Conservatives and Liberals

[seacoaster]

The real story on the lizard hole into which the willing were dragged:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opin ... trans.html

"This is a story about how the right twisted the sexual assault of a teenager into a culture war fantasy. It’s about how a distorted tale on a conservative website became grist for a nationwide moral panic.

On June 22, a middle-aged plumber named Scott Smith was dragged, lip bleeding and hands cuffed behind his back, from a raucous school board meeting in Loudoun County, Va. According to the local newspaper Loudoun Now, he’d been swearing loudly at another parent and leaning toward her with a clenched fist when the police tackled him and pulled him outside. He’d eventually be convicted of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and given a suspended 10-day jail sentence.

Smith’s image quickly went viral as a symbol of the sort of school board strife breaking out all over America. The National School Boards Association, writing to President Biden to request help dealing with the “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation” directed at school board members, included Smith’s arrest in a list of examples.

Soon, however, Smith revealed why he’d been so distraught. In an interview with The Daily Wire, a website co-founded by the conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro, Smith said that his ninth-grade daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. Smith was opposed to a proposed policy allowing trans kids to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identities, believing it made girls like his daughter vulnerable.

“The point is kids are using it as an advantage to get into the bathrooms,” he told the reporter, Luke Rosiak.

By the time Smith spoke to Rosiak, the story had become even uglier. In July, the boy was arrested in the attack on Smith’s daughter and charged with two counts of forcible sodomy. But pending a hearing, he was allowed to enroll at another high school while wearing an ankle monitor. In early October he was arrested again, this time for allegedly forcing a girl into an empty classroom and touching her inappropriately.

After Rosiak’s article came out, Smith became a symbol of a different kind: a blue-collar martyr to wokeness. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Rosiak said, “This story is one of the most disturbing I’ve ever worked on. It raises the possibility that the Loudoun County public schools covered up the rape of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of a boy wearing a skirt in order to pass a school policy that Democrats were adamant about passing.” As a result of that cover-up, Rosiak said, a second girl was allegedly attacked, “and to prevent all of this from coming out potentially, they arrested the father of the victim.”

Not surprisingly, the story ricocheted around the right. Conservatives have long argued that letting trans girls and women into women’s bathrooms would lead to sexual predation, and now that seemed to have happened. They’ve argued that wokeness is a form of tyranny, and in Smith they had a man who seemed to have been tyrannized because his family’s lived experience posed a threat to trans ideology.

If they had it all wrong, it’s almost hard to blame them — the narrative was too irresistible.

Outrage over the assaults has loomed over the Virginia gubernatorial race, where the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, has sought to harness parental anger toward school boards accused of putting left-wing dogma above student welfare. Senate Republicans recently harped on the case in a hearing for an appeals court nominee, Holly Thomas. On Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton badgered Attorney General Merrick Garland about it, indignant about steps the Justice Department is taking to address threats to school board members. Smith’s daughter, said Cotton, “was raped in a bathroom by a boy wearing girls’ clothes and the Loudoun County School Board covered it up because it would interfere with their transgender policy during pride month.”

Buta Biberaj, the Commonwealth attorney who prosecuted Smith, received death threats. So did members of the school board.

But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious. It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence.

Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. “The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,” Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, “He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”

The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.”

On Monday, the boy received the juvenile court equivalent of a guilty verdict. The case dealing with the second attack he is accused of will be decided in November.

We don’t know exactly why the boy was allowed to attend a different school after his first arrest. The district has refused to comment on the transfer because of state and federal privacy laws. According to Biberaj, under state law, juveniles can be detained for only 21 days without a hearing, and her office needed more time than that to get DNA results. A condition of the boy’s release was that he could have no contact with the girl, so he couldn’t return to his original school.

It’s not clear whether the school system had the option of barring the boy from in-person school altogether. In a statement this month, the Loudoun County Public Schools superintendent, Scott Ziegler, called for policy changes that would allow administrators to “separate alleged offenders from the general student body.” Conservatives, of course, have traditionally opposed policies that would keep accused offenders out of school.

As Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education, said last year, “Too many students have lost access to their education because their school inadequately responded when a student filed a complaint of sexual harassment or sexual assault.”

Even as the facts of this case have come out, the damage done by all the disinformation about it will be hard to undo. “Once the politics are over, we’re still dealing with the destruction,” said Biberaj, who wonders how her community is supposed to heal. “You can’t always successfully bring people back to say, ‘I know this is what you were told, but look what happened in court under oath.’”

A sad and complicated truth is probably no match for an exquisitely useful lie."

[MDlaxfan76]

Worth the read.

[Farfromgeneva]

The devos family office lost $100mm on Theranos so we know she’s gullible.

[youthathletics]

So the moral of that NYT story is that our children lie, school boards are idiots for allowing sexual offenders in school...nonetheless two different schools without supervision, plumbers and blue collar workers are called out as irrational for believing their daughters lies, and the NYT makes certain that this blue-collar plumber father is viewed as an idiot, all while blaming Tucker Carlson.

Boy or boy, it must be great being a backseat driver as an NYT blogger, with a political slant.

[MDlaxfan76]

So the moral of that NYT story is that our children lie, school boards are idiots for allowing sexual offenders in school...nonetheless two different schools without supervision, plumbers and blue collar workers are called out as irrational for believing their daughters lies, and the NYT makes certain that this blue-collar plumber father is viewed as an idiot, all while blaming Tucker Carlson.

Boy or boy, it must be great being a backseat driver as an NYT blogger, with a political slant.

Not how I read that...I see a political agenda usurping any reasonable consideration that there may be more to the story, a rush to use such a story to rile viewers up into a frenzy...not actual reporting.

The entire point of the Carlson angle was not only based upon a false understanding and framing of what happened, it absolutely wasn't because of a school policy that allowed trans kids into bathrooms. Policy didn't exist at time of 'assault' that was between two kids who'd previously had a consensual relationship.

Definitely not due to allowing a kid with a skirt on to be in a girl's bathroom.

There's indeed an issue with safety and policies enabling schools to prevent a kid from being a danger, but that's not what Carlson seized upon all too willingly. All about the trans aspect.

Now, we may yet learn even more...for instance, what did the dad actually know and when did he know it? Likewise, when did Carlson know that it actually wasn't due to a trans policy being too loose? Did he care?

[Peter Brown]

The important thing of this story is, folks, what did TUCKER CARLSON know and when did he know it?!?!?

[seacoaster]

So the moral of that NYT story is that our children lie, school boards are idiots for allowing sexual offenders in school...nonetheless two different schools without supervision, plumbers and blue collar workers are called out as irrational for believing their daughters lies, and the NYT makes certain that this blue-collar plumber father is viewed as an idiot, all while blaming Tucker Carlson.

Boy or boy, it must be great being a backseat driver as an NYT blogger, with a political slant.

Think you missed the point, which MDlaxfan politely pointed out to you. It sure seems like your commitment to cultural division is too great to see, you know, facts.

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/loc ... -mundorff/

Here is another perspective to contemplate. The teacher is sexually assaulted, beaten, spit upon and the student alleged to have done this will not even be suspended from school. The cops won't even come because the school district booted them out of all the schools. The cops don't give a chit, the schools don't give a chit and the students certainly don't give a chit. This is an example of the perfect storm of complacency. No one, even a high school student can be held responsible for their alleged criminal activities. Our school have much more serious problems than boys wearing skirts going into the girls bathroom. The students are dictating the terms of what they can and can't do in school. Nobody is willing to do a damn thing about it.

[youthathletics]

Insane story.....keep us posted. Protecting herself is not advised if it jeopardizes injury to the student. When staff are taught restraint techniques, it often requires a second staff member in more physical altercations. Specific techniques are tight in 1v1 altercations.....and if the student is injured not using those taught techniques.....the liability is on the teacher. My guess is this is why it’s taking so long.

