Ethic composition of Muslim Americans

University of Windsor (Canada) law professor Julie MacFarlane has published a survey of 200 North American Muslims on the subject of Sharia Law, the Islamic law system that, in varying degrees of severity, is part of most Islamic countries. Three-quarters of the survey participants live in the United States, with the rest residing in Canada. There was no difference in responses based on nation of residence.

Imposition of Sharia Law in the U.S. and Canada is the anti-Muslim scare tactic being pursued by the right wing. Oklahoma, Tennessee and Louisiana passed laws or referendums banning state judges from considering Sharia or any other foreign law in making rulings, and over 20 other states have debated such laws. New Gingrich wants a Federal law to ban Sharia and Rick Santorum called Sharia an “existential threat” to America.

The right wing plays up the stories from the severest Sharia countries: women being stoned to death for adultery, thieves having hands chopped off, executions by decapitation (shades of the guillotine!), women being attacked for going to school or driving or showing a quarter inch of skin. They ignore the majority of laws covered under Sharia, many of which resemble Jewish laws (no pork) or Mormonism (no alcohol) to make Sharia scarier than it actually is, when applied in more moderate countries or limited to specific areas of life, like inheritance.

MacFarlane has stressed that the study should not be used to generalize about all American Muslims, but offers an insight into Muslim attitudes. The survey, published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, interviewed 101 Muslim men and women, 41 imams and 70 Muslim community leaders about their use of Islamic law in everyday life.

The study was inspired by a 2003 case in Toronto, where a small group of Muslims petitioned for equal treatment in family court cases. Toronto has separate “family tribunals” for Catholics and Jews to hear family law issues. Islam has a very complex set of inheritance laws, which are very different from the civil laws of both America and Canada and may have prompted the request. The request was denied. It set off protests, not just in Canada but in London, Vienna and Paris, with protesters insisting such a tribunal violated the principle of separation of church and state. The contradiction of that, in a city which has two religion-based family law tribunals, was lost on everyone. In America, the right wing has warned of “creeping Sharia” and claims that Muslims want to infiltrate our court system and replace our constitutional and common law with Sharia. Not a small feat for less than 1% of our population to pull off.

When the survey asked if American courts should apply Islamic law to non-Muslims, everyone said “no.” Three imams thought it would be a good idea to have a parallel family law court to handle Muslim family issues, but the rest of the imams are perfectly

Let’s get our comparisons in a row here. Civil law says that two people, once married legally in any state, can get a divorce. Catholic law says they can only divorce if they get a dispensation for a divorce from the Church. A Catholic can choose to obey church law and not obtain a divorce, or choose to follow civil law and get the divorce. There is a parallel to Sharia law here. Under Sharia, a couple marries within their faith and divorces within their faith. To have a legal marriage and divorce, they must do so with the civil authorities. Separate ceremonies, separate contracts. Gee, great idea. The survey participants believe that the two, religious marriage and civil marriage, should be separate, just the way Catholics do it in Monaco. We should not have blurred the line between them and allowed clergymen to certify civil marriage licenses.

MacFarlane wrote, “For most American Muslims, Sharia represents a private system of morality and identity, primarily focused on marriage and divorce rituals.” There is one aspect of Sharia law that might appeal to some of the retro-Mormons out there. On rare occasion, an imam will permit the use of an Islamic marriage contract, a nikah, to take additional wives. No civil laws are broken by this practice, while the Sharia law which encourages multiple wives is satisfied.

MacFarlane said that her sampling was not representative of the Muslim community as a whole. Over 70% of the participants were immigrants and almost half had college degrees. Half were South Asian, 30% Middle Eastern descent, 10% African descent and 10% Caucasian converts and African Americans (African-Americans make up around 35% of all American Muslims.) A follow-up survey would be welcomed, one more closely paralleling the demographics of Muslims in America. It would also be interesting to see a similar survey of Jews and Catholics, both of whom have legal systems within their faiths that are different from the civil laws of our country.

The publication of MacFarlane’s study comes at a very important time in the debate over Sharia. In the most extreme cases, Islam allows the murder of a female family member who “dishonors” her family in some way. It is a cultural aspect of Islam that has been exploited in warfare between Muslims and non-Muslims as in Bosnia and the Sudan. Rape becomes a weapon that is equal to killing the woman, because she will either take her own life or be killed by her male family members.

Hamed and Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Yahya (photo by Graham Hughes, Canadian Press for AP)

In Kingston, Ontario, three members of an Afghan family were found guilt of murder in the deaths of three teenage sisters and their step-mother. The family considered them honor killings because the girls were living as Canadians and not adhering to their father’s strict rules of Islamic life. All four were drowned and their bodies placed in two separate vehicles which were then placed in canals to fact accidents. Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed were each found guilty of four counts of first-degree (premeditated) murder with each count carrying a no-parole 25-year sentence. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson denounced honor killings as “barbaric and unacceptable in Canada.” American courts have come to the same conclusion.

We have had Muslims in America from the very beginning. The percentage has grown in recent years because of wars in their homelands, something that is very common with any immigrant group. But in two centuries, only rarely has anyone made an issue of the imposition of anyone’s religious laws on our civil laws. It was never something suggested by the members of a faith, but a scare tactic used by others, as it was with the non-issue of John Kennedy’s Catholicism.

There is another aspect of Sharia Law that MacFarlane didn’t ask about – how many of those immigrants actually came to North America to escape countries with severe Sharia? There is more to the First Amendment than just being able to practice one’s faith. It is also a guarantee that the state will not impose a religion or a form of a religion that is in violation of one’s personal beliefs. My mother’s Bavarian ancestors were Catholics who came here to escape a state-imposed Protestantism. My paternal grandmother came her to escape a country where Catholic canon law dictated civil law and forbid her divorce from the husband who abandoned her. The Irish came here because being Catholic barred them from civil rights including jobs and educational opportunities in a Protestant country. My husband’s French Canadian parents came here for the same reason. Most Americans get that whole First Amendment thing backwards. Freedom FROM state religion comes before freedom OF religion in the First Amendment.

Via Liz Goodwin At Yahoo News

Related articles

• Study: State Legislation Addressing ‘Sharia Threat’ Misrepresents Views Of Muslim Americans (thinkprogress.org)
• Why Americans Are Right To Be Concerned About Muslims (neosecularist.com)
• Growing use of Sharia by UK Muslims (theromangate.wordpress.com)
• AIG/Sharia Bailout Unconstitutional: Appeal Before Federal Court (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• How Far Advanced is “Creeping Sharia” in USA Classrooms? You Won’t Believe Your Ears. (biblicaltimes.wordpress.com)
• Muslims lobby for sharia in Pennsylvania, claim bill on sharia law unfair to Muslims (creepingsharia.wordpress.com)
• Activist Judges Are Traitors; Allow Sharia Law, Radical Islam, To Override American Law (neosecularist.com)

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch

A second British newspaper owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been dragged into scandal resulting in the arrest of a police officer and four current and former members of the staff of The Sun, the sister paper to The News of the World, which was shut down over its hacking of celebrity and crime victims’ telephones and e-mails.

This time, the charge is bribing the police, specifically paying police for information during the police inquiry into the hacking at The News of the World.

The homes of the newspaper’s employees and The Sun’s offices were being searched by the Metropolitan Police in London.

News Corp is “co-operating” with the investigation, and the Met confirmed that it was information provided by the newspaper that led to the arrests. The company is determined to reduce the impact of these scandals. Because the company had bragged about its ties to the conservative movement and its involvement in the Cameron government, the scandal has cost News Corp its influence with the British government. The hacking scandal set off investigations in New York City, and these bribery arrests could expand the investigation there. News Corp is known for its ties to politics more than for its stellar journalism and anything that reduces its connections, influence and power is anathema to Rupert Murdoch’s plans for the world.

Though the initial investigation of the hacking scandal failed to produce evidence of widespread knowledge within the company of the hacking, News Corp has admitted how large the problem was and agreed to pay damaged to 37 victims, including Sherlock Holmes co-star Jude Law.

Related articles

• Rupert Murdoch’s Staff Arrested As Tabloid Scandal Spreads To Second Newspaper (huffingtonpost.com)
• Cop, Sun journalists arrested in U.K. tabloid probe (ctv.ca)
• BREAKING: Five More Arrested in News Corp Phone Hacking Scandal (thinkprogress.org)

Andre Davis

In November, Andre Davis, 29, was found guilty of 14 counts of felonious assault for having unprotected sex after learning he was HIV-positive. Monday, he was sentenced to 32 years in prison in a Hamilton County, Ohio, courthouse. Davis told the judge that he was a “sex addict” and it is a worse addiction than any other. “Drugs and alcohol are terrible, but sex is something everybody wants,” he said, adding “I am not a monster.” No, he’s just a possible murderer.

Davis’ attorney, Greg Cohen, had argued that the state law regarding HIV and felonious assault does not include any proof of intent to cause harm, and that the women Davis had sex with were equally responsible for allowing unprotected sex. Davis received his diagnosis in July, 2009, when he failed a World Wrestling Entertainment physical. Cohen also argued that since it was a company and not a doctor who had told Davis he was HIV-positive, it was not conclusively proven that his client was carrying the virus. Cohen told the Associated Press that the case will be appealed because he doubts the constitutionality of the law.

Davis is also facing similar charges in Warren County, Ohio.

Related articles

• Former pro wrestler gets 32 years in prison for not warning sexual partners he was HIV positive (offthebench.nbcsports.com)
• Critics assail crime laws aimed at people with HIV (msnbc.msn.com)
• Former Pro Wrestler Sentenced To 32 Years For Not Sharing His HIV Status (suburbanmen.com)
• Ohio wrestler convicted in HIV assault case (sportsillustrated.cnn.com)
• Andre “Gangsta of Love” Davis Convicted of Knowingly Sleeping With 12 Women While HIV Positive (subzinfo.wordpress.com)

Julian Assange, post make-over

WikiLeaks announced Monday that their co-founder Julian Assange has signed a deal with Russia Today for a television series to consist initially of ten weekly half-hour episodes that will be “in-depth converations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world.” The theme of the series will be “the world tomorrow.” Licensing agreements for this syndicated series have been allegedly signed with outlets that will reach “600 million viewers across cable, satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks.”

“Terrestrial broadcast networks”? Oh – got it – they mean the analog stuff you get with rabbit ears in underdeveloped countries.   Russia Today is available on American cable systems and reaches about 85 million viewers here, the ones who have subscribed to third-tier cable services, as in above basic and digitial basic services.   I found it on my cable system in nose-bleed territory just below the pay channels.

The series is set to begin in March on Russia Today, a government-funded English language satellite news network. A Russian crew will film the series at Ellingham Hall, the grand manor house where Assange has been spending his house-arrest in England.

The series will look at “upheavals and revolutions” and expose how “the deterioration of the rule of law has demonstrated the bankruptcy of once leading political institutions and ideologies” in the West.” And to do this exposé of the deterioration of the rule of law, Assange has chosen a television network that is a mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin. Assange continued in the same self-effacing vein, “Through this series I will explore the possibilities for our future in conversations with those who are shaping it. Are we heading towards utopia or dystopia and how can we set our paths? This is an exciting opportunity to discuss the vision of my guests in a new style of show that examines their philosophies and struggles in a deeper and clearer way than has been done before.” Unlike Charlie Rose or Alan Parkinson or Barbara Walters or Edward R. Murrow – okay, forgive me. It is blasphemous to mention Murrow in the same paragraph with Assange. Murrow was an actual journalist and the closest thing the God the profession has. Assange is a poser. The point is, there is nothing new about in-depth, one-on-one interviews with world leaders or analysts or thinkers. It’s a format that has been around since before broadcast TV networks. Assange’s credentials for this TV gig consist of getting other people to risk their jobs and their freedom to give him information to put on his website and promoting himself as the savior of mankind.

It should be really interesting to see who agrees to be a guest on this show.

Of course the series is entirely dependent on Assange either winning his final appeal against extradition to Sweden in the British court system or getting his case heard in the World Court. Lest we forget, there are two young women in Sweden who are not getting television deals or being put up in manor houses or getting a make-over with designer duds provided by deluded supporters. They are trying to go about their ordinary lives while waiting for this POS to return to Sweden to complete the investigations into their accusations of sexual assault. It was on September 1, 2010, that Swedish Director of Prosecutions Marianne Ny reopened the rape investigation on Assange after the initial charges had been reduced to sexual molestation based on complaints filed in August, and on November 20, 2010, that the international arrest warrant was issued for him to be returned to Sweden to complete the investigation. It has now been 17 months that these two women have been waiting for justice. It has been 17 months that this predator who has allegedly left a string of bastard children around the world because he doesn’t like condoms has dodged official questions about his actions. He admits the basics of the charges, and says that they only prove he’s a chauvinist pig, not a criminal. In Sweden, at least, being a pig is a crime.

Julian Assange believes that he is so freaking important to the world that he can operate under a separate set of rules from ordinary people and should not be held responsible for his actions. That makes him and Putin a perfect fit.

Related articles

• You: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s TV show to be aired on Russian channel (guardian.co.uk)
• New Partner For Wikileaks’ Assange: Russia’s State-Run TV (paidcontent.org)
• Kremlin TV to air Julian Assange’s new show (ibnlive.in.com)
• Julian Assange To Get His Own TV Series: The World Tomorrow (techfleece.com)
• Wikileaks 1: Mainstream Media, um, 1 (raincoaster.com)
• WikiCribs: Julian Assange TV (stevehuff.wordpress.com)
• Assange to launch TV chat show (thehindu.com)

Jake Burris, campaign manager of Arkansas Democratic congressional candidate Ken Aden, had been out for an evening with his four children. When they arrived home, the first child to reach the front porch found a horrific sight. The family’s mix-breed Siamese cat was lying on the porch, it’s head bashed in so severely its eye was hanging out of the socket. Painted on the side of the cat, in magic marker, was the word “Liberal.”

I debated whether or not I would include the photo of the cat with this story, and then decided I want this thing to go viral. I want our readers to tweet this and facebook this and e-mail this across the net. I want every liberal and progressive to know what the right wing is capable of and I want every conservative to see what their hate speech causes. And I want every one who can to e-mail this picture to their Congresspersons and Senators and flood the e-mail accounts of right wing radio hosts and Fox News personalities with this.

Every serial killer in history started out by hurting animals. What do we need – government employees and campaign staff found hanging from trees? We have already had campaign headquarters vandalized and burned. What’s next? We had a Federal office building bombed and 168 men, women and children crushed to death by a right wing fanatic during the last Democratic administration. Do we need to have another one before the right realizes this is what they have wrought upon our nation?

I think I’m going to go hug my cross-eyed, anti-social, precious, rescued cat and give thanks to God that I live in Vermont.

Related articles

• Arkansas Democratic Campaign Manager Finds Family Cat Killed, Defaced with the Word ‘Liberal’ (towleroad.com)
• Cat Owned by Democratic Official Slaughtered — “Liberal” Painted on Side of Corpse (sayitaintsoalready.com)
• Democratic campaign manager’s cat killed, corpse defaced with the word “LIBERAL” (retrieverman.wordpress.com)
• Democrat’s Cat Found Dead With “Liberal” Painted On Body (alan.com)
• Democrat’s Cat Found Dead With “Liberal” Painted on Body (maboulette.wordpress.com)
• Ken Aden’s Campaign Manager Comes Home To Find Cat Killed (disclose.tv)
• More Conservative Values — Killing The Pets Of Liberals (ken_ashford.typepad.com)
• Democratic Campaign Manager’s Cat Killed With Word ‘Liberal’ Written On Fur (Contains Graphic Picture) | Addicting Info (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• Horrible Person Kills a Democratic Campaign Manager’s Cat and Scrawls ‘Liberal’ on Its Corpse [Despicable] (jezebel.com)
• Ark. campaign manager’s cat slaughtered (kaystreet.wordpress.com)

On Thursday, charges were filed against three Air Force cadets for sexual misconduct, including one count of rape. The offenses occurred over a 15-month period.

Colonel Tamra Rank, vice-superintendent of the academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, issued a statement in which she said, “Sexual misconduct is a particularly egregious offense and we have a zero tolerance policy in the Air Force. We expect the best from our cadets, and do not tolerate unacceptable behaviors.”

Last week, the Department of Defense announced that sexual assaults in the academies had risen from 41 in 2009 to 65 in 2010′s academic year.

Cadet Robert Evenson, Jr., is charged with rape, unlawful sexual acts, engaging in an unprofessional relationship and conduct unbecoming an officer. He is charged with raping one female cadet and using “power or strength or restraint” in three other instances to prevent the women escaping. Cadet Kyle Cressy is accused of aggravated assault on a woman while she was “substantially incpacitated. Cadet Stephan Claxton is accused of unbuttoning and unzipping a female cadet’s pants while she was incapacitated. Claxton is also accused of underage drinking, abusive sexual contact and several instances of assault, including punching another cadet in the face. Next for all of them will be an Article 32 hearing, the equivalent of a civilian evidentiary hearing to determine if there is enough evidence to proceed to court martial.

Related articles

• Air Force Charges Three Cadets With Sex Crimes (maboulette.wordpress.com)
• Academy Charges 3 Cadets With Sex Assaults (denver.cbslocal.com)
• Reporting Of Sex Assaults In The Military Appears To Be On The Rise (denver.cbslocal.com)
• Harassment of female cadets widespread: report (theage.com.au)
• AFA Responds To Rise In Sexual Assaults At Military Academies (denver.cbslocal.com)

Susan B. Carbon, director of the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice, wrote “The change sends an important message to all victims that what happens to them matters, and to perpetrators that they will be held accountable.” It should increase the number of sexual assaults that are reported and tabulated, providing a better profile of the crimes.

