Legalectric

The Dept. of Justice’s report on its investigation of the Chicago Police Department practices is out, and the DoJ’s press release notes that its findings, linked below, include:

The Justice Department announced today that it has found reasonable cause to believe that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) engages in a pattern or practice of using force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. The department found that CPD officers’ practices unnecessarily endanger themselves and result in unnecessary and avoidable uses of force. The pattern or practice results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability, including the failure to train officers in de-escalation and the failure to conduct meaningful investigations of uses of force.

A consent decree is in the works.  We’ll see if that helps.

Primary documents:

• Chicago Police Department Findings
• Chicago Agreement in Principle
• Chicago Police Department Findings Fact Sheet
• Pattern or Practice Accomplishments Document

These are must reads for a cold winter day.

CALL TODAY — US Senate Committee on the Judiciary

Committee Page

Committee Members

Contact Info for Senators

If you heard Minnesota’s Senator Franken questioning A.G. nominee Jeff Sessions, you heard several instances of Session’s fabrication and/or exaggeration of his experience as a federal attorney, and how Sessions handled this was as disturbing as his misrepresentations.

Here’s another something to consider.  In 1986, when he was up for a judicial appointment, and was thoroughly vetted and then denied the judgeship, Coretta Scott King offered the following for consideration, particularly regarding Sessions’ role in criminal prosecutions regarding absentee voting:

Scott-King-1986-Letter-and-Testimony-Signed

In short:

This is not someone who should be the U.S. Attorney General!

… but now it seems some are taking it seriously.  At long last.

Remember  Drumpf’s comments in the July?

“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing… I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

And the Twit’s tweet:

“If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!,”

From Jeremy Singer Vine’s cloud upload, 35 pages of allegations (published by buzzfeed here), a compilation of reports, and it’s pretty damning.  Is it real?  We shall see (full reports at link):

Trump Intelligence Allegations

Time for “the system” to dig in and work… there’s only 10 days left.  From CNN’s reports, the source has been vetted, and this is not new info, it was out there in August/summer, McCain had info, and now, here we are on the verge of inaugurating this yahoo?

Photo – Gage Skidmore

From CNN, the transcript from his hearing when Reagan had appointed him as federal judge, which thankfully ended in denial by the Senate, from CNN:

Transcripts give close look at old Sessions allegations

Now, today, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is ongoing for confirmation of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General.  Contact the members of the Committee:

Senate Judiciary Committee page

Here’s contact info for your Senators and contact info for the members of the Judiciary Committee — call them.

https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/

The U.S. is the laughingstock of the world, and rightly so.

From Meryl Streep, via New York Times:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

RESIST!  There are many ways, each of us can do something, take action, speak up.  JUST DO IT!