JOSIAH BATES (CAMDEN, N.J.),and KARL VICK (MINNEAPOLIS) , - TIME
Stephan: In my opinion, the entire American law enforcement system needs to be taken apart and reconstituted, and the sheriff’s departments should be eliminated altogether. I say this on the basis of objectively verifiable evidence. My views have nothing to do with politics, which I see only as a way of implementation. Like all my views they are based entirely on wellbeing. What does and does not produce it. There is no other developed Western nation that has anything like the American law enforcement social outcome data. We are number one, for sure, on police shootings, deaths, incarceration, racism, and a host of other trends. Here is a good exegetic essay arguing this.
Credit: WIDLINE CADET (CAMDEN, N.J.) and RAHIM FORTUNE (MINNEAPOLIS)/ TIME
In Minneapolis, the first days after George Floyd’s killing exist in memory as kind of a blur. Even so, the burning of the Third Precinct police station on May 28 was a signal event, and not only for residents of the south side, where Floyd was killed and so many buildings went up in flames. Five miles to the north, residents of the city’s other substantially Black area worried the chaos was coming their way. That night, Phillipe Cunningham, a city-council member representing part of North Minneapolis, drove around for 2½ hours without seeing any cops at all. They were hunkered in their stations.
In the void they’d left, a community stepped up. On Emerson Avenue, gang members took pride of place in the phalanx guarding the So Low Grocery Outlet, one of the north side’s only two super-markets. “We locked it down for seven nights,” says the Rev. Jerry McAfee, a Baptist preacher who works with gangs. Members of his patrol were identifiable by green and white […]
Troy Wolverton, - Reader Supported News/ Business Insider
Stephan: I am always amused when I hear or read some corporate millionaire whining about socialism. The truth that dare not speak its name is that America is, and for decades has been, an overwhelmingly socialist nation. There is no other developed Western nation that even approaches the level of American socialism. It's just that it is socialism for the rich, not in support of societal wellbeing. Bernie Sanders has always been very clear about this, which is one of the reasons I have supported him
Bernie Sanders showed Friday he isn’t afraid to call out hypocrisy — particularly when it comes from someone like Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Musk on Friday tweeted out a meme critical of Sanders and his brand of socialism. The tweet was in response to an article about a bill Sanders introduced Thursday that would place a 60% tax on the wealth gained by billionaires such as Musk during the coronavirus pandemic. The meme, dubbed the “Official Bernie Sanders drinking game!” showed a picture of Sanders along with the text: “Every time the Bernster mentions a free government program, chug somebody else’s beer.
Rachael Bade and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: Thursday's Republican Scum Report shocks even me. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who will be the Republican candidate from Georgia, from a district so Red she will almost certainly win, even by her party's appalling standards is an outlier. She is openly a White Supremacist anti-semite. That men and women and Georgis would vote for such a person is depressing enough, but the loud embracement of her by Trump and Republican Congressional leaders is just gob-smacking. It think it is telling us that this election over the next 83 days is basically going to be a contest between White racists and the rest of America. The Republicans are betting they can suppress or sabotage the voting process to the point that even though they are a minority, they can win -- if not the vote, the electoral college.
Construction executive Marjorie Taylor Greene, third from left, claps with her supporters at a watch party in Rome, Ga., on Aug. 11, 2020. Credit: Mike Stewart/AP
President Trump and Republican leaders’ embrace of a House candidate who has made racist statements and espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory is again highlighting the party’s willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions.
Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Georgia primary Tuesday evening, was a “future Republican Star,” who was “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” The office of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who ignored multiple pleas from his members to wade into the primary to stop Greene — has said that he will seat her on congressional committees.
The decision has left many House Republicans privately griping about irresponsible leadership, even as they do little publicly to challenge the party’s position or to state their opposition to Greene’s joining their conference if she is elected in November, as is expected, in a reliably Republican district.
Stephan: This is what the Republicans have been working on, underneath the Trumpian fecal storms, and it will take a generation to cleanse the American judiciary of toxic choices.
Obama inherited a country in sharp decline as a result of Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans in Congress and pulled the country back together again. Now Biden and Harris are going to have to do the same thing all over again. Any historian can tell you that Republicans from Reagan on have always harmed the nation more than they have helped it, and Democrats have always left the country in better condition than the found it. That isn't partisan, that's just facts.
President Trump arrives at the U.S. Capitol to attend the Republican’s weekly policy luncheon on March 10, 2020, in Washington, D.C. He is flanked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Sen. Roy Blunt. Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty
After Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate in early 2015, they set out to pack the federal courts with radical right-wing judges. Mitch McConnell said, “My goal is to do everything we can for as long as we can to transform the federal judiciary, because everything else we do is transitory.” Under Article III of the Constitution, federal judges serve for life, so a 50-year-old appointed today could serve 30 years or even longer.
McConnell and his sidekick, Sen. Lindsey Graham, started by refusing to confirm President Obama’s judicial appointments. Most notably, they wouldn’t even consider Obama’s appointment of moderate Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court. When President Trump took office, there were more than 100 empty federal judgeships waiting to be filled with Trumpian favorites.
In today’s hardball politics, the federal courts are especially important. Even if […]
Agence France-Presse, - Raw Story/Agence France-Presse
Stephan: I am always trying to look for good news trends, but they are very hard to find. But here, at least, is some good news. I just liked the story, that's why I'm running it.
Beluga whale Credit: Agence France-Presse
Two beluga whales from a Shanghai aquarium have returned to the sea in an Icelandic sanctuary, conservationists said Monday, expressing hopes of creating a model for rehoming some 300 belugas currently in captivity.
Little White and Little Grey, two 13-year-old females, left behind their previous lives entertaining visitors at the Changfeng Ocean World in June 2019 when they were flown to Iceland’s Klettsvik Bay in the Westman Islands, in specially tailored containers.
On Friday, they were moved from their landbased facility to care pools in the sea at Klettsvik Bay — the first time the two belugas have been in the sea since they were taken from a Russian whale research centre in 2011, the conservation charity Sea Life Trust said in a statement on Monday.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
They will stay in the care pools “for a few weeks” before they are released into the bigger sanctuary, a 32,000-square-meter (344,445-square-foot) sea pen that will become their home, organizers said.
