Video footage has emerged of a police officer beating an Iraq war veteran so hard that he suffered a ruptured spleen in an apparently unprovoked incident at a recent Occupy protest in California.
The footage, which has been shared with the Guardian, shows Kayvan Sabehgi standing in front of a police line on the night of Occupy Oakland’s general strike on 2 November, when he is set upon by an officer.
He does not appear to be posing any threat, nor does he attempt to resist, yet he is hit numerous times by an officer clad in riot gear who appears determined to beat him to the ground.
Sabehgi, 32, an Oakland resident and former marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has since undergone surgery on his spleen. He says it took hours for him to be taken to hospital, despite complaining of severe pain. Police have told the Guardian they are investigating the incident.
The police are unionized public workers. The protesters are fighting for the rights of unionized public workers, among other things. Why are the police fighting against their own self-interests and for the destruction of our country?
The asshole who sprayed the protesters is undoubtedly a right-winger fed propaganda from Fox “news” and Rush Limbaugh. He’s a brownshirt for the fascist takeover of our country.
In a case that may lend itself to comparison with the current sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed the Penn State football program, a teacher, two pastors, and a former principal were all arrested Thursday in El Paso County. A grand jury has indicted the teacher for having sexually assaulted a 15-year-old male student at Hilltop Baptist School beginning in 2007, and the other three for covering it up.
According to the indictment, the teacher, 32-year-old Terah Allyn Rawlings, has been charged with eight counts in all: four counts of sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust-pattern of abuse (a class 3 felony), four counts of sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust (a class 4 felony), and obscenity promotion (a class 2 misdemeanor).
KRDO reports the teacher allegedly had a relationship with the boy for two and a half years, beginning when he was 15. Anonymous sources told the station the school covered up the relationship until a staff member called the sheriff against the school’s permission.
Hilltop Baptist School’s senior pastor, 63-year-old Franklin “Wayne” Knight, was also arrested. Knight is Rawlings’s uncle.
Rawlings’s father, 57-year-old Raymond “Alan” Knight, the school’s former athletic director and associate pastor, has been arrested as well and charge with failure to report child abuse or neglect. The school’s Facebook page boasts Alan was the 2011 Division 1A coach of the year.
Jan Ocvirk, the school’s former principal, was also arrested. She faces two counts of failure to report child abuse or neglect.
It is illegal to send out newsletters without allowing the user a way to opt out, but I guess that’s “socialism” to an idiot right-winger. I’ve reported it to Earthlink, where this hate-filled, lying bastard has his email address.
Please spam this email address: blacktygrrrr@earthlink.net
When Daily Kos community member marvinborg was distributing flyers outside of local Chase and Bank of America branches encouraging customers to move their money to credit unions, one of the managers called the police on him. When they arrived, the police promptly told the manager off:
“He has the right to speak and the right to hand out flyers. Unless he blocks you or causes a disturbance, he has the right to be here – please don’t call the police again if he is not bothering you. If you don’t like free speech you should move to another country.”
Much more than a movement against big banks, they’re a rejection of what our society has become.
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he’s not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That’s what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
Jerry Sandusky, the longtime Penn State defensive coordinator who is facing a 40-count indictment on felony sex abuse charges, is a registered Republican, according to records from the Pennsylvania Department of State:
These perverts are almost always religious Christians and Republicans.
A group of Middle Tennessee conservatives is suing a California businessman for $19 million, claiming he tricked them into investing in a sham business idea for a television network devoted to the tea party movement.
Among those suing is Bill Hemrick, the Brentwood millionaire who is the Tennessee financial director for Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Hemrick has been active in tea party circles in Williamson County, helping to organize the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville in 2010 that was headlined by Sarah Palin. He worked briefly raising money for presidential candidate Herman Cain.
Hemrick and the other plaintiffs — Howard Luartes, Reinhold Holtkamp and Melvin W. Martin of Williamson County; James Hearn of Davidson County; and James Huffnagle of Dickson County — ultimately invested $287,500 in the tea party television venture.
Hemrick and Anthony Loiacono founded Tea Party HD in 2010, but Hemrick and the other investors now claim in the lawsuit that Loiacono never kicked in his own promised investment and used the plaintiffs’ money as his own “personal bank account” to pay himself, his family members and his business, Heads & Tails Inc., “exorbitant rates” for the few projects Tea Party HD undertook.
What happened to personal responsibility? They should have done some research before investing in this scheme. And now they want the taxpayers to foot the bill for the lawsuit. Tax dollars pay for the courthouse buildings, roads to get there, government workers to do all the paperwork, the judges salary…
A woman named Sharon Bialek, flanked by attorney Gloria Allred, said at a news conference Monday that the presidential candidate reached under her skirt and tried to push her head toward his crotch in a parked car in 1997. Bialek is a former staffer of the National Restaurant Association who says she was seeking to regain her job.
According to Bialek, the two were having dinner when Cain informed her that he had upgraded her hotel room to what she described as a “palatial suite.” When she mentioned her boyfriend and said she wanted “my job back,” Cain said he would “look into that,” Bialik said.
While driving back from dinner, Cain said he would show her the restaurant association’s offices and parked down the block. Then, according to Bialek, he slid his hand “under my skirt and reached for my genitals. He also grabbed my head and brought it toward his crotch.”
When she protested, mentioning her boyfriend, Bialek says Cain replied: “You want a job, right?”
WASHINGTON — The White House Counsel’s Office has formally rejected a congressional subpoena of documents relating to the $535 million loan guarantee that the administration shepherded for Solyndra, the now-defunct solar energy company.
In a letter to the chairs of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Kathryn H. Ruemmler, counsel to the president, calls the request for documents made by House Republicans a “vast fishing expedition” and a “significant intrusion on Executive Branch interests.”
“As written, [the subpoena] encompasses all communications within the White House from the beginning of this Administration to the present that refer or relate to Solyndra, and the subpoena purports to demand a complete response in less than a week,” Ruemmler writes. “Thus, any document that references Solyndra, even in passing, is arguably responsive to the Committee’s request, and you reaffirmed this week that you intend for the request to be that broad. There is no basis for such a broad request beyond a “vast fishing expedition,” as Congressman Dingell noted yesterday. Moreover, responding to such an expansive request would require the devotion of substantial resources to gather and review many documents that are of no legitimate oversight is itself an unreasonable burden on the President’s ability to meet his constitutional duties.”
Finally, Obama shows a little backbone. The Bush administration LOST billions of dollars in defense spending and there was never an investigation. There was never a serious investigation into how the Bush administration got the intelligence so wrong in the rationale for going to war in Iraq. And the Bush administration claimed executive privilege for matters regarding the politicization of our justice department. But this is different because it involves spending money to make our country better and Republicans hate doing that because it’s “SOCIALISM!”
DRUDGE RETORT 