Pete Thamel
@PeteThamel
Source: San Diego State is expected to deliver a notice to the Mountain West today that it will not withdraw from the league, as the school previously stated it intended to do. San Diego State plans to move forward as part of the Mountain West.
4:08 PM · Jun 30, 2023
1.1M Views
Mazeltov The Artist. Unfortunately for us, he was a free agent and we got nothing for him. Reportedly, we offered him a bit more than $7M per.
During the Court crisis of the 1930's Chief Justice Hughes approached First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at a reception and told her quietly "The president has all the power he needs in the tax law." The Court had struck down early New Deal legislation because, it concluded, President Roosevelt had based the programs on the wrong enabling law. Chief Justice Roberts today signaled in bold that if the administration changed its enabling legislation--or, instead of canceling student loan debt it "waived" repayment under permissible guidelines--the purpose President Biden aimed to serve would be met. That is what PoJo announced today his administration will do.
Is this another instance of a bad case making bad law? I remember at the time there being concern that student loan forgiveness was unwise. Now, it is not the writ of any court to pass on the wisdom of a law. In the case of the Supreme Court they test the law only for constitutionality.
Before striking down the plan, the Supreme Court first said Missouri, one of the six states that challenged the lawfulness of the plan, had the right to sue, known as legal standing.
I would interpret that as the Court wanting to get to the merits, wanting to strike down this law as unwise, in other words.
Justice Elena Kagan authored the dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson and summarized from the bench. "In every respect, the court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our nation's governance," she wrote.
Standing is a threshold inquiry, as is jurisdiction. Courts, state or federal, that do not want to address the merits often use standing as a reason not to. This is an article by CBS, not a legal scholar's analysis, yet, it seems to me that the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts authored the majority opinion, was enough concerned with getting past the standing threshold that he spent time explaining it.
Yes:
The dissenting justices split from the majority regarding not only the legality of the relief plan, but also with its finding that the states had the right to sue. [That is standing.] In deciding the case at all, Kagan said the court overreached.
That finding allowed the court to consider whether the secretary of education had the power to forgive student loan debt under a law known as the HEROES Act.
The court, in a majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, said the law does not grant the secretary that authority.
"We hold today that the act allows the secretary to 'waive or modify' existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up," Roberts wrote.
Here is Chief Justice Roberts once again cutting the baby in half, not going as far as he could, not as far as his corrupt, reactionary brethren Thomas, Alito, and Kavenaugh would have wished.
Roberts ended his opinion by noting that the disagreement among the court's members should not be mistaken for disparagement. "It is important that the public not be misled either," he cautioned. "Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country."
The court invoked the so-called "major questions" doctrine in part of its ruling, a legal theory that holds there must be clear congressional authorization for an executive branch agency to decide an issue of "vast economic or political significance."
The "economic and political significance" of the loan forgiveness plan, Roberts wrote, "is staggering by any measure."
When the Supreme Court reaches for a vague, general doctrine, way up on the high shelves, they want to act. The "major questions doctrine"! Lol. This is a reactionary activist court that is going to legislate from the bench and answer doctrinal questions later.
Yes:
"The result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness," Kagan said.
The decision from the high court is a major defeat for Mr. Biden as he pursues reelection.
That's it: they don't want this elected president "making national policy."
"Today, we have concluded...that the words 'waive or modify' do not mean 'completely rewrite'; and that our precedent — old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,"
Folks, trust me on this please, the bolded language is right from the Hughes Court in the 1930's.
Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday invalidated President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, ruling that a 2003 federal law does not allow the program to wipe out nearly half-a-trillion dollars in debt.
The 6-3 decision by the court's conservative majority derails a major campaign pledge from the president, denying relief to roughly 40 million Americans who stood to have up to $20,000 in student debt wiped away under the plan.
In a statement, the president said...he will address the nation Friday afternoon and lay out "more detail on...the next steps my Administration will take."
Strong echoes of the 1930's when the Court struck down early New Deal legislation. Now, as then, the Court was seriously out of touch with popular opinion and gravely wounded itself, relenting only when President Roosevelt threatened his court-packing plan.
Dear Adela,
Your June 13 letter explicitly states that same is to “formally notice” the Mountain West Conference of SDSU’s intent to resign from said conference. In light of your subsequent contention that said June 13 letter did not “formally notice”, I would like to request an official copy of your IQ test result(s), whenever taken.
