How having the death penalty delays trials

The death penalty should be abolished because it is a barbaric practice. I wrote yesterday about the renewed drive to abolish it and later I came across this article that provides another reason to end it, in that prosecutors demanding the penalty results in trials being delayed. This arose in the case of the student who went on a rampage in a high school in Parkland, FL.

It’s been more than 1,000 days since a gunman with an AR-15 rifle burst into a Florida high school, killed 17 people and wounded 17 others.

Yet, with Valentine’s Day on Sunday marking the three-year milestone, the trial of 22-year-old Nikolas Cruz is in limbo.
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Sri Lanka yesterday may be the US tomorrow

Over time I have noticed that political developments in the US show a pattern that is similar to that of Sri Lanka in the way that democratic norms get eroded, except that there is a lag of a decade or two. Sri Lanka has been a democracy since it obtained independence in 1948 but it has periodically come under great strain as various leaders and parties tried to undermine the institutions of democracy in order to obtain short-term political gain. Undermining the independence of the judiciary and the media and using the instruments of state power to the advantage of the party in power have all been features that I saw in Sri Lanka back in the day and I see in the US now.
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Moving to end the death penalty

There were many things that I hated about the Trump administration but one of the most gratuitously revolting things was how in its last days, we had the grotesque spectacle of Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr rushing through the executions of people on federal death row. There was absolutely no reason for this killing spree except that with Joe Biden being against the death penalty, Trump and Barr mush have feared that those people might be reprieved once Biden came into office. Trump and Barr did not want to give them any chance of life. It was truly sickening. One should never take away someone’s life. To rush to do so when you did not have to reveals the existence of a deeply disturbed mentality.
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Jimmy Kimmel on the first days’s impeachment proceedings

He gave a pretty good summary of what went down.

It is interesting how the various late night talk shows are emerging from the pandemic lockdowns. Kimmel and Samantha Bee are back to what it was like before, wearing formal outfits and standing on stage in their studios, though without a large live audience. Seth Meyers is back at his desk on the studio stage but still dressed casually. Stephen Colbert is also dressed casually and in his office. Trevor Noah is the most casual. He looks like he may be still at home, though it may be his studio office. He dresses in a hoodie and is unshaven and letting his hair grow out.

Another useless Republican post-mortem?

After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, an election that Romney and the Republicans thought they would win and were so confident that they were shocked by the result, the party did what they called an ‘autopsy’ about the loss and what they needed to do to win in the future. Their conclusion? The party’s policies were fine but they needed to make a greater effort to get their message out and to be more inclusive.
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The powerful case against Trump

In today’s opening statement at the impeachment trial against Trump taking place in the Senate chambers, the people making the case for Trump to be convicted on the impeachment charges showed a powerful video taken from many sources that interspersed Trump’s speech on January 6th to the mob with the processing within the Capitol building where the Electoral College votes were being certified and the mobs rioting is support of Trump.

You can see the video.

Trump’s defense team got off to such a bad start in their rebuttal that even Trump-supporting Newsmax and Trump-supporting Alan Dershowitz could not make any sense of what he was saying.

Trump is guilty as hell.

The conservative media bind

Conservative media like Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Newsmax are finding themselves in a bind. Since they are competing for the support of the Trump cult, they need to feed them the red meat about how the election was stolen. This requires them to bring on their shows the loonies who are propagating outlandish conspiracy theories.

But now that the two companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are unlashing massive lawsuits against those who they claim are defaming them, these media outlets have to take defensive actions. What they have chosen to do is to give detailed disclaimers before they put on these people, saying that these are not their opinions but purely those of the speaker.
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The myth of the Chinese debt trap

The US and China are now locked in a competition for global leadership. There is a prevailing narrative that the Chinese government is using its Belt and Road initiative to gain power over developing countries as it seeks to expand its geopolitical influence. Their alleged strategy is to offer countries low-interest loans for big infrastructure projects that it knows that the countries cannot pay back but will likely accept because of those countries’ leaders’ grandiose ambitions. When the countries later find it hard to service those loans and are on the brink of default, China steps in and takes control of the asset it financed, in the process making those countries subservient to them.
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Too close to the truth to be funny

I blogged earlier about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s account of hiding in different places during the January 6th insurrection and hearing a man shouting “Where is she? Where is she?”, making her fear for her life. That episode gave rise to this satirical piece from The Onion.

Republicans Accuse Ocasio-Cortez Of Not Being Anywhere Near Place They Told Capitol Mob She Would Be

WASHINGTON—Pointing out the inconsistency in her personal account of the Jan. 6 insurrection, republicans accused New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Thursday of not being anywhere near the place they told the Capitol mob she would be. “She was supposed to be in a room just off the Capitol rotunda, which is where we told the angry white nationalists she’d be hiding, but she wasn’t even there,” said South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, one of the many republicans condemning Ocasio-Cortez for hiding in a completely different building during the insurrection instead of where her colleagues told the violent rioters they should expect to find her. “A quick examination of the Capitol grounds map we gave the insurrectionists will prove that while they stormed the area where we drew the big ‘X’, the representative was actually in a location that was nowhere close to there. We were all upset by the events that transpired that day, but to be in a different place than the one we told those hunting her she’d be is incredibly disappointing.” At press time, republicans were calling upon Ocasio-Cortez to deliver a full apology and vow to always be open about her exact whereabouts at all times to avoid misleading her potential killers in the future.

A closeup view of the last days of a deranged presidency

We can expect to see a slew of books coming out about the truly disastrous Trump presidency, trying to understand how such a manifestly weird and awful person managed to destroy his primary opponents, get elected president, and turn the Republican party into a cult that has some of the most fanatical and dangerous supporters in recent history. As his presidency went on, it became more and more chaotic as those with even a semblance of independence and competence got replaced if they were not totally subservient to him and replaced by even more sycophantic and incompetent people. The end result was predictable, that he would end up getting advice from the looniest of loonies.

Axios has put together a series of articles titled Off the rails, a description of the final days, starting with election night. Trump’s plan had been that when people went to bed on Tuesday night, they would see a sea of red states predicting a landslide victory for Trump based on just the election day votes, the so-called ‘red mirage’ that he had been warned about. Then when the mail-in vote counts were announced much later and if the tide turned against Trump, people would be more susceptible to his fraud narrative. But things went berserk after Fox News, of all networks, became the first news network to call Arizona for Biden as early as 11:20 pm. This shocked and infuriated the Trump camp, who saw it as a betrayal by the most loyal media network, because it blew apart that narrative.
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