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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston).

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike, just before the show. (Dec. 7, 2015)

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:

“What we’re discovering is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself. Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it. The ball is now squarely in the court of the Republican Party, and particularly Senate Republicans. Will they ever be prepared to say enough is enough?” ~ William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution who graduated from college just before Watergate.

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Show information begins after Item 4, after voting and election information.)

1.  
2. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   1. Last Day to Register to Vote was Monday, October 7, 2019
   2. I’ve received my mail-in ballot. If you’ve qualified, yours should have arrived or will arrive shortly.
3. Next Election: November 5, 2019 – General and Special Elections
   1. Early voting Early voting starts today!! And runs October 21st – November 1st
      1. Sample ballot runs 8 pages, but my precinct ballot is only 2 pages.
      2. 10 Amendments to Texas Constitution
   2. Sample ballot runs 8 pages, but my precinct ballot is only 2 pages.
   1. Harrisvotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   2. VoteTexas.gov
   3. Countywide Voting Centers
      1. HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
         1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
         2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
         3. Current utility bill
         4. Bank statement
         5. Government check
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         7. (a) A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
      2. You may vote early by-mail if
         1. you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
         2. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
         3. Sick or disabled;
         4. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
         5. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
         6. Make sure you are registered:
   4. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
      1. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
         1. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
      2. POLL LOCATIONS & BALLOTS: Find your ballots with simple information entries
      3. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
4. State to take over Houston ISD by replacing school board and superintendent – Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath informed Houston ISD of those plans in a letter Wednesday. He also sent letters saying the state would take over Shepherd and Snyder ISDs. by Aliyya Swaby | ORG | Nov. 6, 20194 PM
   1. In a move that is unprecedented in scope, Texas state officials announced Wednesday they plan on taking over the state’s largest school district, yanking power from Houston Independent School District’s elected school board members to “prevent imminent and substantial harm to the welfare of the district’s students.”
   2. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath sent a letter to Houston ISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan and Board President Diana Davila giving two principal reasons for the decision: the school board’s “failure of governance” and the repeated low academic performance of Wheatley High School, which received its seventh failing rating this year. In addition to appointing a board of governance to replace the elected school board, Morath will also appoint a superintendent to lead the district. The timeline of the takeover action is unclear.
   3. “Given the inability of the board of trustees to govern the district, these sanctions are necessary to protect the best interests of the district’s current and future students,” he wrote. The decision means the state will be taking over its largest public school district, which contains more than 270 schools and educates more than 200,000 students.
   4. Houston ISD officials still have a slim chance at averting the takeover and have two weeks to request a formal review challenging it, according to a Texas Education Agency spokesperson.
   5. The announcement of a takeover was far from unexpected. Last week, a final state investigation report recommended Morath replace the school board, finding that it had violated state open meetings law, attempted to influence how contracts were awarded, and took action on district issues individually without consulting other board members.
   6. Just yesterday, the state denied Houston ISD’s appeal of Wheatley High School’s state accountability rating, killing one of its last hopes of remaining independently governed. A 2015 law requires Morath to penalize a district with a school that has been failing for more than four consecutive years, by either shutting down the school or taking over the entire district. This is the first time that law will be used to take over a district.
   7. The same law also led Morath to inform two small, rural school districts Wednesday — Shepherd ISD, in East Texas, and Snyder ISD, in West Texas — that he would replace their elected school boards with appointed boards. Snyder Junior High and Shepherd’s elementary and intermediate schools received their fifth consecutive failing ratings this year.
   8. The districts will also be assigned state conservators, who will attend all board meetings, oversee district operations and submit monthly progress reports to the state. Houston ISD has had a state-appointed conservator since 2016, initially appointed to oversee another long-failing school.
   9. Boards of managers in those three school districts will be composed of local community members, who can send in applications to the state starting immediately. State officials will conduct interviews and train applicants, before presenting a list of finalists to Morath for final approval.
   10. During its temporary replacement of the elected board, a board of managers has all the same powers and duties to oversee the school district. Once the state determines it has fixed the specific problems it is charged with, Morath will gradually transfer power back to the elected board.
   11. The Texas Education Agency has replaced elected school boards in smaller school districts in the past few years, due to a mixture of financial malfeasance, school board dysfunction, and low academic performance. In Edgewood ISD, in San Antonio, the school board was so mired in personal conflict in 2016 that it couldn’t make a decision on a superintendent or principals for both its high schools. The state replaced the elected school board and is planning to transition power back next year.
   12. Houston ISD is currently suing the state to prevent a takeover, which may delay the process of actually replacing the elected board. Last week, Houston ISD asked a federal judge for a preliminary injunction to stop Morath from interfering with the district’s selection of a new superintendent, replacing its elected board or taking any other action based on the state investigation.
5. Ted Cruz calls efforts to halt Rodney Reed’s execution “remarkable bipartisan coalition” – “If there is credible evidence there’s a real chance a defendant is innocent, that evidence should be weighed carefully,” Cruz tweeted Friday night. by Jolie McCullough and Chase Karacostas | ORG | Nov. 9, 2019 Updated: 3 PM
   1. Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has joined the fast-growing calls from Texas lawmakers and A-list celebrities to take a closer look at the death sentence of Rodney Reed.
   2. Cruz called efforts to halt the execution of Reed “a remarkable bipartisan coalition” on Friday night, the day before hundreds of people rallied outside the Texas Governor’s Mansion in support of Reed.
   3. “Having spent years in law enforcement, I believe capital punishment can be justice for the very worst murderers,” Cruz tweeted. “But if there is credible evidence there’s a real chance a defendant is innocent, that evidence should be weighed carefully.”
   4. Reed is set for execution on Nov. 20 and has been on death row for more than two decades. His guilt has always been shrouded in doubt, but the attention and calls for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop his death has skyrocketed in recent months.
   5. This week, a bipartisan group of 26 Texas House lawmakers sent a letter to Abbott and the parole board asking them to stop Reed’s execution so new evidence can be reviewed. Sixteen state senators penned a similar letter Friday, prompting Cruz’s response. …
   6. … The murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites in Bastrop and the subsequent conviction of Rodney Reed has been in the spotlight for more than two decades. Reed, now 51, has consistently maintained his innocence in the 1996 slaying. His lawyers for years have pointed to new evidence they say makes it impossible for Reed to be the killer and instead, they say, puts suspicion on Stites’ fiancé, Jimmy Fennell. …
   7. … Both men have been accused of multiple sexual assaults. Reed was indicted, but never convicted, in several other rape cases months before his trial in Stites’ death began in 1998. Fennell spent 10 years in prison after he kidnapped and allegedly raped a woman while on duty as a police officer in 2007. …
   8. … Since Reed’s conviction in Stites’ death, a suspected murder weapon has gone untested for DNA, forensic evidence has been reexamined and new witnesses have come forward. …
   9. … Reed has appeals pending in federal court on new witnesses and a repeated request to test DNA on the suspected murder weapon, but most attention is directed at Abbott’s role. The Texas governor can delay an execution for 30 days on his own. With a recommendation from the parole board, he may grant a longer reprieve or re-sentence a death row inmate to life in prison. At Saturday’s rally, King and other speakers said at the very least Reed’s execution must be delayed so there can be more time to look at evidence. But they hope to go much further.
6. Eileen Filler-Corn to Become Virginia’s First Female — and First Jewish — Speaker of the House, By Emily Burack | com |Nov 6, 2019
   1. …Just why does Filler-Corn’s acendancy — alongside the other Democrats’ victories — matter? Well, Virginians can expect a lot of exciting things from Democrats being in power in Virginia. Among them: a $15 minimum wage, gun reform, and — this one’s a biggie — they could become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, bringing the fight to amend the U.S. Constitution to the Supreme Court. …
   2. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was passed by Congress in 1972. It read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” At the time, only 35 states ratified the amendment, falling short of the 38 state minimum to add the amendment. (Also? It was first proposed way back in 1921. We’re only 98 years late…)
7. Trump’s offense is as impeachable as it comes. So no, it can’t wait for an election. Asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is exactly the kind of misconduct the framers had in mind in introducing a check on misuse of power. By Michael J. Gerhardt | COM | November 11, 2019 at 9:42 a.m. CST (Michael J. Gerhardt is the Burton Craige distinguished professor of jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the author of “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.”)
