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houseofbrat · 4 months ago

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Democratic party civil war, you say?

Matt Stoller on Kamala Harris:

There's a fair critique here of Kamala Harris skeptics. What basis do we have for skepticism? I'll lay out my views, which are largely policy-centered. I realize no one cares about what kind of leader Harris will be as President, but if there's one lesson we should take away from this moment, it's that we as a party should try to think more than five minutes ahead instead of panicking ourselves into a rushed decision. I started paying attention to Harris when she became California AG in 2010, because some friends worked to get her elected. It was in the middle of the financial crisis, Bush's and Obama's handling of which eventually led to the emergence of Trump. While AG, she had her most important test as an executive presiding over a big political economy decision - what to do about foreclosure crisis in California. Her position was unusual, because California is a big state, so the AG office is, staffed with many lawyers who can do complex finance analysis. Most states don't. There are only a few places - Texas, NY, Illinois, California - who have the capacity to truly wage independent litigation against powerful institutions like big banks. Harris pledged to do so. [Harris] pledged take on the banks and get something genuinely meaningful for homeowners for a mass legal violation called foreclosure fraud that put them on the hook for trillions. The details aren't important but if you want to know them read Dave Dayen's Chain of Title. It's something I was involved in. After two years where it became obvious Obama was on the wrong side, it was exciting to see a Democrat finally stand up.

Only, she didn't. Harris signed a sham settlement with a big fake fine number, that mostly let the banks do whatever they want, and I believe even get a tax deduction for the fines they did pay. As a result, a lot of people lost their homes who shouldn't have. That was a tragedy. But then when she was running for President in 2020, she *bragged* about what she did. It was rancid, similar to the worst of Obama. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/13/kamala-harris-mortage-crisis… Later it came out that her staff had given her memos on how she should have prosecuted (later) Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin's bank OneWest, but just chose not to. It's not hard to see that, had Obama (and Harris) actually put the bad guys away, a whole slew of Trump officials would have been in jail rather than in the cabinet. https://politico.com/news/2019/10/22/kamala-harris-attorney-general-california-housing-053716…

I didn't pay as much attention to her big tech work or her time in the Senate, but she's quite close to a whole slew of people in the industry, top execs at Google and Facebook like Sheryl Sandberg. While AG, which was when these companies cemented their dominance in America, Harris's office saw Facebook as "a good actor." She took no actions against big firms as AG, opposed important legislation, and even started a privacy-related "monthly working group that included representatives from Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Kleiner Perkins. In internal documents, Harris' office referred to the companies as "partners."' Again, standard operating Obamacrat stuff. https://businessinsider.com/kamala-harris-silicon-valley-big-tech-facebook-attorney-general-2021-11…… Harris's circle of friends and family are biglaw Obamacrats. Her brother-in-law Tony West was a high-level Obama official, and now GC of Uber. Her niece worked at Uber, Slack, and FB, and her husband was a biglaw partner at Venable and DLA Piper. His clients included Walmart, Merck, and an arms dealer, and there were ethics questions since DLA Piper had a long list of foreign clients. https://nytimes.com/2020/08/17/us/elections/doug-emhoff-kamala-harriss-husband-takes-a-leave-of-absence-from-his-law-firm.html…

How does this differ from Biden's track record? As a Senator, you could read him like Harris. Biden did whatever the credit card companies wanted, was in on bad trade deals, and was VP when Obama mishandled the financial crisis. But Biden always had a tinge of populism. In the 1990s, he went after Stephen Breyer in his hearing for the Supreme Court, calling him an elitist for instance. He was a foreign policy guy, and never liked the Silicon Valley and Wall Street execs, he always thought they looked down on him. As President, he delegated and ignored most domestic policy, and so some of it went to populists and union people while most of it went to neoliberals like Janet Yellen and Neera Tanden. The net result of Biden's choices is a mix - good policy in a few areas, and rank incompetence across a host of them, as well as fantastically incompetent messaging. What was Harris's role? As VP, she's largely been absent from most policy areas I follow, so I don't know how to think about her views on Biden's economic agenda. She's certainly never talked about or been involved in anything competition or regulatory minded that I can see. She does not seem to be a player in any of the big money areas. That said, Harris has proven incapable of managing important tasks like addressing or even explaining the obviously dysfunctional asylum process at the border, so it's hard to know how much she *can* actually do in terms of competence. There's also a lot of inertia here, it's not like she can change everything on a dime. She will inherit Biden's legacy and officeholders, and she hasn't done much as VP to thwart economic policy, for good or ill.

So how will she be as President? I don't want to overstate my read, it's just a guess. But since we're all just guessing, what I suspect is she'll lead to a total wipeout of Dems in 2026 and 2028 as the party turns wholly against working people, and a more complete Trump-y style realignment. And that's if she wins. So that's the optimistic scenario.

Dem Civil War commencing...

#my gif #2024: Year of the Wood Dragon #USA #politics #democratic party #joe biden #nancy pelosi #alexandria ocasio cortez #glenn greenwald #twitter #matt stoller #kamala harris #critique #Youtube #election 2024

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petervintonjr · 1 year ago

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"True emancipation lies in the acceptance of the whole past in deriving strength from all of my roots, in facing up to the degradation as well as the dignity of my ancestors."

As we come to the end of Pride Month 2023, I wanted to devote a little time to the remarkable life of Rev. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray --civil rights attorney, Episcopal priest, scholar, and advocate. Born in 1910 Baltimore, their mother tragically died when Murray was only four, and their father succumbed to depression and was later murdered in a mental hospital, and so Murray was raised by an aunt and grandparents, in a time when the threat of violence from the Ku Klux Klan was never too far away. Murray later moved to New York City and graduated from Hunter College in 1933 (as Columbia College did not at the time admit women). Throughout the 1930's Murray grappled with sexual and gender identity --this is in fact when they took on the preferred male-identifying name of "Pauli." A gifted photographer but an even more prolific author, Murray worked as a teacher with the New York City Remedial Reading Project, which offered a great deal of opportunity to write and publish. Among other publications, Pauli's essays and articles about civil rights would regularly appear in The Crisis and in Common Sense (both publications of the NAACP).

