PBS Obtains Video Of US Border Patrol Violence, Ultimately Fatal, Against Unarmed, Nonresisting Mexican

H/T ACLU of Texas in an email for alerting me to this incident.

Here is the PBS video of the incident. At least two videos of the incident were taken by cell phone; only one complete video survived. Exceptionally sensitive readers may want to avoid viewing what is ultimately a killing, quite possibly a murder. Border Patrol agents’ reports on the case do not correspond to events visible… and audible… on the surviving cell phone video. The incident was at night and the video is less than clear, but there is no problem seeing that the man targeted by Border agents is either handcuffed or bound at the wrists and face-down on the ground when he is tased multiple times. The audio is also quite clear: the victim cries out many times for help before he is ultimately silenced.

I will leave you with a statement from the ACLU email. Bolds are original from the email; I have replaced links to videos with direct links to the originals at PBS:

Since 2010, Border Patrol agents have killed eight members of U.S.-Mexico border communities and others have been seriously injured by the use of excessive force.

In June 2010, an incident that occurred along a railroad bridge connecting Juarez and El Paso made international headlines when a Border Patrol agent in El Paso shot and killed a 15-year-old boy on Mexican soil.

Watch the video: Learn more about the use of excessive force by Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol has taken no known action against any of the agents involved in the killings; no investigation has been made public. Last week, PBS’s Need to Know aired a half hour segment exposing excessive use of deadly force that has become routine for the Border Patrol.

Watch PBS’s Need to Know to learn more about the border killings.

Please note that in no way do I, or the ACLU, take a position on the much-debated need to control the borders and prevent illegal entries. That is a separate issue. The issue here is excessive force by the Border Patrol. If you watch the video, you will probably conclude that excessive force was used. There is no justification for that degree of force against a man obviously in no position or condition to resist arrest.

If the US is trying to isolate itself from the world, indeed, from one of its nearest neighbor nations, by xenophobic behaviors quite outside the standards of human decency, it is doing a damned good job of it. Whatever the legal outcome, I am disgusted and ashamed that my nation is pursuing such actions in my name. I do not approve!

Mitt Hates You: Rmoney [sic] To Speak At Conference Of Hate Groups

Via Pam’s House Blend of FDL, Rmoney is invited and plans to speak at the Values Voters Summit in mid-September, an annual gathering of org’s many of which are listed by Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. Anti-gay and racist fanatic Bryan Fischer, politically involved former Klan grand wizard David Duke, Family Research Council zealot Tony Perkins, gay-hater Matt Barber (who must not be important because he has no wiki), etc., will all be under one roof thanks to the sponsorship of that “good” “Christian” institute of… something, Liberty University. And yes, Rmoney plans to speak to them.

Need I say more? If I knew nothing else against Rmoney, this would tell me all I needed to know. You know he’s not going there to tell them to mend their ways.

‘Zero Tolerance’? No… Zero Brains, Zero Compassion

The Boston Globe has the story (oh, shit… the story is via AP. Excuse the blank space while I find another source… OK, here’s another source, but you’ll still have to read the AP source for some of the facts I write about):

CBS has the story:

Six-year-old girl handcuffed and arrested for throwing tantrum at Georgia elementary school

(CBS/WMAZ) MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. – A 6-year-old elementary school student was handcuffed and arrested Friday after she allegedly threw a tantrum in class.

CBS affiliate WMAZ reports that according to the police report, the girl tore items off the walls and threw furniture. The report also says the girl knocked over a shelf that injured the school principal.

The girl was crying in the principal’s office at Creekside Elementary before police arrived. When the officer tried to calm the child, she resisted and was handcuffed.

“Our policy is that any detainee transported to our station in a patrol vehicle is to be handcuffed in the back. There is no age discrimination on that rule,” said Milledgeville Chief of Police Dray Swicord.

Police took the young girl to the police station where she was charged with simple assault and damage to property. As she is only 6-years-old, she will not have to go to court.

The girl was also suspended until August.

…

I grew up as the son of a high school teacher and a middle school counselor. I am not insensitive to the problems of classroom discipline faced by teachers, counselors and school administrators. Indeed, my father once disarmed a mentally disturbed 13-year-old girl who brought a concealed gun into the school office, intending to shoot the principal.

But I’m sorry… any teacher who cannot deal with a kid who has a cell phone or even a condom in class, or even a six-year-old who throws a violent temper tantrum, without calling the police… should find another line of work.

Oh, and why did police refuse to say what set off the kid’s tantrum? Note that the article does not say “the police did not know…”

If you think actions such as handcuffing a six-year-old and charging her with battery assault and damage to property constitute ”good discipline,” you’re fucking, full-blown batshit crazy. Arresting kindergartners traumatizes kids in ways adults cannot even fathom. I cannot imagine it leads to better classroom discipline.

