Oh Ye of Much Faith

WND:

Government to pastor: Renounce your faith!

A Canadian human rights tribunal ordered a Christian pastor to renounce his faith and never again express moral opposition to homosexuality, according to a new report.

In a decision dated May 30 in the penalty phase of the quasi-judicial proceedings run by the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson was banned from expressing his biblical perspective of homosexuality and ordered to pay $5,000 for “damages for pain and suffering” as well as apologize to the activist who complained of being hurt.

All Boisson has to do is convert to Islam, denounce homosexuality, and cite the Koran in doing so.  Then the authorities will leave him be, and never bother him again.

The Keating One

Jo Mannies:

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul will have some competition when he shows up in Branson for a Friday night rally.

Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating — a Republican who served two terms and is a close ally of presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain –will be the featured speaker Friday night at the Missouri Republican Party’s pre-convention gala.

The state GOP’s event — like the Paul rally – begins at 7 p.m. on Friday, at the Chateau on the Lake Resort Spa and Convention Center in Branson, MO.

The rest of the article is the state GOP singing Keating’s praises.  Don’t count me in — The one thing I remember about Frank Keating’s tenure as Governor of Oklahoma is that he did everything he could to prevent a real investigation into finding out the truth about what happened in his state’s capital city on April 19, 1995.  As Keating is ex-FBI, he probably still maintained a lot of organizational fidelity with the Bureau, and thus had as much incentive as anyone not to let the truth come out, which would most likely be monumentally embarrassing to Federal law enforcement.

I think Keating’s arrogance is the reason why Oklahoma now has a two-term Democrat Governor, who won his first term in an upset victory in 2002.

Police Brutality

WWL-CBS-4 New Orleans:

NOPD officer arrested for beating and taking money at a traffic stop

A New Orleans Police Officer has been arrested for beating and taking money from someone at a traffic stop.

After an investigation by the Public Integrity Bureau, the NOPD arrested Rydell Diggs, a 7-year veteran of the force, according to a statement by the NOPD.

The investigation began after someone complained to police that Diggs had beaten and taken money from the complainant at a traffic stop. The Integrity Bureau launched an investigation, locating a witness which led to the arrest, according to the NOPD.

The black civil rights industry and its white minions like to complain about “dem white poleeceseseses” and how brutal they are, but black cops are a hell of a lot more rough on black citizens than white cops are on black citizens. Especially in this day and age of racial pandering, civil rights lawsuits, civil rights prosecutions, and so on. But even notwithstanding that, look at modern-day Africa, where blacks get to make all the rules. Black cops get to do whatever they want to their citizenry, and there is nothing that can be done about it, because nobody interprets that those in power can do anything wrong. At least within the context of a white society, black citizens know that there are rules about police behavior, and that they are transgressed from time to time, and that a particular action by black cops against black citizens is beyond the pale, and that there is a “pale” to begin with.

Who Is Rozita Swinton?

We don’t know exactly who she is, or what connection she has to a polygamist sect in western Texas, but we do know that she is not a 16-year old girl named Sarah that called a child abuse hotline while being locked in a basement within the compound. In reality, she is a 33-year old woman, who made the phone call from somewhere in Colorado Springs, with a cell phone that has a Nashville area code.

A regular poster at American Renaissance thinks that she was opposed to white people having large families, so she made up an identity and a story and phoned it in. I’m not sure about that, but if there are any criminal charges that come down because of this raid, they might all be in danger in court because of the questionable tip.

Also, the girls and young women removed from the compound would have probably been better off at the compound than in DFS/CPS custody. Often times, they’re more abusive towards children than the abusers.

UPDATE 4/21: Also an Obama superdel from Colorado.  The SPLC has criticized the sect for its racial exclusivity, so the racial motivation for her false hotline call becomes more probable.

Speaking of Raids and Compounds and Saving the Children by Hurting Them

Fifteen years ago today.

This Is Scary

AG Mukasey keeps a copy of this book in his office.  But he claims it’s for literary purposes only, and that he doesn’t get public policy ideas from the story.

