Last year in Norristown, Pa., Lakisha Briggs' boyfriend physically assaulted her, and the police arrested him. But in a cruel turn of events, a police officer then told Ms. Briggs, "You are on three strikes. We're gonna have your landlord evict you."
Yes, that's right. The police threatened Ms. Briggs with eviction because she had received their assistance for domestic violence. Under Norristown's "disorderly behavior ordinance," the city penalizes landlords and tenants when the police respond to three instances of "disorderly behavior" within a four-month period. The ordinance specifically includes "domestic disturbances" as disorderly behavior that triggers enforcement of the law.
After her first "strike," Ms. Briggs was terrified of calling the police. She did not want to do anything to risk losing her home. So even when her now ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, she did not call. And later, when he stabbed her in the neck, she was still too afraid to reach out. But both times, someone else did call the police. Based on these "strikes," the city pressured her landlord to evict. After a housing court refused to order an eviction, the city said it planned to condemn the property and forcibly remove Ms. Briggs from her home. The ACLU intervened, and the city did not carry out its threats, and even agreed to repeal the ordinance. But just two weeks later, Norristown quietly passed a virtually identical ordinance that imposes fines on landlords unless they evict tenants who obtain police assistance, including for domestic violence.
Today, the ACLU, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and the law firm Pepper Hamilton filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Ms. Briggs, challenging the ordinance. These laws violate tenants' First Amendment right to petition their government, which includes the right to contact law enforcement. They also violate the federal Violence Against Women Act, which protects many domestic violence victims from eviction based on the crimes committed against them, and the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, and was enacted 45 years ago this month. The ACLU has long argued that evictions based on domestic violence can discriminate against women, because such evictions are often motivated by gender stereotypes that hold victims responsible for the abuse they experience, and because the vast majority of victims are women.
Norristown is not alone. Cities and towns across the United States have similar laws, sometimes referred to as "nuisance ordinances" or "crime-free ordinances." We represented a domestic violence victim in Illinois, who after years of experiencing abuse, decided to reach out to the police for the first time. The police charged her husband with domestic battery and resisting arrest. Yet only a few days later, the police department sent her landlord a notice, instructing the landlord to evict the victim under the local ordinance based on the arrest. The message was clear: calling the police leads to homelessness.
A recent study of Milwaukee's nuisance ordinance showed that domestic violence was the third most common reason that police issued a nuisance citation, far above drug, property damage, or trespassing offenses. The study also established that enforcement of the ordinance disproportionately targeted African-American neighborhoods. The result? Women of color, like Ms. Briggs, were less able to access police protection.
Effective law enforcement depends on strong relationships between police and members of the community. These ordinances undermine that trust, by punishing victims who call 911 and coercing them to endure escalating violence in silence. Even worse, Norristown reports that domestic violence victims make up 20 percent of its homeless population. In order to reduce domestic violence and homelessness, Norristown should repeal the ordinance, and keep it off the books for good. And other towns that are considering enacting or enforcing these ordinances should learn the same lesson.
MAN FIGHT DRAGON:
My name is Lance E. McDonald and I am an independant videogame developer behind Man Fight Dragon down here in regional Australia. Black Annex is my love-letter to the games I grew up on (early '90s PC games, basically). The game is written in QBASIC and runs on Windows XP through Windows 8 (I have functional, but very much "pre-alpha" Mac and Linux builds). You can view the entire development of the game starting from Day-1 at http://www.manfightdragon.com/ The amazing Abducted By Sharks supplied all the music for the game, giving it an absolutely beautiful feel which I don't think anyone else could have achieved. You can find lots of great music at www.abductedbysharks.com if you like what you hear in the trailers so far.
I hope you'll enjoy playing Black Annex. I didn't create it for everyone, but I'm sure there are people out there who will have fun with it.
ExxonMobil’s recent oil spill dumped some 200,000 gallons into Mayflower, Arkansas, killed wildlife, and caused 22 homes to be evacuated. As the Natural Resources committee takes up another bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) argued at a hearing that the spill is more evidence the Keystone XL pipeline is a safe bet for Americans.
Comparing the safety of a pipeline to other transportation methods, Mullin said there is no reason to make a “big deal” about the spill:
“Would we really rather ship oil across the oceans? You’re talking about a catastrophe, we’re buying the oil. The percentages of barrels that are shipped daily from rail, from road, and from water the accidents versus the pipeline accidents, it’s a fraction. Your group is making a big deal about this ExxonMobil spill? I think Exxon should be patted on the back for the way they handled this. Yes this was horrible, yes we don’t like to see it, but they handled it. They did a great job handling it. I think they showed an example of what could be done when a catastrophe happens.
