Month: August 2014

“But then, they always blame America first”

by digby

Hey, do any of you oldies remember this speech from 1984?

They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do – they didn’t blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians – they blamed the United States instead.

But then, somehow, they always blame America first.

When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the “blame America first crowd” didn’t blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.

But then, they always blame America first.

The American people know better.

They know that Ronald Reagan and the United States didn’t cause Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua, or the repression in Poland, or the brutal new offensives in Afghanistan, or the destruction of the Korean airliner, or the new attacks on religious and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, or the jamming of western broadcasts, or the denial of Jewish emigration, or the brutal imprisonment of Anatoly Shcharansky and Ida Nudel, or the obscene treatment of Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, or the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union.

The American people know that it’s dangerous to blame ourselves for terrible problems that we did not cause.

They understand just as the distinguished French writer, Jean Francois Revel, understands the dangers of endless self- criticism and self-denigration.

He wrote: “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

With the election of Ronald Reagan, the American people declared to the world that we have the necessary energy and conviction to defend ourselves, and that we have as well a deep commitment to peace.

And now, the American people, proud of our country, proud of our freedom, proud of ourselves, will reject the San Francisco Democrats and send Ronald Reagan back to the White House.

That was OG Neocon Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican Convention.

Here’s the Democratic National Committee today on Rand Paul:

“This week he’s blaming the Obama Administration for another nation’s civil war. That type of ‘blame America’ rhetoric may win Paul accolades at a conference of isolationists but it does nothing to improve our standing in the world,” DNC spokesman Michael Czin said in a statement. “In fact, Paul’s proposals would make America less safe and less secure.

Simply put, if Rand Paul had a foreign policy slogan, it would be — The Rand Paul Doctrine: Blame America. Retreat from the World.”

They couldn’t call him a “San Francisco” liberal since he’s from Kentucky. But they could have added something about the Aqua Buddha to make it clear that he’s really a long haired hippie freak at heart.

I get that they have to counter Paul’s rhetoric. And I happen to think he’s a hypocritical liar on these issues and spitting into the wind if he believe that Republicans are going to go back to the days of Robert Taft any time soon. They are hawks through and through. But the Democratic Party using the infamous words of Jeanne Kirkpatrick (in exactly the same way she used them)to attack Rand Paul from the right is likely to backfire if it implies that the Democratic Party believes that pacifists and a so-called “convention of isolationists” are unpatriotic. It’s not as if there are many of them in the GOP. But there are a lot of anti-war voters in the Democratic Party. Why alienate your own base by implying that their apprehension about America’s intervention abroad over the past few years is un-American?

It’s not as though “blaming America” is an unreasonable thing to do. Indeed, it’s a necessary thing to do — when America is to blame. How about this news report from 2007, in which the US Senate complied a study that showed American leadership knew that intervention in Iraq could have disastrous consequences for the region:

In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.

Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.

In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community’s think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”

It also warned that “many angry young recruits” would fuel the rank of Islamic extremists and “Iraqi political culture is so embued with mores (opposed) to the democratic experience … that it may resist the most rigorous and prolonged democratic tutorials.”

None of those warnings were reflected in the administration’s predictions about the war.

In fact, Vice President Cheney stated the day before the war, “Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

A second assessment weeks before the invasion warned that the war also could be “exploited by terrorists and extremists outside Iraq.”

And then this:

Fighting a civil war is the way that some societies build a state, and it is hard to imagine how there could have been a smooth transition from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Still, the United States has clearly helped to create the conditions for Iraq’s descent into civil war.

Two failures are worth noting. First, a large literature on contentious politics has shown that violent opposition groups gain legitimacy and public support when the state uses indiscriminate violence or abuses civilians. This is precisely what has happened in Iraq, with recent reports of civilian abuses by the coalition.

Second, civil war studies have shown that insurgencies grow into large wars when insurgents receive external assistance. The American-led coalition simply has not had the manpower to quarantine those Iraqis who have reportedly received assistance from neighboring countries and international terrorist entities.

So yeah, Rand Paul may be a jerk but he’s right about one thing; the US is perfectly capable of creating another nation’s civil war. We did it in Iraq. And the resultant spillover of violence and radicalism is the cause of many of the problems we’re facing today.