June 14:
June 15:
Dear Commissioner Nevarez,
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you hysterically on the phone today while I was in the ladies room with projectile diarrhea.
June 18:
Dear Adela,
Please accept the Mountain West Conference’s sympathies for your 24 hour/$34 million bug and our thanks for your second Notice of Resignation. We wish you only the best in your new conference whether that be the proposed Mexico-American Conference or wherever SDSU can find a home. Do be careful drinking the water.
Chief Justice Roberts, ever mindful of his body's new Not Normal, did not overrule Grutter v Bollinger in his opinion for the majority. He ignored it.
I want to profile this unusual song again. It has not received the attention that it should. The structure recalls classical influence, the William Tell Overture comes to mind. The dramatic tempo and intensity changes build up tension, tease release, elevate again and resolve in a crashing crescendo that has the audience hopping in a frisson of anticipation as the song builds. That in itself is unusual for a popular song but this piece starts at a high tempo, then recedes when the vocals start, builds, falls back, and then explodes. There are horns, keyboard, different stringed instruments--the banjo and guitars, including a bass guitar--unusual--but no drum play.
There is clear religious reference in the lyrics.
It is an intense love song of course and the rhythms are the rhythms of love-making.
It is a hymn sung in the Church of Joy--sex, fun, testosterone-fueled joy.
I say two things on this. First, that imo the Court didn't have to go the full 100 in holding that race cannot be a factor, and indeed there are some places, in the excerpts I have read, where they stopped short of going all the way. A student body's diversity, geographically, socioeconomically, and racially is a valid desideratum of elite higher educational institutions. Second, I say that bad cases make bad law and one of the institutions in this lawsuit was Harvard which had a particularly egregious affirmative action regimen that blatantly discriminated against Asian-American applicants. But the Court had a difficult time articulating its aim. Wrote Chief Justice Roberts for the majority:
“Both programs [North Carolina is the other] lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
So "sufficiently focused" programs can "warrant" use of race as a factor. Squishy.
...“nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”
What does that mean, that the "applicant" can "discuss" race? Can the institution "discuss back"? Can the institution make its acceptance decision based on the "applicant's discussion of race"? Uber-squishy.
The point, he said, was that applicants must be assessed individually. “In other words,” he wrote, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
When someone uses "in other words" it means that (s)he realizes that the first words used were not convincing. Now, let's not take this individual stuff too far! If a wealthy family of generations of alumni surrounds the applicant conferring on her a garland of gold the applicant need not be "treated" as an individual. Just, "in other words", "not on the basis of race."
These cases (I have a third thing to say) have always bothered my liberal heart and mind ever since they first came across my radar in the Bakke case in 1978. Then affirmative action programs were justified as remedial for African-Americans, to overcome centuries of racial discrimination in higher education...You do that in the 1970's by targeting a ratio of African-Americans for admission? What did Allan Bakke have to do with historic discrimination? The concept of retroactive make-up bothered me, as did the 1970's "penalty" on individual non-Black applicants for 1870's discrimination. The reasoning that in choosing him you are not not choosing another bothered me.
That’s all I have to say.
A restaurant next to a bakery,
Also I am reliably told that every single Miami "Heat" fan in Cambria County Pennsylvania opposes this fiendish overreach from Portlandia.
Sergei Surovikin, a senior Russian general known to have a good relationship with Prigozhin, has not been seen since recording a hostage-style video in the early hours of Saturday morning as the mutiny began, according to several people familiar with the matter.
I KNOW WHICH ONE THAT IS! It looked like Surovikin was in the company mess hall or something.
This was HUGE. Only the third state visit of PoJo's presidency, and India! The U.S. famously (infamously here) "tilted" toward Pakistan during the Nixon administration. I never understood that. India is the world's largest democracy and is the most populous country on earth. It has roots in Anglo-American law. And it has always been a bitter rival of China. They have warred. What did we ever get out of our relationship with Pakistan. Osama bin Laden fled to and was captured in Pakistan. But now...If this highest peak of American diplomacy bears fruit we have given the Chinese something to think about. Tremendous move by the president.
My first reaction — watching this drama unfold on CNN and then replayed over the past few days — was to wonder: Was this whole thing for real? I am not a conspiracy buff, but “Live and Let Die” had nothing on this Mutiny on the Moskva script...
...
President Biden, please come onstage and take a bow. It was the broad and sustained coalition Biden assembled to confront Putin in Ukraine that ripped the facade off Putin’s Potemkin village.
