Salt City Sinner

posted 3/21/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Photo: AP Paul Mero has a freedom problem. And not a freedom problem in the sense that an alcoholic has a drinking problem. Modern conservatives have made out like bandits by exploiting metaphors and ideas that are deeply embedded in American culture -- concepts like freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and individualism. During the Bush years, these linguistic tics took on a grim, ironic quality. Increasingly, they were deployed alongside other, older conservative idioms regarding patriotism, faith, and family as a smokescreen to cover concepts somewhat at odds with freedom: indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, and torture (proud new American traditions that continue under President Obama to this day). I've   written before  about how an ideology -- any ideology -- is like a room in which conceptual furniture must be arranged. That's not my metaphor (although I wish I had thought of it first); I cribbed it...

posted 10/25/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Okay, let's get this out of the way first: I am NOT a libertarian, big L or small. I suppose you could consider me a civil  libertarian, as I support the maximum possible amount of personal freedom (i.e., free speech, an end to the "war on drugs," gun rights, etc.). However, the economic views of libertarians (end the welfare state, deregulate industries, lower taxes on corporations) are extremely repulsive to me, since they amount to the opposite of consumer advocacy and the mirror image of activism on behalf of poor, working class, and middle class people. My ideological relationship with libertarianism is complex. Any ideology consists of a subset of emphases. One of my favorite college professors of all time used the metaphor of a room that consists of a certain set of furniture: given said furniture and said room, different people arrange the furniture differently, placing greater emphasis on this or that aspect of...

A quick update on Tim DeChristopher's incarceration situation - as I wrote yesterday , Tim had been moved to the Special Housing Unit at FCI Herlong for an e-mail he sent. This morning at 8 AM MST, Dylan Rose Schneider from Peaceful Uprising received a call from Tim: THANK YOU for all of your support and work on this - I received a call from Tim this morning at 8 am letting me know that he was transferred back to the minimum security camp late yesterday due to the thousands of calls that were received. There's a blog post with further details from PeaceUP   here  . It would appear that if you piss enough people off by running roughshod over the civil liberties of a sort of folk hero, those pissed off people can get results!

Most (if not all) prisons have a "Special Housing Unit" (SHU). Previously known as "the Hole," or, in cases where occupancy is one, by the good old standby " solitary confinement ." The use of SHUs is controversial, with many organizations claiming (and research backs them up ) that it constitutes psychological torture. You may remember climate activist and political prisoner Tim DeChristopher. I certainly do. I've written about Tim before ( here  ,   here  and   here ), but a quick recap may be in order. In 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended an oil and gas lease auction held in the hideous, radioactive sunset years of the Bush Administration, when public lands were being ruthlessly auctioned off in an extremely legally questionable last-minute fire sale. DeChristopher "posed" as Bidder 70 (actually, he was mistaken for a bidder by staff and just went along with it), and purchased 14 parcels of land for a cool $1.8 million, w...

As Utah plays the perennial Lucy to my Charlie Brown, proffering a balmy football helpfully labeled "SPRING" by the Great Editorial Cartoonist in the Sky, only to cruelly yank it away at the last moment, the season's new life *is* creeping into #Occupy. Not that #Occupy has been asleep at the switch - only yesterday, #OccupyOakland attracted enough attention from the police to earn the now-traditional " Greetings Citizen, We've Noticed You " gift basket of non-lethal gadgetry. No, sir, #Occupy have been busy little bees; it is I who have been remiss in reporting on domestic protest movements. It's an unforgivable lapse, really, but I've been busy traveling to L.A . and evangelizing about potatoes , while going to class part-time/online and tumbling head over heels down a rabbit hole of deepening interest in the occult. Anyhow. As always, #OccupySLC's hub page can be found   here  . Facebook discussion forum complete with 6,000% of your ...

In an astonishing act of -- let's call a rose a rose -- creeping totalitariaism, Congress has passed a law that erases the distinction between citizens of the United States and so-called "enemy combatants," a charming turn of phrase cooked up by the Bush Administration to sidetrack pesky things like the overwhelming preponderance of international law and various treaties that many US Presidents (including Reagan!) signed in good faith. While one could view this as an extended hangover from 9/11, or perceived "business as usual" on the part of a new administration trying to keep things flowing smoothly in the consensus department, this is a significant and ominous development in the liberties afforded to not only extralegal detainees, but UNITED STATES CITIZENS AS WELL. Jose Padilla is an American Citizen In accordance with what I've come to look at as standard operating procedure, this odious provision was quietly secreted away deep in the bo...