Gaza, whose population is about 2.2 million.
The figures provided by the Gazan health ministry do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Many international observers have said they believe that the ministry’s overall toll is reliable, while the proportion of Hamas-affiliated fighters among those killed remains unclear.
Anarticlepublished in November in the British medical journal The Lancet said that an analysis of the first weeks of mortality reports from the health ministry “suggested reasonable data quality” and that the deaths were “among Gazan population groups that are likely to be largely civilian.”
Israel has come under growing international pressure to stop its offensive, and even President Biden, its strongest ally, has expressed growing frustration with the rising death toll and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But Israeli leaders have insisted that they will continue fighting in order to eliminate Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel in which officials say at least 1,200 people were killed and 240 others taken hostage, setting off the war.
U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators are working to broker a cease-fire and the release of hostages, but the prospects of that remain murky.
On Wednesday, Hamas’s political leadersaid in a televised speechthat while the group was open to making a deal with Israel, it was also ready to continue fighting. He called on Palestinians to march to the Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem in March, raising the prospect of fresh clashes with Israeli security forces around a site holy to both Muslims and Jews.
In addition to bearing the risk of being killed in strikes or fighting, Palestinians are living with the growing specter of famine and disease.
The health ministry has said infants have died from dehydration and malnutrition in recent days. A physician who was in Gaza in late Januarytold CBS’s “60 Minutes”this week that people were dying “in a fully treatable situation” because of the lack of basic medical supplies.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said on Thursday in a social media postmarking the30,000 deaths that most of those killed in Gaza were women and children.
“This horrific violence and suffering must end,” he wrote. “Cease-fire.”
Middle East Crisis In Chaotic Gaza Scene, Many Are Killed and Wounded as Israelis Open Fire
At Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, after Israeli soldiers opened fire as a crowd of Gazans gathered near aid trucks.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah.
Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Smoke rising from the site of an Israeli air strike on the outskirts of the Lebanese village of Ramia, near the border with Israel.
Kawnat Haju/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Palestinian children waiting for food in Rafah.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Families of hostages held in Gaza marching from the site of the Nova music festival in Re'im, Israel, to Jerusalem.
Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Mourning next to a body at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah in central Gaza.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Walking on a street between the seafront and a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah.
Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, after Israeli soldiers opened fire as a crowd of Gazans gathered near aid trucks.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli forces opened fire on Thursday as a crowd gathered near aid trucks in Gaza City in a chaotic scene where dozens were killed and injured, according to the official Palestinian Authority news agency and an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The circumstances of the deadly incident were unclear, with starkly different accounts from Palestinian and Israeli officials.
The death toll in Gaza passed a somber milestone on Thursday as the local health ministry reported that more than 30,000 people had been killed in the war since Oct. 7.
The number of deaths since Israel launched its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza had already surpassed the tolls of any previous Arab conflict with Israel when it rose above 20,000 in December. Many experts say the official toll is very likely an undercount, given the difficulty of accurately tallying deaths amid unrelenting fighting, communications disruptions, a collapsing medical system and people still believed to be under rubble.
The top human rights official at the United Nations condemned Israel’s military offensive in Gaza in an especially forceful statement on Thursday and warned thatan assault on Rafahwould add a new level of horror to the war.
The terror attacks by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups on Oct. 7 were “appalling and entirely wrong,” said Volker Türk, the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights. But, he added, “so is the brutality of the Israeli response.”
The Israeli war cabinet has decided to relieve the far-right national security minister of responsibility for an important mosque in Jerusalem during the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan, according to an Israeli official, in an apparent attempt to defuse tensions around the holy site.
The minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, promoted a plan last week toimpose more restrictionson Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan, which begins in early March. The Aqsa compound is sacred both to Muslims and to Jews.
Little aid has been able to reach northern Gaza due to security risks and Israeli restrictions.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least a quarter of Gaza’s population is “one step away from famine,” a U.N. humanitarian aid official has warned, as aid groups say that people are so hungry they areresorting to eatingleaves, donkey feed and food scraps.
