FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2024
Judge Jeanine goes off: Over the past few days, a new arrival on the front became the topic of general conversation.
We refer to the no-bail release of the Gotham cop-beaters. This no bail release was widely discussed—everywhere except within our own tribe's blue bayous and blue silos.
(Important exception: Morning Joe, on Thursday and Friday mornings.)
On Thursday's Morning Joe, Al Sharpton quickly agreed—the no-bail release of these violent young men wasn't an example of reform, and it wasn't progressive.
On Morning Joe, the conversations were intelligent, respectful and sane. On Fox, they had The Five.
For all we know, Jeanine Pirro—Judge Jeanine—may be the nicest person in the world, at least among her own. On its face, her thumbnail seems and is impressive:
Jeanine Ferris Pirro (born June 2, 1951) is an American television host and author, and is also a former judge, prosecutor, and politician in the state of New York.
Pirro was elected as a judge of the Westchester County (N.Y.) Court in 1990. In 1993, she was elected to the position of Westchester County district attorney. She is the first women to be elected to either of those positions.
As district attorney, Pirro gained visibility in cases of domestic abuse and crimes against the elderly. Pirro was re-elected district attorney in 1997 and 2001. Pirro briefly sought the Republican nomination for United States Senate to run against Hillary Clinton in 2006, but dropped out to accept the nomination for New York Attorney General. She lost the general election to Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
On its face, Pirro has had an impressive career. Today, she serves as the most outspoken rabble rouser and table banger on the 5 p.m. Fox News program, The Five.
(We're staying away from "loudmouth." In truth, the temptation exists.)
Niceties are rarely observed when the judge mounts her charger and starts to declaim of a late afternoon. Yesterday, she was involved in Day Two of the no-bail cop-beater release discussion.
Given the nature of the events, there's no way to avoid scoring solid points if you're coming at this event from a red tribe political perspective. Eventually, though, the judge went off, as she routinely does.
Eventually, this is what the jurist said, speaking about "these people:"
PIRRO (2/1/24): Let me say one more thing about this.
[Finger-wagging starts]
These— I don't even want to call them people, because they're not people.
These people come here, and they say they want asylum, and we suckers believe it?
They don't respect authority. They take authority down. One of the other ones we didn't know about yesterday was charged with resisting arrest. He pushed a cop, last time a cop arrested him. in addition to their beating down the arrest
So I am sick and tired of hearing this nonsense.
[Seeming to quote standard reporting]
"They traveled 3,000 miles through the [Darién] Gap. It's one of the most dangerous places in the world, because they want to be part of the American Dream." Bull! Baloney!
They don't want to be part of the American Dream. They don't want to swear allegiance. They don't show up for their asylum hearings, and 85% of them who do don't get asylum!
At this point, Jesse Watters broke in, directing a question at the sole liberal panelist. "Richard, why won't Democrats deport people like this?" the bromance-adjacent regular panelist asked.
Especially given the no-bail release and the subsequent apparent flight from New York by several of the assailants, it's hard to avoid scoring points with a question like that if you're a red tribe member. Richard Fowler tried to answer, but he plainly tried and failed.
That said, we thought you might like to take a look at the rhetoric of Judge Jeanine.
She doesn't want to call them people, she said as this peroration began. She doesn't want to call them people because she said they aren't.
As she started, she seemed to be talking about a rather small group of young men. Soon, she seemed to be speaking about a familiar, much larger group. She was quickly speaking about "these people," but also of course about "them."
With respect to the young men who attacked the police officers, we'd advise pity for people who are so sunk in violence at such young ages. We're going to guess there are ugly stories lying behind their violent behavior.
That's how such violence strikes us. In the assertive world of Judge Jeanine, the assailants aren't even human beings, and it almost sounds like every one of "these people" is just like everyone else.
Did the dozen assailants who beat the police come through the Darien Gap? We have no idea, and we doubt that the judge does either.
Were these assailants actually seeking asylum? At this point, we're not entirely sure about that either.
That said, who cares? The judge quickly moved from the conduct of the dozen assailants to sweeping statements in which she seemed to function as an equal opportunity denouncer. Also, this mildly humorous bit of logic:
They don't show up for asylum hearings. And when they do show up, then they get turned down!
