Another example of someone who should be not only fired but banned from ever owning a firearm or being in any kind of position of responsibility. Not even a McCook.
A Denver police officer has been suspended after allegedly brandishing his gun at a McDonald's restaurant in Aurora after his order took too long to fill.
Aurora police confirmed the CBS4 investigation saying the incident
occurred May 21 at the McDonald's at 18181 East Hampden Avenue.
A spokesperson for the Aurora Police Department said they plan to
present the case -- now classified as a felony menacing incident -- to
the Arapahoe County District Attorney's Office Thursday for possible
filing of criminal charges.Sources familiar with the case, and the fast food worker's account of
what happened, say two off-duty Denver police officers placed an order
from their car in the early morning hours of May 21. But once at the
drive through window, the employee said the men became agitated and
angry at how long their food was taking. The men thought they were
being ignored, according to contacts familiar with the worker's
account. The male clerk then said one of the officer's flashed his
police badge and pointed a pistol through the drive through window in a
threatening manner, before driving off without paying.
Juan Cole's response to President Obama's speech on Tuesday. As noted and also all over the MSM it doesn't stop the Limbaugh/McCain/Bohener/Graham/Beck/Palin/Graham/Malkin... hate & lie machine.
But there are dangers here. Obama
will likely be as helpless before a crackdown by the Iranian regime as
Eisenhower was re: Hungary in 1956, Johnson was re: Prague in 1968, and
Bush senior was re: Tienanmen Square in 1989. George W. Bush, it should
remember, did nothing about Tehran's crackdown on student protesters in
2003 or about the crackdown on reformist candidates, which excluded
them from running in the 2004 Iranian parliamentary elections, or about
the probably fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in 2005. It is hard to
see what he could have done, contrary to what his erstwhile supporters
in Congress now seem to imply. As an oil state, the Iranian regime does
not need the rest of the world and is not easy to pressure. So Obama
needs to be careful about raising expectations of any sort of practical
intervention by the US, which could not possibly succeed. (Despite the
US media's determined ignoring the the Afghanistan War, it is rather a
limiting factor on US options with regard to Iran.) Moreover, if the
regime succeeds in quelling the protests, however odious it is, it will
still be a chess piece on the board of international diplomacy and the
US will have to deal with it just as it deals with post-Tiananmen China.
And,
the more Obama speaks on the subject, even in these terms, the more he
risks associating the Mousavi supporters with a CIA plot. Iranian media
are already parading arrested protesters
who are 'confessing' that 'Western media' led them astray. In
nationalist and wounded Iran, if someone is successfully tagged as an
agent of foreign interests, it is the political kiss of death.
The
fact is that despite the bluster of the American Right that Something
Must be Done, the United States is not a neutral or benevolent player
in Iran. Washington overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953
over oil nationalization, and installed the megalomaniac and oppressive
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who gradually so alienated all social classes in
Iran that he was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1978-1979. The
shah had a national system of domestic surveillance and tossed people
in jail for the slightest dissidence, and was supported to the hilt by
the United States government. So past American intervention has not
been on the side of let us say human rights.
More recently, the
US backed the creepy and cult-like Mojahedin-e Khalq (People's Holy
Warriors or MEK), which originated in a mixture of communist Stalinism
and fundamentalist Islam. The MEK is a terrorist organization and has
blown things up inside Iran, so the Pentagon's ties with them are wrong
in so many ways. The MEK, by the way, has a very substantial lobby in
Washington DC and has some congressmen in its back pocket, and is
supported by the less savory elements of the Israel lobbies such as
Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson. I am not saying they should be
investigated for material support of terrorism, since I am appalled by
the unconstitutional breadth of that current DOJ tactic, but I am
signalling that the US imperialist Right has been up to very sinister
things in Iran for decades. A person who worked in the Pentagon once
alleged to me that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was
privately pushing for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. And
Dick Cheney is so attached to launching war on Iran that he
characterized attempts to deflect such plans as a "conspiracy." Given
what the US did to Fallujah, it strikes me as unlikely that a military
invasion of Iran would be good for that country's civic life. And there
are rather disadvantages to being nuked, even by the kindliest of WASP
gentlemen of Mr. Rumsfeld's ilk.
Moreover, very unfortunately,
US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries
about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide
demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to
be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge
against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the
Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium.
Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her
staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, 'protest zones' were
assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded
civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations
outside designated 'protest zones' would be illegal in New York City,
apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken
to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many
observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will
know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil
damages.
Remember when it was the liberal guests who ended up looking like sputtering morons on the O'Reilly Factor? Tonight it was the host. Joan Walsh turned the tables.
Her secret?
Remain calm.
Finish your sentences, even if O'Reilly interrupts you.
Do your research and form your soundbites ahead of time.
Don't raise your voice higher than Bills, or get more emotional. This way, he looks like the crazy one, as nature intended.
Leave no charge unanswered, even if it sounds absurd. Especially if it sounds absurd.
The Salon editor's vitruoso performance led an enraged O'Reilly to the fantastic conclusion that, in fact, Walsh
was responsible for the death of abortion doctor George Tiller, because
she branded him a hero. Uh, OK! Well, it looks like that's all you have
time for. Enjoy your weekend, Bill, and try not to think too much about
how you had your ass handed to you, by a San Francisco liberal. That'll
just make you angry.
The last time wolverines were known to live in Colorado, Theodore Roosevelt
had just died and women had not yet won the right to vote. But now, 90
years later, researchers using radio tracking devices have followed a
wolverine into the state.
The scientists concede that
the return of one animal to a species’ ancient range is hardly cause
for jubilation. “Somewhat of an anomaly,” Rick Kahn, an official in the
Colorado Division of Wildlife, called it in a statement.
But
the researchers hope their efforts to track the young male, designated
M56, will help explain why only an estimated 250 to 500 wolverines
remain in the lower 48 states and what their fate might be in the face
of development and climate change.
Wolverines live in Alaska and Canada, and “we know they used to be in
Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, California and Washington,”
said Robert M. Inman, who directs the Greater Yellowstone Wolverine
Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization that also runs the Bronx Zoo.
It was a crudely stage-managed insult to everyone involved. By Christopher HitchensPosted Sunday, June 14, 2009, at 6:41 PM ET
For
a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I
quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular
updates:
I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally
and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about.
Lots of splotchy boys who can't get a date are given guns and told
they're special.
It's hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid
sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the "Islamic republic"
or as a description of the reserve strength that the Iranian
para-state, or state within a state, can bring to bear if it ever feels
itself even slightly challenged. There is a theoretical reason why the
events of the last month in Iran (I am sorry, but I resolutely decline
to refer to them as elections) were a crudely stage-managed
insult to those who took part in them and those who observed them. And
then there is a practical reason. The theoretical reason, though less
immediately dramatic and exciting, is the much more interesting and
important one.
Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite
theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This
totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery
promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui.
Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in
charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the
insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of
the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over
before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council
determines well in advance who may or may not "run." Any newspaper
referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts,
and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the
ayatollahs. ("They fell for it? But it's too easy!") Shame on all those
media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week.
And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she
hoped that "the genuine will and desire" of the people of Iran would be
reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency
was deliberately forestalled to begin with.
In theory, the first
choice of the ayatollahs might not actually "win," and there could even
be divisions among the Islamic Guardian Council as to who constitutes
the best nominee. Secondary as that is, it can still lead to rancor.
After all, corrupt systems are still subject to fraud. This, like
hypocrisy, is the compliment that vice pays to virtue. With
near-incredible brutishness and cruelty, then, the guardians moved to
cut off cell-phone and text-message networks that might give even an
impression of fairness and announced though their storm-troop
"revolutionary guards" that only one form of voting had divine
sanction. ("The miraculous hand of God," announced Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, had been present in the polling places and had announced a
result before many people had even finished voting. He says that sort
of thing all the time.)
The obvious evidence of fixing, fraud, and
force to one side, there is another reason to doubt that an illiterate
fundamentalist like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could have increased even a
state-sponsored plebiscite-type majority. Everywhere else in the Muslim
world, in every election in the last two years, the tendency has been
the other way. In Morocco in 2007, the much-ballyhooed Justice and Development Party
wound up with 14 percent of the vote. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the
predictions of increased market share for the pro-Sharia parties were
likewise falsified. In Iraq this last January, the local elections
penalized the clerical parties that had been making life a misery in
cities like Basra. In neighboring Kuwait last month, the Islamist
forces did poorly, and four women—including the striking figure of Rola Dashti,
who refuses to wear any headgear—were elected to the 50-member
parliament. Most important of all, perhaps, Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah
was convincingly and unexpectedly defeated last week in Lebanon after
an open and vigorous election, the results of which were not challenged
by any party. And, from all I hear, if the Palestinians were to vote
again this year—as they were at one point supposed to do—it would be
highly improbable that Hamas would emerge the victor.
