Republicans care

Let’s look at how Republicans care about the people.

First, they’ve so busy trying to take medical insurance from tens of millions of people they let medical insurance for children lapse:

Congress has allowed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provided low-cost health insurance to 9 million children, to expire.

If action is not taken soon to restore the funding, the effects will become obvious in schools across the country, with many of the children in the program unable to see a doctor for routine checkups, immunizations, visits when sick, and other services.

Second, they will probably get rid of a program that made it so students scammed by fake universities didn’t have to repay their loans:

Relief seemed to be on the way last year after she learned the Obama administration would forgive her Department of Education loans if she could prove she was defrauded by the for-profit college. But President Trump has brought the worries back.

Trump has thrust Cabrera Garcia and more than 65,000 other student borrowers across the country, including about 1,500 in New England, into a new state of financial limbo by suspending applications under Obama’s program of loan forgiveness.

I wonder why? Oh:

DeVos has investment ties to the for-profit education sector. She also has installed former executives and other officials from the for-profit education industry in her department.

Among them: Julian Schmoke Jr., as the Education Department’s top cop looking for schools that are cheating taxpayers and students of federal aid dollars. Schmoke is a former dean at DeVry University, a for-profit school that, along with its parent company, last year agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $100 million to settle allegations it lured students with false job and salary information. Critics also say he has little to no experience running investigations.

It’s obvious that DeVos just doesn’t care about public education.

Fuck violence

A Congressman along with three others was shot today:

A rifle-wielding attacker opened fire on Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball practice Wednesday, wounding House GOP Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and several others as congressmen and aides dove for cover. The assailant, prepared with ‘‘a lot of ammo,’’ fought a gun battle with police before he, too, was shot and later died.

The only type of thing this type of violence is good for is creating more violence. Violence can come from any political faction and in all cases is both unacceptable and stupid.

And there’s much too much of it:

A UPS employee opened fire at a San Francisco package delivery facility on Wednesday, killing three employees and then himself as officers closed in, police said.

Trump is going under

Here’s Donald Trump a-tweeting:

The Democrats have said some of the worst things about James Comey, including the fact that he should be fired, but now they play so sad!

…

James Comey will be replaced by someone who will do a far better job, bringing back the spirit and prestige of the FBI.

…

Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!

Hey, look at that, Trump might be right–we might be thanking him for firing James Comey. That’s because it’s so outrageous that it might convince some Republicans that there really does have to be a Special Prosecutor to investigate the connections between the Russians and the Trump administration.

The police are never wrong

This would seem cut and dried to me:

Here is my best distillation (based on detailed findings made by the district judge after a five-day bench trial):

In October 2010, officers were searching for a “parolee-at-large” who allegedly had been spotted bicycling in front of a suspected drug-trafficking house in suburban Los Angeles. Officers, who had no warrant to search or arrest, went to the house, announced themselves to the owner, and gained entry by threatening to force their way in. (The parolee was not there.)

Meanwhile, officers Christopher Conley and Jennifer Pederson went to “clear the backyard.” After entering the yard and checking some small metal storage boxes, the two officers came to a dilapidated wooden “shack” that (as the district court found) they could not “reasonably” have believed to be unoccupied. The shack had various signs of occupancy, and a lead officer testified that he had advised the deputies that a man named Angel lived in a shed in the yard with his pregnant girlfriend. (The district judge found that both deputies had heard this advisement, and that if they had not then they had “unreasonably failed to pay attention.”) With his gun drawn, Conley pulled open the door of the shack.

The Mendezes were resting on a futon; Angel kept a BB gun next to his bed to shoot pests. When he heard the deputies’ entry, he picked up the BB gun to move it so he could get up. (Whether the gun was “pointed at” the deputies remains disputed, but the trial judge found Mendez was moving it innocently, merely “to help him sit up.”) Conley shouted “gun,” and the deputies fired 15 bullets at the two occupants. Mendez, severely injured, exclaimed, “I didn’t know it was you guys. It was a BB gun….”

No criminal case was filed against the officers, but the courts did award the Mendezes $4 million in damages in a civil suit. The case is now at the Supreme Court to review that award. I wonder what would have happened if Angel had had a real gun and killed one of the officers?

Crime in New York City

The crime rate in New York City is lower than it’s been in generations:

New York City finished 2016 tied for its second lowest number of homicides in the modern era of record keeping, driving the city’s rate for each 100,000 residents to the lowest level among major U.S. cities except San Diego.

…

NYPD figures show 335 killings last year, down from 352 in 2015. The fewest killings were in 2014, with 333; 2013 also recorded 335 homicides. The 2016 number is preliminary and might be adjusted upward if certain cases are reclassified as homicides.

Total shootings, defined as discharge of a gun in which someone is injured, totaled 998, down from more than 1,100 in the prior year.

…

Since hitting a record high of 2,245 homicides in 1989, New York City killings have declined markedly and are comparable to what the city experienced in the 1960s, when record keeping differed from the CompStat method initiated in 1994 by then-commissioner William Bratton.

And it could be even lower if other states had stronger gun laws:

A gun-trafficking ring in Virginia brought more than 200 legally purchased guns up the I-95 corridor to New York, where they unwittingly sold them to an undercover detective, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday.

The indictment of 627 counts charged 24 people, some of whom have violent criminal records and ties to the Bloods street gang, with conspiracy and illegal weapons sale and possession. In all, the authorities recovered 217 guns, including 41 assault weapons like AK-47s, AR-15s and a Thompson submachine gun.

…

In a phone call in September, Antwan Walker, of Highland Springs, Va., said it was to buy guns in Virginia.

“There is no limits to how many guns I can go buy from the store, you know what I mean?” he said.

But we have to allow such people to buy an almost unlimited number of guns because FREEDOM.

Jeff Sessions shows his critics were right

Jeff Sessions isn’t a racist it’s just that his policies seem to be … or something. Let’s see what Jeff did the last two days of Black History Month:

• He dropped an objection to a voter ID law in Texas:

The Republican-led Texas Legislature passed one of the toughest voter ID laws in the country in 2011, requiring voters to show a driver’s license, passport or other government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department sued Texas to block the law in 2013 and scored a major victory last year after a federal appeals court ruled that the law needed to be softened because it discriminated against minority voters who lacked the required IDs.

Opponents of the law said Republican lawmakers selected IDs that were most advantageous for Republican-leaning white voters and discarded IDs that were beneficial to Democratic-leaning minority voters. For example, legislators included licenses to carry concealed handguns, which are predominantly carried by whites, and excluded government employee IDs and public university IDs, which are more likely to be used by blacks, Hispanics and Democratic-leaning younger voters.

But the Justice Department under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a judge on Monday that it was withdrawing its claim that Texas enacted the law with a discriminatory intent.

but don’t worry, it’s not as if this would affect a lot of people:

Texas’ law is said to be “the nation’s strictest voter photo ID law that leaves more than half a million eligible voters who do not have the requisite types of ID from fully participating in the democratic process.” The DOJ under the Obama administration viewed the rule as draconian to the point that it unconstitutionally violated safeguards of the Voting Rights Act. A federal judge in 2014 called the law an “unconstitutional poll tax.”

and it’s not as if the Trump administration can’t be unbiased (this was before Sessions was confirmed):

 Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department spent the better part of a decade battling a strict voter ID law in Texas, which several federal judges found to be discriminatory. Now, in the Trump era, the acting head of the department’s Civil Rights Division is a Republican attorney who offered Texas officials guidance as they wrote the disputed law.

Thomas E. Wheeler, an Indiana lawyer who previously served as general counsel to Vice President Mike Pence when Pence was governor of Indiana, was named the acting head of the Civil Rights Division this week.

• He is worried much more about the perception of the police than civil rights:

In his first speech as attorney general, Mr. Sessions did not name any specific cities, but he indicated that Justice Department scrutiny from afar was undermining the effectiveness of the police across the country. It was a clear reference to the aggressive efforts of the Obama administration to oversee law enforcement agencies charged with civil rights abuses.

“We need, so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness,” Mr. Sessions said in remarks to the National Association of Attorneys General. “And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.”

…

“One of the big things out there that’s, I think, causing trouble and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities is somehow, some way, we undermine the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult,” he said.

Charles Pierce directs us to this:

Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.

From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.

but it would hurt the perception of the police so we should ignore it.

Now that’s how you celebrate Black History Month, well if you’re a racist.

 

Just ignore this

So we get a racist shooting in Kansas:

A 51-year-old man faces first-degree murder charges after shooting three men in an Olathe, Kan., bar Wednesday night, police say, reportedly telling two of them, local Garmin engineers from India, to “get out of my country.”

One of the Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, died in the hospital later from his wounds.

…

Adam W. Purinton, 51, of Olathe, was also charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder for shooting two other patrons at Austin’s Bar and Grill: Alok Madasani, 32, of Overland Park, Kan., and 24-year-old Ian Grillot, who tried to intervene.

The shooter  doesn’t seem to be Muslim so obviously this isn’t terrorism and there’s no need for Donald Trump to tweet about it. After all, Donald Trump knows that we don’t have to worry about right-wing terrorists.

Corruption, Donald Trump style

This past week has been a showcase for how Donald Trump does business. He settled in the suit against Trump University:

Phony is right; one pillar of Schneiderman’s lawsuit was that Trump had not even bothered to get his “university” licensed by New York state as a bona fide educational institution.

…

Trump University, it will be recalled, was pitched to the unwary as an opportunity to learn “the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market” from a cadre of Trump’s “hand-picked” instructors. Schneiderman alleged that this was false. Of the instructors, “not a single one was ‘handpicked’ by Donald Trump.” Some had little real-estate experience at all, and some actually had gone bankrupt in the business.

We also find that his ‘charity’ broke the law:

President-elect Donald Trump’s charity has admitted that it violated IRS regulations barring it from using its money or assets to benefit Trump, his family, his companies, or substantial contributors to the foundation.

