Uncategorized | The Bitchy Pundit - Part 11

Rand Paul’s Insane Freedom Turrets

February 4, 2015 by Bitchy

So apparently it’s the 19th century and we’re debating whether these new fangled vaccine thingies are safe. Oh, and also FREEDOM. Here, watch Rand Paul explain (don’t worry, you can stop the suffering at 2:55):

Sigh. This moron is going to run for president. And in my opinion, right now, at this very moment, he has a better chance than almost any of the other republican clowns who plan on running. Let me be clear: that is not a prediction. I have no fucking clue who the nominees on either side are going to be because I don’t have a functioning crystal ball, and therefore cannot accurately tell you what’s going to happen nearly two years from now. But that’s a whole other post.

This one is about Rand Paul and his simple minded, childlike view of the world. He lives in a world where he and his pet unicorn, Ayn are free to roam about the country doing as they please because FREEDOM trumps public safety. He wants to do this while enjoying all of the perks of living in a developed country, where the roads are built for him, the water is cleansed of all brain eating amoebas for him, planes aren’t crashing on his head, ebola isn’t running rampant, fires are magically being put out, buildings aren’t collapsing, and the internet just spontaneously appeared one day. Oh, and it’s all in technicolor, like The Wizard Of Oz.

You see, little Rand doesn’t care what your question is because the answer is always FREEDOM! A person who thinks that one answer applies to all (or most) questions is a child, incapable of handling complexities.

When you live in a first world country, you have entered into a social compact. That social compact provides you with millions of things you don’t even realize you’re getting, which is why I made sure to include brain eating amoebas earlier. That’s a thing that no one thinks about, is aware of, and doesn’t realize is being taken care of for them. You are not free to do as you please in that technicolor libertarian dream because you have to give up a little FREEDOM to have nice things.

Obion County Tennessee is a place with the kind of FREEDOM that Rand Paul’s underdeveloped little mind loves. They don’t have their own fire department. It’s a small town who relies on the fire department from a neighboring country to come out and deal with their fires, since they’re too small to viably create their own fire department. So a neighboring town offers them firefighting services for a voluntary fee of $75.00. It’s not a tax, so there’s no one to just take the money. Residents of Obion have to voluntarily send in a check every year if they want firefighters to come to their burning house to put out the fire. Yay FREEDOM, right? Most of you who aren’t afflicted with the libertarian suppression of emotional and intellectual growth disease can see where this is going. But let me tell the story for the unicorn owners. Four years ago, a home in Obion County caught fire. That home owner forgot to send in his voluntary (yay FREEDOM) fee so when he called 911, they told him that they couldn’t help him since he hadn’t paid the fee. The homeowner pleaded with the 911 operator, offering to pay all of the costs of putting out the fire. But that didn’t work, cause FREEDOM means "no pay, no spray". Good news though, the fire department did eventually come out to spray the house next door, who had paid their fee. So that’s awesome for the neighbors whose home was protected from burning down. Of course, they now have a burned down shell of a structure next door to them. But don’t worry, I’m sure that isn’t affecting the property values for all of the homeowners on the block.

So the same thing happened a year later in Obion. Fire…..no fee…..FREEDOM rings….no spray…..everyone watched the house burn down, and their property values with it. But hey, those neighbors should obviously just suck it up, cause [think Big Lebowski] it’s like, freeeeedom, maaaaaaan. So after two of these giant bonfire incidents, Obion county legislators, who still don’t want to raise taxes, have decided that the firefighters should be held personally responsible if:

someone is trapped in a deadbeat house and dies because the fire wasn’t put out or
the fire department makes a clerical error and refuses to put out a fire because they mistakenly had it on the deadbeat list.

So that’s awesome. Obion county legislators are problem solving while still preserving FREEDOM for their residents. Not so much for the firefighters but hey, it’s like, freeeeedom, maaaaaaan.

Wanna know what the FREEDOM killing, public interest protecting cost would be if Obion County residents paid for fire protection through their taxes? 0.13 (go to page 51 on that link) of a cent on each household. Sure, that doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but that’s another 0.13% of a penny of FREEDOM killing!

And we can’t have that, because Rand Paul doesn’t care what the question is because the answer is always FREEDOM. Why did I go all the way to Tennessee to make my point? Because that’s my favorite of dozens of stories that clearly depict that if you want nice, first world things, you don’t have the freedom to do anything you damned please, at the expense of public safety.

Public safety trumps freedom in the developed country 100% of the time. And that, kiddies, is why libertarians can never give me a real world example of a time or a place in history where the FREEDOM unicorn shit out a rainbow of prosperity and bestowed it upon all the people.

Yes, vaccinations should be mandatory. Your batshit crazy, scientifically devoid beliefs do not trump the interests of public safety. I cannot believe this shit needs to be explained.

Oh, but ladies should know that Rand’s FREEDOM-loving ends at your uterus’ edge. He doesn’t think you should ever be allowed to have an abortion. But good news, when you give birth to the child you may or may not have wanted, you’re FREE to cost your community, productivity, the health of others, and the profit margins of businesses who have to shut down because of the plague your unvaccinated child has bestowed upon them.

Let FREEDOM ring!

I Hope The NYPD Temper Tantrum Lasts

January 4, 2015 by Bitchy

So I came across a story in the (I know, I know) NY Post a few days ago. They took a look at police activity during the course of the week that Pat Lynch’s promised a "slow down" of cops doing their damned jobs. They looked at the week of December 22 through December 29th and compared a few statistics to the same week last year. Here are the things they looked at:

Overall arrests – down by 66%
Traffic citations down by 94%
Summonses for low-level offenses (public drinking, urination, etc) down by 94%
Parking violations down by 92%
Drug arrests down by 84%

When asked what the fuck they thought they were doing, police officials cited "safety concerns" as the reason for the pseudo strike. Safety concerns? While writing parking tickets? Are you worried about accidentally slipping on a discarded bagel, falling on your pen and slicing open your jugular vein?

Well I say BRAVO! I hope they can keep this up for another 3 months or so. Why? I have a few reasons.

For one thing, I’m not interested in wasting resources on drug arrests. I’d prefer that our cops fight actual crime, rather than clogging up the court system with this nonsense. Each time they arrest someone for something like drugs or selling loosie cigarettes, they get to spend half of a shift booking that wanton criminal. So basically, we end up with a cop on the clock, basically standing there with his dick in his hand for 4 hours. That doesn’t really seem to me like it serves the greater good.

Another good thing to come out of all of this is that these bullshit offenses that are in place to generate revenue, rather than keep our city orderly are largely hurting low income people who end up sitting in jail because they can’t afford to bail out. I say great! I don’t need 3/4 of our jail population being comprised of people who couldn’t raise $100 bail for a public drinking offense.

But my biggest reason for wanting this to continue is that it will debunk the unicorn known as "broken windows policing" that some obnoxious mayors had embraced in the past. The purely unproven theory is that if you crack down on low level criminals, you will deter them from becoming more serious, career criminals. Bullshit. From 2001 – 2010, when New York City was broken-stop-and-frisk-windowing, violent crime dropped by 29%. That sounds awesome, only if you don’t think critically and ask for context. If you do a little research, you’ll find out that during that same period of time, big cities that weren’t harassing people suspected of being low level offenders were experiencing much larger declines in violent crime.

Los Angeles – 59% drop
New Orleans – 56% drop
Dallas 49% drop
Baltimore (yeah, the one from The Wire) 37% drop

One piece of data without context is meaningless but the people that want to manipulate you know that most people will take one data point and run with that in order to create a whole ideology behind it. Three months of this pseudo strike should be enough to debunk the theory of broken windows policing, or at least make it seriously questionable. Violent crime will continue to drop. Why am I so sure? Because it’s been dropping steadily all across the country for 20 years now. Regardless of the policing practices, and independent of reductions or increases in police force size, crime is going down. I have no reason to believe that’s going to change. If I’m right, we will not only debunk this vehicle for acceptable racist practices, but we can start looking at how many cops are too many cops in New York City.

I have to wonder if the revenue they’re generating by writing these pointless tickets and making these petty arrests can’t be offset by shedding some salaries, pensions, and civil suit settlements through a reduction in force. So you keep up the temper tantrum, NYPD. Keep disrespecting the mayor and stay on strike while still cashing your paychecks while you can because this childishness may come back to bite you in the ass. And then perhaps you’ll see your fearless leader, Pat Lynch for the small minded idiot that he really is.

The Makings For The Next Tamir Rice Shooting

January 4, 2015January 4, 2015 by Bitchy

One of my G+ peeps turned me on to a situation in Cleveland that really should be a national story, but isn’t so I’m writing about it. Please share this, since it needs to go viral. We need to stop something very bad from happening in Cleveland. More specifically, Cleveland PD. I know what you’re thinking, "It’s too late, very bad things have already happened with Cleveland PD since they’re under federal investigation for excessive force, and one of their officers murdered Tamir Rice". You would be correct, but more bad things may be happening.

I’m going to briefly recap the situation in Cleveland, since I want this piece to be relatively short and quickly readable. We all know about the Tamir Rice shooting by now, and have probably seen the video (it’s on youtube). And some of you are familiar with the history of the officer who murdered Tamir. If you’re not, let me give you the highlights. Officer Timothy Loehmann joined Cleveland PD in March of this year. This was a year and a half after he was forced to resign from the Independence Police Department, who found him unfit to serve as a police officer on their force. Here’s a copy of the memo that the deputy chief of the department sent to HR (that’s important but I’ll get to it later). In that memo, the deputy chief described Loehmann as follows, "dangerous loss of composure during live range training" and an "inability to manage personal stress." And he made the following recommendation, "I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies".

Loehmann subsequently resigned. When he applied to work for Cleveland PD, they were aware of his previous employment with Independence. Loehmann’s background check went like this;

Interviewer: Hey Loehmann, are there any disciplinary actions or incidents that we should be know about before hiring you?

Loehmann: Nope

Interviewer: Alrighty then!

To be fair, they did also call HR at independence. That HR person’s comments were (according to Cleveland PD) limited to letting them know that he resigned due to personal reasons. The whole truth of the situation is that he submitted his resignation for "personal reasons" after he was told that a disciplinary process of separation had begun. Whether that last piece of information was included in his personnel record or not is up for debate.

And this brings us to today. 133 police cadets will be graduating, and becoming full fledged members of Cleveland PD tomorrow. Among them is this guy:

His name is Brandon Smith. If you live in Cleveland, you need to burn this picture into your mind. Why? Cause little Brandon here isn’t new to law enforcement. He served on the East Cleveland police force for a few months in 2012, until he resigned right before he was about to be fired. Fired? Yeah, fired because he and his partner shot 10 – 11 bullets into the car of a woman who was fleeing from the cops. She was pulled over for running a red light. They thought, that instead of putting her license plate out there in the "be on the lookout" list, or following her until she ran out of steam, they would fire copious amounts of bullets into her car. Here’s just one news story on the incident at the time it happened. Why do I share that link?

Two reasons:

Google is awesome, especially if you’re an HR person like I am
The article says that Smith was fired.

This is important because if I can find a story that says he was fired, the HR department for Cleveland PD can find it too. What Cleveland PD is claiming isn’t clear to me. I keep finding the same article on several local news sites that all contain exactly the same text (isn’t McJournalism grand?):

"Cleveland City Hall points out Smith was never hit with criminal charges for it. Cleveland’s Department of Public Safety had been under the impression Smith was fully cleared. However, the East Cleveland mayor has told us he let Smith resign instead of getting fired."

WTF is going on in this clown car of a city government? Here’s one thing we do know Cleveland PD became aware of; Smith lied on his application when he failed to disclose a lawsuit against him. A lawsuit over the same shooting incident. They knew about the incident if they found out about the lawsuit. They didn’t even take any disciplinary action against him, never mind explore the incident in greater detail.

The problem here is not a lack of communication. It’s a lack of honest communication. Everybody seems to be bending over backwards not to sully these brutish cops’ employment records so they let them resign rather than firing them, or they leave out details of the resignation. No, I’m sorry but criminals don’t get to erase their records even after they’ve been held accountable for their actions by serving their time. Why do cops get to enjoy a lovely (and lethal for their communities) combination of not ever being held accountable, and not ever suffering a single repercussion of their actions?

No, this needs to stop. Most police departments make if very difficult for someone to access the personnel records of their officers. And if those personnel records are legally mandated to be public, they will bury personnel issues within the individual incident reports so that they’re not easily locatable. We need transparency here because it’s clear that everyone or anyone associated with a police department has far too many ways to cover for a bad cop.

This has to stop.

But right now, our immediate concern is in making sure that little Brandon Smith doesn’t hit the streets of Cleveland tomorrow, after his graduation ceremony.

Here’s a link to the petition urging Cleveland PD to fire Smith. Please share!

Privilege, part 1

January 2, 2015January 1, 2015 by Bitchy

I know that white privilege is a difficult thing to wrap one’s mind around. It’s something that you never asked for and don’t realize you have unless you make a concerted effort to look at how things are for people who don’t have it. I did. I tried very hard to learn what privilege means, and the degree to which it exists. I’m still not sure I have it all figured out.

I’m going to try and present a number of seemingly unrelated data points to try and paint a picture of what privilege is and how it works. I’m going to start with income and wealth inequality. Pew recently published a paper on income inequality and how it’s been growing among racial groups since the end of the great recession. We know that the inequality gap is growing wildly between the top 1% and everybody else, but minorities are getting fewer of the crumbs left over than white people are. The wealth gap between whites has widened to a 13x multiplier. So the median worth of a white family in the US is thirteen times that of the medial wealth of a black family. In 2010, that gap between blacks and whites was 10x. The gap between whites and Hispanics smaller, but it’s still a shocking ten times multiplier up from 9x in 2010. The interesting part is that the typical (not median) worth for whites remained virtually unchanged in 2013 from the 2010 number of $82,300 (adjusted). Meanwhile, the median wealth of black households fell 33.7%, from $16,600 in 2010 to $11,000 in 2013. Among Hispanics, median wealth went down by 14.3%, from $16,000 to $13,700. Every race took a hit because of the recession so median net worth is down across the board. Pew speculates on some of the factors that may have contributed to the growing gap. Blacks and hispanics may have had to dip into more of their savings during the recession, or weren’t able to replenish their savings as much when it ended. Also, financial assets like stocks recovered more robustly than did the housing market, and since white people own more stocks (directly or through pensions or 401ks) they would have recovered more quickly.

