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Well gee Rick, you don't think the stress from asphyxiation triggered that heart attack, after no oxygen entering Eric’s bloodstream all that time? I’m well aware that Eric died in the ambulance after geing asphyxiated, but you don’t see a connection? None at all?!
it puzzles me that such drastic measures were necessary to apprehend this man. He was hardly the picture of health. Couldn't that have been taken more into consideration? Eric didn't appear to be stupid enough, in his condition, to try outrunning or fighting off these fit young men, especially outnumbered to the extent that he was. I saw no evidence of this on the video. I don't get what's so deceiving about it.
Correction: It was “Get the fuck off the street!” not the sidewalk, what Officer Wilson said to Michael Brown and his friend when he first accosted them.
You don't seem to have taken my post personally, sir, despite the bluntness of my comments, which I appreciate and openly acknowledge. But here's the bug up my ass. It just seems to be the consistent pattern that time after time, an unarmed, usually male, young black person is dead... and the case doesn't even make it past the grand jury, let alone to trial, and the killer walks. No indictment, no trial, no nothing. The message this sends the public at large is that anything goes if you’re a police officer, especially if you’re a white police officer and the dead person is black. You'd think the lives of these people were dispensible, that they meant nothing at all.
I will not argue your point that each day, thousands of arrests are carried out in this country without death or injury, even when resistance is involved. How small the percentage of bad cops there are in proportion to the overall numbers probably varies by area. I have had only one bad experience with police that was noteworthy enough to remember, and it happened over forty years ago, back in my Berkeley days. But I’m a white gal.
In the twenty-plus years since my husband & I moved to Oregon, I’ve been stopped two or three times, while driving through town. Each time it was for a perfectly legitimate reason: forgetting to turn on my headlights at night, after exiting a well-lit parking lot or street. So each time I was very polite to the officer, to the point of apologizing profusely for my blunder, and they in turn were polite to me. Each time the officer checked me out, the way officers are supposed to do, and determined that I was sober enough to drive, and let me off the hook without penalty or incident.
However many or few the bad cops, they are having a hugely negative impact on race relations in this country, something I don’t appreciate. People have a hard enough time getting along without this 21st Century version of public lynchings, one after another, and without consequence for any of the killers.
It is my humble view that humans are a quarrelsome species of primate. Granted, some of us are a lot mellower than others! But as a species, we’re constantly fighting and at war with each other, on a grand scale as well as one-on-one, up close and personal. I really wish police academies would pick the even-tempered, cool-headed candidates who would be most inclined to handle volatile, potentially dangerous situations without bloodshed. Many such incidents could be diffused with an assertive but respectful, calming demeanor on the part of the officer, whether or not he needs to make an arrest. If the officers treated these young men with the sort of respect I believe all of us owe one another, in any civil society, most if not all these dead young black guys would be annonymous to this day, and still be alive. If Marc is right, and if they make a point of picking macho men, racists and psychopaths for police training instead of balanced, stable personalities, I don’t see this situation getting better; it’ll just keep growing worse, while the USA becomes more and more of a combat zone. This stupid war on drugs and drug users has not helped the situation any, and has been a tool within easy access for racists wearing the badge. I've heard and read that young black men currently are seven times as likely to be busted for drug use and over thirty times as likely as their white counterparts to be executed-by-cop. This leaves no doubt in my mind that a serious disparity exists in how citizens of different skin tones get treated by law enforcement in our society.
As Thom points out, -- and I agree -- we need special prosecutors having no shared interdependence with or special allegiance to the police; prosecutors who, in these kinds of cases, have no vested interest in any particular outcome and can be impartial without any conflict of interests. Without that, it's all pretense, just empty ritual of no intrinsic value. And thus, from much of the general public's point of view, it's a joke what’s passing for “justice” these days in America. Dead unarmed black man after dead unarmed black man with NO indictments, no trials, not a single one among those several incidents cited in my last post! Outrageous. Indefensible. Unacceptable.
