The Republic of Dogs

This pretty much looks like an open admission that the Majority Leader intends to simply refuse to lead:

Reid says he expects the tactic of gentle persuasion to work best, given the size of his Senate Democratic flock and the political divergences within it. “I don’t dictate how people vote,” he said in an interview this month. “If it’s an important vote, I try to tell them how important it is to the Senate, the country, the president … But I’m not very good at twisting arms. I try to be more verbal and non-threatening. So there are going to be — I’m sure — a number of opportunities for people who have different opinions not to vote the way that I think they should. But that’s the way it is. I hold no grudges.”

Time for Reid to go.

I can’t recall NPR ever researching the conditions likely to be faced by any other convicted criminal, can you?  Well, Madoff is a rich white guy.  Silly me, I keep forgetting that consequences are for poor people! Our ruling elites usually get off with a slap of the wrist in the midst of a lot of media tut-tutting about the importance of looking forward and not playing the “blame game” (known to the rest of us as “the criminal justice system”).  Not this time, apparently.  Looks like Madoff lost this round of Blame Game:

Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison for masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, will likely do no better than medium security and could even be assigned to a maximum-security facility if his safety is deemed to be at risk — and it may well be, experts say.

"I don’t believe Bernie Madoff is going to give anybody any trouble in prison," says Ed Bales, managing director for Federal Prison Consultants LLC. "But the fact is: What are those other inmates going to do? Is he going to get killed? That’s probably the No. 1 question."

Of course, people get maimed, raped and killed all the time in our nation’s gargantuan prison system, but I guess that’s fine.  They’re poor, so they probably deserve it.  Accountability is important to keep the proles in line!

Wherever he goes will be based partly on a point system that will give him positive marks for his age (he’s 71), his college education and the fact that he has no history of violence. But the sheer magnitude of his sentence would likely offset most or all of the items in the plus column, experts say.

Another consideration is geography. Inmates are generally placed within 500 miles of home, which leaves some unpleasant options for Madoff, a New Yorker. The Lewisburg facility in Pennsylvania, for example, is an aging high-security prison known for its gang violence.

Gang violence that every single other inmate in that prison lives with every day.  So, you know, boo fucking hoo.

Madoff’s notoriety and the nature of his crime will also work against him. At twice the age of most other federal inmates — most of whom were convicted of drug-related crimes and will serve a fraction of his time — the disgraced financier will find it difficult to make friends.

El. Oh. El.  Did they really just say that it would be difficult for him to make friends?

Marvin Ragland, a former inmate who served nine years for drug possession and trafficking, says white-collar criminals such as Madoff are "the low man on the totem pole."

"Everybody hates those kind of guys," he says.

No shit!  I guess prison life isn’t so different after all, because everybody hates those kind of guys out here too!

Ragland says the pecking order comes down to an unwritten prison code.

"The greater the crime against society, the worse you are treated," he says.

Well, that is different.  Out here, the greater your crime against society, the more likely you are to receive an enormous “performance bonus” and a professorship at a prestigious university.  We reserve the really harsh punishment for people who smoke weed.

Ragland says he has seen a lot of white-collar inmates cry in prison. They can’t handle having to wait up to three weeks for extra paper to write on, asking permission to have a glass of water, or having to barter with other inmates for an ink pen. And they can’t handle the violence or the loneliness.

Just like the 2.3 million other Americans rotting in our mind-bogglingly expensive prison system!  It’s funny how Prisoner Number 2,300,001 suddenly has NPR so worried.

Via Incertus, this is pure  Friday awesome:

A Jacksonville man wanted to see Lil Wayne perform in Miami, but he wanted to get there as quickly and safely as possible with the help of a police escort.

Unfortunately for 20-year-old Michael Kruse, police escorts are generally reserved for politicians, celebrities and heads of state, but that didn’t stop the rap enthusiast from calling 911 to request an escort or at least the use of a helicopter.

***

"You want a police escort to take you to Miami?" the 911 dispatcher responded, according to WTLV.

"Or, you have a helicopter?" Kruse asked.

***

The dispatcher had Kruse pull off the highway where he was met by deputies and given an escort straight to jail, accused of misusing 911.

The best part is that Kruse had nearly been charged with misusing 911 less than 24 hours earlier, after he called the emergency number to say he was feeling sick.

During that call, the dispatcher began to suspect Kruse was high on something after his speech was slurred.

"Are you sure you haven’t taken something sir?" the dispatcher asks. "Because you’re not making a whole lot of sense."

"I’ve been smoking marijuana," Kruse tells the dispatcher.

"Do you want a deputy to come and take you to jail?" the dispatcher offers.

"Why?" says Kruse.

"You just told me on a taped line you just got done smoking marijuana," the dispatcher says.

"Awww. Are you serious?" Kruse asks.

With all of the problems facing the Catholic Church in America, you’d think nuns doing Reiki and not wearing  habits would be the least of their concerns.  You’d be wrong.

I’m not Catholic, so I have no skin in this particular game, but as a general observation I will say this:  I’ve known a few nuns, and they have all been intelligent and passionate leaders with an appealing combination of real spine and real compassion.  And…well, I’ll just say that my impressions of the Catholic priests I’ve met have been less salutary.

