Reposting this piece by Kat.
The Michigan court system has a cover-up problem
Veteran Oakland County Probate Judge Kathleen Ryan was relieved of her duties on Thursday after recordings of her saying racist and anti-gay slurs came to light.
The recordings were sent to key public officials, including a county executive named Dave Coulter, who is gay. Some of the slurs that Ryan used were about Coulter.
Sounds good,, right? She should be removed. However, first off, she's just been suspended with pay. Second off, she holds a law degree and is certified to practice in the state. Where the charges to disbar her?
And it really does appear that a supervising judge was covering for her up until the last minute. Back to Carson-Holt's article:
According to county officials, Ryan was removed from her docket last week. The tapes, obtained by the Free Press on Thursday, not only capture Ryan’s crude remarks about Coulter but also record her calling the average Black American “a f**king lazy piece of sh*t” and labeling herself as “a new racist.”
Ryan also called Coulter and other elected officials “little fa***t.”
Dave Woodward, chair of the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, confirmed that he also received copies of the recordings.
“I was appalled. There’s simply no justification for it,” Woodward said. He noted that such language “disgraces the judicial position, undermines the integrity of the judiciary, and destroys public trust in our legal system.” Woodward also expressed hope that “if it is indeed the judge making these comments,” an investigation would lead to her permanent removal from the bench.
Oakland County Probate Court Administrator Ed Hutton recorded the former judge in secret, he told WXYZ News. Hutton told WXYZ-TV that he had recorded Ryan for the last two years after hearing “her hate and contempt for various protected groups.”
Hutton also submitted a notice of sexual harassment involving Ryan in May to Oakland County Probate Court Chief Judge Linda Hallmark but didn’t hear any follow-up about it. Hutton took matters into his own hands, sending the recordings to Coulter, Woodward, and Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Elizabeth Clement.
Can someone explain why Judge Hallmark didn't follow up on the harassment complaint?
Ed Hutton submitted it in May? It's September. Seems to me Hallmark needs to be looked into.
I doubt that Ryan's comments -- made to others -- were unknown to Hallmark. So does Hallmark share Ryan's prejudices? Hallmark needs to explain a great deal at this point.
Including how Ryan remained on the court even after an arrest:
Back in 2021 she was charged with domestic assault and battery after allegedly assaulting her boyfriend, at one of their homes in Wixom.
The case was later dismissed after being moved to Wayne County, for conflict of interest in Oakland County.
Why
was she not removed from the bench then? She did assault him, the
boyfriend admitted it to the police. Why were the charges dropped? Why
wasn't she removed from the bench. A man who was on the bench and got
arrested -- and taken to jail and booked -- for assault would have been
removed immediately -- suspended with pay while an investigation took
place -- like what's happening to Ryan right now. Why didn't that
happen then?
Just to recap, she should have been removed from the bench over thee 2021 arrest but someone protected her. She should have been removed for the harassment charge so that it could be investigated. In both cases, she was allowed to remain on the bench. And I do not believe that she's revealing her racism and homophobia in phone calls but not to anyone in the court system.
Someone needs to answer how she has skirted accountability repeatedly.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Friday, September 6, 2024. Conditions become worse in Gaza, Amnesty International documents War Crimes, Junior's campaign's in debt but he's putting it further in debt as he promotes Donald Trump's campaign, Jill Stein remains a predator, and much more.
Let's start in the US with the presidential election.
Oh, look, it's an advert: BRONZER, HOW NOT TO USE IT.
It's as though they're four-year-old little girls playing in Mommy's make up for the first time.
But who's paying for it?
Robert Kennedy Junior, you may remember, wanted to run for president. Even going so far as to run as an 'independent.'
Who's paying the bills right now? Because my understanding is that Junior's campaign had huge debts. So where did the money come from for yesterday evening's e-mail "Who Bobby wants you to vote for"?
That's what the picture's from. That e-mail. Who's paying to produce this stuff?
I don't think it's legal for Junior to use money donated to his campaign to pimp another person's campaign. If people wanted to donate to Trump, they would have done that. I don't understand the legality of someone already in debt on their campaign using resources to go further in debt in order to promote another candidate.