The Five is an angry world. Dana Perino sits at the table, smiling sweetly, pretending she doesn't know better.
Watters and Gutfeld interrupt to crack their insider bro-boy jokes and they giggle and snicker together. Over the weekend, we may show you how it went when Gutfeld interrupted Jessica Tarlov this week to insist that she say the word—to insist that she say "abortion."
The Five is an angry and juvenile world. Our blue tribe newspapers avert their gaze from the chaos on this "news channel." The finer people within our tribe don't like to wrestle with Fox.
People needing people, the singer once said. They're the luckiest in the world!
Perhaps a less impressive episode: This passage also comes from the judge's thumbnail sketch:
Pirro was named as a defendant in a February 2021 defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic in relation to false claims of election fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election. While the allegation against Pirro was dismissed in March 2022, the lawsuit against the other Fox News hosts and the company was in the discovery phase as of April 2023.
Pirro was among the hosts named in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network defamation lawsuit for broadcasting false statements about the plaintiff company's voting machines that Fox News settled for $787.5 million and required Fox News to acknowledge that the broadcast statements were false.
Carl Weathers has died.
ReplyDeleteTerry Gross, is that you?
DeleteNo, it’s not me.
DeleteEveryone's soul is being worked to death by neoliberal capitalism
DeleteThe spammers are just announcing their own grief over their own souls death get it?
DeleteLet’s repeat the magic spell “neoliberal” and “capitalism” ten times, then click our heels, and then throw in “elite” a few times. Feudalism, here we come!
DeleteAmericans deep down know that capitalism isn't a passive system. That someone somewhere is actively turning the people against each other. We don't know what to call these assholes except crazy narcissistic.. Etc. . But they are part of neolibist propaganda, the hatred of democracy as expressed by liberal capitalism is neoliberalism.
DeleteBy the way the Republican party and the center right of the Democratic party are both neoliberal
DeleteStill waitiing for that definition of neoliberal.
DeleteStanford:
Delete, “neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the philosophical view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. "
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/
The neoliberal manifesto
If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/
The neoliberal lobby:
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?search=Neoliberal+&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&fulltext=1
neoliberals take a corporate view
Deleteindividual behavior is the source of poverty and the neoliberal agenda of restricting state aid to the most vulnerable
ReplyDeleteThey are people. They are people who need to be vetted, adequately vetted, before being released into the population.
Otherwise, these things happen. And then various talking heads get upset (genially or not), and say that they don't want to call them "people".
The context, see?
What do you think vetting is?
DeleteAn important question is neglected here and in other coverage of the young migrants arrested in New York: What were the charges brcriought against them?
ReplyDeleteIf they were charged with serious felonies, then their release without bail makes no sense at all. On the other hand, if they were charged with lesser offenses, their release might be altogether commonplace.
Yes, one can make the case that they should have been held or deported or shot into the sun on a rocketship, but isn't this a fairly basic fact that keeps vanishing?
*brought
DeleteIn many, if not most, cities, the cops do not do work for immigration agents. It tend to heighten distrust of police in immigrant communities which makes community policing more difficult.
DeleteThe US has begun to retaliate for the deaths of three soldiers in Jordan. Iran-aligned militias were hit in Iraq and Syria.
ReplyDeleteGood thing otherwise we would be spending all this money on the military for nothing
DeleteWe should just random entities attack and kill our troops. Otherwise, we’re neoliberal warmongers.
DeleteThose who live by the sword die by the sword. They were in another country not just eating ice cream with Biden.
DeleteThe USA lives by the sword.
DeleteThe Manhattan DA's office offered the following:
ReplyDelete"A spokesperson for the DA's office said it requested ROR and supervised release because this is still an ongoing investigation."
In addition, all of the men charged so far have been charged with felonies. That makes their no-bail release a headscratcher. The men are accused of violent felonies, crimes that don't fall under New York's much-maligned bail reform laws. How does an "ongoing investigation" occasion the release of men charged with violent felonies.
Something doesn't add up.
