Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The national ICE raids delayed from a couple weeks ago are now back on in full force and set for this weekend.

Nationwide raids to arrest thousands of members of undocumented families have been scheduled to begin Sunday, according to two current and one former homeland security officials, moving forward with a rapidly changing operation, the final details of which remain in flux. The operation, backed by President Trump, had been postponed, partly because of resistance among officials at his own immigration agency.

The raids, which will be conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over multiple days, will include “collateral” deportations, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the preliminary stage of the operation. In those deportations, the authorities might detain immigrants who happened to be on the scene, even though they were not targets of the raids.

When possible, family members who are arrested together will be held in family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania. But because of space limitations, some might end up staying in hotel rooms until their travel documents can be prepared. ICE’s goal is to deport the families as quickly as possible.

The officials said ICE agents were targeting at least 2,000 immigrants who have been ordered deported — some as a result of their failure to appear in court — but who remain in the country illegally. The operation is expected to take place in at least 10 major cities.

The families being targeted crossed the border recently: The Trump administration expedited their immigration proceedings last fall. In February, many of those immigrants were given notice to report to an ICE office and leave the United States, the homeland security officials said.

Matthew Bourke, an ICE spokesman, said in a statement on Wednesday that the agency would not comment on specific details related to enforcement operations, to ensure the safety and security of agency personnel.

The threat of deportation has rattled immigrant communities across the country, prompted backlash from local politicians and police officials and stoked division inside the Department of Homeland Security — the agency that is charged with carrying out the deportations. The Trump administration’s goal is to use the operation as a show of force to deter families from approaching the southwestern border, the officials said.

Agents have expressed apprehensions about arresting babies and young children, officials have said. The agents have also noted that the operation might have limited success because word has already spread among immigrant communities about how to avoid arrest — namely, by refusing to open the door when an agent approaches one’s home. ICE agents are not legally allowed to forcibly enter a home.

Immigration defense lawyers are likely to file motions to reopen the families’ immigration cases, which would significantly delay, if not stop altogether, their removal from the United States.

Let's get this straight, these are trial runs of the logistics of much larger raids that will be constantly run around the country.  These raids are a weapon of fear and terror being conducted in our name.  People are going to be hurt and/or killed during these.

In other words, we're taking a major move towards Step 8 of the ten stages of genocide: Persecution.

Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. In state sponsored genocide, members of victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is often expropriated. Sometimes they are even segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. They are deliberately deprived of resources such as water or food in order to slowly destroy them. Programs are implemented to prevent procreation through forced sterilization or abortions. Children are forcibly taken from their parents. The victim group’s basic human rights become systematically abused through extrajudicial killings, torture and forced displacement. Genocidal massacres begin. They are acts of genocide because they intentionally destroy part of a group. The perpetrators watch for whether such massacres meet any international reaction. If not, they realize that that the international community will again be bystanders and permit another genocide.

At this stage, a Genocide Emergency must be declared. If the political will of the great powers, regional alliances, or U.N. Security Council or the U.N. General Assembly can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance provided to the victim group to prepare for its self-defense. Humanitarian assistance should be organized by the U.N. and private relief groups for the inevitable tide of refugees to come.

And yes, people are dying in these camps.  People will die in these raids.  People will continue to die.

This is happening here, now.

The Twitter Twit Army

Donald Trump today gathered his most influential social media sycophants for a White House "summit" that involved rewarding the people who spread hateful, racist, and sexist memes across the planet, and made a point not to invite Twitter or Facebook themselves to his little digital hate rally.

The White House has kept quiet about the guest list. But it seems to consist of the Trump Twitterverse, conservative social media personalities who orbit around Trump's Twitter star.

And yet, Trump has attacked those same social media platforms that have been so key to his success.

"You look at Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants, and I've made it clear that we as a country cannot tolerate political censorship, blacklisting and rigged search results," the president said last year.

In May, Facebook banned several high-profile social media personalities who they say violated their policies against hate speech that engages in violence, including right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; extremists Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer and Joseph Watson, who works for Jones' Infowars; and white supremacist Paul Nehlen, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 and 2018. The platform also banned Infowars, as well as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Twitter had already banned several of these personalities.

Google, Facebook and Twitter all deny that they censor conservatives on their platforms, but a lot of conservatives don't believe that.

Conservative talk show host Bill Mitchell is one of them. He blames Twitter's algorithm for some of his followers not being able to see his tweets. He'll be attending Thursday's social media summit, and he hopes they talk about how social media has become the modern public square and the responsibilities that come with that.

"If you become the public square, you really need to offer First Amendment protections to people," Mitchell said to NPR. "Where everybody can have free and open speech. Let's have the debate. And may the best man win."

What the Trumpies here mean by free speech is "a government takeover of all social media so that America has to see our photoshopped images of various Democrats going into gas chambers"  and I expect it will happen by executive fiat.

At the very least, Trump is telling these digital meme soldiers that if they get blocked to contact the White House for backup.  Gotta have that propaganda flow freely, after all.

It's Time To Ditch Mitch, Con't

Amy McGrath is running for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat, but in a state where Donald Trump won by 30 points, she found out in less than 24 hours that threading the "Trump good/Mitch bad" needle is next to impossible in her first major interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal.

CJ: One of the centerpieces for Sen. McConnell's reelection appears to be his work in reshaping the U.S. judiciary. If you had been a senator, would you have voted for Brett Kavanaugh to be on the Supreme Court — why or why not?