I don't understand it and I'm not the only one confused here. Junior finally got a response yesterday from various actual small donors who'd started the journey with him. And they replied back to the shock of the campaign which had no idea just how many people who gave money to Junior now hate him. Actively loathe him. "F**k you" is how 42% of the e-mails basically started.
Junior apparently did not realize how many people now hate him. Not casual election observers, mind you, but people who donated to his campaign. They feel betrayed -- and they should.
Speaking of betrayals, Jill Stein.
Karen Hunter offers her take in the above. That's her take. I've offered mine on this issue. I will add though that AOC is correct that Jill Stein is a "predator."
She waits every four years and shows up to prey on people, to lie to them and mislead them -- that is predator. AOC is correct. Not a Ted Glick fan but we'll note this from his ZNET column:
In 2004 there were about 225 GP members who were in elected office, almost all of them low-level offices like school board, water board, etc. Today Jill Stein says there are 144. There are no GP members who have been elected to a state house or senate seat and, of course, none to Congress. It’s a pretty dismal record for 20 years of existence.
Those of us who took the “safe states” position were in a decided minority then, and today, I am sure, anyone who advocated for it would be very unpopular. The GP has become a narrow, tiny party of true believers, destined to get at most 1% or so of the vote. Of course, that would triple the vote total of their Presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, in 2020.
I remember when it was that I decided I had had it with the GP. I was at a national People’s Summit conference in Chicago in the summer of 2016 organized by National Nurses United and many other progressive groups and individuals who had come together after active involvement in the historic Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign. I was one of those people. On the second day of this event, attended by thousands, I looked up onto a screen that was projecting tweets about the convention that were being posted. I was shocked to see one from Jill Stein explicitly calling out this event and those who organized it as being “sheepdogs for the duopoly.” These supporters of independent socialist Bernie Sanders were all about corralling progressives into the Democratic Party, Stein was saying.
The GP, and others supporting them, don’t get it on mass politics. They believe in ideological purty before anything else. Unless you’re ideologically pure, they would say, you will never be able to bring about the transformational, revolutionary changes needed. Purity comes before anything else.
Twenty years of this approach have made it clear this is a losing strategy. The national US Green Party is a failure because of its rigid and narrow electoral approach.
The Democratic Party sent out a mailing yesterday.
The first early vote ballots will drop in the mail this week.
This is not a drill.
People are voting not just for president, but in critical races that will impact control of the House, the Senate, and races further down the ballot as well.
That is why we are asking you to donate $3 to the Democratic Party today.
$3 because a donation today will go further than at any point later in the cycle.
$3 because control of the White House, Senate, House, and down-ballot races are on the line.
$3 because the DNC is the best organization to ensure we have the infrastructure and resources in the places that will matter most.
We know you didn't wake up and think, “Today is the day I am donating to the DNC,” but just think about the people about to fill out their ballots and the impact your donation can make in reaching persuadable voters before they do.
Today is the day. Donate here:
The election is in 59 days. People need to be watching registration deadlines if they aren't already registered to vote. On that, we're noting this from THIRD's "Roundtable" again:
Sabina and Francisco are doing great work in Texas and it's great to talk to them and amplify them in any way possible. One thing not being reported is that Texas has disabled online voter registration. If you're planning to vote in Texas in November, the first thing you need to do is to check and make sure you weren't purged because Governor Greg Asshole has purged over a million people from the voter rolls. The next thing you need to know is that Greg Asshole has stopped online voter registration. You will need to register by October 7th. That may require you going to your local voter registration officials office. If you're renewing your drivers license or getting a replacement for it, you can register at the DMV. Fall means county fairs and there will be people with booths and tables set up to register voters.. You can also print up an application online and mail it in. You need to move quickly on that because October 7th is the deadline.
I'm not a TYT fan but they did cover what's going on in Texas so I'm noting their video today.
Turning to Gaza, THE NATIONAL reports, "At least six Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes on the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Friday morning. The bodies were taken to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, the Wafa news agency reported."the United Nations notes:
Víctor Aguayo, UNICEF Director of Child Nutrition, described the situation for children affected by severe malnutrition.
Briefing journalists at the UN Headquarters in New York, he described the situation in Gaza as one of the most severe food and nutrition crises in history.
“The nutrition situation in Gaza is one of the most severe that we have ever seen…it is important to remember that the nearly half of Gaza’s population suffering from this devastation are children,” he said.
