That’s absolutely not true, but Shepherd Smith‘s outburst makes entertaining tv. Via Digby
(Possibly NSFW depending on coolness of workplace.)
Articles with the Tag law
The Audacity Of Hypocrisy
Peterr at Firedoglake:
Never Again? That’ll be Quite a Speech, Mr. President
By: Peterr Tuesday April 21, 2009 4:20 pmHow does Obama speak at the national Holocaust remembrance commemoration on the topic “Never Again: What You Do Matters” one week after releasing memos outlining torture as an official US policy, and after declaring that those who employed it will not be prosecuted? We’ll find out on Thursday.
Oh, he’ll manage it; he knows all about the uses of rhetoric.
What’ll Come Out Of The Tap They Turned On?
Martin posted earlier about the proof emerging that Democrats did know and did approve of the unconstitutional domestic wiretapping of their fellow citizens.
Martin described the Dems’ complicity in the outrages of the War on Turr as a ‘clusterfuck of corruption’. So I thought I’d quote from this post of mine from April 2007, which tried to describe just how big a clusterfuck it actually is. It’s not just the spying or the torture and it’s not just the Democrats. Very few are clean.
“[…]
Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.
Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull. That’s where the spying comes in. One ill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo…
It doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.
There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo‘s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example.
Such is the venality of politicians that most involved walked right into what was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA, but they did it anyway. Have penis, will follow.
That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country. I expect there’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.
Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly upright people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.
[…]
Since the days of Reagan, networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.
The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why? Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.
A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.
Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?
Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president.
If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they?ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.
Was I right or was I right? I could link back to or repost the many posts we’ve written over the past 7 years about the complicity of Democrats in the corporate coup, but no need, they’re all in the archives over to your right. Feel free to browse and be disgusted.
[Edited slightly for sense and grammar]
Injustice Is Built In
You wouldn’t have seen it in New Labour’s 1997 manifesto, though.
Labour’s deliberate policy of shutting down legal channels to justice for the average Joe and Josephine in order to crush dissent, this from an adminstration of lawyers, is something I’ve been blogging about for a long time.
I was idly rereading the ‘police’ post archive this morning in light of the G20 police brutality reports when I was reminded of this 2000 Schnews article, which made me wonder: how many of those peaceful protestors arrested at Kingsnorth or Nottingham or the G20 or Plymouth or on misapplied terrorist legislation have had, or can get access to legal advice?
Not too many, I’d wager:
Sweeping changes to the legal aid system are going to mean that thousands who find themselves dragged into the legal system are going to find themselves without proper legal advice. Despite the fact that this government has created 6,000 new criminal offences in the last ten years, and is hauling record numbers before the courts and off to chokey, they’re now keen to restrict access to legal advice. All in the name of cost-cutting and reducing inefficiency of course. What is actually happening is a massive erosion of hard won rights and the end of the legal aid system, which helped achieve some degree of parity in court cases. (OK, so SchNEWS is obviously against the system, man, but meantime still not keen to see what few civil liberties we have taken away!)
The changes came in on January 14th. Prior to this, on arrival at the police station you would be offered contact with a solicitor of your choice. From now on you will be directed to the Criminal Defence Call Centre (CDCC). This is staffed, not by solicitors but by accredited representatives who’ve done a training course, many of them actually ex-coppers. You will only be allowed to contact your own solicitor if you pay privately. Needless to say the call centre advice is probably going to be different to that of a specialist defence solicitor.
While I have met at least one accredited representative who was an ex-copper and did a fantastic job, to put so many of them (they’re cheaper than actual lawyers) in charge of dispensing legal advice to the arrested might lead one to think the government’s given the police control of the independent legal process – though no doubt Jack Straw would deny that to his dying breath.
One Brighton-based solicitor told SchNEWS, “Previously we could intervene in the process earlier – warn people to make no comment, not to sign police notebooks and not to answer any questions off the PNC1 form*. We could act as an outside guarantee of people’s rights while they were inside. Now, the system is in meltdown. If the call centre is too incompetent to get hold of your brief then you may end up using a duty solicitor or remaining unrepresented. If you’re not going to be interviewed then you can be fingerprinted, DNAed and booted out of the door without once receiving any independent advice.”
While there was never a Legal Aid golden age Labour’s deliberate blocking of justice and dismantling of low cost legal advice networks and legal aid over the past 12 years has created a legal advice desert. So far it’s only been affecting those nasty, nasty druggies, petty crims, burglars and crusty anarchists, so there’s been little outcry about it from the bourgeoisie. They’re criminals, who cares?
But if there’s no justice for criminals, there’s no justice for anyone. As I wrote at the time:
Should citizens, empowered by knowing what their rights are and how to enforce them, start to challenge the boss, who knows where it might lead?
The overthrow of New Labour – and that would never do.
Why, such an informed populace might start enforcing their rights on other things too. They might even start to challenge the everyday petty tyrannies of Labour’s incompetent and authoritarian government, like, say, the deaths of children in custody or the illegal invasions of other sovereign nations or the selective imposition of swingeing terrorist legislation on people of a certain ethnicity and/or religion.
Maybe now a few of the comfortable middles at legitimate protests like the G20 have had theirs or their kids’ heads batoned, been kettled by aggressive paramilitaries or arrested on trumped up ‘terrorism’ charges for merely expressing their right to free speech, we’ll see a bit more outrage and a lot more challenge.
Comment of The Day
I see that anarchist rag The Sunday Times (prop. R. Murdoch) is featuring more video of police brutality at the G20.
Rupert Murdoch’s the champion of the oppressed masses now? Who knew? Fight the power, Rupe!
As if.
Commenter GnosticMind responded to Henry Porters’ column on public order policing in today’s Observer and he hits the bullseye when he says:
19 Apr 09, 5:36am (about 2 hours ago)
What is also interesting here is the media treatment of those attacked by the police : The second victim to come forward, the woman from Brighton, has now hired Max bloody Clifford of all people, to represent her : Anyone well versed in Situationist dialectic and critique will see exactly what is happening here — the state media machinery absorbs the threat to the status quo, by repackaging the threat — and selling it back to its own people — as spectacle and entertainment.
The society as spectacle wins yet again — if , that is, most people are fooled and pacified by it yet again.
All that Situationist theory is old hat by now, and very overdone, years ago — but by God they got it right.
They certainly did.
I bet TimesOnline’s hitcount is well up. The management (R. Murdoch) and the advertisers must be loving it. Do I smell an advertising revenue spike?
Dissent and violent repression;not only poliitical theatre but the saviour of the economy.
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