Ratio Of Blacks In Jail To Blacks In College Is 3 To 1

The Wisconsin State Journal published an AP article on this recent study yesterday:

More than three times as many black people live in prison cells as in college dorms, the government said in a report to be released today.

The ratio is only slightly better for Hispanics, at 2.7 inmates for
every Latino in college housing. Among non-Hispanic whites, more than
twice as many live in college housing as in prison or jail.

The numbers, driven by men, do not include college students who live
off campus. Previously released census data show that black and
Hispanic college students - commuters and those in dorms - far
outnumber black and Hispanic prison inmates.

Nevertheless, civil rights advocates said it is startling that blacks
and Hispanics are more likely to live in prison cells than in college
dorms.

"It's one of the great social and economic tragedies of our time," said
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the Urban League. "It points to the
signature failure in our education system and how we've been raising
our children."

The Census Bureau released 2006 data Thursday on the social, racial and
economic characteristics of people living in adult correctional
facilities, college housing and nursing homes. It is the first in-depth
look at people living in "group quarters" since the 1980 census. It
shows, for example, that nursing homes had much older residents in 2006
than in 1980.

The new data have limitations. In addition to not including commuter
students, the data do not provide racial breakdowns by gender or age,
though they do show that males make up 90 percent of prison inmates.

Also, most prison inmates are 25 or older while 96 percent of people in
college housing are age 18 to 24.

The data show that big increases in black and Hispanic inmates occurred
since 1980. In 1980, the number of blacks living in college dorms was
roughly equal to the number in prison. Among Hispanics, those in
college dorms outnumbered those in prison in 1980.

There are many reasons black students do not reach college at the same
rate as whites, said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and
education at Columbia University's Teachers College.

Black students are more likely to attend segregated schools with high
concentrations of poverty, less qualified teachers, lower expectations
and a less demanding curriculum, she said.

"And they are perceived by society as terrible schools, so it is hard
to get accepted into college," Wells said. "Even if you are a
high-achieving kid who beats the odds, you are less likely to have
access to the kinds of courses that colleges are looking for."

Students who don't graduate high school are much more likely to go to
prison, said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at
UCLA. Nearly 40 percent of inmates lack a high school diploma or the
equivalent, according to the census data.

"The criminal economy is one of the only alternatives in some of these
places," Orfield said. "You basically have the criminalization of a
whole community, particularly in some inner cities."

Blacks made up 41 percent of the nation's 2 million prison and jail
inmates in 2006. Non-Hispanic whites made up 37 percent and Hispanics
made up 19 percent.

Are you serious?

Earlier today General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that he believed, due to his upbringing, that homosexuality is immoral. GENERAL Peter Pace, as in director, architect, and adviser to the Bush doctrine thinks that two adults of the same gender having sex (which I'm sure is occurring very frequently giving all the leisure time troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have) is evil. A man who has undoubtedly supported torture, extraordinary rendition, the invasion, and continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan which has led to the slaughter of hundreds of Iraqis and Afghanis THINKS that consensual sex is immoral. Are you shitting me?

It's very telling, given the upcoming election year and the fact that the democrats are often seen as the more friendly (or less blatantly hateful) alternative to the LGBT community, that after several Code Pink anti-war protesters jeered at the General's comments that the Democratic chairman, Senator Robert Byrd, stopped the session, had them removed and sealed the doors before resuming the session. Even more disconcerting were the only dissenting remarks from the Dems reported by AP in the article from Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa), who said he found Pace's previous remarks as "very hurtful" and "very demoralizing" to homosexuals serving in the military. He continued by saying that the General should have a chance to clarify his marks (to me the fact that he already said the same thing in a March Chicago Tribune interview indicates that this expression of his warped moral compass is crystal clear). He ended his stalwart defense of the LGBT community by stating: "It's a matter of leadership, and we have to be careful what we say."

Tisk tisk General, please keep your hateful thoughts to yourself. By the way, great job on the war. We respect you as a leader. We who stand against this kind of hate and as well as the murderous war this guy has helped to carry out need to demand more from the party that claims to stand to the left of the Republicans in the upcoming election year. Only by protesting and outspoken in our criticism and continuing to hold their feet to the fire will we get them to cough up the changes we demand.