Hopefully by the time you read this, Rick, your mile-long, to-do list will be down to the last half mile. Thanks for your patience with me. Not a pleasant topic, but a good one for discussion. It isn't every day I get to debate a retired police sargeant. Thanks for your input. Whether or not I agree with all of it, I respect where it's coming from and know it adds something of unique value to this thread. - AIW
P.S. Please read posts #9 & #10 by Ms. Metcalfe, if you haven't.
Catholic women might have something to say about that and they might find an ally in this pope.
Hi Thom,
As a long time admirer of your books and political analysis, and a former viewer of The Big Picture, I experienced an aha moment while watching your interview with Ralph Nader on YouTube. The reason that I'm a former watcher of the show is that I'm very turned off by the partisan nature of the left-right debates. The focus seems to be on issues that we're determined to find no agreement on and the goal seems to be (at least for many of your guests on the show ) to "win" the debate, regardless of how many facts have to be distorted or ignored to do so.
But watching your interview with Mr. Nader prompted me to think: instead of having heated debates with people who have no wish to find common ground, about issues on which there's little to no agreement on the left and right, why not take Mr. Nader's lead and bring together people from both sides of the political spectrum to discuss issues about which there is a broad consensus? In other words, why not dedicate a portion of the show to bridging the left-right political divide and discussing solutions and strategies for moving forward together?
Thanks,
Phil Byler
They don't work harder than we do, quite the contrary. We just get paid less than they do.
Alicefromwonderland Mr. Garner died from cardiac arrest in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The head lock or supposed choke hold did not kill him. He died from a heart attack because he was in poor physical condition. The video is very decieving, unless you have been involved in such a struggle you do not realize the amount of exertion being expended during an altercation. No doubt there are officers that should not be police officers but statistacally they are a very small percentage. You never hear about the thousands of thousands of resisting suspects who are arrested with little or no injury to them. You very rarely hear of the many officers that are hurt, many times severely, by resisting suspects. The officer's that should not be officers should be dealt with appropriately but the large majority of police officers in this country are good cops doing a very hard job. That's all I can say today, the wife has a "Honey do list" a mile long. Got to get to work. LOL
Rickfromflorida, when you're preventing someone from breathing, and he has to tell you eleven times "I can't breathe" and you STILL won't allow him to breathe while you ignore his pleas for air, and then he dies as a result, how can you claim not to have intended harm?! Of all the things we can't live without, oxygen tops the list. I don't really care if you call that a headlock or chokehold; the guy is dead. Over something very, very petty, that posed no threat to anyone.
I watched that video too, and it didn’t look like much of a struggle to me. I saw a group of men jump on Mr. Garner in unison, and it took less than a minute for them to drag him down to the ground. There was no long, drawn-out struggle. Most of Mr. Garner's resistence was verbal, not physical.
What many of us are so angry about is how cheap human life seems to have gotten in this increasingly run-down, third world country of ours. And there is no human life cheaper than black human life, it seems. A twelve-year-old black kid, playing with a toy gun, gets ambushed and executed in broad daylight; a young black man is executed in Walmart for walking around the store with a toy gun, just a piece of store merchandise! No questions asked; just BLAM! A black teenager gets massacred by a racist vigilante, just walking home from the store, and the cops don’t even bother arresting the killer. The officer accosting Michael Brown and his friend yells “Get the fuck off the sidewalk!” before the altercation leading to MB’s death. (How's THAT for professionalism?!) And let’s not forget Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old, murdered by BART police at that Fruitvale BART station in Oakland! Oscar was shot in the back while lying face-down on pavement, completely helpless, with his hands held behind him by another cop. Is that your idea of “serving” and “protecting”, sir?
I watch video after video where cops are verbally abusive bullies, going out of their way to provoke their targets. They harass black men who are doing nothing wrong, without the slightest provocation. They beat up homeless people, with little or no provocation.
