Why Policing Is Broken (Rolling Stone) Matt Taibbi goes over the reasons, but does not go far enough, and state that one of the purposes is to terrorize the poor and minority.
Amazon’s Private Government (The American Prospect) Amazon is attempting to use its monopoly powers to control vendors at every level.
It appears that the Columbus, Ohio police maced a non-violent protester and stole his prosthetic legs:
For everyone asking: the protesters begged the cops for the legs back, cops refused. Then a group rushed the cops (getting maced) and were able to grab the legs back & get them back to the kid.
President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible.
Brad Parscale, the chairman of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, posted on Twitter on Monday that the campaign had fielded more than a million ticket requests, but reporters at the event noted the attendance was lower than expected. The campaign also canceled planned events outside the rally for an anticipated overflow crowd that did not materialize.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said protesters stopped supporters from entering the rally, held at the BOK Center, which has a 19,000-seat capacity.
But reporters present said there were few protests. According to a spokesman for the Tulsa Fire Department on Sunday, the fire marshal counted 6,200 scanned tickets of attendees. (That number would not include staff, media or those in box suites.)
Reports are that attendance after removing Trump’s entourage are included in the total so the real number was even lower.
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was impressed:
Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID
This means that rather than attempting to protect and serve, police increasingly attempt to, “Dominate the battlespace,” which is antithetical to proper policing:
Calls for the demilitarization of police have gained new prominence in the light of the latest wave of anti-police brutality protests sweeping the United States. But in a country where one-fifth of the police force is ex-military — including George Floyd’s killer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, and Robert McCabe, one of the two officers responsible for knocking down Martin Gugino, the seventy-five-year-old protester in Buffalo — demilitarization won’t come easy. Many police officers are themselves former members of the military who picked up a career in policing after returning from war zones. But this isn’t the only problem. Loaded down with cast-off gear from the Pentagon — body armor, bayonets, automatic rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones — police officers are more likely to regard peaceful protestors as enemy combatants, particularly when the Pentagon’s own top official refers to their protest scenes as “battlespace.” But getting police officers out of the business of being an occupying military force —whether perpetually or in times of crisis — will also require much closer screening of job applicants who are veterans and elimination of their favored treatment in police department hiring. ……… Policing is the third most common occupation for men and women who served in the military. It is an option widely encouraged by career counselors and veterans’ organizations like the American Legion. As a result, several hundred thousand veterans are now wearing a badge of some sort. Though veterans comprise just 6 percent of the US population, veterans now working in law enforcement number 19 percent of the total force. Their disproportionate representation is due, in part, to preferential hiring requirements, mandated by state or federal law. In addition, under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice provided local police departments with tens of millions of dollars to fund veterans-only positions. As noted by the Marshall Project in its 2017 report, “When Warriors Put On the Badge,” this combination of hiring preferences and special funding has made it harder to “build police forces that resemble and understand diverse communities.” The beneficiaries have been disproportionately white, because 60 percent of all enlisted men and women are not people of color. ……… Tougher to tackle is the issue of ex-military personnel being over-represented in the ranks of domestic law enforcers. When you leave the service, says Danny Sjursen, a West Point graduate who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, “there’s no de-programming…They just load you up on meds and then you go straight to the police academy.” According to Sjursen, “military-style of policing is based on notion that high-crime areas should be treated like occupied countries.” So the “military-to-police pipeline” increases the chances “that a guy comes back to Baltimore, Camden, or Detroit and functions the same way we did when occupying Kabul or Baghdad.”
While I do not generally favor the use of Gamatria* in politics, there is a significance to these numbers. 1488 is a commonly used argot of Neo-Nazis, referring to both Hitler and the “protection” of the “white race”.
As the good folks at Psychology Today observe, “Once is a coincidence; twice is a tendency; three times is a rule.”
As Richard Dreyfuss noted in Jaws, “This is not a boat accident.”
