Friday, February 14th, 2020
BECCA ANDREWS, - Mother Jones
Stephan: The deep south states of the old Confederacy controlled by racist Trumplicans by every social outcome measure are falling further and further behind the Democratically controlled Blue states. More and more Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana look like third world countries with Neo-feudalist plantation economies; a few affluent White people in control, masses of Black and Brown peasants in or near poverty, and a tiny middle class, the only demographic made up of all races. Nowhere is this clearer than in the abortion fight. Here is the sad truth.
Kate at Home Credit: Mother Jones
“I would drink bleach right now.”
Kate shakes her head, and her long, sun-streaked brown hair, piled high in a messy bun, shivers. “That’s so bad, and I don’t mean it,” she quickly adds.
She’s exhausted; shadowy crescents frame her bright eyes. Just a few weeks ago, she graduated from the University of Mississippi. “My one goal, as pathetic as it sounds, was do not walk across that stage pregnant,” she says. “Everything I worked for…I’m going to remember graduating and being pregnant.” Kate has been trying to get an abortion since March. It’s a Friday evening at the end of May, and she was just turned away from an Arkansas clinic, about 200 miles from home.
In the morning, she’ll have to go back home to Oxford, Mississippi, where she’ll wait yet another week, and return to the clinic in Little Rock for the third and hopefully final time.
Her day began at 3 a.m., with a text from Laurie Bertram Roberts. Roberts helms the
No Comments
Friday, February 14th, 2020
Stephan: The media, in my opinion, has been completely played and won't or can't recognize what has happened in the current DOJ crisis. Almost all media reporters and commentators are playing the Barr interview as his complaining about how criminal Trump's tweets "make it impossible for me to do my job," as if he were complaining about unwarranted intrusion.
Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell are the only media figures who sees what I see and who seems to have figured out what this story is really about. We are watching our legal system be perverted and destroyed by Trump, Barr, Moscow Mitch, and the Trumplicans in the senate. It is overt, explicit and they are unashamed.
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Thursday urged her viewers not to believe the administration’s “official lie” on Roger Stone’s sentencing that Attorney General Bill Barr unveiled during an interview with ABC News.
“Over the last few days, as this crisis has erupted within the Justice Department and more broadly in a country that is now acutely concerned about the rule of law, but there’s one very specific piece of this that I’m not sure anybody has reported on yet, which is kind of a beacon in a dark night here in terms of demonstrating what happened and demonstrating what the official lie is going to be as they try to make us swallow this,” Maddow noted.
The host described how multiple DOJ sources said Barr’s interference in Stone’s sentencing was “unprecedented.”
Yet Barr told ABC News that his intervention was “totally normal,” in the words of Maddow, and Trump’s tweet “totally coincidental.”
Maddow described that defense as the “official line” from the administration — which she urged voters to ignore.
“Here, plainly, among us citizens, let us not abandon our powers of reasoning and common sense,” Maddow suggested. “I mean, here, plainly, despite the official lie that was rolled out today to try to […]
No Comments
Friday, February 14th, 2020
Michael Brice-Saddler , General Assignment Reporter -
Stephan: Lest you think I am isolated in my views that criminal Trump aided by Barr and the Trumplicans in the senate are dismantling America's legal system, here is what 39 uniquely qualified professionals have to say.
Criminal Trump’s familiar William Barr
Thirty-nine elected prosecutors in a joint statement condemned Attorney General William P. Barr for recent his rhetoric that attacked progressive policies, arguing that his “dangerous and failed” approach to criminal justice disproportionately punished poor people and racial minorities while diverting resources away from more serious crimes.
“Sadly, we are perceived as a threat by some who are wedded to the status quo or, even worse, failed policies of past decades,” the 39 state, county and city prosecutors wrote. “Critics such as Attorney General William P. Barr seek to bring us back to a time when crime was high, success was measured by how harsh the punishment was, and a fear-driven narrative prevailed.”
In their letter, the signatories warned against returning to a “‘tough on crime’ era” that ignored facts and encouraged mass incarceration. Instead, they argued, evidence shows that a data-based approach is not only more effective, but […]
No Comments
Thursday, February 13th, 2020
John R. Platt, - truthout
Stephan: In the United States under criminal Trump we not only are not doing anything to prepare for climate change, we are consciously and intentionally making things worse. Here's what I mean.
President Donald Trump has unveiled his budget proposal for the next federal fiscal year, and it’s predictably harsh for wildlife and the environment — but great for oil, gas and coal.
Of course, the annual presidential budget is more spectacle than anything else. The real budget each year comes from Congress, which may or may not take up the president’s suggestions.
But whether White House budget proposal’s recommendations go any further, it reveals the dark truth about the Trump administration’s priorities, especially as they relate to environmental issues.
Here’s what we see in this year’s budget:
- The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget would be slashed 26.5%, including a 10% reduction in the Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup program, a nearly 50% reduction in research and development, a $376 million take from efforts to improve air quality, and the elimination of 50 programs that the administration perceives as outside the “core” of the EPA’s mission (among them: clean-water grants for disadvantaged communities and the EnergyStar energy-conservation program). It would also reduce EPA staffing to its lowest levels in three decades, further […]
1 Comment
Thursday, February 13th, 2020
Barbara McQuade, Former U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan, Professor the University of Michigan Law School. - New York Magazine
Stephan: A nation of laws... not even close.
Roger Stone
Timothy Shea became the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia last week. On Tuesday, his career ended.
Shea is still technically in office, but his ability to effectively lead the nation’s largest U.S. Attorney’s Office has ceased. That’s because Shea did something unheard of: One day after career prosecutors filed a sentencing memorandum with the court in the Roger Stone case, seeking a sentence that complies with federal guidelines, Shea publicly overruled them by asking the court for a more lenient sentence.
What happened in between? President Donald Trump tweeted his disapproval about the treatment of his friend, calling the initial sentencing recommendation “a horrible and very unfair situation” and stating, “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”
Bowing to political pressure from the president violates the duty of prosecutors to bring impartial justice. Even the appearance that a prosecutor’s office has been swayed by political influence harms its effectiveness by eroding public confidence in its independence. A Department […]
1 Comment