   1. This past weekend, President Trump had new advice for his Republican defenders in Congress. He warned in a tweet that they should “not be led into the fools trap” of saying there was something wrong with his phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, just not an impeachable wrong.
   2. And yet that “trap” remains popular with those of the president’s allies unable to ignore what he actually said in the call, which was that he wanted Ukraine to “look into” former vice president Joe Biden, a political rival, and his son. “I believe it was inappropriate,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.) on said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “I do not believe it was impeachable.” Thornberry went to say that the Constitution “is very specific” on impeachment — “bribery, treason, high crimes and misdemeanors, which basically means felonies.”…
   3. Trump’s action regarding Ukraine, which included demanding that Zelensky publicly announce a criminal investigation into the Bidens in exchange for an Oval Office meeting and the release of military aid to Ukraine, according to testimony in the impeachment inquiry by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, was about as impeachable as an offense can get. Therefore, waiting for an election — the very thing compromised by the offense — is not an option.
   4. As a constitutional law professor, I am used to considering hypotheticals, but I do not need one here. Soliciting foreign intervention to undermine the integrity of the American electoral system is exactly the sort of misconduct the framers had in mind when they established the impeachment process in the Constitution. They were intensely concerned about having meaningful checks against a president disposed to tyranny; after rebelling against a king, they weren’t going to turn around and create an all-powerful leader who had the authority to defy any means for holding him accountable except the one he was trying to rig: the next election. William Davie, a North Carolina delegate at the Constitutional Convention, presciently put it this way: “If he be not impeachable whilst in office, he will spare no effort or means whatever to get himself re-elected.” …
   5. As for “other high crimes and misdemeanors,” the phrase was technical language taken from the British system, where it was used to refer to “political crimes,” which in turn meant abuses of power, serious injuries to the republic and breaches of the public trust. At the Constitutional Convention, delegates described “other high crimes and misdemeanors” variously as “great” offenses against the United States, “attempts to subvert the Constitution,” and instances when the president “deviates from his duty” or “dare[s] to abuse the power invested in him by the people.” In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton declared that impeachable offenses are “those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, the abuse or violation of some public trust,” and “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
   6. In his influential lectures on the Constitution, given shortly after ratification, James Wilson, who was later nominated to the Supreme Court by President George Washington, said that impeachable offenses were “political crimes and misdemeanors.” And Justice Joseph Story, in his “Commentaries on the Constitution” in the 1830s, explained that an impeachable offense was “committed by public men in violation of their public trust and duties” and “partakes of a political character, as it respects injuries to the society in its political character.”…
   7. So what kinds of misconduct fit this terminology? The Virginia delegate George Mason worried at the Constitutional Convention that if the president “has the power of granting pardons before indictment or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?” James Madison responded, “There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have averted: If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty; they can suspend him when suspected, and the power will devolve on the Vice-President. Should he be suspected also, he may likewise be suspended and be impeached and removed.”
   8. Madison added, “This is a great security.” …
   9. … the Constitution does not limit impeachable offenses to felonies. …
   10. … Consider now how the president’s conduct in trying to undermine the integrity of our electoral system easily fits the criteria for impeachable offenses. You do not need a quid pro quo for an offense to be impeachable, but here there was an obvious quid pro quo in Trump’s call to Zelensky on July 25…
   11. Trump called his request a “favor,” and the circumstances make clear that the president had for some time been acting in bad faith in looking for ways to get foreign leaders to help his reelection campaign. The ask was not a one-off, and the president did not stumble into it. Trump had deviated from the usual procedures and protocols for handling a bona fide investigation of a U.S. citizen for potential crime abroad, instead putting together a “shadow” government, led in part by his private lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, to do his bidding in Ukraine. Such misconduct was plainly a breach of trust.