Pauli took the unusual (and risky!) step of petitioning to apply to graduate school at the University of North Carolina (current events alert!) --at the time an all-white institution. Such a prospect was considered sufficiently unobtainable that even the NAACP declined to actively support this effort. Pauli had in the meantime cultivated the acquaintance of then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as A. Philip Randolph (see Lesson #68 in this series); associations which would later carry consequences. Pauli is listed as one of the founders of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), along with Bayard Rustin (see Lesson #5 in this series), and James Farmer (Lesson #17). In 1943 they published a hugely important essay: "Negroes Are Fed Up;" and also a poem, Dark Testament, both of which spoke to the Harlem Race Riot of 1935.

In 1944 Murray graduated from Howard University Law School --while largely identifying as a man but still presenting as a woman, Murray famously coined the expression "Jane Crow" to describe the experience. They then applied to Harvard Law for an advanced degree on a Rosenwald Fellowship but was turned down --reportedly not due to racism (exact same current events alert!) but definitely due to sexism. They instead opted for the University of California Boalt School of Law; their graduate thesis was titled "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment." In 1945 Murray was named deputy attorney general for the state of California; the first African American to hold that post. In 1951 Pauli published States' Laws On Race and Color, a book that would later be described by Thurgood Marshall as the "Bible" for civil rights litigation, and was conspicuously referenced during Brown v. Board of Education arguments.

In 1952 the scourge of McCarthyism caught up with Murray and cost them a number of prestigious posts due to affiliation with "radicals" like Marshall, Randolph, and particularly Ms. Roosevelt. Unbowed, Pauli went on to publish the gripping biographical account Proud Shoes, which led in turn to a job offer in the litigation dept. of Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton, and Garrison (as in, Lloyd), where she would meet lifelong partner Irene Barlow. In 1960 Pauli was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the Committee on Civil And Political Rights, but the issue of intersectionality was never far from their priorities; notably in 1963 Murray took Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King to task for not including a single woman speaker at the March On Washington. Perhaps the most fascinating coda to this remarkable life comes in 1977, when in the wake of Irene Barlow's passing, Murray became the very first African-American woman Episcopal priest. Pauli died in 1985, having never come out publicly.

For a comprehensive listing of Pauli's writings, visit the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice: https://www.paulimurraycenter.com/paulis-writing

#black lives matter #teachtruth #dothework #blm blacklivesmatter #pride month #pride #pauli murray

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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When Robin Marty was writing her 2021 book The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support, people often asked her why she didn’t just make it an online resource.

“I said, ‘Well, we can't guarantee that online is always going to be accessible for people,’” says Marty, who is director of operations at the West Alabama Women's Center in Tuscaloosa. Her concern that women might one day be restricted from reading about abortion online proved prescient.

State lawmakers in Texas are considering a bill introduced last month that would make it illegal to provide information on how to access abortion. The bill would also require internet service providers to block websites offering content like that in Marty’s book, allow prosecution of abortion pill “distribution networks,” and permit anyone to sue a person who shared anything about how to access a medical abortion. The proposal borrows from a Texas law passed in 2021 that offers a cash bounty to citizens who sue a person who helped facilitate access to abortion care.

The Texas proposal to restrict information about abortion follows a recent flurry of attempts to limit reproductive rights in the US, with a particular focus on medical abortions—that is, abortions induced by medication. Experts worry that if passed, the bill could incentivize platforms and internet service providers (ISPs) to censor abortion-related content more broadly for fear of costly court cases.

“It’s scaring the platforms and the ISPs and the speakers into thinking that they can be liable for the speech,” says Jennifer Pinsof, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “So it’s having a chilling effect and advancing the goal of keeping this information from being accessible to people online.”

Access to good information about abortion could become even more important as new restrictions are placed on the procedure. Earlier this month, a Texas judge ruled to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a pill that in combination with misoprostol is part of the standard process for a medical abortion. This week, a federal appeals court ruled that though mifepristone could still be used for abortions, it can no longer be prescribed by mail.

The proposal to block Texans from accessing information about abortion, introduced by three male Republican representatives, is the most far-reaching attempt to date to limit how easily people learn about abortion access in the US. But it is not without precedent. Arizona has had a ban on advertising abortion services on its books since 1873. Other states, including Virginia, Louisiana, Michigan, and California, have restrictions on advertising the procedure.

Free speech is generally protected in the US under the First Amendment to the Constitution, while technology platforms have successfully argued that Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act means they can’t be held liable for content posted by users.

However, the bill being debated in Texas could essentially sidestep at least some of these protections by enlisting citizens to police information about abortions. Instead of the government cracking down on content, citizens would file civil court cases, with potential targets including social platforms and ISPs hosting websites or social posts offering information about abortion.

Pinsof says companies facing such legal threats would have little incentive to defend the free speech of their users if it helped them avoid litigation. “We’ve seen over and over in different contexts that platforms are vulnerable to censorship pressure because they're afraid of being sued,” says Pinsof. “So it's easier to take stuff down than it is to potentially open yourself up to liability.”

Another part of the law would require ISPs to “make every reasonable and technologically feasible effort to block internet access to information or material intended to assist or facilitate efforts to obtain an elective abortion or an abortion-inducing drug.” It also shields them from legal liability resulting from such takedowns, which Pinsof thinks could further encourage companies to remove content related to abortion.

Platforms are currently watching a case in the Supreme Court which argues that tech companies can in fact be held liable for content promoted on their platforms. Any weakening of that protection could expose companies to additional legal hazards in Texas under the proposed bill if they allowed pro-choice content to be shared on their services. Pinsof says the law can be read as making the provision of information about abortion “illegal both for speakers themselves, and also for platforms.”

WIRED reached out to Twitter, Reddit, Meta, and TikTok to ask whether laws like the Texas bill would induce them to change their moderation policies on abortion-related content. None responded. However, experts say that the platforms might preemptively begin limiting content related to abortion.

Last year, WIRED found that Meta was already restricting some abortion content on its platforms, regularly removing posts that referenced accessing abortion pills under rules barring the sale of “illegal or regulated goods."

The Texas bill could also have major implications for search engines, making it more difficult for women to find accurate information about abortion services. So-called “crisis pregnancy centers”—operated by anti-choice organizations—often use promoted results to get themselves to the top of searches for abortion providers.

