I am sure unless you have been asleep under a bridge, you are aware of the latest Supreme Court decision, decided by the christofascist MAGAt cabal. So I am not doing my lead story on just that decision because it is being so well covered. I want to cover an aspect of it that I have not heard a single commentator on television talk about, one that I think is a very important factor. As Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw published in the University of Michigan Law Review in 2006, “The primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women.”
Jennifer Gratz was one of the first to successfully argue against race in affirmative action. Credit: Andrew Burton / Getty
Editor’s note, June 29, 2023: The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended affirmative action in higher education in a pair of cases concerning admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Read our latest coverage here. The original story, on a separate 2016 case out of Texas, follows.
The University of Texas Austin was Abigail Fisher’s dream school. Fisher, from Sugar Land, Texas, a wealthy Houston suburb, earned a 3.59 GPA in high school and scored an 1180 on the SATs.
Not bad, but not enough for the highly selective UT Austin in fall 2008; Fisher’s dreams were dashed when she was denied admission.
In response, Fisher sued. Her argument? That applicants of color, whose racial backgrounds were included as a component of the university’s holistic review process, were less-qualified students and had displaced her.
Students graduating in the top 10 percent of any Texas high school are granted an automatic spot at UT Austin. […]
Once again Thom Hartmann has reached the same conclusions as myself, first recognizing the Great Schism Trend and then realizing what is going on based on the social outcome data. I don’t know Hartmann. He interviewed me once, but over and over we have developed similar evidence based views on the trends shaping American culture. I think, as I have written in SR, and as he does, as described here, that the Blue states are beginning to awaken. They are recognizing the depredations of climate change, and that they the Blue states, are underwriting the poor policies of the Red states in that as well as in many other things. Education for instance. Or healthcare.
Arkansas Governor and Republican MAGAt Sarah Huckabee Sanders waits to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address by President Joe Biden on February 7, 2023 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Credit: Al Drago-Pool / Getty
America is rapidly bifurcating — becoming two nations — and one of the main drivers of the process is a federal system that encourages Red states to mooch off Blue states, using essentially stolen tax money to reinvent the old Confederacy, “own the libs,” and wage “war on woke.”
Most Red states have become oligarchic white supremacist medieval-like fiefdoms with obscene levels of often multigenerational wealth at the top, extreme poverty at the bottom, and working people, women, and minorities kept in subordinate roles through explicit government and corporate policy.
In this, these Red states are following the once-classic European and later Southern US tradition of a patriarchal, hierarchical society run by male kings, nobles, plantation masters, and wealthy churchmen, with all the work done by serfs, slaves, women, or impoverished wage-slaves.
Frederick Douglass, who was born into Southern slavery,
Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff and Josh Katz, - The New York Times
Stephan:
Remote work is transforming the way our economy works, as this article describes. This is a very big deal, and I think this is just beginning. When we get to projected holograms, which is where we are headed, remote work will be the norm. In my view the empty office buildings these workers leave behind should be turned into housing for the homeless, the elderly, and poor families. The big visual takeaway when you travel around in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Is the number of homeless people living on the street. It is much more expensive for a city to have homeless people than to have people housed.
In prepandemic times, the few Americans who worked from home appeared relatively settled there.
They were less likely to move than other workers. And they probably had less reason to: If you were sitting in a rare job in 2018 that enabled regular work from home — and your life was adjusted to that good fortune — why move somewhere new?
The abrupt rise and shifting nature of remote work over the last few years has upended this pattern, according to an Upshot analysis of census migration data. During the pandemic, people who worked from home became significantly more likely to move — and more likely to do so than all other workers:
This rising mobility was driven by remote workers who sought new housing in their same metro areas, but also by a wave of remote workers decamping to other parts of the country. In the first two years of the pandemic, one in four workers who moved long-distance was working remotely in a new home — a previously unheard-of scale of remote migration.
Clarence Thomas’ entire life has been advanced based on his getting affirmative action. He did even speak English until he was 8 years old. Instead, he spoke a regional dialect descended from slaves. He became a Harvard lawyer because of racial affirmative action, what he and the MAGAt cabal just ended. He seems to me to be Black man who hates Black people.
The Supreme Court decision in Jones v. Hendrix will make it harder for prisoners to challenge their convictions in court. Credit: Giles Clarke / Getty
The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction.
One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Jones v. Hendrix, handed down Thursday, does not directly attack this foundational principle. Instead, it does so indirectly by prohibiting many prisoners from ever challenging their convictions in court.
The case centers on Marcus DeAngelo Jones, a federal prisoner who was convicted in 2000 of possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Nineteen […]
I do not agree with most of Liz Cheney’s political views and her father, whom I met several times when I was in government service, was a disaster. But I respect Liz Cheney. She is one of the last of what once constituted the Republican Party before it became the White Supremacy christofascist cult it has become today. And I definitely agree with her views on this new party/cult, and her concerns about the voters who elect these MAGAt cretins.
Former Republican Representative Liz Cheney
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) suggested Monday that the problem with American politics is that “we’re electing idiots.”
“Look, I think that the country right now faces hugely challenging and fundamentally important issues,” Cheney said at an event with the cultural and community center, 92nd Street Y, New York. “What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots.”
Cheney, who is a staunch opponent of former President Trump, offered the reflection in response to a question about whether she would run for president if polling showed that it would hurt Trump’s third White House run.
“I don’t look at it through the lens of, you know, is this what I should do or what I shouldn’t do,” the former congresswoman said. “I look at it through the lens of, how do we elect serious people? And I think electing serious people can’t be partisan.”
“Because of the situation that we’re in, where we have a major-party candidate who’s trying to unravel our democracy — and I don’t say that […]
