great reminder that our Founders took policing power extremely seriously, the interpretation of what they put down in the Constitution about it is the rub;

Here's just one reminder why

A bill introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren comes as the House prepares to vote on major policing reform.

NAACP: CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS CALL ON CONGRESS TO PASS GEORGE FLOYD JUSTICE IN POLICING ACT

FEBRUARY 24, 2021

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Rep. Karen Bass Reintroduces George Floyd Policing Bill in Congress

CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS URGE CONGRESS TO PASS LEGISLATION.

 ...On Wednesday, she and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, reintroduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021....

@ Essence.com, Feb. 26

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So I see that what's going on basically is that they are going to try the same bill over with the new Senate

AND NO MATTER WHICH WAY IT GOES, THEN BIDEN WILL BE DONE WITH THE TOPIC

and be able to move on to other stuff.

Edit to add: the Pressley bill is also a redo, she tried it last session with Justin Amash as a partner, many libertarians like the idea.

From a totally different angle (except for my 4th Amendment thing) here's something big picture that I tend to also see in the BLM/Angela Davis-inspired "abolish police, prisons and courts" anarchist-heaven dreaming. Can you even bring up the phrase "tyranny of the majority" in an anarchist local community meeting, isn't that verboten? Who's the judge of whether people who need eyeglasses are now doomed by the majorty? Nobody, cause there's no judges and no courts

more on the complicated congressional politics being played with the Geo. Floyd bill, here from The House passes a policing overhaul bill named for George Floyd, whose death spurred nationwide protests. @ NYTimes.com, March 4, 2021, 1:14 p.m by Nicholas Fandos, Catie Edmondson and Karen Zraick

[...] The House vote was 220 to 212, with two Democrats joining Republicans to vote no. One Republican voted to pass the overhaul, but quickly said it had been a mistake.

Progressives are plotting to use the opposition as an example of Republican obstruction as they build their case for Senate Democrats to jettison the legislative filibuster, to lower the threshold for Senate passage from 60 to just a simple majority. But Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California and the bill’s principal author, said in an interview this week that she held out hope she could reach common ground with a cadre of Senate Republicans, led by Tim Scott of South Carolina, who had put together their own more modest proposal last summer.

“There is tremendous good faith and good will between Senator Scott and me,” Ms. Bass said, though she conceded that there had been a “loss in momentum” in favor of an overhaul since last summer.

The political shift was evident on Wednesday and may prove too formidable to overcome. After handling Democrats’ proposal gently last summer, Republicans made outright attacking liberal policing proposals a key plank of their 2020 campaigns and emerged convinced it was successful.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, repeated one of those attacks on Thursday, asserting that the bill would “defund the police” by imposing “mountains of new regulations” that would drain departments’ resources. The attack sought to conflate the House Democrats’ effort with calls by progressive activists to shrink or otherwise pull resources from departments — which the lawmakers in Washington who crafted the bill explicitly rejected.

“Democrats just doubled down as the party of Defunding the Police,” Mr. McCarthy wrote on Twitter.

[....]

Law enforcement organizations and police unions have forcefully opposed the measure, and the Trump administration had threatened a veto, arguing it would weaken law enforcement agencies. President Biden supports the bill [....]

Hopefully, but sadly it's more likely this will be the kiss of death as they get labeled Angela-Davis-style Marxists by some conservative radio host who finds out BLM is supporting:

Now I just got to point out that stuff like this is not good p.r. for Cullors' beliefs that communities can end up like a loving family and that there is no need for things like courts:

I don't but he does:

I think they are idiots who almost got Trump re-elected; I thank god that in the midst of all the burning, rioting, looting & threatening of gentrifiers (which no police abuse victim really asked for!) Joe Biden found the bravery to say aloud in public that he wasn't for defunding, but increasing funding.

so there's some brothers here, they are against police, and the court system is working against them; one could make a coalition, just sayin:

Proud Boys Members Allegedly Warned That Cops Were “The Primary Threat” The Night Before The Capitol Insurrection

A grand jury indicted four Proud Boys leaders in the latest conspiracy case to come out of the riot investigation.

by Zoe Tillman @ DailyBeast.com, March 19

Here we see yet another example of continuing troubles with the solidarity thing and the grifter meme:

Looks like BLM Chicago is even more blatantly radical than BLM national:

About Us

Black Lives Matter Chicago is an intersectional vehicle that values Black people and our right to self-determination.

