September 2008

boy, i miss jesse jackson’s voice (did he always talk so southern?) on the national scene. just listened him chatting with amy goodman on democracy now, and the directness of some of his remarks remind me that obama can no longer speak quite so frankly on behalf of african americans. yes, having to bite your tongue because you’re running for president is certainly a subtler form of racism than, say, being hung from a tree or arrested for DWB, but it’s still racism. anyway, i wish jackson had kept it in his pants and not excluded himself from the larger conversation. no, he never would have made nominee, even without the affair, but it’s a damn shame that he has been, for all practical purposes, silenced by his own lively penis.

are you registered to vote? are you losing your house? did you know that the republicans are trying to ensure that you lose your vote along with your house if you happen to be having mortgage problems right about now? oh, and college students in virginia are being told they are not allowed to vote in the town where they live and attend school if that’s not where they’re “from”. untrue and illegal.

you can see that smart & honest poll workers are really needed for the upcoming election. please consider signing up to serve if you can.

in the last week, a 4th-grader was suspended from school because his pencil sharpener was broken. i kid you not — teachers actually called police because the micro-sliver of razor found in all cheap pencil sharpeners had come loose from its little plastic house. not that they thought this straight-A student was a terrorist or anything. you know, they were just saying that it was an exposed razor.

in the last week, eric mcclean was sentenced to 2-4 years in prison for killing the teenager who was banging his wife. in cold blood. he says the shotgun just accidentally went off while he was pointing it at the kid, who was sitting behind the wheel of his car. to my mind, if you shove a loaded, cocked weapon into someone’s face and then it accidentally goes off, it wasn’t an accident. like they say in brooklyn, don’t take that shit out unless you gonna use it.

in the last week (getting out my calculator now), about 57,370 people were arrested for possession of marijuana, despite the fact that Francis Young, the DEA’s own administrative law judge determined that Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man… and despite the fact that many cops are opposed to drug prohibition and despite the fact that even doctors are calling loudly for decriminalization and the right to prescribe (not just for chemo sufferers, either — appears that pot is also pretty handy for ADHD kids, with far fewer [none] side effects than that pharmaceutical crap they are getting now).

most of these people will do more time in jail for their baggies of weed than mcclean will do for having murdered his rival.

sarah palin, of course, inhaled. but she’d prefer that you didn’t, thank you very much.

yes, i’m rambling a bit this morning. these stories are not connected by anything other than my astonishment.

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last night i dreamed of the economy. except it wasn’t the economy, it was a landfill. this is how dreams work: you’re walking through a castle and dream says “this is your office”. rather, dream makes you Know this is your office. dreams are all about knowing, vivid slices of Real in the sleepy night. dreams can be ecstatic, terrifying, repetitive, confusing, erotic — the only thing a dream can never be is uncertain. dreams always know.

i dreamed of the economy and the economy was a landfill but it wasn’t a sparkly new separate-your-recyclables landfill, no. it was a seething, boiling, fetid lake of filth abubble with disintegrating plastics and grease and stale medications. i held a cloth over my face. i couldn’t breathe. i was there, alone, at the edge of the poisonous landfill of our economy. it was a long, long dream. i stood and watched the noxious lake in a landscape that held nothing else, grey and barren as the moon. i saw heat squiggles rising off the black swells. i took small breaths and shivered in the freezing cold.

how many of us believed that the US economy really could collapse? how many of us understand that it has already happened, nothing but the details of it to be worked out….and worked out, and worked out, as savings vanish and opportunities for livelihood cease. a few months ago i wrote here that it’s too late for everything, environmentally speaking. i might have missed the whole point in that post, climate change may be the least of our problems. not that i’ll stop recycling or taking a tote bag to the grocery store.