McGrath: Well, that's a good question. I didn't listen to all of the hearings. I don't think there was anything, and I'm not a lawyer or a senator on the Judiciary Committee, so I don't know the criteria. But I was very concerned about Judge Kavanaugh, what I felt like were the far-right stances that he had. However, there was nothing in his record that I think would disqualify him in any way. And the fact is when you have the president and the Senate, this is our system and so I don't think there was anything that would have disqualified him in my mind.

CJ: Did the Democrats treat him unfairly with the accusations that were against him waiting until the last minute, as some said, to try and delay the hearings?

McGrath: The Supreme Court nominees are a lifetime appointment, and I think there needs to be a lot scrutiny for lifetime appointments. I don't fault anyone for bringing up things that could give folks pause about the character of someone getting a lifetime appointment.

CJ: Did you think Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's accusation was credible?

McGrath: Yeah, I think it's credible. I think this is — I think many Republicans thought it was credible. And —

CJ: That wasn't disqualifying then?

McGrath: Well, I mean I think again, I think it's credible but given the amount of time that lapsed in between and from a judicial standpoint, I don't think it would really disqualify him.

CJ: So you would have voted for him to be on the Supreme Court?

McGrath: You know, I think that with Judge Kavanaugh, yeah, I probably would have voted for him.

(Around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, McGrath tweeted that upon further reflection, she would not have voted to confirm Kavanaugh.)

Surprise!

Seriously, as a Democrat, Mitch engineering the theft of not one, but two Supreme Court seats should be an ironclad reason as to why McConnell cannot be allowed to continue to represent the state, and if McGrath can't take a solid side on that, then...Trump or no Trump, it's gonna be a terrible time for her.

It's gonna be a long 15 months.

StupidiNews!

• Louisiana's coast is under a hurricane watch as torrential rain is flooding parts of New Orleans while Tropical Storm Berry is expected to form and reach hurricane status Thursday.
• Donald Trump says economic sanctions against Iran will be "increased substantially" as British naval ships warned off several smaller Iranian boats in the Strait of Hormuz. 
• A second US judge has blocked the Trump regime from replacing its entire legal team in the US Census citizenship question case, ruling the government had not provided any reason for the change.
• Pension legislation in Brazil has passed the country's lower house by a substantial margin, supporters say the bill has a good chance in the upper chamber against President Bolsonaro's protests.
• AT&T says it will add automated fraud and spam call alerts to mobile lines for free, but blocking spam calls will require a $4 per month fee.

Last Call For The Trump Trafficking Jam

Not only will current Trump regime Labor Secretary Alex Acosta not be fired because of his sweetheart deal with convicted billionaire pedophile, human trafficker, and inhuman monster Jeffrey Epstein a decade ago, but Acosta is once again trying to dismantle the budget to stop human traffickers like Epstein by slashing funds by 80 percent in Trump's proposed 2020 budget plan.

The International Labor Affairs Bureau’s office of child labor, forced labor and human trafficking has several functions, including producing an annual authoritative, congressionally mandated report on child labor and human trafficking globally as well as maintaining a list of products and source countries that the office has reason to believe use child and forced labor. It also helps fund programs in countries through civil society organizations and others non-governmental groups to address the root of child labor and trafficking, according to a source with knowledge of the bureau’s operation.

The Department of Labor did not respond to a request for comment as to why this program chosen for cuts, but a 2017 press release announcing the department’s 2018 budget request states the government will save, “$68 million by refocusing the Bureau of International Labor Affairs on ensuring that U.S. trade agreements are fair for American workers.”

In an interview on Wednesday, [Democratic Rep. Katherine] Clark said the attempt to defund this program “ speaks to the priorities of this administration and specifically the Secretary Acosta that they would in essence make the bureau inoperable.”

“This is the program within the Department of Labor that really promotes a fair global playing field for workers in the United States and specifically it does it by looking at forced labor for children and human trafficking all that sexual exploitation that sadly we see too often,” she said.

She added, “What it showed me is that Secretary Acosta has a pattern of not recognizing the priority of these issues. He certainly did that in Florida when he chose the powerful and the wealthy over child victims and a 53-page indictment that had been put together by his office."

Advocates have also decried recent decision by the Department of Labor to stop issuing certain visas to victims of human trafficking or other workplace crimes until the victims consult with another law enforcement agency like the FBI.

Erika Gonzalez, an attorney with the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, told The Daily Beast the change means victims will have to jump through “a lot more hoops” to get the relief they need. She compared the policy change to the Epstein plea deal, which Acosta did not clear with the billionaire’s victims before accepting.

“What the Epstein case shows is when these policies around human trafficking are implemented, they’re not necessarily considerate of the impact on the victims themselves,” Gonzalez said. “With the Department of Labor asking the FBI to look into [workplace violations] first, they’re adding another barrier for victims of trafficking to access the services the Department of Labor has.”

Other anti-trafficking organizations went further, saying the Epstein case shattered their trust in Acosta’s ability to protect victims of sex and labor exploitation. ECPAT-USA, and anti-child-trafficking organization, wrote a letter to Trump this week calling for Acosta to be fired.

“How can you in good faith be trusted to carry out labor laws when you can’t even enforce sex trafficking laws among children?” Joe Huang-Racalto, ECPAT’s government relations director, told The Daily Beast.

“With the scourge of labor trafficking in this country, the refusal to address recruiter fees, and companies that aren’t playing by the rules, we should [be able to] depend on the Secretary to enforce them—and we don’t.”

He's not going to.  Trump hired Acosta specifically because he was going to dismantle the agency responsible for human trafficking enforcement, so that the powerful could continue to exploit children.  The sheer amount of evil would be laughable if it wasn't for how serious the situation is.

