Amanda Knox should never have been tried in the first place, and the prosecution's allegation of motive was Medieval and misogynistic, literally something out of a 14th Century witch trial. I'm sure it must be as hard to believe that she's finally free after nearly four years - 20% of her life -- but the relief must be epic as well. Great thanks to the Italian legal system, where the appeal is something more of a do-over than here in the U.S. Of course, in Rick Perry's Texas, she'd be executed already:
As one of the prosecutors in the case, Manuela Comodi, no friend of Knox, implied last week in his remarks: were Knox being tried in the United States, she might well be on her way to an execution. The case of Troy Davis, killed by the state of Georgia last month despite the fact that most of the witnesses in his case later recanted their testimony, should linger as the Knox saga is reviewed.
Speaking of Gov. Perry, I don't think the news about the name of the ranch leased by his family means that he's a racist. As our President would say, it's a distracting sideshow. But it does reinforce my prediction that an Obama-Perry duel would look very much like the aged battle for Abolition, and would expect to see rhetoric surrounding the candidates on all sides that mirrored that. I do like the discussion of language that's sprung up around this, like a rather unusual and admirably frank discussion today on The View.
What I do think is that he's a mindless corporatist who, like Bush from Texas before him, thinks the government treasuries are meant for the rich. Which takes us to Wall Street where a very articulate young man, Jesse LaGreca, makes the #occupywallstreet viral video of the day as he takes down Fox News to its face and lays out the real issues:
For example, the ultra-Right Koch Brothers seem to be getting away with having violated the Iran trading embargo. Because they can? Isn't that...treason?
And want to see the opposite of the guy in the above video? Isn't rich, aggrieved, entitled Hank Williams, Jr., born lucky like the Koch Bros albeit with less talent, just the Id of their rightwing Super-Ego:
Ha ha ha his theme song was cut from Monday Night Football tonight and hopefully forever.
There are two things about 98-year-old Verna Oller that just about anyone around her neigborhood in Long Beach, Washington can tell you. She was feisty, and she was frugal.
...
Oller never made much money, earning an hourly wage filleting fish until she was in her 70s. She cut her own firewood until she was in her 90s. But Oller was carrying a secret, a big one, and she entrusted the Glenns to keep it. It turned out she was a master investor.
The sturdy old lady with no formal education amassed a not-so-small fortune: $4.5 million. It was up over $5 million before the recession. Before she died, she directed Guy Glenn to spend every cent of it, but not on her, on her home town.
"She wants a swimming pool to be built, that was her main goal," he said.
Mission accomplished. Part of Oller's money will go to building the town's very first indoor swimming pool. The pool was important to Oller because as a poor little girl growing up there it frustrated her that kids often had no place to swim even though they lived on the ocean. But the shoreline can be dangerous in the Pacific Northwestern town. Money will also be set aside for scholarships and grants for local teachers.
...
When Oller died, she didn't want a funeral or even an obit. In fact, she didn't want any credit at all.
And then there's this America, always breaking the boundaries of homicidal behavior and language taboos, on the Today show, no less:
Kayla Manson, a 13-year-old Florida girl accused as an accomplice after her boyfriend allegedly attempted to murder her best friend, recalled the text messages that her friend and boyfriend exchanged before he attacked her.
Manson said she did not see the texts where her boyfriend, Wayne Treacy, threatened to kill her best friend, Josie Ratley, but rather only ones in which they called each other names.
Manson said the two text messages she saw were "the one where she calls him a rapist, and she calls him a cunt, I mean the one where he calls her a cunt."
"We just have to be careful with our language, but that's all right, sweetheart," Meredith Vieira said.
Reminds me of the classic Kurt Vonnegut short sci-fi story, "The Big Space Fuck," set in a future where all the words have been exposed, so the last obscenity left is "jizzum."
The myths dispelled legend explained, why 420 has become a universally accepted connotation:
The Waldos do have proof, however, that they used the term in the early '70s in the form of an old 420 flag and numerous letters with 420 references and early '70s post marks. They also have a story.
It goes like this: One day in the Fall of 1971 - harvest time - the Waldos got word of a Coast Guard service member who could no longer tend his plot of marijuana plants near the Point Reyes Peninsula Coast Guard station. A treasure map in hand, the Waldos decided to pluck some of this free bud.
The Waldos were all athletes and agreed to meet at the statue of Loius Pasteur outside the school at 4:20, after practice, to begin the hunt.
"We would remind each other in the hallways we were supposed to meet up at 4:20. It originally started out 4:20-Louis and we eventually dropped the Louis," Waldo Steve tells the Huffington Post.
The first forays out were unsuccessful, but the group kept looking for the hidden crop. "We'd meet at 4:20 and get in my old '66 Chevy Impala and, of course, we'd smoke instantly and smoke all the way out to Pt. Reyes and smoke the entire time we were out there. We did it week after week," says Steve. "We never actually found the patch."
