Civil Rights – Page 10 – The Wrongologist

Friday Music Break – April 10, 2015

Friday’s Music break is late, but worth your time. When Walter Scott was first pulled over in North Charleston SC, much of the initial traffic stop was caught on the dash-cam of Police Officer Michael T. Slager. These dash-cams capture video and audio from inside the police car in addition to what transpires in the traffic stop.

The dash-cam video was released by the South Carolina authorities on Thursday, showing Walter Scott getting out of his car and running away after a traffic stop moments before he was killed by Officer Slager. As Slager drives up behind the green Mercedes-Benz driven by Scott, there’s a song playing in the background inside the police car. That song is “What It’s Like,” by Everlast:

Sample Lyrics:
We’ve all seen a man at the liquor store beggin’ for your change
The hair on his face is dirty, dread-locked, and full of mange
He asks a man for what he could spare, with shame in his eyes
“Get a job, you f*** slob, ” is all he replies
God forbid, you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes
‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to sing the blues

It is the last song Walter Scott heard before being gunned down by a killer cop. For those of you who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see song on YouTube here.

Does this song playing in the background of the cop car tell us anything about patrolman Slager? Probably not. It was a #1 song in 1998 from an album that went double-platinum.

But the song’s message, of “Don’t Prejudge” means that it should be the anthem of an America that wants an end to police violence. We are a country where you are 55 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

One reason is that many law enforcement officers consider failure to comply with the officers’ demands as an excuse for using lethal force. Police have become so militarized in modern America that we are gradually losing the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

Cops need to make quick judgements. Everyone accepts that.

But, “What it’s Like” should become a part of their training.

Indiana’s Bridge Too Far

We all have heard about Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA). Republicans are arguing that Indiana’s law is no different from the federal law passed in 1993 that Democrats voted for and Mr. Clinton signed. That is untrue. As Think Progress points out, Indiana’s bill goes much further than the 1993 federal law or any other state law:

There are several important differences in the Indiana bill but the most striking is Section 9. Under that section, a “person” (which under the law includes not only an individual but also any organization, partnership, LLC, corporation, company, firm, church, religious society, or other entity) whose “exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened” can use the law as “a claim or defense…regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.”

So here is the difference: Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state RFRA statutes says anything like that, only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, and the new Arkansas RFRA law contain similar language.

Garrett Epps in The Atlantic points out that the federal RFRA and the other 18 state RFRAs protect private citizens’ religious beliefs from their government. Indiana’s is the only law that explicitly applies to disputes between private citizens. This means it could be used by individuals to justify discrimination against individuals that might otherwise be protected under law.

That’s the difference. The Indiana law is a blanket permission to discriminate, plain and simple. It’s effectively a “Stand Your Ground” law for bigots. If you choose to discriminate against someone, you can claim the law as a defense if you feel your “exercise of religion is substantially burdened.”

Back to Section 9, which also defines a person in this case as any organization, partnership, LLC, corporation, company, firm, church, religious society, or other entity. So, if an Indiana business wanted to refuse to serve LGBT customers on religious grounds, they could theoretically claim this law as a defense, and say that allowing them to shop there would “substantially burden” the business’s “exercise of religion”.

If you doubt the original intent of the Indiana RFRA, check out the photo of Gov. Pence’s signing ceremony. You will see nuns in full regalia, along with 2 anti-gay lobbyists as well. If you missed it, you can see it here. Maybe its not surprising that the Governor’s people won’t reveal the names of all who are in the picture. Indiana had the lowest voter turnout percentage in the Nation in 2014 at 27.8%. Maybe Indiana voters need to take charge of their own situation.

Those on the religious right who hold political office continually promote a social agenda as an act of political resistance to our secular world. This problem has been with us since before we became a country. It was part of most of the original 13 state constitutions. Except for Pennsylvania, every other state’s constitution required you to be a Christian believer to hold office, or in some cases, only Protestants could hold office, since being a Christian seemed too broad a definition.

William Penn only required an acknowledgement in some sort of creator, leaving only atheists outside of the political arena.

Those that want the laws of god in heaven to become the laws of the USA here on earth see Indiana’s RFRA as a political victory. Conservative Christians vote for politicians who will prosecute various forms of “sinful” behavior, especially if sexually defined, like abortion, online pornography websites like hdpornvideo.xxx, pornography magazines, and homosexuality. Some want to outlaw certain books, or music. Some go further, and bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors, while some will beat a gay person to death every now and then.

Now they are back to passing laws against “sin” while pretending they are upholding religious liberty. This is a country where Christianity is overwhelmingly the majority religion. To carry on as if its followers are a persecuted minority is abjectly false. Many of them carry little copies of the Constitution. Too bad they don’t understand what it says.

The Wrongologist is sick of eating their shit, and so are the majority of Americans.

Is Compulsory Voting a Problem, or a Solution?

At a town hall event in Cleveland last Wednesday, President Obama (nearly) said the US should make voting compulsory, like it is in Australia. Eleven countries, including Australia, Brazil, and Singapore, enforce compulsory voting laws. Another 11 have compulsory voting laws, but don’t enforce them.

The response to Obama’s suggestion was predictable. Fox News host Andrea Tantaros along with her fellow panelists on the show “Outnumbered” on Thursday, bashed Mr. Obama’s suggestion, saying:

Do we really want everybody voting? I don’t think so.

Co-host Melissa Francis said:

If you’re not engaged enough to vote, please don’t…Stay home.

Meanwhile, another co-host, Harris Faulkner, argued that mandatory voting would be un-American because our military:

Fought for our right to decide for ourselves.

Whatever that means. The Wrongologist does not support mandatory voting, but not for the vacuous reasons you might hear on Fox News.

Compulsory voting raises questions. First, is voting a right or a duty? If it is a right, then participation in elections is voluntary. If it is a duty, then participation should be mandatory. In countries where voting is considered a duty, voting is compulsory and is regulated in their constitutions. Some countries impose sanctions (like a fine) on non-voters.

Second, what would happen if all citizens voted? Studies show that turnout increases quite a bit. A Harvard study indicated that there are secondary gains as well:

• Compulsory voting could reduce the role of money in politics. Political parties would not spend as much money on their get-out-the-vote efforts since high turn-out would already be ensured and would be fairly inelastic
• It might increase political awareness and engagement. Compulsory voting would change the ways in which candidates and political parties develop campaign strategies. For example, it might lead to fewer negative campaigns featuring attack ads
• Compulsory voting might increase government’s relevance by bringing in groups that are underrepresented among today’s voters, since the population that shows up for US elections is whiter, older, richer and more educated than the general population

But, America is a place where our “right to be left alone” is foundational. Would being legally compelled to vote deprive anyone of a part of their liberty? Yes, if you believe voting is a right, not a duty. And how big would that “deprivation” be, compared to what we have already lost of our 1st and 4th Amendment rights since 9/11?

Perhaps the final question is: Isn’t one goal of a representative democracy to maximize voter participation? Today, registering to vote isn’t easy for every American, but it ought to be. It shouldn’t be the job of the individual election boards to say who is worthy of registration.

It should be the state’s responsibility to issue every citizen a voter registration card. If the state wants to maximize voter participation, it should mail a voter ID card to each of us. How we would deal with those of us who slip through the cracks would need to be worked out.

We have seen the way that barriers to voting emerge. They create enough of a hurdle that a significant percentage of voters fail to clear it. It is not a terrible thing to demand that we have eligibility requirements for voters, but they are often enforced inequitably, and are enough of a nuisance that a significant minority will end up not voting. For the past decade in America, many individual states have been raising barriers, because barriers to voting confer partisan advantage. With mandatory voter registration, the state’s job would be to reduce the barriers to the lowest possible level.

It is arguable if citizens should be compelled to vote, or not. Wrongo believes that is the individual’s business. Yet, as voter participation drops, a self-selected minority determines who runs the country. They then set policy that primarily reflects their interests.

That isn’t the kind of society we need. We should want our country to see all citizens as full political equals, not just in theory, but in fact. The more that barriers to voting rise in America, and the further voter participation falls, the less we resemble that ideal society.

So, issue a universal voter registration card. Move voting to the weekend, or have an entire voting week. Make it frictionless, so it’s not a big effort. Go and vote, say hi to the neighbors, and then go home to view the results.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Monday Wake Up Call – March 9, 2015

Today’s Wake Up is for a few people and their terrible ideas. Sadly, they reflect the current state of our nation. The Selma march to Montgomery was about voting rights, voting rights that became codified into law in The Voting Rights Act of 1965. This photo taken during the march to Montgomery on March 25, 1965 shows a young black man in white face making the point about what it took to be a voter in Alabama in the 1960’s:
Charles Fentress Jr., The Louisville Courier-Journal

But, despite all of our progress, open (and covert) hostility to civil rights and minorities are still with us, even at the Selma commemoration. You have to look no further than South Carolina’s black GOP Sen. Tim Scott for proof. Sen. Scott (R-SC), was an honorary co-chairman of the Selma trip. He is the only African-American Republican in the Senate. He said voting rights and the commemoration of Selma should be “de-coupled”:

The issue of voting rights legislation and the issue of Selma, we ought to have an experience that brings people together and not make it into a political conversation…

We should “de-couple” civil rights from the struggle that necessitated it? He wants warm and fuzzy, because that’s the only way some lawmakers can stay busy disenfranchising whole groups of Americans, and still smile when they attend the commemoration of the Selma march.

Taken to its limit, what Sen. Scott wants us to do is to now pretend Selma isn’t about voting, because that means the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary. And that makes the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Shelby County (Alabama) vs. Holder, which effectively gutted the main provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the right way to look at the state of voting rights in America today. Sadly, that’s all wrong.

An example of overt hostility was shown by a billboard, within sight of Mr. Obama and the Edmund Pettus Bridge where he spoke on Saturday. The billboard depicts KKK founder and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest with the Confederate Flag in its background:

It is hard to see, but under the image of Forrest is his motto: “Keep the Skeer on ‘Em.”

Indeed. This brings home to us again the William Faulkner quote, “The past is not dead; it is not even past”. In fact, it is all too present. Time to wake up, America!

Here is Barenaked Ladies doing “Brian Wilson”. Many know that Wilson, the key singer-songwriter of the Beach Boys, had a nervous breakdown in the mid-1960’s at the height of the group’s fame. He later took to his bed for 3 years. Wilson had a psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, who took advantage of him and his money, and is mentioned in the Ladies’ song.

America, you are now “lying’ in bed just like Brian Wilson did”. Republicans are your Dr. Landy. Wilson said that he cured himself by trucking in sand to his house for inspiration. America, get your sand! Here is “Brian Wilson”:

Interestingly, Wilson later covered the song in 2000, on his album, “Live at Roxy Theater”.

Your Monday Hot Links:

Lockheed Martin claims it now has the ability to generate cheap energy from nuclear fusion with little waste or global warming. Lockheed calls this “Compact Fusion” and says it can build a reactor small enough to fit on a truck that could provide enough power for a city of up to 100,000 people. Invest at your own risk.

A Google research team is developing a model to measure the trustworthiness of a web page, rather than how many hits it gets. The system, not yet live, would count the number of incorrect facts within a page. The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the Internet. Facts that the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings. Searching for web sites based on their truthiness? We’ll see.

A cyber-attack in late December involved a smart refrigerator. C/NET reported that 100,000 devices sent upwards of 750,000 spam emails. Consumers have virtually no way to detect or fix infections when they do occur. So, your fridge could have spam two ways…

Like humans, apes make irrational economic decisions. New research suggests that choice biases, such as loss aversion, might be evolutionarily ancient. Oh, and they found that male apes were much more susceptible to bad decisions than were female apes. It’s not your fault, its evolution that’s to blame when you buy an RV without telling your wife.

New York’s Lincoln Center paid the heirs of Avery Fisher $15 million so they could name Avery Fisher Hall after David Geffen. Fisher’s family had threatened to sue if his name was removed, so Lincoln Center, looking to raise $500 million, really wanted to take Geffen up on a $100 million donation in return for naming rights. So, they paid up, and now there’s going to be a David Geffen Hall in New York.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 8, 2015

March is Wrongo’s favorite month, because it has March Madness™ and Daylight Savings Time.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. On Jan. 14, 1965, newly elected Alabama Gov. George Wallace said in his inaugural address in front of the Alabama State Capitol:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people… I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny…and I say…segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.

On March 7, 1965, the first Selma to Montgomery march began and ended with the events of “Bloody Sunday,” when 600 civil rights marchers, asking for the right of black Alabama residents to register to vote, were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

On March 9, 1965, another march by 2,500 this time, including many who had come from other parts of the country, was led by Dr. King and others to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where a court order prevented them from going all the way to Montgomery.

Finally, on March 21, 1965, Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson ruled that the march could proceed and, the 4-night march began in Selma. 8,000 started the march, but only 300 were allowed to make the entire 54-mile trek to Montgomery. Let us return to March 25, 1965, and read some of Dr. King’s words to the nation that day:

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take”?…I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever.”
How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

On to a busy week in the laughable. The ACA was on trial in the Supreme Court:

The DOJ cites Ferguson, MO police for institutional racism:

Netanyahu and the Republicans see things the same way:

Hillary’s email flap may or may not be a big problem, but it reminds America of Bill:

Some folks seem to be changing their minds about Hillary after the email flap:

Friday Music Break – March 6, 2015

Today we celebrate Eddy Grant. This politically-grounded songwriter had his first #1 UK hit in 1968 as performer and songwriter for the group The Equals, with his song “Baby Come Back“. It is worth a listen if you are a Grant fan, because it is highly unlikely that you have heard it.

But today, we focus on two Grant protest tunes, one which most have undoubtedly heard, and another that most Americans have probably not heard before.

First, the most likely unheard “Gimme Hope Jo’anna“. During the apartheid regime, “Jo’anna” meant Johannesburg. So the song is about the apartheid regime in South Africa, and was subsequently banned there. It is unusual to portray an evil regime as a woman. The play on the name of Johannesburg, the upbeat, happy sounding tune make this a rare protest song. Here is Eddy Grant doing “Gimme Hope Jo’anna” live in London in 2008 celebrating Nelson Mandela’s birthday accompanied by an undistinguished Kurt Darren, a South African music personality:

Sample Lyrics:
Well Jo’anna she runs a country
She runs in Durban and the Transvaal
She makes a few of her people happy, oh
She don’t care about the rest at all
She’s got a system they call apartheid
It keeps a brother in a subjection
But maybe pressure will make Jo’anna see
How everybody could a live as one

Next, the song most have heard, “Electric Avenue”. The song’s lyrics refer to the 1981 Brixton riot in London, the title referring to Electric Avenue, a street in the Brixton area of London. Here is “Electric Avenue”:

Sample Lyrics:
Now in the street, there is violence
And-and a lots of work to be done
No place to hang out our washing
And-and I can’t blame all on the sun

Despite that fact that you can dance to them, Grant’s songs are pointed criticism of the racial politics of the 1980’s.

See you on Sunday.

Is Snowden the First, or Last of His Kind?

Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right saw “CitizenFour” a few days after the Oscars. It is interesting that the Academy recognized both “American Sniper” and “CitizenFour.” The former bagged one Oscar, for Best Sound Editing, while the latter won for Best Feature Length Documentary. One made big bucks, the other is already on HBO. Both celebrate heroes, one a tool of the Global War on Terror, the other a whistleblower computer geek who saw that the War on Terror was compromising our Constitution.

Laura Poitras accepted her Oscar, but Edward Snowden couldn’t, because of that little “treason” thing.

As Kunstler says: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

He [Snowden] appeared to know exactly what he was doing, and with quiet, unshakable moral commitment. And then he disappeared down the gullet of America’s modern times nemesis, Russia, where he continues to taunt with his very existence, the NSA gameboys, lizard-lawyers and puppet-masters who cordially invite him back home to face, ho-ho, our vaunted justice system. Of course any six-year-old understands that they would love to jam Snowden down some federal supermax memory hole as an example to any other waffling NSA code-jockey having second thoughts about reading your grandpa’s phone records.

Snowden is a much more interesting hero than the sniper, Chris Kyle. The documentary follows Snowden, who was hiding in plain sight in Hong Kong in the spring of 2013, after he stole over 220,000 files belonging to the National Security Agency. Glen Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras later began revealing to the public the extent to which the American government was spying on everyone’s electronic life while ignoring that pesky US Constitution, and setting the USA on a track towards becoming a police state.

Listening to Ed talk, you’re pleasantly surprised. He gets the concepts, he articulates them beautifully.

Towards the end of the movie, one of the characters (Greenwald?) makes an amazing statement. He says:

What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead.

Is that what we’re all fighting for? Liberty? Is that a concept that unites the left and the right in America?

You’d expect people to be up in arms about “CitizenFour” but the truth is they just don’t care. That’s our government’s job. If we don’t let the agencies run wild, ISIS will attack Kansas. So we suspend your rights for a while. That’s right, the head fake of fighting “terrorism” has caused us to let our First Amendment freedoms go down the drain, and if someone like Snowden blows the whistle, they are a traitor, or a pariah.

Snowden sparked a debate about how to preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the surveillance state would have continued, and most people might never have known about the government’s efforts.

There’s something hollow in the soul of America today. Right and wrong used to matter. But now, the government works to keep the average person off balance via subterfuge and fear. And very few of us grasp the facts, even when they’re staring us in the face.

So, we’re dependent on lone wolves to help us see. Snowden says he’s only the first, that the government may get him, but others will follow in his wake. Really?

Once upon a time, “CitizenFour” would have incited a national debate. Now it’s just grist for the mill, Snowden’s character has already been assassinated by the main stream media, and his Oscar-winning movie will come and go.

All of the political debating about immigration, DHS funding, taxes, and ISIS are the sideshow. The main event is how they’ve got our number and we’re already living in 1984. And you believed it couldn’t happen here.

The truth is it already has. We need more Snowdens. People who will say, as Snowden did:

There are things worth dying for.

Today’s Reason for Rejecting Conservative Republicanism

Yesterday, we highlighted an effort by a county Republican Party organization to establish Christianity as the state religion of Idaho. Turns out, that idea was smack in the mainstream of Republican ideas: A national poll of Republican primary voters conducted by Public Policy Polling finds that 57% percent of these voters support establishing Christianity as the national religion, while 30% oppose making Christianity the nation’s religion. Well, this means that 57% of Republicans hate America plain and simple. They want to turn our nation into something out of the Dark Ages.

A number of red states have passed statutes forbidding the implementation of Islam-based sharia law in their states, but Republicans apparently have no misgivings about turning the US into a Christian theocracy. The poll’s cross-tabs reveal that support for making Christianity the official religion is strongest among supporters of Mike Huckabee (94%), Rick Perry (83%), and Ben Carson (78%).

Now the poll was small, only sampling 316 Republican primary voters. Sample sizes of 300-600 are the norm for national telephone pollsters. While 316 is on the low end of that, PPP says that its margin of error is ± 5.5%, so some will say that it can’t scale up. However, PPP has been very accurate in the past.

The same poll also found that 66% do not believe in global warming, and a plurality (49%), do not believe in evolution. So, not only do they wish to establish a national religion, but it appears that their version of Christianity is one that is at odds with the scientific consensus in climatology and biology.

These data were buried deep (starting on page 14 of 47) in a report about how Scott Walker leads in the national eye test competition among Repubs.

Here’s a repeat of yesterday’s reminder: The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. There’s a reason that our Founding Fathers wanted to establish a strict separation of Church and State, and the poll results bear out that wisdom. If things were left up to today’s Republican primary voters, we’d already be a theocracy, perhaps as self-righteous and intolerant as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

The ignorance of our Constitution displayed by the poll results speaks to a voting populace that simply doesn’t care about tolerance, multicultural diversity, and most certainly, not about religious freedom.

America ought to be better than this. Instead, a significant portion of the electorate would be perfectly happy to turn this into a Christian theocracy…a recipe for tyranny by these good, God-fearing Christian patriots.

Our Founding Fathers lived at the end of a 300-year period where Europe had been racked by wars of religion, fought between adherents of various “Christian” sects, and they were only a little over a hundred years removed from the English civil wars of the mid-1600’s which were strongly influenced by religion. The colonies themselves mirrored Europe’s religious division, Anglicans in Virginia, Puritans in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland, and many German religious refugees in New York and Pennsylvania. They had darned good reasons to not want any religion to be given preeminence.

And today, we see religious violence in Asia (Burma, India, and China) and in the Middle East. Why would we want to revisit that here, in a nation that knows better?

From fear of Jihadi John, to fear of immunizations, to denial of climate change, it doesn’t seem that Conservative American Christians are comfortable with the idea of critical thinking; it seems to require too much of them. How would atheists, or non-Christians of all stripes survive under the US Christian state? Luckily, that would take a Constitutional Amendment, which could prove very difficult to enact.

How did Conservatives, noted in the not-so-distant past for a fierce commitment to logic, become such prisoners of their various religions?

Did Chicago Police Run a “Black Site”?

“At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact”. − George Orwell

The Guardian is reporting that the Chicago police have used a “Black Site” for years:

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units.
Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights…

Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian reported that alleged activities there included the following:

• Detainees were kept out of the official police booking system
• Persons in custody were often shackled for long periods of time
• Attorneys were denied access to their clients
• There were frequent beatings, causing head injuries

If this is happening in Chicago, then could other cities also be operating illegal detention sites?

