This is Biden's America

This is what almost no one understands about qualified immunity.

Almost everyone who supports or opposes qualified immunity seems to think that this is about punishing police officers. It is not.

If a police officer is sued, the city provides the police officer with a free lawyer and legal defense.

If a police officer then goes on to lose in court, the city pays, not the police officer.

What qualified immunity ultimately protects is the city budget. Many legitimate victims are left with no legal recourse.

Possibly the police are protected because if the city does not have to pay for abuses, there will be less pressure on the city to crack down on police abuses. But individual police officers are not in any danger of "being ruined" by lawsuits either with or without qualified immunity.

Still seems like it would open a can of worms to me - whether the city pays or not, the underlying issues faced by police would remain the same. That is, things will always go wrong in policing, by very nature of what they have to do versus what they face. Civil suits for a profession destined to continually fail seem pointless. But if like Chauvin, there is a crime, then the criminal courts can deal with it.

Civil suits allow people to be compensated if their rights are violated.

No civil suits leaves people with no recourse if their rights are violated.

Also, if many people have their rights violated in a given city, that city will have to pay a lot of money if there are civil suits, and that will provide an incentive for cities to see to it that their police respect people's rights.

This isn't true at all for the topic under discussion. Do I really have to point out the complaints system (which often has several means of making complaints), or the criminal justice system, or the parliamentary system (not sure what your governmental system is called)?

There are 3 other avenues for redress.

If such a system exists in US police departments, it seldom provides redress for most people who have had their rights violated.



That only provides redress in the most severe cases.



The legislature can change the laws to make redress easier to achieve. But you are arguing against them doing this, so it is hard to see what redress you think is being offered through this avenue.

Keh, I am saying that Qualified Immunity seems a necessary thing to me - not that other reforms can't be done by the legislature. I am quite sure there are many other ways of improving police departments.


Eg. In my State there is a body with standing Royal Commission powers (basically they can coerce responses - but if so, such responses aren't directly usable in a criminal court) that can investigation governmental corruption (they actually managed to have two politicians and a judge imprisoned - the judge and one politicians convictiont were however, later overturned). Their main focus though seems to be on police conduct.

That of course is only one type of example. There are no doubt many other avenues. Eg. A law can me introduced to make it a criminal offence not to report misconduct (this is on the spot thinking); (and) Any police officer with a criminal record can be sacked

Etc

It is not necessary or needed in any way whatsoever. It only stands in the way of victims being compensated when their rights are violated.

It can also be said to shield bad police behavior, because if cities do not have to compensate the victims of police misconduct, then they will have no incentive to prevent police misconduct.

You are welcome to disagree. I've already considered what you said, and already explained why it seems necessary to me - but in the end, that is only my opinion.

by Russell Dobular

If God is a novelist, he has a disposition towards the trite, the obvious, and the too on-the-nose. Case in point: Andrew Cuomo. If one wanted to write a book whose theme was personal and political hypocrisy, you couldn’t do any better than to produce one in which liberals rally around one notoriously corrupt bully, in order to demonstrate their rejection of another. In the annals of liberal idiocy, the cult of Cuomo ranks right up there with running Hillary Clinton for President and Michelle Obama unironically describing real-life war criminal George W. Bush, as her “partner in crime.”

Some may object that we didn’t know about Cuomo’s lechery until Lindsay Boylan opened the floodgates by coming forward. But we knew enough to know that Cuomo was a lying degenerate from way back. If you ask a Democrat which state in America is the most corrupt, they’re likely to name a Republican stronghold like Florida, or Texas, but in reality, based on the number of its political leaders prosecuted and convicted, that honor goes to Cuomo’s very own Empire State. The Governor’s response to that was to shut down the Moreland commission, which had been charged with investigating corruption in the state and going to war with Attorney General Preet Bharara who demanded that its files be preserved as possible evidence. This all played out even as his top aide was sentenced to six years in prison for bribery.

And that’s just scratching the surface of what we already knew about Cuomo before the pandemic.
https://duedissidence.com/2021/08/15/andrew-cuomos-legacy-exposes-the-hypocrisy-of-democrats-and-their-voters/

After a nearly six-week exodus over GOP voting bill, enough Democrats return to Texas House to resume work
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Democrats getting credit for fighting for voting rights but not really fighting. Giving up after getting headlines for being fighters.

