Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

We’re not going back!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread and New Mexico Shooting (Until Someone Else Posts About It)

Reader Interactions

87Comments

  1. 1.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Simon Romero
    @viaSimonRomero
    ·
    3h
    I’ve covered violent street protests in Caracas & Rio. Never felt as threatened as last night in Albuquerque

    At one point an armed militia member taunted me for working at the NYT. No police were in sight. Why did authorities cede control of the scene to extremist gunmen?

    Cell phone video shows suspect shoving several women down before firing shot

    Albuquerque Police Chief Mike Grier spoke at a press conference Tuesday explaining that the department had discouraged armed civilians from attending protest saying, “those types of groups encouraged violence, like we say last night.”

    City officials add that when they took Baca and members of the Civil Guard into custody in an attempt to detain and disarm them, they obtained 20 guns and 34 magazines from just five individuals.

    While Baca was arrested and charged with aggravated battery, it is unknown if any members of the Civil Guard were charged.

    In response to the events Monday, Mayor Tim Keller said the “city would remove the statue until appropriate civic institutions could determine the next steps.”

    The statue was removed Tuesday and will remain in storage until further notice.

  6. 6.

    scav

    @rikyrah: and not armed to the teeth with skittles and water bottles. Now those things are to cops what Kryptonite is to Superman or garlic to vampires.

  7. 7.

    cain

    Albuquerque took a wrong turn. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

    Things look grim there it seems.

  8. 8.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    From the Guardian:

    A forklift pried the massive bronze statue of the conquistador on horseback from a concrete pedestal. Cheers erupted among bystanders who saw the memorial as an affront to indigenous people and an obstacle to greater racial harmony, though several people also arrived to defend the statue.

    The county manager, Tomas Campos, said the statue was placed in storage for its own protection. He expected a three-member county commission to solicit public comment on what to do next with the public works project, which was commissioned by the state in the early 1990s.

    “This is public property and I’m not going to allow it to be damaged,” he said. “Plus, I don’t feel like risking my sheriff’s deputies or state police to defend it.”

    Who gives a shit whether it’s public property or not? I’d prefer they go in special spaces designed to give them the proper historical context instead of remaining in prominent public areas, but it’s a statue glorifying a monster who was condemned by his contemporaries. Come on.

    Removal of the statue was followed by heated roadside discussions about local history, under the gaze of a half-dozen deputies. Tony Valerio, 65, rushed to the site after a neighbour alerted him that the statue was being taken down.

    “He’s my hero. He brought a lot of good things to New Mexico,” Valerio said of Oñate. “What’s next? The Statue of Liberty?”

    Lujan Grisham, who has campaigned on her heritage as a 12th-generation New Mexican, called the statue’s removal a “step in the right direction”.

    By Monday evening, dozens had joined a celebratory gathering with Native American dancing and drumming outside the cultural centre where demonstrators left handprints in red paint on the empty pedestal.

    Monuments to European conquerors and colonists around the world are being pulled down amid an intense re-examination of racial injustices in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police.

    Yes, because the Statue of Liberty is the same thing as honoring a psychopath with a statue

  9. 9.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @debbie:

    In that first article I linked, I think I also read that the New Mexico Civil Guard claims he’s not a member of their group

  10. 10.

    scav

    BBC

    Mr Baca is a former candidate for the Albuquerque City Council and the son of a former Bernalillo County sheriff, according to the Associated Press news agency.

    According to the Albuquerque Journal, he ran for office in 2019 on the platform that local officials were “complete wimps when it comes to fighting crime”.

  12. 12.

    Cameron

    NM yesterday was just a warm-up.  2020 is going to be a very, very tough year all over; here in FL, I saw a headline that 1/3 of the families in the state are on the verge of financial collapse.  So: COVID pretty much out of control (unless you believe the guv, and I don’t), hospitality-industry-based economy swirling around the porcelain bowl…and a banner hurricane season in the making!  So much winning!  People are angry and they’re becoming increasingly desperate.  Boy, am I glad I moved here from Philadelphia.

  15. 15.

