Advertising is so edgy these days.
India may ban Google Earth because it may have aided Mumbai terrorists.
Gov. Blagojevich gets out on just $4,500 bail. Good thing they didn’t get him on a drug crime.
Thomas Frank: Free markets lead to low-income women consensual renting out their wombs to barren upper-income women. He find that icky. Let’s ban it! The free market stinks! Better the rich woman stay childless and the poor woman not get the extra income, lest we offend Thomas Frank’s sensibilities. But what do I know. I’m just a “regular feeder at D.C.’s subsidized libertarian troughs.”
Remember the New York City subway sodomy case from a couple of months ago? One of the officers has now been charged.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 11:29 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under Police Professionalism.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
TheAgitator.com
Surprised that two police officers testified in the New York case. There is hope after all….
I didn’t see where Mr. Thomas recommended banning anywhere in his article. So he thinks it’s icky, so what?
Frank writes:
“At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close. The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them.
Massive inequality, we have learned, isn’t the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it’s also profoundly ugly.
Some people haven’t received the memo, though. Take Alex Kuczynski, author of the New York Times Magazine cover story for Nov. 30, which tells how she went about hiring another woman to bear her child.”
…
“Maybe if this young woman had been donating her eggs to buy groceries Ms. Kuczynski would have understood that all this reproduction-for-hire was a product of her billionaire-centric world as surely as the Blahniks and Versace she used to trill about — that college and surrogacy are available to people like Ms. Kuczynski and not to others because that’s how our system works.”
I rearead this thing twice trying to find some coherence. These quoted passaged don’t really seem to fit in with the story. They are just thrown in there as a nonsensical diatribe against his much hated “market.”
Please, if anyone can make sense of the article, I would love to hear it.
Good to see liberals wanting to take reproductive rights away from women just like the conservatives. Frank probably thinks gay marriage exploits the poor somehow as well.
If the Mumbai terrorists would have used hand drawn maps would they now be attempting to ban pencils, and paper? If they had used street maps would they ban Rand McNally? If they had used crayons, and toilet paper would they ban coloring, and pooping?
Fraak is the WSJ’s token “liberal”, and as is the norm they seem to have picked a socialist by mistake.
Re: Frank
How noble the law is that it equally forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.
What seems to elude most anti-market people is that market transactions are voluntary whereas their preferred solutions are not only not voluntary they are coercive and even violent. But their preferred solutions are better…go figure.
LOL you got me with the edgy advertising
Open Thread
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/sick-and-sicker-by-digby-it-looks-like.html
In Oklahoma, a driver goes into severe diabetic shock, but instead of getting help, he’s tasered and then handcuffed.
This video shows what happened in El Reno, Oklahoma last month after the man’s truck spun out on the interstate.
The town’s police chief says his officers thought the 53-year-old man was under the influence of drugs or alcohol and was resisting arrest.
He says after they realized that wasn’t the case, they called an ambulance.
The tape is here. The officers feel bad about what they did, but I have to wonder how police handled situations like this before tasers? Did they shoot them with a gun?
I think it goes to show that Cops are looking to use their toys independent of whether the situation really requires them. What’s the point of this gun if I don’t get to occasionally shoot something? Ohhhh!! A dog. He lunged at me. Shoot!!
Or their tasers. Oh he’s flopping around and resisting arrest. He’s got to be on drugs. Tase him!!
Being a habitual freedom-loving subversive (thereby disqualifying myself from membership in either of the two main political parties), I believe a woman should have the right to rent out her womb just as she should have the right to rent out her vagina.
The backlash against all things free-market has surprised even me. I’d say it is unprecedented in the last ~50 years. Good thing for these people that the benefits of a free market don’t ask about their ideology before providing the good stuff.
When can America officially kill that damn “home of the free” slogan? I’ve never been less free in all my life.
Who is John Galt?
Gov. Blagojevich is probably a crook, but he is definitely not a flight risk in the way a private person might be.
#1 Mike Leatherwood: “Surprised that two police officers testified in the New York case. There is hope after all….”
Perhaps. But this is really the least the officers could do in this situation. If this scenario played out the way Mineo has testified, an officer on scene should have physically stopped the assault, drawn down on the offending officer(s), and taken him into custody. That’s how you would stop any other rape in progress. If no one on scene lifted a finger, everyone should go to prison (looks like a gang rape to me!).
Frank Serpico said that when he became a police officer, he was called upon to enforce the law, no matter who the law breakers were (I’m paraphrasing). He also stated that we must get to the point where the corrupt officer fears the ethical officer, and not the other way around. Obviously, we have a long way to go.
I intitially voiced skepticism about this case, due to what I thought were inconsistencies in Mineo’s statements (I read that he was hesitant to release his medical records to the court). I also didn’t want to think that officers of the NYPD would be stupid enough, or savage enough, to engage in this kind of activity AGAIN. Well, its looking like Mineo’s story may be truthful, and I am disgusted. If they are guilty, they should go where rapists go. Its as simple as that. As for NYPD, I’m almost at the point where I’m tempted to say, scrap it and start the whole damn thing over.
“India may ban Google Earth because it may have aided Mumbai terrorists.”
My place got broken into last month. It’s obvious that it’s the fault of the crowbar companies. When will the US government reign in these criminal enablers? Sorry, your attempts to re-label these devices built to enable B&E criminals as “building tools” just shows your lack of seriousness on the War on Crime. Only criminal-enablers don’t support banning “crowbars”, or as right-thinking Americans call them, Tools of Terror.
And don’t even get me started on matches and lighters.
Given that the point of bail is to ensure that the accused shows up for his court dates, a low bail for Gov. Blagojevich makes perfect sense. He’s not a flight risk. I’m surprised he wasn’t released on his own recognizance.
A relatively anonymous drug criminal, on the other hand, would be a much greater flight risk, so a higher bail might well be called for.
India may be on to something. I just wonder how India banning Google Earth will stop terrorists from looking at it in Pakistan?
On Mumbai terrorists: When information is incredibly available for everyone, it really forces people to think about the consequences of their actions. Or, you can just outlaw information.
Outlawing information is a pretty good description of North Korea. India’s reaction (as well as the restrictions put on thousands of “dangerous” things in the US and across the world) stands side-by-side with N.Korean philosophy.
I think someone should rent ‘Idiocracy’ for Thomas Frank and then ask what he thinks …..
“Given that the point of bail is to ensure that the accused shows up for his court dates, a low bail for Gov. Blagojevich makes perfect sense. He’s not a flight risk. I’m surprised he wasn’t released on his own recognizance.”
So the Duke Lacrosse players required 400 grand EACH because they might have what? Some bonifide whore accused them of raping her?
What? No more Google Earth in India? Why should everyone else have to suffer because of some criminal, terrorist thugs from Pakistan?
“Remember the New York City subway sodomy case from a couple of months ago? ”
I in no way wish to trivialize an investigation of which I know nothing about…
but…
In a quick glance I misread the above as “the New York City subway sodomy case from a couple of _mouths_ ago?”