This disparity in wealth exists in every conceivable way you look at the data. Pew looked at all blacks and did a median wealth comparison to all whites. Here’s a graph that DEMOS put together, comparing blacks, Hispanics, and whites by income level.

This doesn’t really paint much rosier a picture, does it? For the bigots who don’t know they’re bigots, and are in fact positive they’re not bigots, but are totally bigots, let me answer your point for you. No, it’s not their fault for not picking themselves up by the bootstraps and getting themselves an education. Wanna know how you can tell? That median income for the top 10% of earners is just under 500k. Are you telling me that those people didn’t beat your ass over the head with their bootstraps by making over 3x your median income? And still, with all that bootstrapping, they can’t manage to earn more than 1/3 of their white counterparts? They’re clearly educated. So what happened? That’s easy: that top 10% of whites inherited their bootstraps and they were sewn together for them using gold thread. Remember, 3 generations ago, black people had virtually no access to higher education. From the DEMOS article;

"Why is this the case? There are many factors, but one in particular looms large. It turns out that three centuries of enslavement followed by another bonus century of explicit racial apartheid was hell on black wealth accumulation. Wealth accumulation opportunities haven’t exactly been evenly distributed in the last half century either. Because wealth is the sort of thing you transmit across generations and down family lines (e.g. through inheritance, gifts, and so on), racial wealth disparities remain quite massive."

I cannot believe this needs to be explained to some, but it does.

I found a really interesting study done by the Institute On Assets and Social Policy, who really took a close look into why the disparity among blacks and whites exists. From the study;

"Our analysis found little evidence to support common perceptions about what underlies the ability to build wealth, including the notion that personal attributes and behavioral choices are key pieces of the equation. Instead, the evidence points to policy and the configuration of both opportunities and barriers in workplaces, schools, and communities that reinforce deeply entrenched racial dynamics in how wealth is accumulated and that continue to permeate the most important spheres of everyday life."

They’re talking about the institutional racism that privilege is part of. They found an increase of $152,000 in the disparity of median worth between 1984 and 2009. Here’s an excerpt from the study, explaining their approach to getting to the bottom of the widening wealth gap;

"We started our analysis with an overriding question: Why has economic inequality become so entrenched in our post-Civil Rights era of supposed legal equality? The first step was to identify the critical aspects of contemporary society that are driving this inequality Next, we sought to determine whether equal accomplishments are producing equal wealth gains for whites and African-Americans This approach allows for an evidence based examination of whether the growing racial wealth gap is primarily the result of individual choices and cultural characteristics or policies and institutional practices that create different opportunities for increasing wealth in white and black families."

They looked at the households whose wealth increased over that 25 year period and found that years of home ownership accounts for 27% of that disparity. The second largest factor is family income. More education = more income, but it = 5% more income for whites than it does for blacks. Inheritance accounts for 5% of the gap. The amount of wealth that a family started with at the beginning of that 25 year period determined how much wealth they would have by the end. Unemployment was the only significant factor that depleted wealth. That accounts for 9% of the gap. From the study;

"In addition to continuing discrimination, labor market instability affects African-Americans more negatively than whites."

Those factors that I just went through explain 66% of the wealth gap. So they dove deeper into those factors to study how these effects differed by race. I’m going to lift paragraphs directly from the article because I can’t improve upon the explanation;

"The number of years families owned their homes was the largest predictor of the gap in wealth growth by race. Residential segregation by government design has a long legacy in this country and underpins many of the challenges African-American families face in buying homes and increasing equity. There are several reasons why home equity rises so much more for whites than African-Americans:

Because residential segregation artificially lowers demand, placing a forced ceiling on home equity for African-Americans who own homes in non-white neighborhoods

Because whites are far more able to give inheritances or family assistance for down payments due to historical wealth accumulation, white families buy homes and start acquiring equity an average eight years earlier than black families

Because whites are far more able to give family financial assistance, larger up-front payments by white homeowners lower interest rates and lending costs; and

Due to historic differences in access to credit, typically lower incomes, and factors such as residential segregation, the home ownership rate for white families is 28.4 percent higher than the home ownership rate for black families

Homes are the largest investment that most American families make and by far the biggest item in their wealth portfolio. Home ownership is an even greater part of wealth composition for black families, amounting to 53 percent of wealth for blacks and 39 percent for whites. Yet, for many years, redlining, discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race. African-Americans, therefore, are more recent homeowners and more likely to have high-risk mortgages, hence they are more vulnerable to foreclosure and volatile housing prices."

As an aside, I want to tell you something that my landlord told me. My landlords are a black couple who bought a brownstone in Harlem in 2003 (I moved in in 2004). Since about 2002, Harlem has been in revitalization mode. The beautiful brownstones up here were decrepit and literally unsellable from the mid 80s until about 2001 or 2002. They weren’t worth the property tax payments. But in the early 2000s investors started coming in to renovate the brownstones and set them up as rental properties. But it wasn’t all investors. Some of the buyers were middle class black people who had saved enough money to buy one of these brownstones, which were worth very little at the time. My landlord told me that when he would walk across 125th street from about 2004 – 2008, people were standing out in front of every bank, trying to get people to refinance their homes. He said that he would walk by an bank and be asked, "hey, do you own your home?" He would respond in the affirmative, and then got a pitch for what sounded to him like a pretty shady refinance pitch. It turns out that they were pitching subprime refinancing. These scumbag bankers were preying on people in poor neighborhoods who were less likely to be able to spot a shady deal than someone whose parents owned a home.

I digress. Back to the study. There is a lot of interesting information in this paper, and I encourage you to click on the link that I provided to read the whole thing (it’s only 8 pages long) since I’m not going to go through all of it. I want to share another graph from the study that is really shocking;

Wow. Now let me show you why this is because I know what the racist nonracists are thinking. From the study;

"The dramatic difference in wealth accumulation from similar income gains has its roots in long-standing patterns of discrimination in hiring, training, promoting, and access to benefits that have made it much harder for African-Americans to save and build assets. Due to discriminatory factors, black workers predominate in fields that are least likely to have employer-based retirement plans and other benefits, such as administration and support and food services. As a result, wealth in black families tends to be close to what is needed to cover emergency savings while wealth in white families is well beyond the emergency threshold and can be saved or invested more readily."

So no, they’re not spending it as soon as it comes in. That’s not what’s happening here. Every piece of institutional racism cascades out into every aspect of one’s life. A friend of mine who worked in the admissions department at a big state school in California once told me something interesting. A kid graduating from Compton High with a 4.5 GPA is weighed against a kid graduating from Beverly Hills High with a 3.7 GPA. Why? Because the quality of the education is better at Beverly Hills High. And if you live in Compton, you can’t attend Beverly Hills High. The game is rigged from the very beginning.

Here’s another interesting part of the study. If a black family and a white family start off on an equal playing field with the same wealth, that $1 in income increase equals $4.03 in wealth accumulation for the black family. In other words, there’s no cascade from prior institutional racism. There is only present institutional racism that will cascade in the future.

So that was my breakdown of institutional racism and therefore institutional privilege. Part 2 of this post, which will be published tomorrow goes into societal racism, as opposed to institutional racism. And yes, I’m going to go into the cop situation because too many people seem to think that cops treat everyone equally.

Bob McCulloch Should Be Disbarred

December 20, 2014 by Bitchy

So Darrin Wilson’s attorney, I mean ‘prosecutor’ Bob McCulloch admits that he put people in front of the grand jury who he knew were lying. Here’s an interview he did with a local talk show host:

17:00 is the point where McCulloch tells us that witness #40 was a lying sack of crap. He knew he couldn’t have done this at trial. The lying jurors (like #40, who wasn’t even there) would have been ripped to shreds on cross examined during the course of a trial, and therefore never would have been called to testify. Wilson’s preposterous testimony would actually have received some cross examination at trial. He threw as much garbage at the grand jury as he could find because he knew that the lack of scrutiny would confuse and misdirect the grand jury.

At some point, the host asks him if the grand jury took the testimony of witness #40 seriously. He responds by making a claim that he can’t possibly make. He said that they definitely didn’t take her testimony seriously. He can’t know what they thought of any piece of evidence put before them because no one is allowed to be in the grand jury room when they’re deliberating.

This proceeding was a joke, and McCulloch should be disbarred.

Anyone who genuinely believes that Wilson didn’t do anything wrong should agree with me because he’s never going to be seen as an innocent person, given the level of shadiness with which this proceeding was conducted. McCulloch just told the world that this grand jury proceeding was a joke. If Wilson did nothing wrong, he should be able to go through the same justice system that everyone else goes through with the confidence of an innocent man. Innocent people should be confident that cross examination is their friend. It doesn’t matter which side of this you fall on, if your opinion is earnestly held, we should all agree that what Bob McCulloch did here neither proved nor disproved a damned thing.

He’s never going to be an innocent man until he does.

A Shining, Torturing City Upon A Hill

December 10, 2014December 10, 2014 by Bitchy

I read through the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture yesterday. I’m sure you all read plenty of stories telling you that it was all much more appalling than we had previously thought. I decided that I’m going to do this a little differently than how everyone else covered it. I was shocked appalled, and fascinated while reading it so I’m going to give you actual snippets from the report so that you can experience for yourselves, what I experienced when reading it. My comments are going to be relatively short.

The summary broke down their conclusions into different areas which they numbered. I will go through each section in the order the report presents it.

#1: The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

For example, according to CIA records, seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody.* CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were usually subjected to the techniques immediately after being rendered to CIA custody. Other detainees provided significant accurate intelligence prior to, or without having been subjected to these techniques.

While being subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and afterwards, multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence. Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities.

That pretty much speaks for itself.

#2: The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.

The Committee reviewed 20 of the most frequent and prominent examples of purported counterterrorism successes that the CIA has attributed to the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques, and found them to be wrong in fundamental respects. In some cases, there was no relationship between the cited counterterrorism success and any information provided by detainees during or after the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. In the remaining cases, the CIA inaccurately claimed that specific, otherwise unavailable information was acquired from a CIA detainee "as a result" of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, when in fact the information was either: (1) corroborative of information already available to the CIA or other elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community from sources other than the CIA detainee, and was therefore not "otherwise unavailable"; or (2) acquired from the CIA detainee prior to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. The examples provided by the CIA included numerous factual inaccuracies.

That also speaks for itself. The CIA knew this wasn’t working, and took the proactive step of creating the illusion of efficacy.

#3: The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.

Beginning with the CIA’s first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, and continuing with numerous others, the CIA applied its enhanced interrogation techniques with significant repetition for days or weeks at a time. Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Records do not support CIA representations that the CIA initially used an "an open, non- threatening approach,"^ or that interrogations began with the "least coercive technique possible"^ and escalated to more coercive techniques only as necessary.

The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the water boarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings."

Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care,^ resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture. In at least two other cases, the CIA used its enhanced interrogation techniques despite warnings from CIA medical personnel that the techniques could exacerbate physical injuries. CIA medical personnel treated at least one detainee for swelling in order to allow the continued use of standing sleep deprivation.

At least five CIA detainees were subjected to "rectal rehydration" or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity.

Here’s where I have a lot to interject in the form of additional information and some background on Abu Zubaydah. Ali Soufan was an FBI interrogator who had Zubaydah before the CIA took him. Zubaydah wasn’t like all of the other "#2 guys" that the Bush administration bragged about having captured. He actually knew some shit, and he was actually a high level operative in Al Qaeda. Ali Soufan used traditional interrogation techniques that have been proven to work since WWII. He treated detainees like humans with respect and dignity. He earned their trust by taking them out for pizza, and bringing one diabetic detainee some sugar-free cookies. We did this with the Nazis and got actionable intelligence by treating them to steak dinners.

Soufan interrogated Zubaydah from March – June 2002 (the torture began in August). While Soufan was interrogating Zubaydah, he got the single most important piece of information about 9/11: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind. It was because of that interrogation that we started looking for KSM. I’ve read copious amounts of information about 9/11 from a myriad of different sources including George Tenet, Dick Cheney, Ali Soufan, and Terry McDermott and Josh Meyers’ reporting. Yeah, I read Dick Cheney’s painful autobiography so that you didn’t have to. Here’s what most people don’t know about 9/11: Bin Laden had almost nothing to do with it beyond financing and some recruitment. KSM wasn’t even a member of Al Qaeda. They were not working closely together. KSM planned and executed every aspect of 9/11. We didn’t have his name until over 6 months after the attack, when Ali Soufan got it out of Abu Zubaydah by treating him like a human being. Once the torture began, Zubaydah never offered up another piece of information that was worth a damned. Who knows what else we could have learned from him, had the Bush administration not had their heads shoved so far up their asses.

Back to the report.

One interrogator told another detainee that he would never go to court, because "we can never let the world know what I have done to you."^ CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat."^

Threatening women and children. That’s what the US became on Bush’s watch. Is it me, or is it impossible to tell the difference between "the good guys" and "the bad guys" here? That’s the part of the report that disgusted me the most.

#5: The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.

From 2002 to 2007, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) within the Department of Justice relied on CIA representations regarding: (1) the conditions of confinement for detainees, (2) the application of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, (3) the physical effects of the techniques on detainees, and(4)the effectiveness of the techniques. Those representations were inaccurate in material respects.

The Department of Justice did not conduct independent analysis or verification of the information it received from the CIA. The department warned, however, that if the facts provided by the CIA were to change, its legal conclusions might not apply. When the CIA determined that information it had provided to the Department of Justice was incorrect, the CIA rarely informed the department.

That bolded and italicized is the part that jumped out at me. The whole report was written in a way that lays all the blame in the lap of the CIA as if they were a rogue operation secretly behaving badly, and that no one had a clue what was happening. I say that’s complete bullshit. Every arm of the Bush administration from DOJ to the OLC (office of legal council) took the CIA at their word on everything. There was comically little oversight, and that could only have been by design.

Back to #5.

The OLC determined that "under the current circumstances, necessity or self- defense may justify interrogation methods that might violate" the criminal prohibition against torture.

On the same day, a second OLC opinion approved, for the first time, the use of 10 specific coercive interrogation techniques against Abu Zubaydah—subsequently referred to as the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation techniques." The OLC relied on inaccurate CIA representations about Abu Zubaydah’s status in al-Qa’ida and the interrogation team’s "certain[ty]" that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about planned terrorist attacks. The CIA’s representations to the OLC about the techniques were also inconsistent with how the techniques would later be applied.

In March 2005, the CIA submitted to the Department of Justice various examples of the "effectiveness" of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques that were inaccurate. OLC memoranda signed on May 30, 2005, and July 20, 2007, relied on these representations, determining that the techniques were legal in part because they produced "specific, actionable intelHgence" and "substantial quantities of otherwise unavailable intelligence" that saved lives.

Again, the lack of any interest in looking at what the CIA was doing was comical and unbelievable (as in, not to be believed).

#6: The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.

The CIA did not brief the leadership of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques until September 2002, after the techniques had been approved and used. The CIA did not respond to Chairman Bob Graham’s requests for additional information in 2002, noting in its own internal communications that he would be leaving the Committee in January 2003. The CIA subsequently resisted efforts by Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, to investigate the program, including by refusing in 2006 to provide requested documents to the full Committee.

The CIA restricted access to information about the program from members of the Committee beyond the chairman and vice chairman until September 6, 2006, the day the president publicly acknowledged the program, by which time 117 of the 119 known detainees had already entered CIA custody. Until then, the CIA had declined to answer questions from other Committee members that related to CIA interrogation activities.

Prior to September 6, 2006, the CIA provided inaccurate information to the leadership of the Committee.

After multiple senators had been critical of the program and written letters expressing concerns to CIA Director Michael Hayden, Director Hayden nonetheless told a meeting of foreign ambassadors to the United States that every Committee member was "fully briefed," and that "[t]his is not CIA’s program. This is not the President’s program. This is America’s program."^^ The CIA also provided inaccurate information describing the views of U.S. senators about the program to the Department of Justice.

A year after being briefed on the program, the House and Senate Conference Committee considering the Fiscal Year 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill voted to limit the CIA to using only interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual. That legislation was approved by the Senate and the House of Representatives in February 2008, and was vetoed by President Bush on March 8, 2008.

And there it is. Even when all of that plausible deniability the Bush Administration so carefully crafted evaporated, they insisted the program continue, despite the fact that they knew it didn’t work. And still, this report basically leaves the administration out of all of the CIA’s ostensibly totally fucking independent malfeasance. Riiiight.

And the whole next section of the report is dedicated to doing just that.

#7: The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.

The CIA provided extensive amounts of inaccurate and incomplete information related to the operation and effectiveness of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program to the White House, the National Security Council principals, and their staffs. This prevented an accurate and complete understanding of the program by Executive Branch officials, thereby impeding oversight and decision-making.

According to CIA records, no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss, briefed the president on the specific CIA enhanced interrogation techniques before April 2006. By that time, 38 of the 39 detainees identified as having been subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques had already been subjected to the techniques. The CIA did not inform the president or vice president of the location of CIA detention facilities other than Country

Oh, so the Bush administration were just hapless rubes?

But here’s the next paragraph:

At the direction of the White House, the secretaries of state and defense – both principals on the National Security Council – were not briefed on program specifics until September 2003. An internal CIA email from July 2003 noted that "… the WH [White House] is extremely concerned [Secretary] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on." Deputy Secretary of State Armitage complained that he and Secretary Powell were "cut out" of the National Security Council coordination process.

Yeah, not so much with the hapless rube routine.

#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The CIA’s Office of Public Affairs and senior CIA officials coordinated to share classified information on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program to select members of the media to counter public criticism, shape public opinion, and avoid potential congressional action to restrict the CIA’s detention and inteiTogationauthorities and budget. These disclosures occurred when the program was a classified covert action program, and before the CIA had briefed the full Committee membership on the program.

The deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center wrote to a colleague in 2005, shortly before being interviewed by a media outlet, that "we either get out and sell, or we get hammered, which has implications beyond the media. [C]ongress reads it, cuts our authorities, messes up our budget… we either put out our story or we get eaten. [T]here is no middle ground."^ The same CIA officer explained to a colleague that "when the [Washington Post]/[New York Times quotes ‘senior intelligence official,’ it’s us… authorized and directed by opa [CIA’s Office of Public Affairs].

Remember, congress did exactly that in 2008, and Bush vetoed their decision. I find it hard to believe that these leaks were entirely the doing of members of the CIA. I could be wrong, but that really doesn’t sound right to me.

#11: The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.

On September 17, 2001, the President signed a covert action Memorandum of Notification (MON) granting the CIA unprecedented counterterrorism authorities, including the authority to covertly capture and detain individuals "posing a continuing, serious threat of violence or death to U.S. persons and interests or planning terrorist activities." The MON made no reference to interrogations or coercive interrogation techniques.

That would be republican style small government.

#12: The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.

On November, 2002,a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility.

At the time, no single unit at CIA Headquarters had clear responsibility for CIA detention and interrogation operations. In interviews conducted in 2003 with the Office of Inspector General, CIA’s leadership and senior attorneys acknowledged that they had little or no awareness of operations at COBALT, and some believed that enhanced interrogation techniques were not used there.

So now there’s a corpse for which no one appears to be responsible, and no one is asking questions? Curious.

Back to section 12.

Numerous CIA officers had serious documented personal and professional problems—including histories of violence and records of abusive treatment of others—that should have called into question their suitability to participate in the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, their employment with the CIA, and their continued access to classified information. In nearly all cases, these problems were known to the CIA prior to the assignment of these officers to detention and interrogation positions.

This is actually the culture that the Bush administration created within the CIA when Bush appointed Porter Goss to be their Director. At the time, Goss himself said, "I’m not qualified for the CIA." I take that back- this was the culture the Bush administration created throughout the federal government. Remember the horsey lawyer who was put in charge of federal emergency management? You know, the one who was doing a "heckuva job"? This incompetence way systemic and started at the very top (Dick Cheney).

#13: Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.

