SCOTUS

Four days ago, for a variety of reasons, I posted a farewell message to my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/timsnews) after nine years of dedicating my blood, sweat, and tears to keeping it going well, and doing so with no real compensation.

There were several private personal issues that played into the decision of how I need to allocate my time and effort going forward, but those were all secondary to the fact that at the beginning of 2016, this page was reaching nearly half a million individual users a day. Now, with nearly twice as many followers as then, it barely reaches 5,000 a week. This is a direct result of Facebook’s (now Meta’s) algorithms intentionally quashing the voice of progressive and/or humanist advocates.

As a result of all of this, and other changes to how the Facebook user interface works, the page has evolved a few times over the years, going from a place of user engaged discussion and debate of meaningful issues, to me just posting brief commentary on specific news links, and the few people that still engaged doing so simply by clicking a generalized emoticon reaction button instead of processing their thoughts on the issue for a meaningful response.

Since posting that message, quite a few people who have never openly engaged before let me know publicly and privately how much the page has meant to them, that meant a lot.

Also, several extremely major news stories broke each validating much of my efforts here over the last few years.

Trump’s Chief of Staff published a new book exposing that Trump tested positive for COVID 3 days prior to his live debate with Biden in 2020. Meaning that he was “patient zero” for the Super Spreader event celebrating his appointment of Amy Cohen Barrett to the Supreme Court and several other events that week, all of which he attended unmasked while hugging the guests. It also shows that his crowding Biden’s personal space during the debate was an intentional and malicious effort attempting to infect Biden. And every one of his immediate family members and staff, unmasked in the audience, were doing something similar. After backlash from Trump, the author, said in a news interview that his own book was “Fake News.”

A former ranking member of the DOJ choose to plead the 5th in front of a Congressional committee rather than answer questions that would expose his own criminal involvement in the January 6th insurrection. This has been handed over to the current AG for Contempt of Congress charges.

Meanwhile a Supreme Court bench sent the signal that it fully intends to strip women of what remaining personal health autonomy they already have, and in the process set the new precedent for states to completely disregard any and all federal laws and regulations they choose.

You might remember Trump in his debate with Hillary Clinton declaring that he would fill the bench with judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade. And here we are.

Despite the fact that during his confirmation to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh convinced Sen. Susan Collins that he thought a woman’s right to an abortion was “settled law” calling the court cases affirming it “precedent on precedent” that could not be casually overturned. And during her own confirmation, Amy Coney Barrett told senators that laws could not be undone simply by personal beliefs, including her own.

In both cases Senators like Susan Collins choose to believe their lies under oath, rather than see the reality of their previous rulings and opinions and op-ed papers, and Trump’s stated intent and confirm them anyway.

As a result, we now have a Supreme Court bench, one third of which, was appointed by a man who attempted to lead a violent overthrow of our government, actively reinterpreting Constitutional law and legal precedent from a fascist White Nationalist perspective.

The legal team Trump assembled to wage his “Stop the Steal” court battles has turned on each other so deeply that they’re publicly exposing each others crimes, and all are now under investigation. They also lost a major ruling in Michigan as a result of these frivolous lawsuits. And outlets like Fox News and NewsMax are tearing themselves apart trying to figure out who they’re supposed to support and who they’re supposed to attack.

During this brief four day span, we also learned that the mother of the latest school shooting wrote an open later in 2016 to Trump thanking him for giving her the right to bear arms. The weapon the boy used was only purchased by the father four days before the methodical and deliberate massacre. This was a direct result of the incessant #StochasticTerrorism efforts from Trump and his supporters. The young man is now being charged as an adult with murder and terrorism charges. His parents are both being charged with involuntary manslaughter as well.

And over the years, each and every one of those things was predicted by the posts on this page, and then discussed again as they were happening in real time. This, along with your heartfelt responses, further validated my work and effort here and helped me come to a realization.

I started the Facebook page and this blog site for me, they were a place for me to process my thoughts on important and difficult issues, which over the years evolved into an attempt to combat willful ignorance by keeping myself and others informed. One of the key ways I found to do that was to expose the aspects of our #culturalinertia that were holding us back as a society offering suggestions on how we need to shift them in the proper direction. At the same time writing about it and informing others became a form of personal therapy to work through my own “Moral Injury.” If you don’t know what that is, you should. I strongly believe that we as a collective society are all suffering from this shared PTSD. Learn more here: https://www.ptsd.va.gov/…/cooccurring/moral_injury.asp=

So, I realize now, I need to keep doing my writing and sharing it with anyone that I can reach, which means instead of shutting the page down, it is time for it to evolve once again.

I will keep this page open, along with my Twitter page @timelytopics. Of late, I have been over-posting to Facebook and under-posting to Twitter. To solve both those issues, instead of posting so many different news articles with their own separate lead in comments, I will be writing a couple cumulative blog entries on this WordPress page https://tims-news.com/ and posting the links to these social media accounts, you can follow on whichever of the three platforms you prefer.

These blog entries will be more similar in structure to the postings I have shared with you recently from Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, and I will allow more of my personal writing voice to be present in my commentary on the issues (as all of my blog posts have done) than my postings here normally have contained. Expect to find a lot more humor and sarcasm embedded that those of you that don’t know me personally are accustomed to from me.

If you appreciate the work and effort, and are willing to make a donation to cover the expenses of the news subscriptions I use to keep the information here flowing, you can do so at either PayPal: paypal.me/timelytopics or Venmo: timelytopics@gmail.com

One of the ongoing themes of this blog and the accompanying Facebook discussion page that inspired it is the concept of #Culturalinertia.

