#Illinois Policy Institute

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Since late summer, many Illinois residents have been receiving newspapers that they haven't paid for nor, in many cases, even heard of.

Each paper bears a clear-cut tagline: Real data, real news.

And each publication that shows up in driveways and mailboxes carries a partisan punch that's blatant, but not formally disclosed.

"They present a strongly one-sided view of things," said Bernard Schoenburg, who covered Illinois as a journalist for decades.

Schoenburg retired as a columnist for The State Journal-Register in Springfield in December 2020, 44 years after walking into his first job out of college at the Bloomington Pantagraph. In the intervening decades, traditional newsrooms throughout the state have withered, from the Pantagraph right up to the once-mighty Chicago Tribune. Some have shut down.

That erosion of local news has created an opening for these newer publications, which lie dormant and then spring up at election time. They look a lot like hometown newspapers — nothing flashy, just long, printed broadsheet pages with color photos and graphics — but without any real interest in local news.

"You get these glaring headlines of ... what's so terrible about our tax system right now or what's bad about a Democratic governor," Schoenburg said.

ALL SIGNS POINT IN ONE DIRECTION

The coverage all points in a single political direction: hard right.

Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.

"In this age, with so many kinds of media that hit people," Schoenburg said, "people don't know, necessarily, what's real, if they're not sophisticated in this way."

This fall, readers encountering the Sangamon Sun or Chicago City Wire or the Dupage Policy Journal or their sister publications will find coverage uniformly beating up on the policies and persona of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who happens to be up for reelection.

The West Cook News splashed an incendiary quote across the top of its front page recently: "It's going to be literally the end of days."

A two-page spread inside presented a vivid display of photographs of 36 men who were charged with violent crimes — but had not been convicted. They would all be released to Cook County's neighborhoods, the accompanying headline said, under legislation signed into law by Pritzker last year that eliminates cash bail. (Actually, judges will retain discretion to determine whether people facing serious charges pose a threat, according to reporting by WBEZ and other news outlets.)

All but four of the 36 men in the photos were people of color.

"This is Republican propaganda and, in some instances, just outright lies," said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Natalie Edelstein. "The information being presented is intentionally being set up to mislead people. It looks like it's independent, local news. But in reality, when you read the content, it's playing on people's emotions and fear."

A GOP CANDIDATE SAYS PAPERS ARE FILLED WITH "FACT AND TRUTH"

Among the people quoted in that front-page story in West Cook News: conservative talk show host Dan Proft.

Proft runs a political action committee called People Who Play By the Rules PAC that has spent millions aiding Pritzker's Republican opponent, state Sen. Darren Bailey.

"These newspapers that are circulating the state are full of fact and truth — and Gov. Pritzker has the gall to call it a lie," Bailey said on Proft's radio show in early September.

Proft's PAC also helps to underwrite the papers, which he conceded on the air recently.

Yet nowhere in the publications themselves is there any disclosure of the papers' pro-Republican agenda, its source of funding, or even its point of view — except, of course, in the relentless punching of hot-button issues for the right, including trans rights, COVID restrictions and taxes.

Proft did not respond to NPR's efforts to seek comment, nor did cardboard shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, a major party activist who falsely argues that the 2020 presidential race was fixed and who has financed the PAC with more than $40 million this year, according to the Center for Illinois Politics. He did speak to the Chicago-based NewsNation television broadcast, telling anchor Leland Vittert that his readers do not trust mainstream news organizations.

"We provide angles to stories and information that you don't get from left leaning or left — or not so leaning, just hard left — news outlets," Proft said on NewsNation. "They're all sharing a brain and we're providing a different perspective on some of the issues that are salient in people's lives."

In Proft's recounting, the Illinois papers put out by the Local Government Informational Services -- their publisher — sound like a throwback to an earlier age, when papers were openly partisan and ideological on their news pages as well as their opinion section. And there's a school of thought that that's a more intellectually honest way than reporters saying they shelve their own points of view.

What and how those issues are presented in these papers, however, constitutes a sharp departure on the way journalists at more mainstream news outlets, even point-of-view journalists, have covered the news for decades. For one thing, at least in the hard copy editions reviewed by NPR, the papers make no such clear and overt disclosures about their agenda in print, other than the overwhelming thrust of their articles.

THE 7,251ST TOP HIGH SCHOOL TENNIS PLAYER, AND OTHER WEIRD FACTS DRESSED UP AS STORIES

There's a second element to the papers that garners less attention. By contemporary newspaper lights, they are weird.

"There is other information in the publication that makes it look local, like what employees in government agencies are making a lot of money, what homes sold for a lot of money, and it's just things you can pick up off the internet," Schoenburg said.

It's unclear who's scooping up those facts.

Take The Sangamon Sun, based in the county where Springfield, the state capital, can be found. It published a story about an athlete based on his national ranking. David Lu was, the paper reported in mid-September, the 7,251st highest ranked player in the country under the age of 18.

The article was eight sentences long and had no byline. It said nothing about Lu as a player or person. Instead, it offered a rote explanation of how such rankings were made and offered a single quotation pulled from a tennis instructor's 3-year-old essay in New York Tennis Magazine about the fierceness of competition.

The Sangamon Sun did versions of the same story for weeks, each citing slightly lower or higher rankings for Lu, all with the same tennis pro quote.

At least twice, the article was presented below a photograph of a young white boy, no older than 9 or 10, holding a tennis racket. A photograph of Lu during a tennis match taken by the Springfield State Journal-Register, however, shows him to be an Asian American high schooler.

Other papers picked other high school athletes to highlight, equally without any personal touches.

We've seen this before.

NEW BOTTLES, OLD WINE

The man behind that reporting model of mashing together details into something resembling a news story is a former reporter and political operative named Brian Timpone, who later became Dan Proft's business partner and ultimately helped to expand the Illinois paper model to other states.

Back in 2012, Timpone created a service called Journatic, used briefly by mainstream newspapers, that relied upon a core of reporters and an army of freelancers to try to report on real estate sales, school lunches, city council meetings, high school sports and other events. Timpone also promised state-of-the art artificial intelligence. The service's credibility was dinged when This American Life revealed not just its use of bots but content mill workers far from the regions the newspapers served. They were often based in Asia, writing under fake bylines.

"Really what they're doing is assembling and copy editing a bunch of facts, right?" Timpone told This American Life's Sarah Koenig in 2014. "So they write the lead. If there's a paragraph about a person, the paragraph is technically written by someone in the Philippines, but not [really] written."

Timpone sold Journatic to two newspaper chains several years ago and didn't respond to efforts to reach him for comment for this story. Despite the conclusions of media researchers that the papers are propping up candidates and causes, Timpone denied that his current firm, Metric Media, takes money to run content in the papers.

"Agenda-driven writers asserted this slur without a shred of evidence because our existence makes them feel insecure," he told the tech website Gizmodo.

LOOKING FOR THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE BYLINES

For what it's worth, I also haven't been able to reach a single person identified as writing directly for the Illinois papers.

Not the writer whose byline is the same as a former social media manager and writer who works for an outsourcing company in Manila. Not the one who shares the same name as a byline on stories for UrbanReform.org — a conservative Texas-based site that has been part of the same larger network.

Nor The Kane County Reporter's Laurie A. Luebbert. Fifteen years ago, a reporter wrote at The Virginian-Pilot under the same byline. Luebbert has no account on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook — unusual for a reporter in this day and age.

Laurie — if you're out there — feel free to be in touch.

And here's where it gets byzantine. Luebbert's byline doesn't just surface in other Illinois sister papers under Dan Proft. Her work also appears in Old North News in North Carolina, the New Mexico Sun, The Louisiana Record, The Lansing (Mich.) Sun, and Keystone Today in Pennsylvania, published by Metric Media or affiliated companies. The list goes on and on.

"LAUNDERING ADVOCACY" INSTEAD OF AN INTEREST IN NEWS

Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, counted more than 1,200 conservative local news outlets connected around the country in Timpone's network.

She considers them AstroTurf sites "laundering advocacy," driven by the interests of their funders, not an interest in news or in making money from the conventional news business. And she says the Illinois papers served as a model for what's mushroomed nationally. She first issued a study on the proliferation of the sites in 2019.

