Tag Archives: conservatives

There’s More to Kumbaya Than Just Getting Liberals and Conservatives to Agree

by UlrikeCohn89764 Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Tim Lee lists four pro-growth policy reforms that he thinks liberals and conservatives can agree on:

  1. Let developers in coastal cities build more
  2. Boost high-skilled immigration
  3. Reform copyright and patent laws
  4. Liberalize occupational licensing rules

In theory, I suppose these could be areas of bipartisan agreement. But without throwing too much sand in the gears just to make a nuisance of myself, we should take a look at why all four of these things are so firmly going nowhere even though liberals and conservatives allegedly hold common cause on them. Here we go:

  1. Coastal cities. The problem here is that this is a pretty low priority for both liberals and conservatives. They just don’t care that much, and they certainly don’t care enough to fight the nonpartisan power bloc that unfailingly—and rabidly—opposes this: current residents of coastal cities. This is mainly a local issue, not a state or federal issue, and the fastest way for any local pol in LA or San Francisco to get tossed out of office is to propose lots of new high-rise residential buildings that will (allegedly) bring tons of traffic and crime into the community, and probably drive down current property values. So the game just isn’t worth the candle. Plus, conservatives have to watch out for the tea-party crazies who think high-rises are part of an Agenda 21 plot from the UN to make us all live like rabbits in government-controlled urban warrens. Or something.
  2. High-skill immigration. There are people who oppose this—primarily high-skill citizens who don’t really want lots of new competition—but that’s not the big problem. Mainly this is a political football. Sure, liberals and conservatives agree on this particular part of immigration reform. But liberals don’t want to unilaterally agree to it. They want it to be one of the bargaining chips for broader immigration reform. After all, if they preemptively agree to all the stuff conservatives already support, they have no leverage for eventually negotiating a comprehensive bill that includes some stuff conservatives don’t support. So for the time being, it’s being held hostage and that shows no signs of changing soon.
  3. Copyright and patent. I dunno. For a policy that liberals and conservatives allegedly agree about, we sure haven’t seen much action on it. Quite the contrary, in fact. Most Republicans and about a third of Democrats just approved fast-track status for the TPP treaty, which, among other things, enshrines American-style copyright and patent law on everyone who’s part of the treaty. Once that’s in place, we couldn’t change our laws in any meaningful way even if we wanted to. And frankly, I’ve seen very little evidence that either Republicans or business-oriented Democrats really want to. They’re too interested in currying favor with IP owners to bother with an issue that will win them virtually no votes from anyone on Election Day.
  4. Occupational licensing rules. This one, finally, is a bit of a mystery to me. I agree that it’s not an inherently partisan issue, but in a way, that’s the problem. It’s also not a hot-button issue, which means neither party is really willing to fight back against it. On the other hand, taxidermists, animal trainers, bartenders, funeral attendants, and so forth are willing to fight for it since it restricts entry and raises wages in their profession.

There’s a common theme to all four of these issues: there are special interests who care a lot about them, but no real benefit for working politicians to reach across the aisle and fight back. In theory, they might have similar attitudes on these four items, but why bother doing anything about it? No one is jamming their phone lines about this stuff and no one is voting for or against them based on their positions. If activists want action on this kind of googoo stuff, they have to figure out a way to make the public care. Once they do that, they’ll have at least a fighting chance of getting politicians to care too. Until then, don’t get your hopes up.

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There’s More to Kumbaya Than Just Getting Liberals and Conservatives to Agree

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Obamacare Still Isn’t Safe, and Liberals Better Not Forget It

by ViolaVeale Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent warns Democrats not to get complacent about Obamacare:

House Republicans are still forging ahead with a separate lawsuit against Obama over the law (though it may not be resolved for years). Conservatives like Ted Cruz are still calling for holding spending bills hostage to roll back the ACA. GOP presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and Cruz are all pledging to keep up the fight to repeal Obamacare — “every single word,” as Cruz puts it.

