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posted by on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the guilty dept.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that he has directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed U.S. prisons.

[...] In the later years of the Obama administration, a bipartisan consensus emerged on Capitol Hill for sentencing reform legislation, which Sessions opposed and successfully worked to derail.

In a two-page memo to federal prosecutors across the country, Sessions overturned former attorney general Eric H. Holder's sweeping criminal charging policy that instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. In its place, Sessions told his more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to charge defendants with the most serious crimes, carrying the toughest penalties.

More at Washington Post, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Hill

Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:39PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:39PM (#510578)

    The Dems been running on "We're not as bad as those other guys" while those other guys have lurched and lurched further to the right.

    Quick quiz: you know the far-right candidate in France, Marine Le Pen? Where would she sit on the US political spectrum?
    .
    .
    .
    Clue: pro abortion.
    Clue: pro secular state.
    Clue: pro LGBT rights.
    Clue: anti death penalty.
    .
    .
    .
    Any clue yet?
    .
    .
    .
    It's a "radical leftist" politician that fits that bill in the USA.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Marine_Le_Pen [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @07:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @07:10PM (#510680)

    > Clue: pro abortion.

    No more so than the rest of France. Meanwhile her party, the National Front, has a long history of opposing feminism in general and abortion specifically, calling it "anti-french genocide."
    http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/all-hail-marine-le-pen-feminist-champion-modern-france-1493861 [ibtimes.co.uk]

    > Clue: pro secular state.

    Only in as much as it allows her to campaign against excluding non-catholics.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/christian-identity-france/525558/ [theatlantic.com]

    > Clue: pro LGBT rights.

    Except for marriage equality, she's against that and the National Front is homofoe central.
    http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/04/18/anti-gay-marriage-marine-le-pen-could-scrape-to-victory-in-unpredictable-four-way-french-election/ [pinknews.co.uk]

    > Clue: anti death penalty.

    Pretty much the entire western world has outlawed the death penalty.
    And yet Marine her self was calling for it to be re-instated just two years ago:
    http://www.newsweek.com/marine-le-pen-calls-bring-back-death-penalty-after-paris-shooting-297742 [newsweek.com]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:35PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @11:35PM (#510834)

    All of those are on the CIVIL LIBERTIES axis, which is at a right angle to the Left-Right ECONOMIC axis.

    Now, if somebody else is paying for your abortion or churches are getting tax breaks that other businesses don't or you want to calculate in how executing someone is more expensive than imprisoning him for life, THEN we could be impacting the ECONOMIC axis.
    ...but we'd still be in the Liberal region of the political palate which is on the Right Wing (redistributing the wealth of the Capitalists[1]).

    To make it fit on the Left side of the divide, you'd have to explain how the workers collectively owning the means of production figures into the equation.

    [1] Leftists instead make their own money and don't allow (idle) Capitalists to skim off any of that while producing nothing.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday May 17 2017, @06:30AM (1 child)

      by Mykl (1112) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @06:30AM (#510943)

      All of those are on the CIVIL LIBERTIES axis, which is at a right angle to the Left-Right ECONOMIC axis

      And that is the exact problem with today's US politics. If we draw a graph in which economic position is the x axis, and social policy position is in the y axis, our politicians will almost all fit somewhere on the diagonal line drawn from (-x, -y) to (x, y). Socially progressive, economically conservative politicians are almost unheard of, just as socially conservative, economically progressive politicians are. It's become almost impossible to separate the two axes these days.

      As noted, there is also a dramatic skew to the right/conservative in the US compared to pretty much every other developed nation. Right wing parties pretty much everywhere else are more left-wing than the Democrats.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @07:50PM (#511331)

        No need to do that.
        These guys have been doing it for years.
        2008 [politicalcompass.org]
        (The Green Party's Cynthia McKinney is omitted.)
        As you say, no Blue/Red politician can be considered Progressive; they're all above the horizontal center line.
        ...and no politician that PoliticalCompass charted is Anti-Capitalist, so where they put someone on the Left, that shows a leftward bias in their method.
        2012 [politicalcompass.org]
        2016 [politicalcompass.org]

        [the skew] is the exact problem

        Well, it's one indication of a broken system.

        The problems in USA's system are legion.

        Back in the day, The League of Women Voters conducted the presidential debates.
        These days, those are under the supervision of a "commission" that consists of Reds and Blues.
        No 3rd party candidate gets to participate.
        If one does meet clear the hurdles that the "commission" specifies, they will simply raise the bar.

        USA is alone on the globe in having an Electoral College.

        Unlike modern countries, USA uses a first-past-the-post method of counting votes rather than Instant Runoff/Ranked Voting.

        USAian Lamestream Media is a major part of the problem.
        They haven't had to live by the Fairness Doctrine since 1987 (Ronnie Raygun/Mark Fowler).
        Last year, CBS's CEO came right out and said that they don't don't give a shit about the country and will continue to do whatever makes the corporation the most profit.
        ...with TeeVee still being where most USAians get their "information".

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]