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reasons to vote republican

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police privilege makes me sick

the small-print mention in today's AMNY is a half-column wide and less than two inches high. let's just call it what it is: invisible. "Cop won't face criminal charges for road-rage" is its title, and from the way the piece is written you can barely tell if the cop was the shooter or the shootee.

short story: off-duty officer sean sawyer's car was cut off by jayson tirado's and a typical bout of machismo road rage ensued. tirado supposedly stuck his arm out the window and pointed his finger in a toddler-gunlike fashion at sawyer, at which point sawyer blew his head off. there are reports that sawyer had been drinking, but no one knows for sure, since he didn't turn himself in until 19 hours after the killing. the passengers in tirado's car were so soused that one of them can't remember the incident at all and the other's recollection is hazy.

NO CIVILIAN WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THIS KIND OF FREE PASS, but because sawyer's a cop he literally gets away with murder. if you or i did the same thing, even with a fully-licensed pistol, we'd be facing at least ten years upstate for homicide.

sawyer is STILL ON THE NYPD PAYROLL, suspended with full salary. there is a "possibility" that he will be dismissed from the force. i wonder how jayson's mother (pictured, shortly after the murder) feels about this ongoing paid vacation for the man who killed her son.

when i was growing up in brooklyn, the police were viewed as wild animals that you had to be very, very careful around: no eye contact, no casual conversation, no sudden movements. don't even put your hand in your pocket. they ruled the streets and they did so in whatever way they chose. yes, the cops did, as far as possible, protect us from crime and criminals, and i am not making light of their indispensible service. but there was no one and nothing that could protect us from THEM: even the institutions put in place to oversee police behavior were staffed and run by the police themselves. the civilian complaint review board, then as now, simply rubber-stamped police misbehavior and doled out the occasional wrist-slap.

MY FATHER WAS A COP FOR 20 YEARS. in 1971, after one of his beatings, i was taken by ambulance to an emergency room. the extent of my injuries inspired the hospital to call for my father's arrest. but the hospital was in the same neighborhood as his precinct, so he was in effect picked up by his buddies. they had him handcuffed in the ER waiting room, and i could hear him cursing the doctors who had the nerve to try and get him in trouble for "disciplining" his daughter; i could hear the arresting officers agreeing with him and asking him to just be calm, as he was going to no doubt be cut loose very soon. they held him until he started sobering up, then drove him home. no charges against him were ever filed. the case that i subsequently brought to the CCRB was dismissed. my father told them that i was lying, that my boyfriend actually beat me up, not him. no investigation was done, the case was simply closed, though there were several witnesses who would have gladly testified on my behalf: my grandmother, my mother, and my mother's brother, the person who finally, after a few hours, told my father "that's enough" and pulled him off of me.

FIVE YEARS LATER, walking through washington square park, i encountered a small crowd surrounding two officers who were kicking and nightsticking a man on the ground. a righteously indignant teenager, i got right in the middle of the circle and began calling for the cops to stop and exhorting my fellow citizens to stand up for what was right and not just let this happen. next thing i knew i was there on the ground along with the first guy, though they didn't beat me up as badly as they'd been beating him: kicking the shit out of some black old guy who isn't resisting is different from kicking the shit out of a bigmouth white girl, at least in public. so they waited until they got me to the precinct, where i was cuffed to a chair, my shirt ripped down the middle (no bra, this was still the seventies, after all), smacked, kicked, spit on and cursed by every passing officer for several hours. when they finally let me make my legally-required phone call, i got my father down there with HIS badge. if i didn't happen to have a cop-daddy, i am not sure where that night would have ended. a body floating in the river? not impossible. there is no doubt in my mind that people are killed in NYPD police precincts, though likely not as often now as in the past.

the NYPD continues to be out of control, though not as outrageously as it was in the past, and continues not to be held accountable for their actions, as the killing of jayson tirado illustrates. for every high-profile case like sean bell, abner louima, patrick dorismond or amadou diallo, there are a hundred jayson tirados and likely thousands of experiences like the one i was subjected to in the village all those many years ago.

has some progress been made? yes. but not enough. not even close.

I'm Ti-Rod of A-Rod Already

C-Rod, as the tabloids have rechristened Cynthia Rodriguez, may not get "as much as she wants" if the Florida divorce court declines to set aside the prenup she signed in 2000.

Shocking!

All at once, both parties are playing childchess: MY kids, no MY kids, no ...

Not shocking.

