Category Archives: Stand Your Ground Laws

Hot Air

Bang

“I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” attorney Benjamin Crump said yesterday, “[Michael Brown] was executed in broad daylight.”

The only issue I’ll take with Crump is that an execution, by definition, takes place as a penalty for a capital crime, at least in this holy land. Michael Brown not only had committed no capital crime, he’d done nothing wrong at all save for walking in the street and not immediately scooting onto the the sidewalk before his killer opened fire.

In general, we don’t take the lives of jaywalkers in this great democracy.

Noose

We give cops guns and badges but we can’t give them brains no matter how much funding we allocate for our police departments. The cop who whacked Michael Brown didn’t use his fully human brain when he pumped the kid full of lead Saturday afternoon; no, he used the ancient, paleo-evolutionary part of it, the part “involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays” [thanks, Wikipedia,] the part called by some the reptilian brain.

The cop who killed Michael Brown employed no more reasoning power and compassion than a crocodile.

The only question left is how many more cops are there like him?

Hoteliers

A couple of nice young women came into the Book Corner yesterday. They were from Nashville, Tennessee. One of them told me she was a devotee of the Brothers Grimm. She found a colorful, richly illustrated, cloth-bound compendium of their best known tales. She was overjoyed.

The two told me they were in town to train the staff at the new Hyatt hotel on Kirkwood Avenue.

I wished them well. Their hotel, on the other hand? Ick.

Hyatt Place Bloomington

[Side note: As I write this I’m eavesdropping on a tale being told by a property owner near the hotel construction site. This property owner says heavy trucks crushed decorative lighting fixtures and much of a perennial garden she had installed outside her building. When she and her people complained to the contractor, the fellow essentially shrugged and said, Whaddya gonna do?]

Bang, II

The American Bar Association last week released a report finding that killings have actually increased in states that have Stand Your Ground laws.

Imagine that!

Al Jazeera America reports on that report, the product of a 2013 National Task Force on Stand Your Ground Laws set up by the ABA. The report recommends states ditch their SYG laws forthwith.

Figures. Liberal lawyers and socialist task forces — of course they’re going to be against laws that virtually declare states in which they’ve been enacted the Wild West.

From "The Wild Bunch"

Standing Their Ground

And that is the Wild West of a Sam Peckinpah movie. In other words, a load of bullshit.

Iconography

Writer Miriam Krule points out in Slate magazine that with the death yesterday of Lauren Bacall, “all 16 of the 20th-century stars immortalized in Madonna’s Vogue are now dead.”

In case you’ve forgotten, here the others:

  • Greta Garbo
  • Marilyn Monroe
  • Marlene Dietrich
  • Joe DiMaggio
  • Marlon Brando
  • James Dean
  • Grace Kelly
  • Jean Harlow
  • Gene Kelly
  • Fred Astaire
  • Ginger Rogers
  • Rita Hayworth
  • Katharine Hepburn
  • Lana Turner
  • Bette Davis

 

Getting Hotter Air

Chit Chat Chit Chat

How about those Roller Mortis Films boys, Chris Rall and Tony Brewer? They just posted the first in their new series of interviews with fascinating B-towners on their YouTube channel.

Between them and my own Big Talk series on WFHB radio and The Ryder magazine, we’ll have the interview racket all sewn up here in So Cen Ind. The Herald Times, the WFIU news dept., and Bloom magazine may as well start handing out severance checks to their unlucky future former employees.

And, of course, there’s plenty o’incestuousness going around inasmuch as the subject of the first Rall/Brewer opus is, well, one Tony Brewer. Who just happens to be the second subject of the Big Talk series, the recording of which I am, as we speak, transcribing and editing. My Brewer interview should air on WFHB within a week or two. So you can grab yourselves a little sneak peek into the life of TB by checking out Roller Mortis’s 3-minute documentary on him. Rall & Brewer are calling their first effort a pilot, so expect their project to grow and evolve as time goes by.

Just like Big Talk.

Broadcast News

So, it’s out. The spanking new WFHB newsletter has hit the stree…, er, actually, the screen. Your computer screen, that is, if you sign up for it.

Firehouse News

Click Image To Subscribe

The first edition of the community radio station‘s latest stab at transparency now exists in the electron-sphere after a whirlwind gestation and birth. Many of Firehouse Broadcasting’s volunteers, donors, sponsors, and listeners found themselves in a tizzy last fall after the WFHB Board of Directors made a controversial choice to replace former General Manager Chad Carrothers. A fellow named Kevin Culbertson from California and other points west and whose resume included involvement with a passel of Christianist media outlets was tabbed to steer the ship into the foreseeable future. But when folks in these parts got wind of his religious programming past and his non-Bloomington-ness, the resultant roar could be heard as far as the Pacific Coast. Culbertson declined to come aboard and the Board faced the angry glares of its aforementioned constituents.