Aren’t there any means of apprehending someone other than asphyxiating or shooting him to death?
Another blogger, DAnneMarc, has a friend who applied for enrollment at a police academy and was turned down, for being too even-tempered! According to Marc, they want recruits who are psychopaths, bullies and control freaks. And that is the problem with police. They pick the troublemakers for recruits, and we end up with thugs in uniform. This is what has landed your profession's public image and reputation in the toilet, Rick. Don't blame Thom Hartmann; blame yourselves. - AIW
He's better than most other popes but it's still the same old Catholic church, keeping women "in their place".
Here's a little article about St. Francis your Prince of Peace
An institution is not an individual and their collective action had to be a conspiracy of silence all the way to participation in the facilitating of child abuse, well beyond isolated incidents. Pedophilia was a common practice of priest and covering it up was common practice of the church. Comparing individual weakness to an institution trying to protect its image is a flimsy argument; that I would hope you'd reconsider.
The message from the Pope about environmental responsibility is positive, however, the Church of Rome is desperate to change their image around the world. I would think people would find it awful convenient that the Church of Rome, who've remained virtually silent on global warming, suddenly started appealing to such a populace cause. I am not buying it and I would not trust a Pope that spent his Priestly years as a fascist collaborator in Argentina.
http://www.stankovuniversallaw.com/2013/03/washingtons-pope-pope-francis-i-cardinal-jorge-mario-bergoglio-argentinas-dirty-war/
Mid term low voter turnout and Republican diehard mobilization are always the cause of Republican sweeps of the House and Senate. General low information also contributes. In 1994, after the first Republican sweep since '48 or so, Newsweek reported that (by what I believe was an ABC News poll) 59% of Americans believed the deficit had increased since Clintons election and inauguration when it had already been brougbht down by $100 billion. A similar majority believed the recession was still on when it had already ended even before the 1992 election. Such was the foundation of the voters' "rebuke" of Bill Clinton.
He's not on a PR tour for Catholicism, any more than the head of any institution is about promoting it. He's on a tour for peace, justice and truth, using his moral and social authority to promote those very "progressive" values, as he is very progressive and even socialist or genuinely communist, unlike Stalin or someone like that who was ahthoritarian but not humanitarian. He is head of a strict hierarchy and top-down system but his personality is not authoritarian but egalitarian.
Most Catholics are not pedophiles or supporters of pedophilia, you musn't be subsumed with that one problem of the Church. The reason for it, in my opinion, is celibate clergy serving as a repository for what is considered sexual deviance in Catholic society and general superstitious hysteria about sex and sexual abnormality in our civilization. The Catholic clergy has long been where homosexual individuals went to hide and deal with their "deviance" and others with problems of a sexual nature were directed there to be swept under the rug, closeted and have their sexual problems "given to God" to deal with with their preferred - or any sexual activity - renounced by the vow of chastity and committment to a celibate lifestyle. You can see that timebomb already just from that description.
As was done in all traditional religious and other institutions of Western Civilization intolerant of sex or sexual variation, when an issue of a sexual nature comes up, the Catholic Church first tried to deny and suppress the problem rather than face and deal with it. The Church, as an institution, behaved much as an individual person with some kind of personal problem - like sexual deviance, drug addiction, mental illness, etc. - usually behaves. It denied it and tried to ignore it until it could no more.
The previous pope, Ratzenberg, tried, as a solution, the purging of homosexuals from the Church. One great gay priest and pastor I knew and collaborated with on some social justice campaigns and who was a great advocate for justice but was not known to engage in any sexual activity and certainly not any pedophilia, got run out of the Church because he was gay under that regime. I knew another liberal, lefty priest who, in the '80s, because of his politics, was set up and accused of pedophilia by his local conservative clerical authorities. They didn't try to protect him at all but vigorously brought the case to trial - before which he was cleared as the charges were fabricated. He believed Pope John Paul I was murdered - or assasinated - by conservative clergy members - as do many liberal Catholics.
