WTF Community

Mentionable News

In America, if you thwart or even worse kill a black person, you will get fired. That’s it, and probably very little more of it will result. Police are protected and others are publically shamed.

In MN, the death of a black man who was pinned by a police officer, who put his knee on this man’s neck and kept it there even after he screams he can not breathe. Four policemen involved in this are fired.

Woman in NYC in Central Park who while walking with an unleashed dog, was asked by a black man to leash her dog, as was the law in an area which requires it, and she turns the tables on him, calls 911 to say he is assaulting her and her dog. He video tapes the whole thing, stands his ground, and never ever was aggressive towards her.

The worst of it is she is vilified nationally, loses her job, her dog (she mistreated) and is referred to another entitled white woman aka a “Karen”

.

If you ‘hang’ symbolically an effigy of a white governor, Gov. Beshears like he is being lynched, you are just protesting. Despite the fact, it harkens back to one of the worst acts white people did to black people.

The racism in this country is so out of control - employing brutal methods to show your point that is white supremacy. The deep divide in our body politic is so very pronounced and so horrific.

I wish for better.

5 Likes

ok I feel nauseated by all the news you just posted @dragonfly9 but omg I am dyyyyyying at the DENNIS’d-up KAREN sign :joy_cat: :skull:

4 Likes

3 Likes

@dragonfly9

You pretty much summed it up the weekend. Trump for once wasn’t the most outrageous news maker and instead we we’re treated to another episode of murderous police brutality and yet another f—king Karen. It’s that old American white privilege, they know they have it and they want to use it.

I yell at people who disobey leash laws all the damn time. This should not result in someone calling the police and have to face the possible brutality from the other story.

4 Likes

A post was merged into an existing topic: More Questionable Behavior from Trump, T Admin, DOJ, and R’s vs Dems, Press, Justice

4 Likes

WTAF, happened last night!

Folks on twitter say this crazy lady with a knife was stabbing people at a Target, I guess she’s 30 years old and can walk. Why is she stabbing people? What the fuck?!

3 Likes

Holy shit!

Click tweet for video :point_down:

This like something out of the civil rights era.

Current mood

https://youtu.be/ai-1fA4J58E

4 Likes

Shots fired

4 Likes

:eyes:

Click tweet for video feed :point_down:

3 Likes

And there it is

4 Likes

Heather Cox Richardson…recap for 5.28.20

This day’s news has been so brutal…good to get a historic sense on some of the events, from rioting to R’s grab for legislative power, and all within the confines of a raging pandemic which has left the country paralyzed with misdirection, as well as polarized.

WTFery everywhere.

The coronavirus pandemic has ripped the remaining tatters of cover off this country’s racial inequality as black Americans are dying in much higher numbers than white Americans. Racial inequality is not new, but racial brutality has become more and more obvious in the past several years as cell phones have recorded the deaths of black Americans at the hands of authorities or white Americans who took it upon themselves to police their black neighbors.

On Monday night, a Minneapolis police officer killed a handcuffed man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck for ten minutes as other officers either held him down or looked away. It took only five minutes for Floyd, who had initially begged “Please, please. I can’t breathe,” to stop moving. A passerby captured the murder on video, and it has been widely shared on social media.

Last night, in Minneapolis, and then Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and Manhattan, protesters took to the streets. In Minnesota, the protests turned into riots and looting after police greeted the protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. This morning, after two nights of violent protests, the U.S. Department of Justice said it would make a federal investigation into the killing a “top priority.” Tonight, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) called in the state’s National Guard to keep the peace.

It didn’t work: as I write, it appears the Minneapolis precinct police department whose officers were involved in the murder is on fire. Police are reporting that 170 businesses in St. Paul have been damaged and dozens of fires have been set. Protests have spread to Phoenix, Arizona, and to Louisville, Kentucky, too, where 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was killed in her home on March 13 by plainclothes police executing a warrant for a man who lived in a different part of Louisville and had already been arrested.

Historically, political rioting in America is an attempt to call attention to a perceived injustice. In its aftermath, ordinary citizens decide whether or not the rioting was justified.Usually, they support social justice movements and shut down reactionary mobs.

When associated with a political riot, looting takes on a political meaning as well. If a population feels that the law is oppressing them—as it did for African Americans during slavery times, for example—they often break the law deliberately to illustrate their opposition to it (as African American abolitionists did in the years before the Civil War). There are always bad eggs in any mob scene, but in this case the larger story of the looting, after an event where an officer of the law murdered an unresisting man in full view of an audience, demonstrating his sense of untouchability, falls into a pretty well established historical pattern.

Crucially, white Americans are finally paying attention to the violence against the black community. I suspect the reason for this attention is that the current leadership of the Republican Party has gone so far toward consolidating power in favor of an oligarchy that ordinary white Americans are identifying with marginalized people. This is precisely what happened in the 1850s, when even desperately racist white Americans pushed back against the elite slave owners taking control of the American government because they recognized that they, too, could be sacrificed if leaders thought they stood in the way of the economic system that enriched a few.

