To Save America…Restore the Draft?

Milbank makes an interesting point.  The number of Veterans in Congress has reached historic lows. Historically that is when Congress goes out and does something stupid- like try and get us into an unnecessary war based on their ignorance. They also tend to discount Diplomacy – much as the current list of rightwing bozos tries to discredit the accomplishments of President Obama, and get us into war serially with Iran, Syria, Libya or anyone else who strikes their fancy.

Milbank’s proposal is that everyone serve in the Military. I don’t think that is practical. The last thing American needs is a standing army of 12 million. Besides the cost of supporting that – the lure of misusing and abusing that Military by sabre rattling morons in Congress, or if (heaven forbid) another Bushit is elected President is much to strong. I would propose instead a Civilian Corps making up at least half of those draftees. It is not a new idea, but it would require the sort of dedication to rebuilding he country’s aging and shattered infrastructure the sort of zero sum tax break politics of the right caused in the first place.

The issue being, would a national program to rebuild our bridges, national parks, byways, and cities pay an economic dividend in terms of return on investment. I believe a case for such can be made but it takes the sort of long range foresight that hasn’t been our leaders strong point since Raygun.

Save America: Restore the draft

At this time of Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the U.S. military — not just for the usual reason that it protects us from our foes but also because it has the potential to save us from ourselves.

As I make my rounds each day in the capital, chronicling our leaders’ plentiful foibles, failings, screw-ups, inanities, outrages and overall dysfunction, I’m often asked if there’s anything that could clean up the mess.

My usual answer is a shrug and an admission that there’s no silver bullet. There are many possibilities — campaign spending limits, term limits, nonpartisan primaries, nonpartisan redistricting, a third party — but most aren’t politically or legally feasible, might not make much of a difference or, as with Harry Reid’s rewriting of Senate rules, have the potential to make things even worse.

But one change, over time, could reverse the problems that have built up over the past few decades: We should mandate military service for all Americans, men and women alike, when they turn 18. The idea is radical, unlikely and impractical — but it just might work.

There is no better explanation for what has gone wrong in Washington in recent years than the tabulation done every two years of how many members of Congress served in the military.

A Congressional Quarterly count of the current Congress finds that just 86 of the 435 members of the House are veterans, as are only 17 of 100 senators, which puts the overall rate at 19 percent. This is the lowest percentage of veterans in Congress since World War II, down from a high of 77 percent in 1977-78, according to the American Legion. For the past 21 years, the presidency has been occupied by men who didn’t serve or, in the case of George W. Bush, served in a capacity designed to avoid combat.

It’s no coincidence that this same period has seen the gradual collapse of our ability to govern ourselves: a loss of control over the nation’s debt, legislative stalemate and a disabling partisanship. It’s no coincidence, either, that Americans’ approval of Congresshas dropped to just 9 percent, the lowest since Gallup began asking the question 39 years ago.

Because so few serving in politics have worn their country’s uniform, they have collectively forgotten how to put country before party and self-interest. They have forgotten a “cause greater than self,” and they have lost the knowledge of how to make compromises for the good of the country. Without a history of sacrifice and service, they’ve turned politics into war.

Compulsory military service, as old as Athenian democracy and common in countries such as Israel that live under threat, has been in decline in Western Europe since the end of the Cold War. But an exception, Switzerland, is instructive: On Sept. 22, the Swiss voted 73 percent to 27 percent to keep their conscription army. It has less to do with security than with national identity in a land of 26 cantons and four official languages. The government argued that military service teaches people “how to live and work with compatriots from all regions, all linguistic groups and all social strata,” which “contributes enormously to the national cohesion.”

In Switzerland, the sons of bankers and farmers alike do basic training for several months and then are recalled to service for brief periods. But the structure is less important than the service itself. My former colleague Tom Ricks proposes bringing back the draft in the United States but allowing for a civilian national service option — teaching, providing day care and the like — for those who don’t want to join the military.

There’s no mass movement for mandatory service, but the idea has gained a diverse group of supporters, including retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y). Gun-rights groups would cheer an armed citizenry, and an article published by the libertarian Cato Institute argued that compulsory service “can be a pillar of freedom.”

The costs would be huge. But so would the benefits: overcoming growing social inequality without redistributing wealth; making future leaders, unlike today’s “chicken hawks,” disinclined to send troops into combat without good reason; putting young Americans to work and giving them job and technology skills; and, above all, giving these young Americans a shared sense of patriotism and service to the country.

It would take some time, but this new generation of Americans, once again asking what they can do for their country, would undo much of the damage today’s crop of self-interested leaders is doing to our politics.

 

 

Marissa Alexander Released on Bail

Marissa Alexander is the Florida woman who was sentenced to 20 years in prison…

For shooting some drywall.

In the same state where George Zimmerman got “not guilty” for murder – and doesn’t seem to be able to go to jail for shoving guns in the faces of his soon-to-be ex-wife and girlfriend.

At least she gets to spend this Thanksgiving, and possibly Christmas with her kids while awaiting retrial.

Woman Sentenced For Firing Alleged ‘Warning Shot’ At Her Husband Gets Released

The Jacksonville woman awaiting a new trial in a controversial “stand your ground” case is free on bond.

