Combat! - Page 217 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Retry Barry Beach

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized May 23, 2013 7 Comments

Barry Beach, who was sentenced to 100 years in 1984, released pending a retrial in 2011, then returned to prison last week

In 1983, Barry Beach was arrested in Louisiana for contributing to the delinquency of a minor—his stepsister, whom Beach took in after she ran away. Detectives interrogated him for three days, until he confessed to the 1979 murder of high school classmate Kim Nees and to the murder of Louisiana woman Kathy Wharton. A judge threw out the Wharton confession when it was contradicted by physical evidence, and the same detectives subsequently extracted false confessions to the Wharton murder from two other men. On the strength of his confession to the Nees murder, which Beach denies, a Montana judge found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to 100 years. In 2011, after nearly 30 years in prison, another judge granted him a retrial, and Beach was released. Two weeks ago, the Montana Supreme Court overruled that judge and returned Beach to prison without his trial, after he had been free for a year and a half. You can read about the whole sordid affair in my Indy column, which is what you get instead of a blog today. Come on, summer hours.

Bible mom maybe lies about vaccinations, maybe just loves Bible

By Dan Brooks in Christianism May 22, 2013 2 Comments

If you Google "bible vaccinations," this is what you get.

If you Google “bible vaccinations,” this is the second most popular result.

A. Ron Galbraith has alerted me to the news that Bible mom doesn’t want to vaccinate her child, because Bible, but a federal judge in Brooklyn has denied her request for an injunction. For the purposes of this discussion, we will pretend that the New York Post is a reputable source of news and that Staten Island is part of the city. In February, Dina Check sued the NYC Department of Education on the grounds that she had unfairly been denied a religious exemption to let her daughter, ~~A’ishah~~ Mary, attend PS 35 without her shots. Her reason, which is maybe two reasons, reveals a fundamental problem with religious objections to law.

Read the Inspector General’s report on the IRS/Tea Party scandal

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government May 21, 2013 3 Comments

This image of Conan the Barbarian provided as a public-service alternative to pictures of inspectors, hearings or tax forms.

Congressional hearings into news that the IRS singled out conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status is either a tempest in a teapot or a tempest issuing from the mouth of a tyrannical socialist dragon, depending on which news outlet you read. Mitch McConnell says that the heightened scrutiny of Tea Party organizations reflects a “culture of intimidation” in the Obama administration, which is kind of a weird assertion in light of claims that the President also covered it up. As often happens in our brave modern news cycle, the question of what the IRS did has been elbowed aside by questions of who knew what about what the IRS did, whether what the president might have known they did constitutes an impeachable offense, and how “so many Americans knew this was happening,” as Sarah Palin claims. Now you can know what’s happening, too, simply by reading this 55-page report.

That had not occurred to us, dude

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media May 20, 2013

But first, an evening you’ll never forget

In answer to Willy’s question in the Friday Comments section: no, I was not aware that Rick Ross lost his Reebok sponsorship over his very rapey verse on the original UOENO. Fortunately, a quick Google search turned up this article from Billboard.com. Besides important information about what Rick Ross will do to your drink if you hang out with him, the article also contains a valuable lesson about misplaced modifiers. From the very first sentence:

After stirring up controversy for lyrics deemed pro-rape, Reebok has decided to end their partnership with Rick Ross.

Kombat! Kids take note: an initial dependent clause modifies the first noun after the comma. In the sentence above, Reebok has stirred up controversy for pro-rape lyrics. In reality, or at least in the portion of actuality covered by hip-hop, Rick Ross was the one who stirred up c for lyrics deemed p-r. Don’t go to the club with him, even though he is rich, because he will put MDMA in your champagne and then, when you become impaired, encourage you to engage in sexual intercourse that (yo)u (w)o(n’t) e(ve)n (kn)o(w) about. Also his head is essentially Lionel Richie’s head upside-down. This has been the news.

Friday links! Just when I thought I was out edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links May 17, 2013 5 Comments

Remember that thing I wrote yesterday about summer hours? Yeah, that wasn’t true. I’ve got a job of work to do today, just like any other day, and summer hours are but a bitter dream. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Today is Friday, and nuisances are tenacious. Neither president nor weirdo in his apartment is safe, and hope is a fool’s fortress. All we can do is enumerate the slights against us. Won’t you compose a quick list with me?