Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Nearly three-quarters of Black folk believe police killings of Black and brown youth have gotten worse in the last 12 months in a new Axios/Ipsos poll, while only one-third of white respondents do.

Nearly seven out of 10 Black Americans say police treatment has gotten worse in the past year, and about the same percentage believe police shootings of Black and brown youths have become worse in that time, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll.

The big picture: The poll, conducted a year after George Floyd's death, suggests that the relationship between Black Americans and the police not only hasn't improved, but is a profound and escalating crisis.  Far from seeing the police's role as one to protect and serve, a majority of Black Americans now say that calling the police or 911 often does more harm than good. And that distrust is backed by personal experience. Black and Hispanic Americans are significantly more likely than white or Asian Americans to encounter threatening situations at traffic stops, like guns drawn or extra officers called in. 

More results from the poll will be released later today in the latest of Axios' "Hard Truths" series of deep dives on systemic racism, this one focusing on the criminal justice system.

By the numbers: 68% of Black respondents said police treatment of Black Americans has gotten worse in the past year, with just 6% saying it has improved.
42% of Hispanic respondents and 37% of Asian respondents agreed that police treatment of Black Americans has become worse. By contrast, just 25% of white Americans agreed, with 61% saying police treatment of Black Americans had neither improved nor worsened in the last year.

Likewise, 72% of Black Americans said police shootings of Black or brown youths have gotten worse in the last year — a view that was shared by 49% of Hispanic Americans, and comes after the deaths of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in recent weeks. 32% of white respondents and 44% of Asian respondents agreed.

Most Americans still have a positive view of police and law enforcement. But that's not true of Black Americans. Just four out of 10 said they have favorable views of police and law enforcement, while 57% said they have unfavorable views.

 

I've had some iffy experiences with cops at best, but only had one truly bad interaction with police here in Kentucky, and I was almost accused of stealing my own car at the time because my plates had expired in NC, but apparently the officer either didn't want the hassle (it was late, dark, and snowy) or he just gave up on trying to bring me in. He did give me a $350 ticket though and 30 days to pay it, or I would go to jail he promised. I 100% believed he was going to make sure to follow up on that threat.

If I hadn't been able to come up with the money, yeah. Jail, no job, a record. Good luck getting hired again, as Kentucky makes sure that stays on your record for five years. He figured I didn't have the cash and that I'd be disappeared.

Black Lives still matter.

Sunday Long Read: One Versus A Country

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from essayist Alexander Chee in GQ, writing about his experiences with his father's lessons on self-defense, self-reliance, and self-awareness being Korean in America, something very relevant given the massive rise in hate crimes here against AAPI folks.

Born in 1939 during what would be the last years of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, my father, Choung Tai Chee, also called Charles or Chuck or Charlie, came to the United States in 1960. He was flashy, cocky, unafraid, it seemed, of anything. Wherever we were in the world, he seemed at home, right up until near the end of his life, when he was hospitalized after a car accident that left him in a coma. Only in that hospital bed, his head shaved for surgery, did he look out of place to me.

A tae kwon do champion by the age of 18 in Korea, he had begun studying martial arts at age 8, eventually teaching them as a way to put himself through graduate school, first in engineering and then oceanography, in Texas, California, and Rhode Island. He loved the teaching. The rising popularity of martial arts in the 1960s in Hollywood meant he made celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra Jr., Paul Lynde, Sal Mineo, and Peter Fonda, who my father said had fixed him up on a date with his sister, Jane, in the days before Barbarella. A favorite photo from his time in Texas shows him flying through the air, a human horseshoe, each of his bare feet breaking a board held shoulder high on each side by his students.

When I complained about my wet boots during the winters growing up in Maine, he told me stories about running barefoot in the snow in Korea to harden his feet for tae kwon do. His answer to many of my childhood complaints was usually that I had to be tougher, stronger, prepared for any attack or disaster. The lesson his generation took from those they lost to the Korean War was that death was always close, and I know now that he was doing all he could to teach me to protect myself. When I cried at the beach at the water’s edge, afraid of the waves, he threw me in. “No son of mine is going to be afraid of the ocean,” he said. When I first started swimming lessons, he told me I had to be a strong swimmer, in case the boat I was on went down, so I could swim to shore. When he taught me to body-surf, he taught me about how to know the approach of an undertow, and how to survive a riptide. When I lacked a competitive streak, he took to racing me at something I loved—swimming underwater while holding my breath. I was an asthmatic child, but soon, intent on beating him, I could swim 50 yards this way at a time.

For all of that, he was an exceedingly gentle father. He took me snorkeling on his back, when I was five, telling me we were playing at being dolphins. There he taught me the names of the fish along the reef where we lived in Guam. He would praise the highlights in my hair, and laugh, calling me “Apollo.” And as for any pressure regarding my future career, he offered something very rare for a Korean man of his generation. “Be whatever you want to be,” he told me. “Just be the best at it that you can possibly be.”

