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Grace Gannon

Republican Congressman Randy Weber Compares Obama To Hitler - 0 views

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    The ultra-conservative congressman from Texas criticized the president for not traveling to Paris on Sunday to attend a massive unity rally against terrorism, which was attended by dozens of world leaders. Randy Weber said, "Even Adolph Hitler thought it more important than Obama to get to Paris. (For all the wrong reasons.) Obama couldn't do it for right reasons."
saberal

Opinion | Policing Is Not Broken, It's 'Literally Designed to Work in This Way' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Last week, an anxious America awaited the jury’s decision. Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. But whatever feelings greeted such a rare outcome were short-lived for many. The next day, a Virginia man named Isaiah Brown was on the phone with 911 police dispatch when a sheriff’s deputy shot him 10 times, allegedly mistaking the phone for a gun.
  • Today, I’ve gathered three guests who approach reform differently to see where we agree and don’t. Rashawn Ray is a fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. Randy Shrewsberry is a former police officer. He’s now the executive director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. And Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, a social justice training center where seminal figures like Rosa Parks trained.
  • Right, I think that we see so much of what policing has looked like, which is about the criminalization of poverty. I think it’s important to note here that this is something that I want to emphasize that police and justice impacts everyone with the cases of someone like Daniel Shaver, who was shot to death while crying on the floor, or Tony Timpa, who is held down by police while they laughed on body cam, and how much of this is the policing of poverty and the policing of what we think police are supposed to be doing is not what they’re doing. And so, Rashawn, I want to hear from you. You’ve done so much work on this. What are your top priorities when it comes to reforming policing?
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  • And I think we’ve seen that there is an expectation in this country of who is supposed to be policed and who is not supposed to be policed, that you’re supposed to go police those people over there, but if you order me to wear a mask, well, that’s just too much here. And we see time and time again that most killings by police start with traffic stops, mental health checks, domestic disturbances, low level offenses. We’ve seen with the cases of Philando Castile and others that traffic stops can be deadly. Randy, where does this come from? Why is the focus on low level offenses and not solving murders? I think a lot of people think that the police are focused on catching criminals, when that’s not really what they do.
  • Yeah. I mean, I think lovingly, I came to this position because we’ve been putting platinum bandaids and piecemeal reforms into place. And it hasn’t made policing any better for Black people or poor people or immigrant people, right? When we talk about defunding the police, we’re not just talking about the sheriff in your county or the P.D. in your inner city neighborhood. We’re talking about the state police. We’re talking about Capitol police who we literally watched hand-walk insurrectionists out of the Capitol on January 6. We’re talking about immigrant communities that are impacted by I.C.E., right? We’re talking about Customs and Border Patrol.
  • And the roots are embedded in white supremacy ideology that oftentimes we’re unwilling to admit. The other thing, good apples can’t simply override bad apples. Yes, overwhelmingly, officers get into it because they want to protect and serve. But we just heard from Randy what happens in that process. Good apples become poisoned. And they also can at times become rotten themselves. Because part of what happens is that they get swallowed up in the system. And due to qualified immunity, they are completely alleviated from any sort of financial culpability. And I think insurances can be a huge way to increase accountability.
  • So part of what we have to think through is better solutions. And what the research I’ve conducted suggests is that if we reallocate some of those calls for service, not only are there better people in the social service sector, such as mental health specialists or Department of Transportation better equipped to handle those things, but also police officers can then focus on the more violent crimes and increasing that clearance rate.
