Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1358 Editor's Choice: 75
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@scorinthia, what the heck do those two things have do with each other?
[Read the article: "The Great Debaters"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That may be true, but there's no way a movie like that, if/when created, would ever get significant attention in this country. Mainstream America would never get over it. Y'all are still mad about O.J.
What the hell does domestic homicide have to do with Jim Crow?
Domestic homicide has probably existed in the human race for as long as there have been humans. Men were killing their wives long before Europeans started buying African slaves from Africans.
OJ is a common garden domestic abuser. They come in all colors and shapes and sizes and genders and orientations.
It's an insult to every woman who has ever been murdered while trying to get away from her abuser to insist that the OJ case was all about race.
I was raised in a home with domestic violence, by a deranged white Marine who almost killed my white mother.
But you don't care, right?
No, obviously you don't. That would spoil your whole shtick -- to care about people like me.
OJ can fry in hell. I hope he ends up serving time in Nevada. Maybe I should send the Nevada police some nice homebaked muffins or something.
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Celebrity scandals can mask much more impoprtant real world stories
[Read the article: The year in celebrity scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Like the Paris Hilton story. Look at how many so-called journalists erupted in heated public outrage when Lee Baca tried to give Hilton an early release.
Not a single one of those so-called journalists had a thing to say in the way of an apology when the staff at the LA Times went through the actual incarceration statistics for the county jail system and found that most female DUI probation violators get sent to home detention.
The real story behind Paris Hilton's "outrageous" and failed early release was a county jail system that is badly overcrowded.
Nobody cared! An overcrowded jail system is not a sexy story. It wasn't sexy or scandalous enough to warrant coverage in Salon.
BUT happily, the enormous outpouring of misguided rage over Paris Hilton proved to be a good thing for Sheriff Lee Baca. It gave him a good platform for fighting back.
He fought back and he won. Now they're building a new county jail, and the ACLU is consulting in its design.
Along with the new jail, there will be a formal system in place to prevent overcrowding, using home detention and early release.
So sometimes good things do come out of scandal. We will have a safer county jail, and the prosecutors and the lawmakers will be fully forewarned that if they incarcerate too many people for the jail system to handle, then some prisoners WILL be sent home early.
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On the Internet the reaction time is much shorter than the investigation time
[Read the article: The year in celebrity scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It took the LA Times staff several days to get access to the jail records and parse the raw data into evidence that would tell us whether or not Paris Hilton was really getting special treatment by being released so early.
But it only took an hour or two for the tide of white hot rage over her assumed special treatment to build up on the Internet.
And the Hillary campaign hostage situation -- I could see the white hot tide of political outrage building up within minutes before it was finally defused by a factual determination of the lunatic and his mental condition and motivation.
Why can't people just chill and wait for the facts to come out?
I guess it's the Internet. It speeds up the scandal reaction time but it doesn't really speed up the scandal investigation time.
That's not a good thing.
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Another theorem
[Read the article: Roadies' rules of the road]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Democrats will prostitute themselves to the far right to appear tough on crime but the benefits will only be short term at best.
Look at Gray Davis. He pandered to the tough on crime vote and he won.
But then Davis lost in a recall to a moderate Republican who promised to reform the state's overcrowded prison system as ordered by federal courts.
So the same "death on crime" brassiness that got Davis elected also helped him lose the recall.
This happened because the demographic of lower income minority voters happens to be the demographic most likely to have family members in prison and most likely to bear the brunt of any excesses or mistakes made by the tough-on-crimers.
Lower income voters deserted Gray Davis and either boycotted the election or went for Arnold.
The Clinton administration pandered to Trent Lott and Bob Barr on marijuana, using tactics of misrepresenting intelligence similar to the ones Bush II used to trick us into Iraq. Between Clinton and his far right allies, the national arrest rate for potheads was tripled from 250,000 per year to 750,000 per year. College students lost their financial aid for minor marijuana offenses.
(The last brilliant move was followed by an epidemic of binge drinking and several alcohol overdose deaths on college campuses across the nation.)
But this move only benefited the Democrats in the short term.
In the long term, the pseudoscientific anti-marijuana hysteria drummed up by the Clinton White House helped keep Al Gore from the White House as thousands of alienated and criminalized voters abandoned the Democratic Party for unelectable fantasy candidates like Ralph Nader.
Once again, a tough on crime position gave at best a short term benefit to the Democrats but ended up hurting them quite a bit in the long term.