When Politicians Posture, Patients Suffer

Steve Bannon’s odds of going to prison ticked up on Friday when DC’s Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal of his 2022 conviction for contempt of Congress. But more than 18 months after a federal district court judge sentenced the former Donald Trump adviser to four months behind bars for blowing off subpoenas from the House’s January 6 committee, Bannon has not yet exhausted his legal options.

After the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, dozens of schools bearing names that honored Confederate figures renamed themselves. The move came against a flood of similar efforts aimed at addressing the nation’s stark racial disparities—at least on paper. But nearly four years to the day of Floyd’s death, a Virginia school board appears to have changed its mind.

A Virginia school board voted Friday to restore the names of Confederate military leaders to a high school and an elementary school, four years after the names had been removed, a reversal that some experts believe may be the first of its kind. Shenandoah County’s school board voted 5-1 to rename Mountain View High School as Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary as Ashby Lee Elementary. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Friday’s vote reverses a decision by the school board in 2020, a time when school systems across Virginia and the South were removing Confederate names from schools and other public locations in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Rivka Maizlish, senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which maintains a database of more than 2,000 Confederate memorials nationwide, said she is not aware of any other school that has decided to restore a Confederate name that was removed. Overall, she said, the trend toward removal of Confederate names and memorials has continued, even if it has slowed somewhat since 2020.

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. For four decades, I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which a nuclear blast occurs.

At the hush-money trial of former president Donald Trump in Manhattan, Stormy Daniels’ story is, in a sense, a proxy battle for the actual debate about bookkeeping: If you believe Daniels’s accounting of the affair she alleges they had, then you must find Trump—who denies any such encounter—unbelievable. If you don’t believe Daniels, then it becomes much easier to accept the defense narrative that this is all one big con. The sexual encounter that Daniels described in precise and disturbing detail under oath this week is technically irrelevant to the questions at hand.

They just couldn't help themselves, their case was so bad they wanted to Get Trump by any means necessary, and now they may have scuppered their own legal case against him.