By Gail Collins (NY Times) The cities that want to be a convention site create committees, which promise to raise copious cash if chosen. The host committee in Charlotte, for instance, is pledged to raise $36.65 million.
This is turning into something of a struggle, particularly since the Democrats, in a little-noted reform effort, prohibited the host committee from accepting donations above $100,000, or money from lobbyists or corporations. The Republicans will pretty much take anything from anybody. Instantly, like a daffodil in spring, a new committee popped up in Charlotte, called New American City. Its mission is to “showcase all that the city and region has to offer” during the convention and, of course, it has none of those irksome limitations.
While they were banning corporate contributions, the Democrats also reduced this year’s convention to three days from the usual four. However, the eliminated day will be turned over to a celebration at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, during which viewers will have the opportunity to note the close ties between the Democratic Party and Nascar dads. And since it is happening before the official opening gavel, it can be paid for by New American City.
Do not tell me that this country has lost its capacity for innovation.
via It’s Their Party – NYTimes.com.
By Richard Winton (Los Angeles Times) On the ground and screaming that he was “sorry,” a shirtless Kelly Thomas is shown being hit again and again with fists, a baton and finally the butt of a stun gun by Fullerton police officers in a dramatic video that was shown for the first time Monday in an Orange County courtroom.
The grainy black and white video of Thomas violent encounter with police outside a bus depot is the centerpiece of the prosecutions case against two officers accused of escalating a standard police encounter with a homeless man into a fatal beating.
At one point, Thomas — a 37-year-old mentally ill homeless man who was a familiar face in the city’s downtown — screams out: “Dad, they are killing me!”
The video and the sound of fists and a baton striking Thomas were so graphic that several spectators left the courtroom and the judge paused the video at one point after some people in the audience began to groan. He cautioned that those who couldn’t stomach the video should leave.
via Video portrays violent death of Kelly Thomas – latimes.com.
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (AlterNet) Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S formerly Wackenhut, two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
By Rania Khalek (Salon) As the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the failure of authorities to arrest his killer, George Zimmerman, continues to grab headlines, many conservatives and gun rights advocates insist that race has nothing to do with it. Some have also rallied to the defense of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, the self-defense legislation under which Zimmerman was able to avoid arrest. Yet not all stand your ground claims are so successful. Not too far from Sanford, Fla., a black man named John McNeil is serving a life sentence for shooting Brian Epp, a white man who trespassed and attacked him at his home in Georgia, another stand your ground state.
The McNeils weren’t the only ones who felt threatened by Epp. David Samson and Libby Jones, a white couple who hired Epp to build their home in 2004, testified that they carried a gun as a “precaution” around Epp because of his threatening behavior. According to Jones, Epp nearly hit her when she expressed dissatisfaction with his work at a weekly meeting. The couple even had a lawyer write a letter warning Epp to stay away from their property. Samson testified that after they fired him, Epp would park his car across the street and watch their house, saying “it got to the point where my wife and I were in total fear of this man.”
After a neighbor across the street who witnessed the encounter corroborated McNeil’s account, police determined that it was a case of self-defense and did not charge him in the death. Nevertheless, almost a year later Cobb County District Attorney Patrick Head decided to prosecute McNeil for murder. In 2006, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
By Declan McCullagh (CNET) Paul Brigner, until last month a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, now opposes SOPA and Protect IP.
A senior executive that Hollywood hired last year to be its chief technology policy officer has undergone a remarkable about-face: he now opposes the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Paul Brigner, who was until last month a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, has emerged as SOPA’s latest critic. “I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright — including SOPA and Protect IP,” he says.
via MPAA’s former tech policy chief turns SOPA foe | Privacy Inc. – CNET News.
By Walter Brasch (Moronia) When other states, including those settled by Puritans, got rid of their “blue laws,” Pennsylvania still bans the sale of cars on Sundays. By archaic practices, it still allows municipal governments and school districts to raise taxes and create more buildings without giving the people the right of a vote, common in most states. It is also the only state that still taxes people for income, property, and their occupation. Forty-nine other states believe pigeon shoots are animal cruelty; we proudly proclaim our state as the last bastion of the right to “bear arms and blast birds.” And, we don’t allow Independents to vote in our primaries.
Iowa, with anomalies known as a straw poll and a caucus, is the first major battleground in presidential races, having usurped New Hampshire, which thought having the official primary was a birthright dating to when granite first showed up in the state. Nevertheless, whether Iowa or New Hampshire, Americans understand that the people need something to break them out of their Winter funk when snow covers what will eventually become cornfields in Iowa and the ski lifts of New Hampshire will no longer be inoperable because of blizzards.
With nothing else to do in January, the media schussed into the Hawkeye State — just as soon as they could find enough chauffeurs to drive them to wherever Iowa is. With megawatt lights and dimly-lit minds, they infiltrated the state so that the voters not only had their own individualized politicians, they also had their own puppy-dog reporters prancing brightly behind them to the coffee shop, factory, and bathroom.
By Walter Brash (Moronia) The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually in a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, creates health problems for its workers and those in the immediate area, and then leaves.
It makes no difference if it’s timber, oil, or coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the nuclear energy industry promised well-paying jobs, clean energy, and a safe health and work environment. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and thousands of violations issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, have shown that even with strict operating guidelines, nuclear energy isn’t as clean and safe as claimed. Like all other energy industries, nuclear power isn’t infinite. Most plants have a 40–50 year life cycle. After that, the plant becomes so radioactive hot that it must be sealed.
In the early 21st century, the natural gas industry follows the model of the other energy corporations, and uses the same rhetoric. James M. Taylor, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, claims on the Institute’s website, “The newfound abundance of domestic gas reserves promises unprecedented energy prosperity and security.”
The energy policy during the eight years of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration was to give favored status to the industry, often at the expense of the environment. In addition to negating Bill Clinton’s strong support for the Kyoto Protocol, signed by 191 countries, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, former oil company executives Bush and Cheney pushed to open significant federal land, including the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to drilling that would disrupt the ecological balance in one of the nation’s most pristine areas.
A study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), published in 2004 concluded that fracking was of little or no risk to human health. However, Wes Wilson, a 30-year EPA environmental engineer, in a letter to members of Congress and the EPA inspector general, called that study “scientifically unsound,” and questioned the bias of the panel, noting that five of the seven members had significant ties to the industry. “EPA’s failure to regulate [fracking] appears to be improper under the Safe Water Drinking Act and may result in danger to public health and safety.”
By Amy Teibel (AP) Despite saber-rattling from Jerusalem, Israeli officials now agree with the U.S. assessment that Tehran has not yet decided on the actual construction of a nuclear bomb, according to senior Israeli government and defense figures.
Several senior Israeli officials who spoke in recent days to The Associated Press said Israel has come around to the U.S. view that no final decision to build a bomb has been made by Iran. The officials, who are privy to intelligence and to the discussion about the Iranian program, said this is the prevailing view in the intelligence community, but there are also questions about whether Tehran might be hiding specific bomb making operations
via Northwest Herald | Israelis agree Iran hasn’t decided on atom bomb.
