Last week, This American Life produced an episode Confessions. The show primarily consists of two stories. The first is about a detective who learns that he had unintentionally created a false confession. The second is about Jeffrey Womack, whose life was haunted by a murder allegation that he refused to talk to the police about. What is interesting in both cases is the reactions of other people and how they second guess what happened. It is the ultimate example of blaming the victim.

In the false confession case, the officer is so convinced that the suspect did the crime that he feeds her details to parrot back. The case falls apart after the defendant recants and the physical evidence falls apart. But of course, the officer is sure that she was somehow involved. It is only ten years later when he looks back on the “confession” tape that he sees the problem. He says to her, “Let me refresh your memory.” And then he gives her credit card receipts that allow her to know basically all of the details of the case.

What’s most interesting here is that the officer now lectures to other police officers. But he says that he can’t give a lecture on preventing false confessions because no one will show up. So he has to lecture on interrogation tactics and then just throw in a bit about false confessions at the end. As he points out, there is nothing that the police believe as strongly as the fact that innocent people will not confess to a crime they did not commit. This is despite the fact that there are many notable cases like the Central Park 5.

Police work ought to be like science, and under the best of circumstances I’m sure that it is. The evidence should lead the detective to a conclusion. But most cases are obvious. As Verbal says in The Usual Suspects, “To a cop the explanation is never that complicated. It’s always simple. There’s no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you got a dead body and you think his brother did it, you’re gonna find out you’re right.” But that leads to detectives filtering out exonerating evidence. For example, in this case, the woman under investigation was in a homeless shelter during the crime, but the officer didn’t even check until months later after she had recanted her confession.

The second case is one where the police went after a teenager, Jeffrey Womack, for a rape and murder. His lawyer told him not to talk to the police or the media. Again, the case against the kid fell apart because he wasn’t guilty and he had a decent lawyer. But for 30 years, until the actually killer was convicted, he lived under a shadow. Everyone just knew that he did it. But now that there is no doubt of his innocence, no one in the police department thinks they were wrong to harass him. They all think the same thing, “None of this would have happened if he had just talked to us!” Most people in the area think the same thing.

The story interviewed a reporter who said more or less, “I just don’t understand it; if it had been me, I would have been shouting my innocence from the rooftops!” You get that? Because this guy was not behaving the way she thought she would have, it must mean that he’s guilty. I noted this some months ago about the coverage of Debra Milke. Long before people are convicted in court, they are convicted by the media, using the same snap judgments that usually are correct. But “usually” really isn’t good enough. I wouldn’t want to be convicted of murder because a reporter or a police officer thinks I did it and is usually right about such thing.

What is fascinating about these two cases is how the victim is always wrong in the eyes of outsiders. In the first case, people think that the young woman should not have trusted the police; she should have just remained silent and nothing bad would have happened. (To be fair, the detective does not make this argument.) In the second case, people think the young man should have trusted the police. In the first case, I don’t think things would have been much different, except that she might have spent slightly less time in jail. In the second case, I suspect the young man would have spent a lot of time in jail and might have even been convicted. The fault is not with these victims but with the system itself.

Afterword

I think it is interesting that the false confession detective has made a whole career out of it. The victim’s life was destroyed.

60 Minutes claims that Dick Cheney had his defibrillator altered to guard again a terrorist attack. According to the story that will air this Sunday, his doctor “had the device’s wireless function disabled so a terrorist couldn’t send his heart a fatal shock.” I find this odd. It has been my understanding that the terrorists hate America. If that’s the case, why would they want to kill Dick Cheney?

I was thinking this morning that if Cheney were rotting in a jail somewhere, I would have a certain level of sympathy for him. But as it is, his very existence infuriates me. He is an evil man. And what it says to the world is, “It doesn’t matter how awful you are, as long as you have the power, nothing will happen to you.” Hitler died only because he lost the war; otherwise, he would have lived another 20 years and received a state funeral.

