Author: Marie3

In the absence of US governments and media doing their public service jobs to inform the people in this country, The Guardian steps up to the plate.   The data.  Without hyperbole or even comment.

Leaving it up to us to ask why so many people in this country die in encounters with the police.  Are there simply more threatening violence prone or out of control people in this country that can only be subdued by potentially fatal force delivered by police officers?  Possibly.  But by a factor hundreds of times higher?

Paradoxical.  Contrary to the accepted position of the NRA that threatening violence prone or out of control people will take greater advantage of “good guy” individuals or police that aren’t armed and prepared to shoot a perceived miscreant.  If that were true, wouldn’t such people in a population perptrated much higher rates of attacks on  police and unarmed individuals in other western countries than the US?  Places where their risk of being injured or killed are much lower?

(Ukraine is so impressed with US policing that they’ve welcomed US police training instructors for their new recruits.  That the US pays for the instructors was an added bonus.)

Should the spouses or signficant others of police officers that are killed by their police officer spouse or significant other be included in the listing?  “The Guardian” presents the data and it’s left to others to do the calculations.  On a per capita basis, are spouses and SOs of police officers more or less at risk for being shot by their partner than those in relationship with non-police officers?  Or any other specific profession?  Don’t know.  However, police officer shootings of spouses and SO being more than zero tells us that too many police officers are violence prone and/or too easily become out of control.  Precisely the profile of people that a society doesn’t want to employ as police officers.  And unlike the general public, these public employees can and should be vetted and then trained to the highest possible standard.

US law enforcement employees and organizations are feeling that they are currently under unfair attack.  Maybe they are.  However, unless and until they can account for why they kill and injure a much higher percentage of armed and unarmed Black, Latino, and Native American people than white people, their whining should fall on deaf ears.  There are no valid statistics that support a position that white people are engage in less criminal behavior, or are less violence prone or liable to become out of control than minority population.

Yet, to chalk up all of the disparity to LEO inherent racism lets US society at large off the hook for what we’ve done.  We have  assigned LEOs the role of clearing our streets and communities of what are considered “undesirables.”  The druggies, crazies, and petty theives that we  don’t want to see and have instituted draconian laws to put them behind bars.  Then we reward LEOs for “collars” and make excuses for them when they kill or injure those that don’t quickly and easily submit to their authority regardless of how unwarranted the demand for submission is.

The societal norm in the US is white people.  As such, LEOs, regardless of color, perceive the world through a white lens.  People of color, particularly young and male, stand out from the background of whiteness.  Added to that is the much lower rate of employment for those that are young, male, and/or not white.   What are they supposed to do with their comparatively excessive, daily hours of idleness?  Sequester themselves from ordinary public interactions, activities, and spaces?   And if they don’t are viewed as vulnerable and acceptable LEO targets?

Why do I say “we” and not “we white folks” wrt to the assignment given to LEOs?  For the simple reason that white people don’t call for LEO protection at a higher rate than minorities do.  We all want and expect LEOs to provide us with a certain level of protection from those that would do us harm or are up to no good.

BLM and white liberals apparently reject a socio-economic analysis of the disproportionate rate of cop killings of Black people.  Not sure what their answer to the problem is.  Or maybe I’m not listening well enough.  Or not inclined to think that arresting, convicting, and imprisoning every LEO that kills a Black person would be a robust and effective solution.  (Note: I totally support the indictments of the LEOs involved in the death of Freddie Gray.  The cop shooting deaths of John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott are even clearer instances of murder by cop.  But not all killings by cop are as clear cut.)  Those LEOs would be replaced by new LEOs drawn from the same population employment pool as the current LEOs and would get the same form of training.  Why, in the aggregate, would the new ones perform their jobs any better than the previous ones? (Lobotomies to extract racism don’t exist.)

There is  also the high risk to overplaying a hand.  Those of a certain age have seen overplayed hands that lead to backlashes that makes things worse again and again.  “The Blue Line” becomes more robust and clever and ever more intractable and difficult to pierce.  People, and here it is disproportionately white people, become more fearful and easier for TPTB to manipulate into supporting “our cops.”  (A variant of the “support our troops” BS that was crafted in the wake of the Vietnam War that even “good” liberals go around spouting today and IMHO was instrumental in repressing objections to the Bush family wars and the subsequent conversion to waging wars with unmanned drones and US funded proxy armies.)

