July 18, 2014 9:00 am

Remembering Larry Grathwohl: The Media’s Four-Decade Lie About The Weather Underground

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by    in Uncategorized

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All over the internet, people are remembering Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather Underground for the FBI and prevented them from killing people, at the risk of his own life.  Larry passed away last July 18, and we all miss him.  We’re also disappointed by the lies Fox News’ Megyn Kelly allowed Bill Ayers to spout about Larry and other issues on her recent, highly-promoted “celebrity interview” with Ayers.

The sociopaths of the Weather Underground have been given four decades of free press to spread their lies.  You can see a partial list of four decades of fawning coverage of the Weathermen below.

Looking Back: Modern Journalists on the Weathermen

Since emerging from hiding, former members of the Weather Underground have found many allies eager to help them whitewash their pasts.  Other journalists are working to correct such propagandistic celebration of Weatherman.  The following stories are presented in chronological order.  Interestingly, some of the most critical stories are from traditionally liberal sources.

Interviews with Larry Grathwohl and other materials detailing the Weather Underground’s real record of violence can be found at America’s Survival, where Cliff Kincaid hosts Justice for Victims of the Weather Underground, a project dedicated to bringing the Weathermen to trial for their crimes.

We are grateful to everyone who are helping us correct the record about the real reign of bombings, murder, and attempted murder committed by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Judge Eleanor Raskin (neé Stein), Mark Rudd, and the other assorted criminals of the Weather Underground.  Go to the Bringing Down America website to find links to other people writing about Larry today.

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July 9, 2014 1:46 pm

Cliff Kincaid on Larry Grathwohl and Bill Ayers

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by    in war on cops

Larry Grathwohl, who died last July, risked his life to infiltrate the Weather Underground and stop their domestic terrorism campaign against police, soldiers, and ordinary Americans.

Disappointingly, Fox News recently featured Bill Ayers in an over-hyped interview with Megyn Kelly.  Instead of challenging Ayers’ many lies about Larry Grathwohl and other subjects, Kelly gave Ayers free publicity and a national platform.

Cliff Kincaid set the record straight:

Will Megyn Kelly Help Bring Ayers to Justice?

Cliff Kincaid  —   July 2, 2014
Bill Ayers shouldn’t be interviewed; he should be jailed. Megyn Kelly’s interview of Ayers, made reference to the role of Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the bombing-murder of San Francisco policeman Brian V. McDonnell. Unfortunately, Ayers lied his way through the interview, which aired over two nights on her nightly Fox News Channel show, “The Kelly File.”

But this is what happens when a professional liar like Ayers does a “shocking” TV interview. The exchange may achieve high ratings, but nothing good will come out of the interview unless Kelly now follows up with the “Justice for Victims of the Weather Underground” campaign we have been waging for five years for the “cold case” bombing murder of Sergeant McDonnell to be reopened and examined by a federal grand jury. . .

read the rest here

Friends of Larry Grathwohl are putting on a “Blog About Larry” day on July 18 — the first anniversary  of his untimely death.  You can read about it at the Bringing Down America website.  If you’re a cop or a soldier, please take the time to learn about Larry Grathwohl, a Vietnam Vet who stood up to cop-killing radicals at the risk of his life.  If you have a blog, or a podcast, please join us in remembering Larry on Friday, July 18.

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July 7, 2014 9:51 am

Another Hate Crime That Was The Wrong Kind of Hate

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by    in Federal Policy,Hate Crime,The Hate Crime Racket

Among the many toxic effects of hate crime laws, the worst is that they destroy the ethic of equality before the law.  This ethic was the cornerstone of the civil rights movement and its most compelling argument, and for forty years — from 1955 to 1995 — appeals for equal treatment before the law for both victims and offenders swayed white Americans to understand minorities’ plight.

All of this changed when Eric Holder and Bill Clinton shoved through a highly politicized hate crimes regime in the late 1990′s.  From the beginning, this regime wasn’t about punishing hate wherever it happened; it was about weaponizing identity politics where they least belonged: in the courts.  It was about freezing America like a scared rabbit before the image of eternal imaginary Klansmen eternally burning down black churches and eternally lynching minorities.

The hate crimes movement also helped distract from the real “tidal wave” of crimes being committed by offenders who frequently happened to be minorities (as were most of their victims).  The “tidal wave of racially motivated church burnings” in the nineties which was ostensibly the motivator for creating the modern hate crimes regime actually didn’t happen, but that didn’t matter to Clinton or Holder either: they just lied about it.

Hate crime laws were really about re-racializing the justice system.

Holder and Clinton knew that these laws were never really intended to “combat hate” but to create a legal spoils system to reward political friends, punish political enemies and super-charge racial divisiveness.  The winners were the various race and ethnic hustlers and the losers were everyone else.

The hate crimes regime that exists today has succeeded beyond Clinton and Holder’s wildest dreams in sowing divisiveness and inequality before the law.  Sadly, nobody even expects these laws to be enforced equally anymore.  Yet nobody in the Republican Party in the states — most hate crime laws are state laws — has the backbone to try to repeal these laws anymore, though doing so would likely be a popular, politically attainable goal.  The racism card and various other prejudice cards, played endlessly, have successfully reduced Republican elected officials to a quivering silence.

Back in the 1990s, Holder and Clinton still bothered to assure the public that hate crime laws would be applied equally — except, they said with a wink and a nudge, where women are involved because there’s just too many female victims of random rapes, not to mention random sexual slurs and random subway assaults and anti-female graffiti and all those other serious and unserious crimes that result in federal investigations when the writing on the dorm room wall is directed at blacks, or Muslims, or (liberal) Jews, or gays, or lesbians, or transvestites, or Latinos, or homeless people, or any of the other groups selectively empowered to demand mobilization of the hate police.

