Symmetry Video

Police go to the wrong house… assault 12-year-old girl

Sometimes disgust and inaudible screams of disbelief is all one can muster:

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.

As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers…

[...]

… The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn’s attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.

After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.

Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home.

Errors happen. Shit happens… “Collateral damage” happens… I know… But, how? How does a twelve year old girl, or anyone for that matter, recover after something like this?

I wish the men that did this an eternity of sleepless nights, tormented by the horror of their actions, and the knowledge that, in the nightmares of a forever twelve year old girl, they’ll be remembered as monsters.

Paul Krugman wins Nobel economics prize

Like many progressives I’ve read and followed Paul Krugman for a number of years now, and consider him, not only prescient about the Bush presidency, but brave for speaking against the Iraq war when it was politically dangerous for public figures do so. To date, Paul Krugman has been thoroughly vindicated on economic policy, the Iraq invasion and, too, the catastrophe that is the Bush administration.

It is because of my respect for him that I’m sincerely happy to read that Paul Krugman has today been awarded the Nobel prize in economics:

Paul Krugman, the Princeton University scholar and New York Times columnist, won the Nobel economic prize Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.

Krugman has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration and the Republican Party in The New York Times, where he writes a regular column and has a blog called “Conscience of a Liberal.”

[…]

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised Krugman for formulating a new theory to answer questions about free trade.

“What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions,” the academy said in its citation.

I thought I’d lost every post

Phew! That was close. If you visited my site over the past couple of days you, I’m sure, noticed that something was wrong, er, terribly wrong. Uh, yeah. The short story, while conducting an upgrade the table that hosts all my posts “hung up,” making all that I’ve written over the past couple of years completely inaccessible.

I have to admit, there was a moment of panic, where I thought, Shit, I just lost everything! But, I remembered, I have a back up. (That’s right, A back up — as in one back up.) My hope was short lived, though. My back up was inaccessible through the regular admin, and the file had not pulled the posts table. So, although I was able to get to the back up via FTP, my single back up was of no use to me, because it did not contain the posts table. Long story short, I was sure that I would need to start all over again, from scratch — fresh install and give up on trying to retrieve my old posts. After seeking help and some digging around, I was able to get the posts table “unstuck” and, voila, my blog is back.

The lesson: have multiple back ups, and confirm that they contain all relevant tables.

If not Hillary, who?

The NY Times asks a good question, If not Hillary, who? The question can be made more explicit, If not a woman with Hillary’s experience, name recognition, command of policies, executive bearing, establishment backing and plain old tenacity, than just what sort of résumé must a woman have to be elected president?

The NY Times offers some potential candidates, and also a composite profile of what a successful female presidential candidate may look like. The composite profile mentions Chelsea Clinton’s demonstrated ability to be at ease before voters (like her father), and the discipline she showed (like her mother) while stumping for her mother.

Here’s the half joking composite that NY Times offers:

That woman will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged from the private sector to run for governor. She will have executive experience, and have served in a job like attorney general, where she will have proven herself to be “a fighter” (a caring one, of course).

She will be young enough to qualify as postfeminist (in the way Senator Barack Obama has come off as postracial), unencumbered by the battles of the past. She will be married with children, but not young children. She will be emphasizing her experience, and wearing, yes, pantsuits.

Oh, and she may not exist.

Unfortunately the article does not explore in any serious way the gender related obstacles that Sen. Clinton was faced with, and which future female candidates will need to successfully navigate before a woman can occupy the Oval Office.

While I’m not going to list the obstacles that Sen. Clinton was faced with as a woman, I think that this quote from Dee Dee Myers sums up our political landscape fairly well (now, remember, though I started as an Edwards supporter, and have been an Obama supporter for a long while now, I still think that there’s a lot of truth in this statement):

“No woman with Obama’s résumé could run,” said Dee Dee Myers, the first woman to be White House press secretary, under Bill Clinton, and the author of “Why Women Should Rule the World.” “No woman could have gotten out of the gate.”

Indeed, if not Hillary, who? When will we catch up with other nations that have already elected a woman to their highest office? Countries such as Chile, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Turkey, Brundi, Rwanda, Haiti, Peru, Jamaica and others (including Germany and England).