Way to rain on our parade
by digby
Initial jobless claims plunged last week to their lowest levels in more than four decades, according to a Thursday report from the Labor Department.
Happy days are here again!
Here’s the headline:
It’s always something …
Violence against the military
by digby
It happens more than we might think:
April 2014: Violence hit Fort Hood for a second time, when an Iraq War veteran opened fire on the base, killing three and injuring 16 others before committing suicide. Specialist Ivan A. Lopez, 34, shot himself when he was confronted by a police officer. Lopez was being treated for depression, anxiety and other behavior and mental issues, and was being evaluated for PTSD, military officials said.
March 2014: A sailor was killed while trying to stop a gunman attempting to board a ship in Norfolk, Va. Authorities say Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Mayo, 24, jumped between the civilian shooter and a another sailor, saving her life. The alleged gunman, Jeffrey Savage, was killed by Navy security forces.
September 2013: Twelve people died and four were injured after a government contractor opened fire inside the Navy Yard complex in Washington, D.C., committing one of the worst attacks at a U.S. military installation since the November 2009 killing of 13 at Fort Hood. Gunman Aaron Alexis, who had just recently begun an assignment at the site, was shot and killed by officers. Authorities later said that Alexis, who appeared to target his victims at random, “held a delusional belief that he was being controlled or influenced by extremely low frequency, or ELF, electromagnetic waves.”
June 2013: An Army captain at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas was allegedly shot and wounded by her common-law husband, Alvin Roundtree at the Army Medical Department Center and School, where she was an instructor. Roundtree is a retired soldier.
Copperhead Snakes Take Over Texas PropertyApril 2013: Lloyd Gibert, a civilian employer at a Fort Knox, Ky. parking lot, was shot to death outside the post’s Army Human Resources Command building. A Fort Knox soldier, Marquinta E. Jacobs, was arrested in the killing.
March 2013: Marine Sgt. Eusebrio Lopez, a tactics instructor, shot and killed two colleagues at Marine Corps Base Quantico’s Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Va. before shooting himself to death. The victims were Lance Corporal Sara Castromata, a warehouse clerk, and Corporal Jacob Wooley, a field radio operator.
December 2012: Spc. Marshall D. Drake, a soldier at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, shot to death a fellow solder, Pfc. Grant Wise, after a night of heavy drinking. Wise was found dead in Drake’s barracks on Christmas morning. Drake was sentenced for 12 years in a military prison.
June 2012: Spc. Ricky Elder killed himself a day after allegedly shooting and killing his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Roy L. Tisdale, during a safety briefing near his unit’s headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C. News reports indicated that Elder faced legal troubles, and had said he’d been diagnosed with dementia.
May 2012: A soldier was shot by a fellow service member after a traffic accident on the grounds of Fort Carson, Colo. The shooting happened after one of the soldiers allegedly lost control of the car he was driving and crashed into the other soldier’s home. After a fight, the resident opened fire, hitting the driver twice and himself once.
April 2012: A soldier at Fort Campbell, Ky., Spc. Rico Rawls Jr., allegedly shot and killed his wife, Jessica Rawls, at their home on the Army post, then led police on a highway chase into Georgia. Before his arrest, he shot himself and eventually died.
July 2011: Army Pfc. Naser Abdo, 21, was arrested in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood, on warrants out of Fort Campbell, Ky., for being AWOL and possessing obscene material. Abdo, who claimed to be a conscientious objector, later admitted to planning a “massive” attack at a restaurant near the Texas post. After his arrest, the FBI said bomb-making materials were found in his motel room and said he was in possession of a large amount of ammunition, weapons and a bomb in a backpack. The day after his arrest, Abdo shouted “Nidal Hasan, Fort Hood 2009” as he was escorted out of a Texas courtroom. In 2012, Abdo was sentenced to life in prison.
May 2011: Sgt. Jason Seeds, a soldier at Fort Drum, N.Y., allegedly shot his wife during a dispute at their home on the Army post. She lived, and explained later that her husband had suffered from deteriorating mental health since returning home from war.
October and November, 2010: Marine Corps reservist Yonathan Melaku committed a series of drive-by shootings at various military installations in northern Virginia, none of which resulted in anyone getting hurt. When law enforcement agents arrested him, they found bomb making material with him. Melaku was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
November 2009: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan carried out the largest mass murder at a military installation in American history, opening fire on dozens of unarmed soldiers at a medical deployment center at Fort Hood, Texas. Thirteen were killed and another 32 were wounded. Hasan was sentenced to death.
July 2009: Army Sgt. Ryan Schlack was shot while trying to break up a fight at Fort Hood, Texas. A fellow soldier, Spc. Armano Baca, is serving 20 years in prison for the murder.
June 2009: Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a self-described Islamic radical, opened fire on a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., killing one Army private, William Long, and wounding another, Quinton Ezeagwula. Muhammad was sentenced to life in prison.
September 2008: A soldier at Ft. Hood, Texas, shot and killed his lieutenant then committed suicide on the balcony of his apartment.
October 1995: Sgt. William J. Kreutzer Jr. went on a shooting spree at Fort Bragg, N.C., killing one officer and wounding 18 soldiers, members of the 82nd Airborne Division, as they participated in morning physical training exercises. He was sentenced to life in prison.
March 1995: Ernest J. Cooper Jr., a civilian Navy worker, shot and wounded two co-workers at Naval Air Systems Command in Arlington, Va. then killed himself. One of the victims, Nils F. “Fred” Salvesen, was Cooper’s supervisor and the first to be shot. The other, Navy Cmdr. Harry F. Molyneux, was sitting nearby when Cooper turned the gun on him.
June 1994: Airman Dean Mellberg opened fire at the Fairchild Air Force Base hospital outside Spokane, Wash., killing four people and wounding 23 before a security officer killed him.
Of course, it happens everywhere more often than we might realize. But for some reason the only mass killing that worries the authorities is the Lone Wolf Muslim. James Comey said today they are more dangerous than al Qaeda, which is still known to be planning spectacular terrorist attacks like 9/11.
Ok.
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“If I offended any Muslims ….”
by digby
When gunman Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed five U.S. military service members July 16 in Chattanooga, Tenn., a Hamilton councilman went to Facebook to voice his sentiments.
“Murdering bastard. Rot in hell Muslim scum,” Ed Gore wrote at 6:04 p.m. July 16 in a Facebook post. When someone responded to Gore’s statement with a comment telling Gore to not hold back, Gore added, “Oh I never hold back on domestic terrorists.”
Gore apologized Wednesday in an interview with The Trentonian while also explaining why he wrote the controversial statement.
“Certainly I don’t mean all Muslims are scum,” Gore said Wednesday. “If I offended any Muslims, I am sorry. I would certainly hope all Muslims would join me in condemning the murder of innocent Americans anywhere in the world.”
Funny, I couldn’t find any similar condemnation of Dylan Roof. But then he isn’t designated a “domestic terrorist.” Roof is just an All-American killer and that’s no biggie. In fact, you could say he was just using his 2nd Amendment remedies.
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There’s no reason Donald Trump won’t go 3rd Party
by digby
He has more than enough money and his ego is in the stratosphere.
Donald Trump says the chances that he will launch a third-party White House run will “absolutely” increase if the Republican National Committee is unfair to him during the 2016 primary season.
“The RNC has not been supportive. They were always supportive when I was a contributor. I was their fair-haired boy,” the business mogul told The Hill in a 40-minute interview from his Manhattan office at Trump Tower on Wednesday. “The RNC has been, I think, very foolish.”
Pressed on whether he would run as a third-party candidate if he fails to clinch the GOP nomination, Trump said that “so many people want me to, if I don’t win.”
“I’ll have to see how I’m being treated by the Republicans,” Trump said. “Absolutely, if they’re not fair, that would be a factor.”RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called Trump earlier this month asking him to tone down his controversial rhetoric. More recently, the RNC rebuked him for saying that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is not a war hero. Trump didn’t apologize but has since said that the 2008 Republican presidential nominee is a war hero.
Trump told The Hill that the GOP establishment in Washington dislikes him because he’s not part of the political class.
“I’m not in the gang. I’m not in the group where the group does whatever it’s supposed to do,” he said. “I want to do what’s right for the country — not what’s good for special interest groups that contribute, not what’s good for the lobbyists and the donors.”
He’s basically blackmailing the RNC into treating him with kid gloves and warning them that if the other candidates get too tough with him he’ll be a spoiler.
It wouldn’t be the first time …
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A dangerous power trip
by digby
I wrote about police and Sandra Bland today over at Salon:
[I]f you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you.