The N.O.W. under Kim Gandy and several other (not all) feminist organizations cheerfully swallowed this double-standard because they:

(A) were known to cheerfully swallow absolutely anything Bill Clinton told them to swallow.

and

(B) were so dominated by the political lesbians and minorities in their ranks that they really did not care if heterosexual white women were subjected to anything from rape to harassment on a public street — heterosexual white women have long been no more than the feminist movement’s whipping boys.  [And yes, to the Judith Butlerites out there, I know on the one hand that I shouldn't use the term "boys" to describe women, but you (or "u" or "it" or "shoe" or whatever you call yourselves now) must admit that I'm at least disrupting cissexual gender normativity by doing so.]

Back in the nineties, Clinton and Holder swore that white victims of racial violence and abuse would “be counted” alongside other victims (it’s all about the counting).  They swore that these laws wouldn’t diminish other victims of crime.  They promised a lot of things that never happened, but these things were never really intended to happen in the first place.  White people were never intended to be protected against anti-white hate.  Women were never intended to be “counted” as victims of hate.  ”Gender bias” was always intended for only non-biologically-born females, not hatred against females, because there’s just too much of it.

As a consequence of these lies, we’re now at a place where randomly killing a heterosexual woman is not as important to our justice system as killing certain other types of people, and mugging a white man is not as important as using a slur word against a minority, and mugging a black man, if the mugger is also a black man, is not as important as a slur word uttered by a white.  Neither types of muggings is likely to be investigated much, if at all, while the right kind of slur word uttered by the right kind of person actually brings out federal troops to investigate and denounce the crime.

It is important to remember that all of this is by design.

The best example of the selective dehumanization of victims created by the hate crime regime was, for a long time, for me, the beating murder of a transgender prostitute in Cordele, Georgia in 1999.  Tracy Thompson managed to seek help before dying from terrible injuries.  Before she died, she said “her boyfriend” had committed the crime, but it was uncertain whether she meant a John or someone she knew.  It was thus also uncertain whether the killer knew that she was biologically a man dressed as a woman and if that knowledge factored at all into the crime.

And so, the real intentions of hate crime laws were horrifically laid out: if Thompson’s killer was angry at her for being transgender — if he had picked her up with the intent of buying sex and “discovered” male genitalia under her skirt then beat her to death because of it, that was a hate crime.  But if her killer just decided to kill a female prostitute, that wasn’t hate.  It wasn’t a crime that would bring federal intervention; it wasn’t as serious a state crime, sentencing-wise; the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) would not get involved; the activists would not march in the streets; the exploiter organizations, from the SPLC to the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal (the source of the church burning deceptions) to the ADL to the NAACP to the HRC to the NOW (special shame on their heads) would not given a damn; the crime wouldn’t be recounted in the pricey “teaching tolerance” manuals sold by the SPLC and shoved down childrens’ throats at school; it wouldn’t be solemnly memorialized at civil rights events by Eric Holder and Bill Clinton or by Eric Holder and Barack Obama some dozen years later.

If the male genitalia under the skirt didn’t matter to the killer, then it wasn’t an important injustice like killing Matthew Shepard: it was just your run-of-the-mill kidnapping and brutally beating to death of a woman in a lonely field.

At that moment, hate crime laws made “biologically-born” women officially less human than transgendered women and a whole slew of other specially designated people, and this inequality in the courts has only grown stronger since that time.

Nowadays, nobody even expects hate crime laws to be enforced with a facade of even-handedness.  Nobody expects equality before the law anymore, and that lack of expectation is horrifying in its normalcy.  We gave away a lot in 1999.

And so we come to just the latest ethical and practical mess the hate crimes industry has made of our entire justice system.  From the moment Shaima Alwadi was found murdered in her home in California, with a note denouncing the soon-to-be divorced housewife as a “terrorist” nearby, it was well understood that the note was likely a hoax.  But the hate crimes industry cannot let pass any opportunity to accuse Americans of being racist because that is their primary purpose, and so the candles in the cups appeared, and the vigils, and the marchers, and teach-ins on college campuses and elementary schools: the entire apparatus of the for-profit non-profit hate crimes industry struck up the band.  As the media reported: ”The case reverberated across the nation because at first, it was thought to be a hate crime.”  So we have trained people to react and also to not react when the victim is just the usual: black-on-black, or black-on-white, or male-on-random female, or, frankly, male-on-male victim when it’s a sex crime.  The latter never gets counted as gender bias, because that’s not what gender bias laws are for.

From the beginning, there was ample evidence that Alwadi’s murder was some type of domestic violence, including her own recent warning to her sister that she would be killed by her husband.  But we have primed a generation of young people to believe above all else that an easily dismissible note with a racial slur is more important than a woman’s beaten and murdered body.  And so the mob assembled, and when the killer’s laughable ploy was revealed, the mob did not retreat: they simply claimed, as they always claim, that it was a “teachable moment” about white racism nonetheless.

The hate crime activists simultaneously demeaned the real victim and created a fake one.  Alwadi simply wasn’t politically useful if she had just been killed by her husband.

Shaima Alwadi’s husband was convicted for murdering his wife in San Diego this week.  Her killing was not prosecuted as a gender-bias hate crime because it was just an angry man killing a woman because she tried to leave him.  Of course, the question of whether his anger arose from his Muslim beliefs in women’s submissiveness would never be “counted” as potential grounds for hate crime charges — not only because feeling such things about women doesn’t officially count as hate, but also because Muslims are among the groups who are systematically designated only as victims of hate crimes,  not as perpetrators of them.

