Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Google knows all.
New Jersey legislature passes medical marijuana bill.
Grandma, 78, spends two weeks in jail for driving with a suspended license because authorities forgot about her.
Chris Beam has the best take I’ve seen on the Harry Reid imbroglio.
This new Tumblr makes me happy.
More problems for D.C. Metro: Metro’s new strategy [is] to plug its operating budget’s holes by skimping on preventive maintenance, even as it adds new bureaucrats to its staff.
Nobody does the nauseating fluffy celebrity profile like Esquire.
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on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:58 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under General Criminal Justice, General Drug War.
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TheAgitator.com
“More problems for D.C. Metro: Metro’s new strategy [is] to plug its operating budget’s holes by skimping on preventive maintenance, even as it adds new bureaucrats to its staff.”
Rather than actually investigating DC metro the examiner engages in uninformed invective and name calling, and Radley laps it up.
Actually, Ed, the Examiner has broken a number of stories about D.C. Metro, including that more than 100 of its bus and train operators make more than $100,000 per year.
http://www.examiner.com/a-669683~Metro_drivers_make__100_000_in_pay.html
You were reading an editorial based on the paper’s earlier research.
Need to beef up your trolling skills!
Ms. Trudeau should be thankful she wasn’t tasered or worse by the three deputies during there arrest. That would have been par for the course.
bob, do you come here everyday to be proven wrong?
I’m kind of torn about the Reid thing. Being a politician, you’d figure he’d understand what are appropriate things to say. Especially in this day and age, why dod people still get infront of the media and say things that are obviously going to create racial controversy.
But at the same time,he didn’t say anything that was untrue. I also want to defend Reid and tell everyone to get off their PC high horse. It sucks to want to defend Reid.
The sad fact is that Harry Reid is totally right, even if his phrasing is tin-eared. This is what you get for telling the truth in American politics. It’s amazing that the conservative right has tried to play this off as Harry Reid being racist — against, what, blacks? It’s so stupid it boggles the mind. If anything, Reid would be guilty of ascribing racism to the average American voter. And he may be right or wrong about that (I happen to think he’s right), but neither makes him racist.
The problem with Reid has nothing to do with Reid. His comments were not racist in the least. They were, instead, a statement about race and people’s perceptions of it.
The comments are similar to Rush Limbaugh’s statement about McNabb. The statement wasn’t so much about McNabb as a good commentary on people’s perception of him and the role that race plays in it. More here for those unfamiliar:
http://www.slate.com/id/2089193/
The left, of course, jumped all over Limbaugh as a racist, made up other quotes to go along with it, etc. Harry Reid, on the other hand, gets a pass from all the same people who claimed Limbaugh was a racist.
The bottom line is that neither person is a racist, at least not that we can tell from these statements. The reaction says more about the left than anything. And calling Harry Reid a racist for it is a page out of the left’s playbook: hold them to their own standards.
It would be nice if we could actually have a honest conversation in this country about race without being labeled racist.
Metro has been skimping on capital expenditures for a while now. What outrages me is that the union wants a 3% raise.
Mr. Chaney has the Reid thing pegged, all right. And the Slate piece is good, too. I only wish Slate had explained in which audience it was appropriate for Obama to belittle McCain’s physical limitations that resulted from his war injuries.
I’m lost on this timeline and the prosecutors wondering if they may still re-file charges since her license was suspended when they dismissed charges. There was no way she was driving when her license was re-suspended since she was in Jail at the time so she couldn’t have been ticketed for it.
Two assistant public defenders who staff Broward’s magistrate court neglected to represent Shaink Trudeau — who is indigent — during her initial appearance the morning after her Nov. 18 arrest, Finkelstein said. And contrary to office procedure, no assistant public defender went to meet with Shaink Trudeau at the Broward County Jail.
…
The next morning, Nov. 19, Shaink Trudeau made her first appearance before Magistrate Judge John “Jay” Hurley. A video of the proceedings, in which the judge and inmates can see each other on TV monitors, shows Hurley telling Shaink Trudeau that her bond had been set at $2,000.
…
Finally, at her arraignment on Dec. 2, prosecutor Gulden announced the state was dropping the charge because Shaink Trudeau’s license was not suspended.
…
Prosecutors now say they have established that Shaink Trudeau’s license was in fact suspended on the day they dismissed the case. A further records check showed the state suspended it again on Nov. 26 — while Shaink Trudeau was in jail — for failing to obtain a medical reexamination.