The admissions by the Donald J. Trump Foundation were made in a 2015 tax filing made public after a presidential election in which it was revealed that Trump has used the charity to settle lawsuits, make a $25,000 political contribution and purchase items such as a painting of himself that was displayed at one of his properties.

We also find the Donald thinks that Presidents are allowed to be corrupt:

He declared that “the law’s totally on my side” when it comes to questions about conflict of interest and ethics laws. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

He said it would be extremely difficult to sell off his businesses because they are real estate holdings. He said that he would “like to do something” to address ethics concerns, and he noted that he had turned over the management of the businesses to his children.

But he insisted that he could still have business partners into the White House for grip-and-grin photographs. He said that critics were pressuring him to go beyond what he was willing to do, including distancing himself from his children while they run his businesses.

“If it were up to some people,” he said, “I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again.”

Trump rejected the idea that he was bound by federal anti-nepotism laws against installing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a White House job.

And it seems that the people with him are following his lead:

Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon accepted $376,000 in pay over four years for working 30 hours a week at a tiny tax-exempt charity in Tallahassee while also serving as the hands-on executive chairman of Breitbart News Network.

During the same four-year period, the charity paid about $1.3 million in salaries to two other journalists who said they put in 40 hours a week there while also working for the politically conservative news outlet, according to publicly available documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Donald Trump does corruption bigly.

Trump’s lips move, which means he lying

So, Donald Trump gave a speech in Portland, Maine:

In his remarks on terrorism, Trump paid particular attention to Maine’s Somali refugees.

“We’ve just seen many, many crimes getting worse all the time, and as Maine knows — a major destination for Somali refugees — right, am I right? Well, they’re all talking about it. Maine. Somali refugees. We admit hundreds of thousands — you admit, into Maine, and to other places in the United States — hundreds of thousands of refugees,” Trump said.

Let’s see how things really are:

In Lewiston, where an estimated 7,000 Somalis live, police said Friday that crime is going down, not up.

“The Somalis have not caused any increase in crime. They’re integrated here in our city,” the acting police chief, Brian O’Malley, said Friday. “The Somalis come here because they want somewhere safe and good schools to raise their kids, and that’s what Lewiston has.”

Crime in the city fell 17 percent in 2015 compared with the year before, continuing a steady, downward trend, O’Malley said.

So an ignorant lie, typical of Trump. You might notice another lie in that short bit by Trump: crime in general is going down. He also through this in:

“If we keep going the way it is, our whole country is becoming different,” he said. “They’re shooting our police at record levels.”

The article doesn’t even bother to note that police are not being shot at record levels. Trump lies so often, it’s impossible to correct all his lies.

Some good news

Given the dystopia that Donald Trump paints for the current state of the US, it’s good to look at actual statistics to see what’s really happening:

• Violence is way down from its peak in the 1990’s (although there is some sign that it might have increased a bit in the last year or so):

From 1993 to 2014, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 20.1 per 1,000.

…

Since 1993, the rate of property crime declined from 351.8 to 118.1 victimizations per 1,000 households.

The number of murders in New York City really drives this home: there were 2262 murders in 1990 and 352 in 2015. That is an astonishing drop.

• Teen pregnancy is at its lowest level ever:

The national teen pregnancy rate has declined almost continuously over the last two decades. The teen pregnancy rate includes pregnancies that end in a live birth, as well as those that end in abortion or miscarriage (fetal loss).* Between 1990 and 2010 (the most recent year for which data are available), the teen pregnancy rate declined by 51 percent—from 116.9 to 57.4 pregnancies per 1,000 teen girls.

• The graduation rate from US high schools is at record highs:

For the fourth straight year, the U.S. high school graduation rate has improved — reaching an all-time high of 82 percent in the 2013-2014 school year, the Department of Education announced Tuesday.

• The private sector has been adding jobs for the longest stretch ever:

The White House is right about the numbers. The “longest streak” claim was true in 2014, as the Washington Post’s Fact Checker found back then, and the streak has only grown. This was the 73rd straight recorded month of private sector job growth (barring revisions).

• Drug use is down among teens (this is from June 2016):

This year’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey of drug use and attitudes among American 8th, 10th, and 12th graders continues to show encouraging news, with decreasing use of alcohol, cigarettes, and many illicit drugs over the last 5 years—many to their lowest levels since this survey’s inception; no increase in use of marijuana among teens; decreasing use of synthetic drugs; and decreasing misuse of prescription drugs. However, the survey highlighted continuing concerns over the high rate of electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use and softening of attitudes around some types of drug use, particularly a continued decrease in perceived harm of marijuana use.

For many substances, past-year use has declined to the lowest levels since the MTF survey began. This includes heroin, synthetic cannabinoids, Vicodin^®, methamphetamine, amphetamines, inhalants, Ecstasy, alcohol, and cigarettes, among all ages surveyed; hallucinogens, Ritalin^®, OxyContin^®, bath salts, and over-the-counter cough medicines among 8th and 10th graders; cocaine among 8th and 12th graders; and prescription pain relievers (narcotics other than heroin), sedatives, and crystal methamphetamine in 12th graders (the only grade sampled for these substances). Past-year use of illicit drugs was reported by 23.6 percent of 12th graders.

