Impunity

Some more national notice, of this bizarre police shooting in Ohio—at the instigation of a false report. The couple who made it, sound quite untethered (but... white).

And more of police behavior in Ferguson.

Fifty Years Later

Freedom Summer anniversary; "hands-up" demonstrations.

Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

Brad Friedman, "Tale of Two Protests: The Armed Bundy Bunch and the Peaceful Demonstrators of Ferguson"—

It was peaceful citizens, with their empty hands in the air --- not pretend "patriots" aiming long guns... who may ultimately be seen as the ones who helped begin a national rollback of the absurd militarization, perhaps better described as "Hollywoodization," of our nation's law enforcement organizations.

Now, as fifty years ago: different treatment for different protests—or for just being on the streets—

A man, his shirt stained by blood running down his face, is cornered in a doorway by club-wielding police early August 30, 1964 in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The man had been clubbed for refusing to move along. (AP Photo)

Demonstrators shout at policemen who ask them to move on along City Hall in New York, Sept. 24, 1964 as they protest a Board of Education busing program aimed at increasing racial balance in New York City schools. (AP Photo/Harry Harris)

Both photos (and very much more), from 1964: Civil Rights Battles

Roy Edroso sums up the right's response—

After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson on August 9 and word started to get around that the killing might not have been as kosher as the cops said it was, many of the brethren went about dealing with this dead unarmed black guy the way they deal with all dead unarmed black guys: slurring the deceased, and portraying the negative reaction of his friends, family, and community as proof that black people are thugs, the real racists, etc.

Charles Pierce says what should not be forgotten—

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

Hands Up

Even if the narrative of unarmed black teenager killed by police is entirely too familiar: this time around, there's a special motif of pictures, and it's leading the story in remarkable directions.

When police left Michael Brown's body in a Ferguson street for several hours, witnesses took photos and spread the story to social media, and to the world.

The apparent abandonment of the body added a new outrage to old reasons for outrage.

Media coverage was predictable, and outbursts unrelated to the peaceful protests garnered the usual "if it loots it leads" treatment.

But protestors' hands-up theme created powerful counter-images.

In words and pictures: one eyewitness account of protest and arrest.

In the context of covering the right-wing punditry beat, Roy Edroso—

To see a middle-American cop gun down an unarmed black kid, and then see his colleagues go colonial on his black neighbors while arresting MSM reporters in a vain attempt to conceal it, and then say it's Obama's fault -- that is some bullshit. And it beautifully encapsulates a conservatarian strategy we've been seeing a lot of lately: Stroke the bigots who are mashing down black folks with one hand, while pathetically pressing the other against your brow and weeping crocodile tears for the civil liberties you claim Democrats stole from you.

At Roy's police go colonial link: a very large screenshot (from NBC coverage), that is something to behold.

R.I.P ... S.O.P.

The Middle East blows up anew, as we get mired in Iraq anew.

We seem to have a sudden flurry of losing old liberals.

True, Bacall was 89, but this was a shocker.

No misfortune befalling a liberal's family can ever be too sad to give the usual types pause. Tengrain cites "LifeNews.com" headline—

"Robin Williams: Abortion of His Unborn Child May Have Added to Struggle With Depression"

Tengrain continues—

They pulled the article down just now, but it shows us that the Xristian Xrazies have absolutely no ethics or sensitivity.

TPM has excerpts.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the GOP good-will ambassador to the third world's boy bordellos and notorious spokesmodel for better living through chemical dependency, Rush Limbaugh says that Robin Williams suicide was because of his political leftist attitude.

Sounds About Right

Yastreblyansky—

First Israel was fighting to rescue the kidnapped Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel, although they knew the boys were already dead, then to punish the Hamas organization for killing them, though they knew the organization hadn't done it.

Then Israel was fighting to stop firing of thousands of Hamas rockets (which set a kind of record by not even slightly harming a single person during the whole month of attacks), only they didn't know (contrary to their claims) where the rockets were. But they could find some of the tunnels Palestinians had built out of their prison camp to attack their guards on the other side of the border, so they fought to destroy those.

And so on: just a few succinct paragraphs, concluding—

The only true possibility of peace remains what Yitzhak Rabin called the Peace of the Brave, in which Israelis accept that there is a certain amount of ineluctable risk. There is a risk that some Israelis will be hurt if there is peace; if Gazans are permitted to travel in and out of the territory, or if Palestinians in general are permitted to constitute themselves as a state.

Then again some Israelis will certainly be hurt if there is no peace (64 IDF soldiers in the course of the current adventure dead, for what?). The Israeli government seems to have adopted Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" in which if there's a one-percent chance that something dreadful will happen you must act, but if there's a 90% certainty (e.g. that America's coastal cities will be drowned over the next century by the ongoing rise in the sea level) you can ignore that. It's the War of the Hysterically Frightened.

Nice touch: Israel's placing a former GOP trickster in this position. If not surprising—considering how much our right-wingers have mucked around there—it is yet more evidence for how well things go, wherever these folks pull the levers.