The Los Angeles City Council, protesting Arizona's tough crackdown on illegal immigration, voted Wednesday to ban most city travel to Arizona and future contracts with companies in that state.
...The council also called on the city attorney's office to review all of the city's $58 million in existing contracts with Arizona companies to determine which can be canceled.
The resolution, which now heads to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, would still allow city officials to travel to Arizona under "special circumstances" that are in the city's interests. Also, existing contracts with Arizona firms would be exempt from the ban if canceling them would lead to "significant additional cost" to the city.
The council members who supported the ban, which was approved 13 to 1, asserted that Arizona's new law criminalizing being without proof of legal status "would lead to racial profiling and discrimination," a contention with which I certainly agree.
"Los Angeles is the second-largest city in this country, an immigrant city, an international city. It needs to have its voice heard," said Councilman Ed Reyes, one of the resolution's sponsors. "As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport. If I come across an officer who's having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be … deported, no questions asked. That is not American."
Tough to argue with that.
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved a similar resolution earlier this week.
Bonnie Sweeten, Ashley Todd, Jennifer Wilbanks, Susan Smith, and Charles Stuart are a few of the more well-known names in a long history of "racial hoaxes," in which a white person hurts themselves or someone else (usually a family member) and blames an imaginary person of color (most frequently a black man) for their crime, hoping that institutional racism, its narratives and stereotypes, their own privilege, and the prejudices of other whites will allow them to successfully deflect suspicion onto a nonspecific person of color. In the worst-case scenarios, real people matching conjured police sketches are detained—and innocent people have been punished because of these elaborate, racist lies.
It's bad enough when it's just some random asshole pulling this shit. It's even worse when it's a cop.
[Transcript below.]
Thank Maude he was stupid enough to get caught. I hope the department will immediately launch a comprehensive review of his cases—complainants should be contacted to see if they were helped as they should have been; suspects should be interviewed to see if they were mistreated; especially black complainants and suspects—because any white cop who's fucked up enough to shoot himself and blame it on a black man should strongly be suspected of having scapegoated or in other ways inappropriately targeted and/or unfairly treated people of color on the job.
Randi Kaye, CNN Correspondent (in voiceover): It was 4 in the morning when Philadelphia when the radio call came in: cop shot. A white police sergeant said he'd been shot by a black man. Officers responded in force—an all-out search of the African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia's 19th Precinct, where Sergeant Robert Ralston said it all went down.
Kaye (on camera): The sergeant told the story this way: He'd come across two black men along the railroad tracks on the morning of April 5. One ran away, he said; the other pointed a silver revolver at his head. He knocked it away, he said, but it fired anyway, and the bullet grazed his left shoulder. He also said he fired one shot, but wasn't sure if he'd struck the suspect.
Kaye (in voiceover): Police gave thanks their man had survived. Tragedy averted, they said. The white cop described the shooter this way: Dark skin, braided hair, and a tattoo next to his eye. But police never found the black shooter or anyone matching that description. And now, more than a month later, we know why. The real story? The two black men the cop said he encountered never existed. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey says Sergeant Ralston made the whole thing up.
Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Police Commissioner: It was clear to us soon after it took place that this simply was just not true. Just the evidence just didn't support the story he was giving.
Kaye (in voiceover): But wait: what about the sergeant's shoulder wound? The commissioner says Sergeant Ralston actually shot himself, which may be why, he said, he got off one shot at the suspect—an explanation as to why his gun had been fired.
Ramsey: A test was run on his shirt. The powder on the shirt matched the same kind of ammunition we use in the department.
Kaye (in voiceover): That's right—the gunpowder on the sergeant's shirt was the same kind his own weapon used. And there's more. The angle at which the bullet struck him didn't square with his story either, says the commissioner. We tried to ask Sergeant Ralston to explain, but, outside his home, he dodged our cameras and ducked inside.
Unidentified male (offscreen, as Ralston walks by into his house): Can you tell us why you did that, sir?
Kaye (in voiceover): Neighbors called the sergeant's actions a sad statement.
Brawly Joseph, neighbor: I can't believe he would really do something like that. That's really uncalled for. He—ever since I've been living here, he's really been, like, antisocial around this area.
Kaye (on camera): What's still unclear is why Sergeant Ralston, a 21-year veteran of the force, would make up such a wild tale. Only after hours of interrogation, police said, did he finally admit he shot himself on purpose. The police commissioner says he may have done it for a job transfer or maybe for attention, but that the sergeant didn't give a reason.
Kaye (in voiceover) The police commissioner calls this a, quote, "terrible and embarrassing chapter in the department's history."
Ramsey: The fact that he stated that two African-Americans were involved in this, again, just, I think, inflames tensions in our community—something that we certainly do not need.
Kaye (in voiceover): Sergeant Ralston has been suspended with pay. The commissioner says he will be fired. He was given immunity in exchange for his confession, so he doesn't face criminal charges. But he'll have to pay for the massive manhunt to find his phantom suspects. Cops are still adding up the cost. The days of calling Sergeant Robert Ralston a hero and crediting his quick actions for saving his own life, long gone. Randi Kaye, CNN, New York.
So, Disqus did another upgrade overnight, and it appears that some Firefox users lost the ability to comment for awhile, though functionality now seems to be back. My apologies for the inconvenience.
I know the threads look weird; they got rid of our old theme during the update, about which I wasn't notified in advance. I'm working on trying to figure out how to increase the font size for better readability now.
One new feature of note: If you "reply" to a comment in a thread, it will now indicate it on your comment. Example here. (Although, at the moment, the "jump to original comment" link doesn't seem to be working properly, which I'll mention to Disqus.)
I'll also take a moment to mention (since every time they're mentioned in comments there are people who are surprised to discover them!) a couple of other Disqus features: At the top of each thread, there's a dropdown menu that allows you to sort the order of comments to your preference. (It defaults to Oldest First.) Beside it, there are links which allow you to subscribe to an individual thread by email or RSS. And at the bottom of the thread, there is a "sharing" option, which enables you to share the thread on Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo.
What erroneous assumption do people most frequently make about you?
Aside from "bad faith," to which I'm considering legally changing my middle name, an assumption that has dogged me for as long as I can remember in real life is the supposition that I'm aloof or arrogant, because I am criminally shy.
If I were a dude, I'd be mysterious. But because I'm a woman, I'm a bitch.
The deer, named Theen, was cared for by mlcarriker's family after he was discovered alone and malnourished. The family bottle-fed Theen until he began to eat on his own, and although he's now free to wander and mingle with his wild brethren, he "frequently comes back to the house to eat some [cat food] and play with our dog, Buddy," mlcarriker explains. "He doesn't care much for deer corn."
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.
Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.
"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.
So, yesterday, I wrote about professional jerk, nincompoop, rage machine, award-winning running mate picker, and general asshole John McCain's new campaign advert, in which he strolls along the border fence with Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff Paul Babeu, discussing the awesomeness of the McCain/Kyl Border Security Action Plan.
As Andrea Nill explains on the Wonk Room, "Chances are McCain didn't feature a local border town police chief because that person probably would've told him his ten-point plan is a waste of manpower and resources." Indeed, the assistant police chief in Nogales has said that they have not "witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico." The Santa Cruz County sheriff has also said that the state's new anti-immigration law — which McCain called a "good tool" — is downright racist.
Shaker Unree sends along this article from Sports Illustrated about the murder of University of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love (about which I first wrote here). The article is headlined: Why did Yeardley Love have to die?
Have to die? Um. She didn't. That answers that question!
But let us grant that the headline was possibly intended to ask, simply: Why did she die?
It's a question that remains unanswered by the article below, which speaks of the "tragedy" with the same sort of mystified, confounded tone that is usually reserved for philosophical investigations of why a child is struck with cancer. The description across the browser bar reads: "The tragic story of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love." The piece ends with references to "God's plan" and "senseless death."
No conclusion. No "because" to the "why." Only the equivalent of a bewildered shrug—despite the fact that a huge chunk of the story itself is dedicated to painting a portrait of alleged murderer George Huguely as a privileged, entitled, aggressive dude with an unchecked substance abuse problem who became obsessive with multiple women and presaged his murder of Love with threatening emails, texts, and at least one violent encounter witnessed by other lacrosse players.
And yet the question remains somehow unanswered. Or, rather, the dots remain unconnected.
That is merely the beginning of the myriad problems with this story. I will leave it to you to fisk in comments, but not before highlighting this jaw-dropping passage:
When they resumed working out on Thursday, nine days before the NCAA championships were to begin, the women were missing the speedy and clever defender whose exuberance had made some describe her as the heart of the team, and the men were without the burly midfielder who, ironically enough, had been described in game programs as one of the Cavaliers' fiercest attackers.
That is certainly the inevitable result of "Drill, Baby, Drill!", as several dolphins are now the latest victims of BP's catastrophe.
Already, brown pelicans, sea turtles, and various types of fish have turned up dead. Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service is reporting that six dolphin carcasses have also been found in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama since May 2.
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
From a piece in the New York Times which is headlined with the question "For Crime, Is Anatomy Destiny?" and investigates the "connections" between physical attributes and criminal activity:
[Gregory N. Price, an economist at Morehouse College and one of the authors of a paper on height and crime] suggested that there may be policy implications in his work, saying, "Public health policies successful at reducing obesity among individuals in the population will not only make society healthier, but also safer."
Sure, because if there is a correlation between fat and criminality, it's definitely not the lifetime of being ostracized, bullied, ignored, and/or denied equal pay and opportunities that underlies the elevated potential for a fat person to commit crime, but the fat itself. So we should definitely focus on eradicating fat, rather than prejudice.
"I couldn't help myself, Your Honor! My fat made me do it!" WICKEDFAT!
After years of trying, New Line is close to making the workplace murder comedy "Horrible Bosses."
…"Bosses" centers on three best friends who, frustrated by their jobs, come to the conclusion the only solution is to kill one another's bosses.
[Jason Bateman] is a man who believes that his hard work will be rewarded but hits bottom when he gets passed over for a promotion. [Charlie Day] plays a hapless guy who's always in the wrong place at the wrong time. A part still to be cast is a ladies' man who gets a rude awakening when his boss dies and he is replaced.
…New Line is in the process of attracting A-list names for the roles of the bosses, including a master manipulator, a sexually aggressive dentist and a weaselly scion. … Part of the movie's go status hinged on getting big names as the bosses, and New Line is locking those in place, with [Jennifer Aniston] to play the aggressive dentist who is hitting on Day, and [Colin Farrell] as the weasel.
I mean: WTF, Hollywood? Seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
You know, if you've so thoroughly mined the lives of Highly Privileged White Men that the best plot for a comedy film you've got is "a ragtag group of Highly Privileged White Men PLOT TO MURDER THEIR BOSSES," as though workplace violence (particularly committed by entitled, aggrieved, disgruntled white men) is such an extraordinary absurdity that it's totes appropriate for a punchline, maybe that should be a clue that it's time to investigate the lives of people OTHER THAN Highly Privileged White Men.
Or, you know, just option a remake of Turner & Hooch. Whatever.
By the way, I love how it's the female boss who's the sexually aggressive one. OF COURSE.
"If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to 'thin' the herd."—Congressional District 11 (California) Republican candidate Brad Goehring, engaging in a little eliminationist rhetoric on his Facebook page yesterday.
The Facebook entry has since been removed, and Goehring naturally explained he was just joking. Har har. "I intended to include the wording 'we would use votes and not bullets' (but) hit the share button by accident before I finished and decided to leave it, thinking it would not be taken in a literal sense. I'm sorry if I confused anyone."
Yeah, the real problem was the "confusion" he caused; not the fact that he was obviously playing on an eliminationist "joke" (and would have been even if he'd added his allegedly intended voting clause) that has been around for years:
Note the above-linked post is from '05, and I'm certain I wrote about the "liberal hunting license" even earlier (although I can't find it at the moment). These things, and others like them, have been onsale at gun shows and conservative conferences for quite some time.
Digby notes: "Here is the story of some of these adorable jokes... These are the kind of things they sell [at] CPAC every year. It's perfectly common right wing rhetoric."
Indeed so.
Despite the fact that many of the marginalized populations who comprise the liberal bloc in the US are disproportionately targeted for actual violence in real life, outside the absurd imaginary world in which conservative jokes about killing liberals are totes hilarious.
Sexual harasser and alleged rapist Joe Francis, convicted of child abuse and prostitution and accused of much more throughout his career of building the "Girls Gone Wild" exploitation video franchise, has been given his own un-rated, 12-part, half-hour reality series, "Search for the Hottest Girl in America," which has been given the greenlight to air with uncensored nudity.
The controversial franchise will feature complete nudity on a station many viewers get with basic cable.
…["Search for the Hottest Girl in America"] will air in the 1 a.m ET/10 p.m. PT slot on Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's HDNet channel. The independent network is generally included automatically in HD packages with leading providers such as Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network and Verizon. In fact, it's not even a pay-to-order station like HBO or Showtime.
…Francis argues that the reality show is suited to a "“mature audience" – although an edited version will also be made available for a "run on all stations" and will be acceptable for all time periods and all viewers.
"The show is by no means anything harder than anything that's been on HBO. Cuban has brilliantly designed this programming block, what he's done is taken HBO's whole niche and made it for free. You get HDNet as part of your basic cable package," Francis told us. "'Girls Gone Wild' has been demonized for all these years, it's been made out to be controversial when in fact HBO has ten times the harder core stuff and Cinemax is what we call 'Skin'emax. Mark (Cuban) is genius and taken it into the free market."
Neither HBO nor Cinemax have, to my recollection, been sued by women who allege they were coerced into appearing nude or their nude images were used without their permission.
I've nothing to say about the loathsome Francis that I haven't said before. He is the WORST.
A perfect example of why crime stats and conviction stats (such beloved tools of rape apologists) don't really say anything about the actual frequency of rape, care of the NYPD:
Those tapes show vividly that NYPD street cops are told by superiors to "downgrade" crime reports whenever possible, such as convincing a victim to file a "stolen property" complaint even after being physically assaulted in a robbery.
Now, the Voice has learned that the NYPD downgraded a felony sexual assault in a park in upper Manhattan earlier this year to a misdemeanor.
The incident was only reclassified and upgraded to a felony after the victim, journalist Debbie Nathan, protested and the Manhattan District Attorney took the extraordinary step of interviewing the police officers involved and confirming her account.
Nathan was walking in Inwood Park when she was "grabbed by a young man who pushed her off the path and into the woods," telling her he wanted to "have sex with" her. She tried to free herself, but could not.
He grabbed her from behind and pinned her arms at her sides. He began masturbating against her, for a couple of minutes, had an orgasm, and then fled.
What's particularly chilling about this incident is that it's a classic starter attack by someone with the potential to become a serial rapist, the violence of whose acts tend to escalate over time (and with practice). Catching this guy, intervening early, is hugely important.
After hearing her account of the attack, they told her the crime was a misdemeanor for "forcible touching." Nathan, forced to tenaciously pursue justice under the duress of having survived a sexual assault like so many women before her, would not go away quietly.
Nathan insisted that it was an attempted rape, a felony. "I argued that the force used against me, the masturbation, and the veritable kidnapping constituted far more than a misdemeanor," Nathan says.
The officers ignored her protests and left.
On February 22, Nathan called the Inwood Safety Patrol, a citizens group which monitors neighborhood safety. That group called the local state assemblyman, Adriano Espaillat, and the 34th Precinct commander to complain.
After that, Nathan's complaint was upgraded to felony attempted rape. At a packed community meeting, the precinct commander apologized to Nathan, and promised an investigation.
...Nathan was in for a second shock when she got her complaint report. "My story had been scrubbed of everything except the fact that the perp grabbed me, pushed me, and mentioned sex," she says. "Almost every detail of the crime was missing from the report."
The officers had left out her being overpowered and pushed into the woods, the duration of the assault, the masturbation. The report, she says, even said she had reported no sexual assault.
"After special victims downgraded my crime to a misdemeanor, an officer from my precinct tweaked my report so it described a misdemeanor," she says. "They had written non-report to conform to a misdemeanor. They were so sloppy, they forgot to rewrite the report to conform to felony."
Nathan says she was told by Assistant District Attorney Lisa Friel, chief of the Manhattan District Attorney's sex crimes unit, that there was no question that the crime she described was a felony.
Friel, Nathan says, interviewed the police officers involved and learned that they admitted to omitting many details from the report. "It is difficult to believe the omissions were accidental," Nathan says.
Nathan says she spoke with rape crisis advocacy groups, which told her that her case is not unique, that it has been happening across the city over the past year-and-a-half.
"The difference here was that I was a well-educated journalist, someone who knew how to get action," she says.
Not only does this practice deny survivors of justice; it creates more victims, as sex predators are allowed to remain free to continue their predation. It's difficult to overstate how wildly inappropriate and equally ineffective reducing crime rates by downgrading sex crimes is.
This policy also underlines the inherent ignorance in rape apologists' arguments that are contingent on the idea that law enforcement is sensitive and responsive to women alleging sexual assault. (And renders hilarious their ubiquitous argument that law enforcement is overzealous in response to allegations of sexual assault.)
Naturally, there are excellent cops all over the country who are sensitive and responsive to victims, but, when one of the biggest police departments in the country is actively and systemically working against victims—and quite literally allying themselves with sex predators, aiding and abetting their continued predation—to assume a robust response to allegations is universal is to deliberately engage in willful ignorance.
And it is to enthusiastically play a role in perpetuation one of the most pernicious myths of the rape culture.
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