“There’s effectively competition between pro- and anti-choice groups to win those slots at the top of Google search,” says Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks disinformation. “There will be no alternative in search results other than what anti-choice groups have to say about abortion,” he says.

Neither Google nor Microsoft responded to requests for comment about how or whether search results or ads might be modified or restricted in response to the Texas bill.

Hood says he worries that censorship could lead ISPs to decide that hosting abortion-related websites carries too many risks. ISPs have previously blocked websites for illicit materials like child pornography.

“The easiest thing for them to say is just, ‘We're not going to host any website that’s to do with abortion. Full stop,’” says Hood. “It is going to create an incentive for them to just take simple steps, which is to avoid any ambiguity over whether or not they are facilitating access to information about abortion-inducing drugs.”

Marty says that, should the bill be enacted, activists will work out ways around it, as they have for previous restrictions. But she acknowledges that these strategies may still leave many women without critical information, because digital information has become so important.

Pro-choice activists and educators sometimes use QR codes, which can easily be printed as stickers or posters and left inconspicuously in public places to point people to abortion information. “Most of the activism has already and will continue to pivot to QR codes and other ways of providing informational links without the actual information being visible in a text form,” she says. “But even a QR code is a whisper network. You have to know that this is a thing to find the information on.”

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chamerionwrites · 1 year ago

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The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Northern California, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, and National Immigrant Justice Center filed a legal challenge today to the Biden administration’s new asylum ban.

The challenge was filed swiftly after the new policy’s unveiling. The ban largely mimics two Trump-era policies — known as the “entry” and “transit” bans — which were blocked by the courts. It prohibits asylum for everyone at the border who transited through another country en route to the United States (i.e., people from countries other than Mexico) except for those who are able to obtain a scarce appointment to present themselves at a border port through a flawed mobile application; the rare person who first sought and was denied asylum in another country; or those who can prove that they qualify for one of a few other extremely narrow exceptions.

“The Biden administration’s new ban places vulnerable asylum seekers in grave danger and violates U.S. asylum laws. We’ve been down this road before with Trump,” said Katrina Eiland, managing attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The asylum bans were cruel and illegal then, and nothing has changed now.”

The filing argues that asylum laws do not allow the administration to restrict access to asylum based on an individual’s manner of entry or whether they applied for asylum elsewhere. It further explains that migrants cannot meaningfully seek asylum in transit countries because many lack a functioning asylum system, others have systems that are stretched to the breaking point, and most are not remotely safe for asylum seekers to find refuge. U.S. courts have recognized these principles in rejecting the previous asylum bans that the new rule tries to combine and re-impose.

“People fleeing persecution have a legal right to seek asylum, no matter how they reach the border,” said Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS). “Our asylum system was designed to protect people fleeing imminent threats to their lives, who do not have the luxury of waiting for an elusive appointment or for an application to be adjudicated in a country where they are in danger. The Biden administration has had over two years to set up a fair and humane asylum process post-Title 42. That it has instead chosen to resurrect and repackage illegal Trump-era policies is reprehensible.”

The case also cites numerous issues with requiring people to use the flawed CBP One mobile app to secure an appointment to seek asylum, including lack of financial resources to acquire a smartphone, lack of adequate internet access to use the app, technical glitches, language and literacy barriers, and an insufficient number of available appointments. These multiple, compounding barriers to CBP One access will leave many asylum seekers stranded indefinitely in dangerous and life-threatening conditions in Mexico.

“This unlawful rule relies on a mobile app that functions poorly, is available in just three languages, and requires people to enter a lottery for a woefully insufficient number of appointments,” said Keren Zwick, director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “Even more egregious, the rule perpetuates false notions that people fleeing persecution are safe in Mexico and Central America, and it offers purported solutions that will be routinely unavailable, especially to migrants who are not from the Western Hemisphere. In doing so, the rule levies special harm on some of the most vulnerable migrants, including women, LGBTQ people, and Black and Indigenous people.”

The challenge to the ban was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, American Gateways. Central American Resource Center, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Tahirih Justice Center.

#immigration #refugees #lines on a map #politics #news

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

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By: Leor Sapir

Published: Nov 13, 2023

Few figures in the medical world generate more controversy than psychiatrist Jack Turban. An assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, Turban is one of the leading figures promoting “gender-affirming care” in the United States. He is also regularly criticized for producing deeply flawed research and denying the significant rollback of youth gender transition in Europe.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently retained Turban as an expert witness—paying him $400 per hour—in its legal challenge to Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act, which restricts access to “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries to adults only. On October 16, Turban submitted to a seven-hour deposition at the hands of John Ramer, an attorney with the law firm Cooper & Kirk, who is assisting Idaho in the litigation. In the course of the deposition, Turban revealed that, aside from churning out subpar research and misleading the public about scientific findings, he also appears not to grasp basic principles of evidence-based medicine.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) refers to “the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. . . . The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.” Because the expert opinion of doctors, even when guided by clinical experience, is vulnerable to bias, EBM “de-emphasizes intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiologic rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision making and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research.” EBM thus represents an effort to make the practice of medicine more scientific, with the expectation that this will lead to better patient outcomes.

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses sit at the top of the hierarchy of evidence in EBM. A key difference between the U.S. and European approaches to pediatric gender medicine is that European countries have changed their clinical guidelines in response to findings from systematic reviews. In the U.S., medical groups have either claimed that a systematic review “is not possible” (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), relied on systematic reviews but only for narrowly defined health risks and not for benefits (the Endocrine Society), or used less scientifically rigorous “narrative reviews” (the American Academy of Pediatrics). One of the world’s leading experts on EBM has called U.S. medical groups’ treatment recommendations “untrustworthy.”

In the deposition, Ramer asked Turban to explain what systematic reviews are. “[A]ll a systematic review means,” Turban responded, “is that the authors of the reports pre-defined the search terms they used when conducting literature reviews in various databases.” The “primary advantage” of a systematic review, he emphasized, is to function as a sort of reading list for experts in a clinician field. “Generally, if you are in a specific field where you know most of the research papers, the thing that’s most interesting about systematic review is if it identifies a paper that you didn’t already know about.” Ramer showed Turban the EBM pyramid of evidence, which appears in the Cass Review (page 62) of the U.K.’s Gender Identity Development Service. He asked Turban why systematic reviews sit at the top of the pyramid. Turban responded: “Because you’re looking at all of the studies instead of looking at just one.”