Facts collected and soberly and calmly absorbed and discussed in a search for reasonable and possible changes that can make us better may not get us there quickly.  But emotionally screaming past each other doesn’t put us on a path forward and that’s not the worst possible outcome.  So, a big thanks to The Guardian for initiating and continuing to collect the facts we need to know.

Hillary Clinton Spends $19 million

…
The outlay is nearly four times what Clinton spent in the first three months of her last presidential campaign, when she faced a far more competitive primary race against then-Sen. Barack Obama.
…
During that 2008 campaign, Clinton and her team faced charges from donors that they were wasting money on ineffective strategic choices…

This time, her staff has emphasized its “cheapskate” mentality — particularly to contributors. At her first national finance meeting in May, top donors were instructed to purchase their own lunches and fund their own transportation to various gatherings in Brooklyn.
…
During the first three months of her 2008 bid, Clinton spent 14 percent of the $36 million she raised, according to FEC documents. In the launch of this campaign, she’s burned though nearly 40 percent of what she has taken in.

To be fair, everything costs more than it did in 2007.  

Somewhat more interesting are her revenues.  A couple of weeks ago there were reports that she’d received close to 500,000 donations and the average donation was less than $100,  Slight adjustment:

Her campaign also reported that Clinton received more than 250,000 contributions, with an average donation of $144.89. About 17 percent of her contributions were $200 or less.

No figure on the number of donors.  But even if contributors are structuring their contributions (i.e. ten $100 contributions instead of one $1,000), her donor base is still better than it was last time around when a high percentage maxxed out with one donation.  Although she still has $100,000 campaign bundlers.

By comparison, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has fueled an insurgent challenge to Clinton with small donations. He pulled in more than $15.2 million through the end of June, and three-quarters of his donations were $200 or less.

The Guardian: Sanders FEC filing:

His campaign – keen to spin the case that his campaign is spurred by grassroots backers rather than big-money donors – released a statement saying more than 284,000 individual donors gave an average contribution of just over $35 each. Or as Sanders put it: “Our campaign is a strong grassroots movement supported by middle-class Americans from working families, not billionaires trying to buy elections.”

Jeb Bush, by comparison, raised just $368,023 from small donors.

Records show that Bernie 2016 has a not-too-shabby cash-on-hand figure, either: $12,161,737.67. That’s more than Bush, although the former Florida governor has deliberately encouraged supporters to direct their donations to his preferred Super Pac, Right to Rise USA.

Once again Clinton is being bested on the number of donors by a competitor.  Too soon to tell if Bernie is a better money manager because Clinton’s campaign is more mature and his has barely started.

(Sorry — I do find some of this campaign wonky stuff interesting.)

Update:

John Podesta July 15 tweet

91% of all @HillaryClinton donations were $100 or less. Thanks so much people.
UPDATE – FEC filings:

Rand Paul. Contributions: $5.3 million. Transfer (from Senate campaign coffers?): 1.6 million. Spent (including unpaid debts) $3.5 million. Net cash on hand $2.4 million.

(will add others as I pull them up)

UPDATE 2 — additional FEC filings:

The Master List of everyone that has filed Click on the candidate’s name to get the detail. (I’m not compulsive enough to look at more than a few and then not much more than the summaries.) A few observations:

Ben Carson: his expenditure pages are a few million dollars short of the $5 million he reported spending to date. Ben Carson Burned a Ton of Cash on Live Music and Private Jets. To date, his campaign operation is a total joke.

Ted Cruz. Practically a blank page for $5.8 million in expenditures.

Hillary Clinton. Her expenditures page is blank. No shortage of $2,700 maxi donors in her contributions detail.

Rand Paul — based on distributions — has a campaign operation in place. Personnel heavily concentrated in DC and VA, but has people in place in fourteen other states.

A NYTimes article, Marine Commander’s Firing Stirs Debate on Integration of Women in Corps, is a short profile of Lt. Col. Germano and some of the issues involved in her firing.

When Lt. Col. Kate Germano took command of the Marine Corps’ all-women boot camp, the failure rate of female recruits at the rifle range was about three times higher than that of their male counterparts, and she said there was no plan to try to improve it. “The thinking was girls can’t shoot, so why bother,” she said in an interview.
So she worked with trainers to give women better skills instruction, and soon passing rates soared, according to Marine Corps records. In June, 95 percent of women passed initial rifle qualification, equaling the rate for men.
…

What’s not to like about results like that?  She wasn’t just pushing the recruits on the firing range, but in all areas of their training.  And

She began contacting recruiting stations to detail why some recruits had failed basic training — information she thought would help prevent failures in the future.