The good news for the DNC is that some really fine people agree with them. Like yet another OG Neocon, Eliot Abrams, who’s been pushing for war in the Middle East for decades:

“Senator Paul simply has the facts wrong. He published his article in The Wall Street Journal but apparently doesn’t read it himself, or he’d have seen last Saturday’s article there detailing how the Assad regime abetted the rise of ISIS. Those who argued for intervening to strengthen nationalist Syrian rebels have been proved quite right, for as they have weakened ISIS has grown stronger. In fact we’ve done in Syria exactly what Rand Paul always wants to do–nothing–and we see the result. It’s the steady growth of a murderous, barbarous terrorist group that now threatens even the homeland.”

(Apparently it’s ok to “blame America first” when its government decides not to go to war. It’s only once it starts beating the war drums that good patriots have to zip their lips and wave the flag.)

This is going to be a tough path for the Democratic Party as it seeks to balance the various strains running through its coalition on this subject. They’ve got the peace oriented left which is a big faction in the Party, the interventionists like Hillary Clinton and the liberal pragmatists (for lack of a better term) like Obama. It’s never easy for the party as an institution to juggle all that in a coherent fashion. But for heaven’s sake, taking the position of the hard core right is a very odd way to go about it.

It’s not as if the DNC criticizing Rand Paul as an isolationist is going to cost him any Republican votes. They hate his guts. And they are much more clever about aligning him with people and ideas that will further marginalize him in their party. Here’s Jennifer Rubin on Paul’s op-ed:

At times, Paul sounds like the thought bubble over Obama’s head. Indeed, they share a common determination to avoid reality. In their world, the Iraq war was never won. The withdrawal of forces with no stay-behind troops was the right thing to do. And the real danger is the United States doing something effective.

Sometimes it is hard to tell Obama and Paul apart. Consider this: “History teaches us of the dangers of overreaching, and spreading ourselves too thin, and trying to go it alone without international support, or rushing into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.” Obama or Rand Paul?

In case you were wondering, it was Obama. Is he part of the “Blame America” crowd now too?

The only people’s minds this “he’s a Blame America first isolationist” charge might change are … young Democrats. And it will change them in favor of Rand Paul. Why in the world would the DNC want to do a thing like that?

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And in another piece of good news …

by digby

That worked out well:

Weeks of fighting escalated in Libya this weekend as anti-government fighters secured control of the country’s main airport in the capital, Tripoli.

A group of pro-government fighters from the western city of Zintan had controlled the airport since the 2011 fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But on Saturday, a coalition of Islamist fighters from the city of Misrata called “Operation Dawn” pushed that group out.

It’s been just a little over three years since the Zintanis and Islamist fighters battled side by side against Gaddafi forces. Yet today, the two groups — along with smaller supporting militias — are locked in a vicious fight for economic and political control, pushing the country closer to the brink of collapse. Libya is falling apart, and this is why it matters:

Libya now has 2 parliaments and 2 prime ministers.
The government and the army are too weak to impose order.
Regional powers are adding fuel to the fire.
Life for many Libyan civilians is worsening.

Read the article to see the details behind those 4 points. It’s a huge mess.

It’s not America’s fault. But there’s a lesson this about the idea that our “intervention” was going to be, on balance, a good thing for the country. It’s gone from despotism to chaos, as often happens in these cases. And contrary to what one might think, chaos isn’t freedom.

You can’t help but feel some despair at this point. It looks as though we’re in for a long period of unstable unrest in the region and that’s dangerous. And there’s not a whole lot the US can do about it.

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SCOTUS has your back


by Tom Sullivan

No, not your back, innocent victim of law enforcement gone wrong. They’ve got law enforcement’s back. You’re on your own. The dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, Erwin Chemerinsky, explains. There’s not only immunity for cities for the misconduct of their employees — for, say, wrongful death or prosecutorial misconduct — but immunity for officials themselves against personal lawsuits, and “qualified immunity” for officials unless “every reasonable official” would have known the conduct in question was unlawful. Such as shooting Michael Brown in the head, assuming that was excessive or not self defense.

