Friday, September 30, 2016

PARENTS INJURE SON WHILE CUTTING OFF HANDCUFFS

By Ashlynn Turner

Click 2 Houston
September 29, 2016

HOUSTON - A 3-year-old boy was taken to the hospital after his parents used a saw and grinder to remove handcuffs from his legs, police say.

On Aug. 19, Steven McGaha, the father of the boy, found his son had put handcuffs on his legs and lost the key, according to court documents.

McGaha called Savanna Coats, the boy’s mother, to come back to the home on Hopper Road to help look for the key, police said.

The parents looked for the key for five hours. They noticed his legs were losing circulation, so they decided they should cut off the cuffs, according to court documents.

“We didn’t want to get the cops involved, because we knew what would happen,” McGaha said.

McGaha held the boy down while Coats tried to use a reciprocating saw, knife sharpener and, ultimately, was successful when she used a grinder, police said.

According to court documents, it took another five hours to get the cuffs off. During the many attempts to cut them off, the boy was burned and cut by the grinder as it dug into his skin.

Police said the parents did not immediately take the child to get medical assistance until four days later on Aug. 23, when the child had contracted infections on both legs.

“I know we should have taken him on the first day, but we didn’t,” McGaha said.

Police said that the handcuffs had a universal key, and if the parents would have contacted first responders, the cuff could have been removed immediately.

According to Dr. M. Donaruma, a child abuse pediatrician at Texas Children’s Hospital, the child’s scarring and injuries will be permanent and will cause disfigurement and complications as he grows taller.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Investigators learned that it was the mother who cuffed the boy and misplaced the key. Coats was jailed and charged with serious bodily injury to a child.

CORRECTIONAL OFFICER SHOT ON THE WAY TO WORK

By Bob Walsh

A female Correctional Officer who works at the Lawton, Oklahoma facility operated by GEO was shot and wounded on her way to work Wednesday. The woman saw somebody on the street that she thought she recognized from an encounter at work and when she rolled down her car window to get a better look the subject closed with her and opened fire.

The victim is hospitalized and sedated but was able to give some useful information before then.

The Lawton facility houses 2,600 convicted felons.

STUDENT WEARING GORILLA MASK ARRESTED WHILE HANDING OUT BANANAS AT BLM RALLY

BY Bob Walsh

Tristan Retke is a Junior at Eastern Tennessee State. He was arrested on Tuesday for handing out food.

Mr. Retke, who is white, was at a Black Lives Matter rally when this happened. He was wearing a gorilla mask and carrying a bunch of bananas, which he was handing out. He was arrested for Civil Rights Intimidation by the Johnson City PD.

I guess in Johnson City being politically incorrect is actually a crime.

I hope he gets a good lawyer and sues the dogshit out of the city.

VIDEO OF FATAL POLICE SHOOTING OF LOUISIANA BOY, 6, IS RELEASED

Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Lt. Derrick Stafford, Marksville police officers, were charged last November with second-degree murder and second-degree attempted murder

By Christine Hauser

The New York Times
September 29, 2016

The police video footage of the last moments of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis’s life shows deputy marshals firing a barrage of bullets at his father’s S.U.V. after a car chase on the dark streets of central Louisiana. It shows his father slumped over the open car window, injured and bleeding.

Minutes later, the words of an officer can be heard: “There’s a juvenile.”

The deputies had fired 18 times into the car, prosecutors say. The boy, strapped to the front passenger seat of the car, was struck five times in the head and chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene. In the aftermath, one of the officers appeared to vomit, according to audio from the footage.

The video was released on Wednesday at a preliminary hearing in a Louisiana court before the deputy marshals, Officer Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Lt. Derrick Stafford, were tried on charges of second-degree murder. It was the first public glimpse of what happened on Nov. 3 in Marksville, a small city near the Mississippi border.

It raised questions about basic police tactics and the wisdom of high-speed chases. But the fatal shooting of the child, who was white, received little of the national attention that has trailed other police killings. It spurred no organized street protests; no viral hashtags; no movement like Black Lives Matter, which was sparked by anger and frustration over a wave of killings of African-Americans by law enforcement officials.

Some differences in the case are clear. For one, it flips the racial narrative that has prompted protests across the nation: white officers shooting unarmed black men or black men legally allowed to carry weapons.

For another, video of the Louisiana killing had been missing from public view until Wednesday. At the time of the shooting, Facebook Live had not become a widespread tool used by people at traffic stops, such as during the fatal shooting in July of Philando Castile in Minnesota, spurring outrage.

Cellphones, body-camera footage and surveillance video of police shootings have also played a key role in protests, such as in the case of Tamir Rice, 12, who was shot dead in 2014 in a Cleveland playground while playing with a replica gun.

In addition, it appears that the father, Chris Few, who survived the confrontation, had taken the police on a chase with his son beside him. And the current movement against police brutality has been primarily focused on the disproportionate number of African-Americans who have been shot and killed by the police, which is backed by data.

An analysis published this year by The Washington Post found that while more whites are killed by the police over all, police shootings were up in the first part of 2016 and black Americans were 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot by officers.

“They are disproportionately likely to attract police attention, and when they do, they are more likely to have force used on them. And so it is just way more likely that something horrible is going to go wrong,” David A. Harris, a professor and expert in police accountability at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Some families of white victims, however, have been vocal about the fact that their cases are not drawing the same level of outrage and official scrutiny.

“If the victim is white, there just doesn’t seem to be an interest,” Eric S. Bland, a lawyer for the family of Zachary Hammond, a white teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in South Carolina in 2015, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

Mr. Bland, who sent many emails last year to reporters to point out the lack of coverage of Mr. Hammond’s death, said the case had gone relatively unnoticed compared with that of Samuel DuBose, a black driver who was killed in Cincinnati in 2015. Both cases took place around the same time.

“One of the major things we said is that if Zachary had been a person of color, there would not have been a hotel room available up and down from Atlanta through South Carolina,” Mr. Bland said. “It definitely matters what the color of the skin is.”

One of the rare times that such a killing drew street protests was in the case of Dylan Noble, a white 19-year-old who was fatally shot by officers in Fresno, Calif., on June 25. The police said he was shot after ignoring commands from two officers to show his hands, get on the ground and stop walking toward them.

His death prompted demonstrations in the racially diverse city, with some protesters brandishing signs that said, “While Lives Matter,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

As for Jeremy’s case, it did not resonate in the same category of other police shootings, Mr. Harris said, because it was “really counter to the general narrative of police overreaching and killing someone.”

“In an important way, the fleeing civilian brought it on himself,” Mr. Harris said, voicing what could be one possible public perception of the Louisiana case. “I don’t mean he should be killed for it, but he had had a role in creating this risk that a lot of people would say, ‘This is kind of on him.’”

The case also differed from the shooting of Tamir Rice in that “you can’t conceive that they would have been gunning for the 6-year-old,” Mr. Harris said. “They may or may not have been wrong to have shot the father, but it is kind of inconceivable that they meant to shoot the kid.”

Officer Greenhouse and Lieutenant Stafford were moonlighting as deputy city marshals when they began chasing Jeremy’s father, Mr. Few. Initial reports said they wanted to serve a warrant, but officials have not definitively said why they were trying to arrest him.

The video footage, which lacks audio for the first 27 to 30 seconds, was edited from about 14 minutes to various lengths before being published by news media outlets. It shows the officers chasing Mr. Few’s vehicle, and then pulling up to it when it stops. Officers get out of their vehicle and approach the car, guns drawn.

There are glimpses of Mr. Few with his hands up out the driver’s side window. The deputies appear to begin shooting before the audio begins. Then, after the sound of gunfire, they are heard shouting at Mr. Few to show his hands. His form is blurred out in some footage as he slumps against the car door. More officers arrive and walk over to the vehicle. The body of the child is discovered.

“I never saw a kid in the car, man,” Lieutenant Stafford, accused of firing 14 of the shots, is heard saying. “I never saw a kid, bro.”

Someone in the background can be heard throwing up.

The two men, Marksville police officers, were charged last November with second-degree murder.

Matthew Derbes, a prosecutor in the case, argued in court that the video footage should be released to support the claim that Lieutenant Stafford had a pattern of using excessive force, and because it provided a motive, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Derbes could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

The Associated Press reported that the defense lawyers said Mr. Few had driven recklessly in a two-mile chase and then rammed into Officer Greenhouse’s vehicle as he was exiting it, before the deputies opened fire.

Christopher LaCour, a defense lawyer, was quoted in other reports as saying the deputies had acted in self-defense. “Christopher Few was a suspect before they knew that child was in the car,” Mr. LaCour said. He did not immediately reply to a phone message on Thursday.

Lieutenant Stafford’s trial is set for November, and Officer Greenhouse’s trial is scheduled for March.


HILLARY’S DEBATE LIES ABOUT THE ‘SYSTEMIC RACISM’ IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

BY Heather Mac Donald

City Journal
September 27, 2016

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie Monday night that the criminal justice system is infected with "systemic racism." Race "determines" how people are "treated in the criminal justice system," she said. Blacks are "more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated" for "doing the same thing." Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: "Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned," Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that "large racial differences in criminal offending," not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant's criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware's prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission's Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton also complained that "too many young African-American and Latino men end . . . up in jail for non-violent offenses." In fact, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for violent felonies. The enforcement of low-level public order offenses in New York City during the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg actually lowered New York State's prison population by intervening in criminal behavior early, before it ripened into a serious felony. Even as misdemeanor arrests increased in the city, felony arrests and felony incarcerations dropped. The number of jail inmates and convicts under parole and probation supervision in New York City dropped as well. Hillary Clinton may think that low-level public-order enforcement (otherwise known as "broken windows" policing) is racist, but law-abiding residents of high-crime communities beg the police to enforce public-order laws because they know that out of street disorder erupts gun violence and other forms of predation.

Clinton reiterated her call for "implicit-bias" training for officers. The premise of such training is that police officers are shooting black males out of such bias. Yet, four studies have come out this year alone that demolish this charge. They show that if there is bias among police officers in their shooting decisions, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. "Implicit-bias" training, based on a lie, is a grotesque waste of resources at a time when officers are desperate for more hands-on tactical training that will help them make those crucial shoot/don't shoot decisions in the field, or avoid being put into such an excruciating situation in the first place.

Clinton claimed that "stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional." No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots.

Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department's practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal, had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal. Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn't match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin's view.

Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city's population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. Whites are 34 percent of the city's population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run-meaning that someone has been shot-they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.

Clinton claimed that stop-and-frisk was "ineffective" and "did not do what it needed to do." Felony crime dropped 85 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s in New York City; more than 10,000 minority males were spared the violent death that they would have experienced had homicides remained at their early 1990s levels. Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of that crime drop, the longest and steepest on record; it's hard to imagine anything more effective than New York's proactive policing revolution. Stop-and-frisk deterred criminals from carrying guns. Equally importantly, it intervened in a range of other criminal behaviors. If an officer saw someone casing a store on a boulevard plagued with burglaries, or saw someone walking quickly behind an elderly lady in a neighborhood plagued with robberies, he would stop that person and ask a few questions. That stop may not have resulted in an arrest, but it could have averted the commission of a crime.

Homicides and shootings in New York City rose 20 percent in the first half of 2015, thanks to the Scheindlin-induced drop in pedestrian stops. Then-police commissioner William Bratton responded with a massive deployment of overtime manpower to high-crime corners; officers used "command presence"-i.e., their mere presence on the street-to deter criminal behavior. This roll-out of manpower resources quelled the shooting spike and New York City ended 2015 with a 6 percent homicide increase. Other departments do not have the personnel available to them to make up for a drop in proactive policing.

Donald Trump is right to warn about depolicing and what I have called the Ferguson Effect. "Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything," he said. The result is a massive loss of black lives in places like Chicago and Baltimore. Law and order are breaking down in inner cities; officers are surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they get out of their squad cars to conduct an investigation. Resistance to arrest is up, increasing the chances of an officer's own use of force. And race riots are returning to American cities. The current mendacious narrative about policing and race has to change or we can expect to see further violent-crime increases and further racial violence. It is clear, however, that Hillary Clinton will continue to enflame racial tensions through a set of lies about the criminal-justice system.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Liar, liar, Hillary’s broad pants on fire!

A VERY GENEROUS MAN

Several men are in the locker room of a golf club. A cellular phone on a bench rings and a man engages the hands-free speaker function and begins to talk.

Everyone else in the room stops to listen.

MAN: "Hello"

WOMAN: "Hi Honey, it's me. Are you at the club?"

MAN: "Yes."

WOMAN: "I'm at the shops now and found this beautiful leather coat. It's only $2,000; is it OK if I buy it?"

MAN: "Sure, go ahead if you like it that much."

WOMAN:"I also stopped by the Lexus dealership and saw the new models. I saw one I really liked."

MAN: "How much?"

WOMAN: "$90,000."

MAN: "OK, but for that price I want it with all the options."

WOMAN: "Great! Oh, and one more thing... I was just talking to Janie and found out that the house I wanted last year is back on the market. They're asking $980,000 for it."

MAN: "Well, then go ahead and make an offer of $900,000. They'll probably take it. If not, we can go the extra eighty-thousand if it's what you really want."

WOMAN: "OK. I'll see you later! I love you so much!"

MAN: "Bye! I love you, too."

The man hangs up. The other men in the locker room are staring at him in astonishment, mouths wide open. He turns and asks, "Anyone know whose phone this is?"

Thursday, September 29, 2016

THE MOVIE ‘CLINTON, INC.’ IS SET TO OPEN TOMORROW ON 1,000 SCREENS

Hillary is in for a new walloping with the 'Clinton, Inc.' movie that digs deep into her psychology – and Bill's

By David Martosko

Daily Mail
September 19, 2016

With the right lighting a twenty-something Virginia Clinton – Bill's mom – was a dead ringer for Monica Lewinsky.

That realization alone, and all its Freudian implications, is enough to recommend the movie ‘Clinton, Inc,’ a film adaptation of the 2014 book that will hit theaters on September 30.

It turns out the future president's sexually undiscriminating but lovable and charming mother – and the rock-steady but ambitious and intimidating grandmother who helped raised him – formed maternal bookends that he would later reanimate with Lewinsky and Hillary Rodham.

Hillary was the staid, grandmotherly figure from the beginning, the film suggests, the one who he could count on for comfort and security.

Bill's endless string of one-night stands, including one woman he allegedly raped, were a reprise of the trysting situations in which he so often saw his mother, largely with future stepdad Roger, as he worked his way through boyhood.

And as he progressed into manhood, we learn, Bill needed both the stability of his wife and the wildness of other women.

But far from condemning him, 'Clinton, Inc.' casts the boy from Hope, Arkansas in the same light as Alexander Hamilton, this year's unlikeliest political celebrity.

They were both bastards from social and geographical backwaters – Hamilton was born in Charlestown on the nowhere Caribbean island of Nevis – and they both transcended their origins in world-shaping ways.

The hits keep coming in this feature-length film from producer Mark Sain, who gave DailyMail.com the first sneak-peek over the weekend.

Sain's '2016: Obama's America' became the second-highest grossing political documentary of all time. 'Clinton, Inc.' will see a limited release on 20 metro Chicago cinema screens before hitting 1,000 screens nationwide in mid-October, just in time to give voters a new version of plentiful old history to chew on.

With help from Johns Hopkins University professor John Gartner, the film answers the question that logically follows on the unsuitably named Virginia's bed-hopping, much of which happened with doctors in a hospital where she worked.

Gartner believes Bill may have called the wrong guy 'Dad' for his whole life.

'Because of Bill Clinton's own mother's promiscuity, it was likely that someone else was his biological father – the biological father Bill never revealed,' Sain told DailyMail.com in an interview.

And that, he said, presents a bizarre 'parallel between how he and Obama grew up.'

'Neither of them knew his biological father,' Sain explained. 'And they both were raised by these role models that they thought would teach them who they should be.'

Gartner was not the first to name Bill's real dad as physician George Wright, but he does it on camera in a straight-ahead fashion that makes a compelling case – including an anecdote about how the doctor changed where he took his annual vacations so he could be near Bill as he grew.

The man usually acknowledged as Clinton's dad, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., was still on active duty in the U.S. Army until 8 months before his birth.

At its heart, 'Clinton, Inc.' is a psychological study of the Clintons and what makes them tick, a welcome palate-cleanser from the politically driven and often reckless storytelling that was bound to crop up in the weeks before November's presidential election.

Loosely based on the book by Daniel Halper, who now leads the New York Post's Washington, D.C. bureau and ably narrates much of the movie, the new adaptation leans heavily on Hillary, the Democratic nominee for president.

Her White House run, filmgoers learn, is on the one hand an attempt to rehabilitate her family dynasty's image, and on the other a sort of payback for putting up with her lascivious husband for decade after decade.

What's most interesting about it isn't what's most current. The film does a cursory roundup of the latest scandals in Clintonworld, including the Benghazi terror attacks, pay-to-play accusations leveled against the Clinton Foundation and her classified email scandal.

'It's truth whack-a-mole with Hillary Clinton,' Townhall.com political editor Guy Benson quips in the movie.

The filmmakers also rely on the voice of Dick Morris, a one-time Clinton insider whom the first couple tossed overboard after it was revealed that he allowed a toe-sucking prostitute to listen in on his conversations with the President of the United States.

Morris calls the payoffs during Hillary's State Department tenure – speaking fees for Bill and millions in buy-ins for the foundation – 'thinly disguised bribes.'

Morris was a close-up observer from the beginning, helping Clinton win his way into the Arkansas governor's mansion.

As the Lewinsky scandal broke two decades later, he recalls, 'I urged Clinton not to lie to people. I said they'll forgive the adultery but not the perjury.'

'It was Hillary that said, "You gotta deny it, you gotta stand firm, you gotta be intransigent." And her advice always is to stonewall, to stand firm, not to yield an inch.'

Her storied appearance on NBC's 'Today' show, in which she blamed the brewing tempest on a 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' the film explains, came the following day

'Lying,' Morris concludes, 'is her substitute for charisma.'

Hillary's most powerful role in the movie is that of Bill's immoral savior, rescuing him from himself over and over and enabling him to lie and cheat again and again.

Her own mother Dorothy stoically endured an abusive husband's rantings and kept her own family together anyway, and Hillary followed her lead by looking the other way.

Hillary's pre-ordained carpet-bagged coronation as a New York senator after they left the White House, singularly orchestrated by Bill, was her first cashed-in chit.

She was planning her Senate run, in fact, while the U.S. Senate was deliberating on an impeachment vote that teetered on the edge of toppling Bill's presidency.

A return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may be her final claim check for playing her role to a tee.

'To understand Bill and Hillary, don't think of a marriage,' Morris advises. 'Think of a racketeering organization.'

The Clinton duo began as a hippie love story, to be sure, but morphed into a more savage lust for power in the film's telling.

By the time she became America's first lady, Hillary had parlayed her feminist chic into control over the future of the nation's healthcare system, which she botched by arrogantly trying to steamroll Senate Republicans.

But Bill was so in debt to her that he installed her in the West Wing of the White House and dared not infringe on her territory.

Because Bill sensed that he needed to pull the Democratic Party back from the brink of full-scale liberalism, he put his weight behind the North American Free Trade Agreement, a political fossil that's in this year's vernacular as a bone that Republican nominee Donald Trump won't let go of.

In 'Clinton, Inc.'s' telling, NAFTA was an easy sell to then-House speaker Newt Gingrich because its purpose was to win cheap labor for big business.

But Bill Clinton had an ulterior motive in capturing a new source of campaign fundraising from blue-chip companies that suddenly owed him.

Many of the same companies, and their Washington lobbyists, backed Hillary when she ran for Senate.

The filmmakers agree with Trump that NAFTA led to wholesale job losses, and suggest the president didn't care because America's working class would never cross the aisle and support an aging, feckless Senator Bob Dole in 1996.

He was right, of course. And besides, now he had the backing of top Republicans from the NAFTA battle. The nation's working class emerged as the losers while the Clinton dynasty 'triangulated' itself and reaped the benefits.

'The Clintons are about power and about money. They're ruthless,' National Review editor Rich Lowry concludes.

Clinton, Inc., the family business, has three iterations, Sain said.

'The first version was during their Arkansas years, the ideal. Then she becomes the U.S. senator and gets more power-hungry. That's version two.'

'Version three is her attempt now to become president.'

Chelsea Clinton, the pair's adult daughter, is the heir to the throne even before Hillary wears a crown.

