police surveillance of death penalty opponents & peace activists

wow! here's a scary post from karl keys at capital defense weekly. i'll just paste the whole thing:

As most probably know, cops in Maryland have been targeting people opposed to the ultimate use of state power. I’m too cheesed off to even pretend I can talk rationally about this as everyone I know who supports ending the dp in Maryland is, well, ridiculously normal/mainstream. I’ll leave it to Dr. Michael Blankenship from the Justice Gambit:

Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on local peace activists and groups opposed to the death penalty, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year during the administration of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), documents released this morning show.

Read more…

No evidence of criminal behavior was reported during almost 300 hours of undercover surveillance. It was doubtful that the investigation originated because of any illegal activity. So? Being opposed to capital punishment has rarely been viewed in a positive light by the government. I speak from experience when local prosecutors and sheriff’s joined together to complain to the university about my research and testimony as an expert witness.

However, this is a new low. The use of public funds and resources that were supposed to be expended on crime control activities to conduct covert surveillance on a legal and peaceful group of people should make rational individuals afraid - very afraid. Will there be any accountability for this outrageous abuse of power and public resources?

The Maryland docs are here. The only positive thing I can say about all of this (and friends are listed in the docs) is that the officer(s) assigned determined that this was (B)ravo (S)ierra and asked the investigation be terminated.

this is worse than spending all those fbi resources to find all the iraq war protestors when we were signing our names & providing personal info on all those petitions.

truth is this is outrageous, but on the other hand maybe there'll be another good thing to come of this. (i'm making some assumptions here:) i guess we middle-class middle-aged white folks are discovering that the whole criminal justice thing really isn't all that fair and that law-abiding peaceful people are not immune. maybe if this hits home then we'll start to pay better attention to what's really happening in other neighborhoods. and maybe be more willing to believe similar claims by others.

what i wish i were hearing about energy costs

just home from a trip to boston. drove up, flew back. gas prices are painfully high, though i suppose we'll think soon enough that $4.00/gallon doesn't sound so bad.

in theory, i understand that we need these high prices and this pain to motivate a less destructive way of life. what i hate is that, in yet another way, the burden falls hardest on those who can least bear it, while exxon made $40 billion profit from our pain last year, is on track again so far this year, and is now selling off its gas stations because there's not enough profit there.

here are some things i'd like to hear from our leadership:

• this crisis was inevitable and if we'd had good leadership, we'd have done something to prepare, but we didn't.
• there is nothing (sane) we can do to get our old gas prices and lifestyle back. those days are gone.
  
• we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, for reasons relating to national security.
• we need to reduce our dependence on all oil, for reasons relating to our planet.
• this will require some serious changes.
• we need to help the folks on the bottom, especially, for both economic and compassionate reasons. the price of gas is awfully close to minimum wage now.
  
• we need better local public transportation options. now would be good. i've tried using the bus system in asheville for getting around, and it's generally complicated and unnecessarily inefficient. boston, on the other hand, and even tiny ithaca . . .
  
• we need better distance travel options. trains are a great way to travel, but from asheville, i have to come/go through greenville, sc in the middle of the night, and unless i'm going to a city with good public transportation options, i'm stuck once i get there. (a nod to my friend chris ahrens who died last year, but to the very end, argued for passenger rail in our area)
• both local and distance public transportation will have to be subsidized or provided by governments, for the good of all of us, and we can't wait until the demand is high enough to make it profitable. we need investment in it first, so that it works, so that it can be understood as a workable option, so that demand can go up enough to support it.
  
• we need natural light and air in our homes and workplaces, so we're not spending so much on the artificial kind. we need better building design.
  
• for what we now call "the cooling season," we need well-placed trees to protect our homes from direct sunlight. trees that lose their leaves in the winter so the sun warms us in "the heating season." or if we have direct sunlight, what about solar options or green roofs?
• we need heating systems that work room by room. if the baby's room needs to be warmer, great, but we shouldn't have to heat the living room and kitchen all night.
• we need to cut down on how far things are shipped across the country, which means learning how to buy local -- not as a rigid rule, but as a factor to consider. i already pay more for organic, partly because i like supporting organic farmers. i willingly pay more to shop at town hardware, because i like supporting local business. i can start paying better attention to the local angle.
  

