Unsightly Mental Blemishes

When it comes to November, it appears Senator Jodi Ernst (R-IA) remains vulnerable, according to a Civiqs Poll conducted for The Daily Kos:

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA)

1. If the election for U.S. senator from Iowa were held today, who would you vote
for?

Theresa Greenfield, Democrat 48%
Joni Ernst, Republican 45%
Someone else 3%
Unsure 3%

A Des Moines Register/MediaCom poll also puts Senator Ernst in the danger zone:

Fresh off a four-way primary race that drew millions in outside spending, Democrat Theresa Greenfield leads Republican Sen. Joni Ernst by 3 percentage points in Iowa’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows.

According to the poll, 46% of likely voters say they would back Greenfield if the election were held today, and 43% say they would back Ernst.

“This is definitely a competitive race,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the poll. She said the poll contains other “warning signs” for Ernst and noted that this is the first Iowa Poll conducted since Ernst first ran in 2014 in which she has trailed her general election opponent.

Vulnerable but not yet firmly put in the upset column, unlike Senator McSally (R-AZ), whose deficit continues to widen into double digits as November approaches. If Ernst’s gap becomes larger, will Ernst decide to throw President Trump under the bus and strike out on her own, showing independence and disapproval for his behaviors, or would that be political suicide? In the face of the unexpectedly low turnout for the Tulsa Trump rally, it might be a viable option.

A reader responds to my remarks that traffic stops shouldn’t necessarily require the officer carry a gun:

Sorry Hue, this one is plain dumb.

The Castile incident had problems on both sides I give Castile 60% of the blame, maybe a bit more, and it could have just as easily resulted in death for your unarmed traffic stop only cop. Read the report on the death again. Hell, even use the CNN one – that was pretty accurate – if you want to avoid conservative bias. The Wikipedia entry is also valid. If indeed Castile had been stopped :”more than 40 times” in that area, he knew the drill. Dunno about you, but on the rare times I’m stopped by the time the officer gets to my car I have my license and insurance in hand, with hands on top of the steering wheel and window down, with wallet on dash in case he needs anything else. Castile knew that, but probably because he was so wasted he didn’t do that, and instead says “I have a gun” and goes digging on his strong side for his wallet, failing to stop the motion when the officer yells at him to do so. Change this scenario to the all to common one where a driver or passenger _does_ go for a gun, and your unarmed cop has about two seconds to run for cover before becoming a statistic. The whole unarmed police in the US argument is completely invalid.

I’m guessing you have no one in your family who’s a LEO? Or know anyone who is? ANY incident can go from calm to deadly in the space of a few seconds. And the “we’ll have social workers respond to mental illness calls” and “medical staff respond to OD calls” is also deadly. We already have too many ambush setups in the US against responders. The police are the first response people to, among other things, evaluate the security of the situation. In my EMT-B training it was very explicit: Make sure the police have secured a situation before entering it. If you send medical before police you risk completely helpless medical staff. Sorry, I reiterate, this was plain dumb.

I must admit, I’m fascinated by how my correspondent has been trained to perceive the cops as a trigger-happy, dangerous group who must be carefully managed, and I don’t like it. I don’t have any sort of cure for it, but I deplore it and I think it is symptomatic of the current distrust between the citizenry and the cops these days.

Concerning the actual incident, my reader’s summary agrees with my recollection of the various summaries I’ve read since the incident. Yeah, it wasn’t smart to be high while driving, and carrying while driving also seems unwise. But he apparently was complying with the law by announcing he had it.

Whether or not it’s dumb to not send armed police to all incidents appears to be already up for experiment, as I noted in this post when corresponding with a different reader:

* The “Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets” (CAHOOTS) of Eugene Oregon. CAHOOTS is a part of the 911 system such that they will be selected as the first responders — ahead of police — for situations involving mental health. Eugene Police Officers say ” [CAHOOTS provides] resources not available to the ordinary cop…They are an invaluable resource”.

I haven’t had time to track down CAHOOTS to see if it’s still in use and its record. OK, I did a quick search, it appears to be associated with the White Bird Clinic of Eugene, OR:

CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) provides mobile crisis intervention 24/7 in the Eugene-Springfield Metro area. CAHOOTS is dispatched through the Eugene police-fire-ambulance communications center, and within the Springfield urban growth boundary, dispatched through the Springfield non-emergency number. Each team consists of a medic (either a nurse or an EMT) & a crisis worker (who has at least several years experience in the mental health field). CAHOOTS provides immediate stabilization in case of urgent medical need or psychological crisis, assessment, information, referral, advocacy & (in some cases) transportation to the next step in treatment. CAHOOTS offers a broad range of services, including but not limited to: …

This link has some articles on CAHOOTS from 2019. There’s a Wikipedia page, but I don’t see any sort of assessment of results. This link suggests they have a long history, actually.

On July 4, 1989, CAHOOTS began its first shift funded by the [Eugene Police Department] with a second-hand beat-up van. When emergency dispatch received calls that required help but not law enforcement, they routed the call to CAHOOTS. At first, the group worked 40 hours a week, and they have since expanded to 24-hour service, four crisis vans and a total of nearly 50 employees.

1989? And I’ve never heard of them. You’d think Whole Earth Review would have mentioned them at least once. But with that sort of longevity and apparently moving on to other cities, according to Wikipedia, such as Austin, TX, Denver, Oakland, NYC, and others, sending in specialized groups rather than armed police may be a compelling model. Perhaps not for traffic stops, although I still am dismayed at the entire procedure my correspondent feels is necessary, but perhaps for some situations.

My Arts Editor wants morning glories, but she started with a couple of already-growing specimens, not from seed. They seem to be moving right along.

Gotta like that light blue one.

Science folks often try to be precise by admitting to a certain imprecision, generally expressed as “plus / minus”, or ±. You see it in polling, in measurements of physical quantities, just about anything. This, however, seems a trifle excessive when it comes to biology:

Puertasaurus

“I don’t think the scaling equations are wrong,” says Wedel. “I think they’re imprecise.” The main problem is the margin of error, which can be 30 tonnes or more for a gigantic sauropod. Despite its imprecision, the method is popular among dinosaur palaeontologists because it is easy to use, even without a good understanding of sauropod anatomy. They aren’t necessarily concerned by its shortcomings. Biologically and behaviourally speaking, a 30-tonne sauropod was probably similar to a 60-tonne one, says Campione, and pinning down body mass more precisely arguably has limited scientific value. [“The biggest dinosaur ever may have been twice the size we thought,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (13 June 2020, paywall)]

So, off by 30 tonnes for a 30 ton sauropod? Perhaps ±15 tonnes for an estimate of 45 tonnes, just so we don’t end up including an infamously weightless dinosaur when we’re doing the math?

ooof.

And that Puertasaurus above? Deduced from …

[The only specimen] consists of four well-preserved vertebrae, including one cervical, one dorsal, and two caudal vertebrae.

Visually, again from Wikipedia …

I have no problem with deduction, but working from all of four – monstrous – vertebra seems amazing.

You may think you know the situation, but here’s Kimberly Latrice Jones to set you straight.

Regarding the much-discussed Tulsa, Oklahoma Trump Rally last night, Heather Cox Richardson reports:

The other big story today was, of course, Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, designed to jumpstart his campaign and reunite him with the crowds that energize him. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with the president himself, has spent days crowing that almost a million tickets had been reserved, and the campaign had built an outside stage for overflow crowds.

But far fewer than the 19,000 people Tulsa’s BOK Center could hold showed up: the local fire marshal said the number was just under 6,200. Young TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (so-called “K-Pop stans”), along with Instagram and Snapchat users, had quietly ordered tickets to prank the campaign. The technological savvy of their generation has turned political: they knew that the Trump campaign harvests information from ticket reservations, bombarding applicants with texts and requests for donations. So they set up fake accounts and phone numbers to order the tickets, then deleted the fake accounts. They also deleted their social media posts organizing the plan to keep it from the attention of the Trump campaign.

And while it’s great to make this President, corrupt as he is, look this bad, it makes me wonder about the character of future contests. More of the no-holds-barred corruption of each others’ events? Or will technology be developed to stop it?

Or will everyone who’s actually an American just stop being assholes?

There is a hidden blessing in the reduced attendance, artificial or not: that’s fewer people available to catch and spread Covid-19, in a space that’s not as crowded as anticipated. It’s not worth breathing the traditional sigh of relief, but it’s still a slight blessing, saith the agnostic.

Kevin Drum:

But worst of all, it sounds like Trump’s schtick is boring. Apparently he can’t even get much applause when he attacks Joe Biden.

Rayne on EmptyWheel notes another potentially impeachable offense:

He’s made comments before about the number of tests correlating to the number of cases. Comic Sarah Cooper has famously riffed on this.

But this time he’s expressed an intent to withhold health care from the public for personal aims — to keep the reported number of cases artificially low, without regard to the effect this would have on actual reduction of COVID-19 cases.

Aside from revealing again he’s so utterly toxic, this statement needs investigation. It’s impeachable if he both demanded a reduction or slow-down in tests, especially if he did so for the purposes of improving his polling numbers.

More generally, the campaign is not drawing rave reviews. Here’s National Review’s Andy McCarthy:

It’s an old story: fighting the next war with the last war’s battle plan, as if prior success guarantees future victory. So here was President Trump after the Supreme Court gave him another thumping on Thursday, vowing to release “a new list of Conservative Supreme Court Justice nominees” in September — i.e., around the back stretch galloping toward the Election Day finish line.

The president reasons: “Based on decisions being rendered now, this list is more important than ever before (Second Amendment, Right to Life, Religious Liberty, etc.).” Lest we miss the characteristically Trumpian subtlety, he adds, “VOTE 2020!”

If you needed a laugh to get you through just-another-day-at-the-Apocalypse, our “Conservative” president then proceeded to post no fewer than 21 tweets describing the combined hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure spending he plans to shovel out to states he hopes to win in November.

By the way, with Trump in the White House and the McConnell-led Republican Senate having slyly buried periodic public debates over the debt limit, the nation is now over $26 trillion in the red. If you’re keeping score, that’s an increase of over $6 trillion since January 20, 2017. Obama spending was unprecedented, but Trump is on pace to exceed it. And don’t tell me about the unforeseen coronavirus crisis; debt was already accumulating mountainously before the lockdown, and the president keeps saying more infrastructure spending is imperative — it may be the only thing he and congressional Democrats can agree on.

And Steve Berman on the conservative The Resurgent (home of Erick Erickson) with an early historical overview of the debris field of President Donald J. Trump:

President Trump’s irresistible urge regarding institutions is to smash them. Whatever useful purpose they serve is only important to Trump when those purposes serve him. One example, the “police” as a concept is great when Trump is preaching Law & Order, but the FBI (and by extension, the DOJ) is a Deep State hive of Obamaites shovel-ready to bury the glorious reign of MAGA.

Another: the Supreme Court is the most important institution in America, carving legal protections for Americans besieged by liberal activist judges who create rights out of whole cloth. That is, until “but Gorsuch” sides with the enemy, forcing us to navel gaze at our conservative values as we are betrayed by the institution.

Gotta love the lead-in, as well as the finish:

Trump’s presidency will, in hindsight, likely be framed as the old man kicking down the last of the fences established by the WWII veterans who craved order, institutions, and traditions to guide our culture. In turn, the mobs against Trump are fed by the same streak of hedonism and anti-institutional need to smash. This is the fruit of Trump’s tree.

Against this, the institutions, and those who maintain them, are pushing back for their very survival. This president, who needs the institutions to defend, protect and preserve the Constitution, continues to spend his days undermining the very thing he swore to protect.

Which all comes out to me as a description of Trump as an immature, self-centered brat. Back in 2016 when he was running, an old friend noted, rather in horror, that Trump exhibited all the characteristics of a pathological narcissist, and it appears that time has borne her out.

This truth is apparent to those who force themselves to stare at this President. But what about those who don’t, who still think he’s a heckuva President? CNN had interviews with three 2016 Trump supporters, and I was struck by how they seem unmoved by Trump’s missteps and failures. I think the first interview would be particularly useful for study by Democrats:

“We put Democrats in office and she turned around and forgot completely about us,” [Scott] Seitz told Van Jones back in 2016. “We are what makes this world go ’round. We built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars and for you to come through here and completely neglect us, we would have rather vote for anybody instead of her.”

Today, he’s very troubled by Trump’s reaction to the protests and walk to St. John’s Church.

“I think he handled it like an arrogant businessman that he is, showing lack of compassion for people. What he did out in front of the church and making those folks move and smoke bombs and tear gas or whatever it was. Just so he can get to that vista and have that shot of him holding that Bible up with that prop. … If he’s any form of religious guy like he says, then he wouldn’t have done that,” said Seitz, adding, “that was about the last straw for a lot of folks.”

Still, Seitz says while he has reservations, he plans to vote for Trump.

“I dislike Biden that much and don’t feel he’s going to lead our country. I only support him about 10%. Trump’s only about 25%,” he said.

Addressing his concerns might go far to bring his and his fellows to the Democratic side of things – but it can’t be empty. Just as black community concerns about police and system racism cannot be given a hand wave in the event of a Democratic win in November, neither can this guy’s.

And it’s worth talking about previously forbidden topics, such as nullifying free trade agreements. I recall the mainly libertarian arguments from years ago that free trade would reduce duplication of effort and accelerate the development of new technologies as nations specialized and concentrated on what they did well. While the accounting for these attributes holds up well, I believe, it’s time to ask if they are worth the unaccounted for negatives, and even if they are positives as well. Some factors include concerns Covid-19 has exposed about supply lines collapsing; the collapse of local farming communities as cheap foreign food floods markets; and the failure to retrain workers in local sectors that have been flooded with foreign goods.

Underlying much of this is the existence of a fabulously cheap cargo transit system which contributes to anthropogenic climate change.

All of these factors and more need to become part of a discussion that includes these dispossessed workers. Is free trade just another tool for the ultra-rich to simply increase the definitional lower limit of their category, leaving everyone else with little or nothing in their mad quest to accumulate more and more? It’s time to sit down and soberly tot up the results, good & bad, of free trade.

And I say this as someone who thought free trade sounded good when NAFTA was proposed.

Maybe someone whispered in the Administration’s ear about how bad this looks. In the first entry on this thread, I noted that the Administration’s refusal to release information on who was receiving Small Business Administration emergency loans, despite an earlier agreement, was simply another marker of corruption. Treasury Secretary and denizen of the Trump Swamp announced a reversal of policy:

It’s worth noting that police killings of unarmed civilians is not unique to the United States. Eleven months ago the death of Solomon Tekah unsettled Israel, as Mazal Mualem reported at the time in AL Monitor:

Tekah, 18, was killed on the night of June 30 in a public park in Kiryat Haim. The police officer who fired the shot said he was at the site with his family when he saw a group of young people fighting. He tried to break it up, but they started attacking him and even threw rocks at him. Feeling that his life was in danger, he pulled out his gun and fired a single shot into the ground. Tekah was killed by that shot.