Cheney hasn’t only escaped any kind of punishment, he is still held in high esteem throughout the country. We saw him making the rounds explaining what Obama should do about Syria. No level of personal failure can stop the media from listening to evil fools like him. Now Dick Cheney has written a book with his carteologist called Heart: An American Medical Odyssey, which will be available Tuesday. And 60 Minutes is eager to help him sell it.

I haven’t been able to find any reviews of the book. Why would there need to be any? A 15 minute segment on 60 Minutes is worth millions of dollars in advertising and thousands of reviews. It’s another illustration of why we live in a winner-take-all society. In a reasonable country where our leaders were capable of feeling shame, Cheney would at least be hiding out. But instead, he is out in public treated like royalty instead of the evil traitor that he is.

I’m curious about the subtitle of the book, “An American Medical Odyssey.” I assume there will be a lot of garbage in the book about how America has the greatest medicine in the world. I’m sure that’s true if you are Dick Cheney. But a country that fails so miserably for the vast majority of its population is no success story. Cheney could get the best healthcare in the world regardless of what country he was in. The sad thing is that Cheney doesn’t deserve it. He should have died a long time again and I hope he dies soon.

Afterword

This one is for that son of a bitch:

One of the rudest things that people do is call other people by names they don’t like. In general, this is the kind of thing one generally only sees on grammar school yards. But there is one other area where it is common and the maturity level is similar. Conservatives love to call the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party.” It’s nothing but a childish stunt that I think they believe makes them look cool. There is no doubt that the use of the phrase is a signifier, very much like mispronouncing the word “nuclear.” But it is more than just that.

To me, it speaks volumes about what the modern Republican Party is all about. It doesn’t much believe in anything except that its constituencies should be kept relatively happy and that Democrats are doody heads. So coming from some idiotic Representative like Louie Gohmert is just par for the course. I really don’t care. The Republican Party is run by a bunch of extremists with the maturity of a first grader. There are bigger problems than their linguistic tics.

The problem is that even the supposedly respectable aspects of the conservative movement behave the same way. Ed Kilgore linked to an article at Heritage Action. It says, “According to some reports, the Senate will reveal its plan this morning, and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) has indicated he will take up the Senate plan and allow it to pass with Democrat votes.” In that context—in print—it really comes off differently, doesn’t it? It doesn’t come of as petulant the way it does when spoken. It just comes off as illiterate.

According to Wikipedia, the first use of the term was back in 1940. It seems that some Republicans didn’t like the idea that people might assume the Democratic Party was the party of democracy. This doesn’t make any sense. Our country is also a Republic. But I know from my own experience that conservatives do indeed worry about that. It also goes along with the generally poor attitude that conservatives have toward democracy itself. Most of them are not all that keen on it. In fact, according to Safire’s New Political Dictionary, the Democratic Party was named by the Federalists as a derogatory name. The Federalists, like the Republican Party now, were the conservative (you might say aristocratic) party.

Back in 2006, Ruth Marcus wrote, One Syllable of Civility. In it, she says that if then President Bush wanted Washington to be more civil, he might start by saying “Democratic Party” rather than “Democrat Party.” I don’t recall him changing his usage, but he did make a joke about it. It’s interesting that even at the height of Republican power, they couldn’t stop their little dig at Democrats—even from the Republican president himself.

What I think all this means is that the Republican Party is very much like a cult. The people in it are very insecure. Just like fundamentalist Christians, they worry about seeing any information that might erode their faith in the party line. And part of that mentality is signaling to each other that they are part of the clan. And if they can also put down the other side, so much the better. That’s what they get from “Democrat Party.” And this is even what we get from the “political arm” (not that you can tell the difference) of their biggest think tank.

Erick Erickson is angry. I know what you’re thinking, but it has nothing to do with his frozen pig-face. He’s angry because the Republicans are caving. And even more than that, he’s angry at Mitch McConnell for not being smart. Early this morning, he wrote, “Reid used the Senate’s rules to toss aside numerous proposals from the House while McConnell looked on not knowing how to fight back.” It isn’t that McConnell didn’t know how to fight back. He didn’t have any options. Would it be fair to say that Nancy Pelosi didn’t know how to fight back against John Boehner? It sucks being in the minority.

