Rasmussen Reports
November 23, 2009
Just 38% of voters now favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the lowest level of support measured for the plan in nearly two dozen tracking polls conducted since June.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% now oppose the plan.
Half the survey was conducted before the Senate voted late Saturday to begin debate on its version of the legislation. Support for the plan was slightly lower in the half of the survey conducted after the Senate vote.
James Delingpole
November 24, 2009
Climategate: still an astonishing lack of coverage in the MSM, the only major UK exception being the Mail which, after years of agnosticism now seems to have decided to come down firmly in the climate sceptics’ camp – here, here and in this article today by the mighty Booker. (Nigel Lawson is able to slip in a mention, too, in today’s Times).
But is that because – as some of the commenters below my post are so eager to tell me – it’s a complete non-story which deserves to get me the sack for being such a rubbish journalist (with innumerable websites dedicated to telling the world just how crap I am, apparently)?
Or does it have legs? (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
This interview with retired climatalogist Dr Tim Ball offers quite a useful perspective.
There’s no point in anyone from the AGW camp watching it: they’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”
But the type of people I would dearly love to watch it are those like my friends Dan Hannan, Danny Finkelstein, Ed West and Michael Gove. This particular rogues’ gallery has long been a source of frustration and disappointment to me. They are intelligent and wise, eloquent and funny. They are on the side of wisdom and commonsense. They correctly anatomise so many of the ills of the modern world, from the perils of rampant Islamism to the evils of the EU. I like and admire them all hugely. Yet on perhaps the biggest and most important issue of our age – because it’s going to cost so much money and do so much harm to our landscape – they all have a curious blind spot.
What seems to have lulled these four – and many other clever people like them, I fear – into their dangerous complacency is the belief that given the majority of world scientific opinion is backing AGW theory, it would be irresponsible for us non-scientists to disagree.
What the Climategate scandal does is prove just how murky and unreliable this supposed scientific “consensus” really is.
Dr Ball is particularly trenchant on the phrase “peer-reviewed.” You’ll have heard it being brandished an awful lot over the last decade or so, invariably by scientists in the climate-fear-promotion lobby trying to show how all scientists who disagree with them are just ignorant cranks who need not be taken seriously. It’s a virus that has spread to non-scientists. Read George Monbiot; skim through the comments by AGW-believers below any blog on the subject of climate change. “Peer-reviewed”: it’s the magic phrase which – in their eyes – guarantees the reliability and credibility of their favoured scientists, and which completely pulls the rug from under that of the dissenters.
But what if that vaunted “peered-review” stamp of authenticity is about as valuable as a fake Rolex? It would mean, would it not, that the supposedly authoritative community of disinterested scientists who inform the IPCC’s reports are in fact to be trusted about as much as a frog would a scorpion it was ferrying on its back across a river…
This is the key point made by Dr Ball.
“It confirms suspicions that I’ve had working in my thirty years of climate science. I saw the hijacking of climate science particularly by computer modelers and then by a small group associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….”
“What you’ve got here is confirmation of the small group of scientists who, by the way, Professor Wegman who was asked to arbitrate in the debate about the hockey stick, he identified 42 people who were publishing together and also peer-reviewing each other’s literature. So there’s a classic example of the kind of thing that bothered me. About twenty years ago, I started saying ‘Well why are they pushing the peer review?’..And now of course we realise it’s because they had control of their own process. That’s clearly exposed in these emails.”
“On a global scale it’s frightening because this group of people not only control the Hadley Centre, which controls the data on global temperature through the Hadley Climate Research Unit but they also control the IPCC and they’ve manipulated that. And of course the IPCC has become the basis in all governments for the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen accord and so on….”
Dr Ball describes the scandal as not just a “smoking gun” but “a battery of machine guns.” How much more evidence, I wonder, do the likes of Messrs Hannan, Gove, Finkelstein and West need, I wonder, before they feel as strongly about this issue as I do?
James Delingpole
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.
I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.
The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.
