Month: May 2015

The danger of documenting the atrocity

by digby

I certainly hope that this doesn’t portend more retaliation:

Kevin Moore, the man who filmed Freddie Gray’s brutal arrest, has now himself been arrested following “harassment and intimidation” from Baltimore police.

Moore was arrested at gunpoint last night along with two other members of Cop Watch, agroup dedicated to filming and documenting police work.

His video of Gray’s arrest was shot shortly before the man suffered spinal injuries while in police custody that led to his death.

Moore claims that despite having co-operated with two detectives in the Baltimore Police Department’s Office of Internal Oversight and given them the video, police posted his photo and told the public that he was “wanted for questioning”, asking people to identify him.

“What is so important that you have to plaster my picture over the Internet? I’ve already spoken,” Moore said, suggesting that they posted it simply to intimidate him.

He was released a couple of hours after the arrest.

It’s hard to tell what the timeline is from these reports. It’s possible that the “wanted for questioning” notices were put out by the same police from Internal Oversight who eventually spoke with him. But it sounds as the notice may have been put out by other members of the police for different purposes. Who knows why they will say they arrested him? I’m sure they’ll say they have a reason.

In any case, there a many examples of police retaliating against those who film their actions. Some jurisdictions have tried to outlaw the practice. We often see cops trying to confiscate or destroy cameras. This one happened here in Southern california just the other day:

The woman in the video, Beatriz Paez, was apparently out for a walk when she came upon what appeared to be a massive federal operation in her neighborhood involving local bikers.

The video shows Paez standing away from the law enforcement officers, wearing tactical vests emblazoned with the word “POLICE,” holding her phone up as she records the scene and occasionally speaking to the officers.

At one point, a bald man in a tactical vest, safety glasses and a large gun slung over one shoulder runs up to the woman and grabs for her phone, wrestles it away from her, throws it on the ground and kicks it at her.

The smartest thing that the fellow who took the video of the murder of Walter Scott did was come forward and make himself a household name. It undoubtedly would have been very dangerous if  he hadn’t done it.

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QOTD: Donald Rumsfeld

by digby

Oh right:

H/t to Joshua Holland

Libertarians actually take this guy seriously

by digby

TPM:

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) posted a video to YouTube on Thursday applauding Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for ordering the State Guard to monitor the upcoming military training exercise that will be taking place in Texas and six other western states.

The exercise, known as “Jade Helm 15,” has sparked multiple conspiracy theories, including one that speculates the military will use shuttered Wal-Mart stores to stage its takeover of western states.

During the video, titled “Jade Helm: A Military Takeover?”, the former congressman speculated about why Abbott had ordered this monitoring.

“You know it sounds like he’s sort of sympathizing with people who have great concern about federal takeovers,” Ron Paul said. “And, we don’t know what his personal position is but at least legally he’s saying that he’s gonna send the guard in and sort of watch over what the feds will be doing this summer you know in this so called ‘training.'”
[…]
“I sense that the federal government has taken over,” Paul said. “The CIA is very powerful. We have these special forces all over the world and we don’t know who’s really in charge. Who’s the military, the CIA? They’re the ones who direct the drones. So they’re very much involved. And at home, the feds have taken over because they know everything about everybody and that’s through NASA. They spy on everybody.”

Paul mentioned NASA again before catching himself and talking about the NSA.

Paul said that martial law is a real possibility but added that he didn’t think the country was quite there yet.

“I think this is very good that the governor has done this,” Paul said. “I’m not at the point where I think this is the first step and six months from now you’re gonna have see martial law all around the country and I sure hope I’m right on that.”

Yeah, I hope so too.

I wonder if serious libertarians will ever understand that paranoid loons like Paul make it easy for the government to dismiss civil libertarian concerns about the NSA and the drones etc? I know it’s thrilling to hear him say that taxes are theft and that property is God, but it’s not worth it.

