‘It’s terrible to go over to Iraq twice and come back injured, and then get injured by the police that are supposed to be protecting us,’ Mr Olsen’s roommate Keith Shannon told The Guardian, adding that he served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 before leaving the military last year.

‘Oakland Police Department fired a tear gas canister at his head, fracturing his skull,’ said Mr Olsen’s friend Joshua Shepherd. A spokesman for Highland General Hospital confirmed that Olsen was being treated for injuries sustained during the protest. Oakland police have not yet commented.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053502/Occupy-Oakland-protests-Marine-veteran-shot-face-police-rubber-bullet.html#ixzz1bwC7mi9u

May he survive, and recover fully.

Prosecutors had asked the jury for the life sentence after presenting their painstaking and sometimes graphic case, and rejected Jeffs’ contention that he was being persecuted for his religious beliefs.

“The evidence in this case shows that this isn’t a prosecution of a people,” prosecutor Eric Nichols said in his closing argument. “This is a prosecution to protect people.”

During the trial, prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with the 15-year-old and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting the 12-year-old.

Could not be a more appropriate end to a twisted, vicious career.
With any luck at all the TDCJ facility awaiting this sick “preacher” will NOT be one of the hospitals or asylums that are part of Texas’ prison system. Given his notoriety it’s likely he won’t be in the general population for very long, if at all.

This monster boasted of his 78 “wives” and taped his instructions to a 12-year-old, among a group of underage girls he was preparing for molestation, on how to “please God” by doing the things Jeffs’ twisted sexual appetites demanded. The Monitor article says, “Rather than focus on Jeffs’s multiple marriages, prosecutors with the Texas Attorney General’s Office presented a case based on alleged violations of the laws of consent in Texas. Twelve- and 15-year-old girls are not old enough to consent to engage in sexual activities.

Under Texas law, any sexual activity between an adult and an under-17-year-old is a sexual assault even if the minor is a willing participant. The same activity with an under-14-year-old is aggravated sexual assault punishable by up to life in prison.

During the penalty phase of the case, prosecutors played an audio tape of Jeffs allegedly preparing five other young girls to have sex with him. He encouraged his “child brides” to set aside all their inhibitions.”

Will he appeal his conviction? Who can say? Clearly the jury didn’t believe Jeffs’ first amendment rights to “freedom of religion” included the sacrilege he committed when he turned child rape into a sacrament for his cultists.

Meanwhile, his successor as “Prophet” of the FLDS is planning changes to the site of the raid where Texas law enforcement and social services professionals discovered this sorry excuse for a human being’s criminal behaviors, and obtained evidence leading to his conviction. First thing on the church’s list, though, isn’t turning its back on Jeffs’ twisted policies. It’s making their compound look different:

FBI agent John Broadway testified that fathers who gave their young daughters to Jeffs were rewarded with young brides of their own. Girls who proved reluctant to have sex with Jeffs were sent away, according to excerpts from Jeffs’ journals that prosecutors showed to the jury.

Police raided the group’s remote West Texas ranch in April 2008, finding women dressed in frontier-style dresses and hairdos from the 19th century as well as seeing underage girls who were clearly pregnant. The call to an abuse hotline that spurred the raid turned out to be a hoax, and more than 400 children who had been placed in protective custody were eventually returned to their families.

Jeffs is the eighth FLDS man convicted since the raid on Yearning For Zion, in the town of Eldorado, 45 miles south of San Angelo. Previous sentences ranged from six to 75 years in prison.

The church’s traditional headquarters is along the Utah-Arizona border, but it established the Texas compound in 2004. Jeffs once faced criminal charges in Arizona and was convicted of accessory to rape in Utah in 2007. But that was overturned by the state Supreme Court and he was extradited to Texas in December.

Willie Jessop, a former FLDS spokesman, who railed against the raid but has since disavowed Jeffs, said the first priority of the church would be tearing down the guard tower and the gate at the ranch.

During his trial Jeffs had claimed God demanded the removal of District Judge Barbara Walther from the bench. Apparently Jeffs never figured out the voice in his head might not be who he thought it was.

The news of Jeffs’ conviction,

In his closing argument, lead prosecutor Eric Nichols told jurors that the so-called religious persecution and freedom issues Jeffs raised are not a legitimate defense for the alleged crimes.

“This case is not about any people, not about any religion. This case is about Warren Steed Jeffs and what he has done,” Nichols said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

Prosecutors finished presenting their sexual assault case on Wednesday by playing a recording of his alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl for jurors.

delighted a Utah DA: SALT LAKE CITY — Not long after polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs — charged with sexually assaulting two underage girls he took in “spiritual marriages” — was found guilty by a Texas jury, Utahns with ties to Jeffs were buzzing about the verdict.

