I am tired of posting these but feel I must

Once again we have a case of police using unnecessary force on a driver of color. He is now suing the police department.

Army Lt. Caron Nazario filed suit against police officers Joe Gutierrez and Daniel Crocker last month, and video from the officers’ body cameras and Nazario’s cellphone has gone viral in recent days.

Nazario seeks $1 million plus punitive damages from the officers, saying they violated his constitutional rights.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, said the videos raise the question of whether the officers overreacted and used more force than necessary.

The videos “make it seem that Lt. Nazario has a persuasive case,” Tobias told USA TODAY.

The officers said in the police report that they stopped Nazario’s Chevrolet Tahoe because it didn’t have a rear license plate, although the report acknowledges the officers later noticed a temporary plate displayed in the back window.

The fact the Nazario was released at the scene and not charged and that the two police officers “threatened to destroy the lieutenant’s military career with “baseless” criminal charges if he reported them for misconduct” show that the police realized that they had gone too far.

You can see for yourself.


I am amazed the Nazario was able to speak so calmly while being threatened and humiliated by people pointing guns at his face.

I keep posting these because I feel that these cases must be widely publicized to build the case that the police in the US need serious reform and curtailment of their powers. We simply should not let these things pass and become seen as normal.

Don’t deliberately cough on people for any reason

Debra Jo Hunter, a woman in Florida (of course) who deliberately went up to someone and coughed in her face during the early days of the pandemic, was sentenced last week to 29 days in jail. The woman she coughed on had recently had brain tumor surgery.

Duval County Court Judge James Ruth first heard testimony from Hunter’s husband, friends and family who said she has a “really huge heart” and is “broken-hearted” over how she coughed on cancer patient Heather Sprague. But after they spoke on behalf of Hunter, Sprague told the judge about the confrontation that happened only months after she underwent brain tumor surgery. 

Sprague said she watched Hunter, 53, give at least 15 minutes of what she called “escalating bullying,” swearing and threats to Pier 1 staff about a broken item with Sprague’s children nearby. It was only when Sprague said she started shooting video in the final minute of the tirade that she was yelled at, then coughed on.

Here’s video of the incident.

I really doubt her family’s claim that she has a “really huge heart”. People like that do not berate shop assistants, give the double finger to strangers, and call them names. Also, deliberately coughing on someone is something that everyone would agree on is disgusting, similar to spitting on them.

There is something about the pandemic that has unhinged some people to the extent that they react so angrily. Hunter was with her two children. Doesn’t she care what kind of role model she is for them?

British TV criticized for blanket coverage of Prince Philip’s death

It appears that British TV, especially the BBC, decided to go to wall-to-wall coverage of Prince Philip’s death and viewers were not pleased, flooding them with complaints about it all being a bit much.

Viewers switched off their TVs in droves after broadcasters aired blanket coverage of Prince Philip’s death, audience figures revealed on Saturday, and the BBC received so many complaints it opened a dedicated complaints form on its website.

BBC One and BBC Two cleared their schedules of Friday night staples including EastEnders, Gardeners’ World and the final of MasterChef to simulcast pre-recorded tributes from the Duke of Edinburgh’s children.

TV viewers were not pleased. BBC One, which is traditionally the channel that Britons turn on at moments of national significance, was down 6% on the previous week, according to analysis of viewing figures by Deadline. For BBC Two the decision was disastrous – it lost two-thirds of its audience, with only an average of 340,000 people tuning in at any time between 7pm to 11pm. ITV suffered a similar drop after it ditched its Friday night schedule to broadcast tributes to the duke.

The death of a 99-year old man is hardly shocking news. This whole business of ‘official mourning’, where the media pretends that the entire nation is highly upset over the death of someone and is collectively mourning has always been a fiction, to be used as cudgel to beat one’s political opponents with. In reality, apart from close members of the dead person’s family, most people may feel some momentary pangs of sadness but then go on with their lives. They dislike being pressured to be feel something they do not feel.

Amazon unionization effort falls short

Workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama have voted against creating a union by a wide margin.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama, plant have voted 1,798 to 738 to reject the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Counting concluded on Friday morning, and attention will now focus on some 505 challenged ballots , but the margin of victory was too greatto change the outcome.
…

The fight to form a union in the warehouse in Bessemer, a suburb north of Birmingham, we eagerly watched by America’s labor movement as one of its most important battles in recent history. Some 5,800 workers were eligible to vote on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) as the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the US.

In a statement, the RWDSU president, Stuart Appelbaum, said: “We won’t let Amazon’s lies, deception and illegal activities go unchallenged, which is why we are formally filing charges against all of the egregious and blatantly illegal actions taken by Amazon during the union vote.
…

Amazon strongly and publicly opposed the union, from seeking to delay the election, pushing for in-person voting, hiring expensive union avoidance consultants, forcing workers to participate in captive audience meetings, flooding workers with anti-union messaging and encouraging them to vote against it, sponsoring local media content, and waging PR fights against critics.

Amazon had pulled out all the stops to prevent the union from winning. This result will, unfortunately, enable one of the most predatory companies to continue its behavior.

Don’t buy Boehner’s apologia

David Corn recounts John Boehner’s history in light of the latter’s recent efforts in a book excerpt to decry the Republican party’s descent into lunacy while acting like he bears little responsibility for the party going bonkers. It is the old, old political story of party leaders encouraging extremists to gain greater power and thinking that they could control those elements only to find that when they try to regain control, those extremist elements turn on them.
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Are Christian nationalists killing Christianity in the US?

A recent Gallup poll shows that the number of people who belong to a church, mosque or synagogue is dropping rapidly and that this may be due to a reaction to aggressive Christian nationalist politics. (Thanks to reader Jeff for then link.)

Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to a survey by Gallup, down from 70% two decades ago – in part a result of millennials turning away from religion but also, experts say, a reaction to the swirling mix of rightwing politics and Christianity pursued by the Republican party.

The evidence comes as Republicans in some states have pursued extreme “Christian nationalist” policies, attempting to force their version of Christianity on an increasingly uninterested public.
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Christian evangelism and the QAnon cult

An interesting fact about the QAnon phenomenon is that even though the mysterious Q has not been heard of in over four months, suggesting that following Trump’s defeat they are trying to wash their hands of this whole thing, the cult keeps going on, though there has definitely been some attrition as some people’s hopes were dashed when Biden’s inauguration went ahead without Trump swooping in and arresting everybody.

Another interesting thing is that the cult members are not easy to pigeonhole and are all over the place, except for one common factor.
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Jordan Klepper tries to become ‘a good guy with a gun’

He realizes that playing the hero if a ‘bad guy with a gun’ lets loose in a public space is not that easy.

It came out during the NRA trial that Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA who loves talking about good guys with guns being the only people who can stop bad guys with guns, hid out on a friend’s yacht because he feared being the victim of shootings.
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