A Writer and His Deadline

Let’s face it—every writer needs a deadline. And so I tell you—it’s 11AM, I have spent an hour or two surfing for something interesting to write about. News flash—the world is in terrible shape.

Ooops—sorry. According to my friend Rafael, “terrible” along with words like “awful” and “horrible” are words to be avoided. Why? Because they carry a disproportionate emotional weight. You had a terrible day at the office? What happened—a coworker went postal, pulled out the semiautomatic, and shot up the office, leaving another coworker to die in your arms?

I considered briefly telling you about Wisconsin, in case you’ve missed my rants. And in fact, I even read up on something called a long range acoustic device (LRAD). I know about such a thing because I was on Facebook, looking at the following photo:

Beneath the photo was a reference to the LRAD, with the news that one had been used in the capitol yesterday. Right, so I trotted over to Wikipedia, and here’s what they say:

In 2004, Carl Gruenler, a former vice president of military and government operations for American Technology Corporation said that being within 100 metres (330 ft) of the LRAD is extremely painful, and that it was designed for use in short bursts at 300 metres (980 ft), to give targeted people a headache. He said that "you definitely don't want to be" within 100 m; and, that the device will cause permanent auditory damage.[3] LRAD officials deny such common uses, claiming that the device is not a weapon, rather it is a "directed-sound communications system", and that it can damage hearing at 15 metres (49 ft).

To be fair, there are many varieties of LRADs. And apparently, yesterday in the Wisconsin State Capitol it was a smaller version of the device that was used. But that begs the point—why use it at all? The rotunda, the location of the protest, is round and very echo-y. (Or maybe echophonous, as in cacophonous?) Actually, even a megaphone is overkill.

Well, as you can see in the video below, it’s a controversial device.

It’s become progressively more repressive, the police response to the protesters. First they couldn’t assemble—they had to get a permit. Then bystanders were threatened with arrest. Then people were informed—taking photos or video was not allowed. And now this—the use of a very nice tool to communicate with someone two miles away, but torture to anyone nearby.

As it happens, I am particularly sensitive to sound, and especially at this time. As I write, the street outside is being pounded with jackhammers, a portable generator is roaring away, and a large scooper is tossing chunks of asphalt into a truck. And this evening, a few short hours after the workers have left, the partier will have arrived, to start a street fair.

I wrote about it before; here’s what I said:

The United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights have banned the use of loud music in interrogations, but it is still being widely used. The term torture is sometimes used to describe the practice. While it is acknowledged by US interrogation experts that it causes discomfort, it has also been characterized by them as causing no "long term effects."[1]

Ya—enough! Would you like to see some totally wonderful art? Check out the Danish artist Peter Callesen….

Definitely what I feel like before coffee….

Right, that’s fun…. Now, how about…

    

Damn—it’s 12:08. Missed the deadline!

All the Governor Money Can Buy

Well, a woman named Diane Ayers, whom I don’t know, stepped right up to the plate and diagnosed the situation. Here she is:

Re Bill Dunn post, your question: "Why did this never happen in Wisconsin's 165 years of history until Scott Walker became governor?"

Because, Bill, this is the first time in Wisconsin history that the core of state government has been illegitimately seized by corporate-owned political fascists, who do not hesitate to suspend civil liberties and distort or defy the constitutional rights guaranteed to this state's citizens.

Their prime directive is to discredit, divide and destroy all those agencies, civic organizations, labor unions, even community groups of individual citizens seeking to communicate their views and concerns.

Their goal? The permanent destruction of democracy in Wisconsin - and eventually throughout the U.S. - replacing it with an institutionalized oligarchy that maintains its control by doing away with public education, worker rights, voting rights, etc., -- creating a powerless underclass that will work to serve and fear to challenge their corporate masters -now and for generations to come.

Right—got that taken care of. Now—can I go to the beach?

Just a minute, you say—what’s going on in Wisconsin?

Scott Kevin Walker, born 2 November 1967, in Colorado Springs moved to Delavan, Wisconsin when he was ten. An eagle scout, he also attended a two week program called Badger Boys State and Boys Nation in Washington DC. This, he said, inspired him to become a politician.

He entered Marquette University; he dropped out. He worked for IBM and then The Red Cross. At age 22, he ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly and lost. He then moved to a Republican district—Wauwatosa—and won three years later. He served nine years in the Assembly, and then became Milwaukee County executive in 2002. He was elected governor in 2010, and promptly instituted a….

Stop!

I’ve been trying, I’ve really been trying, to be neutral, objective, fair-minded; I’m the son of a newspaperman, after all. But after all, this is not a newspaper; it’s my blog.

So I will tell you that yes, dear Readers plus Diane, this is something not seen before. This is a guy deeply in bed with corporate America, especially the mining and oil interests; guys like the infamous Koch brothers, who contributed big, big money into the recall campaign. How much? Well, I just googled “Koch brothers Scott Walker” and the first citation is from Forbes of 2012: “Scott Walker didn’t get a dime from us,” it reads. The second citation? Politifact.com, saying…well, copy and paste time:

1.              Billionaire Koch brothers gave $8 million to Wisconsin Gov. Scott ...
www.politifact.com/.../billionaire-koch-brothers-gave-8-million-wisconsi...‎

◦                Cached




Jun 20, 2012 - "In fact, the Koch brothers alone gave twice as much money to Scott Walker as the total amount of money raised by Tom Barrett." Roughly ...


I’ll come clean—I didn’t click on either of the links. Why? Because there is ample evidence that there’s a link between the Koch brothers and Walker. Remember the famous prank call, from a radio host pretending to be David Koch?

Well, revealingly, all I had to do was type “Scott” into the search bar of YouTube and up it came….

And what had Scott Walker done, to get himself into a recall election? He had proposed curing an expected 3.6 billion dollar state deficit by eliminating the right of the public service unions to bargain collectively. And that spurred crowds of up to 100,000 people to camp out in protest in the capitol.

Nor was this all. Here’s Wikipedia on Scott Walker’s social issues:

Social issues played a part in the campaign. Walker has stated that he is "100% pro-life" and that he believes life should be protected from conception to natural death.[43] He opposes abortion, including in cases of rape and incest.[23][44] He supports abstinence-only sex education in the public schools, and opposes state supported clinical services that provide birth control and testing and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases to teens under the age of 18 without parental consent.[23] He supports the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives on religious or moral grounds.[23][45] He supports adult stem cell research, but opposes human embryonic stem cell research.[20][44][46][47]

Right—short version: a reactionary.

Who has subverted the rules, rammed down repressive abortion laws, stripped public service positions in favor of his corporate friends. Oh, and had seven or so of his political staff convicted of various crimes. The most recent revelation, by the way, is that as Milwaukee County executive, his campaign staff was actively involved in handling the tragic death of a fifteen-year old kid who was killed by a falling slab of concrete from a county parking garage.

The protests never really went away, and people began singing protest songs at noon in the capitol rotunda. So Walker decided that people would need a permit to protest in the capitol. That of course, led to howls—the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, as well as the state constitution, guaranteeing the right of assembly.

And now comes the slightly thicker edge of the wedge. It turns out that people cannot even watch, and tourists to the Dairy State are being told: spectating is illegal. In fact, a lawmaker, Sondy Pope, was threatened with arrest for just that.

“He stole the election,” said my friend Gary, referring to the 2012 recall, and went on to give specifics. I’ve forgotten, now, and anyway, it seemed irrelevant.

If he didn’t steal it, he bought it….. 

Brian, the Blogging Pigeon

Well, I’m happy to report that on November 28, 2005, while I was celebrating my 49^th birthday, across the world Brian Pigeon was starting his blogging career. Here’s a picture of him:

And here’s his introduction:

My name is Brian Pigeon, and I am London’s premier blogging pigeon.

Pigeon Blog is my online diary.

A bona fide urban pigeon telling it how it is for the pigeons of London.

You can also follow me on Twitter – @brianpigeon

And, if you’re interested, I got me a Facebook page too – Brian Pigeon.

Make sure you get the right one tho coz the other one’s an impostor.

I’m the one who looks like this:

And here he posts the picture above. Well, I can tell you all about this because while munching a tuna sandwich, yesterday, I was watching a documentary about the wildlife in London. I can now tell you that there is a seal in the lower Thames, and that the normally gruff fishermen are improbably throwing their inventory to the seal in the river, as opposed to putting it on ice and selling it. There’s a lady who throws chicken sausages to five foxes—and she’s trained them to sit, too! Hedgehogs are having a hard time of it—they’re sticking the heads into thrown-away coffee cups, lured presumably by that sugar—and then dying. Londoners! Please tear your coffee cups in two!