This is the Trump regime.  We spend too much money on preventing child trafficking, I guess.

This is America, and half of us will vote for him anyway.

Bangers And Mashed

Sir Kim Darroch, the UK Ambassador to the US, has quit his post after diplomatic cables were leaked over the weekend showing he considered the Trump regime to be "inept".

Kim Darroch submitted his resignation on Wednesday as Britain’s ambassador to the United States, following the leak of his candid observations about the Trump administration and the subsequent fierce criticism of him and the British government from President Trump.

“Since the leak of official documents from this embassy there has been a great deal of speculation surrounding my position and the duration of my remaining term as ambassador,” Mr. Darroch said in his resignation letter. “I want to put an end to that speculation. The current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would like.”
“Although my posting is not due to end until the end of this year, I believe in the current circumstances the responsible course is to allow the appointment of a new ambassador,” Mr. Darroch wrote.

On Monday, Mr. Trump said the White House would no longer deal with Mr. Darroch after the leak of confidential emails written by the ambassador that had described the Trump administration as “clumsy and inept.”
Mr. Trump also accused Prime Minister Theresa May of ignoring his advice and mismanaging Britain’s tortured efforts to leave the European Union, a departure now delayed at least until the end of October. As for Mr. Darroch, the president described him as “wacky,” a “very stupid guy,” and a “pompous fool.”

The dispute has cast a shadow over ties between London and Washington and has taken center stage in the contest to succeed Mrs. May as prime minister.

During a TV debate Tuesday night, Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and favorite to succeed Mrs. May, refused several opportunities to say that he would keep Mr. Darroch in his post until a scheduled departure date in January. He also declined to criticize Mr. Trump and played down the rift.

His comments probably made Mr. Darroch’s position untenable, given that Mr. Johnson is the clear front-runner in the contest and is likely to become prime minister later this month.

By contrast, the rival candidate, Jeremy Hunt, the current foreign secretary, described Mr. Trump’s comments as “unacceptable” and said that he would keep Mr. Darroch in his job.

I absolutely believe Boris Johnson's allies leaked those cables to the British press.  Johnson's not only measuring the drapes at 10 Downing Street, he's already cleaning house of anyone who could cause problems between himself and Dear Leader Trump.   Johnson says he'll hunt down whoever the leakers were, but I believe that about as far as Theresa May can throw me.

The good news is that Brexit will eventually finish off Johnson's career as well as May's, and maybe our friends across the pond can get it together.

Alas, we're still stuck with the Orange Imbecile.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

At the behest of Dear Leader, Attorney General Bill Barr continues his quest to find reasons to punish those who dared to investigate Donald Trump, and while Trump was in the UK last month, he had his goons grill British agent Christopher Steele over his now infamous dossier last month for a 16-hour London session, but Steele apparently remained as cool as a North Sea spring.

Christopher Steele, the former British spy behind the infamous “dossier” on President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, was interviewed for 16 hours in June by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The interview is part of an ongoing investigation that the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has been conducting for the past year. Specifically, Horowitz has been examining the FBI’s efforts to surveil a one-time Trump campaign adviser based in part on information from Steele, an ex-British MI6 agent who had worked with the bureau as a confidential source since 2010.

Horowitz’s team has been intensely focused on gauging Steele’s credibility as a source for the bureau. But Steele was initially reluctant to speak with the American investigators because of the potential impropriety of his involvement in an internal DOJ probe as a foreign national and retired British intelligence agent.

Steele’s allies have also repeatedly noted that the dossier was not the original basis for the FBI’s probe into Trump and Russia.

The extensive, two-day interview took place in London while Trump was in Britain for a state visit, the sources said, and delved into Steele’s extensive work on Russian interference efforts globally, his intelligence-collection methods and his findings about Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who the FBI ultimately surveilled. The FBI’s decision to seek a surveillance warrant against Page — a warrant they applied for and obtained after Page had already left the campaign — is the chief focus of the probe by Horowitz.

The interview was contentious at first, the sources added, but investigators ultimately found Steele’s testimony credible and even surprising. The takeaway has irked some U.S. officials interviewed as part of the probe — they argue that it shouldn’t have taken a foreign national to convince the inspector general that the FBI acted properly in 2016. Steele’s American lawyer was present for the conversation.

Oops.  It's almost like unlike the Barr DoJ, Steele and the FBI are career professionals instead of flunkies and idiots. Steele not only survived, he actually convinced the agents interrogating him that he was right about Trump.

No wonder we didn't hear about this when it happened.

It didn't fit the narrative.

StupidiNews!

• Cleveland Clinic doctors have delivered a healthy baby from a woman with a transplanted uterus, a first for the US as the woman has the transplant to correct uterine factor infertility.
• Nicki Minaj has cancelled a concert in Saudi Arabia that was scheduled for next week as activists blasted the superstar on social media for rewarding the country's human rights abuses.
• House Democrats are moving to subpoena multiple Trump White House aides and advisers, as the battle over testimony over the Mueller probe continues.
• In a major setback for the Trump regime, a federal judge has denied the Justice Department's request for new lawyers on the 2020 Census citizenship question case.
• Legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin is looking to revitalize NASA as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing arrives next week.

Last Call For Coming For Your Healthcare, Again, Con't

A three-judge appellate panel heard augments today by several Republican attorneys general that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, and the two GOP-appointed judges on the panel appeared to have heavy skepticism that the law should be allowed to continue.

A federal appeals court panel grilled Democratic attorneys general on Tuesday about whether Obamacare violates the U.S. Constitution, as it weighs whether to uphold a Texas judge’s ruling striking down the landmark healthcare reform law.

