…they say good things come to those who wait…but…that might be misleading?

A team searching the basement of a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till has found the unserved warrant charging a white woman in his 1955 kidnapping, and relatives of the victim who initiated the hunt want authorities to finally arrest her nearly 70 years later.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/29/emmett-till-warrant-carolyn-bryant-donham-family-arrest

…though…sometimes justice is swifter

Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the 10-man unit that carried out coordinated terror attacks in Paris in 2015, has been found guilty of murder and sentenced to full life in prison, the toughest sentence available under French law.
[…]
Another 19 suspects were found guilty of either plotting or offering logistical support, with sentences ranging from two years to life in prison.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/29/paris-attacker-salah-abdeslam-found-guilty-of-and-terrorism

…which is not to say actually swift

The British former socialite and convicted procurer Ghislaine Maxwell has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for charges of recruiting and trafficking young girls.
[…]
Maxwell’s lawyers have said of her background that “it made her vulnerable to Epstein”. This speaks to the popular narrative that Maxwell’s crimes can be explained because she is a victim of two bullies; her father and Jeffrey Epstein. I have spent nearly two years investigating Maxwell for a television series. I reject this narrative. She was a wicked, greedy and depraved criminal in her own right. She was an active partner in enticing and trafficking the girls and took part in sexual assaults. She revelled in the luxury lifestyle provided in return by Epstein, who gave her, among many gifts, an estimated $20m, with which she bought a $17m townhouse in New York. Her lifestyle was breathtaking; flitting on private planes between Epstein’s townhouse, the biggest private home in New York, and his fabulous Caribbean island.

Of course, the nature of Maxwell’s crimes is hard to credit. As a society, we find it hard to accept that a woman would prey on and sexually assault other women. But it happens. Maxwell was an empowered woman who used her cunning and intelligence to commit crimes over years that brought her great wealth. Robert Maxwell can be blamed for many things: the robbery of his company’s pension scheme and his son Kevin becoming the biggest bankrupt in British history. But Ghislaine Maxwell is to blame for her own crimes, not her father.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/29/no-one-but-ghislaine-maxwell-is-to-blame-for-her-revolting-crimes

…either way…though the verdicts might be some consolation

The singer R Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday for sexually abusing women, girls and boys, more than 20 years after first facing allegations.
[…]
A sentencing memorandum filed by the federal prosecutors in the eastern district of New York, said, in part: “With the aid of his inner circle and over a period of decades, the defendant preyed upon children and young women for his own sexual gratification.

“In order to carry out his many crimes, the defendant relied upon his fame, money and popularity […] and used the large network of people his status afforded him – including his business managers, security guards and bouncers, runners, lawyers, accountants, and assistants – to both carry out and conceal his crimes.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/29/r-kelly-sentenced-sexual-abuse

…it’s hard to think of them as “enough”

The full scale of Kelly’s depravity is still unfolding: although he was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child, kidnapping and sex trafficking in 2021, Kelly faces a second trial this year for producing child abuse images. It’s estimated that he harmed as many as 48 women and girls in his decades-long campaign of abuse.
[…]
DeRogatis and his colleague Abdon Pallasch began digging into the allegations, and thus began one of the longest-running investigations in journalism, and the most influential. Without their dogged reporting, it’s likely that Kelly would still be abusing young women – and some men – with impunity. But DeRogatis is not triumphalist about finally seeing Kelly behind bars. “Was there satisfaction with the verdict?” he asks. “You know, the women that I’m still in contact with, to a single one, all said: ‘Sure, I’m glad he’s convicted, but it’s too little, too late for me.’ It was very difficult for any of them to take satisfaction out of the fact it took two decades to stop it.”
[…]
Later, Black women would lead the campaign to bring Kelly to justice. Mute R Kelly, the 2017 movement to stop booking Kelly, was founded by Kenyette Barnes and Oronike Odeleye; while dream hampton’s 2019 Lifetime documentary series, Surviving R Kelly, built on DeRogatis’s reporting to bring Kelly’s crimes to an international audience – after its release, federal prosecutors opened an investigation into Kelly that culminated in his criminal conviction. But for the first 15 years of DeRogatis’s reporting, it was an uphill battle to persuade the Black community, the wider music scene, the press and the criminal justice system to believe Kelly’s victims.

“Where was Rolling Stone?” says DeRogatis, almost spitting the words in anger. “Where was the Chicago Tribune? Where were the organisations much bigger and better staffed than the Chicago Sun-Times? And the police? Every system in Chicago, schools, journalism, churches, certainly the judicial system with that travesty of a 2008 trial, everybody failed these young Black girls. And, you know, that is the most frequent comment I heard in two and a half decades of reporting. Nobody cares about young Black girls. Nobody is going to believe us.” DeRogatis and Pallasch shared 33 bylines on Kelly between 2000 and 2008, and most of these stories were met with indifference. During this period, Kelly’s career flourished. What made DeRogatis keep pushing ahead with the story? “I’m from Jersey,” he says. “You know, I’ve got a thick head, I’m stubborn … It’s this thing I have: no matter how shitty the movie, I have to see how it ends.”
[…]
DeRogatis believes that, after his acquittal, Kelly grew emboldened. “It amplified to a level of insanity,” he says. […]

But, even though his reporting did finally have the impact he had hoped for, DeRogatis is pessimistic about the state of journalism more generally, which has been decimated by a collapse in advertising revenue and print sales. He had struggled to place the cult story, working with three other media organisations only to have it spiked at the last minute due to legal jitters. Today, his primary income comes from teaching (he is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago), while Pallasch, his former Chicago Sun-Times colleague, works in communications.

“I’m encouraged by the next generation,” he says, “and eager to cheer them on, but the thing is, you need resources for this kind of reporting. It takes money, and that’s what’s scary, because internet startups and the places that are hiring the students who leave my classes don’t necessarily have those resources.” What advice would DeRogatis give to journalists investigating similar stories? “There’s no such thing as too much evidence,” he says. “Did they tell contemporaries? Are there text messages? Are there photos? Is there video?”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/04/everyone-failed-these-young-black-girls-journalist-jim-derogatis-on-his-decades-long-battle-to-expose-r-kelly

…& we might like to talk about the court of public opinion…but…it seems like people tend to confuse the kind of court with a jury & the kind full of courtiers

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about Jan. 6 continues to drive brutal headlines for Donald Trump across the country. Leading analysts are describing her revelations as alternately devastating, emotionally powerful and historic. Others are comparing her depiction of the former president’s insurrection to the most deranged presidential moments in U.S. history.

Yet Trump’s propagandists have found an answer. They are claiming Hutchinson’s appearance was a flop, based on the fact that a single anecdote about Trump — one barely related to the central allegations against him — is now being questioned by a handful of bit players in this saga who aren’t even offering this pushback publicly, let alone under oath.

In addition to providing an object lesson in how pro-Trump propaganda functions, this buffoonery reveals just how weak Trump’s defenses have become. The pushback is shriveling into meaningless trivialities even as the enormity of this scandal grows overwhelming.
[…]
As it happens, a source close to the Secret Service told CBS News that Ornato and Engel have already testified to the committee behind closed doors. Of course, as Post reporter and Secret Service expert Carol Leonnig told Rachel Maddow, Ornato and Engel are known as “yes men” to Trump. So we don’t have any idea how cooperative they were.

Regardless, you would think they would leap at the opportunity to rebut Hutchinson’s testimony, now that it’s been made public. Unless that would do more harm than good.

When Greene insists she wants them to testify on live TV, the aim is not to make that actually happen. The real game is to project manufactured confidence that if it did, somehow truths being suppressed by Trump’s enemies would suddenly come to light, to inject a fog of uncertainty into mainstream media coverage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/29/trump-defense-cassidy-hutchinson-peter-ornato/

Former Trump WH Comms director @Alyssafarah says she sees former Trump WH deputy chief of staff (and Secret Service agent) Tony Ornato's reported dispute with Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony he told her the story of Trump lunging at USSS agent Engel through a specific lens…

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 29, 2022

3/ Farah says she told the Committee that she told Ornato and Meadows "to give a warning to the press that they’d be clearing the park so members of the press wouldn’t get hurt. He said on the record to reporters it was untrue." But, Farah says, "half a dozen people heard it.”

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 29, 2022

I can't believe I have to do this but since so many in Trump apology land are doing their best to undermine Hutchinson's testimony let's revisit what she testified to that was from firsthand observations and is not disputed.

1) The White House had intelligence that the 1/6

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) June 29, 2022

is told the crowd is armed. He doesn't care.

4) Trump gets so made that the Mags are thinning his crowd "shot" he demands USSS back down and let everyone in. When told they can't because of safety concerns tied to the weapons, he says he doesn't care b/c the attendees aren't

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) June 29, 2022

making preparations to clear a path. Again, this is despite his awareness the crowd was armed, up to and including AR-15s.

6) After the speech, Trump is told they're not marching with the crowd. Trump is pissed. He planned to march.

That's it. That's the criminal argument. He

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) June 29, 2022

the point. That was the one bit of hearsay Hutchinson included that is now being seized on by Fox and the likes of @ggreenwald to cast aspersions on the entirety of Hutchinson's testimony. It was a wild anecodte, NOT the main testimony.

Enough with the damn gaslighting. /end

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) June 29, 2022

…mind you…hoping to be done with political gaslighting is…unduly optimistic, shall we say

Raab would probably have given PMQs a miss too if he had been given the chance. Because even he now recognises his own futility. There was a time when a PMQs between the two deputies might have had some edge. Box office in its own right. A chance to shine: to show the backbenchers what they were missing.

But not even Dom is stupid enough to imagine he is in with a shout of being Tory leader any more. He had his chance back in 2019 and the Tories wisely decided that having a not-very-bright psychopath with anger management issues was not the best look for their party.
[…]
Nor are Angela Rayner’s immediate prospects of replacing Keir Starmer much better, however much she or many Labour MPs might like it. Rather, her future is very much tied to the Labour leader’s. If Starmer gets a fixed-penalty notice, she will do so too. In which case, both have pledged to resign. And if the police do exonerate them, there will be no vacancy for Rayner to fill as Labour is highly unlikely to have another leadership contest before the next election.

All of which made for a somewhat low-key PMQs. With Starmer and the Convict there’s always a personal undercurrent. They genuinely dislike each other. But Rayner and Raab can’t be bothered to care that much about their opposite numbers. They just sort of rub along OK. Kick a few lumps out of each other for form’s sake, but all in a reasonably disinterested way. There are no hard feeling because there would need to be some feelings in the first place. With them, it’s PMQs as pure ritual. Even more bloodless pantomime than usual.
[…]
We then lapsed into some gentle knockabout. Inevitably Rayner came out on top. Because she always does. She’s far more quick-witted than Dom. And she has a sense of humour. Back and forth we went. First with Raab trying to think of all the things the Tories had done – er, keep inflation below 10%, increase the overall tax burden, that sort of thing – while insisting the Tories wanted Boris to stay leader longer than Labour wanted Keir, and with Rayner inviting the Conservatives to call a general election if they felt so invincible. There were no takers for that idea on the government benches. The next election can’t come slowly enough.
[…]
Rayner just rolled with the punches. Pointing out that Dom had once claimed food banks were just lifestyle choices for those with a cashflow shortage. People who had maxed out the credit card on champagne. Or Prince Charles when there was no Qatari prince to hand over a shopping bag full of notes. Observing that the same Tories who were trying to shout her down had just passed a law preventing Steve Bray from protesting outside Downing Street. And he had just sat on his sun lounger moaning the sea was closed while Boris prioritised the evacuation of pets from Afghanistan.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/29/rayner-outwits-a-condescending-raab-in-a-bloodless-pmqs-pantomime

…dominic raab might not be a familiar name…but to give you a sense of context

Dominic Raab has expressed doubts about including the right to an abortion in the forthcoming bill of rights, saying the matter was already “settled in UK law”.

A cross-party amendment intends to enshrine the right in the bill, though abortion in England and Wales was decriminalised in the 1967 Abortion Act, which exempts women from prosecution for the procedure if it is signed off by two doctors.

…&…to swing back around to the gas-lighting thing…the deputy prime minister there would have you believe not enshrining that access as a right is in fact a result of trying to avoid a calamity where the british “find ourselves, with the greatest respect, in the US position where this is being relitigated through the courts rather than settled”…which seems…at my most charitable…to be misleading

In a complex legal situation, only women in Northern Ireland have the guaranteed right to an abortion, after an amendment backed by MPs at Westminster in 2019 to the NI executive formation bill.
[…]
With regard to England and Wales, the 1967 Abortion Act made terminations legal in Great Britain up to 24 weeks in most circumstances. But the law is framed in terms that mean abortion is not a right, but an exception when two doctors agree it would be risky for the mental or physical health of the woman. That phrasing has come under renewed scrutiny from campaigners.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/29/dominic-raab-says-right-to-abortion-does-not-need-to-be-in-bill-of-rights

…& although I don’t claim to know as much about how this stuff works as some people

If you don't like my many (many) arguments about how the federal government can get around the Hyde Amendment, you should also be calling for @JoeBiden to flatly say he will not sign a 2023 budget that includes it.
Instead of, you know, caving like he did last year.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) June 29, 2022

…I can at least follow their argument well enough to grant they might have a point or two

One particularly maddening aspect of our current politics is that Democrats feel beholden to rules that Republicans feel entitled to burn. Democrats creatively interpret rules in ways that inevitably frustrate their ability to wield power, while Republicans creatively use their power to get around the rules. Democrats invent constraints on themselves, ostensibly to restrict Republicans, while these same Republicans long ago decided to use maximal power to achieve their goals.
[…]
But every time I or anybody else makes arguments for strong executive action to protect people from Republicans, somebody, often a liberal or Democrat, says that the Hyde Amendment prevents the federal government from funding abortions. Anybody who lived through the Trump administration should know that the law rarely outright “prevents” things, and “funding” is a matter of interpretation, but Twitter is awash in so many Hyde takes you’d think it was the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. I have come to believe that, as Voltaire might say, if the Hyde Amendment did not exist, it would be necessary for Democrats to invent it. There are a lot of people invested in the idea that there are secret codes of law that, when you read them under a black light with a Cap’n Crunch Decoder Ring, say “Democrats cannot wield power, ever.”
[…]
So let’s talk about the Hyde Amendment and what it says. Because when you really look at it, you’ll see it’s a paper tiger: While it is harrowingly effective at preventing poor and vulnerable people from getting the health care they need, it is easily shredded by a committed executive at the head of a massive administrative state.
[…]
This is not to say the Hyde Amendment isn’t a smoldering hunk of misogynist garbage that restricts access to abortion for millions of mostly poor women (often with the complicity of the Democratic Party, which is ostensibly elected to protect impoverished people). But, this boogey-man that Democrats argue constrains the commander in chief from providing health care to US citizens is not and has never been some insurmountable prohibition on federal government action.

The idea that the Hyde Amendment restricts all federal action for abortion services is a clear misreading of the amendment. The Hyde Amendment does not, for instance, prevent the government from allowing people in federal prisons to seek abortion services. It does not prevent people being held in immigration custody from being allowed to seek abortion services. And the astute reader will notice that exceptions in the case of rape and incest are written right into the regulation. It is simply inaccurate to say that the amendment, in its current form, prevents the federal government from doing anything that could lead to an abortion. The Hyde Amendment is about insurance coverage.

