DL Open Thread: Friday, April 9, 2021

Immoral Erectitude.  Claims another victim. A holier-than-thou Alabama politico, who was gonna run for Richard Shelby’s Senate seat. Had previously labeled himself a victim, and that his alleged lover was stalking him. Turns out there were tapes. Sad:

Merrill made headlines in 2019 for stating in a town hall that “homosexual activities” and “wife swap shows” are driving moral decline in America. Throughout his time as secretary of state, he has repeatedly drawn the ire of voting rights advocates and Democrats for policies as being antithetical to free and fair elections.

‘Donut Boy’.  That’s what a powerful Kansas Rethug politician called the cop who arrested him for ‘speeding the wrong way on an interstate’. While drunk.  Who does he think he is, John Atkins?

The Ignominious Fate Of The Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair.   It became a toilet.  I love political protest with a sense of humor:

A self-identified “anti-racist action group” made good on its threat to turn a stolen Confederate monument into a toilet.

The group, White Lies Matter, allegedly swiped the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair earlier this week in Selma, Alabama, a monument worth $500,000. White Lies Matter dropped their demand for a ransom in exchange for the stolen seat on Wednesday and defaced it anyway.

The alleged monument-turned-toilet thieves distributed photos to several outlets showing an unidentified group member decked out in a Confederate uniform cheerfully squatting over a big hole on the chair with his pants around his ankles — and waving a tattered Confederate battle flag for good measure.

An unnamed spokesperson for White Lies Matter told the Washington Post on Wednesday night that they were in the process of returning the monument at that moment by dropping it off at a “secure location” where the UDC could pick it up.

“You know, we already cleaned it, we already got all the moss off of it, took a bunch of brushes to it, made it nice and pretty,” the spokesperson said.

He said that the purpose of the whole scheme was to highlight how, in the face of Black liberation movements like Black Lives Matter, groups like the UDC and “normal civilians from the South” have a “tendency to pick objects…over that of human life and over the needs of human beings.”

Right on.

NYPD Cops Are Trained To Violate Protestors’ Rights. There’s even a manual.  The so-called ‘Strategic Response Group’, about which virtually nothing is known:

…(T)he documents also raise questions about the content of police training on protest response itself. While paying lip service to protesters’ constitutional rights, the documents do little to explain how those rights should be protected, offering instead page after page of instructions on how to circumvent them.

Equipped with state-of-the-art anti-riot gear and heavy weaponry, as well as its signature fleet of bicycles and combat armor-clad riders, the SRG, a voluntary unit, attracted cops looking for “more action,” many with lengthy misconduct records. Since 2015, SRG officers have met peaceful protests with violence, failed to intervene as far-right activists assaulted counterprotesters, and participated in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.

In other words, the SRG deliberately attracts rogue cops.

Rethug-Led States (Likely) Illegally Going on Spending Spree For Death Penalty Drugs.  Arizona, Tennessee, and Missouri:

Republican-controlled states are spending astronomical sums of their taxpayers’ money to buy pharmaceutical drugs from illicit dealers in a desperate and almost certainly unlawful attempt to carry out lethal injection executions.

he most jaw-dropping outlay has been made by Arizona, a state in which Republicans hold both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. A single-page heavily redacted document obtained by the Guardian records that last October the department of corrections ordered 1,000 vials of pentobarbital sodium salt, each containing 1mg, to be shipped in “unmarked jars and boxes”.

At the bottom of the document, the record states: “Amount paid: $1,500,000.”

Drugs for executions: Rethugs’ idea of ‘infrastructure’.

DIAA, Buffoons Afraid Of ‘Looking Like Buffoons’. They waited until the end of a seven-hour meeting to vote on lifting mandatory mask-wearing for certain sports.  Turns out they didn’t have a quorum by then.  Can’t anybody here play this game?

What do you want to talk about?