Today's Charlie Pierce

I hope this one's been on everybody's radar the last coupla days:

A rich donor to Tulsa police mistakenly pulled out his gun instead of his Taser and blasted a fleeing suspect.

The volunteer cop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed an unarmed black man was forking over thousands in donations and equipment after becoming an unpaid sheriff’s deputy.

Robert Bates, a 73-year-old insurance executive-turned-deputy, accidentally fired his gun instead of a Taser—costing Eric Harris, 44, his life and adding to the tally of deadly police shootings against minorities nationwide.

Recent update via Daily Beast:

The Tulsa deputy charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting an unarmed black man was the sheriff’s sugar daddy—treating him to exotic cruises and fishing trips—former officers with the sheriff’s department told The Daily Beast.

--and--

“Bob Bates came on board because he had all this money,” one former reserve deputy said, adding that the sheriff and other higher-ups would “go on these cruises in the Bahamas and in Mexico all the time.”

"[Bates] foots the bill,” the deputy added. “The sheriff just gave him free rein because he was treating him right. He bought his way into this position.”

Another former full-time deputy said Bates was “getting glad-handed” around the office because of his wealth.

“This is your typical Southern good ol’ boys system,” he said, adding that before the shooting Bates planned to take Glanz on a fishing trip to Florida.

In case anybody may still harbor the soul-crushingly stoopid notion that "Pay-To-Play-Citizen-Goon" is a good idea, here's Charlie Pierce:

Something has gone permanently squirrelly with law-enforcement in this country. There is the change in attitude by which police increasingly feel and behave like an occupying army in American cities. There is the preposterous increase in available armament. On a wider scale, there is the triumph at all levels of government of an attitude that we will not tax ourselves, ever, for anything, even our own safety. So we wind up with traffic cops who look on, ahem, certain citizens as resources to be pillaged, or we wind up with septuagenarian insurance salesmen empowered to shoot people in the street under color of law, because they were willing to buy guns and ammo privately for a public purpose. This is Kafka rewritten by Grover Norquist and Bozo The Clown. You get what you pay for, and we're not willing to pay for anything any more.

Today's John Oliver

Keynote: Preventing Cable Company Fuckery

And it worked - kinda:

This Thursday, FCC Chair Tom Wheeler will announce that under Title II, broadband companies will be regulated as utilities. Real progress, and we should be grateful to Wheeler and President Obama for listening to the public as we made our wishes known.

It's not the same as putting rules in place that make it illegal to create tiered pricing structures, but at least it gives average jokers like me and you a way to verbally assault the Suits and the Nickle Humpers as they proceed to ease their bullshit ownership paradigm into place.

Stay after 'em.

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Today's Quote

"If your concerns about violence are limited to property damage and looting, and you have never shed two tears for the history of institutional violence, murder, colonialism, segregation, lynching, genocide and police brutality against peoples of color, your words mean nothing; they mean less than nothing. Your outrage, in such a case is grotesque, an inversion of morality so putrescent as to call into question your capacity for real feeling at all. So long as violence from below is condemned while violence from above is ignored, you can bet that the former will continue–and however unfortunate that may be, it is surely predictable. If you’d like the former to cease, put an end to the latter, and then I promise you, it will."  --Tim Wise

DoJ Stats from 2010:

Federal Grand Jury Presentations = 162,000

Federal Grand Jury Indictments = 161,989

(that's better'n 99%)

Cases of cops shooting people presented to a grand jury = 81

Number of cops indicted by a grand jury = 1

(that's a shade over 1%)

Somethin' ain't jake here.

(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Today's Weirdness

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone from a piece that was posted New Year's Eve:

On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most densely-populated city blocks in America, all eyes will be on the city cops stuck with holiday duty.

Why? Because the New York City Police are in the middle of a slowdown. The New York Post is going so far as to call it a "virtual work stoppage."

Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a "hostile anti-police environment in the city," the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.

If you're wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests "only when they have to." (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

Quick and obvious tho't: "conservatives" have been warning us on social media (eg) about all the bad shit that happens if cops decide not to respond to the public's call for help etc etc etc - which of course sounds more like a threat because..well...because a threat is exactly what it fucking is, but no matter.  What makes me nuts is that these "conservatives" seem so totally oblivious to the fact that the cops are threatening to do exactly what "conservatives" are always saying is exactly what they wanna do, ie: cut back on the reach and the scope and the intrusiveness of Da Gubmint.