The protest that erupted after Tekah’s funeral was one of the most violent Israel has ever seen. It continues to reverberate across the country and could erupt again when the investigation’s final findings are released. The protest is giving voice to a growing sense of distrust among weaker sectors of the population for the various law enforcement agencies, chief among them the police and the Department of Internal Investigations. For the Ethiopian community, these two bodies represent the institutionalized racism they face because of the color of their skin, more than anyone else. As the Ethiopian community sees it, the Department of Internal Investigations will always trample on their rights. Perhaps that is true, but even if it is not the case, feelings such as this point to an unhealthy and potentially volatile social situation. …

The killing of Tekah opened a Pandora’s box that refuses to be shut. Dozens of horrific stories of racism, beatings and false arrests directed at the Ethiopian community have been making the rounds over the last few days, both in the press and on social media. The worst of these describe violence and abuse by the police. “Shut down that tainted organization known as the Department of Internal Investigations!” was a popular chant at protests last week. It shows that there has been a complete breakdown of trust in the system.

Has the situation improved in Israel? From the AL Monitor email that caught my attention:

This month, the incoming deputy minister of public security, Gadi Yevarkan, a member of the Likud party and a child of Ethiopian immigrants, has proposed legislation to dismantle the Internal Affairs department and place it under the Justice Ministry.

His ally in the fight is Pnina Tamano-Shata, the first Israeli of Ethiopian origin to serve in the Knesset (parliament) and the minister of immigrant absorption.

“The very fact that Yevarkan and Tamano-Shata were appointed to senior positions in government is especially important to the fight against institutional racism,” Danny Zaken writes. “Their test will be whether they succeed in bringing about real change in the coming years.”

Perhaps they’re also endeavouring to take the difficult but necessary hike to remove racism.

More recent events in Israel-controlled Palestine (police killing), Tunisia (general racism), and concerning French sculptures insulting to Egypt are also noted.

Getting beyond our xenophobic natures will be a difficult but necessary task if we wish to avoid a blood-soaked future in which the vulnerable innocents are the victims.

I found the implicit and, in my mind, false assumptions of this statement to be revealing, if not surprising:

Two Republican-appointed members of the court, including Trump’s first pick, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., have made clear that their opinions will not always be predictable when it comes to issues important to Republicans. They each joined with liberal justices to defeat Trump administration priorities this week.

The court has also refused to take up cases for the next term that had been championed by conservatives, including cases on gun rights and California’s sanctuary cities law.

Semantic paraphasia:

John Gartner, a psychologist and a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote last year in USA Today that there are two signs of language skills deteriorating. “Semantic paraphasia” means you substitute an incorrect word for a correct one. For example, when Trump discussed the “origins” of the Mueller investigation, he said: “I hope they now go and take a look at the oranges, the oranges of that investigation, the beginnings of that investigation.” [“Trump is going to freak out when he sees this,”, Jennifer Rubin, WaPo]

Although I think there’s a better word or phrase, although I cannot think of it right now. The thing I notice is not that he’s using the wrong word, but the word, oranges, sounds a lot like the word he meants, origins.

Heavens knows I’ve done that a time or two.

And, in fact, the next paragraph gives me that phrase:

It’s shark vs chainsaw!

Sharknado (2013) is a gleefully mad little tale of tangled family dynamics, accentuated by sharks flying through the sky to remove meddlesome outsiders, as Fin Shepard battles through hurricanes and tornadoes on the coast of Los Angeles, both burdened with sharks which keep raining down on an incredulous population. Acting ranged from good to awful; special effects and stock footage from awful to excellent.

Yeah, it’s silly. And, if you’re in the mood for bloody fluff, fun.

I am so fucking tired of writing about Trump, but reading Professor Heather Cox Richardson this morning made me laugh, because it’s just becoming a TV comedy show: Trump’s the comedian, and Barr is his ludicrous little sidekick:

Trump tried to fire the US Attorney from the Southern District of New York [SDNY], Geoffrey S. Berman, who has managed a series of cases against Trump and his allies, including Trump fixer Michael Cohen, Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, and Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted for funneling Russian money to Republican candidates for office. Berman is reported to be investigating Trump’s finances, among many other things.

It happened like this: Attorney General William Barr issued a statement announcing that Berman would be stepping down and that Trump would nominate Jay Clayton to replace him. Clayton has never been a prosecutor. He is currently the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but before he took that position he was a lawyer who, among other things, represented Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank is the only bank that would work with Trump after his bankruptcies. It might have given him loans he did not repay, and the Russian money-laundering that landed the bank in legal trouble might have helped Trump.

Legal analyst and Congressional staffer Daniel Goldman noted that this whole scenario was unusual. Normally, when a US Attorney leaves, that person’s deputy takes over. Bringing in a replacement from elsewhere meant that “Trump/Barr did not want anyone at SDNY running the office—likely because there was a serious disagreement.”

But then things got crazier. Berman issued his own statement, saying “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.” …

What’s Berman saying? Well, it might be that Trump’s preference for “acting,” rather than Senate-confirmed, officials has come back to bite him. Berman was not Senate-confirmed; he is an interim U.S. Attorney. By law, the Attorney General can appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for 120 days. At the end of that time, the court can appoint that person indefinitely.

And SDNY, as Richardson notes, is the location of a number of potentially critical Trump investigations. Is Berman, appointed by Trump, even a donor to Trump during his initial campaign, a member in spirit of The Lincoln Project now? The Trump Administration’s timeline is filled with scandal after scandal, any one of which would have brought down a President with professions of honor; only a man of Trump’s lowly caliber would persevere. But it appears that former National Security Advisor John Bolton also has an opinion:

… but former National Security Advisor John Bolton suggested another reason in his forthcoming book: he apparently claims Trump assured Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan he would fill the SDNY with his own loyalists, which would enable him to do Erdogan a political favor.

Fethullah Gülen

And who is out on the East Coast? Old Erdoğan hated rival Fethullah Gülen, here seen in a separate plot involving Trump and discredited former National Security Advisor and potential prison inhabitant Michael Flynn. I don’t know if SDNY would be responsible for deportation proceedings against Gülen, which is the desire, last I heard, of Turkey and Erdogan, but it makes a lot of sense – if you trust Bolton. I do not.

The question would then be: What’s the payback for Trump? Or does Erdoğan have blackmail material on Trump? There’s still some puzzle pieces missing, and half a paragraph later I’m still not trusting Bolton, but this is certainly a compelling story, from DA Berman’s defiance of AG Barr right down to another attempt on the liberty, and probably the life, of Gülen. I shall be looking forward to the eventual reveal when it comes to his scandal, along with whatever straight line is given Barr. If there’s a God, surely he hates Barr.

And, if indeed Gülen’s fate is where this is heading, the character of the United States takes yet another step down in the eyes of the world.

Means matter.

In the interests of following up on the United States withdrawal from the World Health Organization is this:

Two weeks [after Trump’s announcement], no steps toward a formal withdrawal have been taken. A WHO spokesman told The Hill that the agency had received no formal notification that the United States would withdraw.

Senior WHO officials said they continue their relationships with American agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“We worked with U.S. colleagues at U.S. CDC, NIH and a number of academic institutions across the whole country in a variety of networks and different types of platforms since the beginning of the pandemic and that will continue,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, an American who oversees the WHO’s technical response to the coronavirus pandemic. [The Hill]

I recall discussing a former VP of Marketing with one of his employees, and the employee saying he’d never work for him again: He had no follow-through.

Which is to say, he doesn’t follow up with his plans. This is really a mark of incompetence, whether it’s business or government. Plans are built, announcements are made, and then you implement.

Sometimes, Trump doesn’t implement. He runs his mouth a bit because something inspires him while he’s in front of the microphone, but nothing comes of it.

Should we be relieved? Yes. Should we be happy? No. This is not leadership. This is self-indulgence, and it saps world confidence in our leadership, and in democracy itself, because we’re exhibiting just how badly the strongest democracy in the world can fail, how we can fall victim to gross incompetence in both the Executive and Legislative wings of government, with Judicial not far behind.

It makes the democratic model of government less attractive than it should be. Should we slip back to communism, or to Monarchies, or something even less savory than those two failed models? Or forward to something more exotic? I periodically get spam warning about microchips in our heads; all of a sudden, under the boot of incompetence, this seems more likely.

Beep beep beep raise your right hand and recite after your revered leader….

The same reader posted an addition to his first reply that I didn’t notice until posting my initial reply:

Case in point : newly released body cam footage of the Police killing in Atlanta makes clear that Rayshard Brooks did not have a weapon — he said he did not have a weapon and the officers confirmed this by patting him down.  Hence, had the response team been British bobbies without guns, there would not have been a killing last night.

My impression from the tape is that the violence didn’t start until the officers attempted to cuff him for, presumably, public intoxication. It’s not hard to see how an intoxicated black man, faced with handcuffs and menacing cops, would decide to make a break for it. It’s a bad decision caused by another bad decision, but given the societal context he’s in, it’s not surprising. The real solution is fixing society.

ALSO, I have heard (but not found the actual reference) that body cam footage has NOT led to more accountability by the police, or a reduction in police killings.

I’d very much like to see that pointer.

And while I’m on a hobby horse, the Right-Wing Extremist 2nd Amendment Gun Nuts & Weapon Manufacturers profiting therein — all are part of weapon proliferations such that police training in the US *has to* account for the possibility of a weapon at every turn — which is why officers wear the body armor, and are trained to react forcefully with their weapon if they are threatened.  Whereas in the UK & New Zealand the Bobbies mostly don’t have to worry about that.  Not saying that banning weapons stops its proliferation in the hands of wrong-headed people, but cutting off the oxygen to the 2nd Amendment Gun Nuts would go far to stop domestic killings, suicides, mass killings, and eventually (perhaps) a de-escelation of police having to train for urban warfare.

