Breaking News Events

[*Anya*]

California to raise minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2016

By Sharon Bernstein

SACRAMENTO | Wed Sep 25, 2013 5:15pm EDT
(Reuters) - California has become the first state in the nation to commit to raising the minimum wage to $10 per hour, with the increase to take place gradually through the start of 2016, under a bill Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on Wednesday.

The law raises minimum pay in the most populous U.S. state from its current rate of $8 per hour to $9 by July 2014, and $10 by January 2016, well above the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The measure won support from Democrats, who wanted to help low-wage workers in a state where the cost of living is among the highest in the nation, passing the California state Senate by a vote of 26-11 and the Assembly by a 51-25 vote. But it was opposed by many Republicans, who said it would hurt small businesses and ultimately cost some low-wage workers their jobs.

Democrats in California control large majorities in both houses of the state legislature. But the party has charted a more centrist path than many expected, fearing backlash from voters in moderate and conservative districts, and the minimum wage hike did not initially seem poised to pass.

Brown, protective of the state's tenuous economic recovery, initially opposed the bill but then agreed to support it after leaders of both houses of the legislature agreed to put off the effective date of the increase until 2016.

Raising wages for the poorest workers is a "wonderful thing," Brown said at a bill-signing ceremony in Los Angeles.

"It's my goal and it's my moral responsibility to do what I can to make our society more harmonious, to make our social fabric tighter and closer and to work toward a solidarity that every day appears to become more distant," he said.

INCOME GAP

State Assemblyman Luis Alejo, the bill's author, said it would help working people pay for necessities in a state where rising costs have long outpaced wage increases for the poor and working class.

"We have created a system where we pay workers less but need them to spend more," said Alejo in a statement. "That causes middle-class families to fall down the economic ladder. It's the reason our middle class is shrinking and the reason we are facing the largest gap between upper- and lower-income Californians in at least 30 years."

No state currently pays $10 per hour to minimum-wage workers, and California had been among a number of states looking to increase minimum wages to at least that level, according to the National Employment Law Project. The minimum hourly wage in the state had stagnated after rising to $8 in 2008.

Republican Brian Jones, who represents the San Diego County community of Santee, said the increase will make California even more unfriendly to business than he believes it already is.

"I'm afraid the intentions of the author will backfire, and this will hurt the middle class and working poor the most," Jones said in a statement on Wednesday.

The U.S. enacted its first minimum wage in 1938, during the last years of the Great Depression. Today, debate continues on whether government should mandate increasing pay for low-wage workers.

"To cover the costs of this increase, employers will have to cut hours and hire fewer workers," said Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway. "Our state unemployment is still higher than the national average. The legislature should be taking steps to create more high-paying jobs, not penalizing the people who need the help the most."

The state that currently has the highest minimum wage is Washington, where employers must pay at least $9.19 per hour. That could rise to above $10 an hour by 2016, because it is set to increase with certain indicators of inflation.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...98O0U920130925

[*Anya*]

Barilla Pasta Chairman: ‘I Would Not Do A Commercial With A Homosexual Family’
by DAVID BADASH on SEPTEMBER 26, 2013


Guido Barilla has some explaining to do. The chairman of the $5.25 billion worldwide Italian food monolith says he would never show a gay family in his advertising — and if gay people don’t like it they can go eat someone else’s pasta.

In an interview yesterday with an Italian radio talk show, Barilla made clear he considers the “traditional family” and women “sacral.”

“I would never do a commercial with a homosexual family,” Barilla said, according to a Google translation. “We will not be advertising with homosexuals, because we like the traditional family. If the gays do not agree, they can always eat pasta from another manufacturer. Everyone is free to do whatever they want provided it does not annoy others.”

“We have a slightly different culture,” Barilla said, via a Huffington Post translation of the interview. “For us, the ‘sacral family’ remains one of the company’s core values. Our family is a traditional family. If gays like our pasta and our advertisings, they will eat our pasta; if they don’t like that, they will eat someone else’s pasta. You can’t always please everyone not to displease anyone.

“The women are crucial in this,” Barilla added.

“I respect same-sex marriage because that concerns people who want to contract marriage, but I absolutely don’t respect adoptions in gay families, because that concerns a person who is not the people who decide,” Barilla also said.

Of course, after a great deal of criticism and calls for a boycott, Barilla tried to apologize.

“With reference to statements made yesterday,” a Buzzfeed translation notes, “I apologize if my words have generated controversy or misunderstanding, or if they have hurt the sensibilities of some people. In the interview I simply wanted to highlight the central role of the woman in the family.”

Apparently, in Italy, gay people don’t have families and women are never lesbian.

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com...7#.UkWCque9KK0

[DMW]

http://us.stormsmart.org/2013/07/15/...rt-waters-act/

Biggert Waters Act and flood insurance increases at least 25 %
Flood insurance bills will be coming in the mail.

Taking over a coastal community near you. Or any other area that suits
the oil business. Nice.
La, Nj, Ny, Tx, ND, some other states.

[Cin]

What is the most effective way to destroy Obamacare?

It's not to defund it, as there's really no such thing as defunding it. Individuals are mostly funding it by buying insurance policies, and the rest of it as a whole bunch of other separate and individual pieces – things like rules against pre-existing conditions, which require no funding whatsoever.

The way to destroy Obamacare is to make sure that young, healthy people don't sign up for it.

That's because of something known in the insurance industry as the "death spiral."

