Apparently, you’re just screwed. I would imagine this is no different than anywhere else:
One of the little-noticed side effects of New York’s long, failed experiment in arresting huge numbers of people on minor charges is a tidal wave of erroneous and incomplete information that has polluted literally millions of electronic files, in ways that make innocent people look like criminals.
The same city and state agencies that caused the problem — including the NYPD, the Office of Court Administration, the district attorneys, the state Legislature and the Dept. of Criminal Justice Services — now have a political and moral obligation to fix the mess they made.
Anybody who’s seen police dramas on television knows the phrase “rap sheet” (an abbreviation for Record of Arrest and Prosecution), the official summary of a person’s encounters with the justice system. In real life, unlike on TV, information often gets placed on a person’s rap sheet that is outdated, incomplete or just plain wrong — and under current rules, the burden of discovering and correcting the errors falls almost entirely on the person whose life has been turned upside down by the mistakes.
And you thought cleaning up a credit report was frustrating?
To understand the dimensions of the crisis, check out citylimits.org/investigations, where the nonprofit news website City Limits just published the findings of a group of investigative reporters from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
In one case, a woman arrested for shoplifting in Poughkeepsie 20 years ago turned her life around and began working toward a Master’s degree at an Ivy League university — only to discover that her dream of teaching in New York City schools is at risk because her rap sheet erroneously shows no resolution of the case.
In reality, she’d been to court and agreed to a deal in which the record would be sealed after completing a sentence of community service (which she performed). Multiple trips to Dutchess County to correct the file have not resolved the issue because in most agencies there’s nobody specifically in charge of fixing rap sheet errors.
That’s one of the most benign examples. And this sort of thing is going to get a lot worse as all records of one’s life will travel with you forever nowadays. There will never be a way for someone to be a Don Draper and reinvent himself, leaving his whole past behind again. It would be impossible. And that’s a new thing in America. And that was one of our big selling points: you didn’t have to be what your were born into. But what does one do when the information that’s out there is wrong? In this case you can appeal to the government to fix it although that seems to be thankless task. But what about all the other crap that’s out there about all of us?
Privacy is one of the major issues of our time and we are really confused about what it means, where to draw the lines and who should be able to decide what’s private and what isn’t. I don’t know how we’ll sort it out. I do know that humans cannot live in a glass bubble with no privacy whatsoever. We are animals who have to be able to hide from time to time.
I wrote a piece for Salon today about the administration and the Democrats’ slow uptake about what they are dealing with with the modern Republican party:
In a piece published earlier this week, Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine conducted an exit interview with Dan Pfeiffer, a top presidential advisor who’s been with him since the 2008 campaign. He has a lot of interesting insights into the political battles of the past 6 years, but this revelation is particularly fascinating in light of the relationship the administration has had with the progressive base of the party:
The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans—or else, by staking out obviously reasonable stances, force them to moderate or be exposed as extreme and unyielding. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false, and that, in Pfeiffer’s words, “what drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.”
Pfeiffer is correct. And it’s exactly what political activists who aren’t in that town had been saying for years. Despite the idealism of the campaign and the genuine excitement and emotion about President Obama, some progressives were queasy about all these promises of “transpartisan” comity, knowing as they did that it was highly unlikely that any president could single-handedly change this structure much less one who so offended a great swathe of the GOP base. They did not understand how anyone couldn’t see that the modern Republican Party had gone insane and that every incentive and structural political edifice out there made it impossible for them not to be insane.
Progressives knew there was no margin in trying to appease Republicans and that all attempts to try merely moved the political center further to the right. That had been the pattern since the 90s when the Republicans were crazy enough to detonate the nuclear option of impeachment over illicit sex when the president only had two years left on his term. They followed that up by unapologetically using threats and every lever of political power they had, including the Supreme Court, to install George W. Bush even though he’d lost the popular vote in the country. They went to war with a nation that hadn’t attacked us out of sheer opportunism. And yet it took Boehner not being able to deliver on Simpson-Bowles to convince them that maybe these people weren’t quite operating in good faith?
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, suggested Tuesday that the reason Republicans wrote an open-letter to Iran is due to the White House’s resistance to congressional involvement in ongoing nuclear talks.
Corker said the idea originated from a Senate Democrat he spoke to early Tuesday about the negotiations.
“Some of this is pushback because of the administration taking the position that it’s taken. Again, that is someone else’s observation,” Corker told reporters. “The fact that the administration has pushed back on Congress having any role, especially on the congressionally mandated sanctions and issuing a veto threat at a very common-sense approach.”