….Democrats should take continued GOP opposition to Obamacare very seriously. It has serious real-world consequences. As long as states hold out against the Medicaid expansion, it could slow the law’s efforts to realize its goal of expanding coverage. One thing this means is that Democrats should redouble their efforts to regain electoral ground on the level of the states, where future decisions about the Medicaid expansion will be made.

When Obama won the 2012 election, I figured Obamacare was finally safe. Except….there was still the Supreme Court. But they mostly upheld Obamacare, and once again I thought it was finally safe. Whew. Still, Republicans kept fighting. And things were still dicey as long as Obamacare was still vaporware. Then it finally went into effect in 2014, and disastrous rollout or not, I figured that was it. Once it’s actually helping millions of people, it’s safe. But wait! Then there was another Supreme Court case. But that dropped this week, and Obamacare was once again upheld.

So now Obamacare is finally safe, right? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But Republicans are obsessed with Obamacare like no other law that’s been passed in decades. It’s kind of scary, the same way it was scary watching the unhinged Captain Ahab stumping around the Pequod. So no, Obamacare is still not safe. Not unless Democrats win at least the White House, and maybe both the White House and the Senate, in 2016. At that point, Republicans will finally have to give up. They’d have no plausible path to repeal, and by 2020 the law would have been in place for seven years; it would be covering upwards of 25 million people; and the health care industry would be so plugged into Obamacare’s rules that it would literally take years to extricate them if the law was repealed.

It sounds bizarre—not least of all to me, who badly underestimated how long Republicans could stay maniacally fixated on Obamacare—but it won’t truly be safe until and unless Democrats win in 2016. I sure hope Democrats figure this out. If you want to know what we’re up against, use Kevin’s Quick Zeitgeist Test. Type “Obamacare” into Google and then go to image view. Here’s the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?lr=&cr=&safe=images&gws_rd=ssl&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&q=obamacare&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=-HSNVfnbNMLFggSu7YbIAw

Now do a quick count of pro vs. anti Obamacare images in, say, the top 50 results. Not counting neutral photos, I put it at about 10:1 for the haters. These guys aren’t giving up. Those of who support Obamacare had better show a similar level of passion for keeping it around.

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Obamacare Still Isn’t Safe, and Liberals Better Not Forget It

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Nebraska Becomes First Conservative State in 40 Years to Repeal the Death Penalty

by DottyClaudio12 Posted on May 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nebraska legislators on Wednesday overrode the Republican governor’s veto to repeal the state’s death penalty, a major victory for a small but growing conservative movement to end executions. The push to end capital punishment divided Nebraska conservatives, with 18 conservatives joining the legislature’s liberals to provide the 30 to 19 vote to override Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto—barely reaching the 30 votes necessary for repeal.

Today’s vote makes Nebraska “the first predominantly Republican state to abolish the death penalty in more than 40 years,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, in a statement shortly after the vote. Dunham’s statement singled out conservatives for rallying against the death penalty and said their work in Nebraska is “part of an emerging trend in the Republican Party.” (Nebraska has a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, so lawmakers do not have official party affiliations.)

For conservative opponents of the death penalty, Wednesday’s vote represents a breakthrough. A month ago, overcoming the governor’s veto still looked like a long-shot. Conservatives make a number of arguments against the death penalty, including the high costs and a religion-inspired argument about taking life. “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe God should be the only one who decides when it is time to call a person home,” Nebraska state Sen. Tommy Garrett, a conservative Republican who opposes the death penalty, said last month.

“I think this will become more common,” Marc Hyden, national coordinator of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said in a statement following the repeal vote. “Conservatives have sponsored repeal bills in Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri, and Kentucky in recent years.”

But conservative opponents of the death penalty have a tough slog ahead. Though support for the death penalty has reached its lowest point in 40 years, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey, 77 percent of Republicans still support it.

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Nebraska Becomes First Conservative State in 40 Years to Repeal the Death Penalty

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The Keystone Pipeline Just Lost Big in a Shocking Canadian Election

by MichaelMaddock Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

American environmentalists are frustrated that our adorable neighbor to the north is surprisingly retrograde on climate change. The reason is that Canada has a Conservative government. Right-leaning governments almost always have worse records on environmental protection, but this is especially so in present-day Canada because Prime Minister Stephen Harper hails from, and draws a lot of support in, the interior province of Alberta.

