Laurence Tribe is a huckster. That's the kindest thing that can be said about him. I loathe him because I know him. He was supposed to be on 'our side' (the left) but he's not. C.I. was the first one I know to soundly reject that and she has done so to his face and exposed, to his face, his faulty thinking (don't mistake it for logic) and his misunderstanding of legal basics. Tribe starts with a conclusion or finding and then works to support it. He is incapable of honest and constructive thought.
No surprise, he is again lying about Jonathan Turley. He did so in a column he co-wrote for THE BOSTON GLOBE. THE GLOBE has now corrected Tribe's lie. Jonathan notes that in his latest column and much more. Here's what I wanted to excerpt:
States may want to be tad cautious in following such advice. Tribe has been repeatedly wrong on such cases and advanced disproven or unsupported claims of criminal conduct in the past years.
Most recently, Tribe was the reported expert who encouraged President Biden to push a clearly unconstitutional executive order that was promptly rejected by the Court. Five justices previously stated that the CDC moratorium on evictions was unconstitutional. However, many on the left wanted the CDC to renew the order. Biden was reportedly told by the White House counsel and various experts that such an order would be struck down.
Biden acknowledged the obvious — that any new order to extend the moratorium would be unconstitutional. Indeed, he admitted that legal experts overwhelmingly told him so: “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” Yet he added that he was able to find “several key scholars who think that it may and it’s worth the effort.”
The question then arose as to who would offer Biden constitutional cover when virtually every other liberal professor declined to do so — and the “several key scholars” were guessed by some of us to be a single figure: Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. After his own White House counsel agreed that the move would be unconstitutional, Biden reportedly told his chief of staff, Ron Klain, to call Tribe.
Biden followed Tribe and the courts followed the Constitution. The order was quickly struck down.
Now for a different topic.
"TV: Wishes and reality" (Ava and C.I., THE THIRD ESTATE SUNDAY REVIEW):
There's a lot to wish for but, as 2021 draws to a close, we wish people would grasp that, no, we are not in a golden age of TV. If we were, with all these channels and streaming services, there would be a lot more worth watching.
That's their conclusion. They build to it with strong examples. Read and grasp how the streamers ignored women and thought that was the way to garner a paying audience.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
This Christmas may well be the last that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will spend outside US custody. On December 10, the British High Court ruled in favor of extraditing Assange to the United States, where he will be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. It is clear to me that the charges against Assange are both baseless and dangerous, in unequal measure — baseless in Assange’s personal case, and dangerous to all. In seeking to prosecute Assange, the US government is purporting to extend its sovereignty to the global stage and hold foreign publishers accountable to US secrecy laws. By doing so, the US government will be establishing a precedent for prosecuting all news organization everywhere — all journalists in every country — who rely on classified documents to report on, for example, US war crimes, or the US drone program, or any other governmental or military or intelligence activity that the State Department, or the CIA, or the NSA, would rather keep locked away in the classified dark, far from public view, and even from Congressional oversight.
I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the US government’s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unsual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the US government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the US court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals.
The U.S. attempts to distinguish Assange’s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by characterizing it as a “conspiracy.” But what does that even mean in this context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks’ old partners, The New York Times and The Guardian)? Or does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be construed as a typical part of an editor’s job)? The truth is that all national security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow “not a journalist” does nothing to take the teeth out of this precedent when the activities for which he’s been charged are indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigative journalists routinely engage in.
This kind of sincere, credulous, smug, and gloating inquiry is just the most recent, just-in-time-for-Christmas, example of in-the-flesh-and-in-the-word bad faith, presented by media professionals who are never in worse faith than when they report on — or pass judgment on — other media.
On December 22, Doctors for Assange released an open letter, published below, to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, imploring him to seek the WikiLeaks founder’s urgent release on medical grounds. The letter makes that request based on Joyce’s recent statements suggesting that the US extradition request against Assange should now be dropped.
That hundreds of doctors have again written, warning of Assange’s dire medical situation, underscores the grave dangers he faces as he spends yet another year behind bars with extradition hanging over his head and the prospect of being incarcerated for life on trumped-up US espionage charges.
US authorities accuse Assange, 50, of 18 counts relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables, which they said had put lives in danger.
On December 10 the WikiLeaks founder moved a step closer to facing criminal charges in the United States after Washington won an appeal over his extradition in London's High Court.
The court said it was satisfied with a package of assurances given by the US about the conditions of Assange's detention, including a pledge not to hold him in a so-called "ADX" maximum security prison in Colorado and that he could be transferred to Australia to serve his sentence if convicted.
The Supreme Court is the United Kingdom's final court of appeal.