A series of US Supreme Court cases over the past 100 years have codified the rights of suspects under our system, but they may not have protected many suspects in Chicago. The Atlantic interviewed Tracy Siska, executive director of the Chicago Justice Project and a criminologist who wrote a story for The Guardian on military interrogation tactics in the city. Siska spoke about the Homan Square abuses of Constitutional rights: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

What used to happen at Homan Square is that prior to a year ago, if you get arrested and you get brought down anywhere in any district, you would not pop up in the city computer as being arrested until they processed the police report, which could take anywhere from an hour to 15 hours.
If they “arrested” you, then they have to report it. But if they don’t “arrest you,” nefarious things could happen and they could interrogate you without a lawyer. And they would move you around from district to district. So [for example] if the family shows up or the lawyer shows up and they say you aren’t here but you are, they’ve denied you access. But if they say you’re at [district] 17, then move you to 15, and then 12, they can question you without counsel. At Homan Square they don’t process paperwork about your arrest. You’re just gone. No one knows.
At some point they have to do the paperwork and prosecute you. After they get your confession, you wind up back in the paperwork.

One implication of Siska’s interview is that the Constitution-shredding actions of the Chicago PD ended in 2014. Again, according to Siska: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)

About a year ago, [the rule changed]…After arriving at a CPD facility, [officers] have 20 minutes to one hour to put you into the system, and you appear on the system city-wide. Any officer anywhere in the city can find where you are. And anywhere they move you to, every time you move, [officers] have 20 minutes to one hour to put you in so you show up on a computer. Each time you move, your right to phone calls and Miranda rights starts all over again.

Belated exposure of the possible Constitutional abuses at Homan Square proves once again − as if we need more proof − how deeply the police forces in the US have been corrupted by the military-industrial complex and by our political enablers. It shows the extent that policing has become more like an occupation army (as it has been perceived in minority communities for a very, very long time).

There is no evidence that any loss of Constitutional rights, no matter how appalling, will wake up a solid majority of people in this country anytime soon. Like the Orwell quote says, we have agreed not to discuss some very important things, like Constitutional rights in our cities.

Not just that. We had a $4 trillion war based on lies that we didn’t discuss. We had a $1 trillion dollar financial meltdown. Not discussed. We learned that the NSA “collects it all.” Ho-hum.

“Mistakes happen”, and we just move on, talking about “50 Shades of Gray”. Americans have made their screwed-up priorities quite clear. They’ve given up on reality and have decided to go with fantasy.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 15, 2015

Big week, what with Cease Fire #2 in Ukraine, or as Moon of Alabama calls it, Minsk 2.0. Mr. Obama is bombarded by advice about how to move forward, most of it in favor of providing military aid to the government in Kiev. He is trying to balance that advice against the cornerstone of his foreign policy: “Don’t do stupid stuff.” Like some other Obama principles, this has a very high Wimp Factor, particularly if compared to GW Bush’s “bring it on”.

Then there is Mr. Obama’s strategy on Syria and dealing with ISIS. This week, he asked for a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), a mere six months after we began bombing them. So, a few Democrats criticized the proposal as too broad and too vague. They say it could leave the next president with enormous war-making latitude. Republicans want to go bigger.

Obama’s AUMF proposal is an invitation to Congress to offer its own expansive view of the president’s war-making authority. Can Congress do better?

Mr. Obama’s Ukraine dilemma:

Congressional chicken hawks debate the “enduring” war:

In other words, The AUMF, after Congress gets through with it, could be a disaster waiting to happen. The entire situation could devolve into another decade plus of ground war in the Middle East.

So, here in the middle of cartoons, is the anti-war song “Highwire”, by the Rolling Stones from their 1991 album, “Flashpoint”. Remember 1991, that was Gulf War 1.0. There´s only ONE reason for more war: Mo money. That’s the bottom line. Is this song on Obama’s iPhone? It should be. Lindsay, and John, this song’s for you:

Sample Lyric:
We sell ’em missiles, We sell ’em tanks
We give ’em credit, You can call up the bank
It’s just a business, You can pay us in crude
(That’s oil you know…)
You’ll love these toys, just go play out your feuds
We got no pride, don’t know whose boots to lick
We act so greedy, makes me sick sick sick
…
We walk the highwire;
Sending the men up to the front line;
Hoping they don’t catch the hell fire;
With hot guns,
And cold, cold lies.

In other news, some guy killed 3 Muslims, but nobody thinks it’s a big deal:

State’s rights vs. Gay Rights is back on the table for those who think it never left:

Jon Stewart says he’s out:

Finally, Valentine’s day covered for a lot of feelings:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Civil Rights