A religious figure:

If a SMALL percentage of looting RIOTERS discredits the ENTIRE movement, what does a SMALL percentage of RACIST, MURDERING COPS do?

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) June 12, 2020

That's a fair question. However, that small percentage of lawbreakers seems not to have disturbed the American people, not to have undermined their support of the protesters.  Not only does a clear majority of voters favor the protesters, a sizable majority have a "very or somewhat favorable opinion about the Black Lives Matter movement."

By the same reasoning, a small percentage of racist, murdering cops should not discredit the entire police profession.

It evidently has with some individuals, however, because

PSA: trying to seem caring and compassionate will be completely negated when you're dressed for battle. https://t.co/bCGS7OONZ0

— Pé (@4everNeverTrump) June 12, 2020

We cannot definitively know what proceeded the interaction depicted in the video because the latter begins once the officer is out of her vehicle and close to the child. It is possible that a police car pulled up for no reason and the young girl did immediately raise her hands and start crying. However, if you simply assume the accuracy of what "Big Boss" says, you're an idiot, and if you're reading this blog you're an individual of uncommon good sense. Trust, but verify.

But if there was no precipitating cause of the interaction, it illustrates even more clearly what the officer was up to. She may have stopped precisely in order to interact with citizens in an effort to increase trust between the Police Department and members of the community.

The officer could have held out her hand, maybe even give the child a "high five." She would avoid scowling or grimacing as she spoke. Possibly she'd even crouch, virtually going down on her knees to be on eye-level with the child, increasing communication and emphasizing that she was not pulling rank or considering herself in any way superior.

That is precisely what this police officer did. Admittedly, she did not shed her uniform or her gear, an extreme action which even Sergeant Schultz never quite did on "Hogan's Heroes."

That's insufficient for some people, such as our tweeters.  This sort of thing is insufficient also for some people in Minneapolis.

The dialogue- or lack thereof- included

Unidentified male: ... Reelection next year. If he says no, that's what [bleep] we're going to do next.

Unidentified female: Yes or no, will you commit to defunding Minneapolis Police Department?

(Minneapolis Mayor) Frey: The abolition of it?

Unidentified female: What did I say? We don't want no more police.

Frey: No more.

Unidentified female: Is that clear?

Frey: I do not support the full abolition of the police department.

Unidentified female: [Expletive]. You're wasting our time. Get the [expletive] out of here.

Defunding Minneapolis Police Department; full abolition of the police department. They're coming after you, men and women in blue- and the law-abiding public.

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Dereliction Of Duty

It's a failure of leadership.

First, the more significant failure:

Federal officials responsible for spending $660 billion in taxpayer-backed small-business assistance said Wednesday that they will not disclose amounts or recipients of subsidized loans, backtracking on an earlier commitment to release individual loan data.

The Small Business Administration has previously released detailed loan information dating to 1991 for the federal 7(a) program, a long-standing small-business loan program on which the larger Paycheck Protection Program is based.

The SBA initially intended to publish similar information for the new coronavirus-related loans. An SBA spokesman told The Washington Post in an April 16 email that the agency “intend[s] to post individual loan data in accordance with the information presently on the SBA.gov website after the loan process has been completed,” and it made a similar commitment in response to an April 17 open records request.

But the administration appeared to change course at a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza declined to discuss specific borrowers.

“As it relates to the names and amounts of specific PPP loans, we believe that that’s proprietary information, and in many cases for sole proprietors and small businesses, it is confidential information,” Mnuchin said in the hearing. “The reason why we’re not disclosing the names and amounts, unlike in the 7(a) program, is because of that issue.”

Obviously, the congressional arm of the Trump Party wouldn't want transparency. House Democrats, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, maybe should not have helped craft a bill- approved by unanimous consent- which left details to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. The man who in 2017 said of Donald Trump "he's got perfect genes" and who before entering government was widely known as the "Foreclosure King" has now double-crossed Democrats.

