October 7, 2015

Authorities Shift Blame for Certain Fatal Police Shootings Onto the Dead

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/authorities_shift_blame_for_certain_fatal_police_shootings_onto_the_dead_20


via truthdig:



Coined by a former California police officer, the concept of “suicide by cop”—the idea that some people force officers to shoot them because they want to die—has been around for more than 30 years.

In 2015 alone, seven fatal shootings by police officers across the U.S. officially have been designated as “suicide by cop” by local authorities, alarming some experts and the families of those killed, The Guardian reports. Critics have pointed to the possible misuse of the ruling by officials.

In one such ruling in Illinois, prosecutors explained in an email to The Guardian that one victim, Tommy Smith, “expressed suicidal ideation” before being shot by police. Smith aimed a rifle at officers following a standoff, prosecutors said.

But such suicide rulings – two more of which were made this year in South Carolina, along with one each in Indiana, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania – run contrary to guidelines from the National Association of Medical Examiners on how to classify a manner of death. They may also pre-empt criminal inquiries by effectively exonerating officers of wrongdoing and removing their actions from consideration, according to some criminologists.

Members of Smith’s family who saw the encounter deny that he pointed his gun. While he experienced depression on and off for years since his fiancée died in a car accident, said his mother, Jean Tomlin, he did not want to die. “He hadn’t said nothing like that in the last few days,” she said. Shortly before his death, Smith invited one of the officers who would shoot him to join them in watching his beloved Denver Broncos in the NFL playoffs on television.

Police have shot dead more than 100 people who were described by associates or authorities as suicidal so far in 2015. Many of those who died did display suicidal intentions as they entered lethal encounters with officers. The total was described as alarming by mental health advocates, who said law enforcement agencies should urgently provide better training for police in dealing with people in mental health crises.

Most of these deaths were classed as homicides and investigated as usual for potential wrongdoing by the officers involved. But a growing number of state and county authorities are effectively bypassing this process by placing official responsibility for the shootings on the shoulders of the dead, who are judged to have given officers no choice but to kill them.

Such suicide rulings may further undermine the US government’s much-criticised efforts to record the number of killings by police nationwide. This system centres on voluntary reporting by police departments of the number of “justifiable homicides” by their officers each year. Even departments that participate are under no obligation to include in their totals any deaths that were ruled suicides. Amid calls from lawmakers and activists for a more comprehensive database, the Guardian is recording extensive details of all deaths caused by US law enforcement in 2015.

Read more here.

October 6, 2015

Mike Huckabee jumps the shark, a walrus and a blue whale

Published on Oct 5, 2015

Mike Huckabee went on CNN recently to discuss the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. During the appearance Huckabee was asked what he believes is the main cause of all these mass shootings throughout the country. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks discuss Huckabee's comments.

Watch the full segment here: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/05/politics/mike-huckabee-shootings-sin-and-evil/

"Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says the recent spate of mass shootings aren't because of access to guns, but because of "sin and evil" in the world.

The GOP presidential candidate, a former pastor, said there were "warning signals" about the shooter at Oregon's Umpqua Community College who killed nine people and himself last week, including him being "a loner," but no one reported them.

"We have not so much a gun problem; we have a problem with sin and evil. This is an evil thing, when people kill another person," Huckabee said. "Whether it's a pressure cooker or whether it's a gun, we're dealing with people who are either deranged or they're very focused because they want to kill people in the name of terrorism."*

October 6, 2015

Drone Flies Over NSA Complex in Germany, Dropping Leaflets

(The Intercept) A group of activists flew a drone over a key National Security Agency complex in Germany on Friday, dropping leaflets encouraging the intelligence workers inside to quit in protest over invasive surveillance.



The site of the drone fly-by, the Dagger Complex, is a U.S. military installation south of Frankfurt. It houses the European Cryptologic Center — a major source of signals and communications intelligence in Europe for the NSA. According to German media, its 1,100 employees monitor massive amounts of communications with tools such as XKEYSCORE, one of the programs revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The group behind the drone mission, Intelexit, made headlines last week when it drove moving billboards past intelligence agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The billboards, framed by picturesque scenes of sunsets and American flags, include catchphrases such as “Complicit in mass surveillance and drone wars?” and “Listen to your heart, not to private phone calls,” directing observers to “exit intelligence.”

The latest campaign added a layer of symbolism with its use of a drone. ..................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/drone-flies-over-nsa-complex-in-germany-dropping-pamphlets/

October 5, 2015

Photo of White Man, Friends Posting Racist Comments About Black Co-Worker’s Child Goes Viral

http://newsone.com/3200466/photo-of-white-man-friends-posting-racist-comments-about-black-co-workers-child-goes-viral/


Photo of White Man, Friends Posting Racist Comments About Black Co-Worker’s Child Goes Viral





According to the AtlantaBlackStar, the man known as Geris Hilton (real name Gerod Roth) on Facebook has been terminated from his position at Polaris Marketing Group after a picture he posted on his page spurred hurtful and racially-charged comments about a co-workers Black child.

