Pandagon
The Real Victims Here
I'm trying to imagine a liberal student writing a column on a nationally known website about how unfair it was that classes were canceled for 9/11, and how they're showing up for Secured Transactions because classes weren't canceled when the USS Cole was attacked.
And then I'm trying to imagine that person's therapy bills and incomplete degree after they're turned into a national monster.
I'm not even going to point out that it's her second day of classes, which makes me pretty sure that the session of whatever class she's missing can be made up.
UPDATE: And to clarify, the comparison here is between one hugely important event in our nation's history versus another hugely important event in our nation's history.
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Comment by Cardinal results in Vatican homobigoted 'clarification'
Yet again, in its zeal to condemn anything related to LGBTs as frequently as it can, the Catholic church sends out the Prada Papa Ratzi's emissaries to bleat the party line when Benedict himself takes a break from public statements fomenting homophobia.
This time it was Cardinal Ennio Antonelli at the mic sticking his foot in his mouth at the World Meeting of Families in Mexico City, but he inadvertently went off message and suggested that homosexuality within a personal relationship was OK.
"the homosexual experience must stay within the confines of a private relation, a relation between friends."
That didn't go over well after being published in a French paper, so The Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family had to quickly issue a lengthy homophobic "clarification" :
1. Homosexuality is not a necessary component of society, as is the family. Society is organized around the relationship of the couple that is formed by a man and a woman. They find each other in conjugal life and in family life. In this sense, the couple and the family enter into the sphere of social life, and because of this, of civil law. The relationship between two persons of the same sex is not the same as the relationship of a couple that is based on the sexual difference. These two situations depend on structures that are not of the same nature. The homosexual relationship does not enter into this social sphere. It is, as such, a private question. Legislators make an anthropological error when they want to socially organize homosexuality. They run the risk of provoking an intellectual confusion, as well as confusion of identity and relationships. It should not be forgotten that confusion frequently favors insecurity, unstable relationships and violence, when legislators don't respect the fundamental sense of human relationships. The family is a common good of humanity that is not at the free disposition of legislators to respond to the subjective and problematic demands of today. The individual desire cannot be the foundation for the law. Here we find ourselves in the presence of a confusion between the law, which is of the public domain, and the desire, which is subjective.2. Affirming that homosexuality is a private fact, the president of the Pontifical Council of the Family is not justifying it. The cardinal simply underlined that homosexuality does not contribute favorably to the organization of individuals and of society. The exercise of homosexuality does not reflect the truth of friendship. Friendship is inherent to the human condition in that it offers relationships of proximity, help and cooperation, in a courteous and amiable climate. Friendship should be lived chastely.
3. The Church maintains its preoccupation of welcoming and accompanying homosexual persons. Every person that has difficulties to live their sexuality properly is called to find Christ and to live, consequently, in accord with the demands of liberty and responsibility of faith, hope and charity. On the other hand, it is contrary to the truth of the human identity and the design of God to live a homosexual experience, a relationship of this type, and even more to attempt to demand same-sex marriage. It is contrary to the true interests of the persons and of the needs of society. It constitutes a transgression of the sense of love as God has revealed to us through the message of Christ, of which the Church is a servant, as an expression of love toward the men and women of our time.
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Cardinals/Eagles
So, I'm watching the Cardinals/Eagles game, and given my years spent in Philadelphia, it's obvious who I'm rooting for. But, for some reason, I also have it in my head that an Eagles Super Bowl will be more exciting than a Cardinals Super Bowl, despite the fact that the Eagles have a receiving corps made up of hobos and tall guys from my high school, and the Cardinals have one of the most prolific offenses in football.
I don't know how much of it is just built in apathy to the Cardinals, who are one of those franchises that just seem genetically inclined to garner no interest. (For other examples, see the Kansas City Royals, Detroit Lions, any post-Magic NBA expansion team, and any hockey team south of the Mason-Dixon Line.) There's just a sense that they don't belong as a top-caliber team and never will, and some franchises just have that unshakeable feeling. Part of it is history and consistency - we're willing to believe that the Celtics or Yankees or Bears are legitimate contenders after years of futility, because they've succeeded in the past. Part of it is also how a team becomes a contender - we're willing to believe that a team that's been rising and rising and finally reaches its goal is a more worthy contender than a team that just makes an improbable run at a championship, even if the latter is the plot of every team sports movie since the 1970s.
