For six years, at the height of Southern leaders’ massive resistance to desegregation, Derrick Bell held one of the most harrowing jobs in the legal profession. From 1960 to 1966, as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Bell oversaw desegregation lawsuits in the South, trying to make real the integration promised by Brown v. Board of Education.

In the first decade after Brown, integration made little headway — by 1964, only 1 in 85 African American students in the South attended integrated schools. Often, Bell and his colleagues couldn’t even find a plaintiff willing to sue a segregated district, because Black families justifiably feared they’d be targeted by the Ku Klux Klan if their names appeared on a lawsuit. Black civil rights lawyers also risked their lives litigating cases. Once, while he was defending two criminal suspects in Tennessee, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was arrested on false charges and nearly lynched by a white mob.

Bell, who died in 2011, eventually left behind his career as a full-time civil rights lawyer. But the experience of watching the promise of equality beat down by violent white supremacists informed his work as a critical race scholar. “Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal,” he wrote in 1992, warning that “by constantly aiming for a status that is unobtainable in a perilously racist America, black Americans face frustration and despair.”

Bell understood something profound about the United States: The American political system is a rigged game. It was originally meant to advantage enslavers and today benefits anti-egalitarian actors with little interest in true racial equality.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democracy-in-america-is-a-rigged-game/ar-AAYumc0?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=2807f135dba74220bc5553ebc621947d

An interesting read, to say the least, especially for POC.

*snip*

The fact that someone inside the Court’s very small circle of trust apparently decided to leak a draft opinion is likely to be perceived by the justices, as SCOTUSBlog tweeted out Monday night, as “the gravest, most unforgivable sin.”

To this I say, “good.” If the Court does what Alito proposed in his draft opinion, and overrules Roe v. Wade, that decision will be the culmination of a decades-long effort by Republicans to capture the institution and use it, not just to undercut abortion rights but also to implement an unpopular agenda they cannot implement through the democratic process.

And the Court’s Republican majority hasn’t simply handed the Republican Party substantive policy victories. It is systematically dismantling voting rights protections that make it possible for every voter to have an equal voice, and for every political party to compete fairly for control of the United States government. Justice Alito, the author of the draft opinion overturning Roe, is also the author of two important decisions dismantling much of the Voting Rights Act.

This behavior, moreover, is consistent with the history of an institution that once blessed slavery and described Black people as “beings of an inferior order.” It is consistent with the Court’s history of union-busting, of supporting racial segregation, and of upholding concentration camps.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-case-against-the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states/ar-AAWTB5p?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=198d5138ca8a4000a67fdb2b5176e8fd

After reading about the other disgusting decisions the SC has made throughout history, I have lost any respect for the institution as a whole.

The turtle is on tv now, raging about how Alito's leak should be investigated. WTF? Hundreds of insurrectionists attack our capitol, destroy the building, smear s**t on the walls, try to hang a vice president and assault police officers, causing death and destruction, and not one word out of his beak about an investigation. Oh, but a SC justice gets outed for his sick opinion and damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead with an investigation?

Get. The. F**k. Outta. Here.

Hypocrite thy name is Mitch!!!

The Card a Republican House Can Play That Turns Us Into a House of Cards: Newsweek

We wrote a column early in 2020 describing how Donald Trump would attempt to steal the election by using Congress to overturn the legitimate Electoral College results. Unfortunately, the piece ended up being incredibly prescient over time, as we learned more details over the last several months.

A lot of media coverage in the last 18 months since the election have focused on both how former President Trump schemed to overturn the election results, and congressional efforts to create stronger federal voting protections. What the media has not yet surfaced is that because of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, if a Republican controlled House of Representatives in 2024 wants to overturn a legitimate Electoral College result, there is a path to their doing so that no contemplated fix to the Electoral Count Act is likely to prevent.

To understand how this could happen one needs to appreciate how a Republican controlled House under a Speaker Kevin McCarthy (or maybe Jim Jordan) full-throated Big Lie cheerleaders, could upend a legitimate Electoral College victory by the 2024 Democratic candidate. The law provides a path for overturning a legitimate Electoral College result even though doing so would be enormously undemocratic.

Under the existing presidential selection process, if a single House member and a single senator object to the certification of a state's Electoral College delegation, when a competing slate of electors has been transmitted to Congress in a timely manner, the House and Senate are to retreat to their respective chambers and vote on which slate of electors to certify or not. Regardless of whether the Senate is in Democratic or Republican hands, if the House and Senate disagree in their respective consideration of which slate ought to be recognized as the rightful slate of state electors, that disagreement regarding electors from a handful of swing states would likely result in no candidate being able to achieve an Electoral College vote count of at least 270 electors. Under the Constitution, the election would then fall to the House of Representatives to decide the presidency.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-card-a-republican-house-can-play-that-turns-us-into-a-house-of-cards-opinion/ar-AAWPuKA?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=1e4184023eca4b54a9630bf5d966096e

I hope this is BS!

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Among the scathing findings of an investigation launched after the police killing of George Floyd is that Minneapolis police used covert or bogus social media accounts to monitor Black individuals and groups despite having no clear public safety rationale for doing so.

The report released Wednesday by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights echoes numerous past revelations that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have — sometimes illegally — secretly surveilled prominent people and communities of color even though they weren't involved in any criminal activity.

Overall, the two-year investigation found that the Minneapolis Police Department engaged in a pattern of race discrimination for at least a decade, including stopping and arresting Black people at a higher rate than white people, more frequent use of force on people of color and a department culture that tolerated racist language.

