Month: July 2016

QOTD: Mark Fuhrman

by digby

This is the expert Fox calls in to talk about Black Lives Matter:

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): There’s been, you know, a big brush. A lot of these folks paint with a very big brush, Mark, and they find a couple of shootings that are deeply problematic. There’s no question we’ve seen that over the past year and try to push a narrative that all cops are bad, and all cops are out to kill innocent young black men.

MARK FUHRMAN: Well, Megyn, we could have done this for the last five decades, 10 decades. You can always find something that doesn’t look like justice was served one way or another, where somebody made a mistake, somebody was overzealous, somebody was overaggressive. If you’re going to take this micro-moment in the history of a city, a county, a state or a country and use that as a movement, you can never combat this. There’s always going to be something. It’s like having a perfect family. It doesn’t exist.

Yeah he knows a little something about “overaggression.”  Here’s a another quote from Fuhrman back in the day:

I had 66 allegations of brutality: AEW, under color of authority, assault and battery under color authority. Torture, all kinds of stuff. Two guys, well, there was four guys. Two of my buddies were shot and ambushed, policemen. Both alive and I was first unit on the scene. Four suspects ran into a 2nd story in a apartment projects — apartment. We kicked the door done. We grabbed a girl that lived there, one of their girlfriends. Grabbed her by the hair and stuck a gun to her head, and used her as a barricade. Walked up and told them: `I’ve got this girl, I’ll blow her fucking brains out, if you come out with a gun.’ Held her like this — threw the bitch down the stairs — deadbolted the door — Let’s play, boys.

Q: Can we use that in the story?

A: It hasn’t been 7 years. Statute of limitations. I have 300 and something pages internal affairs investigation just on that one incident. I got several other ones. I must have about 3000 or 4000 pages of internal affairs investigations out there. Anyway, we basically tortured them. There was 4 policemen, 4 guys. We broke ’em. Numerous bones in each one of them. their faces were just mush. They had pictures on the walls, there was blood all the way to the ceiling with finger marks like they were trying to crawl out of the room. They showed us pictures of the room. It was unbelievable, there was blood everywhere. All the wall, all the furniture, all the floor. It was just everywhere. These guys, they had to shave so much hair off, one guy they shaved it all off. Like 70 stitches in his head. You know, knees, cracked, oh it was just — We had ’em begging that they’d never be gang members again, begging us. So with 66 allegations. I had a demonstration in front of Hollenbeck station chanting my name. Captain had to take them all into roll call, and that’s where the internal affairs investigation started. It lasted 18 months. I was on a photo lineup, suspect lineup. I was picked out by 12 people. So I was pretty proud of that. I was the last one interviewed. The prime suspect is always the last one interviewed. They didn’t get any of our unit – 38 guys – they didn’t get one day. The custodian — the jailer of the Sheriff’s Department got 5 days, since he beat one of the guys at the very end . . . Boy, you know, and started . . .

Immediately after we beat those guys, we went downstairs to the garden hose in the back of the place. We washed our hands. We had blood all over our legs, everything. With a dark blue uniform, you know, and in the dark, you can’t see it. But when you get in the light and it looks like somebody took red paint and painted it all over you. We had to clean our badges off with water, there was blood all over ’em. Our face [sic] had blood on them. We had to clean all that. We checked each other, then we went our, we were directing traffic. And the chiefs and everything were coming down because two officers were shot, `Where are the suspects?’ `I think some of these officers over here got them,’ they took them to the station. Somehow nobody knows who arrested them. We handcuffed them and threw them down two flights of stairs, you know. That’s how they came. That’s where a lot of people saw, you know.

`Look out! Here comes one. O my God, look out, he’s falling! I mean you don’t shoot a policeman. That’s all there is to it. But anyway, the point is — Well, they know I did it. They know damn well I did it. There’s nothing they could do, but I could. Most of those guys worked the 77th together. We were tight. I mean, we could have murdered people and got away with it. We were tight. We all knew what to say. We didn’t have to call each other at home, and say, `Okay.’ We all knew what to say. Most real good policemen understand, that they would love to take certain people, and just take them to the alley and blow their brains out.

