I wrote about the 57 Buffalo cops who resigned their position as riot cops (but not their jobs), supposedly in support of the two cops who pushed down and old man and were suspended. Here’s an update:
The officers we spoke with said the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association’s statement asserting all 57 officers resigned from ERT in a “show of support” with the two officers that were suspended without pay is not true.
“I don’t understand why the union said it’s a thing of solidarity. I think it sends the wrong message that ‘we’re backing our own’ and that’s not the case,” said one officer with whom we spoke.
“We quit because our union said [they] aren’t legally backing us anymore. So why would we stand on a line for the City with no legal backing if something [were to] happen? Has nothing to do with us supporting,” said another.
The PBA told membership that they can’t pay for the legal expenses of ERT (riot cops) or SWAT members because argle-bargle about the DA and the mayor having it in for cops, as clearly shown by them suspending those two cops whose actions resulted in an old man lying on the ground, bleeding from his ear. Here’s the email:
I don’t think anyone’s posted about James Bennett quitting the NYT after admitting he didn’t even read Tom Cotton’s op-ed before it was posted. Apparently he had better things to do in the 15 or 20 minutes it takes to read every opinion piece in the Times. Good riddance, but I doubt much will change.
Here’s something I haven’t seen posted anywhere — do you think that at least some of the current attitude towards cops is because the pandemic has shown that they’re not the only frontline workers who risk their lives every day? That was always cops’ trump card — nobody else gets shot and killed in the line of duty like we do. But now everyone sees healthcare workers (and bus drivers, and grocery store clerks, and a bunch of other folks) risking their lives without whining, special pleading, and having to fly their own version of the flag.
Open thread.
The Moar You Know
Said this yesterday and I’ll say it for the rest of my life: that’s a fucking lie. He absolutely read it. He reads things, it’s what he does.
The problem is, he didn’t think what Cotton said was a problem. Full stop. And he let it run. And he will never cop to that, it’s unseemly, so he just lied and said he didn’t read it.
Much better for future employment opportunities if you can say “I lost my last job because I overlooked something” rather than “I lost my last job because I get a stiffy over the idea of the US Army shooting thousands of people who stand for treating Americans equally under the law and in fact.”
MattF
Bennett saying he never actually read Cotton’s op-ed was the true WTF moment. If the editorial page senior editor can’t be bothered to read the editorial page, why should anyone?
download my app in the app store mistermix
@The Moar You Know: You may be right that he thought it was his best defense, but it sounds so, so weak. I think it would be better for him to talk about diversity of opinion, blah blah blah, instead. Not that he was in a good position defending the op-ed, but, Jesus, saying he flat didn’t do his job — amazingly dumb.
Wapiti
Yeah, the 57 officers who left the “bust some heads” squad didn’t support the bad actors. There were a shit load of cops applauding those bad actors when they came out of the arraignment. Simply an odd coincidence.
Barbara
Regarding your last point, I don’t really think that’s the case. I think the video of Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck as he slowly lost consciousness and died is too shocking to ignore. You can call it the Bull Connor moment or whatever you want, but many prior incidents could be explained away as the product of ambiguous circumstances or uncertain threats — not this one. It also wasn’t done in the heat of the moment, it was deliberate and ongoing. I still find it viscerally upsetting to think about.
Miss Bianca
@The Moar You Know:
Well, I suppose it all depends on where you’re planning to look for jobs, of course…/
@MattF: I do think he was lying about that, btw. I agree with Moar that he somehow thinks it’s better to say, “I didn’t do my job” rather than “I thought my job entailed putting ‘turn the military loose on American citizens’ out there as a think piece.”
DCrefugee
I think part of the Buffalo PD scandal is that they had an emergency response team with (at least) 59 members. In Buffalo
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Barbara: Agreed. The folks I know who usually explain away police violence aren’t this time.
Amir Khalid
@The Moar You Know:
This former newspaper reporter concurs with you about Bennett. There’s no fucking way a section editor like him doesn’t read every last word of every single article before it goes out. Ensuring that editorial content is up to the newspaper’s standards is fundamental to an editor’s job.
ETA That Bennett missed the fact that Cotton’s opinions were unfit fir decent people to see is the real failiure here.
Gvg
@Barbara: I still expect more info to come out at trial related to them both working as security at the same bar at the same time.
Barbara
@MattF: Having read some more of the back story about the dynamics in the editorial room, it appears that there is, more or less, a cabal consisting of Jim Dao, Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, who are trying to shape editorial policy sub rosa, so to speak. The latter two actually solicited the Cotton op-ed, and Dao, with a junior editor, supposedly did the editorial polishing, e.g., fact checking and such. Sure, Bennet should have read it, but I get the feeling that a disaster like this has been on cusp of happening for a while because they have been looking for opportunities to slip things by. The fact that Bari Weiss LIVE TWEETED a staff meeting as it was happening tells me that her loyalty (and by extension probably that of Stephens) is to something other than her employer. Seriously, if I live tweeted a staff meeting about some company disaster I would be fired. Nearly anyone would.
marklar
@DCrefugee:
“I think part of the Buffalo PD scandal is that they had an emergency response team with (at least) 59 members. In Buffalo”
Every morning, Justin Trudeau wakes up, looks south, and says “Not today.” However, one day he just might decide to pounce, and citizens of Buffalo will wake up with Communized heath care!
CraigM
Thanks for framing this in terms of cops losing their almost-exclusive ownership of the concept of heroism in society, that is really useful.
Miss Bianca
@Gvg: And a skosh more information about how the guy was somehow a training officer? With trainees in tow? Like, WTF – “I’m now going to give you a live lesson in how to kill someone with a chokehold – pay attention, rookies!”?
Barbara
@Miss Bianca: Bennet hired Stephens and Weiss, but he also hired Michelle Goldberg and Jamelle Bouie. I suspect this has more do do with his executive management capabilities than his affirmative ideology in support of anything Cotton said. As Michelle Goldberg said, upon reflection, this just wasn’t something that can be defended on a kind of debate team rationale, that everything is up for grabs. There is a larger context when you are being read by millions of people.
MisterForkbeard
@download my app in the app store mistermix: Yep. “I didn’t do my job and it resulted in the largest cancellations of subscriptions we’ve ever seen” isn’t particularly exculpatory.
Much better to say “We tried to err on the side of giving conservatives and all Americans a voice. We did not fact check Cotton’s op-ed or examine the content to consider whether it was in the public interest to publish it. That was our mistake and we will do better. We are revising our own guidelines so that this never happens again.”
ETA: He could also say “The failure to fact check Senator Cotton’s statement and to review it was mine, and I’m resigning over it to show how seriously I take it.”
Seriously, this isn’t hard.
Benw
So in a fit of butthurt over being held even slightly accountable, the cops are defunding themselves?
win/win!
Barbara
@DCrefugee: Yeah, it seemed like an eye popping number of people to need for crowd control in Buffalo. Maybe after a super bowl win they might need that level of staffing in place, but Buffalo isn’t really large.
MattF
There’s a hilarious Hewitt column in the WaPo this morning about bias in the media. No, really. According to Hewitt, both sides do it, in case you didn’t know.
The column contains an interesting nugget, though, in that Hewitt suggests ways of selecting moderators for a presidential debate. This is a switch, considering that, not so long ago, he expounded a case for no debates between Trump and Biden. Given that Hewitt is a sockpuppet for the WH, it’s possible that Trump’s campaign now believes its own propaganda, that Biden really is senile and would be humiliated by the oh, so manly Orange One. More to come on this subject, I’ll bet.
Gin & Tonic
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
Nobody talks about diversity of opinion in the WSJ editorial pages. Why should the NYT (or any other paper) be diverse?
Kelly
In Seattle yesterday a guy drove his car at high speed thru a crowd of protesters. When stopped and confronted he shot and wounded a protester attempting to drag him out of his car. His pistol had one of those extra large magazines that extend far below the grip with a normal magazine taped to it. IMO, the only reason to rig his pistol that way was he intend to run over and shoot a bunch of protesters. Fortunately he changed his mind in the last moments.
https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1269842341461848065
VOR
Turns out the 75 year old man was approaching the Buffalo cops because he was trying to return a helmet he had found. There is a picture taken from behind his head, when he’s laying on the ground, which shows the helmet next to his left hand. He wasn’t there to argue with them, he was trying to do them a favor. But they were told to clear the square and he was slowing them down.
Ken B
As to the special risks claim of cops, I had a friend that used to be a cabbie. He was fond of asserting that many more cabbies than cops were killed while working.
And he was very pro cop.
Montanareddog
More grist to Kay’s mill that US elites are very low quality. And surely he will find a nice sinecure elsewhere quickly enough
rp
@Ken B: Law enforcement isn’t in the top 10 of the most dangerous jobs. The most dangerous jobs in the US according to the stats:
25. Electricians
24. Firefighters
23. Painters, construction and maintenance
22. Athletes, coaches, umpires and related workers
21. Taxi drivers and chauffeurs
20. Mining machine operators
19. Operating engineers and other construction equipment operators
18. Police and sheriff’s patrol officers
17. First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers
16. Construction laborers
15. Grounds maintenance workers
14. Maintenance and repair workers, general
13. Helpers, construction trades
12. First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers
11. Miscellaneous agricultural workers
10. Electrical power-line installers and repairers
9. First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service and groundskeeping workers
8. Farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers
7. Driver/sales workers and truck drivers
6. Structural iron and steel workers
5. Refuse and recyclable material collectors
4. Roofers
3. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
2. Logging workers
1. Fishers and related fishing workers
Amir Khalid
@Ken B:
In understand there is a US Government agency that keeps statistics to show which jobs are most dangerous. And that according to these statistics, police work is not particularly dangerous; in fact less so than, say, delivering pizza.
schrodingers_cat
@Barbara: Bouie attacks Ds from the left, as the does Charles Blow so fits in totally with the NYT agenda of promoting Rs and undermining Ds. I have stopped reading and clicking on Vichy Times links since the summer of 2016 so I am not familiar with her work.
