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Month: January 2023

Hello? Is this the Democratically controlled Senate?

Perhaps you should look into this?

Via salon:

A human rights organization founded by slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi is calling on Congress and the Justice Department to investigate former President Donald Trump’s business deals with a controversial golf company owned by the Saudi Arabian government and controlled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. 

Nonprofit Democracy for the Arab World Now said LIV Golf, a tournament franchise and PGA Golf rival, paid Trump-owned golf resorts “unknown millions of dollars” to host events. Recent court proceedings revealed that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — chaired by bin Salman — owns 93% of LIV Golf, and pays “100 percent of the costs associated with the events.”

“The revelation that a fund controlled by Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman actually owns almost all of LIV Golf means that MBS has been paying Donald Trump unknown millions for the past two years, via their mutual corporate covers,” said DAWN Executive Director Sarah Leah Whitson in a Sunday statement

“If Trump or his agents discussed any deals with LIV Golf or PIF while Trump was still in office, a criminal investigation would also be in order because federal law strictly prohibits this sort of business dealing by sitting federal officials with foreign governments.”

“The Justice Department and Congress have a responsibility to investigate exactly when and to whom and under what terms Trump has obtained unknown millions from Saudi government coffers controlled by Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, which may well violate even our existing, weak ethics laws,” said Whitson. 

According to this article in the NY Times, the idea didn’t come together until 2021. But there is no doubt that the idea to use Trump’s golf courses (and pay him vast sums for the privilege) was in place from the beginning. I know it’s not as sexy as Hunter’s nude pics, but realluy, it should be looked into — along with Jared’s dealings with the Saudi government.

You can bet that the Republicans in the Senate aren’t going to join in but who cares?

“The apocalyptic mindset is just Republican orthodoxy”

Us vs. Them on steroids

What drove our disloyal opposition to reject democracy for autocracy and authoritarian strongmen?

Amanda Marcotte interviews Jared Yates Sexton whose new book, “The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis,” plumbs the depths of the Grand Old Personality disorder crowd. Growing up as he did in “a really problematic, radicalized environment” makes QAnon and other eschatological beliefs quite familar.

“When you take a look at these ideas and these conspiracy theories, one of the things you start to realize is if you believe these things, if these actually build the world around you or the way that you interact with politics or even your neighbors or your day-to-day life, you’re living in literal terror,” Sexton tells Salon. “And when you feel that way, when you believe that you’re in the middle of a supernatural battle, you literally will do anything in order to protect yourself and the people around you.”

It’s Us vs. Them on steroids.

Apocalyptic thinking made up some of the fuel that caught fire on January 6, says Sexton, and cast the 2020 election as a life-or-death struggle:

The right says there is a conspiracy against them — an incredibly powerful, well-resourced sadistic conspiracy. Unless they do everything in their power, it is going to mean the difference between living and dying. Or, if you want to take it down the supernatural route, they worry about actually losing their spiritual power or spiritual vitality. It creates a story that these people can use to carry out previously unthinkable actions, including assaulting people, breaking into public buildings. There’s a willingness to carry out full-fledged violence or anti-democratic actions. And when you take a look at it from that standpoint, you start to understand that these stories and these mindsets are precursors to something larger, as opposed to being the end result of something.

Conspiratorial thinking goes back to the founding of the republic, Sexton believes:

From the very beginning of conservatism, it was based on the idea of natural hierarchies, that there is a natural elite that rises to the top of society, and as a result, they should be the ones who run the world in political affairs. This is a leftover from monarchical thinking. Edmund Burke and others looked at these revolutions, they saw an unnatural leveling. They believed democratic energies were very destructive. So conservatives ascribed these movements to the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Jews, supposedly overthrowing society as it should be.

Nowadays, never-Trumpers blame all of this conspiracy thinking on Donald Trump, right? That everything was fine before Donald Trump came along. In truth, the origins of that movement are hierarchical thinking that is bolstered and founded or founded in conspiratorial worldviews. They’ve always couched hierarchical thinking in an ideology that there is a conspiracy that has to be protected against. Conservative thinking always relies on those stories.

I’d suggest they are not just authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers as social psychologist Bob Altemeyer outlines. That description is too clinical. For all the right’s breast-beating about freedom, they are in fact royalists and scraping subjects. They remain committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry.

And like the Trump University suckers, they think by showing sufficient fealty and entrepreneurship, their “betters” will treat them as equals, maybe let them marry into royalty, hit the lottery. They will follow their sovereign, Donald Trump, anywhere so long as he’s perceived a “winner.” And dump him for another as soon as the gilt rubs off and reveals the dross underneath.

Sexton is ultimately optimistic. “The illusion of the meritocracy, the illusion of American exceptionalism, I think those things are falling apart,” he tells Marcotte:

Their solutions are making people work for cents on the dollar, relegating women to second-class birthing machines. But I think the window is open for a positive, generational change. And I think that’s where we’re going to go. I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I do think that that is the direction we’re heading in.

I’m less certain. Remember these guys?

See a pattern?

