“The Supreme Court handed down a stern rebuke to some of the most right-wing judges in the country.., holding that no, judges do not get to micromanage how the Biden administration speaks to social media companies.
The vote in Murthy v. Missouri was 6-3, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court’s three Democratic appointees in the majority. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
As Barrett’s majority opinion lays out, this lawsuit never should have been filed in the first place, and no federal court should have entertained it. Her opinion holds that the Murthy plaintiffs, who raised vague allegations that the government tried to censor them, could not even show that the government did anything to harm them in the first place.
Murthy involves a wide range of communications among the White House, various federal agencies, and major social media platforms like Facebook and X (the website formerly known as Twitter). Some of these communications urged platforms to remove content, such as speech seeking to recruit terrorists, to spread election disinformation, or to promote false and potentially harmful medical advice — including false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines.
The plaintiffs in Murthy are two red states plus an array of individuals who had content removed or suppressed by at least one of the social media platforms. They claimed that platforms censored them because of pressure from the government, and that this pressure violates the First Amendment.
That is a highly dubious claim. While the First Amendment forbids the government from coercing media outlets into removing content, nothing prevents the government from asking a platform to do so. Indeed, at oral arguments in Murthy, both Justices Elena Kagan and Kavanaugh recounted times when, during their service as White House officials, they pressured journalists to remove or correct editorials or other content that contained factual errors.
Nevertheless, the far-right US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did not simply embrace this claim, it issued a vague and sweeping injunction forbidding the Biden administration from having “consistent and consequential” communications with social media companies — whatever that means. As a practical matter, this difficult-to-parse injunction made it virtually impossible for the administration to have any communications whatsoever with the platforms.
But the Supreme Court held that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to even consider these plaintiffs’ dubious First Amendment arguments, ruling that federal courts lack jurisdiction over this case.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/357111/supreme-court-murthy-missouri-fifth-circuit-jawboning-first-amendment
“On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled..that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion in Snyder v. United States for the Court’s Republican-appointed majority. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent on behalf of the Court’s three Democratic appointees.
Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As Kavanaugh writes, “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities, by contrast, “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.” (Emphasis added.)”
…
” As Jackson writes in her dissent, the most natural reading of this statute is that it targets both bribes (payments that “influenced” a future decision) and gratuities (payments that “rewarded” a past decision). As Jackson writes,
” veryone knows what a reward is. It is a $20 bill pulled from a lost wallet at the time of its return to its grateful owner. A surprise ice cream outing after a report card with straight As. The bar tab picked up by a supervisor celebrating a job well done by her team. A reward often says “thank you” or “good job,” rather than “please.””
Jackson argues that the statute should be read to prohibit “rewards corruptly accepted by government officials in ways that are functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe,” much like the payment at issue in this case appears to be.”
…
“Kavanaugh’s strongest argument is that the law makes it a very serious crime, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for a federal official to accept a bribe, but federal officials who accept gratuities only risk two years in prison. Meanwhile, the statute at issue in Snyder, which only applies to state officials, applies a 10-year sentence across the board. So Kavanaugh argues that it would be odd to read the law to draw a sharp distinction between bribes and gratuities given to federal officials but to make no distinction when state officials accept a gift.
In any event, the decision in Snyder is narrow. It does not rule that Congress could not ban gratuities. It simply rules that this particular statute only reaches bribes. That said, the Court’s Republican majority also has a long history of imposing constitutional limits on the government’s ability to fight corruption and restrict money in politics.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/357170/supreme-court-snyder-united-states-corruption
“The partnership does not make NATO a direct player in the Indo-Pacific but allows it to coordinate with the four partners on issues of mutual concern, said Mirna Galic, senior policy analyst on China and East Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For example, she wrote in an analysis, they can share information and align on actions such as sanctions and aid delivery but do not intervene in military crises outside of their own regions.
The NATO summit will allow the United States and its European and Indo-Pacific allies to push back against China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to Luis Simon, director of the Centre for Security Diplomacy and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/counter-china-nato-asian-partners-040750159.html
U.S. and China: Edging Toward the Brink?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il_XQhIBR7M
Why Devout Turkish Muslim Denounced Islam After Dissecting Quran (ft. @ApostateProphet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRS9Kdh9HSE
The Supreme Court Is Going To Regret This
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1ycqDxg1-M
Kamala Harris on Kamala Harris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jg3a2Da9xY
“Even if the CDC data isn’t perfect, many scholars agree that far too many people are dying during and after childbirth in the United States.
We have many sources of information about maternal mortality, said Laurie Zephyrin, a senior vice president for advancing health equity at the Commonwealth Fund. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics releases the numbers that have been most debated recently, but the agency also has a Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System that employs medical epidemiologists to comb through death records from pregnancy up to a year after birth. Meanwhile, state and local maternal mortality review committees also independently investigate maternal deaths. “All three of these ways of collecting data are showing that we have a problem in this country,” Zephyrin said.
We can also understand US maternal health better by putting it an international context. Comparing maternal mortality across countries can be complex, for some of the same reasons it’s complicated to count maternal deaths within the US. Some countries use a pregnancy checkbox like the one added in the US while others do not, leading to concerns that other nations may be underreporting maternal deaths, making the US look worse by comparison.
