Archive for 2010

A PROSECUTOR ON THE WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY: A reader who asks anonymity emails:

I’ve followed with interest your series on police misconduct in harassing or arresting bystanders who photograph or video officers on duty. We had a similar case this month – we dismissed the charge immediately and began an internal review of all the officer’s pending cases. His boss (the County Sheriff) brought the matter immediately to our attention and launched an IA investigation as well.

Just wanted you to know that not all prosecutors are idiots … :-)

Some additional inside baseball: nearly all of our officers and their chiefs strongly support audio and visual recording of officers while on duty. Most jurisdictions here have voice-activated microphones and video cameras mounted in their patrol cars and remote microphones clipped to their officers’ collars. Many of these devices automatically download video and audio feeds directly to remote servers to prevent tampering with the raw footage. But the cameras cannot capture everything that happens around an officer and the microphones have a limited range, so bystanders’ portable video can be a potent source of evidence documenting that an officer acted properly – which they do in the vast majority of instances.

Yes, as I’ve noted before, officers who are behaving properly should welcome this sort of thing. And it’s worth noting that when officers and prosecutors act properly, it usually doesn’t make the news.

REGRETS OF THE DYING: “‘I wish I didn’t work so hard.’ This came from every male patient that I nursed.”

Plus this: “Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.”

MICHAEL ARRINGTON: Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.

The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs. The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.

Read the whole thing. Just don’t be an older guy if you want to avoid discrimination in Silicon Valley . . . .

DO YOU KNOW ME WELL ENOUGH TO HATE ME? The man who this week became a symbol of Tea Party intolerance was once a major Democratic donor, contributing tens of thousands of dollars to the party. “According to OpenSecrets.org, he’s donated about $15,000 to Democrats since 2000, including a $10,000 donation to the DNC in 2000, a $500 donation to Howard Dean in 2003, and a $1,000 donation to John Kerry in 2004. His only recent contribution to a Republican candidate was $250 in 2002 to retired Rep. Jim Kolbe, then lone openly gay Republican in Congress.”

AT LEAST SHE WASN’T TEXTING: “A Cincinnati woman was simultaneously masturbating with a sex toy and watching a pornographic video while driving last week, according to cops who arrested her on assorted criminal charges.”

REASON TV: What We Saw at the Glenn Beck Rally in DC.

Well worth watching. Let me just add that although Beck’s rally attracted a lot of Tea Partiers, his religious message is pretty distinct from the core Tea Party message. On the other hand, a lot of people agree with Beck that something’s gone wrong in this country, beyond the last election. Some people worry that Beck’s trying to transform the Tea Party movement into a religious movement, but I’d say that remains unclear at this point. If he tries that, though, it’s likely to fail. For the moment, though, I agree with those who characterize his message as Tocquevillian.

Also, note this from Tim Cavanaugh: “It’s understandable that you don’t want to lose all your invitations, and the dismissive pose toward Beck stems from a well founded fear my fellow rootless cosmopolitans have — that if we seem too close to the cars-on-cinderblocks, chicken-coops-in-yards, shotguns-and-rockingchairs variety of libertarianism, we will lose the respect of liberaloids in New York and D.C. It’s a real concern, but if the trade-off means you reject the Tea Parties — by far the biggest popular movement with a clear anti-government mood that has occurred in my lifetime – and in exchange you get to be comfortable at table with David Frum, well, that deal sounds like a loser to me.”

Also, from Jennifer Rubin:

I admit that I had some serious reservations about the Glenn Beck rally. To put it mildly, I’m no fan of Beck’s, and his rhetoric has given liberals plenty of fodder to paint the right as extreme and incendiary. But both he and certainly Palin conducted themselves well — sticking to general themes of faith and service. That the media could not find a single controversial statement is a tribute to the good judgment and restraint that was exercised.

Indeed. And Prof. William Jacobson zeroes in on a racist criticism of the rally. See a bunch of white people, immediately think of mass murder? Then you are, in Janeane Garofalo’s words, a stone racist. But in my experience, the people who yammer about racism the most tend to be closet racists themselves. And sometimes, not-so-closeted.

Related: Desperately Seeking Racists.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher rounds up the shockingly un-diverse press commentary on the event.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader notes that AP’s photographers don’t seem to have gotten the JournoList memo.

“Pashai Oway, 6, of Arlington, Va., holds an American flag while attending the the ‘Restoring Honor’ rally, organized by Glenn Beck, in Washington, on Saturday,Aug. 28, 2010. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).”

Well, the hoity-toity types often leave the photogs out of the conversation.

INSIDE CABLE NEWS:

One would think the network with the “Best Political Team on Television” could tell the difference between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin….not to mention spell Palin’s name right…

Update: Or knew that she ran for VICE-President. How’d I miss that one?

Nobody’s perfect.

MORE ON THE Nissan Leaf.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Congresswoman Violated Nepotism Rules, Funneled Thousands to Family and Friends. “Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D., Texas), a long-serving congresswoman from Dallas, improperly awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, violating nepotism and ethics rules by giving the funds to multiple relatives and the children of top aide Rod Givens. Johnson also violated a rule that required scholarship winners to live or attend school in the awarding member’s district.”

REBELLION of the serfs.