It would be a perversion of justice of the highest order if we prosecuted hundreds of people for participating in violent insurrection, but let the mastermind & ring leader skate to a life of luxury & golf every day.

No ONE in America has been better at evading justice & no

Dear @SecDef :

First, as an African American Navy veteran who is the daughter of one of the first five Black Men to serve as officers on the USS Midway in the 50s, I cannot express how delighted & proud I am of you and yours ascension to the awesome responsibility & authority

of Secretary of the entire Department of Defense and its multiple subordinate entities. Congratulations, Sir. Yours will not be an easy task, but your reputation of being a smart, deeply ethical and formidable leader proceeds you, and will serve you well.

I write to raise very

specific concern I have regarding the radicalization and polarization of our troops by media outlets that have targeted them with propaganda and deception.

As I am sure you know, FoxNews, OANN and Newsmax have been selling white supremacy grievance as a business model for years

and their presence on Military bases, installation and deployed units is almost ubiquitous.

As the events of January 6, and the ongoing investigations that have ensued demonstrate, the poison of those

outlets is infecting and debilitating our troops.

It is killing off their discernment, causing them to encamp on absolute lies & fiction, tearing them apart from their fellow brothers & sisters in arms, and in too many cases, inciting people who swear to defend the

Something you may not know is that professional Black women are hyper focused on qualification.

We are told young that there will be no leg-up for us, and that we MUST excel academically.

We work hard, compete & get into college.

For many of us, our whole family is counting

on us. We often carry the burden of inter-generational progress, where our success validates the expectations and sacrifice of those before us.

We are always aware that squandering the opportunity for an education would be disrespectful to those who never got that chance.

Then, if we get into graduate school, we see very few others like us, and feel instantly under scrutiny.

There is no hiding or blending in. All your professors are zeroed in on you, trying to ascertain if you can compete. When you produce the goods, they are delighted,

but the delight is often also telegraphing to us that the talent was not expected.

When we ascend into corporate environments, we are again closely scrutinized, not just for competence, but for “fit.”

Our bosses will test us again and again to make sure the “angry black

woman” doesn’t come out.

The onus is always on us to make those around us comfortable, never the other way around.

Once we put our colleagues at ease, things are fine.... until we start getting close to the power echelon.

Then things get dicey.

Since the day Sarah Palin called white conservatives “Real Americans,” I have been vociferously warning people about the danger of allowing that mindset to flourish & ossify.

What happened yesterday was the tantrum of people who believe they are the “real” Americans because they

are white, and that their will should always prevail for that very same reason.

The correlative to that is that all other Americans are “fake”
or “fraudulent,” and that our will is of no consequence.

This mindset in the right is what lead to everything, including Wednesday’s

sedition-fest.

It is this mindset that justifies voter suppression, gerrymandering, unequal policing and justice standards, ignoring Congressional acts from a Dem majority, and insisting that votes from black communities be thrown out.

At base, it’s white supremacist having a

meltdown hissy fit because they cannot accept that they aren’t the majority, and likely never will be again.

Their only gambit at power is to destroy the very concept of majority rule, and to enshrine control by the racist minority.

They worship Trump because he was the first

politician who made clear he would do whatever it takes to make that shift occur, mostly out of selfishness and personal greed, not zealous philosophical accord, but the result was the same.

They love Trump because he is their flavor of both ruthless and immoral.

We MUST

It is VITAL that you understand we got here because we allowed Fox News, Newsmax, Alex Jones, Brietbart and MANY MANY others to create a siege mentality in the right.

One of the most disturbing aspects of a siege mindset is a willingness to reflexively believe ANY claim against

the perceived enemy that echoes or aligns with the established belief. Put simply, the right wing talk sphere trained its listeners to be willing to believe ANYTHING about “libs,” without the least requirement for there to be evidence to support it. It obliterated reasoning as

For 25 years, the GOP has had almost exclusive control of the FL legislature & admin.

