Posts Tagged → abuse
A Day for Presidents and Chiefs
Today is Presidents’ Day, the day Americans remember the more notable and benevolent of the presidents who have administered our collectively owned executive branch. As we are seeing daily, the chief executive has tremendous power not only over our military forces and federal agencies, but over things we rarely see behind the scenes, like how our tax money is spent.
Daily reports of outrageous payments of your and my tax money by rogue federal agencies are riling up Washington, DC, and are vindicating President Trump. Recall that President Trump stated that the Biden Administration was lawless in more ways than just politicized law enforcement and open borders. Turns out that for the past four years, American taxpayers have been sending our hard-earned money to the farthest corners of the planet for the most ridiculous reasons – promoting transgenderism and gender coordinators among climate change cultists in Asia, is just one such boondoggle. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on subjects of dubious value, at best, and of fraudulent purpose. There is undoubtedly corrupt self-serving going on with these grants, as well.
In directly challenging these modern illiberal, really pagan, values that very nearly overran America, Trump is channeling something older and more powerful than himself, or even than modern America: His inner warrior is coming out. We are now seeing the spirit-man himself, no longer speaking from a sterile podium, but rather riding out on his horse, war paint on his cheeks, his Plains Indian headdress flowing in the wind, his reddened war club in his right hand, going straight at the enemy of all things good and sacred.
Mount Rushmore has the faces of our most famous presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Room remains for one more face, and various suggestions have been made about whose face it should be. Because Mount Rushmore is in the Black Hills, a place long sacred and special to various Plains Indians, and which was supposed to be set aside solely for the Indians, many people have suggested that the last face be Indian. Specifically, the same face that adorned the Buffalo Nickel.
A composite face, not necessarily Sitting Bull or Geronimo, but one that represents as many of the native tribes as possible, and thereby capturing the spirit of the carving: Indomitable and fighting to the very last. Truly American. Truly Trump.
While America forcefully defeated the many native Indian tribes, we then immediately put their faces on our coins and public symbols, because of our admiration for them. We liked to think that the deeply faceted spirit of the American Indians was in all of us. The American Indian spirit is something we still universally recognize and value, respect, and admire. So, I will put in with those who say the Indian head from the Buffalo Nickel should be the last face to go up on Mount Rushmore. Maybe just brush a little Donald Trump in there with it.
The way I see it, we will get a two-for-one out of it. It will be symbolic of not just the Indian, whose presence made our frontier more formative of the Yankee spirit that Trump now represents, our European settlers tougher, and our Declaration of Independence from tyrannical government stronger, but also of the inner Donald Trump, who was last in his generation to fight to the last, with everything at risk, everything on the table, against invaders and impure people.
That is the message this Presidents’ Day. Put an Indian chief up on Mount Rushmore, because the spirit of a free America has been defended, and it remains powerful medicine. It will really be Trump up there.
The spirit of Trump is alive, and defending America
America’s guardian
Maybe too much of a good thing?
President Trump and his lawfully appointed government assistants at DOGE have hit the ground running fast, and they have hit the bloated, rogue federal government hard, without question. While Trump may have had an axe to grind with the brazenly insubordinate federal workforce in his first administration, and with all of the brazenly lawless government bureaucrats at DOJ, FBI, DHS etc et al who targeted him with made up nonsense criminal charges and official lawfare for eight years, I still don’t know how many people expected his felt impact to be quite this stunning, this soon.
Trump has been a ton of bricks coming down hard, and to his supporters this is just the beginning of the justice we have wanted for years. Because Trump was not alone in feeling the tyrannical wrath of out of control government. Many of us, his supporters, suffered with him, to one degree or another. Many of us were also maliciously targeted by the Biden Administration for the simple “crime” of having different political views than Biden et al., and so we are all cheering on Trump’s massively overdue housecleaning of the rogue bureaucracy.
