Michael Brown was Killed Because He Didn’t Prostrate Himself to Police Authority

Even if you don't think this killing was racist, it's hard not to agree with the premise of this article.

A white Jewish friend of mine was jogging in Santa Monica, and saw a motorcycle cop down the street, and figured he had time to cross before the cop was even close.

Instead, the cop sped up, cut my friend off, and asked him why he crossed when he saw the cop coming.

My friend didn't think much of it and told the cop the truth, he thought he could cross before the cop got there, but he sped up. Figure their business was done, my friend went on his way, only to find the cop waiting at the NEXT corner.

"Let me ask you again, why did you cross when you saw me coming?"

My friend figured the cop wouldn't leave him alone until he groveled, so he looked at the ground mumbled his apologies and said it wouldn't happen again.

It's not hard to imagine that to the nth degree if the person stopped is black and in a former Jim Crow state to boot.

What’s wrong Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson’s killing of the unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, Michael Brown, and with a Grand Jury decision not to indict him for that outrageous slaying, is what is wrong with American law enforcement and American “justice” in general.

Both actions were permeated not only with racism, which clearly played a huge rule in both the verdict rendered by a Grand Jury composed of nine whites and only three blacks, and in this tragic police killing by a white cop of a black child, but also by a mentality on the part of police — and apparently by at least a majority of the citizen jurors on a panel evaluating Wilson’s actions — that cops are authorities who must be obeyed without question, on pain of death.

Let’s recall the most crucial evidence in this killing: According to the New York Times it was two shots into the top of the head by Officer Wilson that killed Brown — shots that multiple witnesses confirm were fired after the unarmed Brown was on his knees, already seriously wounded by four other apparently non-lethal shots to arm, neck and upper right chest, with his hands raised and pleading “Don’t shoot.” The Times also reports that those shots, apparently fired when Brown’s head was leaning forward, or from a position above him, appeared to have been fired “not from close range,” a determination based upon an absence of gun powder residue around the area of the entry wounds.

It should not matter in the slightest whether or not Brown had first struck Officer Wilson inside his squad car during a scuffle, as claimed by the cop, or even that the officer, as he testified in an unusual appearance before jurors, “felt terrified” at that time. Nor does it matter, beyond being evidence of an inherent racism, that Wilson says he thought that Brown, approaching him at his car initially, “looked like a demon.” If the non-lethal shots that first hit Brown in arm, neck and upper chest had been fired at that early point, perhaps Wilson would have been justified in firing them in self defense, but it’s what happened after Brown tried to leave the scene that matter.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/27/michael-brown-was-killed-because-he-didnt-prostrate-himself-to-police-authority/

LAKOFF: In Politics, Progressives Need to Frame Their Values

Lakoff sums up the problem with large corporations in a way that is hard to imagine the corporate owned wing of the Democratic Party ever doing (or Republicans even contemplating).

If a politician tries to serve both corporate and financial interests and regular people, the money interests will eventually make sure the politician has no other gods before them.

Cosby digitally replaced with Wayne Brady in Cosby Show (STORY & PICS)

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Nick at Nite will be returning the beloved Cosby Show to television after pulling it in the face of sexual assault allegations against star Bill Cosby, but with one critical difference: Cosby will be CGI'ed out of the series and replaced with Wayne Brady.

"Wayne Brady is the least controversial, least offensive, least intimidating black man in the history of television," said Nick at Nite programming Associate Vice President, Frances Lawrence, "maybe in the history of the world. He makes Urkel look like Mike Tyson."

"I'm pretty sure Wayne Brady has never raped anyone. Hell, I'm not even sure if he's ever had sex at all," Lawrence added....


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When our current political system will die

The Democratic Party is patiently waiting for the death (or at least permanent disabling) of the Republican Party as their base of whites who fondly remember the days of Jim Crow dies off and whites in general become a small enough demographic that the percentage of racists and cranks in our midst won't be enough to add up to an electoral majority at the national level.

A similar demographic change could end the stranglehold both parties have on political power.

When people who grew up getting their news from a local paper and TV become a minority, that will be the end of it.

Progressive talk show hosts and pundits rail about the sins of the mainstream media, the Sunday talk shows, columnists at the major papers and what stories those papers get wrong or don't choose to cover at all.

But younger people don't even tune in those sources. We have a myriad of sources available to us online, and if someone is just repeating empty talking points and bringing no real facts or new angles to an issue, we simply move on to a source that does.

I'm fifty, and feel like I sit in the middle of this. I grew up with TV and physical newspapers, but shortly after 9/11, I realized I could get better and more information in five minutes online than I could from any TV news show, and I had already given up reading the print edition of the local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, except as a Sunday brunch ritual. When they raised the price and cut back content, I gave up even that.

Even though I don't rely exclusively on the LA Times, NY Times, or some equivalent, I still feel a kind of reflexive deference when their take on a story differs from the progressive one, even if the progressive one is backed by reputable studies, declassified government documents, or whistleblowers with solid credentials, and respectable news organizations around the world.