Shocking, I tell you! But it doesn't end there.  David Dayen explains that the Congressional Oversight Commission is not fully staffed, has no chairperson, has held no meetings, and is dependent upon the good intentions of the Senate Majority Leader. House leadership

designed a process that relied on cooperation from Mitch McConnell after an entire term in Congress marked by his lack of cooperation. The oversight provisions were a talking point, a useless chimera attached to a giveaway to the capital class and the largest corporations in America. It’s hard not to conclude that there was no desire to scrutinize the bailout, that it was easier and preferred for the Treasury and the Fed to accomplish their handouts in the dark.

Little attention will be given to that failure as Nancy Pelosi can spot an issue no Democrat can (publicly) disagree with. On Wednesday she

called for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and officials from the U.S. Capitol as reignited conversations about the nation's treatment of racial minorities have once again brought the monuments' history into question.

In an open letter to the Joint Committee on the Library, Pelosi asked Congress to "lead by example" and remove 11 Confederate statues from the Capitol.

It now has been over 17 months and over 520 days since Nancy Pelosi has regained the Speaker's gavel. And she has finally figured out that Confederate statues must not be inside or outside the United States Capitol. Finally

"The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation. Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals. Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed," Pelosi wrote in the letter addressed to committee Chair Roy Blunt and Vice Chair Zoe Lofgren.

It shouldn't be necessary to recognize the statues as monuments to cruelty and barbarism or racism and hate.  Most of all, they are monuments to treason.  These folks were civilian or military leaders of the Confederate States of America which, Pelosi might notice, is not the same as the "United States of America."

They were traitors. That isn't really difficult to understand. But Pelosi was content to allow them to stand until the groundswell of opposition to racially discriminatory policing threatened to gravitate to opposition to all manner of racial discrimination, misinterpreted as "racism."

Presumably, most of these Confederate leaders were partially motivated by racial bias. However, the motivation invariably varied at least in part from one to the other and they all had one thing in common: treason. Insofar as their attitudes were manifested in discriminatory private and/or public behavior, they should be dishonored.  However, we know only for certain that they participated in armed rebellion against the United States of America.

That should have been enough to take them off the grounds of the Capitol. Similarly, congressional Democrats already had more than three years of dealing with Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell.  Whether fooled or a willing participant in the flim-flam of coronavirus relief, Speaker Pelosi has failed to provide critical leadership.

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Going Negative Again

Unfortunately for Joe Biden, other Democrats, and the country, Sam Nunberg, who had informally advised Donald Trump in his first campaign but is sitting this one out, is wrong when he maintains

It’s fantastic to have the 2016 group back together, but the facts are the facts. He barely won and he has done nothing at all to grow out his support. He can’t win on nostalgia. It’s not the same race. This is not going to be about slogans or themes, it’s going to be about what you did for me and why I should reelect you based on your record,He can’t just fight the last war. It’s time to adapt or die.”

Nunberg had heard that the President is bringing back the old gang, veterans of the 2016 campaign and

The reinforcements are arriving as Trump comes to terms with the idea that he cannot run the type of campaign he had planned for years — one that looked feasible as recently as January, according to three campaign and White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.

Trump had expected to run on the back of a strong economy before the pandemic crippled it. He had hoped to revive a number of culture war and “deep state” accusations while facing a Democrat from the liberal wing of the party whom he could try to paint as socialist. He wasn’t expecting the more moderate Joe Biden.

Good thinking, Einstein. Even prior to the pandemic (let alone the scenes of hundreds of thousands of people, some of them violent, in the streets) I had ridiculed the idea of Trump running for re-election as steward of a good economy. I understood that ultimately voters would understand that the economy was not as great as the mainstream media (I'm looking at you, MSNBC) was portraying it. Hillary Clinton thought voters realized in the fall of 2016 that the economy was working for them. She got her comeuppance for thinking that after eight years of President Obama, people actually were satisfied with their lot in life.

