August 12, 2023

Saturday, August 12,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

New York Times Deal Book - “President Biden calls China a “ticking time bomb” because of economic problems. At a political fund-raiser, Biden pointed to weak growth, high unemployment and an aging work force and warned that countries in trouble often do “bad things.” A day earlier, the president issued an executive order to restrict investments in key tech sectors in China.”

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Kamala is always busy.

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Trump Consultant Boris Epshteyn seems to the Jack Smith’s 6th un-indicted conspirator.

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Let this fight begin.

Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6.

Two law professors active in the Federalist Society wrote that the original meaning of the 14th Amendment makes Donald Trump ineligible to hold government office.

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”

He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”

There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself.

“It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said.

Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern and Yale and a founder of the Federalist Society, called the article “a tour de force.”

The provision in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each House.

The provision’s language is automatic, the article said, establishing a qualification for holding office no different in principle from the Constitution’s requirement that only people who are at least 35 years old are eligible to be president.

“Section 3’s disqualification rule may and must be followed — applied, honored, obeyed, enforced, carried out — by anyone whose job it is to figure out whether someone is legally qualified to office,” the authors wrote. That includes election administrators, the article said.

Professor Calabresi said those administrators must act. “Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot, and each of the 50 state secretaries of state has an obligation to print ballots without his name on them,” he said, adding that they may be sued for refusing to do so. (New York Times).

The complete New York Times article can be read here.

The legal paper can be read here.

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January 6 Judge makes clear Trump is a criminal defendant.

Judge Limits Trump’s Ability to Share Jan. 6 Evidence.

He is a criminal defendant,” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan said of Mr. Trump. “He is going to have restrictions like every other criminal defendant.”

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election rejected his request on Friday to be able to speak broadly about evidence and witnesses — and warned Mr. Trump she would take necessary “measures” to keep him from intimidating witnesses or tainting potential jurors.

The caution from the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, came during a 90-minute hearing in Federal District Court in Washington to discuss the scope of a protective order over the discovery evidence in Mr. Trump’s case, a typically routine step in criminal matters. Later Friday, Judge Chutkan imposed the order but agreed to a modification requested by the Trump legal team that it apply only to “sensitive” materials and not all evidence turned over to the defense.

She concluded the hearing with a blunt warning to Mr. Trump, and an unmistakable reference to a recent social media post in which he warned, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” — a statement his spokesman later said was aimed at political opponents and not at people involved in the case.

“I do want to issue a general word of caution — I intend to ensure the orderly administration of justice in this case as I would in any other case, and even arguably ambiguous statements by the parties or their counsel,” she said, could be considered an attempt to “intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors,” triggering the court to take action.

“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case,” she added. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.”

The hearing was the first major legal skirmish between prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and the Trump legal team and involved a clash over the core issue that makes the case different than any other: Mr. Trump’s intention to make the criminal case the center of his presidential campaign and to publicly criticize some witnesses, including a political opponent, former Vice President Mike Pence.

Judge Chutkan, in her first appearance as trial judge in the case, made it clear — within minutes of ascending the bench — that she intended to view Mr. Trump primarily as a defendant rather than a political figure, and suggested she sided with the government’s push for a speedy trial. (New York Times).
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Tommy Tuberville, obstructionist MAGA Senator from Alabama, may not be from Alabama. He seems to live in Florida.

Tommy Tuberville: Florida’s third senator?

“Tuberville lives in Auburn, Alabama, with his wife Suzanne.”
— website of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.)


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In late June, Tommy Tuberville traveled to the Wiregrass region of Alabama, which borders Florida. “The Wiregrass is one of the best-kept secrets in Alabama,” Tuberville told a gathering of local leaders in Dothan. “Everyone is seeing the growth in Florida, but that will only last so long because you can only take so many people in the Florida area.

Tuberville — who coached Alabama’s Auburn University football team from 1999 to 2008 and was elected senator from Alabama in 2020 —isn’t heeding his own pitch.

Three weeks after his Wiregrass appearance, Tuberville sold, for nearly $1.1 million, the last properties that he owned in Alabama, according to real estate records. The properties, known as Tiger Farms LLC, are in Macon and Tallapoosa counties, on the outskirts of Auburn. That same month, he also sold one Florida condo for $850,000 and bought another for $825,000.

