Weird that yesterday felt very busy and full of news and yet this morning’s articles weren’t particularly interesting. Maybe everyone is, like me, processing last night’s The Americans.

• In the New Republic, Maya Wiley writes about how district attorneys can change criminal justice:
  

  These are different campaigns, in different communities, but one thing they all have in common is a focus on how “prosecutorial discretion” can be used as a tool for reform.

  It’s a relatively new idea. For decades, reformers focused on changing America’s criminal justice system through its legislatures, a process that is vital but necessarily slow. Entrenched, powerful constituencies, like police unions and DA associations, can often slow legislation or stop it altogether. The California legislature, for example, took almost two decades to amend the notorious 1994 “three strikes” law, which required a 25-years-to-life sentence for a third felony conviction. This was despite the fact that just two years after its enactment, black people were receiving three strikes at 13 times the rate of whites. Today, with more than two million people languishing in America’s prisons and jails, at a cost to taxpayers of $87 billion per year, waiting for a legislature to act is not acceptable. Families with members suffering abuse in jail, job loss, and separation simply can’t afford to wait.

  The quintessential example of this, of course, is the high-profile Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, but according to Wiley, other cities — such as Albuquerque, Denver, Houston, Jacksonville, and Tampa — have also elected reforming prosecutors. It does make me wonder why it’s so hard to convince politicians to change the laws, since apparently these kinds of prosecutors are becoming more popular.

• In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last surprises me by offering up a solution for the kneeling-NFL-player conundrum that I can actually get behind, if for slightly different reasons than he suggests. Yesterday the NFL owners announced that players could remain in the locker room during the anthem, but would be fined if they knelt during it. Here’s Last’s alternative:
  

  [T]he League understands the underlying point of your protests and we agree with you. The statistics on police use of deadly force are sobering. The statistics on police shootings of African-American men are sobering, too. And the specific cases of misconduct that America has seen over the last few years are simply awful. No matter which side of the culture war you’re on, a case like the murder of Walter Scott and the attempt of police to cover it up, ought to fill you with rage.

  So instead of making a gesture by kneeling during the national anthem, we want to try to address the problem in a concrete way. The League is going to start funneling some of its charitable giving to local police departments to fund body cameras.

  I . . . kind of agree with this? (This is very confusing for me.) My issue with the kneeling is not that I think it’s unpatriotic or an insult to the troops or any nonsense like that; the best way to honor the troops, in my opinion, is to take full advantage of the Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms they fought for. It makes no sense to me to elevate a symbol (the flag) over the substance (the Constitution). But why are liberal protestors ceding patriotism to the right anyway? If there’s anything that the last eighteen months has cemented in my mind, it’s that protestors are the real patriots. So protesting in a way that allows the Right to feel morally superior is not my favorite. But I do like the idea of the NFL owners ponying up some of their own cash to try to actually solve the problem, and of them stating on the record that police brutality is a real problem that deserves a solution.

  My guess is that Last’s compromise wouldn’t work largely because a lot of the owners don’t think that police brutality is a real problem. They can’t even be convinced to take it seriously when their players are arrested for domestic violence!

• At Lawfare, Tamara Cofman Wittes writes about her experience observing the Lebanese elections. Her conclusion:
  

  New movements in any democracy take time to see electoral gains—the more so in a system as clientelistic and fractured as Lebanon’s. While the United States has for years hoped to see alternative Shia movements to Hezbollah and Amal emerge in Lebanon, such efforts remain marginal and face relentless intimidation and harassment from Hezbollah. Still and all, the emergence of trans-confessional, independent politicians and the continued pressure for improved governance mean that there is hope for change in Lebanon. The United States currently provides $80 million in economic aid and $120 million in military aid to the country, with funds focused on the army, education, and governance. Developments over the nine years since the last parliamentary elections strongly suggest that change in Lebanese politics won’t come from above but rather from the grassroots. The lesson for American policy makers is to stay in the game.

• And Rosie Gray profiles Stormy Daniels’s colorful attorney, Michael Avenatti, for the Atlantic:
  

  As far as media coverage, the Daniels story has started to resemble nothing so much as major spectacles like the Simpson trial did. It’s an all-encompassing vortex that has pulled all kinds of issues into its wake and become about much more than Trump’s alleged affair: Cohen’s selling of access to the president, his potential role in Russian efforts to help Trump, and what his role in Trump’s world says about how the whole thing works. None of these angles have gotten by without a boost from the smooth-headed Avenatti, who broke the news of the payment from a Russian oligarch to Cohen. “I’m the lawyer for Stormy Daniels in the first instance and I’m the lawyer for the truth in the second instance,” he said on MSNBC last week.

  It’s kind of confusing to me how much people on the left seem to like Avenatti. I suppose it’s because (unlike Robert Mueller) he seems to be spilling information all over the place. But he’s just a lawyer: I believe that he wants to represent Stormy Daniels to the best of his ability but I’m much more skeptical that he’s a disinterested warrior in the battle for the Truth.