The judges focused on whether the 2010 Affordable Care Act lost its justification after Republican President Donald Trump in 2017 signed a law that eliminated a tax penalty used to enforce the ACA’s mandate that all Americans buy health insurance.
Republicans have repeatedly tried and failed to repeal Obamacare since its 2010 passage. The Justice Department would normally defend a federal law, but the Trump administration has declined to take that position against a challenge by 18 Republican-led states.

“If you no longer have a tax, why isn’t it unconstitutional?” Judge Jennifer Elrod, who was appointed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals by Republican President George W. Bush, asked attorneys for the Democratic officials defending the law during a hearing in New Orleans.

A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general led by California’s Xavier Becerra stepped up to defend the law. The U.S. House of Representatives intervened after Democrats won control in November’s elections during which many focused their campaigns on defending Obamacare.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is not expected to decide on Tuesday whether to overturn or uphold the ruling by a federal judge in Texas last year that the entire ACA was unconstitutional.

An appellate ruling declaring Obamacare unconstitutional could prompt an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, opening the door for the top court to take up the issue in the midst of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

Republicans have been trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act for nine years now.  Making health care and millions of Trump voters losing health coverage the top issue of 2020 seems like a pretty stupid idea, but Republicans are clearly counting on Democrats to vote to overturn it and surrender to a GOP "replacement" bill rather than risk a loss at SCOTUS, where this will be headed either way.

We'll see what the judges do later this year, and how quickly this case gets to SCOTUS.

It's Time To Ditch Mitch

Amy McGrath is officially entering the 2020 Senate race to unseat Mitch McConnell.

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot who rose to national prominence last year in her failed campaign for Congress against Republican Andy Barr, is turning her sights on a new target: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

In a three-minute video released Tuesday, McGrath said McConnell has "bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise." 

"I'm running for Senate because it shouldn't be like this," McGrath added. 

McGrath's candidacy marks a significant recruiting coup for Democrats. She emerged as an unlikely fundraising juggernaut in her congressional race, bringing in millions of dollars after her campaign released a biographical video that went viral, and becoming a Democratic celebrity in the process. 

McGrath will have her work cut out for her, however. President Donald Trump won Kentucky by nearly 30 points in 2016, and his presence at the top of the ticket in 2020 will likely help drive Republican voters to the polls 

McGrath failed to win her House race in 2018 against Barr, who won by about 3 points, despite being outspent by McGrath by nearly $3 million. 

In the race against McConnell, McGrath appears poised to run as a moderate seeking to break the partisan gridlock in Washington. In an interview Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," McGrath said she had watched the Democratic presidential debate and was concerned that many candidates were positioning themselves too far to the left on issues like health care. 

Meanwhile, McConnell has shown himself to be a canny and ruthless opponent. In 2014, he beat back a much-hyped rival, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, in a 15-point victory. 

McConnell's team welcomed the challenge from McGrath. 

"Amy McGrath lost her only race in a Democratic wave election because she is an extreme liberal who is far out of touch with Kentuckians," said McConnell campaign manager Kevin Golden. "Comparing President Trump's election to 9/11, endorsing a government takeover of healthcare, and calling the wall 'stupid' is a heckuva platform that we will be delighted to discuss over the next sixteen months." 

On "Morning Joe," McGrath conceded that McConnell "has been formidable" after more than three decades in the Senate. But, she added, "this is a different race." 

"The things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done," McGrath said. "He's not able to get it done because of Mitch McConnell."

Here's McGrath's announcement video, and it's a great one.




I don't know if she can win. I don't know if any Kentucky Democrat can beat Mitch McConnell. But we have to try, and McGrath is the best chance we've had in a while.  She still has to get past the primary, but she's got my vote already for that next May.

But Mitch now has 15 months to call her extreme and socialist and weak and to fill voters' heads with the glory of defending Trumpland from the Evil AOC menace, and in a state where Trump won by nearly 30 points, he can all but say "You're not seriously going to elect this bitch over me, right?" and get away with it.

But you want the plan to get rid of Mitch McConnell?  Her name is Amy McGrath.

Help her win.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Why yes, the Russians absolutely created the idiotic and completely false Seth Rich conspiracy theory to hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the corrupt GOP and their FOX media arm gladly made themselves accomplices in helping a foreign power sabotage our elections in order to gain power.

In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.

“To me, having a foreign intelligence agency set up one of my decedents with lies and planting false stories, to me that’s pretty outrageous,” said Deborah Sines, the former assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich case until her retirement last year. “Maybe other people don’t think it’s that outrageous. I did ... once it became clear to me that this was coming from the SVR, then that triggers a lot of very serious [questions about] ‘What do I do with this?’”

The previously unreported role of Russian intelligence in creating and fostering one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election is disclosed in “Yahoo News presents: Conspiracyland,” a six-part series by the news organization’s podcast “Skullduggery” that debuts this week on the third anniversary of Rich’s murder.

The Russian effort to exploit Rich’s tragic death didn’t stop with the fake SVR bulletin. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks. It was an idea first floated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who on Aug. 9, 2016, announced a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder, saying — somewhat cryptically — that “our sources take risks.”

At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. IRA-created fake accounts, masquerading as those of American citizens or political groups, tweeted and retweeted more than 2,000 times about Rich, helping to keep the bogus claims about his death in the social media bloodstream, according to an analysis of a database of Russia troll accounts by Yahoo News.
Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, Sines, the former prosecutor, said that the Russian conspiracy-mongering vastly complicated her efforts to solve the murder by forcing her and the Washington, D.C., police department to investigate a blizzard of false allegations in order to make sure there was nothing to any of them. “To waste your time investigating BS is just horrible,” said Sines.

