Posted by Elaine Magliaro
Here’s a spectacular “Frozen” lighting display for Christmas:
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On the Subject of Chokeholds and the NYPD: The Story of Anthony Ramon Baez, a Bronx Man Who Died in Police Custody in 1994
Bill Bratton
NYPD Commissioner
By Elaine Magliaro
On December 20, 1994, The New York Times reported the death of a twenty-nine-year-old Bronx man named Anthony Ramon Baez. The article’s headline read: “Clash Over a Football Ends With a Death in Police Custody.” Clifford Krauss, the author of the article, said that the tragic story began “with an errant football hitting a police patrol car early on the morning of Dec. 22…” Krauss reported that police claimed Baez had died of an asthma attack while he was being arrested for disorderly conduct. The dead man’s family, however, “accused the police of choking him to death.” Krauss said that “the Medical Examiner’s office indicated that the cause of death was probably asphyxiation.”
I should note that Baez had never been in trouble with the law.
Last August, Jim Dwyer wrote an article for The New York Times titled Two Fatal Police Encounters, but Just One Video in which he described a photograph of Baez that was shown in court.
Dwyer:
In a photograph shown in court, the lids of the dead man’s left eye were held open by fingers in a yellow glove. Around the white of his eye was a bright red ring left by tiny blood vessels that had burst as he was dying.
His tongue was swollen; there was hemorrhaging in his windpipe; his neck had bruises on the left and right sides.
Posted in Politics, Society, Uncategorized, United States
Tagged Anthony Ramon Baez, Bill Bratton, Chokeholds, Eric Garner, Law Enforcement, New York City, NYPD, police
12 Comments
73 Years Ago Today: Memories of my cousin, Jimmy Gates
By: Chuck Stanley
Hickam Field barracks burning. The American flag is ripped and tattered, but still flying. That same flag flew over the White House on 14 Aug. 1945 when the Empire of Japan accepted surrender terms.
I remember where I was and what I was doing shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon on December 7, 1941. My dad called me in to where he and a couple of his friends were sitting by the huge Stromberg Carlson 350R console radio, its front doors swung open. They were leaning forward, hanging onto every word coming out of the polished walnut cabinet. The breathless announcer was talking so fast he sometimes stumbled over his words. The usual calm and soothing baritone of a professional radio news reporter was replaced by an almost panicked staccato, an octave higher than his voice would have sounded normally. One phrase has stayed stuck in my mind’s ear all these years, “They stabbed our boys in the back!”
At first I thought they were talking about Japanese soldiers bayoneting our soldiers and sailors in the back, as I had seen them do in the newsreels of the massacre of Nanking. Even as a kid, I knew war was on the horizon. Six weeks earlier, a Nazi U-boat had sunk the destroyer USS Reuben James as it escorted a convoy of cargo ships carrying food and supplies to England.
Everyone thought that when war did come, it would come from Europe. No one but a few farsighted tacticians like General Billy Mitchell were looking west, and even predicting that an attack would come by air. Mitchell was Court Martialed for his outspoken military and political heresy. When Americans were killed in what was to be the first military engagement of WW-2 with the sinking of the Reuben James, President Roosevelt held back committing troops and sailors to combat despite the provocation. Hitler was counting on that kind of restraint, or he would not have been so bold as to sink an American warship. He knew the US was not prepared to fight a war, since American troop levels had been drawn down to very low numbers, and much of the equipment was either obsolete or obsolescent. The country was recovering from the Great Depression, and needed time to re-arm.
Admiral Yamamoto took Roosevelt’s options away from him that Sunday morning. Hitler was said to be furious with his Japanese allies.
Which brings us to the story of my cousin Jimmy.
Zaid Jilani on the Role That Liberals Have Played in Our Growing Police State
Former President Bill Clinton
By Elaine Magliaro
I just came across an interesting article titled Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Democrats’ shameful complicity in our police state over at Salon. The article, written by Zaid Jilani, originally appeared on AlterNet. It talks about the role that liberals have played in the growing police state in this country. Jilani said that the recent past “tells us that the Democratic Party in the past three decades has abandoned concerns for civil liberties and civil rights in the pursuit of appearing to be just as tough on crime as their Republican counterparts.” Jilani said that it’s a story “that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Talks with George Stephanopolous about the Need for Change in Police-Community Relations, the Decision of the Staten Island Grand Jury in the Death of Eric Garner, and Rudy Giuliani on “This Week” (VIDEO)
Bill de Blasio
Mayor of New York City
By Elaine Magliaro
Earlier today, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio talked with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s This Week. During his appearance on the show, Mayor de Blasio declined to say whether he agreed with the decision of a Staten Island grand jury not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Panteleo in the choking death of Eric Garner. He said that he respected the judicial process–but added that “the death of Mr. Garner and other similar incidents in Ferguson, Mo., and Cleveland, Ohio, underscored the need for a broader national conversation about the actions of law enforcement officials and their interactions with minorities.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates Speaks about Fatalism Not Being an Option in the Battle Against Racism on “All In” with Chris Hayes
Ta-Nehisi Coates
National Correspondent for The Atlantic
By Elaine Magliaro
On Wednesday night, Ta-Nehisi Coates, national correspondent at The Atlantic, and former RNC chair Michael Steele appeared on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes. Both guests shared their reactions to the decision of the Staten Island grand jury not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.
