Different Day, Same Shit.

Some high school kid decides to cut loose among her friends on Twitter about what she would have said to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, and Brownback's staff decided to rake her over the coals for speaking her mind. If a man can't handle a teenage girl saying bad things about him (and truth be told, it was miles tamer than what less charitable mouths would have opined), then perhaps he needs to grow thicker skin. After all, no one has an obligation to be nice to someone 100% of the time, unless they're drawing a paycheck from said person.*

Then again, Emma Sullivan learned some valuable lessons in public discourse on-line.

• No matter how much the concept of free speech is espoused, there will always be a crybaby out there who's ready to shut down someone for talking bad about them.
• When said crybabies come out of the woodwork, you have to be ready to stand your ground and stand behind your words.

Fortunately, Emma stood her ground and refused to knuckle under to a bunch of knuckleheads. And the attendant publicity only made Brownback and his staff look like complete idiots and crybabies.

What gets me is that others have said far worse about Brownback, yet his staff chose to target a high school student for silencing. If that isn't the hallmark of a bully, I don't know what is.

And if you're in the mood for an opposing viewpoint that reads a lot like a messy Blue Dress session behind the governor's desk, read what Ruth Marcus has to say about Sullivan's tweets. Wear gloves.

*Or if that someone happens to have a drawn weapon. Your mileage may vary on that one.

Anyone who's kept an eye on the Occupy Wall Street protests may have noticed something a bit odd about most, if not all of the rallies. Or maybe not. With this "something," plenty of people wouldn't be able to notice it. Or a lack thereof.

Yep. A lack of black people.

And this is where most whites moan, groan and think to themselves "oh, THAT AGAIN? You people are never satisfied."

BooMan from Booman Tribune does it up in decent fashion, but I want to approach the issue from a slightly different angle:

1) There seems to be this unspoken obligation for blacks to join up with the OWS movement, if only to even out the whole "middle-class white people with iPhones" visual problem.

2) One of the biggest complaints I've heard regarding OWS was how whites steadfastly disregarded police brutality until they and theirs experienced it. That's part and parcel with most problems black Americans face -- their problems are not worth investigating until ordinary whites are affected by it, too.

3) Remember the "middle-class white people with iPhones" visual problem? When working class black and white Americans see those people at OWS rallies, they see a bunch of people who apparently have the leisure time and financial support to spend their time at a political rally. Meanwhile, working class families of all stripes have to deal with minimum-wage jobs that don't afford them that sort of leisure time or the financial support. And obviously, single mothers can't justify dropping the kids off at a sitter just for an OWS rally or even joining in a rally on break if one is nearby.

4) The police brutality. This is something black Americans have to put up with on a daily basis. They're not going to voluntarily put up with it unless there is something tangible for them that they will directly benefit from. This is not the Civil Rights Movement, no matter how hard OWS supporters try to frame it in that manner.

5) This "sudden" discovery of police brutality by ordinary white Americans. Plenty of black Americans have spoken out about it, yet they were largely not taken seriously until it started happening to OWS protesters. It's something that pisses some of us off.

The biggest failure of the OWS movement in regards to ethnic relations was the organizers not going out of their way to frame it as being all-inclusive to all ethnic backgrounds. Instead, it ended up framing itself as a bunch of middle-class white people holding iPhones while conducting mic checks. And conservatives are more than happy to exploit this with a bit of that ol' "divide and conquer" class division.

If you've checked the ACLU's site or most other blogs within the past three to four hours or so, you've probably heard this about the National Defense Authorization Act:

“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor Monday, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.

“I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week. One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved.”

The key provisions to watch were Sections 1031 and 1032, which enclosed the language apparently authorizing the U.S. military to get all John Pike* on their own people. And that's where I ran into a little problem.

You see, there's no "Section 1031". Just a "Section 1032". The money shot?

(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens-
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.
(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.

I know bills get amended, and that may have been what happened. Still, this is not to discount the concern of the NDAA bill, but I just hate it when people run away with a shitload of misinformation.

*I plan to spread the use of "John Pike" as a euphemism for causal, yet cruel violence as perpetuated by a police officer. Help me spread it.

There are some people out there who genuinely believe being on the bottom is a lot better than being on the top.* They're people who'd rather rage against The Man™ rather than be The Man™, or at least be in a position where they just yell and flip birds at The Man™ instead of being in a position to act against him. People who'd rather remain the lovable losers in life rather than go on any sort of winning streak.

I've noticed this within the Democrat party. There's always a cadre of supporters who'd rather play the role of perpetual underdog. They see some sort of beautiful purity in being the perpetual punching bag of opposing forces, where each blow rendered is treated as an absolution of sorts, the same way the Flagellants treated every lash as self-mortification of past and present sins, both real and imagined. For the rest of us, this "beautiful suffering" sucks greatly, as it interferes with other things. You know, like winning elections.

These people don't like President Obama much. They don't like him because he failed in his obligations to play the Magic Negro that most emotional progressives (henceforth known as "Emoprogs") expected him to be. Others don't like him because he doesn't describe to the "beautiful suffering" bit that many perpetual underdog Democrats (henceforth known as "PUDs") subscribe to. He refuses to fall on his sword in grand disgraced samurai style for not bringing the results Emoprogs expected, nor has he shown any inclination to jeopardize support from moderate circles in the pursuit of the PUDs and other groups that have confined the Democrats to electoral loserdom.

A lot of people don't understand that you can't do jack-shit if your people don't win. The Teabaggers, God bless those assholes, understand this well. Sure, they appear to be jokes (because they are), but when Election Time rolls around, they pound the pavement, crank up the Wurlitzers and get their people out to the polls. And after they've won, then they attempt to put all of their crazy plays into motion. Meanwhile, the PUDs are busy thumbing through their Rolodexes in search of the mythical pure candidate who can do the "beautiful suffering" bit on cue with flawless precision.

The PUDs are so pissed with Pres. Obama that they're ready and willing to give him the heave ho at a time where the American people can least afford to do so. To wit, Obama is and will remain an electoral shoo-in, an incumbent who, despite all he didn't manage to do, did far more. With his "11-dimension chess game," he managed to unmask the Republicans as a sorry bunch of obstructionists who are ridiculously obsessed with kicking him out of office, even at the risk of leaving Americans unemployed and uninsured. He gingerly stepped out of the way of the Teabagger bus and watched as the wheels fell off of it in grand fashion. The GOP candidates are a mess and the nominee will most likely be someone who will end up having his head handed to him on a silver platter come November 4, 2012. Democrats have this election in the bag.

And yet there's always someone who can't wait to dump the contents of said bag out on the floor and tear the bag into tiny strips, all because it happened to be a paper bag and not an "environmentally friendly" cloth bag. Which brings me to the brouhaha over Naomi Wolf's op-ed.

As mentioned before, the only crime Wolf can be successfully tried, convicted and flambe'd on is using a bullshit news article to springboard her own sensationalist piece to popularity. And people are still talking about it. In showbiz (or was that public relations?), they say bad publicity is better than no publicity. I'm only surprised at the level of energy being expended on this woman and her crap op-ed, presumably to stop a story like this from becoming accepted gospel.

And why? Apparently because, as Sarah Jones of PoliticsUSA explains:

Why are progressives hawking a right wing rumor? In the best of worlds, I suppose it’s because post-W, we are all government-leary and the Right knows how to stoke this fear in us and use it to scatter us into fragments of what we could be. But just as in any other relationship, a constant attitude of mistrust to such a degree that we believe any smear no matter how unfounded will not lead to positive change. It’s impossible, in fact, to create positive change when you’re hampered by the power of fear and hatred. These are emotional diatribes, at best; at worst, they’re cynical ploys to be King or Queen of the movement.

