DL Open Thread: Saturday, June 17, 2023

Minneapolis Cops Were Racist And Out Of Control:

The Minneapolis Police Department routinely used excessive force and discriminated against Black and Native American people in the years before one of its officers killed George Floyd, federal authorities said Friday.

The Justice Department report presented a dire portrayal of the Minneapolis department as a place where officers use force recklessly, including against people who criticized or questioned them; face little to no accountability for allegations of wrongdoing; and patrolled the streets with “deficient and inadequate training.”

The report is rife with examples of police using improper force, even in cases when no force was necessary, according to investigators.

We only know this b/c George Floyd was murdered there.  There are police departments in major cities across this country operating in similar fashion.  Who will investigate them?  Might I suggest they start with Portland, Oregon?  A bunch of neo-Nazis in uniform who view the citizenry, especially protestors, as their sworn enemies.

North Carolina Dems Doing It The Right Way:

Beyond the financial investment, North Carolina is also getting a jolt of fresh energy and ideas from the state’s new Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, the youngest state party leader in the country at 25.

Clayton, who grew up in the rural town of Roxboro (roughly 8,000 people), doesn’t shy away from saying the Democratic Party has left many voters behind by focusing almost exclusively on densely populated cities. In fact, Clayton is making candidate recruitment one of her chief goals after Democrats left 44 state legislative seats entirely uncontested last year, a key contributor to the Republican Party’s current supermajority.

It’s a formula she has already proven can work. As the chair of rural Person County (population: 39,000), Clayton helped flip Roxboro’s City Council from red to blue in 2021. How? The party ran three “amazing” Black Democrats, she says, in a town that’s 51% Black. Unbelievably, that wasn’t being done before.

While some Democrats question the return on investment of putting money into field organizing across the state, Clayton says it’s crucial. She reels off a half dozen legislative races that Democrats lost in last year’s midterms by a margin of 600 votes or less.

“Those were actual investments that we should have made in order to be able to get back votes and actually have those seats,” she explains. They are very seats that would have deprived Republicans of the super majority they used to impose their highly unpopular abortion ban on the state. “Even if you’re in the reddest of rural—to me, you are still worth fighting for, your vote is still worth fighting for, people are still worth talking to, because I came from a place like that.”

That type of ethic can improve Democratic performance across the state simply by losing less in every contest.

I’m calling it:  The Democrats win NC’s electoral votes next year.  Sometimes it just takes one highly-effective person to galvanize a moribund Party.

Procreation And Proselytization:  Mormon Crickets Invade Nevada, Eat Each Other:

Millions of flightless insects known as Mormon crickets have descended across Nevada, alarming residents, blanketing roadways and buildings, and fueling nightmares.

Footage shared on social media and by local news outlets captures six Nevada counties under siege, with thick carpets of bugs moving slowly and efficiently across the state. (Armed, no doubt, with the Book Of Mormon Insects.) A local hospital had to deploy brooms and leafblowers to clear the way for patients to get into the building, a spokesperson for the Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital, told local news outlet KSL.

“They get run over, two or three come out and eat their buddy, and they get run over, and the roads can get covered with crickets and they can get slick,” Jeff Knight, an entomologist for the Nevada agriculture department, also told KSL. “The bigger issue is these afternoon thunderstorms and put a little water on that and it gets slick, we’ve had a number of accidents caused by crickets.”

The infestation was reportedly caused by the Mormon crickets simultaneously sharing the same Heavenly vision.  W-w-wait, Elko is one of the towns?  Perhaps the Mormon crickets were merely providing insightful commentary on the evils of legalized prostitution.   Or perhaps they went there in search of booze. (Steve, step slowly away from your computer, regain your bearings…)

Delaware’s Revenue Picture Flat.  Remember when John Carney said he liked the ‘idea’ of a couple of higher tax brackets, but that we didn’t need them at the time.  He’s a lame duck.  No better time to implement Rep. Kowalko’s proposal than now.

What do you want to talk about?