   12. Before and after the “favor” Trump requested of Zelensky, he and his lawyers and defenders in Congress have been arguing that he had absolute immunity from any criminal investigation while in office, absolute executive privilege to keep confidential any information he did not wish to share with other branches, the power to shut down an impeachment inquiry and the entitlement to defy subpoenas from Congress (even though the third article of impeachment approved against Nixon charged him with defying four subpoenas, far fewer than the number Trump has defied). Accepting these dubious claims would leave the next election as the only way to hold the president accountable — but he was planning to game that by having foreign leaders find dirt on a political enemy. …
   13. … the president and his defenders are talking about the Bidens’ actions as much as those of the president. Any time a president negotiates with a foreign leader to help himself and not the American people, it is likely an impeachable offense. It was here because soliciting foreign intervention in an American election undermines the integrity of our electoral system. It is hard to imagine a more serious breach of the public trust. The American people expect their president to be negotiating with foreign leaders to further our national security interests, not to get dirt — or invent dirt — that will help their reelection.
   14. Neither the context nor the gravity of Trump’s conduct presents a hard question relating to impeachment. And no, it can’t wait for the 2020 election.
8. The truly frightening thing about Nikki Haley’s big revelation, Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large | CNN | Updated 10:59 AM ET, Mon November 11, 2019
   1. In her forthcoming book about her time in the Trump White House, former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley claims that she was recruited by White House chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to subvert the wishes of President Donald Trump.
   2. “Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the President, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” writes Haley in “With All Due Respect,” …
   3. … Haley told CBS over the weekend. “To undermine a President is really a very dangerous thing. And it goes against the Constitution and it goes against what the American people want. It was offensive.”
   4. But the focus on Haley — and what she did or didn’t do — misses the point, which is this: Two of the top Cabinet officials within the Trump administration were concerned enough about the behavior of the President of the United States that they were actively reaching out to other influential members of the Cabinet to actively work around him. …
   5. … Neither of these men were “never Trumpers.” Both were Trump’s top picks for hugely important jobs — perhaps the two most powerful Cabinet gigs — and, at least in the early days of Trump’s presidency, were considered primetime players. These were the people who, along with Trump, were going to shape the future of the country and the world.
   6. Neither Tillerson nor Kelly can be accurately described as so-called “deep state” actors either. Both men were new to this level of government. They were the farthest thing from embedded within the vast government bureaucracy. And not to sound like a broken record, but Trump appointed both of them!
   7. So consider what it means that within a relatively short period of time, not only had both men identified major concerns with the President, but were so concerned that they were reaching out to others within the administration to try recruit them to a protect-the-country-at-all-costs mission.
   8. You can absolutely question — as Haley has done — why Tillerson and Kelly didn’t just resign rather than trying to run a persuasion campaign within the White House to sideline the President. (My guess would be that they would say they were worried what might happen if they left.)
   9. But what, to me, is the most important part of the story is that both of these hugely accomplished Cabinet officials, who were hand-picked for their roles by the President and who, presumably, came into the administration favorably inclined to him, so quickly and clearly assessed that the man they were working for was an active danger to the country.
   10. And such a danger that they were in the process of actively recruiting people within the administration to help them keep the President from doing anything that would endanger the country. Think about that. It’s terrifying.
9. Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets – Another moment for public protest has arrived. By David Leonhardt, Opinion Columnist | COM | Oct. 20, 2019
   1. On Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election, Obamacare looked to be doomed. Millions of Americans, it seemed, were going to lose their health insurance. …
   2. … Fortunately, some progressives understood that politics isn’t only an inside game. The outside game — of public protest and grass-roots lobbying — matters, too.
   3. Even before Trump took office, activists began planning a strategy to make repeal as politically painful as possible. On the day after Trump’s inauguration, some four million Americans took to the streets for Women’s Marches (which obviously were about much more than repeal). In the months that followed, groups like Indivisible organized people to attend town halls, visit Capitol Hill and inundate members of Congress with phone calls.
   4. The efforts transformed the debate. Obamacare repeal was no longer a bloodless legislative matter, in which public opinion was measured merely with poll results and pundit analysis. The story became rawer, more human and much harder for politicians and ordinary citizens to ignore. …
   5. … Consider what happened last week alone. Trump created a foreign-policy disaster in Turkey and Syria, for no apparent reason, while multiple administration officials testified that he views diplomacy largely as a way to advance his personal interests. His attitude, evidently, is: America, c’est moi. Even more so than a month ago, Trump is a national emergency, flagrantly violating his oath of office and daring the country to stop him.
