Police Shootings, Protests Turned into Riots, Terrorists, Chemical Weapons Used against US Troops -- Does President Obama Have Anything to Say about Any of This?

On Wednesdqy night, America and the watching world saw what can happen when the US President is out-to-lunch during what Newt Gingrich called an "American Tragedy" in Charlotte. Reporters commented as their video cameras showed state troopers in tactical gear, centered around the EpiCentre, the entertainment complex at College and Trade streets as they faced hooligans looting and smashing store fronts and the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The looters caused significant damage and on Thursday morning, a street sign hung from the front window of the EpiCentre news center, after vandals tried prying out the front window. Adjacent restaurants and hotels were also damaged, with doors and windows broken out. An official with the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority said they were working to assess damage to the NASCAR Hall of Fame building, and the adjacent convention center, and would release a statement soon. The vandals also hit the headquarters of the region’s United Way, across from the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The United Way building had its lobby windows smashed out. It was unclear early Thursday if looters entered the building. Given the “ongoing civil unrest,” Bank of America told its employees not to report to their uptown offices on Thursday. The bank’s headquarters is in the heart of the city and two blocks from the site of most of the riot damage. Wells Fargo also told all non-essential employees to work from home. A Duke Energy spokesman told the local Observer newspaper on Thursday morning that all non-essential personnel who work in uptown are being told to stay home for the day. Protesters are convinced the police shot an unarmed protester in the head, but the police say they didn’t fire the shot. ~~~~~~ The ongoing violence stems from police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott -- police said he was armed, but protesters claim he had a book. Police said they had been searching for someone who had an outstanding warrant at The Village at College Downs complex on Old Concord Road when they saw Keith Lamont Scott leave his car holding a gun. CMPD said Scott got out, had a gun on him, and put the officers in imminent danger. Officer Brentley Vinson shot Scott. Both men were African-American, a police official said. A man at the scene said : “Man was in his truck, reading a book waiting for his kid to come home. Cops shot him, for nothing.” Charlotte’s NBC affiliate is now showing a photo allegedly coming from a witness, showing a gun at the scene. ~~~~~~ Asked earlier on Wednesday during a Fox News town hall, set to air Wednesday night, how he would stem “violence in the black community,” Donald Trump offered the Stop-and-frisk procedure used in New York City during Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty. Trump said : "We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically?" Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg candidly talking crime and gun control at the Aspen Institute in February, said that the “only way to get guns out of kids hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them. It’s controversial, but...95% of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America....You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.” Thursday morning on Fox and Friends, Trump explicitly said the police should be able to stop people, frisk them, and take their guns away if they think that person shouldn’t have them. “They know who has a gun, who shouldn’t be having a gun.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's campaign says she is developing "national standards" for police to prevent situations "like these." ~~~~~~ The NAACP leader in Charlotte has a different opinion. Corine Mack told CNN on Thursday that it's irrelevant whether Keith Scott, who was shot by police, was carrying a gun : "I think the most important part is the contrast of him having a book versus a gun. But in my mind and in most of the community's mind, it really doesn't matter if he had a gun." Scott was seen entering a vehicle with a handgun. He was surrounded by police, then killed after he exited the car and refused orders to drop his weapon, according to police chief Kerr Putney. Street protests and violence erupted afterward. Videos apparently showed that Scott was not carrying a weapon, and his family said he was carrying a book, not a gun. Putney said there was "no doubt" that Scott had a gun. Mack added it was the responsibility of the police to manage the situation better : "At the end of the day, we have the right under the Second Amendment to carry here in North Carolina. And [the police's] responsibility was to engage him in a more deescalated way, to find out if he had a permit for his gun and allow him to go on his merry way and he would still be living today. That's not what happened." The video does not automatically mean Scott was guilty of a crime, said Mack and "I don't want anyone to walk