In response to nationwide protests regarding police brutality and racial discrimination, food conglomerate Quaker Oats announced Friday that after 130 years, it would replace its historically racist Aunt Jemima mascot with a black female lawyer who enjoys pancakes from time to time.
“The time has come to replace Jemima, a problematic and stereotypical character that originated in minstrel shows, with Sheila, the public defender of cultivated tastes who eats pancakes on occasion, in addition to a variety of other foods,” said Quaker spokesperson Aaron Parshley, who explained that the former Aunt Jemima brand of syrups and pancake mixes would now bear a logo depicting an African American woman who wears a suit, carries a briefcase, and isn’t an aunt per se, though she is godmother to the child of a dear friend she met as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College.
Our new mascot is based on several real-life black women who are lawyers and eat pancakes some mornings when they aren’t too busy litigating on behalf of the disadvantaged.
While Sheila does enjoy our extended line of breakfast foods, that is only one small facet of her rich and complex identity as a human being: Sheila also speaks fluent Italian, likes U2, is bisexual, and enjoys cross-country skiing.
Let us make it clear that Sheila never serves the pancakes herself, but now and then goes to a diner near the courthouse where waitresses and waiters of a variety of races serve them to her.”
At press time, Mars Inc. announced it would follow suit by replacing the mascot of its Uncle Ben’s brand with a black engineering graduate student.
I suppose I should have been buying Non-GMO Organic Steel Cut right along but you know, if you’re eating Oatmeal at all you kind of get this aura of healthiness even if it’s less than 50% of your Oatmeal Cookie mix.
I use Regular and not Instant because it’s instant enough and dried Cranberries instead of Raisins because I like savory and top it with Butter and Salt. Two parts Water to 1 part Oatmeal (you put your dried fruit in at this point too). Nuke it for about 3 minutes (it gets soft and gummy) but only 30 seconds at a time because otherwise it will crawl out and get all over.
Or you can use it in Meat Loaf or Balls to lighten the texture instead of Bread Crumbs (Richard uses it that way).
One of America’s most recognizable but unreconstructed household brands, Aunt Jemima pancake products, will change its name and image in an effort by the brand to distance itself from racial stereotypes.
The logo of the brand, familiar to shoppers on every supermarket shelf that features pancake mix and pancake syrup – a staple of the classic American breakfast – features an African American woman named after a character from minstrel shows from the 19th century.
“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” a statement from Quaker Foods North America, a unit of PepsiCo that owns the Aunt Jemima brand, said, in a statement obtained by NBC news.
The company has long been criticized for the logo and name of its product, and made the announcement as Black Lives Matter protests against racism in the US continue to grow amid a fresh surge in anger following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.
“As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations,” Quaker said.
Quaker said the new packaging will be introduced in fall of 2020. A replacement name will be brought in some time after.
Early Aunt Jemima logos featured various crude renderings of a dark-skinned woman wearing a headscarf, the design clearly influenced by minstrel shows, where white-skinned actors would portray stereotyped black people.
Later Aunt Jemima was portrayed by real women – first Nancy Green, who had been born enslaved, and then Anna S Harrington.
In 1989 Quaker updated Aunt Jemima, removing the woman in a head scarf and introducing the character which still appears on packaging today. At the time a company spokesman said they “wanted a more modern-looking woman, but one who still has traditional values”, who could retain the “goodwill and positive perceptions that already existed”.
According to the Jim Crow museum of racist memorabilia, Aunt Jemima is “the most well known and enduring racial caricature of African American women” and is based on the “mammy” stereotype.
“From slavery through the Jim Crow era, the mammy image served the political, social, and economic interests of mainstream white America.
“During slavery, the mammy caricature was posited as proof that blacks – in this case, black women – were contented, even happy, as slaves. Her wide grin, hearty laughter and loyal servitude were offered as evidence of the supposed humanity of the institution of slavery.”
A pair of businessmen in Missouri created Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix in the late 1880s. They took the name Aunt Jemima from a popular vaudeville song, according to the Jim Crow museum.
In 2014 two descendants of Harrington, whose likeness was used for Aunt Jemima, sued the brand, claiming they were owed royalties. The case was dismissed in 2015, after Quaker said Aunt Jemima was never meant to be a real person.
“The image symbolizes a sense of caring, warmth, hospitality and comfort and is neither based on, nor meant to depict any one person,” Quaker Oats said at the time.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said 260 workers at the Orlando International Airport have tested positive for the coronavirus after nearly 500 employees were tested but according to the airport management that’s not the case.
“[An] airport in Central Florida had a couple of cases, they did the contact tracing,” DeSantis said Tuesday during a news conference. “They looked [at] almost 500 workers [and] 260 people working close together were positive, 52 percent positivity rate on that one.”
However, it turns out those positive cases were not all airport employees and the cases were from a period of several months, according to the Orlando International Airport.
Orlando airport executives clarified the numbers Wednesday, clarifying not all 260 people are workers nor were they part of the group of 500 workers tested as referenced by the governor.
…
The governor’s office has also since walked back on the claims.
“Governor DeSantis has emphasized the benefit of testing for COVID-19 and contact tracing throughout the state. MCO had 132 employees test positive for COVID-19. Through contact tracing of those employees, an additional 128 individuals not associated with the airport tested positive for COVID-19 resulting in 260 total positive cases. We appreciate MCO’s commitment to working with the Orange County Health Department, the Florida Department of Health and for ensuring best practices are followed for the health and safety of all employees and visitors to the airport,” communications director Helen Ferre said Wednesday afternoon.
More than 2,780 new cases of coronavirus were reported in Florida on Tuesday.
The state reports more than 80,100 people have tested positive from COVID-19 and 2,993 people have died from coronavirus.
The Florida Department of Health reports 5.5 percent of people taking a COVID-19 test have tested positive for the virus.
Gov. DeSantis said this month around 30,000 COVID-19 test results are coming back each day.
The percentage of people testing positive for the virus has gone up since May 17.
Dr. Raul Pino with the Department of Health said coronavirus cases in Orange County are up 202 percent from the week before.
…
In Orange County, Dr. Pino said six people were on ventilators and 70 people were hospitalized outside of the intensive care unit.
The median age for people testing positive for COVID-19 is 46.
Eighty-six percent of COVID-19 related deaths in Florida have occurred in the age group of 65 and older, according to DeSantis.
He also said there have been more COVID-19 related fatalities over the age of 90 than under the age of 65.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
His clownish fight with the president is the denouement that the Trump impeachment saga deserves.
n what may be the stupidest yet of the thousands upon thousands of lawsuits President Donald Trump has triggered, Attorney General Bill Barr’s Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit in a federal court in the District of Columbia on Tuesday ostensibly seeking to stop publication of John Bolton’s upcoming book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. The suit is filed on behalf of “the United States of America,” and it claims that the former national security adviser is in breach of contract and has also violated a government nondisclosure agreement. The suit demands that he complete the government’s official “prepublication review process,” and also “not disclose classified information without written authorization,” and also ensure that his book, which has already shipped, not be published or disseminated, lest its publication cause “damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States.” This of course comes on the heels of recent ominous warnings from Trump that Bolton—whose book is scheduled to be released next week and who has given an interview to ABC News that is set to be aired on Sunday—is staring down the barrel of “criminal problems” if he doesn’t stop this publishing juggernaut right quick.
Barr’s Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit in a federal court in the District of Columbia on Tuesday ostensibly seeking to stop publication of John Bolton’s upcoming book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. The suit is filed on behalf of “the United States of America,” and it claims that the former national security adviser is in breach of contract and has also violated a government nondisclosure agreement. The suit demands that he complete the government’s official “prepublication review process,” and also “not disclose classified information without written authorization,” and also ensure that his book, which has already shipped, not be published or disseminated, lest its publication cause “damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States.” This of course comes on the heels of recent ominous warnings from Trump that Bolton—whose book is scheduled to be released next week and who has given an interview to ABC News that is set to be aired on Sunday—is staring down the barrel of “criminal problems” if he doesn’t stop this publishing juggernaut right quick.
Now if all that sounds like “frivolous litigation” to your ears, it’s because when Trump—in his capacity as the boss of bosses of DOJ—uses the state to try to stop a book from being published, well, that would be prior restraint. As the Supreme Court noted in 1971 when it allowed for the publication of the Pentagon Papers, “Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.” [..]
The prior restraint threat is nothing more than kayfabe, but the humiliation of the Department of Justice is once again exhaustingly real. The marks it will leave will remind us of how many folding chairs DOJ took to the head these four long years. The fact that Trump has a whole privately orchestrated law firm under Bill Barr willing to work the levers at taxpayer expense just makes it impossible for him to stop now.
Let’s be honest: It is a bitter pill to swallow to now be rooting for John Bolton, the man who opted for cashing in over testifying during the impeachment, when his revelations about Trump’s misdealings with foreign governments may have made a real difference. But here we are, not just rooting for the grifter-with-the-mustache against the grifter-with-the-hair, but also profoundly anxious at the fact that the Justice Department as well as an array of federal prosecutors have cheerfully lined up behind Barr to go after another one of Trump’s foes. As John Dean—who knows a thing or two about abuse of power in the executive branch—said, “this is about Barr using the Justice Department as Trump’s law firm.” That we’ve all gone numb to Barr’s willingness to perform precisely this role for some time now makes it all the more troubling. Barr’s gone from Trump’s personal prosecutor general to hisbagman in the blink of an eye.
Armed pro-Trump fanatics are lashing out violently against protesters — and Fox News is begging them to go further
While the majority of the violence against peaceful protesters at Black Lives Matter demonstrations has been orchestrated by police, there’s also been a troubling side trend of increasing right-wing vigilantism against protesters. In city after city — and even in small towns — Donald Trump’s faithful are shooting protesters, hitting them with cars, or, in one case, attacking protesters with a chainsaw. Add to that multiple situations where self-appointed “patrols” of armed conservatives have shown up at demonstrations to threatened protesters, claiming they are responding to the threat of imaginary antifa violence. It’s spiraled so far out of control that even people who have taken no part in the protests are being menaced by gun-toting right-wingers, just because they’re black and the Trump fans have deemed them “suspicious.”