WHAT'S AT STAKE HERE? IT'S NOT ABOUT CUSTODY -- neither one of these parents have ever had what most Americans think of as custody. You know, where you actually spend time with a child and see to its needs, change diapers, cook porridge, watch cartoons, whatever. Millionaires, for the most part, don't do that, the nannies and tutors and au pairs and dressers and handlers and so forth ad nauseum do it, with mom and dad popping in every now and then for a quick night-night.

A-Rod's current contract is valued at half a billion dollars over the next 10 years or so. Not counting what he's already got (the florida digs alone cost twelve million).

THAT'S ENOUGH AND ENOUGH AND MORE THAN ENOUGH for two adults and two children to live in lavish abundance all the rest of their days.

Yet C(unt)-Rod is filing to set aside the prenup, and A(sshole)-Rod is accusing her of "withholding" his children. All this just to solidify their positions: C wanting to take more and A wanting to give less, with the More and Less of it more or less determined by who gets custody.

Come on, people, snap out of it. You have been blessed, financially, beyond what most of us can even imagine. You can't work this out without it getting ugly, without playing tug-o-war with your own children, without dissing each other in the newspapers?

Please, take the high road here. Both of you can afford to do that.

let's kill daddy, instead

a 14-year-old texan has a baby in the bathroom of her (junior high) school and promptly tries to flush it down the toilet. another student hears a baby crying and runs to get the nurse. by the time nursie gets there, the baby is dead, young mom bleeding into the toilet. no word on whether or not the afterbirth had squeaked its way out by then or not.

the baby was full term. the school, Cedar Bayou Junior School, doesn't seem to be one of those hellish inner-city gangster mills; it runs a number of arts programs and sustains (at least according to their website) quite a bit of parental involvement in school activities.

the girl has been charged with murder, and every news story that i have found about this case focuses on whether or not she can be executed for her actions -- if she is tried as a juvenile, she can't get the death penalty, not even in texas, the capital punishment capitol of the country. none of the articles mention anything about her family.

a 14-year-old girl carries a baby for nine months without a SINGLE adult in her little world bothering to notice, is so terrified of anyone finding out about this baby that she births it sitting alone on a toilet, and our first concern is whether or not we can kill HER? going several steps further even than this, the asshole republican ranter says that "if a 14-year-old girl can’t keep her legs together, she’s nothing but a whore" and "there’s no reason that this girl should not know what she did was murder, and frankly, she needs to be made an example of so that teenagers in the future DON’T do this...  Frankly, ANYBODY who commits infanticide should be given the death penalty."

a whore? not if it was her own daddy who raped her and got her pregnant, and everything about this case is screaming INCEST in big, green, ugly blood-red letters. no boyfriend, the babyfather is "unknown", not a single quote from nor mention of the parents in any of the stories.

my take on this story is that the girl is so terrified of anybody finding out that she will do anything, ANYTHING to keep it secret. she spends, minimum, six months under the looming threat of this baby coming into her life and tearing it apart. then They will know what daddy (or uncle bob, or her big brother) has been doing to her every night she she was nine. and if Mommy finds out it will kill her, daddy SAID so, he told her that if she ever said a word to anybody about these nightime things that it would Kill her mom straight-out dead and she LOVES her Mom and would never do anything to hurt her, and she is a bad girl anyway, very bad bad girl, if she wasn't a bad girl daddy wouldn't do those Things and if she wasn't a bad girl she wouldn't be pregnant and it is all her fault and she has to make it go away somehow just make it disappear and everything will be all right and mommy won't Die.

is that the mindset of a cold-blooded murderer?

hopefully someone connected with this case is asking the right questions. and if it turns out to have been her daddy (or her cousin or whatever), i would gladly shove that sick motherfucker into the electric chair with my own two hands.

skimming AMNY

i can't bear to actually read it today, the headlines alone meet every known minimum daily stupidity intake requirement.

"diplo debt parked at $18M" -- this fight has been ongoing since the seventies. diplomats ostensibly here on United Nations business just leave their cars wherever and however and refuse to pay the tickets. (they also claim diplomatic immunity when charged with crimes such as rape, and are deported rather than tried.) here's a headline for you: "New York to UN: Get the Fuck Out!" go build a headquarters in iowa or montana, some state that has a lot of room for you to park your cars and fewer citizens for you sons of bitches to be raping (apologies to all law-abiding UNizites, but if you can't keep your cronies in line, then you will have to share in the consequence of their tomfoolery).

