December 18, 2014

Dick Cheney’s Mind Is Scary?

On Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart said, “Dick Cheney’s mind is the scariest fucking place in the universe.” But is it really? Okay, I know it’s a joke, but the premise is that Dick Cheney dreams up some scary fucking scenarios in that cranium of his, and rightfully so we should all be scared of the mentally and violently unhinged former Vice President. But Dick Cheney is not scary, because Dick Cheney is nothing more than a fearful old white dude, still, 13 years later, invoking 9/11 to justify his fearful old white dude thoughts. Dick Cheney is that special breed of white conservative that is never wrong, in his view that is. He is that type of conservative that will NEVER own up to being wrong about anything. When has Dick Cheney ever said he was wrong about something? I’m pretty sure it’s never happened, and I’d love to be proven wrong. Please post whatever links you can find that would prove me wrong, because, well, I don’t think I am. Yes, I did that intentionally. 🙂

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December 17, 2014

Obama: Working Towards U.S.-Cuba Diplomatic Normalcy

President Obama announced today that the United States and Cuba would work toward diplomatic normalcy. The announcement came as we learned Alan Gross, an American imprisoned in Cuba, would be released in a prisoner swap. “I truly hope we can get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today,” said Gross during a press conference.

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December 4, 2014

A Camera Did Not Hold Police Accountable In The Eric Garner Case

After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, I supported the idea of body-mounted cameras for police officers. But yesterday we found out that even video evidence was not enough to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner in New York City. So, I guess cameras won’t make a difference after all. What would make a difference is if people adopted a less lethal mindset, and I’m especially talking to conservatives here. How many people need to die to placate your desire for authoritarian obedience? Because you need to take a step back, and then another, and well, at least one more, and analyze the situation for what it is, not for what you might like it to be. Eric Garner was breaking the law, selling cigarettes illegally to avoid taxes. Even if he was resisting officers, he wasn’t charging or looking to start a fight. From a physical standpoint, he was entirely on defense, and from a verbal standpoint, he was just plain obstinate. And for many law and order types, you know, people who have no problem with the punishment far outweighing the crime, the fact that Garner was not obeying a person in a position of authority is justification enough for the final outcome, his death. No, of course they won’t say they wished to see him die, but their argument is that he got what was coming to him, because if he had simply obeyed the police, he would still be alive. And in a simplified worldview, that might be true, but do the police not have any culpability here? Shouldn’t the escalation of a situation, and the tactics used to diffuse it, be based on the merits of the crime that is being committed? The police are given the power that they are given in society means it falls on them to not escalate beyond the situation at hand. Had Garner committed a more serious crime, maybe the use of force that led to his death could be justified. But for selling some cigarettes illegally? I don’t think so. But even with video evidence, the grand jury didn’t believe it was worth pursuing. As I said in my previous article, it’s incredibly hard to indict police officers, even using evidence that would easily lead to the indictment of mere civilians.

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December 3, 2014

Ferguson To New York: The Problem With Police Indictments

In the Ferguson case, last week the grand jury decided there would be no charges for officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. This week, in the New York “chokehold” case, the grand jury decided there would be no charges for officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. The problem with police indictments? They simply don’t happen. Okay, sure, there have been police officers charged with crimes, but usually when that happens it’s a crime committed by an officer while not on duty. As we’ve seen in Ferguson, and now today in New York City, it is incredibly hard to indict a police officer. Remember, these grand jury decisions are not about innocence or guilt, they are about deciding if an indictment and trial is warranted based on evidence and eyewitness testimony. In other words, it shouldn’t be that high a bar, but for some reason, when police officers are the ones potentially facing charges, grand juries are reticent. Adding to the difficulty in getting an indictment is the fact that prosecutors are usually on the same team as law enforcement in cases that don’t involve police officers. And based on human nature alone, that’s enough reason to suspect a less than thorough examination of all the facts in the case. Let’s face it, we want to be on the side of police. Most people, if given a choice between police testimony and bystander testimony, are more like to believe the police. And regardless of whether the police are in the wrong, they are human beings as well, which means like anyone else, they are going to tell the story that is most favorable to their future. Add it all up, assuming everything else is equal, it means our judicial system is set up to make it a lot easier for police officers to avoid indictment compared to just about anyone else, well, other than maybe celebrities and people of great monetary means.

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November 30, 2014

Big Government? Small Government? Where’s The Substance?

So I had this thought regarding conservatives and their love of small government, or more specifically (not) their hate of big government. Either way you phrase it, it’s a generality. There’s no substance. They just want to cut taxes and reduce the size of government. They leave the specifics to, well, your imagination I guess. Oh sure, there might be a Senator or a Republican candidate that will call for the abolition of a particular department of government, maybe even forgetting which departments they were against, but that lends support to my point. What is my point? There are a lot of conservatives out there who want smaller government, but they don’t offer much in the way of specifics. And that’s bullshit, and we should call out that bullshit whenever it happens. Nobody is for wasteful spending. Nobody wants bloated government, but you need more than talking points. You need to actually articulate with complete sentence structure the way you would reorganize the federal government, Otherwise, you are simply a parrot for the Republican Party. So, if you are advocating smaller government, tell me, tell the rest of America, exactly what it is you would cut, and why you believe those cuts are beneficial to the nation as a whole. You cannot credibly go around talking about big government as a negative without definitively laying out your strategy for shrinking the federal government in a way that benefits all Americans.

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November 21, 2014

On Obama Immigration Order, Republicans Push Wrong Panic Button

At a time when Republicans should be pushing the panic button on their increasingly difficult electoral college math, instead they are stampeding in reaction to President Obama’s immigration executive action. Republicans and conservative pundits call Obama’s use of executive order anything from “executive fiat” to “executive amnesty” to a “constitutional crisis.” Pay no attention to the fact that Obama did nothing unusual in comparison to the executive orders issued by presidents over the past half century.

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November 21, 2014

Obama, Immigration, And The Media Echo Chamber

The media echo chamber, influenced and amplified by contemporary communication mediums like social media, pretty much explains the polarizing conversation regarding President Obama’s executive action on immigration. The president did not grant amnesty. He did not enfranchise undocumented immigrants. Essentially all the president did was say to undocumented immigrants: We aren’t going to deport you. And many presidents have issued similar executive orders, including George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, and without all the fanfare. And that’s why I return to the media echo chamber. When Bush and Reagan did the same thing Obama just did, we didn’t have 24-hour cable news with dedicated channels for conservatives and liberals. We didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have social media. What we had were newspapers, Walter Cronkite, and later Tom Brokaw. That’s how America was informed, and with that paradigm, the partisan feedback loop was not nearly as strong. Of course, this analysis is not limited to Obama’s action on immigration, because this new paradigm is probably the single largest factor influencing the bastardization of most policy stories.

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November 19, 2014

Global Cooling? NOAA Global Surface Temperature Anomalies Prove Otherwise

There’s no doubt much of the United States has been damn f’n cold lately, and we’ve yet to engage in those late November rituals involving turkey carving and conservative uncle debating. And when the weather turns cold, you know, during months that usually are cold for much of the U.S., climate-change-denying conservatives can’t help themselves, because Al Gore told them global warming/climate change meant that winter would cease to exist — well, at least that’s what they “heard.”

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