One in six children under 2 years old in northern Gaza, where the United Nations says it has not been able to deliver any aid since early this month because of security risks and Israeli restrictions, is suffering from acute malnutrition, the official, Ramesh Rajasingham, told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday."
Chief Justice John Roberts Is to Blame for the Supreme Court’s Extremism
Cases like this new one,FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, don’t get much attention because they seem esoteric and technical. But so many of the more infamous legacies of the Roberts Court — crushing workers, rescinding reproductive rights, shielding big business from accountability, restricting voting rights, eviscerating gun control, complicatingthe fight against climate — can be traced back to its campaign finance rulings, which equate liberty with corruption.
That Roberts doctrine has given oligarchs, corporations, and their front groups a First Amendment right to bankroll political campaigns and now — thanks to the Cruz case — directly funnel cash to politicians’ personal bank accounts. The return on such investments has been all the right-wing laws, obstructions, and judicial edicts that have spewed forth from Washington over the last decade.
Since Roberts was confirmed in 2005 with bipartisan support, corporate media has typically portrayed him as a thoughtful moderate, to the point where polls have shown a majority of Democrats like him. The media has continued veneratingRoberts as an earnest victim of the court’s hard-right turn rather than a perpetrator — even after he voted to uphold the extreme Mississippi law banning most abortions at fifteen weeks, including in cases of rape or incest.
Left out of this hagiography is the story of Roberts as the bag man behind the curtain — the mastermind engineering the entire superstructure undergirding the court’s extremism.
No matter the controversy of the day, you cannot really understand what’s going on in politics unless you first understand Roberts’s campaign that constructed an entire legal architecture of corruption — allowing moneyed interests to buy the presidency, Congress, and thecourts.
Roberts’s plot crescendoed with theCruz case, but that recent decision was part of a much larger twelve-year crusade with a singular objective: creating a government of, by, and for the rich.
“Does Not Mean That These Officials Are Corrupt”
Officially, the United States gets decent marks on anti-corruption indices in comparison to other countries. But that’s because while there is plenty of extralegal graft in the developing world, America made corruption legal by enshrining the right to buy lawmakers and legislation.
This is the real American exceptionalism — and it started with the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision equating money with speech. That ruling created the special class of “issue ads” that front groups still swamp the airwaves with today. One group operating in this space is the conservative dark money networkled by Leonard Leo, former president Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, that built the Supreme Court’s six to three conservative supermajority.
However, the normalization of corruption did not accelerate until the court was taken over by Roberts, who previously represented the US Chamber of Commerce — the organization that converts corporate money into government policy.
Under Roberts’s leadership, the court has issued four landmark rulings declaring that the purchase of “influence and access embody a central feature of democracy” (that’s adirect quote from the court).
It started with 2010’s Citizens United. That ruling officially prohibited limits on so-called “independent expenditures,” which not only triggered record amounts of cash flooding into elections, but also narrowed the legal concept of corruption.
Under the new precedent, illegal corruption is now only cash stuffed in an envelope and exchanged for explicit favors — but not most soft forms of purchased influence and access. Industries can use super PACs and “independent expenditures” to effectively bankroll the campaigns of compliant legislators — as long as the quid pro quo is not explicitly written down.
“That [donors] may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt,” the majority stated. “Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy. . . . Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.”
Four years later, conservative justices issued the McCutcheon ruling that struck down limits on aggregate amounts of cash that individual donors can funnel to candidates and political parties. Once again, the basis of the ruling was the insane idea that corruption is only explicit quid-pro-quo favors, rather than the perpetual purchase of access and influence.
“Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties, does not give rise to such quid pro quo corruption,” the majority ruled. “Nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner ‘influence over or access to’ elected officials or political parties.”
A year after that, Roberts’s court used theMcDonnellruling to legalize the very quid-pro-quo corruption it previously said was still prohibited. In that case, the court stipulated that yes, a nutritional supplement industry executive delivered “$175,000 in loans, gifts, and other benefits” to Virginia Republican governor Bob McDonnell in exchange for him setting up meetings with state officials to promote the company’s products. However, the court insisted that such a quid pro quo is legal, and then berated law enforcement officials for trying to uphold anti-corruption laws.
“Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act,” Roberts wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns. It is instead with the broader legal implications of the government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”
Court Declares Corruption “A Central Feature of Democracy”
That trio of rulings was a prelude to Roberts’s newFEC v. Ted Cruz for Senateruling — a piece of judicial performance art designed to let big donors funnel cash not just into politicians’ campaigns, but also into their personal bank accounts.
At issue was a twenty-year-old law that prohibited elected officials from using more than $250,000 of post-election campaign donations to repay personal loans they give their campaigns. That may seem arbitrary, but the point of the statute was straightforward: it prevented politicians from loaning their campaigns unlimited amounts of money at profitably high interest rates knowing that favor-seeking donors would pay the lucrative vig after the election — when the politician is positioned to deliver legislative favors.
Two decades ago, donors helped a Democratic lawmaker rake in more than $200,000 of interest on a personal loan that she made to her own campaign. Dissenting judges in the Cruz case documented situations in Ohio, Alaska, and Kentucky where donors helped top state officials recoup their personal campaign loans after their elections — and those donors were then rewarded with state contracts.
One amicus brieffrom a campaign finance watchdog group noted that even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called post-election fundraising to recoup loans an “unethical practice of shaking down special interests.”
Until now, the law was working as intended: astudy found that while self-lending politicians are generally more responsive to post-election donors’ legislative demands, once the $250,000 limit was created, that responsiveness decreased.
But then came the epic legal troll from Cruz, who engineered the case by purposely violating the $250,000 loan repayment limit in his 2018 Senate campaign. His cartoonishly corrupt goal: striking down the limit and in the process reaping himself a personal $545,000 windfall from past self-loans that his big donors could recoup for him.
And now the Texas senator’s bet has paid off: the Roberts Court last month ruled that access — and favor-seeking donors funneling post-election cash to lawmakers’ personal bank accounts via campaign loans is “the sort of ‘corruption,’ loosely conceived, that this Court has repeatedly explained is not legitimately regulated.”
The Roberts-written opinion then declared that campaign donors’ “influence and access embody a central feature of democracy — that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”
TheCitizens UnitednoneEra
So to review: In response to the passage of bipartisan campaign finance reforms in the early 2000s, the Roberts Court spent a dozen years dismantling those reforms and then making it legal to spend unlimited sums of money to buy public offices, give gifts to elected officials in exchange for favors, and directly funnel cash to politicians’ personal bank accounts as they write legislation.
At precisely the same time, legislators delivered tax cuts, subsidies, deregulation, bailouts, and other assorted favors to the donors writing the bribe checks — all while Supreme Court justices delivered ever-more extreme rulings to the delight of the dark money network that boughtthemtheir seats.
This system of legalized corruption is now almost perfected — but Roberts and his colleagues’ crusade almost certainly will not stop there. Of late, the American right and lower courts aresignaling a new attack on laws that merely require disclosure, insisting that transparency is unconstitutional “compelled speech.” If Roberts soon applies that argument to campaign finance, the buying and selling of democracy that he legalized could happen in complete anonymity.
In Five to Four’s recent podcast reviewing the Cruz case, one of the hosts noted that this is Roberts and his fellow extremists on the court screaming their ideology out loud, “literally saying, yeah, some corruption can be regulated, but light corruption, that’s free speech.”
And that, he argues, is why the campaign finance cases will define this judicial epoch. They have created the superstructure upon which all the other horrible laws and precedent are built — or, more precisely, bought.
“There’s so much awful that the court is doing right now [but] I really do think that the stuff that’s going to define this era looking back will be their campaign finance — and election-related decisions,” he said. “Just like the early 1900s, we call it the Lochner Era for one of the more egregious cases of the court striking down worker-friendly regulations. I think this is gonna be the Citizens United Era.”
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Trump’s Immunity Claim, Setting Arguments for April
"The former president’s trial on charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election will remain on hold while the justices consider the matter.
Former President Donald J. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court a ruling rejecting his claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
The justices scheduled arguments for the week of April 22 and said proceedings in the trial court would remain frozen while they considered the matter.