InformedCitizenNews
June 22, 2009
ICN Informed Citizen News broadcast Sunday June 21st, 2009. The news you should have heard this week, but didn’t.
Infowars
June 14, 2009
A recently released police dash camera video reveals the truth about a May 24 “altercation” between Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Daniel Martin and EMT worker Maurice White on May 24.
The video, released by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, clearly shows Martin assaulting White on the side of the road in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. A cell phone video of the assault posted on YouTube received well over a million views and was the second most-watched video on May 30.
Fox 23 in Tulsa filed a Freedom of Information request for the dash cam but the OHP stonewalled the request. Late on June 12, the department finally released the video. It was posted on YouTube on June 13. Earlier reports in the media claimed police had turned off the dash cam before Martin assaulted the EMT worker.
“We’ve been well aware of the fact that this incident has drawn enormous attention, but made the decision to protect the integrity of the investigation, any and all relevant evidence, as well as the rights of the department employees,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol spokesman Capt. Chris West told Fox.
In fact, police did not release the video because it shows Martin assaulting White without provocation. After threatening White and putting him in a chokehold, Martin called for backup. He repeatedly threatened the EMT operators, unleashed obscenities, and pinned White against the EMT vehicle.
The police video confirms what witnesses on the scene reported — Martin was out of control and assaulted the EMT worker.
Police initially said the EMT vehicle failed to yield and this was the reason Martin confronted White, assaulted him and threatened to arrest him. But the police video reveals that the EMT was unable to immediately yield due to a car pulling over in the breakdown lane on the side of the road.
“He slowed down, and as the car was getting over, that’s when he passed us,” Kenyada Davis told News 9 in Oklahoma City. The EMT was transporting Davis’ elderly mother to the hospital when the incident occurred.
Martin claims the paramedics not only failed to yield but they also flipped him off. White and EMT driver Paul Franks said it was a gesture of surprise and Martin misunderstood.
Martin claimed he was responding to a stolen car report. It was later revealed his wife was in the police car. After the cell phone video appeared on YouTube and the OHP came under withering criticism, Martin was put on paid leave.
The Okfuskee County District Attorney’s Office initially said it would charge White with obstructing a police officer. On June 5, however, Okfuskee County decided not to charge the EMT or the trooper and announced the case would be dropped. The dash cam video clearly shows White did not obstruct Martin and the cop assaulted the EMT worker.
“After careful consideration off all fact and circumstance, it does not appear it would be appropriate to file charges against (Maurice) White or any other person involved. Although, I do not condone their actions, I do not believe that filing charges at this time would serve the best interests of the public or interests of justice. It has been my experience that emergency service providers generally work well together, and it was disappointing to see a situation where that clearly did not happen,” district attorney Max Cook told KTUL 8.
The OHP attempt to stonewall requests for the police video demonstrate the lengths the state will go to cover up the violent behavior of police officers who are nothing more than jackbooted thugs ruthlessly preying on not only emergency workers but the public at large. Increasingly, police departments around the country are hiring thugs – many veterans of the war in Iraq – who are expected to act like brownshirted gangsters and react violently when citizens question or resist their criminal behavior.
Trooper Daniel Martin needs to be fired and a message sent that this sort of behavior will not be tolerated. If you believe Martin should be fired, sign the “Fire Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Daniel Martin” petition and send the OHP and police around the country a strong message.
TruthAlliance
Youtube
June 06, 2009
It was a big big day at the KBDI Five Points Media center for 9/11 Truth.
Having developed a relationship with the Denver metro area local PBS broadcasting station for over the last 3 years by simply taking donation phones calls, in exchange for a few minutes to talk to the audience about the 9/11 cover up, Colorado Visibility 9/11 has succeeded in making history.
KBDI aired the groundbreaking documentary film 9/11 Press for Truth June 4, 2009 during prime time with well over an hours worth of interviews with film producers Kyle Hence and Ray Nowosielski, and also powerful testimony from Bob McIlvaine.
Station managers and VP were extremely pleased as to how well this documentary was received and should be commend for doing what no other station has done in the nation and air a controversial film exposing the cover up of the 9/11 tragedy by our government.