There are still large problems in the US, but, in many ways, the US is in better shape than ever.

I stand with the LGBT community

Another terrible event in the US:

A gunman who pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State opened fire in a crowded gay nightclub here early Sunday, killing 50 people and injuring 53 others in the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

The man who did this had good reasons:

‘‘We were in downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry,’’ the father told NBC News. ‘‘They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, ‘Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.’ ‘‘

Oh, a family man:

But there also were early signs of emotional trouble and a volatile temper, according to a woman who was briefly married to Mateen. The woman, who spoke on the condition on anonymity, citing fears for her safety, described Mateen as an abusive husband who beat her repeatedly while they were married.

‘‘He was not a stable person,’’ the ex-wife told The Washington Post. ‘‘He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.’’

You know what, that’s enough about him because fuck him.

But think about it, he was investigated by the FBI twice, beat his wife, and had no trouble getting guns. Fuck the NRA

You knew Trump would have something to say:

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

…

Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace!

…

I have been hitting Obama and Crooked Hillary hard on not using the term Radical Islamic Terror. Hillary just broke-said she would now use!

When he says he was right, he means in calling for an end to allowing Muslims to immigrate to the US, but this guy was born and grew up in the US. And I’ve always found the whole ‘they won’t use the correct words’ stupid. Is Osama bin Laden less dead because President Obama doesn’t want to antagonize all Muslims?

For fun, let’s look at a small side story from yesterday:

A New Mexico man is accused of fatally shooting his wife and four daughters in their home and then fleeing in his car, according to authorities Sunday.

Juan David Villegas-Hernandez remained at large a day after the five victims were found dead, Roswell police said.

A relative who went to check on the family late Saturday discovered the bodies, police spokesman Todd Wildermuth said.

This type of thing, a woman and her 4 daughters that were 14, 11, 7, and 3, is not big news.  Mass shootings, even ones involving multiple children, are normal.

Fuck that.

Rape and consequences

Let’s look at 2 cases of rape. The first involves Worcester Polytechnic Institute:

The college made the arguments in response to a civil suit filed last year in Worcester Superior Court on behalf of the victim. The woman’s suit alleges the college failed to provide a safe environment for students.

…

The rape occurred in April 2012 at the condominium building in San Juan where Doe, who was a third-year student completing a two-month research project, and other students lived. Part of the building was leased for student housing, and WPI required Doe to live there.

The security guard, William Rodriguez, was convicted by a unanimous jury in the state court of Puerto Rico and is serving a 20-year sentence, according to court documents.

Rodriguez was previously a state police officer in Puerto Rico but was suspended in 2011 after he was convicted of selling bullets to an undercover agent, documents show.

The civil suit alleges that WPI failed to ensure or require proper background checks for security guards. WPI contracted with a local company, Sea Breeze Inc., for the apartments, but there were no terms in the lease relating to security guards, the lawsuit said.

…

In the court documents, the college said it is not seeking to blame the woman for being raped but challenged her claim that school officials were negligent in their protection of students.

…

The attorneys asked Doe whether her parents had taught her “don’t take candy from strangers” or how to protect herself from sexual assault. In describing the night, Doe said she expected a security guard to protect, not attack, her.

One of the attorneys then asked: “So it was okay to, despite that fact that you felt it was weird and you were surprised that he got into the elevator with you, you felt it was okay to go to the roof, a dark secluded roof with a man you know nothing about, whose name you don’t even know, and you felt that was not risky behavior? Do you understand my question?’’

“Yeah. No, I don’t think it’s risky behavior is my answer,’’ Doe said.

“Okay. Would you agree with me that if you had not gone to the roof with Mr. Rodriguez this incident wouldn’t have occurred?’’ the attorney asked.

“I can’t speculate that,” she answered.

I really don’t understand this. The college says it is not seeking to blame the victim and then … blames the victim. It sounds like the lawyer for the college is trying to argue that the college isn’t responsible since they subcontracted out to the local company which means it doesn’t matter if she was partially at fault (by the way, this is a case where it should be obvious she’s not at fault), so why are they trying to argue it was partially her fault?

In the second case we get a lovely man:

The two bikers skidded to a stop on “Scary Path.” True to its nickname among Stanford students, the dirt trail on the edge of campus was home to something sinister in the early hours of Jan. 18, 2015.

The bikers were on their way to a frat party. They halted, however, at the sight of a man lying on top of a half-naked woman.

Normally, the bikers might have been amused to catch sight of fellow students having sex. But this was different.

The man, tall and slim and athletic, was thrusting atop the woman.

The woman wasn’t moving. At all.

“Is everything okay?” Lars Peter Jonsson, a Swedish graduate student, shouted.

When the man turned around, Jonsson could see the woman’s genitals were exposed.

