Protest art on the fence

Vidor, Texas is a place that fought integration in the 1990s. There used to be a Klan bookstore. A white person there could casually say racist things and get nodding heads from all the white people around them. Dan Solomon writes for Texas Monthly and tweeted a thread about a Black Lives Matter protest in town. Those casual racists felt outnumbered by white neighbors supporting the protests. Hopefully, they’ll be a bit more reluctant to voice their racism. That person in line with you at the store might have participated in the protest.



One result of the protests is voter registration is up.



josie duffy rice is a lawyer and hosts a justice podcast. She tweeted a thread about the current state of police:

we have encouraged and perpetuated a system that allows, and even incentivizes, police to be their absolute worst selves. their least empathetic. their least dignified. their most brutal. extremely unwilling to speak up against the powers that be.

policing also incentivizes failure. right now, as I and many others have pointed out over the past few days, we solve approximately 40% of murders in many major cities in america. 40%. and that's more than the percentage of rapes and other serious crimes we solve.
...
and, unsurprisingly, it isn't working. even if you take brutality and killing people out of the picture entirely - even if the cops were not explicitly harming people every day - we would still have to reckon with the fact that police don't even solve crimes!!!

so who is this system good for? if the police in this country drew up a public safety system from scratch, is this what they would draw? why can't we create better systems that incentivize the people involved to access their humanity?

Interesting and good points. However, I wish she had gone more into how the current system incentivizes police to be bad and who benefits from the current system.



Daniel Block wrote an article for Washington Monthly exploring what might happen the day after the election. I’ve mentioned several times that the nasty guy won’t willingly leave the White House if he loses. Block poses some scenarios.

Most autocrats rig the system well in advance. But our decentralized election system makes that difficult. Though I note it happened in 2000 in Florida, 2004 in Ohio, and perhaps in three states in 2016. Each was an election that was close. There has been talk of voter suppression and claims of voter fraud for a long time now.

Autocrats tend to have a politicized military, which would be hard to do with American military.

If the election is close (so let’s make sure it isn’t) and the nasty guy loses, he’ll claim fraud. Then it will depend whether GOP leadership and Fox News backs him up or simply remains silent. Then it would go to the courts. And the courts already gave us Bush II and have been stuffed with conservative ideologues over the last few years.

The GOP could play constitutional hardball by giving the state legislatures in key states the power to name electors in spite of how the people voted. The whole election could be thrown to Congress to sort out.

Whether the nasty guy wins or loses perhaps 35% of the country will believe the election was rigged.



The nasty guy is fascinated by nuclear weapons. It goes along with his desire to cause mass death (see his response to the virus). So he’s started talking about testing nuclear bombs. Eighty Congressional Democrats wrote a letter to the nasty guy, as well as Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Energy Secretary Dan Broulliette saying what a bad idea this is. Such tests are unnecessary and would be viewed as dangerously provocative. Adversaries would respond in kind. It would not improve America’s security.

It’s scary such a letter needs to be written.



I wrote about the fence the nasty guy put up around the White House to keep protesters away. However, the protesters are having their way with the outside of the fence – they have attached protest signs, memorial signs, and other art to the fence. Aysha Qamar of Daily Kos has gathered photos of the fence.