Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52855"><span class="small">Marc Elias, The Washington Post</span></a>
Monday, 06 January 2020 14:17
Elias writes: "It's a political truism: The candidate whose name appears first on the ballot has an advantage over the competitors listed below. That's not just folklore - numerous studies around the country have shown that candidates who are listed first receive more votes."
A voting button. (photo: Getty Images)
Democracy Is Literally on the Ballot
By Marc Elias, The Washington Post
06 January 20
t’s a political truism: The candidate whose name appears first on the ballot has an advantage over the competitors listed below. That’s not just folklore — numerous studies around the country have shown that candidates who are listed first receive more votes. The advantage is so marked that in Illinois, one of several states where ballot position is based on the order of filing, candidates wait in line overnight to gain the top spot.
Elsewhere, the way ballot order is determined varies widely from state to state. In November, a federal court blocked Florida’s ballot order law, which automatically gave the top position in every race to the candidate of the party of the last-elected governor.
As a result of that law, Republican candidates have been listed first in every race on every ballot in the state for the last two decades. In 2016, Donald Trump’s name appeared before Hillary Clinton’s. In 2018, Ron DeSantis was listed above Andrew Gillum in the gubernatorial race, and Rick Scott was listed above Bill Nelson in the election for U.S. Senate.
The federal court in Florida struck down the ballot order statute because it unconstitutionally gave candidates of the governor’s party — in this case Republican candidates — an unfair advantage over their Democratic opponents. The court found the advantage to Republican candidates to be, on average, five percentage points. Trump defeated Clinton by just over one percentage point. DeSantis won his election for governor by four-tenths of a point. And Scott beat Nelson by just one-tenth of a point.
You would think that in an era of close elections, we could all agree that Republican candidates in Florida should not start with a five-percentage-point advantage simply because a different candidate for a different office in a different year, who happens to share the same political party, won his seat by four-tenths of a percentage point. Yet last month Florida’s Republican secretary of state and the Republican Party sought to block this ruling from taking effect. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit denied their motion for a stay, it set an expedited schedule to hear the appeal in February.
According to the state of Florida and the Republican Party, while there may well be a benefit to being listed first, courts simply have no way of knowing how big an electoral advantage to first-listed candidates is necessary to render the statute unconstitutional. If this argument sounds familiar, that is because it attempts to copy and paste into this case the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent partisan gerrymandering ruling. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the court held that since, in its view, there was no agreed-upon standard for how much partisan gerrymandering made a map unconstitutional, federal courts had to resist considering such cases at all. As many have noted, the Rucho case was a disaster for fair districting and democracy. So far, however, the court’s reasoning in that case has been limited to the unique circumstances of partisan gerrymandering claims and no other aspects of election administration.
If the reasoning of Rucho is extended into other areas of election and voting law, it will inevitably lead to similarly extreme partisan results. Just as states manipulate district lines to insulate politicians from competitive elections and advance partisan interests, unconstrained from judicial review, states will put a similarly heavy thumb on the scale when designing their balloting rules.
Without any judicial check, changing election rules for partisan advantage will become a tool for both parties. For example, the newly elected Democratic majority in Virginia could provide that Democratic candidates are listed first and Republican candidates are listed third. New Jersey could pass a law allowing Democratic candidates to be listed first with their party affiliation but limiting all other candidates to an alphabetical order without any party identification. New York could retain straight-ticket voting for Democrats but not for Republicans. Massachusetts could allow longer voting hours for registered Democrats than Republicans.
We count on the courts to prevent partisan mischief from overtaking fair elections. Giving one party a five-percentage-point advantage in every election is not a fair election. This is not a time for courts to shrink from their responsibility to protect democracy in elections. In this case, democracy itself is literally on the ballot.
FOCUS: Iraqi Parliament Resolves to Kick Out US Troops, and Trump Threatens Mother of All Sanctions
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
Monday, 06 January 2020 12:55
Cole writes: "By a simple majority, the Iraqi parliament in an extraordinary session on Sunday passed a resolution requiring the executive to take steps to preserve Iraqi sovereignty by expelling US troops from the country."