2nd Amendment absolutism, as well as misreading of the 2nd Amendment, accounts for far too many deaths in this nation. Having once been on the other side of the debate, although never an actual gun owner^[1], it’s not hard to fathom the misreadings, as well as the paranoia and forgetfulness in that it’s not The Government, but Our Government, the bad math involved, etc, all motivated by confirmation bias, which is to say critical thinking is not applied because the arguments back up the preferred conclusion.

¹ I’m waaaaay too clumsy to actually dare own a gun.

My apologies on the delay for this response. Generally, most responses are not time-sensitive; this one is. Unfortunately, it arrived just a couple of hours after my primary computer died, and my backup computer is permanently deficient in authoring tools. I’m finally caught up …

A reader writes concerning the suggestion that police officers provide their own insurance:

[…] I’m not ready to hand civil law enforcement over to private insurance company who can suspend coverage for reasons that don’t really make sense! That and I shudder to think of the increasing volumes of training police enforcement has to go through (e.g., “and now we turn to the practice section of how to adjust the handcuffs on a mom you stopped for a suspected DUI so that you can verify and then help her to deliver her baby safely before EMT arrives on-scene…)

To the first argument, I would respond that virtually every state has an insurance regulatory entity that should be capable of regulating the behavior of insurance company in this regard. Policies they enforce could be a matter of public comment and debate, as needed.

To the second argument, there may be some merit in what my reader suggests would happen. However, if the defund movement is implemented, a terrible name for what is basically the removal of certain responsibilities from police shoulders, then there would be time for more training.

And, again, it would fall under the purview of the insurance regulatory authority.

That said, in light of last night’s police killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta — who was sleeping off too much alcohol in his car at a Wendy’s parking lot — it isn’t liability insurance that stops that tragedy. There needs to be a response force that doesn’t carry guns so that the escalation has a ceiling that does not involve deadly force.

I agree! The problem may be deciding if they should be front-line, or on-call – and, if the latter, whether police culture would encourage or denigrate their use.

I understand that “defunding the police” can range from 0% to 100%, but the point of that discussion is not about zeroing out law enforcement; rather, it is all about rethinking law enforcement to find a better balance. For example:

* Bobby’s in England don’t carry guns — there is a whole lot less police killings as a result;

Technically, this is not true, at least as of 2017: “And yet more than 90 percent of [London’s] police officers carry out their daily duties without a gun. Most rely on other tools to keep their city safe: canisters of mace, handcuffs, batons and occasionally stun-guns.” [NBC News] And this technicality is useful, as the article continues: “Some of these gun-wielding officers patrol the city in pairs, others are members of crack response teams — units dressed in body-armor, helmets and carrying long rifles — who are called to the scene of violent incidents like these.” It suggests a strategy for a police force that doesn’t rely on deadly force for incident management, but has it available.

In a response to a different post of mine, a reader had a strong reaction against disarming police officers. I have not yet posted a reply.

* The “Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets” (CAHOOTS) of Eugene Oregon. CAHOOTS is a part of the 911 system such that they will be selected as the first responders — ahead of police — for situations involving mental health. Eugene Police Officers say ” [CAHOOTS provides] resources not available to the ordinary cop…They are an invaluable resource”.

I appreciate the pointer! Some solid, on the ground experience showing that 911 operators can effectively select which first responder is appropriate is reassuring.

Indeed, when I think through the 911 calls I have placed over the years, a non-police response would have been better for the situation I faced. To be clear, I was THANKFUL and GLAD that the St. Paul Police officers showed up quickly, listened to my report and they took action. BUT the response would have been likely better had it been a social worker trained in the particular circumstance — to not only identify and diffuse the immediate issue right then and there, but also for the longer term follow-through. In my book, the police officers are way, WAY over-booked with responsibilities for a range of civil enforcement and actions for which liability insurance would only respond by adding more and more training paperwork, never truly addressing the underlying social and community needs…

Nor do I believe the insurance proposal, jocular or not, was meant to deal with all situations, but rather with the specific problems of inappropriate violence and gypsy cops. The first is dealt with by pricing the cop out of the market, as the employer would have to pay the officer more and more to cover the cost – at some point, they just kick them off the force as being too expensive. The cops covering for cops situation could be dealt with by using a banned list concept for those cops who coverup the misdeeds of other cops. No insurance for them, period.

And the insurance companies, in their relentless pursuit of financial efficiency, would maintain a shared (I should hope!) database of cops’ records, thus mitigating the gypsy cop problem.

I completely agree with my reader that cops, as they themselves acknowledge, are overly burdened with responsibilities. My concern is that, as we consider how to rebuild police forces, the wrong principles will be used by influential people, maliciously or not. For example, parsimony is a poisonous principle.

I hope to expand on this on the near future.

The Gumball Rally (1976) is a pleasant bit of fluffiness having to do with a cross-country rally, some expensive cars, some unfortunate incidents, and generally fun if you like this sort of thing.

I did, actually.

And keep an eye out for the continuity problem near the end.

I must admit that this report on Senator Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) proposal for a data privacy law intrigued me:

Congress has been debating a consumer privacy law since before there were Web browsers, but the United States still doesn’t have one. On Thursday, Brown broke with nearly every past proposal from Democrats and Republicans alike to suggest a more radical idea: allowing companies to take our data only when it’s “strictly necessary.”

For an Internet economy built in part on tracking people, that’s nothing short of a call for revolution. Brown’s new Data Accountability and Transparency Act, released in discussion draft form, would prohibit most collection and sharing of personal data as its starting point. Data could only be used in ways stipulated in the law, such as providing a service you asked for — and no more.

It could mean fewer companies selling your personal information, but also possibly fewer free apps and services.

The Justice who’s become the swing Justice on SCOTUS, Chief Justice Roberts, has twice played a role in rebuffing conservative hopes this week. First, in a major victory for the LGBTQ community, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that it is illegal to fire an employee because they are LGBTQ. Here’s Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday outlawing anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination is a triumph for both the country and the court. It is a victory for the country because, in one fell swoop, the court granted vital protections to LGBTQ people in every state, making the United States a fairer, freer place. It is a victory for the court because the decision is an encouraging sign that the justices can still practice neutral and responsible jurisprudence without partisan influence. The six-justice majority was able to set aside its own potential biases and deliver an unequivocal endorsement of simple, rather obvious legal theory. By following the most straightforward path, the court reached a historic result that brings millions of LGBTQ people closer to full equality under the law.

Monday’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County revolves around a question fraught with political ramifications: Does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bar discrimination because of sexual orientation and gender identity? The law forbids discrimination “because of sex,” but does not mention LGBTQ people. Civil rights advocates have long argued, however, that it is not possible to discriminate against a gay, bisexual, or transgender person without taking their sex into account. So, when an employer engages in anti-LGBTQ discrimination, they are engaging in a form of sex discrimination under Title VII.

Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts were in the majority, but, in contrast to Stern, I note three of the justices voted on the other side, which does not leave me with feelings of wellness. I won’t pretend to understand the niceties of the legal arguments, but I will take Stern’s word for giving Justice Kavanaugh a pass:

Gorsuch’s critique is dead right: Alito does not want the court to stretch Title VII beyond its application—as expected by Congress in 1964—and that approach is not textualism. It is anti-textualism. It elevates the alleged mental processes of long-dead lawmakers over the ordinary meaning of words. Bostock was a hack test, a challenge to the conservative justices to stick by their principles even when they lead to a liberal outcome. Gorsuch and Roberts passed. Alito and Thomas failed. Kavanaugh’s more measured dissent argued that the court should’ve let Congress handle a matter of such importance. But, unlike Alito, Kavanaugh seems happy with the result, even congratulating LGBTQ people on winning a battle he thought they should lose.

One wonders if Gorsuch and, yes, Kavanaugh, are showing their allegiance to younger generations’ wisdom concerning LGBTQ members, while the elderly Thomas and deeply conservative Alito have no such sharing of wisdom.

Today, the decision on DACA (undocumented immigrants who are permitted to stay because they were brought here at such a young age that they would not do well in their “home” country, which they would not even recognize, aka Dreamers) was once again decided towards the liberal inclination, this time 5-4 with only Roberts joining the liberal wing:

But, as lower courts had found, Roberts said the administration did not follow procedures required by law, and did not properly weigh how ending the program would affect those who had come to rely on its protections against deportation, and the ability to work legally.

From Archaeology’s (July/August 2020) Letters column, in response to a query concerning certain characters on a woodcut not paying proper respect to their lords:

There was, in fact, a professional class of jesters in medieval Ireland called Braigetóir whose specialty was, indeed, farting for lords’ and ladies’ entertainment. – The Editors

And so I see the heritage of Peter Griffin has been thoroughly and tastefully researched by Seth MacFarlane.

Despite John Bolton’s new tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened, not having been released yet and being the subject of an unusual lawsuit by the Trump Administration to stop its publication due to, allegedly, it not being stripped of all classified material, quotes are flooding the political pundit websites.

Conservative Jay Nordlinger on National Review:

[F]rom Bolton:

As the trade talks went on, Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction over China’s bullying had been growing. An extradition bill provided the spark, and by early June 2019, massive protests were under way in Hong Kong.

I first heard Trump react on June 12, upon hearing that some 1.5 million people had been at Sunday’s demonstrations. “That’s a big deal,” he said. But he immediately added, “I don’t want to get involved,” and, “We have human-rights problems too.”

That is consistent with the Trump we know, and have long known. During the 2016 election cycle, Joe Scarborough pressed Trump on Vladimir Putin — particularly the Russian leader’s killing of political opponents. “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also,” said Trump.

After Trump was sworn in, Bill O’Reilly pressed the new president on the same issue. “There are a lot of killers,” said Trump. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Back during the campaign, Trump was asked about Erdogan and Turkey. The candidate said, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”

In Cold War days, we conservatives slammed the Left for “moral equivalence.” Now this phenomenon is in our own house, which is astonishing.

Yet not surprising. Chronic mendacity in a leader is predictive of the corruption of the principles of the Party, no? Y’all supping with the devil.