“I’m delighted” Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said Thursday, noting that it’s been 10 years since Utah filed its warrant in a separate case against Jeffs. “I’m extremely pleased justice has finally been served.”

This is the culmination of years of work on behalf of Texas law enforcement and the Tom Green County DA as well as District Judge Barbara Walther. So far none of the defendants in child rape cases arising from the raid on the cult compound outside Eldorado has been acquitted, as far as I’m aware.

There is no exception to child rape laws in Texas for claims that it’s a religious rite.

Grace under pressure, courage in the face of mortality, and — from the time she burst onto the national scene until today — a fine, fine example of living to the utmost.

But there are political realities at play in DC that dwarf the ones I saw firsthand, up-close and
bleeding-edge personal right here in Lubbock, over the last six weeks while I was doing everything
I could do to stop Rick Perry’s political juggernaut. The ones I saw here are of sufficient ugliness to
convince me that whatever else we do as progressives, we mustn’t just sit back on the sidelines and
yell.

We must work for what we want, whether that work pays off or not.

In brighter news, it appears MSNBC is going to allow Keith Olbermann to return to the Countdown host’s
desk tomorrow. More than 250,000 signatures on a petition in less than 72 hours appears to be a big
enough effort to get the attention of a major US corporation.

If we do as much to back our President and our Congress against the onslaughts of the newly-resurrected
(by slightly more than half of slightly more than a third of voters in this country!) GOP, good things still
can happen.

But if we sit on the sidelines and sulk because we didn’t get our ponies, if we abandon the President because
we didn’t get everything we wanted RIGHT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW, if we go forward forgetting history
and refusing to stand up for the truth, we’ll get hammered. Again.

Lack of money is the least, not the greatest, of our faults. If we want Democratic leaders to stand up and show
some backbone, they have to see that we, the voters, are willing to do the same.

Graham Firchlis, speaking only for myself

Last winter I ventured that the Dems would hold their own in the House, plus/minus a few seats, and keep their majority in the Senate intact with the chance to possibly pick up a seat. But that was when I still thought there was some semblance of decency left in a few congressional Republicans, and they would allow passage of a stream of small yet functional stimulus bills to help put the nation back to work.

Alas. It turns out there are no decent Republicans.

Worse, for reasons inexplicable to me apparently driven by delusion, irrational fear and a reptilian logic imbedded deep within the human brainstem, some number of voters across the political spectrum have decided to blame the recently arrived and overwhelmed Democrats for thirty years of systematic Republican cruelty. That’s like punishing the firemen for water damage while continuing to befriend the criminal gang that stole everything you owned and set your house on fire. It just dosn’t make any sense.

Or maybe in the minds of some it is all about having “one of them” in the White House, an inferior “other” who isn’t a servant. Hard to tell.

Apparently I have once again over-rated the common decency and good sense of otherwise apparently intelligent elected Repubicans and a significant cross-sectional share of the electorate, Right, Middle and Left alike. Just when you imagine that after 100,000 years people as a whole couldn’t possibly act more self-destructively….

But prospects likely aren’t as bad for the Democrats as the media and the pollsters and the Republicans want us to think, because the polls that all the current Republican whoop-and-holler relys on are based on a biased voter selection mechanism – the land-line telephone. Modern times, and with significant recent acceleration, the young and the technologically comfortable are moving away from landlines and going it more and more alone with cellular devices. (I’m 63, only modestly technologically adept, wouldn’t twitter if paid to do so, and haven’t had a landline in years.)

Yet pollsters still rely primarily on land-line calls, and even when the more adventurous polls do try to include cell phone users they almost always substantially under-represent them. This creates what is called “coverage error” and can seriously warp the poll outcome. Nate Silver, no less, has substantial concerns and no clear answers.

This particular “coverage error” matters for interpretation of the pollster’s accuracy because the young and the technologically capable of all ages tend to be more Liberal than average in both their thinking and their voting. The polls this year, as they have been for some time, are generally skewed towards recording opinions of Conservative/Reactionary land-line users and away from the intentions of their more Liberal cell-only counterparts. Compare, for instance, the results from two recent major polls. The traditional dominantly landline approach of McClatchy-Marist yielded results consistent with most other pollsters, giving Obama a net negative rating of -4% while showing a massive tilt towards Republican voter enthusiasm, 51% versus 28% for Democrats. A Newsweek poll that deliberately included a reasonable proportion of cell-phone only users provided quite different outcomes, with Obama having a net +14 approval and the “enthusiasm gap” gone entirely.

