"Stop killing black people."

Black rage is now manifesting itself in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and there has been protest all over the country due to the latest televised state killing of another black man on one of the nation's streets.

Black folks are sick and tired of being sick and tired.  Like Eric Garner, this man also pleaded for his life, as he told the officer -who literally had his foot on his neck- that he could not breathe. It made no difference to the officers present that bystanders were also pleading with them to stop, all their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Now, as buildings burn and stores get looted, we are watching a sad and tragic recurring theme play itself out in what is already a trying time to be living through. Personally, I would prefer if these protesters did not destroy the neighborhoods where they have to live, but I don't know if I can blame them at this point, given the level of frustration and pent-up rage that they have been living with. 

In a way, this is indicative of what it means to be living through a trump presidency. Mr trump has emboldened every racist in America to act on their hatred.  And, as a result, we have vigilantes chasing down and killing an unarmed black man, and a woman using the power of her whiteness to threaten a black man with Emmett Till style justice if  she can't have her way. 

When Mr. trump asked black Americans what we had to lose by voting for him, the answer was easy: Our lives.

*Image from usatoday.com



 

Caption Monday.

While the nation mourns almost 100,000 dead, the president golfed on Memorial Day weekend.

I need your caption for this pic.

*Pic from yahoonews.com

The vote thief.

Today while folks are focused on the other racially tone deaf candidate and his white liberal racism, they are forgetting about the unapologetic racist in the race for president, and his efforts to actually steal the upcoming elections in November.

This article in Salon by Amanda Marcotte sums it all up:

"Despite his off-the-charts narcissism, Donald Trump knows on some level that the majority of Americans don't want him to be president and he cannot win in a fair election. He didn't beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in 2016 — she got nearly 3 million more votes — and only won because of the outsize influence of smaller, rural states in the Electoral College. He has only grown less popular since then and is now well behind former Vice President Joe Biden in most national polls, usually by a margin of 5 to 8 points.

But Trump has had a plan to win in 2020, ever since his re-election campaign kicked off the second he was inaugurated: Cheat like crazy.

Trying to cheat in the presidential election is, of course, what Trump was impeached for in December, which no doubt feels like ancient history, due to the rising death tolls and exploding unemployment rate over which our "very stable genius" of a president has presided since then. So here's a refresher: Trump, anticipating (apparently correctly) that Biden would be his Democratic opponent, leveraged the power of the State Department in an effort to blackmail the Ukrainian president into publicly backing right-wing conspiracy theories about Biden, threatening to withhold military aid unless Ukrainian officials announced "investigations" into Biden. The idea was to create the 2020 version of "Clinton's emails" by using phony investigations and innuendo to paint Biden as corrupt, even though there's no evidence Biden did anything corrupt in his dealings with Ukraine.

Impeachment did a lot to shut down that scheme (though I have no doubt they'll keep trying), but that doesn't mean Trump has given up the hope that he can rig some kind of victory, even in an election when strong majorities of Americans oppose him. Since shamelessness and callousness are among Trump's central qualities, he's perfectly happy to exploit the coronavirus crisis to do it. Yep, that same crisis that he made exponentially worse with his negligence and open hostility to science — now he wants to use it to deprive American voters of their chance to kick him out on his keister in November.

But Trump is certain — and for good reason — that if more people get to vote, he's likely to lose. So he's freaking out. He's particularly sweating the possibility that voters in swing states will be able to vote by mail in large numbers, since he knows his best chance of winning those states lies in making sure that as few people vote as possible.

"Breaking: Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election," Trump tweeted on Wednesday, in typical hyperventilating style. "This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of StateI will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!"

He deleted and reposted the tweet later to reflect it was ballot applications that were sent, not ballots themselves, but kept the more disturbing false claim that it's illegal to mail ballot applications to voters. He also threatened Nevada in similar fashion.

As Jack Holmes of Esquire pointed out, Trump is threatening two U.S. states in exactly the same way he threatened Ukraine: Claiming he will withhold funds authorized by Congress if the recipient doesn't help him cheat in the 2020 election. This is election fraud and blackmail, but this time directed at Americans.

