Novara
Novara's JournalMichael Cohen suggests the GOP took illegal donations from China -- and he has the evidence
Source: RawStory
On Thursday, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen announced he had uncovered a hard drive with 14 million files including "e-mails, voice recordings, images, and attachments from Mr. Cohen’s computers and phones," and is prepared to hand them over to House Democrats to stay out of federal prison.
But his subsequent memo to lawmakers, first reported by BuzzFeed News, contains a stunning allegation not just about Trump, but about the Republican Party as a whole.
According to the memo, by Cohen attorneys Lanny Davis, Michael Monico, and Carly Chocron, this trove of evidence indicates "possible federal campaign finance violations by the Republican National Committee, including possibly illegal conduiting of illegal substantial donations to the RNC by foreign nationals, including from China."
Cohen, who also served as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, was sentenced to three years in prison for bank fraud, tax evasion, and campaign finance violations related to his payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up her affair with the president.
He claims that he did this with the president's blessing, and has subsequently sought to cooperate with both House Democrats and federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York.
Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/michael-cohen-suggests-gop-took-illegal-donations-china-evidence/
Ask Congress to pass HR350: Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022
It authorizes domestic terrorism components within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to monitor, analyze, investigate, and prosecute domestic terrorism.
The domestic terrorism components of DHS, DOJ, and the FBI must jointly report on domestic terrorism, including white-supremacist-related incidents or attempted incidents.
DHS, DOJ, and the FBI must review the anti-terrorism training and resource programs of their agencies that are provided to federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies. Additionally, DOJ must make training on prosecuting domestic terrorism available to its prosecutors and to assistant U.S. attorneys.
It creates an interagency task force to analyze and combat white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies.
Finally, it directs the FBI to assign a special agent or hate crimes liaison to each field office to investigate hate crimes incidents with a nexus to domestic terrorism.
HR350
Here's how to contact your Senators.
Here's how to find your representative in the House.
I'd love to see this voted on. Get the republicans on the record voting it down. Great ads for the Dems for the midterms.
Prosecutors Pursue Inquiry Into Trump's Handling of Classified Material
Source: NYT
Federal prosecutors have begun a grand jury investigation into whether classified White House documents that ended up at former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida home were mishandled, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The intensifying inquiry suggests that the Justice Department is examining the role of Mr. Trump and other officials in his White House in their handling of sensitive materials during the final stages of his administration.
In recent days, the Justice Department has taken a series of steps showing that its investigation has progressed beyond the preliminary stages. Prosecutors issued a subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration to obtain the boxes of classified documents, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The authorities have also made interview requests to people who worked in the White House in the final days of Mr. Trump’s presidency, according to one of the people.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/us/politics/justice-department-trump-classified.html
Doing something! Oh yeah!
Oh, So Now Media Men Want to Talk About 'Roe'
But never let it be said that men missed an opportunity to shout over us. To center their own voices. To show off their savvy and political smarts and deep, vital knowledge of how things would poll. To quote one another as they dispassionately discussed the ramifications of allowing the government to force us to bear children.
From the moment Politico published Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade and allowing states to ban abortion without exception, America’s Media Men began talking and they haven’t stopped all week.
They’ve said that maybe this is good news, actually!
snip...........
They can’t even name the body parts they’re trying to pass laws to control, and when called on their ignorance they hide behind religious reasoning that has no place in matters of state.
Even when they’re attempting to convince us how much they care for us, they do so by objectifying us as sainted mothers, objects onto which they can project their fantasies of childbearing unimpeded by the infrastructure needed to nurture those children.
They turn us into lists of circumstances under which they find our lives worthy of consideration and ignore anything that doesn’t fit their narrative.
We are hypotheticals to be discussed secondarily to things like reverence to the Constitution or the comfort of the Supreme Court.
We are scary stories, to be used as cautionary tales for polling purposes, as motivations for this or that constituency and bulwarks of support for a party.
We are anything and everything but people who need the freedom to decide if, when, and how we will get medical care.
It may be beyond the realm of the possible for Republican politicians, enamored as they are equally of stupidity and fascism, to consider that, but our brothers in the press might want to consider taking a step back and letting their female colleagues speak for ourselves.
Instead of approvingly retweeting every savvier-than-thou take on what this means for the holiness of the mostly male Supreme Court or the mostly male U.S. Senate or the entirely male U.S. presidency, media bros should be amplifying the voices of the people whose lives are under attack today.
That the corporate press considers their views less legitimate, less urgent, less fundamental to the future of this country, is a large part of how we wound up here in the first place and we’re not going to get out of this without listening to them.
[link:https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/05/10/oh-so-now-media-men-want-to-talk-about-roe/|
I bet they'll also outlaw tubal ligations and hysterectomies, but...
... not vasectomies.
Does anyone still think we don't need the ERA?
The Limits of Privilege: The new abortion regime is going to affect everyone.
There are a lot of very good reasons to point out the structural inequities that indeed make restrictions on reproductive-health care racist and particularly punishing for the poor. Abortion bans, as Warren says, hurt “the most vulnerable among us,” a statement that is rooted in extremely correct racial and class analysis. It perfectly sums up the circumstances of the past 40 years, when the Hyde Amendment and state restrictions made abortion all but inaccessible to many poor, Black, brown, immigrant, and Indigenous communities while middle-class white people could feel assured about the umbrella protection of Roe.
snip..........
