Month: April 2015

“Like being in a bad marriage”
by Tom Sullivan

Something was bound to give. It’s not as if Baltimore didn’t have a reputation for brutal policing, as Digby noted last night. The Baltimore Sun investigation, “Undue Force,” was from just last fall. As Tavis Smiley asked Bill O’Reilly two weeks ago in the wake of recent deaths of black men at the hands of police, “How many isolated incidents equal a pattern?” After Freddie Gray died from mysterious injuries sustained under police custody in Baltimore days later, his funeral yesterday finally set fire to fuel that was tinder-dry:

After almost two weeks of tension over the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore descended into chaos Monday.

Roaming gangs of mostly young men clashed with police in the streets, seriously injuring officers; tore open businesses; and looted their stocks. Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard, and state police requested as many as 5,000 reinforcements from neighboring states.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake instituted a weeklong citywide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. starting Tuesday.

Rawlings-Blake called the rioting and destruction “idiotic.”

“This isn’t a white-black issue,” Gray family attorney William Murphy told a crowd last night. “This is an issue of how do we treat each other as human beings.” He set the rioting against the backdrop of community oppression from the days of slavery to Sundown towns to the Civil Rights era to a war on drugs that left America with more of its citizens imprisoned than any other country in the world. Murphy concluded:

“Well, we’ve spoken tonight. We’ve spoken with our feet, with our words, and most of all, with our hearts. We live here. We love it here. It’s not perfect. It’s like being in a bad marriage. But we’re not interested in a divorce. We’re willing to go into counseling with anybody that wants to make it right. But we love this city, and we’re here to work as hard as we can and as long as we can until this problem is solved.”

In predictable fashion, the usual media suspects will focus on the looters, on the rocks and bottles, and ignore what sent angry citizens into the streets across the country — in Ferguson, in New York, in North Charleston, and now in Baltimore.

Less predictably, as protests broke out over the weekend,
Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos, son of team owner Peter Angelos, called for due process to be completed before judging the police involved. But he set the protests in a broader context:

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

In some more-affluent, more-privileged communities, the attitude seems to be “let them eat Freedom.” But for those paying closer attention, it’s beginning to feel like 1968 again: Baltimore, Washington, Chicago. That’s not a good feeling.

UPDATE:: Don’t miss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ commentary on the situation in Baltimore.

Baltimore troubles we ignored

by digby

The local press did their job. Nobody cared apparently:

The city has paid about $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits claiming that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects. One hidden cost: The perception that officers are violent can poison the relationship between residents and police…

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.

Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims — if charges were filed at all. In an incident that drew headlines recently, charges against a South Baltimore man were dropped after a video showed an officer repeatedly punching him — a beating that led the police commissioner to say he was “shocked.”

Such beatings, in which the victims are most often African-Americans, carry a hefty cost. They can poison relationships between police and the community, limiting cooperation in the fight against crime, the mayor and police officials say. They also divert money in the city budget — the $5.7 million in taxpayer funds paid out since January 2011 would cover the price of a state-of-the-art rec center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds. And that doesn’t count the $5.8 million spent by the city on legal fees to defend these claims brought against police.

And then Freddie Gray…

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It ain’t Vegas

by digby

I guess you can’t call them a No-tell Motel:

City police have arrested four people staying at the Motel 6 on Jefferson Boulevard as a result of the hotel chain’s agreement to provide police with a daily guest list, Mayor Scott Avedisian said Tuesday.

The names of Motel 6 guests, which police then check for outstanding warrants, is one of five steps Motel 6 corporate managers agreed to take in response to a string of high-profile incidents and concerns the establishment was becoming a haven for passing criminals.

The other measures listed in an agreement Motel 6 executives signed Tuesday include raising the minimum age to rent a room from 18 years old to 21, hiring a police detail every night, sharing their national “do not rent list” with police and conducting regular training, including on how to spot human trafficking.

