Last Call For Grayed Out

Prosecutors in Maryland are dropping all charges against the officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

Charges against the remaining three Baltimore Police Officers in the Freddie Gray case were dropped Wednesday morning. 

The decision was announced at the start of a pretrial motions hearing for Officer Garrett Miller, who was the next scheduled officer to stand trial. Officer William Porter was to be retried in September, and Sgt. Alicia White was scheduled for trial in October. 

Officers Edward Nero, Caesar Goodson Jr. and Lt. Brian Rice have previously been acquitted of all charges in the case, and the trial of Porter ended in a hung jury and mistrial last December. 

The six officers were charged in the arrest and death of Gray, a 25-year-old who suffered a severe spinal injury in the back of a police van on April 12, 2015, and died a week later. His death touched off citywide protests against police brutality, which were followed by rioting, arson and looting on the day of his funeral.

So that's it.  Nobody will go to jail for Gray's death.  Nobody.

Black lives barely matter in America.

Black deaths matter even less.

I am numb.

Assange Gives Away The Game

Whether or not you buy the overwhelming evidence that Russia and Vladimir Putin provided WikiLeaks with stolen DNC emails in order to help throw the election, can we at least all stop pretending that the DNC leaks weren't timed by Julian Assange to specifically hurt the Clinton campaign as much as possible, especially when Assange himself has admitted he would rather see Trump elected?

Six weeks before the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks published an archive of hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of the Democratic convention, the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, foreshadowed the release — and made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency.

Mr. Assange’s remarks in a June 12 interview underscored that for all the drama of the discord that the disclosures have sown among supporters of Bernie Sanders — and of the unproven speculation that the Russian government provided the hacked data to WikiLeaks in order to help Donald J. Trump — the disclosures are also the latest chapter in the long-running tale of Mr. Assange’s battles with the Obama administration.

In the interview, Mr. Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication,” which he pronounced “great.” He also suggested that he not only opposed her candidacy on policy grounds, but also saw her as a personal foe.

At one point, Mr. Peston said: “Plainly, what you are saying, what you are publishing, hurts Hillary Clinton. Would you prefer Trump to be president?”

Mr. Assange replied that what Mr. Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable.” By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Mrs. Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic.

First, citing his “personal perspective,” Mr. Assange accused Mrs. Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks disseminated a quarter of a million diplomatic cables during her tenure as secretary of state.

“We do see her as a bit of a problem for freedom of the press more generally,” Mr. Assange said.

(The cables, along with archives of military documents, were leaked by Pvt. Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence. WikiLeaks also provided the documents to news outlets, including The New York Times. Despite a criminal investigation into Mr. Assange, he has not been charged; the status of that investigation is murky.)

In addition, Mr. Assange criticized Mrs. Clinton for pushing to intervene in Libya in 2011 when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was cracking down on Arab Spring protesters; he said that the result of the NATO air war was Libya’s collapse into anarchy, enabling the Islamic State to flourish.

“She has a long history of being a liberal war hawk, and we presume she is going to proceed” with that approach if elected president, he said.

Guys, WikiLeaks has been part of Russia's counter-operations against Obama and the US for years now.  Assange went on TV six weeks ago to brag about how those emails were going to hurt Clinton and he made good on his boast.  All indications are that they were given this stuff by the Russians too.

Ask yourself why both Assange and Putin so badly want to see Trump elected.

Absolution Row, Or Roy's Lament

Our old friend Avik Roy, professional Forbes columnist, political operative and Obamacare liar, has finally come to terms with the demise of the GOP.  Now the Party of Trump, Roy admits to Vox's Zack Beauchamp that the Republican party is suffering through its McGovern moment.

Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals. 

But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die. 

“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.” 

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans. 

“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me. 

This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.

There's a lot of that going around these days, and I'll say what I always say to Republicans looking for absolution: you will never find it from me.  You created this monster and did everything you could to empower it with the ability to destroy this country and 99% of the people in it, including yourselves.

You lost control of the Rough Beast and once again you are looking to the rest of us to clean up the mess it made. I'm wholly uninterested in your confessions, Mr. Roy, or your apologies.  What I want you to do is to have the good grace to shut the hell up and sit the hell down while the rest of us fix this country, and then the wisdom to stay silent while we make your miserable failures into a country worth being proud of.

Most of all, you preyed on this country and gave voice to the hatred, the bigotry, the divisive rancor and the outright racism that fed and watered an electorate that gave rise to Trump.  You made them powerful.  We have to deal with that now because of people like you.

Please take your analysis and your lament, cover them with broken glass and lemon juice, and shove them up your ass sideways.

Thanks for that ahead of time.

StupidiNews!

• Democrats officially nominated Hillary Clinton as the party's nominee for president, making her the first woman to be nominated on a major party ticket in US history.
• Boston police have arrested and charged a man who posted a Facebook threat to burn down a Boston mosque in the wake of the deadly terror attacks in Paris.
• Vehicle bombs detonated in the Syrian city of Qamishli have killed as many as 31 people and injured dozens as Islamic State is claiming responsibility for the attack.
• Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has announced plans for more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in stimulus spending to prop up Japan's ailing economy.
• Tesla Motors and automotive sensor company Mobileye have reportedly parted ways after last month's fatal Tesla Model S autonomous driving crash.