She has done a little renaming.
The section of 16th street in front of the White House is now officially “Black Lives Matter Plaza”. pic.twitter.com/bbJgAYE35b
— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) June 5, 2020
And a little repainting.
Choke on it, you horrible little stale cheeto.
Just being random:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Great, maybe now we’ll get to see just how small-scale those presidential executive orders can get. In the meantime, allow me to predict and paraphrase the republican / rightwing / FOX pundit response: whinge America whine socialism whine whine law and order whinge whinge Obama whine There’s some time saved.
Oh, is there a betting pool yet how long it’ll take for the sign(s) to be vandalised? Do you get better or worse odds for betting on “incognito cop”? Or am I already too late?
The group Black Lives Matter DC wasn’t as excited about it. They reacted to the street painting with criticism of the mayor, saying she should decrease the budget for the D.C. police and “invest in the community.”
Bowser’s proposed budget increases funding for traditional policing while cutting spending on programs to reduce violence through community-based intervention initiatives.
“This is a performative distraction from real policy changes,” the group said on Twitter, adding “Black Lives Matter means defund the police.”
Did the Mayor dominate the street enough for you cheeto?
@#3, xdrta:
Yeah, the majority of cities where the big demonstrations have been held have Democratic Mayors, and are usually in states with Democratic Governors, and both the mayors and the governors have been the ones who sicced the cops on the demonstrators and then called in the National Guard in the first place. As a former Chicagoan, I can’t help but remember that Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s right-hand man for his initial campaign and much of his first term and then mayor of Chicago, found out that the Chicago PD was torturing people at the Logan Square black site and had in fact committed some outright murders, and instead of challenging them on it he helped cover it up to avoid letting it be an issue in his reelection campaign.
(And, of course, there’s Biden, a guy who has always been super-authoritarian and who thinks cops should shoot protestors but just aim for limbs instead, and that will somehow solve the problem. This is what comes of refusing to move left and deriding criticism as “purity tests” — you end up with a guy who’s okay with literal jackbooted thugs because he wants to chase the Republican vote instead of actually being a decent human being.)
Can’t wait to see how the
idiotsblue-no-matter-who crowd on this site will brush off your comment and mine as irrelevant, though. That’s always interesting.It would be priceless to see Trump’s face when he first learns of this.
She is trying to save face after the horrific MPD actions on Monday enforcing the curfew.
The DC branch of Black Lives Matter is not happy with it at all, calling it a “performative distraction.”
Because it is.
Heh, Vicar. Your despairing schtick is stale by now.
But the irony is strong with you: you wank on about “This is what comes of refusing to move left and deriding criticism as “purity tests””, when it is you who is doing precisely that.
(You imagine it’s not bleedingly obvious?)
Sadly this may have flown under national radar:
https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/06/04/leaders-urge-brevard-sheriff-release-video-jail-incident-gregory-edwards/3142736001/
And:
https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2020/06/02/the-widow-of-a-combat-veteran-will-speak-at-rally-in-rockledge-on-saturday/5308386002/
“The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office said the agency would only comment if their statement was used in its entirety, accusing FLORIDA TODAY of inciting civil unrest for asking a question about the video.” Odd accusation against a free press there.
I love how Vicar has played that character for so long that they now have to stick with it. As things get worse and worse, their posts are making them look more and more ridiculous.
When Trump found out he raged at Mayor Bowser on Twitter. yawn.
I’ve been enjoying #babygate, which is the trending description of Trump’s new ‘high tech’ fencing around the WH perimeter. The jokes, they just write themselves.
I wonder if there are any suitable, large surfaces the slogan could be painted on that Trump would see every time he looks out a window….
re: #13
Sky write it and tell him we’re having an eclipse.
Saad@11–
Vicar’s not even clinging to internal logic anymore. Had to end his comment with yet another unanchored criticism of “purity tests”. Perhaps if there had been a bit more “purity testing” in the Democratic party machine, Emmanuel might have faced losing his Dem ticket for abetting the rampantly criminal police under his authority, which might well have concentrated his mind on addressing the problem instead of sweeping it aside.
That. Is. Awesome.
I think the critics have a valid point. As a middle finger to Trump it’s pretty darn funny, and a powerful symbol of support to the BLM movement. But it’s not change. The mayor of a city can, should and must do more than symbolic gestures.
Its not enough. And it will be used to distract instead of real change.
It is good though to have things like this and prominent NFL people saying they were wrong about kneeling to point to for the folks who whined about how rioting will not achieve anything.
