April 25, 2012

Shocking Video Shows Mexican Immigrant Beaten to Death. Something needs to be done.

More at Democracy Now!
A new PBS documentary exposes the tasing and beating death of a Mexican immigrant by U.S. border agents in California and has renewed scrutiny of what critics call a culture of impunity. In May 2010, 32-year-old Anastasio Hernández-Rojas was caught trying to enter the United States from Mexico near San Diego. He had previously lived in the United States for 25 years and was the father of five U.S.-born children. But instead of deportation, Hernández-Rojas’s detention ended in his death. A number of border officers were seen beating him, before one tasered him at least five times. He died shortly afterward. The agents say they confronted Hernández-Rojas because he became hostile and resisted arrest. But previously undisclosed videos recorded by eyewitnesses on their cell phones show a different story. "All eyewitnesses that we spoke to basically tell the same story of a man hogtied and handcuffed behind his back, not resisting, being beaten repeatedly by batons, by kicks, by punches, by the use of a taser, for almost 30 minutes until he died," says reporter John Carlos Frey, whose exposé aired in a national television special last Friday night as part of a joint investigation by the PBS broadcast, "Need to Know," and the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute. We also speak with Hernández-Rojas’s widow, María Puga. "My husband was tortured. He was severely beaten. And they’ve destroyed an entire family," says Puga, speaking through a Spanish-English translator. "All we want is justice. And we need your help to get that justice."

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/24/death_on_the_border_shocking_video

Law enforcement is out of control on numerous levels in our country. Surveillance, unaccountability, brutality and murder. This should not stand in a 'free' society. Any society, for that matter. (I do admit, this video makes it hard to remain objective. It is sickening.)

On Edit: Don't be afraid to demand action from the Justice Department. Or to circulate the video, for that matter.

April 20, 2012

Open letter to Bishop Jenky. Re: Obama, Hitler and Stalin remarks.

Bishop Jenky,

I grew up in a Catholic home, went to a Catholic grade school and for a couple of years was an altar boy. Having been forced to attend church in my younger years, I assumed my children would feel relief at staying home on Sundays. I was wrong. My two oldest would beg me to take them to church, actually saying, “You got to go when you were my age!” So, I explained that the Church – and I emphasized the Church, not the lay Catholics – were backward in their thinking. About birth control, women, gays - and that when priests did awful things, they protected the Church at all costs, and made the wrong things they did, much, much worse.

I also explained that the most conservative, most fanatical in the Church hierarchy were responsible for the Crusades, the Inquisition, aiding Hitler during the Holocaust and numerous other atrocities throughout history. I told them that even though most of those things were far in the past, some of the fanatics in the Church still interpreted morality though the eyes of reactionaries that are incapable of compassion and logical thought. I did add that there were many in the Church, priests and nuns that helped the poor and hungry, stood up against immoral wars, etc., and that they were a credit to the Church and humanity as a whole. But we still weren’t going, at least until they all acted Christ-like and not ‘Christian.’

My children are now in their early twenties and I showed them what you said the other day about Obama, Hitler and Stalin. Their reaction – “Wow, it’s worse than I thought it was.” I responded with, “Me too.”

This after years of defending the Church, telling people, “No it’s the evangelicals that are nuts, the Catholics don’t think like that.” After the Vatican blaming ‘60’s liberals for the priest’s pedophilia, after the embarrassing reaction to the phony birth control controversy and now your disgusting remarks, I can no longer defend the Church.

At least I know positively, that I did the right thing leaving it.

March 6, 2012

False Equivalency

No matter what the issue, talking heads in the media insist that every wrong done by the right has an equal or comparable wrong done by the left. It’s infuriating, insulting, adds to an already pathetically dumbed-down national conversation and most importantly – wrong!

The latest is comparing Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke to jokes made by left leaning comedians. Besides the fact that Limbaugh’s target was a private citizen and political comedians target public figures, there is this to consider:

Comedians on the left point out hypocrisy and stupidity by using irony. People like Limbaugh and talkers on the right create stupidity and irony by using hypocrisy. There’s a difference.

February 23, 2012

It’s Time for You to go back in the Closet!

You – the collective you – have been pushing your radical agenda on average citizens for years now. You want your holidays, special rights and have relentlessly schemed to brainwash children. You want to have your way of thinking promoted in the classrooms of children as young as six years old. You whine constantly about being persecuted for your way of life, all the while trying to restrict the rights of those who are outside your circle.

I’m talking of course about the Christian right. For close to thirty years now, your tribe has been on the rise. It started with the Moral Majority (who everyone knows was neither), the election of Ronald Reagan and your very unfortunate first victory in removing Soap! from the airwaves. One of the best comedies ever on television, by the way. Because of the mainstreaming of your particular brand of crazy, we now have a male Church Lady, who publicly excoriates Satan for attacking America, doesn’t like people to have ready access to birth control - and is still taken seriously by his base. What century is this again? There were people like Santorum and his base before the latest rise of the Christian right, to be sure, but they were known and accepted as crazies by the mainstream. They didn’t have their own television station that had News in its moniker, and they weren’t given a place at the table during every serious debate. As bad as the Vietnam War was, Nixon never told anyone that Gog and Magog were at work and Biblical prophecies were unfolding.

This should go without saying, but just in case one gets the wrong impression. This in no way impugns the people who call themselves Christian and act Christ-like. Anyone would be highly taxed to find better group of people than those. This is only aimed at those who eschew logic and decency while exhibiting enough self-righteousness to bury the Gingrich Moon-State.

