When the United States Supreme Court invalidated all state sodomy laws in the landmark 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling it didn’t take those state laws off the books. Last night in my state, two men, in what appears to be a domestic dispute/sexual assault case that occurred in private, were charged by the police under the North Carolina’s ridiculous “crimes against nature” law (CAN). From the Raleigh N&O:
Raleigh police first charged Nelson Keith Sloan, 40, of Grand Manor Court, who called them to his apartment about dawn, saying he had been attacked.And, in the ultimate outrage - the police did not charge Flynn with sexual assault. As you read, the police captain 1) doesn’t believe a sexual crime occurred; and 2) doesn’t have a problem with arresting the men under this law, when everyone knows a heterosexual couple would never be charged with CAN.Police later filed the same charge against Ryan Christopher Flynn, 25, of Glen Currin Drive. They also charged Flynn with simple assault for biting Sloan. And they charged him with communicating threats by telling Sloan he was going to disembowel him and show him his innards.
“This looks like a case of a consensual act that may have gotten out of hand,” said Raleigh police Capt. T.D. Hardy. “The law is still on the books. Our detectives got involved in it last night and decided this was the best thing to do. What the D.A.’s office will do with it, I don’t know.”
Sloan, however, said he was the victim of an assault. “I didn’t allow anything,” he said Saturday after being reached at home by phone. “They knew it and turned it around and arrested me. I have never been so humiliated in all my life. It’s just awful.”
More below the fold.
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Animal people looking for good organizations to give your money to, I beseech of you, please ignore PETA, who seems to spend most of their budget getting young women to get naked in public as publicity stunts. If you love both animals and people, look instead to less sexy but much more humane organizations like the Humane Society, who actually have done a bang-up job of using their issue of animal welfare to highlight the problem of domestic violence. From Salon, I see that the effort from organizations like the Humane Society, PAWS, the ASPCA, and the Humane Association (and no doubt many other animal organizations that don’t see the need to parade naked women around to make a point) to improve the public’s understanding of the link between animal abuse and domestic abuse have led to an article in O about the link.
For people who understand how domestic violence really works, this link is not surprising. Abusers use any leverage they can to terrorize their victims and break their will, and will happily resort to abusing and killing pets for that end. There’s also the added incentive of using the pet as leverage to keep your victim from escaping, because she knows that fleeing without or even with the pet might result in the abuser retaliating by killing her pet. In order to make pet safety less of a barrier to women fleeing abusive homes, the Humane Society has put together a list of 170 safe haven programs, where both the victim and her pets are cared for by the shelters, using various methods.
This is beyond absurd. We’ve already got the police Taser-happy, now we have guards and citizens settling disputes (that would be settled in the past with a civil conversation) by pulling out the shock devices on one another. In this case, a guard claimed the co-owner of a Boulder restaurant had parked his van on property it didn’t belong on and was placing a boot on the vehicle, and then …
Harvey Epstein, co-owner of Mamacitas restaurant on The Hill, was arrested Saturday night after he got into an altercation with two officers from Colorado Security Services, one of whom had booted a company vehicle for being illegally parked in the alley behind his Mexican restaurant.If you read the entire article, there are differing versions of the event, so it’s hard to tell who is at fault, but incidents like these are sure to escalate and increase in frequency in the new Taser Wild West.Epstein said the van was on his property and should never have been booted. When he tried to cut the device off with bolt cutters after the guard refused to remove it, the situation escalated.
“(The guard) pointed a stun gun at my mother’s face and I immediately responded with my personal Taser,” Epstein said Sunday evening, within an hour of being released from Boulder County Jail. “And we shot each other at the same moment.”
Epstein, 36, said one of the guards jumped on his back after the Taser duel and pressed the barrel of his pistol against the back of Epstein’s head.’
In more positive Taser news, the stun-gun manufacturer is seeing a slump in sales due to tight police department budgets thanks to the Bush Economy. So sad:
Taser International Inc., the world’s largest stun-gun maker, may get a jolt as the U.S. economic slowdown drains tax revenue from police forces that supply more than two-thirds of its revenue.Hat tip, Sue.Six of Taser’s 10 biggest investors that reported stakes in March 31 regulatory filings, including Veredus Asset Management LLC and Emerald Advisers Inc., said they sold shares. Taser has lost 48 percent this year and short interest, a gauge of bets against the stock, averaged 18 percent higher in the first four months of 2008 than in the past three years.