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but my back-of-the-envelope pencil-metrics put the effect at 2% to 4% underestimation of Democratic-likely voters depending on the urban density – the better the cell phone connection pattern and the tighter the economic squeeze, the more people decide to dump their increasingly anachronistic landlines.

While pollsters do try to make corrections for this kind of bias based on prior responses, their correction algorithms are restricted by historical data which may no longer apply. This is especially true in subject areas with a rapid change in the demographic where adjustments must be made. The shift from landline to cell-only is one of those, with a rapid and increasing rate of conversion.

Currently, a quarter to a third of Americans are cell-only or essentially so and thus outside most pollster’s reach, and that percentage is increasing at an accelerating rate. When a quarter or more of your intended subjects are unavailable, a quarter-plus that differs significantly in makeup and attitude from the residual sample and that divergence is accelerating, any “correction” that might be applied falls more and more under the heading of Wild-Assed Guess.

The other aspect that has been misinterpreted is voter turnout. Anger will motivate, certainly, and angst will de-motivate, but the GOTV effort on the part of the Democrats still has a great deal of power left from two years ago. I’ve talked to a lot of folks who are just as active as in 2008 and some who are even more so this cycle, and the massive Obama-voter-apathy we’ve been told so much about doesn’t seem to me to be as big as is reported.

Add another 2% or so to the poll-predicted Democratic vote totals from this effect.

Combined, and hedging a bit as any decent prognosticator must do, I’ll predict that in general the Democrats as individual candidates will do somewhere from 3% to 5% better than the polls now suggest. Since there are a lot of races where Democrats trail within that range or are holding even, my analysis suggests that there will be a lot more Democrats in office come November 3rd than the MSM, the Republican Party and Nate Silver are predicting. I have Harry Reid being re-elected by 4,000+/- votes and the Democratic caucus holding the Senate 55 – 45, while the Democrats retain control of the House 222 – 213.

Or I could be wrong, and Republicans win everything still hanging in the balance. That would be bad, but from an immediate strategic sense perhaps won’t force much of a change from what already needed doing. Looking forward, every conceivable electoral outcome leaves those of us on the Left in about the same position we’ve been in for the last two years:

Wondering what we might do to make an impact for real Progressive change in the face of a deadlocked – and thus inherently Conservative – Congress, a systematically-obstructed, mostly-well-intentioned but agonizingly-deliberate-to-the-point-of-being-tentative president, massive corruption of the media, a Reactionary grip on the judiciary, all while climate change comes down upon us like all the hounds of Hell and the ascendant power within the Republican Party believes that an Apocalypse is a desirable event. Big picture, our challenge appears to be more systemic than any one general election.

Come Wednesday morning, bright and early, those of us not permanently gripped by chronic depression need to start a serious discussion about what to do going forward that can plausibly succeed. I look forward to getting past the election hype, and back to work on the really hard stuff.

The pundits would have it that this election’s outcome will depend on massive enthusiasm from the TeaParty fools and a scarcity of Liberal voters because they are depressed after finding out that Barack Obama is merely human. Good to know.

But here in California that is certainly not the case. The TeaPartiers have made a lot of noise, that’s what they do best, and the MSM hyperactive talking heads have made the most of it, but the truth is that the state’s voters shifted significantly to the Left in 2008 and that trend has continued through this election. We will elect a Democratic Governor, replacing the utter failure of another Republican administration, and return one of the most Liberal Senators to another six year term. Across the state on a local level we will apparently retain nearly all Democratic House representatives, and keep the Democratic majorities in our state legislature intact as well.

Graham Firchlis recommends:

US Senator: Barbara Boxer
US Representatives: All Democratic candidates
Governor: Jerry Brown
Lieutenant Governor: Gavin Newsom
Secretary of State: Debra Bowen
Controller: John Chang
Treasurer: Bill Lockyer
Attorney General: Kamala Harris
Insurance Commissioner: Dave Jones
State Assembly: All Democratic candidates
State Senate: All Democratic candidates

Down-ticket are several interesting and important initiative propositions, many of which are distinctly misleading. In the following recommendations I include explanation:

Proposition 19; Marijuana legalization: No. [There are better ways. This approach will benefit large commercial grow operations while undermining small-scale growers, while neither price nor quality will likely improve in significant ways. A better approach would be to expand medical indications to include every ailment where the sufferer can benefit by an improved sense of well-being, appetite increase and/or relief of chronic pain.]

