July 2, 2015

A Superman comic just took on police brutality

One of the biggest changes to come out DC Entertainment's big comics revamp this summer turned Superman's world upside-down: Lois Lane revealed his identity to the world, and then he lost almost all of his powers.

When a Metropolis citizen then gets unruly, the commanding officer sees it as an opportunity to march on those gathered, with batons and shields at the ready — and then Superman, absolutely exhausted from his fight, places himself in between the crowd and the cops."

http://www.businessinsider.com/superman-action-comic-42-police-brutality-2015-7

July 1, 2015

Coulter-Geist

Eh, slow news day...I had to post something.

July 1, 2015

The Confederacy was the Islamic State of Its Time

If ever a cause was unworthy, that cause was the US Confederacy. If ever a cause was righteously defeated, it was the cause of the US Confederacy. And if ever a flag was and is an insult to human decency and dignity, it is the US Confederate flag.

The mere fact this is still being debated in the United States, the fact there are those who continue to accord a nobility, valor, and romanticism to the Confederacy – regarded wistfully as the ‘Lost Cause’ by its adherhents – this is evidence of the deep polarization that divides a society yet to fully come to terms with its legacy of slavery, racial oppression, and barbarism."

*Racial oppression, whether delivered from the gun of a mass murderer in a South Carolinian church, or the gun of a police officer, has yet to be expunged in the land of the free, even though 150 years have passed since the Confederacy was defeated in battle.

*The end of Reconstruction in 1877, and the withdrawal of federal troops from states such as South Carolina, resulted in the plight of blacks in said states suffering a sharp reverse. The Klu Klux Klan’s influence and power as America’s first terrorist organization instantly made its presence felt, measured in the rise and entrenchment of white supremacy as a state and culture of segregation returned across the South. Blacks were lynched, murdered, and tortured with impunity from then on, and their status as second-class citizens entrenched.

This mindset remains a fact of life not just across the South but also across the United States, carried in the hearts and minds of right wing Republicans and a reactionary media that on a daily and nightly basis whips up divisions and spews prejudice and racial stereotypes with blithe disregard for common decency.

By far the most compelling evidence of this culture of racial prejudice, however, has been the treatment of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, since he entered the White House in 2009. Never has a US President been subjected to such a sustained campaign of demonization and hate as he has.

*There was nothing noble or romantic about the Confederacy, and its defeat marked a victory for human progress."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/30/the-confederacy-was-the-islamic-state-of-its-time/

July 1, 2015

Openly transgender swimmer at Harvard believed to be a first

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Schuyler Bailar was a star recruit for the women’s swimming team at Harvard University, a tough competitor with a shot at winning titles. But Bailar is opting to forgo such honors to join the men’s team instead, competing as the first openly transgender swimmer in the NCAA.

“It’s half terrifying and half exciting,” said Bailar, a 19-year-old from McLean, Virginia. “I’m just kind of embracing it with open arms.”

Bailar, an incoming freshman, came out as transgender this year after already being recruited for the women’s team. Initially he planned to stay on that team but had mixed feelings about it — he wanted to swim, but he also wanted to embrace his identity."

The Harvard women’s coach saw that Bailar was torn and helped orchestrate another option: In a surprise move, the university offered Bailar a spot on either the men’s or women’s team.

“I was blown away,” Bailar said. “I had no idea how to respond.”

“I just want to be a boy,” he remembers thinking. “I can’t live this in-between thing anymore.”

By then, men’s coach Kevin Tyrrell had already gathered the team to talk about adding Bailar.

“We talked about how we’re all about character and values, and I kind of gave my two cents: If we’re going to say that we care about others, then this is something we should consider,” Tyrrell said. “And basically all the guys said, within 15 seconds, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.'”

http://college.usatoday.com/2015/06/30/first-transgender-swimmer-at-harvard/

June 30, 2015

Republicans are in retreat

Like all mood changes that take place in a mass society, it takes a great deal of groundswell for there to be any uprising that forces government to change. The cycle we are in has been 40 years in the making. The Republican Party has been masterful in using culture war wedge issues as a means of attracting and distracting voters, while they used their time in office to repeatedly pass legislation that favored business over workers and downshifted costs to individuals, which accelerated the erosion of stagnant wages. They have smugly gone about the business of enriching themselves and their sponsors, comfortable in the knowledge that Americans are largely uninformed and do not pay attention to the details of the legislative process."

*The internal disputes within the Republican Party have further indicated that a more isolationist approach to foreign policy as articulated by Paul has been throttled by the knee-jerk emphasis on "terrorist" threats, military might, American hegemony and tough-guy posturing. These policy positions will undoubtedly prevail as we move toward the election, and the probability is that they, too, will ring hollow to an increasing number of Americans who are simply sick of war and sick of American leaders who misguidedly pursue policies promoting American solutions, an American political model or American exceptionalism at the expense of its domestic economy. Americans are increasingly coming to the opinion that military leadership cannot be the reason for impoverishing its citizens.

It is clear that circumstances have changed in this country. The good news for progressives is that the trends favor them.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/246502-republicans-are-in-retreat

June 30, 2015

NYPD gets down during NYC pride

June 30, 2015

The GOP Fails Its Empathy Test

After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee published an “autopsy.” “When it comes to social issues,” the autopsy declared, “the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming. If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people.” The autopsy also added that, “we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case. We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.”

The last two weeks, more than any since Romney’s defeat, illustrate how miserably the GOP has failed.

Start with June 17, when Dylann Roof, a young white man enamored of the Confederate flag, murdered nine African Americans in church. Within three days, Romney had called for the Confederate flag’s removal from South Carolina’s capitol. Four days later, the state’s Republican governor and senators called for its removal too. But during that entire week—even as it became obvious that the politics of the flag were shifting—not a single GOP presidential candidate forthrightly called for it to be taken down. Instead, they mostly called it a state decision, a transparent dodge politicians deploy when they don’t want to make a difficult call."

Then, on June 26, the Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was a constitutional right. If the politics of the Confederate Flag shifted radically over the course of a few days, the politics of gay marriage have been shifting radically over the last few years. Young people, including young Republicans, overwhelmingly back marriage equality. Key conservative writers years ago conceded the fight was lost. Yet not a single major GOP candidate risked alienating the Christian right by endorsing the idea. "

*But those aren’t the only moments in which the GOP presidential field failed."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/-empathy-gop-presidential-race-2016-/397115/

June 10, 2015

Little Rock police slam non-violent blind man to the street.

Wilson left his job at Lighthouse for the Blind. He missed his bus so he started to walk home along 65th St.

Around that time, LRPD says they got a call about someone fitting Wilson's description who was running away from or chasing someone and who appeared to be afraid.

"Hey, come over here and talk to me," the officer can be heard saying on dash camera video.

Wilson is legally blind and says he only sees shadows. He says he didn't know who was calling him.

"I could have possibly been getting robbed," Wilson said. "I didn't know what was about to happen."

Yet, Eric complied and did everything the police asked him to do, as you will see in the newly released video below. The police though, in their report, claimed that Eric pulled away violently and they were afraid he was going to hit them with the handcuffs.

Really? You thought a blind man was going to go Bruce Lee on you with a pair of handcuffs?

Then, seeing something stick out of his pants pocket, police were afraid he had a gun. It was a device that reads the time to blind people.

Welcome to America."

Video at link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/10/1392030/-Little-Rock-police-slam-non-violent-blind-man-to-the-street-Guess-his-race

June 10, 2015

How Activists Intend to Force the Arrest of Police Officers

It’s been 199 days since Tamir Rice was shot to death by a Cleveland police officer. And for a group of community leaders in the Forest City, that’s too long to wait for prosecutors to charge the officers involved in the shooting. Instead, they went to a municipal court judge Tuesday morning and asked him to issue a warrant for the officers on charges of murder, aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, negligent homicide, and dereliction of duty.

If that sounds confusing, it’s not just you. The activists made the request under an obscure provision of Ohio law that entitles citizens to file an affidavit demanding an arrest. While a few other states have similar clauses, the law is little-known and seldom-used—especially in cases of murder. A close reading of the statute suggests that it’s unlikely to seriously change the direction of the case, since any murder charge ultimately has to go through a grand jury. But the filing of affidavits sends a signal, and might add some pressure on the prosecutor to file charges against Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback."

“What you see here is one of the most American things I’ve seen in my life,” said Walter Madison, an attorney for the Rice family, at a press conference on the courthouse steps after filing the affidavits. “The people have taken the opportunity to make the government work for them. This is not a circumvention. This is simply applying the law that is available.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the union representing Cleveland police did not agree, calling it an attempt to “hijack rule of law.” Yet the statute is clear—the coalition behind the affidavits is well within its rights"

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/tamir-rice-case-cleveland/395420/

June 9, 2015

Only one group of Americans has become less accepting of homosexuality in the past 2 years

On Monday, the Pew Research Center released the results of a new survey on how Americans view homosexuality.

n almost every one of the groups Pew broke out, the percentage of respondents who said homosexuality should be accepted increased over the past two years. This was the case for men and women, each of the generational cohorts Pew looked at, and each of the four major religious groups in the breakout.

The only group that had a decrease in the percentage of respondents who believed society should accept homosexuality was conservative Republicans. Each of the other political subgroups, including moderate and liberal Republicans, saw an increase in that percentage between March 2013 and May 2015."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/only-one-group-americans-become-224300984.html

How does it feel to be all alone with your bigotry conservatives?