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Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

I read that as the focus group noticed that for all the Democrats talk about helping marginalized people they can’t actually see how Democrats are helping marginalized people.

Ex-President Trump given ninth-degree black belt in taekwondo

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/5NS95h2B/Screenshot-20211124-065158-Facebook.jpg)

Kukkiwon's Facebook page wrote:

* This ceremony is not related any other political issues.

The problem is that Americans don’t get many benefits compared to our peer nations. Few worker protections, no guaranteed paid time off, no universal healthcare, etc. The average White working class family has it pretty sh*tty and the only real benefit they have is that they aren’t constantly harassed and/or killed for their skin color.

Of course the higher you go on the social-economic ladder, the more your White background pays major dividends.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Ex-President Trump given ninth-degree black belt in taekwondo

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/5NS95h2B/Screenshot-20211124-065158-Facebook.jpg)

Kukkiwon's Facebook page wrote:

* This ceremony is not related any other political issues.

I saw the announcement on FB and replied "So good to see that global supply chain issues haven't hurt productivity at your belt factory".

I would bet real money Trump wheezes when getting up out of his gold-foiled chair. The only black belt he has is an over-sized faux leather one.

I almost posted on Facebook that I can’t wait for Trump to get his 10th degree but then realized that could get me in trouble:

Spoiler:

the joke being the 10th degree is bestowed to a master upon death

Ahmaud Arbery trial jurors requested the following...

The jury has asked to see the shooting video and hear the 911 call that Gregory McMichael made on Feb. 23, 2020, the judge said.

"We, the jury, request to see the following videos three times each: One, the original video, the short version. Two, the enhanced high contrast version. We would also like to listen to the 911 call on to 2/23 made by Greg McMichael."

Cynical me thinks that the jury is arguing amongst themselves that these poor white men were trying to defend themselves when Arbery tried to grab their guns.

TheGameguru wrote:

Let’s all not forget that even if we get a guilty verdict it still took cell phone video and then enormous public pressure to even bring this case this far.. A guilty verdict doesn’t fix a damn thing.

A cell phone video that they took themselves, IIRC. So these racist clowns didn't just think they were doing nothing wrong, they were doing something righteous.

And I've seen the same thing Bruce posted about the citizens' arrest defense. They'd have had to believe they observed him committing a crime right then, not just suspect him of having committed some crime days ago.

Or they thought yelling "citizens arrest!" was a get-of-jail-free card for kidnapping and/or killing anyone they felt like.

JLS wrote:

Or they thought yelling "citizens arrest!" was a get-of-jail-free card for kidnapping and/or killing anyone they felt like.

Not anyone... just non-white people.

I really hope they are not limiting discussion to something like "...and after Arbery attacked, what was the reasonable response?". But it is Georgia.

DSGamer wrote:

This seems important. Focus group on swing voters in Virginia on why things went the way they did.

Focus group results

Not to poo-poo the findings, but the focus group consisted of only 18 people and on the first page the research firm cautioned that because it was "qualitative research, it cannot be projected on the Virginia electorate as a whole."

All three men found guilty of murdering Arbery.

OG_slinger wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

This seems important. Focus group on swing voters in Virginia on why things went the way they did.

Focus group results

Not to poo-poo the findings, but the focus group consisted of only 18 people and on the first page the research firm cautioned that because it was "qualitative research, it cannot be projected on the Virginia electorate as a whole."

Of course. Focus groups are always a sample.

Robear wrote:

All three men found guilty of murdering Arbery.

William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., one of three men, accused of killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, has been found guilty of felony murder.
Bryan now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jurors convicted him of felony murder but acquitted him of the malice murder charge.
Gregory McMichael, one of three men, accused of killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, has been found guilty of felony murder.
McMichael now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The man who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery has been found guilty on all nine charges in the jogger’s death.

A jury found Travis McMichael guilty of malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony.

Federal trial for hate crimes in February for all 3.

And the Federal charges also carry life without parole as the max.

Job well done. RIP Ahmaud Arbery.

Holy sh*t.

There are a bunch of studies that say that the less you see of minorities, the more likely you are to think of them as an other, scary or maybe just not a concern of yours. Kenosha is about 11% Black. Brunswick GA is 55% Black. If nothing else, the jurors in each case know who they have to live with...

Now the pessimist in me is expecting a bunch of assholes to show up armed to any public celebrations of the verdict and try to make themselves into the next Rittenhouse.

I’m completely shocked they reached the correct verdict. Was prepared to be disappointed again.

Bet the dude who released the video feels like a dumbf*ck now that they're all looking at life in prison. The local DA had given them all a pass and it was the video that caused others to look into the case.

One was found guilty of 9/9 charges
The other was found guilty of 8/9 charges
And the third was found guilty of 6/9 charges

I am shocked.

Cue the white folks congratulating themselves and declaring racism over in three, two.....

And the former DA is facing trial on felony charges of misusing her office to delay the trial.

The words of the defense attorney are very telling of the expectations of the American judicial system. She said that this is "what a lynching looks like".

She is "right" in one sense. This trial and the outcome would not have been possible without public knowledge, sustained attention, and outrage. And these assholes ARE being made an example. More importantly, they are being made an example by white folks to make a show of how the judicial system is "impartial" despite the fact that it was the easiest layup for a prosecutor since they found human remains in Ted Bundy's house.

Her and her clients' expectations were that the death of just another poor black man would not be a big deal, because in the vast majority of cases, it isn't. I am sure they went to bed the night it happened and slept better than they had in weeks knowing in their minds that they "got the burglar" without any thought of the future consequences. So when the situation got out of their control, they immediately interpreted it as unfair.