But they did find a useful codeword. "I could say to one of my friends, I'd go, 420, and it was telepathic. He would know if I was saying, 'Hey, do you wanna go smoke some?' Or, 'Do you have any?' Or, 'Are you stoned right now?' It was kind of telepathic just from the way you said it," Steve says. "Our teachers didn't know what we were talking about. Our parents didn't know what we were talking about."
It's one thing to identify the origin of the term. Indeed, Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary already include references to the Waldos. The bigger question: How did 420 spread from a circle of California stoners across the globe?
New York Times columnist William Safire, who was also a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and, by extension, Vice President Spiro Agnew, both of whom left office in disgrace, has died at age 79. Safire is one of the more vexing figures for me, as I disdained his politics but loved his non-political column, "On Language," which ran regularly in the Sunday Times. The column was always informative and witty, and he will be missed for it.
The Times has also reprinted his classic farewell to his political column, entitled "How to Read a Column," well worth the few minutes to read including:
8. Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day. When the two-topic writer strains to tie together chalk and cheese, turn instead to a pudding with a theme. (Three subjects, however, can give an essay the stability of an oaken barstool. Two's a crowd, but three's a gestalt.)
With that advice in mind, I'll just comment on the irony of losing such a dedicated language man on a day when it is leaked that one of the world's major communications companies may very well sell off the magazine publishing arm that gives it its name.
In December I wrote about my visit to the Holocaust Museum in our nation's capital. Now, the week after cold-blooded murderer Scott Roeder killed mercy abortion provider George Tiller in front of his wife in church, another member of the violent rightwing anti-government hate movement visits the Holocaust Museum and starts shooting, ultimately killed an African-American guard named Stephen T. Johns.
Add James Von Brunn to the infamous list of political assassins -- America's homegrown terrorists:
Von Brunn has a racist, anti-Semitic Web site and wrote a book titled "Kill the Best Gentiles."
In 1983, he was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board and served more than six years in prison. He was arrested two years earlier outside the room where the board was meeting, carrying a revolver, knife and sawed-off shotgun. At the time, police said Von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties.
Writings attributed to Von Brunn on the Internet say the Holocaust was a hoax and decry a Jewish conspiracy to "destroy the white gene pool."
"At Auschwitz the 'Holocaust' myth became Reality, and Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations," it says.
This is a not-so-lone gunman -- he's got supporters of his brand of hatred. Some of his writings:
HITLER's WORST MISTAKE HE DIDN'T GAS THE JEWS. JAMES VON BRUNN WWW.HOLYWESTERNEMPIRE.ORG
Remember, the Federal Reserve Act (1913) gave JEWS control of America's MONEY. Followed by control of America's main sources of information.
Interestingly enough, he's an arguably failed painter, much like the Fuhrer he admires so much. And, less and less of a surprise, he's a "birther":
Among the myriad of disturbing qualities of James Von Brunn, the 88-year-old man who shot and killed a security officer inside the Holocaust Museum on Wednesday, is his apparent belief that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States and therefore has no right to the presidency.
The reason it sticks out is that, even among Von Brunn's other characteristics -- including heavy streaks of anti-Semitism, disdain for the federal government, and threads of white supremacy -- being a "birther" has a modicum of political credibility.
Lots of these birthers showed up at the teabagger rallies, which seems more and more like a Fox News-licensed collection of insane people.
To Fox News' credit, their Shep Smith is allowed to speak the truth about how this movement of reactionary hatred is ginning itself up to the point of violence:
What happened when a Department of Homeland Security report on rightwing violence, commissioned by the Bush Administration but completed and released with the new Obama Administration, was released?:
When the 10-page DHS memorandum was made public, however, warnings like these largely took the back seat to charges that the department had been politically motivated in its assessments and writings. Indeed, a wide swath of voices in the conservative movement -- from Rush Limbaugh to RNC Chairman Michael Steele -- lashed out at DHS Secretary Napolitano over what they deemed an anti-Republican report.
"This is the height of insult here," Steele told Fox News. "I mean to segment out Americans who dissent from this administration, to segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration, and labeling them as terrorists and then to call into question the service of the men and women who are right now standing on that wall defending our freedom and linking them to terrorism while you refuse to call the terrorists -- the real terrorists -- terrorists, to me it's the height of insult."
Oh, and in case you're thinking I'm letting anyone off the hook, anti-Semitism isn't just for those on the right:
Asked if he had spoken to the president, Wright said: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office."
God-daaamned you, too, Reverend Wright.
It's time to address the rhetoric of hate, especially in its wink-wink mainstream form, head on. Or should we start expecting one of these a week.
Scott Roeder was insane precisely because of how completely his whole existence became being against a woman's right to choose. As the guy who believed all of the Bill O'Reilly and Randall Terry hate speech, he was by definition insane:
Roeder's family life began unraveling more than a decade ago when he got involved with anti-government groups, and then became "very religious in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way," his former wife, Lindsey Roeder, told The Associated Press.