Baud
@rp:
Cole must not be reporting his injuries because blog operator isn’t listed in the top 25.
Kay
Just imagine if Joe Biden has said that. We would hear about it for months, not from the Trump campaign but from political media.
Two sets of rules.
Baud
@Kay:
Democrats obviously must be less than 10% of the population, so we don’t meet the media’s outrage threshold.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Yes we would. Aside from the Republicans the media have been the Orange One’s biggest enablers since he started his birther campaign. All the media, not just the outlets that cater to RWNJs.
mad citizen
@marklar: Made me recall Michael Moore’s best movie, Canadian Bacon, with John Candy and numerous other funny people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Bacon
But the plot is the reverse; the U.S. provokes Canada. Same area, though.
Please please no debates this fall–hasn’t the shitgibbon had enough air time? Biden could fall asleep during the debate and he’s still going to win the election.
Roger Moore
@DCrefugee:
I think some of this is a misunderstanding. As I understand it, this was not a group of officers who were hired exclusively for this kind of emergency response. Rather these were ordinary officers who were also part of an emergency response team that was activated if/when needed. This kind of thing is relatively common; some people receive extra training so you have a team ready to go in an infrequent or unlikely event. It’s not unreasonable that a mid-sized city like Buffalo would have about 10% of its sworn officers get extra training in responding to public demonstrations. The problem is that they seem to have done a really terrible job of training them how to respond.
rp
@Baud: I should feel some guilt about the pain we’ve caused him, but I don’t.
Kay
@Baud:
Not just to Biden either. They would ask every single Democrat in any elected office “do you agree with Joe Biden that Republicans don’t love our country?”
It would be HUGE. Trump says it, and …nothing.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: That’s because many in our coalition don’t look like the bosses who control the news business. Old white and male.
Ryan
59 cops on an ERT isn’t unreasonable, that’s 15 per shift. Maybe 12 allowing for vacations and sick days, if that’s a thing Americans still get.
The amazing part to me is that these officers apparently expected their employer to pay for their malpractice insurance. I know that whenever I want to kill an irritating customer, before I do anything I think about those premiums going up.
Spanky
@Gin & Tonic:
It’s fortunate for the always execrable Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the FTFNYT story is using up all of the oxygen, because they have their own shitshow to manage:
And then …
So that’s happening as well.
Villago Delenda Est
Hey, you, John Evans. “I was only following orders” was shitcanned as a defense 69 years ago, motherfucker.
Baud
@Kay:
Wouldn’t the correct answer be “I’m late for lunch.”
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I’ve been thinking a lot about the equipment. Tools define a job, so what policing job requires a tank?
I think a lot of policing reform involves subtraction, rather than addition. Strip it down. What are the jobs we require for police and what do they need to do those jobs?
We have a VERY poor crime “clearance” rate in this country. Seems like we need more investigators and fewer heavy equipment operators. More phone calls and interviews, less time on the gun range. Let’s go back to solving crimes. They’re not doing a good job on that central function. Strip away all this pseudo military bullshit and what’s left? That’s the essential job.
negative 1
@Gvg: I feel as though this point can’t be made enough. For anyone who is protesting the ‘what are you going to do about’ violent-asshole attitude of the cops, might I remind everyone that the judiciary is the reason they can.
Ever been to municipal court? Whatever the cop says the judge treats as gospel. If your traffic offense is against a cop, or God forbid arguing with a cop, prepare for the harshest sentence you can get. And if they did something wrong? Somehow still your fault.
This is why I assume this is beginning of these protests not the beginning of change — because no one has really even been to trial yet.
Patricia Kayden
Kay
@Baud:
They’re going to ask every single Democrat about “defund the police” and Biden didn’t even say that. I think fairness requires they ask every Republican whether they believe, like Donald Trump, that all Democrats are bad Americans. Yes or no. There’s no context here.
negative 1
@rp: How are 9 and 12 above 15 and 16?
Baud
@negative 1:
Percentages.
And underreporting.
Kay
Partly, of course, the reason police have so many jobs now and don’t have time to actually solve crimes is because our safety net is all hollowed out and we dump everything on the few services that remain.
No one thought police would be good social workers. They just got the job because there is no one else.
frosty
@Miss Bianca: Because of this issue of being a training officer, I think it’s hard on the two rookies. Wrong place, wrong time. One tried to get Chauvin to turn him over. One was on his fourth day on the job and hadn’t even completed his third full shift.
I wonder if the culture that caused all this also has a component where rookies are not allowed to counteract a veteran’s actions.
Kay
So you could hire more police to be (bad) social workers (leaving the “not solving crimes” part unresolved) or police could just go back to solving actual crimes and we could hire social workers.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: True, they are overburdened just like the teachers in public schools are. You should blog on the FP again. This place needs your voice.
Barbara
@Kay: Ditto with mental health workers. Elliott Rodger’s parents called the police because they were sure he was planning to harm people and the police went and talked to him. But they weren’t trained for that kind of work.
L85NJGT
Late night shit-twittering at Roger Goodell. Rubs chin thoughtfully…. yeah, I’m not seeing any benefit.
Roger Moore
@negative 1:
My guess is that supervisors have to drive a lot more, and driving is a relatively high risk activity. As an example, I remember reading that traffic accidents are a far greater danger to law enforcement officers than crime.
jonas
Ever since the “grab ’em by the **ssy” remark failed to sink his campaign, the media have treated Trump’s lying, racist, sexist and authoritarian tweets and remarks to reporters as just so many “dog bites man” stories. “Trump Says Something Outrageous” doesn’t generate clicks. It’s literally not “news.”
Kay
I knew Biden would say this. Joe Biden is one of the Democrats who is LEAST vulnerable to the idea that he would endorse every idea from the Left, because he has never done that. I can think of 4 areas during the primary where Biden refused to endorse the most-Left policy position. It’s almost his “brand”.
They don’t understand 1. Democrats, 2. Joe Biden, or 3. Democrats relationship with Joe Biden.
Ocotillo
It is long past time to do away with the deification of certain professions. There is value and dignity in all honest work.
Straight out of high school I went into the USAF. Now when someone finds out and says “Thank you for your service” I smile and accept it but think to myself, it was just a job to me. There are so many professions that deserve respect that don’t get it. Teachers come to mind, they are actually villified.
Jinchi
I’d read that he explicitly requested Cotton write an editorial on this subject, presumably after his ‘no quarter’ tweet.
Kay
Maybe political media should hire a reporter and have him or her cover Joe Biden for the election. Then they could start to unravel this Joe Biden fellow, a person they are apparently wholly unfamiliar with.
Jamey
@download my app in the app store mistermix: Didn’t read text of an op-ed contributed by a sitting U.S. Senator? Who’s widely acknowledged to be a political extremist? That’s a pretty flimsy “cop to the lesser crime” alibi.
Aleta
But now everyone sees healthcare workers (and bus drivers, and grocery store clerks, and a bunch of other folks) risking their lives
Only partly to your question about the pandemic, but
1– police risking their lives at work (a theme connected to police’s military obsession, which firemen etc. don’t use to commit violence) is finally being compared to Black people risking and losing their lives just for walking / sitting / buying something / etc.. It took years of video evidence piled up; and, in the last few years, journalists’ stories have mattered a lot.
2–Marchers risking contagion because the pandemic. Attacked by police who outnumber and aren’t being attacked. Mask-wearing underlines the risk marchers have decided they must take.
Baud
@Kay:
They know who Biden is. They choose to adopt Republican caricatures of Democrats because they want to.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Patricia Kayden:
I was waiting for that to happen. Too bad. I wished it could’ve been preserved in a museum. And it is pathetic that the government would do this in the middle of the night
jonas
Yep. I wonder, for example, how much of an average LAPD cop’s shift is spent dealing with the homeless, for example.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Absolutely this. As an example, we really should be sending social workers to deal with welfare checks rather than police. We probably ought to break up the police into a few groups:
Kay
Here’s what Joe Biden said “no” to just in the course of the last D primary:
Medicare for all, free college, no sanctions for border crossings, federal orders desegregating public schools.
He has never had the reputation as someone who feels pressured to adopt the positions of the Left side of the Party. That has never been even slightly something he does. That isn’t an opinion or a value judgment- it’s just the factual history of Joe Biden.
Victor Matheson
@Gin & Tonic: Well the NYT doesn’t aspire to be the WSJ. It tries to be the “marketplace of ideas” rather than pushing a particular viewpoint. And I think that’s probably a decent place to be. But the failure here is that diversity of ideas doesn’t mean open to any or all ideas. I guess you can draw the line at acceptable diversity of thought anywhere, but I would draw it before fascism (and before anti-vax or anti climate change bs).
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
But why do they want to? If they were directly confronted about this double standard, what would they say/do?
West of the Rockies
@mad citizen:
I don’t see how a debate benefits Biden. Trump could urinate his pants on live TV, break down sobbing, and vomit on himself, and his supporters would celebrate his authenticity.
There can be no one in this country with an IQ over 75 who doesn’t know what Biden and Trump stand for and how they’d govern.
Just One More Canuck
@The Moar You Know:
I don’t think that saying “I didn’t do my job” is a great thing to say in a job interview. It might fly if the issue weren’t so high profile, but it shouldn’t in this case (“shouldn’t” is doing a lot of work there)
Having said that, he’ll probably waltz into some cushy job somewhere
eric
@Kay: I saw where FOX has a webstory up about how unbelievable it is that Joe “crime bill” Biden will lead the charge when he was for draconian policies that hurt black people. Aside from a certain segment of the Left, that will not resonate. i remember and know Biden’s past policy shortcomings, but the guy exudes decency, and if he says he has changed over time, he can get by. I have written it here many times, decency/humanity is Biden’s superpower.
