“The overwhelming majority of states allow any lawful voter to obtain an absentee ballot without having to justify their request. Texas, by contrast, allows only a minority of voters to obtain one. One provision of state law allows elderly voters to vote absentee. Another permits absentee ballots if a voter will be away from their home county on Election Day. A third provides that “a qualified voter is eligible for early voting by mail if the voter has a sickness or physical condition that prevents the voter from appearing at the polling place on Election Day without a likelihood of needing personal assistance or of injuring the voter’s health” — a requirement that, according to the state Supreme Court’s decision in Texas, applies only to people who are ill or disabled.
Civil rights groups and the state Democratic Party argued that this third provision should be broadly interpreted to allow anyone who could become infected with the coronavirus to vote absentee. The words “physical condition,” they argued, includes the physical condition of being susceptible to a deadly pandemic disease. In other words, during a pandemic that requires social distancing to control the spread of said disease, nearly everyone has a “physical condition” that should enable them to vote absentee.
In recent elections, older voters have tended to prefer Republican candidates over Democrats. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, objected to the broader interpretation of the law. At one point, his office even threatened to bring criminal prosecutions against any organization that encourages younger voters to request an absentee ballot. The state Supreme Court’s nine Republican justices ultimately sided with Paxton, although two of the nine did so for different reasons.
The court’s decision in Texas will not be the last word on whether younger Texans may vote absentee in November. In a separate Texas lawsuit, a federal trial judge ruled last week that the state cannot discriminate against younger voters. Among other things, he determined that the Texas law violates the 26th Amendment, which permits all otherwise eligible voters over the age of 18 to cast a ballot.
But the federal decision has been appealed to the notoriously conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and may ultimately be heard by a US Supreme Court that is frequently hostile to claims of voter suppression. So it is far from clear that younger Texans will be allowed to vote absentee.”
“the WHO did make some mistakes early on in the pandemic, such as not pushing China to allow international inspectors into the country as the coronavirus outbreak grew, and falsely asserting in January that “Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of Covid-19.
But that’s a far cry from proof of some special WHO-China conspiracy, and serves as a convenient excuse to distract from Trump’s lacking coronavirus response in the US — including ignoring months of US intelligence warning of an imminent threat to the country from the virus.”
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“the president’s decision will be a major blow to the WHO. America’s withdrawal means the health body will lose nearly $900 million in US contributions every two years, by far the most the body receives from any nation. Trump had already frozen about $400 million of that money last month when he first froze funding during a review of US-WHO relations.
The US will now be “redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs,” Trump said, without naming what those might be.
In one fell swoop, Trump is making the global coronavirus response harder to coordinate, has possibly ignited a congressional firestorm, and almost surely worsened the world’s perceptions of America.”
Homicide Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Havard T.H.Chan School of Public Health. FIREARMS AND FAMILY VIOLENCE Arthur Kellermann, Sheryl Heron. 1999. Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0733862705700924 Firearm possession and violent death: A critical review Wolfgang Stroebe. 2013. Aggression and Violent
“injunctions. When a court enjoins a particular defendant, they don’t just order that defendant to cease a particular behavior, they also can enforce that order with criminal sanctions or by imposing escalating fines until the defendant ceases their illegal conduct. A party subject to an injunction, in other words, can be squeezed so hard by court sanctions that they have no choice but to change their behavior.
Consider the case of Eric Garner, who was killed by a New York police officer’s chokehold in 2014. Although the NYPD had a formal policy barring chokeholds, it was frequently unenforced. The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board received 219 chokehold complaints against NYPD officers in just one year.
If one of the victims of those chokeholds had obtained an injunction against the NYPD, then a court could have imposed strict sanctions on the city until police chokeholds ceased. And Eric Garner might be alive today.”
“It is unclear whether ordering emergency curfews — that is, telling people they must stay at home and avoid public areas after a certain time in the evening, and increasing public police presence to enforce it — is effective in reducing unrest. Criminologists note there doesn’t appear to be an abundance of research on the matter. But some experts have raised concerns about the way curfews are likely to be enforced in communities of color and argue they could exacerbate the very dynamics that gave rise to the unrest in the first place: namely, that they will encourage confrontational policing at a time when people are demanding the opposite.”
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““Curfews are an extremely blunt tool that should only be used sparingly and as a last result. They give police tremendous power to intervene in the lives of all citizens,” he said. “They pose a huge burden on people who work irregular hours, especially people of color in service professions who may need to travel through areas of social disturbance in order to get to and from work at night.””
“empirical research has come out persuasively showing that riots in the past have not generally swung public opinion toward the causes they’re rooted in.
Particularly with the 1960s riots, the evidence suggests that white voters’ negative reactions to these uprisings in black communities fueled the rise of “tough on crime” politicians whose policies perpetuated some of the problems that protesters in the ’60s stood against and that demonstrators today are now protesting.
We don’t know if this research on the 1960s uprisings can be perfectly generalized to protests today, when the circumstances, political climate, and population are different. There are other studies suggesting that, at least in limited circumstances, riots have helped some causes.
But there are concerning signs about the way today’s protests are going. With violence becoming a bigger and bigger part of the news, figures like President Donald Trump can ignore the overall message and cause of the protests and instead focus on calling for “law and order” and the deployment of the National Guard. Some, like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), have called for military deployment in cities hit by riots. Unrest at protests is producing the very attitudes and positions — from “tough on crime” to the literal militarization of policing — that protesters are standing against.”
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“research from the past suggests the path to meaningful change, particularly for racial justice, is typically more successful through peaceful means.”
“Since the 2014 wave of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the number of black people killed by the police has gone down, according to data from Mapping Police Violence. So has the number of unarmed people of all races killed by police. And the number of unarmed black people killed by law enforcement has seen a sharper decline.
At the same time, activists have changed national media priorities. Once largely ignored, national outlets have begun to cover incidents of police violence more regularly since nearly six years ago when protesters brought the death of Michael Brown Jr. into the national consciousness. When George Floyd died in Minneapolis last week, it dominated media coverage because activism has changed the news agenda. Incidents of violence aren’t increasing — we just hear about them more.”
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“there is still a ways to go: Police still disproportionately target black people, and are rarely convicted of crimes in these cases.”
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“The huge imminent threat on a practical level is that essentially every state and city in America is on the brink of a budget crisis because of the pandemic.”
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“Pile on top of that Trump’s consistently unhelpful rhetorical posture, the increasingly overt partisanship of local police unions, and the countervailing growing popularity of broad anti-police sentiment (as opposed to focused calls for reform) on the left, and the relative good news of the past few years could end up looking like a blip.”