Thursday, October 1, 2015

Senators Reach Deal On Criminal Justice Bill To Reduce Some Mandatory Minimums

A group of Republican and Democrat senators announced a long-awaited deal on a broad criminal justice bill Thursday. Advocates didn’t get the cuts in mandatory minimums they were hoping for but are still supporting the bill.

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WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators has reached a deal on a long-awaited criminal justice bill that would reduce some mandatory minimum sentences and give federal judges more flexibility in sentencing.

In a press conference Thursday morning, seven Republican and Democratic senators released details of the Criminal Justice Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 — the result of months of negotiations and several years of growing bipartisan consensus around the issue.

The bill does not eliminate any mandatory minimum sentences, as many criminal justice advocates had hoped for, and in fact adds a couple new ones, but it includes several measures that supporters say will nonetheless ease some of the most punitive laws passed during the tough-on-crime heyday of the 1980s and '90s.

"People can always point to things they'd rather have in a bill," Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of the key Republican lawmakers involved in the bill, told BuzzFeed News. "This reflects changes that are positive, strong steps in the right direction. I think they will make all the difference in the world to those to whom the laws will apply."

Other senators involved in crafting the legislation include Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, Texas Republican John Cornyn, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, North Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, and New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker.

Most significantly, the bill secured the support of Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a conservative law-and-order Republican who is considered by advocacy groups to be the biggest hurdle facing any broad criminal justice reforms in the Senate.

The bill would reduce enhanced mandatory-minimum penalties for repeat drug offenders without serious violent felonies, dropping the mandatory guideline from life in prison to 25 years, as well as broaden the "safety valve" exception to federal mandatory minimum sentences. It would also create a second safety valve for certain low-level offenders facing 10-year mandatory minimum sentences.

The bill would also make the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, apply retroactively — a change that could impact the sentences of thousands of federal prisoners serving mandatory minimum sentences.

"It looks like the reforms are going to be meaningful and certainly address some of the worst-of-the-worst mandatory minimum gun and drug sentences," Molly Gill, the government affairs counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, told BuzzFeed News.

"It doesn't go nearly as far as FAMM would like in that it doesn't eliminate any mandatory minimums," Gill said. "With that caveat, it does appear to give judges more flexibility and broaden the safety valve. The current safety valve is pretty strict, so this seems to let more people benefit, and that's a positive thing."

The bill also includes significant portions of earlier legislation crafted by Whitehouse and Cornyn aimed at decreasing crowding in federal prisons, which are currently operating at 30 percent over capacity. The legislation would allow low or medium-risk prisoners to earn earlier releases by completing anti-recidivism programs.

Other provisions in the legislation include limiting solitary confinement for juveniles in federal custody, allowing juvenile offenders to petition for a reduced sentence after serving more than 20 years in prison, and providing for compassionate release for inmates who have served two-thirds of their sentence, are more than 60 years old, and are terminally ill.

Negotiations over the bill in the Senate have been ongoing for much of this year between a core group of "smart-on-crime" Republicans and progressive Democrats.

"This is an issue that I've been wanting to address ever since I got in the Senate," Lee said.

Lee related a story, one he often tells, about his time as assistant U.S. attorney, where he witnessed a man in his mid-20s get sentenced to 55 years in prison under inflexible mandatory-minimum guidelines for selling marijuana three times to an undercover officer.

"I don't mean to condone what he did, but I've never met anyone who thought a 55-year sentence was appropriate in that case," Lee said. "He's going to be in jail until he's 80."

Lee and the other senators' efforts were backed by the White House, which has made criminal justice one of its top issues during President Obama's second term, and top Justice Department officials. A broad coalition of conservative and liberal organizations, ranging from the Center for American Progress to Koch Industries, also have thrown their weight behind trying to get a bill passed in Congress this term.

The question was whether Grassley would balk at the demands to cut mandatory minimums, and whether progressives would stomach any new tough-on-crime measures he demanded.

Grassley appears to have mostly stood firm. The bill would add new mandatory minimum sentences for interstate domestic abuse and providing support for terrorists, while strengthening penalties for certain other crimes.

But the other provisions reducing mandatory minimums seem to be strong enough to keep the delicate bipartisan coalition together. Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy, the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has in the past steadfastly voted against bills that created any new mandatory minimums, but an aide said he supports the new legislation as well.

It's unclear, however, if Congress will have the time or will to take up the bill in the final months of the year.

"The clock is ticking, and we hope Congress acts before the end of the year," Gill said.

In the House, Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott and Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin have introduced their own criminal justice bill, the SAFE Justice Act.

Lee, though, is optimistic, pointing to the large amount of bipartisan support and the crucial pickup of Grassley. "Nothing is easy to move through Congress," he said. "That said, I think we're in really good shape on this one."

Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1LSVoF8

5:38 PM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Voter Sees The “Real Hillary” Her Campaign Seeks To Reveal

Keith F. Thompson / Facebook

Before this year, he was never much of a Hillary Clinton person. But he's never disliked her. He's never found her "cold" or "calculating," never seen her as "inauthentic" or "unapproachable." He didn't buy into all that — the "caricatures," he said.

Still, for Keith F. Thompson, meeting Clinton for the first time in the flesh — seeing her, talking with her, even starting to tear up with her — came as something of a revelation.

“I knew the caricatures — I knew that was from some angry person in their mom’s basement," said Thompson, a 52-year-old delegate from New Hampshire.

"I knew that," he said. “But the contrast is huge.”

Thompson did not plan for the encounter. On the morning of the New Hampshire Democratic convention, as he made the drive to Manchester, he was not expecting that upon arriving, a friend would rush to his side and whisper, “Come with me,” or that soon after, he would find himself deep in the Verizon Wireless Arena, under the dim lights of a makeshift hold-room, waiting with a small group of Democrats to meet Clinton.

Thompson, a self-described “New Hampshire person” — namely, a “New Hampshire person who expects to meet each candidate twice and have dinner or something” — was already committed to her campaign at the time of the convention. But before that Saturday, he hadn’t met Clinton or even seen her speak. In 2008, his candidate was John Edwards. (He loved the “two Americas” bit.) When that collapsed, he “stayed out of the Clinton-Obama thing.” (“It was getting messy.”) This summer, when it came time to pick a candidate, after some going “back and forth,” Thompson landed on Clinton.

That morning, there was a long wait in the hold-room. Thompson figured she’d be rushed — that “maybe all we would get is a quick hi and group photo.” If he did get to talk to her, he’d have to make it quick: He decided to thank her for focusing on gun violence prevention.

Shortly after Clinton walked in, his plan fell apart.

Instead of speeding through the meet-and-greet, she moved slowly and methodically from one person to the next. And when she reached his side of the room, instead of mentioning gun violence, Thompson clasped her hands and thanked her for something far more personal and painful. And instead the “guarded” politician he anticipated, Clinton listened intently, she reached out and touched his arm, she welled up with tears.

In her campaign, Clinton has said the country must do more to help people like Thompson. He works part-time at a library and volunteers in politics — but Thompson also lives with and cares for his mother, who happened that day to be turning 84.

“I’m taking care of my mom,” Thompson told Clinton. “She has Alzheimer’s. I’m one of those people. I’m working part-time now, and… Thank you for speaking up for that.”

“How old is your mom?” she asked.

“Today’s her 84th birthday.”

“Oh, boy.”

“She took care of five children on her own. She took care of my dad, my grandmother. And now it’s my turn to take care of her. Day care for an elderly person is very expensive, and my part-time salary might be in the negative, just for the few hours I work.”

“… so I take her to work with me,” he told her.

It was at that point that Clinton, head back, got tears in her eyes. “Oh my gosh,” she said. Thompson started to cry, too. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” he said.

“No, no, I’m so glad you did. Oh my gosh, Thank you, thank you.” She grabbed his shoulder. “Your story is so incredibly moving, and it’s also a story for so many people. That’s what I keep finding everywhere I go… stories about what’s happening in their lives.”

When he and Clinton parted ways, Thompson watched her move down the line — and do the same thing again. Next to him was a person whom Clinton had already met. “She followed up with her about her daughter, who has a seizure disorder, and she remembered,” he said. “I was just astonished. That blew me away.”

The whole experience left Thompson stunned. “Holy cow,” he said. “I get it. Women of her generation have to be guarded at times. And sometimes she defaults to that. That’s understandable. I just hope that more people get to see her the way she was with me.”

In an effort to share the story, Thompson took to Facebook:

"I'm not usually the one who asserts himself, but when Secretary Clinton came to shake my hand, I held it for a moment and thanked her for speaking out about support for caregivers... I told her of the challenge of taking care of Mom, keeping her safe, and working part time to be able to be with her. Then I told her that, in order to keep Mom safe, I take her to work with me. Her compassion and sympathy was amazing, and she welled up with tears. That, of course, got me going. She wasn't just listening. As I explained the challenges of caring for Mom, Secretary Clinton was actually finishing my thoughts. She was right there with me."

Thompson’s post, widely shared by friends, and eventually by the campaign, teases at a question Clinton has been getting now for more than 20 years — most recently this month, on the set of CBS News’s Face the Nation, near the end of an interview.

Across the table, host John Dickerson leaned in and asked his guest for three words that describe “the real Hillary Clinton.”

