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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
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday May 16 2017, @03:52PM (16 children)
An interesting and perhaps insightful observation, but I think here:
The voters weaponized the candidate and sent him like a guided missile to DC in order to leave the place a giant smoking crater
you give the voters too much credit. Yes, that may well be the result of their votes, and decades from now revisionist history texts might claim that was the intent, but that's not what the majority of Trump voters wanted. They wanted a wall and they wanted "LOCK HER UP" and they wanted somethingsomethingCHINAsomethingsomethingSOUNFAIR!, but I don't think many of them saw their vote as part of a cunning conspiracy to burn down DC with an orange Trojan Shitbomb.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:43PM
Our very own alt-right diva J-Mo specifically says he wants to burn the lot down, and so does Bannon. You know, *Bannon?* That guy?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @05:46PM
MAGA has gotten lost somewhere. I thought it was because we wanted to win. We wanted to get bored of winning. We were tired of loosing. We want La Guardia to get a federal remodel so Trump doesn't have to look down on 3rd world levels of poverty when he flies in from MargoLargo. It's DISGUSTING. Clean up the swampy poor people who get in his flight path.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 16 2017, @06:02PM (13 children)
For what it's worth, Michael Moore said much the same [globalnews.ca]:
Moore's read on it reads quite true to me. So reducing the motivations of Trump voters to a handful of simplistic points falls into the fallacy that they're stupid. They are not stupid. Perhaps not everyone can write a doctoral thesis on their motivations, perhaps for some their support is inchoate, sure, but they're not imbeciles.
It is dangerous to view epochal shifts like these through a cartoonish lens. Please don't do it, and don't contribute to it or applaud it. If you do, you make it so much more likely for the worse things to happen again, or unpleasant things to slide into nightmares. As an example I offer this, that the Jews in Hollywood and the American entertainment complex have spent the last 70 years lampooning and demonizing Hitler and the Nazis to the point that none of us recognize them as human. They're mythical bogeymen. The reality is they had real reasons for doing what they did; they believed they were justified in doing what they did; and their righteous cause made anything done in its name defensible. And the same reasons they had are being nursed in the American national bosom (and also elsewhere) today, and have already been used to excuse war crimes; the CIA tortured, and tortures people by order of the US government, and neither they nor those who ordered the torture have been hanged for it, as they must. As I pray to god they shall.
You may disagree with me and Moore, but after seeing that electing a uniter didn't work, the country did mean to elect a destroyer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @08:27PM (6 children)
> It is dangerous to view epochal shifts like these through a cartoonish lens.
That's rich. You've got your favorite cartoonish explanation which isn't supported by the data.
Over and over again the actual research, instead of your hand-waving wishful thinking, is that Trump won because of white anxiety.
The guy literally made his political bones selling a conspiracy theory that the first black president was an illegitimate crytpo-muslim.
Turmp is end-stage obama derangement syndrome (well, its not end-stage, because the country will continue to brown and fragile whites will continue to lose their shit, but lets hope he's a local maximum).
Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump [prri.org]
Trump supporters are actually richer, not poorer, than average, although they tended to be blue-collar and less educated. Trump supporters also tended to live in racially segregated areas, particularly those that were not especially hard hit by trade or immigration. [ssrn.com]
Voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction [umass.edu]
People who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump [sagepub.com]
Trump supporters are more than twice as likely as Clinton supporters to have negative views of Islam [reuters.com]
Half of Trump supporters think undocumented immigrants have hire rates of crime than US citizens, versus 13 percent of Clinton supporters [people-press.org] (they actually have lower rates [nytimes.com])
43 percent of Republicans said Trump was right to complain about Judge Curiel, while 39 percent said he was wrong. In comparison, only 8 percent of Democrats said Trump was right, versus 81 percent who said he was wrong. [yougov.com]
73 percent of Republicans support building a wall at the US-Mexico border, compared to 13 percent of Democrats. [turner.com]
Trump supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration. [ssrn.com]
More ‘warmth’ for Trump among GOP voters concerned by immigrants, diversity [pewresearch.org]
Trump supporters more likely to view blacks negatively - Reuters/Ipsos poll [reuters.com]
white Trump supporters are much more likely to show high levels of racial resentment than Clinton’s white supporters. [telesurtv.net]
Obama was the first president to declare himself a feminist. And unsurprisingly, hostile sexism correlated with trump support far more than it did with romney support. [twitter.com]
Economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment. Racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. [washingtonpost.com]
In 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment [theintercept.com]
Opinions about how increasing racial diversity will affect American society had much more impact on support for Trump during the 2016 election compared to support for the Republican candidates in the two previous presidential elections. We also find that individuals with high levels of racial resentment were more likely to switch from Obama to Trump, but those with low racial resentment and more positive views about rising diversity voted for Romney but not Trump. [thenation.com]
If the democratic party doesn't figure out a way to check white anxiety, no amount of socialism will help. In fact, in Europe, countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements.