[Farfromgeneva]

People are focused on the World Series but this is a pretty big deal in Atlanta. I don’t love any but Moore might be the best of a weak field. Republicans non existent in the city.


Atlanta 2021 Mayor Election Is Dominated by Crime Problem
‘Everywhere I go, everyone wants to know what are you going to do about the crime issue?’ says a candidate

The Atlanta SWAT team responded to gunfire in the Midtown area earlier this month.
PHOTO: JOHN SPINK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Cameron McWhirter
Oct. 31, 2021 7:00 am ET

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ATLANTA—Voters head to the polls Tuesday in a crowded mayoral contest dominated by public concern over a jump in violent crime.

Fourteen candidates are vying to succeed Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who chose not to seek re-election after 2020 protests that were followed by vandalism, a police shooting that sparked further unrest and a rise in murders and other violent crimes.

The election is one of dozens of mayoral races happening around the U.S. on Tuesday, as well as much-watched gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. Voters in Boston are poised to elect a woman as mayor for the first time in the city’s history. The Minneapolis election—the first since the unrest following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020—includes a mayoral race and a ballot item to decide whether to replace the police department with a department of public safety.


In Atlanta, former Mayor Kasim Reed and City Council President Felicia Moore are leading the field of candidates, according to recent polls, and both have said combating crime will be their priority if elected.


‘The next mayor has about 180 days to reduce crime in a pretty dramatic fashion,’ says Atlanta mayoral candidate Kasim Reed, a former mayor of the city.
PHOTO: ERIK S LESSER/SHUTTERSTOCK
Mr. Reed, 52 years old, who was mayor just preceding Ms. Bottoms from 2010 to 2018, has called for hiring 750 new police officers, giving precincts new equipment and tripling the city’s network of traffic cameras and license-plate readers, including adding more cameras in public parks.

When he was mayor, crime was at a 40-year low, he said in an interview, noting that the police union has endorsed his re-election.

“Issue one, two, three in this election is crime and violence,” he said. Crime is so bad that some people in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood, Buckhead, are proposing a referendum to set up a separate city as early as next year. The next Atlanta mayor has just a few months to turn around the crime problem “or our city will literally become two cities,” Mr. Reed said. “The next mayor has about 180 days to reduce crime in a pretty dramatic fashion.”


Ms. Moore, 60, has pushed solutions such as developing neighborhood watch programs, as well as building up the police force with programs that bring back officers who have retired and recruit new ones. She also wants to train police to reduce tensions and avoid excessive use of force.

“Everywhere I go, everyone wants to know what are you going to do about the crime issue?” Ms. Moore said in an interview.

Atlanta residents are “uneasy and fearful,” and they want a leader who “will set the tone from the top that we are going to tackle this,” she said.


Felicia Moore, city council president, has backed development of neighborhood watch programs, building up the police force and training police to reduce tensions.
PHOTO: PARAS GRIFFIN/GETTY IMAGES
Like many other U.S. cities, Atlanta has seen incidents of violent crime increase since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests that summer. In June 2020, Atlanta police officers shot and killed Rayshard Brooks outside a fast-food restaurant, leading to protests and the burning of the restaurant. The police chief resigned and the officer who opened fire is facing multiple charges, including felony murder.

As of Oct. 23, murders in Atlanta were up 13% over the same year-to-date period in 2020, and 58% from the same period in 2019, according to Atlanta police statistics. Rapes, aggravated assaults and auto thefts are all up compared with 2020.

Mr. Reed’s two terms in office were marked by fiscal stability, population growth and business development. But his time in office was tainted by a federal probe into corruption in his administration. Several people have pleaded guilty to various charges and others await trial. Mr. Reed’s chief financial officer and a deputy chief of staff were sentenced to prison on bribery-related counts. Mr. Reed said he did nothing wrong and was never charged with a crime.