On Thursday, June 18th, Facebook removed ads that the Trump re-election campaign began running the day earlier, citing the company’s policy against promoting organized hate. At the center of the ads and of the controversy was an inverted red triangle. The same symbol was used by Nazis to mark political prisoners–Communists, Freemasons, people who had helped Jews–in concentration camps.
If your reaction is, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” consider also that the first sentence of the ads contained 14 words, and a total of 88 ads were purchased by the campaign to be run on Facebook.
Fourteen words, 14, symbolizes a popular alt-right slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Eighty-eight, 88, stands for Heil Hitler—H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. Together, 14-88 are often used to signal allegiance to an alt-right group and the ideas of White Supremacy.
A mentor used to say, “once is a coincidence; twice is a tendency; three times is a rule.” So it would seem that in this case, the red triangle may not just be a red triangle, that it may stand for something else.
………
A White Power symbol posted by the U.S. president’s re-election campaign, “Team Trump,” helps to legitimize the alt-right movement. When the symbol is shared by the U.S. president himself and by Vice President Pence, observers might wonder if many people actually condone the alt-right movement’s goals and values.
This signaling may be far more sophisticated, and far more malicious, than I had previously thought.
*In Hebrew, every letter is also a number, and Gematria is a sort of mysticism where the numerical characteristics of sentences and word connote a greater meaning.
The judge also noted that this does not mean that Bolton is in the right, and that he is likely to lose any profits and advances from the book, as well as facing civil and criminal sanctions.
All in all, it’s a wonderful ruling, because the first and second most horrible people on earth* both lose:
President Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton can go forward with the publication of his memoir, a federal judge ruled on Saturday, rejecting the administration’s request for an order that he try to pull the book back and saying it was too late for such an order to succeed.
“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done. There is no restoring the status quo,” wrote Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia.
But in a 10-page opinion, Judge Lamberth also suggested that Mr. Bolton may be in jeopardy of forfeiting his $2 million advance, as the Justice Department has separately requested — and that he could be prosecuted for allowing the book to be published before receiving final notice that a prepublication review to scrub out classified information was complete.
I am amused.
*If I was forced to choose whether to let Trump or Bolton die, I would ask for the Dion Sanders option.† †Both.
Andrew McAfee, a “technologist” at MIT, wrote a book, More From Less showing that the US use of natural resources has declined even as its GDP has increased, implying that growth can continue unencumbered without any economic cost.
Scientists are increasingly concerned about the impact that excess industrial activity is having on our planet’s ecosystems. Our pursuit of perpetual economic growth is driving ever-increasing levels of material extraction, which is causing a wide range of ecological problems: deforestation, soil depletion, habitat loss, and species extinction. The crisis has become so severe that last year more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article calling on governments to shift toward “post-growth” economic models, focusing on human well-being and ecological stability rather than constant expansion.
But some figures have rejected this idea and are rallying around a different narrative altogether. In a book published last October titled More From Less, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based technologist Andrew McAfee argues that we can continue to grow global GDP indefinitely while reducing our ecological impact at the same time—and all without any structural, much less revolutionary, changes to the economy or society.
At the core of McAfee’s argument is his analysis of the U.S. economy. He claims that U.S. consumption of resources has remained steady or even declined since the 1980s, while GDP has continued to rise. In other words, the United States is “dematerializing,” thanks to increasingly efficient technology and a shift toward services. The same thing has been happening in other high-income nations, he says. This proves “green growth” can be achieved; rich countries are showing the way, and the rest of the world should follow suit.
………
There’s only one problem: McAfee’s argument is based on a fundamental accounting error. McAfee uses data on domestic material consumption, which tallies up the resources that a nation extracts and consumes each year. But this metric ignores a crucial piece of the puzzle. While it includes the imported goods a country consumes, it does not include the resources involved in extracting, producing, and transporting those goods. Because the United States and other rich countries have offshored so much of their production to poorer countries over the past 40 years, that side of resource use has been conveniently shifted off their books.