In that way, he is the anti-Trump. Plus, he was a white guy that agreed to play second fiddle to a black man and never upstaged or tried to upstage him (excluding the occasional Bidengaffe). People know him from his more recent deeds.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Gin & Tonic:
I would personally like every media company to be better than anything owned by Rupert ‘unfair and unbalanced’ Murdoch. I have mixed feelings about giving Cotton an opportunity to say how he really feels. He’s now outed himself as a fascist to the people who weren’t paying attention, so I’m not sure that is bad. This will always haunt him given how unpopular his view is. However, I feel like they should have rigorously fact checked him and given others a heads up so they could prepare a counter to his statements. You don’t just drop a bomb on your paper. This was really badly handled.
zzyzx
@West of the Rockies: I think it could be amazing just because Trump hasn’t had to deal with someone who has disagreed with him in ages. He could have a real meltdown.
Humdog
If the police officers have been paying union dues, and the union promised to represent the officers if they get crosswise with the law, how can the union just announce “we aren’t going to do one of the things you’ve paid dues to receive”?
Victor Matheson
@Amir Khalid: There is a bit of difficulty in directly comparing the numbers. Often deaths in the line of work include things like heart attacks on the job that are not always directly work related. But yeah, police work isn’t any more dangerous than lots of other types of work.
Furthermore, police are much more likely to have formal and informal life insurance policies as part of their job. We had a firefighter at the station across the street from our campus tragically die in a fire last year and my college offered his kids free tuition if they go to the college in the future. There is no way in a million years that if a delivery guy at the pizza joint next to the fire station was killed making a delivery that we would have made the same offer to his or her kids.
germy
Cheers and slaps on the back from fellow officers:
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I think they should change their approach to petty property crimes from one of catching and punishing perps to one of “customer service” for the people in the neighborhood. They don’t want broken windows not because “broken windows” is some social science theory that leads to more serious crimes- they just don’t want broken windows.
They treat residents of fancy neighborhoods as demanding customers and they treat residents of poorer neighborhoods like shit. Treat them the same on petty property crimes/damage. No one wants that in their neighborhood. Focus not on the window-breaker but instead on the vast majority who don’t want broken windows. They’ll be received better.
rp
One data point that shouldn’t get lost in the debate about policing is that crime rates are the lowest they’ve been in decades. Crime has dropped significantly (with a few blips) since its peak around 1990. Of course, the cops will argue that that’s the result of heavily armed police, aggressive tactics, etc., but there’s little evidence to support that. The leaded gasoline theory is far more persuasive.
Victor Matheson
@Kay: Except that isn’t true. He was (somewhat famously/awkwardly) ahead of Obama on gay marriage, for example.
He seems like a guy who isn’t a tremendous leader for progressive causes but one who can take the temperature of the room. Put together a House/Senate delegation that can pass liberal legislation and I have no doubt he will sign every single bit of it that crosses his desk.
LongHairedWeirdo
That might be part of it. I think the video is the bigger part.
It’s easy to understand how a cop can make an instantaneous, factually-incorrect, decision, and shoot someone. It’s a lot harder to understand how a cop can keep restraining someone, as they plead piteously for help; and harder still to imagine being in that situation, dying, while multiple people supposedly sworn to “…and protect” just don’t give a damn. I haven’t watched the video, but I heard it said that there are witnesses, some of whom cried out for the cops to DO SOMETHING, but they never did. That shows… well, “depraved indifference” is a legal term, but if that’s *not* depraved indifference, it will sure seem that way to any laymen.
As a irreverent side note, a lot of soi disant conservatives now owe Spike Lee an apology for saying that Do The Right Thing showed Lee “hates whitey”, for portraying cops committing violence, in response to a violent crime, inadvertently causing a death, while *one of the cops* was calling out for the attacking officer to let up, and the attacking officer being sure he didn’t *really* hurt the (deceased) brutality victim.
I swear, when I first saw that movie, I realized how carefully Lee had set that up to make it understandable how the whole thing went down.
Anyway, back to the point: I think a lot of people had an easier time comprehending how a cop could make a bad “shoot/don’t” decision, but this was different. It only takes a few seconds to fire a lot of rounds, but it took nearly 9 minutes for a bullying cop to decide he’d had enough sadism for the night.
I’ve long felt there was a problem with cops, and I finally found someone speaking the same thoughts I had. Cops are often taught their number one duty is to come home at the end of their shift. That’s a horrible attitude for a cop; that makes it seem far more sensible to shoot a possible shooter, because that guarantees you won’t get shot at. The real number one duty should be to protect the people (including prisoners), with the second duty should be “except where it’s inconsistent with the first duty, protect yourself.”
Of course, people get yelled at for saying anything that suggests cops take on more risk, but the example I always go back to was a rap artist, asleep in his car, with a gun on his lap. Six cops were on the scene. If you assume the only important thing is coming home at the end of your shift, it makes some sense to start shooting on a warning (which might be a person jerking awake and wondering what that weight is on their lap).
On the other hand, if your first duty is to protect, even an armed DUI suspect, and especially an African American, even if only “because if we can’t prove we did our best to protect him, and he ends up dead, people will start screaming at us”, you’ll proceed differently.
I came up with a plan for safely approaching that situation. It might suck, but that means a better tactician. One cop standing so they have a clear line of fire if the suspect comes out the passenger side; another covers the driver’s side (this one might have their gun drawn, but not aimed). One covers the front (shoot through the windshield) and one, the back. (Obviously, this has to be done so there are clear lines of fire, and 0 chance of hitting one of your partners.) The approach is made from the passenger side, and the cop making contact is a bit jumpy, but has a plan: bolt toward the rear of the car, and hit the dirt. The driver can’t see him, and even if the driver knew where he was, the driver would have to shoot through body panels to hit him. The sixth cop is providing a more calming presence, hopefully with a bullhorn, explaining “you’re surrounded; please put your weapon on the ground next to the car, then step out slowly.”
That sounds more to me like what you do if your first, most important job, is to bring the suspect in alive, unless the suspect forces the issue (or in one of those *truly* rare circumstances where a careful cop can still feel endangered).
planetjanet
@CraigM: +1. That was a really great point. I have had one difficult conversation with a FB friend who is the wife of a cop. Her only response to the controversy has been how difficult it is for good cop, the stress and the suicide rate. The dramatic idea cops dying in shootout is relatively rare. Most deaths in the line of duty are traffic accidents.
trollhattan
@Kay:
Spicey’s “working” for Newsmax? That’s like going from the majors to metro beer softball league.
mad citizen
@frosty: These are good points about the rookie cops. I can’t bring myself to watch the whole video, so have just seen parts of it on the news. My first thought was “Why didn’t the bystanders rush the cop and knock him over?” Then a couple days later I was thinking about what I would have done, and my thought was “Well you have to assume the cop knows what he is doing, he is a professional”
Dadadadadadada
@Barbara: Obviously, Buffalo will never have to worry about managing the response to a Super Bowl win.
Kay
@Victor Matheson:
Yeah, it wasn’t intended as a critique – although I think his college funding plan is wholly inadequate- it’s just that there’s never been any indication in his whole career that he is vulnerable to being pressured to go Left.
Kay
@trollhattan:
They’re all so gross. John Bolton is 100% grifter at this point. He was always horrible but at least you could think perhaps he had some actual ideas or beliefs. No more.
Roger Moore
@Victor Matheson:
The problem is that the NYT wants to be not just be a marketplace of ideas, but they want to be a gatekeeper who decides which ideas are acceptable in the public discourse. They’re being criticized for the latter role; accepting fascism as an acceptable part of public discourse is a big fail.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: Biden seems to support most of the aims of the ‘defund’ movement: less military hardware, less confrontational tactics, more accountability for cops, and getting appropriate people to actually do the work.
But he’s smart to say “I don’t want to defund police departments, I want to fix them”.
He’ll still get attacked from the Left for it, and the right will accuse him of it anyway. But it’s still the smart thing to do.
LongHairedWeirdo
@mad citizen: I suppose folks could have approached one of the other cops, in a group, and demanded the names and badge numbers of everyone, so we can call the local paper to have them report on this incident. That strikes me as the safest course of action. (I think a group is necessary; otherwise, a single person could be conked on the head, and accused of interfering.)
You could also call 911, and say “I see an officer who seems to be committing murder”. That phone call will be recorded.
Finally, the ACLU has a direct-upload video app that will preserve evidence if your phone is seized.
scav
@Humdog:
Oh, look, everything is run like a business! Protect the profit / cash first!
(it’s also rather a tell that the beancounters at the union insurance recognize that the utter immunity of the cops for all their actions is going to be rather pricey to maintain going foreward.)
catclub
WAPO article on anti-Trump ads. Where do they find people who took
4 years to figure out that Trump only cares about himself??
Diners?
guachi
Taken from the previous thread.I posted “Reform. Rebuild. Right Now.” to my FB page.
I like it. Get it trending. Much better than “defund”.
Victor Matheson
@Kay: I see that now that I put together all of your comments in the thread. Disregard any perceived criticism of your comment.
Victor Matheson
@catclub: To be fair to these Trump supporters (not that I am feeling particularly generous to their kind), but not everyone spends all day reading political commentary and chatting in the comment section. Plenty of people are making voting decisions only on the barest information. I will take anyone who has wised up.
sdhays
This seems like something that doesn’t have to be so dangerous.
low-tech cyclist
Being a stat junkie, I’m not exactly representative. But I’ve been following the law enforcement officer fatality stats for a while now, and over the past decade, there have been fewer work-related LEO fatalities than there were in 1960-1969 or in any 10-year period since. And that’s without controlling for the number of police.