The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant, was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable, even though the Constitution had clearly been violated.

Perhaps like me, you’ve noticed a spate of videos surfacing in which a prone suspect is beaten or repeatedly tased as police mechanically scream “Stop resisting!” Or repeatedly yell “Stop going for my gun!” at a suspect with his hands up (as in this video). Make of that what you will. The Supreme Court, it seems, will not.

But in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and an Ohio Walmart patron shopping for a pellet rifle (both men black), one has to wonder whether we as a country haven’t created the conditions for these types of tragedies. In the wake of 9/11, Vice-President Cheney advised America that our response might take us to “the dark side.” He would know.

And with the post-9/11 deployment of military gear and chemical weapons against civilian protesters across the country, are we as a culture encouraging — recommending — their use? The famous Stanford Prison and the Milgram experiments showed how, when ordinary people are placed in a position of authority in an environment that encourages wielding imperious power, authoritarian tendencies surface where they might have remained latent. Not to deny the personal culpability of those deserving the accountability Cheney, et. al. have avoided, but given the commonalities in these police shootings and other violent encounters, we might consider whether, America having gazed “long into an abyss” is seeing the abyss gaze back.

Not to mention how, as I hear, black men are calling into radio talk shows complaining they cannot even enjoy driving the cars they worked hard to earn because of being regularly stopped by police in which the first words police utter are “Where are the drugs?” Or producer Charles Belk on his way to the Emmys this week being detained in Beverly Hills for six hours as a suspect in a bank holdup because, “Hey, I was ‘tall,’ ‘bald,’ a ‘male’ and ‘black,’ so I fit the description.”
Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

And there still will be people who will claim not to “understand” why black people dread the approach of the police.
… because it’s not about race because it’s never about race.

America needs to stop staring into the abyss and spend some time staring into the mirror.

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Tell Harry Reid to move the Death in Custody Reporting Act

by digby

I wrote a piece for Salon yesterday about the odd fact that we don’t have a national database of police involve shootings and deaths at the hands of authorities.  It seems like a useful bit of information:

The shooting of teenager Michael Brown has focused the nation (again) on the dangers faced by young, unarmed black men walking the streets of America. The sight of paramilitary police with guns pointed at peaceful protesters in a suburban town in the Midwest also got our attention. And as we wait for the legal system to determine if officer Darren Wilson will be held liable for the shooting, new questions are rising to the surface about the issue of officer-involved shootings in general. How often does this happen? How are these issues normally handled by prosecutors and the courts? And surprisingly, there is almost no way of knowing how often American citizens are killed at the hands of the authorities.

And check this out:

In 2000 Congress passed a bill called the Death in Custody Reporting Act with bipartisan support. According to its primary sponsor, Rep. Bobby Scott, it was designed to provide oversight over law enforcement during detention, arrest and imprisonment. Unfortunately, it expired in 2006 and despite Scott’s best efforts it hasn’t been renewed. It passed the House in 2009 and 2011 with overwhelming bipartisan support but went nowhere in the Senate each time. In 2011 it was actually sent to the full Senate but ran out of time before it was considered. It passed the House again in December of 2013, once more with bipartisan support. (How often does that happen in this Congress?) Since then it’s been sitting in the Senate where it seems to be waiting to die once again. If it doesn’t pass by the time Congress adjourns this fall it will have to start all over again.

The House (the House!)passed this bill. The Democratic Senate needs to pass it too and the president needs to sign it. And they need to do it now.

The NAACP sent out this action alert to its members on this last week. Click here to see the language if you’d care to join in.

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Give ’em an inch

by digby

Emily Bazelon in Slate points out that the new rules allowing corporations and institutions that are not strictly religious to opt out of providing birth control on religious grounds by simply writing a little note to the federal government isn’t going to stop the assault on the contraception mandate.