Our joy has only been rocketfueled by the daily red meat descriptions of incredible Obama- and Biden-era fraud, waste, and abuse of federal taxpayer funds being discovered by DOGE. And certainly, Trump’s patriotic instincts for justice and hard-about correcting course are only more sharply honed by these really phenomenally outrageous reports. Official corruption now visibly real, and also apparently even bigger and worse than one could imagine. That reasonable Americans will want swift and harsh justice imposed upon the criminals who enabled and engaged in these destructive, nay, treasonous acts is also normal and expected.
All this said, there is sometimes too much of a good thing.
Amidst the required bloodletting we should also want to avoid the appearance of bloodlust. This distinction does not require so much of a let-up in quantity, but rather a more targeted reposte with the rapier. Because in the slash-and-burn comes collateral damage too much for even our beloved Saint Trump to bear. Recall none other than the much and long beloved United States Patent and Trademark Office. Founded by Thomas Jefferson, it is of long and great distinction, for many great reasons. And the USPTO is also of great importance to American business, and it is thus housed in the US Dept. of Commerce.
The highly respected USPTO may have just been caught with a DEI cheat in the executive office, but the office body itself bears no such resemblance. In fact, this work-from-home workplace was among the very first such experiments, begun nearly thirty years ago, with all out-of-DC USPTO attorneys working from expensive, carefully built home offices designed for use only with Dept. of Commerce software. No double incomes here, these attorneys are on the clock day in and day out. Step out of line, fall behind in your caseload, and yes, you, a government attorney, will find yourself standing in the unemployment line, lickety split. The production standards for USPTO attorneys are very high, and they enjoy real hard-earned respect in their field.
The USPTO is one of the very few federal government offices where such potentially harsh discipline still exists, and it exists for good reason: The likely cost of a single USPTO attorney lazing about is very high, borne directly by the AMERICAN businesses who rely upon the USPTO to help them fend off all of the nonstop Chinese fakery and thievery of intellectural property in the active international marketplace. So it also stands to reason that the cost of haphazardly uprooting these finely tuned instruments of American business will be quite damaging to the very companies and business sectors we say we want to protect. Among the ransacking, there are objects of great value worth protecting. The USPTO is one.
Yes, overall, the federal work-from-home thing looks as bad as it probably smells down there in DC. Yes, there are likely countless examples of how work-from-home has been abused across the federal workforce, especially since it became standard in 2020. I know from first hand experience, as I was one of the few at US EPA HQ who got to experiment with it back in the mid 1990s, simply to allow a little bit more room on local roads for DC-bound commuters. What I saw back then with a number of colleagues was what we see in the headlines now: Lots of posh gardening, home-based second businesses, etc., everything but getting The People’s business done. Getting workers back into the work environment is generally a good thing, especially holding federal workers accountable, who exist solely to serve We, The People.
In the critically needed march to bring sanity to our overall disastrously run federal government, let us not also toss the baby out with the bathwater, nor kill the lone golden goose. Let’s not have too much of the medicine America needs.
Sweet Ellen Greenberg’s last two minutes alive
On a cold winter evening in January, 2011, pretty, sweet, gentle, tiny 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg was brutally murdered, stabbed to death in her back and chest twenty times with a kitchen knife that only moments before she had been using.
In addition to the homicidal wounds, one of which severed her spinal cord and rendered her body completely limp, which meant subsequent stabs must have been done with real rage, the autopsy of her body also showed deep bruising on her legs, torso, and arms, old and new. Marks around her neck showed that she had been recently strangled. Her body showed the signs that physically abused people typically carry. Ellen had probably been physically abused for a long time.
So when Ellen was making herself a small meal in the kitchen in which she was about to be attacked, she had already packed up her personal things, including her makeup. She had locked the apartment door, including the inner latch, because she wanted to be left alone. She had made up her mind to move out of the apartment she shared with her fiance, Sam Goldberg, either going home to Harrisburg, or moving in with one of her friends. Ellen had not yet made up her mind where.
For the past fifteen minutes, Sam had been texting Ellen, asking her to unlock the inner door latch, so that he could get into the apartment. Apparently Ellen had been ignoring him, because his last text said “You have no idea.”
Apparently Sam was in a rage.
