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5 Key Inconsistencies in What Happened During the Michael Brown Shooting

by PamalaPjhpr Posted on November 27, 2014

Mother Jones

Since the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office released a trove of documents and evidence reviewed by the grand jury that decided to not indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, there have been numerous reports pointing out the discrepancies between Wilson’s and various witness accounts of what happened on the day that Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. While the grand jury has put an end to the state’s case against Wilson, questions about witness accounts could still sway the outcome of the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation. The Washington Post, Vox, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, PBS, and the Wall Street Journal have reported on these different accounts in further detail, especially the differences between the testimonies of Wilson and Dorian Johnson, a friend who was with Brown when Wilson approached them. We matched those accounts up with McCulloch’s statement during his announcement of the grand jury decision. Here are five key discrepancies:

1. What happened during Wilson’s initial encounter with Brown and Dorian Johnson?

Prosecutor Robert McCulloch: Wilson saw Brown and Johnson in the street, slowed down and told them to get on the sidewalk, and words were exchanged.

Darren Wilson: Wilson saw Brown and Dorian Johnson walking in the middle of the road. He told Johnson and Brown to get on the sidewalk. He noticed Brown was holding Cigarillos and remembered the report about the theft.

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Dorian Johnson: Brown stole the Cigarillos from the Ferguson Market and then the two of them were walking toward their apartments as Wilson passed. Wilson told them to “Get the fuck on the sidewalk.”

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2. How did the situation escalate?

McCulloch: Wilson reverses his car at an angle, blocking traffic and Brown and Johnson’s path. Wilson and Brown get into an altercation, with Wilson still in the car and Brown standing at the driver’s window.

Wilson: After Wilson told Brown and Johnson to get on the sidewalk, he says he heard Brown respond “fuck what you have to say.” He backed the car up to contain them, and asks Brown to come over to the car. He starts to get out of the car and Brown slams the door shut and says “what the fuck are you going to do about it.”

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Johnson: Johnson says neither he nor Brown said a word and Wilson reversed his car unexpectedly, then opened his door and hit both him and Brown, and the door bounced back closed. Wilson then grabbed Brown by the shirt around his neck.

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3. What exactly happened during Wilson and Brown’s “tussle”?

McCulloch: McCulloch says witness statements were inconsistent, with some saying Brown was never in the car at all, and others saying Brown was punching Wilson, some saying they were wrestling, and another saying that it was a tug-of-war. Two shots are fired during the altercation.

Wilson: After getting the door slammed on him, Wilson told Brown to “get the fuck back,” and tried to use the door to push him. Brown shut it again, and Brown then came “in my vehicle.” Brown punched Wilson. Wilson had one hand on his gun and tried to fire twice. Brown reached for Wilson’s gun. The gun goes off twice, and one bullet hits the door.

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Johnson: Johnson says that Wilson reached his hand out of his car window and grabbed Brown’s shirt by his neck. A “tug of war” ensued with Brown trying to escape Wilson’s grip, but Brown’s hands never entered the car. After hearing the first gun shot, Johnson noticed blood on Brown, then turned and ran away. Brown followed behind him.

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4. Did Wilson shoot at Brown and Johnson as they ran away?

McCulloch: McCulloch again says witness statements were inconsistent, with claims ranging from Wilson firing from the car, firing at Brown’s back as he was running, and others saying Wilson didn’t fire until Brown turned around and came back toward Wilson.

Wilson: Brown begins to run from Wilson after two shots were fired from the car. Brown runs but then turns around, and won’t comply with demands to get on the ground. Wilson says he didn’t open fire while Brown and Johnson ran away.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1370883-grand-jury-volume-5-darren-wilsons-testimony/annotations/190096.js’);

Johnson: Johnson hid behind a car, and watched as Brown ran past him and Wilson followed. Wilson opens fire while Brown is still running, at which point Brown stops and turns around. (Witness Piaget Crenshaw has told CNN Wilson shot as Brown ran away, adding that one bullet struck the building she was standing in. Another witness told investigators Wilson shot at Brown as he ran away.)

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5. What was Brown doing when Wilson shot him?

McCulloch: McCulloch says witness accounts differ on whether Brown’s hands were up when he was facing Brown after turning around. Some say Brown didn’t move at all before Wilson shot him, others say he was in “full charge.” McCulloch stressed that several witnesses’ stories changed over the course of multiple interviews with authorities.