US Snipers Use "Bait" to Lure and Kill Iraqis

This is really disgusting. The only thing I would add to the article is the unemployment situation in Iraq, which in some cities reaches over 80%. Thus Iraqis, who are desperate to be able to feed their familes, are killed for finding something on the ground which could be used to buy some respite from hunger. This is what occupation looks like.

Weekly Dave: Kansas City Krackers

This story is a simple illustration of what the Left has been saying all along: political xenophobia of the kind spewing from Congress regarding immigrants turns all too quickly into xenophobic violence.

What merits the Weekly Dave, however, is the news item at the bottom: This same school district suspended a student for the crime of speaking Spanish.

Si me quedo es doble...

The folks at National Review have done me the kind favor of concentrating all the right wing arguments for continuing the occupation of Iraq in one short five-page editorial. I must thank them for providing me with the opportunity to read the essentials of the conservative case without all the ridiculous fluff about freedom and democracy that usually accompanies it Unfortunately, they have declined to post their article online, so I'm forced to give a short summary of their argument.

Their argument can be reduced to three basic points, which supposedly form the nucleus around which a solid case for imperialism can be built. These are 1.) The conflict between al-Qaeda and Sunni tribes in Anbar means that the surge is a military success 2.) We need to stay in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda and 3.) Leaving would precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe. I'll take them in that order.

Given the snorts and grunts of self-satisfaction emanating from Washington over the last few weeks, one would think that in Anbar since the surge they have found both the WMDs and the candy and flowers with which the invaders were supposed to be greeted. As the NR folks say:

Today, al-Qaeda has nearly been routed from Anbar. Its campaign of intimidation, forced marriages, and repressive Islamism backfired...In his surprise Labor Day visit to Iraq, President Bush chose an airfield outside Ramadi for a meeting of his war leaders and the Iraqi government—something inconceivable six months ago.

So apparently the Sunni tribes have agreed to work with the Americans and kick the "terrorists" out of their province and accept the light of democracy from the freedom loving troops, right? Wrong. The residents of Anbar province thoroughly despise the American presence. Since the surge began, the percentage of Iraqis in Anbar who thought the US should leave immediately jumped from forty-nine percent to seventy-six percent. In the same poll, every single respondent from Anbar said that attacks on US troops were perfectly acceptable.

So what has actually happened in Anbar? As the NR boyz note, "The surge slated three additional battalions for Anbar" in early 2007. With an increased US troop presence, local tribal leaders decided it was a better tactic at this point to concentrate on kicking out the takfiris who are attacking their people than to try and attack the just-reinforced US presence. In the process of doing so, the Shaikhs have been more than happy to accept US guns. But this doesn't decrease the hatred Iraqis, and the folks in Anbar in particular, feel for the occupation. In addition, ordinary Anbaris are skeptical of their leaders' collaboration with the Americans, giving them only a 23% confidence rating. In short, none of this conforms whatsoever to the racist right wing myth of the Natives selling out their homeland for whatever trinkets of technology the occupiers can produce.

The second argument for staying, that it is crucial to defeating al-Qaeda is perhaps the most perfidious of the three. The "War on Terror" has never been primarily about terrorism, and the US gov't is not concerned at all about preventing terrorist attacks on the US citizenry. If they were, the first thing they would do is stop invading other peoples' countries and murdering them. Indeed, the 9/11 attacks were an enormous opportunity for the US ruling class to extend its control over oil supplies in the Middle East. I'm not advancing a conspiracy theory here, merely stressing something that is obvious to anyone who's glanced at this country's history: that its rulers don't give a damn for its people. All this to say that they don't really care about fighting al-Qaeda. They care primarily about their defeat insofar as it pertains to the US gaining effective control over Iraq.

That said, it must be further pointed out that the US has been all too willing to encourage al-Qaeda type ideologies in its battle for regional hegemony with Iran. As Patrick Cockburn explained last spring:

The line Bush is taking is actually rather similar to what the people who support al-Qaeda say, which is to blame whatever happens on the Shia side on Iran--to say the Shia are pawns of the Iranians, if not actual Iranians. It’s almost something that could appear on the al-Qaeda Web site, because that’s their argument.