“She didn’t react to my call,” Jonsson testified Friday in a Palo Alto, Calif., courtroom, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “I said, ‘What the f— are you doing? She’s unconscious.’”

The man tried to run away, but Jonsson and his friend caught him and pinned him to the ground until police came and made an arrest.

So, this guy, Brock Turner, was caught raping a woman who was unconscious red-handed. If he had plead guilty and showed remorse, maybe he would would have gotten a light sentence but he decided to go to trial. Let’s look at the victim’s letter:

I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused.

Here’s part of Brock Turner’s statement before the sentencing and the victim’s counter:

You said, you are in the process of establishing a program for high school and college students in which you speak about your experience to “speak out against the college campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.”

Campus drinking culture. That’s what we’re speaking out against? You think that’s what I’ve spent the past year fighting for? Not awareness about campus sexual assault, or rape, or learning to recognize consent. Campus drinking culture. Down with Jack Daniels. Down with Skyy Vodka. If you want talk to people about drinking go to an AA meeting. You realize, having a drinking problem is different than drinking and then forcefully trying to have sex with someone? Show men how to respect women, not how to drink less.

What made this even worse is Turner had supporting statements:

“I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next 10+ years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right,” she wrote to Judge Persky. “But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.”

Wow, that’s some stupid there–calling rape rape is not being politically correct, it’s stating the obvious and a person who rapes someone is by definition a rapist.

And the father (we should give him some slack, but really):

These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve.  That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work, and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations. What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock. He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of Jan 17th 2015. Brock can do so many positive things as a contributor to society and is totally committed to educating other college age students about the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity.

And the judge:

According to the judge: “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him. I think he will not be a danger to others.”

And:

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky said he weighed Turner’s character, lack of criminal history and remorsefulness in determining to bypass the heavier penalty of six years in state prison requested by prosecutors.

With good behavior, Turner, 20, is expected to serve three months in county jail. He will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and complete a sex offender management program.

Gee, 3 months for rape, the perks of the privileged.

 

Threats for terrorism way up

The number of threats of terrorism for one thing was up a lot in 2015 but you probably won’t hear much about it, because it’s about abortion:

According to the federation, death threats targeting abortion providers increased from one in 2014 to 94 in 2015, while incidents of vandalism at clinics rose from 12 to 67.

The most violent occurred in November, when a gunman opened fire at a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing three people and wounding nine. The man accused in the attack, Robert Dear, has described himself as a ‘‘warrior for the babies.’’

…

The abortion federation — alarmed by the heightened hostility — has for the first time hired an outside security firm to track online threats. Saporta said the firm began its work in mid-November and in a six-week span identified more than 25,000 incidents of hate speech and threats.

The report is here and includes:

Additionally, the number of hoax devices or suspicious packages found in or around abortion facilities increased four-fold in 2015.

These levels are far below the 1990s when Operation Rescue was in full swing but it’s still troubling.

If you don’t think this is terrorism, go back to the report to find that since 1977 there have been: 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 185 cases of arson. All to try to get a political goal, outlawing abortion.

Oh, the amount of threats is up mainly because of videos targeting Planned Parenthood. The man who made those videos is now being investigate in a second state because of suspected criminal activity. So far, none of the investigations have found any crime committed by Planned Parenthood.

Conservatives get confused

This is funny:

Others blocked by the no-fly list have ranged from Washington journalist Stephen Hayes to a Florida toddler to Georgia congressman John Lewis to singer Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens. Even agents of the Federal Air Marshal Service have been caught in the no-fly net. There is nothing transparent about the government’s formula for adding names to the list, and there is no due process for getting one’s name cleared. For years, the government wouldn’t even confirm that someone was on the list. Only after the ACLU prevailed in a federal lawsuit last June did that finally change.

Even more opaque than the no-fly list is the gargantuan Terrorist Screening Database. The government has conceded in the past that it “misidentified” tens of thousands of blameless individuals, yet it continues to add names at a staggering rate. In court filings in 2014, federal officials disclosed that more than 1.5 million names had been added to the terror watchlist in the previous five years. Data from the National Counterterrorism Center indicate that of 680,000 names on the watchlist in 2013, fully 40 percent were described as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”

It isn’t that his argument is funny. These are actually good points, ones I have made several times in the past. No, what’s funny is that Jeff Jacoby is only talking about it now that there’s talk of preventing anyone on these lists from buying guns. When Ted Kennedy was having problems, when the journalist was having problems Jeff said nothing. At that point the lists were very popular with conservatives and the typical response to liberals who complained about them was that the people on the list must have done something wrong.

You see the same thing with crime. Conservatives are forever playing up how much violence there is and the problems with terrorism (usually used to restrict the rights of some group they don’t care about), but if the number of mass shootings is used to argue for gun control suddenly they notice that crime has been steadily going down since the mid 1990s. Funny that.

Still it’s good that conservatives have come around.

