Wednesday, October 10. 2007
We are witness to a new American lexicon, Airport Rage. Carol Ann Gotbaum somehow strangled herself after being shackled in a Phoenix Airport prison cell. After some drinking, then being refused boarding for being too late at the gate and after she was refused boarding on the next flight because of a rule that she could not board after a kindly person gave up his seat for her, she got angry, loud and when grabbed fought off security guards. I cannot recall NOT being angry at any airport over the last few years. There for the grace of God go I, or even you... I suppose one way to make the process work better would be the NRA answer to all things, everyone should be well armed everywhere.
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Friday, October 5. 2007
Sweet Home, Alabama where the judges are loons, and hypocrisy looms.
Dateline Oct 1, in the year 2007. I include the year only because it is
difficult to believe the SUPREME COURT here has been battling this issue
for NINE long years. What could BE so important? Could it be hunger,
homelessness, hate crimes, or possibly health insurance? NAY, they have
been duking it out with the good people of Alabama now these
many years to reach this day when they were finally able to issue a
warning to an Adult store to clean their shelves of battery operated
and other "Adult" devices. Merely reading the language in the 1998
anti-obscenities law must surely make the wearers of the gowns swoon! The law bans the distribution of "any device designed or marketed
as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for
anything of pecuniary value." Whew! I hope no one needed smelling salts
after wading through that rough talk!
Continue reading "Court Leaves Alabama Vibrator Ban Intact"
Tuesday, October 2. 2007
"Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.” Antonin “Benito” Scalia expressing the most disgusting thing ever uttered by a Supreme Court Justice
The conservative Supreme Court in deciding to hear the Kentucky Lethal Injection case regarding cruel and unusual punishment has caused many states to stand back and wait before they execute anyone else. Our Governor Perry, our elected prosecutors and judges - whose campaigns to get elected are fixed upon how thirsty they are to kill people - are angry. Here in Dumbass we not only do more executions than most other countries, but it is this county where the vast majority of death sentences are decided. You cannot get on a jury, be a judge or a prosecutor unless you advocate capital punishment. That right there seems to be a bit prejudicial regarding the law.
A few weeks ago we killed three in one week, a banner day for Texans! Executions have become so ubiquitous here since George W. Bush giggled Carla Faye Tucker into the death chamber, one would think The Houston Chronicle would no longer cover them, after all, the same thing happening three times a week isn't news. But they do cover each one. These front page obits have fallen into a consistent formula. First comes the three names of the executed and the time of death. Then a long piece on the bloody details of the horrendous crime. Next comes the picture and story of the wonderful kind innocent victim, and finally the Christian Kick the surviving family members get out of watching someone put to death. All very Texan to be sure.
Please do not be fooled as to why the Supreme Court - made up now of five conservative followers of Jesus Christ - is going to hear this case. Jesus wants them to codify and federalize the chemical formula so Texas and the other 33 states who use capital punishment as a deterrent - which all have higher murder rates than the 16 which do not - can hurry up the process without so much legal shenanigans going on. Like any good American Christian, the more executions the better, it's what Jesus would do. More on Death Penalty from Rack Jite
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Tuesday, October 2. 2007
I read Moby Dick again recently, cementing my view concerning man’s most devastating foible, revenge. Most misery in the world comes from both personal and collective forms of vengeance. The worst ever experienced was WWII (70 million dead) which began with Germany seeking revenge for WWI, which in turn, began over revenge concerning an assassination and so on. We see it everyday not only in the Middle East and Africa but in the execution chambers across America. We see it these days with a President going to war because, “he tried to kill my Daddy.” One would think that if there were a God he would do something about this most debilitating form of human blood lust. Perhaps he could come on down to Earth (or at least send a representative in his name) to teach us all how awful it all is, that there is a better way. But human nature being what it is we would probably nail that touchy feel good liberal to a dead tree.
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Tuesday, October 2. 2007
“Father don’t ever forgive them for they know just what they do. And so I beseech you to found a religion in my name based on the personal vengeance taken in executing more people, more often, more quickly and for ever less reason.” The last exclamation of Christ.
1) There is no greater form of state intrusion into individual liberty than execution.
2) Mistakenly executing someone cannot be rectified.