Back to you, Matt:

In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasn't the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.

But that's not what's going on here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing enlightened about this slowdown, although I'm sure there are thousands of cops who are more than happy to get a break from Broken Windows policing.

I've met more than a few police in the last few years who've complained vigorously about things like the "empty the pad" policies in some precincts, where officers were/are told by superiors to fill predetermined summons quotas every month.

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people "when they have to."

Because it's wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it's even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Over the last 25 or 30 years, we've grown allergic to paying for the things we want.  The Wall Streeters and the Glibertarians and that one rapid in-law everybody's got who can't stop agreeing with and then regurgitating everything he hears on DumFux News have been carping loudly about "other people's money" - which is a term of art that's very very VERY familiar to the Criminal Cronies of Commerce because they've been applying that mode of operation to their dirty little deals for as long as there's been the tiniest notion of capitalism.  But now that they've more or less captured The Commons, they're looking to complete the take-over, so they've been trying desperately to make us believe they're talking about saving us by cutting back on taxation (ie: driving down our operating costs yada yada yada), but they're really just shifting the burden.  They're taking that burden off of themselves and their very wealthy benefactors, and putting it on the shoulders of everybody else.  They've pushed for - and we've helped them achieve - a pay as you go system that's evolved to where everything "the lower classes" do on a daily basis is scrutinized to the point where nobody can go more than a coupla blocks away from home without breaking the law in some way, which means they'll be stopped and frisked and ticketed and fined - all in order to pay the cops to protect the 1% from being killed and eaten by the very people who're paying for the privilege of being badgered and extorted and generally fucked over every day.  Welcome to USAmerica Inc.

Sometimes when I hear 'cop', I think 'Sheriff'.  

And when I hear [insert name of locality here],
I think 'Nottingham'.

That one's on me - feel free to print up as many t-shirts and bumper stickers your pea-pickin' little hearts desire.

God Love The Onion

Even when they hit a little too close.  Or maybe because they hit so close.

FERGUSON, MO—Ahead of a grand jury’s decision over whether to indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, police in the city of Ferguson have reportedly heavily increased their presence this week to ensure residents are adequately provoked. “We’ve deployed additional officers throughout Ferguson in order to make absolutely certain that residents feel sufficiently harassed and intimidated,” said St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar, assuring locals that officers in full riot gear will be on hand to inflame members of the community for as long as is necessary. “It’s absolutely essential that the people of Ferguson have full confidence that law enforcement is committed to antagonizing them every step of the way.” At press time, the Missouri National Guard was on standby with tanks and urban assault vehicles in case Ferguson residents required additional incitement.

hat tip: Democratic Underground

Lance The Boil

When it seems like the world's all fucked up, one thing we have to stop and consider seriously is that maybe the world's just all fucked up.

Eventually, ya gotta get all that putrefaction out. If you don't drain the abscess, it just gets worse.

The UVa rape thing:

...At that same moment, she says, she detected movement in the room – and felt someone bump into her. Jackie began to scream.

"Shut up," she heard a man's voice say as a body barreled into her, tripping her backward and sending them both crashing through a low glass table. There was a heavy person on top of her, spreading open her thighs, and another person kneeling on her hair, hands pinning down her arms, sharp shards digging into her back, and excited male voices rising all around her. When yet another hand clamped over her mouth, Jackie bit it, and the hand became a fist that punched her in the face. The men surrounding her began to laugh. For a hopeful moment Jackie wondered if this wasn't some collegiate prank. Perhaps at any second someone would flick on the lights and they'd return to the party.

"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

The Bill Cosby rape thing:

If Shonda Rhimes had a show called How to Get Away With Rape, it would only need one episode, and it would be a short one.

The hot-shot lawyer main character would give her client this advice: be a respected figure in your own community and target victims with lower status than your own. If you follow those rules, people will be uncomfortable with the consequences of believing your victims. They will not want to do that work. In fact, they will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it.

Show over; roll credits.

On Tuesday, Janice Dickinson became the 15th woman to accuse Bill Cosby of raping, drugging, or sexually assaulting her, and the fifth to do so publicly. These women tell a similar story: that they met Cosby when they were young women. That he spent time with them under the guise of professional mentorship. And that he, at some point, drugged their drinks and assaulted them while they were incapacitated.

First:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

And then:
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. . . . In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail" --Judith Herman, 1997, Trauma and Recovery (pg 7-8)

It's A Wonderment

We can always count on the NRA to come up with something clever to say every time some dipwad kills somebody with a gun.

So I'm wondering why they've said nothing about how the folks in Ferguson wouldn't be having all these problems if they were all properly armed.

And since we're seeing some actual repression of people by an over-amped militarized local police force - as opposed (eg) to the phony crap that went down at the Bundy place in Nevada - where are all those valiant defenders of freedom?  Where is the Tea Party Militia?  Where are the Oath Keepers?

I'm really disappointed that the True Patriots haven't showed up yet - if for no other reason than to show the Murican Public once and for all that they aren't really the gun-sucking, whiny-butt-pussy, racist assholes we all know them to be.

Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg went to the NRA website:

What I was looking for, of course, was outrage over "jack-booted thugs" terrorizing the populace. After fundraising and paranoia, outrage is the NRA's chief product. Whether it's President Barack Obama conspiring to subvert the constitution and strip citizens of self-defense, or former President Bill Clinton deliberately fomenting violent crime as a predicate to gun control, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre has always been extra vigilant about government's potential to abuse its police powers.

"If you have a badge" under the freedom-hating Clinton administration, he said in 1995, "you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens."

I wonder: Has the shooting death of the Missouri teen traumatized LaPierre into silence?

Image Is A Thing

In the picture below, there are 5 guys clearly visible.

Only one of them is not dressed (and not behaving) in a manner which might indicate that he's looking for trouble.

I'm not saying there's anything that justifies the riots.  Sometimes, the reality of shitty circumstances plus the tears of impotent rage just kinda catch up with you and it all blows up in unpredictably unavoidable (and understandable) ways.

You may be at the protest to show a little solidarity with your community, and maybe to vent your spleen a little by yelling at the cops, but all it takes is for one jag-off to throw one bottle, and suddenly a really bad situation gets a whole lot worse.

Cuz here's the thing: Authoritarians will always provoke you into actions they can use to rationalize their intentions to lord their power over you.  Once that bottle is thrown, they have the excuse they were looking for all along.

Here's An Ad

You can go here to help get this ad on the air.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Bile Venting

I'm not crazy about every little thought-item that pops outa this guys head, but sometimes, ya just gotta lance that carbuncle and squeeze it all out.

Here's the rant from The Rude Pundit that got him kinda "censured" by a few of the more sensitive blog-izens:

6/18/2014

Father and Daughter Cheney Can Go Suck a Dick

Let's state this as plainly as possible: The Iraq "war" was a complete and total waste. It was completely and totally worthless. The United States and the rest of the world would be in better shape if Saddam Hussein were still in power. Every life lost was for nothing. Every limb, every scar was for nothing. Every veteran who faces the unending nightmare of PTSD does so for nothing. Let's just stop fucking pretending anything else. Let's grow up a little and face that fact. Let's look the families of the dead in the eyes and tell them the truth.

The invasion of Iraq was the heaving fuck of a bloated superpower dragging its gut over to pump away because it could. And most everyone just went along with it, applauding each "victory" like it was the motherfucking Battle of Gettysburg. All that's left behind is the giant cosmic fucking joke that is a United States made weaker by wasting trillions of dollars on the mad ego trip of acid-blinded utopians and an Iraq that is exploding like a bottle of soda shaken by a paint mixer and uncapped by a gun.

And we need to bring former Vice President Dick Cheney before those families and have him tell the truth: "We did it for the dollars. We went to war with Iraq because war profiteering was the easiest goddamn way to enrich already rich people, like my friends at Halliburton. It was robbery and we named it 'patriotism.' It was extortion and we called it 'honor.'" Then, we should let the families do what they want. Maybe they'd let him go. Maybe they'd tear him limb from hideous limb. Maybe they'd rip out his machine heart and fuck the hole left behind, jizzing into his sternum.

If nothing else, it would stop him from co-signing an editorial from him and his heinous daughter-beast, Liz, like the one that ran in the Wall Street Journal today. In it, Cheney and Cheney pretty much say that President Obama is an America-hating cocksucker who wants our enemies to win and who is too stupid to understand jackshit about the real world, the world that Cheney (Dick) understands is full of threats without understanding that they are threats he created.

Here, in one paragraph, is enough rage fuel to keep your house running for months: "Our president doesn't seem to [care]. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America."

