There’s a lot of noise made every four years about the importance of voting. But there’s all kinds of funny business going on around elections. Visit BlackBoxVoting.com for more info. And see below for the most recent case of potential voter fraud.

From DemocracyNow.com

WV Voting Machines Switch Votes from Obama to McCain
Early voting in the presidential election has already begun in many states, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters in at least two counties using touchscreen voting machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. Six voters reported having this problem in Jackson and Putnam Counties. In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. One voter, a retired nurse named Shelba Ketchum, said, “I hit Obama, and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.” Election officials blamed voters for not being more careful. Both counties use machines made by Election Systems & Software.

Going by the popular Outsider = Reform algorithm that many Joe Sixpacks and Hockey Moms have been parroting, here’s a list of other people who would also be great reformist maverick Vice Presidents:

Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds
Rachel Ray
Osama bin Laden
LaDainian Tomlinson
Jerry O’Connell
The Numa Numa Kid
DJ Qbert
Jesse Camp
Christopher Knight
Jim McIlvaine

Gary Glitter is best known for being the man behind the hit song “Rock and Roll (Part 2),” which is used extensively at sporting events, in plenty of movie soundtracks, and just generally among big crowds to get them excited for something. You know the one I’m talking about, it goes “dadada da-dah HEY! da-da dadada da-dah dadada da-dah HEY!” On and on and on ad nauseum.

But what he should probably be best known for is being a pedophile. Not just a pedophile, but one who used his riches to travel the globe after serving 2 months in a British prison for possessing child pornography in 1997. He has likely been raping young children everywhere he went after permanently leaving England and settling down in Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, and maybe some other places we don’t know about.

He was released from a Vietnamese prison yesterday, and was supposed to return to London, where – from my understanding – they would prevent him from traveling abroad again. He had spent about two years in that prison for repeatedly raping two Vietnamese girls – ages 9 and 11. These are just two of his victims; nobody except the rapist himself knows how many more there have been.

Apparently on the connecting flight from Thailand, he refused to board the plane to Europe. But since Thai authorities refused to allow him in the country, he spent a full day trying to wrangle some other arrangement, eventually ending up in Hong Kong.

How does this happen like this? I mean, I know how. You can draw a line from the differences in nationality, race, gender, social status, wealth, and a million other factors, and the answer is very clear. It’s not how. But just. Why?

By the time help arrived, Luis Ramirez lay convulsing in the middle of the street, foam running from his mouth.

Blows had struck the 25-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant with such force that they left a clotted, bruised impression of Jesus Christ on the skin of his chest from the religious medal he wore.

His attackers were white teenagers, including star students and football players, witnesses told police.

After a night of drinking, the teens taunted the undocumented worker with racial epithets, pummeled him to the ground and then kicked him in the head, court documents charge. He died in a hospital two days later.

from this article on CNN.com

If you were to read the first four sentences of this article only, you would know that Luis Ramirez was an “illegal Mexican immigrant,” an “undocumented worker,” who was beaten to death. And that’s pretty much all you would know.

If you continued to read the first half of this article, you would find out that before being attacked, he “responded to the name-calling with his own insults, which escalated the confrontation.” That the white teenagers who started the fight, and ultimately ended it, were not actually responsible for “escalating” it – apparently that was his own fault.

You’d also know that upon reaching a “a dusty park on Vine Street…Ramirez asked the couple to drop [him and a 15 year-old girl] off so they could walk. What happened next depends on the narrator.” And you might think he was already up to something shady. At this point, the writer has tried to make it clear that Ramirez is not faultless in his own death, after having already come to the country illegally, set out to walk a teenage girl home alone at night, and “escalated the confrontation.”

Later, the writer also makes it a point to tell us about the assailants – bear in mind, there’s no debate about whether these teenagers actually killed Ramirez, nobody is questioning that fact. Their lawyer says “you would be proud to have any of these kids…as your children” We learn about their high grades, their athletic achievements. If you’ve ingested the news in this country for enough years, you know this, the white guy(s) always has a story. The other guy(s) – to put it shortly – don’t. (See here and here for just a couple of examples.)

It isn’t until much later in the article that we learn more details that help paint a better picture of the deceased. He had a fiance, who was in fact local and white herself, so he wasn’t a stereotypical “making money here, sending it to Mexico” you hear so many people talk about. The 15 year-old girl he was walking home at night was his future sister-in-law. The first threats from the drunk white boys were directed toward her, so it’s pretty understandable that he would have been nervous and tried his best to stand up to them.

But the point of it is that they put all those details way down in the story. If you only read the first half of the article, which is what I usually do, you would have seen the description of immigrant men that CNN is comfortable with. Faceless. Family-less. That’s the image we start with. The details that come later – they can only do so much to change the perception.

It’s almost as though CNN wants the reader to believe there were 4 or 5 things Ramirez could have done to avoid being killed. Whereas the kids who killed him, well, this was their first mistake ever.

I have never paid attention to horse-racing ever in my life, but the events of this past weekend have got the wheels spinning a little in my head.

So Eight Belles, one of the horses running in the Kentucky Derby, broke two ankles during the race and was euthanized on the racetrack. My reaction was to immediately question why this horse couldn’t simply have been allowed to live and see her ankles heal and simply hang out in a field the rest of her life. What I found online is that horses generally can’t heal from broken legs and ankles, and not euthanizing a horse after such an injury would actually amount to torture as the healing process for a horse is very painful and oftentimes fatal.

So naturally, my second question was – seriously? If these injuries, which you hear about often enough for the general public to know racehorses are euthanized, are relatively common, why do we have horse racing at all? Isn’t that somewhat needless?

And again the Internets provided the answer. Horses run in the wild as well, and they in fact race each other naturally, so doing so on a track is pretty much giving them a place to do it, and also allows people to get some enjoyment and cash out of it. OK, that makes sense I suppose. There seems to be some acknowledgment that breeding racehorses does result in animals that are a bit more likely to break a bone, and while that doesn’t exactly seem ethical, I’m really not an expert on the matter, and it’s hard for me to judge what’s really acceptable without being very well acquainted with the sport.

Now if you know me, then you probably know where I’m going next. What is the major difference between supporting horse racing, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild, and dogfighting, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild? How are clips of dogfights shown on CNN with a warning, but the Kentucky Derby is nationally televised to an adulating audience? Why are dogfight losers considered “brutally” killed, and Eight Belles was “euthanized?” How does Michael Vick get 23 months in prison, but the owner of Eight Belles gets a letter from PETA?

And as usual, I’m not advocating for the filly’s owner to be tried as a criminal and locked up, I’m just saying, there’s somethign a little uneven here, and if you just think about what types of folks tend to be into horse racing, and what types of folks tend to be into dogfighting, and I’m just saying, the different way they get treated has more than a little bit to do with the race and relative wealth of the audience.

This entry can be read in its entirety at BPRLive.org.

The photo you see here is pretty well-known: it’s of an anti-busing demonstration in Boston in 1977. Essentially, a white dude is using an American flag to attack a Black dude. It’s so deliciously perfectly ironic that it seems like a scene from a play.

Boston has a long history of violence, specifically as it relates to youth. The busing demonstration was made by people who didn’t want to see young Black children – we’re talking school-age children – going to school in white neighborhoods. Boston – both the city and the mindstate – are known to be racially and ethnically segregated. There is a lot of, I guess you could call them misunderstandings between youth from different neighborhoods.

I came of age in what is considered by a lot of folks as the Golden Era for Boston youth: the late 1990s. The dip in the youth homicide rate was so profound that it received national attention: the media dubbed it “The Boston Miracle” and President Clinton even swooped through the city’s roughest spots and congratulated community after community for keeping kids alive.

But as most folks in this region surely know by now, the miracle didn’t last. Youth violence has been – and continues to be – on the rise. The people who are in charge of discouraging this kind of thing have made references to how much it’s starting to feel like the early 90s again.

Read the rest of this entry here.

And the hits just keep on coming…

The background is as follows: this past November, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri laid off all Southeast Asian interpreters at the Rhode Island Department of Human Services. The reasoning was that these translators only come in handy when there are clients who speak “not so commonly encountered foreign languages.”

