More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal of "Christian" Florist

Christofascists suffered a defeat on their disingenuous claims that having to providing services to LGBT individuals in accordance with state non-discrimination and public accommodation laws tramples on their "religious freedom."  The U.S. Supreme Court's rejected the appeal from the Washington State Supreme Court against a bigoted florist who sought to use claims of "religious freedom" smoke screen to provide her a license to discriminate. Hopefully, her fate before the high court will send a message that discrimination by businesses providing services to the general public will not be tolerated and that bigots will suffer consequences for their bigotry and false claims of martyrdom.  The Court's action followed an earlier ruling against the Gloucester County, Virginia school board and its anti-transgender policies. A piece at ABC News looks at the Court's totally proper rejection of the appeal.  Here are highlights:

Over the objections of three conservative justices, the US Supreme Court has turned away an appeal from a Washington State flower shop that violated state anti-discrimination law by refusing to serve a same-sex couple on religious grounds.

The decision means a California Supreme Court judgment against Arlene's Flowers and owner Barronelle Stutzman will stand.

With help from the ACLU, the couple sued the shop under Washington's anti-discrimination law, which says businesses that are open to the general public cannot refuse to serve someone based on sexual orientation, even on the basis of sincere religious beliefs.

After years of legal proceedings, the state's highest court sided with the couple. In 2018, the US Supreme Court remanded an appeal from Arlene's Flowers back to the state for a second look. A year later, the Washington Supreme Court affirmed its original decision.

"The adjudicatory bodies that considered this case did not act with religious animus when they ruled that the florist and her corporation violated the Washington Law Against Discrimination by declining to sell wedding flowers to a gay couple, and they did not act with religious animus when they ruled that such discrimination is not privileged or excused by the United States Constitution or the Washington Constitution," the court wrote.

"The State of Washington bars discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. Discrimination based on same-sex marriage constitutes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. We therefore hold that the conduct for which Stutzman was cited and fined in this case—refusing her commercially marketed wedding floral services to Ingersoll and Freed because theirs would be a same-sex wedding—constitutes sexual orientation discrimination under the [law]," the Washington high court wrote in 2019.

Lawyers for Stutzman in a statement online called the decision "devastating news."

"The Supreme Court has once again said that critical nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people are legally enforceable and has set a strong and definitive precedent," said Alphonso David, president of Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group.

Earlier this week, the court delivered another win for LGBT rights advocates by rejecting the appeal of a Virginia school board seeking to impose a transgender bathroom ban. The move means schools in at least five states can no longer discriminate on the basis of gender identity in the use of restroom facilities.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Today's GOP: Only the Incompetent Need Apply

A column in the New York Times looks at an issue this blog frequently focuses upon, namely how the Republican Party went from being a political party that respected science, knowledge and expertise and accepted objective reality to a party that now embraces utter ignorance and promotes the wildly incompetent.  Indeed, the more insane and incompetent one is, the higher the chances for advancement within today's GOP where subservience to ideology at all cost is among the highest accolades. The piece doesn't have an answer for what happened to the GOP although it lays out the symptoms.  I for one continue to believe the ruin of the GOP as a party that honored knowledge and reality tracks almost directly to the rise of the Christofascist and evangelicals within the party, a demographic that (i) has always rejected objective fact, science and knowledge if any one or all three challenged their house of cards, fantasy "world view," and (ii) lies incessantly to further their anti-modernity and anti-democratic agenda. Here are column excerpts:

I wrote a few days ago about how ignorance — ignorance about history, about science, about economics and more — has become a core conservative value. This exaltation of ignorance naturally goes hand in hand with disdain for expertise: A vast majority of scientists may agree that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but hey, it’s all just a gigantic hoax.

But wait, there’s more. On the right, expertise isn’t just considered worthless, it’s viewed as disqualifying. People with actual knowledge of a policy area — certainly those with any kind of professional reputation — are often excluded from any role in shaping policy. Preference is given to the incompetent — often the luridly incompetent.

I’m currently reading “Nightmare Scenario,” an account by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Trump administration’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. Much of what they report falls into the category of “shocking but not surprising.” One thing I didn’t know about, however, was the special destructive role played by Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser.

It was Moore, the authors report, who walked into Donald Trump’s office just days after America went into lockdown to urge reopening by Easter. . . . and it contributed to a public health disaster that has so far claimed 600,000 American lives — with 95 percent of the deaths happening after Easter 2020.

