Prosecutor Robert McCulloch Made Serious Missteps in Handing the Case of the Michael Brown Killing in Ferguson, Mo.

 In the trial of police officer Derek Chauvin, the prosecutors presented expert witnesses who closed off other contributing factors, except lack of oxygen, as the  cause of death; presented other witnesses who gave emotional testimony about how Chauvin was crushing the life out of George Floyd; and did a masterful job of countering defense claims on redirect. There are prosecutors, however, who do a poor job of prosecuting a police officer. Former St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch is a primary example of a prosecutor who violated state law and strictures about presenting to the grand jury, witnesses who McCulloch knew were "flat-out lying." 

During a Monday night press conference after the grand jury for St. Louis County had decided not to call for the indictment of police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, McCulloch questioned the validity of much of the witness testimony. He said some of the witnesses changed their accounts, heard about the shooting from their neighbors or from the media. He discounted the testimony of the witnesses who said Wilson was shooting at Brown while he, Brown, was fleeing, by claiming that all of the bullet wounds were to the front of Brown's body. By attacking the credibility of the witnesses, McCulloch gave the impression that he was acting as an advocate of Darren Wilson.

In addition to critically examining the manner in which McCulloch presented witnesses to the grand jury, I will present an account about the wounds to Michael Brown's body which will significantly differ from the account that McCulloch gave; provide the differing versions Wilson gave about his initial encounter with Michael Brown and Brown's companion, Dorian Johnson, on Canfield Drive; seriously question Wilson's contentions about what he heard, or even if he heard radio calls about a robbery at the Ferguson Market; present the very different picture National Public Radio paints about witness testimony; and present other pertinent related information.   

I. Missouri Rule 4 - 3.3

This rule states: "A lawyer shall not knowingly... offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. If the lawyer, the lawyer's client, or a witness called by the lawyer, has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take remedial measures, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal. A lawyer may refuse to offer evidence, other than the testimony in a criminal matter, that the lawyer reasonably believes is false."

II. Radio Station Interview

Radio station KTRS in St. Louis was told in an interview with Robert McCulloch that he knew that several witnesses were "flat-out lying," but he allowed them to testify before the grand jury anyway. McCulloch said: "Well early on I decided that anyone who claimed to have witnessed anything was going to be presented to the grand jury." "So my determination was to put everyone on and let the grand jurors assess their credibility, which they did." "There were people who came in and, yes, absolutely lied under oath. Some lied to the FBI. Even though they're not under oath that's another potential offense --a federal offense." McCulloch said he had no interest in pursuing perjury charges against them.

How could the jurors know if witnesses had engaged in "flat-out lying," and if  prosecutors told them    that a particular witness had lied, wouldn't that lead the jurors to question the credibility of the prosecutors themselves? What if the lying  witnesses, in total effect, redounded to the favor of Darren Wilson" Wouldn't this action of presenting lying witnesses to the grand jury be a prejudicial action on the part of the prosecutors? Why shouldn't Prosecutor McCulloch, himself, be subject to prosecution? Also, perjury is considered to be a very serious offense, because it seriously distorts the fair administration of the law. Thus, it would seem to be the case that McCulloch was in violation of his duties as a prosecutor.

Did McCulloch have discussions with the FBI about prosecutions under federal law, which he admits that witnesses providing false information is a federal offense, even if not under oath?

III. Wounds to Michael Brown's Body

The St. Louis County Police Department detectives from the Bureau of Criminal Identification, Crime Scene Unit, recovered 12 spent shell casings. Two of these were from shots fired from the inside of Wilson's Chevy Tahoe SUV. The other ten were casings from shots fired by Wilson after he existed the SUV. McCulloch discounted the testimony of those who claimed that Wilson was firing at a fleeing Michael Brown, because the six bullets that hit Brown came while he was facing Wilson. Shawn Parcells, who assisted at one the autopsies, believed that one of the wounds to the right arm entered the back of the arm. An expert in bullet entrance and exit wounds, who had examined the autopsy material, agreed with Parcells.

The Department of Justice report of March 4, 2015 one-upped the count when it made two observations about wounds to Brown's right arm: "With the exception of the two wounds to Brown's right arm, which indicate neither bullet trajectory nor the direction in which Brown was moving when he was struct, the medical examiner's reports are in agreement that the entry wounds from the latter gunshots were to the front of Brown's body." The second observation was: "Even the autopsy reports do not  indicate the direction Brown was facing when he received two wounds to the right arm, given the mobility of the arm."

