Attorney-General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Can Do Many Dirty Jobs At Once

by 10:50 am. It has 189 Comments.


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The Depraved Leprechaun, busy with the tasks Lord Smallgloves hired him for…

And he’s gonna use the Nixon Administration’s favorite shortcut to guarantee a full supply of “dangerous repeat offenders”…


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“Dangerous permanent trend”

by 12:58 pm. It has 193 Comments.

With elfin racist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III installed as AG earlier today, the so-called president rolled out a series of new executive orders. Via The Hill:

“I’m signing three executive actions today designed to restore safety in America,” Trump said in the Oval Office after swearing in Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

It’s unclear what any of the actions would do precisely, and the White House did not immediately provide copies of what Trump had signed.

Trump said he is directing the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security “to undertake all necessary and lawful action to break the back of the criminal cartels that have spread across our nation and are destroying the blood of our youth.”

Another action, Trump said, establishes a Justice Department task force aimed at reducing violent crime and orders the agency to develop a plan to stop crimes against law enforcement officers.

“We have a crime problem,” said Sessions. “I wish the rise that we’re seeing in crime in America today were some sort of aberration or blip,” he continued, calling it a “dangerous permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk.”

Emphasis mine. There’s a dangerous trend that threatens the nation, alright — a pattern of behavior in which amoral assholes lie to gullible and ignorant people, playing to their worst fears and worst qualities, and are rewarded with power. I don’t think the trend is necessarily permanent, but we seem to be approaching its high-water mark.

These orders sound like a Reichstag in search of a fire. Given the lies about the crime rate and the unreconstructed knob Trump put in charge of the Justice Dept., I think we can guess where this is heading.


Open Thread: Massachusetts Potholeheads

by 9:44 pm. It has 186 Comments.

Must… resist… Andrew Sullivan… joke…

I’m finally seeing anti-Prop 4 commercials during the local tv news — a full week after early voting started in this state. Those ads are both sanctimonious and dishonest, and if I hadn’t already voted in favor, their will nobody think of the children!!! puling would’ve strongly influenced me to do so. (The pro-legalization people have been running extremely discreet ads for the last month or so, and they didn’t feel the need to lie.) I haven’t even been around marijuana since the mid-1980s, but the current “medical use is okay, as long as you’re a white person with enough money, but no way will we allow our nice neighborhoods to be defiled by pot shops or the human detritus they attract” patchwork goes beyond farce into tragedy.

Our (Repub) governor, Boston’s (Dem) mayor, and Cardinal O’Malley (still a force, here in the Commonwealth) have all come out against the proposal, arguing that it will enable filthy cartels to further target ‘the most vulnerable neighborhoods,’ while simultaneously claiming that nobody gets arrested for possession these days anyways. (Technically, adults can only be fined if they’re busted carrying less than an ounce, but ‘possession with intent to distribute’ is still a valuable loophole for law enforcement officers looking to keep Those People in their place.)

Of course, the real make-or-break state for full national legalization is California… although I find it somehow endearing that Maine apparently hopes to replace its decaying pulpwood industry with an even more renewable plant product…


Lines On the Map: The Human Geography of the US’s Southern Border

by 10:00 am. It has 131 Comments.

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(Map 1: US Borders Prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo*)

With all the discussion, both in the current election cycle and year in and year out, about immigration to the US, as well as how to secure the US’s southern border, what often gets ignored is how the US got its southern border. Specifically the human geography of the southwestern US and their relationship to its border. After the conclusion of the Mexican War, in February 1848, the US and Mexico completed the negotiation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did several things, but among them it moved the US’s southern and western borders to roughly where they are now. Basically we moved the line on the map. As was, and still is, the case when borders are drawn the people living on either side of the old and/or new borders do not always pay a lot of attention to that border in their daily lives. This can be seen in kinship maps of various parts of the world where borders were drawn, often by people far from where the borders were or would be, that subdivided or bisected members of kinship groups into separate states regardless of the reality on the ground. You can see this on ethnic maps throughout Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and other parts of the world.

This is also the reality with the US’s southern border. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially moved the lines on the map, but the day to day experience – the pattern of human settlement and the human geography of the region did not really change. Sure, more of what we now call non-Hispanic whites moved into New Mexico and west Texas and Arizona and Southern California, but the overall human geography – the people, places, and things that make up that pattern of human settlement didn’t change all that much. If you look at the pattern of settlement, based on 2010 Census data, you’ll see that where Hispanics and Latinos were living in the southern US hasn’t changed a lot. The highest density areas are still in the southwest.

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(Map 2: Hispanic or Latino Population of the US**)

You’ll notice that on both the map prepared for the negotiations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Rural Health Information’s map of Hispanic or Latino population of the US based on the 2010 Census that the area that the US would get from Mexico in 1848 is still where the largest percentage of the Hispanic or Latino population of the US live. This doesn’t count south Florida, which has a different historic pattern of Hispanic settlement. What the patterns of settlement shown on the maps show us is that the border was moved on the map, but the pattern of settlement remained largely unchanged.

And off and on for almost a hundred years that border was open. People went back and forth for familial reasons, for economic reasons, for social reasons, and for political reasons (don’t forget the Mormon exodus to Mexico in the late 19th Century and their return to the US in the early 20th Century). At different times throughout the 20th Century there have been attempts to seal the southern border for security reasons, which were sometimes/often conflated with xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment. There were also attempts by the Mexican government to police their northern border to prevent (accused) criminals from crossing into the US illegally to escape justice. And all of these, over the course of a decade in the 1940s into the 1950s culminated with Operation Wetback – the last, named operation to deal with the issue at that point in time. These efforts to regulate the southern border also included guest worker programs, like the early 1940s Bracero Program. In the 1980s the Reagan Administration pushed the Immigration and Reform Act of 1986 that included a pathway to citizenship. Later, in the 1990s, there was Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton Administration attempt to secure the southern border. And there was also the disastrous impact of NAFTA and the war on drugs on Mexico’s economy, driving millions north in search of work to support themselves and their relatives at home. And through it all the pattern of settlement in the southwestern US has not changed very much. Until this reality – that the border may have been moved in 1848, but not the demographics of the population – is acknowledged in the debate on what to do with the migration across the US’s southern border, then it will not be possible to formulate feasible, acceptable, and suitable policies for immigration into the US across the southern border and how to best regulate and regularize it.

* Map found here.

** Map found here.


It’s a Societal Addiction Problem When It is White People

by 3:25 pm. It has 76 Comments.

And a crime spree when they are black. The front page of my local tv station’s website has this taking up valuable real estate:

addictionwhenitiswhitepeoplecrimspreewhenitisblackpeople

From the comments section below, this piece:

Thirty years later, America is again seeing an epidemic of drug addiction, particularly heroin. The surge is so great that for the first time in generations, mortality among young white adults has risen. But the national attitude toward drug addiction is utterly different. Even Republican presidential candidates are eschewing the perennial tough-on-drugs speeches and opening up about struggles within their own families.

More important, police chiefs in the cities most affected by heroin are responding not by invoking military metaphors, weapons and tactics but by ensuring that police officers save lives and get people into rehab. As one former narcotics officer described his change of heart on addiction, “These are people and they have a purpose in life and we can’t as law enforcement look at them any other way.” In his inability to name the change that allowed this epiphany, his words also capture our cringe-worthy self-denial. Suddenly, police officers understand crime as a sign of underlying addiction requiring coordinated assistance, rather than a scourge to be eradicated.

It is hard to describe the bittersweet sting that many African-Americans feel witnessing this national embrace of addicts. It is heartening to see the eclipse of the generations-long failed war on drugs. But black Americans are also knowingly weary and embittered by the absence of such enlightened thinking when those in our own families were similarly wounded. When the face of addiction had dark skin, this nation’s police did not see sons and daughters, sister and brothers. They saw “brothas,” young thugs to be locked up, rather than “people with a purpose in life.”

To be clear, no one laments the violence that the “crack bomb” set off in inner cities more than African-Americans. But while shootings, beatings and robberies cannot be tolerated anywhere, the heroin epidemic shows that how we respond to the crimes accompanying addiction depends on how much we care about the victims of crime and those in the grip of addiction. White heroin addicts get overdose treatment, rehabilitation and reincorporation, a system that will be there for them again and again and again. Black drug users got jail cells and “Just Say No.”

Truth.

One of the most eye-opening things for me was about 20 years ago when it was pointed out to me in a class how in every crime tv show or movie from my youth, the villains were almost always black. The days of Charles Bronson and Dirty Harry and Hill Street Blues and Bernie Goetz. Today of course, we have progressed. They’re mainly Muslim.