However, we know that the US lags behind other countries when it comes to policies proven to improve maternal (and overall) health. Among wealthy countries, the US is the only one without universal health care, said Munira Gunja, a senior researcher with the Commonwealth Fund’s International Program in Health Policy and Practice Innovations. It’s also the only one without federally mandated paid parental leave, and it’s the only country that doesn’t provide home visits and other comprehensive postpartum care, instead often limiting birthing people to a lone doctor’s appointment six weeks after birth. “The US is a clear outlier, particularly when it comes to postpartum support,” Gunja said.
Meanwhile, everyone involved in the debate over counting maternal deaths agrees that Black birthing people are dying at a disproportionately high rate. That disparity shows up whether you use the CDC’s method or Joseph’s, and it’s indicative of bigger problems within the US health care system, experts say. Black Americans in general have a lower life expectancy than white Americans, and Black babies are more likely to be stillborn or die in infancy. “This is across the board, not just in maternal health,” said Angela D. Aina, co-founder and executive director of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance.
Some have argued that the language of “crisis” is unproductive, frightening pregnant people and prospective parents and clouding the search for solutions. “The constant drumbeat that maternal mortality is ‘commonplace’ and that pregnancy is ‘deadly’ doesn’t empower me with information to make my own decisions,” Jerusalem Demsas writes at the Atlantic. “It just stresses me out.”
Reasonable people can disagree over what constitutes a crisis and over the best way to measure how often Americans experience the tragic situation in which a person who is already sick dies from their illness after giving birth.
But experts do not disagree on the basic premise that too many pregnant and birthing people are dying in America, that many of their deaths are preventable, and that we already know some of the reforms — from paid leave to better prenatal and postpartum care — that would save their lives.”
https://www.vox.com/health/356794/pregnancy-health-maternal-mortality-pregnant-cdc
“Many supporters of weakening child labor standards argue that they’re simply making it easier for kids looking for work to land jobs. They also argue that current child labor laws create too many obstacles for employers to hire workers.
But by proposing to expand the types of industries kids can work in or to eliminate the youth minimum wage — which the federal government and many states already set as lower than the standard minimum wage — it’s clear that states curtailing child labor protections are, at least in part, engaging in an effort to make cheap labor more available for businesses at a time when a tight labor market is driving wages up, including for young workers. It’s not a coincidence that so many industry groups have lobbied for rolling back basic child labor protections.
These changes in standards have coincided with a rise in child labor violations by companies across the United States. In a New York Times exposé last year, the journalist Hannah Dreier uncovered the various ways migrant children have been exploited in brutal working conditions that all too often lead to serious injuries. And she found at least 12 cases of migrant children being killed on the job.
“The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles,” Dreier wrote.
There’s a stark contrast between the often privileged kids who take a job scooping ice cream or lifeguarding the neighborhood pool for a few months and the migrant and often poor kids working dangerous jobs or ungodly hours. And the weakening of child labor laws has little, if anything, to do with encouraging the former.
“There’s often a disconnect, especially when in states where these lawmakers are proposing rollbacks, where they sort of describe this workforce as if it’s like teens who just want to earn a little bit of extra pocket change and work in movie theaters. Those are the same youth they bring to the hearings to talk about how meaningful and fun it is to work in these jobs,” said Nina Mast, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute who focuses on child labor standards. “They’re always ignoring the reality that a lot of the most dangerous and difficult jobs are being done by migrant youth or other marginalized young people who are not being represented in these conversations.”
That means that lower-income and marginalized kids who might work to supplement their families’ incomes are entering a labor force with eroding standards.
That could eventually lead to even more disparities: Teens who work more than 20 hours a week tend to perform worse academically than kids who don’t have jobs, in part because they have less time to dedicate to schoolwork, which ultimately impacts their educational trajectory and prospects for higher-paying jobs later in life.
The effort to weaken child labor protections, in other words, helps to “create this permanent underclass of workers,” Mast said.”
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/358193/the-death-of-the-summer-job-is-a-good-thing
“So, on the same day that the Supreme Court appears to have established that a sitting president can commit the most horrible crimes imaginable against someone who dares to speak out against him, the same Court — with three justices joining both decisions — holds that the First Amendment still imposes some limits on the government’s ability to control what content appears online.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined both decisions in full. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Netchoice opinion in full, plus nearly all of the Trump decision.”
…
“That’s such a sweeping restriction on content moderation that it would forbid companies like YouTube or Twitter from removing content that is abusive, that promotes violence, or that seeks to overthrow the United States government. Indeed, Kagan’s opinion includes a bullet-pointed list of eight subject matters that the Texas law would not permit the platforms to moderate, including posts that “support Nazi ideology” or that “encourage teenage suicide and self-injury.”
In any event, Kagan makes clear that this sort of government takeover of social media moderation is not allowed, and she repeatedly rebukes the far-right US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which upheld the Texas law.
As Kagan writes, the First Amendment does not permit the government to force platforms “to carry and promote user speech that they would rather discard or downplay.” She also cites several previous Supreme Court decisions that support this proposition, including its “seminal” decision in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974), which held that a newspaper has the right to final control over “the choice of material to go into” it.
Nothing in Kagan’s opinion breaks new legal ground — it is very well-established that the government cannot seize editorial control over the media, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who cares the least bit about freedom of speech and of the press. But the Court’s reaffirmation of this ordinary and once uncontested legal principle is still jarring on the same day that the Court handed down a blueprint for a Trump dictatorship in its presidential immunity case.
It’s also worth noting that Kagan’s decision is technically a victory for Texas and Florida, although on such narrow grounds that this victory is unlikely to matter.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/358326/supreme-court-netchoice-moody-paxton-first-amendment