Another story from last night illustrates exactly this point, showing the lengths to which Republican leaders are willing to go to achieve their legislative goals. In Pennsylvania, a member of the state legislature tested positive for Covid-19. He told his Republican colleagues, who engaged in appropriate quarantining and distancing, but neither they nor the Republican House Speaker, Mike Turzai, told the Democrats, who learned much later that one of their colleagues had tested positive for coronavirus from a reporter.

People outside the legislature learned of the situation last night, when Democratic Representative Brian Sims posted a passionate video on Twitter, angrily calling out his Republican colleagues for putting lives at risk. Sims revealed that he had recently donated a kidney to a patient dying of kidney failure, putting him at particularly high risk of contracting the coronavirus. His outrage that his Republican colleagues would keep such vital information from him and his Democratic colleagues, in order to make sure their goal of reopening the state did not falter, resonated. The idea that Republicans who, theoretically, were supposed to be working with Democrats for the good of Pennsylvanians, would deliberately endanger the life of a man who had secretly donated a kidney seemed the epitome of partisanship gone toxic.

More stories today illustrated that the Republicans are determined to cement their ideology into law no matter what voters want. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told judges over 65 that they should consider retiring to make sure Trump could fill their seats. “This is an historic opportunity. We’ve put over 200 federal judges on the bench. I think 1 in 5 federal judges are Trump appointees. … So if you’re a circuit judge in your mid-60s, late 60s, you can take senior status; now would be a good time to do that if you want to make sure the judiciary is right of center. This is a good time to do it,” Graham added.

Yesterday, Senate Democrats released a report examining how Republican leaders, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have packed the courts. Funded by millions of dollars of “dark money” contributions, they are “rolling back the clock on civil rights, consumer protections, and the rights of ordinary Americans, reliably putting a thumb on the scale in favor of corporate and Republican political interests.” The report notes that the House has passed more than 350 bills this session, nearly 90% of which are bi-partisan and popular, but that McConnell has refused to take them up, focusing instead on judicial confirmations. This “judicial capture” is designed to rewrite federal law “to favor the rich and powerful.”

Their point had another illustration today, when we learned that Marc Short, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, owns between $500,000 and $1.5 million worth of stocks in companies linked to the administration’s pandemic response, in apparent disregard for the law.

But it appears that ordinary Americans have had enough. CNN reported today that GOP operatives are afraid that Trump will both lose the White House and tank the Republican Senate majority in 2020, something borne out by Graham’s call for older judges to retire and be replaced by partisan Republicans while they know they can be.

Knowing that the economic crisis is hurting the president’s chances of reelection, the White House announced today that it will not release the usual economic forecast this summer. Those projections would show the skyrocketing unemployment and ballooning deficit shortly before the election.

Symbolically, it also appears that the anti-maskers are losing ground to those advocating mask wearing. While Trump still refuses to wear one, McConnell, and FNC personality Sean Hannity, among others, have called for wearing masks to help contain the coronavirus.

And finally, Trump’s executive order today attempting to clamp down on social media so that it will not fact-check his inaccurate tweets about the election seem designed not to change policy—legal analysts say it will not withstand legal challenges—but to continue to push the idea that there is a grand conspiracy against him and his supporters. A Washington D.C. District Judge appointed by Trump threw out a lawsuit against Twitter and Facebook today, that claimed they were biased against right-wing users.

Trump’s executive order will shore up his supporters’ sense of grievance, and add more fuel to the argument he seems to be preparing: that any election he loses must be “rigged.”

—-

Notes:

Pennsylvania: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pennsylvania-house-democrats-andrew-lewis-keeping-covid-diagnosis-a-secret

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/pennsylvania-lawmakers-coronavirus/index.html

Marc Short: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/28/860927054/pence-chief-of-staff-owns-stocks-that-could-conflict-with-coronavirus-response

Floyd: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/opinions/minneapolis-george-floyd-video-a-horrific-rerun-alexander/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/28/minneapolis-protests-george-floyd-death/

https://www.ajc.com/news/breaking-violence-rocks-minneapolis-again-after-man-death-killed/3CC3VT0PRzbWFIBnIPodBK/

Judges: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/499957-graham-urges-senior-judges-to-step-aside-ahead-of-november-election

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-democrats-take-gop-court-packing-blistering-new-report-n1215901

https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Courts%20Report%20-%20FINAL.pdf

GOP fears: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/28/politics/republicans-trump-senate-2020-trouble/index.html

Masks: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/losing-the-mask-war

Breonna Taylor: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2020/05/29/breonna-taylor-protest-demand-change-councilwoman-says/5281004002/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/breonna-taylor-killed-by-police-kenneth-walker-911-call-released/

Looting and fires: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/breonna-taylor-killed-by-police-kenneth-walker-911-call-released/

Economic projection halted: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/28/white-house-coronavirus-economic-projections/

Social media e.o. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoints/what-to-make-of-trumps-executive-order-on-social-media

3 Likes

He used the WH twitter account to re-tweet this:

Twitter has responded by flagging BOTH posts and making it so you can’t like or respond to them, only re-tweet, and have to click even to view them.