Your ideological brethren have been with us for well over a millennium. The actions were much more barbaric in earlier times, and your methods of punishment have certainly mellowed, but your thought processes have remained basically unchanged. You believe your freedom is not complete if you are not in control of others. For example, denying all the rights you have to open homosexuals, pushing your religion, and no one else’s, as a science, etc. Hypatia was killed and the Library of Alexandria was burned in 415 by Christian fanatics who were sure they were right and on the side of God. The Crusades were not started by secular humanists, and no open-minded, logical person ever instigated a witch burning. My point is it’s a matter of degrees, no matter how striking the difference in form. Your type of thinking has been an anchor on human progress throughout history, and we move forward as a race when you are seen and not heard.

Here I want to group you with others who are not technically part of the Christian right, although there is some overlap, with those who act cult-like in their beliefs. Whether it is a denial of climate change, belief in racial superiority, or nonsensical economic faith. Just recently Lou Dobbs, with no sense of shame, attacked a Doctor Seuss movie for not being sufficiently corporatist in its leanings. Also, a lawmaker too dumb to know better, Bob Morris of Indiana, went after the Girl Scouts for being pro-abortion, pro-homosexual and communist. With predictable results. Already a nutter has told a ten year old Girl Scout, “We don’t support Girl Scouts because they support abortion, which kills babies.” And with consistent regularity, scientists and science are attacked as power-hungry liars, manipulating mountains of evidence so they force their liberal ideas on freedom loving Americans. This type of thing would not happen, or would happen with less frequency if the Christian right were not so visible and vocal. ?

For brevity’s sake, hypocrisy will only be touched on. An entire ‘C’ drive could be filled if all the examples were mentioned. What happened to Jessica Ahlquist of Rhode Island is all too common. A teenaged girl noticed a publicly displayed prayer in her school and rightly challenged it. But as with most secularists, atheists or religious people smart enough to appreciate the division between church and state, she was attacked verbally by adults and community leaders and even had her life threatened by ‘good Christians.’ Enough already.

The Christian right has embarrassed the Republican Party, the country and thinking people everywhere. We like to think of ourselves as evolved creatures, and you’re making that very hard. With no sense of embarrassment, you bury the bar deeper with each mean spirited action. Please, go back in the closet and leave the rest of us alone. Maybe you should really ask yourself the next time you’re excusing torture or pushing for war. WWJD?

January 25, 2012

CDC Sheds Light on the Cause of the Epidemic Illness in the Bay Area—Glenn Beck

At the beginning of 2012 there was a sharp increase in flu-like symptoms, affecting thousands of people in the San Francisco bay area. This was coupled with an increase in erratic behavior in the area, by those who never experienced the headaches and abdominal pain of those with the suspected influenza virus. “At first my colleagues and I were baffled,” said Dr. Whitmore of Oceanside Medical center. “The increase in those suffering from influenza could not be accounted for using prior year’s seasonal infection rates. This happened at the same time that we noticed an escalation in patients coming into the office irrationally angry, or disoriented. We decided we needed to contact the CDC and find out if what we were seeing was localized, national, or possibly global in scope.”

A spokesperson for the CDC confirmed that the phenomena were confined to the bay area. “We decided to attack the problem assuming that the irrational behavior and the illness were connected,” confided Dr. Margret Shire of the CDC. “That turned out to be a correct assumption and helped in a quick diagnosis. We also knew because of the strangeness of this problem, we had to put our best doctor in charge of the investigation…Doctor House.”

“At first I thought it was drugs,” Dr. House said while playing with his cane. “That turned out to be incorrect. Then I thought it must be something connected to the ports – that also turned out to be wrong. Then it hit me while watching television…There was an increase in irrational behavior nationwide, starting in 2009 and ending in the summer of 2011. There was also an increase in flu-like symptoms throughout the country, simultaneously. That’s when Glenn Beck was on Fox! A quick check on the internet validated my suspicions. Glenn Beck’s show was now being broadcast on a previously left-wing station. No wonder people were becoming ill.”

“Thanks to Doctor House we were able to narrow down the cause of the illness and irrational behavior and instructed doctors in the area to have their patients turn to FM, at least during the morning hours,” Dr. Shire uttered with barely hidden pride. “But that still left us with the mystery of why different people had such differing reactions to the same vocal stimulus. Some people were feeling too sick to finish the morning drive to work and were turning back to go home in droves. Others would yell at strangers passing on the street, or at paper products in the stores, calling them Nazis or communists. Still others were exhibiting signs of profound inanity. I’ll let Dr. House explain the discrepancies.”

“Let me put it to you in laymen’s terms,” said Dr. House to a room full of reporters. “An average or intelligent person reacts to the irrational and logic distorting invective of a Glenn Beck with defensive mechanism as if the body is being attacked by a microscopic invader. The brain doesn’t know exactly what to do. It hears something like, ‘Hitler was a liberal’ said seriously and naturally thinks the world is turned upside down or is turning inside out. This in turn causes vertigo and queasiness.”

“That explains the illnesses, but what about the irrational acts of so many others?” asked CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I’m glad you asked, because this was a very interesting part of the puzzle,” House continued. “You see, in people who aren’t that bright, they don’t know what they’ve heard is wrong, but their subconscious mind knows something doesn’t fit, so it breaks the synapses in the brain in order to avoid further conflict. And in those with a slightly unbalanced outlook, it increases the amount of both glutamate and dopamine because it now believes the unbalanced view of the world is the correct view. So basically, Beck makes the slow-witted, slower, the nutty kind of deranged and the average person sick to their stomach.”

“But couldn’t you say the same thing about the liberal media? Don’t they cause the same thing?” asked Jesse Watters, Bill O’Reilly’s hit-man/producer. “And what about socialism…and…and the War on Christmas?”

“No. No you couldn’t,” said an exasperated House. “Now look at what you’ve done! Dr. Shire and Cenk Uygur are starting to show signs of sickness…And I don’t feel very well myself.”