Fatal Misfire: The police officer who shot and killed a young black motorist outside Minneapolis accidentally fired her gun rather than her Taser, the police chief in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota said yesterday.

  Another night of unrest followed, even with the city under curfew.

  Daunte Wright, 20, had been stopped for expired registration and was being arrested on a warrant. Police video shows he had one wrist already in handcuffs when he jumped back into the driver’s seat and struggled with officers. Officer Kim Potter, a 26-year veteran, can be heard warning that she’s going to use her Taser, but when she pulls the trigger the result is a gunshot.

  Potter is immediately heard saying, “Holy shit, I shot him.” Wright drove away and died down the road.

  Police Chief Tim Gannon said the incident is under internal investigation. Officers are trained to carry their gun on the side of their dominant hand and their Taser on the other side.

  Mayor Mike Elliott said the officer should be fired.

On Trial: In another devastating day for the defendant, a Chicago cardiologist testified in the trial of former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin that George Floyd absolutely did not die as the result of heart disease or drug use.

  Dr. Jonathan Rich said, “After reviewing all the facts and evidence of the case, I can state with a high degree of medical certainty that George Floyd did not die from a primary cardiac event and he did not die from a drug overdose.”

  The defense has claimed that Floyd did not die as the result of the way he was held on the ground with Chauvin’s knee on his neck.

Viral News: The federal government is ceasing use of the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine while it investigates a half-dozen cases of blood clots believed to have been caused by the shot. One woman died and a second is in critical condition.

  Nearly seven million people in the US have received Johnson & Johnson shots. 

  With Michigan fighting the worst resurgence of  Covid-19 in the country, the director of the Centers for Disease Control said the state needs to re-instate shutdown measures. New cases in Michigan are up 60 percent over the past two weeks. Nationally, it’s six percent.

  “The answer is not necessarily to give vaccine,” DDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said at a White House news conference. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and to shut things down, to flatten the curve, to decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent that we have available to contact trace.”

Book Report: In his new memoir, former House Speaker John Boehner says the Republican Party has been taken over by nuts and extremists, some of whom he refers to as the “chaos caucus.”

   Boehner writes in his occasionally foulmouthed “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” that the city was “Crazytown” and “when I took the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, two years into the Obama presidency, I became its mayor. Crazytown was populated by jackasses, and media hounds, and some normal citizens as baffled as I was about how we got trapped inside the city walls.”

   His  book is the No. 1 seller on Amazon right now, 

• Boehner writes of the January insurrection that Donald Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” 
• “Some of the people involved did not surprise me in the least. The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism.”
• “By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash. And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz.”
• “I don’t even think I could get elected in today’s Republican Party anyway. I don’t think Ronald Reagan could either.” 

The Spin Rack: Fox News executive Laughlin Murdoch has dismissed the Anti-Defamation League demand for Tucker Carlson to be fired for espousing the racist “replacement theory,” which holds that white American voters are being replaced by immigrants. Murdoch wrote to the ADL that, “A full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory. As Mr. Carlson himself stated during the guest interview: ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.'” — Actor Will Smith and his director are pulling production of their slavery-themed movie “Emancipation” out of Georgia because of the state’s new voter laws. —  ArcLight Cinemas, a great chain of movie theaters based in Los Angeles including the historic Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, announced the permanent closing of all its locations. 

Deadline Syndrome: Journalists reveal a below-average ability to regulate emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking, according to a study done in cooperation with the London Press Club.

  The study included 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online platforms over seven months. It concluded that journalists’ brains operate at a lower level than the average population because of dehydration and their tendency drink  alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.

  If researchers think reporters are brain damaged, wait till they study the bosses.

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