Jeff Sessions Still a Motherfucking Liar

Charlie Pierce:

Call me an elitist snob if you like, but whenever I hear a Southerner talking about "mah honah," I reach for William Tecumseh Sherman's phone number.

Cops Who Murder Walk; Bitches Who Laugh at Trumpies Get Prison Time

No, that is not an exaggeration. For the moment, her appeal is likely to be heard by Obama-appointed judges who understand the First Amendment.  But every day, those judges are being replaced by trumpies who think Bull Connor was a bleeding-heart liberal.

Scott Lemiuex at LGM:

…she has been convicted on two counts. Tina Nguyen [H/T Downpuppy] adds valuable context:

The Justice Department will not press federal charges against two white Baton Rouge police officers involved in last year’s shooting death of a black man, Alton Sterling, multiple media outlets reported Tuesday, bringing renewed attention to how Attorney General Jeff Sessions, already controversial, is choosing to deal with allegations of police bias and racially motivated shootings. The decision is not entirely surprising: federal civil rights charges in such cases are rare, due to the high burden of proof, and even the Obama-era D.O.J. repeatedly declined to charge police officers involved in high-profile deaths. Still, it is stunning to see what cases Donald Trump’s attorney general has decided to prosecute.

On Wednesday, a jury convicted a 61-year-old female activist who had laughed during Sessions’s January confirmation hearing in the Senate. Desiree Fairooz, a longtime protester affiliated with the anti-war group Code Pink, had been escorted out of the room for laughing in response to Senator Richard Shelby’s assertion that Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” history of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (Sessions had, in fact, been denied a federal judgeship in 1986 because of a history of racially charged remarks, and Shelby himself had once run a campaign ad suggesting that Sessions was a Klan sympathizer.) Fairooz, along with two other protesters, faces up to a year in prison.

Darker Than a Paper Bag? Top Justice Official Thinks You're "Filth"

I honestly don't know why any repug these days is shying away from just screaming "NIGGER!" non-stop.

Charlie Pierce:

We're going to have to make a semi-regular daily feature on the doings of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, presently the Attorney General and the only man in America who thinks Birth of a Nation was a documentary. On Tuesday, he visited the border and, by way of encouraging the law-enforcement types gathered there, according to Tiger Beat On The Potomac, these were his prepared remarks:

"Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings," he said. "It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth."

Nobody I know is in favor of depravity and violence—at least outside the studios of Fox News, anyway—nor is anyone I know in favor of machete attacks and/or beheadings, although some of our staunch allies elsewhere are rather high on the latter. But when you've got the attorney general of the United States planning to refer to other human beings, no matter how criminal they are, as "filth," you've got the Department of Justice descending into the status of a Breitbart comment thread, and that is never good for anyone. When it came time for the speech, Sessions ultimately did not say "filth" out loud, but the Department of Justice doubled down on the word in a statement.

SNIP

What matters to Sessions is putting lots of "brown people" in cells. He doesn't care how many or where. Maybe it's through his idiotic revival of the "war" on drugs. Maybe it's through these E-Z-Bake cook'em-and-eat'em immigration courts he's establishing at the border. Doesn't matter. To Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, America means locking up "brown people." Period.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal points out that Sessions has escalated the racist rhetoric from "illegal immigrants" to "criminal aliens" and writes:

What Sessions doesn’t want the American public to know is that the link between undocumented immigrants and violent crime is a myth. His lies are meant to fear-monger and provide cover for his racist policies.

SNIP

It would be disgraceful coming from any American — much less the Attorney General. Personally, I take this kind of thing as seriously as Sessions lying to Congress during his confirmation hearing. In a world that acknowledged equal justice for all, he would be out of a job for this speech alone.

The New War on Drugs is the Old Terror: Legal Lynching

Jeff Sessions doesn't give a flying fuck how many drugs people do; all he cares about is how the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some Classes of) Drugs (tm LGM) gives him an excuse to throw millions of ni**ers in prison for life. Or just mow them down in the streets. The latter saves money, while the former puts money in the pockets of his private prison corporate friends.

The world he intends to re-create is the one depicted in the movie Rosewood: successful blacks lynched and burned out by drunk, stupid, violent whites.

Charlie Pierce:

It is now conventional wisdom that one of the worst mistakes the country ever made was launching its idiotic, wasteful "war"on drugs. In the three decades in which this "war" has been waged, we have lost two generations of African-Americans to the prison system, shaved the Bill of Rights down to a nub, tied the hands of the judiciary, and, finally, made not an appreciable dent in the problem of drug use and drug addiction. We have blessed ourselves with private prisons and militarized police forces, so there is that.

Prior to the ascension of President* Trump, there was a strong, evolving, and bipartisan consensus that it was time to call a truce on the "war" we were making on our own citizens. The country was getting sensible about marijuana and mandatory minimum sentences at the same time; conservatives abandoned simplistic law 'n order coding and hopped on the bandwagon of criminal justice reform; in many cases, they took the wheel on it. And, at least rhetorically, the response to the opioid crisis was more reasoned and measured than the response to the crisis of crack cocaine was—and the reasons for that are worth exploring. But nobody wants to, least of all JeffBo. Over the weekend, we learned that this brief, fragile truce had ended.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I’d like to remind you of that day when Trump’s OMB Director Mike Mulvaney told us that the reason this administration’s budget cut funding to programs like Meals on Wheels and after-school initiatives for kids was because they could no longer defend spending tax dollars on programs that don’t work.

Let’s put aside the fact that feeding seniors and children is a self-defined success: hungry people are no longer hungry. It’s really that simple.

My reaction to Mulvaney was that if we’re going to defund programs that don’t work, then the best place to start is by ending the so-called “war on drugs.”

But of course if your goal is to kill and imprison as many ni**ers as possible, then the failed War on Drugs is a brilliant success.

Apparently AG Sessions and his top lieutenant Steven Cook think that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of the drug problem, even though both science and recent history tell us that is nonsense. It is worth asking why this administration would cling to one failed federal initiative while proposing to eliminate so many others. Ava DuVernay answered that question with a documentary titled simply: “13th.”

Whether it is Sessions’ move to pull away from police reform, his history of opposition to voting rights, or his plans to ramp up the war on drugs, there is one key element that binds his approach on all of these issues: racism. While we’re in the business of breaking taboos, let’s get rid of the one that keeps us from naming exactly what’s going on here.

What's going on here is what's been going on in this country for 400 years. Vicious, cowardly whites terrified of having to compete on a level field enslaving and killing with impunity.