Category: Knowledge and News

You may have read about this or seen it somewhere. A woman was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote when she had been told that she could. She is black, and several white guys have received slaps on the wrist for actually casting fraudulent votes, so it’s a clear case of unequal justice, right? One major headline even characterized it as “Black Lives Matter activist jailed for six years for trying to register to vote after authorities told her she could.” Rachel Maddow presented the narrative, then pulled her usual trick of asking her expert guest if the story had gotten anything wrong or had focused anything improperly. The problem is that she was asking somebody she already knew to have the exact same take on the case. If she had asked me, I would have said, “Yes, Rachel, you pretty much got everything wrong. There is nothing wrong with what you said. The problem is what you left out.”

First of all, the woman had already gone before a judge, who had ruled that she was still on probation and did not have the right to vote. Unhappy with the legal ruling, she took a chance on getting a low-level civil servant to review her case and certify that her probation had expired. That worked. She then took that certification, which she knew to be legally incorrect by judicial ruling, and submitted it with her registration papers. I presume she did not tell the civil servant that a judge had already reviewed the case and ruled on it, but I don’t know that for a fact.

Second, she has a long record of similar disrespect for legal rulings. She didn’t like the ruling of a judge in 2014, so she impersonated a lawyer and a notary public and tried to file a judicial board complaint against the judge. She also threatened the judge with retaliation, and created a Facebook page to make the judge look like a racist. That last bit seems like it might be protected by the First Amendment, but there are accepted exceptions to that Amendment, so that would require a judicial ruling beyond my knowledge base. That aside, her other shenanigans led to several criminal convictions. Somehow she escaped additional jail time on those particular charges, even the act of threatening a judge. The sentence was so lenient that she was only given probation! (So much for that extra-harsh treatment of the poor woman of color.)

She also has a record of having filed civil suits which ended up with her being ordered to pay court and/or attorney’s costs because she failed to follow the court’s instructions, again demonstrating a disregard for the judicial process. (1, 2)

Third, she has a long, long history of this type of fraud and similar cons. She has 16 prior criminal convictions on her record, including tampering with or fabricating evidence, forgery, perjury and attempting to escape custody. Another of her cons was to swap tags at a department store in order to get a much lower price. The history shows that she is basically a career fraudster.

It is easy to understand the judicial pique. First of all, I’m guessing that if you are convicted of a felony while on probation, and have 16 prior criminal convictions, they are not going to be very lenient with you, while they might be with a first-time offender. Second, when a judge tells you that you are still on probation and you then go behind his or her back to get a civil servant to certify otherwise, that judge is not going to be happy with you, particularly if you have a long history of ignoring judicial instructions, or harassing and threatening other judges. It doesn’t seem to me that there is a racial component there. She happens to be a woman and she happens to be black, but she is a scofflaw, both now and in the past, and she got caught again. The case is about her behavior and her history, not about her skin tone. I’m not going to defend her six-year sentence. I don’t know the applicable laws, and how they apply to repeat offenders, or how they apply to people on probation for previous felonies, but on the surface that does sound like a ridiculously long sentence for what she did.

It may be correct that the black woman’s sentence seems too harsh while the white guys’ sentences seem too lenient, but it’s far more complicated than Maddow presented it, and the woman is absolutely not a sympathetic character. On balance, I think the real issue is not the woman, who is a life-long scofflaw. The real issue is those other four guys who got essentially no punishment for voter fraud. That does in fact sound like bullshit. Those were acts of knowing fraud, and one of them even alleged publicly that somebody else had used his late wife’s ballot, which became a cause célèbre for right-wing crackpots claiming evidence of voter fraud. It turned out there was fraud all right, and he is the one who committed it. He wanted to cast an extra Trump vote. That guy only got probation, which seems outrageous to me.

It’s not dead yet, but it’s about to go on the gurney when the “bring out your dead” guy arrives.