In fact, Exxon has been heavily criticized for its public dismissal of the harm and scope of the spill. And thanks to a technicality, the company can avoid paying taxes toward the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund — an exemption that applies to most tar sands crude.
Mullin also claimed the pipeline would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, which he linked to acts like the Boston Marathon bombing. “I mean, would we rather buy oil from the Middle East that sponsors the acts that we see like at the Marathon that we just saw yesterday?” he said. “I don’t know if that was actually sponsored by them or not but that’s the acts that they support.” Setting aside his sheer speculation over the cause of the tragedy at Boston, Mullin’s claims about reducing foreign oil dependence just don’t add up. Keystone XL guarantees more oil is shipped overseas, not less: The pipeline moves Canadian oil across the U.S. straight to the Gulf of Mexico, where it is refined and then exported. A Department of Energy analysis noted that Keystone XL will have virtually no impact on Middle East imports.
For the record, oil and gas companies rank among the freshman congressman’s largest donors.
Industry | Total | Indivs | PACs |
|---|---|---|---|
Leadership PACs | $104,750 | $0 | $104,750 |
Oil & Gas | $78,750 | $33,750 | $45,000 |
Special Trade Contractors | $66,976 | $63,976 | $3,000 |
Retired | $58,908 | $58,908 | $0 |
Commercial Banks | $53,650 | $38,650 | $15,000 |
General Contractors | $47,700 | $36,700 | $11,000 |
Insurance | $29,900 | $22,400 | $7,500 |
Real Estate | $29,150 | $29,150 | $0 |
Livestock | $28,500 | $26,500 | $2,000 |
Automotive | $24,000 | $14,000 | $10,000 |
Casinos/Gambling | $23,300 | $23,300 | $0 |
Trucking | $23,000 | $22,000 | $1,000 |
Misc Manufacturing & Distributing | $21,750 | $21,750 | $0 |
Candidate Committees | $21,000 | $0 | $21,000 |
Building Materials & Equipment | $20,050 | $20,050 | $0 |
Health Professionals | $19,050 | $19,050 | $0 |
Mining | $18,000 | $9,500 | $8,500 |
Misc Business | $15,842 | $15,842 | $0 |
Food Processing & Sales | $15,500 | $12,500 | $3,000 |
Misc Finance | $15,050 | $15,050 | $0 |
Last week I wrote about how much of the economic troubles in the United States can be linked to a cycle where businessmen and employers have been increasing their profits while not compensating their workers adequately. When people have more money going toward mandatory expenditures like rent/mortgage, utilities, gas, and food, they have less to spend on other things – not good for a consumer-based economy. To me, the solution seems painfully obvious: Employers need to pay their employees fairly and give them reasonable hours.
However, as you might have noticed, not many of the big business owners and politicians agree with me. Instead, they claim, many of our current nation’s issues are in fact the product of a certain class of (as they call them) moochers, parasites, leeches, welfare queens – who, if only they stopped being so lazy and self-entitled, wouldn’t be dragging this nation down.
With this view, a variety of politicians have voiced their desire to hold these people accountable (by Romney’s infamous estimation, about 47% of the nation). One of the most recent examples of this was in Tennessee where State Senator Stacey Campfield attempted to introduce Bill 132, a piece of law some have referred to as the “Starve the Children” bill. The proposed legislation was designed, supposedly, to “encourage” parents receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) whose children are not performing well in school by having their TANF funds cut – kicking them when they’re down is all it is.
Without going too deep into the absurdity of such a premise – a wide field of data shows that children from low-income families do worse, academically, than their middle or upper class peers; often because of a stressful home life where warm water and food might not be there tomorrow and parents who are, themselves, stressed – Randroid Sen. Campfield can speak for himself.
In a shockingly candid video uploaded earlier this week Sen. Campfield is confronted by an eight-year-old who wanted to give him a piece of her mind; in response, Campfield glibly refers to her (even to her face several times) as a “prop.” In the one instance when the senator does address the girl briefly (instead of the several instances when he almost knocks down other people as he attempts to flee) after she states that she’s “worried about the lights going off” he states that “that won’t happen as long as you have a decent parent.”
I encourage you to watch the excruciating four and half minute video (if you can stomach it). It’s always fascinating to see how Randroids try to rationalize an absence of compassion by dehumanizing the people they seek to victimize – in this instance, it was by calling this small girl a “prop” over and over again, as if chanting a mantra to convince himself that she was not a really person. (Though after this confrontation Sen. Campfield decided to drop the bill proposal after what little support he had fled – apparently they forgot the mantra trick.)
It would be one thing if Senator Campfield was unique, an oddity in the American political body. All that sets him apart is his astounding honesty and straight-forward approach to spreading his particularly venomous brand of class warfare. Though Randroids are not at all uncommon in American politics now, most take more tact than Campfield. But they are certainly getting bolder; if you recall, in 2010, South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer had this to say about the impoverished of his state:
My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.
This is Objectivism at its finest – not only are the wealthiest individuals in this country the best people in this country, but the poor underclasses are actually not even people, but animals who cannot think beyond the urge to “breed.” And as animals, clearly Bauer thinks there is a population problem – and short of hunting them for sport (just yet), the most obvious solution is to discourage them from living.
Then we can turn to the immigration debate which is being argued hotly, as new reform legislation is expected to be proposed to the US Senate next week. Last week I wrote about this issue and argued for immigration reform that would allow easy access to full citizenship to the 11+ million undocumented immigrants living in the nation today. In response, some individuals rehashed the so-called “self-deportation” stance – instead of rounding up all the undocumented immigrants and deporting them, which would not look good, let us encourage them to leave the country by making their accessibility to American society as difficult as possible, by denying them housing and employment – what I think should be more accurately described as deportation by starvation.
Regardless of my views, deportation by starvation (briefly) became a mainstream stance after Romney, the master of half statements and backwards wording, used the phrase “self deportation” to describe his position on the immigration issue (LINK). But why did that even happen and why are some people still running with it? Because in this debate it’s become all too easy to dehumanize these people – repeatedly refer to any group of humans as “illegal” for long enough and you’ll believe such a concept is possible. You’ll believe people’s existence can be “illegal,” with the solution being to starve them out of the country.
The belief that, in general, a large portion of this nation (its underclass) are to blame for our economic turmoil and massive deficit and should justly endure the bulk of the burden is pervasive. So strong is this belief that it’s completely stalled Congress and forced Obama to consider granting them one of their greatest requests: switching Social Security to a chained-CPI, which would effectively cut SS pay outs by measuring inflation in the highly dubious way of now also factoring in hypothetical spending habit changes. Not only does Social Security spending have nothing to do with the deficit (it’s only unsustainable because wage laborers are not being enough paid to match inflation and cost of living increases and thus the amount of money they can pay in), but cuts to it will directly affect the most vulnerable – our retired population who do not have a 401k or Cayman Islands stash to fall back on and need money from the system they paid into to feed themselves.
Cuts to Social Security and existing federal medical programs like Medicare are often on the wish lists of the so-called “deficit hawks” in Congress, yet they have nothing to do with the deficit. It becomes possible to think that elementary school children and their grandmas are to blame for the deficit and the poor economy, not because those who have been making money over the last decade haven’t been paying their share in taxes while at the same time we entangled ourselves in two costly, never-ending wars, but because these are not people but are parasites, moochers, freeloaders who feel entitled.
Like Tennessee State Senator Campfield, the only way to maintain the inhumanity of the “other” is to chant a mantra to oneself – they’re props, animals, who are illegal or feel entitled. Don’t believe the nonsense; everyone in this country is a person and deserves to the right to dignity and life – if there was ever “class warfare” it is what the upper classes and big businessmen have been doing to the middle and lower classes for decades now. They are the true entitled class.
Attacks were reported in Baghdad, as well as Tuz Khurmatu and Kirkuk in the north and Nasariyah in the south.
The co-ordinated attacks occurred during the morning rush hour and mainly involved car bombs.
The violence comes ahead of Iraq's provincial elections on 20 April, the first in the country since 2010.
Monday's attacks were particularly broad in scope, with several cities hit, including Fallujah, Tikrit, Samarra and Hilla.
The explosions were caused by 20 cars packed with explosives and three roadside bombs, AFP news agency reported.
Three car bombs went off minutes apart in Tuz Khurmatu, killing six people and wounding more than 60, AFP said.
A number of attacks were also reported in Baghdad.
In one incident, two car bombs claimed two lives and wounded 17 at a checkpoint at the heavily guarded airport, Reuters reported.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, nine people were killed when six car bombs went off simultaneously, police said.
BREAKING NEWS: At least dozens of people have been seriously injured, a Globe staffer on the scene says.
— Boston.com News (@BostonDotCom) April 15, 2013
Two explosions along @bostonmarathon route. Multiple severe injuries. Terrible. Horrific. twitter.com/JackieBrunoNEC…
— Jackie Bruno (@JackieBrunoNECN) April 15, 2013
In gushes, drips, and spills. With leaks, derailments, and ruptures. Oil companies from North and South America have littered the world with more than 1,185,000 gallons of crude oil, tar sands, and other fossil fuel waste in the last month. Tcktcktck has a new infographic that tells the toxic tale...
March 11 – 21: Gwagwalada Town, Nigera
Tuesday, March 19: Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories Canada
Monday, March 25: Fort MacKay, Alberta Canada
Wednesday, March 27: Parker Prairie, Minnesota USA
Friday, March 29: Mayflower, Arkansas
Sunday, March 31: A power plant in Lansing, Michigan USA
Tuesday, April 2: Nembe, Nigeria
Wednesday, April 3: 350KM southeast of Newfoundland, Canada
Wednesday, April 4: Chalmette, Louisiana USA
Monday, April 8: Esmeraldas, Ecuador
Tuesday, April 9: 29KM NE of Nuiqsut, Alaska USA
By Michael Kelley, Business Insider
A New York City court has ruled that the city shall pay $366,700 for a destructive raid on Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park encampment.
Around 1 a.m. on Nov. 15, 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to evict protestors — some of whom had camped there for almost two months — from Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Financial District.
The police threw away 5,554 books from the Occupy library and destroyed media equipment in addition to removing tents, tarps, and belongings.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York decided that the NYPD’s actions violated the protestors’ rights under the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
The city will pay:
- $47,000 in damages and $186,350 in legal fees for The People’s Library.
- $75,000 and $49,850 in legal fees to Global Revolutions TV for damaging their “computers, wifi hotspots and similarly related live-streaming equipment.”
- $8,500 for trashing the bicycle-powered generators that protestors built to light up the park after police held their other generators.
Occupy Wall Street is a movement, beginning on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square, that protests the role of Wall Street in the 2007 financial crisis and aims to resist the influence of major banks and multinational corporations.
Here’s footage of the raid courtesy of Casey Neistat:New York New York and Occupy Wall Street. November 2011
http://youtu.be/pQzRbfN-dYk
On Wednesday afternoon, the Bitcoin bubble appears to have burst. As of this writing, its current value is around $160—down from a high of $260. (It fell as low as $130 today.) There is no obvious explanation for why the digital currency has fallen so far and so fast, although the market correcting after such a huge rise might be a good explanation. (Update 4:05pm CT: Bitcoin seems to have somewhat recovered and appears to be hovering around $200. Update 6:00pm CT: The exchange rate has fallen back to around $160.)
Some redditors have taken solace in a comment thread entitled "Hold Spartans."
"This is just the market venting some pressure after these huge gains," wrote anotherblog. "To be honest I'm glad it's happening now. If it recovers, it will demonstrate resilience in the market and give confidence to future buyers and current holders that they don't need to panic sell, reduce the chances of a crash in the future."
Coincidentally, the plunge came several hours after a reddit user by the name of "bitcoinbillionaire" suddenly, spontaneously decided to give away around $12,000 (more than 63 BTC) worth of the digital currency. Bitcoinbillionaire rewarded 13 seemingly random redditors, then stopped the whirlwind spree after about eight hours. At the moment, no evidence links the currency's plunge with this random reddit charity.
Bitcoinbillionaire took advantage of reddit’s Bitcointip mechanism, which allows users to send each other small amounts of cash (usually less than $5). The mysterious benefactor appears to have given away 20 BTC (now worth slightly less than $4,000) as his or her first gift to one Karelb. This gift happened under a comment titled: “I wish for the price to crash.” That comment now seems prophetic.
A look at the account transferring all this money shows that two hours before the giveaways began, Bitcoinbillionaire received 50 BTC (about $9,500) from another account without an IP address.
Business Insider reported that Bitcoinbillionaire has left hints that he or she was an "early adopter," and had forgotten he or she even had any bitcoins. Not much is known beyond that, as Bitcoinbillionaire vanished as suddenly as he or she appeared.
"You've made me change my mind about this whole thing," Bitcoinbillionaire wrote. "I'm done."
Don’t feel bad if you missed the action. Business Insider also notes that this pot of cash is now being “paid forward.”
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A judge has blocked Iowa State University from releasing documents about food safety research conducted for the beef-processing company that makes the product dubbed "pink slime" by critics.
District Judge Dale Ruigh ruled last month that releasing the records would damage Beef Products, Inc. by revealing information about its proprietary food-processing techniques. Releasing them also would eliminate revenue that Iowa State laboratories receive from companies, who would go elsewhere for testing if they feared results were public records, he said.
"I think it's in the best interest of the companies that do business in Iowa, the general public, and the university," said attorney John Bickel, who represented BPI.
BPI, based in Dakota Dunes, S.D., filed legal action to block the release of records in 2010 after they were requested by Marler Clark, a Seattle law firm that specializes in food safety. The New York Times later sought the documents.
BPI calls its signature product lean finely textured beef. It is made using a process in which trimmings left after a cow is butchered are heated, lean meat is separated from fat and ammonia is applied to kill bacteria. The product, widely used in ground hamburger, faced a nationwide backlash last year after media reports depicted it as unsavory, causing retailers and schools to stop using it and BPI to close plants in Iowa, Texas and Kansas. The company has filed a $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit against ABC News and scientists who criticized the product.
The research at issue was conducted by Iowa State microbiologist James Dickson, who was hired by BPI as a food safety consultant in 2002. Dickson defended the company during last year's uproar, saying his research has found that its ammonia process makes the product safer by killing bacteria that causes food-borne illness. Dickson's research has long been cited by the company and its supporters.
The Iowa Attorney General's Office, which represented the university, argued that releasing the records would not be in the public interest because "they do not affect public policy and do not offer insight as to how government is doing its job." The release would deter companies and farmers from paying ISU for testing, its lawyer argued.
The office has learned that the requesters no longer seek the records and doesn't expect an appeal, spokesman Geoff Greenwood said Wednesday.
Attorney Bill Marler said he was skeptical of BPI's claims about Dickson's research and wanted to learn more when his firm sought the records in 2010, including emails between Dickson and BPI and documents such as reports and test results related to his consulting.
Iowa State gathered 1,650 documents in response but declined to release them after BPI filed a petition for an injunction. BPI argued that the records were exempt from Iowa's public records law because they involved trade secrets, and that Dickson was acting as a private consultant, not a public employee. Its petition said Dickson performed testing on different pathogens to study "the integrity of existing BPI patented processes" and alternatives.
Ruigh ruled that BPI operated in an "extraordinarily competitive" business, saying its rivals had been aggressive in seeking information about its exclusive food-processing methods. Some tried to hire Dickson, who had signed nondisclosure agreements with BPI.
The documents from Iowa State's Food Safety Research Laboratory would divulge "confidential information about BPI's food-processing methods and its development of new methods," as would related e-mail exchanges, Ruigh wrote.
Ruigh said more than 100 Iowa State groups charge the private sector for lab services, and they produce "significant revenue" for the university while providing educational opportunities for students.
Releasing the records "could lead to a significant reduction in the use of ISU's laboratory services by the private sector and thereby jeopardize the financial viability of the laboratories," he wrote.
Marler said he would not fight the ruling, acknowledging the records may detail BPI's "secret formula" for using ammonia. Marler, who is defending two scientists named in BPI's defamation lawsuit, said he believes the records will have to be released during discovery in that case.
"Now that the litigation is basically about whether the product is good, bad or indifferent, all that data is fair game," he said. "They can't hide anything."
Last week, Texas DA Mike McLelland of Kaufman County and his wife Cynthia Woodward were murdered in their home. Only a few months ago, McLelland's assistant district attorney, Mark Hasse, was murdered in a parking lot. Authorities are discovering a link between these murders and the murder of Colorado Department of Corrections chief Tom Clements less than two weeks ago.
The developing connection? The Aryan Brotherhood, a national white supremacist prison gang. McLelland, Hasse and Clements each led charges against the gang and dealt severe blows to their leadership in recent months. The primary suspect in Clements' murder is Evan Spencer Ebel, a known member of the gang.
But Rick Perry wants to blame it on Hispanics. Asked about McLelland's murder on Fox News this Wednesday, Perry gave an answer that will make your blood boil.
We know the drug cartels are very, very active in our country now. It goes back ... to the whole issue of border security and the failure of the federal government to put the men and women, whether they are military or whether they're border patrol or whether working with the local law enforcement, expend the dollars necessary to secure the border with Mexico...That's of great concern. I would suggest to you, it is really at the heart of this issue. You secure the border, then it makes it harder for these individuals to have access into this country as well as it addresses this whole issue that's hanging out on immigration.
Perry's comment is utterly fictional bile that promotes nothing but bigotry and misleads people about the murders. There is growing evidence that these murders are coming out of the Aryan Brotherhood, and no evidence linking them to undocumented Mexican immigrants. Perry is politics at its worst - making up lies to support a narrow political agenda.
Yesterday, Perry offered a $100,000 reward to anyone with information on the Kaufman County murders. But after Perry's terribly misleading comments, it wouldn't be surprising if the reward only applies to claims of evidence against Hispanics.
Vile.
