Lazy Caturday Reads

Good Morning!!

The photographs in today’s post are by famous cat photographer Walter Chandoha.

Lately the media has been following the trial of Derek Chauvin in Minnesota, and understandably they have called attention other cases of Black men being killed by cops. Yesterday a man was shot and killed by police in Portland, Oregon. 

The Oregonian: Portland police fatally shoot man in Lents Park.

Portland police responding to a call of a man with a gun Friday morning in Lents Park fatally shot the man after he drew what appeared to be a firearm, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The man died at the scene.

Investigators recovered what appeared to be a replica firearm with an orange tip on it, the sources said. A witness videotaped the shooting and provided the footage to police.

Police had received multiple calls about the man in the park with a gun shortly after 9:30 a.m.

Two officers who confronted the man fired less-lethal, 40-millimeter munitions at him, and an East Precinct officer shot him with a firearm, Acting Chief Chris Davis said.

Witnesses said they heard two gunshots.

Emergency medics tried to revive the man, but he was pronounced dead beside a fence by the park’s ball field off Southeast 92nd Avenue.

Police said the officer who fired the fatal shot is an 8-year veteran of the department. The bureau did not release the officer’s name.

Dozens of demonstrators gathered at the scene shortly after the shooting, screaming at officers from the park’s perimeter.

The gun wasn’t even real. The story says that the Oregonian usually doesn’t “typically does not identify a person’s race unless it is relevant.” In this case it was relevant, because the victim of the shooting was a white man.

How often do cops kill white people? According to a piece at Substack by Columbia University Professor John McWhorter, who is Black, it happens a lot: The Victorians had to Accept Darwin. We Need to Accept that Cops Kill White People as Easily as They Kill Black People.

The death of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis necessitates a new mental habit among us enlightened American souls.

We embrace assorted cognitive exercises as people with access to higher wisdom, such as understanding that a disadvantaged background can make it harder to excel, or that subtle bias can infect our thinking and actions.

Okay, but we need another one.

Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves “Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?”

Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It’s possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.

This is why so many can only bristle at the idea that George Floyd did not die because he was black.

It’s why now, when the cop who killed Daunte Wright not only says she mistook her gun for a taser, and is even recorded as having done so, legions of people still insist on parsing it as evidence of “racism.” The idea is, I suppose, that she wouldn’t have made that mistake, would have been more prudent, if Daunte Wright was instead a white guy named Donald White.

The article is worth a read. McWhorter argues that poor people of any race are more likely to be killed by cops and because more Black people live in poverty, they are more likely to interact with the police and more likely to become their victims. I think he’s saying that the problem is not just racism, but economics–and policing itself.

Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.

Accounts of this issue that pretend people like me have not presented figures like this – i.e. most mainstream media discussions — are out of court, even if their authors feel it’s their duty to pull people’s eyes away from “irreligious” ideas. Ignore the numbers and, even if you are writing about descendants of African slaves, you are simply plain wrong.

Reflect also: most people who take to the streets about cases like Daunte Wright are not thinking about the fact that black people are killed by cops 2.5 times more than their representation in the population would predict. They are protesting because all they see in the news is the black people killed, and have no way of imagining that whites are regularly killed in the same way and in much greater numbers.

 

Once more. Every time the media broadcasts the murder by cop of a black person, ask yourself if it’s really true that a cop wouldn’t have done it to a white person – and then go to, for example, the Washington Post database and see cops doing just that.

And upon that, we will settle upon an honest national conversation about the cops as murdering people in race-neutral fashion. Or at least we should.

Food for thought.

There’s quite a bit of news today about Trump loyalists. It even appears that some of them may finally get their comeuppance.

NBC News: Justice Department sues Trump ally Roger Stone, alleging millions in unpaid taxes.

The Justice Department on Friday sued Roger Stone, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, accusing Stone and his wife, Nydia, of owing nearly $2 million in unpaid federal income taxes and fees.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, says the couple underpaid their income taxes by $1,590,361 from 2007 to 2011. It further says Stone, 68, did not pay his full tax bill in 2018, coming up $407,036 short. The couple, the suit alleges, used a commercial entity to “shield their personal income from enforced collection and fund a lavish lifestyle despite owing nearly $2 million in unpaid taxes, interest and penalties.” [….]

Stone was on his way to federal prison in July 2020 when then-president Trump commuted his sentence. Stone was sentenced earlier that year to serve 40 months in prison for lying to Congress about his efforts to connect with WikiLeaks in hopes of digging up dirt on Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. The lead prosecutor in the case said Stone had lied because the “truth looked bad for Donald Trump.” Stone was convicted of all seven counts against him….

The Stones deposited more than $1 million in accounts belonging to a commercial entity, Drake Ventures, instead of personal accounts, thereby frustrating collection efforts, the government said in the filing.

From those accounts, the pair covered a down payment on a Fort Lauderdale condominium, paid for personal expenses and covered some of their tax liabilities, the lawsuit alleges, calling the entity an “alter ego” of the Stones.

Additionally, the filing wants to thwart the Stones’ transfer of their $525,000 Florida condominium to an entity known as the Bertran Family Revocable Trust, which the government says is controlled by Nydia Stone and has as beneficiaries their children, Adria Stone and Scott Stone.

A tax lien was being sought against the property, it said. The suit also seeks a judgment for $1,590,361.89.

The government also said the Stones at one point entered into an agreement to cover taxes owed through monthly installments of nearly $20,000, but stopped paying. Additionally, the filing alleges that in 2018, Stone filed his federal income tax return as “a married individual filing separately from his spouse” and owes an additional $407,036.84 for that year alone.

Politico: Pompeos violated rules on use of State Department resources, IG finds.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo violated federal ethics rules governing the use of taxpayer-funded resources when he and his wife, Susan, asked State Department employees to carry out tasks for their personal benefit more than 100 times, a government watchdog has determined.

POLITICO obtained a copy of the report on the Pompeos, which was put together by the State Department’s inspector general’s office….

By digging through emails and other documents and interviewing staff members, investigators uncovered scores of instances in which Mike or Susan Pompeo asked State Department staffers to handle tasks of a personal nature, from booking salon appointments and private dinner reservations to picking up their dog and arranging tours for the Pompeos’ political allies. Employees told investigators that they viewed the requests from Susan Pompeo, who was not on the federal payroll, as being backed by the secretary….

Mike Pompeo, in an interview with investigators, insisted that the requests were often small and the types of things friends do for friends. His lawyer, William Burck, slammed a draft version of the report he received as a politically biased “compilation of picayune complaints cherry-picked by the drafters.”

The inspector general’s office, however, defended the investigation, noting that many of the rules governing such interactions are clear, do not make exceptions for small tasks, and that the Pompeos’ requests ultimately added up to use a significant amount of the time of employees paid by taxpayers….

Susan Pompeo, for instance, asked staff members to buy a T-shirt for a friend; arrange for flowers to be sent to friends recovering from sickness; and help her book hair salon appointments when she was in New York during the U.N. General Assembly and had to meet with foreign dignitaries. One year, a senior adviser to the secretary and a senior Foreign Service officer came in on a weekend “to envelope, address, and mail personal Christmas cards for the Pompeos,” the report states.

State Department staff members also found themselves given more intense assignments, such as planning events, including for groups with which the Pompeos were affiliated but in a non-governmental capacity.

The apparently personal Pompeo tasks required time either when they were on-duty or off-duty, the report states. The Pompeos did not separately compensate the staffers for the non-State Department-related work, the report states.

Of course all this personal work was paid for with taxpayer money.

David Ignatius has an interesting opinion piece in The Washington Post on Kash Patel, whom Trump installed in the Defense Department late in his administration. Opinion: How Kash Patel rose from obscure Hill staffer to key operative in Trump’s battle with the intelligence community.

At least he’s out of government now, thank goodness. Read all about Patel at the WaPo link. 

I’ll end there. What stories have you been following? As always, this is an open thread.

Thursday Reads

By Evariste Carpenpier

Good Morning!!

Wow! There sure is a lot of news out there today. I don’t know how much I can cover in a post, but I’ll do my best. 

1. After 20 long years, President Biden is finally going to pull troops out of Afghanistan, against the wishes of military leadership.

Politico: How Biden’s team overrode the brass on Afghanistan.

The military spent more than a decade urging three different American presidents to stay in Afghanistan. With President Joe Biden’s decision this week to withdraw all U.S. forces by Sept. 11, they finally lost the battle.

“We cannot continue this cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal and expecting a different result,” Biden said Wednesday in a speech announcing the decision. “I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”

As Biden weighed a full exit from the country this spring, top military leaders advocated for keeping a small U.S. presence on the ground made up primarily of special operations forces and paramilitary advisers, arguing that a force of a few thousand troops was needed to keep the Taliban in check and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for terrorists, according to nine former and current U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the four-star commanders of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, Central Command and Special Operations Command, were emphatic proponents of this strategy, the current and former officials said, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning.

But in the end, Biden and his top national security deputies did what no previous president has done successfully — they overrode the brass.

More from Susan Glasser at The The New Yorker: Biden Finally Got to Say No to the Generals.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden announced the close of the two-decade-long American war in Afghanistan, giving the U.S. military a deadline of the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to withdraw all remaining troops. “It’s time to end the Forever War,” he said, in a speech that was both deeply personal and politically emphatic. Speaking from the White House Treaty Room, where George W. Bush had declared the start of the fight, to root out Al Qaeda and its Taliban enablers, Biden declared that there would be no more extensions of the American military presence, rebuffing pleas of the teetering, pro-Western Afghan government and his own generals. It’s finally, really, for-better-or-worse over. I guess this is how eras end: not with a culminating battle or some movie-thriller crescendo but with a Tuesday-morning leak to the Washington Post and, a day later, a fifteen-minute Presidential speech confirming the historic decision.

Karin Jureck, Behind the News

Biden pulled the plug in an unsentimental, sober address, with the only passionate notes reserved for the U.S. military personnel who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq over the two decades, including his late son Beau. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” he said. The President seemed genuinely sick and tired of the endless pleas for just a little more time. “So when will it be the right moment to leave?” he said, pointedly summarizing the arguments that he had dismissed. “One more year? Two more years? Ten more years?” he asked.

On Wednesday, he made the case that the U.S. had long since accomplished its original objectives of neutralizing the Al Qaeda threat from Afghan territory and bringing justice to the 9/11 perpetrator Osama bin Laden. But no amount of clear-eyed argument from Biden could erase the embarrassing historical fact that Afghanistan has now banished another superpower. America did not lose the war—not exactly—but it did not win, either. And, as Biden pointed out, it could never, in recent years, provide a plausible explanation of what achieving its goals would look like.

Read more at the link.

See also at ABC News: Blinken visits Afghanistan after Biden’s withdrawal decision to press for diplomacy. And at The Daily Beast: The Promise and the Tragedy of Biden’s Afghanistan Speech, by Spencer Ackerman

2. After four years of Trump sucking up to Vladimir Putin, President Biden has laid down the law to Russia.

The New York Times: Biden Administration to Impose Tough Sanctions on Russia.

The Biden administration is set to announce on Thursday a string of long-awaited measures against Russia, including far-reaching financial sanctions, for the hacking of government and private networks and a range of other activity, according to people who have been briefed on the moves.

The sanctions will be among what President Biden’s aides say are “seen and unseen” steps in response to the hacking, known as SolarWinds; to the C.I.A.’s assessment that Russia offered to pay bounties to militants in Afghanistan to kill American troops; and to Russia’s yearslong effort to interfere in United States elections, according to American officials and others who have been briefed on the actions.

The moves will include the expulsion of a limited number of diplomats, much like the Obama administration did in response to the Russian efforts to influence the election five years ago. But it is unclear whether this set of actions will prove sufficient to deter Russia from further hacking, influence operations or efforts to threaten European countries.

The sanctions are meant to cut deeper than previous efforts to punish Russia for interfering in elections, targeting the country’s sovereign debt, according to people briefed on the matter. Administration officials were determined to draft a response that would impose real costs on Moscow, as many previous rounds of sanctions have been shrugged off.