Turban’s characterization represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what EBM is and why systematic reviews are the bedrock of trustworthy medical guidelines.

First, even if the only thing that makes a review systematic is that it “pre-defines the search terms,” Turban failed to explain the relevance of this. A major reason systematic reviews rank higher than narrative reviews in EBM’s information hierarchy is that systematic reviews follow a transparent, reproducible methodology. Anyone who applies the same methodology and search criteria to the same body of research should arrive at the same set of conclusions. Narrative reviews don’t use transparent, reproducible methodologies. Their conclusions are consequently more likely to be shaped by the personal biases of their authors, who may, for instance, cherry-pick studies.

To achieve transparency and reproducibility, systematic reviews define in advance the populations, interventions, comparisons, and outcomes of interest (PICO). They search for and filter the available literature with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses. Authors register their methodology and search criteria in advance in databases such as PROSPERO. These steps are meant to minimize the risk that authors will change their methodology midway through the process in response to inconvenient findings.

Turban acknowledged that pre-defining the search terms “makes it a little bit easier for another researcher to repeat their search.” However, he did not seem to grasp that the additional steps introduced by systematic reviews are designed to reduce bias and improve accuracy. Turban, one should note, endorses the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2018 narrative review—a document that, with its severe flaws, perfectly illustrates why EBM prefers systematic to narrative reviews.

Second, Turban is incorrect that the “primary advantage” of the systematic review is to generate a comprehensive reading list for (in this case) gender clinicians. Systematic reviews also assess the quality of evidence from existing studies. In other words, they avoid taking the reported findings of individual studies at face value. This is especially important in gender medicine because so much of the research in this field comes from authors who are professionally, financially, and intellectually invested in the continuation of gender medicine—in other words, who have conflicts of interest. Financial conflicts of interest are typically reported, but professional and intellectual conflicts rarely so. Conflicted researchers frequently exaggerate positive findings, underreport negative findings, use causal language where the data don’t support it, and refrain altogether from studying harms. In short, assessing the quality of evidence is especially important in a field known for its lack of equipoise and scientific rigor.

In EBM, quality of evidence is a technical term that refers to the degree of certainty in the estimate of the effects of a given intervention. The higher the quality, the more confident we can be that a particular intervention is what causes an observed effect. It was only in response to Ramer’s prodding that Turban addressed “the risk of bias associated with primary studies”—namely, one of the key considerations for assessing quality of evidence.

During the deposition, Ramer read Turban excerpts from Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature, a highly regarded textbook of EBM published by the American Medical Association. Ramer asked Turban to explain what the Users’ Guides means when it says that narrative reviews, unlike systematic reviews, “do not include systematic assessments of the risk of bias associated with primary studies and do not provide quantitative best estimates or rate the confidence in these estimates.” Turban responded that systematic reviews do sometimes assess the quality of evidence, but that this is not a necessary condition for a review to be called systematic.

I asked Gordon Guyatt, professor of health research methods, evidence, and impact at McMaster University, what he thought of Turban’s answer. Guyatt is widely regarded as a founder of the field of EBM and is the primary author of Users’ Guides. “The primary advantage of a systematic review,” Guyatt assured me, “is not only not missing studies, but also assessing quality of the evidence. Anybody who doesn’t recognize that a crucial part of a systematic review is judging the quality or certainty of the evidence does not understand what it’s all about.”

Ramer asked Turban to explain the GRADE method (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluations), a standardized EBM framework for evaluating quality. “GRADE generally involves looking at the research literature,” Turban explained. “And then there’s some subjectivity to it, but they provide you with general guidelines about how you would—like, great level of confidence in the research itself. Then there’s a—and then each of those get GRADE scores. I think it’s something like low, very low, high, very high. I could be wrong about the exact names of the categories.” Turban is indeed wrong: the categories are high, moderate, low, and very low. It’s surprising that someone involved in the debate over gender-medicine research for several years, and who understands that questions of GRADE and of quality are central, doesn’t know this by heart.

Ramer asked Turban what method, if any, he uses to assess quality in gender-medicine research. Turban explained that he reads the studies individually and does his own assessment of bias. GRADE is “subjective,” and this subjectivity, Turban said, is one reason that the U.K. systematic reviews rated studies that he commonly cites as “very low” quality. Turban’s thinking seems to be that, because GRADE is “subjective,” it is no better than a gender clinician sitting down with individual studies and deciding whether they are reliable.

I asked Guyatt to comment on Turban’s understanding of systematic reviews and GRADE. “Assessment of quality of evidence,” he told me, “is fundamental to a systematic review. In fact, we have more than once published that it is fundamental to EBM, and is clearly crucial to deciding the treatment recommendation, which is going to differ based on quality of evidence.” Guyatt said that “GRADE’s assessment of quality of the evidence is crucial to anybody’s assessment of quality of evidence. It provides a structured framework. To say that the subjective assessment of a clinician using no formal system is equivalent to the assessment of an expert clinical epidemiologist using a standardized system endorsed by over 110 organizations worldwide shows no respect for, or understanding of, science.”

At one point, Ramer pressed Turban to explain his views on psychotherapy as an alternative to drugs and surgeries. Systematic reviews have rated the studies Turban relies on for his support of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “very low” quality in part because these studies are confounded by psychotherapy. Because the kids who were given drugs and improved were also given psychotherapy and the studies lack a proper control group, it is not possible to know which of these interventions caused the improvement.

Turban seemed not to grasp the significance of this fact. If hormonal treatments can be said to cause improvement despite confounding psychotherapy, why can’t psychotherapy be said to cause improvement despite confounding drugs?

The exchange about confounding factors came up in the context of Ramer asking Turban about an article he wrote for Psychology Today. The article, aimed at a popular audience, purports to give an overview of the research that confirms the necessity of “gender-affirming care.” Last year, I published a detailed fact-check of the article, showing how Turban ignores confounding factors, among other problems. Four days later, Psychology Today made a series of corrections to Turban’s article. Some of these corrections were acknowledged in a note; others were done without any acknowledgement. In the deposition, Ramer asked Turban about my critique, to which Turban replied that he “left Psychology Today to do whatever edits they needed to do,” and that, when he later read the edits, he found them “generally reasonable.”