Wilson: Brown initially runs away but then turns around, and won’t comply with Wilson’s demands to get on the ground. Brown appears to charge toward Wilson. Brown put his hand at his waistband. Wilson opens fire.

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Johnson: When Brown turned around to face Wilson, Brown’s hands were up, one higher than the other. His hands were nowhere near his waist. Brown appeared to try and tell Wilson that he didn’t have a gun, starting to take a step forward. Before Brown could complete his sentence, Wilson shot him several more times. (Crenshaw told CNN that after Brown turned around, he barely moved toward Wilson and that his hands were up. “They were just slowly going up, it probably didn’t even have a chance to get all the way up there before he was struck.”)

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PBS Newshour analyzed more than 500 pages of witness testimony and compared them to Wilson’s statements. Their graphic shows 16 witnesses testified that Brown put his hands up when fired upon:

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5 Key Inconsistencies in What Happened During the Michael Brown Shooting

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Map: Here’s How #Ferguson Exploded on Twitter Last Night

by PiperCasimaty Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

On Monday evening, news of a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown erupted across social media. The announcement was made shortly after 8:20 PM CT and sparked massive protests around the country. The situation was particularly violent in and around the St. Louis area, with more than 60 people arrested overnight.

Using the hashtag #Ferguson, Twitter has mapped out how the conversation took place:

More from the chaotic scene:

Police gather on the street as protesters react after the announcement of the grand jury decision. Charlie Riedel/AP

Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, is comforted outside the Ferguson police department as St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch conveys the grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of her son. Robert Cohen/AP

People watch as stores burn down. David Goldman/AP

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Map: Here’s How #Ferguson Exploded on Twitter Last Night

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Economic Growth Starting to Show Real Signs of Life

by AveryHuang Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest numbers from the Commerce Department show that GDP increased faster than we thought in the third quarter of 2014. Growth clocked in at 3.9 percent, an increase from the original estimate of 3.5 percent. “The economy expanded at its fastest pace in more than a decade,” says the Wall Street Journal. “The combined growth rate in the second and third quarters was 4.25%, the best six-month reading since 2003.”

This is true, but a bit misleading since both quarters were making up for a dismal first quarter in which GDP fell by 2.1 percent. Still, even if you look at things in a more defensible way, economic growth is unquestionably picking up. The chart on the right uses a 5-quarter moving average to smooth out individual quarters that might be unusually high or low, and the trajectory of the economy is clearly on the rise. You still can’t really say that things are booming, and it continues to be true that the labor market is loose and wages are pretty stagnant. Nonetheless, since 2011 growth has increased from about 1.8 percent annually to about 2.8 percent annually. Things are picking up.

If Europe can ever manage to get its act together, we might finally start really digging ourselves out of the Great Recession. I’m not sure I see any signs of that happening soon, though.

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Economic Growth Starting to Show Real Signs of Life

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

by Mitchel123 Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s a chart from a new CBO report on federal policies and innovation. Needless to say, you can’t read too much into it. It shows the growth since 1963 of total factor productivity (roughly speaking, the share of productivity growth due to technology improvements), and there are lots of possible reasons that TFP hasn’t changed much over the past five decades. At a minimum, though, the fact that patent activity has skyrocketed since 1983 with no associated growth in TFP suggests, as the CBO report says dryly, “that the large increase in patenting activity since 1983 may have made little contribution to innovation.”

The CBO report identifies several possible innovation-killing aspects of the US patent system, among them a “proliferation of low-quality patents”; increased patent litigation; and the growth of patent trolls who impose a substantial burden on startup firms. The report also challenges the value of software patents:

The contribution of patents to innovation in software or business methods is often questioned because the costs of developing such new products and processes may be modest. One possible change to patent law that could reduce the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit patent protections for inventions that were relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, patents on software and business methods could expire sooner than is the case today (which, with renewals, is after 20 years), reducing the incentive to obtain those patents. Another change that could address patent quality, the processing burden on the USPTO, and the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit the ability to obtain a patent on certain inventions.

Personally, I’d be in favor of limiting software and business method patents to a term of zero years. But if that’s not feasible, even a reduction to, say, five years or so, would be helpful. In the software industry, that’s an eternity.