our next president, whoever it may be, will be stepping into an impossible job. john mccain said yesterday that he knows how to fix this problem. maybe he doesn’t yet understand, or simply doesn’t want to admit, that this isn’t fixable. that to bail out all of the failing firms means mortgaging not just your future and your children’s futures, but several generations of futures. it means writing checks that we have no way of cashing. it means china cuts off our credit. (it’s abominable that this country has even come to rely so heavily on loans from china in the first place. but we have. how the fiscally conservative republicans who started this practice square that with their financial philosophy is beyond me.) conversely, not bailing out the failing firms means that insurance policies and savings accounts become worthless. means that mortgages vanish completely and only those wealthy enough to pay cash can buy a place to live. it means owners walk away from rental properties and throw up their hands when the shivering residents scream that they need heat. blood from stones. suing the landlord doesn’t accomplish much if he’s as broke as you. lawsuits never filled a furnace or changed a lightbulb yet.

nor fixed a bridge nor paved a road nor repaired a levee. 

but hey, mudd & syron will still get their multimillion dollar kisses on their way out the door. the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

and last night i dreamed of a landfill.

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i am reposting this, in its entirety, as found on joy harjo’s blog.

1. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Fishing

Perhaps no issue is of greater importance to Alaska Native peoples as the right to hunt and fish according to ancient customary and traditional practices, and to carry on the subsistence way of life for future generations. Governor Sarah Palin has consistently opposed those rights.

Once in office, Governor Palin decided to continue litigation that seeks to overturn every subsistence fishing determination the federal government has ever made in Alaska. (State of Alaska v. Norton, 3:05-cv-0158-HRH (D. Ak).) In pressing this case, Palin decided against using the Attorney General (which usually handles State litigation) and instead continued contracting with Senator Ted Stevens’ brother-in-law’s law firm (Birch, Horton, Bittner & Cherot).

The goal of Palin’s law suit is to invalidate all the subsistence fishing regulations the federal government has issued to date to protect Native fishing, and to force the courts instead to take over the role of setting subsistence regulations. Palin’s law suit seeks to diminish subsistence fishing rights in order to expand sport and commercial fishing.

In May 2007, the federal court rejected the State’s main challenge, holding that Congress in 1980 had expressly granted the U.S. Interior and Agriculture Departments the authority to regulate and protect Native and rural subsistence fishing activities in Alaska. (Decision entered May 15, 2007 (Dkt. No. 110).) Notwithstanding this ruling, Palin continues to argue in the litigation that the federal subsistence protections are too broad, and should be narrowed to exclude vast areas from subsistence fishing, in favor of sport and commercial fishing. Palin opposes subsistence protections in marine waters, on many of the lands that Natives selected under their 1971 land claims settlement with the state and federal governments, and in many of the rivers where Alaska Natives customarily fish. (Alaska Complaint at 15-18.) Palin also opposes subsistence fishing
protections on Alaska Native federal allotments that were deeded to individuals purposely to foster Native subsistence activities. All these issues are now pending before the federal district court.

2. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Hunting

Palin has also sought to invalidate critical determinations the Federal Subsistence Board has made regarding customary and traditional uses of game, specifically to take hunting opportunities away from Native subsistence villagers and thereby enhance sport hunting. Palin’s attack here on subsistence has focused on the Ahtna Indian people in Chistochina.

Although the federal district court has rejected Palin’s challenge, she has carried on an appeal that was argued in August 2008. (State of Alaska v. Fleagle, No. 07-35723 (9th Cir.).) In both hunting and fishing matters, Palin has continued uninterrupted the policies initiated by the former Governor Frank Murkowski Administration, challenging hunting and fishing protections that Native people depend upon for their subsistence way of life in order to enhance sport fishing and hunting opportunities. Palin’s lawsuits are a direct attack on the core way of life of Native Tribes in rural Alaska.

3. Palin has attacked Alaska Tribal Sovereignty

Governor Palin opposes Alaska tribal sovereignty. Given past court rulings affirming the federally recognized tribal status of Alaska Native villages, Palin does not technically challenge that status. But Palin argues that Alaska Tribes have no authority to act as sovereigns, despite their recognition. So extreme is Palin on tribal sovereignty issues that she has sought to block tribes from exercising any authority whatsoever even over the welfare of Native children, adhering to a 2004 legal opinion issued by the former Murkowski Administration that no such jurisdiction exists (except when a state court transfers a matter to a tribal court).