away from this conversation today thinking that a video showing he had a gun in any way says that he was guilty of anything.... the police department rushes to judgment, and I think that, many times, African Americans are demonized, when, in fact, they are the victims. And I think we all need to step back and wait for a complete investigation." As to whether the NAACP leader believes the police when they say he had a gun, not a book — Mack said, "I can't, at this point." ~~~~~~ Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Megyn Kelly on Fox : "I think this is an American tragedy. Fifty-three years after Martin Luther King's speech I have a dream...two consecutive African-American attorney generals. Race relations are decaying in this country. I don't know what will happen in the next 50 or so days. One is the country at large will not tolerate this kind of random violence. People will not tolerate looting. They won't tolerate closing I-85. They won't tolerate burning things. On the other hand, most Americans, I think, desperately would love to fix the challenge of the inner city and they know it's not working." When Kelly asked Gingrich a politically themed question related to the protests, he pointed to Clinton's history of anti-police statements and stances : "When she was at Yale as a law student she was a coeditor of an anti-police, left-wing alternative newspaper that described police as pigs. "Her natural instincts is to take the side of the people who are against the police. Her first comments about this were anti-police." Gingrich said he believes Republican Donald Trump might fare well in the inner cities of America come November : "That's why Donald Trump, I think, may do surprisingly well in the inner city because he is at least offering a chance to dramatically change things." ~~~~~~ And, on Wednesday, th Wasington Post quoted Trump as saying he was "very troubled" by the police-involved shooting in Tulsa, saying the man who was killed "looked like he did everything you’re supposed to do. I watched the shooting in particular in Tulsa. And that man was hands up. That man went to the car, hands up. Put his hand on the car -- to me it looked like he did everything you’re supposed to do....This young officer, I don’t know what she was thinking....These things are terrible. In my opinion that was a terrible situation....Did she get scared, was she choking? People that do that can’t be doing what they’re doing." Trump made the comments in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where he was addressing the Pastors Leadership Conference at the New Spirit Revival Center. Cleveland Heights is nearly 43% black. During the question-and-answer session at the church, Trump said he is a "tremendous believer in the police and law enforcement, because we need that for our society." But he said law enforcement was also troubled by the police-involved shootings, adding : "People that choke, people that do that, maybe they can't be doing what they're doing." Earlier this week, Tulsa officer Betty Shelby, 42, shot and killed Terrence Crutcher, who was unarmed. Last week Trump got the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union. Trump, joined by running mate Mike Pence at the Cleveland event, has routinely praised police officers in his speeches to supporters. But after reading from notes about the role of the black church in the civil rights movement and vowing to help struggling black Americans, Trump questioned the Tulsa officer's reaction in shooting Crutcher, who was unarmed. Hillary Clinton has made stopping gun violence and police brutality a central part of her candidacy. She campaigns alongside a group of black women called the "Mothers of the Movement," who advocated for more accountability and transparency by law enforcement. The group includes the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, black victims of high-profile killings. Addressing the North Carolina and Oklahoma shootings on Twitter on Wednesday, Clinton wrote, "Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Too many others. This has got to end. - H" ~~~~~~ But, while Attorney General Loretta Lynch has called for calm moving frozard, we have yet to hear anything from President Obama about the rioting in Charlotte. In the same vein, we have also heard nothing from Obama about the suspected use of chemical weapons by ISIS in an attack against US troops near Mosul in Iraq. ISIS fighters are believed to have attacked US and Iraqi forces with a "crude" chemical weapon, which some have labeled mustard gas, on Tuesday evening, a US official told Fox News. The U.S base outside Qayyarah, 25 miles south of Mosul, was struck by a rocket and traces of a "mustard agent" were believed to be present, the official said. The attack, first reported by CNN, was described by a Pentagon official, who told reporters that a “tar-like black oily substance” was found on the shell that landed within the base hundreds of yards from US forces. An initial test for the agent was positive, but “could be false," the official said. The second test was negative, possibly because the shell had been exposed to the