About 2 weeks ago, 2 members of Support the Dream Defenders boldly went where no member of STDDs has gone before, to a town called Netroots Radio, and 2 detectives were on them like powdered sugar on pancakes. Two members of the Daily Kos group Support the Dream Defenders took a break from their agitatin and activatin and gave up the goods so easily, you could hardly tell they were seasoned
crimin supporters of the Dream Defenders. Who were the detectives?
Justice Putnam and
Wink. Who were the Supporters?
Tortmaster and
2thanks.
Listen my children, and you shall to the podcast or skim through all 3700 words of the transcript, looking for the highlights. Glance at the green Chart of FOIA Progress, and then surrey down to the stone soul pic comments, where operators are standing b waiting breathless at their keyboards to answer your every question about Support the Dream Defenders and to hear you volunteer to help them in YOUR state (if you live in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, or Wyoming) and to see your commentary and links.
Podcast -
All About Support the Dream Defenders -
Justice Putnam and Wink Grill Tortmaster and 2thanks -
The After Show on Netroots Radio -
February 3, 2015
(Interview begins at about the 31-minute mark.)
Transcript of The After Show of February 3, 2015
Hosts: Justice Putnam and Wink
Guests: Tortmaster and 2thanks, Members of Support the Dream Defenders
Notes:
1. The interview starts at about 31 minutes of the hour-length
podcast and is 27 minutes in length.
2. The transcriptionist was unable to differentiate the voices of the two hosts, so they are referred to interchangeably as Host and Host 2.
Introducing ... Support the Dream Defenders
Host: We have with us today Kossacks that we have been wanting to speak to. JoanMar, who is now a new editor at Black Kos Community, directed me to Tortmaster and 2thanks because she started the Dream Defenders, and without getting too involved in it, I should let Tortmaster and 2thanks explain the origins of the group and how it has evolved. Welcome, gentleman.
Host 2: Welcome.
Tortmaster: Thank you, Justice and Wink, this is Tortmaster. We want to thank you for having us on. We really appreciate it. I guess I would go ahead and let 2thanks describe the Support the Dream Defenders group.
Host: I don’t know if we’ve got 2thanks connected. Do we?
2thanks: 2thanks came in after a little technical difficulty there. (Laughter.)
Hosts: (Laughter.) Awesome.
2thanks: Sorry I’m late.
Host: No problem.
Host 2: Don’t worry … Awesome.
In the beginning ... Support the Dream Defenders
2thanks: Support the Dream Defenders got started basically in one of JoanMar’s diaries at Daily Kos, in which I suggested that Support the Dream Defenders would be a really good name for a group.
Host: The Dream Defenders came out of the reaction to the Mike Brown and Eric Garner killings, yes?
2thanks: No. Support the Dream Defenders started the summer before that with the Florida Dream Defenders with Philip Agnew and that whole group. They were having a historic sit-in at the Florida statehouse, and that was in response to the killing earlier in the year of Trayvon Martin. We diaried about that and sent them money during the sit-in. It was historic because it was very long. It was the longest in Florida’s history, and then they stopped that because they went back to school. Seems reasonable to me.
Host: Right.
The Second Project ... The Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act
2thanks: Then our group became quiescent for about nine months or so until after the Michael Brown killing. Then I was feeling very angry, depressed, and frustrated, not knowing what to do, and the idea was introduced that we could write a federal law.
Tortmaster: If I could take over from there, 2thanks, and let you know that that was the second project for the Support the Dream Defenders group. We decided to do something that was kind of unique and new, and, in my experience at least, unprecedented at Daily Kos. The Support the Dream Defenders group saw a problem with out-of-control and rogue police departments and decided to write that law. We ended up calling it the Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, and what it does is give ordinary citizens the power to become a tiny, one-man or one-woman justice department. The law would allow any aggrieved citizen to file suit against an entire police department in federal court in front of a federal judge if that police department is racist, discriminatory, violent, or abusive. If a judge finds that the police department is racist, discriminatory, violent, or abusive, then the entire department gets placed on a year-long, very strict, double-secret probation. What we did, Justice and Wink, was we borrowed from the Voting Rights Act of 1964 some of the provisions, to make it more onerous on the police departments, to give them civilian monitors, to require that the police officers wear body cameras, and many other restrictions that make police departments consider not being so violent, and not being so discriminatory. Now, to build this law with JoanMar and 2thanks and JekylInHyde and the rest of the great group that Support the Dream Defenders did, we used Daily Kos as a crowd-sourcing tool. They put up a rough draft, I guess, of what they thought the law should be, and then they asked everyone to tear it apart. They did. 2thanks, how many drafts did we have, eight or nine drafts?
