“Look out! The 7th Graders have mined the kickball field!”

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Gene Howington

300px-FPCougarsubmitted by Gene Howington

In what can only be categorized as one of the dumbest ideas ever, school police in San Diego have acquired their very own MRAP vehicle.  That’s Mine Resistant Ambush Protected for all you civilians out there. Captain Joe Florentino told the local press “I can totally see people thinking ‘Oh, my God. Are they going to be rolling armoured vehicles into our schools and what the hell’s going on?'”  Ya reckon?  Capt. Florentino was later given the Meritorious Service Award for Mastery of the Obvious. The MRAP was “free” – just like all the military gear recently on display against the citizens of Ferguson, MO – but the maintenance, modifications and upkeep are not.  A wise choice for a school district with budgetary problems and 10 patrol cars in disrepair. Read the full story at The Guardian.

Posted in Law Enforcement, Local Government, United States | Tagged | 20 Comments

“Don’t You Dare Kick That Dog!” — In Defense Of Officer Wilson

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Bob Stone

By BOB STONE

For the cop who paid it forward back in the summer of 1977 by taking the time to track down a 10 year-old boy’s brand-new Ross Apollo 3 speed that was stolen. I’ll never forget how he convinced me that the kids who stole it and raised the seat and stripped off a lot of the paint before leaving it in the woods somehow made it ‘faster.’ I thought it was the coolest bike in the world after that.

And for my friends in college who went on to become cops.

Let me begin by saying that in my own personal mythology I consider all cops and members of the military as my dogs. For anyone that has ever experienced the unconditional love of a dog the metaphor is quite obvious. After all, I do feed the dogs. Sorry, I meant to say “I pay their salary.” And it’s their job to love me unconditionally, or “serve and protect me” — during weekends, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, graveyard shifts, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and other natural disasters, and to otherwise risk their lives — just to make me feel cozy.  Considering all cops and members of the military as my dogs is the highest form of compliment I can pay them. No offense to Cesar Millan, but no room or piece of furniture is off limits to my dogs.  They’re family and as family they are my equals. Accordingly, unlike those who take the dogs for granted—e.g., only claiming ownership when arrested (“I pay your salary….”)—as my dogs protect me I know it’s my job, when necessary, to have my dogs’ backs.

I suppose that’s the best explanation I have for this protective streak I feel for one dog in particular; Officer Darren Wilson. There’s a mob that’s set on kicking my dog; and if possible putting him down. The mob says my dog attacked and killed an unarmed man without justification. They have him traumatized, fearing for his life and genuinely terrified that they’ll convince a grand jury to offer him up as some sort of sacrifice. So I tell the mob that if my dog attacked and killed a man without legal justification, then my dog should be held accountable. But if it turns out that my dog attacked and killed because he was justified in doing so—i.e., he did what he was trained to do—then you’ll have to pack up your torches and pitchforks and apologize to my dog.

And so the mob presents its “case.” And they tell me how important it is that we have a serious discussion about the lingering problems of Jim Crow, racism and class warfare in America. And they talk about right wing voter registration schemes and the systematic imprisonment and disenfranchising of casual black drug users. And they continue with the problems of militarizing the police and whether the authors of The Posse Comitatus Act would have approved of militarizing county sheriff and police departments….

“Important topics; but what does any of this have to do with my dog?” I ask.

Continue reading →

Posted in Crime, Dogs, DOJ, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Evidence Law, Government Propaganda, Jurisprudence, Law Enforcement, Legal Analysis, Legal Theory, Logic, Murder, Mythology, Nazis/Nazism, Neoconservatives, Propaganda, Trolls, Ukraine | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 536 Comments

Exclusive CNN Video Captures Witnesses’ Disbelief to the Shooting Death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Michael Brown

Michael Brown

By ELAINE MAGLIARO

Yesterday, CNN aired an exclusive cell phone video that was recorded several minutes after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The video captured the reactions of two contractors to the shooting of Michael Brown. The video provides new insight into what actually happened on the day that police officer Darren Wilson killed the unarmed teenager. Randi Kaye of CNN said the two men, who were doing construction work in Ferguson, were shocked at what they witnessed. The contractors said the teenager had his hands up in the air when he was gunned down by Wilson.

The two men were reportedly “about 50 feet away from Officer Darren Wilson when he opened fire.” On the video, one of the men can be heard saying, “He had his f**n hands up.”

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Posted in Law Enforcement, Local Government, Media, Missouri, Racism, United States | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

News Roundup: September 7, 2014

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

NewsHeadline

 

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

Sometimes I come across a number of news stories that I’d like to write posts about—but, unfortunately, I lack the time to do in-depth articles about most of them. Here are links to some news reports that caught my attention recently. I thought readers of this blog might find some of them interesting reading.

SALON

Finally, Wall Street gets put on trial: We can still hold the 0.1 percent responsible for tanking the economy
Too Big To Fail bailouts let them get away with it. The amazing result of California fraud trial could change that (9/7/2014)

Excerpt:
As it happens, a trial just ended in Sacramento in which a jury was convinced that “executives intended to make fraudulent loans.” Here’s the thing, though: It wasn’t the government that made the case against the financiers; it was the defendants.

