JustOneMinute

Not Yet Ready For The Weekend Open Thread

Away we go. Jonathan Turley is very interesting on the Supreme Court's recent display of collegiality:

In the latest decision, Borden v. United States, the lineup of justices was strikingly non-ideological. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for Justices Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, with a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas — three liberal justices and two conservatives agreeing to limit the meaning of a "violent felony" for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Last week, the decision in Van Buren v. United States was a majority of three liberals and three conservatives. In that case, the most senior justice was Breyer; he assigned it to his conservative colleague, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote for Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. Although he was on the other side in Van Buren, Justice Thomas joined his liberal colleagues in Borden.

These decisions follow a litany of unanimous decisions from the court, which seems to be sending a message in the timing of the release of their opinions: The justices do not rule on cases to send messages to Congress, but they do control what cases are accepted and when those decisions are released. It is hard not to view the last few weeks as a type of judicial “harrumph” to the continuing calls for court-packing. While we expect more ideological splits in a few upcoming cases, these cases reaffirm that they are not so rigid or “hopelessly divided,” as Democratic leaders and other critics have suggested. .

I suspect its not just Roberts who is worried about the court's current public perception as hopelessly partisan and divided.

Meanwhile, Back In Lafayette Park...

Its Narrative versus Reality at Lafayette Park. Or is it Narrative versus Narrative? ABC News on the Inspector General's report about the clearing of Layayette Park prior to Trump's controversial photo op last summer:

Police did not clear Lafayette Square so Trump could hold 'Bible' photo op: Watchdog

Trump claimed the inspector general's report "totally" exonerated him.

Well, OK-ish. The IG is a Trump-appointed holdover, so there's that. And regardless of when the clearing of the park was originally planned, I'm skeptical that the tempo wasn't affected by the surprise news of an impending Presidential visit. My emphasis on the word "planning" below:

U.S. Park Police did not clear Lafayette Park and the nearby area of protesters on June 1, 2020, so President Donald Trump could walk from the White House over to St. John’s Church, but learned of his interest in surveying the site hours after they already had begun planning to clear the area to put up new fencing, according to a new watchdog report.

And later in the story:

Interior Department Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, nominated by Trump, called the events of June 1 a "a particularly tumultuous event in a tumultuous time" and said their review looked at why U.S. Park Police decided to clear Lafayette Square when and in the manner they did, and whether the president's plans to come out of the White House influenced those decisions. The review ultimately found park police had been planning to clear the area for days to install anti-scale fencing and that the decisions on the ground were not changed because of the president or White House's plans.

"We did not find evidence that a potential presidential visit to the park or the St John's Church influenced the park police's decision making, or their deployment, you know, in their operation to clear out the park. So that's the big, the big finding of our report is, is the is the clear evidence of why they decided to do so and when they made the decision, and on the flip side, the lack of evidence related to the President's potential visit influencing that decision," he said on ABC News Live.

...

Citing interviews, radio dispatches, videos and other records from Park Police, the 38-page report echoes claims from senior Trump administration officials last year that the park wasn’t cleared for Trump’s controversial photo op.

One Park Police commander told the inspector general's office they were caught off guard about Trump's plans during a conversation with Attorney General Bill Barr, who asked, "Are these people still going to be here when POTUS [President of the United States] comes out?" according to the report.

"The USPP operations commander told us he had not known until then that the President would be coming out of the White House and into Lafayette Park. He said he replied to the Attorney General, 'Are you freaking kidding me?'" the report reads.

But it does not explore why so many officers used as much force as they did against peaceful protesters in the area that day -- or dig deeper into the actions of the Secret Service and other federal entities on the ground.

I'm surprised the White House would schedule a Presidential stroll without calling ahead. But that was the Park Police story and the IG didn't vex others to hear their version.

Greenblatt told ABC News that even though his office did not speak to Barr, the White House, or Secret Service for this review, it would have done so if the evidence indicated there was pressure from any of those sources that had an impact on Park Police decisions.

"We would have pursued evidence had it gone elsewhere. But we found that the U.S. Park Police officials on the ground, they owned the decision and the corroborating evidence supported that," he said on ABC News Live.

Well. Fire and brimstone from Glenn Greenwald, who dislikes the legacy media more than he dislikes Trump. Hot Air has more excerpts from the report.

 

Tax Returns Of The Rich And Famous

Thanks to a leak from (almost surely) a politically motivated IRS staffer, ProPublica has access to the tax returns of many of the wealthiest Americans.

Their breakthrough  insight: Bezos, Buffet, Gates et al are seeing huge, untaxed gains in the stocks they own. Hence their tax rates relative to 'economic' income are tiny. This is a stunning revelation to everyone except those who have spent more than five minutes studying the subject of wealth and taxes.

From their story:

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

...

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.

We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

It takes far too long but eventually they get to the obvious - if the problem is the tax code doesn't recognize unrealized capital gains, the solution would be to change the code so it does recognize unrealized gains as income. That is Sen. Ron Wyden's proposal. (Ages ago I was suggesting something similar.)

As to the little matter of IRS privacy and the law, well, whatever. I have no doubt the Biden DoJ will go hard after these leakers.

 

Big News Out There, Probably

Too many distractions.

