The Mess That Is the U.S. Supreme Court; Radioactive Roads Coming to Florida? Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: July 3, 2023

Indy Digest: June 3, 2023

Happy (early) Fourth of July, everyone! (And a special huzzah to all of you who’ve had to work over what’s essentially a four-day weekend.)

As we celebrate our nation’s birthday, I find myself thinking about the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, those thoughts aren’t pleasant.

The recent news about the court should be worrisome to us all, no matter one’s politics or personal beliefs. Unfortunately, we seem to be living in a time when people are willing to look the other way regarding wrong-doing or corruption, depending on which “side” the wrong-doers are on.

I am not sure how anyone can think it’s OK for Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas to be taking undisclosed vacations on the dime of wealthy GOP mega-donors with business in front of the court … yet here we are, with nothing being done about these shenanigans. (And yes, I’d be just as appalled if it was revealed that a justice was taking undisclosed freebies from Democratic mega-donors.)

And now, the U.S. Supreme Court has literally said that it’s OK for businesses to discriminate. That, in and of itself, is an appalling thought—but the fact the case upon which this ruling was made had very little basis in reality makes matters even worse. NPR reports:

A Colorado web designer who the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday could refuse to make wedding websites for gay couples cited a request from a man who says he never asked to work with her.

The request in dispute, from a person identified as “Stewart,” wasn’t the basis for the federal lawsuit filed preemptively seven years ago by web designer Lorie Smith, before she started making wedding websites. But as the case advanced, it was referenced by her attorneys when lawyers for the state of Colorado pressed Smith on whether she had sufficient grounds to sue. …

Smith named Stewart — and included a website service request from him, listing his phone number and email address in 2017 court documents. But Stewart told The Associated Press he never submitted the request and didn’t know his name was invoked in the lawsuit until he was contacted this week by a reporter from The New Republic, which first reported his denial.

“I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I’ve been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years,” said Stewart, who declined to give his last name for fear of harassment and threats. His contact information, but not his last name, were listed in court documents.

Rephrased: The case was filed before the designer had started making websites, and one of the requests cited was apparently made up. And yet the Supreme Court took this case anyway.

The U.S. Supreme Court is broken, in deep and fundamental ways. This is something that should be on all of our minds on this Fourth of July.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Florida keeps getting weirder and more disconcerting. The Hill reports: “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill on Thursday that will allow new roads in the state to be built with ‘radioactive’ mining waste that has been linked to cancer. HB 1191 adds phosphogypsum to a list of ‘recyclable materials’ that can be used for the construction of roads. The list also includes ground rubber from car tires, ash residue from coal combustion byproducts, recycled mixed-plastic, glass and construction steel. Phosphogypsum, a waste product from manufacturing fertilizer, emits radon—a radioactive gas, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The material also contains radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium and radium. … The agency previously confirmed to CBS News that the mining waste—leftover material from phosphate rock—is potentially cancer-causing.”

• Some governors continue to use asylum-seekers as pawns in a political game. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Another bus carrying dozens of migrants from Texas arrived Saturday afternoon at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, courtesy of the governor and taxpayers of the Lone Star State. The 41 asylum seekers arrived about 12:40 p.m. and were received by the L.A. Welcomes Collective, a network of nonprofit, faith and immigrant rights groups, officials said in a statement. The migrants are from Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Belize and Nicaragua. … The migrants were recently paroled by the Border Patrol and voluntarily boarded the bus in Brownsville, Texas, for the 1,600-mile journey, officials said. This is the second bus to arrive from the Texas-Mexico border in just over two weeks, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Los Angeles as the latest Democrat-run city to which his state will bus migrants.”

• In addition to the gay-wedding-website case and the anti-affirmative-action decision, the U.S. Supreme Court also recently threw out the Biden administration’s plan for student-loan forgiveness. A professor of finance, writing for The Conversation, explains what could happen next, especially now that a pandemic-era pause on payments is also ending: “It is estimated that student loan borrowers pay about $70 billion a year on their federal student loans. Any economic benefit that borrowers may have gotten from the suspension of student loan payments is likely to have already been absorbed into the economy over the past three years. In other words, any money borrowers had to spend as a result of the student loan pause has already been spent. With the resumption of student loan payments (in October), there will likely be a small but negative impact on the economy. This reduction in spending on goods and services is estimated to reduce economic growth by about 0.4% When student loan borrowers begin to repay their loans in October, those dollars will no longer be available to pay for other things like food, rent, clothing or gas. So it won’t only hurt the economy, but it will hurt people, too.“

• Our partners at Calmatters look at a program to combat homelessness that seemed to be doing a lot of good … until the funding for the program ended: “A new homeless outreach program pairing a social worker with a police officer in Grass Valley, a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, seemed to be working. The state-funded effort sent the team to homeless encampments, where they helped build trust among vulnerable people and persuaded them to accept help, according to nonprofit Hospitality House, which ran the program. It blew past its goal of engaging 90 people in three years, instead meeting with more than 200. It even helped move some people directly into housing, including an 80-year-old veteran. But when the three-year grant paying for that outreach ended in June, there was no money to replace it. So the program came to a screeching halt, to the disappointment of all involved. … That loss embodies the worst fears of homeless service providers across California, as they struggle to piece together new funding sources after their state grants expire. Many had hoped that Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders would change that dynamic in the state budget deal they announced last week by committing ongoing funds for homelessness that nonprofits, cities and counties could rely on year after year. It didn’t happen.”

• Oh, great, malaria is spreading in the U.S. Wired magazine reports: “At least four people in Florida and one in Texas have been diagnosed with malaria that they must have caught near where they live—because, according to health officials, none of them traveled outside the U.S. or their own states. The very unusual discovery has left infectious disease specialists wondering: Who else might be ill, and will local doctors recognize what’s wrong? Malaria isn’t completely unprecedented in the U.S.: About 2,000 residents contract it every year, but almost always because they traveled to a place where it’s endemic, were bitten by an infected mosquito there, and fell ill once they came home. Locally acquired malaria is extremely rare. … That hasn’t occurred in the U.S. since 2003. … ‘If there are five cases right now, that means there’s got to be a lot more mosquitoes out there that are infected,’ says Ross Boyce, a physician and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, who runs a malaria research program in Uganda. ‘And there may even be more people that are infected than we know about at this point.’”

• And finally … people are using AI bots to fight telemarketers. Insider reports: “There’s a new way to get back at scammy telemarketers—and it won’t cost you more than $24.99 a year. A telephone service called Jolly Roger harnesses ChatGPT and voice modulation software to create and read scripts to telemarketers. Acting as digital, fictitious characters, Jolly Roger keeps can keep telemarketers on the line indefinitely—wasting the scammers’ time and giving the real phone owner immense satisfaction, The Wall Street Journal reported. One scammer may be roped into talking to Whitey Whitebeard, a bumbling senior citizen, while another could catch Salty Sally, an easily distracted mother. The service, which launched seven years ago, has introduced ChatGPT capabilities over the past several months. The result has been telemarketers kept on the phone for as long as 30 minutes, Roger Anderson, the company’s cofounder told Insider.” (You can read the original WSJ piece here.)

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