Why Am I Not Surprised?

http://bit.ly/IFkTsV

Video documentation by local activists and independent media shows that police officers and county deputies from across Minnesota have been picking up young people near Peavey Plaza for a training program to recognize drug-impaired drivers. Multiple participants say officers gave them illicit drugs and provided other incentives to take the drugs. The Occupy movement, present at Peavey Plaza since April 7th, appears to be targeted as impaired people are dropped off at the Plaza, and others say they've been rewarded for offering to snitch on the movement.

Local independent media activists and members of Communities United Against Police Brutality began investigating police conduct around the Plaza after witnessing police dropping off impaired people at the plaza and hearing rumors that they were offering people drugs.  We videotaped police conduct and interviewed participants, learning some very disturbing information about the DRE program.
Officers stated on record the DRE program, run by the Minnesota State Patrol, has no Institutional Review Board or independent oversight. They agreed no ambulances or EMTs were on site at the Richfield MnDOT facility near the airport where most subjects were taken. Multiple times, participants left Peavey Plaza sober, returned intoxicated, and said they'd been given free drugs by law enforcement. We documented on more than one occasion, someone being told they were sober by one officer, and then picked up by a different officer, and returning intoxicated.

 http://bit.ly/IFkTsV

A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”
“Again?” someone said.

We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.
“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Drug-sniffing dogs in traffic stops often wrong

Chicago Tribune

January 06, 2011|By Dan Hinkel and Joe Mahr, Tribune reporters

Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

Snip

pandagon.net 

" I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices."

Snip

Confirmation bias in  the form of the "Clever Hans" phenomena, plus more than little racial bigotry equals an all out assault on the Forth Amendment.  This is you government on drugs.

Tortured Logic

It is truly perverse how the present Fox News inspired Republican Party behaves. It only took twenty-four hours for the push-back against the Administration’s success in Abbottabad to begin.  The very first flowering of the new meme was seen in the Murdock operated Wall Street Journal. It was there in plain sight, a tiny bit of worthless opinion wedged in the story as fact.  You had to go deep into the story, the lead was buried, but it was there none the less : enhanced interrogation had provided at least some of the leads that lead to OBL’s hideout.   What began as a whisper has become a thing shouted from the rooftops : torture works.

To have to go over this particular bit of ground is painful. It is not just that this meme is demonstrably false, that it is a big fat lie. It is that even if true, even if torture provides actionable intelligence, the means still do not justify the ends.

There is something profoundly icky about how much the Right Wing gets its torture groove on. There is a foul reek of sexual needs denied. The whole structure oozes of repressed homoerotic sadomasochistic urges mixed with toxic authoritarianism. The pleasure, the shear joy, that Conservative commentators project when discussing torture is off-putting; you feel an overwhelming desire to take very long shower.

These commentators will not be deterred, they will not even pause in delivering their message of mayhem. They most certainly will not let facts get in the way. They are going for the lizard brain; no detours. To be a true warrior in the battle against terror one must surrender any notions of decency. It seems that the only way to defeat the evil bastards of terrorism is to become an even bigger, even more evil, bastard yourself.

These right-wing warriors accept no limits. Black Site Prisons, extraordinary rendition, Gitmo, indefinite detention, and “enhanced interrogation” are all acceptable. As a matter of fact these methods are more than acceptable, they are the only way to deal with the bad guys. If you are unwilling to become an utter savage, you are obviously a lily-livered coward.

How acting like a perfect Visigoth became the acme of policy is no real mystery. There is a reason that Republicans are attempting to legitimize the methods of the Mongol hordes. It is to set up the old trope that Democrats are weak on defense. In this brave new world only utter depravity towards our adversaries is acceptable. Anything less than wholesale barbarism is weakness. Is your head hurting yet? It should be.

We are a very long way from the thoughts of our first President. We are a very long way from first principle. How is it that when Washington had his back up against a wall, he was able to treat the despised Hessians fairly, but we are unable to do the same against Al Qaeda? Washington was in an existential struggle against the greatest military power of the  age; we are dealing with a rag-tag bunch of nihilists one step above a street gang. Washington was dead set against torture; we have babbling fools who extol the virtues of torture every chance they get.

These fools should be marginal characters. They should be on a soap box on some street corner yelling their obscenities to the pigeons. Instead they occupy positions of trust. They are T.V. personalities, politicians, academics, commentators, Congressmen and Senators. In short they are people who are supposed to know better.

So how did these people loose their grip on reality? Why are they peddling this tripe? It is more than just justifying the programs of the Bush-Cheney Administration. That is only the very top layer of this effort. Those who interpret this push for torture as just a desperate attempt to latch the failed efforts of Bush-Cheney to the successful efforts of Team Obama are only looking at the surface. Republicans have to “prove” torture works. They have to then carry that premise forward so they can beat up Obama for his reluctance to use torture. That way they reset the meme that Democrats are weak because they are unwilling to use this “proven” method of getting to the bad guys. Welcome to crass political considerations.

You expected decency from this lot? The ends justify the means for these people. And the ends is the permanent Republican ascendancy. The end is the permanent delegitimizing of the Democratic party by any means necessary. Only the Republican Party represents “Real America” (tm) And because this is the “Real America” it can do no wrong; no quarter asked or given, no holds bared, might makes right, just win baby.

Now some would say this is a good thing; that the Republicans have gone so far off the reservation that they will “loose the middle,”  hogwash.  The middle is whatever the political elites say it is. It is a flexible, mutable thing, it is totally plastic. The middle can be moved, and it has been moved. The middle in the 21st Century is much more tilted to the right than it was in the middle of the 20th Century.  As long as Neo-Liberals and “Moderate” Democrats keep playing defense the nation will continue its rightward march.

Instead of passively waiting for the Republicans to step on a rake, Democrats should be blasting the Elephants 24/7 on torture. People should not be just loosing elections for their support of torture, they should be loosing their livelihoods. Supporting torture should brand you as a tin-foil hatted crazy, not fit for any job requiring a scintilla of responsibility. Supporting torture should brand you a pervert, as one who perverts the very essence of our nation. It should brand you as a moral reprobate, as worse than a child molester. People who support torture should not be seen as tough, as being hard edged, as leaders or doers, they should be seen as pond scum.  Torture is wrong, end of discussion, end of drill. Anyone who says different is being willfully ignorant, a troll, or overcompensating for their own cowardice.

The TEA Party faithful are more than willing to beat their breast about taking back the country and how much they love the Constitution. It is an odd type of love they show for that document. There are some gaping holes in their infatuation with our founding document; not much love for the the Forth nor Fifth Amendments and the thrill is gone for the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments too. I haven’t seen the TEA Party set wave their muskets nor stage a tricornered hat protest against Gitmo, FISA , sneak and peak nor any other parts of the police state set up by W and Obama. They were more than happy to have any random brown person harassed by TSA, but did draw the line when those same government workers wanted to scan their junk. I guess it is a very situational love they have of the Constitution, with lots of cut-outs and exceptions.

This is a rather simple argument. It is that common decency should be exactly that: common. It should be our default. It should be our rock; that we treat even our worst opponents decently. We are supposed to be the civilized ones, our opponents are supposed to be the barbarians. There should be a wide and noticeable difference in the two behaviors. Our opponents want to drag our nation down to their level. They want us thinking with out lizard brains. They want us living in fear. Why, in God’s name, should we accommodate them?

Uphold the Law, Right.

Charges Dropped Against Woman Framed by Cops

By Todd Wright

NBCMIAMI.

Updated 4:26 p.m. PT, Thurs., July 30, 2009

Alexandra Torrensvilas was the target of cops who pinned a DUI on her for an accident they caused. Now she has been cleared of charges after the Broward State Attorney's Office officially dropped the four DUI citations on Wednesday.

But the saga is far from over as now prosecutors turn their attention to the four Hollywood police officers who made up an intricate story to cover for a February traffic accident involving a cop car. The scheme was caught on one of the officers dashboard cameras.

The disturbing video shows Alexandra Torrensvilas, 23, handcuffed in the back of the squad car as the officers get their stories straight on what they are going to say happened.

Mouthy Grandmother Gets Tased

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Cursing and belligerent, the great-grandmother refused to sign her speeding ticket, got out of her truck and dared a deputy to shock her with a Taser.

So he did.

Video released by a Travis County Constable's Office shows 72-year-old Kathryn Winkfein hitting the ground and moaning while the shocks jolted through her body after the May 11 confrontation with Travis County Sheriff's Deputy Chris Bieze.