Shaink Trudeau’s license remains suspended today, and prosecutors have not decided whether to refile the charge, Gulden said.
Really? You haven’t decided yet whether you are going to file a false charge? A charge that can’t be true since she was stuck in jail keeping her from driving on a suspended license because of your own ineptitude? How benevolent of our overlords.
DC Metro is yet-another cautionary tale. As The Depression extends/accelerates, you can expect The Fist of the state to first cut back on services (in order to keep getting themselves paid).
Result? Ask someone from New Orleans.
Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.
Can someone please settle a question for me once-and-for-all: Is bobzbob real?
Washington state may be making some dramatic moves within the next year on marijuana legalization.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010768731_webmarijuana12.html
Saw this in the local rag today, loved the headline:
“Boston police shoot at pit bull, dog unharmed”
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1225053
This judge Hurley guy needs to be arrested and tossed in jail for a couple of weeks over the holidays and see if he thinks the system is fine or if perhaps he ought to do his job better, or preferably, just be removed from office and made to clean bed pans at a nursing home.
#7
While I agree that that Rush’s comments about McNabb were not themselves racist, Rush has such a long and storied history of (to put it mildly) “racially insensitive) remarks that I feel pretty confident calling him a racist. From “Barack The Magic Negro” to his assertion that Sherrod Brown’s victory over Paul Hackett in the 2006 Democratic Primaries had a “racial component” because “Sherrod Brown is black” (when in fact, Sherrod Brown is white!) to his contention that Colin Powell only endorsed Barack Obama because he’s black, to his constant referring to Native Americans as “injuns” (!). The list goes on. There are definitely some fabricated Limbaugh quotes out there on the Internet, but you hardly need fabricated quotes to hang him for what he’s said.
I too have been wondering if bobzbob is real, or the alter ego of a regular commenter here. It’s hard to post angry rants without the proper ignition. Or maybe we’re just predisposed to conspiracy at this site.
To scale back preventive maintenance to cut costs is self-contradicting. The PURPOSE of preventive maintenance is to save money by reducing unplanned downtimes and other costs associated with machine failure.
Being from Seattle, I’ve been jealous of D.C.’s public transportation systems. But I think I’d prefer painfully limited public transportation over extensive public transportation that’s skimping on maintenance.
#13: I think our voters might actually go for it, too. Some speculation has it as marijuana being sold out of state liquor stores at a .15% tax per gram. Kinda steep, but it’s a price all those I know who indulge are willing to pay.
“It’s like when FedEx delivers a million packages a day and loses one or two. Do we really want to change the whole system because of it?”
Really? A person’s freedom is like a FedEx package, and their unjust confinement is just a late delivery? That is the value a judge places on the rights of the citizen?
Wish I could say I was shocked…
.15% tax per gram.
That’s outrageous. If the government wants to keep kids off weed, the proper rate should be .15% tax per milligram.
Re: the grandma in jail:
the prolonged jailing of an elderly woman with no previous criminal record over a traffic ticket has left red-faced authorities admitting they botched her case.
Talk about the thin blue line breaking down. Arresting officers admitting wrongdoing in jailing a woman on wrongful charges? Take a page from the Kathryn Johnston case, fellas – you can gun down a woman with no criminal record and be acting “according to procedure”!
Athena, I think it has a good chance of passing too. If put to a public vote, I think the drug warriors will be surprised at how many closet smokers there are out there who vote for legalization. If the comment board on the linked article is any indication of public sentiment, it will definately pass.
Obama and “code switching” — just like most politicians, their words rarely line up with their actions. Actions are what really matters. Therefore most politicians are scum. But people still believe the talk and don’t investigate the actions. Therefore most people are idiots. And the wheel keeps spinning round and round …….
Reid’s comments aren’t racist because his words can’t be interpreted as being against the human RACE. It’s long past time to quit using the incorrect racist/racial terms and use the correct ethnicist/ethnicial terms.
Bobzbob is the new posting identity of Dondero.
#23
Snore. Words are symbolic and conventional. “Racist” has a specific etymology that’s rooted in a time when people believed that in fact there were different “races” of people. We now know this to make no sense from a biological standpoint, even though people still use race conventionally to mean broad groupings of ethnicities. Because language is conventional, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with recognizing: “race” has a biological definition and a conventional definition, and “racism” has a specific (contested, for sure) meaning within conventional language. The only time it’s worth changing conventional usage is when it actually interferes with understanding or harms a group of people. Since the conventional definition of “racism” does neither, and it would actually harm understanding to refuse to use an extremely common popular term based upon a persnickety biological definition, you can take your snooty language elitism and stick it. For realz.
