Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I don’t have much to add to the Garner debate, but I do have a question. What exactly has to happen for a cop to be indicted by a grand jury? What is the line that has to be crossed that a prosecutor won’t throw the case and a grand jury won’t balk?
I asked on twitter last night, and someone said “field dress the corpse,” and at this point, I don’t think that is too far off. Seriously, what does it take for a grand jury to indict cops?
Just a quick reminder. I will be speaking with Jay Ackroyd tonight on Virtually Speaking at 9:00pm Eastern time.
We are looking forward to talking about the following:
I enjoyed speaking with Jay last year, and I am looking forward to speaking with him tonight. You should listen in.
Via the comments to a NYTimes article on the ongoing disposition of Maurice Sendak’s estate. (I understand the Rosenbach Library’s disappointment, but it seems clear that Mr. Sendak wanted Ms. Caponera to turn his former home into a house museum and study center…. and what a perfect way to celebrate a great artist’s quirky and thoroughly un-academic work!)
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Apart from remembering what’s important, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Next-level GW Bush diss: http://t.co/VXNfA4hWHj pic.twitter.com/0j96nYbAx2
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) December 2, 2014
Now that is how one commits The Review Direct. Christian Lorentzen, at the London Review of Books, on “Dad & Jr.”:
… Reviewers have welcomed 41: A Portrait of My Father like they miss father and son. Or maybe it’s ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’…‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial Times. ‘Bush Jr’s new memoir doesn’t feel ghostwritten: his low-key Texas swagger permeates every page.’ Actually it gives every indication of being ghostwritten, and there was never much ‘low-key’ about George W. Bush. As with Decision Points (2010), the ghost is Chris Michel, who came by his folksiness via California and Yale, where he was a friend of Bush’s daughter Barbara before joining the White House speechwriting team in 2003 and rising through the ranks during the lame duck years. This time around the intended audience seems to be 11-year-olds of all ages….
The ‘yo, Blair’ voice is gone, but there’s something of the Bush style of saying you’re doing the opposite of what you’re really doing. ‘He never complained. Self-pity is not in George Bush’s DNA,’ we read on the first page. We’re also told that Dad never brags. What follows is a litany of boasts and grievances…
The grievances take in Nixon, for the ‘putrid swamp’ of Watergate; Reagan, for his theatrical upstaging of Bush in a 1980 debate in New Hampshire; Dan Rather, the presenter who pursued a vendetta against both Dad and Jr (and lost his job the second time around); Patrick Buchanan, whose demagoguery in the 1992 primaries distracted the homophobic, sexist and racist elements of the GOP base; Ross Perot, an old friend whose conspiracy theories caused him to turn on Bush and tilted the 1992 election to Clinton; Saddam Hussein; and Nancy Reagan, who never in eight years invited Mother for a proper tour of the White House…
Late Night Open Thread: Old Times There Are Not ForgottenPost + Comments (66)
Via Tommy Christopher at the Daily Banter, my senator/human dumpster fire Rand Paul knows why Eric Garner died…
…cigarette taxes.
“I think it is hard not to watch that video of him saying I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, and not be horrified by it. But I think there’s something bigger than just the individual circumstances. Obviously the individual circumstances are important. I think it is important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive. But then some politician had to say we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette. For someone to die over breaking that law, there is really no excuse for it. But I do blame the politician. We put our police in a difficult situation with bad laws.”
I do not have enough heavy objects to throw in complete sun-crushing rage right now. Of all the possible and myriad plethora of reasons to object to the death of Eric Garner and the rampant injustice of the failure of the grand jury system here, the fact that cigarette taxes are high in NYC is such a peripheral piece of cowflop that even I, as much as I despise Rand Paul, am utterly shocked at his near cataclysmic lack of basic human decency.
Eric Garner was murdered on video for the world to see, and this asshole is worried about cig taxes.
And you know that’s the only reason these ghouls care about a dead black guy at all, because it gives them a reason to complain about government and taxes. Because every black person killed by a cop suffered the ultimate sanction over fucking Austrian school macroeconomics.
Nope. Rand Paul can go straight to hell while wearing thermite boxers with solar corona trim, along with all his glibertarian douchebag supporters.