So things are less dangerous for police officers than they have been in a long time, which is not surprising because crime has been way down too. So for some time now, I’ve been taking these facts into account when I hear cops talk about how they’re putting their lives on the line every day. Maybe they are, but fortunately the risks are a lot less than they used to be.
zhena gogolia
BENNET
hueyplong
@trollhattan: “Spicey’s ‘working’ for Newsmax? That’s like going from the majors to metro beer softball league.”
I wouldn’t draft him in a beer softball fantasy league. Would you?
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
Hahaha
patrick II
@CraigM:
rp got to this first at 25. But I’ll leave it. (I should always read all of the comments first)
download my app in the app store mistermix:
From a CBS news story about the most dangerous occupations (deaths per million) from 2014. ( I imagine meatpackers, nurses, doctors, and nursing home attendants could be added to the list now. Or a black person walking down the street or at home in her bed)
1. Logging
2. Fishing
3. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers (mostly private plane deaths)
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel workers
6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors
7. Electrical power line workers
8. Drivers, including traveling salespeople
9. Farmers, ranchers, agricultural managers
10. Construction laborers
Cops were never on the top ten list. The work is dangerous, but it’s not like climbing on a roof or fixing electrical lines. But, aside from “The Deadliest Catch” there aren’t many TV shows about the dangers of fishermen, farmers, or construction laborers. So the cops get all of the mythmaking.
Flea, RN
@rp: and they are more likely to die in a car crash than being shot or assaulted…
https://www.officer.com/on-the-street/article/21120014/its-not-all-gunfights
snoey
@Victor Matheson: Biden believes that a good leader figures out where their people are going and gets 1/2 step (and no more) in front of them.
hitchhiker
@Kay:
RE: taking away the military toys.
I keep watching these scenes where cops randomly shoot pepper spray directly into the faces of protestors and wondering what exactly would happen if the cops didn’t have any pepper spray.
They seem to use it because it’s there, and easy. It makes the target run away screaming, or fall to the ground screaming. The screaming scares the crap out of everyone around, and they all back off.
Presto! Power exercised, authority affirmed.
The protests expose one thing really effectively … that a significant number of cops are willing to hurt civilians at the slightest provocation, or even just at the threat of provocation. The military toys make it easy.
snoey
@sdhays: Boss gets the heavy equipment. Hard to roll a shovel over on yourself.
Roger Moore
@MisterForkbeard:
I think he’s really smart to talk about supporting police departments that are trying to reform. It simultaneously talks about the need to reform without being aggressively anti-police.
Kent
@rp: Wow. I’ve done 4 of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the US. Who knew? I did know that commercial fishing was at the top of the list. I spent 3 years working as a fisheries observer on the Bering Sea and 5 of the boats I worked on subsequently sank or wrecked so eventually you feel like you are on borrowed time up there. But I didn’t know about some of those others.
catclub
Crime is way down, but the number of police percapita is not.
OTOH, for overall federal government government employees percapita is way down.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: Bingo!
Roger Moore
@catclub:
They did say these are people who don’t follow politics closely. I can imagine someone who tends to ignore politics missing out on just how bad Trump is until things get really terrible. Or, more likely, willing to ignore just how terrible he is until it starts affecting them personally.
hitchhiker
@mad citizen:
I did watch the whole video. The bystanders were increasingly frantic in calling to Chauvin, whose blank expression is one of the most freakish things about what happened. At one point one of them steps forward to take Floyd’s pulse, and Chauvin pulls out a small container from his pocket, still without changing expression or moving his knee.
She says, “He’s got mace … ” and backs away.
They knew what would have happened if they’d rushed forward. They’d have been maced and charged with assaulting officers, and then they’d be in the hands of these same officers. I think these people are going to ask themselves for the rest of their lives if they should have done it anyway.
Kent
Maced. Or shot.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
It’s remarkable how an industry that’s notorious for hiring undocumented workers to keep costs down has a bad safety record. It’s almost like there’s a correlation.
Kay
@hitchhiker:
The longer I live the more I think 90% of our problems could be avoided if we had periodic check ups where we asked everyone: “WHAT is your job? WHO are you supposed to be serving?”
It should be required. Once a year the whole organization gets together and gets back on track. I swear their job will be easier and they’ll do it better.
Just One More Canuck
@Victor Matheson:
“I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it” – FDR
Steeplejack
@negative 1:
Fragging.
Brachiator
There is something strange about the current culture in the editorial offices of the NY Times. Something that adds to the usual BS.
I have known editors and reporters at the old big Los Angeles newspapers, and known a few NY Times editors and reporters in years past. When the LA Times was fat and wealthy, they would hire reporters from other papers and pay them lots of money. Some of the reporters got lazy, but the editors were still in charge. But the journalists wanted to be associated with the brand name of the Times.
Some of the crop of NY Times editors seem content to live on the reputation of the paper, but not do their jobs, or they don’t see that their jobs has to do with doing real journalism. I cannot imagine an editor just pushing the OK button on an op-ed piece, nor can I imagine editors not having some discussion about how solicited or unsolicited op-ed pieces will reflect on the NY Times. It’s as though they have actually got to the point where they think that their stuff does not stink, and that anything they print takes on the scent of Eau de Grey Lady.
And the publisher and executive editor lets them get away with this stuff.
No.
Don’t know what this all means yet. There are still plenty of people who reflexively love the cops, support the cops, believe that the cops can do no wrong. They have just been pushed back for a while.
Kay
She covers the Trump campaign. So they’re going to do this again, I suppose. The only coverage of Joe Biden will be from people covering the Trump campaign who relay “questions” from the Trump campaign to Joe Biden.
They must know this sucks, right? That it puts them all in the position of Donald Trump directing the coverage of the Biden candidacy. Why can’t they fix it?
tokyokie
@Amir Khalid: And this former newspaper coy editor concurs with your conclusion as well. A big part of his job was perusing op-ed submissions and culling through them to decide which ones were worthy of being published, which means reading all of them. And although some copy editor was going to have to go through Cotton’s op-ed to clean up the grammar and spelling and conform style to The New York Times’ guidelines, I’m also guessing that the copy editor was well aware that he or she was not to make substantive changes to anything in a sitting senator’s op-ed, much less offer an opinion concerning the piece’s suitability. (Of course, The Times disbanded its copy desk awhile back so I don’t know whether anybody else even looked at Cotton’s piece before publication, although I suspect that Bennett wasn’t laying out and writing headlines for the opinions section.)
Patricia Kayden
Sloane Ranger
So, the guy who tried to drive his pick up truck into a group of protesters in Virginia this weekend, injuring several, is a member of the KKK.
Quelled surprise!
leeleeFL
@Barbara: It made me physically ill, (and have thought most of the killings perpetrated by police officers on POC been God-awful recreations of master over slave violence).
I have hope for the first time, in a very LONG time, that, perhaps, America can expiate her Original Sin. White privilege must be expunged so that America can finally be a Nation predicated on Equality.
A Girl Can Dream
Kent
@tokyokie: Seriously. WTF does an editor do all day if not review/edit the material in the section that he/she is responsible for.
I don’t for a second imagine that everything printed on the NYT opinion page doesn’t get word-by-word review by multiple editors before going to press. And they probably have daily editorial board meetings to decide what to run and not run.
I have never been in journalism but I was on the editorial team of a very obscure academic journal when in grad school and nothing got published without a LOT of review by multiple people and multiple meetings on top of the normal peer review. And that was for an obscure journal with a circulation of maybe a couple thousand at best.
Brachiator
Anyone see or comment on the article about Amazon Jeff Bezos’ response to a nasty email?
Bezos is still often a bad plutocrat, but he is obvious rich enough to officially not have to give a fuck about personal attacks by idiot customers.
The note is reproduced in the news piece and is full of the typical racist white supremacist nonsense and hints of reflexively stupid worship of authority.
Bezos’ response reminds me of his response to the idiot who tried to blackmail him with the release of photos of him and his girlfriend. He refreshingly is not intimidated for even a nanosecond by this weak stuff.
Bezos can be rightfully criticized for a lot of what his company does, but his reaction here is definitely a good deed.
Kelly
I paid for two years of college on logging crews. The danger of logging is a mix of moving fatally heavy things with powerful equipment and macho morons. When my Dad, a lifetime heavy equipment operator found my logging jobs he made clear to me there are safe crews and dangerous crews. He found me jobs with the safe crews
Macho morons are a threat everywhere.
Roger Moore
There may be a little bit of that, but I suspect the bigger underlying difference is that people are unhappy with Trump. It seems stupid, but Trump has very bigly and publicly backed police violence as the correct answer, and that makes people who are unhappy with Trump that much more distrustful of the police. Even people who say they’re happy with Trump but who have some misgivings are going to feel that way. These protests are a chance for people to protest the state of our politics in general, and thus to protest Trump implicitly, without coming right out and saying that Trump is the problem.
eric
@Kay: catch the “toes the line” as if he is captive to leftist extremism. nice touch
Kent
I grew up in Western Oregon. HS friend of mine died when his log truck rolled off a narrow logging road into a deep ravine. The road collapsed and took him with it.
It’s an old movie now, but Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion” does a very good job of portraying gyppo logging in Oregon and the dangers of the profession. Some things have changed, but it is still dangerous.
My dad logged in the Gifford Pinchot to pay his way through college. He has stories too.
Jeffro
And yet, if you ask a TCNJ about this, they’ll absolutely insist that crime is up all over the place, and that the police are the only ones keeping folks from suffering the ‘American Carnage’ of the dreaded inner cities.
Steeplejack
@hitchhiker:
Also tasers. They were originally touted as a nonlethal alternative to guns in dire, life-threatening situations. And of course now cops use them—often multiple times—at the drop of a hat.
Omnes Omnibus
Biden’s position on the vast majority of issues has been approximately one step to the left of center mass of the party. Always. In a way, he is an almost Trollopian embodiment of Party consensus throughout his career.