In sum, though Turban says that “there are no evidence-based psychotherapy protocols that effectively treat gender dysphoria itself,” the same studies he cites furnish just as much evidence for psychotherapy as they do for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones—which is to say “very low” quality evidence.

Other remarkable moments occur in the Turban deposition. For instance, when asked whether he had read the Florida umbrella review (a systematic review of systematic reviews) conducted by EBM experts at McMaster University and published over a year ago, Turban said that he hadn’t because he “didn’t have time.” When I mentioned this confession to Guyatt, he seemed taken aback. How could a clinician who claims expertise in a contested area of medicine not be curious about a systematic review of systematic reviews? “If all systematic reviews come to the same conclusion,” Guyatt told me, “it clearly increases our confidence in that conclusion.” (My conversation with Guyatt dealt exclusively with Turban’s claims and how they stack up against EBM. I did not ask Guyatt about, and he did not opine on, the wisdom of state laws restricting access to “gender-affirming care.”)

I believe that Turban is being honest when he says he didn’t read the Florida umbrella review. He doesn’t seem interested in literature that might call his beliefs into question. He has staked his personal and professional reputation on a risky and invasive protocol before the appearance of any credible evidence of its superiority to less risky alternatives. Turban regularly maligns as bigoted and unscientific anyone who disagrees with him. Some gender clinicians in Europe now admit that the evidence is weak, the risks serious, and the protocol still experimental. Turban, however, would seemingly rather go down with the sinking ship than admit that he was too hasty in promoting “gender-affirming care.”

Put another way, Turban has intellectual, professional, and financial conflicts of interest that prejudice his judgment on how best to treat youth experiencing issues with their bodies or sex. European health authorities are aware of this problem; that’s why they chose to commission their evidence reviews from clinicians and researchers not directly involved in gender medicine. For instance, England’s National Health Service appointed physician Hilary Cass to chair the Policy Working Group that would lead the investigation of its Gender Identity Development Service and its systematic reviews. The NHS explained that there was “evident polarization among clinical professionals,” and Cass was “asked to chair the group as a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.”

Unfortunately, in the U.S., personal investment in gender medicine is often seen as a benefit rather than a liability. James Cantor, a psychologist who testifies in lawsuits over state age restrictions, emphasizes the difference between the expertise of clinicians and that of scientists. The clinician’s expertise “regards applying general principles to the care of an individual patient and the unique features of that case.” The scientist’s expertise “is the reverse, accumulating information about many individual cases and identifying the generalizable principles that may be applied to all cases.” Cantor writes:

In legal matters, the most familiar situation pertains to whether a given clinician correctly employed relevant clinical standards. Often, it is other clinicians who practice in that field who will be best equipped to speak to that question. When it is the clinical standards that are themselves in question, however, it is the experts in the assessment of scientific studies who are the relevant experts.

The point is not that clinicians are never able to exercise scientific judgment. It’s that conflicts of interest for involved clinicians need to be acknowledged and taken seriously when “the clinical standards . . . are themselves in question.” Unfortunately, the American propensity for setting policy through the courts makes that task difficult. Judges intuitively believe that gender clinicians are the experts in gender medicine research. The result is a No True Scotsman argument wherein the more personally invested a clinician is (and the more conflict of interest he has as a result), the more credible he appears.

Last year, a federal judge in Alabama dismissed Cantor’s expert analysis of the research, citing, among other things, the fact that Cantor “had never treated a child or adolescent for gender dysphoria” and “had no personal experience monitoring patients receiving transitioning medications.” Turban’s deposition illustrates why this thinking is misguided. It is precisely gender clinicians who often seem to be least familiar, or at any rate least concerned, with subjecting their “expert” views to rigorous scientific scrutiny. It is precisely these clinicians who are most likely to be swimming in confirmation bias, least interested in the scientific method, and, conveniently, least concerned with evidence-based medicine.

Jack Turban is frequently a star "expert" in so-called "gender affirming care" enquiries. Aside from being a pathological liar, we can now also conclude he's dangerously unqualified.

#Leor Sapir #Jack Turban #Gordon Guyatt #evidence based medicine #gender affirming care #gender affirmation #gender affirming healthcare #dangerously unqualified #gender ideology #queer theory #conflict of interest #confirmation bias #medical scandal #medical malpractice #ideological corruption #gender activism #religion is a mental illness

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ausetkmt · 1 year ago

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TALLAHASSEE, FL — Authorities in two states are threatening Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with criminal charges after dozens of migrants were flown from Texas to California this week and to Massachusetts in September 2022.

In California, authorities were investigating whether DeSantis was behind a flight that picked up asylum-seekers on the Texas border and flew them — apparently without their knowledge — to California's capital of Sacramento.

The development coincided with confirmation from the Bexar County Sheriff's Office in Texas that criminal charges were recommended against DeSantis in connection to an incident where 49 asylum seekers were flown from Texas to Martha's Vineyard as part of DeSantis' migrant relocation program.

In California, about 20 people aged 21 to 30 were flown by private jet to Sacramento on Monday, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said. It was the second such flight in four days.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and faith-based groups who have been assisting the migrants scheduled a news conference for Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom lashed out at DeSantis on Twitter, calling him a "small, pathetic man" and suggesting his state could pursue kidnapping charges.

"@RonDeSantis, you small, pathetic man," Newsom tweeted. "This isn't Martha's Vineyard. Kidnapping charges?"

With the tweet, Newsom included a section of the California penal code on kidnapping charges that reads, "(d) Every person who, being out of this state, abducts or takes by force or fraud any person contrary to the law of the place where that act is committed and brings, sends, or conveys that person within the limits of this state, and is afterwards found within the limits thereof, is guilty of kidnapping."

DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination to run for president, has been a fierce critic of federal immigration policy under President Joe Biden and has heavily publicized Florida's role in past instances in which migrants were transported to Democratic-led states.

DeSantis and other Florida officials have remained mum, as they initially were last year when they flew 49 Venezuelan migrants to the upscale Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, luring them onto private jets from a shelter in San Antonio.

In a statement to the Miami Herald this week, the Bexar County Sheriff's Office in Texas confirmed that criminal charges were recommended in connection with the Martha's Vineyard case.

The case was then passed to the Bexar County District Attorney, the Herald reported.

