The Erickson Report, Page 4: A Longer Look at the US and the Kurds

The Erickson Report, Page 4: A Longer Look at the US and the Kurds

Last for this time out, we take A Longer Look at the US and the Kurds.

The big news of the week, of course, has been the Turkish invasion of northern Syria with the goal of genocide against the Kurds there, an invasion green-lighted by Tweetie-pie who told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the US would get out his way.

Turkey wasted no time, attacking soon thereafter. Hundreds are dead, well over 100,000 have fled, and the carnage continues at this moment despite Tweetie-pie's risible proposal that he mediate a cease-fire.

But what we need to know now is that this is pretty much business as usual - not for Tweetie-pie but for the US. And I want you to know that in what follows I am very heavily indebted to John Schwartz at The Intercept, a news site I strongly encourage you to check out.

Okay. The morning after His High Orangeness said in effect "the Kurds? Who cares?" New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked on Twitter why Tweetie-pie made this decision:

So did Trump just betray the Kurds because
(a) He has business interests in Turkey
(b) Erdogan, being a brutal autocrat, is his kind of guy
(c) His boss Vladimir Putin told him to
Remarkable that all three stories are perfectly plausible.

What Krugman left out, however, is the most likely explanation: (d)Trump is president of the United States. It is a repetition of an old and established pattern - because this is not the first time we betrayed the Kurds. In fact it is at least the eighth time since World War I.

The Kurds are an ethnic group of about 30 million people ranged across Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. They have lived in the region for over 1000 years and have long aspired to their own state. On a few occasions over the centuries there have been short-lived Kurdistans, but they have always been brutally repressed. Still, the desire for an independent state persists, something that the countries in which they live do not want to happen.

Which means that on the one hand, the Kurds are a perfect tool for US foreign policy because we can arm the Kurds in whichever of these countries is currently our enemy, to make trouble for that country’s government or for some other objective. But on the other hand, we don’t want the Kurds we’re exploiting to get too powerful. If that happens, the other Kurds - the ones living across the border in whichever of these countries are currently an ally - might get ideas about pursuing their own freedom and independence.

Here’s how that dynamic has played out, over and over and over again since World War I.

One: Like many other nationalisms, Kurdish nationalism blossomed during the late 1800s. At this point, all of the Kurdish homeland was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, centered in present day-Turkey. But the Ottoman Empire collapsed after fighting on the losing side of World War I. This, the Kurds understandably believed, was their moment.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres dismembered the Ottoman Empire, including most of what’s now Turkey, and allocated a section for a possible Kurdistan. But the Turks fought back, wanting as much as they could get, and making enough trouble that the US gave in and supported a new treaty in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne. The Treaty of Lausanne allowed the British and French to carve off present-day Iraq and Syria, respectively, for themselves: Iraq for the UK, Syria for France. But it made no provision for the Kurds.

This was America’s first betrayal of the Kurds. However, at this point, the main Kurdish betrayals were handled by the British, who crushed the short-lived Kingdom of Kurdistan in Iraq during the early 1920s. A few years later, the British were happy to see the establishment of a Kurdish “Republic of Ararat,” because it was on Turkish territory. But it turned out that the Turks were more important to the British than the Kurds were, so the United Kingdom eventually let Turkey go ahead and extinguish the new country.

Two: After World War II, the U.S. gradually assumed the British role as main colonial power in the Mideast. We armed Iraqi Kurds during the rule of Abdel Karim Kassem, who governed Iraq from 1958 to 1963, because Kassem was failing to follow our orders.

We then supported a 1963 military coup that removed Kassem from power. We immediately cut off our aid to the Kurds and, in fact, provided the new Iraqi government with napalm to use against them.

Where the Kurds live

Three: By the 1970s, the Iraqi government had drifted into the orbit of the Soviet Union. The Nixon administration, led by war criminal Henry Kissinger, hatched a plan with Iran (then our ally, remember, ruled by the Shah) to arm Iraqi Kurds and urge them to rise up against Saddam.

The plan wasn’t for the Kurds in Iraq to win, since that might encourage the Kurds in Iran to rise up themselves. It was just to bleed the Iraqi government. But that's not what the Kurds were told; they were encouraged to continue fighting.

Then the US signed off on agreements between the Shah and Saddam that included the US severing aid to the Kurds. The Iraqi military moved north and slaughtered thousands, as the US stood by. When questioned, a blasé Kissinger said “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Four: During the 1980s, the Iraqi government moved on to actual genocide against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons. The Reagan administration was well aware of Saddam’s use of nerve gas, but because they liked the damage Saddam was doing to Iran during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), it opposed congressional efforts to impose sanctions on Iraq.

Five: As the U.S. bombed Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush famously called on “the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Both Iraqi Shias in southern Iraq and Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq heard this and tried to do exactly that.

It turned out that Bush was - of  course - lying. Bush never supported the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions or for that matter any democracy movement in Iraq. Saddam’s “iron fist" held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. What the US wanted was for the Iraqi military, not regular people, to take charge. Then Washington would have what it regarded as the best of all worlds: the Saddam Hussein regime, just without Saddam Hussein. So having called on them to rise up, the US military stood down as Iraq massacred the rebels across the country.

Nevertheless, the dying Iraqi Kurds looked so bad on international television that the Bush administration was forced to do something. The US eventually supported what was started as a British effort to protect Kurds in northern Iraq.

Six: During the Clinton administration in the 1990s, these Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, were the good Kurds. Because they were persecuted by Iraq, our enemy, they were worthy of US sympathy. But the Kurds a few miles north in Turkey had been getting uppity too, and since they were annoying our ally, they were the baaad Kurds. The US sent Turkey huge amounts of weaponry, which it used - with US knowledge - to murder tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy thousands of villages.

It's worth noting here that the Turkish constitution does not even acknowledge the existence of the Kurds, who make up 20% of the population, and from 1924 until 1991 it was illegal in Turkey to speak Kurdish and until 2012 it was illegal to teach it in schools. The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the group that Turkey and the US claim is "terrorist," did not spring out of nowhere.