The station Press Release reflects the excitement and enthusiasm of the Colorado’s 9/11 Truth community hailing this a major step forward and encouraging other stations to air this incredible documentary film.
This is being touted as one of the most successful fund raising events in station history and proves that people are dying for real answers about that day.
We are experiencing an economical crisis which is – like the one in and after 1929 – created by the biggest sharks of the Wall Streets It seems that no one can or will stop the crisis – as though it is to be allowed to crash the world economy completely – in order to give a larger proportion of our money to those behind the crisis as well as more political control of the world. Let us see how they are managing to do so.
Demanding the end of national currencies, The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR´s) “Foreign Affairs” May/June 2007 wrote: Globalization and monetary nationalism are a dangerous combination, a cause of financial crises and geopolitical tension. The world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn
I. Reuters March 17, 2009: The day before he returned to the U.S. Treasury for six weeks to help the understaffed Obama administration, Edwin Truman published a proposal to give the International Monetary Fund more firepower to fight the financial crisis: a one-off $250 billion allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to IMF member states. It could be sort of a global central bank printing money which could lead to inflation.
Think of the Special Drawing Rights as you like. Some see them and by and by the dollar, too, in this way.
The CFR supports the IMF solution cautuiously . In 2007, CFT Alan Greenspan suggested the euro to take the role of international reserve valuta instead of the dollar
March 26, 2009 Paul Watson, Prison planet: One day the US Secretary of the Treasury telles Congress that he opposed to a new World reserve currency, the next day he tells the elitist CFR that he is open to it!
But what is behind this?
Pres. Sarkozy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown as of Oct. 2008 called for the IMF to be the international money control organ demanding it to be reinforced by another 250bn dollars so as to have 500bn dollars at its disposal. In the meantime , Mr. Brown demands an 450bn instead – and US Secr. of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, an 750bn dollars more for the IMF. Now the Chinese Central Bank chief has joined the demand: The Telegraph 27 March 2009: The Chinese proposal, outlined this week by central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan, calls for a “super-sovereign reserve currency” under IMF management, turning the Fund into a sort of world central bank. The idea is that the IMF should activate its Special Drawing Rights. These SDRs would expand their role over time, becoming a “widely-accepted means of payments“.
Now in The Times on March 27, China´s Vice-Prime Minister, Mr. Wang Qishan, confirmed Chinas readiness to support such an upgraded IMF financially.
Wall Street Journal 25 March confirms Mr. Zhou Xiaochuan´s proposal. “the proposal is unlikely to change the dollar’s role in the short term.” Like China, Russia recommended that the International Monetary Fund might issue the currency – and emphasized the need of a new super reserve currency. But Russia now demands gold in the currency basket of the IMF – a titbit for Rothschild in particular.
turbogan
March 6, 2009
Unlike our anonymous GL’s, I took it upon myself to contact Dr. Jones and ask
about the reasoning for the presence of oxygen during the DSC testing.
It turns out that our GL’s know nothing about this DSC testing and are simply
blowing smoke. 24 knot smoke at that 
This is my message to and from Dr. Jones received only minutes ago:
Dr. Jones,
I read through your thermite dust study and found it quite fascinating.
You, and the other scientists have ruffled many feathers in the loyalist
community.
The most popular excuse is that the experiments are invalid because
oxygen was present during the DSC testing.
Aside from other proof such as the chemical signature, mircoscopic images
and energy release compared to the control sample, what is the proper
response to those who use the ‘oxygen’ excuse in a debate?
My thought thus far is that the control sample was also tested in air, yet
the “chip samples” were able to produce a higher energy peak over a shorter
duration of time – proving explosive, and energetic material is present in the dust.
Is this accurate?
Thanks again for your quick reply!
Tino
Tino,
Your answer is a good start — more importantly, we find that iron oxide has been reduced to iron in the process, as we find spheres in the ignition residue which have more iron than oxygen.
The formation of these iron-rich spheres shows the thermite reaction because:
1. elemental iron is produced, and
2. very high temperatures were reached, beyond that which can be reached by burning hydrocarbons, to produce molten iron and iron oxide — as shown by the formation of spheres.
We used air in the studies to match conditions used by Tillotson et al., so we could compare with their results for known nanothermite – see Fig. 29 in our paper.
Further discussion on the nanothermite discovery can be found here:
zelikow.wordpress.com…
– a discussion between Swedish nanoscientist Prof. Nilsen and myself at the bottom. I have responded to him as you will see, and await a further response from him Here is the start of that discussion:
Attachment from Nilsen (grey) with comments from Jones (white) :
I wish to thank you for a careful reading of the paper. I will answer and comment point by point after initial comments.
You write: “If one first assumes that the red scales are of paint, and on metallic iron. Then it is easy to assume that the paint may be some sort of corrosion inhibition layer.”
We have learned the composition of the “corrosion inhibition” or primer paint actually used on the WTC towers from a NIST document; see attached paper by Prof. Niels Harrit (Univ. of Copenhagen and first author on the paper). We find that zinc, chromium and magnesium are significant components of the paint used – yet these elements are ABSENT from the red material, as demonstrated in Figure 7 of our paper. Thus, the red chips cannot be the primer paint used.
On the other hand, the elements which are present in the red chips, namely aluminum, iron, oxygen, silicon, and carbon (Fig. 7) – are precisely those expected in formulations of nano-thermite as described in the literature and delineated in the paper.
Furthermore, iron oxide is found in grains approximately 100 nm across and aluminum in plate-like structures about 40 nm thick – and these particles appear quite uniform and intimately mixed across the four separate samples. It is this ultra-fine, nano-scale structure of the Al and iron oxide in the red material that is emphasized in the paper, which we expect for nanothermite, and that we ask Prof. Nilsen to address. (The term “nano” does not yet appear in your comments to us, perhaps an oversight.)
Best wishes,
Steven Jones
William N. Grigg
Pro Libertate
May 31, 2009
Caveat lector: This post contains some subject-appropriate unsavory language.
He’s drunk again, it’s time to fight; she must have done something wrong tonight….
“Hey, it’s no big deal — I just slipped and hit my face on a doorknob,” said Joy by way of explaining the huge contusion discoloring her face.
This wasn’t the first time she had shown up to work with a black eye or other suspicious injury she insisted was the product of some bizarre accident growing out of her incurable clumsiness. Curiously, Joy was not noticeably maladroit when tending to her duties as a waitress for a chain restaurant where I worked while going to college.
A plain but very nice woman on the wrong side of 35, she was easy to work with and put in long hours to help keep her household afloat. She lived with an unemployed, live-in “fiance,” or what I called a “degenerate freeloader.”
Whenever Joy would come to work bearing the visible evidence of a beating and urging us to believe some elaborate tale of innocent self-inflicted misfortune, none of us believed her. But none of us had evidence sufficient to justify prying into her domestic affairs, and she reacted so badly to the broad hints several of us dropped that we didn’t persist.
Just tell the nurse you slipped and fell; it starts to sting as it starts to swell….
Unlike many episodes of suspected domestic abuse, there is no ambiguity in the case of Irma Marquez, a 45-year-old woman from Yonkers, New York. She was physically assaulted, in public, in front of several witnesses; the incident was captured clearly on a surveillance videotape.
The abuse resulted in “a head injury with related loss of consciousness, memory loss, jaw fracture, two black eyes, facial contusions, severe swelling and bruising, hemorrhaging in both eyes, lacerations to the nose, chin and mouth, neck and back pain, bruising and/or lacerations about the back, arms, hands, right knee, right leg, right hip, [and] right breast….”
Were we to take seriously a verdict by a federal jury, the injuries sustained by Marquez were immaculately inflicted. No other human being is responsible — according to that jury — for the wounds that disfigured the 44-year-old home health worker. That’s because she was injured at the hands of a police officer, who was never charged with criminal assault.
