monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

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No one actually knows how many people police kill every year.

The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database is the most frequently cited source for police killings because they are one of the few media sources with the resources and dedication to continue the ongoing research. Killed By Police also keeps a database. The Guardian tried it for two years. Bowling Green’s Phillip Stinson had an expansive police crime database that eventually ended. After comparing all of the publicly available data, we determined ... well ... that no one knows how many people police kill each year.

The reason the number remains a mystery is that law enforcement agencies, politicians, lobbyists and the good ol’ NRA have gone to extraordinary measures to prevent government agencies from counting how many people die at the hands of law enforcement agencies. Even when organizations attempt to count the number of people who die in police encounters, the data is sometimes flawed and often incomplete.

For instance, the Washington Post’s database only lists people who were shot and killed by officers, leaving out victims like Akeelah Jackson. They don’t count deaths in police custody; they don’t count people who have died as a result of beatings or tasers or vehicular deaths. Most outlets also don’t include people who died at the hands of off-duty officers...

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. A black person was three-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cop than a white person.

. A Hispanic person was one-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person

. An unarmed black person was three times more likely to be killed by police than a white person with no weapon

. An unarmed black person fleeing the scene was six times more likely than a white person to be killed by a police officer.

The Blacker the Content the Sweeter the Truth

. A black person was three-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cop than a white person.

No bias there.

Thank the Democrats for that.

To discount the source simply because it's oriented toward a black audience reveals underlying racial hostility on your part.

Yeah, black citizens were much better off without Social Security, affirmative action, the right to vote,

Well now, I guess someone has got to step up to the plate and actually fire him if they want him out. Are they going to wait until he is in front of Judge prosecuting and fire him in mid-sentence?

No definitive precedent exists but there is some reason to believe that the president — but not the attorney general — has the authority.

WASHINGTON — The declaration by the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan that he would stay in his job despite Attorney General William P. Barr’s attempt to fire him raised not just the mystery of what was behind Mr. Barr’s move, but also a legal question: Who has the authority to remove him?

No definitive and settled Supreme Court precedent exists to look to for guidance, and federal statutes appear to conflict on the question. That sets up the possibility of a protracted fight in court if the Trump administration pushes forward and Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, continues to resist.

But legal experts pointed to a 1979 Justice Department opinion to suggest that the ultimate result of any courtroom confrontation will likely be that President Trump — though not Mr. Barr — has the authority to fire Mr. Berman.

“It’s probably the case that Trump, but not Barr, would have to remove Berman and take the political responsibility for doing so,” said Martin S. Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Obama administration.

Normally, under the Constitution, the power to remove government officials rests with whomever appointed them, except in instances where Congress set up an alternative mechanism. At issue is how that framework applies to the position of a U.S. attorney who was appointed by a court, as Mr. Berman was in 2018.

While the president appoints most U.S. attorneys following Senate confirmation, a law permits an attorney general to appoint a prosecutor to fill those vacancies for 120 days. If that temporary appointment expires, judges can fill it. A prosecutor appointed by the court will “serve until the vacancy is filled,” the statute says.

That is how Mr. Berman became U.S. attorney. He was initially appointed by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and federal judges in Manhattan reappointed him after the 120-day period expired. In his statement on Friday night, Mr. Berman indicated that Mr. Barr could not fire him because he had been appointed by the court, and declared he intended to remain in office until the Senate confirms a successor.

“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York,” he said. “I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate.”

However, another federal law says that U.S. attorneys may be removed by the president. It appears to make no exception for those appointed by courts. That raises the question of whether Congress has established that presidents may remove prosecutors appointed by courts.

In 1979, during the Carter administration, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which analyzes legal issues for the executive branch, looked at this question. It concluded that the president — but not the attorney general — could fire such an official.

In a memorandum opinion, John M. Harmon, the head of the office at the time, cited the law that says presidents may fire U.S. attorneys. The law’s broad wording makes sense, he wrote, if it is applied not only to presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys “but also is to be read as extending to ‘each’ U.S. attorney, including the court-appointed ones whom the president could not remove without congressional leave.”

Mr. Harmon also pointed to constitutional arguments to back his conclusion: U.S. attorneys exercise executive power, making the president responsible for the conduct of their offices, so the president “must have the power to remove one he believes is an unsuitable incumbent, regardless of who appointed him,” he wrote.

District court judges in Manhattan may be inclined to disagree and back an alternative interpretation that keeps in their hands the power to remove a U.S. attorney they appointed. But if potential litigation over the issue were to go all the way to the Supreme Court, a majority of the justices are Republican appointees steeped in a conservative ideology of White House power that includes a robust view of the president’s ability to remove officials.

In addition, Mr. Harmon wrote in 1979, it might violate constitutional protections for due process of law if judges overseeing cases as neutral arbiters had the power to fire prosecutors if the judges did not like how they handle their responsibilities.

Office of Legal Counsel opinions are generally considered to be binding interpretations of the law for Justice Department officials, but they are not legal precedents in the sense of judicial opinions by appeals courts or the Supreme Court. The 1979 opinion pointed to one district court opinion from 1963 — also in Manhattan — which expressed the view that a president may remove a court-appointed prosecutor.

Even if that is the case, Mr. Barr overstepped by trying to oust Mr. Berman on his own. Kelly T. Currie, a former acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said Mr. Berman had “called the attorney general’s bluff” because only the president, not Mr. Barr, had the power to remove him.

“It’s telling that Berman’s statement following Barr’s attempt to oust him by press release explicitly defended ongoing investigations in that office,” Mr. Currie said.

“It’s hard not to suspect that Barr’s move is anything but an effort to thwart investigations that could be damaging to the president or his associates,” he added.

Even if Mr. Trump backs up Mr. Barr by ousting Mr. Berman and courts agree that the president can do so, one other question would remain: Who gets to appoint a temporary successor to fill the vacancy while the Senate considers Mr. Trump’s nominee — Mr. Barr, as he purported to do on Friday night by designating the U.S. attorney for New Jersey to also hold that role in Manhattan, or the court?

That could be particularly important because there is reason to believe that the Senate will not confirm Mr. Trump’s nominee for the position, Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on Saturday that he will not move the nomination without the assent of New York’s two Democratic senators.

While it would be an abuse of power for Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Berman if his motive was that Mr. Berman was investigating his associates, the president’s motive is not the kind of questions the courts are likely to address, Mr. Lederman said.

Complicating matters, he added, is that it is far less clear that the Trump administration could unilaterally install any temporary successor to lead the office.

In 1986, when Samuel A. Alito Jr., now a Supreme Court justice, worked at the Office of Legal Counsel, he wrote a memorandum suggesting the attorney general cannot make successive interim appointments. Still, in 1987, Charles J. Cooper, then the head of the office, wrote in another memo that “it could be argued” that after a president removes a court-appointed U.S. attorney, the power to appoint an interim successor reverts to the attorney general.

“It’s not at all clear that either Trump or Barr — as opposed to the court — could name Berman’s temporary replacement,” Mr. Lederman said.

In any case, the Trump administration is heading into legally and politically murky waters. Back in 1979, Mr. Harmon acknowledged some ambiguity even about who could fire a court-appointed U.S. attorney in the first place. He left open the possibility that district court judges might interpret the conflicting statutes in a way that was more favorable to their own powers rather than the president’s.

Mr. Harmon warned that just because he thought Mr. Carter could remove a court-appointed U.S. attorney did not necessarily mean it would be a good idea “since the incumbent U.S. attorney apparently has the backing of the district court. That court might react unfavorably to any action that does not carefully comport with the letter of the statute.”

Who Can Fire a Court-Appointed U.S. Attorney?

Quote:

Who Can Fire a Court-Appointed U.S. Attorney?

The president can fire anyone in the Executive branch of government. Period.

No definitive precedent exists but there is some reason to believe that the president — but not the attorney general — has the authority.

Yeah, sure. And the crime they commit is Being Black While Walking, Jogging, Sleeping, Driving, Cooking, Reaching For Your Wallet In Your Pocket, Talking, Looking Like a Suspect ("stop any black male...."), Existing,.....

Attorney William P. Barr said on Saturday that President Trump had fired the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who has investigated the president’s closest associates, deepening a crisis over the independence of law enforcement and the president’s purge of officials he views as disloyal.
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In a statement released on Saturday, Mr. Barr said Mr. Berman had “chosen public spectacle over public service.”

“Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so,” the statement read. He said Mr. Berman’s top deputy, Audrey Strauss, would become the acting United States Attorney.

No one is denying the right to vote.

Blacks need school choice to get out of the piss poor schools in the Democratic shitholes.

U.S. News recently reported that “school choice” has a branding problem. In that piece, reporter Lauren Camera quotes Senator Ted Cruz, who is carrying the Trump Administration’s water for a $5 billion school choice tax credit proposal, as saying, “We need to expand our coalition.”

Ignoring for a moment the unlikely image of Cruz building a bipartisan coalition, even with his new facial hair, we’re looking at old news.

Camera says that the school choice tent has been a large one, and in some ways she’s correct. School choice has its roots most firmly in conservative free market ideology, folding in both those who sincerely believe that the free market is the best way to raise educational quality and those who sincerely believe that a free market approach to education would give them a chance to get their hands on a ton of taxpayer dollars.