In a new report, released Monday by the Tow Center in the Columbia Journalism Review, Bengani concluded that the sites are providing services even beyond the publications.

"This network acts as a convergence of special interests for free market advocates, multiple political action committees, the fossil fuel industry, a politically motivated Catholic group, and a group propagating the notions of election fraud," Bengani writes.

She documented instances in which the sites and the larger network provided advertising, SMS messages, robocalls and websites as well as consulting and production costs. Timpone is not the only key figure in the system. Bengani also found links to a huge Texas PAC and a major Republican donor who is an oil-and gas-billionaire. In Texas, articles blamed wind power for the failure of the electrical grid there last year. (That has been discredited by multiple mainstream news outlets.)

Stories in Arizona pushed Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters. In Ohio, it was his counterpart, J.D. Vance. And in Kansas, The Catholic Tribune surfaced almost exclusively to serve up anti-abortion rhetoric in advance of the August vote on the proposed state constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion there.

Bengani writes that the political action committees and media operators of the sites often share information. Some contributors to pro-Trump causes who share their emails or mobile numbers find themselves automatically sent the outlets' content.

She hastens to add that those who say that this kind of covert news advocacy happens on both sides have a point.

"If we are to be completely blunt about it, we are seeing folks on the left adopt this tactic as well," Bengani says.

One group, Courier Newsroom, was created by a former Obama administration official. Another, American Independent, is championed by David Brock, the liberal activist and founder of the left-of-center watchdog Media Matters.

Yet Bengani notes the difference in scale. She counts 64 such pro-Democratic newspapers and news sites. That's equal to about 5% of the right-wing publications she has been monitoring.

"You end up with this surround-sound effect," Bengani says. "If people are hearing the same thing in multiple places, are they then more likely to believe it?"

Bengani says she can't measure how influential this echo chamber will prove to be. But she says the partisan papers are blanketing people who want to read local news and have fewer choices than ever.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - May 15, 2023

🐕 - Now It's a Paw-ty

1. World's oldest ever dog celebrates 31st birthday

Bobi was born on 11 May 1992, making him 31 years old, in human years. A big birthday party is planned for Bobi today, according to Guinness World Records.

It will take place at his home in the rural Portuguese village of Conqueiros in Leiria, western Portugal, where he has lived his entire life.

2. The FDA has officially changed its policy to allow more gay and bisexual men to donate blood

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that they’ve eased restrictions on blood donations by men who have sex with men in an effort to address blood shortages. The new policy recommends a series of individual risk-based questions that will apply to all donors, regardless of their sexual orientation, sex, or gender. Gay or bisexual men in monogamous relationships will now be permitted to donate blood.

3. Illinois passes bill to ensure community college credits transfer to public universities

The Illinois General Assembly has passed a bill that would help community college students transfer to public universities.

It would ensure that certain classes taken at community colleges could be transferred to any higher education institution in the state. Some schools currently only count community college coursework as elective credits.

4. Brazilian President Lula recognizes 6 new indigenous territories stretching 620,000 hectares, banning mining and restricting farming within them

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has decreed six new indigenous reserves, banning mining and restricting commercial farming there. The lands - including a vast area of Amazon rainforest - cover about 620,000 hectares (1.5m acres).

Indigenous leaders welcomed the move, but said more areas needed protection.

5. More than 1,000 trafficking victims rescued in separate operations in Southeast Asia

More than 1,000 trafficking victims were rescued in separate operations in Southeast Asia over the last week, officials in Indonesia and the Philippines said. 

Indonesian officials said Sunday they freed 20 of their nationals who were trafficked to Myanmar as part of a cyber scam, amid an increase in human trafficking cases in Southeast Asia. Fake recruiters had offered the Indonesians high-paying jobs in Thailand but instead trafficked them to Myawaddy, about 567 kilometers (352 miles) south of Naypyidaw, the capital, to perform cyber scams for crypto websites or apps, said Judha Nugraha, an official in Indonesia's Foreign Affairs Ministry.

6. A peanut allergy patch is making headway in trials

An experimental “peanut patch” is showing some promise for toddlers who are highly allergic to peanuts. The patch, called Viaskin, was tested on children ages one to three for a late-stage trial, and the results show that the patch helped children whose bodies could not tolerate even a small piece of peanuts safely eat a few.

After one year, two-thirds of the children who used the patch and one-third of the placebo group met the trial’s primary endpoint. The participants with a less sensitive peanut allergy could safely tolerate the peanut protein equivalent of eating three or four peanuts.

7. Critically endangered lemur born at Calgary Zoo

The Calgary Zoo has released pictures of its newest addition, a baby lemur. The zoo says its four-year-old female black-and-white ruffed lemur, Eny, gave birth on April 7. The pup’s father is eight-year-old Menabe. The gender of the pup has not been confirmed but the Calgary Zoo says the pup appears bright-eyed and active and is on the move.

The black-and-white ruffed lemur is registered among the 25 most endangered primates in the world, due mostly to habitat loss and hunting.

----

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[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Corey Walker

The author of a book on Jewish American identity enjoyed a sellout crowd at a rescheduled event after the original discussion was canceled over the presence of a Zionist panelist.  Joshua Leifer, author of Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, spoke alongside Rabbi Andy Bachman at the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn on Monday. The original discussion, which was scheduled at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn last Tuesday, was canceled at the last minute by an employee who did not want the bookstore to platform a “Zionist” rabbi.  During Monday’s discussion, Leifer lambasted the cancellation as both “wrong and antisemitic” as well as “the dumbest strategic thing you can do.” The bookstore’s owner, Daniel Power, later clarified in an interview that Powerhouse Books does not maintain an official ban on Zionist authors and that the employee acted on her own. He revealed that the employee responsible for canceling the event quit on her own accord before he could fire her.  The bookstore issued an apology soon after the incident, writing, “litmus tests as a precondition for participation in public life are wrong. Rejections of dialogue, debate, and nuance are wrong.” Despite the inconvenience, the backlash over the viral incident seems to have benefited Leifer. Roughly 300 people attended the rescheduled discussion, as opposed to the estimated two dozen that showed up for the original event. Leifer’s book currently holds the number one spot in the “History of Judaism” section on Amazon. “In large part, this sanctuary is filled because of what happened,” Bachman stated at the event.  Leifer, a political progressive and writer, has issued blistering criticisms of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. He has called for a change in the “status quo” of Israeli policy and has encouraged the American Jewish community to reexamine its relationship with Israel.  In an essay published in The Atlantic, Leifer reflected on the decision to snub Bachman for being a Zionist, saying that it “exemplified the bind that many progressive American Jews face.” “We are caught between parts of an activist left demanding that we disavow our communities, even our families, as an entrance ticket, and a mainstream Jewish institutional world that has long marginalized critics of Israeli policy. Indeed, Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver,” Leifer wrote. “My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder,” Leifer added. “Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction.” 

Leifer still doesn't get it. Jew-hatred, in the guise of Israel hatred has become part of the progressive canon. "Critics of Israeli policy" are lionized, not marginalized among progressive Jews.

[iww-gnv]

While the rest of the US workforce makes at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25, Americans below 20 years of age can be paid as low as $4.25 for the first three months of their job under US labor law. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) allows young workers to be paid below minimum wage—also known as a “subminimum wage” or “youth opportunity wage”—on a temporary basis. In D.C. and nine states including Washington, Illinois, and New Hampshire, employers can pay young workers subminimum wages permanently under state laws, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) published Jan. 8.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Joseph Figliolia and Leor Sapir

Published: May 14, 2024

Ted Hudacko’s fate was sealed when his son’s court-appointed counsel, Daniel Harkins, wrote in his notes, “[t]hese parents have a choice, they can either continue to believe that they should be in total control of their child’s life or they can come to an understanding that those days are past . . . and give their children some independence and the ability to make some of their own decisions.”

The decisions in question? Whether to start Hudacko’s trans-identified 16-year-old son on a puberty-blocker regimen, followed by a course of estrogen.