More specifically, shifting the way we think and talk about the issues that have become so ingrained in our culture that we may not even recognize the influences that prevent us from progressing forward with new thinking and approaches to the problems at hand.

We have explored, and will continue to explore, many aspects of this cultural phenomenon.

One of the things that makes this Cultural Inertia difficult to expose is the emotional attachments we form to the thinking that has us bogged down and stuck on the path we’ve been on for so long, especially if we attempt to deal with specifics that we all have strong opinions about.

The issue today is the concept of “Innocent until proven guilty,” and how it applies to our society outside of a court of law.

It has been a core tenant of our American legal philosophy that even someone suspected of committing a crime is to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law before a jury of their peers.

However, over the years, that has expanded to a societal claim that we as a society must treat others with this same presumption of innocence. Despite this claim, society does not function this way. It never has. It is not supposed to.

We have seen many people lose their jobs over the #MeToo movement without a criminal trial regarding the allegations. We have seen many people lose their careers and public standing over videos of them giving racist rants in public spaces have surfaced, without a court of law making a determination of discrimination or assault.

After Dylann Roof confessed to killing multiple people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and his personal manifesto was found along with motivations posted on his social media, I commented on his guilt. I was told we needed to wait for a court of law to decide his guilt at trial before we could speculate.

He had confessed. We had witnesses. We had proof. Everyone knew he was guilty. That wasn’t the issue, the issue was could the evidence be presented in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt without committing a procedural violation allowing the cased to be dismissed on a technicality.

Even if the court had found him “not guilty’ for any reason, it would not have changed the fact that he had committed this crime.

Saying he did would not open us up to charges of “defamation” or “slander” for which we could then be sued.

This is exactly why courts use “Not guilty” instead of “Innocent” as a final verdict option.

For an example of the other perspective, our current President famously took out a full page advertisement in a major United States newspaper calling for the execution of five young men that had been accused and convicted of a horrible crime. They were later exonerated of all charges, actually proven innocent of the crime for which they had been convicted.

Those men have no legal recourse against the man who called for the public to execute them for something they had not done. Their accuser is now President of the United States, he has never retracted or apologized for this. He has actually defended it.

The important points being that it is possible to be convicted of a crime of which you are innocent and it is possible to be found guilty of a crime of which you are not innocent.

Now it is also important to note that while there is a statute of limitations preventing some criminal charges from being prosecuted after a specific amount of time has passed, there is no such statute of limitations on public outrage.

This is an important distinction, especially when we get into evaluating personal and professional qualifications for elected and appointed governmental officials.

A political campaign or a political confirmation hearing are not criminal law courts (with the exception of a Senate impeachment trial) and do not operate under the same presumption of innocence.

When running for mayor, governor, Senate, House of Representatives, President, or any other elected office, the candidate is basically put on public trial. In this process, the press serves as prosecutor, the campaign team serves as defense, and the public serves as the jury. This jury must only reach a majority verdict not a unanimous one, and in the event of a tie, a retrial (run-off election) is performed.

Both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were known to have, and admitted to, using drugs in their youth. Clinton with marijuana and Bush with cocaine. The public elected them both despite these issues, neither of which they could have been arrested and tried for at the time they were running for President due to the amount of time that had passed and the lack of proof beyond a confession offered while not under oath and not having been read their Miranda rights prior to confessing. If they had confessed to or been suspected of murder instead of recreational drug usage, every aspect of that would have been much different.

Now we as a people are faced with a Supreme Court candidate that has been credibly accused of an attempted rape. The only third party witness is also a named accomplice and he refuses to testify. So it is the word of two different people against each other with no physical evidence available to provide proof.

A court of law would not convict him based on this allegation. Nor would it provide him, nor any government official, grounds for a “defamation” law suit.

According to many courts, a public official is a government employee who has, or appears to the public to have, a significant role in the business of government and public affairs. Such people are considered to be held in a position that would draw or even demand public scrutiny. They also are considered to have significant ability to defend themselves regarding such public scrutiny and therefore cannot claim defamation unless the statement is not only proven to be false, but the defamer is proven to have shown reckless disregard for that falsity. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254.

This rule also applies to public figures. Not all courts have not specifically defined “public figure,” but they do identify candidates for public office and people who have achieved pervasive fame or notoriety as fitting this description. Curtis Pub. Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130, 87 S.Ct. 1975, 18 L.Ed.2d 1094 (1967). A public figure could also be someone who voluntarily enters the public eye because of a particular public issue or controversy.

Courts have upheld this rule based on the U.S. belief that the public should be able to freely discuss national issues without fear of repercussions. If a public official or public figure believes that he or she has been defamed, he or she must prove with convincing evidence that the statement is false. The public official also must prove that the defamer showed reckless disregard for that falsity, either because the defamer knew the statement was false or should have known. Herbert v. Lando, 441 U.S. 153, 99 S.Ct. 1635, 60 L.Ed.2d 115 (1979).

Just as a defendant is supposed to be set free if they cannot be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; a nominee for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be deemed unimpeachable beyond a reasonable doubt at the time of appointment.

From allegations of sexual abuse, clear proof of multiple counts of perjury, and possible qualification discussions with members of Trump’s personal defense firm, far too much reasonable doubt exists for his confirmation.

There is no requirement for presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion nor is there a statute of limitations on public outrage and outcry.

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