  • That’s how we got Ferguson, right? That’s how we ended up with the death of Michael Brown. So what all of this led me to is when you follow the money, just over the past five years, in the major 20 metropolitan areas in the United States, taxpayers have paid out over $2 billion with a B in settlements for police misconduct. Oftentimes, people are paying for their own brutality, so outside of police budgets, which have swelled over the past three decades. I mean, you have everything from over 40 percent in Oakland to well over 35 percent in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, that these civilian payouts don’t even come from the police budget. And what it led me to is that if we had police department insurance policies, if we had more police officer malpractice individual liability insurance, we would see not only a shift in financial culpability, but also a shift in accountability.
  • How do we keep people safe if we defund the police? But I bet if I asked you, Jane or Rashawn or Randy, to close your eyes and tell me a time where you felt safe, what did it feel like, you wouldn’t tell me that there was a cop there. And if it was, it would probably be because that cop might have been your dad or your mom or your aunt or your uncle, right? Not because they were in their uniform in a cop car policing somebody else. So quite frankly, I think the only solution to policing in this country is abolition. And how do we get there through divestment and investment is really super clear.
  • Do I think that we can reform our way out of the crisis of policing in this country? I do not. And I don’t because I’ve seen so many times us try. I’ve seen us say that if we just trained them more, it would be different. I’ve seen us say, if we just banned no-knock warrants, it would be different. I’ve seen us say, if we just got body cams on these cops, which is more and more and more money going to policing, but what we’ve seen is that that hasn’t distracted or detracted them because they can continue to use reasonable force as their get out of jail and accountability-free card. So I just don’t believe that the data shows that reforming our way out of policing is keeping Black people free and alive.
  • But you know what? They did. But you know what also survived those historical periods? Law enforcement. You know why? Because law enforcement is the gatekeeper of legalized state sanctioned violence. Law enforcement abolition probably requires a revolution we haven’t seen before. Part of what abolitionists also want — because I think there are two main camps. There are some that are like, law enforcement shouldn’t exist. Prisons shouldn’t exist. There are others who are like, look, we need to reimagine it. Like those rotten trees, we need to cut it down. When you deal with a rotten tree or a rotten plant, simply cutting it down doesn’t make it go away. The roots come back, right? And oftentimes, the plant comes back stronger. And interestingly, it comes back in a different form, like it’s wrapped in a different package. And so, but there are some people who say, how about we address abolition from the standpoint of abolishing police departments as they currently stand and reimagining and rebuilding public safety in a way that’s different? See, even the terminology we use is really important — policing, law enforcement, public safety. Part of reimagining law enforcement is reimagining the terms we use for what safety means. And how I think about it is, who has the right to truly express their First Amendment right and be verbally and/or nonviolently expressive? It’s not illegal to be combative.
  • And one of my colleagues was reading a clip. And he was saying, yeah, we need more police surveillance. We need to make sure that we watch what they’re doing. We need more training. This clip was from the 1980s, almost around the same time where Ash was talking about she was born.
  • The United States taxpayer is essentially asked to foot this impossible and never-ending bill to maintain this failed system of policing, right? I want to pull a little bit on Randy’s last point and what Dr. Ray raised about guns as well. It’s like even Forbes, I think, last week mentioned that more than one mass shooting per day has occurred in 2021. And so if cops keep me safe from gun violence, this stat wouldn’t be real, right? So if police officers were keeping Black people safe from gun violence, the world will be a very different place. And I doubt we would be having this conversation in the first place. We’ve got to actually be innovative beyond the request for support for more money for more trainings, for more technology. And so, quite frankly, when we think about what’s happening on the federal level legislatively right now with the Justice and Policing Act, I think the movement for Black — well, not I think — I know the movement for Black Lives unequivocally doesn’t support it. Because, again, it’s an attempt at 1990 solutions to a 2021 problem
  • If you want to learn more about police reform, I recommend reading the text of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act of 2021. I also recommend The New York Times Magazine piece that features a roundtable of experts and organizers. It’s called, “The message is clear: policing in America is broken and must change.
Javier E

Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say - The New York Times - 1 views

  • “This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”
  • Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
  • “Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.
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  • With five months to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump has already said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations. He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics. He has encouraged rough treatment of demonstrators.
  • His proposal to bar Muslims from entry into the country tests the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom, due process and equal protection. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • And, in what was a tipping point for some, he attacked Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of the Federal District Court in San Diego, who is overseeing two class actions against Trump University.Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat.
  • Beyond the attack on judicial independence is a broader question of Mr. Trump’s commitment to the separation of powers and to the principles of federalism enshrined in the Constitution. Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown and an architect of the first major challenge to President Obama’s health care law, said he had grave doubts on both fronts.
  • “You would like a president with some idea about constitutional limits on presidential powers, on congressional powers, on federal powers,” Professor Barnett said, “and I doubt he has any awareness of such limits.”
  • Mr. Post said that view was too sanguine, given the executive branch’s practical primacy. “The president has all the power with respect to enforcing the law,” he said. “There’s only one of those three branches that actually has the guns in its hands, and that’s the executive.”
  • “I don’t think he cares about separation of powers at all,” said Richard Epstein, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who also teaches at New York University and the University of Chicago.
  • President George W. Bush “often went beyond what he should have done,” Professor Epstein said. “I think Obama’s been much worse on that issue pretty consistently, and his underlings have been even more so. But I think Trump doesn’t even think there’s an issue to worry about. He just simply says whatever I want to do I will do.”
  • “I can easily see a situation in which he would take the Andrew Jackson line,” Professor Epstein said, referring to a probably apocryphal comment attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce i
  • “I can easily see a situati
  • There are other precedents, said John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who took an expansive view of executive power as a lawyer in the Bush administration. “The only two other presidents I can think of who were so hostile to judges on an individual level and to the judiciary as a whole would be Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt,” he said.
  • Other legal scholars said they were worried about Mr. Trump’s commitment to the First Amendment. He has taken particular aim at The Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon
  • On one hand, Mr. Trump seemed to misunderstand the scope of presidential power. Libel is a state-law tort constrained by First Amendment principles, and a president’s views do not figure in its application.
  • “There are very few serious constitutional thinkers who believe public figures should be able to use libel as indiscriminately as Trump seems to think they should,” Professor Somin said. “He poses a serious threat to the press and the First Amendment.”
  • On the other hand, said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, Mr. Trump’s comments betrayed a troubling disregard for free expression.
  • Many of Mr. Trump’s statements about legal issues were extemporaneous and resist conventional legal analysis. Some seemed to betray ignorance of fundamental legal concepts, as when he said in a debate that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had criticized Mr. Trump’s sister, a federal appeals court judge, “for signing a certain bill,” adding for good measure that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., while still an appeals court judge, had also “signed that bill.”
  • But bills are legislative rather than judicial documents. And, as it happened, Judge Alito had not joined the opinion in question.
rachelramirez

One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
  • One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.
  • “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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  • As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
  • He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
  • The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
  • The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On.
  • HIV first started infecting humans somewhere in West Africa, having jumped into us from chimpanzees.
  • He also concluded that the virus must have arrived in the U.S. around 12 years before AIDS was formally recognized in 1981.
  • They reveal that HIV had spread from Africa to the Caribbean by around 1967, and had jumped into the U.S. by around 1971. It landed in New York City and began diversifying rapidly
  • By the time anyone noticed the first sign of AIDS in 1981, the virus had already hopped from coast to coast, and become genetically diverse.
  • This means that not only did Dugas not bring AIDS to America, but he didn’t spread it west either. He was a totally mundane part of a very unusual epidemic.
  • In 2010, evolutionary biologists used gene trees to prove that a man named Anthony Eugene Whitfield had knowingly infected many women with HIV. More recently, biologists used a pocket-sized DNA sequencer to track the evolution of Ebola in real-time, providing details about routes of transmission that helped to curtail the recent west African outbreak.
Javier E