As Abigail Shrier recounted in a 2022 City Journal investigative report, shortly after returning from a trip to New York with their two sons, Hudacko’s wife, Christine, told him that she wanted a divorce—and that their oldest son identified as transgender. During divorce proceedings, the presiding judge, Joni Hiramoto, granted Hudacko shared legal and physical custody of his youngest, but stripped him of all custody of his trans-identified son. Hudacko was concerned about administering experimental drugs and preferred to wait and see if his son’s gender issues might resolve on their own, as usually happens in such cases. To the California judge, this confirmed his unfitness as a father.

Hiramoto’s view is shared by a growing social movement bent on deeming parents “abusive” for declining to “affirm” their child’s “gender identity.” The idea that failing to endorse a child’s identity constitutes psychological abuse has spread across major American institutions and power centers and is reflected in recent court precedent, school “social transition” policies, journal publications, and several proposed state laws. Illinois’s House Bill 4876, for example, would redefine child abuse to include denying minors “necessary medical . . . gender-affirming services,” meaning parents who take a more cautious approach to their child’s dysphoria—an approach endorsed by a growing number of European countries—could become targets of investigation by the Illinois Department of Children and Families, with some even losing custody.

The Biden administration is seeking to entrench this redefinition of “abuse” with its recently published foster-care regulations. Guided by misleading characterizations and omissions of existing research, the new rules from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) enshrine activist talking points about what constitutes a child’s “best interest,” with dire implications for foster children and parents alike.

Under the new rules, state agencies must follow specific protocols when placing “LGBTQI+” foster children in residential settings. Given what the ACF describes as the “specific needs” of these children, the agency requires federally funded providers to qualify as “Designated Placements” to serve such youth. To obtain this designation, providers must undergo specialized gender-identity and sexual-orientation training, facilitate access to “age- or developmentally appropriate resources, services, and activities that support the [child’s] health and well-being,” and “commit to establishing an environment that supports the child’s LGBTQI+ status or identity.” State foster agencies, to get federal funds, must develop and submit to the ACF case plans that ensure each child is placed in the most “appropriate setting available.”

Repeating popular activist talking points, the ACF claims that refusing to use a child’s chosen name and pronouns is linked with poor mental-health outcomes. The agency then follows a familiar pattern of citing self-reported survey data to show a supposed connection between “gender affirmation” and positive mental-health outcomes in trans-identifying kids. Surveys of this kind, however, cannot support the ACF’s conclusion that “significant mental health disparities” facing “LGBTQI+” youth “result from experiences of stigma and discrimination.”

One of the ACF’s sources, a research brief from the Trevor Project, claims that “LGBTQ youth” who say they have been in foster care had nearly three times greater odds than non-foster youth of reporting a past-year suicide attempt (notably, the final rules incorrectly cite the wrong Trevor Project survey for this claim instead of the correct survey cited in the proposed rules). The agency’s purpose in citing this study is to imply that youth suicidality is driven by how foster parents deal with the “gender identity” of those in their care. But the correlation has an alternative explanation: Youth who enter the foster system have more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) than do non-foster children, a fact linked to increased suicidality. It’s possible that foster youth with more ACEs and higher suicidality are also more likely to adopt a transgender identity as a maladaptive coping mechanism. This makes sense, given the weakness of the “minority stress” hypothesis and the mounting evidence of elevated rates of co-occurring, suicidality-linked conditions in trans-identified populations that predate their trans-identification.

The U.K.’s recent Cass report bolsters this view. In that review, foster youth were overrepresented in the first clinical cohort seen at the nation’s gender-identity clinic, with nearly a quarter of referrals having spent time in foster care. A systematic review cited in the report found that among children referred to gender clinics, maternal mental illness (53 percent) and substance abuse (49 percent), paternal mental illness (38 percent) and substance use (38 percent), and combined neglect and abuse (11 percent to 67 percent), were very common—meaning that kids at the clinic likely had a higher-than-average number of ACEs, and may have identified as transgender as a coping mechanism.

A different survey question in the same ACF-cited brief tries to establish that trans-identified foster youth are “kicked out, abandoned, or run away” at disproportionate rates because of their “gender identity.” The survey question, though, conflates running away with being kicked out or abandoned; the actual reason for running away is not specified, and the results are not reported separately for each item. The group even disclaimed that its “data isn’t [sic] able to establish whether youth were kicked out, abandoned, or ran away prior to, during, or after being in foster care.” All we can conclude from this survey is that youth in foster care, who, for whatever reason, experience dissociation from their bodies or their sex are more likely to report negative family experiences compared with their peers.

Apparently unphased by these issues, the ACF used another Trevor Project survey to justify the agency’s claim that living in supportive homes results in fewer suicide attempts among trans-identified youth. Significantly, though, the Trevor Project report does not define the term “support,” effectively leaving it up to the child respondents to define it for themselves. Based on the most common ways youth in a separate item self-reported feeling supported—having parents use the correct names and pronouns, and supporting their gender expression—however, it seems reasonable to conclude that the respondents often conceive of “support” as affirming their identity. “Un-supportive” parents could therefore refer to anything—parents who are actually neglectful, or those who refuse to use their children’s preferred pronouns, or even those who do something as banal as not letting their children buy cell phones. Given the muddled inputs, the data are unpersuasive. Elsewhere in the document, the authors disclose that the self-reported suicide-attempt rate didn’t change much between youth who reported living in an a “gender-affirming” home (14 percent) compared to those who lived in a “not gender-affirming” home (20 percent).

Further, a child’s perceptions of “support” may be conditioned by his mental-health history, independent of his trans-identification status. A study by the Family Acceptance Project, for example, concedes that, “Independent of levels of family acceptance, transgender young adults reported lower social support and general health.” This is one weakness of the “minority stress” theory and the associated research, as noted by J. Michael Bailey: it never empirically tests for the possibility that the group in question has greater sensitivity to stressors to begin with, trading on the classic correlation/causation confusion. It is possible, therefore, that youth with more severe psychiatric issues are both more likely to identify as trans and to perceive and report familial situations as unsupportive.

The ACF later asserts that “research consistently shows that when LGBTQI+ youth experience supportive environments and services, they experience the same positive mental health outcomes as other youth.” It cites a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) report to justify this claim.

The citations SAMHSA uses to support its view that “access to gender affirmation can reduce gender dysphoria and improve mental and physical health outcomes among transgender and gender diverse people,” however, are two “conceptual framework” papers, not rigorous empirical studies. These documents cannot possibly provide the required evidence. Meantime, so-called social transition—publicly recognizing a trans-identifying child’s chosen identity, a practice the SAMSHA report endorses—has not been shown to be necessary in improving mental health in high-quality research. A 2023 study from the U.K., for example, found “no significant effects of social transition or name change on mental health status.” That finding is corroborated by a new systematic assessment published as part of the final Cass Review, which found no credible evidence that social transition is either helpful or harmful. Other emerging evidence suggests that “social transition” may interfere with the natural resolution of gender dysphoria and greatly increase the chances that a passing phase becomes the basis for lifelong and potentially harmful medical interventions.

The Cass Review alludes to this possibility, emphasizing that social transition is “an active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning and longer-term outcomes.” The Review recommends consulting a clinician when deciding whether or how to facilitate social transition for children. The Biden administration’s ACF, in contrast, instructs state recipients to ensure social transition on demand, no clinical input required.

The SAMHSA report—which, as mentioned, also endorses social transition—claims that “[e]xtensive research indicates that even just one supportive adult, such as a family member, teacher, or mental health provider, can have a positive impact on the mental health of youth of diverse sexual orientation and/or gender identity; such support can reduce adverse mental health impacts including suicide.” However, the research SAMHSA cites in support of this claim looked only at acceptance of sexual orientation, not of “gender identity.”

This points to another concern about social transition: the most common outcome of dysphoria is not a transgender identity, but homosexuality. As the DSM-5 observes, among childhood “desisters”—people who once identified as transgender or experienced dysphoria but later revert to identifying as their biological sex or cease having dysphoria—63 percent to 100 percent of natal males and 32 percent to 50 percent of natal females turn out to be gay.

