Obama Shrugs Off Global Slavery To Protect Trade Deal

by Zach Carter, Huffington Post

7/27/2015 04:38 PM EDT

The Obama administration outraged human rights advocates on Monday by removing Malaysia from its list of the world’s worst human trafficking offenders — a move that the activists said damages U.S. credibility — simply to boost the president’s trade agenda.

“The Administration has turned its back on the victims of trafficking,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a written statement. “They have elevated politics over the most basic principles of human rights.”

…

For years, the Malaysian government has largely turned a blind eye to sex slavery involving men, women and children. Forced labor is rampant in several sectors of the country’s economy, particularly the electronics industry. In April, mass graves holding more than 130 human trafficking victims were discovered near the country’s northern border with Thailand. That same month, the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia said the government needed to take human trafficking prosecution more seriously.

…

“Malaysia’s record on curbing human trafficking is just not sufficient to justify an upgrade,” said Sarah Margon, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “And I think it’s damaging to the integrity of the report.”

The country’s new status effectively makes it eligible for inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal between the U.S. and 11 other nations. Obama considers the pact a top priority for his second term. But a law that Obama signed in June bars Congress from voting on trade pacts with Tier 3 countries using fast-track procedures, which prevent lawmakers from amending or filibustering the deal. The TPP almost certainly cannot pass Congress without fast-track aid.

“It is easier to lower the standard than to insist that Malaysia protect trafficking victims,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said of Malaysia’s upgraded status. “This report is another indication that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not being used to bring about meaningful change on critical issues.”

…

Several Democrats noted that the upgrade appears to conflict with years of promises from the administration that the TPP will include tough, meaningful labor and human rights protections. If the U.S. needs to fudge its policies on modern-day slavery to let Malaysia into the deal, they said, it’s hard to see the pact improving the plight of workers abroad.

“Instead of paving the way for Malaysia’s participation in TPP, we should be working on actions that Malaysia should be taking to come into compliance with these standards,” said Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees international trade issues. Levin called the upgrade “extremely concerning.”

Extremely concerning indeed.

Discontinuity

Viacom Bites!

The final guest-

• Wednesday 8/5: Louis C.K.

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.  It will take up the whole hour.

This is probably not the piece you expect.  You see, for as much time and  pixels I’ve spent writing about The Daily Show, I’ve never had the emotional connection with it that some have had.

On the positive side, and this is really the best and noblest thing I can say about it, it has replaced and supplanted Cable news.  Under Keith MSNBC showed some signs of sanity, but that was short lived and the rest of it is simply a roiling cesspit of D.C. elite conventional wisdom (and I’m looking right at you Rachel and Chris).

Jon is better than that, but for me, except in his interview with Jim Cramer (and maybe a few other times), he never showed the killer instinct of a Carlin except in the correspondent reports and scripted work.  Lewis Black calls Stewart ‘the Cronkite of his generation‘ and that’s true enough I suppose if you remember Uncle Walter was a moderate conservative of whom it was said ‘if you’ve lost Cronkite you’ve lost the nation’.

We’re waaay dow the rabbit hole from there.  Our country routinely commits war crimes that Germans and Japanese were hung for.  We’ve reached a level of corruption that surpasses the Gilded Age.  One writer said that is time for Jon to go because he’s too bitter and strident.  Sorry, he’s not nearly bitter and strident enough.

Jon wants to keep his Rolodex and you need to tear up every card and burn it to ashes if you want to be truthful about what is happening in the United States today.  But he does know his audience and too many people are willing to pretend that weak tea and a ‘D’ make you something less than a fully bought and paid for corporatist toady.  Jon was never willing to go there because he digs the applause.

And so do I, but if there is one thing that being independent has done for me (umm… my blog you know and I don’t care whether you like it or not) is that it has relieved some of the self censorship.

30 bucks a month for freedom is a small price to pay.

It remains to be seen if success spoils Stephen Colbert.

Did I mention Viacom Bites!

Tonighly we’ll be talking about tomorrow’s Republican debate and Planned Parenthood (which we will live blog) and our panel is Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Robinson, and Ricky Valez.

Denis Leary web exclusive extended interview would be below but Viacom Bites! The real news below.

Don’t look now, but the TPP just hit a major snag

by David Dayen, Salon

Tuesday, Aug 4, 2015 05:58 AM EST

Since the passage of fast-track authority, the biggest obstacle to more corporate-written international trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not been unions or environmentalists or public health advocates. It’s been the calendar. And jostling by TPP member countries over domestic priorities may have just created such a calendar problem that we will not see a deal completed by the end of the Obama presidency.

Ministerial meetings in Maui last week were supposed to end in an agreement between the 12 nations negotiating TPP. But those talks broke up on Friday without a breakthrough. Officials played down the differences, claiming that anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of the details have been finalized. But the outstanding issues involve the basic building blocks of a trade agreement – specifically, what industries get tariff elimination and unfettered market access, and which remain protected.

For example, the U.S. wants to protect profits for the pharmaceutical industry by increasing exclusivity times for prescription drugs, including lucrative biologics that often cost tens of thousands of dollars per treatment. Generic drug manufacturers would not be able to make cheaper knock-off versions for 12 years, a much longer exclusivity period than the current standard in TPP partners like Australia, Chile and New Zealand. Those countries have rejected intellectual property barriers posted for the benefit of large drug companies.

Other stumbling blocks concern major industries. For example, the U.S. won’t open up its sugar trade. Japan wants to limit access to its rice markets. New Zealand is seeking lower tariffs for the Canadian dairy market. Japanese carmakers want to continue to source auto parts from non-TPP countries like Thailand, but Mexico and Canada want that supply chain to end.

…

Japan’s economic minister said talks should resume in late August, but other media outlets claimed they wouldn’t until November. The discrepancy can be explained by news out of Ottawa this weekend: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called elections for October 19, and with important implications in TPP for Canadian dairy farms and beloved state-run enterprises like the CBC and Canada Post (both of which may have to be privatized under the agreement), he would not want to ignite controversy by signing a major trade deal in the middle of the campaign. The chance of August negotiations is made more remote by polls showing the Canadian electorate ready for a change.

If TPP talks don’t restart until November, the timeline slides into elections in the U.S., exactly what President Obama had been trying to avoid. Under fast-track rules, the government must publish the complete text of any trade agreement 60 days before signing. So even completion of TPP in November – and there’s no guarantee of that – would mean that signing wouldn’t take place until next January. And after that, there are reporting requirements that must take place before the White House can introduce the bill in Congress, which could mean another delay of at least 90 days. At that point, Congress has 90 session days to act on the implementing legislation.

So you’re talking about a series of TPP votes in Congress right in the middle of both the presidential race and Congressional primaries, a distasteful scenario for members who don’t want to draw an angry challenger because of their trade vote.

…

The White House would have been thrilled to get TPP done in the dead of winter, preferably over the holidays while everyone was consumed with tree-trimming and shopping. But that’s not going to happen now, which could lead the U.S. to shut down TPP completion until after the 2016 elections. And when you’re dealing with 12 countries, it’s hard to find a sweet spot for a trade deal you can’t sell at home and would rather hide from the public. Australia must hold elections by January 2017. New Zealand will vote in the fall of 2017. And there are local and regional elections throughout this time.

…

(E)xtending the clock adds a bit of unpredictability into a process with a heretofore more predictable ending. What if a change in leadership in Canada causes them to bolt from the agreement? What if Hillary Clinton, worried by the Sanders juggernaut, makes a public vow to stop TPP? What if labor succeeds in picking off a couple Congress members who voted for fast track? What if Australia or New Zealand walk away over the pressure to change their pharmaceutical rules or the controversial investor-state dispute settlement process?

A lot can happen over the next several months, or potentially years. And the loss of momentum for TPP could rebound to the other trade agreements the Administration wants to finish, like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the U.S. and Europe, or the massive 51-nation Trade in Services Agreement.

This is what happens when world leaders try to make deals they know their populations will detest. Apparently the last threads of democracy remaining are strong enough that, sooner or later, these same leaders must stand before their people and defend gutting regulations, selling out their sovereignty and benefiting multinational corporations instead of the public. It’s apparently hard to find a good time to do that.

Discontinuity

Oh, Faux

You are a never ending source of amusement.

This week’s guests-

• Tuesday 8/4: Denis Leary
• Wednesday 8/5: Louis C.K.

