No Spotty ™ for Lisa
Lisa Weisman of Minneapolis wins a No Spotty™ for this letter to the editor in the Sunday Strib.
Bravo to the now 14 federal prosecutors who have resigned from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office in the past month (“8 more federal prosecutors resign,” Feb. 4). Hopefully they will be employed again soon doing legal work that doesn’t require them to turn off their consciences while at the office. Boo to U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen for not showing the same backbone with Attorney General Pam Bondi. I felt deep angst when I read that at a recent staff meeting Rosen was reported as telling staffers to “keep an open mind” and “not be afraid to do unpopular things,” not to mention saying that the U.S. Department of Justice was not asking them “to do anything illegal.” Isn’t the goal that what’s legal also be what’s moral? Thank you again to the federal prosecutors who want to do both.
Lisa lionizes a group that includes many who participated in a feat of legerdemain in December to defame the entire Somali community with fabulist claims of social services fraud, while having proved only a small fraction of it. I wrote about the December press conference at the link, and I encourage you to read the article, as I am not going to repeat what I wrote there. Well, I will repeat one paragraph:
[The December press conference touched off a] month of right-wing social media bloviating, a mainstream media that ran with the nine billion dollar fraud figure as a fact, Donald Trump’s ranting that Somalis people are “garbage” [and initiating Metro Surge], Nick Shirley’s puerile, defamatory video (extolled by the Ovoid Sorehead, Tom Emmer), Tim Walz being driven from a re-election campaign, the fact that Somali and Latino U.S. citizens have to cower in their homes, and the sad little bullshit performance [well, his first one] in Minneapolis by Jake Lang on Saturday, January 17th, can all be laid at the feet of Joe Thompson. It’s quite a legacy.
They’re a day late and a dollar short in the growing a spine department.
In his column in the Minnesota Star Tribune about the negative effects of the immigration “enforcement surge,” business columnist Evan Ramstad said this in conclusion:
In their distortions and misjudgments about fraud and immigration, people who should know better forgot how many Minnesota communities survive today because immigrants, including those who are undocumented and trying to become citizens, do difficult or dirty work other people won’t.
The whole column is a good exposition of the problems we’re foolishly creating.
The resigning of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys is just in small mitigation of the shitshow they helped create, including the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
A No Spotty™ is awarded for a piece of writing that I am glad I had nothing to do with.
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