It’s a painful day here in the CatBox. I am most interested in providing more information for you. Tuesday is Flush your Republicans Day! But Yesterday We Flushed the entire party. Thanks for your love and concern.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 7:25 (average 7:43). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Short Take:
From YouTube (a blast from the past): Simon & Garfunkel – Mrs. Robinson (Audio)
Ah… the memories! RESIST the Republican Reich!!
The Lincoln Project – Another reminder video. Well, that’s what we need. Otherwise people forget.
Now This News generally has CC both enabled and built in. This has neither. I can only imagine the person who posted it needed a hanky too – so much so as to forget CC
Ring of Fire – Interesting news from Texas
Corey Ryan Forrester (not shouty for once) – Boilerplate Conservative Campaign Ad
Beau – Questions about Chicago (Adam Toledo). Credit to Beau for being able to speak in a controlled manner. I think I’d be shrieking. (Ck CC)
It’s a rested day here in the CatBox, and after extreme Republication, I finally have my butt butt functioning properly. What a relief! Oh God, it’s Monday!
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 5:34 (average 5:31). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Short Take:
From YouTube (a blast from the past): Bob Dylan – Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Audio)
Ah… The memories! RESIST the Republican Reich!!
The Lincoln Project – This one has a (wordless) musical background. But silence works.
Glenn Kirschner – Collusion, collusion, collusion. 7.5 minutes but a very big story (even though we knew it all the time!)
Now This News – Bookmark this for the next time someone says there’s no such thing as a good Christian.
VoteVets – So easy for something like this to get lost in other news.
Fugelsang – Governor Cuomo
Beau on police training and change
It’s a very painful day here in the CatBox. I been trying to Republicate without success. What I did produce was bloody. I now have a suppository up my butt and am am hoping for results. I hope I do better soon. The staff here are great, considering that I am such a crappy patient. WWWendy may visit me later. Success at last. I’m drenched in sweat and the throne is full.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 5:16 (average 5:20). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Cartoon:
Short Take:
From YouTube (a blast from the past): The Moody Blues – Nights In White Satin
Ah… the memories! RESIST the Republican Reich!!
Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican.
Not just the politicians in office, but the hordes of MAGA hat wearers. The last few years have elegantly proved this.
They howl about the expense of universal health care and the Green New Deal, but don’t bat an eye at the trillions we squander on “defense.”
They shame people who receive public assistance, calling them “parasites,” yet see nothing wrong with corporate welfare or giving huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy.
They holler for a wall along the US-Mexico border, conveniently forgetting about our thousands of kilometers of coastline. Those seeking to get into the USA would go over that wall, or under it. Since long before Trump proposed his boondoggle of a wall, people have been digging tunnels under the US-Mexican border. If you still think that walls work, talk to the Germans and the Chinese. Their walls didn’t work, either.
They refuse to raise the minimum wage even a quarter an hour, let alone to a living level, even though it has been stagnant for more than a decade while the price of almost everything has steadily risen. They answer demand to raise the minimum wage with propaganda about $20 tacos and robotized fast-food joints – conveniently ignoring (or forgetting about) Australia, where the minimum wage increases every year automatically, and places here in the U.S. that have increased the minimum wage without suffering.
They fiercely defend embryos and fetuses, yet refuse to improve the lot of children who have already been born. They bellow “Abortion kills children!” but are strangely silent about war, gun violence, hunger, and lack of affordable health care, all of which kill children. And fetuses. Also – where are they for mothers-to-be who lack access to affordable prenatal care?
They think that outlawing abortion will stop it altogether. In fact, to hear some of them face-fart, abortion started with Roe v Wade, and will end when it is banned. Yet they think that gun control won’t keep guns out of the wrong hands.
Many of them refuse to wear masks or socially distance in the midst of a global pandemic, mocking those who follow common-sense rules as “sheeple” even while they brainlessly follow ignorant, incompetent leaders. They refuse to “take one for the team” and spew male bovine feces about masks being harmful. Then they wonder why more than 550,000 US residents have died, while many other countries have a much lower per capita infection and death rate.