The new definition expands the crime to include “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” That last part covers those rare cases when women have forced sex acts on men because men have limited control over their responses to stimulation. Including men can lead to prosecutions for rapes that occur in male-only environments like prisons and certain military situations. It can also provide for prosecution of rapes of gay men. Under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, many gay and lesbians soldiers were raped and could not report the crimes because it would expose them to discharge from the service. The new definition allows for rape of unconscious victims and rape of under-age or physically or mentally incapacitated victims, which the old definition did not include.

The rule changes are long overdue. The FBI national crime statistics are used as a measure of the nation’s social health, and allowing so many crimes to be eliminated by virtue of the narrow definition was counter-productive to the purpose of the record keeping and reporting. According to the old standards, there were 84,767 rapes in 2010, a 5% decrease from 2009. We may have to wait until 2013 to see the impact of the new definition, unless states choose to alter their 2011 statistics to reflect this new definition.

Related articles

• U.S. Gov’t. Expands Definition of Rape (livescience.com)
• Rape redefined to include men as victims (abclocal.go.com)
• Will new federal definition of rape significantly impact approaches to sex crimes and punishments? (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Stephanie Hallett: What The New Definition Of Rape Means For Women — And Men (huffingtonpost.com)
• U.S. expands definition of rape to add men, impaired victims (calgaryherald.com)

Governor Scott Walker

A investigation into employees and former employees of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, during his tenure as executive of Milwaukee County, has resulted in three arrests.

Former county housing director Tim Russell, 48, was charged with two felony and one misdemeanor embezzlement charges. Walker’s appointee to the Milwaukee County Veteran Service Commission, Kevin Kavanaugh, was charged with one felony count of embezzlement for taking more than $10,000 from a business and four felony couts of fraudulent writings by a corporate officer. They face up to 10 years in prison if convicted. The investigation also led to the arrest of a third person who worked for the state Department of Public Instruction for six months for two counts of felony child enticement.

There is nothing to tie Walker to any of these crimes, other than the fact that he appointed these men to the jobs where they committed them.

The “Recall Walker” petition drive still has thirteen days to complete collecting the necessary signatures.

Related articles

• 3 Arrested as Part of Probe Into Walker Aides – ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
• Two Ex-Scott Walker Staffers Arrested In Ongoing Investigation (thinkprogress.org)
• Ex-Scott Walker Aide Arrested, Partner To Aide Charged With Child Enticement (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• Walker Investigation Leads To Child Enticement Charges (huffingtonpost.com)
• Recall Of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Appears Inevitable (mykeystrokes.com)

Bobby Joe Rogers, Escambia County mug shot

On New Year’s Day a fire gutted a Florida Panhandle abortion clinic. Bobby Joe Rogers, 41, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was arrested for the crime of violating Federal explosives laws. He is being held in the Escambia Country Jail in Pensacola pending indictment. A conviction could result in a 20-year prison sentence. An anonymous tip led to Rogers’ arrest.

The fire alarm was raised at 1 a.m. and no one was injured. The fire began in a woodland behind the building, and a dense fog kept the fire from being seen soon enough to save the building.

This particular clinic has been targeted before. It was bombed on Christmas Day, 1984, and a doctor and volunteer escort were shot to death in 1994. Paul Hill, who was convicted of the murders, was executed in 2003.

Though Rogers is being held in the county’s jail, this is a Federal prosecution. Depending on the outcome of the indictment and the setting of bail, Rogers could be transferred to one of five Federal prisons in Florida to await trial, most likely the one in Pensacola.

Rasmussen, a right-leaning polling organization, has released their latest poll of “Likely U. S. Voters” on the issue of abortion. Though abortion ranks very low on the list of issues voters are concerned about, it has been used for the past year to divert attention from the more important issues, like jobs.

According to the January 2 telephone poll, in response to the question “Generally speaking, on the issue of abortion, do you consider yourself pro-choice or pro-life?” Americans responded 49% pro-choice to 43% pro-life.

Abortion is one issue that should not be polled with the usual simple questions and even simpler answers. There are too many variables, and too many shades of support. There are also too many ways to slant the questions so that people don’t have the opportunity to nuance their answers.

And finally, over in Ohio, the Ballot Board will take up the issue of the proposed “personhood” amendment. Like Georgia, Ohio’s constitution calls for amendments to contain one issue. There is a question of whether or not the “personhood” amendment, which would grant full rights to a fertilized egg, has too many aspects.

If it has more than one issue, the group which submitted the notification to collect signatures for a ballot initiative on “personhood,” then the group will have to rewrite the amendment and submit each issue separately. They would then need to collect 385,245 signatures for each issue petition. A “personhood amendment” would ban all abortions under all circumstances, as well as many forms of birth control. Everywhere that the proposed amendment has been placed on the public ballot, it has been defeated.

Related articles

• What’s Next In Abortion Fight In Ohio (lezgetreal.com)
• Title Board Okays Colorado Personhood Amendment (prweb.com)
• Arkansas Attorney General Rejects Personhood Amendment, Calling It Misleading (thinkprogress.org)

HIV Predator David Dean Smith

In late October, David Dean Smith was at Pine Rest Hospital in Comstock Park (a suburb of Grand Rapids). The social worker at the hospital sought mental health hospitalization for him. During the evaluation, he was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal tendencies. He was hospitalized in early November, and a judge order up to 90 days of treatment for him. Then, things got really messy.

During treatment, Smith told a doctor he had a “desire to kill others because of reported rage with previous abuse that occurred at a young age.” The evaluation stated that Smith had a “desire to harm women, stating that he feels sexually aroused by causing pain to females.” Smith was released with instructions concerning living arrangements and medications. Continuing therapy was also ordered. On December 22, Smith walked into a Grand Rapids police station and confessed to exposing multiple partners to HIV. His doctors had assumed that his “desire to harm women” involved hitting them or physically abusing them. They never thought it might mean transmitting a disease that could kill them.

Smith has been arraigned on two counts of failing to tell a sexual partner about his HIV status, which carry four-year sentences. His bail was increased from $25,000 to $100,000 because he is a menace to society.

So far, only one woman has stepped forward to say she had sex with Smith. She has been quoted as saying that “He’s charming. He’s very charming.” She went on to tell 24 Hour News 8, a local television station, that confessing to his crime is “…something he should have done years ago. I was diagnosed [with HIV] October 18, 2008. It’s hard, though. It’s really hard, but support is key and getting the right treatment is key.” She also opined that “He has this way of being the hero in the beginning. Like he’s the problem solver, the hero, he’s doing the right thing. Then something horrible will happen, and then he’s the victim. So this is probably his ‘victim’ song.”

Smith told the police there are thousands of victims, both male and female. His victim called him “a predator” and “a sociopath.” Smith’s Facebook page included this post: “When you are young you believe people will love you like you want and keep an eye out for those scandulous [sic] people…as you get older you realize most everyone is scandulous, so you don’t trust anyone but keep an eye out for the special ones that truley [sic] care.”

Michigan is dealing with the prosecution as best they can. Smith’s mental health diagnosis make provide him with a ticket to a mental health institution instead of jail. But the authorities are broadcasting information about him as far and wide as they can. They want his other victims to come forward.

Kent County Health Department Communications and Marketing Manager Lisa LaPlante, said this is the first time the department has encountered deliberate infestation. “We want to make sure that anyone who may have injected drugs with him, who may have had sex with him, does come forward and get tested. We want to make sure that they’re not spreading the virus to anyone else.” The don’t know how many victims may be out there, but they want to cover all possible bases, particularly since his victim says he preys on drifters. She went on to say, “The rate of transmission is relatively low for a single incident, however, that said, it’s still there. We just want to make sure that if anyone is engaging in any risky behaviors, that they’re able to find out what their status is.” HIV and AIDS diagnoses are down in Kent County, from 37 with HIV and 25 with AIDS in 2010 to 24 with HIV and 18 with AIDS in 2011. The county offers anonymous, confidential and free testing. The Department is increasing its public service outreach in light of this possible crisis. LaPlante said, “In some cases, it can take 8 to 10 years before people realize that they have the virus. But it can start showing up in the system within a matter of six months and that’s why people should get tested more than once in the time period after which they’ve been exposed to it.” Counselors are available at the testing sites to educate people about safe sex.

The more Smith’s picture and story are spread throughout the nationwide media, the better. Almost all states offer free testing and counseling. If he did in fact prey on drifters and the homeless, his victims could be anywhere.

Related articles

• Police: Man may have infected hundreds with HIV (usnews.msnbc.msn.com)
• Michigan man may have intentionally infected hundreds with HIV (malexjohnson.com)
• Michigan Man Purposely Infected More Than 3000 Men And Women With HIV (alan.com)

Dr. Nicola Riley (mug shot, Salt Lake City jail)

After a 16 month investigation, the state of Maryland has requested the extradition of Dr. Steven Brigham of Voorhees, New Jersey, aned Dr. Nicola Riley of Salt Lake City, Utah, for performing late-term abortions on viable fetuses. The two were indicted by a Maryland grand jury for their operation in Elkton.

The investigation began with an August 2010 procedure in which a young woman’s uterus and bowel were ruptured. Brigham and Riley drove her to a hospital and basically dumped her in the emergency room. She had been in the 21^st week of her pregnancy.  In 1994, in New York State, Dr. Brigham was found guilty of  professional misconduct in an almost identical case. 

A search of the clinic after this found a freezer with 35 late-term fetuses, including one suspected of being aborted at 36 weeks.

Dr. Steven Brigham

Maryland has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. All abortions are legal if the fetus is not viable, defined in law as the doctor deciding that the fetus has a reasonable likelihood of survival outside the womb. With current medical technology, that would make a requested abortion completely legal through the 21^st week or so, depending on the condition of the fetus. An abortion is legal at any stage when the life or health of the mother is at risk or the fetus shows a serious genetic defect/abnormality that would make that fetus unviable. In Maryland, a doctor is not liable if the decision to abort was made in good faith and in the best medical judgement. Minors can only receive abortions with parental notification, except in cases of abuse, assault, incest or neglect, but a judge can bypass the parental notification.

The news reports did not mention if the women who had these abortions have been identified or if they were residents of Maryland. There was also no mention of whether or not the women involved would be charged with any crimes if identified.

The two doctors are not being charged under Maryland’s abortion laws, but under a 2005 law that allows murder charges for causing the death of a viable fetus. It was a law intended to punish those who assault a pregnant woman and cause the fetus’ death. Brigham faces five charges of first-degree murder, five counts of second-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. Riley, is charged with one count each of first- and second-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. Maryland has legal abortion and doctors who provide this service. It also allows for use of government funds for abortions, so their clinic and their travel to operate the clinic are not consistent with the need for out-of-state doctors that one sees in states which heavily restrict abortion.

This is the first time Maryland prosecutors have used the “assault” law to prosecute an abortion doctor. This case does not threaten the legal abortion operations of Maryland doctors, who would not have performed these late-term abortions without urgent medical need. But this case does feed into the anti-abortion propaganda machine, and that should make abortion advocates the last people to support the defense of these two. We have been fighting for years against the perception that women get abortions cavalierly and without thought, that viable fetuses are routinely aborted on demand, that women seeking abortions don’t know what they are doing. These two doctors have just handed ammunition to the pro-life groups who are pressuring Maryland legislators to pass laws that restrict abortion.

Related articles

• South Jersey Abortion Doctor One Of Two Arrested And Charged With Murder (philadelphia.cbslocal.com)
• Murder charges for out-of-state doctors who performed abortions in Maryland (guardian.co.uk)
• Maryland Doctors Charged With Murder For Late-Term Abortions [Roe V World] (jezebel.com)

The murder leaves behind questions and a devastated collection of Gillespie’s friends.

Gillespie was returning from the grocery store when the elevator that she was in stopped on the fifth floor of the apartment building that she lived in. According to a resident of the Prospect Heights building, “She was screaming at the top of her lungs.” The attack happened at around 4:15pm Friday.

The man who murdered her is believed to have known her, and may be have been a current or former boyfriend. He waited in the hallway for her to arrive and then attacked her. He sprayed her with a bottle full of flammable liquid and then used a long nozzle lighter to light up a Molotov cocktail, which he then used to set her on fire. Gillespie had not even managed to get out of the elevator when the man attacked.

According to NYPD spokesman Paul Browne “He opens the door and sprayed her methodically over her head, over her body. She’s cowering, trying to protect her face with her hands.”

The man actually opened the doors to the elevator one last time to spray more accelerant onto Gillespie.

Heidi Matthews, who has known Gillespie for decades, said that Gillespie worked for the Post Office, and stated that “This is devastating. She was a fixture in the neighborhood for years. This is unreal. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for you. She bought me flowers for Mothers’ Day. She would come home from shopping and say, ‘I have some extra of this, do you need anything?’”

A neighbor named David rushed out of his apartment to try and find her, and then “I smelled smoke, and then ran back upstairs to call 911. It sounded like a person being attacked, rather than someone stuck in an elevator. It sounded like she was in trouble.”

Five others were injured, but none seriously, in the resulting fire.

Via NY Post 1
Via NY Post 2

Sheriff Joe Arpiao by Gage Skidmore

Arizona’s famous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, called the Toughest Sheriff In America, has been featured in a Fox series, had his deputies starring in a TLC series and made headlines for all the wrong reasons – abuse of power, racial profiling, tent city jails, vigilante round-ups of “illegals” that snagged more citizens and legal immigrants than illegals, misuse of funds…you name it, Arpaio is alleged to have done it. Now, the Department of Justice has issued its findings about Arpaio and the allegations have turned into facts.

The Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff’s Office (known as the MCSO) has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Hispanics. The three-year investigation showed a pattern of racial profiling, discrimination, carrying out “immigration patrols” based on racist “citizen complaints.”

The DoJ has been investigating the civil rights violations as well as complaints that excessive force has been used against Hispanic suspects, inadequate protection for Hispanic communities, failure to investigate sex crimes committed against Hispanics, attempts to silence critics with arrests and corruption charges, the lopsided arrest statistics for Hispanics, treatment of prisoners in the “tent city” jails he built, denial of translation assistance for persons with limited English, forcing prisoners to sign forms implicating themselves, and a virtual laundry list of offenses.

Thomas Perez, who heads the DoJ civil rights division, said that the “MCSO is broken in a number of critical respects. The problems are deeply rooted in MCSO’s culture…Arpaio’s own actions have helped nurture MCSO’s culture of bias.” He said the DoJ’s expert on racial profiling called the case the “most egregious case” he as ever seen or reviewed in professional literature. The Federal government could pull millions of dollars of funding from the department if major changes are not made in the department.

Arpaio will be required to set up training against discrimination, establish policies against discrimination and make changes that will be monitored by a judge. There is a January 4 deadline for Arpaio to communicate if he will work out an agreement. If he doesn’t, the government will sue him and let a judge decide the extent of Arpaio’s guilt.

The primary question really ought to be why the Justice Department isn’t throwing the book at this man. Why should he be given an opportunity to correct his department? Over 400 people have given evidence of Arpaio’s actions. Just how many are needed for an indictment?

The Justice Department is still investigating three more areas – the complaints of excessive force, failure to investigate sex crimes and the immigration “sweeps.” But the sheriff’s department has so thoroughly botched relations with the Hispanic community that it is hard to find witnesses willing to talk to any authorities.

Perez wrote in his statement, “MCSO has done almost nothing to build such a relationship with Mariciopa County’s Latino residents…” He’s referring to a relationship that would make it possible to complete the investigation.

Arpaio is nearly 80 years old. He has recently made noises that he will not run for re-election. He is also known for his enormous ego. Any threat to his reputation or authority might be just the impetus he needs to dig in his heels and stay.

Related articles

• Feds: Ariz. Sheriff Arpaio Violated Rights (time.com)
• Feds accuse Arizona sheriff’s dept. of racial profiling – Fox News (latino.foxnews.com)
• Controversial Arizona Sheriff’s ‘Culture Of Bias’ Revealed In Scathing Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• Feds: Ariz. sheriff’s office promotes a ‘culture of bias’ – USA Today (content.usatoday.com)
• US sheriff ‘targeted Hispanics’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Joe Arpaio, ‘America’s toughest sheriff’, accused of racial profiling (guardian.co.uk)

Manuel Noreiga, 1990 mug shot

Once upon a time, Panama’s Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno was an ally of America. He was opposed to communism, so it didn’t matter what kind of leader he was, how brutal or ruthless a dictator he was. As long as he proclaimed himself to be anti-communist, he was our friend. Then, he wasn’t.

In 1989, the United States invaded Panama and captured Noreiga. He stood trial in America and in Europe and in Panama. Each jurisdiction got a piece of him. America got 15 years on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering. Though his sentence ended in 2007, he was held in custody pending extradition requests from France and Panama. France got first dibs, receiving him in April 2010. He was sentenced to seven years on charges of money laundering and murder. A conditional release was arranged so that he could go back to Panama and serve his twenty year sentence for 11 murders, including the 1985 beheading of Dr. Hugo Spadafora, who had threatened to expose Noreiga’s drug dealings and 9 Army officers who led an unsucessful coup in 1989. There were three separate trials, held while Noreiga was in an American prison, and in each case he received a twenty-year sentence. They will be served concurrently.

Noreiga is 77 years old. France’s agreement to the conditional release was a way to prevent Noreiga dying in a French prison in the next six years before Panama got their pound of flesh from him.

Though Noreiga was only “in power” from 1983 to 1989, he was part of the military that controlled Panama from 1968, holding the leadership of the military intelligence force from 1969.

The Panamanians are hoping that Noreiga will provide them with information concerning his years in power. There are still around 100 unsolved murders and disappearances from 1968 to 1989, and the nation would like closure. He left Paris Sunday morning, accompanied by a Panamanian official and a physician. His return is not expected to impact Panamanian politics, as his few supporters have remained out of sight for the past 22 years.

Noreiga is going from the relative civilization of an American and a French prison to a Panamanian penitentiary in the jungle near the Canal. Few people expect him to ever be released. The Central American rain forest is not conducive to reaching the age of 97.

Related articles

• Panama ex-dictator Manuel Noriega flies home (guardian.co.uk)
• Manuel Noriega on way home to prison (news.smh.com.au)
• Noriega en route to prison in Panama after 22 years (calgaryherald.com)
• Manual Noriega extradited to Panama – CBS News (cbsnews.com)

Attorney General Eric Holder

Most of us associate the words “Fast and Furious” with Vin Diesel. But the name was used for a very stupid operation that was intended to prove that American guns were being smuggled into Mexico. Mexican President Felipe Calderón had made that accusation, while asking America to stop the smuggling of guns from our side of the border if we want him to stop the smuggling of humans from his.

The operation was run by the Arizona office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The operation did not have authorization from anyone in Washington. Two thousand firearms were purchased by “straw buyers” – persons who were buying them for the Mexican drug cartels – with the knowledge of federal agents. The guns were not tracked and were allowed to go to Mexico where they have been used in multiple homicides.

When Congress found out about the operation, they went ballistic. In their view, we had allowed 2,000 weapons to fall into the hands of the cartels.There were a lot of things wrong with this operation. If the purpose was to prove the smuggling stream, it would have made more sense to track the guns. Putting GPS chips in the guns would have accomplished that. Rifle butts are the best place for chips, though I’m sure a good firearms expert could come up with places to slip chips. Working with the Mexican authorities, they could have captured the smugglers at the border and both countries would have had scored on this problem. Okay, so the guys who devised this plan don’t have the strategy-formulating skills of a 63-year-old civilian. After spending 30 years married to a Federal employee, I am painfully aware of the fact that there is something in the water coolers which kills brain cells in Federal offices, mostly in the creativity centers.

The most off-the-wall accusations to come out of this mess came from the National Rifle Association. According to them, the operation was a covert method of getting in guns into Mexico so that American gun laws could be held responsible for the smuggling. It is known that the straw buyers target gun shows where identification and back ground checks are not required. To the NRA the whole thing was part of President Obama’s desire to disarm America. Say what? The NRA and Second Amendment crowd have been beating this drum for three years, even though the President has never said anything about gun control, not even after the massacre in Tucson last January. It is an accepted “truth” that all liberals want to ban guns in America. A letter from NRA president Wayne LaPierre, intended to solicit support for pushing Eric Holder out of office, called the operation “…a frame-up against gun owners and the Second Amendment.”

Well, the Senate is holding hearings about the operation and the dust-ups started on Wednesday when Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, called for the resignation of Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who oversees all criminal matter at the DoJ. There have been calls for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation ever since the operation became public.

Grassley gave a floor speech saying that Breuer was guilty of a “complete lack of judgment” in failing to tell the Department about the operation when he learned of it in 2010. He also said that Breuer had misled the Senate in earlier hearings. Breuer denied the operation had ever happened in a letter earlier this year.

On Thursday, Holder appeared in the Senate to be subjected to hours of Republican righteous  indignation.

Republican Senator Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisonsin accused the DoJ of lying about Fast and Furious. Holder shot back, “First let me make something very clear, in response to an assertion you made, or hinted at: Nobody in the Justice Department has lied. Nobody has lied.” Sensenbrenner then demanded to know “Then why was the letter withdrawn?” referring to a letter sent to Grassley by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, which said that the guns were not allowed to cross into Mexico. Both Weich and Breuer have admitted that the information in the letter was incorrect. Holder replied, “The letter was withdrawn because there was information in there that was inaccurate.” Not good enough for Sensenbrenner, who shot back “Tell me what the difference is between lying and misleading Congress in this context?”

Holder responded that whether a statement is a lie or misleading comment depends on what the person was thinking at the time. “If you want to have this legal conversation, it all has to do with your state of mind, and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that can be considered perjury or a lie. The information that was provided in that February 4^th letter was gleaned by the people who drafted the letter after they interacted with people who they thought were in the best position to have the information.” Translation: Arizona lied to us and we sent their lies along because we didn’t know any better. This is one area that the Republicans really don’t want to get into – the jurisdictional and communication mess that the Feds have become.

After the passage of the Patriot Act and the authorization of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, the Bush administration so thoroughly mucked up the law enforcement agencies within the Federal government that one agent testified in a criminal court case in Georgia that he had no idea who he worked for. It was a common problem. The Bush administration created so many layers of bureaucracy in the name of national security that people still don’t know who has all those thousands of top secret clearances. We were actually warned in advance about the Christmas underwear bomber, and the information disappeared into the black hole that Federal law enforcement and intelligence have become.

So, Arizona was covering their butts and lied to the DoJ. The director there probably figured that if the DoJ knew just how much they had bungled this, no one’s job would be safe. The DoJ gave the Senate the information it had at the time. But a simple explanation does not satisfy the Republican blood lust, so the news stories are comparing Holder’s answers to Bill Clinton’s famous “it depends on the definition of ‘is’” remark. Clinton was doing what lawyers do, having the parameters of the question very specifically set. Holder was making a point about legality, that lying is not lying if it is the transmission of inaccurate information. He could have made the statement less “legally correct.” He could have flat-out told Sensenbrenner that the Arizona ATF office lied to the DoJ. The worst thing Holder is guilty of is excessive politeness.

Holder is aware of how simple legal maneuvers can be twisted into anti-Democrat propaganda. After all, Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury when he had specifically asked the attorney taking his deposition about Monica Lewinsky to define “sexual relations” and was not lying when he said, no they had “sexual relations” as defined by the lawyer (straight intercourse). If the Republicans could twist up that deposition that any first-year law student recognized as not involving perjury into an impeachment for perjury, then what can they do with the letters that sent along misinformation that had been provided to the DoJ? No one in their right minds trusts Republicans when they want blood. Facts never figure into that.

At least 300 Mexicans and U. S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry have been killed with the Fast and Furious guns. Yeah, someone should lose his or her job, multiple someones should, but Eric Holder, Ronald Weich and Lanny Breuer are not among them.

Related articles

• Holder to Congress: ‘Fast and Furious’ inexcusable (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• GOP asks for firings over Fast and Furious (abclocal.go.com)
• AG Holder threatened with impeachment over ‘Fast and Furious’ (csmonitor.com)
• Holder calls Fast and Furious tactic inexcusable (sfgate.com)

On Thursday in Walker County, Texas, a jury found Alfonso Hernandez, 24, guilty of a felony. His 21-year-old accomplice, Michael Edmonds, pleaded guilty on Tuesday and said that he was the one who actually fired the shot that killed DASY.

At trial, it was revealed that Hernandez kicked and beat DASY as she lay dying. Sentencing is scheduled for February and the men are facing two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

DASY’s name was derived from the initials of fellow Seals who did not come home.  Luttrell was the only survivor of the 2005 mission Operation Redwing, in which 19 servicemen died. He was awarded the Navy Cross and Purple Heart. In 2007, he was given DASY, as a puppy to assist him with his recovery from his tour of duty in Afghanstan. He has written a book, Lone Survivor, about Operation Redwing. DASY was more than a dog or a pet, she was a vitally important part of Luttrell’s return to a normal life. Her loss was devastating to him.

Texas criminal cruelty laws are fairly good, failing only in their narrow definition of protected animals as only being those who are in the possession of a human. A recent controversial court ruling in Waco found that a lost pet who was beaten to death was not covered under the laws because he was not in the possession of his owner at the time. In a few states, Hernandez and Edmonds would not have face prosecution at all. Though a two year sentence is the maximum in a case like this in Texas, the circumstances of Luttrell’s relationship to DASY makes a maximum sentence a probability. Luttrell is a genuine hero and a well-known figure in Texas, admired and respected. Sympathy for him precludes a short sentence for DASY’s killers.

Hernandez and Edmonds really did choose the wrong victim. They need to be made aware of the way some inmates will exact punishment from other prisoners when they feel the justice system didn’t do enough.

http://www.radaronline.com/category/tags/staff

Related articles

• Almost every story of the SEALs has a heroic ending but that does not stop some of them from being tragic. (oldsaltbooks.wordpress.com)

Anders Behring Breivik

After 36 hours of conversations, the two psychiatrists appointed by an Oslo court to evaluate confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik have submitted their report, concluding that he was insane when he killed 77 people on July 22. Duh. Specifically, the doctors found that Breivik suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and that he was psychotic during the attacks, which means he’s not mentally fit to be sentenced to prison, prosecutors told reporters.

For those who may have been under a rock or at the Jersey shore at the time, Breivik began his day of rage by bombing government buildings in Oslo, killing eight. He then proceeded, dressed as a policeman, to a camp of the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya where he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers. Some were shot in the water as they attempted to swim to safety. One survivor huddled behind the boulder Breivik stood on as he shot her friends.

Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay

Breivik has confessed to carrying out the attacks but denies criminal guilt, saying he’s the commander of a Norwegian resistance movement, opposed to multiculturalism, particularly Muslim immigration. He had published a 1,500+ page manifesto online prior to the attacks, wherein he called his movement the Knights Templar (Grand Master Jacques de Molay has got to be less than pleased!).

If the court accepts the report, Breivik will go to a mental health institution for an undetermined length of time, rather than to a prison. Norwegian courts rarely reject psychiatric evaluations.

 Crime and Punishment in Norway

Dolk graffiti mural, Halden Fenqsel

Norway’s legal code supports its tradition of stressing rehabilitation over punishment. It does not have the death penalty, and the maximum jail term is 21 years. “Both society and the individual simply have to put aside their desire for revenge, and stop focusing on prisons as places of punishment and pain,” one Norwegian prison official told the Daily Mail. “Depriving a person of their freedom for a period of time is sufficient punishment in itself without any need whatsoever for harsh prison conditions.”

We in America have a sense of “prison” as a brutal, dehumanizing environment suitable for the punishment of our predators… where they can prey on each other, and so be it. We think of “hospital” as a gentle, nurturing atmosphere where the mentally ill are protected and live in relative comfort. This man is not in America, however. He is in Norway.

Inmate & Personal Trainer, Halden Fenqsel

In 2010, Norway opened its newest maximum security prison, Halden Prison, the likeliest destination for Breivik if he is indeed prosecuted and imprisoned. Its 75 acres of grounds include extensive outdoor exercise facilities, including jogging trails and personal trainers. Inmates have single rooms with private bathrooms, wall-mount flat panel TV’s, and large bar-less windows. Common areas and communal kitchens are shared by the inmates and the guards, who are encouraged to mingle and establish supportive, friendly relationships with the prison population. There are cooking classes, music classes, a full recording studio, gymnasium, library and state-of-the-art medical facilities. Speaking of, the price tag for the graffiti art commissioned for the prison was $1 million.

Atrium, Östra Psychiatric Hospital

The Östra Psychiatric Hospital is no less luxurious and geared to mental health rehabilitation. In fact, the only real difference I could see in all the photos I looked at was that the psychiatric hospitals do have bars on the windows – they may appear decorative, but they are bars.

The greatest difference between the two types of facilities in Norway, from everything I read, is one of perceived responsibility and expectation. The prison inmates are treated as human beings who are responsible for their actions and their rehabilitation. There is both a hope and an expectation that they will see the error of their ways and choose to reform. The long-term committed mental patients are treated as human beings who are not responsible for their actions, because they have little or no connection with reality. There is hope that they may recover their sanity, but small expectation that they will. Without that recovery, they will continue to be incapable of functioning in society.

Breivik will be held as long as he is deemed a threat to society.  REREAD THAT SENTENCE.  Breivik will have to be sane, to have recovered from paranoid schizophrenia (an incurable mental illness), to be released. He can be held in that hospital for the rest of his life. If he were to be judged sane, he would be released in 21 years, and he is a young man (32).

Norwegian and American societies are so incredibly different. I would need to spend a lot more time researching comparative crimes and recidivism rates between the two to have any chance of offering an informed opinion on whose system is best… but given the Norwegian system, I do believe that committing this man to a mental hospital is safer and better for society in the long run than sending him to prison.  At least there is small chance that he will be released to kill again.

Related articles

• Norway Mass Killer May Be Declared Legally Insane [Anders Behring Breivik] (kotaku.com)
• Lesbian Couple Saved Dozens of Campers from Norway Massacre (towleroad.com)
• Norway’s Breivik Declared Insane, Faces Compulsory Treatment (businessweek.com)

The border at Tijuana (left) and San Diego (right)

Seventeen tons of marijuana were seized when law enforcement found a 400 yard tunnel that connected warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana. That’s 34,000 pounds of pot in two trucks, one on each side of the border. The bales were marked with labels for Captain America, Sprite and Bud Light to identify where they were going.

This is only one of the major smuggling tunnels that have been found under the border since 2008. A total of 70 tunnels, around San Diego, California’s Imperial Valley and Nogales, Arizona, have been uncovered since October, 2008, more than were uncovered in the six years before then. The reason for the higher level of tunnels is a Republican’s nightmare.

The border is being too well protected.

All the activity along the border to prevent illegal immigration has resulted in the cartels having to utilize these tunnels, use boats along the coast and low-flying small planes to avoid the Border Patrol and National Guard.

This particular tunnel was fairly rough, with wooden supports for the roof and barely enough room for people to move through. Two tunnels, discovered last November, were laid out with railway tracks, lighting and ventilation.

Gee, the border is being too well protected. Maybe the administration should use the video from these tunnels in campaign ads next year – just to show the lengths to which the Republicans will twist the truth for political gain.

Related articles

• 400-metre drug tunnel found on Mexico-US border (guardian.co.uk)
• US authorities find major drug tunnel in San Diego (sfgate.com)
• If They Would Just Build a Fence (outsidethebeltway.com)

http://gawker.com/5860072/facebook-declares-victory-in-war-on-rampaging-penises

Puebla State is first light green lfet of narrowest part of Mexico

For a preview of the effects of a personhood amendment, we can look south to Mexico. As in the United States, abortion laws are done state-by-state in Mexico. Sixteen of Mexico’s 31 states have laws and constitutional amendments similar to the personhood amendment that was rejected last week in Mississippi. There are also laws banning abortions for girls under 12 years of age and past the first trimester. Some exemptions exist for rape victims, but the first trimester rule is fairly firm in most of Mexico.

Which leads us to a pretty hysterical set of stories around the web concerning a 10-year-old who was denied an abortion in the Mexican state of Puebla. The news reports screwed up the timeline as it relates to the investigation of the girl’s rape by her stepfather.

The girl, who will turn 11 shortly, was 27 weeks pregnant when she was first brought to the hospital on Otober 22^nd for complications in the pregnancy. At that point, the baby was potentially viable and she could not have received an abortion under any circumstances. The authorities were alerted and investigated. Her stepfather was arrested and is currently in jail. The girl’s complications increased over the ensuing 4 weeks and her baby boy was delivered by cesarean section at 31 weeks gestation, weighing 3.3 pounds. The girl is in foster care. The baby is still hospitalized and is recovering from pneumonia. She visits daily to breastfeed her son. Because the rapist was her stepfather, and not her biological father, there were no genetic complications from consanguinity.

Officials in Mexico have said that if the girl had come to their attention early enough in the pregnancy, she may not have qualified for the rape exemption anyway because the law forbids abortions for girls under 12.

Last year, an 11 year-old was delivered of her baby two weeks prematurely. She had been raped by her biological father, who is in jail. Again, the girl did not come to the attention of the authorities until it was too late for an abortion. Before that, there was a 13-year old who also delivered prematurely.

The cases are re-opening the debate over abortion in the predominantly-Catholic country, which is the wrong way round for this debate. Half of Mexico’s states allow abortion. The real debate should be about education for children.

It is very possible that two of these girls had never had a menstrual period, so they had no way of knowing they were pregnant until something about the pregnancy made them ill. In the case of the 10 year old, it was high fever and seizures that brought to the hospital. Even effective sex education might not have been enough. But abuse education would have been. These girls had no one to confide in, no one to tell of the abuse. They should have been able to tell teachers if they were in school, or nuns at their churches, or as a last resort, their priests in the confessional. I understand that they probably felt they could not tell their mothers, that is typical in these cases, but there should have been some other adult who could help. The first people who need to step into this situation are members of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Mexico.

Do you remember the brouhaha when Irish singer Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II? She had been raped as a child by a relative and when she told her parish priest, he did nothing. The Catholic Church should have progressed since then, but it hasn’t. They are not reaching out to potential abuse victims and offering them a safe haven. They are not teaching what abuse is in their catechism classes. They are not stressing that all children have a right to be safe in their own bodies. It is not enough to tell girls that the Tenth Commandment means don’t twirl around in a skirt cause you might give a boy bad thoughts. These girls didn’t become pregnant the first time they were raped. If they had been able to get help at the start, the church would not have been put in the position of dealing with a possible abortion.

These girls were, at some point, in public primary schools. The state bears a responsibility to get abuse education into these schools, for teachers as well as for students. And for that, the church must get involved. Religion is the primary reason given for children to be opted out of sex education in public schools. If the Church advocated for abuse education, the public schools would be able to reach the greatest number of children. Three pregnant children is three too many.

Barrett Brown

Barrett Brown, one of the few members of Anonymous to have plastered his face all over the internet, is looking for a place to hide. All it took was three beheaded Anonymous members in Mexico to convince him that sometimes 15 minutes of fame can lead to a shortened life span.

Brown has tweeted “I’ve got ex-military people releasing info on me and family. Have to leave Texas. Anyone who can buy me ticket to NYC/Boston and have me pay them back next month, let me know….Home no longer secure.”

Okay, I’ll buy that he’s in danger, but blaming the United States military or ex-service personnel is just too-Julian Assange. Brown is assuming that he has sufficiently irritated the establishment that they would assist the cartels. He has pissed off the Zeta drug cartel. They don’t want his ass in jail, they want him dead for threatening them. He compounded the situation by intimating that the Zetas couldn’t find him without gringo help, just the way Assange lost credibility by claiming the Americans would snatch him and make him disappear.

Anyone who wants to hide, from runaway slaves in pre-Civil War America to runaway abused wives to Lisa Miller, had to get help from sympathetic people. Abolitionists, former abused wives, religious fanatics….their sympathy makes hiding possible. The most sympathetic people in America for potential victims of the Mexican drug cartels are those people who have fled north to escape the cartels and their effect on life in Mexico – our legal and illegal Hispanic community. Saying that Mexicans are too stupid to track IP addresses is a great way to end up with no place to hide. True stupidity is in thinking that a large city, with a thriving drug trade, is a good place to hide.

Brown is not so afraid for his life that he couldn’t sign off without one of his trademark “me in the bathtub” videos. Yeah, a bubble bath and large glass of red wine makes for a sympathy-inducing image.

Brown has a book deal with Amazon which is rumored to have a six-figure advance on it. Apparently, he has not received that advance or he wouldn’t be begging for airline tickets. By the way, Mr. Brown, airline tickets leave a computer trail.

Okay, Mr. Brown, how about some advice instead of tickets? Download everything you want to save from your computer to some thumb drives. Take a hammer to your computer. Withdraw all your cash from your bank accounts. Cut up your credit and debit cards. Get in your car, with only the minimum you need to survive on. Head out in any direction. Stop in some small town and trade your car for an older one, preferably in a private sale. You’ll find them in the local Shopper newspaper. Then, stay off the interstate. Too many drug cartels use them for transport and your face is too famous. Zig-zag in any direction, but I would head for the mountains – the Rockies or the Appalachians. The only way to avoid being found is to go off the grid. There won’t be many bubble baths with wine there, but you might save your life and the lives of your family. A dozen episodes of In Plain Sight or the Viggo Mortensen movie A History of Violence might you give a few ideas.

AND STAY THE HELL OFF THE INTERNET. Try to understand this – I can pick up the phone, call our tech and have your home address in about five minutes, just the way I can tell you which Congressperson’s offices have logged on this site and where harassing e-mails are coming from.

I’m aware of the fact that I tend to aggravate hacktivists and their fans. I do it for a reason – to make you aware of the fact that you are not so superior that you cannot be found, to make you see that you often go the wrong path for having any real impact on issues. I would be the first person to applaud you if you managed to actually get into Fox News’ systems and interrupt their broadcasts, maybe by plastering the word “liar” over Sean Hannity’s face for 30 seconds, or if you could hack into the Syrian security forces or take down their state media….something that had real impact and not just something that irritates the wrong people or endangers innocents.

Barrett Brown needs to run, not because some ex-US military personnel have exposed him but because he was stupid enough to take on an international criminal organization and threaten them without covering his tracks in advance. As long as he doesn’t wise up and realize the extent of his danger or as long as all of you fail to impress on him the best way to escape, he will continue to be in danger and continue to endanger the lives of his family. I’ll make this graphically clear to you – the Zetas are capable of snatching Brown’s family and torturing them, gang raping them, flaying them alive, barbequing them, and putting the images on the net as a warning to others. And they would leave Brown alone, not touch him until he had watched what they did to his loved ones. That’s who Anonymous decided to go after without adequate protections for themselves or their families. This isn’t a government agency or a corporation you are dealing with. These are guys who make Firefly’s reavers look like civilized people.

I really do hope that Brown escapes with everyone he loves and cares about.

Related articles

• Face of Anonymous Flees North as Drug Cartels’ War on Bloggers Heats Up [Anonymous] (gawker.com)
• Anonymous drops Zeta threat after return of kidnappee (news.cnet.com)
• OpCartel Focuses on North Carolina District Attorney (forbes.com)
• News Analysis: Facts Blur as Anonymous and Zeta Cartel’s Feud Ends in a Draw (nytimes.com)
• Anonymous Finally Wises Up (lezgetreal.com)
• Follow Up of the Day: Anonymous Going Ahead With Operation Against Mexican Drug Cartel (geeks.thedailywh.at)

Lindsey Lowe

We reported two months on the case of Lindsey Lowe, a 25-year-old Tennessee woman who on Spetember 12 gave birth to twin boys in the bathroom of her parents’ home and smothered both the babies. Today, Sumner County District Attorney General Ray Whitley announced that the state will not seek the death penalty in this case. A grand jury has indicted Lowe on two counts of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. Whitley said the death penalty is not appropriate in this case.

Lowe had managed to hide her pregnancy from family and friends and said she smothered the babies to keep her family from hearing the babies’ cries. No explanation has been forthcoming for why an adult woman, not a member of a far right-wing church, would feel so compelled to keep her pregnancy a secret or kill her babies. Her attorney has said he feels Lowe’s actions are a “mental health issue.” That has already been taken into account in the decision to not pursue the death penalty. At trial, Lowe’s attorney was probably follow up on that concept and push for institutionalization instead of incarceration.

Related articles

• Tenn Won’t Seek Death Penalty in Newborn Slayings (abcnews.go.com)
• Tennessee woman indicted in deaths of infant twins (cnn.com)

On September 13, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo published the graphic pictures of the bodies of two people hanging from a highway overpass. They had been tortured, the woman disemboweled. Nearby was a banner threatening the Mexican attorney general and two blogs, one the popular Blog del Narco, a reporting site for drug activity. Nuevo Laredo en Vivo responded to the threat by asking people to increase their reporting of cartel activity.

On September 25, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo’s moderator, Marisol Macias Castaneda was found decapitated by the side of a busy road. Her head was on a stone piling with the note “Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and social networking sites, I’m The Laredo Girl, and I’m here because of my reports and yours. For those who don’t believe, this happened to me because of my actions, for believing in the army and the navy. Thank you for your attention, respectfully, Laredo Girll…ZZZZ”

The “ZZZZ” is not the mark of Zorro, but of the Zeta drug cartel. No one could figure out how the cartel had found out Laredo Girl’s real identity. I know a reporter at the Washington Post who could explain it to them. She found me.

Wednesday, Castaneda’s co-monitor, identified only as “Rascaptripas” (fiddler) was found, beheaded just as Castaneda had been. With his body was the message “With this, I say goodbye to ‘Nuevo Laredo Live’.. Always remember, never forget, my handle, ‘Rascatripas.’”

Social media has been very important in Mexico in tracking cartel activities and assisting the government in making arrests. Citizens use these sites to report live on firefights and cartel checkpoints. These deaths are warnings for the people who belong to these networks – they can be found and punished for their honesty.

The users of Castaneda’s and Rascaptripas’ site are refusing to be intimidated. Anon4024 posted, “Do not be afraid to report. This is how we citizens can make a difference in this city.” Another, Danlaredo, warned readers not to give out any personal information. “No need to worry, no way of knowing our data since WE’RE ALL ANONYMOUS, and the only way to know them, is that we disclose ourselves so PLEASE , follow the rules…and do not give your personal INFORMATION….please!”

Unfortunately, Danlaredo is wrong….and he could be dead wrong. Giving out personal information is not the only way for the cartels to find people who report them. You have an address, an IP address. You can be tracked. You can be found. There is only one safe way for people to report the cartel’s activities to the rat-out sites – use a public place like an internet café or public library. And never assume that with the money the cartels make they can’t or won’t hire someone with the credentials of a Penelope Garcia to find those who rat on them. They can afford that kind of expertise more than the Mexican government can.

You all may be legion, but you are not anonymous, not really.

Related articles

• Mexican Blogger Decapitated; Cartels’ War on Social Media Spreads (wired.com)
• Hacker Collective ‘Anonymous’ Goes After Mexican Drug Cartel (techland.time.com)
• Hackers vs. Drug Lords: Anonymous Takes on Mexico’s Zeta Cartel (techland.time.com)
• Anonymous backs off in clash with Mexican drug cartel (go.theregister.com)
• Social network commenter beheaded by Mexican drug cartel (digitaltrends.com)
• Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting (telegraph.co.uk)
• Woman decapitated in Mexico for web posting (seattlepi.com)

To Train Up A Child (image from Amazon.com)

The book is called To Train Up a Child, self-published by Tennessee pastor Michael Pearl and his wife Debi. There are 670,000 copies of the book already sold. It is based on the principle of “spare the rod and spoil the child” which is not from the Bible, but from John Skelton, Samuel Butler and John Dunne. Not exactly a strong religious endorsement there. The book teaches systematic use of “the rod” for children as young as six months, and the implements to use range from switches (flexible tree branches) to quarter-inch flexible PVC piping to belts and wooden spoons. Nice arsenal.

The book is popular among Christian home-schooling parents, like Larry and Carri Williams of Sedro-Woolley, Washington, who in September were charged with murdering their adopted daughter Hana, 11, by disciplining her. They left her naked and unfed in an unheated barn, where she died of exposure and malnutrition. The Williamses admitted to disciplining her with a plastic tube and followed the Pearl’s advice that “a little fasting is good training.” They had even given a copy of the book to friends.

The Pearls have the gall to say that there methods are based on “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.” ‘Scuse me, the Amish don’t use those “principles” on their children.

The Pearls haven’t been charged, but the Williamses aren’t the first case.

Lydia Schatz was a 7 year old, adopted at age 4 from Liberia. Her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz of Paradise, California, hit her with a plastic tube for hours, with breaks for prayers. Lydia died last year. They were followers of the Pearls.

Sean Paddock, age 4, of Johnson County, North Carolina, died of suffocation after being tightly wrapped in a blanket by his mother, Lynn Paddock. Sean’s siblings testified at their mother’s murder trial that they were beaten daily with a plumbing tube. She also followed the teachings of the Pearls.

Michael Pearl refuses to accept any responsibility for the deaths of these children. Just the way Bill O’Reilly, who spent months calling Dr. George Tiller a baby killer, refuses to see any connection between his words and Dr. Tiller’s murder. It’s that favorite rationalization of conservatives and fanatics – “we are each responsible for our own actions so my words didn’t cause anyone to commit murder.”

In their book, the Pearls wrote that “To give up the use of the rod is to give up our views of human nature, God, eternity…” Yeah, their view doesn’t seem to include the fact that Christ was the essence of love and tolerance.

A few Christian groups have asked Amazon to withdraw the book from their catalog. 

Related articles

• Pastor’s Corporal Punishment Advice Scrutinized After Child Deaths (maboulette.wordpress.com)
• NYT: Deaths fuel debate on virtue of spanking (msnbc.msn.com)
• Deaths Put Focus on Pastor’s Advocacy of Spanking (nytimes.com)
• Child’s Death Sheds Light on Biblical Disciplinary Teachings (abcnews.go.com)
• Godly spanking turned deadly: Is a Tennessee pastor to blame? – San Francisco Chronicle (blog) (sfgate.com)
• Why Would Anyone Spank a Child? (patheos.com)
• Michael Pearl defends book by pragmatism (iamarecoveringfundamentalist.wordpress.com)

Governor Beverly Perdue

NBC’s new Rock Center certainly got off with a bang. They told the story of the 7,600 people that were involuntarily sterilized by the state of North Carolina between the 1920′s and 1970′s.

Back then, sterilization was a common decision made for those who were mentally handicapped – retarded was the word used back then. For the parents of handicapped girls it was a painful choice. They knew their child lacked the ability to make the right decisions if or when confronted with a relationship. They also knew that mentally handicapped girls, mainstreamed into normal schools or simply living their lives in their community, were often the target of rape. If a child had been institutionalized, that choice was made by the facility, and therefore, by the state.

But the state of North Carolina went way beyond sterilizing girls for their own good, and engaged in a program of sterilization based on eugenics. The state believed that certain behaviors were inherited, like alcoholism or promiscuity, so they sterilized to prevent breeding by “unacceptables,” and those “unacceptables” were disproportionately African-American girls. Once welfare programs were instituted, sterilization was used to prevent pregnancies in welfare mothers, usually without their knowledge or consent.

One woman, Elaine Riddick, was raped when she was 13 in 1967. She became pregnant by the rapist. He was never caught or prosecuted. As Elaine lay unconscious after the birth of her son, she was sterilized by state order. They had deemed her “feeble minded” and “promiscuous.” Riddick was never told that her tubes had been tied. She found out when she was a 19 year old married woman trying to conceive. The doctor who examined her said she had been “butchered.” Riddick eventually graduated from college and in time sued the state of North Carolina. The case was denied and denied again until it was finally presented to the United States Supreme Court, who refused to hear it. This child was butchered by the state of North Carolina and the SCOTUS couldn’t be bothered to hear the case.

There were 31 states that had programs of sterilization, most to control the birth rate of welfare recipients. North Carolina was the worst. It was an outgrowth of a popular idea called eugenics – promoted by Dr. Clarence Gamble (of the Proctor and Gamble fortune) and James Hanes (of the hosiery company). (Gee, and you thought the Kochs were a new phenomenon.) Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League to spread the gospel of eugenics. It started as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women, but in North Carolina quickly switched to women and girls they could classify as immoral, feeble-minded or both, a third of them under 18 and a few as young as 9. Yes, 9 years old – a rape or incest victim victimized a second time by the state of North Carolina.

North Carolina has been working at compensating those sterilized between 1929 and 1974. Eighty-five percent of the victims were female, 40% were non-white.

Governor Beverly Perdue told NBC News, “You can’t rewind a watch or rewrite history. You just have to go forward and that’s what we’re trying to do in North Carolina.” Though the eugenics board was disbanded in 1977, the law which permitted involuntary sterilization wasn’t repealed until 2003. The state issued an apology in 2002. Since 2003, three separate task forces have been appointed to find and compensate the victims. There may be as many as 2,000 still alive. So far, only 48 have been identified.

At hearings this past spring, the victims were finally heard by the public. Now, the bickering over how much to compensate these victims begins. State Representative Larry Womble has been fighting for these people for ten years. He led the drive to get the eugenics law repealed. He said that if government is “powerful enough to perpetrate this on this society, they ought to be responsible, step up to the plate and compensate.”

The newest task force is trying to decide how much the freedom to reproduce is worth. The recommendations have ranged from $20,000 to $50,000. They have already recommended mental health services at the state’s expense and a traveling museum exhibit about the program. Yeah, right, a museum exhibit. Let’s haggle about the dollar amount, but get that museum exhibit traveling. Perdue says it’s not about the money. “From y perspective, and as a woman, and as the governor of this state, this is not about the money. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay these people for what has been done to them, but money is part of the solution.” She also says she is committed to finishing this. She rejects the idea that if the state procrastinates long enough, the victims will die and the whole problem with die with them. “I want this solved on my watch. I want there to be completion. I want the whole discussion to end and there be action for these folks. There is nobody in North Carolina who is waiting for anybody to die.” Oh, why not? Seventy-four percent of them already have.

Related articles

• NC Justice for Sterilization Victims (growfoodlocally.wordpress.com)
• Black Women in N.Carolina Sterilized without their knowledge (colonel6.com)
• An Outrage: NC Black Women Were Sterilized (theroot.com)
• ‘Butchered’: NC sterilization program targeted women, blacks (rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com)
• Black Woman Forcibly Sterilised In North Carolina (merovee.wordpress.com)
• Horrifying State-Sponsored Eugenics Program Forcibly Sterilized Thousands of American Women [Racism] (jezebel.com)
• 34 people in forced sterilization program found (charlotte.news14.com)
• An Outrage: NC Black Women Were Sterilized (interrace.wordpress.com)

The Latin America branch of Anonymous had threatened to release the names of “loyal servants” of the Zeta cartel – taxi drivers, journalists, police officers, others - who work for the cartel or protect them. They hoped to prompt arrests, saying they were “fed up” with the cartel’s activities. But the kidnapping of their member reminded them that with the cartels they were not attacking a bank or releasing the home phone numbers of state troopers, nice law-abiding people all. They were dealing with people who would track them down and kill them and anyone near them, and would do it slowly, painfully and sadistically.

A Texas hacker posted on Twitter that “I will be continuing the fight against the cartels,” and posted on Pastebin that, while avoiding naming names, he would send information to the German newspaper Der Spiegel. “In the meantime, I will be going after other cartels with the assistance of those who have come forward with new information and offers of assistance.” It appears that the Texas hacker, whose name we are choosing to withhold, doesn’t grasp the fact that these cartels have employees in the United States. He is assuming that the cartels don’t have the sophistication to track him, and is equally incapable of understanding that he may have placed others with his fairly common name at risk.  And if he is using a pseudonym, he has placed totally innocent people at risk.

I have been criticized for criticizing Anonymous and LulzSec, for saying that they are irresponsible and childish. So, get your nasty e-mails ready…..I’m about to do it again.

It is times like this when the age of Anonymous participants becomes their vulnerability. They know very little, if anything, about organized crime. The Mexican drug cartels are far more violent than the old organized criminal gangs of America, what’s commonly called the Mafia, just as the Columbian drug cartels were. But the basics remain the same. It’s not very different from the competition between WalMart, KMart and Target. It’s commercial competition taken to a very bloody level. It is still competition. Barring the day when Americans miraculously stop using drugs or legalize, regulate and tax drugs, the competition will continue. The old gangs were just as competitive. They just didn’t tend to behead each other, and they tried to reduce the collateral damage where possible. My mother used to say she grew up in the safest neighborhood in New York because half her neighbors were Mafioso.

Look it up, guys, do some research. Find out how gang members died, how gangs interacted. Find out how ineffective the government was at controlling organized crime. Find out what did work. Frankly, it takes a level of callous disregard for human life to do what is most effective, and I’m not sure you guys are up to that. If you don’t have the guts, don’t go for the glory. Walk away from this fight and leave it to a Mexican government who is as woefully ignorant of history as you are.

Youth and idealism are wonderful things. I had them once. They don’t take down criminal organizations. Only pragmatism and a willingness to get dirty does that.

Related articles

• Anonymous won’t expose Mexico cartel ‘servants’ (msnbc.msn.com)
• Anonymous vs. The Zeta Drug Cartel of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Follow Up of the Day: Anonymous Going Ahead With Operation Against Mexican Drug Cartel (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Even Drug Cartels aren’t safe from Anonymous:Cartel finally releases kidnapped member of hacking group (occupycyberspace.wordpress.com)
• Anonymous” have quit their campaign against Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel! (pikapvs.com)
• Anonymous Withdraws #OpCartel in Wake of Kidnapping and Murder of Activists (techie-buzz.com)
• Anonymous claims possession of 25,000 emails that allegedly reveal collaborators with Mexican drug gangs (100gf.wordpress.com)
• Anonymous On a Warpath With Zetas Drug Cartel After Kidnapping Of Group Member [Video] (gizmodo.com)

Dan Thomas, left, Frederick Thomas, right (courtroom artist, photo by Richard Miller AP)

The four patriots, desperate to save their beloved country from communism, drew their inspiration from an underground novel, plotting to recreate the hero’s actions in their fight for liberty. They created an enemies list of subversives in the government, scouted their enemies’ locations, learned how to make a deadly poison. The had the time and the resources for their activities….the youngest was 65, the eldest 73.

Ray Adams, left, SAmuel Crump, right (courtroom artist, photo by Richard Miller AP)

Federal prosecutors have charged four Georgia men with plotting to imitate the book Absolved, by carrying out plans to scatter ricin from a plane or a car speeding past major American cities, scouted ARS and ATF offices saying at one point “We’d have to blow the whole building like Timothy McVeigh” and having a “bucket list” of government officials to be “taken out.”

The men were under surveillance for over seven months. They were “infiltrated” by undercover agents at their primary meeting site, the neighborhood Waffle House, as well as at their homes and other places. They were arrested on Tuesday just after evidence was discovered that they were trying to extract ricin from castor beans.

U. S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said “While many are focused on the threat posed by international violent extremists, this case demonstrates that we must also remain vigilant in protecting our country from citizens within our borders who threaten our safety and security.”

Frederick Thomas, 73, Dan Roberts, 67, Ray Adams, 65, and Samuel Crump, 68, seemed to have trouble following the proceedings, cupping their hands to their ears, when they appeared in Federal court on Wednesday, entering no pleas. They were remanded to custody pending a bail hearing next week.

Thomas and Roberts were charged with conspiring to buy an explosive device and an illegal silencer. Adams and Crump were charges with conspiring to make a biological toxin. Thomas is alleged to have been the ringleader and he talked about carrying out the actions described in Absolved, an on-line novel by former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh. In the introduction to the book, Vanderboegh called it a “cautionary tale for the out-of-control gun cops of the ATF. For that warning to be credible, I must also present what amounts to a combinatin field manual, technical manual and call to arms for my beloved gunnies of the armed citizenry. They need to know how powerful they could truly be if they were pushed into a corner.” Vanderboegh denies knowing the four men and said he bears no responsibility for the alleged plot. “I’m glad that the FBI has apparently short-circuited some weak-minded individuals from misinterpreting my novel.”

Last year, Vanderboegh called on citizens to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic headquarters across the country to protest the health care law, and several people carried it out. He has also appeared as a commentator on Fox News. On his blog on Wednesday, Vanderboegh reiterated that his novel is fiction and besides, he was skeptical that a “pretty geriatric” militia could carry out the attacks.

Ever since President Obama was elected, right wingers have insisted that he would create laws taking away our guns, even though he has never called for any gun control laws and didn’t even mention the subject after Gabrielle Giffords was shot. They also don’t seem to understand that Presidents can’t just create laws.

The investigators have pages of testimony from informants loaded with direct quotes from the men. Their families deny that any of them were capable of doing anything taht would harm anyone. As for their ages, former U. S. Attorney Kent Alexander of Atlanta said, “Crime doesn’t have a retirement age. These guys are older than one usually sees, but criminals come in all ages.” As another former U. S. Attorney, Donnie Dixon explained, even if they couldn’t have carried out anything as grandiose as their plans, they could still “cause a lot of problems or hurt a lot of people.”

Thomas’ wife told the Associate Press that “He spent 30 years in the U. S. Navy. He would not do anything against his country. He loves his country.” So did Tim McVeigh. So do most militia members. They love it so much they will do anything to protect it, even kill babies who happen to be in the day care at a Federal building.

Related articles

• 4 men accused of planning attacks appear in court (sfgate.com)
• Feds: Militia plot involved D.C. ricin attack (cbsnews.com)
• Feds Arrest Four In Fringe Group In Plot Based Off Online Novel (huffingtonpost.com)
• Relatives shocked by alleged Ga. militia plot (msnbc.msn.com)
• Ricin Plot Inspired by Fiction Novel: Authorities Arrest Four in Georgia (inquisitr.com)
• Four Right Wing Georgia Militia Members Charged In Ricin Terror Plot (littlegreenfootballs.com)

Goldline CEO Scott Carter, from Facebook

Somewhere in the back of my mind is the memory of a radio announcer who used to say “And the hits just keep coming….” That’s the way this day has gone. First Julian Assange, then Ann Coulter and now Glenn Beck. How sweet can a day get?

It reached a point on Fox News where so many advertisers had pulled out of Glenn Beck’s show – even going so far as to refusing to have their ads run on other shows if Beck was on them – that Beck’s main advertiser was a company called Goldline. Well, today Goldline International is in the news.

A year ago, ABC News reported that officials in Santa Monica, California, were launching an investigation into Goldline’s business practices because of complaints from dissatisfied customers. City Attorney’s Office spokesman Adam Radinsky said at the time that “There are two main types of complaints we’re seeing. One is that customers say that they were lied to and misled in entering into the purchases of gold coins, and the other group is saying that they received something different from what they had ordered.”

Goldline responded to those accusations by saying that complaints were rare and dealt with immediately and the company had a top rating from the Better Business Bureau. Scott Carter, Goldine’s executive vice president at the time, wrote to ABC News “When we learn that customers have not recieved the experience they deserve, we investigate and take action.”

That was last year. Now, the Santa Monica City Attorney’s Office has filed a 19-count criminal complaint against the company. The charges include theft by false pretenses, false advertising and conspiracy, running a “bait and switch operation in which customers, seeking to invest in gold bullion, are switched to highly overpriced coins by using false and misleading claims,” and the complaint specifies charges against former CEO Mark Albarian, executives Robert Fazio and Luis Beeli, salespersons Charles Boratgis and Stephanie Howard for defrauding customers. Current CEO Scott Carter is accused of making false or misleading statements, specifically “disseminat[ing] an untrue or misleading statement in connection with the sale of goods or services.”. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and fines between $1,000 and $10,000 per offense. The complaint went on to the specifics of how these transactions were conducted, how the salespeople were trained and how to mask the mark-up on the gold coins.

Apparently, their commercial spokesperson Glenn Beck is not included in the complaint, in spite of the amount of personal endorsement he gave this company on both television and radio.

Goldline executives told ABC on Wednesday that they will fight the criminal charges, saying the allegations are “without merit” and “preposterous.” Brian Crumbaker, Executive Vice President e-mailed a statement to ABC News saying that “The company will vigorously contest the allegations. We believe Goldline has industry best practices in customer disclosures enabling the most informed decisions.” He said that the criminal complaint has numerous errors, “A core allegation of the complaint cites the company for ‘offering Bullion for sale on Goldline’s website with no intention of selling it.’ The so-called bait and switch allegation is preposterous because bullion accounts for more that 40% of the ounces of gold sold by the company during the past year.”

And while we’re on the subject of Glenn Beck…remember his rally in Washington last year? Remember how he told people to donate to the Special Ops Wounded Warriors Fund to provide scholarships to the children of fallen Special Ops soldiers? Remember the teeny, tiny fine print on his website that said that SOWWF would receive any money that was left over after the expenses of the rally had been paid? Well, it has now been 14 months since that rally. Has anyone anywhere ever seen an accounting of how much money the SOWWF actually received?

Did I mention I bought lottery tickets today?

Related articles

• Glenn Beck-Endorsed Goldline Hit With Criminal Complaint; Brian Ross And GMA Told You So (mediaite.com)
• Goldline: We’ll Fight Fraud Charges (abcnews.go.com)
• Goldline Execs Charged With Fraud (abcnews.go.com)
• Glenn Beck-touted Goldline charged in criminal complaint (dailykos.com)
• Glenn Beck Top Advertiser Goldline Under Investigation In California (oliverwillis.com)
• Congress to Grill Glenn Beck Sponsor Goldline (abcnews.go.com)
• Glenn Beck Fires Back at ABC News Goldline Investigation (abcnews.go.com)
• Glenn Beck’s Sponsor Goldline Under Investigation By Los Angeles D.A. For Fraud (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

Julian Assange by Bob Rand, 2011

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has lost his latest appeal of the extradition warrant issued by the Swedish government. Britain’s High Court has told Assange it’s time to go.

Assange’s attorneys have tried every imaginable avenue to get the British government to reject Sweden’s extradition request. They’ve claimed that the extradition is a means for neutral Sweden to hand Assange over to America for transportation to Guantanamo or summary execution, claimed the two women who filed the sexual misconduct charges against Assange are liars and agents of the United States, claimed the Swedish government doesn’t have the right to demand his extradition, and claimed that there was no crime committed according to British law, so Swedish law should be ignored. Their biggest mistake, from a legal perspective, has been treating the warrant as though it were an arrest warrant to force Assange to stand trial. It isn’t. Assange was in the middle of the investigation of these allegations, asked the Swedish authorities to allow him to go to England on business, promised to return to continue the investigation and dug in in England. The warrant is to compel him to return and answer questions, not to stand trial. No criminal charges have as yet been filed.

Julian Assange - now, who's he holding hands with? photo from El Pais

Assange, of course, refuses as always to believe that facts are facts. He prefers his paranoid version of alternative reality. The judge’s ruling stated that the Swedish warrant could not “be said to be disproportionate” to the allegations as they are “serious sexual offenses.” To permit extradition, the judge had to find the warrant valid, not hear any defense of the accusations. Assange has always demanded that the case be heard and judged by British courts, which have no jurisdiction even if a charge had been filed against him. Assange is very unhappy with the results, saying as he left the Old Bailey, that he “lamented that the terms of the arrest warrant [sic] do not allow me to argue extradition based on the substance of the case. We will be considering our next step. No doubt there will be many attempts made to try to spin these proceedings as they occurred today, but they were merely technical. So, please go to swedenversusassange.com if you wish to know what is really going on in this case.”

The website takes a new tack in the Assange versus the rational world journey. According to him, Swedish feminism is responsible for his plight. He claims that prosecutor Marianne Ny is “biased against men” and “a well-known radical feminist.” He paints Sweden as the “Saudi Arabia of feminism,” and says that “a significant interest group, which can be broadly described as feminists, has gained prominence in Sweden since the 1980′s. it is arguably more defining – almost as an ideology – in today’s Sweden than its (now unrecognizable) model of social democracy.”

This is actually rather amusing. Assange has had the support of many on the progressive left, including filmmaker Michael Moore, but crying “FemiNazis!” like a deranged Limbaugh fan is not going to win him any friends on right. It may even cost him support among those who have been there for him during this eleven-month circus, particularly Biana Jagger and Jemima Khan. Claiming that he is a victim of a massive international conspiracy to silence his arrogant, paranoid, reckless egomania garnered a lot of support among people who don’t pay attention to things like the impracticability of seizing any international celebrity and making him disappear or the fact that the United States government has already announced it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Assange. Claiming that feminists are out to persecute him is just the kind of thing that could finally make people see what I’ve been writing about all along – the man is a sexist pig who should face the consequences of his actions. Coercing a woman into unprotected sex in this day and age, forcing himself on a sleeping woman, these the acts of a man who has no respect for the humanity of his sexual partners nor regard for their rights as people or as women.

Assange may try one last appeal in Britain, even though it has been made clear to him that he stands no chance whatsoever of even having the appeal accepted. The latest 43-page ruling can be summed in up five words: “The court dismissed his appeal.” The Supreme Court only hears cases of constitutional or national importance. No matter what Julian Assange thinks of himself, he doesn’t qualify.

Assange has fourteen days to request the appeal. If the Supreme Court rejects his appeal application, he will be extradited within ten days. He could be on a plane to Sweden on November 26^th.

In the past year, Assange has gone from top of world to bargain basement. His irresponsible handling of the United States State Department cables placed many people in jeopardy while not providing any real evidence of nefarious conduct on the part of this country. The United States is focused on prosecuting Bradley Manning, the young soldier who fed the Defense Department and State Department files to WikiLeaks, not on WikiLeaks itself, just as they were focused on Daniel Ellsberg and not on the people who published the Pentagon Papers. WikiLeaks donations have dried up, and though Assange likes to blame the credit card companies and America, the fact is there were other avenues for donating to WikiLeaks if people really wanted to. Julian Assange is of less interest to people than Princess Bea’ atrocious hat, and his ego can’t handle that. Assange made the mistake of believing that publishers are as important to the world as whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are the ones who risk everything to acquire information. In Bradley Manning’s case, he risked life in prison if not a firing squad. Daniel Ellsberg risked being shot on sight when he entered those offices to copy those documents. Whistleblowers have their lives and reputations and livelihoods destroyed by those they expose. Whistleblowers end up dead, by their own hands because so much has been taken from them, or by other’s hands. Compared to these people, Julian Assange is a whiny, sniveling little spoiled brat with delusions of importance.

Where can I send a contribution to his air fare to Stockholm?

Related articles

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange loses appeal against extradition to Sweden (thestar.com)
• Julian Assange loses extradition battle over sexual assault complaint (arstechnica.com)
• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange loses appeal against extradition (theglobeandmail.com)
• WikiLeaks: Julian Assange prepares Supreme Court challenge in extradition battle (telegraph.co.uk)
• Assange loses appeal, will be extradited to Sweden (hotair.com)

Themis, Goddess of Justice

Did you know that the Georgia State Constitution very clearly states that all amendments should contain only one clause? So, when Georgia passed its anti-gay marriage amendment, intelligent people thought, “this is toast” because it contained two clauses. Not so. The Georgia Supreme Court upheld this unconstitutional constitutional amendment. Why? Because they are elected and they were covering their butts instead of following the law.

Judges worrying about elections is a bad idea. That’s the reason the founders of this country decided to have the Federal judiciary appointed. Even though it meant that the appointments would swing back and forth between political parties, they reasoned that over time there would be a balance achieved. They were right, sort of. The system gets all balled up when the Senate is in the hands of the opposition party to the President or when the opposition decides to filibuster judicial appointments.

Electing judges is a bad idea, but allowing unlimited campaign contributions to state and local judicial races is an even worse one. That’s what has been going on for a few years now – judges being bought and sold by big money donations.

Take West Virginia, for example. In 2007, the West Virginia Supreme Court overturned a $50 million damage judgement against a coal company. The fifth judge, the one who decided the case, received $3 million in campaign funds from the coal company. In 2009, the United States Supreme Court overthrew the decision.

Even though appointed, the SCOTUS isn’t immune, as we have seen with Clarence Thomas. He should have recuse himself, or Chief Justice John Roberts should have barred him from participating, in a case involving Mrs. Thomas’ employers. That’s how high the corruption is seeping – right into the Supreme Court of the United States.

New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics and the Justice at Stake Campaign (a non-partisan reform group) details where the money is coming from. It’s the usual suspects – big business, corporate lobbyists, trial lawyers and a disturbing category called “unknown,” which is the result of very weak disclosure laws. Then, there’s the one-issue special interest money. In 2010, three Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage were taken out by money from the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association. These groups go for the attack ads, smearing candidates by digging up some obscure piece of their past and blowing it up out of all reason. During the 2006 campaign, Bernie Sanders’ opponent tried to use a procedural vote to end debate in the House to show that Bernie was soft on rapists. That’s the kind of warped ad that these groups fund.

The statue of Justice that most of us are familiar with is a blindfolded lady holding a scale. Justice is supposed to be blind to everything except the laws of the land. Unlimited funding by special interests in court elections amounts to Justice having a hand shoved up her butt to use her like a ventriloquist’s dummy. We can’t see her blindfold being removed, so we assume she’s still acting in the interests of the law and justice. Neither is true anymore.

The majority of cases heard in our courts are not criminal ones. Those a fairly cut and dry affairs. There are laws and a person either violates the law or doesn’t. If it were discovered that a judge or a set of jurors were paid to arrive at a certain verdict in a criminal case, that too is a crime and dealt with as such.

The cases that dominate our courts and the ones being influenced by these purchased elections are the civil cases, the ones determine responsibility for harm, compensation for damage, accountability for actions. They frequently involve more grey areas of the law. A state has, for instance, laws regulating the discharge of toxic wastes. A company breaks those laws. They are criminally guilty. But the law results in jail time or fines for the company, not compensation for those who were sickened or died because of the toxic waste. That is the jurisdiction of the civil courts.

Courts are called upon to determine the legality of laws and amendments, as in that Georgia case. This is where national special interest money has its greatest impact. A group that is dedicated to creating a nationwide set of laws on one issue, like NOM and AFA, will buy judges in a variety of states to push an agenda that is not necessarily favored by the majority of residents in that state. Their function is to support or deny a particular legislative initiative, forcing the matter into higher and higher levels of the judiciary.

In the British parliamentary system, which was the only model of an elective government available to our founders, the ruling party – the one with the majority of seats in Parliament – chooses the judges. Those judges serve for the duration of the party’s rule. Our founders envisioned an independent judiciary, one freed from the dictates of a particular political party. That concept is a foundation stone in the revolutions of the Arab Spring. The revolutionaries want their courts to be freed from political influence and control. The Saudi opposition and the Iranian opposition both want courts freed from the control of the ruling clerics in their countries. The idea of an independent judiciary is a powerful one – it speaks to humanity’s desire for equal justice under the law and a fair evaluation of responsibility for actions.

Our judiciary is no longer independent, anymore than our legislators in Washington are really representing us any more. Power may corrupt, as Lord Acton wrote in 1887, but money corrupts power. Occupy Wall Street has focused on the corruption of our government by money. In the process, we also need to be mindful of the way money has corrupted our courts, for therein lies the power to correct wrongs, determine the rightness of laws and punish those who cause great harm.

Related articles

• What We Could Lose If The Republicans Win (lezgetreal.com)
• Judges Are for Sale–and Special Interests Are Buying (ideas.time.com)
• Supreme Court rebukes Ninth Circuit, again, in ‘shaken baby’ case (csmonitor.com)
• Remembering Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, 20 Years Later (usnews.com)
• Supreme Court Stays Out of Dispute Over Utah Roadside Memorials (usnews.com)
• Supreme Court Asked How Much Bad Lawyering The Constitution Allows (huffingtonpost.com)
• Nan Aron: A Question of Integrity Hangs Over the U.S. Supreme Court (huffingtonpost.com)

The Arizona desert (near Tucson)

What would you call a seventeen-month joint Federal-local investigation that results in the arrests of 76 suspected drug smugglers and the seizure of 61,000 pounds of pot, 160 pounds of heroin, 210 pounds of cocaine, $760,000 in cash and 108 weapons over six weeks? How about Operation Pipeline Express? How about a roaring success? How about, if you are the governor of Arizona and have insisted for over two years that the Federal government couldn’t wipe their collective butts with directions…nothing. Well, what can we expect? Gov. Jan Brewer is in Alabama telling Alabamians how great their “papers please” law is and tomorrow her book comes out. Scorpions for Breakfast details Brewer’s one-woman battle to secure our nation’s border from those illegal immigrants who litter Arizona’s desert with headless corpses that no one but Brewer has ever seen.

Meanwhile, back in Arizona, the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office and the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement have shut down a smuggling ring, believed to be part of Mexico’s Sinoloa cartel, which was responsible for moving more than $33 million in drugs through Arizona’s western desert every month. That’s western desert, not the eastern part that burned this year, allegedly according to John McCain, because of illegals. Whoops, his bad, it was white guys who started it. Over the past five years, Sinaloa has moved 3.3 million pounds of maijuana, 20,000 pounds of cocaine and 10,000 pounds of heroin into the United States through Arizona. By the time you hit the end of the distribution line, the drugs generated $2 billion.

The joint operation commanders held a press conference today in Phoenix, where Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeau and ICE Special Agent Matthew Allen stressed that while this was a significant bust, it bearly puts in dent in the problem. “It’s a body blow, but it doesn’t know them out by any sense of the imagination. This literally is just a fraction of what’s going on,” said Babeau.

This particular smuggling ring used an 80-mile section of the border from Yuma to just east of the Rohono O’odham Nation town of Sells. Allen said, “This is not a closing chapter in this book. We have every expectation that command and control in Mexico is working to re-establish their presence, and it’s our job to go after them.”

During the battle over Arizona’s “papers please law,” several sheriffs along the border said that they needed to concentrate their resources on the drug traffic and ordinary crime, not hunting illegal immigants who were only guilty of a Federal misdemeanor. This is what they were talking about – stopping at least a portion of that trade. Governor Brewer used images from the drug war to push her anti-immigrant agenda, refusing to acknowledge that they were two distinctly different problems.

Operation Pipeline Express began in June, 2010, when a Pinal County deputy stopped two smugglers in Stanfield, 50 miles south of Phoenix. One of the smugglers turned informant and the hunt was on. The arrests, which took place in three rounds in September and October, ranged from drug haulers who backpacked through the desert with the goods to scouts to those who were commanding the operation inside America. Allen said, “This is how you attack international organized crime and transnational criminal organizations, by focusing on the people, the leadership and the illicit pathways that they exploit. Our goal is to take them out by their roots.”

In Brewer’s absence, her Attorney General had to make do. Tom Horne told the press that this case shows how important it is that the Federal government gain operational control over the border. “I find it completely unacceptable that Arizona neighborhoods are treated as a trading floor for narcotics. Children are not safe when their homes are located near the other homes that are used as distribution centers for drugs. Our highways are not safe when criminal organizations battle each other, sometimes violently and at risk to innocent bystanders, for control of loads of drugs being transported in vehicles.” Just couldn’t choke your way through “Well done!” could you, Horne. Yeah, we all find it unacceptable that drugs are smuggled across any border into America or sold in any neighborhood in this country, at least as long as the trade is illegal and we can’t get easy tax and licensing revenue from it. But, the rest of us can take a moment out from our disapproval of the trade to congratulate the Arizona deputies and ICE agents who risked their lives for this bust. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your service and congratulations on your success.

Related articles

• ‘Massive’ smuggling ring dismantled in Arizona (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Millions in drugs seized, 70 arrested in Arizona, officials say – CNN (news.google.com)
• Arizona busts massive Mexican drug smuggling operation [video] – Los Angeles Times (news.google.com)
• Video: Sheriff Babeu Considering Run for U.S. House (nicedeb.wordpress.com)
• You: Officials Bust Drug-Smuggling Ring Linked to Mexican Cartel (nytimes.com)

Bridget Wismer and baby

A Delaware grand jury has indicted Bridget Wismer, 33, of Delaware, and John Gavaghan, 54, of Pennsylvania, on charges that they “did intentionally or knowingly trade, barter, buy or negotiate to trade, buy or sell a child under the age of 18.” Both had been arrested in early October and the child in question was taken into foster care in Philadelphia.

As originally presented by Wismer to the press, she and Gavaghan had arranged a fostering of the baby boy outside the normal foster system. Missing from those reports was the fact that Wismer used drugs during the pregnancy and the baby had been born with an opiate addiction.

Ms. Wismer’s drug addiction is a whole separate issue. What is most important in this case is the fact that the baby was born on August 31 with a medical condition that requires careful treatment and monitoring to deal with the immediate effects of infant withdrawal, early intervention for potential learning disabilities or mental disabilities, as well as full disclosure of the condition to the child as soon as the child is old enough to understand the long-range medical implications. Any child born with a pre-natal addiction has a possibility of long-term disabilities as well a possibility that even the most casual, social use of potentially addictive substances can quickly lead to a full-blown addiction. It is normal in cases of drug addicted mothers for a state agency to be involved in the prenatal and post-natal treatment of the child because of the dangers to the baby, and many states will take custody of such a child immediately after birth. According to Wismer at the time of her arrest, her grandmother alerted the Delaware authorities before the baby’s birth of the arrangements that had been made and the Delaware Division of Family Services had been in communication with the corresponding Pennsylvania agency over the situation. The grandmother contacted the police in early September and they placed Wismer under investigation. New Castle, Delaware, detectives presented to the grand jury video surveillance of Wismer and Gavaghan exchanging money and signing papers in late September in what they allege was the final transaction.

Ms. Wismer is unemployed with two other children and resides with her mother. It is not clear what state or federal programs Ms. Wismer was enrolled in during her pregancy, if any or what kind of pre-natal care she received.

Wismer, who was released under house arrest and is being electronically monitored, and Gavaghan, who is free on bail, are charged with three felony counts – dealing in children, falsifying a birth certificate (Gavaghan’s name appears as the father) and second-degree conspiracy charges. They carry a potential of 12 years in prison and $10,000 in fines.

LezGetReal has received a communication from one William Crossan of Alexandria, Virginia, who informed us that he is a personal friend of Ms. Wismer’s boyfriend and said he has personal knowledge of the case. Should this be the case, Mr. Crossan should contact the New Castle County prosecutor’s office with this information and authorize access to his phone records. He should present the prosecutors with the name of Ms. Wismer’s boyfriend, who according to Mr. Crossan, was the person who arranged the placement of the child, and who would therefore be a third defendant in the case. We have forwarded Mr. Crossan’s e-mail to the Delaware Attorney General’s office.

Related articles

• Did She Sell The Baby Or Foster Him? (lezgetreal.com)

A series of attacks by members of a Jefferson County Amish Community is now being investigated as a hate crime. The attackers are alleged to have cut the hair and beards of other Amish community leaders. According to FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson, an independent investigation was launched after the agency met with other officials about the reports.

So far, five Jefferson Country men are facing kidnapping and burglary charges out of Holmes Country, Ohio. The FBI is also assisting local law enforcement with regards to these incidents and others.

Via WTOV9

Harold Lovell’s brother Tim believed that Harold was murdered by Gacy due to the fact that they both crossed paths when Gacy did construction work at a fast-food restaurant in Aurora, Illinois.

That theory got blown out of the water when Tim turned up alive and well…in 2011.

Recently, the Cook County sheriff’s office reopened the Gacy case in order to identify eith of the unidentified victims of Gacy’s, and the Lovell’s contacted them in hopes of being among those to give DNA samples to see if their brother was among those who died. So far, more than 120 families have contacted the sheriff’s department to see if they qualify for the testing to see if they are related to one of the unidentified victims.

According to Sheriff Tom Dart, about seventy of those who have contacted them are “right in our target zone, agewise and locationwise.” That would be that the missing family members fit the profile of most of Gacey’s victims who were between 14 and 21 and were last seen living or working near where Gacy found most of his victims, and Harold Lovell was thought to be among those who he could have been a victim.

Back2Stonewall reported that:

After weeks of looking into Harold Lovell’s possible connection to Gacy they stumbled upon a police booking photo online that showed Harold Lovell was alive and well, although sometimes in trouble with police, in South Florida.

Harold Lovell was reunited with his family. He walked away from his home. He stated “I never felt wanted at home, so I left. gone from having nothing to having all this.” Gacy was convicted of 33 murders and executed in May 1994.

Flint, Michigan

Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell, in Flint, Michigan, has decided without evidence of any kind that his city, with its intersection of Interstates 75 and 69, its proximity to Canada, its location at the base of the mitten’s thumb, all translate into extraordinarily heavy drug trafficking through his county. So, he and his “Sheriff’s Posse” have set up check points on major roads and the I-475 expressway to get a handle on this rampant problem.

It seems that Sheriff Pickell received “intelligence” that drugs were being moved through the county in secret compartments in tractor-trailers.

Initially, the checkpoints were set up daily. After protests, they are now set up randomly. A pick-up truck tows a sign that warns “Sheriff narcotics check point, 1 mile ahead – drug dog in use.” Undersheriff Christopher Swanson said that “We’re doing everything by the book. We think there’s major loads coming through here from all over every day. And this is one tool we use – narcotics checkpoints.” He said that vehicles are stopped and the drug dogs walk around the vehicles. He also avers that if they spot someone doing a u-turn before the drug checkpoint, well, that’s a pretty good indicator that the vehicle is carrying drugs.

And, all holy hell has broken loose over this.

In addition to the Constitutional guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure, there’s the little problem of two hundred years of legal precedent, asserting that random search stops are wrong and law enforcement must have a plausible cause for searching. Pickell has been trying to tweak the program and justify it with a small army of legal minds coming down on him like hail stones.

Pickell’s decision to pursue this program resembles all those voter ID laws – it’s a solution for an unproven problem. He might want to consider what it will do to drug enforcement if funding for local and federal law enforcement is further cut. If he really wants to stop drugs, he might consider lobbying Washington to increase support for local law enforcement and not cut funding for the DEA.

Related articles

• Michigan Sheriff: Random Narcotics Checkpoints Are Totally Constitutional (reason.com)

So far, neither PBS nor Google have been willing to discuss this hacking. “A message posted on the page before its removal claimed responsibility in the names of two other YouTube users, one of whom denied responsibility in a statement on his own page,” according to CNN. That user identified as MrEdxwx stated that “I did not hack Sesame Street. I am an honest YouTuber. I work hard to make quality gameplay videos, and most important I respect the community guidelines.”

Phillip Winikoff, fake doctor

Okay, this one falls under the heading of “how stupid can some people be?”

There are two cases, one in Coconut Grove, Florida, and the other in Boise, Idaho, involving men giving women free breast exams in their homes (Florida) and in bars (Idaho). First, the Florida case….

An 81-year-old male named Phillip Winikoff found out that the local Women’s Breast Health Initiative was going door-to-door in 2006, handing out information about breast exams and breast health and registering women for real mammograms. He decided to take advantage of the situation and knocked on doors at an apartment complex, identified himself as a doctor and offered to perform free breast exams. Some women actually took him up on the offer. It was when his hands started wandering that a few of the women got concerned and alerted the police. He was arrested and had finally, after five years, reached a deal with the Broward County prosecutor’s office.

The had thrown the book at him, charging him with 3 counts of sexual battery, 2 counts of practicing medicine without a license, 2 counts of simple battery and 1 count of using the title “doctor” without a license. He was facing 45 years (in his case, a life sentence) in prison. The deal involves minimal jail time and probable registry as a sex offender.

And to think that the supervisors at the assisted living facility I work in dismissed our claims that a couple of our little old men were engaging in conduct that bordered on sexual harassment. Old saying “just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean the furnace is out.”

The incident in Boise is even more bizarre.

Kristina Ross, who may or may not be Kristoffer Jon Ross, 37, is in custody in Boise on two felony counts of practicing medicine without a license, facing up to ten years in prison and $20,000 in fines for tricking women into submitting to breast exams in nightclubs. The report did not state if the exams were conducted in public or in the ladies room.

Ross introduced her/himself as Dr. Berlyn Aussieahshowna and if the women agreed to the exam, she/he would discuss breast augmentation and liposuction. Then, she/he would give the women the name of a real plastic surgeon. The surgeon’s office started getting all these calls about setting up procedures and contacted the police,

Though Ross was arrested in this case as a woman and booked as Kristina, her/his fingerprints came up in relation to a theft arrest earlier in the year as Kristoffer, and as Kristoffer, has a past criminal record. She/he has been appointed a public defender and will have a preliminary hearing in December.

Okay, I don’t care how impressively a “doctor” rattles off medical jargon or gives off the right vibes, can anyone think of a doctor who would be giving out free exams in a bar, or going door-to-door to give exams? Most states require the presence of a nurse for any “intimate” examination of a woman, but that shouldn’t have been the first red light. Free? House call? Bar call? Seriously? Quick, how many doctors have you known who do house calls or give out free anything anymore (aside from those who volunteer in free clinics)? Marketing analysts claim that the word “free” makes people stupid. These two cases probably prove their point.

Related articles

• Can I Interest You In a Free Breast Exam? (patspapers.com)
• Perv! 81-Year-Old Arrested For Giving Door-To-Door Breast Exams! (bossip.com)
• The Morning Buzz’s Mr. T Examining Ta-Ta’s (buzz103.radio.com)
• Rethink Breast Cancer Presents: Hot Guys Reminding You To Check Your Breasts (blisstree.com)

In an April 20, 2008, cable from the Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir to the third-ranking American diplomat in his country, al-Jubeir spoke of the Saudi King’s approval should the United States decide to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities to hell. In the cable, al-Jubeir said, “He [the king] told you to cut off he head of the snake.” Though al-Jubeir is not a member of the Saudi royal family, his relationship with King Abdullah is long rooted in mutual respect and support. His duties for the King have not been limited to being the chief diplomat in Washington, but have included being a member of the King’s inner circle on foreign affairs and accompanying the King on foreign visits.

Ambassador Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir

The Department of Justice has arrested an Iranian-American and accused him of acting for the Iranian Quds Force to contract a Mexican drug gang to assassinate al-Jubeir. Critics of the arrest have pointed to a lack of a motive for Iran to assassinate the Saudi diplomat as “proof” that Iran wasn’t involved. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI), points to the leaked cable as the motive. “I am sure it was one of many things. He [al-Jubeir] was seen as one of the most vocal critics of Iran, too.” He added that the criminal complaint on Tuesday “was the first public light of what the Quds Force has been up to for years. Other than al Qaida, they have more American blood on their hands than any other terrorist group. They are very good and they have nation-state backing. They have all the institutions and support. They have time to train and they have the ability to move.”

The case came together because of co-operation between the Drug Enforcement agency and the Department of Justice, which has jurisdiction over the F.B.I. The DEA learned of the plot through an informant who reported the non-drug related contact with the drug gang by Manssor Arbabsiar, the Iranian-American charged in the plot. They brought in the F.B.I. to carry through with the sting that captured Arbabsiar, and they in turn brought in the intelligence community. The connection between the Quds Force and Arbabsiar was tracked through the bank accounts used to pay for the assassin, who was really an undercover agent, and through known webs of associations and what are called “cut-outs”- third parties whose job is to break the tracks between perpetrators and managers.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has displayed a tendency to get his knickers in a Gordian knot over little things like the movie 300 (he said it was an intentional insult to Iran’s reputation while smearing Xerxes’ manhood), so finding out that the Saudi King wanted the nuclear power plant bombed into oblivion probably didn’t sit well. The leadership in Iran doesn’t believe in forgive and forget anything. Both the government and the clerical leadership in Iran have staked a lot on their nuclear power plant, both as a means of reducing their oil consumption to make more oil available for sale and as a means to say “Look at us! We’re a world power!” Iran has put itself deeply in debt for this project, jeopardizing the social programs that bribe the rural population into supporting Ahmadinejad. The man would have taken the Saudi King’s preference for annihilation of that plant very personally.

Back to WikiLeaks….

Though the United States is the primary target of WikiLeaks’ activities, the whole world is watching for signs that their cavalier attitude toward redaction and editing have caused damage. The first time someone who was exposed by their leaks – a collaborator, a whistleblower, a diplomat, a spy, a witness – ends up assassinated, or arrested, tortured and killed, or conveniently disappears those who have an interest in that person or persons will be justified in taking whatever legal means they can to take down WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks owes the very nation they hate most a heart-felt “thank you” for their continued existence. Would you want to be on the receiving end if the Saudi King decided you were responsible for the death of one of his closest advisors?

Related articles

• Alleged Iran Plot’s WikiLeaks Link – Daily Beast (thedailybeast.com)
• The Arbabsiar Case: Could Rogue Elements in Iran Be Behind It? (time.com)
• US aims to punish Iran for Saudi envoy plot (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• U.S. to leverage pressure on Iran over alleged plot (ctv.ca)
• Iran plot may violate UN Treaty say experts (showdownmideast.com)
• Iran’s Shadowy Assassins (thedailybeast.com)

Chad O'Reilly

Chad O’Reilly, age 25, has a permit in Ohio to carry a concealed weapon. That means, under the new Ohio law, that he can walk into a bar with his gun, just as long as he doesn’t drink. Well, maybe he wasn’t drinking at the H&H Tavern in Deer Park. Maybe he’d been drinking before he went in there. The point is, he had been drinking and in the course of an argument, he pulled out his loaded, semi-automatic Glock .40 and started waving it around.

The man he was arguing with ducked for cover, the bar staff called 911 and O’Reilly’s friends persuaded him to leave the bar. He was arrested by police officers with their sidearms drawn in the parking lot. The bar’s owner, David Anderson, praised his staff for their quick action, locking down the bar as soon as O’Reilly was out the door. Anderson insists that his is a family establishment and “we never have a problem here.”

O’Reilly has been charged with violating concealed carry laws, aggravated menacing and ethnic intimidation because the man he was threatening is Hispanic and O’Reilly’s threats were filled with racial slurs. He’s also facing charges of possession of a controlled substance because “injectable testosterone was found in his bag.” He’s lucky he’s alive to face charges, given the way police are trained to take down an armed suspect who waves a gun in their direction.

The new law allows people with a permit to carry guns into bars, restaurants, nightclubs any place that serves alcohol. It just says that the person carrying the gun shouldn’t drink. Drinking and toting don’t go together anymore than drinking and driving do, and of course the residents of Ohio never drink and drive, do they? They are so scrupulously honest about that, aren’t they?

All this is happening while Tennessee is debating a similar concealed carry law. Which makes the related story very funny. One of the leading proponents of the law, state representative Curry Todd, was pulled over by a traffic patrol Tuesday night for suspicion of drunk driving. He failed the roadside sobriety test, refused the breathalyzer and then, just to top it off, the police found a loaded Smith & Wesson 38 shoved down between the driver’s seat and the center console when they searched his car. This, by the way, is the same state legislator who refers to pregnant illegal immigrants as “reproducing rats.”

Do I really need to identify Todd’s political party?

Related articles

• Today In Teabagger Irony (joemygod.blogspot.com)
• The Fable of Curry Todd (theawl.com)
• Ohio Passes Law Allowing Concealed Guns in Bars (friendseat.com)

Cheney was also charged with 8 counts of aggravated identity theft, and was also charged with illegal wiretapping. He broke into their email accounts and had them send him their emails without the victims being informed.

Cheney faces up to 121 years in prison with many of these crimes having a minimum sentence of 2 years in prison.

Among those who had their information hacked include Christina Aguilera, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, and celebrity stylist Simone Harouche. There were a total of fifty victims.

Regarding this attack, Johansson stated at the time that it came out that “Just because you’re in the spotlight, or just because you’re an actor or making films or whatever, doesn’t mean that you’re not entitled to your own personal privacy. I think no matter what the context, if that is besieged in some way, it feels unjust. It feels wrong.”

The FBI then went on to take care of some crime prevention stuff including discussing things like password security.  They did not mention anything about not taking nude photos of yourself and emailing them to anyone. LezGetReal has been following this story for some time.

See Also:

TMZ
FOX

Marzieh Vafamehr, by Bonnie Elliott, Sydney Morning Herald

Marzieh Vafamehr must have known the risks when she agreed to participate in the Australian film My Tehran for Sale. Dissidents and critics of the clerics and the government disappear routinely in Iran. So, it wasn’t really a surprise that Vafamehr was arrested in July. Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the clerical courts in Tehran had sentenced Vafamehr to 90 lashes with a whip as her punishment for appearing in the film. The newspaper called it “an outcome that could have been lifted from the pages of the movie’s script.” The Sydney Morning Herald was quoting the Iranian opposition website kalameh.com for the story.

The film “explores cultural oppression in Iran and taboos such as drug use.” In it, “Vehamehr often appears with a shaved head and no headscarf in the film.” Her portions of the film were “shot on the sly in Iran with a local crew in 2008.” Granaz Moussvi, the Iranian-born director of the film who is based in Melbourne, declined any public statement on the arrest or sentencing, citing the requests of Vafamehr’s family for no publicity.

The Iranian judicial system is extra-governmental, controlled completely by the clerical hierarchy. They are notorious for handing down medieval punishments, since they take their laws and their punishments from a strict reading of the Qur’an, which was written in the 6^th century. Global outrage over sentences of stoning to death did manage to get one such sentence stayed, but human rights groups claim that dozens of women have been stoned to death, in addition to the man whose death by stoning was captured on video in 1994 and the two men stoned to death in 2009. It is a sentence usually reserved for adultery and/or murder, but two gay teens were stoned to death in 2005 and another pair of gay men were sentenced to stoning last year.

The parliament has tried to pass laws the reduce or eliminate the barbaric punishments, but no law has any impact on the “independent” judiciary.

It is generally believed that it takes 100 to 120 lashes to kill someone. The use of lashings in Islam (hadd) is usually limited to fornication, alcohol use and slander, but the discretionary form (ta’zir) is used for many offences. It is done in public. Sometimes, the person wielding the whip has a Qur’an tucked under his arm to limit the force of his swing. Sentences involving larg number of lashes, as in Vafamehr’s case, are normally administered in small spurts over time, to avoid inflicting permanent harm.

The original story did not enumerate the charges against Vafamehr or specify if there was also a prison term imposed with the lashings, though the website atlasshrugs2000 noted that Vafamehr was also sentenced to a year in prison. If the industry can make films set on other worlds, producers can certainly make a film about Iran outside of Iran using actors who don’t live in Iran. As CNN’s former Baghdad bureau chief Nik Robertson once said, protecting his sources was more important than getting a story.

Related articles

• Website: Iranian Actress Faces Jail, Lashing (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iranian actress to be lashed 90 times (telegraph.co.uk)
• Iran: Actress Sentenced to One year and 90 Lashes for Movie Role (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)

It all started when two women got into a fight just after 10:30 a.m. At 10:48, the Baltimore County Police arrived at the store, quickly followed by firefighters, a hazmat team, 10 EMTs and multiple ambulances. The women’s fight had deteriorated into throwing bleach and disinfectant at each other with less than accurate aim. A total of 19 people were treated for exposure to the chemicals themselves and the toxic fumes. One was taken to the Wilmer Eye Institute at John Hopkins Hospital for potentially severe eye injury, and three WalMart employees are being treated for respiratory problems.

Though the reports do no state the specifics of the fight, since bleach and most cleaning products are packaged in plastic which might split on impact with a hard surface, it must be assumed that the women were opening the bottles and hurling the contents.

Theresa Monique Jefferson, 33, turned herself in to authorities. She had followed another woman into the store to confront her about a man. He fathered Jefferson’s child but is the boyfriend of the other woman. Jefferson has been charged with first-degree assault, second-degree assault, theft under $100 (presumably for the contents of the bleach and disinfectants) and malicious destruction of property. Bail has been set at $350,000. There was no report as to the care of Jefferson’s child or children.

WalMart closed the store for several hours to clean and ventilate it, issuing a statement that said, “this is obviously not the type of behavior we would expect from people at our stores. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused to our customers.”

That’s just the beginning of it, really. The store was closed during a three-day holiday weekend, and a Saturday – both high earners for WalMart. The closure will impact the store’s sales figures. A year from now, a computer will say that the store doesn’t need as many employees on site on the first Saturday in October because of this year’s sales figures. The employees who are receiving hospital care, unless they are management, have no health insurance through WalMart. The company restricts employee’s hours-per-week to avoid providing benefits. Unless those employees have health insurance through a spouse or partner, they are about to be hit with hundreds, if not a thousand dollars or more of medical bills. They could be facing long-term medical costs if the respiratory damage is severe enough. Not only will they lose pay by not being able to work, they will be stuck with the bills. To avoid having an impact on their workmen’s compensation costs, WalMart can make the case that these people made a choice to intervene in the fight and caused their own injuries. How WalMart handles the medical care costs of their own employees and any injured customers will be worth watching.

Then, on Monday, WalMart was forced by the Chinese government to close several stores in the city of Chongqing and pay $421,000 in fines for mislabeling tons of pork as “organic.” WalMart has 10 stores and 2 affiliates in the city of 32 million, and state media says all 12 were closed.

China is having problems enforcing food safety laws with much of the problem occurring in small stores and markets. It is the new large chains that are getting all the media attention. WalMart is accused of mislabeling 14.4 tons of non-organic pork products. The fine is equal to ten times the value of the pork that was sold. The company issued a statement, vowing that “WalMart is committed to protecting the rights of consumers and will spare no efforts n this regard.” Nonetheless, the company has been repeated cited for food safety and labeling violations since beginning operations there in 2006. The relationship between WalMart and China is a complex one, with the entire WalMart empire being China’s third (may be second by now) largest customer for manufactured goods and WalMart being one of the largest Western companies allowed to do business inside China. WalMart has a total of 284 outlets in over 100 Chinese cities. Some were local retail chains bought out by the retailer. WalMart is the world’s largest retail empire infesting every continent except Antarctica. The massive discounts they are able to bargain from suppliers cuts their prices to the point where local stores cannot compete and fold because of loss of business. The WalMart “Superstore” with groceries has forced the closure of supermarkets in some communities.

China has had an economic explosion in the past twenty years, and now is trying to rein in the consequences that such an explosion creates – the health crisis caused by unchecked industrial pollution, the corruption, the shortcuts that companies take to reduce costs, the failure to meet important standards like removal of lead-based paints from children’s toys and the proper labeling and handling of food. They have also started to have problems with people demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Taxi drivers recently staged a strike for better fares. At the rate China is going, pretty soon it will not be the “regulation free zone” and “cheap labor zone” that has been attracting manufacturers for two decades.

Which is, seriously, the best thing that could happen to America. When the rest of the world’s population decides they are tired of being exploited, abused and killed by unregulated businesses, the playing field for jobs will balance out. Eventually, slave labor chooses not be enslaved.

Related articles

• Wal-mart Bleach Fight! (weeklyworldnews.com)
• Wal-Marts in Chongqing closed for pork mislabeling (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• China Closes Walmarts For Calling Its Pork Organic (huffingtonpost.com)
• Wal-Mart Caught Lying About Its Nasty Pork [Wal-Mart] (gawker.com)

Bridget Wismer and the contested baby boy

The cross-jurisdiction Delaware-Pennsylvania case of a woman accused of selling her baby is a real problem for conservatives. If they applaud her decision not to abort an unwanted pregnancy, they must support her decision to give the baby to a gay couple. If they condemn giving the baby to a gay couple, are they tacitly approving an abortion?

These are the facts as presented by the parties involved: Bridget Wismer (who lives in Delaware) had two children and no husband. She discovered she was pregnant. She did not want to abort the pregnancy and did not want to give the baby up permanently for adoption, forfeiting all contact with the child. Enter John Gavaghan and his long-term partner Antonio, who live in Philadelphia. They offered to help her financially if she would allow them to foster the child (no legal adoption involved) and raise it as their own, allowing her free access to the child. Everyone agreed to the arrangement and were very happy with their decision. Shortly before the baby was born, John and Antonio had a baby shower for “their” baby.

Wismer’s grandmother didn’t like the whole idea – whether she objected to the fostering part or the gay parents part is not known. Grandma alerted the authorities, told them that Wismer had offered the child on Facebook for $15,000 and had “sold him” to Gavaghan. The police arrested Wismer and seized the baby from Gavaghan, placing him in foster care. Wismer is free on bail and presumably caring for her other children herself. In a statement to the courts requesting higher bail for Wismer, the prosecutor insisted that Wismer had posted the baby on Facebook and stated her intention to use the money to take her other children to Disney World. The Disney World part is based on a Christmas present Gavaghan and Antonio (last name not published) decided to give Wismer and her children. It was not payment for the baby. It was intended as a thank you gift for fulfilling their desire to have a child. The “tipster” cited in the prosecution’s filings is assumed to be the grandmother.

Wismer does not have a Facebook account. Wismer and Gavaghan have known each other for some time and were friends, though the police say they were introduces during the pregnancy by mutual friends. Either way, this did not involve advertising for some stranger to buy the baby.

If Wismer’s and Gavaghan’s account of the arrangement reached is accurate, Wismer did not sell her baby. She entered into the ancient practice of fostering. The worst thing they are guilty of is not involving a lawyer in the arrangement. From their statements, to the press and to law enforcement, these are three consenting adults who were trying to do something positive, albeit unconventional, for a baby. During the baby shower, Gavaghan wrote in a card, “Bridget, thanks with all our hearts for giving me and Antonio a baby. We love you, respect you and thank you with all our hearts. You made our life full.”

The ridiculous part of this arrest is the fact that Delaware’s Division of Family Services was allegedly involved before the baby’s birth. They had responded to the grandmother’s complaint with an investigation and gave their approval if the Philadelphia child protection services approved of Gavaghan as a foster parent.

Gavaghan’s name is on the baby’s birth certificate as the baby’s father, and the Delaware prosecutors say he paid $2,000 to Wismer for her to do that. Delaware police say they have a video of Gavaghan signing papers and handing over money to “a woman” less than a week after the baby’s birth and allege that this is proof of the “sale.” Records indicate that Gavaghan gave money to the unemployed Wismer, who lives with her mother, at random intervals during the pregnancy. Wismer is currently free on $1,500 bail and Gavaghan free on $7,000 bail. Gavaghan has refused to speak to the press until he has retained counsel.

Related articles

• Delaware mom denies trying to sell baby (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Mom denies trying to sell her newborn (philly.com)
• Mom Sells Son To Go To Disney World (buzz103.radio.com)
• Total Depravity: The ‘Mother’ Charged with Selling her Baby- so She Could Go to Disney World (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)

Tayshana Murphy

As I read about the Tayshana Murphy murder now being investigated as a hate crime, it made me think, and shudder. I told someone yesterday that the reason I could get along with both parties in a stressed hetero-marriage is that I can do the man-thing when working with the husband, and the woman-thing when hanging with the wife. I’m one of those people. I always have been. And yes, a dozen or so years ago my kid told me that some of the students at the high school I was working at were convinced I was a lesbian. Something about my haircut at the time, and that I was a theatre teacher a lot happier wielding a hammer than a sewing needle.

I blew it off. It didn’t matter to me what they thought, and I wasn’t going to make them uncomfortable by making an issue out of it.

Today that attitude could get me killed. Anytime, anywhere.

If the hetero community is willing to stand by and let members of the LGBTQ-A community be attacked and killed for being what they are, are they going to stand by when it is members of their own community being killed for appearing to be a member of ours? If not, then I have one question for them:

Each and every LGBTQ-A is someone’s child, just like Tayshana Murphy. Why did you wait so long?

Related articles

• Was Murder Of High Schooler Tayshana Murphy A Hate Crime? (lezgetreal.com)
• Suspects In Fatal Shooting Of Basketball Star Tayshana Murphy Back In NYC (newyork.cbslocal.com)
• A Long Road to Safety, Let Alone Freedom: The Murder of a High School Basketball Star (ittakesateam.blogspot.com)

The Tennessee pastor who ordered an attack on a gay couple out side his church, has now been charged with theft from a local business.

Last week we reported that Jerry Pittman Jr and his boyfriend Dustin Lee were physically and verbally assaulted by members of the congregation at Grace Fellowship Church in Fruitland, Tennessee . Allegedly the assault was carried out on the order of his father, Pastor Jerry Pittman Sr. by several church deacons.

