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Wisconsin's Voter ID Law Could Keep Me From Voting at Age 87 |
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Saturday, 27 September 2014 12:14 |
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Frank writes: "In October 2011, an article appeared in my local paper reporting that, in order to vote in the next election, everyone was going to need a state-issued identity card for the first time. At 85 years old, I didn't have one, because I'm handicapped and so I never drove a car or needed an ID."
Eighty-seven-year-old Ruthelle Frank didn't have the necessary ID to vote under Wisconsin's restrictive new laws. (photo: ACLU)
ALSO SEE: Wisconsin Will Enact Voter ID Law
Denounced as 'Recipe for Chaos'
Wisconsin's Voter ID Law Could Keep Me From Voting at Age 87
By Ruthelle Frank, Guardian UK
27 September 14
I’ve been registered to vote since 1948. But once Republicans passed the law, I was asked to prove I’m not an ‘illegal alien’
 n October 2011, an article appeared in my local paper reporting that, in order to vote in the next election, everyone was going to need a state-issued identity card for the first time. At 85 years old, I didn’t have one, because I’m handicapped and so I never drove a car or needed an ID.
The newspaper said that I’d have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and register for a card, and it had a list of the documents that I needed to bring. I hadeverything – except for the legal birth certificate. I’m not sure my parents ever gave that to me. I did have a baptism certificate that was notarized, but that was all.
My daughter drove me down to the DMV with my stack of paperwork, and we tried to ask the receptionist if I had everything, but she just handed me a form with a mess of questions on it. I told her I didn’t have a birth certificate, but she didn’t say I couldn’t go further, so we sat down and I filled it out and brought it back to her.
She barely looked at it, handed it back to me and sent me to the photo department, so I thought we were all set. But after the photo person took my picture, he sent me to another woman, and I handed her the form and my stack of papers, and she just threw my baptism certificate back at me and said it wasn’t valid and I couldn’t get an ID.
She even said, “How do I know you’re not an illegal alien?!”
That really hurt. I’d lived in the same house for 85 years, I’d served on the village board for 18 years, and then they told me that I wasn’t going to be allowed to vote.
I always voted. I’ve been registered to vote since I was 21 (the voting age wasn’t 18 until later), and I have never missed a presidential election.
My polling place is just one block down the street and one block over, so I could always walk to get there. Maybe a couple of times it was a little further away, four blocks or something, but never so far that I couldn’t walk. Voting places are close to home. But I had to get my daughter to drive me to the DMV because it’s 5 miles away. Thinking of all the other poor people, there are lots of us who might be able to get out to vote but not to get to the DMV, not if you don’t drive or don’t have anyone to take you there. And then you get there, and they tell you you don’t have the right piece of paper and maybe you’re an illegal alien who never should have voted?
I left the DMV and thought, “It just isn’t right.” I felt so downtrodden. As handicapped as I’ve been my whole life, as old as I am, it just felt like I wasn’t as good as anyone else.
I did try to get a birth certificate after that. Eventually, they told me I could get one, but I’d have to pay anything from $20-$200, since there was a mistake with my name that had to be corrected. That’s a lot of money! I’m so old now, what am I going to do with a $200 birth certificate? Hang it on the wall?
No one should have to pay a fee to be able to vote.
Everybody should have the chance to express their desire of how they want to have their country run. Just because you’re old or blind doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the right to vote. Everybody, if they want to, should be able to vote.
But you shouldn’t be able to collect campaign funds from out-of-state donors, and then come back here and take away the right of people in your state to vote in the next election. That’s not right.
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How Terrible Police Training Is Destroying America |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23847"><span class="small">Joan Walsh, Salon</span></a>
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Saturday, 27 September 2014 12:09 |
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Walsh writes: "Another day, another troubling video of police killing an unarmed black man. Or so it seems. But the horrific South Carolina video released Wednesday, in which a cop shot Levar Jones while he was reaching for his license, as he was asked to do - was the first recent case in which the officer was disciplined: not only fired, but charged with assault, appropriately."
Police tactics have escalated conflict instead of stopping or preventing confrontation. (photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
How Terrible Police Training Is Destroying America
By Joan Walsh, Salon
27 September 14
Local cops were trained to immediately “engage” an “active shooter” suspect. But a dishonest witness set him up
 nother day, another troubling video of police killing an unarmed black man . Or so it seems. But the horrific South Carolina video released Wednesday, in which a cop shot Levar Jones while he was reaching for his license, as he was asked to do — was the first recent case in which the officer was disciplined: not only fired, but charged with assault, appropriately.