"The case filed includes both felony and misdemeanor charges of Unlawful Restraint," according to the statement. "At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA's office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public."

The case by Texas authorities isn't the first piece of litigation levied at DeSantis regarding the flights to Martha's Vineyard.

Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the suit on behalf of about 50 Venezuelans involved in the flights, and Alianza Americas, a network of migrant-led organizations supporting immigrants in the U.S. in September 2022.

The lawsuit names DeSantis and Secretary of Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue, and called the flights "inhumane and morally repugnant."

The suit says the Florida officials arranged a "fraudulent and discriminatory scheme to transport nearly 50 vulnerable immigrants, including women and children, from San Antonio, Texas to Martha's Vineyard without shelter or resources in place."

According to the lawsuit, DeSantis used about $615,000 in taxpayer dollars to charter the flights to Martha's Vineyard and told the migrants they would arrive in either Washington, D.C., or Boston. The suit also says the migrants were lured into planes with the promise of benefits, including $10 McDonald's gift cards.

#florida #migrants #migrant flights by desantis #desantis #illegal detention #2 States Threaten DeSantis With Criminal Charges Over Migrant Flights #california

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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San Francisco police arrested over a hundred people in the city’s Mission District Saturday night at an annual “hill bomb” event, where skaters and bikers ride down Dolores Street.

Most of the individuals arrested were under 18 years old, and had been surrounded by police at the event and prevented from leaving — a law enforcement tactic known as “kettling.” This police action has prompted severe criticism from residents and officials alike — plus a possible lawsuit by nonprofit legal organization Partnership for Civil Justice.

Rachel Lederman, an attorney with Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and with the Center for Protest Law and Litigation, says she’s hoping to talk to more of the youth who were arrested — or their parents — “to explore what to do to challenge this outrageous conduct” by SFPD.

“You have a right to be an onlooker on the street, as long as you’re not directly interfering in a police action,” Lederman said. “The police can’t just round everybody up. That’s what this sounds like, to me, happened on Saturday night, when they just simply kettled the kids in a number of different areas, by just closing off the block.”

Mission Local, a news organization serving the San Francisco district, reported that young people were handcuffed by plastic zip ties and made to sit on the street. The story also quoted a 15-year-old named Carmen who told Mission Local that other girls there were hyperventilating, with several peeing their pants while being kept zip-tied on the bus that was used to transfer them to the Mission police station. The last person arrested was released early the next morning.

In a statement, SFPD said that they declared the event an unlawful assembly after an officer was assaulted by a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old, according to police. An unlawful assembly is a gathering (of three or more people) with an intent to disturb the peace. In the same statement, SFPD claimed the skaters set off fireworks and vandalized Muni vehicles, and “it was decided that a mass arrest of the crowd was to be conducted to stop the ongoing unlawful assembly and destruction of property.”

Lederman said that in her conversations with the families of young people at the event, she talked to parents “whose kids were simply taking scooters to go to a friend’s house and they happened to pass by the area where this was happening. And they actually made the mistake of asking for instructions from the police and were told, ‘Oh, turn around and go that way.’”

Then, she said, those young people report being “confronted by another police line and not allowed to leave, and arrested and held for hours and hours.”

“This mass arrest was illegal as far as I’m concerned … There’s no guilt by association under the United States law or California law,” Lederman said. “And the police can’t just simply kettle people and arrest everyone in order to get rid of an event that they don’t like [which] in this case, happened to involve primarily children.”

“I’m demanding that all of these charges be dropped, and I hope nobody will face charges,” Lederman said.

It’s not the first time the police have cracked down on the Dolores Hill bomb — and the SFPD has faced lawsuits for use of force when, in 2017, a skater sued the city and won over a quarter of million dollars after an officer pushed them down the hill and into a police vehicle.

So if you — or your child — are ever an onlooker in the vicinity of an event like the hill bomb, or spectating an activity the police have deemed illegal: What are your rights? And what should parents and caregivers especially know about their children being detained?

What are the laws around being a spectator at an event like this?

It’s tricky — and not always clean-cut, legally

“In general, you and I, and everyone has a right to travel safely and freely in public places,” said Chessie Thacher, senior attorney with ACLU NorCal’s Democracy and Civic Engagement Program.

“If you’re walking down the street and you see something that’s interesting — or you’re worried that something suspicious or unlawful is happening — then you stop: You look at it, you’re standing there, you want to record it,” Thacher said. “You have a First Amendment right to do that. And if you want to publish that out to the world, the public also has a First Amendment right to receive that information about newsworthy public events.”

Where it “gets tricky,” says Thacher, is if you’re planning to be present in a place that you know something unlawful will be happening. But even in those instances, Thacher says that the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations “believe that the laws that criminalize spectators are often too overbroad. They sweep in too many innocent people who are really not supposed to be caught up in any kind of a criminalization effort.”

But, she said, “the government is always trying to take a run at criminalizing spectators, and that’s a problem.”

Something that is clearer: Cities will have their own ordinances that say if participating in or spectating at a certain event is illegal, notes Robert Weisberg, faculty co-director at the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. And “if the city has that ordinance that you can’t do it, especially in a certain place, then you just can’t do it — and it’s not going to help you at all if you say, ‘Gee, I had no idea,’” he said.

Weidberg acknowledges that he finds these kinds of ordinances a “bit of a legal stretch” with the exception of illegal fireworks, given the elevated risk of wildfires in California. He said that that he can imagine a person challenging such an ordinance “ as unconstitutional, on the grounds that if you’re merely observing — and if the activity is not something that’s inherently illegal — then […] that’s a pretty rough ordinance.”

But regardless of whether there’s such an ordinance in the place you’re spectating, ignoring a police order to disperse from that place — even if you think it’s without legal justification — remains something that can nonetheless get you “in big trouble,” Weidberg warned.

You can read SFPD’s policy on the Rights of Onlookers here (PDF), which the department says it wants to revise once labor negotiations with the police association, according to San Francisco Commissioner Kevin M. Benedicto in an email to KQED.

What kinds of events can get onlookers in trouble with police?

Partnership for Civil Justice’s Lederman referenced the recent crackdown by officers on a Fourth of July firework display in San Francisco’s Mission District, calling it “alarming.” (In fact, being present at an illegal firework show is explicitly criminalized in San José).