    Nelle

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): My daughter has left journalism after the taunts and threats from Trump rallies.  He singled out the NYTimes, time after time.  At that moment, she was a stringer on assignment from the NYTimes.  (She has a similarly dim view of them now to many here.)

  17. 17.

    Martin

    @debbie: Doubt it. Baca (the shooter) is a wingnut. Dad is a cop, believes that they need a more aggressive crackdown on poor people.

    Reports are that the police referred to the LARPers as “armed friendlies” which is probably why they didn’t intervene.

    Baca may not have been one of them, but Baca and the LARPers were there for the same reason.

  19. 19.

    laura

    Albuquerque Police Chief Mike Grier spoke at a press conference Tuesday explaining that the department had discouraged armed civilians from attending protest saying, “those types of groups encouraged violence, like we say last night.”

    The passive voice accommodates and reassures these types who shall not be named. The media will not report what is happening absent a both sides (Antifa!) Frame. The sheer amount of arms and ammo and “tactical.” The impunity in which law enforcement will standby for violence and extreme intolerance for peaceful protest and dissent. The urging on by thought leaders on television, on radio, on line. This feels like a dangerous moment. There’s hijacking a legitimate People’s Movement for Civil Rights. I fear what the governments response will be.

  20. 20.

    Kent

    Honestly I’m shocked as hell that it took this long to see violence erupt with so many crazies running around armed to the teeth.  Although I guess the guy who jumped out of his car in Seattle and shot a protester was the first to deploy firearms.  Although crazy racists have been deploying their vehicles as weapons all along.

    Rolling back this open carry 2nd Amendment idiocy is going to be a generations-long project.  It is worth doing.  But change will be slow and incremental.  And a lot of old white people are going to have to die off first.

  21. 21.

    cain

    @Martin: Someone left an opening and you just took it, didn’t you? You sly fox. :-)

    Also, I’m now very curious to know the salacious details of what the model for the statue of liberty has done!

  24. 24.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    It seems to always comes down to the same thing – are you full on Castilian (or so close as to claim it) or are you Mestizo?

    It’s the same fucking thing that plagues everything south of the Oklahoma state line. It’s the same thing that Castro spent so much effort and time fighting in Cuba.

  25. 25.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I saw reports that people monitoring police scanners in Albuquerque heard the “civil guard” members described as “armed friendlies.”

  27. 27.

    Yutsano

    @Noncarborundum: It takes a lot, especially after all the other atrocities committed by their contemporaries, to get condemned by one’s peers. Although this was also the phase when Bartolome de la Casas* was really getting amped up. So better treatment of the Native populations was becoming more acceptable.

    *Never knew about him until the Oatmeal cartoon. But he’s worth learning about.

  29. 29.

    Delk

    Fox can sloppily Photoshop a guy with a rifle in Seattle and their audience freaks out. Yet groups of walking gun shops that are actually using their weapons is okie-dokie.

    ps Trump is going to stroke out with the new Lincoln Project ad.

  30. 30.

    Brachiator

    @cain:

    Also, I’m now very curious to know the salacious details of what the model for the statue of liberty has done!

    The Wiki says that the model was the sculptor’s mother.

     

    The Statue of Liberty, the most famous symbolic statue of a woman, was modeled after Marie Bartholdi, the sculptor’s mother.” “Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi knew he wanted to build a giant copper goddess; he used his mother as the model.”

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @WaterGirl:

    I imagine Cheryle is waiting to write about this

    You have really got to make an announcement when you add new front pagers!//

  32. 32.

    Martin

    @Delk: God doesn’t love us enough for Trump to stroke out. Like Dick Cheney, he will live longer than any of us can bear.

  35. 35.

    cain

    @Brachiator:

    I looked at her twitter account.. she’s pretty active!

    That said, apparently there seems to be a lot of stuff about originally it was supposed to be a muslim woman and right wingers discussing.. I quit to protect my IQ.

  36. 36.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): @rikyrah: They ceded control because there is a lot of documentation, just from the last two weeks, of Albuquerque law enforcement hanging around with the white supremacists, and cosplaytriots on the sides of the protests.

