Year: 2020

DeNazification Plan?

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The author of this tweet wonders whether or not Biden will have a DeNazification plan followign the election.

Marcel Marceau answered this question in the film Silent Movie,a nd Joe Biden has repeatedly, and explicitly said that he will not take any actions against the most egregious malefactors of the past 4 years.

There will be no deNasification, period.

In the words of Marcel Marceau, “No”.https://t.co/J5sT53zKLU

— Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff) (@40_Years) November 2, 2020

Sorry for subtweeting @EclecticRadical.

Headline of the Day

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We Can’t Follow Obama Back to Brunch

—The Daily Poster

David Sirota and Andrew Perez offer a long overdue explanation of how Donald John Trump is not the disease, he is the symptom.

Seriously, if we give politics to the people who screwed everything up in the first place, we are setting the table for someone even worse than Donald Trump.:

In the closing hours of the 2020 election, Donald Trump is dishonestly casting his reelection bid as a crusade against the corrupt swamp that he helped expand and profited from, while Democrats are promising that if Trump is defeated, voters will finally be able to go back to brunch as the Washington establishment returns itself to power.

The former’s message is laughably dishonest, the latter’s message is profoundly cynical and potentially dangerous.

………

To counter Trump’s assault, the Democratic campaign this weekend returned to Flint, Michigan — the place the Obama administration left to suffer through a horrific toxic water crisis, exacerbated by Michigan’s then-Republican governor (who has since endorsed Biden).

During the event, Biden declared that during his last tour of duty as vice president, we “went through eight years without one single trace of scandal. Not one single trace of scandal. It’s going to be nice to return to that.”

………

This was the party’s flaccid message in the nation’s poorest city, a former General Motors manufacturing hub destroyed by deindustrialization and offshoring.  

………

It is true that the Obama years were not defined by petty bullshit that is routinely called “scandalous.” However, his two terms were hardly free of actual scandals. They were just the type of scandals that ruin regular people’s lives, but not the lives of people who wear expensive suits to work in Washington.

Obama helmed a presidency bankrolled by Wall Street donors that refused to prosecute a single banker who engineered a financial crisis that destroyed millions of lives.

He turned promises of significant health care reform into legislation that included a few positive consumer protections, but also enriched and strengthened the power of private insurance companies and dropped a promised public option. 

He acknowledged the threat of climate change, but then publicly demanded credit from the fossil fuel industry for helping boost oil production during a climate apocalypse.

He pledged to walk picket lines if workers’ union rights were under attack, but then he promptly walked away from promised labor law reform.

And yes, Obama’s administration slow-walked the response to the environmental catastrophe in Flint, Michigan.

………

That refrain represents a longing that has pervaded Democratic politics in the Trump years, embodied by the now-infamous protest signs insisting that “if Hillary was president, we’d all be at brunch.”  

………

However, Obama’s Flint speech went further. Echoing a previous refrain from Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, it was a call to resurrect Brunch Liberalism whereby large swaths of the American left disengage and defer in much the same way it did during the Obama administration, to disastrous effect.

Though it is now forgotten history, the history is clear: After years of mass protest and activism against the George W. Bush administration, many liberal activists, voters and advocacy groups went to brunch after the 2008 election, fell in line and refused to pressure the new administration to do much of anything. Those that dared to speak out were often berated and shamed.

In touting a presidency we don’t have to think much about, Obama conjures the notion of a Democratic administration once again insulated from pressure from an electorate whose poorer populations are too busy trying to survive, and whose affluent liberals are thrilled to be back at Sunday morning brunch after watching an MSNBC host reassure them that everything is All Good.

We cannot allow a corrupt and increasingly geriatric Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to continue business as usual.

Egregious Enough for Even the Supreme Court to Waive Qualified Immunity

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Except, of course, for Clarence Thomas, of Course, who thinks that prison officers throwing aprisoner in a sh%$ filled cell, and then threw him naked into a cold cell, is OK, because even in comparison to likely rapist wannabee Brett Kavanaugh, Thomas is a deeply evil man.

The case is Taylor v. Rojas:

In their orders on Monday, the justices struck down a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that had blocked a Texas inmate’s lawsuit against prison officials. The inmate, Trent Taylor, was forced to spend six days naked in cells that contained feces from previous occupants and overflowing sewage. Taylor alleged that prison officials’ conduct violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but the 5th Circuit, invoking a doctrine known as qualified immunity, ruled that the officials could not be sued because it was not “clearly established” that their conduct violated Taylor’s constitutional rights. Taylor went to the Supreme Court in April, asking the justices to clarify what it means for a constitutional violation to be clearly established.

