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POPSMonster convicted , but the grief remains I will never forget this case. What Patti Cannady, (Anne's mother) witnessed when she found her daughter close to death that morning is unspeakable. RIP Anne Pressly, I pray her family and friends are able to find some solace in his sentence, be it death (well earned) or life in prison. Thank God it can be nothing else.
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POPS800,000 Americans Busted Annually for Pot
They argue the drug war “is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will,” because * it diverts hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious crimes “to the pursuit of harmless tokers”; * it costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to catch, prosecute, and incarcerate marijuana users and sellers; * it enables government to snatch the cars, money, computers and other properties of people caught up in drug raids even if they have had no charges filed against them; and * it allows “police agents at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their eagerness to nab pot consumers.” The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white. Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted the infamous “Patriot Act” of 2001 for use in non-terrorism cases, allowing “sneak-and-peak” search warra
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POPSNidal Hasan Terrorist Threat 'Not That Big a Deal'....Matthew Yglesias
I think a pretty good case can be made that this kind of situation actually is the main face of the terrorist threat. Not a big well-thought-out plot centrally directed from a “safe haven” in South Asia and undertaken by brilliant covert operatives, but the desperate violent act of a clearly disturbed individual. It’s going to be very hard to prevent this sort of thing. As long as the United States remains a country in which firearms are widely available"for the foreseeable future, in other words"we’re going to be unusually vulnerable to mentally ill spree killers of various kinds, including spree killers who nod in the direction of Islamist thinking. But the larger point is that while these incidents are serious crimes and major tragedies for the victims, they hardly rise to the level of a major macro-level social crisis. They’re certainly not a first-order national security threat. And even put in the lower-stakes context of violent crime in America
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POPSWe Need To Do Better For Our Military Much of the study focused on 4th Brigade, home unit to most of the violent crime suspects. 4th Brigade was compared head-to-head with 3rd Brigade, which recently returned from Iraq. The 4th Brigade, now in Afghanistan, has suffered a higher casualty rate than other units its size in two deployments, the Army found, losing lives at a rate more than eight times that of 3rd Brigade. Along with the deaths came intense combat that took a mental toll on troops, the Army found. Soldiers in 4th Brigade were more likely than other soldiers to suffer mental illness. The study also found, though, that soldiers feel their careers can be damaged by seeking mental health help and too often feel that enlisted leaders don't support troops with mental illness. Read the entire article here: http://www.gazette.com/articles/soldiers-58520-report-army.html
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POPSLiberals Finally Got the Military Murders They've Been Asking For I imagine that President Obama's old mentors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are also pleased with the attack. After all, they sent Ayer's girlfriend and other domestic terrorists of the Weather Underground to attack an Army dance at Fort Dix, an assault thwarted only by their own bomb-building ineptitude. If they had been competent, their attack on Fort Dix would likely have been worse than yesterday's assault. So what say you, progressives... was the massacre of American soldiers all you dreamed it might be?
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POPS Combat Wounded, Combat Dead defense such as we’re already seeing explored on his behalf … rather than as a committed jihadi, an unlawful combatant, a terrorist, a deserter who aided and abetted the enemy, and a traitor who took up arms against his nation. It’s a push Republican lawmakers and those Democrats who agree could take up, that would command a lot of public support. Politicization of justice? Tell me that hasn’t happened already in this country. I’d call it a simple demand for justice. We owe it to the dead and the wounded to acknowledge why and under what circumstances they died and bled. Here’s an American hero who deserves the highest honors we can bestow on her. NY Daily News. Sgt. Kimberly Munley, cop, gunfighting woman. Went into a hot situation without regard for her own safety, gave better than she got, wounded in action, got the job done. I’d call that gallantry and valor in the face of the enemy, plus war wounds. Maybe even above and beyond. She’s reportedly an Army vet.
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POPSHow About We Bomb Mecca? The mainstream media is falling all over itself today in an attempt to somehow paint this domestic Islamic terrorist as the victim rather than the perpetrator.
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POPSReactionary anti-women "men's rights" groups go mainstream
More: Toward the end of her piece, Joyce makes a particularly fascinating point about MRAs' domestic violence arguments: Critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men’s rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves, minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting victims. MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay their personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as false, as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict the violence as mutual—part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse—as individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the violence was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future violence by fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious additional correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to intimidate a community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance.
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POPSThe Opinuary Column: Freedom isn't Free (or Alive)
It fought its addiction to Crystal Meth (Cheaper Than Coke But Still Not Free) and Tobacco (the first carton for soldiers was Free, but after that, not so much) with grit and determination, which it had in buckets (buckets that were Free but had to be returned when it was done with them). In the weeks before its death, the Opinion was often observed meditating on a litany of uncomfortable realizations: it had discovered that its apartment wasn't Free, its bar tab wasn't Free, its groceries weren't Free and, having failed to appear in court on misdemeanor charges, it suffered the additonal ignominy of facing the fact that indeed, not even its DUI was Free ($250.00 just to post bail!). Its only words to the judge were these: "In the bastardized yet immortal phrasings of Kris Kristofferson: Freedom's just another word for something that isn't free..." Family of the deceased Opinion are asking that, in lieu of flowers (which aren't free) that each and every one of us do our part to d
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POPSNonviolence As Their Weapon "It was 2001. Khatib watched in horror as Israeli soldiers shot an unarmed friend at a checkpoint. Two weeks later, the militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade made a revenge attack on the checkpoint, killing seven soldiers. "My first reaction was 'Good for Al Aqsa!' " Khatib said. Then he realized the dead soldiers belonged to a different unit, not the one on duty when his friend was shot. "It made me wonder: This cycle of death, of violent action and reaction, how we can break it?"
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POPS Hunt For 9.11 Killers Finds Trail In Pakistan where his trail was just picked up by the Pakistan forces clearing out the hornet’s nest that is South Waziristan Agency: The suspected 9/11 plotter whose German passport was found in a mud hut in western Pakistan this week has not been in touch with his family for two years, his mother, Anneliese Bahaji, said in an telephone interview Friday. The Pakistani military said it found his German passport five days ago in a mud hut in the village of Sherwangai in South Waziristan, during a search operation. To me this is a good sign that Pakistan, US, NATO, Afghan forces are circling the last remnants of the al Qaeda brain trust and that we may finally get our hands on some long sought targets. Since being pushed out of Afghanistan, it has been my contention al Qaeda has been holed up in the tribal areas of Pakistan. This evidence, however, is a clear indication we may be marching to the big nest of bad guys. The violent responses in Pakistan to the military actions indicate we
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