Tuberville’s office says his primary residence is an Auburn house that records show is owned by his wife and son. But campaign finance reports and his signature on property documents indicate that his home is actually a $3 million, 4,000-square-foot beach house he has lived in for nearly two decades in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., located in the Florida Panhandle about 90 miles south of Dothan.
The Alabama sale in July was notarized by a person who lives in Santa Rosa Beach, indicating Tuberville was there on July 14.

His wife, Suzanne Tuberville, a licensed real estate agent in Florida, has worked at a Santa Rosa Beach real estate firm since the start of this year; she does not have an Alabama real estate license.


The senator also signed in person a deed, notarized in Florida’s Walton County, where Santa Rosa Beach is located, on June 30 — during a two-week period starting June 26 that was designated in the Senate as a “State Work Period,” when lawmakers often return to their states to meet with constituents.

Tuberville’s office issued a news release saying the senator met with local officials on three days of that period, June 26-28, including in Dothan, but was silent on the rest of it.


Under the U.S. Constitution, senators are required to be “an inhabitant” of the state when elected, so residency requirements can be minimal. Two Democrats, Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, were elected senators from New York shortly after moving there. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who represents a district in the Panhandle, in 2019 considered running for Alabama’s senate seat. But voters increasingly are sensitive to the perception that a lawmaker is not connected to a state. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) in 2012 lost his Senate seat after it emerged that, contrary to Senate rules, he had billed taxpayers for hotel stays in the state. Lugar had sold his home in Indianapolis after he was elected in 1976 and bought one in McLean, leaving him with no residence in the state.


‘Carpetbagger’ accusations


The question about whether Tuberville is truly a resident of Alabama has affected his political ambitions. In 2017 he announced his decision not to run for governor the next year, citing potential controversy over residency issues. Alabama law requires a person be a state resident for seven years to run for governor — but only for one day to run for Senate.


At the time of his decision on the governor’s race — about 10 years after his Auburn coaching job ended — Tuberville owned a lakeside home in Alabama, which he sold 16 months later for $1.4 million.


In 2018, he voted in Florida in the midterm elections, according to the Birmingham News, but he registered to vote in Alabama on March 28, 2019, a week before announcing his Senate bid. For his voter registration address, he listed as his residence a property, appraised at about $300,000, located in Auburn.


Local media accounts in 2020 said that Tuberville owns this home with his wife. But property records show it is owned by Tuberville’s son, who has the same first name but a different middle name, along with the senator’s wife. The home was purchased in 2017, when the son, generally known as Tucker, was in the process of obtaining an Alabama real estate license. The son now works in New York, according to his LinkedIn page. Neither Tucker nor Suzanne Tuberville responded to requests for comment.


The senator also owns a condominium in Washington that he and his wife purchased for $750,000 in 2021, with a $674,250 mortgage, according to real estate documents.


During his Senate campaign in Alabama, Tuberville didn’t deny he was a newcomer to the state, even though he had once coached football there. “Yes, I am not an everyday resident of Alabama,” he acknowledged to a group of voters in a video posted by the campaign of his main challenger for the GOP nomination, former senator Jeff Sessions. “… I’m a carpetbagger of this country.”


Tuberville’s frequent visits as senator to his home in Santa Rosa Beach can be gleaned through expenditure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission by Tuberville’s various campaign organizations and PACs. They show that since Tuberville became a senator, there have been almost monthly expenditures for travel and food in either Santa Rosa Beach or another Florida town, Panama City Beach, which is 50 miles away.


While airline expenditures in the Tuberville filings do not reveal the destination of the tickets, American Airlines at the start of this year suspended service to the airport nearest to Auburn. But the airline provides nonstop service from Washington to Panama City Beach. The campaign finance reports list seven expenditures made to American Airlines in 2023. (Tuberville could also pay for flights out of his own pocket, which would not be reflected in these expenditures.)


Tuberville’s response


Steven Stafford, Tuberville’s communications director, did not deny that the senator no longer owns property in Alabama. But he suggested that the Santa Rosa Beach property was a vacation home.
“Coach has purchased and invested in real estate for decades,” Stafford said in an email. “Coach has owned the property in Santa Rosa Beach for two decades — he bought it while he was coaching at Auburn. He goes there upon occasion if he has a free weekend. It is within driving distance of Auburn. I’m sure many Senators have vacation homes.

”
It’s nearly a four-hour drive from the house in Auburn to the home in Santa Rosa Beach, according to Google maps.


Stafford added that Tuberville “purchased his current Auburn residence for his son when his son was a student at Auburn. After his son graduated, he moved out. After Coach retired from coaching, Coach moved into the Auburn house. The Auburn property is his primary residence — although his job requires him to be in Washington four days a week when the Senate is in session.”


Stafford’s statement does not match up with documentary record. Tommy Tuberville never owned the house. Tucker Tuberville graduated in May 2016, according to his LinkedIn page, meaning the house in question was purchased — by Tucker Tuberville and his mother — nine months after Tucker graduated from college. Tucker then worked for his father as an assistant football coach at the University of Cincinnati from May to December that year. Tuberville’s other son, Troy, did not start at Auburn until 2018 and graduated in 2021; he registered to vote using the same address as his father — this Auburn property. He did not respond to a request for comment.


In a later email, Stafford acknowledged the house was purchased after Tucker graduated from Auburn. “His son lived at the Auburn house briefly and then Coach moved there afterward,” he said.


In a 2017 promotional video for ESPN, Tuberville says he retired to Florida, not Alabama.
“Six months ago, after 40 years of coaching football, I hung up my whistle and moved to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, with the white sands and blue waters. What a great place to live,” he said, displaying a view over the ocean from the house.b(The Washington Post).
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The Fearless Fund, being sued for investing in black women entrepreneurs, fights back.

Fearless Fund responds to racial discrimination lawsuit.

The Fearless Fund was launched in 2019 by Arian Simone, Keshia Knight Pulliam and Ayana Parsons.

Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based fund that invests solely in women founders of color, has responded to the suit filed against it by the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER), accusing it of racial discrimination.

In a statement, the fund said that it was “proud of the work [it has] done at the Fearless Fund and Fearless Foundation with the consistent and invaluable support from our corporate partners, investors, mentors, and advisors,” adding that it is “firm in [its] purpose to provide a gateway to economic freedom.” Fearless Fund also noted that of the $288 billion that venture investors put to work in 2022, less than 0.4% of it was raised by women of color.

Arian Simone, the fund’s co-founder and CEO, also went on CBS this morning to talk more about the lawsuit, calling it “an attack to dismantle and address our economic freedom as people of color.” She added that the fund’s response is simple: It will continue the work it is doing to help support women of color.

In its lawsuit, AAER accused Fearless Fund of racial discrimination over a grant program that offers $20,000 to Black-women-owned small businesses. AAER argues the grant violated Section 1981 of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which states private contracts must be made and enforced without regard to race.

When we contacted AAER’s founder Edward J. Blum last week, he said he was initially reached by a woman-owned business that wanted help to challenge Fearless Fund’s grant program. “It is to be hoped that other programs like this one end these practices and offer the benefits to all small businesses regardless of the owner’s race,” he said at the time.

This is not the first time Blum-associated groups have sued organizations for implementing policies that regard race. He is perhaps best known as the man who challenged affirmative action in educational institutions, alleging that Harvard’s admission policies discriminated against Asian Americans by taking race into account.

Several founders and investors we spoke to said AAER’s suit could be the first of many, as funds focused on solely backing diverse founders have grown prevalent in recent years.

Grants are often the only way many overlooked founders raise capital for their businesses. Investing in diversity might also now come with heightened legal risk, Bernard Coleman, a lawyer at The Coleman Law Firm, told TechCrunch last week.

“The outcome of the American Alliance for Equal Rights’ lawsuit against Fearless Fund has the potential to reshape venture capital investments, spotlighting the intersection of civil rights legislation and startup funding practices,” he said at the time. “As the legal proceedings unfold, the implications for venture capital investments and startup support will undoubtedly be closely watched by stakeholders across the business landscape.”