Such a crackdown, she says, seems “pretty extreme to me … I saw a bunch right outside my window. I live in the Mission. So am I guilty of watching illegal fireworks?”

“It seems like a slippery slope,” she said. Although experts disagree, as Stanford’s Weisberg points out the wildfire problem in California.

For Lederman, this kind of criminalization of gathered onlookers is “part of the mayor and the police department’s attempt to look like they are getting tough on crime,” Lederman said. But the hill bomb event, she says, “was really not a crime. It was simply a kids and youth skateboarding event.”

Lederman said often the risks of spectating is a “judgment call,” with most tools people having if they are arrested are to challenge it in court afterwards.

The First Amendment Coalition and the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists also sent a letter to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors last month expressing concern about an ordinance that makes it illegal to be a spectator at a sideshow, which was approved this week. (Being an onlooker at a sideshow is already illegal elsewhere in California, such as within the city of Turlock in Stanislaus County.)

The First Amendment Coalition Legal Director’s David Loy argued it would allow the arrest of people simply watching the cars, even if they were trying to record or report on it. Loy also said it could open the county up to litigation.

“We take no issue with appropriate enforcement of otherwise valid laws against unlawful conduct, but the First Amendment does not allow the government to punish the protected speech of observers or reporters as a means to address the illegal acts of others,” the letter reads.

“We therefore ask the Board to refrain from adopting an ordinance that would criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. The County need not and should not trample on freedom of speech to protect public safety.”

What should you do if approached by police as an onlooker?

Your main priority is keeping yourself safe, ACLU’s Thacher said.

“So if the police attempt to interact with you at a public event, you should stay calm,” she said. “You shouldn’t run, or resist, or argue. Keep your hands where officers can see them.”

In a typical encounter, police may approach and try to talk to you. It’s important to establish whether you’re free to leave this interaction, or the police are in fact detaining you. If you ask an officer if you are free to go and they say yes, “just calmly walk away,” Thacher said.

“If they say, ‘No, you’re not free to go,’ that means that you’re under arrest,” confirmed Thacher.

In California, if you are not being arrested, you do not need to show your ID or give your name to a police officer when asked for it “although sometimes it’s a judgment call about whether that might arouse suspicion,” Lederman said. Officers can’t also ask about your immigrant status.

What if I’m arrested by police as an onlooker?

At that point, ACLU’S Thacher recommends that you reply, “‘I’m not going to answer any questions. I’d like to talk to a lawyer.’ Say this as respectfully and as calmly as you can at that moment.”

“And if you end up being put under arrest, always ask the officers, ‘Why?’ Don’t try to argue. ‘Why am I being arrested?’ And then say you wish to remain silent after that,” Thacher said.

“The main advice that I would give is for anyone who was arrested [at the Dolores Hill bomb event is] if they’re asked to give a statement by the district attorney or juvenile probation or the police there, they’re not required to give a statement, or submit to an interview,” Lederman said. She would advise not giving such a statement or interview “without getting advice from an attorney.”

“If you are detained and the police say you’re not free to leave, you still don’t have to give a statement or submit or answer any questions,” said Lederman.

“If police are seeking to question you when you’re under arrest, when you’re taken into the jail, you will have to answer some basic booking questions,” said Lederman. “But you don’t have to answer questions about the incident that has led to your arrest. Only a judge can order you to answer questions.

What if you forget this advice in the moment, and begin talking to the police? Even after you’ve done this, “you can still invoke your right to remain silent,” Lederman said.

Where can I find a free attorney?

If you are lower-income or if you are under 18, you’re entitled to a free lawyer, a public defender, or court-appointed free lawyer, affirms Lederman.

You can find pro bono (free) legal services for the San Francisco Bay Area in this resource from the State Bar of California.

Can the police search my belongings?

Because police may try to conduct a search, and track you down at an event in order to do so, Lederman said that ��it’s a good idea to actually say out loud, ‘I do not consent to a search.’ Because silence can be interpreted as consent.”

Even if your instinct is to cooperate, you can still say no, said Lederman — who also notes that “in general, police are more likely to ask for consent when they don’t have the legal right to do a search without your consent.”

For that reason, she said, “it’s really best just to decline and say ‘I don’t consent to a search.’ Even if they start searching, it’s important to just verbalize that you don’t consent.”

Lederman said it is important not to physically resist the search, because it could result in getting hurt or getting an extra criminal charge.

“If you are actually under arrest, the police can search your person and they can search the belongings that you have with you without your consent, and without a warrant,” Lederman said.

What about your phone? Lederman said that if the police don’t have a warrant, they can take your phone from you, “but if they ask you to unlock your phone, you don’t have to do that.”

If you’re heading into a situation that may potentially become intense or volatile, like a protest, technology and civil rights experts often recommend you investigate ways to temporarily turn off your phone’s ability to be unlocked with Face ID or your fingerprint — because these unlocking techniques may allow anyone, including the police, to try to access your phone by holding it up to your face, or putting your thumb on it. Instead, you might consider using a multi-digit passcode to unlock your phone, which you cannot be forced to give.

Can I record the police?

“There’s a clearly established right in California, and pretty much all over the country, to record or video police action,” Lederman said.

Remember that if you’re so close to a police officer that you’re actually interfering with or obstructing their action, “You could get in trouble for that” said Lederman. “But you have a clear legal right — a First Amendment right — to video the police.”

“Videotaping and recording is a really good tool for police accountability,” Lederman said. “We can’t really count on the police body cameras to fill that need necessarily because police can switch them on and off. They don’t necessarily capture everything: So the citizen footage can be quite important.

KQED has a lengthy explainer on your rights to record the police — and how to stay safe doing it and what possible pitfalls there are.

Thacher said people should remember the details of problematic encounters with the police they might be troubled by.

“Try to include the time, the date, the location, the officers’ badges and patrol car numbers,” she advised. “Just that information can be helpful.”

Document any injuries you’ve sustained as an onlooker

If a person has been injured — “for example, by the plastic zip tie handcuffs” that appear to have been used on minors by police at the Dolores Hill bomb — they should document these injuries with photographs ASAP, Lederman said. People should document if they have marks or any continuing problems with those injuries and what medical attention they got to take care of them if they wish to seek compensation for them.

People should also document things like missing work, or having to seek counseling.