Here’s why this new rule isn’t going to end the lawsuits anytime soon: Little Sisters and the others don’t want a new mechanism for alerting the government so a TPA can provide birth control. “The government has never offered a reason why it needed to coerce the Little Sisters and others to be a part of its contraceptive delivery system, nor any reason why it chose to treat the Little Sisters as less deserving of religious liberty than houses of worship,” Daniel Blomberg, a lawyer for the Becket Fund, which represents Little Sisters, emailed me. “It is disappointing that the government continues to treat religious ministries as not religious enough to deserve the same exemption it gives houses of worship.”
[…]
This brings us to the real crux of the issue, which Hobby Lobby and all the other litigation has so far obscured: The government wants the employees at the heart of these cases to get the contraception coverage everyone else’s employees get, through their employment. The religious employers do not.

In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s not about religious employers. It’s about any employers being mandated to offer this coverage — to offer any coverage. It’s just one incremental step in a long term strategy to create a legal structure for corporations and other organizations to “opt out” of participating in government mandated programs on the basis of “conscience.”

Bazelon outlines how wily this plan really is — so wily they punk’d the female justices of the Supreme Court:

In its Hobby Lobby ruling in June, the Supreme Court seemed to suggest that the government’s goal was a perfectly acceptable one—easily reached, with a little rewriting of the rules. In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito appeared to see Form 700 as a good compromise. TPAs could arrange for contraceptive coverage, Alito said, “without imposing any cost-sharing requirements on the eligible organization.” This was all very soothing. Alito went so far as to make the government’s stance, in insisting that Hobby Lobby cover birth control for its employees directly, seem a little silly. If the officials at HHS who came up with Form 700 had figured out an accommodation for the religious nonprofit groups, why not offer to extend it to private companies like Hobby Lobby?

But there was a catch. “We do not decide today whether an approach of this type complies with RFRA”—the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the 1990s law that’s the basis for all of these religion-based challenges to paying for birth control—“for purposes of all religious claims,” Alito wrote. A week later, the court walked through this conveniently open door. Wheaton College, which is Christian, didn’t want to sign Form 700, and in another interim but telling order, the court said it didn’t have to. No wonder all the other religious groups and “privately held” companies want the same deal.

In the Wheaton College case, Sotomayor (plus Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) raised hell. In an unusual act of all-female solidarity, the three justices said the court’s order siding with Wheaton “undermines confidence in this institution” because it contradicts the promise the majority made in Hobby Lobby. To me, it looks like some justices thought they’d reached a nice compromise for the religious objectors in Hobby Lobby, only to find that others weren’t along for the ride.

Ooops. Sorry ladies. We were just kidding.

An that means that this new order from the administration is unlikely to stand.

I’m going to guess that this will end up like the Hyde Amendment. It also made no sense when it was enacted, and Democrats tried for years to stop its yearly re-authorization — until they finally gave up and we had President Obama proclaiming that it was a “tradition” to make sure poor women did not have insurance coverage for abortion and negotiated the possibility away permanently in the ACA.

The social conservatives never give up until they get their way on these women’s issues. It’s fundamental to their cause. The fight has now expanded from abortion to birth control which is now a subject of controversy despite the fact that nearly 100% of women in the nation have used it (which makes nearly 100% of women “sluts” according to right wing haters.) And if there’s one thing the history of the past few decades of legislative battles has taught us it’s that when push comes to shove, the Democrats will use “controversial” women’s rights as a bargaining chip and tell the ladies they’ll have to take one for the team.

It’s pretty to think that these latest polling numbers which show Republicans suffering electorally because of their inability to appeal to women will make the Democrats stiffen their spines and recognize that they have to dig in their heels on this. And I suspect they will — as long as it doesn’t mean they have to compromise on something else they care about. Women’s issues are always on the table.

h/t to DC
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Rand Paul and libertarians won’t save the Millennial vote for Republicans

by David Atkins

In the last couple of years there’s been a concerted pushback on the notion that Millennial voters will be reliably Democratic in the future. The argument generally centers on the idea that 1) Millennials tend to be disturbingly libertarian/conservative on some economic issues, and 2) since white Millennials are almost as likely to be conservative on those and a few social issues as their elders, it’s more about race than about age.

There are problems with both of those arguments: yes, Millennials lean libertarian/conservative when asked vague questions about government spending, regulation and deficits–but that’s not surprising given the awful, empty rhetoric on these fronts spouted across all spectra of American politics. But when you actually delve into the weeds of each and every given policy position, from single-payer healthcare to immigration reform to the minimum wage, Millennials really are more liberal even on economics than than their forebears.

Moreover, social issues don’t just wave themselves away. The Republican Party knows it needs to moderate itself on social issues in order to have a future with women, younger and minority voters. But its base simply won’t allow it to do that.

Finally, the fact that Millennials are less white than previous generations isn’t a “yeah, but” thing. It’s part of the point of the emerging Democratic majority. First off, we know that white Millennials are significantly more liberal than their older counterparts by anywhere from 5 to 10 percentage points. 54% of white Millennials still disapprove of Barack Obama, but those numbers are at over 60% in every other generational category. 59% of white voters cast ballots for Mitt Romney, and he still lost. The oldest of the Millennial generation, depending on how you define it, are now in their late twenties or early thirties. Even if a bare majority of Millennial whites do lean conservative on a few issues, that’s still awful news for Republicans, who either need to make up huge ground with minority groups or increase their share of the white vote by large numbers in a browning population.

Another hypothesis out there is that hip new libertarians in the Republican coalition will save the younger vote. That’s wrong, too.

Alan Abramowitz at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball looks at the numbers and concludes:

An analysis of data from the 2012 American National Election Study raises serious doubts about the claim that a candidate with libertarian views would have strong appeal to younger voters. In fact, the data indicate that younger voters tend to hold relatively liberal views on social welfare as well as cultural issues. Only a small minority of voters under the age of 30 can be classified as libertarians. Moreover, both younger and older Americans who hold libertarian views already vote overwhelmingly for Republican candidates, so nominating a candidate with a libertarian philosophy would be unlikely to gain many votes for the GOP.

…

Our results thus far indicate that younger voters would not be especially attracted to a candidate holding libertarian views. Moreover, the results displayed in Table 3 show that the vast majority of young libertarians in 2012 were already voting for Republican candidates: 76% of younger libertarians, along with 82% of older libertarians, reported voting for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. In addition, young libertarians overwhelmingly identified with the Republican Party and favored Republican House and Senate candidates by wide margins. Among libertarians under the age of 30, those who identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party outnumbered those who identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party by 74% to 17%. Of these young libertarians, 75% reported voting for a Republican House candidate in 2012 and 81% reported voting for a Republican Senate candidate.

…

Based on these results, nominating libertarian candidates would be unlikely to improve the Republican Party’s performance among younger voters because these voters are much more likely to be liberals than libertarians and because the vast majority of those who do hold libertarian views already identify with the Republican Party and vote for Republican candidates. In order to increase their party’s appeal to younger Americans, Republicans would need to nominate candidates who are considerably more liberal on both economic and cultural issues than the party’s recent presidential nominees or the vast majority of its current congressional candidates.

One of the most important reasons why the libertarian philosophy holds little appeal for most younger voters is that a disproportionate share of voters under the age of 30 are nonwhite. According to the 2012 ANES, nonwhites made up 40% of voters under the age of 30 compared with 25% of voters age 30 and older. Moreover, the nonwhite share of younger voters is almost certain to increase over the next several election cycles based on the racial composition of the age cohorts that will be entering the electorate in the future.

The libertarian philosophy of limited government holds very little appeal to nonwhite voters in general, and it holds even less appeal to younger nonwhite voters. Only 4% of nonwhite voters under the age of 30 were classified as libertarians compared with 23% of white voters under the age of 30. In contrast, 69% of younger nonwhite voters were classified as consistent or moderate liberals compared with 49% of younger white voters. These results suggest that the limited appeal of libertarian ideas to younger voters is likely to diminish further over time as the nonwhite share of this age group continues to grow.

Basically, the GOP is still in a very difficult position. Rand Paul won’t help them, and younger whites won’t save them, either.

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by tristero

Can we all agree that letting a 9-year old fire an Uzi is a really nutty idea?

Actually, no we can’t:

A Nevada gun range today defended having children fire automatic weapons despite the fatal accident at a nearby shooting range that occurred when a 9-year-old girl was unable to control the powerful recoil of an Uzi she was shooting.

Firing an automatic weapon teaches children the difference between their video games and the real thing, Bill Regenhardt, spokesman for The Range 702, told ABC News.

“It’s an eye opener for them to see the difference: this is not a toy, this is not a plastic Wii gun. It’s heavy, you have to really be mindful of what it does… A lot of times it’s an eye opener for the parents as well,” Regenhardt said.

For the most part, Regenhardt says that after their first time with automatic weapons, children get hooked.

“The reaction is, ‘I’d like to do this again, I’d really like to do this again,'” he said. From there, they encourage the children to take classes.

Granted, there are a lot of individuals in our species, and statistically it makes sense that a small fraction of them will be both bats hit bonkers and unspeakably amoral opportunists, like the person quoted above). What makes no sense at all is that this madness is reported as if it were just one more point of view without even a token quote from anyone in the reality-based community.

The problems’s not that people are crazy; some people always are. It’s that crazy people – Tea Partiers, creationists, and people who give  9 year olds weapons of mass destruction to play with –  are treated by the media as if their opinions are sane.

UDATE: Sigh.

Lol ‘o the day

by digby

John Dean takes a fresh look at Watergate in ‘Nixon Defense’ http://t.co/LybO43QZ5C Total horseshit @JohnWDean planned the break-in— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) August 27, 2014

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Third time’s a charm?

by digby

After the 2012 election a friend of mine insisted that the likely GOP nominee in 2016 would be …. Mitt Romney.  He said it was simply because he knew how to do it. I thought he was nuts.

Maybe not so nuts after all :

The day after Mitt Romney opened the door to another possible presidential run, a new poll shows he has a huge lead among likely 2016 Iowa Republican caucus voters.

According to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Wednesday, 35 percent of likely GOP caucus voters would vote for the 2012 GOP nominee in 2016. When Romney’s name was added to the pool, no other candidate received double-digit votes.

The survey comes as rumors have begun to swirl about a potential Romney bid for president in 2016. After months of insisting that he will not run again, the former Massachusetts governor on Tuesday acknowledged that “circumstances can change.”

Why not? It’s not as if they have anyone better …

Dispatch from torture nation: Cattle prod edition

by digby

Another citizen killed with a taser.  For being too tired to walk:

A Georgia man died after police shocked him with a Taser as many as 13 times because he said he was too tired to walk due to a foot chase, his attorney said this week.

At a press conference on Tuesday, attorney Chris Stewart said that police records showed that East Point officers had discharged their Tasers 13 times to make Gregory Towns, who was handcuffed, get up and walk.

“This is a direct violation of their own rules,” Stewart explained, according to WSB-TV. “You cannot use a Taser to escort or prod a subject.”

“They used their Tasers as a cattle prod on Mr. Towns.”

Stewart said that he pieced together what led up to Towns’ April 11 death using official city records and eyewitness accounts.

“He wasn’t cursing. He wasn’t being abusive. He was saying, ‘I’m tired,’” the attorney pointed out.

Taser logs showed that Sgt. Marcus Eberhart fired his Taser 10 times, and officer Howard Weems pulled the trigger three times. However, the logs did not indicate how many times the Taser made contact with Towns.

In all, records indicated a total shock time of 47 seconds. Stewart called the situation “indefensible.”

Autopsy results obtained by WSB-TV showed that Towns’ death was ruled a homicide because the Taser shocks — combined with physical activity and heart disease — contributed to his death.

Not that this has elicited even the slightest reconsideration of the use of these torture devices:

But Police Benevolent Association lawyers representing Weems continued to insist that the officer’s actions did not cause Towns to die.

Attorney Dale Preiser issued a statement saying that the “use of drive stun to gain compliance is permitted under federal and Georgia law.”

I don’t think that’s been fully litigated actually. And sadly, I’m fairly sure that when it is, the result will not be good. (Read this op-ed by constitutional law professor Erwin Chemerinsky in today’s NY Times to see why I say that.)

Do we, as a nation, believe it’s a good idea to allow torture to gain compliance? Because that’s what this is.

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