Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Books are my comfort food!

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

When I was faster i was always behind.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

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Witness #40

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I’ve been reading through the Ferguson grand jury doc dump released by Mr. McCullough; the documents are housed at the St. Louis public radio station here. The oddest thing I’ve seen so far is the account of Witness #40, who just happened to set out on a journey of racial self-discovery on the very morning of August 9, 2014, the day Mike Brown was killed.

By a series of amazing coincidences, this person magically ended up witnessing events, and his or her perspective aligned perfectly with Officer Wilson’s account. Witness #40’s testimony comes in the form of handwritten journal entries, which you can view for yourself here. Here’s how it starts:

    August 9th Saturday 8 am

Well I’m gonna take my random drive to Florissant. Need to understand the Black race better so I stop calling Blacks Niggers and start calling them People. Like dad always said you cant fear or hate an entire race cause of what one man did 40 yrs ago.

The “journal” goes on to recount how Witness #40 takes a series of wrong turns and coincidentally turns up at the scene of the Brown shooting moments before it happens and sees the whole thing unfold. His or her account includes the following:

The cop just stood there dang if that kid didnt start running right at the cop like a football player. Head down.

The story is helpfully populated with “sweet” and “nice” local people whose wonderful qualities Witness #40 notes in the journal, qualities a racist who was attempting to create a post-hoc justification for a widely publicized police shooting would totally NOT appreciate, let alone record in a personal diary that later inexplicably found its way into evidence files. (wink-wink-nudge-nudge)

The diary entry for that day concludes with a 9 PM post-script in which the author recalls being admonished to “keep my mouth shut” and notes that “no one will believe me anyway.” Sadly, he or she is probably wrong on that last point.

I haven’t read the entire doc dump, but no other files are labeled “Witness #40,” so it’s unclear if this person was deposed or interviewed. Have y’all seen anything else about this alleged witness? This “journal” story sounds for all the world like a fairy tale concocted by Jim Hoft or some other sub-sentient asshole with an ax to grind who lacks the wit to construct a plausible lie.

Can it be that it was submitted for grand jury perusal without an accompanying investigation into its veracity? Some of y’all will say OF COURSE since it backs the cop’s account, but let me clarify my bewilderment: I’m not doubting the lengths to which officials and random yahoos will go to cover up police malfeasance; I’m just astonished at the rank amateurism of this effort. Funny how McCullough didn’t allude to the unreliability of that witness during last night’s soliloquy…

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Different Worlds

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How the media would cover the events in Ferguson were this another country:

Chinese and Russian officials are warning of a potential humanitarian crisis in the restive American province of Missouri, where ancient communal tensions have boiled over into full-blown violence.

“We must use all means at our disposal to end the violence and restore calm to the region,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in comments to an emergency United Nations Security Council session on the America crisis.

The crisis began in August in Ferguson, a remote Missouri village that has been a hotbed of sectarian tension. State security forces shot and killed an unarmed man, which regional analysts say has angered the local population by surfacing deep-seated sectarian grievances. Regime security forces cracked down brutally on largely peaceful protests, worsening the crisis.

In response, ancient American tradition called for the gathering of a community tribal council known as a “grand jury” to weigh the case. On November 24, it announced there would be no charges against the responsible security forces. The stunning decision, which reflects the opaque and mysterious nature of the “grand jury” tradition, further outraged the already despondent local populace.

“”we can and should support moderate forces who can bring stability to America””

America has been roiled by political instability and protests in recent years, which analysts warn can create fertile ground for extremists.

Read the whole thing.

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Worth More Than 1000 Words, Worth Less Than Zero

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This iconic photo of Ferguson last night by Reuters is what is sticking with me this morning.

‘Murica.

We’re learning more about Wilson’s grand jury testimony as well.

Ferguson, Mo. police Officer Darren Wilson testified before a grand jury that Michael Brown looked like an angry “demon” during the Aug. 9 confrontation that ended in the teenager’s death.

St. Louis Public Radio published the full transcript of Wilson’s testimony Monday. The St. Louis County Prosecutor’s office released evidence from the grand jury proceedings after it was announced that no charges would be filed against Wilson.

From the outset, Wilson’s testimony painted Brown as an angry young man. The officer testified that when he first approached Brown and his friend to tell them to walk on the sidewalk instead of in the middle of the road, Brown responded “fuck what you have to say.”

And for that, Michael Brown was summarily executed, and without consequence.