A "death spiral" happens when an insurance company gets more and more older and sicker customers, which raises their costs, which in turn forces them to raise their rates. When they raise the rates, fewer and fewer young and healthy people sign up, and their proportion of older and sicker people gets even worse, and their expenses go up.

Eventually, the health insurance program dies.

The only way to prevent a death spiral is to have a large pool of young, healthy people making up most of the income to the health insurance company, so that it can pay out for what has to be a relatively small fraction of its customer base who are older, sicker or both.

So, if you want to kill Obamacare, prevent young people from signing up.

The Koch brothers tried to prevent young people from signing up with their creepy "Uncle Sam with a speculum" ad, but it was widely ridiculed.

Time for Plan B. Here's how they did it.

First, remember that midnight of September 30 was the moment when Obamacare exchanges across the nation opened for enrollment.

Every news organization in the country had prepared detailed packages and reports on what Obamacare is, how to sign up for it, how he exchanges are going public right now, and all the details.

Obamacare experts were being lined up as guests for September 30 and October 1 on radio and television networks and stations across the country. Local stations planned their local versions of this, talking about their state programs.

Those two days we're going to be a big deal, programming wise. I know. I'm in the industry. We were planning it, too.

These were going to be major programs – in some cases major features – on September 30, and October 1.

This massive news coverage, provided to Obamacare for free, would make up for the millions in advertising to promote Obamacare that Republicans had stripped out of the legislation.

All those programs on radio and television would have given the equivalent of millions of dollars worth of advertising to Obamacare, and caused tens of millions of young people to learn about the program, get excited about the program, and begin signing up right away.

Again, the way to destroy Obamacare is to make sure that young, healthy people don't sign up for it. Because if they don't, it will die. Just simple economics.

So what could the Koch brothers and other billionaire funders of the Tea Party do to make sure that every television network in America did not do a special feature the night of September 30 about how to sign up for the new Obamacare program?

And to make sure that on October 1 there weren't big news and feature stories on radio and television about how the health exchanges were offering cheaper insurance than anybody imagined?

How could they make sure that the starting date of Obamacare got buried in the news cycle so deeply that it was lost?

Under normal circumstances, that kind of story-killing would take a hurricane, or a massive earthquake, or a crazed mass-murderer gunman. But those things are pretty hard to control or predict.

So instead, the billionaires turned to the politicians they own, and told them to pull off such a radical stunt that it would seize the attention, continuously, of all the television networks and newspapers throughout the entire news cycle of September 30 and October 1.

They shut down the government.

It's just that simple.

Come up with the biggest story you possibly can – shut down the government – and run it through at the very moment Obamacare is going into effect. It seizes the new cycle, and hardly a mention is made that, "Starting tomorrow morning you, too, can sign up on a healthcare exchange for your Obamacare plan."

It was a brilliant strategy, and it worked.

The night of September 30, and all both wall-to-wall reporting, often had reporters asking the question, "Why this and why now?" It was right in front of their faces and they missed it.

But wait, there's more! This is also the week that the IPCC is rolling out the details of their new major report on climate change.

Again, networks and news organizations were preparing specials, packages, and wall-to-wall coverage of climate change and the IPCC. All of that is now buried in a closet someplace, along with the feature specials on how to find your local Obamacare exchange.

For the oil billionaires like the Koch brothers, people who make money dumping carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere that we have to pay for, and hold to a political ideology that says the middle class should not have health insurance, this was an absolute twofer.

We've been conned. The media has been conned. And libertarian billionaires who want America to be a "me" society and not a "we" society won.

You can thank the Supreme Court for this, by the way. In their Citizens United decision, they gave corporations and billionaires the power to own politicians more than they ever have before, and that's just what they've done. Welcome to the brave new world of American politics.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-hea...age=1#bookmark

[MsTinkerbelly]

U.S. Capitol placed on lockdown





By Michael O'Brien, NBC News

The United States Capitol was placed on lockdown mid-Thursday afternoon following reports of shots fired in the vicinity of the chamber.

The reports of gunshots were unconfirmed. The House recessed shortly after indications of gunshots. The Senate went into a quorum call -- that is, dispensed momentarily with its official business -- shortly thereafter.

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill tweeted: Shots fired outside the Capitol. We are in temporary lock down.

Colorado Rep. Jared Polis tweeted: There had been some short of shooting here at the capital, we r on lockdown awaiting more info

Congress has been locked for the past week and a half in a contentious debate over funding the government, a disagreement in which contributed to a government shutdown that came to pass at the end of Monday.

Last night, Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy, R, was the victim of a "minor incident" outside of the Capitol complex.

"A random individual, unknown to the Congressman, began screaming at him and grabbed his arm," a spokesperson for Duffy said in describing the incident. "Mr. Duffy was unharmed. He reported the incident in compliance with House security procedures. Congressman Duffy has requested no further action be taken and there will be no further comment on the matter at this time."

On September 16, a deadly shooting occurred blocks south of the U.S. Capitol complex which contributed to a partial lockdown of the Capitol at that time

[Cin]

Another Killer Using 'Stand Your Ground' to Defend Shooting a Black Teenage Boy

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...ck-teenage-boy

[Cin]

It’s quite a long article so I will just post a bit of the article. It can be read in its entirety here:
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-an...age=1#bookmark

Tea Party Radicalism Is Misunderstood: Meet the “Newest Right”
Our sense of the force currently paralyzing the government is full of misconceptions — including what to call it.