But more to the point, Erickson is showing himself to be a perfect example of what’s wrong with the bitter enders. Think of an action film at the end of the third act. The hero looks beaten. He is surrounded by bad guys. But he struggles to his feet. He makes a clever remark like, “Now that I’ve had a little rest…” And then he defeats the bad guys. Roll titles.

That’s great in a movie, but that’s not how it works in real life. In real life, the party that has more power wins in almost all cases. Take the Civil War for example. Through pluck and strong leadership, the Confederates managed to do okay at the start of the war. But over time the enormous advantages the Union had in terms of men and money decimated the Confederacy. The same thing has taken place in Washington this month.

The Republicans control one-third of the negotiating units. And their control of that unit is not strong. The only real advantage is that John Boehner is Speaker of the House and so he can control what bills get votes. He seems to have only the slightest amount of control of how his own caucus votes. From the beginning of this fiasco, majorities in both houses of Congress wanted to end this fight—it was preordained. The only question was how much harm the Republicans would do to themselves. In that regard, they’ve been stunningly successful: they’ve maximized the harm they’ve done to themselves over the last two weeks.

But Erickson is angry. And I can see why. What the Republicans have done is the worst possible thing. If you aren’t willing to go all the way, don’t start. But it should have been obvious to the Erickson crowd that it was at most 20% of the House Republican Caucus who were willing to do that. There are a lot of Republicans who have to worry about electoral attacks from the left as well as the right. And I would go so far as to say that there are Republicans who actually think that they should be serving the public rather than extorting unpopular concessions.

The problem is bigger than even this, though. Erickson has sent mixed messages. He’s been all in favor of shutting down the government. But he wanted the Debt Ceiling raised. In fact, he was downright hysterical about it. (To be honest: when is Erickson not hysterical about anything?) But that just shows the ridiculousness of the government shutdown. Yes, the Debt Ceiling was a fairly hard deadline that would have caused economic damage that the Republicans would have been blamed for. But the government shutdown was hurting the economy more and more each day. Eventually, it would have lead to a crisis.

So Erick Erickson argument has been, “Take a hostage, but not a really good one, and don’t be too serious about it!” I don’t doubt that if this shutdown had gone on for another month, Erickson would have been part of the chorus yelling uncle. You can’t be reasonable while pursuing an unreasonable strategy. But I guess it is easy for a pundit like him. He isn’t held responsible. So now he can call for voting all the bums out. And I’m happy to let him try, because when the incumbent loses in the Republican primary it is more likely that the Democrat will win in the general election. And that’s because the incumbent loses to someone more like Erick Erickson.

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take today’s column by Ruth Marcus, Panetta Rebukes Obama’s Handling of Shutdown. My experience is that when I read something so intellectually oafish that it must be satire, it turns out to not be satire. It is a thing to behold. Now that Leon Panetta is not in the government, he has entered the fray to explain to the world that there is “enough blame to go around.”

The whole article is about how Panetta thinks that if only Obama had shown “leadership” then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Ah yes! The vaunted “leadership.” That fairy dust that Obama is supposed to sprinkle into the eyes of John Boehner and make everything better. This kind of Chris Matthews’ thinking is complete nonsense. As Ezra Klein reported earlier this year in The New Yorker, when presidents get associated with specific policies, it makes it harder to push those policies, not easier.

Just look at Obamacare. Does any serious person think that the Republicans are against the new healthcare law on its merits? If John McCain had been elected in 2008, we would have more or less Obamacare and the Republicans would be thrilled about it. The Republicans hate it today because it is Obama’s healthcare law. It’s as simple as that.

So the idea that Panetta (along with, it seems, Marcus) thinks that Obama could have avoided a government shutdown if he had just been more involved is pure fantasy. A reporter asked him how Clinton would have dealt with the situation. Panetta responded, “Some of us were nervous that Bill Clinton was bending over backwards to try to see if he could get a deal.” So Clinton really worked hard to get a deal. He bent over backwards. And how did that end? Oh, I remember: it ended with a 21 day government shutdown. So Clinton’s great leadership skills accomplished absolutely nothing. Too bad Obama didn’t follow in his footsteps. If he had, we might only be in the middle of a government shutdown.

