December 2008

Remember all the outrage over state workers breaching Joe the Plumber’s records in Ohio? The media, along with the right wing nuts went crazy over it. You would have thought someone beat the hell out of him.

Well here is a story where someone did get the hell beat out of them, and the media hasn’t said shit about it:

A 32-year-old Shreveport man is now recovering at home after he says he was badly beaten at a west Shreveport gas station for wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt.

Kaylon Johnson says he now has a broken nose and eye socket after the brutal attack that he says was racially motivated and brought on by the t-shirt. "They were screaming "f" Obama, f***. Obama something about a n**** president, basically you know I was hit."

This all happened Saturday night around 11:30 at the Citgo on Industrial Drive off of I-20.  He says he had already pumped gas and was walking out of the store with a drink when he was attacked. "Seem like some red necks, they're pretty big guys and they were blasting music or whatever, mean by the time I turned around and looked at him they were on me." Johnson says all he remembers after that was hitting his car door.

{[}]lt;p>The story says that the FBI is now investigating the case also and some 25 year old from Texas was arrested.

The other day Matt Yglesias posted this:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit.

Well this got the powers to be at Think Progress/Center for American Progress a little nervous, which lead to this posting yesterday:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This is a perfect reason why those damn traffic cameras should be outlawed:

High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim's license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.

It’s time for these things to be banned, along with tasers . Law enforcement was an issue I really wanted brought up during the election cycle, but it never was. It’s time we evaluate what is going on with law enforcement and make changes.

This week is the science edition: