Updates on Recent Shootings and Ted Cruz's Comments

I. CPD Lies About Shooting of Teenager
A Chicago Police Department report on the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald claims that McDonald menacing turned toward officers as he walked past the assembled police officers; also, the report claims that McDonald treated to rise up after being shot down and again made a threatening gesture with his knife. The released video shows McDonald actually turning away as he passes the officers and he stays flat on the street after being hit by gunfire.

This claim of aggressive action on the part of McDonald is just another illustration of how police will blatantly lie to save the skin of a fellow officer. The firing of the police chief and the first degree murder charge against Officer Jason Van Dyke, and even the appointment of a special committee to investigate police procedure and behavior aren't really sufficient to address the real problem, which is the corruption in the Chicago Police Department. The crux of the problem is that police department personnel will lie and cover-up when the department's interests are threatened by serious misconduct by its officers, including the many instances of excessive use of force. A root-and-branch investigation of the CPD is needed and the formation of that committee should not be done by anyone with ties to the CPD or the city political leadership. The Department of Justice seems to be the obvious choice to do the investigation, although I, personally, have serious doubts about how well the DoJ handled Michael Brown's murder investigation.

The CPD's cover-up proclivities were in evidence when for many years it wouldn't take any action to stop the torture activities of the notorious Jon Burge, who used his division stationhouse to torture, almost exclusively, African-Americans, to confess to murders that the CPD had not been able to solve. I spoke at a rally for one of those torture victims, who was released from Death Row in the latter 1990s, because there was no evidence, apart from his confession,  tying him to the homicide for which he was convicted.

II. Senator Ted Cruz's Comments on PP Shooting and Firearms
Senator Ted Cruiz (R-TX) labeled the shooter in the Planned Parenthood clinic located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as a "transgender, leftist activist." On Fox News Sunday, Cruz denounced the "vicious rhetoric on the left, blaming those who are pro-life." There is no evidence that the shooter is or was transgender, a leftist or that he was an activist. The neighbors who lived closest to the trailer of the almost certain shooter -- deemed to be innocent until and if he is convicted in a criminal trial -- described him as a loner. Cruz's motivation was obviously to blacken the character of those who are not heterosexual or politically conservative.

A more plausible case can be made for the premise that it was the extreme rhetoric aimed at Planned Parenthood and the efforts in Congress to defund it, that may have figured in the shooter's decision to shoot up the clinic. He has been described as saying that his intent was to stop the sale of fetal tissue. Ruth Marcus, columnist for the Washington Post, wrote an article entitled: "Republicans deserve some blame for the Planned Parenthood shooting", in the December 1, 2015 issue of the Post. Marcus wrote : "Republican politicians who fueled the overwrought and unsupported controversy over selling body parts bear some measure of responsibility." She  calls it "literally, a manufactured issue, cobbled together from doctored videotape, and overheated accusations.The organization's activities have been so mischaracterized, and the practice of providing fetal tissue so overblown and so manipulated by lawmakers and politicians, that blame for the  ensuing violence falls more heavily on them."

Marcus cites the case of Michael ;Bray, who served forty years in  prison for bombing a string of abortion clinics. Bray told "60 Minutes" in 1999 that: "If we are to affirm, as I do, that the children in the womb who are killed at abortion clinics are in fact children... than action taken to defend them is justifiable and cannot be condemned."

Senator Cruz has commented on the strangeness of gun massacres always occurring in "gun-free" zones. The problem is that much of the United States is composed of "guns a'plenty" zones" and guns from these "guns a'plenty zones" are taken to an alarming number of venues to wreck their violence by human trigger-pullers.