The ACF guidance compares objections to child gender transition with “conversion practices” and claims that multiple professional organizations agree that gender-identity conversion efforts have been “rejected as harmful.” This comparison is spurious, however, and has been addressed by psychologist James Cantor in response to an American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on “gender-affirming care,” which made the same argument. Cantor said that the AAP’s claim about “conversion” practices “struck me as odd because there are no studies of conversion therapy for gender identity. Studies of conversion therapy have been limited to sexual orientation, and, moreover, to the sexual orientation of adults, not to gender identity and not of children in any case.” He added, “it simply makes no sense to refer to externally induced conversion. The majority of children ‘convert’ to cisgender or ‘desist’ from transgender regardless of any attempt to change them.”

The ACF’s rules treat “LGBTQI+” youth as a monolith. They assume that research done on gay and lesbian youth applies seamlessly to youth who identify as transgender. This is a well-known strategy of transgender activism: to exploit the ignorance of well-meaning Americans about the differences between sexual orientation and gender dysphoria. 

The finalized rules also fail to address the actual problems in the U.S. foster system. Data on foster-care capacity show a critical shortage of available homes. State foster systems remain generally underfunded, and the average annual turnover rate at U.S. child welfare agencies is almost 30 percent. The ACF could have endeavored to solve these problems.

Instead, the Biden administration seeks to use federal policy to cajole foster families and agencies into affirming a child’s mistaken gender identity, entrenching the idea that failing to do so constitutes abuse. The policy will compound the challenges facing some of the nation’s most vulnerable children.

[offender42085]

Post 974

The jury took just 16 minutes to find guilt of the inmate having a computer flash drive in his cell....

Bradley S Yohn, Illinois inmate S12154, born 1987, incarceration intake July 2023 at age 36, parole eligible November 2135, scheduled for discharge November 2136

Introducing/Possession of Contraband into a Penal Institution, Aggravated Battery/Use of Deadly Weapon, Aggravated Fleeing with Damage to Property in excess of $300, Home Invasion with Weapon, Aggravated Kidnapping, Aggravated Vehicle Hijack

In June 2023. a Springfield man was in court for two different cases in front of two different judges.

Bradley S. Yohn, 36, was in court for a sentencing hearing following an April 2023 conviction in one case and a motion hearing on a separate case where he's charged with two counts of home invasion, one count of aggravated kidnapping, one count of aggravated vehicular hijacking, one count of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one count of residential burglary.

The sentencing hearing was for the case against Yohn for possessing contraband in the Adams County Jail. A jury took just 16 minutes to find Yohn guilty of having a computer flash drive in his cell in contradiction of jail policies.

Judge Frank McCartney heard arguments from Yohn related to evidence and testimony that was presented in that trial. McCartney denied the motions, stating that Yohn asked good questions to make his case, but the jury decided it was not enough to be found not guilty.

Following the recommendations of Adams County state's attorney's office lead trial attorney Joshua Jones, McCartney sentenced Yohn to seven years in the Illinois Department of Corrections on the conviction. Yohn will serve the sentence with day-for-day credit and 205 days credited for time served.

In July 2023, Yohn was convicted of the more serious crimes and sentenced to more than 100 years. 

3u

[odinsblog]

Alvin Taylor and his sister, Pearl, were kids when the City of Palm Springs, California began burning down their neighbours' homes. But they still remember the smell of the smoke.

"We would come home, and a neighbour's house would be gone - just burned rubble," Pearl Taylor Devers said.

In 1965, the City of Palm Springs began razing the Taylors' predominantly black neighbourhood to make way for commercial development near the city centre. Their father, a carpenter, had built their modest home from the foundation up. Their mother, a house cleaner, had worked for celebrities like Lucille Ball and the family of Amelia Earhart, and took the children to church every Sunday.

The Taylors grew up in an area of Palm Springs known as Section 14; racial segregation made the neighbourhood one of the few places where black people could purchase a home.

But that was before the fires. Every week a new home would go up in flames - sometimes with a neighbour's belongings inside. The Taylor family moved from home to home in Section 14, trying to outrun the flames. Each time their house was destroyed.

After a lengthy investigation, a 1968 report from the California Department of Justice deemed the destruction of Section 14 a "city-engineered holocaust".

Onlookers watch a "controlled burn" of a home in Section 14 of Palm Springs.

Nearly six decades later, survivors of Section 14 could finally see restitution after the California Department of Justice Reparations Task Force issued a sweeping set of reparations proposals last week.

The thousand-page report sets out 115 legislative recommendations to address inequalities among black Californians and ensure that injustices - like the destruction of Section 14 - never happen again.

Among the recommendations is a controversial proposal for cash payments of at least $1.2m (£943,400) to each black descendant of slaves.

Members of the task force said they hope their report helps the public understand the true cost of racism in California, regardless of whether the government ends up deciding to give direct cash payments or not.

The issue is highly divisive in the state. A new poll from the Public Policy Institute of California found that 54% of likely California voters had an unfavourable view of the task force, while nearly the same amount, 59%, believe the state should offer a formal apology for human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants.

The atmosphere was charged on Thursday, when the report was presented to the public, with some saying payments could not come soon enough.

"It's my money, and I want it now," one woman yelled.

Others said it was unfair to ask this generation to pay for the sins of the past through reparations that will ultimately be funded by tax dollars.

California Republican Assembly member Bill Essayli, who is Lebanese-American, said he opposes the recommendations of the task force.

"This whole thing of focusing on people's race and victimhood, [it] is nothing but an attempt to divide Americans and pit them against each other," he told the BBC.

Nothing untouched by racism

This debate is nothing new. Americans have argued over the idea of reparations since the end of the Civil War.

In recent years since, members of Congress have tried - and failed - to establish a commission to study proposals for reparations for African Americans.

While reparations efforts might have stalled on the federal level, local discussions have intensified, especially in the years since the murder of George Floyd. Evanston, Illinois became the first city in the US to give financial compensation for racist housing discrimination. But California's plan, if implemented, would be the most sweeping to date.

Dr Cheryl Grills, a clinical psychologist who specialises in racial trauma and was appointed to the task force, said it is necessary to acknowledge how the past continues to impact people today.

"Enslavement may have ended, but the ideology and the mechanisms to try to keep black people at the bottom are very much still with us," Dr Grills said.

Nothing is left of the Taylors' home but rubble. It was destroyed more than 60 years ago, but the lot remains empty.

It's a lesson the Taylors say they learned first-hand. They say the destruction of their home in Section 14 formed a core memory that would shape the rest of their lives.

Their father, a proud man, refused to abandon the home he built for his family. He tried in vain to secure a loan to buy the land, but at a time when most banks refused to give black Americans mortgages, he was left with few options.

(continue reading)

[tomorrowusa]

Minnesota has had a narrow Democratic trifecta since early 2023. Since then, the legislature has been cranking out progressive legislation with Gov. Tim Walz signing it.

A new measure authored by first-term State Rep. Leigh Finke (DFL-66A) would prevent educational institutions and local governments from removing Pride flags and related symbols.

Minnesota schools, colleges and local governments would be barred from removing rainbow pride flags, banners or posters under a bill moving through the state Legislature. The proposal advanced through the House Local Government Finance and Policy Committee on Tuesday and is set to move to a full floor vote after LGBTQ+ advocates said it would provide support for the community. GOP lawmakers said it was an overstep. “The bill does not require anyone to display rainbows, nor does it supersede policies that prohibit the display of all banners, flags or posters,” said bill author Rep. Leigh Finke, DFL-St. Paul. “It just prohibits rainbows from being singled out and banned in schools, libraries and other government spaces.”  Several states are weighing bills that take the opposite approach and would prohibit pride flags from being flown in classrooms and other settings.  “The rainbow is a sign of hope and affirmation to the 2SLGBTQIA community — my community,” Finke continued. “For those outside of the queer community, it may seem trivial to legislate the definition and presence of rainbows. But in our community, depending on the circumstance, the value of a publicly-visible rainbow on a doorway or window or classroom is literally impossible to overstate.”

Minnesota seems to be competing with Illinois to be the Anti-Florida or Anti-Tennessee of the Midwest. 😎

BTW, in Minnesota the Democrats are known as the DFL for Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party – the result of a party merger in the 1940s.

Minnesota is another example of what can happen when Republicans loose control of a state legislature.