The Emoprogs and PUDs have this knack for following only "approved voices" when it comes to stuff like this. The Naomi Wolfs, David Brooks and Jane Hamshers of the world. You know, folks like those. Ever since slowly making my way through to the liberal/progressive end of the political spectrum after spending my formative years in Freeper Hell, I've tried my best to divine exactly what about these people that makes them such an anathema to ordinary left-wingers but just perfect to the PUDs and Emoprogs. Unfortunately, my natural tendency to just disregard these people as not being important enough to even bother with hampers my ability to do just that, but I keep trying.

Perhaps it's the condescending manner to which they speak to others and of others who are outside of their personal and political frame of reference. Perhaps its their love of being the darlings of the cocktail circuit, where it is OK to be contrarian, to a point, just not contrarian enough to piss off those who financially or socially butter your bread. Or maybe its because when push comes to shove, these people are far too wrapped up in the art of being a "beautiful loser" and a "lovable underdog" to actually effect any sort of meaningful change to the way things are done in this country. A lot of these people love the current status-quo -- it works out for them, and to change that would mean screwing up a good thing.

The story of Pres. Obama allowing the DHS to run roughshod over the civil liberties of the OWS and 99% fits perfectly with a lot of narratives from the Emoprog and PUD-end of things. Obama is evil because he lets the Homeland Security dickwads encourage local police to wail on and hose hapless protesters with OC spray. Therefore, Obama must be shown the door. No one ever bothers to answer the following question: "Replace him with who?" No, just some throwaway answers about how Elizabeth Warren or Ron Paul would do a better job and so forth.

No one ever manages to connect the dots between weakening Obama's electoral support and having another Republican president in office. In fact, such an event suits the PUDs and Emoprogs well. Both groups can continue to practice the "beautiful suffering" and "lovable underdog" routines without having to deal with the responsibilities that come with actually effecting positive change to our political and social institutions. Meanwhile, the GOP is left to its usual routine of practicing cronyist ineptitude vis-a-vis governmental affairs while allowing the free marketeers to sell the nation off for wholesale prices, one factory at a time. Status-quo achieved. The Brooks and Hamshers of the world are pleased as punch.

As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of perpetual underdogs.

*Let's get those homosexual/prison jokes out of the way right this instant.

And how. Michael Moore picked up a rumor from Rick Ellis' article at Examiner.com (which is a rather sophisticated content mill that prides itself on "local sourced" news -- uh oh...). That rumor happened to be how the Department of Homeland Security had coordinated a massive crackdown of Occupy Wall Street protests across the nation with a number of federal and municipal law enforcement agencies. Breathing life to that rumor was word from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on how she was on a conference call with other city leaders to put an end to the protests.

As it turned out, that report was all hat and no cattle. Joshua Holland explained how such brainstorming among city leaders wasn't uncommon and that there was no real pressure from any federal agency, let alone from DHS, to bring the Occupy Wall Street protests to a close. The Examiner.com story came courtesy of anonymous sources. These days, anyone can make up a story and attribute it to an "anonymous source" for credibility's sake. This AP story confirms everything except DHS involvement.

Somehow, Naomi Wolf wasn't inclined to believe that the DHS wouldn't have anything to do with the crackdowns, and instead penned her own op-ed, complete with a sensationalist bent designed to tug on the heartstrings of any reader. The main problem? She picked up the already debunked DHS involvement and ran with it, presumably to juice up the op-ed. And here's one of the many problems with this op-ed:

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

Yet there is no concrete proof that DHS was involved. But if one were to repeat the above line long enough, eventually you'll have the masses repeating it themselves, thereby making an otherwise erroneous statement truth to some and gospel for others. And that's exactly what we need less of -- a fallacy masquerading as truth.

Karoli from "odd time signatures" broke his/her foot into Wolf's literary ass over this issue:

There you have it. Bullshit, spread worldwide, with the full cooperation of so-called journalists. It’ll work, too, because she has enough name recognition that people won’t question her claims.

That's a pretty big problem these days. People with name cred who choose to abuse said cred by peddling bullshit to those who refuse to question their "trusted sources." Sound familiar to you?

And this is where I break away from everyone else who posted their own articles over this issue. I get the sense that maintaining journalistic integrity here is far more important than doing something to address the rampant abuses inflicted on protesters by police at OWS rallies. Perhaps that's not entirely true, but that's the vibe I get when I read a lot of these pieces.

We've spent enough time filleting a journalist hack who was caught fishing for more name cred with a juicy, yet rank piece of literary bait. Meanwhile, there's another OWS protester getting hit in the face with America's favorite condiment.

Unemployment going down in Alabama! Why is this? Illegal Immigrants are leaving and Americans are getting their jobs. Amazing how law and order works. I wish the Democrats could understand this simple concept!

This is the meme conservatives tout when exhorting how well Alabama's immigration law is "working." The above relies on a non-understanding of how unemployment rates are counted and the suggestion that Americans are grabbing onto these jobs for dear life.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The basic concepts involved in identifying the employed and unemployed are quite simple:

• People with jobs are employed.
• People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
• People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.

Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following activities:

Contacting:

• An employer directly or having a job interview
• A public or private employment agency
• Friends or relatives
• A school or university employment center
• Sending out resumes or filling out applications
• Placing or answering advertisements
• Checking union or professional registers
• Some other means of active job search

Passive methods of job search do not have the potential to result in a job offer and therefore do not qualify as active job search methods. Examples of passive methods include attending a job training program or course, or merely reading about job openings that are posted in newspapers or on the Internet.

Workers expecting to be recalled from temporary layoff are counted as unemployed, whether or not they have engaged in a specific jobseeking activity. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work (except for temporary illness).

A decrease in unemployment rates does not mean that more people have found work. To wit, if a person simply stops any and all efforts to look for a job, they're not counted as a person looking for employment and are therefore not counted in the statistics. Neither is a person who moved to another state seeking employment. As far as those who do become employed, those who became self-employed or found some form of freelance work may not be counted in the stats.

Plenty of illegal immigrants have packed their bags and moved out, leaving the jobs they used to work open and available for the taking by legal American citizens. But those folks aren't picking up those jobs, most of which happen to be laborious, backbreaking farm and production plant jobs, jobs that most Americans are woefully out of condition for and not desperate enough to take.

Conservatives believe that ordinary Americans are falling all over themselves to fill in the jobs left behind by their illegal immigrant counterparts. This may shed some light on why Americans aren't as enthusiastic about the new openings as conservatives believe they are:

On a sunny October afternoon, Juan Castro leans over the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a field at Ellen Jenkins’s farm in northern Alabama. He sorts tomatoes rapidly into buckets by color and ripeness. Behind him his crew—his father, his cousin, and some friends—move expertly through the rows of plants that stretch out for acres in all directions, barely looking up as they pull the last tomatoes of the season off the tangled vines and place them in baskets. Since heading into the fields at 7 a.m., they haven’t stopped for more than the few seconds it takes to swig some water. They’ll work until 6 p.m., earning $2 for each 25-pound basket they fill. The men figure they’ll take home around $60 apiece.

