Worthy of your attention

I've been busy, so let's briefly note a few stories worth scanning/reading/thinking about:

Deleted. In a previous post on the police killing of Laquan McDonald, we talked about allegation that cops on the scene went into a local Burger King and deleted surveillance video. Chicago officials disputed this claim, and even (absurdly) stated that "forensic analysis" of the cameras demonstrated that there was no deletion. (As if such an analysis were possible!)

Chris Hayes, who has been following this story, said that there was, in fact, surveillance video from inside the restaurant of the cops deleting the video taken from the exterior cameras. Now we have proof. (See the video embedded above.)

General Wesley Clark. Is it too late to mount a "Draft Clark" movement? We need a president who dares to speak the truth...

Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark explains that the existence of the Islamic State helps Sunni countries Turkey and Saudi Arabia geostrategically, by countering the shi'ite powers: Iran, Iraq and Syria.

"All along there’s always been the idea that Turkey was supporting ISIS in some way… Someone’s buying that oil that ISIS is selling, it’s going through somewhere, it looks to me like it’s probably going through Turkey, but the Turks haven't acknowledged that."

“Let’s be very clear: ISIS [ISIL] is not just a terrorist organization, it is a Sunni terrorist organization. It means it blocks and targets Shia, and that means it’s serving the interests of Turkey and Saudi Arabia even as it poses a threat to them,” Clark said.

Crazy Cruz is at it again. Now that is has been established beyond question that Richard Dear was a right-wing maniac, Ted Cruz is claiming that most violent offenders are Democrats. By that, he means black.

Cruz actually was able to cite a study to buttress his claim, but one of the researchers who conducted that study, Michael Morse of Harvard, says that Cruz is "misinterpreting our research."

I would also point out that the study looked into the voting patterns of felons who have served their sentences and petitioned to regain their voting rights. One could therefore argue that the study Cruz cited measure only the voting patterns of reformed criminals seeking a second chance. Such individuals would logically gravitate toward the party considered more compassionate.

The better metric, I think, would have to do with the rates of violent crime in red states vs. blue states. Such studies have, in fact, been done -- and the results probably would not please Ted Cruz.

Barbarity in Israel. Not long ago, an IDF soldier tossed a knife to the ground and ordered her to pick it up. Obviously, he was planning to shoot her once the knife was in her hands. Fortunately, someone was filming the incident: When the soldier noticed the camera, he refrained from shooting. The girl was arrested and charged with an attempted stabbing!

Syria. Writing in The Consortium, Mike Lofgren makes a comparison which I've been wanting to make for a while now:

Deposing Assad, the principal military opponent of ISIS, would be as monumentally idiotic as if the United States, on entering World War II, decided the most expeditious manner of conquering Nazi Germany would be to defeat Stalin’s Red Army.

Just so. Suppose the year were 1942 and FDR announced that he was going to "defeat Hitler" by sending supplies to General Vlasov's anti-Soviet Russian Liberation Movement. Let us further suppose that supplies sent to Vlasov somehow kept ending up in the hands of the Wehrmacht. After a while, would you not form the impression that FDR's anti-Hitler rhetoric was nothing but a ruse and a sham?

A number of writers (including myself) have suggested that the United States -- once it became committed to the mad goal of toppling Assad -- either directly created ISIS or quietly encouraged the creation of that group. Is there any substantive evidence against this idea? Can you formulate a counter-argument, purely as a matter of intellectual exercise?