Yet somehow
a senile and fanatical religious clique that has failed even to
condition the vote in a country like Lebanon, where it has proxy and
surrogate parties under arms, is able to reward itself by increasing
its "majority" in a festeringly bankrupt state where it controls the
media and enjoys a monopoly of violence. I think we should deny it any
official recognition of this consolation. (I recommend a reading of "Neither Free Nor Fair: Elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran"
and other productions of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation. This
shows that past penalties for not pleasing the Islamic Guardian Council
have included more than mere disqualification and have extended to
imprisonment and torture and death, sometimes in that order. A new
movie by Cyrus Nowrasteh, The Stoning of Soraya M.,
will soon show what happens to those who dare to dissent in other ways
and are dealt with by Ahmadinejad's "grass roots" fanatics.)
Mention
of the Lebanese elections impels me to pass on what I saw with my own
eyes at a recent Hezbollah rally in south Beirut, Lebanon. In a large
hall that featured the official attendance of a delegation from the
Iranian Embassy, the most luridly displayed poster of the pro-Iranian
party was a nuclear mushroom cloud! Underneath this telling symbol was
a caption warning the "Zionists" of what lay in store. We sometimes
forget that Iran still officially denies any intention of acquiring
nuclear weapons. Yet Ahmadinejad recently hailed an Iranian missile
launch as a counterpart to Iran's success with nuclear centrifuges, and
Hezbollah has certainly been allowed to form the idea that the Iranian
reactors may have nonpeaceful applications. This means, among other
things, that the vicious manipulation by which the mullahs control Iran
can no longer be considered their "internal affair." Fascism at home
sooner or later means fascism abroad. Face it now or fight it later.
Meanwhile, give it its right name.
I could think of much more descriptive language but this is just one more in the list of millions of reasons police have and deserve no respect. There are just too many "bad apples". If "good" cops really cared they would clean this sort of ongoing shit up rather than just cover it up.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol finally releases video of trooper attack on paramedic
It took a while for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to release a video showing one of its troopers choking a paramedic
who was taking an elderly patient to the hospital, and now that it's
available on YouTube, you can understand why they tried to suppress it.
I'm in awe of the dignified and articulate ambulance supervisor
who bravely stands up to the sickeningly hotheaded trooper who is
furious that anyone would dare to "jump out and talk to a State Trooper
like that."
Patricia Phillips, Oklahoma Crime Examiner, has been covering the story:
An ambulance, with Maurice White acting as supervisor
and paramedic, is taking an elderly woman, who had collapsed, to the
hospital for treatment. Her worried family follows.
Trooper Daniel Martin, who was responding to a stolen car report,
came up behind the ambulance on a two-lane country road. In Oklahoma,
those shoulders are notoriously tricky for even a car to pull off onto.
But there's another factor involved.
As the dash cam clearly shows, a car is on the right-hand
shoulder, partially obstructing the highway. Just as the highway patrol
pulls up behind the ambulance, the medical unit must swing out to avoid
colliding with the parked car.
Let me repeat that, because it's important: if the ambulance's
driver, Paul Franks, had immediately pulled over when the racing
trooper came up behind him, he would have created an accident. It is
impossible to safely pull over while slamming into another vehicle.
After the ambulance gets past the parked vehicle, Franks slows
and safely pulls over for the trooper. As Martin zooms by--at a speed
that I would call excessive for just a stolen car report--he uses the
radio to reprimand the ambulance for not pulling over.
Later in the tape, it's shown that the sheriff's department is
already on scene at the stolen car incident. Martin is released from
any need to be at the scene.
Then he whips around, guns his car, and goes out hunting the
ambulance. When he catches up with the ambulance, what happens next is
a textbook case for bad judgment and abuse of power.
J.D. Tuccille of Civil Liberties Examiner
says: "Consider this a test case. If you don't see a paramedic's
life-saving responsibilities as at least as pressing as the
law-enforcement duties of a police officer, there probably is no limit
to the authority you're willing to grant any government employee with a
badge."