Most Americans believe themselves to be far more valuable in regards to labor than $60 for 11 hours of work, or $7.50 to $9.00/hr. They have families to support and unlike illegal immigrants, not enough family members in the home able or willing to commit 95% of their time spent to working minimum-wage jobs. At least when the illegal immigrants go home, they'll live very comfortable lives on the U.S. dollars they brought with them (provided they aren't robbed, harassed or killed by one of the many cartel groups prevalent in most areas of Mexico and other Central American nations). Meanwhile, Americans remain mired in a knee-deep morass of debt, with no way of pulling themselves out anytime soon.

The men lean against the car, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out how to finish the job before day’s end. “They gotta come up with a better pay system,” says Rayford. “This ain’t no easy work. If you need somebody to do this type of work, you gotta be payin’. If they was paying by the hour, motherf—–s would work overtime, so you’d know what you’re working for.” He starts to pace around the car. “I could just work at McDonald’s (MCD),” he says.

Now there's an idea. Raising the pay would be a worthwhile incentive to most folk who wouldn't touch these jobs with a ten-foot pole. Most employers won't do this because it will eat into their bottom lines. Others aren't able to do it, since they're already operating on bleeding-edge margins:

Rhodes says he understands why Americans aren’t jumping at the chance to slice up catfish for minimum wage. He just doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I’m sorry, but I can’t pay those kids $13 an hour,” he says. Although the Uniontown plant, which processes about 850,000 pounds of fish a week, is the largest in Alabama and sells to big supermarket chains including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Sam’s Club (WMT), Rhodes says overseas competitors, which pay employees even lower wages, are squeezing the industry.

Conservatives just don't realize that people won't go for just any job because it happens to be there. A job that entails backbreaking, monotonous work for 12 hours or more per day won't be filled unless it pays a wage that working people can support themselves and their families on. They won't put themselves at risk for developing arthritis, joint pains, back trouble and other health problems unless they know they're getting a working wage that will hopefully compensate them for putting so much wear and tear on their bodies. And a bit of health insurance wouldn't hurt, either. This was why unions came to be in the first place.

I suspect most conservatives already have jobs -- salaried ones that trend towards the six figures. They already got theirs, and they're scratching their heads over why their poorer fellow Americans won't just shut up and take whatever's given to them. They have no concept of how hard most of these agricultural and factory processing jobs are. No concept of standing on one's feet for 12 hours a day, up to six days a week if necessary, for wages that barely support a single person, let alone a family of four.

Individual states are grabbing the issue of illegal immigration by the balls because they feel the federal government isn't doing enough to enforce immigration statues. Perhaps President Obama would do good to find a way to put immigration law back under the purview of the federal government before states like Alabama hurt themselves further.

- Now that Fox News' designated dumb dirty blond Megyn Kelly declared pepper spray a "food product, basically," people all over the country are taking advantage of this new condiment. People like this Wal-Mart shopper who used it to gain an edge over her fellow shoppers on Black Friday:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was "competitive shopping."

Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.

"I heard screaming and I heard yelling," said Lopez, 18. "Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up."

This is why I usually stay my ass at home on Black Friday. I'm a patient man -- I usually wait for the after-Christmas sales.

- And speaking of dirty blondes, here's another L.A. Times article that's rather sympathetic to Kelly's "dumb blonde moment." Oleoresin Capsicum, the stuff most people refer to as "pepper spray," is far stronger than the "habanero juice" Rene Lynch refers to in her op-ed.

- Steven J. Baum P.C., the firm that brought you the Homeless Halloween party, has now gone under itself. I doubt any of its former employees will be out on the street.

- Ezra Klein thinks the inglorious failure of the "Super Committee" has left Democrats with a golden opportunity sitting right in their lap:

So now there are two triggers. One is an extremely progressive spending trigger worth $1.2 trillion that goes off on January 1, 2013. The other is an extremely progressive tax trigger worth $3.8 trillion that goes off on...January 1, 2013. If you count reduced interest payments, the two policies alone would reduce future deficits by about $6 trillion. That's far more than anything the supercommittee came close to discussing. It's distributed far more progressively than anything the Democrats have even considered proposing. And all that needs to happen for it to pass is, well, nothing.

Meanwhile, David Atkins thinks the president will wimp out and immediately go into "conflict avoidance mode," apparently by brokering some sort of "bipartisan" deal that snatches defeat from the jaws of something resembling victory.

- AT&T's merger with T-Mobile? Ain't gonna happen, at least for now. Deutsche Telekom still intends to saddle up with someone in the cellular business, but the chances of that being with AT&T are now slim to none.

- No, no. This is just too silly. Surely something this utterly stupid wouldn't breeze through Congress, would it?

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. All I have to show for mine is a mess of leftover food and a bigger waistline.

Today's Turkey Day and yours truly has the day off. Bon appetit.

There's a reason that tag exists.

Victim One, the first known alleged victim of abuse by former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, had to leave his school in the middle of his senior year because of bullying, his counselor said Sunday.

Officials at Central Mountain High School in Clinton County weren’t providing guidance for fellow students, who were reacting badly about Joe Paterno’s firing and blaming the 17-year-old, said Mike Gillum, the psychologist helping his family. Those officials were unavailable for comment this weekend.

The name-calling and verbal threats were just too much, he said.

Kids can be natural-born assholes, especially if the school environment allows such asshole/fuckwad behavior to exist unabated, more so if they're egged on by adult teachers and administrators who lack the mental maturity to not include themselves in the bullying.

And definitely if they choose to ignore what goes on in the classrooms, hallways, etc.

The parents? If they choose to be non-supportive and either ignore or ridicule their kids when they're being bullied, they become as culpable as the school faculty and staff.

And people wonder why children as young as 10 are choosing to leave this world and their problems behind.

Something Awful has a great thread on bullying, starting with the story of another (yes, another) 10-year-old who committed suicide thanks to horrifically systemic bullying. Some of the stories there will bring you to tears and impotent anger. It may even trigger some bad memories, so be careful.

"UAB is a national and world leader in many fields," St. John wrote. "The hospital and medical school are points of pride for everyone in our state. But in the last 10 years UAB has faced increasing challenges. In health research funding, UAB's national ranking has declined significantly over the last 10 years. The cancer and cardiology programs are no longer nationally ranked. Changes in health care funding will require intense focus and leadership to maintain the excellence we expect from UAB. I would hope that everyone who cares about UAB and the people it serves will encourage UAB to make these matters of crucial importance to its students and the state of Alabama its highest priority."

The above is University of Alabama System trustee Finis St. John telling the University of Alabama at Birmingham to stay in its lane. Nevermind that UAB wants its own on-campus stadium to expand and further support the Blazers football team. Or that UAB is financially well-positioned to fund its construction. Or the fact that Birmingham mayor William Bell supports the effort, as do the alumni, students and prominent business figures. No, UAB has its position to play, and the folks in Tuscaloosa will be damned if they left one of their offshoots do anything to take shine off the Crimson Tide football program.

This is about the egos lurking within the main Tuscaloosa campus wanting to be the end all/be all when it comes to college football. It's a huge and nasty turf battle that stands to stunt UAB's growth and lock it into an idea of what the T-Town trustees believe it should be instead of what it could be. It's bad enough that UAB only has minimal representation on the Board of Trustees, while UA-Huntsville appears as a mere afterthought.

There's always Legion Field.

A 70,000-seat stadium located miles away from the campus that's in desperate need of upgrading (or rebuilding, in my humble opinion). The Gray Lady's seen better days. In contrast, the new on-campus stadium features a more modest 30,000 seats and will most likely be better equipped than Legion Field.

If you build it, they still won't come.

Lack of use and lack of support, two arguments used for almost any city or county venture. It was the same talk used to discourage the city from building the infamous domed stadium. It's a general "why bother?" attitude that helps hold the city back and allows it to stagnate.