On Wednesday (May 26), a federal jury ruled that Yonkers Police Officer Wayne Simoes didn’t
violate Marquez’s civil rights when he lifted her from her feet and slammed her face-first into the floor of the La Fonda restaurant on March 3, 2007.
Simoes was one of several police officers dispatched to deal with a drunken melee at La Fonda. When they got there, Marquez — who had obviously had a bit too much to drink — was concerned about her niece, who had been injured in the brawl.
The aftermath of the non-abuse experienced by the oddly unfortunate Irma Marquez.
As medical workers attended the young woman, Marquez — out of understandable concern, but with dubious judgment — stooped down to get a better look. She was pushed away, stumbling into a couple of officers, including Simoes.
Marquez, who was unsteady on her feet and visibly uncooperative, should have been escorted out of the room. There was no reason to arrest her. A generation ago a conscientious police officer would have displayed sufficient patience and self-restraint to remove her from the room without strong-arm tactics.
Simoes, on the other hand, clearly subscribes to a doctrine of more recent vintage under which any lack of immediate, servile compliance by a civilian is to be treated as a criminal offense and grounds for arrest — if not potentially lethal force, as in eletro-shock torture administered via Taser.
The videotape shows Simoes starting to jack Marquez’s arm behind her back in order to handcuff her. Given the lack of legal justification for the arrest, this was an act of criminal battery.
He then compounds that offense by bear-hugging her from behind, shifting his footwork under perfect control, and then picking her up and face-slamming her to the floor. This was a move Simoes had probably practiced on many occasions, and most likely was simply dying to use on someone. What better subject than a small, drunken, middle-aged female?
Nothing to see here — just move along: Irma Marquez, who was not abused by Yonkers Police Officer Wayne Simoes, recuperates from the non-abuse she didn’t experience at his hands. At the time this photo was taken, in fact, Marquez stood accused of “disorderly conduct” and second-degree obstruction of governmental administration.
Notice the reaction — or the lack thereof — by the other police officers on the scene: A woman has just been violently face-planted into the floor, and she lies bleeding at their feet, yet none of them moves to render aid, or to rebuke her assailant. Simoes followed up his attack on Marquez not by checking to see if she was all right, but by placing his knee in her back and handcuffing her.
Testifying at the trial, Officer John Liberatore stated that Simoes clearly used excessive force against Marquez. He also recalled asking his partner, Officer Todd Mendelson, “What the f*** just happened?” Mendleson’s reaction was an indifferent shrug.
When the defense pointed out that Liberatore hadn’t offered the same account to internal affairs investigators prior to the trial, he replied, quite plausibly, that he was reluctant to “point a finger at a fellow officer.” It’s hardly surprising that Liberatore’s reluctance disintegrated when he was compelled to testify under oath and liable to perjury charges if he withheld the “whole truth.”
Captain Edward Geiss, the on-scene commander, testified that although he didn’t “think he intended to hurt her the way he did,” his first reaction after seeing Marquez’s bloodied face was to summon an Internal Affairs team to the scene.
Simoes‘ defense counsel, which mocked the prosecution’s case as a matter of “just press play,” enlisted the help of “expert witness” Grant Fredericks, a former FBI analyst, whose job was to provide a “narrative” for the video compatible with the defense’s argument. In plainer terms, his job was to obfuscate what was clearly shown by laying down a dense fog of double-speak.
Fredericks insisted that the video’s capture speed was inadequate to capture critical details; this was essentially an invitation to accept his word that he discerned evidence of “things unseen” that prove Simoes had slipped and dropped Marquez, rather than throwing her to the floor.
After planting that suggestion, Fredericks broke down the video clip into into more than one hundred still photos, insisting as he reviewed them that the demonstrated that the officer had lost control once he had taken Marquez off the floor. But neither he, nor any other defense witness, explained why Simoes had picked the woman up in the first place.
Leaving aside the fact that the video clearly shows that Simoes was sure-footed during the entire attack, once he had placed violent hands on Marquez and removed her from the floor, he became responsible for whatever happened to her as a result of his actions. That’s how the matter would have been treated if it had involved someone who didn’t wear a state-issued costume.
