Really American – Caitlyn Jenner
Meidas Touch – Roland Martin #2
Yes, this really happened. (Crooks and Liars picked it up)
Glenn Kirschner – This is a rant – a righteous one.
Parody Project and The Freedom Toast – “My Pillow”
Beau on police, power, policy, and necessity
It’s a hectic day here in the CatBox. After spending the last hour sitting on the throne and waiting for the last turd to exit my butt was my my limit, I filled the throne with Republicans, thanks and hugs to all.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 5:05 (average 5:50). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Short Take:
From YouTube: (a blast from the past): Mary Hopkin – Those Were The Days – 1968
Ah… the memories! RESIST the Republican Reich!!
The Lincoln Project – “His Psrty”
The Republican Accountability Project – THAT press conference
Really American – “Tough Guys” (I really don’t know what this trend with no CC is here)
Meidas Touch – This is the first of three from Roland, all three of which I will eventually wor in. And of course he is right about this. And it is no excuse to call it the fault of black people. It is anything but that.
Now This News – Racist? Sexist? (spoiler – both)
This was funny when she first reported it … and now that Jimmy Kimmel has picked it up, it’s even funnier. (I set it to start when he brings up Ursula … you can turn it off when he finishes with Ursula)
Beau on why the Chauvin verdict doesn’t feel like winning
For several years I worked at a corporation that I will call XYZ Inc. This company has landed many lucrative defense contracts over the years. I took the job because I had hopes of growing with the company, of developing and using many talents and skills, of advancing my career. I could hardly have been more wrong.
At first, work was great. I was fortunate to have pleasant co-workers and a nice supervisor. Since XYZ kept not only gaining new contracts but maintaining the old ones, it looked as though they were growing at an appreciable pace.
Growing, yes. Accommodating employees and compensating for that growth, no.
As you know, large companies have cube farms where people sit and perform their tasks. While I was at XYZ, I was moved twice. My first cubicle was quite roomy, more than adequate for my needs. The second was smaller, but I could still fit. The last cubicle, though, was less than half the size of the first. I could not fit all my materials in it, and as a result had to commandeer a table for holding them.
That is not all. As the company continued to add to its payroll, the top brass looked for ways to cram more people into what space we had. First, they turned the exercise room into another cube farm. I had enjoyed the exercise room because I could get on the treadmill, or lift weights, for 10 or so minutes during my breaks. Without the exercise room, I had to walk outside, or around the building if the weather was nasty. Then they rearranged the cubes time and again in order to make them smaller and smaller. Remember what I said about my space?
Even that was not enough. Soon they started putting two people in a cubicle that was barely big enough for one person. In some cases they removed the divider between cubicles and shoved in a third person where the divider had been. One man was even placed in a space that hardly qualified as a cubicle, even tinier than my final workspace! He had barely enough room for his desk and chair, and one side of the so-called cubicle was open to a fairly busy hallway. One co-worker I spoke with told me that, if he ever had to share his cubicle with someone, he’d polish up his resume in a heartbeat.
This is how XYZ solved the problem of its growing work force. Rather than expand the building, or add a second story, or rent space in another building – there was available space in the business park just a hop, a skip and a jump away – they crammed people in like livestock on a factory farm.
The growing work force led to a shortage in parking as well. Even re-striping the parking lot and adding new spaces in odd places didn’t help. People had to park in front of the recycling dumpster, or along the entrance lanes. Even though I usually got in to work around 7:00 AM, I sometimes had a hard time finding a space. I rarely left to run an errand, or go out for lunch, because of the risk of losing a good space and having to hunt for a new one. Sometimes, several cars would park alongside an entrance/exit lane so you had to be careful going in or coming out. Not only that, this complicated things for delivery vehicles. Now and then the receptionist had to send messages asking for people to move their cars to make way for big trucks, which could not navigate the constricted lanes.
I met and got to know several contractors who worked there. Some of them had worked for as long as six years without being offered a permanent job. One had gotten only one raise in all that time. As contractors, they did not get paid vacation or sick days. They could not get medical insurance through the company, or even through the contracting firm, and had to rely on Obamacare. During the winter, a lot of people came to work wheezing and coughing. Contractors were shut out of some company activities, including getting free flu shots and receiving holiday gift certificates. They stayed on only because jobs of all sorts were hard to find.