I suppose when the ESPN gang lists the point spread for upcoming football games, you actually believe them when they say that they’re for entertainment purposes only.  I also suppose that when a TV ad touts a 1-900 pay-per-minute psychic hotline, you believe the disclaimer that the hotline is for amusement purposes only — as if nobody who calls those hotlines doesn’t think that the quack on the other end of the line to whom they’re paying $6 a minute has any otherworldy abilities.

This Sounds Like Somebody We Know

AFP:

Sri Lankan man spends 50 years in prison without trial

COLOMBO (AFP) - A Sri Lankan man has been released from prison after spending 50 years on remand, his lawyer said Monday.

D.P. James, now 80, was arrested in August 1958 for attacking and wounding his father with a knife.

He was sent to jail, then moved to a psychiatric hospital, and then discharged back to jail — where he was forgotten about.

Lawyer Dharmavijaya Seneviratne said James, who was never put on trial, was a victim of prison bureaucracy.

“James went to jail when he was 30. He has been robbed of his youth and is now a grey-haired man of 80 with failing eyesight,” lawyer Dharmavijaya Seneviratne said.

***

He probably did a lot more time than he would have done if he was actually convicted at trial for his alleged crimes.

Wrong House

P-D:

BULLET RIDDLED: SWAT Team raids wrong house

With her six kids and husband tucked into bed, Yee Moua was watching TV in her living room just after midnight when she heard voices — faint at first, then louder. Then came the sound of a window shattering.

Moua bolted upstairs, where her husband, Vang Khang, grabbed his shotgun from a closet, knelt and fired a warning shot through his doorway as he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He let loose with two more blasts. Twenty-two bullets were fired back at him, by the family’s count.

Then things suddenly became clear.

“It’s the police! Police!” his sons yelled.

Khang, a Hmong immigrant with shaky command of English, set down his gun, raised his hands and was soon on the ground, an officer’s boot on his neck.

The gunmen, it turned out, were members of a police SWAT team that had raided the wrong address because of bad information from an informant — a mistake that some critics say happens all too frequently around the country and gets innocent people killed.

(snip)

One of the biggest botched raids in recent years happened in Atlanta in 2006, when police killed a 92-year-old woman in a hail of nearly 40 bullets after she fired a shot at what she thought were intruders. Police had gone to her house on a drug raid, but no drugs were found.

Prosecutors said that in obtaining a search warrant, Atlanta police falsely told a judge that an informant had confirmed drug dealing there. The scandal led to a shake-up in the department, two officers pleaded guilty to manslaughter and civil rights charges, and the city faces at least two lawsuits.

Reliable figures on the frequency of erroneous raids are hard to come by. Federal agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, said they do not keep track.

Of course the FBI doesn’t keep track, because it sometimes makes these kinds of mistakes itself.  Several years ago, the FBI raided the wrong house in St. Charles, Missouri, and wound up killing someone who thought their house was being burglared.

Using the logic just employed by the state government of New Jersey in repudiating the death penalty, then there should be no more SWAT raids (which themselves have sometimes resulted in innocent people being killed) by any law enforcement agencies if there’s any doubts about the veracity of stool-pidgeon informants.

Often, these “informants” often become agents provocateurs in order to goad their target into saying something or doing something wrong, in order to produce “results” for the law enforcement agency that has such “informants” (usually low-level criminals seeking to avoid prison themselves) on a string.

Throwing Kurt Weldon Under the Bus Was a Bipartisan Effort

Washington Times:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III ordered an internal investigation into whether bureau agents interfered with midterm congressional elections by disclosing a corruption probe that undermined the re-election bid of Republican Rep. Curt Weldon weeks before the Nov. 7 vote.

The internal probe was disclosed in a Senate Judiciary Committee report containing the FBI’s written answers to questions posed by committee members.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, asked why FBI agents searched the office of Mr. Weldon’s daughter and a business associate three weeks before the elections.

The accusation here is that the FBI, and lingering Clintonistas therein, timed their official investigation of Mr. Weldon to sink his chances for re-election.