First Coast News (http://fcnews.tv/18q19sa) reports that Marissa Alexander was released from jail Wednesday. According to the Duval County Clerk of Court, she must remain under house arrest while awaiting trial.

In 2012, Alexander was sentenced to a mandatory 20-year prison sentence for firing what she insisted was a warning shot during a fight with her husband. She tried to invoke Florida’s “stand your ground” law, but the judge threw out her self-defense claim.

An appeals court ruled in September that the judge in the case gave improper jury instructions.

Alexander says she fired a bullet at a wall in 2010 to scare off her husband when she felt he was threatening her.

 

 

The Pope’s a “Socialist Muslim”! And Obama is Closing the Vatican Embassy!

Totally absurd off the wall accusations have become standard fare for Republicans in their psychotic hatred of President Obama. When you’ve got a base who is stupid enough to believe anything – the the political thing to do is to throw as much shit on the wall as possible. Because some segment of that base is racist enough and stupid enough to believe anything.

Apparently Jeb Bush plans to throw his hat into the 2016 race.

Then the is the “problem” with the Pope. Seems he is getting ready to turn the largest Christian denomination in the world in some decidedly non-conservative directions! If Ol’ Jeb hadn’t spoiled their psychosis, right about now outraged Tea Baggers could be marching, loaded to the nines with their guns to “peacefully” demonstrate at the nearest Catholic Church to demand we pull the American Embassy out of the Vatican – a “Socialist-Muslim Institution”. They would need the guns of course to protect themselves from the Nuns, whose cassocks suspiciously look like Burkas! You never know when one of those flying Nuns might decide to run into a tall building!

“The culture of prosperity deadens us,” the pope writes in a document laying out the platform for his papacy.Pope Francis on Tuesday called capitalism “a new tyranny” and very explicitly called on global leaders to act on poverty and growing inequality.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.
In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us

My…My…My… Is the Pope now a (gasp!) “Socialist”? “Trickle down economics” sound familiar, Jeb? ” To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed.” Sound like a rejection of Ayn Rand, Dittohead? What the Pope laid out as the basis of his Papacy, is an utter and complete rejection of the principles of conservatism as promoted by Republicans.

Can’t wait for the “Pope Francis is a secret Socialist Muslim” from the Sno Ho, the Minnesota Birdbrain or some other illiterate, brain dead scion of the right! After all, he lives in the Vatican which is suspiciously close to the Middle East. I expect any moment for the conservative “press” to release at least a dozen “best sellers” on the “Vatican Brotherhood” being responsible for Benghazi! Dram Queen and Lawn Jockey Extraordinaire Alan West appearing on Faux News with the “bubbling blonde bimbos”  to claim he knew the Pope was a secret Muslim all along because the Church has black members!

In any event, the second part of my story — Jeb Bush, who was supposed to be the Bush brother with brains… Gets Stupid.

Jeb Bush Perpetuates Myth That Obama Is Closing The Vatican Embassy

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) called out President Barack Obama for closing the U.S. embassy to the Vatican, questioning whether the decision was political “retribution” for Catholic opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

Bush tweeted about the closure on Wednesday evening:

Jeb Bush        ✔ @JebBush  Follow

Why would our President close our Embassy to the Vatican? Hopefully, it is not retribution for Catholic organizations opposing Obamacare.

6:12 PM – 27 Nov 2013

However, the Vatican Embassy isn’t actually closing.

Last week, the State Department announced that it would be moving the embassy from its standalone Vatican facility to a larger compound shared with the U.S. Embassy in Italy, as well as the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. According toReligion News Service, the move is anticipated to save the government $1.4 million a year.

Conservatives were quick to criticize Obama on the move.

As CNN reports, the National Republican Senatorial Committee described the relocation as “the latest anti-religion pursuit of this Administration, a slap in the face to Catholic-Americans around the country that weakens America’s position as a global leader.”

“It’s not just those who bomb churches and kill Catholics in the Middle East who are our antagonists, but it’s also those who restrict our religious freedoms and want to close down our embassy to the Holy See,” Raymond Flynn, a former envoy to the Vatican, told the National Catholic Reporter.

The administration, however, maintains that the move is not indicative of any strain on the United States’ relationship with the Vatican.

According to CNN, a State Department official said the move will result in “no reduction in diplomatic staff, there’s no reduction in ambassadors, there’s no reduction in mission.”

 

TeaParty “Knockout Game” Version

Playing a bit of the Devil’s Advocate here…

Seems like there have been at east 20 Republicans busted for forcible or underage sexual assaults in the last few years. I mean, even their Presidential candidate Herman Cain got caught trying to force women to have sex with him through corporate intimidation, and downright physical force.

One has to wonder whether this is an epidemic! Spreading across the  country from lilly white precinct to precinct!

It certainly is far more frequent than reported incidences of the “Knockout Game” attributed o black inner city youth.

Ex-GOP Chairman Drugged, Raped Employee: D

Former Montgomery County Republican Committee Chairman Robert J. Kerns has been arrested for rape of an unconscious person and related charges after an alleged sexual assault that occurred in late October, according to Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman.

Kerns, 66, who led the GOP from 2008 through Nov. 15 when he resigned after the sexual assault investigation was reported, was charged with 19 criminal counts, including rape of an unconscious victim, rape of a substantially impaired person sexually assault, aggravated indecent assault without consent, possession of an instrument of crime with intent, and possession of a controlled substance.

