A Jury May Have Sentenced a Man to Death Because He's Gay. And the Justices Don't Care
Saturday, 23 June 2018 13:23
Tabacco Mar writes: "On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not stop South Dakota from killing a man who may have been sentenced to death because he is gay."
An execution chamber. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
A Jury May Have Sentenced a Man to Death Because He's Gay. And the Justices Don't Care
By Ria Tabacco Mar, The New York Times
23 June 18
n Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not stop South Dakota from killing a man who may have been sentenced to death because he is gay.
Some of the jurors who imposed the death penalty on Charles Rhines, who was convicted of murder, have said they thought the alternative — a life sentence served in a men’s prison — was something he would enjoy as a gay man.
During deliberations, the jury had often discussed the fact that Mr. Rhines was gay and there was “a lot of disgust” about it, one juror recalled in an interview, according to the court petition. Another said that jurors knew he was gay and “thought that he shouldn’t be able to spend his life with men in prison.” A third recounted hearing that if the jury did not sentence Mr. Rhines to death, “if he’s gay, we’d be sending him where he wants to go.”
FOCUS: This Nation Is Beginning to Realize the Full Extent of What It Did to Itself in November 2016
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Saturday, 23 June 2018 11:19
Pierce writes: “Optimism may be illusory, but it’s all we have at this point, so, when it stirs, anywhere, it’s worthy of nurture and support.”
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
This Nation Is Beginning to Realize the Full Extent of What It Did to Itself in November 2016
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
23 June 18
The country's head is clearing. The spell of the reality show presidency is wearing off.
ptimism may be illusory, but it’s all we have at this point, so, when it stirs, anywhere, it’s worthy of nurture and support. Over the past week, ever since the administration’s crimes against humanity along the southern border were revealed, there became an edge to the political opposition that has not been there through all the marches and the rhetoric that have attended this government since the president was inaugurated. Up until now, all of the #Resistance has contained a barely acknowledged undercurrent of futility. It was not that the opposition was empty. It was that it generally broke like a wave on a seawall when it collided with the immutable fact that the president’s party controlled every lever of political power at the federal level, as well as a great number of them out in the states, too.
The week just passed has changed the calculations. The images from the border, and the White House’s fatheaded trolling of the situation, seems to have shaken up everyone in Washington to the point at which alliances are more fluid than they have been since January of 2017. There seems little doubt that the Republicans in the House of Representatives are riven with ideological chaos, struck numb by the basic conundrum of modern conservatism: When your whole political identity is defined by the proposition that government is not the solution, but, rather, the problem, you don’t know how to operate it when fortune and gerrymandering hand you the wheel.
You can fake it pretty convincingly, doing the bidding of your donor class and knuckling the powerless and making a nice living for yourself, as long as events pursue a fairly predictable course for which there are familiar precedents in your experience. You can even see the setbacks coming from around the corner. Even your defeats are predictable and, thus, explainable—or, at least, spinnable. Can’t repeal Obamacare? RINOs like John McCain!
The problem arises when something unpredictable happens, and the government you control has to be fast on its feet, and you don’t know how that really works. A hurricane and a flood drowns New Orleans, and the luxury horse-show official you put in charge of the country’s emergency management system—because who cares, right?—finds that he’s really not up to the job. Or, suddenly, you find that, no matter how hot the emotions run at your rallies or how brightly your favorite TV network polishes your apple, or how hard you pitch the snake oil that got you elected, the country will not stand for being complicit in the kidnapping and caging of children. The pictures begin to pile up. The mirror in which the country prefers to see itself cracks into a million sharp shards that begin to cut your political life away.
You can feel the difference in the air. The members of the governing party, uneasy about the prospects for this year’s midterms anyway, are fairly trembling at the moment, seeing in their mind’s eyes a hundred 30-second spots of weeping toddlers behind chain-link walls. The president has gone completely incoherent, standing firm until he doesn’t, looking for help in the Congress that he’ll never get, and reversing himself so swiftly on his one signature issue that he’s probably screwed himself up to the ankles in the floor of the Oval Office. By Friday afternoon, he was back on the electric Twitter machine, yapping about the Democrats and “their phony stories of sadness and grief.” And a hundred Republican candidates dive back behind the couch.
The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.
The migrant crisis is going to go down through history as one of the most destructive series of own-goals in the history of American politics. The establishment of the “zero-tolerance” policy made the child-nabbing inevitable. The president’s own rhetoric—indeed, the raison d’etre of his entire campaign—trapped him into at first defending the indefensible and then abandoning what was perhaps the only consistent policy idea he ever had—outside of enriching himself and his family, that is. Then the cameras began to roll, and the nation’s gorge began to rise, and the president couldn’t stand the pressure that was mounting around him. Of course, because he knows nothing about anything, including how to actually be president, he bungled even his own abject surrender. He’s spent the days since signing his executive order railing against what he felt compelled to do and arguing against himself and losing anyway.
That’s the optimism, and it may, in fact, be illusory, but the power balance in our politics seemed to shift this week. Terrible policies are still coming from the various agencies. Scott Pruitt remains a grifter of nearly inhuman proportions, and a vandal besides. Neil Gorsuch continues to prove himself to be the reliable conservative hack for whom the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat. But the crisis at the border is a leg-hold trap for all of them. There’s no way for them to keep faith with themselves and get out from under the humanitarian disaster they concocted. One day, maybe, brave Guatemalan mothers and their very brave children may be said to have saved the American Republic from slow-motion and giddy suicide. Some even may be our fellow citizens by then, and we should remember to thank them.
"The administration's current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded," the senator wrote.
Those comments bring to mind a commercial John McCain made eight years ago. At the time, he was facing a tough primary challenge from Tea Party Republican J.D. Hayworth.
In the ad, McCain is seen walking along Arizona's southern border with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, in the shadow of an enormous fence. McCain starts tsk-tsking about the wave of crime pouring into his state.
"Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder?" McCain asks.
"We're outmanned," the sheriff says. "Of all the illegals in America, more than half come through Arizona."
McCain asks if they have "the right plan." The sheriff says, "You bring troops, state, county and local law enforcement together."
"And complete the danged fence!" says McCain.
Sound familiar? "Complete the danged fence" even had a website to go along with it for a while, CompleteTheDangedFence.com. The Trump-era version is just a hashtag, but still.
The heated controversy over Trump's awful family separation policy has been like one of those bug-zapping lights people stick next to pools – it's attracted virtually every species of hypocrite in American public life.
The most conspicuous and ridiculous of these are the hand-over-heart never-Trump Republicans who – after decades of pushing vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric themselves – are now coming out of the woodwork to talk about how mistreatment of the undocumented is contrary to "our principles and values."
It's not easy to pick which wall-humping Republican's hug-an-immigrant statement is the worst, but one from Ted Cruz stands out. The proud champion of the basketball "ring"said:
"All of us who are seeing images of these children being pulled away from moms and dads in tears are horrified. This has to stop … We should keep children with their parents. Kids need their moms. They need their dads."
Ted Cruz was the guy who just two years ago ran for president with the plan of wiping the uninspiring Republican primary field of Jebs and Lindseys and Marcos by being the meanest of the lot on immigration.
He might have succeeded, if it hadn't been for that meddling secret "New York values" liberal, Trump. Cruz's fury at having to deal with someone running to the right of him on immigration was one of the most obvious black-comedy subplots in that disgusting clown car of a primary race.
When Trump started to look like a real winner in late 2015, Cruz – in a move he himself was probably shocked he had to make – recalibrated his already nasty immigration stance to be more hardcore. He called for a tripling of border agents and "a wall that works."
He even brought immigrant children into the debate, echoing Trump by saying it was "well past time to end birthright citizenship." And after the primaries, when the Trump camp flirted with "softening" its immigration stance, Cruz's people ripped Trump as a phony. If we're getting more aggressive immigration policy now, it could easily be because the likes of Cruz have made no secret of wanting to take back Trump's base by reclaiming the meanest-of-all mantle on immigration.
The controversy over Trump's policy illustrates another ugly subtext to immigration as a political issue. The reality is that many – if not most – Americans have long been comfortable with all sorts of cruelties, so long as they don't have to look at them.
Trump's policies are extreme, but the government separating children from parents is not a new thing: Not on the border, not in immigrant communities and not in poor neighborhoods – where women on public assistance live in regular dread of state inspectors taking their kids away over picayune welfare violations or complaints from neighbors.
It's also true abroad, where voters have spent over a decade now tacitly signing off on a whole kit-bag of evil (but mostly invisible) War on Terror policies, many of which involve breaking up families without any kind of due process. If an Afghan family is separated in the forest and nobody sees it, did it really happen?
That's why it was more than a little nauseating when former CIA chief Michael Hayden posted a picture of Auschwitz amid this recent scandal, writing, "Other governments have separated mothers and children."
You might remember Hayden as one of the first people to say out loud that indefinite detention of suspects in the War on Terror was not feasible. Better alternatives existed, he said.
"We have made it so politically dangerous and so legally difficult that we don't capture anyone anymore," Hayden said in 2012, about detention. "We take another option, we kill them. Now. I don't morally oppose that."
Ladies and gentlemen, your Twitter human rights champion, 2018.
Trump's policies on the border were and are monstrous. But those photos of children in captivity, which rightfully have been nearly as damaging to America's reputation as the Abu Ghraib debacle, didn't appear out of nowhere.