“We know everyone who is staying in the hotel tonight,” Avedisian said in a phone interview after a meeting with Motel 6 executives that also included Warwick police chief Col. Stephen M. McCartney and Seekonk, Mass., Town Administrator Shawn E. Cadime.

As of now, guests who check-in at Warwick’s Motel 6 will not be told their names are on a list that goes to the police station every night.

This sort of thing happens under the “third party doctrine” which basically says that if you give your information to a motel (or cell phone provider) they pretty much own it and can give it to authorities without your permission or a warrant. But hey, if you don’t want to have your information handed over to the police authorities don’t stay in hotels or use a cell phone. No biggie.

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Accountability free politics

by digby

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written an epic piece for the American Prospect in which they look at the question of why Republicans don’t pay for for their extremism. One little piece of it:

Whatever the form of participation—voting, working for candidates, contributing to campaigns—the GOP base does more of it than any other group. At the same time, the ideological distance between the party’s most active voters and the rest of the party’s electorate is greater on the GOP side than the Democratic side. Democratic activists are moderate as well as liberal (and occasionally even conservative). Republican activists are much more consistently conservative, even compared with other elements of the GOP electoral coalition.

Nonetheless, the imbalance in prevalence and intensity between self-identified liberals and self-identified conservatives hasn’t changed much in 35 years—even as the role of the Republican base in American politics has changed dramatically. Something has happened that has given that base a greater weight and a greater focus on “Washington” as the central threat to American society.

Here, we need to turn our attention from the GOP’s most committed voters to the organized forces that have jet-propelled the GOP’s rightward trip. Even the most informed and active voters take their cues from organizations and elite figures they trust. (Indeed, there’s strong evidence that such voters are most likely to process information through an ideological lens.) The far right has built precisely the kind of organizations needed to turn diffuse and generalized support into focused activity on behalf of increasingly extreme candidates.

Those organized forces have two key elements: polarizing right-wing media and efforts by business and the very wealthy to backstop and bankroll GOP politics. Pundits like to point to surface similarities between partisan journalists on the left and right, but the differences in scale and organization are profound. The conservative side is massive; describing its counterpart on the left as modest would be an act of true generosity.

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At the heart of the conservative outrage industry, of course, is Fox News. Fox’s role as an ideological platform is unparalleled in modern American history. Its leading hosts reach audiences that dwarf their competitors’. The network plays a dominant role for its audience that is unique. And Fox is also distinguished by extraordinarily tight connections to the Republican Party—linkages, again, that have no parallel among Democrats.

What’s most remarkable is that Fox is just the beginning. The other citadel of the conservative media empire is talk radio, and if cable news looks like a lopsided teeter-totter, talk radio is that teeter-totter with a 16-ton weight attached to the right-hand side. Conservative on-air minutes outnumber liberal ones by a ratio of at least 10 to 1, and all of the major nationally syndicated shows are conservative. Just the top three have a combined weekly audience of more than 30 million. Moreover, the number of talk radio stations has tripled in the last 15 years.

The impact of all this is difficult to calculate. After all, Republicans were moving right even before Fox came on the scene, and much of Fox’s audience consists of people who already have strong political views. Even so, a recent, innovative study by scholars at Emory and Stanford finds that Fox News exposure added 1.6 points to George W. Bush’s vote in the 2000 election—more than enough to cost Al Gore the presidency. And this excludes the impact of talk radio and Fox’s further expansion since 2000. Arguably, however, the bigger impact of conservative media is to increase and focus intensity within the Republican base, sending compelling messages that build audience trust while insulating that audience from contrary information.

Flanking conservative media is a vastly expanded political infrastructure advancing a right-wing economic agenda and rewarding politicians who maintain fealty to the cause. Some analysts have stressed divisions between Establishment and Tea Party wings. But while differing over tactics and a handful of issues, the two large networks dominating GOP finances—the Chamber of Commerce and the Karl Rove–led network, on the one hand, and the Koch brothers network, on the other—overlap and agree far more than they conflict. These networks have coordinated their efforts in recent general elections and now provide organizational and financial support on a scale that makes them virtual political parties in their own right. The Koch network alone has announced plans to raise nearly $1 billion for the 2016 elections.