Since then, the Board and the WFHB staff have sworn to high heaven they’ll dedicate themselves to more open proceedings.

Et voila: Firehouse News.

And, yeah, I’m one of the inked-stained wretches who write the thing.

All Clear

Well, now that WWIII isn’t due to break out just yet, we can all get back to worrying about other important things like Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar night acceptance speech or whether Stand Your Ground laws were written by inmates in mental institutions.

Russia’s Vlad Putin is busy zipping up his fly after exposing his titanic phallus to the rest of the world in the Ukraine this past week. He promised this AM that his boys won’t bomb, maim, rape, pillage, and otherwise recreate in the Crimea unless such pastimes are absolutely necessary, a step back from his Rambo stance of several days ago. Phew, now I don’t have to stock up on canned green beans anymore.

Bomb Shelter

Nothing Says Home Like A Fallout Shelter

Meanwhile, remember that Florida woman who fired warning shots at her potentially abusive hubby? A state court judge had ruled that she can’t hide behind the Stand Your Ground laws because, well, she’s black and the imminent danger she faced was coming from her ever-loving husband. And if a man can’t beat his own wife nowadays, then what did our Christianist Founding Fathers fight and die for, huh?

Alexander

Not White. Not Male. Nobody.

Marissa Alexander faces a retrial that could land her in the joint for up to 60 years now. Those who enjoy sexual relations with their guns are applauding this latest turn of events because, again, Alexander is the wrong color and a wife and what the hell rights do such nobodies have anyway?

As for McConaughey’s speech — I didn’t see it but it’s raised a lot of fuss on the interwebs and, like all ‘net twaddle, will be forgotten by lunch time.

Your Daily Hot Air

Masters Of The Universe

ALEC is meeting in Chicago as we speak. You know that, don’t you? I assume they’re refining their plan to control the Solar System.

Solar System

ALEC’s Realm

Because, you know, complete global domination is a half-assed goal for losers. And those who populate the sinister halls of ALEC secret headquarters are winners. How do we know they’re winners? They have money and, in their universe, all that counts is money.

What is ALEC? Bill Moyers presents a swell picture of it here. ALEC Exposed does the same thing here. Or check Right Wing Watch’s mugshot of the gang here.

If you’re too lazy to click on the above links, just know that ALEC espouses, fights for, bankrolls, and — if it has its way — will soon impose by fiat upon us the following, among many other pro-corporate, fuck-you-people initiatives:

  • Stand your ground laws
  • “Shoot first” laws

John Wayne

ALEC’s American

  • The end of public education
  • Schools for profit
  • Defanging environmental standards and regulations
  • Union-busting
  • Deregulating the energy rackets

In its infancy (ALEC is celebrating its 40th birthday in Chi) the club worked tirelessly for prayer in public schools and against the Equal Rights Amendment. Later, ALEC-sters were among Saint Ronald Reagan’s most ardent stage door Johnnies. Now, it is simply the legislative muscle behind the corporate mob.

A number of people I know or am acquainted with are making nuisances of themselves outside the Palmer House Hilton Hotel where the ALEC-sters are perfecting their nefarious plots. These people are to ALEC what mosquitoes are to you and me. And ALEC is employing its very own flyswatter, in the form of the Chicago Police Department, to brush those nuisances away.

The thing is, mosquitoes may indeed be nuisances to you and me, but their bites remain with us for days and days. Sometimes the bites even interfere with our sleep.

Somehow, though, I don’t feel the ALEC archvillains are going to lose any sleep over the buzzing on East Monroe Street. They don’t seem to lose sleep over anything much.

Here are some citizen vids of the protests and arrests:

Meanwhile, corporate media hasn’t yet received the phone call alerting them to the protests. Golly gee, I wonder why!

BTW: If you’re interested in learning whether or not your elected representatives in the statehouse or in Congress are bought and paid for by ALEC, dig the interactive map here.

Now, turn off your TV and let’s do something about these slobs.

The Washington Slurs

In brighter news, Slate, the neo-lib online mag that’s usually as loath to making waves as a man standing up in a canoe, has decided, editorially, it shall never allow the moniker Washington Redskins to sully its portal again.

Redskins Logo

Vintage Washington Logo

Cool. Even though Washington NFL team owner Daniel Snyder thus far has stood on his head to insist he’ll never, ever, ever change its nickname no matter how many Indian groups or sympathizers raise a stink, it’s only a matter of time before the Redskins logo hits the dustbin. And none too soon, I may add.

Then again, the NFL and its devolved fan base really don’t care about trivialities like crippling leg injuries, scrambled brain syndromes, and the families of degenerate gamblers, so why would they care a whit about insulting a Holocausted people?

Redskins Cheerleader

Slurring Two Groups With One Stone

Ah, forget it: The Redskins they shall ever be. That doesn’t mean we have to say the word, does it?

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