New Jersey Cops Watch While Police Dog Mauls Man Who Later Dies While in Custody (VIDEOS)

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

VinelandPoliceLogoBy Elaine Magliaro

Last week, James Joiner wrote in a Daily Beast article that “Policing in this country really seems to be going to the dogs” after seeing a video that  appeared to show Vineland “police allowing a K9 dog to tear into the face of what looks to be an unarmed black man while he is curled up on the ground.” The man who was mauled by the police dog was identified as 32-year-old Phillip White. White died while he was in police custody.

Joiner:

The police were responding to a report of a disorderly person, who was “screaming and yelling,” according to a local television station with access to the police radio transmissions of the incident. Multiple officers arrived on the scene and requested backup, yelling as they allege White reaches for one of their weapons. Moments later, one of them reports, “Slow units down. Subject under apprehension. Tried disarming me.”

According to a statement from Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae, “White was handcuffed and restrained… White was placed in an emergency vehicle to be transported to the hospital. At some point during transport White became unresponsive.”

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Posted in Law Enforcement, Media, New Jersey, United States | Tagged , | 4 Comments

The State of South Carolina Files Amicus Brief with SCOTUS…Claims It Is Legal to Discriminate Against Women–So Why Not Against Gays?

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

Seal_of_South_Carolina.svgBy Elaine Magliaro

Mark Joseph Stern posted an interesting article titled South Carolina to SCOTUS: We Can Discriminate Against Women, So Why Not Gays? over at Slate on Thursday. In his piece, Stern said that a major problem with the theory of originalism “is that the men who wrote our constitution had some pretty barbaric views about humanity.” He pointed out that James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, owned hundreds of slaves. Stern said, “The same Congress that passed the 14th Amendment segregated schools and opposed women’s suffrage.” He added that under “originalist theory, almost every landmark equality case, including Brown v. Board of Education, is almost certainly wrong. Few originalists, however, have the courage to admit that their theory would lead to an appallingly unequal and unjust America.” Stern said the state of South Carolina “is the glittering exception to this cowardice.”

Alan Wilson Attorney General of South Carolina

Alan Wilson
Attorney General of South Carolina

South Carolina is evidently so intent upon continuing to ban gays and lesbians from marrying that it has “filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court” in the hopes that the state will “continue to be able to do so.” In the amicus brief, the state makes an “‘originalist’ argument that if the Constitution is read just as its drafters understood it, gays can be discriminated against because women can be discriminated against.”

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Posted in Christianity, Civil Liberties, Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Courts, Democracy, Equal Rights, Free Speech, Government, Homosexual Rights, Jurisprudence, Justice, Politics, Religion, SCOTUS, Society, States, United States | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

“Woodchucks” and Three More Poems by Maxine Kumin for National Poetry Month (VIDEO)

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

NationalPoetryMonthLogo

Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin

By Elaine Magliaro

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) served as the United States poet laureate from 1981 to 1982. From 1989 to 1994, she was the poet laureate of New Hampshire. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Kumin was also a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She taught at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including MIT, Princeton, and Columbia.

Margaret Fox (New York Times) described Kumin’s poetry as spare–with deceptively simple lines that “explored some of the most complex aspects of human existence — birth and death, evanescence and renewal, and the events large and small conjoining them all…”

The Poetry Foundation:

Despite traveling away from home to lecture at schools and universities around the United States, Kumin retained close ties with her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire; in an interview with Joan Norris published in Crazy Horse, the poet disclosed, “Practically all of [my poems] have come out of this geography and this state of mind.”

For the second Saturday of National Poetry Month, I’m posting an excerpt from Kumin’s poem Woodchucks.

WOODCHUCKS
By Maxine Kumin

Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck’s face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Click here to read the rest of the poem.

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Posted in Art, Literature, Poetry, Short Video | Tagged | Comments Off on “Woodchucks” and Three More Poems by Maxine Kumin for National Poetry Month (VIDEO)

Religious Freedom Laws: Digging a Little Deeper

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

640px-Bishops_Bible_Elizabeth_I_1569By Elaine Magliaro

Religious Freedom Restoration Act: Indiana

Discriminatory state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts appear to be all the rage in some parts of this country. Unlike the RFRA legislation passed previously in other states, the recent passage of Indiana’s RFRA was met with harsh criticism. Garrett Epps (The Atlantic) said that there was “a factual dispute about the new Indiana law.” The Indiana law has had its defenders–including The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post–who reported that the state’s RFRA was basically no different from the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was passed in 1993. Epps said, however, that it becomes clear when you read and compare the tedious state statutes that “you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not.” He said that the Indiana law explicitly allowed “any for-profit business to assert a right to ‘the free exercise of religion.’”  Epps added, “The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s…”

Epps:

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.”…Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage.