In short, the Republican base generates an exceptionally strong gravitational pull, and that pull takes politicians much farther from the electoral center than do the comparatively weak forces on the left of the Democratic Party.

This is what drives me nuts about the mainstream media. They follow this right wing infrastructure as if its legitimate and in the process legitimize it. And this:

[T]he GOP has become, in the apt words of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, “an insurgent outlier in American politics”—a party willing to tear down governance to gain larger majorities in government.

Appropriately for a party increasingly geared not to governing but to making governance impossible, the two leaders of this transformation were not in the White House but in Congress: Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell. Gingrich liked to describe himself as a “transformative figure”—and he was. His political genius was to sense that if voter anxieties and anger could be directed at government and the majority party that ostensibly ran it, power would come. Achieving this goal required simultaneously ratcheting up dysfunction and disgust while more sharply distinguishing the GOP as the anti-government party.

Gingrich and his allies adopted a posture of pure confrontation. The goal was to drag the Democrats into the mud, and if some mud got on the Republicans, well, they were the minority and, besides, they were not the party of Washington. In 1988, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich described a “civil war” with liberals that had to be fought “with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.” He meant it.

Fatefully, Gingrich also went to war with moderate Republicans. (His faction liked to joke that only two groups were against them: Democrats and Republicans.) He led a rebellion against the first Bush administration’s efforts to reach across the aisle, hobbling the president’s 1992 re-election campaign before it had even started. Once the elder Bush was out of the White House, it became even easier to pursue a strategy of uncompromising opposition and scandal-mongering. Obstruction and vituperation became a twofer. With a Democratic president, the Republican assault not only weakened an opponent but promoted the sentiment that politics and governance were distasteful. Association with “Washington” became increasingly toxic, and the Democrats were the party of Washington.

The second phase of Republicans’ anti-Washington strategy was engineered primarily by Mitch McConnell. Personally devoid of mass appeal, McConnell nonetheless has a rare understanding of the American voter. Early on in his leadership, he recognized that American political institutions create a unique challenge for voters. The complexity and opacity of the process—in which each policy initiative faces a grueling journey through multiple institutions that can easily turn into a death march—make it difficult to know how to attribute responsibility. Even reasonably attentive voters face a bewildering task of sorting out blame and credit.

McConnell fully embraced this opportunity after 2008. He organized the GOP caucus in a parliamentary fashion and worked to prevent individual party members from accepting compromise: “If [Obama] was for it,” “moderate” Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” Without Republican willingness to “play,” the imprimatur of bipartisanship was unavailable. Republicans could make the Democrats’ policy initiatives look partisan to voters and produce a pattern of gridlock and dysfunction that soured voters on government—and the party of government. American institutions, McConnell knew, gave Republicans a lot of capacity to impede governance without a lot of accountability.

On occasions, Republicans have overplayed their hand, as they did with the government shutdowns of 1995, the impeachment of Clinton in 1998, and the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011. But the GOP has escaped blame for the general decline of effective government. What voters get is a sense that the system is a mess and Washington can do little about pressing problems. If voters place blame anywhere, it is as likely as not to fall on the pro- rather than the anti-government party, and on the president, who is viewed as the country’s leader even if he has no capacity to pass laws or effectively promote bipartisanship when the GOP refuses to reciprocate.

Thus Judis is right to note that many moderately inclined Americans are now open to an anti-government message, fueled by their completely understandable distaste for contemporary Washington. This is not, however, because these voters have become more conservative. It reflects the GOP’s success in simultaneously activating and exploiting voter disgust. The deeper message of 2014 is that a radical GOP first drove government into the ditch, generating historically low approval ratings for Congress, and then reaped the benefits.