The company released a statement via Twitter to address Roth’s termination:

This morning I was disgusted to learn that one of my former employees made several racially charged comments on his personal Facebook page. Even worse, the comments were directed toward the son of another employee.
It breaks my heart that Sydney and her adorable son Cayden were subjected to such hateful, ignorant and despicable behavior. Cayden visits my office almost every afternoon after daycare, he's sat at my dinner table and I consider him a part of the PMG family.
The atrocious lies, slander and racism he and his mother have been forced to endure are wholly intolerable. Myself and the entire PMG family in no way condones this kind of behavior and would never willingly associate with anyone who does.
It has no place in the world.
PMG has terminated the employee responsible and will ensure that none of the businesses that we associate with will ever do business with him again.
Sincerely,
Michael Da Graca Pinto
President
Polaris Marketing Group, Inc

October 5, 2015

Abby Martin: The Real House of Saud - Saudi Arabia's Oil-For-Tyranny

Published on Oct 3, 2015

Meet the new head of the United Nations panel on Human Rights: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Abby Martin takes us inside the brutal reality of this police-state monarchy, and tells the untold people's history of resistance to it. With a major, catastrophic war in Yemen and looming high-profile executions of activists, The Empire Files exposes true nature of the U.S.-Saudi love affair.

Watch more on teleSUR http://www.telesurtv.net/english/

October 5, 2015

Campus Carry (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/campus_carry_20151002

October 5, 2015

Least Surprising Baseball news today

Washington Nationals fire manager Matt Williams


ESPN.com news services


The Washington Nationals, who failed to make the playoffs after being saddled with high expectations, have fired manager Matt Williams, multiple media outlets reported Monday.

Williams, the 2014 manager of the year, guided the Nationals to a 83-79 mark and finished seven games back of the New York Mets in the NL East.

General manager Mike Rizzo had said Sunday that the team was prepared to make a quick decision about Williams' future, saying the team wasn't "going to let people twist in the wind."

Williams guided the Nationals to an NL East title in 2014 -- his first season on the job. In February, the Nationals exercised the option on his contract for 2016. His deal also includes a team option for 2017. ...................(more)

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/13814518/washington-nationals-fire-manager-matt-williams

October 5, 2015

Howard Zinn: What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire

from TomDispatch:


Empire or Humanity?
What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire

By Howard Zinn


With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire -- or period of "imperialism."

I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion&quot which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now call "ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration. .....................(more)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176052/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_howard_zinn%2C_the_end_of_empire/

October 5, 2015

"State repression, unbridled self-interest, an empty consumerist ethos, and war-like values"

by Henry Giroux


Ten people were killed and seven wounded recently in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Such shootings are more than another tragic expression of unchecked violence in the United States, they are symptomatic of a society engulfed in fear, militarism, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and a growing disdain for human life. Sadly, this shooting is not an isolated incident. Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the US this year alone, proving once again that the economic, political, and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed.

State repression, unbridled self-interest, an empty consumerist ethos, and war-like values have become the organizing principles of American society producing an indifference to the common good, compassion, a concern for others, and equality. As the public collapses into the individualized values of a banal consumer culture and the lure of private obsessions, American society flirts with forms of irrationality that are at the heart of every-day aggression and the withering of public life. American society is driven by unrestrained market values in which economic actions and financial exchanges are divorced from social costs, further undermining any sense of social responsibility.

In addition, a wasteful giant military-industrial-surveillance complex fueled by the war on terror along with America’s endless consumption of violence as entertainment and its celebration of a pervasive gun culture normalizes the everyday violence waged against black youth, immigrants, children fed into the school to prison pipeline, and others considered disposable. American politicians now attempt to govern the effects of systemic violence while ignoring its underlying causes. Under such circumstances, a society saturated in violence gains credence when its political leaders have given up on the notion of the common good, social justice, and equality, all of which appear to have become relics of history in the United States.

In the face of mass shootings, the public relations disimagination machine goes into overdrive claiming that guns are not the problem, and that the causes of such violence can be largely attributed to the mentally ill. When in actuality, as two Vanderbilt University researchers, Dr. Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish, publishing in the American Journal of Public Health observed that “Fewer than 6 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.” ...............(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murder_usa_why_politicians_have_blood_on_their_hands_20151002

October 5, 2015

California woman sues police over beating during arrest over alleged seatbelt violation

A woman in Carlsbad, California is suing police after an officer punched her in the face while arresting her over an alleged seatbelt violation.

The New York Daily News reported on a police brutality suit brought by 40-year-old Cindy Hahn, who was arrested and beaten in 2013 as her two children, ages 7 and 11, watched.

According to Hahn’s complaint, on July 31, 2013, she and her children were leaving a birthday party when they came upon a vehicle which was unoccupied with its alarm blaring.

Police cruisers with their lights flashing surrounded the vehicle, but officers were allowing the alarm to blare. When Hahn — whose father is a police officer — asked an officer on duty why police weren’t shutting off the car alarm, the officer — identified in court documents as Officer Kenyatte Valentine — reportedly told her to mind her “own fucking business.”

Hahn used her cell phone to call the police non-emergency line to complain about Officer Valentine’s behavior. As she drove away, Valentine pulled her over claiming she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. He and another officer pulled her from the vehicle and pinned her to the ground. ....................(more)

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/video-shows-california-cops-punching-unarmed-woman-in-brutal-arrest-for-a-seatbelt-violation/