Fox is just shameless. But you knew that.

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This is how they move the country right

by digby

It’s also called holding your breath until you turn blue to get your way. It’s very effective.

And no, I have no idea how you deal with this other than to get a political majority and give the GOP a long time out.

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Oops he did it again

by digby

photo illustration by Emil Lendoff/Daily Beast

Yet another white supremacist tied to Trump:

A pro-Donald Trump rally scheduled to take place at the Republican National Convention and co-hosted by longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has cut ties with a white nationalist website that was previously sponsoring the event.

Media Matters reported this week that a “unity rally” featuring several Trump surrogates scheduled to be held in Cleveland on July 18 was being co-sponsored by Eternal Sentry, a self-described “altright” website that has repeatedly warned about “White Genocide” and posted other racist and anti-Semitic material. Paul Chambers, who produces the Eternal Sentry website and was also listed as the “Content Creation Team Director” for rally co-host Citizens for Trump, has also posted racist material arguing that whites need to “fight back” against African-Americans and “send them back to the mud-huts they so desperately and obviously desire.”

Citizens for Trump’s Tim Selaty told Cleveland.com he was not aware of Chambers’ “harmful” views and that his group had failed to do its “due diligence.” According to Selaty, Chambers “decided to drop his sponsorship and resign his volunteer position on our staff”

Yeah, right. It’s all a big coincidence that Trump’s campaign has featured white supremacist delegates, images, tweets, comments and endorsements. Nothing to see here.

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Obama on the problem of guns. (Again)

by digby

The president was asked this morning about whether it was wise of him to talk about guns in the wake of mass shootings. This is what he said:

With respect to the issue of guns. (heavy sigh) 

I am going to keep on talking about the fact that we cannot eliminate all racial tension in our country overnight. We are not going to be able to identify ahead of time and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to to do harm against innocent people. But we can make it harder for them to do so. 

And if you look at the pattern of death and violence and shootings that we’ve experienced over the course of the last year or the last five years or the last ten years. I’ve said this before, we are unique among advanced countries in the scale of violence that we experience and I’m not just talking about mass shootings, I’m talking about the hundreds of people who have already been shot this year in the town of Chicago.  The ones that we just consider routine. 

Now we may not see that issue as connected to the one that happened in Dallas but part of what’s creating tensions between communities and police is the fact that police have a really difficult time in communities where they know guns are everywhere. As I said before, they have a right to come home and now they have very little margin of error in terms of making decisions. So if you care about the safety of our police officers, you can’t set aside the gun issue and pretend that that’s irrelevant. At the protest in Dallas, one of the challenges for the Dallas police department as they’re being shot at is, because this is an open carry state, there are a bunch of people participating in the protest with weapons on them. Imagine if you’re a police officer and you’re trying to sort out who is shooting at you and there are bunch of people who’ve got guns on them.

In Minneapolis, we don’t know yet what happened but we do know that there was a gun in the car that apparently was licensed. But it caused in some fashion those tragic events. So, no we can’t just ignore that and pretend that it’s just political or that the president is just pushing his policy agenda. It is a contributing factor, not the sole factor, but a contributing factor to the broader  tensions that arise between police and the communities where they serve. 

And so we have to talk about it. And as I’ve said before there is a way to talk about it that is consistent with our constitution and the 2nd Amendment. The problem is that even mention of it somehow evokes this kind of polarization. And you’re right when it comes to this issue of gun safety there is polarization between a very intense minority and a majority of Americans who think we could be doing better when it comes to gun safety. 

But that expresses itself in stark terms when it comes to legislation in congress and state legislatures. And that’s too bad. We’re going to have to tackle that at some point and I’m not going to stop talking about it because if we don’t talk about it we’re not going to solve these underlying problems. It’s part of the problem.  

