Cops and Trumpery

Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of Nixon's resignaton from the US presidency.  We used to have annual parties to celebrate.  I miss that.  It was also the thirteenth anniversary of That Accident I had.

• Baltimore, MD.
• Washington Post excerpts from Justice Department's Report.

  and more than 60 complaints alleging unlawful strip searches. In one of these incidents — memorialized in a complaint that the Department sustained — officers in BPD’s Eastern District publicly strip-searched a woman following a routine traffic stop for a missing headlight. Officers ordered the woman to exit her vehicle, remove her clothes, and stand on the sidewalk to be searched. The woman asked the male officer in charge, “I really gotta take all my clothes off?” The male officer replied “yeah” and ordered a female officer to strip search the woman. The female officer then put on purple latex gloves, pulled up the woman’s shirt and searched around her bra. Finding no weapons or contraband around the woman’s chest, the officer then pulled down the woman’s underwear and searched her anal cavity. This search again found no evidence of wrongdoing and the officers released the woman without charges. Indeed, the woman received only a repair order for her headlight. “

• Background (Sarah Lazare, AlterNet)

  In other words, Baltimore’s widely demonized protesters were telling the truth. They were expressing outrage at a police force whose atrocities against their community are now confirmed and documented in harrowing detail by the federal government.

And still some people (probably not of color) who think that Black Lives Matter exaggerates the problem.
• Lenny Bruce, in a sketch I used to have on tape ("The Palladium"), recounted the disastrous outing of an unfunny comedian who resorted to rudeness on stage.  (Yes, you have to hear the whole thing.  Think of it as background research.)  John Scalzi dissects the current iteration of unfunny clown.

  So here’s the context of that joke: Donald Trump is a man who has pursued the presidency through racism and white nationalism and by insinuating criminal activity on the part of his opponents (or their families), who has encouraged foreign agents to subvert the US election process (another “joke”) and who is actively training his base of support — angry and scared white people, many of whom have a nearly-fanatical attachment to their firearms — to consider the election process rigged if it does not produce the result they want. Then, at a political rally, as the GOP candidate for president, while speaking about the 2nd Amendment and arguing how his opponent Hillary Clinton wants to get rid of it — to get rid of his angry white supporter’s firearms! — he drops a little joke about how, well, actually, they could oppose her, nod nod, wink wink.
  
  Trump wasn’t making a private joke with friends in the comfort of his own ridiculously baroque home. He wasn’t writing satire (which is often not funny) or black humor in the pages of, say, the New Yorker. He wasn’t on the stage of a comedy club trying out five minutes of edgy new material in front of a half-drunk midnight crowd who are there to see someone else anyway. He wasn’t putting it in the comments of his liberal friend’s Facebook post about gun control. He wasn’t doing any of those things — although even if he were, he could still be held accountable for his words. Rather, he was, as the GOP candidate for president, at a rally of his supporters, in a race he is currently far behind in, joking about someone killing off Hillary Clinton, or whomever she appoints as a judge. He wasn’t there to make comedy. He was there, quite literally, as a political statement. That’s the context.

  Ahem.