Reader Tom sent me a link to this post that makes a whole lot out of a little fact about Jane Hamsher’s advertising company, CommonSense Media. That little fact is that Jane’s company apparently does work for both Democrats and Republicans. There’s no indication of which Republicans, or how many. I’m not going to jump to the same conclusions as the writer of that post, but it is worth noting.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
Reality-based Advocacy
Dan Savage on Obama’s “for it before he was against it” position on gay marriage:
Before I risk publicly disagreeing with “some strategists” let me say with this: I think the president should come out in support of marriage equality. I think everyone should. And I believe Obama supported marriage equality in 1996, and I think he supports it now. But I also believe that Barack Obama will pay a political price—a potentially determinative price—if he endorses marriage equality before the 2012 election. Because Republicans who support marriage equality aren’t going to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 just because he came out for marriage equality. But Democrats who don’t support marriage equality are likely to vote againstObama if he does.
Obama’s team, I expect, realizes this (they’re probably polling it as I type), and their mission is to get the president reelected. Our mission is to secure our full civil equality and I don’t see how a Romney/Bachmann administration gets us closer to that goal. The country is moving our way, time is on our side, and I expect that Obama’s kabuki evolution will pick up a serious head of steam sometime in January of 2013. Who knows? The president could wind up evolving all the way back to 1996.
But there will be no evolutionary leaps between now and November of 2012.
The whole thing is worth a read, because it’s an example of how to be a solid advocate for your position without losing sight of political reality. I’ll just add that letting a Republican get anywhere near a Supreme Court appointment in the next few years would be devastating. Imagine another Thomas or Scalia replacing Ginsberg.
Class Inaction
Tony Scalia, in yesterday’s Wal-Mart ruling:
“On its face, of course, that is just the opposite of a uniform employment practice that would provide the commonality needed for a class action,” Justice Scalia wrote. “It is a policy against having uniform employment practices.”
The case involved “literally millions of employment decisions,” Justice Scalia wrote, and the plaintiffs were required to point to “some glue holding the alleged reasons for all those decisions together.”
I don’t see how anyone can get a class certified in a discrimination case against a large company, if this kind of logic is applied to those cases. All the company needs to do is to delegate policy-making authority far enough down into its organization, and there’s no way that a lawsuit can proceed. It doesn’t matter if this delegation of authority generally results in discrimination. As long as those at the top state that it isn’t their policy to discriminate, they don’t have any responsibility for widespread discrimination, since it results from actions of managers making independent decisions. This sounds like basic “hear no evil, see no evil” reasoning in practice.
We’ll never know if Wal-Mart’s leadership knew about patterns of discrimination, and whether they tried to counteract it, because the usual 5-4 suspects won’t even let this case come to court. I’m sure every other corporation is studying what Wal-Mart did to dodge this bullet, and they’re working overtime to replicate this American success story.
Update: It’s a little confusing, but the critical part of this case was a 5-4 ruling. Dalia Lithwick:
Don’t be distracted by the fact that the court decided part of the case unanimously. The nine justices were in agreement regarding only the important, but technical question of whether the request for back pay was improper under a provision that normally provides only injunctive relief. The red meat of the Wal-Mart decision lies in the fight between Scalia and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg over a much more fundamental question: Was there a single question of law or fact common to all the women in the suit? The federal district court and 9th Circuit believed that there was. The five justices in the majority disagreed.
SWAT Follow Up
ED Kain has posted a bit more about SWAT teams. Here’s an interesting statistic from a Baltimore Sun report he highlighted:
The statistics compiled on police raids give a broad picture of how the tactic is used in Maryland. Of the 806 raids conducted in the six-month period, more than 94 percent stemmed from search or arrest warrants. Most of the others came as the result of a barricade situation.
As Radley Balko notes, Maryland is the first state in the nation to require that cities report how their SWAT teams are used. In one county, over half of the SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and non-serious felonies.
In my post yesterday, I wondered why the Rochester SWAT team had fired only one shot in 30 years. I found this old story that indicates a couple of reasons. First, Rochester’s team is made up of on-call members of the police force — it’s not a standing unit. It was recently renamed the “Emergency Task Force”. Since “emergency” being the opposite of “routine”, I assume the point is that the group is to be used for extraordinary situations, not serving misdemeanor warrants.
A lot of the paramilitary hardware used by SWAT teams was purchased with post-9/11 Homeland Security grants. There’s no reason the federal government couldn’t impose national standards for equipping, usage and reporting on police departments who get money for their SWAT teams.
Open Thread: The Devil’s Dictionary
Al Jazeera has discovered a copy of the top-secret mainstream media dictionary, and the letters A and B are posted. Some samples:
accident. n.
Airstrike in Afghanistan by NATO/ISAF forces usually killing scores of men, women and children.
atrocity. n.
Act of mass murder. Only Arab, Asian, African and Balkan leaders capable. See genocide.
Bahrain. n.
Nothing happening here, move on.
brown. adj.
See suspect.
Here’s an open thread for the other 24 letters or anything else worth discussing.
The Winter of a Serious Man
“There is substantial evidence that some of these fires are caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain proclaimed, pointing to nothing in the way of substantial evidence. He went on to say that immigrants “set fires in order to divert law enforcement agents and agencies from them,” adding that part of the solution to the wildfire problem “is to get a secure border.”
[…] What’s more, a U.S. Forest Service official told CNN yesterday that while it appears that an “escaped campfire” initiated the widespread blaze, there’s nothing to suggest immigrants who entered the country illegally were involved.
McCain is 74. He just started another 6 year term in the Senate. There’s nothing in this for him politically — this is simply the plain old-fashioned bigotry and race-bating of a bitter old man.
SWAT
I don’t know much about the use of SWAT teams by police departments, just what Radley Balko, ED Kain and others have been writing about their misuse and the tragic deaths involved.
This may just be ignorance on my part, but there seems to be a fair amount of variation in the way these teams are used. For example, last week was the 30 year anniversary of a terrible hostage situation in Rochester. A deranged man shot his parents and another man at his home and then walked down the street to a local bank and took hostages. Here’s how it ended:
“Our sniper who took this guy out,” John Strong a now retired veteran of the Rochester Police SWAT Team said. “He saved more innocent lives that day than you’ll ever know.”
The incident ended when a sharpshooter fired through a bank window from his position across the street in a church window. He struck and killed Griffin moments after Griffin shot and killed a hostage in front of the bank’s side door.
To this day Faggiano [another policeman] and Strong say that one shot represents the only bullet the Rochester SWAT team has ever fired in a combat situation.
There are plenty of drug arrests in Rochester, and there have been incidents of questionable shootings during those arrests. But apparently the SWAT teams at least have kept their powder dry, if they were involved at all, if they’ve only fired one shot in 30 years. Yet other jurisdictions deploy paramilitary police regularly for what sound like fairly routine raids and warrants, and those cops tend to fire their weapons with terrible results. Do any of you guys know if the standards for deploying paramilitary police are really this scattershot, or am I just drawing conclusions from a few anecdotes?