Police State America

Armed and dangerous, ready-to-kill agent checks passports

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap ... between the government and the people. ... What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
— Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).

Police-state America is a leviathan into which America stumbled.

Plenty of racists and fascists around, check your local municipal cops, but the hostility of the 1,000,000s of cops happened slowly, with silent accent or loud complicity from liberal mayors and the local corporate press.

On the national front, Dave Lindorff, a writer returning from the Philippines, Hong Kong and China, was subjected to, and witness to where the United States now stands vis a vis other authoritarian countries around the world.

Give Lindorff's piece a good read because the Untied States is going to get worse before it gets better.

Wrongful Conviction: Penny Brummer Is Innocent and Still in Prison

Don't worry Penny, we'll keep up the edifying debate about how noble Dane County (Wisconsin) police really are amid 'mistakes' like Dane County throwing your life away.

From MC, Jan. 14, 2016

Penny Brummer - Wrongfully Convicted
by bigotry and police tunnel vision

Bigotry, police tunnel vision, police deceit, prosecutorial misconduct and the prison-industrial complex all suggest a criminal justice system gone way, way wrong.

Manitowoc, Wisconsin is one international focal point; Madison, Wisconsin is another.

Penny Brummer was convicted in 1995 for first degree intentional homicide and given a life sentence.

This is Madison, Wisconsin. The question advocates ask: Will a more enlightened community 20 years later give Ms. Brummer a new trial for a prosecution that should never have taken place?

That's really what advocates want because there is no chance in a million Brummer would be convicted today.

Bill Lueders has the story at Isthmus.

Writes Lueders:

Which brings us to Penny Brummer, convicted of the March 1994 murder of Sarah Gonstead, the best friend of Penny’s female ex-lover, after a night of barhopping. The case has all the hallmarks of wrongful conviction: No prior criminal history on Brummer’s part. No physical evidence tying her to the crime. No credible eyewitnesses, and one manifestly non-credible one. 

Which Dane County jurist will come forward and champion justice, and save the life of an innocent woman in the process?