Offering asides, recommended links, blogworthy quotations, and more, In Brief is the Northwest Progressive Institute's microblog of world, national, and local politics.
“The twenty-seven-year-old man who was arrested was part of a pro-Trump rally Saturday afternoon on the Capitol Campus. They eventually clashed with black-clad counter-protesters at Capitol Way South and 11th Avenue Southeast,” The Olympian reports. Allegedly, the man fired his gun at people protesting the Trump regime.
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A group of militant right wing extremists who were plotting to harm Governor Gretchen Whitmer have been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the federal government announced today.
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Via The Oregonian, confirmation of what we already knew: “Racially motivated extremists and ad-hoc citizen militias appear to present the most pronounced threat of violence to human life, according to a Joint Intelligence Bulletin circulated to law enforcement in June by the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center.”
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When it was her turn to spar with Trump’s enforcer, Pramila Jayapal made the most of it. Watch her take Bill Barr apart in this three minute video.
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“The bill, passed by the Legislature earlier this week, also bans chokeholds and fear-based or ‘warrior-style’ training, which critics say promotes excessive force,” The Associated Press reports. “It imposes a duty to intercede on officers who see a colleague using excessive force and changes rules on the use of force to stress the sanctity of life.”
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Feeling conflicted about celebrating Independence Day and honoring America’s founders this year? Take a few minutes to read this excerpt from Whose Freedom.
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“We must stop talking about the flag and shift our attention to the real issues of systemic racial injustice, economic oppression, police brutality, and judicial & prison reform. We are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history! If not now, then when?”
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Defendants are charged with conspiring to mail threatening communications and stalking.
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Archconservative Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich told The Guardian that “it almost sounds like going back to the Hitler Youth concept”.
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A racist old white male newspaper editor who called for the Klan to ride again and lynch people in D.C. will be replaced by a black woman. Read an anonymous Alabama Democratic activist’s take on these events.
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A roundup of national and world media coverage of the Washington State Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Gregory.
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“Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn,” Barnhart says.
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All I could think about was how things might have been different if the situation was reversed and that young black state trooper with braces
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“We’ve had enough of thoughts and prayers. If you supported us, you would have made a change long ago. So this is to every lawmaker out there: No longer can you take money from the NRA. We are coming after you. We are coming after every single one of you, demanding that you take action.”
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Survivors of the horrific attack on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student body have announced plans to march on the nation’s capital next month to demand stronger gun safety laws.
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“Though drivers may not realize it, tens of millions of American cars are being monitored,” reports The Washington Post, “and the number increases with nearly every new vehicle that is leased or sold. The result is that carmakers have turned on a powerful spigot of precious personal data, often without owners’ knowledge, transforming the automobile from a machine that helps us travel to a sophisticated computer on wheels that offers even more access to our personal habits and behaviors than smartphones do.”
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“The violence in El Salvador today is a direct result of both American foreign policy during the Salvadoran civil war and the immigration policy immediately following. In vowing to send nearly 200,000 people back to a country plagued by violence, we seem destined to repeat the same mistakes, with consequences perhaps even more dire than before.”
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The New York Times examines “a phenomenon distinct from the routine racism so familiar in this country: the provocative use of Trump, after the man whose comments about Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented immigrants — coupled with his muted responses to white nationalist activity — have proved so inflammatory.”
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“Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card? Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.”
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“Many in Pacific County thought Trump would take away ‘drug dealers, criminals, rapists’ with his immigration crackdown,” writes Nina Shapiro. “They were shocked to see who started to go missing.”
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“In the week since bombshell allegations against film mogul Harvey Weinstein became public, the Breitbart website has been all over the scandal as an opportunity to showcase liberal hypocrisy in Hollywood. One thing missing from its coverage, though, is the role that its executive chairman Steve Bannon once played for Weinstein,” writes Eriq Gardner.
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