To judge from the commentary inspired by the shutdown, most progressives and centrists, and even many non-Tea Party conservatives, do not understand the radical force that has captured the Republican Party and paralyzed the federal government. Having grown up in what is rapidly becoming a Tea Party heartland–Texas–I think I do understand it. Allow me to clear away a few misconceptions about what really should be called, not the Tea Party Right, but the Newest Right.

The first misconception that is widespread in the commentariat is that the Newest Right can be thought of as being simply a group of “extremists” who happen to be further on the same political spectrum on which leftists, liberals, centrists and moderate conservatives find their places. But reducing politics to points on a single line is more confusing than enlightening. Most political movements result from the intersection of several axes—ideology, class, occupation, religion, ethnicity and region—of which abstract ideology is seldom the most important.

The second misconception is that the Newest Right or Tea Party Right is populist. The data, however, show that Tea Party activists and leaders on average are more affluent than the average American. The white working class often votes for the Newest Right, but then the white working class has voted for Republicans ever since Nixon. For all its Jacksonian populist rhetoric, the Newest Right is no more a rebellion of the white working class than was the original faux-populist Jacksonian movement, led by rich slaveowners like Andrew Jackson and agents of New York banks like Martin Van Buren.

The third misconception is that the Newest Right is irrational. The American center-left, whose white social base is among highly-educated, credentialed individuals like professors and professionals, repeatedly has committed political suicide by assuming that anyone who disagrees with its views is an ignorant “Neanderthal.” Progressive snobs to the contrary, the leaders of the Newest Right, including Harvard-educated Ted Cruz, like the leaders of any successful political movement, tend to be highly educated and well-off. The self-described members of the Tea Party tend to be more affluent and educated than the general public.

The Newest Right, then, cannot be explained in terms of abstract ideological extremism, working-class populism or ignorance and stupidity. What, then, is the Newest Right?

The Newest Right is the simply the old Jeffersonian-Jacksonian right, adopting new strategies in response to changed circumstances.

The political strategy of the Newest Right, then, is simply a new strategy for the very old, chiefly-Southern Jefferson-Jackson right. It is a perfectly rational strategy, given its goal: maximizing the political power and wealth of white local notables who find themselves living in states, and eventually a nation, with present or potential nonwhite majorities.

Although racial segregation can no longer be employed, the tool kit of the older Southern white right is pretty much the same as that of the Newest Right

The Solid South. By means of partisan and racial gerrymandering—packing white liberal voters into conservative majority districts and ghettoizing black and Latino voters–Republicans in Texas and other Southern and Western states control the U.S. Congress, even though in the last election more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans. The same undemocratic technique makes the South far more Republican in its political representation than it really is in terms of voters.

The Filibuster. By using a semi-filibuster to help shut down the government rather than implement Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is acting rationally on behalf of his constituency—the surburban and exurban white local notables of Texas and other states, whom the demagogic Senator seems to confuse with “the American people.” Newt Gingrich, another Southern conservative demagogue, pioneered the modern use of government shutdowns and debt-ceiling negotiations as supplements to the classic filibuster used by embattled white provincial elites who prefer to paralyze a federal government they cannot control.

While each of the Newest Right’s proposals and policies might be defended by libertarians or conservatives on other grounds, the package as a whole—from privatizing Social Security and Medicare to disenfranchising likely Democratic voters to opposing voting rights and citizenship for illegal immigrants to chopping federal programs into 50 state programs that can be controlled by right-wing state legislatures—represents a coherent and rational strategy for maximizing the relative power of provincial white elites at a time when their numbers are in decline and history has turned against them. They are not ignoramuses, any more than Jacksonian, Confederate and Dixiecrat elites were idiots. They know what they want and they have a plan to get it—which may be more than can be said for their opponents.

[*Anya*]

My comment: Note the use of pepper spray on a grossly psychotic inmate! That borders on torture to me. An IM antipsychotic would be far more humane. I have been in a team of mental health professionals to take down an assaultive patient, without harming that patient, using Management of Assaultive behavior techniques. Are these guards that manage a unit of mentally ill inmates not trained?

U.S. NEWSOctober 4, 2013, 7:17 p.m. ET

Fight Over Inmate Mental Care in California Sharpens

By ZUSHA ELINSON

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—A decadeslong legal battle over mental-health care in California prisons returned to the spotlight this past week, with graphic videos showing confrontations between guards and mentally ill inmates as the latest point of contention.

In the videos, presented for the first time in a civil trial that began in federal court here Tuesday, guards can be seen dousing prisoners with pepper spray. The footage provides evidence of continued unconstitutional treatment of California inmates, according to lawyers seeking an order limiting the use of force and punishment against prisoners with mental issues.

Lawyers for the state counter that the videos are being shown out of context, and that inmate care has improved to the point where court oversight of the prison mental-health program is no longer needed.

The trial is the latest chapter in litigation between prisoners and the state, initiated in 1991, that led to a 2009 ruling by a panel of federal judges to trim the state prison population. California has until Jan. 27 to shed about 8,500 inmates to reach the court-mandated 137.5% capacity. About 26% of state inmates, or more than 34,000, have mental-health issues. The overcrowding has made a solution to the problem of care for mentally ill prisoners all the more difficult.

In the current dispute, lawyers for the inmates want U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton to force prison officials to restrict the use of pepper spray and batons. State officials say such changes aren't needed because the state has a strict policy governing the use of force, including pepper spray.