"go chasing waterfalls" talks about using art in "a call for revitalization of areas that have been underutilized". i've got news for you: new york city doesn't HAVE any underutilized areas. for chrissake, there isn't even enough room for the ambassador of darfur to park his limo! the art project itself, a collection of four manmade waterfalls spouting away in the east river, seems interesting and beautiful ... and somewhat useless. it cost millions of dollars to put this watershow together, while the city is busily cutting back on services such as sanitation and rat-population control because we're running out of money. an overcrowded city that can't hire enough cops because their starting wage is less than that of an administrative assistant shouldn't be throwing this kind of money around in a misguided effort to further overutilize its underserved resources.

one article is slyly entitled "mta hands pried from E-ZPass" - and how they restrained themselves from saying "cold dead hands" i couldn't tell you, but one of the board members fighting the loss of this illegal (and undeserved) perk dropped dead of a heart attack the other day. i'm not sure, but i think the dead guy was the one who had eight (8! count 'em!) free E-ZPass tags assigned to him. eight tags in exchange for an allegedly unpaid board position, when the toll for the verrazzano bridge alone is nine bucks a pop. meanwhile, the MTA has the nerve to criticize the media for making much of the free passes, and (according to chairman dale hemmerdinger) (no, i didn't not make that name up) served to take "the focus off the other issues facing the MTA, which are how we're going to fund megaprojects and continue funding service for eight and half million new yorkers." in other words, it's such a relatively small amount of money (a "postage stamp on a football field," as board member warren dolny characterized it) that the taxpayers have some nerve even mentioning it. meanwhile, just one of mr. dolny's passes accounted for more than $3600 in tolls in one 12-month period.

there are 88 of these passes in circulation. and if dolny's tag is any example, this sleazy under-the-table deal cost new yorkers $316,800 per year.

if that's a postage stamp, how big is the damn field?

vegetarians & SPLS

our food supply is seriously compromised. three times in the last two weeks I’ve been slammed with the SPLS*, one instance bad enough to seriously compromise my father’s day visit with dear old dad. in each case I’d eaten salad the evening before in a decent restaurant.

(*Screaming Projectile Liquid Shits)

in a recent article on alternet, allison kilkenny writes:

In 2007, a California produce company recalled bagged fresh spinach after a sample tested positive for salmonella. Nearly a year before, an outbreak of E. coli in fresh spinach killed three people and sickened 200. The recent tomato salmonella outbreak has affected at least 145 people, resulting in 23 hospitalizations, and many believe water contamination is the cause of the affected tomatoes.

It's not the veggies that are to blame. The problem is the meat. Salmonella is an animal pathogen, so it doesn't originate from tomatoes. Most experts agree that the bacteria probably come from groundwater contaminated with animal feces.

You read that right: Cow shit is in your tomatoes.

and it’s getting there via the aquifer, at the exact same moment that many large US cities are signing a pledge against buying bottled water.

these days my apocalyptic daymares are a combination of hurricanes, earthquakes, lightning storms (such as several hundred this week that set half of california on fire), and an exodus of terrified pedestrians fleeing the cities in a world that’s run out of gas.

you are here:

 

the thing about screen names...

...is that they need to fit, like a decent pair of sneakers. or underwear. when they don't fit, they rub the skin off of you and let everybody see all that ugly, bloody, raw, red pulsating shit underneath.

as in this exchange on YouTube, responding to keith olbermann's announcement that walmart had, at long last, done the right thing in the debbie shanks case  (reformatted in reverse-chron order for clarity):

WellSpokenNegro
I love walmart. Fuck CNN!

IPOMonster
Keith Olbermann has yet to have a guest on his show who isn't obliged to kiss his ass, and all you can come up with is that O'Reilly interrupts guests?

<snip>

Liberals are cowards and pacifists. Olbermann highlights these traits...

WellSpokenNegro
LMAO! Goot one!

stillheretoday
You need to change your you tube name, from WellSpokenNegro, to i speak ghetto, and i guess, we all here on you tube, need to get ready for the change, if Obama wins, from hello, when you call somebody, to who-dis.

