monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

For any moron that cannot accept the past and the mistakes made as the way it went and is not relevant to today's situation in anyway shape or form. Horror stories from the past are now just used for propaganda to vilify a whole race that like any other race all through history treated people like ****. Human nature is not pretty.

This is the unsolvable problem of any economic system. How do you get established citizens to allow newcomers to compete with them for ownership of the land and/or other resources and means of production? No one wants to hire an employee and then end up losing your business to the employee because they work hard and earn the right to buy the business from you.

Somehow we need an economy where resources are preserved while people get what they need and land and other resources are all protected for future generations, i.e. because we are all going to ultimately die and leave this world behind to others who have to also take care of it for those that come after them.

He was vetted. How much vetting did he require? He's always been one thing: a lying jerk.

It was the perfect confluence of anti government left and right plus a 30% vote chunk of basket of deplorables who were voting for a man who thought just like them on race, immigrants and pointy headed intellectuals plus the help of Russians and a weird twist in the electoral collage. Clinton did, after all, take the popular vote by 3,000,000.

Goes to show one how powerful gerrymandering is and how very important off year elections for state legislatures are. Your vote only means nothing if you don't use it.

We're talking slavery and you're talking land reform for conditions 400 years ago.

Las Cruces cop charged with manslaughter in February death

JUNE 6, 2020 / 9:52 PM

By Christen McCurdy

June 6 (UPI) -- A police officer in Las Cruces, N.M. has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after using a choke hold that killed a man in February.

According to a statement from the Las Cruces Police Department, on Feb. 29 Las Cruces Police Officer Christopher Smelser "utilized a vascular neck restraint technique" which resulted in the death of auto mechanic Antonio Valenzuela.

Police said during a traffic stop Valenzuela, 40, fled on foot and police chased him, deployed a Taser twice and then restrained him.

Valenzuela died at the scene. The department has since prohibited use of vascular neck restraint during apprehensions.

More:
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/06/06/Las-Cruces-cop-charged-with-manslaughter-in-February-death/7221591494300/?sl=1&ur3=1

Over 800 cops were killed in the line of duty last year. Where are those stories?

Over 90 cops were killed in the line of duty this year. Where are those stories?
https://www.odmp.org/search/year

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 429 civilians having been shot, 88 of whom were Black, as of June 4, 2020. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 30 fatal shootings per million of the population as of June 2020.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/08/the-number-of-u-s-police-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty-increased-last-year-infographic/#50a17d211894

In other word: more black were shot by cops than cops were killed criminally.

The FBI has released its latest statistics regarding line-of-duty deaths and/or assaults on law enforcement officers in the United States. A total of 106 police officers lost their lives on duty last year, a 13% increase on 2017. 55 officers were feloniously killed while 51 died accidentally. The average age of officers killed feloniously was 37 and they had an average tenure of 10 years in law enforcement. Three were female and 52 were male.

You completely miss the point of my comment and Walter Hinteler's additional observation — and in doing so, you illustrate what it contends.

I think the media gave him a leg up by not reporting on all his crooked deals. They seemed to think that because he was a billionaire he could do no wrong. Even the liberal press, what their is of it didn't tell it like it was. Most billionaires are badly bent in order to get to be billionaires and do bad things to keep as much of it as they can. Think of the Ketch brothers. They have done as much to wreck the us government as the Russians. Only a bit less than Trump.

They turned him into a Yeltsinish sort of harmless clown.

Why would a clown make a good President?

Rubber Bullets Are Still Bullets

Rubber bullets are just one of several “less lethal” weapons used against crowds at protests. But researchers have known for years that they can be just as dangerous as the real thing.

<"Less lethal" is the term the cops came up with!!!>

By Giulia L. Heyward
Illustration: HuffPost; Photo: Getty Images

Amara Green wasn’t entirely sure what hit her.

The 19-year-old had been at a protest in downtown Minneapolis at around 8 p.m. on May 27. She was in the middle of a crowd across the street from the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct headquarters. All Green remembers is her boyfriend trying to push her out of the way as a flying object hit her bottom lip.

“There was this ringing in my ears,” Green said. “I knew my lip was gushing blood, but I didn’t know what was going on.”

Fellow protesters helped Green and her boyfriend push through the crowd to an area where medical volunteers could appraise her injury. She was told to get to the emergency room, because she was going to need stitches. (Warning: graphic photo below.)

<I left it at the site>

“My lip and chin had both been busted open,” Green said. “While they sewed me up, they told me that my jaw may have shifted, and I would maybe need reconstructive surgery.”

The care will likely cost her thousands of dollars. Though she had previously been covered under her mother’s health insurance, her mom had recently lost her job. It wasn’t until a few days later that she learned her injury was from a “less lethal” weapon police had fired into the crowd: rubber bullets.

Rubber bullets are formally known as “kinetic impact projectiles,” and are not always made of rubber. Some are wood, plastic or even have a metal core. Rubber bullets have been used for decades to subdue riots, and are now being aimed at protesters, journalists and uninvolved bystanders as protests continue throughout the country over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other victims of police brutality. And while researchers have known for years that “less lethal” can still be deadly, police units in the United States continue using them.

“To even use the word ‘safe’ is a misnomer,” said Ian Wittman, chief of emergency medicine at NYU Langone Hospital. “It is absolutely, unequivocally unsafe to use these ammunitions.”

From Northern Ireland To The Civil Rights Movement

The use of kinetic impact projectiles can be traced as far back as the 1880s, when police in Singapore used the ends of wooden broom handles to subdue rioters protesting an array of social issues. By the 1970s, the British Ministry of Defence began using rubber bullets in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

And with the civil rights movement underway in the U.S., President Lyndon B. Johnson created a blue ribbon commission in 1966 to explore less lethal ammunition for protests and riots. Manufacturers began producing less lethal weapons to sell to American police departments.

But in 2003, the BBC published declassified document from 1977 detailing legal advice for the Ministry of Defence to push for a settlement with the family of a young boy who had been blinded by a rubber bullet. The concern was that going to court would lead to further investigation that would expose how the bullets had not been tested properly and had caused more serious injuries in the past.

A National Center for Biotechnology Information study examining injuries from 1990 to 2017 found that over 71% of all injuries from rubber bullets and similar projectiles were severe, leading to at least 53 deaths and another 300 permanent disabilities during that period.

Zeelee Segura was attending a May 30 protest in La Mesa, California, when she was shot in the mouth, a high risk area, with a rubber bullet.

“I didn’t know you could actually see a bullet as it’s coming towards you,” Segura said. “I was just happy it hit me and not the pregnant woman next to me. There were some little kids not too far away from me either.”
Zeelee Segura shows her rubber bullet injury soon after leaving a May 30 protest in La Mesa, California.

In the first 24 hours after, Segura was in so much pain that she couldn’t touch her face. Nearly a week later, the 21-year-old is having nightmares from the incident. She often wakes up dry heaving from panic attacks. Although she’s seen a doctor, she is still worried about long-term damage to her teeth.

“If I close my eyes and try to remember what being hit felt like, it was like a real bullet,” Segura said. “In the moment, I couldn’t tell the difference.”

Mike Griffin, 34, a senior organizer at Community Change Action, says he’s seen countless injuries from batons, tear gas canisters and rubber bullets every day in Minneapolis since demonstrations began.

“I’ve seen welts the size of a baseball, and I’ve seen people rushed to the hospital for internal bleeding or because a bullet hit an eye,” Griffin said. “I don’t even get why any of these are called ‘less lethal.’”

Wittman said most physicians feel the same way.

“It’s a heavy object being shot out of a gun at a high rate of speed at a human body,” Wittman said. “The most common injuries are fractures or ruptured blood vessels and nerves. If it hits someone’s eyes, they have a high likelihood of losing vision, and there are sometimes skull and intracranial fractures.”

There aren’t any national standards when it comes to training police officers to use less-lethal weapons, so it’s often up to the discretion of each police department. And using a rubber bullet is a speciality skill, because where it’s aimed can make a huge difference in the damage it does.

Steve Ijames, a Missouri police officer who has traveled the world training police departments on how to use less-lethal weapons, believes that less-lethal ammunition can save lives when used correctly, but acknowledges that the level of training each police department receives on how to use them can vary.

“The adequacy of training varies from state to state,” Ijames said. “My training can be as long as a full eight-hour day, but it could also be a 15-minute briefing in the range where someone said, ‘Here’s a beanbag [bullet], just shoot the arms and legs.’ I’ve seen that before.”

