HughBeaumont
HughBeaumont's JournalUN. BELIEVABLE. McGinty: "Tamir Pulled His Replica on Police"
In likely one of the most despicable pieces of building-sized bullshit to emerge from this travesty, Timothy McGinty is now stating grainy security footage of Tamir Rice's 0.79 second murder by Timothy Loehmann was justified because Tamir was apparently the fastest draw in Cleveland or anywhere.
He has called the evidence "indisputable."
Assistant County Prosecutor Matthew Meyer explained how frame-by-frame analysis of surveillance video — handled by Grant Fredericks of Forensic Video Solutions in Spokane, Washington — revealed crucial facts about the November 2014 shooting at Cudell Recreation Center.
It came down to a small point of contrast seen just after officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir.
"You can actually see the gun after Tamir gets shot," Meyer said. "There's a point of contrast on the film that you can see, after [Tamir] collapses to the ground, the point of contrast appears on the concrete gazebo floor that had not been there before."
That point of contrast, prosecutors said, is the replica Colt 1911 that Tamir was seen aiming at people in the hours before someone called 911.
About 40 seconds after the gun appears on the gazebo floor, Loehmann's partner, Frank Garmback, walks to it and kicks it out of the way, Meyer said.
"The significance of that is this: for it to have fallen on the ground, it would have had to have been in Tamir's hand, which means he would have had to have pulled that gun out," he said. "Both officers had their weapons drawn on Tamir even though we know in hindsight he wasn't a real threat to them, which indicates they saw a gun or what they thought was a gun."
The images corroborated the written statement Loehmann recited to the grand jury, McGinty said.
"You could actually see [Tamir] draw his gun on this film," McGinty said. "We could not see it in the muddied [low-resolution] film."
A grand jury declined to charge Loehmann and Garmback after McGinty recommended against an indictment.
"We knew that ethically there couldn't be a trial in this case," he said.
Subodh Chandra, one of a team of lawyers representing the Rice family in a civil lawsuit against the city, department and the officers, said it is debatable whether Tamir is seen pulling the gun out of his waistband.
"That is hotly disputed," he said. "The prosecutor is literally just making that up. He's making it up to try to sell the public on what he's done. That is not true that it's undisputed."
Sorry There Ain't No Better Way of Puttin' It:
Racism doesn't usually look like someone shouting slurs, it looks like people eagerly looking for a reason why a black kid deserved to die. - Lou SchumacherPlain Dealer: Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories
Likely because inviting 1,000 more creative ways to say "I hate (insert racial slur here)s" kinda gets old after a while.And, unironically, the comments ARE turned on for this article, in case you wanted to see just how many Klansmen and AB members exist here in Northeast Ohio.
The simple answer is that we don't fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.
We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.
The trouble was that we couldn't keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.
We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir.
Or, they persisted with the ridiculous narrative that Tamir pulled his pellet gun on the drive-by shooters with badges (even though the footage clearly proves he didn't).
Either way, a 12 year old is dead and his murderer was a drive-by shooter who happened to be wearing a badge.
Yeah, we'd better just forget about ever having Universal Health Care in America.
The War Machine, Inc. and Corporate Welfare NEED those blank checks.The wealthy NEED higher salaries and corporations NEED infinitely larger profits.
Face it; there simply isn't enough money in this country that we can allocate to making the nation's health situation better. It just isn't possible without throwing the entire country into upheaval.
Your publicly-traded insurers, plain and simple, are the best people to determine and distribute your healthcare; at an exorbitant out-of-pocket cost, of course. After all, this is YOUR health we're talking about, right?
All you progressive la-di-dah pie-in-the-sky dreamers better just get this silly notion that we can provide a human right for our citizens while throwing our beloved productive job creatin' wealthy and War Machine, Inc. to the back burner OUT OF YOUR HEADS.
"If I was still president, ISIS would be WASWAS!!"
Uh, really?
If Reagan was President, ISIS would be given Missiles and the profits would be funnelled to Al Shabaab or something. Why do conservatives laud a guy whose administration essentially committed high treason?
Some conservatives hilariously attribute this meme to Bewsh, who essentially gave BIRTH to ISIS thanks to his folly wars. Now we're a mile past denialism and headlong into "Not Even Wrong".
Republicans aren't rootin-tootin shoot-em-up cowboys. They're traitors who take the shortcut to thinking and legality every time.
Regarding the conservative position of keeping health care unaffordable . . . .
I think I finally figured out why some people in the USA are so hellbent against instituting universal health care in this country.