According to Ferman, Kerns and the victim, and employee at his Upper Gwynedd law firm, were at a work celebration at Radice restaurant in Whitpain township on Oct. 25. Around 6 p.m., Kerns offered the victim a ride to her home in King of Prussia and allegedly encouraged her to drink from a bottle of wine that he had secretly drugged with Ambien.

Ferman says that the victim lost consciousness, and Kerns raped and sexually abused her while in his car; the assault was allegedly so violent that it cause severe genital injuries and other injuries to multiple parts of her body.

Ferman alleges that the victim began to regain consciousness as the defendant drove closer to her neighborhood, and remembers the last few turns to her house. Once at her house, the victim said Kerns took her upstairs and sexually abused her once more before leaving her home.

Kerns was also charged with unsworn falsification to authorities, tampering with physical evidence, and more.

The incident occurred just one day after Kerns announced a truce among warring factions in the Republican Party, which had impacted the party for decades.

 

Searching for a White Trayvon – The “Knockout Game”

First the Faux News racist sensationalism –

The Knockout Game Myth and its Racist Roots

The stories are chilling–conjuring a world of senseless, alien violence as incomprehensible as it is reprehensible. Rightfully, we are mortified and outraged and we fear for a country in which A Clockwork Orange ultra-violence finds life in our streets. The analysis of many pundits is startling: these attacks are racially motivated hate crimes against whites by black youths and the media and our politicians refuse to identify these racist motives out of political correctness.

What goes mostly unspoken in these commentaries on the “knockout game” is the idea that these assaults are racially motivated and so white people should be wary of groups of black men. Some take this further and blame the “liberal media” for the violence, since the media allegedly hid the “truth” about the race of the criminals. If only the media would tell us when black people attack white people, we’d know to not trust them and we’d be safe, the logic goes.

But are these pundits correct? Are these crimes committed by roaming packs of black “savages” against white people?

Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s new, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, andMatt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, CNN from claiming that it is “spreading,” or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.” Most sources claim that it is spreading, and a number of sources claim that it is racially motivated. But how do they know? Where are they getting their data from?

Alec Torres wrote what appears to be the most thorough survey of all the reported accounts of the “knockout game,” but these “reports” are actually newspaper reports, not police reports, so they don’t give us a reliable picture. Yet, Torres is confident enough to conclude: “Most of the victims have been whites and Asians, and attackers tend to target Jews, immigrants, and the elderly in particular. Most of the attackers have been African American.”

“Most” is an awfully slippery word to describe a increasingly popular, violent hate crime.

What’s very perplexing about Torres’s post is that he quotes multiple times from an award-winning article by John H. Tucker in Riverfront Times titled, Knockout King: Kids call it a game. Academics call it a bogus trend. Cops call it murder. I say this citation is perplexing because Tucker’s article explains quite clearly why sweeping claims about rising incidences of the “knockout game” and the racial identities of the perpetrators and victims are bogus. Tucker helps us see how many commentaries about these assaults are deeply flawed.

First of all, we don’t have reliable data:

A variety of factors make it impossible to quantify how many assaults can be attributed to Knockout King. For one, police often categorize such attacks as attempted robberies; though participants say theft isn’t the motive, they’ve been known to add larceny to injury when the opportunity presents itself. Moreover, because victims usually don’t get a good look at their assailant, incidents seldom result in charges. Many of the most vulnerable victims don’t file police reports, either because they fear revenge or were taught in their native countries not to trust police.

In order to draw any remotely competent conclusion about these assaults, you’d have to deal with all the above problems and also consider if crimes by whites are reported as frequently as crimes by blacks, whether teens of other races might refer to the game by another name or not label it at all, how the percentage of attacks by blacks compares to the general percentage of assaults by black teens, and so on. Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling “knockout game.” Here’s Tucker again:

Given that 4.3 million violent attacks were reported by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, Males [a research fellow at the nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice] says reporters should know better than to highlight a handful of random attacks by kids and call it journalism. It’s the same thing as plucking a few instances of attackers with Jewish surnames who beat up non-Jews and declaring it a “troubling new trend,” he argues.

All but two of the ten victims . . . interviewed were white (one was black and was Latino), and all of the players were black. But Knockout King does not appear to be bounded by race. Jason, from St. Louis County, says two white friends were part of his punch-out crew. One Dutchtown woman, agreeing to speak on the condition that her name not be published, says police caught her son, who is white, playing Knockout King. . . .

“It’s not a black thing, it’s a kid thing,” the woman says. “It’s teenage kids trying to be cool. My son’s as white as can be. He doesn’t have a black bone in his body.”

How could Torres read this article and yet still come to the conclusion that the assaults are on the rise and that “most” of them involve black assailants and white or asian victims? In his defense, other pundits have drawn the same conclusion, despite the lack of evidence.

Of course, there are some things we can confidently say about these crimes: “Most criminologists and youth experts agree that unprovoked attacks by teenagers on strangers are a real, if extremely rare, phenomenon,” notes Tucker. What’s more, unquestionably these attacks are horrid and inhumane, Mark Steyn is right that these perpetrators lack a basic moral fortitude, the guilty parties must be apprehended and punished, and the public should be warned about the realities of random violent crime. And we might even admit that some of these assaults appear to have been hate crimes. None of these claims are objectionable because we have evidence for them.