Stark video evidence helps account for the difference in the treatment of Jones’s police assailant and the cops who shot Mike Brown in Ferguson, choked Eric Garner in Staten Island and gunned down Ezell Ford in Los Angeles. But what about John Crawford III, the young father shot by police in a Beavercreek, Ohio Walmart holding a toy gun? Newly released video is almost as stark as in the Jones case. It shows the police opened fire on Crawford immediately, even though the gun he held was fake and he wasn’t pointing it at anyone. Yet a grand jury declined to bring charges against the officers involved.
There are two main reasons for that. One, a young white wannabe Marine, 24-year-old Ronald Ritchie, lied to a 911 dispatcher and claimed Crawford was pointing his gun at other shoppers, including children. He would later, in a television interview, make the false claim that Crawford had also aimed the gun at police. Ritchie should clearly be prosecuted.
But another reason the cops weren’t charged is the fact that they did exactly what they were trained to do, from authorities starting with Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine. The Guardian’s Jon Swaine got ahold of a Power Point used to train Beavercreek police officers, just two weeks before they killed Crawford, in what to do when faced with an “active shooter threat.”
It essentially tells them to shoot first – I’m sorry, I mean “engage” first — and ask questions later, as they did in Crawford’s case.
The training manual, “Single Officer Response to Active Shooter Threats: What to do when YOU are first on the scene,” emblazoned with DeWine’s name, boasts of the way police departments have changed their protocols when facing cases like Crawford’s. From 1966 through 1999, the Power Point explains, “patrol officers respond by locating the shooter, containing the suspect, evacuating the area” and “notifying the SWAT team.” That sounds awfully soft on crime.
Local cops were trained to immediately “engage” an “active shooter” suspect. But a dishonest witness set him up
From there to 2008, the response was a little sharper, but it still emphasized “containment.” Then in 2008, the approach shifted. Suddenly “officers are empowered to engage the active threat upon arrival,” without waiting for backup. It cites FBI studies showing that active shooter event normally last 3-4 minutes, but “average time per kill/injury is 15 seconds.” Clearly, officers have to act fast.
In case that message was lost on anyone, the presentation closed with two slides. One asked what the trainees would police to do in case of an active threat in a building “with the one I love the most:” Wait for backup, “or enter the building and engage the suspect as soon as possible.” Then came a photo of a teacher leading tiny children to safety at Sandy Hook in December, 2012.
Is it any wonder Beavercreek officer Sean Williams charged into Walmart, wearing protective gear, with his gun aimed at Crawford, who was talking on his cell phone and holding the toy gun at his side? A witness later said he heard the police “yell and shoot simultaneously.”
“I believe that had he been white, the tolerance level of the officer involved realistically would have probably been more favorable,” John Crawford Jr told Swaine about his son. Crawford also told Swaine that he thought the 911 call claiming his son had been menacing, pointing the gun at other shoppers, wouldn’t have been made if he was white.
We’ll never know for sure, but that sure seems to be the case. I only just watched the television news interview Ronald Ritchie gave on the day of the shooting, back when he was presumed to be a hero. He looks so pleased with himself, sharing how “a black gentleman…was just waving [the gun] at children and people…I couldn’t hear anything that he was saying. I’m thinking that he is either going to rob the place or he’s there to shoot somebody else.”
Ritchie claimed the police told Crawford to drop the gun, twice, but Crawford “decided to swing the rifle to the officers, pointing at them, and that’s when the officer shot him twice.” When the Crawford family and their attorneys got a look at the surveillance video – it wasn’t released until after the grand jury decision – they said it was clear John Crawford never pointed the gun at anyone. Now that the video is public, we know that is true.
So Ritchie recanted his story, in an interview with Swaine: “At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody,” he said. But it was too late: His false story set in motion the sped-up response laid out in “Single Officer Response to Active Shooter Threats.”
The reaction to Mike Brown’s shooting in Ferguson focused the country on the militarization of local police departments. John Crawford III’s killing should do the same with their terrible training. And Ronald Ritchie’s false 911 report should make us realize that the racism that led Ritchie to either cruelly lie about Crawford, or to somehow see a menace where none existed, is deadly too.
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FOCUS | ISIS: You Can't Defeat Somebody With Nobody |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=28222"><span class="small">Rep. Alan Grayson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Saturday, 27 September 2014 11:08 |
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Grayson writes: "For the past decade, we have purported to 'train' the Iraqi military and police, at the cost of at least $24 billion. That's almost $100 for every man, woman and child in America."