Proposition 20; Assigns redistricting of congressional representatives to an appointed commission: No. [Empowers the Republican Party. *See redistricting summary below.]

Proposition 21; Vehicle tax surcharge to fund state parks: Yes. [Permanently funds state parks for $1.50 a month per vehicle, taking them out of the political arena and making them available to citizens with no admission fee.]

Proposition 22; Prohibits state from seizing taxpayer funds from local government: Yes. Local agencies were promised a share of state revenue. Now the state under Ahnold is reneging on that promise, taking the funds to to balance the state budget while leaving local agencies in the lurch, in many cases for project funding that has been years in the planning process. The result is lost jobs and usurpation of local authority to meet local needs.

Proposition 23; Suspends California’s landmark air pollution control law: No. Funded by big oil. We need to move forward with pollution control and sustainable energy, not backwards.

Proposition 24; Repeals billions of dollars in unnecessary sweet-heart tax breaks for selected businesses: Yes. This bit of nonsense was the price a Republican legislator demanded to get last year’s budget passed, handing out tax breaks to companies that electorally back Republicans. The effect was to provide campaign funds to Republicans, using taxpayer money.

Proposition 25; Lowers legislative budget approval requirement from two-thirds to simple majority: Yes. [*See redistricting summary below.]

Proposition 26; Imposes two-thirds vote requirement for new fees by local agencies: No. The 2/3 vote requirement on new taxes has crippled California’s ability to fund projects required for the general welfare of our citizens. Adding that restriction to fees will do more of the same. Voters who dislike fees can respond by voting out the elected officials who imposed them.

Proposition 27; Eliminates appointed state commission on redistricting, returning authority to the legislature: Yes. [*See redistricting summary below.]

——————————————

Sticking my nose into other states’ business:

I think states should be free to handle their internal electoral processes free of outside interference, so long as constitutional requirements are respected. I certainly did not appreciate Utah’s LDS “Church” massive interference in our struggle to define equal rights for our citizens. But sometimes issues deserve limited discussion from beyond a state’s boundaries:

In Nevada, for Senator: Harry Reid
In Wisconsin, for Senator: Russ Feingold
In Florida, for Senator: Charlie Crist (Potential Dem caucus pickup. The Democratic candidate cannot win)
In Alaska, for Senator: Lisa Murkowski (Less likely Dem caucus pickup, but there have been back-channel discussions and she’s seriously displeased with the Republican Party both in Alaska and nationally. The Democratic candidate cannot win.)
In Pennsylvania, for Senator: Joe Sestak
In Missouri, for Senator: Robin Carnahan
In Texas, for Governor: Bill White
In Rhode Island, for Governor: Lincoln Chaffee (Chaffee, formerly a Republican running as n Independent, is a Progressive while the Democratic candidate is a Reactionary.)
In New York, for Governor: Andrew Cuomo (Keep an eye on this young man. He wins this election and things go as I expect, he’ll make a run for President in 2016.)

——————————————

[* Redistricting issue summary. Redistricting in California rested with the state legislature for many years. Under Democrat Willie Brown, a deal was cut to bring stability to electoral districts based on either Republican or Democratic majorities. Both parties accepted the arrangement. But Brown foresaw what Republicans did not, that the tide of voter sympathies would eventually shift towards a pattern that would allow the Democratic Party to assume legislative control and keep it. Republicans have been trying to thwart majority rule in California ever since that reality dawned on them.

The infamous Republican-backed Prop 13 initiative bribed voters with enormous real estate tax breaks in return for establishing a 2/3 requirement to pass state taxes and the state budget, handing Republicans a powerful lever with which they could control state affairs from the minority. In the last election another Republican initiative, foolishly backed by a number of Progressive groups, took the redistricting authority away from the Democratic-controlled legislature just as the Democrats were on the verge of obtaining the two-thirds majorities they need to finally govern as a majority of the state’s voters desire.

That redistricting power would be vested in a new commission comprised of five members from each major party and five from the governor. The effect would be to hand the Republican Party, an abject minority in the legislature, an equal voice with the dominant Democratic Party when it comes to redistricting. After decades of avoiding the consequences of voter preference and defying the democratic principle of majority rule, the Republicans have found yet another tool to keep their slender unjustified hold on power.

Proposition 20 in this election would extend that minority dictatorship to congressional redistricting, and should be defeated. Proposition 27 reverses the misguided establishment of an “independent” commission, thwarts the attempted coup by the minority Republican Party, and returns the serious responsibility of redistricting to the representatives elected by the people - where it belongs.]