The court’s brief order said the court will decide this question: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”
The Supreme Court’s response to Mr. Trump’s bid for delay had taken on increasing urgency because its ultimate resolution would determine whether and how quickly Mr. Trump could go to trial. That, in turn, could affect his election prospects and, should he be re-elected, his ability to scuttle the prosecution.
In anemergency applicationasking the Supreme Court to intervene, Mr. Trump saida unanimous three-judge panelof the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had been wrong to rule that he may be criminally charged for his conduct as president. Total immunity for his official conduct, Mr. Trump’s application said, is required by the separation of powers, implicit in procedures for impeaching the president and needed to prevent partisan misuse of the criminal justice system.
“An absence of criminal immunity for official acts threatens the very ability of the president to function properly,” the filing said. “Any decision by the president on a politically controversial question would face the threat of indictment by the opposing party after a change in administrations.”
Mr. Trump, widely considered the Republican front-runner, added a practical concern.
“Conducting a monthslong criminal trial of President Trump at the height of election season will radically disrupt President Trump’s ability to campaign against President Biden — which appears to be the whole point of the special counsel’s persistent demands for expedition,” the application said. “The D.C. Circuit’s order thus threatens immediate irreparable injury to the First Amendment interests of President Trump and tens of millions of American voters, who are entitled to hear President Trump’s campaign message as they decide how to cast their ballots in November.”
Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump,took issuewith every element of his argument, citing his efforts to subvert democracy.
If Mr. Trump’s “radical claim were accepted,” Mr. Smith wrote, “it would upend understandings about presidential accountability that have prevailed throughout history while undermining democracy and the rule of law — particularly where, as here, a former president is alleged to have committed crimes to remain in office despite losing an election, thereby seeking to subvert constitutional procedures for transferring power and to disenfranchise millions of voters.”
Mr. Smith added that there was no reason to fear tit-for-tat prosecutions that would chill other presidents from taking decisive action.
“That dystopian vision runs contrary to the checks and balances built into our institutions and the framework of the Constitution,” Mr. Smith wrote.
Ina supporting briefurging the justices to deny Mr. Trump’s request for a stay, several former prominent officials who had served in Republican administrations said the court need not rule broadly, as the conduct Mr. Trump is accused of was so clearly outside of any immunity the Constitution might confer.
“Denying a stay would not preclude possible federal criminal immunity for a president’s official acts in some different, exceptional situation,” the brief said.
Mr. Smith echoed the point, citing the officials’ brief. “A sufficient basis for resolving this case would be that, whatever the rule in other contexts not presented here,” he wrote, “no immunity attaches to a president’s commission of federal crimes to subvert the electoral process.”
“President Biden endured a protest vote, Donald Trump fended off Nikki Haley again, and both may face challenges with their party coalitions as they start to look toward November.
A protest vote against President Biden was organized by local Arab American leaders in Michigan.Emily Elconin for The New York Times
A protest vote against President Biden was organized by local Arab American leaders in Michigan.Emily Elconin for The New York Times
Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald J. Trump won Michigan’s primary elections on Tuesday as the president and his predecessor hurtle toward a rematch in November.
But the results showed some of the fragility of the political coalitions they have constructed in a critical state for the fall. Losing any slice of support is perilous for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by about 150,000 votes, and Mr. Trump carried it in 2016 by about 11,000 votes.
The results of the primaries on Tuesday carried extra weight because Michigan was the first state that is a top general-election battleground to hold its primary in 2024.
Here are four takeaways from the results:
President Biden with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan speaking to United Auto Workers members.Pete Marovich for The New York Times
‘Uncommitted’ succeeded in grabbing Biden’s attention.
When the movement to persuade Democrats to vote “uncommitted” began three weeks ago, its public goal was clear: Pile enough pressure on Mr. Biden that he would call for an unconditional cease-fire in Gaza.
And yet the strength of the “uncommitted” effort surprised the president’s campaign, which until this week didn’t anticipate the strength of anti-Biden sentiment among Michigan Democrats.
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In the early hours of Wednesday, roughly 13 percent of primary voters had chosen “uncommitted” — a share that paled next to Mr. Biden’s 81 percent, but represented more than 75,000 people in Michigan who made the effort to lodge their disapproval of the president.
The movement is now likely to spread to other states, many of which have an option for voters to choose “uncommitted” or “no preference” in their primaries. Listen to Michigan, the group that kicked off the state’s protest vote, is holding an organizing call for supporters in Minnesota, which votes next week, and Washington State, which holds its primary on March 12.
“This is the only option we have to enact democracy in this moment,” said Asma Mohammed, a progressive activist who is among the leaders of a new group called Uncommitted Minnesota. “We are against a Trump presidency, and we also want Biden to be better. If that means pushing him to his limit, that is what it will take.”
The challenge for the Biden campaign will be slowing any perceived momentum after Michigan by those protesting his Gaza policy. As long as the war grinds on and the United States keeps sending aid to Israel, there is little Mr. Biden can do to assuage voters who are angry about the mounting Palestinian death toll.
The protest vote in presidential primaries
Percent of vote going to “uncommitted” or to minor candidates in party primaries where an incumbent president ran without major competition
5.8% minor candidates
Both front-runners have clear vulnerabilities.
Mr. Trump has long been the heavy favorite to become the Republican nominee. Mr. Biden left little doubt that he would run again for Democrats.
Yet tens of thousands of Michiganders in both parties voted against their standard-bearers on Tuesday, a stark rejection that suggests they could have problems stitching together a winning coalition in November. The saving grace for each man, as Karl Rove, the former top strategist for George W. Bush, vividly put it recently, is that “only one can lose.”
Part of the reason Michigan’s results appear more damaging to Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump is the matter of expectations.
Ms. Haley has been campaigning against Mr. Trump for months, and her share of the Republican electorate has gone down from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Michigan.
But Mr. Biden cruised through his first two primaries in South Carolina and Nevada before a loosely organized group of Arab American political operatives, with $200,000 and three weeks to spare, won enough support that their effort is likely to clinch delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
“If the White House is listening, if our congressional leaders are listening, if our state leaders are listening, we need a change of course or we risk the complete unraveling of American democracy come November,” said Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn.
Biden needs to keep an eye on college towns.
It was not surprising to see “uncommitted” beat Mr. Biden in Dearborn and Hamtramck, two of the Michigan cities with the highest concentrations of Arab Americans. With nearly all ballots counted, Dearborn gave 56 percent of its Democratic primary vote to “uncommitted.” In Hamtramck, “uncommitted” drew 61 percent of the city’s Democratic vote.
Perhaps more worrisome for Mr. Biden was his performance in Ann Arbor, a college town 30 miles to the west.
There, where most students and faculty members at the University of Michigan live, “uncommitted” earned 19 percent of the vote. In East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, “uncommitted” got 15 percent of the vote.
While no other battleground states have Arab American communities the size of Michigan’s, they all have college towns where young, progressive voters are angry about American support for Israel.
It is in those places — Madison, Wis.; Athens, Ga.; Chapel Hill and Durham, N.C.; Tucson, Ariz.; and State College, Pa., among others — where Mr. Biden faces a general-election threat if he does not attract overwhelming support and turnout among students in November.
Nikki Haley’s still in it, but she’s not going to win it.
Donald J. Trump won — again. Nikki Haley lost — again.
At one point in the nominating calendar, the Michigan primary had the potential to be a brief but notable way station between the four first states and Super Tuesday.
But the lopsided results offered more of the same, with Mr. Trump dominating everywhere in Michigan and Ms. Haley on track for her weakest showing since the race narrowed to two candidates. She marches on, with planned rallies and fund-raisers in seven states and Washington, D.C., before Super Tuesday on March 5.
The month of February was about momentum, and Mr. Trump has all of it. March is about delegates, and he has most of those, too.
But the race for delegates is about to quicken sharply. California alone on March 5 has more delegates at stake than all of the contests in January and February combined.
Ms. Haley’s campaign called her share of the vote — she was below 30 percent early Wednesday — “a flashing warning sign for Trump in November.” But it was a warning sign for her candidacy now.
Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Dearborn, Mich., and Alyce McFadden from New York.
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.More about Reid J. Epstein“
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