Even when work was piling up, XYZ was very reluctant to allow people to take overtime. I got in some overtime on only a couple occasions. Otherwise, you just had to hope that you could keep up with your work, which was always accumulating like mad.
Meanwhile, XYZ landed one lucrative defense contract after another. I did research, and found that these contracts were helping XYZ rake in some huge profits! The distant CEOs (I worked at a satellite facility) were making money hand over fist. Yet XYZ could not spare the cash to provide adequate work space and parking, or turn contractors into permanent employees.
From time to time you hear about people who wig out and go on shooting sprees. Whenever I walked through the parking lot to get some exercise, I spotted no fewer than a half dozen NRA stickers. You can bet your bottom dollar at least some of these people had guns at home, if not all of them. How much longer before someone who had an appreciable arsenal at home snapped? It seems as though this country can go barely a week without a major gun-fueled bloodbath.
I no longer work for XYZ; I have since found a better position with a small company that pays me a decent wage. Since I left my contracting position I have read plenty of horror stories about companies treating their workers like expendable objects, especially in warehouses where people are scolded for being too slow and are forbidden from taking too many bathroom breaks. How big companies maltreat their rank-and-file employees could fill a substantial book.
We may be seeing a turn-around, though. More and more people are clamoring for a living minimum wage and more workers’ rights. Amazon employees in Alabama failed to unionize, but other efforts are underway. Let us hope that we can return our country to one where the Little Guy has a genuine voice in corporate management as well as government.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
The trial of Derek Chauvin is now over. The verdict was on one level expectable (God knows there was more than enough evidence and it was very clear), and yet, in our unwell society, unexpected. Let’s look at some takeaways while it is fresh in our minds.
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Alexis Karteron, Rutgers University – Newark ; Jeannine Bell, Indiana University; Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University, and Ric Simmons, The Ohio State University
Scholars analyze the guilty verdicts handed down to former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Outside the courthouse, crowds cheered and church bells sounded – a collective release in a city scarred by police killings. Minnesota’s attorney general, whose office led the prosecution, said he would not call the verdict “justice, however” because “justice implies restoration” – but he would call it “accountability.”
Alexis Karteron, Rutgers University – Newark
Derek Chauvin’s criminal trial is over, but the work to ensure that no one endures a tragic death like George Floyd’s is just getting started.
It is fair to say that race was on the minds of millions of protesters who took to the streets last year to express their outrage and pain in response to the killing. Many felt it was impossible for someone who wasn’t Black to imagine Chauvin’s brutal treatment of George Floyd.
But race went practically unmentioned during the Chauvin trial.
This should not be surprising, because the criminal legal system writes race out at virtually every turn. When I led a lawsuit as a civil rights attorney challenging the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program as racist, the department’s primary defense was that it complied with Fourth Amendment standards, under which police officers need only “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity to stop someone. Presence in what police say is a “high-crime area” is relevant to developing reasonable suspicion, as is a would-be subject taking flight when being approached by a police officer. But the correlation with race, for a host of reasons, is obvious to any keen observer.
American policing’s most pressing problems are racial ones. For some, the evolution of slave patrols into police forces and the failure of decadeslong reform efforts are proof that American policing is irredeemable and must be defunded. For others, changes to use-of-force policies and improved accountability measures, like those in the proposed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, are enough.
Different communities across the country will follow different paths in their efforts to prevent another tragic death like George Floyd’s. Some will do nothing at all. But progress will be made only when America as a whole gets real about the role of race – something the legal system routinely fails to do.
Ric Simmons, The Ohio State University
The guilty verdicts in the Chauvin trial are extraordinary, if unsurprising, because past incidents of police lethal use of force against unarmed civilians, particularly Black civilians, have generally not resulted in criminal convictions.
In many cases, the prosecuting office has been reluctant or halfhearted in pursuing the case. Prosecutors and police officers work together daily; that can make prosecutors sympathetic to the work of law enforcement. In the Chauvin case, the attorney general’s office invested an overwhelming amount of resources in preparing for and conducting the trial, bringing in two outside lawyers, including a prominent civil rights attorney, to assist its many state prosecutors.
Usually, too, a police officer defendant can count on the support of other police officers to testify on his behalf and explain why his or her actions were justified. Not in this case. Every police officer witness testified for the prosecution against Chauvin.
