It is unfortunate that the most complete and honest debate regarding the current state of affairs as it surrounds the use of torture by America was on The Daily Show.
With people turning to gun violence during times of desperation and with the recession increasing incidents of desperation the MSM has been covering incidents of gun violence frequently lately. Of course in the MSM this topic always is an opportunity to discuss gun control. At the same time the Obama administration has been discussing gun control in relation to Mexican drug cartel violence on the border. In the MSM this leads to discussions that assume the return of the Brady Ban. I get the feeling that this is a wag the dog situation. Especially since it seems that reports in the MSM of violence on the boarder are inflated beyond all proportion.
My suspicions are raised even more that the MSM is just getting their gun control rocks off when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says that a renewed assault weapons ban would not be effective in reducing Mexican drug cartel violence.
This is a pretty detailed article on the whole affair. The bottom line is that the legislative investigation found that Sarah Palin violated the public trust in her office as Governor when she allegedly pressured for the firing of a State Trooper that had been married to her sister. In these cynical times it is hard for me to explain how serious a violation of the public trust is other than to say that even lawyers are required to be more ethical than this.
Once again this raises the question of how well Palin was vetted before she was picked as the VP nominee. Her ability wink and to segue into memorized talking points during the VP debate does not reassure me that she is more intelligent than the Couric interviews have shown her to be. Now there is this report detailing how she wasted no time in becoming corrupt after being elected as Governor of Alaska. Its probably a testament to her Orwellian campaigning that she was originally billed as a reformer.
The most telling part of this story is the reaction of the Republican party and the Republican presidential campaign. When the eye of justice was turned on them they immidiately and vigorously began attacking the integrity and nature of the investigation. What they were doing was analogous to if one was a murder suspect, arguing that the police did not have the authority to look for the murder weapon.
Earlier this week I was thinking about the racism that is frequently concealed within anti-terrorism rhetoric. Particularly among Fox pundits. People are so willing to forget that Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the Anthrax scare was perpetrated by a white American. Then I came across this story which recounts that the Bush administration tried to get the FBI to ignore the whole investigation thing and blame it on al Quaeda. You know, because they care about security. The images are mostly things i have come across on the Internet related to 9/11 and making light of the situation. The one with the Muppet's was a joint creative venture between Th'Dave and APPhilosophy.
Fortunately for bloggers like myself there are real reporters out there doing the hard work like research to produce helpfull things like this. If you have ever been outraged by a Bush asministration supporter and found yourself too flustered to back up your claims that various members of the administration might have possibly violated the law, Slate has decided to help all of us with an interactive chart of who did what.
It may be beating a dead horse to talk about blood diamonds except people are still buying them, the artifical custom of the diamond engagement ring persists, and the average person does not feel blinded by rage when they see a commercial for diamonds. Also, you may be wondering what sparked this posting. I didn't just see the movie Blood Diamond and have my eyes opened to this tragedy and rush out to tell the ten people who accidentally come to this blog every day. I have been pissed about this injustice since I was a little high school hoodlum but I recently stumbled on my notes from last summer regarding this topic and I stumbled on this article on Fark.
That article recounts an older story regarding how the value of diamonds was artificially inflated and bullshit symbolism was imbued into the diamond. It recounts how a common stone with little intrinsic value was kept from the market in order to artificially create a low supply while some clever advertisers associated the diamond with eternity and love and forced every man in western society from then on to spend two months salary on a worthless crystal of carbon for fear of sending the wrong message to the woman he loves. Fortunately, for their trouble, those advertisers will have to crouch in the desert of sodomites for all eternity. Unfortunately love isn't enough to overcome the demands of consumerism in our culture, or informed women who truly loved their future husbands would insist on not wearing murder on their hands. They would not be able to look at their enggement ring and see the love of their husband but would instead witness blood flowing from the stone on their ring, the blood of the children who died in the mines and the men and women who were murdered when a new militia came and took over the mine.
Remember those anti-drug adds just after 9-11 where the Bush administration and John Ashcroft were trying to capitalize on nationalism in the war on drugs? They implied a connection within the drugs trade wherein money American teenagers spent on pot went into the coffers of the terrorists who had attacked us. The same is true of the diamond trade. If you buy diamonds, you are putting money into Osama Bin Laden's pockets.
What about the Kimberly process you ask? What are you some lobbyist for the diamond industry? For the rest of you, the Kimberly process is the method the diamond industry created to pretend they were doing something about blood diamonds as a public relations scheme. The process is entirely voluntary, completely self-administered with no accountability, and there are large financial disincentives to poor african countries to conform rigorously to the process's own loose guidelines. Given the fact that emeralds and rubies come from conflict ridden regions in Colombia and Burma respectively, and the gem industry turns a blind eye to the suffering inflicted on people in those areas, it is unsuprising that their own method of self monitoring the origins of diamonds is far from robust. This is what it looks like when evil people try to do good but can't stop thinking of their own greed.
Today the Supreme Court Ruled that the Second Amendment ensures an individuals right to own and possess a firearm. Few people were suprised by this decision. Either in its ultimate result or in its scope. Scalia, who wrote the position for the majority, has previously written opinions for the court in gun control cases that are fundamentally similar to this result. The Court has said in the past that the right enshrined in the second amendment is an individual right but it is not a right without restriction. This can be seen in past cases regarding the federal ban on fully automatic rifles such as in Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600 (1994).
The cases and statutes throughout the United States have created a general guideline that seems to indicate an individual may own as many guns as they wish for recreation, sporting, or self defense, but may not own military equipment, and may be restricted in time and place of usage and transport within reason. The definition of what is military equipment changes frequently as can be seen by the recent expiration of the Brady Bill which forbid removable magazines of a capacity over ten rounds among other things. This most recent ruling not only ensures the individual's right to own and possess firearms, it also sets a line that may not be crossed in restricting type of gun and how it may be possessed and transported. This is because the D.C. gun ban that is overturned forbid ownership of a handgun. The court has clearly declared that this type of restriction violates the Constitution. The law also required registration of other firearms and that those registered firearms be locked when in the home. It is already well settled law that when transpiorting a gun one must have it locked and the ammunition must be locked in a seperate container, but today's Supreme Court ruling seems to indicate that a local law may not require that one keep ones guns locked in ones own home.
The ruling also seems to indicate that legislation requiring registration of firearms also goes to far. Many may not understand why this would be objectionable. After all, you have to register your car. The principle difference there is that there is no constitutionaly protected right to own and operate a vehicle. This is more than just a trite observation. Though a car may seem more essential to one's daily life, Congress may decide one day that cars are too dangerous and too polluting to allow in private ownership and ban them. However possession of a weapon is a right granted to us by our creator, like freedom of speech, and is protected by the Bill of Rights. The second reason to object to registration of firearms is a bit more paranoid. Firearm registration just gives the government a list of what law abiding citizens have guns ans what they have in their arsenal. The fear of armed government agents going door to door with a list and confescating the firearms of law abiding citizens in a time of emergency, when they are more likely to need them, is less paranoid when you remember that it happened and happened recently. When Bush suspended posse comitatus after hurricans Katrina and the national guard confiscated guns from people who were just trying to defend themselves from looters and murders who were roaming the streets after the disaster.
Despite the apparent clarity, the actual bounds of the Supreme Court's decision will be heavily litigated and fought over. The lawsuits have already started. As this article indicates these lawsuits by the NRA were already in the works before the decision came down.
Here is another reason for innocent people to fear a government with free access to lots of information. They will use it to widen their dragnet and intentionally sweep up people they know are not involved in the crime they are investigating.
California (that pioneer of hairbrained legal shenanigans) has decided to use DNA evidence to round up family members of whoever's DNA they happen to find at the crime scene. I left DNA everywhere I went today. If a crime happens there later, does that mean the cops are going to go harrass my mother at her workplace in the hopes of finding a clue? Or will they simply use this circumstantial evidence as an easy way of pinning the blame on the first most likely suspect they can scrape up, in a horrifying combination of lazy police work and beureaucratic demands to justify an expensive test?