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Ms. Moore has spent decades on the city council and touts her efforts to overhaul the city’s pension system, secure pay raises for police and firefighters and fight to expand affordable housing in the city as home prices rise. She said Atlanta needs “a leader who has integrity” and not someone clouded by ethical issues.

A September poll by the University of Georgia for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found 44% of respondents stated that crime was the city’s most pressing issue. Mr. Reed led the polling with about 24%, followed by Ms. Moore with about 20%. The other 12 candidates garnered single-digit support, and about 41% of those polled were undecided.


If no candidate wins more than 50% of the votes cast, a runoff between the two leading candidates will be held on Nov. 30.

Nikolay Orekhov, 38, a stay-at-home dad in Atlanta’s Ormewood Park neighborhood, said he cast his ballot for Mr. Reed in early voting, though he understands how polarizing Mr. Reed is.

“I’m still grappling with that decision,” he said. Atlanta’s economy improved when Mr. Reed was mayor, and crime was relatively low, so perhaps what Atlanta needs now is a leader “who can get things done,” Mr. Orekhov said.

Write to Cameron McWhirter at [email protected]

[Peter Brown]

What a tragedy Atlanta is.

When crime is the going-away largest issue for a race for mayor, be assured you are hosed.

There is one solution and that is to bring in a Republican, which obviously can not happen. No Democrat will seriously tackle this problem. Lip service and all that, but at the end of the day, they get paid the big back room bucks by the corrupt national party to try to swing votes their way. This is a story as old as dirt.

Buckhead will secede, as it should, and then Atlanta will really crumble, as it should. Only when the city fully disintegrates, will the necessary cleansing occur. Unfortunately that will take a century, possibly less.

Look to Baltimore as an example. Baltimore has been absolutely hollowed out by a combination of extremely weak white liberals and corrupt African American leaders. West Baltimore is in every metric worse than Mogadishu.

From the ashes, the city is beginning to see signs of life, mostly due to one company and one man, Under Armor and Kevin Plank. But to get to there, the city had to literally waste to zero, taking 80 years to arrive at their ground zero. Under Armour bought about a tenth of Baltimore’s real estate (Port Covington) for practically zero. And what they don’t buy, John’s Hopkins takes the rest.

Murder is still third world, but a negative birth rate and abject poverty is leaving vast swaths of land to purchase for nothing by those who can reset the city and not squander opportunity.

Atlanta will go the same route.

[Farfromgeneva]

Notwithstanding what people who talk out of their a** may write, and I couldn’t care less, this real estate story below represents the area adjacent to an area called “Tha Bluff” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_on_tha_Bluff — https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-cu ... permarket/), which was an open air drug market until 5-7yrs ago….

VINE CITY
Next to Vine City's new park, 2 acres officially up for grabs
Marketers: Multiple offers expected before property overlooking downtown, Midtown hits market

OCTOBER 22, 2021, 10:10AM JOSH GREEN COMMENTS

The potential of new Atlanta greenspaces to be agents for investment and change is playing out right now in what’s become a hot pocket of real estate in Vine City, a historic but beleaguered neighborhood in the western shadows of downtown.

At the edge of Vine City’s Rodney Cook Sr. Park, a scenic 16-acre greenspace opened in July, a 2-acre assemblage of properties has drawn serious buyer interest before coming to market, officials with commercial real estate brokerage Colliers International tell Urbanize Atlanta.

The collection of adjacent properties, owned by two different landholders involved in the deal, is located where Elm Street and Sunset Avenue meet Joseph E Boone Boulevard.

A portion of the land overlooks the new park—and the skylines of downtown and Midtown beyond that.

The assemblage of properties owned by two different landholders involved in the deal, where Elm Street and Sunset Avenue meet Joseph E Boone Boulevard.
Courtesy of Colliers
The properties in question are home to former apartments (Wachendorff Gardens), a commercial building along Joseph E Boone Boulevard, another empty residential structure, and a corner lot of vacant land.

