Month: April 2009

We had this debate throughout the campaign, and the whole notion was, is that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness. The American people didn’t buy it. And there’s a good reason the American people didn’t buy it, because it doesn’t make sense.

— President Barack Obama, responding to Republican criticism of him greeting Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

Bad news for all the folks out there who see drug offenders as one color. Your stereotype just got blown out of the water by a new study that analyzes data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, FBI, and the Department of Health and Human Services for all 50 states.

For the first time in 25 years, since the inception of the “war on drugs,” the number of African Americans incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses has declined substantially, according to a study released today by The Sentencing Project. It finds a 21.6% drop in the number of blacks incarcerated for a drug offense, a decline of 31,000 people during the period 1999-2005.

The study…also documents a corresponding rise in the number of whites in state prison for a drug offense, an increase of 42.6% during this time frame, or more than 21,000 people. The number of Latinos incarcerated for state drug offenses was virtually unchanged.

Less dependence on racial profiling is one element in the changing numbers, but another important one is the drugs themselves. Crack cocaine is on the downhill side of popularity, while methamphetamine use is still rising. Crack is traditionally associated with black users while meth seems to be more of trailer trash thing. Whoops, speaking of stereotypes.

Besides, there’s still plenty of bad news to go around.

While the number of persons in state prisons for a drug offense rose by less than 1% during the study period, the increase in federal prisons was more than 32%. These latter changes are attributed to ongoing aggressive enforcement of drug laws, including application of harsh mandatory sentencing policies. Despite declines in the use of crack cocaine, federal prosecution and incarceration levels for crack offenses remain high and have a stark racially disparate impact.

…despite the new trend, African Americans are still imprisoned at more than six times the rate of whites for all offenses. Moreover, high incarceration rates for low-level drug offenses remain a function of the largely punitive approach to drug abuse that has proven expensive and ineffective.

“We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

— First Runner-Up Miss California in the Miss USA Pageant

“That is not the value of 95 percent of the people in this audience. Look around this audience and tell me how many gay men there are.”

— Pageant attendee, as quoted by the Associated Press during a shouting match in the lobby after the contest

At some point on April 15, the day of the teabagging protests, rank and file Republicans who supported the movement, including some of the estimated 250,000 people who attended the meetings nationwide, were finally clued in to the fact that “teabagging” was a frat-boy double entendre for a sex act.

The moment of realization may have come that morning when party boss Rush Limbaugh informed his audience that “teabagging” had a second meaning that he couldn’t divulge on his “family program.” He encouraged them not to think about the unfortunate branding and its likely fatal consequences for their nascent movement but rather to “think of steeping” tea bags instead.

Observers of the tea bag movement had known about the double meaning for months, and as the day of the event approached, mockery of it in certain quarters — okay, on MSNBC — provided some much-needed comedic relief related to economic news after months of nothing but doom and gloom.

Here’s David Shuster, sitting in for Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, on April 13:

It‘s going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they‘re going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals.

They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending — spending they did not oppose when they were under presidents Bush and Reagan. They oppose Mr. Obama‘s tax rates — which will be lower for most of them — and they oppose the tax increases Mr. Obama is imposing on the rich, whose taxes will skyrocket to a rate about 10 percent less than it was under Reagan. That‘s teabagging in a nut shell.

That it took so long for the teabaggers to realize their movement was being mocked just underscores their cluelessness.

On teabagging day — at the very moment it was too late to fix the problem — the GOP establishment sent its messagemeisters onto Fox News to try to shift blame for their own inept brand management onto the satirists who were mocking them:

[…]

U.S. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) made it abundantly clear on This Week with George Stephanopoulos why the Republican party is adrift. No ideas, no solutions, no nothin’. Hell, they can’t even agree on what the problem is. Watch the video. Stephanopoulos is both incredulous that the House Minority Leader denies the role of carbon emissions in climate change, and determined to get a coherent answer. Good luck with that, George.

P.S. Note to Boehner: Cows emit methane, not carbon dioxide. You’d think someone from Ohio would know that.

“Suppose for a moment that a large swell had hit the USS Bainbridge just as the three Navy SEALs were squeezing off their shots at the Somali pirates’ heads, making one of the bullets go awry. The surviving pirate surely would have killed Capt. Richard Phillips. Back in the U.S., those with a dim view of Barack Obama would brand the attempted rescue a ‘fiasco,’ betraying Obama’s fecklessness and lack of inner steel. As it happens, the SEALs’ aim was true. So this week, some pundits are lauding Capt. Phillips’ rescue as a demonstration of the president’s competence and coolness.

…this spasm of instant judgment—this macroanalysis of micro events—is now standard operating procedure for a punditocracy that must reach definitive historical verdicts every four hours…Is the stock market down a few hundred points? Obviously, investors are taking a dim view of Obama’s economic rescue plan. What’s that—the market’s back up a few hundred points? Clearly, Obama’s brilliant plan is working.”

— William Falk, Editor-in-Chief, The Week

I wish I knew who gets the original credit for this because it sums up The Problem really well.

This poor idiot made it five minutes in front of this mob, which I would say is the moral equivalent of 15 on one of those broncing bull machines. The participants at this Greenville, South Carolina tea party booed, turned their backs, and one boor yelled “Go home!” every time U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett paused. What had the fellow Republican done to earn such enmity? He voted for his own president’s too little, too late bailout bill last October.

In his surrealistic speech, Barrett tried to throw red meat to the crowd but they wanted a fresh kill instead — him. He better come up with a different approach if he plans to continue his campaign for governor in 2010. The fact that, according to one of his spokespeople, he was ranked as the fourth most conservative member of the House by the National Journal did nothing to improve Barrett’s reception with these drooling mouth-breathers. Man. These tea bag types take no prisoners, even from their own team.

Pensito Review is supporting the National Day of Silence, which seeks to end the out of control bullying and taunting of gay, lesbian, bi, trans, straight but funny-looking, straight but shy, straight but fat or thin, straight but geeky, straight but…you get the idea, that goes on in schools and increasingly ends badly.

This year’s DOS is dedicated to the memory of Carl Walker-Hoover, who would have turned 12 on April 17 if he had not committed suicide after enduring endless name-calling and torment that teachers did nothing to stop.

Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover was 11– hardly old enough to know his sexuality and yet distraught enough to hang himself last week after school bullies repeatedly called him “gay.”

The Springfield, Mass., football player and Boy Scout was ruthlessly teased, despite his mother’s pleas to the New Leadership Charter School to address the problem…

“There was no reason for the mother to believe he was gay,” said Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network spokesman Daryl Presgraves. “It just happens he was someone his peers targeted, calling him, ‘girlie,’ ‘gay’ and ‘fag.’ According to the mother, it was a daily occurrence.”

Nationwide and certainly in my area, high schools and even private colleges have fought to keep out gay, lesbian and straight alliances, claiming they promote gay “lifestyles.” In fact, they seek to promote dialogue and discourage bullying and violence. Ultimately, they work to avoid outcomes like what happened to Carl.