One of the videos showed guards in white suits and gas masks repeatedly pepper-spraying an inmate through the food slot of his cell as he paced around naked, raving and screaming in between coughing. According to testimony from plaintiffs' expert witnesses who reviewed prison records, the guards were trying to remove the man, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, from a cell in a mental-health unit after he refused medication.

Edward Kaufman, a psychiatrist serving as an expert witness, said the inmate was so psychotic he was smearing feces on himself. "There appears to be no awareness of the mental illness that the individual has," he said.

Patrick McKinney, an attorney for the state of California, said there was no pattern or practice of excessive force. He said the inmates' lawyers were focusing on the force and not the events that led up to it, which in many cases included hours of clinical intervention and cooling-off periods. "In each of the cases, the inmate refused a lawful order to come out of the cell," he said.

The state fought the release of the videos. Judge Karlton ruled they could be shown, but only in the courtroom and with the names of the guards and prisoners stricken from the record.

State prisons spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman said the department "is committed to the proper care and treatment of every inmate and has a strict use of force policy."

Write to Zusha Elinson at zusha.elinson@wsj.com

Cost of Custody
Projected mental-health spending in the California prison system for the current year includes:

$15,728 per inmate

$140 million on inmates admitted to state hospitals

$62 million on medications for inmate mental-health treatment

$519 million overall

— Source: California Department of Corrections

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...064443026.html

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by *Anya*

My comment: Note the use of pepper spray on a grossly psychotic inmate! That borders on torture to me. An IM antipsychotic would be far more humane. I have been in a team of mental health professionals to take down an assaultive patient, without harming that patient, using Management of Assaultive behavior techniques. Are these guards that manage a unit of mentally ill inmates not trained?

I doubt that they are, given that it's a prison, not a mental hospital. Add that to the long list of problems with prisons being the new half-assed substitute for asylums.

[Cin]

My comment on this article: They seem to believe that this purposeful dumbing down of America is stupidity on the part of the GOP and the elite and is simply a by product of the desire to take from the poor and give to the rich by cutting social programs. I think it is not a by product. I think it is part of a purposeful, systematic plan to keep control as a minority of rich white and powerful individuals standing up against an ever changing demographic that is destined to shift to a non white majority.

Are American's Dumb? No, It's the Inequality, Stupid
Huge disparities in education between the rich and the poor are at the root of all stupidity.

Are Americans dumb? This is a question that has been debated by philosophers, begrudging foreigners and late night TV talk show hosts for decades. Anyone who has ever watched the Tonight Show's "Jaywalking" segment in which host Jay Leno stops random passersby and asks them rudimentary questions like "What is Julius Caesar famous for?" (Answer: "Um, is it the salad?") might already have made their minds up on this issue. But for those of you who prefer to reserve judgement until definitive proof is on hand, then I'm afraid I have some depressing news. America does indeed have a problem in the smarts department and it appears to be getting worse, not better.

On Tuesday, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the results of a two-year study in which thousands of adults in 23 countries were tested for their skills in literacy, basic math and technology. The US fared badly in all three fields, ranking somewhere in the middle for literacy but way down at the bottom for technology and math.

This shouldn't be all that surprising as there is a well documented pattern of American school kids failing to keep up with their tiger cub counterparts in other countries. But these results are the first concrete proof that this skill gap is extending well beyond school and into adulthood. The question is, do the study's results imply, as the New York Post so delicately put it, that "US adults are dumber than your average human"? Hardly, but it does suggest that many Americans may not be putting the smarts they have to good use, or, more likely, that they are not getting the opportunity to do so. Put another way: it's inequality, stupid.

Just a quick scan of the countries that fared really well in all three categories (Norway, Sweden, Japan, Finland and the Netherlands) compared to the countries that fared really badly (America and Britain) gives a pretty good indication that the inequality that is rampant in the (allegedly) dumber nations might have something to do with their pitifully low scores. A closer look at the results is also revealing. The incomes of Americans who scored the highest on literacy tests are on average 60% higher than the incomes of Americans with the lowest literacy scores, who were also twice as likely to be unemployed. So broadly speaking, the better off the American, the better they did on the tests.

Now this is just a wild guess, but could this possibly have something to do with the fact that the kind of schools a poor American kid will have access to are likely to be significantly inferior to the kinds of schools wealthier kids get to attend? Or that because of this, a poor kid's chances of getting into a good university, even if she could manage to pay for it, are also severely compromised? And let me go one step further and suggest that the apparent acceleration of America's dumbing down might be directly connected with the country's rising poverty rates.

Before I go on, I should say that even I can see some holes in the above theory. You only have to look at certain members of congress (read Republicans who forced the government to shutdown last week), for instance, many of whom attended some of the finest universities (and make bucket loads of money), to see that even an Ivy League education may be of little use to a person who is simply prone to stupidity. I should add also that many people believe that it's the large immigrant population (of which I'm a member) who are responsible for bringing down the nation's IQ, which further complicates the dumb American narrative. Indeed one could argue all day about the reasons Americans are falling behind, (Woody Allen blames fast food), but we should at least be able to agree on the remedies.

Here's the thing, most economists agree that in this technology driven age, a highly skilled workforce is key to any real economic recovery. It doesn't bode well for the future then that so many American students, particularly low-income and minority students, are graduating high school without basic reading or math skills. Nor does it inspire confidence that students who leave school without basic skills are not acquiring them as adults. So America's alleged dumbness has a lot to do with inadequate schooling for (poor) children and teenagers and a dearth of continuing education opportunities for low-income adults. By contrast, the OECD study found that in (more equal) countries that fared better in the tests, like Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands, more than 60% of the adult population have engaged in continuing education programs or on the job training.

