US politics - cooked

Exactly. That Russia is trying to influence elections was never surprising. The Republicans willingness to get into bed with them and the toothlessness of the US domestic intelligence agencies was the surprise. But Dem supporters have been talking about it for years.

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This is incomprehensible. The 5 police officers involved are all Black which makes it clear that a militarized police serves no one but itself.

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Was this posted and I missed it??? Santos has been nominated for two committees by the Republicans?

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3816976-george-santos-gets-two-committee-assignments/

And the solution, as always, will be to give them more money.

Which will just be spent on more weapons and more military garb.

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Another article, or rather series of articles and live updates on this from the NYT. I’ve copied below the background on the police unit from one of the posts.

The story of policing in Memphis has often mirrored in miniature the story of policing across America over the last decade.

Yet after all those conflicts, the city had largely kept tensions from erupting so violently that they spilled onto the national stage. There were several reasons for this. Its police force was less wedded to stop-and-frisk tactics than the New York Police Department, or to pretextual traffic stops than the police in Ferguson, Mo. Memphis, a predominately Black city, has a long tradition of Black police chiefs. And in a city with one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, the police have a deep reservoir of support.

The five officers, who were indicted on second-degree murder charges Thursday, had been assigned to a new unit with an acronym that emphasizes subdual: Scorpion. It stands for “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.”

Commissioned in late 2021, the roughly 40-person unit was modeled after the aggressive anti-crime squads that in many big cities patrol neighborhoods deemed to be high-crime in unmarked cars, on the lookout for gang members or any sign of criminal activity. Such units typically rely heavily on car stops and stop-and-frisk tactics. In Memphis, city officials were eager to tout the unit, claiming it was racking up arrests. The very day after Mr. Nichols died as a result of his injuries, the mayor publicly credited Scorpion with helping bring about a slight drop in the city’s homicide rate in 2022.

But with Mr. Nichols’s death, it has already come at a cost, said Earle Fisher, a Memphis pastor and community activist who was among those caught up in the earlier surveillance by the Memphis police.

“The mayor and police director put that unit together in the fall of 2021, and you don’t even have a year-and-a-half go by before there’s at least one dead body,” Mr. Fisher said. The fact that five officers stand accused, he said, meant that the incident reflected the culture of policing within the unit. “This doesn’t fall in the bad apples category,” he said. “If two is company, and three is a crowd, then five is a system and a structure.”

Little has yet emerged about the five officers. One of them

Important to look after yourself when ugly stuff happens. I’m very wary of the things I watch. If it has the early vibe of something you don’t need in the memory banks, just don’t play it.

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Worth posting again.

Interestingly, this one also talks about the Memphis police department. It paints a very different view of it by the community from the NYT article I posted snippets from above.

Hell yeah, I’m not watching the videos. Just reading the articles!

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Of course no one will hold him to account, his voter base actively supports whatever corrupt means are necessary.

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There’s no need to hide this stuff anymore. That’s what Trump has done for us.

Say what you want, when you want, no matter how gauche, and a certain subset of mouth-breathing minions will eat it up.

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No, only right wingers would be able to do that. Anyone on the left (or what passes for it in the US) would be whacked hard for doing anything 10% as bad.

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Correct cause “her emails” and “Hunter Biden”.

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Those tweets are only slightly misleading.

In response to being asked whether republicans should embrace ballot harvesting and early voting, he said:

“I think Zuckerbucks is corrupt as hell, but if it’s legal and the Democrats are doing it, why aren’t we doing it? I would say ban ballot harvesting and do all that. But if it’s not banned, you need to do it because, otherwise, we’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”

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Basically an open invitation to likewise right wing cookers to do the same.

What could go wrong with the USA’s free approach to home schooling and libertarian ideas of individualism???

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Reminds me of what happens when you let libertarians run everything.

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543 votes. Sigh.

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