3) Who we choose to execute is more often decided by emotion, race and economics than by law.
4) Execution has repeatedly been shown not to be a deterrent to capital crimes.
5) Solving problems through killing is the wrong message to send our children.
6) Capital crooks won’t be putting their hands up as much causing a rise in the amount of dead police.
7) When the government kills people it makes us all party to murder.
8. We end up substituting one set of family victims for another.
9) Compassion and mercy are better indicators of civilization than are violence and vengeance.
10) If we took that eye for an eye crap seriously, we would all be blind and toothless in no time.
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Monday, August 27. 2007
 Pictured are marchers in London from the Million Marijuana March .
Dateline: Drug Central, Betty’s Yard, Guilford County, North Carolina.
Here is but one typical story, which made the news this week. There are no action scenes. You won’t read of a Scar face-like character diving into a mountain of cocaine. Meet 71 year old Betty Holt Walker, the desperado grandmother who was arrested and faces charges of manufacturing marijuana and felony possession of marijuana.The long arm of the law in the form of a sheriff’s deputy saw the plant as he drove past her home earlier in the month.
The single plant was chest-high. Betty said she’d found the first plant in her garden and repotted it. She stated it was a special plant to keep animals out of her yard. I get the impression she wasn’t trying to hide it, unless the lawn in her front yard is chest high. This warranted an investigation. It was found that there were five smaller plants behind a shed, as well as marijuana stems and seeds, and a water bong made from a soda bottle inside of the house. What to you bet that Betty Walker spends more time in jail than Lindsay Lohan’s 82 hours, and in a federal prison at that? Oh - It was added that a daughter who lives in the home was unaware of the plants and not charged. Make what you will of that. To read more of Betty's story click here AP News 8/23/08
For a good read, see what former detectives and police who spent countless years trying to enforce this fruitless and expensive war have to say about it on the LEAP website. Here is but a snippet of the tone of their feelings concerning this idiocy.
COPS SAY LEGALIZE DRUGS! Ask us why!
After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease! To Read LEAP
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Monday, August 6. 2007
As everyone's heard by now, the invertebrate Dems passed Bush's peeping tom bill this weekend. As soon as he signs the bill into law, he will have the right to peek into your bedrooms, your bathrooms, and even smell your dirty underwear.
For some unexplained reason, the existing FISA law wasn't adequate enough, that being they could still peek into your bedrooms and bathrooms and smell your dirty socks, only under the caveat that they had to obtain a slam dunk warrant within 72 hours. In other words, Bush could pretty much wiretap anyone he wanted, as long as he applied for a warrant after the fact, a mere technicality since nearly all of warrants requested were approved after the FISA law was enacted in 1976.
Of course I'm jesting but only slightly. Bush coddled the Dems into believing he needed the ability to wiretap everything and anything without a warrant, something he's been doing illegally anyway until he got caught.
Logically none of this makes any sense. Like the terrorists are so stupid, Ahib is going to phone Muhammad and say, "brother terrorist, we're taking out the White House tomorrow, don't tell anyone." Call it the skeptic in me, but can anyone else imagine dirty political tricksters like Karl Rove using this warrantless spy program to advantage over their poltical opponents? No, of course not.
Oh, almost forgot, and in fairness to Bush, he did say that instead of the courts administering the program for abuses, he'd appoint the most credible person available, Alberto Gonzalez, to oversee the program.
Can the game get any more rigged?
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Friday, July 13. 2007
...And Texas ain't one of 'em.
Recently Michael Moore hit CNN with an angry rant about how the mainstream media does not tell the truth. Not so much a matter of individual facts as it is a matter of corporate embedded cream cheese reporting. Because of laziness and corporate bias; daily newspapers, television networks, radio stations and cable news channels refuse to take a chance in offending The RIght for fear of a monetary backlash. Here is one egregious case in point.
A Houston Chronicle article by media editor James T. Campbell (who is an African-American) appeared in the editorial section of the Sunday paper, Teen an unwitting player in a story that touched us about what happened to one Hispanic boy here in Houston because he was Hispanic. A recap of the story from Wikipedia:
During a party held at the Sons family house, two students who attended Klein Collins High School, David Henry Tuck of the 3400 block of Nutwood,[3] and Keith Robert Turner of the 21000 block of Star Grass,[3] brutally beat, tortured, and sodomized David Ritcheson, a 17-year old Hispanic Klein Collins student and former running back for the school football team.