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Speaking Jesus in Spanish

by digby

I wrote about Republican outreach to Hispanic evangelicals today in Salon:

Republican candidates are down in Texas this week to woo another important potential voting bloc. No, there isn’t a billionaires convention in town — it’s a meeting of the evangelical National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference . Jeb Bush was there, of course, speaking his fluent Spanish and touting adorable latin nicknames, as the Bush brothers are wont to do. (Recall that for reasons which remain obscure, W used to call NY Times reporter Frank Bruni “Panchito,” and Jeb shared that he calls his son George P. Bush “Chicharito,” which means “little pea.”) Jeb also made the pitch that immigrants should be able to come out of the shadows and talked up ISIS as a major threat to Christians everywhere. By all accounts, he was much more relaxed and comfortable than usual and the crowd received him well. 

But it was Mike Huckabee who surprised observers with a rousing speech, which he opened with his characteristic humor saying, “I do not come to you tonight with the ability to speak Spanish. But I do speak a common language: I speak Jesus.” And that he did. 

Huckabee didn’t bring up ISIS, but he did make the case that Christianity is in grave danger here in the U.S. He said “We are living in perilous times where people who are Christian are on the brink of being criminalized for their conviction.” He even went so far as to say that, while he respected the Supreme Court, “it is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God.” These are the kind of fighting words that social conservatives of all stripes love to hear. 

It’s not surprising that GOP candidates would appear before this group. It’s long been an article of faith that this was the most likely path by which the Republicans could entice Hispanic voters to come over to their side. The community has traditionally been Catholic, but this is a growing religious bloc within it and they share many of the same views on social issues. Indeed, it was aussumed that it was George W. Bush’s identity as a “born again” Christian which led so many Latinos to vote for him in 2000. Hispanics are assumed to be very traditional and conservative, which makes them natural GOP voters, if only they knew it. (Or so the thinking goes.)

It won’t work. I explain why at the link. It turns out that Hispanic evangelicals have a different view of what Jesus thought government should do than Mike Huckabee does.

Freedom’s untidy
by Tom Sullivan

So in light of recent events in Baltimore, a friend dredged up this nugget from the memory hole:

FLASHBACK #TBT Rumsfeld: Looting is transition to "freedom": http://t.co/FoTiGoQI0k @HuffPostHill @chrislhayes pic.twitter.com/UM1HdelBNP— Murshed Zaheed (@murshedz) April 30, 2015

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave that explanation for the looting in Baghdad at a briefing on April 11, 2003. He followed those remarks by saying:

… freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here.

[snip]

The task we’ve got ahead of us now is an awkward one, because you have to go from a transition — from a repressed regime to an unrepressed regime that is free to do good things and also do bad things, and we’re going to see both.

Notice how easily the untidiness in Baltimore knocked ISIL, a.k.a. Rumsfeld’s Baby, right off the front pages? Yes, ISIL is that much of an existential threat to America.

The scary thing for Iraq and Syria, however, is that now the media-conscious ISIL will want to do some “bad things” that put them back on the front pages.

We are all Democratic Socialists now

by digby

Jonathan Cohn explains what Bernie Sanders means when he calls himself a Democratic socialist. Of course he wants to send all the conservatives to FEMA camps first and foremost.  That goes without saying. But after that, this is pretty much what it means:

“Sanders doesn’t shrink from the label socialist, Andrew Prokop pointed out in a profile for Vox last year, but he generally identifies himself as a democratic socialist. The distinction matters. Democratic socialism, as generally conceived in the U.S., is a milder, more aspirational form of the ideology. Democratic socialists might not recoil at the thought of government running large industries, but they don’t actively pursue that goal. Instead, they focus on decidedly less radical objectives — like making the welfare state more generous, giving workers more power, limiting the influence of money on politics and policing the practices of business more closely.

That sounds like a majority of the Democratic party!  Runferyerlives!!!

Oh, and guess what?

A study by VoteView, determined that Sanders is actually less liberal than many Republican senators are conservative.

They don’t embrace the word that best describes them. We’ll just call them “ultra-conservative” and leave it at that.

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