#Shelby County

[whenweallvote]

Barriers to the ballot box have increased significantly since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a critical section of the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling 11 years ago today.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Consider today’s anniversary a reminder to check your voter registration at WeAll.Vote/register.

[middleland]

Heritage Duo on the Big Four by Spencer Harmon

Via Flickr:

CSX I008-09 runs over the Great Miami River in Sidney at CP 163 on the Indianapolis Line with the Western Maryland and Baltimore & Ohio units leading on a dreary Sunday morning.     

[scrollonso]

my state... 🔥🔥🔥

[sangcounty]

Love in the Prairie State

[todieforimages]

Dr. Christopher M. Roulhac House of Memphis, Tennessee

The Dr. Christopher M. Roulhac House, located at 810 McLemore Street in Memphis, Tennessee, was built in 1914. The eclectic American Four Square was originally home to the Halpern family, but in 1926, the Roulhac family moved into the home. Dr. Roulhac graduated from Howard University Medical School in 1910 and moved to Memphis in 1913. He was a surgeon at Mercy Hospital and served as a medical…

[whitesinhistory]

On June 25, 2013, in a 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and effectively gutted one of the nation’s most important and successful civil rights laws. Despite adoption in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting, Southern states and others used poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence to deny Black Americans the right to vote for another century. Unchecked and systematic voter suppression targeted African American communities in the South for generations. After decades of organized civil rights activism, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) finally became law on August 6, 1965. It outlawed discriminatory barriers to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests and also imposed strict oversight upon states and districts with histories of voter discrimination. The new law quickly proved extremely effective; Black registration rates soon rose throughout the South, and Black officials were elected at the highest rates since Reconstruction. In this way, the Act directly confronted and addressed a century of racist voting policies. Section 4 of the Act required jurisdictions with the worst records of discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the federal government before changing voting laws. However, in Shelby County v. Holder, Alabama officials argued that preclearance was no longer constitutional or necessary, and the Supreme Court agreed. Chief Justice Roberts reasoned for the majority that “things have changed dramatically” since 1965—voting tests are illegal, racial disparities in voter turnout and registration have diminished, and people of color hold elected office “in record numbers.” Yet voting discrimination—and the need for the Voting Rights Act—continues in the present day, the dissenters pointed out. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in dissent that covered jurisdictions continue to propose voting law changes that are rejected under the VRA, “auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy eliminated.” The decision drastically reduced the VRA’s power to combat “second-generation barriers” to voting, like racial gerrymandering, which minimize the impact of minority votes. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective,” wrote Justice Ginsburg. “The Court appears to believe that the VRA's success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed. With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.” The decision unleashed a surge in voter suppression measures—including strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls—that are undermining voter participation by people of color today.

[conandaily2022]

US Marshals arrest Memphis, Tennessee's Travon Marshall

Travon Marshall, 19, of Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, United States has been arrested. He was wanted for a murder in Frayser, Memphis. Travon Marshall (©Shelby County Sheriff’s Office)

[onenakedfarmer]

HIV testing and prevention in Tennessee may be more difficult to attain come this spring. Dozens of organizations across the state are bracing for the loss of significant federal funding for HIV prevention after the state declined nearly $9 million in government funds from the CDC. It’s a move that could result in a spike of new infections and be a bellwether for the rest of the nation — especially in red states …

In Memphis, leaders are particularly concerned about what the funding cuts may mean because of the heightened risk factors in Shelby County. As recently as 2021, the Memphis area ranked third in the country for new HIV infections and first for new AIDS cases. It also had the fourth highest rate of poverty in U.S. cities larger than 500,000 people.

“It just makes no sense,” Diane Duke, executive director of the Friends for Life in Memphis, says. “In one of the poorest states in the nation with great health disparities, huge transmission rates for HIV, why would you give that money back?”

… Across the state in Memphis, Duke’s organization Friends for Life stands to lose more than $1.5 million in funding, which is distributed directly between their testing and treatment offerings, along with PrEP and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) access, and indirectly through pharmacy rebates for HIV meds. Even the nonprofit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which treats and researches HIV in addition to its cancer efforts, could lose funding.

