Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Let there be snark.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I did not have this on my fuck 2020 bingo card.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

We still have time to mess this up!

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

This is how realignments happen…

Good luck with your asparagus.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

People are complicated. Love is not.

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

This blog goes to 11…

Everybody saw this coming.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

We are aware of all internet traditions.

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Shitty Cops

Texas Officer Charged With Murder

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Texas Officer Charged With Murder

Updated to add a photo of Jonathan Price.

His name was #JohnathanPrice. In Wolfe City, TX he was known as a hometown hero. Motivational speaker, trainer, professional athlete and community advocate— he was dearly loved by so many.

Yesterday he noticed a man assaulting a woman and he intervened. When police arrived, I’m told, he raised his hands and attempted to explain what was going on. Police fired tasers at him and when his body convulsed from the electrical current, they “perceived a threat” and shot him to death.

Here is a link to support his family is.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/25o7kmjy5c…

I have spoken to the family and have agreed to do whatever it takes to get justice for JP. – Lee Merritt

A hopeful sign in a horrible story.  More of this, please. Or better, stop killing people of color.

Open thread

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Excellent (Heartbreaking) Read: “A mentally ill man, a heavily armed teenager and the night Kenosha burned”

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Anti-police-brutality demonstrators were converging on Kenosha from all over Wisconsin for a second night of marches. An armed right-wing group had put out a call for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend [our] City tonight from the evil thugs.”

Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone — didn’t belong to either side. He had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18 and struggled with bipolar disorder. That day, Aug. 25, Rosenbaum was discharged from a Milwaukee hospital following his second suicide attempt in as many months and dumped on the streets of Kenosha.

His confrontation hours later with Kyle Rittenhouse, a heavily armed teenager who had answered the call for “patriots,” kicked off a chain of violence — the deadliest of the summer — that left Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, dead. A third victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, lost a chunk of his right biceps but survived.

Within hours, the three men and the teenager who shot them were assigned roles in the country’s churning partisan drama. On the right, Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were cast as antifa foot soldiers, bankrolled by shadowy forces and determined to set fires and spread anarchy. On the left, the three shooting victims, all of them White, were celebrated as anti-racist martyrs battling armed vigilantes who had coalesced to support police departments accused of racism and brutality…

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Excellent Link: “Correcting the misinformation about Breonna Taylor”

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Radley Balko, at the Washington Post:

Wednesday’s announcement from Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron about criminal charges in the Breonna Taylor case set off a frenzy of misinformation on social media. Based on what we do know — which I’ve culled from my own reporting, reporting from the New York Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal, as well as from conversations with the lawyers for Taylor’s family — the decision to charge Detective Brett Hankison with wanton endangerment was probably correct, as was the decision not to charge the other officers involved in the shooting. If ballistics had conclusively shown that one of the bullets from Hankison’s gun killed Taylor, he could be charged with reckless homicide, but according to Cameron, the bullets that struck Taylor could not be matched to Hankison’s gun. There’s the problem that the police who conducted the raid were relying on a warrant procured by another officer, which was then signed by a judge. There were many flaws and abrogations in that process, but it would be unfair and not legal to hold them accountable for any of that.

But “not illegal” should not mean “immune from criticism.” Part of the problem was Cameron himself, who was selective in what information he released to the point of misleading the public about key facts in the case. (This raises real questions about whether the grand jury was also misled. That’s why an attorney for Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker, who fired at the police during the raid, is demanding that Cameron release the evidence that was presented to the grand jury.)

Furthermore, Taylor’s death was not, as Cameron suggested, simply a tragedy for which no one is to blame. The police work in this case was sloppy, and the warrant service was reckless. Taylor is dead because of a cascade of errors, bad judgment and dereliction of duty. And it’s important that the record on this be clear. So here are some correctives for the misinformation I’ve seen online…

“This is just an all-around tragedy. We shouldn’t focus on who to blame, whether its police, prosecutors, Walker or Taylor.”