Find out who represents you in your legislature. If it's a MAGA Republican then contact your local or state Democratic Party to ask about helping to flip the district(s) or the entire legislative chamber.

Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.

[houseofbrat]

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...

[kny111]

New York would create a commission to consider reparations to address the lingering, negative effects of slavery under a bill passed by the state Legislature on Thursday.

"We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies," said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. "This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward."

The state Assembly passed the bill about three hours after spirited debate on Thursday. The state Senate passed the measure hours later, and the bill will be sent to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for consideration.

New York would be following the lead of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020. That group recommended a formal apology from the state on its legacy of racism and discriminatory policies and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents. They did not recommend specific payments amounts for reparations.[1]

The New York legislation would create a commission that would examine the extent to which the federal and state governments supported the institution of slavery.[2] It would also address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by Black people in the state today.

According to the New York bill, the first enslaved Africans arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, around the 1620s and helped build the infrastructure of New York City. While the state Legislature enacted a statute that gave freedom to enslaved Africans in New York in 1817, it wasn't implemented until 10 years later.[3]

"I'm concerned we're opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago,"[4] said Republican state Assemblymember Andy Gooddell during floor debates on the bill. Gooddell, who voted against the measure, said he supports existing efforts to bring equal opportunity to all and would like to "continue on that path rather than focus on reparations."[5]

In California, the reparations task force said in their report that the state is estimated to be responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods. California's state budget last year was $308 billion.[6] Reparations in New York could also come with a hefty price tag.

The commission would be required to deliver a report one year after its first meeting. The panel's recommendations, which could potentially include monetary compensation for Black people,[7] would be non-binding. The legislature would not be required to take the recommendations up for a vote.

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is the first Black person to hold the position, called the legislation "historic."[8]

Heastie, the governor and the legislative leader in the state Senate would each appoint three members to the commission.[9]

Other state legislatures that have considered studying reparations include New Jersey and Vermont, but none have passed legislation yet.[10] The Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.[11]

On the federal level, a decades-old proposal to create a commission studying reparations has stalled in Congress.[12]

Some critics of reparations by states say that while the idea is well-intentioned, it can be misguided.[13]

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University said even calling them reparations is "presumptuous," since it's virtually impossible for states to meet the potentially hefty payouts.[14]

He said the federal government has the financial capacity to pay true reparations and that it should be the party that is responsible.[15]

"My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say there's no need for a federal program," Darity said. "If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed."[16] K, Blog Admin notes: [1] This is useful because it's attempting institutionalization of the divestment in needing money to solve the issue of slavery reparations and instead aims to provide a means to account for such a system by way of adhering to necessities. This seems like a legislative path to that. A formal apology is well overdue so the creation of these institutions, paired with divestment in money (which are literal enslavement notes) makes for said apology more effective and honest.

[2] Correct, slavery is handled and supported to this day at a state and federal level. Any strategies aimed at changing this enslavement system requires changes at both state and federal levels, otherwise what's the point? [3] Legislature like the one in 1817 what it did was make enslavement go covert while continuing to operate with the same engine. Which is why we need to correct any semblance of it existing by abolishing institutions that were created from slavery and repurpose ones sabotaged by past and existing pro slavery legislature. Reparations fixes itself to do just that.

[4] Read [3] because slavery's door was never shut. There's never been enough evidence, something I hope this legislature corrects, with regards to presenting when this "end of slavery" ever occurred. As far as everyone experiencing this god awful system is concerned slavery continued just fine.

[5] Slavery as a system created such a historical inequivalence for all involved that a path has never honestly been formed to claim we're all equal. How can we "continue" on something we've never even established?

[6] Translation: The enslavers who own this system over us and invested so much in slavery can't put their money where their labor is. This is our issue how? Legislature like this will help correct that.

[7] I would hope that this conversation around monetary compensation and reparations from enslavement systems involves a divestment plan from a currency note that has factual connections to and will continue to be looked at as an enslaver note to those who study slavery historically. So this might look like an institution that can help communities divest from ever even needing to use money due to their systemic connections to slavery.

[8] This legislature is needed and overdue, I wouldn't call it historic yet. People within government tend to have a low bar for what's historic and epic.

[9] Not enough people. 3 is not enough. This is a ridiculously low amount considering how easy it can be to sabotage this work as they have in the past, this increases that chance. They need more community input. Otherwise, what's the point?

[10] Further implicating these states with systemic slavery.

[11] Not enough for similar reasons that a slaver creating their own paper and telling you to live off of it is not enough to stop slavery.

[12] So the one thing that did have a semblance of working, you let it rock there, doing nothing? Seems like an institutional trend.

[13] How? Explain using evidence in the same way we abolitionists use evidence to prove slavery is not needed.

[14] Agreed, and they don't have the capacity to make their enslaver dollars mean much into the future. Money temporarily becomes pay outs which are like the apology letter you include system changes with otherwise its just enslavers recycling their image.. AGAIN.

[15] Agreed, but I hope this doesn't mean shift in focus from what needs to structurally change at a state level and what these types of legislature can do. I think federal changes should come with state strategizing as well.

[16] see [14] and [15]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch:

In continuing our tour of the lesser-covered but still potentially disastrous Trump campaign promises, I want to look today at the former president’s repeated vow to confer some sort of “immunity” on law enforcement officers. During Trump’s disastrous interview at the National Association of Black Journalists forum last month, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked him about this. In particular, she asked if he thought the Springfield, Illinois deputy who killed Sonya Massey — one of the more horrific police shootings recently caught on video — should be given “immunity.”

Trump stammered. He said the killing “didn’t look good to me,” and did not appear to object to the murder charges brought by local prosecutors against deputy Sean Grayson. He then quickly pivoted to a non-sequitur about violence in Chicago, then garbled, “There’s a big difference between being a bad person and making an innocent mistake.” Later in the interview Trump claimed, as he often does, that crime is soaring, and that post-George Floyd efforts to hold police more accountable are to blame. The truth of course is that Trump is the first president since George H.W. Bush to leave office with a higher murder rate than when he started. Crime has also dropped since Trump left the White House, and in most places is nearing the historic lows we saw prior to the pandemic. Trump’s calls to immunize police are clearly in reaction to the modest reforms we’ve seen since the murder of George Floyd. And they’re of a piece with his 2016 and 2020 campaign promises to “unleash” or “unshackle” the police to go after the bad guys without fear of recrimination.

It can be difficult to cobble together a coherent policy from Trump’s vague, stream-of-consciousness rambling. But his answer to Goba and his other public statements on police immunity suggest that, while he thinks police officers should be given the benefit of the doubt, those who engage in egregious, unambiguous abuse — like Grayson’s killing of Massey — could merit criminal charges. This, in fact, is pretty much how things already operate today. Less than 2 percent of police officers who kill someone while on duty are ever charged with a crime. We can debate whether that number is too high or too low. The point is that while criminal charges for police abuse are marginally more common today than they were before George Floyd, they’re still vanishingly rare.

The main thing Trump appears to want to change is who makes these decisions. Currently, the decision to charge police officers is made by locally-elected district attorneys or, in rare cases, by U.S. Attorneys independent of the White House. Trump wants these decisions to be made by him, or at least by those loyal to him. But Trump also clearly has no idea what he means by “immunity,” how immunity currently works, or what he could do to change it. For starters, he doesn’t seem to understand that immunity for police officers from criminal charges isn’t . . . well, it isn’t anything. It doesn’t exist. Trump first invoked this idea earlier this year while making the once ridiculous — and now, thanks to the Roberts court, all-to-real — argument that as president, he should be immune for any crimes he may have committed while in office. In the process, he compared the immunity he thinks presidents need to the immunity he thinks police officers need.

But police immunity from criminal prosecution isn’t a policy any serious person has ever suggested — not police unions, not Jeff Sessions, not the Manhattan Institute. You could make a persuasive argument that when prosecutors consistently fail to charge police officers for clear crimes, the police enjoy a sort of de facto immunity. But there is no law, policy, or regulation anywhere in the country that says police officers can’t be charged with crimes.

