I've actually ordered a Trump joke book, sort of. It is Trump tweets edited and illustrated by Trevor Noah and gang. I might order a few more after our ordeal is over. They will be more fun than the current dull pain by then.
Mmm. On that subject, I rather enjoyed
Pennyfarthing's books for a bit of cathartic amusement.
Elsewhere...
NOAA Admits It Was Wrong to Back Sharpiegate
That took way too long. Better late than never, though.
To poke for a moment at current events in foreign affairs, looks like the balance of power
in Libya has tipped a bit again, away from the Russian backed warlord, unveiling the aftermath of what seems to be some pretty horrific massacres.
A bit more close to home...
Appeals court denies immunity to officers who shot a motionless black man 22 times.
Last week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied immunity to Martinsburg, WV police officers who shot a “secured” and “incapacitated” black man 22 times.
From the judicial opinion (which is well worth reading in its entirety).
In 2013, Wayne Jones, a black man experiencing homelessness, was stopped by law enforcement in Martinsburg, West Virginia for walking alongside, rather than on, the sidewalk. By the end of this encounter, Jones would be dead. Armed only with a knife tucked into his sleeve, he was tased four times, hit in the brachial plexus, kicked, and placed in a choke hold. In his final moments, he lay on the ground between a stone wall and a wall of five police officers, who collectively fired 22 bullets.
I don't think that that needs anything more said, really, beyond that the appeals court ruled that "qualified immunity," well...
To award qualified immunity at the summary judgment stage in this case would signal absolute immunity for fear-based use of deadly force, which we cannot accept. The district court’s grant of summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds is reversed, and the dismissal of that claim is hereby vacated.
Still, this is 7 years later and it would be unsurprising for this decision to be appealed. On the positive side, it has the potential for lowering the bar on qualified immunity to something less utterly absurd, though.
Elsewhere on the legal front...
Treasury Department concocted legal opinion obstructing oversight of COVID-19 bailout programs
Yeah, the Trump Administration still hates and actively blocks oversight, as they have since the start.
Onward to Georgia voting problems...
GA's New Computer Scanners Failed to Tally Unknown 1000s of Votes in Primary
Election Integrity advocate JEANNE DUFORT, was reportedly the first to notice that the digital computer scanners were simply failing -- inexplicably -- to count completely countable votes on ballots she reviewed while serving on a bi-partisan three-person review panel in her county. Dufort has served as a plaintiff in a number of successful legal complaints brought by the non-partisan Coalition for Good Governance, challenging the horrific computerized voting and tallying systems (both old and new) forced on all 159 counties in the state by its Republican Secretary of State.
After first spotting the apparently uncounted votes, she says on today's program, "we checked the audit trail. The computer said, 'unvoted.' But we're looking at a voter mark. No confusion that it's a vote." The same problem was subsequently discovered on a huge proportion of ballots reviewed in DeKalb, Clarke and Cherokee Counties. According to voting systems experts, the uncounted votes are likely to be found in every county in the state, since they were all forced to use the same new systems this year. (A system which, by the way, even the state of Texas refused to certify for use there, finding it to be "fragile and error prone.")
Despite rates of anywhere from 5 to 10% of ballots discovered in the initial four counties to have had valid untallied votes on them, DuFort says that while the votes on ballots they reviewed were added to the results, Morgan County's Board of Elections voted against an examination of the county's other 3,000 absentee ballots.
5-10% of validly cast ballots not counted. That's pretty horrific, even if there isn't intentional partisan skewing of the votes not counted (though it would be totally unsurprising if there is such).