If we enforced hate crime laws in ways designed to actually fight hate, even this domestic murder might be investigated as a form of gender bias.  But if we enforced hate crime laws equally, the Muslim terrorists of 9/11 would count as the most prolific hate criminals in our country’s history (3,000 dead thanks to anti-American nationality hatred); Major Hasan would be one of the worst individual hate criminals in history (13 dead thanks to anti-infidel hatred), and female victims of serial, stranger rapists would be by far the largest category of hate crime victims (gender bias hate) and male victims of serial, stranger rapists who targeted men exclusively would be a significant cohort of gender bias hate crime victims as well.  If anti-white slurs and targeting of random whites were counted as hate, as it should be, minority males (and increasingly females) would rank the highest among hate crime offenders for crimes ranging from robbery to gang assault.

The vast majority of hate crime victims would be white, and the vast majority of hate crime offenders would be from several of the minority populations whose advocates control the deceptive enforcement machinery of these laws today.  These activists could not, of course, allow the truth to be told this way.  To maintain their hate-filled, false vision of America, they must make sure that these laws are never enforced equitably.  Until conservative elected officials find the backbone to address this terrible injustice, we should cease pretending that equality before the law is an ideal or practical matter in our courts.

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June 20, 2014 5:56 am

Hillary Clinton and Thomas Alfred Taylor’s Underpants: It Takes a Village to Rape a Child

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by    in Academia,Academicians on Crime,crime statistics

Or maybe we should say: It Takes a Village to Get Away With Raping a Child.  

bill-and-hillary

This is Hillary Clinton in 1975.  She was on her way to becoming a “feminist icon,” so of course she stepped up to defend a 41-year old man who admitted to raping a child — a twelve-year old child.  There were two witnesses to the crime — another man and a teen boy who were in the car with the rape victim.  The offender plied the child with alcohol and then raped her.

As reported in The Washington Free Beacon in a well-researched article by Alana Goodman, Clinton, in 1975, by her own giggly admission, knowingly orchestrated a fraudulent test of the evidence from the crime in order to try to deceive the jury about her client’s guilt: she sent a part of the rapist’s underpants that had no fluids on it to a lab in New York and then threatened to use the negative lab result to disprove the prosecutor’s other evidence.  She also made false claims about the victim’s mental state, calling her an unstable liar.  Ultimately, despite powerful evidence condemning the rapist, the prosecution let Clinton’s client plead down to little more than time served.

There are lessons for everyone in this story.

Academic Feminists (a category that includes many feminist journalists) are now piling on anyone who deigns to criticize Clinton for using dirty tricks forty years ago to help a child rapist get off with a slap on the wrist.  This may sound odd, but Academic Feminists have never been interested in putting real rapists into real prisons.

In fact (a fact you won’t learn in women’s studies classes), from the very beginning of the modern feminist movement, Academic Feminists have been far more interested in playing identity politics than in punishing rape.  At the first meetings of the N.O.W., violence against women wasn’t even going to be included as a platform of the group, out of fear that condemning violence against women would result in some minority men getting convicted for the rapes they committed.

Couldn’t have that.

Better to throw all rape victims under a bus than hold black rapists responsible for their rapes  – of mostly black women and children.  From the beginning of modern feminism, racial and ethnic sensitivity – who committed a crime — was more important than the victim or the crime itself, let alone the ethic of justice for all.

[It should be noted that this attitude disgusted a critical mass of other feminist women who started working with police to protect women and children anyway -- regardless of the color of their offender.  These service provider types generally like to stay away from politics, and they shouldn't be confused with Academic Feminists and other political bottom feeders]

Fast-forward to today: the Academic Feminists have spent the last several years perfecting their March Towards Universal Guilt But No Prison Time Only Re-Education For All Men But Especially White Fraternity Brothers.

Academic Feminists have always just been leftists who care more about emptying the prisons than about real victims of crime.  They would rather exploit rape cases for political ends than imprison rapists.

For example, Amanda Marcotte at Slate is wagging around her frayed invisible Code of Defense Lawyer Ethics to explain why Clinton wasn’t merely right to use deceit and character assassination of a 12-year old rape victim to get her rapist client off: according to Marcotte, Clinton was super-right to use deceit and character assassination of a 12-year old rape victim to get her rapist client off  because she’s Hillary Clinton:

Defense attorneys have an unpleasant but necessary job, and Clinton did what she was obligated to do, which was to give her client a constitutionally mandated adequate defense. … As long as juries keep acquitting based on this myth that women routinely make up rape accusations for the hell of it, defense attorneys will continue to use it. The problem here is a larger culture that promotes rape myths, not defense attorneys who exploit these myths in last-ditch attempts to get acquittals for rapists who have overwhelming evidence against them.

According to Marcotte, everyone else uses rape myths, so the legal standard is to use rape myths, so Clinton was just giving her client the benefit of a really good defense by using rape myths and she should be praised for doing this because it had to be super hard for her to shed her principles that way, but, by the way, if a frat brother uses a rape myth, even if there’s no rape involved, even if he’s just making a bad joke, he deserves to be destroyed, preferably by Amanda Marcotte, Hillary Clinton, and millions of other women.

Yes, this is the way the Academic Feminists think.  I think it has something to do with all that mascara intersecting ink from bad tattoos and shards of bad prose by Judith Butler in the dark little place where your heart’s supposed to be.  Other people just call it identity politics.

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Amanda Marcotte, Defense Ethics Specialist, With Cat

The Academic Feminists are certainly showing their tushes with this defense-of-Hillary-defending-the-child-rapist-thing.  At least the masks are off.

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Wicker Women

But there is another story here, one that it would behoove the conservative critics of Academic Feminism to remember as they fight back against the guilt-by-identity regime. The lesson is this: in the real world, in real courts, real rape victims are still being subjected to such horrific, humiliating injustices, and real rapists and child molesters are still walking away from their crimes in nearly every case.