Fake Meats, Finally, Taste Like Chicken - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “Frankly, we’ve never said we’re interested in food,” said Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, a venture capital firm that has backed Google and Facebook — and Beyond Meat. “What we’re interested in is big problems needing solutions, because they represent big potential markets and strong opportunities for building great returns.”
  • Among the problems he listed that his firm’s investment in Beyond Meat are intended to address are land and water use, stress on global supply chains and the world’s growing population. “These are venture-scale problems with venture-scale returns,” Mr. Komisar said.
  • More than anything we’re trying to reverse what we see as a problem, which is cheap and convenient food that is always going to win in China, win in India and win with my father, but isn’t good for the body or animals or the environment.”
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  • “Much of the new growth in the segment is coming from younger consumers who seek foods that fit an overall lifestyle, be it for health reasons or personal ethics,” Mr. Loucks wrote. “They are not just seeking foods that mimic meat. Instead they specifically want vegetarian foods with distinctive flavors and visible, recognizable ingredients.”
  • “Not that long ago, electrical cars were considered nonperformers, and when Prius came out, a lot of people didn’t think there was a market for it,” said Yves Potvin, founder and chief executive of Gardein Protein International, which makes the Gardein line of meatless products. “Now people are willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla, and more than one million Prius cars are sold each year.”
  • Mr. Brown is most proud of Beyond Meat’s “chicken breast” products, which are sold in strips that look like real chicken and can be pulled into shreds for chicken salad. “That was kind of the holy grail,” he said.
  • “It has to be just as good as, just as convenient as and maybe even cheaper than ground beef or chicken,” Mr. Brown said. “Our business is to create something better than meat; otherwise we are not going to move the needle.”
Javier E

Biggest Scorer in World Cup? Maybe Univision - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • During a private equity boom in 2007, his group acquired Univision for $13.7 billion in a bidding war orchestrated by the company’s largest shareholder and former chairman, A. Jerrold Perenchio. Mr. Perenchio, a onetime Hollywood agent, saw the potential of Spanish-language television in 1992, when he bought Univision for just $500 million.
  • Univision, which was started in 1955 as a local San Antonio TV station, is now a sprawling media empire based in New York, reaching nearly 100 million television households across the United States.
  • “We’re seen as a Spanish-language broadcaster that mostly competes with Telemundo,” the company’s chief executive, Randy Falco, said. “But in my view, we should be competing with the English-language networks because increasingly we will have an audience that will surpass them.”
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  • Mr. Ramos is also a co-host of Univision’s nightly news program, “Noticiero Univision,” which averages about two million viewers a night, a modest number compared with those of the Big Three English-language networks — but one that dwarfs those of cable news shows like CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” or MSNBC’s “Politics Nation.”
  • the number of eligible Hispanic voters in 2016 will total 27.7 million, a 17 percent increase from 2012. “From the numbers that we have, we see 800,000 Latino kids turning 18 every year,”
carolinehayter

14-hour days and no bathroom breaks: Amazon's overworked delivery drivers | Amazon | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Fourteen-hour shifts were common because delivery service providers wouldn’t allow drivers to return any packages from their routes and the pressure to meet delivery rates meant Meyers used a plastic bottle to go to the bathroom on a daily basis.
  • “Any time a van is off route or stops for longer than three minutes, it notifies the delivery service provider. Amazon encourages the delivery service owners to cut down on said stops
  • Amazon uses contractors for delivery services, a move Meyers said makes it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and he said, contributes to drivers being overworked and underpaid by the delivery service providers who are paid bonuses on metrics such as route completion percentages.
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  • “If Amazon decides to take millions of jobs and essentially cut their labor costs in half, that only comes out of workers’ pockets,” added Korgan. “That creates a major economic problem in an industry that for the last 50 years has done a good job of supporting millions of middle-class jobs.”
  • “This sort of model is problematic for the entire industry,” said Randy Korgan, the director of the Teamster’s Amazon Project. “They’re willing to loan these small subcontractors money, get them access to their vans and help them advertise for employees to offload all the responsibility that would normally fall on Amazon.”
  • Amazon has been publicly opposed to unionization and organizing among their employees, most recently through an anti-union campaign launched ahead of a union election vote at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, which has included anti-union captive audience meetings and sending mass texts and ads to workers encouraging them to vote against the union.
  • Drivers for Amazon contractors have complained of the surveillance and pressure they receive through cameras and a tracking app, Mentor.
  • remain
  • Drivers for Amazon delivery service providers also face fear of retaliation for trying to organize in their workplaces.
  • Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have gone back and forth every week about who is the wealthiest person in the world and I can’t even pay my rentDerrick Flournoy
  • “Sixteen dollars an hour isn’t enough for the amount of work that we have to do. We’re a representation of the wealthiest company in the world and we’re barely making enough money to live,”
  • An Amazon spokesperson claimed drivers have built-in time through their routes for breaks and provide a list of nearby restrooms in the delivery app. They did not comment on the unfair labor practice charge or on organizing efforts by drivers.
katherineharron

