Click the image to see the full cartoon.

And the full explanation for it.

I have nothing original to add to the discussion of the police murder of Sean Bell and the judge's decision to let the guilty cops go free. Maybe because I'm too pissed off, or nauseated, or both by the loss of life, the criminal murder of an innocent man, the inherent racism of the police state, the loss to the man's wife and young daughter and the rest of his family - I could go on. But others are writing more eloquently than I can muster today, so I link with approval to them.

Holly writes at Feministe that the police murder of black men is a feminist issue. She makes a strong, eloquent case.

The problem is that this disproportionately affects communities of color. The black men who are most often slaughtered by such violence, and all the women and children in their lives too, their loved ones, friends and relatives. A system that is all too eager to exonerate “the thin blue line” and continue business as usual. All of these are feminist issues. Racism must be a feminist issue, for any kind of feminism that counts. Police brutality must be; the biases of the criminal justice system must be.

The SuperSpade is rightly flabbergasted and bitter:

I know there will be rallies held in New York to protest this miscarriage of justice and if you are in the area, you should go. After the marches though, Bell’s story like Amadou Diallo and others will be filed in the Black consciousness as the continuing saga of injustice that has plagued Black folk since we were kidnapped from Africa. Surely this is worth Black folk being bitter right?

Mikhael B. Reid expresses her outrage and posts links to cartoons she has done on this case and on police brutality.

I'll post more when I find it.

Oh, And: Barack Obama registered the predictable "we are a nation of laws so don't go crazy in the streets" admonishment. Not that I expected him (or think he should) advocate rioting, but it would be refreshing to hear a prominent politician say something like, "We are a nation of laws, sure, but I don't see how the police can be allowed to gun down a person in cold blood and get away with it. Something is wrong with our justice system. Cases like this make the law seem like a sham to protect the power of the state against the rights - the very lives - of the people."

NOTE: I'll be posting updates as I find them at the entry on my WordPress blog.

That's what it takes for the Democrat-controlled Congress to approve retroactive immunity for the telecommunications corporations who began cooperating with the BushAdmin's domestic spying program before September 11th. Not that it was justifiable after the date, but at least there was a fig leaf of a rationale.

Just so we're clear: our government spies on us, rounds up people it defines as "enemy combatants" (a term it made up) in wide dragnets, puts them in secret detention, tortures them, uses torture-based evidence in military tribunals, invades a country without provocation based on fabricated evidence and chimera threats, loses billions of dollars that it can't keep track of, employs mercenaries with no legal accountability, and rewards corporate cronies with no-bid contracts in "reconstruction" projects that remain unfinished.

Our government. The one we support with our tax dollars and our votes. Both parties.

To his credit, Barack "Changety-Change Change" Obama voted "Yea."

Hillary "Experience" Clinton did not vote.

And fuck yeah I'll politicize that.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has been following the fate of the FISA bill and surveillance matters for months now. His post on this news is worth reading in entirety.