The Chris Moeller Archives

Brexit, OJ, and the cabal

One early tangible result of Great Britain leaving the European Union should be the granting of freedom to Julian Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since the summer of 2012, facing trumped-up rape charges and believing that his extradition order to Sweden is part of a conspiracy to extradite him to the United States and be imprisoned on espionage charges.

Snowden's arrest warrant is only valid in member-states of the European Union.

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I watched and enjoyed the ABC/ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America, and it's evident that the officers that investigated the case in 1994 still don't get it. Retired detectives Tom Lange, Mike Albanese, and Mark Fuhrman were among those who appeared in the film to offer new (and old) perspective on the case. The disgraced Fuhrman says he watches video even today of the Rodney King beating and only sees officers doing what they are trained to do. Albanese refers to the Southern California residents that lined the freeway during the Bronco chase, and those that gathered at Rockingham Estate waiting for OJ on that bizarre summer day, as "losers." The irony is that the LAPD often gets credit for saving OJ's life by talking him through his surrender, but I contend that it was those people that watched the slow-speed chase in person-- and those of us who watched on television-- that saved OJ's life.

The LAPD and the LA county prosecutors were-- and still are-- embarrassed by the Bronco chase, but whether it be mishandling evidence, employing officers with racist pasts, or disregarding other possible suspects, notably OJ's son, Jason, the chase was one of the few elements of police work executed correctly in the case. What the blue liners don't like about it is precisely that people were watching. It's the only part of the murder investigation that the public isn't forced to just accept at face value based on police accounts. We are all probably well-aware of the fact that cops hate having people watch them while they do their jobs. The only thing they hate more is somebody recording them while they do it.

The OJ story is lacking a common element of many we hear regarding minority criminal suspects in the United States-- the part where the suspect attempts escape, or attacks an officer, or goes for an officer's gun. If the news helicopters had never spotted the 1993 white Ford Bronco on the Santa Ana and the 405, the surreal story that culminated in the driveway at Rockingham may very likely have had a different ending.

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Trump vs. Clinton: A man with a terrible set of answers versus a woman who doesn't acknowledge or recognize the questions.

Let's nip this in its infancy. Banging on the panic button of a Donald Trump presidency to get me to vote for Hillary is a dead end. If the economic elites in the Democratic Party really feared a Trump inauguration, they would have thrown in behind Senator Sanders, who bettered Trump in head-to-head polls by double the margins that Clinton does. After a disastrous June for Trump, the crypto-fascist still only trails Clinton by five percentage points in national polls.

For almost 20 years, Washington Democrats and Republicans have stood as one on both the issues of border security and neoliberal imperialism. President Bill Clinton made even legal immigrants ineligible for health care benefits. Their religion is already a severe handicap placed on Muslims immigrating to the United States from the "wrong country" and Trump is not yet in office. And when President Trump employs the Espionage Act to imprison anyone that contradicts or displeases him, which he has already vowed to do and has done nothing during the tenure of his private enterprise to make anybody think he's lying about this, we'll need to remember that it was President Barack Obama who brought back an almost-century dead law and used it as a blunt weapon against whistleblowers, journalists, and the freedom of the press.

posted by CM @ 1:01 PM