  37. 37.

    cain

    @Delk: God doesn’t love us enough for Trump to stroke out. Like Dick Cheney, he will live longer than any of us can bear.

    As Ben Kenobi said ‘He’s more machine than man now..”

  38. 38.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @cain:

    The aspiration in former Spanish colonies is to be as Castilian (purely Spanish) as possible. That even holds in Cuba, after decades of official, society-leveling communism.

  44. 44.

    Adam L Silverman

    @WaterGirl: My guess is that if anyone even suggested that she change her name to Cheryleee, that that person would get kicked in the shins.

  48. 48.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cameron: I didn’t want to leave Carlisle. I loved living there and would be more than happy to be able to go back should that opportunity ever present itself.

  50. 50.

    Patricia Kayden

    Facebook executed a takedown Tuesday of social media accounts connected to two organizations the company considers to be hate groups and had banned across their platforms: Proud Boys and American Guard. https://t.co/a7Rpf05quK via @ABC— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) June 16, 2020

  53. 53.

    Martin

    Ohhhhhhh

    The Mary Trump that spilled the beans on the tax cheating wasn’t Donald’s sister, it was Donald’s niece – daughter of Fred Trump Jr. Somehow I had that entirely wrong. Here I thought Mary (the judge) was burning her bridges into retirement. Nope.

    This was the branch of the family that got fucked over by Donald pushing his dad to rewrite the will so that no money would be available to help with the child with CP, who was Mary’s niece.

    Apparently Mary may have had the tax returns from the lawsuits at that time, showing the fraud.

  59. 59.

    Ken

    @Adam L Silverman: Apparently Balloon Juice After Dark has started early today.

    It starts as soon as anyone sees “Open Thread”.  Personally I always find the combinations fascinating.  Here the ostensible topic is the shootings, so we end up leering at the Statue of Liberty and watching the buffalo roam.

  60. 60.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Martin: Mary the niece is also a PhD in clinical psych, is a licensed clinical psychologist, and will be providing, based on first hand observation, a full psychological workup of her uncle as part of the book.

    ALEXA!!!!!!! Order all the popcorn and whiskey!!!!

  62. 62.

    Cameron

    @Adam L Silverman: I  confess I love central PA cities – Carlisle is the best, but there are a bunch of others.  Whiteness is a disease there, but I think it can be beaten.  Have you considered teaching, like at one of the community colleges there?  If that’s interesting, please let me know.  I have some contacts, but obviously I wouldn’t get in touch with them without your approval.

  63. 63.

    Mary G

    Here is an article in Elle Magazine about the mostly female artists behind some of the Black Lives Matter murals around the country. The musty old pundits and journalists who’ve been around forever are completely missing the political activism done by women and celebrated in publications that on their face seem dedicated to frivolous things like making your eyelashes look longer:

    My narrative lives at the intersection of Blackness and Femininity in hopes to provide visual representation that I can only wish I had as a child. At an early age, quite subconsciously we are conditioned to associate Blackness with a stance of trauma, violence, and inadequacy. And while I don’t run away from the errors of law that have been used to oppress our humanity, it’s so important that I use art as a reminder that we remain uplifted, resilient, and divinely intrinsic to this life.

    That’s one of the things I admire most about some black people. If I had to live with the daily crap they get, I would be angry and bitter all the time and probably dead by now. I’ve been really trying in this age of Trump to find things that are right with the world and keep from being outraged all the time.

    There’s another article also on Elle’s website about a young second generation Ohio state representative (and minority leader) named Emilia Sykes who argues that racism is a public health problem and makes a lot of good points. Asked about conservatives calling liberal hypocrites for advocating social isolation and distancing for the red staters who miss their free iced tea refills:

    We have two viruses infiltrating our country: the coronavirus and racism. Racism has been around for 400 years. We know it, we understand it, and for those of us who are experiencing it, we know how deadly it is. The coronavirus is new, and while it is deadly and harmful, it is nowhere near as harmful as racism has been to Black people since the founding of this country. People are willing to take the risk, because if they can change these systems for generations in the future, that’s what people are willing to risk their lives for. Not haircuts, not manicures, not mimosas. Real change. Systemic change. Addressing the root causes so that the virus of racism that has permeated nearly everything can be eradicated. It is a risk analysis that people are taking, and I think they’d rather risk catching the coronavirus than having to experience racism for another 400 years.