Fearless Fund recently announced a multi-million-dollar fundraise for its efforts from Costco and Mastercard, the latter of which is the sponsor of the fund’s the Strivers Grant Contest that’s being challenged in the lawsuit. (Tech Crunch).

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I was thinking of Hillary’s article about growing loneliness in America when I saw the article below.👇

US suicides hit an all-time high last year.

NEW YORK (AP) — About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.

“There’s something wrong. The number should not be going up,” said Christina Wilbur, a 45-year-old Florida woman whose son shot himself to death last year.

“My son should not have died,” she said. “I know it’s complicated, I really do. But we have to be able to do something. Something that we’re not doing. Because whatever we’re doing right now is not helping.”

Experts caution that suicide is complicated, and that recent increases might be driven by a range of factors, including higher rates of depression and limited availability of mental health services.

Hub peek embed (apf-trendingnews) – Compressed layout (automatic embed)

But a main driver is the growing availability of guns, said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Suicide attempts involving guns end in death far more often than those with other means, and gun sales have boomed — placing firearms in more and more homes.

A recent Johns Hopkins University analysis used preliminary 2022 data to calculate that the nation’s overall gun suicide rate rose last year to an all-time high. For the first time, the gun suicide rate among Black teens surpassed the rate among white teens, the researchers found.

“I don’t know if you can talk about suicide without talking about firearms,” Harkavy-Friedman said.

U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest level since 1941. That year saw about 48,300 suicide deaths — or 14.2 for every 100,000 Americans.

The rate fell slightly in 2019. It dropped again in 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some experts tied that to a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and natural disasters, when people pull together and support each other.

But in 2021, suicides rose 4%. Last year, according to the new data, the number jumped by more than 1,000, to 49,449 — about a 3% increase vs. the year before. The provisional data comes from U.S. death certificates and is considered almost complete, but it may change slightly as death information is reviewed in the months ahead.

The largest increases were seen in older adults. Deaths rose nearly 7% in people ages 45 to 64, and more than 8% in people 65 and older. White men, in particular, have very high rates, the CDC said.

Many middle-aged and elderly people experience problems like losing a job or losing a spouse, and it’s important to reduce stigma and other obstacles to them getting assistance, said Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer.

Suicides in adults ages 25 to 44 grew about 1%. The new data indicates that suicide became the second leading cause of death in that age group in 2022, up from No. 4 in 2021.

Despite the grim statistics, some say there is reason for optimism. A national crisis line launched a year ago, meaning anyone in the U.S. can dial 988 to reach mental health specialists.

The CDC is expanding a suicide program to fund more prevention work in different communities. And there’s growing awareness of the issue and that it’s OK to ask for help, health officials say.

There was a more than 8% drop in suicides in people ages 10 to 24 in 2022. That may be due to increased attention to youth mental health issues and a push for schools and others to focus on the problem, CDC officials said.

But even the smaller number masks tragedy for families.

Christina Wilbur lost her 21-year-old son, Cale, on June 16 last year. He died in her home in Land O’ Lakes, Florida.

Cale Wilbur had lost two friends and an uncle to suicide and had been dealing with depression. On that horrible morning, he and his mother were having an argument. She had confronted him about his drug use, his mother said. She left his bedroom and when she returned he had a gun.

“I was begging him not too, and to calm down,” she said. “It looked like he relaxed for a second, but then he killed himself.”

She describes her life since as black hole of emptiness and sorrow, and had found it hard to talk to friends or even family about Cale.

“There’s just this huge 6-foot-2 hole, everywhere,” she said. “Everything reminds me of what’s missing.”

It’s hard to find professionals to help, and those that are around can be expensive, she said. She turned to support groups, including an organization called Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors that operates a 24/7 online forum.

“There’s nothing like being with people who get it,” she said. (Associated Press).

Here is Hillary’s article, from The Atlantic.The Weaponization of Loneliness.

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Let’s feed the children!

The Governor of Massachusetts gets the job done.

States that Have Passed Universal Free School Meals (So Far).

Multiple states have begun to provide free school meals to all students, regardless of income, and many more are considering making the move as per proposed legislation. Three states—California, Colorado, and Maine—have made this policy permanent. (NYCFoodPolicy.Org).

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