Leading Off
1) Today, the Texas Solicitor General will argue to the U.S. Supreme Court the state has a right to execute child rapists. It comes one day after Dallas County announced its 16th DNA exoneration, this time for a man who was imprisoned for 23 years for burglary and — (wait for it) – rape.
2) Add to the questions raised yesterday about the raid in San Angelo the question of why the police felt the need to go in Waco-style with body armor, terrorist masks, automatic weapons, and an armored personnel carrier. Especially since all they were met with prayers and singing which, admittedly, can be tortuous torturous. Still, it’s fortunate we didn’t have an “isolated incident.”
3) In response to the commotion caused by his effort to get a gay Collin County employee fired, Commissioner James Hoagland said, “I think we need to hire the most qualified person for the job, irregardless of race.” Awesome.
(Your Wednesday moment of Zen.)
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1. I hope the expense account being labored for this excerise in ignorance isn’t part of the education budget.
2. This is going to escalate into such an embarrassment for the state that all the cults that can take the weather here will call Texas home. They’ll know they’re safe from investigation because we’ve screwed up so bad twice now that we’ll never even think of messing with a cult ever again.
3. Collin county, ’nuff said.
So I turned on the TV last night to find myself wondering if I traveled back to 1862. I mean, I get it’s a religious thing and all (more power to you) but that should not give anyone permission to grow one eyebrow and make Little House on the Prairie clothes look new age. Screw me for looking at these cult people in a weird way but I feel it’s my duty to do that.
BTW, what is it with April, Texas and cults? Waco/Koresh was April 19 and now this thing. Why must everyone freak out in the month of April?
As to #3, I was impressed that Jerry’s comments were as accurate/articulate as that. I’ve seen him do worse on the record.
I’m not sure which is worse: using a word that doesn’t exist (irregardless) or referring to homosexuality as a race. Awesome, indeed.
It should be noted that #1 concerns ‘repeated offenders’ . Yeah, just an opinion, but I think that warrants execution.
1) I’m looking at it from a different angle. The people being exonerated didn’t have the benefit of DNA testing at the time of their trial. Since DNA evidence is now setting inmates free, obviously it’s a good enough standard. Therefore, I’m all for executing all child rapists going forward from here if DNA evidence proves they did it. Don’t execute the people currently in prison, you can in a sense “grandfather” them in (probably not the appropriate term given the topic, but I could have said uncle or priest them in). Let it be known that any child rapes that occur from this day forward, you will executed if DNA evidence proves you did it. Sounds good to me.
Great Leads today!
1) How I laugh when a friend tells me repeatedly that “No (later proven) innocent person has ever been executed in the USA, let alone Texas!” (I tell him, ‘be patient’.)
2) This ‘we received a call from an anonymous someone outside the compound saying they were inside the compound and 16 years old and being abused so we’re seizing everyone’s kids’ travesty is being handled like Katrina. Heckuva job.
3) Wanta bet James Hoagland reads Mark Davis?
Rawlins, if Hoagland reads Mark Davis he’s the only one.
Mark missed his calling. He should have followed Copeland and Haggard into the ministry. He’s a parasite.
Rawlins, I’d take the wager on (3), given that I have have serious doubts at this point that Hoagland has the ability to read.
Harvey, parasites take offense when you compare them to lower forms of life.
Trey, you mean torturous, not tortuous.
You’re very welcome.
Danke, Daniel.
Hey, Trey: Well done Monday-morning quarterbacking a law enforcement raid on a known cult. I’m not sure I’m happy with the way it’s going down for those poor kids either, but the point is that the officers had no way of knowing whether they would come out praying or come out shooting. THAT’S why you break out the body armor and the artillery - because the kids of those officers very much want their mommies and daddies coming home safely that night. But, if you have such a problem with cops being prepared, I’d invite you to ride along sometime with your local SWAT team. You - unarmed and unprotected - are more than welcome to walk up and knock on the door of the next crack house and see how that turns out for you.
If Trey was a more slippery and deft journalist with a political future, he would have responded to Daniel as follows: “Daniel, I meant to say that the path to personal enlightenment is a tortuous trail whereas being greeted upon arrival by prayer and singing can be torturous indeed.”
They had crack at the polygamist compound, DA? The story just keeps getting cooler!
I don’t like how this raid is playing out, either, but I have a bigger issue with these Laura Ingalls clones pimping their children. I’m also disturbed by how similar they all look (red hair, brown eyes, and one eyebrow). Someone has peed in that gene pool for sure.
If there’s truth to the information that among the children removed from the compound was a 16 year old girl who has had 4 kids already, the “armed” raid will have been worth it for that alone. Something tells me she’s not getting repeatedly impregnated by her teenaged “cousins” against her mother’s wishes. Bring on the DNA testing (provided any of those people have a single strand that is different from the other).
These “devout” people lied about why the bought the land in the first place. They are now lying that all of the adult women have returned to the compound. Not true. According to State officials, several refused to go back and have sought protective shelter.
3) “irregardless”? Really?
Those Plano schools aren’t as good as they like to pretend they are I guess.
These people are reprehensible freaks, to be sure — the menfolk should probably be locked up for a long time — but the cops drastically over-reached with their redneck-macho role-playing games, as usual. For the love of St. Pete, these aren’t Mexican druglords.
Glad the cops rescued those poor women, but more harm than good can come from going about it the way they did. Their methods satisfied their sense of themselves more than it served the situation at hand.
Following up on excellent Daniel’s point.
Per the ‘good’ this is doing, I know, I know. Heard it all before but let me dispel an omnipresent myth: It COULD happen to you.
I could make an anonymous call and say that I have knowledge that sexual abuse is taking place in your home. I could suddenly announce that you made ‘inappropriate advances/touching’ at the health club. Your step daughter could ‘get even’ by saying you violated her ‘privates’. Your pupil could write in their diary that you are cute and you are suddenly placed on indefinite leave per investigation per the parents of your admirer.. On and on.
This ‘who cares’ mentality combined with ‘let’s err in the name of caution’ is a toxic brew. And a lot of Americans have lined up at the cauldron. I know quite a few for whom the damage done was in the name of ‘protecting’ others, be they children, neighborhoods, ‘religious principles’, even heterosexual male ‘values’ (like that’s a threatened monolithic mindset).
This act of taking all the children prisoners in the name of avenging the as-yet-unknown-and-un-located ‘16 yr. old’ who called from outside the compound while claiming “she” was imprisoned within is a red herring waiting to be filleted. Mark my, Wick, Trey’s words. Justice for the mass abductions w/o due process or even human dignity creates odd political bedfellows. Fluff up the futon, it’s going to be a bumpy nap.
Sorry, my back hasn’t stopped grating from nails on a chalk board over the guy using the non-word word “Irregardless.” Regardless of what he said, it’s not a word. Which makes suspect everything else he said. Regardless.
Mark Davis has used the non-word ‘irregardless’ (along with ‘complected’ rather than ‘complexioned’, but hey, picky picky) more than once. But one is so blinded by his intoxicating intellect and brilliance as a wordsmith/historian dedicated to exhaustive analysis and minute verification of source material, that these otherwise distracting errors are but a June bug at the Arboretum.
In regard to part 1 above, Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote an excellent book a few years ago, “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times.” The title is taken from Baron de Montesquieu’s famous line “There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”
I’m greatly opposed to what seems like serial sexual abuse of non-consenting minors in compounds like this one, but I’m also opposed to the prosecute ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out later philosophy that is endemic in these kinds of cases. It ruins good lives in the process.
Rabinowitz’s book should be mandatory reading for anyone who is concerned with issues that lie at the intersection of criminal justice or child custody and allegations of child abuse/child sexual abuse. I’m just about as conservative as they come, but I’ve been in the maw of the beast (only as counsel, fortunately). God help anyone who is falsely accused of sexual assault of a child; ever tried to prove a negative? Good luck.
Mark Davis is a local DJ. Nuff said.
I gather Amanda would prefer to see these gals in Prada or perhaps some trashy halter tops and thick mascara? More in the line of a pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears? Maybe the men should dress in flowing gowns like Bishops and Priest? I would gather that when the state takes your children, a choice of wardrobe is the least of their worries.
Remember how elegant Andrea Yates looked after she drowned her children because Jesus told her too?
If you really want to delve in the fashion of the situation, then question the multiple hair extensions that Marilee Meisner has on her Katherine Harris looking head. And why is it important that the cops wear cowboy hats while giving a news conference? Do they have calves to heard right soon like?
IJS
Mark Davis’s brilliance as a wordsmith/historian and his minute verification of source material cries out to be set apart using the just-announced punctuation in the New American Bombastic Dictionary — it’s called the “prepostrophe.”
How appropriate many Dallas folks defend a cult that pimps out 12 year old girls to marry their cousins since they let 12 year olds dance nude there.
http://www.dallasnews.com/shar.....ae074.html
Bill, thanks for the encouragement as I humbly attempt to channel the inimitable Mark Davis. (Like doing scales—”Do-Re-Me”: repeat “prepostrophe-preposterous-portentious-proscribed”). Because, between last week’s memorable column and today’s DMN lofty witness to Obama’s fallacy, can we who seek to speak (or write or read) dare do less?
Dare I ask if this be how Davis might ‘portend the fate of this familial disarray’ after the raid in San Angelo?
“The ascent of tribal wretchedness adorned the stench of the betrayed progeny as they stalked the halls of post-partum unthinkable abuse. Throughout, the weeping guilty sought comfort in the Devil’s guidance that had taken them from God’s arms to Hell’s door in Eldorado.”
I have a strong dislike for chicken hawks. I really really really dislike chicken hawks like Mark Davis.
Mark Davis from his perch on high
Says, “sure American boys might have to die.”
With the big picture in mind
It’s easy to be so kind.
Because for his own he won’t have to cry.
Chicken hawks who are all for sending other people’s kids off to die suck. The only kind of chicken hawk that sucks worse is the kind that claims unearned valor.
Ah, Harvey…thanks for the reimforcement of my unveiled sarcasm re: Mr. Davis, who represents all that you poetically describe.
PS: My street has a lot of ‘children’ at war in Afghan and Iraq. Most of those who rant about history validating GWB’s war don’t know a soul carrying arms abroad. Unless it’s the child of their maid or brother of their nanny.
It’s possible that Trey meant “tortious,” given the context.
We need the draft back Rawlins. Our military needs the logic and conscience that draftees provide. Americans need it so that everyone potentially faces having their dawg in the fight.
“I’d invite you to ride along sometime with your local SWAT team.”
So at 4 a.m. I can watch a bunch of guys on steroids throw flash bangs in where there are children, toss grandmothers to the ground, shoot the dog and then recover a $20 bag of ditch weed?
No thanks.