Anyway, here's Kurt Warner drawing what God looks like:
I, for one, appreciate the shield-amoeba thing behind Jesus/God's head.
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Your Irony Of The Day
Big Hollywood, the site that was set up to protest the silencing of conservative voices by the McCarthyite Hollywood left, has banned me for posting critical comments. Not profane, not threatening, just critical.
I don't even have a mansion to go home and host a dinner party in. Dammit.
UPDATE: This was the post, and they've apparently unbanned me, although my comments are still subject to moderation. You know, because being black and talking about a post on Notorious and all, there's no telling when I might just bust a gat out.
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Columnist: 'Why Do Homosexuals Want to Serve in the Military? For Sex, Of Course'
I don't know anything about Gregory D. Lee other than he has some serious misconceptions about gays in the military. From the impression given from his column, you'd think:
1) There aren't already gays and lesbians serving (closeted and openly) in the military.
Having openly gay men and women in close living quarters with heterosexuals would make straight soldiers uncomfortable, to say the least. The morale of units would decline almost immediately, and re-enlistments would most certainly suffer.
They are already there, bub. And many of their colleagues and superiors know they are gay or lesbian. Re-enlistments suffer when you have endless military actions like those our soon to be former Dear Leader sends troops out to engage in.
2) There's a ton of homosex and aggressive pick up action that's going to happen if DADT is repealed. He must have deep conversations with Elaine Donnelly.
[Y]ou need to understand that homosexuals predominantly want to serve in the military in order to have access to people their own age with whom to engage in sex. It’s just that simple. It’s all about sex, and not about serving the nation. It is not unheard of to have a lesbian officer coerce a lower enlisted woman into engaging in lesbian sexual activity. “I’m an officer and you’re a private, who are they going to believe if you tell them I forced you to have sex with me?” Or two male soldiers go out on the town. One has too much to drink, and when they return to the barracks, he passes out in his buddy’s room. When he wakes up, his “buddy” is performing fellatio on him. These are two actual cases, and many more like them have occurred, which prompted the ban to begin with.
3) Lee has some serious issues with his masculinity and delusional heterosupremacy.
I’ll tell you why having openly homosexual military members in the military is an awful idea. Go to West Hollywood or San Francisco the last weekend in June during “Gay Pride” festivities and take a good look at what these people are doing. Then ask yourself if any of them should have anything to do with national security, and if they should serve with, or be in charge of you, your son or your daughter if they were in the military....Could the Army stop a homosexual transvestite soldier from wearing a female soldier's uniform while on duty? Should gays be allowed to form civil partnerships in the military and be allowed to occupy military family housing and adopt children? Is the military prepared to handle increased health care costs associated with homosexual activity?
What are these increased costs he's talking about? Does he mean unprotected sexual activity of the nature some gays and straight folks engage in? Are we to believe that STDs the sole province of gay folks? Go take a look at any stats in any community that has abstinence-only education before lobbing that lunacy over the fence.
Since Lee says there will be an exodus of heteros from the military should homos will be allowed to openly serve, he's afraid there will be a return of the draft to stem the bleeding. Well, that would certainly reduce any half-cocked military misadventures right quick, wouldn't it?
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Ron Ashton, RIP
Jesus, I just found out that Ron Ashton died last week. I can't even begin to describe how important to me the music of the Stooges has been over the years. I was lucky enough to see Ron Ashton play many years ago at Emo's. I was going on a date with a guy I'd met recently, and he suggested we go see if we could get into a J Mascis and Mike Watt show at Emo's for South by Southwest. This was back in the days when there were barely any badges, and you could get into some pretty major shows without wristbands. We showed up, and it was more packed than I would have expected for a J Mascis/Mike Watt show (remember, this was In The Day), but somehow we managed to get in without wristbands. Turns out that it was so crowded because it was J Mascis, Mike Watt, and Ron Ashton. I was about to pee my pants with excitement. The guy I was with didn't really seem to get why this mattered so much to me, or care that it did, really. So the date part was a failure. But the seeing Ron Ashton part will stick with me for a long time.