Seconds later Sam kicked in the door, which broke the inner latch, and the rest of what happened seems clearly obvious to everyone except the corrupt Philadelphia Police, the corrupt Philadelphia DA’s office, and now a formerly corrupted or confused medical examiner, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, all of whom said sweet Ellen’s death was a suicide.
The man who conducted Ellen’s autopsy, who saw the bruises and the stab wounds from behind, who saw the photo of a large clump of Ellen’s hair on the kitchen floor, who initially ruled her death a suicide, Dr. Osbourne, has now changed his official opinion to “death not by suicide,” which sounds a hell of a lot like a line from a purposefully ridiculous Monty Python skit.
In other words, Dr. Osbourne now says Ellen was murdered, to which everyone around the world who has a heart and a brain says “No sh*t, Sherlock.” We already knew this years ago. It only took a lawsuit against Dr. Osbourne by Ellen’s parents and a pending court appearance to finally elicit his honest opinion, again.
Minutes after Ellen had slumped to the floor, Sam Goldberg called his uncle and his cousin, both of whom are criminal defense lawyers who live near the apartment Ellen shared with Sam. Only after Sam spoke with his lawyer relatives did he call 911, and tell the dispatcher “She fell on a knife.”
Now that Dr. Osbourne has changed his opinion about Ellen’s death, the law demands that a real criminal investigation be conducted. There is no statute of limitations on murder. And Ellen’s personal journal can finally be released from Dr. Osbourne’s office to her parents and to whomever is going to be investigating her murder, and whomever is going to be investigating the blatant coverup.
I mean, surely someone in law enforcement wants to know how Sam’s uncle, who is both a criminal defense lawyer and a former judge, was allowed full access into the apartment right after Ellen’s death. We know that the lawyer uncle left the apartment with some of Ellen’s personal belongings, including her computer.
Other glaringly obvious questions come to mind: What did Sam’s uncle take from the apartment? Why did he take them? What did he do with them?
Why has Dr. Osbourne’s office clung to Ellen’s personal journal all these years, unwilling to release it? If no murder happened, then why not release it, right? Why say Ellen suicided herself, but then act like you know she was murdered, Dr. Osbourne? Wonder what that journal says!
Why did the Philadelphia Police behave so casually about Ellen’s death? Her blood was splattered all over her kitchen, and her battered body showed the usual signs of a homicide. Her clump of hair on the kitchen floor was from someone grabbing her hair and violently pulling it (probably to bend her over to be able to stab her in the back of her neck).
Why did the Philadelphia DA’s office send representatives to an early 2011 meeting with the Medical Examiner and the Philly police, and have them ask that Ellen’s death certificate be changed from homicide to suicide?
What is the connection between the 2011 Philadephia DA’s office and Sam’s family? Obviously both were “in the business” together, and probably knew each other. Did that relationship somehow color the medical examiner’s decision to change his office’s initial finding of homicide?
Even more bizarre was the decision by then – PA AG Josh Shapiro to let stand the suicide ruling just a couple years ago, despite lots of new evidence that said otherwise. Shapiro also had a personal relationship with Sam’s family, and a political relationship, too.
Just so, so many tangled relationships in this whodunit murder, and not enough transparency about them!
Justice for Ellen demands that some outside professional outfit conduct the subsequent investigation into who murdered her. Who can do it? Josh Shapiro is now the governor, and he oversees the PA State Police. That means he could influence any investigation they would do. The FBI is completely corrupt, infiltrated, politicized, and untrustworthy, so they are out.
I don’t know who can investigate who murdered sweet Ellen Greenberg, but at this point, there is so much physical and circumstantial evidence out in public already that all we really need is an outdoor court room with split rail seating, a horse, a rope, and a tree.
I volunteer to slap the horse in the ass.