Winkfein was stopped for driving 60 mph in a 45-mph zone just west of Austin. A dashboard camera in the deputy's car shows the 4-foot-11 Winkfein refusing to sign her speeding ticket, getting out of her white pickup truck and cursing at the deputy constable.

Bieze then pushes her to get her away from traffic.

"You're gonna shove a 72-year-old woman," Winkfein says angrily, standing inches from the deputy.

"If you don't step back, you're going to get Tased," Bieze says.

"Go ahead, Tase me," Winkfein says. "I dare you."

The video shows Bieze using the Taser and Winkfein hitting the ground and moaning in pain.

"Put your hands behind your back or you're going to be Tased again," Bieze yells, and then hits her with another jolt.

Winkfein was eventually charged with resisting arrest, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and fines up to $4,000.

Tell Me Again How The Police Are Such Wonderful People

Arrested in silence: Police use Taser, pepper spray on deaf man
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
By ROBERT McCLENDON and MARK R. KENT
Staff Reporters

Mobile police used pepper spray and a Taser on a deaf and mentally disabled man Friday after they were unable to get him to come out of a bathroom at a Dollar General store, authorities said.

After forcibly removing Antonio Love from the bathroom of the Azalea Road store, officers attempted to book the 37-year-old, on charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer, but the magistrate on duty at the jail refused to accept any of those charges.

Love's family members said they had no idea where he was during the time that police had him in custody.

Brodrick Love said the officers dropped his brother off in the parking lot of their apartment building without saying what happened or why his brother had been missing for six hours.

Love's family members have filed a formal complaint against the officers.

Christopher Levy, a Police Department spokesman, said the officers didn't find out that Love had a hearing impairment until after they got him out of the bathroom and found a card in his wallet indicating he was deaf.

14 Year Old Epileptic Tasered

Girl recovering after dart surgically removed from her head

July 3, 2009 - 4:01 PM

By Chelle Delaney: Freedom New Mexico

A 14-year-old Tucumcari girl is recovering at an Albuquerque hospital after being shot in the head with a Taser dart by Tucucmari Police Chief Roger Hatcher.

Now, her parents say they want the police department to review its policies for using the Taser.

The girl was hit in the head Thursday by one of two darts fired simultaneously as she was fleeing, Hatcher said.

The other dart lodged in her hip.

Hatcher said be believed he had no other option.

“There’s a lot of issues,” Hatcher said. “She committed a delinquent act. She was running from police across traffic without looking.”

Hatcher said he chased her, ordered her to stop and “then did what I had to do.”

Her mother, Stacy Akin, said her daughter underwent surgery Friday morning at University of New Mexico hospital in Albuquerque.

“One of the darts entered her skull,” said Akin, interviewed by telephone.

After a CAT scan, a hospital resident told her the dart was “in her brain a little bit, but not much,” Akin said.

She was in pediatric intensive care following the surgery, Akin said. “She seems OK, but she she’s in a lot of pain. Her head is hurting her real bad.”

Police were trying help Akin because she and her daughter had been fighting, Akin said.

Akin said while she could understand the use of a Taser on an adult, it shouldn’t be used on a child.

“She’s only 14, why?” Aikin asked.

Akin also said her daughter has epilepsy.

The girl’s father, Donny Martinez of Amarillo, said his daughter takes medication for the condition.

“I’d like to find out what happened,” Martinez said, adding, “Someone, independently should look at it” to see if excessive force was used.

Snip

http://www.pntonline.com/news/tucumcari-17846-year-chief.html

Is just me or is police officer behaving as bad or worse than the offending teen?

Baptist Pastor Gets Beat Down By Thugs In Blue

Check out other UTubes from this Pastor. His Fourth Amendment absolutism probably did not make many friends with DHS employees. Thanks to Republican appointees to the Supreme Court DHS and other law enforcement are allowed to rummage into your car without much provocation and definitely without a warrant. Even though the good reverend does not come close to fitting the profile of a drug or people smuggler the cops have carte blache to harass him and toss his car basically on a whim. Instead of meekly conceding to the cops absurd if technically legal request to inspect his car the Precher became a royal pain in the posterior. The Cops of course totally over reacted acting like the pissy authoritarians they are. They finally snapped out of camera shot (or at least out of the Reverends camera shot) and put a beat down on the minister.

At the very least the DHS and Arizona law enforcement reacted in a very unprofessional manner to a civilian who was yanking their chain. At worst this was felony assault and battery under the color of law and a blatant civil rights violation. Both DHS and Arizona need to retrain their officers on use of force guidelines. Both need to dragged in to a civil tort court at the very least.

