Just Getting The Rules Clear

Apparently it is okay in America to shoot people, even unarmed people, even restrained people, in the back if

• you are a police officer
• you are scared of those people
• you only meant to taze them*
• they don't give you instant obedience
• they do give you instant obedience but the situation makes you tense
• it's a big crowd around
• they are black people

*Can we please get rid of tasers now?  How much more abuse do we have to wait for?

Oil Spill

I have not been blogging much about the Deepwater spill.  Too depressing.  Also, what is there to say?  We are fucked, and no one is doing much to fix it.  No one seems to know how to fix it, from what I can see.  And BP?  Well, BP seems to think if they can just keep the spin managed, like by shutting their executives up (by sending them to yacht races, I guess), for instance, or stopping the press from seeing just how bad the situation is, well, then the situation won't actually be that bad.

What sucks is that even with an administration that's supposed to be pro-environment, very little is being done.  I know, I know:  Obama:  Get Disappointed by Someone New.

Also:  What Fred says here (Scroll down -- not what he says about McChrystal, though, yeah, that too-- what he says about BP/drilling.)

All Right Then

Particularly I still, from time to time, see Right-Wing Blogs citing "what happened in New Orleans after Katrina" to excuse their vicious racism/classism, this is good to see.

They've Got It Comin', The Sluts!

That's the reaction Zelda got when she told her students about the 10-year-old Ozark child who was tasered by the cop on Tuesday.

The police chief also defended the officer's actions, but hey, we're used to that by now. I'd expect the local police to defend their officers if they zapped a toddler, frankly. "Brat was coming at me with his rattler, Chief."

However, the students in Zelda's class defended the police officer's actions assiduously, and why?

"These ten year olds today, they're out there getting pregnant! They've got it coming!"

What? You -- What?

"They're out of control! You have no idea!"

(Because Zelda, see, who has raised two kids and is helping to raise several grandkids, she has never met a 10 year old....)

I just got a paper from a local kid, we're on the problem/solution paper now, explaining to me how crime was higher than ever, and teen pregnancies were soaring, and violence in schools was out of control, and drug use was sky-rocketing, and I said, dude, where are you getting this information?

Well, it's common knowledge, he said, confused. Everybody knows it.

They all believe that about the world, which is why they're happy to have the police be jack-booted thugs, tasering grandmas and grammar-school kids, turning the US into Prison USA, dumping endless amount of tax dollars into the War on Drugs and the War on Terror and the War on Sex, and meanwhile not a fucking nickel into educating any of them so that they could do some fucking research and find out that teen pregnancy was actually dropping until Bush started funding Abstinence Only bullshit and have a look at who, if a ten year old is pregnant, just who it might be got her pregnant, because I really, really, really fucking well doubt that ten year old child is out seducing other ten year olds, jeezus crap on a bicycle.

Common knowledge. Ai.

Poverty & Race...

...and jackbooted thugs.

By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton.

Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you’re littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect, according to “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is like looking “overly anxious” in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police “can force you to stop just to investigate why you don’t want to talk to them.” And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”

There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID — say, while visiting a friend or relative — can be charged with criminal trespassing

America The Police State

It's only gotten any press b/c it was Bob Dylan, just as the Gates arrest only raised a fuss because it was Henry Louis Gates Jr, but really, really -- wasn't this the country where that word free and that word citizen meant something?

Apparently, as a community, we've decided that the police are our owners now?  They can stop anyone they like on the street, demand proof of ID for any reason, and we're supposed to roll over on pain of a beating or being tasered?

That's the country we've decided we want to live in?

More Cops Putting Citizens in their Place

I'd say I can't believe this shit, except I totally can: over on Pandagon, Pam, who keeps track of these issues, has a clip of a 73 year old woman getting tased by one of our fine Police for giving him mouth on Hwy 71.

She's about five feet tall, this great-grandmother, obviously not armed and dangerous, and her high crime? Speeding. (Police have been running speedtraps like crazy where I live lately, trying to make up for falling revenues, so I imagine it's the same there.) 

She's miffed, I imagine, at getting pulled over for DWP -- police where I live, I have noticed, never pull over the Hummers or the giant SUVs or the Jags that zip past me going 95; no, it's always the pickups like the one this woman is driving, or my bit of shit car (I've been pulled over six times in the past two years, always for going less than fifteen miles over the limit, twice for bullshit -- once because my tags were "on wrong,").  Anyway, so instead of doing what you're "supposed to" when the police have you, which is act all nice and apologetic, she talks back.

This giant police officer shoves her around, yells at her, throws his clipboard at her, threatens to tase her ("I dare you," she snaps back), and then?  Then the fucker tases her!

Then, while she's lying on the side of the highway wailing in pain, fucker threatens to tase her again, threatens her over and over -- get your hands behind your back, he keeps yelling, or you'll get tased again!  She keeps crying that she can't do it, he keeps bellowing threats.

So here's my question: still time for a beer, is it?

Update: And, of course, in the comment section of the Fox Station where the clip is originally posted, most of the commenters are defending the cop -- as did his boss.  Bitch had it coming, see.  Should have shut up and done what the cop said.  Appropriate use of force, and tasers never hurt nobody anyway.