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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: 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.