Power and prominence, we're reminded, are generational. As she campaigns for her mother, Chelsea is hyper-aware that she stands to inherit a family business whose goal is to create wealth and political power.

All the while, Bill and Hillary strut the trappings of a marriage based on a weird mashup of aw-shucks charm and conniving dishonesty.

Voters, of course, will be the film's consumers. They'll come away exposed to the idea that aging baby boomers are looking to install a female president as the incarnation of social upheaval they stoked generations ago.

But feminists in particular have a problem: Hillary Clinton reached the base-camp beneath her ultimate summit because of who she married. Bill made her first lady and furnished her with a Senate seat.

Why? Because he always needed her, he always cared about her, and she has always lacked the raw political talent to earn it on her own.

'They're co-dependent,' Sain told DailyMail.com, while cautioning that 'it's more complex than that.'

'They do very much love each other, but their own personal ambitions drive things as well.'

Investors sank $1.5 million into making 'Clinton, Inc.,' which the MPAA has given a PG-13 rating. Lewinsky's blue dress makes a cameo, and there's ample talk about Bill's affairs – although no appearance from alleged rape victim Juanita Broaddrick.

Sain insisted that he didn't set out to put a divisive hit-piece on the big screen.

'When I made the movie it wasn't with the intent of trying to impact the election,' he said.

'We really tried to make it so that it would appeal to a wide audience.'

'Great movies are great character stories,' he explained. 'And this is a great character story.'

PERSONAL TRAGEDY CAN MAKE FOR CRAPPY LAW

By Bob Walsh

Personal tragedies are nasty for those involved. I get that. That being said it does not give the sufferer license to impose his will on the rest of the country, or at least should not.

A case in point is the Brady Bill. Jim Brady worked for President Regan and was badly injured in an assassination attempt on Regan. He was left with significant brain damage. His wife, using him as a poster boy, pushed hard and with significant success to limit the rights of honest, law-abiding gun owners based on their personal tragedy.

Now we move to Gavin Newsom. Newsom was formerly the mayor of the People’s Republic of San Francisco. I almost wrote “ultra-liberal mayor” but that would be a redundancy in modern S.F. He is now the Lt. Governor of the formerly great state of California and, unless something truly bizarre happens, will be our governor in two years.

Gavin Newsom hates guns. He hates people who like guns. He hates people who own guns. I always just assumed it was because he was, by nature, a liberal asshole. I was wrong and now I know why, thanks to today’s S. F. Chronicle.

Arthur Menzies was Gavin Newsom’s grandfather. He was a WW II veteran and a survivor of the Bataan Death March. That experience somewhat unhinged him. (The death rate of American prisoners held by the Japanese during WW II was about 43%. I can’t imagine how nasty that was.)

At one time Menzies stood his daughter (Newsom’s mother) and her twin sister up against the fireplace and announced he was going to blow their brains out. He didn’t do it, but that doesn’t make it nice. Finally, one evening at the dinner table, in front of the family (including young Gavin) Menzies blew his brains out. That has left Newsom with a dislike for guns. A dislike he thinks should be enforced on the rest of society.

Newsome is the principle pimp for Proposition 63, which bans possession of ammunition magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds of ammo, including those you might have purchased legally and been in legal possession of for years, and greatly restricts the ability of honest, law-abiding citizens to purchase ammunition. This proposal, if it is passed into law and survives legal challenges certain to come, would make mail order purchases of ammo illegal and would drive many small dealers out of business with severe and expensive regulations. This would, among other things, require purchasers to have a license to buy ammo.

My own guess, for what that is worth, is that the ammunition magazine ban is probably unconstitutional as it is effectively a taking of property without compensation. Other states do require a special license to buy ammo so that might fly. Regulating business they don’t like out of business is a specialty in California so that might be acceptable to the courts.

In any event there it is. Gavin Newsom’s grandfather went off the rails so you can’t be trusted to own ammunition.

HOUSTON METRO OFFICER WHO BEAT MAN WITH BATON INDICTED

By Zach Despart

Houston Press
September 28, 2016

A grand jury on Wednesday indicted a former Metro Police Department officer on assault charges after he beat a man with a baton on a train platform earlier this month, Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson said in a statement.

Jarius Warren and another officer, identified only as D. Reynoso, were suspended after the September 14 incident. A grand jury cleared Reynoso of wrongdoing, Anderson said. Warren resigned from his position on Monday.

Darrell Giles was sitting on the Burnett Transit Center train platform, on Metro's Red Line, around 7:30 a.m. when the officers approached him. According to Harris County court records, the pair arrested Giles on suspicion of trespassing.

But Metro Police Department Chief Vera Bumpers told reporters two days later that surveillance footage of the train platform showed Warren used "excessive force" during the arrest. Video of the beating shows Warren striking Giles repeatedly with a baton. Anderson called the clips "disturbing."

"The case was presented to a diverse grand jury and we wholeheartedly support their decision," Anderson said in her statement. "This officer used excessive force and should not be wearing a badge."

Prosecutors had dismissed charges against Giles by the time the officers were suspended.

OHIO STATE TROOPER GAVE HOPE TO MAN WHO DISLIKES POLICE

Sgt. David Robison drives Mark Ross 100 miles to reach his grieving family

By Sarah Grochowski

New York Daily News
September 27, 2016

A cop in Ohio drove a grieving man 100 miles to reach his family — and the act of kindness is attracting national attention.

Mark Ross was in a speeding vehicle, traveling Sunday to visit his heartbroken mother following the death of his 15-year-old sister Eliza, when the car was pulled over.

With the car being towed, Ross started to cry.

“I knew I was going to jail due to a petty warrant,” Ross wrote on Facebook.

Officers in Michigan — where Ross’s outstanding misdemeanor warrant was issued — refused to pick the man up because of the distance, he wrote.

When an officer, identified as Ohio State Highway Patrol Sgt. David Robison, learned of Ross’s situation, he decided to drive Ross to visit his family.

"I broke down crying, and he saw the sincerity in my cry,” Ross wrote in the viral post, which features a selfie of Ross and Robison. “He reaches over and began praying over me and my family,” he described in the viral post.

Ross concluded his post with an admittance of his own struggle to embrace police enforcement. “Everybody knows how much I dislike Cops but I am truly Greatful for this Guy.”

But Sunday’s events and the kindness of Sgt. Robison caused Ross to admit, “He gave me hope.”

The original Facebook post has now been shared about 100,000 times.

EDITOR’S NOTE. I would think that Sgt. Robison obtained permission from higher-ups in the Ohio State Police to give Ross a lift to Detroit. The Ohio State Police and Robison are to be commended for this heartfelt act of kindness. On the other hand, if Robison took Ross to Detroit without receiving permission, he should be suspended and demoted, if not fired.

BLM, please note that Ross is black and Robison is a white cop!

TRACKING DEVICE IN MONEY LEADS TO CHASE AND ARREST OF HOUSTON PIZZA SHOP BURGLARS

By Lea Wilson

Click 2 Houston
September 28, 2016

A pizza shop break-in turned into a chase Wednesday in northeast Houston.

According to investigators, four people in a stolen van smashed into a Little Caesars in the 6200 block of Lyons.

The burglars stole money, police said. Officers were able to find the van because of a tracking device in the cash.

Police said the driver led them on a chase, reaching speeds of up to 90 miles per hour.

It ended at Homestead near Tidwell, where the accused thieves ran away.

Three people were arrested and one person is still on the run, police said.

FEDERAL AGENT ACCIDENTALLY SHOOTS SAN DIEGO DEPUTY

By David Hernandez

The San Diego Union-Tribune
September 27, 2016

SAN DIEGO -- Authorities say a federal agent accidentally shot a deputy’s leg at the sheriff’s station in Lemon Grove while unloading a handgun that was seized by a joint task force Monday.

The deputy’s injury was not considered life-threatening, sheriff’s spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said.

The names of the deputy and the federal agent were not released.

The agent and other members of the unnamed task force recovered the .22 handgun while serving a search warrant in East County, Caldwell said.

The task force members returned to the sheriff’s station on Main Street to secure evidence about 5:30 p.m. While unloading the handgun, the agent accidentally discharged the gun, striking the deputy in the lower leg, Caldwell said.

The deputy was taken to a hospital and is expected to survive.

Authorities did not say whether the agent was placed on leave.

Sheriff’s detectives are investigating the shooting.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the name of transparency, I demand that the authorities immediately release the names of the federal agent and deputy, as well as all body camera and sheriff’s station surveillance camera videos of the shooting!

THREE ARIZOBA COPS CHOSE TO RESIGN AFTER MAKING A TEEN EAT ALL HIS WEED

VICE News
September 23, 2016

Phoenix chief of police Joseph Yahner announced Thursday that three officers have chosen to resign after a teenager said the cops forced him to eat all the marijuana in his car, ABC News reports.

The 19-year-old, whose name has not been released, was pulled over during a traffic stop in the middle of the night on September 13. When the police spotted around a gram of weed in his car, the teen claims they told him to eat it or else face jail time. He swallowed the marijuana and reportedly felt sick after.

"Their actions are appalling and unacceptable," Yahner said. "This conduct is against everything that we stand for."

The officers were identified as Richard G. Pina, Jason E. McFadden, and Michael J. Carnicle. Yahner said that two of the cops are also being investigated to see if their actions were criminal. A fourth Phoenix police officer was demoted to sergeant for knowing about the incident and not reporting it.

"I was going to fire them," Yahner continued. "They chose to resign."

EDITOR’S NOTE: Aw come on Chief, they were only trying to make sure he ate his veggies.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

BEFORE DONALD TRUMP


Ah hah! Hillary has conveniently erased Bill's State of the Union speech from her mind when she condemns Trump on immigration.

BRONX MARIJUANA GROW HOUSE EXPLOSION KILLS FIRE CHIEF, INJURES 20 AS COPS NAB SUSPECT IN NEW JERSEY

A brief but intense manhunt led to the arrest hours later of renter Julio Salcedo, 34, across the Hudson River in Cliffside Park, N.J.

By Ginger Adams Otis, Laura Dimon, Thomas Tracy and Graham Rayman

New York Daily News
September 27, 2016

An FDNY battalion chief was killed by flying debris when a Bronx explosion tore the roof off a drug house early Tuesday, injuring another 20 people, authorities said.