They thump their chests about being “rugged individuals,” but become sheep every Sunday, flocking to church to swallow camels after straining at gnats the other six days of the week. They think that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, even though neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions Christ or Christianity.
They shriek about the “evils” of socialism – which they frequently confound with Communism – while benefiting from many of those “evils.” Take away everything that could be regarded as socialist, and those bugnuts wouldn’t survive a week.
They break their own rules for Supreme Court appointees. They stymied Obama’s efforts to replace the late Antonin Scalia with Merrick Garland by making a rule that the President could not nominate a new justice during an election cycle. Then they rammed through Amy Coney Barrett right in the middle of an election year – and against the final wishes of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
They believe that “trickle-down economics” works even though history has clearly shown that nothing trickles down. If giving tax breaks to big corporations really did create jobs, the unemployment rate would be at rock bottom and we’d be begging immigrants to come here. Most jobs that mega-corporations create are in overseas sweatshops, in countries where workers have scant protection and wages are extremely low.
They stamp the label “tax and spend” on Democrats when they do the same thing. The difference is they spend on subsidies for companies that are already raking in profits hand over fist, and unnecessary foreign deployment of our armed forces. Defense contractors get the gold mine, while veterans in need of mental and physical therapy get the shaft.
When right-wingers harp on the shortcomings of Democrats and the Left, they are pots calling the kettles black – when the pots are a lot blacker. OK, so Democrats are no prize, especially these days. OK, so the Left isn’t right on everything. But that doesn’t mean the Right can get away with demonizing its enemies and spewing out-and-out lies.
Republicans howl about smaller government, but want to regulate our bodies to the hilt – especially our reproductive organs. Especially those of women. Their deregulation has led to numerous power vacuums, which profits-über-alles Big Business quickly filled. All they do is substitute one bureaucracy for another, and furthermore, for one that is concerned with only the Bottom Line.
And they wonder why Biden won in 2020.
The Lincoln Project – The silennce speaks for itself
Meidas Touch – Right.
Now This News – File under “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”
John Fugelsang is REALLY on a roll. It’ll take me days to catch up.
Ted Cruz FOX audtion Part I
Ted Cruz FOX audition Part II
Puppet Regime
Beau – Chicago – Strobe lights. The boy’s name was Adam Toldeo.
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 scheduled to go to closing arguments Monday. While I doubt if anyone here watched every minute of the stream, we have probably sll been following it So I won’t comment much What I do have to say will be after the end of the article.
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Lewis R. Gordon, University of Connecticut
There is a difference between enforcing the law and being the law. The world is now witnessing another in a long history of struggles for racial justice in which this distinction may be ignored.
Derek Chauvin, a 45-year-old white former Minneapolis police officer, is on trial for second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter for the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man.
There are three questions I find important to consider as the trial unfolds. These questions address the legal, moral and political legitimacy of any verdict in the trial. I offer them from my perspective as an Afro-Jewish philosopher and political thinker who studies oppression, justice and freedom. They also speak to the divergence between how a trial is conducted, what rules govern it – and the larger issue of racial justice raised by George Floyd’s death after Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. They are questions that need to be asked:
The presumption of innocence in criminal trials is a feature of the U.S. criminal justice system. And a prosecutor must prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of the defendant’s peers.
The history of the United States reveals, however, that these two conditions apply primarily to white citizens. Black defendants tend to be treated as guilty until proved innocent.
Racism often leads to presumptions of reasonableness and good intentions when defendants and witnesses are white, and irrationality and ill intent when defendants, witnesses and even victims are black.
Additionally, race affects jury selection. The history of all-white juries for black defendants and rarely having black jurors for white ones is evidence of a presumption of white people’s validity of judgment versus that of Black Americans. Doubt can be afforded to a white defendant in circumstances where it would be denied a black one.