Now that’s an interesting point

Here are a few stories in today’s Boston Globe:

one on the EPA tightening pollution standards:

‘‘The Clean Power Plan is one of the most far-reaching energy regulations in this nation’s history,’’ said Attorney General Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, among those leading the challenges. ‘‘I have a responsibility to protect the lives of millions of working families, the elderly, and the poor, from such illegal and unconscionable federal government actions.’’

Yes, that is indeed someone arguing that he is trying to protect lives by trying to allow higher amounts of pollution.

a second on police:

With his remarks, Comey lent the prestige of the FBI, the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But Comey acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just be one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals being released from prison.

“I don’t know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” Comey said in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School.

Comey is arguing that trying to make sure police follow the law makes them less likely to do their job. He adds:

“Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a police officer, a strong police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close ‘What are you guys doing on this corner at 1 o’clock in the morning’ policing,” Comey said. “We need to be careful it doesn’t drift away from us in the age of viral videos, or there will be profound consequences.”

Somehow this applies to everyone except the police, who should be left alone.

Rape in India

Another judge, this one in India, has shown he shouldn’t be a judge:

When Madras High Court Judge P. Devadass recently let a rapist out of prison on bail so he could “mediate” with his victim, it caused an uproar among legal scholars and women’s rights activists.

The move was deemed “retrograde,” “misogynistic” and simply bad jurisprudence. Lawyers who work in the courthouse’s mediation center wrote a letter to the chief justice, demanding that Devadass’s order be rescinded. India’s Supreme Court, weighing in on a different case, said last week that any compromise between a rape victim and a perpetrator would be a “spectacular error.”

The Washington Post has more idiotic quotes from Indian politicians here. The Guardian has a couple, here:

In the latest controversial remarks by a politician, Ramsevak Paikra, the home minister of central Chhattisgarh state, who is responsible for law and order, said on Saturday that rapes did not happen on purpose.

“Such incidents [rapes] do not happen deliberately. These kind of incidents happen accidentally,” Paikra, of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which also rules at the national level, told reporters.

Paikra, who had been asked for his thoughts on the gang-rape and hanging of two girls in a neighbouring state, later said he had been misquoted. His original remarks were broadcast on television networks. The remarks come just days after Babulal Gaur, the home minister of the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh state, said about rape: “Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong“. Gaur made the remarks on Thursday amid growing anger over the gang-rape and murder of the girls, aged 12 and 14, in the northern Uttar Pradesh state late last month.

and here:

Arun Jaitley, who holds two cabinet posts and is one of India’s most senior leaders, was speaking to a gathering of state tourism ministers on Thursday.

“One small incident of rape in Delhi advertised [the] world over is enough to cost us billions of dollars in terms of lower tourism,” he said.

The parents of the 23-year-old victim, who was repeatedly raped by six men on a moving bus, sexually assaulted with an iron rod, thrown from the vehicle naked and later died from her injuries, expressed their disbelief at the comments.

“An honest citizen lost her life, isn’t that a loss to the nation?” asked her father.

And there’s another one here:

A regional politician from Modi’s own party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said on Thursday that the crime of rape can only be considered to have been committed if it is reported to police.

“This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong,” said Babulal Gaur, the home minister responsible for law and order in the BJP-run central state of Madhya Pradesh.

“Until there’s a complaint, nothing can happen,” Gaur told reporters.

Gaur also expressed sympathy with Mulayam Singh Yadav, head of the regional Samajwadi Party that runs Uttar Pradesh. In the recent election, Mulayam criticised legal changes that foresee the death penalty for gang rape, saying: “Boys commit mistakes: Will they be hanged for rape?”

I previously posted on this here.

This, of course, doesn’t just happen in Indian. It’s worse in Somalia under al-Shabab where you are sentenced to death if you are raped or in Saudi Arabia where you a judge thinks that being lashed and jailed is too lenient if you’re raped.

It’s not quite so bad in the US, we only get things like:

Former Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh was chosen for the award by the board of directors of the Yellowstone Area Bar Assn. based on his lengthy service to the people of the Treasure State, the group’s president said in an email Friday.

…

Baugh sparked nationwide outrage in 2013 when he handed down a 30-day sentence to a former high school teacher convicted of raping the teenager, who had killed herself while the case was pending, just before her 17th birthday.

When he imposed sentence, Baugh commented in court that the girl was “older than her chronological age” and “as much in control of the situation” as Stacey Dean Rambold, the teacher who was convicted on one count of sexual intercourse without consent.

and:

The suit, filed July 5, alleges when the girl — a special education student — told officials about the harassment, assault and rape that occurred during the 2008-09 school year, they told her they did not believe her. She recanted.

The suit also alleges that, without seeking her mother’s permission, school officials forced the girl to write a letter of apology to the boy and personally deliver it to him. She was then expelled for the rest of the 2008-2009 school year and referred to juvenile authorities for filing a false report.

“School Officials, although mandatory reporters under Missouri’s Child Abuse Reporting Law, failed to report [the girl’s] complaints to the Division of Family Services or to Greene County Juvenile Authorities,” the suit says.

