When police act like organized crime syndicates

A Cleveland police officer named Michael Brelo is on trial for the killing of two unarmed people at the end of a crazy and dangerous chase through the city with 62 police cars and 100 officers in pursuit that ended with the victims and their car having 137 bullets pumped into them, 49 of them by Brelo, the last 15 after he jumped on the top of the car and fired straight down, as if he was the star in some action film. It later turned out that the insane chase and deaths may have been triggered by the victims’ car backfiring that some police thought was a gunshot.
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The song is the same, only the names change

John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden about the abuses by the US government has been viewed over 4.3 million times and so of course the apologists for the national security state in the media and politics have come out of the woodwork to smear him yet again because they fear that his exposure of widespread government surveillance in pursuance of ways to control the population and suppress dissent will enable those seeking to curb those excesses to gain traction. These people may say they fear terrorism but what they really fear is transparency and democracy.
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The Daily Show on the Indiana law against gays

We see in Indiana a repeat of what happened with Chik-fil-A a few years ago when that company got calls for a boycott for the anti-same sex marriage statements of the owner. People opposed to equal rights for gays rallied around the company in solidarity and there were long lines of people waiting to buy products. In Indiana, a similar thing occurred with people sending lots of money to support a pizzeria that got a lot of flak and death threats for saying they would not cater a same-sex wedding.
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p.s. I also need war plans for Iran by 3:00 pm today

Via Tom Levenson, I learned about the 12th anniversary of this memo from then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to then Under Secretary for Defense Donald Feith.

Unbelievable. Read it and weep.

This is how our great minds think. With such arrogance, no wonder the neoconservatives got this country in such a string of messes and caused death and mayhem and misery to millions of people. Why they are allowed anywhere near any job that requires thinking is beyond me.

Yet another reason to abolish the death penalty

There are many reasons to hate the death penalty. But one of the main ones is because poor defendants are often sent to death row by prosecutors who simply don’t care if they are guilty of the crime or not but simply want to get a conviction. The latest example of this is that of Anthony Ray Hinton who was sentenced to death and spent 28 years in jail in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. He has just been released at age 58 after vigorous efforts on his behalf. But he could well have ended up dead, one more innocent person killed because our society’s obsession with vengeance is matched by a shocking lack of concern about fairness and justice.
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The Iran deal

It looks like the P5+1 nations (US, Russia, China, France, UK, and Germany) have arrived at a framework for a deal with Iran on partially reducing the sanctions regime against that nation in return for concessions on its nuclear program, and both sides are claiming satisfaction with the deal. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks explains what the preliminary deal struck between Iran and the western powers involves, and says that Iran had made some extraordinary concessions.
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