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Police body cameras are all the rage lately. Al Sharpton wants them used to monitor the activities of cops. Ann Coulter wants them used to shut down Al Sharpton. The White House wants them because, well, theyre a way to look both tough on police violence and tough on crime by spending $263 million on new law enforcement technology.

When Al Sharpton, Ann Coulter and the president of the United States agree on anything, my immediate, visceral reaction is extreme skepticism. In this case, the known facts support that skepticism.

Its exceedingly unlikely that widespread use of police body cameras would reduce the rate or severity of unjustified police violence. Weve already seen the results of numerous technology solutions to that problem.

The introduction of mace and tasers to police weapons inventories encouraged a hair-trigger attitude toward encounters with suspects (suspect being law enforcement-speak for anyone who isnt a cop). Their supposed non-lethality made it safer to substitute violent action for peaceful talk.

The introduction of military weaponry and vehicles to policing hasnt produced de-escalation either. Quite the opposite, in fact now we get to watch small-town police departments stage frequent re-enactments of the Nazi occupation of Paris in towns across America.

And police car dash cams? Thats obviously the most direct comparison. But the dash cam always seems to malfunction, or the police department mysteriously loses its output, when a credible claim of abusive police behavior arises.

On the other hand, its absolutely certain that widespread use of police body cameras would increase the scope and efficacy of an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state.

The White House proposal calls for an initial rollout of 50,000 cameras. Does anyone doubt that the output of those cameras would be kept, copied, cross-referenced and analyzed against law enforcement databases (including but not limited to facial recognition databases) on a continuing basis?

Assuming a camera attaches to a particular officer with an eight hour shift (rather than being passed around at shift changes for 24-hour use), thats 400,000 hours per day of random warrantless searches to be continuously mined for probable cause to investigate and arrest people. Even George Orwell didnt go so far as to have 1984s Thought Police carry portable cameras everywhere they went!

Video technology is certainly part of the solution to police violence, but that solution should remain in the hands of regular people, not the state. More and more of us every day come into possession of the ability to record video on the spot, while instantly porting it to Internet storage so that it cant be destroyed at the scene or tampered with after the fact. Cops need to be on cameras they dont control.

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Police should not be behind the camera, they should be on-camera

Ann Coulter - I Supported Romney Because He Proposed Self Deportation Of Illegal Aliens
From Blogger #39;s Briefing on Immigration, CPAC 2014.

By: maroonedinmarin

See the article here:
Ann Coulter - I Supported Romney Because He Proposed Self Deportation Of Illegal Aliens - Video

A few days ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks took the occasion of the outrage in Ferguson, Missouri, to call for a national effort to combat classism, an unfortunate form of prejudice that, he says, results from widening inequality. Nowadays, Brooks asserted, classism intertwines with racism to produce a truly monstrous complex of attitudes toward the people at societys bottom.

If you are a newcomer to the culture-war labyrinth, you might be surprised to hear a leading conservative deplore classism, because its the rights beloved free-market system that has opened the yawning crevasse between the classesbetween the people who work and the people who own. But in truth class grievance is central to the cosmology of modern conservatism. They love nothing more than to denounce snobberyjust as long as they are able to attribute that vice to scholarly liberal weaklings who disdain the plainspoken ways of middle America. David Brooks himself wrote one of the best-known iterations of this stereotype, back in the days when people were just beginning to associate red states with proletarian authenticity and blue states with upper-class pretension. (And back in October, he argued against the scourge of partyism.)

When Brooks skewers the tastes of the liberal professional class, he often does it in a self-effacing way. He presents himself as one of them, a liberal manqu, and his message to red-state America is: Youre right to distrust them/us. But consider the right-wing classism critique as it has been enunciated by a very different writer, in a 2003 book that is probably best forgotten:

Liberals thrive on the attractions of snobbery. Only when you appreciate the powerful driving force of snobbery in the liberals worldview do all their preposterous counterintuitive arguments make sense. They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs.

The writer here is Ann Coulter, and though it may seem unfair to associate her poisonous prose with the thoughtful stylings of David Brooks, I do so for a reason. She and he are on the same political team, roughly speaking, and if you can make your way through the smoke and the shrill, you can see the conservative mind beginning to change.

