Later On

Good column from Greenwald:

Charles Krauthammer,The Washington Post, today:

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion.Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

Yahoo! News, August 12, 2010:

A new CNN poll has found that most Americans think gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married. . . . As polling-statistics blogger Nate Silver points out, the margin of error [as well as the poll's status as the first to find majority approval] means we can’t assume that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, but it is "no longer safe to say that opposition to same-sex marriage is the majority position . . . . "

That particular factual inaccuracy, which I am 100% certain will never be corrected by the Post, is the least of the problems with Krauthammer’s column today.  Above all else, he seeks to delegitimize concerns over the Right’s intensifying use of racially and ethnically divisive tactics as nothing more than the last refuge of a Democratic Party which, he argues, espouses unpopular policies and thus has no means of winning an election other than by falsely accusing its opponents of bigotry.

It requires extreme blindness or extreme dishonesty to deny that our politics is more racially and ethnically polarized than it has been in a long time.  Virtually every Fox News/right-wing-talk-radio controversy relies on scaring economically anxious white Americans into ignoring the prime cause of their economic insecurity — plundering by Wall Street bankers, abetted by the government they own — and focusing instead on some manufactured menace from powerless racial and ethnic minorities:  black people preventing them from voting (New Black Panthers), stealing their elections (ACORN), and treating them unequally (Shirley Sherrod and Eric Holder’s Justice Department); Muslims who want to conquer their country and celebrate over their Christian corpses (the Triumphalist Ground Zero Mosque); invading, marauding Latino armies coming to steal their property and rape their women while their Marxist allies in Government (led by a black Muslim President) disarm the white victims.  Matt Taibbi, in lamenting the takeover of the GOP by the most riled-up of these factions — the Tea Partiers — recounts just some of the lowlights here.

Cowardly and opportunistic Democratic politicians have only added to this inflammatory brew.  When the execrable, desperate Harry Reid isn’t feeding this majoritarian paranoia by demanding that the Park51 community center move, he’s seeking to capitalize on it through explicit advocacy of ethnic-based voting in order to salvage his worthless political career.  The American Right has no hope of recovering from its Bush-era implosion except by aggressively exploiting ethnic and racial resentments — the most telling statement of the last year was probably Glenn Beck’s pronouncement on Fox that Obama is a "racist" who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" — but many career Democratic politicians, such as Reid, are so disliked that their only hope for staying in power is to milk those same divisions to their own advantage, often by conflating justifiable, substantive opposition to Democratic rule with the ugly bigotry fueled by the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh circus.  An incumbent Party which has presided over extreme economic suffering has little to offer other than dredging up fear — much of it well-grounded — in the alternative (you may despise what we’re doing in power, but look at those hateful, bigoted freaks over there).

The real problem is …

Continue reading.

>The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press offers a summary of tape-recording laws: On Phones And Elsewhere: ‘Can We Tape?’

At least that’s often the case. TYD points out this story by Cheryl Corley at NPR:

If the government can record citizens, why can’t citizens record the government? That’s the question posed by a Chicago artist who faces prison for recording the sound of his own arrest.

It’s generally legal to videotape an on-duty police officer in public, but in some states, recording audio of what an officer says can be a serious crime.

This Chicago case, in which an artist is charged with violating the state’s eavesdropping law, actually began as civil disobedience.

As a group of kids drummed on buckets on Chicago’s State Street late last December, Chris Drew stood nearby. On the crowded sidewalk, Drew was dressed for attention, wearing a blazing red poncho covered with art patches that he was selling for a dollar each.

Drew is a free-speech advocate; his State Street appearance was part of an ongoing protest against a Chicago law restricting where artists can sell their wares. A Chicago police officer noticed Drew in the off-limits area, and told him to move along.

Drew was hoping to get arrested to test the city’s law; he got his wish. Prosecutors charged him with two misdemeanors. He was not expecting what came next. After police found a small recording device in his belongings, Drew was charged with a felony for violating the Illinois eavesdropping law, which requires all involved to consent to any audio recording.

"And shortly after, they put a bond of $20,000 on me for selling art for a dollar on State Street and audiotaping my own arrest," Drew says.

The misdemeanor charges were dropped, but the felony charge remains — and with it, a possible four- to 15-year prison term.