What we don’t have evidence for is the claim that this “game” is becoming increasingly popular or that it is part of a larger problem of black mob violence which the media is ignoring. To support such absurd claims we need to turn elsewhere, away from the experts and the data, to a man who has made a name for himself peddling a book which purports to show that a covert race war is being waged by blacks against whites all across the country, and the knockout game is just one weapon in their arsenal.

Before almost anyone else was talking about the “knockout game,” Colin Flaherty was reporting on it and other incidences of what he calls “black mob violence” for WorldNetDaily, the notoriously deceptive, far-right news and opinions site. His schtick is simple: every time he finds a report of black “mob” violence or black on white violence, he writes about it. He’s compiled many of these incidences into his book, White Girl Bleed A Lot, which is ranked #1,455 under “Books” at Amazon as of Sunday evening, 24th of November. Its high ranking is undoubtedly due to the press he’s been getting. Hannity had him on his radio show. And Thomas Sowell’s article on the knockout game, which was published in the New York Post and the National Review Online, cites Flaherty and repeats much of the WND author’s rhetoric about the national epidemic of racial violence that the media has covered up. This isn’t too surprising, since Sowell’s original review of the book was actually published on the NRO’s website, where he gave the book high praise. His book has also received praise from Allen West, David Horowitz, and American Thinker.

What’s surprising about all the positive press Flaherty has received is that his articles purporting to prove this epidemic of black racial violence are incredibly, basically absurd. And that absurdity, the lengths Flaherty is willing to go to support his assertion about the secret race war can really only be interpreted as bigotry. Flaherty deceives his readers to sell his book, peddling the classic white fear of the savage, violent, black man, mixed in with a little contemporary rhetoric about how the “liberal,” politically correct media is covering up for black thugs. This narrative fits nicely into the larger perception that Obama has created a nation of entitled, lazy, and violent blacks, which I have written about before.

The most basic flaw in his argument is that his entire project is one big stacked evidence fallacy. If you only cite examples of black crime, of course you’ll conclude that there’s a national racial crime wave! Using that “logic” I can prove that any group is waging a secret race war (it is interesting to note that Robert Spencer of JihadWatch uses a very similar method to argue that Muslims are dangerous). On top of that egregious error, Flaherty entirely ignores all other characteristics of the crimes: social class, education, setting; nothing else matters except race to him. Any respectable criminologist would scoff at such a methodology, not because they want to be politically correct, but because it’s a gross reduction of the factors that actually contribute to crime. Next, Flaherty fails to recognize that correlation does not equal causation. So, because a black person commits a violent crime, his blackness must have caused it, in Flaherty’s logic. And because a black party got out of hand, it’s a “race riot.” Yes, that’s right, because the partiers were black, it was a “race” riot. Because “black” is a race. Makes perfect sense, right?

When the media doesn’t mention that a violent crime was committed by a black person, that’s evidence of a cover up for Flaherty. In one article, he describes calling and emailing the police to try to learn the racial makeup of a party that turned into a “mob”:

“What happened? Was this a case of black mob violence?”

No reply. I get that a lot. It is a red flag.

So, he called the police and explicitly asked if an incident was “black mob violence,” and when he got no reply, it was confirmation to him that the police were hiding the truth. My guess is that in most of these cases, the media and police are silent about the race of the perpetrators because “race” isn’t really a factor in the crimes.

Flaherty regularly stacks and exaggerates the evidence (also see here, or here, or here).

Colin Flaherty and his project have been cited repeatedly to support the claim that the “knockout game” is really about racial violence against whites.  He’s been cited to this end not just in far-right publications like WND, or FrontPageMag, but in the National Review Online, one of the most respected conservative journals, and one that I like to recommend. His conspiracy is extremely racist, as Flaherty reduces everything down to the color of the criminal’s skin, regardless of the facts. He consistently distorts the truth in order to portray black people as the savage, animalistic, and Other.

We need to be honest and accurate about these crimes, neither sharing the hysteria and racial fear-mongering nor trivializing the reality of these crimes. This isn’t easy to balance. We have the right to be concerned about random violence and the authorities have the responsibility to protect us and prosecute violent criminals. But we also have the responsibility to tell the truth about our neighbor and the world.

And no Faux news race baiting is complete without the resident ncle Tom –

 

Tea Bagger Militia OKs Shooting President Obama

Two parts to this one demonstrating the exist hatred of the right…

This one from Dinesh D’Souza – One of the right wing’s “brown darlings”…

And this one from the leader of something called the “Christian American Patriots Militia”…

Christian American Patriots Militia leader: We now have authority to shoot Obama

An apparent threat made against President Barack Obama’s life posted on Facebook has caught the attention of the Secret Service.

Agents declined to comment on the post, which has been removed but was preserved in screen captures by Social News Daily, made Tuesday by Everest Wilhelmen, leader of the Christian American Patriots Militia.

“We now have authority to shoot Obama, i.e., to kill him,” Wilhelmsen posted on hisFacebook page. “His willful violations and alienation of our Constitution, constant disregard for our peaceful protests and corruption of all the three branches of government, (i.e., rogue and illegitimate government), reveal the dictator that he is. Obama and his co-conspirators disrespect our Constitution (constitutional rule of law) and abuse the American people.”

