Tuesday Reads: Jeff Sessions Dog Whistles Dixie
Posted: January 10, 2017 Filed under: 2016 elections, Black Lives Matter, Psychopaths in charge, public hangings, Rule of Law, Voting Rights, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: Jeff Sessions Hearings 54 Comments
The first of our new theocratic, Putin-loving, grifter overlords is sitting in front of a Senate committee with absolutely no vetting being grilled and testified against by his peers. Neoconfederate radical christianist Senator Jeff Sessions can sure tell some whoppers and he sure does whistle Dixie.
In an unprecedented move, Senator Corey Booker has chosen to testify about Session’s treatment of the law and of black people.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker is set to testify against Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions Wednesday in an unprecedented move during his attorney general confirmation.
This would be the first time in Senate history that a sitting senator will testify against another sitting senator for a Cabinet post during a confirmation.”I do not take lightly the decision to testify against a Senate colleague,” Booker said. “But the immense powers of the attorney general combined with the deeply troubling views of this nominee is a call to conscience.”
Sessions’ confirmation hearings, which started Tuesday, are expected to raise additional questions on old allegations of racism from his past. When Sessions was a 39-year-old US attorney in Alabama, he was denied a federal judgeship because the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony during hearings in March and May 1986 that Sessions had made racist remarks and called the NAACP and ACLU “un-American.”
Booker told CNN on Tuesday morning shortly before Sessions’ hearing started that it was “consequential moment.”
“This is one of the more consequential appointments in American history right now given the state of a lot of our challenges we have with our policing, a lot of challenges we have with race relations, gay and lesbian relations,” Booker said.
LIVE Trump confirmation hearings: Jeff Sessions’ first hearing
Representative John Lewis will also testify against Sessions along with my Congressman Cedric Richmond who will represent the Black Caucus and me for that matter.
Several other prominent African-American figures in addition to Booker also plan to testify against Sessions, including two members of the House: Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, a leader of the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-Louisiana, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The NAACP has also strongly opposed Sessions’ nomination, calling him “a threat to desegregation and the Voting Rights Act.”
Sessions is a hodgepodge of bad things. He’s failed to disclose his oil interests and ethnics experts are taking issue.
Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions did not disclose his ownership of oil interests on land in Alabama as required by federal ethics rules, according to an examination of state records and independent ethics lawyers who reviewed the documents.
The Alabama records show that Sessions owns subsurface rights to oil and other minerals on more than 600 acres in his home state, some of which are adjacent to a federal wildlife preserve.
The holdings are small, producing revenue in the range of $4,700 annually. But the interests were not disclosed on forms sent by Sessions to the Office of Government Ethics, which reviews the assets of Cabinet nominees for potential conflicts of interest.
He is currently up on the stand doing things like telling Dianne Feinstein that he really thinks Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional and badly decided but it’s established law. He’s explaining his vote against laws to protect women victims of violence as being against the establishment of the rights of Native Americans to hold trials against accused rapists in their own courts. He’s just a big ol’ bug hiding nasty fangs and a poison sac right out there for every one to see.
You may want to read the story of Sessions and his role in prosecuting the Klan to really understand how deep his southern roots go. Sessions has also testified he loathes the clan today. Sessions apologists hold this case up as proof he’s really not all that racist.
letter from 23 former assistant attorney generals cited the fact that he had “worked to obtain the successful capital prosecution of the head of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan” as evidence of his “commitment to the rule of law, and to the even-handed administration of justice.” The Wall Street Journal said that Sessions, “won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial,” a case which “broke the Klan in the heart of dixie,” and The New York Post praised him for having “successfully prosecuted the head of the state Ku Klux Klan for murder.” Grant Bosse wrote in the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leaderwrote that “when local police wrote off the murder as a drug deal gone wrong, Sessions brought in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and brought Hays and the Klan to justice.”
Sessions himself recently listed the case as one of the “ten most significant significant litigated matters” he had “personally handled” on his Senate confirmation questionnaire. And in 2009, Sessions told National Review that there had been a campaign to “smear my record,” whereas in fact, he had “prosecuted the head of the Klan for murdering somebody.”
No one involved in the case disputes that Sessions lent his support to the prosecution. “Not all southern United States attorneys welcomed civil-rights division attorneys into their districts back then,” said Barry Kowalski, a former civil-rights division attorney who was one of the main lawyers on the investigation, and who defended Sessions in his 1986 confirmation hearing. “He did, he cooperated with us completely.”
However, in seeking to defend Sessions from charges of racism, Sessions’s allies, and even Sessions himself, seem to have embellished key details, and to have inflated his actual role in the case, presenting him not merely as a cooperative U.S. attorney who facilitated the prosecution of the two Klansmen, but the driving force behind the prosecution itself. The details of the case don’t support that claim.
You can read the details in the feature I’ve linked to which came for The Atlantic.
The Sessions hearings are on CSPAN if you want an uninterrupted view of it all. The Hill has a list of five things to watch. This first one is as important as questions on policing and voting rights.
Does he detail Trump’s plans on immigration?
Sessions is known as the foremost immigration hawk in the Senate, so you can bet he’ll be pressed on an issue that has liberals on edge in the age of Trump.
Expect Democrats to come armed with statistics challenging the notion that illegal immigrants are flooding across the southern border; that crime is out of control among illegal immigrants; and that President Obama has not done enough to deport those in the country illegally who have committed other crimes.
In addition, while it won’t necessarily fall under his purview at the Justice Department, Democratic senators will likely look to score political points by challenging Sessions on the complications of building a border wall.
And they’ll likely look to get him to say that he won’t move to deport, en masse, the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in the country, and in particular the estimated 700,000 young undocumented immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
As president, Trump could do away with that program by executive order.
I have to work and grade today but will try to follow comments on Twitter. They are plentiful.
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So, anyway, I’ve got to go warp minds and grade papers. BB’s successfully moved to her new apartment too! She’s patiently waiting for the cable guy. JJ is still with her mom in the facility and is having up and down days. We’re just happy to have you all here for breaks in our mundane lives!!!
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Reading over the post yesterday, and of course getting nearer to the unthinkable, it is abundantly clear that the Republicans intend to create a dictatorship, though they would of course be very angry if anyone called it that. I really do thiink that it is imperative that the Democrats, or indeed anyone else who has a forum, calls them fascists, and calls what they are creating, a dictatorship. Maybe words like that will get through to some people. Trying to normalize it, even find it interesting, as the media is doing, simply allows it. And as was shown under Hitler, first they start in this manner, by purging dissidents, taking away powers; and before long, it is a complete tyranny. And those are extremely difficult to overcome. Always remember that Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo were not overthrown, they were defeated by armies from other countries. No one is going to come in here and nobly save our democracy.
What is desperately needed is some leadership, the kind we will never see from Obama, who is now being lauded for his past speeches, and for his gracefulness, but who in my view helped enable this fascist takeover, by not informing the country about Russia not only trying to help Trump, but actually (in my perception) creating and running his campaign;, or the FBI corruption. Every move that Trump is making on the foreign related front, is being engineered by Putin, who apparently owns him. Media looks blankly; “huh?” So many collaborators. Some entities need to quickly form a gameplan. The Senate is not going to be able to defeat these cabinet appointees. The Republicans have lost any pretense to a soul, they vote right down the line on anything, like an army of zombies or the invasion of the bodysnatchers. I applaud Booker and others for fighting, but it’s not going to stop Sessions, or anyone else. This is all going to become very familiar, like totalitarian state show trials. The flimsy appearance of democracy, which hides the tyranny beneath. And wait until the Republicans make it virtually impossible for any Democrat in a battleground state to vote. It is surely the greatest threat to our democracy that we have ever faced. And it may already have won; the zombie armies may have overrun the barricades.
We need gameplans and approaches. Peopl doing everything they can to not support the economies of Red states? People trying to legally defray or limit tax payments to the federal government? Democrats pulling all of their money out of the stock market? I don’t have the answers, but these are ideas. If Democrats, liberals, people who care about our country and planet, just shrug and watch all of their rights be taken away, they’ll never magically come back. So legal and nonviolent things must be immediately done. People must do whatever they can not to enable the tyrants. And there is always the CIA, which I do hope has something in mind, before Trump and Flynn and their henchmen replace all of them with Russian agents. I realize that there is no de facto leader of the Democratic Party, and that self-serving egomaniacs like Sanders are trying to lead the Party off the cliff, to a place where they can never win another election. But some significant entities need to speak up, and to suggest plans and approaches for citizens to follow. And of course the media will attack them, and say that they are disloyal, but it has to be done completely regardless of what the media says. The media is virtually a state-run propaganda arm of the Republican Party at this point. Whatever is done has to be without expecting them to ever call out fascism. I know that we are all used to a time when the media would finally say, “enough,” but they won’t this time. It has to be people. Hillary won counties which make up 68% of the economic output of the country. That is financial power–if someone can figure out how to channel it, and quickly.
The amount of corruption and looting is going to be absolutely unfathomable. I can’t imagine this isn’t all eventually going to wind up in a huge mess and hopefully before we all wind up in wars and chaos. But, the Republicans appear to be dead set on tearing down everything that happened right down to the shingles on the federal buildings. I’m scared to death.
The other thing I was thinking is how refreshing it is to have actual DOERS and folks that take action on the Dem side. Unlike Bernie who blathers on about the same thing and does nothing, Senator Booker is acting on his convictions.
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Thanks Dak, I’ve been following Sessions. I am totally pissed that he got away with laughing when asked “did you ever say lock her up”……….he laughed, it’s all a laugh. He admitted he had no knowledge about Russian hacking, only what he saw in the media……..what the enquirer? We read the reports from the intelligence agencies, we watched the committee meet, but NOT Sessions. It’s obvious he thinks it’s okay for Russia to have impacted our election, and cause Hillary Clinton to lose.