It’s one of the most poisonous conceptions in the Middle East--one which says the Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are just Iranian pawns. It’s going to increase sectarianism in the region, and the smaller Shia minorities are going to be further repressed and victims of terrorist attacks, as they already have been in Pakistan and other places.

In seeking to turn Iraqis against Iran, the US has actually helped to legitimize the Salafist arguments that the Shi'a are mere pawns of an infidel nation. So the NR boyz argument that if we leave we will "enhance the terror group's prestige" is really quite disingenuous. If enhancing the prestige of terror groups is what will effectively block Iran from extending its regional control, then the US is more than willing to do it.

The final, "moral" argument (the shortest of the bunch, it is worth noting) is the most disgusting. It's short enough that I will quote it in full:

V. The Moral Case
THE self-interested reasons to win in Iraq are enough to justify sticking with the surge. But there are compelling moral considerations as well. In almost any other circumstance, many on the left would find these reasons sufficient in their own right to continue our intervention. Without us, there would be more suicide bombings against Shiite targets, ripping apart markets, mosques, and children standing in line to get candy. There would be more Shiite deathsquad killings, with innocent Sunnis abducted, tortured, murdered, and dumped on the streets. The ethnic cleansing already underway would accelerate, and the refugee crisis—2 million Iraqis have fled the country, and 2 million more are displaced internally—would worsen. Forthright opponents of the war admit that a humanitarian catastrophe would follow our pullout. The New York Times editorial page recently conceded that American withdrawal might bring “reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide.” Instead of summoning a ringing call of “never again,” the Times shrugs all this off as the unfortunate price of withdrawal. Barack Obama has explained that we needn’t worry overmuch about genocide in Iraq since we don’t do much to stop it in Africa. As a moral principle, this is perverse. It doesn’t follow from our inability to stop all genocides that we shouldn’t stop them when and where we can—especially in a case where stopping mass slaughter doesn’t require new intervention, but simply the continuation of what we are already doing. We also have a special obligation to Iraq. Unlike in Somalia or Kosovo, where we intervened on humanitarian grounds, we played a direct causal role in bringing about this maelstrom. Yes, Saddam Hussein did much to ruin Iraq, and the country might have fallen apart someday regardless (upon his death or overthrow, for instance). But America picked the day. The Iraqis have paid an enormous price in their struggle to found a new state—and they have paid it at our instigation. Our national honor is therefore implicated. This consideration alone would not justify the cost in blood and treasure that the war extracts, but it is another weight on the scales in favor of finishing what we started.

Note how the pious entreaties to consider the lives of innocent Shi'as and Sunnis gives way at the end to a statement that our national honor is really what counts here. As Nancy MacLean has shown in her brilliant book, Freedom is Not Enough, National Review's roots are in arguing that the Civil Rights Movement should have been met with harsher repression (apparently terrorist bombings and firehoses weren't brutal enough. These are the same people who say we could have won Vietnam if we just would have "untied the arms" of the military.) so I shouldn't be surprised by their moral degeneracy.

The argument itself is specious in the extreme. Take the refugee crisis, for example. While Iraq today is home to the worst refugee crisis on the planet, the NR boyz decline to mention that since the surge began, the rate of ethnic cleansing has actually increased. The number of internally displaced persons doubled since the surge began. The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes every month has gone from 50,000 to 60,000. The refugee crisis is in short a desperate example of why the US must leave now.

The arguments about ethnic strife are similarly disingenuous. As described above, the US is perfectly happy to inflame ethnic hatred against Shi'as if it means countering Iranian designs. Even more chillingly, through the use of "the Salvador option" the US has created an apparatus of Shi'a death squads. These squads were in essence a terror campaign to destroy the initially Sunni-led insurgency. If innocent Sunnis had to die to demobilize the insurgency, the US attitude was basically one of omelettes and eggs. While the failure of the secular left in Iraq is surely part of the reason sectarian identification remains the predominant articulation of political identity, the bulk of the culpability for the crime must lay on US hands. To bring it back the NR boyz, the single greatest blow against the sectarians would be the removal of their greatest sponsor.

To conclude, I realize that there are harder targets than the intellectual flatulence of National Review. However, it's important for our side to take down the talking points of their side. And I'm an implacable polemicist who can't resist easy targets.

The Problem with Organized Labor

This news has been breaking recently, noting that this election the AFL-CIO will commit around $53 million to "electing a pro-worker president" and "six pro-worker seats in Congress."

That is to me, dear readers, disgusting. Using statistics from the AFL-CIO website, we can find the highest-ever recorded membership count for the "nation's Union Movement" as 14,070,000 members. This means that even if private sector unionization were at the 1974-5 rate (which I would bet it is not - most numbers put it at around a stunning 8% today), this would amount to $3.77 million per member spent on the Presidential Election. I can't make this up (nor would I, if I wanted to).

What's worse, the union is committing 200,000 "regional organizers" to the task, which no matter how you slice it, means 200,000 less people organizing for the rights of workers across the country. I'll remember that the next time the national union claims understaffing as a reason for not supporting a wildcat strike.

The workingpeople of this country deserve better than $53 million for the hope that a President might listen.

Hate Crime: What about the Enablers?

The day after 20,000 people descended on Jena, Louisiana to protest the racist actions against the Jena 6, police in nearby Alexandria arrested two admitted Klansmen (one Klanschild and one adult) for driving around town with two nooses hanging out of the back of their pick up truck in order to intimidate and harass protesters. The 16 year-old told police that his entire family was in the Klan and had KKK tatoos as well as brass knuckles in the vehicle. Following the events in Jena, as well as the obvious implication of the act, one would think that no other charge could be given except that of hate crime. Yet, the police have charged the 18 year-old driver with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and the passenger with driving while intoxicated. The police report goes to absurd lengths to avoid charging the two with hate crimes as an entry says "Bias Motive: Racial Anti-Black"(another way to say 'hate crime'), leading Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy to say that he is "looking into whether the incident was a hate crime."

Firstly, let's discuss for a moment what hate crimes are:

Hate crimes differ from conventional crime because they are not directed simply at an individual, but are meant to cause fear and intimidation in an entire group or class of people.

Clearly the case of the noose hangings in Jena and Alexandria seek to intimidate a specific group of people, given the painfully recent history of Jim Crow, and the effect, like motyat points out, is instantaneous to anyone who witnesses it. In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Wisconsin v. Mitchell that

"bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest.... The State's desire to redress these perceived harms provides an adequate explanation for its penalty-enhancement provision over and above mere disagreement with offenders' beliefs or biases. As Blackstone said long ago, 'it is but reasonable that, among crimes of different natures, those should be most severely punished which are the most destructive of the public safety and happiness."

Thus, there can be no doubt that these actions were anything less than hate crimes.

To me, following motyat's post on the Jena 6, the fact that politicians and members of the criminal justice are willfully ignoring the racist nature of these crimes is pivotal for understanding the disgusting manifestations of racism aka the hanging of nooses and the confidence of not only Klansmen, but just racists shits in general, to have the confidence to rear their ugly heads. In the most recent International Socialist Review, an interview with Friends of Justice director Alan Bean, reveals the impact of the Jena District Attorney's dismissal of the act as youthful shenanigans:

The incendiary situation that sparked four days of racial violence in early December in Jena, Louisiana, was created by the very man who is now prosecuting these cases: District Attorney Reed Walters. Had Walters and Superintendent Roy Breithaupt called a hate crime by its proper name, the students of Jena High School wouldn’t have been forced to resolve issues far beyond their competence or understanding.

Short, out of school suspensions are NOT the way to stop racism nor make an example of the perpetrators of blatently racist acts.

Like the bigoted rhetoric of politicians like Rick Santorum gives confidence to gay-bashers that they are justified, or the confidence that anti-immigrant racists like Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs give rise to vigilante violence by groups such as the Minutemen and other extreme right groups, actions by the DA and other public officials who are not willing to take a call a hate crime a hate crime are PART of the problem. As history shows that we can't rely on politicians to end racism, we need to keep fighting like the 20,000 in Jena and other thousands around the rest of the country to end Jim Crow be it from a Klansmen or a politician who gives him the carte blanche.