This is leadership. It would be very easy for him to elide the gun issue right now. Many people of both parties are happy to do it. But his saying that it’s the guns themselves that are part of the problem is important. (I said this on Friday, here: they’re giving us a mass case of PTSD)

We have always had cycles of political unrest in this country, even political violence. But we have never before had a citizenry armed to the teeth, many of them with military style weapons designed to kill mass numbers in one go.  For that we can thank the NRA.  It is a recipe for carnage on a level that I suspect way too many people have not yet fully understood, even with the massive bloodshed of innocent people, including tiny children, we’ve experienced these last few years.

Common sense says that we can do something about this if we want to do it. If men and women who love their killing toys are not allowed to have them, they will not be oppressed. They will still have all the civil liberties that everyone has to ensure a free society. Their excuse that citizens with guns will be able to repel a tyrannical government like the Minute Men in 1776 is a silly fairy tale. If it comes to that we will have much bigger problems than the lack of a semi-automatic rifle in our home.

Anyway, I’ll just put this up again. If we were sane we would see that the first step is to deal with the guns:


Here is an interesting story for you to read today:

British doctor John Snow couldn’t convince other doctors and scientists that cholera, a deadly disease, was spread when people drank contaminated water until a mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.
[…]
Dr. Snow believed sewage dumped into the river or into cesspools near town wells could contaminate the water supply, leading to a rapid spread of disease. 

In August of 1854 Soho, a suburb of London, was hit hard by a terrible outbreak of cholera. Dr. Snows himself lived near Soho, and immediately went to work to prove his theory that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak. 

“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Dr. Snow wrote “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption (sic) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.” 

Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down information from hospital and public records on when the outbreak began and whether the victims drank water from the Broad Street pump. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. His pioneering medical research paid off. By using a geographical grid to chart deaths from the outbreak and investigating each case to determine access to the pump water, Snow developed what he considered positive proof the pump was the source of the epidemic… Snow was able to prove that the cholera was not a problem in Soho except among people who were in the habit of drinking water from the Broad Street pump. He also studied samples of water from the pump and found white flecks floating in it, which he believed were the source of contamination. 

On 7 September 1854, Snow took his research to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump, making it impossible to draw water. The officials were reluctant to believe him, but took the handle off as a trial only to find the outbreak of cholera almost immediately trickled to a stop. Little by little, people who had left their homes and businesses in the Broad Street area out of fear of getting cholera began to return. 

It took many more years before it was widely accepted that cholera came from the water. (In fact, it took a priest trying to prove that it was God’s will to finally do it!)
But here’s the relevant takeaway: they didn’t need to cure the disease to end the epidemic. What ended it was shutting down the pump.

This gun fetish is the most maddening issue of our current era, in my opinion. It feels as if our culture is literally insane.



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How they’re handling it

by digby

The right is being as responsible and decent as always:

sigh …

“You don’t understand being black in America”
by Tom Sullivan

The shootings of police in Dallas have not dissuaded Americans from calling for a change to our criminal justice system. They will not be ignored.

Black Lives Matter condemned the killing of police in Dallas, but from New York to California, organized protests continued last night.

#BlackLivesMatter advocates dignity, justice and freedom. Not murder.— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) July 8, 2016

In Atlanta, protests led by the NAACP gathered steam, culminating in nearly 2,000 marchers peacefully blocking an interstate ramp downtown. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed briefly joined protesters last night:

“One of the things that is exciting about this protest tonight. Our young people have an expectation that they will be treated fairly and justly … Every generation makes their demands.”

“Their tolerance level is much different to perhaps my parents’ generation or their parents generation.” he added.

Reed said that while his father instructed him to go out of his way to be deferential and compliant in any encounters with police, “this generation has a different expectation.”

“My dad grilled into me the lesson of driving a vehicle as as black man. Keep your hands on the steering wheel. Look forward and say, ‘yes sir’ or ‘ma’am’ to the police officer. Place your wallet in the seat beside you. Ask for permission to do anything because he was concerned about me living. He just wanted me to get home safe.”

