The most recent Taser victim? A 16-year-old in Missouri who’d fallen off a bridge, breaking his back. Upon arriving to the scene, police tasered him 19 times for lack of compliance.
Archive for July, 2008
Tasers
Monday, July 28th, 2008Poisonclover’s Patch
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008FLYMF contributor Patrick Alexander has started a new blog, Poisonclover’s Patch. The blog promises a fun, irreverent take on everyday life. As he puts it, “I have a lot of free time in the summer and I finally got around to creating my own place on the Net to vent my mental cruelty and off colour humour. Tell your friends, tell your enemies.”
Consider it done, Patrick! Patrick’s work for FLYMF included The Enza, The Swab, Why I Need Weapons at a Wake, The Lepre-Con, and Confessions of an Anti-Dentite.
Another Taser Murder
Saturday, July 19th, 2008At 1:28 p.m. last Jan. 17, Baron “Scooter” Pikes was a healthy 21-year-old man. By 2:07 p.m., he was dead.
What happened in the 39 minutes in between — during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser, while reportedly pleading for mercy —is now spawning fears of a political coverup in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.
American Inequity—In Graph Form!
Thursday, July 17th, 2008The American Human Development Project has put together a fascinating report, “The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009,” which uses United Nations human-development rankings to evaluate the state of the nation, highlighting health, access to knowledge and standard of living.
As the report explains, this is the first time this has been done for “an industrialized nation.” The results show a wide gulf in development scores between different regions and races. As the map shows, the South comes out the worst (and the deepest blue states come out the best). Meanwhile, African Americans have nearly half the living index of white citizens.
Congressional Clowns
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has today’s gut-punch article, “Let the Games Begin,” in which he compiles the ways that Republican Congressmen Steve King and Darrell Issa used parliamentary tactics to derail a Judiciary Committee hearing on torture architect (and “fucking stupidest guy on the planet,” according to General Tommy Franks) Doug Feith.
Our Diminished Democracy
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008In his White House Watch column for the Washington Post, Dan Froomkin does a good job of summing up the Bush administration’s disastrous response to September 11. In doing so, though, he also summarizes how these actions reflect not just a response to difficult circumstances, but rather a conscious power grab on the part of Cheney and his advisors.
Froomkin’s daily column remains a valuable resource for following the misdeeds of the current administration. Every installment raises a painful question: why isn’t the media more interested in exposing this lawbreaking?
Bush’s Failures, All in One Spot
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Brad Reed has a thorough breakdown of the Bush administration’s criminality and ineptitude in a Alternet story, “The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Administration.” It’s depressing to look back at eight years of lows, but copious links and a quick-hit analysis do a good job of summing everything up.
Sometimes I think about the colossal task it”ll be to sum up for my children the immense awfulness of the Presidency. “We get it, we get it,” they’ll say, to which I’ll only be able to point back at resources like this and say, “No, you don’t get it at all.”