#leonard — Public Fediverse posts

♫ Otra canción que me gusta en Spotify ►«Everybody Knows» de «Leonard Cohen» en su album «I'm Your Man»
https://open.spotify.com/track/60s0QWaOZ2UTzqdIHBCt3x #music #spotify #Leonard Cohen

♫ Otra canción que me gusta en Spotify ►«I'm Your Man» de «Leonard Cohen» en su album «I'm Your Man»
https://open.spotify.com/track/5atFAXIgMXP378op4FaxBm #music #spotify #Leonard Cohen

♫ Otra canción que me gusta en Spotify ►«Take This Waltz - Paris Version» de «Leonard Cohen» en su album «I'm Your Man»
https://open.spotify.com/track/4QbvmYYVLl8LNUsOXstLft #music #spotify #Leonard Cohen

Un chercheur pense avoir résolu un mystère vieux de 500 ans dans un dessin de Léonard de Vinci https://www.presse-citron.net/un-chercheur-pense-avoir-resolu-un-mystere-vieux-de-500-ans-dans-un-dessin-de-leonard-de-vinci/

#culture #leonard #science

♫ Otra canción que me gusta en Spotify ►«First We Take Manhattan» de «Leonard Cohen» en su album «I'm Your Man»
https://open.spotify.com/track/6UEzGV76d96lYTA68iBO0B #music #spotify #Leonard Cohen

Léonard - Tome 56 - Eclair de génie - Critiques - 1001BD.com https://www.1001bd.com/index.php?/ecriturecritiques/l%25C3%25A9onard-tome-56-eclair-de-g%25C3%25A9nie-r5634/ Note : 2.5/5 @LeLombard #leonard #jeunesse #humour

Kostel sv. Linharta / Church of St. Leonard #Leonard #Church #Dronephotography #drone #photo #photography #landscape #landscapephotography #CzechScape #CzechRepublic #Czechia

Why #Leonard's #Glasses Don't Have Lenses On #TheBigBangTheory

https://www.slashfilm.com/1903313/why-leonard-glasses-lensless-the-big-bang-theory/

D'où le prix, certainement 🤔...
#art #pinceau #Leonard #aquarelle #madeinfrance

What a chicken-shit, 11th hour move from Biden. Instead of pardoning #LeonardPeltier for a crime that his own prosecutor said he didn't do, #Peltier's sentence was commuted to house-arrest for the rest of his life (to surely avoid the ire of the FBI). DJT was getting sworn in within the hour--how difficult to change the word "commute" to "pardon"?

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5095591-biden-commutes-leonard-peltier-sentence/

While this is surely one of the happiest days that #Leonard and his family have had in a long time, this isn't justice.

Moments before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of Indigenous activist #Leonard #Peltier, who was convicted in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents.
Peltier was denied parole as recently as July and wasn’t eligible for parole again until 2026. He was serving life in prison for the deaths of the agents during a standoff on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
He will transition to home confinement, Biden said in a statement.
Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Emery Nelson said after Biden’s commutation that Peltier remained incarcerated Monday at USP Coleman, a high-security prison in Florida.
The fight for Peltier’s freedom is entangled with the Indigenous rights movements.
Nearly half a century later, his name remains a rallying cry.
An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota, Peltier was active in the American Indian Movement,
which began in the 1960s as a local organization in Minneapolis that grappled with issues of police brutality and discrimination against Native Americans. It quickly became a national force.
The movement grabbed headlines in 1973 when it took over the village of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge
— the Oglala Lakota Nation’s reservation
— leading to a 71-day standoff with federal agents.
Tensions between the movement and the government remained high for years.
On June 26, 1975, agents went to Pine Ridge to serve arrest warrants amid battles over Native treaty rights and self-determination.
After being injured in a shootout, agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were shot in the head at close range, the FBI said.
American Indian Movement member Joseph Stuntz was also killed in the shootout.
Two other movement members and Peltier’s co-defendants, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler, were acquitted of killing Coler and Williams.
After fleeing to Canada and being extradited to the United States, Peltier was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced in 1977 to life in prison, despite defense claims that evidence against him had been falsified.
Biden’s action Monday followed decades of lobbying and protests on Peltier’s behalf by Native American leaders, human rights activists, liberal lawmakers and celebrities who maintain he was wrongfully convicted.
Amnesty International has long considered Peltier a political prisoner.
Advocates for his release have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, actor and director Robert Redford and musicians Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte and Jackson Browne.

https://apnews.com/article/leonard-peltier-biden-pardons-eba525b713f2ec739b84aa4426366775

Wow, diving into #Leonard #Nimoy ’s discography seems very … promising :D

https://www.discogs.com/artist/278871-Leonard-Nimoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuQbus0xfhk

#LeonardNimoy #StarTrek

On December 5, right-wing culture warriors instructed lawmakers attending the
American Legislative Exchange Council’s ( #ALEC )
"States and Nation Policy Summit"
in Washington, D.C.,
on the steps their states can take to upend policies and practices
designed to help address the unfolding climate emergency and diversify workforces.

CRC Advisors Senior Vice President 💥#Mike #Thompson 💥led the workshop
“Battles Won, War Continues:
The Left, ESG and State Policy,”
according to materials obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

In 2020, #Greg #Mueller and #Leonard #Leo, who played an integral role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges,
founded CRC Advisors
— the group Thompson represents
— to “funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.”

Although not as well known as Leo,
Thompson, a member of ALEC’s private sector advisory board,
is an important Christian Right operative
who plays multiple leadership roles in campaigns and communications.

Thompson’s public relations skills were on full display in his remarks
demonizing the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ),
“a global coalition of leading financial institutions committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the economy”
in order to preserve the planet from further destruction.

Thompson argued that large asset managers and banks that participate in GFANZ
— including BlackRock, State Street, Wells Fargo, City Bank, Morgan Stanley, Chase, and Bank of America
— are breaking antitrust law by utilizing sustainable investment strategies.

Thompson provided an example of a lawsuit against BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard
filed last month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and 10 other Republican attorneys general
— all active members of the fossil-fuel backed "Republican Attorneys General Association" ( #RAGA )
— alleging that the three companies violated antitrust law in colluding to raise electricity prices through their investments.

“The states have filed an antitrust lawsuit and they detail in it all of the evidence where those three companies were colluding to keep coal in the ground and from coming to market,
thus, driving up the price and violating antitrust law,”
Thompson told workshop participants.

The PR professional neglected to mention that CRC Advisors is a paid consultant of RAGA
or that his boss Leo’s "Concord Fund" has funneled $3.5 million to the pay-to-play group this year
and $20.3 million since the organization was founded in 2014, according to CMD’s analysis of its tax filings.

#Sal #Nuzzo, the first workshop presenter, is executive director of
"Consumers Defense",
the sister organization of Consumers’ Research,
which is a vice-chairman sponsor of ALEC’s summit and a driver of the right-wing’s manufactured crisis around “woke” capitalism.

Nuzzo argued that reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 through renewable energy production would force Americans to cede
“two-thirds of [the] U.S. electricity generation supply chain to the Communist Party of China.”

He didn’t cite a source for this claim, nor does the group’s website provide any research substantiating it.

Nuzzo also attempted to raise the alarm with lawmakers from states that depend on agriculture
by claiming that the Left has “shifted their attacks and tactics into the agriculture space”
in response to anti-ESG legislation passed over the last three legislative cycles
and has moved to prevent farmers from getting access to loans.

“The [Left’s] coordinated attacks on agriculture are occurring at all levels.
They’re at the producer level.
They’re at the distributor level.
They’re at the consumption and sales level,”
Nuzzo claimed.

“If farming interests cannot get financing, [farmers] cannot operate.”

#Paul #Watkins, founder of "Fusion Law" and both a senior legal fellow at "Consumers’ Research"
and a special counsel with "Heritage Action", made a number of claims in his presentation
based on his belief that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are discriminatory,
and therefore illegal.

As a member of ALEC’s "Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force", he is involved in drafting and voting on most of the group’s pro-fossil fuel policies alongside lawmakers and polluting industry lobbyists.
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2024/12/07/top-leonard-leo-lieutenant-leads-alec-bootcamp-against-woke-capitalism

For decades, as a leading figure in the Federalist Society and other conservative legal groups,
#Leonard #Leo identified and promoted the careers of lawyers and law clerks who shared his regressive views of the constitution.
He supported the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
Now, having done so much to influence American jurisprudence, Leo has set his sights on reshaping American culture.
His plans involve the #Teneo #Network, which describes itself as a "talent pipeline" for the conservative movement,
with ambitions to influence Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other cultural power centers that he and fellow conservatives see as dominated by liberals.

The proposed technique is similar to Leo's network of judicial nominees:
raising money from conservative donors to help identify, connect and promote the careers of like-minded people.

In the language of Teneo's one-page website, the group exists "to Recruit, Connect, and Deploy talented conservatives who lead opinion and shape the industries that shape society"
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/24/nx-s1-5199049/federalist-society-conservative-supreme-court

Inskeep: Do you see this as a multi-decade project, rather like the project for the judiciary has been?

Leo: Well, I think these kinds of changes do take time, although I have to say I am impressed by how quickly the Teneo Network has been able to build pipelines of talent in these places.

And I am also very impressed with how quickly you're seeing efforts, for example, in the journalism and entertainment spaces, the standing up of new production studios and news platforms.

Very impressed with the speed with which the debate about ESG [environmental, social and governance] has kind of flipped and changed.

Electoral reform was on the ballot in several states this election.
-- Why did these measures fail?

Americans in several states rejected ballot initiatives to curb extreme partisan gerrymandering and implement open primaries and ranked-choice voting.

Ohio voters decisively rejected a ballot measure that would have stripped lawmakers of their ability to draw electoral districts and given it to a 15-person bipartisan commission of ordinary citizens.

The vote came after Republicans, who control the legislature and redistricting process, ignored the state supreme court seven times to draw districts that heavily favored Republicans.

Voters in seven states – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota – all rejected ballot measures that would have done away with party primaries and replaced them with a non-partisan primary in which the top vote-getters would advance to the general election.
Several of the measures would have implemented ranked-choice voting for the general election.

The defeats were somewhat surprising.
Ballot initiatives to curb partisan gerrymandering and implement electoral reforms have been broadly successful in recent years. Bipartisan momentum around them has built, especially after Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But the failures this year show that momentum may be stalling.
Opposition to ranked-choice voting has grown more organized, led by a network linked to #Leonard #Leo, the influential conservative who has wielded enormous influence in shaping the US supreme court.

“In retrospect, it looks like it was always going to be a tough year for these pro-democracy ballot measures,” said Deb Otis,
the director of #FairVote,
a non-profit that supports ranked-choice voting.
“The presidential election was looming heavily over voters and with a large number of ballot measures in some of these states. I think maybe voters defaulted to a no position on new concepts.
“I also think the ranked-choice measures were harmed by an increasingly well-organized national opposition,” she added.
“This opposition is driven by funders and organizations that have sown uncertainty in our elections for years. These are the same forces behind [the] ‘stop the steal’ [movement] and election denialism

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/15/electoral-reform-ballot-measures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Leonard Leo, an influential conservative lawyer who advised Donald Trump during his first term forcefully pushed back Friday on talk that one or more conservative Supreme Court justices might retire after Trump again takes office in January.

Leo, who helped the president-elect select three Supreme Court picks during his first term, said in a statement that discussions of Justices #Clarence #Thomas, 76, or #Samuel A. #Alito Jr., 74, stepping down are unseemly.

The comment drew a rebuke from #Mike #Davis, a Trump aide who is advising him on potential judicial picks this time around,
while #Leonard #Leo appears to be keeping his distance.

“No one other than Justices Thomas and Alito knows when or if they will retire, and talking about them like meat that has reached its expiration date is unwise, uninformed, and, frankly, just crass,” Leo said in the statement.

“Justices Thomas and Alito have given their lives to our country and our Constitution, and should be treated with more dignity and respect than they are getting from some pundits.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/08/trump-supreme-court-leonard-leo-mike-davis/

The Maga legal networks that could 💥topple Planned Parenthood 💥and gut women’s healthcare:

In the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency,
a young lawyer with crisply shorn blond hair approached the podium at a gathering for Texas members of the Federalist Society,
a conservative legal group that wields immense power in the US judicial system.

As vice-president of the group’s Fort Worth chapter, #Matthew #Kacsmaryk had the honor of presenting the first speaker.

“We are blessed to have Judge #Edith #Jones,” Kacsmaryk announced.

Jones, a longtime judge on the US fifth circuit court of appeals,
stepped on stage to introduce the evening’s guest, her friend,
the supreme court justice #Clarence #Thomas.
In her introduction, Jones also hailed the four new conservative judges Trump had appointed to join her on the appeals court.

“They’ve raised the bar for the fifth circuit since I got on,” she said. “And that’s thanks to the #Federalist #Society, to Leonard.”

#Leonard #Leo needed no last name in his introduction to this crowd
as he took his seat in a black leather chair across from Thomas.

The justice was the featured speaker
but Leo may have been the most important person in the American legal system in that room
– a conservative activist who had built the Federalist Society into a political powerhouse
and helped Trump create the supreme court majority that,
in 2022, erased federal protections for abortion.

His influence continues to be on display now in one of the most consequential cases moving through the American legal system
– one that seeks to strike another blow to abortion rights
💥and could possibly bankrupt Planned Parenthood,
one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare for women.

It’s a lawsuit that has been filed by an anti-abortion activist tied to Leo and heard by judges
– from the lower courts to the fifth circuit appeals court
– who are also linked to Leo

Three of the people on the stage at the Federalist Society event in Fort Worth in 2018
– Kacsmaryk, Jones and Leo
– have all played key roles in the case.

Though the stakes in this case couldn’t be higher for one of the nation’s oldest healthcare providers,
it is about more than abortion or healthcare.

The lawsuit is a parable about Leo’s power amid a presidential election season
whose outcome will probably determine to what extent Leo will continue to reshape the makeup and ideology of the nation’s courts.

The case was filed in February 2021 by an anti-abortion activist
who had conducted what he described as an
“extensive undercover investigation” of the organization.

He accuses Planned Parenthood of fraud
– claiming that it owes $1.8bn in fines, fees and reimbursements to the Medicaid program.

It’s an amount that could force the 108-year-old nonprofit healthcare provider to shutter clinics across the country.

The lawsuit is titled
"USA v Planned Parenthood"
because it was filed under a federal whistleblower law
that allows citizens to sue on behalf of the US government
over allegations that federal programs have been defrauded.

It is the latest in a series of legal actions that started in 2015
after Texas’s health officials used footage from the activist’s hidden-camera recordings as a basis to expel Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program.

The activist and his allies claimed the videos showed Planned Parenthood was illegally selling fetal tissue and endangering pregnant people’s health.

Planned Parenthood repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

Investigations in multiple states triggered by the video resulted in no disciplinary action against the healthcare provider.

The US government
– the source of 90% of the Medicaid funds paid to Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas
– disputes that Planned Parenthood owes the federal government money.

Federal officials say in a court filing that they found no evidence that Planned Parenthood had improperly billed for its services
and that they found no reason Planned Parenthood should have been removed from Medicaid.

Experts in healthcare law expected the case to be dismissed quickly.

Yet none of these facts are as important to understanding the significance of this case as knowing where it was filed:
in the federal courthouse in Amarillo, Texas
– home to zero Planned Parenthood clinics.

This wasn’t an accident.

The US district court in Amarillo is under the purview of the US fifth circuit court of appeals,
making it likely that any upward appeals in Planned Parenthood’s case would be heard in the hard-right appeals court,
including by judges appointed by Trump or other conservative stalwarts like Jones.

And by the time the Planned Parenthood case was filed, Kacsmaryk
– that young attorney on stage making introductions at the Federalist Society event in Texas
– had been serving as the federal district court judge for Amarillo for nearly two years.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/22/maga-courts-planned-parenthood-case?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other