Don't Tase Me, Bro!

Account of Shreveport resident Robert Baillio, who got pulled over for having two pro-gun bumper stickers on the back of his truck -- and had his licensed gun confiscated.
According to Cedric Glover, mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, his cops "have a power that [. . .] the President of these Unites States does not have": His cops can take away your rights.


And would you like to guess which rights he has in mind?


Just ask Shreveport resident Robert Baillio, who got pulled over for having two pro-gun bumper stickers on the back of his truck -- and had his gun confiscated.


While the officer who pulled him over says Baillio failed to use his turn signal, the only questions he had for Baillio concerned guns: Whether he had a gun, where the gun was, and if he was a member of the NRA. No requests for a driver's licence, proof of insurance, or vehicle registration -- and no discussion of a turn signal.


Accordingly, Baillio told the officer the truth, which led the police officer to search his car without permission and confiscate his gun.


However, not only does Louisiana law allow resident to drive with loaded weapons in their vehicles, but Mr. Baillio possessed a concealed carry license!


What does such behavior demonstrate, other than transparent political profiling -- going so far as to use the infamous Department of Homeland Security report on "Americans of a rightwing persuasion" as a how-to guidebook, no less?


Mr. Baillio made no secret of his political affiliations: An American flag centers a wide flourish of pro-freedom stickers and decals on his back windshield.


In fact, when Baillio asked the officer if everyone he pulls over gets the same treatment, the officer said no and pointed to the back of his truck.

Thanks to Rabbit

Many modern (and ancient) narratives, art and musical works have been based on creative riffs on, appropriations and transformations of aspects of previous works. Such apparently was the idea of Frederick Colting in a novel titled  60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,imagining what a 76 year old Holden Caulfield, called Mr. C in the book, might have become, six decades after the events portrayed  in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. But, unless we buy the UK edition, we in the US will never know because, according to a US district court judge, copyright now means the right to control all imaginative appropriations of as book's characters and themes.

The NY Times reports

In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of "The Catcher in the Rye."

The judge, Deborah A. Batts, of United States District Court in Manhattan, had granted a 10-day temporary restraining order last month against the author, Fredrik Colting, who wrote the new novel under the pen name J. D. California.

In a 37-page ruling, Judge Batts issued a preliminary injunction -- indefinitely banning the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in this country -- after considering the merits of the case. The book has been published in Britain.

"I am pretty blown away by the judge's decision," Mr. Colting said in an e-mail message after the ruling. "Call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books." Mr. Colting and his lawyer, Edward H. Rosenthal, said they would appeal. The decision means that "members of the public are deprived of the chance to read the book and decide for themselves whether it adds to their understanding of Salinger and his work," Mr. Rosenthal said.

In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed June 1, lawyers for Mr. Salinger contended that the new work was derivative of "Catcher" and Holden Caulfield, and infringed on Mr. Salinger's copyright.

The work by Mr. Colting, 33, centers on a 76-year-old "Mr. C," the creation of a writer named Mr. Salinger. Although the name Holden Caulfield does not appear in the book, Mr. C is clearly Holden, one of the best-known adolescent figures in American fiction, aged 60 years.

(The similarities between the characters were not much in dispute. As Judge Batts wrote in her ruling, "Both narratives are told from the first-person point of view of a sarcastic, often uncouth protagonist who relies heavily on slang, euphemisms and colloquialisms, makes constant digression and asides, refers to readers in the second person, constantly assures the reader that he is being honest and that he is giving them the truth.")

Mr. Colting's lawyers argued, among other things, that the new novel, titled "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," did not violate copyright laws because it amounted to a critical parody that had the effect of transforming the original work.

24 year old tackled to ground and beaten for asking why he was being ordered out of car.

The Washington Post reports

Prince George's County police are reviewing the actions of an officer who arrested a motorist on charges of slugging and tackling him during a traffic stop in Hyattsville. A police video of the encounter last year shows the officer yanking the man out of his car, slugging him twice and tackling him.

"Step out of the car now, or I'll have you out of the car," Cpl. Steven Jackson says after the motorist does not comply with three rapid-fire demands to exit the car.

"You yelling, but you have to give me a reason to step out of the car," Shawn M. Leake, 24, replies.

Jackson opens the driver's side door and pulls Leake out of the car. Almost immediately, Jackson makes a fist and slugs Leake in the face, then quickly slugs him again in the face, the video shows. Leake does not hit or appear to try to punch Jackson.

Thanks to Raw Story

Dateline June 28 2009, not 1969.