The Russian-inspired conspiracy theories also have had a devastating effect on the Rich family, especially after the theories migrated to alt-right websites and, ultimately, primetime Fox News shows. As they did so, there were repeated suggestions by alt-right commentators that the DNC staffer’s parents and brother were concealing information about his conduct.

“You’re used, you’re lied to, you’re a pawn in your own son’s death,” said Mary Rich, Seth Rich’s mother, who, along with her husband, Joel, was interviewed for the podcast. “I wish they had the chance to experience the hell we have gone through. Because this is worse than losing my son the first time. This is like losing him all over again.”

The Russians did this to hurt Clinton and to help get their preferred candidate, Donald Trump, into the White House.  The entire Republican Party went along.  And we knew this a year ago.

But oh well, it doesn't matter, right?

Let's not strengthen our election defenses and media against Russian propaganda to help Trump.

Last Call For Trumping The Center

NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie turns the tables on the whole "Why aren't Democrats moving to the center that Trump is leaving behind" nonsense in the Village press by being just about the first person to ask "Why isn't Donald Trump tacking to the center?"

What is President Trump going to do to win the voters who rejected him in 2016?

It’s a serious question. Roughly 137 million people voted in the last presidential election. Most of them — about 74 million people, or 54 percent of all ballots cast — did not vote for Trump. His self-proclaimed “massive landslide” rests on a thin margin of victory in just three states.

Once in office, Trump abandoned the heterodox Republicanism of his campaign for hard-right policies opposed by most Americans. He fought to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When that failed, he pushed for an unpopular upper-income tax cut. He reveled in cruelty toward immigrants and took the side of racist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va. He governs for his base alone, with no sense or understanding of the collective good.

“I have a base that’s a phenomenal — it’s just a phenomenal base,” Trump said in a recent interview with Time magazine. “It’s a very loyal base and I’m loyal to them also.” When asked if he should reach beyond his supporters, he answered simply, “ I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.”

As a result, the narrow coalition that put him in office is even narrower. The 2018 backlash that gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives was built on major gains in Republican-leaning suburbs throughout the country, as a small but still substantial number of 2016 Trump voters either cast a ballot for Democrats or didn’t vote at all.

Trump’s approval rating is nearly 10 points under water, meaning that over all, people disapprove of his performance as president by a large margin (52.3 to 42.7 percent); in several recent polls he loses hypothetical matchups with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg; and as of April, 52 percent of registered voters said they “definitely” wouldn’t vote for him in 2020. He still has the economy on his side, but if the president doesn’t try to reach out to voters outside of his base — if he doesn’t try to appeal to Democrats and Republicans who rejected him in 2016 — there’s a good chance he’ll lose re-election.

It's a fabulous work, made all the more poignant by the fact that if we had a press actually capable of assigning agency and responsibility for Trump alienating the majority of Americans rather than assigning it solely to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama.

Our press refuses to treat Trump like an adult, instead making it all the Dems' fault for not handling him.  Glad to see anybody, anybody at all, handling it differently.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Trump regime Attorney General William Barr says the White House can simply ignore last month's Supreme Court ruling stopping the government from adding a citizenship question on to the 2020 Census, and will promptly begin the process of doing so.

Attorney General William Barr said Monday that he believes the Trump administration can legally add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, though the Supreme Court ruled against its inclusion last month.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said he has been in regular contact with President Trump about the question, which the president is determined to see featured on the decennial survey.

“I agree with him that the Supreme Court decision was wrong,” Barr told the AP. The attorney general added that he thinks there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”

Barr declined to provide further details to the wire service on how the question will be added to the census.

However, the AP cited a senior official who said President Trump is expected to issue a presidential memorandum to the Commerce Department directing them to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census. Action is expected to be taken in the coming days.

So unless the courts intervene again, we have zero rule of law anymore, and Trump will simply issue executive orders to do whatever he wants.  Even if SCOTUS does get involved, there's a better-than-even chance that Chief Justice Roberts will defer to the executive, and the plan to permanently rig the election in favor of the party of white supremacy will continue.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Yes, the US federal government is using state DMV data to identify you and facial recognition software to track you on a regular basis.

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through hundreds of millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state Department of Motor Vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other “biometric data” taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of a vast majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime.

Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool.

“Law enforcement’s access of state databases,” particularly DMV databases, is “often done in the shadows with no consent,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement to The Post.

Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at the use of driver’s license photos in federal facial-recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or individual license holders.

“They’ve just given access to that to the FBI,” he said. “No individual signed off on that when they renewed their driver’s license, got their driver’s licenses. They didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh, it’s okay to turn my information, my photo, over to the FBI.’ No elected officials voted for that to happen.”

Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned facial recognition into a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000 facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having returned a “possible match.”

San Francisco and Somerville, Mass., have banned their police and public agencies from using facial-recognition software, citing concerns about governmental overreach and a breach of public trust, and the subject is being hotly debated in Washington. On Wednesday, officials with the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection and the Secret Service are expected to testify at a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security about their agencies’ use of the technology.

The records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local
contact, the records show.

“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” said Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.”

The good news is that both Republicans and Democrats seem pretty upset with the Big Brother surveillance state, but that's probably the extent of it.  We've been living in the era of facial recognition and tracking for several years now, and that's not going to change.

Expect it in fact to get worse as ICE comes in and uses this tech to track undocumented in real time. New Deportation Commissar Ken Cuccinelli is claiming ICE is now ready to conduct mass arrests and mass deportations in one of the biggest police crackdowns in history.