It fashioned every law it could to advantage Republicans, gerrymandered at a bionic level & stymied popular efforts to increase voter participation such as restoration of felon voting rights.

During that same time, the FL GOP poured MILLIONS into turning the state party into a sophisticated, permanent, well-funded voter contact machine.

This gave GOP candidates two massive advantages: 1) they didn’t have to spend on selling the GOP position, 2) all of

in-state messaging got backed up by the RNC, and most importantly, the constant drum beat of Fox News.

There is no biological way to overstate the advantage that Fox News gives to Republicans in red states. MSNBC is NOT the opposite of Fox News.

MSNBC does not structure its programming around whipping up white grievance and fear. Whereas Fox News is the propaganda arm of the RNC, MSNBC is the left leaning version of CNN, not the DNC.

So when I say that Fox News is a huge advantage for the GOP, I know of what I speak.

In FL, Dem candidates spend a inordinate amount of time debunking Fox News lies, even to died in the wool Dems.

Because GOP candidates at every level do not have to spend on messaging, and so not have to spend on attacking Dem policy, they spend almost exclusively on 2 things:

1/

The SNP versus the Law

The SNP is in trouble. They know it and we know it. It’s almost certain that Nicola Sturgeon will need to resign for lying to Holyrood

This explains the frantic calls for another referendum

Brexit is done and the sky didn’t fall in

2/

This removes their number one Bête Noire. A Disastrous hard Brexit

They were banking on that happening. There will be, and are, difficulties with the new trading arrangements but these will play out over years and will be sorted one way or another

3/

The Law

As it stands, the SNP cannot call another referendum without the permission of the UK Parliament

Some people dispute this, including many in the SNP

So. What’s the alternative?

The could call a non binding non legal referendum but what’s the point

Unionist will

4/

boycott it and non SNP councils will refuse to participate

Although that’s their latest plan, it’s a non starter

In the absence of a S30 order their only recourse is to test the competence to hold another referendum in the Supreme Court

This is fraught with dangers

5/

They have to balance the possibility of getting a positive SC judgement against getting a negative judgement

I’ll start with the negative judgement first

Were the Scot Gov to go to the SC they would risk not one but two massively disastrous and fatal outcomes

In a final address, @JusticeATR Makan Delrahim says some of the changes recommended by House Judiciary are "quite sensible." DOJ needs more funding for antitrust, and he backs higher filing fees for mergers.

He has six recommendations: 1) Create bright line rules and alter burden of proof for mergers.

“Courts need additional guidance in these cases.” In cases where a company has more than 50 percent market share, burden should be on merging parties for any transaction in that market, he says

DOJ would still have to prove the market definition and the market share of the dominant firm.

Permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal in the Bell v Tavistock case has been refused. 10 grounds of appeal were advanced. None succeeded, including an attempt at an Article 14 (discrimination) point which had not been suggested previously by the Defendant.

Here is a copy of the Order refusing the Defendant’s application for permission to appeal.

An application for permission to appeal will now to be made TO the Court of Appeal itself.



That appeal will only be allowed where the court below (the High Court) was wrong or the decision unjust because of some procedural irregularity. The High Court has already said no. Will the CoA?

In other words - permission has been refused by the High Court to appeal up to the Court of Appeal.

The Court of Appeal now gets to decide ITSELF if it will hear the appeal. That we won’t know the outcome of for a few months.

Be sure to note you WILL hear about it.

Tonight we have dissents from both Sotomayor and Breyer in the last instance of the Supreme Court waving the matador's cape for Trump's machinery of death without so much as a word of reasoned justification

Trump's DOJ has moved with unseemly haste in order to preempt credible legal challenges, and the Court has happily gone along

"This is not justice"

The Supreme Court did not meet the standard required to grant cert before a judgment by the lower court

The actual reason for the extraordinary haste is that the people have chosen a president who opposes the death penalty, and the 6 bloodthirsty Republican-nominated justices want the executions to happen. But this is not a *legal* reason.