OK Corral

Even trained police officers couldn't bring down a single shooter in a populated setting without hitting nine bystanders:

The volley of gunfire felled Johnson in just a few seconds and left nine other people bleeding on the sidewalk.

Yet the NRA's so-called solution is armed amateurs meting out hot lead wherever they feel a threat. This idea is unbelievably stupid.

I shudder to imagine a citizen's intervention by the guy next to me at the handgun range last week, belching out bullets by the clip with his .45. He couldn't hit a zombie poster with a tight group at 10 feet.

(Note to those who can't read without assuming things I haven't said: I'm not saying this was a bad shoot.)

Update: Turns out Atrios was waaay ahead of me in shooting this particular fish in a barrel.

Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?

Palace guard

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Who do you think I work for?

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Quality of life policing

Click image for full Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News cartoon.

Loughner's never getting out, so what's the problem?

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer prepares to empty the asylums.  Oh, too late, done decades ago.  Brewer proposes to stop taking care of the mentally ill except to fling tranqs at them.  Complex problems, simple-minded solutions, the Republican way...

Can't you just purr from the warm feeling of Republican Nocare!  Yes, the free market is going to take care of these people.  It always does.  They can sell their meds on the street and get their transplants.  If that's the rational way to act in the market for medical services.  Though we might need a government program to intervene from time to time - what do we give cops tasers for, anyway?  Portable electroshock!

Then Arizonans can finance it all with yet another zombie movie.  It's already cast, so no need for a casting director.  Win-win-win!

(h/t Digby)

Who you calling Anglo?

Click image for full John Branch/San Antonio Express-News cartoon.

Give voice to the billyclub

What's Bob Greene's gig at CNN? To give sympathetic interviews to reactionaries.

Look, being a Marxist, much less being a war protester with no revolutionary impulses, is not sufficient reason to have your skull bashed for the "crime" of free speech. Taunting comedically doesn't deserve assault. It's not even illegal to be an asshole, as some of the protesters surely were. Look, these cops getting back together is definitely not a reunion of the Waffen SS. I'm sure most of the cops had long and honorable careers. But they're not heroes for their police riot.

The cops weren't in the right in August 1968. Never mind whether one or two of them now "remember" that they opposed the Vietnam War, they brutally defended the existing pro-war Establishment order. Greene says that their defense of their riot here in 2009 was only attention-getting. Oh bullshit.

The reason there's no healing from this is that journalists like Greene continue to help with the rationalization of brutality. In forty years, someone will take this role to excuse the Constitutional crimes of the Bushist regime.

The lesson: As long as there is no accountability, there's no learning, no progress, no resolution.

Shopping for an AR-15

Boston cops want to pack the semiautomatic version of the M-16 into battle on the streets of Boston. Uh, no. What a stupid idea.

The dangers are not imaginary, but the police have to go to Mumbai to justify their desire for new toys. In Columbine, the police hesitated to establish a perimeter, or so they said.

The BPD wants a weapon with a range of a five hundred meters to shoot bad guys in the city. How many 500-meter fields of fire are there in Boston? How many should anyone send a high-velocity bullet tumbling down? How many would be empty enough to have a righteous shooting?

If I were one of the targeted bad guys, I might think about jacking a cop car to get the assault rifle out of the trunk.

Better body armor would be much safer for cops and civilians.

Bomb squad called to supermarket

Fruit case filled with boxes of some infernal device that looks a lot more like a cherry bomb than this:

We really have lost our minds. I've seen dog turds that look more like explosives. But at least the cops got to deploy their robot.

Click thumbnail for The Tech's report.

Not pressure enough by itself

But a body was missing in this case, and so was another element that former prosecutors and law enforcement officials said is crucial to solving a case: public pressure.

To solve the disappearance and presumed murder of a 5-year-old boy requires public pressure! It seems to me that the police in this case are bemoaning their own low expectations.

Relying on the dumbness of strangers

After welcoming the state trooper firing investigation just last week, Sarah Palin now says it's a partisan witch hunt. Never mind that the same guy is running it as was running it before McCain plucked her out of well-deserved obscurity. Now, she has found her excuse not to cooperate.

I'll give Palin this: She learns the Republican way with astonishing speed. She's not even elected, and she already thinks she's above the law.

Republicans lie. It's what they do to remain in power.

American media and voters let them. Ignorance truly must be bliss if so many people are opting for it.

If she were running from the scene of a mugging, we'd all conclude she was probably guilty. Instead, she's using her office to settle a personal score and then visibly covering it up. The right sanction is to assume that she is guilty as charged. If that's how the narrative went, she'd open right up.

Update (9/16): Here are all my Sarah Palin posts. Blogger tells me that there are 28 so far. Have fun!

One serious thing about Palin: You'll notice I didn't jump on the weird, outlandish rumors, like the one about Trig's parentage. I didn't publish the Photoshopped fake picture of her in a stars and stripes bikini toting a rifle, though I thought it was wicked funny when I got a copy. There was other even funnier stuff mocking the Palins. You can find it if you want, but I didn't publish it. The media should be so responsible!

I've been trying to find out who Palin is and what she represents. Despite her smile, it ain't a pretty picture.

Disappointed expectations

Some white people were raided and subjected to police intimidation. Also, some people who were quoted as chanting that they were white people have rioted and been arrested. As a liberal, I support the right of white people to dissent vocally and with some level of civil disobedience, but I think white people should be arrested if they riot.

What I would expect a responsible media to do is to find out whether the first group of white people and the second group of white people overlap in any way and by how much. That might put into perspective the police intimidation and at least justify the issuance of the warrants, though perhaps still not every alleged bit of police conduct.

I do expect to be disappointed in my expectation. The media are really fond of lumping all white people into the same category and holding all of them responsible for the acts of a few.

Of course, I substituted 'white people' for 'anarchists' to make the whole point of this item.

On the side of the loonies

These self-described anarchists act as if politics is street theater, and the world they would like to live in is probably something from the fever of youth, but I can't interpret this story as anything other than heavy-handed police harassment:

St. Paul Police spokesman Tom Walsh said they were executing a search warrant.

"The cause for the search warrant is not public at this time," Walsh said.

As many as 30 police officers entered with guns drawn, according to witnesses in the building.

"The convergence center is simply a gathering place and is not used for illegal actions -- it is a place for workshops and trainings," a statement from the protest group said. "Tonight, we were watching films and sharing food."

"We are now accused of a simple fire code violation," the statement said.

I do count myself anti-authoritarian in the Constitutional sense. This raid is fruit of the police attitude set free by the scoundrels' PATRIOT Act and the Bushists' open contempt for the Constitution.

Update (8/31): See also "Hippie kids and god bless 'em", in which I apologize for calling them loonies.

Thought you said 'dogs'

War on drugs, war on dogs, what's the difference?

Either way, you don't expect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to still apply, do you?

If this sort of thing can happen to the township mayor, you better believe it could happen to you. Over marijuana, not even an opiate.

Mayor Calvo came downstairs into a new time in America, in which no one is presumed innocent and guilt is only an assumption away.

My guess: If you looked into the operating history of the Prince George's County Police, you'd find aggressive use of civil forfeiture laws to fund special projects out of alleged drug money.

Something else that I had to go find myself: The PGCP is under a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice for excessive force and civil rights violations, ironically related to its K-9 unit.

No crime

It's hard to understand how there was no crime at all in the killing of Sean Bell.

If Bell or his friends had had a gun and had fired back, their plea of self-defense would have been laughed out of court. They would have had to claim that they couldn't identify as police the men shooting at them, but that claim would have been very credible.

Quis custodiet?

You mean cops are subject to traffic laws!?

"You can't have one set of laws for police officers and another one for the rest of the world," Andrews said.

In recent weeks, officers have twice been photographed speeding past a camera and extending a middle finger, an act that police supervisors interpreted as a gesture of defiance.

Or was the officer propositioning the camera?

Hysterically,

Leaders of the police union recently filed a grievance arguing that the citations constitute a change in labor conditions that the department must negotiate with the union before implementing.

I find this whole story hilarious.