Trump launches defensive Twitter spree as America grieves - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump began his Wednesday with a Twitter spree defending himself, attacking his critics and suggesting he's done more for black Americans than any president, with the "possible exception" of Abraham Lincoln.
  • The tweets come as the White House is facing ongoing fallout from the President's response to ongoing protests and the events of Monday evening, where peaceful protesters were forcefully dispersed before curfew so he could participate in a photo opportunity with a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church, which suffered a fire during protests over the weekend. The move has been widely criticized by clergy.
  • After a night of largely peaceful protests around the country with some brief clashes near the White House, Trump has tweeted or retweeted 40 times since 5:52 a.m. He said he's "done much more for our Black population" than 2020 rival Joe Biden or "any President in U.S. history, with the possible exception" of Abraham Lincoln, trained his ire at the media, promoted baseless conspiracy theories about his predecessor, called for "LAW AND ORDER!" and congratulated Randy Feenstra, who bested Iowa Rep. Steve King in Tuesday's primary.
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  • The President continued to ignore calls for him to calm racial tension and instead claimed the reason he was moved to a bunker on Friday night amid violent protests was for an "inspection" rather than safety concerns. He defended his baseless attacks accusing a former US congressman of murder of an aide, despite pleas from the aide's widower for him to stop.
  • "We have to get the police departments, everybody has to do better," Trump said, "This is a long term problem, this didn't happen today."
anonymous

Tainted Cutter polio vaccine killed and paralyzed children in 1955 - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • On Aug. 30, 1954, Bernice E. Eddy, a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., was checking a batch of a new polio vaccine for safety.Created by Jonas Salk, the vaccine was hailed as the miracle drug that would conquer the dreaded illness that killed and paralyzed children. Eddy’s job was to examine samples submitted by the companies planning to make it.As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine designed to protect against the disease had instead given polio to a test monkey. Rather than containing killed virus to create immunity, the sample from Cutter contained live, infectious virus.
  • As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure.
  • Despite Eddy’s warnings, an estimated 120,000 children that year were injected with the Cutter vaccine
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  • Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died,
  • It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.
  • “People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”
  • The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that.
  • Many survivors had to wear painful metal braces on their paralyzed legs or had to be placed in so-called iron lungs, which helped them breathe
  • In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies.
  • On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study.Salk’s vaccine was given to 420,000 children. A placebo was given to 200,000. And 1.2 million were given nothing.
  • She had started at NIH in 1937, had headed testing of vaccines for influenza, and in 1954 was asked to help test the Salk polio vaccine. The pressure was intense. “For weeks she and her staff worked around-the-clock, seven days a week,” O’Hern wrote.“This was a product that had never been made before, and they were going to use it right away,” Eddy had said.She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys.“What do you think is wrong with these monkeys?” she asked a colleague, Offit recounted.“They were given polio,” the colleague replied.“No,” Eddy said. “They were given the … vaccine.”
lucieperloff

Allegheny County Bar Association recommends voters keep 4 judges | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 0 views

  • a list of four judges that it recommends voters keep on the bench during the municipal elections on Nov. 2.
  • All four judges are at the end of their 10-year term, and voters will decide whether to vote yes or no on their retention.
  • Superior Court Judges John T. Bender and Mary Jane Bowes were both recommended by the ACBA, as were Common Pleas Judges Alexander T. Bicket and Randy Todd.
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  • whose experience working in front of these judges gives them a distinct expertise in evaluating a judge’s performance
  • We’ve surveyed our members, and the attorneys of the Allegheny County Bar Association strongly recommend these four judges for retention. On Nov. 2, we encourage voters to vote ‘yes’ and retain these qualified judges.”
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