Derek Chauvin’s sentencing is today [BUMPED UP with UPDATE – please scroll down for new posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

UPDATE 4:00 PM

The sentence is no surprise. Judge Cahill has split the difference in favor of the prosecution, but not given them the full measure of what they’ve asked for:

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced Friday afternoon to 22½ years in prison for murdering George Floyd last year by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill handed down the sentence after hearing victim-impact statements from four members of Floyd’s family, while Chauvin’s mother pleaded for leniency and Chauvin gave brief remarks.

Chauvin was taken immediately into custody for him to start serving his sentence.

Chauvin’s attorney had asked for probation and time served, or alternately, less prison time than the 10½ to 15 years recommended by state sentencing guidelines for someone like Chauvin who has no criminal history. Prosecutors had asked for 30 years, noting that there were four aggravating factors that supported a higher term than outlined by the guidelines.

Chauvin is the second officer in modern Minnesota history to be sentenced to prison time for killing a civilian on the job…

Former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was sentenced in 2019 to 12½ years in prison on second-degree murder for fatally shooting Justine Ruszczyk Damond while responding to her 911 call about a possible sexual assault in an alley.

Noor is a black man from Somalia and Damond was white. He shot a totally innocent Damond, and yet his sentence was just about half of Chauvin’s. I’m not going to go into the facts of Floyd’s death, because I’ve written an enormous number of posts about it already. Suffice to say I believe that Chauvin’s conviction on counts of murder and today’s sentencing are racially motivated and involve fear of the mob reaction if the court had been too lenient.

I wonder whether Chauvin will survive prison. It really depends on the conditions under which he’s held, and they are likely to involve a lot of solitary confinement. He has an appeal pending and is also facing more charges:

Chauvin is in court and has the opportunity to address Judge Cahill before sentencing, but he is in a box. He has bona fide appellate issues and he remains in jeopardy in the duplicative federal civil rights case filed against him and his colleagues. Anything he says can be used against him in a hypothetical retrial in state court and in the very real federal case that is pending against him.

Another show trial is planned.

Chauvin has a mother, who spoke at the hearing:

Chauvin’s defense began its arguments for leniency with a statement from his mother, Carolyn Pawlenty, who told the court: “When you sentence my son, you will also be sentencing me.”

“Derek devoted 19 years of his life to the Minneapolis Police Department. It has been difficult for me to read and hear what the media, public and prosecution team believe Derek to be an aggressive, heartless, uncaring person. I can tell you that is far from the truth,” she said, before addressing him and recalling that her happiest moment other than giving birth to him was pinning his police badge on him upon becoming an officer.

“My son’s identity has also been reduced to that as a racist,” she said in her first public comments since Floyd’s death. “I want this court to know that none of these things are true and my son is a good man. … He has a big heart and always put others ahead of his own.”

Pawlenty said she believes in her son’s innocence, and “I will never waver from that.”

That’s the end of my update for now. The following is my original post, prior to the sentencing itself.

It’s being followed live at Legal Insurrection:

Under normal sentencing guidelines, Chauvin would get 12 years. With enhancements, the maximum 30 year sentence could increase. The prosecution is asking for a 30-year sentence.

I expect the verdict to be closer to the 30-year mark than the 12-year mark. Chauvin, who has been regularly regarded as the most heinous example of police brutality, must be maximally sentenced or the mob will erupt again and destroy more of the city of Minneapolis – or what’s left of it.

The mob may decide to riot anyway, whatever the sentence may be.

General Milley and the ongoing war on the “terrorists” of the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In other words, to justify the current domestic War on Terror that has already provoked billions more in military spending and intensified domestic surveillance, the Pentagon must ratify the narrative that those they are fighting in order to defend the homeland are white supremacist domestic terrorists. That will not work if white supremacists are small in number or weak and isolated in their organizing capabilities. To serve the war machine’s agenda, they must pose a grave, pervasive and systemic threat.

Viewed through that lens, it makes perfect sense that Gen. Milley is spouting the theories and viewpoints that underlie this war framework and which depicts white supremacy and “white rage” as a foundational threat to the American homeland. A new domestic War on Terror against white supremacists and right-wing extremists is far more justifiable if, as Gen. Milley strongly suggested, it was “white rage” that fueled an armed insurrection that, in the words of President Biden, is the greatest assault on American democracy since the Civil War.

That’s been the narrative from the start. Actually, it was the narrative even before January 6th. The Capitol incursion just gave the left the perfect excuse for ramping things up, but the basic script – that the far right was as dangerous or even more dangerous than any other group today – had already been set. For example, see this, as well as this, this, this, this, and this.

Those links are to just a few examples from a host of similar articles over the years. In fact, we can even go back to the Kennedy assassination, when the actions of Oswald, an avowed Communist who had once defected to Russia, were somehow cast as the results of the supposedly hate-filled right-wing atmosphere of Dallas.

I wrote at length on that subject on the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

It’s never been easy for the left to admit that a Communist killed JFK. So, as the event recedes into the ever-more-distant background, why not recycle the tired old tried-and-untrue narrative that it was the fault of the right? The mechanism this time was a NY Times op-ed by James McAuley, entitled “The City With a Death Wish in Its Eye: Dallas’s Role in Kennedy’s Murder.” It begins:

“For 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.”…

It’s hard to believe the Dallas right was an inspiration for the actual killer, the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, who…had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate [right-wing General Walker]…just a few months before Oswald’s successful attack on Kennedy. As for the influence of Dallas on Oswald, he had only lived there (or in nearby Fort Worth) for the years from first to sixth grade, spending the bulk of his youth in New Orleans, with a two-year stay in New York (the Bronx, to be specific) and then back to New Orleans: “By the age of 17, he had resided at 22 different locations and attended 12 different schools.”

Oswald had dropped out of school and joined the Marines, then defected to the USSR and lived there for nearly three years. He came back to Dallas because he had family there, attempted to kill General Walker about ten months later, almost immediately moved back to New Orleans for about five months, and then tried to get to Cuba through Mexico, and only returned to Dallas in early October 1963. He got the Texas School Book Depository job in mid-October, and started living in a Texas rooming house during the week and visiting his wife (who was living with friends in nearby Irving) on weekends.

A little over a month later, Kennedy visited Dallas—the motorcade route having been published in the newspaper just a few days earlier—and the rest, as they say, is history. But it’s hard to see Oswald as a product of Dallas in any meaningful way, much less of the right in Dallas.

Of course, none of this matters to the Times and writers like McAuley. They have their own bones to pick and their own fish to fry and their own use to make of the 50th anniversary of the assassination.

Well, facts have never stood in the way of a good leftist narrative. And the “incredibly dangerous white-supremicist middle-America insurrectionists of January 6th” is one of the best leftist narratives of all, and the most useful.

Biden and the Republicans in Congress: the old Lucy-and-the-football routine

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Biden isn’t so addled that he can’t pull a fast one. Or maybe being addled helps him to pull a fast one, because he forgets the contradictory things he says.

At any rate, this is how it went:

Mr. Biden stood with five Democratic and five Republican Senators at the White House and endorsed their trillion-dollar infrastructure outline. Back-slapping and self-plaudits all around. But two hours later the President said he won’t sign the infrastructure bill unless the Senate also passes the other $3 trillion or more he has proposed in tax increases and multiple new entitlement programs…

Most politicians at least wait a decent interval to pull a double cross. But Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Biden are trying to prevent a revolt on the left. So they are now holding a bipartisan deal hostage to the left’s demands. This is political blackmail aimed at Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who are part of the bipartisan Senate Gang of 10: Unless they sign on to all of the progressive tax-and-spend agenda, they won’t get their bipartisan deal. And Mr. Biden and progressives will blame them for the failure.

The real question is why some Republicans signed off on the infrastructure bill in the first place, but my guess is that they figured that improving infrastructure is popular and they wanted to get some credit for bipartisanship.

They certainly should have expected a bait-and-switch routine. But as Byron York writes:

Biden’s threat was news to Republicans, even some of the ones who had been negotiating the bipartisan proposal. On one hand, the president sang the praises of bipartisanship, leading Republicans to think he might actually work with them, and then Biden, citing a plan devised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, reneged on the whole thing.

Republican anger followed. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer “literally pulled the rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. As for the president, McConnell said, “It was a tale of two press conferences — endorse the agreement in one breath and threaten to veto it in the next.”

Lindsay Graham should know better – and perhaps he does:

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, who was one of the bipartisan group of 21 negotiators, was much more blunt. If Biden is going to tie the two bills together, Graham told Politico Playbook, “He can forget it! I’m not doing that. That’s extortion! I’m not going to do that. The Dems are being told you can’t get your bipartisan work product passed unless you sign on to what the left wants, and I’m not playing that game.”

Graham said most GOP senators, and even some inside the bipartisan group, did not know the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer plan. “Most Republicans could not have known that,” he told Politico. “There’s no way. You look like a f—ing idiot now. I don’t mind bipartisanship, but I’m not going to do a suicide mission.” And that was that. The bright, shining bipartisan deal instantly became much less than it seemed.

So Republicans like Graham are either remarkably gullible (possible) or playing Failure Theater (possible).

There was a time within living memory when there actually was some meaningful legislative bipartisanship in the US. It was possible back then because the parties’ positions weren’t so very far apart, and the legislation proposed tended to be less extreme and supported by a majority of the public as well.

No more.

Biden threatens to beat up Corn Pop and nuke American gun-owning insurrectionists

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden loves to threaten people and then to brag about threatening people. For example, the tale of Corn Pop:

Biden has publicly repeated several stories of him rebuking racial division and has relayed one specific incident detailed in his autobiography of how he supposedly faced down an African-American gang leader for breaking the rules at what he described as an all-black pool. ..

Ultimately, in the story, Biden gets “Corn Pop” to put down his straight razor and become friends after threatening to beat him with the “six-foot metal chain around his arm.”

Or there was the time Biden said he would have “beat the hell” out of Trump had they been in high school together.

Or this threat to a gun owner:

That brings us to today, when Biden said this:

The Babylon Bee was quick to respond with “Huge Spike In Americans Buying F-15s After Biden Suggests You’ll Need Them To Overthrow Government.”

And Kurt Schlicter has a number of questions for Biden that the press, unfortunately, will never ask, including this:

Can you explain how you would employ bombers to hold territory, like a city? What means would you use to identify targets to bomb within the United States? What would the rules of engagement be when using bombers against American citizens?…

Have you considered that the military forces of the National Guard in red states, which include aircraft, artillery and infantry, may refuse or even oppose your campaign against American citizens? Would you attack those forces?

I realize that Biden is now commander-in-chief, at least nominally. And I don’t think he or the left would hesitate to use whatever force they thought necessary to put down any actual armed insurrection – as opposed to the supposed insurrection of January 6th. But Biden has long reminded me of this character:

Note also the strawman nature of Biden’s argument. I don’t think anyone is saying there should be absolutely no limits on Americans’ rights to own any weapon under the sun. But Biden is speaking as though that’s what gun rights advocates are saying. Also, he doesn’t seem conversant anymore – if in fact he ever was – with the quote from Jefferson he’s trying to paraphrase. It goes like this:

We have had 13 states independant 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

[ADDENDUM: On the issue of whether Biden was actually issuing a threat, and what that threat might be –

I think it’s not the least bit unreasonable to think he is doing some threatening, saying the equivalent of, “Don’t even try it, because we can outgun you with our weaponry, up to and including our very biggest guns if need be. Your puny little firearms are no match for our fighter planes and our nuclear bombs.”

The fact that the goal of his threat is to deter insurrectionists is irrelevant to the discussion of what he is actually saying he would do if push came to shove. MAD, the Cold War philosophy of nuclear weapons that involved nations armed with such weapons, involved the deterrence function of a threat to use them. The idea was that the threat would keep war from happening because the destruction would be so great. And what Biden is saying here, it seems to me – addressing a non-nuclear power that lacks fighter planes as well – is that the superior weaponry of the government, which includes fighter jets and nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them, should deter the insurrectionists from ever using their own weaponry (guns, bombs I suppose) to fight the government. The deterrence doesn’t work if the government isn’t willing to use those fighter jets and those nukes.

As far as I know, there is no precedent whatsoever for an American president saying anything even remotely like this to the political opposition, left or right.]

[ADDENDUM II: Biden the whisperer.]

The re-education of the January 6th prisoners

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, they’re political prisoners, after all, so they need re-education [emphasis mine]:

[Court-appointed defense attorney] Shaner’s legal captives are learning the hard way what the government will do when one resists their commands to comply. Not only have their personal lives been shattered, finances depleted, and reputations destroyed by an abusive Justice Department investigation, Shaner’s clients must be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda about America’s alleged systemic racism.

The purge of the populist mindset is underway, courtesy of the fetid Beltway judicial system and the Joe Biden regime. Judges routinely lecture January 6 defendants about the wrongthink of a “stolen election” while prosecutors openly mock their political beliefs, including home schooling and gun ownership.

“I have had many political and ethical discussions with Anna Lloyd,” Shaner wrote in her motion agreeing to the plea and probation for Lloyd. “I tendered a booklist to her. She has read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Just Mercy, and Schindler’s List to educate herself about ‘government policy’ toward Native Americans, African Americans and European Jews. We have discussed the books and also about the responsibility of an individual when confronting ‘wrong.’”

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with watching or reading any of Shaner’s “booklist.” What is very wrong is a taxpayer-paid attorney—one who is supposed to fight the government’s charges related to January 6, not play along with its phony depiction that “white supremacists” attacked the Capitol—using her authority to reprogram the political views of people she is supposed to be defending. The presumption of racist beliefs is automatic.

But it all worked. Lloyd changed her opinion on the death penalty; in her review of Schindler’s List that was submitted to the court, she lamented that “my Son-In-Law doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened as it did.” She admitted that she’s “lived a sheltered life and truly haven’t experienced life the way many have.”

Her attorney and the government seem pleased with Lloyd’s reformation. “Though she supported the past president in January, she totally accepts President Biden as the leader of our country,” Shaner wrote to the court. “She has worked hard to come to terms with what she believed before January 6th, 2021 and what she has learned since then.”

I wouldn’t be so quick to blame attorney Shaner, who may just be doing what she knows the courts want. And it’s unclear what Lloyd really thinks now versus what she’s saying she thinks in order to ingratiate herself with the court. But this whole episode makes me think of this (minus Room 101, hopefully):

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

CRT in schools: it may hurt, but it’s a good hurt

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “shadow” writes:

My mother told me about a news segment she watched this morning on CRT. Someone defended it against accusations that it was making kids feel bad, saying that you need to feel hurt sometimes in order to learn. First of all, if that’s their answer, that’s pretty damning. They can’t even pretend to say “no, we’re not teaching anything that hurts kids!” – they jump straight to saying “it’s okay because kids need to be hurt sometimes.” And second, while ADULTS can certainly learn from being hurt and sometimes need to feel a sense of shame in order to have insight into their actions and improve their behavior, that method of teaching is not appropriate for elementary-school-aged children.

Of course you don’t need to feel hurt in order to learn. We learn plenty of things without being hurt at all. However, in the course of learning, sometimes children do feel hurt. You might call it a sort of collateral damage.

One small example is grades. If a child gets poor grades, that child often might feel hurt. That hurt can take one or more of several forms: embarrasment, guilt, feelings of failure, or fear of parental anger, for example. But the inflicting of hurt is not the intention of grading systems, which are there to measure students’ learning and performance, and also to let the student and parents know whether the student is absorbing and understanding the material. After all, the point of school is to learn, and grades supposedly measure the extent of learning, although they are an imperfect instrument. No overt shaming goes along with the process; in other words, teachers don’t say, “If you get poor grades you are a bad person.” At least, they’re not told or taught to say that – not anymore, anyway.

Some students don’t feel hurt when they get bad grades because they don’t care what grades they get, and their parents sometimes don’t care either. In fact, poor grades can be something to brag about. When I was growing up, I actually felt some hurt as a result of good grades – for example, I was sometimes teased or even shunned by some kids because of them. But that certainly wasn’t the intent of giving good grades.

The hurt many students getting bad grades feel can act on them in different ways depending on the student. For some it’s a goad to do better. For others the pain makes them give up and just feel bad about themselves. But the infliction of pain is always a side issue nowadays, and not an overt part of the lesson (although in the past it sometimes included a public tongue-lashing).

Another thing that modern parents are told to do is to avoid shaming a child for what or who that child is. In other words:

Only the behavior is treated as unacceptable, never the child…

Limit criticism to a specific event—don’t say “never”, “always”, as in: “You never listen,” “You always manage to spill things”, etc.

In other words, don’t say to a misbehaving child: “You’re a bad girl” or “You’re a bad boy.” Say “What you did there was bad.” It may seem like a little thing, but it’s actually very helpful because children are very aware of labels and they will often decide that, if their essence is to be bad, then there’s no hope of change so why bother? Some children may even come to embrace it: “If I’m bad, I’m going to be the baddest m-f-er I can be. That’ll show you all for hurting me.”

So to purposely make a child feel bad in that very basic way – about who or what that child may be – is, among other things, often counter-productive. And to do it intentionally hasn’t been taught to teachers for over fifty years.

Till now, that is. Now it’s okay and even desirable to tell white children that their essence is bad. In addition, children are being told that race is the most essential part of them, rather than what they do.

That just may be the most pernicious thing about CRT for children.

It’s also ironic that such a pedagogical device, when used in CRT, is being defended by educators who otherwise have tried to protect children very thoroughly not only from those who would purposely make them feel bad but also from any collateral bad feelings that might come as a natural consequence from other teaching practices such as grades. That protection has been so extreme that many children are crippled by it and have no tolerance for anything other than praise in school, no matter what they do wrong.