i recently heard mike farrell quote john o'donohue, saying that the duty of privilege is absolute integrity.

we who are privileged need to make choices others can't make. we all need to do what we can to create the world we want.

i'm no energy expert. these things won't solve everything. i just want us to think about all this, have a real conversation and go in a sane direction. for a change.

bush, a very successful president

this from will durst at 23/6:

Say what you will about the President, he knows how to turn the switch that greases the gears of the Republican Party Cash Machine. Oh sure, he may have an approval rating lower than a puppy-eating cobra, but this puppy-eating cobra lays the golden egg. The last seven years have been very very good for America's wealthy which means the wealthy still like George Bush very very much and they will pay very very good money to hang out and have their pictures taken with him. He's not only a rich person, he's a rich person's rich person.

so, sure, not all extremely wealthy people make these choices based solely on economic self-interest, but still.

durst's post is about mccain's relationship to bush and money, but it gave me a way to understand what i perceive to be bush's continuing pride in the job he has done/is doing. maybe it's not cluelessness. if the people around him around him are genuinely delighted with his presidency, then he can see himself through that lens and continue to feel good about it, despite . . . well, everything. which is how he appears to me: self-confident, pleased, laid-back, spending his lame-duckness the way seniors who've done well spend that last bit of high school.

electability silliness

clinton's recent position, which nyt's bob herbert calls "He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!" is not only offensive, it's silly. i don't know what the actual numbers are, but see if you don't agree:

are there really enough voting, non-conservative, non-chauvinist racists out there to make him unelectable?

think about it:

don't the majority of these people lean to the right? aren't they more likely to be under the gop umbrella, not likely to vote for any liberal or progressive? if so their vote is not "lost" because of race. paint obama white (or substitute hrc) and they still wouldn't vote dem.

of the ones who are left, how many of these people would vote for a woman? as commander in chief, remember.

eliminate the ones who talk a lot but don't actually vote.

compare what's left with the number of independents and republicans who thought mccain looked pretty good until they saw obama, plus all the shiny new voters, and the argument that he's unelectable falls apart completely.

noticing racist statements

many of us who are white and privileged fail to notice things like this. From a usa today article on hillary:

I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, . . ."

umm, four problems right off the top.

1. working, hard-working americans = white americans?

2. having hard-working white americans as a base doesn't exactly describe a "coalition"

3. many non-white people who have been left out or who have not seen any candidate worth supporting are coming into the process, participating. this is a good thing. the base is changing, and some of us white folks need to let loose our sense of entitlement to center stage.

4. i was surprised that there were so many white and so few non-white celebrants at asheville brewing tuesday night. it occurred to me that we were celebrating separately, and might need to look at this. but the point for now is that there are a great number of white people supporting obama, at least around here, and not just young ones, either.

i think this kind of statement is not-so-subtly racist and divisive. i point it out, not to attack hillary's character, but to call attention to the racism we caucasians need to be careful to notice.

prison population mark

from the drug law blog late last week:

A major report from the Pew Center is out today noting the sad statistic that 1 in 100 adults is now locked up in jail or prison in this country.

if you have a second, the graphic here, which shows the racial breakdown, is worth a look. The 1 in 100 figure above includes women. For black men 20-34 the figure is 1 in 9.

1 in 9.

1 in 9.

international human rights

unc law's 12th annual student-organized conference on race, class, gender and ethnicity was held yesterday --lots of food for thought.

using an international human rights framework to look at domestic legal issues is a fairly new idea, and one that is fascinating. there are serious hurdles, including the fact that international treaties have these pesky little non-self-executing clauses (rendering them unenforceable), even when they have been ratified.

still, there is reason for hope. it may be possible to use them in the legal arena as evidence of international standards. i am also interested in the idea that they can be used with the public -- maybe it will be useful to understand human rights violations as things which happen not only in countries like iran, china, but here. we think we always wear the white hats.

also intriguing was this concept, offered, i think, by mark gibney of unca during q/a: human rights-based education of young children. wow -- that could make a difference. my brain has gone bounding off into summer democracy camp or something, where kids could actually go off together, learn about basic human rights, and create rules and a societal structure for enforcing them, etc. and play it out -- really give them power within human rights framework -- see how it works and how complicated it is, get them thinking, participating -- is anyone doing this?