ABC 7 in New York reports this:
Delete"One suspect, Yohenry Brito, was arraigned Thursday afternoon with bail set at $15,000 cash, making him the first of the defendants to be held on bail. Police say he is the man who resisted arrest that sparked the melee over the weekend."
Any migrant who enters the US without authorization, when apprehended, can simply claim they are seeking asylum. They have a right to a hearing before an administrative law judge. These cases are incredibly backed up, been that way for years, and must be getting worse now. They can appeal an adverse decision by the administrative law judge to a federal court (generally if they have a lawyer), which would take even longer to resolve. At the administrative hearing, the asylum seeker has to prove that he or she belongs to a certain group that is subject to persecution in their country, or that they belong to a group that is being persecuted and the government isn't protecting them. There are a lot of technical issues that the asylum seeker needs to prove, it's not that easy to win these cases (I'm not an immigration lawyer - someone knowledgeable could certainly describe it better. Asylum seekers very often lose at these administrative hearings - I would hardly be surprised if Pirro is exaggerating about 85% losing - but I believe well more than 50% do lose, because they don't meet the standards for asylum. The migrants can just say they are seeking asylum, whether there is a basis for it or not. The system is a mess. whoever is right or wrong, it's obviously an issue against the democrats in our elections.
ReplyDelete“ it's obviously an issue against the democrats in our elections.”
DeleteWhy?
Nice comment with some useful facts ac/ma
DeleteBiden has proposed a rule to take effect in May that would deny the ability to apply for asylum to yhose entering illegally.
DeleteRemember when thousands of white people stormed the Capital to overturn an election, injured over a hundred fifty cops, and killed a couple to boot. And none were arrested? Neither does Somerby.
ReplyDeleteBob knows there's crazy people but doesn't know how to reach liberals to beat them in an election
DeleteYou can’t reach crazy people. I don’t think Somerby is talking about teaching the crazies. On the other hand, he thinks the support for Trump, a crazy person, is rational.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:59pm, they didn’t kill any cops and they weren’t released with no bail.
Deletehttps://youtu.be/bLZPx1yVJow?si=K8WGsGkj8CqwWS4N
DeleteWe don’t have enough blue and pink haired Americans fighting with cops and flipping everyone off?
Deport them, immediately.
Not released without bail? They weren’t even arrested.
Deletehttps://nypost.com/2024/02/01/metro/police-believe-4-of-the-migrants-arrested-in-nyc-cop-beatdown-fled-to-california/amp/
DeleteSeveral were arrested, only one on felony assault.
DeleteAnonymouse 8:23pm, only because he had priors. Evidently, kicking police officers is a three strikes and your out.
DeleteCecelia, you seem well informed. There was a pretty horrifying amount of death and destruction on both sides. Right?
Deletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-deaths.html?bgrp=g&smid=url-share
.
In the days and weeks after the riot, five police officers who had served at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died. Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, who was attacked by the mob, died on Jan. 7. Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department killed himself after the attack
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHard to Google number arrested day of, as everything pops up w/ over 1,000 insurrectionists attempting an autogolpe have been sentenced to jail;. My recollection was next to nobody was arrested the day of, maybe a couple real loons with firearms. Most all arrested many months/years later for bragging about being an insurrectionist on a frcking selfie. I find it a tad bit concerning so many folks deflect criticism about a freaking Democracy ending coup. But views vary.
DeleteCorrected post.
DeletePolice officers died by their own hands, after mere months of experiencing or pondering violence or fretting over any real or imagined personal failures. Mere months.
What are the odds of that?
Come on now. Read the article. And I don't appreciate DARVO.
DeleteWhen conservatives are done demanding we hook up a Muslim terrorists genitals to car battery they're complaining about violence
ReplyDeleteThe conservative ideology says work everyone as hard as possible and have huge white Catholic families to out breed the poor. Deport the poor.
ReplyDeleteThe liberal ideology says, we'll let in those who are easy to work. Deport enough to satisfy the border business lobby.
Both are capitalism. Both are exploitation. They just disagree with how far away the servant class lives from them.
Vote for the party that wants to dismantle capitalism, then. And replace it with…what exactly?