The Albuquerque PD did

Solomon Pena, failed GOP candidate for NM House District 14, was arrested Monday in Albuquerque. The former felon is suspected in a conspiracy to fire bullets into the homes of Democratic officials.

The first few bullets fired through homes and buildings in Albuquerque, New Mexico beginning in early December appeared random. But by January 3, after multiple similar attacks, Albuquerque police Chief Harold Medina opened an investigation into what appeared to be a pattern. No one was injured in the shootings.

On Monday, SWAT officers surrounded the home of a man they allege was the “mastermind” behind a conspiracy to attack Democratic officials’ homes. Suspect Solomon Pena, reports the Albuquerque Journal, “is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for office in November, has made repeated claims that the election was rigged and appears to have attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in Washington, D.C.”

Police allege Pena himself fired on at least one of the homes and that he hired four other men to commit the other shooting attacks against the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators:

Pena ran unsuccessfully in the House District 14 race and claimed on social media he should have won the election. He also visited three of the targeted officials’ homes unannounced in November complaining the election was fraudulent and should not be certified.

“APD essentially discovered what we had all feared and what we had suspected — that these shootings were indeed politically motivated,” Mayor Tim Keller said at a news conference. “They were dangerous attacks not only to these individuals … but, fundamentally, also to democracy.”

“This type of radicalism is a threat to our nation and it has made its way to our door step, right here in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Keller said. “But I know here, we are going to push back and we will not allow this to cross the threshold.”

“State records show juries convicted Pena of 19 felonies, including burglary, larceny, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and receiving stolen property,” Milan Simonich, editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote in August. “He spent almost seven years in prison.” Part of his prison time was for leading a burglary ring.

A judge ruled in September that since he’d had his voting rights restored Pena could remain on the fall ballot. Pena claimed he’d graduated from the University of New Mexico after prison and turned his life around. Given the sordid flood of lies from Rep. George Santos of New York (if that is his real name), someone might want to fact check Pena’s claim.

Perhaps as the Albuquerque PD just did, it is time to stop seeing actions committed by conservative extremists as random incidents.

Billie Davis has been charged with repeatedly stabbing an 18-year-old Indiana University student in the head on a public bus in Bloomington, Ind., on Jan. 11, 2023. Bloomington Police Department photo.

In the Midwest last week:

A 56-year-old white woman was arrested after she allegedly confessed to repeatedly stabbing an Asian Indiana University student in the head in a what police said appeared to be an unprovoked, racially-motivated attack that unfolded in front of passengers on a public bus in Bloomington, Indiana.

The suspect in custody is Billy R. Davis of Bloomington.

Davis, according to a criminal complaint obtained by Indianapolis ABC affiliate WRTV, allegedly confessed to stabbing the 18-year-old victim with a folding knife, purportedly telling detectives because it would mean “one less person to blow up our country.”

Yes, there is a pattern.

There is also the little matter of a violent insurrection by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, and the alleged criminal plot by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election. Those involved who are not yet in jail are still being investigated or facing prosecution. As is Trump himself. Seditious conspiracy convictions establish that there was nothing random about Jan. 6 planning by Oath Keepers. Multiple Proud Boys are on trial right now on seditious conspiracy charges.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives pledges to crash the U.S. (and world?) economies if Democrats do not agree to cut Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Failing to would violate the government’s constitutional duty to meet its financial obligations. Not that Republicans care:

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz recently articulated the party’s position using even more direct language.

“In exchange for not crashing the United States economy, you get nothing,” Schatz said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “You don’t get a cookie. … You’re just a person doing the bare minimum of not intentionally screwing over your constituents for insane reasons.”

Schatz is not being hyperbolic. One suspects that future historians will view this period of political violence as a time of mass insanity. We look back now on the violence against democracy and ethnic minorities by fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s and wonder how people — educated, ostensibly Christian, “normal” — could have been caught up in ethnic hatreds that spawned war and mass murder. But we have been reminded since then in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in Burma that civilization is a thinner veneer than we’d rather think.

It took the GOP just 20 years to go from promoting “global democratic revolution” to exporting autocracy and calling it patriotism. Here at home, the same reactionary conservative impulses promote election denialism, nihilism, and attacks against political opponents and ethnic minorities.

See a pattern? You should.

Trump deploys Kristi Noem to do his dirty work

If this is true, he’s being unusually subtle about it:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t even declared whether he’ll run for president in 2024, and Donald Trump has tried to restrain himself from going after his top GOP rival, but the former president’s allies are already mounting an offensive—with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem now leading the charge.

Noem may be interested in running for president herself, and therefore would have good reason to go after DeSantis, but she also may be angling for a different role: Trump’s vice president.

Earlier this month, Noem’s press secretary, Ian Fury, took a shot at DeSantis seemingly from out of nowhere. Fury sent a follow-up email to the National Reviewfor an article ostensibly about “the transgender lobby’s outsized influence in South Dakota.” Fury went on a tirade—against DeSantis.

“Governor Noem was the only Governor in America on national television defending the Dobbs decision,” Fury said, referring to the Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections. “Where was Governor DeSantis? Hiding behind a 15-week ban. Does he believe that 14-week-old babies don’t have a right to live?”

