July 2008

the story of rachel hoffman’s murder (which i somehow missed when it broke back in may) is getting a lot of attention right now, largely because of an ABC broadast that aired last friday. i read about the case today in a short, heartbreaking article by paul armentano on alternet.

cliff notes: busted by the tallahassee police for possession of a little baggie of pot, rachel was coerced into turning police informant and sent to buy cocaine, ecstasy and a handgun from some known drug and weapons dealers.

rachel in her favorite hat

they take a 23-year-old pothead kid and send her into a park at night to buy a gun? a fucking GUN? what do guns have to do with smoking a couple joints with your friends? in the sixties, it was understood that these worlds rarely intersect. what happened? has everyone in law enforcement lost their sense of perspective as well as their minds?

you can see the chief of the tallahassee PD on the 20/20 special report talking about doing his job by “taking these people off the street” and the people he’s talking about are people like RACHEL. a weepy hippy-dippy college kid, getting ready to go to chef school. she’s in the same category, apparently, as the scumbags she was supposed to buy the coke and the pills and the gun from.

the cops hand her $13,000 cash and send her out alone after the bad guys.  yet the police chief displays no remorse whatsoever when discussing the fiasco that ended with rachel’s murder. not only was this a stupid thing to do, this was — by the police own’s guidelines — against the law: probationers are not permitted to associate with known drug dealers. additionally, all informant operations are supposed to be cleared through the local D.A. not only wasn’t this done, the TPD cops insisted rachel keep their deal to herself. they knew an operation like this would never be approved.

rachel hoffman is not the only casualty of the this country’s rabid and misguided war on drugs (more appropriately called “drug prohibition“). check out becky c’s “recovering lawyer” blog for a short list of other, similar murders.

the case is in the news again because her killers go before a florida grand jury this week.

but those are just the guys who pulled the trigger. rachel hoffman was murdered by the callous, narrow-minded decision-makers at tallahassee PD, and they — from their unremorseful chief down to every last cop who “managed” rachel in their botched operation — should be standing trial right beside the thugs.

it was the cops who set rachel up, and it’s the cops who should take the fall for the crime.

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although i am opposed to trading carbon offset credits on the open market (see this post for the reasons why), today i accepted Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge and added the badge to my blog. why? because this is, as BP freely acknowledges, simply a way to focus attention on the growing threat of climate change. this blog, in and of itself, is using neither more nor less carbon than it used before i posted the badge; however, the badge itself is a call for change that others may see, acknowledge, act on and propagate.

350.org, the inspiration behind Brighter Planet’s badge program, is an online agent for positive environmental change. i urge you to visit, sign up, brainstorm and perhaps start an action of your own. i’ve got one in mind that will get rolling as soon as i am able to make the time.

still, i am about to unnecessarily burn a bit of carbon this morning by driving to a memorial service that i would prefer not to attend. why not? it’s a family thing. the woman being memorialized was my first cousin and, at this point in our (mid)lives, a near-total stranger. i’d laid eyes on her exactly twice in the last twenty-something years, and spoke to her on the phone exactly never. she was a good and friendly woman, it’s not that we didn’t get along, it’s simply that our lives and interests did not intersect. we might have passed each other on the street without knowing it — unlikely, though, as we lived a few thousand miles apart.

so why am i going? quite simply because, if i don’t, i will be in a world of shit with my aging father, who will take it as a personal slight. why am i dreading going? because there will be other cousins in attendance whom i would rather not see. cousins whom, if they were afire, i would not spare the piss to quench. in short, it’s not likely to be an especially pleasant day, and the fact that i’ve got to waste gasoline to do it is just an extra spoonful of sadplanet icing on the cake.

but hey, i got my badge.