Since the ’90s, this so-called “real Hillary” has made regular cameo appearances in news stories and biographies, and in Clinton’s own campaign literature and strategy. She is most often invoked as hidden or unknowable, separate from the figure who walks through public life. Friends wish you could meet the “real Hillary.” Aides wish you could appreciate the "real Hillary.” In 1992, her husband’s pollsters strategized ways to show off the “real Hillary.” In 2000, her Senate campaign drew up biographical pamphlets headlined, “Hillary: The Real Story.” And in 2008, advisers commissioned video testimonials from friends and family for a series called, “The Hillary I Know.”

That Sunday, when the question arose again on the set of Face the Nation, Clinton sat up, threw her arms in the air, and exclaimed, “I mean, look. I am a real person!”

At this point, Clinton may be resigned to the routine. In the interview with Dickerson, she cited the regular tabloid series, “Stars: They’re Just Like Us,” which shows photos of celebrities living doing regular things like regular people: getting groceries, pumping gas, carrying luggage. “I've been in the public eye for so long that I think it's like the feature you see in some magazines sometimes,” Clinton said. “‘Real people actually go shopping!’”

The aides on her second presidential campaign — now six months in — have looked for ways to show voters that Clinton, as Thompson discovered, is indeed a real person.This month, Clinton sat for at least 16 interviews with news and entertainment outlets.

But campaign aides have also pursued a more organic, digitally based strategy in videos and on social media, seizing on moments like the one she had with Thompson this month in New Hampshire. On the road, even at large events, voters stand to share deeply personal stories and problems: a son, dead of a drug overdose; a nephew, unable to get psychiatric help; or a caretaker, working part-time and taking his mother along with him, because Medicaid and Medicare don’t provide day-to-day support outside a nursing home.

More often than not, though, the exchanges happen far from a stage or podium, unseen to reporters and aides in headquarters.

The moment from the convention might not have surfaced were it not for a circuitous chain of events across multiple platforms. It started with Thompson’s “public” status update on Facebook. That night, one of Clinton’s most devout volunteers, Kim Frederick, happened to read about the post on the page of a mutual friend. (Frederick doesn’t know Thompson, she said.) Frederick then shared a link to Thompson's Facebook post on Twitter, tagging several reporters. From there, Thompson’s story began traveling across both platforms, and the next day, campaign aides reposted Thompson’s status update on Clinton’s Facebook account. ("A moving moment backstage," the caption read.) That night, they cut and published a video of the exchange on YouTube. In recent speeches, including one at the convention, Clinton also referenced the encounter.

Stories like Thompson’s are of course more likely to be shared by and with people who already back Clinton. But even for supporters, the moments can be newly revealing.

Days later, Thompson was still posting about it on Facebook. “I cannot stress enough how empathetic and REAL Hillary Clinton was,” he wrote last week. “With real people, she is real. Real people are her strength… None of us would be comfortable with Jimmy Fallon or a network reporter."

"We are more ourselves with other real people, and so is she.”

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Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1LSVoEW

5:37 PM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

Donald Trump Has Long Argued The U.S. Shouldn't Get Involved In Conflict For Humanitarian Reasons

Trump says he welcomes Russian airstrikes targeting ISIS in Syria, and that he would send Syrian refugees back to Syria.

Darren Mccollester / Getty Images

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Keene, New Hampshire Wednesday night, Donald Trump said, as president, he would send Syrian refugees back to Syria, arguing that the refugees might actually be a "200,000 man army" for ISIS.

"I'm putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration. That if I win, they're going back. They're going back. I'm telling you," Trump said.

Trump also he said he welcomes Russian airstrikes in Syria and believes the Russians are targeting ISIS.

"Russia wants to get rid of ISIS. We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let them get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?" Trump told 60 Minutes on Sunday.

The comments are in line with a position Trump laid out first in his book The America We Deserve 15 years ago -- the U.S. should not get overly involved in conflicts for humanitarian reasons.

"Humanitarian concerns, which are sometimes represented as working in our 'national interest,' are not good enough reasons in themselves for deployment of forces," writes Trump, who goes on to say the U.S. doesn't "have a dog" in most of the world's conflicts.

Trump says the U.S. has no right to intervene just because we don't like seeing innocent people being killed.

"That's not to say our hearts don't go out to people whose countries are being ravaged by war," writes The Donald. "Far from it. Our hearts do go out to them, and so does a lot of U.S. humanitarian aid. But we have no business, and certainly no right, to intervene in conflicts just because we don't like to see innocent people being killed or dislocated. Just after we started bombing the European capital of Belgrade, a poll came out saying that a majority of Americans thought it was our 'right' to get into this longstanding and bloody dispute. I disagree."

Citing The Balkan War at the time, Trump said the U.S. intervening does little more temporary tilting the balance of war in the conflict.

