We’ve also developed some for lack of a better term traditions, with one recently-emergent one being me taking about 5-7 minutes on “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed),” going on about three or four things outside the main headlines.
It occurred to me that since I have to prepare for that anyway, I might as well post them here, particularly because the very nature of it being weekly means they doesn’t have to be breathless, breaking, up-to-the-moment news. Just hopefully worth knowing.
So herewith the first of what I sincerely hope will be a weekly Tuesday evening feature called, again, “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed)” starting with two Updates which I know seems weird but trust me, it made sense at the time.
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Update #1
I mentioned last week that Hawai’i had passed legislation redefining what a corporation is in a way that makes it harder to contribute to political campaigns. I added that Gov. Josh Green had until June 30 to either sign or reject the bill.
The Update is that it turns out I was wrong: He’d already signed it on May 14.
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Update #2
Our other update relates to the DOI (Department of Injustice) suing 31 states to force them to release confidential voter information. Two more of those cases, those in Maine and Wisconsin, came to a decision this week, bringing the total to eight - and the DOI has lost every one of them.
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This you may well not have missed but I’m doing it anyway because it made me white with fury.
On May 22, a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter said that the DOI is “quietly” removing from its website news accounts related to January 6, in what as mainstream an outfit as AP described as “the latest step by the Trump administration to dramatically rewrite the history of the assault on the Capitol.”
In response, the DOI thugs not only acknowledged doing it, they celebrated doing it. “There’s nothing quiet about it,” they crowed.
They called the accounts documenting the actual criminal charges, the actual convictions and guilty pleas at court, and the actual sentences given to those violent, rioting, insurrectionist traitors, they labeled those actual facts, as “partisan propaganda” and they were positively puffed with pride about erasing the history.
Among the records stripped were those regarding the convictions of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy, whose convictions the DOI last month asked a federal appeals court to vacate.
On May 21, they got their wish. The very next day, May 22, the DOI moved to have the cases dismissed entirely.
Related to all this is the fact that the DOI has subpoenaed The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets that have been critical of the The Orange Overlord (aka TOO) for records of their journalists’ activities, contacts, and more under the hoary excuse of investigating “leaks.”
I’ve taken to calling it the Department of Injustice, but it seems I should be calling it the Ministry of Truth. Or Minitru for short.
(And if by some chance you don’t get the reference, look it up! I’ll give you a hint: It comes from the same source as the quote “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” which appears to be the unspoken motto of Minitru.)
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Some bad news and some good news on the death penalty.
In 2023, in the case of one Edward Lee Busby, who was convicted of murder, the state of Texas agreed he was intellectually disabled to the point that he was ineligible to be executed and so entered a motion that his sentence should be commuted to life.
Without going into the complications of the whole case, which are considerable, after that motion failed Texas flipped sides and said in effect “what the hey, snuff him” - that is, arguing the man they said shouldn’t be executed actually should be.
Ultimately, by the unsurprising vote of 6-3 the Supreme Court vacated a stay of his execution, and Texas killed him on May 14.
On the other hand, after 29 years in jail for a murder he has persistently sworn he did not commit, a time that included nine execution dates, three last meals, and a Supreme Court ruling in his favor over a year ago, Richard Glossip is out of an Oklahoma prison.
For now.
In February 2025, SCOTUS vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that the sole witness against him lied on the stand - and what’s more, prosecutors knew he lied but kept their mouths shut.
But instead of releasing him, the state of Oklahoma has announced it intends to try him yet again and fought to keep him in prison. It wasn’t until May 14, 15 months after his conviction was vacated, when a county court finally granted him bond.
So Glossip is out he’s but still facing new trial, one apparently to be based on same now-discredited evidence from the same now-discredited witness.
It is sadly true that under our criminal justice system - which really should be called our prosecutorial procedure system - that while the state is often willing to admit it did it wrong, that it got some procedural technicality wrong, it will often, if you will, fight to the death the avoid admitting it got it wrong, that it sent an innocent person to the gallows.
The death penalty, that remnant of barbarism, still hangs over us.
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Now to make sure you’re really depressed.
On May 19, the House passed the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” allowing TOO to strip federal funding from any school that “teaches or advances concepts” related to transgender people, looking to codify the bigoted, pseudoscientific fantasies of his Executive Order definitions of sex and gender into federal law.
The notion of “concepts” and what makes for “advancing” them are so vaguely defined that any discussion, material, or school library book that even mentions the existence of transgender people could be banned; even a transgender teacher could risk punishment for using their own name or pronouns.
Another provision requires public schools to forcibly out transgender (or even possibly transgender) students to their parents with no exceptions for potentially hostile home environments.
You’ve heard of state-level “Don’t Say Gay” laws; this is like a federal-level “Don’t Say Trans” law.
The silver lining here is that this now heads to the Senate, where the 60 vote filibuster barrier is one that no standalone anti-trans bill has cleared this entire Congress and this one will likely meet the same fate.
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Finally, something to keep on your radar.
During TOO’s first months in office, the Supreme Court’s GOP-approved majority used the notorious shadow docket and an underlying notion of the “Unitary Executive” to allow him to fire commissioners on various boards and commissions that are technically part of the Executive Branch, doing this despite and in the face of a 90-year old precedent from a unanimous Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which found that Congress had the Constitutional authority to create independent agencies whose commissioners could only be fired for cause.
One of the suits arising from those firings is that of the TOO-fired FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. That case had oral arguments in December and a decision is expected in the next few weeks - a decision in which it is predicted that the Scurrilous Six, the appropriately-acronymed SS, making up the majority will simply dump that 90-year old precedent in the trash, effectively (technically not legally, but effectively) giving TOO personal control over the makeup of the entire federal-level regulatory system by making those in charge of running and administering it subject to this personal whims and will.
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I'll end with my old closing from my TV days:
You have the best week you possibly can't and we'll see you then.
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