Finally, convictions after police killings are rare because, evidence shows, jurors are historically reluctant to substitute their own judgment for the split-second decisions made by trained officers when their lives may be on the line. Despite the past year’s protests decrying police violence, U.S. support for law enforcement remains very high: A recent poll showed that only 18% of Americans support the “defund the police” movement.
But Chauvin had no feasible argument that he feared for his life or made an instinctive response to a threat. George Floyd did nothing to justify the defendant’s brutal actions, and the overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecutors convinced 12 jurors of that fact.
Jeannine Bell, Indiana University
Like other high-profile police killings of African Americans, the murder of George Floyd revealed a lot about police culture – and how it makes interactions with communities of color fraught.
Derek Chauvin used prohibited tactics – keeping his knee on Floyd’s neck when he had already been subdued – to suffocate a man, an act the jury recognized as murder. Three fellow Minneapolis Police Department officers watched as Chauvin killed Floyd. Rather than intervene themselves, they helped him resist the intervention of upset bystanders and a medical professional. They have been charged with aiding and abetting a murder.
The police brotherhood – that intense and protective “thin blue line” – enabled a public murder. Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, unusually, broke this code of silence when he testified against Chauvin.
Research shows that even if officers see a fellow officer mistreating a suspect and want to intervene, they need training to teach them how to do so effectively. The city of New Orleans is now training officers to intervene. Once training is in place, police departments could also make intervention in such situations mandatory.
When some officers stand by as other officers ignore their training, the consequences can be dangerous – and potentially lethal – for civilians.
Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University
This verdict reflects a little-known truth about Minneapolis: As the city and metro region have become Blacker and more diverse, police violence against Black people has intensified. This is not to suggest that things have always been good for Black Minneapolis residents. Indeed, Minneapolis’ Black population – a group without political power or visibility – has faced segregation, police violence and Northern Jim Crow policies in its downtown music venues for decades.
White Minnesotans and Minneapolitans developed a false belief that somehow they were above racism; that their form of neighborliness known as “Minnesota nice” was an antidote to anti-Blackness and that – most of all – race didn’t matter in a place as nice as Minnesota.
That false assumption was easy to believe when the Black population was small, contained and largely out of sight. But Black Minneapolis’ population growth in recent decades, and the torrent of police violence that has followed, proved otherwise.
The murder of George Floyd last year and Daunte Wright’s killing in a nearby community last week demonstrate that despite the state’s liberal posture and Lutheran ethic, institutional anti-Black racism is as Minnesotan as ice fishing, untaxed groceries and “ya, sure, youbetcha” memes.
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Alexis Karteron, Associate Professor of Law, Rutgers University – Newark ; Jeannine Bell, Professor of Law, Maurer School of Law, Indiana University; Rashad Shabazz, Associate Professor at the School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University, and Ric Simmons, Professor of Law, The Ohio State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I can’t agree with Alexas Karteron. Race may not have been used as an issue, but it was still very much an issue. Ric Simmons is right on about the attorney general’s involvement making a difference – and especially whan that AG is Keith Ellison. Jeannine Bal is not only right but has put her finger at or close to the heart of our biggest problem in the US. I hope Rashad Shabazz is right … but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The Furies and I will be back.
My Aunt has passed.
I will be taking a “sabbatical” of sorts, and probably be scarce for the next week or two.
It’s a very hectic day, here in the CatBox. Yesterday I had a visit from my new Providence Hospice Chaplain. I was thoroughly impressed with her. I found her a totally authentic Christian and consider myself blessed to have her. If you are so moved, please join me in a prayer of thanksgiving. On the down side I was unable to Replicate this morning. Wish me success on that. Have a fine weekend!
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 5:30 (average 5:19). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Short Take:
From YouTube (a blast from the past): Jefferson Airplane – Good Shepherd
Ah… the memories! RESIST the Republican Reich!!
I don’t see a monologue … but I do see a new rule.I’ll just put up what there is in the order in which it was posted to YouTube. I don’t know why they don’t all have CC tonight, and can only hope someone there enables it soon.
Fran Lebowitz on Post-Pandemic Life
Tripitor (Psilocybin)
“Other People” in America
New Rule: OK Boomer