Probably not the right way to go about improving the overall quality of the recruits.  But sometimes in hierarchical organizations, the only way to get things done is to bypass all the middle-men.  So, don’t know if that’s a completing legitimate complaint about her performance.

“This whole thing started when her Marines — her female Marines — were telling us they were being mistreated,” said Col. Jeffrey Fultz, the chief of staff for Parris Island. “She was telling them their male counterparts will never respect them if they don’t get good physical scores. You just don’t do that.”
…
She requested an independent investigation, saying Colonel Haas had created a hostile work environment and was biased because of her gender. The investigation, completed June 24, did not find evidence of either, but said the female battalion’s need for more drill instructors should be addressed. It also said another survey — one that did not allow more than one response per Marine — should be conducted.
…

She was fired anyway.   What a waste and squandering of a good opportunity to improve the operation.
—-

One morning I received a call from a field office employee.  Somewhere in Texas early that day, a bank had been held up and the robbers had gotten away with half a million dollars.  I immediately imformed my supervisor who leaned back in his chair and said, “You know Marie, proper loss control procedures prevents such occurances. “

I fumed.  “Yes, I know.  But at the moment I can’t even recall this damn bank.”

I then took off to get the file.  The reason I couldn’t recall it was that I never seen the account.  

On return to the office, I placed the file on my supervisor’s desk and said, “Looks like this one is your’s.”

He picked up the file and handed it back to me, “Not anymore.  Your territory.  Your bank.  Your robbery.”

It had been a slick job.  And in the days prior to ubiquitious security cameras and recordings, they got away with it.  Still it shouldn’t have happened.

What does this have to do with Lt. Col. Germane?  Well, I pounded on field colleagues to pound on the banks we serviced to double down on operational procedures to prevent such a robbery.  Until a few months later when my supervisor, who was a good guy, said, “You’ve proved you point and now it’s time  to lighten up.  A little, or a lot, more balance can achieve 99.9% and that’s good enough.  That last 0.1% isn’t worth the cost.”

Good managers not only do but teach/coach their subordinates good management practices.  Gently reel in subordinates that have lost perspective in the pusuit of perfection.

—

Doesn’t appear that Colonel Haas has the right stuff for a senior position.  And Col. Jeffrey Fultz doesn’t appear to be much better.   Lt. Col. Germano is exactly what is needed on the management front lines; they do the heavy lifting.   However, they also need quality skilled superiors to nudge them in the right direction when they get too extreme or off course.

Aaron MacLean at Washington FreeBeacon adds more in: Why Did the Marine Corps Fire Kate Germano — It’s Complicated.  The MacLean assert that the NYTimes article is too biased in favor of Germano.  That’s a judgment call that I don’t share after reading both.

But wait, there’s more!

Allegations that Germano took a “victim-blaming” approach to sexual assault prevention stem from a January brief to officers. Witnesses said she implied that sexual assault is “100 percent preventable” and that “by drinking, you are putting yourself in a position to be sexually assaulted.” One attendee said she would not feel comfortable reporting an assault following the brief because she felt it would not be taken seriously.

…But one thing I know for a fact is that no male Marine officer, absent some sort of career death wish, would ever utter the words Germano reportedly did regarding sexual assault. Suggesting that female Marines could exercise some agency in matters of sexual assault rather than be helpless victims provided her enemies at Parris Island with a mile-wide advantage.

…no male Marine officer, …, would ever utter the word

Dare we ask how the US military is doing on preventing rape and arresting and convicting the perpetrators?  How many programs over how many decades and what are the results?  Do women and men find it easy to report rapes?  Not according to statistics.  Maybe, just maybe, they’re doing some things wrong.

While I would never suggest, or even think, that women have the agency to prevent 100% of the sexual assaults they are subjected to.  And believe that women should have the autonomy to live perfectly acceptable and normal lives without the threat of sexual assault.   However, I agree with Germano that women do have agency in avoiding situations that inherently make themselves easy targets for rape.

If the college campus rape statistics excluded first year students that of their own accord became highly inebriated before they were assualted, the statistics would be less alarming.  Maybe no better than they were in the past, which is still unacceptable, but it wouldn’t look as if we were going backwards at a fast rate.  Since telling young people to just say no to alcohol doesn’t seem to work, maybe they should be instructed in how to drink without putting themselves at high risk for assault.   Sort of like high society cut the drink-drive accidents and deaths way down from what they once were.

MacLean does have a money quote at the end of his piece:

Germano’s sin seems to be that she was pursuing actual respect for–and self-respect by–women in the Marine Corps, and not the fictitious appearance of equality that both her bosses, and some of her subordinates, appear to prefer.

