Know Your Rights

I make a habit out of watching the show COPS, and counting all the things that are done wrong by (sometimes) the police and (most of the time) by the suspects. I really have always found it amazing how many people will let the police search their car during a traffic stop because they asked to.

Darnell Dockett of the Arizona Cardinals, however, refuses to be played in such a way. (HT: EDSBS)

I remember the first time I refused a search during a traffic stop, even the officer was like "Really? Wow. Well, you're within your rights to refuse."

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Body Counts in the Drug War

DADvocate makes note of the police killing of Jose Guerena in Pima County, Arizona.

The war on drugs has become a war on the freedom in America. Too many police departments have taken on the cowboy/Dirty Harry mentality and are terrorizing the populace.

At least in Arizona, the police are still using the drug war as an excuse to terrorize the population. Some police departments have a bar far, far lower. Once you accept that the police can violate your rights for one reason or another, you'll have to defend everywhere else.

For those keeping score at home, Guerena was a United States Marine, a veteran of the Iraq War, and members of his family had recently been killed in a home invasion. So the SWAT team comes pouring into his yard in military garb, as part of a marijuana investigation. In the confusion, he takes up a weapon - who wouldn't, with armed men invading your home - and is killed in a hail of 77 bullets.

The police initially claimed that he had shot at them, and that illegal drugs were found on the property. This would justify their actions. Of course they feared for their life, as Guerena feared for his. Why do we put our police and citizens in such situations?

Of course, it is now coming to light that this might be a CYA story, that Guerena never got the safety off the weapon, and nothing illegal was found in the house. Nothing really connected him to the marijuana investigation at all other than the word of a secret, confidential informant. An informant that provided information into a home where nothing illegal was found. Why am I not surprised?

When I grew up, I remember hearing stories about despotic governments, where the thought police would keep track of people, and report on them to the government. In such places (thought to be the Third World, the Asian Tyrannies, and the Eastern Bloc) secret informants could destroy your life with a few words. The informed-upon would be "disappeared" to a camp or a mass grave, leaving the family only wondering.

The drug war has already been like that for a long, long time.

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4th Amendment?

What 4th Amendment?

The case ultimately reached the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled last week that current "public policy" is not conducive to resisting entry because civil protections have arisen to mitigate the threats of pre-industrial prison life -- threats like indefinite detention, violence or disease from unclean, overcrowded facilities.

The court reasoned that since those things are no longer of concern (even though they are), Indiana should not permit citizens to resist unlawful police entry, which they saw as having the potential to cause an escalation of violence toward officers.

The decision (PDF).

This reminds me of Arizona's Jan Crow laws - where police are able to stop anyone anytime and demand to see their papers proof of United States citizenship.

So now police in some of the several states have the ability to check someone's identification (and prove some cause later) and to enter someone's home without a warrant (and prove some cause later). Which isn't terribly different from what came before, but now has explicit legal allowance to do so. Why is it so difficult for some individuals to envision the intended and unintended consequences of such allowances?

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Actions & Words

Hey, look! Ridiculous words lead to ridiculous actions.

I wonder what all these jokers are going to do when their own state government has to let Obama on the ballot because he has all the paperwork proving he was born in Hawaii? This won't end there, because it isn't really about the integrity of elections, it is about demagoguery and Obama being labled "other."

If it were about integrity of elections, they'd be talking about the ridiculous way this country handles redistricting.

Update: I wonder how much her veto of this bill will hurt Jan Brewer's reelection chances?

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Politics & Football

Most sports blogs I read try to stay away from politics as best they can. Hell, one of the reasons I started this weblog six years ago was so my friends and I would have a place to chew on politics away from the tailgate.

But with so much public money tied up in sports, at the college and professional levels, sometimes those paths are going to cross. This is what happens when they do.

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Profiling

My first post regarding Tuscon focused on seperating the act itself from the guns that were used and the political rhetoric being discussed. But now, in less than a week, the story has gone from the incident itself and stories of the victims to the way the media victimizes "conservatives." Why do all our news stories end up "victimizing conservatives?"

Let's see if I've got this right, Sarah:

Violent rhetoric from politicians against other politicians? OK.
Military metaphors from politicians against other politicians? OK.
Gun and target graphics in political campaign literature? OK.
Talk of secession? OK.
Demonizing political rivals and their supporters? OK.

Questioning whether any or all of the above contributed to the assassination attempt of a political figure? NOT OK.

Now, did the violent rhetoric drive this shooter to murder a bunch of people? We don't know that, yet. Right now, it is looking like this guy is just one of those men who wants to watch the world burn. But I'm willing to say probably not.

So why, in the first shocked hours as our nation tried to make sense of the tragedy, did there come to be a focus on the violent, vile and destructive political rhetoric of the right-wing? One word answer.

Profiling.

Back it up just a second (I mentioned this on Maitri's post the other day). When almost anything bad happens, and the perpetrator has even a slightly Middle Eastern name, the immediate gut reaction is to blame terrorism from fundamentalist Islam. And then crank up the right-wing "Sharia law is coming to get you" meme. And then blame all followers of Islam, everywhere. Hell, as far as over-politicizing a tragedy is concerned, the right-wing wins this contest going away. And soon after, you hear the calls for "profiling" possible evil doers and the assertation that "political correctness" is leaving us open to terrorism.

So, in a country with our political rhetoric being what it is, where we have faced the real spectre of political violence in the past, when a Democratic congresswoman - a congresswoman who has, in fact, gone on record responding to violent rhetoric, images, threats and vandalism to her person and office - her staff, and bystanders are gunned down by a 22 year old white male, in Arizona of all places, what do you think the immediate, gut-reaction is going to be?

That's profiling. Sorry, folks, you got to dance with the one that brung ya.

Because even more than overblown, violent rhetoric in this country, we have developed a well-honed progress-resistant trait called jumping to conclusions. Then we hold onto those conclusions despite contrary evidence. Or we argue about the initial reaction instead of discussing the contrary evidence.

And even as this story began to move away from the initial political aspects, as any story tends to do, the right grabbed a hold of it from their angle and won't let it go. I wonder how many stories were actually written about Sarah Palin's map being at fault for this shooting compared to how many stories, talk radio segments, and breathless pundit appearances have been made about how those few stories unfairly demonize the right wing? Because all I'm hearing about now is the latter.

Thus: "Democratic Congresswoman, staffers and bystanders shot; actual human beings dead and hurt; right-wing noise machine victimized by media."

Perhaps we should not let the right-wing define the terms of the debate any longer, because they're doing it even here. Y'all, I can't speak for others, but I've been concerned with the overblown, hyperbolic and emotionally overwrought rhetoric of the American right for a long, long time. I don't know how many times I can say it. From a sitting US Senator (R-Texas) politically justifying volence against judges back in 2005, to Sharon Angle's "Second Amendment Remedies," this has become a destructive cultural trait of the political right. And it has been years in the making.

Though there may be large numbers of professional protesters, internet meme creators, and even some candidate also-rans of the Democratic Party that spew vile rhetoric against the right; there may be some ridiculous college students who try to silence Ann Coulter by throwing pies - let us try to remember who is doing what.

But there is a big difference between a cafe-press t-shirt and Rush Limbaugh. There is a difference between a poster at a protest and Candidate for Vice-President of the United States of America Sarah Palin. As a matter of fact, I would state that there is a Mount f ing Everest of difference there, in terms of cultural and political power. And before we start comparing apples to apples, even the right-wing also-rans can become political celebrities if you add guns and promise to kick someone's ass.

So is it a shock that, in the hours following what appeared to be a political shooting, people may look immediately at those who have marketed themselves as gun-toting ass-kickers and literally used target images when describing the specific individual who got shot, so much so that the specific individual who got shot publicly raised concerns about it? Think about it another way, right-wing, this just proves that your marketing works as well as you think it does.

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Speech Vs. Publicity

George Will follows the right wing of the cliff like a lemming in this howler of an article confusing the definition of free speech, and supporting the Supreme Court-backed march towards the feudalization of the United States.

Yup, I'm talking about campagin financing. While this time, his focus is on the Arizona state method of allowing candidates to voluntarily limit their contribution ceiling and campaign dollars by applying for public campaign funding.

Will uses the rhetorical device of false equivalency: because public funding of a campaign will increase the amount of money to a candidate based on the amount of money private funding candidates spend against them, Will claims that somehow "limits" someone's free speech in some way. Speaking of the 9th Circuit, who upheld Arizona's law, Will says

It upheld this abominable law that is obviously designed to coerce candidates into limiting their political speech by making the exercise of their First Amendment rights trigger government spending on behalf of their opponents.

Sorry, that's not true. No one is limiting what a privately funded candidate or polictical group can say, or how they can say it or how much money they can raise to say it (all different things, in descending order of civil-liberty-related importance). All this law does is allow for a publicly funded candidate to respond without going bankrupt; and I do not believe they recieve dollar-for-dollar matching funds, or funds in triplicate, as Will attempts to suggest. But they do get to tell the voters that they aren't raising money from interest groups, and are instead accepting limits on their own funding.

It isn't their fault that American voters tend to distrust those candidates who spend all their time hobnobbing with the richest and most well-connected contributors and then writing legislation or contracts that benefit those contributors. (Why would people equate smoke with fire, anyway?)

The other thing this law does is make campaigning accessible to more individuals, not just rich or well connected individuals, by removing the artificial but real limits on free political speech built into a system where running for office costs as much as it does. Those real limitations are, noticably, ignored by Will in this article.

Finally, no one's free political speech is limited by any campaign finance law, despite how many well-financed right-wing pundits continue to say it is. Limiting money to a candidate does not silence speech - they still have the right to say whatever they like, with only the other candidates, the media and the education of the voters to determine if what they say is true. All that campaign-finance rules affect is how the candidate publicizes their free speech.

There's a big difference between the two.

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