ACAB

A police officer in Kansas stirs up outrage by posting a photo of a McDonald’s coffee cup labeled with the words “fucking pig”. He made it all up. He claims it was “just a joke”. He has been dismissed from the police force.

A class of correctional officers in training (prison guards, that is) included all of the members giving a Nazi salute in the class picture, claiming it was “simply a greeting”, and that “there is nothing wrong with it, we have people of all colors and backgrounds in the picture and every one of them are participating.” The training officer, Byrd, also said that it was an honor because she was “a hard-ass like Hitler.” All of them, including two officers, have been fired.

As a capstone to this demonstration of historical ignorance, the cadets say they were just following orders.

The report states some cadets “only followed what they perceived to be an order from Instructor Byrd to do the ‘Hail Byrd’ for the photograph because they feared they would not graduate, or would be disciplined for failure to follow the order of a superior.”

These are not the worst things the police have done and are doing — murdering citizens for being black has to top that list. It does tell you that there is something deeply wrong in the training of the police, or the kind of people who sign up to “serve”–they seem to think they’ve joined up to be tinplate authoritarians.

Highly on-brand for a billionaire

The Bloomberg campaign claims to have discontinued this practice, but they were using prison labor to make campaign calls.

Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.

Sweet! It’s good to be in Minnesota, where we’ll be mostly ignored throughout the campaign season, but it must be reassuring to Iowans to know that some of the election noise they get dunned with is produced by slave labor.

Oh, not quite slavery: the prisoners get paid, sort of.

John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.

When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”

Let’s do the math. $7.25 an hour is $58 per day; if they work them 4 weeks per month, that would be about $1100 dollars per month, which isn’t much of a wage. But the prisons cap their earnings and skim off most of the money. In the worst case of limiting them to $20/month, the prison is making $1080 off their labor. In the best case, where they’re getting paid $27/day, the prison gets about half their earnings.

I wonder if there is some kind of profit motive driving mass incarceration in the United States? Nah, couldn’t be. That would be evil. This Republican, for instance, wouldn’t be evil, would he?

Does this man look like a terrorist to you?

No? A nebbish in glasses and a suit, especially a white nebbish, doesn’t fit your picture of a terrorist? Adjust your search image. That’s Matt Shea, an elected Republican representative from Washington state whose activities have been investigated in a report with this alarming conclusion.

Based on evidence obtained in this investigation, it is more probable than not that Representative Shea is likely to plan, direct and engage in additional future conflicts that could carry with them significant risk of bloodshed and loss of life. It is the professional opinion of the Investigators, that on a more probable than not basis, Representative Shea presents a present and growing threat of risk to others through political violence.

That conclusion was reached not by criticizing his badthink, but by looking at what he has actually done. We’re talking about more than just openly despising the federal government (I’m guilty of that one), but also actively conspiring with violent organizations, such as various militia groups.

He also used his position in the government to obtain and leak information about police responses to those terrorists to the terrorists. He’s also a Christian theocrat, of course: “Representative Shea unveiled the Biblical Basis for War that offered his view of God’s authorization for war. [At] the same meeting Representative Shea distributed the Restoration document which was his blueprint for rebuilding after the fall of the US Government.” The Biblical_Basis_for_War is, naturally, abortion, homosexuals, and those goddamned Commies.

The Seattle Times is calling for his expulsion from the legislature. I’m sure that will persuade his constituents in Spokane. For those not familiar with Washington state politics, the west side of the state, and especially Seattle, is the relatively wealthy, democratic, populous and urban side, while Spokane and the eastern side in general are rural, sparsely populated, agricultural, and very conservative; for sure, there are knees jerking hard in sagebrush country, and a recommendation from the Seattle Times will be reflexively opposed. Coincidentally, Shea also sponsors the idea of splitting the state in two, with a new state called Liberty formed from the most impoverished region in the state, but where Christian Dominionism could flourish.

One note of hope, though, is that it is Republican officials from the eastern side of the state who are begging that he be stripped of power. I guess there are limits to what kind of violent lunacy even Republicans will accept.

For the rest of us, absorb this important lesson. That bland doughboy at the top of this page is the real face of domestic terrorism.

How much longer must we put up with this?

No one is in doubt that this man is unfit for office, are they?

There has to be some medical/psychological reason to have him removed from office immediately. He is humiliating the whole country.

I’m not one of the grown-ups in the room

You should all know by now that my wife Mary is the mature adult at my house. While I fled to the movie theatre to watch a tired fantasy about space wizards, Mary stayed home to watch the Democratic debate and all the follow-up news stories — I think she eventually crawled into bed in the early hours of the morning. I don’t know what she thought of the candidates because she’s still unconscious in the other room.

I can guess, though. She’s very dedicated to getting Bernie elected. In fact, I’m beginning to fear the election because I’m inclined more towards Warren, but if Bernie loses there will be much anger and anguish here. If I didn’t do my part by voting for Bernie in the primary, I might get the icy glare of rage and death afterwards.

So while she is recovering from her binge mainlining politics last night, I turned to Amanda Marcotte to find out how the debate went down.

Klobuchar, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts all came across the actual grown-ups in the room. Sanders, as usual, impressed with his moral clarity. Klobuchar is an unapologetic centrist, but presented a strong case for her competence as a leader and ability to pull the levers of power to get things done. Warren, in particular, took advantage of the time to show off her earnest intelligence and in-depth knowledge of both policy and the strategies needed to get those policies passed.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I’d rather not see Klobuchar as the candidate, but she does have a reputation in her home state for being a tenacious fighter who would run a strong campaign. But I don’t want a centrist. Warren wins me over with her brains. Sanders really does have a strong moral vision of what is right and is probably the best anti-Trumper we’ve got.

Buttigieg, Steyer, Yang, and most of all Biden aren’t even in the running for space in my mind. I want them gone. I’d give more credibility to Castro and Booker, and they weren’t even on the stage, which tells you there’s another deep problem with the Democratic machine.

Impeachment? I’m not enthusiastic

Now if we were talking firing squads, guillotines, or rioting mobs tearing down every stick and brick of the White House, I might be roused enough to cheer. Today, though, I see a criminal running the country, an entire political party dedicated to corruption over democratic representation, and an electorate that wants to negate every aspect of human progress in the USA and celebrate the barbarity of oppression, so excuse me if I don’t get excited about plodding procedural maneuvering by bureaucrats cautious about protecting their privileges. Especially when I expect Republican sycophants to block any change, while continuing to pack the judiciary with incompetents and ideologues.

I expect my grandchildren will remember this era not for the clown in the oval office, but for the way we ignored real crises in the environment and civil rights, fueled by a selfish majority and short-sighted politicians. They’re going to wonder what was wrong with us that we didn’t storm the halls of power and change our course right now.

Oh, well. We’ve got a dedicated thread for discussing the infuriating political situation. Join in there! I just don’t have the heart anymore.

Why hasn’t Rush Limbaugh collapsed into deflated pile of canvas & sticks?

Ian Marsden

Like an empty gasbag should? I guess he’s still ranting on the radio, but I haven’t heard from him in years, and apparently he hasn’t mellowed or acquired the wisdom of age yet. He’s still one of those people who is responsible for some of the worst science denialism, like this:

The first thing to notice about Greta Thunberg is that she’s 16 years old. She claims she has Ansperger’s type — Ausperger’s — or autism — Asperger’s — some kind of problem in that area.

And so she is made the Person of the Year by Time magazine, which is what? A political news magazine. Greta Thunberg has been introduced into the political arena by the worldwide left, including the Democrat Party. They have made her a political figure. They do this on purpose.

So she’s out tweeting and politicizing, and she is free to lie and say whatever she wants to say about climate change and who’s responsible for it. And nobody is permitted to question her, you see, because she has — what did they call it? She is in the autism spectrum, so you can’t disagree, you can’t question, because she’s not well.

So. Much. Wrong.

Yes, Time Magazine’s person of the year is popular fluff chosen to sell magazines. It doesn’t mean much, except that it throws a certain kind of person into a tizzy. There is no “worldwide left”, it’s very disorganized, and the Democratic Party is a centrist political party at best, not at all aligned with the Left. Time Magazine is right-centrist outlet that is not controlled by the Left, nor does it lean Left by any sensible meaning of the word.

Greta Thunberg has achieved notoriety because she ably represents a scientific consensus, and is angry and vocal about the way the Old Guard has wrecked the environment and set us on a path to environmental catastrophe. This shouldn’t be an exclusively Leftist awareness; the only reason it has a political dimension is because the Right, including decrepit gasbags like Limbaugh, have made a refusal to recognize the consequences of our technological/industrial/capitalist society. Reality ought to be apolitical. Our process for dealing with reality is most definitely a political concern. But the Right is simply refusing to deal, denying the observable phenomena looming on the horizon and sweeping in fast.

Thunberg is autistic. That is simply a different way of thinking, and to label it as a “problem” or “not well” is disgraceful. She has made her autism a strength and has used her personality to present her ideas forcefully to the world community, and has constantly demonstrated her effectiveness as an advocate. Never has she hidden behind her nature to refuse to answer questions or to disallow any questioning. However, flatly declaring her ill to avoid addressing the problems she presents is not questioning her — if you want to criticize her, go ahead, discuss the evidence against global climate change.

Limbaugh can’t, because there isn’t any, and also because he’s an ignorant coward who’d rather label someone with a syndrome so he doesn’t have to face his shortcomings.