Liberal Steve Benen:

While I have not yet read the book, the latest reporting describes a rather brutal indictment of a president who is corrupt, ignorant, mocked by his own team, hostile toward the rule of law, and guilty of all kinds of official misdeeds — including trying to get both Ukraine and China to help with his re-election campaign.

Nothing new there, but I suppose confirmation from yet another insider is nice.

Wonkette:

You up on the whole legal fight over John Bolton’s book? (Wonkette kickback linky here!) Make sure you get current on that, because ready or not, HERE COME THE BUGFUCK EXCERPTS.

We had been hearing reports that Bolton just really thought the House impeachment managers did a dereliction of duty by focusing on Trump trying to force Ukraine to help him steal the 2020 election. Why? Because, according to Bolton, they should have investigated him for doing that like A HUNDRED ELEVENTY BILLION times. That really makes us want to kick Bolton in the dick, because of how he could have totally gone to the impeachment hearings and said that to Adam Schiff’s face.

Which places Bolton in a fairly dark shadow, really.

Liberal (?) David Ignatius of WaPo:

Bolton is the hero of nearly every anecdote in the book. Indeed, for a memoir that is startlingly candid about many things, Bolton’s utter lack of self-criticism is one of the book’s significant shortcomings. Nearly every policy discussion is an opportunity for Bolton to say that he was right, people should have listened to him, he knew it would never work, he was vindicated. His only problem is that, having burned so many bridges with this book, Fox News may not give him a future platform to explain how right he is.

Given how long and disastrously Bolton enabled this president, his self-satisfaction becomes annoying. So does Bolton’s trademark disdain for the foreign policy establishment (who he likes to deride as the “High-Minded”). Sometimes, his antagonism toward negotiations is so reflexive, you almost sympathize with Trump’s desire to talk with forbidden adversaries, such as North Korea and Iran.

It’s telling that one of the criticisms Bolton makes about Trump’s opening to North Korea was that he was acting like a diplomat. “The real irony here was how similar Trump was to the Foreign Service.”

Similar to the Foreign Service diplomats? Really? Bolton doesn’t seem to like traditional American diplomacy, he’d much rather bomb his way to the goal, or so it seems from his public utterances, and maybe his contempt is coloring his judgment. But I think Ignatius is completely out in the left field stands with this:

Speaking of Kevin Drum, he has another one of his nifty charts concerning how widespread lead poisoning, and its reduction, is a better explanation than policing methods for crime level fluctuations:

This is one reason why, for example, stop-and-frisk programs like the infamous one in New York City are so damaging. They focus almost entirely on Black men and produce in those men a fully justified resentment toward cops who are constantly harassing them. What’s more they don’t even work: New York’s stop-and frisk program was mostly stopped between 2011 and 2013, and the only thing that happened is that the city’s violent crime rate continued to decline[.]

The entire lead poisoning link to crime will, of course, fly in the face of the barroom blowhards in charge of the Republican Party, because it’s subtle and discards human bigotry in favor of science. Worse yet, rather than changing police behavior, it suggests that changing commercial behavior will be necessary, in the future, for achieving other improvements.

And regulating business is anathema to them.

But this is becoming another iconic example of why regulation is, when properly implemented, a good thing.

Kevin Drum has a thought on traffic stops:

Make traffic into traffic stops and nothing more.

What I mean by this is that too often traffic stops are mere pretexts to look for outstanding warrants or search a car on a fishing expedition. And we know that Black drivers are stopped far more frequently than white drivers. So why not eliminate the pretext? Don’t allow cops to randomly “run plates” looking for an excuse to stop someone, and forbid vehicle searches following a stop. In other words, with only a few clearly defined exceptions the only allowed outcome of a traffic stop is either a ticket or a warning, and that’s it. This is no panacea, but it would reduce the incentive for police officers to pull over Black men just because they seem “suspicious.” …

Why am I so sure this wouldn’t affect the crime rate? I’m not. But the reason I suspect it would have little effect is one all of my readers are aware of: the crime rate in the United States has plummeted over the past three decades thanks to the elimination of gasoline lead. What this means is that a lot of the things we used to think were necessary for reducing crime aren’t true anymore. Teens and 20-somethings are simply less violent and less prone to crime than they used to be, and a lower key form of police interaction won’t change that. We have moved from a country in which crime was high and (arguably) justified tough measures, to one in which crime is low and is likely to stay that way. We desperately need policing that recognizes this.

And don’t permit a weapon to be carried by the officer during the traffic stop unless there’s a clear reason to do so. Philando Castile might be alive today if Officer Yanez hadn’t been carrying a weapon.

Gallup has published its latest reading of the strength of public pride.

Steve Benen comments:

Procyclical:

Procyclic describes a state where behavior and actions of a measurable product or service move in tandem with the cyclical condition of the economy. [Investopedia]

Noted in “‘Covid baby bust’ could lead to half a million fewer births next year,” Christopher Ingraham, WaPo:

The reason? Children are expensive, and having a child is in many ways a financial decision. The loss of a job or otherwise uncertain prospects for a steady income lead many would-be parents to postpone having kids until things are more settled. In economic jargon, birthrates are “procyclical” — they tend to rise during times of economic growth and fall during recessions.