The smart thing to do then surely would be to pour resources into early and continuing education opportunities so that American adults will be equipped with the necessary skills to compete in the global economy. This is where the dumb argument really gets a boost, however, because the opposite is happening. Those same congressional geniuses I alluded to earlier are also responsible for forcing through the cuts known as sequestration, which among other things cut 5% from the federal education budget. Because federal education funding is doled out according to the number of low-income students in a given school, it is poor children, the ones who most need the help, who are being disproportionately impacted by the cuts. Furthermore since 2010, almost $65m, over one-tenth of the entire budget, has been cut from adult education grants.

So are Americans dumb? The answer appears to be yes, some are. The dumb ones are not the poor minorities or low skilled adults who fared badly on the OECD tests, however, but a certain privileged and selfish elite, who have suffered from no want of opportunities themselves, yet seem to think that denying millions of struggling Americans an equal (or indeed any) opportunity to get ahead is a sensible way forward. The results are in now and clearly it isn't. The question is will enough Americans be smart enough to do something about it?

http://www.alternet.org/education/ar...age=1#bookmark

[Cin]

This just makes me sick to my stomach. How can you live with yourself doing shit like this? I mean don't people with Down Syndrome have enough they have to deal with every day. Now we can add the possibility the cops will just kill them for being a special needs person and acting accordingly. We haven't come very far from when experiments like feeding the mentally handicapped radioactive cereal were commonplace. If we refuse to protect the most vulnerable members of a civilized society then we are not very civilized or much of a society at all.

Killed by Cops Over a Movie Ticket: How Police Hurt the Disabled
A man with Down syndrome died in a confrontation with police. Officers need better training before more people die.
October 9, 2013 |

On Jan. 12, Robert “Ethan” Saylor of Frederick County, Md., a 26-year-old man with Down syndrome and an IQ of 40, died of asphyxiation after a confrontation with three off-duty police officers. He was being restrained for attempting to see “Zero Dark Thirty” for a second time without a ticket. According to witnesses, Saylor’s last words included “it hurt” and “call my mom.”

Saylor’s ashes now sit in the family’s living room while the three officers continue their usual shifts. No charges have been filed.

Saylor’s death stands out as especially tragic, not only because he loved police officers. Despite testimony from Saylor’s aide that she told the officers to “be patient” and let her “handle it,” a local grand jury decided not to file criminal charges. In late July, the federal government finally took note and opened an investigation into whether police violated Saylor’s civil rights.

This slow-moving process reveals something disturbing: Our law enforcement system often fails to protect people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and, in some cases, is complicit in their abuse.

Saylor is far from the first person with special needs to be harmed by police. In 2010, Steven Eugene Washington of Los Angeles, a 27-year-old man with autism, was shot dead after his inability to follow police’s directions made officers suspicious. He reached into his waistband, leading officers to fear he had a gun; he did not. In 2010, North Miami Beach police shot Ernest Vassell, 56, a man with mental disabilities, who was playing with a toy gun that they believed was real after he, too, had difficulty complying with officers’ commands.

Police can misinterpret the behavior of people with special needs because they do not even recognize that the person has cognitive or intellectual impairments. “We as human beings tend to approach everything through our own prism, and if someone is acting extremely peculiar, we’re immediately frightened,” said James Mulvaney, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an autism advocate. “If you’re a cop, you’re probably thinking this person is a danger.”

Police academies often devote only a brief amount of time to studying disabilities, and deal with physical, mental and other disabilities all together with little time specifically focused on developmental or intellectual ones, according to Leslie Morrison of Disability Rights California. “Those are very different categories.”

“Most officers have more knowledge about mental illness,” than about developmental or intellectual disabilities, said Leigh Anna Davis of the Arc, a community-based advocacy group for people with such disabilities. “In fact, they may think they are the same thing.” She added, “Without face to face contact, it’s hard to help officers realize the need to change their behavior or ways of interacting.”

People with autism may be at elevated risk because, unlike with people with Down syndrome, there are no tell-tale physical features of the disability. As a result, when they do not quickly follow police directions, they are often misconstrued as being disobedient or suspicious.

In fact, because it was so apparent that Saylor did have special needs, his case is all the more “confounding,” said David Whalen, the New York statewide project coordinator of disability awareness training. Whalen runs one of the few programs in the country that exhaustively trains law enforcement in recognizing and appropriately responding to people with a range of disabilities. “Down syndrome is not hidden. The lack of recognition of the individual having a disability is baffling to me,” he said.

Unfortunately, Frederick County officers not only apparently failed to comprehend what Saylor’s disability entailed, but also quickly made it a physically aggressive situation, allegedly refusing to listen to the aide’s plea for patience.

The rest of the article:
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/kill..._disabilities/

[Cin]

My comments: Leaders of 12 powerful countries will meet behind closed doors to seal an extreme Internet censorship plan called the Trans Pacific Partnership. The TPP will make the Internet more expensive, censored, and policed. Even if you have the extra money to pay I can pretty much guarantee you will not like the censorship. They will be able to monitor internet use, censor content and even remove whole websites deemed unacceptable. The possible repercussions are infinite. This is some scary shit that will negatively affect all our lives.

There's an International Plan to Censor the Internet in the Works -- Let's Stop It in Its Tracks
How the Trans Pacific Partnership making its way through Washington seriously undermine citizens’ rights to participate in a free and open Internet.