The case started as a routine mortgage-fraud prosecution, brought by none other than the aforementioned U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner. A group of eastern European immigrants had bought houses in California in 2006, in a real-estate market that was in the early stages of collapse. According to the indictment, filed in 2012, these people’s mortgage applications contained blank spots and wrong information; they were accused of getting the mortgages in order to sell the houses to one another at pumped-up prices in what is called a “straw buyer” scheme. Also, they defaulted on the loans.

However, members of the immigrants’ legal defense team—several of them appointed by the state—had read the newspapers over the years and were aware of the kinds of things that had gone on in real estate during the bubble. They knew, for example, that in the go-go days of the last decade, the mortgage origination industry routinely cranked out “stated income” loans—also known as “liar’s loans”—to people who were obviously unable to make the payments. The bankers back then almost never checked on whether the borrower was telling the truth about their income; they just wanted to make the loan. So the defense team in Sacramento came up with a novel strategy: How can the borrower have committed fraud on a mortgage application if the lender didn’t care whether their answers were truthful?

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Posted in News Roundup | Tagged | 9 Comments

Smear Merchants and Bias in News Reporting: Regarding Michael Brown, Darren Wilson, Race, Right-Wing Blogs, and the Mainstream Media

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
Michael Brown

Michael Brown

By ELAINE MAGLIARO

Bias in the Mainstream News Media?

On August 14th—five days after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—Nick Wing published an article on Huffington Post titled When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims. Wing said that after news of the unarmed teenager’s death broke, “media-watchers carefully followed the narratives that news outlets began crafting about the teenager and the incident that claimed his life.”

Wing:

Wary of the controversy surrounding the media’s depiction of Trayvon Martin…people on Twitter wondered, “If they gunned me down, which picture would they use?” Using the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, users posted side-by-side photos, demonstrating the power that news outlets wield in portraying victims based on images they select.

Wing said that on the previous Monday “Twitter user LordSWVP tweeted out a photo driving home another point: Media treatment of black victims is often harsher than it is of whites suspected of crimes, including murder.”

Here is one of the examples that Wing provided:

Headline of story about a white crime suspect: Theater Shooting Suspect Was Brilliant Student

Headline of story about Michael Brown: Police: Michael Brown Struggled with Officer before Shooting

Wing noted that such treatment of black crime victims and white crime suspects may not be “standard media protocol”—but added that it “happens frequently, deliberately or not.” He said that media news reports “often headline claims from police or other officials that appear unsympathetic or dismissive of black victims.” He added that sometimes news headlines even appear to imply that black victims “are to blame for their own deaths, engaging in what critics sometimes allege is a form of character assassination.”

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Posted in Conservatives, Crime, Law Enforcement, Murder, Propaganda, Racism, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , , | 40 Comments

Poetry Friday – Hamish Imlach: Folk singer and musician, raconteur, poet, activist, storyteller and much larger than life

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Chuck Stanley

By Charlton Stanley

In Scotland, they call it Hogmanay. To most of the rest of the world, it is New Years. The giganticHamish Imlach man quietly slipped away during the wee hours of Hogmanay morning 1996, at the age of 55. He was born in India, but always insisted he was conceived in Scotland.

A giant of a man at 20 stone, described as “gargantuan” in his obituary, he had an appetite for life, strong drink, music and anti-nuclear activism that fit his great size. His accomplishments are many although few outside Scotland have ever heard of him. He always said that when he died, he wanted, “Everyone to be knackered.” Hogmanay morning in Scotland? The last item on his bucket list was checked off.

This is not going to be a reprise of his obituary. You can read that at this link.

No, the best way to meet Hamish is through his songs. More over the fold:

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Posted in History, Humor, Literature, Music, Poetry, Scotland, World War II | Tagged | 8 Comments

After the Supreme Court Ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway Ruling: It Appears Atheists, Agnostics, and Some Faiths May Be “Getting the Shaft” with the Town’s New Prayer Policy

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

praying_hands1By ELAINE MAGLIARO

On May 5, 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in the Town of Greece v. Galloway case “that local governments can, under certain conditions, open their meetings with prayers—even if those supplications to the deity are Christian most of the time.” Rob Boston of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State said that his organization “litigated this case…on behalf of two women who opposed the ‘majority-rules’ prayer practice in Greece, N.Y.” Boston noted at the time of the ruling that Americans United was strongly opposed to the court’s decision. He also noted that the decision “was marked by a familiar 5-4 split.” Sahil Kapur (Talking Points Memo) said that in its 5-4 ruling “along ideological lines, the Court ruled against the Jewish and atheist plaintiffs, who argued that the practice violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.”

