Search Results for: phelps

Truth Mashup: Glenn Beck’s crazy defense of anti-gay bill .

John Green: Is the American Dream real?:

Sam Seder: Poor Mitt Romney doesn’t want to be remembered as a loser.

Spying on the Senate:

• Desk to Desk: Explaining the CIA search allegations.
• Sen Feinstein’s double standard.
• Mark Fiore: Bestest Friends.

Thom: What do cancer and Reaganomics have in common?

Mental Floss: 21 mind-blowing now-extinct life forms.

Is this World War III.

Obama Nation:

• Obama calls Putin.

Barely Political meets the President.

Obama between two O’Reillys.

Pap and Thom: Another week, another GOP voter suppression bill.

The Prosecution of the Uber-rich:

• Sam Seder: Another demented billionaire says addressing inequality is Nazi talk.
• Sam Seder: Why do crazy rich people keep talking about Nazism?
• Sam Seder: Billionaire Home Depot founder apologizes for calling us Nazis.

Ann Telnaes: The high cost of the Iraq war.

The Law and Lesbians:

• It’s hard for a lesbian to get a proper stoning these days!
• Young Turks: So, a lesbian knocks on a church door….

Newsy News: CPAC, Crimea & Masturbation.

AC370—Breaking News:

• Young Turks: A freaking psychic?!?!
• Matt Binder: Rupert Murdoch’s insane Malaysia airplane conspiracy theory.
• Young Turks: What Noah’s Ark tells us about Flight 370.
• Sam Seder: CNN W.T.F?!?
• Young Turks: Chuck Todd rips CNN.
• Young Turks: FAUX News host blames flight 370 disappearance on Muslims.

David Pakman: Harry Reid, “Republicans are addicted to Koch”.

Things to do in your 20s: Get Covered:

Republicans Target Millennials in New Ads:

• Paycheck–The Original
• Paycheck with Last Week Tonight goodness
• All of the Above–The Original
• All of the Above with Last Week Tonight goodness
• Sam Seder: The G.O.P.’s bizarre millennial advertisement.
• Young Turks: GOP launches ad campaign courting minorities.

Sam Seder’s moving rememberance of Fred Phelps.

Maher: New Rules (via Crooks and Liars).

White House: West Wing Week.

Republicans Say the Darnedest Things:

• Richard Fowler: Paul Ryan is really convinced poor people are lazy
• Paul Ryan: The inner city expert.
• Richard Fowler takes on Paul Ryan’s stupid, racist comments
• Sharpton: Republicans still obsessed with Black “cheats”.
• Pap and Sam Seder: Why Republicans should not use Twitter.
• Truth Mashup: Watch Republicans dodge Ted Nugent questions.
• Sam Seder: Nutjob Chicago Republican, “gay rights are responsible for natural disasters, mental disorders”.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

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– It’s not talked about much, but one of the biggest reasons to end marijuana prohibition is because of the environmental damage that’s done by having the crop grown illegally in our national forests and parks.

– Governor Gregoire has the rare chance to sign a truly progressive drug law reform bill.

– A reader pointed me to this post from Geoff Baker on the Mariners Blog at the Seattle Times. Towards the end of the post, he talks about new Mariner Tom Wilhelmsen, a one-time hot prospect who left the game in 2005 after being sent to a treatment program by his former club, the Brewers, for marijuana use. As someone who writes about sports and not drug policy, Baker’s thoughts came across as honest, insightful, and indicative of how people are having trouble accepting the long-unquestioned idea of treating marijuana the same way we treat other drugs. When some of the best athletes in the world – from Michael Phelps to Tim Lincecum to Santonio Holmes to countless NBA players – have all been exposed as occasional marijuana users despite excelling in what they do, it just doesn’t compute any more why a team like the Brewers would piss away their investment in Wilhelmsen the way they did. Now that he’s a Mariner and joins what might be their strongest pitching staff in years, let’s hope they’ll be rewarded for giving him a second chance.

– Last week, I was watching a rerun of The Chappelle Show and it was the sketch where they juxtaposed how an upper-class white criminal who committed a financial crime gets treated with how a lower-class minority criminal who committed a drug crime gets treated. The sketch contains a very graphic scene where the white criminal’s dog is shot by raiding police officers. It had been a while since I’d last seen this and it hadn’t occurred to me how similar this was to what happened to Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo – except for one major difference – Calvo was completely innocent of any crimes and this fact should have already been obvious to the Prince George County Sheriff’s Office.