In 2009-10, the girl was allowed back in school, and the boy continued to harass and assault her, the suit says. She did not tell school officials because she was afraid she would be accused of lying and kicked out of school.

In February 2010, the boy allegedly forcibly raped the girl again, this time in the back of the school library. While school officials allegedly expressed skepticism of the girl, her mother took her to the Child Advocacy Center and an exam showed a sexual assault had occurred. DNA in semen found on the girl matched the DNA of the boy she accused, the suit says.

Despite the finding of the Advocacy Center, the school suspended the girl for disrespectful conduct and public display of affection, the suit says.

and:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in a clip posted to YouTube by the Democratic super PAC American Bridge. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

and:

But the widest criticism of the bill comes in its exemptions for rape — provisions that would allow federal money or private insurance to be used to cover an abortion. H.R. 3 says those provisions would kick in only in cases of forcible rape, a distinction from other forms rape of that is largely undefined but seems to suggest that a rape that doesn’t include violence wouldn’t count. The bill would also limit the incest exemption to women under the age of 18 — meaning a victim of incest who was legally allowed to vote wouldn’t have her abortion covered by Medicaid and would likely have more limited access to private insurance than she does today.

But that’s different

I find this a little weird:

Holder discussed the potential for strikes against the United States by individuals or small groups tied to Al Qaeda or another terror organization.

‘‘It’s something that frankly keeps me up at night, worrying about the lone wolf or a group of people, a very small group of people, who decide to get arms on their own and do what we saw in France,’’ he said on CBS’s ‘‘Face the Nation.’’ ‘‘It’s the kind of thing that our government is focused on doing all that we can, in conjunction with our state and local counterparts, to try to make sure that it does not happen.’’

…

Several senior lawmakers also warned Sunday of more terrorist attacks, saying that they would be pressing the Obama administration to keep closer tabs on US citizens and others who travel overseas to train with terrorist groups and then attempt to return home.

Small-scale attacks are ‘‘very difficult to detect, deter, and disrupt, which is really our goal,’’ Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who leads the House Homeland Security Committee, said on CBS.

‘‘I think we’re going to see more and more of these taking place, whether it be foreign fighters going to the warfare and return[ing] or whether it be someone who’s getting on the Internet . . . and then radicalizing over the Internet,’’ McCaul said.

There are two things I don’t understand about this. First, I don’t get why this type of thing:

 Investigators found five guns and a laptop computer in the vehicle of a man suspected of killing three people in a shooting spree, a police chief said Sunday, but they hadn’t yet uncovered any motive for the rampage.

John Lee, 29, was arrested after a high-speed chase in Washington state after the shootings Saturday. Police believe he opened fire at three locations in Moscow, killing his landlord, his adoptive mother, and a manager at a restaurant his parents frequented. A Seattle man was critically injured.

which is quite common in the US–as of January 12, there have been 376 deaths from gun violence including 8 mass shootings–doesn’t seem to get noticed. If you slap the term ‘terrorism’ on a shooting then it’s front page news, but otherwise it’s become too common to mention each time it happens.

The second is a comparison to other places:

One survivor of the Baga violence, Ibrahim Gambo, estimated that more than 500 people may have died and said he did not know what happened to his wife and daughter. The 25-year-old truck driver said he was part of a civilian militia that, bolstered by a belief that its fighters were protected from bullets by a magical charm, initially had success in resisting Boko Haram insurgents.

But the army told his militia group to pull back so that a military plane could attack Boko Haram forces, which then surrounded Baga when the plane didn’t arrive, Gambo said in an interview with The Associated Press.

‘‘It is sad that our fortification charm became ineffective once we showed fear,’’ Gambo said.

The type of thing that happened in France, happens in places like Nigeria or Iraq or Pakistan, it seems, almost every day and we’ve learned to ignore it. Ok, really, I get this–France seems similar to the US so if it happens in France we can picture it happening here, while Nigeria is someplace far away from us (in lots of ways) and so we don’t think what happens there will affect us.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that what happened in France isn’t terrible.

Ferguson and the police/military

I haven’t said anything about what’s going on in Ferguson, MO because it seems to have deep-rooted problems. It does seem to have brought the militarization of the police to a wider stage. This isn’t a new problem and some have been talking about it for a long time:

• Digby has an article here
• Kevin Drum has one here
• PrivacySOS is here
• the ACLU is on it

But you’re also starting to see more high-profile moves against it:

• Rand Paul (in response to a tweet by Rep. Castro) has a nice editorial here; Claire McCaskill is also speaking out about it
• There are stories in the NYMag, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Nation, and the AP among others
• Rep. Hank Johnson has introduced a bill to stop sending military weapons to the police (the actual bill is here)

Perhaps something will actually be done.

We stopped because it was making us look bad

It seems the FBI doesn’t like being wrong:

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said.

…

According to a Justice Department spokesman, officials last August completed reviews and notified a first wave of defendants in 23 cases, including 14 death-penalty cases, that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they linked hair to crime-scene evidence.