It looks to me like Ms. Trudeau is a victim of the “War on Indigents”, where people who will be unable to pay for a lawyer (And thus, are given an overworked Public Defendant who probably won’t even show up) are given ‘preferential’ treatment in the enforcement of warrants (And by ‘preferential’ I mean “More likely to be served”
The job of the police is to prey on citizens. The slowest, lowest hanging fruit with the least likelyhood of defending itself gets the attention.
I’m not quite willing to call this racist. It’s actually a reasonably well-known term in current literary analysis. There are a hell of a lot of popular books and movies where a black person appears out of nowhere to help a white person overcome some obstacle or even “Learn An Important Life Lesson”, and then disappear, all the while remaining a cipher, just a foil to the white protagonist.
I think there were significant differences between what Limbaugh said about McNabb (and the media) and what Reid said about Obama (and the electorate). Limbaugh said that McNabb wasn’t a great quarterback, but the media treated him like he was, because he was black. This statement is not racist per se, but it does raise the question of whether other black people might be treated better by the media, and might encourage others to to treat all reports of successful black people as overstatements and puff-pieces. That is, it might be capable of enhancing and entrenching racist attitudes. Even if this were true to some extent, confirmation bias would exacerbate the tendencies for people to get what they already believe out of it.
Of course, even this short analysis is not something you get in the media. You get cries of “racist”. Even if such an analysis did get played somewhere, it gets shortened immediately to “they called Rush racist” by anyone else talking about it.
All that said, Limbaugh has clearly made racist statements in the past –I just don’t think these are great hooks to hang that thesis on.
Reid said that Obama was lighter, and spoke English in more standard manner than the stereotypical black man, and that this made him more electable. This implies that there is a significant enough (only has to be a few percent to make a large difference) portion of the electorate who feels differently enough about lighter skin vs darker *or* about speech patterns that it would make a difference in their vote versus some other hypothetical black candidate. Following the parallels, what it implies (and gives confirmation bias to) is that “stereotypical” black people have a harder time in this society than “whiter ones”. This doesn’t seem to me to be a proposition that is as dangerous to inadvertently confirm as the previous. But, well, I believe it, so I might be prey to confirmation bias here.
#26, unwillingness to use correct language (the means by which people communicate) is a display of a mental wall that you intentionally keep erect. Just because something may have been defined as one thing in the past doesn’t mean it should continue to be defined the same way.
To use your childish phrasing, take your stubborn ways and shove them. For realz.
#31:
So close, yet so far! Communication is the key. “Racism” is a commonly used and widely understood term. It has a conventional definition. Language is conventional. You are NOT actually facilitating communication by turning up your nose and refusing to use the common parlance; you are in fact hindering it, by insisting upon substituting a word few people use to mean what another word already means. What makes one word more “correct” than another is whether people understand it to mean what you’re trying to communicate. Words have no “essential” meanings because they are just sounds to which we assign meanings.
The above is an example of an explanation. I’ve provided it twice. Simply asserting that I’ve erected mental walls is nothing more than a (lame) insult. Try responding with an argument this time.
#28 (and #29)
What makes Barack the Magic Negro racist and offensive is not the name, but the construction of the song. Paul Shanklin’s decision to frame the tune by doing a minstrel-show caricature of Al Sharpton (who, btw, supported Obama’s candidacy); his curious decision to “parody” the article which focused on WHITE perceptions of Obama by creating a Black character to criticism him; and of course the obnoxious lyrics ending with the Sharpton caricature looking for a buffet (!).
Hell, the “sassy black girl” is a TV/movie trope, too, but I’d probably think it was offensive if someone wrote a song trying to reduce a prominent female person to the stereotype.
I read your post. Went to the link and read the headline again. Read half way through the article. Went back to the headline. Finally came back to your post. And only then did I finally realize it said “unharmed” and not “unarmed”.
Just read the New Joisy article about medical maryjane. Seems an ideal way to cut the US prison population in half. Just give a “can get pot” card to EVERYONE and bingo!
radley, you’re smarter than this. it’s not about what group reid was talking to. it’s the double standard.
it’s not about uttering the term “negro.” it’s the fucking double standard.
it’s not whether reid is a racist or not. IT’S THE GODDAMN DOUBLE STANDARD.
and you know that.