Police prevented the marchers blocking the exit to I-75/85 at Williams Street from entering the highway, but allowed the protesters to remain. “We’re gonna let these young people go forward with this protest,” Reed said. “We’re respecting their first amendment right and we’re the home of Dr. Martin Luther King.”

As #Atlanta crowds continue to grow, @PoloSandovalCNN reports some protesters have climbed atop a tractor trailer https://t.co/8qSoty1OTt— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) July 9, 2016

This item (via Facebook) skillfully explains the usual efforts to ignore or evade the questions of unequal justice Black Lives Matter has raised:

Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!

The problem is that the statement “I should get my fair share” had an implicit “too” at the end: “I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else.” But your dad’s response treated your statement as though you meant “only I should get my fair share”, which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that “everyone should get their fair share,” while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That’s the situation of the “black lives matter” movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.

The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work that way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally not considered “news”, while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase “black lives matter” also has an implicit “too” at the end: it’s saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying “all lives matter” is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means “only black lives matter,” when that is obviously not the case. And so saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

Perhaps with recent high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police (some captured on cell phone video), the reality of being black in America is finally beginning to sink in with people who found it easier to spout patriotic shibboleths about equality rather than confront the unequal truth. “Never let it be said that Newt Gingrich is predictable,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s politics blog observed yesterday. The former U.S. House Speaker surprised journalists when he acknowledged, “it is more dangerous to be black in America.” Gingrich continued (emphasis mine):

“It is more dangerous, in that they are substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don’t respect you and where you could easily get killed. And sometimes for whites it’s difficult to appreciate how real that is and how it’s an everyday danger,” the former House speaker said Friday on CNN commentator Van Jones’ Facebook Live stream in a conversation on race and law enforcement.

“It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years, to get a sense of this: If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk,” he added.

If Gingrich hadn’t already decided he would not be Donald Trump’s running mate, that probably cinched it.

Friday Night soother: mountain lion kitten edition

by digby

I need a little respite from the storm for a few minutes. Maybe you do too?

Two litters of fluffy, blue-eyed mountain lion kittens born to two different mothers, but with the same father, were recently discovered in the eastern Santa Susana Mountains, officials said.

Researchers from the National Park Service found five small, adorably furry kittens last month in the large mountain range, which connects mountain lion populations in the Santa Monica Mountains and Los Padres National Forest.

Mountain lions in the area appear to be reproducing successfully despite a variety of natural and man-made challenges, including busy freeway traffic.

“The real challenge comes as these kittens grow older and disperse, especially the males, and have to deal with threats from other mountain lions and also road mortality and the possibility of poisoning from anticoagulant rodenticide,” said Jeff Sikich, a biologist with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Using GPS locations transmitted by their mothers’ collars, researchers found the three blonde and black-striped female kittens and two male kittens living in separate dens. Their living spaces are usually located in hidden crevices and thick brush for protection.

The first litter of kittens – two females dubbed P-48 and P-49 – were tagged on June 8, and were delivered by a 6-year-old female mountain lion known as P-35.

Researchers have tracked the kittens’ mother since April 2014. She had previously given birth to another kitten, but it did not survive to adulthood.

The second litter was discovered in a cave-like den on June 22. The kittens – a female known as P-51 and two males known as P-50 and P-52 – were living beneath large boulders.

Their mother is P-39, a 5-year-old mountain lion that researchers have tracked since April 2015.

The father of both litters is believed to be a male mountain lion named P-38.

Researchers determined this by tracking his location via GPS. Data showed that he spent days with the kittens’ mothers months before they were born.

Genetic testing will be done to determine the true identity of the kittens’ father.