The Catholic Church is facing two enormous challenges: a rapidly dwindling pool of candidates for the priesthood that will serve the growing Catholic population in the US, and the apparently epidemic scope of pedophilia (and dishonest cover-ups) among the existing priesthood.  On both of these fronts, ordaining some women religious to the priesthood would be a healthy step.  It would immediately expand the supply of priests and recognize the de facto priesthood being exercised by nuns in many parishes.  Over the long-term, I also think that the closed, closeted fever-swamp culture of the existing all-male priesthood would be vastly improved through the process of male priests forming and being shaped by collegial relationships with these extraordinary women who are up to their elbows in the muck of the real world and its many struggles.

It’s sad to see an organization so wedded to patriarchy that it ignores (or actively fears and suppresses) it’s most loyal and talented members just because they happen to be women.  Not particularly surprising, but still unfortunate.

Just my two cents.

Via a friend of Facebook, here come the clowns:

Monday, police chief Jeff Halstead said the officers’ actions are being investigated. However, he also said that officers that entered the bar during the scheduled inspection were touched inappropriately.

"You’re touched and advanced in certain ways by people inside the bar, that’s offensive," he said. "I’m happy with the restraint used when they were contacted like that."

Witnesses denied the chief’s account.

No shit.

Having put in an appearance or two at gay bars over the years (*ahem*), I’d like to emphasize this point from Savage:

All of this is bullshit.

I’ve been in a million gay bars. I’ve been in gay bars on multiple occasions when the police came in to check everyone’s IDs and make sure no minors were being served. Gay men don’t grope police officers when they enter gay bars. I find it inconceivable that the gay men drinking in the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth responded to a raid by attempting to grope the police officers. This "they groped us!" shit is a lie.

I, too, have been through a few of these little “bar checks”, and was present years ago for one full-on raid (in a bar that admittedly needed a little raiding…they might as well have just called that place “Den of Iniquity”).  What chief Halstead is describing just doesn’t happen.  I think it’s safe to say that many (if not most) gay people assume on some level that many (if not most) cops are homophobes. Homophobes with guns and tasers.  This assumption may be unwarranted, but it does have a history (see: Stonewall Inn).  Most people err on the side of caution when the police show up.  When the police show up in a bar, everyone is wondering that they’re there for, and half of the crowd is busy trying to get rid of their drugs.  No one is hoping to score with the cops who just walked in.

It’s fun to play make-believe, though.  Let’s just assume the police chief is telling the truth.  Does that mean that female police officers can just go ahead and give very guy who hits on them a nightstick in the groin?  Ha ha, of course not! It doesn’t work that way!  “Sexual panic” defenses have one purpose and one purpose only: to preserve the heterosexual male entitlement to violence.

This slow-motion train-wreck is getting painful to watch:

Despite his obvious emotional connection with Chapur, Sanford said he is trying to fall back in love with his wife, Jenny, his partner of 20 years and the mother of their four sons. "I owe it too much to my boys and to the last 20 years with Jenny to not try this larger walk of faith,” he said.

”This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story,” Sanford said. ”A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”

They met for romantic stays in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, paying cash so their whereabouts could not be traced. They met one more time in the city, a rendezvous meant as their last, sanctioned by his wife, Jenny, after she learned of their affair and chaperoned by a spiritual adviser who came to help them say goodbye.

But the governor could not stay away. Four months later, telling his staff he was going hiking on the Appalachian Trail over Father’s Day, he got on a plane to Argentina, hungry for more time with Chapur, and discovered why he could not close the door. "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate," he said.

For God’s sake, would somebody shut this guy up?  Forget “falling back in love” with your wife – how about just treating her with a little respect?  How does he think she feels listening to him tell the Associated Press that his mistress is his soul mate?

Also…what a freak show!  The spiritual advisor, the wife-sanctioned teary farewell, the hilariously melodramatic language about a “forbidden and tragic” love…I’m certainly sympathetic to his wife and kids (especially now that he’s using AP reporters as therapists), but frankly they all sound like a bunch of weirdos.

Of course, there’s also this:

And Sanford, who called for President Clinton to resign for lying about his dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky during a previous era, said he saw no reason to leave the governor’s mansion now.

…but at this point, hypocrisy is such a core component of the Republican MO that it’s barely worth pointing out.

When Democrats cheat on their wives, it’s because they’re perverts, and they must immediately be drummed out of public life forever.  When Republicans cheat on their wives, it’s because they were unfairly tempted by Satan’s wiles,  and the aftermath is an intensely private journey of spiritual discovery and family healing.

Photo by Chuck Potter

I’m in a rush to get ready for work right now, and I’ll try to write more about this later, but I wanted to help spread the news:

Police say 7 arrested for public intoxication: one man remains hospitalized with brain injury

FORT WORTH — About 18 hours after officers with the Fort Worth Police Department and agents with the Texas Alcoholic Beverages Commission raided a Fort Worth gay bar, about 150 to 200 people gathered on the steps of the Tarrant County Courthouse in downtown Fort Worth Sunday night, June 28, to protest the raid.

