DL Open Thread: Friday, April 23, 2021
First, a personal note: I’ve been binge-watching BoJack Horseman. That show’s incredible. But, I digress.
NZ PM: ‘Stop Subsidies For Drilling’. Quote that makes sense to me: “We cannot take money from emitters paying for their carbon emissions and then give them money back in subsidies.” The emitters are getting about $500 billion annually in governmental subsidies. Gee, wouldn’t it be great if those subsidies went to sustainable energy?
Driving Cars Over Rioters No Longer A Crime In Oklahoma. Well, the bill says ‘unintentionally’ running over rioters. Good luck parsing the difference in court. Some weird shit out there.
Yep, Capitol Police Were Instructed To Target Anti-Trump Protestors On January 6. A tape exists, but is being kept from the public. It’s time to ‘sunset’ the Capitol Police and start over. Hopelessly dysfunctional. Speaking of January 6, look who the Republican Attorneys General Association just hired. The good news? RAGA is in disarray.
The Perils Of Online Dating. Would-be romantic suitor turned in for participating in Jan. 6 insurrection. Not a match.
US Marshals Engaged In Surveillance-By-Drone Of DC Black Lives Matter Protests. Betcha they were mothballed for January 6. Doesn’t appear the Marshal Service had the legal right to do this:
“How did it become part of the mission of U.S. Marshals Service to engage in aerial surveillance during a protest movement?” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s hard to know with all the secrecy, but it looks like once again, powerful high-tech tools sold to the public for use against the worst criminals are now being deployed against peaceful protesters and activists.”
Read this article. You’ll learn something.
Captain Obvious: Police Reforms Don’t Work When Police Ignore Them. This takes place all the time in my youngest daughter’s city of Portland. When it comes to out-of-control big city police departments, Portland is right there with the NYPD. There is some good news, though:
Still, Walker says there’s been a “sea change in public attitudes” around police reform. “An awful lot of states passed laws mandating de-escalation and de-escalation training,” Walker says of the immediate backlash to Floyd’s murder. “I think that’s going to become embedded in routine police practices. A lot of them passed a law requiring independent investigations of officer-involved fatal shootings—that’s not going to change. There’s a lot of permanency in that.”
Independent investigations of officer-involved fatal shootings–can’t we at least get that?
Interlude: Rethug Senator Josh Hawley was the only no vote against ‘an anti-hate crimes bill aimed at addressing a surge in attacks on Asian Americans amid the Covid-19 pandemic’. Wow. Every other racist in that Cucus voted yes. Hawley has the ‘Total Haters’ all locked up for 2024.
How Trump, Graham And Usual Rethugs Set Biden Up For Failure On Border. A must-read:
The conversations around the trip were some of the earliest indications that Republicans anticipated the spike in migrants crossing the border — due to seasonal patterns and regional crises — and planned to use it as a political cudgel to try to retake Congress in the midterm elections. The topic turned out to be much more of a vulnerability for Biden than even they expected.
A record increase in the number of unaccompanied children coming to the border, the slow pace to process and house them, and the White House’s muddled message around it all is complicating Biden’s attempt to focus on fighting the coronavirus and reviving the economy. And while many of the political problems he is facing are of his own making, some of it was set in motion — through policy choices and political calculations — by his opponents before he even stepped foot in the Oval Office.
Can We All Agree That Gender-Reveal Parties Is The Dumbest Idea Ever? It’s gender-reveal time. Why not set off an earthquake?
Oh, No! Higher Taxes Could Hurt The Bitcoin Market! Bitcoins are something that I’m too old to even care about. Or understand.
Delaware NAACP Calls For DOJ Investigation Into Lymond Moses Shooting. Guaranteed that nobody in power in Delaware will do anything about it. So, why not? AG Garland has already started an investigation into the Minneapolis Police.
Mountaire Will Remain Unionized. Good. Overcame National ‘Right To Work’ skulduggery. Here’s the (partial) story:
Oscar Cruz Sosa submitted a petition seeking to stop United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27 from representing about 1,000 Selbyville employees early last year. Sosa, who has not been available for interviews, received free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
UFCW Local 27 called the case a “right-wing effort to strip union rights away from Mountaire Farms employees” and said that over the past year, “Mountaire Farms pressured workers to decertify their union membership, holding captive audience meetings with anti-union messages during the height of the pandemic.”
National Right to Work called the ruling “appalling” and said the labor board “steamrolled” the rights of workers.
