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A city oversight agency pretty much found that the New York City Police Department handled anti-police brutality protests as horribly as viral videos implied. The New York City Department of Investigations, the city’s inspector general “with independent oversight of City government,” released a 115-page report Friday revealing that the NYPD “likely escalated tensions, and certainly contributed to both the perception and the reality that the Department was suppressing rather than facilitating lawful First Amendment assembly and expression.”

“The NYPD’s use of force and certain crowd control tactics to respond to the Floyd protests produced excessive enforcement that contributed to heightened tensions,” DOI Commissioner Margaret Garnett wrote in the report. She specifically pointed to mass arrests, use of pepper spray and batons and “inconsistent application” of curfews. “NYPD use of force and crowd control tactics often failed to discriminate between lawful, peaceful protesters and unlawful actors, and contributed to the perception that officers were exercising force in some cases beyond what was necessary under the circumstances,” Garnett said.

The report analyzed police response to summer protests following the brutal arrest of George Floyd, a Black man who died when a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes on May 25. Patrick Lynch, president of the city police union, blamed his officers’ brutality on a lack of city support. “The DOI report confirms what police officers knew on the first night of riots: our city leaders sent us out with no plan, no strategy and no support to deal with unrest that was fundamentally different from any of the thousands of demonstrations that police officers successfully protect every single year,” he said in a statement Friday. “Nearly 400 police officers were injured—struck with bricks, bottles, fire extinguishers and folding chairs—because of the mixed messages emanating from City Hall and Albany. No amount of new training or strategizing will help while politicians continue to undermine police officers and embolden those who create chaos on our streets.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said after reading the report, it’s clear “we’ve got to do something different.” “I want to be really clear. Those days in May and June were not like anything I think that’s happened before in this city’s history, certainly for me were like nothing I ever experienced before, incredibly challenging,” he said, “and we saw problems that we had not seen before.”

Unfortunately for Black and brown people, police brutality is something we have seen before in New York City, quite routinely actually. Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black father, was accused of selling loose cigarettes outside a store on Staten Island when former NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo choked and killed him on July 17, 2014. Viral video shot in March shows New York police officers violently taking down a Black Brooklyn pedestrian after he asked repeatedly what crime he had committed, receiving no response, and the city’s infamous stop-and-frisk policy, which allowed cops to temporarily detain and question suspects based solely on “reasonable suspicion” of a crime, led to almost 700,000 stops in 2011 alone. “Most of the people stopped were black and Latino, and nearly all were innocent,” the ACLU of New York reported.

But with regards to more recent incidents of police brutality, the watchdog probe included 20 policy and practice recommendations for NYPD, including forming a protest response unit and patrol guide for demonstrations. NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in a statement CNN obtained that he intends to incorporate the recommendations “into our future policy and training.”

That doesn’t seem to make experts particularly hopeful, nor should they be. Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor, called changing policy an “important step one” but ultimately said it was “low-hanging fruit.” “Culture eats policy for breakfast, so there are a lot of things that have to happen for a police agency to change,” he told NBC News.

Nancy La Vigne, the executive director of the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing, told NBC News the report seemed “well researched and highly prescriptive.” “What remains to be known is the degree to which these prescriptions are adopted into policy and practice, that’s where often things can fall apart,” she said. “You can release all the reports you want, but if you don’t change the underlying structure or create incentives or really have accountability that is meaningful to a law enforcement agency, it’s hard to promote the change you want .”

RELATED: Witnesses recall NYPD officers unmasked ‘screaming in people’s faces’ as they arrested protesters

RELATED: NYC woman suffered ‘serious seizure’ and concussion after NYPD officer shoved her in viral video

RELATED: ‘I can’t breathe’: Public outrage about 2 Black men killed over cigarettes leads to changes in law

RELATED: ‘What crime did I commit?’ Woman films NYC police brutally assaulting a man walking home from work

The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting starts Dec. 14. 

Let’s give GOP Leader Mitch McConnell the boot! Give $4 right now so McConnell can suffer the next six years in the minority.