…Taser is a defendant in 37 lawsuits alleging wrongful death or personal injury and has won dismissals in 69 others, according to a May 12 regulatory filing.
…While two-thirds of U.S. police departments own at least one Taser, only a third of officers carry them, estimates Minneapolis-based analyst Steven Dyer of Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC. The figures show that some departments can’t afford more, he said.
…”Their customers are municipalities,'’ Dyer said. When cities have to scrape for money to finance schools and repair roads, “Tasers become a lot more discretionary.'’
I don’t care how hilarious rapist / murderer-releasing, Christian Reconstructionist- supported, Man-On-Dog wannabe, former Arkansas governor, and Baptist minister-without-a-theology-degree Mike Huckabee thinks he is, this isn’t funny. We’ve already seen the yahoo vote unapologetic about the fact that they’d never vote for a black man — and plenty of them have an NRA card.
After all, look at what a Freeper posted yesterday in response to the marriage equality ruling in California. These folks are sick.During a speech before the National Rifle Association convention Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee — who has endorsed presumptive GOP nominee John McCain — joked that an unexpected offstage noise was Democrat Barack Obama looking to avoid a gunman.
“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak,” said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”
38 posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008 1:37:53 PM by Lancey Howard
Related:
* Noose found at Secret Service training center
* Dallas: weapons screening halted at Obama rally
* Other posts on the security breach
Wow, this headline reads like something in the Reader’s Digest circa 1970, wedged between articles on why kids don’t appreciate waltzing anymore and how smoking marijuana cigarettes will cause your daughter to become a streetwalker: “Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?” (Via.) The article isn’t nearly so bad, and gives full voice to women who grasp that a man yelling sexual (and insulting or threatening) things at you on the sidewalk is insulting you for being a woman, not complimenting you.
But just like those articles of old from Schlaflyites (”I love getting hooted at on the street, and husbands have a right to rape wives!”), this one is full of women the reader is supposed to take cues from on how to be less of a grumpus pain in the ass who thinks she has dignity worth defending.
On the other hand, some women appreciate the attention in certain cases, like Jessica, a 31-year-old health-care educator in Los Angeles who declined to use her last name to protect her privacy.
“Yeah, it’s objectifying and all, but you know, if I walked down the street and didn’t have men looking me up and down and catcalling, I’d think, ‘Boy, I must really be getting old and dumpy,’ ” she said.
She’s gotten catcalls just walking her parents’ dog in baggy sweats. “I thought it was hysterical, like, ‘Boy, doesn’t take much to impress you, does it?’ “
So I was listening to the latest episode of “On The Media” on Mighty Ponygirl’s suggestion (because they have a great report on the Cult of Ayn Rand and how they’re trying to buy themselves credibility they can’t generate honestly), and I heard this story that I think should be an iconic example of how the Bush administration is both evil and stupid. It’s about the corruption in the Office of Special Counsel, which is a whistleblower protection agency. As you can imagine, the Bush administration is opposed to whistleblowing (and puppies and kittens and sunshine), so they went out and found the craziest asshole wingnut possible to head up this office: Scott Bloch. He did an admirable job of refusing to do the job he was appointed, and in proper BushCo fashion, this exemplar of malfeasance is now facing a cavalcade of subpoenas and general calls for his head. Bloch ran into trouble when he squelched a complaint that came from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, because it turns out they were able to get the FBI to care enough to raid Bloch’s offices, take his computers, and subpoena 17 employees to testify against him. The executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suggesting that Bloch successfully destroyed the office to the point where it’s easier now to dismantle it and rebuild how the government handles whistleblowers than to salvage the office.
The emergency room at hospitals are surreal places, and I always wonder how people who work there full time deal with it. One broken bottle of salsa on our tile floor, one misplaced foot, one aborted attempt to remove the sliver of glass with tweezers, one sinking realization that the attempts were just pushing it in further, and I find myself face down on a hospital bed with the doctor rolling up one of the bells on my cute new corduroy pants to keep from getting iodine and blood on them while he pulls out the sliver. Now I’m moving slowly and cautiously all along my left side, because not only does my foot hurt, but so does my entire left arm from the tetanus shot. To add to the surreal nature of my afternoon, after we got home, a short thunderstorm dumped giant, ill-formed hail all over our apartment complex, putting a dent in the top of my truck.
The hurry-up-and-wait nature of the E.R. meant I had a chance to finish Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. My mother gave me her copy a long time ago, and I figured with the recent raid on a polygamous cult in Texas, I should bone up on the information about Mormon fundamentalism inside this book. I found the book to be a fair book, empathetic towards why people are drawn to Mormonism and fascinated by the religion’s perseverance while pulling no punches in exposing how the history of the church breeds this conservatism that made the fundamentalists inevitable, along with the sexual abuse they dish out to young people of both sexes.
The ostensible purpose of the book is to chronicle the story of the Lafferty brothers, two men who, angry that the wife of their youngest brother was resisting their attempts to transform their entire family into a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon one, decided to murder her and her baby daughter. The daughter’s death was justified because of her gender; daughters of “bitches” grow up to be forbiddingly independent-minded women as well was the theory, a theory that makes more sense if you really understand the Mormon obsession with lineage. In telling this story, though, Krakauer also tells the story of how the LDS church evolved, especially how the doctrine of polygamy was, at various times, fiercely defended and just as fiercely rejected, depending on the need to either separate the Mormons from the mainstream of America, or to embrace it.*
From Roy, I found this great study that shows that the sexual assault rate at the University of New Hampshire saw a decline from 1988 until 2000, and then it held steady after that. The reason for the decline appears to be more education and better services.
Overall, UNH has found that the number of unwanted sexual experiences on campus declined significantly from 1988 to 2000, during which time the university established a crisis center and put a number of prevention programs in place. However, there has been little change since 2000 — prompting a need for more creative, broad-based responses, said Victoria Banyard, an associate professor of psychology and a co-author.
I find this interesting, because the reduction in the rape rate that’s been national and somewhat continuous ever since feminists made rape a big issue shows that the primary criticism feminists have—that ours is a “rape culture”, i.e. that rape is a product of a culture that is tolerant or even approving of it—was right, and when you change the culture, you change the rate of rape.
Out. Of. Control. Dateline Kamloops, British Columbia - Three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers apparently couldn’t subdue an elderly patient. The sadistic sickness continues. BTW, you can see pics of the man’s stun gun burns at the CBC site.
Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the stun gun marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.The article also refers to the Taser as “the conducted energy weapon.”“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.
Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.
RCMP said nurses called police after Lasser became delirious and pulled a knife out of his pocket.
Lasser told CBC News that he sometimes become delusional when he can’t breathe properly. He said he couldn’t explain why he refused to let go of the knife even after the Mounties arrived.
“I was laying on the bed by then and the corporal came in, or the sergeant, I forget which it was, and said to the guys, ‘OK, get him because we got more important work to do on the street tonight,’” Lasser said.
Hat tip, Shane.
Apparently in the City of Brotherly Love the police training for cadets includes how to act like a punks in a schoolyard. I guess we have to be pleased that the Taser wasn’t whipped out as well for good measure. These men in the car may or may not have been guilty, but they certainly don’t look like they are resisting other than to stop the ass-kicking. Why do these officers have to whale on suspects in this manner when the person is already down on the ground?
Fifteen police officers were taken off the street as authorities investigate a video showing three suspects being kicked, punched and beaten after they were pulled out of a car during a traffic stop.“At a glance it does appear to be a bit beyond the pale,” Doug Oliver, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Nutter, said Wednesday. “Officers are not allowed to operate outside of the law.”
…The video, shot by a WTXF-TV helicopter, shows three police cars stopping a car on the side of a road. About a dozen officers gather around the vehicle and pull three men out. About a half-dozen officers hold two of the men on the ground on the driver’s side. Both are kicked repeatedly, while one is seen being punched; one also appears to be struck with a baton. On the other side of the car, another group of officers can be seen kicking a third man who ends up on the ground.
Image from Gretchen Schermerhorn.
So, this Ecuadorian politician named Maria Soledad Vela has tried to write women’s right to sexual pleasure into the nation’s constitution. From what I understand, the law is just about laying the groundwork for public policies that acknowledge that women are sexual agents, not just wombs on feet. And everything that would follow—good education, reproductive rights, etc. Perhaps that’s why so many male politicians are throwing first class hissy fits. One claimed that this meant mandatory orgasm provision. (Oh noes!) Another suggested that the legislation is like life in prison. I had an imagine of a man with a woman strapped spread eagle to his face like a feedbag, but that’s the only way I could really see this as a prison.
I can’t believe I’m writing about even more Taser horrors so soon. Stop the f*cking madness. I just can’t take it any more. Via African American Political Pundit:
As reported by many News Outlets and USA: Amnesty International Nine months after Emily Delafield, 56, died after being tased by police, her family has few answers about the events that led to her death. “This has been a very tragic and sad situation,” nephew Ryan Delafield said… Ryan Delafield says he is his aunt’s personal representative. In the weeks after her death he needed a death certificate for matters of her estate. “May, June, July… it was three months before we got the death certificate,” Delafield said.The officers have been cleared in the case - big surprise. From First Coast News (which has audio recordings from the 911 call).
Delafield, a schizophrenic, sounds calm at first on the audio tape. Police say when they got to her, she was armed with two knives and a hammer. Police say the wheelchair-bound woman was threatening to hurt herself and others.Let’s just wind the clock back before the advent of Tasers. Certainly the officers would have been able to subdue this woman without resorting to quasi-lethal methods. And when these officers drew out the devices, they applied the Tasing with gusto. Read in disbelief below the fold.Delafield is heard on the tape saying, “You better get back.” Police debated what to do and then used their tasers. In the audio recording, you can hear Delafield screaming.
“My aunt was basically tortured like an animal or something,” Delafield’s nephew, Ryan Delafield, told First Coast News months ago.
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Need I say more? Now it’s come down to official scrubbing the use and abuse of Tasers by law enforcement. From Ohio, a look at where the police state is going.
A Summit County Common Pleas judge ordered the county medical examiner to delete any reference that Tasers contributed to the deaths of three Ohio men.Wow. Not only the Taser reference is scrubbed, but all the other kinds of abuses common in police brutality cases! My, my. And yes, someone from Taser International had something to say about the ruling. It’s after the jump.All three men were in an ‘agitated’ state and ‘on drugs’ when police officers shot them with Tasers, and the judge ordered their deaths be ruled ‘accidental’ also that any reference to “homicide or “electrical pulse stimulation” should be deleted from death certificates and autopsy reports.”
Five sheriff’s deputies had been indicted on charges related to the death of one of the men, who also had a history of mental illness. The judge further ordered that man’s death be ruled as “undetermined” and to “delete any references to homicide and the death possibly being caused by asphyxia, beatings or other factors.”
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Uh huh. Here’s yet another reason why there is distrust out there about law enforcement “protecting and serving” everyone equally.
Los Angeles Police Department officials announced Tuesday that they investigated more than 300 complaints of racial profiling against officers last year and found that none had merit — a conclusion that left members of the department’s oversight commission incredulous.I’m sure the vast majority are claims that cannot be proven since you have to prove the officer’s intent to say, pull over a black driver more often than a white one. But the LAPD has a sorry history, and that makes it difficult for some to believe the outcome of the report.It is at least the sixth consecutive year that all allegations of racial profiling against LAPD officers have been dismissed, according to department documents reviewed by The Times.
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Man wakes to unwanted sex surprise. Remember Glenn Murphy, Jr., the former Young Republican National Federation chair who, not once, but twice was busted for assault — pole smoking passed-out men? He must have a trainee –
A Brisbane youth worker who sexually assaulted another man as he lay unconscious at a party has avoided jail.Brisbane’s District Court today heard Corey Lloyd Wensor’s 17-year-old victim was so drunk he was unable to move during the January 12, 2006 attack, but was vaguely aware of a “warm sensation” in his groin as Wensor, 21, forced oral sex on him and later massaged his genitals.
Crown Prosecutor Angus Edwards said the victim woke up during one attack but was unable to resist due to his level of intoxication.
…Wensor’s defence barrister, Bruce Mumford, said his client, who had only been “tipsy” at the time, had acted out of the mistaken belief the sex was consensual, because at one stage he had heard his victim make moaning noises.
As Richard at All Spin Zone notes, shouldn’t there be an investigation by officials into this? Inciting a riot is a felony. Here’s Rushbo:
He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.Richard:“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country…
…Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.
“We do, hopefully, the right thing for the sake of this country. We’re the only one in charge of our affairs. We don’t farm out our defense if we elect Democrats … and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don’t elect Democrats. And that’s the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think,” Limbaugh said…
Someone needs to tell me the difference between Rush Limbaugh and Moqtada al-Sadr (above and beyond the fact that al-Sadr is an ordained cleric, and Limbaugh is just an ordained asswipe). And I want to know how Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, etc. etc. can continue getting away with inspiring their listeners to violence, yet are never called on it by either the Republican Party leadership or law enforcement authorities.Note this is not an exaggeration — Mr. Hillbilly Heroin could be in a heap of trouble. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper realizes that a line has been crossed, saying “Anyone who would call for riots in an American city has clearly lost their bearings.”If you feel so moved, you can contact the Colorado Attorney General’s office and express your concerns. At a minimum, inciting to riot is a serious offense. When the call goes out from someone of Limbaugh’s stature, who has legions of loyal dittoheads hanging on his every word, it’s very, very likely that his “call to arms” could motivate some right wing crackpots to action.
Why does Rush Limbaugh hate America?
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State Rep. Sally Kern — how about this fine upstanding citizen of your state? Is he more or less of a threat to society than your average aggressive radical homosexual or everyday homosexual?
Michael Burgess, sheriff in Custer County, OK is a pious family man, he even offers a Sheriff’s prayer on his website. Unfortunately he needs a few prayers right now, as he is charged with abusing his authority by offering leniency to inmates in exchange for getting blown and laid.
Michael Burgess, sheriff in Custer County, Okla., since 1994, surrendered to state law enforcement agents Wednesday and appeared in district court to face 35 felony charges, including multiple counts of rape, forcible oral sodomy, bribery by a public official and perjury.More details below the fold, including a snippet of Jesus’ General’s letter to Sally about the goings-on in her little slice of pious heaven.
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Wow. In light of the recent gay panic verdict in Michigan, the idea that a defense attorney can float the idea that 15-year-old Oxnard, CA student Lawrence King deserved to die because he didn’t conform to gender norms is sickening. We’re looking at a trans-panic defense.
On Feb. 12, King was shot during an English class minutes after school started, and classmate Brandon McInerney, 14, was arrested a few blocks away. King later died in an Oxnard hospital, and McInerney was charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime.So wait, the idea here is that it’s an understandable reaction to kill someone if you don’t agree with or understand someone whose gender expression is not what you think it should be? King had been harassed for some time at the school, so the defense is also saying that some sort of herd mentality caused McInerney to snap, get a gun and shoot his classmate.It’s a tragedy, McInerney’s defense attorney said in an interview, but one he believes might have been avoided if someone had stepped in to help beforehand. Senior Deputy Public Defender William Quest said E.O. Green’s administration knew about tension on the middle school campus and allowed the situation to fester — allegations the school district says are untrue.
…Students have said they witnessed confrontations between King and McInerney in the weeks or days before the shooting, including King’s teasing McInerney and telling him that he liked him.
McInerney perceived King’s treatment as harassment, Quest said. Quest, however, declined to discuss any specific confrontations or issues between the boys. He also declined to say if McInerney ever sought help from an adult to deal with the issue.
Quest said he believes school administrators supported one student expressing himself and his sexuality — King — and ignored how it affected other kids, despite complaints. Cross-dressing isn’t a normal thing in adult environments, he said, yet 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds were expected to just accept it and go on.
Hat tip, Lena.
Shorter Rod Dreher: Rape and child abuse should be legal long before we allow consenting adults of the same sex to marry. (Hat tip.)
What a massive, stinking asshole.
First, he tries to show his bona fides before he suggests that selling your daughters to your friends as rape toys should be legal.
Regular readers know that very little upsets me as much as child abuse. My default position is that the authorities must not hesitate to go in to protect children who may be being abused.
But then he immediately backs off this and gives people an exception if they say that god told them to rape girls that are barely past puberty. And he notes that raping young teenage girls has been considered a perfectly fine way to past the time throughout history, so we should take that into consideration when we decide to tolerate the practice of men raising daughters to give to their friends as sex toys, what you might call an FDLS compound, but I call a rape farm. By Rod’s argument, we should also be lenient on slavery (though it’s worth noting that the FDLS definition of wifehood is close to indistinguishable from slavery), infanticide, rule by kings, torture chambers for heretics, witch-burning—ah shit, what am I saying? All these injustices tend to fall on the shoulders of those who are not in his privileged shoes, so he’s probably see all of them as tolerable as long as you hid behind the “people of faith” label.
Update: This article makes it very clear that the victim’s delusions about the situation put her in very real danger of getting hurt. She’s very young and naive, and the abuse of her was so violent that this really could be a march towards murder in short order if the authorities don’t intervene.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this case where the Toronto cops have detained a pregnant 19-year-old to force her to testify against the man who beats her, because she’s doing what all too many victims do, and changing her mind about pressing charges and trying to return home so her abuser can beat her more. There’s no telling, I guess, what causes women to do this. It varies from woman to woman, I suppose. Some probably think that he’s going to stop the beating. Some probably know he’s going to keep doing it, but have been convinced, possibly by the abuser and relatives, that they don’t deserve any better and that if they lose this man, they’ll never get another. Some might be foolishly holding it together for the children, having been convinced by social conservatives that fathers are absolutely critical, even fathers who beat their girlfriends. Some might fear the abuser’s retribution.
But I’m going to go against my instincts here and try to be sympathetic to the position the police are in, while not excusing this final decision. Feminists have long, and for good reason, accused the cops of being sexist pigs who don’t take domestic violence seriously. We have our list of reasons that they’re in the wrong: They think it’s a private matter. They agree with the abusers that some women need to be beaten down. They don’t like taking a woman’s side against a man. All these criticisms are true, but we’d be intellectually dishonest if we didn’t admit that the fact that women will often file charges and then retract them pretty much immediately contributes to the situation. It’s much, much easier to dismiss a victim as hysterical when she’s behaving like this.
A follow up: Steven Scarborough was charged with felony murder and faced mandatory life in prison without parole in the death of 62-year-old Victor Manious.
Scarborough admitted in taped police interview that he hit Victor Manious with a bat, stuffed him in a car trunk after either 1) he was come on to, or 2) he woke up to find Manious performing oral sex on him, and in either scenario Scarborough felt that this violated his beliefs as a Southern Baptist, justifying the bat attack and all the rest of it — including the theft of Manious’s wallet and mobile phone. The Southern Baptist convictions of Scarborough also made him use the man’s credit cards for shopping sprees, gas and air fare to Texas.
Manious was alive when stuffed into the trunk — medical authorities said he would have survived if 911 had been called at the time Scarborough was “out of danger.”
The jury decided that, despite the ludicrous account and changing stories, Scarborough was indeed assaulted and the bat attack/murder/criminal spree didn’t merit a sentence of felony murder — they gave him manslaughter. It carries a 15 year max.
Related:
* Gay panic: the defense that will not die (and on Pandagon)
Bush’s Torture U.S.A - they all knew.
You’ll find out the one member of the administration who made the above statement below the fold. It’s hard to find any words to describe how sick this is. The ABC headline says it all: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation‘.
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.I guess it’s bye-bye to that VP fantasy, Condi. Below the fold, there was only one member of that committee who had any reservations about the path of torture they were taking.…The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
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The allegations against Anthony Gutierrez, a top aide to Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann are severe. Once again, I’m finding myself really rethinking the whole model of sexual harassment, because it seems to me that “quid pro quo” sexual harassment should be some degree of rape. If you threaten someone into having sex with you, that’s rape by any reasonable measure, so why isn’t it considered rape if you hold someone’s livelihood over their head? And that’s the nature of one of the allegations, coming from two separate women.
Both women said Gutierrez pressured them with sexual propositions, saying, “you owe me,” the newspaper reported.
The other allegation is potentially even worse.
The woman reported seeing Dann and his scheduler, Jessica Utovich, who was wearing pajamas and lying on the floor with a laptop. The woman said she felt intoxicated and Gutierrez encouraged her to lie on his bed, the report said.
She said she later awoke to find three buttons on her pants undone and Gutierrez beside her wearing only underwear.
These allegations are serious criminal matters, not some trashy sex scandal. But look what the Dayton Daily News is running with as a headline.
(UPDATE: The defense worked. The verdict: voluntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. He was charged with felony murder and faced mandatory life in prison without parole.)
Here we go again, this time in Michigan. From the Grand Rapids Press:
What is also clear is that if Scarborough was in such a panic, he got over it pretty quickly after stuffing Manious’s body in the trunk, since he went on a four-day binge, using the dead man’s cell phone and credit cards for shopping sprees, gas and air fare to Texas. He was arrested in the Lone Star State.More taped police interviews with accused murderer Steve Scarborough were played today for the jury charged with deciding whether the 21-year-old is responsible for the murder of Victor Manious in July.
In the interview between Grand Rapids Detective Kristen Rogers and Scarborough done from a Texas county lock-up, the accused claims that he was sitting in the Kalamazoo Avenue SE apartment of his friend Justin Robinson when Manious entered the apartment.
He said Manious set his keys on a kitchen counter, crossed over to the living room where Scarborough sat on a couch and asked if Robinson was home while at the same time the 62-year-old removed his clothes. Scarborough was interviewed for several hours, which were taped after he fled to the Houston area on Aug. 3 with a plane ticket he allegedly bought using Manious’ credit card.
Scarborough said Manious, stripped down to his underwear, put his arm around him, tried to kiss Scarborough and grabbed at him. Scarborough said he was freaked out by the advances of the man, hit him with a bat and dragged his body down a flight of stairs. He said he put the man in the trunk of his own Toyota and left the victim to die in the car parked on Ottawa Avenue NW.
More below the fold.
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My grand plan was to find something newsworthy to blog about this Sunday afternoon, but I’m feeling a little fried for whatever reason, so I’m going to review the latest book I’ve read, which has been out for like 15 years: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon. It’s a perfect fix for those of us who are trying to wean ourselves off “The Wire”, and you really get a chance to see the seeds planted in Simon’s year following the homicide detectives of Baltimore PD that came to fruition on that show. The book is absolutely compelling, and gets better and better as it goes along, leaving you a bit bereft at the end, wishing you could still be the fly on the wall following this set of detectives as they investigate drug murders, domestic killings, drunken brawls gone wrong, and those homicides that still have the power to shake even the hardened detectives, mostly the rape/murders and the child killings.
The most amazing thing about the book, I’ve concluded in the 24 hours since I’ve finished it, is that Simon really does a remarkable job of extending his sympathy to almost every that he encounters in the course of this book. He’s got no love in his heart for people who murder in cold blood, and especially not those who victimize the truly innocent, but everyone else is played with a sympathetic hand. And that’s remarkable, since there’s a lot of people that lock horns or have ill will towards each other—detectives who dislike each others’ styles, the largely black citizenry of inner city Baltimore’s distrust of the police, the prosecutors versus the detectives versus the defense attorneys—but Simon allows that everyone has a point and portrays conflicts between people as usually not being a matter of right versus wrong, but of circumstances that are out of any individual’s control. This is a theme that he developed more substantially in the fictional world of “The Wire”, but you can really see that eye that casts sympathy to every person’s circumstances already in play here. It’s a much different thing than the fetish for “balance” observed by the lazier assholes of the journalism world, where people are pitted against each other and their arguments/beliefs drained of real meaning for fear that someone will actually take something seriously in this world. Above all, Simon is, while a seemingly grouchy and cynical person, a real humanist, as grouchy and cynical people often are.
Will we see an outcry from the professional “Christian” set, the Dobsons, Perkins, and all the rest about this story of heinous abuse in Mississippi? Don’t hold your breath. They are too busy panicking over the Brown Menace and the Homosexual Agenda. Between the Taser misuse and abuse and the treatment detailed in this story, there are much bigger fish to fry. (CNN):
Represented by attorneys with the Southern Poverty Law Center, Erica and nine other girls housed at Columbia are suing the state, claiming they endured a range of sexual and physical abuse, including shackling. Don Desper, a licensed therapist and former employee at Columbia who opposed the practice, told CNN it was used to prevent the teens from escaping.In Ohio, things aren’t any better. Read below the fold.In a handwritten affidavit, a 15-year-old girl described a male guard molesting her. She wrote: “He came inside my cell half way half of his body and he started touching me and he tryed (sic) to kiss me and then he left he came back with my snack in his hand and he opened my cell again and he started grabbing me around my waist and he tryed (sic) to stick his hands in my pants and I started crying.”
When the lawsuit was filed in 2007, a U.S. Justice Department monitor was making periodic inspections at Columbia as part of a 2005 settlement with Mississippi in a previous case. The Justice investigation that led to that settlement found Columbia youths were hog-tied, forced to strip and eat their own vomit and were held in isolation in what was called the “Dark Room,” a windowless room with a hole in the floor used as a toilet. Read the Justice Department report that describes girls being shackled to poles
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I really, really like the design of this T-shirt, I have to say before I say anything else. It’s brilliant. Really captures the sense of shame that rape victims have, a sense of shame that, in a just world, would be the property of rapists, who are all too often belligerently unashamed of what they did.