Are they going to arrest those illegal Democrats and put them in jail now?

Or are they going to just let them get away with having disrupted the legislative process all this time?

Oh nonsense.

Michael Moore

Most won’t say it, so I will:

America has thankfully lost another war. Let’s make this the last.

This is nothing here to celebrate. This should only be a monumental gut-check moment of serious reflection and a desire to seek redemption for ourselves. We don’t need to spend a single minute right now analyzing how Biden has or has not messed up while bravely handling the end of this mess he was handed — including his incredible private negotiations all this week with the Taliban leaders to ensure that not a single enemy combatant from the occupying force (that would be us; e.g., U.S. soldiers and spies and embassy staff), will be harmed. And Biden so far has gotten every American and foreign journalist out alive, plus a promise from the Taliban that those who stay to cover it will not be harmed. And not a single one has! Usually a force like the Taliban rushes in killing every enemy in sight. That has not happened! And we will learn that it was because of the negotiating skills and smarts of the Biden team that there was no mass slaughter. This is not Dunkirk.

Help Us Enrich Uranium

Dozens of planes have safely taken off all week — and not one of them has been shot down. None of our troops in this chaotic situation have been killed. Despite the breathless shrieks of panic from maleducated journalists who think they’re covering the Taliban of the 1990s (Jake Tapper on CNN keeps making references to “beheadings“ and how girls might be “kidnapped” and “raped” and forced to become “child brides”), none of this seems to be happening. I do not want to hear how we “need to study” what went wrong with this Taliban victory and our evacuation because (switching to all caps because I can’t scream this loud enough): WE ARE NEVER GOING TO FIND OURSELVES IN A SITUATION LIKE THIS AGAIN BECAUSE OUR DAYS OF INVADING AND TAKING OVER COUNTRIES MUST END. RIGHT? RIGHT!!

Just look at this:

Korea.
Vietnam.
Cambodia.
Iraq (1991).
Iraq (2003).
Afghanistan.

There are two themes that run through this list of countries we’ve invaded since World War II.

One, none of them ever invaded us or posed any kind of threat to our lives — the only true justification to ever use armed force.

And number two, they ain’t white. Since May 8, 1945, for some reason, we only kill people of color. Probably just a co-inky-dinky.

As with the Viet Cong in Vietnam, we were defeated in Afghanistan by a rag-tag army that did not own a single helicopter, not a single jet fighter, no stealth bombers, no missiles, no napalm, no Burger King at the PX, not one air conditioned tent — not one! — not a goddamn tank in sight, just a bunch of guys with beards in pick-up trucks firing bullets into the air. Oh, and one other similarity with Vietnam — it was their country! Not ours. We were the invaders. In Vietnam we killed 2 million people. In Afghanistan, estimates of the dead go as high as 250,000. In Iraq we killed nearly a million (going back to Bill Clinton’s civilian bombing campaign).

We spent over $2.4 trillion in Afghanistan for 20 years while the poor in America went without food, medical care, decent schools. The water in the Black-majority city of Flint was poisoned by the Governor. A thousand people shot by the police in the U.S. each year.

We sacrificed over 2,400 American lives to invade a country where Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Bush said early on he no longer had any interest in capturing him. In 2011, Obama’s seal team found him in a house just down the road from Pakistan’s “West Point”. Who woulda thought!

What a tragic mess. Defund the military-industrial complex, defund the NSA, defund Homeland Security. They sent our young troops to their deaths. For shame! No Afghan attacked the World Trade Center. 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia! Not from Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Iran. How come “Bandar Bush” — the Saudi Royal Family’s tender nickname for their longtime friend, George W. Bush — why didn’t Bush attack Saudi Arabia? Oh. Right. They have something we need. Fill ‘er up!

So, yes, we lost this stupid, senseless war and I’m happy that it has finally ended. Our fake Afghanistan Army couldn’t wait for us to leave — and, as soon as we did, the Afghan soldiers stripped off their fake Army costumes we gave them, threw them to the ground and spit on them. They joined the Taliban in the streets in celebration. The Taliban did not shoot a single one of them. The Afghan interpreters and others who colluded with the enemy, the USA, for 20 years — yes, they might be in trouble (just like if Russia invaded Alaska and a bunch of Alaskans collaborated with them and after the Russians left some Americans might want retribution from the collaborators). You get that, right?

The pundits on TV wail: “We’ve abandoned our Afghan helpers! No one will ever trust us again! No one will ever believe us! Our word is no good!!”

EXACTLY! Correct! Yessss! We should never be believed! Note to the rest of the world: You see us coming? RUN! Nothing but tragedy awaits you. Do NOT help us. If we sign a climate agreement, we will not follow it! If we sign a nuclear deal with your mullahs, don’t believe it. It only means we’re getting ready to bomb you. And you should know that when it comes to we, the American public, there is not a single morning where we ever wake up thinking about you or giving a rat’s ass whether 80% of your people live in a state of oppressive abject poverty. It’s always only about us, baby — and what YOU can do for US, for our AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!

And by the way, make sure there’s always a roof where we can land that goddamn escape helicopter when we need to get the F outta Dodge!

It’s always Saigon Time in America.

P.S. May our troops and the Afghan civilians someday forgive us. Much condolences and love to all families who lost loved ones in this disgustingly sad war. I can only imagine how you all have felt this week. Nineteen of our American veterans commit suicide every single day. Please, don’t leave us. I/we will not abandon you. (If you need to talk to someone, call 800-273-8255).

Progressives hate America, and side with terrorists and evil dictators.

Biden chooses Rahm Emanual who ought to be in jail for covering up murder. Oh me.

It is wrong to jail people for imaginary crimes.

BTW, edgarblythe, I recently heard an interview with Josh Mitchell, author of The Debt Trap. It opened my eyes to the real reasons for this behind the explosion in debt and I've changed my mind about student debt relief. I hadn't studied the problem in enough detail and suspected it was the work of the crybaby faction among progressives — it's not. Mitchell is no "progressive" and his analysis is quite compelling. So I owe you a sort of apology.

Along with six Caribbean allies we decisively won the Great Grenada War in six days and saved the world from unspeakable Marxist tyranny!

The Debt Trap, by Josh Mitchell

Although the education system as it affects beleaguered and defunded public schools and also Black education, it's nevertheless a reality still in Biden's America. - edgarblythe

Heather Cox Richardson
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August 20, 2021 (Friday)
On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”
State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.
But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing, and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.
And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.
Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.
In 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”
But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to the “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”
Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”
When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, dividing money up according to illiteracy rates. But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business protecting Black education; that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.
Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional.
Immediately, white southerners lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Others took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. These segregation academies dovetailed neatly with Ronald Reagan’s rise to political power with a message that public employees had gotten too powerful and that public enterprises should be privatized.
After Reagan’s election, his Secretary of Education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a "widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system." The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced: “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used it to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would: “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”
The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system has remained a top priority for Movement Conservatives eager to dismantle the federal government, although a recent study from Wisconsin shows that vouchers do not actually save tax dollars, and scholars do not believe they help students achieve better outcomes than they would have in public schools.
Calling education a civil rights issue—as President Barack Obama had done when calling for more funding for schools—former president Trump asked Congress to fund “school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children. These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.” (In fact, most of those using vouchers are already enrolled in private schools.) His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a staunch supporter of school choice and the voucher system; she and her family gave $600,000 to promote school choice ballot laws in the decade before 2017.
The coronavirus pandemic sped up the push to defund public schools as Trump pushed hard to transfer funds from the closed public schools to private schools. In December 2020, he signed an executive order allowing states to use money from a federal anti-poverty program for vouchers, and as of mid-2021, at least 8 states had launched new voucher programs. A number of Republican governors are using federal funds from the bills designed to address the pandemic to push vouchers.
In 1831, lawmakers afraid of the equality that lies at the heart of our Declaration of Independence made sure Black Americans could not have equal access to education.
In 1971, when segregation academies were gaining ground, the achievement gap between white and Black 8th grade students in reading scores was 57 points. In 1988, the year of the nation’s highest level of school integration, that gap had fallen to 18 points. By 1992, it was back up to 30 points, and it has not dropped below 25 points since.