Someone should tell Scott Brown: If he voted with the Democrats more often, this wouldn't be happening in his home state. Of course, I'm assuming this problem is repeated all over the country. No wonder the Taser incidents keep going up:

Massachusetts spends far less than other states on training for police officers, committing less money to its police academies than it did 20 years ago, according to a state legislative report that says the result is a fractured system with an outdated curriculum that fails to keep officers abreast of the latest trends in law enforcement.

Even academy instructors are falling behind on key topics like Taser and pepper spray use, firearms use, defensive tactics, and first aid, says a draft report by the Legislature’s Municipal Police Training Commission.

“There are a number of police officers, because of the lack of money departments have, they’re not getting any [specialized] training at all,’’ said Kenneth Scanzio, legislative director and vice president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police and a member of the commission. “There’s a lot we have to work on to get our police training to better standards.’’

Lance Mannion: Vampires, Wraith, banksters, and other villains meet for dinner at the End of the Universe

Truth Wins Out : Haters, Hating [an entertaining roundup of anti-gay reactions to the Prop 8 Decision]

Wonk Room: Boehner derides police officers and teachers as 'special interests'

Blue Gal: The GOP is absolutely right

The Poor Man Institute: Pezzi Dispenser

Wonkette: Why is Harry Reid giving his monkey friends all the good drugs?

DOWNLOADS: (1212)

PLAYS: (1685)

Embed

It was a little amusing that Fox News contributor Wayne Simmons this weekend attacked WikiLeaks as "a terrorist organization that uses the First Amendment of the United States to hide behind."

Talk about projection -- for anyone associated with Fox News.

Because Glenn Beck has made it perfectly clear on his Fox News show this week that he has no intention whatsoever of backing down from his demonization and scapegoating of the Tides Foundation on Fox, even after one of his TV acolytes, ginned up by Beck's repeated smears and attacks on Tides, engaged Oakland police in a massive shootout that wounded two police officers, en route to a planned terrorist attack on Tides' Bay Area offices that no doubt would have left a number of innocent people dead had he not been apprehended beforehand.

Indeed, all this week he stepped it up: For much of the week, he pretended that the shootout hadn't even happened, refusing to even mention it in segments featuring Netroots Nation panel remarks in which the planned terrorist attack was the de facto context. On Wednesday, as you can see above, he continued to smear Tides' work by claiming it promotes an ideology identical to that held by the Weather Underground. Then on Friday, he made up his own "facts" in order to compare it to a sniper shooting in Oakland that had no known political component.

Make no mistake: Glenn Beck has been inciting acts of terrorist violence, and the Byron Williams case clearly establishes it -- even though it is far from the first such case. It in fact was preceded by several similar cases in which the dehumanizing rhetoric, scapegoating and conspiracist smears promoted by Fox clearly played a powerful role in the violence that ensued:

-- Jim David Adkisson's shooting attack on a Knoxville Unitarian church. Adkisson left behind a manifesto that repeated numerous right-wing talking points generated by Fox commentators and specifically cited a Bernard Goldberg book. His library at home was stocked with books by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

-- Richard Poplawski's shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers, because he believed a conspiracy theory that President Obama intended to take Americans' guns away from them, and he reportedly believed the cops had arrived to carry it out. Poplawski, a white supremacist, liked to post Beck videos about FEMA concentration camps to the Stormfront comments board.

-- Scott Roeder's assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Roeder was heavily involved in Operation Rescue and avidly read its newsletters -- which featured weekly pieces from Bill O'Reilly, including several attacking Tiller as a "baby killer" -- and its website, which liked to feature O'Reilly videos attacking Dr. Tiller. Indeed, O'Reilly had indulged a high-profile and unusually obsessive (not to mention vicious) jihad against Tiller, resulting in 42 such attacks on Tiller, 24 of which referred to him generically as a "baby killer."

The Byron Williams case was functionally a shot across Fox News' bow: a warning that it is playing with extreme fire by allowing Beck to recklessly demonize specific targets and to inflame his audience against them by imputing the most extreme and nefarious motives to them. In the case of Tides, Beck has been claiming all along that they are trying to "brainwash your children" -- a charge that always raises extremely visceral reactions.

If Fox allows this continue, then eventually someone -- someone who eats, breathes and lives Fox News, as so many right-wingers do these days -- is going to succeed. Eventually, someone is going to walk into (or drive up to) the offices of some group that Beck has singled out as being part of a nefarious progressive "cancer" that is "destroying America" -- whether it is the Tides Foundation, or the ACLU, or the SEIU, someone at MSNBC, or from ACORN -- and shoot the place up or set off a bomb.

