As this piece makes clear, Utah’s Highway Patrol defends the recent tasering of Jared Massey as wholly by-the-book and therefore quite legitimate:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/11/23/intv.tasered.speeder.speaks.cnn

If you disagree, please let them know:

http://highwaypatrol.utah.gov
Utah Department of Public Safety – Highway Patrol

MCM

From Luke Bookner:

>The “professionals” have stepped in….
>
>http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/11/23/intv.tasered.speeder.speaks.cnn
>
>http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3533816n
>
>The CBS story actually makes it sound like a bad thing that the guy
>got tasered.
>
>CNN, on the other hand, makes wonderful use of an official source in a truly
>uninspiring piece of uninvestigative journalism. The moral of their
>story: It’s
>only bad if the police decide it was improper procedure to taser
>someone. If it’s
>in the manual, however, it’s A-OK.

Holocaust Denial, American Style
By Mark Weisbrot
November 21, 2007, AlterNet

Iranian President Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the
reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But
another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the
holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi
civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The
most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual
number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one
million.
This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and
even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was
confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm
Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths
since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by
doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of
Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the
Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000
people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the
basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more
than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died
because of public health problems created by the war, including
breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of
medicines, etc.

Read more.

Faith-Based Spending Goes Relatively Unchecked
By Thomas D. Williams_
t r u t h o u t | Report
Friday 23 November 2007

For the past six years, President George W. Bush’s administration
has spent billions of dollars to largely aid Christian faith-based
groups, in assisting prison inmates as well as the poor and
less-fortunate persons here and worldwide. Yet many experts and
investigators nationwide agree government controls auditing this
spending, or checking into whether the religious groups are illegally
using this federal funding to promote their faiths, are weak or
nonexistent.

Federal funding of a host of non-faith-based social programs can
be critical in child or adult health, housing and other subsistence
aid to the poor or disadvantaged. However, with tight or even regular
federal budgets, waste in one program can adversely impact others.

Several inquiries and complaints dug up a host of systemic
dangers and violations of the rules and law resulting in questionable
or wasted spending.

Read more.

Resurgent Taliban closing in on Kabul
Militants seen educated in cyber training camps
Wed Nov 21, 2007 11:34am EST

By Luke Baker

LONDON (Reuters) – The conflict in Afghanistan has reached “crisis
proportions”, with the resurgent Taliban present in more than half
the country and closing in on Kabul, a report said on Wednesday.

If NATO, the lead force operating in Afghanistan, is to have any
impact against the insurgency, troop numbers will have to be doubled
to at least 80,000, the report said.

“The Taliban has shown itself to be a truly resurgent force,” the
Senlis Council, an independent think-tank with a permanent presence
in Afghanistan, wrote in a study entitled “Stumbling into Chaos:
Afghanistan on the brink”.

“Its ability to establish a presence throughout the country is now
proven beyond doubt,” it said. “The insurgency now controls vast
swaths of unchallenged territory including rural areas, some district
centers, and important road arteries.”

Read more.

Military training program for teens expands in US
by Mira ObermanSun Nov 25, 6:17 PM ET

Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand
at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill
sergeant goes through a list of the day’s do’s and don’ts.

Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And
wear your uniform with pride.

“Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I’m done for two
or three weeks. WRONG,” Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.

“Young ladies. There’s been no problem with your uniforms but there
is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear
your ties when you come to my class.”

Read more.

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet_Posted on November 26,
2007, Printed on November 26, 2007

Earlier this year, using the clout that only
major broadcast networks seem capable of
mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of
all 50 states requesting their official records
of death by suicide going back 12 years. They
heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains
of gathered information, they sifted out the
suicides of those Americans who had served in the
armed forces. What they discovered is that in
2005 alone — and remember, this is just in 45
states — there were at least 6,256 veteran
suicides, 120 every week for a year and an
average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself
after coming home, and as the author of a book
for which I interviewed dozens of other women who
had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to
PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in
Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for
undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am
also heartbroken that the numbers are so
astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic
that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to
attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will
finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively
because this is an administration that melts hard
numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a
continuous flood of alarming reports, the
Department of Defense has managed to keep what
has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath
the radar of public awareness by systematically
concealing statistics about soldier suicides.
They have done everything from burying them on
official casualty lists in a category they call
“accidental noncombat deaths” to outright lying
to the parents of dead soldiers. And the
Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped
their disinformation, continuing to insist that
their studies indicate that soldiers are killing
themselves, not because of their combat
experiences, but because they have “personal
problems.”

Read more.

Here’s yet another harrowing video–and this time the cop’s victim was no loud protester trying to make a scene, and not a troubled woman throwing a tantrum in an airport terminal, and not some dark-skinned person with a scary accent and/or Arabic surname. This time, the victim was a white guy with a decent job (apparently), a doting family and a nice big car; and he couldn’t have been more polite or rational in dealing with the cop who tasered him (from behind), cuffed him and drove off with him, on the basis of no provocation whatsoever.

Thus it’s happening already, just as it has always done, eventually, wherever fear has helped a government take over. Suddenly they’re not just going after those who fit the profile of the Enemy–those who “had it coming, after all,” and whose protests we therefore fail to hear. Now, suddenly, it’s you whom the police are beating up and dragging off to jail; and now your protests too make not the slightest difference.

Let me say that I don’t much admire the blogger’s gloss on all of this. It’s self-indulgent, and a bit pretentious; and I don’t see any point in jeering at the cop for his presumed illiteracy. The problem is far larger than that one man’s thuggery–which is now dangerous because there are so many other lowly cops out there just like him, thanks to the new ruling caste of thugs who’ve seized the White House, and the courts, and much of Congress. All these trigger-happy troopers have been carefully worked up against the rest of us, by Bush and Cheney, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia, Giuliani and the DoJ, FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and all the rest of them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats just sit there, merely diddling while the Constitution burns.

MCM

Cellphone Tracking Powers on Request
Secret Warrants Granted Without Probable Cause

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 23, 2007; A01

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order
cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data
so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug
traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects,
according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without
requiring the government to demonstrate that there is
probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place
or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime.
Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose
average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny
of their daily lives.

Such requests run counter to the Justice Department’s
internal recommendation that federal prosecutors seek
warrants based on probable cause to obtain precise
location data in private areas. The requests and orders
are sealed at the government’s request, so it is
difficult to know how often the orders are issued or
denied.

Read more.

“Now that the Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear the cases of the first two American deserters from the Iraq war to come knocking at its door, the last real hope for U.S. soldiers who have moral objections to the war lies in the hands of Canadians and our elected officials.”

Read more at the Ottawa Citizen.