Kelly
@Kent: Yeah there’s a lot of random hazard. When I was in high school a neighbor died when a tree he was falling broke apart while he was cutting. Hidden week spots in the tree. He had been falling timber for 10~15 years and had a cautious reputation.
Jeffro
@Roger Moore: in a similar vein…I think people are just exhausted from all the fear and chaos caused by trumpov, the pandemic, and now all this police violence. Just sick of it.
Add those most recent insanities to the 40-year project by the Randians to stop having government do much of anything (well, anything that the majority wants, anyway – the government is still quite good at carrying out what billionaires want) and people are just sick of it.
No more tinkering around the margins, whether it’s rebuilding the police or health care coverage. People are fed up with the way we just spin our wheels and very little gets better for the vast majority of Americans.
Brachiator
@catclub:
Here’s a thing about people who believe the “Make America Great Again” stuff. A good chunk of them don’t follow the political news, or much news at all, because they don’t want to.
And when things are going well, they don’t need to. Hell, when things are going well, they don’t even need to vote, or they just reflexively vote GOP because that’s what they do.
The seductive thing about society is that when the economy is going well, when you have a job and a bit of security, you really don’t need to participate in democracy if you don’t want to. You certainly don’t have to be concerned about people not like you who may be getting kicked in the head.
Back in the day when I worked for a major newspaper, I would note that quite a few letters to the editor and notes with cancellation requests were not from people angry about ideological issues. Their biggest complaint was that the paper printed too much “bad news.” Their lives were good, and that’s all they wanted to know about.
They just wanted to be happy.
L85NJGT
The public is demanding civilian control return to law enforcement.
It’s being received as a loss of professional status, much of which was accrued in the aftermath of 9-11.
Don_Quijote
@Baud:
Republicans love America, they just don’t particularly care about Americans, especially the ones with high levels of melanin.
leeleeFL
@eric: THIS! OVER AND OVER!
Kelly
@Kent: My Dad loved Ken Kesey’s book “Sometimes a Great Notion”. He liked the movie to but he said the book caught the feel of gypo logging.
Baud
@eric: Good catch. Completely unprofessional language for a reporter.
leeleeFL
@Humdog: Not the Unions, the Insurers. The real powers in this country are the money guys who pay out for the evil. When they are done, they call for change by not being ass-covering SlimeBalls.
Omnes Omnibus
@eric: I would posit that most “Biden-gaffes” have been intentional. BFD about the ACA? He knew the mic was live. Gay marriage? He could float it and, if it bombed, they could “Biden-gaffe” it. If it went over well (as it did), then they knew. He is a seasoned politician; he knows how to work his reputation.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
Very good observation. The Wiki says this about Biden’s 1972 Senate campaign.
This could be any good Democrat almost any election year.
Booger
@Amir Khalid: But Cotton wears the protective mantle of having been in the military, so his opinions on such things are beyond questioning and must be accepted as gospel because reasons.
West of the Rockies
@Sloane Ranger:
They just want their Confederacy back!
Kent
I think about how many guys I grew up with have died and it has been a lot. Top athlete on my HS football team died the summer of our junior year. He was a farm kid, moving aluminum irrigation pipe and somehow got one caught in a power line and electrocuted himself. I knew another farm kid who died when loading hay and a hay bale crushed him. I’ve know a lot of guys who have died at sea.
Nora
@negative 1: Boy, that’s true. And anyone who’s shocked that police might sometimes lie has never done criminal defense and never seen an actual criminal trial. I used to do criminal defense and I had a client who was on her third felony, though the first one she’d actually fought, and she was just shocked that the police officer would actually lie under oath. Not Captain Renault shocked, either, but genuinely taken aback.
J R in WV
@sdhays:
Yes, it does are first glance. But power tools are dangerous, and the “first line supervisors” are almost certainly managing several groups at different clients in different locations, so driving between jobs a lot.
Driving all day is really dangerous, it’s how cops get hurt/killed on the job, mostly.
nasruddin
@marklar: And don’t forget the street signs in French
nasruddin
@catclub: I take comfort (sorta) in George Carlin’s bit about stupid people. There are a lot of slow learners out there.
Martin
I think there’s a much larger dynamic at play. We’re getting pieces written now about how the public has decided that the pandemic is no big deal. I think that’s backward. I think the public did their part, stayed home, wore masks, to buy government time to act, and then the government didn’t act. The public has given up on the government. The founders referred to this as ‘losing the consent of the governed’ which is what the American revolution was.
So, that’s the low key backdrop here, it’s the deep sea in which the waves form. The trigger was a series of events including George Floyd but also Central Park Karen who knew that the easiest way to deal with a POC was to call police and yell ‘rape’. Not lost on many of us is the legacy of the absolute fucking mass hysteria around the Central Park 5 which Trump himself inserted himself into calling on those 5 boys that were railroaded by police to be executed. Even I was shocked at the ease with which that woman knew exactly how to punish someone daring to talk to her and yet, that was more or less the daily reality in Jim Crow south. So, seeing that in very liberal NYC is quite a shock. And then the video and audio of George Floyd and the newly released video of Ahmaud Arbery showing what looked like a good ‘ol 1930s lynching underway, were the shockwaves that propagated through that deep sea until they crashed like a tsunami. I think that’s why the responses are so broad, and why nations like the UK are tearing down their colonialist statues as well – their state has also failed them, and the populace is no longer willing to accede to maintaining the kind of order that the ruling party demands.
If you haven’t seen John Oliver’s bit, it’s great, especially the end. That woman is 100% correct. Policy is a contract. It specifies the role both parties are expected to play, and if public safety depends on our being orderly, and you fail to deliver on that safety and break the contract, then we revoke our role of being orderly. That’s also the risk of rent-seeking as the woman also points to – the rent-seeker is at real disadvantage if a single molotov is able to completely wipe our your asset. The entire relationship extracting rent or service income or retail profits hinges on the willingness of the majority population to not throw a $1 projectile at your asset. And they routinely forget that. Paying taxes is part of the contract. Providing fair services is part of the contract. Not discriminating is part of the contract. And the folks on the other side of the contract have way, way, way more power than you, which is always forgotten in the time between uprisings.
Trump and ungovernable police departments and a host of others have broken the social contract, and our responsibility to behave orderly is now null and void. I don’t cheer for the rioters and looters, but holy shit do they have every right to feel shit-upon and lash out inappropriately.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: Seriously?
Booger
@Roger Moore: Well, you’ve just given Dick Wolf the keys to the kingdom there, friend. He’s set for the rest of his life, and cable will never see the end of it.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
The biggest gripe I always had against Biden was his tendency to show up on the Sunday shows and talk about odious Republicans as “my good friend” and the like. It may turn out to be the number one reason he wins in November.
Uncle Cosmo
CPT (corrigé pour toi)! :^D
JCNZee
Every comment a gem!
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: As it happens, I don’t think that he is a doddering old fool who somehow backed his way into the nomination. So, yeah.
narya
I think Biden’s opponent will not be Trump. His dementia is getting worse, and I don’t know if it will survive five months. So: How will Biden do against Mitt?
tokyokie
@Kent: I used to work at a major metro paper that simultaneously promoted several people to assistant managing editor jobs. One of them had so little to do that the copy desk jokingly referred to him as AME without portfolio.
But that was back when newspapers were profitable. Nowadays, staffs have been cut back so drastically that each newsroom hand is doing what had been the work of several people previously. For instance, at my last outpost, the guy who was business editor was also acting as the business section’s line editor and covering three beats that had previously been the responsibility of three reporters.
So I can’t say who performs what role these days at The New York Times. But seeing as previous posts have indicated that Bennett had at least three assistant editorial page editors (or whatever their titles are) and my hunch is that some lower-level staffer was handling layout and copy editing, that indicates The Times still has some fat in that department. The newsroom staff can be safely gutted, but heaven forfend trimming the exalted editorial department. The Sulzbergers are OK with gutting that portion of the workforce that subscribers actually want, as long as they maintain an air of elitism on the editorial page.
Martin
Adding to my comment above. Some years ago some small farm community out in the midwest, I think it was, had an election for sheriff. The new sheriff promised to crack down on crime (which we here would have argued was sufficiently nonexistent to be deserving of being cracked down on). Anyway, the new guy won. And one of the things he decided to crack down on was the small corner of everyones farm where they grew pot. It was something of an understood activity that farmers would grow a small amount of pot that would serve as insurance against the main crop. If the main crop failed, they could sell the pot and still pay the mortgage. If the main crop didn’t fail, they’d destroy the pot (or use it personally, I don’t know) but they wouldn’t risk getting busted for dealing. Apparently everyone did this, but the new sheriff saw the pot farms as bringing dealers to their community and as a result bringing crime.
Within a few months the community recalled the sheriff and elected the old guy. The old guy understood that protecting the farm was more important than enforcing the law regarding growing and selling pot, particularly given how it was handled in this community. But a traditionally conservative law and order community decided where the balance should be, that the new sheriff broke the contract, and got rid of him.
The public will decide how it will be governed. That’s really why Presidents get so hung up on having a mandate (having the consent of the governed), and why lying about it usually goes so badly. It’s also the risk of the electoral college of putting someone in power that the majority is opposed to. It’s always bad to have rules that aren’t conformant with the social contract. Conflict will always result, eventually.
Just One More Canuck
@nasruddin: for some real fun, try driving through Montreal using google maps as your guide
japa21
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed. He will occasionally misspeak, but so do we all. But his biggest gaffes have frequently been done on purpose. And I also agree with you he has always, publicly, been one step to the left of center mass, as you said. And note, I said “publicly”. I think internally he has been further than that. But I think he, even more than Obama, has been attuned to what is actually possible to be achieved as opposed to what he would ultimately like to see achieved.
catclub
Cheapskates? (Is this taking advantage of fundamental numerical illiteracy?)