We fight for justice with families most impacted, while working to create just and equitable systems.

We work to end state violence and criminalization of Black communities by deconstructing white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy.

We are 100% volunteer run.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love and protect each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
-Assata Shakur

“We are not responsible for our oppression, but we are responsible for our liberation.”
-Frank Chapman

“Hope is a discipline.”
-Mariame Kaba

 

I went over to check their site because I first read this interview with Kaba published today at The Nation. Where she talks not just about dreaming about abolishment of prisons but walking the walk with her "anarchist friends", basically creating a Marxist heaven that has nothing to do with the United States as it exists, indeed she talks about a vision of "deconstructing" all of current western capitalist society. Some things remind me of Pol Pot's vision for Cambodia. Here a couple excerpts, followed by tweet with the link

Capitalism has deskilled us from things that we should know how to do and that we should not be outsourcing. It’s going to take a lot to change that. This is why I’ve always struggled alongside and respected my anarchist friends. I wonder how we’re going to do things without a government, however that government gets reconstituted. How are we going to be able to distribute resources en masse or do things in common like build roads? I don’t know. We as individuals can do a lot, and we also need spaces where we do things collectively toward survival. We have to do both, and then some more. I’m open to alternate configurations.

ER: The anarchist example is interesting because you note that when people talk about abolition, listeners often say they can’t imagine a world without prisons. Imagining things without the state is not dissimilar. When you find that you can’t imagine something, how do you push through?

MK: I’m a constant student. Just because I, Mariame Kaba, can’t imagine something doesn’t mean that thing isn’t valuable or that thing can’t be undone or done. It’s possible to think about statelessness, so I look to others who have spent the time doing the intellectual and practical work that it’s going to take to do something different. It really doesn’t matter if I, as an individual, can’t imagine a thing. It matters that there are people imagining that thing.

ER: Not “What can I imagine?” but “What can we imagine?”

MK: What can we imagine and what can we do together? We have to collectively imagine. PIC abolition is a collective project. My personal desires and views are interesting to me, but abolition isn’t Mariame Kaba’s vision of the world. I want to engage with other people, to learn from their ideas to refine my own and to change my mind, which I think more people should be open to. I look forward to doing that: Trying to think together as we work together to bring into fruition the world in which we want to live. Prefiguring that world.

ER: I hate to ask you about all the people that you’ve ever read, but as you were describing this book as a doorway, I figured it might be helpful to hear who your doorways were.

MK: Angela Davis is a huge doorway for me. George Jackson is a huge doorway for me. Camara Laye was a huge doorway for me. Malcolm X was a huge doorway for me. Later I was influenced by the writing of Amílcar Cabral, Assata [Shakur], Robin Kelley, Charles Payne, Grace Lee Boggs, Maryse Condé, Mariama Bâ, Audre Lorde, and so many more. They taught me that this isn’t just how the world is. This is constructed. You can deconstruct it and build something different. Encountering Marx was really formative for me. It took two times of reading [his work] in groups for me to understand he was giving us a theory of the world and not just a theory of economics.

ER: I always think about that Cedric Robinson line in Black Marxism: “to Black radicals of the twentieth century, one of the most compelling features of Marxism was its apparent universalism.”

MK: Marx gave me an opening. And frankly, I didn’t have a gender analysis until I went to college. I saw myself as a Black person, and maybe a little bit genderless. I’m not sure. Going to college and being exposed to bell hooks, June Jordan, and Alice Walker opened up for me that not only am I a woman, I’m a Black woman. It opened the door. You’re not guaranteed to walk through it, but in my case, when the door opened, I felt pushed out. I was propelled. All my ideas were changed by reading and by meeting people who pushed me to actualize my ideas. The push-pull of that has served me well.

I can't see anyone sane belonging to the Democratic party going along with this program. Bernie bros. are moderates by comparison.