With protests occurring all across the country each day, police departments are running out of this ammunition, and turning to other departments for help.

“Most police agencies are poor planners, and historically very reactionary, so they have very little or no knowledge on less-lethal ammunition,” Ijames said. “Manufacturers right now are already overwhelmed by demand as is, so police departments are now trying to beg and borrow ammunition from other departments. It hasn’t been this bad since Ferguson.”

This scramble is why Dennis Kenney, a criminal justice professor at John Jay College in New York City and a former police officer, thinks most rubber bullets are shot by people who don’t know how to use them.

“Most agencies also don’t have that kind of equipment just laying around, and training can be cumbersome if you have to take people out of service,” Kenney said. “So when you see all of this equipment during protests, they haven’t had a lot of time for the advanced training. It’s very safe to assume that very few of them have been properly trained.”

Kenney also noted that shooting at a crowd means the target is constantly moving, which also decreases accuracy and increases the likelihood of severe injury.

“In general, nonlethal force is used to overcome resistance, not to maintain compliance,” Kenney said. “Rubber bullets are impact devices that tend to inflict pain, when the force used to overcome resistance is being met. But in a good deal of these cases, the resistance is low. It’s about getting a crowd to comply. Using a device of that significance seems to be excessive.”

The number of reported injuries continues to climb. On May 31, 20-year-old Justin Howell was shot in the skull with a rubber bullet, and is expected to have permanent brain damage. A GoFundMe campaign has already raised nearly $150,000 as of Saturday to help cover his medical bills. Meanwhile, a federal judge is now temporarily prohibiting Denver police from using less-lethal weapons, including projectiles like rubber bullets, at protests.

Green has also started a GoFundMe to help cover her upcoming surgeries. In a few days, she was able to raise over $14,000.

“I was so overwhelmed, I broke down in tears,” Green said. “I mean, I don’t even know these people.”

And while Green may be looking at months of rehabilitation, she thinks it was worth it.

“Even if this money hadn’t happened, I still wouldn’t regret going to the protest at all,” Green said. “It was really scary, but it made me stronger.”

Trump’s Presidency Is Reaping What His White Grievance Politics Sowed

“He’s just shown blatantly over and over again that he’s a racist,” said one Black Lives Matter protester.

By Arthur Delaney

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-black-lives-matter_n_5eda7c30c5b629130d78201b

Donald Trump has not had a great year. It started with an impeachment trial, then a pandemic, and now widespread demonstrations against police brutality toward Black Americans. But hardly anyone protested outside the White House until this week.

The president himself had no direct involvement with the murder of George Floyd, but it makes sense that Black Lives Matter protests would surge under Trump’s watch.

He founded his political career on white identity politics, with his 1989 call for the execution of the Central Park Five, his questioning of President Barack Obama’s birthplace, his frequent invocation of “law and order,” his 2017 claim there were “very fine people” among white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, and of course, his constant attacks on immigrants.

The Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by police murdering Black people, predates Trump’s presidency by several years, but the president personifies the kind of systemic racism the movement has always decried.

“He’s just shown blatantly over and over again that he’s a racist,” said Ashley Ezekieva, a 23-year-old protesting outside the White House on Thursday evening. “From Obama to the Central Park Five, he’s shown over and over again that he does not like Black or brown people.”

Overt anti-Black racism has been taboo in American politics for some time, which is why Trump still maintains that he’s “done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln.” He’s pointed to a criminal justice reform bill and a historically low unemployment rate for Black people, even though it remained nearly twice as high as the rate for white people ― at least until both unemployment rates skyrocketed in April.

But racial resentment has remained a powerful political tool, one that Trump has harnessed more effectively than his recent Republican predecessors.

From Obama to the Central Park Five, he’s shown over and over again that he does not like Black or brown people. Ashley Ezekieva, protester

One way researchers try to evaluate voters’ motivations is by looking at their voting patterns and studying their answers to survey questions on political topics. One such question, asked as part of the Annual National Election Studies, asks people how much they agree with the statement that “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.” The more strongly someone agrees with statements like that one, the more “racially conservative” they are.