Oil-rich Alberta—home to notorious tar-sands operations—is just north of Idaho, and has the politics to match. The right-leaning party has been in power there for 44 years. But not anymore.

On Tuesday, the lefty New Democratic Party (NDP) won the provincial elections on a platform that promises to diversify Alberta’s fossil fuel-dependent economy. The NDP campaigned on criticism of the Conservatives for being too close to the oil industry and a pledge to tax more oil profits. From The Wall Street Journal:

The longtime ruling party of Canada’s energy-rich Alberta province lost its four-decade hold on power on Tuesday, ushering in a left-leaning government that has pledged to raise corporate taxes and increase oil and gas royalties.

The Alberta New Democratic Party swept enough districts to form a majority, taking most of the seats in both the business center of Calgary and the provincial capital of Edmonton, according to preliminary results from Elections Alberta.

Canada has a multi-party system. The three biggest are the Conservative Party, which is the largest right-of-center party; the Liberal Party, which is center-left and roughly equivalent to mainstream US Democrats; and the NDP, which is like the left wing of the Democratic Party. So this election result is shocking, like Dennis Kucinich being elected governor of Alabama. For historical reasons, the Alberta Conservative Party is oxymoronically known as the Progressive-Conservatives, but this doesn’t mean they are any more moderate than other Conservatives. The Alberta NDP is moderate compared to the NDP of, say, liberal green-minded British Columbia. But the election result is still a paradigm shift with potentially major environmental implications.

The Journal reports:

“We need to start down the road to a diversified and resilient economy. We need finally to end the boom-and-bust roller coaster that we have been riding on for too long,” NDP leader Rachel Notley, who is expected to succeed Jim Prentice as Alberta’s premier, said at a news conference.

The NDP has long been a marginal force in Alberta’s traditionally conservative politics, but recent public opinion polls showed its popularity surging. In the campaign, Ms. Notley attacked Mr. Prentice for reinstating provincial health-care premiums and being too cozy with oil-patch interests.

In a move that spooked some energy company executives during the campaign, Ms. Notley raised the specter of increasing royalties levied on oil and gas production, although she said that her party would only consider that once crude-oil prices recovered from recent lows.

She also signaled her party wouldn’t support a proposed Enbridge Inc. crude-oil pipeline, called the Northern Gateway, which would connect Alberta’s oil sands with a planned Pacific coast terminal in British Columbia, telling a local newspaper that “Gateway is not the right decision.”

Notley also doesn’t support plans for Keystone XL, and pledged to stop spending taxpayer dollars to push the pipeline in Washington, DC. (She does support two other tar-sands pipeline projects, though.) And she wants Alberta to get more serious about climate change, as the Globe and Mail reports:

Another focus, according to Ms. Notley’s platform, will be bolstering the province’s reputation on climate change as previous governments have resisted establishing tougher targets for carbon reduction from the oil sands and other industries.

The NDP triumph in Alberta may put political pressure on the Harper government, which is facing a federal election this fall. The province’s voters sent the message that they want more protection for the environment and less pandering to oil interests. This couldn’t happen at a better time, as environmentalists are nervously awaiting Canada’s proposal for carbon emission reductions heading into the UN climate negotiations to be held this December in Paris. Will Harper now make a more significant climate commitment? We’ll all be watching to see.

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The Keystone Pipeline Just Lost Big in a Shocking Canadian Election

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Democrats in Oregon of All Places Just Torpedoed a Bill to Expand Abortion Rights

by cazaresibiuieftina Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s how quickly the prospect of expanding abortion rights can kill a piece of legislation: In February, a group of state lawmakers introduced a bill that would require insurers to cover the full spectrum of women’s reproductive services at an affordable prices. Just two months later, the same lawmakers have killed the bill. The section calling for abortion coverage proved just too controversial.

This didn’t happen in the Rust Belt, or in a purple state where Democrats hold the statehouse by just a vote or two. It happened in Oregon, where the Democrats control both chambers of the legislature by a supermajority and where the party has a lengthy history of going to the mat for abortion rights.

Nina Liss-Schultz of RH Reality Check (and a MoJo alum) has the full story. The tale is an illuminating one as progressives contemplate how to respond to the historic number of anti-abortion laws that have passed in the last five years.

It’s also an important dose of reality.

Conservatives have enacted more abortion restrictions in the past few years than they have in the entire previous decade. In January, though, several news reports circulated that made it seem as though a full-fledged progressive counter strike was already under way. The stories were based on reports by the Guttmacher Institute and the National Institute for Reproductive Health, pro abortion-rights think tanks. They found that in 2014, dozens of lawmakers introduced dozens of bills—95, by Guttmacher’s count—supporting women’s reproductive rights, surpassing a record set in 1990. “A Record Number Of Lawmakers Are Starting To Fight For Reproductive Rights,” one headline announced. Another read, “Inside the quiet, state-level push to expand abortion rights.”

It’s certainly true that the tidal wave of new abortion restrictions has inspired a progressive backlash. But the suggestion that the two sides are evenly matched, or even approaching that point, is out of line with reality. Just four of those 95 measures were eventually passed into law. One of them was a Vermont bill to repeal the state’s long-defunct abortion ban, in case the makeup of the Supreme Court allowed the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade—a looming danger, but not the most pressing issue facing abortion rights.

By contrast, last year alone conservative lawmakers introduced 335 bills targeting abortion access; 26 passed. And in two states that are overtly hostile to abortion rights—Texas and North Dakota—the legislature wasn’t even in session. That’s part of why you can expect this year’s abortion battles to be even uglier.

But it’s not just about sheer numbers. At the same time that progressive lawmakers were pushing forward-thinking laws, the 2014 midterms undermined their efforts. In states where there were serious efforts to expand reproductive rights—Colorado, Nevada, New York, and Washington—Democratic losses on Election Day have placed those plans on indefinite hold.

Here’s how things fell apart in Oregon, according to the Lund Report, an Oregon-based health news website.

Democratic health committee chair Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson said the abortion language was so toxic that “leadership”—her caucus leaders—would not even allow her to have a public hearing on SB 894, let alone move it to the Senate floor. She said House Democratic leaders were also involved in the discussion over whether the bill could see the light of day.

Meanwhile, in the time it took for Oregon to abandon this bill, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, and West Virginia passed 10 new abortion and reproductive rights restrictions. What happened in Oregon shows just how much reproductive rights advocates are playing catch-up, even in states that appear friendly to their agenda.

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Democrats in Oregon of All Places Just Torpedoed a Bill to Expand Abortion Rights

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Is It Fair to Keep Peppering Scott Walker With Gotcha Questions?

by MarlonCorones Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lately Scott Walker has been asked:

Whether he agrees with Rudy Giuliani’s comment that President Obama doesn’t love America.
Whether he believes in evolution.
Whether he believes that Obama is a Christian.

Is this fair? Why is Walker being peppered with gotcha questions like this? Are Democrats getting the same treatment?

There are no Democrats running for president yet, so it’s hard to say what kind of questions they’re going to be asked. But if Hillary Clinton attends a fundraising dinner where, say, Michael Moore suggests that Dick Cheney should be tried as a war criminal, I’m pretty sure Hillary will be asked if she agrees. And asked and asked and asked.

As for the other stuff Walker is being asked about—evolution, climate change, Obama’s religion, etc.—there really is a good reason for getting someone like Walker on the record. He’s basically a tea party guy who’s trying to appear more mainstream than the other tea party guys, and everyone knows that there are certain issues that are tea party hot buttons. So you have to ask about them to take the measure of the man. Sure, they’re gotcha questions, but they have a legitimate purpose: to find out if Walker is a pure tea party creature or not. That’s a matter of real public interest.