Right again, and he had to convince Volo the Magnificent that the Russians were coming.
I like how Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat in the United States, described it in Haaretz this week: Biden understood from the start that Putin “is the epicenter of an anti-American, antidemocratic, fascist constellation that needs to be defeated, not negotiated with.”
That is a BRILLIANT take by Alon Pinkas. Throw Trumpie in with his butt buddy Putin, too!
Putin has long ruled with two instruments: fear and money, covered with a cloak of nationalism.
Insert Trump for Putin and it works perfectly (Bob Woodward's book on Trumpie: "Fear".)
If I were Prigozhin or one of his allies, I’d still stay away from anyone walking along a Belarusian sidewalk with an umbrella when the sun is shining.
Great line. And great advice!
All that said, we should be worried as much by the prospect of Putin’s defeat as by any victory.
Absolutely NOT! I HATE when columnists play that game! Play that line of thinking out: So should we help Putin?
In the near term, though, if Putin is ousted, we could well end up with someone worse.
So what should we do, Friedman, help Putin? Vet his successors for him?
You could also get disorder or civil war and the crackup of Russia into warlord/oligarch fiefs. As much as I detest Putin, I detest disorder even more,...
Well Thomas L., Uncle Alf sure brought order to Germany in the '30's! Run that one back?
How would you feel if Prigozhin had been in the Kremlin this morning, commanding Russia’s nuclear arsenal?
Guys (and gal-guys) who play this game ALWAYS go for the most extreme, impossible alternative as a debating point.
This is not a defense of Putin. It is an expression of rage at what he did to his country, making it into a ticking time bomb spread across 11 time zones. Putin has taken the whole world hostage.
I'm as pro-rage as Thomas L. Rage is a family value. THOUGHT, RATIONAL thought is better when making decisions.
If he wins, the Russian people lose. But if he loses and his successor is disorder, the whole world loses.
Okay, so although "This is not a defense of Putin", it is a...preference? BULLSHIT.
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin led an armed rebellion against the Russian military — and walked free. Others who merely voiced criticism against the Kremlin weren’t so lucky.
On Tuesday, Russia’s main domestic security agency, the FSB, said it had dropped the criminal investigation into last week’s revolt, with no charges against Prigozhin or any of the other participants, even though about a dozen Russian troops were killed in clashes.
The Kremlin had promised not to prosecute Prigozhin after reaching an agreement with him that he would halt the uprising and retreat to neighboring Belarus. That came even though President Vladimir Putin vowed to punish those behind the rebellion.
That is what that tells me. You don't attempt to assassinate and then imprison Alexei Navalny and walk back your threat to punish Prigozhin. The U.S. has convicted over 800 people in its Jan. 6 coup d'etat and that coup's Prigozhin, Trump, is up next. Putin couldn't make good on his threat because he doesn't have the support and Prigozhin does.
The 6-3 majority dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory, which would have given state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over federal elections.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a legal theory that would have radically reshaped how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures largely unchecked power to set all sorts of rules for federal elections and to draw congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering.
The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing the majority opinion. …
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
This coalition, headed by Chief Justice Roberts, is the new normal in at least election jurisprudence. Earlier this term Roberts surprisingly joined the Court’s normals in rejecting an Alabama congressional map that effectively limited the state’s Blacks to one congressional district. Roberts styles himself the custodian of the Court’s public reputation and standing. He is stung by the disfavor into which the Court has fallen with unprecedented numbers of Americans. The Dobbs abortion decision last summer, and its leak, effected a paradigm shift in the Chief Justice’s thinking, and hence, on the Court’s opinions.
As the Wagner Group was staging its 24-hour mutiny against the Kremlin, the Israeli government held a situational assessment on its ramifications, concluding that it indicated a “profound Russian weakness,” according to a report Monday.
The report by Channel 13 news cited an internal document that was issued following a meeting in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Saturday as the Wagner rebellion was unfolding in Russia, though it was finalized after the rebellion was abruptly called off.
...
The Israeli document reportedly said in its first paragraph that the
Wagner rebellion had undermined President Vladimir Putin’s rule, and was
a symptom of a “profound Russian weakness” both on the war front and
internally.