Panetta said that if Obama couldn’t manage the shutdown, he should find someone who could. Marcus sounded like a schoolgirl when she gushed:

See what I was saying about satire? That’s just embarrassing. So we have an old politician who is talking nonsense and a reporter who thinks he is just the bee’s knees. Someone please make this stop.

I just watched the “Tea Peter” episode of Family Guy from the tenth season. In general, I’m not that happy with the series when it does politics. Like most shows, it tries to have things both ways. Plus, I don’t think I’ve ever fully forgiven the producers for allowing Rush Limbaugh to whitewash his career. This episode was certainly better.

In the episode, Peter is running an illegal business out of his home that police shut down. This makes him angry, so he joins the local Tea Party group. It turns out that it is run by Lois’ billionaire father, just as Brian had predicted. They manage to get the mayor to shut down the government and then everything goes to hell. At the end, Peter gives a speech in which he replaces the government with something even better:

It’s pleasing, because I’m afraid that most Americans (not just conservatives) tend to forget what government actually is. But when it comes to conservatives, they have the market cornered in the business of discontent. They don’t like the way government works (Who does?!) but they want revolution rather than reform. This comes from the fact that they know that their ideas are unpopular. They can’t really work toward changes because “the people” will never agree with them.

My problem with the episode comes in its treatment of the Tea Party members. In general, they do not want to get rid of the government. And sadly, it is a whitewash to suggest that they do. What they want is to keep the government just the way it is and eliminate the programs that help “those people.” I’ve never met a Tea Party member who wanted to cut military, Medicare, or Social Security. Well, that and the national debt make up about 70% of the budget. And they are in favor of most of the remaining 30% too. So all their ranting about budgets is really just vindictiveness against groups that they don’t like.

I’ve been having a discussion about my video on Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express. For years, she has been making speeches and going on television talking about the budget deficit. But after all that time, it seems she has learned nothing of the federal budget. Most especially she doesn’t seem to have noted how it has decreased ever since we got a Democrat in the White House. If she really wanted what she claims, she would be a Democrat. But she isn’t. Because she doesn’t want what she claims. She, like almost all of her peers, wants to take money away from “those people.” And there isn’t a lot of question about exactly who those people are.

The Family Guy episode was inaccurate in another way. It aired on 13 May 2012. But it showed big crowds at a Tea Party rally. In 2012?! By that time, it would have been 8 protesters and 30 people from various news organizations.

Afterword

I just found this great clip of Amy Kremer on CNN last year. She doesn’t know what’s she’s talking about. And the funny thing is that the question she gets about the $5 trillion Romney tax cut is one that I’ve seen her struggle with a few times. She just can’t admit that supporting Romney goes against what she claims to be for. And that’s because she isn’t for Romney because he would be better on the debt. She is for him because she knows that he is for the right kind of people and against the wrong kind of people. That’s it. This is what passes for a conservative activist:

VS

There are a few things to note about UPS. OK, one of them is I really don’t like them. I think it’s only fair to begin with that statement, since it is not really my plan to try giving them an unbiased review, in this writing.

Most of my adult life, job wise, I have found myself working in customer service and shipping.

I’m not a particularly fast worker. I do my best, but because of my inability to assemble miniature artificial trees at an acceptable rate, I was offered a position as a shipper, for the same company where I was interviewing for a production job.

Years later, at the now defunct startup BroadLink Communications, on my first day of work, I received a package from UPS. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a package BC had shipped to a customer a month prior. I researched the tracking information (which, at the time, provided much more info than they do today). Not only did the shipment never reach the customers address, it never even visited their state. Instead, I was provided with the grand tour of the US, which the package had underwent… visiting no less than 10 UPS facilities spread across 8 states, until it finally made it to the address they had entered as its destination: BroadLink Communications, its point of origin. Nice.