Full story of this act of christian terrorism here.

[1991diamondaries]

[alabamare]

Pelham AL Pool Homes For Sale

Go Shopping for Houses For Sale in Pelham with ME! Featured Property: 471 Ballantrae Rd, Pelham, Alabama – Price: $680,000 – Beds: 4 – Baths: 4 – Square Feet: 3600 Follow this link to see more: Pelham AL Pool Homes For Sale (Clickable) One of the most peaceful plots in Ballantrae. Beautiful 4-bedroom 4-bathroom home located in Ballantrae Golf Community in the peaceful section of Kirkwall.…

[middleland]

OH Newport - Cynthian Cemetery 4 by Ken

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Michael de Adder :: @deAdder:: All the King's men

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 28, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 29, 2024

On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed. 

“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn‘t dispute it, you know,” Barr said to Collins when she asked him about it. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

Collins followed up, asking if Trump would call for executions on other occasions. “He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr answered.

Why not? Collins asked. 

“Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him,” Barr said. “I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.” Barr said he intends to vote for Trump. 

“Just to be clear,” Collins said, “you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen.… You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr said. “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

The contention of the former attorney general—who had been responsible for enforcing the rule of law in the United States of America—that a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency than a man who is using the power of the federal government to create jobs for ordinary people, combat climate change, protect the environment, and promote health and education, illustrates that Republican leaders have abandoned democracy.

In November 2019, in a speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, Barr ignored the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, to argue that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the king, but rather against Parliament. In the modern world, Barr argued, Congress has grown far too strong. The president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.

That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight. 

The theory took root in 1986, when Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, proposed the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, president Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.” 

In 2004, when Congress outlawed the newly-revealed U.S. torture program at remote sites around the world, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.” In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” Now, in 2024, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies. 

As Republicans have embraced unlimited power for the president, they have also turned against the right of American citizens to have a say in their government. Beginning with so-called ballot integrity measures in 1986, they embraced methods to knock voters off the voting rolls. That policy intensified after Democrats passed the so-called Motor-Voter Law in 1993, making it easier to register to vote. 

After voters nonetheless elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, the Supreme Court handed down the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, permitting unlimited donations to political campaigns, and corporate money flowed into them. In that same year, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP to elect Republicans to state legislatures ahead of the redistricting required after the 2010 census. Operation REDMAP resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering that would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win elections even if they won a majority of the vote. 

Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. The court said that preclearance was no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Republican-dominated states proposed new laws that discriminate against voters of color.   

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion. 

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government. 

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.  

Saturday night, journalists, politicians, and celebrities gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association, which protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House, assigns seats in the briefing room, funds scholarships for aspiring journalists, and gives awards for outstanding journalism. It is traditionally an evening of comedy, but last night, after a humorous speech, President Joe Biden implored the press to take the threat of dictatorship seriously. 

“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake,” he said. “Every single one of us has…a serious role to play in making sure democracy endures….  I have my role, but, with all due respect, so do you.” 

George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week apparently took this reminder to heart. “Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[odinsblog]

BREAKING: Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo paid Ginni Thomas OFF THE BOOKS—$80,000, with at least one $25,000 payment being routed through Kellyanne Conway.

Leo specifically said that the payments should not mention Ginni Thomas.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012. The documents reviewed by The Post do not indicate the precise nature of any work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or the Polling Company.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

In December 2012, the Judicial Education Project submitted an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging a landmark civil rights law aimed at protecting minority voters.

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[craigsumter-justice]

This will be used to improve the quality of my blog and the discovery process.

[todieforimages]

Once Listed in the Green Book, Memphis’s Presley Gulf Station Still Stands Today

Constructed in 1958 at 181 W. Brooks Road, Presley Gulf Station appeared in the 1963 and 1966 Green Book. 1966 Green Book

[inthecityofgoodabode]

August 2023: Graffiti, Hawk & Harvest

Seen while walking:

We went out to Plot 420 today to harvest & do some cleanup. We saw this hawk on the drive out:

Today's Plot 420 & 419 harvest: