Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Naveena Sadasivam at Grist writes—US states have spent the past 5 years trying to criminalize protest:
Over the past half-decade, a wave of bills that criminalize civil disobedience has swept state legislatures across the country — particularly those controlled by Republican lawmakers.
Military officials also ordered use of two Army National Guard helicopters to intimidate civilians in Washington, D.C., sources told The New York Times.
Braving the still raging coronavirus and the potential for being tear-gassed and bloodied by unprovoked cops showing their skill with billy-clubs, in cities large and small, hundreds of thousands of mostly masked Americans turned out Saturday to express their opposition to police violence and to grieve and show their support for the family of George Floyd, the hand-cuffed African American killed on camera in Minneapolis by out-of-control police May 25.
This is the real virus, systemic racism. It was exposed by the Cover-19 crisis. It’s like Trump, it makes everything worse.
Today I received an email from the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas (where I apparently stayed many years ago, back when the world was different). Their president and COO proudly announced that, as of today, they are open for business and welcoming eager patrons.
Trump visited a plant that produces sterile swabs and mingled with workers who wore white lab coats, masks, gloves, hair coverings, goggles and booties.
The pandemic has created an almost infinite number of questions. One of the biggest faced by our country, our states, and our localities is how to start “reopening.” Most states mandated widespread closures of businesses and other public institutions in order to mitigate the damage caused by COVID-19, but even with those measures, and social distancing, we’ve already lost over 100,000 Americans—disproportionately Americans of color.
An Associated Press investigation into arrest records found that very few people were affiliated with organized groups.
City and state balance sheets are in serious trouble after the pandemic-induced economic slowdown. As local governments are making decisions about budget cuts, some protesters have a suggestion: defund the police.The sociologist Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, joins Atlantic staff writer James Hamblin and executive producer Katherine Wells to explain the research and nuance behind the idea, on the podcast Social Distance.
As China comes into greater conflict with the West, and the United States in particular, now is a good time to consider the long arc of this relationship. In the West, Chinese history is commonly framed as having begun with the first Opium War, giving the impression that European powers always had the upper hand. But from the first direct contact between East and West—the arrival of the Portuguese in south China in the early 16th century—the Chinese were dominant.
Updated at 12:04 p.m. on June 6, 2020Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts—and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them.
This week began with angry Trump, but, don’t worry, it ended with the president as a happy man.There he was Monday evening, jaw set in the familiar simian rictus, marching from the White House across Lafayette Square, with a cloud of flunkies and Secret Service agents trailing him. His path had just been cleared of inconvenient citizens by phalanxes of cops using tear gas in hopes of making the president’s walk in the park as pleasant and uneventful as a walk in the park.
On early Sunday morning, when the Dallas Police Department tweeted asking people to submit videos of “illegal activity” at protests to its iWatch Dallas app, K-pop fans were ready.“I wanted to do something to stop or slow [the police] down,” a 16-year-old Houston girl who goes by @YGSHIT on Twitter told me.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives Matter announced Thursday they are suing President Trump and Attorney General William Barr for authorizing an “unprovoked and frankly criminal attack” on protesters at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., where the National Guard and officers dressed in riot gear fired tear gas, rubber bullets and flashbangs to disperse peaceful protesters on Monday so Trump could have a photo op with a Bible in front of St.
As the nationwide uprising in defense of Black lives continues, demonstrators are recording videos of police brutality on the streets. We speak with Chris Frierson, an African American documentary filmmaker and cameraman who was filming a Black Lives Matter protest on Saturday in Brooklyn, New York, when police moved in on demonstrators. As Frierson filmed, police pepper-sprayed him directly in the face. Chris kept on filming as he struggled to the sidewalk crying in agony from the pain.
On Thursday, disturbing new details were revealed in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man who was chased, ambushed and shot dead by a group of white men in Georgia in what many have called a modern-day lynching.
In Minneapolis, members of George Floyd’s family, loved ones and supporters gathered for a tribute to his life. During the memorial service, people stood in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck as he pleaded for his life.
America continues to battle the coronavirus, demonstrators fill the streets to decry police brutality and racism, and former members of President Donald Trump’s own Cabinet are denouncing his leadership. There’s undeniable surrealism to the moment at hand, with police killings captured on camera running parallel to the bizarre image of the president strolling to a church to hold up a Bible, after the police used violent force to clear his path of peaceful protesters.
Many wait to see what Congress will do before committing to tax hikes, big spending cuts
Roger Williams Jr. was 10 years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. It was 1968, and the assassination prompted chaos, uprisings, and fires across the country, including in his own Chicago neighborhood. “At the time, as a kid, you didn’t understand it,” Williams, now 62, told me.
Nobody in Congress likes to give other politicians money. But the track record shows that writing checks directly to states could keep the recession from becoming way worse.
Kramer wasn’t afraid to scare people in power and alienate his own allies—and he changed the world.
It was the biggest quarterly decline in more than a decade.
Judge Frederic Block on the Nesbeth ruling, and fictional pleas in the criminal justice system.
Judge Frederic Block on the Nesbeth ruling, and fictional pleas in the criminal justice system.
He managed to alienate church leaders who see it as part of their mission to get along with the president.
He managed to alienate church leaders who see it as part of their mission to get along with the president.
Trump “dodged the draft” and now “hides from protesters in a deep bunker firing off tweets,” mocks a new video by The Lincoln Project.
Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams writes—World Environment Day Provokes Warnings That ‘To Care for Humanity, We Must Care for Nature’:
As a pandemic that’s killed over 393,000 people rages on and demonstrations demanding racial justice continue across the globe, the international community on Friday marked World Environment Day with scientifically supported warning