Tuck and Turner were both under the influence of recreational drugs, and said they were told that Ritcheson, also under the influence of drugs[5] tried to kiss a 12 year old girl, Danielle Sons.[6] Danielle's statement threw Tuck into a rage, and Tuck punched Ritcheson. The first punch was so powerful it broke Ritcheson's cheekbone and knocked him unconscious, stated Red Duke, the emergency physician who treated him. Tuck and Turner dragged the teenager outside, stripped him naked, burned the victim with cigarettes, choked him with a gardening hose and proceeded to engrave a swastika into the victim's chest. Tuck kicked Ritcheson with steel-toed boots and violently kicked a PVC pipe up his rectum several inches while yelling racial slurs. After the sodomy ended, the perpetrators poured bleach on the victim's body to conceal the evidence of the crime. The vicious attack lasted for over an hour. Tuck, who was described by prosecutors as a white supremacist is eligible for parole in 25 years. 18 year old Ritchenson recently committed suicide by jumping from a Carnival Cruise ship off of Cozumel Mexico.
Recapping the story Campbell printed the letter below as an example of the angst directed at the Chronicle from its readership:
 "There are probably hundreds of people that kill themselves each day, and yet the Houston Chronicle devotes half a page in a section to one troubled teen," a reader wrote. "Every parent that has a child commit suicide ought to sue the Houston Chronicle for being biased in its reporting! Why did one young man get so much publicity? Was it because he was loved more by his parents than other bereaved parents loved their lost child? No, not in the least. Ritcheson is the poster child for a hate crimes bill — a piece of useless legislation that will do more to harm free speech than the American Civil Liberties Union ever dreamed ... "
James T. Campbell responded, “The first e-mailer's complaints about our coverage of Ritcheson's suicide and his being the "poster child for a hate crimes bill," is a fair point, but ignores the obvious in saying he was just one troubled teen."
This is one of literally millions of such examples. Campbell should have told the truth. That anyone taking the time to write a newspaper to decry this story even appearing, coupled with such angst toward Hate Crime Legislation ARE bigoted racist pigs who are the ones we should be taking about deporting to someplace more to their liking. Like the friggin' Moon. But rather we hear from Campbell that they made ‘a fair point”.
Though no mainstream editorial board will allow the truth to be told about that swath of tens of millions of Conservative racists running through the Old South up into the mountain States, the least Campbell could have done was print that person's damn name. For if I write a letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle with a liberal slant, they are going to print my full name and town so these very apologists for White Supremacist know where my children live. It pisses me off.
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Tuesday, July 10. 2007
 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, No. 05-908, is the most historic Supreme Court decision of the 2007 session. It will be the precedent to not only move back employment and educational opportunities of African-Americans, but has already made race relations worse than they already are.
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
The above quote is from:
a) David Duke
b) The KKK
c) The Aryan Nations
d) Chief Justice Roberts
e) All of the above
"E" is the correct answer of course. This crazyass line of reasoning has been used by every racist and Right-wing talking head since Affirmative Action began in the late 1970’s. It’s one of those statements that is meant to be read without thinking, for the less one thinks the truer it becomes. Most everything the Radical Right and the Libertarian Party injects into our political discourse suffers the same silliness. A superficial philosophical truism that does not translate into the actual world we reside in.
The most important Supreme Court decision in this century has now been torn asunder. John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and David H. Souter signed on to Stephen Breyers dissent.
“Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together… The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown, to invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the nation will come to regret.”
More Blacks have joined the middle class through Affirmative Action than from any other historic event. All Fortune 500 companies have such plans which they all say not only increases profit regarding public relations by having a multi-cultural workforce, but that those hired through Afffirmative Action plans have preformed as well or better than everyone else.
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Monday, July 9. 2007
In trying to write a serious article on the recent Supreme Court decision Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which will be the precedent to roll back Brown v Board of Education from now on, I found this at the top of my Google search which pretty much says it all.