Both the state courts and the federal courts have struck down Palin’s policy of refusing to recognize the sovereign authority of Alaska Tribes to address issues involving Alaska Native children. Native Village of Tanana v. State of Alaska, 3AN-04-12194 CI (judgment entered Aug. 26, 2008) (Ak. Super. Ct.); Kaltag Tribal Council v. DHHS, No. 3:06-cv-00211-TMB (D. Ak.), pending on appeal No 08-35343 (9th Cir.)). Nonetheless, Palin’s policy of refusing to recognize Alaska tribal sovereignty remains unchanged.

4. Palin has attacked Alaska Native Languages

Palin has refused to accord proper respect to Alaska Native languages and voters by refusing to provide language assistance to Yup’ik speaking Alaska Native voters. As a result, Palin was just ordered by a special three-judge panel of federal judges to provide various forms of voter assistance to Yup’ik voters residing in southwest Alaska. Nick v. Bethel, No. 3:07-cv-0098-TMB (D. Ak.) (Order entered July 30, 2008). Citing years of State neglect, Palin was ordered to provide trained poll workers who are bilingual in English and Yup’ik; sample ballots in written Yup’ik; a written Yup’ik glossary of election terms; consultation with local Tribes to ensure the accuracy of Yup’ik translations; a Yup’ik language coordinator; and pre-election and post-election reports to the court to track the State’s efforts.

In sum, measured against some the rights that are most fundamental to Alaska Native Tribes – the subsistence way of life, tribal sovereignty and voting rights – Palin’s record is a failure.
*********************************************
Kaltag:
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0231295649
Fleagle:
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0231254875
State v. Norton opinion:
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/023086165
State v. Norton complaint:
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0451584225
Tanana:
[Alaska court system is not electronic]
Nick v. State
https://ecf.akd.uscourts.gov/doc1/0231352147
*********************************************
Lloyd B. Miller
Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Miller & Munson, LLP
900 West Fifth Avenue, Suite 700
Anchorage, Alaska 99501
Telephone: (907)258-6377
Facsimile: (907)272-8332

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it’s a sad day when amnesty international issues a press release about your own country

gloria steinem rips sarah palin a new one in the LA Times

best-titled blog this week: fred thompson with his head up his ass smoking a crack pipe

caribou barbie says “sambo beat the bitch!”

alicublog weighs in on Ace O. Spades and the flag-trashing spat

what is the proper use of childeren during a campaign and when is it namecalling?

the media apologizes to john mccain

when can judges force women into surgery against their will?

threats and retribution in alaska

when politicians play god

why the police go wilding the way they do

a site for all the twitterers in the house: govtweets

last but certainly not least, a correction to yesterday’s post on charles rangel — while the details are still being sorted out, it seems that the earnings were $75k over the whole 20 years, not $75k a year as originally reported, and all of it went straight to the holder of the mortgage, rangel didn’t receive any checks. he may still have some tax obligations associated with that, but it’s a whole different story. sending MAD LOVE again, chuck!

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yeah it’s old news — VERY old news, 26 years old, in fact. but i just read the story today. and it makes me sick. if this is an example of the american justice system working correctly, we’re all fucked.

in 1982, alton logan was convicted of murder for killing a security guard, though he was actually home sleeping when it happened. (as his entire family testified at the time. but you can’t trust those black families, they’ll say anything.)

shortly afterward, another man — arrested (and subsequently convicted) for murdering two cops, admitted that he, not logan, had killed the guard. guess andrew wilson just liked shooting at people in uniforms. 

here’s how wilson responded when his court-appointed attorneys confronted him about the shooting:

“He was pleased that the wrong guy had been charged. It was like a game and he’d gotten away with something. But there was just no doubt whatsoever that it was true. I mean I said, ‘It was you with the shotgun-you killed the guy?’ And he said, ‘Yes,’ and then he giggled,” Coventry added.

after he finished giggling, wilson attested to the murder in a signed, notarized statement that these public defenders then stashed in a safe deposit box, where it has rotted for the past quarter-century. you know, while alton logan was rotting in prison. kunz and coventry only revealed the confession a year ago, after wilson died in prison. 

