Mississippi is Sooo Dirt-Poor, a Boycott Wouldn’t Even Be Noticed

The threat of a national boycott — and/or a Fortune 500 company threatening to leave a state — usually gets noticed by governors and state legislators.  The governor of Arizona vetoed the legislature’s “Zee Paperss Pleassse!!!” law a few years ago, fearing a loss of business and tourist-industry income.  And I think the governor of Missouri just vetoed one of those nefarious “religious freedom” bills for the same reason.  The governors of North Carolina and Indiana are under intense economic pressure to overturn the “Jesus Don’t Like Them There Homasexials” laws that they’ve signed.

And last week the governor of Mississippi signed the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” which might be the most far-reaching of all the recent “We’s Gonna Take Our Country Back to the 1850s” laws.

Should Mississippi be worried about a boycott?  ROTFLMAO!!!  Mississippi is in the same position as a disgruntled employee who knows he/she is just about to be fired:  “ooooohhh, what’re they gonna do, fire me?!?”

As Leonard Pitts Jr. says in today’s column, Mississippi is the poorest, unhealthiest and least-educated state in the union.  And with no Fortune 500 companies and not much of a tourist industry, what’s there to boycott?  If there was a boycott, how could they tell?

Leonard Pitts Jr. closes his column with:

“…Mississippi just passed a law that 80 percent of its eighth-graders would struggle to read. If they graduate, those young people will look for work in a state with an unemployment rate significantly higher than the national average. But if one of those kids does manage to find work at the local doughnut shop, say, she will — until the law is struck down, at least — have the satisfaction of refusing service to some gay man, secure in the knowledge that the state that failed to educate her or give her a fighting chance in a complex world, now has her back.

One feels sorrier for her than for the gay man. Her life will be hemmed by the fact of living it in a state that fights the future, that teaches her to deflect and distract, not resolve and engage.

The gay man can buy doughnuts anywhere.”

Republicans: Fact-Checking Journalism is Biased

Who could possibly have a problem with political fact-checking organizations?  Republicans of course.

Overall, more than eighty percent of Americans have a favorable view of political fact-checking.  But when you break it down according to party affiliation, fact-checking is viewed much more favorably by Democrats than Republicans.

And that's not all.  Among people who follow politics only marginally, there's not much difference.  Fact-checking is viewed favorably by 36% of Democrats vs. 29% of Republicans.  BUT (and this is where the plot thickens):

Among those who follow politics closely, fact-checking is viewed favorably by 59% of Democrats and only 34% of Republicans.  What could this possibly mean?  As Leonard Pitts Jr. says in his column:

“What’s partisan about fact?

Nothing — you’d think. Except that for Republicans, something obviously is.   Perhaps we ought not be surprised given the pattern of party politics in recent years. On topics as varied as climate change, health care, terrorism and the president’s birthplace, GOP leaders and media figures have obfuscated and prevaricated with masterly panache, sowing confusion in the midst of absolute clarity, pretending controversy where there is none and finding, always, a ready audience of the fearful and easily gulled.  As political strategy, it has been undeniably effective, mobilizing voters and energizing campaigns...

Who could have a problem with a fact-checker? He is your best friend if what you’re saying is true.  You would feel differently only if what you’re saying is not.”

And that's a FACT.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article19762902.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article19762902.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article19762902.html#storylink=cpy

Somebody can Agree with Your Political Views and Still be an Asshole

This column by Leonard Pitts Jr. is titled Why I Don't Like Bill Maher. I personally don't have any opinion one way or the other on Bill Maher.  I don't get HBO so I only see occasional YouTube links to some of his jokes from Real Time With Bill Maher.  I loved Politically Incorrect when it was on Comedy Central and later got moved to one of the main networks.  But I can picture him being a “smarmy, self-satisfied, condescending and just plain nasty” person, as Leonard Pitts Jr. describes him.

I can be somewhat opinionated politically, as some of my previous posts on this blog would indicate.  But I don't hold other people's opinions against them, or assume somebody must be a F#%$$!&%# just because he/she voted for _____________ instead of ____________.

About thirty-odd years ago I worked for a nonprofit health reform organization.  Great cause and all that, but most of my coworkers and supervisors were assholes.  We could have sat around all day discussing politics and not disagreed on anything.  But I've never seen as much backstabbing, infighting, self-righteousness and just plain meanness as I did during the year I spent with that organization.

In contrast, my previous job had been as a telemarketer with a sleazy organization working for an even sleazier cause.  But most of the supervisors and other telemarketers were nice, likeable people.  Workplace morale was very high.

I live downtown in a town of about 20,000 people, and a lot of local/downtown issues completely transcend any sort of political labels.  I often agree with people — whom I know to be conservative — on certain local issues, and vice versa.

And this brings me to the first person I thought of as I was reading Leonard Pitts' column:  a local progressive/liberal city councilman who turned out to be one of the biggest douchebags I've ever met.  I knew him personally; he seemed pretty likeable and we agreed on practically every local and national political issue.