And he said that Roe vs Wade was illegal and against the constitution.
Gonna be a long day…………off to dentist…………..
P.S. luv those cartoons.
it’s the only thing that I can laugh about these days and we all need a chuckle in these troubled horrid times!
8 Reasons The Senate Must Reject Jeff Sessions
The positions and policies he has supported do not uplift America’s shared values of love, justice and mercy.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
President, North Carolina NAACP and leader of ‘Moral Mondays’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/8-reasons-the-senate-must-reject-jeff-sessions_us_5873b82ee4b099cdb0fe6818?935wmi
Hi everyone!
I’m too exhausted to read right now, but wanted you all to know that I’m in my new apartment and hooked up to the internet again.
I love you all!
and you are well-admired by your grateful readers who hope you will be happy in the new digs
Thank you so much. I hope I can recover enough in the next couple of days to locate things I need. I’m going to have to go back for a couple of things. The judge gave us two weeks for that.
Happy to read this, bb. Been thinking about you. I haven’t been doing much but perusing twitter the past few days but I’m glad to know that you are connected with us again.
Thanks, Janice! It was only 24 hours without internet, but it felt like I was cut off from the world completely.
Hooray BB, so happy for you, and hope it all went smooth. Would love to be helping you! I heard that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign………..digging that.
Thanks Fannie. I got a lot of help from two sisters in law. I never could have done this without my brother either. He was really wonderful.
I’m glad you’re in your new place.
Thanks. I’m glad too, but I’m completely exhausted.
All the best wishes to you BB in your new place. You deserve peace and happiness. I’m glad your family has been so supportive. You’re truly a lucky woman to have such a great support system. Please keep us posted on how you’re liking the new place.
Luv you, BB!
How do we donate?
Up to the right is a donate button. If you push it, it takes you to where it will get to our paypal account. It’s oval with blue letters. It takes debit and credit cards. Thx!!!
Thanks.
Well now we have a little bit of an idea what Pelosi was so upset about after she was briefed by the IC last week.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-russia/index.html
So, Trump hated the Obamas so much, particularly Michelle, that when he went to Russia, he stayed in the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton because he knew the Obamas had stayed in that room and he hired prostitutes to perform “Golden Showers” on the bed where the Obamas had slept.
This is some of what the Russians have on Trump.
BB won’t have any problems finding thing to post in the morning! So glad you got settled in and all the best to you in the new place!
This is pretty significant breaking news:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/01/10/buzzfeed-trump-caught-in-perverted-sex.html?via=desktop&source=copyurl
Cover your eyes. TRIGGER ALERT for grossness
This is the same spy that David Corn talked to awhile back.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump
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This ain’t no unsecured personal email server, Jason Chaffetz! Schedule a committee investigation, you idiot, or not.
I’ll bet tRump does not hold a press conference tomorrow.
I think Chicken tRump will likely go into hiding for a few days
http://heatst.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/trump-chicken.jpg?w=1200&h=630&crop=1&quality=80&strip=info
http://rs1190.pbsrc.com/albums/z460/mbarteski/37.gif~c200
https://twitter.com/Green_Footballs/status/818964889779638272
I like the part that says Putin feared Hillary Clinton.
https://twitter.com/MattOrtega/status/818966809739198464
lol
https://twitter.com/Scott_Gilmore/status/818981010369105922
Andrea Mitchell is choking her words out because she just can’t talk about this “raw, unverified” information. Of course, they spent weeks on unverified crap about Hillary.
Andrea Mitchell can kiss my ass. She was one of the foremost carrier of tall tales against Hillary throughout the campaign.
I hope this story takes down a lot of reporters as it takes down trump
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and it has been named “GoldenGate”
I’m beginning to think that he’s our karma for slavery and native american genocide which means we’re in some deep doo doo here
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/10/fbi-chief-given-dossier-by-john-mccain-alleging-secret-trump-russia-contacts?CMP=share_btn_tw
The FBI wanted Trump wiretapped!!!
Dahlia:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/01/jeff_sessions_confirmation_hearing_had_one_moment_that_revealed_why_so_many.html
Wouldn’t it have been nice if this information had gotten out, say, two months and two weeks ago. That it didn’t, speaks volumes about many aspects of our broken and corrupted political system. If it were out, Trump could not win. Even if people put up with the sex acts, the compromising information to be used by Russia, would have certainly disqualified him. Of course, the media and the Republican Party has shown that they will put up with anything from Trump, while they savaged Hillary daily for absolutely nothing. It was obvious that the Russians had something on Trump, and the media didn’t even sniff for it. What loathsome corruption by them.
Well, if Trump denies it, it must be true.
But what about the CHILDREN????
He’ll be busy: