Last Call For Bad Boys Bad Boys

Police officers protect citizens, supposedly, but sometimes they're just all-too-human dumbasses with guns and licenses to kill people who just happen to be comically bad at their jobs.

An internal investigation has been launched at the Detroit Police Department after two different precincts got into a turf war as they converged on an east side neighborhood. 

Neighbors who live on Andover on Detroit's east side will be the first to tell you this area is known for constant drug activity.

"Definitely a drug problem in our neighbor for years," said one resident, " but I don't think anyone can stop it." 

On Thursday Detroit police certainly tried -- but maybe too hard. 

Sources say it started when two special ops officers from the 12th Precinct were operating a "push off" on Andover near Seven Mile. That is when two undercover officers pretend to be dope dealers, waiting for eager customers to approach, and then arrest potential buyers and seize their vehicles. 

But this time, instead of customers, special ops officers from the 11th Precinct showed up. Not realizing they were fellow officers, they ordered the other undercover officers to the ground. 

FOX 2 is told the rest of the special ops team from the 12th Precinct showed up, and officers began raiding a house in the 19300 block of Andover. But instead of fighting crime, officers from both precincts began fighting with each other. 

Sources say guns were drawn and punches were thrown while the homeowner stood and watched.

The department's top cops were notified along with Internal Affairs. Each officer involved is now under investigation as the department tried to determine what went wrong. 

"You've gotta have to have more communication, I guess," said the resident. "I don't understand what happened about that - communicate."

I don't know where to begin on this story.  You have the odious War on Drugs, which has destroyed black neighborhoods in cities like Detroit for decades.  You have the property seizure angle, as the Detroit cops posing as dealers were completely ready to take people's vehicles regardless of guilt.  You have the race factor as these cops were there to contribute to crime in a black neighborhood in order to "stop" it, something that would never be tolerated in a wealthy white Detroit neighborhood like Palmer Woods or Sherwood Forest. And you have the police misconduct angle, where two sets of undercover cops got into a goddamn fistfight because each thought the other were actual crooks.

This is the state of policing in America in 2017, and under Trump and Jeff Sessions it's only going to get worse.

The Tale Of A Lesser Moore, Con't

Senate Republicans really, really, really want to get rid of Roy Moore for two reasons: first, he's not Donald Trump so he's problematic, second, they remember Todd Akin in 2014 (the whole "he's a repugnant chancre on the ass of humanity" doesn't seem to matter as the guy is a solid 98% vote for the GOP agenda.)

It's gotten so morbidly funny because Moore absolutely refuses to drop out, Republicans are trying to rig the election to keep their 52-48 majority in 2018, and they want to get placeholder GOP Sen. Luther Strange to resign ASAP, which would somehow trigger a brand new special election process and allow Alabama GOP Gov. Kay Ivey to appoint someone else.

Can you guess who that might be?

Republican leaders are exploring a dramatic remedy to salvage the Alabama Senate seat as fresh polling shows Roy Moore's prospects fading fast. 

With less than four weeks until the special election and no sign that the party’s besieged nominee will exit the race, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his top advisers are discussing the legal feasibility of asking appointed Sen. Luther Strange to resign from his seat in order to trigger a new special election.

McConnell aides express caution, saying they're uncertain whether such a move, one of several options being discussed, is even possible. Yet the talks underscore the despair among top Republicans over relinquishing a seat in deep-red Alabama, further diminishing their slim Senate majority. 

New GOP polling obtained by POLITICO suggests that Moore is cratering. A survey conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee after allegations emerged that Moore had engaged in sexual misconduct with teenagers showed him trailing Democratic candidate Doug Jones by 12 points. Other recent polling has the race closer. 

McConnell’s team had been high on the idea of asking Jeff Sessions, who held the Alabama seat for two decades prior to becoming Attorney General, to run as a write-in candidate. But the committee polled the prospect of Sessions waging a write-in bid and the outcome was unfavorable, said three people familiar with the results. Party officials worry that a write-in candidacy would serve only to split the Republican vote and seal a Jones victory. 

Plus, Sessions isn't interested, according to several people who've spoken about it with him. He has received overtures from Republican lawmakers, including Richard Shelby, Alabama’s longtime Republican senator, who spoke with Sessions this week.

I believe that Sessions might not want to do this, but I damn sure bet that Sessions will do it if Trump tells him to resign.  Of course in this scenario, Alabama would need another interim senator between whenever Strange resigned and whenever Ivey decides to hold the special election, and I'm guessing Sessions would be convinced to do it.

My theory then goes that Trump would need an interim Attorney General, and Trump would just play Saturday Night Massacre and keep firing people until he found somebody who would get rid of Mueller.

Of course, the combination of staking out Roy Moore in the desert and firing Robert Mueller would be that Constitutional Crisis™ moment that we've been expecting for some time now, with the results being who knows what.  It's going to be a political supervolcano going off under the country and I think things would get demonstrably worse around these parts very quickly.

Personally, I keep forgetting that the DoJ official that Nixon found to be his bag man to shitcan special prosecutor Archie Cox was the now infamous Robert Bork.  I wonder who Trump will find to pull the trigger should this go down.

And before you say "Trump won't do that" consider that we're at the point where the GOP is so completely morally bankrupt and fundamentally opposed to open democracy that they party leaders are now openly having a serious talk of voiding an election just to get rid of a guy whom they can't convince to step aside.

So yes, I absolutely think the GOP is 100% capable of doing this.  Whether Trump will or not I don't know, but it would be the best way to get rid of both Mueller and Sessions.  Both have slighted Trump in the past, and we all know how much Trump loves to gain vengeance.

If we're at this point in the game, where Strange is being pressured to resign now, then the rest of this is absolutely possible.  If it happens things are going to move extremely quickly.

Stay tuned.

What About Bill Whataboutism

Given a known vile Republican sexual predator currently in the White House and another one trying to win a Senate seat in a special election next month, only Democrats would be stupid enough to go after Bill Clinton at a time like this, but there you are.

How vitiated Bill Clinton seemed at the 2016 Democratic convention. Some of his appetites, at least, had waned; his wandering, “Norwegian Wood” speech about his wife struck the nostalgic notes of a husband’s 50th-anniversary toast, and the crowd—for the most part—indulged it in that spirit. Clearly, he was no longer thinking about tomorrow. With a pencil neck and a sagging jacket he clambered gamely onto the stage after Hillary’s acceptance speech and played happily with the red balloons that fell from the ceiling.

When the couple repeatedly reminded the crowd of their new status as grandparents it was to suggest very different associations in voters’ minds. Hillary’s grandmotherhood was evoked to suggest the next phase in her lifelong work on behalf of women and children—in this case forging a bond with the millions of American grandmothers who are doing the hard work of raising the next generation, while their own adult children muddle through life. But Bill’s being a grandfather was intended to send a different message: Don’t worry about him anymore; he’s old now. He won’t get into those messes again.

Yet let us not forget the sex crimes of which the younger, stronger Bill Clinton was very credibly accused in the 1990s. Juanita Broaddrick reported that when she was a volunteer on one of his gubernatorial campaigns, she had arranged to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, he had changed the location to her room in the hotel, where she says he very violently raped her. She said that she fought against Clinton throughout a rape that left her bloodied. At a different Arkansas hotel, he caught sight of a minor state employee named Paula Jones, and, Jones said, he sent a couple of state troopers to invite her to his suite, where he exposed his penis to her and told her to kiss it. Kathleen Willey said that she met him in the Oval Office for personal and professional advice and that he groped her, rubbed his erect penis on her, and pushed her hand to his crotch.

It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation, and it was willing—eager—to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.

The notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed by Gloria Steinem must surely stand as one of the most regretted public actions of her life. It slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and age-shamed; it urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused. Moreover (never write an op-ed in a hurry; you’ll accidentally say what you really believe), it characterized contemporary feminism as a weaponized auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

And Michele Goldberg isn't the only one dealing in hair shirts and horsehide whips this week, over at Vox Matthew Yglesias comes to the conclusion Clinton should have resigned 20 years ago in order to prove his wokeness.

In the midst of the very same public statement in which he confessed the error, Clinton also mounted the defense that would see him through to victory — portraying the issue as fundamentally a private family matter rather than a topic of urgent public concern.

"I intend to reclaim my family life for my family," he said. "It's nobody's business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

To this line of argument, Republicans offered what was fundamentally the wrong countercharge. They argued that in the effort to spare himself from the personal and marital embarrassment entailed by having the affair exposed, Clinton committed perjury when testifying about the matter in a deposition related to Paula Jones’s lawsuit against him.

What they should have argued was something simpler: A president who uses the power of the Oval Office to seduce a 20-something subordinate is morally bankrupt and contributing, in a meaningful way, to a serious social problem that disadvantages millions of women throughout their lives.

But by and large, they didn’t. So Clinton countered with the now-famous defense: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Ultimately, most Americans embraced the larger argument that perjury in a civil lawsuit unrelated to the president’s official duties did not constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.

But looking back through today’s lens, this whole argument was miscast. The wrongdoing at issue was never just a private matter for the Clinton family; it was a high-profile exemplar of a widespread social problem: men’s abuse of workplace power for sexual gain. It was and is a striking example of a genre of misconduct that society has a strong interest in stamping out. That alone should have been enough to have pressured Clinton out of office.

I'm going to say this once: Bill Clinton indeed needs to be reckoned with, but right now is about the worst possible time for the Democrats to be having this argument.  It's great to say that Clinton should have been pressured to resign two decades ago, but Clinton isn't in the White House right now.

Donald Trump is.

Can we pressure him to resign first since he's the imminent danger?  Can we do that?  Can we get Roy Moore to drop out?  Can we take a look at both Democrats and Republicans who are in Congress now who have sexually assaulted people and need to be pressured into resigning before we tackle Big Dog's very real issues?

Yes, it's far past time to talk about Clinton, sexual predator.  I get that.  But he's not in office right now.  We have sexual predators who are, one of who may be Democratic Sen Al Franken.

Let's deal with them first, shall we?

StupidiNews!

• In yet another reversal of an Obama-era foreign policy, the Trump regime will remove restrictions on importing elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia.
• Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Christ, "Salvator Mundi" has fetched a record $450 million at auction this week, obliterating the old $180 million record for a single work of art in 2015.
• House Republicans are expected to pass their version of the GOP tax bill today after a morning meeting with Donald Trump, the bill faces a much more uncertain future in the Senate.
• As Trump's new Fed chair Jerome Powell takes over in February, Fed governors are pushing for higher inflation targets to give the government more room to maneuver in the future.
• Mobile carriers are lobbying the FCC to ban state and local net neutrality rules before they can be imposed as the FCC is expected to end net neutrality at the federal level next month.