2thanks: Yes. We started about two months before the election, and I was focused on the election. I thought I would be volunteering for the election, and we would just kind of slowly waltz toward this law, but Daily Kos had a completely different idea. People came in. We had seven or eight lawyers who showed up. More than 400 members of Daily Kos supported us in one way or another, and within seven or eight weeks, we had our final version.
Tortmaster: When we looked at this, I think it was our eighth or ninth draft, we saw that our baby was strong, she was bold, and she was beautiful, and she was ready to go out into the world.
All: (Laughter.)
The NAACP and the ACLU Supported Our Crowd-Sourced Bill
Tortmaster: And that’s what we did. We sent the Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act out to every NAACP chapter in the United States and also most of the ACLU chapters, and just about every major human rights and progressive criminal justice organization we could think of, and Wink, Justice, luck was with us. Within a week we got a call from Hilary Shelton. Hilary Shelton is the legislative director for the NAACP, and he is the NAACP’s Washington bureau chief. He holds that position now with the NAACP that Thurgood Marshall held before Thurgood Marshall joined the Supreme Court. Director Shelton called us. He loved our baby. He liked our bill. He agreed to send it to members of Congress. We also took it upon ourselves to send copies of the Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act to every member of the Congressional Black Caucus and most of the progressive caucus, and our luck was still strong about a week later, when we heard from the national legislative director for the ACLU. She called us and told us, “We love your baby. We want to partner with you.” Now things couldn’t be going any better until, guess what happened? I think 2thanks kind of foreshadowed it earlier, the midterm elections.
Host: Right.
Tortmaster: And you know what happened then. The Senate got ugly, and the House got uglier, but we are realists. We can wait in the weeds like the NRA does, the Heritage Foundation, and [garbled] do, and we can wait for a couple of years until the country gets tired of the Republican-led Congress and votes the Democrats back in. Moreover, we’ve got a state version of the law that we have sent off to a couple of states, and we are hopefully going to be giving an announcement about that shortly. That is basically our second project. Our third project involves …
2thanks: May I interject?
Tortmaster: Go ahead.
2thanks: One thing I wanted to say is one of the provisions of the Over-Policed Rights Act is that police departments must report statistics, demographics about violence and population ratios by race, and part of that provision was actually signed into law by Obama in December [2014].
Host: Right.
2thanks: Whether that actually came out of our law directly, or that was something that was waiting in the wings, I don’t really care. I feel that we can take credit for it. (Laughter.)
A Good Question
Host: Before we move on to a description of the third project, let me just ask a question, really quickly, and I apologize if this sounds like I’m being a devil’s advocate. I lived, up to recently, about 35 years, in the San Francisco Bay area. A majority of that was in Berkeley, a very progressive town. There is a police review board there that is reviled by the police, a board that has essentially no powers, except people get to stand at a podium and address complaints. When I hear any individual can act as a mini-DOJ, wouldn’t the judge say, “Do you have standing?” Does the act address the issues of standing? I suppose since the ACLU at the national level and the NAACP are taking it, that these are all questions that have been addressed, and I am just, you know, whatever. But how does that work? I mean, to get the bill passed, you have to do some horse trading, I guess.
Tortmaster: Yes, but the thing is, you have to get the bill passed, and once it passes, the bill will give standing to individuals who are discriminated against …
Host: Okay.
Tortmaster: The police have been shown to have stopped perhaps people of color, arrested people of color, or abused or used their weapons on people of color or with language-minority status. So they would automatically have standing, based on what is in the statute …
Host: I see.
Tortmaster: … and they can go in front of the federal judge then and argue their case, and they can use, like 2thanks just said, the statistics that we required them to give them, for their case. So it’s kind of almost an open-and-shut case.
Host: The FBI from the 1960s had agreements with police forces across the nation to share arrest data. Many of these municipalities have not done that.
Tortmaster: You mean … not provide …
Host: Yes. Statistics, how many people were involved in police violence, burglaries, arrests, by color, etc., etc. They were supposed to be sharing some limited data, and I am just saying, I like the idea of this bill giving some teeth to that edict.
Tortmaster: What the bill does to get around that problem is to say, “You either give us this information, or you lose federal funding. You give us this information, or you lose your militarized weaponry. You give us this information, or when that one-man or one-woman justice department walks into court, they can use, as an inference, the fact that you did not give them the information, as proof that you are an over-policed rights jurisdiction, and then you are facing double-secret probation." That is how the law would work in that instance.
2thanks: Tortmaster, what is that phrase you are using? Double-something? I didn’t catch that.
Tortmaster: I’m sorry. I just used … Probably the wrong phrase to use. Double-secret probation: It is from the movie, Animal House; it is inappropriate. It is just rigorous, stringent probation that the police department would be under. They would have many restrictions. They would be audited by the Attorney General, and they would have to return in reports just about every time they spit.