“If kids were forced to miss work, like older teenagers, or if parents have to take off work in order to deal with this? I would just document all that,” Lederman said.

What should parents and caregivers know about minors being arrested at an event like the Dolores Hill bomb?

Lederman said while kids are being held by the police, “there’s just not a lot that the parents can do” — besides calling and going to the station.

“There was a sizable group of parents who went out to try to pick up their kids, even while the kids were being held for hours and hours just sitting on the street,” Lederman said. “The police refused to release the kids to their parents, and instead put them on buses to drive them to Mission Station, which is just very close to where they’re being held [at the event].”

Because of police choosing to do a full processing on these minors, Lederman said, “some of the kids didn’t get out until four in the morning. I heard about kids having to walk home by themselves.”

“The police didn’t call families until maybe just before they were going to release the kids and so, because they had taken the kids’ phones when they detained them, really a lot of these children were just held incommunicado — and parents didn’t know where they were,” said Lederman.

Here’s what parents and caregiver can do in a situation like this:

Seek counseling, document any injuries

Lederman recommends that if possible, parents and caregivers explore seeking counseling for their kids if they were arrested at the Dolores Hill bomb — and again, that any injuries are documented swiftly.

Resist the impulse to insert yourself at the police station

Thacher said families should “not to try to go to the police station and explain your child’s current conduct, or what you view your child’s conduct was.”

”Really, it’s better to remain silent and get a lawyer and figure out what happened,” she advised.

Prep your kids for a situation like this

People who’ve been arrested have the right to make a phone call, and for this reason, your child should be able to memorize their parents’ or caretakers’ number. Because of kids’ access to cellphones, knowing a parent’s number by heart is not as common as it once was, notes Thacher.

Also, make sure kids know their rights around the police.

Contact your local officials

Lederman said parents should think about reaching out to their officials “demanding that not only the charges be dropped, but there should be some accountability.”

For Lederman, the police action at the Dolores Hill bomb is “clearly just using these children as political pawns to try to seem tough on crime,” and if people feel similarly, she advises them to contact Mayor London Breed’s office to communicate that this “isn’t something that the people that vote in San Francisco are going to tolerate.”

To contact the mayor of San Francisco, email [email protected] or call (415) 554-6141.

To contact the Department of Police Accountability, you can file a complaint online or call (415) 241-7711.

To contact the San Francisco Police Commission, email [email protected] or call (415) 837-7070. Individual phone numbers are also made available to the public on the SF Police Commission site. The next meeting of the commission is July 12 at 5:30 p.m.

Thacher said if people were to be swept up in an event like this, they are invited to contact a civil liberties organization for advice and potential legal next steps:

ACLU Northern California’s page on needing legal help

First Amendment Coalition’s legal hotline

Funny how a mass arrest goes completely under the radar when it's mostly teens, right?

#acab #dolores hill #police state #legal rights

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wyrmfedgrave · 19 minutes ago

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NBC News: Democratic governors vow to protect their states from Trump and his policies

Democratic governors are intent on bolstering the fundamental rights & values of their states - just as they did during tRump's 1st presidency.

Governor Newsome (California) is focusing on civil rights, reproductive freedoms, climate action & on immigrant families.

California's Justice Dept. will soon have additional resources to pursue litigation against unlawful acts by the tRump administration.

"We won't sit idle", Newsome stated, "We've faced this problem before & know how to respond."

Governor Pritzker (Illinois) says he'll fight against "anyone trying to take away our freedoms, dignity & opportunities."

"We are", he continued, "a refuge for human rights being denied elsewhere."

This includes political asylum, reproductive health care & safety from persecution of one's sexual orientation."

Pritzker's already codified abortion rights & has made gender-affirming care covered by local health insurers!

He's now looking into protecting outsiders needing reproductive care - by protecting their medical records...

Even environmental regulations are now being codified - just in case.

And, labor protections are being strictly maintained.

A united effort, with other Midwestern states is on the schedule. They've all survived the Rapist Con Man's last time & learned their lessons well.

Governor Hochul (NYS) has just announced the "Empire State Freedom Initiative", that addresses "policy & regulatory" threats from Republikkkans.

Things like federal attacks on legal, reproductive, immigration, civil, environmental & other issues.

Hochul states that she "wants to make NY a safer, stronger & more livable place."

Her administration has already developed legal, regulatory & appropriate responses to counter any federal actions.

Massachusetts Governor Healy will use "every tool in our 'toolbox' to protect residents, democracy & the rule of law."

As a State Attorney, she actually challenged Prez tRump's immigration laws during his 1st presidency.

She's firmly promises that her State Police won't help carry out tRump's mass deportation scheme.

Finally, NJ Governor Murphy vowed to "fight to the death" on issues pertaining to when immigration & reproductive rights are federally challenged...

Good to know that someone remembers that we're supposed to have inalienable rights.

End.

#Dem Govs #ready 2 fight #rump proof #political laws #safeguard #values & rights #1st steps of the #resistance #against historic Rep corruption

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andrewdosalaw · 1 year ago

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strategy-law-llp · 1 month ago

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Why You Need an Employment Law Attorney in San Jose: Strategy Law LLP

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One of the greatest benefits of working with an employment law attorney is having access to preventative legal strategies. At Strategy Law LLP, we help businesses implement proactive measures to avoid legal pitfalls, such as creating employee handbooks, conducting regular audits of workplace practices, and providing compliance training. For employees, our attorneys help you understand your rights and protect them before issues escalate into legal battles.

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At Strategy Law LLP, our employment law attorneys provide comprehensive legal services tailored to the specific needs of businesses and employees in San Jose. We understand the ever-changing legal landscape and offer strategic, personalized solutions to help you navigate it. Whether you're an employer looking to implement strong workplace policies or an employee facing a legal issue, our team is dedicated to protecting your rights and ensuring the best possible outcome.

Final Thoughts

Employment law is a complex field that affects every business and employee. Whether you're dealing with compliance issues, employee disputes, or employment contracts, having a dedicated employment law attorney is essential to protecting your interests. Strategy Law LLP offers expert legal counsel to both employers and employees, helping you navigate the complexities of employment law with confidence.

Contact Strategy Law LLP today to learn how our employment law attorneys can assist with your legal needs in San Jose.

#employment law attorney

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