Thus, Chauvin, as white, could be granted that exculpating doubt despite the evidence shared before millions of viewers in a live-streamed trial.
The customary questioning of police officers who harm people focuses on their use of what’s called “excessive force.” This presumes the legal legitimacy of using force in the first place in the specific situation.
Violence, however, is the use of illegitimate force. As a result of racism, Black people are often portrayed as preemptively guilty and dangerous. It follows that the perceived threat of danger makes “force” the appropriate description when a police officer claims to be preventing violence.
This understanding makes it difficult to find police officers guilty of violence. To call the act “violence” is to acknowledge that it is improper and thus falls, in the case of physical acts of violence, under the purview of criminal law. Once their use of force is presumed legitimate, the question of degree makes it nearly impossible for jurors to find officers guilty.
Floyd, who was suspected of purchasing items from a store with a counterfeit $20 bill, was handcuffed and complained of not being able to breathe when Chauvin pulled him from the police vehicle and he fell face down on the ground.
Footage from the incident revealed that Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Floyd was motionless several minutes in, and he had no pulse when Alexander Kueng, one of the officers, checked. Chauvin didn’t remove his knee until paramedics arrived and asked him to get off of Floyd so they could examine the motionless patient.
If force under the circumstances is unwarranted, then its use would constitute violence in both legal and moral senses. Where force is legitimate (for example, to prevent violence) but things go wrong, the presumption is that a mistake, instead of intentional wrongdoing, occurred.
An important, related distinction is between justification and excuse. Violence, if the action is illegitimate, is not justified. Force, however, when justified, can become excessive. The question at that point is whether a reasonable person could understand the excess. That understanding makes the action morally excusable.
Police are allowed to use force to prevent violence. But at what point does the force become violence? When its use is illegitimate. In U.S. law, the force is illegitimate when done “in the course of committing an offense.”
Sgt. David Pleoger, Chauvin’s former supervisor, stated in the trial: “When Mr. Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers, they could have ended their restraint.”
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified, “To continue to apply that level of force to a person proned-out, handcuffed behind their back, that in no way, shape or form is anything that is by policy.” He declared, “I vehemently disagree that that was an appropriate use of force.”
That an act was deemed by prosecutors to be violent, defined as an illegitimate use of force resulting in death, is a necessary conclusion for charges of murder and manslaughter. Both require ill intent or, in legal terms, a mens rea (“evil mind”). The absence of a reasonable excuse affects the legal interpretation of the act. That the act was not preventing violence but was, instead, one of committing it, made the action inexcusable.
The Chauvin case, like so many others, leads to the question: What is the difference between enforcing the law and imagining being the law? Enforcing the law means one is acting within the law. That makes the action legitimate. Being the law forces others, even law-abiding people, below the enforcer, subject to their actions.
If no one is equal to or above the enforcer, then the enforcer is raised above the law. Such people would be accountable only to themselves. Police officers and any state officials who believe they are the law, versus implementers or enforcers of the law, place themselves above the law. Legal justice requires pulling such officials back under the jurisdiction of law.
The purpose of a trial is, in principle, to subject the accused to the law instead of placing him, her, or them above it. Where the accused is placed above the law, there is an unjust system of justice.
This article has been updated to correct the charges Chauvin is facing.
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Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, to me one of the best moments in the trial was during the cross examination of the defense’s final expert witness, who cied an expert who “used to” believe in “positionary asphyxiation, but has retracted his statements.” The prosecution was ready for that. They had an affadavidt from the cited expert which included “many people have said that I retracted [my statements on positionary asphyxiation, but in fact I have never retracted and do not retract any of my statements on the matter.” How can you not love a trial attorney on either side who does his homework in anticipation of it beeing needed to ensure that truth gets told?
There is no guarantee exactly how a jury will vote, but I am feeling some hope … tempered by finding it difficult to trust a jury. We shall see. We shall all see.
The Furies and I will be back.