(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The stage is set for Thursday [1] [] Date: 2023-08-22 We begin today with Tamar Hallerman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the widely reported news that a $200,000 bond has been set for former president Donald Trump along with other terms. Under the terms of the consent bond order, Trump can’t perform any acts of witness intimidation or communicate directly or indirectly about the facts of the case with any codefendants except through his lawyer. The document was signed by Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee and Trump’s three Atlanta-based attorneys. The latter were spotted walking into the Fulton County courthouse on Monday afternoon. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who secured a racketeering indictment against Trump and 18 others from a grand jury last week, is giving defendants until Friday at noon to surrender. Patrik Jonsson of The Christian Science Monitor looks at the need to achieve a balance of transparency and safety with regard to juries. In the 1970s, threats against juries led judges to allow some jurors at mafia trials to remain faceless. More recently, threats against the judiciary system more generally have spiked. The U.S. Marshals Service, which provides security for the federal judicial process, has seen inappropriate communications and threats against those it protects rise from 1,278 in fiscal year 2008 to 4,511 in fiscal year 2021, according to department documents. These threats have sometimes turned into violent acts. In 2020, an attorney known for anti-feminist views dressed up as a delivery driver and shot and killed the son of federal Judge Esther Salas at her home in New Jersey, also wounding her husband. Judge Salas has since pushed for federal legislation that would offer broader protections for U.S. judges.[...] Yet there is also a risk of going too far in protecting juries. Allowing jurors to remain anonymous can throw into question the basic constitutional purpose of a jury of one’s peers, including creating a sense of accountability and legitimacy. Moreover, one survey by the Cornell Law Review found that anonymous juries are 15% more likely to return a guilty verdict than a named jury. That means the threshold for keeping juries secret should remain extraordinarily high, says Gregg Leslie, executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at Arizona State University in Tempe. Point taken although grand juries are always conducted in secret. But I do see the possible need for anonymity for a trial jury given the threats of violence. John Hendel of POLITICO reports that a program vital to supplying both rural and urban communities with Internet connections face roadblocks for continuance because of Congressional Republican gridlock. Over the past 26 years, the Universal Service Fund — a federal subsidy pool collected monthly from American telephone customers — has spent close to $9 billion a year to give Americans better phone and internet connections, wiring rural communities in Arkansas, inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, and public libraries and schools across the country. Now it faces the biggest crisis of its existence, and Congress appears paralyzed in the effort to fix it. [...] Congress, which created the USF as part of its last landmark telecom law rewrite in 1996, could stop any potential shutdown by fast-tracking legislation securing the fund’s role and its constitutionality, funding sources and missions. But the roadblocks to any kind of deal on Capitol Hill are already looming. It has become the center of a Washington lobbying war between Big Tech and the leading telecom firms, both of which want the other to foot the bill. And partisan politics are seeping in, too, with some Republicans starting to attack the fund as an icon of government waste. Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker reports that the U.S. government is having a difficult time reining in Elon Musk. In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from nasa, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ” Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood. Once the U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn affirmative action at the college/university level, it seemed only a matter of time before elite high school admissions also came under scrutiny. Stephanie Saul and Adam Liptak of The New York Times report that the time has arrived. A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in May that Thomas Jefferson, a public school in Alexandria, Va., did not discriminate in its admissions. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law group, wants the Supreme Court to overturn that decision, arguing that the school’s new admissions policies disadvantaged Asian American applicants. At issue is the use of what the school board said were race-neutral criteria to achieve a diverse student body. The constitutionality of such practices was left open in the Supreme Court’s decision in June against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, effectively banning the use of race-conscious admissions practices by colleges, though the majority opinion said, quoting an earlier decision, that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.” Although the new case involves a prestigious magnet high school, the decision could ultimately affect colleges, which are implementing new admissions criteria after the June decision. “This is the next frontier,” Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, has said of the litigation. Beth Mole of Ars Technica reports that officials simply do not have enough information to determine the nature of the threat posed by the BA.2.86 variant of COVID-19. In preliminary examinations of BA.2.86's mutations, viral genetics experts say it looks adapted to escape neutralizing antibodies—even those spurred or boosted by exposure to a currently circulating omicron sublineage, XBB.1.5. Many of the spike mutations seen in the new variant are linked to antibody escape, according to an analysis by Jesse Bloom, a viral evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Bloom's analysis suggests that BA.2.86's overall mutations give it at least as much antibody-escaping abilities as XBB.1.5, relative to BA.2. And BA.2.86's mutations give it the ability to