*snip*

Officers used “covert, or fake” accounts to seek and gain access to the online profiles of Black individuals including an unnamed City Council member and a state elected official, the report said, as well as groups such as the Minneapolis NAACP and Urban League. The activity included friend requests, comments on posts, private messages and participation in discussions.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/report-calls-out-abuse-of-social-media-by-minneapolis-police/ar-AAWIdm1?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=64e9b84ac2c545d49b475f0b5de0c766

And they wonder why some people are calling for defunding the police. This is a terrible abuse of power.

Donald Trump's political circus and freak show is continuing its American tour. Everywhere it stops, Donald Trump unleashes a torrent of lies, hatred, ignorance, bigotry, racism, narcissism, authoritarianism, threats of violence and other antisocial and evil values.

Trump's political rallies resemble George Orwell's "six minutes of hate" from "1984," expanded to two hours or so.

The mainstream news media has made an obvious editorial decision to downplay or ignore Trump's political hate rallies and similar events. That may be an attempt to correct for the wall-to-wall coverage Trump received the first time he ran for president, but it won't save the American people or American democracy — or the "freedom of the press" — from the neofascist assault. Moreover, ignoring Trump's escalating threats at this point, given all we know, amounts to journalistic malpractice and betrayal of the public trust.

Many other Americans, to be sure, are also ignoring Trump's rallies. Most of those who are paying attention, it appears, are mostly doing so in order to mock Trump and his followers as ignorant or stupid. They are doing this rather than responding to the danger with an appropriate mixture of fear, caution and then effective planning for how best to defeat the threat. Such behavior is an example of what psychologists call "defensive contempt," a reaction born of deep existential fear.


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-latest-hate-rally-a-master-class-in-cult-mind-control/ar-AAWGNrx?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=fdf412a9015348da97011f24b24b47e9

Best description of TFG BS rally I've read to date. Salon dogs the hell out of him. LOL Kind of a scary ending though. Geez.

Tucker Carlson has accused Kevin McCarthy of being a "puppet of the Democratic Party" after leaked audio revealed the House Minority Leader asked if social media companies could suspend the accounts of some GOP lawmakers in the wake of the Capitol attack.

The Fox News host made the remarks about the top Republican in the House of Representatives while talking about Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter, and what that could mean for censorship on the platform.

Carlson then discusses the reports first made by The New York Times that McCarthy asked a group of leading Republicans if tech companies could suspend the social media profile of GOP lawmakers who supported Donald Trump's false claims the 2020 election was rigged after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During a monologue on Tuesday night, Carlson said that Democrats "favor censorship for political ends" but now some "Republican leaders support it too" in the wake of the revelations surrounding McCarthy.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tucker-carlson-calls-kevin-mccarthy-a-puppet-of-the-democratic-party/ar-AAWDQZU?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=baa0f8f360f74740b080961edef46485

Love it! Watching them turn on each other. Makes me wonder how long before the Shuckster turns on TFG.

By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.

After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said ​​Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”

“I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth,” Salazar answered. “The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies.”

“The truth about what?” Sessions asked.

“In this case, it’s the manipulation of votes,” Salazar said. “And the lies being told to a country.”

That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/building-the-big-lie-inside-the-creation-of-trump-s-stolen-election-myth/ar-AAWBzU6?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15&cvid=270238e659774f65a1d4e0db47261b9e

From ProPublica, this report debunks many of the claims of a stolen election by people like Salazar, Sydney Powell, and that my pillow idiot, among others, showing how their BS played out and remained unproven. A very interesting read.

The American Constitution is an outdated, malfunctioning piece of junk — and it's only getting worse.

When written, the Constitution made a morally hideous compromise with slavery that took a war and 750,000 lives to make right. And while its basic structure sort of worked for awhile in the 20th century, the Constitution is now falling prey to the same defects that has toppled every other similar governing document the world over.

The truth seems clear: America is going to have to overhaul its basic structure of government, or eventually it will fall to pieces.

The major problem with America's Constitution is that it creates a system in which elections generally do not produce functioning governments, and there is no mechanism to break the deadlock (like calling snap elections). Most of the time, control of the House, Senate, and presidency is split between the two parties in some way. Bipartisan compromises to keep government functioning used to be common, but are near-impossible anymore due to extreme party polarization. So as Michael Kinnucan points out, during divided government "there is de facto no legislative body."

https://theweek.com/articles/750816/americas-constitution-terrible-lets-throw-start-over

This article is from 2018, but it really surprised me with what’s happened since then. It promotes 5 things that should be changed: “To fix the problem, America should aim to make itself more like a proportional parliamentary democracy, by far the most successful and road-tested form of government.”

What do you think?

As CNN works to debunk misinformation about the war in Ukraine, some social media accounts are working to spread misinformation about CNN's own coverage of the war.

A series of phony screenshots -- screenshots supposedly depicting CNN's reporting but that are actually fabrications that aren't from CNN at all -- have spread widely on social media platforms over the past week.

One of these fakes, a screenshot of a nonexistent "CNN" report about actor Steven Seagal being spotted in Ukraine, was shared and then deleted by prominent podcaster Joe Rogan on Monday.

A second fake was posted by a hoax Twitter account that falsely claimed to be affiliated with CNN. That fake, of a nonexistent "CNN" report about an American being killed in Ukraine, was amplified on Monday by a Russian representative at the United Nations.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-phony-images-masquerading-as-cnn-coverage-go-viral-amid-war-in-ukraine/ar-AAUDJEA?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15