The CIA contracted with two psychologists to develop, operate, and assess its interrogation operations. The psychologists’ prior experience was at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.

On the CIA’s behalf, the contract psychologists developed theories of interrogation based on "learned helplessness,"^^ and developed the list of enhanced inteiTogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees. The psychologists personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA’s most significant detainees using these techniques. They also evaluated whether detainees’ psychological state allowed for the continued use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, including some detainees whom they were themselves interrogating or had interrogated. The psychologists carried out inherently governmental functions, such as acting as liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, assessing the effectiveness of the interrogation program, and participating in the interrogation of detainees in held in foreign government custody.

In 2005, the psychologists formed a company specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the CIA. Shortly thereafter, the CIA outsourced virtually all aspects of the program.

In 2006, the value of the CIA’s base contract with the company formed by the psychologists with all options exercised was in excess of $180 million; the contractors received $81 million prior to the contract’s termination in 2009. In 2007, the CIA provided a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program. The CIA has since paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement.

What can I possibly add to that except that, the incompetence that allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place didn’t end on 9/11.

The Bush administration suffered from ideologically driven tunnel vision before, during, and after 9/11. We know that Richard Clarke repeatedly and emphatically warned the administration about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda from the moment that Bush was sworn in. Remember, Clarke worked under Reagan, Poppy Bush, and Clinton. He was there when republicans were screaming "no war for Monica’ in 1998 when Clinton tried to kill Bin Laden. He was there when the first terrorist attack happened at the World Trade Center. This is somebody who should have been taken very seriously. He says that they were so obsessed with Saddam, that they dismissed what he had to say entirely. In addition to Clarke’s warnings, the CIA had sent five PDBs (presidential daily briefs) warning that Bin Laden was planning another attack. That famous August 6th 2001 brief wasn’t the first one warning about Bin Laden. It was the last in a series of five that started in the spring of 2001.

The Bush administration suffered from incompetence and arrogance all the way through the last day of that miserable 8 years the world had to endure.

Don’t anyone tell you that this report says that this was entirely a CIA problem. They accidentally included some information that tells me exactly the opposite. The plausible deniability that was baked into this program to shield the administration for any culpability created a monster that any rational person could have seen coming. Those assholes turned Reagan’s "shining city upon a hill" into a terrorist nation that threatens women and children.

And if you’re one of those assholes who claims that Obama has shredded the constitution, you can go fuck yourself. You don’t care about your country at all. You’re an idiot rooting for a sports team and no one should take you seriously.

Death By Cop Is An Epidemic In America

December 8, 2014December 8, 2014 by Bitchy

I’ve been getting some push back lately in regard to my copious police brutality posts. To be clear, there wouldn’t be copious posts if there weren’t copious instances of brutality, but that’s too obvious a point. I get a lot of "not all cops are bad" comments with really no data or effort made to show me anything at all. So I thought I would put together some numbers to help us take a really close look on what’s going on here. After all, maybe we don’t actually have a rash of homicidal cops. Maybe social media is blowing the situation out of proportion.

Let’s examine. A good place to start would be to look at violent crime. Do we have more violent criminals necessitating more instances of lethal self defense from cops? Not so much. Violent crime has actually been going down for over two decades now.

Murder/manslaughter – down

Forcible rape – down

Robbery – down

Aggravated assault – down

Property crime – down

So crime is down, down, down straight across the board. Well that’s weird. Maybe more cops are getting killed despite the fact crime is down, and that’s why they seem to be shooting their guns so frequently? Negative. 2013 brought us the lowest number of cops killed (as a result of a felonious act) in fifty years. That data goes up to 2012. The number of cops killed during a felonious act in 2013 was twenty seven. Twenty seven? All year? All across the country? That doesn’t really seem like enough to create the twitchy cop syndrome we seem to be witnessing lately, does it? Even cops reporting their own numbers on cops being shot in the line of duty is way down from previous years. Here’s a visual to help you understand the crime to cop homicide trend;

Wanna know what else is down? Gun ownership. These cops are not facing the meanest streets ever.

Hey cop apologists, feel free to esplain this away. Go ahead, I’m listening.

Maybe it just seems like cops are shooting a lot of people because these stories spread like wildfire thanks to social media It’s possible that it feels more frequent than it actually is, right? Here’s where this all gets tricky. We don’t really know how many people cops kill every year because no one is really counting. I posted a meme yesterday that cites 409 deaths by cop in 2014.

This number comes from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report. I have news for the commenters who didn’t like it; it’s way below the actual number. The reporting has some major issues like ambiguity on how "justifiable" and "unjustifiable" are determined, and the fact that it’s based on self reporting from the states. Only 750 out of over 17,000 law enforcement agencies report their numbers. Think about that for a minute. 400 homicides by cop from just .44% of agencies reporting. If you think that the lack of accurate data on this is an accident, I have a decaying bridge in America to sell you. This information is nearly impossible to collect by design.

There are a few different efforts being made out there to gather the information by crowd sourcing it. How pathetic is that? Seriously, we have to resort to reporting each one of these when we hear about them and entering the website set up to do what our law enforcement officials won’t? What does that tell you about the FBI’s official number? Some of these crowd sourcing efforts have come up with more than 1,000 per year.

To recap, 27 dead cops and at least (remember, that’s just what Googling turned up) 1,000 civilians killed by cops. If you don’t think there’s a problem here, it’s because you don’t want to see it.

Here’s a really fucking disturbing article I found. You know how some people like to deflect whatever is being said about murder by saying, "gang violence" or "black on black crime"? I actually had a douchebag purporting to be a cop show up on my Facebook page saying that. The Salt Lake City Tribune looked at the cause of homicides in Utah. The #1 highest instances of homicide in Utah is from intimate partners killing each other. Wanna wager a guess on what the #2 highest instance of homicide is? Gangs? Nope. It would be death by cop.

What do you have to say to that, cop apologists? Do you want to tell me how I’m being hyperbolic and one sided again?

In the tradition of Law And Order, I will now move from the criminal act to the court proceedings. And in order to do that, I must offer up more sketchy information that isn’t collected through any official procedural means. A researcher named David Packman (not the one from the podcast) compiled a database of police brutality reports. I know what the cop apologists are going to say, "a complaint doesn’t necessarily mean it happened." That’s true. It’s also true that police brutality is often not reported. Take the case of Daniel Holtzclaw for example. This motherfucker is on trial for sexually assaulting thirteen women (that we know of). This predator was smart because he preyed on most powerless group of women in the country; black women with criminal records. He was sailing along, raping women with impunity until one day in June when he fucked up and assaulted a woman who didn’t feel powerless. Up until he fucked with the wrong woman, there were no reports. By the way, officer motherfucker is on paid leave, sitting at his parents with a monitoring device around his ankle, waiting for his trial to begin. Doesn’t that sound lovely? I hope he’s got a big 4k tv to watch the rape porn collection I’m positive he owns on. His family and friends are out there calling the victims drug addicts and scumbags. Classy. I digress. Packman found 4,861 unique reports of misconduct involving 6,613 officers (354 of which were chiefs or sheriffs) in 2010. Those brutality allegations resulted in 247 fatalities. The total cost to taxpayers for settling these law suits is an estimated $346,512,800 for just one year.