   6. Yet the chances of removing him appear as dim as Obamacare’s chances of survival did on Nov. 9, 2016. Trump even has plausible paths to re-election, some of which involve again losing the popular vote.
   7. A. Kauffman, a historian of protest movements, has said that effective ones often throw “a monkey wrench into a process that was otherwise going to just unfold smoothly.” That’s the role that an outside game can now play in the impeachment saga.
   8. It can wake up more Americans to the gravity of the situation. It can mobilize progressives to work as hard as they did during the 2018 midterms. It can confront congressional Republicans with their cowardice.
   9. “Protests work,” as Kauffman has said — not always, of course, but often “when groups are willing to be bold in their tactics and persistent in their approach within the broad discipline of non-violent action.” As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.
   10. So it’s time for a sequel to that first Women’s March — an Americans’ March, in which millions of people peacefully take to the streets to say that President Trump must go. And it’s time for a more intense grass-roots campaign directed at his congressional enablers, one that conjures the respectful intensity of the save-Obamacare campaign. Even if the Senate still acquits Trump, a new protest movement can help galvanize people to defeat him, and his enablers, next year.
   11. The country is in crisis. Right now, that crisis feels all too normal.
10. The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It. The share of college students casting ballots doubled from 2014 to 2018, a potential boon to Democrats. But in Texas and elsewhere, Republicans are erecting roadblocks to the polls. By Michael Wines | com | Oct. 24, 2019
    1. At Austin Community College, civics is an unwritten part of the curriculum — so much so that for years the school has tapped its own funds to set up temporary early-voting sites on nine of its 11 campuses.
    2. No more, however. This spring, the Texas Legislature outlawed polling places that did not stay open for the entire 12-day early-voting period. When the state’s elections take place in three weeks, those nine sites — which logged many of the nearly 14,000 ballots that full-time students cast last year — will be shuttered. So will six campus polling places at colleges in Fort Worth, two in Brownsville, on the Mexico border, and other polling places at schools statewide. …
    3. … Their turnout in the 2018 midterms — 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education — was more than double the rate in the 2014 midterms, easily exceeding an already robust increase in national turnout. Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, students have suddenly emerged as a potentially crucial voting bloc in the 2020 general election.
    4. And almost as suddenly, Republican politicians around the country are throwing up roadblocks between students and voting booths.
    5. Not coincidentally, the barriers are rising fastest in political battlegrounds and places like Texas where one-party control is eroding. Students lean strongly Democratic: In a March poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, 45 percent of college students ages 18-24 identified as Democrats, compared to 29 percent who called themselves independents and 24 percent Republicans.
    6. Some states have wrestled with voting eligibility for out-of-state students in the past. And the politicians enacting the roadblocks often say they are raising barriers to election fraud, not ballots. “The threat to election integrity in Texas is real, and the need to provide additional safeguards is increasing,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said last year in announcing one of his office’s periodic crackdowns on illegal voting. But evidence of widespread fraud is nonexistent, and the restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians’ efforts to discourage voters likely to oppose them. …
    7. … Florida’s Republican secretary of state outlawed early-voting sites at state universities in 2014, only to see 60,000 voters cast on-campus ballots in 2018 after a federal court overturned the ban. This year, the State Legislature effectively reinstated it, slipping a clause into a new elections law that requires all early-voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking” — an amenity in short supply on densely packed campuses.
    8. North Carolina Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that recognized student identification cards as valid — but its requirements proved so cumbersome that major state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, but much confusion remains, and fewer than half the state’s 180-plus accredited schools have sought to certify their IDs for voting.
    9. Wisconsin Republicans also have imposed tough restrictions on using student IDs for voting purposes. The state requires poll workers to check signatures only on student IDs, although some schools issuing modern IDs that serve as debit cards and dorm room keys have removed signatures, which they consider a security risk.
    10. The law also requires that IDs used for voting expire within two years, while most college ID cards have four-year expiration dates. And even students with acceptable IDs must show proof of enrollment before being allowed to vote.