Dany Koe, Colliers’ vice president in Atlanta, says two offers on the property are expected to be submitted as early as today, after a promotional package including a video was compiled.

Koe declined to name potential buyers and said it’s not yet clear what might be developed on the site. No one involved in the deal has shared the asking price.

The assembled 2 acres in relation to Cook Park, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and other downtown landmarks.
Courtesy of Colliers
Longtime Vine City real estate investor James Arpad owns the apartments that overlook the park and roughly a .8-acre parcel behind it. Arpad tells Urbanize Atlanta he was enlisted by the property owner next door to include his holdings in the deal, to allow for a larger and more marketable assemblage of land.

The promise of revival—alongside heightened gentrification concerns—has heated up in Vine City and neighboring English Avenue as projects such as Mercedes-Benz Stadium and the new Westside BeltLine Connector have come together next door.

The $40-million Cook Park project, funded by the Trust for Public Land and Atlanta’s departments of Watershed Management and Parks and Recreation, includes a water feature that’s expected to solve Vine City’s notorious flooding issues.

This angle illustrates proximity to another recent addition in Vine City and English Avenue, the Westside BeltLine Connector.
Courtesy of Colliers
But even during charrette stages, neighbors expressed concerns that such an amenity could rapidly accelerate housing price increases. (One seasoned Vine City flipper said earlier this year he was having difficulty even listing his renovations before they would sell.)

The land deal next to Cook Park’s northwestern section isn’t the only potentially big development afoot.

On the flipside of the park, near the Georgia World Congress Center, a rental community called Villas at the Dome is expected to be redeveloped into 70 for-sale units with backing from Invest Atlanta.

That $20-million project, ParkView Townhomes, will include 21 “permanently affordable” residences, Invest Atlanta officials have said.

• Photos: At downtown Atlanta's edge, Cook Park is a functional gem (Urbanize Atlanta)

[seacoaster]

Wasn't sure where to park this very interesting opinion piece from the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opin ... ncoln.html

"Who created the Constitution we have today? As a law professor, I’ve always thought the best answer was “the framers”: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the other delegates who attended the Philadelphia convention in the summer of 1787.

The Constitution they drafted has since been amended many times, of course, sometimes in profound ways. But the document, I’ve long reasoned, has also exhibited a fundamental continuity. We’ve always had one Constitution.

I no longer think this conventional understanding is correct. Over the course of several years of research and writing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the true maker of the Constitution we have today is not one of the founders at all. It’s Abraham Lincoln.

This might sound like mere rhetorical license, since Lincoln did not take office until 1861, some 70 years after the Constitution was ratified. And we all recognize that his presidency played an instrumental role in the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which, by making a decisive break with slavery, became a turning point in our nation’s history.

But I’m making a stronger argument. What has become clear to me is that even before the passage of those Reconstruction amendments — indeed, as a kind of precondition for them — Lincoln fatally injured the Constitution of 1787. He consciously and repeatedly violated core elements of that Constitution as they had been understood by nearly all Americans of the time, himself included.

Through those acts of destruction, Lincoln effectively broke the Constitution of 1787, paving the way for something very different to replace it. What began as a messy, pragmatic compromise necessary to hold the young country together was reborn as an aspirational blueprint for a nation based on the principle of equal liberty for all.

Today, when the United States is engaged in a national reckoning about the legacies of slavery and institutional racism, the story of Lincoln’s breaking of the Constitution of 1787 is instructive. It teaches us not only that the original Constitution was deeply compromised, morally and functionally, by its enshrining of slavery, but also that the original Constitution was shattered, remade and supplanted by a project genuinely worthy of reverence.

Let’s go back to the 18th century. Americans today tend to think of the Constitution of 1787 in exalted moral terms. But the history is otherwise: The original Constitution was a complex political compromise grounded in perceived practical necessity, not moral clarity.