Impeach, impeach, impeach
Impeachment is a powerful tool provided in the US Constitution as well as in every state constitution. Over the past 100 years, America and American citizens have enjoyed a historically unprecedented veritable explosion in food security, home security, financial security, and almost endless creature comforts that just a couple decades ago were considered unimaginable luxuries. And so in the past 100 years of increasingly corpulent self-satisfied hourly comfort, Americans have lost their sense of purpose, necessity, hunger, their edge. And so the use of impeachment has pretty much died, as few people saw or sensed the need to use such a drastic tool in such comfortable times.
Americans now view political corruption and official abuse of the law as a cost of doing business, a cost of having such a luxurious lifestyle available to so many of us.
Why rock the boat with something like impeachment when everything is going so great? President Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment for behavior that by today’s standard was positively Girl Scout level, and President Bill Clinton was understandably impeached for having brazenly lied under oath. There have been only a small handful of state level impeachments over the decades, usually against aberrant judges whose behavior is so brazenly corrupt that people overwhelmingly agreed that removing them from office was an obvious necessity.
Then President Donald Trump was supposedly impeached in a process without any procedural integrity, without the right to call witnesses in defense, without the right to file motions or submit evidence. His first “impeachment” was a political circus, not a real court proceeding with all the seriousness the dignity of all the offices involved require.
The second so-called impeachment of President Trump was even more procedurally flawed than the first attempt, including the absence of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, whose daily presence is constitutionally required for an impeachment to go forward. Chief Justice Roberts’ absence did not hinder the lawless circus from continuing, though, so it was not really an impeachment. This process was in fact just the mis-use and mis-appropriation of the impeachment name applied to a set of theatrical political activities.
You would think with all this one-sided impeachment-lite activity that the “other side of the aisle” would be ready to apply the same medicine now that they have the power to do so. And you would be wrong. The elected eunuchs have no intention of fighting back at all.
And so we now find America in the throes of widespread lawlessness by one political party, whose judges behave like theatrical political tyrants while ignoring all legal precedent and legal process requirements of their court rooms. For example, this week Federal Judge Chuktan scolded the Trump legal team in DC that they should have spent the prior year reading through the 12,000,000 pages of discovery material in preparation for a defense they only found out about a few weeks ago, and whose access to the related documents only began a week ago. This is absolute lawlessness by Judge Chuktan, whose lawlessness makes an absolute mockery of the very idea of a legal process.
In case you are not understanding this, the judge refused to allow the Trump defense attorneys adequate time to read through and use in court over twelve million pages of material being used to falsely prosecute President Trump for his mere political speech. Nope, Trump’s team is expected to arrive in court fully prepared within a couple months. This is a grotesque and corrupt abuse of the federal judge’s powers and discretion.
Another example is the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court majority that – crazily, corruptly, partisanly – held that unilateral last-second changes to Pennsylvania election law, right before the 2020 general election, by unelected people in the executive branch, and in open defiance of the Pennsylvania constitution which places all election law only in the hands of the legislature, were just fine and would stand. These state supreme court judges were wildly abusing their authority and discretion to implement a plainly flawed election process that defied Pennsylvania’s legal process for establishing election law, and which subsequently allowed a huge amount of voting fraud to occur in the 2020 election.
Other examples of grotesque courtroom malfeasance by politicized judges can be found ad nauseum in the federal courtrooms in Washington, DC, where jurisprudence and respect for the rule of law have been thrown away in the interest of obtaining patently illegal political outcomes that benefit one political party and that are designed to hurt President Trump and anyone around him. Tainted jurors, tainted judges, conflicts of interest, abuses of courtroom decorum and legal procedural law, the list of malfeasance there is incredible.
The one answer to all of these politically active judges is impeachment. Real, honest-to-goodness impeachment that includes all the bells, whistles, and fixins of a gen-u-ine courtroom hearing. Just like the US Constitution and state constitutions have a process for fraudulent elections to be challenged, so they also provide for impeachments.
And while one political party is riding the impeachment horse all over the place, the other political party wants nothing to do with impeachment. Why that would upset the apple cart, or some such nonsense, is what we hear from elected Republicans across America. Most of the federal judges involved in the January 6th cases have abused their positions and should be impeached. More than half of the Pennsylvania state supreme court members deserved impeachment and should have been impeached. What was lacking in the political process was the political willpower from among the “other” political party to mount a response, to resist the lawlessness.