Daniel R. Celantano, Reading the News

“It will not simply be sanctions,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said in February. He has frequently said it will include “a mix of tools seen and unseen,” though there have been disagreements in the administration about how many of the steps to make public.

Restrictions on sovereign debt affect a nation’s ability to raise dollar-denominated bonds, with lenders fearful of being cut off from American financial markets. The United States has used similar techniques against Iran, among others.

Russian bond prices have fluctuated in recent weeks in anticipation of possible sanctions. Russia has relatively little debt, making it potentially less vulnerable to the tactic. And rising oil prices will benefit the country’s economy.

Nevertheless, any broad sanctions on Russia’s financial sector would amount to a significant escalation in the costs that the United States has been willing to impose on Moscow. And part of the administration’s concern has been whether Russian entities could retaliate by exploiting “back doors” implanted in American systems.

See also The Washington Post: Biden administration imposes significant economic sanctions on Russia over cyberspying, efforts to influence presidential election.

3. Democrats are seriously considering expanding the Supreme Court.

NBC News: Democrats to introduce bill to expand Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices.

Congressional Democrats will introduce legislation Thursday to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, joining progressive activists pushing to transform the court.

The move intensifies a high-stakes ideological fight over the future of the court after President Donald Trump and Republicans appointed three conservative justices in four years, including one who was confirmed days before the 2020 election.

The Democratic bill is led by Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. It is co-sponsored by Reps. Hank Johnson of Georgia and Mondaire Jones of New York.

The Supreme Court can be expanded by an act of Congress, but the legislation is highly unlikely to become law in the near future given Democrats’ slim majorities, which include scores of lawmakers who are not on board with the idea. President Joe Biden has said he is “not a fan” of packing the court.

But it represents an undercurrent of progressive fury at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for denying a vote in 2016 to President Barack Obama’s pick to fill a vacancy, citing the approaching election, before confirming Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett the week before the election last year.

The anger has taken hold within the Democratic Party, and the new push indicates that it has not dissipated in an era when the party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.

The lawmakers, who intend to announce the introduction of the bill outside the Supreme Court building, will be joined by progressive activists Aaron Belkin, who leads Take Back the Court; Chris Kang, a co-founder and chief counsel of Demand Justice; and Meagan Hatcher-Mays of Indivisible, according to an advisory notice. All three groups advocate adding justices.

Read more at Vox: A new bill would add 4 seats to the Supreme Court, by Ian Millhauser

4. In Minnesota, another officer is charged in the senseless killing of a Black man.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune:  Officer charged with second-degree manslaughter in killing of Daunte Wright.

Former Brooklyn Center police officer Kimberly A. Potter was charged Wednesday with second-degree manslaughter in the death of Daunte Wright, joining just a handful of officers who have faced charges after shooting someone they said they intended to shock with a Taser.

Haynes King, Recent News

Potter, a 26-year veteran of the department who resigned Tuesday, was arrested and booked into the Hennepin County jail shortly after noon. Bodycam footage from the shooting Sunday shows her shouting “Taser!” three times before killing Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, with a single shot from her Glock 9-millimeter handgun. Police officials blamed the death on human error.

Protests over Wright’s killing have focused on how Potter, who is white, carried out a sequence of events that led to the death of a Black motorist who had been stopped for a minor traffic violation. Wright cooperated with Potter and another police officer at first, but a criminal complaint filed Wednesday showed how the encounter turned violent after one of the officers told Wright he was being arrested on a warrant.

Potter fired her gun 12 seconds after Wright pulled himself free from the officers.

Potter was released from jail Wednesday evening after posting $100,000 bond. Her attorney, Earl Gray, was unavailable for comment.

5. The Matt Gaetz scandal grows worse every passing day.

The Daily Beast: Matt Gaetz’s Wingman Paid Dozens of Young Women—and a 17-Year-Old.

As new details emerge about Rep. Matt Gaetz’s role in an alleged sex ring, The Daily Beast has obtained several documents showing that the suspected ringleader of the group, Joel Greenberg, made more than 150 Venmo payments to dozens of young women, and to a girl who was 17 at the time.