It goes without saying that Moore isn’t an expert on epidemiology. But he isn’t an expert on economics, either. In fact, he has a reputation among many economists for being wrong about almost everything. . . . . it is unusual for him ever to get the facts right, or even manage to land in the remote vicinity of the truth.

Yet in right-wing circles Moore has failed steadily upward, serving as a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, becoming chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, and more. Trump tried to appoint him to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and might have succeeded if Moore hadn’t been found in contempt of court for failure to pay alimony and child support.

And there he was, at a crucial moment in the pandemic, urging Trump to downplay the medical emergency and endanger American lives.

Yet by Philipson’s own account, pretty much nobody took his advice. And in general, the U.S. right — not just Trumpists but the movement as a whole — distrusts anyone whose competence has resulted in an independent professional reputation. After all, you never know when someone like that might take a stand on principle.

I’ve written in the past that “the modern G.O.P. doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks, who are its kind of people.” And it turns out that the same is true for epidemiologists.

The right’s hatred of Dr. Anthony Fauci is a familiar story.  However, much of “Nightmare Scenario” follows the saga of Dr. Deborah Birx . . . . Trump’s inner circle never trusted her precisely because she was knowledgeable and had a reputation to defend. She was shut out in favor of politically reliable quacks.

So how did we end up here? How did one of our two major political parties come not only to reject democracy, but to exalt ignorance and despise competence of any kind?  I don’t know, but if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump Is Preparing for the Worst

Faced with criminal indictments against his company and CFO - many suspect that more indictments will be forthcoming - Donald Trump is doing what he has done all his life: lied and sought to distract his cult like followers from the simple reality that he is a liar and con artist who has played them for fools by playing to their hatred of others and prejudices.  Tellingly, as a piece in The Atlantic notes, the initial statement released by the Trump organization doesn't plead innocence but instead resorts to Trump's standard lie that it is all political and a witch hunt since he knows that the company is guilty and there may be more to come.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he Trump Organization is confronting troubles that accumulated gradually and have coalesced suddenly. And once again, friends are at the bottom of it.

A grand-jury indictment of Donald Trump’s business and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, unsealed this afternoon in New York, alleges tax evasion arising from an attempt to pay Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives extra money “off the books.” Prosecutors charge that Weisselberg and others received rent payments and other benefits without paying the appropriate taxes on them. Weisselberg and the Trump Organization have said they will plead not guilty.

So far, the danger is to Trump’s friends and his business, not the former president himself. But the danger could spiral, because Trump knew only so many tricks. If Trump’s company was bypassing relatively moderate amounts of tax on the income flows to Trump’s friends, what was it doing with the much larger income flows to Trump and his own family? Even without personal testimony, finances leave a trail. There is always a debit and a credit, and a check issued to the IRS or not.

An early indication that things may end badly for Trump is the statement released today from the Trump Organization. “Allen Weisselberg is a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather who has worked for the Trump Organization for 48 years. He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President. . . . . This is not justice; this is politics.”

Here is what is missing from that statement: “I’m 100 percent confident that every investigation will always end up in the same conclusion, which is that I follow all rules, procedures, and, most importantly, the law.” That’s the language used by former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke when he was facing ethics charges in 2018. Likewise, when Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe was accused of violating campaign-finance laws in 2016, he too was “very confident” that “there was no wrongdoing.” Plug the phrases very confident and no wrongdoing into a search engine and you will pull up statement after statement by politicians and business leaders under fire. . . . It’s the thing an innocent person would want to say. So it’s kind of a tell when it goes unsaid.

An earlier statement from Trump himself likewise omitted an affirmative defense of his company and its employees, and instead attacked the professional prosecutors as “radical Left” (not to mention “rude, nasty, and totally biased”). The key line in Trump’s own statement is an anticipation of the possibility that one or another of his friends might flip: “They”—the prosecutors—continue to be “in search of a crime; and will do anything to frighten people into making up the stories or lies that they want.”

One of Trump’s skills as a politician is preparing the battlefield in advance.  . . . . He’s readying his supporters for bad revelations about his company’s taxes and directing them to a fallback line that singling him out as a tax scofflaw is politically unfair.