Host: Don’t worry. We reference Animal Houseand Meatballs here on The After Show quite frequently, so …
Tortmaster: (Laughter.)
Host: … There is nothing beneath us.
All: (Laughter.)
Third Project - The Freedom of Information Act Project
We request all documents showing your efforts to track the number of people who have died or who may have died because you have refused to expand Medicaid. |
Host: Let’s talk about the third project, and then I want to talk about your FOIA team.
Tortmaster: The FOIA project, that’s our third project. JoanMar and 2thanks and JekylInHyde and Yasuragi and a bunch of the other great folks at Support the Dream Defenders decided to broaden our group’s vision to include not just criminal justice issues but also social justice issues, and one of the biggest current social justice issues, which is not being reported by the media, I might add, involves red-state governors who refuse to expand Medicaid. Those red-state governors have made a cold-blooded decision, based on no good or fair reason, to murder some of their working poor constituents. There are now millions of Americans in what I have been calling the Medicaid gap. They are the working poor who make more than the federal poverty-level guidelines, but who don’t make enough to pay for health insurance and feed their children. Of these millions of humans, many of them have undiagnosed diabetes, heart conditions, cancers, high blood pressure, and many of those illnesses and conditions can be diagnosed and treated very cheaply. In fact, for high blood pressure you can get medication from the doctor that is $10 for a three-month supply. That is a lot better than having to go to a hospital and spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars because you had a stroke, so what the red-state governors are doing is basically blithely murdering their working poor constituents who are just above that federal poverty line and bankrupting a number of them too.
Host: And raising the cost of health care in general, we are raising the cost of health care.
Tortmaster: … and for no good reason, because the state is going to have to pay for it in the long run anyway. So the group saw this problem, and JoanMar and 2thanks and JekylInHyde decided to put the spotlight on the governors, to put pressure on them, to galvanize the media, and to do that, we decided to send Freedom of Information Act requests to all red-state governors.
How Do We Catch the Evil Governors?
Tortmaster: We are asking all our red state volunteers to specifically make this kind of Catch 22 request of their governor, and if you don’t mind, I’ll quote it for you.
Host: Please do.
Tortmaster: “All documents showing the governor’s efforts to track the number of people who have died or who may die because you, the governor, refused to expand Medicaid.” We want our volunteers to send that out to their governors in the red states and the governor in the blue state who is the red actor. That is Missouri, of course. We know it is kind of a Catch 22 request because no murderer is going to go out and find evidence of their murders.
Host: Right.
Tortmaster: No governor is going to go out and collect evidence of the killings. Also, we have first-hand experience. I have already received a response from Governor Haley in South Carolina and her health department, and, come to find out, just as I expected, they are doing jack to find out how many people she is killing. They just aren’t interested.
Host: Just remember, she is not a witch, so you remember that.
All: (Laughter.)
Host: Right.
Effects of Republican Governors Versus Effects of Ebola
Tortmaster: Wait a minute, I am going to compare and contrast her with Ebola, here in a second, if you will give me one more minute. To put it into some perspective, consider this. You can consider the deaths caused by the Ebola virus versus those caused by Republican governors. Right now, there are less than 9,000 people in all of Africa and the United States who have died from Ebola. According to a Harvard study, up to 17,000 people annually will die because Republican governors refuse to expand Medicaid. The moral of the story, Wink and Justice, is this: As vicious and nasty and evil as Ebola is, it is still going to have to up its game just to measure up to a few Republican governors. What we want to do with the information we get, the requests and the responses and nonresponses we get, is to send that data to you, Justice and Wink, and to send it to Rachel Maddow, send it to Al Jazeera, send it to the Associated Press. We want to put the pressure on the governors.
Our Better Angels
Tortmaster: If you don’t mind, I would like to be evangelical for a little bit and tell you, there is good news. We have volunteers who want to help out with the process, and we have angels who have agreed to donate to help defray the cost, but we still need volunteers in some of the red states. We have got slightly more than half covered, but we need volunteers in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, so if you are a listener, and you are out there, and you want to do some activism, and you want to put the spotlight on your governor for your governor’s evil decisions, get in touch with us. You can contact JoanMar, 2thanks, or me at Daily Kos, or you can send me an email at thetortmaster@yahoo.com. Okay, now I’m done being evangelical.
Host: (Laughter.) Thanks for that information. That’s great info. Thank you.
Schedule of Diaries of Support the Dream Defenders
2thanks: We run our group’s diaries on Friday nights. Right now they are at 7:25 p.m. Eastern, and you can find the links and follow that information from there.
Host: If you are a Kossack currently, join the group, and for those of you who are just tacitly knowledgeable about Daily Kos, contact Tortmaster at thetortmaster@yahoo.com, and we need all the help that we can get, because we progressives are in this fight together.
Host 2: Yep, absolutely.