The payment from Greenberg, an accused sex trafficker, to the 17-year-old took place in June 2017. It was for $300 and, according to the memo field, was for “Food.”

Greenberg’s relationship with Gaetz, and the money Greenberg paid to women, is a focal point for the Justice Department investigation into Gaetz. And the new documents obtained by The Daily Beast—containing years of online financial transactions—establish a clear pattern: Greenberg paid multiple young women (and at least one girl) hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars on Venmo in one transaction after another.

Nearly a year after Greenberg’s June 2017 payment, Gaetz Venmo’d Greenberg to “Hit up ___,” using a nickname for the teen. She was 18 years old by then, and as The Daily Beast reported, Greenberg described the payment as being for “School.”

It was one of at least 16 Venmo payments to 12 different women listed as being for “School.” Typically, the payments were for around $500, but also went higher than $1,000 in the transactions obtained by The Daily Beast.

Gaetz made only one previously unreported transaction in the newly obtained documents: a payment from the Florida congressman to the former Seminole County tax commissioner for $300 on November 1, 2018, with the love hotel emoji (“🏩”) in the memo field. The Daily Beast was unable to tie that transaction directly to any woman, but confirmed that Greenberg booked one night for that date at The Alfond Inn, a luxury hotel in Winter Park, Florida.

Click the Daily Beast link to read the rest.

6. House hearing on law enforcement and the Capitol insurrection.

NPR: Ahead Of Hearing, Capitol Police Says It Needs Help To Address Insurrection Failures.

Members of Congress on Thursday will hear for the first time public testimony from the U.S. Capitol Police inspector general that will detail the most extensive findings yet in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Charles Sims, Reading the News

The inspector general, Michael Bolton, will tell a congressional committee in prepared remarks that the agency must pivot from its reactionary role as a police department to one that works in a protection posture to deal with rising threats to the Capitol.

U.S. Capitol Police responded Wednesday to reports of Bolton’s findings by acknowledging that “much additional work needs to be done,” but that it will need “significant resources” from Congress to implement the new changes.

“January 6 was a pivotal moment in USCP, U.S. and world history that demonstrated the need for major changes to the way USCP operates,” the agency said in a statement.

Lawmakers will hear more about those major changes needed in a hearing before the House Administration Committee that will feature Bolton and his findings after submitting to them a 104-page report detailing a litany of concerns.

The panel’s chair, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, called for the testimony after receiving a briefing from Bolton last month. Lofgren, D-Calif., has said the report provides “detailed and disturbing findings and important recommendations.”

Bolton’s report — which was labeled law enforcement sensitive and was obtained by NPR but has not been made public in its entirety — said Capitol Police mishandled intelligence gathering ahead of the attack. Bolton said some of the agency’s own intelligence offered a “more alarming” warning that Congress itself was a target.

 Some scary insurrection stories:

The Washington Post: Armed ‘quick reaction force’ was waiting for order to storm Capitol, Justice Dept. says.

The Washington Post: 17 requests for backup in 78 minutes.

At 1:13 p.m. on Jan. 6, a D.C. police commander facing a swelling crowd of protesters on the west side of the U.S. Capitol made an urgent call for more officers in riot gear. “Hard gear at the Capitol! Hard gear at the Capitol!” Cmdr. Robert Glover shouted into his radio.

​​​​​Glover and a team of D.C. police officers had rushed to the besieged complex moments earlier at the behest of Capitol Police. By the time they arrived, the Capitol grounds were already being overrun by a mob intent on overturning President Donald Trump’s electoral defeat.

Over the next 78 minutes, Glover requested backup at least 17 times, according to a Washington Post analysis of the events, and the mob on the west side eventually grew to at least 9,400 people, outnumbering officers by more than 58 to one.

The Post reviewed police radio communications, synchronized them with hours of footage and drew on testimony and interviews with police supervisors to understand how failures of preparation and planning played out that day. The examination reveals how police were hampered by an insufficient number of officers and shortages of less-lethal weapons and protective equipment and also provides a glimpse into communications breakdowns within the police response.

Read about it at the WaPo.

That’s a hell of a lot of news. What did I miss?