However, with CRT, the rules are reversed – for white children, who are purposely made to feel bad about who they are and who their parents are, through no fault or action of their own.

12-story condo building in Miami collapses

The New Neo Posted on by

What on earth caused a catastrophic failure of this nature?:

Miami-Dade Police have confirmed that one person has died as a result of a building collapse in Surfside, Florida.

Further fatalities are feared but not yet confirmed, as more people are thought to be trapped under the rubble of Champlain Tower South, near 88 Street & Collins Avenue.

Miami-Dade officials said at a press conference that the number of missing people is yet to be established and that investigations into the incident could take up to a week. Initial indications from officials suggest 51 are unaccounted for.

The building was built in 1981. That’s forty years ago, but it’s not hundreds of years ago, and one doesn’t expect a building of that vintage and type to just suddenly collapse. But I haven’t yet seen any indication of what might have caused it.

Parents versus school boards

The New Neo Posted on by

For a long time, CRT in the schools seemed to be flying under the radar.

No more:

Parents are beginning to understand what is going on. Everything taught in that [CRT] class is intended to stir up visceral, violent hatred against Whites and Republicans. Black parents of goodwill understand that what’s happening is every bit as dehumanizing as the old Jim Crow system. Moreover, as Lincoln said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — and they would prefer not to live in an imploding nation.

CRT is the sort of thing that most people will be against if they know what it is. Its proponents have relied on a combination of factors to push it through: obfuscating language that makes it sound far more benign than it is (and anti-racist rather than pro), leftist school boards and teacher associations, and lethargic and/or distracted parents in the middle and right. However, now that more information is out there about what’s actually being taught under the label of CRT, the news seems to be spreading and more and more people are incensed about it. And incensed parents can be hard to ignore or fend off.

HR1 going nowhere for now, and all the Republicans in the Senate voted to block it

The New Neo Posted on by

HR1 has been the central pillar of the Democrats’ legislative plans. It was going to “reform” voting laws on a federal level and supersede many of the voting integrity safeguards that red states and even some purple states have trying to put in place after the debacle that was the 2020 election.

The bill had already passed in the Democrat-controlled House. But it failed to advance in the Senate, not because the Democrats there were against it – they weren’t, at least not publicly – but because two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, refused to nuke the filibuster in order to pass it. And blocking the anti-filibuster effort was only possible because of the razor-thin margin by which the Democrats control the Senate: 50/50 with VP Harris able to break a tie.

HR1 and the filibuster are linked, and not just in the obvious manner, which is that the filibuster would have to have been ended if HR1 was to pass in the current Congress. They are also linked becaue the Democrats realize that nuking the filibuster is dangerous unless they can guarantee that they’ll always be in charge. If Republicans ever managed to take the helm again, the filibuster would be Democrats’ friend. So they must assure that the GOP can never win again.

I think the Republicans – even the RINOs among them – are quite aware of this. You might even say that HR1 is an existential bill for them. I believe that is why all fifty Senate Republicans voted not to advance the bill for debate, which effectively killed it. Republicans in the House had previously voted against it, as well. That represents an unusually united front by the GOP.

I know that many people on the right who are fed up with McConnell and the GOP in general thought there would be some defections, but there were none. McConnell has long been relentless in his criticism of HR1 – see this, for example, with links to what McConnell was saying back in early 2019, when the Democrats of the House were passing an earlier version of the bill.

I’ve also seen some speculation that the Democrats didn’t really want to nuke the filibuster or pass this law, and that all the talk about it and the vote on it is just to placate their base. I strongly disagree. I think that if they could pass it they would dearly love to do so, because they believe (perhaps correctly) that it would set up perpetual victory for them. They are setting their sights on 2022 in hopes that they gain greater control of the Senate and can finally do what they wish. Whether that’s possible is an open question, and much can happen before then. But I’m convinced that is their plan.

This bill was not a reaction to the 2020 election; there was an earlier version of HR1 that had been the first major order of legislative business after the Democrats got control of the House in the 2018 election. It died in the Senate and of course Trump would have vetoed it anyway had it passed both houses of Congress. The 2020 election was actually the Democrats’ fairly successful attempt to implement many aspects of this bill at the state-by-state level through state executive action and lawfare, with COVID as the excuse. COVID was the way the camel got its nose in the tent, as it were.

So this will come up again and again, particular with Biden as president. He’d sign whatever they pass, however they pass it. The fight will go on.

[NOTE: Biden may even try to sneak in some of its provisions through an executive order that may or may not hold up in court. He’s already issued an executive order regarding voting that seems relatively mild, but that avenue remains open.]