Pope Francis represents the new Church "in recovery' from its personal problems.
Thom I admire and agree with much of what you say and do on your show but this post is way off base. "Worshipping Police"? I'm a retired police sergeant from South Florida. I won't even get into the worship comment but I will say police officers most times feel people like or worship them about as much as they do their dentist. That is to say they don't want to see them unless they need them. But what I really want to comment on is the Garner case. I will hole heartedly agree that there are racial and brutality issues that need to be addressed in this countries law enforcement, but the Garner case is not an example of excessive brutality and if you read further I will explain why. Much of the public believe by shear training police officer can do amazing things. Some think we have some magic move that allows us to take resisting suspects, who maybe much large then ourselves, into custody without hurting them or ourselves. There is no doubt that Mr. Garner was resisting a lawful arrest. He had been arrested for the same violation in the past and for other numerous violations some involving violence. In reality having been involved in hundreds of physical altercations with criminals that don't want to be arrested the confrontation is always a total free for all. It’s absolutely nothing like you see on the TV cop shows. People have an unreasonable expectation of what police officers can really do. (In that way you maybe right about the worship thing.) You may say well there were multiple police officers involved, well in reality no matter how many officers are there only two or at most three of the officers will be able to actually physically get their hands on the suspect. You may also say that three trained officers should easily be able to restrain a suspect. Unless you have been involved in physically arresting a resisting suspect you really have no idea of how hard it is to do, especially with a person as large as Mr. Garner. It really is a total mayhem! You may say what about the illegal choke hold. The move was in fact a head lock type move not a choke hold. If it was a choke hold Mr. Garner would not had been able to even speak to say the words he could not breath. I will say that from personal experience usually once the suspect is subdued the reason why he is subdued is because he and the officers are physically exhausted from the altercation. Unfortunately Mr. Garner had some medical issues that came into play when he expended so much physical exertion resisting arrest. You may also say why didn’t they get him medical treatment sooner. From the video’s I have seen I can not tell how long it was before medical assistance arrived. The one area that should be addressed is the fact that most officer have very little training in providing medical assistances. Officers are expected to be in good physical shape so they are less likely to succumb to health related issues during an altercation as Mr. Garner did. You may say you’re a retired cop so your backing up your buddies, all I can say to that is you don’t know me. If you did and you talked to those who knew and worked with me most would say I’m a very honest hard working person. My adult son has gone as far as to say I’m sometimes to honest. The Garner case is no doubt a tragedy but it was a perfect storm of events that lead to Mr. Garners tragic death. The facts are the police officers involved had no intent to harm or kill Mr. Garner which is why they were not indicted.
Still listening!
Isn't he the Vicker of the Lord? Why doesn't he just ask God to fix it?
This Pope is on a shameless PR tour for Catholicism . The Church of Rome is in decline so he's making a token populace appeal.
I try not to be cynical about such things, but the Catholic church is a pedophile protection network that should be burnt to the ground, not admired for , in my humble or not so humble opinion, placating people in hopes of good publicity.
Thom, talk about pension cuts proposed by congress and adding tax to gas price in pa.
Mark my words, they're gonna off this pope, either by "mad" gunman or, like John Paul I, Monsignor will put something in his tea and he'll die in his sleep like it was "God's will" to stop a progressive pope.
Congress needs to be drug tested. Might be surprised how many cokeheads legislate for us.
Yes, the GOP will pass more laws but most will be detrimental to the nation and society and environment as a whole.
Tarheels, I’ve got no stomach for this “blame the victim” paradigm you and various conservative bloggers keep peddling here. Shame on YOU for joining that chorus. How do you know the toy gun was aimed at the cop; were you there? Did you see a video of the incident? According to what I’ve heard, that cop shot the kid two seconds after exiting his car. How do you instruct anyone to do anything in two seconds?!! The cop could have told that kid to set the toy gun down and step back, then gone over to investigate, in which case he would have determined that it was a TOY. If it was a BB gun, posing a danger to anyone, it could have been confiscated without bloodshed. Instead the officer stepped out of his car and— BLAM-BLAM! Another dead black kid. For nothing.