However, concerned that errors were found in the “vast majority” of cases, the FBI restarted the review, grinding the process to a halt, said a government official who was briefed on the process. The Justice Department objected in January, but a standoff went unresolved until this month.

Yup, the FBI decided to stop the review because it was showing they had messed up. And this wasn’t just for small cases:

The report said the FBI took more than five years to identify more than 60 death-row defendants whose cases had been handled by 13 lab examiners whose work had been criticized in a 1997 inspector-general investigation.

As a result, state authorities could not consider whether to stay sentences, and three men were put to death. One of those defendants, who was executed in Texas in 1997, would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, the report said.

Obviously the FBI would rather allow a potentially innocent person to be executed than get some bad publicity.

The police/military

The police in the US have been becoming like the military for quite awhile which is why you can see stuff like this and not blink:

Between 1994 and 2009, 82 police departments and other authorized agencies in Massachusetts received 1,068 military weapons from the DoD—including 486 fully automatic M-16 machine guns and 564 semi-automatic M-14s. While the State Police received the most weapons, departments in towns like Wellfleet, Medford, Duxbury, and Hamilton also obtained machine guns from the military, free of charge.

West Springfield, Massachusetts, population 28,137, got two grenade launchers through the 1033 program.

Massachusetts police departments also received five “peacekeeper armored vehicles” valued at $1 million, 771 vehicles worth more than $11 million, and large marine craft worth $300,000. In 2012, Massachusetts agencies requested equipment worth over $2 million from the DoD, including night vision goggles, binoculars, telescopes, computers, and trucks.

Of course it could also be because we don’t hear about it:

This acquisition of military equipment including powerful weapons happens without a process for public input. A Boston Globereport found that when it surveyed 12 Massachusetts police departments, not one had informed the public that it was getting free military weapons through the 1033 program.

It has also become the new normal:

In 1972, America conducted only a few hundred paramilitary drug raids a year, according to Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” By the early nineteen-eighties, there were three thousand a year; by 2001, Alexander notes, the annual count had skyrocketed to forty thousand. Today, even that number seems impossibly low; with one annual count of combat-style home raids hovers around eighty thousand. (The title of Alexander’s book reflects the racially disparate impacts of these policies.)

Of course, this isn’t the only crazy part of the war on drugs:

n a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with BIG Potential!”

They pulled into a mini-mart for snacks. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.

He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.

No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.

Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

and:

Another case involves a monthly social event that had been hosted by the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. In the midst of festivities one evening in late May, 2008, forty-odd officers in black commando gear stormed the gallery and its rear patio, ordering the guests to the ground. Some in attendance thought that they were the victims of an armed robbery. One young woman who had fallen only to her knees told me that a masked figure screamed at her, “Bitch, you think you’re too pretty to get in the mud?” A boot from behind kicked her to the ground. The officers, including members of the Detroit Police Department’s vice squad and mobile tactical unit, placed the guests under arrest. According to police records, the gallery lacked proper city permits for after-hours dancing and drinking, and an old ordinance aimed at “blind pigs” (speakeasies) and other places of “illegal occupation” made it a crime to patronize such a place, knowingly or not.

After lining the guests on their knees before a “prisoner processing table” and searching them, the officers asked for everyone’s car keys. Then the raid team seized every vehicle it could find, even venturing to the driveway of a young man’s friend nearly a mile away to retrieve his car. Forty-four cars were taken to government-contracted lots.

Most of those detained had to pay more than a thousand dollars for the return of their cars; if payment wasn’t made promptly, the car would become city property. The proceeds were divided among the offices of the prosecutors, police, and towing companies. After the A.C.L.U. filed a suit against the city, a district court ruled that the raid was unconstitutional, and noted that it reflected “a widespread practice” by the police in the area. (The city is appealing the ruling.) Vice statutes have lent themselves to such forfeiture efforts; in previous years, an initiative targeted gay men for forfeiture, under Detroit’s “annoying persons” ordinance. Before local lawyers challenged such practices, known informally as “Bag a Fag,” undercover officers would arrest gay men who simply returned their glances or gestures, if the signals were deemed to have sexual connotations, and then, citing “nuisance abatement,” seize their vehicles.

But this is what makes this case a different level of crazy:

NEMLEC, a group of 58 police and sheriff departments in Middlesex and Essex counties, receives government grants and taxpayers’ dollars to purchase high-tech equipment, and oversees several operational units. One of these units, the SWAT team, uses armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and combat gear to carry out military-style operations, such as forced entries and high-risk arrests.

NEMLEC operates as a regional law enforcement unit, yet when the ACLU of Massachusetts requested records from NEMLEC, the agency responded that it is a private, non-profit organization, wholly exempt from public records laws.

That’s right, the SWAT teams claim they are not a public agency (and my city of Malden is part of the organization). Hey wait because:

“Private individuals can’t own automatic weapons, or even get product information about armored vehicles,” Rossman said.

it means that the SWAT teams are an organized criminal organization and that means we can seize their assets.