Chief Michael Fahy, a 17-year fire veteran who followed his father into the department, was struck in the head and mortally injured as he stood outside the two-story home about 7 a.m.

“We had a tragedy today,” Mayor de Blasio said in announcing the death. “A tragedy has befallen a family, a fire department and our entire city.”

The blast in the Kingsbridge section came about an hour after a passerby called 911 to report an odor of gas around the home at W. 234th St. and Irwin Ave., authorities said.

“I felt something so strong, like a boom!” said local resident Porfiro Paulino, 64, who opened his window to see smoke pouring into the sky.

The rental property, an attached brick residence, was already under investigation as a marijuana grow house before the explosion, said Police Commissioner James O’Neill.

The blast scattered pot plants along the block outside the home, and cops found fertilizer in the ruins.

A brief but intense manhunt led to the arrest hours later of renter Julio Salcedo, 34, across the Hudson River in Cliffside Park, N.J., law enforcement sources said.

Salcedo paid rent at the 234th St. address, and cops were questioning him about the blast, the sources said. He had a prior arrest on a domestic violence charge.

“If you want to get our attention, blow up your marijuana grow house,” said the source. “You get the full attention of the NYPD. Doesn’t matter if you go to Indiana or Bali, we’re going to find you.”

A neighbor said the current renters, unlike past years when Manhattan College students lived in the corner residence, were low-key and drove high-end cars — Mercedes-Benz and BMWs.

“This definitely wasn’t college students,” said Mike Garcia, 28, an electrician. “We didn't hear any commotion or see any people. We thought it was shady.”

It was unclear if the pot production contributed to the blast, and an investigation by the NYPD arson and explosion squad was underway.

“It’s a crime scene, and it will be for a few days to come,” said FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro.

O’Neill said cops were in the initial stages of an investigation on the block after a tip that there was “a possible grow house” raising marijuana plants.

The police source said the weed was grown on the second floor, with each plant in a large plastic pot insulated with styrofoam panels.

Nine firefighters, six police officers, three Consolidated Edison workers and two civilians were injured by the blast that threw pieces of the roof into the street as smoke billowing skyward.

Fahy, whose dad Thomas was a decorated FDNY battalion chief, was struck in the head and “various other parts of the body,” said Nigro. He was the father of two boys — Michael, 11, and Cormac, 6 — and a daughter Anna Elisabeth, 8.

“One of our rising stars,” Nigro said of Fahy. “He was on the rise, he was a star, he was a brave man. ... it’s a loss, a terrible loss, not just for the Fahy family but the fire department family.”

Fahy was pronounced dead at NewYork-Presbyterian/Allen Hospital, officials said.

His parents and his widow, who rushed separately to the hospital, later returned to his Yonkers home on a street lined Tuesday with police and fire vehicles.

A priest accompanied the parents as they walked, their heads down, into the house. Neighbor Jackie Sutton choked back tears after hearing the news.

“There’s nothing but kind words to be said about this man and his family,” she said. “He was just a very wonderful neighbor. He was a pleasant, pleasant man ... a model in every way.”

None of the other injuries were believed to be life-threatening. The death was the FDNY’s first in the line of duty in more than two years.

“When it exploded, 3 blocks away me and my son were in my apartment and the entire building shook,” Instagram user advocateofwordzw wrote.

Onesimo Guerrero, the owner of the residence, knew little about the blast or the current renters.

“It was a very bad accident,” he told the Daily News. “I didn’t know the people living there. It was a starter house.”

Asked about the drug lab, Guerrero replied, “Nobody told me anything about that.”

More than 100 firefighters eventually responded to the blast.

The last FDNY line of duty death came in July 2014, when Lt. Gordon Matthew Ambelas died while fighting a fire in a Brooklyn high rise.

MORE COLLATERAL DAMAGE

By Bob Walsh

A three-year old girl was just murdered in the crime-ridden and gang-infested cesspool that is Stockton. She was in the back seat of a car being driven down the street in a not so wonderful part of town when some person or persons started throwing lead. The cops don’t believe the parents, who were in the car, were the intended targets and the little girl certainly wasn’t. She is however just as dead as if she was.

The neighbors are all horrified and outraged. They even provided the cops with a vague, general description of the car they believe the shots came from. At least one parked car and at least one home was also shot up a bit in the process.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Such shootings are quite common in black neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Houston, etc., but since they don't involve cops shooting blacks, Black Lives Matter shows no concern.

EX-LAPD SERGEANT DEFENDS HIMSELF AGAINST ETHICS CHARGE OVER CONTROVERSIAL STOP OF ‘DJANGO UNCHAINED’ ACTRESS

Actress Daniele Watts had accused Los Angeles police officers of mistreating her because she is black

By Kate Mather

Los Angeles Times
September 26, 2016

The long-running saga involving a Los Angeles police sergeant and an actress from “Django Unchained” wound its way into a downtown courtroom Monday, where a judge heard arguments over whether that sergeant violated city ethics rules by leaking a recording of the controversial stop to the media.

Monday’s hearing marked the latest in the Los Angeles Ethics Commission’s action against now-retired Sgt. Jim Parker, a highly unusual case that has been closely watched within the L.A. Police Department.

No one questions whether Parker released the recording — he’s admitted that in interviews with reporters, at a Police Commission meeting and again while testifying Monday. Instead, the case hinges on whether that recording was confidential and thus, whether Parker violated city rules by making it public.

Ethics officials allege he did just that, accusing Parker of unlawfully sharing confidential information without authorization and doing so to “create a private advantage for himself.”

Sergio Perez, the Ethics Commission’s director of enforcement, accused Parker of releasing the tape because he faced criticism over the encounter. City employees, he said, shouldn’t be allowed to “disclose whatever information they’d like for whatever reason they’d like.”

“By releasing that tape, Mr. Parker violated law,” Perez said. “Mr. Parker knows that it was wrong.”

Parker’s attorney, Larry Hanna, insisted that the tape wasn’t confidential and that his client was being unfairly targeted for defending himself. Hanna pointed to other LAPD officers who aired similar recordings in small claims court or on national television — including “Judge Judy” — without being punished.

“Officers have been doing this for years,” Hanna said.

If the administrative law judge overseeing the case, Samuel D. Reyes, decides Parker violated the ethics rules, the retired sergeant faces a fine of up to $10,000.

The case stems from a headline-grabbing stop Parker made in September 2014, when he responded to a report of a couple having sex in a car parked near a Studio City talent agency. There, he found actress Daniele Watts and her boyfriend, Brian James Lucas, who police say matched the description of the couple involved.

When Parker asked for their identification, police said, Watts refused and walked away. She was handcuffed down the street by two other officers, but released after her boyfriend handed police her ID.

The story quickly gained national attention after the couple publicly complained about the way Watts was treated. Lucas wrote on Facebook that police acted as though the couple had been engaged in prostitution because he is white and Watts is black.

The LAPD opened an internal affairs inquiry into the allegations. Parker defended his actions and released a 24-minute audio recording of the encounter, captured on a personal recorder he kept in his pocket.

The recording quieted some of the criticism levied against Parker and the LAPD, and prompted some backlash against the couple’s comments. Watts and Lucas later pleaded no contest to disturbing the peace and were ordered to write apology letters to the officers and citizens who reported them.

Parker was accused of insubordination for speaking to the media about the incident without the department’s permission, he said. He was ordered to attend a disciplinary hearing but retired instead, ending his 26-year career with the LAPD.

In November, the Ethics Commission announced its accusations against Parker.

On Monday, much of the discussion focused on LAPD policies and directives, which both Perez and Hanna used to try to make their point. Parker again defended his decision to release the tape, saying he was trying to quell accusations that he was racist.

A handful of LAPD officers also took the stand, including a captain who oversees internal investigations who said he believed recordings from an officer’s personal device are considered confidential information. The president and a director with the union that represents rank-and-file officers also testified, saying they had publicly aired personal recordings.

Craig Lally, the union’s president, told the judge that he once gave a tape to journalist Diane Sawyer. The recording was of a conversation Lally had with Nicole Brown Simpson after responding to a call at her Bundy Drive home, six months before she was killed.

“Did anybody from the Ethics Commission come and knock on your door and say, ‘Shame on you?’ ” Hanna asked.

“No,” Lally replied.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sgt. Parker’s release of the audio would never have been questioned were it not for the fact that she was an actress in the highly acclaimed film “Django Unchained.” Parker was just trying to defend himself after Watts went public with her racism accusation and for that he got fucked over by LAPD.

Here is part of that recording:

WATTS: "Do you know how many times I've been called, the cops have been called just for being black? Just because we're black and he's white? I'm just being really honest, sir."

PARKER: "Who brought up the race card?"

WATTS: "I'm bringing it up."

PARKER: "I said nothing about you being black."

The judge ordered Watts and her boyfriend to send a letter of apology to Parker. The letter they sent was declared insincere by the judge. A revised letter was also declared insincere, bu the judge did not order them to compose a third apology. .

WHY BACKPAGE.COM ESCORT ADS CONTINUE … IN SPITE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT COMPLAINTS

Backpage.com and other websites that host ads by pimps for the services of their girls, remain out of reach by the police, protected by federal law and the First Amendment

By Brian Rokos

The Press-Enterprise
September 25, 2016

Five years after the National Association of Attorneys General urged classified advertisement website Backpage.com to remove its “escort” listings, law enforcement officials appear no closer to realizing their goal of eliminating what they consider thinly disguised solicitations for prostitution.

Since the letter signed by all 50 attorneys general was sent to Backpage, there have been some successes in prosecuting the pimps that place the ads, which dance around the edges of the law by withholding most mentions of price for “candy,” “massages,” and “service.”

Just last week, the San Bernardino County Human Trafficking Task Force arrested Marquell Deante “Kell the King” Stewart, who investigators said forced juvenile girls to work for him and advertised their availability on Backpage. In August, detectives said they broke up a ring trafficking enslaved Chinese nationals that operated in nine counties, including San Bernardino and Riverside, and advertised on Backpage.

But the big prizes, Backpage.com and other websites that host the ads, remain out of reach, protected by federal law and the First Amendment.

“They are a tool for human traffickers,” San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos said. “We have seen the ongoing victimization of those being trafficked for sex in San Bernardino County and across the country.”

Liz McDougall, Backpage’s general counsel, disagrees. She says the company is on firm legal ground and works hard to report abuses of the website.