Far too much data in this one to absorb easily or quickly.  Poll taken July 4-6.   (I’m going to bookmark it for future reference.)   But a few things stand out and aren’t independent from most of the detailed responses.  1) Old people follow the news; young people don’t.  Factor in that Faux news is a major source for old people.  Thus, the percentage of old people with an opinion on all the questions is the highest.  “Don’t know” is the highest for the youngest age group.  2) High correlation between Party ID and specific opinions.  And Independents, at least in this poll, tend to fall in between DEM and REP opinons.  However, that interpretation may be superficial and therefore, misleading.

What I direct your attention to today is Page 74.  Favorability of Donald Trump.   Total “Don’t Know” is a mere 9%.   Only Jeb(!), among GOP candidates, comes near that low level of “Don’t Know” at 16%.  Only among the olds does Trump have a combined “Very Favorable” and “Somewhat Favorable” rating above 33% and at 59% it is far above all the other age groups in which he scores a combined 60% “Very Unfavorable” and “Somewhat Unfavorable.”

Somewhat and Very Unfavorable by Race:
White: 55%
Black: 73%
Hispanic: 61%

(Trump must be taking comfort from that 28% positive rating from Hispanics as he continues to do his darndest to increase the number of Latinos that hate him. )

Women hate him (62%) more than men (52%).  And those with family income >$40,000 hate him more than those <$40,000.  (That would be skewed by lower income seniors.)

A (D) bag of rocks could beat this guy.  Make it a Trump/Palin GOP ticket and they’d stuggle to get half the GOP vote in the general election.

Jeb(!) Fav v. Unfav are 34% and 50% respectively.  Ouch.

Hillary kicks butt with the lowest percentage of “Don’t Know” at 6%.   Democrats might want to take note that her Fav v. Unfav is 45% v. 50%.  The 45% Fav is good at this point and she has time and room to increase her favorables and reduce her unfavorables.  However, her Very Fav v. Very Unfav ratio of 24%  v. 40% isn’t good (except in comparison with Trump’s 18%  v. 46%)

Sanders’ “Don’t Know” is 36%.   Fav/unfav 32%/32%.  Fav:Unfav by demographics:

White: 31%:36%
Black: 37%:29%
Hispanic: 40%:14%
Male: 31%:38%
Female: 33%:26%

Sanders best Fav/UnFav age demographic is 30-44.  Fav: 35% and Unfav: 24%.  (Not the first time I’ve noted of late a stronger left lean in this age group.)

Looking at those >64 years old, Clinton’s “Don’t know” is 2% and Sanders’ is 18%.  The oldsters aren’t keen on Sanders –30% Very Unfav and 19% Somewhat Unfav.   Not good.  Clinton’s are worse (and likely more intractable) at 60% Very Unfav and 6% Somewhat Unfav.

As this is just an early snapshot and the sample size is middling, don’t see any reason to attempt any interpolation calculations to adjust for Sanders current much lower Name ID.   It’s entirely possible that as more >64 year olds come to know Sanders that they will dislike him as much as they dislike Clinton and LIbs and Mods may never like him as much as they like Clinton.  However, those asseting that Sanders’ appeal is limited to white liberals are full of bull.  So far, he’s performing better with blacks and latinos than whites.  Likely completely in line with minorities that skew liberal and Democratic.    

Sometimes I have nothing to add to what I think is a must read article.  Ravitch hits it out of the part with Arne Duncan’s Legacy.

…
When Obama was elected, many educators and parents thought that Obama would bring a new vision of the federal role in education, one that freed schools from the test-and-punish mindset of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. But Arne Duncan and Barack Obama had a vision no different from George W. Bush and doubled down on the importance of testing, while encouraging privatization and undermining the teaching profession with a $50 million grant to Teach for America to place more novice teachers in high-needs schools. Duncan never said a bad word about charters, no matter how many scandals and frauds were revealed.
…

That’s just a teaser for the long list of just how much damage has been done to public education during Duncan’s tenure.  Read it and weep.

…The next president and the next Secretary of Education will have an enormous job to do to restore our nation’s public education system from the damage done by Race to the Top. We need leadership that believes in the joy of learning and in equality of educational opportunity. We have not had either for 15 years.

Nothing would have been better than the federal, costly something of the past decade and a half.  Can’t we ever get rid of these destroyers?      

Dateline: 6/24/15 – The House Appropriations Committee GOP Panel Votes to Keep Funding Ban for Gun Violence Research.