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

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Finland Starting to Think Hard About Joining NATO

by AlanKunkle Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Behold the results of Vladimir Putin’s brilliant strategy of scaring the hell out of every single country within bomber range of Russia:

As Russian-backed separatists have eviscerated another non-NATO neighbor this year — Ukraine — Finnish leaders have watched with growing alarm. They are increasingly questioning whether the nonaligned path they navigated through the Cold War can keep them safe as Europe heads toward another period of dangerous standoffs between West and East.

….The palpable anxiety in this country that many in the West consider a model of progressive and stable democratic governance reflects how unsettled Europe has become since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March. Many in Helsinki are convinced that Russia will not remain deterred for long and say Finland needs to fundamentally rethink elements of its security policy that have been bedrock principles for decades.

….“It’s going in a terrifying direction,” said Elisabeth Rehn, a former Finnish defense minister who favors NATO membership. “It’s only been 100 years since we gained our independence from Russia. Crimea was a part of Russia, too. Will they try to take back what belonged to them 100 years ago?”

Rehn said she doubts Russia would go that far but said the fear of Russian military aggression is real.

Will Finland join NATO? Probably not anytime soon. But just think about what Putin has accomplished here. Finland stayed out of NATO for the entire four decades of the Cold War, but is now so unnerved by Russia’s actions that it’s seriously thinking about joining up. If Putin is truly afraid of Russia being fully surrounded by the West, his worst fears are about to come true thanks to his own actions. No one wants to be the next eastern Ukraine, and right now NATO membership is probably looking mighty appealing to a lot of people who were OK with the status quo a few years ago.

Putin’s bellicose nationalism may play well at home, but it sure isn’t doing him any favors anywhere else.

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Finland Starting to Think Hard About Joining NATO

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Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

by MandyToddmqo Posted on November 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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After two years of seemingly endless Benghazi coverage, how did the nation’s major media cover the report of a Republican-led House committee that debunked every single Benghazi conspiracy theory and absolved the White House of wrongdoing? Long story short, don’t bother looking on the front page anywhere. Here’s a rundown:

The Washington Post briefly moved its story into the top spot on its homepage this afternoon. In the print edition, it ran somewhere inside, though I don’t know where.
The New York Times ran only a brief AP dispatch yesterday. Late today they finally put up a staff-written story, scheduled to run in the print edition tomorrow on page A23.
The Wall Street Journal ran a decent piece, but it got no play on the website and ran in the print edition on page A5.
USA Today ran an AP dispatch, but only if you can manage to find it. I don’t know if it also ran anywhere in the print edition.
As near as I can tell, the LA Times ignored the story completely.
Ditto for the US edition of the Guardian.
Fox News ran a hilarious story that ignored nearly every finding of the report and managed to all but say that it was actually a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration. You really have to read it to believe it.

I get that the report of a House committee isn’t the most exciting news in the world. It’s dry, it has no visuals, it rehashes old ground, and it doesn’t feature Kim Kardashian’s butt.

Still, this is a report endorsed by top Republicans that basically rebuts practically every Republican bit of hysteria over Benghazi spanning the past two years. Is it really good news judgment to treat this the same way they would a dull study on the aging of America from the Brookings Institution?

UPDATE: Late tonight, the LA Times finally roused itself to run a non-bylined piece somewhere in the Africa section.

I should add that the stories which did run were mostly fairly decent (Fox News excepted, of course). In particular, Ken Dilanian’s AP report was detailed and accurate, and ran early in the morning. The problem is less with the details of the coverage, than with the fact that the coverage was either buried or nonexistent practically everywhere.

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Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

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Republicans Finally Sue Over Obamacare — And There’s Even a Surprise Included

by MiguelHincks Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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House Republicans finally filed their long-awaited lawsuit against President Obama today, and it actually contained a surprise:

The suit also challenges what it says is President Obama’s unlawful giveaway of roughly $175 billion to insurance companies under the law. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration will pay that amount to the companies over the next 10 years, though the funds have not been appropriated by Congress. The lawsuit argues that it is an unlawful transfer of funds.

….If the lawsuit is successful, poor people would not lose their health care, because the insurance companies would still be required to provide coverage — but without the help of the government subsidy, the companies might be forced to raise costs elsewhere. The subsidies reduce the co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs that consumers incur when they go to doctors and hospitals.

Long story short, it turns out there are two parts to the suit. The first part challenges Obama’s delay of the employer mandate, and it’s entirely symbolic. After all, it’s only a delay. Even if Republicans win, by the time the case makes it all the way through the court system it will be moot. The delay will be over by then and the employer mandate will be in place.

But this second part is unexpected. Republicans are arguing that a provision of the law called Cost Sharing Reduction wasn’t automatically funded, as were most parts of the law. The law authorizes CSR, but no appropriation was ever made, so it’s illegal to actually pay out these funds.

Do they have a case? This is a brand new allegation, so I don’t think anyone has yet had a chance to look into it. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably about as specious as every other allegation against Obamacare. Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court won’t uphold it. You never know these days. In the meantime, conservatives are likely to be dizzy with excitement over the whole thing since (a) it involves a clear constitutional question about appropriating funds, and (b) it would hurt poor people. That’s quite a twofer.

Of course, the suit still has to survive challenges to Congress’ standing to sue in the first place, and that might kill it before any court even begins to judge the merits of the case. Wait and see.

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Republicans Finally Sue Over Obamacare — And There’s Even a Surprise Included

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

by Ilaria3pl Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Andrew Sullivan cogitates today on the seemingly endless outpouring of outrage over relatively small lapses in decent behavior:

I wonder also if our digital life hasn’t made all this far worse. When you sit in a room with a laptop and write about other people and their flaws, and you don’t have to look them in the eyes, you lose all incentive for manners.

You want to make a point. You may be full to the brim with righteous indignation or shock or anger. It is only human nature to flame at abstractions, just as the awkwardness of physical interaction is one of the few things constraining our rhetorical excess. When you combine this easy anonymity with the mass impulses of a Twitterstorm, and you can see why manners have evaporated and civil conversations turned into culture war.

I’m as guilty of this as many….

Why yes! Yes you are, Andrew.

On a more serious note, I actually disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, which has become so common as to be nearly conventional wisdom these days. Here’s why: I have not, personally, ever noticed that human beings tend to rein in their worst impulses when they’re face to face with other human beings. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Most often, they don’t. Arguments with real people end up with red faces and lots of shouting constantly. I just flatly don’t believe that the real problem with internet discourse is the fact that you’re not usually directly addressing the object of your scorn.1

So what is the problem? I think it’s mostly one of visibility. In the past, the kinds of lapses that provoke internet pile-ons mostly stayed local. There just wasn’t a mechanism for the wider world to find out about them, so most of us never even heard about them. It became a big deal within the confines of a town or a university campus or whatnot, but that was it.

Occasionally, these things broke out, and the wider world did find out about them. But even then, there was a limit to how the world could respond. You could organize a protest, but that’s a lot of work. You could go to a city council meeting and complain. You could write a letter to the editor. But given the limitations of technology, it was fairly rare for something to break out and become a true feeding frenzy.

Needless to say, that’s no longer the case. In fact, we have just the opposite problem: things can become feeding frenzies even if no one really wants them to be. That’s because they can go viral with no central organization at all. Each individual who tweets or blogs or Facebooks their outrage thinks of this as a purely personal response. Just a quick way to kill a few idle minutes. But put them all together, and you have tens of thousands of people simultaneously responding in a way that seems like a huge pile-on. And that in turn triggers the more mainstream media to cover these things as if they were genuinely big deals.

The funny thing is that in a lot of cases, they aren’t. If, say, 10,000 people are outraged over Shirtgate, that’s nothing. Seriously. Given the ubiquity of modern social media, 10,000 people getting mad about something is actually a sign that almost nobody cares.

The problem is that our lizard brains haven’t caught up to this. We still think that 10,000 outraged people is a lot, and 30 or 40 years ago it would have been. What’s more, it almost certainly would have represented a far greater number of people who actually cared. Today, though, it’s so easy to express outrage that 10,000 people is a pretty small number—and most likely represents nearly everyone who actually gives a damn.

We need to recalibrate our cultural baselines for the social media era. People can respond so quickly and easily to minor events that the resulting feeding frenzies can seem far more important than anyone ever intended them to be. A snarky/nasty tweet, after all, is the work of a few seconds. A few thousand of them represent a grand total of a few hours of work. The end result may seem like an unbelievable avalanche of contempt and derision to the target of the attack, but in real terms, it represents virtually nothing.

The culture wars are not nastier because people on the internet don’t have to face their adversaries. They’re nastier because even minor blowups seem huge. But that’s just Econ 101. When the cost of expressing outrage goes down, the amount of outrage expressed goes up. That doesn’t mean there’s more outrage. It just means outrage is a lot more visible than it used to be.

1I’ll concede that this is potentially a problem with a very specific subset of professional troll. Even there, however, I’d note that the real world has plenty of rough equivalents, from Code Pink to the Westboro Baptist Church lunatics.

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

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Today’s Math You Can Use: Marijuana + Big Corporations = A Lot More Marijuana

by QGZEdwinagft Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s a good example of how cavalier snark can get the better of you. This is Kevin Williamson writing at National Review:

From the annals of issues that only intellectuals are capable of misunderstanding: Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, is worried that the drug trade might end up being dominated by people who care about making money. My experience with drug dealers suggests very strongly that they are a profit-seeking, entrepreneurial lot as it is.

Har har. Mark is a friend of mine, so I guess I’d be expected to defend him, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean his short piece about the commercialization of pot to be an attack on the free market. Quite the contrary. In fact, he has a powerful appreciation of the efficiency of the market, and knows very well that drug gangs are actually pitifully incompetent at the basics of modern distribution and logistics. Put them in competition with Philip Morris or RJ Reynolds and they’d go out of business in a few months. At the same time, with a truly modern, efficient multinational corporation at the helm, sales and consumption of marijuana would most likely skyrocket.

Remember what happened to all those mom-and-pop stores when Walmart came into town? It would be about like that.

I don’t even know that I agree with Mark about trying to keep pot away from the commercial sector. My guess is that it’s not really workable. Still, his argument is simple: The free market is powerful. Big corporations are far, far more efficient than a bunch of hoodlums. So if big corporations start selling drugs, then drug use (and abuse) is going to increase. Maybe a lot. You might still favor complete legalization, and that’s fine. But you should at least recognize that it comes with a likely cost, just as it did with cigarettes and alcohol.

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Today’s Math You Can Use: Marijuana + Big Corporations = A Lot More Marijuana

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Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

by CarleyFreehill Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Brooks is unhappy that President Obama continues to be a liberal even though Democrats lost in this year’s midterm election:

The White House has not privately engaged with Congress on the legislative areas where there could be agreement. Instead, the president has been superaggressive on the one topic sure to blow everything up: the executive order to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws.

….I sympathize with what Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of how it’s being done is ruinous. Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We’ll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely).

This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll have immigration reform anytime soon. White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way. This executive order would destroy their efforts.

I continue to not get this train of thought. In 2006, Republicans lost. President Bush’s first action was to order a surge in Iraq, which infuriated Democrats. In 2008, Republicans lost. They responded by adopting a policy of obstructing every possible action by Democrats—including even a modest stimulus package during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In 2012, Republicans lost. They responded with brinkmanship over the fiscal cliff, a flat refusal to fill open judicial positions on the DC circuit court, and an endless bellowing rage over Benghazi and other manufactured outrages.

By comparison, all Obama is doing is something he’s been saying he’ll do for nearly a year. It’s not even all the big a deal if you step back for a moment and think about it. Several million undocumented immigrants are going to be told they’re officially free of the threat of deportation for a temporary period, as opposed to the status quo, in which they’re effectively free of the threat of deportation. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a big deal for the immigrants affected. But in terms of actual impact on immigration policy writ large? It doesn’t really do much.

And yet, this single action is apparently enough to—rightly!—put Republicans into warfare mode. If that’s true, I can only conclude that literally anything Republicans don’t like is enough to justify going into warfare mode. That’s certainly been how it’s worked in the past, anyway.

Look: Republicans can decide for themselves if they want to go to war. If they want to pass yet another bill repealing Obamacare, that’s fine. If they want to sue the president over the EPA or immigration, that’s fine. If they want to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, that’s fine. I assume Obama will win some of these battles and lose others, but in any case will treat them as the ordinary cut and thrust of politics instead of declaring them calculated insults that have infuriated him so much he can’t possibly ever engage with the GOP again. In other words, he’ll act like an adult, not a five-year-old.

This is what we expect from presidents. Why don’t we expect the same from congressional Republicans? Why are they allowed to stamp and scream whenever something doesn’t go their way, and everyone just shrugs? Once and for all, why don’t we demand that they act like adults too?

POSTSCRIPT: I didn’t bother with Brooks’ claim that Republicans are “privately” discussing real, honest-to-goodness immigration reform, but color me skeptical. If they want to engage on this subject, they need to discuss it with Obama, not between themselves. They’ve had plenty of time for that, and have never been willing to buck the tea party to get something done. Why would it be any different now? For more, I think Ed Kilgore has about the right take on this.

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Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

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