Seven: Before the Iraq War in 2003, right-wing pundits were saying we had to do it, had to got to war, to help the Kurds. But post-war, Kruds in northern Iraq gained some regional autonomy, which disturbed Turkey, so in 2007, the US allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds inside Iraq. By which time, the right wing was declaring that this betrayal was exactly what America should be doing.

With Trump’s thumbs-up for another slaughter of the Kurds, America is now on betrayal number eight. We are nothing if not consistent.

The Kurds have an old, famous adage that they “have no friends but the mountains.” Now more than ever, it’s hard to argue that that’s wrong.

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrage]

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrage]

Now for the Outrage and it's something I've noted a few times but there is a specific point I want to make. We start with three examples among many more which could have been chosen.

A policy known as expedited removal allows for undocumented immigrants found within 100 miles of the Mexican or Canadian borders and who entered the US in the last two weeks to be deported quickly without going through immigration courts.

The administration is trying to expand the application of the policy to the entire country and to any immigrant who entered the US without official papers in the previous two years.

Then there was ending "medical deferred action" and so beginning to deport people who previously had been protected because they were receiving treatment for serious medical issues.

More recently we have the vast expansion of who could be denied a green card on the grounds that they might be a “public charge,” going from someone who would be primarily dependent on the government to someone who might at some point in the future need government help such as food stamps or housing vouchers or subsidized health insurance, including Medicaid and using the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies when buying insurance on an exchange - a set of requirements that most American citizens could not meet. Could you pay for health insurance out of your own pocket? Neither could most of the rest of us.

The move could bar roughly 375,000 legal immigrants annually - that's 2/3 of the total of legal immigration.

And of course, the impact will not be random but will mostly affect those who enter through what Tweetie-pie sneers as "chain migration," where people enter to join family already here, and those coming in via the diversity lottery - mostly coming from those "shithole countries" full of nonwhite people that Tweetie-pie finds so disgusting.

So when they tell you that it's about "illegal immigration" and "securing our borders," that is utter bull. It's about immigration, period, immigration of non-white people.

People have often spoken of the cruelty of the collection of white supremicist racists populating the White House, have spoken of the cruelty of the cages, the family separations, the deportations of people who have been here decades, the cruelty of so many of the policies. What we need to recognize and always remember is that the cruelty is not a byproduct. The cruelty is the point.

It is an outrage.

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clown]

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clown]

Now for one of our regular features, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages

Our Clown this time out is the administration of Cape Elizabeth High School in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Sophomore Aela Mansmann felt that administrators hadn’t been doing enough to respond to allegations of sexual assault in the school, so on September 16 she wrote “There’s a rapist in our school and you know who it is” on yellow sticky notes and posted them on bathroom walls in the school.

No names were used and there was no identifying information.

She said she hoped to spark more of a conversation of sexual assault incidents. She may not have gotten that, but she did get a reaction.

Initially, school officials had assured her mother that there would be no punishment. But after the local paper ran a story on the students' concerns, Mansmann was pulled out of class and told she was being suspended for three days - for bullying. Bullying, that is, via a note containing no way to tell who it was aimed at - or even if it was aimed at a specific person. Bullying an unnamed rapist with a sticky note.

On October 7, dozens of students walked out of class to protest her punishment, along with that of two other students who were also suspended for helping to post the sticky notes.

The school, needless to say, whined that the sticky notes were not the proper way for students to voice their frustrations. Of course. They should have gone to the administration and then silently accepted being ignored.

Suspending students for "bullying" an unidentified someone - or someones - because you were embarrassed by a newspaper article about sexual assault on your watch? Practically defines "Clown."

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Noted in Passing

We start the time with a feature called Noted in Passing, where we take a brief look at some news items that may not get a lot of attention here but were too important to lest pass without noting.

And we start that with something I can't say is significant in any way because it reveals nothing that was not long since clear, but it was a lovely little moment and worth noting.

Speaking with reporters on October 4, Tweetie-pie was asked, obviously, about the infamous phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine. His High Orangeness insisted that his concern had nothing to do with Joe Gaffe-machine Biden, it was all about corruption.

Then a reporter asked “Have you asked foreign leaders for any corruption investigations that don’t involve your political opponent?”

Tweetie-pie was stumped. He just looked to the sky and blathered something about being against corruption.

I have an enjoyable image of that reporter getting some deserved high-fives once the cameras were off.

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People my age may remember the song In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. It predicts a rather dystopian future and in the last verse says "now it has been 10,000 years" and "now man's reign is through."

Well, on October 8, a controversial dam project was closed and the Tigris River began to rise and will continue to until its waters swallow Hasankeyf, a small city of about 3300 in southeastern Turkey.

Hasankeyf

So why do I bring up the song in this connection? Because in it, 10,000 years was presented as if it were an incredibly long time - while the city of Hasankeyf has been inhabited by various peoples for 12,000 years, perhaps longer. It is one of the oldest known human settlements, an historic crossroads of empires and cultures and one of the cradles of human civilization - and now it is about to be destroyed.

Ultimately, about 15,000 people in the region will be forced to move and 300 archaeological sites and settlements will be beneath the surface of the new reservoir.

There were attempts to protect the site by naming it a World Heritage Site, but they failed. The ancient city meets nine of the 10 required criteria, but the tenth is that the Turkish government must apply for a conservation listing - and since they are the very ones who want to be able to flood it, you know how far that got.

The dam project has proceeded despite fears it will spark water wars with countries such as Iraq that sit downstream of the new dam and depend on the Tigris, the flow of which now will be affected by decisions Turkey makes about maintaining its reservoir.

For my part, I can't help but wonder if Turkey's determination to go ahead with the project has anything to do with the fact that the population of the area is predominantly Kurdish.

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It has been said that national cultural trends have a habit of starting in California. Two recent items make me hope that is true.

First, on October 2, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the state’s public banking act, which allows city and county officials to sponsor public banks. Public, that is, as opposed to private, non-profit as opposed to profit, opening the prospect of low-interest loans for public projects. The LA City Council already has said they’re going to propose creating one.