The post was made the same day as a gathering of right-wing cranks, conspiracy theorists and gun advocates met at a park across from the White House demanding that Obama voluntarily leave office.

Wilhelmsen does not refer specifically to theReclaim America Now rally, but he does circle the date as he attempts to constitutionally justify his apparent call for the president’s murder.

“The authority to kill Obama comes from the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution: He is levying war on the United States and aiding and comforting our foreign enemies – the 2nd Amendment gives us the right and duty (authority) to engage an enemy of the United States that does so with the design to reduce us under absolute Despotism. I would be very surprised, if Obama does not leave Washington DC today (Nov. 19th) … never to return, if he is not dead within the month,” Wilhelmsen posted.

Wilhelmsen is listed as the group administrator of the Christian American Patriots Militia’s Facebook page, which claims more than 1,400 members who operate as a “closed group” and cites a hodgepodge of Bible verses to justify armed rebellion against the U.S. government.

“God judges time morally and He will use whatever He sees fit to accomplish His ends,” the group says in its social media description. “So be prepared to wage war. And this is in fact why Obama has labelled Christians and other patriots as ‘terrorists,’ a lie to his army. Obama knows God may lead us to wage violent war in the defense of our Constitution.”

Wilhelmsen posts a variety of anti-Obama and anti-Muslim messages on his own Facebook page and Twitter account, including multiple links to a blog post that attempts to argue that military personnel are duty-bound by their oath to remove Obama from office as a criminal.

His social media accounts frequently compare to Obama to Hitler and warn against impending genocide, particularly against Christians and conservatives.

Two other apparent threats against Obama’s life drew the Secret Service’s attention in recent weeks.

A University of Connecticut student, 32-year-old Joshua Klimas, underwent psychiatric evaluation after agents said he admitted to sending threatening emails to the White House.

“If you do not resign by the end of the year I will kill you! You are a traitor and it is my duty under the United States Constitution to end your life for crimes against the American people,” one email read. “There will not be any more warnings only bullets flying in your direction from drones I built for the sole purpose of removing you from the office you stole from this country.”

An 81-year-old Wisconsin man, Elwyn Nels Fossedal, was ordered held last week by a magistrate after prosecutors said he told neighbors he would shoot and kill the president if he suddenly appeared in front of him at the post office.

Witnesses reported the incident, and Secret Service agents said Fossedal repeated the threat after they met with him to investigate.

If convicted of the threat, Fossedal could face up to five years in prison.

 

Indian Response to Criticism of Miss America

Ow!

Her real name is Lilly Singh, her Youtube name is !!Superwoman!!, and she hosts a Youtube page here. You can also find her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr…

 

Police Misconduct and Brutality…Again

Why is it the police in Florida can arrest a black man at his job 258 times for being at work…

And can’t get a murderer like George Zimmerman off the street and not pulling guns on women?

In the second incident this week to make the news concerning racial profiling, police abuse, and brutality – “Get Tough on Crime” laws have turned into a mechanism of racial harassment and brutality. The first incident (or more properly series of incidents) were in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where officers harassed, beat, and videotaped black men they accosted on the street, threatening them with arrest if they didn’t sing or dance on video for the officers amusement. A series of videos uncovered by local paper posted at a local Police internal message board, by the Motor City Muckraker, show black men in the town being stopped and harassed by police, and forced under threat of beating or arrest to sing or make animal sounds.

 

 

The case in Miami Gardens, Florida is even more vicious.  A local store owner, tired of having his employees and customers summarily harassed and arrested by Miami Gardens Police, while doing nothing more nefarious than taking the trash out, minding the store, or purchasing a Lottery Ticket,  installed a video surveillance system. What the videos show is Miami Gardens Police harassing, arresting, and using force to arrest people on manufactured grounds over a year.

Here, a store employee (Earl Sampson) taking out the trash is arrested for “trespassing”…

Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years.

He’s been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.

Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.

Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing.

Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.

But Sampson isn’t loitering. He works as a clerk at the Quickstop.

So how can he be trespassing when he works there?

The link to the Miami Herald Article which broke the story is here.

Earl stocking the shelves…And arrested for trespassing…

Now admittedly Miami Gardens has a crime problem. It is a poor area, and robberies and shootings are not uncommon. However, it is hard to see how arresting law abiding citizens on trumped up charges, while they are at work – is doing anything to stop the serious crime problems.

How “Zero Tolerance” Policing Helped Bad Cops in Florida Create a Civil Rights Nightmare

The Miami Herald has published a stunning, maddening story about alleged persistent police harassment of blacks in the city of Miami Gardens, Fla. (You should read the entire Heraldstory; it will raise your blood pressure and ruin your weekend, but you should still read it.) For years, police would come to a convenience store in a transitional neighborhood and hassle black customers and employees in the name of proactive crime prevention—regularly citing and arresting men for loitering or trespassing, even when they weren’t.

One man, an employee of the store, was “stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years,” with almost all of these incidents happening on store premises. He was arrested 62 times for trespassing, and, again, these were arrests for being on the grounds of the store where he was employed. These incidents and others were recorded by video cameras installed by the store’s owner for the express purpose of documenting police misconduct:

The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.