Not only are these tweets an effort to blackmail the states, but they are also a direct effort to scare ordinary citizens out of voting.

As political analyst Judd Legum pointed out in his newsletter, Popular Information, "Telling someone that an absentee ballot application they receive was sent to them 'illegally' could dissuade them from voting."

Indeed, the tweets themselves are arguably voter intimidation, since Trump is literally trying to scare people into thinking they may be prosecuted if they fill out an application for a mail-in ballot. Voter intimidation is a federal criminal offense that could lead to jail time — except that Trump is hiding behind "executive privilege," which has been used to argue against legal punishment for all his criminal behavior.

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan literally warned the nation about this possibility during Trump's impeachment hearings. 

Pamela Karlan: "What would you think if, when your governor asked the federal government for the disaster assistance that Congress has provided, the President responded, 'I would like you to do us a favor.' I'll... send the disaster relief once you brand my opponent a criminal." pic.twitter.com/J96FY30k3y
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) December 4, 2019

Well, the day is here and Trump isn't even being coy about it, but belligerently trying to use the pandemic to scare people into not voting, while threatening Democratic-led states with the loss of federal funding. To justify this, Trump told more lies Wednesday afternoon, claiming that "voting is an honor" (it is in fact a right) and  that "they" mail in "thousands and thousands of fake ballots," an utterly false claim with zero evidence behind it.

What Trump is doing is illegal, and congressional Democrats know it. Sen. Kamala Harris of California noted on MSNBC that, "it is a federal crime to withhold money from states with the purpose of interfering with people's right to vote."

Even threatening to do that is arguably a criminal act, especially if, as noted above, these threats are ameant to scare people out of voting. Either way, it's an abuse of power for the purpose of cheating in an election, which is precisely what Trump was impeached for last December.

I find myself physically exhausted even thinking about it, but it must be said: Democrats must consider the possibility of impeaching Trump again, and soon. What he's doing now isn't just as bad as what he did to Ukraine — it's much worse, since he's directly attacking American citizens and their constitutional right to vote. This is the Ukraine scandal on steroids. (And the Ukraine scandal was Watergate on steroids!)

It's a terrible thing to think about, especially since Senate Republicans, who don't care what crimes Trump commits, would just acquit Trump again. And it's hard to imagine what another round of impeachment hearings, much less another impeachment vote, would look like in the age of the coronavirus.

Still, we know one thing about the first impeachment: It worked. It blew up Trump's scheme to blackmail the Ukrainian president, and exposed the fraudulent nature of the conspiracy theory against Biden so thoroughly that the even Trump-curious reporters like Ken Vogel at the New York Times have been scared away from pretending there's anything serious to these conspiracy theories about Biden.

As difficult and disheartening as another round of impeachment might be, it could be the only way to keep Trump from using the coronavirus to cheat in the 2020 election. If Democrats can impeach him for blackmailing Ukraine in this surely they can impeach him for blackmailing the governors of Michigan and Nevada in exactly the same way.

More important still, Trump has made no secret of his desire to cheat. He does it right out in the open, on Twitter, and will only continue to escalate these threats if there are no real consequences. A second impeachment, ugly as it will be, may be the only way to ensure a free and fair election during this pandemic. " [Source]

Pay attention people.

*Image from Dlisted. 

"Cray cray."

    America, admit it, your president is insane. I know it's a hard pill for a lot of you to swallow, given that you voted for him and all, but it has become painfully obvious that something is just not right in that mind of his.

If you saw any of his recent press conferences, or if you have read any of his latest screeds on twitter, you would know what I am talking about.

Yesterday,incredibly, the man admitted to taking a drug for the coronavirus that his own government has cautioned against. The side effects of the drug (which has still not been formally approved for coronavirus treatment) has been known to kill people for crying out loud. And yet there he was on national television promoting it to the country.

Frankly, as he does with everything else, I think the man was lying. I think he was trying to create yet another distraction from some other serious issues that are taking place in his corrupt administration. Primarily, the latest firing of  an Inspector General (and there has been many) after he was starting to uncover wrong doings in the trump crime cabal.

"Trump fired State Department Inspector General, Steve Linick, for investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s misuse of State Department employees.

