12-04-09 - You all suck

Maurice Clemmons apparently killed a few cops up here. On Nov 30, he was a suspect with a manhunt on to find him. There were no witnesses, only weak circumstancial evidence that he was the killer. He was pulled over in a traffic stop and was shot and killed by an officer who saw no gun. It's hard to say whether or not the shooting was justified or not, but it's definitely questionable. For one thing, the officer only identified the person he shot by visually seeing that he "matched the description" of Clemmons - this was in the middle of the night in darkness. Without knowing that the person was in fact Clemmons, or that Clemmons definitely was the cop killer, and without seeing a gun, the cop killed this man. Luckily the man shot actually was Clemmons and he was in fact the cop killer. However, I made the mistake of reading the comments on the news story :

seattle times or seattle weekly

Here's a semi-random sampling of the comments :

Good job, coppers!

kiro7 twitter says he's dead. I'm glad this saga is over and we don't
have to see him in court. 

Now lets hope they shot Clemmons just like the other recent police
officer killer; paralysis for life. Only Morfort was paralyzed from the
waist down. In an indeal world this S.O.B. would be a quadraplegic. 

The perfect ending for a cop killer: capital punishment by cop.

Well, best way to get him. I don't want to pay tax after any of the
criminal just to have theire "house, food and amusement" in jail. Good
job officer :)

yeeah kill that sucker I am glad he is dead, do not let this monster live just kill it

It's pretty amazing how completely retarded you all are. There's absolutely no concept of the rule of law or the function of courts, there seems to be no concept of the idea that cops assasinating suspects might be a bad thing. I'm just disgusted.

I see the same thing with the Republican comments about Guantanamo. They seem to think it's perfectly reasonable to torture *suspects* and give them no access to courts, no human rights. Now, it's one thing to debate torturing someone who you *know* is a terrorist, but these people are suspects and we know for a fact that over half of them are completely innocent. We've seen many cases of people who have zero connection to any terrorist cell being apprehended and extradited, and you still think it's perfectly reasonable !?

I listen to NPR on my commute and it almost always makes me furious. (for one thing the fucking Steve Scher who does the call in show here is such a dull moron, I just want PRI and Pacifica and BBC please). He had a guy on the other day talking about what Mike McGinn might do to make Seattle a better place for bicycles (which was a big part of McGinn's campaign). The guest was actually really smart, he made some excellent points that I hadn't really thought of before. One is that the difficult and dangerous bike routing that we currently have in Seattle causes a population selection - only young, bold, fearless, dedicated people will ride; the older more reasonable safe people won't ride because it's too dangerous and the bike routing sucks too much. What that means is the biker population is biased towards kids who antagonize cars and it creates a vicious cycle. In cities like Copenhagen or Portland where you have lots of good bike routing, that encourages a wider spectrum of the population to get out, which makes the average cyclist more calm and considerate, and gets more people interested in supporting good bike routes, which is a nice positive feedback cycle.

Anyhoo, I'm feeling happy listening to this smart guy and then they start taking calls. Every single call is "the real problem is the cyclists don't obey the laws". The call in guy is like "okay, do you have any comment on public policy?". Next caller is "I drive and all the time I see cyclists just cruising through stop signs". Okay, do you have anything useful to say? Do you really think that if the cyclists stop at the stop signs they are going to create such wonderful goodwill that the city will shower them with money for better bike lanes? Are you fucking retarded? Can you vent your spleen on your blog and not the fucking radio?

Today I'm listening and they have Obama on talking about the economy. He says jobs only declined slightly last month. Big applause. He says he is encouraging the banks to lend more to main street. Big applause. Seriously? Are you so seduced by his serpent's tongue? He has done *nothing* for jobs, and *nothing* to reform the banks. He's absolutely in their pocket. His team seems to buy the ridiculous macro-economic mumbo-jumbo that increasing GDP is all that matters, even if that GDP is nothing but financial industry profit.