Still, law enforcement officials are keeping their noses to the keyboard. On Sept. 28, Ramos, president of the National District Attorneys Association, will be one of the opening speakers at an international human trafficking summit in Honolulu.

Ramos said he plans to discuss successes his office has had fighting human trafficking — suppression, victims’ rights, Stop the John and intervention — and the next steps that should be taken with legislation.

“To me that is really just a crime that is so easy to access for both the john and the traffickers,” Ramos said.

Protected speech

Any legislative action would likely involve Congress attempting to amend the Communications Decency Act, an effort that would be sure to touch off a constitutional fight, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.

A court ruling in March strengthened Backpage’s legal position.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against Backpage brought by three women who had appeared in escort ads posted by their pimps. The judges ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act prohibits treating an online service provider such as Backpage “as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Chemerinsky said the ruling that puts the onus on the advertiser to comply with anti-prostitution laws means “it’s going to be very difficult to stop things like Backpage from being able to have the ads.”

With the First Amendment protecting commercial speech, Chemerinsky said, law enforcement’s best alternative would be for police to target individual pimps, one lurid listing at a time.

“There’s no doubt what it is for,” he said, while adding, “Just because some (ads) are illegal doesn’t mean they all are.”

Backpage must answer

Police department vice squads scour Backpage ads, looking for cases to pursue. They’ll look for photographs that appear to depict minors and contact the advertiser to set up an undercover sting. They go after the pimps. Police now largely consider the prostitutes to be victims and offer them services and the opportunity to redirect their lives.

Backpage has said it scans for 25,000 terms and code words linked to prostitution, sex trafficking and child exploitation, and it reports about 400 suspicious ads every month to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“I firmly believe what we are doing is part of the solution and in the best interest for the victims,” McDougall said.

Backpage will have to prove that point after the U.S. Supreme Court this month refused to block a congressional subpoena seeking documents on how Backpage screens ads for human trafficking. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had sought the documents as part of its investigation into human trafficking over the internet.

McDougall, meanwhile, drew a distinction between the criticism from elected officials such as district attorneys and attorneys general, and what she said is support from front-line police who combat human trafficking.

“This has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with victims,” said Ramos, who has announced plans to run for state Attorney General in 2018.

San Bernardino police vice Detective Kim Hernandez praised Backpage, to a point.

She said Backpage is responsive to requests for records on those who purchase escort ads

“In that way that’s positive,” Hernandez said. “But I think that they could do better as an organization to combat human trafficking if they didn’t allow the escort ads at all.”

Hernandez said the ads are deceptive, sometimes showing photographs of an adult when the person advertised is a minor. And sometimes a minor is shown.

“It’s shocking because they (customers) can see how young they are in the photographs,” she said.

Asked if she is hopeful about her mission, Hernandez said: “My biggest sense of hopefulness is that people are becoming more educated about human trafficking. My hopefulness comes from increasing sentencing requirements.”

GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND HILLARY’S FAKE CONSERVATIVES

Bush gave us the Clintons. And now the Clintons may end the Bush legacy

By Daniel Greenfield

FRONTPAGE Magazine
September 22, 2016

Ronald Reagan’s worst mistake was named George H.W. Bush. Bush was the price that Reagan paid for the support of fake conservatives.

And the price ended up being his legacy.

Reagan had never felt good about naming Bush as his second, worrying about “turning the country over to him.” And he was right to worry. Once in office, Bush disavowed Reagan’s economic policies, which he had always hated, got deep into bed with the Saudis with disastrous results, and lost a winnable election to Bill Clinton. Reagan had handed Bush victory and Bush had brought Republicans utter defeat.

Bush was the ultimate political insider, with shaky popular appeal, but impeccable political connections. Loyal to party, rather than principles, he was trusted by the establishment in sensitive positions. His final task was to undermine the Reagan Revolution. It’s unsurprising to hear that he will vote for Hillary.

George H.W. Bush ran against Reagan as a left-leaning Republican. In Congress he had backed a plethora of destructive leftist programs. On his way to the White House, he was for abortion and the ERA and the FHA. Described by his wife as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, he failed to live up to even that low bar in the White House.

Past party labels, George H.W. Bush has a great deal in common with Hillary Clinton. Both of them emphasize social welfare in domestic policy and Muslim appeasement in foreign policy. They both view the role of government as that of patron rather than representative. They see political leaders as wiser than the people they serve. They despise “religious fundamentalism” of the non-Islamic kind, hate Israel, cheer Planned Parenthood and want to fight as many wars for the Saudis as they can manage.

Bush is not unique in that regard. The latest Bush incarnation, Jeb, ran on that same noblesse oblige of an unwanted elite lecturing taxpayers on their obligations to the Democratic Party’s voter base. Bush I had no interest in what the people in his district thought of his social welfare votes at their expense. But this philanthropic contempt runs through much of the fake conservative class which incessantly lectures conservatives on the virtues of illegal immigration, freeing drug dealers and social welfare.

Abroad, the fake conservative believes in international law and exporting democracy as fervently as Hillary. He is the sort of fellow who calls the Muslim Brotherhood moderate, seeks a “two state solution” to divide up Israel between Jews and Muslim terrorists and believes that terrorism can be defeated by meeting the demands of the populations that support terrorism in some other way.

If this sounds a lot like the Democratic Party’s program, that’s because it is. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren all used to be Republicans. The difference between them and some of the Bush loyalists who are now backing Hillary is that they at least told the truth about leaving the GOP.

The GOP has been steadily moving to the right to the profound discomfort of its remaining cohort of left-wingers who have never been more thoroughly out of touch with their party’s base than they are now.

It hasn’t been a steady transition.

Every time a Reagan rises, a Bush is there to undermine him. Every conservative victory is followed by a careful program to isolate, water down and destroy that victory.

The Tea Party is only the latest incarnation of the conservative movement to get the treatment.

Hillary’s appeal to fake conservatives has produced defections that are statistically insignificant on a national scale, but highly notable within the hothouse world of the political establishment. Bush is the highest profile name, but countless Bush cronies like Brent Scowcroft, Richard Armitage, Carlos Gutierrez, Tony Fratto, Henry Paulson, Sally Bradshaw have been more open in their support for Hillary.

It’s tempting to dismiss the Bushites as sore losers mad about Jeb’s defeat, but it’s bigger than that.

Hillarystan is swelling with Bush loyalists defecting to a friendlier country where they still believe that illegal migration is an act of love, that big government is the answer and democracy needs exporting.

This is a primal battle between two worldviews in the GOP. One believes in big government at home and abroad. The other prefers self-reliance. The Bush-Hillary consensus is invested in the importance of government infrastructure. It believes that government is the most important institution in human affairs and that its expansion, domestically and internationally, is both inevitable and virtuous.

And that it is our mission to solve domestic and international problems through government power.

This is the worldview that the rise of Trump threatens and disrupts. Fake conservatives believe that they are protecting America by supporting Hillary over Trump. Unfortunately they have defined America to mean the policy infrastructure of government rather than the people, the history and the nation.

This is a struggle between individualism and technocracy, between national interests and international law, between the community and the government.

And George H.W. Bush has more in common with Hillary in this struggle just as he did with Carter.

The GOP has long been burdened with privileged politicians who pay lip service to conservative virtues while dreading the thought of actually implementing them. George H.W. Bush has a long history of championing left-wing policies before flipping to conservative ones when it was politically convenient.

When Reagan picked Bush, the latter changed his colors, but he never changed his beliefs. And once he had his chance, he wrecked Reagan’s legacy. And this has been the left-wing Republican pattern all along.

The defections to Hillarystan have exposed men and women who held positions of great power in the GOP without ever being committed to conservative values and ideals. Their treason is helping to pave the way for a newer and cleaner party based on ideals rather than on political allegiances.

This is the twilight of the left-wing Republican. Members of the establishment are self-deporting themselves from the GOP by making it clear that they have more in common with Hillary Clinton than with their own base. What was an open secret in certain circles is no longer a secret at all.

Each generation the influence of left-wing Republicans has waned. Where Reagan had to fight a difficult and uphill battle against a leftist establishment that controlled the high ground, the remainder of their ilk are abandoning the party on their own. That is a good development for the GOP and for America.

George H.W. Bush gave us the Clintons. And now the Clintons may end the Bush legacy.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

TOMMY GUN-FIRING LAWYER PERMANENTLY DISBARRED BY HOUSTON COPS

Houston lawyer Nathan Desal, wearing a Nazi uniform complete with swastikas and using a tommy gun, wounds nine before being perforated by the cops

Nathan Desal, a Houston lawyer, had some serious issues with other members of his law firm. About 6:30 Monday morning, Nate began to take his frustrations out on his neighborhood which borders on the urb of West University Place. Using a Tommy gun with a straight magazine – as opposed to a 50-round drum magazine – and wearing a WW2 Nazi uniform complete with swastikas, Nate opened fire, shooting at everything in sight on a strip shopping center parking lot and at cars passing by on the streets.

At one point a neighbor looking out of her apartment window, observed Nate standing by his Porsche Boxster and calmly reloading his gun.

An army of cops from Houston, West University Place and Bellaire descended on the scene. Nate engaged them in a gun battle. The cops won, so perforating him that he was permanently disbarred.

Nate wounded nine people, one critically and another seriously. Several other people narrowly escaped being wounded or killed when the cars they were driving were hit by Nate’s random gunfire.

When it was all over the FBI and the ATF showed up. A search of the Boxster turned up more weapons and a search of Nate’s nearby condo turned up more Nazi regalia and memorabilia.

Ach du lieber! Der Führer would have been proud. And because the late Nate used their favorite gun - the Thompson sub machinegun – so would Bonnie and Clyde.

IT IS NOW LEGAL TO SMASH CAR WINDOWS IN CALIFORNIA ….. SOMETIMES

By Bob Walsh

Jerry Brown just signed a bill into law in the formerly great state of California that relieves a person of both civil and criminal liability for smashing car windows...under certain circumstances.

The law, sponsored by the SPCA, permits a person to break into a car to rescue a small furry animal that appears to be in distress due to heat due to being locked in a car. The vandal must have previously contacted the authorities, reasonably determined that the animal in question can not wait for the authorities to arrive and must hang around for the ultimate arrival of the authorities.

Strangely this law does not apply to the rescue of humans. I admit to also being surprised that this occurs sufficiently often that a whole new law is required to deal with it.

IT’S ALL JUNK SCIENCE

If you are ever asked to be interviewed by the police in reference to a crime they suspect you might have committed, shut your mouth!

By Harry Dunne

A lot of convictions are brought about because a police investigator didn't like the way a suspect looked, talked, fidgeted or argued during an interrogation. Don't fall for the term interview or just talk to us so we can clear you. It's all an interrogation. You may be labeled as refused to cooperate but that's all. The 5th Amendment gives you the right not to incriminate yourself.

When an investigator goes to the grand jury or trial, these key phrases like these may eventually come out:

Based on my many years of experience...

The suspect was uncooperative.

He was very nervous during our interview.

He showed signs of deception.

His reaction and or demeanor when told about the crime was not typical because of a lack of emotion.

He seemed detached from the conversation.

He fit the general description of the actor.

He owns a weapon similar to the one used in the crime.

He has no alibi.


Based on some or all the above, innocent people have been convicted of a crime.
It's all Junk Science. Like I have said all along, if you are ever asked to be interviewed by the police in reference to a crime they suspect you might have committed, shut your mouth!

The new thing is voice analysis. So if you speak, some junk science analyst will testify about the inflection in your voice showing stress on a meter. There is no known base line to compare it to. Just like a polygraph, the operator determines who is lying.

Police Investigators are evaluated on productivity. This includes arrests and cases cleared. If an investigator targets you as a suspect chances are he may develop tunnel vision on you. Other suspects and evidence will sometimes be ignored because of his gut feeling backed by many years of experience. Get It?

ASSURANCES FOR U.S. SUPPORT OF ISRAEL GIVEN TO NETANYAHU IN SEPARATE MEETINGS WITH TRUMP AND CLINTON

Trump acknowledged that “Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish People for over 3,000 years” and promised Netanyahu that his administration would “finally accept the long-standing Congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.”

By David M Jackson

USA TODAY
September 25, 2016

A day before their first debate, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in a little global diplomacy courtesy of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While both presidential candidates pledged to guarantee Israel's security during separate meetings with Netanyahu in New York City, each stressed different issues in post-meeting statements: Trump used his session to discuss security fencing — echoing his call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — while Clinton emphasized the need for a two-state agreement involving the Palestinian Authority.

Clinton, a former secretary of State, "reaffirmed her unwavering commitment to the U.S.-Israel relationship and her plan to take our partnership to the next level," said a statement issued by her campaign after the evening meeting with Netanyahu.

In a separate statement issued after a morning meeting at Trump Tower, the Republican campaign said that "Mr. Trump and the Prime Minister discussed the special relationship between America and Israel and the unbreakable bond between the two countries."

Clinton's statement said she expressed continued support for the Iran nuclear deal, which both Netanyahu and Trump have criticized. It added that Clinton said she would work to block Iran's support for terrorism in the region, and vowed to fight the Islamic State and other extremist groups that threaten Israel.

The Democratic presidential nominee also "stressed her commitment to countering attempts to de-legitimize Israel," the statement said, "including through the BDS movement" that supports economic boycotts of Israel over the Palestinian issue.

The former secretary of State "reaffirmed her commitment to work toward a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiated directly by the parties that guarantees Israel’s future as a secure and democratic Jewish state with recognized borders and provides the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity," said the Clinton campaign statement.

It added that Clinton opposes "any attempt by outside parties to impose a solution, including by the UN Security Council."

After his meeting with Netanyahu, Trump said his administration would "finally accept the long-standing Congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel," according to his campaign statement.

As for the peace process in general, the campaign said that Trump and Netanyahu agreed that "the Israeli people want a just and lasting peace with their neighbors, but that peace will only come when the Palestinians renounce hatred and violence and accept Israel as a Jewish State."

The two men also discussed their mutual opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement and support for the battle against the Islamic State, the Trump campaign said, as well as cybersecurity, a high-tech economy, missile defense and efforts to defeat terrorism in general.

Another topic: An anti-migration wall along the lines of the one Trump has proposed for the U.S.-Mexican border.

"Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed at length Israel's successful experience with a security fence that helped secure its borders," the Trump campaign said.

GEORGIA WALMART WORKERS REFUSE TO BAKE OFFICER A CAKE FOR HIS RETIREMENT PARTY

By Katherine Rodriguez

Breitbart
September 25, 2016

Three Walmart workers in Georgia refused to bake a police officer a cake for his retirement party because they said it was racist.

“I was so shocked,” the police officer’s daughter, who asked that her name not be divulged, said to Todd Starnes. “I didn’t know what to do or say or anything. I was trying not to lose my temper or make a scene.”

The police officer’s daughter went to the McDonough-area Walmart on Sept. 22 to order a flag design on a cake for her father’s retirement party from the police force after 25 years of service.

When she showed bakers a picture of the police officer’s flag design that she wanted on the cake, one of the bakers said that the design was racist and that none of the bakers felt comfortable making that design on the cake.

The officer’s daughter suggested another design for the cake, a chocolate frosted cake with a thin blue line, when the baker rejected that idea too.

“She said, ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing this,’” the police officer’s daughter said. “I asked her, ‘Is there something wrong with cops?’”

She left after a third time of being rejected and said she would find another bakery.

A friend of the family posted about the incident on Facebook when the Walmart store manager called the police officer’s wife and daughter to apologize.

“Our goal is to always take care of customers,” a spokesperson for Walmart told Todd Starnes. “But, sometimes we misstep. We’re glad we were able to connect with the family to apologize and make this right.”

“He said he was so sorry,” the daughter said. “He offered to make the cake free of charge and he gave me a $50 gift card.”

The manager wound up decorating the cake himself, since the cake decorators refused to do it.

The daughter was not impressed with how the design came out, and lamented about how the bakers wouldn’t make a cake for a police officer.

“It irritates me that in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Walmart was looted and the cops were protecting them,” she said. “And you can’t make a cake for the people who are protecting you?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: You gotta remember that this is in the heart of Dixie. Maybe if police uniforms were gray instead of blue, them diehard Confederates would have welcomed making that cake.

WHAT IF ALL THE BLACKS SUDDENLY LEFT AMERICA?

Blacks make up only 13.3 percent of the total U.S. population, but if they suddenly disappeared:

Amount of people in poverty would drop - 34%,

The prison population would go down by - 37%,

Welfare recipients would go down by 42%,

Gang members would go down by 53%

Chlamydia cases would go down -- 54%,

Homelessness would go down - - 57%

Syphilis would go down - - - 58%.

AIDS & HIV would go down by - - 65%,

Gonorrhea would go down - - - 69%,

Average ACT scores would go UP - 5.5 points.

Average IQ would go UP - - 7.4 points, putting us 3rd in the world tied with Japan,

Average SAT scores would go UP almost - - - - - 100 points,

The average income for Americans would go UP over $20,000 a year.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m not sure those percentages and points are correct, but the downs and ups would certainly occur in each category.

Now, is that due to blacks being oppressed as Colin Kaepernick claims? Certainly not! It’s due largely to the fact that many blacks are uneducated, and that can be partly attributed to socio-economic conditions and discrimination.

Monday, September 26, 2016

COLIN KAEPERNICK CAN CALL POLICE ‘MURDERERS’ AND DISRESPECT THE FLAG, BUT A NORTH CAROLINA TEACHER CANNOT STEP ON THE FLAG

Fayetteville high school history teacher Lee Francis is suspended for 10 days without pay for stomping on the U.S. flag during a lesson on First Amendment rights

Lee Francis teaches history and civics at Massey Hill Classical High School in Fayetteville, N.C. Recently, as part of a lesson on First Amendment rights, Francis took a U.S. flag and stomped on it.

The flag stomping outraged many members of the community. Cumberland County Schools Superintendent Dr. Frank Till announced Friday that Francis was being disciplined for inappropriate conduct.

On Wednesday, Francis told ABC 11that he had been suspended for 10 days without pay. He explained he was just trying to teach his students about their First Amendment rights when he stomped on a flag in his history class. He emphasized: "I have the utmost respect for our men and women in the military. I have the utmost respect for the symbols that makes this country great. I also have respect for the laws and rights and privileges that people need to know they have."

I believe the suspension meted out to Lee Francis was adequate. It served to illustrate that an employer can discipline his employee – Kaepernick is an employee of the 49ers and the NFL – for disrespecting the flag on the job, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that burning the flag is protected speech under the First Amendment.

I might add the students also learned that free speech can have consequences.

Now compare the swift and harsh discipline dished out to Francis by the school superintendent to the NFL’s response to Kaepernick’s public misconduct. Instead of suspending Colin Kaepernick for telling the media that the police are “murderers” and for refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem, his coach and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell praised the spoiled asshole.

HILLARY COULD DRAG US ALL INTO A CATASTROPHIC WAR

Hillary’s militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying and drag us into war, you may rely upon it

By Peter Hitchens

Daily Mail
September 24, 2016

MOSCOW, Idaho -- Here in my favorite American small town, I detect a strange, ominous feeling of approaching danger. Something has gone wrong with the USA.

I first came to Moscow, Idaho, eight years ago when the great Obama frenzy was at its unhinged peak. This is a divided place, traditional rural conservatives living alongside a Left-wing university campus, but in 2008 they coped with their deep divisions in the usual way.

People disagreed, but they did it politely and openly, and were ready to accept the result even if they did not like it. Almost every front lawn had its partisan placard.

Now politics has gone underground in an almost sinister way. I searched the town’s pleasant suburbs for a Trump or Clinton poster and found none, only a single defiant declaration of support for America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Left-winger Bernie Sanders, who long ago quit the race.

Republican headquarters in Main Street until recently contained posters supporting lots of the party’s candidates for local office, but none at all for Donald Trump. Last week they finally managed to mention his name, but you have to look carefully for it in their window.

Democrat HQ, almost directly opposite, is nearly as coy about Hillary Clinton.

In private conversations (the only sort where people will say what they really think), you find out what this means. Democrats are holding their noses over Hillary because they despise her and wish she wasn’t their candidate.

But many Republicans are stifling their genuine enthusiasm for Trump, because – in small towns like this – they don’t want to annoy or alienate neighbours who may also be customers, clients, patients or employers.

Of course there are conservatives, usually serious Christians, who loathe and mistrust Donald Trump and see him for what he is – a balloon of noise and bluster which will one day burst in a terrible explosion of disappointment and regret.