Didn’t Michael Jordan just organize a $100M donation to similar groups? I don’t think Jordan is anywhere near Bezos level wealth.
MisterForkbeard
@Don_Quijote: I think the problem here is that everyone expects Democrats to think the best of our country and everyone in it, to try and build consensus and unity.
It’s been tacitly acknowledged for years that Republicans think Democrats are traitors. Newt Gingrich made it explicit in the 90s. And yet it’s a scandal when a Democrat points out that some americans behave badly or say that Republicans aren’t working in good faith.
It’s a huge media problem. They just decided to accept that Republicans hate Democrats so it’s not news, but Democrats still have to be nice to everyone.
Amir Khalid
@Uncle Cosmo:
Paws oh zhoor dwee, maze amee!
I have decided not to say anything about your orthographe française.
bemused senior
@jonas: My daughter…lapd cop. 1year out of the academy. She’s told me 50% of her encounters on patrol are with homeless and mentally ill people. The department has a team of social workers, but seriously over worked and can’t be called and respond in reasonable time. Officers can take people into a hospital for a hold if a danger to themselves or others. Doesn’t apply in many or most cases.
Martin
@Flea, RN: You’re missing the psychology of it.
Humans assess risk very differently. There’s incidental risk and then there’s targeted risk. Generally we wave off incidental risk, since most of it is out of our direct control. Someone gets hit by lightning now and then. But targeted risk is very different. If you know someone is targeting you, you assess the risk at 100%.
Situations like this make it clear to anyone paying attention that unlike cracker-ass me, where dying to police violence is incidental, to a POC it becomes apparent that it’s targeted. So even if the stats worked out the same for both of us, the realization that police dramatically escalate for a POC means they will assess that risk differently.
Law enforcement is a targeted group. Criminals target them. So they always assess their risk as much higher than the data suggests. And that’s understandable. It’s normal. But you can manage that if you try. It doesn’t help if you train them to all be predators and first strike actors.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I wasn’t implying that, but come on, the man is pretty famous for stepping on rakes in ways that are/were in no way strategic. I was seriously wondering if you were serious because of that.
catclub
Interesting theory. Do trump’s backers care about dementia?
I have seen many predictions that trump would fail and drop out or resign over the last 5 years. So far, (includuing my own) all wrong.
frosty
@Martin:
This, along with your entire comment, is a really good observation.
trnc
@The Moar You Know:
You’re probably right about the future job prospects, but I don’t think the statement “You had one job!” could possibly apply to anyone more than Bennett. I hope the media overlords consider that at the next place he applies.
Jinchi
Mitt is a pariah among Republicans right now and has been for years. All for his fairly tepid criticism of Donald Trump. He will not be their nominee, even if Trump keels over and Pence refuses to run in his place. The Trump presidency is a product of their toxicity. They are not going to reject everything they’ve built up and suddenly discover a passion for Mitt any more than they will follow him down 16th Ave wearing BLM regalia.
catclub
Obama won twice and never brought up that they were definitely NOT his friends.
Martin
@narya: Almost impossible to change that at this point. The GOP does not have the courage to remove Trump from the ticket, even with Mitts niece running the party. And if he’s the nominee, there are untold state laws regarding replacing the nominee on the ticket that they would have to navigate.
What’s more, I can’t imagine any Republican with eyes toward the top office willing to step into the absolute shit-show that would result by trying to oust Trump. You think Trumpers hate Democrats…
Brachiator
@Martin:
Huh? You fundamentally mis-state the facts, which is odd because you and I are both in California.
The federal government did not act. And people did not simply do their part on their own. They stayed home because state and local authorities directed them to do so. It was a massive display of trust in good government. Someone on some talk radio station noted that they were surprised that Governor Newsom did not have to call out the National Guard to enforce the lockdown.
Many of your other individual points are very good, but you fail to connect the dots.
Booger
@hitchhiker: I swear that’s the ‘Star Trek’ fallacy in action. Phasers work ‘on stun’ in the 23rd century, so obviously we need a ‘non-lethal’ alternative to projectile weapons now…despite the fact that tasers, pepper spray and rubber bullets are all obviously lethal in their own delightful ways. But they’re NON-LETHAL, see there right on the label? So there’s no reluctance to use them whenever you get the chance, because clearly, just like on Star Trek, once stunned, they’ll come right back to their senses by the end of the commercial break.
But we all wear red shirts now.
trnc
The recent statement would indicate they’re feeling some heat.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
They didn’t for Reagan, so I doubt they’ll make a big deal about it for Trump. Besides, any signs of dementia will be written off as fabrications by the evil media.
hitchhiker
@Martin:
QFT, as we used to say. That’s exactly how I see it, and I wish this comment were in front of every American.
Martin
@japa21: Biden is very good at reading a room. He genuinely listens. He knows where the center of mass is on an issue and he starts there and pulls left. Obama was similarly good at that.
Of course they get it wrong from time to time, but their process is designed to achieve good outcomes.
Subsole
@The Moar You Know: Didn’t their entire masthead run a similar line a little while back? Something to do with a headline?
frosty
@bemused senior: Good luck to your daughter. My son is 3 years out of the Pittsburgh Police Academy. Good mayor, good chief, pretty good reputation, but I worry about the union and the culture and how it will affect him.
AnneWith
@Patricia Kayden:
A followup tweet says that’s not the same fence & the signs are still up.
https://twitter.com/chatelainedc/status/1270060424105517056?s=21
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: See Japa21’s comment. I’d also note that a number of times he has been accused of a gaffe and it has later turned out that he was right. Bosniaks, for example.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
The only way Trump gets replaced at the top of the ticket is if something truly disastrous happens: death, near death that leaves him obviously physically unfit, or being so obviously mentally unwell in public that the media can’t ignore it. They haven’t given a damn about his obvious unfitness for office since 2015; they aren’t going to change that now.
catclub
I disagree. When early states allowed opening up, lots of people stayed home on their own. And are STILL acting on their own even if a state is technically all open for business. Old people know they are still at risk.
Subsole
@Barbara:
This. There’s video going round of the cops knocking the guy around as he’s in the back of the cruiser.
He was pinned on the pavement on the wrong side of 4 to 1 odds, begging.
You cannot complicate that. Full stop.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I think you’re missing something vital: people started to stay home and socially distance before there were any official government rules telling them to. The reason Newsom didn’t have to call out the National Guard to enforce the stay at home order was because people were staying at home without being ordered. Even in states that never had an official stay at home order, many, many people did so voluntarily. Plenty of people are upset that the government hasn’t done more about COVID than it has, at both the state and national level.
West of the Rockies
@bemused senior:
I’ve heard that as governor, Reagan dismantled the mental health hospital apparatus in California (why spend money on such nonsense//). That has contributed to the situation in this state.
James E Powell
@narya:
Republican voters despise Mitt. He is finished outside Utah.
Jeffro
You cannot possibly think that the nest of vipers that is today’s GOP would simply stand by and let Mitt. Effin. Romney. waltz in, somehow unite the party, SOMEhow win over its rabid base, and win the nomination, much less the election?
Pence thinks he’s next. Haley thinks she’s next. Cruz knows he was the runner up in 2016. Cotton and Hawley aren’t going to wait around.
Biden vs Mitt? Come on now. =)
Brachiator
@catclub:
RE: The company also announced plans to donate $10 million to organizations supporting justice and equity, including the NAACP and the National Urban League.
Michael Jordan and the Jordan Brand (a subsidiary of Nike) are giving $100 million over 10 years.
The donations are kinda in the same ballpark with respect to corporate giving.
But yeah, Bezos could give a lot more. But still, this is more than just chump change.
Martin
@Brachiator: I think you’re failing to give the public enough credit here. We did our part of the contract, so did the CA government. But there were things that only the feds could do – that we and the states could not. This is why despite Newsoms very strong start on getting in front of this he’s had to back off because he recognized the feds weren’t doing their part. We’re not reopening because of the economics, we’re reopening because there’s no point staying closed – the feds are doing nothing. I think the public recognizes this. We’re still generally with state and local governments (the policing being a notable exception because even the mayors are now signaling that they are powerless to address some of this), but the feds have lost our consent. Newsom is still recording high approvals, CA residents are still voluntarily respecting social distancing to a high degree. We can be happy with certain parts of government and refuse to recognize the authority of other parts. That this is a national movement suggests it’s a national problem. It didn’t stay confined to Minnesota.
West of the Rockies
God damn, I hate that pop-up ad at the bottom of the screen with the pink-hatted old lady with a stupid look on her face. Click it away and it’s back 30 seconds later. Don’t click the X perfectly and it pops up for real. I now loath her face.
Baud
@Martin:
I read that as “human asses risk very differently.”
Which also works.
germy
Jeffro
VERY upset, and they should be. All we did was buy a little time. And in that time, the federal government has done nothing, half of the states have done nothing, and here we go with cases spiking all over the place. Testing, PPE, even a national consensus that we should be wearing masks when we’re inside a building (much less that we should still refrain from large gatherings).
trumpov’s ineptitude cost us a $10T/40M job fine, and 3 months of our lives in isolation, and now we’re just going to somehow muddle through until January 2021, when an *actual* government takes over.
Martin
@Roger Moore: 3 ½ years ago I warned that Trump will have to be carried out of the WH (one way or another), and I stand by that warning.
J R in WV
When I was involved in a daily newspaper as a young person, every reporter was expected to turn in a couple stories for the next morning’s paper, every day, and then to cover the County commission or city hall or police beat. There were only maybe 10 people, including 2 guys on sports who filled a couple of pages, two people on regional desk editing notes from ladies all over the circulation area, who filled a couple of pages, and 5 or 6 people doing a couple of “beats” and turning in a story each day, and working on a story for tomorrow.