  65. 65.

    Martin

    @Ken: Geez, I never said I leered at her, just that I grunted my way up inside of her until I couldn’t go any further, and when I’d had enough I hustled right back out, then sat down to catch my breath. It’s not like I was alone – I bet a few hundred other guys did the same thing that day.

    I mean, it was a great view, and how many other ladies have a gift shop to peruse when you’re done?

  68. 68.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Cameron: I miss living there very much. Are we talking community colleges or the local state and private colleges? Shoot me an email and we can talk.

  69. 69.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Delk: Trump is going to stroke out with the new Lincoln Project ad.

    Trump Is Not Well – did Ricky Ticky Wilson figure this out all by himself?  What a big boy – welcome to summer 2016, Rick!

  72. 72.

    Martin

    @Adam L Silverman: Yeah, no shit.  And also Simon and Schuster.

    Hey, S&S. If you offer a bundle with all royalties going to Mary and none to Bolton, I’ll buy that in a second.

  74. 74.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: They ceded control because there is a lot of documentation, just from the last two weeks, of Albuquerque law enforcement hanging around with the white supremacists, and cosplaytriots on the sides of the protests.

    Heck, Albuquerque got special attention during the last great national protest wave, during the Occupy Wall Street days.

    But I think I’m gonna steal cosplaytriots, cuz that’s excellent!

  75. 75.

    Brachiator

    @cain:

    That said, apparently there seems to be a lot of stuff about originally it was supposed to be a muslim woman and right wingers discussing

    Wow. The idiocy of right wing nut jobs is truly limitless.

  76. 76.

    japa21

    OT, but I was just looking over the figures on CoVid at worldometer.  I know the administration likes to say that the increase in cases is just due to increased testing and not a real rise in serious cases.  And I know that an important figure is percent of tests that are positive.

    Over last 24 hours, Texas did 22,000 tests. They have 4,412 new cases.  That’s a 20% positive rate. Florida’s was around 12%.  I didn’t do any others but both of those, if the numbers used are accurate, are devastating.

  77. 77.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Adam L Silverman: I do solemnly swear that I am up to no good!

    Careful.  If you start making trouble in the neighborhood, Will Smith will have to move to Bel-Air!

  79. 79.

    Cameron

    @Adam L Silverman: There’s a whole universe of public/private colleges.  I’m not sure what effect the COVID disaster has had on them; I’m 69 years old, so I’m not bucking for a degree anytime soon.  If it’s OK with you, let me take a look around and shoot you an email in a day or two.

  80. 80.

    trollhattan

    @Cameron:

    From Cheney’s POV, the planet has roughly 7 billion more potential heart donors, so why not keep this party going.

    BTW, is Liz a shoo-in for the senate, because I’m concerned about her longterm damage potential there.

  83. 83.

    dexwood

    @Adam L Silverman: True. ABQ cops have a long history of lawlessness. DOJ oversight has been resisted from the beginning. I’m tired of hearing about all the good cops my city has. They are complicit in their silence.

  85. 85.

    burnspbesq

    @japa21:

    i’m surprised those rates aren’t higher. In general, testing in Texas is voluntary, so the vast majority of those being tested have some symptoms of some illness.

  87. 87.

    Ella in New Mexico

    My husband and I were camping at 8800 feet, nearest cell phone service 40 minute drive away,  in the beautiful Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico when this shit went down.

    I’m so glad the victim is ok. Albuquerque PD needs and is gonna get some deep-dive investigation right now, especially since it appears a few officers were working with these civil militia type groups on the down low during previous protests. We’ll get it done, no doubt, thanks to some decent leadership, but it just goes to show we have far too many badly trained LEO’s in the ranks nationwide.

    It was so nice to have 5 days of absolute peace and disconnect from the world. Why couldn’t the first news that binged my phone have been Donald Trump dying from a massive heart attack? Ugh.

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