I mean, watching classmate after friend after relative have to put up gofundmes, fund raisers and bake sales to fund five-to-six-digit hospital/pharmaceutical bills for the crime of getting sick (this is on top of all the normal bills they have to deal with) isn't making any bells and whistles go off in anyone ELSE'S heads regarding our imminently sensible for-profit-only system that, like higher education, is slowly becoming the domain of the upper middle class and greater income brackets and firmly tethered to how gainfully employed someone is.
So let me drop the REAL reason why .. . . . .
I think it's because it's far more important to these people that citizens they deem economically, culturally or socially inferior to them DON'T get what every other industrialized nation considers a human right than it is EVERY American citizen HAVING Universal Health Care.
It's like an inherent NEED in America to feel like you're BETTER than someone else rather than have a nation that's truly serious about opening up opportunity to ALL people.
I can dodge lawn furniture.
Ditto rocks, pencils, wrenches, power tools, remote controls, screwdrivers, billiard balls, random blunt objects, etc.
I might come out with skin or organ damage, but I'd likely survive a knife wielder.
I can't outrun or dodge hollow points or 7.62mms.
I'd also like there to be a better way to identify a law abiding good guy with a gun versus a mass shooter other than hoping I win the "When the Shooting Starts" lottery.
I finally watched "Game Change" from beginning to end . . .
Sigh.
I gotta tell you . . . . I'm well aware that there are people on my FB feed and in real life that think Barack Obama is the biggest piece of Stalinist Leninist Marxtits Communist Fascist Nazi (insert racial slur here) shit walking the Earth. Even though we all know that, as a moderate, he's neither here nor there but the country is glacially pulling itself out of the Bush morass despite the inequality and no Universal Health Care. You mention his name and people's nostrils flare and their faces get all fucking red; like you're mentioning Castro or Khrushchev or O'Saddama Bin Laden or someone like that. I know, because in the past month, I actually saw it happen. It's frightening stuff, to be frank.
This movie though, it just pains me to think to this day that FIFTY SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE thought that putting this stunningly inept and dilettante person one bad heartbeat away from The Presidency of the United States . . . .was a good idea. Furthermore, one cannot claim "liberal bias", because much of what's portrayed in this movie actually happened according to the Republican staffers that were part of the campaign.
I don't think the antagonist of this movie was McCain (who should thank Ed Harris for making him look better than he actually is) or Steve Schmidt or Fred Davis or really, even Sarah Palin.
I think the real problem here is we just plain and simple have way too many might-makes-right, well conditioned, faith-based, education-disdaining, poor-hating, wealth-loving, front-running, crank magnet ultracrepidarian extremists who really don't seem to stand for a societal and unilateral ideal that doesn't involve a zero-sum inevitability where rich white (and let's face it, mostly male) America runs the planet rampant at the behest of everyone underneath them.
They support an economic platform that relies on the assumed benevolence of the wealthy, the hope that a business will pan out to a sustainable fruition, the demand that children finance a high-interest mortgage merely for their economic advancement, the vanquishing of an underfunded but highly necessary social safety net, and most laughably, the almost sarcastic assurance that an individual's "gumption and hard work" will save them despite the sheer lack of solutions as to how that's going to happen.
In the death throes of the McCain/Palin campaign, we got to see just how conspiratorial, paranoid and ugly the sentiment of the voting public got. A prophetic line from the end was "ah, who cares? In 48 hours, no one will remember who she is." IF Only.
Looking at the 15 candidates left in the RNC, most of them religious extremists, mean-spirited celebrities, CEOs that think about as much of firing thousands of people as they do sneezing, crank magnets, global warming denialists, anti-science, anti-woman, pro-Wealthcare, anti-student . . . the RNC has either not learned anything or they agreed and sided with the antagonists.
Or, sadly, maybe they've done both.
People need to STOP ACTING like Kim Davis is being held hostage by a book or an invisible being.
This is utter BULLSHIT that this woman is even being taken one bit seriously. Given press time. Rejoicing on stage to thunderous applause with opportunistic assrockets like Mike Huckabee like she's in Godspell or something. Given chance after chance after chance and no one is allowed to touch her because she's without a doubt being held hostage by a believed ominscient being or her twisted interpretation of a long-edited religious text and she absolutely cannot CHANGE.
COME on.
To quote Steve Martin in All of Me . . . "Is everyone here bananas??"
[font size="4"]Stop treating this woman like she's anything other than a batshit insane megalomaniac!![/font]
There is no omniscient sky daddy that holds precedence over the laws of the land.
Your book is not holding you hostage.
We do NOT govern by mythology here.
Everyone really needs to grow the fuck up and put their foot down once and for all when it comes to this crap.
Religion is great if it gives you spiritual enlightenment and well-being.
Anything past that, especially instances where you're denying other people due human rights because of your belief . . . NO.
STOP TAKING THIS BULLSHIT SERIOUSLY. JUST STOP.
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