In a fair world, saying you were raped should cause you no more shame than saying, “I was mugged,” or “I was carjacked.” In our world, however, it’s a crushing thing to talk about. I feel guilty bringing it up on this blog that it’s happened to me, though I know intellectually that it’s very important for those of us who can talk about to talk about it, to get the message to other victims: You aren’t alone. Which of course is the main attraction of this T-shirt designed by Jennifer Baumgardner as something of a sequel to her controversial “I had an abortion” T-shirt. (Hat tip.)
I appreciate the idea that visibility is critical to getting people to understand that women who get abortions or rape victims—two groups dehumanized and demonized in an effort to strip them of their rights—are human beings. I was in full support of the “I had an abortion” T-shirt, because to me, it’s not complicated. The anti-choice movement tries like hell to erase women’s existence, or at least our individuality, and the T-shirt undermines that. It also clarifies that abortion is nothing to be ashamed of. For me, “I had an abortion” should be as morally loaded as “I had a Pap smear”. The underpinnings of the moral angst about abortion—the idea that a woman has no right to pry loose a flag a man has planted in her (even if he agrees with her decision, as most men in this case do), or that she should be punished for having sex—offend me to the core, and that many women go through anguish over getting abortions depresses me. They shouldn’t feel bad for having sex or having autonomy. In fact, they should be proud of themselves for taking care of themselves despite all the misogynist messages out there that women don’t have a right to take care of ourselves. People balked at the idea that the “I had an abortion” T-shirts smacked of that mortal female sin of pride, but I applaud it. Women should be proud of doing right by themselves in a world where that’s socially disavowed.
I took this screenshot of the first page I pulled up with the search term “young women facebook” because I think the real moral of this story is going to get lost as right wingers sink their teeth into it and go nuts. (Via.)
In DeKalb County, Georgia, a grand jury found that 1 in 12 fatal shootings by the police are unjustified and in one case a medical examiner planted evidence to help officers. (AP, hat tip, Tasered While Black):
A special grand jury questioned in a report released Thursday whether the right training is being provided to a suburban Atlanta police department whose officers killed 12 people in 2006, four times as many as the year before.Given that swill, what kind of solution do you think is necessary? How about handing the officers Tasers to run wild with?The panel said that one of those shootings by DeKalb County police was unjustified, and that one of the two officers involved should be investigated for potential criminal prosecution.
It also asked the district attorney’s office to determine whether someone from the county medical examiner’s officer planted a knife at the scene after the unjustified Sept. 12, 2006, fatal shooting of 21-year-old Lorenzo Matthews.
The panel also recommended that all law enforcement officers, including those in DeKalb County, get more training at night, in use of force and how to de-escalate situations. It also suggested that law enforcement officers should be equipped with Tasers, and that all law enforcement officers should undergo alcohol and drug screening immediately after a use of deadly force incident. DeKalb County police currently don’t use Tasers.Given the growing Taser files here, does this sound like a good idea?
Another case — and today’s video — are below the fold.
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I find it interesting that the NY Times published this article about bullying at school and then published this one about workplace bullies. I thought that this meant that the Times was doing a series, but unfortunately, they’re not. Which is too bad, because I think bullying is an interesting area to explore. It’s like there’s two worlds in America—the officially recognized one where people are kind and polite, and the one lurking right underneath where bullying happens.
The article about Billy Wolfe from Fayetteville, Arkansas is really the sort of feature story that the Times still excels at. It really captures the essence of bullying. The kid selected is picked for reasons lost to the mists of time, or most likely for arbitrary reasons that were rationalized after the fact. The abuse is back-breaking and non-stop. Most school officials look the other way, because, let’s face it, there’s almost something biological in people that makes them dislike the unpopular even if the unpopular are unpopular for no reason at all.
But what I really liked about the article was that it really clues you in to why bullies bully. Let’s face it; they’re proud of their behavior. Picking on other people to make yourself feel more powerful has this ability to make other people believe that you’re something special, at least for short periods of time. I got bullied in school a lot, but it really petered out in high school, and I think it’s because kids grow up and the social rewards of being brutish start to peter out as kids get more sophisticated. But Wolfe is 15, and so he’s in the thick of it.