The harassment continued even after the store’s owner asked the cops to leave him and his employees alone. Since then, the store’s owner has reported police harassment of his own. “I ’m going to get you mother-f—–,” he says one cop told him during an allegedly gratuitous traffic stop.

How does something like this happen? Blame it on endemic racism, yes, and on bad apples in the police department—but also blame it on a short-sighted local crime-reduction policy that, in retrospect, was always, always ripe for abuse. The convenience store incidents began when police convinced the store’s owner to enroll in the department’s “Zero Tolerance Zone” program. In Miami Gardens, when a shop becomes a Zero Tolerance Zone, the owner signs an affidavit authorizing the police to enter the premises when the owner is absent and question, eject, and/or arrest all those whom they suspect of being up to no good. The website of the Miami Gardens Police Department notes that the program is “designed to reduce the number of individuals who are sometimes seen trespassing and loitering on private property without legitimate business.”

Miami Gardens does have a serious crime problem—murders there have “more than doubled” in recent years, says the Herald—and, in theory, this program is meant to address that problem by keeping potential malefactors on their toes and off the streets. In practice—at this one convenience store, at least—by authorizing police to act in the owner’s stead, the “Zero Tolerance Zone” just made it easier for bad cops to abuse power.

The fact that Miami Gardens police kept arresting that one particular employee even after it was very clear that he worked at the store is baffling, and obviously indicates that more was going on here than simple overzealousness. But the alleged police misbehavior is rooted in the idea that cities can keep their streets safer by keeping poor black men off of them, and that it’s up to an individual cop’s discretion to determine what sort of behavior is and is not appropriate.

The “Zero Tolerance Zone” initiative sounds similar to the controversial stop-and-frisk programs that have been deployed in New York and other cities, where police officers are encouraged to routinely stop and question people on slim grounds—“suspicious behavior” is a favorite excuse—in hopes of seizing guns and drugs and stopping crime before it starts. In both programs, cops have been accused of routinely exceeding their authority against people who have no real means of stopping them from doing so. Inevitably, the people being stopped and questioned are minority residents of crime-ridden areas—police have no incentive to deploy these tactics in rich white neighborhoods with minimal street crime. Inevitably, when cops are authorized to engage in this sort of proactive policing, some cops will overdo it, and trample citizens’ civil rights in the process.

This all comes down to the goddamn stupid, silly, racist “broken windows” theory of crime prevention that encourages police to treat the symptoms in hopes of curing the disease. This doesn’t work in medicine or crime prevention. “Broken windows” theorizes that disorderly neighborhoods invite criminal behavior, and that cracking down on quality-of-life violations can make neighborhoods safer. But while taking a hard line on public disorder might make the streets cleaner, there is little evidencethat the strategy is an effective way to reduce crime. (Broken-windows policing was most famously applied in New York during the Giuliani administration, but the decline in the city’s crime rate during that timespan probably had more to do with the end of the crack epidemic than with the NYPD taking a hard line on jaywalking.)

More broadly, there will always be crime in poor neighborhoods as long as these neighborhoods lack good jobs, good schools, good mental health resources, and other things that truly help make neighborhoods stable. Thinking you can stop crime by ticketing loiterers (or manufacturing bogus charges against people who look like loiterers) is the sort of willfully obtuse policymaking favored by shortsighted, indifferent leaders who value appearances over results. As a long-term crime-prevention strategy, broken windows is intellectually bankrupt; as a short-term strategy, it is a recipe for civil rights abuses. If the allegations are true, the Miami Gardens story makes this all painfully clear.

 

 

 

Duke Rape Accuser – Crystal Magnum Convicted of Murder

The woman who was at the center of the firestorm caused by her false accusation of 3 Duke University Lacrosse players having raped her, has been convicted of murder in the stabbing death of her boyfriend…

 

 

Civil Rights Leaders Remember JFK

The Belafonte TV Ad

Andrew Young Remembers JFK and MLK’s sorrow at hearing Kennedy had been assasinated –

John Lewis’ remembrance –

 

 

More Baltimore Jail Indictments

This one is going to be a movie. What has been going on in the Baltimore Detention Center – and perhaps other Jails in the State of Maryland is unbelievable. The inmates truly were running the prison…

 

SJSU – Hate Crime on Campus As Student Abused

Read this one with a bit of disbelief at first.  Then, I thought about it. This is the logical outgrowth of the racist policies promoted by Ward Connerly, and the Prop 209 he promoted.

Although highly criticized by conservative whites, one of the functions of the Black Student Union back in the 60’s and 70’s was self protection. White conservatives didn’t like the idea that they couldn’t just round up a few of their neo-confederate buddies and beat the hell out of some black kid, without winding up in a donnybrook. The segregated California University system has apparently put that type of behavior back in play.

San Jose State students accused of tormenting black roommate are charged with hate crimes

First, his white roommates nicknamed him “Three-fifths,” referring to the way the government once counted blacks as just a fraction of a person. When he protested, they dubbed him “Fraction.”

Then they outfitted the four-bedroom dormitory suite they shared with a Confederate flag. They locked him in his room. They wrote the “N-word” on a dry-erase board in the living room. They fastened a bicycle lock around his neck and told him they lost the keys, then tried it again a few weeks later.

