Charlie Pierce, Esquire, is alarmed by a new "pediatric health" study:
Of all the numbers in this new study, the following remains an astonishing statistic: By the time they're 23, 41 percent of American kids have been busted for something more serious than a traffic stop… To me, it's an indication of that something is seriously out of whack in the way we're asking our law enforcement community to interact with our children.
Children today grow up surrounded by the police power of the state, both the soft and hard versions of it. At almost every level of their lives, they are policed, in one way or another, either by the police themselves, or by administrators and bureaucrats to whom the police and the courts have subcontracted the job. They have no Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights as soon as they walk through the schoolhouse door. They are searched. They are tested for drugs. Their rights of free expression are tightly circumscribed. Rights unexercised atrophy. We have raised, and are now raising, generations of children who are completely ignorant of the rights they have as citizens, and we are doing it through the application of the most coercive powers the state possesses…
Another triumph for the Banana Republicans! Let's face it, the fortunate sons of the One Percenters—ask the C-Plus Augustus—have always been able to treat the police as nothing more than well-armed security guards. Cops were for keeping those people in line and away from the better neighborhoods, unless they were toting cleaning equipment or yard tools. And the bottom Twenty Percenters, give or take, knew "the arrangement" and warned their kids about the dangers. But over the last few decades, as the unindicted Watergate co-conspirators cemented their criminal takeover under St. Ronnie and the two Bush regencies, those Americans who were once fortunate enough to consider themselves "middle class" have been ever-so-slowly relegated to the ranks of barbarians-outside-the-gated-community. And the increasing militarization of School Security (because drugs! Gangs! Forced busing! Drugs! Hippies! Also Columbine! Foreigner gangs! And did we mention, drugs!) has been one weapon for reminding the rank and file that they—we—have no rights our masters can't find an excuse to erode.
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Let's say that you want to be a school administrator. So here is the test: It comes to your attention that a student with Down's Syndrome has hugged a teacher's aide. If your reaction is to have the kid arrested and charged with sexual harassment, then: Congratulations! You're qualified to be a school administrator.
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Raw Story: Rich people less empathetic than the poor: study
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These punks are sociopaths who deserve long prison sentences and a lifetime of punishment for this. Then, with prison records, unable to get jobs or apartments, they should find themselves homeless and victimized by suburban punk assholes who will beat them up for shits and giggles and post it to the internet. "A 20-year-old and a 17-year-old have been arrested in New Jersey after they allegedly posted videos on YouTube of themselves beating and kicking a homeless man. ... Taylor Giresi, 20, allegedly beat the homeless man in a wooded area of Wall Township as an unidentified 17-year-old cameraman cheered him on, according to The Associated Press. ... "About to go beat up this bum," Giresi says as the video begins. ... After pushing the homeless man to the ground, the suspect kicks him in the head. As the homeless man gets up, he is hit with a rock and falls again. ... "Take his bike," the cameraman says. ... "No, I need my bike!" the man exclaims. ... In a second video, Giresi is seen tackling the homeless man from behind. Blood is flowing from his nose as he stands up. ... "Oh, my God, you're bleeding!" the teen cameraman says sarcastically. "We didn't mean to do that. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Wipe off the blood." ... Giresi then reaches out with his arms as if to give the homeless man a hug, but instead gives him a knee to the stomach."
A federal judge sentenced white supremacist Kevin Harpham to 32 years in prison for the attempted bombing of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington. Harpham was honorably discharged from the Army and had no criminal record, but the judge said Harpham had been influenced by "shrill and caustic and vitriolic" culture fueled by talk media.
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Former President Bill Clinton said Newt Gingrich is "not really" responsible for balancing the budget in the 1990s, as the former House speaker claims. "He did work with me to pass some good budgets," Clinton acknowledged, however, in an interview with the NBC's Today show.
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The Department of Homeland Security told Congress yesterday that it will cut the number of National Guard troops at the U.S. Southwest border from 1,200 to 300 with greater air support. The change is possible "because of a jump in the number of Border Patrol officers in the region, an increase in technology and a drop in apprehensions at the border."
Let's spend as much money as we possibly can so the defense contractors can keep raking in the cash with the new "aerial assets equipped with the latest surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities."
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Santorum: "I'm for income equality."
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The Occupy Wall Street protests, since they began, have received a fair bit of ire from the 1 percent, as some of the richest Americans have taken exception to the protesters' focus on growing income inequality and the political power of corporations. Bloomberg today rounded up a series of billionaires and wealthy CEOs griping about how unfair the criticism of them has been, likening the Occupy protesters to imbeciles and saying that the protesters' call for the rich to pay their fair share is vomit-inducing.
But it's simply undeniable that the richest 1 percent have seen their income explode in the last few decades, and that many of them are not paying their fair share in taxes, taking advantage of loopholes, tax havens, and the preferential tax treatment of investment income to drive their tax rates down below the rate paid by middle-class families. In just the last few decades, taxes on the richest one percent sunk dramatically. At the very top of the income scale, share of income of the 400 richest Americans quadrupled in the last 12 years, while their effective tax rates were halved:
As Reuters' Felix Salmon put it, "let's not kid ourselves that the men with the billions…are in any way hard done by. Not when there's so much real hardship in America." Indeed, last week the Census Bureau reported that about half of Americans are either living in poverty or qualify as low-income.
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Major investigation: Capitol Xmas tree lacks Jesus-themed ornaments
The Christian News Service has done a careful study of five of the five thousand donated ornaments on the Capitol Christmas Tree, and the findings are not pretty. Two out of these five ornaments were about Barack Obama, and zero were about Jesus. So by statistics, we can say that 2,000 of the ornaments on the tree this year are about Barack Obama, and still none of them are about Jesus. GOOD ENUFF MATH 4 TERRORFYING HEADLINE: "U.S. Capitol Tree Pays Homage to Obama — But Not Jesus." AAAAAAHHHHH. READ MORE »
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Texas Tops List of 10 States Worst-Ravaged By Natural Disasters in 2011
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Well, this makes sense: John Boehner announced that House Republicans expect to vote down tonight a two-month payroll tax cut extension that passed 89-10 in the Senate, presumably to round out the year in teabagger obstructionism with a full-circle reversal of the defining GOP platform for the last million years, "not raising taxes." Nobody even seems to know why they are having a petulant adolescent fit over the bill other than that mean Dad Barack Obama likes it, forcing John Boehner to just wing an official objection on the grounds that the extension lasts only two months instead of, uh, twelve, and twelve is a higher number. READ MORE »
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