In a brief unsigned opinion on Monday, the Supreme Court invalidated the 5th Circuit’s decision, without calling for briefing on the merits or oral argument. The justices acknowledged that qualified immunity protects an official who makes a decision that, “even if constitutionally deficient, reasonably misapprehends the law governing the circumstances she confronted.” But in this case, the justices emphasized, “no reasonable correctional officer could have concluded that, under the extreme circumstances of this case, it was constitutionally permissible to house Taylor in such deplorably unsanitary conditions for such an extended period of time.” The court of appeals, the court noted, did not identify any emergency or other need for the prison officials to hold Taylor in these conditions, and the record in the case suggests that at least some of the officials were well aware of – but ignored – the conditions in the cells: One officer, putting him in a cell that was covered with feces, said to another officer that Taylor would “have a long weekend,” while a second officer, putting Taylor in a “frigidly cold” cell, expressed hope that Taylor would “f***ing freeze.” The justices sent the case back to the lower court to allow Taylor’s lawsuit to move forward.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the court’s decision, although he did not file a separate opinion to explain his vote.

Thomas might very well be the worst Supreme Court Justice since Roger Taney.

Now Its Up to the Federal Court

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(Update:  The federal judge that it was brought to, the most deranged right-winger in the 5th circuit, has rejected the application for lack of standing.)

The Texas Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Republicans to throw out 127,000 votes in Houston:

A legal cloud hanging over nearly 127,000 votes already cast in Harris County was at least temporarily lifted Sunday when the Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by several conservative Republican activists and candidates to preemptively throw out early balloting from drive-thru polling sites in the state’s most populous, and largely Democratic, county.

The all-Republican court denied the request without an order or opinion, as justices did last month in a similar lawsuit brought by some of the same plaintiffs.

The Republican plaintiffs, however, are pursuing a similar lawsuit in federal court, hoping to get the votes thrown out by arguing that drive-thru voting violates the U.S. constitution. A hearing in that case is set for Monday morning in a Houston-based federal district court, one day before Election Day. A rejection of the votes would constitute a monumental disenfranchisement of voters — drive-thru ballots account for about 10% of all in-person ballots cast during early voting in Harris County.

………

The Harris County Clerk’s Office argued that its drive-thru locations are separate polling places, distinct from attached curbside spots, and therefore can be available to all voters. The clerk’s filing with the Supreme Court in the earlier lawsuit also said the Texas secretary of state’s office had approved of drive-thru voting. Keith Ingram, the state’s chief election official, said in a court hearing last month in another lawsuit that drive-thru voting is “a creative approach that is probably okay legally,” according to court transcripts.

Plus, the county argued in a Friday filing that Texas’ election code, along with court rulings, have determined that even if the drive-thru locations are violations, votes cast there are still valid.

“More than a century of Texas case law requires that votes be counted even if election official[s] violate directory election laws,” the filing said.

The challenge was the latest in a flurry of lawsuits on Texas voting procedures filed in recent months, with Democrats and voting rights groups pushing for expanded voting access in the pandemic and Republicans seeking to limit voting options. In this case, the lawsuit filed Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to close Harris County’s 10 new drive-thru polling places and not count votes that had been cast at them during early voting.

Seriously, this Republican Jihad against voting is a clear and present danger to the Republic, and this needs to be dealt with.

Making a common cause is not possible at this point.

My suggestion is that we take the suggestion historian and author Robert Graves regarding the Germanic tribes during the Roman empire:

Spaniards can be impressed by the courtesy of the conqueror, French by his riches, Greeks by his respect for the arts, Jews by his moral integrity, Africans by his calm and authoritative bearing, but Germans are impressed by none of these things. They must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them; they will respect the hand that dealt them.”

—Germanicus Caesar, Roman general
(15 B.C.- 19 A.D.)

 We need to stop trying to accommodate them. 

Why People Call for Abolishing ICE

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One reason is because the organization has treated its detainees negligently, and when deaths and injuries result, they cover it up.

To quote P.C. Hodgell, “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”

Since January 2017, at least four dozen people have died while being held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Some were old, and some were young. Some had been in the US for years before being detained; others came here only recently, seeking refuge or better economic circumstances. Some were in terrible health upon arrival; others became ill while in custody.

………

In June 2019, BuzzFeed News filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the release of emails, investigative reports, medical records, and other documents related to 25 deaths in custody that ICE had publicly disclosed since President Donald Trump took office.

When the agency did not promptly provide records, BuzzFeed News filed a successful lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. To date, DHS has produced more than 5,000 pages of documents related to deaths in ICE custody. Collectively, they tell the story of how ICE has in some instances failed to provide adequate care to detainees, some of whom are locked up for months or years before their immigration cases are resolved.

………

ICE has publicly insisted that both the detention facilities it runs as well as those that are operated by private, for-profit corporations provide thorough and adequate medical care to all detainees. In response to a request for comment on this story, ICE said the agency takes the health and safety of detainees very seriously and while deaths are “unfortunate and always a cause for concern,” they are “exceedingly rare.”

But internal emails show that ICE’s own investigators raised serious concerns about the agency’s care of the people it detains, with one employee describing the treatment leading up to one death as “a bit scary.”

The documents show that:

  • In multiple instances, guards who were supposed to observe detainees placed in solitary confinement for extra monitoring falsified records to hide apparent dereliction of duty. In at least two cases — at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and Adelanto Detention Facility in California — people died while they were not being watched but should have been. “During the 51-minute period, the officer documented three welfare checks, none of which were supported by video surveillance,” one internal death review states. The guard resigned two days later, documents show.

    ………

  • Medical staff at some detention facilities — including a psychiatrist at Krome North Processing Center in Miami and nurses at Glades County Detention Center, also in Florida — at times did not use an interpreter when treating a detainee with limited English proficiency. The detainee was asked to sign documents related to his care in a language that he may not have understood. He later died while still in ICE custody.
  • Investigators found other failures that point to serious lack of care even if they did not lead directly to death. One man whom doctors noted had no lower teeth and was missing several upper teeth during a physical, for example, was not given a special diet to make sure his nutritional intake was adequate. In another instance, surveillance footage showed a detainee falling out of his wheelchair and struggling to move, but nurses told a guard who expressed concern that the detainee was faking or exaggerating his symptoms. Later that day, the detainee died.

………

Although ICE has maintained that it takes the well-being of its detainees seriously and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on their medical needs, immigrant advocates have repeatedly questioned the quality of care in ICE custody, concerns that grew this year as detainees began contracting COVID-19. Despite a dramatic dip in the detention population in recent months due to the pandemic, 21 immigrants died in ICE custody in the most recent fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the highest number of such deaths under the agency’s watch in 15 years. Several of those who died tested positive for the coronavirus.

ICE revels in cruelty and and abuse of immigrants.

I’m not sure how you fix this without firing them all and replacing every single officer.

And in the Continued War on Voting

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In Minneapolis, a Trump official and the police union are trying to bring in retired officers to intimidate voters.

The fact that a Trump administration is trying to gin up a voter suppression effort is no surprise, but the involvement of the PBA, and it’s notoriously president belligerent Bob Kroll in actively recruiting thugs to suppress the vote is crossing the line from the thin blue line to active criminality:

The Minneapolis police union put out a call this week for retired officers to help serve as “eyes and ears” at polling sites in “problem” areas across the city on Election Day, at the request of an attorney for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

The request was made by William Willingham, whose e-mail signature identifies him as a senior legal adviser and director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign.

In an e-mail Wednesday morning to Minneapolis Police Federation President Lt. Bob Kroll, Willingham asked the union president about recruiting 20 to 30 former officers to serve as “poll challengers” to work either a four- or eight-hour shift in a “problem area.”

“Poll Challengers do not ‘stop’ people, per se, but act as our eyes and ears in the field and call our hotline to document fraud,” the e-mail read. “We don’t necessarily want our Poll Challengers to look intimidating, they cannot carry a weapon in the polls due to state law. … We just want people who won’t be afraid in rough neighborhoods or intimidating situations.”

Kroll then passed on the request to federation members, saying “Please share, and e-mail me if you are willing to assist,” according to a copy obtained by the Star Tribune.

Neither Willingham nor Kroll responded to requests for comment Wednesday.

Bob Kroll is a menace to the citizens of Minneapolis.

Speaking of Privilege………

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In the 1990s, there were a whole series of Wunderkind at The New Republic, Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass who were later revealed to be fabulists and/or plagiarists.

The fact that the magazine was a disaster under the ownership of racist Marty Peretz, is of little interest today, except for the fact that Ruth Shalit, now Ruth Shalit Barrett, is still getting her stories into prominent publications.

In this case, it was The Atlantic which published an article from her about parents getting their children into fencing to get them into top flight schools.

It turns out that it was (once again)  she made sh%$ up.

Seriously, if you are a white person who went to the Ivy League, you are the equivalent of  a “Made Man” in the Mafia.

It’s the only explanation as to why she gets any non-fiction writing now:

The Atlantic on Sunday took the extraordinary step of retracting an article by Ruth Shalit Barrett, who was a rising young political reporter in the 1990s when accusations of plagiarism derailed her career as an associate editor at The New Republic.

“We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the article,” The Atlantic said in an editor’s note that it updated on Sunday night.

The buzzy article, which was published online last month and appears in the magazine’s November print edition, chronicles a world of wealthy parents in the Connecticut suburbs obsessed with prodding their children into niche sports like fencing, crew and squash in hopes of getting them into Ivy League schools.

In the editor’s note, The Atlantic said that its fact-checking department had thoroughly rechecked the article, which was more than 6,000 words, speaking with more than 40 sources and independently corroborating information.

“But we now know that the author misled our fact-checkers, lied to our editors, and is accused of inducing at least one source to lie to our fact-checking department,” the note said. “We believe that these actions fatally undermined the effectiveness of the fact-checking process. It is impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy of this article. This is what necessitates a full retraction. We apologize to our readers.”

The Atlantic, went so far as listing her name as, “Ruth S. Barrett,” as the byline, because, after all, she went to Princeton.

I get that Shalit is a talented writer, but why any editor would ever publish her in non-fiction is a marker of just how dysfunctional the current caste system is in the united states.

I may be the, “Worst Writer on the Internet,” but I would be a better choice for any reporting, because I don’t make sh%$ up. (Though I freely admit that my ideology can seem a bit deranged at times, and this this would necessarily shape my coverage.)

I Haz Invented a New Drink

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You’ve heard of a Rum and Coke? 

It’s commonly called a Cuba Libre, though some argue that this also requires lime juice.

The other day, I picked up a pizza when I picked up my son from work at Mod Pizza, and decided to get some Birch Beer, which is somewhat hard to find, but always stocked there.

When I got home, I poured the birch beer in a glass, and mixed it with some (a lot, actually) dark rum. (No citrus added)

The wintergreen overtones (The oil in wintergreen and birch are almost identical) works very well with dark rum.

My only question now is what to call it.

“Rum and Birch” sounds like some sort of S&M thing.

I Did Nazi That Coming

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Politically motivated terrorism

A group of Trump supporters tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas. 

The use of Brownshirt is now appropriate, now matter what Godwin’s law says:

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign canceled a Friday event in Austin, Texas, after harassment from a pro-Trump contingent.

Texas has emerged as a battleground state in Tuesday’s presidential election, with polls showing the typically Republican stronghold now only marginally favoring President Donald Trump. The Biden campaign scheduled a Friday event in the state, in a bid to drum up last-minute support.

But when the Biden campaign bus drove to Austin, it was greeted by a blockade of pro-Trump demonstrators, leading to what one Texas House representative described as an escalation “well beyond safe limits.”

………

Historian Dr. Eric Cervini was driving to help with the Biden campaign stop when he filmed a line of pickup trucks along the highway, many of them flying Trump flags. The drivers were “waiting to ambush the Biden/Harris campaign bus as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin,” Cervini tweeted.

“These Trump supporters, many of whom were armed, surrounded the bus on the interstate and attempted to drive it off the road,” he alleged. “They outnumbered police 50-1, and they ended up hitting a staffer’s car.”

………

Video from the highway shows trucks surrounding the bus, at one point colliding with an SUV.

Footage from a CBS affiliate in Austin shows Trump supporters with signs and bullhorns surrounding the bus when it parked, with one person screaming that Biden was a communist.

Rep. Sheryl Cole, a Democrat representing nearby Pflugerville in Texas’s House, announced that a Biden event in her city had been canceled due to the harassment.

………

The Biden campaign’s Texas communications director, Tariq Thowfeek, said holding the event would have placed Biden staffers and supporters at risk.

“Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas today instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way,” Thowfeek told The Daily Beat. [Yes, the Daily Beast misspelled their own name right here, I double checked.]

………

The Trump campaign—and often Trump himself—has encouraged in-person conflict around the polls. Trump used the first presidential debate to urge supporters to act as “poll watchers,” a call that sparked concerns of voter intimidation. His son, Donald Trump Jr., made an explicit call-out regarding the Biden campaign’s Texas outreach efforts.

………

On Saturday, the president himself relished in news of the MAGA contingent harassing Biden’s campaign bus, retweeting video of the incident along with the caption, “I LOVE TEXAS!”

This does not bode well for the future of the republic.

Also, can we PLEASE give Texas back to Mexico?

Cervini’s tweet storm embedded after the break

 

 

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The Timber Industry Lies

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A study of logging shows that logging does not prevent wildfires.

The argument has always been that private, and more heavily logged, forests are less prone to wildfires.

An extensive study has shown this to be false:

As thousands of Oregon homes burned to rubble last month, the state’s politicians joined the timber industry in blaming worsening wildfires on the lack of logging.

………

In the decades since government restrictions reduced logging on federal lands, the timber industry has promoted the idea that private lands are less prone to wildfires, saying that forests thick with trees fuel bigger, more destructive blazes. But an analysis by OPB and ProPublica shows last month’s fires burned as intensely on private forests with large-scale logging operations as they did, on average, on federal lands that cut fewer trees.

In fact, private lands that were clear-cut in the past five years, with thousands of trees removed at once, burned slightly hotter than federal lands, on average. On public lands, areas that were logged within the past five years burned with the same intensity as those that hadn’t been cut, according to the analysis.

“The belief people have is that somehow or another we can thin our way to low-intensity fire that will be easy to suppress, easy to contain, easy to control. Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Jack Cohen, a retired U.S. Forest Service scientist who pioneered research on how homes catch fire.

The timber industry has sought to frame logging as the alternative to catastrophic wildfires through advertising, legislative lobbying and attempts to undermine research that has shown forests burn more severely under industrial management, according to documents obtained by OPB, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica.

………

“That kind of management clearly didn’t provide community protection,” said Dunn, who spent eight years as a wildland firefighter. He now studies fire behavior and risk for Oregon State University and the Forest Service.

In 2018, Dunn co-authored a study with Humboldt State University’s Harold Zald that found the 2013 Douglas Complex Fire in southern Oregon burned 30% more severely on private industrial timber plantations than on federal forestlands.

The way to protect forest from catastrophic wildfires is more fires, whether naturally occurring or prescribed burns, period, full stop. 

The movement for thinning is timber industry propaganda.

2020 Sucks

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My favorite film of Connery’s

Sean Connery, best known for his hard-edged portrayal of British spy James Bond, has died at age 90.

While I enjoyed his turn as 007, my favorite movie of his is the space-western Outland.

Following his turn as Bond, he spend a lot of time trying to move beyond that, and toward the end of his career, it seemed that all too often he was playing Sean Connery more than he was playing a character.

In Outland he was far enough removed from Bond, but had not become an icon that directors under-used.

His role in the movie as a marshal was restrained and understated, and I particularly liked his interplay with Frances Sternhagen, and Peter Boyle, as always, gave a solid performance.

He will be missed:

Sean Connery, the Scottish actor best known for his portrayal of James Bond, has died aged 90. His son, Jason, said he had died peacefully in his sleep, having been “unwell for some time”.

He was admired by generations of film fans as the original and best 007, and went on to create a distinguished body of work in films such as The Man Who Would Be King, The Name of the Rose and The Untouchables.

………
 
Born Thomas Sean Connery in 1930, he grew up in the tough Fountainbridge area of Edinburgh and left school at 14 to work as a milkman for the Co-op. In 1948, he joined the Royal Navy, but was later discharged on medical grounds. He began bodybuilding aged 18, and got work as a life model, among many jobs, and entered the Mr Universe contest in 1953, though he did not win. Having been interested in acting for some time, Connery used his Mr Universe visit to London to audition for a stage version of South Pacific, and landed a role in the chorus.

………

But it was his casting, at the age of 30, in the first film adapted from Ian Fleming’s series of James Bond novels that cemented his screen status. Reportedly at the insistence of producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli’s wife, Dana, Connery got the role in Dr No over better known actors due to his “sex appeal”. Despite initial misgivings, Dr No was a huge success, not least because it had been produced, cautiously, on a comparatively low budget. Released in 1962, it was a hit in Britain, but also did well commercially in the US.

Connery went on to appear in four more Bond films in succession, between 1963 and 1967: From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. His dramatically increased star status also allowed him to take films outside the series, notably the psychological thriller Marnie, for Alfred Hitchcock, and The Hill, a military-prison drama directed by Sidney Lumet. However, his increasing disenchantment at playing 007 saw him drop out of the next Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and he was replaced by George Lazenby. However, the Australian actor’s tenure lasted only for a single film, and Connery was lured back for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 with an enormous fee.

………

Throughout his career, Connery made no secret of his support for Scottish independence, and became a high-profile member of the Scottish National party, taking part in party political broadcasts in the 1990s and appearing alongside then-leader Alex Salmond. His politics reportedly led to the Scottish secretary Donald Dewar blocking plans for Connery’s knighthood in 1997, but the honour finally came three years later. However, as Connery had moved away from the UK in the mid-1970s, his substantial financial contributions to the SNP were ended after legislation disallowed funding from overseas residents.

So many of the figures from my youth seem to be leaving us these days.

Makes one think about one’s own mortality.

Official Misconduct in the Breonna Taylor Affair Gets Even More Sordid

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First, it appears that the grand jurors completely freaked out when they realized that they wouldn’t be presented any possibility of indicting the cops who killed Brionna Taylor.

Even with the power that the Attorney General had over the proceedings, they knew that this was an egregiously corrupt turn of events:

Two grand jurors who heard the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office presentation of the Breonna Taylor case say prosecutors were dismissive of their questions and that there was an “uproar” when jurors realized Louisville police officers wouldn’t be charged with Taylor’s death.

The grand jurors — who are choosing to remain anonymous, citing security concerns — spoke to journalists by phone Wednesday evening along with their attorney, Kevin Glogower, and community activist Christopher 2X. They spoke about how their service on the Taylor case was unlike dozens of other cases they heard throughout their month of service.

………

Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Annie O’Connell earlier this month allowed grand jurors to speak about their service after Grand Juror 1 filed court documents suggesting public comments by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron about the proceedings were misleading.

Six possible homicide charges under Kentucky law weren’t considered against the Louisville Metro Police Department officers who fired their weapons in Taylor’s apartment because “they were justified in the return of deadly fire” after being shot at once by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker III, Cameron said in a news conference last month. The “grand jury agreed” with that decision, he said in his first public comments about the grand jury proceedings.

Grand Juror 1 described Cameron’s comments as “inaccurate” and said the first time he heard there were six possible homicide charges that the jurists could have reviewed was in Cameron’s news conference.
“Even though we asked for other charges to be brought, we were never told of any additional charges. We were just told that they didn’t feel that they can make any charges stick” and that LMPD officers were justified in returning fire,” the juror said.
“They didn’t go into the details of the self-defense statutes, they didn’t go into the details of any of the six possible murder statutes,” he said, explaining Cameron’s news conference was the catalyst for filing the petition with the court.
………

A third anonymous grand juror who also has come forward “firmly supports the fact that no additional charges were allowed at the conclusion of their service,” according a statement released late Friday afternoon by Glogower, who now represents all three grand jurors.

………

“When they finally did present the charges to us … almost of all of the people at once said, ‘Isn’t there anything else?'” The reply from the attorney general’s office was there were no other charges that they could make stick, Grand Juror 1 recalled.

“There were a lot of questions,” he said. “We didn’t go right into deliberation on charges because we wanted to know what else was missing. … There was an uproar at the end, and it suggested to me that there were several other people who wanted to know more information.”

According to Kentucky law, prosecutors “shall attend the grand jurors when requested by them” and “when requested by them, draft indictments.”

And in addition to all of that, we have one of the killer cops is suing Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend for causing him, “severe trauma, mental anguish and emotional distress.”

These cops break down the door with no notice in response to a bogus warrant, fire indiscriminately, refuse to provide any aid to Taylor after she is shot, and now one of these murderous bastards is suing for “mental anguish and emotional distress”.

The entire institution of law enforcement in the United States needs to be dismantled brick by brick.

Have I Mention That Cops Lie?

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BREAKING VIDEO: Here Philly PD appear to smash the windows of a passing vehicle that was trying to turn around, then dragged the parents out and beat them on the ground in front of their terrified children. [@MrCheckpoint] pic.twitter.com/e6mmXWqzkr

— ☭ New York Socialist ☭ (@TheNYSocialist) October 28, 2020

Philadelphia’s Finest

A Philadelphia toddler was ripped from his mom’s SUV after police smashed in her windows.

The Fraternal Order of Police claimed in a Facebook post that the “lost” child was found “walking around barefoot” after police shot Walter Wallace Jr. https://t.co/CX9rpD8bSg

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 30, 2020

There are lies, damn lies, and every single word that you might ever hear from the Policemen’s Benovelent Association

During the protests over the police shooting of Walter Wallace, Jr., police broke the windows of a SUV that had strayed into the area, beat its occupants, dragged them out, and then took the baby in the back and used it for a photo-op.

The victim has still not been told where her car is, which means that it, and the baby’s hearing aid that was left in it, are “gone with the wind”.

Somewhere in hell, Frank Rizzo is smiling:

Philadelphia police pulled a woman from an SUV during unrest in West Philadelphia Tuesday morning, beat and bloodied her, separated her from her toddler for hours, and kept her in handcuffs in the hospital, her attorneys said Friday.

She has not been charged with a crime, and police won’t say what prompted the show of force.

Philadelphia civil rights attorneys Kevin Mincey and Riley H. Ross III are representing the woman and the toddler, who they said were both injured as police pulled them from an SUV shown in a now-viral video from the 5200 block of Chestnut Street at about 2 a.m. Tuesday. The video depicts at least 15 police officers swarming a vehicle, bashing in the windows, pulling out the driver and another passenger, beating them, then appearing to remove a child from the backseat.