Meanwhile, other cities in the state are allowed to grow as they see fit. It's only the Birmingham/Jefferson County area that's bitch-slapped every time it decides to grow beyond adding a few new restaurants in the Highland/Five Points South area.

There are a lot of people out there who want to see the city of Birmingham crumble and have Tuscaloosa or Montgomery take its place. And there are a lot of people who want UAB to "play its position" and cease their silly notions of their silly football team who, mind you, is currently coached by a guy who only got his position because he was buddies with Paul "Bear" Bryant's son. And that guy has a losing streak that's a mile wide and a mile deep:

UAB fans and boosters have long felt that Alabama Trustees were not in favor of the decision to build a football program in 1996. That suspicion gained strength in 2007 when UAB began conducting a search to replace football coach Watson Brown. UAB likely could have hired one of the hottest young coaches in the country to run the program; then-LSU offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher. A few influential UAB boosters proposed that they would assist with donations to help cover Fisher's $600,000 salary, but the Trustees stepped in and squashed the hire, claiming "financial considerations." On its face, that argument appeared bogus. Again, UAB supporters suspected that a few paranoid Trustees feared that UAB might wind up with a better coach than Alabama and that some members of the Board overstepped their boundaries and handpicked another coach, Neil Callaway, which has turned out to be a sub-standard hire.

The reception to Callaway's hire from UAB fans was cool—and with good reason. Five years later, Callaway's record is 16-41, and for 2011, his record is a disappointing 1-8.

He's a veritable dud. But that dud knows Junior, and Junior won't let him go anywhere. The Board of Trustees should stop playing Fiefdom Lords to the serfs in the UA system.

Chancellor Katehi, your students aren't very happy with you. Not with the way you've handled things recently. Not with stuff like this happening.



Allowing the authorities to do these things to your own students with nary a word in opposition? As the Field Negro would say, that's "House Negro" behavior. From The Second Alarm:

A few commenters and people on Twitter have asked why the chancellor is at the center of this firestorm over the police pepper spraying. Chancellor Katehi approved of the police action (though specifics of what she ordered exactly are still a mystery), and ordered the UC Davis cops to evict the protesters, resulting in the heinous pepper spraying video now plastered everywhere on the web. She has not apologized to the students or worked to remedy the situation — for instance, one student who was pepper sprayed told me she still has health problems after the incident, and no one from the administration contacted her to see if she’s okay. Katehi’s refusal to condemn the police action has only made a bad situation worse.

The dead silence (minus the reporters) speaks volumes. That's a hell of a way to send a message.

I've already covered one instance of fallout from Alabama's immigration law, also known as "HB 56" or "Scott Beason's Royal Cock-Up" in most circles. From what was reported, it seemed BBVA Compass was quietly making moves to pare down its investment and presence in Alabama to a minimum, thanks to this law.

And now there's this story.

TUSCALOOSA, Alabama -- A German manager with Mercedes-Benz is free after being arrested for not having a driver's license with him under Alabama's new law targeting illegal immigrants, police said Friday.

Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson told The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag Wednesday night and asked the driver for his license. The man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters, Anderson said.

The 46-year-old executive was charged with violating the immigration law for not having proper identification, but he was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver's license from the hotel where he was staying, Anderson said.

It wasn't immediately known how long the man was in custody or the status of his court case.
The law -- parts of which were put on hold amid legal challenges -- requires that police check citizenship status during traffic stops and take anyone who doesn't have proper identification to a magistrate. Anderson said that's what was done, but someone in the same situation wouldn't have been arrested before the law took effect.

"If it were not for the immigration law, a person without a license in their possession wouldn't be arrested like this," he said. Previously, drivers who lacked licenses received a ticket and a court summons, according to Anderson.

Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman Felyicia Jerald said the man is from Germany and was visiting Alabama on business. The company's first U.S. assembly plant is located just east of Tuscaloosa.

"This was an unfortunate situation, but the incident was resolved when our colleague ... was able to provide his driver's license and other documents to Tuscaloosa police," Jerald said.

Even if this executive shrugs off this "Papiere, Bitte" moment, it's bound to leave a bad impression on the rest of the Daimler AG group. You can now expect them to have a heart-to-heart with the governor and key Alabama legislators over this little incident. Money talks, and when it does, politicians listen carefully.

Given how the good doctor is busy wooing automobile manufacturers to open shop in the Heart of Dixie, he might want to be careful in making sure HB 56 doesn't step on the wrong set of toes, if you catch my drift.

One thing that pisses people off to no end about our judicial system is the lopsided and disproportionate punishments that happen for a variety of reasons. For those on the lower end of the economic totem pole, judicial punishments are a lot harsher than for those who are well-heeled and well-connected. Those disparities only grow larger with each passing day.

On one side of the coin, there's Anita McLemore, mother of two teens who wanted to keep them from going hungry. With prior state drug convictions, the possibility of being eligible for food stamps was slim to none, so she did what most mortgage lending companies did to keep the big bucks rolling in: lie, and hope no one paid attention to that lie.

Of course, it didn't work. And despite paying back all of the $4000+ in food stamp benefits, a federal judge decided to send a message and deliver a harsh three-year sentence. If having several drug priors didn't trim down her opportunities for financial advancement, then this federal conviction all but slammed the door on them. And of course, one would have to wonder if this woman had been a white mother of two young kids, would she have been free to go after paying only restitution, if she even had to do that.

On the other side of the coin, you have former Citigroup CFO Gary Crittenden and investor relations head Arthur Tildesley, Jr. essentially fined $100,000 and $80,000 respectively for lying about information contained in shareholder disclosures by the SEC. And then there's Campus Crest CEO Ted Rollins, who repeatedly violated court orders pertaining to his divorce from his then-wife, Sherry Carroll Rollins, and successfully manipulated child support and alimony judgments that were so paltry, his ex-wife and daughters are now on food stamps. Good thing she doesn't have drug convictions on her record.

The point is, these people are well-connected and well-funded that most, if not all crimes that don't involve pissing off someone who ranks higher on the totem pole can be made to "go away" with the right amount of legal pressure, media manipulation and favors called in. Meanwhile, those with little to no means are slammed and slammed hard by a legal system that is all too willing to keep poors locked into poverty and even exploit them during their entrapment in the legal system, shortly before curb-stomping them out of existence.

Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers’ money to run immigration detention centers. Their largest facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, receives $200 a night for each of the 2,000 detainees it holds, and rakes in yearly profits between $35 million and $50 million.

Prisoners held in this remote facility depend on the prison’s phones to communicate with their lawyers and loved ones. Exploiting inmates’ need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day. At that rate, it would take five days to pay for just one minute.

I'd have to wonder if you're in debt to these people when your sentence is up, do you still remain incarcerated until you've paid off that debt? If I didn't know any better, I'd say what we have here is a new form of debt peonage that's far more insidious than any credit card or title loan trap. It's no wonder some judges are eager to enact harsher sentences for lesser crimes -- it makes them look like they're tough on crime while receiving kickbacks from the private prisons.

Conservative Law-and-Order Troll: Or maybe they're just doing their jobs.

The job of the judiciary is to interpret the laws of the land, not to act as a pipeline that leads directly into privatized prisons and debt peonage.