A Heckuva Gun Violence Awareness Day

This headline is a bit of a shocker:

Federal Judge Overturns California’s 32-Year Assault Weapons Ban

Whoa, what? Don't get me started on the "logic" of an AWB. My basic position is that semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines are dangerous; making them black and adding a pistol grip and a bayonet mount does not make them significantly more dangerous. Consequently, the AWB is a brain-locked yet highly emotive debate centered on ignorance and fear and focused on cosmetics rather than substance. Fighting an epidemic of alcohol deaths (about 80,000 per year) by banning gin but not vodka would be about as sensible.

That said, the ignorant and fearful get votes, too, and the idea that California (or NY, Massachusetts, Illinois, or pick your favorite Blue state) can not regulate this aspect of public safety will cause a MAJOR political storm. If the Supreme Court restricts abortion and expands gun rights prior to November 2022, prepare for un-civil war.

But what is the likely timing? This is one judge - normally the liberal Ninth Circuit would rein him in. A solid clue on timing is this:

Judge Benitez was appointed as a district court judge in 2003 and confirmed by the Senate the following year.

In 2017, he blocked a new California law that would have banned magazines of more than 10 rounds. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld his ruling last year in a split decision, but the appeals court said in February that an 11-judge panel would rehear the case.

A 2017 ruling is still up in the air? I can see why the gun comntrollers want to keep this away from the Supreme Court but this is a strong delay game. Long time NCAA hoops fans are recalling the old "four corners" attack. Sorry, 'attack'>

Lower The Cone of Silence

The Vanity Fair piece describing the interest if some US officials in preserving a 'see-no-evil' probe of the Wuhan lab is a big deal. Its also a big deal for Fauci, whose emails confirm what we all knew - he was a supporter of gain of function research and wasn't eager to see the Wuhan lab put under a microscope.

This email caught my eye. Fauci is flagging for attention a troubling published paper:

More than a year prior, however, Fauci sent an email to NIH Principal Deputy Director Hugh Auchincloss on Feb. 1, 2020, with an attachment labeled “Baric, Shi et al - Nature medicine - SARS Gain of function.pdf” and the subject line, “IMPORTANT.” Fauci’s message had a tone of urgency, saying, “Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. I have a conference call at 7:45 AM with [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar. It likely will be over at 8:45 AM. Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done. Thanks, Tony.”

That is almost surely this paper that went on to become controversial. Baric and Shih are credited as authors, Baric is a leading GoF researcher in the US, and check the title:

"A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence"

Potential for human emergence! Yike! And why are they so sure? The abstract is high-level techno-babble, but the gist is clear: they sliced, diced and recombined viruses, produced live candidates, and found some to be infectious in test tubes and hapless little animals.

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations¹. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system², we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

Sort of like when I was a kid and I would test to see if something was flammable by holding a match near it. Not always the best technique if safety is a consideration.

 

Where's The Beef?!? And Pork!

Fortunately Biden is President, because if Trump was in charge and we had allegations that Russia is hacking our hot-dog production prior to the 4th of July, MLB and the NBA playoffs would be cancelled and the media would be 24/7 on "Where's the beef?".

Memorial Day, or, How Can I Remember The Post I Can't Forget?

It's Memorial Day, a day on which we honor our war dead and I hark back to a happier time - candidate Obama, observing the moment in 2008:

Obama's intro to his Memorial Day speech in New Mexico:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

They've fallen - but they've gotten back up!  Well, he was in New Mexico...

To quote a Hollywood great, we've all passed a lot of water since then.

Saturday!

Are you ready for a long weekend?!?

Punt.

Sure, blocking the 1/6 Commission will make the whole thing go away.

Oh, Brother - A Summer of Grand Jury Leaks?

It was too much to hope for a slow news summer:

Prosecutor in Trump criminal probe convenes grand jury to hear evidence, weigh potential charges

NEW YORK — Manhattan's district attorney has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development.

The panel was convened recently and will sit three days a week for six months. It is likely to hear several matters — not just the Trump case ­— during its term, which is longer than a traditional New York state grand-jury assignment, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Generally, special grand juries such as this are convened to participate in long-term matters rather than to hear evidence of crimes charged routinely.

The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance thinks he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump, by someone potentially close to him or by his company.

Team Trump surely engaged in all sorts of complicated transactions. Normally, one hires lawyers and accountants to advise and opine on these activities. At best, the transactions stay within the letter of the law; at worst, Team Trump can argue "No criminal intent" - they can say they hired lawyers to help them comply with the law, not break it.

Well. The process is the punishment, and they won't have legal opinions for everything.

Sunday Morning

Are you ready for some b-ball?

I've dusted off my legacy Dr J stuff and am all-Sixers. Trust The Process! And Big Ben.

Friday Afternoon

Probably something happening. I'm afraid to find out.

Standup Joe Biden

Biden did not bring his "A" material to the Coast Guard Academy commencement (or maybe he did.) When he didn't get the laughs he was looking for he decided to heckle the crowd:

“I can only assume that you will enjoy educating your family about how the Coast Guard is quote, ‘the hard nucleus around [which] the Navy forms in times of war,'” Biden said, to crickets, at the outdoor event in New London, Conn.

Biden then jeered his crowd: “You are a — you are a really dull class. I mean, come on, man, is the sun getting to you? I would think you would have an opportunity when I say that about the Navy to clap.”

Yes, he did mangle the Coast Guard quote by dropping the "which". Both Reagan and Cheney got it right, but Biden is in a different league.

As to his performance skills, Biden is improving! In 2016 when a joke fell flat Biden called the soldiers both "a dull bunch" and "stupid bastards". He's mellowing with age!