Iraqis attend the funeral ceremonies of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. (photo: Murtadha Sudani/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Iraqi Parliament Resolves to Kick Out US Troops, and Trump Threatens Mother of All Sanctions
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
06 January 20
y a simple majority, the Iraqi parliament in an extraordinary session on Sunday passed a resolution requiring the executive to take steps to preserve Iraqi sovereignty by expelling US troops from the country. The Sunni and Kurdish parties made themselves scarce, and there was only just barely a quorum. All the major Shiite parties voted for the resolution. Shiites make up 60 percent of Iraq’s population and they now dominate the upper echelons of the government and military.
Some members of parliament chanted “Death to America” during the session, an unprecedented event. That chant is associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iraq’s parliament is relatively weak, and implementation of the resolution is up to the prime minister and his cabinet. The signs are however, that Abdulmahdi and his successor (a new prime minister is in the course of being installed) will in fact press for the US military to leave the country.
Axios reports that US State Department initially attempted to stop the parliamentary vote from taking place (presumably by pressuring its Iraqi political allies). That press failed miserably, given the angry mood of the country after the US attack on an Iraqi military officer. After the resolution passed, State pleaded with the Iraqi parliament to rethink its decision, but somehow I don’t think that is going to happen.
Trump went ballistic on hearing the news and threatened to impose “sanctions like you’ve never seen” on Iraq if it does kick out US troops. He also demanded repayment for the costs of constructing the al-Balad Air Force Base. The US invaded Iraq illegally in 2003 and essentially stole its oil income for years to pay for its military occupation of the country.
It is highly unlikely that the world would cooperate with Trump sanctions on Iraq over this issue, and unlikely that the 4.6 million barrels a day produced by Iraq could or would be made up, so that any Trump sanctions would send petroleum prices skyrocketing. This development would be good for the health of the planet, since people would likely buy electric cars in that case.
Some Iraqi militia leaders suggested that US military training could be replaced with Russian or Chinese such help.
The Abdulmahdi government submitted a formal complaint to the UN Security Council over the US action. While the US will deploy its veto in the face of any condemnation, it will be an embarrassment to be condemned by the other members, if they take that step.
The US and other coalition forces in Iraq have announced the end of their training activities and of any active fighting of ISIL (ISIS), in favor of just protecting themselves. That is, the 5,200 US troops in Iraq are now not so much troops as hostages.
Caretaker Prime Minister Adil Abdulmahdi addressed the Parliament before the vote. He lashed the Trump administration for its assassination by hellfire missile last Friday morning of Iranian Qods Brigade commander Qasem Soleimani, along with the deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (who reported to Abdulmahdi and was a part of the Iraqi armed forces), and several others.
As Abdulmahdi told the story, Saudi Arabia had contacted him, seeking his mediation to cool down Riyadh’s conflict with Iran. Abdulmahdi said he sent the Saudi message to Tehran, and then invited Soleimani to come give the reply. (Soleimani came openly to Iraq on a commercial airliner and went through passport control with his diplomatic passport. There was nothing covert about the visit). Soleimani was on his way to consultations with his host, Abdulmahdi, when Trump rubbed him out.
Abdulmahdi’s account makes nonsense of everything Trump and Pompeo and Esper are saying about the circumstances of the murder of Soleimani. He wasn’t coming to kill Americans. That entire meme never made any sense. There were hardly any Americans in Iraq save for the 5,200 military personnel, and it is not clear how Soleimani could have killed any of them without starting a war.
Abdulmahdi said that the United States had been authorized by Parliament to send its troops to Iraq for only two purposes, to help in the fight against the terrorist organization ISIL (ISIS), and to help train the Iraqi military. No other activity on Iraqi soil, he said, was authorized, and the United States had violated the terms of this authorization with the assassination.
Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on parliament to rescind its authorization for the presence of US troops and to close the US embassy. Al-Sadr’s Sairun Party has 54 seats in parliament. He said merely passing a resolution in parliament is far too weak a response to what Washington had done, and urged the formation of an international militia to defend Iraqi sovereignty.
RSN: Madam Speaker, I Rise in Support of Withholding the Articles
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Monday, 06 January 2020 09:32
Ash writes: "The decision, Madam Speaker, to withhold the Articles of Impeachment is clearly justified by Abuse of Power. However, it is not the president's abuse of power as articulated in the Articles of Impeachment, but rather Senator Mitch McConnell's abuse of his power as Senate Majority Leader that necessitates the course you have rightly undertaken."
Thursday, October 31, 2019: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addresses reporters on the impeachment investigation of President Donald J. Trump. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Madam Speaker, I Rise in Support of Withholding the Articles
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
06 January 20
“Make no mistake, we are not impeaching this president. He is impeaching himself. If you are the president, and you obstruct justice, try to bribe a foreign leader, and threaten national security, you’re going to get impeached. End of story.”
– Susan Davis, D-Calif., Impeachment Debate, House of Representatives, Wednesday, December 18, 2019.
he decision, Madam Speaker, to withhold the Articles of Impeachment is clearly justified by Abuse of Power. However, it is not the president’s abuse of power as articulated in the Articles of Impeachment, but rather Senator Mitch McConnell’s abuse of his power as Senate Majority Leader that necessitates the course you have rightly undertaken.
Given Leader McConnell’s stark and clear declaration of intent to undermine the objectivity the Constitution envisions in an impeachment trial, you are compelled to safeguard the process by all means at your disposal.
Moreover, you are further empowered by the mandate of public opinion on the matter. By an overwhelming margin, the American people want precisely what you are negotiating for – open, public testimony from administration officials with direct, firsthand knowledge of the events for which the president has been impeached. They are surely entitled to have it.
In addition, unfolding events accelerate the urgency. New evidence of the president’s involvement in the Ukrainian affair now surfaces on an almost daily basis. White House emails newly obtained by Kate Brannen at Just Security illustrate a clear intent on the part of the president personally to withhold Congressionally approved aid from Ukraine as the administration demanded an investigation into former vice president Joseph R. Biden.
The New York Times report “Behind the Ukraine Aid Freeze: 84 Days of Conflict and Confusion” adds granular detail of how events unfolded to the public record. This information adds significant context and urgency to the case for impeachment. The administration officials cited in these reports were directly involved. The public has a fundamental interest in hearing from them in the Senate trial.
In totality, your demand for objectivity and transparency in the Senate impeachment trial is the least the public and history have a right to expect. I support your efforts.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52845"><span class="small">Richard Flanagan, The New York Times</span></a>
Sunday, 05 January 2020 13:35
Flanagan writes: "Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe."
An out-of-control fire in Hillville, in the Australian state of New South Wales, on Nov. 12. (photo: Matthew Abbott/NYT)
Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide
By Richard Flanagan, The New York Times
05 January 20
As record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom.
ustralia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen.
The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country.
The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe.
I Was Jailed for My Trafficker's Death. I'm Free Now - but Other Women Languish.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52842"><span class="small">Cyntoia Brown-Long, The Washington Post</span></a>
Sunday, 05 January 2020 13:28
Brown-Long writes: "In August 2006, a Tennessee prosecutor convinced a jury that I was guilty of murdering a man who had trafficked me for sex. I was told to expect a sentence of 60 years. I received a life sentence. I was 16 years old."
Cyntoia Brown. (photo: AP)
I Was Jailed for My Trafficker's Death. I'm Free Now - but Other Women Languish.
By Cyntoia Brown-Long, The Washington Post
05 January 20
n August 2006, a Tennessee prosecutor convinced a jury that I was guilty of murdering a man who had trafficked me for sex. I was told to expect a sentence of 60 years. I received a life sentence. I was 16 years old.
