Oh, it’s totally freedom of speech. But freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to broadcast your speech on public property without exception.

If they hung the banner on their house or private property, there would be nothing to be done to stop them.
But you can’t hang a banner from the governments property without their permission, which must be given in a manner impartial to the content on the banner beyond any compelling interests like “no hanging very distracting banners where it could cause accidents”.

They didn’t ask, so they can have their banner removed just as though they hung it from the flagpole in front of the courthouse.

They’re being prosecuted because a racial component to a crime is an aggravating factor that makes it more appealing to prosecutors.
So their claim is entirely correct: they’re being prosecuted because their crime was minor but made worse by being racist. We’ve already decided that it’s reasonable for the government to be particularly harsh on racist crimes because it singles out a type of behavior that’s particularly harmful to society.

The article was also pretty non-inflammatory in my opinion.

They (governments) don’t do it because it’s taken as threatening, but more because it’s not. It’s a very specifically not belligerent way to push back on a country. “I can wander in here right up against your borders because your zone of exclusive control isn’t as big as you claim”.

We do the same thing with China to push back on their claims that certain waterways belong to them. (Ours looks a little different since we routinely patrol shipping lanes, so a more overt ship but also more common to just see tooling around looming at would be pirates, so it’s not the same message as if a Russian missile destroyer showed up off the Florida coast. We send that message with a carrier group.). By overtly and openly using a waterway we say “LOOK AT US JUST NORMALLY USING THIS PUBLIC ROUTE LIKE A NORMAL SHIP IN PUBLIC WOULD DO WHEN THEY WEREN’T VIOLATING CHINESE TERRITORIAL WATERS”.

We would rather other nations not send military vessels near the US mainland. Russia would rather not have a bunch of stuff happen that we regularly facilitate. So they discreetly give us the finger by doing the tamest version of what we don’t want while still having a perfectly normal excuse.

I think it’s just cruelty and some perverted sense of constructionism honestly.

If it were about forcing birth, they’d be in favor of forcing all forms of IVF to be legal. Probably in favor of deregulating it and removing any form of sane protections.

That’s fair. Being openly remorseless does tend to encourage the judge to give the full extent of what they’re allowed to do.

I’m just cynical about anyone wanting to be the first person to sentence a former president to prison, and maybe finding any possible reasonable way to skirt over that for whatever reason or just “the good of the country”, justice or not.

Or not, and they’ll just seize the opportunity to show that justice is blind.
We’ll find out in July. 😊

I believe they meant “crime” as in “the criminal act of paying hush money and hiding it to illegally influence an election”, not the specific criminal charges.

In some jurisdictions, in some contexts, and for different lengths of time some criminals are denied the right to vote.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map

Depends on the state. Some states permanently revoke a felons right to vote. Some for the time that they’re actively in prison. Some do not revoke it at all.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-map

Prisons, on paper, have a responsibility to ensure a degree of prisoner safety. The level of effort required to give a former president that safety is beyond what even a white collar criminal oriented prison is going to be able to easily provide without disruption. For example, who would be preparing his food? How many guards would have access to him while he slept?

It’s possible to do, but it’s the sort of thing that could factor into the decision.

I mean, probation is the “slap on the wrist” punishment.
There’s an actual possibility of him going to prison. That’s not a hypothetical, or even unrealistic. Cohen served prison time for this same act, and he pled guilty and agreed to testify.

Trump is unlikely to go to prison due to the politics of the situation, but it’s not impossible. If he doesn’t go to prison, the only other punishment is probation, which carries with it things like travel restrictions. Those aren’t negotiable. They’re unlikely to deny his requests, but he would actually have to make the request, and check in with his court appointed probation officer at least by phone on a regular basis, or that officer can just send him to jail for non-compliance. A home inspection is standard procedure, and the officer doesn’t need anyone’s permission to do it.

If the judge that Trump has continuously attacked decides that Trump, who has shown zero signs of remorse or contrition for his crimes, deserves leniency then I see no reason to expect that the terms of his leniency would be exceptionally lenient, to say nothing of “in open defiance of the minimums of what’s required of probation”.

I would entirely agree. But, the world is what it is, and it might be untenable for the justice system or the judge might decide it creates too many opportunities for everything to go wrong on appeal.

Time will tell though, and July is just around the corner.

Yes. The system is designed to allow the probation officer a lot of leeway in how they enforce things.
Usually the system is petty and difficult to work with, but it’s not obligated to be.
They could say something like a biweekly phone call and a call before traveling out of state is all that’s required.

Unlikely though, since blatant deference makes them look bad, and opens up whichever political appointee or elected official that sits above the probation system to an easily justifiable replacement.