This is the system that this morning I am being told I have to “trust” and “put my faith in”.  The one that was never meant to protect anyone who looks like me.  The system that allowed Darren Wilson to walk, and arranged a public shaming of the victim and his family in a strange tirade where the county prosecutor defended the officer accused of killing an unarmed black man and ripped into the eyewitnesses as being anything but credible.  The system that decided that 8 PM local time was the best time to announce the decision after supposedly sitting on that decision for a weekend. The system that took over 100 days to determine that there was no evidence worthy of even sending this case to trial.  The system in that photo above, I am being told, I have to “believe in”.

You will excuse me if I withhold that benefit of the doubt.  In his testimony, Wilson, a 6’4″ man, referred to Mike Brown as “it”, and “a demon”.  He wasn’t human.  He was a thing, and there’s no penalty for shooting a thing and so this thing was shot time and time again because it had to be put down, a monster, a beast, a nightmare made flesh.

And whatever actually took place on that street that day, it does not warrant a trial to investigate it. That is the lesson here. Did Brown deserve the ultimate sanction, the taking of his life?  We’ll never know.  There’s no trial to compare the evidence, to advocate one way or another in a court of law, nothing to weigh, no due process.  He wasn’t worth that. That’s what the system says.

A picture, they say, is worth 1000 words.  The life of a black person is worth less than nothing.  That’s what I’m being told I need to “believe in” this morning.

I believe I’ve had enough of this bullshit.

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Auto-renewing without good options

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Some problems have no good solutions as the rest of today’s blog-wall will illustrate.  But one of the minor problems in post-racial America (my ass) is how do health insurance policies on the federal Healthcare.Gov exchange get auto-renewed.

Right now the auto-renewal feature is that on December 15th, any one who has a still active 2014 policy and has not selected a 2015 policy will be auto-renewed.  The hierarchy of automated choices is the same policy by the same company, then a similar policy by the same company.  This is a good 80% solution, but there are plenty of obvious hang-ups.  The biggest problem is that the same policy in 2014 will have a dramatically different subsidy most of the time in 2015.  Subsidies are calculated by the difference between a family’s expected income as related to the federal poverty line as that produces the expected family contribution, and the price of the second least expensive Silver plan in the market.  The gap is the subsidy amount.

The second Silver plan has often changed between 2014 and 2015.  The second big problem is that this process assumes no change in income or family size for the 2015 subsidy calculation.  That is an unreasonable assumption.  Auto-renewed policies will be giving people wildly divergent subsidy amounts.  People will be over-paying, and people will be underpaying and the under-payers will get hit with a big tax bill in 2016.

As Adrianna McIntyre fears, this is a significant political problem:

Consumer tendency toward inertia could mean that a lot of subsidized enrollees could see unexpected premium hikes that only materialize when subsidies are reconciled. It’s the reason you’ve (hopefully) read that exchange beneficiaries should shop around during open enrollment…..

Call me a skeptic, but I’m hard-pressed to believe two-thirds of exchange enrollees fully understand the volatile nature of subsidies and want to keep their current plans anyway.

And yes, I worry about political blowback, too. Not only is the underlying problem difficult to explain, it’s also likely to be an unhappy surprise for affected enrollees. For some, that will happen during open enrollment (when there’s still an opportunity to change plans); for others, this issue won’t become clear until taxes are filed. The assumptions implicit in auto-renewal—that an enrollee’s income hasn’t changed, and that she’s entitled to the same level of subsidy

There is no good way of making a universal default decision.  The optimal situation is for everyone who has a current policy from Healthcare.gov to go back into the system and make a new choice after they updated their family and income situations. But that will not happen, so then choices have to be made, and negative trade-offs will be incurred. I’ll outline some of the other options and their trade-offs.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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There’s a major storm looking to complicate holiday travel all up and down the Eastern Seaboard Wednesday, but I suspect we’re nowhere near talked out on last night’s miscarriage of justice…

Jamelle Bouie, at Slate, has (yet another) excellent take:

… None of this was a surprise. It’s extremely rare for a police officer to face an indictment for a shooting, much less criminal punishment. “The FBI reported 410 justifiable homicides by law enforcement in 2012,” noted Talking Points Memo in an August story following the events in Ferguson, “The number of indictments appear to be minimal after a TPM review of available press reports.”…

Beyond this, there are the general standards for use of deadly force by police, which give wide latitude to officers who use their weapons. The Supreme Court allows police to use their weapons in two circumstances: To defend their lives and to stop an escaped felon. If Wilson believed that Brown was a felon—or committed a felonious offense—then he was justified under existing law. And if Wilson believed he was in danger of losing his life—a belief that only has to be “objectively reasonable,” not likely or even possible—then, again, he was justified under existing law…

… The judicial system as we’ve constructed it just isn’t equipped—or even willing—to hold officers accountable for shootings and other offenses. Or put differently, the simple fact is that the police can kill for almost any reason with little fear of criminal charges.

Which is to say this: It would have been powerful to see charges filed against Darren Wilson. At the same time, actual justice for Michael Brown—a world in which young men like Michael Brown can’t be gunned down without consequences—won’t come from the criminal justice system. Our courts and juries aren’t impartial arbiters—they exist inside society, not outside of it—and they can only provide as much justice as society is willing to give…

Here’s Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

… There is something gone badly wrong in the way police are taught to look at civilians these days. This is the logic of an occupying power being employed on American citizens. Ever since 9/11, when we all began to be told that we were going to have to bend a little bit, and then a little bit more, to authority or else we’d all die, the police in this country have been militarized in their tactics and in their equipment, which is bad enough, but in their attitudes and their mentality, which is far, far worse. Suspicion has bled into weaponized paranoia, especially in the case of black and brown people, especially in the case of young men who are black or brown, but this is not About Race because nothing ever is About Race. Even the potential of a threat requires a deadly response, Dick Cheney’s one-percent idea brought to American cities and towns until Salt Lake City, of all places, winds up with cops who are deadlier on the streets than drug dealers. This is how you wind up with Darren Wilson. This is how you wind up with Michael Brown, dead in the middle of the road. This is how Darren Wilson walks, tonight, for the killing of Michael Brown. This is how you end up with an American horror story…

Even this little putz smelled something hinky:

In the Washington Post, Jenny A. Durkan (“United States Attorney in Western Washington for five years, until October 2014… served on Attorney General Holder’s Advisory Committee and served on the Civil Rights Subcommittee.”) describes some horror stories from her time in Seattle, and talks about the next step:

… My office joined the DOJ Civil Rights Division to conduct two investigations: a criminal civil rights probe, and a separate broader look at whether the police were systematically using force in an unconstitutional way. (This is happening right now in Ferguson too.)

After looking at the facts, we concluded that we couldn’t bring criminal civil rights charges… But broad and enduring change was still possible. Even where individual criminal cases cannot be brought against an officer, a system that fosters unconstitutional policing can be corrected.

We reviewed voluminous documents and data, conducted dozens of interviews and meetings with both community members and law enforcement. Eventually, our other investigation concluded the Seattle Police Department had a pattern of using unconstitutional force and found troubling evidence that it acted with racial bias….

Opposition was stiff at times. Political leaders were bitterly divided. Even after agreement was reached and a consent decree entered, pockets of resistance remained. But under threat of litigation, the city finally agreed to a broad consent decree entered in federal court. The order required wholesale changes in how and when police used force, how they were trained and how they will be held accountable…

Today both the city and the department have new leaders who have embraced reforms. Years of work remain to implement the new policies and truly change the culture. But all parties-community, police, elected leaders and the DOJ-are building the type of department the city needs and wants. These are the lasting changes that are possible in any city, including Ferguson.

***********
What else is on the agenda for the day?

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Thoughts from Another Country

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Was There Ever Any Doubt?

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I watched about three minutes of the presser, and didn’t even wait for the indictment. I knew. What I saw was not a prosecutor seeking charges in those three minutes, but the closing arguments of a defense attorney.

Was there ever any doubt that there would never be an indictment.

*** Update ***

Obama just gave the worst speech I have ever seen. Flat, detached, and making no sense. And, actually, violent protests do get results. Ask the people of Benton Harbor:

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Next we report on what may be an uncomfortable truth. It concerns the effect of political protests. Sometimes violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted people to say violence won’t improve anything, which is naturally what we would prefer to believe. Who favors violence? Reality can be more complicated. Let’s look now at the actual aftermath of another city that saw violent protests – Benton Harbor, Michigan. In 2003 a black man died during a police chase there. The death set off two nights of violent demonstrations and afterward there was a real effort to change the city. Dustin Dwyer of Michigan Radio reports on the lessons of Benton Harbor.

*** Update ***

On the positive side of things, we can always hope the police will confuse Don Lemon with a protestor.

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