That line of defense may well rally Trump’s supporters. It will not do him much good in court. It’s impossible for tax collectors to scrutinize every return. Selecting high-profile evaders and holding them to account is how tax laws are enforced. And if a former president numbers among those high-profile evaders, that makes the case for targeting him stronger, not weaker. It sends the message that the tax authorities most want to send: Everybody has to pay, especially powerful politicians.

Trump and his team already appear to expect that the law will be against him. They are counting on that fact not to matter very much—not enough to overcome the political hullabaloo they hope to raise in Trump’s defense.

Trump worked all his life on the theory that law can be subordinated to political favors and political pressures. That theory has carried him this far—and it’s pretty far, all things considered. We are now about to see a mighty test, before the country and the world, of whether that theory will carry him the rest of the way home.

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Infighting and Poor Planning Leave Condos in Disrepair

There are positive aspects to having a condominium, including - at least in theory - that the condominium association (or the management company hired by the association) will take care of needed maintenance and upkeep and establish an adequate capital reserve fund to take on major maintenance projects as needs arise.  As the aftermath of the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South complex near Miami is revealing in stark detail, the actual reality is all too often something quite different.  Even low rise condominium developments can face huge capital expenditures over time, but high rise projects like the Champlain Towers South complex often face staggering costs as the project ages.  Typically, as a piece in the New York Times notes, condo associations have inadequate reserves and efforts to increase monthly assessments or, more difficult yet, special assessments trigger civil wars amongst neighbors (we have several friends all too well acquainted with the phenomenon).  The lesson is that one needs to know what one is getting into when purchasing a condominium unit.  Here are excerpts from the Times piece:

For years before the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South complex near Miami, the condo board wrestled with how to come up with the $15 million needed to fix the building’s dilapidated roof, a poorly designed pool deck and crumbling support columns.

The problem: The homeowners’ association had just $800,000 in reserves, and getting the work done meant asking residents to shoulder huge special assessments ranging from $80,000 to $200,000 on each home. No one was eager to pay.

“The dirtiest words in the community-association industry are ‘special assessment,’” Donna DiMaggio Berger, a lawyer for the board, said of the effort to get 135 homeowners — of varying means and of multiple nationalities — to agree on a plan to do the repairs.

During the prolonged tumult over the needed renovations, several members of the board had quit in frustration.

The deferred maintenance and inadequate savings at the Champlain Towers building are common dilemmas at condo associations across the country, where volunteer board members, sometimes with little expertise in financing or maintenance, find themselves dealing with vicious infighting with their neighbors and pressure to keep dues low.

Only about 10 states require associations of homeowners to assess how much money they will need for big-ticket repairs in the future, and a vast majority of states do not require condo boards to maintain robust reserves to help pay for those items when they come due.

About one-third of associations are far behind on their savings, with 30 percent or less of the money needed to prepare for future big-ticket projects, said Robert Nordlund, whose company, Association Reserves, has studied tens of thousands of condominium groups and other homeowners’ associations in all 50 states. He said some boards get stuck focusing on regular maintenance costs — utilities, gardeners and pool cleaning — but fail to think about the even bigger bills that could arrive with sudden urgency.

The debates over deferred maintenance, money management and escalating homeowners’ association dues that unfolded in Surfside are hardly unfamiliar to condo residents across the country, who often find themselves caught up in political dramas with their neighbors whose outcome can dictate everything from the color of their garages to the resale value of their homes.

Industry leaders and some states have long pressed condos and other homeowners’ associations to have robust reserve funds in order to avoid consternation and procrastination when a big bill is coming due. But with little voluntary progress, a move to reshape state laws has gained momentum in recent months, attracting support from some homeowners, community managers and engineers in the industry.

A committee at the Community Associations Institute, which advocates for homeowners’ associations, is looking at a proposal to require homeowner communities to commission expert studies to assess the amount they need in reserves. Dawn M. Bauman, the institute’s senior vice president for government and public affairs, said the committee was also looking at minimum reserve requirements, although that proposal was subject to more vigorous debate.

The next backstop is local government, which could determine that a lack of repair is a code violation, which could trigger enforcement proceedings to force compliance.