The response of impeachment that should have met every single one of these lawless judges was taken off the table before any real discussion of it began. The co-equal branch of government that is by design supposed to be able to impeach and then remove aberrant officials is completely out of this fight, and so the official lawlessness continues.
As in any fight, if one side is throwing haymaker punches and the other side is simply standing there taking all of the punishment, eventually the guy standing there taking all the punches is going to lose the fight. There is only so much abuse that any person or body can take before it breaks, and in the case of America, the abuse of lawlessness being inflicted on our body politic is beginning to crush our nation. Our political and professional institutions are collapsing under the onslaught. American citizens are beginning to lose trust in their official institutions.
The natural answer that is hard-wired into our various constitutions is impeach, impeach, impeach, and thereby hold lawless officials accountable and restore balance to our crumbling political system.
I do not know why in 2020 and 2021 former state senator and president pro tem of the Pennsylvania Senate, Jake-The-Snake Corman, and PA House leaders Kerry Benninghoff and Bryan Cutler, refused to even consider impeachment of the lawless PA state supreme court members who threw the rule of law out the window to immediately benefit one political party. It made no sense from a political perspective or from a let’s-uphold-the-basic-law perspective. Their impotence simply made no sense.
Nor does it make sense why US House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan refuse now to impeach the lawless federal judges and bribe-taking Joe Biden, the lying-before-Congress FBI Chris Wray, the endlessly lying and obviously lawless chief law enforcement officer US AG Merrick Garland, and a whole host of other corrupt federal employees whose job #1 is to uphold The Law.
Isn’t it curious that the people who are supposedly standing on “the other side” of the lawless people are unwilling to take a stand, to implement those impeachment processes that are spelled out in our various constitutions? By their unwillingness to fight back, every one of these politicians – Jake Corman, Kerry Benninghoff, Bryan Cutler, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan etc et al – is enabling and abetting their supposed opponents. By refusing to fight back in any meaningful way, these elected officials are actually allowing America to descend into not just lawlessness, but one party domination and the destruction of America as a political entity that naturally follows.
Only one explanation for GOP weakness makes any sense: How many pieces of silver have these elected officials taken to have their loyalties swayed away from their oath of office? How many elected Republicans across America are owned by China?
Twitter staff are attacking conservatives again
We all thought that Elon Musk had brought great change to Twitter. More openness, more transparency, more fairness, more balance, less hostility to inconvenient facts that some people in power don’t like, less censorship.
Well, that honeymoon has ended as conservative Twitter accounts are being shut down this week in a brazenly partisan and double standard bloodbath. My own Twitter account, which I don’t use much, was locked without warning (see screenshot below) for supposedly violating the Twitter rules against “abusive behavior.”
What abusive behavior? When, against whom, under what circumstances?
And why lock an account without any warning?
Turns out my succinct, well-earned, and fair response on Twitter to an abusive leftist was misconstrued as “abusive behavior.” And bang, just like that, my account was locked. Oh, I was given the option of eventually re-opening it, if I delete the tweet I wrote back to someone who was abusing me. But I am not going to go through Twitter’s version of Mao’s re-education camp, and so my tweet will remain. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and the tweet is mild in comparison to the things the person it was aimed at was writing at the same time.
Commentator Dan Bongino is constantly harping on the liberal hypocrisy thing. He is constantly pointing out that liberals don’t care about being caught as brazen hypocrites. Rather, Bongino says, liberals like the raw, unadulterated, unlimited power they feel when they get to act unfairly and treat other people unfairly. He points out that when liberals hold themselves to zero standard, and then hold people like Josh First to an impossibly high standard, liberals don’t see a fairness problem. They see and really enjoy the raw exercise of power and hierarchy, the ability to simply crush someone’s free speech rights because of a made-up fake violation of some subjective rule that is never applied to one side of a debate and that is always mis-applied to the other side of the debate.
