Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)
Ed Brayton is a participant in the Center for Independent Media New Journalism Program. However, all of the statements, opinions, policies, and views expressed on this site are solely Ed Brayton's. This web site is not a production of the Center, and the Center does not support or endorse any of the contents on this site.
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Here's one of the more appalling cases you'll ever hear of a cop getting off, first literally and then figuratively. Cop pulls over stripper, ejaculates on her during the traffic stop and is acquitted of any wrongdoing. The basic facts:
No one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.
When the case went to trial, however, defense attorney Al Stokke argued that Park wasn't responsible for making sticky all over the woman's sweater. He insisted that she made the married patrolman make the mess--after all, she was on her way home from work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.
"She got what she wanted," said Stokke. "She's an overtly sexual person."
You might remember the story about a school in Ohio whose mission statement declared belief in God as one of the values the school supports. It looks like they may be changing that statement:
The Lake Local Schools Board of Edcuation gave temporary approval to a change in two policies that involve the school district's mission statement in response to the possibility of a lawsuit by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
The change involves removing the phrase of valuing a "belief in God" but leaving in a phrase about valuing religious freedom. The board will vote on giving final approval to the change at the next board meeting, Jan. 11.
But it passed with less support this year than last year, which is good news. Reuters reports:
The U.N. General Assembly condemned defamation of religion for the fifth year running on Friday but support continued to erode for a resolution Western countries say threatens freedom of speech.
The assembly passed the Islamic-sponsored resolution with 80 votes in favor, 61 against and 42 abstentions. That compared with 86 votes to 53 with 42 abstentions for a similar text last year and figures of 108-51-25 in 2007, the last time the measure commanded an absolute majority of U.N. members.
As you probably know, Washington DC got hit by a massive snowstorm on Saturday. That prompted a whole lot of people to have a big snowball fight at the corner of 14th and U. The idea spread on Twitter and Facebook accounts and lots of people showed up and had a peaceful time throwing snowballs at each other.
Until a cop drove by in his hummer and got it hit by snowballs. He decided to jump out and start waving a gun around -- without bothering to identify himself. And naturally, the police are lying about it and claiming he didn't do so despite pictures of him waving his gun around and video of his admission to having done so because he got hit by a snowball. The Washington City Paper reports:
The Worldnutdaily has its typically hysterical overreaction to the fact that a Muslim mosque has opened just a few blocks from where the World Trade Center was before 9/11. Never mind that the head of the mosque is a guy who works with the FBI teaching Islamic culture to their agents and has helped the United States in reaching out to the Muslim world to repair the damage done by Abu Ghraib and other atrocities. He's a Muslim and Muslims are terrorists, dontcha know, so get that outrage machine cranked up.
The funny thing is that they can't even find some mildly respected right winger to inveigh against this so they have to quote anonymous commenters on unnamed blogs instead, saying things like this:
Or so it would appear, unless the judge refuses to accept a ridiculous plea deal.
A former Texas police officer who used a taser on his girlfriend during a fight is expected to get a plea deal that would keep him out of prison, KXXV reported Thursday. Oly Ivy was charged with aggravated assault after he shocked his live-in girlfriend, Amanda Juaraz, twice in the stomach and once in the face. If the judge accepts the plea deal, Ivy will received one year of probation and anger management classes.
Whenever a court rules in favor of something the religious right doesn't like, we hear about the horrors of "unelected judges" imposing their will on our duly elected representatives. So what happens when duly elected representatives vote for something the religious right doesn't like? Well sorry, but that's not enough either. If you don't let them vote on every policy they feel strongly about directly, you've violated their right to vote. So says the National Organization of Marriage after the Washington DC city council voted overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex marriage:
Balko has an article at Reason about the rampant corruption in the Chicago Police Department and the fact that they're actually working to become even less accountable than they already are - which scarcely seems possible. He recounts some of the recent scandals there:
You can certainly understand why someone would want to get a planned interaction with Chicago police on tape. In the last few years, the department has been hit with scandals of egregious police misconduct that, had they not been captured on tape, likely would either never have been investigated, or the investigation wouldn't have been based on what actually happened.
The most famous incident was footage of an off-duty cop viciously beating a female bartender who refused to continue serving him in 2007. He wasn't even charged until three months later, after the surveillance video surfaced on the Internet, generating worldwide outrage. There are other examples: six cops beating two men in a bar brawl; a video of a fatal police shooting in a subway station where officer accounts of the incident don't match the video footage. The department also recently disciplined two officers after a video showed up on the Internet showing a Chicago PD unit posing for a trophy photo with a protester they had apprehended earlier this year at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.
Well this was a fun night all the way around. Went with a couple friends to go see the Verve Pipe in Grand Rapids. Verve Pipe is a local band who became a one-hit wonder in the 90s with the song Freshmen. But they've long been one of my favorites and they have a lot of great material other than that song (which was better in the original acoustic version they put out locally than the one that ended up being a hit).
