Back in January, Pulitzer winning journalist Chris Hedges sued President Obama and the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, specifically challenging the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force or, the provision that authorizes military detention for people deemed to have “substantially supported” al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.” Hedges called the president’s action allowing indefinite detention, which was signed into law with little opposition from either party “unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous.” He attacked point blank the civil rights farce that is the never-ending “war on terror” conducted by both parties, targeting whom exactly is unclear, but certainly attaining ever more intense retaliation from foreigners such as the furious attacks against the US consulates in Egypt and Libya. Continue reading
new york times
Mayor Bloomberg Says Cops Should Go On Strike Until Americans Give Up Their Guns (one can hope) | Reason
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN’s Piers Morgan last night that he doesn’t “understand why police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike, we’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.”
We’ve been hearing a lot of that recently. Earlier this year, The New York Times reprinted a Department of Justice press release and slapped this lede on top of it: “As violent crime has decreased across the country, a disturbing trend has emerged: Rising numbers of police officers are being killed.”
Bloomberg and The New York Times are both wrong:
- In 2008, ten times more civilians regular people were killed by cops than cops were killed by perps.
- In 2011, 72 cops were shot and killed in the entire U.S.; in L.A. County alone, cops shot and killed 54 suspects the same year–22 percent of those people were unarmed.
- As Scott Reeder reported at Reason this morning, “Farmers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, loggers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, construction workers, pilots, steel workers, roofers, and others are far more likely to face death on the jobs than police or firefighters, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
- And as Choire Sicha wrote earlier this year, “2008 was the ten-year low for police officers being killed, and 2012 is, so far, year-to-date, down 49% from last year.” Continue reading
The Grey Enigma 