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Kagan said, “In arranging for clergy members to open each meeting, the Town never sought (except briefly when this suit was filed) to involve, accommodate, or in any way reach out to adherents of non-Christian religions. So month in and month out for over a decade, prayers steeped in only one faith, addressed toward members of the public, commenced meetings to discuss local affairs and distribute government benefits. In my view, that practice does not square with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share in her government.”

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Posted in Conservatives, Constitutional Law, Courts, Jurisprudence, Local Government, Politics, Religion, SCOTUS, United States | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Second Life

Posted on August 29, 2014 by James Knauer

By JAMES KNAUER

This is the second of a three-part series dealing with life, its constituency, and some prophesy regarding its future here on Earth. You can read part one here.

DNATreeI am related to a plant pathologist, Dr. Skinner, a geneticist who specializes in grasses. As he precedes me by ten years, my role has ever been his student, and when he began his career, our discussions were of Mendel’s Laws, regressive traits, and these new devices that were handy for analysis and had come down in price so that many more of them could be employed: mass spectrometers. These were used to identify base pairs for later genetic sequencing. We postulated that computers would do more of the heavy lifting, and wondered aloud if something as complex as a single cell could even be represented digitally.

Then came the Human Genome Project. Our language then was of genes and RNA and enzymes. And though much work had been done sequencing the genomes of creatures less complex than mammals, it remained a mystery how such splendid coordination among life’s various traits of movement, balance, shape and hue could possibly arise. There were predictions that as many as 100,000 genes could be involved, with most of that under the general heading of regulation. When the Human Genome Project concluded, and the tape read out, only 21,000 protein-encoding genes were found, barely one thousand more than the humble roundworm. Worse – and you knew trouble was coming from the phraseology – most of what was found was labeled junk.

It was a most untidy result.

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Posted in Anthropology, Biology, Courts, Evolution, Government, Health Care, Jurisprudence, Legal Theory, NASA, Science, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 105 Comments

POETRY FRIDAY–“I, Too, Am America”: The Poetry of Langston Hughes

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro

PoetryFridayButton

Langston Hughes 1936

Langston Hughes
1936

Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

Back in August of 2013, I did a post about the poetry of Langston Hughes for Res Ipsa Loquitor. The impetus for my doing that was the—at times contentious—discussions we had been having about race, racism, and bigotry in this country on 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 Langston Hughes.  I believe the poems of this great American writer make powerful statements about the Black experience in “the land of the free.”

Here is a comment that someone left at my Langston Hughes post:

Well, I don’t think Old Langston needs to worry much about “Dixie” lynching him. It’s a lot more likely he will get mugged and killed on his way home from a poetry reading by another little Trayvon. And, I bet Old Langston could have figured out how to register and vote all by himself, even if it required a Voter ID, and it wouldn’t have taken a whole village of crying Democrats to carry to him to the polls.

I think we have a long way to go before our country becomes “post racial” America.

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?

  Continue reading →

Posted in American History, Equal Rights, Literature, Poetry, Racism, Short Video, Society, United States | Tagged , | 11 Comments

The Killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and John Crawford III: It’s Not about Race…It’s Never about Race!

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Elaine Magliaro
John Crawford III

John Crawford III

By Elaine Magliaro

Back in March of 2012, Charles Pierce wrote a post for his Esquire Politics Blog about the death of Trayvon Martin and the people who came out in support of his killer, George Zimmerman. In his piece titled The ‘Color-Blind’ Delusions of the Trayvon Backlash, Pierce said that following Martin’s murder, the defenders of George Zimmerman were “circling their wagons down in Sanford.”

 

Pierce:

…The defenders of George Zimmerman, the trigger-happy wannabe who clipped Trayvon Martin for the crime of being a black kid in a hoodie with snack foods in the wrong neighborhood, is now being cocooned by his lawyer — who scarpered on an appearence on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night — by some alleged friends, and by the local police department, which has screwed this case up to a faretheewell since the night the shooting happened, but which is now leaking like a sieve. Ask yourself how we suddenly know that the dead kid had been suspended from high school because he got caught with a bag that might once have contained marijuana. Ask yourself why we know that. We know that because this case is Not About Race.

It is Not About Race because It Is Never About Race. Race is the past. Black people can vote. One of them is president. Nothing Is About Race anymore. Just ask Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum — and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick that guy is? — and they’ll tell you that the president “injected” race into the tragedy. It wasn’t there before the president — who is (shhh!) black, you know — put it there. Ask Joe Oliver, this “friend” of the gunman who insists that Zimmerman might have said “fucking goons” and not “fucking coons,” because the latter is an obsolete racial slur and the former is a “term of endearment,” according to Oliver’s daughter. This is enormously believable because, if you’re an armed 28-year old gunslinger in pursuit of what you believe is a dangerous burglar, the first descriptive that would leap to anyone’s mind is a term of endearment used by high-school girls. Yeah, sure. Whatever. As if. And it is enormously believable because This Is Not About Race.

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Posted in Conservatives, Equal Rights, Justice, Law Enforcement, Local Government, Politics, Propaganda, Racism, Society, United States | Tagged , , , , , , | 21 Comments