They forget that rioting is a reflexive act, not a strategic one and they forget that the only time the establishment has ever made changes is in the face of seeing that they have pushed people too far and they need to give some things up for business to resume unimpeded.
That in itself is terrible but all the smug armchair critics of people getting out and putting their bodies in harms way are just wrong in their analysis and are failing to properly examine the components of the current chaos as well as its outcomes.
And not all of the outcomes may be good. It may breath new life to the right (or may not). But what is happening is not strategic (at the level of looting small business etc), its human desperation.
I’m curious, The Vicar @5: How do you get there from here? That is, how do you get to a decently progressive society, given that the society we’re starting from, the society we actually have right now, is manifestly not decently progressive?
cubist @19:
You don’t. Vicar is just another Trump-supporting fascist, they don’t want a more progressive society.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating: if they were for a more progressive society, they wouldn’t spend the time on every fascist Republican outrage to try and distract away attention to the Democrats.
Just dropping by to kick Vicar around a little
They’re one of those people that may occasionally say incidentally true things, but it’s not worth actually trying to discuss it with them; the conversation should be had but they’ve destroyed any credibility they have to have it so they aren’t a part of it
Fwiw, yeah, Democrats have been utter failures at addressing systemic racism and reigning in the police, and there’s a lot of angles to it (like that police are mostly independent (legally anyway) from executive control, and for good reason) that need to be sorted out – but none of that is relevant to vicar’s mission of messily masturbating all over everything
The view from a higher plane:
https://twitter.com/planetlabs/status/1269046985119727616/photo/1
Smoke that, you orange shit gibbon.
The Vicar has made clear before now that he wants the USA to collapse into chaos – because Biden won the Democratic primary. He doesn’t give a shit about the huge amount of suffering and premature death such a collapse would cause, primarily, of course, among the people at the bottom of the heap who he pretends to care about.
Remember when some New Yorkers wanted to name the block in front of Trump Tower Barack Hussein Obama Way?
That’s a whole new category of trolling.
@1: a man for all seasons.
I saw it when I was a kid; it’s memorable.
“… to gain the world but lose his soul, but for Wales</>?” Dad had to explain it to me.
Remember, DC is the place with “Taxation without representation” on their license plates. They’re good at putting up a symbolic middle finger when and where it’s needed. Unfortunately, DC voters and residents have little real power. They don’t have representation in Congress and Congress has significant control over DC, more than it typically has over a city or state. This is not to say that the mayor shouldn’t defund the cops to the extent that she can, because of course she should, but that won’t stop federal troops or mercenaries from being used to “keep order”, whatever the mayor does.
Keep waiting for Trump to burst an aneurism. Those cybernetic implants must be keeping all that burger grease locked in place.
Well this boggled my mind; federal law enforcement
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/05/protests-washington-dc-federal-agents-law-enforcement-302551
Now I’m waiting for armed officers of the Federal Bureau of Street Painting to show up at the mayor’s door.
Meanwhile, where’s the music? I did find this!
@16, @25: YES!
What is laughable is that Trump thinks that he can rule D.C.. He can’t, D.C. has limited home rule, but is fully under the control of only one branch of government and it ain’t the executive branch.
Congress “owns” D.C., so he can piss and moan until the cows come home, the House won’t budge to do anything that’s Trump’s whim this week.
Of course, Trumpelstiltskin can stamp his feet all week, the press gets their shiny and all fail to notice that which is important. Not jobs returning as businesses reopen, not stock market whims and fancies, but the fact that 9000 people died of COVID-19 this week and nobody fucking noticed or cared.
When Trump was hiding inside of his bunker, they should’ve poured concrete into the access tunnel.
On another rant, I’ve heard that New York City is still having trouble with storage of human remains. I’ve also read that Trump Tower has plenty of vacancies.Two problems that can offer one solution…
Well, back to Twitter to fuck with what passes for a mind for Republicans.
Shows up on google maps as Black Lives Matter Plaza already
@#8, John Morales:
You have it wrong. I have always felt that we should demand purity from candidates, and I am complaining about the idiots who have derided the idea of “purity tests” in order to protect hopeless candidates like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Al Gore and so on, and so on, and so on. Had we actually demanded purity back then, this wouldn’t be happening now — and at the very least, we would still have a party which stood for something. I put “purity tests” in quotation marks because I object to people who use that phrase, who defended and still defend Biden, and think that he will actually improve things. He won’t; he is already preparing to normalize Trump’s policies.
