The Goat Pen

No Country For Innocent Men

"Dear Mr. Cole," the letter began. "My name is Jerry Wayne Johnson. I'm presently a Texas prisoner. You may recall my name from your 1986 rape trial in Lubbock."

Ruby Session was shaking as she read on. The year was 2007, and the letter was addressed to her son Timothy Cole. "I have been trying to locate you since 1995 to tell you I wish to confess I did in fact commit the rape Lubbock wrongly convicted you of."

Ruby sat down, stood up. A picture of Tim in a tuxedo, taken at his junior prom, smiled from the mantle. Before his trial the prosecutor had offered him a deal to plead to lesser charges. "Mother," Tim had said, "I am not pleading guilty to something I didn't do." He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Thirteen years later, he died behind bars.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12 ... rick-perry

(Rick Perry is a serial killer)

[youtube]XCiOgjMMjbg[/youtube]

Heh.


Signs that your health care professional is a fake: He smokes a cigar during the surgery, asks you to hold the IV bag, and comes to your house to flush 6lbs of your medical waste down your toilet.

Gee, it ain't right to deny the 99% their $180 Air Jordans

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/1 ... -over.html

Wonder how he was convicted...did the victim ID him incorrectly?

AlabamAlum wrote:Wonder how he was convicted...did the victim ID him incorrectly?

Yes...basically from a tainted photo spread, and no other item that could tie him to the rape.

Wow, I hope they make his mom rich (but I doubt it will happen). How did he die? Shanked? Got sick? Suicide?

He had severe asthma, found himself in shuttled in and out of prison infirmaries (sp?) over 13 years. They found him in his cell unconscious. He was 39.

Wow, I hope they make his mom rich (but I doubt it will happen).

Actually, apparently Texas passed a compensation bill for unfairly incarcerated exonerated prisoners. They named the bill after him (Timothy Cole), but I don't know if his family was eligible for compensation at that point.

This is what the founding fathers were concerned about when they wrote the second amendment.

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Nestled amid plains so flat the locals joke you can watch your dog run away for miles, Fargo treasures its placid lifestyle, seldom pierced by the mayhem and violence common in other urban communities. North Dakota’s largest city has averaged fewer than two homicides a year since 2005, and there’s not been a single international terrorism prosecution in the last decade.

But that hasn’t stopped authorities in Fargo and its surrounding county from going on an $8 million buying spree to arm police officers with the sort of gear once reserved only for soldiers fighting foreign wars.

Every city squad car is equipped today with a military-style assault rifle, and officers can don Kevlar helmets able to withstand incoming fire from battlefield-grade ammunition. And for that epic confrontation—if it ever occurs—officers can now summon a new $256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret. For now, though, the menacing truck is used mostly for training and appearances at the annual city picnic, where it’s been parked near the children’s bounce house.

“Most people are so fascinated by it, because nothing happens here,” says Carol Archbold, a Fargo resident and criminal justice professor at North Dakota State University. “There’s no terrorism here.”

Like Fargo, thousands of other local police departments nationwide have been amassing stockpiles of military-style equipment in the name of homeland security, aided by more than $34 billion in federal grants since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a Daily Beast investigation conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

The buying spree has transformed local police departments into small, army-like forces, and put intimidating equipment into the hands of civilian officers. And that is raising questions about whether the strategy has gone too far, creating a culture and capability that jeopardizes public safety and civil rights while creating an expensive false sense of security.

“The argument for up-armoring is always based on the least likely of terrorist scenarios,” says Mark Randol, a former terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. “Anyone can get a gun and shoot up stuff. No amount of SWAT equipment can stop that.”

Local police bristle at the suggestion that they’ve become “militarized,” arguing the upgrade in firepower and other equipment is necessary to combat criminals with more lethal capabilities. They point to the 1997 Los Angeles-area bank robbers who pinned police for hours with assault weapons, the gun-wielding student who perpetrated the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, and the terrorists who waged a bloody rampage in Mumbai, India, that left 164 people dead and 300 wounded in 2008.

The new weaponry and battle gear, they insist, helps save lives in the face of such threats. “I don’t see us as militarizing police; I see us as keeping abreast with society,” former Los Angeles Police chief William Bratton says. “And we are a gun-crazy society.”

Adds Fargo Police Lt. Ross Renner, who commands the regional SWAT team: “It’s foolish to not be cognizant of the threats out there, whether it’s New York, Los Angeles, or Fargo. Our residents have the right to be protected. We don’t have everyday threats here when it comes to terrorism, but we are asked to be prepared.”

That's just North Dakota pols in Washington using their leverage to get DHS money for their home state. It pissses off NY pols because it reduces the grants they get for counter-terrorism activities.

Not just that, but Fargo is our first, best defense against an attack from The Menace of The North: Canadians.

Something's got to be done. Their insidious infiltration of this country by their 'hockey players' has got to be stopped before we're overrun. 'manual labor' from the south and 'hockey players' from the north.

From the Houston Chronicle, one of their regular bloggers: GOPlifer on Ron Paul about his newsletters

http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2011/12/ ... wsletters/

Comments You Won’t Find in Ron Paul’s Newsletters
The Paulistas are fighting back over the issue of Ron Paul’s racist newsletters with their favorite rhetorical contortion. They claim that Paul shouldn’t be held to account for the wacky material in his publications because he didn’t write them and was unaware of their content.

Paul defended the newsletters during his South Texas Congressional campaigns in the 90’s. His audience then didn’t seem too concerned so he was comfortable standing by the material. It won’t be so easy to disavow the newsletters now.

A simple mental exercise might illustrate why the content of the newsletters and Paul’s decades-long delay in renouncing them are a reflection of his character. Imagine for a moment what would have happened if one of the following statements had appeared in a rough draft of the Ron Paul Freedom Report:

- Karl Marx had a lot of great ideas.

- Americans are way too attached to their guns.

- Hillary Clinton…I’d totally hit that.

- US treasury bonds, what a great investment!

- Abortion isn’t a big deal.

- Why do people give Israel such a hard time?

- My soul won’t rest until they find the guy who killed Tupac.

- Homeschooling is weird.

- There’s nothing special about gold.

- The South had it coming.

- The Constitution is completely outdated.

- What this country really needs is a politically independent banking and currency regulator.

You can bet your 2nd Amendment rights that any ‘ghostwriter’ who tried to slide one of those statements into a Ron Paul newsletter would be locked out of the mimeograph room faster than you can say ‘Bilderberg.’ Whatever it’s editorial style, The Ron Paul Freedom Report was not Wikipedia.

Would he have allowed articles to be published in his name that glorified Stalin or recommended that the US give California back to Mexico? Does anyone seriously believe that he would have shrugged off such inflammatory comments by simply saying they were written by someone else?

The newsletters tell us what sort of shockingly offensive comments don’t upset Ron Paul.

Paul’s proto-blog provides a candid look at who he surrounded himself with, what wacky ideas interest him, and what sort of creepy ideological swamp fed his rise. The reason he is distancing himself now from Neo-Confederate rhetoric that gave him no hesitation fifteen years ago is simple – he had more freedom to be himself when he was a ‘90’s fringe character far from the media eye.

If only he could enjoy such liberating obscurity again.

When principles meet capitalism

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... p4.twitter

It's all in the game, yo

The New Dealers

Family, kids, minivan—and drug dealing. How the recession has driven average Americans into the game.

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2011/ ... na-growers

The issue with Ron Paul's newsletters is that Lew Rockwell wrote them and Ron Paul is being loyal to Lew Rockwell.

I'm not defending them or the fact that Ron Paul shouldn't be held accountable for at a minimum, not immediately ending its publication, but Lew Rockwell has been invaluable to gaining momentum for Ron Paul when few others would.

He won't throw Lew Rockwell under the bus and even if he did, it wouldn't do him any good. At this point there is very little Ron Paul can say other than what he is currently saying.

remember what I said on Dec 14th

http://goatpen.net/forums/viewtopic.php ... 180#p32706

So many things to comment on that article, but I'm not home & using my BlackBerry, so I'll wait. However, how common are these types of structures? I know that the military complex gets billions of dollars per year for products that will never be used in warfare...and those are not tied to performance hurdles.

My pee burned twice today.

I would have hit Hillary Clinton in 1990, too. she was sort of hot then.

If you take a little time, you'll see Islam and Judaism are not too far apart...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/world ... emism.html