Delete
DeleteFor America to vote for an anti-capitalist platform it would first have to be a democracy.
The electoral college system, and the way politicians are financed are both extremely anti-democratic. A citizen's vote matters statistically more or less depending on which region of the country they're living in, as well as how much inherited wealth their family has given them to spend on politics. The people with more money are more likely to win elections because they can buy more advertisements. They get an edge by capturing one bloc against another with media investments.
Some things that a democracy would require some America already has but that doesn't mean that America is a democracy yet. We have regular elections, some independent media if you look for it, and libraries.
If America were a parliament we would just say unions are better and vote for a spectrum of opinions that will hold together in a cross pay movement. Instead with our two party system we have a technocratic class of capitalism that allies with nonprofits and a Southern aristocracy that feeds hate movements.
We have to work state by state creating campaign finance reform to become a democracy in the first place. Until then capitalism is going to easily crush and stall progress keep us on a hamster wheel.
Right now we can organize working class people better under Democrats than Republicans and this is the main reason I would like to see Republicans lose. But by no means am I happy to see s neoliberal corporate party keep spitting on educated people with student loans or misguided Republican proletariat who died of corona virus. Your snobbery helps advance no agenda but your own losses which Trumpism is there to benefit from.
Snobbery? Mine? You have a way with persuasion, don’t you?
DeleteMy apologies, if you don't go along with Bob's comment section when they spit on student loans and unintelligent Republicans then I don't hold any criticism of you.
DeleteBut most people hate are liberals.
Most people here are liberals
DeleteBiden has done a lot of things very well but people utterly despise him. It couldn't be more clear a huge majority of Americans do not like him and do not want him to run for president. Why is he even running? People HATE him more and more every day. Let's get someone else. Hillary would be better. People hate her too though. Maybe Marianne Williamson. Someone who will stand up to the war machine. And is not hated. And is less that eighty.
Delete1:54
DeleteIt's not really about who is in the presidency but which ideology he gives power to
Pirro’s characterization is sadly fairly widespread amongst “conservatives”. And yet, liberals are supposed to empathize with the “others” when they dehumanize immigrants like this. Sorry. Not gonna happen.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think we need to “empathize” with people who hold opinions we don’t like, we just need to exercise a measure of common sense and proportion as to how “bad” each of those opinions really are. We also need to recognize the fact that people like Judge Jeanne have seen a lot more in their time than most of us.
DeleteSaying that those who attack policemen aren’t people is very bad. I disagree with Cecelia and David, but they are people.
DeleteAnonhmouse 7:01pm, that’s good of you. If you can be that magnanimous towards people who merely disagree.with you, surely Judge Pierro can be that way towards dangerous thugs.
DeleteSympathy and cognitive empathy are two different skills.
DeleteIf someone is chasing a train to get to their job, and they fall and hurt themselves my brain gives me two pieces of information.
1. They are hurt
2. They were hurt trying to get on the train
Sympathy says, I feel sorry they are hurt.
Cognitive empathy says, I'm guessing what they were trying to do.
What we have to exercise in a complex modern world is a mastery of both of these qualities, to care and to understand. With only one or the other, we can't see why things happen.
The media are not going to tell you the perspective of everyone in the whole world. They're going to invite only specific guests and tell only specific stories, so we as citizens have to fill in with independent research, much like a journalist SHOULD be doing, the extra information to decide how much priority we put on sympathy for various people.
We have a real empathy gap, caused by the culture being dominated by a media, run for a few people at the expense of the many.
It’s correct to divorce empathy and sympathy from agreement with the actions and opinions of others.
DeleteFrom a technical standpoint it may matter whether they were charge with a felony. But, from a common sense POV, people who did what these people did should not be free without bail. That goes double if they're migrants who will most likely just disappear. I don't know if the law is wrong or its enforcement is wrong, but these people should not be free to without bail and allowed to just reside in the US.
ReplyDeleteI’m glad you acknowledge that they’re people.
DeleteI’ll bet it seemed like self defense to the migrants.
DeleteAnonymouse8:21pm, for all seven of them.
DeleteIf one guy is jumped the rest will have his back.
Delete12 migrants against two cops with no injuries suggests restraint, not a brawl.
DeleteWould you harbor that same standard of “restraint” if during a dispute between the police and the inhabitants of a black neighborhood, only two cops out of seven beat the hell out two black locals?
DeleteThere are studies about levels of average force used against different races. It forms an odd gradient where black people are beaten the hardest, then brown people then white.
DeleteProximity to whiteness is what saves people lives from excessive force.
" The effect of percent Hispanic, while substantial, is
appreciably smaller than the effect of percent black. The smaller effect for percent Hispanic may
reflect the diversity of the Hispanic population. Some subgroups, notably those of Mexican origin,
are stereotyped much the same as blacks (see, for example, Bender 2003) and may experience
discrimination at the hands of police. Past research suggests the use of excessive force against
Hispanics is concentrated in the Southwest (Holmes 2000; Smith and Holmes 2003), where most
Hispanic residents are of Mexican origin. The findings here suggest that its use may have diffused
across the nation, perhaps because of substantial increases in the Mexican-origin populations of
cities outside the Southwest in recent years (Suro and Singer 2002).
The place hypothesis predicts that the challenging circumstances of policing in America’s
ghettos and barrios may trigger the use of excessive force. Our findings provide partial support for
this prediction, showing that cities with extremely high levels of black segregation, which is closely
tied to black disadvantage, have a far higher incidence of sustained excessive force complaints
compared to less segregated cities. Hispanic segregation is unrelated to sustained complaints. One
possible explanation for these findings is that a tipping point exists; the conditions promoting the
use of excessive force may occur primarily in extremely segregated cities. The extreme of Hispanic
segregation is much less pronounced (fifth quintile dissimilarity range = .54 to .71) than for blacks
(fifth quintile dissimilarity range = .65 to .87) and may fall below the level necessary to generate
greater use of excessive force "
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=4458113815893372439&hl=en&as_sdt=0,14
Anonymouse 1:06am, the scenario is of two officers in the process of arresting two brown people.
DeleteThat’s a 1:1 ratio. You’ve seen the video of the officers being confronted and being kicked by at least four other people. You’ve seen the officers using learned techniques of protecting themselves.
How does your post address the idiotic statement/deflection by anonymouse 10:46pm that the crowd used restraint in their violence and how could such a notion be germane in any sense?
Anonymouse 10:45pm, you mean if one guy is in the process of being arrested it ok for the other guys to attack the police officers?
DeleteDo you give that leeway to everyone?
When the January 6 patriots attacked cops, it was perfectly OK.
DeleteIf you're running just on the economy it's not enough to say unemployment is going down, unionizing is up. You also have to explain why capitalism is creating the border issue. Otherwise the tail of the culture war is gonna wag the media and we're going to get 4 more years of calculated self-cannabalizing of the country under Trump. You also have to be able to explain to people why their private medical and student debt haven't gotten better since 1982, what the hell liberals are gonna do about besides blame conservatives.
ReplyDeleteWe have a market society that trains everyone to think in immediate impulses then complain when those immediate impulses do irrational things like create 4 years of quasi-fascism.
Just saying great economy! Is not how you defeat Trump. You have to name capitalists like Elon Musk, and embarass them. You have to actually piss off the people exploiting us a bit and show that you're on our side.
DeleteAmanda
Thursday, February 1, 2024 @ 6:51pm
I've read all your comments and I think I finally found something that can work for me... I've searched for a long time for something like this. Thank you everyone for sharing your experience.
Mia Westbrook of New York was tired of worrying all the time where the next dollar is coming from. Life seemed merely a succession of bills and worrying about how to pay them. One late night while surfing the internet, her long hours of research had finally paid off and she discovered a tight lip secret to getting a break in life and making money online. She was finally able to provide for her three children while staying at home with them.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteAmy
Wednesday, January 31, 2024 @ 3:11pm
Sign me up :)
ReplyDeleteOne of many
https://nypost.com/2006/09/28/pirros-fury-at-cheating-al-feds-probe-her-plea-for-kerik-to-wiretap-husband/