The House of Representatives, who represent us, the American People, have this week voted to sue President Obama for something or other. It’s yet more proof that my complex convoluted nefarious plot to subvert the government in ways that will always ensure that I have idiocy to write about is continuing to be gloriously successful.
I was wondering how the House was going to sue the president over the health care law, since the courts generally don’t accept such lawsuits from anyone who is not themselves adversely affected by the law. Also there’s that little problem that you can’t force other people to join a lawsuit with you, right? If the Democrats don’t want to sue they shouldn’t be a party to the suit, right?
The answer, courtesy of conservative “think” tanks, is they propose to pass a law that gives Congress standing in court, no matter what the court says.
If even one congressman had standing, you know they would have the money to hire a lawyer. They wouldn’t need to act as a legislative body. To do so at all is a tacit admission they have no case.
Speaking of jokes just happening in the news and bounds being overstepped, they say that the police officer who has been writing 80 percent of all the Seattle tickets for public pot smoking is known as the Joker on the street. Someone call Batman.
Seriously, someone call Batman, this guy needs to be put away.
Let’s do some math. The SPD also found out that 37 percent of all the tickets went to African Americans, and 46 percent went to homeless people (See page 4 for the news story). Let’s suppose that the 20 percent of tickets not issued by the Joker were all issued to African-Americans and homeless people. Where does that huge benefit of the doubt leave Mister J? It still leaves him, personally, ticketing African Americans at a rate almost three times their numbers in the population (21 percent vs. 8 percent), and ticketing homeless people an amazing 37.5 percent of the time, even though they constitute barely 1 percent of the population.
Oh, wait, that’s not fair. The homeless people smoke pot outdoors because they don’t have an indoors to go to. Hence the term “homeless.” And you know what? Half of all the homeless in Seattle are black, so if you harass homeless people as a class, black people come along as a gimme.
If it was only the statistics, all we could say was the Joker was doing the same dirty job all the other police were doing, only more of it. It wouldn’t be so bad.
But, alas, he used the tickets to send messages to the city attorney who crafted the law. He used the tickets to make political statements. Mister J was using his police authority, ticket book and uniform, and his power over those homeless people on his beat, to enforce a personal political agenda.
He probably would justify ticketing so many homeless people by pointing to the fact that homeless people get so many tickets, it proves how much they break the law.
It’s one of my many theories about how prejudice forms. Let’s say we have a cop, let’s use a new name, Hole, and suppose Hole wants to send a political message to the Seattle City Council and City Attorney by ticketing 66 people and putting snarky comments on the tickets. Well, he’s not going to issue those 66 tickets to his own friends and family, is he?
He’s going to pick on a class of outsiders who, unlike members of Congress, probably have no money to hire lawyers and sue on their own.
And then what happens is all those people become statistics and are fed back into the statistics grinder, to “prove” that such outsiders are more likely to earn tickets for this and that. Therefore, prejudice takes root, and we all are invited to join in and become Holes.
Back in real life, Officer J will probably get a nice desk job in return for his diligent efforts.