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[click image]Fed’s Search of Twittering Anarchist UpheldI want to know what it is about bits of news like this that is ambiguous... how you can read it and go about your thing without seeing that all this partisan squabbling and even all this tearing out tufts of hair over election integrity is just outright ludicrous in the face of what's really happening....
By Ryan Singel | November 4, 2009 | 7:25 pm
Federal authorities can resume combing through the notebooks, memory cards and computers of a twittering anarchist being investigated for violating an anti-rioting law, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.
U.S. district court judge Dora L. Irizzary found no reason to throw out the government’s search of the home of a 41-year old social worker who used the micro-publishing service Twitter to help anti-globalization protestors at the recent G-20 convention, clearing the way for the feds to look through the evidence they collected. Madison and his attorney sought to have his possessions returned unexamined, on the grounds the search violated his constitutional rights to free speech.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Elliott Madison’s house in a dawn raid on October 1, seizing myriad computers, unpublished manuscripts, phones and books from the social worker, his urban planner wife and his housemates. The materials were seized as evidence in a federal grand jury investigation of whether Madison violated a rarely-used federal statute that makes it a crime to help rioters.
Madison, an anarchist and prolific writer, seems to have drawn the attention of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office after he was arrested in a Pittsburgh motel room on September 24 for legally listening to a police scanner and then tweeting the information. During the G-20 summit, heavily armed police officers reacted to the anti-globalization protesters with tear gas, sonic weapons, rubber bullets and mass arrests. Madison was in jail during the height of the confrontation, charged with criminal use of a communication facility.
When protesters in Iran similarly used Twitter to organize anti-government rallies, the U.S. State Department hailed the micro-blogging service as a boon to democracy.
The Department of Justice is not so easily persuaded of the service’s usefulness. While Madison has not been charged by the feds, the rioting law he’s suspected of violating carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.
After the subsequent raid of Madison’s home in Queens, New York, Madison’s lawyer Martin Stolar won an emergency stay, prohibiting the police from looking through the evidence they’d taken. Stolar sought to have the search thrown out on the grounds it violated the Constitution, but in a short ruling, the judge rejected those arguments Monday and lifted the temporary stay.
Now police must sort through the evidence, make copies of hard drives and memory cards and return the electronics and the non-germane possessions.
Stolar asked the judge for another emergency stay while he appealed the decision to the appeals court, but the judge rejected that motion and warned Stolar to stop pestering the judge with non-emergency phone calls to chambers.
Madison is a social worker in New York with no previous convictions. He argues that the so-called anarchist gear the feds seized, including handheld radios, a pick axe, knee pads and gas masks, are for his civilian defense work. That assertion is backed up by a YouTube video made prior to the raid, describing the usefulness of the various tools in case of a disaster, such as Hurricane Katrina, which led Madison and his wife to volunteer in Louisiana.
The U.S. Attorney’s office says it can not comment on an open grand jury investigation.
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[click image]Half of US kids depend on food stamps during childhood: study
(AFP) WASHINGTON — Nearly half of all US children, including an overwhelming majority of black children, will eat meals at some point during their childhood paid for by food stamps, an indicator of poverty, a study showed Monday.
"If you get food stamps, you are by definition in poverty and your household doesn't have many assets," said Mark Rank, a co-author of the study with Thomas Hirschl of Cornell University.
"The fact that half of American children at some time during their childhood find themselves in this position really ought to be a wake-up call to America," he told AFP.
The study found that 49.2 percent of all American children will at some point live in a home that receives food stamps.
Among black children and children living in single-parent households, the percentage is much higher: around 90 percent live in homes that receive food stamps at one stage or another.
And nearly all black children in single parent homes where the head of household has less than a high school education live in financial and food insecurity during part of their childhood, the study says.
The study, which was published Monday in the American Medical Association's Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, is based on an analysis of a 32-year study of some 4,800 US households.
It concluded that American children face the highest levels of poverty and social deprivation of any children growing up in Western developed nations, and they have the flimsiest social safety net to fall back on.
"It's always been weak, particularly compared with European countries or Canada or other industrialized countries," said Rank, a professor at the school of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
"One of the reasons why our rates of poverty are so high is because we do so little in terms of trying to protect families from getting into poverty. We have to cast our safety net wider," he said.
Poverty and food insecurity are "two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child's health" and tag 22 billion dollars a year onto US health care costs, the study said.
"Children in poverty are significantly more likely to experience a range of health problems, including low birth weight, lead poisoning, asthma, mental health disorders, delayed immunization, dental problems and accidental death," it said.
"There's a strong connection between poverty, health and mental health," said Rank and the detrimental effects of growing up poor, even if just for a short period, often carry over into adulthood, he said.
An earlier study conducted by Rank and Hirschl showed that half of American adults resort to food stamps to put a meal in their stomachs.
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[click image]...This should be enough to make you wish to quit engaging in the plutocrats' game of keeping you embroiled in endless polemics. We should not be gleefully dissing the snot out of the uprising of the-not-really-that-far-right. We should be howling in outrage that their movement -- based on real existential hardships, that ARE the fault of government -- has been coöpted by the moneyed interests, the fascists, to both help prevent any moves that tend toward the general welfare and to give the Democratic fascists cover for not delivering those.
THE MOST DELICIOUS moment in the recent Palin brouhaha, after all, was her classic fuckup in the days after her resignation, when she slipped up while arguing that as president she wouldn’t have to deal with the persecution she faced as Alaska governor. “I think on a national level your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said, apparently unaware that there is no federal “Department of Law.”
This amazing gaffe reminded everyone of what we might have to look forward to in 2012, when the Republican Party may well nominate a woman who would lose at Trivial Pursuit to a Chilean sea bass, who makes George W. Bush look like Sir Isaac Newton. What’s incredible about Palin isn’t that she has a few gaps in her knowledge base, but that she doesn’t know anything about anything at all; she moreover doesn’t seem to feel the need to make sure one idea follows the next when she talks, instead just blurting out random unconnected bits and pieces of deep-seated resentment and persecution complex. Even ideological consistency is an alien concept to her (she wears her religious fundamentalism on her sleeve, but lets her unmarried daughter shack up with a human hard-on in the next room over) and she appears to resent the notion that it shouldn’t be.
All of which makes Sarah Palin the perfect leader for the inevitable pushback against the Obama era, when America in a vague and superficial sort of way decided to celebrate the values of culture, tolerance and knowledge. The other America doesn’t read and doesn’t remember anything it didn’t learn in the last five minutes; it’s angry and unhappy but doesn’t want to think about why, and knows only that it wants someone to pay the price for what it feels.
These people don’t want a president who reads Urdu poetry, they want a president who thinks Urdu is a Swedish dog food and doesn’t care if you know it. Just like them, Sarah Palin is now an unemployed loser who lost her job and her status thanks to forces beyond her comprehension and thinks she knows exactly whom to blame – laugh at her now if you like, but see if her humiliating exit doesn’t turn out to be the hole card that wins her the Republican nomination.
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No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."
If in your travels you meet the Buddha, throw him through your tv set.
—Davis Fleetwood
I've found that culture, however useful and important, is neither the foundation nor the ceiling of human experience, even if it is commonly used for walls.
I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States. —Hillary Clinton
