Thanks for filling out my dance card. .

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ajnNkl31UN2c

Quoting from the article:

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President Barack Obama said he should have “calibrated my words differently” in remarks about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in which he said police “acted stupidly.”
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Imagine the uproar from Rush Limbaugh if he were arrested under similar circumstances. We’d be hearing about how fat white people are victims of abuse, and the rightwingers would be saying the skinny black President didn’t support fat white guys.

(… goes back to looking for a partner to tango with …)

Acronym decoder for the above post:

CYA: Cover Your Ass
BFD: Big F@#$ing Deal

Other acronyms seen in these posts lately:

MSM: Mainstream Media

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124844815302279253.html

Quoting from the article:

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Asked if the president regrets weighing in on the matter at Wednesday’s prime-time news conference, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “I think he would regret… if he realized that… how much of a overall distraction and obsession it would be, I think he would probably regret distracting you guys with obsessions.”
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Translation from mouthpiece speak to everyday speak:

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Obama does not regret saying the police acted stupidly. He regrets giving all you idiots something to make a big deal of by saying the police acted stupidly.
—

Of course, some media will miss this distinction and will have yet another field day with this.

Gates said he had no problem with the woman calling the police because she saw some men trying to force the front door open. The description of the men as black or African-American was not a problem, it’s just a physical description along with other physical characteristics.

What Gates took issue with was a) the officer’s refusal to give his badge number and name, and b) the officer’s behavior and actions after he (Gates) had provided his driver’s license and Harvard ID card.

The Cambridge officer called the Harvard campus PD after Gates produced his ID. Why? This was not on campus, this is not their jurisdiction.

The Cambridge PD has been trying to CYA by saying the officer taught a race relations class. BFD.

What this officer really needed was to be *trained* in conflict resolution and situation management.

Anyone who has ever been in a confrontive situation knows how easily it can escalate. Professionals such as police officers are supposed to be trained in how to de-escalate the situation, defuse the tension, and how not to become ensnared in a confrontation themselves.

This police officer failed the practical application of this training miserably.

Oh, so hearing Skip Gates say, “I’ll see ya mama outside” is reason for arrest? Nope. Where did this guy grow up that he never had someone call his mama names (or called others’ mamas names himself)? Oh his poor sensitive ears. Oh his poor mama. They shouldn’t hire such fragile people and give them a badge and a gun.

Very unprofessional behavior on the police officer’s part, and all the smoke about the race relations training he supposedly taught, and all the other nonsense, is just CYA.

What’s really different about this situation is that the officer really had no idea who he was messing with and the potential fallout from it. Joe Sixpack would still be in jail, and no one would be discussing police response and institutional racism.

Who knows how many times situations such as this occur and go unreported? That’s classism trumping racism. Gates’ incident is a proxy for all the other poor schlubs who get poorly treated and wrongly arrested without public scrutiny.

Maggie, I know you’ve been under the weather lately. I’ve missed your cogent writing and thoughts. Hope you’re doing better.

(1) Skip Gates is a small, grey-haired, immaculately attired man. Yeah, that’s the class card, but seems like race trumps class here.
(2) Skip is disabled, walks with a pronounced limp. Often uses a cane. Just NOT a physical threat. Except for the color of his skin, which pushes him over the line to “menace” in white public perception.
(3) The cop who arrested him is all over the news saying no way he’s issuing an apology because Gates should be “thanking him” for “insuring his (Gates’) own safety”. This is the mindscour that cops are trained with nowadays, that we should be GRATEFUL to them no matter how they treat us.
(4) The cop who arrested him said Gates made a comment about his mother. What he reports Gates said was, when he was demanding Gates come outside a second time after Gates had already shown ID and established himself as the owner of the house, was “Yeah, I’ll come see your mama” or something to that effect. It was a jeer and a slam, but since when is that punishable by arrest? At what point did we lose our right to talk back to the police if we’re committing no crime and interfering with no other action? The fact is, Skip was being “uppity” to a white man in a uniform, and he got arrested for THAT. If he had been white, he would not have been arrested for using language (and not profane language at that) to make fun of a cop.
(5) Every news broadcast I saw is going out of its way to say the cop who arrested him had been chosen by a black cop to lead sensitivity sessions about racial profiling. As if a black cop with their training cannot have internalized racism operating and as if racism is not complicated, appears in some forms in an individual and is absent in other forms. As if once you’ve done one non-racist thing, you’re issued a get out of jail free card with regard to racism for all time. As if racism is not a SYSTEM that permeates every fucking thought we have.

We’ve lost control of the cops in this country, we’ve given up too many of our basic rights in the same of “safety” and “respecting authority” (which has also contributed to militarism in general), and any loss of civil rights is going to follow lines of oppression more often than not. So people of color, women and other people who look like the “wrong gender”, poor people, youth, and disabled people are all going to experience much more police violence, with a presumption of their guilt until proven otherwise, than the white males who are in fact heading the crime charts. No slamming around Bernie Madoff, no handcuffs for Karl Rove — but talk back to a cop if you’re an old woman or a teenaged girl, and you’ll be tasered, then arrested for “making them” taser you.

Recently here in Austin, a man was pulled over by the police near a nightclub area because they were blanket testing people for sobriety. One of his companions in the car is a prominent local attorney (a white woman) and former city government official. The guy was doing their sobriety exercises fine but they wanted more, either a breathalyzer or, their latest passion, a blood test where his DNA would be permanently stored as well. He was saying no and the cops were getting belligerent. His friend the attorney got out of the car, came to stand several feet away in her evening attire and heels, identified herself as an attorney, and began advising her friend of his rights. They promptly arrested her and him both, claiming public intoxication (which was later disproven). The next day a judge dropped all the charges, and the cops went “judge-shopping” for a week until they found another judge who would allow them to arrest her AGAIN. But once the second (moron) judge found out how he had been used, he dismissed the charges as well. She is now suing the shit out of the police department because she says this uncontrolled harassment of people insisting on their rights needs someone like her — with knowledge and power — to put a scare into the bully-boys.

I’m glad Obama, for once, is not backing down and is repeating it was a stupid thing for that cop to do. I earnestly hope Skip files suit and pursues it as far as necessary. He’s linking it to poor people and women, not just blacks, by the way — but then, Skip is one of us.