The most serious questions here concern the investigation itself, and why these officers were asked to serve a warrant on Taylor’s home in the first place. There’s the lie about the postal inspector. There is the fact that despite the surveillance on Taylor’s home, the police didn’t know there was another person inside. There are the police bullets that were inadvertently fired into surrounding apartments. There’s the cut-and-paste language used to secure the no-knock portion of the warrant. There’s also the fact that the officer who procured the warrant was not part of the raid team. There’s the fact that five officers involved in the Taylor raid were involved in another violent, botched raid on an innocent family in 2018…

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There’s No Comfort in Responsibility

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I’m finally back from taking care of my parents in the Dakotas, having my time there increased by my sister and brother being exposed to COVID+ individuals and having to quarantine (both tested negative in the end).  I got back just in time for Rochester to be the center of yet another police homicide of an unarmed black man.

For those of you who’ve missed this one, the short recap is that Daniel Prude was killed in custody on March 23 (he died a week later but he essentially choked to death that night).  Here’s a tick-tock from CNN that covers the details of his death, which has been ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner.

His death wasn’t an issue until the family obtained bodycam footage through a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request and held a press conference on Wednesday to release it.   There have been demonstrations ever since.  Last night, a group of protesters with three elected officials at the head was met with pepper balls from the police — one of the elected officials was shot in the head with a pepper ball.  This occurred immediately after the police declared that the protest was an unlawful assembly – which, at that point, it clearly wasn’t.  After that declaration, the crowd pitched water bottles and other debris at the cops, and the cops shot a number of reporters in the head with pepper balls.

Here’s a shot of another city council member confronting police:

Throughout this crisis, Mayor Lovely Warren has been, as usual, awful.  Her transparently false excuse that she couldn’t make any announcements about Prude’s death because it was being investigated by New York Attorney General Tish James was rebutted by James’ office.  The day after a shambolic news conference where she made that claim, Warren suspended all officers involved in Prude’s death.

This afternoon, at another weak news conference, (video link) Warren and Police Chief LaRon Singletary outdid each other in the quest to form words into sentences without conveying meaning.  The main announcement at the press conference was that a local pastor was going to form a group of “elders” who would create a buffer between protesters and police.  Reverend Myra Brown will lead this group, and volunteered to do it, after protesters sheltered in her church to avoid pepper balls — in other words, she’s pushing Warren to agree to have a set of pastors and community leaders act as human shields.

So, this is where we are right now.  The police are so out of control, and Warren is such a weak leader, that someone from the community has to step up to serve as a human shield.  I predict injuries, because our cops are as bad as all the rest, which is to say, pretty bad.

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American Carnage After Dark: The (Extrajudicial) Kenosha Shooter

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The kid who murdered at least two people in Kenosha seems to have been a softer, dumber version of the guy who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville — a dropout whose uneasy classmates ‘joked’ about becoming a school shooter, someone whose only strong affiliation or interest was a Protect & Serve! fantasy of blue knights standing guard over a grateful community against the forces of disorder. In the Reuters video with the best short summary, he runs away from people attempting to disarm him, literally trips over his own feet, and starts spraying bullets in all directions when they catch up to him. Then he walks toward an armored police vehicle with his hands up — only to be waved past by LEOs in search of the real threat, mouthy Black protestors and stoners armed with skateboards.

And then the Worst People in the World leapt to his defense, because after all this ‘misunderstood young man’ was just doing what they’d been urging all their listeners to do.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Just How Broken *Has* 2020 Made Us?

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Broken enough that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion needs a warning label:

Per the Daily Dot:

The FBI’s Records Vault Twitter account is facing criticism after it tweeted out a link to a PDF that included the Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax, without any context.

The Records Vault account is automated, and tweets out links to Freedom of Information Act requests that are now public. However, the account tweeting out the hoax literature without context has generated a heap of criticism…

The PDF the FBI tweeted out does include a 1964 report from the Senate Judiciary Committee where it explicitly calls the document “fabricated,” however, it is toward the end of the 139-page PDF, after several copies of Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion, which the FBI apparently had in its records from when people sent it to them.

Given that the FBI’s tweet was just a link to a PDF with no context, it quickly was condemned online as “wildly irresponsible” and “vulnerable to ‘endorsed by the FBI!’ spin on this infamous racism.” …

Do better, FBI!

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Late Night Bad Indicators Open Thread: Portland

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