Having returned from the enclave last week, he said that the impact of the war and severe restrictions on humanitarian response have led to a “complete collapse” of food, health and protection systems, with catastrophic consequences.
“The fact is that the diets of children in Gaza are extremely poor. It is estimated that over 90 per cent of children are eating at best two types of food per day for weeks or months, in the context of very severe…lack of access to safe water and sanitation,” he said.
Estimates suggest that more than 50,000 children need immediate treatment for acute malnutrition, requiring medical professionals and nutrition workers.
“I walked through markets and neighborhoods, or what is left of markets and neighborhoods…there is no doubt in my mind there is a famine and a large-scale nutrition crisis,” he emphasized, calling for an immediate ceasefire and sustained humanitarian access.
This weekend, Israeli soldiers in Gaza discovered the bodies of six hostages executed by Hamas. The response was an outpouring of protests: Israelis flooding the streets to call for a ceasefire that would bring all hostages back and end the war, a demand that a majority of Israelis support. The Histadrut, Israel’s national labor union, called a (swiftly ended) general strike.
The response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to double down on war. In a Monday night press conference, he insisted that any ceasefire would depend on Israeli control over a stretch of territory in southwestern Gaza called the Philadelphi Corridor — something Hamas is not prepared to give. Netanyahu’s presser was so belligerent, in fact, that it may have single-handedly torpedoed ongoing ceasefire talks.
It’s clear that the Israeli public has no faith in Netanyahu’s handling of the war: Roughly 70 percent believe he should resign his position. Yet despite ongoing protests, it’s equally clear that the prime minister will not be changing course voluntarily.
And it looks like he’ll likely get away with it, at least for now.
His government has weathered dismal polling on its war effort, as well as sporadic protests, since the war began last October. And yet, as with past demonstration flare-ups, there has been no evidence that this weekend’s events have brought his government to the brink of collapse. How can this be?
The answer is brute power politics. The 2022 election gave right-wing parties a clear majority in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), allowing Netanyahu to build the most far-right government in Israeli history. Though this coalition has since become extremely unpopular, there’s no way for voters to kick it out on their own.
The government could only collapse if it faces defections from inside the governing coalition. But at present, the greatest threat to Netanyahu’s coalition comes from his extreme right flank, which wants him to continue the war at all costs. And for that reason, he seems intent on doing so.
That's a little too much reality if your name is Debra Messing or Gweneth Paltrow. Too much facts, too much truth, too much reality. Here's some more reality from Amnesty International:
International humanitarian law, which applies in situations of armed conflict, including during military occupation, is comprised of rules whose central purpose is to limit, to the maximum extent feasible, human suffering in times of armed conflict.
The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977 are the principal instruments of international humanitarian law. Many of these treaties’ rules are considered customary international law, meaning that they bind all parties to an armed conflict regardless of whether they have ratified particular treaties and whether they are a state forces or a non-state armed group.
According to this customary norm, “the destruction or seizure of the property of an adversary is prohibited, unless required by imperative military necessity”. In addition, according to article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which regulates the actions of Israel as the occupying power in Gaza: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”
According to article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” is a grave breach of the Convention, and thus a war crime.
Where such destruction is carried out as collective punishment, it also violates article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which provides: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”
Civilian property in armed conflict is also protected by the principle of distinction, which requires that parties to the conflict at all times, distinguish between “civilian objects” and “military objectives” and direct their attacks only at military objectives.
According to customary international humanitarian law, civilian objects are all objects which are not “military objectives”; and military objectives are “limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose partial or total destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage”. Civilian objects are protected against attack, unless and for such time as they become military objectives when all of the criteria for a military objective are temporarily fulfilled Protocol I requires that, in cases of doubt, parties to a conflict should presume that the structure retains its civilian nature. Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects is a war crime.
It's a lengthy press release which is why we linked to the release itself (normally on Amnesty, CCR, etc, we link to home page of the organization). Brett Wilkins (COMMON DREAMS) reports:
Amnesty International said Thursday that the Israeli military should be investigated for the "war crimes of wanton destruction and of collective punishment" over its destruction of entire communities along Gaza's border with Israel.