And then not just Glenn Beck, but Fox News and all its affiliates, are going to have blood on their hands. And there will not be any hiding it or pretending otherwise.

Beck wants to pretend that all he's done is "discuss" the Tides Foundation -- but in fact he's consistently portrayed them as nefarious key players in the progressive "conspiracy" to "destroy America from within", and he's cast them in a particularly slimy role: propagandizing your unsuspecting children. Is it any wonder someone decided to "take them out"?

We can talk until we're blue in the face about how profoundly irresponsible Fox and Beck are being. But matters have reached the point now that it is necessary to call them all out as an organization that is aiding and abetting domestic terrorism.

It must stop.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (547)

PLAYS: (674)

Embed

CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are reporting that Judge Susan Bolton has blocked key portions of SB1070, Arizona's police-state immigration, from taking effect tomorrow, when the law was due to be enacted.

According to Fox's reporters, Bolton has issued an injunction blocking the state from enacting the portions of the bill that require police officers to request immigration papers and which make failure to possess immigration papers a crime.

More details shortly.

UPDATE 1: Details from AP:

The law will still take effect Thursday, but without many of the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws. The judge also put on hold a part of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton put those controversial sections on hold until the courts resolve the issues.

UPDATE 2: Here's the ruling itself. Plus: The New York Times has more.

DOWNLOADS: (1794)

PLAYS: (3906)

Embed

C&L readers will remember the case of Jerry Kane, the traveling "sovereign citizen" who, with his 16-year-old son in tow, toured the country giving seminars on how to take advantage of the current foreclosure crisis by the usual fantasy-based schemes of Patriot-movement pseudo-legal "constitutionalism".

All that, of course, before he and the boy opened fire on two police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas, after which they were mowed down themselves in a blizzard of police bullets in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

If you watch the video, and the others Kane left behind, you'll see that the scheme he was selling entailed creating "strawman" companies that would enable a "sovereign citizen" to then claim ownership, by virtue of their sovereignty (often defined in divine terms), of whatever properties they set their sights upon. As one account noted:

Seminars of this type usually teach that each person has a real self and a “corporate self” that is a fabrication of the government, and that banks cannot legitimately lend money that belongs to their depositors.

“It’s mumbo jumbo; it’s magic words; it’s abracadabra,” Ms. MacNab said.

You'll note also that Kane had been promoting this scheme in the Seattle area:

Jim Jenkins, a former mortgage broker in Seattle who attended one of Mr. Kane’s seminars in April, said that Mr. Kane had been largely congenial, but that his anger had flared when he recalled a traffic stop earlier that month in New Mexico. Mr. Kane was arrested and jailed on charges of driving while his license was suspended or revoked and concealing his identity.

Well, surprise, surprise: Someone operating under a scheme awfully similar to the one Kane was promoting recently popped up in the news in Seattle. My old friend Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times has the story, involving a woman who appears to have taken up residence in a vacant $5 million mansion in Kirkland, across the lake from Seattle:

That's odd, neighbors thought. The West of Market neighborhood in Kirkland is friendly, easygoing. So one of them called the real-estate agent to ask what was up.

What he said floored them. The house is still for sale for $3.3 million. Whoever is living there had broken in. They're squatters.

"It's blown everybody away around here," said another neighbor, who asked me not to print her name.

"It takes some real guts to just waltz into a house like that, I'll give them that."

We were standing across the street from the six-bedroom, six-and-a-half bath house, dubbed in the ads as "Mediterranean Natural." With its rock exterior and terraces, it looks like a miniature hotel.

"Elevator to the theater, wine cellar & tasting room, game room, recreation room, nanny's quarters, den/library, culinary artist's kitchen, bonus room and the lavish master suite & bath," reads a listing from 2008, when the house was for sale for $5.8 million.

Of particular note was the means by which the squatter has been able to forestall being carted out as a trespasser:

A form posted on the door of the house by its new "tenants" says "all rights, interest and title in said property" has been transferred to something called the "Priority Rose Children's Outreach" in Bothell.

That's a charity that was incorporated only two weeks ago, according to the state Secretary of State's Office. Its purpose is listed as "spiritual training for adults and children in a religious safe environment for the development of all mankind."

That sounds nice. But the phone number for the charity is also the number for a Bothell company called NW Note Elimination that specializes in "eliminating mortgages." It does this by finding flaws with loans or titles and exploiting them to stake outright claims to property.

One of its strategies, according to a primer it posted on Craigslist, is to create a land trust and claim title to a piece of property, then try to challenge the existing mortgages as flawed in hopes the banks eventually will just go away.

"The idea is that with this economy, people are looking for any kind of real-estate loophole they can find," said Sgt. Robert Saloum of the Kirkland Police.