But what may be even more important is the impact of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, who have been shamelessly misleading their audiences, hyping imaginary threats and creating the rationalizations that right-wing vigilantes — or, more bluntly, domestic terrorists — need and want in order to justify their assaults and threats against peaceful protesters and other innocent people.
Using emergency relief at the court, the administration has imposed controversial policies without a final determination of their legality.
In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to clear its docket of current term cases, with potential major decisions on DACA, abortion, President Trump’s financial records and public funding for religious schools. Like Monday’s ruling on L.G.B.T. discrimination, it’s a safe bet that they will generate outsize attention — and that the decisions will be deeply controversial in some quarters.
But for all of the attention that we pay to these “merits” cases on the court’s docket, the Trump administration, with a majority of the justices’ acquiescence, has quietly racked up a series of less visible — but no less important — victories by repeatedly seeking (and often obtaining) stays of lower-court losses.
Such stay orders are generally unsigned and provide no substantive analysis. But they nevertheless have the effect of allowing challenged government programs to go into full effect even though lower courts have struck them down — and often when no court has ever held them to be lawful in the first place. [..]
At the very least, if the justices mean to change the rules for when government litigants should be allowed to obtain emergency relief, they should say so. Otherwise, the court’s behavior in these cases gives at least the appearance of undue procedural favoritism toward the government as a litigant — a “disparity in treatment,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in February, that “erodes the fair and balanced decision making process that this Court must strive to protect.”
Especially when that disparity seems to repeatedly favor conservative policies over progressive ones, it gives at least the appearance that the court is bending over backward to accommodate a particular political agenda — a message that, now more than ever, all of the justices should be ill inclined to send.
Keep your friends close and your enemies away from book publishers.
Beware the number of enemies you make, and pray to God they don’t have literary agents.
That’s a lesson President Trump never learned. But he’ll be schooled anew in late July, the scheduled publication date for a book by his niece, Mary Trump. Spoiler alert: She’s not defending the honor of a misunderstood uncle. She’s reportedly plunging a dagger into him, though its lethalness is unclear. It’s not as if she had an Ivanka-grade seat to the circus of his life.
John Bolton had an excellent, if briefly occupied, perch as the third of Trump’s four national security advisers so far. That’s surely why he makes the president so nervous. Trump and his flunkies are raging about and suing to delay distribution of Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” set for release early next week. (“He’s broken the law,” Trump fumed on Monday, referring to the administration’s claims that Bolton is trafficking in classified information. “I would think that he would have criminal problems.”) But Martha Raddatz of ABC News has done a long interview with Bolton to be aired on Sunday. One way or another, the truth will come out.
Then again, the truth was never in. While most presidential administrations leak like kitchen faucets — or at worst, garden hoses — Trump’s leaks like Niagara Falls, as many unflattering books and much unsparing journalism have already shown. And while most presidential administrations have a few embittered exiles, Trump’s has a teeming diaspora of disgusted refugees, many of whom tattled as soon as they fled, either on the record or in whispers to reporters.
There are countries around the world, large and small, where aggressive government action and a mutual commitment by the population have gotten the coronavirus pandemic under control. The United States is not one of them.
Well over 2 million Americans have been infected, over 115,000 of us have died, and rather than falling, our rates of new infections and deaths seem to have stabilized at horrifically high rates.
Yet now, in a propaganda effort that can only be described as obscene, the Trump administration is trying to convince us not only that the pandemic is all but behind us, but also that its spectacularly incompetent response has been a great triumph.
This will without a doubt go down as one of the worst presidential failures in American history. And we can see now that it had three distinct (if overlapping) phases. [..]
It will be nowhere more apparent than at Trump’s upcoming rally in Tulsa this Saturday. Local officials are pleading with him to cancel it, but he is determined to pack 20,000 people into an arena where they can shout and cheer and breathe each other’s air — and you can bet that almost none of them will be wearing masks, because that would just show that they aren’t devoted to the president who refuses to wear one himself.
This pandemic is an era-defining catastrophe, and it didn’t have to be this way. It’s almost impossible to imagine a president more ill-prepared, by virtue of experience and temperament and judgment, to handle it, and all our worst fears have come true. Don’t let him or any of his lackeys tell you otherwise.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
The Watergate scandal begins to unfold; The Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution; O.J. Simpson arrested in the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman; Singer Kate Smith dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect, they will go out of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way, they will go out of their way to make your life difficult.
A growing body of research suggests that some of the most widely adopted reform efforts have not succeeded at curbing police violence in the ways the policies intended.
Research into the use of body cameras by police officers has shown no statistical difference in behaviors or reduction in force when the cameras are on. Body cameras also haven’t stopped egregious killings, have rarely led to discipline or termination, and have almost never yielded charges or convictions.
In 2018, three years after Sacramento began a $1.5m body-camera initiative, officers fatally shot unarmed Stephon Clark in his family’s backyard. The release of the videos traumatized the family, but prosecutors ruled the killing was justified because officers thought his phone was a gun.
