There were a few diaries posted about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and while I'm not typically sympathetic towards cops (Digby's list of taser deaths, personal experience, renegade cops like in the Duke Lacross case, theTexas San Jacinto sheriff planting drugs on blacks, and numerous other reasons, I still think it's worthwhile getting the other side of the story. (I've been doing that a bit with Walpin as well), and noticed that no one seemed to quote the cop on the scene.

So here is the investigating officer's statement.

And here is Professor Gates' take.

Our task and difficulty as always is to figure out if the truth is with one, the other, between, or somewhere out there somewhere.

Read, comment, argue, vent.

Update: Here's a profile on Sergeant Crowley, to allow him to be a bit human.

And here's what Obama could have said instead of saying "the Cambridge police acted stupidly" even though "Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all the facts." while joking about the White House, "here I'd get shot". Aside from pissing off police nationwide and appearing a bit un-Presidential, it also had the effect of taking attention away from what was supposed to be a major health care push.

Update 2: Via the Harvard Crimson - "Damaris J. Taylor '12, alumni and public relations chair for the Harvard Black Students Association, said that based on police reports, he personally didn't think the arrest was racially motivated and that "the officer was just doing his job." But he also said that while the professor may have overreacted or even acted rudely, the police should not have issued an arrest." Hey, someone I agree with. Perhaps views across "the racial divide" don't have to be irreconcilable as is sometimes claimed.

Kevin Johnson's replacement as Executive Director of St. Hope, Rick Maya, was forced out in June with a $100,000 payout - pretty classy for a struggling non-profit that has to pay back $430K to the government and is behind $700K in rent. What did Maya claim in April? That a Board Member Sam Oki had deleted emails during a federal investigation. Oops. Johnson's office said it was only an IT guy. Plumbers and cable guys, they always take the fall. Anyway, 3 other Board Members resigned/were forced out as well - perhaps none of them like that the settlement that was supposed to end it all didn't end the new federal investigation into deleting the emails.  Wonder how St. Hope will keep going to repay all its money.

But anyway, we start to get more light as to why Walpin had to go in a bipartisan way. Americorp was set to triple its size from the US under the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. And there Walpin was not only pursuing St. Hope, he was looking at CUNY to the tune of $75 million. Imagine what Murdoch and the New York Daily Post would do with that. And if there's one thing Democrats and Republicans have proven in Congress, bipartisanship can truly work if something is threatening both sides of the aisles' cash cow. With all these sacred cows around, it's starting to look like India. Wonder if Walpin's replacement is planning on continuing the CUNY investigation, or will he be led around by a nose ring like the others.

[I guess it's also rather humorous that Sacramento voters will soon be debating whether to give Kevin Johnson even more power to screw things up and have interns wash his car. It never rains in California, but it pours.]

So Monica Conyers cops a conspiracy plea for a max 5 years to make a scandal go away. And indeed it has. Hey, I don't pay much attention to Detroit politics except for an occasional glance at an auto company bankruptcy and bailout plan. But when that little piece on her resignation appeared on TPM a few weeks back, something didn't quite look right - she sold her vote on a $1.2 billion for $6000? But out of sight, out of mind - I wouldn't have noticed except I went to the Freep to see something on Chrysler.

Well, looks can deceive. Ta-nahisi Coates digs into the Madness Called Monica, and Monica's way out there, so maybe she is that crazy to work for so little. But looks can conceive as well. In this case, indictments including Monica's name keep piling up. But whereas Monica is capped at her 5 year plea agreement, her bag boy is looking at potentially 100 years for various cases of extortion that brought them a minimum $65K. It makes you wonder why the DA copped such a light deal with such a strong case, and typically we plea the little guy to get to the big fish, say the head of the City Council who's taking the bribes to change a vote. Why just a wrist slap?

One might guess their take could be more extensive - typically it's hard to get evidence on these kind of bribes, and having at least 5 makes me think a few more could have gone unnoticed. And then there's suspicion of a deal that did get noticed, where Monica's husband changed his vote in a way that helped out Monica's friend Papas. The husband, head of the House Judiciary Committee, is kind of a heavyweight, and I imagine there might be some interest in NOT [ed.] damaging Michigan's strongest arm in Congress at a time when Detroit's already getting hammered with auto bankruptcies.

So John Conyers' version is that he switched to allow a questionable pollution move go through in order to protect the Police and Firemen's Pension Fund's investment, which is only slightly less attackable position than saying he did it to keep orphans off the street - who would argue against our Police and Fire Fighters' retirement? Well, guess we can live with a bit more pollution.