Some comentators have suggested that the reason Western reporters were
shocked when Ahmadinejad won was that they are based in opulent North
Tehran, whereas the farmers and workers of Iran, the majority, are
enthusiastic for Ahmadinejad. That is, we fell victim once again to
upper middle class reporting and expectations in a working class
country of the global south.
While such dynamics may have
existed, this analysis is flawed in the case of Iran because it pays
too much attention to class and material factors and not enough to
Iranian culture wars. We have already seen, in 1997 and 2001, that
Iranian women and youth swung behind an obscure former minister of
culture named Mohammad Khatami and his 2nd of Khordad movement,
capturing not only the presidency but also, in 2000, parliament.
Khatami
received 70 percent of the vote in 1997. He then got 78% of the vote in
2001, despite a crowded field. In 2000, his reform movement captured
65% of the seats in parliament. He is a nice man, but you couldn't
exactly categorize him as a union man or a special hit with farmers.
The
evidence is that in the past little over a decade, Iran's voters had
become especially interested in expanding personal liberties, in
expanding women's rights, and in a wider field of legitimate expression
for culture (not just high culture but even just things like Iranian
rock music). The extreme puritanism of the hardliners grated on people.
The
problem for the reformers of the late 1990s and early 2000s was that
they did not actually control much, despite holding elected office.
Important government policy and regulation was in the hands of the
unelected, clerical side of the government. The hard line clerics just
shut down reformist newspapers, struck down reformist legislation, and
blocked social and economic reform. The Bush administration was
determined to hang Khatami out to dry, ensuring that the reformers
could never bring home any tangible success in foreign policy or
foreign investment. Thus, in the 2004 parliamentary elections,
literally thousands of reformers were simply struck off the ballot and
not allowed to run. This application of a hard line litmus test in
deciding who could run for office produced a hard line parliament,
naturally enough.
But in 2000, it was clear that the hard liners only had about 20% of the electorate on their side.
By
2005, the hard liners had rolled back all the reforms and the reform
camp was sullen and defeated. They did not come out in large numbers
for the reformist candidate, Karoubi, who only got 17 percent of the
vote. They nevertheless were able to force a run-off between hard line
populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a pragmatic conservative billionaire. Ahmadinejad won.
But
Ahmadinejad's 2005 victory was made possible by the widespread boycott
of the vote or just disillusionment in the reformist camp, meaning that
fewer youth and women bothered to come out.
So to believe that
the 20% hard line support of 2001 has become 63% in 2009, we would have
to posit that Iran is less urban, less literate and less interested in
cultural issues today than 8 years ago. We would have to posit that the
reformist camp once again boycotted the election and stayed home in
droves.
No, this is not a north Tehran/ south Tehran issue. Khatami won by big margins despite being favored by north Tehran.
So
observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for
Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the
last 12 years of Iranian history. It was about culture wars, not class.
It is simply not true that the typical Iranian voter votes conservative
and religious when he or she gets the chance. In fact, Mousavi is
substantially more conservative than the typical winning politician in
2000. Given the enormous turnout of some 80 percent, and given the
growth of Iran's urban sector, the spread of literacy, and the obvious
yearning for ways around the puritanism of the hard liners, Mousavi
should have won in the ongoing culture war.
And just because
Ahmadinejad poses as a champion of the little people does not mean that
his policies are actually good for workers or farmers or for working
class women (they are not, and many people in that social class know
that they are not).
So let that be an end to the guilt trip. The
Second of Khordad Movement was a winning coalition for the better part
of a decade. Its supporters are 8 years older than the last time they
won, but it was a young movement. Did they all do a 180 and defect from
Khatami to Ahmadinejad? Unlikely. The Iranian women who voted in droves
for Khatami haven't gone anywhere, and they did not very likely much care for Ahmadinejad's stances on women's issues:
'In a BBC News interview, Mahbube Abbasqolizade, a member of the
Iranian Women’s Centre NGO, said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s policies are that
women should return to their homes and that their priority should be
the family.”
* Ahmadinejad changed the name of the government
organization the “Centre for Women’s Participation” to the “Centre for
Women and Family Affairs”.
* Ahmadinejad proposed a new law that
would reintroduce a man’s right to divorce his wife without informing
her. In addition, men would no longer be required to pay alimony. In
response, women’s groups have initiated the Million Signatures campaign
against these measures.
* Ahmadinejad’s administration opposes
the ratification of the UN protocol called CEDAW, the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This doctrine
is essentially an international women’s Bill of Rights.
