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.

Molly Today

“I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.”  --Molly Ivins

Today's Pix

Monday's Minor Miracle

OK OK - no miracle; just good photography (or PhotoShop or whatever).  

But then again, maybe the miracle is that the wingnuts aren't jumping up and down screaming about how Obama's some kinda evil sorcerer who hates America because he's calling on his African Usurper God to bestow blessings on a buncha black people in Haiti.

And you know none of that's particularly funny because you know it's a little too close to the fucking truth.

Today's Eternal Sadness

Another day, another 1.64 dead children.

CLEVELAND (AP) — A 3-year-old boy picked up an unattended gun inside a home and it went off, shooting a 1-year-old boy in the head and killing him Sunday afternoon, police said.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said investigators are trying to determine where the gun came from.

Emergency workers said the 1-year-old was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

Full details about the shooting on the city's east side weren't released, but Williams said at least one adult was home when it happened.

"It's a sad day for Cleveland," he told reporters outside the home. "This fascination that we have with handguns, not just in this city but in this country, has to stop. This is a senseless loss of life."

Cleveland.com (http://bit.ly/1I5oHQ6) reports that the boy's mother could be heard screaming on the back porch after learning her son had died.Neighbors told the news website the mother lived in the house with at least three small children.

"They were really nice," next-door neighbor Larry Simpson said of the family. "It's a shame this had to happen."

It was absolutely not something that "had to happen", Mr Simpson.  And statements like that are a good indication of the kind of unconsciously malicious and deliberately ignorant viewpoint that makes these "accidents" inevitable.

Tunes For Friday

The Walk --Mayer Hawthorne

Harvest Moon --Bedlam

Same Ol' Me --Amazing Rhythm Aces

The Fools --Bob Schneider (hat tip = Little Green Footballs)

Little Green Bag --The George Baker Selection

This Or That (cover) --Dianne Reeves

Number 20,526,718

...but number 1 in your hearts!

As per Alexa:

Phrasing update:  "Opinions are like blogs - every asshole's got one".

The Big Show

The Daily Show
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This wasn't an announcement so much as an attempted Product Roll-out.  But anyway, once they actually got to the point, we got all the usual bullshit. Liberty, justice and personal responsibility.

He's gonna get the economy cookin' by FREEDOM (privatization)!!!

He's gonna break the cycle of Poverty-Lousy Schools-Unemployment-&-Crime by PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY (privatization)!!!

He's gonna get the federal government under control by JUSTICE (privatization)!!!

And he's gonna Take Our Country Back!!!!!!!!!!

I slag the Press Poodles a lot.  And this crap from yesterday is a fair example of why I slag the Press Poodles a lot.  There was almost no real policy in anything Paul had to say.  There was lots of jingoism and the obligatory attempts to seem "Reaganesque" - which for Lil Randy just made him look like the standard 2-year-old wearing daddy's great big shoes.  And nobody said anything about any of that.

I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect somebody to ask one or two obvious-as-fuck questions when these guys disgorge some of the less meaningful (ie: Content-Free) bromides that their focus group gurus feed them.

Senator Paul: "..we're going to take this country back."

Press Poodle: "Take it back from whom?  Who has it?"

-or-

Poodle: "Take the country back ... to the 1950s? - the 1890s?  the 18th century?"

In the end, what this guy wants is to take what's left of this country away from all of us and sell it to his buddies.  So he needs us to go along with the toxic notion that the Noble Rich are the only ones who worked their asses off to build this joint and so they're the only ones who deserve to cash in on it now.  Unfortunately, he's got a fuck-ton of self-loathing rubes standing in line, looking for an excuse to start turning over all the wrong tables and throwing shit thru all the wrong windows.

When there's so much money and power concentrated in so few hands, and when the rest of us are left with nothing more to lose, guess what happens.  Paraphrasing: rebellion is the language of the powerless.

We'd best be making sure we've got this thing pointed in the right direction.

Today's Quote

It occurs to me that seeing all those Islamist martyrs blowing themselves up and crashing various modes of transportation into various symbols of Western Colonialism or whatever, Americans are feeling a bit challenged.  

"We own this fuckin' joint and nobody ever out-maniacs America.  USA! USA!"

But we'll do it our own way, thanks and fuck you very much.

From Addicting Info:

Like the equally discriminatory Memories Pizza, in Indiana, which has earned over $800,000 in sympathy donations so far, Stutzman’s own GoFundMe campaign has pulled in nearly $90,000.

According to The Seattle Times, almost half of the money Stutzman has gained so far has been picked up in the last few days, though. It seems her campaign, created back in February, may be getting a fresh insurgence of support on the coattails of the Memories Pizza success.

It’s always interesting to see in the dirty, sell-anything world of capitalism when Jesus and morals win, isn’t it? Yes, you too can hate and get paid!

Stutzman was fined by the Benton County Superior Court last month for refusing service to a same-sex couple two years ago, claiming her Southern Baptist beliefs prohibited her from doing so. She is the owner of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts.

So what’s the moral of this story, and is it anything remotely “Christian?”

So in light of this "hot new fashion trend" of good Christian entrepreneurs lining up to make a show of their eagerness to become martyrs to the noble cause of TheoCommercialist Bigotry, I tho't Mencken's quote from about 90 years ago might be timely.

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” --HL Mencken, Chicago Tribune 1926

One of the favorite themes of all three of the Book Religions is the one about being Persecuted For Your Faith.  And it doesn't matter that you're a totally dominant majority of your country's population.  If there's any chance for you to reaffirm one of the big deal tenets of your religion, you jump on it.  It also doesn't matter if you have to make up some shit about your current circumstances to get everything to fit, because religion is all about making shit up to begin with.

I guess I'm a little surprised that anybody - including me - is at all surprised by any of this.

Happy Easter