escape some antibodies against XBB.1.5, which is the variant targeted by the upcoming fall booster vaccines. Of course, neutralizing antibodies are not the totality of immune responses; there are non-neutralizing antibodies as well as cell-based protections that can work to prevent severe disease. So far, it's unknown whether BA.2.86 can cause more severe disease than existing variants, though the tiny bit of data so far suggests that it does not. Denmark's Statens Serum Institute, which has identified three of the world's six cases, said on X last week that "there is no indication that the new variant causes severe illness." It also noted that the patients were not immunocompromised and did not have epidemiological links between them. In fact, all six cases are unrelated to each other. In a report by the UK Health Security Agency on Friday, officials also reported that the UK case had no recent travel history, suggesting domestic transmission. Perhaps the biggest question left unanswered about BA.2.86 is how well it will spread relative to other variants in circulation, namely XBB.1.5, EG.5, FL.1.5.1, and others. For BA.2.86 to cause its own wave, it must couple its antibody-escaping abilities with changes that make it more easily transmissible than other variants. So far, there's simply not enough data to know if this is the case or not. Perry Bacon Jr. of The Washington Post writes about his journey to becoming a religious “none.” I didn’t leave church for any one reason. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, I was reading more leftist Black intellectuals. Many of them either weren’t religious or were outright skeptical of faith. They didn’t view Black churches as essential to advancing Black causes today, even though King and many major figures in the 1960s civil rights movement had been very devout. I started to notice there were plenty of people — Black and non-Black — who were deeply committed to equality and justice but were not religious. At the same time, my Republican friends, many of whom had been very critical of Trump during his campaign, gradually became more accepting and even enthusiastic about him. While my policy views had always been to the left of these friends, our shared Christianity had convinced me that we largely agreed on broader questions of morality and values. Their embrace of a man so obviously misaligned with the teachings of Jesus was unsettling. I began to realize that being a Democrat or a Republican, not being a Christian, was what drove the beliefs and attitudes of many Christians, perhaps including me. [...] Finally, something happened at church itself. One of the men who had been in the church group I hosted had sought to lead one himself. But a church higher-up told him that he could participate in church activities but not lead anything because he is gay. I had not realized the church had such a policy. I learned that my church would also generally not conduct weddings for same-sex couples. So between early 2017 and early 2020, I went from someone who clearly defined himself as a Christian and attended the same church most Sundays to someone who wasn’t sure about Christianity but was still kind of shopping for a new religious home and going to a service every few weeks. I wasn’t fully comfortable with the idea of vetting churches by their views on policy issues. I had never really done that before. (Perhaps I should have.) David Pierson, Lynsey Chutel, Jack Nicas, Alex Travelli, and Paul Sonne report for The New York Times that the BRICS group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are entertaining expanding the number of its member nations. As leaders of the five nations meet starting Tuesday at an annual summit, this time in Johannesburg, how they navigate those differences might determine whether the group becomes a geopolitical coalition or remains largely focused on financial issues such as reducing the dominance of the dollar in the global economy. The task of finding common ground is only getting harder as the great power competition between Beijing and Washington intensifies, placing pressure on other nations to choose sides. And as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on, the conflict is roiling food and energy prices for many of the poorer countries that BRICS members claim to represent. “China under Xi is looking to use BRICS for its own purposes, particularly in extending its influence in the Global South,” said Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute in London. “India is highly unlikely to go along with it as the Chinese proposal will turn BRICS into something else — one which will serve primarily Chinese interests.” Dozens of countries have expressed interest in joining the club. They include countries that fall squarely in the Chinese camp, like Iran and Belarus, and nonaligned states such as Egypt and Kazakhstan, reflecting a desire to hedge between China and United States in the face of geopolitical polarization. Finally today, Mihaela Papa, Frank O’Donnell, and Zhen Han write for The Conversation about changes in U.S. foreign policy that the Biden Administration may need to make should the BRICS group of nations expand. To date, U.S. policy has largely ignored BRICS as an entity. The U.S. foreign and defense policymaking apparatus is regionally oriented. In the past 20 years, it has pivoted from the Middle East to Asia and most recently to the Indo-Pacific region. When it comes to the BRICS nations, Washington has focused on developing bilateral relations with Brazil, India and South Africa, while managing tensions with China and isolating Russia. The challenge for the Biden administration is understanding how, as a group, BRICS’ operations and institutions affect U.S. global interests. Meanwhile, BRICS expansion raises new questions. When asked about U.S. partners such as Algeria and Egypt wanting to join BRICS, the Biden administration explained that it does not ask partners to choose between the United States and other countries. But the international demand for joining BRICS calls for a deeper reflection on how Washington pursues foreign policy. Everyone have the best possible day! [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/22/2188607/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-The-stage-is-set-for-Thursday Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/