    After cruising to re-election by almost 20 points without facing a primary challenge or having to do a single interview with a non-friendly conservative media outlet, DeSantis is now facing his first real test from the right—this largely one-way feud with Noem.

    “I think what Noem gets out of this is currying favor with Trump and raising her stock as a potential VP pick,” a Republican strategist told The Daily Beast, adding that Trump advisers see Noem as “the ideal person for them” to carry out the MAGA black ops mission against Florida’s governor.

    DeSantis has consistently polled in the top two spots among GOP presidential primary voters, trading spots back and forth with Trump. The Sunshine State governor recently drew comparisons to John F. Kennedy—not for the first time—after Florida first lady Casey DeSantis wore a mint-green dress at his Jan. 3 inauguration, an eerily similar look to one of Jackie Kennedy’s outfits from the Camelot era.

    And so, as DeSantis’ star burns brighter, Trumpworld is looking for someone to dampen the light—which is where Noem comes in.

    According to three GOP sources with behind-the-scenes knowledge of the quarrel, Noem has Trump’s blessing to take some shots across the DeSantis bow. And Noem’s efforts haven’t been going unnoticed as Trump continues filling out his VP shortlist.

    When asked for their thoughts on the DeSantis-Noem dustup, one source close to Trump responded simply with a popcorn emoji before later elaborating.

    “Any experienced primary campaign operative will tell you arguments between potential opponents are best left to roil, fester, and spread,” the longtime friend of Trump’s told The Daily Beast.

    “This is where you head to Costco to buy cases of microwave popcorn and distribute them to staff with instructions to pop, butter, and enjoy quietly.”

    The seemingly random—and gratuitous—shot from Noem’s camp is understood in Republican circles to be about more than just a rogue spokesperson whose surname may be even a little over the top for Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Fury, who cut his political teeth as a spokesman for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), did not return a request for comment.)

    Beefing with other governors became something of a specialty for DeSantis during the height of the pandemic. But in this case, he’s facing incoming attacks from within the GOP in an effort to “wedge” his supporter base over abortion and “chip away at the governor from the right,” according to a Republican operative familiar with the tussle who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal conversations.

    It’s also testing the DeSantis camp’s theory of the case on running an extremely online communications operation predicated on owning the libs and severing any access non-conservative outlets have come to expect from a Florida governor.

    “This is a 2024 move, I think you’ve gotta see it through that lens,” the strategist said. “I think she’s showing here that DeSantis is flimsier than people think he is. He’s never been tested on the national stage, really. He’s had all controlled environments with conservative press.”

    The strategist added there are worries around the DeSantis communications shop being “way too online” and more focused on Twitter fights than a more comprehensive messaging strategy.

    Brad Coker, a longtime Florida pollster with Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy, told The Daily Beast that while DeSantis hasn’t faced this kind of an affront from his right before—with the only comparable example being Roger Stone having a go at him ahead of the 2022 midterms—it’s something he’ll have to learn to cope with.

    “Locally, it seems like ignoring Kristi Noem is the smart thing to do at this point. She’s not a Tier 1 candidate,” Coker said. “If I were advising DeSantis, I would just go back to trying to get Disney’s land from them and pay it no attention.”

    Coker added that DeSantis still mixes it up with the Tallahassee press corps from time to time, but will eventually have to start facing the heat from major national outlets.

    The abortion issue, however, could be a lingering sore spot for DeSantis, the veteran pollster said.

    “The problem that Republicans have on the abortion issue is there are sort of mixed messages out there on what is the quote unquote ‘correct position,’” Coker said. “It’s a circular firing squad right now on abortion.”

    One GOP source close with DeSantis said his reputation remains strong among party brass, and he couldn’t think of another conservative stepping out against the Florida governor in the way Noem has.

    “When I travel with RNC folks from other states, I’ve never heard one negative thing about Mr. DeSantis ever,” the Florida operative said. “It’s incredible, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

    The Noem salvo also came with another warning sign, the first GOP strategist said.

    “Politicians are terrified to answer the question on DeSantis and Trump—and a lot of them might be inclined to support DeSantis, but they’re not gonna cross Trump. But people will attack DeSantis publicly,” this strategist said, adding that Trump has vanquished, in their opinion, more talented foes such as Sen. Marco Rubio and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

    “DeSantis is gonna realize very quickly, the closer you get to the waters, you have to realize Trump is still the king of this party,” the strategist continued. “And he might be tucked away in Tallahassee with his Twitter trolls who pump him and breathe his praise. But you’ve gotta remember, people will line up for Trump and do things for Trump. DeSantis does not have that same type of following that Trump does.”

    This could be Noem freelancing, looking for a little press and reassuring Trump she’s not a turncoat. Or she may just be testing the waters for a presidential run herself. Anything can happen with Republicans.

    The Kewl Kidz are back!

    The new generation of Villagers take their seats at the table

    Here’s how the super insider Punchbowl is reporting the news today:

    Happy Monday morning. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we’re only publishing the AM edition. We’ll be back to the regular schedule tomorrow.