Linick had been on the job since 2013 and had recently issued reports criticizing some Trump appointees of retaliating against career public servants. Democrats expressed outrage at his firing. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., accused President Trump of taking the action to protect Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.


“I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo,” Engel said. “Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”

A Democratic aide on Capitol Hill elaborated that “the OIG was looking into the Secretary’s misuse of a political appointee at the Department to perform personal tasks for himself and Mrs. Pompeo.”

Pompeo and his wife are accused of using government employees as their personal servants, which is against the law." [Source] 

Throw in the reports that there might have been some illegal arms sales to Saudi Arabia by the trump administration and you can see why this guy had to go.

This is all coming at a time when even the usually laid back Obama can't take it anymore and has to speak out. This has infuriated trump and his racist pals like Karl Rove (that's Karl with a K, not a C) and Turtle, and they have fired back at former President Obama with a vengeance.

“I think President Obama should have kept his mouth shut,” “We know he doesn’t like much this administration is doing; that’s understandable. But I think it’s a little bit classless, frankly, to critique an administration that comes after you. ... Generally, former presidents just don’t do that.”

Irony is clearly lost on these people.

What they have failed to realize, of course, is that former president Obama is right.

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this picture. 

*Image from medium.com

First responder's lives matter.

Thanks to COVD45 and the incompetent administration whose job it is to protect the American people, we have now lost almost 86,000 Americans (as of 8:08 AM on 05/05/20). That's kind of a big deal. But we still have a president who is downplaying the seriousness of this virus, and who is doing more to protect his friends on Wall Street and making sure that the DOW does well, than prioritizing the lives of the American people.

Anyway, speaking of lives, I am posting about a black one that was lost because she was murdered by police officers. This case is  particularly tragic because the woman was a first responder.  

 "A woman was shot and killed in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police executing a "botched" search warrant who forced their way in, surprising the woman and her boyfriend who thought the officers were burglars, her family says in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit — filed by the family of the woman, Breonna Taylor, an EMT worker — says she and her boyfriend thought they were being burglarized and he fired at the officers in self-defense. The lawsuit accuses the three officers of "blindly firing" more than 20 shots into the apartment.

After the March 13 incident, the Louisville Metro Police Department said the officers had knocked on the door several times and “announced their presence as police who were there with a search warrant.” After forcing their way in, they “were immediately met by gunfire,” Lt. Ted Eidem said at a news conference.

Taylor, 26, was shot eight times by police. Kenneth Walker, 27, was arrested and charged with assault and attempted murder on a police officer. An attorney for Walker could not immediately be reached.

Crump called Taylor's death a "senseless killing."

"We stand with the family of this young woman in demanding answers from the Louisville Police Department," he said in a statement Monday on Twitter.

The attorney called out the police department for not providing "any answers regarding the facts and circumstances of how this tragedy occurred."

"Breonna Taylor was sleeping while black in the sanctity of our own home," Crump said at a Wednesday press conference, adding, "we cannot continue to allow them to unnecessarily and justifiably kill our black women and escape any accountability."

"The defendants then proceeded to spray gunfire into the residence with a total disregard for the value of human life," the lawsuit alleges. "Shots were blindly fired by the officers all throughout Breonna's home."

The suit states that Walker had a license to carry and kept firearms in the home, and that Taylor was unarmed.

Taylor and Walker had no criminal history or drug convictions. No drugs were found in the apartment.

Her address was listed on the search warrant based on police's belief that a drug suspect had used her home to receive mail, keep drugs or stash money. The warrant also states that a car registered to Taylor was seen parked on several occasions in front of a "drug house" known to the suspect.

Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, filed the lawsuit in April in Jefferson Circuit Court alleging wrongful death, excessive force and gross negligence.

Crump said during an interview on MSNBC that Taylor was "completely innocent" and went on to say that "black women's lives matter too." The attorney also called for the charges against Walker to be immediately dropped.

A police spokesperson had no comment this week because the investigation was still ongoing.

The officers, identified as Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove, were reassigned pending the outcome of the investigation.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said on Twitter Tuesday, "As always, my priority is that the truth comes out, and for justice to follow the path of truth."[Source] 

Wow! How do you botch a "no knock" warrant in such a manner? The address was at least ten miles off and the person they were looking for was already in custody. 

