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.

James Garner

It was natural for someone with his good looks and genial air to have been cast as heroes.

The image may not have been so different from reality. Garner does seem to have been humble enough to remember his past; according to the NYT, it included his leaving home home at 14 to escape abuse, then drifting for years before finding his way to acting.

And Garner was willing to step up as a citizen. As Soraya Nadia McDonald recounts—

When actor James Garner decided to help organize and attend the March on Washington in 1963, he wasn't just listening to his conscience. He and other actors who attended may have been embarking on Hollywood's first large-scale political act since the days of McCarthyism and Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist.

Garner's involvement was part of a long career of political activism. He told people he met his wife, Lois Clarke, at party for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. (Clarke gently corrected him in an appendix to his memoir, "The Garner Files" — they actually met at an earlier party, she said.)...

You have to admire a star who not only had the same wife for 58 years, but who wanted to say he had met her thanks to Adlai Stevenson!

Nelson continues—

...Though he believed in supporting causes political and environmental, Garner was staunchly against actors holding office for the most part. In "The Garner Files," the self-identified "bleeding-heart liberal" wrote:

Too many actors have run for office. There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.

This long Wiki page adds—

The "most explosive revelation" in his autobiography was that Garner smoked marijuana for much of his adult life. "I started smoking it in my late teens," Garner wrote. "I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn't like the effect. Not so with grass. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving. I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn't like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don't know where I'd be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I've concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal."

I best remember Garner in the role he named his favorite. (Co-star Julie Andrews said the same of her part.) It's understandable that the actors felt that way about this one.

The News From Radio Rwanda

During a season that happens to mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, the recently concocted media narrative is "crisis"—a rising number of unaccompanied Central American children turning themselves in at the border.

This is not about immigration, "illegal" or otherwise. And yes, there is a crisis, but a completely different one: a crisis of human rights. It's also a crisis many years in the making, and intimately tied to US Central American policies: support of repressive regimes, "free trade," drug war. By now, the escalating brutality of criminal gangs and absence of functional governments in the region has made the future so dire for these children that families risk sending them on this dangerous trip.

A different, and perpetual "crisis": the Right's need to get the crazies riled up and staying that way until November. A crisis decades in the making? All Obama's fault...

The usual opportunism and lack of human decency is on display, as in the "diseased immigrants" theme.

And—to carry on the tradition of Republican politicos who once took the Hippocratic Oath—the cynical conflation of this refugee crisis with the current outbreak of Ebola in west Africa.

Establishment pundits are eager as always for some imagined means of making the lunatics happy.

The rabble-rousing is effective: residents of a town—a suspiciously named town, at that—succeed at mob action, a la Bundy Ranch.

With rightwingers' eagerness to use these children's suffering for political gain, Edroso deems them "Borderline Personalities: Rightbloggers Vs. Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free."

And, never forget: It's Obama's Fault! As Roy puts it—

As the Obama Administration has deported at least two million aliens, and on immigration matters is basically following a federal law signed by George W. Bush, that's pretty rich. But since Obama's a liberal and liberals are notorious bleeding hearts -- plus which he's not white, either! -- rightbloggers still accused the President of flooding the nation with dangerous brownskins for some nefarious purpose.