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Consensus on the COVID-19 relief bill that Congress is getting ready to pass, possibly by early Tuesday morning, is well summed up by Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial market economist at Oxford Economics in a quote to The Washington Post: “This is better than nothing, and there’s some good news that we’re finally getting a deal. … The bad news is it’s less stimulative than the prior packages, and the relief measures are short-lived.”

Since the CARES Act was passed and became history, 8 million people have been shoved into poverty. Hunger is at its highest point yet in the pandemic, especially in families with children. The clip of small business closings has accelerated, new unemployment applications are at a quarterly high, and large employers are threatening that layoffs are imminent. This bill will help stem some of that, but not for long. Expanded unemployment benefits only extend to mid-March, and the less than $1 trillion price tag barely dents the $16 trillion in economic damage the Congressional Budget Office predicted back in June. Given the months and months we’ve gone through in which no relief came through Mitch McConnell’s Senate, that estimate is likely worse.

“If we know anything about recessions, it’s that the recovery, especially for people with lower levels of education, is going to take longer,” Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, told the Post. “It’s going to take us a long time to get out of this, and the aid in this bill doesn’t last for long enough.” There’s this, too. “Even if Congress gets their act together and passes this stimulus tonight, it won’t make a big impact for weeks,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Many states will have to reengineer creaky unemployment systems again, so that will take time. The $600 stimulus checks will likely be swallowed up immediately by long past-due bills and rent. And there is no funding beyond some education and transportation support, along with vaccine distribution money for state and local governments, which have already bled employees—1.3 million since November of last year. More public sector job cuts and tax hikes are likely. “It’s $900 billion, but it’s not a particularly well-designed package,” said Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capitol Economics. “It won’t include any direct transfers to state and local governments, which gets you the biggest bang for the buck.”

“You need to go big to get the economy going again,” said Glenn Hubbard, the former chief economist to President George W. Bush and former dean of Columbia Business School. “President Biden will need something like a big infrastructure program that commits to spend money over several years to give people much more confidence that the economy won’t slip back.” It’s not nearly enough because, with a Democratic administration about to take over, Republicans all of the sudden feel the need to pretend they care about the deficit again and aren’t willing to spend more. (Which is yet another reason we have to get Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected, to keep those deficit peacocks from ruining absolutely everything.)

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In what is becoming a too-typical scene, a group of Trump supporters, some with guns and/or body armor, repeatedly attempted this morning to force their way past police officers and into the Oregon state Capitol building to protest pandemic safety restrictions and/or demand “revolution.” They were met with mace and pepper balls.

An undercover report from inside the protest describes the far-right protest in detail, from unconfirmed reports that someone saw “a Chinese person” inside to numerous calls for “revolution” and a debate over whether to burn a Blue Lives Matter flag after police refused to allow them entry. (They did not.)

As reported by Laura Jedeed, the attempt to storm the legislature appears to have been egged on primarily by Patriot Prayer’s Joey Gibson and Chandler Pappas, both fixtures of the Oregon far right, who also appear to have not been willing to actually risk arrest themselves while leading the would-be revolutionaries. The crowd consisted of “between 100 and 150” protesters, which is small for a revolution but which would completely fill a Chuck E. Cheese.

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The Washington Post has yet another look at how Donald Trump and his loyalists are spending their last days at the levers of power. Not all of it, of course, because there’s just too much, but the highlights.

To be honest, it’s difficult to believe Donald set aside time for any of it. He has been singularly obsessed with delusional claims that the November elections were rigged against him, to the tune of millions and millions and millions of sneaky fake votes, because he is a malignant narcissist whose failure is causing him to decompensate into a sludgy puddle of make-believe. He and his top staff are engaged in a full-tilt campaign to overturn an election based on literally nothing but propagandistic falsehoods. He, and they, are spitting on their oaths of office as a full-time profession.