And now all the 2nd Amendment and NRA enthusiasts will come out in support of Mr. Walker and his right to protect himself within his own home with a legally owned and licensed forearm. 

That was a joke. They will not come out and support Mr. Walker. One of the dirty little secrets about the NRA is that they do not support the rights of people of color to legally own firearms like they do certain other folks. It's been crickets from them so far. 

Let's hope that justice will be served for this woman and her family. She was on the front lines of the fight against COVD45. She deserved more. 

Above the law.

Paul Manafort is being released to house  arrest today , in order to serve out the next four years of his sentence. The reason given is that there is a COVD19 outbreak at his prison.

This, like everything else in trump world, is a lie. Make no mistake, folks, he is being released because Donald trump wants him released.

This early release to house arrest for Manafort was orchestrated by no other than William Barr, one of the leaders of the trump crime cabal. Mr. Barr instructed the Bureau of Prisons to let him go. This is the same William Barr who had his Justice Department refuse to prosecute former trump national security advisor, Michael Flynn. The same Mr. Flynn who pled guilty  (after being properly colloquyed I might add) to lying to federal agents. Mr. trump himself fired the guy, but now he is trying to claim that he (Flynn) was railroaded.

Mr. Barr's conduct has been so outrageous that sixteen former Watergate prosecutors and two thousand former federal prosecutors (democrats and republicans) have urged the Judge in the case to disregard the actions of Mr. Barr.

I learned today that the Judge in the case has taken the extraordinary measure of delaying the justice department's request to drop the Flynn case.   I say good for him. It's nice to see that there is someone trying to stand up to the rule of law in this country.

This is where we are in America with a lawless president and the people around him who are buying into his lawlessness.

We will soon find out if the highest court in the land has also been compromised by trump. They are deciding if his tax returns and business records should be released, and by all accounts it would take an incredible amount of pretzel logic to find for Mr. trump.

Frankly, I expect them to find for him. Given the makeup of the court and their willingness to protect trump at any cost, I am sure that they will find a reason to allow him to keep his tax returns and business records from Congress and the Manhattan district attorney. I hope that they surprise me and find that the president is not above the law, but I am not holding my breath.

It's actually crazy that this issue has made it all the way to the Supreme Court, when Mr. trump promised the American people years ago that he would release his tax returns. Clearly he has something to hide. Now we are left asking ourselves, what is it?

I have an idea what it is, and let's just say that it ain't pretty. 

A killing in Georgia.

The vigilante style killing of an unarmed black man in Georgia has stirred all kinds of ugly memories for black folks.

From Emmett Till to Travon Martin, we have seen this movie before. Sadly, it doesn't make the ending any less painful.

This is what Charles Blow wrote about the latest case in Georgia for the New York Times.

"The video is short and shocking.

It’s taken from the perspective of a vehicle following a young black man running at a jogger’s pace. The jogger is 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. Arbery approaches a pickup truck parked in the street. There are two white men, one outside the vehicle with a shotgun, 34-year-old Travis McMichael, and the other, his father, 64-year-old Gregory McMichael, standing aloft in the flatbed.

The McMichaels had reportedly chased Arbery, blocking his path at another location, at which point he had turned around and jogged another way to avoid them.

In the video, when the men encounter each other, there’s immediately an altercation. Arbery and the younger McMichael fight for control of the shotgun.

Shots are fired. Arbery tries to run away, but he is clearly wounded and his knees buckle. He collapses to the ground. The video ends.

After Arbery fell, the younger McMichael rolled over the limp body “to see if the male had a weapon,” according to a police report. There was blood on McMichael’s hands when the police arrived.

Arbery died of his wounds.

This is how the police report detailed the father’s explanation for why he and his son chased Arbery:

“McMichael stated he was in his front yard and saw the suspect from the break-ins ‘hauling ass’ down Satilla Drive toward Burford Drive. McMichael stated he then ran inside his house and called to Travis (McMichael) and said, ‘Travis, the guy is running down the street, let’s go.’ McMichael stated he went to his bedroom and grabbed his .357 Magnum and Travis grabbed his shotgun because they ‘didn’t know if the male was armed or not.’”

