The Gringo Mask

Highly recommended for anyone traveling through or residing in Arizona for whom the authorities might have a "reasonable suspicion" of not being a white person and thus perhaps not an actual American. I'm just glad I was born looking as American as I do.

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SWAT Team Drug Raid Video

Radley Balko at Reason.com revisits a previous post:

In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family's pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a "small amount" of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = "child endangerment." Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone's safety.

Just so we're clear.

Now there's video, which you can watch below. It's horrifying, but I'd urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

Here's the video:


Look at the house. It isn't a drug den or a crack house, these are your next door neighbors and their kid. This happened in America. Per a discussion in the comment section of a previous post, this is one of the costs beyond the billions we spend every year on the failed War on Drugs. Of course, this video doesn't definitively prove that it's a failure (as Balko says, they did successfully stop this guy from smoking his cannabis) but is this what you imagine when you think of the drug war succeeding?

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How GM Paid Back It's Bailout Loans "In Full"

I was wondering how they were able to do this so quickly:


Figures. For the record, I drive Japanese.

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Something Surprisingly Sane Someone Else Said

"He is a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens. If you are a citizen, you obey the law and follow the Constitution. He has all the rights under the Constitution. We don't shred the Constitution when it is popular. We do the right thing." -Glenn Beck on Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born American arrested in connection with a failed attempt to set off a car bomb in New York City's Times Square.

I still think he's a dishonest performance artist but good on him for actually getting the Constitution right this time.

Damien Walters Jumps Over Stuff

Pretty self explanatory. I love this shit:


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Maher On What's Not Negotiable

I think this defense of free speech rights from Bill Maher nicely echoes my recent explanation for participating in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day:


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Picture Of The Day

I can't believe that I've never seen this photo before:

After an oxygen tank exploded and crippled their service module, the Apollo 13 astronauts were forced to abandon plans to make the third manned lunar landing. The extent of the damage is revealed in this grainy, grim photo, taken as the service module was drifting away, jettisoned only hours prior to the command module's reentry and splashdown. An entire panel on the side of the service module has been blown away and extensive internal damage is apparent. Visible below the gutted compartment is a radio antenna and the large, bell-shaped nozzle of the service module's rocket engine. On April 17, 1970 the three astronauts returned safely to Earth.

I couldn't imagine what those three men must have felt during that harrowing experience. Astronauts are some of my favorite American heroes.

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Book Club Break

No time for blogging today. My book club is meeting to discuss our latest tome over some BBQ and vino on a day so beautiful that it not only makes me glad to be alive but also extra glad that I'm spending it in Northern California. If you have the means to live here, or even just visit, I highly recommend it. Oh, and how this man is still alive is completely beyond me. I thought that I'd abused my body with chemicals but Ozzy is in a whole other realm of crazy. Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

Chart Of The Day

So someone explain this to me: how can any honest conservative who decries governmental intrusion into our lives whilst trumpeting that private enterprise is so much more efficient support a program that has utterly failed going on four decades now? Bonus points if your explanation doesn't include the word "hypocrisy".

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George Trailer

Long before the winter of our discontent came the Summer of George. It's amazing how music and context can change things:


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