They were not when Gallup found that 37% of voters surveyed from November 1- November 6 of 2016 believed that the country was on "the right track" while 62% believed it was on the wrong track. They are not now. Rassmussen found in early October of 2019 that only 36% of respondents thought the country was headed in the "right direction" with 57% believing it was on the "wrong track." When the numbers improved to 46% positive, 50% negative in early February, it represented the high water mark during the Trump presidency.

That was the best Trump could manage and he really seemed to believe at that time that he could sell Americans on the idea that America had been made great again. But he is no happy face candidate.

The President, governing (or not) where 27% of voters give their country's direction a thumbs-up and 66% a thumbs-down, appears finally to have been shaken out of his complacency.  Donald Trump never has been about competence, optimism, or cheerfulness. He always has been about bitterness, resentment, and anger, which he channels extraordinarily well. This is what he is.

It is no longer a matter of somehow convincing Americans that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. We know the country is in bad shape and likely to get much worse. It is a matter of who is going to be blamed for the "American carnage" Trump claimed during his inaugural address to see, but which was really a foreshadowing.

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Send More Cops

It's not surprising that the Covid-19- friendly events of the past couple of weeks have inspired several idiotic or misleading tweets. Here are two which are not atypical:

Camden, NJ also disbanded their police department in 2013. Homicides dropped by 50% to the lowest numbers since 1987. Crime dropped even more drastically. The police department is now smaller, paid less, and handcuffs/any weapon is a LAST resort. This is common around the world. https://t.co/lqDRShvZJZ

— Stephanie Abbott 🐝 (@_StephOnSports) June 7, 2020

police do not need to exist, Camden NJ has already defunded and re-regulated the public safety system, anyone who tells you it’s impossible to defund and abolish our current police system is either uneducated or lying to you

— bobby wasabi (@bIondiewasabi) June 8, 2020

The city of Camden, NJ, 50%+ Latino and 42%black, has long been one of the poorest and crime-ridden cities in the USA. In 2012 it disbanded its police department and replaced it with the Camden County Metro Police Department.  While there was legitimate reason to do so, it also eliminated all union contracts, which resulted in incoming officers being paid poorly with fewer benefits than the previous officers had.

Moreover, it placed the municipal police department under the control of the county (hence, Camden County Metro Police Department), thus under the control of the Board of Freeholders, controlled by George Norcross, an insurance billionaire who is at worst the second most influential individual in New Jersey politics.  If Camden policing is held up as a model for the reform movement, proper context demands an explanation of the complexities of southern New Jersey politics, which unhelpfully is routinely ignored in news reports.

Several important reforms were enacted.  Community policing, including more engagement with the community, is encouraged.  Training emphasizes de-escalation and the force now has more black and Latino members.

But there is one other change, grotesquely under-emphasized, which is conveniently ignored by activists. The police force in Camden is not smaller than it once was- it is significantly larger.

This is, in the context of this summer's politics, a dirty little secret.  The larger number of police officers not only helps deter crime and allows officers to respond more promptly to reports of lawbreaking, domestic disturbances, and other emergencies which arise. It also. permits them to engage more fully with the community because their time is not monopolized by more traditional duties.

Many demonstrators, some of them black, undoubtedly have brought the coronavirus back to their families, resulting in more death.  Moreover, these protesters and others demand not only needed reforms, but fewer police officers, if any at all.  That will not only encourage more crime, particularly in poor black and Latino neighborhoods, but also make more humane police practices less viable. Irony is not dead.

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Three Simple Words

The world is flat. Santa Claus is driving his sleigh around it, and later the Easter bunny will bring eggs to all the little girls and boys in town. Similarly

Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.

If we believe in the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, and a flat earth, we also believe that defunding and abolition does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety. Otherwise, Georgetown law professor and co-director Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program ChristyE.Lopez is simply blowing smoke up where you don't want it blown.

Defund the Police is a clever slogan because it is concise and easy to understand. "Defund" means "to stop providing the money to pay for something." The something in the slogan is the police. "Defund the police" means to stop providing the money for police. It doesn't take 81 words to explain t.

The slogan is not "stop giving so much money to police," "shift money from police to social service providers," or "build more housing, dammit." It means, well: defund the police.

