Speaking of the US’s love affair with long prison sentences – what should the penalty be for stealing hedge clippers?

A black man in Louisiana will continue to serve a life sentence in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers after the state supreme court denied a request to review his sentence.

Fair Wayne Bryant was convicted in 1997 of attempted simple burglary.

So he’s already been locked up for 23 years for trying to steal hedge clippers.

This really is a terrible country in a lot of ways.

The five justices who rejected his appeal – all white men – did not explain the reasoning for their decision, which was first reported by the Lens, a non-profit news site

Life in prison for vandalism?

Some Black Lives Matter protesters in Salt Lake City could face up to life in prison if they are convicted of splashing red paint and smashing windows during a protest.

…

The felony criminal mischief charges are more serious because they carry a gang enhancement. Prosecutors said on Wednesday that was justified because the protesters worked together to cause thousands of dollars in damage, but watchdogs called the use of the 1990s-era law troubling, especially in the context of criminal justice reform and minority communities.

A gang enhancement for violent crimes might make sense; for vandalism it makes no kind of sense.

I looked for photos of the damage – it’s a big mess of … Read the rest

Deutsche Bank has handed over the records.

New York prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s finances previously issued a subpoena to Deutsche Bank, one of the foremost lenders to the president’s business, as part of their inquiry – and the bank complied, according to the New York Times.

The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, is seeking eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted the prosecutor and his team to request the records beyond payoffs to women to silence them about alleged affairs with Trump in the past.

Patience. He’ll tell us when Donnie is dragged away screaming.

Lawyers for Vance told a judge in New York on

Dictionary.com’s “definition” of “TERF” is not a definition at all but a misogynist jeremiad crossed with a political rant.

TERF is used to describe cisgender women who self-identify as feminist but who are opposed to including transgender women in spaces they reserve for people who were assigned female at birth.

As if real dictionaries refer to “cisgender” women as opposed to women, and as if they go on to talk about “people who were assigned female at birth” when they mean women.

This is because they believe trans women are men and since men cannot coexist with their feminist ideologies, they exclude them from their beliefs and support.

That’s just gibberish. “since men cannot coexist with their feminist ideologies”?? What … Read the rest

You have got to be kidding.

Beware the TERF. https://t.co/n5eHIUJr7B

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) August 6, 2020

Updating to add: they changed the image; when I posted it was this.… Read the rest

Oh no, I’m not anything as tedious and old hat as a woman – I’m special.

The musician and poet formerly named Kate Tempest has changed their name to Kae Tempest, and announced they are non-binary.

Which means…what? Nothing, apart from a new nickname.

In the announcement on Instagram, Tempest said they were changing the pronouns they use, from she and her to they and them. Their new name is pronounced like the letter K.

Wow!

They wrote: I’ve been struggling to accept myself as I am for a long time. I have tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds

Jeffrey Toobin on why Mueller’s approach was such a disaster, starting with the failure to make Trump testify:

Trump was the protagonist of this entire affair. He’s also a pathological liar, and he is someone whose perspective, if you want to call it that, was indispensable to resolving what really went on here, what Trump was thinking, what his intent was in a legal sense. So the failure to have his voice in the Mueller report and in Mueller’s determinations about what to do with the information he gathered left, I thought, a massive hole in the investigation…

The written questions were basically a joke. They were essentially written by the lawyers, and lawyers, doing what lawyers do, answered

Trump says Biden is gonna hurt god. What, bash it over the head? Bite its hand? Stamp on its foot?

https://t.co/rUCQAP8ype

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 6, 2020

[wedge hand] Take away ya gunz, destroy ya seccun amennment, [flap hand] no reelijunn, no anything, [hatchet hand] hurt the bible, hurt god – [hesitation; flap hand] he’s agenst goddd, he’s agenst gunnz, he’s against energy, arr kind of energy, ahhh – I don’t think he’s gunna do too well in Ohio.

Brilliant stuff.… Read the rest

It is what it is.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – On Thursday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19. DeWine took a coronavirus test as part of the standard protocol to greet President Donald Trump on the tarmac at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland.

So, no greetings for him. It is what it is.

WH testing protocols just led Ohio Gov. DeWine to learn he has the coronavirus. He was slated to greet Trump on the tarmac in Ohio today.

Note: These quick tests are designed to keep President Trump safe. But, Trump won’t say when these types of tests will be available for all.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) August 6, 2020

No, such luxuries are … Read the rest

Isabel Wilkerson has a new book out about the caste system in the US. She talked about it on Fresh Air:

TERRY GROSS: When my guest Isabel Wilkerson was writing her book “The Warmth Of Other Suns” about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North looking to escape the lynchings, the cross burnings, the terrorism and the lack of opportunity in the South, she says she realized she wasn’t writing about geography and relocation; she was writing about the American caste system.