When Big Stuff is happening I reflexively turn to them. But they were really behind Twitter this time. They had their...goddamned Kyiv reporter with "updates" from a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in which one or two were killed all throughout the crisis. Writ small. So microscopic it was meme-worthy. It honestly aggravated me and I closed out. Their story today: "What just happened?" I expect the New York Times to know the answer to that question, or find out, not pose it as a million idiot bloggers did.
…he left stunned Russians wondering how the leader of a paramilitary group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, could stage an armed mutiny on Saturday that threatened to reach Moscow…
This weekend, Russian stability was nowhere to be found, and neither was Mr. Putin, who after making a brief statement on Saturday morning vanished from sight…
Zach Lowe for ESPN canvassed Association execs for lessons learned from the "Heat's" unreal playoff run:
What if the Heat’s run was proof that in the era of load management, 3-point shot variance, and the play-in tournament, the regular season now mattered much less?
A sports league that plays 82 games just to winnow the title contenders from 30 to 16 and then has an 8-seed make it through three rounds all the way to the championship round, such a league, the NBA, loses credibility with fans who it asks to pay for those 82 meaning-diminished games. That is a real problem.
"But we don’t build over dead bodies in America.”, said the relative of two killed in the collapse of Champlain Towers South.
The emotional debate...is now dominating town meetings here in Surfside while serving as yet another test of how the nation recognizes grief and memorializes victims of tragedies.
From mass shooting scenes and the locations of deadly natural disasters, to newly discovered, centuries-old cemeteries, the question of what should come next has been vexing officials and developers for generations. Although some locations of mass death are ultimately preserved as memorials or historical markings, others have been rebuilt or repurposed as land values soar and communities seek ways to move beyond grief.
*Well, the ugly truth is that we do. It baffles me and I have researched how and if America builds on shadowed ground and I cannot identify a common thread. I first had my head literally turned one time in New York City. I was walking someplace and rounded the corner of a building. A plague at eye level caught my attention. "Site of Triangle Shirt-Waist Factory Fire". 146 girls and young women, died in 1911 when with the de rigeur locked doors and extremely flammable cloth lying about on the shop floors the victims were trapped on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors when the fire broke out. Those who escaped the building went onto a fire escape which promptly collapsed plunging them to their deaths on the street below. I was outraged to learn that those floors had long since been converted to administrative offices for New York University. As I recall, and my memory here may be faulty, I went up to one of the floors to look around. As, or perhaps more likely, I saw photos of the retrofitted office space. The Triangle had all of what I could think to be the indicia of preservation: It spurred the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, a political force in the city for the rest of the 20th century and beyond. But that seemingly sure-fire cocktail of factors pointing powerfully to preservation did not prevent gentrification and the erasure of the horror. I could not make sense of it.
There are many others: The Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago eight years earlier. A holiday matinee soon after reopening. 602 mostly women and children who had come to see Mr. Bluebird perished. A year later the theater reopened under a new name. I visited that site too. The impressive bronze plague affixed to the building soon after had been moved. "Where?," I asked. In a hallway in City Hall. I own one of the type of fire extinguishers, a Kilfyre, that they had but one on site that day as I recall and it was as completely ineffectual as a toy water pistol. You had to open the end of the Kilfyre and thrown the smothering contents on the fire. The fire started above head level and so they had to throw the contents up at the developing fire.
The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942. 492 burned to death on a Thanksgiving weekend celebration of a tremendous upset in college tackle football between Holy Cross and Boston College. There is a foot-burnished plaque in the concrete that was implanted years later. If you're not looking down you'd never see it.
There was the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate Kentucky just outside Cincinnati Ohio in 1977. The singer John Davidson was the headline act. An electrical fire started in a room that had had a wedding celebration moments before. There's a poignant photo of the melting wedding cake, from the heat in that room and it was soon to burst into conflagration, fumes and fire racing down the hallway to the main show room. 165 were incinerated or trapped at exits (a common cause of death in building fires) and crushed or asphyxiated. Personally, I like the way the Beverly Hills site has been preserved. But for nature gradually reclaiming the land the site is otherwise as it was when the fire was extinguished. No building has been erected on the site.
There are yet others, the Eastland disaster in 1915. 844 people, again mostly young women on an outing offered by their employer General Electric, on board drowned when the top heavy boat listed to one side, then the other and quietly capsized--still anchored at dock!--in 20 feet of water at its pier in the Chicago River. I've been there too; there's a plaque on the road over the ship's berth memorializing the unspeakable tragedy. I can see the difficulty in properly memorializing a water tragedy but the Eastland was retrofitted and saw action in World War I and I think World War II as a troop transport. I own a deck chair that had been on the Eastland when it rolled over.
