Jon Stewart slams Fox News for hypocrisy and then literally drops the mic.

Click image to play video

Courtesy of Raw Story:

Stewart pointed out that, while Fox hosts have focused all of their attention on a Justice Department report finding no evidence that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson last year, they have pointedly ignored that the department also found extensive evidence that Wilson’s colleagues on the Ferguson Police Department systematically targeted the city’s black residents for citations and traffic stops — a pattern of discrimination which lent itself to a flashpoint incident like the shooting. 

Similarly, he said, Fox “used ‘Benghazi’ like a clubhouse password” — right up until the Republican-led House Intelligence Commmittee debunked the network’s favorite talking points. 

“Did Susan Rice go on TV and try to deceive anyone? Report says no,” Stewart explained. “Did the administration ignore credible warnings about that day’s attack? Report says no. Was there a stand-down order or failure to rescue [the victims] and send rescue planes? Report says no. Was there a massive intelligence cover-up? Report says no — not CIA, not FBI, none of them.” 

“They demand accountability for anger and divisiveness whilst holding themselves entirely unaccountable for their anger and divisiveness. For two years, they used Benghazi as shorthand, as a symbol for the whole concept of a corrupt, lying, tyrannical — possibly murderous — Obama White House,” Stewart said. “Kind of how other people used ‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’ as a symbol for systemic racism. There’s really only one difference between the two phenomena: systemic racism actually exists.”

After making that point Stewart literally dropped the mic.

And well he should because THAT was a thing of beauty. 

Bar complaint filed against Ferguson grand jury prosecutor Bob McCulloch. About damn time!

Courtesy of CBS St. Louis:  

A bar complaint against St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch and Assistant Prosecuting Attorneys Kathi Alizadeh and Sheila Whirley has been filed regarding the handling of the Ferguson grand jury. 

Attorney and former judge James R. Dowd and attorney Robert Ramsey reviewed the grand jury transcript – including evidence, witness interviews and testimony – before a group of seven citizens and attorneys – led by Christi Griffin, founder of the Ethics Project – filed an 11-page complaint with the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel in Jefferson City, Missouri. 

Griffin says the complaint focuses on more than 15 Rules of Professional Conduct the group believes were violated, including the following: 

- Presenting witnesses to the grand jury – including Darren Wilson – who McCulloch, Alizadeh and Whirley knew or should have known would make false statements, is not exhaustive. 

Under Missouri Supreme Court Rule, the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel has the duty to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawyers and for prosecuting cases where the misconduct poses a threat to the public or to the integrity of the legal profession. It is the position of the complainants that McCulloch, Alizadeh and Whirley’s conduct have done both. 

- Presenting the grand jury with a legal instruction ruled unconstitutional for decades. 

- Mislabeling and misplacing evidence related to key witness Dorian Johnson.

 - Failing to provide specific charges to the jury after “dumping” on them thousands of pages of interviews and evidence the complainants cite as going above gross negligence.

Personally I hope this is only the beginning and that this guy not only loses his job but gets sued into bankruptcy.

A member of the Michael Brown grand jury is suing so that he can speak out about the case. And we should all hope he wins.

Courtesy of St. Louis Post-Dispatch:  

A member of the grand jury that declined to file criminal charges against former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown sued St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch Monday for the right to speak publicly about the proceedings. 

The suit says that the former juror, identified in court documents only as "Grand Juror Doe," wishes to speak out to challenge public misconceptions about the case and that speaking publicly could "contribute to the current public dialogue concerning race relations" that was sparked by the Aug. 9 fatal shooting. It hints that jurors were not unanimous in their decision. Doe also wants "to advocate for legislative change to the way grand juries are conducted in Missouri," the suit says, and more simply, be able to talk about the case "with close family members at home." 

..............

The plaintiff claims McCulloch's characterization of the grand jury's view of the evidence after they declined to indict Wilson was at odds with Doe's opinions of the case, that the public's understanding of the grand jurors' views is "not entirely accurate." 

The investigation of Wilson "had a stronger focus on the victim than in other grand jury cases," the suit says. The presentation of evidence and "the State's counsel to the grand jury" "differed markedly and in significant ways. . . from the hundreds of matters presented to the grand jury earlier in its term." The suit also claims the legal guidelines presented to jurors in applying facts of the case were "muddled and untimely" compared to other cases.

Well we all know that this gran jury case was fixed from the get go, so it would be really great to have the opportunity to hear what really happened behind the scenes. 

It might also be helpful to the Feds who are doing their own investigation.

MSNBC reported last night that St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch put witnesses before the Ferguson grand jury that he KNEW were lying. WTF?

Click image to play video

Courtesy of Crooks and Liars:  

Certain witnesses who spoke before the grand jury investigating the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown told obvious lies under oath, St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said Friday. 

“Clearly some were not telling the truth,” he said during an interview on KTRS 550. He added that he's not planning to pursue charges against any lying witnesses. 

In his first extensive interview since the grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, McCulloch said he had no regrets about letting grand jury members hear from non-credible witnesses. 

“Early on I decided that anyone who claimed to have witnessed anything would be presented to the grand jury,” McCulloch said. He added that he would've been criticized no matter his decision. 

During the interview, McCulloch referenced a woman who claimed to have seen the shooting. 

This “lady clearly wasn't present,” McCulloch said. “She recounted a story right out of the newspaper,” backing up Wilson's version of events.

Okay I am pretty sure that it is unethical to have witnesses provide testimony to a grand jury that you know are lying.

And I KNOW it is against the law to lie to the grand jury.

So why isn't anybody getting prosecuted over this?

I think that the prosecuting attorney should be disbarred and this woman thrown in jail. That to me seems obvious.

And then I would like somebody to call Hannity out for constantly using the ONE witness which supported his inner prejudice and his desire to find Darren Wilson guiltless.

The oft quoted "Witness 40" in the Michael Brown shooting trial turns out to be a racist ex-felon who was nowhere near the incident that day.

Courtesy of the Smoking Gun:  

The grand jury witness who testified that she saw Michael Brown pummel a cop before charging at him “like a football player, head down,” is a troubled, bipolar Missouri woman with a criminal past who has a history of making racist remarks and once insinuated herself into another high-profile St. Louis criminal case with claims that police eventually dismissed as a “complete fabrication,” The Smoking Gun has learned. 

In interviews with police, FBI agents, and federal and state prosecutors--as well as during two separate appearances before the grand jury that ultimately declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson--the purported eyewitness delivered a preposterous and perjurious account of the fatal encounter in Ferguson. 

Referred to only as “Witness 40” in grand jury material, the woman concocted a story that is now baked into the narrative of the Ferguson grand jury, a panel before which she had no business appearing. 

While the “hands-up” account of Dorian Johnson is often cited by those who demanded Wilson’s indictment, “Witness 40”’s testimony about seeing Brown batter Wilson and then rush the cop like a defensive end has repeatedly been pointed to by Wilson supporters as directly corroborative of the officer’s version of the August 9 confrontation. The “Witness 40” testimony, as Fox News sees it, is proof that the 18-year-old Brown’s killing was justified, and that the Ferguson grand jury got it right. 

However, unlike Johnson, “Witness 40”--a 45-year-old St. Louis resident named Sandra McElroy--was nowhere near Canfield Drive on the Saturday afternoon Brown was shot to death.

Witness 40 is of course the ONLY witness that Sean Hannity ever quotes, while he conveniently pretends that the other twenty or more witnesses do not exist.

Not at all surprising that he chose the one that is a fucking liar. 

For those who may have forgotten this is the graphic that shows the numerous inconsistencies among the witnesses.

I have a feeling that this Sandra McElroy is not the only "witness" to have perjured themselves before the Grand Jury.

I strongly encourage you to read the entire article. It is quite eye opening.

Darren Wilson did NOT know about the convenience store robbery when he confronted Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson. Update!

Courtesy of the Daily Mail:  

In Wilson's now very public account of his encounter with Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson on August 9 he has claimed that he asked Brown and Wilson to move to the sidewalk rather than walk in the street. 

When they walked on, Wilson has repeatedly stated, he realized they matched the description of two suspects wanted in connection with the robbery of nearby Ferguson Market. A youth matching Brown's description had stolen a box of Swishers cigarillos. 

It was this realization, he stated, that caused him to reverse his vehicle and sparked the car-side confrontation that left Brown dead on the street with six bullets in his body. 

But the sworn testimony of Wilson's squad supervisor directly contradicts this account. 

Wilson's supervisor was the first officer to speak with the 28-year-old cop following the shooting. The men spoke before St Louis County Police had even been notified of the incident and before the medical examiner or investigating officers had arrived on the scene. 

At that time, the supervisor said:'He [Wilson] did not know anything about the stealing call.' 

When pressed by the attorney questioning him, the officer reiterated that Wilson, 'did not know anything'. 

Asked, 'He told you he didn't know about there being a stealing at Ferguson Market?' 

The officer responded, 'Correct.' 

Now this is a key fact because, number one it proves that Wilson was not responding to a person that he knew to be violent, and number two it proves that Wilson lied to the Grand Jury. 

And the part that I found particularly enlightening was that in fact Wilson could NOT have known about the robbery because the call came in AFTER the shooting had already taken place.

(Update: Okay somebody asked me how I know that the robbery call came in after the shooting. In point of fact I described that poorly. What I meant to say was that it was unlikely that other officers would be looking out for Brown as the responding officer only received the call after 11:54, which is immediately after the robbery took place. He then had to drive to the convenience, conduct his interview (At which time he received a more detailed description.) Brown was shot dead at 12:01 which means that quite literally this officer was probably in the process of conducting his investigation.  And as this was a low priority, unarmed, snatch and grab it is very unlikely that he called for assistance or put out an APB.)

And remember 15 witnesses said that Michael Brown was running away when Wilson started firing at him, and 16 said he had his hands up before the last bullets were fired.

I think at this point the Justice Department has no choice but to launch their own investigation.

This whole thing stinks like crazy.

Darren Wilson has resigned from the Ferguson Police Department. Gee, really?

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

The white police officer who killed Michael Brown has resigned from the Ferguson Police Department, his attorney said Saturday, nearly four months after the fatal confrontation with the black 18-year-old that fueled protests in the St. Louis suburb and across the nation. 

Darren Wilson, 28, has been on administrative leave since the shooting on Aug. 9. His resignation was announced Saturday by one of his attorneys, Neil Bruntrager. The resignation is effective immediately, Bruntrager said.

Nothing at all surprising about this. After all how could this man ever be expected to walk the streets of Ferguson as a law enforcement official after this.

Or walk down the street at all actually.

And why should he keep such a low paying job, rife with the possibility of further interaction with people who so desperately need to be shot, when he can get paid simply to spin his tales on television?

Courtesy of Got News:

A NBC source with knowledge of the #DarrenWilson interview talks said that ABC offered to pay “mid-to-high” six figures for the interview. 

The source did not say an exact figure because NBC stopped bidding for it after ABC upped the ante.

Mid-to-high six figures, that sounds somewhat north of $500,000 doesn't it?

Quite a bump up from what police officers typically make, isn't it?

Well perhaps Wilson is looking for a more lucrative job providing analysis on some cable new outlet or something. Hmm, I wonder which cable news station would be so unscrupulous as to hire a man who just may have shot a young man to death in cold blood?

By the way Wilson characterized his decision to quit the Ferguson police force as "the hardest thing I've ever had to do."

Yes so much harder than gunning down an unarmed teenager in the streets. Right?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo sums up why he finds it so hard to believe Darren Wilson's account of the shooting of Michael Brown.

Michael Brown's family at Thanksgiving dinner.

I just read Josh Marshall's editorial on the the Grand Jury decision and was struck by how closely his points mirrored my own.

Here are the main points I want to share courtesy of TPM:  

I'm going to set aside all the questions about just how far apart Wilson and Brown were when the fatal shooting occurred, the angle of Brown's body, whether his hands were up. Lots of people have parsed the evidence on that a lot more closely. Those points are technical and accounts are conflicting. 

It's Wilson's description of how the incident began that just does not ring true. To believe Wilson, you have to believe that Brown, an 18 year old, is stopped by a police officer on a street in broad daylight. The police officer is armed. He's in an SUV. And Brown's immediate reaction is to begun screaming and cursing him, physically attacking him and before long literally daring him to shoot him. 

Here's how Wilson's account unfolds: Wilson passes Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson and tells them to stop walking in the middle of the street. The two friends basically blow Wilson off at first and then when Wilson tells them again, Brown yells "fuck what you have to say." When Brown and Johnson ignore Wilson's request, he backs up his vehicle and turns to the left, slightly cutting them off. As Wilson begins to get out of his car, Brown says "What the fuck are you going to do about it" and slams the door shut on him. 

After this, Brown and Wilson scuffle with Brown leaning into the car striking Wilson and Wilson, still seated, defending himself. Wilson describes thinking through how to escape from Brown or which weapon to use against him before finally pulling his gun and saying "get back or I'm going to shoot you." 

At this point, Brown grabs Wilson's gun and says "you are too much of a pussy to shoot me." 

They scuffle. A shot goes off but neither is injured. Brown comes at Wilson again - another scuffle and another shot which apparently hits Brown in the finger. Brown runs off. It's after this that the fatal shooting takes place, with the various questions about how it happened. 

We all have our intuitive, experience-based sense of what's credible and what's not. I doubt Michael Brown was going to physically assault an armed police officer in broad daylight, sitting in his SUV, without any apparent provocation or mutually escalation. But what really puts it over the edge are Brown's alleged statements, as recounted by Wilson. None of them ring true from what we know about Brown.

After that Marshall goes on to describe the famous Michael Brown robbery of the convenience store, and the fact that he roughed up a clerk, which in the minds of many was all they had to see to write Brown off as deserving of his fate that day.

I know this because the video was exactly the reason that my brother decided to argue with me during OUR Thanksgiving dinner as to why Michael Brown deserved to be shot.

To our credit we remained fairly calm, but my brother was completely convinced that Brown "was looking for trouble" that day. And his theory was based solely on the video of Brown manhandling that much smaller convenience store clerk.

What I suggested to my brother was that he ignore that footage as it did not factor into Wilson's decision to shoot Brown. Even if Wilson knew of the robbery, which is still somewhat debatable, he certainly had not seen the footage and would have no visual in his head of how Brown bullied that clerk into letting him walk away with those cigarillos.

Instead I asked my brother if he thought that shooting to death an unarmed man for walking down the street seemed reasonable. At that my brother asked how the officer would know he was unarmed, and I said because when they were supposedly grappling for the officer's gun (Darren Wilson's version of events) Brown did not pull a piece of his own once Wilson shot at him.

My brother also seemed blissfully unaware that Brown had been shot at least six times, twice in the head. (My brother only knew of two shots even though he said that he had watched hours of footage on TV.)

One of my brother's arguments was that Wilson had no choice as Brown was much bigger. In response I reminded him that they were of almost equal height (Brown's 6 ft 5, to Wilson's 6 ft 4.)

"But he charged him," my brother said. I mentioned that such a claim was not consistent through all of the witness testimony, and that several had said that Brown was staggering toward him, NOT rushing him.

This went back and forth a few times, with me eventually informing my brother that how the Grand Jury decided on the indictment was also essentially unheard of and that it was also cause for concern by those demanding justice. 

My brother's a good guy, he really is. However his responses were a real education to me as to how people who were only minimally paying attention could come away firmly convinced of something that was not backed up by the facts.

By the way he got ALL of his information from CNN.

And yes we had a really nice dinner and plenty of reasonable conversation after that exchange.

Republican Congressman Peter King believes that President Obama should invite Darren Wilson to the White House. Oh yeah, that's good idea.

Courtesy of Politico:

Rep. Peter King has a suggestion for the White House in dealing with the latest developments in Ferguson — invite Officer Darren Wilson over. 

“I think it would be very helpful if President Obama went and met with the police officer, or invited him to the White House and said, ‘You’ve gone through four months of smear and slander, and the least we can do is tell you that it’s unfortunate that it happened and thank you for doing your job,’” the New York Republican told Fox Business on Tuesday. 

“I thought it was terrible how, over the last four months, a narrative was put out there by our national leaders and by many in the media presuming that the police officer was guilty,” King said. 

Yes poor, poor Darren Wilson. Who somehow was able to get the St. Louis prosecuting attorney to skew the results of a Grand Jury decision by providing, and promoting, evidence to exonerate him.

Something essentially unheard of.

And now Peter King thinks the President should slap the African American community in the face by inviting this man to the White House?

Gee, it's almost like Rep. King were trying to convince the President do something that would enrage black Americans and convince them they were betrayed by the first black President elected to the White House.

Gosh I wonder why he would want to do that? (#2016.)

George Stephanopoulos gets first interview with Darren Wilson after Grand Jury decision.

Courtesy of HuffPo:  

ABC News broke into scheduled programming Tuesday afternoon to give a brief preview of the interview. Stephanopoulos told viewers that he spent more than an hour with Wilson in a "secret location." He said Wilson told him that he is "sorry" for the death of Brown, but that he would not do "anything different" if he were to relive that day. "He does not think he could have done anything differently," Stephanopoulos said. 

"He says he did what he was trained to do. He has a clean conscience over his actions that day."

"He has a clean conscience over this actions that day." You know having a clean conscience after ending the life of another human being indicates a psychopath.

Even soldiers fighting in wars against individuals that are trying to kill them, do not usually say they have a clean conscience over the soldiers they have killed.

Even if you really feel you are justified that is a troubling way to put things.

And saying that he would not have done anything differently....well I don't even know what to do with that statement.

If you watch this tonight feel free to weigh in here to let us know what you think of Wilson during, and after the interview. I am interested to learn if it changes anybody's mind or not.