Calvo is still fighting back against the reckless officers who invaded his home that day and shot his two dogs. And the latest development is even more sickening. One of the officers tried to get the charges against him dropped because he claims he shot one of Calvo’s dogs after it was already dead. The judge rejected the plea. How disturbed does one have to be to shoot a dead dog in the head? And how out-of-control is the Prince George County Sheriff’s Office that not only do they have psychos like this guy their police force, but that they continue to insist that their officers did nothing wrong during the raid?

As someone who grew up in Kansas (and we got the heck out of there as soon as we had the means to do so,) I would just like to say I’m sorry that some Kansans are so messed up and they’re really not all like this.

The protesters targeted Mount Zion Baptist Church in Seattle during the worship service, shouting and waving placards saying “You’re Going to Hell” and “God Hates Fags.”

Jonathan Phelps, one of the protest ringleaders, said Mount Zion and other churches are spreading lies.

“They’ve preached that lie from hell that God loves everybody – that you can live like the devil and have any hope of heaven at all,” Phelps said.

The Phelps clan is a real piece of work, that’s for sure. I realize it’s easy to dismiss “flyover country” but there are lots of good folks back in the Midwest who have to battle the crazy folk while still managing to deal with business. The fellow who taught us high school biology, for example, wound up as a leading force fighting the Discovery Institute’s attempts to impose their ideology on Kansas high school students.

Once up on a time Kansas was almost progressive, but it’s kind of gone to hell now politically, despite the gains by Democrats under Kathleen Sebelius.

It’s too bad because when Kansans aren’t buying into Discovery Institute creationism, they tend to have an admirable emphasis on education and child welfare. Think “Minnesota nice” with a southern Plains flair, all but obscured now on the national scene by hate and craziness.

– The Cannabis Defense Coalition is closely following another trial – this one in Mason County. The defendants, Karen Mower and John Reed, were charged after a police raid on their home found 38 plants. Both are authorized patients. Mower is a terminally ill woman in her 40s who’s been given only 2 years to live by doctors, but the judge has disallowed a medical defense. The next pre-trial hearing is on Monday, June 8 at the Mason County Courthouse in Shelton. The CDC will be arranging for carpools so that concerned citizens can attend the hearing.

– Scott Morgan reminds us that despite what the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle keeps saying, the initial arrest and prosecution of Marc Emery was motivated by Emery’s politics more than anything else. In Emery’s home province of Ontario, lawyers are preparing a case that will challenge Canada’s marijuana prohibition in court.

– New York Times columnist Nick Kristof recently posted a query about drug legalization to his facebook account, soliciting feedback for a column this week. It’s great to see some of the most well-respected journalists in the country starting to tackle this question. Here are what I consider the 5 most important reasons the U.S. should go down that path right now:

1. Reducing law enforcement/incarceration expenses – You can just peek ahead to the section below on LEAP’s Howard Woolridge for a good rundown on this one. He talks about the law enforcement side of the equation when it comes to marijuana, but the incarceration costs for all drug users is an even more enormous expense that would be greatly diminished if we invested public funds into treatment. We sometimes think of the economic benefits of ending drug prohibition from the standpoint of how much money would be raised from taxing it, but the real savings come from the amount of money we won’t spend trying to put the 20-30 million Americans who either use or distribute drugs through our criminal justice system. We’re in a very serious economic crisis across the country right now, and while ending drug prohibition won’t solve the problem alone, the problem is virtually unsolvable without reducing the amount of public money that we spend incarcerating as many people as we do.

2. Improving the situation in Mexico – The decades long “war on drugs” had one major effect on drug trafficking. It successfully pushed control of the supply chain to a place where American law couldn’t reach it – Mexico. Now, the Mexican government is completely unable to deal with an illegal industry that pulls in tens of billions of dollars per year from American drug consumption. This has had devastating effects on Mexico’s economy and even more dire consequences for its security.

3. Keeping drugs out the hands of children – Without a regulated market for recreational drugs, the supply chains are run by criminal organizations who have zero incentive to keep drugs out of the hands of children. This has led to a situation where children have greater access to dangerous drugs, and even worse, often become easily dispensible pawns to be used for risky border crossings and other dangerous situations. You can solve both of these problems by setting up regulated markets for drugs.

4. Improving public health – Drug abuse and mental illness are two very costly health problems that feed off of each other. Our emphasis on incarcerating people in order to combat drug addiction doesn’t work and it makes the problem worse. Decriminalization of personal drug use is a vital first step in reducing the public health costs associated with addiction. Allowing doctors to prescribe drugs to addicts is another necessary step on this path, along with needle exchanges and other effective ways to mitigate the effects of drug addiction on our overall public health. In countries where these tactics have been done, they’ve been extraordinarily successful, both at reducing public health problems and lowering drug abuse rates.