Representative Alan Grayson. (photo: AP)
ISIS: You Can't Defeat Somebody With Nobody
By Alan Grayson, Reader Supported News
27 September 14
 lashback, 2000: At a military checkpoint on the side of a road in Lesotho, an officer pointed an automatic weapon at me, and asked for $20. I took out my business card, I handed it to him, and I told him that I worked with the U.S. government and I didn't need to give him $20. He pretended to read the card (he was obviously illiterate), he smiled, and with his machine gun, he then waived me back to my car. Perhaps he said "Have a nice day"; I don't recall specifically.
Flashback, 2001: On a street in Myanmar, I negotiated with a shopkeeper over a curio. There were some soldiers leaning against a wall down the block. When we had a deal, he told me that I had to pay him in the alley, not in the street. I did so, and then asked him why. He explained that if the soldiers had seen me handing him money, they would have come and taken it away from him. They wouldn't take it away from me, but they would take it away from him.
Because that's what soldiers do, in most countries. Like fish gotta swim.
For the past decade, we have purported to "train" the Iraqi military and police, at the cost of at least $24 billion. That's almost $100 for every man, woman and child in America. We have undertaken this training even though in the Middle East, many millennia ago, the Iraqis' ancestors invented the concepts of both the military and the police, at a time when our ancestors were drawing pretty pictures on cave walls employing colored dirt.
Such training consisted primarily of a one-month paid vacation to the neighboring country of Jordan. American instructors who did not speak a word of Arabic were paid roughly $170,000 per year to teach "ethics" -- ethics! -- to these trainees. For sure, a good time was had by all.
We used to be good at training blood-thirsty killers. Google "School of Americas," and see what I mean. In the old days, we trained the caudillos of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru and, in Africa, Gambia. When did we lose our touch?
Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time observing soldiers and police officers in Third World countries like Iraq and Syria will tell you that it's ridiculous to think that any amount of "training" will make them want to put their head into the meat-grinder called "war." That simply is not the gig.
Here is the gig: In countries like Iraq with vast amounts of unemployment, being in the military or police (not a big difference between the two, in their minds) means a steady income -- in Iraq, around $500 a month. In addition to that, if you are posted somewhere other than in your hometown, you can steal whatever you get your hands on. That's it. That's the job. It has nothing to do with shooting at people, much less killing people. And for sure, absolutely for sure, it has nothing to do with being shot at. That sounds dangerous.
And no amount of training is going to change that. You can't train people to commit suicide.
But what about our military, you ask? Well, our military has gotten very good at killing without dying. Take drone warfare, for instance -- thousands of kills, no U.S. military deaths. In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the death rate for U.S. soldiers was just above 1 percent -- which is just above the death rate each year for the U.S. population as a whole. Moreover, our military doesn't have anything else to do except "the mission"; it doesn't enjoy the same opportunities for ... "enrichment" ... that attracts young men in countries like Iraq.
Let's compare that to the death rate for Iraqis who counterattack against ISIS. It's roughly the same as the death rate from Ebola disease.
Everyone recognizes that ISIS cannot be defeated by bombing and missile strikes alone. It just doesn't work that way. ISIS now controls a population of nine million people, including the second-largest city in Iraq. When it comes to ground forces occupying urban territory, you can't defeat somebody with nobody.
So then what is the "plan" from our leadership? To try to reanimate the dead corpse of the Iraqi Army. Also, to assemble a ferocious regiment of orthodontists and bookkeepers to take back eastern Syria from ISIS. And how will we assemble such a force? By giving them a one-month paid vacation -- not in Jordan this time, but in Saudi Arabia.
Not going to happen. I regret to say this, but even with U.S. air support, there is no way that the Iraqi Army or the "moderate Syrian rebels" are going to defeat ISIS. And by the way, there are no "moderate Syrian rebels." We might as well arm leprechauns riding bareback into battle on unicorns. If you don't believe me, just ask the CIA.
So realistically, the current strategy is nothing but air strikes. And how effective are these air strikes against ISIS? Well, the first ones destroyed some oil refineries in ISIS-controlled territories. Those attacks increased the price of oil by approximately three dollars a barrel this week. And the United States imports almost eight million barrels a day. So these attacks have cost us $24 million a day in higher gasoline costs alone -- almost 10 cents a gallon. That's showing them!
Oil powers Saudi Arabia and the UAE bravely joined in these air attacks that increased the price of oil. Surprise, surprise. Are they laughing at us?
But not all is lost. Assuming for the sake of the argument that ISIS is something more than a band of theatric psychopaths, and actually does represent a threat to some fundamental U.S. strategic interest, here is how you could defeat ISIS militarily. Right now, Iraq says that it wants no foreign soldiers fighting ISIS in Iraq. So you give Iraq a firm deadline to defeat ISIS and take back western Iraq under international air cover. Let's say six months, which is how long it took for ISIS to occupy the territory.
