Gov. Dayton says a white man wouldn't have been killed under the circumstances

Philando Castile was, and that he was appalled that no one tried to administer first aid to him -- that instead they were busy ministering to the officer who had shot him.

I'm surprised and impressed with how honest Dayton is being.

Question about hearing: are any Democrats participating? n/t

"It's OK, Mommy. It's OK," said the child who just saw her dad get shot. "I'm right here with you."

She said this sitting next to her mother in the back seat of the police car after witnessing the police shoot Philando Castilo in cold blood -- 4 times through the window.

The man's girlfriend says they were stopped for a broken taillight and the police shot him as he was, per their instructions, reaching for his wallet.

His job was working in a school kitchen, preparing food for children.

There's a nice photo of him at the first link -- not covered in blood.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/man-shot-dead-minn-police-traffic-stop-article-1.2701935

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/philando-castile-falcon-heights-shooting.html

The Minnesota video, which begins after the shooting itself, shows the man slumped bloody against the woman who was recording it. Her young daughter sat in the back seat.

The footage was extraordinary in that the woman begins by calmly narrating what was happening as she trained the camera on the man, whom she described as her boyfriend, and on at least one officer who was pointing a gun through the driver’s side window.

“Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him,” she said. “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.”

The woman’s daughter, who was in the back seat, appears several times in the video. Near the end of the 10-minute clip, as the two are sitting in the back of a police car, she comforts her mother, saying, “It’s O.K., Mommy. It’s O.K. I’m right here with you.”

http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/philando-castile-falcon-heights-minnesota-police-shooting-facebook-live-video-watch-uncensored-you-tube-police-shooting-man-shot-lavish-reynolds/

According to WCCO television, Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said Philando Castile worked as a cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in St. Paul.

“This was a GOOD MAN,” a parent of a child at the school wrote on Facebook, saying that Castile snuck extra graham crackers to children and hugged a borderline autistic child every day. He “pushed extra food in them like a grandma” and took care to know every single child’s name.

SNIP

In the Facebook Live video, Castile’s girlfriend, Lavish Reynolds, says that he works for the St. Paul school system, is not a gang member, and doesn’t have a criminal record (a records check with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety showed only Philando Castile had only a case for not having insurance; he was also booked once for driving after revocation. No non-traffic offenses came up. The Star-Tribune said his record consisted of “misdemeanors and petty misdemeanors”.)

In MN, broken tail light gets Philando Castile killed by police -- with 4 year old

girl in back seat and girlfriend right next to him. The NAACP tweeted that he was a kitchen worker in St. Paul schools.

According to Castile's girlfriend the police shot him through the window as he was trying to get his ID out -- per their instructions. He informed them that he also had a gun and a legal permit -- and they shot him four times and killed him.

Or course he is black. Even in Minnesota, where only 6% of the population is black . . . this can't just be random. We know it's not. What are we going to do to stop this?

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2016/07/06/police-officer-involved-shooting-in-falcon-heights/

How did Alton Sterling end up with gunshots in his chest -- AND in his back?

Did they flip him over and then shoot him on the other side? While he was lying down?

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/alton-sterling-baton-rouge-police-shooting-aclu-questions-lack-of-body-cameras/

Louisiana ACLU executive director Marjorie Esman said in a statement that "questions abound" over the shooting, including why Sterling "was shot to death while he was on the ground and two police officers were on top of him," CBS affiliate WAFB reported.

"Why did the officer shoot -- multiple times -- when Mr. Sterling was already being subdued?" Esman asked. "How did Mr. Sterling end up with gunshots in his chest and his back? What happened to cause both officers' body cameras to fall off during the same incident?"

Esman said she wants to know if the officers were trained in how to properly fasten the cameras. She also said authorities also should investigate whether police could have used some other means of subduing Sterling and "if it was necessary to subdue him at all."

Esman said Sterling was the 122 black person shot and killed by law enforcement in the U.S. this year.

In "defiant" "manic" speech, the Don once AGAIN defends his anti-semitic anti-Hillary image.

He just can never, never back down.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Donald J. Trump on Wednesday offered a defiant defense of his campaign’s decision to publish an image widely viewed as anti-Semitic — saying he regretted deleting it — and vigorously reaffirmed his praise of Saddam Hussein, the murderous Iraqi dictator.

In the span of 30 minutes, an often-shouting Mr. Trump breathed new life into a controversy that was sparked on Saturday by his posting of an image on his Twitter account of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with money seeming to rain down in the background. The image was quickly, and broadly, criticized for invoking stereotypes of Jews. Mr. Trump deleted it two hours later, and replaced the star image with a circle.

“ ‘You shouldn’t have taken it down,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled telling one of his campaign workers. “I said, ‘Too bad, you should have left it up.’ I would have rather defended it.”

“That’s just a star,” Mr. Trump said repeatedly.