5. Setting an example for how other countries can help reduce global organized crime and terrorism – When it comes to the divide in international drug law reform, the United States is on the same side as countries like Iran, Russia, and China, and opposed to countries like Switzerland, Portugal, and Canada, who’ve had greater success in dealing with drug addiction. The result is that the demand for illegal drugs (primarily heroin) is fueling the resurgence in the power of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan in a very similar fashion to how American drug consumption has been fueling Mexican drug gangs. It’s vital that we switch sides in this debate and start working with the countries that are boldly using reason, compassion, and empiricism to deal with this issue and reduce the demand for heroin. As the numbers of drug users rise dramatically in emerging nations like China, an inability to keep that money from flowing to people who view the western world as their enemy will be truly catastrophic.

– Frosty Woolridge, whose brother Howard is a former Michigan police officer and now the main lobbyist for LEAP in Washington DC working to end drug prohibition, posts some of Howard’s most compelling justifications for treating marijuana the same way we treat alcohol:

“Almost all of you reading this will have either been searched for marijuana or know someone who has. My profession has certainly changed its motto from ‘Protect and Serve’ to ‘Search and Arrest.’ A vehicle search will require two officers. Most officers operate alone, thus a colleague must be brought over from a neighboring district to assist. If a 911 call goes out in that district, the response time will be longer than necessary. Ditto for the district where the officer is searching the car. Reduction in Public Safety!

“The average search will require close to 60 minutes of total police time. So 750,000 possession cases equal only ¾ of a million hours, right? Wrong! According to my colleagues back in Bath Township, Michigan who spent most of their 12 hour shifts looking to bust the next Michael Phelps, they search an average of 15 cars to find one with a baggie. Now we are up to about 11 million hours or the equivalent of 5,500 street officers who do nothing but arrest the Willie Nelson’s of the world. Reduction in Public Safety!

…

Using a conservative figure of five hours per dealer bust, we are adding about 1.5 million more hours wasted. The hard number to calculate is how many hours are spent flying around in helicopters, locate an MJ garden and then spend a day cutting down the plants and airlifting them out….all without busting anyone. Now you have a clearer picture of the horrific amount of police time spent. Reduction in Public Safety!

“Wait! We are not done. These 845,000 MJ cases go to the lab that must show that the green stuff really is pot. Labs around the country are over-loaded with drug cases. Since drugs are the most important, guess what cases are not being processed? Rape kits & their DNA. According to National Public Radio and unrefuted, 400,000 rape kits some years old have never been opened. Rapists are running loose as labs process Willie’s last possession with intent to smoke bust. Reduction in Public Safety!

“Pop Quiz. According to our FBI, which crime receives more agent time: marijuana or child pornography? No brainer, right? And you are wrong! When FBI Director Mueller was asked by a not too happy Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz last year in a House hearing about the pitiful number of FBI agents (33 full-time equivalent) involved in kiddy porn crimes, his response was no new agents, no shifting of resources, nothing, nada, zip. IMO the expression on his face was ‘let them eat cake.’ Obviously he was never a street cop like me who has gently interviewed 7 year old rape victims and then arrested their tormentors. My blood is boiling as I write this, BTW. Reduction in Public Safety!

“Who else is unhappy with this criminal mis-direction of police resources? Some members of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. They will admit in private that the millions of street cop hours could be refocused & spent reducing deaths due to DUI by thousands. In public they are forced by funders to support MJ prohibition but in private they told me they support ending marijuana prohibition.

“The No Illegal Entry Into the USA groups are now opening their eyes to the fact that MJ prohibition means millions of extra border crossings. Why? Federal agents like ICE and Border Patrol have as their #1 priority federal (Title 21) drug laws. #2 is the catching of illegal entry. So, they literally will let 100 illegals coming thru without hindrance to stop one guy with a 60 pound backpack of grass. Experienced agents have informed me that absent the smuggling of pot with today’s manpower and technology, they could almost stop illegal entry across the southern border.

The emphasis two paragraphs above is mine. I’m very curious to know who’s actually running MADD and why they have such a strong stake in keeping marijuana illegal.

– I was chatting with Dan Robinson last night at DL, and he was telling me about an encounter he had during his latest call-in for jury duty. An older gentleman, when asked if he thought the accused had done something wrong, responded by saying “well, he must have done something wrong, or he wouldn’t be here.” The examples of why it’s a bad idea to believe that are far too numerous to mention, but another huge one surfaced last week.

Over at Reason, Radley Balko breaks another story involving corruption in Mississippi. In this case, an old video surfaced showing Michael West, a forensics expert working on a case from Monroe, Louisiana, intentionally putting bitemarks on a toddler who’d drowned in a bathtub. The defendant who was eventually convicted in the case, Jimmie Duncan, has been sitting on death row for 10 years.

Balko has long covered the case of Mississippi’s main medical examiner and West’s colleague, Steven Hayne (more posts here). Hayne has been doing autopsies in Mississippi for 20 years (and doing far more than other forensics experts say is even possible) and has testified in thousands of trials. There have already been a number of people who’ve been exonerated by DNA or other evidence after being sent to long prison terms, or even death row, by Hayne’s testimony.

– Josh Marshall writes about Sir Allen Stanford, the nation of Antigua, and how the latter owes the former $100 million.

Now, I have an affinity for the place because I’ve been there three times. Not that I’m some big Caribbean island hopper or world traveller. It’s the only place that I’ve ever been in the Caribbean. But I’ve been there three times. So I know the place a bit. And Stanford’s flameout has completely upended the whole place because he had made himself such a player there. As a funny illustration, a few days ago I went to the website of the local newspaper, the Antigua Sun, to try to find out the latest on what was happening down there. And I couldn’t find anything about it, which struck me as weird. And then I dug a little deeper to discover that … well, the Antigua Sun is owned by Sir Allen. So maybe that explains it.

The country has been hit by a major banking panic, not surprisingly. And the entire population has been in a panic over what’s going to happen to the country. Today the government announced that it is confiscating the land that Sir Allen owns in the island “to protect the national economy.” And that makes me wonder if more of that might be afoot because a few days ago the Prime Minister revealed that the government of Antigua owes Stanford “more than $100 million.”

And in good news for rich Americans looking to do business in the Caribbean, we might be able to play in Cuba again soon.

– Legendary drug warrior Calvina Fay speaks out against the California bill to regulate marijuana:

“If we think the drug cartels are going to tuck their tails between their legs and go home, I think we’re badly mistaken,” Fay said.

“They’re going to heavily target our children.”

Calvina, they already heavily target our children. Not just as customers, but as employees too. If you legalize marijuana, you’ll no longer have 16 year old kids standing on the street selling it. You’ll have old hippies in a head shop or maybe a state liquor store doing that. And the unscrupulous people who still try to sell drugs to young people? Well, we’ll finally have the police resources to catch them when we’re not wasting our time trying to arrest Michael Phelps.

– Finally, with Jenny Durkan looking to become the U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, what will happen with the case against Marc Emery, the Canadian marijuana seed-seller who’s long been fighting extradition by the previous two U.S. Attorneys here?

Sam Quinones writes about Mexico in the Foreign Policy online magazine:

I’d recently lived in Mexico for a decade, but I’d never seen anything like this. I left in 2004—as it turned out, just a year before Mexico’s long-running trouble with drug gangs took a dark new turn for the worse. Monterrey was the safest region in the country when I lived there, thanks to its robust economy and the sturdy social control of an industrial elite.

…

That week in Monterrey, newspapers reported, Mexico clocked 167 drug-related murders. When I lived there, they didn’t have to measure murder by the week. There were only about a thousand drug-related killings annually. The Mexico I returned to in 2008 would end that year with a body count of more than 5,300 dead. That’s almost double the death toll from the year before—and more than all the U.S. troops killed in Iraq since that war began.

But it wasn’t just the amount of killing that shocked me. When I lived in Mexico, the occasional gang member would turn up executed, maybe with duct-taped hands, rolled in a carpet, and dropped in an alley. But Mexico’s newspapers itemized a different kind of slaughter last August: Twenty-four of the week’s 167 dead were cops, 21 were decapitated, and 30 showed signs of torture. Campesinos found a pile of 12 more headless bodies in the Yucatán. Four more decapitated corpses were found in Tijuana, the same city where barrels of acid containing human remains were later placed in front of a seafood restaurant. A couple of weeks later, someone threw two hand grenades into an Independence Day celebration in Morelia, killing eight and injuring dozens more. And at any time, you could find YouTube videos of Mexican gangs executing their rivals—an eerie reminder of, and possibly a lesson learned from, al Qaeda in Iraq.

Of course, when it comes to the traditional media’s coverage of the drug war, the devastation in Mexico isn’t as interesting as whether or not Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane was going to arrest Michael Phelps.

Thanks to everyone who read through my series last week. Just as a followup to the last part, where I talked about the botched police raid on a small town mayor’s residence in Maryland, the Washington Post has a far more in-depth look at the case.

Here are some more updates on stories I’ve been following, and some other news of note:

[Read more…]

Sure, the guy is nuts, but this is what inevitably comes from violent, eliminationist rhetoric:

The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.

Jim D. Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he described his feelings and why he committed the shooting, Owen said.

Adkisson said he was frustrated about not being able to obtain a job and how much he hated the liberal movement, Owen said.

Adkisson hated liberals… and so he shot up a Unitarian church. During a children’s play.

Committing suicide by going on a shooting rampage in a Unitarian church is like shooting fish in a barrel and expecting the fish to shoot back. The Unitarians I’ve known are about the most peaceful and harmless folks I’ve ever met; indeed, the only church less likely for Adkisson to find armed resistance would have been a Friends meeting house. (And even then, only maybe.)

So of course this guy was crazy. Sane people don’t go on shooting rampages.

But hatred like his doesn’t grow in a vacuum; it is nurtured, shaped and focused by hate-mongers like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, who cheer at the notion of killing a few liberals to keep us in line, or who have made careers out of vilifying the political opposition as terrorists or traitors or worse. No, neither Coulter nor O’Reilly nor any of their cohorts pulled the trigger, but they surely understood that their words might feed the insanity of someone who could. If these are the mullahs of the extremist right, then the liberal-hating homicidal Adkisson is a suicide bomber of their own creation.

Say what you want about the aggressive rhetoric of netroots activists like me, but we don’t advocate violence, because we understand that ultimately, the sole purpose of advocacy is to incite action.

UPDATE:
Sam Smith at Scholars and Rogues weighs in:

Jim Adkisson was an unbalanced man, and perhaps it was only a matter of time before he snapped. But two questions to ponder: first, who created the conditions that hastened the snap? And second, when the train jumped the tracks, who created the bogeyman that the diseased brain latched onto as the cause of all the pain?

[Read more…]

Faced with inexplicable tragedy like the killer tornado that wiped Greenburg, Kansas off the map, people of faith sometimes ask how a compassionate God could allow such horrific suffering. Well, the Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas explains: God hates fags.

Amen.

Just read Robert Jamieson’s column in today’s Seattle P-I: “Critics go after the wrong pastor.”

Hmm. I wasn’t aware that us critics were limited to going after only one pastor at a time.

It’s an embarrassment of riches out there with the likes of Mark Driscoll, Ken Hutcherson, Joe Fuiten, Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Fred Phelps, and the inimitably mule-fucking Rev. Neil Horsley routinely making headlines. So many pastors, so little time.

The anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS, announced plans to picket Seattle’s civic mourning in the wake of the Seahawk’s disappointing loss in Super Bowl XL.

The city’s championship dreams collapsed last night under the weight of sloppy play, questionable clock management, and drive-killing penalties, which the Rev. Fred Phelps blamed on “divine retribution” for recently passed gay civil rights legislation, declaring “The Lord works in mysterious ways… and sometimes through the zebras.”

The controversial church is best known for picketing military funerals, shouting at mourners “God hates fags” and other scripture. But Rev. Phelps has recently expanded his missionary work to more high profile events, including last month’s memorial for the 12 miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster, where protesters held signs reading, “Thank God for Dead Miners,” “God Hates Your Tears” and “Miners in Hell.”

Phelps and his church have protested at the funerals of Matthew Shephard and Mr. Rogers, and have also announced plans to picket the funeral of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King. Citing her vocal support of gay issues, Rev. Phelps called her “an ingrate — unthankful and unholy,” who brought down the “wrath of God” upon herself:

“God hates fags and fag-enablers! Ergo, God hates Coretta Scott King and is now tormenting her with fire and brimstone…”

Rev. Phelps struck a similar chord in talking about Seattle’s Super Bowl loss, saying that God chose to torment fans with momentum-turning penalties and dropped passes in retaliation for the city’s unholy abomination: “God hates Seattle! It was Seattle’s fags who hardened God’s heart, and it was God’s wrath that turned Jerramy Stevens’ hands to stone.”

As for Pittsburgh, he described the Steelers’ home town as a “manly, God-fearing” city… except maybe for some excessive hugging in The Deer Hunter. “That was a little faggy,” Rev. Phelps admitted, “but God already punished director Michael Cimino with Heaven’s Gate.”