Conservatives are complaining that Walker is facing a double standard. Maybe. We’ll find out when Hillary and the rest of the Democratic field start campaigning in earnest. But I’m curious. What kinds of similar questions would be gotchas for Democrats? Drivers licenses for undocumented workers? Support for single-payer healthcare? Those aren’t really the same, but I can’t come up with anything that is. It needs to be something that’s either conspiracy-theorish or else something where the liberal base conflicts with the scientific consensus, and I’m not sure what that is. GMO foods? Heritability of IQ? Whether George Bush stole the 2004 election by tampering with voting machines? I’m stretching here, but that’s because nothing really comes to mind.

Help me out. What kinds of Scott-Walkerish gotcha questions should reporters be saving up for Hillary?

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Is It Fair to Keep Peppering Scott Walker With Gotcha Questions?

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1958: The Year That Writing About Gay Rights Became Legal

by BryantRiggins Posted on January 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m familiar with the usual highlights of the gay rights movement, but not much more. So I found today’s article by David Savage about the 1958 Supreme Court case ONE vs. Olesen pretty interesting. Lower courts had ruled the Los Angeles magazine ONE obscene and therefore illegal to ship by mail, but a young lawyer named Eric Julber persuaded the editors to appeal to the Supreme Court:

By coincidence, the Supreme Court was struggling at the same time with the question of obscenity in a case involving Samuel Roth, a New York book dealer, who was appealing his conviction for selling sexually explicit books….”All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guaranties” of the 1st Amendment, said Justice William J. Brennan in Roth vs. United States, handed down on June 24, 1957. “Sex and obscenity are not synonymous,” he added.

With that ruling fresh in their minds, several Supreme Court law clerks read Julber’s petition — as well as the magazine itself — and advised the justices it was not obscene. “This was an easy one for the liberal justices. It was a speech case,” recalled Norman Dorsen, who was then a law clerk to conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan and would go on to lead the national ACLU from 1976 to 1991. But even the conservatives were not in favor of censorship practiced by the Post Office.

“The conservatives on the court then — Felix Frankfurter, Potter Stewart and Harlan — were not like the real conservatives we have now. They were more tolerant,” he said. Brennan, the author of the Roth opinion, looked at all the petitions on his own. He would have seen the magazine and its supposedly obscene articles. After taking several votes, the justices decided on a simple, one-line ruling issued on Jan. 13, 1958, reversing the 9th Circuit decision.

This is obviously a bit of local color for us Southern Californians, but also an interesting tidbit in the history of gay rights for those of you who, like me, had never heard of it before. Worth a read.

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1958: The Year That Writing About Gay Rights Became Legal

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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For

by FinleyBernier Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Atrios, here is America’s-mayor-for-life Rudy Giuliani commenting on the killing of two New York City police officers yesterday by a deranged gunman:

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

….The former mayor also criticized President Barack Obama, Holder, and Al Sharpton for addressing the underlining racial tensions behind the failure to indict the white police officers who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island and Mike Brown in Ferguson. “They have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities. For that, they should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.

Fair enough. But I assume this means we can blame Bill O’Reilly for his 28 episodes of invective against “Tiller the Baby Killer” that eventually ended in the murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. We can blame conservative talk radio for fueling the anti-government hysteria that led Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. We can blame the relentless xenophobia of Fox News for the bombing of an Islamic Center in Joplin or the massacre of Sikh worshippers by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. We can blame the NRA for the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora. We can blame Republicans for stoking the anti-IRS paranoia that prompted Andrew Joseph Stack to crash a private plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing two people. We can blame the Christian Right for the anti-gay paranoia that led the Westboro Baptist Church to picket the funeral of Matthew Snyder, a US Marine killed in Iraq, with signs that carried their signature “God Hates Fags” slogan. We can blame Sean Hannity for his repeated support of Cliven Bundy’s “range war” against the BLM, which eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff and declaring, “If they’re going to come bring violence to us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.” And, of course, we can blame Rudy Giuliani and the entire conservative movement for their virtually unanimous indifference to the state-sanctioned police killings of black suspects over minor offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, which apparently motivated the murder of the New York police officers on Saturday.

Or wait. Maybe we can’t do any of those things. Maybe lots of people support lots of things, and we can’t twist that generalized support into blame for maniacs who decide to take up arms for their own demented reasons. Maybe that’s a better idea after all.

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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

by AmieSheppard Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been obvious for a while that sometime soon the Supreme Court is going to take on another major abortion case. So far, what’s kept it from happening is probably the fact that both sides are unsure how it would go. Nobody wants to take the chance of a significant decision going against them and becoming settled law for decades.

But Ian Millhiser suggests today that this might be about to change. Conservatives have been unusually aggressive over the past four years in testing the limits of the law at the state level, and yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court upheld a recently-passed Texas statute that had the effect of shutting down all but eight abortion clinics in the entire state. Ominously, Millhiser says, the majority opinion went to considerable pains to acknowledge that its reading of the law was different from that of other circuit courts:

That’s what’s known as a “circuit split.”….Judge Elrod’s lengthy citation — which includes one case that was decided three years before the Supreme Court built the backbone of current abortion jurisprudence in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — is an unusually ostentatious and gratuitous effort to highlight the fact her own decision is “in conflict with the decision of another United States court of appeals on the same important matter.” If anything, Elrod is exaggerating the extent to which other judges disagree with her.

That’s a very strange tactic for a judge to take unless they are eager to have their opinion reviewed by the justices, and quite confident that their decision will be affirmed if it is reviewed by a higher authority. By calling attention to disagreement among circuit court judges regarding the proper way to resolve abortion cases, Elrod sent a blood-red howler to the Supreme Court telling them to “TAKE THIS CASE!”

Elrod, it should be noted, is not wrong to be confident her decision will be affirmed if it is heard by the justices. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the closest thing the Supreme Court has to a swing vote on abortion, hasn’t cast a pro-choice vote since 1992. As a justice, Kennedy’s considered 21 different abortion restrictions and upheld 20 of them.

Conservatives, including those on the Fifth Circuit, are increasingly confident that Anthony Kennedy’s position on abortion has evolved enough that he’s finally on board with a substantial rewrite of current abortion law. And since the other four conservative justices have been on board for a long time, that’s all it takes. Kennedy might not quite be willing to flatly overturn Roe v. Wade, but it’s a pretty good guess that he’s willing to go pretty far down that road.

We are rapidly approaching a point in half the states in America where abortions will be effectively available only to rich women. They’ll just jet off to clinics in California or New York if they have to. Non-rich women, who can’t afford that, will be forced into motherhood whether they like it or not. At which point conservatives, as usual, will suddenly lose all interest in them except as props for their rants about lazy welfare cheats.

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Is a Major Abortion Showdown Finally In Our Near Future?

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South Carolina Cop Unloads on Unarmed Driver Reaching for His License

by ThomasReddall Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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This video of a traffic stop in South Carolina earlier this month was published yesterday, and it’s been making the rounds today. You really need to watch it to get a sense for just how appalling it is, but in a nutshell, here’s what happened. At about the 00:35 mark, a police officer stops a black guy at a gas station for a seat belt violation. Guy gets out of his car. Cop asks for his license. Guy reaches into his car to get it, and the cop instantly starts screaming at him and unloads several shots at point blank range.

Luckily, this cop was apparently a lousy shot, and the motorist is recuperating. But the most heartrending part of the whole thing is how apologetic the motorist was after getting shot for no reason. “I just got my license,” he pleads. “I’ve got my license right here.” Then: “What did I do, sir? Why did you shoot me?”

“You dove headfirst back into your car,” the cop says. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes abjectly. “I’m sorry.”

Thank God this police car had a dash camera. If not for that, probably no one would have believed the motorist’s story. As it is, Julian Sanchez says this video might finally be having a real effect on people:

Seeing an unexpected number of comments on conservative boards to the effect of: “Holy shit, I’m white and this would never happen to me.”….My anecdotal gestalt impression is this SC shooting is actually a Road to Damascus moment for a nontrivial number of conservatives.

We can hope so. If neither Ferguson nor the Ohio Walmart shooting did it, maybe this finally will.

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South Carolina Cop Unloads on Unarmed Driver Reaching for His License

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