Arbery was not armed, and he was not the “suspect” in any break-ins. He was a former high school football player who liked to stay active and was jogging in the small city of Brunswick, Glynn County, Ga., near his home.

Neither of the McMichaels was arrested or charged. From the time this happened in late February, they have had the luxury of sleeping in their own beds, free men, while Arbery’s body is confined to a coffin, deep in a grave at New Springfield Baptist Church in Alexander, Ga.

According to The New York Times, “Gregory McMichael is a former Glynn County police officer and a former investigator with the local district attorney’s office who retired last May.” The local prosecutor recused herself from the case because Gregory McMichael had worked in her office. The next prosecutor, a district attorney, also recused himself because his son worked for the district attorney for whom Gregory McMichael had worked.

But, before the second prosecutor’s recusal, he said in a letter obtained by The Times:

“It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael and Bryan Williams were following in ‘hot pursuit,’ a burglary suspect, with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop. It appears their intent was to stop and hold this criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived. Under Georgia law this is perfectly legal.”

The third and current prosecutor on the case said Tuesday that the case should be heard by a grand jury.

He cites the statute: “A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.”

But there is a clear problem here: Arbery had committed no offense. His only offense, the thing that drew suspicion, was that he was black and male and running through these white men's neighborhood.

The recused prosecutor’s letter states: “Given the fact Arbery initiated the fight, at the point Arbery grabbed the shotgun, under Georgia law, McMichael was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself.”

The similarities here to the Trayvon Martin case are uncanny. These men stalked Arbery, projecting onto him a criminality of which he was not guilty, then used self-defense as justification to gun him down in an altercation that they provoked. Arbery was killed eight years to the month after Martin was killed, just about three hours north.

The Black Lives Matter movement that peaked a few years ago focused activism and protests largely around police killings of black people, but the moment was born of another phenomenon, one present in the Martin case and again here: anti-black vigilantism.

This form of anti-blackness marks black masculinity as menacing, and state laws protect the vigilantes’ rights to involve their weapons and their power to end lives.

The most infuriating part of most of the cases in which unarmed black men are killed, either by the police or vigilantes, is the lack of arrest, prosecution or conviction. It is not any suggestion that the killers were right, morally, but rather that in most cases it could be reasonably argued that the killings were legal.

As has too often been the case in this country, the law works to black people’s detriment and sometimes their demise.

Slavery was legal. The Black Codes were legal. Sundown towns were legal. Sharecropping was legal. Jim Crow was legal. Racial covenants were legal. Mass incarceration is legal. Chasing a black man or boy with your gun because you suspect him a criminal is legal. Using lethal force as an act of self-defense in a physical dispute that you provoke and could easily have avoided is, often, legal.

It is men like these, with hot heads and cold steel, these with yearnings of heroism, the vigilantes who mask vengeance as valor, who ­cross their social anxiety with racial anxiety and the two spark like battery cables.

Arbery was enjoying a nice run on a beautiful day when he began to be stalked by armed men.

What must that have felt like?

What must he have felt when he approached the truck and saw that one of the stalkers was brandishing a shotgun?

What must he have thought when he fought for the gun?

What must he have thought when he took the first bullet?

Or the second?

What must he have thought as he collapsed to the ground and could feel the life leaving his body?

Ahmaud Arbery was a human being, a person, a man with a family and a future, who loved and was loved. The McMichaels took all of that away on a glorious Sunday afternoon in February. Who knows what Arbery could have become. He was young, his life a buffet of possibilities. Friday would have been his 26th birthday."

Now for an update: Two of the alleged perps have been arrested. Why it took so long only speaks to the way the judicial system works in some places in America. Two career prosecutors now have some explaining to do. 

Black folks are celebrating the arrest, but I would urge caution. There still has to be a trial, and there is already a narrative is being painted about the victim being a criminal who deserved what he got. Shades of Trayvon Martin.

Just remember what happened in that trial. Somewhere in America George Zimmerman still roams free.    

No post.

Hey field hands, I've been out of pocket for a few. (Not to worry, no COVD45)

I'll be back soon.

Caption this.