Liberals/ Leftists are at the top of the hierarchy, and people like Josh First are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Hierarchy and power, that is what the Josh First Twitter account lock is about. Talk about abusive behavior! Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I am now the powerless victim of a power-crazed corrupt absolutist tyrant, some person who works at Twitter named Ella Irwin. Apparently she has been going after the accounts of other conservatives, too, including activist Michael Knowles and congresswoman Marjorie T. Green.
Here’s the thing about this latest censorship of conservative voices at Twitter: The people doing it are unfair, mean, abusive, bullies, censorious, against free speech, against ideas that scare them, and tyrannical. Any and all of these characteristics are negative. You would not normally choose to be around or subject to individual people who have these sorts of negative traits and broken personalities. And yet here we are again, pushed back into sharing digital space with people from Silicon Valley, California, where the overwhelming majority of people in control of the digital town square are just pure bad crap like Ella Irwin.
And take note: Not one Democrat Party person or official objects to this. Which means that the Democrat Party people have the same intention for governing America as their allies govern Twitter, FaceBook, etc. They all believe in using massive coercive force against people who disagree with them.
Twitter gives us a view into the souls of the people who oppose us. No wonder they want to take away our guns! Then we would be completely helpless against them. Give these people a huge swastika to wear proudly, because that is what they are.
Some conservatives are sounding cruel about Ukraine
Yes, we know that Ukraine has been a money laundering pedophile child pornography child prostitution child slave trade playground for American elites and especially for children of the Democrat Party. Ukraine is also the locale of Burisma, the corrupt natural gas company that just happened to hire crack-addict Hunter Biden for a million dollars a year to do what, no one knows. Even Hunter Biden has admitted in an interview he was hired only because of his dad, then-VP of the USA.
And Ukraine is also the locale of the federal prosecutor fired by the Ukrainian government for investigating Burisma and Hunter Biden, because Joe Biden bragged about threatening to withhold a billion dollars in American aid to Ukraine if the prosecutor wasn’t fired. This is Corruption 101, and we all see it.
Yes, there are a surprisingly large number of Americans whose allegiance to the corrupt and immoral Democrat Party is so certain (why why why?) that they will overlook all of this disgusting, horrible sickness and they will try to explain it away with nonsensical blather. And it is this nonsensical blather that really gets the goat of a lot of conservatives, and makes our side say some dumb things.
Like lots of conservatives are openly cheering on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because dictator Vladimir Putin is corralling and exposing the Democrat Party illegalities and corruption there. They say that because Russia is exposing the deep state’s dirty little hidey hole, everything that Russia is doing there is just fine. Tear it all down, they say.
Say what?
Conservatives used to pride themselves on being humane, conscientious, pro-life. And yet here a fair number of American conservatives are cheering on the utter flattening of Ukrainian society, made of innocent people who have no skin in the corruption game, no dog in the corruption fight. They simply own simple little homes and apartments where they eked out a small, simple life, until Russia invaded and violently destroyed everything these people owned.
It is possible to oddly respect cruel dictator Vladimir Putin for his love of his country, and for his rough handed defense of Christianity and traditional human values, without simultaneously cheering on his latest war crimes against humanity.
What Putin’s Russia is doing to Ukraine is barbaric and cruel, it is wrong, it is wantonly destructive, and everything bad that can happen in return to Russia is something that Russia has earned ten-fold. Watching the videos of Ukrainian peasants, the simplest and humblest of people, crying over their dead children, their crumbled homes, their crushed cars, their villages reduced to rubble, we realize that these innocent people are caught in the crossfire between a corrupt Ukrainian government and a brutal, inhuman Russian government.
It is possible to relish the blown cover the Democrat Party is running from in Ukraine, while also cheering on the heroic defense of homeland by the Ukrainian people. They are fighting the good fight against a ruthless invading army. Cheering on the Ukrainian fighters doesn’t mean you have to love Ukraine’s president Zelensky, although he too has risen to the moment and is providing quality leadership the likes of which eastern Europe has not seen in a very long time. Even though he is also a mini dictator.