The practical problems I have with this new California program is that they will be spending millions on testing to answer a question that a simple records check could answer. Also, this law will only serve to create more costly criminal litigation as the courts hash out how it dovetails with the new federal law making its way through congress that forbids discrimination based on genetics.
I have often focused on how government failures contribute to Cleveland being a horrible place to live but I have overlooked how the awful people that live here do their own part every day to contribute to the horrid torments of this city.
Yesterday I saw two things that I never expected to see in my life, let alone in America. In the middle of the afternoon on a Monday I saw two school buses traveling down the road, packed full of kids, on fire. The kids weren't on fire the busses were. Well, now that I think of it the kids could have been on fire. I could not see inside the buses through the heavy, ten story tall, cloud of smoke shrouding the busses. I was stuck behind these busses for some time and they made no effor to pull over and remove the chidren from danger, or to put the fires out.
The second horrendus thing I saw yesterday: A person, I could not tell what gender, tossed a cat off an overpass into rush hour traffic on I-71.
In Cleveland, the housing market crash has mixed with joblessness to get the recession started off soon. This economic catastrophy has turned the desperation of poverty into a criminal desperation. In a city like Cleveland where the criminal population is a demographic measured by the census this increase once again causes Cleveland to win the trophy, the catastrophy. Copper pipe theft is a trade in Cleveland, one that a young boy can apprentice in with some of the more enterprizing members of the community. In the county which has been hardest hit by foreclosures there are many vacant houses lying about. Within hours of a house becoming unoccupied it is stripped of its metal siding, copper piping, appliances, and even the wire is ripped out of the house. Next, vagrants and drug dealers move in using these vacant buildings as their office so they don't have to ply their dangerous trade door to door. Eventually all the windows are broken out and ultimately the house will either be burned down or will become someone's urban tomb.
First, by way of introduction, here is a moving testimonial from a cop who doesn't understand the pharmacology of tetrahydracannabinol. (How many style points does that judge have?)
We've already talked extensively about police corruption and brutality. I would agree that there are law enforcement officers who are more than thugs with badges. Unfortunately for those who would like to have a rosy view of the state of law enforcement in America, there is an abundance of evidence that police officers aren't always the most upstanding citizens. But, also, there is a sense of helplessness in the face of power, demonstrated by the examples of police who are charged with brutality or some other criminal charge, yet are given the equivalent of a vacation with pay.
In this case,(with video) a police officer is caught on the camera of his squad car planting marijuana on a suspect. As the suspect already had a warrant out for his arrest, the additional brutality and charges seem rather spiteful.
In this case,(with video) a family from Hobart, Indiana catches their beating on their front yard surveillance camera. I can't help but wonder what that woman said to the police officer to receive that kind of treatment.
In the trial of the two officers charged with manslaughter in the 50+ bullet shootout that resulted in the death of Sean Bell, there has been some pretty startling testimony. I'm sure that the defense will try to destroy the credibility of the witness on cross examination, but the question remains whether or not officers identified themselves as such before they started shooting.
Of course, there is the question or racial discrimination in the enforcement of laws. In some cases, as is allegedly the case in Seattle, there are allegations that police officers arrest minorities on subjective charges, which will invariably tear communities apart through distrust. In other cases, law enforcement officials cover-up the actions of violent racist extremists, as allegedly is the case in North Carolina, which would appear to be a horrible example of officially legitimated violence against those protesting racism and injustice. As the records in question were allegedly destroyed in 2004 or 5, one has to wonder who is being protected by this?
While it may seem a foregone conclusion that our society must have police officers, it is not necessary that there be police officers who flagrantly violate the law. After all, if those entrusted with enforcing the law have no interest in following the law, why should the rest of us? (+ or -?)