Rather than Mike Pence and the rest of Trump’s top staff stuffing him into a sack while delivering formal notice that the “president” has, alas, become so unstable as to be incapable of fulfilling his duties, a collection of fascist-minded House Republicans is egging him on, America’s violent underbelly of paramilitary frothers is taking Trump’s delusions as signal that their own plans for genocide will soon come to fruition, and the press is still describing all the details with a detached, neutral air that both recognizes Trump’s acts as unprecedented and attempts to play them down as (1) the impotent ravings of a man who is Too Sad Right Now or (2) not all that different from, say, the undignified spats between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Here’s the deal: The presidency of the United States is currently held by a leaking bag of garbage. Also, the bag is a psychopath with delusions of grandeur. The garbage bag is currently mulling, with his advisers, things like can the military enter the swing states Trump lost in November, seize the voting machines, and force the citizens to vote in a new election held according to whatever rules Trump’s federal forces can enforce? This is not likely to happen, mostly because even the staff that eagerly assisted him in a prior extortion scheme aimed at forcing a foreign power to cooperate with a scheme to falsely incriminate his election opponent still has reservations about partaking in crimes technically punishable by firing squad. But Trump is, still, mulling ways to not just declare the United States elections illegitimate and invalid (he’s already doing that, and daily), but enforce his claims using federal force.

On track two, and mind the gap, Trump’s collection of archconservative party-line Republicans, anti-democratic activists who have for decades worked to portray all challenges to Republican rule as inherently illegitimate, is hurriedly sabotaging the nation’s government by installing like-minded loyalists in positions where they cannot be easily dislodged, eagerly and gleefully using basement-tier conspiracy theories to amplify their own prior claims of non-Republican illegitimacy, and pushing forward last-minute actions intended to damage Biden’s ability to govern at all.

Even if, as with the Republican efforts to block the Federal Reserve from providing emergency pandemic aid the moment Joe Biden has taken office, it results in deaths.

These are not policy spats. These are organized efforts to delegitimize democratic elections and to sabotage the economy so as to delegitimize non-Republican leaders. Trump’s status as emotionally unstable buffoon is not a lucky coincidence making the rest of it slightly less dangerous, but an intentional choice made by a Republican electorate that demanded a cult-leader clown, the latest in a long-bubbling rebellion against government know-it-alls and book learners that has pushed an entire new crop of conspiracy clowns, con artists, and outright saboteurs into Congress.

The media, writ large, seems to find itself continually surprised when Trump and his top advisers take new steps even more contemptuous of laws and democracy than the last. It was evident when Republicans neutralized impeachment charges that the White House would take it as affirmation and redouble their efforts. It was evident when the White House purged increasing numbers of “disloyal” government watchdogs that the intent was to eliminate institutional resistance to doing once-shocking things. It was evident throughout the summer that the White House was more comfortable using propagandistic claims and bluster to downplay the severity of a nationwide pandemic than taking concrete steps to save lives. It was evident from Trump’s preelection, pandemic-era rallies that he intended to challenge the election if he lost by only a little; it was evident within days of the election that he now intended to challenge the results even after losing by a lot.

He will propose even more shocking things, and the media will pretend to be surprised by them. His White House and Republican Party allies will embrace those things, or at least hold their tongues while waiting to see whether his newest contemptible acts will, by some chance, bear fruit.

Trump reworked Syrian policy as a favor to an oligarch he had long courted as a possible real estate partner. Trump tasked his “lawyer” with producing evidence incriminating his rival, who subcontracted the job to Russian-allied organized crime. Trump has used both the Department of Justice and his own pardon powers to immunize his allies from the consequences of crimes committed for his own benefit or that push his own agenda.

I’m not saying that we should hold off on the retrospectives of all the malignant ways Trump’s White House and his Republican allies are attempting to sabotage government rather than hand it off to a rival intact. It’s fine. But there’s a month left, and Trump is continuing to re-tune his staff to include those willing to endorse even more radical schemes while jettisoning objectors. This is considerably more dangerous than it is being portrayed. Still.