If these past years with COVID have taught us anything, it’s that if you tell middle-class white people that they will be fine, they will not give a rat’s ass about anyone else. And so this message, intended to engender empathy and provoke action and commitment, may instead have been an anesthetizing one. It may have permitted middle-class white people, with their significant political clout, to sleepwalk comfortably — as they have through all of Roe’s existence — into the waiting jaws of illegality.
More: https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/roe-v-wade-limits-of-privilege.html
Liars for a Lifetime
Liars for a LifetimeYes, there’s come to be an old song and dance that Supreme Court nominees perform—Senators ask direct questions about world-altering legal precedents like Roe v. Wade and the nominees deliver clever answers meant to convey their respect for that precedent without ever saying what they really think. That’s the performance that we’re all supposed to just gloss over or accept as the reality of “how it is.”
In 2006, Amy Coney Barrett signed her name to a published ad from an anti-abortion group that has urged “an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” Yet when questioned during her confirmation hearing last year, just before the 2020 election, she insisted, “I don’t have an agenda.” Earlier, when seeking a seat on the Court of Appeals, she claimed, “It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge's personal convictions whether they derive from faith or anywhere else.”
As for Brett Kavanaugh, when he wasn’t expressing his love for beer, shouting at US Senators or denying assault charges, he was asserting that Roe was “settled as a precedent” because it has been “reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years.” He got back-up from Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who committed to vote for him after a private meeting in which he told her that Roe is “settled law.”
And then there’s Neil Gorsuch, the first of the Trump nominees who was questioned about constitutional protections like abortion and marriage. “I have never expressed personal views as a judge on this subject,” he smugly insisted, “and that is because my personal views do not matter.” (Sen. Collins also was assured by Gorsuch in private about his principled commitment to precedent—and voted for him.)
So smooth. So self-assured. So comfortable lying about the truth of their convictions and their intentions once the opportunity arose.
Now we’re about to see the painful consequences of a world where liars lie and—despite the fact that 70 percent of Americans support abortion and reproductive rights—we all are expected to just take it. Of course, liars lie, what else would you expect? Aren’t we all just supposed to go along with the con artistry of the confirmation process, which after all is a job interview leading to a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land?
More: https://america.substack.com/p/liars-for-a-lifetime?s=r
RBG always said that the right to abortion should have been decided
...not on the right to privacy but on equal protection of women's rights.
snip..........
Both as an advocate for women’s rights before the Court and then as member of that Court, Justice Ginsberg consistently asserted that a woman’s right to seek an abortion was grounded in the wrong part of the Constitution. She always maintained that it would have been much better grounded, and therefore better guaranteed, as an equal protection right instead of as a privacy right.
snip..........
If the fate of Lochner taught anything, it taught that when the Court locates a right in a liberty interest stemming from substantive due process, it is building a house on theoretical sand. Yet, in 1965 the Court began construction of a new house upon the rubble of Lochner. In Griswold v. Connecticut, a privacy right was found for married couples to use contraceptives in their own homes as a liberty interest stemming from substantive due process. Griswold’s progeny ultimately led in 1973 to Roe, where the Court took this privacy right to encompass a woman’s decision to seek an abortion. Perhaps sensing this infirmity, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 1992 declined in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to use the word privacy in upholding this right, yet nevertheless replaced Roe’s strict scrutiny standard with a lower undue burden test on state actions limiting abortions.
Now, nearly 50 years after Roe, if five conservative justices decide in the Mississippi case to aim their arrow not at the edges of Casey, but to shoot over the heads of all the reproductive rights cases and strike at the heart of Griswold, the privacy right as a liberty interest will collapse just as the freedom to contract as a liberty interest collapsed. Roe will be as dead as Lochner and for the same reasons. Justice Ginsberg foresaw this. She argued that considering a woman’s right to seek an abortion as part and parcel of a woman’s right to gender equality, guaranteed by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, would anchor it in constitutional text in a way that Griswold and Roe do not.
Dissenting in Gonzales v. Carhart, where the Court upheld a federal abortion law in 2007, Justice Ginsberg noted, “[L]egal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus, to enjoy equal citizenship stature.” In other words, women cannot be fully equal, as the Constitution demands, if they lack control over their own bodies and therefore, over their own destinies. Not surprisingly, the Roe era Court should have been listening to RBG all along. How the Supreme Court handles the upcoming Mississippi case may bear this out. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s notion of “super precedent” (which she applies to Brown v. Board of Education but not Roe v. Wade) could be troubling. Justice Ginsberg’s fear for women, and for society, was that Lochner’s cautionary tale might become a post-Roe handmaid’s tale. However, if the Court takes the more cautious approach, it will leave Justice Ginsberg’s ghost to rest a bit longer.
This article is from September 2021.
If you're more concerned about the "leak" than about women,
You are doing it wrong.
Don't be distracted with the leak. They want us to take our eye off the ball.
This political SCOTUS desperately needs to be reformed.
DAMN RIGHT
My body, my choice. I don't give a fuck that I am too old for this to affect me, IT AFFECTS WOMEN, and that is not acceptable. And I am FULL of RAGE.
I am hoping that once the sheer, white-hot rage of a thousand white-hot burning suns dissipates a little, we can formulate a plan of action. Maybe we need another Women's March, maybe we need to fight like hell for all Democratic challengers to republican Senators in the midterms so we can get some goddamned laws passed. Maybe we need to pressure Manchin and Sinema to abolish the filibuster or THEY WILL BE REPLACED.
I don't know yet. I am seething and can't think straight.
And the next woman who says, "Oh well, it doesn't affect me" will receive a throat punch.
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