In Volume V of the grand jury transcript, officer Wilkson describes three series of shots. "I know I missed a couple, I don't know how many, but I know I hit him at least once because I saw his body kind of jerk." Wilson continues" I tell him to get on the ground, get on the ground, he doesn't. I shoot another round of shots." Again he doesn't recall if he hit him every time, but he thinks he hit Brown at least once, because he saw Brown flinch or stumble. As Brown gets closer to him, Wilson says: "At this point it looked like he was bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I'm shooting at him." As Brown gets 8 to 10 feet away, Wilson says, "and he had started to lean forward as he got close, like he was going to tackle me, just go right through me." Wilson shoots again -- "I don't know how many."

The major fallacy in McCulloch's reasoning is that he ignores the "shooting at" category, whereby one or wounds may have been inflicted while Brown was running away; moreover, Wilson may have missed one or more shots before Brown turned to face him.

Brazil Still Matters on Climate Change, and Mistreatment of Asian Americans Continues to Grow

 #Glenn Greenwald, "Why Brazil Still Matters," The Nation, 4 . 19 - 26, 2021. - "Beyond the sprawling, untapped pre-salt petroleum, Brazil controls the vast majority of the environmental asset, scientists around the world agree is the single most important natural resource, by far, in averting catastrophic climate change: the Amazon rain forest. The Amazon's primary value lies its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. As a comprehensive Associated Press article about the region explained: 'Currently, the world is emitting around 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.' "

Brazil's leader, Bolsonaro, "has long railed against the protections accorded to the Indigenous tribes of Brazil, and to the Amazon territory where they have lived for centuries. Along with his defense of all forms of military and police violence, the aggressive exploitation of the Amazon is one of the few core beliefs Bolsonaro has championed consistently throughout his decades as a politician."

Greenwald calls Bolsonaro "far darker and more menacing; indeed, in mentality, disposition, ideology, and ultimate vision, he is more like President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, or even General Abdel al-Sisi of Egypt."

"In 2018, Bolsonaro's presidential campaign featured a claim that gay men were trying to infiltrate schools, using a fictitious tool he called a 'gay kit,' which he told parents across the country was being used by gay people and their  teacher allies to indoctrinate youth and turn their children gay." 

"Bolsonaro is a gifted demagogue who succeeded in turning the hatred that elite institutions harbored against him to his own advantage." "As Norm Chomsky has noted on many occasions, popular contempt for elite institutions and political insiders is driving such election results across the democratic world." "As we saw, Republicans were only too eager to withhold bipartisanship from a number of Biden's cabinet appointees who happen to be women of color." "The same party that rushed to confirm a Supreme Court justice after people had already started voting in the 2020 election, now expects Biden to hold off on appointing some new judges for years." 

"Securing the courts should be the number one priority for Democrats if they hope to be allowed to win future elections."

#Christie Ahn, Kathleen Richards, and Dr. Terry K. Park, "Evil Empire," The Nation, 4 . 19 - 26, 2021. - "The anti-Asian character of US foreign policy has manifested itself in the wars that have killed millions, torn families apart, and led to massive displacement; in the nuclear tests and chemical weapons storage that resulted in environmental contamination in Okinawa, Guam and the Marshall Islands; in the widespread use of napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam, Laos and the Koreas; and in the sanctions that subject everyday people to economic, social, and physical harms." 

"Of the 3,800 hate incidents reported against Asian Americans last year, almost 70 percent were directed at women. Exoticized and fetishized, Asian American women have borne a dual burden of racism and sexism, viewed on the one hand as submissive and sexually available 'lotus blossoms,' and on the other as manipulative and dangerous 'dragon ladies.' "  

#Sanya Mansoor and Andrew R. Chow, "A Breaking Point for Atlanta Asian Businesses," Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "Asian Americans meeting the public in such service-industry jobs are extra vulnerable to racist mistreatment. Business owners say these dynamics have worsened during the pandemic, as xenophobic language that emphasizes the coronavirus's origins has been spread by those in positions of power." 

" 'There was a lot of name calling, calling me an 'Asian bitch,' she [Mylinh Hsia, a businessowner] says." They say: 'Go back where you came from.' 

ADDENDUMS:

*According to American University professor David Vine, there are approximately 300 U.S. bases circling China. This military presence increases the risk of a violent clash or even war between two nuclear-armed powers.

*Sen. Lindsey Graham said on April 5 that the surge of migrants at the southern border should be blamed on President Biden for bringing a surge of COVID-19.

*Sen. Graham has also said that H.R.1 "would become a disaster to our elections."

*Trump donors who intended to make a one-time donation to Trump set themselves up for recurring -- in some cases -- weekly donations that were automatically withdrawn from their bank accounts. The pre-checked box was known as a "money box."