11. Who has qualified for the November Democratic debate – The Nov. 20 debate, co-hosted by MSNBC and The Washington Post, will be held in Georgia, By Kevin Schaul | COM | October 24, 2019
    1. A few Democrats are in danger of missing the November presidential debate, thanks to another tightening of the rules by the Democratic National Committee. Nine candidates appear to have qualified so far. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) appeared to qualify Thursday morning.
    2. Under the new rules, candidates must register at least 3 percent in four polls approved by the party since Sept. 13, or at least 5 percent in two early state polls. Candidates must also earn donations from at least 165,000 unique donors, with at least 600 coming from 20 individual states.
    3. These requirements must be met by the end of Nov. 13. The DNC will officially release the list of qualified candidates around that date, a week in advance of the debate.
12. The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise. By AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY and CALVIN TERBEEK | com | August 31, 2019 (Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Calvin TerBeek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science)
    1. MIKE NOTE: The Federalist Society  – The Federalist Society is a tax–exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax identification number is 36-3235550.
    2. This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars. …
    3. Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.
    4. Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.
    5. The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.
    6. But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades. …
    7. …The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”
    8. SHORTER VERSION OF ARTICLE ABOVE- REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges, By Matthew Chapman | COM | Published on August 31, 2019
       1. On Saturday, political science academics Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin TerBeek wrote an exposé in Politico revealing that the Federalist Society, an association of conservative and libertarian lawyers infamous for forming a semi-official pipeline of right-wing academics into the federal court system, have deliberately misled the public about the purpose of their organization’s existence for years.
       2. “Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party ‘or engage in other forms of political advocacy,’ as its website says,” they wrote. “The society does not deny an ideology — it calls itself a ‘group of conservatives and libertarians’ — but it maintains that it is simply ‘about ideas,’ not legislation, politicians or policy positions.”
13. How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours, BBC.COM | 7 July 2019
    1. What is the point of sending someone to prison – retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive “lock-up” approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. …
    2. [Are Hoidal governor of Halden Prison ] says “… in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms “revenge” and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled. … since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after five years. So this works!”
    3. In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.
    4. The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents’ sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature …
    5. … “We start planning their release on the first day they arrive,” explains Hoidal, as we walk through to the carpentry workshop where several inmates are making wooden summer houses and benches to furnish a new prison being built in the south of Norway.
    6. “In Norway, all will be released – there are no life sentences,” he reminds me.
    7. Normalising life behind bars (not that there are any bars on the windows at Halden) is the key philosophy that underpins the Norwegian Correctional service. At Halden, this means not only providing daily routines but ensuring family contact is maintained too. Once every three months, inmates with children can apply to a “Daddy In Prison” scheme which, if they pass the necessary safeguarding tests, means they can spend a couple of nights with their partner, sons and daughters in a cosy chalet within the prison grounds. …
    8. … It takes 12 weeks in the UK to train a prison officer. In Norway it takes two to three years. Eight kilometres north-east of Oslo in Lillestrom, an impressive white and glass building houses the University College of the Norwegian Correctional Service, where each year, 175 trainees, selected from over 1,200 applicants, start their studies to become a prison officer.
    9. Hans-Jorgen Brucker walks me around the training prison on campus, which is kitted out with reproduction cells and prison-style furniture. I note a bulging pile of helmets and stab vests in one storage room. Brucker acknowledges that prison officers will undergo security and riot training, but he’s fairly dismissive of this part of the course.
    10. “We want to stop reoffending which means officers need to be well educated,” he says. He shows me a paper outlining the rigorous selection process, which involves written exams in Norwegian and English (about a third of the prison population is non-native, so officers are expected to be fluent in English) and physical fitness tests.
    11. “My students will study law, ethics, criminology, English, reintegration and social work. Then they will have a year training in a prison and then they will come back to take their final exams.” …
14. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
    1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
    2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
    3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
    4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
    5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
    6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
    7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
    8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
    9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
15. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
    1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
    2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
    3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
    4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
    5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
    6. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
    7. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
    8. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
    9. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
    10. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
    11. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
    12. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.

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