Yonkers Police Officer Wayne Simoes
The prosecution countered Fredericks with its own FBI-trained “expert” video analyst, Alan Fuller. Furthermore, the trial judge, Kenneth Karas, instructed the jury to disregard Fredericks‘ assessment of Simoes‘ actions. This effectively left the defense without a case.
Nonetheless, the jury of twelve good men and true — actually, eight men and four women — acquitted Simoes on the basis that they couldn’t determine his intent to injure Marquez on the basis of his documented actions. Again, it’s impossible to believe that the jury would have been inclined to draw such sophistical pseudo-Kantian distinctions if the accused had been anyone other than one of the state’s consecrated agents of holy violence.
“I have always had faith in the justice system,” smarmed Yonkers mayor Phil Amicone following the trial. “In this case, a verdict was rendered by twelve people who found that there was no act of excessive force.”
With that in mind, look at Irma Marquez’s face once again. Apparently, the injuries she sustained were the product of proportionate force, used to deal with a distraught woman whose “offense” was to take excessive interest in the well-being of her niece.
This brings us to the crowning injury inflicted by Simoes on his victim: While Marquez was bleeding at his feet, Simoes was preparing to file criminal charges against her for “disorderly conduct” and second-degree “obstruction of governmental administration.”
The former isn’t a crime, in anything other than a positivist sense, unless it interferes with the rights or property of another individual; the latter is quite frequently a moral obligation. Beating a woman bloody is not “proportionate” force for dealing with those “offenses,” either jointly or separately.
Even though Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore didn’t see fit to file criminal charges against the bully who face-planted Marquez, she zealously prosecuted the victim on spurious criminal charges that were quickly disposed of by a jury in May 2008.
High-gloss hypocrite: Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore.
Before becoming D.A., Janet DiFiore “lectured extensively” on, inter alia, domestic violence. She also served as a family court judge and served on the County Commission on Domestic Violence.
In fact, her campaign literature boasted of the fact that as a family court judge DiFiore had presided over “hundreds” of domestic violence cases.
I sincerely doubt that any of those previous domestic violence cases involved prosecuting the victim for supposed offenses against the assailant.
She looks at you, she wants the truth; it’s right out there in the waiting room;With those hands lookin‘ just as sweet as he can….
As is so often the case when men abuse women, Simoes reserved all of his sympathy for himself. During his trial he was frequently seen weeping — not over what had happened to Marquez, mind you, but rather over his own predicament as a poor, misunderstood public servant.
Simoes wept again following his acquittal, his chronic lachrymosity yielding to bile as he assailed those unspecified people he held responsible for “all the garbage you guys put me through.”
Take Simoes out of his official costume or his well-tailored suit, put him in a wife-beater, and move the scene of the crime from the backroom of a restaurant to the kitchen of a private home, and imagine how that self-pitying statement would be received. No, he wasn’t drunk in the conventional sense when he assaulted Irma Marquez, but he was certainly intoxicated with a sense of his own power.
All of this happened in Westchester County, New York — Hillary Rodham Clinton country, a haven of progressive enlightenment and exquisite sensitivity to “sexism.”
It’s entirely likely that there are men from that part of New York who have been convicted of, and imprisoned for, domestic abuse charges that don’t involve anything nearly as serious as the injuries inflicted on Irma Marquez. There are certainly plenty of such cases elsewhere in this country. But they’re different, you see, because the accused in each case wasn’t an agent of the state’s divine will.
Wayne Simoes, petty thug and unpunished abuser of women, prefers to be called by the supposedly exalted title “Officer.” Assuming that there is anything innately honorable in that designation, the term can be appropriately (if somewhat awkwardly) worked into a paraphrase of an entirely appropriate lyric from one of my favorite workout songs:
[Officer]’s a name you haven’t earned yet
You’re just a child with a temper
Haven’t you heard `Don’t hit a lady’?
Kickin‘ your ass would be a pleasure.
