Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
"Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants—whether they're innocent or guilty—to take a plea deal." Punishment Without Trial "showcases how plea bargaining has undermined
justice at every turn[, forcing] the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal
system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is
dogging our jails and punishing citizens because it's the path of least
resistance."
Instead of protecting defendants’ right to have their guilt or innocence
decided by their peers, judges routinely punish defendants for
exercising that right. Specifically, judges regularly impose longer
sentences on those defendants who insist on going to trial than on those
defendants who plead guilty. A 2018 report
shows that, on average, defendants who insist on a trial receive
sentences three times longer than those of defendants who plead guilty.
… The reason that the Supreme Court gives for carving out the jury-trial
right from its ordinary constitutional rules is simple: resources. The
Court doesn’t think that the criminal-justice system could handle
granting every criminal defendant a trial. Without plea bargaining, the Court said, “the States and the Federal Government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court facilities.”
… On some level, the resources argument is convincing. It is certainly
true that our courts could not possibly hold trials for all of the
criminal cases that come through the justice system. But this lack of
capacity does not explain how few trials
we have now. In 1990, more than 7,800 criminal trials were held in
federal court. By 2016, that number fell to fewer than 1,900. In other
words, we have made it so easy for prosecutors to pressure defendants
into pleading guilty that we have less than a quarter of the criminal
trials that we had 30 years ago, even though we have more judges and
more prosecutors now than we did then. So resources can’t explain the
policies that we have adopted to pressure nearly every defendant to
plead guilty. Even if we accept the resources-argument logic, we could
still protect the constitutional rights of thousands more Americans each
year.
But is the resources argument right to begin with? Of course, many
Americans want government to be efficient and keep costs down. But
efficiency in the criminal-justice system has a serious downside: The
more easily and cheaply it can be run, the more people end up in it.
Unfortunately, the United States has been incredibly efficient at
locking people up. As a result, we are the world’s leader in imprisoning
our citizens. … So maybe we should be thinking about how we can make
our system less efficient.
It isn’t too late for the country to change its course. The rise of
originalism—the theory that the Constitution should be interpreted as it
was understood when it was first written—could hold the solution to
plea bargaining and mass incarceration. Good evidence suggests that the
people who founded this country thought that plea bargaining should be
prohibited.
… But adopting an originalist view of the Constitution isn’t necessary to
reject the constitutionality of plea bargaining and the trial penalty.
No matter what your constitutional theory of interpretation, punishing
people for exercising their constitutional rights is entirely
incompatible with the very idea of a constitutional right.
After you read the inhumane treatment that the January 6 political prisoners have been undergoing for nearly a year "as
subhuman", see if Abraham Lincoln did not predict the opposition's condescending (and, frankly, hateful) attitude as far back as 1860.
released “Unusually Cruel — An Eyewitness Report From Inside The DC Jail,” her report about what she saw when she was finally allowed to meet the January 6 political prisoners.
Reps. Greene, Gohmert, Gaetz, and Gosar tried, unsuccessfully, to
visit the January 6 political prisoners twice earlier this year. … Greene and Gohmert (and their respective staffs) finally got to tour
the D.C. jail where the J6 inmates are held, though the jail staff DID
try to end the tour of the jail before the reps got to meet the
political prisoners.
“What is there to hide?” Gohmert pressed. “The complaint has been that they’ve been treated
differently than the other detainees. I thought tonight we were going to find out.”
At that point, the tour had already lasted two hours and Greene and
Gohmert hadn’t yet met a single J6 inmate. After an 11-minute
discussion, the tour went forward.
Greene and Gohmert met with roughly 40 J6 inmates, in what Greene
described as a noticeably older part of the prison, which appeared to
have not been updated recently, unlike the rest of the prison.
… Greene’s report is disturbing and damning. It highlights the brutal
and unconstitutional treatment of J6 prisoners at the hands of Biden’s
legal system. J6 inmates have been beaten. The prisoners complain of
chemicals and pubic hair in their food.
The conclusion to her report starts with the following,
The congressional visit to the D.C. jail on November 4
unquestionably proved that there is a twotrack justice system in the
United States. This two-tiered system is not based on race, violence, or
conviction of crime, but politics.
It would be too much of a stretch to compare Andersonville (to use another Civil War-era image) to "the DC Gulag", but still, when you hear how rights are being violated by Democrats or leftists, check out if the portrait of one of the wardens isn't at least partly reminiscent of the CSA's Commandant Henry Wirz…
Especially while reading Kathleen Landerkin's tweets calling Trump and/or his supporters — i.e., the warden's current prisoners — "morons," "people who conspired with the traitors," and persons who are worse than "foreign terrorists."
Future court filings, interviews, and
security footage will slowly reveal to the public how law enforcement,
beginning at around 1 p.m. that day and continuing for hours, attacked
and beat American citizens who dared to protest the election of Joe
Biden.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
(R-Ga.) and 13 other Republicans are calling for the immediate
termination of the deputy warden in charge of inmates connected to the
Jan. 6 riot, who are being held inside a Washington, D.C. jail.
"While
most of these inmates have no prior criminal history and have yet to be
convicted of any crime, Landerkin is allowing them to be treated as
subhuman," Greene wrote in the letter Thursday signed by fellow
Republican Reps. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Andy Harris (Md.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo.).
Deputy
Warden Kathleen Landerkin, the person in charge of J6 pre-trial
detainees is an unhinged left-wing ideologue who despises President Trump, his supporters, and Republicans.
… The letter criticized Landerkin for tweets it said she had sent calling
Trump a "pig," and "equating Christians to the Ku Klux Klan," as well as
saying Ashli Babbit, a rioter who was killed on Jan. 6, "was
responsible for being shot.
So where does Abraham Lincoln and his 1860 speech fit into all this?
And 160 years ago, when an Illinois Republican felt the necessity to
address himself to Southerners and Democrats (during his Cooper Union
speech in February 1860), guess which term Abe Lincoln reached for:
…when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as
reptiles [!], or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a
hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to [Republicans].
In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an
unconditional condemnation of [Republicanism] as the first thing to be
attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an
indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be
admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be
prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to
us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and
specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or
justify.
"Reptiles, outlaws, pirates, murderers"… How often have Republicans been
called (domestic) terrorists in the past seven years? (And in the years, in the
decades, before that?)
Who would want to be patient long enough to hear such heinous beings deny or
justify? (Ain't that true, MainStream Media?) Who wouldn't want to punish such monsters?
… the people in charge of diverting your attention are working overtime right now
… political parties, like markets, often seem the strongest right before
they collapsed. The problem is, at this moment, the Democratic Party is
still in power, and that's a very bad combination for the rest of us.
Regimes in decline tend to become dangerous. As they weaken, they get
increasingly desperate and ruthless. They've been rejected by voters.
Democracy doesn't work for them anymore. That means they can no longer
operate within democratic boundaries and hope to stay in power. So
inevitably, they swerve outside those boundaries. Instead of trying to
convince the public to support them, that's a democracy, they invent
domestic enemies and national panics to keep themselves in charge. And
that's exactly what we're watching happen right now.
… CNN and its masters in the Democratic Party have identified the real
villain to blame for [the latest COVID outbreak]. And you'll know, even before we tell
you that it's not Pfizer, it's not the government of China. It's
America's working class, a group now known as "The Unvaccinated." On
Thursday, Joe Biden informed us that these people will die for what
they've done.
… Biden's advisers want you looking elsewhere. And to get you looking
elsewhere, they are working to create a kulak class — a group of reviled
subhumans at the rest of us are free to hate and mock and whose deaths
were allowed to root for. That's the unvaccinated.
When David
Frum tells you we should let the unvaccinated just die, he's not alone.
That is not the official position of the Democratic Party. If you get
COVID in you’re unvaccinated, it is immoral for you to go to the
hospital, you're overcrowding it. And we need that space for the many
people who've taken the COVID vaccine and are now sick from COVID.
That's what the president United States just said on Thursday.
… whatever personal decisions about the vaccine or COVID or how many masks
you wear, if any, know what you're watching here. This is not a public
health campaign designed to save you from a variant that has not killed a
single confirmed American. Sorry, it has not. No. So, what is this?
These are the muscle spasms of a dying political party. The people in
charge are on their way out. Unfortunately, they can still hurt you.
America has no enemies, we are told. All of humanity could easily live as brethren. With one exception. America's conservatives and, on a larger scale, the American people.
They hate you.
And they want you dead.
“We’re in a war, and it’s a war to the death. Now they [the Left] actually admit it. They used to pretend. Not anymore.”
Here we are, coming up on the second anniversary of “two weeks to slow
the spread” of a flu-like virus most likely hatched in a Chinese
Communist laboratory in Wuhan, with a little help from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the American taxpayer, and the dreaded COVID-19 chest cold has conquered the planet, instilling fear and loathing in weak minds whenever and wherever it appears in any of its Transformers-like, constantly mutating configurations.
… The irony is, had the novel coronavirus been treated the same way as
its immediate predecessors, including SARS, the H1N1 pandemic of 2009,
and the Hong Kong flu of 1968, no one would be talking about it, there
would have been no lockdowns, no masks, no ruination of the economy, no
destruction of the travel industry, no stealth takeover of private
medicine and, most important, no unconstitutional loss of personal
liberty.
But the very act of neurotically obsessing over it has triggered and
weaponized the critter and, a la Heisenberg, transformed it from a bug
that preyed on old people into the Thing that Devoured the Planet.
Ever since the politically conveniently timed appearance of the CCP virus
early in 2020, Fauci and his coevals at various government “health”
agencies have whipsawed the American public with their erratic,
contradictory, and wholly unscientific pronouncements, all in the
interest of aggrandizing more power.
These [Transformers-like] Decepticons managed to take down the gullible Trump
administration, institutionalize their priorities for controlling the
population by nullifying the Bill of Rights, helping to install Joe
Biden, and giving a big fat Christmas present to the pharmaceutical
companies—which have profited handsomely from the pandemic.
… A “disease” that is in many cases strikingly asymptomatic, whose
lethality (such as it was and depending on who’s counting and how) is
counted by “cases” (a meaningless statistic), whose survival rate has
always been near 99 percent for the vast majority of the world’s
population doesn’t seem like much of a threat in the cosmic scheme of
things.
Nor does a “vaccine” that not only doesn’t prevent you from getting the bug but permits “breakthrough” infections and also has significant side effects seem like much of a vaccine.
But from the beginning the Democrat-Media Complex has gone all-in on
apocalyptic hysteria as governments around the globe have vowed to
“defeat” the virus, and some—like the newly formed police states of
Australia and New Zealand—even articulating an impossible “zero COVID”
policy.
… As it happens, Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr., has addressed these issues and more in a new book, “The Real
Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy
and Public Health,” a no-holds barred, full-frontal attack on Fauci
& Co. It’s a bracing read.
“Suddenly, trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to
generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd
seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass
public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly
licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it
unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.
“Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the
well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and
censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of
science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use
of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these
unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced
orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating.
… Enough is enough. After two years of poisonous squid ink regarding the
origins of the disease and its dangers, it’s time to put away the
electron microscope, back away from the Petri dish, and just ignore
Omicron
… trust evaporates when journalistic entities embrace political projects
… Because the [New York] Times ignored
today’s most eminent relevant scholars — e.g., Brown University’s
Gordon Wood, Princeton’s James McPherson and Sean Wilentz and Allen Guelzo, City University of New York’s James Oakes, Columbia’s Barbara Fields — the project’s hectoring tone and ideological ax-grinding are unsurprising.
… The project’s purpose is to displace the nation’s actual 1776 founding,
thereby draining from America’s story the moral majesty of the first
modern nation’s Enlightenment precepts proclaimed in the Declaration of
Independence and implemented by the Constitution. Although
monomaniacally focused on slavery, the Times’s project completely misses
the most salient point:
The phenomenon of slavery was millennia old in 1776, but as Gordon Wood says, “It’s the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world.” Sean Wilentz (see his 2018 book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding”) correctly insists that
what “originated in America” was “organized anti-slavery politics,” and
it did so because of those Enlightenment precepts in the Declaration’s
first two paragraphs.
… Has … the slogan of the party governing Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984” [“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”] supplanted “All the news that’s fit to print” as the Times’s credo?
What is stunning is that George Will can see through the 1619 Project, and that so clearly, while he is still blind-sided regarding Donald Trump, the January 6 "riots", and the like.
Still, on this, the shortest day in the year, let George and his December 2021 column have his/their time in the sunshine:
The [New York] Times’s original splashy assertion – slightly fudgedafter the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize
– was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our
history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to
preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775
British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.
That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.
… Addressing the American Council of Trustees and Alumni last month, Gordon S. Wood,
today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding, dissected the 1619
Project’s contentions. When the Revolution erupted, Britain “was not
threatening to abolish slavery in its empire,” which included lucrative,
slavery-dependent sugar-producing colonies in the Caribbean. Wood
added:
“If the Virginian slaveholders had been frightened of British
abolitionism, why only eight years after the war ended would the board
of visitors or the trustees of the College of William & Mary,
wealthy slaveholders all, award an honorary degree to Granville Sharp,
the leading British abolitionist at the time? Had they changed their
minds so quickly? ... The New York Times has no accurate knowledge of
Virginia’s Revolutionary culture and cannot begin to answer these
questions.” The Times’s political agenda requires ignoring what Wood
knows:
“It
was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776.
... Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding
governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States
became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the
despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history
completely backwards.”
Wood’s doctoral dissertation adviser in 1960 to 1964 was Bernard Bailyn, the title of whose best-known book,
“The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” conveys a
refutation of the 1619 Project’s premise that the Revolution originated
from base economic motives.
… The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded
in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those
progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains
saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental;
it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the
agenda of clearing away all impediments, intellectual and institutional,
to — in progressivism’s vocabulary — the “transformation” of the
nation. The United States will be built back better when it has been
instructed to be ashamed of itself and is eager to discard its
disreputable heritage.
The 1619 Project aims to erase (in Wood’s words) “the Revolution and the
principles that it articulated – liberty, equality and the well-being
of ordinary people.” These ideas are, as Wood says, the adhesives that
bind our exceptional nation whose people have shared principles, not a
shared ancestry.
The Times says
“nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from
“slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s
historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is
maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to
construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of
what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.
As Glenn Reynolds reminds us, regularly (with good reason),
The 1619 Project is the kind of false history that a conqueror would impose on a defeated people to break its will.
… On some level, the resources argument is convincing. It is certainly true that our courts could not possibly hold trials for all of the criminal cases that come through the justice system. But this lack of capacity does not explain how few trials we have now. In 1990, more than 7,800 criminal trials were held in federal court. By 2016, that number fell to fewer than 1,900. In other words, we have made it so easy for prosecutors to pressure defendants into pleading guilty that we have less than a quarter of the criminal trials that we had 30 years ago, even though we have more judges and more prosecutors now than we did then. So resources can’t explain the policies that we have adopted to pressure nearly every defendant to plead guilty. Even if we accept the resources-argument logic, we could still protect the constitutional rights of thousands more Americans each year.
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