One month.

That’s the time left before the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could become a finalized agreement. For those who are drawing blank looks -- and understandably so -- the TPP is a highly secretive trade deal involving 12 nations around the Pacific Rim.

Described by experts Lori Wallach and Ben Beachy of Public Citizen as“one of the most significant international commercial agreements since the creation of WTO”, the TPP is more than a trade agreement - it’s an underhanded attempt by old industry interests to censor the Internet.

The lack of general awareness about the TPP is exactly what unelected trade officials and lobbyists hope for; the more covert the negotiations, the easier it is to usher in extreme new Internet censorship rules.

The TPP’s extreme Internet censorship plan

The changes proposed by the TPP could seriously undermine citizens’ rights to participate in a free and open Internet. We know fromleaked drafts that these draconian measures could criminalize your everyday use of the Internet, force service providers to collect and hand over your private data, and give old industry conglomerates more power to fine you for Internet use. As opposed to fostering a global forum in which citizens can engage with one another, the TPP would stifle any kind of innovation within the Internet community.

TheElectronic Frontier Foundation underlines the dangers of the TPP:

“The copyright provisions in the TPP will carve a highly restrictive copyright regime into stone and prevent countries from enacting laws that best address and promote users’ interests. In this final stage, it’s time for us to demand that our lawmakers join those who are already denouncing this agreement. We must drag this out into the light and reject international laws that uphold corporate interests at the expense of users’ rights.”

Obama fast tracks the TPP, bypasses democracy

If it isn’t bad enough that these talks have occurred behind closed doors, President Obama is now taking this secrecy even further by attempting to “fast track” the deal through Congress.

This means that elected U.S. Congress members would be forced to vote on the agreement without the possibility of sharing, discussing, or amending its contents. Under such intense pressure from the President, it seems as though the most comprehensive and covert post-WTO trade agreement could be finalized by as early as the end of October. The urgency to wrap up this controversial deal is reaffirmed by the White House’s recent announcement that they’ll go ahead with the TPP -- despite the current government shutdown.

Unsurprisingly, Congress members have not taken to Obama’s undemocratic, fast track plans without protest. Several representatives have recently spoken out against this backdoor deal, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro: “I oppose fast-track authority like what we have had in the past [...] we are not just here to rubber stamp what gets done.” Echoing this sentiment is Rep. Alan Grayson, who has described the Obama Administration’s secrecy about the TPP as “an assault on democratic government.”

Over 100,000 citizens against Internet censorship

It’s not just Congress that has spoken up. Over 100,000 citizens from all across the Trans-Pacific region have made it clear that they’re against the TPP’s dangerous Internet censorship plan. As negotiations are set to wrap up by the end of this month, this really is the last chance for global citizens to let their decision-makers know that they will pay a hefty political price for supporting a deal that censors the Internet.

It’s time to put an end to Internet censorship now. Join the over 100,000 others who have spoken up and sign the petition against Internet censorshiptoday at https://openmedia.org/censorship

http://www.alternet.org/theres-inter...age=1#bookmark

[Kobi]

Privacy advocates were dealt a one-two punch this week as Google announced plans to sell some of its users’ information for use in advertisements, and Facebook said it’s removing the privacy setting for Timeline searches.

The former came yesterday, when Google revealed that, beginning Nov. 11, some of the ads it displays will include users’ names, photos and endorsements they’ve made on Google+ and other Google services like YouTube.

The change in its terms of service will not apply to users under 18, and adults will be able to opt out on Google+’s settings page.

Google did not return calls yesterday, and Facebook declined to comment. But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said users “should not have to restore their privacy defaults when Google changes its business model.”

The company shouldn’t use people’s names, photos or posts for commercial purposes without their consent “because it’s taking something of value from somebody without their agreement,” Rotenberg said.

The center also bristled at Facebook’s announcement on Thursday that it’s finishing the removal of a setting that controls whether users’ Timelines can be found when people search for them by name.

The setting was removed last year for people who weren’t using it. The “small percentage” of those who still are will see reminders about its removal in the coming weeks, Facebook said on its Newsroom page.

“This is another unilateral change by Facebook that reduces users’ ability to control their personal information,” said David Jacobs, EPIC’s consumer protection counsel.

David Gerzof Richard, professor of social media and marketing at Emerson College, urged people to comb their Facebook and Google+ pages for anything they wouldn’t want to show up in an ad on Google or in a search on Facebook.

“These platforms are free, but we’re paying by giving up our privacy,” Gerzof Richard said. “Corporations look at their own interests first. And both Google and Facebook know that what sells products best are third-party endorsements. Any advertising campaign out there doesn’t compare to the power of the voice of consumers. It’s only when there’s extreme push-back that corporations reconsider.” -

See more at: http://bostonherald.com/business/bus....Gw4S4vVG.dpuf

[Cin]

Will Obama Abandon Tens of Millions of Seniors to Get a Budget Deal with Right-Wing Republicans?
Are cuts to Social Security and Medicare on the table?

The next few days may be the most perilous for ordinary Americans in Obama’s presidency, as the White House is looking for a deal with far-right Republicans that takes Obamacare off the budget-cutting table, reopens the federal government and raises its debt ceiling.

As the government shutdown continues, Democrats have seen their approval ratings soar, prompting pollsters to say that the GOP will be punished in the next federal election. But what’s shaping up 13 months from now is less important than what will shape up in the next 13 or so days. That’s because the White House’s openness to revive “grand bargain” talks with GOP radicals over future funding for entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and more tax cuts for the wealthy, can only end badly for the middle- and working-class Americans.