This is not an outcome we should be celebrating. It is one that we should be EXPECTING. And the fact that we don't is what is wrong with America.

Now good white folks will go on with their business confident in the notion that they have done everything necessary to prove that racism doesn't exist just as George W Bush gleefully bragged about how the murderers of James Byrd (who was dragged to death by his chained ankles behind a pickup truck because he was black) were given the death sentence.

Shame on us. Shame on all of us. People of color deserve better.

Bet those 3 guys wish they got Rittenhouse's judge.

Oh, there is still room for trouble.
They are obviously going to appeal. They might get a Rittenhouse style judge in the higher court. Or would you trust the Supreme Court with this case?

It's just so open and shut. I can't see an appeal succeeding.

DSGamer wrote:

This seems important. Focus group on swing voters in Virginia on why things went the way they did.

Focus group results

An interesting follow-up article on this problem and how it's a hell of a nut to crack

The Mess Age

Running against an unpopular president remains a good way to pick up seats in Congress no matter what your message is, and that’s just what the Democrats did again in 2018. The problem is the margins were smaller than 2006, and, unlike Bush, Donald Trump’s unpopularity seemed eerily stable and entirely disconnected from actual events. Now, everyone with a brain expects Democrats to lose Congress in the next few years, and perhaps the White House again as well, which is why everyone is yelling at each other online all day about messaging and popularity.

Faced with this depressing vision of the near future, it is obviously understandable to say, “Well, the Democrats should go back to doing what worked in 2006, when they could win statewide elections in places like Missouri and Ohio, because they clearly stopped doing something that worked then, or started doing something that doesn’t work since then.”

So Democrats could recruit more white moderates maybe. It is true that the Democratic Party used to have a lot more white moderates, or at least white people coded as moderate, who could win elections in the sorts of places that also supported George W. Bush. They have less of them now, which makes it much harder for the Democratic Party to win control of Congress. There are a lot of reasons for the decline of these sorts of politicians. One reason is that many of these white moderates subsequently lost elections to Republicans. A proposal to reverse that trend that I do not think should be taken seriously—though it’s one that I fear would be quite popular in the offices of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—is “make it 2006 again by science or magic.”

Here’s my suggestion: Perhaps the Democratic Party has, actually, stayed more or less the same. (Notably, many the people running it today were also running it in 2006.) Perhaps the Democratic Party largely stood still, leaning heavily on policy and messaging very much like the document pictured above, as everything else changed.

A fun fact—one that might seem almost unbelievable to any longtime follower of American politics—is that many white American voters did not associate the Democratic Party with racial justice issues until the Obama presidency.

Here's how the political scientist Michael Tesler explains it:

Across time, a large and stable majority of whites with a college degree believed that the Democrat was more supportive of federal aid to blacks. But among whites with no college degree, there was a substantial 22-point increase in awareness from 2004 to 2012. The election of an African American Democratic president helped shrink a different diploma divide — this time, in awareness of the two parties’ differing positions on race.

Whites without diplomas (not necessarily "working class" whites, of course) abandoned the Democratic Party years before Donald Trump descended the escalator and a solid decade before anyone who works for a think tank had ever encountered the slang form of the word “woke.” “Simply put,” Tesler says, “racially resentful whites without a college degree were most likely to flee the Democratic Party during Obama’s presidency.”

To me, the evidence suggests this was less of a result of Democrats going “too far” on these issues than it was simply that this particular segment of white voters finally and decisively noticed (or, rather, had it explained to them, over and over again) that the Democrats are the party “for” Black people. One might even trace the shift to the day, in July 2009, that Barack Obama said “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” when they arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at his own home.

Those who stress the importance of messaging would identify Obama’s comments as a gaffe. Instead of saying that the cops acted stupidly, Barack Obama should've said, "I have no opinion about this and I'm going to lower the price of prescription drugs." And, sure, maybe that's true. Empty platitudes about race from Democratic politicians do more to harm their political chances than they do to help race relations seems like a defensible and even benign claim. But I think it’s important to be clear that if it hadn’t been this, it would’ve just been something else. Another moment in the Obama years that raised the “salience” of racial justice issues in a way that probably drove more of these voters away from the Democratic Party was when a minor Black government official told a story about helping a white farmer save his farm. Does the political and media environment that created the Shirley Sherrod incident seem like one in which Democrats can simply avoid controversial rhetoric about race?

Democrats who came of age when the party still relied on these lost white votes took some time to process that the loss was not some temporary aberration. But they’re clearly well aware now. Events like the humiliating defeat of Evan Bayh in the 2016 Indiana Senate race surely helped drive home the lesson that “the business-friendly moderate” was no longer a viable model for winning the sorts of very white places that people like Evan Bayh used to win. That worrying realization led inexorably to this modern freakout against rampant liberal activist wokeism dooming the Democrats. And that freakout also reflects a touching hope that 2006 can, in fact, be reconstituted, and it can be done by punching left.

..........

How could the White House’s attempt to get the border “under control,” in order to reduce the salience of anti-immigration sentiment in our politics, backfire so spectacularly? The same way Shirley Sherrod’s heartwarming story about tolerance turned into a days-long feeding frenzy invoking ancient American tropes about Blacks with government power using it to exact retribution on whites who oppressed them: Because your political opponents also have the ability to craft messages and they are frankly much better at getting those messages delivered to voters. No one has a natural, unmediated opinion on whether or not their country has a “border crisis.” The cannier side understands that politics is getting them to think that there is one, not to make them forget that they think so.