Last week, Chrystul Kizer, charged with first-degree intentional homicide and arson in the death of a 33-year-old man who had sexually abused her multiple times, was told by a Wisconsin judge that she faces life in prison. She was 17 when she is alleged to have shot him.
The more things change.
I take responsibility for the life I took in a moment of fear and desperation. But if my trial had been held today, my defense likely would have included a discussion of domestic-minor sex trafficking and the diminished culpability of girls who are caught up in it. Since 2006, there has been new understanding of the complex trauma that sex trafficking inflicts on its young victims. Children who are bought and sold for sex are not prostitutes, they are trafficking victims. Because of the new awareness brought to my case by advocates, then-Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) granted me clemency in January, scheduling me for release after 15 years served.
I was freed in August, but that can’t be the end of this story. It has always been my hope that my case would show people there is a need to change things for other young women in similar circumstances. A 2016 Vera Institute report showed that 86 percent of all women in jail report having experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, 77 percent report partner violence, and 60 percent report caregiver violence. I, too, was assaulted by a man who told me that I needed to prostitute myself to survive. I know my situation was far from unique.
But it is now painfully clear to me that my clemency has not translated into larger-scale change. As I spend my first holiday season at home since my release, many women languish in prison cells as a result of the same laws and practices that affected me.
There can be great power in putting a name and a face to injustice. When we hear a person’s story, it becomes that much easier for us to put ourselves in their shoes, to empathize — and to mobilize. But how we respond determines whether the faces we see can serve as representation for the ones we don’t. For every name we know — for every #freecyntoiabrown campaign — there are countless others who will never be heard. Unless we work to change the laws behind the injustices, identical injustices will follow.
We know about the 14-year-old trafficking victim, identified in HuffPost by her nickname “Lici,” serving 20 years in Texas. We know about Alexis Martin, a 15-year-old serving 21 years to life in Ohio for playing a role in the killing of her trafficker. Now, thanks to reporting by The Post’s Jessica Contrera, Kizer is in our timelines. But how many others are out there? And how do we advocate in a way that reaches beyond the few to the many?
For every injustice we see in the criminal-justice system, there is a law, practice or policy that allowed it to happen. That is where the change must happen. In Kizer’s case, a loophole in the law allowed a judge to deny her the ability to use an “affirmative defense” — the option to argue that she should be acquitted because the crime occurred as a result of her being trafficked. Now, unless her appeal is successful, a law specifically designed to protect victims of sex trafficking simply would not apply to Kizer. It is only when we bring the cracks in the system to light that we can effectively lobby to close them. It is only in closing these cracks that we can ensure justice for all.
A year ago, I was sitting in a prison cell, praying that the world would redefine what justice looks like for people like me. Chrystul, and all trafficking survivors, deserve the kind of justice that boldly acknowledges: “Your life matters, too.”
The scholar Cornel West encourages us to “be a voice, not an echo.” To be a voice in the face of injustice requires more than shouting into a bullhorn. It is our responsibility to become stewards of a system that exists to serve, and not to subject. That responsibility involves looking past the emotions, digging into the details and committing ourselves to advocating for change that affects everyone — not just the names we know. And the only way to ensure our voices are not mere echoes on a timeline is to pursue substantive changes to the laws, practices and policies that govern our justice system.
An injustice to one is a threat to us all. #FreeEveryCyntoia
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t’s a political truism: The candidate whose name appears first on the ballot has an advantage over the competitors listed below. That’s not just folklore — numerous 
y a simple majority
he decision, Madam Speaker, to withhold the Articles of Impeachment is clearly justified by Abuse of Power. However, it is not the president’s abuse of power as articulated in the Articles of Impeachment, but rather Senator Mitch McConnell’s abuse of his power as Senate Majority Leader that necessitates the course you have rightly undertaken.
ustralia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests 
