Buffalo police not trustworthy

You might have heard that a 75-year-old-man was seriously injured Thursday night by Buffalo (NY) police. The man had been attempting to speak to officers when one pushed him in the chest hard enough to send him stumbling backwards and then to the ground. As he fell he hit his head on the pavement and blood came rushing out.

After a video of the incident went viral two officers were suspended without pay while the matter is being investigated. The suspension apparently angered the other members of the special emergency response team to which the suspended officers belonged.

"Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders," Buffalo Police Benevolent Association president John Evans told WGRZ on Friday. WKBW also reported news of the resignations.

Buffalo mayor Byron Brown defended the suspended officers by asserting that the victim shouldn't have been there.

Speaking of the injured man, the mayor said, "He was asked to leave numerous times last night."

Police felt that it was important to clear the area before fights broke out among the protesters, the mayor said. He stressed that the instructions from the police managers to officers was to be careful, protect residents and use common sense.

Hey, Mr. Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, I have some questions for you:

Is it part of Buffalo PD training and policy to shove a nonviolent, unarmed civilian to the ground hard enough to crack his skull open?

Were the officers unable to arrest a nonviolent, unarmed civilian, or simply unwilling to break their nice straight advancing line?

Are you claiming that inflicting a life-threatening injury on a nonviolent, unarmed civilian constitutes "simply executing orders"?

Mr. Evans, the suspended officers' actions don't make your benevolent association look benevolent. Neither do your "just following orders" remarks.

Either your members really did receive orders to hurt nonviolent, unarmed civilians — which I leave to you to prove if you can — or you are full of shit.

And Mayor Brown, "he was asked to leave multiple times" is a reason to have arrested the victim, not to have cracked his skull open. You'd better not be trying to claim otherwise.

To Mr. Evans and Mayor Brown and the officers involved, including the 57 who resigned from the emergency response team, you are proving protesters' point: police violence is out of control.

As not just police officers (or elected officials) but as members of the community, you have got to realize that.

You have got to stop seeing civilians as "other", as mere entities to be corralled and controlled by police.

You have got to see that the behavior of the two suspended officers was deeply disturbing and problematic.

Police around the country have been injured during these protests. However, that's not an excuse for police to hurt nonviolent, unarmed civilians preemptively.

Police are the ones with legally sanctioned weapons and powers of arrest. They have to be trained that with those powers come responsibilities. Chief among them is, or damned well ought to be, not harming nonviolent, unarmed civilians.

Police officers will make mistakes in the heat of the moment. Maybe, contrary to all the evidence I've seen, that will turn out to be the case here with the 75-year-old victim.

But Mr. Evans, and Mayor Brown, and you 57 Buffalo PD officers who resigned from the emergency response team, your words and actions can't be excused as mistakes made in the heat of the moment. You've all had time to digest what happened.

Your willingness to excuse the inexcusable suggests the Buffalo Police Department has a seriously twisted and sick culture, one that can't be tolerated by the civilians you are supposed to serve.

Live with respect

It might surprise you — it surprises me — that I'm mildly hopeful about the U.S. getting through this pandemic.

Don't get me wrong: I don't simply mean that I'm hopeful the U.S. will still exist after herd immunity is achieved. That has never seriously been in question, just as it's not in question that the Earth will continue to exist long after Homo sapiens has left the scene.

No, I mean that I'm mildly hopeful that epidemiologists' and public health experts' worst fears about rescinding stay-at-home orders won't be realized. I'm mildly hopeful that infection and death tolls won't be as high as projected.

Several weeks ago I read an intriguing piece (sorry, reference lost to the mists of time) wondering why, if Florida was full of beachgoers oblivious to the need for physical distancing, its hospitalization and death rates weren't higher. (Infection rates can appear artificially low if you simply refrain from testing — a tactic our domestic Dear Leader would love for us to embrace — but you can't hide hospitalizations or deaths as easily.)

It turned out that actual Florida residents were better at following stay-at-home guidelines, promulgated by local officials rather than the hands-off governor Ron Desantis, than those infamous beachgoers, who unsurprisingly were largely from out of state. In fact, Floridians had somewhat higher rates of staying at home than residents of other states.

This, along with anecdotal evidence from other states in news articles, suggests that much of the public has taken heed of public health guidance intended to slow the spread of infection. We won't disregard that guidance just because a governor, or even the domestic Dear Leader, declares the economy reopened.

To be sure, most of us have gone a little stir-crazy while remaining largely at home for a couple of months. There will therefore be some understandable relaxation of our vigilance, and there will likely be increases in the rate of infection as a result. That's regrettable.

However, if the majority of us don't resume life as it was in January or February — if we keep physically distancing, and wearing masks when physically distancing isn't possible, and doing all the other things we've learned will reduce the speed of the virus' spread — the worst fears of epidemiologists might well be avoided. The worst projections might well not be fulfilled.

There will remain some percentage of us who won't follow best practices for philosophical reasons: they don't believe SARS-CoV-2 is real, or they think the threat it poses has been wildly exaggerated. And maybe for them, especially if they live in areas of low population density, the novel coronavirus might as well not exist for all the health effect it has had or will have. Even if they come into contact with others who are infected, they might not contract CoViD-19, or might not suffer seriously from it: there is such a thing as getting lucky.

For those who view SARS-CoV-2 as a serious threat, understand that there's only so much you can do to keep other people from becoming infected, or from infecting others. In particular, you're not the mask- or physical-distancing police. Refrain from telling off strangers who aren't following what you think are best practices. You don't know their situation and in any case, your best bet is simply to keep well clear of them any way you can. And those feelings of resentment you get for having to inconvenience yourself when they're clearly the ones in the wrong? Get over them. Self-righteousness is a bad habit. Anyway, again, you do not know what difficulties they have in their lives.

On the flip side, if you don't think the threat of SARS-CoV-2 is serious (or even real), how about cutting the rest of us a break? It won't kill you to keep your distance from others who are wearing masks even if you think they're fools. And just as airlines can keep you off their planes if you won't comply with security measures (however pointless some of the measures might be), restaurants and stores can keep you out if you won't comply with best antiviral practices (however pointless some of those measures might seem). Follow their rules and be grateful they're open. Remember, too, that you might be wrong: the viral threat might be real.

Let's figure out a modus vivendi, shall we? Let's treat each other with a modicum of respect and humility in these weird times.

The U.S. coronavirus crisis was foreseeable

The U.S. coronavirus crisis was completely predictable.

First, a public health crisis in the form of a pandemic was inevitable. Really. This kind of crisis recurs in human history. Students of history and science knew it would happen again someday.

Second, the crisis that is this administration's inexcusably awful response to the pandemic was also completely predictable. Denial that a crisis exists, followed by boneheaded, simplistic, and futile attempts to address the crisis once its existence can no longer be denied, are exactly how Trump responds to every crisis.

Trump has contempt for expertise whenever it disagrees with his fixed ideas, and he cannnot be brought to revisit those ideas save by trickery.

Trump has the overweening arrogance that is the telltale sign of an inability to cope with being wrong, hence his all-consuming need to blame everyone else for legitimate criticism aimed at him. He is simply terrified of ever admitting responsibility, especially to himself.

Trump also gets a high from crowds cheering his scapegoating. They boost his fragile self-esteem by reinforcing his deep-seated belief that what is popular is also correct.

Trump's self-esteem is also tied to his financial self-worth, so he obsesses over maximizing his personal fortune. That the nation of which he is nominally president might have interests that conflict with his greed does not concern him. He is also incapable of measuring the nation's well-being except in purely economic terms.

Contempt for expertise, the desperate need to protect his fragile ego, and greed explain every deceitful statement Trump and his lackeys have made minimizing the virus' potential and actual impact, every fatuous boast about his administration's response to the crisis, every failure of his administration to act swiftly and in accordance with best scientific practices, and every opportunity his administration missed to mitigate the virus' spread.

Do you know why the U.S. has lower numbers of confirmed coronavirus carriers and COVID-19 sufferers than most other countries? It's not because we're magically immune, and it certainly isn't because of any mitigating action the Trump administration has taken. It's because you can only know the extent of an outbreak if you test widely, and the U.S. is alone among developed nations in its failure to test aggressively. We literally do not know the extent of coronavirus' spread in this country! Still! After months of knowing about its spread in other countries!

We still don't have that basic information because the Trump administration has failed for weeks to marshal the will and the resources. And the failure of will comes squarely from the man on top.

We are still in the dark because Trump's head is in the sand.

Unfortunately, pandemics are like once-a-century floods or storms or earthquakes: even though we know they will happen, as a society we don't prepare for them to anything like the degree we should. President Obama created a pandemic-response team only in the aftermath of the SARS and Ebola crises, a belated recognition that such outbreaks were bound to recur. Unfortunately, of course, Trump dismantled that bit of critical infrastructure. (Honestly, I would have expected nothing less from a man who is so obsessed with hating President Obama.)

So in addition to our usual level of unpreparedness for very infrequent disasters, we face this one saddled with a president whose unique intellectual, emotional, and moral deficits render him incompetent to face it head-on.

And this incompetence was foreseeable.

Trump fails first stage of COVID-19 response

In case it wasn't obvious, the United States is way, way, way the hell behind the curve in reacting to the new coronavirus, the one that causes the infection officially named COVID-19.

Other countries — South Korea, Germany, Italy, China — have been aggressively testing their populations for days or weeks now. They've all managed to test thousands if not tens of thousands of people; in China that number almost certainly has reached into the millions.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., we've seen baffling incompetence from the federal government, and not just from the Incompetent-in-Chief: the respected Centers for Disease Control has fallen down on the job as well, according to a New York Times piece entitled, "As Coronavirus Numbers Rise, C.D.C. Testing Comes Under Fire".

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first attempt to mass produce a diagnostic test kit, a discovery made only after officials had shipped hundreds of kits to state laboratories.

A promised replacement took several weeks, and still did not permit state and local laboratories to make final diagnoses. And the C.D.C. essentially ensured that Americans would be tested in very few numbers by imposing stringent and narrow criteria, critics say.

One misstep, though exasperating, would have been understandable. This cascade of botched actions, though, tells us that our domestic Dear Leader's assault on the expertise within the federal government has gone far enough that we must assume the federal government is not up to protecting us from COVID-19.

Far more widespread testing in this country should have started days or weeks ago. It didn't happen. Why?

Not just because the C.D.C. botched the first batch of mass-produced tests. Trump also (a) didn't make COVID-19 a priority and (b) had already hollowed out the federal government's pandemic-response capabiility by defunding efforts initiated under President Obama.

Yes, this administration's shameful ineptitude at responding to COVID-19 stems, as so much of its ineptitude does, from the domestic Dear Leader's frustration that a black man did the domestic Dear Leader's job an order of magnitude better than the domestic Dear Leader can.

Trump will lie about his administration's inexcusable failures in responding to COVID-19. However, only those in the thrall of slavishly adoring far-right punditry will believe him.

The truth is that his administration is desperately playing catch-up, flailing to respond due to wounds he inflicted on federal agencies — and due to his own ignorance, overweening pride, and contemptuous indifference to the job he holds.

MSNBC, get your priorities straight

Although I pledged a while back not to watch news, especially pundit-driven news like that of the cable so-called news networks, I broke that promise to indulge in Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. On her best nights she pulls together disparate facts in a non-conspiracy-mongering way to paint a hitherto unrealized picture. (That's on her best nights. She doesn't live up to her potential every night.)

Tonight Maddow focused her whole show on the new coronavirus and our federal government's inept response so far. Some might consider her tone unnecessarily alarming but I think she and her guests made their case that the federal government simply is not sufficiently staffed up to cope with the crisis, and the staffing (and funding) shortfall is squarely Donald Trump's fault. (Perhaps needless to say, that doesn't surprise me: if I expected anything from the Ignoramus-in-Chief, it was a total inability either to cope with scientific fact or to take expert advice.)

Her show segued into The Last Word, guest-hosted by Ali Velshi. Velshi had Anthony Fauci, a noted public-health expert, as one of his two guests. Fauci had baarely completed his opening remarks when Velshi jumped in to mention that the Democratic primary debate had ended and that programming would now switch to post-debate coverage.

What the fuck?

It's bad enough that MSNBC, like its two major competitors, is fixated on the horse-race aspect of the presidential primaries. That's asinine but in general that's not too harmful. It even has one positive consequence: it frees up time I otherwise might spend watching Maddow.

However, when a substantial chunk of the network's audience has just spent an hour absorbing the gravity of an incipient public-health crisis, jumping back to the horse race isn't just jarring, it's journalistically irresponsible.

To the geniuses making editorial decisions at MSNBC I have one request:

Get your heads out of your asses!

Nobody will remember or care about the horse race a month from now.

However, we will remember the night you idiots decided to place your moronic horse race above a worsening public health crisis.

What is wrong with you?

Get your fucking priorities straight, for Christ's sake.

Quid pro quo, or not?

William Taylor's opening statement in his deposition as part of the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry included a description of a 7 September 2019 phone call between Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, as relayed to Taylor by NSC Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs Tim Morrison.

According to Mr. Morrison, President Trump told Ambassador Sondland that he was not asking for a “quid pro quo.” But President Trump did insist that President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelenskyy should want to do this himself.

Donald Trump may have insisted he was not asking for a quid pro quo, but does his assertion fit the facts? Here's Taylor's description of Sondland's conversation with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy subsequent to Sondland's 7 September call with Trump.

The following day, on September 8, Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He said he had talked to President Trump as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump was adamant that President Zelenskyy, himself, had to “clear things up and do it in public.” President Trump said it was not a “quid pro quo.” Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelenskyy and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskyy did not “clear things up” in public, we would be at a “stalemate.” I understood a “stalemate” to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance.

"Stalemate" only makes sense if there's some kind of interaction. In business and diplomacy, negotiations stalemate when neither side is willing to change its bargaining position.

Trump knew Ukraine needed the military assistance Congress had approved but that he was refusing to disburse. If Trump had a different reason for holding up that aid, a reason that would stand public scrutiny, he would have told Zelenskyy.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Trump was holding up the assistance in order to extort a public announcement that President Zelenskyy would "investigate" Joe Biden in order to dig up "dirt" that Trump's campaign could use in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump also wants whatever flimsy vindication can be conjured up for the nonsensical conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.)

"Give me dirt on Biden and I'll give you your military aid." That's the message Trump was sending Zelenskyy.

In the truth-telling world, we call that a quid pro quo — literally, this for that.

Whether Trump was lying or being an imbecile, his insistence that he wasn't asking for a quid pro quo is simply false.

Trump's defenders will repeat until the end of time that he never asked for a quid pro quo. Sondland himself tried to parrot that line, not just in the 8 September phone call with Taylor but in subsequent text messages to Taylor. Taylor, not being a fool, saw through that bullshit.

So do the rest of us.

Yes, it was a quid pro quo. And no amount of bullshit from Trump or his defenders can change that.

Is it an impeachable offense? Different question but as long as I'm writing — yes, it goddamned well is impeachable, too.

Trump leveraged the power of the presidency to extort a foreign head of state for personal gain. He wasn't acting in the interests of the United States. That's a violation of his oath of office, which requires him to act in the nation's interests, not his own.

You may love Trump, you may think he has gotten a raw deal from those of us who didn't vote for him, but you goddamned well ought to see what a terrible precedent his extortion sets for future presidents — including those you might loathe.

He has grossly abused the power of his office in exactly the way some of the Founders worried a president might. He must be impeached. I would also urge Senate Republicans to give serious consideration not just to convicting him but to removing him from office. There are a ton of reasons he is unfit to be president (and Congressional Republicans will privately concede most of them) but this incident alone is sufficient to justify that extreme step,

Of "executive power"

The United States Constitution, in Article II, Section, 1, states:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Curiously, nowhere in the Constitution is "The executive Power" defined.

Prof. Julian Davis Mortenson took a stab at figuring out what "executive power" actually meant to the generation that wrote the Constitution. His piece begins, somewhat provocatively, "Is the president a king?" Put so baldly the question sounds "absurd", as Mortenson admits, but "[a] great many lawyers, politicians, judges, and policy experts think the U.S. Constitution builds from exactly that starting point". One of those judges is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and one of those lawyers is Attorney General William Barr. In short, imperial-presidency advocates carry a lot of weight in our current government.

As for Mortenson (spoiler alert!):

After years of research into an enormous array of colonial, revolutionary, and founding-era sources, I’m here to tell you that—as a historical matter—this president-as-king claim is utterly and totally wrong.

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Revolutionary War: Britain's George III is no hero in any American telling of that tale. The astonishing thing, then, is that so many otherwise intelligent people think the Constitution would grant the president such royal power.

(Lest you think this is an anti-Trump hit piece, by the way, Prof. Mortenson notes that both Obama and W also argued for arguably over-broad interpretations of presidential power when it suited them.)

This is an important piece to read if you want to understand what the founding generation actually intended the president to do in our government. It wasn't much, at least at the beginning of the republic.

Prof. Mortenson has a warning for textual originalists, as so many conservatives today are:

You can advocate originalism in constitutional interpretation. You can support the imperial presidency. But you can’t do both at the same time.

However you feel about presidential power, you owe it to yourself to read this relatively short but cogent piece.