Only when I was older did I understand the warning about being strong enough to swim to shore in another context, when I learned the boat he and his family had fled in from what was about to become North Korea nearly sank in a storm. In Seoul as a child, he scavenged food for his family with his older brother, coming home with bags of rice found on overturned military supply trucks, while his father went to the farms, collecting gleanings. His attempts to teach me to strip a chicken clean of its meat make a different sense now. I had thought of him as an immigrant without thinking about how the Korean War made him one of the dispossessed, almost a refugee, all before he left Korea.

When I began getting into fights as a child in the U.S., he put me into classes in karate and tae kwon do for these same reasons. He loved me and he wanted me to be strong. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to take on a whole country.

A country that would accept you, to a point, as long as you were one of the "good ones". Yeah, I can relate.

Farming Up Old History

Rural white farmers across America are growing increasingly hostile toward the idea of a Biden administration program that pays Black farmers a damn thing and that it's "reparations", and if they don't get money too, they'll make sure nobody gets a dime.

Shade Lewis had just come in from feeding his cows one sunny spring afternoon when he opened a letter that could change his life: The government was offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan, part of a new debt relief program created by Democrats to help farmers who have endured generations of racial discrimination.

It was a windfall for a 29-year-old who has spent the past decade scratching out a living as the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri, where signposts quoting Genesis line the soybean fields and traffic signals warn drivers to go slow because it is planting season.

But the $4 billion fund has angered conservative white farmers who say they are being unfairly excluded because of their race. And it has plunged Mr. Lewis and other farmers of color into a new culture war over race, money and power in American farming.

“You can feel the tension,” Mr. Lewis said. “We’ve caught a lot of heat from the conservative Caucasian farmers.”

The debt relief is redress set aside for what the government calls “socially disadvantaged farmers” — Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other nonwhite workers who have endured a long history of discrimination, from violence and land theft in the Jim Crow South to banks and federal farm offices that refused them loans or government benefits that went to white farmers.

The program is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to confront how racial injustice has shaped American farming, which is overwhelmingly white. Black farm advocacy groups say that nearly all the land, profit and subsidies go to the biggest, most powerful farm operations, leaving Black farmers with little. But in large portions of rural America, the payments threaten to further anger white conservative farmers.

The plans have drawn thousands of enraged comments on farm forums and are being fought by banks worried about losing interest income. And some rural residents have rallied around a new slogan, cribbed from the conservative response to the Black Lives Matter movement: All Farmers Matter.

If you thought the politics of white resentment was going to cost Democrats any shot at rural states before, wait until Republicans are running ads with camera shots where money is given from white hands in suits to black hands in work shirts, and the white hand in the work shirt in the shot gets nothing. Run that for 2022 and even California will lose multiple House seats.

Support for Black Lives Matter among white voters has cratered in the last year (and it's fallen among Latino voters too.)

 

It's only going to get worse, too. This will absolutely be a rallying point in every rural community and things are going to go very, very badly for Black farmers. Granted, it just means Republicans will win rural House districts by 30 instead of just 20, but it could very well cost Dems seats in 2022 on top of everything else.

Really what I'm afraid of at this point is more violence. And Republicans are already suing in multiple states to block the program.

No, I quickly foresee Black farmers quietly telling the Biden administration that they don't want the money, because it comes guaranteed with the hatred of neighbors. And Black farmers in general are only going to suffer more in the months and years ahead.

Because we always do.

This is America.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie moves from Arizona to Georgia, from Phoenix to Atlanta, as a GOP judge has ruled that the state's new GOP voter suppression laws now allow for a "citizen recount" of November's mail ballots with the intent of overturning Biden's win there.

A Georgia state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County to allow a group of local voters to inspect all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 election in response to a lawsuit alleging that officials accepted thousands of counterfeit ballots.

The decision marks the latest instance of a local government being forced to undergo a third-party inspection of its election practices amid baseless accusations promoted by President Donald Trump that fraud flipped the 2020 contest for President Biden.

The inspection in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, is likely to proceed differently than an audit underway in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Republican state senators ordered county election officials to hand over equipment and ballots to a private company called Cyber Ninjas for examination. That process has come under widespread criticism for lacking security measures and failing to follow the rigorous practices of government recounts. On Thursday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) urged local officials to toss their machines after the audit is complete because their security is now in doubt.

In Georgia, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ruled on Friday that the nine plaintiffs and their experts could examine copies of the ballots but never touch the originals, which will remain in the possession of Fulton election officials. Further details of how the inspection will proceed are expected next week, said one of the plaintiffs, Garland Favorito.

The order for the new ballot inspection comes after Georgia officials did three separate audits of the vote last year, including a hand recount, which produced no evidence of widespread fraud.

Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts said it was “outrageous” that the county “continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year’s election.”

“The fact remains that Fulton County safely and securely carried out an election in the midst of a public health pandemic,” Pitts said in a statement. “It’s a shame to see that the ‘Big Lie’ lives on and could cost the hardworking taxpayers of this county.”

A spokesman for Pitts said he plans to meet with the Fulton County attorney to “review all legal options” to block “this waste of taxpayer resources.”

Fulton County is one of numerous communities where local residents have recently pushed to revisit the 2020 election results, echoing Trump’s false claims of fraud.

 

I'm sure another lawsuit will be filed to force the county to hand over the original votes, and will continue for months. Expect other blue urban areas in red states to be force-audited again and again as well, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Milwaukee, the list will go on and on.

 

The entire point of the Big Lie remains to justify the coming GOP nullification of Democratic party wins in 2022. Period. 

Count on it.

Things get very nasty from there.

The Big Lie, Con't

The consequences of the Big Lie continue in Arizona's largest county as AZ Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is warning that the entire county's election machines will need to be replaced because chain of custody practices were absolutely not followed to protect the machines from tampering.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Thursday that the voting machines Republicans turned over to private companies as part of their audit of the 2020 election are no longer safe for use in future elections.

In a letter sent to Maricopa County officials and shared with NBC News, Hobbs, a Democrat, cited security concerns about losing the chain of custody over the equipment when it was handed over to the auditors and urged the county to get new machines. If it does not, her office would consider decertifying the equipment involved in the audit, she wrote. That would remove the machines from service.

State Senate Republicans subpoenaed nearly 400 of Maricopa County's election machines, along with ballots cast by voters in November's election, to facilitate an unusual audit of the election results. The GOP hired private firms, led by the Florida-based cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas, to do the work.

"I have grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas' control," Hobbs wrote in the letter to the county's mostly Republican Board of Supervisors, which oversees the county elections.

In Arizona, the secretary of state can decertify machinery in consultation with the state's Election Equipment Certification Committee, a three-person panel appointed by Hobbs.

The audit itself is an extraordinarily partisan effort after Arizona Republicans spent months questioning the accuracy of President Joe Biden's narrow win in the state while boosting former President Donald Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him.

The recount operation has been dogged by controversy and conspiracy theories since Day One, as state and federal experts and law enforcement officials have questioned the legality and prudence of the auditors and their efforts. The Justice Department and election experts have warned that some of their proposed processes could violate federal law, while auditors' searches for things like bamboo and secret watermarks have drawn scorn and mockery.

 

There's no doubt in my mind that the machines were fiddled with and that doing so was the entire point of the plan. If Hobbs had allowed the machines to be used again, the GOP would have pounced and said "Aha! The machines really were altered! " Hobbs would have been run out of the state if not arrested for fraud and it would have been the turning point in the "battle" to "prove" national election fraud in favor of the Democrats.

Luckily, Katie Hobbs is much smarter than that and has flipped the argument on its head, and she absolutely has the power to decertify the machines and toss them, forcing the county (and state) to pay for all new machines.

Still, expect the narrative to be "SHE'S DUMPING THE EVIDENCE OF FRAUD" and for the state GOP to try to stop the decertification somehow.

Me, I'd have the machines audited for tampering by Cyber Ninjas, but this works too.

A Lotto Solutions In Here

Maryland joins Ohio in taking the money that would have been used in ad campaigns to get vaccine resisters to get the jab and instead just using it for lottery prizes for the vaccinated. 

With vaccine demand dropping, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is launching a $2 million lottery that will hand out dozens of $40,000 cash prizes to state residents who have received coronavirus vaccinations — along with a grand prize of $400,000.

Hogan (R) said daily drawings for a $40,000 prize will be held from Tuesday to July 3. On July 4, the $400,000 grand prize will be awarded via a random drawing.

All state residents 18 and older who received coronavirus vaccinations in Maryland will be eligible — regardless of when the shots were administered. No registration or entry is necessary.

“That’s 40 drawings over 40 days for the chance to win $40,000 each day,” Hogan said. “Entry is very simple. . . . Get your shot for a shot to win.”

The VaxCash lottery is the latest effort by Maryland to boost vaccination as the state tries to return to pre-pandemic normalcy. It is one of the largest cash incentives a state government has offered. This month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) announced that he would offer five $1 million prizes to vaccinated state residents, along with four-year college scholarships for five vaccinated Ohioans younger than 18.

“Those of you who are still on the fence, there is no better time than now,” Hogan said outside the governor’s mansion in Annapolis, standing next to state lottery and health officials and a man in a Maryland lottery ball costume.

Each vaccinated Maryland resident will be randomly assigned a number in a system that will be maintained by the state Department of Health, officials said. The state lottery agency will select a number each day during the promotion.

Winners will be contacted and have to provide written consent to accept the prize. They can remain anonymous but will be encouraged to share their stories.

Maryland Lottery and Gaming Director Gordon Medenica called the effort “one of the most creative lottery promotions” his agency has ever done. He said officials are scrambling “on relatively short notice” to pull it together.

“This promotion is going to be good for the lottery, but much more importantly it is going to be good for the state of Maryland, because everybody is a winner if you get vaccinated,” Medenica said.

The funds for the drawing are being provided by the state lottery’s marketing fund, Hogan said.

 

I'm actually okay with this. If we have to make it lowest common denominator to get people to get vaccinated, then fine. Do what it takes. Better than spending millions on ads that they'll ignore.