Poisoned Gift or Second-Hand Present?

Blackwater USA finally went too far. Though they've been committing low-level atrocities outside the jurisdiction of any body with oversight capabilities for some time now, the incident last Sunday that resulted in the deaths of approximately twenty Iraqi civilians appears to have been the final straw. The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior's review, released today, concluded that Blackwater was wholey responsible for the violence, and demanded that they be replaced with Iraqi security companies (a delicious prospect, I must add. Given that the Iraqis overwhelmingly hate the the US occupation, I think that the possibility of key US diplomatic figures being placed under Iraqi care is one that anti-imperialists cannot help but relish).

The US response to this rather rude assertion of Iraqi sovereignty has been, of course, to flatly ignore it. The Yankee occupiers seem to have decided that a week of soul-searching is enough to ensure that Blackwater will cease and desist from such wanton violence in the future. This situation, I think, creates something of a problem for those seeking to blame the occupation's failure on the Iraqi government. While they insist that the al-Maliki government has the power and responsibility to stop sectarian violence, they brazenly inhibit the exercise of Iraqi sovereignty in the most basic areas. Do Iraqis have the power to determine whether insane ex-marines with automatic weapons will operate in their country with no oversight, or do they not? The US has answered decisively in the negative, and in doing so, they have ripped to shreds whatever thin veil of supposed sovereignty with which the occupiers sought to cover their war crimes.

This blatant level of imperial control is interesting, I think, in terms of larger trends in international law in the last century. China Mieville, the Marxist historian and theorist of international law, has described national sovereignty for oppressed nations as "a poisoned gift" (he takes the term from Hardt and Negri.) While on the one hand the removal of the colonial presence is undoubtedly a boon for the colonized, it also exposes starkly the dimension of internal class exploitation which an occupation often hides. At the same time, it casts the liberated country willy-nilly into the Hobbesian world of inter-imperialist rivalries.

Iraq, it seems, received this gift second-hand. The Us has already opened it, and taken all the fun toys, leaving Iraqis with little more than wrapping.

Another Blow to Legal Lynching

Another victory in the fight against the death penalty! Yesterday, Tennessee Federal judge Aleta Trauger ruled that the state's method of executing its prisoners, lethal injection, constituted cruel and unusual punishment because the victims were not properly anesthetized. This makes Tennessee the 11th state to block or halt executions based on the nature of lethal injections.

As some of you may remember, last year a California judge ruled that misshandled injections constituted cruel and unusual punishment. According to the judge, "implementation of lethal injection is broken [but] it can be fixed". Following this ruling, in December of 2006 Florida Governor Jeb Bush was forced to halt further lethal injections after the horrific execution of Angel Diaz.

In the Florida case, this is what witnesses had to say about the 'botched' execution

Witnesses said his death took more than twice the usual time - 34 minutes rather than the usual 15.

He needed a second dose of the lethal chemicals as the needles were injected straight through his veins and into the flesh of his arms.

Following the autopsy, the medical examiner concluded the injections had been wrongly administered.

He was found to have large chemical burns on both arms and his lawyer reported that the 55-year-old continued to move and mouth words more than 20 minutes after the initial dose.

Surely, proponents of lethal injection feel that this appalling treatment of human beings can be corrected if the injection is given properly. However, according to a recently published study in the Public Library of Science, lethal injection is NOT humane and can never be.

Execution by lethal injection, even if it uses tools of intensive care such as intravenous tubing and beeping heart monitors, has the same relationship to medicine that an executioner's axe has to surgery.

According to the study, despite the redundancy of the chemicals administered (each is administered in a lethal dose), no government execution is humane nor can it be.

It is not our intention to encourage further research to “improve” lethal injection protocols. As editors of a medical journal, we must ensure that research is ethical, and there is no ethical way to establish the humaneness of procedures for killing people who do not wish to die. Human research to further the ends of governments at the expense of individual lives is an obvious violation of the Declaration of Helsinki, which was conceived largely in response to the atrocities of Nazi “medicine” in order to articulate an international standard for ethical human experimentation. Whatever local law might say in a given place and time, no ethical researcher would propose a study to establish such procedures, no ethical reviewers would approve it, and no ethical journal would publish it. The acceptability of lethal injection under the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on inhumane punishment has never been established; the data presented by Koniaris and colleagues adds to the evidence that lethal injection is simply the latest in a long line of execution methods that have been found to be inhumane. It is time for the US to join the majority of countries worldwide in recognizing that there is no humane way of forcibly killing someone.