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There is an iron rule of conservatism: Nobody is allowed to criticize conservative religion because that is prejudice and oppression, but we are allowed to demonize all other religions because they are evil and contain communists.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler, whose only evident religion is day trading, may be an inexperienced politician but she is rich enough to have hired Republican strategists who know these things, so she’s been leaning into attacks on opponent Raphael Warnock, an actual reverend, with wooden, scripted gusto. Religious leaders are now calling on her to knock it off.

As reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, over 100 religious leaders published an open letter to Loeffler to end her “false attacks” on Rev. Warnock’s religion. Most are from Georgia. The letter also includes a condemnation of Loeffler’s support for the “radical” and “seditious” Trump efforts to “overthrow the will of the people by tossing Black votes.”

In short, Georgia’s (non-conservative) religious leaders are quite tired of Loeffler’s attacks on non-conservative religion as illegitimate. It may be a commonplace conservative election strategy, and the adoption of Lying Rapeguy von Taxcheat as conservative evangelicalism’s greatest hero demonstrates just how wide the chasm is between current “conservative” religion and most of the others, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to put up with it.

It’s quite bloody obvious that Loeffler herself does not spend even a moment’s time contemplating any of her political attacks—from attacks on Warnock’s religion to declarations that everything under the sun is now “socialist”—but simply repeats the things her strategists tell her to repeat. Honestly, that should be the subject of another letter. Now that her state’s religious leaders have called her out for repeated attacks on their spiritual views, the nation’s political leaders should deliver another letter condemning her for embarrassing politicians everywhere with her near-cyborgian delivery of scripted attack lines.

C’mon now, you have to at least pretend you believe any of the nonsense you’re spouting. This isn’t something you can hire a butler for. Loeffler’s delivery of attack lines makes Mitt Romney’s speeches look off-the-cuff. Have you seen Sen. Lindsey Graham? That guy can work himself into tears over anything, including over the divine right of a college kid to get as blackout drunk as he damn well wants to.

Whoops, got a bit sidetracked there. Anyhow, it was perhaps inevitable that an actual religious leader running for office as a Democrat would have their religion attacked vigorously, even alongside Republican demands that the sometimes Extremely Weird religious affiliations of Republicans go studiously unmentioned. Loeffler’s cheap bit is now being challenged by 100+ Americans who are tired of it. She won’t care because the attacks were never sincere to begin with, but there are Georgia voters who might.

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Once again, Republicans have forced a very pro-business, pro-rich coronavirus relief bill on Democrats. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but still:

If you’re on SNAP for basic subsistence, you have a lot of hoops to jump through. If you’re a wealthy businessman, you can eat out without any limits at all and write it all off on your taxes—100% of the costs of those meals, in the guise of assistance to restaurants. Because, sure, that’s why restaurants are failing. This will surely be incentive for hordes of people to do the one thing that epidemiologists have found to be among the most dangerous in this pandemic—going out to eat with other people.

Republicans have been on this for months (decades, actually) spurred on by Trump who, with restaurants in New York and D.C.—the twin epicenters of power lunches—will of course gain financially by it. At least Democrats got some additional assistance for the poorest out of it. 

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News of a new strain of COVID-19 that could be up to 70% more infectious has led many countries to suspend travel from Britain. That includes Canada and France, among many others, but not the United States.

The good news, such as it is, is that experts expect the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that have begun distribution to be effective against the new strain. But the virus was already spreading faster than the vaccines, and this will make that effect much worse. Already the mutation has been found not just in Britain but in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Iceland.

Britain, meanwhile, is getting an early taste of Brexit, with massive backups at ports and worries about shortages of necessary goods, including fresh produce.

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It’s amazing what can happen in end of the year legislative wrangling. For two years, Congress has had multiple bipartisan proposals to end the practice of surprise medical billing, proposals that went nowhere because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted on doing a minimum of actual legislating. Now, however, in the amalgam of coronavirus relief and 2021 spending, it is happening. Finally.