The need to garner the support of smaller states, for example, gave us the Senate. More damning were the compromises over slavery, without which the Constitution could never have been ratified: the repugnant “three-fifths” provision, by which enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of political representation; the promised 20-year preservation of the slave trade; and the fugitive slave clause, which required even free states to support slavery by returning escapees to their putative masters. These compromises were reaffirmed and reinforced by further compromises enacted by Congress from 1820 to 1850.

In April 1861, when the Civil War began, Lincoln was thoroughly committed to the compromise Constitution, which he had endorsed and embraced for his whole political life. Indeed, the month before, in his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln promised to preserve slavery as a constitutionally mandated permanent reality.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he said, vowing never to defy what was “plainly written” in the Constitution. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

But in the 18 months that followed, Lincoln violated the Constitution as it was then broadly understood three separate times.

First, he waged war on the Confederacy. He did this even though his predecessor, James Buchanan, and Buchanan’s attorney general, Jeremiah Black, had concluded that neither the president nor Congress had the lawful authority to coerce the citizens of seceding states to stay in the Union without their democratic consent. Coercive war, they had argued, repudiated the idea of consent of the governed on which the Constitution was based.

Second, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without Congress, arresting thousands of political opponents and suppressing the free press and free speech to a degree unmatched in U.S. history before or since. When Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court held that the suspension was unconstitutional, Lincoln ignored him.

Lincoln justified both of these constitutional violations by a doubtful theory of wartime necessity: that as chief executive and commander in chief, he possessed the inherent authority to use whatever means necessary to preserve the Union.

Third, and most fatefully, Lincoln came to believe that he also possessed the power to proclaim an end to slavery in the Southern states. When he finally did so, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, he eliminated any possibility of returning to the compromise Constitution as it had existed before the war.

Unlike his first two violations of the Constitution, which came quickly, Lincoln’s movement toward emancipation was agonized and slow, precisely because he knew that emancipation would have the effect of destroying the core of the constitutional compromise he had pledged to uphold.

As Lincoln explained in a letter to Senator Orville Browning of Illinois in September 1861, emancipation would be “itself the surrender of the government” he was trying to save. “Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S. — any government of Constitution and laws,” Lincoln asked, if a general or a president were able to “make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”

In the end, Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation turned on his realization that the war could not be won as he had originally hoped — namely, by inducing the Southern states to rejoin the Union on compromise terms similar to the status quo before the war. To proclaim the enslaved people of the South as emancipated was to announce that there was no going back. The original compromise Constitution would no longer be on offer, even if the South gave up and rejoined the Union.

Contemporary observers, even those unsympathetic to slavery, understood that the Emancipation Proclamation left the original Constitution in tatters. The retired Supreme Court justice Benjamin Curtis, who had dissented from the notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (in which the court held that Americans of African descent could not be citizens), said as much in a pamphlet condemning Lincoln’s declaration as a repudiation of the constitutional rule of law.

“By virtue of some power which he possesses,” Curtis wrote, Lincoln “proposes to annul laws, so that they no longer have any operation.”

In the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln did just that. The 13th Amendment, which with Lincoln’s encouragement was passed by Congress and sent to the states in February 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. But in a meaningful sense it merely formalized Lincoln’s guarantee, in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation nearly three years before, that whatever new constitutional order followed the war would no longer be a slavery-based compromise.

Likewise, the 14th and 15th Amendments, enacted after Lincoln’s death in April 1865, formally secured the equal protection of the laws and enfranchised African-American men. But Lincoln had already transformed the Constitution from a political compromise into a platform for defending moral principles by invoking its authority to end slavery.

In the last paragraph of the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, Lincoln declared “this act” to be “warranted by the Constitution” — notwithstanding the consensus view to the contrary, which he himself had long endorsed.

The fact that the Constitution of 1787 was not so much modified as broken and remade during and after the Civil War should be a starting point for nuanced conversations about the true meaning of the Constitution today. Indeed, even before Lincoln broke the Constitution, some of the most sophisticated thinkers about the nature of the Constitution were attuned to the complexities of the question.

Frederick Douglass, for example, began his career as an abolitionist in the late 1830s by rejecting the Constitution as immoral. Over time, however, his views changed. In 1850, he wrote that “liberty and slavery — opposite as heaven and hell — are both in the Constitution.” The Constitution, he concluded, was “at war with itself.”

Even this would turn out to be a transitional position for Douglass. In 1851, he declared that he now believed that slavery “never was lawful, and never can be made so.” He pointed out, as some defenders of the framers still do today, that the Constitution of 1787 did not actually use the word “slavery.” Douglass would hold this view for the next decade, until the war came. It was intended to leverage a redemptive reading of the Constitution to change the existing document into something new and better.

Of course, the “moral” Constitution made possible by Lincoln’s defiance of the Constitution of 1787 has too often been thwarted. About a decade after the Reconstruction amendments were ratified, the moral Constitution was betrayed by the imposition of segregation and disenfranchisement on Black Southerners. It took Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the modern civil rights movement to start redeeming the promise of Lincoln’s new Constitution.

Persistent inequality still afflicts the United States, including inequality before the law of the kind the moral Constitution prohibits. The reality is that Lincoln’s moral Constitution, like all constitutions, is not an end point but a vow of continuing effort. Through that Constitution, we define our national project and strive to achieve it, even if we never fully succeed."

[jhu72]

What a tragedy Atlanta is.

When crime is the going-away largest issue for a race for mayor, be assured you are hosed.

There is one solution and that is to bring in a Republican, which obviously can not happen. No Democrat will seriously tackle this problem. Lip service and all that, but at the end of the day, they get paid the big back room bucks by the corrupt national party to try to swing votes their way. This is a story as old as dirt.

Buckhead will secede, as it should, and then Atlanta will really crumble, as it should. Only when the city fully disintegrates, will the necessary cleansing occur. Unfortunately that will take a century, possibly less.

Look to Baltimore as an example. Baltimore has been absolutely hollowed out by a combination of extremely weak white liberals and corrupt African American leaders. West Baltimore is in every metric worse than Mogadishu.

From the ashes, the city is beginning to see signs of life, mostly due to one company and one man, Under Armor and Kevin Plank. But to get to there, the city had to literally waste to zero, taking 80 years to arrive at their ground zero. Under Armour bought about a tenth of Baltimore’s real estate (Port Covington) for practically zero. And what they don’t buy, John’s Hopkins takes the rest.

Murder is still third world, but a negative birth rate and abject poverty is leaving vast swaths of land to purchase for nothing by those who can reset the city and not squander opportunity.

Atlanta will go the same route.

... Kevin Plank, just one more dishonest republican businessman.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2021/04/2 ... n-project/

[jhu72]

https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2021/04/2 ... n-project/

... Port Covington was always a scam, couldn't stand on its own financially. Plank got out too far over his borrowed skis.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.columbusunderground.com/bef ... north-bw1/

Columbus is a good example.

[a fan]

From the ashes, the city is beginning to see signs of life, mostly due to one company and one man, Under Armor and Kevin Plank. But to get to there, the city had to literally waste to zero, taking 80 years to arrive at their ground zero. Under Armour bought about a tenth of Baltimore’s real estate (Port Covington) for practically zero.

... Kevin Plank, just one more dishonest republican businessman.

Pete----this is your guy, huh? Fleeces taxpayers out of millions in handouts that he doesn't need, in order to make more money?

Please tell me that this isn't how your company makes money, too------by getting handouts and tax breaks from the government?

[runrussellrun]

So the moral of that NYT story is that our children lie, school boards are idiots for allowing sexual offenders in school...nonetheless two different schools without supervision, plumbers and blue collar workers are called out as irrational for believing their daughters lies, and the NYT makes certain that this blue-collar plumber father is viewed as an idiot, all while blaming Tucker Carlson.

