Daily Kos

As a beat reporter, I cover police brutality and corruption as it unfolds. The goal is to zoom in on the breaking micro-stories and attempt to uncover minute details in very specific cases. This microscopic strategy helps in telling what are often very isolated stories of police misconduct and abuse. Today, instead of zooming in, let's pull back with the hope that together we can see the Chicago Police Department for the deeply corrupt and violent gang that it truly is.

As Chicago continues to struggles with record-setting violence, these findings suggest that the Chicago Police Department plays a significant contributing role in the culture of violence in the city and that its corruption, from top to bottom, is as responsible for the underdevelopment of inner-city Chicago as any single institution. The physical, emotional, and financial toll that police have cost the city and its citizens is criminal.

As you will read below, the police will stop at nothing to keep you from learning just how criminal they truly are.

Maryland will stop shackling children in juvenile courts due to a new policy adopted this week by court authorities, reports the Baltimore Sun.

Until now, kids in over half of Maryland's jurisdiction have often been shackled during court appearances, some as young as age 7. Authorities have been neither selective nor methodical in the practice, despite the fact that the vast majority of juveniles are being charged with a misdemeanor. Children have been chained for truancy charges or for stealing a friend's iPhone.

In Baltimore, shackling is more common and more extreme—The Baltimore Sun reports that "child suspects were often shackled with handcuffs, body, and leg restraints." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baltimore has twice the percentage of black residents than the state average.

Children who have endured the chaining have expressed their dislike of the practice. One girl said that she "felt like an animal." Another boy said that shackling "made me feel so bad about myself that when I walked into the courtroom, I felt like an animal being prepared to be put down. I also started to feel like I was some type of killer or a monster the way I was shackled."

The new policy makes Maryland the 22nd state to stop "juvenile shackling by law, rule or policy."

However, judges will still have the option of shackling juveniles if there is a "particularized security concern."

There's more below.

To hear the glowing reviews late last week, Carly Fiorina won the September 16 Republican presidential debate. And by debate, we mean a spectacle of pithy soundbites cranking out revenue like a ratings engine devoid of judges, scoring, and winners and losers.

But as Josh Marshall and others have noted, Fiorina has a habit of just making shit up. Her problems begin when anyone with an Internet connection and reading comprehension skills outside of the cheering squads takes notice:

2) California "destroys lives and livelihoods with environmental regulations"

[B]etween 1993 and 2013, thanks to energy efficiency, the average residential electricity bill in California declined, on an inflation-adjusted basis, by 4 percent, even as bills rose elsewhere in the country. Between 1990 and 2012, the state cut per-capita carbon emissions by 25 percent even as its GDP increased by 37 percent. ... Oh, and California created more jobs than any other state in the nation last year, with the fifth-highest GDP growth rate. And its budget is balanced.
[...]
6) "Coal provides half the energy in this nation still"

No, it doesn't. Coal provides 20 percent of the total primary energy used in the US.

Fiorina claims to have seen babies cruelly being kept alive as a tissue farm for Planned Parenthood. In fact no such video exists. Doctor Professor Pastor Carly Fiorina has also been a regular critic of the Iran nuclear deal on the grounds that . . . something along the lines of Obama should have solved it all his first day in the White House with a single phone call to the Supreme Leader. And of course she plays up her business success when it's been widely reported how she bungled her own big merger between Compaq and HP so thoroughly that she was kicked to the curb by panicked shareholders and fellow executives:

Six weeks after publication of this article that pilloried Hewlett-Packard, the board hired Mark Hurd to replace Fiorina. Only then did the company acquire the management skills needed to take the raw material that was there and transform it into a world leader in technology. In the three years since Hurd became CEO, the results have been truly remarkable.

Still, consider that the current GOP front-runner is a trust fund braggart who thinks China has collaborated with NASA and others to hoax us into believing several hundred thousand super accurate thermometers display local and global temperature inaccurately. Or that fully one-third of the GOP base and at least half of the tea party admit they are or were convinced that the government was going to take over the American state of Texas a few weeks ago. Next to them, Carly Fiorina almost stands out as a scientific savant.

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We've all heard the repeated refrain, from supposedly "smart" people, that the real problem in inner-city communities with trigger-happy police forces is they simply have too much black-on-black crime.

We've heard it from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani:

After noting how he diversified the New York City police force, Giuliani said it was very disappointing that “we are not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks are killed by other blacks.” The implication was that the so-called black-on-black crime was far more common than white-on-black crime, so the attention should be paid on the former.It quickly became personal. Giuliani and Dyson talked over each other for most of the 2-minute banter. Eventually, Giuliani uttered the line that went viral almost immediately (“White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.”) and Dyson fired back at the “defensive mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir.” (That comment also was picked up widely by Dyson’s critics.)