Apparently the FNYT has at least a couple hundred reporters, many of whom turn a story once a month? Amazing. Simply amazing. And still a lot of what they print is hand outs? From political campaigns and advertisers? Shameful work load… Makes me wish I subscribed so I could cancel my subscription. Saw a commenter who couldn’t get thru to the phone-only cancellation desk – so went to his PayPal account and stopped payment, which works for me.
I’m sure they will get a call asking WTF you didn’t pay your bill, and at that point they can explain there’s more than one way to cancel a subscription when a publication makes the normal way difficult. And Goodbye, sir or madam!!!
sdhays
@J R in WV: That’s why I worded it the way I did. I didn’t want to suggest that there’s not dangerous stuff going on, just that if it’s really one of the most dangerous jobs out there, something should change.
Making our roads safer would seem to reduce a lot of the danger for a lot of professions.
Kay
This is what the internet is best at:
Subsole
@Ken B: Hell, you want danger? Go work night shift at a liquor store.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Exactly, in the 2 weeks before the stay at home order, most of the Bay Area moved to work from home, all of the universities closed, all of the public schools closed, businesses like Apple closed all of their stores. Newsom had the benefit of a ton of momentum from other institutions and the public which made his order seem entirely reasonable.
Generally speaking, the state all seems to be on the same page here. If anything, the public is very skeptical of reopening, but since the feds have no interest in protecting us, the best we can hope to do is get sick more slowly.
Martin
@Kay: You suggesting the same police that wrote ‘cops are pigs’ on their own Starbucks cup and then tried to frame the 17 year old barista might be falsifying letters from 5 year olds?
Where is my shocked face? I left it around here somewhere.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think this was the case at all, for large numbers of people, especially in Los Angeles County and the Bay area.
And this was not just about people staying home, and certainly not about people starting to wear masks. People voluntarily obeyed when state and local authorities asked that businesses be shut down, and began to detail what were essential and non-essential businesses.
Are you suggesting that people stayed home because they arrived at this decision using “common sense” and personal judgment and did not believe the CDC and local government health authorities?
How many cases were there of businesses closing and sending employees home in advance of any government directive? There may well have been some, or even many, but I did not see news stories about this.
It’s weird that we are barely out of the lock down and revisionist history is already happening.
And no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that people trusted state and local government. It is simply a misstatement of the facts to suggest that people stayed home in large numbers because they believed that the government had failed or could not be trusted.
John Revolta
@bemused senior: Reagan dumped the job of taking care of the mentally ill onto the cops 40 years ago. Fix that and we’ll take away a huge part of the problem.
Martin
@Brachiator: NYPD budget is $6B/yr. Their union dues are around $1000/yr/officer, so around $23M in union dues annually.
That’s one city’s PD. Just to give a sense of scale to how outgunned even Bezos and Jordan are.
sdhays
@germy: Horrors!
Miss Bianca
@mad citizen:
I would have assumed no such thing. I would have assumed that the cop would have fucking shot me, not even bothering to move from his poistion, for daring to not “RESPECT HIS AUTHORITEH!”
Humdog
@narya: There is zero chance the party that nominated Shitstain would nominate Romney again. Cotton, maybe.
John Revolta
@West of the Rockies: Not just in CA. One of the first things Reagan did as President was to repeal the Mental Health Systems Act in 1981.
zzyzx
@Brachiator: I can’t speak for SF, but most of King County (Seattle, etc) in Washington’s tech companies went to work from home in the first week of March. Despite the government talking about moving to new phases, we’re all still WFH through summer if not the rest of the year.
PJ
@Kay:
@MisterForkbeard:
@snoey:
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Brachiator:
I also think Biden has his privately held thoughts about what policies would be best, but is acutely aware of what policies are possible at a given moment. In this interview with Kitty Kelley from 1974, Biden comes out and says that health care is a basic right:
https://www.washingtonian.com/1974/06/01/joe-biden-kitty-kelley-1974-profile-death-and-the-all-american-boy/
I haven’t done a search, but my guess is that Biden toned down his language about health care being a right as the country moved rightward after Reagan was elected. But I don’t doubt that he still believes health care is a right; his main consideration is on how that can be best implemented in this moment. “Medicare for All” is an inaccurate slogan (it’s not, in fact, about expanding what is now Medicare to everyone) and it gets Democrats no votes, so why should Biden support it? But Biden is pushing for universal coverage, including a public option, with private coverage for those who want it, and if Congress puts a better plan on his desk, he will sign it.
Brachiator
@Martin:
You failed to distinguish between the federal and state and local response in your original comment.
There is a larger point to be made that a lot of where we are now is because of an absolutely unnecessary clash between the federal and state and local government, and Trump’s personal incompetence, and perhaps his disregard for the social contract.
ETA: Trevor Noah’s comments on the shredding of the social contract and its connection to the recent protests remains the most insightful that I have seen anywhere.
tokyokie
@Jinchi: I think nowadays Mitt is running to become president of the LDS Church, not president of the United States. And although the LDS Church is heavily Republican, Mitt feels a need to distance himself from the more toxic elements of the party. And if that’s behind his current calculus, then more power to him.
Omnes Omnibus
@PJ: I agree. There are, however, a number of regular commenters here who see Biden as GOP-lite. And others who think he is losing it. Perhaps the past couple of months have changed this, but this place was a pretty hardcore Warren site for quite a while.
Sab
@Kelly: Nicest hing my ex ever did for me was get an autograpjed copy of that book. Ex preferred ” Cuckoos Nest.”
@Nora: I remember my surprise my first year in law school when a second year student came back from his own bout in traffic court absolutely shocked that the cop had lied on the stand.
I think he ended up practicing in high level corporate, so at least he isn’t a threat to the public welfare.
Subsole
@Aleta:
Also, the cops shooting and beating our ace supersavvy arbiters of balanced reportage like they were common taxpayers probably didn’t do the blue line any favors.
The Moar You Know
@hitchhiker: I get that but they shouldn’t. Catching a 9mm round in the forehead wasn’t going to help George Lloyd. And I have zero doubt that Chauvin had his gun holster open and ready to go. No doubt at all.
jonas
@West of the Rockies: That is true. At the time it was considered a progressive move and the idea was that rather than just warehousing people in these awful institutions, they could find solutions closer to home, with medications, counseling, and group homes, etc. What happened was that the state closed the mental hospitals, but never came up with resources for the second part of the plan. Just like when Prop 13 passed that drastically reduced local property taxes for schools, they promised that the state would make up the difference from the general fund, but of course, it never did and California’s public school system never really recovered.
narya
I actually think there’s a non-zero chance that the mango monster will have a serious health incident that would prevent him running. I do agree that if his dementia stays at current levels, there will be no change.
I was thinking Mitt because I can see them pointing to his anti-T actions (impeachment, this weekend) as a response to the current moment, but I am likely very wrong about that. I keep myself so far away from R politics that I’m a bad judge. Does Pence really want the top job?
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
Back in the 1970s and early 80s when the LA Times was flush with money, they would spend big bucks to hire away the top reporters from other papers. These people were often given lots of time to develop (or nurse) their stories, to the extent that it almost became a joke in the industry. And then the stuff was often too long to read. But there were plenty of ads to wrap around the editorial content.
I’ve been reading more economic stories. I noted that the NYT and other media websites would fail to provide links in their stories to the government sites. Especially stories dealing with GDP and employment figures.
When I find a way to go to the actual site, I often find that the “news story” is often just a reprinting of a press release or government summary. And the full government report (for example the Federal Reserve Beige Books, on employment and business figures) is often available for full for free.
It’s also interesting to see that the press releases often have embargo dates that indicate when the news media is allowed to print the story. I understand this, but sometimes the “news story” is presented as though they have dug and gotten a scoop, as opposed to simply printing information regularly made available by federal agencies.
Kay
@PJ:
All that means is he stays in the center of the Party. When the Party was further Right in the 1990’s and early aughts, Biden was in the center then too, except it was further Right.
He was never Left of the Party. The Left of the Party people voted against the Iraq war. There were 21 of them, out of 50. The Left of the Party people fought Biden restricting access to consumer bankruptcy. There’s no need to turn him into a progressive. He’s doing fine as a centrist and obviously the majority of Democrats preferred one.
joel hanes
@L85NJGT:
I think this insight, at comment 133, is the crux of the biscuit.
Roger Moore
@tokyokie:
I don’t know if he’s intending to move up in the LDS church, but I know Romney is worried about keeping in touch with feelings in the state of Utah, not the USA as a whole. And Trump is not popular in Utah. Showing some independence from him- especially on the character issues where Trump as really lost the Mormons- is good practical politics on Romney’s part.
Martin
@jonas: They did make up the difference through private foundations that allow them to steer money to the schools for the people they support and not the people they oppose. Our local district has a massive endowment that they can draw money off of every year to keep music and arts programs running that no other district in the state could maintain off of taxpayer revenue.
Newport-Mesa district had been the most diverse in the nation. The white Newport Beach folks had long wanted to cut the brown kids from Santa Ana loose, but were always rebuffed by the state. So instead, they defunded the entire district, set up massive foundations just for the schools in Newport Beach, and achieved their goal.
Always think of this dynamic when people talk about funding reform, vouchers, charter schools and the like. This is generally the goal.
Martin
Brevard County Florida reaching out to police accused of misconduct to fill openings.
Consent of the governed…
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Here in Pasadena, the schools have never recovered from attempts to fully desegregate. The schools were officially never segregated, but they were carefully located so the school enrollment boundaries made them mostly segregated in practice. When the schools were forced to implement busing to overcome that segregation, the rich white people sent their kids to private schools. Pasadena still has much higher levels of private school attendance, and lower levels of achievement in the public schools, than neighboring communities.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: I think that part of the issue here is that a number of us would suggest that being at the center of Democratic politics does not make one a centrist. I would say that Biden’s policy positions have largely reflected those on the center left in this country. Saying that he is a centrist places him further right than his record warrants and, I would say, buys into a leftist trope.