Surprise billing has cost American consumers billions over the years. It happens when one of the medical providers involved in patient care isn’t in the patient’s insurance network. A hospital might be in an insurance network, but the doctors and lab techs and anesthesiologists working there might not, and people have been having to fork up the payments for their services, even though the hospital they were at was in their insurance network. Everybody wanted to see this end, but the powerful healthcare lobbying groups who have been passing the hot potato of who actually has to pay—insurance, providers, hospitals—have leaned heavily into not letting it happen. The flurry of negotiations in Congress over this massive package just swept that away. So as of the passage of this legislation, surprise billing will be illegal. Or will be in 2022.

The legislation forces healthcare providers to work with insurers to negotiate a fair price for their services. It applies to doctors, hospitals, and air ambulances (but not ground ambulances). Nearly 20% of emergency room visits will end up causing surprise bills, averaging at $600. Most of the time, these surprise bills come from the doctors patients aren’t able to select, and usually in emergency situations. People have been faced with more than $100,000 bills for things like heart attacks. The problem has been increasing because, of course, greed.

See, it’s not just the healthcare industry involved here. “Some private-equity firms have turned this kind of billing into a robust business model, buying emergency room doctor groups and moving the providers out of network so they could bill larger fees,” the Times reports. Which is just one more reason the nation needs a single-payer healthcare system. Private equity firms have absolutely no business being involved in the delivery of medical care.

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The editor of a leading Missouri newspaper, The Kansas City Star, made the kind of confession Sunday that media organizations throughout the country should be mimicking. In an editorial dubbed “The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star,” Mike Fannin wrote that the newspaper that has been “one of the most influential forces” shaping the Kansas City region for 140 years “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.”

“It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining,” Fannin wrote. “Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”

Taking the advice of education reporter Mará Rose Williams, the newspaper editor revealed that what started as “an honest examination” of its history evolved into a six-part project poring over “thousands of pages of digitized and microfilmed stories” dating back to the newspaper’s founding in 1880 and interviewing Missourians who had lived through some of the city’s historic events. Staff members compared coverage from The Star with that of Black publications including The Kansas City Call and The Kansas City Sun. 

“Reporters were frequently sickened by what they found — decades of coverage that depicted Black Kansas Citians as criminals living in a crime-laden world,” Fannin wrote. “They felt shame at what was missing: the achievements, aspirations and milestones of an entire population routinely overlooked, as if Black people were invisible.” The editor said the positive tradition of receiving the city newspaper with enthusiasm wasn’t accessible to Black families. “Their children grew up with little hope of ever being mentioned in the city’s largest and most influential newspapers, unless they got in trouble,” Fannin wrote.

Then, in heartbreaking detail, he gave an account of the newspaper’s oversight of legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, who was from Kansas City. He “didn’t get a significant headline in The Star until he died,” Fannin wrote, “and even then, his name was misspelled and his age was wrong.”

“But white businessman J.C. Nichols got plenty of ink,” Fannin added. “His advertisements promoting segregated communities ran prominently in The Star and (its sister paper The Kansas City Times.)” And during the nationwide fight for civil rights in Black communities, Roy Roberts, editor at the time, reportedly said: “We don’t need stories about these people.”

Fannin apologized for the newspaper’s history, but more importantly he described projects it had already started to forge ahead on that follow a more inclusive path. The paper hired a race and equity editor and took on a two-year project on how distrust in the police among people of color contributed to gun violence in a state ranked No. 1 in the number of Black people killed as a result of gun violence. The work was inspired by protests responding to the arrest of George Floyd, a Black man killed on May 25 when a white Minneapolis cop kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. Similarly, the Los Angeles Times confessed to its own shortcomings in coverage with an editorial in September that newspaper owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong headlined: “The Times’ reckoning on race and our commitment to meaningful change.”

He wrote: 

“This news organization can succeed only to the degree it engages, examines and accurately reflects the city and the region. Much of its best work has succeeded because it has done that. But over its history, The Times has also mirrored, and in some cases propagated, the biases and prejudices of the world it covers, reflecting and shaping attitudes that have contributed to social and economic inequity. Today, we are beginning the process of acknowledging those biases of the past and taking positive action to affirm a commitment that our newsroom will not tolerate prejudice.”