In short, Republicans have found a serious flaw in the code of American democracy. What they have learned is that our distinctive political system—abetted by often-feckless news media—gives an extreme anti-government party with a willingness to cripple governance an enormous edge. Republicans have increasingly united two potent forms of anti-statism: ideological and tactical. And they have found that the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

And yes, too many Democrats play along or are too weak to confront this dynamic. The Big Money Boyz benefit and they pass on many of those benefits to political elites. But this is a strategy that comes from the right and it is enabled and advanced by the mainstream media which seems to be completely clueless.

There’s a lot more at the link. I encourage you to read the whole thing. I’ll be revisiting it for sure.

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Right wing flights of fancy. (Yo journalists, this is a thing)

by digby

Ok, so we have two excellent examples in the last few days of right wing operatives using the same rationale for mudslinging without proof: “I’m just asking questions, I’m not an investigator. The ball is in the media’s court.” And like the good little lapdogs they are too many members of the press go haring off chasing the ball.

First example is, of course, “Clinton Cash” author Peter Shweizer:

SCHWEIZER: No, we don’t have direct evidence. But it warrants further investigation because, again, George, this is part of the broader pattern. You either have to come to the conclusion that these are all coincidences or something else is afoot.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that — that is that — the Clintons do say it’s a coincidence. As they say, you have produced no evidence. And I still haven’t heard any direct evidence and you just said you had no evidence that she intervened here.

Here’s Paul Hinderaker on the ridiculous bogus story of Harry Reid being beaten up by Mafia thugs:

TPM: You write that you checked Pfeifer out “to the extent reasonably possible.” How did you vet him?

Hinderaker: Basically online. As I said in my post, I spent a lot of time with the guy on the telephone. And you know, he was consistent and seemingly sincere. I checked him out online, he didn’t come up in any negative way under either of those names — obviously, having two names is odd.

But as I wrote in the post, just Googling Easton Elliot and Lawrence Pfeifer turned up information that tended to confirm how he described himself.

The point I kept making over and over again, is that to really investigate this, you’ve gotta be on the ground and you’ve gotta be an investigator.

And you’ve called for an investigation of Reid’s injury, right?

Exactly, right.

And what kind of investigation? What would that look like? An actual police investigation? Could you describe that?

Well [laughs]. I can describe aspects of it, I suppose. I’m not an investigator. I don’t know all the techniques that could be available to investigative reporters, even. But, I mean, there are obvious omissions in we know in this incident.

See, they’re just asking questions. There’s no character assassination or innuendo involved at all.

Finally, one can’t help but go back to one of the more famous of these flights of fancy which I posted the other day. It was Peggy Noonan wondering why Bill Clinton would return a little six year old boy to his father:

The great unanswered question of course is: What was driving Mr. Clinton? What made him do such a thing? What accounts for his commitment in this case? Concern for the father? But such concern is wholly out of character for this president; he showed no such concern for parents at Waco or when he freed the Puerto Rican terrorists. Concern for his vision of the rule of law? But Mr. Clinton views the law as a thing to suit his purposes or a thing to get around.

Why did he do this thing? He will no doubt never say, a pliant press will never push him on it, and in any case if they did who would expect him to speak with candor and honesty? Absent the knowledge of what happened in this great public policy question, the mind inevitably wonders.

Was it fear of Fidel Castro — fear that the dictator will unleash another flood of refugees, like the Mariel boatlift of 1980? Mr. Clinton would take that seriously, because he lost his gubernatorial election that year after he agreed to house some of the Cubans. In Bill Clinton’s universe anything that ever hurt Bill Clinton is bad, and must not be repeated. But such a threat, if it was made, is not a child custody matter but a national security matter, and should be dealt with in national security terms.

Was it another threat from Havana? Was it normalization with Cuba — Mr. Clinton’s lust for a legacy, and Mr. Castro’s insistence that the gift come at a price? If the price was a child, well, that’s a price Mr. Clinton would likely pay. What is a mere child compared with this president’s need to be considered important by history?

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did. Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we’ll find out what really happened.

This irrational bullshit “speculation” is the right’s modus operandi. It’s really not their fault if they keep doing it.  The mainstream media keep jumping on the bandwagon.

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QOTD: Steny Hoyer

by digby

“I’m thankful to all of you for what you do because I think what you do is critically important to what I do and to what our people expect us to do, and that is to understand the issues that confront us and them and make the decisions that help them.”

Was he talking to academic researchers? To his staff? To his fellow congressional representatives?

No. He was talking to a group of lobbyists.

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Highpockets pwned

by digby

This is the funniest thing I’ve heard all year:

No, Harry Reid was not beaten up by his brother, says the man who concocted the false rumor to explain the Senate minority leader’s injuries after an exercise accident months several months ago.

Larry Pfeifer told the Las Vegas Sun that he made up the story after being appalled that conservative blogger John Hinderaker published a rumor that Reid’s injuries occurred as a result of a Mafia enforcer roughing him up.

“It was just so outrageous,” Pfeifer told the Las Vegas Sun. “The fact that someone can say something completely false that can destroy somebody’s life, it’s just wrong. Where’s the moral compass?”

Pfeifer said that he completely fabricated the story in which Reid’s brother, Larry, showed up drunk to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on New Year’s Eve and said he had beaten up a relative.
Pfeifer, whom the Sun describes as a former consultant in the nightclub and entertainment industry, said he thought the episode “would be over in a day and a half.”

Hinderaker said earlier on Laura Ingraham’s show that he had “absolutely no idea” whether the story was factual. “He called me and told me this story. He’s related it consistently. Whether he’s right or not, I don’t know,” he said.

Limbaugh also passed along the story, but stopped short of presenting it as fact. Still, Pfeifer blasted their decision to broadcast it without properly vetting the details or its source.
“They had no problem using a story that had nothing but some guy’s word,” said Pfeifer, who said he used the pseudonym Easton Elliott to spread the tale. “Not one of them knew my real name. I didn’t even give them my phone number.”

Highpockets is my pet name for Hindracker who used to blog under the pseudonym “Hindrocket” which is just so … typical.

Couple of things. First, recall this famous Highpockets quote:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Second, Powerline is the blog that brought then Army lieutenant Tom Cotton to national attention by publishing his op-ed calling for journalists to be jailed.

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Tom Cotton leads the charge on the Patriot Act

by digby

You’ve undoubtedly heard that certain elements of the Patriot Act are scheduled to expire in June. What you may not have heard is that Tom Cotton is leading the charge to renew it — and add more powers while he’s at it.  I wrote about this for Salon over the week-end:

One of the more disturbing quotes of recent days (and that’s saying something) is this one:

Rep. Jim Jordan on whether he backs Corker’s Iran bill: “I want to talk to Tom Cotton. He’s the guy who has the best insight.”
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) April 22, 2015

Obviously, the idea that any insight can be gleaned from the freshman senator — who famously made the Republican caucus look like a bunch of bumbling fools when they signed on to his embarrassing letter to Iran — is the disturbing part of that comment. When I described Cotton as “a leading light on the right in foreign policy and national security,” back in February, I thought I was making a little joke. But this man, who has been in the Senate for about three months, really has become the go-to expert on all things related to foreign boogeymen.

But as Ed Kilgore noted in an interesting article last week, this is about more than just Tom Cotton. It is part of an overall GOP turn backwards on national security, which was signaled pretty clearly in the 2014 midterms.

Kilgore writes:

I didn’t write about this a whole lot in my own book on the 2014 midterms, but did discuss it: towards the end of that cycle Republican Senate candidates—led by Scott Brown, who ran a surprisingly strong race in NH—really started demagoguing about terrorists pouring into the country via “porous” borders or in response to the general surrender-money [sic] tendencies of the Obama administration. And since the elections, I think we are all aware that Republican pols and rank-and-file alike are increasingly more likely to favor a re-invasion of Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.

This has made one of the big developments of the previous couple of years—the emergence of a bipartisan coalition in Congress aimed at curtailing Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) surveillance programs at NSA and elsewhere—very, very fragile.

Personally, I thought that coalition was always pretty fragile since it mostly consisted of about six libertarian cranks and a bunch of liberal Democrats, but it was something. And even more than that, the general revulsion among the public over the way the wars had been conducted under Bush and Cheney and the urgent attention required for domestic affairs in the wake of the financial crisis made national security a weak, second-tier issue for Republicans — a first in the modern era. But it was always only a matter of time before they got their hawkish mojo back, and there is no time better than when the Democrats are likely to be running a woman for president. (As I have written here before, that fits perfectly into their decades-long storyline about “feminized” Democrats that goes all the way back to the era of long-haired hippies.)

Read on to see how Cotton and company are planning their attack.

Blue America sent a letter to its members this morning. This is part of it:

“After much deliberation I opposed the USA Freedom Act because I continue to believe it doesn’t strike the necessary balance between protecting our national security and protecting our 4th Amendment rights. Without question, national security issues are critically important, and I applaud all those who work at the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and others for their dedication to duty and professionalism. We must provide them with the means to gather the information necessary to keep America safe. However, we cannot allow the pursuit of that goal to infringe on the civil liberties that we, as Americans, hold sacred and fought so hard to defend.”

“Yet again we have a clear difference between myself and my opponent in the Democratic primary in NJ-01. Today, Donald Norcross voted in support of the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill that is a surveillance bill disguising itself as a cyber-security bill. This bill gives companies a significant expansion in their ability to monitor customers’ online activities. It allows them to share vaguely defined ‘cyber threat indicators,’ which then automatically go to the NSA. The NSA is then authorized broad law enforcement rights that could stretch beyond cyber-security. This chain of events is a slippery slope. I totally disagree with the structure of this bill. We must stand up for individual privacy. What we have in this bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and if I were in Congress, I would have voted against it like other progressives such as Alan Grayson and Judy Chu.”

The provisions of the Patriot Act which are set to expire in June should not be extended. We don’t know for sure if they will. The USA Freedom Act ultimately died in the Senate when the Democrats who were in the majority at the time added a few safeguards and then couldn’t overcome a filibuster. (Yes, the GOP ultimately filibustered the bill for being too weak …) The Republicans are now in charge and Tom Cotton is working overtime to give the NSA every last item on their wishlist. Perhaps we’ll get lucky and gridlock will work in favor of freedom once again. But I wouldn’t count on it. 
There are simply not enough principled, progressive civil libertarians in congress to stop these abuses. We must elect more of them. Please give what you can to stalwart civil libertarians like Donna Edwards and Alex Law. 

Deprivation of rights under color of law … for tasering

by digby

This could be a big case.  I hope so anyway:

Two former small town police officers in South Carolina should spend at least a year in prison for shocking a mentally disabled woman at least eight times with a Taser without giving her time to follow their orders, federal prosecutors say.

Both Eric Walters and Franklin Brown will be sentenced on federal charges Monday in Florence. The two Marion police officers pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law in October.

Walters was patrolling in Marion early on the morning of April 2013 when he saw 40-year-old Melissa Davis walking out of the yard of a home for sale. He asked her what she was doing, thinking she might have broken into the home, then shocked her with his Taser, according to court papers.

After Davis fell to the ground, Walters ordered her to put her hands behind her back, then shocked her four more times before she could respond, prosecutors said.

By the time Brown responded, Walters had determined Davis did nothing wrong and was removing the Taser probes from her back. Brown noticed one of Davis’ hands had slipped from her improperly applied handcuffs and ordered everyone to move away and shocked Davis again, even though she was not trying to fight or escape, according to court papers.

Brown shocked Davis twice more, then offered to let her go if he could shoot her in the forehead one more time with his Taser, prosecutors said.

Brown told the other officers at the scene he shot Davis with the Taser because he “did not want to touch that nasty (obscenity),” according to his plea agreement.

Both officers are white. Court records did not indicate Davis’ race.

Prosecutors said they agree with federal sentencing guidelines that ask for 12 to 18 months behind bars for Walters and an 18- to 24-month sentence for Brown. The guidelines are tougher for Brown because Davis was in a vulnerable position when he shocked her.

Walters’ lawyer asked for a six-month prison sentence and six months of home detention because he is in poor health after several heart attacks suffered before age 39. The lawyer added that Walters had a good record as an officer before the incident. Brown’s lawyers did not file any motions asking for mercy before the sentencing.

Prosecutors said the officers should have known Davis had a diminished mental state, and a lawsuit filed by her caretaker against the officers and the city of Marion said she was well known around town.

The civil suit said along with the physical pain and suffering from the shocks and their after-effects, Davis also continues to need help to deal with mental anguish from what happened. Her lawsuit is seeking a minimum of nearly $2 million.

The officers originally faced state charges, which were dropped when federal prosecutors took over. At least three officers in South Carolina have been recently charged with shooting unarmed suspects.

The fact is that mentally disabled people are often unable to follow an officer’s orders. As are deaf people or those who are in the midst of a seizure or old people. Sometimes people who are nervous or anxious in the presence of police (kind of like whitecoat anxiety when you’re in the presence of a doctor) can make people behave in ways that police don’t care for and see as disrespect.And in all those cases and more, cops routinely shoot people with electricity to make them behave and often administer electro-shock after they are in custody to deliver some street justice for having failed to show proper respect.

And nobody gets this worse than the mentally ill. Sometimes, there may be no choice. If they are a danger to themselves or others, it might be the best way to quickly de-escalate. But the police most often use these torture weapons gratuitously and unnecessarily, either for their own convenience or out of malice. Maybe a few cases like this will start to change the legal atmosphere that allows it.

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A whole new not-you
by Tom Sullivan

This is how crazy the world is. Designer Adam Harvey’s goal is to make your face unrecognizable by surveillance software:

His CV Dazzle designs for hair and makeup obscure the eyes, bridge of the nose and shape of the head, as well as creating skin tone contrasts and asymmetries. Facial-recognition algorithms function by identifying the layout of facial features and supplying missing info based on assumed facial symmetry. The project demonstrates that a styled “anti-face” can both conceal a person’s identity from facial recognition software (be it the FBI’s or Facebook’s) and cause the software to doubt the presence of a human face, period.

Click through to see some of the wild makeup and hair for foiling surveillance cameras and facial recognition programs. Some of the info in this Raw Story post might be a year old or so old, but it’s new to me. And not surprising. I grew up watching dystopian science fiction movies. Now it feels as if I’m living in one. But would rather not have my eyeballs replaced, thanks.

David Atkins has written here before about how technology will, inevitably, eliminate jobs in The World of Tomorrow as automation takes over. Self-driving cars, etc. The challenge is what to do with people who have become obsolete. In a lengthy article on Big Data turning you into an information source the way the Matrix turns you into a power source, Jacob Silverman writes at Salon:

This situation won’t be completely remedied by more aggressive regulation, consumer protections, and eliminating tax breaks. Increasing automation, fueled by this boom in data collection and mining, may lead to systemic unemployment of a kind we’ve never seen. Those contingent workers laboring for tech companies through Elance or Mechanical Turk will soon enough be replaced by automated systems. It’s clear that, except for an elite class of managers, engineers, and executives, human labor is seen as a problem that technology can solve. In the meantime, those whose sweat this industry still relies upon find themselves submitting to exploitative conditions, whether as a Foxconn worker in Shenzhen or a Postmates courier in San Francisco. As one Uber driver complained to a reporter: “We have a real person performing a function, not a Google automatic car. We have become the functional end of the app.” It might not be long before he is traded in for a self-driving car. They don’t need breaks, they don’t worry about safety conditions or unions, they don’t complain about wages. Compared to a human being, automatic cars are perfectly efficient.

And who will employ him then? Who will be interested in someone who’s spent a few years bouncing between gray-market transportation facilitation services, distributed labor markets, and other hazy digital makework? He will have no experience, no connections, and little accrued knowledge. He will have lapsed from subsistence farming in the data fields to something worse and more desultory—a superfluous machine.

Once that happens, will Big Data even care what superfluous machines “like” on Facebook?