    

Preventing the Next Pandemic, Underpaid Women, and Worker Co-ops Growth

 #Jerome Groopman, "Beyond the Vaccine," The New Yorker, April 5, 2021. - [Peter Hotez, author of "Preventing the Next Pandemic," (John Hopkins)] "He [Hotez] identifies a cluster of non-medical drivers of deadly outbreaks -- war, political instability, human migration, poverty, urbanization, anti-science and nationalist sentiment, and climate change -- and maintains that advances in biomedicine must be accompanied by concrete action on these geo-political matters." "Armed conflict causes malnutrition, poor pest control, and sanitation problems; even the soil often becomes contaminated." "Hotez writes that wars in the Middle East have made the region 'a new hot spot of emerging and neglected tropical diseases.' "

"Some forty megacities are predicted to emerge by 2030, many of them in low-income nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Hotez paints an alarming picture of megacities incapable of providing safe water and adequate sanitation, leading to typhoid fever and cholera, as well as leptopirosis..." Hotez observes that there are some five hundred Web-sites spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, whose assertions are further disseminated on social media and on e-commerce platforms."

"Obama spoke of 'a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.' He pledged to provide Muslim-majority countries with a polio-eradication campaign, funding for technological development, and science envoys to disseminate expertise in such areas as agriculture, energy and medicine." "Medically speaking, the fact that many countries around the world now have the capacity to create reliable vaccines so quickly is cause for rejoicing." 

#Julia Lurie, and Maddie Oatman, "Moving the Needle," Mother Jones, May + June, 2021. - "Of the people tested [in San Francisco], 41 percent were Latino, and 41 percent were white. Yet 98 percent of those who tested positive were Latino, 88 percent made less than $50,000 a year, and 93 percent worked in jobs that didn't enable them to shelter in place." "Meanwhile, the Unidos en Solud site in the Mission, with a fraction of the testing capacity, accounted for between 16 and 46 percent of the city's positive tests on any given day." 

#Jeffrey Kluger, "The Psychology of Influences," Mother Jones, May + June  2021. - ""In all three countries, (U.S., Italy, and South Korea), the higher the level of shame and guilt people felt over falling ill, the less likely they were to play it safe, and to report their COVID-19 status." 

"Some 52% of those polled said they got the vaccine because they wanted to travel, for example. The people around us also play a major role, with 56% of respondents saying they got vaccinated after a friend or family member did."  

#Janice Min, "Pinterest paid..." TIME, April 12/April 19, 2021. - "Not just at Pinterest but in the long exclusionary saga of Silicon Valley, where 5% of tech leaders are women, far fewer are Black or Latinx, and only 2% of venture-capita goes to female founders." "A 2017 study found Black women in tech were paid 21% less than white men for comparable jobs; all women 16% less." 

"Since 2015, it has been illegal for California employers to ask workers to keep compensation confidential."

#Maddie Oatman, "a Fair Slice," Mother Jones, April 12/April 19, 2021. - "A 2016 meta-analysis of more than 100 studies across several counties linked employer ownership to better productivity, organizational stability, and business survival. In times of crisis, co-ops have been shown to be more resilient than traditional enterprises, and less likely to lay off workers." "Before the Great Recession, there were about 350 worker co-ops in the country; that number climbed to 465 by 2017, about a tenth of which are restaurants, cafes, or bakeries."

ADDENDUMS:

* A senior Biden employee said political tampering under the Trump administration had 
compromised the integrity of some agency science, The New York Times reports. "The broader list of decisions where staff says scientific integrity was violated is expected to reach 90 items, according to one person involved in the process."

*"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker, April 5, 2021. - "Harsh sentences lead the vast majority of defendants, including an estimated hundred thousand innocent people, to opt for plea bargains, a process that lacks oversight. Meanwhile, prosecutors fail to hold high-level executives accountable for serious offenses."

*Suyin Haynes, "Trans Rights in the Spotlight..." Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "Over 100 bills attacking transgender people have been introduced in state legislatures since 2020, according to the ACLU." "On March 29, the Arkansas senate passed a bill that would ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth." "Simply a politically motivated bill for the sake of discrimination itself," said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, of Anti-Trans Sports bills.

Guns, Guns, Guns; Ivanka Trump's Empowerment Program; and the Age of Strongmen

 #Ian Frazier, "Guns Down," The New Yorker, April 5. 2021. - ""The New Yorkers Against Gun Violence ( N.Y.A.G.V.) has successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass a major gun-safety measure. A law now requires that all guns in homes with children be under lock and key, thanks partly to the group." 

Ian Frazier cites statistics that show "ninety-six per cent of all mass shooters are male; there may be ten million assault rifles in private hands; and seventy-five per cent of gunowners say that owning a gun is essential to their sense of safety." 