You conservative white dudes are forever minimizing, trivializing and outright denying the disparity between how whites and blacks are treated by police, all around this country. Your pro-police bias has been made crystal clear in your posts, ever since you began participating here.
Every time another black kid is executed by a cop, we get two versions of the story: one from corporate media and the law & order crowd, the other from noncorporate media and those with no allegiance to law enforcement. From my perspective, the version deserving of my attention is a no-brainer.
Okay, so an unarmed white teenager was shot and killed in Salt Lake City by a black cop last August. It doesn’t change the fact that statistically (according to MY sources) a black teenager is over thirty times as likely to be executed by the police compared to white teenagers. Isolated incidents don’t generate mass protest while a pattern of such fatal encounters most certainly does. And I challenge YOU, Tarheels, to prove to us that killer black cops are as common as killer white cops, in proportion to their numbers.
I’ll be listening! - AIW
AIW,
Dispatch didn't tell the officers in Cleveland that the gun was a BB gun. Shame on the child for altering the gun to look like a real one and shame on the parents for letting him do it! If a gun is aimed at you could you tell if the gun was real or would you wait until you were shot to realise that hesistating cost you your life or would you shoot first and ask questions later ?
He was instructed to raise his hands and instead he chose to pull a gun from his waistband. I don't care what color you are or whether you are rich or poor you can agree that pulling a gun on police officer is not the brightest thing to do.
In August of 2014, an unarmed white teen was shot and killed by a black police officer in Salt Lake City Utah. The officer was not indicted by a grand jury. Where were the riots and the stop traffic protests?
RFord,
2nd Amendment
A well regulated militia- meaning a militia formed of and by the people, not a militia that is formed by the government.
Being necessary to the security of a free state- meaning that is militia is formed for the purpose of opposing a corrupt or otherwise oppressive government or other threat of hostility.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms-meaning that the general public shall be allowed to own and use said arms to defend their freedom and way of life against said oppressive government or threat of hostility.
Shall not be infringed- meaning exactly what it states, shall not be infringed or rights that shall never be taken from the people.
They will pass removing Obama care, austerity measures (Greek style), end abortions, cut funding for the EPA and change the Senate rules back to 51 votes (2/3 vote) at least that is what McConnell (R) KY says he will do to stop Obama.
"In March, Pope Francis will urge the world's 1.2 billion Catholics to do more to address global warming."
You're up DALAI LAMA!
The KOCH BROTHERS (aka TWINKLES & LURCH) will NOT be happy! : )
Happy New Year Thom, Louise, & Company!
Scott Walker and all the rest like him will eventually pay for their crimes against the people. The people will eventually stop voting for the likes of them.
Good evening all,happy new year.Look up;Annunake,Yazidi prophecy(Iraq war three started with ISIS attack on our brothers and sisters there, pray for them),and Thom as you reported on a radio signal 10 seconds out,well it was for those tuned in to our maker.Proof;ozone layer depleted yes?ionize gold dust as the creator wanted and apply to ionosphere.James of Spring City(James Michael Campbell)Peacock angel,Arch angel those that share the name,Michelle,Michael,Mikael etc.Heart lght turned on a year or so ago,I have many answers to our Mother Earth cleanup.She is our reward for helping him so long ago.You know our garden of eden.this not the first time in our geologic history that we have made a mess of her.Tell the Honorable Senator Sanders to look for a letter with the contents of Ram-Hydrogen(combustion)transportation and 3D printed car.I am trying to find help getting it to paper.I have not been very successful.Please ask pope Francis to pray for me on thie endevour.I pray I get to meet you soon.James(Michael) of Spring City.Yazidi love to all!
They will pass bills with the usual rhetoric to confuse voters into assuming the bill was in their interest.