Sources have said that seven people were arrested in the raid although witnesses at the scene said many more people were handcuffed with zip ties and taken out of the bar.
One man, identified by his sister as Chad Gibson, was in the intensive care unit at Fort Worth’s JPS Hospital with bleeding in his brain after officers threw him to the ground and used zip-ties to handcuff him.

The raid happened on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion.

***

Fort Worth police have not returned calls seeking comment placed by Dallas Voice beginning at 10 a.m. Sunday morning. However, Fort Worth police released a statement to several mainstream media outlets saying that Rainbow Lounge was one of three bars targted by six Fort Worth police officers and two TABC agents and a supervisor.

The statement said that nine people were arrested at the first two bars — the Rosedale Saloon and Cowboy Palace, both on Rosedale Avenue — and that another seven people were arrested at Rainbow Lounge.

The statement also said that “an extremely intoxicated patron made sexually explicit movements toward the police supervisor” and that person was arrested for public intoxication.

That last bit of bullshit about “sexually explicit movements toward the police supervisor” makes me particularly sick.  When the cops raid gay bars, it’s always some pack of muscled up, scared-shitless closet fags just WISHING somebody will hit on them so they can go on a rampage and feel straight again. 

(As an aside, it’s hard for me to believe that the TX legislature couldn’t do something better with our tax dollars than give them to TABC so they can run these melodramatic raids to arrest people for being drunk in fucking bars.)

Pam Spaulding is on the case, and the Dallas Voice blog Instant Tea is covering this story closely.  There’s also a Facebook group.

Quote of the day from eye-witness Robert H.: “It felt so very Stonewall, but without the standing up for ourselves.”

The lesson of Stonewall is that they have never given us anything, and they never will.  What little we have, we have because we literally fought in the streets for it.

If this story is true, people who actually care about LGBT equality need to stop giving money to Human Rights Campaign.  Period.

Stars and Stripes confirms HRC deal with WH to de-prioritize DADT

I don’t know how it is in other communities, but in San Antonio, HRC is very much the cause of choice among the upper-crusty A-list gay set.  They get together for their fancy and expensive fundraisers, and send the money off to Washington to keep Joe Solmonese in mani-pedis so he’ll look cute for his photo ops with the President.  They siphon off money that is desperately needed in our local community, but they provide both posh parties and moral cover for the too-good-to-get-their-hands-dirty upwardly-mobile crowd.  All of which is sleazy enough.  But now they’re actually working against our agenda? 

San Antonio is a big military town, and there are a lot of gay and lesbian men and women here who are forced to live a double life every day just because they want to serve their country.  And now we find that HRC is actively working to nail the closet door shut on these folks?

Thanks, but no thanks.  I think it’s time for some of us to ask some hard questions of the representatives at the ever-popular HRC booths at PrideFest and other community events.  Loudly.  It would be a sign of political maturity if our community would give up the pavlovian get-out-your-wallet response to the mere sight of the blue and yellow HRC logo.  We need a conversation about what we’re actually getting for those dollars.

I’ve avoided jumping on the blogospheric bandwagon that equates changing your background color to #00FF00 with the terrible danger and violence being faced by the protestors in Iran, but these people deserve our profoundest respect and solidarity.  Would that we in the U.S. had the courage to defend our democracy against the state as these people are doing.

This Google map shows a list of embassies accepting injured protestors in Tehran.

UPDATE:  CNN has apparently reported that the UK and Italy deny that they are taking injured at their embassies, so the above like may not be valuable at all.

This page collects information about treating exposure to pepper spray and tear gas.

Austin Heap has information on how to set up a proxy server to help people in Iran continue to have access to the outside world.  If you have a static IP address and are a reasonably competent sysadmin, this is a small thing you can do to help.

In comments over at 3 Bulls! the other day, I said:

All I’m hoping is that the Iranian people get what they want. I hope this for the people of every other nation, including my own. Call me cheezy, but I think that the progress of democracy (which is contingent, uneven, easily derailed and never guaranteed) requires that we maintain that hope — usually against history rather than because of it.

I’d like to draw a distinction between that simple hope and the grandstanding of Sully and company or the false historical comparisons that hilzoy rightly identifies emanating from the right. Those things are unwarranted precisely, as hilzoy says, we’re just not very popular in Iran — for good reason. As a citizen who has never supported my government’s policies toward Iran and who is ashamed of the role my country played in the events leading to the 1979 revolution, I’d like to see that change, and I don’t know any good way of pursuing that end other than being straightforwardly on the side of the Iranian people (to the very limited extent that I can).

Beyond that, I don’t know what else to day.  I think there’s a good case to made for noninterference, and I think anyone who suggests military intervention should be publically shamed and ridiculed for the imperialist fools they are.  But I hope the people of Iran get what they want. This kind of suffering should never be in vain.

Sigh.  Just when I thought PETA couldn’t blow goats any harder than it already does:

Che Guevara’s granddaughter Lydia has graciously decided to start a "vegetarian revolution" by posing for PETA with "the torso naked, covered only by a sling loaded with carrots as bullets."

PETA: desecrating everything they touch since 1980.