Trump appears to be confusing criminal liability for police with the post-George Floyd debate over qualified immunity — a form of immunity from civil liability, not criminal charges. It’s about how much protection police officers should get from lawsuits. Qualified immunity makes it extremely difficult to get lawsuits for police abuse in front of a jury. To do so, a plaintiff must show not only that an officer violated their constitutional rights, but that the officer’s actions were unconstitutional under “well-established” law. This generally means that you have to find a case in which another officer engaged in similar behavior, after which a federal court ruled that his actions were unconstitutional.

[...]

High probability, low impact

A Trump DOJ will almost certainly stop providing oversight for constitutional violations by police. Traditionally, when local prosecutors have refused to prosecute police for clear constitutional violations, federal law enforcement has stepped in — the FBI will launch an investigation, which might result in federal criminal charges. It’s a near-certainty that Trump will appoint DOJ leadership and U.S. attorneys who refuse to intervene in such cases. It’s also a near certainty that a Trump DOJ would stop seeking new consent decrees with police agencies with a pattern and practice of abusive policing. It’s also likely that the DOJ will stop enforcing existing decrees — or just laxly enforce them. Project 2025 calls on the next administration to “promptly and properly eliminate all existing consent decrees.”

A second Trump administration would also likely tie favored police and prosecution policies to federal funding. Currently, presidents don’t have much influence over local policing (though Trump will seek to change that, too). But they can use funding and other incentives to reward policies the president favors, and discourage those he doesn’t. Project 2025, for example, explicitly calls for denying federal funding to cities that don’t use stop-and-frisk. (Given the overwhelming data on these policies, it seems safe to say that the more discriminatory and racist the policy, the more Republicans seem to support it.) More generally, Trump and the Project 2025 people want less discipline in policing. They want officers using more force, more often (unless it involves people with close ties to Trump). They want more militarization, less deescalation, and less negotiation. This is the main reason why they also want to end federal training for state and local law enforcement, which they consider to too woke, too weak, and too conciliatory.

High probability, moderate impact

Moving up in seriousness, a Trump DOJ may also interfere when local prosecutors do try to hold bad cops accountable. His administration could threaten to withhold federal funding to jurisdictions in which local prosecutors and police agencies discipline bad cops, as he tried to do with sanctuary cities. A Trump DOJ may also try to bully cities away from voluntarily implementing police reforms, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to do in Chicago. Trump is also likely to pervert the intent of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division by opening investigations of local prosecutors and police agencies who do hold officers to account by launching “civil rights” investigations of those agencies based on alleged “reverse discrimination,” as previous Republican administrations have done in other contexts. Trump has already vowed to open “civil rights investigations” of “radical leftist prosecutors” who “refuse to charge criminals.” Project 2025 calls for this as well — criminally charging progressive DAs for not enforcing certain laws. (Back in reality, no DA has the resources to enforce every law. All DAs prioritize based on the resources they have). The 2025 blueprint also calls on the Civil Rights Division to divert resources from investigating police abuse to investigating public agencies, private businesses, and universities for DEI programs and affirmative action that engage in “reverse discrimination.”

[...]

Back in July, several media outlets reported that MAGA activist Ivan Raiklin has been assembling a Trump enemies list. The list apparently includes “high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, U.S. Capitol Police officers, officials at the FBI and other intelligence agencies, witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trials, and journalists at The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.” Once Trump takes office, Raiklin plans to recruit far-right sheriffs to arrest the people on that list. Raiklin also thinks he can also recruit tens of thousands of ex-military personnel, people he says were discharged for refusing COVID protocols. This is an unserious, unconstitutional, pie-in-the sky, batshit-insane scheme. But so was sending a bunch of idiots to the Capitol to stop Mike Pence from certifying electors in a bid to overturn the election. They tried it anyway. (Raiklin, by the way, is generally credited as the first person to float that Pence/electors scheme.)

So far, media outlets have been unable to find any sheriff who will commit to the plan. I’m not sure how much comfort we should take in that. Democrats currently run the DOJ. I doubt any sheriff is going to publicly volunteer himself as a participant in a criminal conspiracy to violate the Constitutional rights of, among others, the people who currently oversee the Justice Department. If Trump were able to make the DOJ into his personal law firm, fixer, and enforcer, I suspect things could change. The scheme doesn’t seem likely to get far in blue states. A Democratic attorney general, a state police force in a solidly Democratic state, or a Democratic governor with the National Guard would snuff it out pretty quickly. I’m less confident about red states, particularly those with feverishly MAGA attorneys general and governors. It could get at least far enough to intimidate and chill dissent, which is the whole point. And it’s more likely to get that far if the law enforcement officers who carry it out know they won’t be prosecuted for doing so.

Raiklin, by the way, isn’t just some fringe activist out of nowhere. He’s a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, and was an aide to QAnon conspiracist and unregistered foreign lobbyist Michael Flynn — the man Trump appointed National Security Advisor, the single most sensitive position in U.S. government. Raiklin and Flynn remain close, and Trump has said he’d appoint Flynn to another high-ranking position. I suppose that on some level, once we reach the point where sheriffs are making out-of-jurisdiction arrests of journalists and politicians with complicity from the DOJ, whether or not those sheriffs can later be charged or sued is probably the least of our problems. Like the mass deportation plan, when the details were reported, the MAGA faithful on sites like X-Twitter didn’t react with denial or skepticism. They reacted with glee.

Radley Balko exposes how Donald Trump’s two-tiered plans for law enforcement could impact policing in a 2nd Trump term: favorable immunity for cops who follow his tune, and retribution for those that don’t follow it.

[coochiequeens]

Another violent man trying to worm his way into spaces with vulnerable women. Did he feel like a woman when he attacked a women’s health center?

By Anna Slatz March 20, 2024

A trans-identified male serving a 53-year sentence for multiple domestic terrorism charges is suing the Bureau of Prisons, demanding transfer to a women’s prison. Emily Claire Hari, formerly known as Michael Hari, led a ragtag right-wing militia called Patriot Freedom Fighters, later re-named to the White Rabbits.

Hari, along with the small group, began engaging in criminal activity in 2017 with the intention of carrying out acts of domestic terrorism. In August of that year, Hari’s group set an improvised incendiary device near the Imam’s office of the Dar-al Farooq Islamic Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One of Hari’s associates, Micheal McWhorter, would later confirm the purpose of the attack was to “scare Muslims out of the United States.” No one was injured in the attack.

In November of 2017, Hari and his “soldiers” targeted the Women’s Health Practice in Champaign, Illinois, where they threw a pipe bomb into the building. The bomb did not detonate and was found by a receptionist of the clinic who called police to safely extract the device from the facility. 

Hari in Sherburne County Jail in 2021.

Hari and his militia would go on to engage in a series of petty crimes in an attempt to gather the funds to continue their operations, including robbing a Hispanic man and holding up two local Walmarts in Clarence, Illinois in December of 2017.

In early 2018, Hari and his ‘militia’ attempted to sabotage railroad tracks near Effingham, Illinois with a bomb. After the attack, the group sent ransom emails demanding $190,000 in cryptocurrency under threat they would damage the railway further. 

Shortly after, Hari tried to frame another individual for the crimes, but the effort would only lead to Federal Investigators more easily tracking him and the members of his militia down.

Hari and his colleagues were ultimately arrested, and, in 2021, Hari was sentenced to 53 years for his role in the Dar al-Farooq bombing. He later received an additional 14 years in 2022 on a number of other charges related to his domestic terrorist activity and the attempted bombing of the women’s clinic. The 14 years is to be served concurrently with the 53-year sentence.

During his trial, it was revealed that Hari identified as a transgender “woman.” While leading the White Rabbit militia, he had been searching terms such as ‘sex change,’ ‘transgender surgery,’ and ‘post-op transgender’ on the internet. Hari allegedly planned on fleeing to Thailand to get ‘gender affirming’ surgeries.

Hari had asked the court to take his gender dysphoria into consideration, and made a request for an amended federal prison placement based on his identity. The details of his request were placed under a seal and the presiding judge stated he would defer to the Bureau of Prisons to make the final call.