First of all, the stats that people like Giuliani, and Joe Klein, and Joe Scarborough tend to use are all completely bogus. But the even greater tragedy is that while people like Giuliani misconstrue the actual stats to justify police violence against black people, they also use them to ignore all violence against black people, and then blame them for it.

There's more below.q

If you're looking for some enjoyable weekend reading, don't miss Scott Walker's campaign manager, Rick Wiley, unloading in a post mortem interview with Politico about the demise of the Wisconsin governor's campaign. Wiley lamented how hard they worked to get Walker ready for the first debate (spoiler alert—this is really the best quote of the piece):

"It is really, really difficult. ... I'm just saying, you know, like it's a f---ing bitch, man. It really is."

Hmm. Maybe that says a little something about the mettle of the candidate.

Wiley spent a lot of the interview detailing the fundraising operation—when it was flowing and when donors suddenly closed their wallets, much to his surprise. But perhaps the most telling quote of the piece came in the last paragraph:

"It is stunning to me," Wiley added, "that you can lead everywhere and then have a debate performance that's panned as OK, and then all of a sudden you just plummet. ... We were going to try to ride it out in Iowa, and we just didn't quite make it."

Wiley's bafflement speaks to the disconnect that takes place between a campaign and voters on the ground when big donors throw money at candidates based on their own pet projects. The money inevitably lulls campaign lieutenants into believing their candidate is actually connecting. Wiley explains Walker's fall from grace by suggesting that a certain narrative spontaneously took hold based on media reviews of Walker's debate performance, as if the guy hadn't been flailing as a candidate for months. Follow below for more.

In Maryland's Howard County school system, black students account for about 57 percent of suspensions, but make up just 22 percent of the school population. In fact, during the 2013-2014 school year, black students were seven times more likely to be suspended than white students.  

The disproportionate rate of suspensions for black students is reflective of a bigger nationwide trend. According to The Baltimore Sun, black students are suspended three times more than white kids on average nationwide. While the statewide gap isn't as wide as the Howard County one, it is still concerning.

Out-of-school suspension is a last-resort punishment that is too often bestowed on children who have not done anything to deserve it. Suspension often takes the place of counseling, mental health services, and support structures. And it means that a kid loses class time, and often results in the student falling behind.

Suspension is an integral cog in the school-to-prison pipeline wheel, which "describes a national trend in which students who are suspended or expelled receive less classroom time, fall behind in school, and become more prone to behavior issues and possibly incarceration." Racialized punishment incontrovertibly means that we are setting up students to succeed and fail according to race, as well.

Howard County Education Association president Paul Lemle stated, "Research and experience tells us that fighting to keep kids in school—resisting suspension and expulsion—is the best thing we can do[.]"

The Sun reports that:

"The most common reasons for suspension among black HCPSS students in grades K-12 during the 2013-2014 school year … were "attacks, threats, fighting," followed by "disrespect, insubordination and disruption." As of July 2015, the latter infraction was removed as a reason for giving a student an out-of-school suspension in the HCPSS student code of conduct."

One parent and member of the African-American Community Roundtable, the community group that requested this data, theorized about the reason for the disparity. Read on below.

Marco Rubio is the latest Republican presidential candidate to get into a snipefest with front-runner Donald Trump. Trump had described Rubio as a "lightweight" and mocked his debate-night water-drinking and sweating. Thursday, Rubio responded:

“He had a really bad debate performance last week,” the Florida senator told Kentucky Sports Radio. “He’s not well informed on the issues. He really never talks about issues and can’t have more than a 10 second soundbite on any key issue. And I think he’s kind of been exposed a little bit over the last seven days, and he’s a very touchy and insecure guy and so that’s how he reacts, and people can see through it.”

When asked why people should vote for Rubio over Trump, Rubio answered, “First of all, he takes shots at everybody that gets anywhere close to him, in terms of a poll, or anytime he hits a rough spot that’s what he does,” Rubio said.

That might be more compelling if Rubio had in fact gotten close to Trump in any recent polls. Trump outsourced his initial response to a spokesman:

"He's still eight times higher than Marco Rubio. He doesn't think about Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio doesn't mean anything to him. And as far as foreign policy, what gives Marco Rubio the right to talk about foreign policy?" Cohen said in an interview on CNN's "New Day" with Alisyn Camerota about the latest polls.

Rubio is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Camerota responded.

"And look at where we're at as far as this country is concerned. We are a disaster in this country as far as foreign policy. We're not respected by any country in this world," Cohen said. "This is not a man who belongs in the White House."

The sad thing is, Rubio's response about how Trump was weak because he didn't understand the issues was no more substantive than Trump's spokesman's mockery.

As if Maine Gov. Paul LePage wasn't bad enough, now he has a wannabe mini-me in the form of Lewiston Mayor Robert MacDonald. MacDonald wants the state legislature to pass a bill setting up a public registry for people on government assistance:

“We will be submitting a bill to the next legislative session asking that a website be created containing the names, addresses, length of time on assistance and the benefits being collected by every individual on the dole. After all, the public has a right to know how its money is being spent.”

MacDonald is of course targeting what we generally think of as welfare recipients, but what about the many other forms of government benefits that flow to middle-class people and to the top one percent? Will he be creating a registry for people getting the home mortgage interest deduction? The carried interest loophole? Social Security? Medicare? Pell grants? Student loans?

MacDonald also wants a bill preventing children born to families already on welfare from getting benefits, but somehow he didn't mention anything about the bill that must surely accompany that to sponsor free birth control and abortion for all.

Today, September 26th, is “National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day.”  It’s a day where you can safely, conveniently, and responsibly dispose of expired and unwanted prescription drugs at collection sites in your community.

In a week chock full of news—a papal visit, a joint meeting with the Chinese president, and the announcement of the unexpectedly sudden resignation of House Speaker John Boehner—President Obama chose to focus this morning's weekly address on ... prescription drug abuse.

Perhaps the week was so busy the White House didn't want to be forced to choose between events?

At any rate, he discussed not just the take-back day, but the administration's prescription drug abluse prevention plan:

We’ve been partnering with communities to combat overdoses, and we’re seeing some promising results. That’s why the budget I put forward this year would build on those efforts. It would make critical investments in things like drug monitoring programs, equipping more first responders to save more lives, and expanding medication-assisted treatment programs – including in our prisons.

Probably the key phrase in the address that we can hope to hold the president to is: "...we should approach abuse as an opportunity to intervene, not incarcerate." He closed the address with a promise to discuss drug issues more in the future: "This is something I’ll be talking about more in the weeks to come, in communities across the country. Because it’s a challenge we can solve if we work together."

To read the transcript in full, check below the fold or visit the White House website.

Isn't it great to hear a revered religious figure stick up for science and for regular people, instead of apologizing for the rich, defending the powerful, bashing the weak and poor, or my personal favorite, crashing the economy by creating mountains of the most toxic debt in history and then lecturing the middle class taxpayers who bailed the economy out about taking on too much debt? And you better believe the usual suspects didn't like that one bit:

Why does the GOP — the party traditionally most closely aligned with religious voters — have such trouble embracing the head of the church so many of them belong to? Because they've been accustomed to picking and choosing — taking the parts of Catholicism (like its stance on abortion) that match their politics, but leaving behind the parts they don't (like its teachings on the poor). ... But historically, the Republican Party and religious conservatives, in general, have been more aligned with the Catholic Church and its leaders than not. Any shift, I think, says more about the modern GOP than it does Pope Francis. The pontiff is tapping into the hearts of millions of Americans. Republicans are simply missing the beat — and moving farther and farther to the extreme, out-of-touch right.

It's been said before and I'll say it again: any time you mix religion and politics, the politics almost always wins, at least it does in America. The right has grown used to that, and this Pope threatens the scam they've been pulling on evangelicals for decades. How long before they call this Pope a Satanic impostor?

• Speaking of impostors, Ben Carson is a giant whackjob who thinks cosmology and biology are the spawn of Satan:

  “I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary, and it has become what is scientifically, politically correct.”

• Pluto data dump: a strangely colored, gorgeous world as seen by the Multi-Spectral Visible Imaging Camera on New Horizons; if you have the bandwidth, or look here for a more manageable size and description.
• You thought Komodo Dragons were big? Check out what Ice-Age Australian aborigines had to deal with. Hint: they were large and probably hungry all the time ...
• Glider enthusiasts hope to reach the edge of space with no engine or power of any kind.
• The continental US will have prime seats to a lunar eclipse this weekend starting around sunset tomorrow night in most places. Just look east as the full moon rises Sunday night and watch it turn blood red.
• China and the US are planning to really do something about greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in general:

  The announcement allows China to implement something that evaded President Barack Obama during his first term in the White House: an economy-wide reform putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions and encouraging big polluters to develop alternative ways to generate energy.

Perry Bacon Jr:

[Speaker john] Boehner is in some ways the first and only victim of the failure of the Republican Party to achieve its policy goals in the Obama era. Party activists and some House members have chosen to pin the blame primarily on Boehner for the GOP's inability to stop Obama, who over the last year has cemented a legacy of pushing America left on a number of issues.