During the discussion, Coates told Hayes, “We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism…But the racism doesn’t actually come from the criminal justice system. It doesn’t come from the police. The police are pretty much doing what the society that they originate from want them to do.”
Luscious Libations: Recipe for a Sidecar Cocktail
By Elaine Magliaro
This sidecar cocktail recipe is for my cyber-buddy Blouise. It’s a great drink to serve during the holiday season.
INGREDIENTS
- 4 ounces Cognac
- 3 ounces Grand Marnier
- 3 ounces freshly squeezed lemon juice, strained
- 1 ounce freshly squeezed orange juice
- 1/2 ounce simple syrup
Posted in Edible Flowers, Libations, Recipes
Tagged Cocktail Recipes, Cocktails, Libations
2 Comments
I, Too, Am America: The Poetry of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
By Elaine Magliaro
Back in August of 2013, I put together a post about the poetry of Langston Hughes for Res Ipsa Loquitor. My reason for doing so was because we had had some interesting—and at times contentious—discussions about race, racism, and bigotry in this country at that blog. We had talked about Paula Deen, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, a rodeo clown impersonating President Obama, voter suppression and Jim Crow laws. Those discussions brought to mind the poetry of Hughes–a great American writer. I believe his poetry makes powerful statements about the Black experience in “the land of the free.”
NOTE: I also posted these poems at Flowers for Socrates a few months ago. Still, I decided to post them once more. I often return to my favorite poems time and again when I feel the need. Poetry speaks to me in a way that most prose does not.
Here is an excerpt from Hughes’s poem Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too?
So this is what I want to know:
When we see Victory’s glow,
Will you still let old Jim Crow
Hold me back?
When all those foreign folks who’ve waited—
Italians, Chinese, Danes—are liberated.
Will I still be ill-fated
Because I’m black?
Here in my own, my native land,
Will the Jim Crow laws still stand?
Will Dixie lynch me still
When I return?
Or will you comrades in arms
From the factories and the farms,
Have learned what this war
Was fought for us to learn?
When I take off my uniform,
Will I be safe from harm—
Or will you do me
As the Germans did the Jews?
When I’ve helped this world to save,
Shall I still be color’s slave?
Or will Victory change
Your antiquated views?
Click here to read the rest of the poem.
Posted in Art, Poetry
4 Comments
Does Senator Tom Harkin Want To Take Money From College Students “To Pay Reviled Loan Contractors?”
Senator Tom Harkin
D-Iowa
By Elaine Magliaro
This just in…
Shahien Nasiripour (Huffington Post) reported this morning that outgoing Democratic Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa “wants to take federal money from low-income college students to pay student loan contractors, whose tactics toward borrowers have been criticized by consumer advocates, federal regulators and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.”
According to Nasiripour, Harkin, who is chairman of the Senate education committee and the appropriations subcommittee in charge of federal education expenditures, “has proposed taking $303 million from the Pell grant program to increase revenues for some of the nation’s biggest student loan specialists, according to a July 24 version of a 2015 fiscal year spending bill now being negotiated by congressional leaders.” Nasiripour said that student advocates and congressional aides “largely missed Harkin’s move last summer — partly because the full text of the spending bill wasn’t publicly released until six weeks after Harkin’s subcommittee approved it.” He added that it was only noticed “in recent days as congressional negotiators work off his bill in the rush to finalize discussions on the federal government’s 2015 spending plans.”
Posted in Government, Politics, Society, United States
11 Comments
Should Public Employees Know the Details of the Investments Being Made with Their Retirement Savings?
By Elaine Magliaro
In an article published earlier this week in In These Times, journalist/author David Sirota wrote that Kentucky has a message for public school teachers in the state: “You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings.” Sirota said that was basically “the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system’s money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees.”
Sirota:
The denial was the latest case of public officials blocking the release of information about how billions of dollars of public employees’ retirement nest eggs are being invested. Though some of the fine print of the investments has occasionally leaked, the agreements are tightly held in most states and cities. Critics say such secrecy prevents lawmakers and the public from evaluating the propriety of the increasing fees being paid to private financial firms for pension management services.
Posted in Government, United States
Tagged Gina Raimodo, Illinois, Kentucky, Public Pensions, Rhode Island, Wall Street
11 Comments
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