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this is the first post in a weekly series on my favorite bloggers. i’ll give you two at a time, hopefully two that make some kind of sense as twins. pairing these two ballsy ladies for starters was a no-brainer.

given how in-your-face many of her posts are, it makes sense that Angry Black Bitch maintains personal anonymity on her blog — and the way she does it is one of the many delightful things about her writing style. you gotta love a line like “This bitch was fascinated by the mommy bloggers who were out in full force at BlogHer” not only because it introduces BlogHer (a fantastic resource for shebloggers) but because watching the Mommybloggers through the eyes of an Angry Black Bitch is a bit like dropping acid at a Carpenters concert. in this post, as she often does, This Bitch reflects on her own background as she thoughtfully evaluates the matter at hand and quietly delivers a deft (and sometimes ballbreaking) summation like “I’m left wondering where the line is between wanting the best for your child and running your child’s life as if it were a new product launch.” i be reading that bitch daily since i found her on the Majikthise blogroll. a rant “inspired from the internets” that she posted on my brother’s birthday is one of my favorites so far.

at the other end of the blogging bitches spectrum is Bitch, PhD., a mommyblogger with a seriously strong tude and for all i know an uzi in her pantry. her comments policy, which is WAY up front & center on the blog, sets the tone: “Comments are great; obnoxious comments get deleted. Deal.” this is HER house you’re visiting, and if you don’t like it, there’s the fucking door. i could fall in love with a no bullshit bitch like this (except its ABB, not PhD, who’s with me over here on the queer side) (wouldn’t be hard to fall in love with ABB neither, come to think of it). anyway, BPhD’s blog is a nice salad of politics, home-ec, book & movie reviews, web reviews (not just aggregation) feminism and social crit. on days when she’s a little too busy with Anonymous Kid (my assumption; her name; check the photo on her home page — is that AK giving a version of her mother’s single-finger salute to the world?) she may serve up a post like this one, a little treasure map to follow to put some fuel on your liberal fire. her post on abortion, along with some followup information on just how much it can suck at times once your blog becomes well-known, is required sheblogger reading.

both of these gals are long-term bloggers, with archives that date back to around 2004, they both post frequently — while each may skip days here and there, they also have occasional multipost days (like today, when ABB’s brother, whom we already know and care about from other of her posts, landed in the ER after a pretty serious accident; she gave her readers an update once it was clear that he’d be OK.) they are both responsive to comments — though you got to get past BPhD’s guerilla moderation tactics before you’ll get any comments from her.

i’ve been taking these two regular as vitamins with my morning coffee lately and i gotta say that there are few things better than starting your day with a Bitch.

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three cheers for france sticking it to hijab!

women in burqa

no, they’re not throwing faiza silmi out of the country. she can stay. she just can’t become a citizen (kids or no kids, husband or no husband) because she has taken niqab, and that is not in alignment with their values. good for them. silmi is shocked, says that she “would never have imagined they would turn me down because of what i choose to wear.”

they didn’t. they turned you down because of what you choose to represent, the concept that a woman’s body is little more than manbait and must be covered to the utmost lest salacious, unscrupulous males become inflamed by a glimpse of cheekbone and fall upon you, devouring and despoiling. and we all know how much a despoiled woman is worth these days, don’t we? (especially amongst the faithful of islam, where stoning an unmarried teenager to death is considered an appropriate response if she is found guilty of the crime of having sex.)

the practice is not only insulting (and socially crippling, in western terms) to women, it’s just as much of a slap in the face to men, who are presumed to be little more than slavering sex fiends who can’t be trusted not to lust after, if not outright ravage, any woman showing more than three or four square inches of flesh.

is this an example of a government interference with free religious expression? you bet, and it’s a good one — along with all those other freedoms that governments tend to interfere with, like blood sacrifice. while many moslem groups worldwide praised france for this decision, m’hammed henniche of the french union of muslim associations said, “Religion, so far as it is personal, should be kept out of these decisions.” i agree with you, m’hammed, except that it isn’t “personal” to go out in the streets wearing a straitjacket (as fadela amara characterized it). that’s called advertising, and i’m glad france isn’t having any of it. i wish my country had that kind of balls.

freedom of religion is highly overrated in the united states, where nonprofit tax shelters benefit svengalis from the sun myung moon to jimmy swaggart, where the religious agenda of moronic right-wing christians in backward states forces some schools to teach the “science” of creationism alongside evolution and where rabid anti-choice hate-baiters who wouldn’t adopt an unwanted baby if jesus h. christ himself delivered it to their door shut down medical clinics and successfully block the legal sale of contraceptives at many pharmacies.

it’s enough to make you lose your lunch:

