Vandals With Badges

Two law enforcement agencies acknowledged Monday that officers patrolling Minneapolis during the height of recent protests knifed the tires of numerous vehicles parked and unoccupied in at least two locations in the midst of the unrest.

Video and photo images posted on the news outlet Mother Jones show officers in military-style uniforms puncturing tires in the Kmart parking lot at Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue on May 30.

It wasn't "a few" vehicles, which the duty liars for the cops said. It was a shitload of vehicles. It was all of the cars in a Kmart parking lot.

The official liar said that the cops "deflated" the tires. No, they slashed them. If they wanted to deflate them, they could have cut the valve stems, but no. They vandalized those cars. Oh, the cops like to talk about how they try to protect people's property, but then they go around vandalizing cars with wild abandon.

The departments involved should be sued within an inch of their budgets. Every nickel that people had to pay to replace their tires should come out of the departments' budgets.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Reacting to the journalist April Ryan’s call for her to be fired, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, on Friday, that she has been the victim of the media’s “widespread anti-liar bias.”
...
Kellyanne Conway, the White House senior counsellor, spoke out in support of Sanders, telling reporters, “An attack on one liar is an attack on all liars.”

“Our country has seen some dark days, from the Bowling Green Massacre to the bugging of the White House microwave,” she said. “But this might be the darkest.”

Kudos to the Balmer Cops For a Nice Job of Riot-Starting

Which is pretty much what they did. The cops didn't allow the kids to take the buses home. The cops, in essence, came openly ready for a riot and treated everyone as though they were going to riot.

And so, a riot they got.

On another note, calling Whole Paycheck Foods a bunch of "kale-powered eco-fascists" is one of the better insults of late.

A Couple of Thoughts About Balmer

First, I'd suggest you read BadTux's piece on what the cops call "black dog runs".

Second, one thing I keep thinking of is that, back during the debate on Obamacare, one would see no shortage of posts from Wingnuts, along with protests, promising "Second Amendment Solutions" and crap along the lines of watering the tree of freedom with blood. Some rancher grazes his cows on Federal land, the Feds get upset, and before you know it, busloads of angry old white dudes are out there with rifles, pointing them at the cops. Same sort of folks, promising revolution and so on and so forth.*

But then you have places where the oppression of the population by the cops is not theoretical or a construct of the minds of those who put tinfoil linings in their ballcaps. The harassment and abuse of people who are guilty of no more than going about their business with skin darker than a sheet of cheap typing paper, harassment that takes place in city after city, need hardly be related here. One need only reflect on the fact that when police forces act so far outside of the law that the Department of Justice steps in and consent decrees result, those are almost never brought about by the cops abusing white folk.

The Baltimore cops killed a man whose sole crime was not wanting to talk to them. They denied him medical attention, then they not only tuned him up a little in the back of a paddy wagon, they crushed his larynx and snapped his spine.

And people aren't happy with being beaten by the cops and yes, they don't believe that they'll get a fair shake from the justice system. Because they don't. When the cops don't act according to the rule of law, only a fool would expect that the people on the other side of the batons, the tasers, and the guns will respect the rule of law. Too many people, including cops, seem to confuse the meaning of the words "respect" and "fear".

Stopping a guy from grazing cows merits an armed response. Murdering a man in the back of a paddy wagon doesn't, at least, if one pays any heed to the Right on this. The former is a response to oppression. The latter is criminal action, if you buy their line.

Yes, a lot of what goes on in any riot is opportunism and hooliganism. Yet, one should not lose sight of how well the ground was prepared for it.
_________________________________________________
* Protesting other abuses of the powers that be, well, that's off-limits. One need only review the response of the Wingnuts to the Occupy Wall Street protests, a response that tended towards "give them a whiff of grapeshot".