Author: tristero

To all the youngsters out there, this is why so many of us older folks hoped and prayed that this time it would be different but feared that nothing was likely to change:

Political leaders in Minnesota promised sweeping reforms after George Floyd’s killing turned their state into a focal point for nationwide fury and grief over police killings and racism.

But those efforts collapsed early on Saturday as leaders in the Minnesota Legislature — the only one in the country where Democrats control one chamber and Republicans the other — failed to compromise on a package of law-enforcement reform measures before a special session ended.

Ultimately, legislators could not reach a deal that reconciled the Democrats’ calls for far-reaching changes to police oversight with Republican leaders who supported a shorter list of “common-sense police reforms” that included banning chokeholds in most situations and requiring officers to stop their colleagues from using unreasonable force.

Democrats said the plan passed by the Republican-led Senate consisted of tepid half-steps that were already in place in most law-enforcement agencies and did not rise to the moment’s calls for dramatic action. Republicans balked at the proposals passed by the Democrat-controlled House to restore voting rights to tens of thousands of felons and put the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, in charge of prosecuting police killings.

How many times do we have to watch the tragic farce of government complicity in racism through inaction ? How many deaths will it take ’til we know that too many people have died?

Adding: note the not-so-subtle anti-reform bias and both-siderism of the Times reporting. Note especially the Times’s assumption that it is reasonable for Republicans to call proposals that include chokeholds “common sense.”

Please remember that John Bolton is merely one more fanatical right wing operative with a long history of lunatic remarks. He has no integrity and no credibility. If he did have any credibility, if he really was the patriot he pretends to be, he would have testified in front of Congress during impeachment. Instead, he opted to withhold information the American people desperately needed for no other reason than he knew he could make a buck.

In the fight over the release of his book, please remember that the book itself is nearly completely worthless as an historical document. Bolton has zero incentive and zero obligation to tell the whole truth or only the truth. He is not under threat of perjury. He can make stuff up and mix it in with real stuff and if caught, suffer no consequences except, maybe, a little embarrassment. Please understand that someone with Bolton’s mindset would have no compunction whatsoever about lying to or misleading the “liberal” media if (1) he could see more copies sold and make more bucks and (2) if the lies could advance his extremist agenda.

If the publication of Bolton’s book leads to actual sworn testimony, I will pay close attention to him then. But in my opinion, nothing that man says is worth a hill of beans unless he knows that if he lies, he’s going to the pokey.

So those of you who plan to read his swill, please, please, don’t take any of it at face value. He is not to be trusted.

The WaPo reporting:

Protesters in Albuquerque wrapped a chain around the neck of a bronze statue and began tugging and chanting, “Tear it down,” shortly before sunset on Monday. Their efforts to pull down a monument of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate suddenly stopped as four shots rang out.

Most people instinctively turned toward the noise, videos from the scene show. A few screamed. Just yards away, a group of men sporting militarylike garb and carrying semiautomatic rifles formed a protective circle around the gunman.

The gunshots, which left one man in critical but stable condition, have set off a cascade of public outcry denouncing the unregulated ‘militia’’s presence and the shooting. On Tuesday morning, the Albuquerque Police Department announced that detectives had arrested Stephen Ray Baca, 31, in connection with the shooting.

Baca was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and firearm enhancement, according to a criminal complaint.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m very glad this thug was arrested. I’m also very glad that he was arrested alive even after the shooting began. It shows that at least when it comes to right wing militia types, the police are perfectly capable of capturing even highly dangerous and armed suspects without kneeling on their necks for 9 minutes or shooting them in the back.

James Bennet, the editorial editor of the Times “resigned” today. He had a remarkably bizarre and sloppy career.

For example, in 2019 Bennet published an op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton proposing the US buy Greenland (not a link to the op-ed, you think I’d link to anything Cotton wrote?). To call this a cockamamie scheme is to dignify it and the fool who wrote it. Bennet had no business publishing such crap.

And just recently, Bennet published another piece of nonsense from Cotton. But this time, it was highly dangerous nonsense because Cotton proposed using American troops against peaceful people protesting George Floyd’s death.

And the kicker?

Despite Bennet knowing full well that Cotton was a delusional idiot, despite knowing this was the hottest button subject in the news at the time, Bennet didn’t even bother to read the op-ed, let alone get it properly fact-checked. There was a revolt at the Times over it:

As of Thursday evening, over 800 staff members had signed a letter protesting its publication, addressed to high-ranking editors in the opinion and news divisions, as well as New York Times Company executives. 

Let me be clear. The Times has great reporters (some of whom are my friends, full disclosure) and has broken more important stories than almost any paper. But across far-too-many departments at the paper, when the subject is American politics, they have a propensity to screw up badly. They fall over and over again for right wing cons and scams. And this has caused incalculable harm.

I swear to God, Buddha, Zeus, the philosophes of the Enlightenment, you name it: I am not making this up. Joe Klein on David Frum:

Frum is well situated because he is a former neoconservative, a longtime pillar of the Republican Party’s intellectual elite who was shocked to learn in 2016, with the rest of us, that the Republican Party no longer had an intellectual elite. 

No, Joe. “The rest of us” figured out a long time ago that the Republican Party hasn’t had an intellectual elite since a white supremacist delivered a bullet to the brain of Abraham Lincoln.

The media are awash with prominent intellectuals and journalists proclaiming that what with rampant disease, violent police riots, and a cratered economy this is the end of the Trump presidency.

They are completely wrong. He’s been waiting for this. He now has an opportunity to show all those liberals how to govern in the right — as in extreme right — way.

No federal public health plans: just suck it up and die if you can’t afford to isolate or buy your own ventilator.

No civil rights legislation: just more fire hoses and bullets. Lots more.

