Will Gov. Kemp Sign Georgia GOP's 'Racist' Bill Targeting Local Prosecutors? Uh, Yeah, Probably.
Maintaining proud racist tradition of suppressing minority political power.
The Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly approved the creation of a "prosecuting attorneys oversight commission" this week. The commission would have the authority to review complaints against local prosecutors and issue punishments that could include removal from their elected office. The approval passed by a 92-77 vote, mostly along party lines, just like Georgia Republicans' earlier voter suppression legislation.
The next step in this obvious right-wing power grab is for newly re-elected Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to sign the bill into law.
So, we all know what's going on here: Republicans have gerrymandered themselves into power in the state legislature, but they resent that the more liberal residents of big cities elect officials who aren't right-wing hacks. This was a big issue during the COVID-19 pandemic when Kemp regularly fought local officials over sensible COVID-19 policies. We're not going to insult your intelligence by pointing out how Republicans used to go on about "local control." That was just their excuse to get their Jim Crow on without federal intervention.
PREVIOUSLY:
Georgia DA Fani Willis Did Not Come To Play With These Trifling Republicans
GOP Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp Wants To Ban Atlanta Mayor From Talking About COVID-19
Georgia Republicans are irritated that Athens-Clarke District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez said she wouldn't prioritize low-level marijuana possession charges, which is within her prosecutorial discretion. Republicans in general are annoyed that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis might hold Donald Trump accountable for his blatant coup attempt in the state.
The district attorney is an elected position, and Gonzalez and Willis clearly represent the interests of the people who elected them. Republicans from outside the jurisdiction, likely responding a complaint from an aggrieved minority, want to overrule the will of the people whenever they see fit. While that's on brand for them, it's still alarming.
Defending the legislation, Republican state Rep. Joseph Gullett from Dallas said, "We have grounds for removal and it’s very narrow. If there’s a complaint there must be a sworn affidavit detailing personal knowledge of the facts supporting the complaint. If there’s disciplinary action, that can be appealed to the Superior Court of the county where the district attorney or solicitor general served.”
It's unclear how receptive the Fulton County Superior Court would be to an appeal from DA Willis.
Here's some relevant Fulton County history for you. After the Civil War ended, white Georgians resented newly freed Black people's growing political power in the area and rained violence on them. The number of lynchings steadily increased in the late 19th Century, as white conservatives reimposed and maintained white racial dominance through outright domestic terror.
White terrorists lynched 595 Black people in Georgia from 1877 to 1950. At least 35 were from Fulton County, and according to the Georgia Lynching Project, 25 of those were killed in 1906 alone, during the Atlanta Race Riot. The number might have been considerably higher.
Historians have stated that the stage production of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (yes, that was the title) might've sparked the flame in the Atlanta riot. Police and military were on high alert in Savannah, where the play opened, but white mobs still rampaged through Black communities. D.W. Griffith would later adapt The Clansman as the infamously racist Birth of a Nation.
The violence impacted black residential and business development in Atlanta, and by 1908, the Georgia legislature effectively disenfranchised Black Georgians with voter suppression laws that excluded Black people from the political system.
This bill is less bloody but it's nonetheless part of the same theme. White conservatives can't abide Black political power and seek to neutralize it.
Last week, during an interview with Rachel Maddow, Michael Moore, former US attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, didn't mince words about the new law: "I think we ought to just call it what it is. It's racist."
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Trump Howls As Pecker Leaks All Over Grand Jury
These headlines really write themselves.
Dear God, the fate of the country is in the hands of a guy whose business model relied on paying a few thousand dollars for stories about celebrities, and then locking up those stories in a safe to use as leverage over the celebrities. And his name is literally a synonym for penis.
We're talking of course about David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and head of American Media Inc. You can read about the sordid history of Trump's Pecker Protector here, in case you don't remember every detail from 2018. Pecker was a key player in the conspiracy with the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign to buy up stories that might embarrass Trump during the 2016 election and make sure they never saw the light of day. He was given immunity by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and his testimony helped implicate "Individual 1" in Michael Cohen's guilty plea.
In 2016, after arranging to buy Stormy Daniels's story about bumping bits with Trump a decade earlier, Pecker pulled out of the deal, fearing that it might violate campaign finance laws. Instead, Cohen tapped his home equity line and paid Daniels the $130,000 himself. Flash forward five years, and Pecker is once again spilling his load (sorry, not sorry), this time before the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump for falsifying business records to hide the reimbursement to Cohen, made in a series of $35,000 checks totaling $420,000, to cover Cohen's tax liability as well as $50,000 he'd paid to a guy from Liberty University to rig an online poll.
As Rudy Giuliani famously admitted to Sean Hannity on air, "When I heard of Cohen’s retainer for $130,000, he was doing no work for the president. I said, 'Well, that’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael.'" And five minutes later, the law firm Greenberg Traurig decided it didn't want to work with Rudy any more. Go know!
And speaking of lawyers who have lost their damn minds, Joseph Tacopina spent the entire weekend hopping from television studio to television studio trying to convince someone — anyone — that Trump can't be prosecuted for violating campaign finance law because he used "personal funds" to reimburse Michael Cohen. As if the predicate crime here wasn't falsification of business records because Trump paid Cohen using Trump Organization funds and described them as a business expense.
Here's Tacos getting spanked by Al Sharpton on MSNBC.
"You have a lawyer who paid a woman 10 years after the alleged sex act, right before an election, and he was reimbursed by your client. How is that not a prima facia case for the grand jury?" demanded Sharpton.
Tacopina insisted again that it was "clearly not" because "this was paid with personal funds" to "prevent embarrassment to himself and his family."
"Even Michael Cohen said that under oath when he pled guilty," the lawyer insisted. Although he omitted to mention that Cohen admitted that the entire scheme was part of a conspiracy with Pecker and the campaign to protect Trump. FFS, the first person who Michael Cohen told that he'd completed the payment was Kellyanne Conway.
And speaking of Kellyanne ... guess who else testified to the grand jury in recent days?
CNN reports that the grand jury, which meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, but not always on the subject of Trump, heard from Pecker yesterday and is scheduled to convene again tomorrow. Because, although Trump and his minions seem very hot to discredit Cohen as a liar and a fraud, DA Alvin Bragg is clearly going to corroborate everything Cohen says with documents and other witnesses. Whether Pecker will have the juice to get the grand jury over the finish line has yet to be determined. Here's hoping we get a big indictment money shot later this week.
LOCK HIM UP.
[CNN]
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100 Year Old Lady At Florida School Board Better Patriot Than All Book Banners Put Together
Knows a thing or two about fascists.
Earlier this month, the school district in Martin County, Florida, purged at least 84 books from school libraries after complaints from the head of the local Moms for "Liberty" chapter under the state's school censorship law, HB 1467, passed last year. PEN America notes that most of the books were removed following challenges by a single objector, "who filed forms indicating that she did not actually read any of the books in question." No problem; in keeping with the law, a DeSanctified "media specialist" in the district reviewed the books, or at least the list, and the books were gone.
Among the familiar suspects like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved,the banned books also included 20 by a single author, Jodi Picoult, who writes novels for the young adult market. Picoult notes in an op-ed that the complaints — again, all from the one Moms for Censorship lady — inaccurately described all her books as "adult romance that should not be on school shelves." Picoult, who we suspect knows her books better than the mom who didn't read them, points out that most of the books that were targeted "do not even have a kiss in them.," but they do deal with social issues that make rightwingers sad, and they "encourage kids to think for themselves." Can't have that.
Picoult also notes that one of her books marked for culling was The Storyteller, a novel about the repercussions of the Holocaust.
It chronicles the growth of anti-Semitism and fascism in Nazi Germany. There was a strange irony that a parent wanted this particular book removed, because it felt a bit like history repeating itself.
Julie Marshall, the Mom for Purity who lodged the complaints, told the Washington Post by email, "At this point, we believe we have challenged the most obscene and age inappropriate books," but didn't specify what her issues with The Storyteller were. Apparently there's sex, including depictions of Nazi guards committing sexual assault, so maybe we wouldn't want kids thinking Nazis were rapists.
The removal of all those books meant that Tuesday night's Martin County school board meeting was packed, with about 200 people there. Many of the 40 who spoke at the meeting called for the books to be restored, although a few also worried about all the nasty sex in books available to high school readers, giving the very laziest local news stations an excuse to present one quote from each side and call it good coverage.
Marshall was there, in a Wonder Woman T-shirt, to explain that while she filed almost all the complaints, she works with many many concerned parents both locally and nationwide, and sadly she didn't actually say "There are dozens of us! Dozens!" But she did say
"If you guys want to continue making me out to be the sole parent in all of this and give me the power that I can have all these books removed and make me out to be Wonder Woman, so be it ... Persecute me for standing on morality, I really don't care."
We really do hope someone lets her know that Wonder Woman is a queer icon, that Lynda Carter thinks bigots suck, and that the character was created in the first place by William Moulton Marston, who lived very happily in a throuple and deliberately included a LOT of bondage references in the comic, what with that Lasso o' Truth and all. (He was also a lie-detector crank who always looked for a way to cash in on his dubious inventions, so there's that.) Marston included this illustration, by Harry G. Peter, of what a real Wonder Woman believes, in his article "Why 100,000 Americans Read Comics" in American Scholar (1943-44):
Image: Harvard College Library via NPR
Happily, among the many folks calling for freedom to read, there was a real wonder woman at the school board meeting, 100-year-old Grace Linn, who knows far too well why fascism has to be nipped in the bud whenever it arises. Her husband was killed in action fighting them in WW II, and by god she's not going to allow any book burners in her America, thank you very much.
Linn brought along a quilt she had made to honor books and ideas that the current round of fascists are trying to snuff out; in January, as America's censorship crusade was well under way, she had shared a photo of her quilt with MSNBC's Ali Velshi for his show's "Banned Book Club" feature.
The quilt includes censored titles like Beloved,Maus, Fahrenheit 451, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gender Queer, Two Boys Kissing, and more. Linn told Palm Beach TV station WPTV — one of the non-lazy ones! — "When I showed this to adult women, they'll say, 'Oh, no they didn't do that to The Color Purple.'"
Now, let's get out of her way and listen:
A few highlights (full transcript of Linn's remarks at AlterNet):
Good afternoon folks. I am Grace Lynn. I am a hundred years young. I'm here to protest our school district's book-banning policy. My husband Robert Nichol was killed in action in World War II, at a very young age, he was only 26, defending our democracy, Constitution, and freedoms.
One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned. They stopped the free press, banned and burned books. The freedom to read, which is protected by the First Amendment, is our essential right and duty of our democracy. Even so, it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups who think they hold the truth.
Linn noted she'd made the quilt last year in reply to the Right's mania for book banning, and urged her fellow citizens not to knuckle under to today's fascists, who seek power by trying to make us afraid of other Americans:
Banned books, and burning books, are the same. Both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control. My husband died as a father of freedom. I am a mother of liberty. Banned books need to be proudly displayed and protected from school boards like this. Thank you very much. Thank you.
And that's what we all need to be saying at every school and library board meeting in America, the end.
UPDATE: Well silly me, I didn't include anything about the school board's reactions to the two hours of public comment. According to the local paper, the board didn't take any action on the banned books at Tuesday's meeting, and no board members responded to the comments.
[PEN America / Daily Beast / WaPo / JTA / NPR / AlterNet / TC Palm]
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Gee, Wonder Why This Idaho Hospital Had To Quit Delivering Babies!
It is a mystery!
Sometimes it's just really easy to know how something is going to go.
Like how, if you are watching a Lifetime movie and a new person comes into the main character's life, whether as a nanny or a surrogate or a secretary or a new gal on the cheer squad, or the identical twin who was separated from them at birth, that person is going to try to take over the main character's life, steal her baby and her boyfriend/husband and in the course of doing so will murder her quirky best friend who senses something is amiss and probably at least one other rando who gets in her way, get in a big confrontation with the main character at the end and then either die or end up in a mental institution.
You know, like that?
Anyway, when states started banning abortion, anyone with a lick of sense immediately thought of the fact that there is a major doctor shortage all over the country — an ob-gyn shortage in particular — and this would probably make that a lot worse in these states (where things were already bad to begin with). And guess what? That's exactly what's happening.
An Idaho hospital is closing its labor and delivery unit, citing the fact that all of their doctors are leaving and they cannot get more because no ob-gyns want to move to Idaho, which has one of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the nation.
Via CBS:
An Idaho hospital will stop labor and delivery services, citing doctor shortages and the "political climate," the hospital announced Friday.
"Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving. Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult," Bonner General Health, located in the city of Sandpoint, said in a news release.
Pregnant women who utilized Bonner General, a 25-bed hospital, will now have to drive to hospitals or birthing centers in Coeur d'Alene or Spokane to give birth.
In 2022, doctors delivered 265 babies at Bonner General and admitted less than 10 pediatric patients, the hospital said.
That's ... not very good. But it's reasonable. Idaho is one of six states where doctors can be prosecuted for performing an abortion, and we can't exactly blame doctors for not wanting to be in a situation where they have to decide between treating a patient and breaking the law and ending up in prison.
Now, I am not wide-eyed and innocent enough to think that hospitals closing over stupid abortion laws is going to lead to any of these states changing their abortion laws. I mean, we live in a country where we've all pretty much decided that we are okay with it costing an absolute fortune to be pregnant and give birth, which is just not really heard of anywhere else in the known universe in the year 2023. These people aren't really going to care if there is nowhere to give birth. There are already not a lot of places to give birth, or even just go to the doctor in rural areas, and all they care about are other people's children god forbid going to eat some waffles and watch a man in a sequin gown lip sync to Kylie Minogue.
"What about all of those ladies who gave birth in stuck elevators and taxis on television sitcoms, huh? They seemed fine! Zack Morris delivered Mrs. Belding's baby, in an elevator, as a high school senior. What do we even need doctors for?" is what they would say, I imagine, if they said anything at all.
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