    President Joe Biden’s split screen on Sunday was stark.

    Biden spoke at a memorial service for the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The high-profile speech came at the invitation of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), the senior pastor there. On what would’ve been MLK’s 94th birthday, and from King’s own pulpit, Biden warned that the United States is at an “inflection point,” with the future of democracy in peril.

    “We’re at what we would call an inflection point. One of those points in world history where what happens … in the next six or eight years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next 30 or 40 years. It happened after World War II. It’s happening again.”

    More Biden:

    “My message to this nation on this day is we go forward, we go together, when we choose democracy over autocracy, a beloved community over chaos, when we choose believers and the dreams, to be doers, to be unafraid, always keeping the faith.”

    While Biden overuses the “inflection point” line, the issues of voting rights and ballot access remain big ones for Black voters, a critical group for the president if he runs again in 2024 — especially in Georgia.

    Meanwhile, back in Washington, Biden’s fellow Democrats were offering only tepid support for his handling of the classified-documents scandal. Some are even calling for the release of more information after White House lawyer Richard Sauber on Saturday disclosed the existence of additional classified materials at the president’s Delaware home.

    “Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. Right?” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

    Stabenow, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, added that “this is the kind of thing that the Republicans love.”

    That’s especially true right now. After a brutal public struggle last week for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans, GOP committee chairs can now focus on Biden and the probe being conducted by special counsel Robert Hur. It’s a major political gift for Republicans, who’ve wasted no time going all in.

    On Sunday, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) called for the release of the visitor logs for Biden’s Delaware home. And Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) have already sought any communications between the Justice Department and the White House over this issue. The White House said it received no heads-up on Hur’s appointment.

    Here’s more from Comer:

    “So the administration hasn’t been transparent about what’s going on with President Biden’s possession of classified documents. And we just want equal treatment here with respect to how both former President [Donald] Trump and current President Biden are being treated with the document issue.”

    I will just interject here with this, which gives a teensey weensy bit more context to that bullshit from Comer:

    Punchbowl could have included that but it just wouldn’t be cool and savvy enough. Anyway, back to the breathless coverage:

    What’s more, few Democrats are publicly defending Biden’s handling of the matter.

    Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the former Intelligence Committee chair, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he wants to know “whether there was any risk of exposure and what the harm would be [to national security] and whether any mitigation needs to be done” as a result of the materials being misplaced.

    Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), the lead counsel for Democrats in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, praised Attorney General Merrick Garland’s actions in this case — but didn’t go much further than that.

    “This administration is doing things by the book,” Goldman said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

    Goldman acknowledged that classified information shouldn’t have been at Biden’s home in the first place, but noted that the president isn’t accused of obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve the materials, unlike Trump.

    “There is a divide and a separation between the Department of Justice and the White House that certainly did not exist in the last administration. And President Biden and his team have reached out to the [National] Archives, they’ve reached out to the Department of Justice, they have done everything they can to cooperate. And that’s in direct contrast to what former President Trump has done, where he has obstructed justice at every turn.”

    Goldman also said we don’t yet know all the circumstances surrounding the document discovery.

    Oh whatever. That doesn’t matter! Here’s what’s important:

    We do know, however, that the timing of this controversy couldn’t be worse for Biden and Democrats in many ways. Besides allowing McCarthy to glide over the deep divides in his own conference — at least for the moment — Republicans have hit the Justice Department on how it handled the search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago versus the Biden probe.

    Of course, the two situations aren’t comparable, but consistency isn’t something pols ever worry about anyway.

    There you have the Church of the Savvy, as Jay Rosen puts it, in full effect.

    I’ll give you Josh Marshall on that one: [Sub. only]

    The headline of this Dan Balz column perhaps sums it up most nicely: Biden, Trump cases aren’t alike. The political system doesn’t care.

    The deputy editor of the Post opinion section goes so far as to say that the Biden documents “should spell the end of any realistic prospect of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump” and lauds this as a wonderful thing since such charges would have been terrible for the country. Arrrghghghghg.

    To state the obvious succinctly: we are the political system. We shouldn’t be afraid of stating clearly and loudly what happened here. Indeed, much of the press momentum behind this story is driven by Democratic sheepishness about it. Republican elected officials are going to town on it while Democrats try to avoid eye contact. That’s embarrassing. One instance here is at most administrative sloppiness; the other is willful theft of government documents, refusal to return them, claims to own U.S. government documents, ongoing obstruction of government attempts to retrieve the documents. Any of these Democratic elected officials should be spending whatever microphone time they have on this reiterating the gravity of Trump’s offenses.

    Clearly, they think they are gaining some credibility or credit for evenhandedness but lying or actively misleading people — which is what they are doing — doesn’t make you credible. It certainly gains no credit in a capital still mostly wired for the GOP. We can’t dictate how the “political system” operates but we can choose what part we play in it.

    I’m having a hard time even reading some of this swill or watching cable news right now. There is nothing new about this story being reported today, but they are still leading with it on the front pages and at the top of every hour for at least 20 minutes, regurgitating every story from the past week and throwing out breaking news chyrons as if it all just happened this morning.