Ian Frazier writes that James Dobbins III, assistant director of community affairs for a nonprofit called 'Guns Down, Life Up,' "began by telling me two facts: Lincoln Hospital, located in the southwest Bronx, has the busiest emergency room in the city, and people who are shot and survive have a fifty percent chance of being shot again within five years. Of every ten people who present at a hospital with gunshot wounds and don't die, five will eventually be shot again, and of those, two will die."  

"In 2020, there were fifteen hundred and thirty-one shootings in New York City, almost twice as many as in 2019. The number of people hit by bullets was eighteen hundred and sixty-eight." "Since before the 2020 election, gun stores nationwide have been over-whelmed."

"Gun deaths of 19,380 in 2020 exceeded the gun deaths in each of the prior six years, when gun deaths were below 15,000, roughly matched 15,000, or were a little above 15,000. Gun injuries were 39,427 for 2020. This figure exceeded each of the prior 4 years, when gun injuries clustered around the 30,000 mark, with a range of possibly 28,000 to 32,000. 2014 saw gun deaths at around 12,000 and gun injuries at around 22,000."

#Ivanka Trump lauded her father before an audience of German women, saying that "I'm very proud of my father's advocacy," calling him "a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive." She was met with boos and hisses.

President Trump signed the Women's Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018. The money for it was supposed to be spent on micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises assistance, and was called Women's Global Development and Prosperity Initiative (W-GDP). Ivanka said this program would enable "us to rigorously track the execution and the efficacy of the money that we are spending." She described it as: "The first ever all-of-government approach to unleashing what is unarguably the most under-utilized resource in the developing world: the power, the potential, the grit and the genius of the world's women."

The GAO has found that USAID, which was supposed to carry out Ivanka's program, has not developed a process, and there are three key gaps that impair USAID's ability to carry out such a process. The GAO also said that: "USAID collected and reported incomplete and inconsistent data in the process..." 

Once more, Ivanka's father has slashed funding for his daughter's program.

#David A. Bell, "Methods of Power," The Nation, 4 . 19 - 26 . 2021. - "The 'ring the alarm bells' camp has tended to see right-wing authoritarianism as a powerful, malevolent force that can operate in at least partial independence from prevailing social and economic conditions. It can arise and destroy democracy wherever people lack the moral and institutional force to successfully oppose it." " 'The strongmen,' she [Ruth Ben-Ghist, author of 'Strongman: Mussolini to the Present'] insists, 'is a modern political type -- indeed, the modern political type.' 'Ours is the age of the strongman,' she states categorically." 

" 'A crucial factor is sheer moral weakness. The same holds true for Trump, as awful as he was as president. Despite his vile language, atrocious norms -- and despite the real harm done by so many of his policies -- does he really rank among the great monsters of modern history?' "

" 'Communist authoritarian have tended to rule differently because the parties to which they belonged often retained considerable power and autonomy. The factors that brought the strongmen to power were an ability to project a charismatic image, an uncanny sense of how to appeal to their followers' basest instincts, and a will to embrace the other elements of the playbook --' 'And as for Trump, the crucial factors highlighted are the United States' deepening inequalities, its deep and toxic heritage of racism, and a political system choked into paralysis by special interests.' "

" 'Mussolini,' she [Ruth Ben-Ghist] keenly observes, 'was an expert student of early cinematic techniques, and who mastered the exaggerated body gestures typical of silent films.' "

ADDENDUMS:

*The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that at least 55 of America's largest corporations paid no taxes in 2020 on billions of dollars in profits -- on reported incomes totaling $77 billion. Many also received millions of dollars in tax rebates.

*Abby Vesoulis, "Will Amazon Workers..." Mother Jones, May + June 2021. "Public support is also growing: according to a September 2020 Gallup report, 65% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest umber in nearly two decades."

Vindicating America, Fixing U.S. Courts, Reopening Schools, and Black Farmland Loss

 #Leonard Pitts, "Even a Chauvin conviction will not vindicate America," The Albuquerque Journal, April 9, 2021. - "It's not difficult to understand why many of us believe that what happens in that courtroom will render a verdict on Chauvin, but also on the nation, in our self-appraisal land of truths held self-evident, equality under the law, liberty and justice for all. Is any of that real?" "Let's assume for a moment Chauvin is acquitted. What message does that send?" The answer is obvious. It sends the same message that has been sent for four centuries: that, for African Americans, justice remains elusive, nearly impossible, especially in cases of police wrongdoing." 