After that assault, the couple filed assault charges against two of those deacons. Pittman Jr. also pressed additional charges against his father and another church official.

Now according to WBBJ the elder Pittman was in trouble before that incident and had been  arrested for stealing copper from his wife’s business:

Police arrested the 52-​year-​old on September 21, after his estranged wife told them she had heard from co-​workers that he had been stealing from her business.

“Our investigation into the incident that was reported showed that he and another gentleman did scrap copper at a scrap yard here in Trenton,” Lt. James Wilson said.

Investigators said he scrapped the copper at least three different times since August. It was hundreds of pounds, and worth more than $1,000.

“It was quite a bit that they scrapped,” Wilson said.

WBBJ also notes it  is not the first time Pittman has been arrested:

 Police said he was arrested back in 2006 for a simple assault charge.

“It was over an incident where the daughter and the boyfriend had a joint child,” Wilson said. “There were some accusations involving the father of the child, which was the boyfriend, and he confronted the father of his grandchild at a local grocery store.”

According to investigators, Pittman is charged with theft of more than $1,000. He bonded out of jail the day he was arrested, and his next court appearance will be October 28 at Trenton Municipal Court.

Two California burglars looking for blank CDs in a barn ended up with a whole lot more after stumbling upon their victim’s stash of kiddie porn.

According to Fox News, the pair broke into Kraig Stockards barn in Delhi, Calif., on Sept. 12 and stole 50 CD-Rs, which Stockard later reported stolen. However, when the burglars took the CDs home to burn music onto, they discovered that more than 30 of the “blank” CDs actually had child pornography on them.

A family member later convinced the larcenous duo to come forward and report the contents of the discs to the Merced County Sheriff’s Department.

Sheriff deputies then  served a search warrant on Stockard’s property and found three desktop computers and three laptops containing child porn on those computers. Investigators believe Stockard has been downloading the images and movies since 2004.

Stockard was booked into jail for possession of child pornography and already made his $25,000 bail.

The two burglars who found the pornography were not arrested for the burglary.

Said Deputy Tom McKenzie, “We did not actually go out and arrest the suspects for the burglary. They were obviously the lesser of two evils.”

First suspect sketch

There has been a man or a couple of men (depending on how you interpret the witness sketches) who have been attacking, groping and grabbing women in the South Park Slope area of Brooklyn, New York. There have been at least 10 attacks since March, all currently unsolved, and one rape in May. The NYPD’s best advice for women in the neighborhoods? Don’t go out at night wearing skirts or revealing clothing..

 Okay, that’s the part that’s making headlines. The NYPD is also issuing the usual warnings for women – don’t walk alone, carry a weapon (keys in fist, whistle, pepper spray), walk purposefully, be aware of your surroundings. We’ve all heard these same warnings for years, and not just when there is a known danger. I’ve watched the weapons list evolve. When I was in junior high it was carry hat pins on the outside of your purse and a can of hair spray. A rock or brick in the purse was also a good idea.

Second suspect sketch

The skirt thing makes a weird kind of sense. For a street rapist, speed is of the essence. Now that it’s fashionable to not wear pantyhose, a skirt certainly speeds up the attack. It probably has nothing to do with a sexual appeal of skirts or dresses. After all, rape is not a crime of sex, but a crime of power.

 Police officers, on foot patrol in response to the attacks, have stopped women and pointed out to them that they are looking particularly vulnerable. In a neighborhood known for liberal and feminist sensibilities, some women have taken offense to the recommendations. The NYPD spokesperson responded that the officers were not telling women what not to wear “There’s a TV show that does that,” but making them aware of what the rapist is looking for. Whether the spokesperson was referring to the TLC show What Not To Wear or to Bill O’Reilly’s famous remarks about clothing inviting rape is unclear.

Third suspect sketch

Some women are taking offense at the tactic of suggesting that women be aware of their clothing choices. A group called Safe Slope has been founded, with a website and Facebook page. One of the founders, Jessica Silk, called the police warnings “completely inappropriate” and was not swayed in her opinion by the suggestion from men that the police were acting in the women’s best interests. Silk said, “There have been reports that the women attacked were all wearing skirts. Unfortunately, this might be a common link between the women that were attacked, but the message shouldn’t be that you should wear a skirt. The message should be ‘Here are ways that you can protect yourself.’”

Police has stepped up their presence in the South Slope, Greenwood Heights and Sunset Park neighborhoods, with both patrol cars and foot patrols. They have circulated three police artist’s sketches of the suspect or suspects, all showing a male of indeterminate race with certain similarities in the features that suggest is it one person.  He is described as a thin 5-foot-7 man, 19- to 24-years-old and weighing about 150 pounds. He was last seen wearing a black T-shirt, baggy dark jeans and a black baseball cap

Related articles

• NYPD’s warning about skirts irks women (msnbc.msn.com)
• A Thin Line On Skirts (brandtstandard.com)
• NYPD Message To Women: Keep Wearing Skirts If You Want To Get Raped (buzzfeed.com)
• NYPD questions women’s outfits (rt.com)
• ‘SlutwalkNYC’ march draws hundreds (nydailynews.com)

Six-foot, gas-powered cargo plane model from NitroPlanes.

After 9-11, when people in the government were saying “No one thought about flying planes into buildings,” Hollywood screen writers raised their hands and said, “Excuse us. We did.” They weren’t the only ones. Tom Clancey is famous for his ability to see into the minds of terrorists and predict behavior our intelligence agencies never think of, like how Jack Ryan became President – little plot line about a jet liner hitting the Capital during the State of the Union address, Debt of Honor, 1994.

So, when the news came out that someone had planned to use large model airplanes to deliver bombs, my first thought was “Oh, yeah, the kind of models they talked about in Flight of the Phoenix.” Second thought, “Wrong movie. Try Dirty Harry, not the original, a later one. Used model cars to deliver bombs.” I finally looked it up. The movie was The Dead Pool, 1988.

It’s not unexpected that intelligence agents don’t really get into spy movies. Don’t ever watch the ejection sequence in Top Gun with an Air Force flight mechanic. He’ll spend the whole movie complaining about the technical errors. Same thing with lawyers and courtroom dramas, doctors and nurses with hospital shows, teachers and those funny school shows. Crime scene investigators spend the hour of any C.S.I. complaining about not having anywhere near that level of equipment. Professionals in any field spend so much time bitching about the reality errors that they don’t really pay attention to the plot lines.

When a G-8 summit was held on Sea Island, Georgia, we were living on the adjacent mainland. The island was locked down tight. The waterways were being patrolled. The port had been closed, sending half a season’s shrimp catch to Jacksonville. The powers that were declared that no one could commit any act of terrorism against the delegates. Oh, really? My daughter and I drove around town looking at all the places where terrorists could strike. Our rationale was that terrorists wouldn’t need to strike Sea Island to have an impact on the proceedings. They just needed to blow something up, disrupt life among the civilians more than the lock-down had. We eye-balled the fuel depots in the port, the sewage treatment plant, the power substations, the water towers, a few abandoned houses, for example. And those were the easy targets.

There is a very good reason why the C.I.A. and F.B.I. and any other agency involved in intelligence should set up bi-annual conferences in Hollywood. If you want to stay one step ahead of the imagination of a terrorist, you need to consult people with imagination. No matter how outlandish a Hollywood plot may be, there will be some terrorist somewhere who either gets inspiration from it or came up with the same idea.  Frankly, the real men in black aren’t known for their other I.Q. – imagination quotient.

This isn’t the first time someone has come up with the idea of using model airplanes to deliver bombs. The last incident was in 2008, also thwarted before it could be carried out. Knowing our intelligence services, the second time has probably been enough to cause the guys at the top to tell the guys at the bottom to start monitoring sales of large model aircraft. And knowing terrorists, they will probably never use the idea again.

Related articles

• Tom Clancy to Release Locked On on December 13 (readersread.com)
• The Netflix Of Terrorism (fastcompany.com)

William M. "Boss" Tweed (1923-78), The Emperor of Political Corruption

When the subject of voter fraud comes up, the single greatest accusation one will hear from the right wing nuts is that huge numbers of illegal immigrants voted for President Obama in 2008 and he is not dealing with illegal immigrants so he can retain their votes. Oh, and they also include accusations that ACORN was responsible for massive voter fraud and is still engaged in it. They don’t talk about people voting using the identities of the dead or students voting in two states or absentee ballots filed out by the wrong people until someone challenges the allegations of widespread voter fraud. The “illegal immigrants” argument is part of why some states are passing laws beyond photo ID for voting and including provisions that require birth certificates or naturalization documents to register to vote. The ACORN argument is just raw bullshit.

Those defending the new restrictions on voting have an interesting case – it’s the “we can’t prove it because it happened” defense. Republican Rep. Todd Rokita, who was Indiana’s Secretary of State for eight years, testified before a Senate committee that “It is something that happens in an instant and then it’s gone. Witnesses dissipate. These are volunteer poll workers. It’s not a domestic violence case. It’s not something that leaves visible scars or bruises. It’s the kind of case that is very hard to prosecute. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says that the reason there is no proof of voter fraud is because no one checked ID in the past. He uses a mic-1980′s New York case involving 14 years of a “crew” hired to vote multiple time in multiple elections using the names of dead voters, voters who had moved away and fictitious voters. The time frame for this fraud was 1970 to 1984, hardly evidence of present-day fraud. But he says, “Nobody’s saying its large scale,” but such fraud could make a difference in tight races. Von Spakovsky led the Bush administration’s Justice Department civil rights division and we all know how protective of our civil rights the Bush administration was. Richard J. Daley, whom historians consider the “last of the big city bosses,” died in office in 1976, so much of their “evidence” comes from the days when the party bosses still ruled politics in many locations, when true corruption was still present in our political system in ways most Americans don’t even remember. Today, we live in a world where a politician can’t spit without being YouTubed and every little hint of an ethical infraction is turned into a Federal case, at least in the blogosphere.

Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin have passed laws requiring photo ID to vote, but allowing people without one to cast a provisional ballot as long as they show up later at the designated place to certify their existence. Indiana and Georgia already have these laws and Indiana’s was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2008. Of the 250 cases used to support the law, Justin Levitt, an election law expert for The Brennan Center for Justice, found only nine cases of someone voting in someone else’s name. The other cases could not have been prevented by enhanced identification laws. The remainder involved vote buying, ballot-box stuffing, problems with absentee ballots or ex-convicts voting in spite of laws barring them from doing so. Over the same seven year period, Levitt says, over 400 million votes were cast in federal, state and local elections. Even the 250 cases would be considered a statistical blip, amounting to 0.0000006% of the ballots cast. Yup, that’s one massive fraud problem.

Justin Levitt

Levitt, who wrote “The Truth About Voter Fraud” for The Brennan Center for Justice, explains it this way, “I’ve compared this to the snake oil salesman. You got a cold? I got snake oil. Your foot aches? I got snake oil. It doesn’t seem to matter what the problem is, ID is being sold as the solution to a whole bunch of things it can’t possibly solve.” Levitt also pointed out that “They identified a lot of fraud, but very, very, very, very, very little of it could be prevented by identification at the polls.”

So, what are those “whole bunch of things” that it can’t solve? In a nutshell, votes being cast by the wrong kind of people, that’s what.

One Republican, discussing the push to bar students from voting at their college campuses in the Presidential races, came right out and said it – students vote Democratic and liberal and we don’t want them skewing the election results in our states for national candidates. If barring them from voting is insufficient, there are the provisions that say they cannot use their photo student ID as proof of who they are. The poor in urban settings tend not to have drivers licenses because of the use of public transportation. They also tend not to have certified copies of their birth certificates or have the means to obtain them easily. The new laws help disenfranchise the poor. They disenfranchise the disabled, who also don’t have drivers licenses. And so far, no one has seen fit to explain how their voter ID laws are going to be applied to those who use absentee ballots. Just how do they expect a serving soldier in Afghanistan to present his photo ID to register or vote, or a lucid, but bed-ridden patient in a nursing home?

The answer to the lack of photo ID is “so, go and get one!” Yup, that explains why the state of Wisconsin, having passed their voter ID law promptly announced plans to shut DMV offices in Democratic districts. No photo ID because you don’t drive, but you can obviously get across county lines to get one. Governor Scott Walker, out of the goodness of his Koch-owned heart, has waived the fee for a photo non-driver ID for voting purposes. Now, just prove you want it to vote, and not to buy liquor or cigarettes. South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley graciously volunteered to personally drive anyone needing a state ID to the DMV office, before setting up an elaborate system for drivers. Somehow the idea that meeting this requirement means losing time from work or having to make arrangements for child care or having to cover the cost of transportation never quite sinks in. If a middle-class suburbanite can manage to take the time to drive his/her own car to the DMV during it’s truncated office hours, certainly some low-life can do the same.

There are an amazing number of right-wingers who believe that the only people who vote Democratic are welfare queens, drug addicts, entitlement cheats, illegal immigrants and gays. Keeping these “anti-American unworthies” from voting is the core purpose behind all these new identification laws, all of them originating out of states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors.

The chances that the current challenges to these laws will be successful are somewhere between nil and non-existent as long as the Supreme Court is loaded with flaming conservatives. These are the five people who gave us corporations as people, so no one can count on them ruling in favor of real human beings any time soon. That leaves only one avenue to fight this….volunteerism. Groups like The League of Women Voters, with their long history of registering voters and helping people get to polls are going to have to up their game considerably in the next 14 months. We need volunteers to help people acquire birth certificate where they are required. We need volunteers to plaster the news across college campuses that students need to contact the election commissions in their home towns and apply for absentee ballots. Anything that anyone can do to increase voter registration and voter turnout in the next fourteen months must be done.

This isn’t just about re-electing President Obama. The jury’s still out on whether we are really committed to re-electing him unless one considers the alternative. More importantly, its about the local elections – governors, state legislatures, mayors, aldermen, representation in Washington. It’s about breaking the momentum of the Tea Party, preventing the dominionists from achieving one of their seven pillars – control of our government, reversing the damage done by Republican governors and legislatures. They say that all politics is local. In the 2012 election, it most certainly will be. Those who work to increase voter involvement need to make their cases in terms of their local elections, not in terms of the presidential race. They need to say “do you really want this state legislator who voted to take away your town’s government and turn it over to the governor?” They need to ask if people really want to re-elect a Congressman who voted against jobs or voted to defund the EPA while your town has been waiting for over a decade to have toxic soil removed from a Superfund site or while your air continues to stink from the chemical plants. Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in truly democratic states can volunteer our computer services if not our personal presence to assist in such things as finding the proper sources for birth certificates and donating whatever we can to the organizations that are doing the ground work.

The 2012 election is going to be different from previous ones. Never before have we had such an uphill battle just to make sure people can exercise their constitutional right to vote. Never before have we had to fight so hard for the very soul of our nation. Never since the dawn of mass communication have we faced so formidable a propaganda machine as we are facing in right wing media.

Never in my lifetime have the rights of the individual been under such attack, and never before in my lifetime has the power of the individual been more important.

Related articles

• Voter ID laws target rarely occurring voter fraud (sfgate.com)
• Congress Investigates GOP War on Voting (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• GOP-Pushed Student Voter Fraud Investigation Finds Zero Voter Fraud (kaystreet.wordpress.com)
• Voter ID laws target rarely occurring voter fraud (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Rhode Island Gov. Signs Voter I.D. Law (lezgetreal.com)
• Victoria Coats: Protecting Or Suppressing The Vote? (huffingtonpost.com)
• The GOP And Voter Disenfranchisement (jonathanturley.org)
• Knoxville voters express support for ID law, but dissenters fear discrimination (knoxnews.com)

Police officials in New York say they have begun a criminal investigation of the circumstances surrounding the suicide of gay teen Jamey Rodemeyer.

Jamey took his own life over the weekend following what his parents and friends say, were years of bullying and harassment over the boys sexual orientation.

The Buffalo News says:

Amherst police are investigating whether school bullies could be charged with harassment or hate crimes related to the suicide of Williamsville North High School freshman Jamey Rodemeyer.

Jamey was found dead outside his home Sunday morning after years of complaints by him that he was bullied and subjected to hateful comments in school and online, mostly related to his sexual orientation.

“We’re going to look into whether he was the victim of any crimes leading up to his suicide,” Police Chief John C. Askey said.

Members of the public, including those from the school community, have reached out to police in recent days with information suggesting that Jamey had been subjected to what would amount to criminal harassment, Askey said.

“We’ve heard that there were some specific students, an identifiable group of students, that had specifically targeted Jamey, or had been picking on him for a period of time,” Askey said.

According to reports, the students had been posting hate comments with gay references on Jamey’s Formspring account, a website that allows anonymous posts.

“JAMIE IS STUPID, GAY, FAT ANND [sic] UGLY. HE MUST DIE!” one post said, another read, “I wouldn’t care if you died. No one would. So just do it It would make everyone WAY more happier!”

According to ABC News, the Amherst Police Department’s Special Victims Unit has said it will determine whether to charge these students with harassment, cyber-harassment or hate crimes. Police said three students in particular might have been involved.

“The special victims unit is looking into the circumstances prior to his death,” Captain Michael Camilleri said. “We are not sure if there is anything criminal or not.”

Anyone with information that could assist police are encouraged to call the Amherst Police Special Victims Unit at 716-689-1393.

Related articles

• Anderson Cooper Speaks to Family of Jamey Rodemeyer: VIDEO (lezgetreal.com)
• Young “It Gets Better” Filmmaker Commits Suicide At Age 14 (lezgetreal.com)