Observations: FOIA, Governors, Racism
Justice Putnam: I like the idea of Freedom of Information Act requests because it puts pressure on the specific department in specific states, and that is the governor’s office. That is rather astute.
Tortmaster: Actually, was that you, Justice, or was that you, Wink?
Wink: That was Justice speaking. It is hard to tell the two voices.
Tortmaster: I actually got a call from the [South Carolina] governor’s office yesterday, wanting me to call them back, and I am not going to call them back, I am going to let them wait another couple of hours, because they have not responded to one of my requests, and I am kind of mad about that. Besides being with a group of fun, entertaining, intelligent folks who are trying to help people, if you come and join Support the Dream Defenders, you get to put the spotlight on your governor, and, I tell you what, nothing feels better than adhering that certified-mail return-receipt request to the letter to your governor, asking her why she is killing these people and if she is trying to track how many she is killing.
Host: Awesome. I suspect the political reasons why governors in red states will be doing this is the general over-arching theme of just not letting Obama have any positive examples of his presidency and the extremes in which the Republican leadership determined that they would go. It is a sad commentary on our political process because it is, literally, putting people’s lives in jeopardy over a spot …
Tortmaster: Over a lock-step position that has no basis in reality.
Host: Right. It is sad … skin color for these Republicans is what it is. Obama has got the wrong skin color. I think if he was a white guy, I think all this stuff would probably have gone through. Probably Republicans as well as also the Democrats, progressive …
Host: I suspect that these FOIA requests are a way to bridge the gap between the midterms and the presidential election coming up in 600 and what, now, 40-some days.
Host 2: Yes. Yes. Exactly.
Host: Because I suspect it is going to be rather difficult to get legislation passed. You can present it, and try to get an up-and-down vote, but we know how the Republican Party works in gumming up government, but this is the legislative work that needs to be done. We are going to have a Supreme Court decision coming up on Medicaid expansion over a typo, but of course we will always say, make legislation.
More Observations: Supreme Court, Governors versus Ebola Again, Voting
Tortmaster: I do not think that suit is going to have any success in the Supreme Court. The Chevron decision back in, I believe it was 1984, said administrative departments of the Executive Branch, who make a ruling on what the legislation says, should be given deference. I can think of Scalia and Alito and Thomas, of course, voting against it, but Roberts … he can’t possibly do it because he does not want to look like an idiot, and that would make him in the legal community look like an idiot.
Host: Right.
Tortmaster: One thing I wanted to add was, as far as the Freedom of Information Act requests, the biggest thing I think it will do is put pressure on the governors and put pressure on the media to report the issue, because it has been under-reported. We heard Ebola, Ebola, Ebola before the midterms. We did not hear anything about Republican governors killing more people, and that has to change, and if there is some way we can do that, then we are going to try.
Host: Freedom of Information is the way to go, there. I appreciate that effort. Holy cow, man! Great stuff.
Host: Another over-arching concern is that … maybe we have too many Republican governors.
Host 2: Yes.
Host: There is a strategy to mitigate that problem. I think it is called voting.
Hest 2: Yep.
Host: That is a proverbial tough row to hoe as well, but you know, all politics are local. People need to be thinking of city, county, state politics, not just your senator or congresscritter and the Pres.
Tortmaster: Until your governor decides to run for Vice President or President, like Scott Walker or possibly Nikki Haley, then all of a sudden, their decision to mindlessly kill thousands of their working-poor constituents might not look so good in Indiana or a possible purple state like Florida, and I think that puts pressure on them to react, and I think as much pressure as we can put on them, I think we need to do it.
Giving Thanks and Kudos
Host: That is great news to hear, and I am glad you guys are on the front, doing this, and also JoanMar. Kudos to her as well.
Tortmaster: She’s our leader.
Host: I wanted her to come on, but she has expressed, and I get it, she says that … she intimated stage fright, which we all have, but I think that she has some important things to say and has been doing some important work, and I am glad that you guys came on to describe what Support the Dream Defenders is, and the great work that you guys are doing.
2thanks: Thank you. One last parting comment from 2thanks is Tortmaster’s email is thetortmaster@yahoo.com.
Host: Thank you. And you can also follow the Tort Master @thetortmaster on Twitter, and I believe that is also your Daily Kos handle as well. Yes, Tortmaster?
Tortmaster: Yes, sir.
Host: And 2thanks can be found on Daily Kos as 2thanks. (Laughter.) So check him out and Follow him. I did, today. All right. Thanks so much, guys. We will have you on soon to find out the progress on the great work you guys are doing.
Host 2: Absolutely.
2thanks: You are very welcome!
Host: All right. Thanks.
Tortmaster: Thank you!
(Transcribed and very gently edited for readability by 2thanks. The diarist inserted headings in the transcript.)