Black Lives Matter has brought this issue to a head at long last. I go on to discuss why this happened and how the changes and retraining the police are now attempting are being met with resistance from the rank and file — which the antics by the NYPD make obvious.
We have a problem.
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They saved millions
by digby
But I thought this was something interesting that people might not know:
Historically, the use of fetal tissue has produced some groundbreaking scientific discoveries. According to the American Society for Cell Biology, a nonprofit representing a large and varied group of scientists, “Fetal cells hold unique promise for biomedical research due to their ability to rapidly divide, grow, and adapt to new environments. This makes fetal tissue research relevant to a wide variety of diseases and medical conditions.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit focused on sexual and reproductive health, tissue from fetuses has been used since the 1930s for a variety of purposes. Perhaps most famously, the 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to researchers who managed to grow polio vaccine in fetal kidney cell cultures.
In another example, Leonard Hayflick created a cell line from an aborted fetus in the early 1960s that has been used to create vaccines against measles, rubella, shingles and other diseases. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the journal Nature in 2013 that “[t]hese cells from one fetus have no doubt saved the lives of millions of people.”
In more recent years, however, the use of stem cells for therapeutic and research purposes has taken a more central role than fetal tissue. As Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University, told Buzzfeed News, “fetal cells are not a big deal in science anymore.”
In spite of the waning interest, it remains legal to donate tissue from a legally aborted fetus, and for that tissue to be used for research purposes.
Despite the fact that there’s no reason for it not to be legal other than to advance the political agenda of the allegedly “pro-life” crowd, I’m going to guess it’s not going to be legal for much longer. They wouldn’t care regardless, but luckily it looks as though it’s not as essential as it once was.
And as I wrote earlier, I think this may be the issue that allows these ghouls to “ACORN” Planned Parenthood. It’s irrational but that’s how we roll.
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“I’ve never had that talk with my girls”; plus Sandra Bland dashcam video news
by Gaius Publius
Digby covered this story here, but there’s much more from other sources. This is literally heart-wrenching. Shaun King writing at Daily Kos:
How the assault, arrest, and death of Sandra Bland changes everything for me
I live in a house with six black girls and women. I have four daughters, ranging from the ages of 2 to 15 years old. My wife, Rai, is my high school sweetheart and we’ve been inseparable since 1995. My 60-year-old mother-in-law, a Pentecostal minister, lives with us as well. Outside of our only son, most of our house, and most of my life, revolves around loving, caring, learning from, providing for, and protecting these six black women. They are everything to me.
I made a mistake though.
I drastically underestimated the very real and present threat police present to black women in America. As a journalist, as a leader, and as a husband and father, I’ve gone to great lengths to communicate the disproportionate threat of brutality that black men face at the hands of law enforcement. If you live in my house, the names Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice—each unarmed black boys and men who were killed in fatal encounters with police—are deeply familiar, almost like slain family members. We talk about their cases and the pain facing their families at our dinner table. Last week I would’ve told you this with a sense of pride. Now, though, not so much.
About a week ago, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman from Chicago had just accepted a new job at Prairie View A&M University, about an hour outside of Houston, Texas, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in agriculture. Leaving the campus on the afternoon of Friday, June 10, everything about her world would soon come crumbling down.
Officer Brian Encinia, a white officer with five years of experience for the Texas State Police, can be seen on recently released dashcam footage roaring full speed behind Bland to catch up to her slow-driving Hyundai. As many of us have been trained to do, she moved her car, as courtesy, to the right lane to allow the speeding officer to pass her by. We don’t just see this, Bland herself, on this same footage, can be heard later communicating to the officer that she indeed changed lanes because she noticed his fast-approaching patrol car behind her. The officer, though, saw a technicality. In getting over to the next lane for him, Bland failed to use her turn signal. He put on his flashing lights, Bland pulled over, and we now know that she lived only three more days. This encounter was the beginning of her end.
This is where my mistake comes into play. Black families often speak of “the talk” we have to have with our sons about just how dangerous a simple encounter with police can quickly become. I’ve never had that talk with my girls. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think it was necessary. I was wrong. It is painfully and urgently necessary. Officer Brian Encinia, who has been suspended from active duty by the Texas Department of Public Safety for multiple violations of state policies during his arrest of Sandra Bland, has made it such that I will now have “the talk” with my girls as well.