………

Mincey said Young was struggling to get her child to fall asleep, and, hoping a car ride would help, she took the toddler with her to West Philadelphia to pick up her 16-year-old nephew from a friend’s house as unrest roiled the neighborhood. Mincey said Young encountered police barricades and attempted to make a three-point turn when police surrounded the vehicle.

Then, he said, police pulled Young and the 16-year-old from the car and threw them to the ground; police beat both with batons, handcuffed them, and detained them, he said. Mincey said Young relayed that police at the scene refused to tell her where her child would be taken, saying only “he’s gonna go to a better place, we’re gonna report it to DHS,” presumably referring to the Department of Human Services, the city’s child-welfare agency.

………

Police then took her back to headquarters and processed her. Mincey said she was kept in a holding cell, wasn’t informed of charges against her, and was issued a wristband that read: “assault on police.” She was released without being charged. Mincey said she’s unsure what time she was released, but she said “the sun was up.”

Young and her son were separated for hours. Mincey said Young was in the police van with another woman who had a cell phone. Young called her mother, Mincey said, and the boy’s grandmother went to the scene to retrieve the child. There, according to Mincey, police directed her to go to 15th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard, four miles away in Center City. The grandmother, Mincey said, found the child sitting in his car seat in a police cruiser with two officers. The child had a lump on his head and glass from the SUV’s broken windows was still in his car seat, Mincey said.

Video shows Philadelphia Police breaking into an SUV in West Philly early Tuesday morning, and then beating the driver while a child was inside.

Mincey said police have not told the family where their vehicle is, and he said the child’s hearing aid and Young’s purse and wallet are still inside it.

………

Ross also slammed the National Fraternal Order of Police for on Thursday posting images of an officer holding the child and falsely writing in a caption: “This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.”

The child was the same one pulled from the SUV, according to images shot at the scene by an Inquirer photographer and a freelance photographer in the area. The Inquirer is not publishing images of the toddler out of concern for the privacy of the family and the child.

The FOP deleted the posts about 30 minutes after the Inquirer asked for comment. On Friday, an FOP spokesperson said after posting the photo, the organization “subsequently learned of conflicting accounts of the circumstances under which the child came to be assisted by the officer and immediately took the photo and caption down.”

………

The video of the incident was shot less than 12 hours after two Philadelphia police officers shot and killed Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old Black man who family and neighbors said was experiencing a mental health crisis. Video of his killing showed him holding a knife and walking toward police when they opened fire, each firing seven shots.

Seriously, the cops are completely out of control.

Linkage

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The greatest martial arts fight in the history of cinema.
The spear duel in Kurasawa’s The Hidden Fortress:

GDP and Unemployment Numbers Today

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The initial jobless claims numbers are out, and they are not so bad: 

The number of Americans filing initial claims for unemployment insurance fell last week to the lowest level since the pandemic began, suggesting layoffs are easing despite a rise in coronavirus infections.

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 40,000 to 751,000 in the week through Oct. 24, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was the lowest level of claims since mid-March, just before the pandemic shut down much business activity throughout the U.S.

But the other shoe dropped on the Covid front:

Daily virus infections reached new highs over the past week, and it is too early to tell how employers and consumers will respond.

Claims remain exceptionally high by historical standards. Last week’s new claims were more than three times the weekly average early this year, before the pandemic. Initial claims, which reflect the number of people laid off only recently and not those receiving assistance for more than a week, are just one measure of unemployment assistance. In total, more than 20 million Americans are still receiving unemployment benefits through regular state and emergency programs.

The GDP numbers for the 3rd quarter also came out today, and that initial report shows that the economy grew at 7.4% between July and September, which is impressive, but with the stimulus having ended, and Covid infections hitting new records, I am calling (as I always do) a dead cat bounce:

U.S. economic output increased at the fastest pace on record last quarter as businesses began to reopen and customers returned to stores. But the economy has climbed only partway out of its pandemic-induced hole, and progress is slowing.

Gross domestic product grew 7.4 percent in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The gain, the equivalent of 33.1 percent on an annualized basis, was by far the biggest since reliable statistics began after World War II.

The rebound was fueled in part by trillions of dollars in federal assistance to households and businesses. That aid has since dried up, even as the recovery remains far from complete: The economy in the third quarter was 3.5 percent smaller than at the end of 2019, before the pandemic. By comparison, G.D.P. shrank 4 percent over the entire year and a half of the Great Recession a decade ago.

………

Economists said the third-quarter figures revealed less about the strength of the recovery than about the severity of the collapse that preceded it. G.D.P. fell 1.3 percent in the first quarter and 9 percent in the second as the pandemic forced widespread business closures. A big rebound was inevitable once the economy began to reopen. The challenge is what comes next.

