Have at it.
I’m watching season 3 of Better Call saul and I fucking hate Chuck with a passion. Almost as much as I love Kim.
This post is in: Election 2017
Have at it.
I’m watching season 3 of Better Call saul and I fucking hate Chuck with a passion. Almost as much as I love Kim.
by John Cole| 75 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America, Shitty Cops
The dashcam video of the public execution of Philando Castile has been released, and it is actually worse than I imagined it would be:
Yanez met with two special agents from the BCA at 1:42 the day after the shooting, accompanied by two attorneys, Tom Kelly and Robert Fowler. It had been a long 17 hours for Yanez and his attorneys noted he had only gotten a couple hours of sleep. Yanez had only pulled over two people since starting his shift at 6 p.m. Since it was a slow night, a recent convenience store robbery, to which Yanez responded to the week before, was very much on his Yanez’s mind, and he was keeping a close eye on the store. He saw a white car pass and thought the driver appeared to match the description of one of the robbers. But when the agents asked Yanez in the interview to elaborate, he couldn’t offer many details. He wasn’t sure about height, weight or even gender. One had cornrows or dreadlocks. One had a hat on.
“And then just kind of distinct facial features with like a kind of like a wide set nose,” he said.
Translation- “I PULLED HIM OVER BECAUSE HE WAS BLACK.”
He then goes on to say he smelled marijuana but told him he was being pulled over for his headlight, so he’s already contradicted himself several times. He pulled him over because he was black. The taillight was an excuse, the marijuana is just bullshit to cover his ass.
There are so many things to unpack here, but really, one of the easiest things we could do, right this very instant, without costing a penny, endangering the public, or requiring any roll-out or training that would lead to an immediate decline in these sorts of encounters is this simple: an immediate ban on traffic stops for bullshit like expired tags and broken taillights and crap like that. We all know those only exist (at this point) to harass people, particularly black people, and because taxcut jeebus requires that towns and municipalities fund themselves with bullshit tickets for crap like this. This is not rocket surgery.
Let’s go through the list of recent high profile murders and incidents involving traffic cops:
Philando Castile: Taillight. Dead.
Walter Scott: Taillight. Dead.
Samuel DuBose: Front license plate. Dead.
Eric Garner: Selling cigarettes. Dead.
Freddie Gray: Riding his bike away from police. Dead.
Sandra Bland: Failure to signal lane change. Dead.
We could go on and on and on. Stop the bullshit. We’re not serious or mature enough of a country to deal with systemic racism or implicit bias, so let’s treat cops like kids and limit their interaction with the public and the people who clearly scare them so much. We’ll save lives.
by David Anderson| 122 Comments
This post is in: Election 2017, Open Threads, Politics
There is always an XKCD, always….
And here is the one for tonight’s election results from Georgia’s 6th District:
Open thread
GA-06 Election Night Result open threadPost + Comments (122)
This post is in: Local Races 2018 and earlier, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Daydream Believers
Overrated: GA-6's importance as an electoral bellwether.
Underrated: GA-6's impact on whether AHCA gets passed.https://t.co/JIJnRLShgV— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 20, 2017
… Here’s the thing, though: Sometimes dumb things matter if everyone agrees that they matter. Congressional Republicans could use a signal of any kind right now to coordinate their strategy around two vexing issues: first, their health care bill, and second, their behavior toward President Trump and the investigations surrounding him. Whatever direction Republicans take on these questions, they will find some degree of strength in numbers. Republicans would probably be less afraid of publicly rebuking Trump, for instance — and becoming the subject of a @realDonaldTrump tweetstorm or Trump-backed primary challenge — if other GOPers were doing the same.
The Georgia 6 outcome might trigger some herd behavior among Republicans, therefore, changing the political environment in the weeks and months ahead. A loss for Handel would probably be interpreted by the GOP as a sign that the status quo wasn’t working. If even a few members of Congress began taking the exit ramp on Trump and the American Health Care Act, a number of others might follow. A win, conversely, would have a morale-boosting effect; Republicans would probably tell themselves that they could preserve their congressional majorities by turning out their base, even if some swing voters had abandoned them…
In either case, the narrative that emerges from the Georgia 6 runoff will lack nuance and will oversimplify complex evidence. While special elections overall are a reasonably useful indicator in forecasting upcoming midterms, their power comes in numbers. A half-dozen special elections taken together are a useful sign; any one of them is less so. But we’re at a moment when Republicans have a lot of decisions to make now, and the story they tell themselves about the political environment matters as much as the reality of it. The narrative will probably be dumb, but it might matter all the same.
Gonna be a long night for the results-watchers, regardless.
Apart from that, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Ossoff: "It's all going to come down to turnout." pic.twitter.com/Oz5jIjTFiq
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) June 19, 2017
.@JasonKander, in town for @Ossoff, to volunteers: "You know the whole country's watching." No pressure!