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.

Did you know Jon smokes?  Hope that doesn’t ruin it for you.  It’s one of the things that he and Denis Leary share.  Denis is the guest Jon invites because they are buds on and off camera.  He may pitch something but it’s just an excuse.  This will probably be one of Jon’s worst and most sentimental interviews ever.

Trevor is keeping the production team including the writers, but Jon is leaving the building.

Do you know I was a Boy Scout?

I was horrible.  The Troop that was school based was not so bad, the Troop that was Church based was virulently homophobic and homoerotic at the same time.

I didn’t leave because I was threatened sexually, I just couldn’t stand the constant bullying.  Not me, others.  There are things I will not tolerate.

Tonightly the topic is Toy Guns.  The panel is Mike Yard (who’s wiki warnings have been removed I note.  About damn time, he’s only the head writer for a major Cable network show.), Lennon Parham, and Jessica St. Clair.

Amy Schumer got a web exclusive extended interview! That and the real news below.

Discontinuity

We will play in Spades

This week’s guests-

• Monday 8/3: Amy Schumer
• Tuesday 8/4: Denis Leary
• Wednesday 8/5: Louis C.K.

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.

I like Amy Schumer.

Yes Sensei!

Oh yeah, therapy and Oprah.  Well, I’m in therapy with a wonderful person who has made me much more positive and less confrontational unlike other bloggers I could name (Armando).

Actually I kind of like him but really, whining about hide rates?  Show a little dignity dude.  I am permanently and definitively banned, not by some auto hide rate system but by the personal action of Meteor Blades who had to break all the rules (rules?  Hah!) to do it.

Denise, you’re still a rapist apologist and Blade- you’re a disappointing sellout, a whore to corporatists and Plutocrats.

Yes, I feel MUCH better now.

Amy is in fact the cousin of Chuck who is probably as embarrassed as can be about the fact she’s perceived as the bluest female comic performing today.  Among the things she will be talking about is tighter gun control in the wake of the tragic shootings at her new film Trainwreck.

Oh, it’s not her best work.  In the end the damsel gets saved by a guy, rent Frozen instead.

Man Bites Dog

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

Oh, and Dirk Benedict is a neighbor and he likes to be remembered for his role as ‘Face’.

Our panelists tonightly will be Julie Klausner, Rory Albanese, and Deon Cole.

The real news below.

By Galtisalie

I don’t know about you, but if I never have to read another piece that mentions the Koch brothers in the first sentence that would be fine with me. Oops. It seems so unnatural to do so, especially during a hot summer of so much fun, except for the police killings, right wing terrorism, ongoing Greek tragedy, and countless other bummers that are absolutely ruining my beach blanket bingo.

But I generally assume their will to power must be confronted by mine at every opportunity. And because their will to power (collectively including that of their amazing retinue of bought and paid for attendants) is way bigger than mine, it’s going to be pretty miserable if I spend much of my time dreaming of how to bring down their kingdom, but I do it anyway.

They alone (and they are not alone) also have a huge head start in cultural hegemony, with a massive perpetual intellectual propaganda campaign involving not only think tanks, billions of dollars, binders of semi-famous dead and living capitalist economists and other scholars, and a famous dead mercenary woman with a cool first name who wrote two incredibly awful but famously anti-altruistic novels in the 1940s and 50s followed by decades of mostly inhumane essay writing, but also by a famous and imposing dead German philosopher whose name until recently I could neither spell nor pronounce.

I suppose I should on some level study up. Instead, what a major part of me really feels compelled to do down deep on hot summer days with the planet melting is to ignore my anti-capitalist comrades, to practice the fine art of chilling out, which apparently involves working on thinking more happy and grateful thoughts, appreciating family, friends, and neighbors more, and whimsically watching life drift by with the thermostat turned way down. And I think on some level those ultra-rich superior brothers know that, which disturbs my reverie-potential even more. So, in truth, for me, it is much easier to want to fight them compulsively with all my meager energy and will to power, every single waking minute until, like the Black Knight in Monty Python, I can fight no longer, the assholes.

But I awake need more than my compulsions, even my compulsion for fighting the power. I awake need to be both among the familiar and a small hopeful part of nurturing a better world. I awake do not wish to be a human commodity waiting on economic growth to trickle my way or anyone else’s, but neither do I wish to be the silly Black Knight.

I awake am not, and you are not, to use the term in Le Gauchiste’s piece last Sunday, “homo oeconomicus.” I awake want to be unchained, and I awake want others to be as well.

But how can we take power away from the Koch brothers and those like them without saying their names with the repetition of a liturgy, becoming fixated on their power and our lack thereof, and even routinely employing martial metaphors in our theory and practice? I am not talking about “eliminationist” language, which of course is disgusting, authoritarian, and rightly verboten. I am talking about the language “of force,” using imagery we may routinely feel justified if not compelled to use, but which we sometimes would prefer not to use on some internal level.

Perhaps sometimes to be squeamish is to be healthy. I may be hesitant, but I cannot simply stay inside and ignore the cries and gasps of my brothers and sisters on the outside who cannot breathe. In that situation, I have no choice, if I am to be moral, but to go outside and to join some way in the revolt against the hands and ropes literally around their throats.

Interestingly, Dr. Fanon’s full quote begins with, “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture.” Revolution is not culturally, much less genetically, predestined, and neither is it designed in advance to implement this or that 10-point plan. “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

If I am not of the particular culture that is the oppressed group outside my window, I cannot pretend to be in a position to lead them in their time of greatest need, to tell them what their priorities should be, or to attempt to move their gaze from the hands and ropes around their necks back to the Koch brothers, income inequality, global warming, TPP, or even to the holistic and fundamental need for global system change from anti-human unsustainable capitalism to deep democracy with economic, social, and cultural, as well as civil and political, rights for all. It is their breath being lost in that moment, not mine.

Similarly, if one is being deported, or one’s parent or spouse is, in that moment, nothing else matters. Or, if a woman is being forced to abandon control of her own body because of someone else’s religion or brutality, the invasion of her person, her human dignity, and her most personal liberty and privacy is being violated, which cannot be condoned or made to wait.

While never forgetting root causes, I need to join them, follow them, take whatever solidarity positions in the masses they prefer me to have. I may even catch some words or glances of misdirected hostility or suspicion from time to time, because, THEY CAN’T BREATHE and can’t be expected always to speak or see clearly and fairly in their agony toward those who fit the outward description of the oppressor group who show up in peaceful support. Within strict limits of my right and duty to protect my own person, I should be tolerant and forgiving of their occasional minor mistakes that result from the confusing plight for which they did not ask.

And indeed, if I am not in the oppressed group, I may make mistakes too–some of my “fighting words” and show of support from time to time may not be helpful or revolutionary but rather inauthentic, presumptuous, or pretentious. While self-flagellation helps no one, neither does grandiosity.

More broadly, even from a revolutionary perspective, by being a fighter all or most of the time when I want or need more than anything to be a lover, am I not thereby becoming in some way part of the system I detest? I want to have a clean conscience as regards my friends and even my enemies as much as possible, but it is more than that. I awake want to reject holistically the system that has been foisted upon us, but even “to reject” at every turn is to live in contrast to that system rather than in freedom from it.

I am guilty as charged in some or all this and raise this complex issue of “just means” in all sincerity. In fact, I recently, ironically rather haughtily, stated as such in a religiously-themed piece I published at Daily Kos, which thankfully only a few of my best buds read (which may be the same with this here piece!): “[I] don’t claim to be pious and admit to being something of a fighter out of a sense of obligation, but with words only.”

In my opinion, apathy, not confrontation, is the social disease of our time. Faced with the seeming choice between allowing myself to be apathetic and risking imperfect confrontation, I often feel obligated to do the latter in part because so many choose the former. But is that wise? Is that the best I can be doing as a species-being?

We won’t get any modicum of heaven on Earth without raising a lot of hell. We still live in a “fighting age” and need to put on our “fighting clothes” (shout out to JayRaye and the Hellraisers like Mother Jones who are daily chronicled in Hellraisers Journal). But how we each choose to raise hell must be personally authentic to the time, place, and particular Hellraiser, with justice in the service of love not unforgiving fanaticism.

Many of us would prefer to stay in our caves, preferably a well-appointed man or woman cave. Nonetheless, caring humans crawl out even when we do not have to, blink at the uncaring sky, and seek out peace, liberty, and justice for all or at least for those we see before us being choked by “the man.” In that case, our duty is to do whatever we can to stop the choking. Our solitude and circumspection may have to wait.

But they cannot always wait. We must in general follow our bliss even as, when duty calls, we “confront,” “battle,” and “defeat” the “foes” who are the beneficiaries of divide and rule. Not always an easy balancing act. Even to begin to describe the system is to risk a migraine and to expose our own disproportionate political-economic weakness as individuals in it–a bubble-driven system powered by financial gimmickry, non-dischargeable consumer debt, production based on profits and not human need, and environmental destruction; the unsustainable but seemingly unstoppable use of non-renewable resources; the exploitation of labor and the reserve army of the unemployed; and prejudice and discrimination by “race”/ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, place of birth or other happenstance that has nothing to do with one’s infinite value as a beautiful human being; and which, in a workplace and on a street near us, is reinforced not only by institutionalized state violence but also by cultural hegemony.

Pass me the bong. As bad as the global system is, we the people, taken off the farm and often wedged into inhumane living conditions, are not at all inclined to or interested in external violence. Stress results in massive self-medication involving alcohol and other drugs, at its worst a form of internal violence. However, right wing terrorists who say, for instance, that they are trying to provoke a two-way “race” “war” are not only grotesquely immoral but also liars. It is a one-way war of right wing terror and police violence against people of color. The former (and sometimes the latter) hope to dehumanize African Americans and to encourage other lone wolves and small groups of racist killers. They do not seriously expect that African Americans are going to engage in retributive racially murderous acts.

Almost all working people, regardless of our race or ethnicity, first and foremost want peace and security for ourselves, children, elderly, and other vulnerable persons with whom we may come into contact and will not purposely engage in violence except as a last resort. In short, except for the terrorist who is exercising a bloodthirsty and hateful will to power, every normal human instinct is to walk or even run away from a gunfight. That is why stand your ground laws are not only completely unnecessary but also causative of violence. They pretend people are in harm’s way who are not in order to sell unnecessary guns that cause unnecessary injury and death. We may chafe at and hopefully do protest injustice, but we do not use violence unless truly exceptional circumstances are presented–unless, that is, we are among those mercenaries engaged in state-sanctioned local or international police action or those desperate who have been unable to find lawful employment and get caught up in the illegal non-prescription drug industry.

But how do we ourselves also avoid wallowing in the toxic language of hate?–for there are things to hate. Should we avoid the intellectual exercises and temptations involved with understanding and refuting the intellectuals and propaganda gurus of the powerful? Must we ourselves eschew aesthetics, intellectual development, and intellectual pleasure? How can we engage in the study that leads to greater ability to engage in argumentation against the philosophers of the powerful, such as Nietzsche and Rand, without becoming mesmerized or coopted in the process?

I will not link to “The Atlas Society” website, but in a 3/5/11 piece by one Stephen Hicks, the many differences in the two are, to my view, overwhelmed by their similarity in rejecting socialism and aid to society’s losers and exalting “the hero”:

In politics, they agree that contemporary civilization has very significant problems, and that socialism and the welfare state are nauseating; but while Nietzsche has good things to say about aristocracy, slavery, and war and bad things to say about capitalism, Rand says the opposite. Finally, they share the same exalted, heroic struggle sense of life–although Nietzsche adds to that a strong dose of bloodthirstiness that we do not find in Rand, while Rand regularly adds a strong dose of anger that we do not find in Nietzsche.

We have no choice but to “fight the power” and the ideas they use to blind us to the fact that they are not actually engaged in exalted, heroic struggles but mass injustice to maintain their system of divide and rule by any means necessary for the purpose of controlling the world’s resources for their own profit-taking and capital accumulation. However, we refuse to lose sight of what makes us beautiful, which has nothing to do with how we look or winning spelling contests, or our fighting ability

or winning anything else, from awards to games to wars to battles for interpretation of our history.

True allies respect the disrespected:

“I cant speak on it ’cause I’m not gonna see it,” [Spike Lee] tells VIBETV. “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s just me…I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.”

We must also respect ourselves and our own imperfect humanity. Permanent deployment is deadly, including participating in endless political battles against mercenary politicians, pundits, think tanks, and advertising gurus who wish to define and commodify us at so many dollars per vote under a “First Amendment” that speaks not the language of justice in the service of love but the language of money in the service of more money. And it is not simply a matter of getting back to the future either. Our ancestors made horrible mistakes too, often of tribalism, paternalism, sexism, and other forms of division and social hierarchy, so that to awake is not merely a retrospective cultural event.

So not only the will to power but also power itself as an end or a means to money stinks with the stench of greed, selfishness, and death. We absolutely don’t want to become like the Koch brothers.

But is there an easy, or at least emotionally cathartic way out? When we awake, as we must, should we try to make being a loser “cool”?

That “loser as coolness” commodity was produced and sold two decades ago to great aesthetic effect … seems like yesterday

We should refuse to be purchased by a consumer culture that can even package the language of the desperate and their would-be allies for commercial purposes. Surely the stuff of revolution is more than adoption of a certain fashion consciousness. Signs of solidarity must be more than proudly affecting the pose of “losers” in some kind of kubuki show of support for those who truly suffer from the grosser forms of injustice.

As a precaution from being frauds, do members of the left then need to adopt cultural austerity? Do we need to stop reading all books other than our chosen school of socialist thought and lose what little sense of humor we still have? Will doing otherwise lead us down the slippery slope to being poseurs? Of course not. We should not try so hard to “fight” “the winners” in their own fixed games that we either adopt the tokens and terminology to which we have been assigned or only speak with our own insider terms of reference.

The advertisers and other mercenaries working for the ruling class have decided all manner of linguistic packaging to keep us enticed and preoccupied when all the while inside the packages there is very little there there. “Mystique” itself is such an impressive French-sounding word. But we should not adopt an anti-intellectual pose any more than we should adopt the pose of “loser.”

Still, when we unwrap the supposedly precious intellectual commodities of the ruling class, when we touch those rings of power, we should be careful and realize that, like Frodo Baggins, there is nothing so special or moral about any of us that makes us beyond temptation.

Let us begin to be awake by giving up our craving for acceptance in the supposedly glamorous world of waiting for Mr. Übermensch. Let us not be so occupied with the minds of our enemies that we are unable to free up our mental energy away from that which does not make us more loving global citizens, including the “correct” spelling and pronunciation of the names of mercenary intellectuals we are expected to admire. Let us not be taken in either by their brilliance and mental dexterity or our own.

We do not want to become one of the ruling class or one of their mercenary class who gets to stand nearby in the high places, feed our betters grapes, and wave fans over them in their exalted, heroic struggles.

U. Of Cincinnati Shooting Puts Spotlight on Campus Police

Associated Press

JULY 31, 2015, 3:58 P.M. E.D.T.

It would be a mistake to shutter the university police department, Ono said.

“You need to have a knowledge of how to interact with students. There are many different issues and federal guidelines that have to be followed that are very specific to campus policing,” he said in an interview, adding that municipal and campus police work closely together. “Sometimes UC police and Cincinnati police ride together in a car. They collaborate to help each other out. It really brings crime down generally.”

There’s also an expectation among parents and students that university police should be responsible for safety off campus.

“We’re getting pushed to ignore those imaginary lines on the map,” Jeff Corcoran, then the interim chief of the University of Cincinnati police, told The Associated Press in an interview last year.

I’ve been on a jury.

Someone claimed someone else had run their truck up and down the side of their car, which was parked, and had not only damaged the car but also injured them (because they were in the car at the time) and left them with a permanent disability for which they were seeking damages from the insurance company of the truck driver.

I have never before (and never since) been treated to a fantasy based on such a transparently thin tissue of lies.

Oh, this is definitely one of those ‘both sides do it’ real life experiences that have no satisfactory resolutions.  Both the injured party and truck driver claimed they were ‘inspecting a construction site’.  At 1 am.  In a section of town notorious for street drug dealing.  Right.  I was born, but it wasn’t yesterday.

While the plaintiff (the injured party seeking damages) set out to confuse us with photos of the damaged car artfully posed between 2 total wrecks that had absolutely no relation to the case at all, they did in fact show tire marks that clearly matched the tires on the truck in question (which were not common).

The defendant claimed, of course, that it wasn’t him and besides he had taken off from the encounter in the 180 degree opposite direction than the plaintiff said.  This was indisputably contradicted by the pictures which definitively showed the direction of the impact (tire marks, duh).

To counter this the defense, which is to say the insurance company, brought in an ‘expert’- a retired State Police Officer who had been in charge of Accident Investigation for (mumblety) years.

And he flat out lied to us on the jury.

I glanced around at my fellows and found no indication that it had even registered which I soon found was entirely true.

We had sat on this case for 3 weeks which is unusually long in a civil action for damages and when we got to the jury room I was the lone hold out for the plaintiff.

‘But he lied,’ said I.  ‘Look, I can prove it!’

Nope.  They bought it hook line and sinker.  The Officer was an expert, and who was I?  Just some guy prolonging the agony in a forgone conclusion.

It’s not exactly my finest hour or twelve.  I held out for a day and a half, but the truth was that the plaintiff’s case fell completely apart on it’s second leg- damages.  There was no proof at all that he had actually been in the car when it was struck AND, since he was already 30% permanently disabled, it was hard to argue based on a shyster (made their living by testifying) Chiropractor’s (on my list of Voodoo right after Economics, Mormonism, and Scientology) testimony that there had been an increase.

So I relented with conditions that I’m sure were promptly ignored but it reinforced a lesson I’d learned a long, long time ago-

Policemen lie, under oath, as easily as they breathe.  How can you tell?  Their lips are moving.

What brings this up?

Officers at Sam DuBose scene involved in death of another unarmed black man

by Ryan Felton and Oliver Laughland, The Guardian

Friday 31 July 2015 15.22 EDT

In court documents obtained by the Guardian and filed by Brinson’s family in a civil suit against UC police and the hospital, all seven officers are accused of using excessive force and “acted with deliberate indifference to the serious medical and security needs of Mr Brinson”.

According to the lawsuit, before Brinson was placed in restraints he “repeatedly yelled that slavery was over and he repeatedly pleaded not to be shackled and not to be treated like a slave”.

The documents named University of Cincinnati officers Eric Weibel and Phillip Kidd – the same men who, in a formal report, supported officer Ray Tensing’s claim that he was “dragged” by DuBose’s vehicle on 19 July.

Tensing’s account that he was “dragged” was used as justification for the lethal use of force. It was later dismissed as an attempt to mislead investigators and as “making an excuse for the purposeful killing of another person” by the Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters, who charged Tensing with murder on Wednesday.

Weibel and Kidd?  Do you really need to ask?

No charges for additional Cincinnati police officers

By Amanda Sakuma, MSNBC

07/31/15 01:53 PM

A grand jury has decided to not indict additional Cincinnati police officers involved in the investigation into the death of an unarmed black man who was shot in the head during a routine traffic stop earlier this month, Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters announced Friday.

…

Kidd and Lindenschmidt were on the scene moments later, guns drawn as Tensing reaches into the car to kill the engine. In additional body camera footage, the officers are heard claiming they saw Tensing be pulled by the car.

“Did you see him being dragged?” a responding officer asks.

“Yes,” University of Cincinnati officer Phillip Kidd says.

In the incident report, Officer Eric Weibel wrote that “Officer Kidd told me that he witnessed the Honda Accord drag Officer Tensing, and that he witnessed Officer Tensing fire a single shot.”

Discontinuity

Reagan’s Eyesocket

Gay Eureka Springs

Next week’s guests-

• Monday 8/3: Amy Schumer
• Tuesday 8/4: Denis Leary
• Wednesday 8/5: Louis C.K.

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.

There is a near certain probability J.J. Abrams will be on to talk about Mission Impossible which if I haven’t mentioned it before I find entirely derivative and uninspired, the acting terrible and wooden, and the action sequences cliched and boring; only some of which was true about the original TV version.

Now I’d be just as happy if J.J. would talk about his uncredited writing for the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode, The Drill, but I suspect most of you would find the topic a little arcane.  What I would like to find out about (and I suspect most of you also) is the Disney reboot of Star Wars due for ek’smas, The Force Awakens.

Thinning the Herd

Tonightly we will be talking about Sam DuBose and Plantation Weddings with our panel Robin Thede, Ed Helms, and BIG K.R.I.T..

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

The real news below.