"The anti-tax stuff came first, and then it grew and grew. He became very anti-abortion," said Lindsey Roeder, who was married to Scott Roeder for 10 years but "strongly disagrees with his beliefs.
"That's all he cared about is anti-abortion," she said.
Doctor killer Roeder had been building towards this for awhile, using the casual epithets of those enjoying the rapture of their totalitarian hatred:
Arriving for an early shift around sunrise, a nurse at the Kansas City clinic, Aid for Women, noticed the man trying to pour super glue into a lock on the back door, another clinic worker said. Spooked, the man fled, but not before the nurse noted his license plate number, which the authorities later linked to Mr. Roeder.
The man seemed strident, the clinic worker said, and repeated phrases like “baby killer.”
Baby killer. By his standards. Repeated, like the simpleminded. The desired endpoint of the repetition of that phrase by Terry and O'Reilly, which in the media always means deliberate branding. The brand worked, they got some action finally, sated for a moment, their message reached and filled up a murder vessel for Bill O'Reilly, with Terry's Operation Rescue in touch with Roeder on the ground.
Premeditated:
In the days before Dr. Tiller’s death, Mr. Roeder’s behavior seemed erratic in other ways. He invited his 22-year-old son to dinner and a movie on Friday night, something unusual for Mr. Roeder, according to his former wife, Lindsey Roeder. Ms. Roeder said he usually rested on the Sabbath beginning Friday at dusk, and that he rarely made outings of any sort with his son, with whom he saw “Star Trek.”
“He really wanted to prolong the evening with dinner and ice cream,” said Ms. Roeder, who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park. “Looking back, I think it was a way of saying goodbye to his son.”
Sorry Dr. Tiller didn't get that opportunity with his family.
The idea that then-Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney ordered up torture to wring a confession of connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq in order to justify his long-planned war is on the verge of metastasizing into the big story, with only the enormity of this possibility holding it back. Read Joe Conason for the latest roundup and check out David Waldman bringing it to a CNN discussion where no one can refute his main point, that if an elected official conducted torture for political purposes, that would be a crime beyond any post-9/11 panic judgment:
The other panelists are woefully underarmed for this and try their usual mis/re-direction and comparative morality distractions to no effect. This is the big story, and no one has called Cheney on it yet:
The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.
And as long as he stays out of investigations or hearings, he won't be asked -- not as long as he sticks to either conservative or wussified news media.
The question he was asked, by Bob Schieffer on this past Sunday's Face the Nation, was whether the President himself (W. Bush, remember?) authorized the torture policy. And his tangled answer, unusual for the always rehearsed and controlled-speech Cheney, has stuck in my mind all week:
Cheney: "I have every reason to believe that he [President Bush] knew [about the interrogation program]-- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. This was a presidential-level decision and the decision went to the president and he signed off on it."
So let's take the man at his words -- and parse what he's really saying.
"I have every reason to believe that he [President Bush] knew [about the interrogation program]--
What, he doesn't know for sure if Bush knew about the program? He never had a direct conversation with him about it? He kept his hands clean by sending in his henchmen? Or maybe he slipped him the papers to sign in with everything else? Or maybe just never told him until the questions started coming?
-- he knew a great deal about the program.
What did you hide from him, Dick?
He basically authorized it.
He authorized it or he didn't? He didn't know he authorized it? You did it without authorization because of your Machiavellian view of the legal entitlements of the Vice Presidency? He played along later after he found out about it?
This was a presidential-level decision
Did Bush decider it or didn't he? Does that mean you did it as Vice President under the shield of the general Executive Office or your proximity to the President? Did you make the decision for the country and authorize it at the "presidential-level" yourself?
and the decision went to the president
Wait, so first someone (you?) made the "presidential-level decision" and only after you had decided (implemented?) the torture policy did the President rubber stamp it? Because it sure doesn't sound like the decision came from the President himself but was simply presented to him somewhere along the line without his even asking. (How different from our current Chief Executive.)
and he signed off on it."
And so Cheney comes to rest on this closer, recollecting himself, the plan from the moment he got the job of helping W. select his running mate, which Cheney of course made himself, that this would be the second coming of the Nixon White House only shrewder, standing behind rather than in front of the cameras, with the little self-deluded salesboy providing all the cover necessary to enact The Plans, all down the line.
All the way to indictment, ideally to cut it off at the pass.
This is the most revealing statement ever made by Cheney on the topic, and hats off to the crafty Bob Scheiffer (not as soft as you'd think) for tripping him up. The next question is going to be our will, not to mention our national morality. And if the nation's truthseekers are successful in pressing the question, then we're back to my thesis that either the Bush's close ranks with Cheney (they'll have to be completely sure that by doing so all will get a pass) or there will be a much, much more interesting situation.
I, for one, don't see Barbara Bush allowing her son to be dragged down with Dick.