Then there are the bird people. Oh, and did you know that the British government ordered the peregrine falcons to be killed in World War II? Apparently, the War Office was still using carrier pigeons, and the falcons were eating them….

Now where was I?

Ah, yes—the blogging pigeon. It seems that there’s a London woman—was her name Lisa? Think so—who goes about photographing pigeons; she reports that she been in virtually every neighborhood in the city. And she knows about as much about pigeons as I do about iguanas. And if I may say so, I was considerably more reticent about the sex life of iguanas than is Lisa about the pigeon equivalent. Really, Lisa, I was eating at the time!

Well, I obviously had to check in on Brian Pigeon’s blog—and well worth it. I happened on the page entitled “Press” and discovered that The Guardian, Time Out, and The Times have all reviewed it favorably—wow, and now comes Iguanas! The capping on the cake, or whatever the expression is….

Wow—and Brian has a good head for business, as well as a fine design sense. Look, who could resist the tote bag below?

Or what about the Brian Pigeon Classic Thong?

A bargain at just under twelve buck. Not only made in the USA—thanks, Brian!—but absolutely guaranteed to drive your lover, or even your husband, into the extremes of lascivious lust at the very sight of it. Be prepared—you won’t have a minute’s peace while wearing it.

But enough rank materialism. Brian tells a remarkable story of a common bird: here’s his very first blog post, on that late November day in 2005:

Welcome to the first ever online diary of a London pigeon. Well, in all fairness I come from Hayes which is not strictly speaking London. It’s close enough and, let’s face it, it’s as good as you’re gonna get coz not many of us pigeons have mastered the art of blogging! Mores the pity. You never know though, if enough of them can be arsed to read this – it might just catch on! Pigeon-friendly Cyber Caffs are, as a result, hard to come by so posting may be a little irregular (although I heard there’s quite a good one in Slough? Anyone know it? Let me know in the comments…).

This is a picture of mum. I think she sent it to me so I won’t forget her birthday.

And guess what! Brian has 2859 followers! Wow—wonder how many followers Iguanas will have after eight years!

I bring you the story of Brian as recompense for the video below. And please, call Wisconsin Capitol Police Chief David Erwin at (608) 266-8797, and give him a piece of your mind.

Oh, and Brian? You got any friends on the Capitol Square? Friends who could do what you guys do so well?

Call me….

When the Chief Goes Bad

You should know—click on the video below, and you’ll be exposed to a level of vitriol and hatred rarely seen. Your gut may wrench—mine did. Your blood pressure will rocket. When the madman fires his automatic weapon—which you knew was coming—after the explosive, profanity-laced rant, it’s like being kicked in the stomach.

And the madman is Chief of Police Mark Kessler.

And on 1 August, the town board of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, attempted to hold a meeting to decide what to do about this nut. The video had gone viral, with half of the country loving it, the other half horrified. And there was a problem—sure, most of the town loves their guns, but even this was a little extreme.

But not as extreme as what Kessler did, which was to get a hundred other crazy people from all around the country to run into Gilberton, and block the doorway to the meeting. And they were all weaponed-up.

This had, as you can imagine, a slightly chilling effect on the citizenry, many of whom opted to stay home—presumably under their beds. Nonetheless, the town board voted to suspend Kessler for a month, without pay. Here’s what Michael Morrill, an activist who had a petition of 20,000 signatures asking to fire Kessler, had to say:

In an email Morrill told me, “I have been organizing for four decades. I have faced Klansmen in Kentucky, Ustase in Bosnia and police indiscriminately beating demonstrators in Italy. [Wednesday] night in Gilberton was more frightening than any of those situations.”

Nor was it the first time that Kessler had got himself in trouble. In 2010, he illegally arrested a councilman and did a strip search on him. The reason? Kessler said it was the profanity the councilman allegedly used. The councilman turned around and sued—and the taxpayers forked up $15,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

There was also a little incident in a crowded bar, during which the off-duty cop shot himself in the hand. There was a brawl going on at the time; the event is still under investigation.

Well, the town is scared; many people who might have spoken out at the meeting feared retaliation, nor is it hard to see why. Here’s what one woman had to say:

You know why there’s not more residents here? The threats. That’s why. Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’re going to have their windows shot out.” – Lifelong Gilberton resident Rose McCarthy speaking about Police Chief Mark Kessler and his supporters on July 31, 2013.

Wanting to be fair, I went into Kessler’s website, and I bring you this:

"FREEDOM ISN'T FREE" 

I will sacrifice all I have defending my country, our constitution, OUR FREEDOMS

NEVER AGAIN WILL I BE RULED BY TYRANTS, DICTATORS, OR SCUM POLATICIANS

 For I am jus one man who stood against many and said, NO MORE!

OK—spelling is not his long suit. But let’s talk straight. This guy brought a hundred armed people and barred the way to a public meeting. The moment he did that, there should have been arrests. In fact, where is the United States Justice Department?

A month ago, the feds came to an agreement with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico about the reforms needed and the plan of action established to improve the police department of the island.

In fact, the feds might address another situation: Kessler’s Constitutional Security Force, the group that provided the 100 gun-toting crazies last Wednesday night. According to one Internet source, the CSF has members in 38 states. Is it true? Who knows….

This is insanity. We have heavily armed nuts who are convinced that there is a dictatorship and who will, at the drop of a hat, blow the bejusus out of everybody.

We’re on the brink of catastrophe.

The Governor Hears the Door Slam

Right—I usually back away from this topic, which is not a hot potato but a burning and radioactive one instead.

If you’re a gringo, the word  “status” has no particular meaning for you. If you’re Puerto Rican, you tense—here it comes, the old but undiminished in its ferocity debate on whether Puerto Rico should be a state, independent, or continue as it is.

And what is that, you ask?

Depends on whom you ask. In Spanish, our status is something called Estado Libre Asociado, which puzzled me the first time I saw it, those decades ago.

“How can something be free and yet a state and yet associated,” I asked Mr. Fernández, those many years ago.

Little did I know…

“IT’S A LIE, IT’S A TRICK, IT’S A BASE AND FOUL CANARD….”

Hint—remove trajectables (it’s a word in Spanish, computer!) at the onset of any discussion of status.

Advocates of our current status have developed a capacity to smoke screen unparalleled by any other group of fanatics. We are a nation, goes the theory, a sovereign nation in “association” with the United States. We therefore hold US passports, receive federal benefits, pay no taxes, and don’t vote for president. In fact, Puerto Rico is one of the few places—the US Virgin Islands is another—in the world where an American citizen cannot vote for president, and has no voting representation in Congress. And for those of you who gnashed their teeth through the eight long years of George W. Bush, trust me—you would have been spared them had Puerto Rico been allowed to vote….

We got to be citizens back in 1917, with the passage of the Jones Act. And how convenient that was, because there was a little war going on—the first of the World Wars—and Puerto Ricans died, and have subsequently died in every other war, in disproportionate numbers.

 Which is what made me believe, fifteen years back, that our current status is heart-stoppingly simple, as well as cynical. Here’s the deal—the rich and empowered Puerto Ricans receive federal dollars in turn for the blood and lives of their poorer brothers.

Predictably, there are those who aren’t satisfied with that. So periodically we have plebiscites—usually when there is a statehood governor. And our last plebiscite, in November 2012, was a double decker—first we were asked if we were satisfied with our current territorial status; then we were asked to choose between statehood, independence, or a sovereign nation in association with the United States.

Also predictably, the Popular Democratic Party—which champions our current status—frothed at the mouth at the mention of the word “territorial.” The party has been trying for years to deny that we are an unincorporated territory. Instead, they hope to “improve” our current status, presumably by getting full parity of money with the states, not paying taxes, but being fully represented in Congress. The last time anyone expressed this idea to a puzzled congress, one congressman noted that if that idea were feasible, he’d have to go home and recommend that his constituents pursue the same option. And so last Wednesday the Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing, and the governor ran up to Washington to advocate for “enhanced” commonwealth.

He had a pretty rotten time of it.

Here’s what the chairman, Ron Wyden, had to say at the start of the session:

The “New Commonwealth” option continues to be advocated as a viable option by some. It is not.

Persistence in supporting this option after it has been rejected as inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Justice Department, by the bipartisan leadership of this Committee, by the House, and by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations undermines resolution of Puerto Rico’s status question.

Well, ABC news reports that the governor was “frustrated” with the event. Here’s a sample of what he said:

In a meeting with reporters after the hearing he said he favors an "enhanced" commonwealth status that would give Puerto Rico "maximum autonomy" while cementing a permanent relationship with the United States. He'd like Congress and Puerto Rico to agree on which federal laws should apply to Puerto Rico and which should not. He would oppose laws that would be "harmful" to the island's development, he said, but didn't go into further detail.

Wyden, apparently, didn’t buy in. Here’s more of the opening statement:

Puerto Rico must either exercise full self-government as a sovereign nation, or achieve equality among the States of the Union.

The current relationship undermines the United States’ moral standing in the world. For a nation founded on the principles of democracy and the consent of the governed, how much longer can America allow a condition to persist in which nearly four million U.S. citizens do not have a vote in the government that makes the national laws which affect their daily lives? That is the question.

At last—a congressman got it….

The Plutocratic States of America

It may be that I’m thinking about money, lately, because I’m about to buy an apartment. Or it may be because I’m generally broke. Or it may be simply because that’s one of the two things—won’t specify the other—that guys think about.

At any rate, if you have half an hour or so, you might want to look at the three videos below. In the first, you’ll see how drastically unfairly the wealth is distributed in our country. In a nutshell, most people have no clue how radically rich the 1% is. But consider this lead from an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

4 out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

4 out of 5? 80%? Ummm, I hate to write incendiary words in an age of surveillance—but shouldn’t we have insurrection in the streets? Looting, riots, marches on Greenwich, Connecticut?

We have CEOs making hundreds of millions annually—and 80% of us are poor? Say whaaaa?

OK—consider the following facts, gleaned from a blog in the Washington Post:

·      Average pay for the CEOs of the top 350 firms, including the stock options they exercised, was $14.1 million in 2012–up 37.4 percent from 2009. 

·      That’s a bit higher than it would be if you just measured stock options granted. “Firms apparently pared back the value of new options granted because CEOs fared so well by cashing in options as stock prices grew,” the report’s authors write.

·      The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 273-1, down from a high of 383-1 in 2000, but up from 20-1 in 1965.

·      CEO pay has increased faster than wages to high-skilled workers, suggesting that the salary market isn’t very efficient. “Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment,” the report concludes.

·      CEO pay is now also closely tracking the S&P 500 index, which didn’t used to be the case.

OK—the first ingredient in the stew: we seriously screwed up who gets the cookies and who hopes for the crumbs in this society.

Now then, the second video. Caveat at the start: this was produced by the AFL CIO, which understandably has a hatchet or two to grind. But here’s the gist: what happens—even in a game, even when you know the game is rigged—when you get rich? Well, the video will tell you. You become entitled, you think you deserved it, you have no empathy for somebody who didn’t do it the way you did—by hard work and the sweat of your brow. Sure, your name is Rockefeller, but that didn’t mean you had it easy, that just meant you had to work harder to prove yourself! So fuck the poor!

I met twice the wife of Oscar Mayer—yes, of the bacon and hotdog fame. She was a nice lady, she adored my father, and she also completely stunned me by ordering Gunnar Johansen, a famed concert pianist, to sit down and play. After a bit, she told him to stop. Johansen was a gracious man, but was it just charm that made him get on and off the piano bench? Or did the fact that Mrs. Mayer had given him the piano (a rare double keyboard) enter into the equation?

Right—now we get to the last video. In which we hear, at about 9:30, that “capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathy.” And then, 10 seconds later, that capitalism at its most ruthless is a manifestation of psychopathy. And guess what? I’ve worked for one of the biggest SOBs in the business; from the reports I got from the upper levels, it’s true.

And consider—what is the rate of psychopathy in the general population? 1%. That should ring a bell—remember that the 1% of the richest people own over thirty percent of the wealth. And guess what those guys are? You got it—psychopaths.

Oh, and they own us, because they bought Congress, and the media as well, and-I-hate-to-sound-like-Edward-Snowden but the only people who are speaking out are nobodies like me.

When I lost my job—yes, I’m part of the 80%—I went down to get my unemployment insurance with Moisés, my brother-in-law. We got up at 4:30; we were making the line at 5AM. Nor were we the first—we were number thirty or so. There were perhaps a hundred people at 7AM, all mulishly lined up against plate glass windows in the Puerto Rican sun; we were waiting for the 150 bucks a week that we could get for a year. The office was on a street that has the water company, the housing department, the labor department—in short, every social service department in the government. Three blocks away, men in three-piece suits were strolling into the corporate offices of the largest banks on the island.

Why weren’t we storming them?

Requiem for the Judge's Wife

Well, the word is in. After an ordeal of three years, Aida de los Santos, the mucama or bedchamber maid, is free and innocent of all charges.

You may remember the case—Georgina Ortiz Ortiz, the wife of an ex-state supreme court judge, Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, was killed on 17 August 2010 in a fashionable area of San Juan.

And in what must have been the most cynical and depraved stunt of the year, the police decided to go after the maid, despite conflicting evidence of the husband, despite a witness who said that the photos of the scene didn’t match what he had seen, despite a bloodstained man’s shirt found in Irizarry’s hamper, despite the fact that the daughter of the victim had hired a private eye to follow her mother (so worried was she), despite the fact Irizarry had hired a detective as well to spy on his wife, despite the fact that DNA collected from under the nails of the victim was from more than one man….

Well, today’s banner headline in The New Day, our local paper, reads Sin justicia or No Justice, and there’s not much doubt—there was no justice done indeed. And the family of the victim came out and said it, yesterday—Irizarry was involved.

Well, if he was, wouldn’t you think there would be physical evidence? Oh, but there’s a problem—no one bothered to impound the judge’s car until two years after the murder of Ortiz.

Two factors—no, three—entered into this case.

Race—de los Santos is black;

Nationality—de los Santos is from the next island over, Dominican Republic. And yes, there’s a lot of prejudice against Dominicans here in Puerto Rico;

Do I need to tell you what the last factor is?

Minimally, it’s class; maximally, it’s the convergence of wealth, power, and politics. So for the last three years a woman had to take the rap for someone else—someone for whom she also had to clean his toilet. And for the last six weeks or so we’ve had to watch as a sham of a trial played out.

Justice has been served, said some—after all, de los Santos wasn’t convicted, right? In the end, it worked for her, didn’t it?

Don’t see that—at one point in the ordeal, de los Santos may have attempted to take her life (her version is that she woke up in the Witness Protection Center when somebody was slipping ropes around her neck). No matter how innocent you knew you were, how—especially coming from the Dominican Republic—could you trust that you’d get a fair trial?

Mind you, I don’t think the judge did it—he would have been about 88 at the time. But for the same reason, it was never very credible that de los Santos did it, either.

Just to intrude this bloody fact into your day, it takes a lot of butchery and strength to slit the throat, as somebody did that bad day in June of 2010 to Ortiz. You need strength and surprise, as well as the trust of the victim. And so de los Santos would have needed to be exceptionally strong or exceptionally enraged to have killed her boss in that way.

Throughout the day, I’ve been listening to the most amazing music—music by a composer whom I can’t believe isn’t much more well-known, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, born in Germany forty years before Johann Sebastian Bach. Here’s his Requiem `a 15, a stunning work.

To the memory of Georgina Ortiz Ortiz. May she rest in peace.  

May I Please, Please Protest Today?

For many Saturdays this year, a group of us have sat on a plaza and read names. People drift by, look puzzled, clutch their small children’s hands more tightly. Some gaze, some avert their eyes. Anyone who establishes eye contact gets a little flyer explaining what we are doing. The point is to engage in debate.

Among the people strolling through the plaza are a policeman or two, who stand by and look on. What don’t they do?

Put me in handcuffs and fine me 701 bucks.

That, unbelievably, is what happened yesterday in the capitol rotunda of Madison, Wisconsin.

Full disclosure—I got the figure of $701 from a friend; I’ve looked but been unable to verify it. However, I did come across the video of Will Williams, below. And Williams is a 70-year old veteran who got handcuffed and escorted down the stairs. Whereupon he tripped—or was he tripped?—on the first steps, and fell onto his handcuffed hands. Ouch. 

Nor was Williams the oldest person to be thrown into cuffs and led off. Check out Wednesday’s post—there’s a clip of an 80-year old woman being handcuffed. She’s singing away, the cops cuff her, and she trots off with them. At no point is she resisting—she’s just singing.

Let’s be clear. This is assault. And under what circumstances can a cop stick cuffs on a person? When I worked on inpatient psychiatry wards, the use of restraints was very clear. A patient had to have shown behavior that was a danger to himself or to others. And that behavior had to be documented. OK—so are cops operating on a different set of criteria? Here’s what one guy said:

Actually, there are several reasons a law enforcement officer can detain you without notifying you of the reason. They need not produce an arrest warrant if they have probable cause that you have committed a felony. Placing handcuffs on a person is not always the result of being arrested; an officer need not arrest you to detain you. If the officer feels you are a flight risk and that flight would compromise an ongoing investigation, or if he feels you are threat to him or another, he may take you into temporary custody. If there are other pressing matters to which he must attend to maintain public or personal safety, he need not speak to you at all.

Nor am I the only one to think so. Check this out….

Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney Thursday refused to retract remarks made Monday during a radio interview on his apparent condoning of the protest singing in great numbers, despite a federal judge's ruling only assemblies of twenty people or less could be staged without a permit.
"I'm here to join alongside the Solidarity Singers. This is an example of freedom of speech," Mahoney told Workers Independent News (WIN) Monday.


This is a monstrous attack on human dignity and on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. And despite the temporary order upholding the government’s “right” to require permits for demonstrations with over 20 people—no. If people want to get together and sing songs in the capitol, dammit, they have every right to do it.

Oh, and the legislator who had a meeting with the chief of capitol police and the secretary of administration? Here’s what she wrote after the aborted event.

"I was very shocked and disappointed today when you and Department of Administrative Assistant Gwendolyn Coomer walked out of a meeting scheduled in my office," she wrote in a sharply worded letter (PDF) that was hand-delivered to Erwin's office in the state Capitol. Taylor also took the police chief to task for being unable to identify the "specific conduct you believe to be unlawful."

Yes, it’s very clear that there are some people breaking the laws at noon in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Very, very clear…..

For those who can help with the legal costs incurred by protesters, please donate via PayPal to the following fund: 
http://solidaritysingalong.org/

Hint—Don't Google Pressure Cookers!

She’s a writer with a 20-year old son and a husband. The son is a news junkie, and the husband is curious about things. So they’re all on the Internet a lot; she had looked up pressure cookers. Her husband had researched backpacks. And her son had followed a lot of links in the days surrounding the Boston bombing.

Wanna see what happened?

Yup, six armed guys from the Joint Terrorism Task Force had come to Michele Catalano’s house at nine in the morning. Her husband went out to greet them; they asked if they could enter the house. Here’s Catalano’s description of the event:

They asked if they could search the house, though it turned out to be just a cursory search. They walked around the living room, studied the books on the shelf (nope, no bomb making books, no Anarchist Cookbook), looked at all our pictures, glanced into our bedroom, pet our dogs. They asked if they could go in my son’s bedroom but when my husband said my son was sleeping in there, they let it be.

Meanwhile, they were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked.

Guys—do any of you feel significantly safer by having the federal government running around asking people if they have any bombs?

They got to equally tough questions—had he ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? Sure—said the husband, whom Catalano dubs, “ever the oppositional kind”—haven’t you? Two of the guys admitted they had.

The officers asked to do a cursory search—they missed two rooms (undoubtedly crammed with bombs, boys!) and never touched the computers. Oh, and they dropped the news that they do this a hundred times a week, and “99%” of the time, it turns out to be nothing. Catalano rightly wonders—what about the other 1%?

Well, the task force spent 45 minutes chatting with Catalano’s husband, and went pleasantly off to investigate the next terrorist. Here’s how Catalano concludes her piece:

This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online.

I’m scared. And not of the right things.

Well, the question is—since the government is not supposed to be reading anyone’s email, how did the Joint Terrorist Task Force know Catalano’s family had googled “suspicious” sites? Were they connected to suspected terrorists? If so, how?

The bad news is that almost all of us are connected to suspected terrorists; here’s Yahoo News on the subject….

It hinges on what's known as "hop" or "chain" analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone records, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people.

If the average person called 40 unique people, three-hop analysis would allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist.

Right—so we have the Joint Terrorist Task Force investigating people who google pressure cookers, but not following up on Tamerlan Tsarnaev when the Russians go out of their way to tip off the FBI?

In the meantime, the head of NSA held up a placard stating that they had foiled 54 terrorist plots by using telephone and Internet data. Predictably, nobody in Congress trusts them. Who could?

Look, if it hadn’t been for Edward Snowden, they’d still be lying on their stack of Bibles. They were asked direct questions; they lied.

Which, by the way, is contempt of Congress. Anybody remember Rita Lavelle, the EPA official who lied to Congress in 1983? Here’s what she got, according to Wikipedia:

Indicted for lying to Congress; convicted; sentenced to 6 months in prison, 5 years probation thereafter, and a fine of $10,000

Throw the book at ‘em!