Not Even In The Same Galactic Sector As The PointPost + Comments (171)
December 2006 CNN poll: Hillary 37, Obama 15. December 2014 CNN poll: Hillary 65, Warren 10. For all you “she was inevitable BEFORE!” folks.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) December 2, 2014
Sure, many of us who follow politics even though we’re not paid for it, plus a very vocal segment of those who are, find the very idea of a Hillary 2016 campaign shopworn and boooorrrrring. Per Martin Longman, at the Washington Monthly:
… I think we political junkies operate with certain assumptions that we internalize after a while. We’ve had it in the back of our minds for years now that Clinton will run, will likely win the nomination, and should be heavily favored to win the presidency. We have good reasons for making these assumptions, but having internalized them long ago takes the novelty and excitement of having a female president out of the picture. Far from feeling like some path-breaking moment in American history, it seems more like a very boring and predictable outcome.
The midterms reiterated for us the importance of excitement and interest in the elections to driving Democratic turnout. Barack Obama was able to provide that in a way that Al Gore and John Kerry simply were not. Hillary seems like she is somewhere in between. She isn’t as charismatic as Obama or her husband, but she isn’t crushingly dull, either. Her fan base does include some very strong enthusiasts which we simply didn’t see with Gore and Kerry. She’s somewhat better at riling up the base.
And, when the time comes and the opportunity is finally at hand to make a women the most powerful political leader on the planet, there will be a real sense of novelty and possibility and potential for progress. I just don’t know how strong it will be…
Dave Weigel, at Bloomberg Politics, has a post explaining his tweet(s):
…[T]he latest CNN/ORC International poll… conducted right before Thanksgiving with a sample of “1,045 adult Americans,” finds the former secretary of state far ahead of the Democratic field in a national ballot test. Clinton’s at 65 percent support among Democrats, followed by Senator Elizabeth Warren at 10 percent, Vice President Joe Biden at 9 percent, Senator Bernie Sanders at 5 percent, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Governor Deval Patrick and (the only candidate so far exploring a bid) former Senator James Webb at 1 percent, and Governor Martin O’Malley with support too low to calculate….
It’s just a national test, but the story’s identical in the states—Clinton with swollen leads in New Hampshire and Iowa. In Iowa her numbers are better than twice as high as they were at this point in that cycle, when a war-skeptical Democratic electorate was desperate for another choice. You see why the discussion among the chin-strokers is about whether Clinton can remain so aloof from voters and still win the nomination. The press wants a race, and the left wants a race, but the Democratic electorate isn’t sure that it needs one.
Voters — that undernourished segment of the American electorate — were desperate for CHANGE in 2008, which worked to then-Senator Obama’s advantage. The GOP tried promoting Willard Romney as the CHANGE candidate in 2012, but the people who bothered to go to the polls weren’t convinced (that we needed it, or that Romney represented it, or both). A big part of the 2016 equation is going to be whether Hillary Clinton — assuming she runs — will be perceived as carrying on President Obama’s agenda. And whether the voters we can drag to the polls decide they want that agenda carried forward, as well. But as the first “serious” female contender for the Oval Office, she does have a positive CHANGE metric that can’t be denied.
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Apart from the eternal “horserace” campaign, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: Well, She’s Got the Name Recognition…Post + Comments (103)
Another grand jury somehow manages to avoid indicting a cop who put an unarmed man in an illegal chokehold and, ignoring his pleas (“I can’t breathe!”), strangled him to death. Eric Garner’s crime was peddling untaxed cigarettes on the sidewalk. He was a husband and the father of six. And he was a black man. I hope I may be forgiven for believing that last fact to be germane, both to the confrontation in which he died and the fact that his (white) killer, Officer Daniel Pantaleo, now escapes any scrutiny of law.
Another district attorney somehow managed to avoid gaining an indictment within a grand jury process he entirely controlled. It is said that any competent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, if that’s what’s desired on the day. I hope I may be forgiven for believing that Staten Island DA Daniel M. Donovan Jr. had no intention of putting a cop on trial. Never mind that Officer Pantaleo was captured on video tape performing an illegal act that led to the death of a human being who’s threat to society consisted of dodging local tobacco taxes, cancer stick by stick.
I got nothing. This is not a justice system. This is not policing in any form that I understand. This is how law serves as cover for power when the forms but not the substance of civil society are all that is left.
I got nothing at all.
Image: Hans Memling, Massacre of the Innocents at Bethlehem, (detail), 1480.