Former Alabama Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard was convicted of ethics crimes after new laws were passed in Alabama. Now Alabama Republicans want to reverse those laws. Brynn Anderson/AP/REX/Shutterstock

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

We generally leave the doings of the various state governments to our semi-regular weekly survey on Thursday, but the great state of Alabama is pulling one of the most magnificent grand democratic illusions that we in the shebeen ever have seen. In 2010, Republican majorities in the state legislature passed such stringent new ethics laws that the speaker of the Alabama House got convicted. This, it appears, is something up with which the legislature would not put. And Kyle Whitmire of the invaluable AL.com is our guide to what came next.

A bill filed in the Legislature on Wednesday by state Sen. Greg Albritton would legalize many of the crimes Hubbard was convicted of breaking. It would open up Alabama for legal corruption, lifting restrictions on gifts to lawmakers and lightening penalties for bribery and theft of government funds and property.

There's a lot of this going on out in the states—longtime Republican majorities trying to saddle a changing electorate with policies they passed in their ascendancies. In Idaho, they're monkeywrenching Medicaid expansion. In Florida, they're playing games with the successful referendum that gave the franchise back to convicted felons who'd served their sentences. And now, in Alabama, the Republicans are backing the truck up over their own reforms. This is beautiful.

Sen. Greg Albritton filed a bill on Wednesday that would reverse anti-corruption laws the state passed in 2010. AL.com/YouTube

Here's my favorite provision, as illustrated by Whitmire, who also gets the joke.

When it comes to outright bribery, Albritton’s bill would make anything under $6,000 a misdemeanor. Likewise, theft of government funds or property less than $6,000 would be a misdemeanor, under the new bill. Both are Class B felonies under the current law, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fine up to $30,000. And here’s where it really gets crazy. If this bill passes, it could create two classes of people in Alabama: Public officials and employees who could steal from the government and only suffer a misdemeanor, and members of the public who would still be guilty of felonies if they did the same thing.

This bill still could fail. Some fairly powerful forces including the state's attorney-general are arrayed against it. But the philosophy behind it will roll merrily on regardless, a further demonstration of John Dos Passos's verdict on Sacco and Vanzetti:

All right, then. We are two countries.

Just when you thought this administration*'s immigration policies couldn't get more grotesque, we find that, by any reasonable definition, human experimentation may be going on. From Harper's Bazaar:

There are 28 pages detailing the periods, pregnancies and reason for the pregnancy (whether by rape or not) of teen girls in custody, some of whom are as young as 12. There may well be reasons for the government to track whether or not a woman is pregnant, and how far along in her pregnancy she is, but there’s no reason to track the cause of her pregnancy. It’s pretty fair to assume that they’re not doing this because they want to ensure women know all the options regarding their pregnancy. It’s almost certainly an attempt to bar them from getting abortions.

We know that, because the tracking was done by the anti-abortion advocate Scott Lloyd, the head of refugee resettlement at the height of the children separation (he has since been removed from that post). Lloyd declared he needed to sign off on all abortion requests (this was previously not the case) and in one instance, attempted to use a migrant girl as a way to test an “abortion reversal” method.

Holy Christ.

Vice news broke this little crime against humanity a year ago.

Scott Lloyd, a longtime crusader against abortion who heads the agency that oversees undocumented minors who enter the country without their parents, spoke with staffers about trying to reverse the abortion of a pregnant teen in their custody, according to a deposition he underwent as part of a lawsuit between the Trump administration and the American Civil Liberties Union.



In the past few years, opponents of abortion have championed the idea of halting a medication abortion midway by using the hormone progesterone. Anti-abortion activists have pushed governors in four states to sign laws requiring healthcare providers to tell patients about this so-called “abortion reversal” method. But there is no credible medical evidence that such a procedure works, and the mainstream medical community worries that using it amounts to experimentation on women.

Dr. Moreau, please call Emergency. And, in case we all had forgotten, and I doubt if Lloyd ever had known, here is the Nuremberg Code devised after World War II, to make criminal what Lloyd was proposing to do. Point One seems very specific.

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

Adolescents in custody would seem to me to be incapable of voluntary consent.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo does not think international law should apply to Americans. This probably comes as no surprise. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

Luckily, these days, we have the International Criminal Court to handle situations like this when they arise. No, wait. Let me rephrase that. When crimes against humanity arise among Them, that is. From the BBC:

The decision is thought to be the US response to Ms Bensouda's investigation into possible war crimes by American forces and their allies in Afghanistan.The US secretary of state had warned the US might refuse or revoke visas to any ICC staff involved in such probes. Ms Bensouda's office said the ICC prosecutor would continue to her duties "without fear or favour."



Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: "If you're responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of US personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan, you should not assume that you will still have or get a visa, or that you will be permitted to enter the United States.



"We're prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions if the ICC does not change its course," he added.

American Exceptionalism means Except For Americans, I guess.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Buckjump" (Trombone Shorty): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: This is the 70th anniversary of NATO, which helped save western Europe and which the current president* believes was designed to pick his pockets. Anyway, here's the signing of the original pact in Washington. Hey, we're a cohesive organism! History is so cool!

And so, as we know, is science, especially when it gives us a look into our own dismal future. From those incurable romantics at LiveScience:

The dead planet's broken heart consists of heavy metal, and it orbits at breakneck speed through a dirty cosmic boneyard full of other chunks of dead planets. Mourn the dead planet and its dead star if you like, but do not pity them; one day, astronomers say, our solar system will probably look much the same. (Happy spring!) This grim conclusion, which is described today (April 4) in the journal Science, comes from observing a dead planet chunk (or "planetesimal") circling a white dwarf star in a solar system about 410 million light-years away from Earth.

Like all white dwarfs — which form after stars like Earth's sun run out of fuel, balloon outward in fiery cataclysms, then shrivel down into dead crystalline husks — the star that caught the team's attention is extremely dense. According to the researchers, this white dwarf packs about 70 percent of the mass of our sun into a tiny sphere no larger than Earth, giving it a devastating gravitational pull. "The white dwarf's gravity is so strong — about 100,000 times that of the Earth — that a typical asteroid will be ripped apart by gravitational forces if it passes too close," lead study author Christopher Manser, a physicist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, said in a statement.

That is one powerful dead thing right there. And doesn't this read like an original Star Trek script? Has anyone seen Nomad?

Is it a good day for dinosaur news , Smithsonian? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

A newly identified fossil, however, adds a bit of unexpected variety to the prehistoric Arctic ecosystem: researchers found the fossilized remains of a lambeosaurine, a crested duck-billed dino, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports ... When grad student Ryuji Takasaki from Hokkaido University in Japan came to the museum to study the hadrosaur fossils, however, he also picked up on the strange skull fragment. “This guy probably looked at more Edmontosaurus bones than anyone else on the planet,” paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo of the Perot Museum tells Hwang. “He came into my office one day and said, ‘This is something different.’”

On closer analysis, the fragment was found to belong to a lambeosaurine, a type of duck-billed dinosaur with large hollow crest on its head. “This first definitive evidence of a crested hadrosaur in the Cretaceous Arctic tells us that we still have much to learn about the biodiversity and the biologically productive environments of the ancient north, and that the story these fossils tell us is continually evolving,” Fiorillo says in a press release.

The Arctic was a bit warmer and forested during the Late Cretaceous when these dinosaurs lived, but life was still much more challenging than it was for dinosaur living in the tropical or subtropical areas of Earth. The Associated Press reported in 2015 that the mean annual temperature hovered around 40 degrees Fahrenheit and was similar to present day British Columbia. At least four unique dinosaur species have been confirmed in the region and paleontologists believe they have found evidence for a dozen species of polar dinos in the area, suggesting that certain dinosaurs were adapted to the colder, harsher climate. Gregory Erickson of Florida State University, who helped discover a new species of hadrosaur along the Liscomb Bonebed in 2015 says it’s “basically a lost world of dinosaurs that we didn’t realize existed.”

Polar dinos! How is this not a way dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now?

The Committee knows Easter is coming and so it is Scripturally inclined. (It also recalls serving on the altar as a kid during the interminable Good Friday service, which had the added charm of being one of the most blatantly anti-Semitic public exercise north of George Lincoln Rockwell.) So it was struck by the Biblical Top Comment from Top Commenter Kent Anderson.

Conservatives are like Caiaphas. Obsessed with Ocasio-Cortez as he was with Jesus. They'll end up throwing a ton of money in an effort to defeat her, but unlike the priests in the Temple, they won't defeat her.

Wow. That's very...seasonal. Take these 89.11 Beckhams and go with God.

I'll be back on Monday with the news of 105 more Democratic presidential candidates entering the fray, and the announcement that the DNC is renaming the 2020 national convention to SummerSlam. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and beware dead planets in your immediate orbit.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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