"If it takes that level of violence and that level of public pressure for Chauvin to be convicted, would that really attest to the integrity of American justice toward African American people? Or would it not ultimately say pretty much the same thing an acquittal would: that for us, justice is harder; the bar higher, the road steeper, especially where allegations against the police are concerned." "All it would say is that, in a crime committed before the entire world, and with the entire world watching -- or at least a jury of 12 Americans -- could not bring itself to deny a self-evident truth. That's no inspiring affirmation off national values. Rather, it's the bare minimum common humanity demands." 

#Elie Mystal, "Can Biden Fix the Courts?" The Nation, 4 . 19 - 26, 2021. ""During the next four years, he [Trump] appointed 226 judges, including three US Supreme Court justices, 54 US court of appeals judges, and 174 US district court judges." "And most progressive policies and many of the immediate goals of the Biden administration won't survive their first contact with the reality of these revamped courts." Between 1961 and 1990, Congress added one or two judges to each of the circuits approximately every decade, as well as a number of new district courts judges." 

Mystal believes that Biden's nominees "should be predominately plucked from classes of unrepresented legal professionals who are routinely ignored for consideration." 

"As a general rule, blue slips are like the filibuster: a tool that allows a single senator from the minority party to thwart the will of a popularly elected government." 

#Melinda D. Anderson, "School's Out," Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "Few issues this year have been as rife with division and drama as the on-again, off-again efforts of school districts to restart in-person learning." "According to a December report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 62 percent of white parents agreed that school should reopen this fall, while less than half of Black parents agreed." 

"According to CDC data published in September, Black youth accounted for 29 percent of COVID-19 deaths among people under 21, twice the percentage for white youth." 

"Well into  November, some 60,000 New York City students were still waiting for devices to participate in remote learning." 

#Tom Philpott, "Black Land Matters," Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "By 1910, although share-cropping remained dominant, a USDA census revealed that about 219,000 Black farmers owned land." "Poverty and hunger within rural communities spiked, driving the Great Migration of Black people fleeing the agrarian South for factory jobs in the urban North and West, which in turn reinforced white political power back home."

"Black wealth from land loss could be in excess of $300 billion --." "Today, the median white family is more than 10 times wealthier than its Black counterpart."

The legislation pending in Congress, titled Justice for Black Farmers Act, would devote $8 billion annually to buying farmland and granting it to Black farmers. The goal: 20,000 grants per year through 2030, with maximum allotments of 160 acres.

#Katie Reilly, "The Lost Year," TIME, April 12/19, 2021. - "Estimates from U.S. Census Bureau surveys conducted biweekly since Aug. 19, 2020, indicate that anywhere from 7.7 million to 10 million adults canceled plans to take postsecondary classes last fall because of financial constraints related to the pandemic." "The number of students completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) also declined 9.1% by March 5, compared with this time last year, and fell more sharply at high schools serving large populations of low-income students and students of color, according to a tracker from the National College Attainment Network (NCAN)."

#Alana Semuels, "Desperate for debt forgiveness," TIME, April 12/19, 2021. - "The sheer balance of student loans in the U.S.. -- around $1.6 trillion, up from $250 billion in 2004 --has made student debt forgiveness a popular idea among politicians like senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer,..." "One federal income-driven repayment program bases monthly costs on a borrower's income and forgives debt after 20 years of payments." But only a mall number of the roughly 2 million people who might have been able to qualify for the program have had their loans forgiven.

ADDENDUMS:

*Elizabeth Kolbert, "Build Back Greener," The New Yorker, April 12, 2021. "In the context of the U.S. economy, a hundred billion dollars is barely a rounding error. Globally, its been estimated that replacing all existing fossil-fuel infrastructure would take at least twenty trillion dollars."

*Megan L. Ranney, "America's guns pandemic," TIME, April 12/19, 2021. - "From 2014 to 2017, death rates from gunshot wounds in the U.S. increased by approximately 20%.  In 2020, preliminary reports suggest that the overall rate of gun homicides and suicide increased by 10% overall. More than 100 people died, and more than 200 were injured every single day of 2020."

SoHo Condominiums, and GOP Senators Acting Badly

 #New York prosecutor Cy Vance's office learned that condominiums owners at the Trump SoHo believed that they had been cheated by Trump's children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who were managing the project for the family business, the Trump Organization. The lawyers claimed that the Trumps had lied to them by inflating the number of apartments that they had sold, thereby misleading them into thinking that the condominiums were better investments than they were. 

Mary Trump said that "Vance left two of my cousins off the hook. If he hadn't, he may well have kept Donald Trump from running for President when two of his children were indicted for fraud." 

As for prosecuting a head of state, Anne Applebaum, author of 'Twilight of Democracy,' noted that "it's not uncommon for heads of state to be prosecuted." She warned that the lesson from democracies under strain elsewhere around the world is that failing to lay down the law "is dangerous -- it creates long-term feelings of impunity, and incentives for Trump and those around him to misbehave again."

#Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Georgia) has said that when he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, he only wanted to find out how the state evaluates signatures on mail-in ballots; however, as Raffensperger has pointed out, Graham wanted him to find out how tens of thousands of ballots could be thrown out. He recommended to Raffensperger that all the ballots from the district -- or the county -- that had the highest number of unmatched signatures, should be thrown out. Throwing out all the ballots from Fulton County -- which incudes Atlanta -- would ensure that no Democrat vying for a high office would be elected in Georgia.

#Sen; Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that he wasn't concerned about the Capitol rioters, because they had high respect for law enforcement and they loved this country. He would have been concerned, however, if it had been Black Lives Matter and antifa people who were rioting. It is a great tragedy that Wisconsin voters had one of the best senators  to ever grace the U.S. Senate in Russ Finegold, and they twice elected Johnson, once a Tea Partyer. Johnson's only service to the Republican Party is that of a conspiracy theorist.

#Sen. Mitch McConnell has warned of a "earth-shaking" outcome if the Democrats eliminate the filibuster, or even significantly modify it. What this portends is that lawmakers representing a significant minority of the U.S. population can defeat a bill supported by a significant majority of the U.S. population. The 50 U.S. Democratic senators -- including the two Independents who vote with them in the same caucus -- represent far more persons than do the 50 Republican senators. So  even if 90% of adults support expanded background checks for firearms, 41filibustering GOP senators can defeat any action.

ADDENDUMS: 

*The U.S. Supreme Court has established the standard of "one person-one vote." The GOP is intent on burying the standard.

*Donald Trump appeared on Fox News recently, and said the Capitol rioters represented "no danger."

Police Crime Statistics, and COVID-19 Shortfalls

 #"Since 2005, 98 nonfederal law enforcement officers have been arrested in connection with fatal, on-duty shootings, according to the Police Integrity Research Group's data. Another 22 officers were acquitted in a jury trial, and 9 were acquitted during a bench trial by a judge or prosecutor. Ten cases were dismissed by a judge or prosecutor." "Police officers convicted for fatal shootings are the exception, not the rule." 

Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, found that in officer arrested cases, about 6.3% involved false reports or statements. Stinson also found that of all arrested officers, just one half lost their jobs. A chart prepared by Stinson on a subset of 31 convictions, shows that convictions for manslaughter exceeded convictions for murder by about 4 to 1 -- 21 to 5. Sentences for manslaughter tend to be much lighter than convictions for murder.

#Stephen Rushin, an associate professor of law at Loyola University, Chicago, and Atticus Deprospo analyzed 657 police union contracts and 20 law enforcement officers' bill of rights. About 20% of the agencies stipulated a waiting period for officers before they can be interrogated about suspected misconduct, and about 28% of agencies required internal investigators to turn over potentially incriminating evidence to officers before they may be questioned.

#According to data compiled by The Social Movement Lab at IRISE (University of Denver), that even after adjusting for inflation, since 1980, criminal justice spending has more than doubled in 48 of 50 states. Nationally, our criminal justice spending is now 232% higher than it was in 1980. Police spending has increased by 223%;  judicial/legal spending has risen 235%; and corrections spending is up by 340%.

#Michael Gerson,"GOP disregard for COVID-19 risk is a moral outrage," The Albuquerque Journal, April 2, 2021. - Gerson says of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem: "What level of hubris, extremism or insanity does it take to crow about one of the worst COVID-19 records in the nation?" 

""Under former President Donald Trump, the federal government largely surrendered its role in the unfolding crisis, leaving red and blue states to respond according to  their ideological proclivities." "By Aug. 5, the relative risk of dying from COVID-19 was 1.8 times higher in GOP-led states,"  "But concerning COVID-19, Republican governors tended to put a greater value on economic activity than preserving the lives of the elderly and vulnerable and others, when compared with Democrat-led states."

#Kathleen Parker, "From Birx to Fauci to Trump, plenty deserving of blame," The Albuquerque Journal, April 2, 2021. - " 'Uncomfortable' is an apt way to describe how [Dr.] Birx routinely looked during these White House news conferences with Trump during the pandemic peak." " 'Why doesn't she say something?' I heard myself shouting at the screen. Why, during all these months as thousands were dying, didn't she say, 'Enough! This is ridiculous!' "Fauci, too, conveyed a stoic's resolve to reveal nothing of his professional or personal thoughts as Trump rambled through daily data."

'Given the threat of a deadly airborne virus, the task force prescription was akin to telling children in the 1950s and 1960s to get under their desks in case of a nuclear attack." "But shouldn't Birx also accept some responsibility for numbing her tongue and allowing the president's pandemic to flourish?"

#Editorial: "Santa Fe leaders should release police internal affairs reports," The Albuquerque Journal, April 2, 2021. - "But transparency should be the easy part of police reform. It requires no balancing act between civil rights and police authority, or arguments over police use of military gear, nor debates about bringing the values of the community and the police together, or whether money needs to be diverted from law enforcement into mental health programs."

#In addition to calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find' some 1,178 votes for him to edge out Joe Biden's victory margin, former President Trump called the chief investigator of the Georgia secretary of state's office to overturn the results of the election, he told the investigator, Frances Watson: "When the right answer comes out, you'll be praised." Watson replied that she is interested only in the truth.

ADDENDUMS:

*Trump said of Dr. Birx: "Dr. Birx is a proven liar  with little credibility left." He called Fauci and Birx, "two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned."

*The U.S.is building a new $100 billion nuclear missile, called the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD). The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said: "It is becoming increasingly clear that there has not been a serious consideration of what role these cold-war-era weapons are supposed to play in a post-cold war security environment."

Police Budgets, Fighting Extremism, and the Vaccine Gap

 #Shreya Chattopadhyay, "By the Numbers," The Nation, [Date not captured]. 

1 - Number of major cities that slashed their police budgets by more than 15 percent for the year 2021 (Austin, Texas).

$150m - Amount cut by the Austin City Council from the police department's budget (about one-third). 

26% - Share of Austin's city budget that will still be spent on the police in 2021.

$6.7m - Amount diverted from the police budget in January to purchase a hotel that will be converted into homes for the unhoused.

60 - Number of units of permanent housing that the converted hotel will maintain.

52% - Share of the 50 largest cities that increased their police budget for 2021.

50% - Amount the Seattle City Council vowed to cut from the police budget -- before reducing it by only 11 percent. 

#Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan, "The Biden Administration has vowed to defeat far-right extremism," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021. 

"Spurred by the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, Biden has asked senior advisers to do something no previous Administration has attempted: refocus the network of U.S. security agencies to help combat domestic extremism."

"For three decades, the U.S. has suffered escalating violence at the hands of far-right extremists, from Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to El Paso. Since 9/11, right-wing terrorists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks on American soil as Islamist terrorists, including all but one  of the 17 domestic-terror attacks launched in 2019."

"By January, nearly 4 in 10 Republicans said violence may be necessary 'if elected leaders will not protect America,' according to a survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute." 

" 'The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing,' FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on March 2. He noted that the FBI is currently working on about 2,000 domestic terrorism cases, twice as many as it was in September."

"Only 14% of nearly 15,600 state and local police agencies involved in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program even report hate crimes." In 2019, "the FBI said 80% of its counter-terrorism agents in the field were assigned to international terrorism cases, while just 20% worked on domestic ones."

#Janell Ross, "The vaccine gap," TIME, March 15/March 22, 2021.

"In the 23 states that try to track the race or ethnicity of those vaccinated, most reported white people were getting vaccinated at disproportionately high rates, according to a Feb. 1 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation."

"Non-Hispanic white residents [in Dallas County] made up 28% of the population but were nearly 63%  of those registered to receive vaccines as of Jan. 24, about three weeks after online-only registration had opened to people ages 65 and up."

[Again in Dallas County] "The system was tilted in favor of wealthier white people by prioritizing the 75-and-older crowd initially for vaccines." "An analysis produced by PCCI [the Dallas-based Parkland Center for Clinical  Innovation]  found that in the weeks when vaccine registrations were limited to those 75 and older, 71% of the people registered in that age range were white. About 8% were Black and 11% were Latino."

#"Rentier vs. Renters," The Nation, 3 . 8 - 15 . 2021. 

"From March to December 2020, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, saw his wealth nearly quadruple [from $36.3 billion to $142 billion]. He "could pay off all rental debt in the United States and barely see an impact on his net worth. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimated that by December 2020, 1.34 million households owed $7.2 billion in rent, an average of around $5,400 each." 

ADDENDUMS: [Found in Paul Rauber, "Up to Speed: Two Months, One Page," Sierra, March/April 2021].

*"Amazon used enough plastic bubble wrap in 2019 to encircle the globe 500 times."

*"US pot growers use more electricity than electric-vehicle drivers."

*"A deal is reached to remove four large dams on the Klamath River on the Oregon-California border. It will be the largest dam-removal project in US history, and will reopen 400 miles of prime salmon habitat." 

*"A hitherto unknown population of blue whales in the Indian Ocean are identified by their unique song."