why would they do this? attorney-client privilege. so sacrosanct.

all i can think is that they must not be very good lawyers, then, because i can think of a dozen ways around that right off the top of my head. lawyers spend years learning the arts of innuendo and manipulation, it’s their bread-and-butter. if they gave a flying fuck about alton logan, they would’ve found a way to get the word to the right people in the right way without apparently compromising their client.  

i want to know how they managed to sleep nights and look themselves in the eye every day since 1982 knowing that an innocent man was spending every one of those same days wrongfully imprisoned. how do you get your mind around something like that? 

and there’s another player in this, the mystery person who told kunz that wilson had murdered the security guard. here’s how he puts it:

“We got information that Wilson was the guy and not Alton Logan. So we went over to the jail immediately almost and said, ‘Is that true? Was that you?’ And he said, ‘Yep it was me,’” Kunz recalled.

what does that mean, “we got information”? a message in a bottle? a note pinned on the door of their office (no, they would have said so), a midnight session with a ouija board? sombody — somebody who wasn’t logan’s attorney – told them that wilson was the murderer. why didn’t that person come forward? why wasn’t that person pressured to come forward? there’s hardly a word about it in any of the accounts, just this mysterious getting of information.

apparently even the prosecutors knew that wilson, not logan, had committed this murder. but they did not act on the information for fear of queering the case against logan’s co-defendant. in other words, better to send an innocent man to prison than let a guilty man walk.  

if this is the best we can expect from our legal system, it’s pretty pathetic. what happened to doing the right thing? when did innocence become less important than the letter of the law? 

how can people be so heartless?

listen here…

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i ran across a very interesting analysis about the use of lifejackets on airplanes at the british fly blog this morning: lives saved vs. lives potentially saved vs. fuel most certainly used. i agree with gareth robinson – you’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery, so go ahead and heave those jackets overboard. and i say this as a person who (reluctantly) logs an awful lot of hours in the air.

when it comes to air travel vs. the environment, though, what we really should do is put a match to all the e-tickets and take a long walk down a local street. does wonders for lardass as well, should you be among the 64% of americans with a skyrocketing BMI.

speaking of being left without a parachute (wait a minute she was talking about life jackets, what’s up with the parachutes? well, clearly you didn’t read the link to the blog that inspired this post, now did you?) seems to me that bristol palin has really gotten the shit end of the stick. whether her mother stays on the ticket or not, whether mccain wins the election or not, she has become a public figure, likely without so much as a by-your-leave. after all, if john mccain really only did take one day to vet sarah palin,  then neither did sarah & family have much time to discuss the implications of her candidacy. 

though, looked at in another way, bristol is being treated with kid gloves. after all, asks cenk uygar at the huffington post, what if bristol palin were black? what indeed. 

i continue to be mystified by women who approve of palin’s selection because they want a powerful woman in the white house (the whole glass-ceiling notion having been exploded more than 20 years ago by geraldine). condeleeza rice ranked 4th on the most recent forbes 100 most poweful women list — and it’s unlikely that a mere VP could displace angela merkel at the head of that line.

can i get a Hail Mary?

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the arrests began on saturday: homes were raided, laptops and cell phones confiscated. automatic weapons cocked and brandished at peaceful citizens. people cuffed on living rooms floor as their homes were searched.

what were they guilty of, these (mostly) twenty-somethings? they were guilty of planning to protest the republican convention. in other words, their lives were invaded and their dresser drawers ransacked because of something the police THOUGHT they were THINKING.

pre-emptive arrests. the kind of arrests that have been expressly forbidden since this country was founded — at least, until GWB disemboweled habeas corpus and and elevated suspicion to the level of a committed crime. and don’t go crying for no phone calls, neither, you’ll get your fucking phone call when we tell you.

megan wilson’s Earth Activist Bust (the “permibus”) was seized. the bus is also her home. do the police seriously believe that people like megan are terrorists? if they do, we are all in trouble. if they don’t, we are in worse trouble, as the police become robotic arms of some unseen, lawless masters.

