Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy speaks at the St. Regis Hotel on Monday.(Michael Bonfigli /The Christian Science Monitor) EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy was confirmed as the US Environmental Protection Agency's chief in…
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If white people are exhausted from the protests, the chants, the news coverage of police brutality and bad cops, imagine how exhausted people of color are living it every day. It was one reason that John Oliver called the week a "f*cking nightmare." So, he took a different approach to a week filled with mass shootings, police brutality and Derek Chauvin's defense dominating cable news.
At the top of "Last Week Tonight," Oliver noted that over the seven years that his show has been on the air, they've covered cases of white supremacy in police departments, police militarization, the overuse of municipal violations, police raids, and the lack of police accountability.
"And look, we could keep up our part in that saga," said Oliver. "I could cite statistics about police using excessive force. I could dunk on all the appalling responses from conservative media figures. I could reiterate, yet again, that what happened is completely wrong. But the fact is, we couldn't even finish writing about what happened to Daunte Wright before the city of Chicago released videos of one of their officers killing a 13-year-old unarmed child... footage which clearly contradicted the picture of an 'armed confrontation' pained by the police and the mayor, and a prosecutor who said 'Adam had a gun in his hand when he was shot.' Which he did not."
The shooting began the cycle again of calls for protests, police responding to protests with violence, protesters growing angrier, police being told to stand down, and protests calming until a few days later when the next police officer kills another person of color or unarmed child.
"I could make the same arguments to you again," Oliver explained. "I could describe the problem to you, but I think you know what it is. I could offer solutions, but I think you know what they are. I can offer you anger, but if you are a sentient human being alive right now and you are not already full of that, I honestly don't know what to say to you."
So, instead of doing all of that, Oliver decided to go in a different direction. Over the course of seven minutes, he reported funny stories, weird stories and naked Canadian political officials.
He closed the segment by asking Americans to continue taking to the streets, continue standing up for justice and for lawmakers to start proposing solutions.
See the video below:
Nothing that Republicans do in the Jan. 6 commission will hand them a win, so they're continuing to fight against Democrats trying to hold an investigation into what happened during the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
First, Republicans demanded that there be supporters of President Donald Trump on the panel. Then they demanded that the Jan. 6 commission investigate a ton of other things that happened outside of Jan. 6. Democrats want an independent commission, but it's going to be difficult to be independent after watching it unfold on live television, through the impeachment trial and in the over 377 arrests since the day.
The Washington Post reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is still pushing for a compromise with Republicans. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) won't say anything about it.
"Behind the scenes, Democrats are developing contingency plans. Pelosi acknowledged this week that one backup option is to appoint a select committee of House members to investigate events surrounding the riot, though she told USA Today that it was 'not my preference'," said the Post. Another would be to defer to congressional committees that are currently examining the failures in planning that left the Capitol vulnerable to attack, which Pelosi has called a potential 'resource' to a future commission, should one be established."
Republican demands to investigate everything other than Jan. 6 doesn't make sense because none of the other protests happened at federal buildings, attacked federal officials or the federal government. Still, Republicans want to build a narrative that the attack on the legislative branch of government is just as bad as burning down a Wendy's.
The whole thing puts Republicans in a difficult spot because they have to placate former President Donald Trump, who is still in control of the GOP.
"We have a real dilemma on our hands," said Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. "The political imperative at this point is to discredit any investigation, to deny any ties either to Donald Trump or to the members of Congress . . . who either helped to plan the [riot] or helped to incite it."
The problem is that Republicans fought against any of the Democratic proposals. If they had allowed their proposals to move forward, they could have easily claimed that the deck was stacked against Trump from the start. By negotiating, they're now stuck helping craft a commission that will ultimately find funds from the Trump campaign paid to put on the rally in which Trump called on his followers to march to the U.S. Capitol. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) confessed that he thought Trump was guilty. He opposed impeachment on the so-called "technicality" that Trump was no longer president. He fought against holding the impeachment hearing until Trump was out of office.
Meanwhile, none of the House committee investigations or hearings have gathered conclusions about what allowed the Capitol to be attacked. In fact, the House Appropriations Committee is the only one to have held hearings with current and former law enforcement or Trump military officials who helped coordinate the security for Jan. 6.
"In recent weeks, public hearings held by the House Judiciary and Armed Services committees have devolved into shouting matches, as GOP members accuse Democrats of ignoring threats from the far left, while Democrats accuse them of equivocating to distract from the fact that far-right extremists have become an active force in the Republican Party," the Post noted.
With a Republican Party divided between being for Trump or against Trump, it'll be difficult to find an independent member of the GOP to appoint. In the 9/11 commission, it was Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Richard Shelby (R-AL). All independent-minded Republican senators have been voted out or run out of office.
"Should the current Congress proceed along a similar timetable, Congress would not set up an independent Jan. 6 commission until next spring, when the 2022 midterm elections season will be heading into primaries where Trump has pledged to play a selective, but active, campaigning role," the Post also noted. "That alone threatens the prospects for achieving the compromise Pelosi has called for."
Republicans would be smart to get it over with because if they fight against it, the commission will reveal findings in time for the 2022 election. If they stop it from happening, it will be a key talking point of the 2022 midterms too.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, Oath Keepers leader Jim Arroyo revealed that active-duty law enforcement is part of their movement and helping with militia training.
"Our guys are very experienced. We have active-duty law enforcement in our organization that are helping to train us. We can blend in with our law enforcement," he said.
Javed Ali, Towsley Policymaker in Residence at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, formerly served as a former NSC senior director and was a counterterrorism official at the FBI under the Trump administration. Speaking to CBS News, he explained that the Oath Keepers is "unique."
"Beyond the fact that they are a formal group with chapters all over the country, is that a large percentage have tactical training and operational experience in either the military or law enforcement," the domestic terrorism expert said. "That at least gives them a capability that a lot of other people in this far-right space don't have."
In August 2020, Michael German is a former FBI special agent who penned several reports on U.S. law enforcement failing to control the right-wing terrorists in their ranks. According to his findings, law enforcement officials are increasingly tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000. Updated research has revealed things are much worse.
His report explained that over the years, police had grown increasingly linked to militias and white supremacist groups in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.
As Americans are growing increasingly concerned about police brutality and police shootings of unarmed people of color, the conversation about the white supremacists flocking to law enforcement are an even greater concern.
PBS reported in 2016 that ten years prior, the FBI warned of the problem. Since the, little has changed.
In Feb. the New Yorker reported on associate professor Vida B. Johnson, at Georgetown Law, who "authored a paper in 2019 that included a list of more than a hundred police departments in forty-nine states that have faced scandals over racist texts, e-mails, or public social-media posts by officers just since 2009. Johnson proposes that, if police officers have a history of racist speech or behavior, or are known to belong to hate groups, this information should, in cases that involve the testimony of those officers, be disclosed to the defense, under the Brady doctrine, which requires prosecutors to share information that might be exculpatory or show witness bias. The credibility of a known racist cop can, in some cases, be attacked on those grounds, as O. J. Simpson's defense team memorably showed."
Given police and sheriff's departments are governed largely by state, county and local communities, implementing national standards would likely be seen as a federal overreach. So, it leaves it up to local entities to police their police.
See the segment on "60 Minutes" below:
The Oath Keepers militia group's path to breaching the Capitol www.youtube.com
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