Like motyat might say: death penalty apologists, your argument is a nonstarter, and they proved it with science. YAHTZEE.

Welcome to the Dark Ages

The World Health Organization today reported a cholera case which appeared in Baghdad. It might have been bad enough that Iraq is seeing the re-emergence of a disease that is fatal only 1% of the time if treated and nearly nonexistent in developed countries (Wikipedia never lies). But it gets worse: the reason this is even making headlines is that it means that a disease which had been endemic to northern Iraq has spread south.

Why is this acceptable to us? Why does the mainstream media not balk at the fact that cholera should not exist in the modern world, let alone outside of "third world" countries? What's more, the NYT.com article noted above interviews several who criticize the al-Maliki government for inaction on this point. Where is the criticism of the occupation which is ravaging Iraq so badly that it faces impending epidemic from treatable diseases? The U.S. occupation is the cause of this cholera scare, not the al-Maliki administration.

Shut Up, Congressman

Peter King (R-NY), had this to say, recently:

Unfortunately, we have too many mosques in this country. There are too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully. We should be finding out how we can infiltrate. We should be much more aggressive in law enforcement.

This is after August, 2006, where the man proposed using racial profiling openly as a law enforcement tool.

Sounds good to me, Congressman. I think, unfortunately, that we have too many closed offices in this country. There are too many people sympathetic to radical imperialism. We should be looking at them more carefully. We should be finding out how we can infiltrate. We should be much more aggressive in law enforcement. Maybe we could have special checkpoints for middle-aged men of white-ish American descent. Oh, was that racist? I didn't mean it that way. What I meant was that, while not all white men are war criminals, all the most recent war criminals are white men.

Hanging from a Hollow Tree

This week is record-breaking in its intensity of racism. It's time to talk about the Jena Six. The assumption for this article is that if you are a regular reader of General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle, you are probably already familiar with the Jena Six, and possibly organizing to support them. If this assumption is not apt, brush up on Jim Crow-era court behavior here.

What concerns me in this article is the recent homogeneity that has appeared in the reaction to activism surrounding the Jena Six. The counterargument to the idea that the Jena Six should be acquitted in self-defense runs as follows: the children who hung the nooses from the "White Tree" to scare off black students (remember, their only crime at this point was to attempt to sit under this tree) "were just playing." It is understandable to doubt that people would actually make this argument, so I provide evidence here and here.

A lot of things could be said at this point. The activist would claim that racism and threats of lynching are not "joking." And she'd be correct. The polemicist would claim that the movement for the freedom of the Jena Six should be blasting the bigots brazen enough to say these things, and he'd be correct, as well.

But this author is a linguist, and so will take those arguments as given, and present a bit of a diversion to point out that there is, theoretically, no such thing as "joking" here. Christopher Potts, a linguist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has done a lot of work in recent years on "expressives" the class of linguistic items that contains racial epithets. He argues in his work that "expressives do not so much offer content, as inflict it [emphasis mine --MT]." This means that epithets are not simply words that can be used willy-nilly, but instead have more in common with speech acts.

One defining characteristic about a speech act (and particularly the class of items known as expressives) is that it is immediate, which is to say that, once uttered/completed, its impact is immediate, and there is no going back. Potts illustrates this in his paper "The Expressive Dimension" (available here, though it will be hard-going for the non-linguist once Potts deploys his theoretical machinery) with an ingenious anecdote: a newly-instated superintendent at a mixed-race school district nearly loses his job after saying, in the opening of a speech: "To me, niggers come in all colors. To me, a nigger is someone who doesn't respect himself or others."

Potts notes that the superintendent's intentions were pure, and the then asks the question: why was he unable to redefine the meaning of the epithet, as he was trying to do? Here we begin to mix issues for Potts, but the answer is that once he had said the word, the damage was already done. Potts goes on to show, formally, how this notion can and should be captured in theories of natural language semantics/pragmatics.