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yesterday i would’ve told you i’d probably heard them all — from “yo my niggahs” (here in the neighborhood) to “show us your tits” (at a monster truck show in bloomsburg, pennsylvania where my biracial boyfriend was the very only niggah at the racetrack). people like to get drunk and drunk people sometimes like to yell, or seem to like to yell more often than undrunk people do. or maybe the yelling of the drunkards is in some way more compelling, more memorable (or simply much more fucking annoying) than the yelling of the sober.

anyway. this is about people yelling after rather than before they’ve embarked upon their various forays into alcohol (near-)poisoning.

it’s usually a single word, or a very simple phrase — Freebird! Captain Video! — some fragment of the buddycircle’s inside joke du jour distilled and compressed into the minimum possible syllables then sung, chanted, shouted, screamed, perhaps spray-painted on handball courts and left in various voicemail messages. often forgotten by morning, these catchwords fire and power the night. toasts are drunk to them. I’m your Huckleberry…

but until tonight, i have never heard a politician’s name used this way. maybe in france they stagger down the boulevards shouting for Le Pen or de Gaulle (do they?), but outside of a protest or support rally i’ve never experienced anything like that in new york.

loping down the washington square subway station’s uptown ramp was a loose-connected quartet of midlife latinos shouting …. Obama! that’s it, just the name, no exhortations, no “You Go”s, just the word. Obama! then, “Yo, Yo, Rose — Obama!” and then “Listen up, listen up, I said Obama!” and it passed back and forth and it spread from the original gang of four to a few other half-lit (and maybe even a couple spber) wannabe subway-catchers and for a few moments tonight, at 8pm in the west village in the united states of america, a grinning posse of citizens jogged toward the station nudging and elbowing each other and shouting Obama! Obama!

and i, idiot, had neglected to recharge my little minicam.

they seemed to just love having his name in their mouths, igniting from tongue to tongue as the train barreled in and the group moved faster. Obama! like AC/DC fans chanting for Angus before the lights come up in madison square garden.

we all ended up crammed in the last car of the uptown C, where among all the standees and backpacks and crowding and shouted conductor announcements, Obama slowly petered out, reduced to a bit of sotto voce chuckling and a couple of high-spirited elbowed ribs.

i’m a bit miffed at obama myself, since the FISA vote. an early and fervent supporter, i would have turned cartwheels in the street when hillary finally conceded, if my weary old ass was still in cartwheel-capable mode. (who am i kidding? even at 25 i couldn’t manage cartwheels! i do cartwheels of the heart, that’s as good as it gets.) but he got it dead wrong about immunity for the wiretappers, and i am miffed. as if he neglected to buy me chocolate on valentine’s day.

mccain can’t tell viagra from birth control the banks are failing your house is in foreclosure take nothing for granted nothing is safe war without end amen toxic ocean fish killer salmonella tomatoes all the bees are dying bird flu hepatitis AIDS AIDS AIDS darfur iran the NRA on a throne of spent AK-47 cartridges and ten elderly couples murdered in their beds.

Obama!

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the small-print mention in today’s AMNY is a half-column wide and less than two inches high. let’s just call it what it is: invisible. “Cop won’t face criminal charges for road-rage” is its title, and from the way the piece is written you can barely tell if the cop was the shooter or the shootee.

short story: off-duty officer sean sawyer’s car was cut off by jayson tirado’s and a typical bout of machismo road rage ensued. tirado supposedly stuck his arm out the window and pointed his finger in a toddler-gunlike fashion at sawyer, at which point sawyer blew his head off. there are reports that sawyer had been drinking, but no one knows for sure, since he didn’t turn himself in until 19 hours after the killing. the passengers in tirado’s car were so soused that one of them can’t remember the incident at all and the other’s recollection is hazy.

Irene Tirado

NO CIVILIAN WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THIS KIND OF FREE PASS, but because sawyer’s a cop he literally gets away with murder. if you or i did the same thing, even with a fully-licensed pistol, we’d be facing at least ten years upstate for homicide.

sawyer is STILL ON THE NYPD PAYROLL, suspended with full salary. there is a “possibility” that he will be dismissed from the force. i wonder how jayson’s mother (pictured, shortly after the murder) feels about this ongoing paid vacation for the man who killed her son.

when i was growing up in brooklyn, the police were viewed as wild animals that you had to be very, very careful around: no eye contact, no casual conversation, no sudden movements. don’t even put your hand in your pocket. they ruled the streets and they did so in whatever way they chose. yes, the cops did, as far as possible, protect us from crime and criminals, and i am not making light of their indispensible service. but there was no one and nothing that could protect us from THEM: even the institutions put in place to oversee police behavior were staffed and run by the police themselves. the civilian complaint review board, then as now, simply rubber-stamped police misbehavior and doled out the occasional wrist-slap.