In case you were wondering

by digby

Newt’s not a racial healer


by digby

Let’s not bend over backwards to give Newt Gingrich too many props for his late-breaking racial sensitivity.  He said the right things for a change. But it would be foolish to think that the man who has been brainstorming with Trump about how to double down on his anti-semitism is actually evolving. He is who he is, as Judd Legum at Think Progress partially documents:

In 2010, Gingrich accused President Obama of engaging in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Those comments came a year after he called then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” for her comments about how being “a wise Latina woman” might help her come to better legal conclusions. Two years before that, Gingrich claimed that bilingual education teaches “the language of living in a ghetto.” Perhaps most infamously, when he was House Speaker, Gingrich proposed that the federal government should take children born out of wedlock to women under 18 and put them in orphanages. 

One need not travel so far back in time for examples of Gingrich’s racial insensitivity. Just hours before his Friday Facebook Live broadcast, Gingrich appeared on Fox & Friends and said, “My argument is the policies that have driven us apart, the policies that have trapped African-Americans in all too large numbers in poverty and in hopelessness [are] the ideological policies that say, ‘Black lives matter.’ 

“Well, baloney! All American lives matter, of all backgrounds,” he continued. “And we ought to challenge the Hillary Clintons and the Bernie Sanderses to say that American lives matter. All American lives.”

Nobody understands wingnut dogwhistle rhetoric better than he does. He was one of the perfecters of the practice. When he called President Obama “the food stamp president” he knew exactly what he was saying.

I’m willing to give anyone credit for evolving on these issues.  But not this guy.  He’s been a malignant force in American life for decades and I don’t believe for a minute that he’s changed.

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“A sunk cost fallacy of power politics and partisan score settling”

by digby

This piece by Brian Beutler is as good as anything I’ve read from old timers on how Clinton Derangement Syndrome works in practice:

What we witnessed Thursday was part of a pattern that goes back more than 20 years. A Clinton does something—in some cases innocuous, in this case worthy of criticism—and her political nemeses respond completely out of proportion. They’ve invested so heavily in the fantasy that she’s one email or utterance away from complete self-destruction that they can’t bring themselves to accept anything less than the highest return. A sunk cost fallacy of power politics and partisan score-settling.

The pattern has become so familiar that reporters now anticipate it. When FBI Director James Comey excoriated Clinton for her sloppy email protocol, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Republicans would peer so deeply into the mouth of the gift horse he’d just given them that they’d pop out the other end. On Thursday, they hauled him up to Capitol Hill knowing that any number of right-wing members on the House Oversight Committee might attack his integrity, and sure enough they did. Now the chase continues.

We will be dealing with the fallout of the email investigation well into Clinton’s first term in the White House.

What made this episode unique is that the same media that expected Republicans to overreach played a critical role in increasing their expectations of a political windfall.

Republicans in Congress and their conservative media allies largely brought this upon themselves. They were the ones who made right-wing sop out of baseless speculation that Clinton might be indicted for violating a law nobody’s ever been convicted of violating.

But due to a strange brew of incentives that proved toxic—the competition for eyeballs, the lack of subject matter expertise, the industry standard of reportorial balance—the mainstream media did nothing to puncture this myth. To the contrary, it treated the threat of indictment as a permanent question mark hovering over Clinton’s campaign like a dark cloud. In a different media ecosystem, this wouldn’t have happened. A mix of common sense and truly basic research and reporting would have established a consensus that Republicans were trying to gin up intrigue and damaging innuendo, but that an indictment was extraordinarily unlikely. Instead, the remote odds of one came to be seen as something like a 50-50 proposition, to the point where even professional Democrats began to worry Clinton might be charged with a felony and prosecuted.

There’s more and it’s all good.

I would just add that liberal journalists are also subject to a herd mentality and seem to find themselves searching for reasons to reassure the public that they aren’t political hacks so they add to the atmosphere by being heavily critical on the “optics, judgment and narrative” aspects of these scandals which leads to a different kind of distortion. These dynamics play into each other creating the sort of febrile environment that characterizes these passion plays.

This is what leads to a sort of political establishment consensus that “something is terribly wrong” that the rest of the country finds confusingly out of touch.

Case in point, the Village.

Anyway, read Beutler’s piece. He’s refreshingly clear eyed about this as are a number of the other younger journalist/pundits following this race. It’s good to see it.

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