It's only a beaver moon

 The land of the free famously has more people locked up or otherwise entangled in its prison-industrial complex than any other, so it's not surprising that our top stories concern "justice."  What is surprising is that some of the news is relatively good.  Julius Jones's death sentence was commuted to life in prison with no possibility of parole.  In New York two men convicted of assassinating Malcolm X in 1965 had their convictions vacated.  Muhammad A. Aziz is 83 and Khalil Islam died in 2009, so maybe not such a great day for America, especially since it took a Netflix documentary to bring this about.  Still.

No verdict in Kenosha at this hour.  Punk crosses state lines with an illegal weapon (no matter what Judge Alzheimer says), kills two men, gets a job offer from Statutory Gaetz, what more do they need?  A marriage proposal from Laura Loomer?

Yesterday in the Guardian Tayo Bero detailed amusingly how "Harvard students aren't that smart after all," news which will shock absolutely no one.  Bero should write a series.  Next:  Yale, land of Bushes.  Or closer to home, Magdalen College Oxford, which can boast John Neely Kennedy (R-LA) among its alumni.  Neely K is the master of confirmation smear, asking Comptroller of the Currency nominee Saule Omarova if he should call her "professor or comrade" because she was born in Kazakhstan while it was part of the USSR, and because she once wrote a paper critical of the greatest banking system ever, ours.  (Yes, the C-word is back; everyone the Republiclowns dislike is a COMMUNIST.  If you're too young to remember McCarthyism, this is how it smelled.)  The bayou buffoon has also asked Justice nominee Hampton Dellinger if he believes in god and called Deb Haaland a "neo-socialist left-of-Lenin whackjob."  I can't tell if he read history or English at Magdalen.  Either way, the place with the dreaming spires needs to revise its admissions policy.

Here's some news Neely K will hate:  John Deere fought the United Auto Workers and the UAW won.  After a month-long strike, ten thousand workers will get a 20 percent wage hike over six years, a "signing bonus" of $8,500 and cost-of-living adjustments they had previously lost.  Unions are awakening everywhere, from Starbucks to the coal mines of Alabama.  Where did I put that Woody Guthrie record?

Down in Brunswick Travis McMichael took the stand and turned on the tears as he explained he had no choice but to shoot Ahmaud Arbery after the previously unarmed jogger grabbed his gun.  Well, he could have refrained from chasing, cornering and drawing on him but, you know, maybe he was a burglar.  Jimmy Swaggart, Alex Jones, Brett Kavanaugh, Kyle Rittenhouse, this guy -- did the original Nazis blub this much?

If Lee Harvey Oswald were around today he’d say he shot JFK in self-defense. - Andy Borowitz

More good news, I guess -- the US Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 228-28 to allow pro-choice politicians access to communion, only seventeen years after raising a stink over John Kerry's presidential campaign.  Maybe they'll butt out of politics for a while and clean out their own Augean stable, the criminal abuse of thousands of children.  

Today in science news, catastrophic floods in British Columbia and Washington state; and get ready for another winter of covid.  Thanks, Trumpanzees, we couldn't do it without you.  At least you won't be full of horse worms.

BLM can stand for Black Lives Matter or Bureau of Land Management, but apparently the two are not compatible -- or they weren't when the previous administration moved the Bureau's main office to Grand Junction, Colorado.  This had the effect of reducing Black employees to 312, less than four percent of the total.  Inadvertent, I'm sure.  The good guys are moving it back to the District of Columbia.   

Here's a reason to thank Rittenhouse and the McMichaels -- not much coverage of the Unite the Right trial in Charlottesville.  Casual TV viewers have been spared the praise for Hitler, the racial slurs and the abandonment of all decency in Tom Jefferson's hometown.  Did Christopher Cantwell weep again from the witness stand?  (Yeah, another one.)  Will Richard Spencer recover from this "character assassination"?  How much will the plaintiffs get?  All I know is, the judge's name is Norman Moon.