MY FATHER WAS A COP FOR 20 YEARS. in 1971, after one of his beatings, i was taken by ambulance to an emergency room. the extent of my injuries inspired the hospital to call for my father’s arrest. but the hospital was in the same neighborhood as his precinct, so he was in effect picked up by his buddies. they had him handcuffed in the ER waiting room, and i could hear him cursing the doctors who had the nerve to try and get him in trouble for “disciplining” his daughter; i could hear the arresting officers agreeing with him and asking him to just be calm, as he was going to no doubt be cut loose very soon. they held him until he started sobering up, then drove him home. no charges against him were ever filed. the case that i subsequently brought to the CCRB was dismissed. my father told them that i was lying, that my boyfriend actually beat me up, not him. no investigation was done, the case was simply closed, though there were several witnesses who would have gladly testified on my behalf: my grandmother, my mother, and my mother’s brother, the person who finally, after a few hours, told my father “that’s enough” and pulled him off of me.

FIVE YEARS LATER, walking through washington square park, i encountered a small crowd surrounding two officers who were kicking and nightsticking a man on the ground. a righteously indignant teenager, i got right in the middle of the circle and began calling for the cops to stop and exhorting my fellow citizens to stand up for what was right and not just let this happen. next thing i knew i was there on the ground along with the first guy, though they didn’t beat me up as badly as they’d been beating him: kicking the shit out of some black old guy who isn’t resisting is different from kicking the shit out of a bigmouth white girl, at least in public. so they waited until they got me to the precinct, where i was cuffed to a chair, my shirt ripped down the middle (no bra, this was still the seventies, after all), smacked, kicked, spit on and cursed by every passing officer for several hours. when they finally let me make my legally-required phone call, i got my father down there with HIS badge. if i didn’t happen to have a cop-daddy, i am not sure where that night would have ended. a body floating in the river? not impossible. there is no doubt in my mind that people are killed in NYPD police precincts, though likely not as often now as in the past.

the NYPD continues to be out of control, though not as outrageously as it was in the past, and continues not to be held accountable for their actions, as the killing of jayson tirado illustrates. for every high-profile case like sean bell, abner louima, patrick dorismond or amadou diallo, there are a hundred jayson tirados and likely thousands of experiences like the one i was subjected to in the village all those many years ago.

has some progress been made? yes. but not enough. not even close.

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C-Rod, as the tabloids have rechristened Cynthia Rodriguez, may not get “as much as she wants” if the Florida divorce court declines to set aside the prenup she signed in 2000.

Shocking!

All at once, both parties are playing childchess: MY kids, no MY kids, no …

Not shocking.

WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE? IT’S NOT ABOUT CUSTODY — neither one of these parents have ever had what most Americans think of as custody. You know, where you actually spend time with a child and see to its needs, change diapers, cook porridge, watch cartoons, whatever. Millionaires, for the most part, don’t do that, the nannies and tutors and au pairs and dressers and handlers and so forth ad nauseum do it, with mom and dad popping in every now and then for a quick night-night.

A-Rod’s current contract is valued at half a billion dollars over the next 10 years or so. Not counting what he’s already got (the florida digs alone cost twelve million).

THAT’S ENOUGH AND ENOUGH AND MORE THAN ENOUGH for two adults and two children to live in lavish abundance all the rest of their days.

Yet C(unt)-Rod is filing to set aside the prenup, and A(sshole)-Rod is accusing her of “withholding” his children. All this just to solidify their positions: C wanting to take more and A wanting to give less, with the More and Less of it more or less determined by who gets custody.

Come on, people, snap out of it. You have been blessed, financially, beyond what most of us can even imagine. You can’t work this out without it getting ugly, without playing tug-o-war with your own children, without dissing each other in the newspapers?

Please, take the high road here. Both of you can afford to do that.

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