Just Going to Leave This One Here; BLM Ed.

Caturday

Priss, our outdoor cat:

She's "ours" in that we feed her and provide her with a place to sleep in the garage and a litterbox. She comes and goes as she desires. The most we can do for other care is try to get some Revolution bug shit on her each month. Which she hates.

How Low We Have Sunk As a Free Nation

That it is now necessary to have a website that tracks police abusing reporters.

This is the sort of shit that was supposed to happen in shitholes like Russia, Iran, Belarus or one of the former Soviet *-stans.

The United States of America was once a country that took pride in freedom of the press. Those days are gone under the misbegotten reign of King Donald the Nutter.

We are now just another nation that is teetering on becoming a failed state that is ruled by an authoritarian thug, codenamed Bunker Boy, who hides behind fortifications.

Let's Play 2020 Bingo!

Here's your card:

Stolen from Tam's FB page.

Brutality in Buffalo

An old guy went up to talk to some cops. Two cops shoved him hard, the old man fell down and cracked his head. When another cop began to kneel to help the old man (who was bleeding from his ears), one of the cops who did the shoving pulled him back.

The first thing that the police brass did was to lie about what happened ("he tripped"). The cops in Buffalo are pretty damned stupid if they haven't figured out, by now, that there are video cameras in people's hands everywhere.

The shovers have been suspended. The City of Buffalo should warm up its checkbook.

Because It's Friday

The Essex Valley RR Polar Express:

I didn't know that they were operating two trains at a time.

Profiles in Gutlessness

President Donald Trump’s inability to unify the nation at a time of grave unrest is testing his uneasy alliance with mainstream Republicans, some emboldened by Gen. James Mattis’ plea for a leader who lives up to the U.S. ideals of a more perfect union.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Thursday called the rebuke by Trump’s first Pentagon chief “necessary and overdue.”

“Perhaps we’re getting to the point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally, and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up,” Murkowski said.

This is what it took for some of those birds to speak out against the fecklessness of Donald Trump? All the other shit, the corruption, the enriching himself and his relatives, business associates and political appointees grifting at the public trough, the coziness with authoritarian regimes, the destruction of global relationships with democratic governments, all of that made no nevermind with you, Lisa?

You knew Trump was corrupt and has been betraying his oath of office since the day he gave it. But did you do anything about it, especially when you had the chance? No. You couldn't be bothered.

But only now, when it's becoming possible that Trump and a lot of his fellow Republicans are going to be ejected by the voters, not to mention the near certainty that history will not be kind to either Trump or his enablers, now you speak up?

Spare me your handwringing, you rotten suckup, you fucking weathervane. You're not much better than Miss Lindsey Graham. At least he's a loyal toady.

Riot Humor

One Amusing Thing

The very same political class that twisted themselves into knots over an imagined military takeover (Jade Helm 15) are now clamoring for the military to take over American cities and shoot everyone on the streets to who dares to lift up their eyes.

Tom Cotton, in particular, has forgotten that the time that troops were sent into his state, it was because his side was reacting to integration with violence. Dollars to doughnuts that if Cotton was in politics back then, he'd have been the first to decry the use of troops.

James Mattis Speaks Out

IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH

I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.