    I’ve seen this movie before. There’s a very special feel the news coverage gets when the Villagers see an opening to go after a Democrat. This is because they are hit constantly by the right for their “liberal bias” — because they are compelled by the facts to discuss Republican malfeasance, criminality and corruption all the time. When they can turn their focus a Democrat it gives them the opportunity to signal their partisan neutrality. And they always overcompensate.

    Keep in mind, they just do this for each other. The right doesn’t care (although they are happy to use their coverage to make their own political points.) They’ll never stop screaming “fake news” whenever the media reports anything they don’t like. So this is really just a way for them to preen and pose for each other.

    An egregious taser killing in Los Angeles

    There was a time when I would have been all over this story when it happened because I was documenting taser use around the country and the world. To me this use of electro-shock to put people into compliance is nothing short of torture and sometimes, summary execution. But I was told by some experts, and criticized by activists, who said that while the dangers of tasers are horrific they are nothing when compared to the horror of police shootings so I backed off my little crusade after the Michael Brown shooting.

    But it’s still happening, particularly to people with mental health issues which is just heartbreaking. And there are times, like this, when it is deadly force:

    Videos released this week of a teacher who died after Los Angeles police discharged a Taser on him at least six times on a Venice street raise serious concerns about the officers’ tactics, law enforcement experts who reviewed the tapes said.

    The LAPD’s actions have sparked alarms from community activists as well as Mayor Karen Bass and are now the subject of an internal investigation.

    Several policing experts who reviewed the videos for The Times said that the amount of force used by the officers seemed excessive given the man’s actions and that some of the tactics seemed haphazard.

    “It is going to be hard to convince any judge that these officers were using reasonable force,” said Ed Obayashi, a Northern California deputy and a top state advisor on police tactics. “From the visual aspect, it looks like he is not fighting back; he is not threatening the officers. He is saying I am not resisting … and what could be considered resisting is an automatic reflex of the body to the pain application from the Taser.”

    In the videos, Keenan Anderson, 31, becomes distraught and cries out for help as multiple officers hold him down.

    “They’re trying to George Floyd me,” he screams, referencing the Minneapolis man killed by police as one officer briefly has his elbow on or around Anderson’s neck as he is held down on the blacktop.

    Eventually, he is handcuffed and hobbled at his ankles before paramedics take him away. Four hours later, he died at the hospital. A cause of death has not been established.

    The incident began Jan. 3 at 3:30 p.m. with a motorcycle officer arriving at what the LAPD characterized as a “felony hit-and-run” car crash at Venice and Lincoln boulevards. Police said Anderson was in the middle of the street, declaring, “Please help me.” LAPD Chief Michel Moore alleged this week that another driver reported that Anderson had attempted “to get into another car without his permission.”

    Anderson then wanders in and out of cars, with the officer telling him to get on the sidewalk, according to the video. The officer yells, “Get up against the wall.”

    Anderson then holds up his hands. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.” Anderson sits down on the sidewalk.

    After a gap of several minutes, Anderson declares, “I want people to see me,” and “you’re putting a thing on me.”

    That is when Anderson gets up and runs back into the roadway, according to the video. When Anderson stops, an officer says, “Turn over on your stomach.” As a swarm of officers moves in, Anderson cries out to onlookers, “Please help me,” and says the officers are “trying to kill me.”

    Officers then attempt to pin him down. One can be seen on the video placing his elbow on Anderson’s neck while he lies on his back. The officer standing above him shouts, “Turn over, or I’m going to tase you.”

    The officer then fires the darts of the stun gun into Anderson’s back and pulls the trigger, attempting to discharge the muscle-constricting electrical pulse. He discharges the Taser twice and then applies the Taser in stun mode directly to Anderson’s back at least four times.

    Moore said data from the Taser weapon showed “there were six separate activations over 42 seconds. The first two [were] in the probe mode. We believe the darts weren’t effective. Then four activations over 33 seconds” in the stun mode in which the pulse was applied directly to the skin.

    Walter Katz, a former independent police auditor in California and Chicago, said it’s up to the coroner to determine the role of the Taser in Anderson’s death, but either way that doesn’t mean the officer’s actions were appropriate.

    Katz said the incident begins to go wrong when the officer with the Taser directs Anderson to turn over on his stomach and stop resisting.

    “The first application of Taser is in such a way that if effective contracts the muscles so the person cannot move and makes them unable to comply with that order,” he said.

    Then, Katz said, the officer used the Taser on Anderson’s body repeatedly without really giving the man the chance to reset. Katz said it should have been clear by that point that Anderson’s behavior suggested he was somehow impaired.

    “To do more tasering to me was a poor decision,” he said. “This officer went down the path of this is the tool I am going to use.”

    Under LAPD policy, “there is no preset limit on the number of times a Taser can be used in a particular situation; however, officers should generally avoid repeated or simultaneous activations to avoid potential injury,” Moore said.

    The chief alleged that Anderson was in an altered state and resisted officers’ efforts to detain him. His bloodwork showed the presence of cocaine and cannabis in his system, Moore said.

    Moore said one officer’s “elbow appears to be along the collar bone and may have touched the neck or not, but I hear, ‘Partner your elbow.’” The chief said there is no evidence of Anderson’s airways being compromised.

    Timothy T. Williams, a use-of-force expert and former supervisor with the LAPD elite Robbery Homicide Division, said he was also concerned about the tactics.

    “The tasing was, in my opinion, excessive force. You use the force which is necessary. You don’t hold a Taser on a person that length of time to control him or her,” he said.

    Police had enough officers, Williams said, “to get him turned over and handcuffed and sat up.” He said the first motorcycle officer did the right thing by calling for backup. But in the slow-evolving incident, he never heard anyone call for the department‘s mental evaluation team, which specializes in handling people suffering a mental health crisis.

    Carl Douglas, a well-known civil rights attorney representing some of Anderson‘s family members, said the officers failed to consider Anderson’s mental state and did not follow appropriate tactics and policies.

    “Several officers are working independently here and not as a team,” Douglas said. “He repeatedly tased him in the back of his heart.”

    Anderson was a 10th-grade English teacher at a public charter school in Washington, D.C., and had a 5-year-old son. He was in Los Angeles visiting family and moving his belongings back to the nation’s capital, Douglas said.

    In the video you can see that the officer deployed the taser directly to Anderson’s upper back repeatedly. That should never be allowed. Think about it. We all just had a big tutorial on the how the heart can be disturbed by blunt force during a 30-millisecond window in the heart’s electrical cycle after the Damar Hamlin event on the football field. Does anyone think it’s safe to directly deploy electro-shock to someone’s back repeatedly while they are lying on the ground with an elbow on their neck? It’s not.

    This man was not threatening anyone or doing anything but causing a disturbance, which happens approximately 50,000 a day in Los Angeles. These police officers were way out of line dealing with someone who was having some kind of mental health crisis. I suspect the problem was that he yelled “they’re trying to George Floyd me” which made them angry. So they tortured him a little — and it killed them.

    This man happens to be the cousin of one of the founders of Black Lives Matter so it’s getting national attention. But it happens frequently. And nobody is counting the deaths by tasers nor has anyone taken up the cause of the junk science that is “excited delirium” a made-up cause of death to justify the tasering of people who are in police custody.

    Tasers have killed hundreds of people over the last ten years and have been used to torture thousands. But the calculation is that if we didn’t use them, the police would have shot and killed many more. So that’s that. Other countries don’t do either. Why do we?

    You can see the video on Youtube.

    Can you believe it?

    Happy Martin Luther King Day to you. Or, if you come from a different faith tradition, happy Robert E. Lee’s birthday?

    Because this is a thing the state of Alabama apparently celebrates.

    I wish this was a joke, but it’s not:

    Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday are right around the corner.


    As noted in the original this surely proves there is no institutional racism, amirite?

    He was woke, guys, super woke

    This piece by Peter Drier sums it up for those guys who want to appropriate King for their one single purpose:

    Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was no moderate. Today, he is viewed as something of an American saint. His name adorns schools and street signs. His birthday January 15, 1929 – is observed as a national holiday on the third Monday of January each year. This year as in year’s past, Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King’s name to justify their beliefs and actions.

    But in his day, King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Both Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson worried that King was being influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment’s campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 – as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and bank lending discrimination—the Gallup Poll found that 63% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33% who viewed him favorably.

    King called himself a democratic socialist. He believed that America needed a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He challenged America’s class system and its racial caste system. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country’s misadventure in Vietnam. He was a strong ally of the nation’s labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike.

    King’s views evolved over time. He entered the public stage with some hesitation, reluctantly becoming the spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, at the age of 26. King began his activism in Montgomery as a crusader against racial segregation, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace.

    During the early 1960s, the nation’s media accurately depicted both King and Malcolm X as threats to the status quo. But the media portrayed Malcolm X as an almost demonic force because he described white people as “devils,” and called on Black Americans to use self-defense – including violence, if necessary – to protect themselves from racist thugs and police brutality. King – a proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience and racial integration – was dismayed when Malcolm X, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael, and others began advocating “black power,” which he warned would alienate white allies and undermine a genuine interracial movement for economic justice.

    Just as King’s views evolved over the years, Malcolm X’s ideas changed, too. Toward the end of his life, he had rejected Black separatism and by-any-means-necessary tactics. In 1963, he traveled to Africa, the Middle East and Europe, where he met radical white people whose political ideas he agreed with. When he was in Ghana, someone asked him “What do you think about socialism?” Malcolm X asked: “Is it good for Black people?” “It seems to be,” came the response. “Then I’m for it,” Malcolm X said.

    In 1964 he broke with the Nation of Islam and rejected its policy of non-cooperation with the civil rights movement. He reached out to King and other civil rights leaders.

    When Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, King sent this message to his wife: “I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.”

    In reviewing King’s life, we can see that the seeds of his later radicalism were planted early.

    King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, the son of a prominent black minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the “anticapitalistic feelings” he experienced as a youngster as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines.