The scruffy bearded feller in the photo is Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez. Yeah, he doesn't look all that Hispanic, but that's beside the point. Here is the man responsible for attempting to assassinate President Barack Obama. Although some people wouldn't call it an attempted assassination. After all, the president was nowhere near the White House when this happened:

Federal authorities charged a 21-year-old Idaho man on Thursday with trying to assassinate President Obama. They said he had told friends that he believed the president was “the Antichrist” and that he “needed to kill him,” according to a complaint filed in federal court.

The man, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, of Idaho Falls, who is accused of firing a semiautomatic assault rifle at the residential floors of the White House last week, was also “convinced the federal government is conspiring against him” and had become “increasingly more agitated” before he disappeared from Idaho last month, the complaint said.

Law enforcement authorities had been hunting for Mr. Ortega-Hernandez since Friday night, after discovering evidence linked to him in a car abandoned about seven blocks from the White House.

The black Honda Accord with an Idaho license plate — which had been seen speeding away after gunshots were heard near the presidential mansion just after 9 p.m. that night — had a Romanian-made semiautomatic rifle inside. Mr. Obama was out of town at the time.

The complaint filed in federal court said that Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s friends said he owned such a weapon. It also cited several witnesses who saw the sedan stop in front of the Ellipse — a grassy field between the White House and the Washington Monument — and saw or heard someone fire gunshots through the passenger window at the White House before the car sped away.

It was not clear for several days that someone had deliberately fired at the White House. But the Secret Service has now found at least two bullets. The agency would not say where the White House had been struck, but workers on Wednesday were examining a window overlooking the Truman Balcony, an area outside the second-floor residential quarters where the first family sometimes relaxes or hosts guests. A second round was found outside.

The shooting came from roughly 750 yards south of the White House, just outside the outer security perimeter. The security perimeter extends to the south edge of the Ellipse, where the National Christmas Tree is displayed. It is across Constitution Avenue from the more distant Washington Monument.

It's being said that Ortega-Hernandez is most likely schizophrenic and in need of psychiatric help. So was John Hinckley Jr., but that didn't stop the courts from sentencing him to life imprisonment.

And for those who want to discount this act of terrorism because the president wasn't around, don't. Even firing into an president-less White House is intended to send a message. It doesn't matter whether the president was around to bear witness to it or not. I'll count this as an attempted assassination.

I realize I'm probably a day late and a dollar short on this issue, but better late than never.

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet Blacklist Legislation as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA's provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

To summarize, it's yet another attempt to return the Internet to the days of America Online's "walled gardens." Anyone old enough to remember those free floppy disks and CDs will remember how there used to be two separate Internet experiences for AOL users: one was the walled garden portal that had AOL-supplied content on AOL's own mini-browser, and the rest of the World Wide Web, available to those who were brave enough to open up Internet Explorer.

Or better still, it's an attempt by major content providers to turn the Internet into the same closed and regulated resource as cable television. It's a place where resources like Hulu and YouTube don't exist, and NBCUniversal and Comcast are more than happy to feed you content, on their terms. Like most things in life and legislation, the push for SOPA/PROTECT-IP comes from the pocketbooks of corporate interests.

SOPA/PROTECT-IP effectively gives copyright holders greater leeway in having a site it believes to be in the business of infringing upon its content removed, and it places greater impetus on domain registrars and Internet service providers to remove or block said websites. It also extends secondary liability to third-party groups who were formerly immune under existing laws.

As for the promise that it doesn't expand secondary liability, that's nice to say but it's simply untrue. By its very nature, the entire purpose of the bill is to extend secondary liability to third parties that had previously been almost entirely immune from such liability: ad networks, payment processors, search engines and ISPs now face liability if they do not disconnect service from certain websites. That is, without a doubt, a pretty massive expansion of secondary liability, no matter how many times the drafters of this Act insist it's not.

That's right. Even search engines like Google can get put on the hook for failing to remove "infringing links and/or content."

The most worrying aspect of SOPA/PROTECT-IP is its promotion of regulatory capture of Internet technologies, causing innovations that happen to run afoul of entertainment industry interests to remain shelved for good. These acts also allow for selective enforcement of copyright, enabling it as a tool to shut down organizations and individuals who say the wrong things about the wrong people. I can see bloggers getting shut down due to dubious copyright infringement claims, without the due process available to vet those claims as being false.

Check out the House and Senate bills in the links provided.

Malcolm Hines walked out of prison in 2007 with a plan to get his life straight. Unlike most other ex-convicts, he had a bit of seed money with which he opened his own shoe store, and he did just that in a depressed, retail-starved and crime-ridden area that most others would have given a pass to. Given how many of the stores in the area had been robbed at some point or another and how the police department proved itself to be highly ineffectual in catching these criminals, it only made sense for store owners to keep some measure of protection with them.

Except Hines couldn't do that, because his status as a twice-convicted felon prohibited him from owning any firearms. Nevertheless, his sister legally purchased a shotgun and left it at the store for protection. It was a gesture that would come back to bite him in the ass.

Hines was arrested March 28 after a dispute with a customer. A teenager bought a pair of New Balance 2000 sneakers. But Hines mistakenly gave him a mismatched pair — one from an adult pair, worth $140, another from a child’s pair, worth $70.

The customer returned to the shop and got into an argument with Hines, who asked to see a receipt before providing the match for the more expensive shoe. The boy didn’t have one and left, saying, “We’ll be back, you’ll see,” according to Hines’s telling.

The teenager came back with his father and another man. According to court documents, the father said Hines stepped into a closet next to the cash register. The man said he heard the racking of a shotgun slide and saw a barrel peeking from the closet door. Hines said he stepped into the closet after seeing the teenager hold his hand in his pocket as if he was holding a pistol — Hines had been robbed at gunpoint five days earlier — but said he didn’t even know the shotgun was there.

After the three left, they alerted police, who got a search warrant and discovered the shotgun hidden at the back of the closet, tucked behind a water heater.

During a three-day trial in October, Hines’s sister-in-law testified under an immunity deal that she had purchased the shotgun legally in Maryland and brought it to City Beats for protection. She said Hines did not know the gun was in the shop, but a jury convicted him. Sentencing is set for Dec. 9 before Superior Court Judge Robert I. Richter; Hines faces a minimum sentence of three years.

Maupin said that Hines’s arrest was “unfortunate” but that officers had no choice.

In this case, the law is an ass, but the law is the law, although I have to wonder if any stipulation would have been made if Hines had been another color. Given the ethnically-imbalanced justice system of this country, it's a fair question to ask.

Of course, there are those who ask why Hines chose to open a shop in such a shitty area. Or how Hines managed to hold onto $10,000 in blue-chip stocks after a drug conviction, where the usual procedures are to assume that all assets are "tainted" with drug money and are therefore subject to seizure. Or perhaps why his sister left a shotgun in the store in the first place.

18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) mandates that anyone convicted in any court for any crime for which imprisonment exceeds one year is barred from possessing a firearm. There's no set time limit for such disenfranchisement. 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(20) and (a)(33)(B)(ii) essentially leaves the restoration of firearm ownership up to the states. Some states don't restore firearms ownership to ex-convicts, no matter how long ago their convictions were. I've been looking into whether the District of Columbia allows for restoration of gun ownership rights, but I haven't found anything as of yet. If D.C. doesn't offer that option, then Hines is practically barred from being near a gun for life. Not good if you want to stay in business in rough territory.

In other words, Hines was put between a rock in a hard place: risk his life to maintain his freedom or risk his freedom to maintain his life. It was a split-second decision that's now cost him his freedom. And the aftermath?

Since Hines’s arrest, there have been some changes at City Beats. Cameras monitor the sales floor. No one works alone in the shop.