Somebody are not fooled, such as the governing body of Minneapolis because

A majority of the members of the Minneapolis City Council said Sunday they support disbanding the city’s police department. Nine of the council’s 12 members appeared with activists at a rally in a city park Sunday afternoon and vowed to end policing as the city currently knows it.

“It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” Lisa Bender, the council president, said. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.”

They intend to terminate the Police Department: disband it, dissolve it, or eliminate it. That was only 14 words, and only about 7 were necessary.

If she is being sincere, the director of Black Visions Collective and founder of the Minneapolis chapter of Black Lives Matter does believe in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. “A world without police means," Kandace Montgomery maintains, "that everybody has what they need to survive and what they need to live healthy lives. It means we have the money that we need for education, health care, housing, workers’ rights.”

Oh no, it doesn't.  Disbanding the police department means eliminating not only the jobs of police workers, but also those of many other workers.  We didn't need SARS-CoV-2, with the catastrophic impact it will have on city, county and state, budgets, to recognize that the highest priority of most elected officials is to keep taxes down.  Tax-cutting has been for a few decades the greatest priority of one of the two major political parties, as well as of a critical number of Democrats.

Coming to towns, counties, and states near you: creative means to balance budgets by cutting costs.  If funds are removed from one area of a jurisdiction's budget in an outpouring of ideological frenzy, they will not be moved to an area (allegedly) supported by activist groups such as Black Visions Collective and Black Lives Matter.  In most places, it will be considered found money, manna from heaven available to the delight of politicians to minimize inevitable tax increases.

On Morning Joe, Defund the Police advocate, the Reverend Al Sharpton, claimed "the slogan may be misleading without interpretation."  Untrue. To those of us for whom English is either a first or second language, "defund the police" means- wait for it- defund the police.

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Messaging

President Trump has lost control of the narrative; or, less hopefully, lost control of the narrative.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has found

Voters by a more than 2-to-1 margin say they’re more worried about the death of George Floyd, an African American man who was killed in Minneapolis after a police officer put a knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes, and the actions of police, than they are by recent protests that have occasionally turned violent.

Fifty-nine percent of all voters — including 54 percent of whites, 65 percent of Latinos and 78 percent of African Americans — say they’re more troubled by Floyd’s death and the actions of police.

That’s compared with 27 percent who say they’re more concerned about the protests over Floyd’s death, some of which have turned violent.

Not only that but

When it comes to the presidential contest in November, Democrat Joe Biden leads Trump nationally by 7 points among all registered voters, 49 percent to 42 percent — unchanged from April’s poll.

With the public apparently siding with protesters against police- for whom Trump has consistently touted his (alleged) love and support- it's a little surprising that Biden's margin over Trump hasn't increased. However, we know that support for Trump, for whom the basement always has been relatively high and ceiling relatively low, rarely changes markedly.

Both survey results, though positive for the Democratic nominee, have been derived during a period in which Trump has failed to find his bearings. The narrative has been captured by the left and Republicans including Trump have been flailing about trying to find a counter-narrative.  That was vividly demonstrated last Monday, when the President's clumsy photo-op in front of a church contrasted glaringly with peaceful demonstrators being gassed in the street across Lafayette Square Park.

However, Trump may finally have found his message:

Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to “DEFUND THE POLICE”. I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2020

O.K., O.K., no significant Democratic politician, most notably presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden, has offered support for the "Defund the Police" message initiated by Black Lives Matter. It doesn't matter.

This is almost as effective a message for Trump as it is volatile.  No one opposes great police officers nor well-paid police officers, nor cute babies or snow on Christmas Eve.

It's also difficult to oppose "law and order." It has its roots in a racially biased appeal of George Wallace and Richard Nixon and has been barely repurposed for Donald J. Trump. However, as a slogan, it proved effective in the past and probably has not passed its expiration date.

At the center of the current message, though, is "defund the police." If the President repeats this endlessly- and Republicans join him in it- it has the potential to be a game-changer.  The best hope is that the scatter-brained and easily distracted Donald Trump either moves on to another issue or drops this thought entirely.