    During King’s first year at Morehouse College, civil rights and labor activist A. Philip Randolph spoke on campus. Randolph predicted that the near future would witness a global struggle that would end white supremacy and capitalism. He urged the students to link up with “the people in the shacks and the hovels,” who, although “poor in property,” were “rich in spirit.”

    After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King studied theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (where he read both Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx), planning to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the ministry. In 1955, he earned his doctorate from Boston University, where he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential liberal theologian. While in Boston, he told his girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that “a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs is wrong.”

    When King moved to Montgomery to take his first pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he was full of ideas but had no practical experience in politics or activism. But history sneaked up on him. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and veteran activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to resist the city’s segregation law by refusing to move to the back of the bus on her way home from work. She was arrested. Two other long-term activists – E. D. Nixon (leader of the NAACP and of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and Jo Ann Robinson (a professor at the all-black Alabama State College and a leader of Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council)—determined that Parks’ arrest was a ripe opportunity for a one-day boycott of the much-despised segregated bus system. Nixon and Robinson asked black ministers to use their Sunday sermons to spread the word. Some refused, but many others, including King, agreed.

    The boycott was very effective. Most black residents stayed off the buses. Within days, the boycott leaders formed a new group, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). At Nixon’s urging, they elected a hesitant King as president, in large part because he was new in town and not embroiled in the competition for congregants and visibility among black ministers. He was also well educated and already a brilliant orator, and thus would be a good public face for the protest movement. The ministers differed over whether to call off the boycott after one day but agreed to put the question up to a vote at a mass meeting.

    That night, 7,000 blacks crowded into (and stood outside) the Holt Street Baptist Church. Inspired by King’s words—”There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression”—they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. It lasted for 381 days and resulted in the desegregation of the city’s buses.

    During that time, King honed his leadership skills, aided by advice from two veteran organizers, Bayard Rustin and Rev. Glenn Smiley, who had been sent to Montgomery by the pacifist group, Fellowship of Reconciliation. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, and he was subjected to personal abuse. But – with the assistance of the new medium of television – he emerged as a national figure.

    In 1957, with the help of Rustin and organizer Ella Baker, King launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to help spread the civil rights crusade to other cities. He helped lead local campaigns in different cities, including Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, where thousands marched to demand an end to segregation in defiance of court injunctions forbidding any protests. While participating in these protests, King also sought to keep the fractious civil rights movement together, despite the rivalries among the NAACP, the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SCLC.

    Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles, spoke more than 2,500 times, and was arrested at least 20 times, always preaching the gospel of nonviolence. King attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which connected him to a network of radicals, pacifists and union activists from around the country whose ideas helped widen his political horizons.

    It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King was proud of the civil rights movement’s success in winning the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. But he realized that neither law did much to provide better jobs or housing for the masses of black poor in either the urban cities or the rural South. “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” he asked, “if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”

    King had hoped that the bus boycott, sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience would stir white southern moderates, led by his fellow clergy, to see the immorality of segregation and racism. His famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written in 1963, outlines King’s strategy of using nonviolent civil disobedience to force a response from the southern white establishment and to generate sympathy and support among white liberals and moderates.

    “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” he wrote, and added, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

    King eventually realized that many white Americans had at least a psychological stake in perpetuating racism. He began to recognize that racial segregation was devised not only to oppress African Americans but also to keep working-class whites from challenging their own oppression by letting them feel superior to blacks.

    “The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” King said from the Capitol steps in Montgomery, following the 1965 march from Selma. “And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”

    When King launched a civil rights campaign in Chicago in 1965, he was shocked by the hatred and violence expressed by whites as he and his followers marched through the streets of segregated neighborhoods in Chicago and its suburbs. He saw that the problem in Chicago’s ghetto was not legal segregation but “economic exploitation”—slum housing, overpriced food and low-wage jobs—”because someone profits from its existence.”

    These experiences led King to develop a more radical outlook. King supported President Johnson’s declaration of the War on Poverty in 1964, but, like his friend and ally Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers, King thought that it did not go nearly far enough. He began talking openly about the need to confront “class issues,” which he described as “the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.”

    In 1966 King confided to his staff: “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

    King became increasingly committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. Invited to address the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in 1961, King observed, “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.

    He continued: “The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”

    In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King proclaimed, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

    Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, “Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice.”

    King’s growing critique of capitalism coincided with his views about American imperialism. By 1965 he had turned against the Vietnam War, viewing it as an economic as well as a moral tragedy. But he was initially reluctant to speak out against the war. He understood that his fragile working alliance with LBJ would be undone if he challenged the president’s leadership on the war. Although some of his close advisers tried to discourage him, he nevertheless made the break in April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence.” King called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was “an enemy of the poor.” In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King wrote, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”

    In early 1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

    King kept trying to build a broad movement for economic justice that went beyond civil rights. In January, 1968, he announced plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, a series of protests to be led by an interracial coalition of poor people and their allies among the middle-class liberals, unions, religious organizations and other progressive groups, to pressure the White House and Congress to expand the War on Poverty. At King’s request, socialist activist Michael Harrington (author of The Other America, which helped inspire Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to declare a war on poverty) drafted a Poor People’s Manifesto that outlined the campaign’s goals. In April, King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to help lend support to striking African American garbage workers and to gain recognition for their union. There, he was assassinated, at age 39, on April 4, a few months before the first protest action of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC.