No New Deal: just hand over as much government money to the richest as possible.

And the sicker, more racist, and poorer the country becomes, the more excuses Trump has to seize power and concentrate wealth.

No, my dears, the Trump presidency hasn’t ended. In fact, it’s barely begun. He’s eager to show all of us how modern American history should have been done (far) right. And that includes war: Soleimani was just a preview of what’s to come.

He must be defeated in November at the polls.

This is Christianity. It’s also common human decency. It’s also simple common sense.

The soaring sanctuary of the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, in the District’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, bustles daily in normal times with parishioners — predominantly immigrants, many undocumented. But the coronaviruspandemic has shuttered communal worship for the church, as with most congregations across the country. It has also cut off many parishioners and neighborhood residents from work and unemployment benefits. And thus from food.

And that’s when prayer took another form at Sacred Heart.

The Catholic parish became one of the U.S. houses of worship that has transformed its sacred and communal spaces into a kind of food distribution center. With gloves and masks, in small teams, mostly in silence, congregants for the past few weeks have come to the sanctuary to pack some 560 baskets of food. Beans, oil, rice, carrots. One basket for each family who needs food. The packers don’t know the names of the recipients, some of whom are fellow congregants, some of whom aren’t even Catholic.

And this point should be stressed:

“A church is more than a building, that’s in scripture. But I also feel spaces can evoke emotion. Both of those things can be true,” she said. Porter has had those feelings in virtual worship and in preparing food boxes.

“We at All Souls are very clear that the church is not a building,” said the Rev. RK Keithan, social justice minister at the church, where he says attendance online has been higher than that typically in-person. “Our building is closed but All Souls is very much open.”

This, of course, is the exact opposite of the un-Christian, indecent, and irrational behavior of the christianists, who have weaponized Christian symbolism for right-wing causes — and which have disgracefully sickened so many.

Of course:

Accidental poisonings in the country from disinfectants and bleach increased in April, the month when President Trump mused that people might be able to fight the novel coronavirus by injecting themselves with disinfectant, new data show.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers reported a 121 percent increase in poisonings from disinfectants and a 77 percent spike in bleach poisonings in April, compared with the same month last year. The April 2020 data included the seven days that followed Trump’s false and dangerous comment about disinfectant, which he made April 23.

Duly noted: correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But still…

The story of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynching and the story of Elon Musk daring the police to arrest him for flouting lockdown — they’re the same story, the story of a country that is no republic but merely a monarchy (and a pretty crummy monarchy at that).

Due solely to their connections to power and the race of their victim, the two vigilantes escaped arrest. Musk, too, despite his flagrant violation of the law, will also escape arrest. He, too, has all the connections he needs to escape justice.

In the dreadful Arbery case, only a leaked video forced the state, 74 days later, into action. But then (of course!), a prosecutor, in his recusal, muddled the case, making it harder to prosecute. As for Musk, being a billionaire and a celebrity, it will take a lot more than video evidence of a shooting to get him into a jail, even if, by defying the lockdown, his facility could likely serve as a vector for countless numbers of infections and deaths.

The Arbery killers and Musk demonstrate that we are, and have been for a very long time, a nation of men. Those men are invariably white, invariably connected to power, and many of those white men are richer than anyone can rationally imagine. As for law? What law protected Arbery? What law will protect Tesla’s workers, or those in the meat plants? There’s actually a law empowering vigilantes in Georgia — oh, excuse me, I meant Georgia’s got a “citizen’s arrest” law. And Trump and his cronies are doing all they can to indemnify companies from liability during the pandemic.

These men, not us, can do whatever the fuck they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want. And barring the occasional random video, they will get away scot free with lynchings, spreading contagions, and other heinous crimes.

There’s just one problem. The US does not have what you call a sustainable model of governance. Any country this unjust, this unequal, this corrupt and this goddamm stupid is headed for a reckoning. Unless things change course very soon (November, if not sooner). I’m deeply afraid that as bad as it is, the US response to the pandemic is not even close to the reckoning all of us, the pawns of these few despicable men, will have to endure.

I’ve been wondering about this for years: Why aren’t editorial boards screaming: Trump has to go? Joe Lockhart analyses and seeks to answer this.

After three years of political and actual carnage under Trump, including Robert Mueller’s description of acts that amounted to, he told Congress, obstruction of justice; Trump’s “fine people on both sides” reaction to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed; his rampant conflicts of interest and credible accusations of his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution; his close to 17,000 false statements; a travel ban that primarily targets mostly Muslim-majority countries;impeachment for alleged extortion of a foreign government (he was acquitted in the Republican Senate), and the gross mishandling of a deadly pandemic, you’d think somebody on an editorial board might say it’s time for the President to leave.

Y’think???? But only one has called for his removal, The LA Times, and they said exactly what every single member of every responsible editorial Board knows should happen :

while a handful of large-newspaper editorial boards called for his impeachment, I could find only one — the LA Times — that called for his removal (and with a headline that covered all the bases: “Convict and remove President Trump — and disqualify him from ever holding office again”).

The article is long but worth reading to get a sense of the history of newspapers calling for presidential resignations. But the reason why only one newspaper has called for Trump to go is never directly stated, although a lot of virtual ink is spilled talking around the reason: They’re cowards.

And in fact, Joe Lockhart is also a coward for his refusal to explicitly label his pals’ cowardly behavior for what it is. Still, he does conclude nicely, although he surely knows he’s whistling in the dark:

…they [newspapers] should go down fighting. If the President is unfit to lead the country, then say it. And if lives are at risk and our Constitution is being attacked on a regular basis, then it is the duty of our great editorial pages to seek the ultimate remedy — a call for resignation.

Never going to happen. As I said: cowards.