Corker introduced a bill with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) several weeks ago that would allow Congress 60 days to review any nuclear deal struck with Iran before its implementation, but the White House immediately issued a veto threat.
Gosh I wonder who the Democrat who suggested the idea could be? Surely, not the same one who sponsored the bill with him and was revealed just days earlier to be imminently indicted on corruption charges?
Officer Sean Kenney had shot two people in less than five months, and even though they had both died, he was still patrolling Vallejo, California, on Oct. 24, 2012, when he responded to a call about a domestic disturbance.
The report came in after neighbors heard a commotion in Jeremiah Moore’s front yard at around 1 a.m. Marvin Clouse, who lived next door, went outside to see what was going on. Jaime Alvarado, who lived across the street, looked out his window.
Moore, who was white, was a friendly neighbor. He was autistic, his family said. He lived with his boyfriend Jason Jessie and the two of them fixed up old cars, which sat parked on their front lawn. The garage was packed with antiques and vintage electronics that Jessie spruced up and sold on eBay. One of the items he kept in the garage, Clouse said, was a 1920s-era .22-caliber rifle.
In recent months, neighbors had noticed that the couple had started acting strange — paranoid rants, extravagant conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. They had started taking peyote and other heavy drugs, Clouse said.
“They were really nice guys, but they had a mental breakdown,” said Clouse.
Moore and Jessie were in their front yard, naked, smashing their cars. Clouse pulled out his phone to record what he was seeing. It was dark outside, so you can’t see anything in the video, but the audio is clear. “You start the fire,” Jessie told Moore. Moore went back inside the house and within minutes smoke was rising from out the back of the house. By now, police had received multiple calls about the disturbance. Patrol cars pulled up and officers stepped out.
“And within about 30 seconds they shot Jeremiah,” Clouse said.
There was a volley of several gunshots at first. Then a pause of a few seconds. Then “Show me your hands!” Then two more shots.
There are differing accounts about what happened then but the witnesses say the officer got nervous when the mentally ill man started shaking and acting agitated and shot him. The police have given differing accounts saying that someone had a shotgun. One thing is not ins dispute. This officer killed 3 people in different incidents within 21 days and was rewarded with a promotion. You have to assume they think it’s all in a day’s work.
“What I do, basically, is that I’ve got iPads, and I play around,” Graham explained. “But I don’t e-mail. I’ve tried not to have a system where I can just say the first dumb thing that comes to my mind. I’ve always been concerned. I can get texts, and I call you back, if I want. I get a text, and I respond not by sending you a text, but calling you if I think what you asked is worthy enough for me calling you. I’m not being arrogant, but I’m trying to jealously guard myself in terms of being able to think through problems and not engage in chat all day. I’ve had a chance to kind of carve out some time for myself not responding to every 15-second crisis.”
See, people who use that crazy newfangled email thing are thoughtless fools who just throw out the first thing that leaps to their minds.
Very thoughtful. Here’s a thoughtful one he didn’t delete:
President Obama says he wants to destroy ISIL but I don’t think anyone believes him. His actions are not consistent with his statements.
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) February 12, 2015
Or these:
This latest episode once again shows that under President Obama’s leadership it is better to be America’s enemy than her friend. #Ukraine
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) February 9, 2015
President Obama’s continual weakness in the face of aggression is making the world a more dangerous place.
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) February 9, 2015
That doesn’t include the shrieking about how everyone is coming to kill us all in our beds. And I do mean everyone — Iran, ISIL, North Korea, Russia, China, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and more. Every last one of them are planning to invade “the Homeland” and KILL US ALL!!!!
The stuff he routinely puts out in public is so hysterical and silly, I honestly cannot imagine what it is he’s afraid will get out unless he has a weird compulsion to admit to being a huge fan of Taylor Swift or is afraid that his grocery store list will reveal that he eats an unhealthy amount of Cherry Garcia.
Some might call that puerile. Embarrassing for a US Senator (or anyone other than a 14 year old One Direction fan…). But on the right this is what they call manliness.
“Joe Biden, as Barack Obama’s own secretary of defense has said, has been wrong about nearly every foreign policy and national security decision in the last 40 years,” Cotton said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in a reference to former Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who ripped Biden in a tell-all memoir after leaving office.
“Moreover, if Joe Biden respects the dignity of the institution of the Senate he should be insisting that the president submit any deal to approval of the Senate, which is exactly what he did on numerous deals during his time in Senate,” Cotton said.
On Monday, the freshman senator from Arkansas, along with 46 other Republican senators, signed a letter to top Iranian leaders informing them that any nuclear deal they reach with President Obama would be “nothing more than an executive agreement” that would likely be tossed out when a new president takes office.
Biden released a strongly worded statement on Monday night, saying that the letter “is beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.”
Obama Campaign Alumni–Led “270 Strategies” Form Astroturf Group to Promote TPP
by Gaius Publius
I want to lead this piece with something buried in the middle of it. The perp in the story is “270 Strategies” (my emphasis everywhere):
270 Strategies, is the Democratic-aligned PR firm behind Democrat-in-name-only Ro Khanna’s congressional campaign against Mike Honda (CA-17) and Educators for Excellence, a Gates-funded front group
270 Strategies — your takeaway is that they’re known-bad. Now the story.
The TPP wars are heating up, and the lobbyist money is flowing. The latest effort attempts to brand TPP as “progressive” instead of “neoliberal” — “neoliberal” being an obvious-by-now offshoot of the kind of pre-FDR “liberalism” that meant “privatized and controlled by the owners of wealth.” (That’s the sense of “liberal,” by the way, in which Hayek, Friedman and Clinton are “liberals” alike — all government disablers; all wealth enablers. That definition of “liberalism” goes back to the 1700s.)
Obama Campaign Alumni Form New Astroturf Group to Promote TPP
Obama campaign alumni Mitch Stewart, the Battleground States Director for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and Lydia Tran, the former National Press Secretary for Organizing for America, just launched a new astroturf campaign to promote the fast-track authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Their efforts will focus on Oregon and Washington at first because they are both export-heavy states–and because Ron Wyden (D-OR) is the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee [and a TPP proponent].
Their firm, 270 Strategies, is the Democratic-aligned PR firm behind Democrat-in-name-only Ro Khanna’s congressional campaign against Mike Honda (CA-17) and Educators for Excellence, a Gates-funded front group that advocates against teacher tenure and for teacher evaluation systems that rely on the use of standardized test scores.
From the quoted “Progressive Coalition” press release (read the rest at the link above):
With Congress set to debate concrete measures for strengthening the American economy this year, the Progressive Coalition for American Jobs (PCAJ) is launching today to pave the way to trade promotion [Fast Track] authority for President Obama and to help pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership. PCAJ is kicking things off with a significant digital advertising effort in Oregon and Washington State and will expand to other key states in weeks to come.
PCAJ will bring together progressive voices across the activist, advocacy, and business communities to share information about the benefits of this groundbreaking trade agreement—which is expected to support hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States.
Mitch Stewart, Battleground States Director for the 2012 Obama for America Campaign, and his fellow partner at 270 Strategies Lydia Tran, are coordinating the public launch and will provide strategic counsel for the coalition.
Deconstruction:
“measures for strengthening the American economy” — “measures for strengthening global corporate bottom lines“.
“advertising effort in Oregon and Washington State” — “work to protect the reputation of our ‘progressive’ pro-TPP ally, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden“.
“progressive voices” — “voices of progressively-branded neoliberals you haven’t figured out yet“.
“groundbreaking” — “forward-looking” — as in “progress” and “progressive” — you know, like you.
“expected to support hundreds of thousands of new jobs” — “just like NAFTA, but with jobs“.
“Obama for America” — once his campaign organization, currently the Obama-controlled policy marketing group, a pretend bottom-up outfit for promoting the Obama agenda.
Here’s the translated version:
With Congress set to debate concrete measures for strengthening global corporate bottom lines this year, the Progressive Coalition for American Jobs (PCAJ) is launching today to pave the way to trade promotion [Fast Track] authority for President Obama and to help pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership. PCAJ is kicking things off with a significant digital advertising effort in Oregon and Washington State to protect the reputation of our ‘progressive’ pro-TPP ally, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and will expand to other key states in weeks to come.
PCAJ will bring together voices of progressively-branded neoliberals you haven’t figured out yet across the activist, advocacy, and business communities to share information about the benefits of this “forward-looking” (you know, like you) trade agreement—which is expected to do what NAFTA did, but with jobs in the United States.
Mitch Stewart, Battleground States Director for the Obama-controlled policy marketing group, and his fellow partner at 270 Strategies Lydia Tran, are coordinating the public launch and will provide strategic counsel for the coalition.
Got it now? Every word a true one, especially the “NAFTA, but with jobs” part. NAFTA was never intended to create jobs; just profit. None of this is snark; just factual. The purpose of pre-FDR “liberalism” and post-New Deal “neoliberalism” — both — is to strengthen the profits of the private sector by getting government out of the way. Only FDR’s New Deal allowed a strong role for government in the economy. If those ideas make sense to you (and if you watched Clinton and Obama, they should), then the translation should make sense as well.
270 Strategies Is a Name to Avoid
Someone spawned that group, 270 Strategies, set it up, funded it, guides it, and is clearly using it to create the most confusing, focus-tested TPP branding the “left” will swallow. And of course, the linkage to Obama and OFA are important, since if Obama didn’t want TPP badly, we wouldn’t be bothering our heads about it. Again, more at the link. The diarist’s last sentence makes an excellent bottom line.
My own bottom line is up top — remember the name, 270 Strategies. On this basis alone, they’re known-bad. From a link in the dKos diary, here are some of the entities on their client list:
Cory Booker for Senate (“Stop Being Mean to Bain“) McAuliffe for Governor (longtime Clinton “liberal”) Peers (support group for Uber and the like) Ready for Hillary (natch) Ro Khanna (Obama “grad” who ran against Mike Honda) Educators 4 Excellence (a Gates “ed reform” group)
Care to bet that Cory Booker and Terry McAuliffe could be among those “progressively-branded neoliberals” (my translated phrasing) who will “share information” in favor of TPP? Maddow really likes Booker, despite moments like this:
So a question — what are Planned Parenthood and SEIU doing on this client list? After all, any money paid to 270 Strategies funds their operation, right? And that operation is no friend of actual progressives, right?
Just a thought.
(Speaking of Maddow, if anyone has a link from any nighttime MSNBC host covering TPP, please send it. All I see is silence, and that’s a tell in itself.)
If you have been following the travails of states under “small government” Republican rule, this will sound familiar. After 59 percent of voters in the city of Denton, Texas voted on November 4 to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in their town, well, Republican lawmakers in Austin are rethinking that whole “bringing democracy closer to the people” thing. Representative Phil King (R) of Weatherford has introduced two bills to prohibit city voters from controlling what happens within their own borders.
King, who per the Center for Media and Democracy sits on the executive board of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is leading the charge to restrict pesky Texas citizens from exercising democracy when it interferes with the oil and gas bidness:
According to The New York Times, eight states led by Republicans have prohibited municipalities from passing paid sick day legislation in just the past two years. Other such preemption laws have barred cities from raising the minimum wage and regulating the activities of landlords. This year, Arkansas passed a law that blocks a city’s ability to pass anti-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people, and bills introduced in six states this session would follow Arkansas’ lead.
Many industries, including, most prominently, the restaurant industry and oil and gas interests, are working together this year through ALEC, which generates “model” legislation that advances the interests of its corporate members throughout state legislatures. Rep. King is serving as ALEC’s national chair this year and introduced his two preemption bills with Denton’s fracking ban in mind.
King denied that his role in ALEC had anything to do with the introduction of his preemption bills and said the bills were not model legislation created by ALEC. The organization’s corporate funders have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to King over the years.
Two other bills filed in Austin this session would go even further than King’s in gutting local regulatory power: One would prevent any city or county in Texas from banning fracking, and another would effectively kill home rule authority (a city’s ability to pass laws to govern itself) so that cities cannot pass local ordinances.
This pattern is familiar. Here in Asheville, NC, former state Representative Tim Moffitt, also a former ALEC board member (you’re welcome), attempted to gain state control of the city’s water system through legislative action after 85 percent of city voters apposed the move in a 2012 referendum. Unable to win elections in several areas of North Carolina, Republican state lawmakers plan to imposed redistricting plans on local governments to change how officials are elected:
The fractious debate over a possible nuclear deal with Iran escalated on Monday as 47 Republican senators warned Iran against making an agreement with President Obama and the White House accused them of undercutting foreign policy.
In an exceedingly rare direct congressional intervention into diplomatic negotiations, the Republicans sent an open letter addressed to “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” declaring that any agreement could be reversed by the next president “with the stroke of a pen.”
The letter appeared aimed at unraveling an agreement even as negotiators grow close to reaching it. Mr. Obama, working with leaders of five other world powers, argues that the emerging agreement would be the best way to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb, while critics from both parties contend that it would be a dangerous charade that would still leave Iran with the opportunity to eventually build weapons that could destroy Israel or other foes.
Exactly five years ago this week, as the Congressional debate over the Affordable Care Act was coming to its eventual conclusion, Rush Limbaugh made a bold statement about his future as a resident of the United State of America.
Speaking to a caller who expressed concerns about the impact of Obamacare on the U.S. healthcare system, Limbaugh said, “If this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented, I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.”