But, Hines said, people in the neighborhood know there’s no longer a gun inside. “They gotta have in their mind that if they come in the store, you can’t pull a gun on us,” Hines said. “Without people thinking there’s some repercussions . . . they would definitely try to take advantage.”

On Sunday, his wife, Sherita McLamore-Hines, closed the shop as usual at 5 p.m., then proceeded to review inventory with her son and nephew.

About two hours later, a familiar customer knocked on the shop’s glass door, cash in hand. McLamore-Hines let him in, hoping to make one more sale. But after the man stepped in, three men wearing ski masks came in behind him. One of the men held a gun to McLamore-Hines’s head and cleaned out the cash register as she crouched behind the counter.

Police had not made any arrests in the case.

I don't expect them to. Knowing a place like MLK, Jr. Avenue, it's probably a Lost Cause as far as law enforcement is concerned, so there's minimum effort to protect shop owners and their livelihoods. They're on their own here.

This is the story of a man who tried to do things the straight, narrow and right way, only to find himself in even more trouble. Sometimes, you just can't win for losing.

Metafilter had this story posted, but it got axed thanks to their rather fickle standards for a "good post." Fortunately, I caught it just in time to repost it here. Their loss.

This is Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old participant in the Occupy Seattle protests. A couple of nights ago, she was hit in the face with pepper spray deployed by police. Pepper spray burns. Like hell. Now imagine your grandmother or great-grandmother being hit in the face with this stuff. This picture was taken after she was doused with a milky substance that's supposed to counteract the effects of the spray.*

But that's part and parcel for police departments that have responded to largely peaceful gatherings and protests with intentionally violent crowd control and suppression tactics that are designed to goad protesters into responding with like violence, finally giving law enforcement officials the official pretext to effect even more heavy-handed detainment procedures.

So this is what police departments all over the country do when they want to "restore order" and clear out OWS sites. They bean war veterans in the head with tear canisters and spray elderly women in the face with pepper spray. But the cops don't deserve all the blame -- they had their orders from higher up, after all.

*I expect crude "money shot" jokes from less-cultured conservatives, trolls and other assorted assholes. But since this is DDSS, where trolls are a genuinely endangered species constantly bordering on extinction, these comments may happen elsewhere, but not here.

When you hear about shots being fired outside of the White House, the last thing anyone should do is make jokes about offing the president, no matter how much you dislike him.

University of Texas student and "College Republican" Laurene Pierce went ahead and did just that.

Hours after Pennsylvania State Police arrested a 21-year-old Idaho man for allegedly firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House, the top student official for the College Republicans at the University of Texas tweeted that the idea of assassinating President Obama was “tempting.”
At 2:29 p.m. ET, UT’s Lauren E. Pierce wrote: “Y’all as tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama. We need him to go down in history as the WORST president we’ve EVER had! #2012.”
Pierce, the president of the College Republicans at UT Austin, told ABC News the comment was a “joke” and that the “whole [shooting incident] was stupid.” Giggling, she said that an attempted assassination would “only make the situation worse.”

The proper follow-up should have been a swift backhand to the face and the laser-targeted use of a derogatory word for a particular female body part.

I'm sure there will be some boilerplate CYA responses from fellow Republicans on how her views are not theirs and whatnot. You know, things said to disassociate themselves from someone who transformed themselves into liabilities.

HT to ABL @ Balloon Juice

It's not everyday that I dig around a website that is largely geared towards celebrating the birth of white English occupation of what would eventually be known as America and the existence of its white American offspring (to the everlasting detriment of native residents). But while working on the last post about Elizabeth Wright, one of the links featured on another blog led me to a story on Johnathan Tilove and Michael Falco's book, "Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street." The book was intended as a portrait of black American life and culture along streets often renamed after the famous Civil Rights activist. The blog's review sidewinds into a hit piece on a religious figure and a brief musing on how black Americans are being squeezed out by a growing Latino population and gentrification caused by developers in search of young, affluent paying customers. The old chestnut was that only streets in the poor, worse-off neighborhoods were named after MLK, Jr.

The only aspect of the blog posting that stood out was a brief comment about kin solidarity:

But the big chains are latecomers to the process of crowding out black shopkeepers. They were pushed aside years ago by immigrants from patriarchal cultures, such as Greece or Korea, where the senior male can compel his entire extended family to toil diligently in the clan's store or restaurant.

African-Americans, by comparison, tend to lack the kin solidarity needed to prosper in small business. Big corporations with carefully worked out procedures offer ambitious individual blacks a surer road up the ladder.

It's a "blind squirrel finds acorn" moment.

Kin solidarity is something that is sorely lacking in the black American community. Other nationalities and ethnic groups seem to have no issue with helping build generational wealth by having the entire extended family cultivate and grow a business. Those who participate often leave with the skills needed to manage their own businesses or, at the very least, have a solid financial backing for other endeavors. It's something I've seen in Carib and African families, but not necessary in our own.

Instead, most black Americans would rather strike out on their own or rather take their chances climbing the ladder in already established corporate outlets. For the most part, we often stay separate from our extended family unless family reunions, funerals and other such events bring the family back together. It's a very individualistic streak that black Americans have taken to heart, as though that's how things are supposed to be.

I hate to pin the blame on slavery, but it's where blame is going. The lack of family cohesion thanks to the omnipresent threat of being separated and sold to persons unknown and shipped to parts unknown promoted a subconscious streak of kin independence out of sheer necessity, because you never knew when those family bonds would be severed for good. Other cultures never had to deal with that particular generational trauma, and it's something that has to be slowly but surely deprogrammed from our subconscious being if we want to practice any form of kin solidarity. It's a big step along the road of consolidating our own economic independence from the rest of America.

Dealing with rather resilient trolls on other blogs can be a pain in the ass, especially if there seems to be more of the trolls than there are of sane, intelligent and interesting commentators willing to discuss the topics at hand in an enlightening and sane manner. This is why I rarely leave comments on Topix and other sites with lax or nonexistent moderation, if I bother to comment at all.

A particular group of trolls (although you can't really call them trolls in the classical sense) have spent years attempting to derail and otherwise change the tone of a few liberal blogs, attempting to make sure that free, unfettered and anonymous conversation turns into bickering, backbiting and all-out nonsense. Other trolls assume the identity of minority groups in a bid to identify and commensurate with outspoken conservative trolls, or to engage in an orgy of self-hatred designed to bring about pity for that particular poster as the assailed token conservative who is set about on all sides by bullying liberal posters.

These trolls are highly annoying, in the sense that absolutely no amount of proof over how wrong their tactics are or how screwed their worldview is will dissuade them from depositing their bile and idiotic, clueless banter onto what should be a forum for intelligent (or at least troll-free) discussion. They don't want to learn and I always find myself having to leave posts that attempt to dispute their views and neutralize their bile, if only for the benefit of the casual reader who may or may not get sucked into the vortex of idiocy as crafted by said troll.

One troll's dissatisfaction with the liberal content put forth by the blog owner led me to think about the kind of people they would rather see the blog owner base their content and posting style on. I thought about another misguided commentator-turned-blogger from years back. And then I started thinking about Elizabeth Wright.

She's long gone, and nary a single black blog, mainstream or otherwise, acknowledged her passing. The only eulogies I've seen given have come from either "white empowerment" groups, staunchly conservative blogs and a couple of websites that engaged in critiquing the contents and legacy she left behind.

“When the white population falls below the 50% mark, the days of whites running interference for blacks will be over. And so will those special laws biased towards safeguarding perquisites for the “Disadvantaged,” which can be mighty expensive to enforce.

Again, what are the odds that those 18th century injunctions devised by those funny little men in britches and waistcoats will prevail, once the polyglot new Americans from Asia and Central and South America begin to flex their political muscle?

So many blacks and their white liberal gurus failed to appreciate those Anglo-originated laws based on “self-evident truths” and the consent of the governed, which were flexible enough to take under their protection the nation’s former slaves. Who will there be to ensure that jobs and scholarships and government contracts, and the surfeit of other entitlements, will be available for a people who have grown used to looking to others for slices from the economic pie, instead of baking their own share of it?

Once what’s left of constitutional law is gone, partly out of neglect, because the story of the Constitution and its creators will no longer be taught in the various Chinese-Indian-Latino-Arab colored school systems, a new corner will be turned. If blacks think they’ve been mistreated at the hands of whites, just wait until the affirmative action, set aside party is over—when there is no one to insist that they get undeserved perks, or have a “right” to intrude themselves into places where they are not wanted.

The new dominant ethnics come to this land with their own sob stories of oppression. Unlike whites, they are hardly likely to fall over one another to apologize for past wrongs. Nor are they likely to spend their time in Congress concocting new laws designed to discriminate against their own sons and daughters in favor of blacks.

“Reparations,” did you say? Just wait until the first move is made to un-name and re-name some of those Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards.”

The basic translation is that whites have been far too nice and too lenient on black Americans, and when these whites are largely gone (in a demographic sense), black Americans won't have anyone to coddle or pet them, as other ethnic groups will begin relegating them back to second-class citizenship in a manner white Americans weren't ruthless enough to undertake.

If the message is how black Americans should have worked towards standing on their own two feet as an ethnic group so they can operate independently of any other ethnic group and the implication being how white Americans were slowly but surely working them up to that point during the time between the end of Reconstruction and the end of the Civil Rights movement, that message gets lost as people are immediately turned off by what they see as a black American woman wagging her finger at fellow black Americans while whites look on in a distinctly pleased and self-satisfied manner. "Bad" blacks being chastised by a "good one," thereby reaffirming the inherent "goodness" thought to be exclusive to whites and their innate concept of "whiteness."

I went back over a comment of mine concerning Wright that I noticed now felt incomplete. So I intend to complete that thought by finding out what it lacked:

In a nutshell, Wright believed that in the quest of granting equality to black Americans, whites ended up prostrating themselves at the feet of a black race who are now coasting along on a wave of hand-me-ups and federal largesse. She believed the "endless retelling" of Jim Crow, lynchings and other heinous actions visited upon the black community are just ways of "race pimps" and similar "extortionists" to keep the pot of psychological racial dependency bubbling. She saw a people who were, in her opinion, being crippled by embracing "perpetual victimhood" and that "white liberals" are to blame for "coddling" blacks. She believed that whites are "disgracing themselves" by apologizing and fretting over race, and that whites should be more outspoken on when to tell blacks to go "sit and spin" when presented with racial grievances, contrived or otherwise.

In other words, she specialized in something I find rather disturbing: the act of chastising blacks and pointing out flaws in black society for the indirect amusement of her fellow white Americans. Not to say that she shouldn't have done these things, but when you have folks from the Council of Conservative Citizens and Stormfront co-signing with you, you should take a good, long look at the message you're sending.

I knew I forgot to add something else to that colored paragraph: She didn't just specialize in chastising black Americans in front of white conservative audiences, she also worked to embolden white Americans in exercising their innate "whiteness" and attendant ethnic superiority. She genuinely thought whites were being cowed into shame over their "whiteness" and sought to free them of it. In other words, it was okay for a white person to say something that could definitely be construed as being "racist" or highly insensitive on ethnic grounds if it happened to be "the truth." And there's never any discussion on who exactly defines that truth, except when there is a convenient stack of FBI crime stats one can point to and say, "THERE!!!"

Crime stats, BET, YouTube videos, rap albums, music videos, and the occasional fear-inducing run-in with a black American under nearly any circumstance are supposed to be proof positive of a failed people with a failed culture.

Funny how no one points to videos of rednecks and rednect culture, the Jerry Springer show, skinheads, white American criminals, Spring Break revelers, sports rioters, and the occasional white American hate crime suspect as proof positive of failed white American culture. Instead, such acts and examples are neatly compartmentalized and set out of the way of greater white American culture. Those are the perks to be had as the dominant culture of this nation.

I don't know what kind of thought processes or environment led Elizabeth Wright to adopt the views she had up to her passing. The only way anyone can glean that information is to read the material she left behind and come to one's own conclusion.

In late September, the SEC ended its case for disgorgement against former Birmingham mayor, former Jefferson County commission president and former Fairfield mayor Larry Langford, after the SEC discovered the only asset they could get as part of restitution was a 1/2-interest in his home. It's the only thing he has left, aside from a mess of debts stemming from criminal and civil penalties.

Langford is currently serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison, after being convicted of over 60 counts of bribery and corruption. Given his age (65) and how he won't be eligible to walk out of prison until at least 2023, it's a possibility that this man will die in prison. On the other hand, the two men convicted alongside him, investment banker Bill Blount and former lobbyist Al LaPierre, earned much lighter sentences. True, they plead guilty and Langford didn't, but the disparity in sentencing only raises the usual conclusions about racially-motivated "justice" in this country.

Most AL.com commentators have been chomping at the bit for Langford's demise and rolling around in his family's misery like happy pigs in slop. Blount and LaPierre never got this much bile thrown at them.

Larry Langford's story meshes neatly with the story of Jefferson County's staggering debt and how it was finally forced to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Rolling Stone magazine has a staggeringly comprehensive backstory on the entire saga, including what led Jefferson County to build a high-tech sewer system in the first place and how $250 million ballooned into over $4 billion in debt thanks to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and its three-card credit swap monte.

Langford, Blount, LaPierre and J.P. Morgan Chase banker Charles LeCroy were instrumental in driving Jefferson County further into debt. To summarize, LeCroy would pay Blount millions of dollars to help grease the lending skids with whoever was in charge of signing off those deals. Blount then feted then-county commissioner Langford (with LaPierre as a go-between) with what would eventually total over $240,000 in clothing and other gifts. Langford would then effectively steer business back towards Blount's investment firm when he signed off on the deals that would eventually land the county in the financial shithouse. This happened quite a lot.

And it kept happening until those bills came due.

For Jefferson County, the deal blew up in early 2008, when a dizzying array of penalties and other fine-print poison worked into the swap contracts started to kick in. The trouble began with the housing crash, which took down the insurance companies that had underwritten the county's bonds. That rendered the county's insurance worthless, triggering clauses in its swap contracts that required it to pay off more than $800 million of its debt in only four years, rather than 40. That, in turn, scared off private lenders, who were no longer ­interested in bidding on the county's bonds. The banks were forced to make up the difference — a service for which they charged enormous penalties. It was as if the county had missed a payment on its credit card and woke up the next morning to find its annual percentage rate jacked up to a million percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the annual payment on Jefferson County's debt jumped from $53 million to a whopping $636 million.

It gets worse. Remember the swap deal that Jefferson County did with JP Morgan, how the variable rates it got from the bank were supposed to match those it owed its bondholders? Well, they didn't. Most of the payments the county was receiving from JP Morgan were based on one set of interest rates (the London Interbank Exchange Rate), while the payments it owed to its bondholders followed a different set of rates (a municipal-bond index). Jefferson County was suddenly getting far less from JP Morgan, and owing tons more to bondholders. In other words, the bank and Bill Blount made tens of millions of dollars selling deals to local politicians that were not only completely defective, but blew the entire county to smithereens.

And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time "termination fees" of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.

Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.

And to think this all started with a consent decree.

In 1996, the EPA ordered Jefferson County to revamp its aging sewer system after a lawsuit involving the Cahaba River Society. Something about keeping waste out of the rather fragile Cahaba River, which also served as a source of the city's drinking water. Instead of ordering the city to repair that particular problem, the EPA issued a mandate to eliminate all sewer outflows. That would require a damn-near brand-new sewer system designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. So the city of Birmingham set out to build the new sewer system, to the tune of $250 million.

A $250 million estimate, turned into a $4 billion clusterfuck of epic proportions.

Meanwhile, whatever chance JeffCo had of paying that debt off ended when its occupation tax did, started in 2005, the 1-cent tax was the county's attempt to recoup some income from the hordes of suburban commuters from outside of the county who still worked in the Birmingham/Jefferson County area. After a fair bit of whining from the usual anti-tax forces, the occupation tax was rendered unconstitutional and struck down, leaving Jefferson County with little to no options for paying down its debt.

At some point, the sewer system fell under receivership and under control of John Young, state court-appointed and given the power to raise sewer rates as necessary. Second Front talks about how he endeared himself to the citizens of Jefferson County:

Since appointed, Young has become one of the least popular public figures in the sewer debacle, mostly because he has been paid $500 per hour for his services, even when giving interviews to the media or speaking to civic groups. Last week, the receiver’s total compensation exceeded $1 million. Also, Young has told the state court that a sewer rate increase of 25 percent would be appropriate for the creditors and affordable for most ratepayers.

In these economic times, seeing a guy get paid $500/hr to putz around with people's future sewer rates is a bit much to bear.

Two county commissions spent three years coming to an amicable agreement on how to repay the debt, but it fell through at the last minute:

Three of the commissioners interviewed by Reuters said the turning point came last Monday when creditors who include JPMorgan sent a document to commissioners outlining new settlement terms.

They said the new terms weren't what they thought they had negotiated and they spent two days combing through the document with lawyers before deciding that bankruptcy was a better alternative to accepting a revised deal.

Among the concerns, the creditors were insisting on being paid back $2.19 billion of the $3.14 billion debt, rather than the $2.05 billion the commissioners had expected. And the commissioners claim that the revisions meant an assistance program to help those on a low income pay higher sewerage rates would have to be shouldered by the county for 10 years.

"When I read the document that came back Monday my blood pressure shot up. I felt like everything was in favor of the creditors and nothing was in favor of the county," said Republican Commissioner Joe Knight.

The Commission President David Carrington, also a Republican, said he had been optimistic up until last Monday night. "When I left here (the commission offices) Monday night I thought we had an agreement. I felt good. But I got a call from one of our attorneys. It was about nine o'clock, saying there was these new revisions," he said.

"They had these conditions and those conditions are unacceptable. I knew it wasn't going to happen," he said.

In a last ditch effort, creditors urged governor Robert Bentley to call the state legislature to a special session:

In the wake of the tentative deal, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley promised to call a special session of the state legislature to consider a bill to allow the county to raise fresh funds to address a shortfall in its general fund that could, in itself, have led to bankruptcy.

Already, it has forced the county to cut jobs and services so that, to give one example, a long line snaked outside the courthouse early on Thursday morning of residents waiting to pay for their car tag renewal.

No session was called, however, and there appeared to be little appetite in the Republican-controlled legislature for any increase in taxes. The source said the county voted for bankruptcy mainly because that special session looked increasingly unlikely to happen.

When that didn't happen, Commission President David Carrington filed bankruptcy on behalf of the county and subsequently lost over $1 billion in concessions from creditors.

The fallout's been horrific. Langford, LaPierre and Blount were convicted and sentenced. The old county commission was seen as a bunch of corrupt assholes. The Jefferson County government had to furlough employees, shut down courthouse satellites and even stop county sheriffs deputies from responding to traffic accidents. Sewer customers will most likely see their rates rise by 25% and even higher in subsequent years. This municipal bankruptcy is the largest in recent history, after Orange County's $1.5 billion bankruptcy.

Now that the county's officially declared bankruptcy, the federal courts have stepped in to resolve the matter, first to determine if the county is actually eligible for bankruptcy and second to determine the best financial settlement terms possible for the county and its creditors. A bit of side drama is whether the sewer system remains under control of John Young or whether it defaults back under control of the county itself.

Lots of lives and livelihoods were devastated by the willingness of several entities to engage in greed, and it seems the only people who aren't paying for it are those under employ of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., although it was one of the institutions instrumental in causing the county's fiscal collapse.

- President Obama tells China to stop acting like bitches and get their minds right on currency and trade policies. This comes on the heels of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, where President Obama urged Asian leaders to create a pan-Asian free trade zone.

Using some of his toughest language yet against China, Obama, a day after face-to-face talks with President Hu Jintao, demanded that China stop "gaming" the international system and create a level playing field for U.S. and other foreign businesses.

"We're going to continue to be firm that China operate by the same rules as everyone else," Obama told reporters after hosting the 21-nation APEC summit in his native Honolulu. "We don't want them taking advantage of the United States."

China shot back that it refused to abide by international economic rules that it had no part in writing.

"First we have to know whose rules we are talking about," Pang Sen, a deputy director-general at China's Foreign Ministry said.

That's the funny thing about China. They only abide by the rules that benefit them. Sounds familiar...

- Meanwhile, China's flexing those new-found military and foreign policy muscles by grabbing bigger chunks of the Spratly Islands. Now, what's so special about a 190-island chain smack in the middle of the South China Sea?

Oil. And lots of it.

Now the Philippines are speaking out against China's attempt to claim territory that's just 50 miles from the nearest Philippine province. Understandably, the rest of South Asia is wary of China developing a territorial and military hegemony over the entire region.

- American Eagle becomes the first airline dinged by a tarmac-delay rule that penalizes airlines for lengthy delays. The rule was enacted in 2010 as a part of a series of consumer protection rules. Airlines are now fined up to $27,500 per passenger if those passengers are stranded on the tarmac for more than three hours.

American Eagle was dinged to a tune of a cool $16.7 million dollars. Parent AMR Corp. later settled for $650,000 and passenger compensation totaling $250,000.

The airline industry has opposed the tarmac-delay rule, saying it has had the unintended result of increasing the number of cancellations.

And increased ticket prices and fees, don't forget about those.

- The six Democrats and six Republicans on the "Super Committee" are busy working out a deal to resolve the national budget. If the committee fails to push $1.2 trillion in spending cuts or tax increases by November 23, automatic across-the-board budget cuts come into play for 2013.

- Did anyone hear how Allen West was in a white supremacist gang? No? Neither did I. Shades of Clayton Bigsby? Well, I guess even white supremacist groups need a token or two. And speaking of tokens... (HT RippDemUp)

- C-Span won't be showing the next GOP debate. "Budgetary concerns," they say. I think it's how they've finally had their fill of GOP shenanigans and inane debate for once. Oh, Romney and Huntsman won't be there, either. I assume they'll have a little one-on-one chat over coffee at the local Denny's. Oh, who am I kidding? Poor Jon will be there by his lonesome, largely forgotten in the face of Herm, Michelle, Rick, the other Rick and Newt.

Thanksgiving's coming up soon, and I plan to have a wonderful feast. *drools at the thought of good stuffing with cranberry sauce*