No Apologies: The House voted yesterday to censure Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar for his posting of an anime video that depicted him killing Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and assaulting President Biden.

  Only two Republicans voted with the Democrats, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming, and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. 

  Gosar was also stripped of his committee assignments. It’s only the 24^th time in the country’s history that censure has been deployed.

  Censure is a form of public humiliation that requires the recipient to have regrets if it’s going to have any effect. Gosar, a far right winger who has sided with white nationalists and espoused QAnon conspiracies has not apologized and Republican leaders have refused to condemn him. He re-posted the offending video shortly after his censure.

  To give you an idea of what kind of guy Gosar is, his own siblings have described him as a political pariah.

  The vote followed an at times angry debate between the two parties. Gosar said on the floor that what he did was not dangerous or threatening and Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California described it as a one-sided affair saying, “There’s an old definition of abuse of power: rules for thee but not for me.”

  Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “When a member uses his or her national platform to encourage violence, tragically, people listen.” She said that “depictions of violence can foment actual violence, as witnessed by this chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.”

  And Ocasio-Cortez asked, “What is so hard, what is so hard about saying that this is wrong?” She said, “This is about what we are willing to accept.” 

Life and Death in Georgia: The white Georgia man who shot and killed the unarmed black jogger Ahmaud Arbery testified yesterday in his own defense that he thought he faced a life or death situation.

  Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan chased Arbery in two vehicles in February 2020 near Brunswick, Georgia before the final confrontation in which the younger McMichael killed Arbery. The three have claimed they thought the 25-year-old Arbery had committed a burglary and they planned a “citizen’s arrest.”

  Travis  McMichael testified that when he got out and went to the front of his vehicle, Arbery grabbed McMichael’s shotgun and struck him.

  “I shot him,”   McMichael testified. “He had my gun, he struck me, it was obvious … that he was attacking me, that if he would have gotten the shotgun from me, then it was a life or death situation.”

  The question of course, is whether the entire pursuit was necessary and whether, when confronted by a man with a shotgun, Arbery acted out of fear for his own life. 

Justice Delayed: Two men found guilty in the 1965 assassination of the civil rights leader Malcolm X are expected to have their convictions thrown out today in an acknowledgment of serious errors in their prosecution.

   A lengthy investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and lawyers for the two men found that prosecutors, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the New York Police Department  had withheld key evidence that likely would have resulted in their acquittal. The 2020 Netflix documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” was influential in re-opening the investigation. 

   Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam each spent more than 20 years in prison. A third man,  Mujahid Abdul Halim, was also found guilty and has confessed claiming the other two were not present at the killing. 

  Aziz, 83 was released in 1985 and is now 83. Islam, who was released in 1987 and died in 2009 at age 74. 

  “This wasn’t a mere oversight,” said Deborah Francois, a lawyer for the men. “This was a product of extreme and gross official misconduct.”

  Just 39 years old at the time of his death, Malcolm X had separated from the black nationalist  Nation of Islam and was forming a new group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. One night as he began to speak at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, three men rushed the stage and shot him in front of his pregnant wife and three of his daughters.

Covid Nation: Heading into Thanksgiving gatherings, cases of Covid-19 are on the upswing again, up 23 percent over the past two weeks.

 White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci warns that the vaccines’ diminishing protection combined with the highly transmissible delta variant will result in a “double whammy” that will hit “even the vaccinated people.”

  This morning 767,439 Americans are dead of Covid-19 

The Spin Rack: Jacob Chansley, the man known as the QAnon Shaman who was bare-chested in face paint and wearing a horned head dress as he stormed the Senate floor during the Capitol insurrection, was sentenced yesterday to 41 months in prison for his plea to a single felony. — Young Dolph, a 36-year-old Memphis rapper whose most recent album “Rich Slave,” broke out  at No. 4 on the Billboard chart last year, was shot and killed at  Makeda’s Homemade Butter Cookies, a bakery that Young Dolph liked to frequent. He had previously been shot at and missed and was wounded once in a shooting in Hollywood. — More than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses over a 12-month period for the first time in US history, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. It’s a 28.5% increase over the same period the previous year.

Shoot From the Lip: As a jury in Wisconsin considers whether to send 18 year-old-Kyle Rittenhouse to prison for life, Florida republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said he might offer the Kenosha killer a job.

  “Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a pretty good congressional intern,” Gaetz said last night during an appearance on the right wing  Newsmax. “We may reach out to him and see if he’d be interested in helping the country in additional ways.”

  Rittenhouse’s first act of “helping” the country was shooting and killing two unarmed men.

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