The first thing that comes to mind is "Golfing? Really, you fucking piece of frog shit and its daughter? You are criticizing a president for golfing?" But what the paragraph is really saying is that Obama doesn't care if the United States is attacked by "terrorists."

And then: "Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch." Dick Cheney bears no blame for the "decline" of America, oh, no. Not the vice president of an administration that wrecked the economy.

The Rude Pundit imagines Dick Cheney dictating this to Liz Cheney, his fingers too slickened by the viscous goo that comprises what we might call his skin, a gelatinous semi-human form that doesn't so much as move as undulate, that doesn't so much as eat as absorb, so that one can place, say, a kitten or a Pakistani child on his globular stomach and it will be digested immediately, without chewing, without swallowing. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, secretly turns the egg vibrator in her snatch up to "WMD," and she can barely pound out the words her father slurps out for need of crying out in orgasmic glee.

The two of them actually have the audacity to speak out and call Obama's policy toward Iraq "willfully blind," as if Obama is deliberately attempting to undermine some great and mighty victory in Iraq. That's as much living in a fantasy as those who say, "Well, at least we got rid of Saddam."

That Dick Cheney is still alive is a demonstration that either there is no God or that God said, "Fuck it" and walked away a long time ago.

- See more at: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com

Today's Debunkment

Did ya hear the one about the guy who didn't take the meds prescribed by his Homeopath for 3 days?  He died of an overdose.

What do they call Alternative Medicine or Homeopathic Medicine that's been studied and tested and proven out?

They call it Medicine.

This is part of a longer (and wider-angle) look at reason and rationality called The Enemies Of Reason:



I hate thinking I have reason to believe Healthcare is driven mostly by Rent-Seekers demanding a fat profit at the expense of sick and dying humans.  So it follows that I'd hate it even more whenever I think about those same Rentiers manipulating people into a belief in Folklore-Over-Fact just because it gets harder and harder to take anybody's word for anything.

The profit-takers are playing both sides, just like always. Only this one's the perfect parlay.

American Capitalism has degenerated into a proposition of delivering less for about the same money and then pretending we're getting quite the rare deal (thank you, Milton Hershey eg).  In "traditional" healthcare, it means the family doc throws freebie drug samples at us at the end of ever-shortening office visits; and if we ever manage to get admitted to the local hospital, they send us home as early as possible - generally sicker and weaker than ever before - hoping we'll be OK on our own for the first few days/weeks/whatever.

Well, Homeopathy and Alt Med both fit that model perfectly, so why would any right-thinking Corporate Slag not promote the fuck outa diluting everything in sight until we get to the point where we're delivering tap water at Dom Perignon prices?

I dunno - makes my head hurt.

Truth In Small Packages

Ya gotta know it's bad when a 12-year-old kicks your ass in public.



One of the big precautionary tenets in fighting any kind of battle is that you have to go to great lengths to avoid fucking up the kids.  Fuck over a kid when he's 10 or 12 and you've got an implacable enemy for the next 50 or 60 years.

A Question

Repubs are trying to "save face" by offering to fund the federal government piece by piece - which I think is another lie being peddled to us by the Press Poodles because the Repubs have mostly won already. The Dems are in practical agreement on budget numbers that are very near to Paul Ryan's wet dream of a government funded at Wal-Mart Wage levels.  But that's another rant.

Here's my question: Which part of Da Gubmint do you think this guy was fighting for?



Or do you think that maybe he just kinda understood that it makes no sense fighting to  improve something if you don't fight to keep it alive?

Little Guy Wins One

And he may be set to win another one - big

The wild west atmosphere in Russia since the USSR fell apart, has pointed up some of the worst examples of Unfettered Market Capitalism.  But 2 days ago, we learned that a little pluck and imagination - plus a pair of brass balls - just might get you a shot at some payback.

From Business Insider:

In 2008, Dmitry Agarkov received an unsolicited letter from Tinkoff Credit Systems (TCS) offering the 42-year-old Russian man a credit card with what he found to be unattractive rates.

While most people would have just thrown away the letter, Agarkov decided to do something different. He scanned the contract in the letter into his computer and altered it in his favor, including, for example, a 0% interest rate, no fees, and no credit limit. Moreover, every time the bank didn't stick to these rules, they'd be fined 3 million rubles — $91,000 — which of course would go to Agarkov. If they broke the contract, they'd have to pay Agarkov 6 million rubles ($182,000).

