Police

Right Wing Lies (III)

Fox News says an ever-increasing number of people are losing their jobs. 15 million alone in a 3-month period in 2010! That’s patently absurd. But it’s cited to the Bureau of Labor Statistics so it must be true. They “corrected” their graph to read: “total unemployed.” Straight up, I guess ever since Obama started handing out all that “Obama money.”…

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A technicality?

It’s not easy to separate emotion from constitutional issues. Ronell Wilson killed two NYPD detectives in 2003 and was found guilty and sentence to death by a federal jury. Good. Now, in 2010, an appeals court struck down the sentence (but not the conviction… the bastard did it). It’s easy for cops and conservatives to bitch about “liberal” courts letting…

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Gates Arrest was “Avoidable”

Ya think? Here’s the final report by the Cambridge Review Committee. I haven’t read it yet, but this may be the key sentence: “But instead of de-escalting, both men continued to escalate the encounter.” And the key insight may be here: “To say that the arrest of Professor Gates was avoidable is not to say that it was unjustified from…

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Checks and Balances

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Senate said, “Liberal or conservative, we’re not going to approve any Supreme Court justice that won’t tell us his or her position on issues”? The Senate is not supposed to be a rubber stamp. The founding fathers had no stated opinions on many current issues. Semi-automatic handguns didn’t exist when they wrote the 2nd…

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Police

Brother, can you spare a dime?

So I’m in the grocery store, buying a few things, and decide to use the self-serve lane for a change. I realize I have just $15.25 in cash. So I start scanning things… careful not to go over. Then I go over. An employee walks by and I tell the lady, a middle-aged black lady, that I need to take…

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Granny Rap

Plenty to do in Amsterdam… thanks to GVB, Amsterdam public transportation. But I’m really posting this because it’s starring… my mom! It’s also produced by my brother (and he’s the questionably hetero one in the video). This may be the slickest ad ever for public transportation (with the old Detroit People Mover song as a close second).

Police

Heather MacDonald on NYPD Stop-and-Frisks

Heather MacDonald has an op-ed in the New York Times. You know, on police issues we probably agree 75-80% of the time. And yet I’m always left frustrated and strangely disappointed by her writings. She’s too predictable. And her writing lacks depth as she simply sidesteps the main points of the opposition. I generally agreewith her, and yet still find…

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Somebody Snitched

And Ronnie “Skinny Suge” Thomas get sentenced to 20 years in the Federal Pen. Ronnie was the not-so-smooth talking star and co-producer of the 2004 “Stop Snitching” video which had its moment of fame when basketball player Carmelo Anthony was featured in the first DVD. From the Sun: “Eight other people associated with the videos have been prosecuted in federal…

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Police

Trial of Officer London

I don’t really have a problem with the first two minutes. The suspect, Walter Harvin, was aggressive and uncooperative. Harvin pushes Officer London at 0:26 and has to go. I turns into a messy arrest, but that’s sometimes how it is. As much as I don’t like tasers… tasing this guy sure would have saved both officer and suspect a…

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