Brian Vander Ark, the singer and leader of the band, is really a great songwriter. And they have guitarist AJ Dunning back in the group after a few years away. But now they're using an expanded lineup, with a harmonica player and a horn line. They just put out an album of mostly songs for kids, a few of which they did at this show. They weren't bad, though a bit silly.
That law degree that Orly Taitz got through the mail is looking about as legitimate as Kent Hovind's "doctorate" right about now as she continually screws up her filings in case after case. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed another birther case filed by Taitz because she didn't file the right paperwork.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed an appeal by an Army reservist who sought to avoid deployment to Afghanistan because he questioned President Barack Obama's eligibility as president.
The reason: he didn't file the appropriate paperwork needed for the appeal.
If you didn't see this brilliant takedown of Glenn Beck on the Daily Show, you have to see it. Beck has a clear conflict of interest here, being a paid spokesman for a company that makes money when the price of gold goes up while simultaneously telling his listeners to buy gold. And as is often the case, comedy tells the story far better than a media article could.
Amy Goodman isn't the only one having trouble at the U.S./Canada border. A Canadian writer named Peter Watts was apparently roughed up at the border trying to come into Michigan. My buddy DarkSyd knows Watts and has an interview with him at the Orlando Examiner.
[F]or three f*&%ing hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation ... dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my [freaking] paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots.
I'll say the same thing I said when Goodman was detained: This is no way for a free, democratic nation to behave.
Dozens of convictions for drunk driving are suspect now that a routine audit of a crime lab in Colorado Springs showed that the results of those tests were typically overstated by the lab's testing.
Prosecutors have begun contacting lawyers for 82 defendants whose drunken driving charges were based in part upon incorrect blood alcohol tests by the Colorado Springs police crime lab.
In each of the cases, test results reported by the forensic chemist unit of the Metro Crime Lab were higher that the actual results, police officials disclosed Friday.
After all of the debate in the comments on my post about FIRE's annual report on speech codes on college campuses, I'd like to tell the story of one of the most important disputes over free speech at universities in our history.
In the early 1970s, a Nobel Prize laureate named William Schockley -- inventor of the junction transistor -- spent most of his time touring around the country giving speeches on college campuses about the genetic inferiority of blacks. Needless to say, this caused a great deal of controversy. In 1973, he came to speak at Staten Island Community College and was greeted, as always, with counterprotests and demands that he not be allowed to speak.
Another appalling case of a life ruined because of a consensual sexual relationship between teenagers -- and from Michigan, which leads the nation in the highest number of residents per capita on the sex offender list by a wide margin. Matthew Freeman had sex with his 15 year old girlfriend when he was 17 and how he is listed as a sex offender for the next 25 years. And he was arrested recently because he lives with his mother, who lives within 1000 feet of a school.
The Supreme Court denied certiorari in Rasul v Rumsfeld, a lawsuit from four British citizens against several high ranking Bush administration officials for their detention and abuse at Guantanamo Bay. That leaves the appeals court ruling in place, which said that the Bush officials were protected by qualified immunity because it wasn't clear at the time they were tortured that torture was illegal.
Here are a couple more instances of DNA exonerating an innocent person wrongly convicted of a crime, courtesy of Balko. In the first case, a man spent 28 years in prison for rape and murder until finally being proven innocent.
Donald Gates was convicted of the savage 1981 attack on 21-year-old Catherine Schilling as she walked home from work through Rock Creek Park. He has always maintained his innocence.
Two separate DNA tests have vindicated him and prosecutors are preparing to have him released during a hearing in D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday, a top law enforcement source told The Examiner.
This time in SeaTac, Washington, where the city has plans for an entertainment complex by the airport to keep travelers nearby to spend their money - and they're not taking no for an answer from those who already have thriving businesses there.
James and Doris Cassan own a park and fly business in the area the city wants to development. They want to replace the parking lot there with a new parking garage for their new entertainment complex. The Cassans signed an agreement with the city to form a mixed-use development in the area but now the city just wants them out so they can take it over.
I'll be talking to Mary Kane, the financial correspondent for the Washington Independent, about the financial regulation bill working its way through Congress.
And I'll be talking to Eartha Melzer, the environmental reporter for the Michigan Messenger, about Dow, dioxin and corporate-funded research.
As always, you can listen between 6 and 7 pm EST by clicking here.
George Carlin famously joked about how God, according to the televangelists, always needs money - "He's all knowing, all powerful and all wise, but somehow he can't hold on to money." He could also have pointed out that the televangelists -- who are, as Rick Overton once declared, the pro wrestlers of religion -- always blame it on Satan when there isn't enough of the green stuff flowing in. The Columbus Dispatch reports on Rod Parsley's desperate plea for donations:
Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
