Archive for 2013

A BARACK DIVIDED AGAINST HIMSELF CANNOT STAND: Victor Davis Hanson: Obama Indicts Obama.

One of the problems that Barack Obama has in mounting an attack against the Assad regime is that the gambit violates every argument Barack Obama used against the Bush administration to establish his own anti-war candidacy.

The hypocrisy is so stunning that it infuriates his critics and stuns his supporters.

Deriding the Iraq war was Obama’s signature selling point. He used it to great effect against both Hillary Clinton (who voted for the war) in the Democratic primaries and John McCain in the general election. For the last five years, disparagement of “Iraq” and “Bush” has seemed to intrude into almost every sentence the president utters.

And now? His sudden pro-war stance makes a number of hypocritical assumptions.

Why yes, yes it does.

RON BAILEY: Watched Cops Are Polite Cops: How requiring police to wear video cameras will protect your constitutional rights.

Who will watch the watchers? What if all watchers were required to wear a video camera that would record their every interaction with citizens? In her ruling in a recent civil suit challenging the New York City police department’s notorious stop-and-frisk rousting of residents, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan imposed an experiment in which the police in the city’s precincts with the highest reported rates of stop-and-frisk activity would be required to wear video cameras for one year.

This is a really good idea. Earlier this year, a 12-month study by Cambridge University researchers revealed that when the city of Rialto, California, required its cops to wear cameras, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent and the use of force by officers dropped by almost 60 percent. Watched cops are polite cops.

Jay Stanley, a policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), calls police-worn video cameras “a win/win for both the public and the police.” Win/win because video recordings help shield officers from false accusations of abuse as well as protecting the public against police misconduct. The small cameras like the AXON Flex from Taser International attach to an officer’s sunglasses, hat, or uniform.

In order to make sure that both the public and police realize the greatest benefits from body-worn video cameras, a number of policies need to be implemented.

Read the whole thing. And I agree. Citizens may have a due process right to record the police, but there’s no reason to rely on that.

#WARONMEN: Daughter Trying to Free Dad She Once Accused of Rape. “At nine, Chaneya Kelly accused her dad of raping her. He was sentenced to forty years in jail. Now an adult, married, and a mother, she says her mother threatened her into making that accusation, her dad is innocent, and she’d like to see him set free. . . . The insanity of assuming that any child making that accusation is telling the truth; the insanity of the idea that any accusation of abuse must have truth at its core is a sort of madness many — aware of the creation of false memories — are willing to shake off. But there is something else at work here: that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that a mother (or any other adult with control of the child) could use the child as a weapon in a marital dispute or a divorce. That is a form of blindness that must be unique to our times.”

IRONY: Global Warming Expedition Foiled By Ice. “Residents of Resolute say 20 years have not seen anything like. It’s, ice, ice and more ice. . . . This has been the coldest season with the most ice since we started Arctic Watch in 2000. Almost no whales. The NWPassage is still blocked with ice. Some of the bays still have not melted!”

But Fallen Angels is just a science fiction story, right? Right?

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is It Evil to Send Your Kids to Private School? “Parents who think that they are supporting public schooling by moving to a pricey district with good schools are actually supporting private schooling. They’re just confused because the tuition payment comes bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops.”