A kindergartner with an arrest record… that’s just what our society needs, right? Oh, did I mention… the six-year-old girl is African American? Who’d have expected that in the great State of Georgia! [/snark] (Or any other state, Southern or otherwise. This stuff is happening everywhere.) Maybe that’s why the cops refused to name the provocation… was she perhaps the target of a racial slur?

Santorum, Incapable Of Completing Anything, Uses Half Of The ‘N-Word’

Lisa Derrick of FDL has details… and a video.

The real problem is that Santorum’s half-mumbled racial slur is not an accident, nor is it atypical of extreme right-wing nut-jobs in America. To them it’s just another word. Yes, they know it’s derogatory, socially unacceptable and damaging to race relations, but it falls off their lips without any thought given to those aspects. And many of today’s Republicans are just like Santorum. He is representative of them. And that’s scary, when you think about it.

Look. I am white. It is a simple fact that my ancestors on my mother’s side of the family “owned” the likely ancestors of some of the African Americans I have known and worked with… in the legal sense only, in the old South, not that any human being ever has a moral right to own another. To my way of thinking, my family’s actions three or four generations ago obligate me: there is no way to compensate a person or his or her descendants for two or three generations of captive unpaid servitude… slavery… but it is my obligation to try.

For Santorum and his ilk, however, that historical reality leads them to treat today’s African Americans with a deep-seated contempt… just because of their skin color and their racial origin. There is plenty to fault in Barack Obama as a politician and a president, but Santorum and his cohort choose instead to vilify him for his race. That tells me all I need to know about Rick Santorum.

I almost wish I believed in reincarnation. Santorum needs to spend a lifetime in an African nation with an unstable government, an Islamic majority (Santorum is Catholic) and a shortage of food. Oh, and of course, he needs to be reincarnated Black.

ACLU Wins Immigration Case In Texas

Texas is a big place, and a lot of people here are more immigrant-friendly than the people of Farmers Branch, TX, whose anti-immigrant law was ruled unconstitutional by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. America is also a big place, and such local laws as the one in Farmers Branch are more frequent than you might think:

Yesterday the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals declared the Farmers Branch, Texas, anti-immigrant ordinance unconstitutional. The decision, which came in a suit brought by the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is the latest in a long line of suspensions, withdrawals, and invalidations of “self-deportation” laws, including ordinances in Hazleton, Pa.; Escondido, Calif. and Riverside, N.J., and key aspects of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 and similar state laws in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Utah, and Indiana.

…

Economic hard times probably account for some of the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment. But I’ve seen some of the work immigrant farm workers do, and I’d have to be awfully hungry to do such work myself. And frankly, the undocumented immigrants I’ve run across off and on over the years overwhelmingly behave themselves, pay their taxes and supply services most Americans are not interested in providing.

The worst about these local laws (apart from the fact that local governments simply don’t have the constitutional authority to make laws about immigration) is that they exist because of a more general prejudice against people of color. Ask any Hispanic American citizen when they were last stopped by police and asked to prove their citizenship… many of them have such a story to tell.

This is absurd. Almost all of us (except American Indians) have ancestors who immigrated here, for whatever reason, within recorded history. How American citizens can justify an attitude toward would-be or actual immigrants now of “I’ve got mine; forget about you” is quite beyond me. Any shortages in America… of goods, cash, food, whatever… are due to laws that favor the obscenely wealthy to the detriment of literally everyone else. Immigrants, legal or undocumented, are simply not to blame.

Pair O’ Quotes 3

Many a sincere [white] person will answer: “Our attitude towards Negroes is the result of unfavorable experiences which we have had by living side by side with Negroes in this country. They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability.”		There’s nothing in here that has a racial tint at all - Pete Hoekstra (R), interview with Megyn Kelly, referencing his “Debbie Spend-it-NOW” political ad depicting an Asian woman speaking in broken English, 2012
I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery.  The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition. – Albert Einstein, “The Negro Question”, 1946
• You may have noticed I’ve been reading a lot of Albert Einstein lately. I think it is safe to assume that I’ll post other quotes by him, and of course by other notable people.

That Old Racial Reverse Discrimination Claim Rears Its Ugly Head

… in South Carolina, where DoJ has halted implementation of a voter ID law which South Carolina’s own statistics show would have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters. Lawyers for South Carolina, including Christopher Coates (infamous for the New Black Panther Party case) and the utterly despicable Bradley Schlozman (reports of his humanity are greatly exaggerated), are claiming the DoJ is violating white people’s civil rights. Yeah, right… tell me another one.

I can’t believe I’m reading this in 2012. It sounds more like 1957. I am sure they understand full well, in South Carolina as in Texas, that the intent of the law is precisely what they say it is not: to prevent African Americans from voting.

I admit to a different bias myself: having seen Bradley Schlozman on TV several times during the Bush Junior administration, I believe he should be thrown in jail for his arrogant, condescending manner alone… [/snark]

The Back Of The (Israeli) Bus

There has been discussion within the lefty blogosphere of the incident described in an article in Haaretz titled Israeli woman refuses ultra-Orthodox dictate to move to back of bus. Some, such as Echidne, compare the woman, Tanya Rosenblit, to our own Rosa Parks. Others, such as Charles II of Mercury Rising, disagree.

Of course, this phenomenon is not unique to Judaism. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews, some strict Muslim sects and not a few American Christian fundamentalist denominations declare unapologetically that women are to be subjugated, or must follow dress codes, or must sit in the back of the bus. Religious subjugation of women is widespread across many religions, and is hardly anything new.

But Israeli courts have recently ruled to accommodate this ultra-Orthodox demand and permit the more than 100 bus routes, many in or to Jerusalem, that require women to sit in the back. See Echidne’s post, linked above.

If you’re American, you can say it’s not your fight; it’s theirs. I disagree. America’s taxpayers devote an absolute fortune to defending Israel, allegedly because it’s “the Middle East’s only democracy.” So if you’re American, your taxes defend a “democratic” society that treats women much the way Blacks were treated in the pre-civil-rights-era South.

How do you feel about that?

Playing The ‘Racist’ Card

Someone I have heretofore had considerable respect for, Melissa Harris-Perry, wrote an article in The Nation (“Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama“) that disappointed me in the extreme. In essence, Harris-Perry plays the “racist” card, claiming that white liberals are abandoning Obama because he is black, in a way that they did not abandon Bill Clinton in allegedly similar circumstances in 1996.

Where to begin? First, the comparison with Clinton is specious.

There are some similarities. Clinton, like Obama, is a conservative Democrat. Clinton, like Obama, is an excellent public speaker. Clinton, like Obama, tossed a lot of bones to conservatives both in his own party and across the aisle, especially on social issues such as gay rights and the war on some drugs.

But there, in my opinion, the similarity ends. Clinton inherited an economy that was lukewarm or worse and managed a turnaround that benefited large numbers of people. Obama inherited an economy wrecked by George W. Bush and proceeded in exactly the wrong direction, making it much worse, with worse still to come. Obama inherited wars and a fear of terrorism from George W. Bush, maintained both major wars and exacerbated the fear of terrorism; Clinton challenged acts of terrorism in U.S. civilian courts and won. Obama inherited a “unitary executive” theory from the George W. Bush administration and extended it… that’s right, extended the claims for presidential powers… to the point of jailing people indefinitely (including American citizens) without charge and without access to any sort of due process, and… this tops it for me… secretly ordering targeted assassinations of American citizens, again with no due process whatsoever. Clinton almost certainly never heard of a “unitary executive” during his terms as president.

Oh, and Clinton had no plans that I know of to eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid. Obama… well, you know.

If all of that doesn’t constitute reason enough in Harris-Perry’s estimation for me as a white liberal to abandon Obama in 2012, well, I have to question the standard by which she evaluates racist behavior in white liberals.

Am I a racist? I don’t know… no white person really knows to what degree s/he is a racist; we don’t have the racial lenses through which to see the signs. I don’t think I am a racist, but I utterly decline to put on a performance for Harris-Perry’s sake, or apologize or back down in the least from my stated grievances against Obama as president. As president… emphasis on that… he has betrayed virtually every campaign promise he made before his election. As president… limiting my criticism to Obama in that role alone… he has committed numerous acts of dubious constitutionality. As president… he isn’t too much different from George W. Bush.

David Sirota presents a similar case in his Salon article “Why white liberals are (really) ditching Obama: Racism isn’t responsible for the president’s drop in popularity. His right-wing policies are“. I am glad to see there is at least one white liberal with higher web stats than my own to publish the case. There is really no response to the accusation of racism; it is the card that trumps all others in the game of politics. But those of us who oppose Obama on policy grounds need to say it over and over again anyway: Obama is losing my vote by being effectively a Republican more conservative than Ronald Reagan. Period.

Here ends the rant for the moment.

(H/T Avedon for the link to Sirota.)

Public School Desegregation: Firmly Established By Late 1960s-1970s?

NO:

Watch this Robert Greenwald video:

There is no way to express the depth of evil to which the Koch brothers have applied the almost unlimited resources at their disposal. If you thought this work was done 30-40 years ago, you were sadly mistaken: racism never rests.