Raw Story reports

Forty years to the day after Stonewall -- when a police raid of a New York gay club led to riots and launched the modern gay-rights movement -- police in Fort Worth, TX, are being accused of repeating the incident.

Early Sunday morning, Fort Worth police, accompanied by agents of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, raided the Rainbow Lounge, a newly-opened gay club in Fort Worth.

According to CBS 11 News, "seven people were arrested for public intoxication and at least a dozen more were restrained. The incident was captured on camera and posted on local blogs. The scene was the topic of conversation at Sunday's Million Gay March in Dallas."

Police say they were investigating allegations that the club was over-serving its customers. They also allege one of the officers was "groped" during the raid, an allegation that witnesses dispute.

The Dallas Voice blog quotes an eyewitness identified only as Alison, who says the police "only arrested men and seemed to be targeting effeminate men."

CBS 11 News quoted a witness, Raymond Gill, who said he was pulled aside by officers "because of the way I was walking. He said I looked like I was drunk. But ... I got to the bar 30 minutes before they got there. I sat down had not got up before police got there. No one saw me walk."

According to the Dallas Voice, one man has been hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage after being thrown to the ground by police officers. Pictures of the incident have made their way to the Internet, sparking further anger among the gay community.

Thanks to jgodsey

This is a month or so after the fact, but haven't seen this incident very widely reported.

SFScope reports

Boom! Studios sends word that comics writer Mark Sable was detained by TSA security guards at Los Angeles International Airport this past weekend because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries Unthinkable. Sable was detained while traveling to New York for a debut party at Jim Hanley's Universe today.

The comic series follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type "unthinkable" terrorist scenarios that now are coming true. (See this article for more on the series.)

Sable wrote of his experiences: "Flying from Los Angeles to New York for a signing at Jim Hanley's Universe Wednesday (May 13th), I was flagged at the gate for 'extra screening'. I was subjected to not one, but two invasive searches of my person and belongings. TSA agents then 'discovered' the script for Unthinkable #3. They sat and read the script while I stood there, without any personal items, identification or ticket, which had all been confiscated.

"The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics.

"I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation. While Unthinkable blurs the line between fiction and reality, the story is based on a real-life government think tank where a writer was tasked to design worst-case terror scenarios. The fictional story of Unthinkable unfolds when the writer's scenarios come true, and he becomes a suspect in the terrorist attacks.

"In the end, I feel my privacy is a small price to pay for educating the government about the medium."

Thanks to jgodsey

Acknowledging that Pittsburg officer Paul Abel's off-duty altercation with a pdestrian was inappropriate, imprudent and ill-advised Judge Jeffrey Manning nonetheless cleared Officer Abel of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and DUI charges and perhaps cleared a path for his return to the police force, noting that police have after all  wide "discretion in the use of force"

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette reports

His methods, the judge said, were "inappropriate, imprudent and ill-advised."

But Pittsburgh police Officer Paul Abel's off-duty altercation with a South Side man last year wasn't criminal, Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning ruled yesterday.

Following a nonjury trial, Judge Manning cleared Officer Abel of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and DUI charges and perhaps cleared a path for his return to the police force.

Officer Abel, who has been suspended without pay since his arrest, was not reinstated yesterday and a decision has not been made about his status with the department, police spokeswoman Diane Richard said.

After the ruling, Officer Abel declined comment except to say he wanted his job back. Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1 President Dan O'Hara said the union would fight to get Officer Abel reinstated, but it is a process that could take some time.

Officer Abel, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force, was arrested June 28 after he shot 21-year-old Kaleb Miller in the hand. Officer Abel claimed Mr. Miller had punched him moments earlier while he was in his car at a stoplight. Officer Abel, who testified he had four beers and two shots that night while celebrating his wife's birthday, grabbed his service weapon from his trunk and pursued the suspect.

Officer Abel drove around the block until he spotted Mr. Miller, whom he knew from the neighborhood. Witnesses said the officer hit Mr. Miller on the neck with the butt of his Glock and the gun went off, grazing Mr. Miller's hand.

Officer Abel said he was trying to make an arrest for aggravated assault and had to be aggressive because Mr. Miller did not obey his commands to lie on the ground.

Mr. Miller denied punching the officer, and two other witnesses said Mr. Miller looked nothing like Officer Abel's assailant.

But the case hinged on whether Officer Abel was arresting a suspect or acting in retaliation -- regardless of whether or not he had the right man. Judge Manning noted that the law allows officers discretion in the use of force, and police officers can act in their official capacity whether they're on- or off-duty.

Thanks to William Grigg

The MotorHome Diaries interviews Asheville, NC couple, who give their account of being chased out of their home at gunpoint and arrested for flying the US flag upside down.