WellSpokenNegro
I am black and prout!

stillheretoday
I have a life, because i'm not a zombie bitch like you, who shops at walmart. What does walmart do for negros, or America, thats good. I do know that walmart sends money to China. And that China, has already killed over 10 million baby girls, because of there one-child policy.

clearly, WellSpokenNegro does not have a WellChosenScreenName but one that is so pathetically wrong for him that it's almost comical, though this exchange as a whole is anything but funny. StillHereToday, who seems to have a certain amount of political/global awareness, notices the spelling errors and goes straight to the racist toolkit and quotes a line out of Boyz N The Hood while invoking obama.

both of these YouTubers may well be americans of voting age. what a terrifying thought.

but at least we have keith olbermann! when his producer at Countdown asked why, in his latest Special Comment, he had to tell george bush to "shut the hell up", keith replied that it's because he's can't tell him to shut the FUCK up on television. go keith! in this latest (and greatest) indictment, he shreds GWB's pathetic "golfing would show disrespect to the murdered soldiers" statments:

creeping up on green pride

it was discouraging, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort of a way, to settle my stuff on the Starbuck's microtable and realize that i'd forgotten to request a staycup. (staycups are real cups, made of glass or pottery or whatever it is that those big old off-white coffee cups are made of, to be returned to the barrista when emptied, rather than dispatched to the landfill with a million other chlorine-bleached go-cups.)

if i were really serious about greening myself i wouldn't be in starbuck's at all, of course, i know that. but i do love sunday mornings with the horrid new york times and a cup of coffee that i didn't have to brew for myself. it's the type of thing that a long-time-single person learns to rely on, to look forward to, almost like having breakfast delivered to you in bed. anyway, this morning i forgot to specify a staycup (which usually has to be explained and is never, under any circumstances, offered or suggested).

i can see from my Con Ed bill that i am honoring my commitment to green, though:according to yesterday's bill, i used only one-third as much electricity as i did during the same period last year. i admit to having been an energy slob -- the computer (including DSL modem and wireless router) left on night and day along with the living room exhaust fan, incandescent bulbs in every socket... well, i'm having no more of that, and i am very proud of the progress i've made. i mean, one-third less! and i wasn't even out of town during the month. allow me a pat on the back, unnecessary go-cup and all.

even the times is in synch with me today, with a small front-page story about an upscale zero-emission home just built in santa monica. this house is completely off the grid, generates all of its own power, is almost entirely made of recycled materials, and is selling for (hold on to your seats!) 2.8 million dollars. it's a green trophy home, something like a hybrid rolls royce (maybe not yet, but mark my word the day is nigh).

one step at a time i am reducing my carbon footprint. this gives me something to take pride in, some small measure of hope in what feels like an increasingly hopeless world. the fact that it's ongoing, not a one-shot deal but many different choices that i must consciously make throughout my day, is changing my life and my consciousness in unexpected ways. i very rarely forget to bring my own bag to the supermarket when shopping. if i forget the bag but only buy a few things, i'll tuck them under my arm for the block-long walk to my apartment.  i am trying to catch up with germany, which is rapidly becoming the world's greenest state.

i've been a bit quiet on the blogging front these past couple of weeks. my trusty desktop computer has been in hospice for about a month, and what with mercurcy retrograde, dell needed weeks to ship the laptop replacement that i ordered in may. finally it has arrived, and i've spent a couple of max stress days xferring all (i hope) my links and docs and settings over to the new system. it's another element of my greening, this laptop, as it uses far less power than a desktop/monitor combination (i am not using a docking station nor external monitor, and so expect to see my electric usage continue to plummet, air conditioner notwithstanding.)

i tried to make the switch to mac. i really really tried. i love the mac, i do, it is a delightful little personality of a machine. but i may be in the realm of old dogs at this point, not very good at learning new things, so i will focus for now on my greenlife, and maybe take another look at converting to the religions of apple a bit more down the line. (that goddam delete key that works backwards! i just can't get used to that -- anybody know a hack?)

in the meantime, i am going to get myself a copy of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, to get me back on consistent track with my blogging!

if you see something, say something

the campaign has been around for awhile, but these days it seems like every other bus carries an ad larger than most nyc apartments that proclaims:

"Last Year 1,944 New Yorkers Saw Something and Said Something"

and what, if anything, came of all this telling? certainly no terrorist plots were foiled, nary a bomb was defused, the lid wasn't put back on the poison gas cannister moments before a bevy of tired midtown commuters streamed into the subway-car-cum-narrowly-averted-coffin.

a few years ago, at the most absurd height of the government-induced anti-terrorist panic, someone called 911 during the morning rush hour to report a suspicious unattended brown paper bag on a subway platform. NYPD's riot and bomb control squads responded promptly, the subway line was shut down, the would-be passengers shooed out into the street, where they would be safe (even if terribly late for work).

the bag contained a half-eaten sandwich.