@#19 cubist:
At this point? Step one is the rigid discipline to reject the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party en masse and elect people from outside the duopoly, which has spent the last several decades making sure the government is as worthless as possible. We need to get rid of them all; the fact that Democratic mayors dispatched the police to attack protestors and Democratic Governors called in the National Guard to quell opposition shows as clearly as any sane person could desire that the Democratic Party is not going to make any of this stop. Both parties need to end, the people at the top of both parties need to go to trial (at least!), and we need to start from scratch. Anything less than that isn’t going to change a damn thing.
If Democrats are not willing to do that, then we aren’t going to get a decent society, progressive or not. There is no path to a decent society which starts off with “we hand even more power to people like Joe Biden who created this problem in the first place” unless it also passes through “we utterly reject people like Joe Biden” anyway, so why not start with the rejection?
For much of the country’s history, it was possible to make the claim that “[opposition party] will discontinue [terrible thing that government is doing]”. Right now we have the Republicans doing terrible things, and Joe Biden is either not commenting, or outlining the ways he’s going to normalize those things — his campaign has already said he’s going to continue Trump’s mideast foreign policy in every significant way (which was largely a continuation of Obama’s anyway!), he has said he won’t take significant action on climate change, he has said he’ll actively veto single-payer if it makes it through Congress — I would be willing to bet money, if there were a secure anonymous way to do it conditionally this far in advance, that in the event that he wins the election, Biden will make all the “Blue No Matter Who” idiots regret supporting him within a month — more likely a week, but I’m hedging.
(Which of course means they’ll turn explicitly fanatical — it’s already happening; it’s why Democrats now say in polls that a rapist is just fine in high government office.)
@#21, rpjohnston:
Name, then, a substantial positive action — that is, something other than “not being Republicans” or “putting a black man into the Presidency” — that Democrats have succeeded at, in the last 30 years. No war crimes trials for Iraq, and we’re even running the people who voted for it again. No real health insurance reform, just the Romneycare-based ACA. No bank regulation, no reining in of police violence, no restoration — let alone expansion! — of the social safety net, no real prosecutions for the 2008 meltdown, nothing.
@#23, KG
At this point? Yes, I’d say that’s pretty accurate. By making 2020 Biden versus Trump, we have guaranteed that the US is doomed no matter what. Biden not only is incapable of solving any problems, he actively wants to prevent problems from being solved; he will normalize Trump policy on every front and the “Blue No Matter Who” crowd will pretend it isn’t happening the same way they did when Obama normalized Bush policies. (Hey, remember when Bush got slapped down over “Total Information Awareness” because it was so blatantly a totalitarian nightmare of a policy? That great Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Democrat Obama implemented essentially all of it, and we heard not a fucking peep from any of you.)
Since the US is doomed anyway — and make no mistake, there’s no hope, we’re toast; I suspect the UK as a single entity is as well — it makes sense to destroy it now, rather than wait until the collapse — the faster it happens, the faster any rebuilding that can be done can take place. Every year that passes without the fall of the US government is a year in which we’re throwing immigrants in detention camps, macing protestors, letting people die by the million of poverty in one form or another — why would you want to keep that going?
(And, also, if the country dies now, the fucking assholes who voted for both Trump at all and Biden in the primaries, who are by a strong majority older people, will have to suffer for sabotaging the country; Biden might possibly manage to prop up the status quo for a while so that the collapse hits — and kills — exclusively younger generations. I don’t believe in an afterlife; if these people are going to pay for their greed, stupidity, and evil, it has to happen before they die.)
Problem solved!
Re: harryblack @ #18…
I will believe that the NFL is serious about the change in policy when they publicly urge the team owners to find a team that will sign Kapernick…and when one or more teams promptly make offers. Until then, it’s just face saving to avoid being hammered for past ill behavior.
This is why the purity fools like Vicar arent really progressive. When they downplay the ACA they shiw their hand. Because who gives a fuck about the millions of lives that were either saved or made better now that they had access to healthcare thanks to ObamaCare? It wasnt medicare4all from the get go so the good it did doesnt matter I guess. Might as well not exist.
When you ignore progressive victories like that because it didnt solve 100% the problem; worse actualy when you actively work against it, then youre not progressive. When you’d rather see the establishment fail than support actions that help people you are regressive. Plain and simple. Progressive requires progress. When you decide to undermine that by pretending that Obama was not progress because he wasnt a perfect left wing angel then you become an enemy of it. Aca helped millions. Gay marriage was progress. Black president, despite you not giving a fuck, was progress. And many more. To pretend otherwise shows me that your demand for progressiveism is just for show.