"Using bulldozers and manually laid explosives, the Israeli military has unlawfully destroyed agricultural land and civilian buildings, razing entire neighborhoods, including homes, schools, and mosques," the London-based rights group said in a new investigation.
Amnesty analyzed satellite imagery, as well as photos and videos posted online by invading Israel Defense Forces troops between October and May, and found that the IDF has cleared wide swathes of land up to 1.2 miles (1.8 km) wide along Gaza's eastern border.
"In some videos, Israeli soldiers are seen posing for pictures or toasting in celebration as buildings are demolished in the background," the report states.
[. . .]
In the 335 days since October 7, Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 145,000 Palestinians in Gaza while forcibly displacing almost all of the embattled strip's 2.3 million people and destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures, according to Palestinian and international officials. Rebuilding after Israel's obliteration of Gaza's civilian infrastructure is expected to cost over $18.5 billion, or nearly Palestine's entire annual gross domestic product.
Israel is currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan has applied for warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes including extermination.
"International humanitarian law, which applies in situations of armed conflict, including during military occupation, is comprised of rules whose central purpose is to limit, to the maximum extent feasible, human suffering in times of armed conflict," Amnesty explained Thursday.
The group noted that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, "extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly," is a war crime.
Additionally, the treaty bans collective punishment of civilians, stating that "no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed."
Also covering the report is Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT):
According to an analysis by Amnesty International released Thursday, Israel has cleared a strip of land ranging between 1 km and 1.8 km wide. The buffer zone encompasses nearly the entirety of the Gaza side of its border with Israel, covering 58 square kilometers, or about 22 square miles.
Satellite imagery from May shows that over 90 percent of the buildings in this zone have been destroyed or severely damaged, the rights group found, while the majority of agricultural land there is also damaged.
Investigation by Amnesty International finds that Israeli forces created the buffer zone merely because of its proximity to the border fence, and for no supposed military necessity or tactical purpose. Anything in the zone appears to have been eligible for destruction: homes, schools, farms, mosques and cemeteries were all demolished.
“Around my family home we had a three dunam (0.7 acre) orchard full of fruit trees. They were all destroyed. Only an apple tree and a rose were left. I had bees and produced honey. All of it is gone now,” Salem Qudeih told Amnesty International. Qudeih lived in Khuza’a, situated near the border in Khan Yunis, which Israeli forces raided and nearly totally destroyed in December and January.
Again, this is reality. It's not the deranged fantasy that a bunch of self-deceiving idiots keep promoting to justify (and argue for it to continue) the genocide. Devi Sridhar (GUARDIAN) notes:
The discovery of polio in Gaza reminds us that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to assess the true cost of the war. We don’t have a sense of how widespread disease and starvation are – so called “indirect deaths” – and we are in the dark in terms of total number of deaths. Usually, data is collected from hospitals and morgues, which certify each death and notify the health ministry. Yet these civil registration systems have broken down in Gaza, meaning there is no accurate data on how many deaths have occurred. The health ministry has been trying to put together figures using media reports, which isn’t a reliable way to capture the full picture. It is estimated that there are more than 10,000 bodies buried under rubble still (meaning they can’t be counted), as well as a rising number of unidentifiable bodies.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this conversation another professor, Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept, associate director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program at The New School, not far from Columbia University. Her most recent piece, “College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests.” Can you put Professor Thrasher and Professor Franke’s experience in a broader context of the universities from here in New York, NYU, to other universities around the country?
NATASHA LENNARD: Absolutely. And thank you. It’s lovely to be back. And I firstly want to say thank you to Professor Franke and Professor Thrasher for being among the professors who refuse to be silenced in this moment of what is widely being called a “new McCarthyism.” And I think that’s an accurate description.
Their cases are not unusual, and it is indeed sad, and it is indeed disappointing, indeed no less than ghoulish. We are having, both de facto and through policy, both in terms of new regulations and student conduct guides coming through for this semester, as well as punitive actions against students and professors, a real reification of the claim that Israel critical speech and pro-Palestinian speech should count under violations of Title VI nondiscrimination law and regulations and policy in universities. What that does is align university policy with the right-wing agenda of Congress and right-wing lawmakers who follow in the footsteps of a right-wing Israeli-U.S. consensus.