If the UFCW is happy, and the National Right To Work is unhappy, I’m happy. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
What do you want to talk about?
George W. Bush reveals he helped Trump win Texas (by writing in his vote for Condoleeza Rice). Presumably voted for Cornyn for Senate too.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” – Neil Peart
Bush’s support is not surprising, considering Trump is the only thing that keeps Bush from being our worst President. I hate the normalization of Bush, and I constantly have to remind people that Bush tanked the economy and lied us into a bloody war of choice. Bush was still in the lead for Worst President until Trump botched COVID and led a violent insurrection.
He paints better than he governed, and that ain’t sayin’ much.
I call bullshit on that Polico story claiming the border situation has been a black eye for Biden.
The media is even more determined than the Republicans to pretend it’s a crisis, as that story demonstrates. It’s going nowhere with the public, which didn’t much care when Trumpists were treating migrants like shit and doesn’t seem to be any more concerned about it under Biden.
The media is the enemy. Never forget it.
Trump is right about one thing, the media needs him to keep the clicks coming. It seems (perhaps naively on my part) that a great % of people walked away from their keyboards on January 20. I know I did. Yet I still see That Name showing up in stupidly insignificant ways. The media got him elected, IMHO, with their wall-2-wall breathless “OMG, did you hear what he said?!”, to keep the audience they’ll keep him relevant, and then start it all over again in 2023.
There has definitely been a drop in news consumption, mainly because people don’t wake up every day wondering what new horror has been foisted upon us.
The media has become addicted to the breathless promotion of bullshit they have trained their audience to desire. Conflict sells, and always has.
Here’s a way the media trains the public that we never talk about: Crime reporting. In newspapering it’s been known for generations that there’s a positive correlation between crime headlines and newsstand sales, which is why what bleeds leads on local TV news.
The News Journal dutifully prints stories about minor crimes — in Delaware, the media gets only what police agencies release, meaning they cannot look at the raw reports and so don’t know what crimes they are not told about.
The police also release, and expect to have printed, descriptions of suspects that include what they were wearing at the time of the crime (almost always a t-shirt and jeans) as if they hadn’t changed clothes in the intervening hours or days, as if someone is going to tip them off based on this newspaper account. Because the WPD releases reports of minor crimes like purse-snatchings, there are plenty of suspects whose descriptions start with “black.” This is why the News Journal made a point some years back of no longer printing the race of the suspects as reported by the police.
I don’t think it takes a supercomputer to work out how such media coverage contributes to fearful, dim-bulbed white people who don’t live anywhere near a minority community buying guns to fight off the lawless minority hordes.
You are a sick person.
And you are a moron. What’s your point?
American business depends on a constant reserve army of exploitable noncitizens in fear of their status. They don’t want the influx to stop, nor do they want them to acquire citizenship and those pesky “rights” that come with citizenship.
Agreed, the corporate media is the enemy, the tabloid mentality is deep seated at this point. ” Not to choose is to choose”, not Neal Pert but a 100 years old Existentialist saying. Merrick Garland has just begun on Operation Police Accountability, as noted their are many openly corrupt and racist big city police forces out there with NYC and Baltimore arguably leading the pack.
Hey, don’t forget Philadelphia. The Philly PD was exposed the other day as having asked the feds to infiltrate protests last summer because they’ve been banned from doing it themselves:
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-police-protests-dea-infiltrate-surveillance-20210419.html
Just learned WHYY has a series on Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner:
https://video.whyy.org/video/philly-da-vuyiid/
Thanks for the NZ post, very informative as well as your position. Keep it coming. I checked to see if our two sentator’s were getting emitter’s money and they weren’t.
Love that word (emitters). Will hammer their asses.
BoJack is a great show and BoJack is one of the most hateable scumbag pile of crap characters ever.
Yes, but he’s a much deeper character than that. He’s often more sympathetic than some of the sycophants who ‘manage’ him. I think that’s what makes the show fascinating.
I dont wanna drop any spoilers for Alby…..
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But I disagree. He benefits from the constant forgiveness we heap on shitty predatory men. Bojack is extremely privileged in his wealth and constantly makes selfish decisions. Just because he knows he’s awful doesn’t make his constant failure to improve any better.
He’s an archetype of so many people who are manipulative abusers who are able to gain pitty. Don’t get me wrong, I love the show. But while yes, he’s a “horse”, we all know he’s a white man.
Don’t worry, it’s a TV show, and therefore not my thing.
Hey, man, he saved that baby seahorse. Doesn’t that count for something?