Monthly Archives: August 2014

Friday Follies for August 29, 2014

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It has been a long week. It shouldn’t have seemed that way but it did. I’ve been beating the bushes trying to get conservatives involved in politics. I’ve not been very successful.

Case in point. I’m a member of several conservative political organizations. In every one, there is a small group that is active. Each group has an occasional drop-in who may visit for a meeting or two but their attendance is irregular at best. Most, pleading a busy schedule, drift off.

There is a distinct age gulf in the membership. All the active members are older—in their 50s and up. The younger crowd is too busy to bother—and that is a problem. Not for us, but for them.

We want to get younger members to join, whole families if possible. But we are rarely successful—“We’re too busy! The kids have too many activities. I have to take Junior to baseball/softball/soccer/football/basketball/swimming practice.” It is just the same for the girls. Then, during school session, add voice/band/music practice, Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts/4-H, plus the kids come home with a 30lb backpack full of homework (do the kids ever do work at school anymore?).

Oh, we can still get a turnout for an isolated meeting for a cause such as Common Core or Agenda 21. But when it come to electing officials who will represent us in government, people claim they don’t have time.

It’s a cop-out. People can and will act if their private ox is being gored but politics? Heavens, no! In reality, it is a matter of priorities. What is more important. Being a helicopter parent who is determined their kids are under constant scrutiny or insuring those same children have any freedom when they become adults.

I constantly hear, “I’m not interested in politics!” and every time I remember the remainder of that quote—“but politics is interested in you.”

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Homeschoolers! Lissen-up!

http://www.umsystem.edu/newscentral/legislative-update/files/2014/03/LU-3-13-Emery.jpgNeed a project for your kids? Take them to the upcoming Missouri Legislature Veto Override session. There are a number of interesting issues that will be voted upon to override Governor Jay Nixon’s veto.

Meet the legislators; visit your state Representative and Senator, watch the bills being discussed and voted upon from the visitor’s gallery. See your state government in action. Coordinate your activity with another group (WMSA pitch here.) Find other homeschoolers, combine resources and perhaps share costs.

When I was in grade school and later in high school, I was required to pass a test of the US and state constitutions. One test was required to graduate into high school. The other was a state requirement for a high school diploma. In my high school, we spent a complete semester being taught the mechanics of government. Anyone who failed had a second chance in summer school. There was a third chance to pass the test for a high school diploma in a night class with adults, an early form of G.E.D.

That requirement no longer exists. It should, but it doesn’t. I suppose it’s more important to be taught diversity and other social engineering agendas than for students to understand how government works.

Homeschoolers take note of this opportunity. Every year I see a number of Jeff City public and private school kids touring the Capitol. I’ve seen other homeschoolers there as well with their kids. Witnessing government in action is too good an educational opportunity to miss. Perhaps you, too, will learn something as well.

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ISIS is back in the news and Obama is, as usual, ignoring that crises. “We’re not at war with ISIS,” he claims. Obama ignores the statements from ISIS that they are at war with us and the rest of the world.

Islamic State’s ‘Laptop of Doom’
By Rick Moran, August 29, 2014

We don’t have a strategy yet to attack Islamic State. But they are developing a strategy to attack us.

A laptop found by Syrian rebels last January in an ISIS hideout proved to be a goldmine of information. Foreign Policy’s Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa got their hands on the machine, downloaded 146 gigabytes of material, and were shocked at what they found:

The laptop’s contents turn out to be a treasure trove of documents that provide ideological justifications for jihadi organizations — and practical training on how to carry out the Islamic State’s deadly campaigns. They include videos of Osama bin Laden, manuals on how to make bombs, instructions for stealing cars, and lessons on how to use disguises in order to avoid getting arrested while traveling from one jihadi hot spot to another.

But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop’s owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.

The information on the laptop makes clear that its owner is a Tunisian national named Muhammed S. who joined ISIS in Syria and who studied chemistry and physics at two universities in Tunisia’s northeast. Even more disturbing is how he planned to use that education:
The ISIS laptop contains a 19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons and how to weaponize the bubonic plague from infected animals.

“The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge,” the document states.

The document includes instructions for how to test the weaponized disease safely, before it is used in a terrorist attack. “When the microbe is injected in small mice, the symptoms of the disease should start to appear within 24 hours,” the document says.

The laptop also includes a 26-page fatwa, or Islamic ruling, on the usage of weapons of mass destruction. “If Muslims cannot defeat the kafir [unbelievers] in a different way, it is permissible to use weapons of mass destruction,” states the fatwa by Saudi jihadi cleric Nasir al-Fahd, who is currently imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. “Even if it kills all of them and wipes them and their descendants off the face of the Earth.”

When contacted by phone, a staff member at a Tunisian university listed on Muhammed’s exam papers confirmed that he indeed studied chemistry and physics there. She said the university lost track of him after 2011, however.

It is very difficult to weaponize any biological agent. You need a modern lab and a trained team of scientists to build a usuable weapon. But that doesn’t mean that the terrorists aren’t trying very hard to build one:

Nothing on the ISIS laptop, of course, suggests that the jihadists already possess these dangerous weapons. And any jihadi organization contemplating a bioterrorist attack will face many difficulties: Al Qaeda tried unsuccessfully for years to get its hands on such weapons, and the United States has devoted massive resources to preventing terrorists from making just this sort of breakthrough. The material on this laptop, however, is a reminder that jihadists are also hard at work at acquiring the weapons that could allow them to kill thousands of people with one blow.

“The real difficulty in all of these weapons … [is] to actually have a workable distribution system that will kill a lot of people,” said Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College. “But to produce quite scary weapons is certainly within [the Islamic State’s] capabilities.”

As you can see, ISIS is not a bunch of sheepherders hiding in caves. Educated professionals are also flocking to their banner and you have to think they can accomplish just about anything any modern army does – including building weapons of mass destruction.

Islamists call us “Crusaders.” There have been many Crusades over the last millennium. Perhaps it is time for another one. It is already being fought from the Islamist’ side. If we are to survive as a people and culture, it is time to recognize that fact for what it is.

***

Money laundering. Says it all.

 

 

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Zip!

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More and more, it seems that nothing in my morning flood of news items strikes my fancy. The national division between conservatives and establishment hacks continue within the RNC. The dems continue to push for expanded welfare and open borders dividing the country between those who produce and those who are parasites, to what end?

I sat next to a group a local dems earlier this week at lunch. All were in the 50s and 60s, all decried the flood of illegals streaming over out borders and Obama doing nothing to control the flood. If I hadn’t known for a fact they were dems—several have Obama-Biden stickers on their pickups, I’d have thought there were ‘Pubs. But they are not. They will continue to vote for democrats, pushing everyone like themselves, down the chute to hell and then they’ll blame everyone except themselves. The stupidity of such people continues to astound me.

Regardless, I’ve not found a topic for today. I’m taking the day off. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a better attitude and I’ll find something more to write about than the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and saying, “I told you so!”

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Truthy

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I was at a meeting of local county conservatives last night and one of the members started talking about how much personal information people, unthinkingly, release on the ‘net. Personally, especially on Facebook, my profile is sparse. I post my name, that I’m married and the company name I used to work for. I thought long and hard before I added that last bit and did so only at the request of a few former work buddies.

But all too many people post everything—all their personal information, phone numbers, personal details, family photos by the ton, oblivious just how much they release. We hear of the NSA spying on US citizens and no one really believes the NSA’s claims of innocence.

PRISM is one such spy program that examines all email traffic looking for specific pieces of information.

The Prism program collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to Internet companies such as Google Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6] —  Wiki.

http://static.tumblr.com/k6l9ga7/1pRlvb0xk/big-brother-1984-cropped.jpgThe conversation from last night was still fresh in my mind this morning when I found the article below in my morning news basket from Ed Morrissey. He compared “Truthy” to George Orwell‘s Big Brother watching everyone.

Media curiously silent on “Truthy”

posted at 8:41 am on August 27, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

It’s been a couple of days since the Washington Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington first reported on the three-year-old  federal grant from the National Science Foundation for the “Truthy” database, and … not much else has happened. Blogs have picked it up, including our own Mary Katharine, and Reason’s Bobby Soave did a good job of highlighting its inherent contradictions. Twitchy has collated a number of tongue-in-cheek attempts to kick-start Truthy. Other than that, the national media appears to have gone radio silent on this latest project; according to a Bing news search this morning, no national outlet has yet picked up the story from WFB.

That’s interesting, because one might have guessed that they would take notice of a million-dollar effort to encroach on their fact-checking turf. In my column for The Week today, I wonder why the federal government is spending a million dollars to create a mechanism that sounds like it could come straight out of Orwell when we have a perfectly good private-sector market for free speech:

The better question is this: Who makes these subjective judgments? At least at first, the answer would be the researchers who are building Truthy under a federal grant from the NSF. It’s not to hard to imagine a scenario in which the federal government would eventually find a use for Truthy, and would make the subjective judgments on how best to monitor political speech on social media.

Reason’s Bobby Soave points out the basic contradiction in claiming, as the abstract does, to support “the preservation of open debate” while attempting to apply labels to speech such as “suspicious memes,” “hate speech,” and “subversive propaganda,” as well as determining which arguments constitute an “organic meme” versus an “inorganic” one. “Those seem like conflicting goals,” Soave writes, “even if pursued in a totally apolitical way.”

Or an “inorganic” way, for that matter. Truthy is the very definition of a top-down determination of the legitimacy of public speech. In a free society, citizens make those determinations for themselves. That is the organic approach to political speech, stemming from those who wish to engage in — or become spectators to — the contest of ideas, arguments, analyses, and proposals. Instead of allowing people to reach their own conclusions about those ideas and arguments, Truthy and the NSF instead appear to want to delegitimize the people who engage in those debates, which would in any other circumstance become the very kind of political smear that Truthy is supposedly designed to protect against.

The fact-checking industry, for all its faults, at least uses a free-market approach to criticism and debate that “Truthy” would pervert. Citizens of a free nation who value political speech shouldn’t pay a dime for Truthy, let alone a million dollars. Its abstract describes an apparatus for state control of political thought, as though its proposers read George Orwell’s 1984 as a how-to rather than a cautionary tale.

The Inquisitr takes a look at the principals involved in this project, and wonders just how non-partisan this project really is:

The project website also says that while many memes are created in a “perfectly organic manner,” others are allegedly driven by the “shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns.” Free speech advocates say, “so what” to the organic vs. organized meme creation. If a political advocacy group makes a Barack Obama golf meme, will they wind up in the government-funded database? According to the description and focus of the Truthy database project, the answer would be a resounding “yes.”

But speaking of “the shady machinery of high-profile … campaigns,” we have this:

The Truthy database project is billed as a non-partisan effort, but the “lead investigator” on the project is reportedly involved with a multitude of progressive or liberal groups, Filippo Menczer has reportedly uttered support for Moveon.org, Amnesty International, and President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, among other groups. Filippo Menczer is also a computer science and informatics professor at Indiana University. Links to the political and activists groups the Truthy database leader supports are posted on his bio page at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. Menczer’s page also says that he is on sabbatical at Yahoo! Labs for the 2014-15 academic year. The $1 million grant funded by the taxpayers runs during the same year.

But don’t worry … you’ll love Big Brother! They promise not to make that a “suspicious meme,” too.

For most of us, bits and pieces of our history and personal details are already in some database—a piece here, a piece there, including our tax and income data, even our medical history. It’s too late for us but we should be ever vigilant to not allow more of our personal data to come into some one’s hands. Privacy is achieved only through constant vigilence.

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On the Missouri side…

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I wrote about Jay Nixon’s fiasco last week. His handling of the Ferguson shooting was incredibly inept. I’m being kind with that description. Some of his fellow democrats were not pleased either.

FERGUSON — ‘Black legislators air frustrations in meeting with Gov. Nixon in St. Louis County,’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Members of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus used a meeting Sunday with Gov. Jay Nixon to vent over the investigation into the Aug. 9 shooting death of an unarmed Ferguson teenager. The meeting Sunday afternoon at the University of Missouri-St. Louis was closed to the public and reporters, but some legislators said they repeated calls for an indictment of Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson and for Nixon to remove St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch from the case. “He’s pretending he cares,” said Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, D-University City, who walked out of the meeting after about 10 minutes. “It’s a waste of time. He’s doing this to look good.” — PolitocMO Newssletter, August 26, 2014.

Nixon told the St. Louis Post Dispatch that he would be attending Michael Brown’s funeral. A space was reserved for him. But, come the funeral, Jay Nixon was missing.

Nixon told the Post Dispatch on Sunday that he would be attending Michael Brown’s funeral yesterday. He had a place marked for him at the church where the funeral took place, but was not in attendance. Per spokesman Scott Holste: “The Governor has communicated to attorneys representing the family of Michael Brown that he will not be attending today’s funeral out of respect for the family, who deserve time to focus on remembering Michael and grieving their loss.” — St. Louis Today.

Every one seems to be jumping on Jay Nixon. I can’t think of a better person to be receiving all this negative attention.

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Last week, by state law, democrats and republicans met to ‘reorganize.’ By reorganize, I mean all the Precinct Committeemen and Committeewomen elected in the primary on August 5th, met to choose committee officers for the next two years.

Each county has a party central committee. What I didn’t know until last week is that each House and Senate districts also have committee each with a set of officers. The county central committees choose a Chairman, Vice-chairman, Treasurer and Secretary for the House District committee. The House District Chair and Vice-Chair are automatically members of the Senatorial District Committee.

What is the purpose of these committees? Basically, to choose candidates for office in case of a vacancy. For example, a couple of years ago, the Cass County Presiding Commissioner was deemed ineligible for office. The county central committee chose a candidate to run for office and that candidate won a special election a couple of months later. The committees also sent recommendations to the Governor when an appointment to fill a vacant term is needed.

The House district committee serves the same function if the state Representative position falls vacant for whatever reason. In such an occurance, the district committee would choose a candidate for the position.

The Senate district is slightly different. Its members are the two Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen of all the House districts that fall within the Senatorial district. They choose a candidate for the state Senate seat if case of a vacancy. Plus—they also choose members of the state central committee. The House and Senatorial committees may have more functions than I have described, but those are the ones pertinent to today’s discussion.

Why am I going into all this detail? Because of what is happening in one House and Senatorial district.

TROUBLE BREWING IN STATE GOP? — ‘Local leader in GOP faces issue for post,’ Joplin Globe: “A longtime Southwest Missouri conservative activist has hit a bump in the road after his three decades of involvement within the inner workings of the Missouri Republican Party. The eligibility of ballots submitted by Carthage-area resident John Putnam, former chairman of the Jasper County Republican Central Committee, in his two-way race to become chairman of the 127th House District Republican Committee has been questioned. The issue arose after Putnam narrowly defeated Dade County resident Bob Jackson in a 15-14 vote last week. … 
“Putnam, a tea party activist who is well-known throughout the state, has not been shy about his concerns with the so-called party establishment. He backed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin until the end of the tumultuous 2012 campaign, and he has taken criticism directly to Republicans who he thinks are too flimsy on their beliefs. The night before the 127th District Republican Committee chairman election, during remarks to the Jasper County Republican Central Committee, Putnam criticized U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., for what he said was Blunt’s support of Mississippi Republican U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran in his heated primary against tea party favorite Chris McDaniel. … 
“‘’Roy Blunt has divided the Republican Party before, and I can’t support him in the Senate race next time, and I do think that has some bearing on what’s happening now,’ Putnam said in an interview. Missouri Republican Party Chairman Ed Martin has called for the Republican National Committee to investigate the Mississippi Senate race. He has said the runoff election there included “racially charged” television ads opposing McDaniel that should not be tolerated by the Republican Party. That episode solidified the distrust between Martin — and Martin’s supporters, like Putnam — and the so-called Republican establishment. Putnam said, ‘They can read the tea leaves: If I’m the chairman of the district, I’m going to vote for a state committeeman and woman that will support Ed Martin in his re-election.’” — PoliticMO Newsletter, August 26, 2014 and The Joplin Globe.

If Putnam’s election to the House District is upheld, he will automatically be a member of his Senatorial committee…and possibly be selected as a member for the state central committee.

Roy Blunt is well known in ‘Pub politics as being an establishment butt-boy. His endorsement and contribution to Thad Cochran’s campaign, in opposition to Missouri’s GOP State Chairman Ed Martin, broadened the schism between party conservatives and the Washington (and state) establishment. Ed Martin was elected State GOP Chairman with the backing of the Tea Party and other grassroots activists as an anti-establishment candidate. The question upcoming is whether he will retain his position after the new crop of state GOP committeemen are chosen.

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Is history repeating itself?

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A number of writers and bloggers, myself included, have noted the similarities of our current events to those just prior to World War I. If you take a step back and look at the underlying issues, our times also mirror events during the 1930s just before World War II.

Putin wants to restore Russia to its former USSR status. While the former USSR was nominally Communist, it was governed by a closed group, a political party that operated as an oligarchy. Hitler, like Putin after him, wanted to restore Germany to the status it held before World War I with its world-wide empire. Germany, like the USSR, was nominally socialist but was governed by an oligarchy masquerading as the National Socialist Workers Party, the Nazis.

Hitler took the Rhineland breaking Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact in 1936. The Rhineland was a demilitarized zone in western Germany, that created a buffer between isolating Germany from Belgium and France.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in July 1919–eight months after the guns fell silent in World War I–called for stiff war reparation payments and other punishing peace terms for defeated Germany. Having been forced to sign the treaty, the German delegation to the peace conference indicated its attitude by breaking the ceremonial pen. As dictated by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s military forces were reduced to insignificance and the Rhineland was to be demilitarized.

In 1925, at the conclusion of a European peace conference held in Switzerland, the Locarno Pact was signed, reaffirming the national boundaries decided by the Treaty of Versailles and approving the German entry into the League of Nations. The so-called “spirit of Locarno” symbolized hopes for an era of European peace and goodwill, and by 1930 German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had negotiated the removal of the last Allied troops in the demilitarized Rhineland. — History.com.

Two years later in march of 1938, Hitler annexed Austria into the growing German Empire. The Anschluss, as it was called, is exactly like the annexation of Crimea into Putin’s resurgent Russian Empire.

Before the end of 1938, Hitler, through political maneuverings, absorbed the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia when Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Édouard Daladier of France refused to intervene.

http://gdb.voanews.com/CBBF0236-4C48-427A-8268-A80B0BECB923_cx0_cy10_cw0_mw1024_s_n.jpgI should note that Russian armored forces has entered the Ukraine and the Ukraine is left defenseless after the US and NATO have refused to honor security agreements between them and the Ukrainian government.

Ukraine says Russian forces cross border in tanks, armored vehicles

By Annie Gowen and Karoun Demirjian August 25 at 11:12 AM

KIEV — Ukraine charged that Russian forces crossed into eastern Ukraine early Monday in military vehicles, including tanks, as Russia vowed to send a second humanitarian aid convoy into the country this week to deliver emergency supplies to areas held by pro-Moscow separatists.

Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Russian military vehicles with the insignia of the separatists’ self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic “violated the state border of Ukraine” near Novoazovsk in the southern part of Donetsk region.

It was the latest, and one of the most forceful, accusations from Kiev that Russia has been directly supplying weapons, personnel and other assistance to the separatists fighting government troops in eastern Ukraine.

…

Lysenko said at least 10 tanks, two armored vehicles and two trucks from russia crossed into Ukrainian territory at 5:20 a.m. Monday, potentially bound for the key port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. The highway leading to Mariupol is currently under control of the Ukrainian military, he said.

The Russian military vehicles flying rebel flags moved toward the village of Shcherbak, where they engaged in battle with soldiers of a Ukrainian border unit, Lysenko said in a briefing Monday. He said the Ukrainian forces then called for reinforcements and managed to stop the advance of the convoy just outside the villages of Shcherbak and Markyne. The villages are north of the larger town of Novoazovsk, about five miles from the Russian border.

The rest of the article can be found here, at the Washington Post website.

The first question is if Putin’s incursion into the Ukraine is like that of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. The difference is that in 1939, Britain and France actually honored their treaties with Poland. Today, after Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, Obama couldn’t be bothered and is playing golf somewhere and the EU nations and NATO have emasculated themselves by depending on the US military to provide their defense. The similarities between today and the open scenes of World War II are astounding.

On the other side of the world, similar scenes are playing. In the 1930s, Imperial Japan invaded China in a quest for natural resources. As an island nation, Japan had few, if any, resources needed for an industrialized society. It lacked oil, iron and coal. China and the territory around the South China Sea, Indo-China, the Philippines, and Dutch East Indian Islands, had all those resources in abundance. The problem facing Japan is that the territory belonged to other European powers…until an opportunity arose when those powers became embroiled in war.

Communist China is acting Imperial Japan of the 1930s. China has arbitrarily and in violation of a number of Open Seas treaties, laid claim to much of the South China Sea—and the resources that lay underneath those shallow waters. China started drilling in territory claimed by Vietnam that sparked riots and the movement of Chinese troops to the Vietnamese border.

China has expanded their military and has recently taken to harassing US Navy maritime patrol planes. In 2001, a Chinese fighter colliding with a US Navy EP-3 patrol aircraft causing the US plane to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. China asserted its right to harass aircraft after this latest incident.

China rejects U.S. criticism over jet encounter

BEIJING Sat Aug 23, 2014 1:19pm EDT

(Reuters) – China on Saturday called US criticism of an approach by one of its jets to a US Navy patrol plane off the Chinese coast earlier this week “completely groundless” and said its pilot had maintained a safe distance from the US aircraft.

The strongly-worded statement attributed to Ministry of National Defense spokesman Yang Yujun was a response to a diplomatic complaint the Pentagon filed with Beijing on Friday.

The complaint concerned an August 19 encounter about 215 km (135 miles) east of China’s Hainan Island in which a Chinese fighter jet came within meters (yards) of a US P-8 Poseidon anti-submarine and reconnaissance plane and, the US claimed, performed acrobatic maneuvers around it.In its statement, the Chinese defense ministry said the J-11 jet was conducting routine checks and described the pilot’s actions as professional.The United States’ frequent short-range reconnaissance missions threatened the safety of both militaries, it said.

It urged the US to reduce short-range reconnaissance against China and to respect international law and conventions.

Yes, more and more the world appears to be entering a new stage for conflict, a conflict on the scale of earlier world wars. And, like those earlier wars, the United States and Europe are woefully unprepared for conflict.

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It’s Fridaayyy!

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Yes, I’m sure it’s Friday, I double checked.

After stepping into a large pile of brown and stinky, I bet Governor Jay Nixon wishes today was Saturday. Unfortunately for him, Nixon created that large pile on his own. His mouth made a bad situation worse and he has no one to blame except for himself.

What did Nixon do? He publicly called for the “vigorous prosecution” of Officer Darren Wilson before the investigation was complete. Then, when evidence began to appear that showed Wilson killed Brown in self-defense, Nixon compounded the problem by refusing to recant his earlier statement. Instead of supporting the law and legal process, Nixon sided with the mob for nothing more than personal political gain.

Missouri Governor under fire after calling for ‘vigorous prosecution’ of cop who shot dead Michael Brown but grand jury won’t make decision until OCTOBER

  • Governor Jay Nixon said on Tuesday ‘a vigorous prosecution must be pursued’ after Ferguson officer Darren Wilson shot dead teen Michael Brown

  • The governor called for the prosecution of Wilson comes ahead of the grand jury meeting today to see if the officer will even be charged

  • Officer Wilson, a six-year veteran of the Ferguson force with a clean record, has not been arrested or charged with any crime

  • Missouri’s Lt. Governor criticized Nixon saying he had ‘prejudged the case’ 

By Louise Boyle for MailOnline and Associated Press, Published: 10:31 EST, 20 August 2014 | Updated: 16:39 EST, 20 August 2014

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has come under fire after calling for the ‘vigorous prosecution’ of the Ferguson police officer who shot dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

The Democrat governor released a five-minute video on Tuesday, where he said: ‘A vigorous prosecution must now be pursued.’

His statement began: ‘Ten days ago, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in broad daylight. The world has watched as a community has been engulfed in grief, anger, fear, at times violence.’

The governor then called upon Attorney-General Eric Holder and St Louis county prosecutor Bob McCulloch to ‘meet expectations’ by finding justice for Michael Brown and his family ‘thoroughly, promptly and correctly’. 

Governor Nixon’s call for the prosecution of Officer Darren Wilson comes ahead of any decisions by the grand jury who are meeting today to see if the 28-year-old will be charged.

St Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch said on Wednesday that he estimated it would be the middle of October before the grand jury reached a decision on whether Officer Wilson will face charges over Michael Brown’s death.

Nixon made his statement before some FACTS came to light—the video of the convenience store robbery, the video of the confrontation with the background voices confirming Officer Wilson’s account, the recantation of the statement by Dorian Johnson, Brown’s accomplice, that said Wilson shot Brown in the back, the independent autopsy that showed Brown was shot from the front, two dozen or more eye-witness statements that said Brown charged Officer Wilson before being fatally shot. Nixon ignored all this real evidence deciding it was a good opportunity to gain political points at the expense of Wilson’s life and reputation.

Nixon prejudgment ignored the accumulating evidence. The Grand Jury, empaneled in May 2014, won’t release its results until October. So why did Nixon attempt to politically lynch Officer Wilson?

Maybe because Nixon has further political ambitions. One rumor is that he would be Hillary’s Veep in 2016. I don’t think that will happen now. Nixon’s bungling attempt to gain liberal creds from the black community failed. Instead he’s now being held in ridicule by nearly everyone including members of his own party.

But probably the worse cut of all comes not from a news item or a reporter but from a cartoonist. Michael Ramirez posted this cartoon and it cuts directly to the issue.

http://www.investors.com/image/RAMclr-082214-lynching-IBD-COLOR-FINAL-147.gif.cms

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Meh…

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I woke up this morning thinking it was Friday. Then I realized I was off a day, it is only Thursday. I’ve been told this is not an unusual situation. Mrs. Crucis admits she has to double check, from time to time to determinbe which day it is.

OK, we’re retired and I admit that on occasion, one day does seem to be much like another. But the condition isn’t solely for the retired. When a day, whether at work or not, seems much like another it is easy to get confused.

When I was still employed, I was a project manager assigned to build a facility in New Zealand using equipment manufactured in the UK. New Zealand was a day ahead of us being on the other side of the International Dateline. London, the location of the equipment manufacturer, was six hours ahead of us. I was caught in the middle.

That project lasted months. Months when I came to work before dawn to be able to talk with the folks in London and stayed well after dark to talk to the engineers and site manager in New Zealand. I had several episodes of heading in to work only to realize, a few hours later, that it was Saturday. Top that off when our Sunday is New Zealand’s Monday.

Time frames without reference can be, and is, difficult to manage. For some reason, today is as well. Perhaps my nightly meetings this week is one contributor. It has been an interesting week observing politics in action at the local and state level.

Be that as it may, I’m out of sync with the world. I’m cutting this post short and plan to just spend some time getting back to normal. Y’all have a good day.

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