Liberal Youth

Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:23:55 -0400

Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages:

The state’s manslaughter laws weren’t supposed to apply to women who lose pregnancies. Prosecutors don’t seem to care.

This again.

crisisgroup: Drone Strikes In Pakistan ‘Ineffective’ | Sky...

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:22:50 -0400

crisisgroup:

Drone Strikes In Pakistan ‘Ineffective’ | Sky News

US drone strikes targeting militants in the tribal area of Pakistan have been ineffective at preventing attacks on Nato troops, a new report has concluded.

The International Crisis Group report says that drone strikes have killed a significant number of al Qaeda leaders and commanders of the Pakistan and Afghan Taliban, but also scores of innocent civilians.

Since 2004, there have been at least 350 drone strikes in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) - mostly in North Waziristan, South Waziristan and Kurram.

But the report criticises the killing of civilians through “signature” strikes that target groups of men based on behaviour patterns associated with terrorist activity rather than known identities.

FULL ARTICLE (Sky News)

Photo: UK Ministry of Defence/Flickr

Photo

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:21:36 -0400

crisisgroup: Did you know these facts about the United States’...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:32:30 -0400

Photo: KAZVorpal/Flickr

Photo: DVIDSHUB/Flickr

crisisgroup:

Did you know these facts about the United States’ drone program in Pakistan?

Washington and Islamabad have no official agreement regarding U.S. drone strikes on Pakistani territory.

Since it does not officially acknowledge the CIA-run drone program in Pakistan, the U.S. government provides no breakdown of casualties.

Some communities in targeted provinces in Pakistan have become reluctant to hold funerals lest they attract drone strikes.

The U.S. government claims that targeted killings are a legally justified response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. International legal experts have challenged this assumption that the U.S. can, more than a decade later and outside an active battlefield, still be at war with those it holds responsible and invoke the laws of war when targeting them.

Unlike international humanitarian law, international human rights law does not countenance the killing of civilians or bystanders.

Read more in our latest report, Drones: Myths and Reality in Pakistan

"For some reason when it comes to my indigent ghetto clients, it becomes easy to forget that people,..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:30:49 -0400

“For some reason when it comes to my indigent ghetto clients, it becomes easy to forget that people, including those who break the law, are complicated and often charming. That they too contain multitudes. Oddly, no one has trouble understanding the humanity of White crooks. We mythologize them all the time—Bonnie and Clude, John Gotti, Carolyn Warmus—all are complex people we find ways to relate to and even admire. At the movies we cheer for Butch and Sundance, Scarface, or [the] Ocean’s Eleven crew. The fact that John Gotti was a ruthless killer who wreaked havoc on far more lives than any of my clients ever touched never eclipses the public memory of him as big, handsome, and defiant. People loved Gotti’s resistance to governmental authority. But put a Black face on Gotti and no matter how dapper a don he is, the press, the prosecutors, and the public only read menace. I’ve often represented people as “big,” “handsome,” and “defiant” as John Gotti, yet when I invoke the humanity of these faceless robbers and killers, it sends most listeners from the land of mere confusion to that of utter incomprehension. To this day, I wrestle with where this understanding goes off the rails. Fundamentalist Christians constantly speak passionately about seeing the possibility of redemption in everyone, and no one bats an eye. But make this same point in the secular context of the criminal justice system, and rather than praiseworthy piety it is head as liberal gibberish.”

- David Feige, Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, pg. 53–54, (via letterstomycountry)

40% of Republicans think Benghazi is the biggest scandal in US History: not Marines gunning down Vietnamese villagers, not the discovery of mass graves in Iraq, not the annexation of Hawaii, not the annexation of Native lands, not the internment of Japanese-Americans, not any of the lynchings of Black folks, Jews, Italians, Mexicans, and Chinese Americans, not the Colorado Coalfield War, not the Red Scare, not the Banana Wars, not slavery: not a million scandals that seem to define the United States.

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:42:59 -0400

4,127 people have been killed by guns since Newtown.

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:31:45 -0400

think-progress:

And that number is growing rapidly. Just yesterday afternoon, the number was 4,099.

mohandasgandhi: verbalresistance: Why aid organizations...

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:15:22 -0400

mohandasgandhi:

verbalresistance:

Why aid organizations should focus on making rich people happy, not making poor people less hungry.

“…Making rich people happier by increasing their incomes by 10 percent is therefore just as valuable as making poor people happier by doing the same…” [via FP]

Today in Foreign Policy saying stupid shit…

Should your stove top burst into flame, the little time you have to act should be used to turn the oven on and the furnace in your home up, not running to grab your fire extinguisher. If you have time, grab the morning newspaper and throw it on!

Satire. http://fyre.it/1MdV

Photo

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:13:43 -0400

motherjones: Chart of the day. Full data here.

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:43:00 -0400

motherjones:

Chart of the day. Full data here.

High School Student Arrested, Deported, then Arrested Again

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:37:47 -0400

High School Student Arrested, Deported, then Arrested Again:

MIAMI, FL — Failing to learn from the example of Kiera Wilmot in Bartow, FL, a Miami student, 16-year-old Gabriella Silva, arrived at Vargas High School this past Tuesday with a water bottle filled with a mixture of household cleaning products, capped with aluminum foil. A reaction between the chemicals in the cleaners and the aluminum foil produced hydrogen gas and a resulting pressure build-up inside of the bottle. Eventually the top popped off in a firecracker-like explosion with a loud sound and smoke. When this occurred, even though no students were hurt, Silva was immediately apprehended by school security and promptly turned over to the police to be handcuffed and charged with a felony.

The police were frustrated at first when they couldn’t find the honors student with no previous criminal record in their system, but they then discovered the true reason why there were no records for the student: Silva was an illegal immigrant.

“I can’t believe I let my daughter speak to her, let alone hang out with her,” said Sally Smith, the mother of one of Silva’s best friends.

Officers said that, after making their discovery, they turned her over to Customs and Border Protection, an organization within the Department of Homeland Security. The officer in charge declined to comment, but The Flipside was able to attain an off-the-record statement from another member of the department:

“It’s real good that we caught this when we did,” the source said, adding, “you know how it spreads once they turn into adults – Mexicans have so many babies.”

Silva is of Chilean descent.

After deporting Silva, though, authorities realized that they never ended up making her serve time for the felony charge of blowing the cap off of a water bottle. This supposed “injustice,” according to Vargas High School Principal Mary McClean, was remedied right away when the police travelled to Chile to bring Silva back with them.

A second unnamed source, who was a part of the force sent to arrest Silva, was “relieved that we could make her serve time in the country she committed her crime in,” because letting her live out her days in a country she left when she was two-years-old was “too easy.”

It currently costs $19,469 per year to incarcerate an inmate in Florida.

liberalsarecool: College Republican meme.

Wed, 08 May 2013 23:26:35 -0400

liberalsarecool:

College Republican meme.

randomactsofchaos: Hajo de Reijger (05/01/2013)

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:17:41 -0400

randomactsofchaos:

Hajo de Reijger (05/01/2013)

letterstomycountry: fuckyeahprisoninmates: Bruce A. Liller,...

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:07:21 -0400

letterstomycountry:

fuckyeahprisoninmates:

Bruce A. Liller, Chief of Psychology at North Branch Correctional Institution in Maryland explains why, despite the higher security risk of allowing inmates out of their cells during the day, the practice is necessary. Even though North Branch is a Maximum Security institution, the inmates are not on lock-down 24 hours a day. As Dr. Liller suggests, the psychological well-being of the inmates demands some movement and involvement in activities such as working in the cafeteria, visiting the library, or exercising in the yard. [x]

LTMC: This is the reason why Mississippi was able to shut down one of their Supermax facilities in 2010. They let the prisoners out of their cages and allowed them to move around, play, work, be in the sunlight, and so forth. Each one of those prisoners was supposedly the most dangerous inmates in all of Mississippi. Every one of them was eventually moved back out into the general population. It reduced violence, increased officer safety, and saved the taxpayers money.

When you treat people like animals, they behave like animals as well. It just so happens that treating them like human beings is more cost efficient.

Czech Republic Sends $2 Billion in Maps as Foreign Aid to Geographically Oblivious U.S.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:47:56 -0400

Czech Republic Sends $2 Billion in Maps as Foreign Aid to Geographically Oblivious U.S.

"Clearly Fox is where you can see legitimate journalism taking place in terms of adversarial posture..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:44:23 -0400

“Clearly Fox is where you can see legitimate journalism taking place in terms of adversarial posture towards those in power.”

- Fox News’ Juan Williams agrees with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that Fox News is the one true cable news network. (via mediaite)

Why Government Spending Is So Hard To Cut

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:53:58 -0400

letterstomycountry:

One of the reasons why Government spending is so hard to cut is because people do actually rely on it for one reason or another. Whether it occurs through transfer payments (i.e. benefits) or funding someone’s job, Government spending does actually make a difference in people’s lives.

One can see this in the implementation of the sequester. I recently had the honor and privilege of working in a federal public defender’s office. Those offices are getting hosed right now under the sequester. In fact, many Federal Defender offices are getting hit up to six times harder than their prosecution counterparts. The head of one Ohio Federal Defender’s Office fired himself to save his staff. This is happening in Federal Defender’s offices around the county, including the Boston office that will be representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

These cuts are raising Sixth Amendment Gideon issues, as federal public defense attorneys now have even less time to work on their client’s cases. While case loads in the federal system are not as bad as they are in the state system, these cuts nonetheless damage the quality of representation that federal criminal defendants receive. In other words, calls go unanswered, less motions get filed, and the motions that are filed contain less legal arguments, Such omissions may make the difference between winning or losing a client’s case. In federal court, that usually means they end up in prison for a long time, as Congress still loves their mandatory minimums, United States v. Booker notwithstanding.

Elsewhere, there’s controversy over the Chained CPI proposal for Social Security. According to Robert G. Romasco, President of the AARP, it would result in substantial cuts for beneficiaries:

Under a chained CPI, older veterans would be hurt twice, as both Social Security and veterans’ benefits would be cut. So much for the administration’s claim to protect the vulnerable. Permanently disabled veterans who started receiving disability benefits from the Veterans Administration at age 30 would see their benefits cut by more than $1,400 a year at age 45, $2,300 at age 55, and $3,200 a year at age 65.

Of course, these cuts are kind of the point when you’re cutting Government spending. The largest parts of the federal budget are military spending, social security, and healthcare spending. There’s no magic button we can press to cut spending in these places without hurting someone. Cutting defense spending, even by only a few million dollars, means a decent number of people are out of a job. Cutting Social Security benefits means people on fixed incomes have to make do with less.

This isn’t to say there isn’t genuine “waste” in Government. A recent example is the Federal Government spending $890,000 in bank fees for empty bank accounts. Years back, the Pentagon spent $100 million on unused airline tickets for which it never sought refunds. The Pentagon in particular is notorious for wasteful spending projects, such as $436 hammers, $600 toilet seats, and $7,622 coffee brewers. Or how about spending $100,000 for a 2011 workshop on interstellar space travel that included a session entitled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” According to the link, “the session probed how Christian theology would apply in the event of the discovery of aliens.” I feel safer already.

Nonetheless, even if we got rid of much of this waste, we’d still have to make substantive cuts to make a dent in the federal budget. Even if we had a balanced approach of 50/50 spending and tax increases on a 10-year plan to reduce to the deficit back to healthy levels, it would still involve cutting a lot of people’s livelihoods. No matter where you cut from, somebody’s either losing their benefits or losing their job. and that’s why it’s so hard to cut Government spending, even if doing so is the overall right thing to do.

"Go to sleep or I will call the planes."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:36:00 -0400

“Go to sleep or I will call the planes.”

- what some Yemeni parents say to their children, according to activist Farea al-Muslimi’s testimony before a Congressional hearing Tuesday on the use of drones. (via washingtonpoststyle)

"Let’s imagine that instead of sending a handful of investigators from the ATF and the Chemical..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:46:17 -0400

“

Let’s imagine that instead of sending a handful of investigators from the ATF and the Chemical Safety Board to West, Texas, we marshaled every local, state and federal resource available to discover the exact sequence of events that led to the explosion. Let’s imagine that the question—Why?—became so urgent that the nation simply could not rest until it had overdetermined the answers. We’d discover that OSHA hadn’t inspected the plant in twenty-eight years—did this play a role in the disaster? If it’s found that the company that owns the plant, Adair Grain, violated safety regulations, as it had last year at another facility, we might call it criminal negligence and attribute culpability. But would we ascribe ideology? And which ideology would we indict? Deregulation? Austerity? Capitalism? Would we write headlines that say Officials Seek Motive in Texas Fertilizer Explosion? And could we name “profit” as that motive in the same way that we might name, say, “Islam” as the motive for terrorism? Would we arrest the plant’s owners, deny them their Miranda rights and seek to try them in an extra-legal tribunal outside the Constitution, as Senator Lindsey Graham has suggested we treat US citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Would we call for a ban on the production of ammonium nitrate and anhydrous ammonia? Would we say that “gaps and loopholes” in our nation’s agricultural policies were responsible for the tragedy, as Senator Chuck Grassley has suggested about immigration in the Boston bombing case?

No, we won’t. We won’t do any of these things, because even if the West fertilizer plant disaster is ultimately understood as something more than “just an accident,” it will still be taken as the presumed cost of living in a modern, industrialized economy.

When it comes to terrorism, we have the opposite response. We launch wars against other countries, denude the Constitution and create massive state bureaucracies for espionage, covert operations and assassinations. Since 9/11, it’s become a political imperative that our nation must express zero tolerance for terrorism, even though, like workplace fatalities, terrorism has been with us long before globalization lent it a more exotic and threating (sic) provenance.

”

- Richard Kim in The Nation.

Constructivism.

afternoonsnoozebutton: appropriate use of “literally”

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:21:57 -0400

afternoonsnoozebutton:

appropriate use of “literally”