As he was nearing the end of his single term on the city council (more on that later), he e-mailed everyone he knew to announce that his wife — also liberal/progressive — was running for a local office.  He assumed that everyone he knew would jump on the progressive bandwagon and start marching in lockstep behind his wife's candidacy.  Anyone who didn't — I'm in that category — instantly became The Enemy.  A Traitor to the Progressive Cause!  One of Them!

Anyway, his wife got defeated in her election campaign.  Immediately after that  — before his term was up — the city councilman resigned from office, had several embarrassing (or at least they should have been) public tantrums, and the two of them fled to Oregon.

The disgraced has-been city councilman started a blog about a year ago (sorry, no names or links provided) with the sole purpose of condemning and libeling the town that hadn't appreciated him or his wife.  Needless to say, he hides behind a screen name, but there's no question who it is.  I don't know whether anything on his blog is technically libel or not, but he continuously spews out the kind of shit you'd never say to anyone face-to-face unless you wanted your internal organs rearranged.

Every post at this person's blog has 30, 40, 50, maybe 80 comments — all Anonymous — all congratulating him on yet another brilliant post.  “LOL.”  “Hey, thank you for what you're doing.”  “Another courageous post.  Keep up the good work.”  And on and on and on...

Trouble is, this person has alienated virtually everyone he ever knew in this area.  The only explanation I can think of is, the jillions of comments at his posts are all from him.  “The calls are coming from inside the house!”

Kind of sad — once a charismatic politician on the rise, now reduced to sitting at home spewing on his blog, blubbering back and forth with his imaginary friends.  Guided by the voices in his head.

Anyway, to steal the same quote again from Leonard Pitts Jr., this disgraced former city councilman is “smarmy, self-satisfied, condescending and just plain nasty,” in addition to being more slippery than a road covered with wet leaves.

$670,000 Fine for Illegal Downloading

No country can possibly survive with a “justice” system this lopsided.  I guess it goes hand in hand with CEOs paying a lower tax rate than janitors.

Joel Tenenbaum, a former Boston University student, was fined $670,000 for the heinous crime of downloading and sharing thirty songs.  Off with his head!  And the Corporate Arm of the Republican Party — formerly known as the Supreme Court — has refused to even review this case.  Who’s this Tenenbaum fellow think he is, anyway — a corporation?

It’s not what you ripped off, it’s WHO you ripped off.  Now if this college punk had stolen billions of dollars from shareholders and bank depositors, he’d be getting a promotion and a larger bonus next year.

Stealing about $45 worth of songs from the all-powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on the other hand, is a much more serious crime.

There are too many examples of America’s huge sentencing disparity.  Here are just a few:

Set a fatal booby trap along a popular hiking trail — which by a roll of the dice didn’t ensnare anybody — and you get charged with misdemeanor Reckless Endangerment.

This column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. has some incredible — as in “you can’t make this shit up” — reports of absurd crime sentences.  Thirty years to life for stealing a VCR.  A woman shoots a gun into the air in order to scare off her enraged husband who had been strangling her — twenty years.  (The husband wasn’t charged with a crime.)  Another woman finally shot and killed her husband after he had been beating and kicking her for three days straight — fifty years.  What happened to that “Stand Your Ground” meme that conservatives have been spewing out en masse?

In the case of Joel Tenenbaum’s $670,000 fine, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Supreme Court isn’t interested.  A lowly individual versus the RIAA — in mean, come on.  Not that the Supreme Court has a pro-corporate bias or anything like that.  Just because Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto, and Scalia’s son is a Wall Street lawyer fighting on behalf of bank CEOs…

Police Brutality is Legal; Photographing It ISN’T

This seems to be some people’s “reasoning.”  The infamous Rodney King beating by the LAPD would have been their little secret if the entire incident hadn’t been videotaped from somebody’s apartment window.  At the time, there were jokes going around that the L.A. city council wanted a 3-day waiting period before you could buy a video camera.

These days it’s not even a joke.  There are already a few state and local laws prohibiting citizens from videotaping police officers during an arrest.  Leonard Pitts, Jr. writes about it in this column, Give Thanks to Citizens With Cameras.

He tells about a woman in Rochester, NY who was arrested for videotaping a traffic stop from her own yard.  In Miami Beach, a man was arrested, beaten by police and had his cell phone stomped on — how convenient — after he recorded an officer-involved shooting.

The recent pepper spraying incident art UC Davis would have been nothing more than a rumor if the incident hadn’t been captured on a cell phone.  Same with the police execution of an unarmed handcuffed suspect on an Oakland BART train (New Year’s Day 2009.)  The executioner, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle, is already out of jail after serving a shorter sentence than most people would get for shoplifting.  But if the murder hadn’t been caught by somebody’s cell phone, the police would have come up with an official story that the murder victim — Oscar Grant — had fallen and hit his head; pulled a gun and had to be shot; or something.

About ten years ago (give or take), the San Francisco Police Department filed a libel suit against a woman whose only “crime” was giving a sworn statement about what she had witnessed during an arrest.

Just as you don’t need a weather man to tell which way the wind blows, you don’t need a court ruling to know that these laws against videotaping police officers are clearly unconstitutional.  Every one of these laws should be suspended immediately by the federal government until the courts can come to the obvious conclusion.