The Trump administration's top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said immigration authorities are ready to identify, detain and eventually deport approximately one million undocumented immigrants with pending removal orders.
"They're ready to just perform their mission, which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders," Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) branch charged with removal operations.

Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner who took the helm of the agency last month, said it is within ICE's discretion to determine who among those with final orders of deportation will be targeted in operations, suggesting the full pool of approximately one million immigrants might not face deportation after all.

"They've been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort ... is really just information kept within ICE at this point," he added. "The pool of those with final removal orders is enormous."

I've been warning about this for years now.  Trump got cold feet last month.  Next time he won't, and this country will erupt when he makes his move.

StupidiNews!

Back on track after a holiday weekend, so here we go with the news:

• The US Women's National Team defeated the Netherlands 2-0 in France to win the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, but the players still face an uphill battle for pay equality back home.
• Ten Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls came to Houston over the weekend to speak to teachers at the National Education Association's first presidential forum of the year.
• The UK Ambassador to the US referred to the Trump regime as "inept" and "dysfunctional" in a series of memos leaked to the British Daily Mail newspaper on Sunday.
• Police in Hong Kong have arrested five as protest marches in the city continue over the now delayed policy to extradite criminals to mainland China.
• International researchers have concluded that a 33,000-year-old fossilized skull found in 1941 belonged to a murder victim, killed by blunt force trauma to the head.

Last Call For Amash-ed Potato

Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash has now dropped the pretense of remaining as a Republican as his primary numbers in his district have plummeted to somewhere around "David Duke at the Apollo Theater" levels and as a result, he's leaving the GOP to pursue the tried and true role of helping Republicans as the third party spoiler

Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, the only sitting Republican member of Congress to support impeaching President Trump, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the party after facing fierce attacks from the president and fellow Republicans. 

In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post that did not mention Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Amash wrote: “I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.” 

Three hours after the essay was published, Mr. Trump responded with a personal attack against Mr. Amash, calling him “one of the dumbest and most disloyal men in Congress.”.

Mr. Amash, 39, is known as a libertarian with a contrarian streak and has been one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest critics on the right. He has even considered a run against him in the 2020 election. Mr. Amash’s move on Thursday makes him the only independent member of the House, which has 235 Democrats and, now, 197 Republicans.

In May, he became the first — and so far the only — sitting Republican member of Congress to join Democrats in saying that the president had committed offenses that rose to the level of impeachment.

That assertion was based on his reading of the redacted report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which was released in April. In a series of tweets, Mr. Amash accused Attorney General William P. Barr of deliberately misrepresenting the report’s findings in his summary. Mr. Amash argued that the report had provided multiple examples of conduct that could be labeled obstruction of justice. 

The president immediately struck back, calling Mr. Amash a “loser” and reinforcing the congressman’s isolation within the Republican Party. A conservative state representative in Michigan, Jim Lower, and a National Guard veteran, Tom Norton, quickly suggested that they might mount primary challenges if Mr. Amash runs for a sixth term next year. 

In his essay, published on the morning of Independence Day, Mr. Amash wrote that his father, a Palestinian refugee who moved to the United States at 16, had instilled in him the belief that America is a land of opportunity.

Mr. Amash quoted George Washington on the dangers of partisanship and strongly criticized the two-party system. 

“Modern politics is trapped in a partisan death spiral, but there is an escape,” he wrote. 

He called for Americans to join him “in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.”

If all of those are setting off your Gary Johnson "enough third-party anti-Trump votes to hand him the election" alarm bells, they should be, because that's exactly what's happening here.  Martin "BooMan" Longman saw this coming weeks ago.

The name that has been coming up with increasing frequency lately is Rep. Justin Amash from the Grand Rapids area of Michigan. He’s the only Republican member of Congress to say that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, and now he’s facing a serious primary challenge that he may not survive. He also quit the Freedom Caucus this week, saying that he didn’t want to be a distraction. One advantage of Amash over Romney is that Amash is actually a libertarian, so he wouldn’t be hijacking the party for his own vanity project. Beyond that, though, there’s little to recommend him as a vote-getter. Certainly, Romney would have vastly more potential for splitting votes off from both major party candidates. As a far-right Republican, Amash’s appeal to the left would be limited to a small subset of people who are primarily interested in the surveillance state and privacy issues, and those who agree with Amash’s critiques of America’s bipartisan foreign policy. Many of these people’s first choice will be the Green Party candidate. 

In any case, Rep. Amash is not discouraging this speculation: 

There has also been speculation Amash might challenge Trump in 2020 as a libertarian candidate, something he did not rule out at a recent town hall. 

“I’ve said many times, I don’t rule things like that out,” Amash said. “If you’re fighting to defend the Constitution, if you find a way to do that that’s different and maybe more effective, then you have to think about that.”   

Normally, you’d expect the libertarian candidate to cut more deeply into the Republican candidate’s base than the Democrat’s, but that is not a certainty. It might even cut in different directions depending on the state. A lot will depend on how comfortable the Democrats’ affluent white suburban professional base is with the their nominee. They may seek a middle option to register their disapproval, just as many are suspected to have done in 2016. Romney would be an easier landing place for them than Amash, but he might also soak up #NeverTrump votes that would otherwise go to the Democrat.

Amash may run in his district to keep his current job, but I expect him to seriously consider a 2020 third party bid, one that could be real trouble for the Democrats, and once again it's one man's arrogance that's going to cost the country dearly.

Justice Finally Served, Con't

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is headed for jail after he was arrested in NYC on charges of child trafficking and conspiracy.

More than a decade after receiving one of the most lenient sentences for a serial sex offender in U.S history, multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested in New York, sources confirmed to the Miami Herald Saturday night.

A passerby said she saw about a dozen agents knock down the door of Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse around 5:30 p.m.

Epstein, 66, is expected to be arraigned in federal court in New York on Monday on charges that he molested dozens of underage girls in New York and in Florida, the sources said. His arrest, first reported by the Daily Beast, comes nearly two weeks after the Justice Department announced that it would not throw out his 2008 non-prosecution agreement, even though a federal judge ruled it was illegal.

Rumors had been circulating for months that Epstein was under investigation on sex charges in the Southern District of New York. It’s not clear what instances those investigations involved, and the Herald had not been able to confirm the status of the New York probe.

Sources said he was arrested by the FBI pursuant to a sealed indictment that will be unsealed on Monday. He is in custody in New York and a bail hearing is set for Monday.

“That bail hearing will be critical because if they grant him bail, he will disappear and they will never get him,’’ a source in New York told the Herald.

Last November, the Miami Herald published a series of stories, titled Perversion of Justice, that described the ways in which the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, worked in conjunction with Epstein’s lawyers to engineer the non-prosecution agreement — and keep it secret from Epstein’s victims. Acosta is now President Donald Trump secretary of labor.

Sources told the Herald that the indictment includes new victims and witnesses who spoke to authorities in New York over the past several months.

“Oh my God. Finally, finally, finally! Justice!’ said Michelle Licata, one of Epstein’s victims who was molested by him when she was 16 years old.

Epstein, who has homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico, Paris and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, sexually abused nearly three dozen girls, mostly 13-16 years old, at his Palm Beach mansion in 1999 to 2006, according to investigators. He used the girls to help recruit other young girls as part of an operation that ran similar to a pyramid scheme. He also had recruiters who helped with his appointments, scheduling as many as three or four girls a day, the FBI probe found.

Acosta met one-on-one with Epstein’s lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, in October 2007, at a West Palm Beach Marriott. Records reviewed by the Herald showed that it was at that meeting that Acosta agreed to a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and others involved in his operation federal immunity.

The Daily Beast story on Epstein posits that the charges against Epstein could net him 45 years in federal prison, and it backs up the Miami Herald story on the SDNY nailing him with new witnesses and testimony.

And yes, if Epstein is granted bail, he will step on a yacht and vanish like a ghost.  Even if he bugs out with only a fraction of his wealth, he'll be comfortable for the rest of his life in some country with no extradition treaty, probably the UAE or Mali or Russia...especially that last one.  Epstein is pretty mobbed up you know and if he does vanish, expect Trump to pardon him on the way out.

As to the fate of the man who Epstein bought last time to avoid spending the rest of life in prison, current Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, well who knows?  He hasn't been forced to resign yet, why would he be now?

We'll see what happens on Monday.  The Miami Herald team is basically responsible for putting Epstein away, so we'll see if they get the credit for it.

I'll Have The Patty Meltdown, Please

Hope everyone had enjoyable cookouts and all that for the 4th no matter what you eat these days, and speaking of cookouts, you know a green product is a real threat to capture American market share when corporate America calls on Republicans to regulate their competition out of existence.

It’s been a good few months for the plant-based meat movement — so good that opponents of the fledgling industry are starting to mobilize.

This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.

“The plant-based meat alternative category is on fire right now, with consumers demanding healthier and more sustainable options,” Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant-Based Foods Association, said in a statement. “This law, along with similar laws in several other states, is the meat lobby’s response.”
The makers of meat alternatives are suing. In a lawsuit filed on July 2, they argue that since their products are already labeled “vegan,” no consumers are confused. If anything, the requirement that they avoid product descriptions like “veggie burger” makes things more confusing.

“There is no evidence that consumers are confused by plant-based bacon or veggie burger labels, and federal laws are already in place that prohibits consumer deception,” said Jessica Almy, director of policy at the Good Food Institute, an organization that works on expanding access to plant-based foods. “This law is a tremendous overstep of state powers.”

And that’s not the only problem. Food scientists are working right now on cell-based meat products, which are identical to meat from animals but grown from stem cells in a factory. Those products (which aren’t on the market yet) are meat in every relevant sense — most importantly, anyone with an allergy to meat will experience an allergic reaction to the products, and the items must be stored, refrigerated, and handled as meat. But under Mississippi’s current law, it’d be illegal to disclose that on the label.

This legal fight matters. Labeling laws like these have been discussed around the country, and courts will soon debate whether they’re constitutional. At the same time, federal regulators are looking to the states for cues about labeling laws for plant-based meat. Aggressive prohibitions could slow the growth of plant-based alternatives, which are badly needed.

“This bill will protect our cattle farmers from having to compete with products not harvested from an animal,” said Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation president Mike McCormick in January when the bill passed in the Mississippi state House.

Mississippi isn’t the first state to consider this. Missouri passed the first such labeling law last year, and it was challenged in court by groups including the Good Food Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that such a “content-based, overbroad, and vague” restriction on the language companies could use to describe their products was unconstitutional. The lawsuit is now in settlement talks.

Dozens of other states have considered similar laws since then. The laws are popular with farmers and ranchers, who see their business model threatened by the rising popularity of plant-based meat.

Expect this to go to the courts in a losing battle while the Trump FDA issues new "labeling guidelines" that make Mississippi's law a national one, and soon. The rancher and meat processing lobby wants plant burgers and lab-grown meat to go away now, because if Millennials and Gen Z get hooked on Impossible Whoppers from Burger King now, they know they're done in an increasingly greening and sustainable world.

