LRPD Excessive force: not certain, but believable

Many blogs have written about this incident so I thought I'd show this video and discuss my thoughts.

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For anyone who hasn't heard, the above video is of an incident that happened outside the restaurant Ferneau. Having watched the video, the face punching is the one part that to me seems absolutely uncalled for. The rest of the video is hard to see, but I fail to see how an officer is justified in holding an unarmed suspect's neck and punching him in the face multiple times. I have friends who have been or are in law enforcement and this runs counter to all the training and handling of suspects that they have told me about.

I will also add to that a personal experience I had on Cinco de Mayo at El Porton in LR several years ago where I witnessed excessive behavior by an officer working security. The officer approached a man sitting at a table near ours and asked why the man was looking at him "funny". Having been at the front door the officer walked all the way into the bar area to ask that. The man denied looking at the officer any sort of "funny" way and it escalated into the officer asking the man to leave and then slamming the man on the table, knocking it over, and spraying mace. The mace then basically cleared the entire area of the restaurant as everyone started coughing and dealing with burning sensations. So the idea of a Little Rock police officer acting excessively isn't too crazy to me.

Glass Steagall, it's time to bring it back

  

  Caught this blog post from Slate the other day, which mentions both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich basically agreeing that Glass Steagall should never have been repealed. Okay that's great, we agree on that, now what?

  This should be a non-partisan issue. For all the GOP debate talk about repealing Dodd-Frank, there was little discussion of what to do in its place (Huntsman came close in last night's debate with talk of an anti-bailout fund paid by the banks, as well as his touching on the need to "right size" our banks, shoot he even semi-called out Goldman Sachs!). A return to Glass Steagall's separation between commercial banks and investment banks would definitely help protect the assets of America's citizens and make headway into dealing with TBTF. Now if we could only get a candidate to say that onstage...

House of Representatives proves it doesn't have amnesia

The House of Representatives voted recently to reaffirm that the motto of the United States is still the same motto that has been in place since 1956: "In God We Trust"

In other news they also voted to affirm that Abraham Lincoln's face is still on Mount Rushmore and that his position hasn't been usurped by William Henry Harrison...

Is Tea Partier Joe Walsh a "deadbeat dad"?

  Huffington Post carried a story whose implication was that "deadbeat dad" U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (not the totally awesome guitarist who was the only cool thing about the Eagles) hypocritically accepted a pro-family award from the Family Research Council. The story can be read here.

  That Walsh is a child support owing deadbeat has been the spin in a lot of the left leaning media for a little while, but a little bit of further reading shows that it's not that clear. I'm no fan of Mr. Walsh and I definitely think the FRC is full of it and spends most of its time assaulting the liberties of others rather than "protecting the family". But since this is a blog that has no use for spin and smears, even against those with whom it disagrees, it decided to delve into this.

  This story from examiner.com has this section which definitely paints a less black and white picture:

According to Joe Walsh, $2,134 a month is being withheld from his government paychecks to support one teenager.  Two other children are now 20 and 24 years of age.  The three children are from Walsh’s 17 year marriage which ended in 2004. 

The Representative also says that his wife’s allegations have given him a reputation as one of those ‘deadbeat’ dads – a term used to describe men who do not pay child support for their children.  He argues with that label by saying that he has been involved with his children.  In fact, he says that his youngest child lived with him for a time in 2009 and 2010 while his wife was off in Indianapolis making a six-figure salary by being employed by Eli Lilly & Company.  During that time, the Representative claims he only made $39,000 in 2009 and $61,000 in 2010. 

  I don't know the whole situation so I won't make a judgment on the topic.  But based on the above information definitely raises some questions about the spin of the first article...but then again this section from a Huffington Post story (here) seems to call some of the previous article's section into question:

A withholding order currently deducts $2,134 each month from Walsh's income as a member of Congress -- a $174,000 annual salary -- which goes toward his back child support obligations.

Largely thanks to the child support issue, Walsh was named as one of Congress's thirteen "most corrupt" members in a Citizens For Responsibility And Ethics In Washington (CREW) report in September. In her December filing, his ex-wife claimed that Walsh said he could not afford to make the payments for their three children while, at the same time, he loaned his own campaign $35,000 and took vacations abroad.