The critical line in the Coulter passage above is about the way liberals embrace criminals. After each incident of outrageous police brutality of the last few decades, liberals have generally sympathized with the victim, while conservatives have reached for the law-and-order megaphone, closing ranks with the police and even presenting them as blue-collar heroes. This goes back at least to the Kerner Commission, which was appointed to investigate the urban riots of the 1960s (it famously found that police forces were often seen by black residents as an occupying force) but which wound up being used to stoke the white backlash. Since then, race vs. class has become the insane script for everything from the Henry Louis Gates controversy back in 2009 through the shooting of Trayvon Martin and even the recent events in Ferguson.

The twist Brooks is putting on this narrative is something new. He doesnt even mention liberals in the article. Today we once again have a sharp social divide between people who live in the respectable meritocracy and those who live beyond it, he writes.

People in the respectable class have meritocratic virtues: executive function, grit, a capacity for delayed gratification. The view about those in the untouchable world is that they are short on these things. They are disorganized. They are violent and scary. This belief has some grains of truth because of childhood trauma, the stress of poverty and other things. But this view metastasizes into a vicious, intellectually lazy stereotype. Before long, animalistic imagery is used to describe these human beings.

Brooks gives us no examples of some respectable someone indulging in such a stereotype, so its difficult to understand who he has in mind or what political effects he wants his accusation to have. But he is certainly expanding the familiar right-wing class grievance in a remarkable way. Now its not merely the police whom professional-class snobs dont understand, but their victims as well. We privileged folks can blog as earnestly as we want, but thanks to the class divide, we still dont really know what life is like in Ferguson, Missouri, or Cleveland, Ohio, or even in certain reaches of New York City.

Perhaps Brooks was moved to write this as an act of conscience. Maybe hes noticed that toxicity has taken over in the GOP. Perhaps hes realized that the decades-long conservative project of highlighting the pathologies of the underclass has been little more than an excuse for doing nothing at all to address racial grievances.

See more here:
Thomas Frank: Ann Coulter and David Brooks play a sneaky, unserious class card

Today is Monday, Dec. 8, the 342nd day of 2014 with 23 to follow.

The moon is waning. Morning stars are Jupiter, Mercury and Saturn. Evening stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus and Venus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include Mary Queen of Scots in 1542; Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, in 1765; General Motors founder William Durant and French movie pioneer Georges Melies, both in 1861; Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in 1865; Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in 1886; humorist and artist James Thurber in 1894; actor Lee J. Cobb in 1911; entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. in 1925; actor Maximilian Schell in 1930 (age 84); comedian Flip Wilson in 1933; actors David Carradine in 1936 and James MacArthur in 1937; Irish flutist James Galway in 1939 (age 75); Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members Jim Morrison in 1943 and Gregg Allman in 1947 (age 67); writer Bill Bryson in 1951 (age 63); actors Kim Basinger in 1953 (age 61) and Teri Hatcher in 1964 (age 50); political commentator Ann Coulter in 1961 (age 53); Irish singer/songwriter Sinead O'Connor in 1966 (age 48); actor Dominic Monaghan in 1976 (age 38); and rap artist Nicki Minaj in 1982 (age 32).

On this date in history:

In 1886, delegates from 25 unions founded the American Federation of Labor, forerunner of the modern AFL-CIO, in Columbus, Ohio.

In 1941, the United States, Britain and Australia declared war on Japan.

In 1949, the Chinese Nationalist government, defeated by the Communists, retreated from the mainland to the island of Taiwan.

In 1980, former Beatle John Lennon was shot to death outside his apartment building in New York City. He was 40.

In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the first treaty between the two superpowers to reduce their massive nuclear arsenals.

In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist when the republics of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine signed an agreement creating the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Read more:
UPI Almanac for Monday, Dec. 8, 2014

The Ann Coulter Hang Ups
Ann Coulter Hang-Ups shows Coulter repeatedly punting and ending interviews instead of answering valid questions about her defense of Romney who instituted #39;gay #39; marriage funded elective...

By: Bob Enyart

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The Ann Coulter Hang Ups - Video