It doesn't have the Tesla problem either, plant burgers are actually cheaper in some places because hey, Trump's stupid trade war and climate change and family farms tanking has made beef pretty pricey these days, it's $4-$5 a pound here in the Cincy area for ground beef and well more than that for steak.  Plant-based products are cheaper.

So yes, I definitely see Trump's FDA moving to hamstring plant burgers like this, and if they don't, GOP legislatures will be lobbyed until they do.

It's Still The Economy, Stupid

Pundits, especially on the right, keep telling us that Trump's re-election is a slam dunk finish because the economic and job numbers are "the best in your lifetime".  Only one problem with that analysis, and that is the analysis is flat out wrong for those left behind by wealth inequality.

Sommer Johnson thought everything was finally coming together for her last year. She was engaged, working full time and doing well in online college classes when her fiance’s mother died a week before their wedding day — triggering a series of large and unexpected expenses that left her struggling to pay her bills and brought her to the verge of bankruptcy.

“I keep hearing this is one of the best economies we’ve ever had and unemployment is down, especially among African Americans, which I am,” said Johnson, 39, who lives in Douglasville, Ga., an Atlanta suburb. “I’m looking around going, ‘Where is this boom?’ From where I sit, this doesn’t look like the best economy ever.”

The economic expansion this week became the longest in U.S. history, surpassing the 1990s boom, which lasted exactly a decade.

The stock market is at record levels, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing at a new high Wednesday ahead of the July 4 holiday, and President Trump has made the economy’s strong performance a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

But this expansion has been weaker and its benefits distributed far more unevenly than in previous growth cycles, leaving many Americans in a vulnerable position.

This is a “two-tier recovery,” said Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at the investment bank UBS. About 60 percent of Americans have benefited financially, he said, while 40 percent have not.

The 40 percent — which Mish calls the “lower tier” — have seen paltry or volatile wage growth, rising expenses for housing, health care and education, and increased levels of personal debt. They tend not to own homes or many stocks.

In discussions with 30 Americans unable to pay all of their bills, a clear pattern emerged: Most were able to eke by until they faced an unexpected crisis such as a job loss, cancer, car trouble or storm damage.

The extra expense caused them to get behind on their bills, and they never fully rebounded.

Economists fear such precarious financial situations put many Americans at risk if there is even a mild setback in the economy, potentially setting up the next recession to be worse than anything in recent history except the Great Recession.

“So many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Signe-Mary McKernan, vice president of the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute. “We are headed toward a political crisis, if not an economic one.”

It won't take much, either.  I think the catalyst is going to be Trump's trade war with China, spiking consumer prices across the country, and that will hurt the "lower tier" more. 

And again, we're talking 40% of the entire country, which means we're talking about a number of working-class white voters as well as black, Latino, and Asian voters who are going to quickly fall into real trouble and soon.  How many working-class white voters will stick with Trump if they start going under?

Probably a large majority of them.  Will they actually show up and vote?

We'll see.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Some excellent news in the case of Marshae Jones, the black woman in Alabama who was charged with manslaughter in the death of her unborn child after she was shot in the stomach by another woman in an altercation at a store.  Jones will not be prosecuted as the county DA has dropped the charges.

One week after her story drew national attention, Marshae Jones, the Alabama woman who faced criminal charges after a shooting caused her to miscarry, will not be prosecuted, the Alabama district attorney announced Wednesday.

“After viewing the facts of this case and the applicable state law I have determined that it is not in the best interest of justice to pursue prosecution of Ms. Jones on the manslaughter charge for which she was indicted by the grand jury,” Jefferson County District Attorney Lynneice Washington said at a press conference. “Therefore, I am dismissing this case and no further legal action will be taken against Ms. Jones in this matter.”

In recent days, Washington’s office faced heavy criticism for Jones’s indictment, and Jones’s lawyers had filed a motion to have the case dismissed.

”There are no winners, only losers in this sad ordeal,” Washington added.

At the end of June, Alabama news outlets reported that Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham resident, had been taken into police custody after a grand jury indicted her on manslaughter charges for the death of her then-5-month-old fetus. Police argued that Jones had initiated a fight with 23-year-old Ebony Jemison in December and was directly responsible for the fact that Jemison fired a bullet that struck Jones in the stomach.

According to a report from Al.com, police initially charged Jemison with manslaughter over the shooting. But a jury declined to indict her, saying that Jones initiated the altercation and that Jemison was acting in self-defense when she shot at Jones. That same jury later indicted Jones, arguing that she “intentionally caused the death of her unborn baby by initiating a fight knowing she was five months pregnant.”

Local police also blamed Jones for the shooting. “Let’s not lose sight that the unborn baby is the victim here,” Pleasant Grove Police Lt. Danny Reid said shortly after the shooting. “She had no choice in being brought unnecessarily into a fight where she was relying on her mother for protection.”

The indictment was heavily criticized and immediately raised questions about why the woman who was shot was the one charged. Reproductive rights advocates argued that Jones’s story was a troubling example of the ways pregnant women of color are criminalized in states like Alabama, which has prosecuted hundreds of women for things like “chemical endangerment” while pregnant. These groups argued that many more pregnant women in the state might be punished in the wake of a recently passed law that bans most abortions in Alabama. The law is scheduled to go into effect in November.

A definite win for Jones and legal sanity, but I fear there will be far more women punished under state laws like this, and should the Supreme Court open the floodgates for states to regulate abortion out of legal existence, cases like this will become the norm, not the exception.