Neo-Nazi James Fields Convicted of First-Degree Murder of Heather Heyer

James Alex Fields Jr., who used a car to attack counterprotesters, is guilty of first-degree murder. The avowed supporter of neo-Nazi beliefs who took part in the violent and chaotic white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder for killing Heather Heyer by ramming his car through a crowd of counterprotesters. A jury of seven women and five men began deliberating this morning and took just over seven hours to reach its decision that Fields, 21, of Maumee, Ohio, acted with premeditation when he backed up his 2010 Dodge Challenger and then roared it down a narrow downtown street crowded with marchers, slamming into them and another car. Heyer, 32, was killed and 35 others injured, many grievously.

Republicans have spent years warning us that voter fraud is rampant, despite having no evidence that this is the case -- election fraud in the United States is in fact rare. President Donald Trump has warned us repeatedly about hordes of Mexicans and other illegals attacking this pillar of our democracy, and the GOP has put legislation into place in states across the country to make it harder to vote, arguing that it's necessary to protect the sanctity of elections. They take voter fraud seriously, they say. It's become one of their core issues. So, we would expect that faced with a rare case of potentially serious and pervasive electoral fraud, they would jump on it -- insist on an investigation, figure out exactly what happened, punish wrongdoers and close whatever holes in the system led to the abuses. So, here’s their chance. Allegations of flagrant absentee ballot fraud in a North Carolina district have thrown the Election Day results of one of the nation's last unresolved midterm congressional races into question. Will North Carolina do what's right?

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, should receive a “substantial” prison term of roughly four years, despite his cooperation, federal prosecutors in New York said on Friday. Mr. Cohen, 52, is to be sentenced in Manhattan next week for two separate guilty pleas: one for campaign finance violations and financial crimes charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, and the other for lying to Congress in the Russia inquiry, filed by the Office of the Special Counsel in Washington. Prosecutors in Manhattan said the crimes Mr. Cohen had committed “marked a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life,” and though he was seeking a reduced sentence for providing assistance to the government, he did not deserve much leniency. “He was motivated to do so by personal greed, and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends,” the prosecutors said in a lengthy memo to the judge, William H. Pauley III.

Mourners from across the nation gathered in Washington and Texas to pay their respects and celebrate the life of former president George H.W. Bush. He was America's 41st president. He was eulogized as a patriot, statesman, father, loyal friend, husband and grandfather.
These can be complex discussions. Accuracy and context are very important to me. There’s an interesting piece in The Nation: "George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World," by Greg Grandin. He says, "George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. The single most important through-line in Bush’s life is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world’s poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness." He voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in...