The Supremes have agreed to hear the discrimination suits against Harvard and UNC

“The advocates who first developed the Harvard and UNC lawsuits in 2014 aspired to an eventual battle at the Supreme Court, where affirmative action has been upheld only through fragile one-vote margins.”

Given the new roster on the court, I see no chance for affirmative action to survive. Those one-vote decisions belong to the past. Even Justice Roberts, who often sides with the liberals, has been an opponent of the practice. It’s not just the composition of the court that seems to doom affirmative action. There is also law and that pesky Constitution. I believe that affirmative action is good for society, but it’s difficult to find any legal basis for it.

Take note of these two points:

• “Harvard argued that it considers race in a flexible way that benefits all highly qualified candidates. Its lawyers told the trial court that the college could fill its freshman class entirely with applicants who had perfect test scores and grades, but that it wanted a different mix on campus, a broader range of talent and life experiences.”
• “The lower US courts that ruled for Harvard and the University of North Carolina in the dual-track cases, however, said the programs used race in a sufficiently limited way to fulfill compelling interests in diversity.”

You see what the Harvard defense and the lower court rulings have in common? They have absolutely no basis in law or the Constitution. They are based on social justice arguments rather than the actual pertinent law. What Harvard “wanted” is not the same as what Harvard must do under the law, and “compelling interests in diversity” is a social engineering argument, not a legal one.

On the other hand, the case against Harvard was brought under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits schools receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race. The UNC lawsuit similarly claims Title VI grounds, as well as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law, which covers state institutions. Those are valid legal arguments. Justice Roberts himself famously declared, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

I have mixed feelings about this matter. I believe in the benefits of affirmative action, and even some of America’s prominent conservative voices have agreed with me, but its legal basis has always been tenuous at best, and I believe that the current conservative Supreme Court is highly unlikely to uphold it. If you’re a betting man, the over/under is that six judges will vote against Harvard and UNC.

Here it is in VHD:

According to some reports, the explosion was so loud that it could be heard in Alaska!

Here is a satellite photo that shows the size of the initial cloud compared to the size of Australia (click to enlarge)

The Tonga Online website has some pics from surface level.

Terrorism: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”

Oh, those tricky “cc” and “ch” combinations. In the past week I have had to look up the pronunciation of four words that are mispronounced so often by allegedly intelligent commentators that I thought perhaps I had been pronouncing them incorrectly all these years:

machination
chicanery
accede
flaccid

My pronunciations were all correct. People just use words that they don’t know how to pronounce. Those ch’s are really pesky.

they are a “k” in machination
they are an “sh” in chicanery
they are a typical “ch” in chicken

As for the cc’s in flaccid and accede, for centuries they have been pronounced as “k”

(ækˈsiːd)
(ˈflæksɪd)

But many American dictionaries, in the non-fascist spirit of favoring description over prescription, are now listing “a SEED” and “FLAH-sid” as alternate pronunciations because languages are living, evolving entities. If everyone pronounces a word a certain way, it becomes correct by default. In a classic example of linguistic evolution, if you pronounce the word “mauve” in the traditional correct form, almost every American will either misunderstand you or think you’ve messed up! (It should rhyme with “grove.”)

Here are OED’s phonetic representations of those two words:

məʊv
grəʊv

Frankly, I have given up on this one. I deliberately pronounce it “mawv” now so Americans will know which word I am saying. I would pronounce it the traditional way if I were in Canada or the UK, but I’ve never had a need to use that word in those countries, and I don’t expect that I ever will. It just doesn’t come up that often in conversation. Maybe it could pop up in trivia competitions: “Name all of Tom Wolfe’s books.”

“Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is now appearing to reverse course on the probe and saying its findings are “something the public needs to know.””

Stone said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination “to every question” they asked him. Don’t they start by asking his name? How can that incriminate him?

(Now that I think about it, admitting “I am Roger Stone” is an admission that you are someone with seven felony convictions, so maybe he has a point.)