Just how I've been feeling a little lately.

Source: Think Progress

A former Mesa, Arizona police officer who fatally shot and killed an unarmed father of two was cleared of second degree murder charges on Thursday. Philip Mitchell Brailsford, 27, was also cleared of criminal liability in the death of Daniel Shaver. It took the Maricopa County jury approximately 12 hours over a span of two days to find Brailsford not guilty.

Harrowing body-cam footage of the shooting shows Brailsford and five other heavily-armed Mesa officers proceeding through the hotel to confront Shaver and one of his acquaintances. As they exit the room, police scream at the pair to get on the ground. “Apparently we have a failure for you to comprehend simple instructions, I gotta go over some of them again,” one officer says. “If you make another mistake there is a very severe possibility that you’re both going to get shot…. I’m not here to be tactful or diplomatic with you. You listen. You obey.”

The officers then proceed to give the two civilians a convoluted series of instructions, including interlocking their fingers on their head and crossing their left and right legs, before asking them to crawl toward the officers. They take the female acquaintance out of the way and attempt to do the same with Shaver, who is sobbing and can be heard saying “please don’t shoot me.” Shaver then moves his right hand downward momentarily, prompting Brailsford to shoot him several times with his AR-15. In his testimony, Brailsford maintained that he reacted correctly and believed “100 percent that [Shaver] was reaching for a gun.”

The Shaver case is another grim reminder of how common it is for police officers involved in unarmed shootings to avoid any sort of punishment for their actions. Even officer firings like Brailsford’s are something of a paper tiger: an August investigation by the Washington Post found that, of the 1,881 officers fired for misconduct since 2006, more than 450 were reinstated after union appeals.

Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/arizona-cop-who-shot-sobbing-unarmed-man-at-point-blank-range-acquitted-of-murder-53bbceda925c/

Here's an Aussie couple opposed to marriage equality (which just passed in Australia! Yay!!) that said they'd get divorced if it passed:
Full Article Here



The only people mucking up your relationship is you, dimwits!!!

Just in time for the holidays! Now, my hubby's (Chef Caleb) not a butcher and he's a little out of practice breaking down a bird, but he really wanted to do a turkey video for the holiday season, and we've been seeing a bunch of people talking about spatchcocking this year, so we decided to do a video on that. We went a little further and removed the breastplate and also the thighs in our video, then we applied the compound butter we made last week under the skin, and it turned out SO well. It's amazing how fast a bird roasts when it lies nice and flat like that!

Also, we've just hit 275 subscribers! That's super exciting to me, and I thank anyone here who has subscribed to us on YouTube and/or passed our videos around to friends who are into food.

I'm serious, it's an absolute mystery to me what we do. We hold ourselves to a higher standard that we KNOW the other side will not only not uphold, but will fight tooth and nail to avoid even looking at. They lie, they cheat, they bribe, they cover up, and they win. All the fact-checking in the world doesn't do a thing to them, but the slightest accusation of impropriety paints our side with the broadest brush.

Do we do the same? Do we start buying elections? Do we start bribing and covering up? I know the moral high ground doesn't mean anything, but do we need to abandon our principles? Do give up women's reproductive rights to win elections? Do we give up on gun control? Do we give up on LGBTQ+ rights? Do we give up on equality for POC? What do we do to fight the cesspool on the other side of the aisle without diving headfirst into it?

The wealthy own the mass media. CNN and MSNBC aren't run by liberals, they're run by corporations, and you can look pretty hard and still not find any liberals or progressives on the boards of those corporations. The right has muddied the water so much you can walk on it, now. Facts are over. There's no such thing. When a bunch of people on the right still believe in Pizzagate, we've lost the war on facts. So, what do we do? Where do we go from here?

I'm so frustrated I can't even think straight. All I see are walls going up. Traps being set by the right and the far right that we keep face planting into. Now we're going to lose Franken, a tiger in the Senate, and Moore's still looking good to win in AL. I'm grinding my teeth into splinters.

Our leaders have held back on attacking for years in the "spirit of bipartisanship" in order to make it seem like trying to reach across the aisle and bridge the gap, but every time we do, we get our arms grabbed and dragged further and further to the right. The GOP has given up any pretense of any sort of integrity or principle in favour of *actual nazis* and *child molesters*. There is no depth to which the GOP will not sink in order to gain and hold on to power.

Source: The Guardian

Donald Trump’s banking information has formally been turned over to Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating whether the president’s campaign conspired with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election.

Deutsche Bank, the German bank that serves as Trump’s biggest lender, was forced to submit documents about its client relationship with the president and some of his family members, who are also Deutsche clients, after Mueller issued the bank with a subpoena for information, according to multiple media reports. The news was first reported by Handelsblatt, the German newspaper.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment. The bank told Bloomberg in a statement that it always cooperated with investigating authorities.

It also indicated that any investigation into Trump personally may not be limited to the question of whether or not the president sought to obstruct justice when he fired the former FBI chief James Comey. Instead, said Ryan Goodman, a New York law professor and former Pentagon counsel, it showed that Mueller was possibly examining whether the president could be compromised by Russian interests.



Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/05/donald-trump-bank-records-handed-over-robert-mueller?CMP=share_btn_tw

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And John Iadarola from TYT tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/johniadarola/status/938071234993987584

This just showed up on my Twitter feed (from Keith Boykin), and I thought it was an interesting and compelling short list of things the next Democratic government should work on:

https://twitter.com/keithboykin/status/937494552100966400

7 Reforms After Trump

1. Repeal Shelby v Holder

2. Repeal Citizens United

3. Abolish electoral college

4. Apply anti-nepotism law to White House

5. POTUS candidates must release tax returns

6. Presidents may not self-pardon

7. Special counsel has power to indict president

From The Crosstab: http://www.thecrosstab.com/2017/07/22/congress-polarization/



And an interesting tweet on the subject (that led me to the article):

https://twitter.com/JoshuaMound/status/937702538350034944