Of course, there was no thought given to the fact that having native Southeast Asian language speakers on staff at DHS might actually help build trust between the department and the people they serve. Hiring private translators might get the job done on the surface, but it shows that there’s no investment in helping Southeast Asian communities in the state. From what I gather, folks at DHS know this and wanted to keep the interpreters on, but the governor’s budget cut them out. So many youth activists in Rhode Island – many of whom are affiliated with the dope organization PrYSM – criticized the move as racist.

To clarify: I don’t think anyone is saying the governor laid off people because of their race. I think the feeling is that by choosing not to have Southeast Asian language speakers on DHS staff, it shows a lack of care for the thousands of Southeast Asians in the state. And I think there is a reasonable way that the state’s executive branch could respond to that criticism, but…well…read for yourself:

I think they have mentors who are much older than them who are training them up. You know — how those terrorists have kids blow up, you know, Benazir Bhutto and so forth? You think the kids thought of it? I don’t think so.

Rhode Island First Lady Sue Carcieri

First of all: wow.

Secondly: there are so many faulty assumptions in these four sentences, it’s almost like the comment from another planet. I don’t actually know where to begin…but I will try:

1. Just to get it out the way, I never heard any indication that Bhutto was assassinated by youth?
2. The statement completely ignores the issue at hand! Instead she attacks the people who dare have an opinion counter to hers.
3. There is always an assumption that youth who refuse to accept whatever information they are spoonfed by people in power are actually brainwashed. Sorry ma’am, you got it backwards.
4. She calls them terrorists!
5. When asked to apologize, she refused and then said she expected an apology from them!

Anyway, it’s not even a surprise that people in power feel it acceptable to disrespect the powerless. What’s more: she actually turned it around and claimed that she is the one who is offended!

After my post yesterday about the Harvard student who got 2 years for stabbing a young man of color to death, Stephen Bor passed on information about the resolution of a court case on the other side of the country on the same day.

Two men shot semiautomatic weapons into a car of unarmed Cambodian men; two of the men in the car – Sovintha Nhem and Sophea Sun – were killed. One of the gunmen also died. The other gunman – after two hung juries – copped a plea and walked free yesterday.

The shooting stemmed from a confrontation that began when Nhem, who had been asked to leave a Skyway bowling alley and casino with his friends, wandered into the yard of Sidorchuk’s nearby rental home. The two exchanged increasingly heated words — with Sidorchuk and Belk hurling racial slurs and Nhem’s group shouting threats in return — until Nhem and his four friends backed a car into Sidorchuk’s driveway.

At that, Sidorchuk and Belk opened fire with semiautomatic weapons, shooting more than 20 rounds into the car. None of the young men inside were armed.

Deputies who later rushed to the scene discovered a marijuana-growing operation inside Sidorchuk’s home, but no testimony about that was allowed at trial.

From Seattle Post-Intelligencer

(more…)

In 2003, a Harvard student stabbed 18 year-old Michael Colono to death in Cambridge. The press went crazy about it because it was like good Harvard boy gone bad, I can remember so many details about this guy. His parents were divorced. His mother was an attorney in Colorado. He lived in Somerville, and that night had decided to walk home from a bar in Cambridge. He drank Jim Beam. He had been hanging out with 2 women earlier in the evening, and done the gentlemanly thing by seeing them off in a cab. I remember his name, although I won’t use it here, because as far as I’m concerned this person is not human and doesn’t deserve the courtesy of being thought of like a human.

But the information about Michael Colono was slow to come. So slow. I remember just wanting to know anything about him. I can remember picking up pieces here and there, that he had a young daughter and I think he worked as a cook. But the press told us other stuff about him, I think he had been picked up by police once or twice for fighting or something relatively minor.

But why did we need to know the victim had past experiences with police? How did that matter when he – unarmed, sitting in a car, with his friends – was the one who was killed? And why did we need to know the family story of the assailant? The killer was older, taller, heavier, and carrying a concealed lethal weapon – not just a small switch-blade, but a large knife. All the victim did was laugh at how drunk this random pedestrian was, and I guess the killer felt like a big man and was so offended by being the butt of an inoffensive joke that he killed an 18 year-old.

I hate to take away the focus from human life, but just imagine if the killer had been the young Latino father, and the murdered was the one who was the white Harvard student. Whose backstory would we have heard about in the news? Honestly. (more…)