The leftward wing of the coalition included those who sincerely believed that an alternative was needed to a public school system that was not serving minority students, as well as those who sincerely believed that school choice would give them a chance to get their hands on a ton of taxpayer money. The Democratic wing of the coalition also brought in the neoliberals, who believed that education could be better provided by private businesses.

That coalition held under the Obama Administration. Its pro-charter stance made it okay for Democrats to support school choice. The major teachers unions dealt with some tension, as members pushed back on administration-favored policies like Common Core, and union leadership tried to support administration positions..

Camera does not talk to anybody outside of the choice camp, and so she presents the most common narrative about the current struggles of the choice movement: it’s Donald Trump’s fault.

That is certainly part of it. Trump’s embrace of school choice made it poison to many people. At Politico, Mackenzie Mays quotes Margaret Fortune, a California Democrat who runs a group of charter schools and previously advised two governors: “Has it been damaging that Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos have given an unwelcome bear hug to charter schools? Absolutely.”

In reality, very little about school choice policy coming out of D.C. has changed—other than the names attached to it. It’s not entirely unfair to blame the Trump Factor for the splintering of the charter alliance. But there are other things to consider.

The marriage of left and right on education reform was always one of convenience. Way back in May of 2016, Robert Pondiscio kicked off a fairly thoughtful discussion among reform advocates about whether or not the social justice wing of the reform movement was pushing aside the conservative wing.

When it comes to choice, the hard right has argued that what matters is choice, choice, and also choice—that parents be free to choose. But on the left, the concern is that if choice leaves students no better off than they were before, then what is the point? And while right-tilted choice advocates may have felt they were being pushed out of the conversation, Betsy DeVos is much more of the right-tilted way of thought, and so her administration leaves left-tilted choicers feeling they have no true ally in D.C.

But beyond the splintering of an uneasy alliance, choice faces a bigger branding problem. Charters and choice have now been around long enough for the general public to get to know them.

School boards across the country are feeling the financial pinch of having revenues redirected to charter schools. More and more communities have watched the trouble that comes from charters that crash and burn, sometimes in the middle of the school year. The hashtags #AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal and #CharterSchoolFail present running tallies of the many and varied ways charter schools flame out in a burst of fraud and incompetence every single day. The report “Asleep at the Wheel” from the Network for Public Education shows that roughly $1 billion of federal taxpayer dollars have been lost to fraud and waste in the charter sector—and that’s just the federal money being spent.

Charters promised all sorts of miraculous educational achievements at low, low prices. But those achievements haven’t appeared; these “laboratories of innovation” have produced no new educational techniques (sure, charters have shown that more spending, smaller classes, longer hours, and only teaching the students that suit you all work—that’s hardly news).

Charters have, for the most part, not done a better job than public schools. And in many states, charters have shifted from their promises of great education on the cheap to demanding that they deserve more money. In Florida, for example, public school voters who raise taxes to improve their own public schools must now hand some of those tax dollars over to charters.

On top of all that, communities are becoming increasingly sensitive to how charter and choice programs strip local control. More and more people are understanding that what we’re really talking about is not a new type of public school, but the privatization of our public school system.

By mid-2018, education reformers were asking the question, “Why is charter growth slowing?”

After twenty years, almost every trick in the education reform tool box has been tried, including charters and choice. When your product has failed, you have more than just a branding problem, and for the nominally lefty-tilted education reformers, the current administration provides none of the protective cover that Obama and Duncan did. As Pedro Noguera put it in The Nation :

“For almost 20 years, reformers have had their chance to demonstrate what their vision for education could achieve, and they’ve failed to deliver the improvement they promised. Now, many of them find themselves bereft of ideas and unsure of how to distinguish themselves from Trump’s right-wing education agenda.”

Many reform supporters are still intent on fixing the optics. Camera references an analysis from University of Arkansas that tries to claim that charters are more efficient by computing schools’ ratios of cost-per-pupil to points on the Big Standardized test. Although it’s weak and paper-thin, Betsy DeVos has been citing it even as she calls for education policy to be non-partisan.

But trying to build a bipartisan coalition to support a long-tried and widely-failing partisan policy is a losing game, and it will take more than Ted Cruz with snappy facial hair to pull it off.

Let me suggest an alternative. Instead of asking, “How can we convince more left-leaning folks to support the privatization of public education,” maybe progressives could ask, “If charters and choice really aren’t the answer, what are some better ways to improve U.S. public education?” Maybe someone could build a coalition around that.

Attorney William P. Barr said on Saturday that President Trump had fired the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who has investigated the president's closest associates, deepening a crisis over the independence of law enforcement and the president's purge of officials he views as disloyal.

Is your "Period" backed by something different?