Years later I worked purchasing, shipping and receiving audio/visual equipment, which largely was installed in hospitals. I would get urgent requests for a replacement unit, managers screaming at me over the phone. I’d say to my boss, “the route isn’t there for another week, I can get a delivery there in two days, via UPS.” He would shake his head and tell me no way could I get a small tv to the (SF) East Bay, 35 miles away, in one piece using UPS. Over some time, I boxed with excess padding; I double-boxed; I even triple boxed one unit….and all I accomplished was proving Mr. White correct. I am an awesome shipper, but I could not get the men in brown to deliver a single electronic shipment, via 2-Day Blue, intact, over a 35 mile distance. Why ship a product 2nd-day delivery, over a 35 mile span? Because GROUND could take 3-4 days to make it across the bay…….about a 40 minute drive. Something also worthy note is, in general, if you buy 3-day delivery, it makes it there in three days. Never two. This is frustrating.

Over the years I have shipped many products, ebay sales etc. I have, in the process, become very fond of the people in blue, your United States Postal Service (USPS). Despite all disparaging remarks about USPS regarding inefficiency, incompetence, laziness etc., I have been beyond satisfied with their service, both shipping domestic and international. I have entrusted them with fly-fishing poles, expensive camera (telephoto) lenses, children’s acoustic guitars, glass ornaments and the ever popular Beanie Babies. They have NEVER lost, misplaced, delayed or damaged one item. WOW!

Its time for me to disclose what spurred this rant. I received a package on the day I began writing this. I waited all day for my shipment, knowing UPS delivers to my apt complex twice. Sometimes three times in a day. I ran downstairs at the sound of every truck or van noise…..school buses, water deliveries etc. High priority packages, Overnight Red get here in the AM. Blue 2nd-day sometimes do too. But if your package is arriving via Ground, enjoy the wait, especially if you are receiving at a residential address.

UPS, when you absolutely have nothing better to do with your day!

As I was watching Jane Siberry videos, YouTube recommended one named Galloway tries to justify 9/11 and gets destroyed by Hitchens. I don’t off hand know who Galloway is, but I get the picture. Did he “justify” 9/11? Who knows? He may have just tried to explain why it happened. To the neocon crowd, there is no distinction between the two. And I’m sure that Christopher Hitchens’ argument would be the same either way. Hitchens was a brilliant man, but to say that he had a huge blind spot when it came to these issues, is a great understatement. What’s more, it was clear in the last decade of his life that he was a racist. The fact that many humanist to this day hold him in high esteem is mind boggling.

But very briefly, I want to take on the case. No reasonable person would ever justify 9/11. And I have no clear memory of ever hearing anyone justify it. But too many people in the United States want to claim that 9/11 is simply the work of fanatics and it had nothing to do with our policies. And these very same people support our blanket killing program. We kill people in Afghanistan based upon suspicious behavior that has never been explained to the American people. And I’m sure that in 50 years when the documents that explain what constitutes such suspicious behavior are released, we will learn that it is a lot of generic stuff that doubtless killed far more innocents than anyone else.

My point is that of course 9/11 is an indefensible attack on innocent people. But our nation has also been in the business of killing innocent people all over the world for my entire lifetime. That too is indefensible. And 9/11 does not give us just cause to kill innocent people. There is never just cause for killing innocent people. And regardless, we were killing innocent people long before 9/11.

The funny thing is that pre-9/11 Christopher Hitchens understood this. And he never repudiated his old opinions. So he could kind of get away with claiming that our bombing campaigns were based upon the “war” started on 9/11. But most people have the same opinions both before and after 9/11. So the question is where do these people stand? Either it was okay for the terrorist to attack us on 9/11 or our many acts of modern warfare on civilian populations were wrong. For me, it is very clear: they are both wrong. But sadly, for most Americans and almost all conservatives, any act of aggression is right as long as we are the aggressors.

So I just watched the beginning of the video and it does appear that Galloway is not saying that the 9/11 attacks were justified. He’s only saying they didn’t come about in a vacuum. But I can’t watch any more because after saying that, the audience started going crazy. An individual has no problem understanding that a pedestrian crossing against the light does not justify a motorist running him down; but it does at least partly explain it. Put a hundred people together and they can’t understand the distinction. Apparently, they think the only way we can have moral authority is if our hands are completely clean. When people think like this, they never mature. The same is true for societies.