But they have been swept aside by the great carnival of resentment and revenge which has carried Trump past all the obstacles and restraints that are supposed to prevent such people getting near real power. For Trump is the anti-Obama – emotional, irrational, a spasm.

Those who had to sit, grinding their teeth, through all the long-years of Obama-worship, now hope for their own matching hour of gloating.

And we really ought to recognise that rejoicing over the woes of your enemies is one of the greatest sinful pleasures in life. Few will turn down the chance.

I can see no good outcome of this. Adversarial politics are a good thing, but only if both sides are ultimately willing to concede that their rivals are entitled to win from time to time. But that attitude seems to have gone. Now the rule is that the winner takes all, and hopes to keep it if he (or she) can.

A narrow defeat for Trump will poison the republic. Millions of his supporters will immediately claim fraud at the polls, and nothing will convince them otherwise. The bitterness of the Florida ‘hanging chad’ episode of 2000 will seem like brotherly love compared with that fury.

A victory for Trump – decisive or narrow – will give astonishing powers to a lonely, inexperienced, ill-educated old man who (I suspect) is increasingly terrified of winning a prize he never really intended or expected to obtain.

A clear victory for Hillary Clinton would create even greater problems. Educated, informed people here believe that there are serious doubts about her health. Even if they are wrong, her militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying.

I lived through the Cold War and never believed we were in real danger. But I genuinely tremble at the thought of Mrs Clinton in the White House. She appears to have learned nothing from the failed interventions of the past 30 years, and scorns Barack Obama’s praiseworthy motto: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’

She will do stupid stuff, and drag us into it, you may rely upon it.

How odd it is, to hear on the air the faint but insistent sound of coming war, here in this place of sweet, small hills, rich soil and wistful, mountainous horizons.

Men came here in search of what we all really desire, to be left alone to get on with the really important aims of life, to build a home and raise a family, to see the fruits of their labour, to believe what they wish to believe.

I cannot quite work out how the good, sane impulse that gave birth to the USA could possibly have led us to this nightmare choice between two equally horrible outcomes.

I shall just have to carry on hoping that I am wrong.

$4,000 POT DEAL GONE BAD BETWEEN NEW YORK SCIENCE TEACHER AND 16-YEAR-OLD STUDENT

Bronx charter school teacher accused of beating, robbing student who pocketed his weed money allegedly threatened teen’s mom with rape ‘every day after work’

By Megan Cerullo, Thomas Tracy and Larry McShane

New York Daily News
September 25, 2016

This Bronx teacher had no class.

Charter school instructor Kevin Pope, outraged when a student robbed him of $4,000 in drug money, beat the teen senseless and threatened to have his mother raped, authorities charged Saturday.

“You better get my money,” the teacher snapped at the battered 16-year-old after the Wednesday beatdown, according to court papers. “You know where I work.”

Pope, 48, repeatedly punched the boy in the face, knocking him backward into the glass window of a local business before the teen collapsed on the sidewalk, a criminal complaint charged.

“Do you want to die?” Pope allegedly shouted at the teen. “You want to steal from me? I should break your arm ... I should get someone to rape your mom every day after work.”

The victim needed three staples to close several deep wounds on the back of his head after the beating near the John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy in Hunts Point, according to the complaint.

The instructor’s attack on the teen was captured on surveillance video, Assistant District Attorney Gerard Donahue said.

Pope was released without bail Saturday after a Bronx hearing where his lawyer bizarrely claimed the student had simply stolen the science teacher’s briefcase — which was filled with $5,000 in cash.

Police sources indicated the youth made off with the cash in a June drug deal gone bad. And a criminal complaint charged that Pope robbed the 16-year-old student of a gold chain, iPhone and wallet during the Wednesday assault.

Pope, per his lawyer’s instructions, said nothing as he left the courtroom. The instructor was charged with assault, grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and robbery, and Judge Harold Adler issued orders of protection requiring Pope to steer clear of the victim and his mom.

Bronx Judge Harold Adler took a skeptical view of defense attorney Japel Filiaci’s claim that Pope was robbed while riding a city bus with all that cash.

When Adler asked what Pope was doing with that much money on mass transit, Filiaci said she never asked.

“He took the money out, maybe to transfer it,” the lawyer replied.

The extracurricular drama began three months ago, when the teen told the teacher he had a drug connection in Manhattan, police sources said.

Pope agreed to pay $4,000 for roughly a pound of weed, possibly in hopes of peddling the pot — and the pair went to meet with the dealer, according to sources.

But the transaction collapsed when the connection demanded $7,000 — and the student walked away with Pope’s cash.

The teacher finally approached the teen on Wednesday to settle the debt.

I’LL BET HE ASKED FOR THE POLICE DISCOUNT

Houston cop caught in prostitution sting run by his own department

Some cops find it harder to keep their peckers holstered than to keep their guns holstered.

It’s gotta be embarrassing to get caught trying to fuck a street walker who is an undercover officer from your own department.

Since he was going to pay $200, it is obvious he did not get the usual 50 percent police discount cops get at fast food joints and other retail establishments.

Here is a brief account of soon to be ex-officer Jermaine Tyree Owens.

HPD OFFICER ARRESTED IN PROSTITUTION STING

By Ashlynn Turner

Click 2 Houston
September 22, 2016

HOUSTON - A Houston police officer was caught offering money to engage in sexual acts with an undercover officer, according to court documents.

Jermaine Tyree Owens, was arrested for agreeing to have sexual intercourse with an undercover officer at a Motel 6 around 7:25 p.m. Sept. 21, court documents said.

Owens offered to pay an undercover officer $200 to have both oral and straight sex with him, according to reports.

He was arrested on the spot.

Owen is a 13-year veteran of the Houston Police department assigned to the west side patrol, according to police.

Police said he has been relieved of duty with pay pending the outcome of the investigation.

Owens is set to make his first court appearance on Sept. 29 for the charges of soliciting prostitution.

TEXAS IS AHEAD OF THE FEDS WHEN IT COMES TO FORENSIC SCIENCE IN COURTROOMS

By Meagan Flynn

Houston Press
September 21, 2016

President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has a pretty clear-cut message to prosecutors across America: Stop convicting people based on junk science.

On Tuesday, the advisers released a scathing review of various forensic "science" practices that have, for some time, remained kosher in courtrooms — despite the serious lack of evidence proving their scientific validity.

Of the several methods reviewed, the only one the experts deemed trustworthy was your basic DNA testing, or analysis of simple mixtures of DNA when only two people's DNA is present. The other methods the council examined included bitemark analysis, complex DNA mixture analysis, footprint analysis like the kind you might see in some detective b-movie, microscopic hair analysis, firearms analysis and latent fingerprint analysis. And all of them were either in need of substantial improvement to be considered admissible in court or were considered basically useless.

Not necessarily a good look for criminal justice, especially when religious viewers of shows like CSI have been accustomed to trusting TV actors to catch the bad guys using these same fancy methods.

At least, however, there's some good news: Texas's own forensic science commission — which is not a common agency among all states — has already been studying these very issues in the past couple of years, and the White House findings mirror exactly what Texas experts have been saying.

"Texas has been really ahead of the curve in understanding that much of the pattern forensic evidence may be flawed," said William Press, vice chair of the council and a computer science and integrative biology professor at the University of Texas. "Texas is in a better position than most states to take the necessary steps to bring science into forensic science, and to make sure that we convict the right people."

The science and technology council's findings particularly line up with those of the forensic science commission on bitemark analysis, hair analysis and complex DNA mixture analysis.

The commission outright discredited bitemark analysis in April, recommending to all the state's prosecutors and judges to stop using it to secure convictions. The way it works is, forensic dentists examine a bite left on skin, for example, and compare it with a mold of a suspect's teeth. Forensic dentists have claimed for decades that the chance is slim to none that your bite marks are the same as anyone else's in the world — which is something both the president's advisers and the state forensic science commission have taken serious issue with.

As Tuesday's report notes: "Available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of the bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bite mark."

Here's how that plays out in a trial: A forensic dentist told a Dallas jury in Steven Chaney's murder trial that there was a "one in a million chance" that the bite mark found on a dead person's arm belonged to anyone but Chaney. Turns out, Chaney was wrongfully convicted — based primarily on this testimony. He spent 28 years behind bars before being released last fall. At the time, Texas prosecutors and experts had reached agreement that bite mark analysis was junk.

“I think pretty much everybody agrees that there is no scientific basis for a statistical probability associated with a bite mark,” Dr. Henry Kessler, chair of the Texas Forensic Science Commission’s subcommittee on bitemark analysis, told us in April.

Texas has also particularly led the way in navigating major issues with interpretation of complex DNA mixtures. Last year, new advancements in DNA technology led forensic science experts to conclude that lab technicians may have been wrongly interpreting DNA mixture results (for example, if multiple people's DNA was present in a rape case) in thousands of cases dating back to 1999. In Texas specifically, more than 25,000 cases may need to be retested — because whereas before those forensic experts may have told juries there was a "one in a billion" chance the DNA could belong to another person, now experts believe it could be more like one in 38.

Still, despite the strides made in identifying questionable forensic science methods, Press said that Obama's science and technology advisers have already received negative feedback from prosecutors about Tuesday's report, presumably unhappy that the council is making it harder for them to secure convictions.

"It struck us as a little bit shocking, because every time you convict the wrong person, then the actual person has gone free," Press said. "It's hard to see how prosecutors would want to convict the wrong person. I think it's just that the law is a very conservative system, and change is very slow. But we feel that, by now, the scientific evidence is absolutely clear."

EDITOR’S NOTE: Grits for Breakfast notes that “when one finds the need to append the word 'science' on a field - like forensic science, political science, military science, computer science, creation science, etc. - that the endeavor is thereby virtually guaranteed not to be science.”

