S#*! Sarah Palin Says (QWERTY Edition)

[Sigh.] I'd actually force myself to have the slightest bit of respect for Sarah Palin in this instance if she'd just admit she fucked up. But no. She brought up the whole "refudiate" story all over again in a feeble attempt to prove that it was just a typo.

"I pressed an F instead of a P and people freaked out," said Sarah, pointing out that her blunder was the second-most-searched word on Google trends.

Really, Sarah? Because when I look at my BlackBerry, the letter 'F' is about two thirds away from the letter 'P' on my keyboard. Oh, what's that you say?

In the clip from "Sarah Palin's Alaska"... it turns out that Palin claims she "pressed an 'f' instead of a 'd'" on the way to creating the word "refudiate." While the "f" and "d" keys are indeed closer to each other on a QWERTY keyboard, such an explanation would suggest that she was intending to spell the word "redudiate," which is also not a real word.

Once again... *sigh*... If you'll just admit that you melded the words "refute" and "repudiate" together in the excuse you call a brain, this would have been dropped long ago. Actually, it WAS dropped, but in your infinite wisdom, you decided to bring it up again to prove that you're never wrong when in actuality, you're often wrong (see Death Panels, Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign, the Bush Doctrine, abuse of power while governor of Alaska, etc.).

On Life in a Growing Police State

posted by Armadillo Joe

Been busy the last few weeks, so not holding up my end of the blogging bargain very well at this'n here site, but I wanted to check-in real quick with something that has stuck in my craw all week.

Henry Louis Gates should sue the shit out of the Cambridge PD and Obama should not have apologized for saying they behaved stupidly. Since the days of Goldwater and Nixon, "law and order" has been a crypto-fascist cudgel (along with "strong national defense" and "family values") the GOP has used to bash the licentious girly men of the Democratic Party into meek apology, not to mention the dog-whistle language of veiled racism that specific phrase has thanks to Tricky Dick and his evil minions. Officer Crowley was wrong. Further, I would posit that he acted wrongly knowingly and with malice-aforethought. What did he do?

From Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community blog (bold-faced sections are mine):

No one who is familiar with law enforcement can miss the significance of Crowley's report. As so often happens with documentary evidence, a person seeking to create a false impression spends lots of time nailing down the elements he thinks will establish his goal, but forgets about the larger picture. Under color of law, Crowley entered a residence to investigate a possible break-in, and after his probable cause had evaporated, he continued to act under color of law, but without any justifiable purpose. And he covered it up with false charges. Figuring that his best defense was a criminal charge, Crowley did what bad cops do. He decided he would look better if Gates looked worse.

...[snip]...

Sgt. Crowley's report almost certainly contains intentional falsehoods, but even accepting his account at face value, the report tells us all we need to conclude that Crowley was in the wrong here, and by a large factor.

The crime of disorderly conduct, beloved by cops who get into arguments with citizens, requires that the public be involved. Here's the relevant law from the Massachusetts Appeals Court, with citations and quotations omitted:

The statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct, G.L. c. 272, § 53, has been saved from constitutional infirmity by incorporating the definition of "disorderly" contained in § 250.2(1)(a) and (c) of the Model Penal Code. The resulting definition of "disorderly" includes only those individuals who, "with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof ... (a) engage in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior; or ... (c) create a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor.' "Public" is defined as affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.

The lesson most cops understand (apart from the importance of using the word "tumultuous," which features prominently in Crowley's report) is that a person cannot violate 272/53 by yelling in his own home.

Read Crowley's report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates's Harvard photo ID. I don't care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates. Any further investigation of Gates' right to be present in the house could have been done elsewhere. His decision to call HUPD seems disproportionate, but we could give him points for thoroughness if he had made that call from his car while keeping an eye on the house. Had a citizen refused to leave Gates' home after being told to, the cops could have made an arrest for trespass.