If that fails -- and it very, very likely would -- then you acknowledge that the government of Iraq is unable to control its own territory, which is the most basic function of any national government. Under the auspices of the UN and the Arab League -- both of which have already authorized military action against ISIS -- you then assemble an international Sunni fighting force and deploy it against ISIS.
Now, let's suppose that the neighboring Arab League countries refused to provide such a force. What does that tell us? Why should we defend them, when they won't defend themselves?
But that's unlikely, because three Sunni Arab countries already have said that they would populate such a force, and with prodding from the United States, more would join. That force largely would consist of soldiers who speak Arabic, who look like the Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, who understand the religion and the customs, and who would not be regarded by the locals as invaders. Unlike the Iraqi Army, they have responsibilities other than cashing paychecks and looting from the locals, and they would be able to keep their own casualties down to what modern military forces view as acceptable levels.
That is how you defeat ISIS.
Is this realistic plan to defeat ISIS with Arab League forces ever going to happen? Probably not. Our present leaders have no interest whatsoever in action orchestrated by the United Nations or the Arab League. They don't have the chutzpah to tell Iraq, "look - you've failed to defend your territory from a terrorist group, why don't you give the other Arabs a shot at it?" And it would take too much effort to assemble a real fighting coalition, not a Potemkin-village "Coalition of the Willing" or a "Core Coalition" or whatever the polling says that they should call it these days.
I hope that I'm wrong, but I predict that our air attacks, without international Arab League "boots on the ground," will not defeat ISIS in western Iraq or in eastern Syria. I also predict that this war will fade from the news, just as the earlier war in Iraq did. I also predict that we will continue to throw half a trillion dollars each year at the military-industrial complex, which has now successfully transitioned from Osama bin Laden's corpse to a new bogeyman.
And it doesn't have to be that way. Peace, anyone?
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson
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Obama's Propagandistic UN Address |
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Saturday, 27 September 2014 07:30 |
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Excerpt: "During President Barack Obama's first term, he generally was careful in making comments about world affairs - not that he was always completely honest but he was circumspect about outright lying. Over the past two years, however, he appears to have lost any such inhibitions."
President Obama addresses the United Nations. (photo: AP)
Obama's Propagandistic UN Address
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
27 September 14
 uring President Barack Obama’s first term, he generally was careful in making comments about world affairs – not that he was always completely honest but he was circumspect about outright lying. Over the past two years, however, he appears to have lost any such inhibitions.
That’s the case even when he is engaged in something as serious as addressing the United Nations General Assembly on issues of war or peace as occurred both last year and this year. In September 2013, Obama made what he knew was a deceptive comment about the mysterious Sarin gas attack in Syria a month earlier. He did something similar on Wednesday in describing the Ukraine crisis.
Regarding the Sarin case, Obama knew before his 2013 speech that many of his own intelligence analysts believed Syrian rebels were behind the Aug. 21 attack that killed several hundred people outside Damascus. These analysts suspected the incident was part of a scheme to blame the government of President Bashar al-Assad and get the U.S. military to attack Assad’s forces. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Fixing Intel Around Syria Policy” and “Was Turkey Behind Syria-Sarin Attack?’]
Despite this knowledge, Obama delivered a formal address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, declaring: “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack.”
Similarly, Obama knew the complex reality in Ukraine when he took to the podium on Wednesday. He knew that the crisis was instigated not by Russia but by the European Union and the United States. He knew that the elected President Viktor Yanukovych had been targeted for “regime change” by officials within the U.S. State Department, led by neoconservative Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who literally hand-picked the new leadership with the aid of U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who described the need to “midwife this thing.”
Obama knew that Nuland had told Ukrainian business leaders that the U.S. government had invested $5 billion in support of their “European aspirations” and that the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy had subsidized scores of “non-governmental organizations” to help destabilize the Yanukovych government. He also knew the key role played by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias in seizing presidential buildings on Feb. 22 and forcing Yanukovych’s officials to flee for their lives.
Obama was aware, too, that the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine had rejected this coup regime and rose up in resistance to the imposition of what many saw as illegitimate authority. He knew that the people of Crimea – faced with this coup regime in Kiev – voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a move the Russian government supported and accepted.
Obama knew that the Kiev regime brutalized southern and eastern Ukraine, with the regime’s activists burning alive dozens of ethnic Russian protesters in Odessa and its military killing thousands with heavy weaponry fired into towns and cities of eastern Ukraine. The coup regime in Kiev even dispatched Nazi militias, such as the Azov battalion, to engage in bloody street fighting – the first time since World War II that any government had deployed armed Nazi forces to attack a European population. Obama knew that, too. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
Obama also knew that some of his own intelligence analysts had concluded that extremist elements within the Ukrainian government were probably responsible for the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, possibly using anti-aircraft missiles deployed close to rebel-controlled territory and aided by one or more Ukrainian fighter planes in the air. Obama knew, too, that the Ukrainian military attacked the crash site, driving investigators away and apparently setting fire to a wheat field containing remnants of the plane. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts.”]
Obama’s Ukraine Tale
Yet, this is how Obama presented the Ukrainian crisis to the world: “Recently, Russia’s actions in Ukraine challenge this post-[World War II] order. Here are the facts. After the people of Ukraine mobilized popular protests and calls for reform, their corrupt president fled. Against the will of the government in Kyiv, Crimea was annexed. Russia poured arms into eastern Ukraine, fueling violent separatists and a conflict that has killed thousands.
“When a civilian airliner was shot down from areas that these proxies controlled, they refused to allow access to the crash for days. When Ukraine started to reassert control over its territory, Russia gave up the pretense of merely supporting the separatists, and moved troops across the border.
“This is a vision of the world in which might makes right — a world in which one nation’s borders can be redrawn by another, and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed.
“America stands for something different. We believe that right makes might — that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones, and that people should be able to choose their own future. And these are simple truths, but they must be defended. America and our allies will support the people of Ukraine as they develop their democracy and economy.
“We will reinforce our NATO Allies and uphold our commitment to collective self-defense. We will impose a cost on Russia for aggression, and we will counter falsehoods with the truth. And we call upon others to join us on the right side of history – for while small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun, they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions.”
Becoming Bush
An honest person would have described all these events very differently, including what “America stands for.” There could have been at least some acknowledgement of how the United States in the post-World War II era has often relied on “the barrel of a gun” – or cruise missiles and smart bombs – to impose its will on other countries, including “regime change” in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011.
Obama could have acknowledged, too, that the United States has often used coups d’etat to unseat governments not to its liking, even when the leaders have been popularly elected. A partial list would include Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002, Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and now Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014.
But instead Obama chose to present a simplistic, propagandistic version of what has transpired in Ukraine. Essentially he’s saying: It’s all Russia’s fault and everyone on the U.S. side is a good guy, on “the right side of history.”
It is interesting, however, that Obama did not come out directly and implicate Russia and the eastern Ukrainian rebels in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Given his access to detailed U.S. intelligence on the topic, he should have been able to point the finger directly, if indeed that’s what the facts showed. Instead, he played word games to create the impression that the rebels and Russia were to blame without actually spelling out any evidence against them.
This was similar to how President George W. Bush gave speeches in 2002 and 2003 juxtaposing the names Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to create the perception among Americans that the two were joined at the hip when they were, in fact, bitter enemies. Now, President Obama has come to replicate these Bush-like deceptions.
There is also new evidence of how the supposedly “popular” government in Kiev has been developing its democracy — by incarcerating people who dare to protest against its policies. As the New York Times’ Andrew E. Kramer reported on Thursday, the Kiev regime has been padding its prisoner exchanges by throwing in political dissidents arrested far from any battlefield.
Kramer wrote: “The Ukrainians, … widely understood to be lacking enough prisoners of their own to effect a one-for-one exchange, set free a motley group of men, women and teenagers wearing tracksuits or dirty jeans, and taken, they said, from jails as far away as Kiev. “Soon enough, many of them were objecting to anybody who would listen there on the highway that they had never fought for pro-Russian separatists, and in fact had no idea how they ended up in a prisoner exchange in eastern Ukraine. …
“In interviews at their point of release and in a dormitory where former detainees are housed in Donetsk, a dozen men freed in exchanges over the weekend by the Ukrainian Army gave similar accounts. Some said they were arrested months ago in other parts of Ukraine for pro-Russian political actions, such as joining protests calling for autonomy in eastern Ukraine or for distributing leaflets.”
In other words, the Kiev regime does not only send Nazi storm troopers to attack people in eastern Ukraine but it jails citizens elsewhere who pass out leaflets.
Recognizing some of these darker truths – rather than simply reciting a litany of shiny propaganda – could have given President Obama’s UN address more credibility. Perhaps the old Obama would have made a stab at greater intellectual honesty but the new one has taken on the personality of his predecessor, who famously didn’t do nuance.
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ur hearts go out to the people, governments and courageous healthcare workers in the three countries most devastated by the current Ebola outbreak: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. But our sympathies are not enough. The UN Secretary General has estimated it will cost USD $1 billion to combat the disease and the havoc it is wreaking across West Africa.