At the Champlain Towers South project, the condo association had been working with an engineer in preparation for a 40-year recertification process required by the government. A letter written in April by the condo president, Ms. Wodnicki, showed that the association did not have enough reserves or cash on hand to fund the $15 million in repairs that residents were being asked to pay. And she warned that conditions in the building had “gotten significantly worse” since a 2018 engineering review highlighted millions of dollars in problems.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump Organization and CFO Are Indicted for Tax Crimes

UPDATE:  This from The Hill:

The Trump Organization's longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney's office Thursday morning, following reports that a grand jury in Manhattan filed criminal indictments against the executive and the organization for tax-related charges, according to multiple sources. . . . . Weisselberg, who has worked for Trump since the 1980s, was accompanied by his lawyer Mary E. Mulligan when he turned himself in at about 6:20 a.m., according to the New York Times. He is expected to be arraigned in the afternoon along with other company representatives.

We likely will not know the full details until later today when the indictments become public, but reportedly the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen H. Weisselberg, will be formally indicted today for tax crimes, including it would seem tax evasion.  No doubt prosecutors hope to "flip" Weisselberg who knows where all of the bodies are buried in order to ultimately reach Trump.  Like everything in the Trump universe, the underlying theme is one of greed and a desire to avoid payment of taxes which Trump no doubt believes are only paid by "losers."  A piece in the New York Times looks at what is currently known.  Here are highlights:

A grand jury in Manhattan has indicted Donald J. Trump’s family business, the Trump Organization, and one of its top executives in connection with a tax investigation into fringe benefits handed out at the company, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The specific charges against the company and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, were not immediately clear. The indictment was expected to be unsealed Thursday afternoon after Mr. Weisselberg and lawyers for the Trump Organization appear in court.

But prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office have been examining bonuses and luxury perks that Mr. Weisselberg received — including an apartment in Manhattan, leased Mercedes-Benz cars and private school tuition for at least one of his grandchildren — and whether taxes should have been paid on those benefits.

The charges will deal a blow to Mr. Trump, who has denounced the investigation as political persecution. Although he could rally supporters around the idea that he is the victim of what he has called a “witch hunt,” defending his company on criminal charges could be an expensive distraction as he considers another presidential run.

The indictment will also amplify the pressure that prosecutors have placed on Mr. Weisselberg for months to turn on Mr. Trump and cooperate with their ongoing investigation.

Interviews with 18 current and former associates of Mr. Weisselberg, as well as a review of legal filings, financial records and other documents, paint a portrait of a man whose unflinching devotion to Mr. Trump will now be put to the test.

Mr. Weisselberg and his wife moved into a Trump-branded building on Manhattan’s West Side, where they lived rent-free for years. He bought a home in South Florida, not far from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and traveled there and back on weekends on Mr. Trump’s jet.

Mr. Weisselberg had become so woven into the fabric of the Trump Organization that when Mr. Trump moved into the White House in 2017, he entrusted Mr. Weisselberg, along with the former president’s adult sons, with running his company. His earnings reflected his importance: Between 2007 and 2017, his total pay averaged nearly $800,000 a year; in 2018, he earned more than $977,000 in salary and deferred compensation, according to tax return data obtained by The New York Times as part of an investigation published last year.

Mr. Weisselberg has maintained that keeping a close eye on the organization’s finances and accounting had not given him insight into potential malfeasance at the company. In a 2015 deposition, he made it clear that it was not his job to ensure that the company complied with the law; it was the job of the Trump Organization lawyers.

Among the tasks Mr. Weisselberg attacked with fervor, former employees recalled, was ensuring that, per Mr. Trump’s direction, no dime left the company’s coffers unless absolutely necessary.

“He and Trump were like Frick and Frack when it came to stiffing vendors,” Mr. Cohen — who at times took on that same role for Mr. Trump — wrote in a book published last year. Mr. Burke, who served as chief financial officer for Mr. Trump’s casino business, said any Trump employee who dealt with vendors knew to “squeeze every penny” out of people, and that Mr. Weisselberg excelled at minimizing and delaying payment.

But more recently, Mr. Weisselberg’s actions on behalf of Mr. Trump have made him vulnerable. When federal prosecutors charged Mr. Cohen in 2018 with various crimes, including campaign finance violations for the payment to Ms. Daniels, they described Mr. Weisselberg as “Executive-1,” according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. Mr. Weisselberg instructed a subordinate to classify the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen as legal fees, even though no legal services were performed, prosecutors wrote.

[T]he Trump Organization’s lawyers have taken steps to avoid the appearance of any impropriety. In the past, many of Mr. Trump and Mr. Weisselberg’s conversations were private and behind closed doors. Now, they are under instructions to meet in the presence of a witness.