And over the years, police have mostly used footage to prosecute civilians, research shows: “Not only is it ineffective in stopping police violence, it actually expands the powers and surveillance capabilities of police,” said Mohamed Shehk, with the abolitionist group, Critical Resistance.
Policies aimed at preventing excessive force and protecting free speech rights at protests have similarly led to little change. In protests across the country this week officers from some of the same departments that enacted reforms were seen violating those policies.
In Austin, policy dictates that officers may use beanbag rounds to de-escalate potentially deadly situations or “riotous behavior” that could cause injury. But at one of the early protests after Floyd’s death, police fired a beanbag round at a 16-year-old boy’s head, even though he was alone on a hill far from officers, and appeared to be watching the events. His brother said the ammunition fractured his skull and required emergency surgery. “The policies certainly don’t allow you to shoot an unarmed child in the head for no reason,” said Emily Gerrick, managing attorney with the Texas Fair Defense Project.
In Los Angeles, protest footage analyzed by the LA Times appeared to show officers firing projectiles at someone’s head and firing from a moving vehicle, both of which are prohibited.
And although New York’s governor touted a new state law passed this week banning police use of chokeholds, others have called it “useless”, noting that the city police department had banned the practice in 1993, two decades before an officer placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold.
Studies have also come to mixed conclusions as to whether increasing the diversity of police forces has led to culture changes within those departments.
One researcher who interviewed hundreds of residents of Ferguson and Baltimore after the uprisings in 2015 found increased representation didn’t address structural and cultural problems within the departments that had created deep distrust among the population. Despite its relatively diverse force, Baltimore continued its “severe and unjustified disparities” in stops and arrests of black Americans, the justice department found in 2016.
When Eddie Johnson stepped up as Chicago police superintendent in 2016 following intense controversy over the killing of Laquan McDonald, he immediately faced backlash for saying he has never witnessed misconduct in 27 years on the job. But he promised to change the culture, saying a “cover-up is always worse than an incident”. Three years later, the mayor fired Johnson, saying he had been “intentionally dishonest” about a scandal in which he was found asleep in his car.
“People thought that being black he would understand systemic racism,” said Calida, the Chicago activist. “Having more racially diverse police isn’t going to help.”
A former Richmond, California, police chief, Chris Magnus, one of the first openly gay chiefs in the country, received national attention for his progressive strategies to reduce gun violence and for holding a Black Lives Matter sign in 2014. The department emphasized working with community members instead of punishing them. But two years later, the department was caught in a huge scandal involving officers’ sexual exploitation of a teenage girl. At least six officers were implicated, including the department’s chief of staff.
Efforts to train officers to more frequently use non-lethal force have also not stopped tragic killings . In 2017, Seattle insisted it had created a progressive model for crisis intervention and de-escalation training, aimed at finding ways to slow down situations, isolating people so they can’t harm others, and using non-lethal force.
But when Charleena Lyles called 911 to report a burglary, two officers showed up to her door, and within less than three minutes shot her dead in front of her one-year-old son, later claiming she was holding a knife. Both officers had completed the crisis training.
There is also minimal evidence that implicit bias trainings affect officers’ prejudiced behavior on the job, and some research suggesting they could even be counterproductive, making officers resentful and more entrenched in racist viewpoints. In San Jose, California, earlier this month, a black community activist who had trained police on implicit bias for years, and personally knew the chief and others, tried to de-escalate a confrontation between officers and protesters. Police shot him in the groin with a rubber bullet, possibly preventing him from having children.
These kinds of repeated scandals are reminders that misconduct, abuse and brutality aren’t isolated acts that reforms can fix, activists said.
“The issue is not a ‘bad apples’ problem,” said Alisa Bierria, an organizer with Survived and Punished, a prison abolition group. “There is something specific about the institution of policing that is intrinsically violent.”
That idea was exemplified this month in Buffalo when two officers were suspended after video showed them shoving a 75-year-old peace activist to the ground. More than 50 officers, the entire emergency response team, resigned from that unit after the suspension, apparently in support of the two colleagues.
In the wake of protests, a handful of US mayors have pledged to reallocate some funds from police, and many more have, once again, promised to improve policies.
But given the failure of many past reforms, a coalition of activists actively opposes such moderate policy shifts and argues the US needs more radical change, pointing at the failures of past reforms. These activists say that it would not only be a waste of the momentum of these global protests, but that continuing to rely on police departments to address their own violence will simply lead to ongoing harm.
They point at the continued power and influence of police unions and legal protections for police officers accused of wrongdoing and excessive force as barriers to change. If police and politicians who oversee law enforcement continue to adopt policies that focus on fixing individual behaviors, they say, it will not address institutional and deeply embedded cultural problems.
Instead, they are backing efforts to immediately reduce police power and size, as a way to move toward dismantling police departments and creating different models of safety.
“Reform is only a way to steal more resources from the community,” said Kristiana Rae Colón, a Chicago playwright and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective.
Very simple. Zero tolerance (hey, if it works for kids it will work with Cops). If your Body Camera “fails” and you don’t notice it and report back to the Station for a replacement?
Perhaps you consider it a rather unmelodic and puzzling Beatles tune.
Well then, you’re probably not as crazy and homicidal as Charlie Manson.
Charles Manson often spoke to the members of his “family” about “Helter Skelter” in the months leading up to the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in August 1969, an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and whites. This “chimerical vision involved reference to music of the Beatles, particularly songs from their 1968 double album The Beatles (commonly known as “the White Album”), and to the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Manson and his followers were convicted of the murders based on the prosecution’s theory that they were part of a plan to trigger the Helter Skelter scenario.
But a lot of people are, and they are heavily armed.
Alicia Gee said she was preparing on a cheerful Sunday morning not for church but for a demonstration “long overdue in my little town.”
“A demonstration to show my neighbors there are people who care, to show my very monochromatic town that Black Lives Matter,” said Gee, who identified herself as a lifelong resident of the village of Bethel, Ohio — population roughly 2,800. It was a testament to the wide reach of the movement against racism and police brutality convulsing the country since George Floyd’s death in police custody, weeks of demonstrations that have swept from cities to suburbs and tiny Midwestern towns that haven’t seen protests in decades.
But the 80 or so expected demonstrators ended up dwarfed Sunday afternoon by some 700 counterprotesters — motorcycle gangs, “back the blue” groups and proponents of the Second Amendment, village officials said. Some carried rifles, a local news station reported, while others brought baseball bats and clubs. Police say they are investigating about 10 “incidents” from the clashes that followed, including a demonstrator being punched in the head.
By Monday evening — after another tense day of faceoffs — the mayor had imposed a curfew while citing “the threat of continued and escalating violence,” and Gee had a new message. “It is not a time for any type of Black Lives Matter supporters to be in Bethel,” she said in a video posted to Facebook. “It’s not safe.”
“Our purpose was not to create division in our community, and right now, that division has been just exploded,” she said, urging the mayor to “stand up” and denounce the people who she said had flocked to Bethel not to exercise their First Amendment rights but to “incite fear and hatred.”
…
Gee, a teacher, has told the Cincinnati Enquirer that she did not think of Sunday’s gathering as a protest — the Facebook event was called “Bethel’s Solidarity with Black Lives Demonstration.”
“I guess in my mind, we only think about protests happening in the city,” she told the Enquirer. “I’ve always gone to cities to protest. And then to see that something was happening in Hazard — I was like, if Hazard, Kentucky, can have a protest, Bethel can have something.”
But she wrote on social media that she was driven to the streets by the deaths that have rallied people around the country to protest police violence against black Americans.
“The events of the last few weeks [have] made it perfectly clear to me it’s time for my comfort to be put by the wayside, it is time for me to use my body, my voice, and my [privilege] to show my town that it is not ‘fine,’ that it’s not just ‘city folks’ that have the right to peacefully assemble, and that Black Lives Matter even if there are just a few in our town,” she wrote.
…
All six of Bethel’s police officers were on duty at the demonstration Sunday, according to village officials. Some county deputies were scheduled to help, but most were pulled away on an urgent call at the last minute, they said. And those who remained were stretched thin by violence initiated by the counterprotesters, mostly shoving, Dotson said.
One video, which the poster said showed his “niece getting pummeled by bikers,” captured an altercation in the crowd amid chants of “Blue lives matter!” and “All lives matter!”
“This ain’t Seattle!” a man yells in another video. “We’re not in a Democratic state here!”
Bethel resident Abbi Remers wrote on Facebook that her brother was “sucker-punched from behind.”
“Counterprotesters started walking down on the other side of the street from up town, yelling obscenities and threatening us … ripping signs out of our hands, ripping the hats and masks off of our faces, ripping things out of our pockets,” she wrote, above a photo of a man’s bloody face.
People disbelieve me when I say this is what is coming, win or lose in November. I certainly hope I am wrong but believe me I’ll be standing close to the egress.
Protesters in Albuquerque wrapped a chain around the neck of a bronze statue and began tugging and chanting, “Tear it down,” shortly before sunset Monday. Their efforts to pull down a monument to Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate suddenly stopped as four shots rang out.
Most people instinctively turned toward the noise, videos from the scene show. A few screamed. Just yards away, a group of men sporting quasi-military garb and carrying semiautomatic rifles formed a protective circle around the gunman.
The gunshots, which left one man in critical but stable condition, have set off a cascade of public outcry denouncing the shooting and the unregulated militia presence. On Tuesday morning, the Albuquerque Police Department announced that detectives had arrested Stephen Ray Baca, 31, in the shooting.
Baca was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and firearm enhancement, according to a criminal complaint.
The victim, Scott Williams, suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the torso and immediately received aid from bystanders, according to the criminal complaint. Authorities said the investigation is ongoing.
“The heavily armed individuals who flaunted themselves at the protest, calling themselves a ‘civil guard,’ were there for one reason: To menace protesters, to present an unsanctioned show of unregulated force,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said in a statement. “To menace the people of New Mexico with weaponry — with an implicit threat of violence — is on its face unacceptable; that violence did indeed occur is unspeakable.”
Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller (D) said the statue would now be speedily removed as an “urgent matter of public safety” until authorities determine a next step.
…
Police have released little information about the suspected shooter and have not said whether they think he has any connection to the armed group. In a Facebook post, New Mexico Civil Guard Curry County denied that the gunman was a member, writing that their affiliates responded to prevent further violence.
A spokesman for the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department on Tuesday confirmed that Baca’s father had worked for the department, but said he had not been employed there since 2001. “Despite false rumors, the suspect has no connection to BCSO,” Sheriff’s Deputy Connor Otero said in an email.
Otero declined to say whether Baca or the New Mexico Civil Guard were previously known to the sheriff’s department.
The New Mexico Civil Guard, which identified itself to a New York Times reporter covering the protest Monday, has a controversial history. The right-wing group has repeatedly shown up at Black Lives Matter protests in recent weeks with guns and in quasi-military garb.
On Facebook, the group has shared materials encouraging people to arm themselves, promoted military training on infantry tactics and “ambushing,” and shared multiple posts opposing the leveling of monuments to Confederate figures in the South and Oñate in New Mexico. Members of the group recently told the Eastern New Mexico News that their aim was to protect businesses from damage during protests. They said they had been in contact with police and were following guidance given to them by officials.
The FBI announced Tuesday that Steven Carrillo, the U.S. Air Force sergeant who allegedly murdered law enforcement officers in California during protests earlier this month, was associated with the right-wing Boogaloo movement, and that Carrillo chose the timing of his attacks to “take advantage of a time when this nation was mourning the killing of George Floyd.”
Last week, Carrillo was charged with murder after he ambushed Santa Cruz deputies and threw pipe bombs at police on June 6, killing Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller and wounding four other officers.
On Tuesday, the FBI announced Tuesday that Carrillo has also been federally charged with the murder of federal security officer Pat Underwood, who was killed in a drive-by shooting on May 29 in Oakland.
A suspected accomplice, Robert Alvin Justus Jr., has been arrested as well.
Justus was allegedly the driver of the van used in both the Oakland Federal Building shooting and the Santa Cruz attack.
Before he was apprehended, Carrillo reportedly scrawled the word “boog” and “I became unreasonable” in blood on the hood of a car.
“Boog” is short for boogaloo, which, according to NBC News, is a far-right anti-government movement that began on the extremist site 4chan and aims to start a second American civil war.
The phrase “I became unreasonable” has seemingly become a meme in public Boogaloo communities on Facebook.
Authorities say they also found a “boogaloo” patch in the van the duo used.
During Tuesday’s press conference, FBI agent Jack Bennett said Carrillo and Justus purposefully chose the protest as the locality of the killing to blend in better and to take advantage of community grief over the police killing of George Floyd. “There is no evidence that these men had any intention to join the demonstration in Oakland … They came to Oakland to kill cops,” Bennett said. Carrillo has been charged with 19 felonies related to the attack, and the charges carry enhancements of “lying in wait,” which means that Carrillo will be eligible for the death penalty. However, prosecutors have not said if they will pursue death. According to an ATF official, the weapon used in the fatal shootings was a homemade so-called ghost gun without a serial number. “This firearm is a machine gun with a silencer attached to its barrel,” said the official.
What? You didn’t know you can build an AR-15 out of a Receiver and replacement parts?
The Receiver is also a replacement part.
Attorney General William Barr and other top government officials, including President Trump, have frequently blamed Antifa activists for the violence stemming from recent demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. However, last week NPR published a review of court documents of 51 individuals facing federal charges related to protests, and none is alleged to have links to the Antifa movement. Among all the cases brought by the Justice Department thus far, the only extremist group mentioned in court documents is the right-wing “Boogaloo movement.”
“Elements of The Boogaloo have evolved from a gathering of militia enthusiasts and Second Amendment advocates into a full-fledged violent extremist group, which inspires lone wolf actors and cell-like actors alike,” said Joel Finkelstein, director of the Network Contagion Research Institute. “Given recent events and the inability of law enforcement to grasp and intercept this new mode of distributed terror, we think an increase in these kinds of violent attacks against police are almost inevitable.”
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Rayshard Brooks should be alive today, not dead at the hands of a trigger-happy Atlanta police officer after Brooks panicked and resisted a drunken driving arrest. The people who are attempting to justify Brooks’s killing aren’t convincing anyone. But they are illustrating just how much work we have to do to redefine what we want out of policing and to make clear that yes, black men’s lives matter even when they get drunk and fall asleep in a Wendy’s drive-through lane.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was wrong Sunday, on “Face the Nation,” when he said of Brooks’s killing: “That situation is certainly a far less clear one than the ones that we saw with George Floyd and several other ones around the country.”
The ifs, ands and buts of the Brooks case should not be seen as mitigating factors but as counts in the indictment of a system that treats African Americans — and black men especially — as less than fully human. [..]