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) June 19, 2017
GOP chair in #GA06 thinks the Scalise shooting will "win this election for us." What a warped way to think. https://t.co/4Yn7OunpSH pic.twitter.com/S2Zgul3nHL
— Emily C. Singer (@CahnEmily) June 19, 2017
The lesson for future Dems: Run on moderation and deficit reduction and be called a black bloc terrorista anyway https://t.co/i25l5mGEh4
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) June 19, 2017
Karen Handel tells the reporter who was assaulted by a politician that the press is to blame for lack of civility https://t.co/aG5oYPCzTm
— Pema Levy (@pemalevy) June 20, 2017
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: No <em>Pressure</em>, Though, Mr. Ossoff…Post + Comments (119)
This post is in: Russiagate, Science & Technology, Assholes
Michael Flynn is known for thinking outside the box, and we need ideas outside the box to solve some of the world’s problems. It’s also great when an action can address more than one problem. But it also helps to know what you’re doing.
Here’s an IDEA: The United States and Russia work together to supply Middle Eastern countries with civilian nuclear power. Several of those countries have been seeking nuclear power. The United States and Russia have companies that can build the plants. That’s the deal Flynn was seeking in October 2015.
The contracts would presumably specify that spent fuel go back to the supplier country, so that it wouldn’t be available for extracting plutonium for Middle Eastern nuclear weapons. The motivations for uranium enrichment and reprocessing, the technologies that could be used for making weapons, are undercut. The very wealthy Saudis would finance the program and thus have skin in the nonproliferation game. It would also help to bolster the US nuclear industry, which is suffering, among other things, from plant closures due to the currently low price of natural gas.
It seems like a great IDEA until you start considering some specifics: Should Iran be one of those Middle Eastern countries? The Saudis might not be pleased to finance their nuclear development. Why should Russia open those markets to the United States? Reactors and their associated services are a major source of income to Russia, one of their few manufactured exports. They already have been selling reactors in the Middle East, including sixteen to Saudi Arabia announced just after Flynn’s trip. And Iran is (more or less) Russia’s friend.
Given the plethora of Flynn’s IDEAs, it’s not surprising that the article lists additional downsides.
This IDEA looks quite a bit like one of Donald Trump’s old ideas. Back in 1987, Trump wanted to join with the Soviet Union to bully the rest of the world into nonproliferation. Supplying civilian nuclear plants to the Middle East to prevent proliferation is a kinder gentler version of that idea at a smaller scale. Trump mentioned the idea of a Middle Eastern NATO during his trip to the Middle East, which is defense-related rather than civilian nuclear, but more or less the same countries presumably would be included.
A question that might be asked is whether Flynn structured the deal to appeal to Trump, or if Trump was involved in formulating it. The lack of research that Flynn put into the background suggests not a lot of thought, so perhaps this apparent similarity to an earlier Trump idea is by chance only.
Flynn’s trip to the Middle East to broker the deal is another that he did not report on his security questionnaire. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are asking for more information on the trip.
Photo of reactors being constructed in Abu Dhabi by South Korea.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.
by John Cole| 94 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
So it appears the conviction and abuse of Chelsea Manning served no purpose other than to fulfill our sadistic tendencies and send a message to others, because her leaks did nothing to harm American interests:
In the seven years since WikiLeaks published the largest leak of classified documents in history, the federal government has said they caused enormous damage to national security.
But a secret, 107-page report, prepared by a Department of Defense task force and newly obtained by BuzzFeed News, tells a starkly different story: It says the disclosures were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.
Regarding the hundreds of thousands of Iraq-related military documents and State Department cables provided by the Army private Chelsea Manning, the report assessed “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq.”
The report also determined that a different set of documents published the same year, relating to the US war in Afghanistan, would not result in “significant impact” to US operations. It did, however, have the potential to cause “serious damage” to “intelligence sources, informants and the Afghan population,” and US and NATO intelligence collection efforts. The most significant impact of the leaks, the report concluded, would likely be on the lives of “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”
You can read the document here.
The leaks exposed this, which I guess we just weren’t supposed to know about.
America, fuck yeah.
The folks at LGM say this article and I are full of shit.
Well That Was Certainly Worth all the God Damned FussPost + Comments (94)
by DougJ| 193 Comments
This post is in: Music
I’m not a big car person. I like driving long distances but I hate having to use cars to get around town. But nevertheless, I often like songs about cars and driving.
What are the best songs about cars and driving (“driving” could mean a motorcycle or a truck too)? Here are my favorites
Little Red Corvette — Prince
Racing in the Streets — Bruce Springsteen
I Used To Could — Mark Knopfler
Riding Along In My Automobile — Chuck Berry
1952 Vincent Black Lightning — Richard Thompson
Hot Rod Lincoln — Commander Cody
Blue Drive — Vetiver
Six Days On The Road — Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris
Ole 55 — Tom Waits
What are you favorites?