I do not think that the 4th quarter will come even close to the numbers, particularly with Covid exploding.

*It’s an old Wall Street saying, “Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height.”

Trump Pushing Derp Immunity

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In case you are wondering, it appears that Donald Trumo is giving up whatever miniscule f%$#s that he used to have about dealing with Covid.

He is going full birther herd immunity. 

To quote Michael Cain in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Despite publicly downplaying it, President Donald Trump and his team of White House advisers have embraced the controversial belief that herd immunity will help control the COVID-19 outbreak, according to three senior health officials working with the White House coronavirus task force. More worrisome for those officials: they have begun taking steps to turn the concept into policy.

Officials say that White House adviser Scott Atlas first started pushing herd immunity this past summer despite significant pushback from scientists, doctors and infectious disease experts that the concept was dangerous and would result in far more Americans getting sick and dying. Since then, various White House advisers have tried to play down the idea that the administration has implemented a strategy for COVID-19 based on herd immunity, which holds that if enough people contract a disease and become immune from it, then future spread among the broader population will be reduced.

………

But those working on the government’s COVID response say that the attempts by the White House and Atlas to steer clear from using the phrase “herd immunity” are merely a game of semantics. Privately, one of those sources said, the actual policy pursuits have been crafted around a plainly herd immunity approach; mainly, that the government should prioritize protecting the vulnerable while allowing “everyone else to get infected,” that source said.

In a recent call with reporters, in which The Daily Beast participated, administration officials laid out a new emphasis in the president’s coronavirus policy which underscored “protecting the vulnerable,” key among them nursing home patients. One official said the coronavirus was “dangerous for a certain subset of the population” and that “most people do extraordinary well.”

Officials on the call pointed to a Great Barrington study, which was assembled by a team of scientists who advocate for trying to reach herd immunity through the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19.

………

Health officials say that the practical acceptance of herd immunity by the president could lead to a dangerous and potentially deadly new phase in the pandemic, even if it is accompanied by a simultaneous effort to screen and protect seniors and those with comorbidities. Scientists warn that if the administration continues to focus just on protecting, for example, individuals in nursing homes, it will overlook those people who fall outside of the most vulnerable population but who could still contract the virus, survive it, and have long-lasting health complications.

………

For Trump, Atlas’ advocacy of this approach has represented an opportunity. The president has long pushed for less restrictive public health measures to combat COVID, under the belief that the country needed to prioritize economic interests. Herd immunity as a theory “basically gave him permission to reopen the country even if we hadn’t flattened the curve,” one official said.

If, as the polls indicate, Trump loses on Tuesday, I would expect even more bizarrely destructive actions from Trump and his Evil Minions™, on their way out the door.

I expect to see actions that make Herbert Hoover’s hissy fit following the 1932 election look like a tea party.

This is Actually a Good Idea

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Which is the last thing that I would expect from Trump and Evil Minions™, but the proposal to award H1B visas on the basis of highest salary first, instead of doing so through a lottery.

My idea was to go through a lottery process, but this is also an elegant solution to the problem, assuming that the Indian body shops don’t manage to incorporate kick-backs into their recruiting.

I still favor a bid process for H1B applications though:

The Trump administration has proposed changes to the H-1B visa that will see it abolish the current lottery process and instead prioritise highly paid workers.

“Modifying the H-1B cap selection process by replacing the random selection process with a wage-level-based selection process is a better way to allocate H-1Bs when demand exceeds supply,” says a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement of the proposed policy.

“If finalized as proposed, this new selection process would incentivize employers to offer higher wages or petition for positions requiring higher skills and higher-skilled workers instead of using the program to fill relatively lower-paid vacancies.”

………

“The H-1B program is often exploited and abused by U.S. employers, and their U.S. clients, primarily seeking to hire foreign workers and pay lower wages,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli. “The current use of random selection to allocate H-1B visas …. fails to leverage the H-1B program to truly compete for the world’s best and brightest, and hurts American workers by bringing in relatively lower-paid foreign labor at the expense of the American workforce.”

………

The document also suggests that economic benefits could possibly include:

  • A better chance of attracting skilled and highly paid workers to apply for the H-1B, plus the prospect of higher wages for visa applicants because paying them more would rank them more highly as visa applicants;
  • Increased job opportunities for lower-skilled US workers who would otherwise have to compete with H-1B visa-holder;
  • Increased wages for H-1B recipients whose earnings fall into middling earning bands.

This appears to actually be an well thought out and thoughtful policy.

I credit a few million monkeys chained to typewriters.