“If we went into serious negotiations, then I think that could be taken in short order,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-OK and House Appropriations Committee member, said Friday, after negotiating Thursday night with other House GOP leaders at the White House over ending the shutdown and debt stalement.

The problem that Democrats face is that the agenda of the House’s slightly less-extreme Republicans is not new. It is still so far to the right that a deal could imperil programs that Democrats have built over decades, starting with the cornerstone of the 1930s New Deal, Social Security, and continuing in the 1960s War on Poverty, with Medicare, or health care for seniors. Fully funding retirement security programs is needed more than ever today, as near-retirees owe an average of $102,000 on home loans and $18,000 on credit cards, according to Social Security Administration statistics.

Polls continuously find that the vast majority of Americans, regardless of political party, do not want entitlements like Social Security or Medicare cut. But these big-ticket items have consistently been in right-wingers’ budget-cutting crosshairs, where they are falsely but deliberately blamed for outsized roles in creating the federal debt—instead of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and a war of choice in Iraq. The hard right, now driving the federal shutdown, has been laboring for years to end America’s social welfare programs. That attitude is part of why the right hates Obamacare, as it is seen as expanding that legacy.

It appears that the GOP’s price for reopening government and raising the debt limit is for Obama to “seriously consider,” as Cole said, an array of policy options targeting these needed and popular entitlements. This menu would include the unbalanced Simpson-Bowles plan of cutting retirement benefits while lowering federal income tax rates, especially in the top brackets. Or, as Obama has said, possibly changing the inflation formula that calculates Social Security increases, which would hurt the majority of seniors who have little lifetime savings.

These “grand bargain” proposals are nowhere near the political 50-yard-lines. They are far to the right, just as the shutdown and debt fight are driven by even more extreme right-wingers. Yet mainstream media coverage of would-be dealmakers is filled with revisionist history or worse, historical amnesia. Republicans who a year ago were seen as being out-of-touch—notably 2012 Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan—are today touted as “adults” that the White House can deal with. That’s how The New York Times portrayed Ryan this week, glossing over his slash-and-burn agenda that voters rejected in the 2012 presidential election.

There’s a real danger that the Republican extremists will move from their 5 yard line to their 15 yard line and stop there, bellowing that they have compromised while demanding lasting cuts to safety nets. Obama would then look intransigent if he keeps saying no.

The end game is dicey. In 1995, when the government was shut down by Republicans led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, that revolt came after President Bill Clinton did what no Democrat thought that their party would do—support and pass punitive welfare reform. Then and now, some of the same dynamics are at play. Republicans, seeking to sound reasonable, have begun talk of reforming programs that they just want to kill.

“Everyone was being cute,” The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Drew wrote in her 1996 book, Showdown, about the Gingrich shutdown and welfare law. “The Republicans were pretending to be ‘reforming’ a program they were trying to destroy. The President was dodging the most important issue and dealing in word games, while his aides encouraged people to think whatever they wanted to think were his intentions.”

Then, like now, a Democratic president was willing to meet the GOP partway. Will Obama be the Democratic president who is willing to par back some of the most popular and needed federal programs ever, including Social Security and Medicare? Will he back the Keystone XL pipeline in a grand deal, despite a deepening climate change crisis?

Americans across the political spectrum should take heed. These are perilous times.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-an...age=1#bookmark

[Corkey]

http://freakoutnation.com/2013/10/13...lows-commence/

In case anyone missed the change to our representative "democracy".

[Jesse]

It's over! Well, as over as it is ever going to be.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-17-01-19-44

[Cin]

Support the FTT, make some noise, tell your representatives in Washington.

A Simple Reform Could Save America From Wall Street and Boost the Economy: What’s Washington Waiting For?

Financiers have been getting a free ride for too long. Let's make them pay their share instead of robbing seniors.

It’s a simple tweak that would reign in an out-of-control financial sector, stimulate jobs, generate billions of revenue, and possibly prevent another heart-wrenching crisis. Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman want it. Billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates want it. Polls show the majority of Americans want it. Even the Pope wants it.

We’re talking about a financial transaction tax (FTT) — a tiny tax of, say, less than half a percent: maybe 3 cents per $100 — on Wall Street trading. It’s simple, more than fair, widely supported by the public, and long overdue.

Over the last weeks, Americans have been kept from going to work, asked to go without food inspections and postpone their visits to national parks. The Centers for Disease Control couldn't help protect us from salmonella outbreaks. The families of fallen service members were unable to get death benefits. The fragile economy has been strained as members of Congress wrangle over another phony budget crisis, even as the deficit is shrinking. Meanwhile, Wall Street is raking in billions of dollars in profits from financial transactions. And theypay not a penny in taxes on most of them.

Instead of talking about nickel-and-diming seniors by cutting their Social Security and Medicare, letting our infrastructure crumble, and forcing our children to go without proper education or medicine, we could be returning sanity and balance to our financial system. The FTT would put the breaks on the sort of reckless, breakneck-speed computer gambling that helped tank the American economy five years ago. It could raise hundreds of billions annually. Did you hear that, deficit hawks? We’d have enough to close the funding gaps in states that had their budgets destroyed by Wall Street’s risky behavior and predation. We’d even have enough to invest in new jobs.