last summer, there was nearly a riot at the post office in my neighborhood when one of the postal clerks, apparently obeying the letter of the law (if not the spirit of brotherly love), saw an unattended briefcase leaning on the wall beside the PO boxes and, without making any kind of an announcement, threw it out the door and into the late harlem afternoon sunlight, where it did not sit for long. when the owner, a slight and elderly black man who apparently couldn't hold the briefcase while wrangling his package through the bulletproof pulldown window, finished his business and turned to pick up the bag, it was gone. really gone -- not only from the nearby wall where he had set it down, but also from the street where the clerk had flung it. wallet, house keys, important papers... personally, i'm not setting any bag of mine down anywhere in public unless it's touching some part of my body: one foot slung through the shoulder strap, squeezed between my knees, on top of a foot or right in my lap. the old gent was reckless with his bag, but if he should have been concerned about the possibility of it being stolen, he certainly should NOT have been worried about it being thrown into the street like a sack of garbage.

the real problem with both of these stories, ridiculous (and funny!) as they may be, is that this is precisely how the government wants us to live these days -- afraid of and suspicious of absolutely everything. spend half an hour on the subway and you'll hear at least two fear announcements -- the ubiquitous and utterly tiresome "if you see something, say something" chestnut paired with various reminders to keep your bags close and your eyes open at all times, be alert to danger at every moment.

but actions speak far louder than words, and if the MTA had a real concern i guess they'd pry those lazy-ass clerks out of the token booths and get them inspecting the stations. they'd arm the conductors and block the ends of stations so that not everybody who feels like it can stroll down onto the tracks at any given moment. (a woman was raped on the subway tracks a couple of weeks ago, just yanked off the station and down into the dark. everybody must have been so busy looking for unattended sandwich bags that they didn't notice the son of a bitch dragging her off the platform.)

token clerks haven't had a job to do since the MTA stopped making tokens a few years ago. they don't sell metrocards, they don't make change for the metrocard machine. they allegedly give directions, but as the booths are flanked by massive (and massively detailed) subway maps, no one has much to ask them. apparently, they are not allowed to read -- this, i have to believe, as believing that none of them WANT to read, that they actually prefer sitting in their little fluorescent-lit booth, hands folded primly on the counter, gazing off into the distance, is too disheartening.

but that's all the evidence i need that "see something, say something" is a load of bull.

is it sweat or tears?

both, i suppose. i actually shed a few for hillary yesterday, reading the inevitable postmortems on this fine, 100-degree june morning; felt just like the late august dog days of my childhood. today will be more of the same, another record-breaking day in what i predict will become a record-breaking month, just as last october was the hottest ever recorded in nyc history, just a year and change after our record-breaking snowfalls.

not that we're trying to show off or anything. DC broke records in february, when it hit 73 degrees, and vegas did it with 104 in may.

I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE INTERESTING to get an idea of what average temperatures were back in the day, say a hundred years ago, but i couldn't find that. NASA states the warming in terms of temperature increase over time, which is not the same as telling me how hot it was on 6/9/1957 (or 6/9/1857 while we're at it). after quite a bit of digging, i found currrent "averages" (though no information on how those averages were determined), but even for these i had to scroll down and select the averages and records tab on that page -- and they're only available for the present day.

i'm no conspiracy theorist (the government is far too incompetent to execute any meaningful conspiracies) but i did find the fact that the only way you can get this information is to pay a LOT of money for it somewhat daunting. the climate change psychology blog is excellent, but even they don't seem to have the old-time records that i would have expected to easily find in the public domain that is the internet.

OR IS THE INTERNET REALLY A PUBLIC DOMAIN? according to bill moyers it isn't. free speech, both in print and online, is narrowing every day, not because of any conspiracy but because the media has largely rolled over and played dead in the face of corporate and governmental pressure.

getting back to hillary (i know, you were wondering when i'd work her back in), the the nutcracker doll is a perfect example of inappropriate journalistic silence -- the same kind of silence i have found this morning, in my search for some pretty basic information on how regional temperatures in the US have changed over time. i'm sorry, but endless articles that amount to "hot enough for you?" and "drink plenty of water" simply aren't enough. the planet is going down in flames and all we get from the so-called mainstream media is an unfunny version of denis leary's asshole.

WE ARE NOT WITHOUT POWER IN THIS BATTLE, despite the size of today's media conglomerates and the ignorant fascists in the white house. but we need to keep the pressure on. do not remain silent in the face of journalistic silence -- blog, shout, write letters to the editor, make calls to congress. join the elecronic frontiers foundation (EFF), which has been working for years to keep speech free on the web.

and don't count on me to inspire you. instead. let 40 minutes with the brilliant and fearless bill moyers do that, as it did so very well for me: