Why the Culture War Will Never Die

Paul Waldman | The American Prospect | September 28, 2014

Depending on how you define it, the American culture war between liberals and conservatives can stretch back all the way to the nineteenth century. But I prefer to date its current iteration to the 1960s, when the hippies and the squares gazed across a high school football field at one another and said, “Man, I hate those guys.”

However the actual 1960s played out, in our memories, the hippies were definitely the good guys, and the winners in the end. (This is in no small part because liberals created all the novels, TV shows, and movies that chronicled the period.) They may have been a little silly, but there’s one thing that’s undeniably true: They had all the fun. While the squares were getting buzz cuts, convincing themselves that the Vietnam War was a great idea, and nodding along with Richard Nixon’s encomiums to the Silent Majority, the hippies were getting high, dancing to cool music, and above all, getting laid.

And the squares are still mad about it, even the ones who weren’t actually born then. Here’s a report from Suzy Khimm on an event held at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday called “Where Is Liberalism Going?” They homed in on what it’s all about:

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City Coffers, Not Police Budgets, Hit Hard By the High Cost of Brutality

Rachel M. Cohen | The American Prospect | September 28, 2014

As the national conversation around racism and police brutality quickly fades—ramped up briefly in the wake of Michael Brown’s death—U.S. taxpayers remain stuck footing the bills for their local law enforcement’s aggressive behavior. This week alone, Baltimore agreed to pay $49,000 to man who sued over a violent arrest in 2010, Philadelphia agreed to pay $490,000 to a man who was abused and broke his neck while riding in a police van in 2011, and St. Paul agreed to pay $95,000 to a man who suffered a skull injury, a fractured eye socket and a broken nose in 2012.

In 2013, Chicago paid out a stunning $84.6 million in police misconduct settlements, judgments and legal fees. Bridgeport, Connecticut, paid a man $198,000 this past spring after video footage captured police shooting him twice with a stun gun, then stomping all over him as he lay on the ground. And in California, Oakland recently agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle a lawsuit a man filed after being shot in the head, leaving him with permanent brain damage. You get the picture.

The thing is, these steep payments rarely come from the police department budgets—instead they’re financed through the city’s general coffers or the city’s insurance plan. It’s the taxpayer, not the law enforcement agency, who pays the price.

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Pleas for help at UN General Assembly fall on deaf ears

US bombs its own military hardware in Syria

White House Prepares Rules for Domestic Drone Fleets

Craig Whitlock | The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | September 28, 2014

he White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.

The presidential executive order would force the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to reveal more details about the size and surveillance capabilities of their growing drone fleets — information that until now has been largely kept under wraps.

The mandate would apply only to federal drone flights in U.S. airspace. Overseas military and intelligence operations would not be covered.

President Obama has yet to sign the executive order, but officials said that drafts have been distributed to federal agencies and that the process is in its final stages. “An interagency review of the issue is underway,” said Ned Price, a White House spokesman. He declined to comment further.

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Pamphlet shows parents how to teach kids about homosexuality without turning them gay

Scott Kaufman | Raw Story | September 27, 2014

Pre-School Children In The Classroom With The Teacher (Shutterstock)

The Friendly Atheist reports that the conservative group Focus on the Family has released a pamphlet that teaches Christian parents how to talk about children about homosexuality without turning them gay.

The pamphlet, by Jeff Johnston and titled “How to Talk To Your Children About Homosexuality,” is explicitly not designed for parents of homosexual children — those parents are strongly encouraged to call Focus on the Family’s counseling hotline. The pamphlet’s intended audience is parents who want to be sure that the children they are raising do not grow up to become homosexual.

“Before your children are even aware of homosexuality,” it admonishes them, “begin by giving them a biblical view of the world. In other words, you are framing the issue for them by teaching them about God and His redemptive plan [sic] humankind.”

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Bernie Sanders: “To Stop Global Warming, Get Dirty Money Out of Politics”

Amy Goodman | Democracy NOW! | Reader Supported News | September 28, 2014

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our coverage of the People’s Climate March here in New York. Organizers estimate some 400,000 people took part. Democracy Now! did this three-hour broadcast from the historic march, from the launching point of the march. We’re going to turn to highlights from that special. Just before the march began, I interviewed independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who’s considering a run for the White House in 2016.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: With about a thousand Vermonters and several hundred thousand Americans who understand that global warming is real, that it is already causing devastating problems in the United States and around the world, that it will only get worse if we do not act aggressively to cut carbon and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. This is a huge issue. It’s a planetary crisis. We’ve got to act, and we have to act boldly.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the signs and one of the mantras here is: “We need system change, not climate change.” What does that mean to you?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, of course you need climate change. I mean, you know, we are—the scientist community tells us we have a narrow opportunity to move. You have to do that. But you also have to change the system, because, I mean, among many other things, one of the reasons that we have virtually no Republican in Congress who even acknowledges the reality of climate change is because of all the money in politics. So, we are not going to change politics in America unless we, you know, deal with the Koch brothers and the other billionaires who are now trying to buy elections. Furthermore, if we live in a society which is based on simply purchasing, purchasing, purchasing, consumerism, consumerism, consumerism, more and more development, without understanding sustainability, we’ll have long-term problems.

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ISIS: You Can’t Defeat Somebody With Nobody

Alan Grayson | Reader Supported News | September 28, 2014

lashback, 2000: At a military checkpoint on the side of a road in Lesotho, an officer pointed an automatic weapon at me, and asked for $20. I took out my business card, I handed it to him, and I told him that I worked with the U.S. government and I didn’t need to give him $20. He pretended to read the card (he was obviously illiterate), he smiled, and with his machine gun, he then waived me back to my car. Perhaps he said “Have a nice day”; I don’t recall specifically.

Flashback, 2001: On a street in Myanmar, I negotiated with a shopkeeper over a curio. There were some soldiers leaning against a wall down the block. When we had a deal, he told me that I had to pay him in the alley, not in the street. I did so, and then asked him why. He explained that if the soldiers had seen me handing him money, they would have come and taken it away from him. They wouldn’t take it away from me, but they would take it away from him.

Because that’s what soldiers do, in most countries. Like fish gotta swim.

For the past decade, we have purported to “train” the Iraqi military and police, at the cost of at least $24 billion. That’s almost $100 for every man, woman and child in America. We have undertaken this training even though in the Middle East, many millennia ago, the Iraqis’ ancestors invented the concepts of both the military and the police, at a time when our ancestors were drawing pretty pictures on cave walls employing colored dirt.

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Public Pressure Forces Tar Sands Waste Operator Out of Chicago

Katie Valentine  ThinkProgress | Reader Supported News | September 28, 2014

n operator in charge of storing petroleum coke, a dirty byproduct of tar sands refining, has announced it’s leaving the city of Chicago, and taking the black, dusty piles with it.

Beemsterboer Slag Corp., which has been storing petcoke at a storage facility by the Calumet River, has closed the facility after facing increasing pressure from city officials and residents.

“The property has been sold,” company president Alan Beemsterboer said of the Calumet Transload Facility. “Doing business in the city is increasingly difficult.”

At the end of April, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance that banned new petcoke storage facilities from opening and prevented existing storage facilities from expanding. In addition, earlier this month, Beemsterboer was fined $50,000 for violating an order to remove petcoke from a different site.

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How Terrible Police Training Is Destroying America

Joan Walsh  | Salon | Reader Supported News | September 28, 2014

Local cops were trained to immediately “engage” an “active shooter” suspect. But a dishonest witness set him up

 

nother day, another troubling video of police killing an unarmed black man . Or so it seems. But the horrific South Carolina video released Wednesday, in which a cop shot Levar Jones while he was reaching for his license, as he was asked to do — was the first recent case in which the officer was disciplined: not only fired, but charged with assault, appropriately.

Stark video evidence helps account for the difference in the treatment of Jones’s police assailant and the cops who shot Mike Brown in Ferguson, choked Eric Garner in Staten Island and gunned down Ezell Ford in Los Angeles. But what about John Crawford III, the young father shot by police in a Beavercreek, Ohio Walmart holding a toy gun? Newly released video is almost as stark as in the Jones case. It shows the police opened fire on Crawford immediately, even though the gun he held was fake and he wasn’t pointing it at anyone. Yet a grand jury declined to bring charges against the officers involved.

There are two main reasons for that. One, a young white wannabe Marine, 24-year-old Ronald Ritchie, lied to a 911 dispatcher and claimed Crawford was pointing his gun at other shoppers, including children. He would later, in a television interview, make the false claim that Crawford had also aimed the gun at police. Ritchie should clearly be prosecuted.

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