Ho-Hum, Some More Shootings

Posted by BooMan | Jan 10, 2013 | 17 |

Today was car maintenance day for me, so I missed the afternoon headlines. I see that there has been another school shooting. Five more people got shot in Philly on Monday and early Tuesday morning. Everyone freaks out about the former, but hardly anyone cares about the latter. I understand that it’s harder to take when kids get shot, but they sometimes get shot in places other than school.

Early Tuesday morning, a 17-year-old was reported in stable condition after he was shot in the leg on East Atlantic Street in Harrowgate.

See?

It’s a big problem no matter where it happens.

I’m hoping Joey Biden is ready to kick some ass.

About The Author

BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

17 Comments

Brendan Skwire on January 10, 2013 at 6:29 pm

Hunting Park is a really dangerous area. I’m really beginning to hate Philadelphia. And Pennsylvania in general.
- Phil Perspective on January 10, 2013 at 8:17 pm
  
  Why? Re: your 2nd and 3rd sentences.
  - Brendan Skwire on January 11, 2013 at 9:29 am
    
    Sentence two: I am throughly tired of being worried I’m going to wind up shot. Teenagers shooting at each other on the El and the Broad Street Line. The constant echo of pop-pop-pop in my neighborhood. Last summer’s shooting on the basketball court ACROSS THE STREET FROM MY HOUSE, witnessed by 200 people who “didn’t see anything”. A city in which more than 50% of the adults read at or below the 5th grade level. A mayor whose response to a fiscal crisis is to shut libraries and rec centers. I’m tired of the in-your-face anger, deliberate disrespect, and plain old hopelessness. And yeah, there’s good stuff here. But I’m fucking sick of the rest of it.
    
    Sentence two: many of the problems in our fair city can be laid at the feet of the racist motherfuckers in harrisburg who wish Philadelphia would disappear in a cloud of smoke. So yes, i am sick of the state as well.
    - Brendan Skwire on January 11, 2013 at 11:03 am
      
      case in point: argument over a cell phone.
      
      what’s not to hate about this daily occurrence?
mainsailset on January 10, 2013 at 6:49 pm

Good time to remind folks that in despite a nomination for an ATF head, the GOP/NRA has been able to block confirmation…for 7 years.
- WaterGirl on January 10, 2013 at 6:57 pm
  
  Time for a recess appointment.
donnah on January 10, 2013 at 6:50 pm

Biden is made for this kind of fight. He can cover Obama on one front and go after the gun lobbies on another. He doesn’t care what people say about him and he can dig in for as long as it takes. I am a big fan of Old Handsome Joe and I hope he can make some progress in this crazy battle.

The issue isn’t going away. There are enough voices crying out for change, and the gun lovers are starting to feel the pinch. Let’s not quit now, while we have a toehold.
Arthur Gilroy on January 10, 2013 at 7:31 pm

Koey Boy, eh?

The erstwhile Senator from MBNA?

The champion anti-drug warrior?

read on.

Dancing With the Sausage Maker

The Corruption of Joe Biden

by JOHN GRANT

Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.

– Mark Twain

In the spirit of Twain’s famous metaphor, Joe Biden is a mighty gifted sausage maker. The vice president is the man of the hour, the Obama administration’s legislative deal-maker on the fiscal cliff and leader of forging gun-control legislation following the Newtown massacre. Biden is the LBJ of the Obama White House when it comes to dealing with Congress as that institution sinks ever deeper into an historic nadir of national trust.

Ever since he showed his political pugilistic skills with Paul Ryan in the VP debate following President Obama’s dull performance in the first presidential debate, Biden has moved to a position reminiscent of Cheney’s with George Bush.

“Joe” is always billed as an ordinary working class guy. On the campaign trail, the youthful 70-year-old flirtatiously nuzzles motorcycle mamas at lunch cafes. Last week, he amused the pundits by spouting corny jokes or wisecracks with everybody at a photo-shoot for new congress members being sworn in. As Maureen Dowd points out, the VP is comfortable in the halls of Congress and he is not afraid of letting his sub-conscious free-associate and have a little fun. He’s the politician you’d like to have a beer with. Michael Smerconish on MSNBC gushed, “Praise Biden for showing how it’s done, how to be a pol.”

VP Joe Biden in the limelight December 31st

On the other hand, this would-be working-man-of-the-people was re-elected US senator from the Moneybags Corporate State of Delaware for over 36 years, a period known for the inexorable slow demise of labor unions. Ponder that for a while and you realize what a brilliant and accommodating man Biden must be.

Joe Biden has been making sausage for over a third of a century. Among his list of successes is the current Drug War and the current Counter-Terrorism War, both of which are now interlocking to become one long, bi-partisan war without end. While Biden may scrap with Republicans, he is a classic Cold War Liberal in the Hubert Humphrey mode, pushing moderately progressive legislation while reinforcing the pillars of imperial militarism and the burgeoning police-state that is post-9/11 America.

—snip—

Mark Twain’s metaphor for law-making

Biden quotes Humphrey saying this: ” `The senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, …. and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it’s a pretty good detour.’ ” If Humphrey’s metaphor is to make any sense, however, the “good intentions” of the Senate cannot be a “detour.” The point of the metaphor is good intentions can lead to hell. I submit that that hell is what we’re living through today: Unquestioned, bi-partisan, fiscally irresponsible, mostly-secret militarism accompanied by a highly partisan struggle in congress for the left-over domestic scraps. Another aspect of that partisan struggle is over what is the cause of the nation’s grotesque deficit: Militarism or domestic so-called Entitlements?

As Dave Lindorff from TCBH has pointed out, “The US is currently running a $1.3 trillion deficit (that) almost exactly matches the amount that is being spent annually on the US military, and on military/intelligence-related activities.”

We’ve been on this road to hell for a long time, certainly since Humphrey and his boss LBJ escalated the Vietnam War into a debacle that remains to this day arguably the most misguided, costly and tragic foreign policy adventure ever undertaken by our government. A 25-year, multi-million-dollar Pentagon effort — the Vietnam War Commemoration Project — has been established to clean up that image, something that is doomed to fail. The point is, anyone who says there is no bi-partisanship in Congress is wearing blinders. When it comes to military, intelligence, surveillance and police expenditures, bi-partisanship is impregnable. Consider how the recent FISA national surveillance legislation – ie., spying on the citizenry, something that should be controversial — breezed through Congress and the White House two weeks ago.

A Personal Beef With Joe Biden

In the spirit of full disclosure, of all the various national and local politico celebrities I’ve asked a question of in public, the most galling and insulting response I ever got was from Joe Biden. Frank Rizzo once physically shoved me out of his path and almost knocked me on my ass; but that was nothing compared to Biden. And as will become clear later, his insulting response to me made sense.

It was the mid 1990s at Widener University south of Philadelphia. Senator Biden had come to make a speech on crime and the Drug War. At the time, he was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was in the second row. I raised my hand and he called on me. He walked over and stood right in front of me.

“Senator Biden, I’ve worked with a needle exchange program in Philly. I’ve talked about this subject with a number of people and have read up on things like Harm Reduction. So I’m curious what your position is on the idea of de-criminalizing drugs as a way of gradually weaning ourselves off the Drug War, which seems to be a failure?”

Biden chuckled in a public sort of voice so the audience could hear him. He pointed right at me.

“This man thinks he’s smart,” he said, looking at the audience with that patented Everyman Joe smirk. “He’s carefully using the term `de-criminalize’ when what he wants to do is `legalize’ drugs across this nation. This guy wants to make heroin and crack legal and available for everyone to obtain.”

I wanted to interrupt and say, “No, sir, that’s not what I said.” But he kept at it for a bit longer as he eased himself back to the center of the audience and pointed to another questioner. I took the beating and sat down.

Senator Biden is one of the architects of our current Drug War, especially in how it relates to federal resource-sharing with local police forces who desire the latest police gadgetry. His interests are not to lessen the stigmatization and criminalization of citizens in America caught up in the Drug War, many of them poor and black. Michelle Alexander has eloquently made this critique of the Drug War in her book The New Jim Crow. From the point of view of a poor, inner city black kid, drugs are too often a matter of free-private enterprise and about getting ahead as an entrepreneur.

The senator’s insulting and disrespectful answer spoke volumes to me, and the conclusion I came to was that Senator Biden’s mind was locked and he was using his leadership of the judiciary committee and his sausage-making talent with crime bills to continue to mobilize an international drug war notably opposed by most of the leaders of Latin America.

Joe Biden and the Drug War

Joe Biden’s background is instructive. He made a name for himself in the Senate Judiciary Committee in the early Reagan years using crime bill issues to regain power for Democrats after they had lost the senate and the Presidency.

Biden had been on the famous Church Committee in the late `70s that investigated intelligence excesses. “The experience convinced him that crime should be viewed as a form of domestic security,” writes Ted Gest inCrime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order. Biden’s first effort in this vein was developing the National Security and Violent Crime Control Act. It was an “attempt to put crime in a defense context — getting the armed forces involved in drug interdiction, for example.”

This, of course, is the federal/local nexus that has been developed and beefed up over the years and was, of course, put on steroids after September 11, 2001, leading to the current rage for fusion centers. As a Democrat, Biden opportunistically rode the right-moving wave of the Carter demise and the Reagan ascendancy. It’s clear he’s a brilliant and effective politician.

—snip—

Biden’s counterpart in the House was New Jersey Congressman William Hughes. “Re-establishing a strong federal narcotics policy was the first area where Biden and Hughes wanted to make a mark,” Gest says. “Their main goal was to reverse the Democrats perceived weakness on drugs. … Biden became convinced that federal anti-drug policy was a mess.” The Carter White House, of course, had toyed with the notion of legalizing marijuana.

Biden pushed for mandatory minimum sentences and the creation of a cabinet-level “drug czar.” It was sometimes rocky going, but in the end he got what he wanted. However, the “landmark” 1984 crime bill was such a grotesquely slapped-together knockwurst that it contained a significant amount of rotten meat. One example was a forfeiture scheme that allowed law enforcement agencies across the nation to benefit financially by seizing the property of “accused” drug criminals. Gest cites “a string of horror stories” of agents padding their institutional coffers by confiscating the homes and cars of people who were eventually acquitted of the crime charged. None of this confiscated wealth was ever returned. It was 16 years before this egregious section was altered.

Until I read Gest, I did not realize how deeply Joe Biden was invested in the drug war when I asked him what he thought of de-criminalizing drugs. Now it makes sense why he answered the way he did. I was a nobody and my question was a direct threat to what he was selling and what he’d made his name doing. I had to be swatted like a fly.

—snip—

Mark Twain understood the corruption endemic to our legislative bodies, and he accordingly recognized that making laws is not always a pretty business. But that doesn’t mean our laws have to be nasty-smelling things forged out of corrupt back-room deals designed to bamboozle tax payers. The only reason the current struggles are so vile is that there is so much secrecy and dishonesty focused on sustaining an American imperial militarism around the world. This militarism, as happens in all cases of declining empire, eats resources that might maintain the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, provide for the social needs of American citizens and the general welfare of the homeland. It’s that simple.

Clarity should be possible. And if there’s a lack of clarity, no one is more to blame than those citizens who hold the likes of likable ol’ Joe Biden up on a pedestal.

JOHN GRANT is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper.

Joe Biden.

My kinda guy.

Not.

Your kinda guy, though.

And welcome to him.

AG
- seabe on January 10, 2013 at 7:37 pm
  
  Huh. Singing a different tune I see:
  
  http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/10/2/185522/943#5
  
  I wouldn’t call Biden corrupt, but yes, he is a drug and copyright warrior.
  - Arthur Gilroy on January 11, 2013 at 1:06 am
    
    Only as “corrupt” as the rest of the PermaGov. Charming? Clever? Someone to have a beer with and tell some jokes? Hail fellow well met? A better hang than say Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon? Of course. Yes. But a moral or cultural hero? Someone with foresight? A deep thinker as far as the problems of the culture and nation are concerned? I think not.
    
    Sorry, but there it is.
    
    In a national government almost entirely populated by power-mad fools, stiffs and nasty corporate hustlers, Biden stands out by having maintained some line-level sense of humanity. But fight the good fight? Only if it’s politically expedient.
    
    Bet on it.
    
    So it goes.
    
    AG
- Phil Perspective on January 10, 2013 at 8:17 pm
  
  He wasn’t called “The Senator from MBNA” for nothing.
chocolate ink on January 10, 2013 at 9:23 pm

I live a few blocks from the Taft school shooting. The kid who did the shooting had specific person in mind. Apparently he’s been bullied for a long long time(years)with nothing done about it even though parents have tried to get the school to do something. Lot of other rumors out there that all the local kids and young adults like my nephew are talking about having to do with this kid being bullied.

Also of course people saying this is a nice little town, etc and so on. I don’t know about nice, it’s an incredibly racist(still have KKK here)redneck town. Don’t want to put any other rumors out there but most of the ‘rumors’ I heard earlier have been confirmed.
- WaterGirl on January 10, 2013 at 9:58 pm
  
  You raise a good point about bullying.
  
  It seems like there has been a lot of talk today on Balloon Juice about all the people above Bradley Manning’s pay grade in the military who failed him because they surely saw that something was not right and did not take any action. Those people should be held accountable, too.
  
  The same thing is true of adults who turn a blind eye to bullying because it’s just “boys will be boys” or they think it’s not a big deal. Those folks should be held accountable, too.
  
  The same thing is true with pedophile priests in the catholic church, with pedophiles in the boy scouts, with pedophiles at penn state. All those folks in the church and the boy scouts and penn state and second mile who turned a blind eye should be held accountable, too.
  
  So why does it seem that accountability is only for the little guy and rarely for the people with power?
  - Arthur Gilroy on January 11, 2013 at 11:15 am
    
    I started a reply to this comment and it grew.
    
    Now a stand-alone post.
    
    “Accountability?” It Depends On Who Handles The Accounts.
    
    Later…
    
    AG
    - WaterGirl on January 11, 2013 at 3:26 pm
      
      I read your post.
      
      You’re right, the answer to my question as written is obvious. Why does it seem like accountability is only for the little guy? It seems like that because IT IS like that.
      
      What I was really attempting to do is share my frustration at the fact that it seems to be acceptable for it to be that way. Why aren’t we all rioting in the streets with outrage over all the things that are so wrong?
      
      I was in Boston a few years ago at some little museum related to the founding of our country. I would read the quotes from our founders and think how radical it would sound today, and how incredibly wonderful it is that our country was founded on all those populist beliefs.
      
      I can only imagine that our founders are now shaking their heads at us in disbelief, if not rolling over in their graves.
      - Arthur Gilroy on January 11, 2013 at 9:39 pm
        
        Why aren’t we all rioting in the streets with outrage over all the things that are so wrong?
        
        The simplest answer? (Although not by a long shot the most fashionable one, especially on leftiness websites.)
        
        Because we are always outnumbered and always outgunned.
        
        Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Walter Moseley’s brilliant novel ostensibly about Socrates Fortlow, a black ex-con in the segregated LA of the ’50s.
        
        But really? About us all.
        
        I just watched another episode of Oliver Stone’s equally brilliant series on SHO, The Untold History of the United States. Truth after truth presently in a supposed “bold” manner by the cable network SHO, which is owned by the same PermaGov media complex that owns the rest of the mainstream media. YOU know, the one that claims “freedom of speech for everyone” and then uses presentations like Stone’s series to prove its point even though that set of viewpoints is decisively “outnumbered and outgunned” by the other 99.9% of the media that does not present the various truth(s) of the matters(s) at hand.
        
        Remember the media runup to the Iraq War for all you need to know on this tactic.
        
        “Fair and balanced” reporting. Seventeen crisply well-dressed PermaGov functionaries agreeing that what we have to do is to go get Iraq for the 9/11 attack balanced out by a couple of frowzy nuns and a somewhat confused-seeming older liberal in a sagging old tweed jacket and a cloud of pipe smoke saying “Well…are you sure this is what Christ would have recommended?”
        
        Please.
        
        Send in the clowns.
        
        And wake the fuck up.
        
        AG
  - chocolate ink on January 11, 2013 at 5:54 pm
    
    What I’m hearing from kids around town is that this kid has been bullied for years. The school’s answer to his parents was to tell them to go to another high school in a smaller town few miles away.
    
    I didn’t know we had armed guard at this small school. It’s about 900 high school kids and only high school here. Except the guard wasn’t here because he’d been snowed in and couldn’t get to the school.

Ho-Hum, Some More Shootings

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