There's still a part of me that suspects that pre-packaged "conventional wisdom" is true, that the ghost of Walter Cronkite is guiding the writers and editors and newsreaders of the mainstream news media toward accuracy over balance and the public interest over the owners and investor class.

I'm not sure how much younger than me they are, but there's a generation coming up who won't know who the hell Walter Cronkite is.

When they become the voting majority, no one will be able to convince them that they have only two choices, and there are things that they shouldn't know. They will know the other choices and they will find out what those in power don't want them to know.

And if some old fart calls some opinion of theirs a conspiracy theory, they will know there's a decent chance that facts will eventually leak out making today's conspiracy theory tomorrow's ho-hum accepted history.

When they become the majority, things will start to change faster than our pot laws are now.

Corporate Democrats Act Like the Cable Company

After enduring another round of DLC/Third Way/Centrist whatever the fuck they're calling themselves this week berating of progressives after and even before the election because we didn't adequately support their candidates, I just realized their behavior is a lot like the cable company.

Remember that guy who tried to cancel his service a while back, and the cable company kept him on the phone haranguing him about what a good deal he was giving up?

Where else are you gonna go? Back to the three shitty channels you get with an antenna?

Corporate Dems think they are cable and Republicans are the antenna. They know fewer and fewer people like the handful of channels they get with the antenna: tax cuts for the rich, cuts to government services, fear of gays, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, and some foreigners yet to be determine, and military spending and war 24/7.

So the corporate Dems give us some channels we like: gay rights, better education spending, health care reform, Social Security, and a couple of others.

But they also make us pay for a lot of channels we don't want, including a lot of the worst Republican ones: trade deals, privatization of government services like education, weak punishment and regulation of Wall Street crimes, the surveillance state, and endless war.

Sure there are third parties like the satellite systems, but they are set up much like the cable companies, and while they offer a better deal, they don't really cut into the cable business in most places.

They think they just have to wait for the old farts that like antenna's racist, "get off my lawn" audience to die off, and they will own the market.

But like cable, competition could come from some entirely unexpected direction.

People are cutting their cable and getting the programs they want a la carte on Amazon, iTunes, and the like.

The corporate Democrats don't seem to realize that that kind of unexpected changes is coming to politics.

Even if they took better care of their customers, it would only delay the inevitable.

The cable box is going to end up in the dumpster along with the last rabbit ears antennas.

And if they don't take better care of us, we might throw the box out before we figure out what the replacement is.

VIRUNGA: documentary on gorillas vs. oil companies

This looks pretty compelling.

After listening to Obama's statement on the midterms, it seems like this is the situation he wanted

all along.

Even when he had both chambers of Congress at the start of his presidency, he talked and made proposals as if Democrats were in the minority, and was far quicker to criticize the progressive wing of the Democratic Party than Republicans.

If that sounds crazy, consider how Andrew Cuomo is governing in New York. The Working Families Party gave him their endorsement in part by getting him to promise to work to elect a Democratic majority state senate.

Think about that: a third party had to bargain to get a Democratic governor to work for a fully democratic state legislature. Shouldn't that be automatic?

And he didn't even keep that promise that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

Instead, Cuomo has worked with Republicans and adopted some of the policies wholesale, like privatization of K-12 public education (Obama has as well).

On ebola, he is literally following the Republican playbook.

That seems to be the DLC way. A lot of what Bill Clinton got done during his administration were neoliberal policies, most of which Republicans could love.

Obama and Mitch McConnell have already had a love fest on trade deals that average Americans across the political spectrum loathe.

The DLCers seem to be embarrassed when their own party controls the legislature because they can't pretend the Republicans are forcing them to enact policies that hurt average Americans.

So they do as little as possible, this time helped by Republican obstruction, until the Republicans regain the majority.

And then they have the perfect illusion of checks and balances, and excuse to "compromise," which is really capitulation to the corporate agenda.

I don't think Obama is going to become "Dr. No," and wield the veto pen, nor do I think Democrats in the Senate will be one-tenth or even one one-hundredth the obstruction Republicans have been.

Instead, a few will put up token opposition, definitely sincere from a very few, but the rest will relax, knowing that the natural order has been restored.

Did Democrats do ANYTHING to stop GOP vote suppression like CROSS CHECK?

Would Democratic politicians rather lose than risk losing rich donors?

I heard an interview with Ralph Nader last night, and he said the Democrats had a winning issue with the minimum wage and one that easily set them apart from the GOP.

Nader met with Harry Reid and said if Obama had gone barnstorming around the country asking voters to give him the Congress that would pass such a bill for him to sign, it would have made a huge difference. Reid agreed but said instead, Obama was fundraising, and the party didn't present a unified message.

This morning on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman said minimum wage ballot measures passed even in very conservative states, indirectly confirming Nader's point.

If Democrats don't run on a simple, easy to explain progressive issue that is overwhelmingly popular, you have to wonder whether keeping their wealthy donors is more important than actually winning.

I guess they figure if they side with the rest of us instead of the 1% and they lose, we can't offer the consolation prize of high paying jobs as lobbyists, CEO's, corporate lawyers, or consultants. We can only offer the jobs we elect them to do, so they can win or lose. With the fat cat 1%, they win either way.

What do you think?