Forget the idiotic academic fake statistics that claim one in five women are raped in college for a moment: in the real courts, one in five rape victims don’t ever get a day in court.  Hell, more than four in five rape victims don’t ever get a day in court.  So while you’re busy fighting the Academic Feminists, do not make the mistake of believing that what you see happening on college campuses has any bearing on the real criminal justice system.

And when you’re done demanding justice for yourself, you should demand justice for victims of real rape, lest you become like the Campus Feminists you’re fighting — lest you become interested in injustice only when it affects you and people who look like you.

Once you’re done being disgusted by the glee that Hillary Clinton expressed in recounting her clever deceits that freed a child rapist, don’t get gleeful yourself over Clinton’s comeuppance: there’s still a child victim involved, and nothing about what happened to her is funny.  There’s still an injustice to be righted.

The Hillary Clinton rape defense is also an important story because it lays bare the perverse lies that pass for criminal defense and the sleazy tactics that warp rules of evidence.  If conservatives really care about right and wrong and justice and injustice and toppling identity politics, they cannot draw a circle around these real injustices committed against rape victims and say: this has nothing to do with me because I’ve been persecuted by the Campus Feminists.

There are many thousands of rape victims, hundreds of thousands of them, victims of real rape, who have  been denied justice.  Hillary Clinton’s giggly story shows how easy it was in 1975 to get a rapist off, and things haven’t changed as much as one might think today.

We need conservative men to be willing to stand up for these victims, because the campus feminists don’t care about them.  That little raped girl isn’t responsible for speech codes and campus tribunals against frats.  Rapists still routinely walk because of warped rules of evidence and prejudiced jurors who believe they’re sticking it to the man, or sticking it to some feminist, or playing Atticus Finch by springing a predator back onto the streets.  Child molesters still routinely plead down to time served, or less.  If the conservative movement is going to engage the subject of rape, they should also stand up for these rape victims instead of putting all their energy into battling feminists in the fantasy-realm of academia.  It would be nice to see Minding the Campus and Truth Revolt and Phi Beta Cons expand their interrogation of injustice and rape to include the real courts.

Scoring political points isn’t everything.  Only people like Amanda Marcotte and Hillary Clinton should be guilty of an accusation like that one

 

 

 

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June 11, 2014 1:24 pm

Alex Jones and Eric Holder Sing the Same Cynical Song About Police Brutality — And Then Cops Die

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by    in Activists,Federal Policy,war on cops

 Alex Jones (the politically elastic InfoWars host) and Attorney General Eric Holder (no introduction needed) both routinely rally their troops by crying wolf about police brutality.  Jones encourages his libertarian followers to harass police and to view them as stormtroopers; Holder uses the power of the Executive Branch to warp criminal justice via the race card, imposing punitive oversight over state and local police on the grounds of “racial discrimination,” and encouraging minority populations to view police as racist persecutors.

So when police get assassinated by violent black power thugs or drug-addled white power wannabes, as happened to Officers Beck and Soldo in Las Vegas this week, Eric Holder and Alex Jones both deserve censure.  Did they put the guns in the assassins’ hands?  No.  But they encourage such events, and then they exploit them for cheap political gain while police attend their colleagues’ funerals then put themselves on the line of fire again.

officer-alyn-beck-1

  Officer Alyn Beck

officer-igor-soldo

Officer Igor Soldo

Of course, Eric Holder is the most powerful person in law enforcement in America while Alex Jones is just a radio talk show host.  But both of them are tearing away at the social fabric relating to law enforcement in similar ways.

It is perverse that we have, in Eric Holder, an Attorney General who has repeatedly sided with violent cop-killers and against police.  Throughout Holder’s private and public career, he has taken extreme positions against police safety, agitated for the release of cop-killers and terrorists, and even secured the release of terrorist cop killers via Bill Clinton’s presidential pardons.  Holder does not oppose the spilling of police blood so long as the cop killer is a leftist; he only cares when he can score political points by accusing anyone and everyone on the right for cop killings committed by fringe, allegedly right-wing types.

Holder also has the power to define the system’s response to crimes, and he is largely responsible (along with Elena Kagan and Bill Clinton back in 1997) for the creation of hate crime laws that make the murders of some types of people more important than the murders of other types of people.

Thanks to Eric Holder, the murders of Las Vegas Police Officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck will not be counted as hate crimes because the Department of Justice doesn’t count police as victims of hate.  If they did — if they counted as hate crime not only the killings but the assaults, attempted murders, verbal abuse, and other hatred directed generally at police, then police would rank among the most vulnerable hate crime victims in America.

But Holder would never let that stand.

Alex Jones is just a radio talk show host, but he uses his bully pulpit to dehumanize police in other ways: he accuses them of crimes against humanity and of taking part in ornate deceptions of the public through “false flag” events.  Though Jones claims that he is really blaming the government and not ordinary police officers for “false flags,” that claim is a lie: he spews rage about police “stormtroopers,” and his websites are festooned with images of cops purportedly responsible for beating and torturing civilians.

Jones tells his listeners that police are guilty of perpetrating atrocities against the American public: he says they are the ones who helped the U.S. government cover-up its role in the terrorist attacks that killed thousands on 9/11.  He says they are the ones who murdered the schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, if there were any children murdered at all.  He says the police set off the bombs at the Boston marathon, if there were bombs at all and that police were the killers in the Aurora movie theater massacre, if there was a massacre at all.  Jones really says these things: every time he calls these massacres “false flag” events what he is saying is that either people didn’t really die or the police are the ones who killed them at the behest of our government.

As I wrote in 2010:

[P]olice everywhere are paying the price for the anti-cop rhetoric surfacing in political speech and political activism across the political spectrum these days.  This anti-cop drumbeat is always the same, whether it comes from the White House or a fringe anti-government website, from libertarian hysterics on the right or criminal rights activists on the left.

In 2009, four Seattle Police were assassinated in cold blood by Maurice Clemmons as they sat in a restaurant in a town near Seattle.  Clemmons, a violent career criminal and rapist, had told numerous people of his plans to assassinate police, and after the killings he became a cause celebré among anti-cop leftist activists in Seattle and California.  Before the killings, he had been granted leniency by half a dozen judges and also by then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has refused to apologize for his role in freeing Clemmons, who went on to rape, brutalize and murder dozens of victims in several states, including these fallen heroes.

fallen

Seattle Police Sergeant Mark Renninger and Officers Tina Griswold,                                                                                 Ronald Owens, and Greg Richards, murdered by Maurice Clemmons in 2009.

Also in 2009, serial rapist Lovelle Mixon became a left-wing counterculture hero for gunning down four police officers in Oakland, California.  Occupy protesters and activists from Oakland’s deeply anti-cop culture celebrated Mixon after the murders, just as they have long celebrated Mumia Abu Jamal, another cold-blooded cop killer.

4up

Sergeants Ervin Romans, Daniel Sakai, Mark Dunakin, and Officer John Hege                                                                   murdered in Oakland in March, 2009 by Lovelle Mixon

Also in 2009, Richard Poplowski, a white supremacist, murdered three police officers and severely wounded two others during a domestic violence call to his mother’s home.  Killed by Poplowski were Officers Paul Sciullo, Eric Kelly, and Stephen Mayhle.

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Officer Paul Sciullo

Unknown

Officer Stephen Mayle

19890Officer Eric Kelly

In each of these cases and also in the Las Vegas killings yesterday, men with long histories of violence, mental instability, race hatred, substance abuse, and animosity towards law enforcement ambushed or assassinated police officers.  But you would not know the similarities in these cases by reading your daily newspaper or even looking up official statistics about police killers: newspapers, taking their cues from leftist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Eric Holder’s Justice Department, identify only the right-wing killers as “political” killers of police.

Alex Jones is half-right when he says that he is being singled out for blame for the Las Vegas killings because he is a conservative: he is right that conservative anti-cop agitators get singled out while left-wing agitators don’t get singled out for identical behavior.  But the solution isn’t to give Jones a pass: the solution is to blame left-wingers who incite anti-police violence as well.

Left-wing political cop killers like Mumia Abu Jamal and the fugitive serial cop assassin Assata Shakur are celebrated and defended by the New York Times and by professors at our most prestigious universities.  They are mooned over by ethical buffoons like Terry Gross of NPR.  They are given radio shows on the taxpayer’s dime on NPR to spew their race hatred and hatred of police.  NPR and Terry Gross and the New York Times and all the Harvard professors agitating for Mumia and sheltering Assata Shakur deserve the same sort of blame that Alex Jones gets.

That would be fair.  Also fair: investigating Eric Holder for bias and fraud whenever he and his favorite propagandists at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League create deceptive “statistics” and “reports” that are no more than bombastic political lying designed to blame the Tea Party for violent acts committed by others.

In addition to perverting the mission of the Justice Department by playing partisan politics, Holder, the SPLC, the ADL and the mainstream media are all missing (or actively suppressing) the real story of a dangerous anti-police movement that gains its power not from the Tea Party (a law-abiding, peaceful movement which has been much maligned) but from an unholy alliance of druggy leftist anarchists, druggy right-wing anarchists, and druggy individuals with no discernible politics who nonetheless feed off the paranoia of sites such as InfoWars on the far right, Critical Resistance on the far left, and Cop-Watch on the fringes of both fringes.

As soon as news of the police murders in Las Vegas broke, Alex Jones went on the air and predictably declared the event a “false flag” designed by the government to discredit . . . Alex Jones.  The SPLC’s Mark Potok hit the news circuit with his own false flag, trying to tar the Tea Party with the actions of the Vegas killers despite the fact that killers Jerad and Amanda Miller were kicked out of the only patriot citizen event (at the Cliven Bundy ranch) they were known to have attended (and even the Bundy ranch standoff was not widely endorsed by Tea Party activists).    CNN shamelessly regurgitated Mark Potok’s line, reporting that the Millers had been seen at the Bundy Ranch but leaving out the fact that the Bundy family made them leave.  On his radio show, Alex Jones shamelessly ranted for hours about how he was the real victim of the Vegas shootings.  In coming weeks, Eric Holder will doubtlessly use the shootings to ramp up the Department of Justice’s scrutiny of Tea Party groups and military veterans (though the Millers were neither veterans nor members of any known Tea Party).

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Not the Tea Party

To Eric Holder, cop killers present opportunities for cold-blooded political calculation; to InfoWars’ Alex Jones, they represent an opportunity to grow audience share by egging on viewers to believe they are being persecuted by a”military-industrial police state.”  As I wrote in 2011, it takes a village to kill a cop.  The village invented by these two ideologues is a very ugly place to be.

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May 19, 2014 10:19 am

If You’re Still Thinking Bob Barr Might Make A Good Candidate Despite That Baby Doc Thing . . .

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by    in Child Molestation,Politics

I urge you to take a few more strolls down memory lane.  Let’s take the older post first.  Note the date:

September, 2011: Gaming The System: DragonCon Founder Edward Kramer Caught With Another Boy 

“Are we actually supposed to believe that Bob Barr and his partner, Edwin Marger, knew nothing about Ed Kramer’s real physical condition when they claimed he was too sick to attend court in 2009, or that he had basically fled what little court-ordered control they had managed to wrangle for him under extremely questionable circumstances?  Well, here’s some clues:

Ed Kramer sporting a Barr ’08 button

Here’s Ed Kramer in either 2007 or 2008.  He claimed he was too sick to stand trial for molestation, but he looks like he was having a really good time campaigning for his lawyer, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr.  If anyone knows more about this photo, please contact me.

Ed Kramer at the 2008 DragonCon

Here’s Ed Kramer hanging out at DragonCon when he was supposed to be housebound and in such serious pain from a “spinal injury” that he couldn’t stay awake for trial.  Hundreds of people saw him hanging out at a hotel in downtown Atlanta after midnight, chilling with some guy in latex shorts carrying a bongo drum.  What, they couldn’t pick up a phone when they saw the following story in the newspaper a few months later?  You know . . . acting to protect kids from getting raped, like their favorite superhero might do?

Read the rest of my 2011 post here

Now fast-forward a mere 26 months.  Bob’s client didn’t waste much time after Barr got him sprung from protective custody . . . again, check the date:

December, 2013:  Ed Kramer Guilty of Child Molestation: Now Will Bob Barr Face Consequences for His Role in the Deception?

“After leaving Congress in 2003, Georgia Congressman Bob Barr reinvented himself politically in dramatic ways.  He aligned with the ACLU, began advocating for the legalization of marijuana, and ran for president on the 2008 Libertarian Party ticket.  Now Barr is attempting to rejoin the Republican and conservative mainstream in a bid to secure Georgia’s 11th District congressional seat, where he is currently a leading contender.

Barr’s about-face on issues that alienate conservative voters left many wondering what he really stands for.  His role in the notoriously corrupt defense of now-convicted child molester Ed Kramer should raise more questions in voters’ minds.  Here is my previous post on Kramer’s decade-long manipulation of the justice system.

Edward Kramer, co-founder of the sci-fi and fantasy convention, Dragoncon, pled guilty in a Georgia courtroom yesterday to three counts of child molestation in a case that has been delayed thirteen years, thanks to repeated efforts by Kramer himself to claim medical incapacity.  Barr served as Kramer’s attorney until early 2013, when he decided to run for office again.  But Barr did not just serve as Kramer’s lawyer: he held the sci-fi purveyor up as the victim of a religion-fuelled witch-hunt; he helped him deceive the court regarding his client’s capacity to sit through a trial, and he helped him acquire an eyebrow-raising bond agreement that enabled Kramer to flee the state illegally, resulting in Kramer’s arrest in 2012 for endangering another child — a 14 year old boy Kramer had in his motel room in Connecticut.

As if these facts aren’t bad enough, Barr used the molester’s defense to promote his new libertarian politics.  You cannot separate the Kramer case from the person Barr is offering to voters, even if he tries to distance himself now.

In 2007 Barr told an audience at the Federalist Society that Kramer was a victim of his new pet peeve, prosecutorial over-reach.  Despite the fact that it was Kramer himself who had created the delays, Barr insisted that it was the fault of the state.  The video of Barr promoting Kramer’s case as a civil rights issue has, curiously, been scrubbed from the internet in the last 24 hours, but Barr’s incredibly sophomoric amicus brief on behalf of Kramer is going to be harder to erase.  Barr should be called on to re-release the video: he isn’t running for dog-catcher; he’s running for Congress, and his behavior and expressed beliefs between 2003 and 2013 should not be hidden from voters this way.”

Read the rest of my 2013 post here

Now — back to the future:  for those of you gearing up to send in whiny comments about how “everyone deserves a defense lawyer,” don’t bother.  Of course they do.  What child molesters don’t deserve is decades on the run while their lawyers use dirty tricks to keep them from facing justice in a courtroom.  And that is what Bob Barr did for this piece of human trash.  I don’t see how anyone could seriously believe Barr did not know that his (now former) client’s alleged “profound disability” was and is a stunt.

Porter on [April 2013] called two witnesses who testified about seeing Kramer, a science-fiction author and film buff, at movie sets in Kentucky and Connecticut taking behind-the-scenes pictures and video clips. Both the witnesses, one who was a makeup artist and another who was an audio/visual producer, testified that Kramer seemed to have no serious problem breathing, standing or walking around. They also said Kramer did not have an oxygen tank with him at the movie sets

Someone in the media ought to ask candidate Barr how much he billed his client — cough, the taxpayer — AND cost the court system — cough, the taxpayer — for everything from Ed Kramer’s faux vapors before every court date for over ten years to the medical privileges he demanded in prison to the gas mileage on the cop car that had to haul Kramer back from his 2012 woodland adventure in Connecticut.  Some details are here, but it’s hardly the final tally.

 

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March 18, 2014 5:41 pm

Will Privatizing Child Protection Protect Georgia’s Children? Yes and No.

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by    in Child Protection/Foster Care,Crime Denial,failures to prosecute,Florida,Politics,The Guilty Project

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As Georgia prepares to follow in Florida’s footsteps in privatizing child protection services, there has been a lot of politicking but little talk about the real issues that lead to failures to protect children “in the system.”  Privatization in Florida has been a very mixed bag, with some counties improving their performance and other counties mired in scandals involving the private non-profit agencies hired to protect children.  It’s reasonable to expect that Georgia will fare a little better, but don’t expect the failure rate to drop — or rise — significantly.

The failures lie in policies enforced by the courts, and nobody is talking about reforming those policies.

Like Florida, Georgia plans to eventually privatize the services that come after an investigation has determined a child is in danger, namely: foster care, family “reunification” interventions, and adoption.  State workers will continue to be responsible for investigating abuse, and courts will still be responsible for deciding if a child should be removed from a home, returned to a home, or adopted.

Private agencies do a great job with adoption, and some of them do a better job than the state in supervising foster care.  Much of this care is already done through public-private partnerships in Georgia.  But in all the politicized talk about private versus public, little has been said about the real  problem with our child protection services.

The problem is the mandate to keep families together or achieve “reunification” as soon as possible.

Approximately a decade ago, many states began to move towards a model of keeping families together, no matter the cost.  Florida went further than Georgia, though it wasn’t an issue tied to privatization because that part of child protection is still performed by state agencies.

And now Florida is counting the bodies.

In an extraordinary report, the Miami Herald investigated the deaths of 477 children who  had prior contacts with child protection services.  477 — since just 2008.  The Herald makes a strong case for blaming the mandate for “family preservation” for many of those deaths:

They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.

The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents.

Public or private, the child protection system is dealing with multigenerational problems that are far more severe than most people realize.  It’s easy to criticize government social workers, or to lash out at efforts by private agencies.  The hard part is acknowledging that “family preservation” may be the wrong goal:

Rather than go to court to force parents to get treatment or counseling, the state often relied on “safety plans” — written promises by parents to sin no more. Many of the pledges carried no meaningful oversight. Children died — more than 80 of them — after their parents signed one or, in some cases, multiple safety plans.

• Parents were given repeated chances to shape up, and failed, and failed and failed again, and still kept their children. In at least 34 cases, children died after DCF had logged 10 or more reports to the agency’s abuse and neglect hotline. Six families had been the subject of at least 20 reports.

The decision to prioritize family unification was made by bureaucrats and politicians from across the political spectrum.  Liberals defend state agencies and argue that biological parents should receive as many resources as possible to keep their children; conservatives argue for the primacy of family and against state involvement.  Failure is bipartisan:

“It’s the system that’s broken. When numbers take over instead of outcomes for people, you are doomed to failure,” said James Harn, a 30-year law enforcement officer who spent his last nine years as a commander supervising child abuse investigators at the Broward Sheriff’s Office before leaving a year ago. “They want to keep families together, but at what cost?”

Prioritizing family preservation is just one policy error.  Others involve the increasingly hands-off attitude towards the family arrangements of women living on public services and the leniency granted to serial offenders in the courts.  
Social workers have had little power since the 1960′s to insist that women on welfare live alone with their children, rather than inviting a boyfriend, or a series of men into their state-subsidized homes.  These unattached men frequently abuse the children they are living with:

The night before Aaden Batista died, his killer played a baseball game on his Xbox, smoked marijuana and gave the toddler a bath.

As Aaden’s mother, Whitney Flower, worked as a medical assistant at a nearby hospital, Jason Padgett Sr. prepared the toddler for bed, putting on his diaper before, ultimately, viciously shaking him and slamming his head on the floor. . .

Aaden became part of the yearly count of children killed at the hands of paramours — child welfare’s oddly genteel term to describe boyfriends or girlfriends of custodial parents. Protecting children from abusive paramours is one of the great challenges facing the Department of Children & Families.

“Paramours are a huge red flag,” said Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as chairman of child welfare at the school. “They are enormously over-represented as the slayers of young children.”

Under-prosecution and under-incarceration, especially for domestic violence, presents another problem.  Expect this problem to grow worse as “Right on Crime” Republicans, left and right-wing libertarians, leftists, and liberals join forces to shrink our criminal  justice system and empty the prisons.  Their political kumbaya moment is going to mean more violence, more crime, and more murders.   You need only peruse the Miami child death report to find evidence of hundreds of people who have been granted serial leniency in our allegedly-harsh justice system:

In the pre-dawn hours of May 5, 2009, Jasmine Bedwell had to make a decision: Take more blows or more chokes — but try to rescue her son from the clutches of her enraged boyfriend — or go find help. She left and borrowed a cellphone to call 911.

 
 
 

 

 

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March 5, 2014 4:04 pm

Mumia Activist Voted Down for DOJ Civil Rights Position!

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by    in war on cops

This is what justice looks like:

“Senate rejects Obama appointment of Debo Adegbile to top civil rights post”

We need to thank Democrats and Republicans who voted against this nomination:

Casey Statement
on Debo Adegbile Nomination

Washington, DC- Today, U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) released the following statement on the nomination of Debo Adegbile to the position of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights:
“I believe that every person nominated by the President of the United States for a high level position such as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights should be given fair and thoughtful consideration as senators discharge their responsibility of ‘advise and consent’. I respect that our system of law ensures the right of all citizens to legal representation no matter how heinous the crime. At the same time, it is important that we ensure that Pennsylvanians and citizens across the country have full confidence in their public representatives – both elected and appointed. The vicious murder of Officer Faulkner in the line of duty and the events that followed in the 30 years since his death have left open wounds for Maureen Faulkner and her family as well as the City of Philadelphia. After carefully considering this nomination and having met with both Mr. Adegbile as well as the Fraternal Order of Police, I will not vote to confirm the nominee.”

3 comments!
March 4, 2014 12:00 pm

Maureen Faulkner: Stop Mumia Abu Jamal’s Lawyer, Debo Adegbile, From Department of Justice Appointment

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by    in Politics,Pro-Criminal,war on cops

There is a Change.org petition drive you need to act on TODAY!

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Vote “No” to the Confirmation of Debo Adegbile to the Department of Justice
Petition by Maureen Faulkner
Los Angeles, CA

PLEASE SHARE THIS PETITION WITH FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND COLLEAGUES!

As early as Tuesday [UPDATE: THE VOTE HAS BEEN DELAYED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5], the Senate will vote to confirm Debo Adegbile as the next Assistant Attorney General to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. This confirmation must be stopped.

Thirty years ago, Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was violently murdered by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a member of a racist group that advocated violence against police. A jury convicted him and sentenced him to death for the brutal crime.

In the three decades that followed, Abu-Jamal filed appeal after appeal – each rooted in lies, distortions and allegations of civil rights violations. Today, as Officer Faulkner lies in his grave, Abu-Jamal has become a wealthy celebrity and continues to spew his vitriol from prison.

Old wounds were ripped open again, and additional insult was brought upon our law enforcement community when President Obama nominated Mr. Adegbile for the Department of Justice post. Mr. Adegbile previously led the Legal Defense Fund at the NAACP. In that position, Mr. Adegbile chose to throw the weight and resources of his organization behind Abu-Jamal. Attorneys working under Mr. Adegbile’s supervision have stood before rallies of Abu-Jamal supporters and openly professed that it was “an extreme honor” to represent the man who put a hollow based bullet into Officer Faulkner’s brain as he lay on the ground wounded, unarmed, and defenseless.

While Mr. Adegbile may be a well-qualified and competent litigator, through his words, his decisions, and his actions he has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated that he is not the best person to fill this position. Clearly there are others with similar qualifications that would be better choices.

The thought that Mr. Adegbile would be rewarded, in part, for the work he did for Officer Faulkner’s killer is revolting. Please set aside any partisan feelings you have and do the right thing when you vote on Mr. Adegbile’s confirmation. Please vote “no.”

………………………………………………….

Previous TINATRENT.COM Posts On Officer Faulkner and the Pro-Mumia Movement:

Mumia Abu-Jamal and Marty Hittleman: California Teachers Endorse a Cop Killer, Get Caught, Blame Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Maureen Faulkner is Right: The Fight Against Mumia Will Never Be Over, as Amnesty International Proves with Their Holiday Catalogue

More on Mumia

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February 23, 2014 4:47 pm

Martin Preib versus the Innocence Industry

4 comments
by    in The Guilty Project

An amazing article by Martin Preib, a Chicago cop who exposes the dark underbelly of the “innocence” industry, in which scores of law and journalism students and their professors resort to deception in their desire to play Atticus Finch to criminals who aren’t really wrongful convicted:

Wrongful conviction settlements are big business, but they are not always sensible. Chicago settles millions of dollars in cases where convicted offenders claim they were wrongfully convicted.

For a number of law firms, suing the city over wrongful convictions has become a kind of cottage industry. Inmates claim they were tortured and coerced into confessing. The offenders are freed from prison. Attorneys quickly initiate civil lawsuits against the city. Many people assume that a settlement signifies the police were culpable and had something to hide.

But this is not the truth in several key wrongful conviction cases, none more so than the Anthony Porter case, a double murder in 1982 in Washington Park on the South Side.

Preib shows how students and professors at Northwestern University and post-conviction lawyers didn’t even bother to interview the detectives involved in the conviction of Anthony Porter when they tried to exonerate Porter years later:

One common theme permeates the entire wrongful conviction movement: the police are crooked, willing to coerce confessions from the wrong man, willing to frame the wrong man, torture him, even. Police are often accused of racism in wrongful conviction cases, that they don’t care about African-American suspects or their communities. Many of these accusations were lobbed against the detectives in the Porter case, one of the most crucial wrongful conviction cases in the state’s history.

That Martin Preib could singlehandedly, with no resources, uncover more evidence than armies of well-connected, well-funded professors, students, and lawyers speaks volumes about the dynamics of post-conviction criminal justice activism.

The media repeats the claims of the Innocence Industry uncritically and dumbly parrots their nonsensical “statistics” about so-called “causes of wrongful conviction” — statistics and causes that are a pure fabrication.  If the Innocence Project were actually trying to create real wrongful conviction statistics, they would have to do several things they don’t do now — first and foremost contextualize their cases within the numerical universe of rightful convictions.

They would also have to stop inventing “causes of wrongful conviction” that highlight only one aspect of a case, often something minor or irrelevant to the conviction but that serves their ideological interests.

They would have to acknowledge that the most common “cause” of wrongful conviction is being a criminal and running with other criminals.  Lying for a criminal friend, being a non-DNA depositing co-conspirator in a murder that leaves no witness, dealing in stolen items from the crime, and letting your own brother go to prison in your place are all causes of wrongful conviction that you won’t find anywhere in the Innocence Project’s highly touted “statistics.”

Several of the Innocence Project’s most high-profile clients are serial rapists popped for the wrong crime BECAUSE they were committing similar crimes in the area or had done so elsewhere.  The media avoids mentioning this part of the story because they want to act out their own Atticus Finch drama.  Fabulist journalists go looking only for the story they want to hear, as Prieb demonstrates:

One wonders when journalism professors started teaching students to get only one side of a story. It turned out that, during the Innocence Project  investigation, the detectives say that neither Protess [head of the Innocence Project at Northwestern] nor his journalism students ever attempted to sit down with the detectives and listen to their account.

Finally, many Innocence Project clients were not actually innocent at all.

See here and here for examples of the misbehavior of activists wanting to spring guilty men to gratify their own self-regard.

I have repeatedly urged Innocence Project activists to use some of their vast resources and manpower to try to identify offenders who got away with murder and rape.  Merely saying this is a great way to get laughed at — or accused of racism, the movement’s eternal fallback pose.

The Martin Preibs of this world toil on their own in the shadows to correct grotesque injustices, as the defense bar and their media lackeys labor to spring anyone and everyone from prison, regardless of their crimes.

Imagine if someone made that into a movie.

Crossing Lines: What’s Wrong with the Wrongful Conviction Movement by Martin Preib

Martin Preib’s Amazon Page

 

 

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