Now let’s look at convictions. From April 2009 through to the end of 2010, Packman tallied 8,300 allegations of misconduct involving 11,000 cops. Of those, a mere 33% resulted in conviction and a paltry 12% resulted in incarceration. Let me put that into perspective for you by comparing it to conviction and incarceration rates for everyone else;

Huh. That seems like a pretty big disparity but then again, so does paid leave and an ankle monitor for thirty five counts of sexual assault.

Please tell me again that these victims of killer cops shouldn’t have committed crimes in the first place. Go ahead. Here’s what else you should feel free to to ahead and do;

Dismiss my data because you don’t like it, without even bothering to provide your own data.
Ask rhetorical and leading questions that you can’t be fucked to answer, in order to make a point that you can’t make. Not only is that a lame tactic, but it makes me do the research for you, which is why I wrote this post (you’re welcome).
Give me anecdotes that can’t be proved, and only relay what one person thinks they saw during a single point in time. Cause that’s way more valuable than someone else’s painstakingly compiled data.

We have a problem here, and it needs to be addressed. Is every cop a bad cop? Not even remotely, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a giant problem on our hands. For every killer cop story I post, there are exponentially more cops on that guy’s force covering for him. A blind, deaf, and mute cop isn’t a good cop just because he’s not doing the beating, raping, or killing.

They’re not all bad, but there are way more bad cops out there than what we’re aware of.

Definitely Not The Most Imortant Election In Your Lifetime

November 4, 2014 by Bitchy

I have said virtually nothing about this election. Weird, right? Why is a political junkie silent about an upcoming election? I have two reasons. First and foremost, there are too many senate races that are too close to call. Nate Silver says that republicans have a 76.2% chance of taking the senate. That sounds crazy to me. Not because I don’t like what he’s saying, but because those six races are so close that it’s really going to come down to a factor that hasn’t been taken into account; ground game. Sam Wang, who was even more accurate than Nate Silver in 2012 (not in 2010) has republicans odds of taking the senate at 53%. Wang and Silver are actually in a math geek pissing contest. It’s kind of amusing to watch if you’re as geeky, but not as mathy.

53% makes more sense to me even though Wang only uses polling data to come up with his odds. Nate Silver takes some other factors (generic ballot polls, approval ratings, cash raised, etc) into account. So even though Silver incorporates data that I personally believe is important into his model, I think that Wang’s odds are better this time around. Neither of them factor in ground game. Ground game is going to be the deciding factor in six senate races.

I’m not going to go through them. This is not a horse race piece. I’m not going into it because it doesn’t matter. Control of the senate is as close to irrelevant as control of the senate has ever been in our history. The gridlock situation isn’t going to change. Republicans aren’t going to pass anything too insane through both houses because they’re working very hard to make sure they have no platform that can be attributed to them.

The most relevant thing about control of the senate this time around is the impact it will have on 2016. The first status update I posted in Facebook for 2014 was a promise that I wasn’t going to talk about 2016 until 2015. I’m going to break that promise a tiny bit (hey, 11 out of 12 months ain’t bad!). Republicans can’t pass too many bills because anything they’re erroneously blaming on Obama now can easily be turned around on them if they control two out of the three branches. So the river of bullshit blaming that has flowed in one direction for the past six years, will now flow in two directions. Republicans won’t risk that. They also won’t risk creating a platform for the first time in six years because any platform they put forward hurts their odds of taking the White House in 2016.

As an aside, that lack of a platform thing is what democrats are doing now, and it’s a huge mistake. They didn’t have a platform for the midterms. Elizabeth Warren tried to guide them, but they didn’t follow her. Offering absolutely nothing works well on conservative constituents, but it most definitely doesn’t work on liberals. Like any other public page on the internet, I get a decent number of trolls (I was so proud of myself when I finally got noticed enough to attract my first troll!) The one and only post I put up that is 100% troll proof, is the one in which I ask conservatives to tell me one single thing that republicans have done to improve their lives. That post leaves the trolls mute. They know the answer and they don’t care. They’re not interested in results or a promise to deliver results. They’re happy making less and less money every year, seeing their kids opportunities shrink, and losing liberties as long as their hate is fueled. I say this earnestly and with no hyperbole; the GOP motto should be, "I hate, therefore I am".

Liberals are inherently different. They need ideas and something in the way of a result to cling onto. There are a significant number of liberals that hare having none of the Hillary-is-the-inevitable-nominee talk. We’re not happy with the, "I’m married to Bill" platform. We’re not republicans, who were happy to vote for Poppy Bush’s dumbest son for no reason other than he was Poppy’s son.

Anyway, I digress. The point of this post is to day that this election is fairly insignificant. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I will make one prediction about one too-close-to-call election that is actually really relevant. Get ready to say buh bye to Rick Scott. His approval ratings have been in the 30s for the past two years. It’s inconceivable to me that he isn’t going to lose tonight. Florida democrats despise Rick Scott more than Florida republicans like him. He’s gonzo. This is important because once Christ wins the seat, he’s going to keep it for a few terms. We need Florida in democratic hands in 2020 so that we can undo the redistricting damage.

That said, GO VOTE! Just because the national seats don’t matter much, doesn’t mean that your local races aren’t important.

Ferguson’s Biggest Threat Is Ferguson PD

September 8, 2014September 7, 2014 by Bitchy

The disturbing news about Ferguson PD just keeps growing and growing. A few weeks ago, I learned that Michael Brown’s shooting was the first murder of the year in Ferguson (see my previous post to understand why I’m justified in referring to it as murder). When I read that, I naturally got to fact checking. I got some crime statistics for 2000 – 2012. Here are the total number of murders for those years:

2000 – 3 murders
2001 – 1 murder
2002 – 1 murder
2003 – 1 murder
2004 – 1 murder
2005 – 1 murder
2006 – 1 murder
2007 – 1 murder
2008 – 1 murder
2009 – 3 murders
2010 – 0 murders
2011 – 5 murders
2012 – 2 murders

I know that sounds like Ferguson is a really safe place to live, but that’s misleading. You have to remember that Ferguson only has a population of 21,000 people so it’s a tiny place. If you calculate those murders in the context of the national average murder rate per 100,000 people, it’s not good. Ferguson is not a particularly safe place to live.

I bring up this data so that you have the context you need to get to where I got when evaluating the situation in Ferguson. Ferguson has 2.54 officers per 1,000 residents, compared to Missouri’s average of 2.45.

Here’s the big bombshell that makes reading all of that context pay off; five people (including Michael Brown) have been killed by Ferguson PD so far this year. They have shot at sixteen people so far this year.

We’ve still got 1/3 of the year left to go.

That link contains a whole lot of information that I’m not going to go into for the purpose of this post, but you should definitely read it. I want to focus in on murders. In a community that has an average of 1.61 murders per year (over the span I have data for), also has 6.66 police officer killings per year (assuming they keep up their average for the rest of the year).