Those are just the facts. What one should do with the knowledge of those facts is open for interpretation. What one should do with knowledge of those facts while in charge of the executive branch of government is still another thing. I will stipulate that everything I am about to say will be disputed by Republicans. If that matters to you, I do not know how to help you. I do not allow my thinking to be cabled within the confines of “what Republicans agree with” because my desire to live in a pluralistic society built on justice and equality outweighs my desire to be liked by The New York Times. But in my opinion, this now-boilerplate budget amendment cannot prevent the might of the executive office from fighting for women’s rights.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/hyde-amendment-abortion-biden/

…&…well…if the hyde thing was all it took for the opponents of abortion to think they had this thing in the bag…would even this supreme court feel the need for this sort of thing?

There is little to say here other than the fact that our Supreme Court has become a superlegislature. Precedent, statutes, separation of powers, reason, the rule of law, these things all mean nothing.

— Maggie Blackhawk (@MaggieBlackhawk) June 29, 2022

…or this, for that matter

On Monday, tucked away in a busy news cycle, was a quiet, subtle but no less terrifying judicial development. US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas laid out the formula for destroying the free press.

Thomas dissented to denial of certiorari in Coal Ridge Ministries Media v Southern Poverty Law Center with an opinion giving us more than a hint of precisely what he has in store. Freedom of the press has a rightwing target on its back. Thomas wrote that the court should “revisit” the landmark free press case of the 20th century, New York Times v Sullivan.
[…]
Thomas asserted that “New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity’.” He offered no evidence and made no argument in defense of his claim that the existing burdens on those who sue for defamation are indeed excessive, given the competing interests at stake.

Make no mistake. Overruling Times v Sullivan to make it much easier for public figures to sue their critics would strangle the media’s ability to report freely and speak critically about public figures, especially elected officials.
[…]
The chill is real. Imagine if, to terrify critics, political figures such as Donald Trump could weaponize the negligence standard Thomas would have the court install in place of the higher barrier that “actual malice” represents.

There is so much of great importance that we might never have learned. Case in point: the meager amount of factual material that would have been published about 6 January under the chill that a Thomas standard would generate might not have sufficed for the special House committee or the justice department to pursue an investigation of Trump’s role in the insurrection or of his role in the attempted coup of which the insurrection was a part.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/29/does-justice-clarence-thomas-want-to-overturn-a-landmark-freedom-of-the-press-ruling

These and thousands of other frantic, ephemeral text messages that might have otherwise been lost to history are now key to piecing together the most vivid and comprehensive picture to date of the events surrounding the chaos at the Capitol. […]

The committee so far has publicly revealed only a sliver of the thousands of text messages it has received so far. The panel has left a trail of newly released text messages between other players in Trump’s inner circle beyond the 4,000 messages provided by Meadows as it compiles communications from hundreds of individuals and entities who have cooperated with its investigation. The committee’s trove includes texts from dozens of people, a committee staffer said.
[…]
The earliest message to Meadows released so far came on Nov. 4, 2020, when a cellphone linked to former Texas governor and Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry posited a novel way to overturn the election results.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/texting-insurrection/

…but sure…this is the part that’s “important”

Former president Donald Trump’s supporters online sought to undercut stunning testimony Tuesday to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, seeking to belittle Cassidy Hutchinson’s claims that she was told Trump had lunged for the steering wheel of his vehicle and attempted to throttle a member of his security detail when they refused to take him to the Capitol as rioters were besieging the building.
[…]
The quibbling followed an aggressive campaign before the testimony by pro-Trump commenters on social networks, blogs and message boards seeking to portray Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, as an irrelevant attention seeker.
[…]
More than 4,000 accounts liked a tweet from a pro-Trump Twitter account calling her “Amber Heard 2.0” — a reference to the actor who recently lost a defamation lawsuit filed by ex-husband Johnny Depp. By Tuesday night, the phrase “Amber Heard 2.0” was trending on Twitter.
[…]
On the pro-Trump message board patriots.win, one poster said, “She sounds like a child gossiping.” Some patriots.win posters said the testimony showed how unfairly Trump had been treated. One poster said the story showed that “the Deep State coup plotters” of the Secret Service had “effectively kidnapped the President of the United States of America against his wishes” as part of a “C.I.A. Military Industrial Complex coup d’etat.”

Some there argued she should be “locked up for lying under oath,” while another poster there suggested her wild testimony was just Washington as usual.

“Even if she’s telling the truth,” the anonymous patriots.win poster said, “where’s the f—ing problem?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/28/trump-cassidy-hutchinson-jan6-hearing/

…where’s the fucking problem?

Mob boss blames witness for firing the mob’s lawyer so she can tell the truth. Hutchinson has a story to tell to the Bar holding her previous attorney’s license to practice law. pic.twitter.com/w4nMCmMxlO

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 28, 2022

We're going to need a bigger balloon!🤣 #Mogul #January6thHearings pic.twitter.com/ggVNMOggBL

— Jonathan Chappell (@Dijb89) June 28, 2022

Hutchinson’s former attorney, Stefan Passantino, has deep Trump World connections. Her new lawyer, Jody Hunt, is a longtime close ally of Jeff Sessions and served as his chief of staff when the former attorney general enraged Trump by recusing from the Russia probe.
[…]
Passantino, Hutchinson’s former attorney, was the Trump White House’s chief ethics lawyer. And Passantino’s firm, Michael Best, has Trump World connections; its president is former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and Justin Clark — also a top Trump World lawyer — is currently on leave from the firm, according to its website.

Attorney Alex Cannon, who worked on the Trump campaign and with Trump’s legal team after his presidency, is also a lawyer at the firm.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/hutchinson-former-meadows-aide-replaces-lawyer-jan-6-hearings

In the morning, I sit with a cup of coffee and organize myself for the day. I watch the sunrise over the lake by my home, and I listen to the sounds of the sparrows and wrens. Orioles come and go from our grape jelly feeder, and each one makes me smile. I breathe deeply for 10 breaths to ground myself in my body. I remind myself of my many blessings and set my attitude to positive. My old calico, Glessie, sits by my side. Even though I am ragged with grief at the news of the world, I am ready to face whatever happens next.

Over the decades, I’ve acquired skills for building a good day. […]

Of course, I am leading a double life. Underneath my ordinary good life, I am in despair for the world. Some days, the news is such that I need all my inner strength to avoid exhaustion, anxiety and depression. I rarely discuss this despair. My friends don’t, either. We all feel the same. We don’t know what to say that is positive. So we keep our conversations to our gardens, our families, books and movies and our work on local projects. We don’t want to make one another feel hopeless and helpless.
[…]
As we are pummeled with daily traumatic information, more and more of us shut down emotionally. I can hear the flatness in the newscasters’ voices, see the stress in my friends’ faces and sense it in the tension of the workers at my sister’s nursing home. We are not apathetic; we are overwhelmed. Our symptoms resemble those of combat fatigue.

The most informed and compassionate among us are the most vulnerable to despair. We understand the brokenness and the sorrow in our own and faraway communities. We are also fully aware of all the things we cannot change. Staying focused on the light in the world is hard work.
[…]
Psychology teaches that the best way to cope with suffering is to face it. We must feel it in our bodies, explore its meaning and then muster our inner resources to move forward. We find ways to balance our despair with joy. We reach out to our friends and family. We find a way to help another person. Action is always an antidote to despair.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/opinion/coping-climate-war-happiness.html

…so…yeah…have yourselves a good day, folks