There have been efforts to establish public banks in nearly two dozen other states. This year alone, four state legislatures beside California - New York, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts - have introduced bills to create or explore creating public banks. None, however, have passed. The only state- or municipally-owned bank now in existence is the Bank of North Dakota, which has been in operation since 1919.

Getting back to California, nine days later, Governor Newsom signed a bill that says that as of Jan. 1, 2020, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation won't be able to enter into or renew a contract with a private, for-profit prison to incarcerate people. The goal is to eliminate private, for-profit prisons in the state, including those used for immigration detention, by 2028.

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It's well-established that the IRS audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1% even though it's obvious that the latter is where the money is. In April, Sen. Ron Wyden asked IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig for a plan to fix the imbalance. Rettig agreed.

Well, the "plan" came out in September and turns out the IRS isn't going to do anything about it until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years - something which GOPpers in the Senate have no intention of doing.

The IRS said it uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers, audits are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time. Those people claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, the EITC, alone account for 39% of all of the IRS audits last year.

On the other hand, the IRS whines, auditing the rich is hard. It takes senior auditors hours upon hours to complete an exam.

In other words, it's just easier and cheaper to audit the poor - especially considering that, in something this "plan" didn't address, the rich have the resources to fight back while the poor have to just pay up and shut up.

Ginger Baker

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We have an RIP this time out.

On October 6, Ginger Baker, pioneer of double-bass drumming and drum solos in rock, died at the age of 80. The cause was complications from chronic-obstructive pulmonary disease.

For most of his life, Baker was a combative, mostly-unpleasant, often-nasty SOB - but his music helped to define rock music for a generation and establish the drums as an essential part of that music and I still can fantasize playing the drum solo on the Wheels of Fire version of Toad.

So thanks for the music: RIP, Ginger Baker.

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Montgomery, Alabama, is 60% non-white. Despite that, in its 200-year history it has never had a black mayor. That is, it didn't until October 8, when Steven Reed received 67% of the vote in a run-off election.

Reed had gotten a plurality of the vote in the general election, but fell short of a majority, necessitating the run-off, which he won handily.

There's a special significance to achieving this in Montgomery. Before the Civil War, Montgomery was a center of the domestic slave trade. It was the birthplace and first capital of the Confederacy. It was the site of George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech. It was a hub of violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, the site of a brutal attack on the Freedom Riders.

It's also where Rosa Parks made her stand and the year-long bus boycott that followed was an early major victory of the civil rights movement, and the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a national leader.

Steven Reed

It's a sad thing that we still have to celebrate such firsts, that there are still so many firsts to achieve. Nonetheless, every such first is a victory, a step, a stair, and so should be celebrated.

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I've included this here largely because of the twist it involves. Breast cancer in men is pretty rare; it makes up only about 1% of the total number of cases.

At the same time, the rate of breast cancer in men has increased by 50% since 1975 while the rate of breast cancer in women, while obviously much higher, has been declining for the past twenty years.

A study just published in JAMA Oncology reveals that in this case men have worse outcomes than women, have lower survival rates for breast cancer. And one of the reasons, it appears, is a difference in treatment: Women were far more likely to receive standard-of-care endocrine therapy for appropriate tumors. There’s one twist: Women getting the better care. Here's the other twist: Clinical trials for breast cancer treatments usually don't include any men.

It has become a scandal how women were often not included in clinical trials under the assumption that "women are just small men." The result was that, to cite one notorious example, heart disease and even heart attacks in women were often grossly misdiagnosed because the symptoms can be significantly different in women and all the research was done on men.

Here we have the twist, the opposite, where it was men excluded from the research, leading to men not receiving the best treatment. A good reminder of the fact that sexism and assumptions about gender hurt everyone.

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Finally for now, according to a new study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, headquartered at California State University at Santa Barbara, hate crimes rose 9 percent in major U.S. cities in 2018, the fifth consecutive yearly increase.

The most common victims for hate crime reported to police in major cities in 2018 were African Americans, Jews, and LGBTQ people.

While extremist homicides decreased markedly in 2018, those committed by white nationalists and the far right rose by a third and were the most common, which, although the report did not say this, I'm prepared to connect to the fact that Jews were the direct target of half of the bias/extremist killings in 2018, in what was the worst year ever for anti-Semitic killings in the United States.

It's worthy of particular note that while there are politically motivated assaults attributed to Antifa and so-called "hard left extremists," they committed no homicides in 2018 or so far in 2019.

The Erickson Report for October 16-29

The Erickson Report for October 16-29, 2019

This episode:

Noted in Passing
   - Tweetie-pie stumped by reporter's question
   - Town inhabited for 12,000 years to be flooded by new dam
   - California allows public banks, bans private, for-profit prisons
   - IRS admits it's just easier and cheaper to audit the poor rather than the rich
   - RIP, Ginger Baker
   - Steven Reed is Montgomery, Alabama's, first black mayor.
   - In a twist, men with breast cancer excluded from clinical trials, get less care than women
   - Hate crimes rose 9% in major US cities in 2018, 5th yearly increase in a row

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages
   - The Clown: Cape Elizabeth High School in Cape Elizabeth, Maine
   - The Outrage: White House immigration policies show that cruelty is not the result of the policies, it is the point

A Longer Look: the US and the Kurds
   - Tweetie-pie's betrayal of the Kurds was at least the 8th US betrayal of them since WWI

The Erickson Report, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid - the Outrages

The Erickson Report, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid - the Outrages

Now we turn to the Outrages.

Late in September, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling making it impossible for graduate student workers to unionize.

How? By issuing a regulation "establishing that students who perform any services for compensation, including, but not limited to, teaching or research, at a private college or university in connection with their studies are not 'employees'" under the National Labor Relations Act. The rule, if it gains final approval after a public comment period, will overturn an earlier rule that said grad student workers could, in fact, unionize. I mean, yeah, they're workers, duh.

You see, the thing is, graduate student workers do much of the actual work of teaching undergrads - doing the backgrounds, gathering the materials, doing research, and conducting many of the classes. They do the work, they get paid for it - not enough, but they get paid - they have regular hours, they have a boss to who they report and who assigns their duties, but somehow, according to the now-rightwing NLRB, they still are not employees of the university that pays them.

In recent years, graduate student workers, along with another underpaid group, adjunct professors, have been very active in the labor movement, which may be why they were targeted here. And yes, since the Board didn't even wait for an actual case to come before it to try to strip these workers of their rights, it certainly looks like they were targeted for this Outrage.

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Next, I earlier noted a case where a teacher was claiming that their religious belief - more honestly described as their religious bigotry - freed them from having to follow the rules, in that case their employer's requirement to use male pronouns in referring to a student transitioning to male.

Here is a more ominous application of the same idea.

Joshua Payne-Elliott is an educator fired in June from his job at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, a Catholic high school in the Indianapolis archdiocese.

He was fired because he is married to Layton Payne-Elliott and the Archbishop of Indianapolis, one Charles Thompson, demanded the school get rid of him because he regards all Catholic school teachers as “ministers” - no matter their actual beliefs - who are therefore required to uphold church teachings, which as we all know do not include same-sex marriage.

Layton and Joshua Payne-Elliot

The school was supportive of Payne-Elliott but faced serious repercussions, including losing its nonprofit status, its diocesan priests, and its ability to offer the Eucharist, a key Christian rite, if it resisted Thompson's demand.

In fact, Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School in Indianapolis was temporarily kicked out of the archdiocese for refusing to meet Thompson’s demands that it fire Layton Payne-Elliott. The Vatican has suspended the ouster pending an appeal of the move, but it shows the threat from the archbishop was very real.

Joshua had worked as a social studies and world language teacher at the school for 13 years and Cathedral had offered to renew his teaching contract for another year. But in June, the school told him it was terminating his employment “at the direction of the Archdiocese.”

But right there in those two sentences is the crux of the matter: Joshua did not work for the archdiocese. He worked for Cathedral High School. That's who his contract was with. The school, not the archdiocese, was his employer.

So he sued, charging that the archdiocese had illegally interfered in his employment contract with Cathedral, which it seems pretty clear it did.

Not, however, and here we come to the important point, not according to the US Dept. of Injustice, which has filed a statement of interest in the case defending the archdiocese on the grounds of - you got it - "religious freedom" and calling for the suit to be dismissed.

The brief argues that the First Amendment bars courts from interfering in how a religious group interprets and applies its teachings - even if, apparently, that application consists of bullying a school into firing what the brief itself calls "an excellent teacher" because that group, the Catholic church, doesn't like who he married.

Again, according to the Injustice Dept., claiming a religious belief is supposed to override all civil rights and all civil rights laws - even if means a religious group illegally interfering with a business contract to which it's not a party.

Vanita Gupta, who headed the DOJ’s civil rights division during the Obama administration, summed it up well on on Twitter, writing that "[The administration] is once again using religion as a shield against core anti-discrimination principles that protect LGBTQ people.”
       
Using bigotry to uphold bigotry. Which is truly an outrage.

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Saving what is probably the worst for last.

In the summer of 2017, police in Southaven, Mississippi, were searching for a domestic violence suspect. They got the address wrong and went to a house on the other side of the street.

There, they shot and killed an innocent man, 41-year-old Ismael Lopez.

According to various news reports I found, police first alleged Lopez appeared at the front door with a handgun and then tried to run away. At another point, they claimed they saw a rifle poking though the now only partly open door. They also said a dog ran out which of course they immediately shot at and they then fired through the door - which in fact they did, killing Lopez with a shot to the back of his head.

Ismael Lopez

Despite the changing details, in July 2018, a local grand jury - surprise! - declined to indict the two officers involved in the fatal shooting, after which the prosecutor refused to release either the names of the cops involved or the investigative file, which attorneys for the family had to pry loose.

But that's not why this is here; cops getting away will killing brown and black people is old news. No, this one has an extra twist of the knife.

About a year after the failure of the grand jury, that is, this past summer, the family filed a $20 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Southaven, the chief of Southaven police, and the officers involved in Lopez’s death.

In responding to the suit, the city declared in open court that it is their policy that if you are an undocumented immigrant, which Lopez was, if you have no “legally recognized relationship” with the US, you have no constitutional protections, you have no constitutional rights, not even the right to not be wrongfully killed.

Quoting attorney Katherine Kerby, arguing for the city,

If he ever had Fourth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment civil rights they were lost by his own conduct and misconduct. He may have been a person on American soil but he was not one of the "We, the People"

and so lacked all protections.

Murray Wells, an attorney representing Lopez’s family, lambasted the city’s argument as both “chilling” and “insane” and said “We’re stunned that someone put this in writing.”

It's hard to grasp how totally demented, totally vicious, the city's position is. If accepted, it would turn all police into a version of the Tonton Macoute, able to abuse and even kill any undocumented person with total impunity.

Happily, it's also total crapola, as the Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that people on U.S. soil are guaranteed certain basic rights, no matter their immigration status, and the cases the city cites in support of its contention are grossly misapplied and have absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand.

As an illustration of how vacuous the city's position was, one case it cited involved courts finding that an undocumented immigrant did not have a Second Amendment right to a firearm - in a ruling that said in so many words that this did not impact Fourth Amendment rights.

But while that makes the city's attempt grounds for a Clown award, it is much too vile, much too appalling, for that. Even the term Outrage barely contains it.

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid - the Clowns

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid - the Clowns

Now for one of our regular features, it's Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages. And as we usually do, we start with the Clowns.

And we start with a return appearance by rightwing big brain Ben Shapiro, who, on his radio show a couple of weeks ago, praised America’s healthcare system by touting the country’s life expectancy - which according to the Centers for Disease Control has been declining for the past three years - as being “pretty good when you take out all the confounding factors” such as auto accidents, murders, and suicide. Note that gun deaths and suicides are both considered public health issues.

In other words, Shapiro was saying, our life expectancy is great - as long as you ignore a lot of the people who died.

I swear to you, Shapiro really is considered an intellectual by the right.

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Next up, we have George Murdoch, a former pro-wrestler going under the names Brodus Clay and later Tyrus who now has a show on Fox. He considered the climate strike that involved millions of people around the world as being not of any significance because, to quote him, “If it's pre-planned, it's not really a protest.”

He didn't go on to explain what in that case it was.

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Next up is Charles Payne, a host at Fox Business.

According to Payne, having to work multiple jobs to get by is not a problem, it's not a bad thing, it's an "opportunity," something to be "celebrated" as part of the gig economy - you know, that economy where no one has a regular job, no one has benefits, no one has job security and you have to scramble every day. You know. That thing Charles Payne thinks we should celebrate

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And here ya go, there almost had to be an entry for Tweetie-pie. Reports are that during the first week of October, Tweetie-pie is planning to sign an executive order calling for further privatization of Medicare by expanding "plans offered through Medicare Advantage."

The purpose, it's said, is to "protect" the government-run program of Medicare from being subjected to "socialist destruction" under a Medicare for All program.

Remember the classic case of the woman who at a town meeting during the debate over Obamacare had a sign reading "Keep your government hands off my Medicare?" It seems she is now working at the White House.

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Five Things Noted in Passing

Okay, moving to Five Things Noted in Passing, a collection of a few things I couldn't let pass without at least mentioning.

First up, a combination of bad and at least no-so-bad news on net neutrality.

On October 1, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld the FCC's repeal of net neutrality. It was a cause for celebration among AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon and a hard blow for consumers - particularly because the main argument pushed by the corporations to eliminate the rule, that it stifled investment in broadband, has been shown to be a lie by multiple studies.

But there was victory for our side as well - and by the way, I do mean our side as against the Dark Lords: More than 85 percent of voters, including 82 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats, support net neutrality - we did get one true victory in that the court ruled the FCC could not block states from passing their own net neutrality rules, as at least nine states have done in the wake of the FCC's repeal of its rules.

Net neutrality could be restored and placed beyond the reach of the FCC if Congress passed the Save the Internet Act, which has already passed the House but which Fishface McConnell refuses to bring up in the Senate. So what we are more likely to see is a rush by corporations to fast-track legislation to give the FCC the authority block state-level net neutrality - but chances of such a bill passing the House right now seem pretty dim. So the fight is going to the state level.

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Greta Thunberg

Next, just an observation: According to the right wing - these are all quotes - Greta Thunberg is an “annoying, foreign, communist propagandist” who "channeled Hitler In [a] Hate-Filled Rant” "instilling fear in millions of kids around the world" who should be “Tase[d] and arrest[ed].”

But at the same time, she is also "an obsessive, mentally troubled young girl" and a victim of "child abuse" who is a “creation of powerful Marxists, Soros-backed NGO's, Al Gore, and more" who is now “being exploited by her parents” and other adults.

Consider it an illustration of the old adage: If you can't attack the message, you attack the messenger.

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Some good news here: On Tuesday, US District Judge Steve Jones blocked Georgia's restrictive new abortion law from taking effect. It was supposed to go into force on January 1.

The law bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women even realize they're pregnant.

It also declares that an embryo or fetus is a "natural person" once cardiac activity can be detected, giving the fetus the same legal standing as an actual born child, potentially making any woman or health provider involved in an abortion that is not state-approved liable to be charged with murder.

This so-called heartbeat law is one of a wave of such laws passed recently by GOPper-controlled legislatures in a coordinated attack on Roe v. Wade. Happily, none of the bans has taken effect: Some have already been blocked, the rest are under challenge. But the threat remains.

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Then there's the fact that as of October 1, the second anniversary of the Las Vegas massacre, some teachers in Florida can enter classrooms armed with guns. In fact, Florida is one of eight states that allow some teachers and coaches to carry guns in schools.

Some 36 of the state’s 67 school districts are participating in the so-called Guardian Program, apparently operating under the notion that the more guns there are around the safer everyone is - no matter how many times that notion is knocked down, it rises like a zombie to walk again - and security is found in a vision of recreating the gunfight at the OK Corral.

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Finally, here is a case to watch because of what its success - if it succeeds - will indicate.

Peter Vlaming was a teacher at West Point High School in West Point VA. He had in one of his classes a female student who was transitioning to male. Vlaming refused to use male pronouns such as "him" and "his" in referring to the student and was accused of using female pronouns when discussing him with other people.

When the school found out, administrators told Vlaming to either use male pronouns or risk losing his job. He refused and ultimately was fired for insubordination.

Now he is suing the school and the school board for $1million, accusing them of violating his religious conscience and requiring him to, in the words of the suit, "take sides in an ongoing public debate regarding gender dysphoria and" - here comes the tell - "use pronouns that express an objectively untrue ideological message."

That is, being transgender is "objectively untrue" and an "ideological message."

Again, and it is becoming a real trend, religion - and let's be blunt, every time of which I am aware it has been conservative Christianity - is being used as a weapon to justify bigotry.

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Listen Up! on impeachment

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Listen Up! on impeachment

So - I go away on vacation for a couple of weeks and the domestic political world explodes.

I'm not even going to try to talk about impeachment news because it would likely be outdated by the time I finish recording this, much less by the time you see or read it. So instead I'm going to make some broad comments.

I'll start by addressing the issue of Nancy Pelosi, who all through the spring and summer and into the fall was against impeachment.

Against it because her only - okay, her primary - concern is electing Democrats to the House and she was afraid that pursuing impeachment will hurt the party's chances in the 2020 Congressional elections, particularly the chances of those "vulnerable" incumbents, those Democrats from relatively moderate or conservative districts, where, it's thought, impeachment will get the right wing all hot and bothered and turning out in droves. chances. That's why she was against it.

It had nothing to do with Tweetie-pie "not being worth it," as she said at one point; even less did it have anything to do with the notion that he would "self-impeach," whatever the hell that wqas supposed to mean. It was strictly a political calculation about 2020.

Now that she has embraced the idea, she is being praised by some on the left as some sort of brilliant strategist who was instead just wait for the precise right moment to strike.

That is just nonsense. Nancy Pelosi is still against impeachment because she still has the same concerns about 2020.

But by late May, over half of the entire House, which of course meant most of the Democrats, wanted to open an impeachment inquiry. By the end of September, 90% of House Dems openly supported doing so.

Nancy Pelosi's caucus was running away from her and major committee chairs such as Adam Schiff at Intelligence, Elijah Cummings at Oversight, and Jerry Nadler at Judiciary seemed to be moving on their own, creating what amounted to an impeachment inquiry, just without the official designation. Endorsing impeachment was the only way Pelosi could reassert some control.

On that score, it's notable, I think, that in endorsing an inquiry, she insists on it being limited to one issue, to focus solely on the Ukraine business.

Which I do not want to minimize: In addition to being a remarkable abuse of power and a betrayal of the public trust - using his position as president and let's not forget taxpayer money to pressure a foreign government to dig up some dirt on a potential political opponent, that is, for his own personal benefit - the fact that it was tied to Congressionally-approved military aid or future sales to Ukraine (oh no, not explicitly, there was no specific quid pro quo, like there ever is) marks it as at the very least a form of extortion. Do you imagine that President Zelensky didn't know that the aid had been held up for months for no apparent reason; do you imagine that when Tweetie-pie said "we want you to do us a favor, though" that Zelensky didn't get the meaning? The conversation played out like someone with a bent nose doing their best Marlon Brando impression and saying "Nice military aid package ya got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it. By the way, on this other matter, you can do me a favor...."

In fact, the call and what surrounded it could involve four separate felonies: illegally soliciting campaign help from a foreign government, bribery, misappropriation, and conspiracy.

But getting back to Pelosi, the fact remains that, again, she is still unhappy with the whole business, she has the same concerns she did before. And limiting the inquiry to a single issue, particularly an easily understood one, is the best way to control that inquiry and get it over with so fast that it, the idea is, won't be an issue in 2020 or at least not as big an issue as it would otherwise be.

But the hard fact is, we should not, we must not, let this be limited to a single incident, a single issue, a single case. There is so much more that should be addressed.

The fact is, if we ignore these other issues, it means we are saying that obstructing justice, ignoring the emoluments clause and openly profiting from the office, breaking campaign finance laws, abusing the classification system for personal gain, undermining constitutional government and corrupting the political process, colluding with a foreign government to influence a national election, ignoring subpoenas, refusing to obey laws even if the plain black letter of the law says otherwise, subverting the very rule of law by turning the Attorney General into his personal lawyer, subverting free speech by encouraging violence against protestors; subverting the free press with lies about "fake news" and declaring his own twitter feed the only source of truth, engaging in witness tampering and now witness intimidation, suggesting whistleblowers should be executed and members of Congress arrested for treason, even refusing to recognize Congress as a co-equal branch of government - if that is not part of impeachment, we are saying that none of it is important enough to address.

In the very first edition of The Erickson Report, back in May, I said we can't not impeach, that even if we thought there was no chance in the Senate, we had to throw down a marker saying "this is not acceptable."

That remains true. And as significant as that phone call to Ukraine is, it remains true for more than that. We cannot not impeach on more.

The Erickson Report for October 2 to 15

The Erickson Report for October 2 to 15

This episode:

Listen Up: Impeachment must not be limited to one issue

Five Things Noted in Passing

Two Weeks of Stupid: the Clowns

Two Weeks of Stupid: the Outrages

The Erickson Report, Page 4: A Longer Look at Our Criminal Law System

The Erickson Report, Page 4: A Longer Look at Our Criminal Law System

And that brings us to A Longer Look at that profound failing at the heart of our legal system, because these cases are linked by more than the fact that they're both about convictions for murder.

Larry Swearingen was legally murdered because there was no error in the procedures, there was no misstep in applying the rules of the courts, and there is no requirement for a court to consider newly-discovered evidence or to believe it if it's produced. Johnson is still in prison because the court system was more interested in "the integrity of the legal process" than the fact of a wrongful conviction.

The court system, that is, the courts as part of what we call the criminal justice system, is more interested in the technicalities of legal procedure than it is with truth or with justice. It has been said before that "The law is not about justice. The law is about the law." And despite what we call it, we do not have a criminal justice system; we have a criminal law system.

So what happened in these cases is not the fault of Judge Edwards. It is not the fault of Judge Hogan. It is the way the system is designed: The original trial court is the place, the only place, where facts are to be determined, where truth or falsehood are to be found out. After that, at any higher court, it's all about procedure, about rules and regulations, and the truth of the original charge, indeed the very personhood of the convicted person, fades to insignificance.

Oh, certainly if you can show corruption on the part of the police or prosecution you can get a conviction overturned, but that's because they broke the rules; it has nothing to do with the truth or falseness of the charge.

Larry Swearingen

The profound flaw at the heart of our criminal justice - properly criminal law - system is that it equates justice with the process, not with truth or fairness or decency or even the accuracy of a criminal charge and sees nothing wrong with innocent people being imprisoned or even executed as long as they got "a fair trial."

To be convicted, the evidence has to show guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But once you are convicted, the system is designed to assume that result was correct, so in the absence of some demonstration of official misconduct, of clear and undeniable rule-breaking, getting reconsideration on the basis of new evidence of innocence is like changing the mind of someone who already has firmly made theirs up - particularly because if a case is sent back to consider new evidence, it usually goes back to the original trial judge, who is now in the position of being asked, in effect, to confess that they were partly responsible for sending an innocent person to prison or even to Death Row. Such a change of mind happens, but it's rare. The system that claimed a bias in favor of the defendant at trial now has a far stronger bias in favor of the prosecution.

Lamar Johnson

It goes so far that the Supreme Court has never actually found that it is unconstitutional to execute a person known to be innocent of a capital crime, not so long as all the correct procedures were followed.

For example, in the 1993 case Herrera v. Collins, the Supreme Court denied habeas relief to a Texas death row inmate, ruling that in the absence of other constitutional grounds, newly discovered evidence of actual innocence would have to meet an "extraordinarily high" threshold - a threshold far higher than that required for conviction - to be grounds for a new trial. The court said he didn't meet that requirement. He was later executed.

The only sliver of hope on this particular front is found in the case of Troy Davis, another possibly innocent man executed by the state, in this case the state of Georgia in 2011. Responding to a 2009 petition from Davis, the Supreme Court ruled that "the District Court should receive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes petitioner’s innocence."

Troy Davis

That is indeed an "extraordinarily high" threshold, requiring evidence that could not - not was not, could not - have been obtained at time of the trial and which "clearly establishes innocence" - not "creates reasonable doubt about guilt" and note again that it's not necessary to "clearly establish" guilt in order to convict. But it at least suggests - but again does not say - that it would be unconstitutional to officially murder an innocent person even if all the legalities were seen to.

And in any event the failing - the devotion to procedure rather than justice - remains. I don't have an answer for this, I don't have a grand proposal for thoroughgoing change. I admit in fairness that a lot of the incantation-encrusted structure that has grown up around the law arose from attempts to prevent personal biases and cruel arbitrariness from determining outcomes of legal proceedings, but in so doing is has also for the most part locked out concepts such as compassion and completely rejected the concept that sometimes it's necessary to slip outside the rules in order to do what is right.

Meanwhile, as our legal system has become a nearly impenetrable, self-referential, high priesthood where most of us can find ourselves blocked from the courthouse for not knowing which official form to file or missing a deadline of which we were never informed because it was up to us to know, that failing continues to eat away at the justice we foolishly believed the system was about and the names like Larry Swearingen, like Lamar Johnson, like Troy Davis, like all the others wrongly convicted, even wrongly executed, will continue to haunt us.

Again, I don't know the answer. But I do know this: At his legal murder, Larry Swearingen said "Lord forgive them. They don't know what they are doing." I think he was wrong. They know exactly what they are doing. They are serving the system.

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

Now the Outrages, and there are two of them, linked by the way they demonstrate a profound flaw, a profound failing, at the heart of our criminal justice system. And I'm not talking about racism or classism - the advantages the rich have over others - or anything like that, I am talking about the philosophy that undergirds the system itself.

The first involves one Larry Swearingen, who on August 21 was legally murdered by the state of Texas.

Swearingen had been convicted in 2000 of the 1998 rape and murder of 19-year-old Melissa Trotter. The evidence was strictly circumstantial, consisting largely of the fact that he was the last person seen with her before she disappeared and some signs of what could have been a struggle in his home. No physical evidence connected him to the crime; the closest thing to actual hard evidence was that a cell phone tower noted his phone signal that evening, meaning he was in the vicinity of a certain road potentially relevant to the case at the time.

Swearingen never denied knowing Trotter and maintained his innocence literally to his last breath. His attorneys had mounted a major effort through the legal system to defend him, fending off four previous dates for execution over the years, arguing that the prosecution relied on "junk science."

So what's the deal? It's that a number of influential Texas pathologists, together responsible for thousands of death investigations every year, say that the evidence proves that Trotter had not been dead very long when her body was found more than three weeks after she disappeared. In which case, Swearingen could not have killed her, since - the ultimate alibi - he was in prison on an outstanding warrant and had been there since a couple of days after Trotter vanished. Even the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Joye Carter, recanted her trial testimony in 2007, admitting that the ease with which she was able to weigh and dissect Trotter’s organs, which would have been seriously deteriorated had she been killed in the time before Swearingen was arrested, made the state’s timeline impossible.

Larry Swearingen

Here's the crucial point: The courts didn't care. As an example, a nine-day hearing was held in 2012, laying out expert testimony on why Trotter had to have been killed not long before her body was found, thus long after Swearingen was in prison. Even before the final transcripts were filed, Judge Fred Edwards, who presided over the original trial, dismissed the science presented by the defense as "junk."

And so it went: The rulings were issued, the procedures were followed, there was no error in the operation of the machinery of the law, all the i's were dotted and the t's crossed according to formula, and so finally Swearingen was officially killed and the law was satisfied - as a quite likely innocent man lay dead.

Our second Outrage involves Lamar Johnson, who has been in prison in Missouri for 24 years, having been sentenced to life without parole for a murder even prosecutors now say he did not commit.

Johnson was convicted of murdering Marcus Boyd in 1994, in a case that even at the time should have left everyone scratching their heads. Prosecutors claimed that in the space of just five minutes, Johnson left a friend's apartment, traveled 3 miles to Boyd's home, killed Boyd, and then traveled by foot back to his friend's apartment.

But what's brought renewed attention is the fact that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner's Conviction Integrity Unit has filed a 67-page motion seeking a new trial for Johnson, based on having uncovered a staggering amount of misconduct on the part of homicide detectives and prosecutors, including inventing witness statements, paying the single eyewitness, and pressuring that person into making a false identification. Then there was the fact that two other men confessed in 1996 and 2002 that they were the ones who killed Boyd in a botched robbery.

Lamar Johnson

But Circuit Judge Elizabeth Hogan rejected the motion on August 23, saying in effect it was 24 years too late, citing a provision of Missouri law that, believe it or not, requires a motion for a new trial to be made within 25 days of trial's end. Hogan's decision gives no evidence of there being an exception for evidence discovered after that time.

In fact, in her ruling, Judge Hogan seemed much more concerned with a question of if prosecutors and Johnson’s lawyers had violated some rules of court procedure in pressing for his freedom. She wrote that she was "concerned about the integrity of the legal process in this case" even as she could not spare a word for what one of Johnson's lawyers called "the clear, convincing, and overwhelming evidence" that Johnson is innocent.

She did, however, for some reason find it relevant to include in laying out the background to the case that the same day that Gardner filed her motion, she "also released a copy of its motion and exhibits to the national media," an irrelevant observation which bluntly doesn't say much for Hogan's impartiality.

And so Johnson still sits in prison, hoping against hope for a successful appeal although it's hard to see on what basis if Judge Hogan cited that law about filing for a new trial correctly, since there is then no visible error, even if the aside about releasing the motion to the media could be taken as an indication of personal bias against Gardner or her office.

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

Okay, we turn now to a popular feature, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages. We start, as usual, with the Clowns and oh do we have a carful this time.