As Jeremy Scott of Forbes put it: “What is important is that the financial sector, which bears a disproportionate share of the blame for the deep recession that is still affecting employment and growth, share in the costs of insuring against future bailouts and be forced to restructure itself to better insulate the rest of the economy from excessive risk.”

Once upon a time, we had a financial transaction tax in America, and it served us well from 1914 to 1966. Wall Street leaders at the time complained bitterly that the tax would be ruinous, but if you stop and think about those years, you notice that the American economy was actually much healthier than it is today. Income inequality was much lower, and jobs were more secure. After the Wall Street crash of 1987, major politicians, including Senate Majority leader Bob Dole and President H.W. Bush, called for a return of the FTT. Since the Wall Street-driven crash of 2008, renewed support for the tax has surged from every direction — except, of course, from Wall Street and the politicians who rely on their donations.

Because of their outlandish size and undue influence, financial firms have wriggled out of just about every attempt to introduce sane rules of the road since 2008, and they’re more dangerous and concentrated today than they before the crisis. Bankers and financiers left millions of Americans to suffer, and if something is not done soon, they will almost certainly do it again. It’s merely a question of when.

One of the biggest arguments against the FTT is that it will somehow hurt the economy by discouraging Wall Street activity. Of course, what it would actually do is protect Wall Street from itself by reducing the wild volatility of the market and the speculation fever which have prompted ordinary investors to run scared and caused jitters in the overall economy. Over the last decade, speculative activity has skyrocketed 400 percent — and only a miniscule fraction of that actually does anything to build the real economy in goods and services. The vast majority of it is just arbitrage, high-speed trading, casino gambling, and siphoning more money from ordinary people to the super-rich.

Another argument you hear is that regular folks would be hurt when they do things like make transactions on their 401(k)s or use a debit card. But this is nonsense. The tax would not apply to normal consumer activities, and traders could also be legally blocked from dumping costs onto consumers. The FTT is about giant banks and investment firms — behemoth companies like Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. Not you and me. Some huff that high-frequency traders will simply leave the country if we slow them down. Here’s an idea: can we help you pack? Seriously, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Many industrial nations already have some form of FTT, including Hong Kong and Singapore. Some members of the European Union have tried to push ahead with an FTT, but it has gotten caught in the complicated web of the European legal framework. Naturally, the big financial firms have lobbied relentlessly to block it and convince the media (much of which relies on advertising dollars from Big Finance) that it’s a bad idea. They’ve succeeded in getting the tax’s effective date pushed into the middle of 2014.

Over on this side of the Atlantic, you may have heard that bank CEOs having been meeting with the president during the shutdown. It’s not hard to imagine what they had to say: Just carve another pound of flesh from the American populace in the form of cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and leave us to make our billions at their expense. Protect Big Finance at any cost. So far, Obama has done pretty much just that. He has surrounded himself with economic advisors, like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers who have played Santa Claus to bankers and oppose the FTT. Current Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew is against the tax and gives us the official White House position: "The administration has consistently opposed a financial transaction tax on the grounds that it would be vulnerable to evasion, create incentives for financial re-engineering and burden retail investors.” Which is all a big pile of baloney.

So is there any hope? Much of Congress, attentive only to the drumbeat from Wall Street, has turned a deaf ear to the idea, despite a recent proposal from Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Peter DeFazio. The bottom line is that we need people in Washington willing to challenge banks. You could take Elizabeth Warren’s election to the Senate as a sign that we might finally be getting somewhere. She is a very popular politician, and if she were to get behind the FTT, there could actually be a chance of getting it passed.

In the meantime, we really need to mob our representatives with messages of support for the FTT. Flood them with letters, emails, and phone calls. Make noise. Tell them that if they are not willing to champion the public good, they will not get your vote.

And if the President dares to move forward with cuts to social programs, public services, Medicare, and Social Security while such a strong, sane idea as the FTT is supported by the population, well, maybe it’s time to take to the streets.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/simp...age=1#bookmark

[Cin]

police officer shoots a guy 4 times in the gut after being on the scene for like 10 seconds and having the suspect make no threatening movements or gestures.

http://www.alternet.org/dallas-polic...tanding-street

What makes this different from all the many times the police in various cities and states throughout the country have used excessive force in the past is there is a video. It's kind of amazing to watch. It looks likes the cops just get out of the squad car, walk over and shoot the guy.

I can almost imagine them pushing one of the easy buttons you get in Staples that say "THAT WAS EASY!"

Makes a good case for thinking twice before you call the police.

[Slowpurr]

Video is deemed private on YouTube and a few other sites but is still available here along with quite a few other questionable shootings.

The Mom claims she was not let into the hospital to see her son. Police told her she he was under arrest for trying to hurt police officers.

http://benswann.com/caught-on-tape-d...tally-ill-man/

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

police officer shoots a guy 4 times in the gut after being on the scene for like 10 seconds and having the suspect make no threatening movements or gestures.

What makes this different from all the many times the police in various cities and states throughout the country have used excessive force in the past is there is a video. It's kind of amazing to watch. It looks likes the cops just get out of the squad car, walk over and shoot the guy.

I can almost imagine them pushing one of the easy buttons you get in Staples that say "THAT WAS EASY!"

Makes a good case for thinking twice before you call the police.

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Slowpurr

The Mom claims she was not let into the hospital to see her son. Police told her she he was under arrest for trying to hurt police officers.

Well standing motionless with your hands by your side is certainly dangerous to others. It was just dumb luck those cops weren't hurt.