In any case, Conyers doesn't live with his wife - so in terms of knowing about her kickback schemes and extortion, it's possible he doesn't know anything about it. Though if it turns out her illegal take was into a few hundred thousand, it may be he should have thought about her change in fortune and any financial forms they might have filed together.

Another aspect to the case is that the companies paying the money are not being charged. While some could be victims, others could have initiated deals, knowing who on the Council was on the take and could change their fortunes. So in the end Sam Riddle is the (deserving) fall guy, and he'll take almost all the blame.

But one thing keeps nagging me - why, since Riddle had already talked and given immune testimony in a deal that 99% of the time leads to copping a plea - why did he back out? Though his testimony can't be used against him, any perjury can, so he's in a fine pickle. Stay tuned, bat fans, this story's likely to keep on giving.

[Taken from a thread on Pat Buchanan regarding "arguing the finer points of Affirmative Action with Pat Buchanan" and arguing against Buchanan's "100% white" or "almost 100% white" comments.]

It's not "the finer points" - it's the basic principle. But Buchanan goads you into arguing against "the sky is blue" (yes, of course at night it's black) instead of simply insisting that affirmative action is necessary. In fact, you end up arguing against yourself by pretending that black participation in the historical events he mentions was anything more than marginal. The real answer is, "Yes, you're right, Pat, even though blacks have been here for hundreds of years, American History and Politics is almost completely 100% white. Even 100 years after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th-15th Amendments this was true. So obviously the situation was not just going to fix itself, whites were not just going to relax attitudes, blacks were not just going to apply themselves, hop into school, hop into good jobs. Even with the Civil Rights Act, with government enforcement of laws on the books (pushed by black protests and black legal actions from the likes of MLK and Thurgood Marshall) it didn't just happen. So to get past the water cannons, the German Shepherds, the severe economic disparities and the permanently tilted playing field, some measures have been required to counter this. Affirmative Action is only one part. It's not the goal, it's a tool, and while we may misuse the tool occasionally and our use of the tool will become more skilled over time, that doesn't mean the tool or approach is fatally flawed. And if you use a word such as "horrid" to not differentiate between Allan Bakke missing out on one grad school slot out of hundreds available, vs. black kids not being able to go to a real school, one with whites where there are books and resources, or blacks denied jobs continuously for a hundred years just because of their skin color, then your command of English vocabulary is extremely taxed. They are not synonymous situations, not even the slightest. I have sympathies for Allan Bakke, and would like to make sure he's taken care of, but I have sympathies for millions of blacks in more dire straits.

There was once a sci-fi movie where aliens had kidnapped 3 children, so the leader of Earth decided to surrender the planet so as not to have the 3 children harmed. It seems ludicrous, laughable, insane, but then the Republican attitude towards Affirmative Action is built on the same weird, absurd premise. Hey, 3 white people got hurt, so let's ignore the plight of tens of millions of blacks!!!

These small cases where a white person gets burned do not rise to the level of "horrid" in the same way that does blacks prevented from voting and participating fully in American government, society, industry, power. The Ricci case is a red herring, but indicative of the difficulties that Affirmative Action brings, because it is implemented by flawed commoners, not by skilled trained surgeons. Affirmative Action can be a scalpel or a chain saw - a lawsuit where blacks are denied promotions is likely a finer-tuned response than integrating the military full stop.

The case of Ricci v. New Haven seems at heart 1 thing - a misplaced emphasis on a testing process only vs. a balanced approach that includes performance on the job, character and team leading skills, comfort with typical tasks. And it points out that likely blacks aren't as good at taking tests as whites. Oops, you may not know what I mean. Because I wasn't good at it either, until I'd failed my Masters' final. Because I assumed that I was supposed to work from my class texts, the lectures, the assignments. But after I failed my test, I discovered what fraternities had known for years - that there were hundreds of old exams available for every course, and the questions didn't change much year to year. I could have been a bigger drunk *AND* had a better GPA. Okay, that's only one part of Ricci. There's also the side tutoring special courses that it may have been more whites took, and I haven't seen a fair comparison on who spent more time on studying. I know I had a job opening I went for, with a list of criteria, and I spent weeks and well over a thousand dollars getting all the certification pieces in that I didn't have, finishing 6 or 7 Microsoft and other exams in 2 weeks. And then they decided to change the requirements for the announced position. This happens all the time, and historically if you're black, it's more likely to happen *against* you than *with* you. The fact remains in Ricci that there are fire departments around the country who manage to run promotion tests and evaluations without lawsuits, so one botched test should not be a huge change in legal precedent.

