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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, November 03, 2007

For Sale Cheap: Two Acres, House, Garage....And A Snowblower 

...a number of years of personal experience have educated me into the difference between El Niño and La Niña, the charming little innocent-sounding names for varying sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific that can play so powerful a roll in the weather all across the globe...and especially here in the Pacific North West. Over the last many years, La Niña has meant long, cold, snowy winters with a number of months where the only way to see the ground was to grab a shovel and dig through the snowpack to try to find it...

Given all that experience, this is not good news. I find that I am growing tired of long snowy winters. It's fine as far as Christmas is concerned (I mean, a person needs to have a White Christmas), but that thrill over the years can tend to lose its power as February runs into March and April and...well, snow shovelling is only fun for so long. In any case, this isn't the sort of thing I really cared to hear today....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:24 PM 0 comments

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Criminalizing Teen Sex The Oregon Way 

...Georgia, it appears, isn’t the only place where teenage sex is a dangerous behavior for reasons having nothing to do with any normal understanding of the subject. Oregon, as it turns out, is another state where the Big Nasty between high school students can get a young fella stomped, beaten, and ruined for life, not by the normal assortment of fathers, brothers, and other offended relatives but by a legal system that almost seems to have too much time on its hands. This story isn’t generating the same sort of national renown as that recent one out of Georgia, but the case of David Lee Simmons in Madras, Oregon, has some disturbing similarities and - if anything - appears to be even more a perversion of the fairness that many so innocently nurture hope our judicial system strives to maintain...

One almost needs some powerful relational database installed on the latest hotrod computer to keep track of only the major craziness involved in this case:

1) How in the world did the DA’s office miss the fact that the issue a ‘Not True’ finding finding in the first place?

2) How did three - not one, but three - people who are presumably the beneficiaries of legal training at some institution of greater standing than Regent University manage to miss the fact that the indictment was improperly filed?

3) How is it that a teenager with no previous background of legal prolbems who endured the punishment of indictment, threat of lengthy imprisonment, the process of plea-bargaining, and who served a thirty-day sentence in a real live jail have that entire life-altering experience just simply vanish from the radar screen when it comes time to discuss whether double jeopardy applied to a subsequent indictment?

4) How the hell can an assistant DA refile charges in a case where a grand jury found no grounds for indictment to begin with?

...especially when his rational includes the fact that the ‘perp’ isn’t under the supervised probation that was part of the conviction that was vacated because the grand jury found that there wasn’t any evidence of the crimes that the DA’s office was looking for...

...and that he hasn’t undergone sex offender treatment as part of the conviction that was vacated because the grand jury found that there wasn’t any evidence of the crimes that the DA’s office was looking for...

I understand that, while Central Oregon isn’t the mean streets of the Big Cityh, there are a lot of the sorts of people that you probably wouldn’t want to have as your neighbors. My experiences from jury duty (and I am possessed of some sort of mysterious magnetism for being picked for juries to the point that I suspect that only dressing up as Osama bin Laden and chanting “Death to America” relentlessly from the security checkpoint all the way into the courtroom will ever bust my strange karma) has instructed me that in many cases it’s a toss-up as to whether the plaintiff is just as deserving as the defendant for being convicted for something. The denizens of District Attorney’s offices probably have earned at least some minimal right to look out the window and only see an ocean of potential perps. Having said that, however, they haven’t been granted the right, either by Constitution or law, to engage in prosecutions just because they have the power to do so...

There probably isn’t any real connection between the prosecutorial and legal excess that have been the hallmark of both the Bush administration Justice Department and the increasing number of strange, overly punitive prosecutions that keep hitting the news at the state and local level, but the parallels are looking pretty grim. The Case Of The State vs. David Lee Simmons in Madras, Oregon, is just another example of the sort of dark prosecutorial overreach in what is apparently no more than an effort to individualize the criminalization of a behavior that has been happening amongst high school students for longer than the Assistant District Attorney of Jefferson County has been alive. The state of Oregon has been wrestling for a number of years with the issue of providing sufficient bedspace for prisoners and, in the most supreme of ironies, Madras is the site of a future State Prison. If the efforts of the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office are any reliable measure, Oregon had better start building a whole hell of a lot more prisons, because the need to house teenage boys convicted of sex crimes for doing what teenagers have been trying to do for a long time is going to overwhelm the need that more level-headed ‘law and order’ types had estimated...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:15 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Law And Order, State Department-Style 

...I am not a lawyer, nor do I have any law enforcement training worth noting. I have, on the other hand, read tons of gripping lawyer and crime drama novels, grew up watching Perry Mason, and have spent the occasional indolent hour watching Law and Order and other Cop/Lawyer shows on the tube and have a certain 'involved layman's' experience in court actions involving Federal land management actions to which lawsuit-based objections have been offered by interested members of the public. I have never either read or heard in all of these experiences, be they fictional or real, anything approaching the granting of limited immunity to those who were being investigated...

Apparently I've been hanging out on the wrong end of the beach, soaking up the wrong aspects of American culture...

It appears that beating people senseless with phone books to work confessions out of them is only a bit of art on Fox network. Apparently the phrase "...and we'll go easy on ya" is some quaint creation of the writers of cop shows and not the sort of thing that one would really need to expect to hear in an investigation of the shooting of innocent residents in Iraq. That apparently isn't the way things work for security contractors in Iraq, however, and more's the luck for them. In the world on my TV, Fred Thompson would be nailing their flea-bitten hides to the barn door. In Condi Rice's world, nothing they say can be used against them, which is probably the sweetest permutation of Miranda that any suspected perp could ever hope to score...

In the bizarre parallel universe that is the US occupation force in Iraq, the normal rules that would apply to the potential commission of crimes do not exist. There are probably all sorts of righteous-sounding reasons for the immunity that is offered to contract security personnel for statements made during investigations of shootings that may result in the unnecessary death or maiming of innocent citizens. For all the outrage that was expressed yesterday over the revelation that Blackwater [(employees/subcontractors) circle one] were receiving a certain limited immunity for their statements about the Sept. 17 shoot-em-up , the most amazing new bit of reality is that this limited immunity has all along been a regular feature of State Department protocol regarding security contractors operating in Iraq. The whole idea of self-immumzing confessions is an interesting permutation of the American Experiment, but more than that it is another perfect example of Bushco's insistence that the laws of the land and of the world are no more than what Bushco chooses to say they are....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Framing The "Do-Nothing" Debate 

...it should be expected, I imagine, that the Republicans in Congress would jump all over the news that the Democratic leadership plans on cutting back on the schedule next year, giving members Friday off. Winger Congress-critters and their on-line minions have made sure to register supreme snideness about how that is just as well, given the lack of accomplishment under Democratic leadership. Even ol Gee Dub hisownself, the biggest expander of the federal budget since Nixon (and that with a Republican majority in Congress), has been getting in on the act, chiding the Democrats for 'not doing the work of the people' while conversely vetoing as too expensive various popular bills that have been passed by the Democratic Congress...

It's all part of a game that has been played for a couple of decades now by the Repubs: misrepresent the facts, tell outright lies, and hope the American people are too wrapped up in their own lives to have memory sufficient to know the actual truth. They don't want you to remember the vetoes or the filibusters; they don't want you to recall the passage of important legislation that actually helped the individual person; and they sure as heck would rather you not recollect that a Republican President and a Republican Congress failed utterly to pass a budget - any budget - for the fiscal 2007 budgetary year for perhaps the first time in the nation's history. It has worked so well in the past because of the rather twisted devolution of journalistic even-handedness into some shallow "he said/she said" drivel absent any of the sort of analysis that once served to actually inform the public...

Repub's don't want to talk about the occupation of Iraq or any of their other failings and they certainly have no successes to take with them out of the highly partisan primary season to show the general voting public why they should be back in power. "Do-Nothing Democratic Leadership" is about the only game they have, and it's a weak one, given that a significant component of the public disastifaction with Congress springs directly from the failure to get out of Iraq and not because the Health and Human Services budget hasn't been passed yet. It's the only game in town for them, however, so that's what we're going to be seeing for the next year or so...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:34 PM 0 comments

Barrow, Alaska: Banana Belt 

...this story probably didn't actually rattle very many of my neurons - except to think "how much must it suck to have your airplane malfunction and leave you stuck in Barrow-freakin'-Alaska with the Big Kahuna Admiral as one of your passengers" - except for this part:

The cause of the engine problem that developed after the trip "may have been something to do with the cold" as the plane sat outside overnight, Fredrickson said. The National Weather Service listed the low temperature Thursday night as 17 degrees above zero.



...heh...
[mutters under his breath]

...according to my little weather station on the desk, the low temperature Thursday night here in my part of Central Oregon was 14 degrees above zero...

Clearly, if I ever acquire that C-130 I've had my eye on, I'm gonna need to build a bigger garage...

Posted by: Jack K. / 4:21 PM 0 comments

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