*
Ahmadinejad implemented the Social Safety program, which monitors
women’s clothing, requires the permission from a father or husband for
a woman to attend school, and applies quotas limiting the number of
women allowed to attend universities.'
Mir Hosain
Mousavi was a plausible candidate for the reformists. They were
electing people like him with 70 and 80 percent margins just a few
years ago. We have not been had by the business families of north
Tehran. We've much more likely been had by a hard line constituency of
at most 20% of the country, who claim to be the only true heirs of the
Iranian revolution, and who control which ballots see the light of day.
For
reasons which I personally cannot fathom, the American media seems to
have decided that the Iranian election and it's aftermath were either
not newsworthy at all or simply a minor story not worth interrupting
regular programming. After seeing report after report on Twitter
last night from inside Iran about the rapidly deteriorating situation
there, I flipped to every major news station on TV. Nobody was covering
what was happening in Iran. Larry King was interviewing motorcycle
builders, MSNBC was airing a sensationalistic documentary on some
American prison, and Glen Beck was...well...playing with goldfish.
Disgusted, I turned the TV off and went back to Twitter.
If
you want news out of Iran - not the official government press releases
but breaking news from the street level - check out the #iranelection
hashtag. If you are new to Twitter and unfamiliar with how to search
for hashtags, you can simply go here. You just may be surprised at how little the American media is telling you about the situation on the ground.
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - A state Republican activist has admitted to and
apologized for calling a gorilla that escaped from the Riverbanks Zoo
Friday an "ancestor" of First Lady Michelle Obama.
A screen capture of the comment, made on the Internet site Facebook,
was obtained by FITSNews, the website of South Carolina politico Will
Folks.
The image shows a post by an aide to state Attorney General Henry
McMaster describing Friday morning's gorilla escape at Columbia's
Riverbanks Zoo.
Longtime SCGOP activist and former state Senate candidate Rusty
DePass responded with the comment, "I'm sure it's just one of
Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless."
DePass told WIS News 10 he was talking about First Lady Michelle Obama.
And then DePass offered the rote non-apology apology:
We spoke with DePass over the phone Friday night. He said, "I am as
sorry as I can be if I offended anyone. The comment was clearly in
jest."
Clearly in jest. Clearly. Surely. Only humorless, hypersensitive,
politically correct people would make a stink over something so
harmless. How could anybody be offended by a joke that DePass probably heard the first version of from his grandfather who heard it from his grandfather?
Ah, yes, those Republicans have such a rambunctious
funnybone. So funny, in fact, that they can't leave well enough alone
and nearly always make things worse by just making shit up:
DePass took his apology a bit further. He also said, "The comment
was hers. Not mine," saying the first lady made statements in the media
recently saying we are all descendants of apes.
But an Internet search for those comments turned up no news articles of the like.
No surprise there. In fact, the ape reference in relation to African Americans has a long history.
But it's not just history. Some Americans, especially those of us
raised in the South, grew up with it as standard fare, even in the
classroom. While the crudest depictions of black people as apes have
disappeared from American culture, for many there remains a mental
association of African Americans with apes.
Not only is it not a jest, it is also not harmless prejudice.
According to six cognitive studies put together by a team of
psychologists led by Professor Philip Atiba Goff, "participants’ basic cognitive processes ... significantly alter[ed] their judgments in criminal justice contexts."
Included in the team's studies - published as "Not Yet Human:
Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary
Consequences" - was an archival look at hundreds of articles published
in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1979-1999. They discovered that blacks convicted of capital crimes were four times more likely than
convicted whites to be described with "ape-relevant" language, such as
"barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." Worse, they wrote:
...those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. [My emphasis - MB]
Arriving in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, I went on dozens of
ridealongs in police cruisers as part of an effort to get acquainted
with the gang phenomenon in the part of the city that was then called
South Central, then predominately African American. Officers constantly
would refer to a call as an N.H.I. I soon discovered this meant No
Humans Involved.
I suppose Rusty DePass would find that pretty funny, too.
Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen is revealed to have an enlightened
attitude about marijuana in this exchange with drug war dinosaur Robert
Mueller. The tired-looking FBI director seems to be reciting his false
arguments like a pull-string puppet. (Via The Agitator)
Remember when it was the liberal guests who ended up looking like sputtering morons on the O'Reilly Factor? Tonight it was the host. 
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