Michael Shaun Schaffran, 32, and Cody Jacob Rogers, 18, were arrested after allegedly breaking into a home on Tuesday night in Gautier, Mississippi. They were each charged with three counts of kidnapping and burglary of an occupied house, the Sun-Herald reports.
According to police, Schaffran and Rogers dressed up in military gear, ski masks and bullet-proof vests, broke into the house, and attacked the three people who lived there. At the time of the arrest, Schaffran had a knife, though Rogers was unarmed.
Authorities say Schaffran is the “commander” of a paramilitary group of teenagers called “The Savior Unit” or “The Tactical Support Unit,” and Rogers is the “captain.” According to an operations manual allegedly confiscated from Schaffran and Rogers, the goal of the group is to “promote Christ, obtain offenders who are a danger to society, do community service work for churches and halfway houses, and do security for different functions.”
Uh, guys, I don't think "saving souls" means sending them up to Heaven prematurely, and no one's gonna want to willingly come to Christ at knifepoint. If they had met the business end of a shotgun, would we still call them "martyrs" or just dangerous dumbasses?
- Michigan Governor Rick Snyder came up with the idea of putting cities that were considered to be deep in the fiscal shit under the control of "emergency managers," who would then be given the power to rewrite, suspend or scrap collective bargaining agreements altogether, among other things. The main problem is how the cities that are currently under the stewardship of emergency managers are all, to put it lightly, a bit dark in their overall complexion. And now the state is considering placing Detroit under the stewardship of an emergency manager. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is not pleased with this turn of events, to say the least.
A group known as "Stand up for Democracy" has close to the 162,000 signatures needed to have the law suspended until a vote is taken in November 2012. If the current law that governs the powers of emergency managers is suspended, they'll most likely default to a weaker version of the law enacted in 1990. Of course, state officials are working on a revamped emergency manager law to head off the possibility of the current law's suspension.
Eclectablog doesn't see the emergency manager situation as being racially motivated, to an extent, and he/she holds high hopes that someone will come up with a long term solution that actually addresses the core issues plaguing these cities:
As I have pointed out repeatedly, the quick fix, balance-the-books-and-leave approach of Emergency Managers will not make the conditions that created the crises go away. What's needed is a more comprehensive, long-term and creative approach. Simply throwing our hands in the air and saying, "Everything has been tried! This is all we have left!" is poor governing and poor leadership. If things have been tried and found not to work, we must keep trying. We must educate the residents of these communities on how to run their governments properly. We must do everything in our power to restore some element of economic sustenance for these communities so that they can become prosperous again.
Good luck with that. If anything, the GOP administration in Michigan are more inclined to use these cities' economical and social problems to highlight how these "N-words" are incapable of running their own cities, nevermind these cities already had problems that were well in the making when they were majority-white.
Whether its the emergency managers or the economic impact of industry leaving Michigan in favor of the southeast U.S., Mexico, China or other parts unknown, black Americans have always had the shit end of the disproportionate effect stick. The last thing they need is to have their current representation stripped away and replaced by an overseer of sorts who has no real connection to the communities they manage and no real intention of doing anything but making themselves look good by turning red into black (or black into white) by any means necessary.
- I rarely watch TV, so I didn't know there was such a show as All-American Muslim. Apparently, there needs to be a television show that tells the nation's whitebread that Muslims are just goshdarnedly American as they are, by golly.
Welp, the Florida Family Association thought otherwise and embarked on an email campaign to the show's sponsors, "encouraging" them to pull their advertising from the show, and as skittish sponsors are wont to do in the face of indignant anger from the right-winged pseudo-Christian set, at least one of them did just that. And now Lowe's is getting a lot of shit from all corners for it, from Russel Simmons to House Rep. John Conyers and California state senator Ted Lieu. Makes you think these guys should have made an executive decision over whether it would be less painful to have a bunch of anti-Islam jokers pissed at your company or to have Muslim Americans and every other sane citizen pissed at your company. Or perhaps they did and figured they could ride out or even profit from the controversy.
- Some yokels compare President Barack Obama to a skunk. Because he's half-black, half-white, and according to the wingnuts, everything he does stinks, get it?
Conservatives make horrible comedians. They're thin-skinned, can't help but take themselves seriously and they come up with the lamest jokes possible. And when they can't think of anything original, they resort to toilet humor - 6th/7th grade poop, fart and dick jokes anyone with half a brain could make.
- Former Alabama state official Bill Johnson would most likely voice his staunch opposition to gay marriage or gay rights, but apparently he isn't above donating his seed to New Zealander lesbian couples in need.
The New Zealand Herald reported in its Sunday edition that Johnson, who is married, has been using an alias to meet women who want help getting pregnant. The newspaper said it confirmed at least nine women had received sperm donations from Johnson, and at least three were pregnant.
The newspaper cited fertility medicine specialists in New Zealand who said that donors should not make sperm available to more than four families, to prevent accidental incest and lessen the stress donors and children face if they meet.
If Republicans are scratching their heads wondering why liberal-minded people don't take them seriously, perhaps the words "hypocrisy" could come into play.