how were these people targeted? the minneapolis joint terrorism task force recruited everyday citizens to plant in groups considered potentially dangerous, like vegans. police began systematically rounding up everyone identified by these recruits and locking them up days before the convention started. there were at least 300 arrests as of yesterday, at least that’s what i’ve been able to glean from the blogs: there has been NO coverage of this in the mainstream media outside the twin cities themselves, and that is a criminal omission on the part of outlets like AP, Reuters, CNN and the like.

if amy goodman herself hadn’t gotten arrested yesterday, even alternet might not have covered this story.

the new york times covered arrests only after the protests turned violent — which they did (watch the video on this page), and i’m not at all surprised. after three days of sweeps and unwarranted, violent, pre-emptive arrests, the mood in minneapolis was ugly.

and naturally, once protests actually began, the pepper sprayed and the rubber bullets flew. police wore gas masks.

the other side of the Big Silence is how the republicans manipulated hurricane news in order to take the focus off of their pathetic excuse for a convention: thousands of acceptance-speech tickets still unsold, scandal swirling around mccain’s extremely ill-chosen running mate, the fear of comparison to the democratic convention in denver. despite the fact that conventions were held in this country smack in the middle of the second world war, gustav was enough of a reason to cancel the republican’s party — at least after john mccain was talked down from whatever ledge he was on, imagining it would be a cool idea to move the whole fucking show to NOLO in the face of the storm. i would ask “what is that man thinking” if there were any evidence that he’s thinking at all. he sure put his foot in his mouth with that comment about “taking off his red hat” to put on his american hat.

i know it’s been overquoted and overused the last few years. maybe that’s because it’s become so frighteningly applicable:

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945

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any lingering doubts i may have had about how the republican party views american citizens have now been removed. morons, all of us, morons who think with their crotches. men are expected to fall over one another in order to vote for the beautiful governor (and preliminary polls sadly show some truth in this) while women will vote their gender — though the fact that palin was booed down in pennsylvania when invoking hillary is cause for hope.

so what, other than her beauty-queen credentials and the honor of governing the smallest (we have more people in the Bronx), most politically corrupt state in the nation, does she bring to the table?

sarah palin believes that climate change has nothing to do with the activities of humankind.

she does not believe that polar bears are an endangered species.

she’s a right-to-life breeder (five kids! it’s downright embarassing) who seems to think that the world really needed another retarded baby. by the way, her fifth kid is in truth her grandson.

she calls herself an average hockey mom despite the fact that there is no such thing in the US. russia, maybe, has hockey moms.

she believes it’s OK to use her position as governor to wage a vendetta against her former brother-in-law, a crime for which she is still under investigation.

she’s already lying through her teeth about what she did and didn’t support as governor — for the view from alaska, visit the excellent mudflats blog.

we are left with an inexperienced politician whom, despite the meagerness of her record, still required a bit of whitewashing before being anointed veep. i don’t know who “young trigg” is, but i sure know who he works for.  no one — left, right or center — believes palin was chosen with america’s best interests at heart. sure, picking a VP is a political choice, and campaign considerations must play a part. but the country deserves a bit of consideration as well: mccain’s got one foot in the grave, and the best he can do for america is this very junior, scandal-ridden, narrow-minded, bible-thumping, moose-hunting “hockey mom” who, as recently as august had no clue as to what the vice president actually DID? whose own mother-in-law isn’t going to vote for her because of her lack of experience? (though that’s a problem mccain shares, as his sister-in-law has gone public with the fact that he’s not getting her vote.) if the NYT got it right, mccain didn’t even want palin on the ticket, he wanted joe liebermen, but the conservatives wouldn’t have it. i can believe that, if not the reasons that the times came up with — is the party who brought us (and intends to continue bringing us) the war in iraq really that concerned with the so-called “right to life”? i think the bible-thumpers simply wouldn’t have a jew on the ticket.

mccain may well find himself hoist with his own petard over this choice. palin’s got nothing to contribute to national (let alone international) politics and policies, and is only good for one thing: getting mccain elected. and it’s already starting to look like that one thing’s gonna backfire.

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