But squatting? In somebody else's home?

I called the charity to ask how moving into a house you don't own promotes the religious and spiritual development of all mankind. Nobody called me back.

Saloum said when Kirkland police went to the house, the woman who answered the door showed a form claiming she owned the house.

"It's up to a court to sort that out," he said.

This is hardly the first time this has cropped up. There have been scattered reports of similar schemes taking place in southern California, where the vacant foreclosures are as common as sagebrush. Here in the Northwest, the scheme has also cropped up in Montana -- unsurprisingly, since we're talking about the Home of the Freemen here.

Continue reading »

31 Iraqi Police Kidnapped in Western Iraq

Wires-AP Baghdad

Police in Karbala said Wednesday that 31 Iraqi policemen have been kidnapped in western Iraq while returning from training in Jordan.

A Karbala police spokesman who spoke under condition of anonymity said that the police officers were ambushed Sunday in the town of Rutba near the Jordanian border.

"There was an attack on a hotel occupied by policemen coming back from training in Jordan," he said.

The spokesman cited a Karbala policeman who returned from Rutba as saying that an armed group had kidnapped the policemen, many of whom were from Diyala province.

The police officer told him that 20 armed men stormed the hotel rooms where the police were staying, covering the captives' heads with black bags

Well, no one can say they were surprised by this:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a new state immigration bill that President Barack Obama called "misguided" hours earlier.

Brewer, saying that the state had been "more than patient waiting for Washington to act" on the issue of illegal immigration, said that the bill would protect Arizona citizens without violating individuals' constitutional rights.

The sweeping legislation makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It also requires local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegally.

You can read the bill here [PDF file].

As Media Matters Action Network explains:

If Arizona Governor Brewer signs the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act, police will be authorized to demand residency paperwork from anyone they suspect to be in the state illegally, even if that suspicion is based on the color of their skin and nothing else.

The Bill Makes It A Crime To Be In Arizona Without Proper Paperwork

AZ Bill "Requires Police" To Determine A "Person's Immigration Status." The Los Angeles Times reported that the newly passed Arizona immigration "bill, known as SB 1070, makes it a misdemeanor to lack proper immigration paperwork in Arizona. It also requires police officers, if they form a 'reasonable suspicion' that someone is an illegal immigrant, to determine the person's immigration status." The legislation passed 35 to 21. [Los Angeles Times, 4/14/10, emphasis added]

Those "Unable To Produce Documents Showing They Are Allowed To Be In The United States Could Be Arrested, Jailed For Up To Six Months And Fined $2,500." According to the Seattle Times, under the Arizona immigration bill "the police would be authorized to arrest immigrants unable to show documents allowing them to be in the country and the legislation would leave drivers open to sanctions, in some cases for knowingly transporting an illegal immigrant, even a relative. Immigrants unable to produce documents showing they are allowed to be in the United States could be arrested, jailed for up to six months and fined $2,500. Currently, officers can inquire about someone's immigration status only if the person is a suspect in another crime. The bill would allow officers to avoid the immigration issue if it would be impractical or hinder another investigation." [Seattle Times, 4/14/10, emphasis added]

Yup, sounds like a police state to me. Just the kinda place where I wanna go spend my vacation, eh?

DOWNLOADS: (747)

PLAYS: (1865)

Embed

Prosecutors late last week, at a bail hearing for members of the Hutaree militia, played tape recordings of the kinds of things the Hutaree leaders were telling their followers. As I suggested back when the busts occurred, the evidence makes clear that these "Patriots" were telling the public one thing to present a "good citizen" face, while they were telling their followers quite another.

CNN has the audio, and it also presents a portrait of an apocalyptic religious cult that believes it's up against the forces of Satan, embodied in government workers, law enforcement officers, and United Nations soldiers:

"In this nation, we think we are free, but you need a certificate to be born, a license to drive, a permit to build, a number to get a job and even a paper after you die," says David Bryan Stone Sr., 45, the alleged head of the Hutaree militia, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government and plotting to kill police officers.

"These are permission slips from the terrorists organization called the new world order," Stone says in the tape, which was recorded clandestinely by an FBI agent who infiltrated the militia and obtained exclusively by CNN.

... "People in this nation as well as some around this world are waiting for those individuals like you see sitting in this room to actually make the decision to go to war against this evil, greedy new world order," Stone says on the tape.

"They need leaders who are not afraid to stand up and actually mean, 'No more.' We are free and we should not be afraid or ashamed to admit that we are the American militia. We outnumber them. As long as we let them terrorize any American through fear and intimidation, then they are winning this battle and we should step up to the fight that they have started and finish it."

... "Every day, we watch ever so close for those evil blue helmets to appear on our streets -- but as long as through Interpol, law enforcement mercenaries called the brotherhood working for the new world order are doing such a great job, then we don't need to watch for these foreign armies to come to our shores. They are already here," Stone says.

The striking aspect of the audio is the way Stone's rhetoric is essentially a logical outcome of basic Patriot-movement rhetoric about the "new world order" and "sovereignty" -- rhetoric that is nowadays gaining wide currency at Tea Party rallies and on their websites. Indeed, as we've been reporting for some time, the Tea Parties are fundamentally a revival of the '90s Patriot movement, this time with the blessing of official conservative-dom.

We've frequently discussed the political dimensions of this trend, but there's also an important religious component to it as well, an apocalyptic one brought into stark relief by the Hutaree folks. Frederick Clarkson at Religion Dispatches has a good piece examining this dimension in detail:

Continue reading »

The segment of "Sicko" where we learned about the disabilities suffered by 9/11 volunteers haunts me to this day. If only we'd just offered to cover their medical care, instead of prosecuting Michael Moore for taking them to Cuba.

So many of the people whose respiratory systems were destroyed by the debris from the World Trade Center collapse are already dead. At least something's finally being done:

New York City and a group of contractors have agreed to pay up to $657 million to more than 10,000 workers who alleged that rescue and cleanup efforts around the World Trade Center made them sick.

The settlement, announced Thursday night, sets up a system to compensate thousands of firefighters, police officers, contractors and volunteers based on the severity of their medical problems. "This settlement is a fair and reasonable resolution to a complex set of circumstances," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement.

The awards would range from $3,250 to seven figure sums. By agreeing to the settlement, the plaintiffs release the city and its contractors from any future damage claims.

Mr. Bloomberg commissioned a task force in 2006 to develop a coordinated plan for responding to the massive health problems associated with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

That panel projected roughly 43,000 people might ultimately seek treatment for exposure to the dust and smoke that permeated lower Manhattan after the towers toppled.

The settlement, coming just months before the first trials were to begin, comes after years of contentious arguing in court. Many of the sick workers have accused the city of failing to respond quickly and humanely to what were in many cases devastating health problems, a charge the Bloomberg administration has rejected.

In 2008, the city sparked outrage when it argued a third of the Ground Zero workers who sued the city had minor health problems, such as runny noses or trouble sleeping.

"This agreement enables workers and volunteers claiming injury from the WTC site operations to obtain compensation commensurate with the nature of their injuries and the strength of their claims, while offering added protection against possible future illness," said Christine LaSala, president of the WTC Captive Insurance Company, formed in 2004 to insure the city and nearly 140 other parties against claims connected to 9/11.

DOWNLOADS: (1858)

PLAYS: (2239)

Embed

Many of us celebrated when the Justice Department announced it had indicted three police officers for obstructing justice in the case of the bias-crime murder of a Latino named Luis Ramirez in the rural town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.

But as Maegan La Mamita Mala at Vivir Latino observes (be sure to read the whole post):

Civil rights and the more expansive human rights matter little when you’re dead. So longer sentences make us feel better, like all the marching, chanting, petition signing, mouse clicking and text messaging meant something. Whatever the outcome of the Federal case, no one will go to jail for taking Luis Ramirez from his children and this world. So while we need to support this case, it has to be done in a larger context. Whatever the outcome of the Federal case, it still will be dangerous to be a Latino in the United States.

This reality is underscored by the details as they emerge in the Ramirez case. Indeed, the conditions that gave rise to the attempt to cover up the bias crime by local officers are present in nearly every small rural town in America.

Consider, for instance, what the local prosecutor saw going on with the case as he handled it:

The Pennsylvania prosecutor who failed to secure felony convictions against two teens in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant says he thought his case was "compromised" from the start.

Like many residents in the small, tight-knit eastern Pennsylvanian community of Shenandoah, Schuylkill County District Attorney James Goodman knew that an officer investigating the death of Luis Ramirez was in a relationship with the mother of one the teens involved.

Goodman also believed the investigation and evidence hadn't been handled as it should have been.

"They didn't interview the perpetrators, the boys. In fact, not only did they not interview them, they picked them up, gave them rides, helped them concoct stories, brought them back and told the boys what to say," Goodman told CNN.

The son of Shenandoah Police Lt. William Moyer also played on the same football team as the teens who were involved in the July 2008 street brawl, according to court documents.

"It's clear they were trying to help these boys out, for whatever reason -- they were football players, these police officers were trying to help these boys out and limit their involvement in the death of Luis Ramirez."

Likewise with the local eyewitnesses to the crime:

Continue reading »