Honestly? I think a probation officer is likely to be picked for seniority in his case, for the purposes of making the new York justice system appear more, frankly, funded than it really is. I don’t think the political pressure on that officer is likely to be the same as the political pressure on someone like a judge. Their pressure will be to make the department look good.
That will inevitably be interpreted as professional, courteous and unbiased.
I don’t think he’ll be drug tested, but I do think he’ll have at least one off hours home visit that is coincidentally picked up by the media, and they’ll find a reason to deny some request until additional concessions are made.
At some point someone will say that as far as they’re concerned, the former president is just another individual under their supervision who’s being treated just like any other. It’s not true, but it requires some indignity to happen to be plausible, just because everyone is watching.

Enough so that no one says they’re obviously just weak, since that makes them look bad, but nothing so much as to make people say “wow, they’re actually awful, we need to fix the system”.

Alternatively the system assigns someone at random who more than likely power tips a little and takes advantage of the opportunity to abuse a rich person just because they can. Probably not though, since that requires a different level of institutional incompetence.

He can appeal, but he is still a convicted felon. He will be sentenced before any appeal can happen. He will most likely get probation, which isn’t a lot but also comes with a lot more indignity then he is likely used to, and can carry a significant amount of bad optics during an election cycle.
As in, probation officer can enter his house without warning any time of day, deny his ability to travel out of state, random drug tests and unannounced workplace visits. Even just stipulating that he must report to their office every week would have a very visible impact on his campaign.

Something to keep in mind is that as of right now, he is guilty. If sentencing decides he goes to jail (very unlikely), they do not have to let him go free while the appeal takes place.

More likely though, is that he’ll be bound by the terms of probation. Which is potentially hilarious, since it means the probation officer can enter his home at will, send him to jail if he knowingly communicates with a felon, and can deny his requests to leave the jurisdiction he was convicted in essentially at will. He needs to be available to be interviewed by the probation at their discretion anywhere he is, and the probation officer can deny his living arrangements if they believe it creates a risk of a prohibited behavior.

It’s unlikely, but a particularly vindictive parole officer could make a very legitimate argument that attending the convention where they vote on making Trump the Republican candidate must be denied due to the likelihood of associating with known felons or former criminal associates related to his conviction.

If would be petty, but it’s not like anyone has put much care into abuse in the probation and parole system before, so…

If one is being objective and not paying attention to his former job or publicity, he’s a first time offender convicted of non-violent offenses with a business footprint that makes him low risk for probation violation.
He would also place a burden on the penal system if incarcerated, and his current state of having round the clock law enforcement presence further lowers the likelihood that he goes to prison.

On the flip side, he has done a lot to actively antagonize the person who will be mostly in charge of his fate, and he’s got a good month to build a body of evidence that says he’ll immediately disrespect probation.

So almost certainly not, but it’s not as close to zero as you would expect for a former president.

Problem is the price of ingredients for cooking at home have gone up too, and with the value of labor for more workers falling in comparison, the cost of cooking at home is at best keeping pace.

I believe that’s what they’re saying, yes. Concern of the trait spreading to other strains of rice are exaggerated because there’s nothing that would make this trait an advantage outside of the domestic food context, whereas Roundup resistance provides value to plants that want to grow near Roundup.

Which big corps would that be exactly?

It’s perfectly possible to show that it’s safe to any reasonable standard: https://www.irri.org/golden-rice-faqs

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jafc.9b01524

The only biologically meaningful difference between GR2E and control rice was in levels of β-carotene and other provitamin A carotenoids in the grain. Except for β-carotene and related carotenoids, the compositional parameters of GR2E rice were within the range of natural variability of those components in conventional rice varieties with a history of safe consumption.

How exactly do you propose that the genetic makeup of the rice is going to impact the person eating it, if chemical analysis shows it’s not meaningfully different from any other rice?

You can’t demand that people prove something beyond unreasonable doubt. At some point you have to be able to articulate a concern to justify further scrutiny.

But Roundup doesn’t have anything to do with GMOs? They made genes that let some plants tolerate a pesticide. The effects of that pesticide have nothing to do with the gene.

Indeed, “eating more food” is generally agreed to be the best way to remedy childhood malnutrition and food insufficiency. It’s hands down agreed upon to be the best possible approach.

Unfortunately, children who suffer from these maladies often lack additional food to eat, which is why there are several lines of inquiry for solving this problem:

• can we make it so more food?
• can we make the food better?
• can we make the food faster?

Inevitably, that means things like “vegetables that tolerate bad soil”, “vitamin fortified rice”, or “fast growing wheat”, or “crazy fertilizer strategies”.

It’s a sad reality that most places that can’t grow enough food to properly feed children typically lack the ability to just grow more, to say nothing of diversifying into more resource intensive crops. otherwise they would probably do that.