But Reduxx has now learned that the judge in the case recommended Hari be placed at FMC Carswell, a female institution, but that Bureau of Prisons instead sent him to a men’s facility. As a result, Hari launched a lawsuit agains the Bureau of Prisons in late 2022 in a case that has been quietly making its way through the US District Court in the Central District of Illinois.

Hari is seeking transfer to a women’s prison under the Bureau of Prison’s transgender policy, which was amended in February of 2022 to make a transgender inmate’s “personal safety” and gender identity a priority when determining housing.

In his complaint, which was hand-written, Hari claims he has been subjected to sexual harassment by “dangerous tranny chasers,” and made fun of for his gender identity. He has since filed over two dozen “exhibits,” attempting to show the court he does not belong in a men’s prison. Among these exhibits include photos of himself wearing a dress-like inmate uniform.

Hari formally applied for transfer to a women’s prison in October of 2023, attempting to exhaust his internal remedies.

In an email exchange dated January 10, 2024, the Transgender Executive Council, which makes housing decisions, re-affirmed his placement at the men’s facility and told Hari his case would be re-reviewed in November — something Hari had been told repeatedly in the past.

In a Motion for Miscellaneous Relief, Hari claimed that if he were not transferred to a women’s prison in November, he would go on a hunger strike and slice off his own penis.

“The hunger strike is a political protest against both the conditions that I have been held under, and the conditions that my transgender sisters have been held under in BOP custody,” Hari wrote. “If I am not given some reasonable assurance that I am to be moved to a gender affirming housing by November 5, I will initiate a hunger strike and auto-castration on that date.”

From the motion for miscellaneous relief filed on November 13, 2023.

Hari is currently housed at Allenwood USP, a high-security facility in Pennsylvania for male offenders. While he is classified as a “male” inmate, his name in the BOP system has been changed from “Michael” to “Emily.”

If Hari is moved to FMC Carswell, he will be one of several dangerous trans-identified males held at the facility.

As previously broken by Reduxx in December, a trans-identified male convicted of rape and child sexual abuse was transferred FMC Carswell after launching a lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons claiming “discrimination.” July Justine Shelby, born William McClain, was convicted on multiple counts of child pornography trafficking after being caught distributing photos of infants being sexually abused.

According to Keep Prisons Single Sex USA, there are approximately 1,980 transgender offenders in the federal system, of which 1,295 are trans-identified males. Of them, almost 50% are in custody for sex offenses. This is compared to just 12% of the general federal inmate population, meaning that trans-identified males are incarcerated for sex offenses at a rate of almost four times that of non-transgender inmates.

Between 2022 and 2023, there was an almost 23% increase of federal inmates who identified as transgender.

[dailyanarchistposts]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uline's billions fund voter suppression

Every billionaire is a policy failure, but every billionaire is also a factory for producing policy failures at scale. The political power conferred by massive wealth accumulation makes a sham of democracy, because “one person, one vote” is easily swamped by “one dollar, one vote.”

That’s why we need to abolish all billionaires, even the “good” ones who promise to support charities or causes we support. But today, I want to focus on some extremely bad billionaires, Dick and Liz Uihlein, owners of the packing-supply monopoly Uline.

The Uihleins are a multi-generational far-right clan of wealthy conspiracy peddlers. The family money starts with the founding of the Schlitz Brewery (and you thought Coors was the only fascist beer!).

The Schlitz fortune let Edgar J. Uihlein pour money into Charles Lindbergh’s America First movement, an antisemitic, pro-Nazi isolationist group that was part of a wider anti-Jewish movement that Lindbergh helped found, whose projects included translated and disseminating an English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax document purporting to reveal a conspiracy of Jewish bankers to take over the world.

Edgar Uihlein Jr — father of Dick — was a major funder of the John Birch Society, another conspiratorial far-right authoritarian group, who campaigned against secret communists, water fluoridation and civil rights. Edgar lavished funding on pro-segregationists.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Today on Propublica, Justin Elliott, Megan O’Matz and Doris Burke document the vast and shadowy support that Dick and Liz Uihlein provide to far-right causes, using the windfall profits from Uline, whose sales have ballooned along with the rise of ecommerce:

https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial

Back in 2002, Uline was pulling in $18m/year. By 2018, it was $712m. The pandemic goosed Uline’s sales still further. The Uihleins did their best to prolong the pandemic, putting money into local school-board races to oust trustees who advocated for covid safety measures:

https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2021/10/27/uilhlein-bankrolls-mequon-thiensville-recall/

They also campaigned against workplace shutdowns, and turned their own facilities into super-spreader sites where employees sickened at shockingly high rates:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/28/uline-dick-liz-uihlein-workers-covid-safety

That’s just a small corner of the Uihleins’ contributions to culture war bullshit in public schools. They’re also big donors to the American Principles Project and its anti “transgender ideology” attack ads, which also target abortion and “critical race theory.”

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/07/19/uline-chairman-funnels-2-5-million-to-anti-abortion-pacs/

There’s no anti-abortion candidate too extreme for the Uihlines. They spent $50m to support Darren Bailey’s bid for the governorship of Illinois. Bailey says that the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to abortion” (and Bailey also condemns “perversion in our schools” in the form of curriculum that acknowledges the existence of queer people).

Dick and Liz named their foundation after Dick’s father. The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation sends tens of millions to the architects of anti-democractic, anti-majoritarian, pro-voter-suppression organizations, including the Federalst Society, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Foundation for Government Accountability:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-filings-reveal-another-billionaire-dick-uihlein-behind-the-big-lie

The Uihleins play an inside/outside game, funding “think tanks” and other outside/astroturf groups, and also backing election campaigns directly. They’re the GOP’s largest federal donors. They’ve backed campaigns Jim Marchant, who is running for Nevada Secretary of State on a Big Lie platform that denies the 2020 election. They’re also backing the PA gubernatorial bid of Doug Mastriano, the Jan 6 insurrection participant who is associated with notorious antisemites:

https://whyy.org/articles/pa-2022-governor-elections-mastriano-jewish-democrats-press-conference/

The Uihleins epitomize the idea that rich people are born to be in charge of the rest of us, and that their wealth entitles — and even obliges — them to organize the lives of the people around them. They are workplpace tyrants, micromanaging bullies who force their employees to take down their kids’ drawings and ban women from wearing pants (they also ban corduroy!).

Employees who arrive for work one minute late are considered “tardy.” An employee may not display more than four personal items, and no item may be larger than 5x7 inches. “Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up.”

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23179330-uline-cubicle-dos-and-donts

The company hosts mandatory “lunch and learn” sessions for employees where they are required to endure speeches from Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and other far-right figures (the Uihleins once hired a Donald Trump impersonator as the warm-up act for one of these sessions).

The Uihleins are ideologues, but it’s a mistake to view their authoritarianism, antisemitism, racism, and homophobia as the main force of their ideology. First and foremost is their belief that they deserve to be rich, and that the rich should be in charge of everyone else.

That commitment to the one dollar, one vote system is the motivating factor behind everything else. The Uihleins fund voter suppression, sure, but that’s to weaken the power of the ballot box, which might otherwise check the power of oligarchs.

Oligarchs like the Uihleins say they believe the government is incapable of doing good, but it’s more true to say that they are committed to ensuring that the government can’t do good. They don’t want a small state — they want a captive one, one that will do their bidding.

In 2017, Donald Trump achieved the only significant policy victory of his presidency: a $2.3 trillion tax giveaway to the ultra-rich. Trump may have been in charge of the Executive Branch, but he lacked the executive function to get anything done. His plutocratic class solidarity overcame his poor impulse control for this issue alone.

The actual tax bill was an incredible mess. Lawmakers literally scribbled illegible hand-written amendments all over the 479-page bill, carving out tax breaks that sent millions to individual donors.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/12/02/handwriting-wall-and-page-senate-passes-tax-bill/915957001/

Two of the biggest beneficiaries of this corrupt bonanza were Dick and Liz Uihlein. Their pet senator, Ron Johnson, threatened to tank the entire tax bill unless he was given a clause that created deductions for “pass-through” entities. Johnson claimed this would “simplify and rationalize the tax code” for a wide range of businesses, but that was a lie.