The arrogance that Affirmative Action is always better, always done well, should be avoided. There are dozens of examples where busing was counter-productive, often destroying the societies it was supposed to help integrate, with marginal benefit of access to resources and real gains for students. Of course making kids spend  2 or more hours on a bus each day would seem to be a huge, obvious flaw, but one that didn't seem to deter a particularly activist judge in Boston and ones elsewhere. That again doesn't mean busing can't be a good solution for some locales, it's just not a one-size-fits-all cornucopia for entrenched racial disparities in education.

[A good non-detailed overview of the merits of the Ricci case itself here. In my case, changes were made to job requirements that targeted only me. In the Ricci case, there was likely surprise both New Haven had set itself up for a law suit, but they were almost undoubtedly shocked and embarrassed at the unwanted biased outcome of their own proceedings.]

Update: Will tack on another (slightly modified) comment I made that seems pertinent:

Try a few classics. Jackie Robinson was "Affirmative Action", by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey. Robinson was a great ball player. Though he might not have been the best of the Negro Leagues. Why not? Because Rickey wasn't looking for the best black player - he was looking for a great player *AND* one who could take being spit on and cursed at and spiked and a host of other indignities. So he wasn't chosen as the best overall player - he was chosen as the best player for a particular situation.

Just one simple example that you can rarely just open up human structures and they equalize like a machine would. Water and electricity aren't biased, don't have memory, they just flow. People are and do. Our institutions have structural memories. Using baseball, certain players perform better in certain situations, at certain ball parks. The Supreme Court in particular is a team, not just an arbitrary group of individuals, not just 9 power hitters. Their job is to argue and elicit, to reach consensus and to elaborate on non-consensus. But if we start to realize that their view is more narrow than our society, that the team has no members that can adequately represent huge swaths of perspective, legally valid perspective that's never had adequate representation in our courts, then it's time to adjust that team - get a base stealer, a relief pitcher, a motivator or a brawler - someone to shuffle the energy, to refocus on the real situation. The law is based on the "rational man" theory, which in practice means "the rational white male". That doesn't mean we need a tribunal for each court - it means we need more diverse reasoning and perspective at the top, and all the levels down through - to increase our chances of getting good, solid, all-inclusive precedent cases that help us model a fuller, more just jurisprudence.

Yes, its "judicial activism" at the top, because it's reinterpreting precedent using diverse perspectives to further refine intentions of the Constitution with real rights in a vastly changed society. [Conservatives always manage to get us running away from describing what we're doing. Stand tall, be strong.] Certainly there are white males capable of contributing greatly to this effort, but to have only white males really impedes the process. And I don't want to denigrate Clarence Thomas by implying he's "not black", but I don't think he's sympathetic enough to the problems of the tilted table and structural bias against the underprivileged, nor sympathetic towards women at all, and his questioning and written work on the bench has been relatively useless for moving jurisprudence at all, much less expanding our interpretations in light of a fully multicultural and multi-gender respected society.

As an analogy, simple database searches look for exact matches of words. Slightly more advanced "fuzzy logic" ones allow for mistypings and "close" answers. More sophisticated ones like Google's use semantic nets, allow feedback from the previous choices around millions of searches and clicked-through answers to affect desired outcomes, to group answers and present categories to allow diverse selection, rather than having the top 10 answers returned be all the same. But we have conservatives arguing for a fundamentalist interpretation of the Constitution rather than using all our logical and philosophical and societal gains and wisdom over 235 years to have any influence, our understanding of assembly lines and teamwork and how market economies work and how racism and immigration and assimilation work, the effects of our monied classes and the nation-threatening excesses in our financial backrooms. They prefer the snapshot-in-time approach, the Luddite theory of jurisprudence, the nation and world as created in 4000BC. [Edits end]

The problem re: Allan Bakke is that we don't have a satisfactory solution. We do end up having to discriminate to some degree for some amount of time in many many cases. And it sucks to be on the other side of discrimination always. Even if you excuse it with trying to correct hundreds of years of injustice, someone will have their life ruined, their opportunities blocked.

And then there's the blindness we have to other people's discrimination. Men often don't see or understand sexual discrimination, often see "just joking" where a woman sees and senses an imbalance of power. Same for racial issues. So if white men continue to make all the decisions, they can likely continue to discriminate even while being new thinkers, simply because their perspective doesn't extend well enough to women and racial minorities.

Regarding the Court, we've put politicians on the court before - non-judges. Buchanan is big on written decisions now, but if I recall correctly with Alito and Roberts, his buddies tried to find people without a lot of written opinions to refer to. In short, it's all about politics, not any real concern about legal standards. It's quite possible we have too many bookworms on the Court and not enough who can synthesize. And then we have Clarence Thomas who's basically useless for judicial opinion, just a predictable vote. This doesn't seem to bother Buchanan either.