The top third of countries — that is, the ones with the largest welfare states — saw roughly four times the rate of far-right support among the working class as the countries in the bottom third did. [kai-arzheimer.com]
Its almost as if not having to worry about dying from lack of healthcare or starving from lack of food frees up extra time to focus on tribalism. Its called "welfare chauvinism" [nytimes.com] — the idea that only 'deserving' people should get state support and if you aren't white you aren't as deserving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @01:42AM (1 child)
I voted for Trump because the other politicians hated him. I hated them, so in theory the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I know Trump wouldn't be my friend, but there were no friendly options for me, so what goes around comes around. If they're too busy fighting each other maybe they'll leave me alone a little more often and perhaps the internal power struggles will lead to a slightly better government in the future. I would have voted for Sanders solely because his voting record was consistent, or at least that's what I had heard (would have looked it up if he had been running).
It's all bullshit anyway. The President is supposed to be more focused on foreign policy than internal policy. Somehow the general public thinks the President's job should be what Congress does. Sadly members of the government are buying into that miss-belief too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @01:36AM
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more, no less.
- Howard Tayler (Schlock Mercenery)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @12:54PM (3 children)
No, no, you're obviously right. The same sources that proved Hillary was going to win the election in a walk have now, per you, proven that Trump won because racism. You have proven that the clear economics that Americans live every day had nothing to do with why they voted for Trump, and that all that was eclipsed by the simplistic racism of credulous white racists.
You see, I know how to push-poll, too. I can design surveys that produce the answers I'm looking for. I can oversample and undersample to skew trends. There are all sorts of ways to use data to lie. And if I have a narrative I'm trying to serve, and purpose to de-legitimize a guy or trend I don't like, it's so seductively easy to do all of that to "prove" I'm right.
It's easy to fool people who don't know anything about social science or statistics or PR, isn't it?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @03:28PM (2 children)
> The same sources that proved Hillary was going to win the election in a walk have now
(a) The polling did not show that. Pundits spun a thin a margin into a decisive win for sensationalistic news.
(b) It isn't even close to the same thing - this isn't push polling at all. These are academic researchers.
> It's easy to fool people who don't know anything about social science or statistics or PR, isn't it?
Its even easier to fool conspiracy freaks.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @09:35PM (1 child)
Sigh. Yes, sure, pal. The NSA is not really spying on us. Bush & Cheney really were telling the truth about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. The DNC wasn't really rigging the primaries for Hillary. Anything else factual, proven, that you would like us to now dismiss while you're waving your hand and smearing all of us as "conspiracy freaks?"
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @11:00PM
Gee, is that the best you can do? There once was an actual conspiracy, so all conspiracies must be true!
And thus we know that the Killary body count is all true, so is pizzagate, spirit-cooking and Obama really was born in Kenya.
If you are trying to convince us that you are a conspiracy freak you are doing a bang-up job.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @02:52AM (5 children)
As much as I despise Michael Moore, his take on the election is pretty accurate. In fact, I share the attitude, "Fuck the Establishment!" The Establishment, of course, being the marriage of government and megacorporations.
Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, but he probably didn't visualize that the rest of government and corporate America could go the same route.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @03:37PM (3 children)
> In fact, I share the attitude, "
You also share the attitude of insane levels of white anxiety directed at muslims and mexicans.
Its nice to be able to say its about the establishment though. Makes it easy to sleep at night.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2017, @03:51PM (2 children)
SHUT UP YOU MEXICAN MUSLIM!!!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @09:38PM (1 child)
Look, man, they may speak a different language but you're supposed to call them "Southerners," not, "Mexicans." Real Mexicans drive bigger pickups.
You may be right with "Muslim," though, since nobody but Runaway seems to know what the hell "Daesh" means or how to use it correctly in a sentence.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18 2017, @12:46AM
Mohammad's Daesh is really sore since he passed out in the Blue Oyster bar.
If you spread the Daesh evenly over the field and then plow it in, your plants will grow better.
Daesh the Daeshing Daeshers.
There you go, 3 sentences containing the word Daesh..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 18 2017, @12:33PM
Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, but he probably didn't visualize that the rest of government and corporate America could go the same route.
In the same speech, Eisenhower warned against other things:
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields… ,” Eisenhower warned. “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
and earlier on:
But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
So he did visualize that other parts could go that way, and mentioned two of them.