Unfair sentencing
Iowa Congressional Representative Bruce Braley, a tone-deaf and entirely ineffectual political campaigner, got trounced by a baffoon, Joni Ernst, in his race for the U.S. Senate earlier this month. Among other missteps, Braley had been captured on video earlier in the year warning a gathering of trial lawyers in Texas that, if the Democrats lost control of the Senate, Senator Charles Grassley (above) from Iowa would become the first-ever head of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that did not hold a law degree. According to Braley's speech, Grassley was only “a farmer.” Months later, the farmers drove their pick-ups to the polls and voted with their pitchforks.
Well, for what it’s worth, Grassley will now ascend to that committee position, and he looks to be the solitary roadblock to the righteous cause of mandatory sentencing reform. There's an amelioration bill in the Senate that has 30 co-sponsors, the backing of both the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation and everybody from Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin on the left to Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul on the right.
Grassley will be the one that decides what gets considered and what doesn't. He delivered this speech on the Senate floor in favor of mandatory sentencing in May, and since the election, has made another brief statement reaffirming his long-time support for 1980's-era drug policy, "I've raised concerns about people importing heroin into the country, of having their sentence reduced. I think you gotta be very careful what sort of signal you're sending."
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Bill Cosby's mountain of a television series, The Cosby Show, has had its reruns pulled from the TV Land programming lineup upon the resurfacing of rape accusations against the comedian. (You might want to attend this year’s Moeller TV Festival on December 6th if you're interested in watching an episode of the series.) Suppression is cyclical because Cosby, during the late 1960s, fronted a petition group aimed at getting re-runs of the popular but controversial TV series Amos & Andy removed from syndication. (The series was popular with both black and white audiences. With an all-black cast, it was nominated for an Emmy as Best Sitcom in 1953.) By 1970, the show, which depicted negative stereotypes about African-Americans, was gone from the airwaves, never to return. CBS continues to own the rights to the series, but has not authorized an official DVD release while the media company vigorously fights to curb bootleg releases through mail order. (You can see full episodes on YouTube.)
Would a comedy about silly, broad characters like Amos & Andy be more offensive to blacks than, say, The Honeymooners would be to whites? Clarence Page asked this question in 1985. Most criticisms of the series at the time seem to center, ultimately, not on the series itself, but on the fact that there was nothing else on the air at the time to counterbalance it. It's worth remembering an interview Cosby did with Playboy in 1969 when he was very critical of the Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams series. When asked whether there could be a TV series about a non-stereotypical black family, he responded in part...
"If you're really going to do a series about a black family, you're going to have to bring out the heavy; and who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see, a show that talks about the white man and puts him down. It would strike indifferent whites as dangerous; it would be called controversial and they would not want to tune in."
All in the Family, the Norman Lear situation comedy about a white bigot, debuted less than two years later, and was the #1 rated series from 1971 to 1976.
posted by CM @ 10:23 AM
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