    President Johnson utilized this national tragedy to urge Congress to quickly enact the Fair Housing Act, legislation to ban racial discrimination in housing, which King had strongly supported for two years. He signed the bill a week after King’s assassination.

    Throughout his life, King had his moments of despair. He lamented that the factions within the civil rights movement undermined its potential. He was frustrated at the reluctance of some liberal politicians, including President Johnson, to fully embrace the freedom movement unless they were confronted with protests. He wondered whether he had the stamina needed to endure the constant travel, speeches, and threats on his life.

    But King would have rejected the nihilism and fatalism of what is now called “Afro-Pessimism,” a perspective that views American racism as so intractable that no movement for justice can redeem the nation’s democracy, or its soul.

    King would certainly be appalled by the recent upsurge of white supremacist and neo-fascist violence, catalyzed in part by Donald Trump. But he would recognize that they are the heirs of racist thugs like Bull Connor, George Wallace, the White Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan of his day.

    If he were alive today, King would no doubt still be on the front lines, lending his voice and his energy to major battles for justice.

    Update:

    “Global democratic revolution” to exporting autocracy

    It took the GOP just 20 years

    Nashville’s replica Parthenon (with some of the Nashville Skyline). Photo by Brent Moore via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

    Here in North Carolina, this New York Times essay by Margaret Renkl strikes very close to home. Where Republicans are in charge, spite drives policy and rationality takes a holiday. Here or just west in Tennessee, blue cities have targets painted on them:

    Last year, when Nashville’s Metro Council voted not to support the state’s bid for the city to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, retaliation was widely understood to be inevitable, according to Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN News.

    Now we know what shape retaliation will take: Last week, on the first day of the new legislative session, Republicans in both the Tennessee House and Senate introduced legislation that would cut our Metro Council in half. (The bills ostensibly apply to all city governments with a legislative body larger than 20 members, but that’s just Nashville.) If passed, the law would overturn not only a 60-year history but also the will of the Nashville people, who voted in 2015 to keep its 40-member council intact.

    The new bills set a “dangerous precedent,” according to the Democratic House caucus chair, John Ray Clemmons. “The G.O.P. supermajority’s continued efforts to overstep into local affairs and usurp the decision-making authority of local officials for the purpose of centralizing more and more power at the state level is concerning,” Mr. Clemmons told The Tennessean. “Ultimately, Nashville families know what’s best for Nashville.”

    Remember that oft-quoted Jeffersonian maxim that “government closest to the people serves the people best”? That once was gospel for Republicans. As you’ve guessed, it was as deeply held as Rep. Elise Stefanik’s principles. Preemption is now in vogue where the GOP dominates state legislatures, Renkl observes:

    There is, of course, a long history of legislative pre-emption in Tennessee. The tactic is also used by Democratic-controlled legislatures, but it is especially egregious in Southern states governed by Republican supermajorities. Just last week, another state lawmaker here introduced a bill that would ban local governments from helping residents fund out-of-state abortions — a policy that members of Nashville’s council have already proposed.

    It’s no surprise that the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement is also the party of undermining local governance. But it’s worse this year, or at least it feels worse this year, because this year Nashville voters can’t count on representation at the national level either.

    The minoritarian design of the U.S. Senate and surgically precise House gerrymandering left in place by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause) have seen to that. Thanks to that decision, Nashville finds its residents represented “by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected.”

    The GOP’s leveraging minority rule it has effectively engineered is now an issue not just in Nashville but among cities across the country where state capitols are MAGA-controlled.

    Mark E. Green, an ardent Trump supporter who represents Tennessee’s Seventh District, which now includes parts of Nashville, is a vocal election denier. Mr. Green is one of 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text messages with the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the far-right flank of the party sought nominal justification to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Even after the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Green voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election. As Holly McCall, the editor in chief of the nonprofit news site the Tennessee Lookout, writes, such behavior from elected officials has “seeded our voting public with mistrust that continues to harm our democracy.”

    But wrecking American democracy is not enough for the Dead Dog Party. Last fall Mr. Green flew to Brazil to do the same thing in that much more fragile democracy. In a trip paid for by the American Conservative Union, he met with Brazilian lawmakers pushing to change election laws. The meeting’s agenda: to discuss “voting integrity policies.” We know what happened next: Thanks in part to one of Nashville’s representatives in Congress, anti-democracy riots are now an American export.

    Meanwhile, here at home, Mr. Green has just been named chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

    The Republican Party under George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 over false allegations that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the September 11 attacks. Bush further claimed his goal was to plant and spread democracy across the Middle East, that it “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.” Bush imagined a “global democratic revolution.” That pretense did not survive the occupation that spawned ISIS. It certainly did not survive the arrival of anti-democratic MAGA Republicanism roughly a decade later. That Republican Party now exports autocracy abroad and rebrands it as patriotism here at home.