29 year old woman brought in to Harris County, Texas on two week jail stint possession of small amount of pot dies in custody, with no explanation offered. Apparently that kind of thing happens a lot down there, at least 141 times in the past 10 years.

Raw Story reports

A woman serving a short sentence in a Houston, Texas, jail for possession of marijuana died in custody over the weekend, and officers are not saying how or why.

The 29-year-old, identified as Theresa Anthony, had expected to spend just two and a half weeks behind bars in the Harris County lockup. On Saturday, Cynthia Prude, Theresa's mother, received a phone call from the jail's Chaplain informing her that her daughter was dead.

"I almost got in a wreck," Prude told the local Fox affiliate. "I thought somebody was playing on the phone. I would like to know what happened to my daughter."

Prude has not been allowed to see the body, nor has the Harris County Sheriff's Department even spoken with her, according to area media.

"Today I still don't know if that's my daughter," Prude told Houston news station KHOU. "I'm only going by a Social Security number that we got from Ben Taub Hospital."

Houston's Fox affiliate noted that an autopsy has not yet been conducted on Theresa's body.

The Harris County Sheriff Department's public information officer was not available to answer RAW STORY's questions.

Not the first time

It is hardly the first time serious questions surrounded the death of a Harris County inmate.

On 4 June 2009, the Justice Department concluded a 15 months-long investigation into the Harris County facility and determined in the subsequent  27-page report that over 142 prisoners had died there since 2001. Most expired due to lack of medical care, the report claims.

The Associated Press noted that after the Justice Department declined to make its findings public, The Houston Chronicle was able to obtain a copy, which it released on the Internet.

The findings, addressed to Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, lauded the prison's efforts to maintain security, booking and intake programs and take basic fire safety precautions. The Justice Department said that by these measures, the facility "complies with constitutional requirements in a number of significant respects."

The Justice Department added that in spite of these marginal safety and procedural issues, "certain conditions at the jail violate the constitutional rights of detainees. Indeed, the number of inmate deaths related to inadequate medical care [...] is alarming."

Intelligence scholar's program will fund unidentified government agents in training to attend colleges.

Counterpunch reports

As the continuities and disjunctures between the Bush and Obama administrations come into focus it becomes increasingly clear that while Obama's domestic agenda has some identifiable breaks with Bush's, at its core, the new administration remains committed to staying the course of American militarization. Now we have an articulate, nuanced president who supports elements of progressive domestic policies, can even comfortably say the phrase LGBT in public speeches, while funding military programs at alarming levels and continuing the Bush administration's military and intelligence invasion of what used to be civilian life.

The latest manifestation of this continuity came last week when Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced plans to transform the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) from a pilot project into a permanent budget item. Blair also announced plans to establish a "Reserve Officers' Training Corps" to train unidentified future intelligence officers in US college classrooms. Like students receiving PRISP funds, the identities of students participating in these programs would not be known to professors, university administrators or fellow students--in effect, these future intelligence analysts and agents would conduct their first covert missions in our university classrooms.

Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposés on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), then a pilot project funded under section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with US security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor's offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns--an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.

It seems likely that many of the affected disciplines will offer little resistance and some may quickly warm to announcements of any new funding stream. Traditionally, the disciplines of political science, history or area specialists coming from the humanities have seldom resisted such developments; but for disciplines like anthropology, these undisclosed intelligence-linked programs present devastating ethical and practical problems, as the non-discloser of funding and links to intelligence agencies flies in the face of the basic ethical principles of the discipline. But even without the problems for individual disciplinary ethics codes, the presence of these undisclosed secret sharers in our classrooms betrays fundamental trusts that lie at the core of honest academic endeavors.

While the National Intelligence Director's move to make PRISP a permanent budget item will damage the academic freedom and integrity of American universities, it will likely be met by the open arms of university administrators facing crashed university endowments and dwindling budgets. That some administrators would so easily accommodate themselves and their institutional integrity for the promise of funds should be of little surprise, but I fear that the combined forces of the current economic collapse conjoined with President Obama's ability to bring a new liberal credibility to the this warmed-over Bush era project will induce many faculty and students to seriously consider participating in these programs. Times are hard and as funds get scarce it will be increasingly difficult for many to say no.

This development is just the latest installment in on ongoing efforts to increase the militarization of American higher education. None of this should be surprising in a nation that alone spends about 48% of the planet's military budget. In the social sciences, these shifts away from broad funding sources designed to create independent knowledgeable scholars, to those now requiring indentured servitude has been a long time coming.

