Seth Meyers on Trump and the police reaction to the protests

He says that the police are lashing out violently because the protests have had an impact. More and more people are coming out for the demonstrations and public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the protestors.

He also emphasizes that the rising stock market reveals what many of us have been saying for years, that the stock market has no relationship to the lives of most people but is just something that measures the how well the wealthy are doing. And it appears that they are doing very well indeed despite the pandemic and the turmoil.

Powerful show on police brutality

On Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver devoted the entire show to the need for police reform in the US and what the options are. It is an excellent show about what needs to be done to deal with the toxic police culture in the US that has led to so much brutality. One of the things he focuses on is the very negative role played by police unions.

I am really glad that so many white, Hispanic, and Asian groups have identified with and joined in the protests. That is a sign of hope because we need a broad multi-racial and multi-ethnic and multi-generational coalition to get real change.
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A must-see video from Hasan Minhaj

Hasan Minhaj has a special episode where he lets loose his outrage at what has happened as a result of the George Floyd murder. During this 12-minutes clip, he also takes the Asian community to task for our hypocrisy and racism, taking advantage of all the benefits that we got because of the civil rights struggle led by the black community at great cost, while sitting on the sidelines or condemning the protests when the black community reacts to being under siege.

He does not mince his words. His anger is palpable. He speaks the truth.

Incidentally, Minhaj must have made this earlier yesterday because later in the day Minnesota state attorney general Keith Ellison did exactly what Minhaj urged him to do. He upgraded the murder charge against Derek Chauvin from third-degree murder to second-degree murder and charged the other three police officers on the scene with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. All four are now in custody.

Mail-in voting

For some reason, Trump and the Republicans are dead set against mail-in voting, constantly repeating some crackpot theory about how it will lead to massive fraud though studies have repeatedly shown that voting fraud in the US is almost non-existent and that committing such fraud with mail-in ballots is not only hard to pull off but the reward is hardly worth the risk of a felony prosecution.

I think that their opposition is based more on the general attitude of Republicans that making voting harder will discourage poor and minority communities from voting, which is their only hope of clinging on to power, hence all their attempts at making voting more onerous in so many ways. But in the case of mail-in voting they may be hurting their own cause more, since the older white people that make up so much of their base are more likely to want to mail in their ballots.
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Instagram

I do not have an Instagram account and thus have never been to the site or used it in any way. All that I know about it comes from what people tell me and what I read in the media. It seems to be a favored platform for so-called ‘influencers’, people who use their accounts to promote products and in order to more effectively do so portray their lives in an unrelentingly upbeat way.

(Pearls Before Swine)

(Pearls Before Swine)