TheAgitator.com
Evening Links
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007• The state of Maine bans soda and candy, finds that—surprise!—school kids are still finding ways to eat stuff that tastes good.
• Federal drug warriors were boasting this year about an alleged decline in Afghanistan’s opium harvest. They apparently didn’t notice that Afghan farmers were replacing the opium with marijuana. Why can’t these silly Afghan farmers just grow rice and corn, get shut out of world markets by U.S. and European subsidies, and accept their poverty like the rest of the developing world?
• Dahlia Lithwick looks at H.R. 1955, the “thought crimes” bill that’s been generating a lot of heat on Reddit, Digg, and the like. Lithwick’s middling take seems about right to me, though it’s troubling that the bill passed so overwhelmingly with so little public discussion.
• The Idaho family whose dog was shot three times by a cop (in front of a three-year-old) is suing. Fun bonus tidbit:
Justin Frandsen says he was in the sheriff’s office the night before the dog was shot and he heard deputies talking about the animal.
Justin Frandsen: “They were joking and laughing about what weapons they wanted to shoot him with and how they were gonna shoot him. At the end of the conversation, they were almost feuding over who got to shoot the dog.”
Shocked by what he heard, Frandsen says he spoke up to the deputies.
Frandsen: “You guys must feel like you’re real big cops, real tough guys, to have to go out and basically assassinate somebody’s house pet.”
• The mouse that can’t get cancer. I presume he can, however, still get smashed by a mousetrap.
• Ah, the party of Ted Stevens is about to nominate another winner:
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
That last bit is especially rich for a law-and-order former prosecutor like Giuliani. You gotta’ think the sex was extra great for Rudy on those nights, knowing that as he was screwing his mistress, he was also screwing a bunch poor people who couldn’t afford criminal lawyers.
I’m really happy that you added comments, especially because I wanted to ask if there had been any updates on the case of the young (Hispanic?) man who was shot in the face and killed after being awoken by the screams of his sister when police no-knock raided his family’s house. I can’t find anything about it in even your archives post just a month after it happened, and the police had still been stonewalling and so on.
There’s another article that appeared here, http://www.jhguide.com/article.php?art_id=2472 , that’s a little more indepth.
Allow me to quote something from that article that’s I think is relevent.
“The release, issued Monday, said the shooting was in accordance with Section 8 and 11.4 of the Teton County Ordinances. According to the release, Section 8 says “that if any vicious animal so found at large cannot be safely taken up and impounded, such dog may be destroyed by the Animal Care and Control Officer or Teton County Sheriff’s Office.” ”
“The release’s reasoning included references to the dog as a pitbull – a breed deemed too dangerous to be accepted by the Idaho Humane Society – and previous allegations of aggression, all made by a neighbor. It also highlighted the Barboza family’s response to the shooting.”
Then there is 25-2805 Section 2 of the Idaho Code:
“(2) Any dog which, when not physically provoked, physically attacks, wounds, bites or otherwise injures any person who is not trespassing, is vicious. It shall be unlawful for the owner or for the owner of premises on which a vicious dog is present to harbor a vicious dog outside a secure enclosure. A secure enclosure is one from which the animal cannot escape and for which exit and entry is controlled by the owner of the premises or owner of the animal. Any vicious dog removed from the secure enclosure must be restrained by a chain sufficient to control the vicious dog. Persons guilty of a violation of this subsection, and in addition to any liability as provided in section 25-2806, Idaho Code, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. For a second or subsequent violation of this subsection, the court may, in the interest of public safety, order the owner to have the vicious dog destroyed or may direct the appropriate authorities to destroy the dog.”
First off, it appears that this dog did not “physically attack, wound, bite or injure” any person. Secondly, it would also appear that this dog would have to go through some declaration process conducted by the issuing authority and allowing for appeal by the owners.
As a former animal control officer, we took statements from the victims, any witnesses, collected evidene, photographs, veterinary reports (if applicable) and impounded the dog during the course of our investigation. If the dog was declared dangerous or vicious (vicious was extremely rare) then the owner had X amount of days to appeal the determination.
Lastly, this deputy was completely in the wrong in the interpretation of the ordinance. If any vicious animal cannot be taken up and impounded it may be destroyed. The dog could’ve been take up as the owner had control of the animal and could’ve released the dog to animal control to be impounded.
The Humane Society states that they cannot take in pit bulls based on their determination the breed is too dangerous. This dog is not a pit bull and any person with an ounce of dog identification knowledge can plainly identify the dog for what it is; a lab mix.
By jarring coincidence, I happened to be driving to work this morning and thinking about this story just as I passed a police officer on the side of the road pulling out his sidearm and shooting a huge deer (which must have been hit by a nearby truck, but was still capable of standing and walking) several times in the head.
Now, while I have some sympathy with animal rights causes, it certainly looked like killing the deer was an appropriate action: it was injured and freaking out on the side of a busy street, and could have run out into traffic again to cause another accident. But what sort of bothered me about the choice of method was that the sidewalk the deer was on was separated from residential houses by a high wooden fence. Bullets, especially fired off in quick succession, are not exactly the safest things to have flying around in a residential area, and the officer was basically shooting horizontally at the deer’s head such that anyone who might have been standing on the other side of the fence would have been shot. In an ideal world, there would be a lot safer of a procedure for such a killing: heck, even tazing the deer so that the officer could get close enough to shoot downwards.
Likewise, part of what’s shocking about this dog incident, aside from the sheer cruelty, sadism, and incompetence is that an officer would unnecessarily choose such a dangerous killing method with all sorts of civilians, including a child, standing around. Bullets fly long distances. Bullets ricochet. If there are other options available, discharging a weapon should never be your first choice. If the dog was posing no immediate threat to anyone, there are countless other ways to put it down that aren’t so frontier execution style.
This is why real animal control officers never just kill an animal on site unless someone’s health or safety is threatened. They capture it and take it to a facility where it can be killed safely and humanely… and successfully. This officer failed on every single count.
Re: H.R. 1955
If a law aimed at dealing with political activity would make criminals of the Founding Fathers, chances are, it’s a bad law.
“And then there’s the all-you-can-eat pizza, french fry and soda buffet across the street from one of the state’s high schools — Blum didn’t say which.”
It sure sounds like she’s suggesting that they need a “no fast food within 1000 feet of a school” style rule.
Well said Ochressandro. I read the Slate article and all I could think of was the recent Southpark episode where terrorists nuke our imagination and Kurt Russel gets violated by Christmas Critters.
Nice how the article on Afghanistan makes out as if growing cannabis is almost worse than the poppies. If Afghanistan starts producing more hashish and less heroin, that sounds like a pretty great improvement to me, both for Afghanistan and the rest of the world.
all i can say as an animal lover is that if a cop came to my house and shot one of my animals like that there would be a headline in the paper about the death of a cop
“In an ideal world, there would be a lot safer of a procedure for such a killing: heck, even tazing the deer”
for that to happen, bad, the deer would have had to mouth off to the cop or argue about a speeding ticket.