Oh and once again. Electing Hillary would have been progress. Not just in terms of equality, but because having two democrats back to back would have forced the right to reconsider a more moderate candidate thus pushing the country more towards the left. But its not the automatic leftist utopia that you wanted so you rebeled agaimst progressivism. None of your purity fools have answered the political fact that neoliberals exists becaise you fucks wont vote. So aparently continueing to not vote aparently magicaly saves it all this time? Gtfo of here.
if anything ever made it clear that there are so called radicals who do not have an honest or clear of history or the present moment that statement is it.
we have the situation we have the history is long and the conditions predate the Constitution and predate the colonial endeavor as well.
That the people should determine how they should be governed.
It seems that a majority of the democratic party and possibly the country as a whole would like someone moderate as executive this time. Attacking them for their preference is insulting and counter productive as well. If the majority want something you think is inadequate for the needs then explain it, make the case for more “radical measures” otherwise you just confirm to everyone your hostility to the principles of democracy. just another spoiler who wants his own way or else.
It is together not my way or the highway we move forward.
uncle frogy
Just a reminder — this is Vicar in 17 May 2016:
Names were different, schtick the very same.
@logicalcat, currently, electing Genghis Khan would’ve been progress. A potted plant would be progress.
Still, Vicar lost me at rigid discipline. This isn’t the infantry, this is the real world. What’s his proposed solution to non-compliance, tie their shoelaces together? Vote them off of the island?
Still, foolish people voted Trump in, if the foolish people stay home, the loss isn’t humanity’s loss.
Meanwhile, we still have troops and apparently, federal prison riot police lugging around machine guns. An M4 or M16 fires three round bursts, that’s ten bursts per magazine. Trump keeps his shit up, we’ll end up with something that makes Kent State and New Mexico U (11 students bayoneted by Guard) look like children playing!
As P.Z. too often does, he jumps in to post something without investigating background.
Here is some background on Mayor Bowser – not something to be proud of
https://twitter.com/Curious_Kurz/status/1268929700489035794
Bob, PZ’s post is factual; whatever the background, whatever the impetus, whatever the outcome, those facts remain.
(Do you dispute the factuality of the naming and the painting?)
Pretty sure that his bloated ego is Trump’s achilles heel; he goes ballistic when it’s pricked.
(Not that I’m suggesting he exhibits symptoms of what used to be called Pick’s disease or anything like that…)
John Morales,
I don’t dispute the factuality of the naming and painting, nor does the twitter thread I linked to (did you read it?) I do dispute P.Z.’s claim that Bowser is “on the ball.” She is, in fact, for the most part a terrible mayor. But just as Andrew Cuomo once in a while does something that should be done, once in a while Bowser does something that should be done. With both of them, though, it is a matter of CYA, not of integrity. P.Z. should have realized this, since it has been well publicized for many years.
Bob:
But that’s not what you wrote initially, is it?
You wrote that he hadn’t done his research.
Nice concession.
What made you imagine PZ thought that? ;)
Ah, I think I get you. Did you think that “on the ball” refers to being on [our] side, rather that reading the state of play and alertly reacting to the state of play?
This evening now BLM protesters are painting a giant DEFUND THE POLICE right on 16th Street in yellow on the next block up from yesterday’s mayor’s painting.
Video from wapo: https://wapo.st/30gRa7G
Yeah, logicalcat pretty much nails it. Also just google all the things Dems have done in Virginia since we flipped blue last November, and for that matter, passing Medicaid expansion a couple years ago after massive gains.
Moreso though: The path is what you make of it. The election is between Trump and Biden. The people who are going to actually work for progress can do FAR FAR more work under Biden than under Trump. That is, the people who actually get down to the dirt and toil, unlike mere keyboard warriors. The people who actually have to look at the situation we’ve got and figure out what to do next with what we have.
I’m sorry when ever I see BLM the first thing that comes to mind is ” Bureau of Land Management” an agency often in the news lately involved with many important environmental issues.
Black Lives Matter is also an important issue to put it mildly. I think the mayor was on the ball as well. She knew that the president has no authority to command the city of DC, that what he did was a moral affront besides and was seen that way by many others including the pastor of the church he used as a prop,
She also knows that the Washington population has a large percentage Black residents.
she also knows she has to assert herself as mayor in her city to maintain any credibility at all.
best part is she knows what to do to really tie a can to trumps tail and piss him off without doing herself any harm. win win on the ball
uncle frogy
The Vicar@32,
This level of arrogant stupidity really deserves some sort of prize. If the past few years – FFS the past few months have not taught you that the course of human affairs is hard to predict, I guess nothing will, but you really shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously.