More than any other factor ― education, income, fear of missing a house payment ― voters’ racism correlated with their support for Trump, and the correlation was stronger than it had been for any candidate in the previous two elections, according to the 2018 book “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” by political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck.

While many white Obama voters had racist views, far fewer such voters supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, with Trump making it very clear he was on their side.

Using a mountain of polling data, Sides, Tesler and Vavreck found stronger evidence for the racial grievance explanation of the electoral outcome in 2016 than for economic anxiety, Russian meddling, or the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails.

“The activation of racial issues helped Trump because there were so many Obama voters whose views on these issues were arguably closer to Trump’s than to Obama’s or Clinton’s ― and these voters were especially prevalent in battleground states,” the trio of researchers wrote.

The mass protests could put Trumpism to a serious test. The president has urged police to come down hard on protesters, and now there’s an endless highlight reel of cops brutalizing people in the way Black Lives Matter activists have always said they do.

“Trump, in his long-standing rhetoric and in his immediate response to the protests, has clearly demonstrated that the problem rises to the highest levels of American government,” said Vanessa Williamson, a scholar of public opinion with the Brookings Institution.
Subscribe to the Politics email.
From Washington to the campaign trail, get the latest politics news.

In a 2018 paper, Williamson and co-authors Kris-Stella Trump and Katherine Levine Einstein found that “Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to occur in localities where more Black people have previously been killed by police.” They counted more than 780 protests in the year after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

White Americans nowadays are more likely to say Black people have been treated unfairly than they were when Richard Nixon won the White House with a “law and order” campaign in 1968. One tracking poll from a Democratic-affiliated firm even found that as of last month, more white people support than oppose Black Lives Matter. (Recent polls also show a modest decline in Trump’s overall approval rating.)

Nevertheless, Trump and other Republicans have tarred the protests as havens for terrorists intent on destroying property.

“I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail,” the president said in a speech from the White House this week. “This includes antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence.”

It’s possible that Trump could turn the narrative into a referendum on respecting the flag and defunding police departments. “But so long as the focus remains on ruptured race relations and remedying glaring police brutality and discrimination against African Americans, it’s a big loser for Trump,” said Tesler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine.

Several protesters told HuffPost this week that Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric has been inflammatory.

“It’s just kind of like we have a figure that usually uses his voice for hate,” said Natalie, a 24-year-old from Arlington, Virginia. “Having that as a leader just doesn’t help at all. And right now, all I see is just mutual hate everywhere.”

Raphael, a 25-year-old from Alexandria, Virginia, said Trump emboldens people who don’t like Black Lives Matter. “They’re like, ‘Hey, we got a leader, we’re good, like he’s gonna keep us protected,’” he said.

Ezekieva and two friends drove more than two hours to Washington from Snow Hill, Maryland, on Thursday after previously attending a small protest in Ocean City, Maryland.

“This stuff would still be happening, but just the things he’s been saying in general is just making the whole situation worse ― he’s escalating it,” Ezekieva said.

“‘Shut up and die’ is basically what we’re being told, and we’re tired of it,” she said. “I’m doing this today so the next generation doesn’t have to do it, because our parents and grandparents did it so we didn’t have to do it, but here we are today. There needs to be bigger change.”

I'm not going to go to the trouble of researching the matter but I don't think there are many precedents for a spread of this magnitude.

And that makes either one good? What is the point of bitching about cops doing their jobs? Did any of those Black shooting victims have guns? Statistics like yours never examine all the facts just the ones they like.

Just the ones that cause more division and more hate.

Nailed it. Great post.

I missed no point and what you contend I disagree with. You are not going to tell what America or what people are like because I do not think you have any idea.

You and Walter are the ones talking like racists here, not me.

You guys do it all the time. After you finished the above crappy phrase, you accused two people of being Racists. ?Hows yer memory meds working out for you?

No, I did not accuse them. I said they were talking like racists. If you cannot see the difference there is no point explaining it to you.

Is there any actual discussion going on where you explain something and someone understands and the discussion proceeds with common understanding?

I think all that happens is that people keep trying to overpower discussion by just saying something else that propagates their partisan suppression of anything that isn't in lockstep.

They don't really want to discuss racism, only use it as ammunition for partisan flag-waving, virtue-signaling, etc.