KKK Applauds Supreme Court Ruling
Major Victory for Parents in America! And its About Time!
National Director Thomas Robb of The Knights Party, said on Thursday that he was extremely pleased with the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the desire of white parents who did not want their children to be a part of America’s greatest social experiment tragedy.
"America has held dear to the concept of freedom of association and yet Brown V. Board of Education took that most fundamental right away from parents in choosing the most appropriate schools and resultant playmates and peers for their children," Robb said.
Rachel Pendergraft, spokeswoman for the organization said that the ruling is indeed monumental.
"We have been saying for years that forced integration of the schools was bad for taxpayers, bad for ethnic neighborhoods, bad for education, and bad for the white families of America."
Robb added that no race benefited from forced integration and in fact was a primary culprit in the decrease of morality and increase in violent crime.
"This is a tremendous day for white Christian America!" Ku Klux Klan Website
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Wednesday, June 13. 2007
 George and Elisa Kelly made a birthday party for their 16 year old son at their home. They made a deal with the party goers that they would supply beer if they all spent the night. The Kelly’s then collected all car keys and everyone stayed at their home and there was no trouble.
Today the Kelly’s sons, Ryan and Brandon, drove their parents to the Virginia State Prison to begin serving their 2 year sentence, reduced from the original 10 years.
Not only is this a lesson for parents to insure that their kids pile into cars -- have some older friend buy a keg and a couple quarts of 151 -- and drive out of town down some dark road to an obscure woods near Old Farmer Dell’s place -- and then all drive home drunk as skunks, but it brings up the conservative fun of Rule of Law.
Rule of Law hey? Okay then. How many other parents are guilty of this horrendous crime of tying to keep their teenagers from driving drunk by keeping the occasional party at home? Let’s say 5 million a year. 2 years in prison.
Rule of Law hey? Okay then. How many kids between 16 and 20 purchase, possess and drink alcohol illegally? Let’s say 30 million a year? Two years in jail.
Rule of Law hey? Okay then. How many college students have smoked pot? Let’s say about 10 million a year? Two years in jail.
Rule of Law hey? Okay then. How many people drive at a .08 blood alcohol level? Let’s say 25 million a year. Two years in jail.
We already have the highest incarceration rate in the world closing in at 2 million in prison (the majority drug and alcohol related) which we have no room for as it is. So let’s across the board grab hold of this conservative sponsored Rule of Law crap and put 70 million more in jail. It is how conservatives define Freedom, Liberty and Democracy.
Gosh, I almost forgot the 15 million illegal immigrants and their families they want to hold in jail for deportation hearings. That’s 85 million.
Oh my God, I forgot the biggest slice of all! Every man who has received a BJ and lied about it! Add another 100 million! That’s 185 million in jail just this year alone! Over half our population. Round them up! And I expect them all to be White and speak English Only.
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Tuesday, June 12. 2007
 The conservative spin on forcibly rounding up and deporting 12 million people of one ethnicity – a larger project than Nazi Germany’s round up of Jews in the 1930’s – is defended by invoking the Rule of Law. Beware, whether it be BJs, deportation or peeking in your window, whenever you hear them invoke the Rule of Law you know it is to cover one form of intolerance and(or) bigotry or another. Witch burning, Slavery, Jim Crow and The Holocaust were all carried out under the Rule of Law.
As happened with Gun Control, the Democrats are forced by the reality of a xenophobic electorate to cave in do our non existent Mexican problem. National figures show that illegal immigration is not a statistical issue, applying the ups and down of it results in stasis. No, the bottom line is that it is the GOP’s last grasp to save their sorry asses in 2008 from being dumped into the ashbin of history. Per usual, whether 911, WMDs, aluminum tubes, Saddam Hussein with a nuke or Osama bin Laden swimming the Rio Grande, they will ply the fear to play on middle America’s ethnic and racial bigotry. With voter age demographics slowly pushing religious intolerance back under the rocks where it belongs, it is the only issues they have left.
Since this began with Lou Dobbs leading the way, polls show that the 8% of Hispanic voters have moved from 60% voting Democrat to 80%. I wonder how the Republican consultants do their math? I suppose it is that their base in this are old farts who vote in higher numbers than Hispanics.
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