With no constraints on their behavior beyond their own desire for profit, they have become a menace to their employees and their communities:
………
“I wasn’t going to get tested, because on Saturday they were going to give out half a slab of rib-eye, and I really wanted it,” she says. “I thought, I’ll get tested on Monday.” Morales says her husband eventually talked her into getting screened that Friday. She tested positive for Covid-19 and didn’t get to collect the prized meat, though she did make a full recovery. Two months later, there were six Covid-19 deaths associated with the plant and more than 900 infections. (The company disputed those numbers but did not provide its own.) While this was going on, managers at multiple JBS plants were promising $600 to workers with no unexcused absences.
………
The federal agency that does have the power to regulate conditions in meat plants is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the Department of Labor. But with its staff cut by the Trump administration and its inspection activity sharply curtailed, the agency hasn’t issued a single enforceable order for what meat plants should do to prevent workers from contracting Covid-19. As usual, meatpacking companies are on their own, unencumbered by regulators they’ve assiduously kept at bay.
Together, JBS SA and three other big U.S. producers, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef, control more than 80% of the U.S. beef market. There have long been allegations of price fixing, driving up costs at the supermarket. For the past decade, meatpackers and processors have spent close to $5 million annually on lobbying, up from only $542,000 in 1999. The industry spent $1.3 million on the 2018 election, with two-thirds of that going to Republican candidates, according to an analysis of campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics. After Tyson ran full-page newspaper ads and a statement on its website warning of food shortages if meat and poultry plants were forced to shutter, President Trump signed an executive order to keep them open.
In the interest of averting cases like Morales’s, the CDC warned JBS on April 20 to stop offering inducements for workers to come in, but JBS ultimately didn’t follow the agency’s advice. OSHA, for its part, ordered its staff in April to do in-person inspections only of hospitals and other front-line facilities during the pandemic—not meat plants—because health-care employees and first responders were deemed to be the only workers at sufficient risk of contracting the virus to warrant immediate investigation. All other OSHA probes were to proceed by phone and fax. Even in normal times, OSHA and its state partners have just 2,100 inspectors, who are responsible for the well-being of 130 million U.S. workers at more than 8 million work sites. That translates to one compliance officer for every 59,000 workers.
………
A safer, less deadly meat industry could be fashioned through widespread legislative and regulatory reform. Consumers, too, could force change with mass boycotts—or if they were willing to spend more money on less meat. But in the absence of pressure, the industry has no incentive to change.
Covid-19 has become just another workplace hazard in one of America’s deadliest industries.
………
Historically, politicians and regulators have rewarded the industry with autonomy and lax regulations. As its labor supply dwindled, National Beef appealed to Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Mike Beam to muscle the union on its behalf. “Our request is that they hear from the Governor’s office about the importance and special responsibility of food production workers and to ask the Union to encourage its folks to continue to report for work,” Simon McGee, National Beef’s chief financial officer, wrote to Beam in an email.
In Nebraska, Governor Pete Ricketts directed departments not to release Covid-19 case statistics at meat plants, citing concerns about privacy and the quality of the data. Cattle production is the leading industry in the state, where cows outnumber humans 4 to 1 and license plates proudly boast that it’s “the beef state.” Among the donors who’ve supported Ricketts’s career are Tyson Foods Inc., Smithfield Foods Inc., and the Nebraska Cattlemen.
This is why we need real regulation and real antitrust, and not just in the meat packing industry.
Geoffrey Berman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, just got fired. (“Resigned”)
I wonder which Trump crony pulled some strings when the heat got too intense:
The Justice Department on Friday abruptly tried to oust the United States attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, the powerful federal prosecutor whose office sent President Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to prison and who has been investigating Mr. Trump’s current personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. But Mr. Berman said in a statement that he was refusing to leave his position, setting up a crisis within the Justice Department over one of its most prestigious jobs. “I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Mr. Berman said, adding that he learned that he was “stepping down” in a press release from the Justice Department. Attorney General William P. Barr’s announcement that President Trump was seeking to replace Mr. Berman was made with no notice. Mr. Barr said the president intended to nominate as Mr. Berman’s successor Jay Clayton, current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Barr asked Mr. Berman to resign but he refused so Mr. Barr moved to fire him, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump had been discussing removing Mr. Berman for some time with a small group of advisers, the person said.
………
The announcement came late on a Friday night, a time of day when government officials sometimes release information so that it does not attract widespread attention.
There are so many potential conflict of interest and corruption here that it is going to be tough to narrow it down to a specific clause.
He had accumulated an extensive accumulation of illegal weapons while having accusations of domestic violence lodged against him.
Additionally, he received a massive (Can$475,000.00) cash transfer 2½ weeks before the shooting.
Experts say that this all points to his being an undercover asset of the law enforcement agency:
The withdrawal of $475,000 in cash by the man who killed 22 Nova Scotians in April matches the method the RCMP uses to send money to confidential informants and agents, sources say. Gabriel Wortman, who is responsible for the largest mass killing in Canadian history, withdrew the money from a Brink’s depot in Dartmouth, N.S., on March 30, stashing a carryall filled with hundred-dollar bills in the trunk of his car. ……… Sources in both banking and the RCMP say the transaction is consistent with how the RCMP funnels money to its confidential informants and agents, and is not an option available to private banking customers. The RCMP has repeatedly said that it had no “special relationship” with Wortman. Court documents show Wortman owned a New Brunswick-registered company called Berkshire-Broman, the legal owner of two of his vehicles (including one of his police replica cars). Whatever the purpose of that company, there is no public evidence that it would have been able to move large quantities of cash. Wortman also ran his own denturist business and there is no reason to believe it also would require him to handle large amounts of cash. If Wortman was an RCMP informant or agent, it could explain why the force appeared not to take action on complaints about his illegal guns and his assault on his common-law wife. A Mountie familiar with the techniques used by the force in undercover operations, but not with the details of the investigation into the shooting, says Wortman could not have collected his own money from Brink’s as a private citizen. “There’s no way a civilian can just make an arrangement like that,” he said in an interview. He added that Wortman’s transaction is consistent with the Mountie’s experience in how the RCMP pays its assets. “I’ve worked a number of CI cases over the years and that’s how things go. All the payments are made in cash. To me that transaction alone proves he has a secret relationship with the force.”
Without some sort of law enforcement or intelligence service involvement, I cannot imagine that he could have been able to do any of this.
There have been a number of infamous instances, Whitey Bulger being the most prominent, where law enforcement assets have gone onto commit notorious crimes.
I think that this is one such case, and the RCMP will never come clean about it.
The ruling was not on constitutional grounds, it was essentially a statement that the way that they had repealed DACA was so incompetently done as to be invalid.
Oh, Lord, thank you for making the evil so inept:
It has been eight years since the Obama administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which allows undocumented young adults who came to the United States as children to apply for protection from deportation. In 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would end the program, which it believed had been illegal in the first place. Today, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration acted improperly in terminating the program, and it sent the case back for the Department of Homeland Security to take another look. The ruling means that the DACA program will remain in place, at least for the foreseeable future. ……… The battle over DACA came to the Supreme Court in November 2018, when the Trump administration asked the justices to take up three different challenges, filed in California, the District of Columbia and New York, to the decision to end DACA. The challengers – which include states, cities, universities, DACA recipients, civil rights groups and even Microsoft – argued that the decision to rescind DACA violated the rights of DACA recipients and the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal law governing administrative agencies. In all three cases, the lower courts ruled for the challengers and ordered the government to keep DACA in place. At the end of June 2019, the Supreme Court announced that it would review the three cases. ……… Roberts then turned to the central question in the case: whether the Trump administration followed proper procedures in terminating DACA. Under the APA, Roberts stressed, courts should not substitute their own judgment for that of the agency. Instead, he explained, their job is to determine whether an agency made its decision “based on a consideration of the relevant factors and whether there has been a clear error of judgment.” In the majority’s view, the Trump administration had failed to meet even this relatively low bar.
Businesses are reopening after coronavirus shutdowns, governments are easing restrictions, and workers are gradually returning to their jobs. But the layoffs keep coming.
Another 1.5 million people applied for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, while 760,000 more filed new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal emergency program that extends benefits to self-employed workers, independent contractors and others who don’t qualify for standard benefits.
It was the 13th straight week that filings topped one million. Until the present crisis, the most new claims in a single week had been 695,000, in 1982.
………
Economists said the current layoffs, though smaller than the wave in March and early April, were in some ways more worrying because they suggested that the crisis was reaching deeper into the economy even as lockdowns eased.
I still can’t believe that I am saying this, but Trump’s lack of subtlety on race baiting has stunned me.
Facebook on Thursday removed advertisements posted on its platform by the Trump campaign that prominently featured a symbol used by Nazis to classify political prisoners during World War II, saying the imagery violated company policy.
The Trump campaign had used the ads, with a picture of a large red triangle, to inveigh against antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist protesters that President Trump has blamed for violence and vandalism during the nationwide protests against racial injustice. There is scant evidence that antifa has been involved in any coordinated campaigns during the demonstrations.
………
It was not clear if the Trump campaign was familiar with the origin of the symbol, which was reclaimed after World War II by some anti-fascists in Britain and Germany, in the same way that various political groups over the years have reclaimed words and symbols used to oppress them.
“We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate,” Facebook said in a statement. “Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
I’m even more stunned that Facebook actually took action and yanked the ads.
I think that the judge should sentence the company to a few years in prison.
If a flesh and blood person pled guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter, they would spend a significant amount of time in prison.
I know that there are no corporation jails out there, but that’s not the judge’s job, he just needs to direct the Department of Corrections to take them into custody.
Let them hash it out while PG&E chills its heels in its cell:
California utility firm Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that it was responsible for the deaths of more than 80 people in a massive 2018 wildfire caused by its equipment.
The fire, known as the Camp Fire, began in November 2018 when two PG&E power lines came into contact with nearby dry brush, sparking flames. Eighty-five people died in the fire, which also destroyed 18,800 structures.
………
PG&E “had a legal duty to the public to avoid wildfires and failed to perform that legal duty by recklessly failing to maintain and operate its electrical lines and equipment in a manner that would minimize the risk of catastrophic wildfires posed by those electrical lines and equipment, resulting in the Camp Fire,” each of the 84 manslaughter counts reads.
Company president and CEO Bill Johnson entered the guilty plea in court yesterday on behalf of the company. “Our equipment started the fire that destroyed the towns of Paradise and Concow and severely burned Magalia and other parts of Butte County,” Johnson said. “On behalf of PG&E, I apologize for the pain we have caused.”
As part of its plea agreement, the company agreed to pay a $3.5 million dollar fine and an additional $500,000 to cover the costs of the investigation.
The deal has been cut with the prosecutor, and while the judge is expected to approve the deal, the judge can sentence the utility to prison.
As protests against racial police violence have spread across the US, we’ve seen how video captured on mobile devices can help identify misconduct by law enforcement. But such evidence isn’t just useful at a protest, but during all sorts of routine interactions with the police, including traffic stops. That’s why the Siri shortcut “I’m getting pulled over” exists.
Once you load this (free) shortcut onto your iPhone, all you need to do is say “Hey Siri, I’m getting pulled over” and it will kickstart a chain of events. It will dim your phone, pause any music being played, and start recording video from your front-facing camera. It can also send your current location and a copy of that video to an emergency contact, though you’ll need to confirm a few pop-up messages to complete these steps.
………
So, to get things up and working, you’ll have to first make sure iOS is updated to at least iOS 12. Then, download the Shortcuts app which you can find here on the App store. After that’s done, visit this link on your mobile device from the built-in Safari browser to set-up the shortcut. (Be careful: other browsers won’t work!) You’ll also need to make sure your phone can load unverified shortcuts (go to Settings > Shortcuts and toggle Allow Untrusted Shortcuts to allow this) and give the program access to your location, which you can see how to do here.
The cop who shot Rayshard Brooks has been charged with felony murder, and his partner has been charged with charged with aggravated assault. Normally, a DA would present it to a grand jury, and remind them that a police officer is not a ham sandwich, and the would no-bill.
Not this time, which shows that something has moved in the political ecology of law enforcement:
The former Atlanta police officer who shot and killed Rayshard Brooks was charged Wednesday with felony murder and 10 other offenses in his death, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office said. At an afternoon news conference, DA Paul Howard announced the charges against Garrett Rolfe, who shot Brooks twice during a suspected DUI arrest at an Atlanta Wendy’s on Friday night. Rolfe was fired the next day, shortly before Chief Erika Shields stepped down from her post. ……… A second officer present during the incident, Devin Brosnan, will face four charges, including a count of aggravated assault and three counts of violation of oath, the warrants said. ……… Howard, who faces a runoff election in August, cited that his office has reviewed eight videos, including three cellphone videos. Due to the amount of video evidence, Howard said he did not need to wait on the GBI to complete its investigation.
And here we have the politics coming in. Howard came in a fairly distant second place in the Democratic primary, and his speed in filing charges is (for now at least) a political winner for him.
I cannot remember there ever being a time when a willingness to prosecute police for excessive force was a political winner, but it is now.
Shumer’s “Great White Hopes” of the US Senate races this year are Amy McGrath in Kentucky and John Hickenlooper in Colorado, and things are not going well fore either of them.
The largest papers in the state endorsed her primary opponent Charles Booker, as has Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is part of the Democratic Party aristocracy in the state. (Useless, but all aristocracy is useless)
I’m thinking that her deer in the headlights performance when asked about police protests in the last debate which was lame beyond belief: (See vid)
Remember Amy McGrath? Maybe you do. In 2018, the Kentucky Democrat was briefly famous for a viral campaign ad and an ultimately doomed campaign to represent her state’s Sixth Congressional District. A moderate and a former Marine fighter pilot, McGrath is the apotheosis of a particular Democratic electoral strategy: to win in a conservative state, dispatch a veteran with lukewarm politics. That strategy didn’t put McGrath in the House in 2018. But two years later, Senate Democrats tried it again, pitting McGrath against a top prize: Mitch McConnell.
Now she might be lucky to win her primary race.
McGrath faces a robust challenge from Charles Booker, the youngest Black legislator in the Kentucky House of Representatives. Booker has run to her left, and while McGrath holds a major fundraising advantage, Booker is gaining significant momentum ahead of the primary on June 23. Two of the state’s largest newspapers have endorsed him, and on Tuesday, Booker earned another major supporter. Alison Lundergan Grimes, who challenged McConnell in 2014, endorsed him over McGrath.
— Alison Lundergan Grimes (@AlisonForKY) June 16, 2020
The Grimes endorsement might be the clearest sign yet that McGrath is in real trouble. Booker already had the backing of a number of progressive politicians and groups, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, but Grimes is no leftist. She’s firmly part of the Kentucky Democratic Establishment, which makes her endorsement something of a surprise — and an unignorable vote of no confidence in McGrath. The retired Marine is backed by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, but locals are less convinced.
Democrats’ best pickup opportunity in their battle for the majority in the U.S. Senate has suddenly been complicated by not one but two unforced errors from their star candidate in Colorado, former governor John Hickenlooper. But it’s not clear whether either or both are enough to turn the tide of the race in favor of Republicans. The two controversies:
An independent ethics commission in Colorado said Hickenlooper violated state law on gifts when he was governor in 2018 by accepting rides on a private jet and, separately, in a Maserati limousine.
He appeared to compare a job as a political scheduler to the slave trade, in 2014 comments that were unearthed Monday. His campaign immediately apologized for them. “Imagine an ancient slave ship,” he said, “with the guy with the whip, and you’re rowing. We elected officials are the ones that are rowing.”
………
The first controversy carries a more immediate impact for Hickenlooper. The commission, which was set up as part of an anti-graft law Colorado voters approved more than a decade ago, fined him almost $3,000 for the luxury rides as he was traveling as governor. The commission also held him in contempt for not showing up for the first day of video hearings even though he was subpoenaed.
………
Hickenlooper’s most immediate contest is a June 30 primary. He’s facing Andrew Romanoff, a former Colorado House speaker, who has his supporters but is not seen as a major threat to Hickenlooper. Romanoff is campaigning on Hickenlooper’s left in support of Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal and has the support of some younger, liberal activists. (But no endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or his liberal allies in Congress.)
That may still be the case, given how late Hickenlooper’s ethics violation is coming in the primary and how much Hickenlooper has been billed as the best candidate to beat Gardner among Democrats. Romanoff is trying to leverage Hickenlooper’s ethics troubles to reverse that narrative. “He represents a threat we cannot afford,” Romanoff told The Washington Post recently.
I am not sure how much Romanoff is a long shot. Romanoff won the Democratic Party endorsement at the state convention, though that does not count for much in the primary.
And this woman has a badge, a gun, and power to arrest people.
Protect and serve, protect and serve:
There’s not much sympathy online for this cop crying over an Egg McMuffin.
A tearful video of a Georgia police officer accusing a McDonald’s MCD, +0.24% of withholding her breakfast order went viral on Twitter TWTR, -0.83% on Wednesday, leading the local owners of the burger joint to apologize to the officer and clarify to MarketWatch that she “was never denied service.”
A Twitter user who calls herself “Ann” and identifies as a conservative Trump supporter in her profile posted the clip of an officer she says is named “Stacey” who sobs while recounting how the restaurant workers kept her waiting and withheld part of her breakfast order. Stacey suggests this was done on purpose as part of the growing backlash against officers and the calls for police reform in the weeks since Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed during their encounters with law enforcement.
“Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds,” Ann writes in her post. “She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop.” MarketWatch reached out to Ann to verify the authenticity and origins of the video, but she did not respond by press time. But the local McDonald’s owner/operators confirmed the incident to MarketWatch.
Ann’s post had already been viewed 4.5 million times and retweeted more than 50,000 times by the time this story posted, renewing a heated online debate about the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.
The clip, which runs just under two-and-a-half minutes, features Stacey explaining that she placed a mobile order for an Egg McMuffin meal. But her order wasn’t ready when she went to pick it up.
“And I’m waiting. And I’m waiting. And I’m waiting,” she says, noting that she was hungry because she had not eaten for a very long time. She was told to pull over to the side, and an employee eventually came over and gave her a coffee. But Stacey’s order was supposed to include an Egg McMuffin and a hash brown, as well.
“That’s all she hands me is the coffee,” Stacey says, breaking down into tears. “I said, ‘Don’t bother with the food because right now I’m too nervous to take it!’ It doesn’t matter how many hours I’ve been up. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done for anyone. Right now, I’m too nervous to take a meal from McDonald’s because I can’t see it being made!”
She pleaded with people watching the video to, “Please, just give us a break. I don’t know how much more I can take.” She added that she has never had such anxiety in all of her years of service, and asked people to say “thank you” when they see cops.
Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop😢😡 Come on America. We are better than this. pic.twitter.com/IcudsNfVLY