In the video, Officer Encinia notices that Bland is visibly frustrated for being pulled over. In what first appeared to be a courtesy, but soon showed itself to be a ruse, he asked her the cause of her frustrations. It otherwise appears she had no intentions of communicating her feelings to the officer. Almost as soon as she begins to express herself, Officer Encinia, overstepping his authority in a show of power, asks Bland to put out her cigarette.
Bland, though, knows her rights, and communicates to the officer that she is fully and completely allowed to smoke in her car. She was right. It was downhill from there. Officer Encinia first asks, then demands that Sandra Bland get out of her car. He then forcefully attempts to make her get out of the car. She refuses. On 14 different occasions, Bland asks Officer Encinia what she was being arrested for, but he gives no answers. He then pulls out his Taser and tells Bland, “I’ll light you up,” if she doesn’t get out of the car. This is another abuse of his power.
“I’ll light you up.” In some districts, I’m completely convinced, attitudes like these are a plus at the officer candidate interview. And by “like this” I mean, explicitly:
Quote me. I know therapists who treat the families of police officers. They attest to the third point. The first two have been amply and publicly demonstrated.
More from Mr. King:
Arrested for assaulting an officer, which did not appear on any
either video we have from the day, Bland would communicate to the bail
bondsman that she feared for her life in the jail and wanted to get out
immediately.On Monday, July 13, on the day she was scheduled to be released, Bland left the jail, dead.
Another day, another cop letting his own freak flag fly — not to mention his friends at the station who may have joined right in.
Was the Sandra Bland DashCam Video Edited?
Answer: Very possibly yes.
Rather than quote the source, I’m going to send you to dKos diarist Patience John who’s done some interesting work. While the audio appears to by only somewhat interrupted, the video clearly loops. Oddly (or not), the same cars keep driving by in a section that starts about 32 minutes into the video.
I do want to quote this observation though:
Waller County is also home to Prairie View A&M,
one of the oldest traditionally black universities. This could have
been any of the many young black youths and young men and women in the
area.
Click, read and watch. More from Ben Morton, who finds other discrepancies:
Yet more from Yesha Callahan at TheRoot:
Hat tip to radio host Angie Coiro via email for each of the last two links.
This could be major. It also could well blow up.
Late news: Looks like the maybe-edited dashcam video has been rereleased in a shorter, less glitchy version. This second version appears less edited, or unedited, or (dare we say it) reedited to appear unedited. ABC News:
Texas police have released a second version of the dashboard-camera footage of Sandra Bland‘s traffic stop and ensuing arrest.
The footage was recorded on the dashcam of a highway trooper who pulled Bland over July 10 and shows their interaction as it escalates from a verbal exchange to a physical one.
Bland’s arrest is being scrutinized in light of her death in a jail cell three days later.
The Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin first released a 52-minute version of the footage Tuesday night via YouTube, but viewers quickly noticed video anomalies. Some viewers lashed out on social media, claiming the tape had been edited, though a department spokesman denied any edits had been made in a statement released this morning.
The new version of the video, which is just over 49 minutes long, was just released and does not have any of the visual anomalies that were noted in the first version.
So what should we believe? That the original released recording was raw, unedited and had “uploading errors” — or was edited (badly) to make the traffic stop look somehow better? That the second released recording was even more raw and even more unedited — or that the edited first version was somehow cleaned up for this release? We really do need answers to these questions, as well as to the cause of death itself.
This is being treated as a murder investigation. That department has a history of problems related to African-Americans (see link). So far, there’s no released autopsy report that I’m aware of, just the medical examiner’s initial ruling of suicide. Has the body been released to the family? No idea, but I’m not seeing a report of it.
We’ll have to see how it goes. To me, this still looks like it could well blow up.
GP
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Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the ALEC States of America
by Tom Sullivan
Republican presidential hopeful Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is in San Diego this morning to address the 2015 convention of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). If politicians really did wear sponsors’ logos on their jackets like NASCAR drivers, Walker’s relationship with ALEC’s funders would win him the pole position:
It is a relationship that spans two decades. Since he first took public office in 1993 as a Wisconsin legislator, through to his current position as that state’s governor, Walker has maintained close ties to Alec, with policies to match. Many of Walker’s most contentious actions – a tough-on-crime bill that sent incarceration rates soaring, stand-your-ground gun laws, protection of corporate vested interests, attacks on union rights and many more – have borne the Alec seal of approval.