Be honest; if you lived in Ferguson, would you be more afraid of your neighbor, or the police officer hanging out in front of the doughnut shop?

Bush’s Beheadings

September 3, 2014September 3, 2014 by Bitchy

So we had a second beheading of another journalist from ISIS yesterday. Fox is (naturally) positive that they know this is all Obama’s fault. Listening to some of them yesterday actually made my ears bleed. The ignorance and complete lack of facts is becoming too hard for me to take. So I’m going to give you my analysis.

This is the Bush administration’s fault.

If I were Fox, that would have been the end of the post and millions of incredibly dim witted people would be very satisfied with that analysis. So satisfied, that they would parrot it to their friends and on social media with the impunity of people who are well informed and intelligent.

But since I’m not Fox and I expect my readers to be more discerning and more demanding that to settle for my opinion, I’m going to do something unconventional by showing you the basis of my opinion. I know! Weird, right? In the interest of keeping this post at a readable length, I’m going to stick to basics.

Let’s start with President Obama and see if we can find a way that this could possibly be his fault. First off, there was a rescue attempt made. It would have been great, had they been successful but these missions usually don’t work out that way so it failed. That’s just an unfortunate fact of life. Here’s what Fox had to say about the rescue attempt;

President Barack Obama’s “hesitation” to make a decision about American reporter James Foley’s rescue mission delayed the failed operation, according to a report.

Personally, I like hesitation and pensiveness. I wish Bush had (ever) partaken because I suspect that things would have turned out better for us if he had. Let me digress for a moment; I don’t understand how a person who writes at a junior high school level gets paid to write things for grown-ups. I’ve never heard of Sarah Hurtubise, who wrote this piece for Fox (she appears to be on loan from the Daily Caller), and I hope that I never do. Look at that sentence structure for a minute. First off, why is hesitation in quotes? Who is she quoting? Or does she maybe think that the word hesitation was erroneously used, and wants to highlight that opinion? But that wouldn’t make much sense because the criticism of the hesitation seems to be the basis of her piece. Maybe there were just some random crayon marks that the transcriber of the piece mistook for quotes? Also, shouldn’t the sentence begin with "according to a report"? Is she Yoda? Seriously, who reads this crap and thinks they’re getting information?

Anyway, enough of my twit rant. Let’s contrast that pile of dung with the way that everyone else reported the story. NBC just put forth the facts. Here’s what happened, here’s our sources, and here’s how it turned out. Newsweek likewise told us what happened, who they spoke to, and how it turned out. CNN, The Washington Post,USA Today, ABC, Business Insider, and every other journalistic outfit presented the facts of what happened. They all used the word "failed" in the headline, which is perfectly fine. It was a failed attempt. The Fox fucks talked about the hesitation without bothering to demonstrate how said hesitation affected the mission. Did the hesitation cause it to fail? Was there a delay that changed the outcome of the mission? Or is the point that hesitation in and of itself a bad thing? Does anyone remember Fox touting how Bush made another huge decision without giving any thought to it? If hesitation is bad, shouldn’t the opposite approach be good? And what kind of critically thinking impaired idiot reads that tripe and walks away feeling informed?

Okay, I spend way too much time on that. Onto the next point. Before the actual beheading of James Foley, Isis demanded cash for his return. They wanted A LOT of cash, and the release of a prisoner. Was President Obama supposed to hand over one hundred and thirty million dollars and a bunch of terrorists? Was that where he fucked up? Would this have satisfied Isis and been the end of our troubles with them? Cause they definitely didn’t want to use that money to do bad things, right?

Okay, so they behead James Foley because President Obama fucked up by not giving them what they wanted. They were thoughtful enough to produce a video with, not only the beheading, but also an explanation of why it happened and a list of things that the US needed to do to prevent the next one. Here are some of the key points contained in the video entitled, "A Message To America". In the video, Foley was made to say,

[The American Government] effectively hit the last nail in my coffin [with the recent airstrikes in Iraq]

He’s referring to the strikes we assisted with to save the Yazidi. Is that where Obama fucked up? By not sitting idly by while Isis exterminates people they don’t like in Iraq? Would abiding by a genocide have been the right course of action?

The charming fellow who actually did the beheading had some tips for President Obama, on how to prevent the next beheading. He’s of the belief that Isis isn’t an insurgency so he refers to them as a "state".

State that has been accepted by a large number of Muslims worldwide.” He threatened: “Any aggression towards the Islamic State is an aggression towards Muslims from all walks of life who have accepted the Islamic Caliphate as their leadership. So any attempt by you, Obama, to deny the Muslims their rights of living in safety under the Islamic Caliphate will result in the bloodshed of your people.

The video concludes with the fighter holding Sotloff in a similar outfit and saying:

The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.

Okay, so allowing Isis let their genocidal freak flags fly unmolested would have prevented the next beheading. Is that where Obama fucked up? By proceeding with bombings even though Isis told him not to? Should he let them be in charge now? They’re bigger than Al Qaeda ever were, with an estimated 50,000 members but President Obama fucked up by not letting them get bigger and stronger?

Where exactly did Obama go wrong, other than being too pensive for Fox’s taste?

Now onto why this is Bush’s fault.

Everyone who knew anything about the middle east was opposed to Bush’s invasion of Iraq. They were opposed because they all knew that getting rid of Saddam would mean that Iraq would splinter into warring factions and come apart at the seams, paving the way for extremist groups to fester. You can Google Russ Feingold, Juan Cole, Reza Aslan, and a slew of other people’s statements about what would happen for yourself (set the search parameters to dates that preceded the invasion), but I’m going to give you just one. Here’s Dick Cheney in 1994, before he lost his fucking mind.

That would be precisely what happened. Isis is an acronym for "The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria". Bush paved the way for Isis, just like Cheney said would happen. But creating the environment in which they could thrive and grow isn’t all that Bush did. He pissed them off and gave them permission to behave barbarically.

Let’s go back to the Foley video. I’m not going to post it (but I did provide a transcript above), and I haven’t watched it so I’m relying on journalism from people who have watched it. In the video, Foley is apparently wearing an orange jump suit, a la Gitmo. That wasn’t an accident. Isis said that it was a statement about Gitmo. Who could have guessed that Guantanamo Bay was going to come back to bite us in the ass? Oh, right. Never mind.

Guess what else Bush did to piss off Isis? I’ll give you a hint; it was Cheney’s precious waterboarding. Thanks to Bush, Isis is doing it to our people with the impunity that only Bush could have given them by doing it first. Again, who could have possibly seen this coming?

So yeah, I blame Bush. I don’t blame Bush because I have a hard on for Obama, who can do no wrong in my partisan hack mind. I blame Bush because Bush is to blame. Ten or fifteen years from now when the children of Pakistan, who grew up under a barrage of drone strikes come for us, I will blame Obama because that will be Obama’s fault.

But not today. Today, we’re living with Bush’s colossal fuck up.