This is no doubt unfair to Boehner. Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican Supreme Court appointee, twice opted against striking down Obamacare. Another Republican justice, Anthony Kennedy, cast the deciding vote making gay marriage a constitutional right. American voters reelected Obama, a liberal president who is very unlikely to defund Planned Parenthood and reached a nuclear agreement with Iran.

But conservatives can't fire Kennedy, Obama or Roberts. So they chucked aside Boehner instead.

Politico:

With their top object of scorn, John Boehner, about to leave the scene, conservatives are already training their ire across the Capitol on Mitch McConnell.

Boehner's departure will leave the Senate majority leader with two unenviable roles: He'll be the sole Republican leader with direct experience with how to get Washington out of a jam. And the Kentucky Republican will soon inherit the bright red target for conservative outrage that Boehner sported for so long.

Matthew Dickinson:

Half a century ago, when "all politics was local," to borrow the aphorism made famous by former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, and when the two political parties shared overlapping ideologies, the tension between serving the interests of the House's majority party and serving the House's interests as a governing institution was far less pronounced. It was easier for a speaker like O'Neill, or the legendary Sam Rayburn, to pursue a legislative agenda that drew bipartisan support.

Alas, those days are long gone. Today's speaker often finds that the interests of more ideologically-extreme party members clashes with a desire to actually govern by finding common ground with moderates and even members of the opposing party. In the short run, to avoid Boehner's fate, his successor may be willing to work more closely with conservatives to pursue their legislative objectives. But if that precipitates a government shutdown, the new speaker runs the risk of damaging the party's brand name and its electoral fortunes.

More politics and policy below the fold,

Purple Colorado is clearly blue about the idea of shutting down the government to defund Planned Parenthood—55 percent of Colorado voters oppose it. Additionally, a majority oppose defunding Planned Parenthood at all. Via PPP:

Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose (a government shutdown)- 72% of them oppose it, compared to only 23% who say support the idea. And it has opposition from critical independent voters- 55% are in opposed to 38% in favor. Overall 52% of voters oppose defunding Planned Parenthood whether or not a government shutdown is in play.

A vote to shut down the government is also far more likely to place a representative's seat in jeopardy than a vote against the shutdown.

48% of voters say they’d be less likely to vote to re-elect those who stage a government shutdown, including 66% of Democratic voters and 52% of Independents. Just 35% of voters say they’d be more likely.

At least 50 percent of voters also agreed that a willingness to vote for a shutdown would demonstrate that Congressional Republicans are "too extreme" and "out of touch with the needs and concerns of women today" and "put partisan politics ahead of what's best for the country."

And let's not forget this one...

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—10-2-10: One Nation Working Together:

A week from today, hundreds of thousands of Americans will join each other in Washington, D.C., in a demonstration organized by One Nation Working Together to renew the effort to build a movement, a grassroots movement, that is not dependent solely on supporting a political party to obtain its goals, but that also recognizes the need to elect effective progressive leaders at every level of government. [...]

The usual suspects among media pundits will no doubt categorize what happens in Washington on 10-2-10 and afterward as class warfare. In fact, the dozens of organizations in the coalition of One Nation Working Together are engaged in self-defense for rank-and-file Americans, the majority of our population, who, for more than three decades, have been the target of an elite dedicated to an upward transfer of wealth that makes the Gilded Age look like practice.

This has been achieved by destruction of progressive taxation, union busting, over-militarizing the economy, off-shoring jobs and, as always, dividing us against ourselves in every possible way. While pushing the fakery that the middle class isn't working class, that the interests of educated professionals have nothing in common with clerks or factory workers or burger flippers, they have, for tens of millions of Americans, punctured the dream that our children will have a life at least a little better than our own. They have lined us up against each other by generation, race, gender, ableness and orientation. They have shackled us to fossil fuel and undermined every effort to adopt clean energy. They have allowed our infrastructure—both physical and social—to rot.

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Tweet of the Day

"Did you bring the black guy?"
"No... did you?"
"I thought you had him." - h/t Sean Platter pic.twitter.com/Ic60aZPlZj

— Donna NoShock (@NoShock) September 25, 2015

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, David Waldman, with Greg Dworkin discuss the Pope, polls, politics and - BREAKING: Boehner does a terrible job doing his terrible job, and leaves! Why? Who will take his place? What's next? Anyhow, back to Trump. Are we at peak Trump? Is a 2nd tier of less-loser candidates forming? Anti-Muslim activist quits Oath Keepers when they refuse to help him arrest US Senator. A Mayor in Maine wants to publicly shame welfare recipients. A TX county screened job applicants to hire only Baptists. Think it can't happen where you are? David looks into what it takes to get into the local political clubs. Remember to tune into Netroots Radio next Monday at 8AM for Hopping Mad with Arliss Bunny & Will McLeod, and their discussion of the canonization of Junipero Serra, by Pope Francis! Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

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