It may sound like something out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. But police reports indicate it happened last month in the Obama era to a black student at San Jose State University, a liberal campus boasting statues of Olympic athletes making a black power salute.

Late Wednesday, prosecutors filed misdemeanor hate-crime and battery charges against three of the student’s roommates over the alleged hazing, which has sparked anger in the community and on the diverse campus. The men are Logan Beaschler, 18, of Bakersfield; Joseph Bomgardner, 19, of Clovis; and Colin Warren, 18, of Woodacre (Marin County).

“This is outrageous,” said the Rev. Jethroe Moore II, president of the San Jose/Silicon Valley chapter of the NAACP. “This form of bullying cannot be tolerated.”

The students were not available for comment and it was unclear late Wednesday whether they had legal representation. They could face penalties ranging from probation to a year in jail if convicted, as well as university discipline.

University spokeswoman Pat Lopes Harris said the incident is still under investigation, and no decision has been made yet on whether the students will be sanctioned.

The alleged harassment began in late August when the freshman and seven other young white men — all assigned to live together — moved into the four-bedroom, on-campus suite. Eight weeks later, in mid-October, the freshman’s parents noticed a Confederate flag draped over a cardboard cutout of Elvis in the living room of the suite and a dry-erase board with the “N-word” scrawled on it, and reported it via housing officials to campus police. Two of the young men were immediately transferred to a different dorm.

But at least two residential assistants were aware before then that one of the roommates had tacked a Confederate flag to a bedroom window. They asked the young men to take it down “so it could not be seen by the general public,” but did not investigate any further, according to university police reports and campus-housing department memos.

The freshman, now 18, said in a brief telephone interview that he’s never experienced this kind of mistreatment, even though he was one of only a few black students at his high school in Santa Cruz. This newspaper is not naming him at his parents’ request because of the ongoing campus investigation.

“I’m still in shock,” he said, noting he tried not to spend much time in the suite and didn’t report the situation to campus police in hopes the conduct would stop. “I tried not to dwell on this. But my family is upset and I’m upset.”

He told university police he always locked his door at night because he was scared of most of the other students living in the four-bedroom suite. He also didn’t feel safe studying in his own room and believes his grades weren’t as good as they could be as a result.

The young men acknowledged during police interviews that they incessantly harassed the then-17-year-old, according to the reports. But they downplayed the incidents as mere “pranks” and “jokes,” denying their actions were racist.

University police, however, recommended that District Attorney Jeff Rosen file the case as a hate crime.

Prosecutor Erin West emphatically agreed, saying, “The District Attorney’s Office has no tolerance for those who criminally prey on others because they are different.”

Police reports, separate documents prepared by housing officials and photographs document the freshman’s ordeal. The events allegedly occurred after everyone in the suite attended a two-day orientation session this past summer that included sensitivity training.

After the nicknames, there followed a series of coercive incidents, including barring the freshman’s bedroom door with furniture several times to prevent him from coming out.

The first time they wrestled him to the ground, they succeeded in getting the metal bike lock around his neck, the suspects themselves told police. The second time, he managed to evade them, but he told police he got slightly banged up in the process.

One time, they removed the doorknob from inside a closet, and knowing that the freshman was claustrophobic, tried to induce him via a series of post-it messages around the suite to step inside it. One note referred to the closet as “the enrichment center,” and included a homophobic slur and the insult, “Eat —- and die.”

Investigators also found Nazi symbols in the apartment, including a picture of Adolf Hitler, the “SS” lightning bolt symbol and a swastika. They also discovered pictures of pentagrams, apparently intended to alarm the freshman, who is Christian.

After the freshman’s father talked to the roommates and reported the matter, the freshman received what police characterized as a “sarcastic apology note,” signed only “The Residents.” The note mentions “the Beloved Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.” and urges the freshman to let bygones be bygones. It also contains a warning of sorts in the postscript: “The Residents have welcomed you, it is not advised to ignore the call of The Residents.”

Remember…”There is no racism in America!”

One can only wonder when Hannity will have the 4 boys on his show as the right’s new “victimized heroes”, and the local Tea Party will put out a national call for donations to the boy’s defense fund..

 

Matt Lewis and Michael Eric Dyson Battle It Out

Foo Fight!

Dyson may be right – But it was the wrong time and place to make the argument.

And Matt isn’t going to convince Dyson he is wrong, simply because a large portion of Dyson’s black audience of professionals and the highly educated have experienced exactly what he is talking about in their professional lives at some point. Way too much of what goes on in conservativeland mirrors that.

Dyson did get a bit carried away and rambled on. Obviously he wanted to get that issue off his chest. Perhaps both he, and Matt Lewis were the wrong people to have that “discussion on race”.

In any event, the decision today by Senate Leader Harry Reid to use the Nuclear Option in severely trimming back Republican efforts to stymie President Obam’s appointments is at least, in part a concession to to Dyson’s point. Now that that emotional dam is broken, I have a feeling Senate Democrats at least, are going to be handling the opposition quite differently. Whether this presages a new Democratic Leadership with backbone, I don’t know.

I do know that Democrats have realized that the compromises they made with Republicans in passing the Obamacare law were Trojan Horses, designed to make the law ineffective and fail. So there is more than a little anger over getting snookered again trying to be real legislators.

Been saying for a long time that it has been time for the Progressives to lead, and cut this compromise shit with the Rethuglys.  You can only compromise with someone who is honest, and has an honest goal. That is not what the country is dealing with on the Tea Shagged side of the aisle right now. Their goal is no less than the destruction of this Presidency, even if they have to destroy the country in the process.

 

 

 

75 Years Late…Scottsboro Boys Pardoned

This was one of the major (Mis)Trials of the last century. 9 black Boys accused of raping two white women in the segregated, Jim Crow, Alabama of 1931.Amazingly enough, despite high tensions – they didn’t get lynched. All but one of the boys was convicted and given the death penalty. None of the Boys was executed, but spent long terms in jail.

The Scottsboro Boys, with attorney Samuel Leibowitz, under guard by the state militia, 1932

   Alabama grants posthumous pardons to Scottsboro Boys

Alabama’s parole board voted Thursday to grant posthumous pardons to men known as the Scottsboro Boys from a 1931 rape case.

The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted full and unconditional pardons to three of the nine black boys who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in northeast Alabama in 1931.

The board unanimously approved the pardons for Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems and Andy Wright after a short hearing in Montgomery. The three men were the last of the accused to have convictions from the case on their records.

“This decision will give them a final peace in their graves, wherever they are,” said Sheila Washington, director of the Scottsboro Museum and Cultural Center in Scottsboro, who helped initiate the petition.

Patterson, Weems and Wright, along with defendant Clarence Norris, were convicted on rape charges in 1937, after a six-year ordeal that included three trials, the recantation of one of the accusers and two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions on legal representation and the racial make-up of jury pools.

The men were all convicted by all-white juries, and all but the youngest defendant was sentenced to death.

Alabama ultimately dropped rape charges against five of the accused. Norris received a pardon before his death from Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1976.

Last spring, the Alabama Legislature unanimously passed a law to allow the parole board to issue posthumous pardons for convictions at least 75 years old. The law was specifically designed to allow the pardon of the Scottsboro Boys to go forward.

In October, a group of scholars petitioned the Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant pardons to the men. The petition was endorsed by the judges and district attorneys of the counties where the initial trials took place.

“This is a different state than it was 80 years ago, and thank God for that,” said state Sen. Arthur Orr, a Republican from Decatur where the second and third round of trials took place. “It’s an important step for our state to take.”

Under Alabama law, pardons can only be granted to those who have felony convictions on their record. The petitioners had initially hoped the board would review the status of each of the defendants.

The Board’s decision led to a round of applause Thursday morning, but many of those who worked on the pardon called the news bittersweet. Patterson died of cancer in 1952, and many of the other defendants, including Weems and Wright, felt compelled to move out of Alabama and keep a low profile after their release from prison.

University of Alabama professor John Miller, who helped prepare the petition, said at the time of his pardon, Norris was living in New York under his brother’s name.

“With some of them, we really don’t know if they died with their right name, or a different name,” Washington said. “They no longer wanted to be known.”

Weems is known to have moved to the Atlanta area after his release, but his date of death is unknown. Washington said Wright, along with his brother Roy, another one of the Scottsboro Boys, is buried in Chattanooga, Tenn.

“It’s tragic in that those young men’s live were destroyed, all by a very biased and unfair judicial process,” Orr said. “The place where you seek justice did not dispense justice for these young men. It ruined their lives, some more than others, and it affected them to their graves.”

 

Nuke ‘Em, Harry!

Harry Reid has had enough…

So have virtually all Democrats in the Senate.

Let’s hope at least 51 Democrats have the cajones to hang on – and not go Yellowback Donkey.

Reactionary Rethugs have derailed and objected to virtually every President Obama appointee, abusing rules which were put there to protect the Minority Party Vote in the Senate…Not as a tool to bring the entire legislative process to it’s knees as a policy.

Senate poised to limit filibusters in party-line vote that would alter centuries of precedent

The Senate on Thursday opened a contentious debate about striking down the long-standing filibuster rules for most presidential nominations, with Democrats appearing poised to do so on a party-line vote that would alter nearly 225 years of precedent.

Infuriated by what they see as a pattern of obstruction and delay over President Obama’s nominees, Democrats tried to trigger the so-called “nuclear option” by bringing up one of the judicial nominees whom Republicans recently blocked by a filibuster.

“It’s manifest we have to do something to change things,” Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in remarks on the Senate floor to open the debate. Reid argued that the Senate has wasted way too much time on things that should be relatively routine — like approving judges and executive-branch nominees.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) responded by accusing Democratsof a power grab and suggesting that they will regret their decision if Republicans regain control of the chamber.

“We’re not interested in having a gun put to our head any longer,” McConnell said. “Some of us have been around here long enough to know that the shoe is sometimes on the other foot.”

McConnell then addressed Democrats directly, saying: “You may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” he said.

Shortly after 11 a.m., the senators began voting on a motion to reconsider the nomination of Patricia Millet to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That vote could set in motion a complicated parliamentary process that would end with a simple-majority vote to set a new rule, allowing for swift confirmation of executive branch nominees and most selections for the federal judiciary without having to clear a 60-vote hurdle.

If Democrats go through with the threat, it will pave the way for confirmation of several nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit who have recently been stymied by GOP filibusters, amid Republican assertions that the critical appellate court simply did not need any more judges…