Today's Eternal Sadness

32-year-old Tony Timpa died at the hands of poorly trained cops in Dallas three years ago.

It took over two years and a decision in federal court to get the video released.

Dallas Morning News:

The officers pinned his handcuffed arms behind his back for nearly 14 minutes and zip-tied his legs together. By the time he was loaded onto a gurney and put into an ambulance, the 32-year-old was dead.

Timpa called 911 on Aug. 10, 2016, from the parking lot of a Dallas porn store, saying he was afraid and needed help. He told a dispatcher he suffered from schizophrenia and depression and was off his prescription medication. The News first reported Timpa’s death in a 2017 investigation that showed Dallas police refused to say how a man who had called 911 for help ended up dead.

Those three officers -- Kevin Mansell, Danny Vasquez and Dustin Dillard -- were indicted by a grand jury in 2017 on charges of misdemeanor deadly conduct, three months after The News published its investigation into Timpa’s death. Following two days of testimony, the grand jury’s indictment stated that the "officers engaged in reckless conduct that placed Timpa in imminent danger of serious bodily injury.”

But in March, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot dismissed the charges.

Creuzot previously told The News that he met with "all three medical examiners" who had testified to the grand jury. They reportedly told him they did not believe the officers acted recklessly and "cannot, and will not, testify to the elements of the indictment beyond a reasonable doubt."

Today's Quote

I can do without Claire McCaskill as often as not, but she's got her moments.

Let's be honest. If America were all white, there would be universal healthcare and free college like in the other Euro & Scandinavian countries. The only reason we don't have it here is because white people don't want brown and black people getting "free stuff." 

--Claire McCaskill

Today's Pix

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Continuing Daddy's Legacy

Failure is a family tradition.

Forbes:

Ivanka Trump’s latest memoir on empowering working women is so far a moneyloser for its publisher, Portfolio, a division of publishing giant Penguin Random House, Forbes has found. 

From its May 2017 release through the end of the year, Trump’s book Women Who Work sold 31,900 copies, according to data from NPD Bookscan, which tracks 85% of the U.S. domestic book market. That means the book, which advises women on how to excel in both their social and professional lives, has raked in about $1.1 million. Portfolio received an estimated $566,000 from all the sales, while it paid a $787,500 advance to Trump prior to her joining her father’s administration as an advisor. The First Daughter will receive another installment of her advance in the upcoming months. Altogether Forbes, with help from publishing experts, estimates that Portfolio, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has lost at least $220,000.

Today's Quote

Coolidge is something of a hero for libertarians. When he's shown to have countervailed what most of them would tell you is a core principle for them, it makes me think there really is something to my own belief that a libertarian is a Progressive-In-Waiting.

Not really dumb or evil - just underdeveloped.

Today's Tweet

It's downright karmic.

"The people who push such unhinged smears are doing Putin’s destabilizing work for him."

Indeed. Describes u & Donald to a T.#ElectionSecurity #DitchMitch #MoscowMitch #GrimReaper #GOPComplicit #CountryOverParty #VoteBlueToSaveDemocracy #IndependentVotingBlue@MurphyCartoons pic.twitter.com/uY11XH7xNb

— (((Jana Ben-Moshe))) (@jb_in_motion) July 30, 2019

Today's Today

HAPPY EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY!

It's your choice - you can become Green, or you can become Red.

Justin King aka: Beau Of The Fifth Column:

The Scariest Thing

Kate Marvel, Scientific American:

Cahokia was larger than London, centrally planned, the Manhattan of its day. Most people there would have come from somewhere else. There were defensive foundations, playing fields, and a magnificent temple. There would have been sacred ceremonies and salacious gossip. It must have been a very exciting place to live.

And then, relatively abruptly, it ceased to exist. We know of the city only because of the physical traces left behind. Few stories of Cahokia have survived; it disappeared from oral tradition, as if whatever happened to it is best forgotten. The archaeological record shows traces of the desperation and bloodshed that almost always accompany great upheavals: skeletons with bound hands, pits full of strangled young women.

- and -

I am often asked what frightens me most about climate change, whether I lie awake at night thinking about ocean hypoxia or arctic permafrost or other feedback processes that could turn a bad thing into a catastrophe. I am scared of the physical changes that await us on a warming planet, but the most important feedback process is the least well understood. The scariest thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.

The New Republic:

National crises make governments vulnerable to autocracy—a rather obvious assessment, perhaps, but one rarely seen in debates about climate change. Take the Maldives, an atoll nation in the Indian Ocean. Rising seawater is projected to consume most, if not all, of the country this century. In 2008, the Maldives chose its first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed. Almost immediately, he made climate change preparations central to his administration. He announced plansto move 360,000 Maldivian citizens to new homelands in Sri Lanka, India, or Australia, and he promised to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral country. Nasheed also demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, staging an underwater Cabinet meeting that turned him into a viral climate celebrity. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.”

