Also on today’s menu:
Conviction Overturned, Man Sues Police Department
No Agreement On Gender Reassignment Of Teens
Supreme Court Issues Unethical Ethics Policy
Early comparisons of Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler were a bit of a stretch, despite the former president’s penchant for ridiculing people with whom he disagreed during his rallies and praising the way authoritarian dictators treated dissenters in other countries. Since his defeat in the 2020 election, however, Trump has come to see fascism as the only way forward, and his comments at Stevens High School in Claremont on Veterans’ Day fully embraced Hitler’s rhetoric.
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.
[T] he threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.
Trump’s campaign has rejected criticism that he was echoing the language of fascist dictators with his vow to root out his political opponents like “vermin,” but campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said that the “sad, miserable existence” of those who compare Trump to Hitler and Mussolini would be “crushed” when Trump returns to the White House.
Trump plans to sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in the United States, rounding up undocumented people and detaining them in camps while they wait to be expelled. He wants to cancel the visas of foreign students who have participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests and expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. Trump wants to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents; and, to withstand legal challenges to his policies, Trump’s allies are preparing for him to replace government attorneys who follow the law with more aggressive right-wing lawyers for whom such considerations are not important.
When the New York Times downplayed the import of Trump’s words with the headline, “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction”, satirical headlines mocked it with examples such as “John Wilkes Booth Takes Theater Attendance In A Very Different Direction”. The Times later changed its headline to “In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to 'Root Out' the Left”.
Trump supporters in Claremont accepted his fascist rhetoric, seeming to agree with Trump’s statement, “If you don’t want your nation wrecked; if you don’t want your economy destroyed; if you don’t want American blood or American treasure squandered in a needless global war, you have to vote for a gentleman named Donald J. Trump.”
Conviction Overturned, Man Sues Police Department
Lebanon City Manager Shaun Mulholland maintains that the Lebanon Police Department did nothing wrong by not revealing the discipline records of two officers whose testimony helped send 57-year-old Vermonter Scott Traudt to jail, despite Grafton County Superior Court later overturning his assault conviction on just that basis. Traudt now is seeking monetary damages from the city through the United States District Court in Concord.
Traudt was convicted of assaulting a Lebanon police officer during a 2007 traffic stop and he spent a year in jail. He was released when the court learned that the prosecution had not provided exculpatory evidence on discipline against former officer Richard Smolenski and current Chief Phil Roberts.
Mulholland told InDepthNH.org that the Lebanon Police Department “followed the procedures they were supposed to follow” according to the legal standards of the so-called Laurie List as they existed in 2007 and 2008. The standards have changed over time, he noted.
The lawsuit cites the fact that Smolenski had been disciplined months before the arrest for conducting an affair on department time, and that Roberts was the subject of a criminal investigation while he was a Vermont police officer before taking a job in Lebanon. The suit names both the city and the department, as well as Roberts, Smolenski, and former police chiefs James Alexander and Gary Smith as defendants.
In overturning the conviction, Grafton County Superior Court Judge Peter Bornstein wrote, “At the very least, the information should have been disclosed to [Traudt] because, given that his theory of the case was that the officers involved were renegade police officers and were not credible, the evidence of Smolenski’s investigation and discipline would have been relevant to that defense or otherwise used as impeachment evidence.”
No Agreement On Gender Reassignment Of Teens
The House Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs Committee in Concord, in a tie vote, failed to recommend passage of an amended House Bill 619 that narrows the original language of the legislation to prohibit genital gender reassignment surgery to anyone under the age of 18. The prohibition would not apply to persons born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development, or who do not have normal sex chromosome structure, sex steroid hormone production, or sex steroid hormone action; nor would it ban the treatment “of any infection, injury, disease, or disorder that has been caused by or exacerbated by the performance of genital gender reassignment surgery” in the past.
The bill also would have outlawed the use of public funds to “any entity, organization, or individual that provides genital gender reassignment surgery to an individual under 18 years of age” and would have prevented the New Hampshire Medicaid program from reimbursing or providing coverage for such treatment.