On this day in 1872, the great British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was born. He is a very distinctive composer that I’ve never really been able to peg. Wikipedia quotes John Alexander Fuller Maitland as saying, “One is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new.” I don’t totally agree. Stylistically, he was not ever on the cutting edge. But I now see that as largely the correct approach for a composer to take. Despite all that we have been through in music over the last century, Williams is still deeply edifying. And that’s true both as a listener and as a musician. I remember in college, his work was really difficult to play, even though it didn’t have much in the way of “fireworks.” It required great care, but was very rewarding for the effort. Here is perhaps his best known work, the hauntingly beautiful Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:

The very great singer-songwriter Jane Siberry is 58 today. I’ve seen her in concert a number of times. She’s absolutely fabulous. And she’s made all of her catalog of albums available for free download. I recommend checking out her first couple of albums. All of them are good, but she has become more and more musically challenging over time. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check them out. But unlike too many popular artists, Siberry has been on a journey her whole career, and I think listeners are best taking that journey with her. Start with the first album. She brings you along gently. The following song is from her third album, The Speckless Sky. It is “The Taxi Ride” and it is one of the best expressions of what it is like to end a relationship. “It’s a long long lonely ride to find the perfect lover for your lover and the morning light’s just breaking.”

Other birthdays: French scholar Jacques Sirmond (1558); inventor Elmer Ambrose Sperry (1860); comedian Dick Gregory (81); musician Samuel David Moore (78); actor Hugh Jackman (45); and really fucked up professional Christian Kirk Cameron.

The day, however, belongs to the great Art Clokey who was born on this day in 1921. (His 90th birthday was the occasion for a great Google Doodle.) He was a pioneer of stop motion clay animation or claymation, best known for The Gumby Show. His career started in 1953 with the short animated film Gumbasia. It’s pretty rudimentary compared to what he was doing a decade later. I think people of my age tend to misremember Clokey’s work because growing up we were introduced to a great deal of weak claymation. I remember being shocked at how great the work of Aardman Animations (e.g. Wallace & Gromit) was in the 1990s. And it was! But it wasn’t that much better than what Clokey was doing 30 years earlier. Here is a beautiful and charming episode of The Gumby Show, “A Hair Raising Adventure”:

Happy birthday Art Clokey!

Even by Fox News standards, this is incredible. And note, this happens all the time in conservative media. But last Saturday, Fox News reported a satirical news story on National Report as real news. (See the video below.) What’s going on is that conservatives really do believe their own rhetoric. They think that Obama is the anti-Christ. How else do you explain believing a headline like this, Obama Uses Own Money To Open Muslim Museum Amid Government Shutdown? And even if you, as a reader, believed it, how does a reporter just believe it without checking it in the least?

As I mention all the time (conservatives especially get confused), I am not a reporter. Yet whenever I read anything interesting enough to write about, the first thing I do is search Google to see how other people are reporting on it. In this case, apparently some Fox News producer saw the article and didn’t think twice. It was too delicious. And note the way it was reported by Anna Kooiman, “President Obama has offered to pay out of his own pocket for the Museum of Muslim Culture … yet it’s the Republican National Committee who’s paying for [the veterans’ memorial].” That’s fair and balanced, God damn it!

If the Fox News producers had looked on the internet, they probably would have found a 3 October article from Free Republic, tellingly titled, (Satire) Obama Uses Own Money To Open Muslim Museum Amid Government Shutdown. In fact, on the morning of that Fox News broadcast, the top Google search for that headline yielded, MORE FAKE NEWS: Obama Uses Own Money to Open Muslim Museum at About.com’s Urban Legends section.

Or they could have simply looked at the bottom of any page on National Report. They all say:

What’s especially sad is that Fox News wasn’t alone. Most of the articles as of the day of the Fox News report were conservative websites proclaiming the outrage that Obama was using his own money to keep the museum open. Is it any wonder that conservatives hate Obama so much when they get “news” of this quality?