The point of all this? It's impossible to joke about lynching, as the rebuttals claim. The very act of hanging nooses from the White Tree inflicts its content in the same way that giving the middle finger makes an American driver instantaneously angry, even if meant lovingly. A joke, by nature, needs to have ironic or humorous content associated with it, but it is that very association which is blocked in the immediacy of displaying a noose in a part of the south where memories of KKK lynchings run thick.

And while that was a long digression, let me say this in conclusion to apologists for white-noose-hangers: your argument is a nonstarter, and I just proved it with science.

Who Needs Gas?

This news story is firing all over the wires as you point your browsers to GYTIAPW, dear readers, and it scares me to death. Let's make Derrida proud and do a bit of deconstructing:

Under a plan proposed by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israel would disrupt electrical supplies, reduce fuel shipments to a bare minimum to run hospital generators, and choke off shipments of goods to allow only essential food and medicine to enter Gaza. In addition, it will continue military operations "against terror organizations."

Disrupting electrical supplies, fuel shipments, and food/medicine, huh? Let's set aside for a moment the ever-present horror of how what Israel says is going through checkpoints never actually does. Even assuming that Israel allows "the minimum" of these things into Gaza, it still sounds eerily to me like something I've read about elsewhere. But never fear, Gazans! It's not all bad:

The ministers, however, voted not to disrupt the water supply to Gaza, the home of 1.4 million Palestinians.

Oh, how gracious of you, Israel. Especially considering that Gaza already suffers from a massive water crisis. I guess you cannot disrupt what does not exist.

Finally, let's talk about this textbook example of what would get you a Weekly Dave, had I not already handed it out this week:

An Israeli government statement said, "The Hamas organization is a terror organization that seized control of the Gaza Strip and turned into a hostile area. This organization carries out hostile actions against the state of Israel and its citizens and are responsible for this activity."

I just want to remind readers that Hamas was democratically elected. But even barring that for a moment, the comment about Gaza's citizens being responsible for Gaza's actions, while standard rhetoric for Israel, simply proves my point. So at this point, I will claim QED.

This is just further proof that Israel's actions, both in Gaza and the West Bank, constitute massive human rights violations. This latest move is, I say again, collective punishment. We need to organize and fight it, before there's no Gaza left.

Sometimes Dems Make it Easy

The authors on this blog can easily be, and often are, berated by mainstream liberals for our unflinching criticism of the Democratic Party. With catchphrases like "the graveyard of social movements" (imagine what we call our significant others, with pet names like that!), it's no wonder that in both 2000 and 2004 the three of us constituted three more votes for G.W.

But sometimes, the Democratic Party makes our jobs easy. One of those times was when two of the authors were thrown out of Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)'s office during a rally because our Palestinian flag "made the issue too real for constituents." Another one of those moments was when Howard Dean attempted to remove my friend from a dinner and Q&A session despite the fact that my friend had been instrumental to bringing Dean to Cornell. His crime? Being associated with a group of hair-brained radicals who dropped a banner demanding Dean take a stand on the Iraq war.

And then there's this newest development. University of Florida police officers tasered a student for asking too many questions. Interesting is that while the University of Florida President has apologized for the incident (which makes sense, since UCLA got slammed for similar actions), the Kerry orgainzation has made, to my knowledge, no comment about the incident, or even the shutting-off of the student's microphone when he asked about black voter disenfranchisement, which provoked the incident.

The conclusion here? Like Michael Moore, true activists or lefties asking real questions are personae non gratae from the Democratic Party. While I understand the draw of the Party in the 2008 elections to voters tired of eight years of Republican autocracy, and am happy to organize with these people here and into the future, I think we can do much better.Publish Post

Remembering Brown v. Board (The Weekly Dave)

This author has been MIA recently because of a move across country, but now has working internet, and managed to hang his six-foot posted of Lenin the other day, so writing for General, Your Tank... can now resume with all due diligence.

With that, here's this week's Weekly Dave. The Tuscaloosa School District responded to complaints about overcrowding by forcibly moving hundreds of minority students. Congratulations, folks, for being so racist that even the New York Times had to analogize your actions to George Wallace's.