elements. The shell and its residue are being sent to Ft. Detrick, Maryland, for processing to confirm the presence of a chemical agent. Unlike mustard gas, which can spread, mustard agent leaves an oily residue behind. The official said the security posture at the base had not changed. No one was injured in the attack and there were “no signs of exposure” shown by any US troops, including the two soldiers who inspected the shell. Two to four soldiers who were near the shell received full decontamination treatment. The official said : “Unless you are right next to [the shell], exposure is unlikely." US troops at the base are equipped with chemical weapons exposure suits. Tuesday's assault is thought to be the first chemical attack on US forces in Iraq since they returned in 2014. Nearly 5,000 US troops are currently on the ground in Iraq and "hundreds" of them are located at the Qayyarah base, the official said. National Review noted that none of the network evening news broadcasts mentioned the mustard-gas attack : "You have to go over to the U.K. Daily Telegraph to get a sense of ISIS’s chemical-weapons capabilities and the worst-case scenario. While it is the first chemical attack against US troops, there have been 20 documented cases of chemical weapons being used against the Kurdish Peshmerga army, which has been moving in on the city from the east for the last few months." Hamish de Bretton Gordon, former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment (CBRN), who has been advising and training the Peshmerga in Kurdistan, said troops should be prepared for bigger and more lethal chemical attacks. He told the Telegraph that Peshmerga commanders have intelligence that ISIS has rigged with explosives a chemical plant 25 miles south of Mosul and six miles north of Qayyarah. An explosion at Misraq, which holds thousands of tons sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, could be catastrophic. De Bretton Gordon’s downwind predictions of 6-10 miles would mean Iraqi and any supporting US forces would be at risk. It should be major news that ISIS controls a chemical plant that produces sulfur, but apparently the mainstream media in the US is not alarmed. ~~~~~~ And, dear readers, London's newly elected Moslem mayor doesn't seem to be alarmed either. London Mayor Sadiq Khan dismissed the bomb blasts in New York and New Jersey as part of living in the world today. He told the UK Evening Standard in New York City on Sunday : "It's part and parcel of living in a great global city. You've gotta be prepared for these things. You've gotta be vigilant. You've gotta support the police, doing an incredibly hard job. You've gotta support the security services. It is a reality I'm afraid that London, New York, other major cities around the world have got to be prepared for these sorts of things." Perhaps President Obama is working on a version of Mayor Khan's statement that will include not only terror attacks in large cities but also lawless rioting and the use of chemical weapons on any side of the non-existent red line drawn by Obama when Syria used, and reportedly continues to use, chlorine gas against its civilians. But, I suspect Mayor Khan will change his tune if George Soros sends Black Lives Matter hooligans into London to trash and pillage shops and hotels there after a minority neighborhood-police dispute erupts into protests. These BLM hoodlums have hijacked the efforts of reasonable US protesters who want to stop police shootings of black men. Thursday, the largest French radio network reported that 186 people have been killed by US police so far in 2016 and that 25% of them were black, twice the ratio of the 12% of Americans who are black. There is much to be said for Michael Bloomberg's position that "95% of your murders, and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America..." But, there is also something to be said for lowering the tone, finding leaders who want to make it easier for black communities and their police live together peacefully, and reducing police shooting deaths overall. Stop-and-frisk helped. So do neighborhood walking police patrols. And, perhaps we ought to be looking at the backgrounds of younger American police officers. Are they often veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan deployments? Have they been trained to view people on the street as likely terrorists or, at the least, enemies? Has any effort been made to study this aspect of policing in America today? Instead of immediately attacking police as the problem, is anyone trying to understand whereAmerica's police come from, and what life experience baggage they bring with them. AND does anyone consider what being on the street in hostile neighborhoods where some people are shouting "The only good cop is a dead cop" does to their nerves and resolve? We should consider the police in the current crisis -- all of us -- starting at the top with President Obama, who likes to blame the police for every bad thing that happens when police and hostile citizens interact in inflammatory situations. Every problem has a solution if leaders and citizens have the courage to talk through it.