SNIP

Mr. Trump had not discussed the Twitter message at length until Wednesday night, at his rally in Cincinnati, and his remarks seemed to clash with those of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, who earlier in the day had defended Mr. Trump in an unusual and candid op-ed article, suggesting that the Twitter post was “careless.”

CA Dem primary votes FULLY COUNTED, including provisionals and mail-ins.

Hillary won by 7.1 percent (53.1 to 46), or about 364K votes.

http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/president/party/democratic/


http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf

(All the columns in the second link show zeroes because all ballots have been counted.)

The DoJ manual BARS prosecutors from smearing unindicted people, like Comey did.

No wonder he chose to have the presser on his own, without notice.

Loretta Lynch would have reminded him of the basic legal principles he chose to violate.

Here is a link to the US attorney's manual, if anyone cares to dig.

https://www.justice.gov/usam/united-states-attorneys-manual

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/fbi-director-james-comey-breaks-federal-prosecutor-rules-smearing-not-indicting

The Department of Justice’s voluminous U.S. Attorneys Manual has sections restricting press comments when there’s no indictment in all but the most exceptional cases, barring prosecutors from interfering in political campaigns. It states that prosecutors should not name unindicted defendants, and even cites federal court rulings chastising prosecutors for doing exactly that.

Comey, a Republican appointed as FBI director by President Obama, crossed all three of those lines. Very few commentators noted that Comey shouldn’t have said anything at all, and how unusual it was that he did. One exception was Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

“The first notable thing in FBI director Jim Comey's statement on the Clinton email flap is that he issued it,” he wrote. “Normally, the FBI does not issue reports on its investigative findings separate from Justice Department decisions regarding what to do with those findings. Much less does it make public its recommendations, particularly in a fashion that effectively preempts the Justice Department's prosecutorial decisions with respect to those recommendations.”


SNIP

“The Department of Justice policies are you don’t comment on people you don’t indict. You don’t punish them in the press,” said an ex-Connecticut public defender. “The other thing is the DOJ policy is you don’t do things to affect elections, period. I don’t see anybody questioning this. Everybody thinks the FBI is sacrosanct.”

“I think it was highly inappropriate,” said John Williams, a civil rights lawyer from New Haven, Connecticut. “I suppose he will get away with it because [as FBI director] he is not a prosecutor. And you do get that all too often. Law enforcement will issue a press release and the prosecutor will not say anything.”

“It’s like a perp walk, but this is worse, because they’re saying we will not arrest them,” Williams said. “To hold a press conference where he [Comey] makes comments on the behavior of the person who will not be indicted? That’s not appropriate. I don’t recall ever seeing that by a FBI director. It harkens back to J. Edgar Hoover’s days.”

SNIP

Did Comey decide to grandstand about Hillary in order to distract from his own

agency's poor performance with regard to the Orlando shooting massacre?

The FBI has some mud on its face for dropping its investigation of Mateen, despite multiple reports of his threats to others. Maybe it's trying to smear Hillary instead.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obama_should_demand_fbi_director_james_comeys_resignation_20160613

Obama Should Demand FBI Director James Comey’s Resignation Today

Posted on Jun 13, 2016

By John Kiriakou

James Comey Committed Gross Abuse of Power, per former Justice Dept official

He has made public charges against Hillary that she will never have a chance to legally answer. He couldn't recommend criminal charges since none applied, so he decided to slam her personally instead. This was despicable.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/james-comeys-abuse-of-power/2016/07/06/7799d39e-4392-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html

Matthew Miller was director of the Justice Department’s public affairs office from 2009 to 2011.

When FBI Director James B. Comey stepped to the lectern to deliver his remarks about Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, he violated time-honored Justice Department practices for how such matters are to be handled, set a dangerous precedent for future investigations and committed a gross abuse of his own power.

SNIP

In a case where the government decides it will not submit its assertions to that sort of rigorous scrutiny by bringing charges, it has the responsibility to not besmirch someone’s reputation by lobbing accusations publicly instead. Prosecutors and agents have followed this precedent for years.

These practices are important because of the role the Justice Department and FBI play in our system of justice. They are not the final adjudicators of the appropriateness of conduct for anyone they investigate. Instead, they build cases that they present in court, where their assertions are backed up by evidence that can be challenged by an opposing party and ultimately adjudicated by a judge or jury.

In this case, Comey ignored those rules to editorialize about what he called carelessness by Clinton and her aides in handling classified information, a statement not grounded in any position in law. He recklessly speculated that Clinton’s email system could have been hacked, even while admitting he had no evidence that it was. This conjecture, which has been the subject of much debate and heated allegations, puts Clinton in the impossible position of having to prove a negative in response.

In several instances, Comey made assertions that are outside the authority of the FBI. He inserted himself into a longstanding bureaucratic battle between the State Department and the FBI and intelligence agencies, making claims about classification practices at the State Department that do not fall under his jurisdiction. He raised the possibility of administrative sanctions that could be taken, another decision that is not his to make — any such sanctions, if appropriate, would be decided by the State Department, not the director of the FBI.

SNIP