Apparently Twitter is not backing down on Trump’s threats against them.

4 Likes

Where does the phrase ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’ come from?

Before Trump, it was uttered by a Southern police chief during civil rights unrest in the 1960s.

Remember, Trump LIVES in the past. He often references things 40-50 years out of date… from this era.

4 Likes

Yes, Twitter not backing down. Twitter are setting guidelines…and calling out where they see misinformation and blocking some comments. Thank you.

The president’s tweet, which implied that protesters in Minneapolis could be shot, could not be viewed without reading a brief notice, and users were blocked from liking or replying to it.

Twitter added a warning label early Friday to a tweet from President Trump implying that protesters in Minneapolis could be shot, in a move likely to escalate tensions between Mr. Trump and his favorite social media megaphone.

The company said Mr. Trump’s post violated its rules against glorifying violence, and it prevented users from viewing the tweet without reading a brief notice, the first time it has restricted one of the president’s messages in this way. Twitter also blocked users from liking or replying to Mr. Trump’s post, though they were still allowed to retweet it if they added a comment of their own.

But Twitter did not take the tweet down, saying it was in the public’s interest that the message remain accessible.

4 Likes

CNN Crew was arrested early this morning.

4 Likes

7 people shot in protests over the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, police say

4 Likes

The MN situation with Police officers killing George Floyd is beyond belief…wreck less, malicious evil and horrific. I can not look at the videos as I have seen already too much

All eyes are on the FBI to bring charges…and arrest at least the main perpetrator. However…here is the rub…legally the bar is set very high in order to claim the officer willfully killed a man. It should be, officer knowingly killed a black man.

Our eyes and ears do not lie.

Explained in this thread…

THREAD

1/MN US Atty, FBI are investigating federal civil rights violation of #GeorgeFloyd. Some ask why no arrest yet. The answer - the statute is bad. It requires such overwhelming evidence as to make it almost impossible to prove, despite compelling video evidence.

2/ Statute, 18 USC 242, makes it a crime to deprive someone of constitutional rights under color of law. Elements are 1) victim lived in US, 2) def acted under color of law, such as police authority, 3) def’s conduct deprived victim of constitutional right, 4) def acted willfully

3/ Here, elements 1 and 2 are easily met, but 3 is a challenge, and 4 can be virtually impossible.

4/ For element 3, deprivation of a constitutional right, the allegation would be that the officer(s) used excessive force and deprived Mr. #Floyd of his right to be free from unreasonable seizures under the 4th Amendment.

5/ Jury would be told reasonableness is judged from perspective of reasonable officer at scene, not 20/20 vision of hindsight, because officers must make split-second judgments in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving. Even that element is probably met here5/ Jury would be told reasonableness is judged from perspective of reasonable officer at scene, not 20/20 vision of hindsight, because officers must make split-second judgments in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving. Even that element is probably met here

6/ It is the 4th element, willfulness, that is virtually insurmountable. To prove willfulness, the prosecutor must show the officer had a specific intent to do precisely what the law forbids, not just a bad purpose.
7/ For willfulness, it is not enough that an officer’s force was excessive and unjustified, or that he intended to harm or to frighten. It is not enough to show that death was accidental, negligent or reckless. It is not enough to show a mistake, panic or bad judgment.

8/ Instead, it must be proven that that the officer knew what he was doing was illegal and chose to do it anyway. This element must be proved for each officer charged, and can be impossible to prove.

9/ And so, a prosecutor must anticipate that a defense attorney will hammer this element at trial, and portray the officers’ conduct in the best light possible and Mr. Floyd’s in the worst. To overcome this high bar, it is essential to gather evidence about the officers’ intent.

10/ Investigators will look at all of the circumstances, not just the video. They must interview civilian and police witnesses, and lock in their testimony at grand jury, likely suspended for now by COVID, so that they don’t change their stories at a trial many months from now.

11/ Investigators will review officers’ training, department policies, statements by the officers before and after the incident, and look for any evidence of a cover-up.

12/ Even then, convictions are rare. Jurors give great deference to police officers. Implicit bias may play a role. The legal bar is set deliberately high to protect officers from criminal liability when they must respond rapidly to life-and-death situations. Perhaps too high.

13/ So how do we ensure a just system that allows for police officers to do their jobs? Amend 18 USC 242 to change the intent from “willful” to “knowing” or even “reckless.” This change could help reduce the injustices we see too often on viral videos. Justice for all. END

3 Likes

Obama weighs in

3 Likes

Trump’s ‘Looting’ Remark Dates Back to Racial Unrest of the 1960s

The phrase the president tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” was first used by a Miami police chief widely condemned by civil rights groups.

2 Likes