And I think if a university is not a place where that can be critically challenged, especially at a time of genocide, when there are no universities left standing in Gaza — which we cannot forget — and the concerns of our academy is the speech of professors speaking out for academic freedom and speaking out for the liberation of an occupied people, we’re in very dark times indeed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, you write in your piece in The Intercept that, quote, “Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the new NYU” — New York University — “guidelines introduce an unprecedented expansion of protected classes to include 'Zionists' and ’Zionism’”?
NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, this is a very exemplary, in the worst of ways, document that was just released by the administration at NYU. It is a new updated guide of student conduct about nondiscrimination and harassment. It goes further than any document I have seen in asserting that Zionism, when used critically, should or at least readily can be understood as — and I quote the document — a “code word.” It doesn’t say that occasionally by antisemites that Zionism is used as a code word. It takes that as a given.
So, that is — to clarify, that is a student conduct guide, very poorly written, very open to misuse, that is asserting that the political ideology founded in the 19th century of the ethnostate of Israel being a Zionist project, that that should be considered part of the protected class of Jewish identity, religion and ethnic and shared ancestry. That is what we’re seeing in attempts of statehouses nationwide to attach Zionism, the political ideology, to the protected class of Jewish identity. It’s extremely dangerous. It performs de facto apologia for Israel. And to have that put into writing by a university so clearly is just open for further abuses and an escalation of the sort of repression we’ve already seen.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Franke?
KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, I teach a class on citizenship and nationality in Israel and Palestine. And we begin with a critical look at the concept of Zionism. Of course, it was advanced as a place, as an idea, about the safety of the Jewish people being located in Mandate Palestine, but there were plenty of Jewish people at the time who said, “This is actually a horrible idea from the perspective of the safety of Jewish people, because what it says is the Jews all belong in Israel and nowhere else, not in Europe, not in the United States, nowhere else. And so this will lead to more violence, more expulsions, more antisemitic pogroms, if we lean in too much to the idea that Jews belong primarily and especially in Israel.” And those were critiques coming from Jews, again, themselves.
So, if we are not allowed to talk about that anymore in universities, what we’ve done is surrendered the very idea of the university itself. And that is so much what troubled us about Minouche Shafik, our president — former president of Columbia’s testimony in Congress, and some of those other presidents who came, who were called before Congress, is they not only did not put up a robust defense of the idea of a university where we teach students how to be critical thinkers in such a critical time, but they actually joined in to the criticism of the university. My president did not stand up for any one of us, nor did Professor Thrasher’s at Northwestern.
And this is part of what concerns me, is that our universities are places now where we could not have a protest and say things that are now being said in Tel Aviv by Israelis. The protests that are happening there this week, if they took place on Columbia’s campus, our students would be expelled or charged with very serious disciplinary violations. This is where we’ve come. It’s impossible to talk about the kinds of things that, Amy, in your setup, of the just horrible things that are happening right this week in Jenin, in Gaza — we can’t talk about that at Columbia. That’s part of what concerns me is, is that we don’t know our history, and these new policies are keeping us from learning it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, we just have about 30 seconds, but you’ve noted that universities are not only facing attacks from Congress, they’re also being subjected to lawsuits all around the country. Could you talk about that briefly?
NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, we’ve seen a series of litigation, including at NYU, Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, brought by often unnamed students and faculty, often very frivolous suits that universities are forced to answer to nonetheless, and then, through settlements and often nonpublic agreements, are then forced to change policy, often leading to the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue this discussion over time. We’ll link your piece, Natasha Lennard, “College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests.” She’s at The New School. Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke, Kathleen Peratis, civil rights lawyer, and Steven Thrasher. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Nada AlTaher and Nagham Mohanna (THE NATIONAL) report:
Towering piles of rubbish, widespread destruction and tents spread out as far as the eye could see greeted UN workers and medical teams as they arrived at Gaza's southern city of Khan Younis for the second stage of a polio vaccination campaign.
The scale of destruction after several Israeli assaults, and the squalid conditions thousands of Palestinians are living in, shocked even local Gazans such as Dr Fady Abed, from the US-based NGO MedGlobal. He was among those who travelled from the central areas of the enclave to carry out the southern phase of the campaign.
"I saw kids playing among piles of garbage taller than the bus we were in," Dr Abed told The National on Friday.
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