Now she’s written a new book called “Caste” that explains why she thinks America can be described as having a caste system and how if we use that expression, it deepens our

Jack Holmes on Trump’s galactic narcissism:

It’s not just that the president knows nothing about anything and cares less. This was an astounding showcase for his malignant narcissism, his inability to process anything except as it directly relates to him. The whole world of observable reality is filtered through how it affects him, and him only. You and everyone you know and love are not relevant. The task of thinking about himself is all-consuming. When Swan pressed him on his decision to hold an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June—the culmination of a prolonged spasm of happy talk on the pandemic—he went immediately to how big the crowd was, and how Fox News got its best

On the Sally Yates hearing:

Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates defended a sensitive Justice Department investigation into onetime Trump aide Michael Flynn on Wednesday, telling lawmakers Flynn was essentially “neutering” American sanctions and undercutting the Obama administration by “making nice” with a foreign adversary after Russia’s unprecedented attack on the 2016 election.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yates said Flynn’s lies to the FBI were “absolutely material to a legitimate investigation” — contradicting the rationale the Justice Department has now offered in seeking to dismiss the case.

Yates, who was a prosecutor for nearly 30 years, said the effort to drop a prosecution against a defendant who twice pleaded guilty was “highly irregular.”

It’s so bizarre having a … Read the rest

There was this tweet.

Imagine being a civil liberties and rights organisation and crapping on some of the most marginalised in society, such as people with disabilities or complex medical conditions, to advance a non-related, regressive political agenda. Meet the @ACLU…. #NotInMyName pic.twitter.com/eUbe5IlDo5

— Intersex Facts (@intersexfacts) August 5, 2020

I wondered if I could find the source, and behold, I could. The first-named author is, of course, Chase Strangio, their star purveyor of fairy tales.

The title is Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked.

Upholding trans athletes’ rights requires rooting out the inaccurate beliefs underlying harmful policies sweeping through state legislatures.

They’re not inaccurate though. The nonsense Strangio talks is inaccurate.

The item in the tweet is … Read the rest

Oh whew, Trump says Obama is completely wrong about racism, the US doesn’t have any and Obama is a dirty rotten scoundrel for saying it does. Obviously Trump would know way more about that than Obama does.

The Republican president, in an interview on Fox News, criticized President Barack Obama’s speech last week, in which the Democrat urged Americans to protect democracy and outlined a list of needed reforms such as making election day a national holiday, expanding early voting and increasing polling sites.

“There is an attack on our democratic freedoms and we should treat it as such,” Obama said in a eulogy for the late U.S. Representative John Lewis, a Black civil rights icon.

…

Trump, who

Uh oh, Don is pissed off again.

.@CNN has no sources on the Task Force. Their “sources” are made up, pure fiction! Jim Acosta is a Fake reporter!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2020

Nah, he’s not. So let’s see what his source told him.

President Donald Trump was still struggling to fully grasp the severity of the coronavirus pandemic during a task force meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a source familiar with the meeting told CNN.

“He still doesn’t get it,” the source said. “He does not get it.”

No, we know. We saw that interview with Jonathan Swan yesterday. We know anyway – he doesn’t get much of anything.

Trump’s meeting with

Benjamin Wittes says this collecting intel on journalists caper is stupid.

… contemplating the Washington Post’s revelation that the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS I&A) issued two intelligence reports about tweets I had written, I can’t help but think that this is what J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses of power might have looked like had Twitter existed in Hoover’s time—and had Hoover been a total idiot.

On the one hand, DHS I&A was preparing intelligence reports on American journalists—on me and on Mike Baker of the New York Times—based on activity indisputably protected by the First Amendment: reporting unclassified information about the conduct of government. That’s toxic stuff. And DHS knows it. No sooner had

Oh hey, look at that, the Trump security people have been investigating journalists.

The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.

“Alarming” is putting it very mildly.

Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for theNew York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents

REPORTER: You called the Beirut explosion an "attack." Are you confident it wasn't an accident?

TRUMP: "Well, it would seem like it."

(This, in case it needs to be pointed out, is totally irresponsible.) pic.twitter.com/7LYYq1dWFr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 4, 2020

Little bit, seeing as how reporting is that it was a warehouse full of explosives rather than an attack, so let’s not go to war.

The thing is…if you take New York out then the US hasn’t done quite so badly.

REPORTER: When you look at the percentage of the population that has died from Covid, only 3 countries are worse than the US. How do you explain that?

TRUMP: "Well, I think actually the numbers are lower

Daniel Dale lists some of Trump’s lies in the Axios interview – some because they’re still reviewing it at CNN and there could be more, because, you know, Trump.

Many of Trump’s interviewers are right-wing sycophants who have no interest in challenging him. But Trump has defeated even his other interviewers by employing a strategy we can call the hit-and-run — saying dishonest stuff, then darting ahead to other dishonest stuff before the interviewer reacts.

Aka not letting other people get a word in. I just watched a 15 minute clip of the Swan interview, coronavirus section, and it’s maybe Trump’s one actual talent – the ability to keep the flow going no matter what nonsense he has to talk. … Read the rest

He’s bumpity-bumping down the stairs.

Donald Trump stumbled through his second damaging interview in as many weeks, floundering in a conversation with the news website Axios over key issues he is tasked with responding to as president.

…

In a lengthy discussion about the US’s poor response to coronavirus, Trump described the pandemic as “under control”.

Swan responded: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”

“They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”

Ohhhhhhhhhh I see, “under control” means “as under control as we can get it, which is zero, … Read the rest