Should Walker win the Republican nomination in 2016 (a plausible outcome) and then defeat the Democratic candidate to take the presidency (a harder, though not unthinkable, challenge) he would become the first Alec alum to enter the Oval Office. In short, it is now possible to conceive of the first Alec president of the United States.
See Merriam-Webster’s definition for “shill.”
For those needing a refresher, Brendan Fischer of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reports:
More than 200 corporations and a quarter of state legislators belong to ALEC, where corporations vote as equals with state legislators on “model” bills before they are introduced in legislatures to become binding law. The group receives 98 percent of its funding from corporations like Shell Oil, Peabody Coal, and Altria/Phillip Morris, and from sources like the Koch family foundations, and many of the “model bills” that it has promoted – from prison privatization to environmental deregulation — directly benefit the financial interests of its funders.
Fischer explores the conference agenda here.
ALEC may have chosen San Diego for its conference to draw a line in the sand. ALEC strongly opposes moves across the country to raise the minimum wage:
Aside from the weather, ALEC organizers may have also been attracted to the city’s political climate. Last year, the San Diego City Council voted to raise the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour. It joined Los Angeles and Boston as one of the communities to raise the minimum wage at the local level. Detractors were able to put the measure to a referendum scheduled in 2016. Businessweek labeled San Diego a “bulwark against minimum wage hikes” in headline, talking [about] the referendum.
The group has long had public education as a target, with a goal of transferring public education funding to private schools (part of its overall privatization agenda) and abolishing pubic education altogether. Milton Friedman addressed this at an ALEC meeting in 2006 [emphasis mine]:
How do we get from where we are to where we want to be—to a system in which parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you’re not gonna to do that. So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. And the answer is, in my opinion, choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of its being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so that the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.
And of course deceiving the public about that goal is the way you go about it. You sell the hollowing out of the American tradition of public education with talk about choice, racial inequity, innovation, etc. And school reformers did for a long time. At this ALEC conference, however, it seems finally the mask has come off:
With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is meeting in San Diego today, has decided to drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class—a project which, if pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic standing.
As President of the United States, Scott Walker hopes to take the first ceremonial swing with ALEC’s golden sledge hammer.
The GOP presidential campaign gets serious
by digby
I love these guys …
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Who cares what they think?
by digby
So I keep reading that Hillary Clinton is hugely unpopular now. And yet there’s this from this week’s Washington Post poll:
The poll brings into perspective the popularity of candidates on the Democratic side, too. Hillary Rodham Clinton has ticked back up slightly, moving from a net negative position in May of 45-49 favorable-unfavorable to a net positive position of 52-45 favorable-unfavorable.
Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Vermont senator making a run for the Democratic nomination, is largely unknown at this point with ratings that split 27 percent favorable to 28 percent unfavorable. A 45 percent plurality are unable to rate him. Sanders has generated a lot of intensity from the furthest left wings of the Democratic party, with rallies attended by thousands on college campuses.
Sanders has gained ground in New Hampshire and Iowa according to some recent statewide polls, but he still trails Clinton by very wide margins in national popularity. Even among his supposed base of liberal Democrats, Clinton’s favorable ratings are nearly twice as high as Sanders — 86 percent favorable for Clinton to 48 percent for Sanders. In fact, Clinton’s strongly favorable ratings are equal to Sanders’s overall favorable ratings among liberal Democrats.
Whatever. Polling is pretty much useless right now for anything but measuring the momentary popularity of the freak show.
But there is one little thing that strikes me as being very interesting as I observe all the ostentatious pearl clutching about Clinton’s inherent weakness:
Clinton, who has highlighted the possibility of becoming the first female president in U.S. history, is far more popular among Democratic women than men, by almost 20 points
Huh. That seems a little bit odd. But what difference does it make, amirite? After all, there’s no electoral advantage to having women enthusiastic about her:
According to Gallup polls, the gender gap in the last five presidential elections has averaged 15.8 points. In 2012 it was the highest they’ve measured at 20 points; Barack Obama trailed Mitt Romney by 8 points among men but led him by 12 points among women (exit polls put the gap at a slightly lower 18 points). If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee in 2016, it will almost certainly be even higher.
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