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”

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Posted in Christianity, Civil Liberties, Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Democracy, Equal Rights, Fundamentalism, Government, Homosexual Rights, Jurisprudence, Justice, Labor Movement, Political Science, Politics, Religion, Reproductive Rights, Roman Catholic Church, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Poetry Friday: Aviation Poems

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Chuck Stanley

by Chuck Stanley

Chuck's Office

Chuck’s Office

Aviation has a history of poets, some great, some not so much. Poems about flying go back into history, but out of World War One, “The War to End All Wars,” truly great poems began to emerge. Some, such as “The Poor Aviator Lay Dying,” came from mess halls and ready rooms. In those places, a mixture of fear and grief was dealt with through verse and song. The verses below appeared on both sides of the lines, in different languages. The same poem was adapted to other services, such as navy, submarine service, and merchant marine. It reappeared during World War Two, with verses adapted to the times and machines. I believe the version below is the original one, probably first sung in 1914 around a tinkly piano in some unknown British or French aerodrome.

This is sometimes titled, “The Bold Aviator Lay Dying.” Obviously, the original author is unknown.

A POOR AVIATOR LAY DYING
Sung to the tune: “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”

A poor aviator lay dying
At the end of a bright summer’s day
His comrades had gathered about him
To carry his fragments away

The airplane was piled on his wishbone
His Hotchkiss was wrapped round his head
He wore a spark-plug on each elbow
‘Twas plain he would shortly be dead

He spit out a valve and a gasket
And stirred in the sump where he lay
And then to his wondering comrades
These brave parting words he did say

“Take the magneto out of my stomach,
And the butterfly valve off my neck,
Extract from my liver the crankshaft,
There are lots of good parts in this wreck”

“Take the manifold out of my larynx,
And the cylinders out of my brain,
Take the piston rods out of my kidneys,
And assemble the engine again.”

More verses were added by unknown authors, but many of the added verses detract from the original song.

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Posted in American History, Art, Poetry, United Kingdom, War, World History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Few Thoughts about Religion in America

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

Posted by Elaine Magliaro

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The biggest threat towards America today is not Communism, it is moving America towards a fascist theocracy . . . . When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost towards Attila the Hun . . . .

~ Frank Zappa, 1986

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Posted in Christianity, Conservatives, Equal Rights, Fundamentalism, Politics, Religion, United States | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

Zaid Jilani: “How Religious ‘Liberty’ Has Been Used to Justify Racism, Sexism and Slavery Throughout History”

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

SlavePicBy Elaine Magliaro

Zaid Jilani has an interesting article titled How Religious ‘Liberty’ Has Been Used to Justify Racism, Sexism and Slavery Throughout History over at AlterNet. Jilani says that religion has been used for hundreds of years to deny people their rights. He thinks that using religion in this way has hurt both the church and the state.

Jilani opens his article by writing about the “enormous backlash” there has been to “Indiana’s decision to enact a law that would allow businesses to discriminate if they invoke religious liberty.” He noted that Governor Pence responded “to a flurry of boycott threats” by signing a “fix” to the original bill.

Jilani said that battle lines have already been drawn for the religious right—and that 2016 Republican presidential “contenders like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson and others…all rushed to defend Indiana’s legislation, as a number of state legislatures continue to debate enacting similar measures.” He pointed out that in the state of Louisiana, a Republican lawmaker is “introducing a narrower bill specifically taking aim at marriage, with the intent to allow businesses to discriminate against same-sex weddings and deny benefits to employees in same-sex marriages.”

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Posted in American History, Christianity, Civil Liberties, Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Democracy, Equal Rights, Government, History, Homosexual Rights, Justice, Louisiana, Political Science, Politics, Racism, Religion, Society, States, United States | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Et Tu, Wisconsin?: Following in the Footsteps of Florida, the Badger State’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands Bans Discussion of Climate Change for State Agency

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

WisconsinSealBy Elaine Magliaro

Eric Roston (Bloomberg) reported earlier today that discussing the subject of climate change is now “out of bounds for workers at a state agency in Wisconsin.” Roston said that “any work related to climate change—even responding to e-mails about the topic” is verboten.

Roston:

A vote on Tuesday by Wisconsin’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, a three-member panel overseeing an agency that benefits schools and communities in the state, enacted the staff ban on climate change. “It’s not a part of our sole mission, which is to make money for our beneficiaries,” said State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk, a Republican who sits on the board. “That’s what I want our employees working on. That’s it. Managing our trust funds.”

Adamczyk raised his concern at a public meeting on Tuesday that the board’s executive director, Tia Nelson, had spent on-the-job time working on global warming. Nelson did indeed work on climate change a bit in 2007 and ’08—at the request of the governor. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle, who stepped down in 2011, appointed Nelson as co-chair of a global warming task force (PDF). “It honestly never occurred to me that being asked by a sitting governor to serve on a citizen task force would be objectionable,” she said.

Roston said that the measure would only affect “a small number of Wisconsin state workers…” He noted, however, that it “follows an alleged effort by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to stop employees from using the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ in official communications.”

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Posted in Climate Change Deniers, Climatology, Conservatives, Denialism, Government, Government Propaganda, Political Science, Politics, Propaganda, States, United States | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

WTF: Department of Justice Defies Congress and Claims It Can Prosecute Medical Marijuana Cases…at a Time When a Government-Funded Group Admits New Research Shows That Cannabinoids May Be Helpful in Treating a Deadly Form of Brain Cancer

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

US-DeptOfJustice-Seal.svgBy Elaine Magliaro

Timothy Phelps (Los Angeles Times) reported last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) claims that it can prosecute medical marijuana cases despite the fact that Congress passed a bipartisan amendment last year which prohibited the DOJ from spending money to undermine state medical marijuana laws. Phelps said that “Congress added an amendment to a spending bill ordering the Justice Department not to interfere with states that allow the sale of medical marijuana from implementing their laws” in December.

Phelps:

Patrick Rodenbush, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said in a statement Wednesday that it did not not believe the amendment applies to cases against individuals or organizations.

Rather, he said, it stops the department from “impeding the ability of states to carry out their medical marijuana laws,” contrary to some claims from people being prosecuted that the amendment blocks such prosecutions.

Phelps added that the narrow interpretation of the law was “of particular interest in the Bay Area, where the Justice Department has initiated forfeiture proceedings against three medical marijuana dispensaries it considers to be in violation of federal law.” Henry Wykowski, a lawyer for the medical marijuana dispensaries, was quoted as saying, “I think that the amendment is vague and it hasn’t been interpreted by any court yet. But the language can be read more broadly to encompass such prosecutions.”

Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance said that the DOJ “continues to target people who are complying with their state medical marijuana law.” He added, “This insubordination is occurring despite the fact that members of Congress in both parties were clear that their intent with the amendment was to protect medical marijuana patients and providers from federal prosecution and forfeiture.”

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Posted in Biology, Constitutional Law, Courts, Crime, DOJ, Government, Health Care, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law Enforcement, Pharmaceuticals, Politics, United States, War on Drugs | Tagged | 6 Comments

Gun Owner Accidentally Shoots Himself While Attending Easter Vigil Mass in Altoona, Pennsylvania

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Elaine Magliaro

cathedral2 - CopyBy Elaine Magliaro

Courtney Fischer of WTAE reported that a gun accidentally went off about 11 p.m. on Saturday during an Easter Vigil Mass at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Altoona police said that the gun owner was grazed by the bullet when the weapon snagged on his pants.

Jason Wagler was attending the Mass with his fiancée when he heard the gunshot. Wagler said, “We were standing for a few minutes and just before the final procession started, the gunshot went off.” He added that no one seemed to know what happened at first. Then he saw smoke. According to Fischer, Wagler took a number of photos with his phone shortly after the incident happened.

A “critical piece of the handgun” reportedly got caught on the gun owner’s pants as he stood up. Christy Heck, an Altoona police officer, said that the gun’s safety “apparently was not engaged. The man who accidentally fired his gun reportedly had a permit to carry it.

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Posted in Religion, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , , , , | 33 Comments