"Yet it should be clear by now that when we intervene in these conflicts we do little more than temporarily tilt the balance of power," writes The Donald. "Sometimes, as in the Balkan mess, we're allies with one side for a while, then shift our support to the other side. In the first place, we don't have any idea of how to build democracies in these countries, even if such a thing were possible or desired by them. To top it off, we are deploying troops at the same time we are cutting defense expenditures. None of this makes one bit of sense."

Trump wrote the U.S. could give money, but only intervene if there was a direct threat to the U.S. at the time.

"Make no mistake, I love the American desire to help others," he writes. "The American public will give the disadvantaged money and aid with no expectation of return. They give simply because they know it is the right thing to do. We are the greatest of all humanitarian nations.

"At the same time, we must not get involved in a long-festering conflict for humanitarian reasons. If that's our standard, we should have troops stationed all over Africa, and much of Asia as well. We will provide humanitarian assistance, but when our men and women volunteer in our armed forces it should be with the strict understanding that they will be sent into danger's way only in cases where our national survival is directly affected. Young people now enlist, thinking they're signing up to protect America, and end up responding to and end up responding to a palace coup in a country few ever heard of."

Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1MJGr6K

5:37 PM Author mohaisen CategoryNews No comments Read More

"Metal Gear Solid V" Is So Good I Want To Cry

Why I love Hideo Kojima’s demented and hilarious masterpiece.

Konami

Two and a half years ago, at a gaming industry conference in San Francisco, the mercurial Japanese developer Hideo Kojima took the stage for a keynote presentation with his entire face wrapped in white bandages. To particularly devoted fans of Kojima's Metal Gear series, this made sense. The bandages were a reference to Joakim Mogren, a fictional Dutch game developer at the center of an elaborate ruse Kojima had concocted to sow confusion about the newest installment in the series. (Joakim Mogren is an anagram for Hideo Kojima.) Shortly after the presentation began, Kojima removed the bandages and introduced Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

To many in the crowd, it was a bizarre move. This wasn't E3, an annual gaming hypefest targeted at consumers. It was the relatively staid, often technical Game Developers Conference. Metal Gear is a legendary title in gaming, but Kojima had invited an odd crowd to its debut: grown-ups in the games business, people with jobs, people who could hardly be expected to know or care about Joakim Mogren or any of the strange feints of a man who can come across as a kook. The reaction in the room was one of tolerant amusement, like you might extend to an eccentric uncle at a wedding. I hadn't paid attention to Kojima's bafflingly complex games — or his hijinks — since I was a teenager, and I remember sitting there thinking, What the hell is the deal with the bandages?

Via YouTube

Earlier this month, I sat down to play The Phantom Pain based on the good word of mouth the game was getting. It had me laughing almost immediately. The opening scene of the game takes place in a hospital, where players are immediately confronted with not one, but two characters whose faces are totally covered in white bandages. It was the punch line to a two-and-a-half-year-long joke that no one outside of Konami had even realized was happening.

"So this was his plan all along," I whispered aloud, to no one.

It was the perfect introduction to Metal Gear Solid V, which is the most surprising and delightful video game I have played in years, and a complete vindication of one of gaming's most notorious eccentrics.

Eccentric! Metal Gear Solid V is a game in which you attach high-powered balloons to your unconscious enemies in order to whisk them back to your secret base in the Seychelles. It's a game in which you can ship yourself around that secret base in a cardboard box to save time. It's a game that revolves around an anticolonial plot to eradicate the English language. It's a game set in a 1984 in which you get perfect internet service in the wadis of Afghanistan.

It's also a game with a special button combination to make your horse poop.

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5:37 PM Author mohaisen CategoryTech No comments Read More

Americans Try Hong Kong Desserts For The First Time

The sesame balls are kind of made out of magic.

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5:37 PM Author mohaisen CategoryLifestyle No comments Read More

The Study Claiming That Blotting Your Pizza Saves Calories Might Have Been A Marketing Campaign

True or false: Blotting your pizza before eating will save you a ton of calories, prevent you from gaining weight, and make your life perfect.

mic.com, huffingtonpost.com, cosmopolitan.com

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Which means, as this infographic shows, that if you dab every slice you eat for a year, you eat 6,600 fewer calories than if you didn't dab.

Which means — if 3,500 calories equals one pound — almost two fewer pounds gained.

This is also considering you're the average American who eats about 23 pounds of 'za (or 87 slices) yearly.

labdoor.com

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5:37 PM Author mohaisen CategoryLifestyle No comments Read More

31 Delicious Things You Should Cook In October

Gentlemen, start your ovens.

Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed

Five-Ingredient Butternut Squash, Arugula, and Goat Cheese Pasta

Recipe here.

gimmesomeoven.com

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4:36 PM Author mohaisen CategoryLifestyle No comments Read More

These worms eat WHAT?

Plastic, long considered nonbiodegradable and one of the biggest contributors to global pollution, might have met its match: The small, brownish, squirmy mealworm.