All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Gray Lensman]

It does seem premature to say that the party with the White House, control of the Senate, and a majority of Governors is likely to go away.

Parties get weaker at times, but they tend to recover.

Richard Nixon won a 49 state landslide two years before Democrats beat Republicans by 15% in the 1974 Senate midterms.

It's entirely possible that Biden will deliver a massive asskicking to Trump, and that Democrats will control the Senate. But the midterms tend to be bad for the party in the White House, and the 2024 is likely to be an open presidential election.

The additional problem for Republicans is the demographic shift - and Trump has spent his time trying to stop it by any means possible, entrenching those ever-increasing demographics against the party he leads.

[Kusanagi]

I tend to agree that if the Democrats win out in the fall, it's not the end of Republican party. The following midterms would tell the health of the party.

What I am interested in seeing is if the Republicans lose both the white house and senate, will this be the end of the Tea Party/Trumpism that's held sway over the party for about a decade? Or will they double down on it, and run Trump styled (possibly backed) candidates in 2022?

[Tami]

The additional problem for Republicans is the demographic shift - and Trump has spent his time trying to stop it by any means possible, entrenching those ever-increasing demographics against the party he leads.

Yeah. If you have a Party of Inclusion versus a Party of Exclusion, over time the Party of Exclusion is going to exclude it's self out of existence. There is diversity in a number of countries, though few come anywhere close to the degree of diversity that can be found in the US.

Trump and his Republican followers act as if they are living in, well, a country that their ancestors controlled in isolation from the rest of the world for thousands of years. A country without diversity.

Fewer and fewer countries fit that profile. The US is the antithesis of that profile.

[Tami]

Atlanta Police Chief Resigns After Officer Shoots and Kills Black Man

Atlanta’s police chief resigned on Saturday, less than 24 hours after a police officer shot and killed a man at a Wendy’s drive-through who had run from the police after failing a sobriety check and taking an officer’s Taser, the authorities said.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said that security footage appeared to show that the man, Rayshard Brooks, 27, who is black, had fired the Taser toward the officer, who was chasing him before he was killed.

“While there may be debate as to whether this was an appropriate use of deadly force, I firmly believe that there is a clear distinction between what you can do and what you should do,” Ms. Bottoms said. “I do not believe that this was a justified use of deadly force.”

In addition to the resignation of the police chief, Erika Shields, who just weeks earlier had engaged with demonstrators protesting the killing of George Floyd, Ms. Bottoms said that she had also called for the immediate firing of the police officer who killed Mr. Brooks.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.

The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”

We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.

Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.

History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the future.

The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most common complaint against the police was about “clubbing” — “the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks,” as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.

The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations, like working to build “community support for law enforcement” and reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by police officers.”

These commissions didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests. Calls for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.

[Malvolio]

It does seem premature to say that the party with the White House, control of the Senate, and a majority of Governors is likely to go away.

Parties get weaker at times, but they tend to recover.

Richard Nixon won a 49 state landslide two years before Democrats beat Republicans by 15% in the 1974 Senate midterms.

It's entirely possible that Biden will deliver a massive asskicking to Trump, and that Democrats will control the Senate. But the midterms tend to be bad for the party in the White House, and the 2024 is likely to be an open presidential election.

You're kind of burying the lead there by not mentioning how the 1974 Senate midterms might just have been influenced by, I don't know, oh yeah, Nixon RESIGNING three months prior to the election! Yeah, I think that year might have been a little bit more than mere course correction after a Presidential landslide.

[Kirby101]

I tend to agree that if the Democrats win out in the fall, it's not the end of Republican party. The following midterms would tell the health of the party.

What I am interested in seeing is if the Republicans lose both the white house and senate, will this be the end of the Tea Party/Trumpism that's held sway over the party for about a decade? Or will they double down on it, and run Trump styled (possibly backed) candidates in 2022?

The Republican voters are mostly Tea Party Trumpers and Evangelicals. That is who their voters are. Most of the others have left. So it will be hard to move away from that.

[MiddleMan]

dont know if this goes here

ESPN is reporting that the MLBPA has rejected the MLBs most recent offer and will not counter offer, basically saying tell US when the season resumes and when players should report

there will be a 50ish game season

and I assume this is just a precursor to the strike thats going to happen in 2021 when the CBA runs out next year

[Robotman]

I tend to agree that if the Democrats win out in the fall, it's not the end of Republican party. The following midterms would tell the health of the party.

What I am interested in seeing is if the Republicans lose both the white house and senate, will this be the end of the Tea Party/Trumpism that's held sway over the party for about a decade? Or will they double down on it, and run Trump styled (possibly backed) candidates in 2022?