  The time frames and salary figures from these two opposing sections muddy the waters in this whole affair quite a bit. The echo chambers on either the right or left send out messages that fit into the reinforce the preconceived notions of their base. I think digging into all sides of an issue is the responsibility of anyone who has a love for the truth, takes an interest in our nation's politics, and isn't a partisan hack or dirtbag. And if what comes up isn't a clear answer, well, there's no sin in saying "I don't know".  So, I don't know whether Joe Walsh is a deadbeat dad.

Herman Cain's enigmatic ad/comedy extravaganza!!

I don't have anything too serious to share with this post but I have to comment on Herman Cain's ad which has become an almost viral sensation. I was trying to explain it to someone recently, and I found it difficult to speak through my laughter. Here it is:

                                                     

Okay, so did the campaign just suddenly decide "we need an ad, time to break out our secret weapon: Mark Block!"? And the smoking at the end. So perplexing. Is it supposed to be the smoking of the desperate down on their luck, lower class American? A symbol of America's need for a smoke break? Is it supposed to make Mark Block look somehow cooler? Is it a "screw you" to all those liberals and their anti-smoking laws? No campaign ad will top this for pure, almost avant garde, weirdness.

Obama and Steve Jobs: the significance of their meeting

  

    Recently people in the media have been poking fun at the Occupy Wall Street protesters for using iPhones and other products that are produced by corporate America. The implication being that they are hypocrites for protesting corporations while using their products for their own betterment. An example of this can be found in the picture below:

This of course ignores the real target of the protests, and the fact that most Americans can point to very few beneficial things that the average prop trading desk for a Wall Street firm does but they can hold an iPhone in their hands and find millions of uses for it. Which brings us to Steve Jobs.

   In excerpts from an upcoming biography of  Mr. Jobs there is a story of a meeting between President Obama and Mr. Jobs in which Jobs told Obama that he could be a one termer. You can read a little about it here.

   While there are some things Jobs said that I disagree with, like his scapegoating of teacher's unions for the failures of our country's education system, when he moves to the topic of business I'm all ears. Jobs said that regulations in our country had made it harder for companies to build factories in the U.S. This is something I'm accustomed to hearing from whatever generic Koch brothers mouthpiece you hear on FOX News, but coming from a Buddhist, acid dropping, lefty like Jobs it carries a little more weight with me.

  Political views aside, Jobs recognized that Obama wasn't doing a great job in aiding the growth of the economy. And he didn't parrot a call for more government intervention in the economy, he called for the opposite. If Jobs had made these statements public it could have been an "only Nixon can go to China" moment for a lot of liberal Apple loving citizens in our country (who, speaking of China, probably don't give much thought to the fact that their iPhones are made there). One can only hope that the release of this biography brings more attention to the business views of a man whose company has done so much to advance our country for the better.

 

Breitbart is no Taibbi.

  I just read this story from Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism about the alleged role of the "mainstream media" in working with the Wall Street protesters.


  I have to say that the concept of the piece is pretty flimsy. Dylan Ratigan doesn't have near enough of a following to influence hardly anyone. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald aren't super mainstream either. Definitely not any more mainstream than Breitbart himself.

   My biggest gripe is the way Matt Taibbi is portrayed as being some sort of scheming journalist trying to influence the movement, even getting a mention on the Rush Limbaugh show. Here are two of his responses, here, and here. Taibbi is a journalist, but he's still opinionated.

   I fail to see a big difference between him giving suggestions to OWS protesters (if he was doing this) and Breitbart's speaking at numberous conservative/Tea Party gatherings. As it is, nothing that I've seen shows me that he is personally trying to relay anything to the OWS people that he hasn't written in his articles.

  The concept of Breitbart's website going after Matt Taibbi is hilarious. Breitbart fashions himself a "journalist" but he's really just a spastic kid who takes (often dubious) information from other people and gathers it together. Breitbart would be lucky if he had a person with even a drop of Taibbi's talent working for him.


UPDATE: Another article from Big Journalism does actually have some info on Dylan Ratigan possibly giving guidance David DeGraw who was actually going to be interviewed by Ratigan's fellow NBC employee  Brian Williams. That would cross a line in my mind, especially since they work for the same news network with Ratigan as more of an editorialist and Williams as a straight newsman. Still, I see no concrete info that Taibbi is nearly as involved as Ratigan. Even if he is, I don't have a problem with him trying to get his ideas out to people who could make a difference. If there were more conservatives and liberals raking up the same muck as him then this would probably be a better country.