Can we torch the South again, please?

Radley Balko spots a fantastic example of the typical Southern authority-loving, bigoted, small-minded hillbilly cracker wankery we've come to expect. I'll summarize, but do read the whole thing, wouldja?

Prentiss, Mississippi. Night after Christmas. An anonymous tip sends the police hunting down an alleged drug dealer. A SWAT team busts in the house on a "no knock" warrant, their minds focused on tearing ass.

Problem is, the house they're in is a duplex.

One of the cops, throwing caution to the wind, busts down a door & is met by gunfire. Apparently a lucky shot, it enters below his vest, killing him. The shooter? The scared owner of the duplex, who doesn't live in the side they had a warrant for, who fired out of fear for him & his daughter's life. Obviously the kind of response to be expected when you rip into someone's room in the middle of the night.

The shooter? Black. The dead cop? Not only white, but the son of the town's chief of police. As if the man wasn't already behind the 8-ball...

Did the cops find any drugs? No. Well, they claimed to have found the slightest piece of a joint later, but 1) evidence brought up this long afterwards is a red-flag for tampering, & 2) the response was disproportionate anyway even if there was a joint there. They approached this as if they were encountering Tony freakin Montana.

Long story short, an overwhelmingly white jury convicted the man & sentenced him to get the needle. Not because they felt he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but because they didn't like his lawyer & felt he was a spoiled brat.


This deserves outrage, and I'm talking tons. Any kind of activist group you could possibly think of that would have a stake in something like this, flood their goddamn inbox until they get this man back to freedom.

People that violate your liberty deserve to be shot, I could care less if they're wearing a badge. Call it "extreme" all you want, understanding takes too long, and in the environment this guy was in it's a ticket to a body bag. They would've killed him AND his daughter if he hadn't pulled the trigger, cops have done that before. There is no logical reason for cops to be able to get away with murder while civilians get locked up for exercising their RIGHT to defend themselves against aggression.

The bias of the mind

U.S. attention spans lost.

I remember a study done not too long ago showing that most people that read the paper don't read the entire articles in the important sections. For example, if Joe Average reads the Washington Post, he probably flipped to the sports section right after this

The House passed three separate tax cuts yesterday and plans to approve a fourth today, trimming the federal revenue by $94.5 billion over five years -- nearly double the budget savings that Republicans muscled through the House last month.

GOP leaders portray the tax bills -- for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, affluent investors, U.S. troops serving in Iraq and taxpayers who otherwise would be hit by the alternative minimum tax -- as vital to keeping the economy rolling.

"Our economic policies have done the trick," said Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio). "We are in the middle of one of the strongest economies this country has ever seen."

Now, on one note they actually nail it: rarely do you see it mentioned that spending is never cut enough to actually make a dent in the deficit, if it is even in the real world realm of a "cut". However, the way this is worded one could easily think that this was a straight party-line vote, that the GOP wanted this while the Dems were being "responsible" (as if one could only do so by avoiding tax cuts religiously...ha!).

Read further:

The three measures passed overwhelmingly, with virtually all Democrats voting with Republicans, and with hardly a mention of their impact on the deficit, which is projected to reach $331 billion in fiscal 2006 and remain above $300 billion a year through the end of the decade, when most of Bush's tax cuts are set to expire. The Senate has already passed similar measures, indicating that all the measures are likely to become law.

The House voted 414 to 4 to spare 17 million individuals and families from paying the alternative minimum tax next year. Democratic Reps. Jerry F. Costello (Ill.), Collin C. Peterson (Minn.), Martin O. Sabo (Minn.) and Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (Va.) voted against the measure.

In a highly partisan atmosphere, tax cutting without regard to the growing federal debt appears to be one area that both parties can agree on, said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "Everybody's losing credibility right now," she said. (emphasis mine)

No surprise that the AMT delay wasn't even a close one, enough people are genuinely concerned about that that to do nothing would've pissed us off. Clearly not far enough, but this is D.C. we're talking about, looking good is better than truly doing good.

Far as I'm concerned, if you're too lazy to read past the first paragraph or so, then you shouldn't even bother reading the paper at all.

"That's nice, but who cares?"

He might as well be president of Iraq:

President Bush offered a mildly upbeat assessment of Iraq's economic reconstruction Wednesday, saying the country is making slow progress against a host of big problems.

Speaking with new candor about the difficulties in Iraq, Bush tempered his optimism with acknowledgement of past mistakes and a description of the remaining hurdles to economic development. He said Iraqis were beginning to see the benefits of freedom despite uneven progress in the rebuilding effort.

"Iraqis who were disillusioned with their situation are beginning to see a hopeful future," he said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It doesn't always make the headlines in the evening news. But it's real, and it's important, and it is unmistakable to those who see it up close."

Uh, yeah whatever G. Now about that structural defecit at home....

Viral accountability

Found this interesting:

John Seigenthaler joins Google Watch protest site creator Daniel Brandt in his claims that their bios on Wikipedia are not accurate. USA Today published an op-ed by Seigenthaler on November 29 calling a Wikipedia entry alleging that he was involved in the Kennedy murders a "character assassination."....

"I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious 'biography' that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia, the popular, online, free encyclopedia whose authors are unknown and virtually untraceable," Seigenthaler wrote in his USA Today editorial. "At age 78, I thought I was beyond surprise or hurt at anything negative said about me. I was wrong."

So an awkward claim goes in an article & all of a sudden Wikipedia is terrible. "It's just a bunch of random yahoos!" "No central authority to verify!" "Anyone can edit!" "It's mad I tell you, MAAAD!"

Oh, really?

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, told TechNewsWorld he is just as upset as Seigenthaler. Seigenthaler's erroneous bio was removed immediately *snip* (emphasis mine)

If that site were organized any other way, it would've sat like that for a long time. Instead, someone sees it and yanks it right away. That's the benefit to not having a traditional organizational structure, errors actually get addressed rather than waiting for the top brain to approve something.

I recall a time where I was on there looking around at various articles (sorta a lame hobby of mine to pick a starting point there & clickthrough links in each entry until I reach a stub), and I spotted the bio entry for Fareed Zakaria. It had a biased part in it where someone who edited it was giving their own view of him. I commented about it in the discussion page for it, and within the next minute someone swooped in & the entire entry was fixed.

WTF?

I'm looking for a stronger word for this than "incompetance":

The 100,000 pages of documents that Blanco sent to Congress on Friday include a series of letters starting with one Blanco sent President Bush a day before the hurricane hit.

"I have determined that this incident will be of such severity and magnitude that effective response will be beyond the capabilities of the state and the affected local governments and that supplementary federal assistance will be necessary," Blanco wrote.

Three days after the storm, Blanco wrote Bush asking that the 256th Louisiana National Guard Brigade be sent home from Iraq to help. The governor also asked for more generators, medicine, health care workers and mortuaries.

Five days later, Bush assistant Maggie Grant e-mailed Blanco aide Paine Gowen to say that the White House did not receive the letter. "We found it on the governor's Web site but we need 'an original,' for our staff secretary to formally process the requests she is making," Grant wrote. "We are on the job but appreciate your help with a technical request. Tnx!" (emphasis mine)

....huh?