Agarkov's altered contract was, surprisingly, accepted and he received a credit card. "The Bank confirmed its agreement to the client's terms and sent him a credit card and a copy of the approved application form," Agarkov's lawyer Dmitry Mikhalevich told Kommersant this week.

I'll be kicking myself for a while for not thinking of this one.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Fuck You, NSA

I just wanna give a good solid shout-out to my government, as it wastes an enormous amount of their time and my money looking for shit they can hang on people who have nothing more nefarious in mind than fixing a decent meal for their families, and knowing something about the world they live in.

A New York woman says her family's interest in the purchase of pressure cookers and backpacks led to a home visit by six police investigators demanding information about her job, her husband's ancestry and the preparation of quinoa.

Michele Catalano, who lives in Long Island, New York, said her web searches for pressure cookers, her husband's hunt for backpacks and her "news junkie" son's craving for information on the Boston bombings had combined somewhere in the internet ether to create a "perfect storm of terrorism profiling".

Members of what she described as a "joint terrorism task force" descended on Catalano's home on Wednesday.

I may have to post just that simple loving phrase every day - I may even have to answer my phone with a good hearty "Fuck the NSA", like a lot of us used to say "Fuck the FBI" back in the 70s - and I say 'loving' because just like practically everybody else, I truly love this joint which means I have to insist on expecting my government to live up to the ideals it was founded on.  I want us all - together - to be the country we know we once were, and can be again.

So yeah - Fuck You, NSA.  Here I am.  Come and get me.

Confidence

Gallop put out another popularity poll - trying to discern the level of 'confidence' Americans have in various institutions (eg: SCOTUS, Congress, Military etc).

And guess what?  It shouldn't come as any kinda news to anybody that we love the US Military and we hate Congress - even though we continue to re-elect the people who make up the institution that gets a whopping 10% confidence rating.

90% of us say we don't have confidence in our #1 governing body, and yet the incumbents get re-elected 96% of the time.

Here's the thing:  We do what we're told to do.

Every time we turn around, there's somebody somewhere telling us every jarhead, zoomie, dog-face and squid is so Star-Spangled Awesome that God his-own-self steps aside whenever one of 'em walks into a room.

We are also constantly badgered to the point of befuddlement about how fucked up every little thing is when it comes to Government - except of course in those state and local rural centers where the good Christian small-government conservative dirt-huggin' gun-totin' real people hold power like an abused and frightened 4-year-old clutches a suffocating duckling on Easter Sunday.

We don't need to be brain-washed.  And we don't need to be turned into programmable automatons.  All anybody really has to do is keep us a little off-balance; getting us to consider just for a moment that (eg) Niall Ferguson's opinion that "hey, fracking isn't all that bad" is just as valid as the actual research that's been done proving there's at least real cause for concern, and that maybe we shouldn't be turning everything over to The Suits at giant corporations who feel nothing for anybody or anything that doesn't pump an extra 2¢ per share into their quarterly reports.

The enormity of the bamboozle is practically never revealed until well after the enormity of the crash caused by the bamboozle starts to sink in.  And if you wanna know what that's like, ask a Russian some time - or any of a rapidly-growing number of Greeks or Irish or Americans or or or.

What Ya Don't Do

• You don't fight terrorism by becoming a terrorist.
• You don't improve a democratic system by squelching the voting franchise.
• You don't boost Demand in a struggling economy by making it harder for people to buy stuff.
• You don't make your Democratic Party brand stronger by acting just like the Republicans.
• You don't ensure our precious way of life here in God's US America™ by turning the joint into some bullshit parody of itself, as we actually become something more like Noriega's Panama if you look too close.

I'm thinking there's more to this than we know (as usual - it's not about what they tell us it's about).  And what we don't know could easily either mitigate or exacerbate the "scandal", but even if I'm willing to give TeamObama some wagon room on this, I still have a hard time not thinking somebody in Obama's administration - up to and including Obama himself - needs to get kicked right in the nuts.  (And BTW, that goes for the Diane Feinsteins and Lindsay Grahams in congress as well)

At the very least, the politics and the "optics" make this look a lot worse than it may actually be.

I do have to ask one question tho'.  This kind of abusable power has been legal - and has been applied inside the US - for a very long time now.  That doesn't make it OK, even after "9/11 changed everything", but still, why are we gettin' all spastic about it now?

A Pretty Good Rant

Fitch The Homeless

"Where is - like - the Douchebag Section?"

Fight The Power

I think this is what revolution should look like.

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.