John Revolta
@Martin: Fuck them. Since when does the Fraternal Order of Police do the hiring? Fuck them.
ETA:”The ‘Brevard County F.O.P.’ page and organization has no official affiliation with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office and was not authorized in any capacity by me or our agency to recruit or comment on our behalf!!” Sheriff Wayne Ivey said in a statement posted to the sheriff’s office’s Facebook page.
Miss Bianca
@Martin: I think this is a brilliant statement and right on.
Betty Cracker
@James E Powell: Gotta give Utah some credit for being more immune to Trump’s “charms” than most hard-right states. I’ve seen it suggested that this may be partly due to Mormons doing mission work abroad, making them less likely to be xenophobic. Maybe that’s true.
I used to have a job with a Utah-based company, so I worked with a lot of Mormons at headquarters and attended conferences in Utah. There’s a lot NOT to like about the culture if you’re a liberal, but their emphasis on old-fashioned virtues DID seem to inoculate them against worshiping a low-character asshole like Trump, so kudos to them for that!
Subsole
@tokyokie: As someone who edited a little copy myself that floors me.
They don’t have a copy desk? How does that even work?
Subsole
@eric: You saw that too.
God, junior high mean girls have nothing on these people.
How does someone end up that fucking old and that fucking petty?
Subsole
@Jeffro:
Then people need to show up more than once every four to six years.
Nelle
@Martin: May I share this, attributed to you (as I know you – Martin, an online acquaintance). (By the way, Martin was a favorite uncle. It was a disconcerting to hear the song “Abraham, Martin, and John,” as those were the brothers sitting in the front seat of the car when we were driving to Canada to my grandmother’s funeral in ’62.)
Subsole
@L85NJGT:
It floors me how fast they pissed all that goodwill away.
I really don’t think most of them see it yet, either.
laura
@West of the Rockies: this hits close to home. I can confirm that Reagan closed state hospitals – or limited their use. However, it also happened due to changes in the law including the Lanterman Act. Reagan’s failure was not providing the community-based services that were to supplant commitment to the state hospital. My paternal grandmother lived with severe mental illness and the hysterectomy at 28 was supposed to cure her. It did not. She was both committed by the courts on request by her husband, but also self-committed when life was too difficult. It was a tremendous burden on my dad – most of which he shielded from our knowledge. Now, the state’s hospitals are used to house the criminally insane – complete with the “secured treatment areas” essentially identical to the state’s prison system except for the historic buildings and grounds.
In my current job as a Union business agent I have the Napa State Hospital, the Veteran’s Home in Yountville and the remains of the Developmental Center in Sonoma. Unbelievably beautiful places, vastly underfunded and dedicated workforce to maintain what remains of the facilities.
The Developmental Centers have recently been emptied out in favor of for profit group homes. Vulnerable populations are now experiencing the full effect of using law enforcement for intellectual disabilities just like the effect of criminalizing mental health issues.
Subsole
@Booger: For which the heartiest of Fuck Yous to Bush and Cheney.
sdhays
LOL. I think he’ll be greeted about as well Rick Santorum was in 2016 after being the “runner up” in 2012.
gbbalto
On policing, worth reading the Savannah cop Patrick Skinner – WaPo opinion at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/03/beat-cop-militarized-policing-cia/ and twitter feed @SkinnerPm. He sees the public as neighbors that he tries to serve and help. He was trained that way and has trained other cops. Wish there were more like him.
WaterGirl
@West of the Rockies: PLEASE us the Site Feedback form in the sidebar and select “Report Ad Issues”.
I can tell Cole about ad issues until I am blue in the face, but he ONLY cares about ones that are reported though the form.
He figures that if they are not annoying enough for people to take the time to use the form, they are not important enough for him to make a change.
Please EVERYONE, when you have ad issues, report them.
Subsole
@Martin: Dude I wish I could print and frame this. Very well put.
Jeffro
@sdhays: Oh, totally. There are a lot fresher, less-punchable faces out there now. I’m just saying he thinks he’s a ‘contendah’ =)
sdhays
@Jeffro: I don’t doubt it, but I will enjoy watching him be told, again, that nobody likes him, and respects him less than they did before he debased himself for Dump
ETA: To riff off of the old Al Franken sketch, “You’re really not good enough, you’re absolutely not smart enough, and, dog on it, people just don’t like you.”
Subsole
@narya: I am starting to wonder if it will matter.
My logic, if you can call it that:
No Trump, no bigot base. No bigot base, it doesn’t matter who the cancer party yarfs up.
The cancer party cannot win without the Pharisees and the Klan. Period, paragraph, end of chapter.
If Trump drops out or gets sidelined they’ll have to sub in Prince Derpay or Prince Herpay or Princess Nepotia to stop the desertions. Not defections. Desertions. Our side might see defections, certainly from the never Trumpers. But just sitting on ass at home? I don’t see it. Too much anger, too much swallowed abuse.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Also, Mormons historically had to endure their own share of government sanctioned discrimination and outright persecution. Maybe this also informs some of their perspective.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I would ask that if Biden is using the word – reform – maybe that’s the one we should use?
It’s not like every jurisdiction is going to dissolve their police departments on Jan 20 or sooner. We do need police. We have crazy fucking morons running around with chain saws ready to saw up protestors. We have every nasty Karen in the country getting or at least needing to be bitch slapped and sooner or later one of them is going to be shot. We have nazi sympathizers (who would be actual nazis if they could manage that) acting like this is 1937. We are a country, if not at war, at the very least not at peace with our own country and the way it’s being mis operated. One side wants the most repressive government – for everyone else, the other side wants us all to just get along. And a government that is yanked from side to side, which really isn’t good.
So I don’t think it’s working out all that well. So maybe the words actually are important.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I’m going out on a limb here and saying I think they may want it that way…..
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
But he was almost never “Left of the Party”. Not one step, not two steps, not any steps. His position on gay marriage is the exception not the rule.
WaterGirl
@Kay: Omnes didn’t say Biden was LEFT of the Democratic party. He said this, which I agree with: (bolding mine)
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator: Excellent point.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Not what I said.
Uncle Cosmo
@Amir Khalid: Inasmuch as you’ve decided not to say anything, I will return the favour ;^D by refraining from (ri)posting anything on the order of (par exemple) Va te faire foutre – which, b’en sur, I would have meant in the most courteous possible way…
TriassicSands
@MattF:
If the senior editor reads everything that appears on the Opinion Pages of the Times, is there really any reason to have subordinate editors?
Not with Dean Baquet (and Sulzberger) in place.
The real weakness of the Times’ case for publishing a fascist call to arms was evident in the shifting explanations, which began with a traditional “print everything, let the readers decide” type of rationale.
The great failing of the Times and perhaps to a lesser extent of the Post is that they are still treating Trump and the Republican Party as though they are just a reasonable alternative to the Democrats (and democracy?). They are still behaving as though Trump and Republicans are simply a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind that threatens our entire system of government and freedom itself.
sgrAstar
@Roger Moore: sadly, the most recent polling continues to show that trump has a slight positive approval rating in UT. Mormon repubs hate all the same things that their fellow-travelers do.
?
Betty Cracker
@sgrAstar: True, but. I’m not religious at all, but as someone raised in a Southern evangelical culture that looked down its nose at Mormons, I gotta say the Mormons are doing a lot better on the character test that Trump presents than the Southern evangelicals are.
Romney reflects them pretty damn well — he goes along with Trump for judges and tax cuts (boo) but he doesn’t worship the gilded turd like Southern evangelicals do (yay).
PJ
@Omnes Omnibus: I was a Warren fan too – volunteered and donated a lot to her. But it’s not a fluke that Biden won the nomination – he had decades of work with the black community. And I think he has the ability to win purple states that other Democratic nominees might have struggled with, and in doing so may bring big coattails in the Senate and House. If that’s true, and we have Democratic control of Congress, I expect that he will be the most progressive President of my lifetime.
Barry
@narya: “I think Biden’s opponent will not be Trump. His dementia is getting worse, and I don’t know if it will survive five months. So: How will Biden do against Mitt?”
I can’t see any way that it’s not Trump, barring a fatal cardiovascular event. He’ll hold on. IMHO, by the time that he’s a public drooling mass, everybody in the GOP will breathe a sign of relief, and let the Blue Wave happen.
J R in WV
@TriassicSands:
Reading written material and editing that written material are two very different tasks. Reading takes maybe 10% of the time actually editing something takes. Having done a lot of reading and some editing, I can tell you all that editing is very hard work,
perhapsalmost certainly beneath the designated “editor” of the NY Times opinion spaces, according to that editor.Gvg
@Kay: I do not agree because I think the problems start at the top. The top management is good at selling themselves but also most susceptible to being sold silly slogans so they can show they are doing all the latest approved things to be seen doing.
We get focus meetings that waste my time coming up with division purposes that mash together every bodies suggestions into phrases of mangled English.
I know what my job is. Serve the students to the limit of the law and all our available funding. I am a college financial aid counselor. I hate those stupid time wasting meetings. Too many upper management people want us to read some inspirational improvement book. Or talk about some idea. I have a lot of work to do. Self examinations that come from management always confuse things not clarify.
You mean well Kay, but I just don’t think that could work. To many people, not just management, seem to me to get bored with simple truth and it makes them feel good to make up all these slogans rather than stick with already known ordinary works well job descriptions. Fortunately, my workplace does seem to still do a very good job at our real purpose even though they talk about a bunch of other things.
No One You Know
@Roger Moore: They do. That is actually where the real training is: the sergeant is making himself available to mentor in the field. But he doesn’t take calls unless he’s specifically asked or had a compelling reason. Ever see two cruisers in a lot? That’s what they’re doing.