Remember how then potential Attorney General candidate, Kurt Schaeffer, like a dog with a really, really tasty bone, wouldn’t let go of the Planned Parenthood issue that erupted after a video surfaced that purported to show that the organization “sold baby parts.” Long after a state investigation cleared the Missouri Planned Parenthood affiliate of anything verboten, and, indeed, long after the videos themselves were widely discredited, Schaefer kept shaking that juicy, and, in terms of tax-dollars and legislative time, very expensive, ultimately imaginary bone.

Remember how he wanted to shut down abortions in Columbia by making the far-fetched claim that the University of Missouri was violating a law that forbids spending tax-dollars on abortions because the University Hospital gave a doctor who performed abortions at the Columbia Planned Parenthood the hospital privileges also required by state law? Remember how when a judge ruled against his efforts, he whined that Attorney General Chris Koster should “appeal immediately to enforce long-standing state law”? Expensive, time-consuming, futile. For sure. But Schaefer didn’t care. Then.

Well, guess what? Schaefer seems to have had his come-to-Jesus moment. As St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger put it:

… He [i.e., Schaefer] was the star witness for the defense — yes, the defense — in the case of 23 members of the clergy — most of them African-American — facing charges of trespassing and obstruction of the state Senate related to a protest they held on May 6, 2014, in the gallery of the Senate.

[…] on Tuesday, Schaefer stood up for the state constitution. He stood up for the law. He stood up for the principles of the First Amendment. He stood up for 23 people who never should have been charged with a crime, people who were in the Senate that day two and a half years ago to protest Schaefer’s stubborn opposition to allowing Medicaid expansion in Missouri.

While this principled stand is not, in itself, in opposition to his earlier actions in regard to Planned Parenthood, his rationale does give one pause:

“This case is all about prosecutorial discretion,” Schaefer told me after his testimony. “I just spent a whole lot of money telling Missourians about my prosecutorial experience. Well, you spend your resources on things that are real, not things like this. This case never should have come to trial.”

Too bad he didn’t remember this principle of “prosecutorial discretion” earlier. He could have saved the state a bundle and perhaps, just perhaps, the legislature might have had enough time to so some real work. Too bad that the principle he chose to observe instead was the pander principle.

Remember after Sandy Hook when Roy Blunt was adamant that he would not support legislation that might restrict Second Amendment rights? By which he meant the right of citizens to amass stockpiles of just about any type of weapon. Which was, incidentally, the right of the same folks to enrich organizations that sponsor the NRA, which, in turn, offers tangible aid to politicians like Roy Blunt. Instead he sought to blame government for failing to keep those pesky mentally ill folks under control:

Blunt said in an interview that federal funds have been handed to some communities in states that move people from mental institutions, where federal dollars were used to help them, “and put them back into the community without much monitoring whether people are ready to be in the community or not.”

So guess who he blames when a mentally troubled individual shot two policemen in New York?  His constituents, Missourians who exercised their 1st amendment rights to free speech in Ferguson this summer. Evidently the 2nd amendment trumps just about every concern, including public safety. First amendment? Not so much – at least when it involves issues that get old white guys, the only constituency that matters to Blunt, all itchy and bothered. God forbid that police should be accountable.

And, of course, there’s the mental health dodge that was trotted out in the wake of Sandy Hook, but not so much in the case of the NYPD shooter. When a NRA-loving, gun enthusiast shoots a school full of little children, we blame the shooting on his mental problems, not his collection of lethal weapons. But when a troubled and violent man, angered by one more miscarriage of justice, goes off the deep end and the innocent suffer, Blunt wants to blame the folks who expose the bigger, original problem and demand that it be addressed. Nice distraction.

If we’re looking under the carpet for underlying causes, things that might prompt a disturbed man to go off the rails and shoot two innocent policemen, we might turn our regard to the type of toxic police community relations that the protesters are trying to get us to take seriously – and fix the real problem rather than trying to suppress free speech. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if we carried through with those mental health spending initiatives that Blunt was pushing in the wake of Sandy Hook, but which are languishing now that the public is becoming jaded by regular episodes of gun violence.

Of course, like Blunt, lots of people don’t get it. They confuse the symptoms with the disease. A recent letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that:

The St. Louis metro area is starting to learn the consequences of the recent violence in our midst. Corporations no longer consider moving here. Organizations are reluctant to hold conventions and meetings here. Tourism is down. Enrollment in local colleges is down. More fallout is almost certain to follow.

None of this bodes well for advertising revenues. Perhaps local news media such as the Post-Dispatch and Channel 5 should have considered this before taking an editorial stance that seems to favor the protests. …

In other words if we could cover up the problems nobody – or at least, the implication is, nobody who matters – will ever know or care. If folks would just shut up, we wouldn’t have any problems at all.  Wipe the pus away and you don’t really have gangrene. Didn’t we all learn in Philosophy 101 that if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it doesn’t really make a sound.

Update:  Steve Benen has this to say about what seems to be a GOP stampede to politicize the NYPD shootings (as usual, it seems that Blunt was just following the program laid out by his betters):

There’s no shortage of related examples. Joe Stack flew an airplane into a building, motivated by anti-government sentiment. Dr. George Tiller’s assassin was motivated by his opposition to abortion rights. The Oklahoma City bombers killed 168 people. How much responsibility do mainstream conservative pundits and politicians carry for these crimes? None.

There was also Cliven Bundy’s dangerous conflict with the Bureau of Labor Management – which generated all kinds of support from Republican policymakers and conservative pundits – and which “eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff … 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.'”

Under the reasoning espoused by Giuliani, King, Pataki, and others over the weekend, the responsibility for all kinds of violence should apparently be extended to every corner of our political world.

Which is largely why this blame game isn’t worth playing. Tragically, lunatics sometimes commit horrific crimes. When it comes to maintaining a healthy discourse in a free society, let’s not connect their violence to political opinions we may or may not like.

None of which, Roy Blunt, means that we can’t try to get a handle on the tools of violence employed by these folks – making it harder for those with a record of mental illness and violent crime to access guns won’t eradicate criminal violence, but it can help. Same goes for limiting access to weapons designed to serve military needs.

The latest expression of white tribalism prompted by the protests in Ferguson is the disavowal of the St. Louis Rams football team by a local bar after some of the players signaled their support of the Ferguson activists by appearing on the field with their arms in the symbolic “hand up” position adopted by protestors. According to the report in the Huffington Post, the bar owners felt it incumbent upon themselves to signal their tribal allegiances by vowing on social media to switch their loyalties from the hometown team to the Kansas City Chiefs, while urging “customers to ‘stand up to thugs who destroy our community’.”  Yeah, they used the word “thugs”!  

When they experienced pushback for equating athletes exercise of free speech with thugery, the representatives of the bar suddenly decided that free speech was important after all – for themselves, at least, if not for the Rams players, responding with this opus:

Just to clarify our point of view at Time Out.

We SUPPORT FREEDOM OF SPEECH

We SUPPORT PEACEFULL DEMONSTRATION

We are NOT TAKING SIDES ON THE FERGUSON TRAGEDY

We DISAGREE WITH BRINGING THE PROTEST TO A NATIONWIDE PROFESSIONAL SPORTING EVENT.

We welcome all opinions because we believe in the first amendment, just PLEASE respect each other!

Just to clarify our point of view at Time Out. We SUPPORT FREEDOM OF SPEECH We SUPPORT PEACEFULL DEMONSTRATION We are NOT TAKING SIDES ON THE FERGUSON TRAGEDY We DISAGREE WITH BRINGING THE PROTEST TO A NATIONWIDE PROFESSIONAL SPORTING EVENT. We welcome all opinions because we believe in the first amendment, just PLEASE respect each other!

Yeah, sure. they’re not taking sides. And to make sure you know it, they used lots of capital letters.  And, of course, pigs fly. A commercial, publicly accessible bar can take a stand, but athletes can’t because more people see football games than patronize the Time Out. Have you ever noticed that folks in this particular tribe (the one that camps on the right side of the river), always seem to think that freedom of speech is sooooo important, except when it doesn’t support their point of view?

Nor is it just the athletic arena that is supposed to be free of real life. Remember when some St. Louis symphony goers got all huffy because they were subjected to a short, respectfully orchestrated protest at a performance that asked them to spare a few minutes from their comfortable and cultured complacency in order to witness a moving reminder that life isn’t nearly so nice for young men like Michael Brown?

This free speech for me, but not you attitude is not new; it’s status quo in conservative circles where every day Fox news clones are all atwitter over some liberal’s exercise of free speech that, in turn, causes logic-challenged wingers to go ballistic. In the political sphere, I think it was George W. Bush who made a habit of restricting “free speech” to reservations far away from media attention, effectively censoring the expression of opposition sentiment. Such “free speech zones” have since them become routine.

This carefully monitored, almost private exercise of free speech  is evidently what the folks at the Time Out Sports Bar & Grill expect to be the norm when it involves a point of view they don’t like. If a few individuals had stood up on national TV at the Rams game and made a show of their unconditional support for anyone who wears a police badge, I bet we wouldn’t have heard a peep from them.  Just like the folks who try to censor the opposition by segregating them in free speech zones also insist on extending freedom of speech to a rich man or corporations’ pocket-book. But hey, rich men are always right and corporations, unlike Rams’ players and other thugs, are people. We’ve all learned over the past few election cycles that dollar bills create their own free speech megaphone when they speak.

The Ferguson incident: A young unarmed black man, Michael Brown, was shot several times by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. Several witnesses have publicly stated that Brown  had his hands up and was facing Wilson who continued to shoot him. There was an explosive reaction to this event on the part of black residents of the city, leading to a military-style police overreaction. Most of this is now accepted as true.

In the aftermath, there’s been some official effort to understand and explain why one shooting among so many shooting deaths generated such a reaction. There’s also been plenty of backlash towards those efforts to understand and deal with the anger among Ferguson residents in any way other than denial and suppression. The instinctive reaction of many in the area seems to be to “support” the police no matter what they do, as long as they’re doing it to “those people.” Consider the following when you hear anyone telling you that the Ferguson events are exceptional and folks mostly get along in St. Louis:

— An online fundraiser to cover “expenses” for the police shooter. Among the comments left by donors:

“Ofc. Wilson did his duty. Michael Brown was just a common street thug.”

“Waste of good ammo. It’s my privilege to buy you a replacement box.”

“Black people can be their own enemy and I am not white…He was shot 6 times cause the giant wouldn’t stop or die. Evil people don’t die quick”

“All self-respecting whites have a moral responsibility to support our growing number of martyrs to the failed experiment called diversity.”

“I am so sick of the blacks using every excuse in the book to loot and riot.”

“I support officer Wilson and he did a great job removing an unnecessary thing from the public!”

The fundraiser was shut down when it seemed that there might be legal, tax-related issues about how the money could be used – but not until it had raised $400,000 dollars from sympathizers for the shooter. Did you know you could shoot an unarmed boy and collect a big reward for doing it?

— Until the U.S. Justice Department stepped in, some law enforcement officers working to contain the protests in Ferguson thought it was helpful to express their opinion of the shooting by obscuring their name badges and wearing “I am Darren Wilson” bracelets.

— Residents of Wildwood and other West County locations made it their priority  to organize a food and water drive for the policemen who were moving all their heavy military surplus equipment into Ferguson to put down the protests. According to a police spokesperson, this effort to express appreciation for police efforts to shut down the turmoil as forcibly as possible rendered the police “ecstatic.”

— St. Louis Cardinals fans really showed their colors when they responded to peaceful protesters at Monday night’s game:

At one point, an older white man starts yelling at the protesters, shouting, “That’s right! If they’d be working, we wouldn’t have this problem!” Then, the Cardinals fans begin chanting “Let’s go Cardinals!” which morphs into “Let’s go Darren!” referring to Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot Brown.

Later on in the video, a woman shouts, “We’re the ones who gave all y’all the freedoms that you have!” which is a tidy way of identifying with slavers and Abraham Lincoln at the same time, covered in a thick layer of modern racism.

— There have also been more refined expressions of distaste for activists’ efforts to keep the issues surrounding Michael Brown’s death alive. SMP’s Michael Bersin wrote about the events at the St. Louis symphony Saturday night when a group of symphony goers inserted a “Requium for Mike Brown” before the beginning of the second act of the Brahms Requiem. According to Bersin, “they pulled this off perfectly,” and the audience was mostly sympathetic. No doubt. However, nothing is perfect and in this morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Letters” section, genteel disapprobation of what the letter writer evidently deemed an unseemly disruption reared its head:

Is Powell Hall a proper venue for a protest? I assume the protesters bought tickets for this opportunity to have their voices heard. What comes next? Can we expect such events to happen at the art museum? At Circus Flora? At a school graduation? The experience saddened me profoundly. Just like the Ferguson situation, I was left tensely unresolved.

Imagine. A man was murdered, his shooter is very unlikely to be punished, and this individual is horrified that he/she had to sit “rigidly for what felt like an eternity” during the brief protest. If he/she was left “tensely unresolved,” as opposed to as blandly indifferent as his letter implies he wishes to be, then it’s high time that the protest has invaded this refuge for well-off St. Louisians.

You want to know what is behind the events in Ferguson, read the list above and think about what it implies about the St. Louis zeitgeist. While folks do mostly get along, I suppose, it’s also true that things are not always just what they seem to be at the surface. The water can get mighty dirty when we start fishing in the depths.

* Last sentence of last paragraph and last sentence of 4th paragraph edited for clarity and style.  

Occupy Wall Street Protesters Pepper Sprayed by New York Police Department

The New York Daily News reported that over 50 arrests were made by the New York Police Department on September 24, 2011 in connection with the “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement. The same story mentioned “there were unconfirmed reports that mace may have been used” and the online story contained an embedded video that clearly shows a noxious gas being deployed by a police officer. USLaw.com’s slow motion analysis of the same video shows a senior New York Police Department officer deploying a spray cannister in an unorthodox manner on a small group that were being ‘kettle netted’ by a half dozen officers, some of whom were also affected by spray….

You know, the titans of arbitrage and other speculative financial alchemy could easily calm the seas by taking a few lousy percentage points in their top marginal tax rate. They won’t. Who do you think will spray protesters after they break public safety unions in the interest of accumulating an even higher proportion of wealth? Just asking.  

Representatives of the Party of No and its supporters responded in one of two ways immediately after the passage of the Senate bill on Mondayhealth care reform law – with violent rhetorical excess, or with real violence. The first characterized the GOPers in congress who competed to outdo each other’s demagogic excesses in their efforts to portray this bill as an  “outrage” that threatens democracy. Their tantrums arguably helped whip up the second, more violent response on the part of their out-of-control Tea Party dupes. The result? Violence and threats of violence against Democrats who had refused to be intimidated by months of implied threat.

The latest beneficiary of the Republican efforts to fan the Tea Party frenzy is Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-3rd). A coffin that had earlier figured in a Tea Party protest was left on the lawn of Carnahan’s residence Tuesday night. Even KMOV reporter Matt Sczesny, who has seemed at times perhaps a little too friendly to the Tea Partiers to be considered objective (they certainly appreciate his coverage, at any rate), was moved to observe:

… the police were not involved, since it doesn’t appear there was any direct threat and the coffin was empty. However, one can only imagine what may be implied by leaving a coffin on a front lawn.  We all know that emotions have been running high over the health care reform debate, but this has to make you wonder where this debate is going.

Sczesny is correct – even though the Tea Party is claiming that they have been “smeared” by Carnahan and the coffin was simply part of a prayer vigil in which it symbolized the death of freedom. Viewed in the context of the the recent threats of violence, Carnahan, along with all sane Americans, should be concerned about where the delusional hysteria and bullyboy tactics of this group may take us.

The individuals, however, who ought to be most concerned are our putative Republican leaders who have been willing to play on the emotions of the looney tunes brigade for their own political purposes. As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo observes about the recent spate of violence:

… this didn’t come from nowhere and it can’t be pawned off on a few cranks. Everything that’s happened over the last five days has grown from a pattern of incitement going back almost a year — wildly hyperbolic statements, coded appeals to menacing behavior, flippant jokes about bringing firearms to political events and all the rest.

We need to contact our Republican congressional representatives and demand that they take responsibility for inciting fear and anger among their more unstable constituents, and for implicitly indicating that violence might be justified whenever individuals fail to prevail politically. Not that they’ll ever own up to their role – already they are fishing around for ways to blame the victims – but they ought to hear that a few of us at least know just what they have been doing – and that we will do our best to make sure that that knowledge becomes a commonplace.

Addenda:  Ezra Klein gets it right while keeping a calm, civil tongue in his head.