Boy or boy, it must be great being a backseat driver as an NYT blogger, with a political slant.

done with this disgusting crowd........nytimes posting "she asked for it" narrative....and the hateful gang is blaming the female. Weird. gross.

Loudon cty have a "trans" card to determine whom can use the "trans" bathroom, or are you just blaming another female victim, like your hero's the Clintons........disgusting narrative.

[Farfromgeneva]

What a tragedy Atlanta is.

When crime is the going-away largest issue for a race for mayor, be assured you are hosed.

There is one solution and that is to bring in a Republican, which obviously can not happen. No Democrat will seriously tackle this problem. Lip service and all that, but at the end of the day, they get paid the big back room bucks by the corrupt national party to try to swing votes their way. This is a story as old as dirt.

Buckhead will secede, as it should, and then Atlanta will really crumble, as it should. Only when the city fully disintegrates, will the necessary cleansing occur. Unfortunately that will take a century, possibly less.

Look to Baltimore as an example. Baltimore has been absolutely hollowed out by a combination of extremely weak white liberals and corrupt African American leaders. West Baltimore is in every metric worse than Mogadishu.

From the ashes, the city is beginning to see signs of life, mostly due to one company and one man, Under Armor and Kevin Plank. But to get to there, the city had to literally waste to zero, taking 80 years to arrive at their ground zero. Under Armour bought about a tenth of Baltimore’s real estate (Port Covington) for practically zero. And what they don’t buy, John’s Hopkins takes the rest.

Murder is still third world, but a negative birth rate and abject poverty is leaving vast swaths of land to purchase for nothing by those who can reset the city and not squander opportunity.

Atlanta will go the same route.

... Kevin Plank, just one more dishonest republican businessman.

Sheeeeeeeet, he's just a modern day Stringer

SEC Charges Under Armour Inc. With Disclosure Failures
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2021-78

Washington D.C., May 3, 2021 —
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged sports apparel manufacturer Under Armour Inc. with misleading investors as to the bases of its revenue growth and failing to disclose known uncertainties concerning its future revenue prospects. Under Armour has agreed to pay $9 million to settle the action.

According to the SEC's order, by the second half of 2015, Under Armour's internal revenue and revenue growth forecasts for the third and fourth quarters of 2015 began to indicate shortfalls from analysts' revenue estimates. The order finds, for example, that the company was not meeting internal sales projections for North America, and warm winter weather was negatively impacting sales of Under Armour's higher-priced cold weather apparel. The order further finds that in response, for six consecutive quarters beginning in the third quarter of 2015, Under Armour accelerated, or "pulled forward," a total of $408 million in existing orders that customers had requested be shipped in future quarters. As stated in the order, Under Armour misleadingly attributed its revenue growth during this period to various factors without disclosing to investors material information about the impacts of its pull forward practices. The order finds that Under Armour failed to disclose that its increasing reliance on pull forwards raised significant uncertainty as to whether the company would meet its revenue guidance in future quarters. According to the order, using these undisclosed pull forwards, Under Armour was able to meet analysts' revenue estimates.

"When public companies describe how they achieved financial results, they must not misstate any information that is material to investors," said Kurt Gottschall, Director of the SEC's Denver Regional Office. "By using pull forwards for several consecutive quarters to meet analysts' revenue targets while attributing its revenue growth to other factors, Under Armour created a misleading picture of the drivers of its financial results and concealed known uncertainties concerning its business."

The SEC's order finds that Under Armour violated the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a)(2) and (3) of the Securities Act of 1933, as well as certain reporting provisions of the federal securities laws. Without admitting or denying the findings in the SEC's order, Under Armour agreed to cease and desist from further violations and to pay a $9 million penalty.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by L. James Lyman, Jeffrey Lyons, and Donna Walker, with assistance from Gregory Kasper and Nicholas Heinke of the Trial Unit, and supervised by Ian Karpel, Jason Burt, and Kurt Gottschall.