Thanks for confirming that you’re not just an arrogant fool, but a vile genocidal scumbag.
Good catch John. I’d forgotten this evil fuckwit had been polluting the blog for that long.
“Ah, I think I get you. Did you think that “on the ball” refers to being on [our] side, rather that reading the state of play and alertly reacting to the state of play?”
No.
“On the ball” refers to alert competence. In this single matter, Bowser was alert to her need to appear to be on the side of most Washingtonians (CYA). In many other matters, described in detail in the twitter thread I linked to – did you read it? If you read it, did you understand it? – she disdains to do so.
I don’t see any point in carrying on a discussion with you if you persist in misreading.
So the vicar turns out to be a fascist enabler. I should have known. During the 2016 election there were many elements of the left that acted as another branch of right wing propaganda due to their actions. Who actively fought against Hillary due to foolish dogmatic adherance to their antiestablishmentarian principles and their ignirance regarding fascism (many didnt believe he was really fascist, just saying shit to get attention and that Hillary was the real threat). I hope that by 2020 these people have seen and acknowleged their error. I hope Vicar is not representative.
They may be leftists, but they may as well be right wing since propping them up is the consequence.
God reading that 2016 thread is cringe as fuck. If ever there was an aggregate of evidence that the “lesser of two evils” thinking was toxic and counter intuitive, its that thread right there.
Further to my #50, the above is not just vile and genocidal, it’s also gobsmackingly stupid. According to exit polls,
50% of those in their 40s who voted in 2016, voted for Trump. The numbers didn’t go much higher – up to 53% – for those in their 50s or older. Most of those then in their 40s and many in their 50s are (pandemics, nuclear wars and other such catastrophes aside) going to be around until mid-century. So to exempt them from suffering the agonies The Vicar wants for them in the supposedly inevitable collapse, Biden would need to “manage to prop up the status quo” for at least 2 or 3 decades. Thus the logic of The Vicar’s position is that a single term of Biden could, somehow, delay collapse for 20-30 years, but not leave the slightest chance of actually avoiding it. And on top of that, we know that he actually wanted Trump to win in 2016 – yet somehow, thinks all those older people who didn’t vote for Trump (which would include most older black voters, for example) deserve to suffer simply because a small majority of those in their age group who voted, voted for Trump. For The Vicar, hate for those in the target group trumps logic, just as it did for Hitler and Stalin.
The Vicar’s mother, watching her beloved child march past in a parade:
“Oh would you look at that, little Vicar is the only one marching in time!”
Not to derail things here, but I’ve been asking Trump and not getting an answer.
Is he going to install a moat inside of the wall that he wanted around the White House and will it contain alligators?
I also asked a question that might trigger some folks, apparently, there were a lot of folks around the White House that had blue helmets on… Yes, they were police, but who in their right mind dresses police in black and blue?!
wzrd1:
Heh. Nice.
(To make things obvious, I reckon probably more than a few people would like to dress at least some cops’ bodies thus, as retribution)
@KG and @logicalcat,
Look, all you need to know, and all you need to point out to the peanut gallery is that Vicar consistently answers every fascist, alt-right and/or Republican (but I repeat myself) outrage with an attempted derail of “but the Democrats!”.
The exact content of their argument is irrelevant. The consistency of the derailment attempt is enough to point out that they are nothing but a MAGAt.
mvdwege@57,
I disagree: it’s important to show how full of holes his arguments are. It’s not important whether he himself thinks he’s a MAGAt: objectively, he works for Trump, whether or not he’s paid to do so, and whatever he likes to tell himself.
KG @58,
While I don’t entirely disagree, I think that the derail attempt is the biggest hole, and putting a spotlight on that means you don’t have to waste energy to go into the details.
mvdwege@59,
How about you do you, and i’ll do me?
@KG: Deal. If you have the energy to spare to dissect this kind of disinfo, I’ll be glad not to have to go too deep into it. I get depressed at that kind of depraved stupidity. I honestly, not sarcastically, salute you that you can stand it.
@61
same here, it is too tedious to get down in the weeds with that kind of shit thinking mono maniacs
uncle frogy
Well I dont speak for others but when I engage with the flawed thunking of people like Vicar I do it for the same reason I would a creationist or a trump voter. Because im trying to convince those who might be reading rather than the one im responding to. Those who might be reading and are on the fence or sympathetic to these bad ideas. So they can see that these ideas are flawed.
Of course im definitely not saying that you should or its a duty to respond. I admit there have been times where im like “fuck this stuoid shit, im out”.