There are others that perhaps I am forgetting but those for sure I researched and in three of the four, the Beverly Hills is the only exception, I have traveled to the sites, for whatever it was worth. Not much.
I thought and I wrote previously that every...goddamned town in the South has a monument to its local Civil War hero or heroes--who were not heroes, who fought for the perpetuation of slavery and that maybe we need heroes not "merely" victims in order to memorialize. There's a book, Shadowed Ground, on the general subject and the academic pigeon-holed the various tragedies into categories that seemed to me forced, formulaic, and ultimately unconvincing. It seems to me that when we Americans can't convince ourselves that heroism was involved, "only" victims, that we don't memorialize. "Honor every soldier" but forget innocent victims. It sounds profoundly fucked up to me.
I acknowledge that there seems to be a psychological block at work: Sheer tragedy, unspeakable tragedy, is beyond rationalization and when we cannot understand, the pain is too much for us and so we simply erase it and efface the site that keeps the memory that so pains us.
The town of Surfside does not own the Champlain Towers South site, it was owned by a private developer and has been sold to another, and that is Surfside's defense. But there is the tool of eminent domain. A governmental entity can seize land in the public interest. Surfside should have used eminent domain to seize the shadowed ground of Champlain Towers South and turned it into a beautiful, quiet, contemplative public space. It has only been two years but Surfside is moving on. A luxury condo for the ultra-wealthy will be build over this hallowed and shadowed ground and the memory and the dignity of the 98 victims lost in the collapse will be defaced, debased, and forgotten. It is cruel insult but indeed, we do build over dead bodies in America.
MFA Russia
@mfa_russia
Here's another history lesson for the West US-led / sponsored wars have a similar pattern - humiliating defeat, hasty retreat, abandoned allies. The result: wasted taxpayers' money & human lives lost
Bay of Pigs - 1961
Saigon - 1975
Kabul - 2021
Kiev - coming soon [Summer of 2022?]
Paul Golding
@GoldingBF
1) Wagner units on their way from Rostov to the Donbas region. [I thought they were going to Belarus?]
2) Putin has been utterly humiliated today. [Agree] A small military unit of 25k soldiers humiliated a vast military machine of over 1.5 million servicemen.
3) Genuinely shocked. [I as well. I ran out of popcorn and had to go out to get some real food. 😂]
#WagnerGroup
From War Monitor
3:38 PM · Jun 24, 2023
357K Views
Pepe Escobar
@RealPepeEscobar
Putin wins ON ALL COUNTS. [Oh my God, no he did NOT! He looks like a weak jackass!]
1) Making an absolute ass of Western MSM [mainstream media] again; [I feel that I was made an ass.]
2) Rallying people to end the war quicker; [Don't even know what that means.]
3) Amassing a list of traitors and 5th, 6th columnists;
4) And freedom to deploy CTO [counterterrorism operations] martial law powers.
3:45 PM · Jun 24, 2023 159.8K Views
He doesn't say that this was an inside job, i.e. that Putin and Prigozhin collaborated. I actually had that (among a zillion others) thought: The handshake between Prigozhin and the commander in Rostov after Wagner had seized the headquarters and the city; In one photo I saw Wagner's guys looked like they had gone to Starbucks in Rostov--they all had cardboard cups in their hands; the lack of any resistance to Wagner's road trip on the M4. A column that long (50 km I read) and on a major, paved highway is a sitting duck for strafing from air by fighters or drone attack (see Ukraine making mincemeat out of Russian columns on streets. I could believe that this Yevgeny's excellent adventure was cooked (except for a host of counters, e.g. for Putin's evident panic) but not even this guy alleges that. I still can't help feeling taken, that is how I feel, but not by Putin, who is not a "winner" here. How many world leaders consider Putin stronger today that 48 hours ago? Taken by Prigozhin, yes. I don't know what his intent was. Taken by the Russian security forces? Maybe. Why was there no fight back?
max seddon
@maxseddon
Kremlin spox Dmitry Peskov: –
1) charges dropped against Prigozhin,
2) Prigozhin will leave Russia for Belarus,
3) Wagner fighters who didn't take part in the uprising will sign contracts with the MOD,
4) Wagner fighters who did take part not charged.
No word on potential MOD leadership changes
3:46 PM · Jun 24, 2023
652K Views