Police Get The Wrong House In Galveston, Allegedly Assault 12-Year-Old Girl

Wed Dec 17, 2008 at 12:37:01 PM

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn's home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.

As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me."

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.


All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the "tight shorts" she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn's attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.

After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.

Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond's school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. The case went to trial, but the judge declared it a mistrial on the first day, says Griffin. The new trial is set for February.

"I think we'll be okay," says Griffin. "I don't think a jury will find a 12-year-old girl guilty who's just sitting outside her house. Any 12-year-old attacked by three men and told that she's a prostitute is going to scream and yell for Daddy and hit back and do whatever she can. She's scared to death."

Since the incident more than two years ago, Dymond regularly suffers nightmares in which police officers are raping and beating her and cutting off her fingers, according to the lawsuit.
Griffin says he expects to enter mediation with the officers in early 2009 to resolve the lawsuit.

We've got calls in to the officers' lawyer; we'll let you know if we hear something.

Update: This is from the officers' lawyer, William Helfand:

Both the daughter and the father were arrested for assaulting a peace officer. "The father basically attacked police officers as they were trying to take the daughter into custody after she ran off."

Also, "The city has investigated the matter and found that the conduct of the police officers was appropriate under the circumstances," Helfand says. "It's unfortunate that sometimes police officers have to use force against people who are using force against them. And the evidence will show that both these folks violated the law and forcefully resisted arrest."

Chris Vogel

Snip

Well, at least they did not taser her.

AP Undercover officers use Taser on pallbearer

WILMINGTON, N.C. – A North Carolina sheriff's official has apologized for plunging a funeral into chaos when undercover agents tried to arrest the dead man's son — and used a Taser on him in the process.

It happened as the coffin was being loaded into a hearse. The officers planned to quietly arrest pallbearer Gladwyn Taft Russ III, The Star-News of Wilmington reported Wednesday.

Relatives said two deputies dressed in coats and ties grabbed Russ and kneed him in his back before Tasering him. One deputy's gun fell out of its holster.

Russ' sister, Taffy Gause, said when she got out of the car a deputy "was waving a gun at me and my mom and yelling to get back or he was going to shoot." She said some mourners went home instead of going to the cemetery.

Russ, 42, had failed to surrender after being charged with threatening his ex-wife who lives in another state, officials said. Following his father's death Nov. 11, Russ agreed to surrender after the funeral.

When deputies approached Russ during the Saturday funeral, he "went wild" and spat on the officers, said New Hanover County sheriff's chief deputy Ed McMahon.

McMahon said the officers should have waited until after the cemetery service.

"It was never my intention to create any more problems for the family, and I am truly sorry and apologize for that," he said.

McMahon said the officers pointed Tasers at people because the crowd was moving toward them.

Russ was charged with assault on a government official, resisting an officer, disorderly conduct and felony malicious conduct by a prisoner.

"Everybody was so scared. We thought it was a drug deal gone bad," said Ronnie Simmons, a pallbearer and Russ' brother-in-law. "We almost dropped the casket."

Snip

Does anyone else out there think it is past time for us to take away these dangerous toys from these irresponisible fools?

Big Brother is listening.

While the economy was melting down this week we had a quick and mostly unnoticed drive-by shooting of our Constitution. It was a small dispatch from ABC News reporting on the N.S.A. The N.S.A or more appropriately the NSA/CSS for National Security Agency/ Central Security Service is a super secret spy agency. It is supposed to collect the communications of foreign governments and independent hostile actors. In the post 9/11 era the NSA was trying to listen in on Osama’s cell phone conversations and other forms of “terrorist communications.

Thanks to FISA and Warrantless wiretapping the NSA could listen to and record any communication that it might interested in; no matter how peripheral. The unwashed masses were assured that the government would never abuse this authority. No Mr. and Mrs. American citizen, the government would only listen into those evil foreign terrorist plotting to do evil things. At least that was the talking point put out by the Administration and their water carriers on Fox News. It was surprise, surprise, a big fat lie.

Turns out that when there is no oversight by the courts or the legislature there really will be abuse after all. Technicians decided to listen in on the very private conversation of American citizens. It gets worse. Those citizens were the loved ones and spouses of military service members. The pillow talk of our men and women in uniform station overseas was recorded and shared as entertainment of jaded NSA staffers.

Very few Americans have any idea of the type of sacrifices a military life requires. Even fewer have had to deal with the stresses of an overseas posting. Still fewer know what it is like to serve in what the military terms isolated duty. Isolated duty, where the service member is deployed to a duty station without his or her family, is one of the hardest tours to endure. It only gets worse when the service member is in a combat zone. Each communication with a loved one is that much more intense and precious. It is a rare and special moment of intimacy and privacy in a life that has very little of either. To have those special moments passed around for the prurient entertainment of bored technicians who were not supposed to be listening in to tehm in the first place is appalling.

This is why we have, or should we say had the 4th Amendment in the first place. When you give people carte blanche to pry into people’s personal lives they will delve into places they have no business being. Our founders knew the extent an untrammeled executive would go if not curtailed. They placed the courts as a firebreak to the excesses of the executive. But that was before the FISA cave-in by our legislators.

It was not like the Congress did not know what the Bush Administration was up to. They had the story from James Comey of John Ashcroft’s hospital bed refusal to sign on to the secret surveillance / warrantless wire tap program that the Bush Administration was running. Somehow Congress never got an answer on exactly what this program was. We can only guess the full wretchedness and illegality of that program. It had to be hideous for a rock-ribbed conservative like John Ashcroft to object to it. Still the Congress gave Bush a get out of jail free card and retroactively approved the massive intrusion into our private lives on the oft chance that someone may be blowing kisses to Osama bin Laden via AT&T’s friends and family program.

With that approval the NSA was able to listen to anything they damn well pleased. No person or group was immune from the prying ears of the spooks at the “Puzzle Palace” not our servicemembers, not NGOs. Both Doctors without Borders and the I.R.C. were bugged. This rampant disregard for probity and rules of any kind has become a hallmark of the Bush / Cheney Administration. While sickening the disclosure of this behavior by the N.S.A. is hardly surprising. Older heads, those who recall the Church Committee hearings, remember this all too well. Those graying heads remember the abuses of the C.I.A., D.I.A., F.B.I., and other intelligence gathering agencies during the Vietnam War Protests. They remember the stomach churning abuses perpetrated by that old cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover. For them it is especially distressing that we are repeating that awful history. Back then the excuse was fighting Communists; now the excuse is fighting terrorism. The violations of the law, of common decency are distressingly similar.

If there is a silver lining in this dark cloud it is the fact that civil libertarians have not given up. There is a civil suite against Verizon challenging the warrantless wiretapping undertaken on government orders. There is a specific challenge to the retroactive immunity granted in the FISA bill as an unconstitutional ex post facto law. Will we get a 5-4 upholding of that proposition? It is the best we can hope for. If we had a sane Supreme Court, not one packed with Republican Ideologues from the Federalist Society, we would not have to worry if Justice Kennedy might slip over to Dark Side with Dick Cheney. Remember that the Kangaroo Court known as the Military Commission Tribunal in Gitmo was struck down by a slim 5-4 vote. Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia were just fine with shredding Habeas Corpus. Scalia was especially hideous in his comments, sounding like a candidate for the Republican presidential primaries instead of the sober justice of the highest court in the land.

While we wait for our government to return to us our Constitutional rights to us there we are not totally without options. If you have friends in foreign lands or family members deployed by the military overseas get them a pair of these gadgets for their stocking stuffers this Christmas. After all Osama has not only a nice secure land-line but probably one of these too.

Stay Away From Those Beans.

MSNBC News Services

updated 6:55 a.m. PT, Fri., Sept. 26, 2008

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. - A West Virginia man accused of passing gas and fanning it toward a police officer no longer faces a battery charge.

The Kanawha County prosecutor's office requested that the charge be dropped against 34-year-old Jose Cruz.

According to a criminal complaint, Cruz passed gas and made a fanning motion toward patrolman T.E. Parsons after being taken for a breathalyzer test.

"The gas was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking nature with Patrolman Parsons," the complaint alleged.

Cruz acknowledged passing gas, but said he didn't move his chair toward the officer nor aim gas at the patrolman. He said he had an upset stomach at the time, but police denied his request to go to the bathroom when he first arrived at the station.

"I couldn't hold it no more," he said

Meanwhile in the Sunshine State...

A 40-year-old man walking his dog in the nude Friday night in northwest Tallahassee was Tasered by police when he became belligerent and refused to follow an officer’s commands.

An officer on patrol spotted the man about 8:15 p.m. in the 2200 block of Hartsfield Road, said Officer David McCranie of the Tallahassee Police Department.

When asked what he was doing, the man told the officer, “Allah told me to watch a Bruce Willis movie and walk the dog,” McCranie said.

Burning Down The House

Are the fire hydrants in your neighborhood turned on?
By CHRIS HAWES / WFAA-TV

ROCKWALL COUNTY - A North Texas homeowner wants you to learn from his family's tragedy.

The fire hydrants in his neighborhood are turned off.

But he didn't know that until June 24th, the night his house caught fire.

"My grandfather died last year. My wife's grandfather died last year. All our pictures were the biggest thing that we lost," said Eric Aderholt.

It didn't have to happen. When the fire began, firefighters from around Rockwall County responded quickly.

But when they went to hook hose to hydrant, there was no water.

"No one ever told us that they were turned off," said Aderholt.

Clay Hodges is the general manager of Cash Special Utility District.

He explains all the district's hydrants, including those in Alexander Ranch, have had their water turned off since just after 9/11 - something a trade association spokesman tells us is common practice for rural systems.

"These hydrants need to be cut off in a way to prevent vandalism or any kind of terrorist activity, including something in the water lines," Hodges said.

But Hodges says fire departments know, or should have known, the water valves can be turned back on with a tool.

"All our fire departments, at least the local ones, I know were notified of that."

But, when firefighters came to the Aderholt's home, no one had that tool.

By the time someone brought it, it was too late.

The neighborhood association's now working to get the tools in the hands of homeowners, as an extra precaution.

Cash Water's also sent out a letter letting fire departments know they're welcome to use the hydrants, if there's enough water pressure but reminding them they'll have to turn on the water first.

"It was a tragic situation we don't like to see that happen to anybody, especially one of our water customers," said a company representative.

You may have noticed the fire hydrants along Aderholt's street are black, not red.

In Texas, that legally warns firefighters they may not function - private companies such as Cash Water are not required to maintain enough water pressure to fight fires.

They maintain the hydrants are technically only there to help flush out and clean their systems.

Canadian Jet Ski Attack

Sunny Freeman
Staff Reporter
Jason Haist's arrival in the U.S. was a complete accident. After nearly drowning in rapids on the Niagara River, he washed ashore on American soil, where he was promptly informed he faced charges for entering the country illegally and could be detained for up to three weeks while officials try to determine his intentions.

Snip

Haist said he and a group of friends departed from a dock on Princess St. in Queenston. Still traumatized from his near-drowning, Haist said he doesn't remember exactly what happened after that but thinks he travelled south to the Whirlpool Rapids, where he was tossed into the swirling water.
"All he remembered was he went under with the Jet Ski, then the Jet Ski took off and he went down with the current," his partner, Catherine Kerr, said at their Toronto home.
Haist's lungs filled with water and he was knocked unconscious. His cousin, Edward Haist, 21, tried to save Jason, but couldn't get to him, Kerr said. Boaters in the area called for help. "That's when the Coast Guard got involved," Kerr said.

Jason was taken to hospital and Edward was arrested by Border Patrol officials, supervisory U.S. Border Patrol agent Jason Ciliberti confirmed yesterday.

Snip

Not being a National Security expert DHS may have something here. This may be a novel Al Queda tactic. They will now terrorize us with teams of Jhadi Canadian Ski-Do operatives who will overwhelm our emergency services by multiple near-drowning incidents. Those evil Mooslim Terrorists!
H/T to The Star and to Jonathan Turley

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (CNN) -- Police raided a rental hall used by a group organizing protests at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Friday.

The RNC Welcoming Committee, which describes itself as "anarchist/anti-authoritarian," accused St. Paul police of trying to disrupt their protest planned for Monday, the day the GOP convention is set to begin.

Although no one was arrested, the group said police temporarily detained and photographed at least 50 people who were inside the building.

St. Paul Police spokesman Tom Walsh said they were executing a search warrant.

"The cause for the search warrant is not public at this time," Walsh said.

As many as 30 police officers entered with guns drawn, according to witnesses in the building.

"The convergence center is simply a gathering place and is not used for illegal actions -- it is a place for workshops and trainings," a statement from the protest group said. "Tonight, we were watching films and sharing food.

"We are now accused of a simple fire code violation," the statement said.

Oddie Miller, a 19-year-old from Fort Collins, Colorado, said it was "just a space to get food, free Internet, community organization."

"There were no bombs or anything in there," Miller said.

Snip
From CNN Reports.

Welcome to the era of Bush "Justice." A harmless bunch of protesters gets rousted by overzealous police officers. The last time anarchists were a threat to the established order was at the turn of the last Century. The Palmer Raids of the 1920 crushed the last remnants of the movement. These days anarchists are much more likely to toss cream pies than bombs. As threat against the Government they are not much to worry about. There anarchists; they hate any kind of organization. So much for the right to peacefully assemble.

China Outsources Abuse to U.S.

Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators

By JUSTIN ROOD of ABC News
May 20, 2008

U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report.

Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there.

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

cf to firedoglake

cf to talkleft

cf to Sadly No!

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Our country is being buried in a mountain of offal and "fertilizer" and we still ignore the smell.

Louisiana Senate panel approves bill allowing castration for sex offenders

BATON ROUGE -- A Senate committee today took the first step toward giving judges the authority to order sex offenders to undergo physical or chemical castration.

The Judiciary C Committee unanimously passed Senate Bill 144 by Sen. Nick Gautreaux, D-Abbeville, to give a judge the option to order medroxyprogestrone acetate, or MPA, to be administered to a first time sex offender. On a repeat violation, the judge must order the treatment for a specific time if a medical expert agrees the treatment can help the offender.

The offender can opt for physical castration on a first or second offense if he agrees to the surgery and a judge concurs.

Gautreaux said the state does not currently allow either type of castration. He said one or both forms of the procedure can help sex offenders lower their sex drive and possibly keep them from committing future sex crimes.

Gautreaux said either type of castration would be in addition to the jail time a judge orders the offender to serve. The castration cannot reduce the sentence or replace it, Gautreaux said.

"This does not make it easy on the sex offender," Gautreaux said.

The committee also approved Gautreaux's Senate Bill 143 to prohibit anyone convicted of a sex offense from wearing a mask, hood or costume to hand out candy or gifts on Halloween to children under 18. The bill was amended to prohibit the distribution of gifts by a sex offender who may or may not wear a costume at other times of the year, such as Easter and Christmas.

A violator could get at least six months and up to three years in jail with the first six months to be served behind bars.

Both bills must now be debated by the Senate.

Ed Anderson can be reached at eanderson@timespicayune.com or (225) 342-5810.

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Nice to see how pandering to the Reptile brain is still the preferred default for politicians. Sexual assault is not about sex, it is about power. The urge lies in the head not the testicles. Even with castration the thoughts remain, and the will to act on them.

Not to get too graphic here but you do not need a sexual organ to perform sexual assault. There are other ways. Thus the whole idea of prevention via castration will not work. What we have here is government sanctioned maiming of an individual. It appeals to our darker side. It appeals to our taste for revenge.

Dollars to donuts very few white or middle class offenders will fall under this proposed law. Poor persons of color are the people who become the geldings.

Judge calls immigration officials' decision 'beyond cruel'

By Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 13, 2008
H/T to Cliff Schector's Blog and "Gotta Laugh"

In a stinging ruling, a Los Angeles federal judge said immigration officials' alleged decision to withhold a critical medical test and other treatment from a detainee who later died of cancer was "beyond cruel and unusual" punishment.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson allows the family of Francisco Castaneda to seek financial damages from the government.

Castaneda, who suffered from penile cancer, died Feb. 16. Before his release from custody last year, the government had refused for 11 months to authorize a biopsy for a growing lesion, even though voluminous government records showed that several doctors said the test was urgently needed, given Castaneda's condition and a family history of cancer, Pregerson said.

But rather than test and treat Castaneda, government officials told him to be patient and prescribed antihistamines, ibuprofen and extra boxer shorts, the judge wrote in a decision released late Tuesday. In summary, the judge wrote, the care provided to Castaneda "can be characterized by one word: nothing."

Pregerson blasted public health officials' "attempt to sidestep responsibility for what appears to be . . . one of the most, if not the most, egregious" violations of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment that "the court has ever encountered."

At this stage of the proceedings, "the only question is whether" the plaintiffs' allegations, if true, show that government officials "were deliberately indifferent to his condition. The court finds that they do," Pregerson said.

"Everyone knows that cancer is often deadly. Everyone knows that early diagnosis and treatment often saves lives," the judge wrote. The government's own records, he emphasized, "bespeak of conduct that transcends negligence by miles. It bespeaks of conduct that, if true, should be taught to every law student as conduct for which the moniker 'cruel' is inadequate," Pregerson concluded in permitting the case to move forward.

Conal Doyle, an Oakland attorney who is co-counsel for Castaneda's family members, said the Salvadoran immigrant spent eight months in custody on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with intent to sell, then was transferred to immigration custody because he did not have legal residency.

He first informed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement medical staff at the San Diego Correctional Facility on March 27, 2006, that "a lesion on his penis was becoming painful and growing," the judge wrote. The next day, a physician assistant at the facility examined Castaneda and issued a treatment plan calling for a consultation with a urologist "ASAP" and a request for a biopsy, according to government records cited by the judge.

Over the next 11 months, several doctors, with increasing urgency, made the same recommendations. For example, after conducting an examination June 7, 2006, Dr. John Wilkinson, an oncologist, wrote a report saying he strongly agreed that Castaneda had an urgent need for a biopsy and an assessment by a urologist because he might have "penile cancer. . . . In this extremely delicate area . . . there can be considerable morbidity from even benign lesions which are not promptly treated."

That same day, Pregerson said, Dr. Esther Hui of the Division of Immigration Health Services acknowledged Castaneda's condition but said the government would not admit him to a hospital because her agency considered a biopsy "an elective outpatient procedure."

Pregerson, who became a federal judge in 1996, said evidence presented by the plaintiffs suggested that Hui, one of the defendants, characterized the surgery as elective so the federal government would not to have to provide or pay for it.

In February 2007, after the American Civil Liberties Union intervened, a biopsy was finally scheduled. A few days before the procedure, however, Castaneda was abruptly released, the judge wrote. He went to the emergency room of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and was diagnosed with metastatic squamous cell carcinoma. His penis was eventually amputated, and chemotherapy ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Four months before he died, Castaneda testified at a hearing held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law, as his teenage daughter listened.

"Mr. Castaneda's case was just outrageous," Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), chairwoman of the subcommittee, said in an interview Tuesday.

Lofgren said one of the things she found most troubling was that "bureaucrats" at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington have the power to overrule recommendations of doctors who have actually seen the medical problems of detainees. "That is a recipe for disaster," she said.

Lori Haley, an ICE spokeswoman from Laguna Niguel, said in an e-mail that she could not comment on the Castaneda case but that the agency spent nearly $100 million on medical, dental and psychiatric care for detainees in fiscal 2007.

The government had argued that its employees were immune from this lawsuit. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office said the Justice Department might appeal Pregerson's ruling.

Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on medical care at immigration detention facilities that said officials at some of the sites "cited difficulties in obtaining approval for outside medical and mental health care as . . . presenting problems in caring for detainees."

Doyle said Castaneda's death "would have been prevented by the exercise of basic human decency."

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the decision was legally significant and factually compelling. "This was not a detainee with a hangnail," she said. "You should not have to have your penis fall off to get medical treatment from the government."

henry.weinstein@latimes.com

Cops Behaving Badly-Albany Pt2

Police: 'You fit the profile'

By BRENDAN J. LYONS Senior writer Click byline for more stories by writer. First published: Sunday, March 2, 2008

ALBANY-- The cops in the marked patrol car had circled through West Hill a couple times keeping an eye on their female target. They were part of the Street Drug Unit, an aggressive squad assigned to help rid Albany's neighborhoods of drug dealers and addicts blamed for much of the city's problems. It was early evening and already dark when the patrol car's emergency lights flashed in the rearview mirror of Lisa Shutter's Mitsubishi sedan on Quail Street, just off Central Avenue. Police records show the officers called out a "Signal 38" to alert a dispatcher they were onto something suspicious and about to pull someone over. They would later write in a report that they had pulled her over for "failure to signal," although no ticket was issued, according to police records shared with the Times Union. The actions of police in the minutes that followed would end in controversy rather than with an arrest. They would also leave Shutter, a 28-year-old single mother from Ravena, shaken and angry after one of the officers allegedly inserted his finger into Shutter's vagina on a public street during an apparent search for drugs. When it was over, "I pulled off down the road and I just cried for probably a half hour," Shutter said. "I called my dad. ... I felt like I had been basically raped."