Like we all know now, eastern Europe is a giant knot, a huge mess of intertwined allegiances and back and forth brutalities going back five hundred years, at least. It is a difficult place to make sense of at any time, and especially now. We Americans both like to root for the underdog and for the good guy, and in this fight both sides, Russian and Ukrainian, have both good guys and bad guys, especially at the upper echelons.
But if there is one thing a real American disagrees with, it is watching innocent people get crushed by an evil ruthless dictator. C’mon, people, don’t let anyone think we conservatives are cruel, that we have no heart, and that we are okay with the working people of Ukraine being abused and destroyed in the process of a Russian dictator outing bad Democrat Party members from America while he tries to add more land to his empire.
We patriots can simultaneously cheer on the brave Ukrainian people defending their homes, and not cheer on their corrupt leaders; and we can appreciate the public service Russia is inadvertently doing by exposing American political corruption in Ukraine without actually cheering on the Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
This ain’t difficult for conservatives. Don’t put us in the same category as convoluted Democrats trying in vain to explain away their party’s dramatic descent into Hell.
Eric Papenfuse, you owe Robert Ford an apology
The following story is found at http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2015/06/harrisburg_artsfest_veteran_st.html#incart_m-rpt-2.
The other day, a Harrisburg Police officer aggressively harassed an old Marine dressed in his uniform, accusing him of stolen valor. That is where people wear military uniforms and medals they are not entitled to wear. They do it to make themselves appear better, cooler, tougher. Turns out, the old Marine, Robert Ford, was in fact honorably discharged from the US Marines a long time ago, and the uniform he proudly wore was given to him by the US Government. He had just finished performing “Taps” at a Memorial Day ceremony and decided to walk over to ArtsFest along Front Street and the Susquehanna River.
American citizens cannot be expected to put up with this kind of over-reach and abuse of power. It is official malfeasance, which is actionable. Harrisburg City has real crime problems. This is Bad Government, Exhibit A. My God, what is happening here?
Questions about this videotaped and photographed event abound:
a) Will Detective (!) John O’Connor offer an apology to Ford?
b) Will Detective (!) O’Connor be demoted or terminated for his wildly unprofessional, threatening, bullying behavior of a free citizen?
c) Will Mayor Papenfuse have anything to say? Will he do anything?
d) Will Harrisburg police Captain Deric Moody also apologize, or be demoted? Moody’s behavior is almost worse than O’Connor’s, because he compounded the initial antagonistic behavior and then tried to cover it up.
Folks, Harrisburg is in trouble, deep trouble, and unless elected officials are quick to get these kinds of situations under control, a festering culture develops. Recently I discovered that yet another city agency is once again making bad decisions in a vacuum.
Mayor Papenfuse, an apology from your police officers is Job #1. Other elected officials should chime in, too.
Good or bad, the cops have our backs
A society without a professional police force lacks the rule of law. No rule of law? No civilization.
Are there bad cops, violent cops, corrupt cops, abusive cops, escalating cops? Of course. I’ve seen it. Central Pennsylvania Attorney Devon Jacob has seen it, and he’s a former police officer who prosecutes police brutality. Even he says the bad cops are a minuscule fraction of the overall number.
Overall and overwhelmingly, the police across the nation are the best of the citizenry. They sacrifice their safety to bring a certainty to yours. Without police like American police, there’s no America. Not as we’ve come to know it.
That’s what gets me about the anti-police attitude so common now. What, you want anarchy?
Despite the fake and misplaced rage about criminals dying at the hands of the police they attacked, there is truth to the observation that police forces are too militarized. And too many police officers are quick to escalate situations to satiate an ego in need of control. These aren’t secrets and these are issues the left and the right agree on. It’s going to get resolved professionally through the political process.
The blips on the radar screen that get our attention most are momentary deviations from the standard behavior of nearly all police officers. The extremely high standard of care that the police in every community bring to all of us is second to none.
So, how any American identifies the police as the bad guys is beyond me. It’s a sign of deep cultural decay and failure. It’s time that stopped.