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas called Fannin’s editorial “a positive step” and added that more is needed. “Now I hope my friends in the local TV news business do the same,” he tweeted Sunday. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery tweeted Sunday: “I say this every time one of these critical self examinations happens: every news organization should do this.” Podcaster Jay Scott Smith tweeted Sunday: “I wonder how many news organizations (not just daily papers) would do an honest and raw assessment of themselves and their history like what the @KCStar has done here? This isn’t a rhetorical question.” Journalist Soledad O’Brien tweeted Monday: “This is soo remarkable that I am encouraging everyone to read it:”

RELATED: ‘It means a lot to my ancestors’: Miami newspaper hires first Black woman as executive editor

The Georgia runoff is Jan. 5. Click here to request an absentee ballot. Early in-person voting starts Dec. 14. 

Let’s give GOP Leader Mitch McConnell the boot! Give $4 right now so McConnell can suffer the next six years in the minority.

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The House is set to pass, finally, some $900 billion in coronavirus relief along with a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2021, with the Senate following soon after. This comes 219 days after the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, and 81 days after the House passed their compromise $2.2 trillion bill, both of which Senate Majority Leader McConnell steadfastly refused to consider. Here’s the toplines:

It’s barely a dent in the need for millions of people who’ve been unemployed for months. Those $600 one-time checks are going to be means tested, so people who made more than $75,000 ($150,000 per household) in the last tax year will get smaller checks, and those who made $99,000 and up (individual) will get nothing. Never mind that many of the people who earned more than that in 2019 might have made closer to $10,000 in pandemic 2020—they’re getting skinnier checks. More, much, much more will need to happen. But it could have been worse, so there’s that.

Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania attempted to derail the entire thing at the last minute by trying to hamstring the incoming Biden administration by stripping emergency lending programs for the pandemic from the Federal Reserve as of January 1. Toomey backed down in negotiations with Sen. Chuck Schumer—the Fed maintains its emergency lending capacity, but won’t be able to just replicate 2020 programs in 2021. The blanket liability protections McConnell had been insisting on since April are also not included, but with that Democrats had to abandon hundreds of billions in critical state and local government assistance.

On the good side, there’s another $13 billion for increased SNAP and child nutrition programs. That will help relieve hunger for all the people who will have to turn over their $600 pittance to their landlords or utilities. The package also extends the eviction moratorium until January 31, setting up yet another cliff, and provides $25 billion in emergency assistance to renters. 

The other approaching cliff comes in that unemployment boost—it will end in March. It adds $300/week to unemployment checks, half of what was included in the CARES Act. Those extra payments ended last summer, but the boost will not be retroactive. It could start as soon as December 27, but some states will need more time to reengineer their clunky systems to get the additional money out.

The plan pours more money into the troubled Paycheck Protection Program small business loans. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) The more than $284 billion has some modifications to be more helpful to non-profits and independent restaurants and reserves some funding for “very small” businesses. It also includes a Trump demand—full tax deductibility for business meals. That could be a boost to restaurants, if it’s ever safe for people to eat in restaurants again.

To that end, it includes $20 billion for the purchase of vaccines, as well as $8 billion for distribution of those vaccines, and an additional $20 billion to help states with testing. In a statement released Sunday, Pelosi and Schumer said that billions were “reserved specifically for combating the disparities facing communities of color, and to support our heroic health care workers and providers.”

It has $7 billion to increase access to broadband as well as $82 billion for schools and colleges to make renovations to make them safer. It provides $10 billion in childcare assistance. Rounding out, there’s transportation assistance, including “$16 billion for another round of airline employee and contractor payroll support; $14 billion for transit; $10 billion for highways; $2 billion for intercity buses; $2 billion for airports; and $1 billion for Amtrak.”

On the floor Monday, Pelosi said “I look forward to a strong bipartisan vote today on this legislation, respecting it for what it does, not judging it for what it does not, but recognizing that more needs to be done.”