Fans know that Ashton was as integral to the sound of the Stooges' sound as Iggy Pop's vocals. Shortly after I saw this show, the Stooges reunited for real (with Mike Watt on bass for a lot of it) and have been touring as the Stooges, and seem to kick some major ass despite aging. Here's them from a few years back:
Here's them in 1970:
If you've been subjected to The Shins or something like it for too long, then listening 1970's Funhouse will set you on the right path.
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Men and women are different, in that their opportunities are different
Twice in one day, I read or heard someone suggesting that it's weird and outdated for the Golden Globes, Oscars, and other awards like that to break up the acting awards by gender. They idly wondered why the separate categories on Overthinking It podcast and then I saw Sybil at Bitch, PhD post about it. Sybil's points summarize the issue nicely:
Is it not so strange that all the awards shows for non-music, that is, all the completely performance based awards (because at least in theory things like Best Album are about writing) segregate the actual performance awards by gender? Not Best Screenplay by a Man or Best Cinematography by a Woman, but always and across the board Best Supporting Actress and Best Actor. What's the deal with that?
It's all about the performance aspect, no? The writing and directing and score and costuming awards we can think of as awarding a discreet skill. But performativity, as I figure it, is so inextricably linked to gender that we cant think of ways to compare performances across those lines. I admit it's hard for me to conceive, because of conditioning, of the nominees being Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Kate Winslet, and Mickey Rourke. And if such a thing ever were the case, wouldn't it be fascinating to see how the gender allocation of award winners broke down? How else to make clear the relative dearth of choice roles for women?
They had similar questions on Overthinking It---by separating the genders, are we saying there's something fundamentally different in the way men and women act? I don't think that's true now, nor do I think that was really the reason they created the categories in the first place. I think the real reason was that it was understood when they created these awards that due to the sexism of the industry, women would almost never get nominated or win in a non-gendered category, which meant that the stream of people accepting awards on stage would be nothing but men. This conflicts directly with the Hollywood need to have female movie stars. If the only movie stars were male, that would put a wrench in the tabloid/paparazzi system that has, since the beginning of Hollywood, been a major form of marketing the Hollywood product. Our society respects men more, but we like to stare at women more. In most areas of life, there's no conflict between the two---most women learn early on how often we're expected to be seen and not heard---but, as Sybil indicates, actors are about being seen as much as heard. This, I think, was the original reason, but in the years since it's become the only way that the many talented but under-utilized actresses of Hollywood even have a chance of getting that recognized with awards.
I disagree with Sybil on one issue. Combining the categories would highlight squat. The annual scrambling for enough nominees to fill the slots for the actress categories doesn't drive home the message that there aren't enough parts for women. The fact that Kate Winslet won for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes won't wake people up to the fact that Kate Winslet is one of the few women who gets good roles. (She deserves them, too, but she gets them all because there aren't that many.) In all honesty, if they combined the two, I think that the nominating committees would be relieved that they don't even have to pay attention to women anymore. They'd feel like they have blanket permission to nominate mostly or only men. Actresses like Winslet or Meryl Streep would routinely turn in the best performances of the year without ever seeing an award, because there's such a stereotype that women are there mostly for eye candy.
Worse, I think the few meaty roles that go out to women now are largely the result not of some deep respect for women from the studios, but from the studios deep desire to advertise their movies with the number of Oscars on the cover. Without a Best Actress category to shoot for, the few good roles for women, especially anything that puts older women in roles other than "suffering mother", would probably dry right up. Men dominate as directors and writers, and so the tendency is to write parts for women based on how much you'd want to fuck them,* and also to write women who are primarily defined through their relationships to men. TV is getting a little better about this problem. Fans like myself who want to see female characters who are defined as themselves, not by their relationships, get to see shows like "Battlestar Galactica", "30 Rock", and "Ugly Betty", where women get to be more fully realized characters. Even "Mad Men", which is largely about how women were forced to define themselves through men in the 60s, has a character who is busy defining herself as an independent woman with a creative career. I can't help but think award shows have pushed us into this direction, amongst other things. Actresses play characters that are more than The Girlfriend, The Mother, or The Wife, and then those actresses are covered in awards (because playing fully realized characters is what you get awards for), and then they get magazine covers and therefore ratings. Really, it shows that the much-maligned quota system works---by making sure that 5 actresses a year get nominated, you make space for 5 actresses who fully deserve it to get the attention that they otherwise wouldn't get due to the sexist system.
*This tendency makes reading or listening to film criticism, which is male-dominated as well, hard on me sometimes. I just wish these men would try, just once, to reverse the genders on how they describe actors and actresses, and praise men's acting by talking about how beautiful and luminous they were, and talk about women strictly in terms of performance.
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Birthdays Was The Worst Days
I'm sorry, but I'm obsessed with Big Hollywood. Andrew Breitbart managed to assemble the ur-wingnut site, and then focus every single contributor on the most inane topic imaginable - their own victimization at the hands of people who entertain intentionally. It's like assembling the greatest minds of the Renaissance to figure out the nature of existence, except the exact opposite of that.
Debbie Schlussel, who you make recognize as every racist relative in your family, wonders when Hollywood will, and I quote, "stop glorifying hip-hop thugs". Keep in mind that she also loved Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which may actually be a worse offense than racism.
There's a long history of making movies about people who were in gangs, from West Side Story to American Gangster. For some reason, a movie about a compelling, larger than life figure, however imperfect, can't be a continuation of a cinematic tradition going back to the very beginnings of celluloid - it's got to be affirmative action:
I walked out thinking that I guess this is the new civil rights: If you’re gonna make a hero out of a White (Larry Flynt) and Latino (Ernesto “Che” Guevara) scumbags, then I guess the new “equality” is to do the same for a Black scumbag . . . on the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Makes sense - why else would you make a biopic out of a multiplatinum recording artist's life unless you made a movie about free speech rights for a white guy thirteen years ago? It's sad that we won't get the Wutang movie until Nazis Come To Skokie gets made, but them's the breaks, kid.
After Schlussel bares her id, it's time for the killer right hook - there was a shooting at a movie theater which was showing Notorious this weekend! Surely, with a white Iraq vet shooting another moviegoer at a showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which may contend for the whitest movie ever made, they wouldn't go straight to the Savage Negro theory, would they?
Would I be asking that question if they didn't?
Local police say that they cannot be certain about whether there is a link between the shooting and the movie Notorious, which is playing on three screens at the complex, but let’s be honest. Every theatre that opened this movie had legitimate security concerns given that Christopher Wallace aka Biggie Smalls aka Notorious B.I.G. lived and died violently.
Right, just like movie theaters had legitimate security concerns over, among other movies, 300, Monster, Cinderella Man, The New World and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, all of which featured people who lived and/or died violently. Since we heard no major concerns over a string of homicidal woman-on-woman killings in 2003, this can't just be about people whose lives were filled with violence - you could barely show a movie in this country! Well, Christopher Wallace was obese, so maybe that's it. Hollywood's never produced anything about someone with a high BMI who committed a crime before. Makes perfect sense.
Oh, and the reason police can't be certain about the link between the movie and the shooting? The shooting happened in a hallway, outside of any theater. The only reason there's even a connection between the shooting and the movie is because the theater decided to reopen, but stop showing Notorious - and only Notorious - in the shooting's aftermath. Here's a list of the movies showing at the theater, Notorious being the only one involving violence, bad language or anything less than saints feeding starving children. Oh, and Marley and Me, but fuck that piece of shit. Patrons noticed the problem:
Keisha McMillan of Greensboro showed up Saturday at the Grand 18 to watch the movie, only to find it wasn’t showing.
“I think it’s stereotyping,” she said. “I think it’s because it’s a black movie. If it was another kind of movie, they wouldn’t have canceled it.”
McMillan questioned whether the shooting had anything to do with the movie in the first place.Police said it was unclear if there was any connection.
Tyrae Ellison , who had been at the theater Friday to watch another movie, said the building was packed and the argument might have had something to do with long lines of people waiting to get a seat.
Regardless, what happened shouldn’t be blamed on “Notorious,” he said.
“It’s not the movie’s fault,” Ellison said.
With names like Keisha and Tyrae, though, well...you know. Probably went to see Bride Wars, and you know you can't trust those people.
This is already being turned into a Notorious shooting, based on little more than the theater's seeming overreaction to the event as it relates to the film. No story I can find actually links the shooting to any showing of the movie - there's not even a patron willing to say they saw or heard a connection, and local news can usually get eyewitnesses to blame gangsta rap for everything from osteoporosis to excessive cleavage in high school. Betcha Notorious gets attacked for this far longer than Benjamin Button gets blamed for the shooting that actually happened in the theater. It fits a narrative, after all.
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Sanctity of Donuts Day
I got a lot of emails about this, and I sent them to Emily at RH Reality Check, and discovered she was already on it. But seriously, it's worth spreading the news, because as weird as this story is, it reveals a lot about the anti-choice movement (and right wing fundamentalism in general). The American Life League is calling for a "boycott" of Krispy Kreme because they....wait for it.....used the phrase "freedom of choice" in a press release that is primarily about tying their donuts to the occasion of the inauguration in a way that's so generic that they would have put the same release out if John McCain had won. Read it and weep:
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet 'free' can be.
We have a black man and a liberal about to take the White House, so naturally the nuts are in full-blown panic mode. In normal circumstances, the freaks at ALL know that it's unwise to show their pure freakiness in public, and they might, under other circumstances, have reminded themselves that most people think the word "choice" means "choice", instead of how they take it, which is to mean "the demonic assault on male supremacy by witches/feminists". In this case, though, events just overtook their last grasp on reality.
What made reading this move from the "merely hilarious" column to the "fucking scary" column for me, though, is that I'm currently reading Matt Taibbi's latest book The Great Derangement, and he spends a good deal of his time in the book pretending to be a Christian attending James Hagee's church in San Antonio. (If you don't know much about Washington player, apocalypse fan, and megachurch pastor James Hagee, I think Bill Moyers has done a bang-up job covering him.) And what Taibbi explains is something that's ignored in most mainstream representations of the fundie megachurch culture, because it's probably considered impolite to reveal how much the yokels act like yokels. Taibbi discovers that the church members believe that the world is literally haunted by demons around every corner, and they're all seeking ways to enter your body and make you a sinner, and that the only way to get rid of them is to playact exorcisms. You can read some here.
This casts the fundie boycotts of this or that in a much different light. Most of us tend to think of boycotts as things you do in order to pressure companies to change policies.* But I suspect, reading this Taibbi book, that it's more about adding to the already long list of Things To Avoid Lest The Demons Get You. Taibbi experiments at one point by shaming his "fellow believers" when they reach for fortune cookies by claiming that he believes fortune cookies are Satanic. Sure enough, they all toss the cookies back, fearful and ashamed. I get the impression that the more mundane the sinful thing, the better, because it helps keep followers in a state of constant paranoia. Also, it makes it impossible for demons not to get into your body, meaning you have to keep coming back for regular exorcisms. Or, short of that, it makes it impossible to avoid being a wretched, no-good sinner, no matter how hard you try, so you need to cling to the church (and right wing politics) for dear life, or you're going to hell for sure. Taibbi is repeatedly appalled at how much the church breaks people down, by relentlessly driving home the message that they are nothing, that they're debased and worthless. Putting Krispy Kremes on the list of demon entry points is sure to be effective at the aim of making the followers feel like they're constantly besieged by Satan.
The overreaction to the innocuous use of the phrase "freedom of choice" points to another issue, which is that we're not even really speaking the same language as the fundie nuts. That's why Bush declaring the last "Sanctity of Life Day" makes so much sense to the nuts, but none at all to the normies. Because it's obvious that life has no sanctity to Bush---not female life, not gay life, not Iraqi life, not American soldier life, not the planet's life, not the life of the people (all of us) who need a healthy planet to survive. The day really is "Fundie Nuts Are Better Than You Day", and it's understood that way. I don't really think "life" even means "fetal life" so much anymore---after all, pregnant women are on the list of people whose life is not precious to Bush, especially if they're poor or Iraqi, and that means the fetuses inside them are not precious, either. At this point, The Fetus is a demigod in the fundie pantheon. Fetus: The God Of Female Subjugation. It has no more relationship to real people's experiences of pregnancy than Aphrodite directly described most people's experience of romance. Through many layers of complicated symbolism, then, "life" functions as a code word for the fundamentalist view of the godly life---women and children subjugated to men (with pregnancy functioning as a physical representation of the conquest), gay people erased from the equation, sex tightly controlled---a world with the wrinkles ironed out, with all the answers handed to you, and subsequently a life without much texture or color to it. But at least it's safe. And then there's the next one, so wasting this one isn't so bad, now is it?
*In reality, they're usually ineffective and undertaken to demonstrate moral righteousness through sacrifice.
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Dear CNN pundits
We know that someone is behind the scenes moving the holograms and the screens. When you wave your hands around, trying to create the illusion that you're somehow affecting the visual illusions, you undermine your image as a serious person. We know you're not manipulating some kind of magic hologram theremin of news. It's not that it's wrong for CNN to want to make the news more visually interesting. But can they find a way to do that without making their pundits look even stupider?
By the way, Anderson Cooper is going to probably die with a look on his face that says, "I can't believe I have to spend my time with such idiots." After all, you make that face long enough, and it freezes that way. Not that I can blame him. He is smarter than all these idiots.
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An open letter to Rick Warren that throws down the gauntlet
Yesterday I ran a couple of video open letters to Rick Warren -- from Faith in America's Mitchell Gold and Tracey Zoeller, author of "The Pastor's Daughter."
Today's open letter is from Rodney Powell, a member of Faith In America's board of directors and a former student activist in civil rights movement, and he has no patience for the smooth, media-friendly mega-pastor Rick Warren's attempt to spin his brand of evangelical conservatism as enlightened or in any way reaching out to the LGBT community. He believes that Warren's actions and attitude are no different from those of segregationists and racists. Here is the powerful smackdown:
A partial transcript of a meaty portion of this open letter:
"When you seek to force your views and intolerance on others, you are no different from racists, segregationists, sexists, anti-Semites and other bigots throughout America's history of religion-based bigotry. Dr. King vigorously and harshly challenged and rejected the acceptance of institutions and persons who advocated and advanced religion-based racial persecution and its resultant bigotry and hate.
It is astounding to me, and I'm certain to other former student leaders of non-violent protest during the civil rights movement such as Congressman John Lewis, that you will deliver the keynote address at the Martin Luther King Commemorative Service at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Mr. Warren, I do not believe Dr. King would find your spiritual leadership unifying, and I'm certain he would not find it to be part of his vision for America of a beloved community."
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TN: Officer shoves 71-year-old Wal-Mart greeter to the floor, faces no charges
What can you say when even a senior citizen isn't safe from police brutality?
Chattanooga Police Det. Kenneth Freeman will not face charges in an incident in which he shoved a 71-year-old greeter at the Wal-Mart in Collegedale to the floor after he tried to stop him while doing a receipts check.Collegedale Police declined to bring charges, then the employee, Bill Walker, filled out a complaint himself. Collegedale Judge Kevin Wilson has reviewed the complaint and did not issue an assault charge.
In the incident on Christmas Eve, Mr. Walker said an alarm went off when Det. Freeman and another city police officer, Edwin McPherson, were leaving the store.
He said he reached to try to stop Det. Freeman and he was pushed against a soft drink machine and to the floor. He said the officer then hovered over him as he lay on the floor.
Oh, by the way, when a customer tried to chastise the officer for shoving an old man to the ground, he was thrown through a glass door of the store by Freeman.
A police report says a customer then told Det. Freeman, "You can't push down an old man" and began struggling with him. It says Det. Freeman then shoved that man, Gholom Ghassedi, through a glass door. Officers found Mr. Ghassedi with blood on his neck, but he declined medical treatment.Sgt. McPherson broke up the fight between Det. Freeman and Mr. Ghassedi.
The disgusting, almost-surreal nature of this story spurred Jesus' General to propose that the Chattanooga PD star in a new reality show.
You deemed it a good beating and declined to arrest, or even cite Freeman.That's it. That's what our show, "Greeter Beaters," will be about. Every week we will show Collegedale and Chattanooga police assaulting elderly greeters, parking lot attendants, and bystanders in the greater Chattanooga metropolitan area. I'm also thinking of giving each show a theme. One week might be "batons," another "tasers," and maybe "shootings" for each season finale.
Your involvement is crucial. I don't think we can find another police chief in the country who'd allow it.
The sad truth is, with the Oscar Grant execution and the rampant abuse of Tasers as "compliance-assurance" devices instead of its proper use as a gun alternative, the idea of Greeter Beaters is way too close to reality.
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