Scott Boehmer

Category: Politics

  • Profiles in Courage

    Sometimes it takes a crisis to reveal one’s true character. This is especially true of people who occupy positions of leadership, both in the private and public sectors. Are they courageous, or are they cowards? Worse yet, are they complicit in doing grave harm?

    …

    But today I’d like to honor unsung heroes whose courage in the face of the Trump-Musk takeover of America deserves our profound thanks. They are public servants who have chosen to fight rather than submit to Trump’s treachery, contesting his blatantly illegal attempts to fire them.

    Robert Reich

    Profiles in Courage (Robert Reich)

  • Egg Prices!

    Well, after farmers wrote that letter, the White House and FTC started making noise about antitrust action. They said egg companies, we heard you’ve been price gouging. You’re just overcharging and you’re using bird flu as an excuse. We see you. The fact that you can play with prices like that tells us that there’s not enough competition happening in the egg market.

    …

    And that’s all the federal government had to do. FTC didn’t have to do anything beyond that, because just threatening antitrust action is often enough to get companies to back off.

    Sarah Taber

    Egg prices! Bird flu! Price gouging! What’s going on? (Farm to Taber)

  • The End of Law?

    As Trump’s marauding continues, America’s last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.

    On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

    This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately,” not the president.

    Robert Reich

    The end of law? (Robert Reich)

  • The Fix Our Forests Act

    That’ the Fix Our Forests Act, a logging bill disguised as a fire fighting bill. The tell is in the numerous and creative ways it would obstruct citizen input, from delaying citizen review until after the trees are cut to reducing the statute of limitations for filing lawsuits from six months to 120 days, seriously straining the ability of small citizen groups to apply legal restraint. It waives NEPA protections on fire-sheds as large as 250,000 square acres and allows loggings to proceed even if courts find the logging plan violates the law. There are no limits on the size and age of trees to be cut and the language is so vague that even clear cuts could qualify as “fuels treatment.” If passed, it would open millions of acres of forests to logging without scientific review or citizen input. A better name for this legislations would be the Fix It So We Can Log Without Citizen Oversight Act.

    Rob Lewis

    The Fix Our Forests Act: It’s Not What It Claims to Be (The Climate According to Life)

  • The Constitution Should Be a Red Line

    In fact, this herky-jerky structure of checks and balances, vetoes, two houses, jurisdiction left to the states, the war powers divided between the president and the congress. This unwieldy structure is the whole idea. No one has or should ever have all the power. So the concern I’m raising today isn’t some academic exercise or manifestation of political jealousy, or abstract institutional loyalty. It’s the guts of the system designed to protect us from the inevitable, and I mean inevitable, abuse or an authoritarian state.

    Senator Angus S. King, Jr.

    Now is the time to establish a redline — the Constitution itself (Senator Angus S. King, Jr.)

  • Innovation is a Distraction

    We do absolutely know what we need to to to fight the climate crisis: Reduce carbon emissions radically. Which we have known for decades (I was taught about the “greenhouse effect” in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde). We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating as much meat, invest in cleaner energy sources and insulate houses, etc. We know.

    But it’s inconvenient. The solutions we know, we have researched, we have tested, are annoying. They force us to change our lives, force us to rethink our social and economic structures (Oh who would have thought: An economic system based on limitless growth and consumption would lead to bad outcomes. Let’s start a research project!). And who wants to do all that?

    Jürgen Geuter / tante

    Innovation is a distraction (Smashing Frames)

  • Protecting North Carolina’s Voter Rolls

    Established in 2012, ERIC offers a modern and common-sense approach to interstate voter registration maintenance. At its core, ERIC is a voluntary and bipartisan interstate collaborative that now includes 21 states and Washington, D.C. Together, member states agree to securely share and cross-reference voter registration data across state boundaries in order to identify and eliminate duplicates, deceased voters, and people who have moved from one state to another.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    Protecting North Carolina’s Voter Rolls (Carolina Forward)

  • When Creators are Disappointing

    It’s entirely up to you where you draw the line for yourself. It sucks to think that something into which you invested so much of yourself was created by a monster, and that you might then have to change your relationship with it. I know. But that relationship does change.

    Bryan Young

    Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling and the fall of beloved creators (Salt Lake City Weekly)

  • Who Owns the Streets?

    For the vast majority of civilization, the streets were a shared space for kids playing, bicycles, pedestrians, merchants and more. But by the 1920s there was a huge shift in how we use our public space, and that has major consequences on how we live today. So what happened then? And what happens now when cities rethink how we use our streets?

    Justine Underhill

    Who Owns the Streets? How Cars Took Over Our Shared Spaces (Justine Underhill)

  • How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

    Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

    Brett Murphy

    A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza (ProPublica)