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Saying "Thank You, Thank You"

During a news conference, President Trump addressed the possibility of meeting with black legislators by asking African-American journalist April Ryan "Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?" And now

I can report that among those who have met with @JoeBiden #VP co-chairs & currently being vetted are:

• Mayor @KeishaBottoms
• @RepValDemings
• @AmbassadorRice
• Sen. @KamalaHarris
• @GovWhitmer
• @StaceyAbrams
• Sen. @ewarren
• Sen. @AmyKlobuchar #JoeBiden

— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) June 4, 2020

And now, without journalistic education or training or contacts in Washington, I can reveal that Joe Biden is considering only five of those.

Governor Whitmer has governed with resolve and common sense amidst attacks by President Trump against her and her state. Elizabeth Warren, who arguably understands the world of business and finance- of capitalism- better than anyone in the United States Senate, would be wonderful a heartbeat from the presidency. And Amy Klobuchar is, well, from the swing state of Minnesota.

But none of this will mean anything unless Joe Biden is elected President. And Whitmer, Warren, and Klobuchar all lack what Bottoms, Demings, Rice, and Abrams (Harris, on one side) possess. That is African-American parentage.

In response to Ryan's tweet, one individual coming to the correct conclusion via invalid reasoning asserted "I strongly thought it should be a black woman before the murder of Floyd. Now it's a must.  America ,especially black America, needs and deserves this."

Black America needs an individual whom, if she became President, would work ending racial and economic injustice as no American President has since Lyndon B. Johnson. That does not necessitate a black vice-president or president, nor is it assured with a black President, as Barack Obama so plainly demonstrated.

However, African-Americans do deserve selection of someone black as vice-president, not as apology for racism or discrimination but as a show of gratitude.

After Joe Biden had continued his winless streak in presidential primaries and caucuses over more than three decades, insightful Democratic senatorial candidate of South Carolina Jaime Harrison warned "You can't be the nominee for the Democratic Party and you can't go to the White House without the African American vote. It is essential."

South Carolina's Jim Clyburn wholeheartedly endorsed Biden and the former vice-president smashed Bernie Sanders on Saturday, February 29  in S.C. Three days later, Biden- who had trailed Sanders in polls of most Super Tuesday states- won overwhelmingly, and the fat lady had sung.

That result three days after South Carolina was no coincidence and Eugene Robinson, reminding us that Hillary Clinton was in 2007 the favorite among black voters, noted 

When it became clear that Obama could win in an overwhelmingly white state such as Iowa, and thus might actually win a general election, black voters in South Carolina turned on a dime. Clyburn didn’t actually endorse Obama before the 2008 primary but left the distinct impression that he wanted to. Obama won that contest. We know the rest.

He added "The landslide those voters gave to Biden seemed to clarify things for black voters in the Super Tuesday states."

My guess? It clarified things also for a lot of white voters, who recognized that blacks constitute the popular base of the Democratic Party, and that their presidential nominee cannot win a general election without energizing that base, arguably long neglected in Democratic politics and inarguably in society.

If Biden is not a nincompoop- and he is not- he realizes this.  He probably understands further that the protests of the past week or two help a black candidate. Blacks appear better able to navigate this issue than whites, who would be unable to respond to Vice President Pence with "but from my experience...."  Nor would a white nominee be able to do this:

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ message to children who have questions about racism: “Keep loving each other. And when you see someone who’s doing something wrong or saying something wrong, say that it's wrong.” https://t.co/icV04F4FNW #CNNSesameStreet pic.twitter.com/Sz5LJq6VRc

— CNN (@CNN) June 6, 2020

Selecting a black female- Biden months ago stated that his running mate would be a woman- would at least somewhat increase turnout among blacks.  Additionally, the hundreds of thousands of whites joining blacks demanding an end to racial inequality in policing suggests that  it would increase turnout of young whites for the Democratic nominee.  That would be a win-win.

And, oh yes, this guy.

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