OK, “Anglo-American law” is a synonym for the common law, but Sessions rang an apparently improvised change on it. My #1 thought when I heard “Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement” was “Oh, you mean like lynching?” Context matters, and the context here includes a racist AG in a racist administration. I think the item is newsworthy. I’m interested in what lawyers, legal scholars, and historians have to say about the phrase.
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Agree with you, Matt, on the Obama portraits. HIs grabbed me immediately. Hers made me think “Huh,” but it’s growing on me PDQ.
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Glad to see other news outlets finally pay attention to this. Maddow has been following it for close to a year now.
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I’m so hooked on watching Maddow…I love the way she digs into stuff like this. If I were to guess, I’d say trump considers himself to be a “charity”, just as the fund-raising he’s been doing under the guise of his re-election fund is actually paying his lawyers & who-knows-what-else. He’s hoping everyone will stop asking about it. 
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It’s helpful to look at Michelle Obama’s portrait by Amy Sherald in the context of the artist’s body of work. (She is amazing, btw)
Then look to the artist’s statement:
Sherald, “known for her stylized, archetypal portrayals of African Americans,” survived a heart transplant in 2012, the museum notes. “A personification of resilience herself, Sherald conveys the inner strength of her subjects through a combination of calm expressions and confrontational poses,” the gallery writes.
Let’s then look at the content of the image, the pose, the dress by Michelle Smith for Milly and even the color choice of the background. This portrait is layered in meaning but does require some context.
The dress, Smith said by phone from Paris, is based on one that was in her spring 2017 Milly collection. That season Smith was inspired by a “desire for equality, equality in human rights, racial equality, LGBTQ equality,” she says.
The pose, seems contemplative and very measured.
The light blue background is telling a story too. Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness.
Here’s a link to Kihinde Wiley’s work as well, he is also amazing!
Both of these paintings are absolutely stunning and wonderful additions to the Portrait Gallery. I hope that helps! What do you all think?
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There’s been some commentary on it in the twittersphere, enough that I think it would be worth issuing a correction. It does sound weird and racial at first glance, but apparently it’s an inside-baseball term that’s seen use from many far more anodyne sources.
https://twitter.com/PoliceLawProf/status/963188872661397504
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/963226742067531777
FWIW, Snopes reached the same conclusion as @abellenz as well:
“While we are unable to ascertain Sessions’s motives for the change he made to his prepared speech (there were many other places he diverged, as well), we can say that it is factual that Sessions made the statement that “the office of Sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement” and that “Anglo-American” is a way to reference to the common law legal heritage the United States sheriff’s system shares with Europe.”
The trouble with the trump administration is that they (especially trump but others too) say things that are ambiguous…I’m convinced it’s done deliberately to signal their base in ways they know they can “get away with” using plausible deniability after the fact. And it’s not as if they never completely contradict themselves in plain English anyway…they depend on people hearing what they want to hear out of all their gaseous emissions.
Snopes: I thought they were no longer considered reliable for fact-checking?
Do you have any further details on this? I hadn’t heard this, so I’m curious. I know they had legal issues over their website hosting last year and their was that whole Save Snopes campaign, but it was unrelated to their reliability from my knowledge.
Not off-hand I don’t…it’s been about a year since I used them to look up something that was disproved elsewhere. Then I heard from someone else they weren’t considered to be reliable any longer-? Wish my memory was better on this, sorry…it’s not my intention to bad-mouth them at all, I used to use them now & then, it was a disappointment. I’ve had no awareness of any other website issues they may have had.
I like the Obama portraits…they aren’t the musty old-style portraits of yesteryear.
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So they raised $107 million, and spent ~$100 million? Then praised themselves for being frugal? Obama spent ~45M in 2009, an event that was much larger, and better attended for comparison. Good lord.
They only spent ~$51M on actual inauguration expenses (but raised ~$107M).
“…the overwhelming majority of the funds went toward expenses related to the inauguration, with the biggest share — nearly $51 million — split roughly evenly between two companies.”
Which *still* insane – because as you mentioned Obama only spent ~$45M for a much, much larger inauguration (and accompanying events).
I read that as they paid $51 million to two “vendors” and spent the rest ~$49 million on inaugural expenses. They donated ~4.75 million and they have a few million left over.
(If this posts 6,000 times it’s only because I’m getting errors on submit and I’m impatient, not because my point is that important)
Thank you for the link, I was pretty sure I wasn’t hallucinating about that. (If only the POTUS could be chalked up to a mere hallucination?) The relevant section is pretty far down in the copy, for anyone looking.
Oh, interesting. I haven’t seen that. Got a link?
Can you find the video of the segment? Without verification, this is just hearsay.