Mark Donahue, the head of the Chicago Police Union, says the officers simply enforced the law. And changing the law, he says, could hamper police work, and cause some officers to hesitate on the job.

"You don’t want that hesitation," he says. "You want them to act on their instincts, and their training as well."

If officers think they’re being recorded, Donahue says, "they think there’s an extra Big Brother over their shoulder that will judge them 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 years down the line, on the action or utterances they’re making today."

Eavesdropping and wiretap laws were designed to protect private conversations. So the question becomes, what’s private and what’s not?

In 12 states, including Illinois, recording the audio of an on-duty officer in a public place without consent could be considered illegal.

Perceived violations are likely to be played out in court, such as in a case in Massachusetts.

Three years ago, lawyer Simon Glik flipped open his cell phone and recorded Boston police officers as they used what Glik considers excessive force in an encounter with a young man.

Glik was arrested after an officer asked if he had recorded any sound and Glik answered that he had.

Sarah Wunsch, an attorney with the Massachusetts ACLU, says the state law is not being interpreted correctly.

"To say that in the United States of America, this would be considered a crime — to record if there’s any sound attached to it — is crazy," she says. "If the police can record a stop, the ordinary citizen needs to be able to observe and record what’s going on in a public place. There is no right to privacy of the police officers in that context."

In another controversial case, motorcyclist Anthony Graber, 25, was speeding on an interstate in Maryland earlier this year. With his helmet camera rolling, he sped and popped wheelies on Interstate 95, near his Baltimore home.

When Graber came to a stop at an exit, a state trooper in plainclothes and an unmarked car blocked his access and approached him, gun in hand, ordering him off the bike.

Graber was ticketed, but after he posted the encounter on YouTube, authorities got a warrant, seized his camera and computers. Harford County Prosecutor Joseph Cassilly charged Graber with three felonies for violating the state’s wiretap law.

Even so, Cassilly says that he disagrees with the law. Calling it too broad, he says that its criminalizes the conduct of citizens. But, he says, there is another side to consider.

"Police officers need to do a job where often they need to take statements or information from people," he says, "that are reluctant to talk to the officer, or reluctant to give information to the officer."

And that, Cassilly says, means police conversations with witnesses or victims should be private. He suggests, along with others, that Maryland’s eavesdropping law be rewritten.

An attempt to revise the Illinois statute failed a few years ago. Now it’s being challenged in federal court.

The law is unconstitutional, says Harvey Grossman of the Illinois ACLU.

"The general theme that drifts through these cases is very clear," Grossman says. "Law enforcement, in these instances, is rebelling and is refusing to allow public scrutiny of their behavior. And they are using the eavesdropping statute as a weapon against civilians."

With the proliferation of cell phones and ever-smaller recording devices, more cases involving who gets to record what’s said between police and civilians will very likely end up in court.

Cute Overload was pwned, and apologizes:

As longtime C.O. readers know, we can’t get enough of trick pool shooting, and love to showcase new talent. And so we thought we had when we featured “Lightning Vinnie” Garbanzo, who seemingly cleared an entire rack in a single break.

Alas, it was a fraud. In this slowed-down version of the original video, you can clearly see that an accomplice was used. We regret being taken in by this base deception, and wish to assure readers that this will not happen again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Still no drop, but hanging in there. The little special yogurts were probably a mistake: they were not nonfat. Nordic Track 15.5 minutes non-stop. Best thing to listen to that I’ve found so far: Nancy Wilson’s Jazz Profiles, which you can download from NPR. I was listening to Art Tatum this morning. Nice mix of good jazz and good conversation about the music and the artist.

UPDATE: Just back from diet counselor. Up a pound. She took a good look at my food log and told me to pull out some of lunch and dinner and eat it for snacks: not increasing the amount of food, but spreading the same amount over more eatings: small morning snack around 10:00, lunch, small afternoon snack around 3:00, dinner. That should get the loss going again. I think I’ll also resume kettlebells but only for swings and deadlifts until I can make myself more flexible.

Very cool razor that shaves extremely well. Here they are.

Maybe I’m getting the hang of it. The Simpson Duke 3 Best worked up a fine lather from Durance L’òme shaving soap, though I definitely like a longer loft. The Edwin Jagger lined Chatsworth with a Swedish Gillette blade delivered three extremely smooth and effective passes, and then a splash of Aqua Velva finished the job.