Those scenes are the latest in a long series of developments, under which politicians like McCain and Cruz and Dick Cheney, along with officials like Hayden, have gradually normalized the idea of human rights abuses as solutions to political problems. Now they're all hiding behind someone else's scandal. America's manufacturing sector may be failing, but we still produce plenty of hypocrites.
RSN | Life and Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to The Donald
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Saturday, 23 June 2018 08:59
Wasserman writes: "I now host two radio shows, co-wrote the Grammy-winning Solartopia with Pete Seeger, helped coin 'No Nukes,' spoke at Woodstock 2, co-/wrote twenty books and many viral screeds. I've joyously embraced Civil Rights, social justice, radical journalism, organic farming, No Nukes, Solartopia, election protection, psychedelic exploration, and a whole new way of thinking."
The crowds at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. (photo: AP)
Life and Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to The Donald
IFE & DEATH SPIRAL is the first total bottom-up re-write of US history since Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US (published in 1980: 2 million sold).
Howard graciously introduced my first History of the US in 1972 (30,000 sold).
I now host two radio shows, co-wrote the Grammy-winning Solartopia with Pete Seeger, helped coin “No Nukes,” spoke at Woodstock 2, co-/wrote twenty books and many viral screeds. I’ve joyously embraced civil rights, social justice, radical journalism, organic farming, No Nukes, Solartopia, election protection, psychedelic exploration, and a whole new way of thinking.
SPIRAL is a factual, proudly opinionated 300-page easily understood howl about our organic life story, from the Indigenous to the immediate, for popular/activist/academic readers.
It totally shreds the standard approach to our national story.
Unlike any mainstream history, it:
Fully credits Indigenous America for our feminist DNA, Revolution, Constitution, Bill of Rights
Links our embryonic conception to the rape of our Indigenous matriarchy by Puritan patriarchs
Portrays our evolution as the back/forth, yin/yang war between our masculine/feminine DNA
Organizes our history through 1992 into six shortening cycles, which form a spiral
Makes those natural rhythms of our historic interplay easy to understand and remember
In synch with our matriarchal/Indigenous DNA, the cycles rhyme with the seasons of the year.
In synch with our patriarchal/Puritan DNA, the spiral rises up a linear axis to the Trumpocalypse.
SPIRAL grows from conception (1688), birth (1776), “Manifest Adolescence” (1828-1896), “Bully Manhood” (1896-1932), “Peak Adulthood” (1932-1960), “Mid-life Crisis” (1960-1976) and “Imperial Senility” (1976-1992) to the brain-dead imperial coma of our deceased democracy.
This book is meant to righteously and clearly rewrite how our national story is seen, taught, and through the enduring magic of citizen activism … made whole.
For SOLARTOPIA! ~ Sluggo
___________
If you are interested in this book, contact Sluggo Wasserman at www.solartopia.org.
Reich writes: "Trump's most lasting legacy might be his impact on the federal court system. It must be stopped."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
The Trump Takeover of the Courts
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
22 June 18
rump’s most lasting legacy might be his impact on the federal court system. It must be stopped.
Quite apart from the Supreme Court, Trump is already having a dramatic effect on the lower federal courts.
Even though much of his legislative agenda has stalled in Congress, Trump is nominating and getting Senate confirmation of judges to the federal bench much faster than previous presidents.
Many of Trump’s picks for these lifetime positions are extremists with little judicial experience. For example, Thomas Farr, his nominee for a North Carolina judgeship has ties to a group that has promoted white supremacist policies and eugenics.
Other Trump picks have openly spread conspiracy theories, defended lethal injection, and one even called a sitting Supreme Court justice a “prostitute.”
Fortunately, not all of them have been confirmed. But by the end of his first term Trump could end up filling over 20 percent of the judges in the federal courts.
And even if he’s removed from office, these judges will be around long after he’s gone. Trump has identified young candidates who could serve for decades.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is greasing the wheels in the Senate to speed up the confirmation process.
Traditionally either senator from a judicial nominee’s home-state was allowed to block a nomination. But McConnell has done away with this rule, even though he did everything he possibly could to block President Obama’s nominees, including his pick for the Supreme Court.
This takeover of the federal bench is another assault on our democracy. The power of the courts is being placed in the hands of people who share Trump’s ideology.
That’s why we need to keep up the pressure, and it’s another reason why we need to win back the Senate.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
n Monday, the Supreme Court 
ohn McCain, in Arizona receiving treatment for brain cancer, 
IFE & DEATH SPIRAL is the first total bottom-up re-write of US history since Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US (published in 1980: 2 million sold).
rump’s most lasting legacy might be his impact on the federal court system. It must be stopped.