A GOP-led panel blocked a proposal Wednesday that would have reversed a nearly 20-year-old ban on funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to research on gun violence.

The House Appropriations Committee voted 32-19 against ranking member Rep. Nita Lowey’s (D-N.Y.) amendment to a bill that would fund health, education and labor programs in the next fiscal year.

“When it comes to gun violence, my friends, this committee won’t give one dime for the CDC to conduct research on something that is killing Americans by the thousands,” Lowey said.
…

The issue of gun control was once again, and predictably, raised last week after the massacre in Charleston.  The arguments don’t change.  The positions of groups and individuals don’t change.  Everybody cites whatever facts they have handy to support their belief; be it that “guns don’t kill; people kill” or “guns increase homicides.”  At this time, the former group has better facts on their side because although the number of guns in the US has increased, there’s general statistical agreement that the per capita gun homicide rate has declined (Pew Research).  Significantly from a high of 7.0 in 1993 to a low of 3.6 in 2010.  Still extremely high by western industrialized nations standards but a significant improvement. Not that anyone can explain the drop.
While that Pew report is consistent with other reports on gun homicides, the numbers shown for “non-fatal violent firearm crime” are dubious.  Last week, I asked what seemed to me to be a simple question: on an annual basis, how many people incur non-fatal gunshot wounds?

IOW has the rate of gun homicides gone down because fewer people are shot or because trauma medical care for gunshot victims improved?  Or some combination of the two.   And how much does all that medical care cost the US health care “system?”
It wasn’t difficult to find numerous reports that seemed to address those questions.  And yet, it became quickly apparent to me that they were all based on estimates and not actual data.  The only honest investigative report on this was done by ProPublica: Why Don’t We Know How Many People Are Shot Each Year in America?

How many Americans have been shot over the past 10 years? No one really knows. We don’t even know if the number of people shot annually has gone up or down over that time.

The government’s own numbers seem to conflict. One source of data on shooting victims suggests that gun-related violence has been declining for years, while another government estimate actually shows an increase in the number of people who have been shot. Each estimate is based on limited, incomplete data. Not even the FBI tracks the total number of nonfatal gunshot wounds.
…
While the number of gun murders has decreased in recent years, there’s debate over whether this reflects a drop in the total number of shootings, or an improvement in how many lives emergency room doctors can save.
…
Meanwhile, the CDC numbers are based on a representative sample of 63 hospitals nationwide, and the margin of error for each estimate is very large. The CDC’s best guess for the number of nonfatal intentional shootings in 2012 is somewhere between 27,000 and 91,000.
…
The FBI also gathers data on gun crime from local police departments, but most departments do not track the number of people who are shot and survive. Instead, shootings are counted as part of the broader category of “aggravated assault,” which includes a range of gun-related crimes, from waving a gun at threateningly to actually shooting someone.
There were about 140,000 firearm aggravated assaults nationwide in 2012, according to the FBI’s report. How many of those assaults represent someone actually getting shot? There’s no way to tell.

How can we begin to address an issue that’s as controversial and complicated as gun violence if we don’t even have the tangible facts?  Facts that aren’t subject to argumentation by any side of the debate.  The public doesn’t object to mandatory reporting of diseases to the CDC.  We demand it and are quick to blame the CDC and hospitals if they aren’t immediately on top of an occurrence of an unexpected and rare disease.  (Reference Ebola in one hospital last year and the collective freak out in the country.)    There aren’t any great impediments to instituting mandatory reporting of gunshot wounds to the CDC by medical professionals.  Not even necessary for those professionals to determine if the victims were intentionally or accidentally shot.  Sampling and statistics can provide a good enough answer to the intentional and accidental rates as well as the severity of the injuries.

Is there some number of annual non-fatal gunshot victims and average medical cost per victim that would make a difference in the opinions of Americans on guns?  (The occasional mass killings and over 11,000 gun homicides per year must be tolerable since it doesn’t lead to public demands for changes.)  They had no difficulty coming up with a number of military deaths in Iraq that they thought would be acceptable, approximately 5,000, and the US military made sure that it came in right around that number.  What’s the tolerance for the number of gunshot victims?  And cost (a question wrt Iraq that Americans weren’t asked and didn’t bother to think about).   Nobody knows the answer to that either.  (The tolerance level for both for the majority are likely much higher than gun control advocates want to believe.)

With each mass killing that commands national attention, we continue our verbal shots in the dark.  No more informed than we were with the last tragic event.  And so it goes.