Year: 2014

Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

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Veronica Dunnachie, the “Open Carry” activist, who has just been arrest for shooting her ex-husband and step daughter to death:

A woman charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and stepdaughter has strong connections to groups advocating for expanding open carry gun laws in Texas.

Local news outlets on Wednesday reported that Veronica Dunnachie was arrested and charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and step daughter.

Buried in some of the initial reporting on the arrest of Dunnachie seems to have been an active participant in open carry groups in Texas. The local ABC affiliate, WFAA, noted that Dunnachie’s Facebook page is photos of her engaged in open carry firearm advocacy activities. WFAA also noted that one of her profile pictures included the text “Sometimes removing some people out of your life makes room for better people.”

Veronica and Russell Dunnachie were going through a divorce, according to court records.

They say that the gun most likely to kill you is your own.

It appears that the 2nd most likely gun to kill you belongs to your ex.

Please Use Yiddish Responsibly

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Would someone please inform Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their subsidiary formerly known as Wisconsin as to the proper use of Yiddish:

Navigating a religion or culture you weren’t brought up in can be challenging, to say the least.

 It’s something most politicians find themselves doing at one point or another, though, whether it’s in relating to constituents or appealing to donors.

………

 As Gov. Scott Walker courts Republican mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s support for a likely 2016 presidential run, he’s found himself dining with top GOP donors — but also addressing a crowd at the Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting.

 ………

 These overtures represent a marked improvement from a letter Walker sent — also about a menorah — during his time as Milwaukee County executive.

 In an undated letter unearthed by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now during the August release of documents from the first of two John Doe investigations related to the governor, Walker responded to a letter from Milwaukee attorney and chairman of the Wisconsin Center District Franklyn Gimbel.

 Walker told Gimbel his office would be happy to display a menorah celebrating “The Eight Days of Chanukah” at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, and asked Gimbel to have a representative from Lubavitch of Wisconsin contact Walker’s secretary, Dorothy Moore, to set it up.

 The letter is signed, “Thank you again and Molotov.”

 Presumably, Walker meant to write “mazel tov” and didn’t intend to wish good tidings of incendiary weapons. Perhaps it was a case of AutoCorrect or that pesky Microsoft Word paperclip causing shenanigans.

Under these circumstances, it is clear that he intended the Yiddish version, pronounced MAW-zil-Tawf, not the Hebrew rendition, pronounced maw-ZIL-Tove, and this is always pronounced the first way in the US under similar circumstances.

In any case, while the term is used in modern Hebrew, it is not used in Biblical Hebrew, and the term originated in Yiddish.

In either case, Governor Walker, don’t even bother.

You are arguably the Whitest Guy in Wisconsin™, and you are just going to embarrass yourself.

Israel’s Right Wing Christian “Allies” are a Bigger Threat to them than Hamas

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Case in point, one Adam Everett Livvix,* who was indicted for plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem:

The Israel Police and Shin Bet Security Service released information on Tuesday regarding a Christian American citizen arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack on Muslim holy sites in Israel.

According to Shin Bet and Israel Police reports, the suspect is Adam Everett Livvix, a 30-year-old from Texas. Livvix has previously been wanted in the U.S. on drug charges. He was arrested in Israel on November 19, on suspicion of possession of illegal weapons and planning a terror attack.

According to the Shin Bet, Livvix, while residing in the Palestinian territories prior to his arrest, was approached about assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama while the latter was visiting Israel, though the suspect refused to take part in the plan.

Livvix came to Israel in 2013 and lived in the Palestinian cities of Hebron and Bethlehem. It was while living in Bethlehem that Livvix was approached by a Palestinian about assassinating Obama the with a sniper rifle. Livvix refused. After leaving Palestinian Authority territory, Livvix entered Israel illegally, and remained in the country illegally for roughly a year and a half.

Livvix became acquainted with Israelis and presented himself as a former U.S. Navy SEAL. During questioning, Livvix admitted to being involved in various fraud schemes, as well as the initial stages of planning terror attacks on sites holy to Islam in Israel.

He was apprehended in possession of various weapons and explosives that were stolen from the Israel Defense Forces. In October of this year Livvix asked his roommate, an IDF soldier, to procure weapons for him in exchange for money. His roommate managed to bring him a 1.4 kilogram explosive device, for which Livvix paid part of the agreed upon sum.

The American Federal Bureau of Investigation was notified of the investigation by Israeli security services, and the Central District Prosecutor filed an indictment against Livix in the Netanya Magistrate’s Court. On Monday, the court ordered that Livvix be held until the end of legal proceedings, and that he undergo psychiatric evaluation as per the request of his defense attorney.

The Israel Police and the Justice Ministry stated that the suspect attempted to flee when he was apprehended by police, by jumping out of his seventh-floor window onto a sixth-floor balcony.

Livvix’s indictment comes at a time of rising tensions in Jerusalem, mostly over a disputed holy site that is holy both to Muslims and Jews.

You know, the Rapture Ready™ crowd literally expects the Jews of the world to burn in hellfire so that they can float up to heaven like a bunch of helium filled sex dolls.

That’s why they do sh%$ like this.  They literally want to hasten the end of the world.

Can you imagine the sh%$-storm that would have come down if he had succeeded in blowing up a bomb on the Temple Mount?

He wouldn’t care.  Anything bad that happens to people in Israel is just collateral camage to their warped theology.

BTW, in addition to everything else, it appears that this guy is a seriously bent piece of work.

*Why do all these guys always go by three names from anyway?

F%$# the South

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Michael Tomansky, writing for The Daily Beast, suggests that the Democrats are wasting resources trying to win in the South:

I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).

………

 But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Charlie Pierce disagrees strongly:

I sympathize with Mike. I truly do. But I still will stand with Governor Dean and the 50-state strategy, at least applied judiciously. To me, the key to the problem is to break the stranglehold of the Washington-based consultant class over what candidates will be run in what places. It wasn’t the Beltway crowd who found Jon Tester in Montana, or Jim Webb in Virginia. The national party should be involved in these races only as a means by which money can be shrewdly spread around, and as a means of employing some sense of party discipline. No, Mr. Breaux, we won’t be following your easily rented ass any more. We will find progressive populists, white or black, and we will run them and support them, and maybe the first five tries won’t work but, sooner or later, there will be a breakthrough, and it will not be led by the next Bill Clinton and the next DLC.

For example, Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds in South Carolina and in Mississippi. He wouldn’t come close to winning anything in either of those states, but there is a working-class audience there that is interested in listening to him, and that is worth respecting in our politics. There always has been a kind of working-class populism in the South, and it always came to grief over race. But it’s 2014, and forging an actual alliance of working people, black and white, in the places that need it the most, is a worthwhile effort whether it fails initially or not. To abandon the people trying to forge that alliance — and, therefore, to abandon the people on whose behalf that alliance is being forged — would be political malpractice of the highest order. It would be an odd kind of confirmation of Willard Romney’s first bumbling attempts to run away from himself on health care, whereby G.I. Luvmoney averred that what worked in Massachusetts would not work in Mississippi, as though Those People were expendable because the Mississippi Republicans would have them die by the side of the road. Sometimes, the fight alone is enough.

The problem is much like the supporters of Julian Schwinger’s and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga’s competing theories of quantum electrodynamics.

They are actually saying the same thing, but they are talking past each other and arguing about notation.*

Neither one of them is actually suggesting that we not run candidates.

They are both asserting that the current campaign for seats in the south is being done by compromising Democratic Party values, and neither of them are suggesting that candidates not be run.

In order to support the clearly doomed campaigns of Landrieu in Louisiana and Pryor in Arkansas, Obama held off on an executive order to help illegal immigrants.

Over the past 6 years, Obama has engaged in the most aggressive deportation policies in our nation’s history in an attempt to support southern candidates.

It’s been bad policy and bad politics.

*I am making no claims here to my having anywhere near the intellectual heft of the man who resolved this dispute, Richard Feynman. He is way out of my league.

Stay Classy, My Friends

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A bar in Missouri (or is that Misery?) was found to offer a “Michael Brown Special”, 6 shots of Jose Cinge for $10:

A “Michael Brown Special” is now being offered at Mug Shots, a Missouri bar. The six shots of Jose Cinge for $10 drink has sparked quite a controversy both in the town of St. Joseph and around the country.

Mug Shots bar is reportedly known for its “sarcasm is always free” mantra. One of the co-owners of the Missouri bar now regrets his most recent attempt at sarcasm and the creation of the Michael Brown Special drink.

During an interview with WDAF-TV local news, the co-owner who asked not to be identified, said, “[The Michael Brown Special drink] was not meant to cause any harm. I should have thought a little bit more about it before I made it a shot special.”

Gee, you think?

It’s on a par with the Trayvon Martin pistol targets.

Get back under your rock and stay there, you contemptible ratf%$#.

We Finally Got the Torture Report. It is Actually a Bit Worse than I Expected.

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Understand that we are talking about an executive summary (PDF) that spans 525 pages(!), and I have not read it in detail.

But here are the basic points from the report:

  1. The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
  2. The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
  3. The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
  4. The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
  5. The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  6. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
  7. The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
  8. The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.
  9. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
  10. The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
  11. The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
  12. The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
  13. Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
  14. CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA headquarters.
  15. The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
  16. The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
  17. The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
  18. The CIA marginalised and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  19. The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
  20. The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.

First, I curse the people who jade me agree with John McCain, when he said that he suspected that, “The objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure: torture’s ineffectiveness.”

It is the nature of secret organizations to misuse the classification process to avoid embarrassment and for bureaucratic and budgetary infighting.

BTW, John “I Opposed Torture, I Pinkie Swear” Brennan is saying that we should the ignore this document, because torture really worked.

He keeps slicing that bullsh%$, and Barack Obama keeps a swallowing it.

Here are some things have been observed by people who have read the report in more detail than I have been able to yet:

Note the Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into releasing this report.

For all of his assertions that the President wants to ensure that this will not happen again, the people who did this, people who were rewarded with promotions and prestige, will suffer no consequences.

We will torture again, and we will do this soon, because people in senior positions at the US state security apparatus are in those positions because they either tortured or facilitated torture.

Fire Brennan.  He supports torture, and he lied to Congress.

Fire Clapper.  He lied to congress.

Pull the security clearances of those involved in the torture program, particularly Jose Rodriguez, for moral turpitude.

Get the contractors out of the intelligence committee.  They are a cancer on an already dysfunctional culture.

I So Wish She Were Running for President

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Elizabeth Warren just opened up a serious can of whup ass on the Obama toadies who are pushing for the nomination of Antonio Weiss for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made clear on Tuesday that she is not swayed by supporters of Obama administration nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy Antonio Weiss. Warren upped the ante in the unusually heated nomination fight, even mocking his defenders who point out that he supports “poetry.”

………

Warren, in her speech at an event hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Roosevelt Institute and Americans for Financial Reform, ticked off the most common points defenders of Weiss have made about his nomination.

“He spent the last 20 years at the investment bank Lazard and has been named to be under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department. He is focused on international corporate mergers — companies buying and selling each other,” Warren said. “Now, it may be interesting, challenging, but it does not sufficiently qualify him to oversee consumer protection and domestic regulatory functions at the Treasury Department.”

………

Weiss’s nomination contradicts the Obama administration’s opposition to bringing in personnel who won’t have conflicts of interest with Wall Street, Warren said.

“Now, this matters because at the end of the day the administration undercuts its own opposition to this practice by nominating someone who was involved in a high profile, cross boarder inversion and who, by the way, made $15 million in the last few years, working for Lazard, a firm that did three of the four major announced inversions,” Warren said “And by the way, Lazard isn’t an American company anymore either. It already moved to Bermuda to cut its taxes.”

Recent profiles of Weiss, oddly, have included the fact that he’s been involved in publishing the Paris Review in ticking off his Democratic bona fides. That wasn’t lost on Warren.

“Third, and maybe you can help me understand this argument, people say opposition to Weiss is unreasonable because, wait for it, he likes poetry,” Warren said. “I’m actually not kidding on this one. Supposedly because he helps publish a literary magazine called the Paris Review we should trust that he will zealously pursue financial reform. Now I confess, I don’t read many literary magazines but, really?”

In leaving Lazard, Warren noted that Weiss would receive a golden parachute of about $20 million.

“For me, this is just one spin of the revolving door too many. Enough is enough,” Warren said. “The response to these concerns has been, let’s say, loud. First his supporters say ‘come on, he’s an investment banker so of course he should be qualified to oversee complicated financial work at treasury. But his defenders haven’t shown his actual experience that qualifies him for this job at treasury.”

One of the more substantive arguments against Warren’s opposition to Weiss is that he’s as good as could possibly be gotten in a nominee for a top treasury position. Warren said she has supported qualified people with ties to Wall Street but that’s not what Weiss is.

“Look, when I set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau I interviewed, I hired, and I worked alongside many people with Wall Street experience and I was glad to do so. In the Senate I have voted for plenty of nominees with Wall Street experience,” Warren said. “But we need a balance. Not everyone who swoops in through the revolving door should be offered a top job without some serious examinations. Qualifications matter and Weiss doesn’t have them.”

Ouch.

Instead, I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for some corporate Democrat.

Unless Bernie Sanders run.

Run Bernie!!! Run!!!

“Most Transparent Administration Ever,” my Ass!!!

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So, the administration, via the gentle words of John Kerry, has asked that the unclassified summary of the torture report release be delayed:

Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.

 Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad. Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now.

 “What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. “He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue — it’s a foreign policy issue.”

Bullsh%$.

If this gets delayed, then Richard Burr (R-NC) is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina has made it clear that he is opposed to any release of any information regarding torture by the committee.

The Obama administration, which has been thoroughly captured by the most repulsive elements of the US state security apparatus, would be fine with that.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Call me a Curmudgeon, But………

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The most recent news on employment, which shows good employment growth, is good news, but I would not start singing Hosannas yet.

There are a number of temporary externalities, most notably a 40% drop in the price of oil in the past 6 months and renewed froth in the housing market, that account for much of this, and neither of them are sustainable.

Also, it increasingly looks like the big casino on Wall Street is back, and they can f%$# up anything.

Voting Against Voting Against Nazism: Where Bad Foreign Policy Takes You

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The Russians proposed a motion in the General Assembly of the UN condemning the Nazis, and those who glorify them.

The United States, Canada, and the Ukraine voted against the resolution, while the EU nations abstained:

The war of words between Russia and Ukraine over the issue of anti-Semitism heated up this weekend, with Moscow condemning the former Soviet republic, as well as the US and Canada, for voting against an annual UN resolution condemning Nazism.

The draft, which was approved by a vote of 115 to 3 in the UN’s Third (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) Committee on Friday, condemned the “glorification” of Nazism, neo-Nazism and “other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” It was backed by Russia, with support from Pakistan, Cuba and Rwanda, among others. Fifty-five countries abstained from the vote.

It is “highly regrettable” that the US, Canada and Ukraine opposed the measure and that members of the European Union withdrew from the vote, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

Russia was particularly “depressed and alarmed” over Kiev’s opposition, the ministry said, as Ukrainians “experienced the full brunt of the horrors of Nazism and contributed importantly to our common victory over it.”

Russia has consistently asserted that Ukraine’s post-revolutionary government, which took power after popular demonstrations pushed out pro-Moscow President Victor Yanukovich, is composed of fascists and anti-Semites.

“It could never occur to anybody that radicals and neo-Nazis could come to dominate Ukrainian politics,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told deputies in Russia’s parliament last week.

The US government actively supported the right wing nativist Pravy Sektor party and its violent and xenophobic militia to overthrow the government of Victor Yanukovich

Both of these organizations see themselves as heirs to the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, and Pravy Sektor is a part of the ruling coalition in the Ukraine, it’s not surprising the the Ukrainian ambassador would vote no.

Because the US was instrumental in making this happen, it’s not surprising that we cast what is essentially a pro-Nazi vote.

As to Canada, at least under the Harper government, being in mindless lockstep with the US is just how they roll.

Still, it’s pretty f%$#ing disgraceful.

Whiny Loser of the Day

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Mary Landrieu, of course.

I understand that she is upset that she is about to be turfed out of office.

It’s a reasonable feeling.

But if the DSCC were to steal the British Crown Jewels, and pawn them for money to help her campaign, she would still lose, and even if she were to win, the Republicans would still have control of the Senate.

Even so, they let you have your stupid vote on the Keystone bitumen pipeline, so you could kiss oil company ass one last time.

Get over yourself, and start lining up that cushy K Street lobbying job.

The DSCC has done way more for you than you deserve.

Your Daily Update on Police Impunity

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Even Jon Stewart cannot handle this. No joke here.

The New York Daily News, a paper not generally considered a friend of the minority community, nor an adversary of the police department, is livid over the refusal of a Staten Island grand jury to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for the killing of Eric Garner:

The grand jury’s vote to exonerate the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner on Staten Island has glaring earmarks of a gross miscarriage of justice.

 The ruling is painfully far harder to understand than the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

 To a large degree, the evidence against Officer Daniel Pantaleo was widely scrutinized by the public in the form of a on-scene video posted to the Internet by the Daily News. The image of Pantaleo wrestling Garner to the ground with his arm around Garner’s neck was horrifying.

 Even granting that a cop has wide latitude in using force to make an arrest, Pantaleo’s sudden aggressiveness was unnecessary. The fact that it entailed a chokehold only reinforced the excessive quality of his actions.

 After the medical examiner found that a chokehold and chest compression led to Garner’s death, the connection between cause and effect seemed enough to many people not only to indict but to convict Pantaleo.

 Deep, intense skepticism about the grand jury’s ruling is fully warranted — while recognizing that no one other than the panel and Staten Island prosecutors have reviewed all the evidence and matched the facts against the law.

And then we have news on the shooting of 12-year old Tamir Rice.

It appears that, before he was hired as an officer by the Cleveland PD, Tim Loehmann was fired by the Independence, Ohio police department because he was mentally unfit:

Tim Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death last month, resigned from a smaller Ohio police force in 2012 after being found unfit for duty. Among other obviously disqualifying behavior, Loehmann was “distracted” and “weepy” during his firearm qualification session, according to just-released records from his brief tenure with the Independence police department.

“He could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” Independence Deputy Chief Jim Polak wrote in a letter on November 29, 2012, according to records obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group. “For these reasons, I am recommending he be released from the employment of the city of Independence. I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies.”

Polak also wrote that he believed there would certain situations during which Loehmann would “not react in the way instructed.”

………

The problems at Independence erupted on Nov. 28, 2012, the records say. Loehmann showed up “sleepy and upset” for a 6 a.m. state gun qualification session.

Tinnierello wrote that Loehmann “was distracted and was not following simple instructions” at the shooting range.

At one point, he went to the back of the range to reload his magazine and could not return to the line where he was supposed to shoot from, Tinnierello wrote. Loehmann appeared to be crying and was emotionally upset so Tinnierello said they would stop the exercise for the day.

Seriously?

This guy got hired by the Cleveland PD?

I would not hire him as a pastry chef!

Repeat after me:  Police cannot police themselves.

Allowing them to do so is an invitation to corruption and incompetence.

Only Took 3½ F%$#ing Years………

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In South Carolina, a former police chief was indicted on murder charges.

The alleged crime took place in 2011:

A white former police chief here was indicted on murder charges in the 2011 shooting death of an unarmed black man after an argument, a case that instantly drew comparisons to the Ferguson shooting and the chokehold death in New York.

 The indictment of Richard Combs, the former chief and sole officer in the small town of Eutawville (YOO’-tah-vihl), was released Thursday. He faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted in the death of Bernard Bailey.

 Combs’ lawyer accused prosecutors of taking advantage of national outrage toward police and the justice system to get the indictment.

 “He’s trying to make it racial because his timing is perfect,” attorney John O’Leary said. “He’s got all the national issues going on, so they want to drag him in and say, look what a great community we are here, because we’re going to put a police officer who was doing his job in jail for 30 years. That’s wrong. That’s completely wrong.”

 Prosecutor David Pascoe said he had always planned to seek a murder charge if a judge threw out the former chief’s “stand your ground” self-defense claim, which happened last month.

 Combs, 38, had previously been charged with misconduct in office for the shooting. He had faced up to 10 years in prison.

 The indictment is one of three this year for white officers in the shootings of unarmed black men in South Carolina, which has a dark and painful past of civil rights violence.

 The shooting happened in May 2011. Bailey’s daughter received a traffic ticket from the chief for a broken taillight and called her father to the scene. Bailey and Combs argued, but eventually went their separate ways. The police chief got an arrest warrant for Bailey for obstruction. A few days later, Bailey went to Town Hall to argue about his daughter’s ticket. When he showed up, the chief tried to arrest Bailey, a 6-foot-6 former prison guard.

 Prosecutors said Bailey marched back to his truck, and Combs tried to get inside to turn off the ignition. The two briefly fought, and Combs shot Bailey, 54, twice in the chest.

 Combs said he was tangled in Bailey’s steering wheel and feared for his life if Bailey drove away. Last month, a judge threw out his self-defense claim and ruled Combs should have let Bailey leave.

Seriously? 3½ years to indict this guy?

Still, this prosecutor did his job, as opposed to the St. Louis and Staten Island prosecutors, and in South Carolina of all places.

But it should not take 3½ years.

Nope, No Racism Here

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When activists marching from Ferguson to the state capitol, Jefferson City, Missouri, got to Rosebud, MO, they confronted with a display on the road of fried chicken, watermelon, and a 40 oz bottle of beer.

The crowd waved Confederate flags, and shouted racial epithets:

About 50 activists marching from Ferguson to Jefferson City encountered a hostile counter-protest Wednesday in Rosebud.

About 200 people met the marchers as they reached Rosebud around noon, activists said. A display of fried chicken, a melon and a 40-ounce beer bottle had been placed in the street. A Confederate flag flew. Counter-protestors shouted racial epithets.

Rhea Willis of Velda City, Missouri, said she saw a boy she estimated to be 8 years old holding a sign that read, “Go home.”

Somebody shot the window out of the back of one of the buses traveling with the march, dubbed by the NAACP as the Journey for Justice. The outer pane of glass broke. The bullet landed in the windowsill, the driver said.

Clearly, we are in a post-racial society.

After all, we have a black President, don’t we?

Euro Exit Enters Italian Political Mainstream

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There are an increasing number of people who have questioned whether the continued existence of the Euro Zone makes sense, but in the countries that are large enough to matter (i.e. not Greece or Portugal) none of the mainstream parties (i.e. not the National Front) have even begun to question the currency union, until now:

………

Many analysts have come to believe that the big danger to the Eurozone is political, not economic, that the loss of sovereignity, the continued squeeze of ordinary workers and the inability of countries to depreciate their currencies to help exports, make the benefits of Eurozone membership look questionable relative to the costs. But most political commentators have downplayed this risk, arguing that the benefits of Eurozone membership are so large that no incumbent would relinquish it. And indeed, the noise-making has come from parties like UKIP, who have no realistic odds of forming a government. Up until now, France’s Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, has seemed like the most likely contender among Eurozone-exit-favoring party leaders, but she is seen as more able to move France’s Overton than get France out of the Eurozone.

But Wolfgang Munchau, in the German edition of Der Spiegel, argues that a real shift has taken place in Italy. Unlike other countries, where the anti-Eurozone parties are seen as fringe players, in Italy, two factions that could realistically rule are both pushing for leaving the Eurozone.

From Munchau’s article, translation courtesy Google Translate:

One of the reasons why we even have the euro, was the broad political consensus in all countries who would later take part in it. No matter whether government or opposition, they were all for it. Just the consent of the opposition parties was important because in the course of 15 years, all have times over the government – the SPD in Germany, and the Socialists in France and Spain. The euro has characterized the many changes of government since its inception nearly 16 years ago survived.

………

 Unlike in Italy. There are now all opposition parties against the euro. First, the does not mean anything. The Italian Social Democrats under its chief Matteo Renzi have a large majority in parliament. And they enjoy a great, albeit not overwhelming support in the population. But in democracies oppositions come eventually to the government. And then of course it is important to know whether such a government would implement its anti-euro policy.

 The five-star Party, the largest opposition party, had spoken before the European elections for a referendum on the euro. The party was by then EUR critical, but the positions were not then as hard as now. Party leader Beppe Grillo has revealed its stance recently. His party, the euro zone as soon as possible to leave.

 In the regional elections in the northern Italian province Emiglia Romana Although Renzis party won almost, but the Northern League came on 30 per cent, which no one would have expected. The Lega is not just for a separation of northern Italy and southern Italy. It is now also include a separation from the euro. And this position was rewarded by voters.

 Italy’s exit would be the worst of all scenarios.

 And that has now brought Silvio Berlusconi on the taste. Really friendly europe Berlusconi was of course never. Opportunistic as it is, after all, he is now the future of the euro in question. Moreover, he and his party Forza Italia, the second largest in Italy, have an elaborate plan. Berlusconi wants to win back the monetary sovereignty by introducing home a parallel currency which is freely traded against the euro. Wages and salaries and of course the prices in the shops would be enrolled in this new currency.

 One would exchange their legacy euro and the new Italian Euros first one to one. Then the new currency would be released, whereupon its foreign currency would collapse immediately, probably 30 to 50 percent. The Italian economy would be competitive again with one blow.

This is a credible scenario, even if the name Berlusconi is invoked.

The problem is and remains, as Paul Krugman trenchantly observes, the Germans, and its leaders who are approaching the economic realities as a morality play for partisan electoral benefit:

………

 The point is a simple but important one: at this point any European imbalances associated with the surge in capital flows to the periphery after the formation of the euro have been worked off via extremely painful and costly disinflation. If we look at the whole period from 1999 to the present, most of Europe has had cost growth and inflation just about consistent with the ECB’s long-standing just-under-2 percent inflation target. There’s just one big outlier:

At this point the European imbalance problem is a German problem, caused by Germany’s persistent failure to have wage and price increases in line with what the euro requires. This German undervaluation is in turn exporting deflation to the rest of Europe. By contrast, France, Spain, and even Italy have been playing by the rules.

If you want to save the Euro, you have to kick Germany out.

It’s Good to be a Jew

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found circumcision to be unambiguously medically beneficial:

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines regarding the safety and benefits of circumcision. While the CDC won’t actually instruct parents to get their sons snipped (since it is a personal decision that could be influenced by culture and religious beliefs), the report makes it clear that it is a very good idea to do so, and urges teenage boys to elect to have the surgery if they have not already.

“The scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks,” said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “The first thing it’s important to know is that male circumcision has been associated with a 50 to 60 percent reduction of H.I.V. transmission, as well as a reduction in sexually transmitted infections such as herpes, bacterial vaginosis and the human papilloma virus (H.P.V.), which causes penile and cervical cancer,” he continued.

They also ignore the role that a traditional Brit Milah in preventing alcoholism:  You get your very first taste of wine, then ……… Whack!!!!.

It kinds of puts one off of boozing too much.