In truth, only a very small number of businesses benefited from this, and right at the top of the beneficiaries were the Uihlnes, who donated $20m to Johnson’s campaign and got $215m back in the first year. Overall, they stand to make $500m from Johnson’s amendment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

The rich are a factory for producing policy failures, and the Uihlines operate one of the most efficient policy-failure factories in the world. Yes, they support causes that threaten to exterminate Black people, Jews and queers. Yes, they want to force women and children to give birth.

But most of all, they want to rule. They want to tell us all what we can wear and to dictate the maximum size of the keepsakes we post around our desks. They want to force us to attend their “learning sessions” and to watch their Trump impersonators and clownish politicians.

They derive this authority from being born rich, and from growing still richer. Having won the lucky orifice lottery and then leveraged the advantages of being born on third base, they get to impose their will on millions of others. They believe that some were born to rule, and the rest of us were born to be ruled over.

This is the core of the monopolist’s project — to deprive you of choices, so that you are cornered into doing the monopolist’s bidding. Not only do the Uihlines want to take away your vote, they also want to force you to fund it, by monopolizing the packing materials business, so that every time you ship a box, you support your own disenfranchisement.

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

[Image ID: A paper shredder that is shredding a document labelled 'official ballot'; the box is emblazoned with the Uline logo, as well as a VOTE HERE instruction and an 'I Voted' disc.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

mike luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 19, 2024

This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.

Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting. 

In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.) 

This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.

“I always tell people back home beware of bipartisanship," Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) said on the House floor during the debate. “The most bipartisan thing in Washington, D.C., is bankrupting our country, if not financially, morally…. It’s not just the spending, it’s all the terrible policies that are attached to the spending.”

Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election. 

A piece today in the Washington Post by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstadter about the difficulties of reestablishing democracy in Poland after eight years under a right-wing leader illuminates this moment in the U.S. Hockstadter’s description of the party of former Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski sounds familiar: the party “jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.”

Although voters in Poland last fall reelected former prime minister Donald Tusk to reestablish democracy, his ability to rebuild the democratic and judicial norms torched by his predecessor have been hamstrung by his opponents, who make up an “irreconcilable opposition” and are trying to retain control over Poland through their seizure of key levers of government. 

The U.S. was in a similar situation during Reconstruction, when in 1879, former Confederates in the Democratic Party tried to end the government protection of Black rights altogether by refusing to fund the government until the president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, withdrew all the U.S. troops from the South (it’s a myth that they left in 1877) and stopped trying to protect Black voting. 

At the time, the president and House minority leader James A. Garfield refused to bow to the former Confederates. Five times, Hayes vetoed funding measures that carried the riders former Confederates wanted, writing that the Confederates’ policy was “radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” for it would allow a “bare majority” in the House to dictate its terms to the Senate and the President, thus destroying the balance of power in the American government.

In 1879, well aware of the stakes in the fight, newspapers made the case that the government was under assault. American voters listened, the former Confederates backed down, and Garfield somewhat unexpectedly was elected president in 1880 as a man who would champion the idea of the protection of Black rights and the country itself from those who wanted to establish that states were more powerful than the federal government. 

Chastened, the leaders of the Democratic Party marginalized former Confederates and turned to northern cities to reestablish the party, beginning the transition to the party that would, fifty years later, usher in the New Deal.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[beardedmrbean]

I don't know if this is a news story you'd be interested in but there's a girl on tiktok who found out that during a call with a law professor about a pelvic exam performed on her without her consent the professor had her on speaker phone at her hair dresser. The girl had detailed her medical issues, previous sexual assault, and how she could tell a pelvic exam was performed even though she was under anesthesia and at the beginning of the call was assured everything was between the 4 people who she knew were on the call. She found out she was on speaker because the hair dresser asked her a question regarding it. The professor is on paid leave currently

https://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/university-illinois/ui-legal-scholar-on-paid-leave-over-alleged-mishandling-of-private-phone-call/article_b54fb4bb-acda-5e63-8c9d-ff3b8842b9da.html

I'm interested in most news stories, just can only run so many.

Female law professor even, huh that'll throw a wrench in people blaming evil men which I was anticipating.

This is about a month old too, may be a update for me to find as well.

This is not one I'm going to be able to not editorialize I see.

URBANA — The University of Illinois Ethics and Compliance Office is investigating a claim made against one of its prominent legal scholars — that she mishandled a call under the promise of privacy.

Robin Fretwell Wilson, director of the UI System’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs who holds a tenured appointment in the College of Law on the Urbana campus, is currently on paid administrative leave, UI Associate Chancellor for Public Affairs Robin Kaler said Monday.

“We can’t comment on specific personnel issues,” Kaler said in a written statement to The News-Gazette. “We take very seriously any reports of behavior that might violate the university’s policies or employment expectations related to professional conduct, ethics, research compliance or other matters.”

The allegations came forward from a now widely viewed TikTok post on the account of @bonniedoes, an artist and disability-rights advocate with more than 200,000 followers. The woman behind the account said she has not divulged her full name — on social media or to the university — due to a previous unrelated case of harassment. She has no affiliation with the UI.

Attempts to reach Wilson were unsuccessful.

According to emails shared with The News-Gazette, members of Wilson’s team affiliated with the UI’s Epstein Health Law and Policy Program, a legal research program, reached out to the woman last month after she shared a story on her social-media platform detailing an unauthorized pelvic exam that was performed on her while she was unconscious during an operation at a teaching hospital outside of Illinois.

The practice, sometimes done solely for medical students’ education and not for the benefit of the patient, is highly controversial and currently banned in 21 states, including Illinois. Since January 2019, Wilson and the Epstein Health Law and Policy Program have assisted with legislative efforts to require hospitals to obtain informed consent from patients before conducting invasive medical exams.

I appreciate that some folks are wording this in what I consider a correct way

non consensual is the correct term, it is for a legitimate medical purpose so sexual assault may be a reach, from a linguistic standpoint at least, I know that's what I'd call it tho.

Snopes piece is old obviously

Wilson and her colleagues did not act as lawyers for the woman, or being consulted for legal advice. According to email correspondences, they wanted to understand how TikTok could be used to help speed up this legislative process.

The woman said she agreed to talk, with the understanding that Wilson and three other members of the research team would be the only ones listening in. 

But while she was sharing the intimate details of what happened to her, she said later on her TikTok post, another voice chimed in with a question. The voice, she said, came from Wilson’s hairdresser, who was listening to the conversation while the professor had the call on speakerphone.

“I was stunned and didn’t know what to say,” the woman told the News-Gazette on Monday. “I was not at all prepared to handle that. I wanted to just hang up immediately.”

After the conversation ended, the woman emailed the team, calling Wilson’s choice to put the call on speaker “extremely inappropriate and tone deaf.”

“We were having a discussion about the trust between a patient and doctor being violated, while, yet again, my trust being broken by someone who tells me they are here to help,” she wrote in an email.

One of Wilson's colleagues replied to the woman that she was “not aware” Wilson was going to be in a public place during the call.

Wilson later replied in an email, “I owe you an apology since my schedule slipped, but I should have set that out front. Happy to call you privately regarding this.”

The woman has since spoken openly about her call with Wilson on her TikTok page, and brought forward her accusations to the UI System and the UI College of Law.

“Immediately upon learning of this matter, the University Ethics Officer communicated with the individual who posted their concerns regarding their interaction to obtain additional information,” Kaler said Monday. “There have been several other communications directly with that individual since the initial one. We care deeply about any individual who has been affected by inappropriate behavior.

“We believe that survivors of sexual misconduct should always be treated with empathy and dignity and in a manner that fully respects their wishes for privacy and confidentiality.”

Wilson is a well-known scholar in family law, bioethics and religious liberty. She was invited to the White House in December for the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act because of her role in helping to craft the legislation.

The woman said she does not plan to file suit against Wilson.

“I had a concern that she is not treating this issue with the respect and care it deserves, and not treating the victims with the respect and care they deserve,” she said. “The people in that hair salon, under no circumstances did they need to hear that information.” ___________________

There is absolutely everything wrong with this, good grief. Not seeing any updates either.

What a mess, that procedure needs to be illegal without consent, one of those things there's no law about because nobody though it would be needed I guess.