The trouble with that is that, while it’s partly true, in 2006, the FBI was run by a Republican White House. And Mr. Weldon, who made a name for himself by exposing the Able Danger scandal, (i.e. where American military intelligence’s AQ-spying unit of that name was forever hamstrung in their effort to discover terrorist plots by egalitarian crazies and their obsession with not “racially profiling”), which encompassed both the Clinton and Bush Administrations, wasn’t well liked on either side of the January 20, 2001 schism. The Bush White House had just as much motivation to throw him under the bus as the Clintonites did, and I think it was a joint effort — such an effort could not have been successful without White House participation or complicity.

They Have One Jerk Cop, By George

The fact that a St. George cop had none-too-kind words to say to a motorist parked at the MoDOT commuter parking lot near Reavis and I-55 somehow does not surprise me. After all, St. George is among the worst speed traps in the area. This means that if you use Reavis Barracks Road for any stretch west of 55, 30 means 30, not 31. And the latest news is that this cop allegedly absconded with the recording made by his own cop car’s in-dash recording system of this altercation.

What I want to know is this — what, if anything, did Mr. Darrow say or try to do to the cop before the cop went verbally ballistic, that he isn’t showing us in his video version of the story? Maybe Sgt. Kuehnlein and Mr. Darrow have a history that led to this. Maybe there was a little bit of method to this cop’s madness.

Big Whoop-Dee-Doo

One day in jail. That’s what it gets for falsely using its public authority to accuse wrongly three men of raping a black stripper, for which they could have spent years in state prisons full of blacks.

I think real prison time and a felony conviction would have made a more appropriate punishment.

Because Half the World Wants to Commit Terrorist Acts in Zimbabwe. (Get Real)

International Herald Tribune:

HARARE, Zimbabwe: President Robert Mugabe has approved a law that will give the government sweeping powers to monitor the Internet and mobile and fixed telephones in a country where the independent press has been gagged.

The official Herald newspaper said Saturday that the Interception of Communications Act would allow the government to “sift for information it deems subversive or used for organized crime.”

The law allows “certain communications to be intercepted or monitored in the course of their transmission through telecommunications or the postal service and sets up a monitoring and interception center,” it said.

This means that Zimbabwe’s computer and its telephone will be bugged. But it’s not going to be cheap: It’s estimated that the ZimPATRIOT Act will cost Zim$10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (US$22.62) per year to enforce.

Which Planet is Newt Gingrich From?

CNS News:

America is on the cusp of a “golden age of freedom and prosperity,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a speech Thursday before a group of young conservatives.

No doubt, America faces “enormous challenges,” Gingrich told the crowd. But he predicted that the young conservatives in attendance, along with conservatives nationwide, would lead America to a brighter future.

Gingrich was speaking at the Young America’s Foundation’s 29th National Conservative Students Conference, held at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Other speakers at the week-long conference included former Virginia Sen. George Allen, talk-radio host Michael Reagan and syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

Really? Not with the USA becoming more and more Hispanic with each passing year. Notice that Jeffersonian ideals don’t thrive in Mexico, and they won’t thrive in the USA when it becomes a northern province of Mexico. And with the ever-increasing labor pool, and the downward pressure on wages, you can forget about “prosperity,” except for the plutocrats.

Even beyond the non-white body politic, the Federal government (and especially Federal law enforcement) is getting more and more abusive and arrogant, and big corporations are more than willing to persecute white people who dissent from the egalitarian zeitgeist. That doesn’t sound like a climate that will incubate a new “golden age of freedom.”

The old bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all model is slow, inefficient and wasteful, said Gingrich. On the contrary, companies such as FedEx and UPS, for instance, can track millions of packages they are shipping in real time, while the federal government has failed to locate the millions of illegal immigrants living in American society, he said.

FedEx and UPS are truthfully no better than the U.S. Post Office when it comes to losing packages. And I don’t buy this business that governments can’t find illegal aliens in the country. Missouri’s and Kansas’s tax authorities have no trouble finding them.

See No Evil, Speak No Evil

Nifong: No crimes were committed in the Duke Lacrosse non-scandal.

Gee, if you would have said that and come to that conclusion in March 2006, you might still have a job and a law license today. Better never than late.

People Get Sent to Prison For Lying to the FBI

But who is guarding the Praetorian Guards?

AP:

BOSTON - The FBI helped frame four men for a 1965 murder and withheld information for decades that could have cleared them, a federal judge ruled Thursday in ordering the government to pay the men $101.7 million.

(snip)

Peter Limone and Joseph Salvati, who were exonerated in 2001, and the families of the two other men who died in prison had sued the federal government for malicious prosecution.

They argued that Boston FBI agents knew mob hitman Joseph “The Animal” Barboza lied when he named the four as killers in the 1965 death of Edward Deegan. They said Barboza was protecting a fellow FBI informant, Vincent “Jimmy” Flemmi, who was involved in the hit.

The four wrongly convicted men were treated as “acceptable collateral damage” because the FBI’s priority at the time was taking down the Mafia, their attorneys said.

(snip)

Salvati and Limone were exonerated after FBI memos dating back to the Deegan case surfaced, indicating that the four men had been framed by Barboza. The memos were made public during a Justice Department task force probe of the Boston FBI’s relationship with gangsters and FBI informants James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi.

In other words, the FBI was so anxious to break the Boston mafia that they fabricated murder charges against four gangsters.

Hugo-Sized Ego

Chavez to foreign critics of his dictatorship administration: Get out of my country

I don’t know how to treat this story. On the one hand, I want to bemoan his increasingly dictatorial mentality and actions. But on the other hand, I want to cheer for him as he tells the world that Venezuela is for Venezuelans.

Sinophobia

Scotsman.com:

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Briton who has spent years trying to convince foreigners that China is not as repressive as Western media often portray it to be has been ordered to stop publication of his politically sensitive newsletter.

China’s media censors and security officials zealously nip in the bud any threats — real or perceived — to stability.

 

Now Beijing authorities have threatened to deport newsletter editor Nick Young and ban him from visiting China for five years, Young said in an e-mail without naming what he called “credible sources” for the information.

About a dozen officials from the Beijing Public Security Bureau and the Beijing Statistical Bureau visited the office of the newsletter, China Development Brief, on Wednesday last week and accused Young of “conducting unauthorised surveys”.

Young has since been questioned by police responsible for supervising foreigners in China.

This means that the Chinese government has a special police force whose sole purpose is to monitor non-Chinese in China. Don’t try something like that here, or you’ll have the entire public and private alphabet gang whining about profiling, discrimination, nativism, and McCarthyism.

Impeach Bush

American Patrol:

MSNBC reported today that President Bush’s Chief of Staff warned that without amnesty the government would leave the border open. America is being held hostage by a crazed criminal.

MSNBC interviewed DHS Secretary Chertoff. He said the government would have 150 miles of fencing completed by the end of September. If he is talking about the kind of fence specified in the Secure Fence Act of 2006, he is lying. If he isn’t, he is misleading the Senate and the American People.

It might not happen in the short time left in his term, but it’s time to get President Bush out of office. Yes, I know, Cheney has the same position, but the symbolism of starting impeachment proceedings would communicate an important message to future potential traitors.

I think that even if the “immigration reform” the White House wants passes, nothing will be done about enforcement.  Also, even if the “enforcement” measures in this bill are enforced, they will be moot because of the soft amnesty measures.

Dumbfonged

Now there’s talk that some of the cases he worked on since he joined the Durham County D.A.’s office in 1978 will be re-examined based on his perfidy in the Duke lacrosse scandal.

And maybe he went after something associated with Duke University because:

Nifong joined the county prosecutor’s office as a volunteer in 1978 after graduating from law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked his way up to be Hardin’s chief assistant.

So this Tar Heel probably wanted to stick it to the Blue Devils for school rivalry alone.

Atlanta Pols Nullify Constitution

At St. Louis CofCC Blog.

Then again, Atlanta nullified the Constitution years ago, with the exception of the late Congressman Larry MacDonald.

In Cuffs

Let’s see how good you would look in an orange jumpsuit 

The defense lawyers for the three Duke lacrosse players that were wrongly charged with rape and kidnapping by former Durham County D.A. Mike Nifong have filed a motion that might be resolved with Nifong being led away to the can in handcuffs.

This is why I think it’s necessary, even though it sounds excessive.

Cruel But Not Unusual Punishment

The penalty for using a cell phone in North Korea? Death.

Which makes me wonder, if the Dictator Kim doesn’t want his subjects to use cell phones, then why are there cell phone networks and towers? Though the best answer is that those recalcitrant North Koreans are probably near their country’s northern or southern border, and are able to hit cell towers in China and South Korea, respectively.

Two Strikes And You’re Out

I think this story is mistitled.

City Pages of Minneapolis-St. Paul:

Gun Shy
After the Virginia Tech tragedy, even talking about concealed carry is grounds for suspension

(snip)

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”

If one would stop reading the article there, one would think that he was suspended only for his conceal-carry advocacy. But read on:

After stewing over the issue for two days, Scheffler sent a second email to University President Linda Hanson, reiterating his condemnation of the concealed carry ban and launching into a flood of complaints about campus diversity initiatives, which he considered reverse discrimination.

“In fact, three out of three students just in my class that are ‘minorities’ are planning on returning to Africa and all three are getting a free education on my dollar,” Scheffler wrote with thinly veiled ire. “Please stop alienating the students who are working hard every day to pay their tuition. Maybe you can instruct your staff on sensitivity towards us ‘privileged white folk.’”

I think that’s what did it. He insulted affirmative action and the whole racial pandering and preferences system. If he only said this, and nothing about conceal-carry, I think he would have been suspended. This after his e-mails about the guns, and university creeps probably started worrying that they had another Cho on their hands.

We will probably never know if he was liable for a “third strike” of being a serious fundagelical Christian who proselytized on campus.

Quality and Quantity, Both

Lamplighter Blog has links to various pro- and con- opinions from around the blogosphere on the Prof. Walter Kehowski question.

Perusing the responses, most of those that were opposed to his receiving a sanction, (and this blog’s opinion was duly linked to), contained logic, reason and common sense.  Some of these such responses were from Voltaireist liberals.

By contrast, the few that thought his suspension (and potential dismissal) was a good idea wrote rambling, paranoid posts that often featured misspelled words, among which was “facist” (sic).  If you’re going to call someone a “fascist,” please spell it correctly.  The St. Louis Metro Area CofCC has first-hand experience with people opposed to “fascism” that have trouble spelling the word.

Alabama’s Homeland Security Agency Declares Most White Alabamians As “Terrorists”

From Lew Rockwell.

That Alabama state agency took that “antiquated” website down, but thanks to the Internet Archive project, there is no such thing as unringing a bell on the Web anymore.

This begs the question of why they ever put it up in the first place. Just think, that state has had chief executives named John Patterson, George Wallace, Guy Hunt and Fob James.

Unforgivable Academic Sin

Hostile and derogatory ole you

Walter Kehowski, a math professor at a community college in Glendale, Arizona has been suspended, and might be fired, for sending several of his colleagues an e-mail with George Washington’s 1798 Thanksgiving Day Proclamation. The e-mail also had a link to Pat Buchanan’s official website.

“Chalmers” Must Be Ebonics For “Nifong”

Lost in all the buzz and hubbub over the misconduct of Durham County (N.C.) District Attorney Mike Nifong in relation to the Duke Lacrosse non-scandal, are similar abuses of power and perfidy on the part of the Durham, N.C. Police Department, and its illustrious Chief.

Dear Anarchists

This would be you if President Bush were as one-tenth as evil and devious and dictatorial as you put on that he is.

They’re Just “Human Resources”

The Blotter by ABC:

Labor rights advocates say U.S. multinational corporations have aggressively lobbied to weaken key provisions in a new Chinese law that would expand rights and protections for Chinese workers.

“U.S. corporations have used their considerable power and influence there to weaken the labor laws that are being proposed,” said Ellen David Friedman, a  U.S. labor organizer who’s worked  with developing trade union groups in China.  “They are in essence acknowledging that what they have liked about doing business in China is the very, very cheap labor and the low level of enforcement.”

They don’t think much better about American employees.

Don’t Fix It (Even If It’s A Little Broke)

AP:

Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government’s blessing want to scrap all that and start over. The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet “works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions,” said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”

(snip)

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

So, any reconstruction of the Internet would be centered around the whims of multinational corporations and power-mad governments. I sense Hillary Clinton’s “gatekeeper” in the mix. Bye bye web freedom.