Sunday, September 25, 2016

COLIN KAEPERNICK CAN CALL POLICE ‘MURDERERS’ AND DISRESPECT THE FLAG, BUT SEATTLE MARINERS CATCHER STEVE CLEVENGER CANNOT CALL BLM PROTESTERS ‘ANIMALS’, LAUGH AT THE CHARLOTTE SHOOTING, AND CALL OBAMA ‘PATHETIC’

For his tweets on social media, the Seattle Mariners have suspended Clevenger without pay for the rest of the baseball season

Another tweeter bite the dust for expressing his opinions on social media. On Thursday, Seattle Mariners Catcher Steve Clevenger posted the following tweets:

“Black people beating whites when a thug got shot holding a gun by a black officer haha shit cracks me up! Keep kneeling for the anthem”

“BLM is pathetic once again! Obama you are pathetic once again! Everyone involved should be locked behind bars like animals”


While I agree that BLM and Obama are pathetic, I certainly would not say “haha shit cracks me up” about the situation in Charlotte. Nor would I say to lock them up like animals. Clevenger was clearly out of line and his remarks are being construed as racist by those who are uber-sensitive to any derogatory statements about blacks.

Thus Clevenger joins scores of cops who’ve had their words on social media come back to chew apart their dumb asses.

I believe the Mariners were correct in suspending Clevenger without pay for the remaining 10 games of the season. Seattle is out of the playoffs. I suspect the Mariners will end up firing Clevenger.

Now compare the swift and harsh discipline dished out by the Mariners to the NFL’s response to Kaepernick’s public misconduct. Instead of suspending Colin Kaepernick for telling the media that the police are “murderers” and for refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem, his coach and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell praised the spoiled asshole.

CRUZ ENDORSES TRUMP

Does this mean they are now besties? Not a chance!

By Bob Walsh

Ted Cruz reversed himself and on Friday decided to go ahead and endorse Donald Trump. Does this mean they are now best buds? No. What it means is that Ted Cruz is still a relatively young man and is certainly going to be a candidate again for President. He is disliked enough by the mainstream Republicans as it is. If he can at least say he backed his party's nominee, even though he disliked the man and had been dissed by him, publically and repeatedly, it will help him down the road.

Will it help Trump? Somewhat, yes. Will it be significant. That depends. If it gets him 10,000 votes and he wins by 9,000, yes. Remember a few thousand votes in the right precincts in Florida would have made Al Gore president instead of Bush 43.

What it means is that Cruz has joined the "Hold your nose and vote for Trump" crowd. Trump might be a jerk but Hillary would be a disaster. Sometimes in real life there are no good choices. Sometimes you have to go with the least bad choice. Cruz has now signed on to that premise. Welcome Aboard.

POLICE SEX ABUSE CASE IS BAD NEWS FOR PRESIDENT ENRIQUE PENA NIETO OF MEXICO

A crackdown Pena Nieto ordered a decade ago when he was governor of Mexico State is under scrutiny

By Azam Ahmed

The New York Times
September 22, 2016

MEXICO CITY — International human rights officials are demanding an investigation into the brutal sexual assaults of 11 Mexican women during protests a decade ago — an inquiry that would take aim at President Enrique Peña Nieto, who was the governor in charge at the time of the attacks.

The demand is part of a multiyear examination by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights into abuses during a 2006 crackdown ordered by Mr. Peña Nieto on San Salvador Atenco, a town in Mexico State where demonstrators had taken over the central square. During the operations, which left two dead, more than 40 women were violently detained by the police, packed onto buses and sent to jail several hours away.

The case was brought by 11 women to the international commission, which found that the police tortured them sexually. The women — a mix of merchants, students and activists — were raped, beaten, penetrated with metal objects, robbed and humiliated, made to sing aloud to entertain the police. One was forced to perform oral sex on multiple officers. After the women were imprisoned, days passed before they were given proper medical examinations, the commission found.

“I have not overcome it, not even a little,” said one of the women, Maria Patricia Romero Hernández, weeping. “It is something that haunts me and you don’t survive. It stays with you.”

For Mr. Peña Nieto, the human rights commission’s call for an investigation is another blow to a presidency under siege. Corruption scandals and continued violence have already dragged his approval ratings to the lowest of any Mexican president in a quarter-century. His invitation of Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate reviled in Mexico for his statements critical of Mexican immigrants, plunged his administration even further into controversy.

The assaults are also a reminder of countless other cases in the country that remain unresolved, including the haunting disappearance of 43 college students two years ago. International officials contend that the investigation into that case was actively undermined by Mr. Peña Nieto’s government.

The president’s office noted that the commission did not accuse Mr. Peña Nieto of wrongdoing or explicitly name him as a target of the investigation into the sexual assaults. Beyond that, his office said, legal cases in Mexico that have thoroughly investigated the attacks have never held him responsible.

“There is no one who can point to an order permitting the abuse of force,” said Roberto Campa, the under secretary for human rights in the Mexican Interior Ministry.

But the international commission found Mexico’s efforts to investigate the abuse insufficient so far. Instead, it demanded a much more thorough inquiry to uncover responsibility across the entire chain of command, which would most likely make Mr. Peña Nieto part of the investigation because he ordered the crackdown.

It also called for disciplinary or criminal action against any authorities who contributed to the denial of justice for the women.

The commission delivered its findings last week to the Inter-American Court, an independent judiciary with legal authority over Mexico. If the court agrees with the commission, it can order Mexico to broaden its current inquiry into the case, a requirement that could force the state to investigate its own president.

The commission suggests that the state government under Mr. Peña Nieto had sought to minimize and even cover up the events. Perhaps the most lurid example is whom the government chose to prosecute: Rather than go after the police who committed the sexual torture, the state initially prosecuted the women instead. Five were imprisoned for a year or more, on charges like blocking traffic, detentions the commission found arbitrary.

Days after the episode, the state denied the accusations of the women, essentially calling them liars. Mr. Peña Nieto told a local newspaper at the time that it was a known tactic of radical groups to have women make accusations of sexual violence to discredit the government. Others in his administration made similar claims.

Since then, while the government has acknowledged the veracity of the accusations, not a single person has been convicted of any crime related to the assaults in Atenco. Most recently, five doctors charged with ignoring evidence of sexual abuse had their cases dismissed.

The case is an example of the lengths victims must go to in pursuit of justice in Mexico. The women endured more than 10 years of threats, intimidation and psychological trauma. They watched as men who assaulted them walked free.

But by refusing to drop the case, the women pushed it to an international level, making it a symbol of the broken rule of law in Mexico and the widespread impunity that ensures it never heals.

While it is unlikely that Mr. Peña Nieto’s government will conduct an investigation into whether he knew of or covered up the assaults, the admonition of an international body is a deep embarrassment for him.

Having been presented to the court, despite several attempts by the Mexican government to delay and derail it, the case offers a rare opportunity for accountability in a country where only a tiny percentage of crimes are ever solved. The women refused to settle the case for years, with legal assistance from the human rights organization Centro Prodh, turning down promises of free homes and scholarships. In interviews with all 11 victims, a fundamental desire emerged: a public reckoning of what happened to them and who ordered it.

The residual trauma of the assaults has marked each woman differently. For some, family and friends offered a way to recover, if not entirely, and move on with their lives. A few found ways to connect their struggle to the broader push for justice and rights in Mexico. But others found no such comfort, with time’s passage a useless salve.

“I could never tell my son and my father of the fact I was raped by not one but several policemen, because they would have gone mad,” Ms. Romero said. “I didn’t want to inflict even more pain on them. We had suffered enough.”

The assaults, prosecution, imprisonment and stigmatization borne of sexual violence would come to define the next 10 years for the women of Atenco. In interviews, they described their lives as split in two: the women they were before the episode, and who they became after.

Those in school at the time quit college and never returned. All struggled with intimacy. Mothers watched their children abandon them, frustrated and fearful of the endless campaign for justice. Fathers turned their backs on daughters, embarrassed by the abuse and the public fight that followed. Partners, too, moved on, unable to adapt to the trauma of a survivor of sexual assault.

“I made the conscious decision to survive, to be alive and well today, to feel pretty again, to love me and see me in the mirror and recognize the person I saw,” said Patricia Torres Linares, 33, who quit her studies for a political science degree after the assault. “It was that they stole from me, my way of being, of loving, of feeling. I was tender and sweet before, afterwards I became cold, and distant.”

For some, a sense of shame, even responsibility, for what happened clouded their relationships with others and their own sense of identity. Survival became their metric of success, a tangible progression to mark the days.

“It hurts to know that the Claudia of before Atenco is gone,” said Claudia Hernández Martínez, 33, who abandoned her studies at the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico after the assault. “Now, I am scared all the time. Scared of everything. Scared of going out on the streets, of expressing my own ideas, for people to know what happened in Atenco.”

“At the end of these 10 years, I wonder: What have I done in all this time?” she continued.

She paused, staring at the floor.

“Well, I guessed I just survived,” she said, wiping a stray tear. “And I think it’s understandable. It was understandable that I cried, that I thought about killing myself, that I cried so much, and that I am now here.”

The assaults coincided with the beginning of a challenging period in Mexican history: the start of the drug war.

Since 2006, more than 150,000 people have been killed and an additional 27,000 have vanished, disappeared without a trace. The violence comes at the hands of the cartels, who wield enormous influence in the country, and the government’s deadly response to it.

The case of Atenco, however, bears few of the complexities that accompany violence between armed groups. And yet justice in even the most basic form has been elusive.

Nearly two dozen individuals charged with abuse of authority have been acquitted at trial or on appeal, including an officer charged with forcing one of the victims to perform oral sex on him.

“That has been the hardest, most enraging part of this entire process,” said another of the women, Ana María Velasco Rodríguez, 43. “I was full of anger, thinking nothing happens, even when you find the guilty party, the very person who attacked you, they walk away free.”

In recent years, with the Inter-American Commission looking into the case, the government has renewed its efforts to pursue those involved. But officials have pursued low-level officers, either failing or refusing to investigate those higher up the chain of command. The most senior individual charged to date is the police commander who oversaw the use of the buses — where the abuse occurred — to transport the women to prison, though a judge recently found insufficient evidence to order his arrest.

While the government argues that it has gone after those responsible, after years of stagnation, the commission found its efforts both late and inadequate. Thirty-four low-level officers were on trial as of August, wending their way through a slow and unpredictable court process that has failed to appease the victims.

This April, almost exactly 10 years after the events of Atenco, Mr. Peña Nieto paid the town a visit. The event was covered widely in the local news media, including the speech Mr. Peña Nieto gave before a crowd of women and children.

Neither the president nor the local reports made a single mention of the protests, the deaths or the rapes.

Instead, the visit and its coverage focused on Children’s Day, and the president’s new initiative to spread preschool to all of the nation’s children.