Even if the Dems win big in November, the Republicans would still have a great chance to take back the Senate and/or the House in the mid-terms because traditionally fewer people vote in the mid-terms. Lower voter turn out favors the republicans. I would love to see election days become national holidays. Sadly that won’t happen.

The Republicans have gone all in with White Nationalism. As long as Fox News and right wing media keep pumping out racist conspiracy theories, the Republican Party will be the party of Trump and his ilk. I think they actually had a chance to rebrand themselves about 20 years ago and have a bit more inclusion. Blue collar and lower socioeconomic class Hispanics and African Americans are traditionally more religious, focus on “family values”, they’re not the biggest supporters of the LGBTQ community, and are in favor fiscal responsibility. All staples of the traditional GOP platform. George W. Bush did surprisingly well his Hispanics, but The GOP has long squandered and chance of expanding their base. They’re going to have to rely on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other types of good old fashioned cheating to survive.

[MiddleMan]

Even if the Dems win big in November, the Republicans would still have a great chance to take back the Senate and/or the House in the mid-terms because traditionally fewer people vote in the mid-terms. Lower voter turn out favors the republicans. I would love to see election days become national holidays. Sadly that won’t happen.

The Republicans have gone all in with White Nationalism. As long as Fox News and right wing media keep pumping out racist conspiracy theories, the Republican Party will be the party of Trump and his ilk. I think they actually had a chance to rebrand themselves about 20 years ago and have a bit more inclusion. Blue collar and lower socioeconomic class Hispanics and African Americans are traditionally more religious, focus on “family values”, they’re not the biggest supporters of the LGBTQ community, and are in favor fiscal responsibility. All staples of the traditional GOP platform. George W. Bush did surprisingly well his Hispanics. The GOP has long squandered and chance of expanding their base. They’re going to have to rely on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other types of good old fashioned cheating to survive.

that can be countered if there is engagement by young folks and others in local and state races

[InformationGeek]

So Trump had the West Point Speech and yeah, it was bad.

However, there were continuous signs of his... problems in there.

[AnakinFlair]

The Republican voters are mostly Tea Party Trumpers and Evangelicals. That is who their voters are. Most of the others have left. So it will be hard to move away from that.

Do you think it's possible that, if the Republicans are trounced in November's election, we could see the creation of a viable third party made up of more moderate Republicans, and the crazies will be relegated to a Tea Party Republican party?

[Mecegirl]

The Republican voters are mostly Tea Party Trumpers and Evangelicals. That is who their voters are. Most of the others have left. So it will be hard to move away from that.

I wouldn't say that. Like my roommate(I live in Georgia) isn't either of those. She identifies as an independent. But was raised in a house hold that would mostly vote Republican just by stereotype. White, middle class for a good chunk until her dad showed his true colors and left, from Florida. She was home schooled too.

During the 2016 primary she was rooting for Marco Rubio, she thinks he's a great speaker. She admitted to me the other day that she voted for Trump in 2016 because of Judges. She says that she thinks the Supreme court needed to be balanced...though I know that she is anti abortion, we just don't talk about it. Anyway she says that she won't vote for Trump this time and seems to dislike him a lot. She has said bad things about Gov. Kemp from time to time. She is pro Black Lives Matter even. She just found out about redlining and was appalled by it. But the idea of voting for Biden still gives her pause. And I've never heard her speak negatively of Marco Rubio despite the fact that he never stands up to Trump. Whenever I mention Mitt Romney she kinda goes silent. So I guess if it isn't her boy Rubio she doesn't have much positive to say??

She is just 24 so who knows how far she might grow, but considering her background I am not surprised. And if I found out that even after all her hand wringing she still votes for Trump in 2020 I wouldn't be surprised. I just hope she goes third party or doesn't vote at all. But I think people like her are part of why the Republican party numbers are so low. But also why it will take a severe trouncing for the party to truly fade. A lot of right leaning independents who believe most of the Republican party line but don't like the stink of it. I wish 2016-2020 sucked less so I could have more faith in humanity.

On the bright side an Independent friend of mine in Ohio has vowed never to vote for a Republican again. And her and her husband have been nagging the fuck out of their elected officials with repeated phone calls.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

So Trump had the West Point Speech and yeah, it was bad.

However, there were continuous signs of his... problems in there.

Well, what Trump speech ISN’T a train wreck? But this one was Grade A awful. As for those....problems, yeah, something’s definitely up.

[Robotman]

So Trump had the West Point Speech and yeah, it was bad.

However, there were continuous signs of his... problems in there.

Meh, it was the usual mush brain stuff from Trump. Nothing out of the ordinary. Can’t pronounce names or locations, most likely because he’s never heard of these historical figures. I’m surprised he can still read off a teleprompter. Kinda impressed at this point.