Our first Clown is conservative radio host and poster boy for privilege Ben Shapiro, who said on his show a couple of weeks ago that people who have to work two jobs are actually just, well, stupid:

If you had to work more than one job to have a roof over your head or food on the table, you probably shouldn’t have taken the job that’s not paying you enough. That’d be a you problem.

Put another way, if you have to take a second - or a third, or a fourth, or whatever - job in order to provide for your family, it's your own damn fault because you should have refused to take any job at all until one that paid enough came along.

He got scorched on Twitter, provoking him to shift into damage control mode, claiming - I shouldn't even have to tell you this - claiming he was taken out of context, the context being, it seems, that the government should take no steps at all toward establishing a living wage because The Market (pbui) "knows more than you do."

Ben Shapiro

How that affects his blaming struggling people for their problems goes unexplained. Which is pretty typical for a Clown.

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Next up, and we're sort of taking these chronologically, is the Hasbro company, which has come out with a variation on the board game Monopoly, this one called "Monopoly Socialism." You immediately can get a flavor of the game by noting the tagline is "Winning is for capitalists."

Historian Nick Kapur described the game in a lengthy Twitter thread, including noting the lame jokes about vegetarianism - how that got to be about socialism is beyond me - and the "We Are All Winners" school as well as pointing out the mockery aimed at environmentalism and, get this, voting.

the game

The whole idea seems to be that no one in the game gets anywhere, the "community fund" that finances projects which individual players can't afford is designed to be constantly going broke, and from time to time any wealth that the community has actually accumulated is simply destroyed.

I could have done without Kapur's suggesting the target audience is "hate-filled baby boomers who grew up during the cold war and are triggered by anything done by anyone under 40," but the fact remains that the whole thing is so thoroughly lame it is hard to imagine just who it is for and it is clearly the product of the minds of Clowns.

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We move on to the fact that last week, in response to a report that bedbugs had been found in the New York Times newsroom, a George Washington University professor named named David Karpf tweeted that "The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens," Stephens being a right-wing Times op-Ed columnist.

Bret Stephens

His tweet got, Karpf later said, nine likes and zero retweets and was not sent to Stephens.

Now personally, I think the joke is not funny and in fact a bit creepy but Stephens, who somehow heard about it, went out of his little mind. He wrote to Karpf complaining about his tweet and essentially daring Karpf to come to his house and say it to his face - a letter which he copied to the the university provost, that is, Karpf's boss. Oh, not to threaten his job of course, not to get him in trouble at work, oh no perish the thought, rather it was merely that he thought the provost should be aware of his underling's behavior. He then wrote a whole column about about attacks on Jews in World War II referencing insect comparisons and saying "the rhetoric of infestation is back."

To top is off, he then took advantage of his place as a contributor on MSNBC to get face time to bloviate about his side of his by-then-viral tiff with Karpf, who of course was afforded no such opportunity.

And if all that doesn't add up to Clown status (with the Times and MSNBC as enablers), then how about this:

James Inhofe

Despite cc'ing Karpf's boss, when it came to the case of Tucks Carlson saying Iraqis are "semi-literate primitive monkeys," Stephens defended him, saying threatening someone's career is an assault on free speech - in addition to which, insect and "infestation" references are not new to him, as he once compared Palestinians to a giant mosquito.

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Okay, an old favorite Clown is Sen. James Inhofe. He has introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to limit the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to regulate lake levels and flood control related to a dam on Grand Lake in northeastern Oklahoma.

Folks upstream of the damn, including local Native American tribes and officials in the high-poverty town of Miami, say that maintaining high water levels on the lake has contributed to repeated floods as water backs up from the dam. Two dozen floods in less than 30 years, in fact, with 150 homes torn down and more abandoned as a result. This spring’s floods forced the Eastern Shawnee tribe to evacuate, its ceremonial grounds covered in three feet of water.

LeBron James

Inhofe wants higher water levels at Grand Lake on the grounds that it "makes the lake a better place for recreation and commerce." We're all sure here that the facts that he has a vacation home there and a company in his wife’s name holds $1 million in property around the lake has nothing to do with his enthusiasm for deregulation.

Inhofe's middle name, no joke, is Mountain. Which seems entirely appropriate for a Clown who has rocks in his head.

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And the Clowns keep on coming. LeBron James has reportedly filed for a trademark for the phrase "Taco Tuesday," apparently based on his popular series of social media posts on the theme.

According to the application, James wants to trademark the phrase for "advertising and marketing services" through "indirect methods" that include social media and blogging.

So be careful: If you ever want to have tacos on a Tuesday, you may have to pay a fee to LeBron James, professional Clown.

the shirt

As a footnote to that, of course the phrase "Taco Tuesday" has been around a long time, long before LeBron James became a fabulously rich man who wants to be a fabulously richer one. You're not supposed to be able to trademark a common phrase or expression, but in a world where money speaks louder than law and the patent office is hopelessly overburdened, that principle did not keep Paris Hilton from trademarking "That's hot!" or Rachel Zoe from getting a trademark on the word "bananas" referring to something crazy, even though that's an expression that dates back to at least 1935.

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Then there are the Clowns of the administration of the Highland Hills Middle School in Highland Hills, Indiana, where a 13-year-old girl got in trouble over a t-shirt.

What was wrong with it? Well, it had a slogan that read "Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you can just be quiet?" which the principal declared inappropriate and disrespectful, along with claiming the words “Sex” and “Homo” were too eye-catching. As you can see in the picture, yeah, they really do just pop out at you, don't they.

The school's dress code bans shirts that are "suggestive, obscene or promote alcohol or drug products or use" or are sheer. It seems that "oppose bigotry" needs to be added to that list - unless doing so is already considered obscene by the Clowns at Highland Hills Middle School.

Dan Rehill

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Finally for this time, we have the Rev. Dan Reehil, a Clown pastor at the St. Edward School, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Nashville, Tennessee. He just sent an email to parents of students telling them that the Harry Potter books have been removed from the school library because they "risk conjuring evil spirits." Seriously.

Quoting the email:

These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception. The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.

Personally, I think that's just Riddikulus.

Clowns to the right of me, Clowns to the left of me, Clowns in front of me, volleyed and thundered....