Back in the early 1990s when the National Security Education Program (NSEP) was first introduced it was widely condemned by professional associations like the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association for blurring the lines between independent scholarship raised by NSEP's its requirements that program participants later seek employment in governmental agencies. But with the depressed economy, plummeting endowment funds at universities and foundations, the difficult academic job market, and scarce academic funding sources, I fear that professional associations' reactions against these developments will be muted. As pilot programs, PRISP and the Intelligence Community Scholars Programs made scarce funds available to students, as traditional non-payback funding programs were being cut. Programs like PRISP that seek to tie young scholars to agencies like CIA early in their career as a means of bringing new ideas and skills to these agencies will fail in meeting the claimed goal of getting these agencies to think in new ways because such ties to institutional culture early in student-agent careers will increase the influence of agency cultural groupthink while diminishing the impact of academic culture. If the Obama administration really wants to improve governmental agencies' knowledge of and approaches to the world, they need to increase funding to a broad range of educational funding programs that do not encumber or limit the range of knowledge in the ways that programs like PRISP do.

This move to establish PRISP as a permanent budgetary item is the sort of program that likely will speed through congress--which can then claim it is both supporting education funding, and military and intelligence sectors, with a bonus feel-good work-ethic mandate thrown-in by requiring students to payback their funds through required future governmental service. But this push will be done without an outside assessment of PRISP as pilot program. PRISP needs an independent assessment of what it has accomplished--including an assessment of the impact of the predatory penalties facing former PRISP students who come to realize that they do not wish to fulfill their commitments to work for these agencies upon graduation. Because of the lack of transparency surrounding PRISP, we have little idea what is really going on with the program. Last year I was able to identify one social science recipient of PRISP funds who explained to me that PRISP had been such a failure in finding social scientists to fund that PRISP had sought out this person and provided them with funds for work that was already underway just to spend-down the PRISP budget. Given these recent difficulties with the program, I wonder if the current expansion of PRISP is a supply-side effort to troll the pool of increasingly underfunded and debt-carrying desperate young scholars with few other funding options.

Professional associations like the American Association of University Professors, the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association need to speak out in opposition of the permanent establishment of PRISP. PRISP risks further blurring already hazy borders marking proper independent academic roles, and it stands to confuse academic identities in ways that many will not even realize. Some of these processes are reminiscent of a recurrent motif in Philip K. Dick's stories where protagonists becomes unclear of their own agency and identity; becoming unsure of their own histories and memories, or true political alliances--in effect becoming undercover agents with identities unknown even to themselves. As this new generation of programs covertly brings undeclared and unidentifiable students into our universities they disrupt university identities and transforms the roles all who teach, research, study and work there in ways that they will not necessarily understand--as institutions of higher learning further lose their independence and become unwitting agents of state intelligence functions.

Thanks to Alternet

DC librarian claims city school district requested lists of "gay themed" books in order to "scrub" any of them from school summer reading lists.

School Library Journal reports

You won't see books like And Tango Makes Three (S & S, 2005), The Geography Club (HarperCollins, 2003) or any other gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLTB)-themed title on the summer reading lists for the District of Columbia Public Schools. But is there any chance that could change? 

That's the answer the capitol's gay and lesbian community--and many librarians--are awaiting, pending a finalization of the district's summer reading list on Friday, June 26th.

Officials are taking a second look at the list after a post appeared on the American Library Association's GLBT listserve that said, "The DC (District of Columbia) Public Schools decided to scrub their summer reading list of all GLTB related books. This seems outrageous. We're thinking that if a parent writes a strong letter, it'll be the most effective. I'm thinking it should go to the mainstream press, and perhaps someone in the school system too."

The post was originally made by Jeanne Lauber, a librarian at the DC Public Library on the Yahoo! discussion group "Lezbrian". She goes on the say, "Apparently the public library system told the schools which books were GLTB (not knowing why they were being asked) and the schools removed them."

Upon seeing the post, School Library Journal contacted both the DC Public Schools and the DC Public Library, and spokespeople at both said they had no knowledge of the situation. Since then, both institutions have ignored calls and emails from SLJ.

Summer break started June 15 for D.C. public schools, but the district's summer reading Web site says the list is tentative with a final list being released on June 26^th.

Nevertheless, pdf versions for each grade level are marked as final. The lists were created jointly by D.C Public media specialists, the Department of English Language Arts, and the District of Columbia Public Library. An introduction to the lists reads, "There are a variety of books from pre-kindergarten to grade twelve to satisfy every reading interest."

Sources say that a meeting between the school district and public library took place late last week in the hope that GLBT titles will be included on the lists before printed copies are released to students.

Thanks to Natl. Coalition against Censorship