How often are white Americans killed by police for falling asleep in their cars at fast-food restaurants? Or for paying for items in a store with a bogus $20 bill, as Floyd allegedly did? Or for minding their own business in their own homes, like Breonna Taylor, who was shot to death during a no-knock raid? Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, murdered nine innocent African Americans at Mother Emanuel AME Church, and police managed to capture him alive. Brooks wounded a police officer’s pride and appears to have been executed for it.
Brooks’s encounter with the police was complicated, but whether his killing is justified is not “less clear.” Black lives are still disposable. And as long as there is no justice, there must be no peace.
After all these years, Hertz is No. 1 again. Not in market share: The car-rental company is a distant second to Enterprise. But Hertz has become Exhibit #1 of the madness that has been sweeping the stock market in these times of Covid-19 — a madness that may do considerable harm, not because stock prices themselves matter all that much, but because Donald Trump and his minions treat the stock market as a measure of their success.
About Hertz: Last month the company, which is deeply in debt and has seen its business plunge amid the pandemic, filed for Chapter 11 protection. This is a form of bankruptcy that keeps a company operating by restructuring its debts.
But while companies that enter Chapter 11 often survive, their stockholders are normally wiped out. So Hertz stock should have become more or less worthless.
Sure enough, Hertz’s stock price fell from more than $20 in February to less than $1 in early June. But then a funny thing happened: Investors suddenly piled into the stock, driving it up by more than 500 percent. And Hertz — in bankruptcy! — announced plans to raise money by selling more stock.
The Hertz story was just one example of a broader phenomenon. The run-up in stock prices that took place between mid-May and Thursday’s sudden plummet was driven, to an important extent, by investors rushing into very dubious companies — what one observer called a “flight to crap.”
The sudden, rapid embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement by white people is a function of the undeniable brutality of George Floyd’s videotaped killing. But public opinion has also moved left on racial issues in reaction to an unpopular president who behaves like a cross between Bull Connor and Andrew Dice Clay.
And the thrilling 6-3 decision the Supreme Court just issued upholding L.G.B.T. equality wouldn’t be as devastating to the religious right if it had happened under a President Clinton.
Before Monday, you could legally be fired for being gay, bisexual or transgender in 26 states. Now the court has ruled that gay and transgender people are protected by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex. The decision has extra cultural force because it was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, and joined by the conservative chief justice John Roberts. [..]
The phrase “But Gorsuch” is shorthand for how conservatives justify all the moral compromises they’ve made in supporting Trump; controlling the Supreme Court makes it all worth it. So there’s a special sweetness in Gorsuch spearheading the most important L.G.B.T. rights decision since the 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
This isn’t simply Schadenfreude. The fact that this momentous ruling was written by a right-wing judge sends a message that progress on L.G.B.T. rights will be very hard to reverse.
His made-for-TV rallies can be matters of life and death.
Once again, President Trump is taking heat for treating the presidency like a branding exercise.
This time, instead of brandishing a Bible he doesn’t read next to a church he doesn’t attend, the president is resuming huge, made-for-TV campaign rallies. The first is set for Saturday in Tulsa, Okla. It will take place in a 19,000-seat arena that, in deference to the coronavirus pandemic that’s still raging, had canceled all other events through the end of July.
For Trump’s triumphal return, his campaign has decided that no social distancing is required. He wants this to be a spectacle, packed with as much noisy adoration as possible.
But whatever risks those attending might incur, Team Trump is taking steps to ensure that it bears none. All rally attendees must sign a liability waiver holding the campaign legally blameless in the event that people subsequently fall sick. Or drop dead. [..]
Now Mr. Trump is thinking even bigger — and demanding greater risk from his most faithful followers. From a public health standpoint, resuming large, crowded, indoor rallies is madness. But the president is not content simply to endanger the lives of his supporters. He is demanding they sign away their rights for the privilege.
As promised, Mr. Trump continues to disrupt and redefine presidential norms. Downward.
In response to this surge, Americans living in our polarized political culture are pointing the finger at each other. Conservatives are opportunistically blaming the anti-racism protests spreading across both big urban areas and small towns. Liberals, on the other hand, are casting a gimlet eye on Americans who have crowded into outdoor spaces at bars and restaurants in states that have allowed those establishments to reopen. [..]
But whether those engaging in corona-shaming are on my political “team” or not, my heart sinks to see it. People need to stop blaming each other. Instead, we should focus our ire on Trump and the Republicans, who have put us in this untenable choice between indefinite lockdown and the coronavirus spreading unchecked.
The lockdown was never supposed to be indefinite.
The lockdown was supposed to be a temporary emergency measure, put in place so that the federal government could draft a long-term plan to ramp up testing and tracing, as well as medical response, so the country could be reopened in a safer manner and our health care systems wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Abraham Lincoln says America cannot remain divided over slavery; Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space; Deadly Soweto riots erupt in South Africa; Ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defects.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
It is an everyday struggle to neither fall into despair nor explode in anger.
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the massive wave of protests that have swept the country and the world, New York State on Friday passed a package of policing reforms, banning chokeholds and opening police disciplinary records, among other things.
After signing the bills into law, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at one of his coronavirus news conferences: “You don’t need to protest, you won. You accomplished your goal. Society says you’re right, the police need systemic reform.”
Cuomo’s statement betrays a fundamental understanding of this moment.
Yes, the package of bills he signed, and the steps being taken in other cities and states, represent movement in the right direction on the issue of policing, but people aren’t only in the streets because of a single killing or a single issue.
People are marching as a way of screaming, a way of exhaling pain, as an enormous group catharsis.
This isn’t only about the pain of police brutality, it’s about all the pain. This is about all the injustice and disrespect and oppression. This is about ancestry and progeny.
For that to happen, some monuments — and the historical myths they supported — are going to have to come down.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that a nationwide protest over police brutality would, for some, become a reason to take action against Confederate statues and other controversial monuments. But it has. In just the last week, protesters have knocked down Confederate statues in Richmond, Va., Nashville and Montgomery, Ala., as well as monuments to Christopher Columbus in Boston and St. Paul, Minn.
This is because the George Floyd protests are not just about police violence. They’re about structural racism and the persistence of white supremacy; about the unresolved and unaddressed disadvantages of the past, as well as the bigotry that has come to dominate far too much of American politics in the age of Trump. Born of grief and anger, they’re an attempt to turn the country off the path to ruin. And part of this is necessarily a struggle over our symbols and our public space.
Another way to put this observation is that police brutality, the proximate cause of these protests, is simply an acute instance of the many ways in which the lives of black Americans (and other groups) are degraded and devalued. And while the most consequential form this degradation takes are material — the Covid-19 crisis, for example, has revealed to many Americans the extent to which black lives are still shaped by a deep racial inequality that leaves them disproportionately vulnerable to illness and premature death — there are also many symbolic statements of black worth, or the lack thereof, out there for all to see.
John Bolton made a mistake. It’s not the one you may think it is.
The former national security adviser’s memoir about his experiences working for President Trump will arrive on June 23. For months, the book has triggered criticism that Bolton put commercial profit over country by saving his depiction of Trump for the book, instead of providing it under oath during Trump’s impeachment proceedings last winter. A new wave of such criticism hit Bolton on Friday, when his publisher revealed more about what’s in the book. [..]
If Bolton was trying to preserve and enhance the commercial value of his manuscript by avoiding testifying, he likely blundered: More people may well be dissuaded from buying the book than will rush to snap it up.
But Bolton’s supposed cash-over-country motive actually makes little sense at all.
Imagine the book Bolton could have written had he testified. Not only could he have told the story of Trump’s malfeasance, but he also could have depicted his own courage in coming forward, along with the possibly dramatic consequences. He might have changed history — and could have told that story firsthand. That would have been a blockbuster for the ages. John Dean’s “Blind Ambition” spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list, and copies of its 40th anniversary edition remain available for purchase. Had Bolton been motivated purely by profit or even simple self-aggrandizement, he could have maximized both by testifying.
Yet Bolton didn’t. The question is why. It wasn’t because Bolton feared Trump; he plainly does not. The promotional materials for his book, which tell us Bolton is perfectly happy to brand Trump an unfit, self-absorbed menace to America’s security, make that clear.
Muriel E. Bowser is mayor of the District of Columbia.
The moment I decided to create Black Lives Matter Plaza was when I came face to face with a line of federal police blocking a street in my legal jurisdiction. I was downtown with members of my Interfaith Council to pray for wisdom and peace. Here we were in my hometown, in the capital of the United States of America, with people all around us protesting for change, demanding reforms to the racist and broken systems that killed George Floyd and so many black Americans before him. But instead of bringing the country together, the federal government was blocking the streets. It was clear the president was doing everything he could to tear us apart.
Just a few nights before my walk downtown, federal helicopters flew dangerously low to frighten and disperse protesters in streets of the nation’s capital. Like a scene from a dystopian movie, Americans saw images of soldiers in camouflage arrayed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Units of federal law enforcement officers lacking any identifying insignia roamed downtown.
This blatant degradation of our home right before my own eyes offered another reminder — a particularly powerful one — of why we need statehood for the District. Another reminder that the fight for statehood cannot be separated from the fight for racial justice.
The president is the best thing that ever happened to the corporate elite, a distraction on the lines of the old Jim Crow
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, took the knee last week before cameras at a branch of his bank. Larry Fink, CEO of giant investment fund BlackRock, decried racial bias. Starbucks vowed to “stand in solidarity with our black partners, customers and communities”. The Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO, David Solomon, said he grieved “for the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and countless other victims of racism”.
And so on across the highest reaches of corporate America, an outpouring of solidarity with those protesting brutal police killings of black Americans and systemic racism.
But most of this is for show. [..]
Half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr observed much the same about the old southern aristocracy, which “took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”
Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy, and not just because he has given them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.
He has also stoked division and racism so that most Americans don’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, won’t notice giant tax cuts and bailouts for big corporations and the wealthy while most people make do with inadequate schools and unaffordable healthcare, and don’t pay attention to the bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.
The only way systemic injustices can be remedied is if power is redistributed. Power will be redistributed only if the vast majority – white, black and brown – join together to secure it.