Co-sponsors of the bill said it would prohibit uninformed parents from agreeing to the treatment for their children who may later regret it. Representative Erica Layon (R-Derry), a member of the committee and one of the sponsors of the bill, said she did not support banning all gender-affirming care, but wanted teens to wait until they are 18.
The United Kingdom, which was a leader in performing gender reassignment surgery, has pulled back from the practice after learning that several people who as teens had undergone the treatment later regretted it, saying they did not realize the full implications and potential adverse health effects at the time they agreed to the procedures.
Supreme Court Issues Unethical Ethics Policy
On November 13, the US Supreme Court released a “code of ethics” in response to reports of justices’ conflict of interest — accepting lavish gifts by wealthy donors who, in many instances, had cases before the court. The prologue states:
The undersigned Justices are promulgating this Code of Conduct to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court. For the most part these rules and principles are not new: The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice. The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.
Robert Hubbell had this to say: “In an act of disrespect, the justices blamed the American public for ‘misunderstanding’ the corruption that has plagued the Court.” Robert Reich wrote, “Misunderstanding? I’m sorry, but the public understands quite well that the justices regard themselves as free to do whatever they wish, in terms of ethics.”
ProPublica has documented years of undisclosed luxury travel by Justice Clarence Thomas, including private jets and trips aboard a super-yacht, courtesy of Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, as well as a motor coach, private school tuition for a grandnephew, and the justice’s mother’s home in an undisclosed real estate deal. Thomas also has declined to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election, despite the fact that his wife, Virginia Thomas, was among those working to overturn the 2020 election results in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch failed to disclose their connections to wealthy people, such as Alito’s 2008 trip on the private jet of Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who later had cases before the court. Gorsuch did not disclose that the head of a major law firm had purchased a Colorado vacation property that he co-owned. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s staff pushed public entities hosting her to purchase her books, and she failed to recuse herself from cases involving her book publisher.
The new code states that “a Justice should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary” and “a Justice should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities” as well as “A Justice should comply with the restrictions on acceptance of gifts and the prohibition on solicitation of gifts set forth in the Judicial Conference Regulations on Gifts now in effect.”
“By comparison,” Hubbell points out, “the Judicial Conference Regulations on Gifts [that apply to lower courts] are mandatory prohibitions: ‘A judicial officer or employee is not permitted to accept a gift ....” The Supreme Court only suggests that they act ethically, and there are no penalties for not taking the suggestions.
The new ethics policy comes out just ahead of Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting where members are scheduled to vote on issuing subpoenas to Crow and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo as part of its ongoing investigation into the Supreme Court gifts. Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse said, “We need to develop information about how systemic this was. This isn’t just a random gift here and a random gift there. It’s always the same individuals, the same front groups. … What you have is billionaires with a demonstrated pattern of trying to influence the Supreme Court through a whole variety of groups by giving donations and participating, who are at the same time also giving enormous, massive, secret gifts to justices. Just on its face, that merits investigation. And if it happened in any other court in the United States, it would have been investigated. There would have been fact-finding, and there would have been a result and consequences. It’s only the Supreme Court that is living outside the bounds of the rules.”
National Gratitude Month
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Every single Jew in this country know what that dog whistle, “vermin” means. They have grandparents who had numbers on their arms. He hasn’t come out with, Jews will not replace us. However, he did say that their were good people on both sides who were marching with torches chanting that phrase. I don’t know who bothers me more. Him, or the people at his rallies who laugh and chant similar slogans.
As far as transgender rights. Leave them alone. Trans kids commit suicide before 18. What do they have to say to that? We have two trans nieces. Now, neither one has decided to have surgery at this point. One is 18. The other is not. They both said that they had known since 11 that they were not male. They are both doing well now after hormone therapy, psychological counseling, and family support.
It still should be between the young person, their physician and their family. Just like women’s health.