*"The mass of human-made things now exceeds that of all living things on Earth,"

Ending the Forever Wars

 Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn, "How to Finally End 'Forever Wars,' " The PeaceWorker, 03/2021. 

 'A decade of war is now ending,' proclaimed the American president -- eight years ago. President Barack Obama would soon expand what he had criticized as 'a perpetual war,' the military conflict against Islamist terrorists that began in 2001 in Afghanistan, but that sprawled to the war in Iraq and to many new enemies in many countries.

Now President Biden, too, is holding out the possibility of 'ending the forever wars' by asking Congress to replace the 2001 and 2002 statutes that authorized the 9/11 perpetrators and Iraq with a 'narrow and specific framework.' Congress should embrace his worthy aspiration, but no one should be fooled. The president and Congress will need to go well beyond merely narrowing Congress's old permission slips for war. That would leave the permanent war footing intact and preserve the president's now almost limitless powers to fight anywhere, indefinitely.

To understand the limited significance of this approach to ending the forever wars, you need look no further than Mr. Biden's Feb. 25 airstrikes in eastern Syria against the Iran-backed militias responsible for assaults on U.S. and allied personnel in Iraq. The United States is not at war with Syria or Iraq, and Congress had not authorized the strikes. The president ordered them nonetheless, based on his independent authority, under Article II of the Constitution, 'to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.' Narrowing the 2001 and 2002 laws would leave this presidential power untouched.

The theory behind the Syria strike is that Article II allows the president, without congressional approval, to engage in what has been called 'light-footprint' warfare -- airstrikes (drone and manned), cruise missiles, cyberattacks and stealthy actions by Special Operations forces -- in contexts that serve 'the national interest.' Executive branch lawyers have interpreted the national interest to cover any conceivable situation in which a president, in the name of self-defense or a related rationale, would want to strike anywhere around the globe against even dim terrorist threats to the United States or its allies. They have gone further still to justify presidential unilateralism to mitigate humanitarian crises, to support international organizations and to preserve regional stability. And they have given presidents permission to ignore the constraints of the U.N. Charter.

That President Biden is even talking about ending the forever wars is a partial tribute to former President Donald Trump's success in further degrading Al Qaeda and in 'defeating' the Islamic State, at least for the moment, and in mainstreaming the goal of terminating these wars even as Mr. Trump too failed to do so.

But Mr. Biden and Congress face a fundamental choice. Perhaps terrorist threats are so severe that the president must maintain broad discretion to meet or pre-empt them with targeted lethal force. But the  infrastructure for and operation of the country's vast military engagements should not be, as they currently are, obscure to the American people. And the president should not mislead the American people by claiming that an alteration of the 2001 and 2002 congressional authorizations will have a material impact on the forever wars. If such wars are to continue, Mr. Biden and Congress should be more open with the American people about what is done in their name.

Yet perhaps instead we should wind down the forever wars and engage in genuine reform of presidential powers, Eight years ago, Mr. Obama explained that 'force alone cannot make us safe.' Even when it kills terrorists, he added, 'any U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.' A war fought 'through drones or Special Forces,' he finished, could also 'prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.'

If this is right, Congress must do more than withdraw old permission slips and reduce America's heavy military presence abroad. It should end its long acquiescence in presidential arrogation of war powers by affirmatively prohibiting unilateral uses of force except in tightly defined circumstances of actual self-defense. It should automatically cut off funding for discretionary presidential wars after a short period, absent congressional permission of a defined emergency. And it should reduce the enormous global military and intelligence infrastructure that leaves the United States always on the precipice of war even when presidents opt not to strike.

Only such steps, beyond fiddling with the 2001 and 2002 congressional authorizations, will mark   progress toward ending the forever wars."

George Washington's Views on Political Parties, and Selective Views of the GOP

 George Washington wrote about a political party that if "agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments, occasionally, riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions." 

The Republican Party appears to have decided that, particularly at the state level, it will pursue tactics, such as gerrymandering and voter suppression, that will enable if to wield power even from a minority position. According to a study conducted last month [March], by the American Enterprise Institute, nearly eighty percent of Republicans hold favorable views of Donald Trump, and two-thirds of them believe that there was widespread voter fraud in November despite clear evidence to the contrary. 

ADDENDUMS:

*A federal judge has ruled that a non-disclosure agreement that the Trump 2016 campaign required staffers to sign, was too broad and vague to embrace. U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe said campaign staffers were not free to peak about anything concerning the campaign.

*The death rate in the U.S. jumped by 15.9% between 2019 and 220, with  Covid-19 responsible for about 1 in 10 deaths.

*A new poll by the Public Policy Instituter of California shows 56% oppose the recall of Governor Newsom, and 40% support it.