Hot tip for radical activists in grievance bubbles:

John McWhorter:

His argument includes mention of the data I have posted elsewhere and then it goes further to what has already appeared totally logical and rational to me

[....] The cops kill hundreds and hundreds of people every year. Of them, white people are the majority by a good margin. For every incident we hear of where cops kill a black person, there are multiple others where cops killed a white person and we did not hear about it.

Black people, however, are killed more than what our proportion of the population would predict in itself. Specifically, black people are killed at a rate two and a half times our representation in the population.

The good word is that this “proves” that racism is behind the killings of black people. Presumably racist bias, even subconscious, makes cops pull the trigger in tense situations.

This is an understandable approach, but not truth incarnate, and it leaves something out. Poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, partly because cops are sent more to poor communities and partly because poverty can force you or even nudge you into dangerous choices. And just as black people are two and a half times more likely to be killed by cops, black people are also two and a half times more likely to be poor.

That is not fair. But – it also explains the disproportion. That is: both things are true. It is wrong that more black people are poor, but that fact also explains why black people are two and a half times more likely to die at the hands of the cops.

That this almost uncanny statistical match-up is no accident is further supported by studies showing that while cops are more likely to rough up and verbally abuse black people, they are not more likely to kill them.

These facts lead to a conclusion that makes many very uncomfortable: that George Floyd did not die because he was black.

Many just cannot swallow that. It seems inconceivable that a white cop would snuff out the life of a white guy in the same way. What Chauvin did seems to recapitulate so much about how white people and black people have always interacted in this country.

But our sense here is impressionistic, and the impressionistic is no more valuable here than it is in whites’ impressions that a black person is “suspicious” or underqualified or angry or is less susceptible to pain.

And the simple truth is that a white guy named Tony Timpa died under very similar conditions at the hands of the cops a few years before Floyd did.

* * *

In my experience, a great many think that to be a good person one simply cannot accept these facts, that they absolutely must be waved away at all costs. However [....]

People can argue and do argue whether the reasons most blacks are poorer than most whites, which is also a reality. And reasons for the economic difference can reasonably include lasting effects of past systemic racism and current continued racism.

BUT THAT HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH POLICE!  It especially has little to do with police in large Democratic cities who have been racially integrated for a long time. It gets especially absurd when the cop involved is black.

McWhorter is a linguist and words matter to him, and he thinks the police abuse problem is not properly labeled as a racist problem! He's right, it's just not.

Doing so stupidly inserted racial antagonism by those given to it including racists, racialists, and people who feel unfairly mislabeled as either into an argument where it doesn't belong!

Not a joke: if this movement was to be about police, and lessening abuse by them, to be effective rather than ensnarled in politics of race, it really really should have been named  "Poor Live Matter" or "All Lives Matter". Making it all about race doomed it, especially the main slogan.

Forty years ago, Mehmood Ansari immigrated from Pakistan to Atlantic City and eventually opened a shop on the boardwalk - City Souvenirs.

The 66-year-old father worked hard, morning and night, and was “always smiling,” says his son Asif Ansari.

On Thursday night, tragedy struck inside the store. Mehmood collapsed and died shortly after being robbed by a knife-wielding 12-year-old boy during a confrontation with multiple juveniles who were rampaging through the store, authorities said. While Ansari’s autopsy results are pending, his son said he believes Ansari died from the shock of the incident [....]

Missed this, their foundation took in $90 million last year

(In light of that, the accusations from some struggling families of black victims complaining about them using their loved ones names for profit are no surprise)

Downtown Minneapolis Sept. 14: nothing left to loot, no one left to abuse, and you don't need cops if you got plywood. Thanks, BLM movement, for showing us a vision of what the glorious future could be like! (Those jurors must be having some fun, amirite? what an awesome gig!)

not official BLM, but very much a fellow traveler:

MANY THANKS due to Jim Clyburn and others who read the riot act to lefties in the Dem party about using BLM fucking "defund" and "abolish" slogans until the Georgia Senate race was done:

Crosslink: turns out many of your stylings have been enormously counter-productive