DL Open Thread: Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Killing Of Kadir Skinner Restarts Demand For Police Reform.  Remember, kids, the Senate had a really good LEOBOR reform bill back in 2023.  Couldn’t pass the House:

Following the fatal shooting of Kadir Skinner in Wilmington, Democratic state lawmakers in Delaware have advocated for several new police reform measures, include timelines for the public release of body camera footage and new statewide standards for investigating officer-involved shootings.

The proposals follow weeks of public outrage and demonstrations after the shooting of Skinner by a Wilmington Police officer. The response intensified in recent days following the release of body camera footage Thursday showing an officer shooting Skinner as he was running away.

During rallies on Thursday and over the weekend, community advocates demanded to know the name of the officer who fired the fatal shot, and called for criminal charges to be filed against him.

They also called on state legislators to pass police reform legislation, arguing that current law allows departments to conduct police-involved shooting investigations without publicly releasing reports, camera footage, officer names, among other details.

In an apparent response to the community’s calls, Democratic leaders in Delaware’s House of Representatives and Sen. Marie Pinkney (D-Bear/New Castle), said they would pursue legislative reforms to promote transparency and accountability.

“Our community is grieving, and public trust has been broken,” Pinkney said in a statement on her Facebook.

House leadership also released a statement Thursday evening following the release of the body camera footage that calls for a “thorough, independent, transparent” investigation of the incident. 

“This case has also highlighted broader questions about how Delaware responds to officer-involved shootings and how confidence in those responses can be strengthened,” the House statement said. 

Memo to House leadership:  Pass the same bleeping original bill that Tizzy Lockman introduced several years ago.  Memo to voters:  Get rid of police enablers like Franklin Cooke, Nnamdi Chukwuocha, Stephanie Bolden, Lumpy Carson and Kim Williams, to name but a few of the most egregious.

Let’s take a trip into the Not-So-Wayback Machine.  To February.  Do you remember the initial rationale that Trump gave for starting a war with Iran?  If you said ‘to stop Iran from imminently getting a nuclear weapon’, dingdingding, you’re a winner.  Do you know what the rationale is for restarting the war?:

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, defended the Trump administration’s strategy after being confronted with his earlier claims that the war which began in February would have ended by now.

Wright argued that the mission had since shifted toward ensuring oil shipments can move through the strait of Hormuz.

“We did a pause to try to get an agreement with the Iranian people to allow oil to flow without them attacking it,” Wright said. “They’ve proven unwilling to do that, and we’ve pivoted. Now, what we’re doing is assuring that that oil and gas and other products can flow through the strait of Hormuz with or without Iranian cooperation, and we’ve continued to degrade their offensive military capabilities.”

Am I hallucinating, or is the reason why the oil isn’t flowing can be directly tied to Trump’s decision to go to war in the first place?  Oh, and the renewed attacks have hastened a decrease in the flowing of oil:

As the U.S. war with Iran spilled across the Middle East over the past five months, Yemen largely stayed on the sidelines.

That was until Monday, when the Iran-backed Houthi militia, which controls a significant part of Yemen, declared a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. The move threatened to open a new front in the regional war and further disrupt global energy supplies.

Analysts say Iran may be urging the Houthis to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, which would cause further upheaval in the global energy markets. Oil prices have shot up in the past months as a result of dueling Iranian and American blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, another critical waterway for global shipping and energy supplies.

With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed for months, the Red Sea has become a vital alternative export route for the transportation of Saudi oil and gas.

Did nobody game-plan this out?  Which reminds me, did nobody game-plan this out?:

In the week leading up to the Iranian attack on Friday that killed two U.S. soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes against U.S. forces in the country.

Those attacks injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters, according to several U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

The Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted. Yet later on Monday on social media, its chief spokesman said that the number of U.S. military casualties from Iranian attacks since July 7 had risen to nearly 100.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that the military had not withheld or misrepresented U.S. casualties in the war. “Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action,” he said in a statement on Monday. (A lie.)

He later posted on social media that the “vast majority” of the nearly 100 casualties since July 7 involved “mild concussions,” and 96 percent of those service members have returned to duty.

In the days since the collapse of a fragile truce, the Pentagon has provided little information about the American military strategy after nearly five months of war. The last major Pentagon briefing on the war was in early May.

In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.

 ‘We need to hide the truth from the American people so as not to further distress them.’

80 Days In ICE Detention For The Crime Of Being Muslim:

“It all brought back old memories of things that happened to me when I was tried in Palestine,” said Salah Sarsour in his first interview since being released last month. “The humiliation, the treatment by guards, the way they talk to people, the way they try to put people down.” He said he lost more than 30lb while in immigration detention.

Sarsour, who was born in the West Bank and has been a US permanent resident for nearly three decades, was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March and released after a federal judge found he had probably been detained in retaliation of his advocacy for Palestinian rights – a likelihood the judge said would render his detention unlawful. The Trump administration is continuing to seek his deportation and Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, personally signed off on a memo last year describing Sarsour as deportable, because “his actions undermine US foreign policy to combat antisemitism around the world”.

Sarsour believes his detention was a blatant attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate people out of denouncing Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“They thought that by arresting me they would scare people fighting for justice for Palestinians, but it’s the opposite,” he said.

Sarsour, 53, is the owner of several businesses, the father of six US citizens and grandfather of nine – with a tenth grandchild on the way. He is also a prominent community leader in Milwaukee, where he has lived since moving to the US in 1993 with his wife to build a family in a place where he could “live freely”, he said.

On 30 March, he was on his way to see his elderly mother when he was surrounded, he said, by at least 10 unmarked vehicles and armed agents in civilian clothing and whisked away, first to a detention center near Chicago and later miles away at a facility in Indiana.

His detention drew condemnation from scores of civil rights groups, community members and legislators as well as protests outside the detention center.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment but has claimed that Sarsour was “suspected of funding terror organizations and lying on immigration forms”. He has denied both claims.

He shouldn’t have to deny anything.  DHS has the obligation to prove them.  Which they can’t, because this indeed was an intimidation tactic that cost Sarsour 80 days of freedom.

What do you want to talk about?