Jennifer Rodgers/CNN:
After Rittenhouse verdict, it's time to question the law
The trial came down to
two dueling narratives. To the prosecutors, Rittenhouse was a vigilante with an AR-15-style weapon who went looking for trouble. To the defense, Rittenhouse was the sobbing teenager who testified that he found himself under attack and in those lightning-fast moments made a reasonable decision to protect himself.
The jury clearly believed the latter, which, given the facts, the law and other circumstances of the trial, is no surprise.
Paige Williams/New Yorker:
The Outsized Meaning of the Rittenhouse Verdict
A Wisconsin self-defense law made it difficult for the jury to convict—an outcome that was celebrated by the Republican Party’s violent fringe.
The public’s assessments of Rittenhouse’s performance coalesced, predictably, around the hyper-partisanship that distinguished the reactions to the Kenosha shootings from the start. As I reported, in detail, over the summer, opportunists seized on the case—often inaccurately—as a referendum on constitutional freedoms and American racial progress. Schroeder instructed the jurors to treat the defendant like any other witness, assessing him on such factors as credibility, conduct, appearance, demeanor, and apparent intelligence. He told them, “In everyday life, you determine for yourselves the reliability of things people say to you. You should do the same thing here.”
John Blake/CNN:
There's nothing more frightening in America today than an angry White man
Those are just some of the names for a racial stereotype that has haunted the collective imagination of White America since the nation's inception.
The specter of the angry Black man has been evoked in politics and popular culture to convince White folks that a big, bad Black man is coming to get them and their daughters.
I've seen viral videos of innocent Black men losing their lives because of this stereotype. I've watched White people lock their car doors or clutch their purses when men who look like me approach. I've been racially profiled.
Marc Fisher and Mark Berman/WaPo:
After Rittenhouse: Will deadly clashes multiply as the right to self-defense expands
But in America’s courts, law schools and state legislatures, a quieter yet still fitful struggle has waged over the past couple of decades, focused on the central dilemma raised anew by the Rittenhouse verdict: What does a right to self-defense really mean? When can Americans choose to use deadly force? Who gets to decide?
As often happens in the legal realm, these essentially moral questions can get lost in a Talmudic thicket of the criminal code.
“The problem here isn’t the law,” Billy Martin, a prominent D.C. defense attorney who formerly headed the homicide division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, said Saturday. “It’s the state of mind right now, the acceptance in society of the ability to have weapons and use them to defend yourself. You’re seeing a more receptive attitude among jurors for people to arm and defend themselves if they reasonably believe their life is being threatened.”
David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
The Republicans Have Turned Congress Into Arkham Asylum
The Congress of the United States is not Arkham Asylum, the psychiatric hospital and prison in Batman’s Gotham City.
Though if you watched the mad ranting of Minority “Leader” Kevin McCarthy, who spoke on the House floor for eight and a half hours from Thursday night until early Friday morning, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. For most of his speech there was almost no audience. For all of his speech he made no sense. His marathon babblefest achieved nothing whatsoever. But he blatherbustered on and on, full of, as Shakespeare would say, sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Zeynep Tufekci/NY Times:
After a Pandemic Failure, the U.S. Needs a New Public Spirit
No one knows when the pandemic will end. But the worst of it may be over for the United States after this winter. For good reasons — growing vaccine eligibility, boosters and new antiviral treatments — and bad — high levels of prior infections — it’s possible the ongoing Delta surge could be the last major spike in hospitalizations and deaths for the United States.
That does not mean Covid-19 is going away. Cases will likely increase in the winter, when more people are gathered indoors, and persist wherever there are pockets of unvaccinated people who had not been exposed. While there will continue to be spikes and drops — cases are beginning to tick back up — the pandemic in the United States will eventually peter out, possibly in the spring or early summer, its long-term fate subject to viral evolution.
But right now, in the United States over 1,000 people continue to die each day, and over 750,000 American lives have been lost so far — one of the highest Covid death rates in the world.
Americans are sharply divided on how to act. There are highly vaccinated areas with few cases where some people remain unsure if they can let down their guard at all and other areas with low vaccination rates and high community transmission where people are living as if it were 2019.
Bruce Deachman/Ottawa Citizen:
New normal: As COVID-19 moves from pandemic to endemic, some changes will stick
How and where we work, travel and shop are among the biggest shifts as the pandemic slowly recedes
As COVID-19 settles in for the long haul, any hopes we may have once had of eradicating it have been replaced with plans to lessen its virulence, push it into the background with flus and other endemic illnesses, and learn to live with it.
What that approaching world will look like is uncertain, but it’s extremely unlikely the “normal” we arrive at will match the one we knew two years ago.
Juan Cole/Informed Comment:
Startling Transformation: California has 1 mn. EVs on road, as they become state’s No. 1 Export
On, Monday, Juliet Eilperin, the environment editor at the Washington Post hosted a live event that included the Energy Commissioner of California, David Hochschild.
Hochschild pointed out that electric cars are now California’s number one export. The state exports $156 billion of goods abroad annually, and is second only to Texas in exports among US states and territories. California exports make up 10% of the US total.
In 2020, California exported $5.7 billion worth of electric vehicles, amounting to 3.7% of the state’s total exports. Aircraft and plane engines and parts came in second. The next few items are related to computer chips and modems. Almonds and diamonds come in 6th and 7th. Joe Biden rightly considers electric vehicles a potential winner for American industry if we don’t let China get a technological and market edge and crowd us out of the market. There is money in the just-passed infrastructure bill for electric charging stations to encourage EV sales.
Bemidji Pioneer:
Thankful for life after COVID-19 scare, Crow Wing commissioner says he regrets vaccine skepticism
“I think I made a mistake by not getting vaccinated,” Koering said during an emotional phone interview Nov. 10. “I guess I don’t have a good explanation of why. I don’t know that I was skeptical, I guess, about the vaccination. I still could have gotten it even with the vaccination, but it might not have been as severe. Which would have been helpful, because I’m serious. This was, this was — I don’t know. It was pretty close.”
The 56-year-old three-term commissioner drove himself to the hospital in the middle of the night Nov. 1 after 12 days of feeling progressively worse. When he arrived, doctors told him he’d narrowly avoided needing a ventilator. Instead, he was placed on a respirator with high oxygen flow and a medication regimen, including a steroid, Koering said.
The Hill:
Jan. 6 panel may see leverage from Bannon prosecution
But Brad Moss, a national security law expert, said much of how other former Trump aides respond could depend on how Meadows decides to proceed.
“The Bannon indictment made clear both the committee and DOJ weren’t messing around with their willingness to prosecute those who brazenly defy subpoenas. The real threshold will be if a former Government official who was still working for the government at the time, such as Meadows, is indicted for categorical refusals to comply,” he told The Hill by email.
“If DOJ crosses that proverbial Rubicon, you could see a wave of less senior officials who lack major fundraising abilities looking to cooperate rather than put themselves at risk,” he added.
That could include Jeffrey Clark, a former midlevel attorney at the Department of Justice whom the president considered installing as attorney general as a way to have an ally forward his efforts to unwind state election results. Clark showed up for a deposition earlier this month but was said to be uncooperative and failed to reappear in the afternoon.