In 2012, the military deposed Nasheed, forcing him to flee the country at gunpoint after mass protests over economic stagnation and spikes in commodity prices. His eventual successor, Abdulla Yameen, has since suspended parts of the constitution, giving himself sweeping powers to arrest and detain opponents, including two of the country’s five Supreme Court justices and even his own half-brother. Meanwhile, Yameen has tossed out Nasheed’s climate adaptation plans and rejected renewable energy programs, proposing instead to build new islands and economic free zones attractive to a global elite. “We do not need cabinet meetings underwater,” his environment minister told The Guardian. “We do not need to go anywhere. We need development.”

If any lesson can be drawn from the power struggle in the Maldives, it is that people who feel threatened by an outside force, be it foreign invaders or rising tides, often seek reassurance. That reassurance may come in the form of a strongman leader, someone who tells them all will be well, the economy will soar, the sea walls hold. People must only surrender their elections, or their due process, until the crisis is resolved. This is perhaps the most overlooked threat of climate change: Major shifts in the global climate could give rise to a new generation of authoritarian rulers, not just in poorer countries or those with weak democratic institutions, but in wealthy industrialized nations, too.

Our social structures have never been very good at keeping pace with either technology or the kind of disruption that Climate Change is bringing - has brought.

And we've got a triple whammy going

• Automation and globalized trade that drives economic disruption
• Climate Change that drives political disruption
• Oligarchs & Plutocrats who think they control things well enough to keep themselves above it all

So my default is still in effect: Hopeful but not optimistic, even though more of us are starting to get woke.

The Coming Campaign

Tim Wise on MSNBC



Here's the beginning of the Tweet thread Joy mentioned:

1/ Just a reminder that the folks who refuse to call Donald Trump a racist, thought Barack Obama was one. Why? Here's a short list: 1) Because of a small tax on tanning bed visits (bc "only white people" use these)...https://t.co/5BHRtJDVfqhttps://t.co/k8JuCboqOC

— Tim Wise (@timjacobwise) July 28, 2019

Today's Tweet

“If Trump really thought that I was a con man, he’d be nominating me to his cabinet!”

Al Sharpton with the comeback of the year: “If Trump really thought that I was a con man then he’d be nominating me to his cabinent!”pic.twitter.com/8JxAzUYjKa

— Ryan Knight 🗽 (@ProudResister) July 29, 2019

Today's Eternal Sadness

Stephen Romero

LA Times:

A shooting at the famed Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday evening left at least three dead and 15 injured, sending hundreds of terrified visitors running for their lives.

The popular food festival at the “Garlic Capital of the World” in Santa Clara County was about to close around 5:30 p.m. when at least one gunman opened fire. Authorities said police officers fatally shot the assailant, but they were continuing to investigate whether he had an accomplice.

Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said witnesses reported that a second man was somehow involved, but police were still searching for him. He said the gunman was able to circumvent the festival’s security by entering from a creek area and cutting through a fence.

The gunman was not immediately identified, and Smithee said the motive was unclear.

KNTV reported that 6-year-old Stephen Romero of San Jose was killed in the shooting. His mother and grandmother were also injured, according to the NBC station.

- and -

Jack Van Breen, lead vocalist and guitarist for TinMan, told KGO-TV that the band was playing an encore when he heard a pop. He turned in the direction of the noise and saw a man “in a green top with a gray handkerchief kind of around his neck and what appeared to be an assault rifle.”

“He started shooting again in the direction of where all the food people were dining,” Van Breen said. He directed his band members to clear the stage, which they ducked beneath so they couldn’t be seen.

Van Breen told the Associated Press he heard someone shout: “Why are you doing this?” and the reply: “Because I’m really angry.”

America is sick in the head.

Yes, It's That Bad

Fred Hiatt, WaPo:

The economy is humming. We’re not at war (much). So he can’t be that bad, right?

Steadfast NeverTrumpers may find it hard to believe, but I’m hearing that argument more and more lately, as people try to come to terms with the possibility of a second Trump term. It’s the “normalization” we’ve been warned about since Donald Trump’s ascension, but in a different form than we might have expected.

After all, many of the people telling themselves that things aren’t “that bad” insist they are as offended as ever by the racist tweets and sexist taunts. They’d prefer someone more civil in the Oval Office, of course.

But . . . the government, and the world, carry on. He insults our allies, but they remain on our side. He imposes tariffs, but unemployment stays low. He threatens defaults, but the debt ceiling is raised. Maybe, people think, a second term wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I’d argue such complacency is not justified. First, because a second term could be a lot more dangerous than the first. There would be more Trump judges on the courts to validate his lawlessness, no Jim Mattis or (God help us) Jeff Sessions in the Cabinet to curb his authoritarian whims, no worries of voter anger to restrain his bellicosity. A second mandate surely would embolden him; at worst, we could find that his jokes about a third term were no joke.

But complacency is misplaced also because — and here’s where the normalization comes in — things are that bad, even now. If people discount the damage, it’s due to a combination of fatigue and relief: fatigue, because it’s almost impossible to maintain outrage when the outrages are so incessant; and relief, because we are constantly aware that things could be worse.

"...things could be worse."

That's always one of the main threads to listen for when the Daddy State speaks.

It's not a neutral passive thing. It's an active threat. "You should be glad for the shitty; and you need to be very sure to express your appreciation to us for the shitty, or we'll make it shittier."

Party At The Border

Samantha Bee

That Baltimore Thing

Simply put, there is nothing redeeming (or redeemable) about that dipwad currently occupying the oval office.

Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA......

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

The Baltimore Sun: (the whole banana)

In case anyone missed it, the president of the United States had some choice words to describe Maryland’s 7th congressional district on Saturday morning. Here are the key phrases: “no human being would want to live there,” it is a “very dangerous & filthy place,” “Worst in the USA” and, our personal favorite: It is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” He wasn’t really speaking of the 7th as a whole. He failed to mention Ellicott City, for example, or Baldwin or Monkton or Prettyboy, all of which are contained in the sprawling yet oddly-shaped district that runs from western Howard County to southern Harford County. No, Donald Trump’s wrath was directed at Baltimore and specifically at Rep. Elijah Cummings, the 68-year-old son of a former South Carolina sharecropper who has represented the district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1996.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. The congressman has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream. President Trump bad-mouthed Baltimore in order to make a point that the border camps are “clean, efficient & well run," which, of course, they are not — unless you are fine with all the overcrowding, squalor, cages and deprivation to be found in what the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector-general recently called “a ticking time bomb."

In pointing to the 7th, the president wasn’t hoping his supporters would recognize landmarks like Johns Hopkins Hospital, perhaps the nation’s leading medical center. He wasn’t conjuring images of the U.S. Social Security Administration, where they write the checks that so many retired and disabled Americans depend upon. It wasn’t about the beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry. And it surely wasn’t about the economic standing of a district where the median income is actually above the national average. No, he was returning to an old standby of attacking an African American lawmaker from a majority black district on the most emotional and bigoted of arguments. It was only surprising that there wasn’t room for a few classic phrases like “you people” or “welfare queens” or “crime-ridden ghettos” or a suggestion that the congressman “go back” to where he came from.

This is a president who will happily debase himself at the slightest provocation. And given Mr. Cummings’ criticisms of U.S. border policy, the various investigations he has launched as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, his willingness to call Mr. Trump a racist for his recent attacks on the freshmen congresswomen, and the fact that “Fox & Friends” had recently aired a segment critical of the city, slamming Baltimore must have been irresistible in a Pavlovian way. Fox News rang the bell, the president salivated and his thumbs moved across his cell phone into action.

As heartening as it has been to witness public figures rise to Charm City’s defense on Saturday, from native daughter House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, we would above all remind Mr. Trump that the 7th District, Baltimore included, is part of the United States that he is supposedly governing. The White House has far more power to effect change in this city, for good or ill, than any single member of Congress including Mr. Cummings. If there are problems here, rodents included, they are as much his responsibility as anyone’s, perhaps more because he holds the most powerful office in the land.

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

The Moon

It's just not possible that we've come far enough to be able to capture this, and we're still nowhere near capable of resolving our conflicts peacefully on a regular basis - or even close to an understanding that we have to give up on the stoopid notion that someone could ever actually conquer the world.

Defining

We've been having this fight for quite a while.

1913 Paterson Strike

A libertarian is an anarchist who expects the police to protect him from this slaves.

The Paterson Strike

The 1913 Paterson silk strike was a work stoppage involving silk mill workers in Paterson, New Jersey. The strike involved demands for establishment of an eight-hour day and improved working conditions. The strike began in February, 1913, and ended five months later, on July 28th. During the course of the strike, approximately 1,850 strikers were arrested, including Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leaders William Dudley Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Spotted Friendly Foot - Shot Same.

Right now, the only thing the Repubs think they have going for them (they're flacking the shit out of it anyway) is an economy that they portray as being the best ever and the reason you should all run out and vote for rich white people to get richer and even more purebred-white-bread.

So what does 45* do?

BBC News:

US President Donald Trump has accused French President Emmanuel Macron of "foolishness" over a digital services tax, and hinted that he would tax French wine in retaliation.

Mr Trump voiced his anger in a Tweet on Friday, in response to French plans to tax multinational firms like Google.

French authorities argue that the firms pay little or no corporate tax in countries where they are not based.

The Trump administration has said the tax unfairly targets US tech giants.

"France just put a digital tax on our great American technology companies. If anybody taxes them, it should be their home Country, the US," Mr Trump wrote on Twitter. 

"We will announce a substantial reciprocal action on Macron's foolishness shortly. I've always said American wine is better than French wine!"

Asked about the issue in the Oval Office later, Mr Trump, who is teetotal, said: "I've always liked American wines better than French wines. Even though I don't drink wine. I just like the way they look."

45*'s tariffs so far have cost us in the 100s of billions of dollars in trade, plus the nearly $30 billion he's throwing at American farmers to buy their continued support, plus the fact that the slowdown in international trade has created an additional drag on GDP growth, which was already slowing, and is set to come in at a rather anemic 2.1% for 2019 - on top of the fears that we tip into full blown recession by this time 2020.

All of which makes 45*'s "promise" of 3 or even 4% growth pretty much another great example of a guy trying to convince me the 1985 Yugo is a great car at a great price.

Because Trump always makes things worse for Trump (thanks, Bob Cesca).

Bless Their Hearts

Rich white and over-privileged.

HuffPo:

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a $250 million lawsuit against The Washington Post from the attorneys of Nick Sandmann, the MAGA hat-wearing teen captured in a viral video with Native American activist Nathan Phillips in January.

A student at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, Sandmann was part of a group of teens filmed surrounding Phillips while he performed an American Indian Movement song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial early this year.

Rich white people who're looking for a nice fat payday at the expense of other rich white people have to stop making shit up about "lazy brown people always looking for a handout at the expense of rich white people."

Buncha fuckin' moochers

Part Of The Bernie Problem

Mimi Rocah's taking some heat about her comments on MSNBC, saying "Bernie makes my skin crawl."

That seems a bit harsh, but there's something that's always bugged me about Bernie too. 

I voted for him in the Virginia primary in 2016, but the bloom is off that rose now. It's not that he's become something bad, it's just that I think he's served his purpose - he's made it OK for Dems to show themselves taking the "lefty" positions they need to take.

That's what I've always thought Bernie's job was. It's what I think Hillary and Debbie and Donna figured would be part of a good way to move "left", but maintain the option to do the usual "hippie-punching" whenever they needed to calm the more conservative elements of the Dem Party - the Claire McCaskills and Joe Manchins.

Anyway, I think it mostly worked, even though the Bernie Bros wouldn't let it go when it was time to get back together and make things happen in the general election.

BTW - we know now that a lot of those Bernie Bros may well have been largely spurred on by Bernie Bots, assuming most of them weren't actually Bernie Bots and Trolls and Ghost Accounts.  We don't know nearly enough about that shit yet.

But back to Mimi and the "something ain't quite right with that Bernie guy" meme.

Behold, a GIF:

Bernie gets all gesture-y and Abby Huntsman tries to get him out of her space. Bernie's reaction to her objection has the earmarks of a guy who's being dismissive of her, as he seems to be playing the victim, and then trying to recover by blowing it all off with a smile - almost like he's trying to be self-deprecating, but failing at it.

It ends up as: Bernie, rebutting some nonsense from Stephen Moore, and basically telling Huntsman she doesn't matter.

It's a very bad look in retrospect. I didn't see it that way at the time. Rocah's tweet prompted me to go back and re-watch some stuff, and apply some context.

We're in a different place now. Our "manly" behavior is far more closely scrutinized, and we're just gonna hafta get used to the fact that women aren't putting up with that shit now, and many more of them are willing to get in your face because of it.

On the whole - I'll call it progress and try to figure out how to go with it.

On Getting Woke

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column.

"Don't be so woke that you can't dream"

There's a very important space between healthy skepticism and self-destructive cynicism.

Trolling In Real Time

This is just too fucking sweet. Seems to be a real thing.

Vox:

As President Donald Trump spoke in front of a crowd of young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s student summit on Tuesday, nobody took a second glance at the presidential seal projected behind him. They probably should have, considering that it was altered to poke fun at the president.

The photoshopped seal contains several details that are meant to troll the president for his friendliness with Russian President Vladimir Putin and expensive golfing habits. The bald eagle in the center has two heads instead of one, and its shield is swapped out for a more rectangular symbol that resembles Russia’s coat of arms. A two-headed eagle is also a symbol of empire and dominance and is featured on the flags of Serbia, Albania, and Montenegro, according to the Washington Post, which first reported on the incident.

The letters on the banner the eagle holds in its mouth are also altered: Rather than the Latin phrase “E pluribus unum” — “Out of many, one” — it says “45 es un títere,” a Spanish phrase that translates to “45 is a puppet.” And the eagle is holding cash in its talons instead of an olive branch.

Bless you, unknown graphics intern person - you are a true American hero.

Today's Pix

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None of this shit is new