But for the sake of education, let's watch while Crowley makes it worse. Read on. He's staying put in Gates' home, having been asked to leave, and Gates is demanding his identification. What does Crowley do? He suggests that if Gates wants his name and badge number, he'll have to come outside to get it. What? Crowley may be forgiven for the initial approach and questioning, but surely he should understand that a citizen will be miffed at being questioned about his right to be in his own home. Perhaps Crowley could commit the following sentences to memory: "I'm sorry for disturbing you," and "I'm glad you're all right."

Spoiling for a fight, Crowley refuses to repeat his name and badge number. Most of us would hand over a business card or write the information on a scrap of paper. No, Crowley is upset and he's mad at Gates. He's been accused of racism. Nobody likes that, but if a cop can't take an insult without retaliating, he's in the wrong job. When a person is given a gun and a badge, we better make sure he's got a firm grasp on his temper. If Crowley had called Gates a name, I'd be disappointed in him, but Crowley did something much worse. He set Gates up for a criminal charge to punish Gates for his own embarrassment.

By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53. He gets Gates out onto the porch because a crowd has gathered providing onlookers who could experience alarm. Note his careful recitation (tumultuous behavior outside the residence in view of the public). And please do not overlook Crowley's final act of provocation. He tells an angry citizen to calm down while producing handcuffs. The only plausible question for the chief to ask about that little detail is: "Are you stupid, or do you think I'm stupid?" Crowley produced those handcuffs to provoke Gates and then arrested him. The decision to arrest is telling. If Crowley believed the charge was valid, he could have issued a summons. An arrest under these circumstances shows his true intent: to humiliate Gates.

Obama, by walking back from the word "stupid", has legitimized the poo-flinging monkeys of the GOP who leap on the faintest quiver of "disloyalty" to supposed attacks on 'murrican hee-roze not from a genuine sense of offense, but from a sleazy desire to drum up votes via political theater performed within the carefully-constructed narrative (a narrative our nation's media buys and sells hook, line and sinker) of the Republicans as the Daddy Party -- the strong disciplinarian, the hard-hearted, steely-eyed protector of the nation's honor -- and the Democrats as the Mommy Party -- the profligate coddler, too soft-hearted and full of "love" to make the hard choices that keep us safe, both from threats foreign and domestic. Of course, the narrative is bullshit, but it still frames our national discourse and the true measure of raw GOP power, even after the godawful nightmare of eight years of Bush-as-GOP-apotheosis, even after the drubbing they've taken in two consecutive elections, even after every buck-fuck nuts, crazy-as-a-shithouse-rat, hare-brained scheme for reinforcing our calcifying corporatocracy for the sake of Amerikkka Inc.'s bottom-line and old-money's trust funds (with the added side-benefit of protecting white privilege generally, no matter the social status) which all got passed off as a fresh, new "ideas" has finally, fully been utterly discredited and flushed down the historical toilet, even after These United States finally elected a man to the most powerful office in the land who within the living memory of over half the electorate would have been killed for even attempting to exercise his right to vote in vast swaths of this country (most of which represent the GOP's current base of power, BTW)... even after all of that the true measure of the GOP's latent, pervasive raw power is that Barack Hussein Obama has to apologize for calling "stupid" the actions of a thin-skinned white cop who can't take being righfully challenged on over-stepping his authority by a understandably upset black man.

Evidently, in America today, it's a crime to disrespect a police officer, even after he's disrespected you. Gates is lucky he wasn't tasered, in which case being disrespectful could be a death-sentence.

Watch what you say to the po-leese.

A Few Basic Rules

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, you Blog-O-Maniacs! B'way Carl has again asked me to mind the store in his absence, but told me no SUPERTRAINS! so I'll have to find something else to write about.

How about social justice?

Or just basic vengeance?

Because when we evolve out of our natural state, when we build institutions and organize ourselves into entities that coerce or persuade through incentives or through the naked threat of violence (or the actual use of violence) the lone caveman to stop bashing other cavemen on the head and taking their cavegirls, we have formed a government.

No one ever signed on for such an enterprise, mind you, because we don't choose the time and location of our births. Besides, someone has to be in charge and who was that first caveman to tell all the other cavemen to stop bashing heads? Well, he was the baddest MF of them all and what he says goes. Until some bigger and badder MF comes along and does the same to him. And that leads us to all sorts of questions about lines of succession and who gets to be in charge, because if its a simple matter of just bashing heads until no one is left to say you can't have the throne, anyone can eventually become king, right? Its still true to this day for dictatorships throughout South America and Africa. Thus, the folks at the top of the food chain eventually declared that god himself put them there and everyone else should just accept that fact and go about their business of growing food and otherwise fighting and dying for the king's ambitions.

What could go wrong with a system like that?

Which is why, by the 17th & 18th Centuries A.D., a bunch of idle rich hanging out in the salons of the European continent who had grown weary of hearing this whole "divine right of kings" crap to justify every cockamamie idea that ever popped into a monarch's head -- ideas which usually resulted in the deaths of hundred or thousands of their countrymen, too boot -- and who were young and idealistic (as youth are wont to be) finally cooked up a bunch of alternate ideas about social contracts and "consent of the governed" to explain how and why we got here, with all those kings and bureacracies and gendarmes and all that sort of thing. For a few decades, all their lofty rhetoric and fancy words remained just the college newspaper Op-Ed screeds of their day, laying fallow and unheeded, until a bunch of yeoman farmers in a far-flung British colony over on the American continent (and the wealthy transplants who owned the land those farmers worked and saw a way to keep even more of their money) got a hold of those ideas as a way of giving the finger to that clown King George who thought he could do whatever he wanted because, well, he was king.

A couple of years and one semi-hot revolution later, we had ourselves a king-free government, though not for lack of trying on the part of a great number of our so-called Founding Fathers. Luckily, our own George (Washington, that is) had read enough of all that coffee house prattle from Yurp to actually believe some of it and, to our everlasting relief, declined every attempt to put a crown on his head.

But other mischief was afoot back on the Continent and enough peasants got tired enough of starving and dying for Marie Antoinette's pearls that they had a little revolution of their own. You might recall it had something to do with guillotines and some cat named Robespierre. From that blood-soaked chaos, some time later (like almost 30 years later), the dictator who rose up from humble origins on a small island off the French coast to have royalty bow down before him was ultimately defeated on a battlefield in Belgium, but not before reshaping the way government ruled over the people who resided on the land it controlled. Consent of the governed became our notion of the Rule of Law and the people were assured a voice in their own government. OK, only if they were white and male, but at least divinity was no longer a pre-requisite for governing and that put us on the road to the expansion of suffrage, battles which are being fought -- even in this country -- to this very day.

All of which brings me to this quote:

“No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?” e-mails an irate Citigroup executive to a colleague.

I think you guys can predict my response to this Marie Antoinette from Citigroup:



Because when I use the phrase "Ruling Class" to refer to a certain group of people in this country, I'm not kidding. I'm not exaggerating. They are a direct line from the aristocracy of a former day -- not always by blood, mind you, but always by disposition -- and they really and truly think this country, all the people in it and its institutions and all of its natural resources, belong to them. The purpose of this country and all the people in it is to support them in the oppulent lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed and to do whatever they require to maintain the economic and political structures (domestic and foreign) that enable that lifestyle, which is why they have no qualms about soaking up our tax dollars when they try so hard to avoid paying any taxes at all and then sending the poor and brown-skinned among us either to prison or off to a war they themselves are too precious to fight. Like Vietnam, Iraq is a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

The previous president is from the Ruling Class and he sure as shit acted like the military was his personal revenge and ego-boosting tool, which Cardinal Richelieu Dick Cheney was more than happy to exploit for his own nefarious ends.

Whether AIG bonuses or torture to justify a ginned-up war, the impulse is the same for these people, the logical waters they drink are drawn from the same poisoned well, and the natural political home for their functionaries is the GOP. But these people and their pet political party didn't come out of nowhere. They have deep roots in human history and this country is no exception, no matter what our glorious mythologies may tell us about what a free and noble people we are, about what an exception to history our story represents.

For more on that, go read driftglass.

Plus, some SUPERTRAINS! --

Choo-choo trains RAWK!