Tenino mayor accused of having ‘intimate moment’ in city car

By Lindsay Cohen Published: Sep 19, 2012 at 11:12 PM

LACEY, Wash. — A local mayor is under investigation, accused of having an “intimate moment” with a woman in a city vehicle on the city’s dime.

Police in Lacey have forwarded their report about the incident to the city attorney, who will decide whether to file any charges in the case.

Police say they took a report on Monday involving Tenino Mayor Eric Strawn. Strawn admits he used a city car to run a city-related errand and, on his way back, he stopped to have lunch with a female friend.

While there, he said he had a glass of wine, waited a few hours and then got back behind the wheel. It was when he stopped to drop off his female friend that he said he had an intimate moment. He said the two shared an “affectionate kiss,” but nothing more.

Strawn, who recently separated from his wife, said he was soon approached by police officers. He said the officers told him “they got a report of some oral sexual activity.”

Strawn denies that claim, and believes whoever called the police alleging there was something illicit going on may have had the wrong impression.

“I’m confident I did nothing wrong, so I am confident to stand here and tell you this,” he said. “I am confident to stand here and tell anybody listening that I did nothing wrong. I merely had an affectionate moment – a kiss – with another woman, which I am allowed to have. It just so happened that it was in my vehicle that I used for work.”

Strawn also said the car he was in is a former police vehicle that’s currently used for the city’s motor pool.

Lacey police would only confirm that they took the report and that it’s now in the hands of the city attorney. Strawn wasn’t arrested and wasn’t detained.

If you haven’t already become fed up and closed your Bank of America account in favor of a local member owned Credit Union, here’s another good reason to do so:

The Bank of America is refusing businesses that support the 2nd Amendment. That’s right. Read on!

…the Right of the People to bear arms shall not be infringed…

Phoenix, Arizona –-(Ammoland.com)- McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, McMillan Firearms Manufacturing and McMillan Group International have been collectively banking with Bank of America for 12 years.

Today Mr. Ray Fox, Senior Vice President, Market Manager, Business Banking, Global Commercial Banking came to my office. He scheduled the meeting as an “account analysis” meeting in order to evaluate the two lines of credit we have with them. He spent 5 minutes talking about how McMillan has changed in the last 5 years and have become more of a firearms manufacturer than a supplier of accessories.

At this point I interrupted him and asked “Can I possibly save you some time so that you don’t waste your breath? What you are going to tell me is that because we are in the firearms manufacturing business you no longer want my business.”

“That is correct” he says.

I replied “That is okay, we will move our accounts as soon as possible. We can find a 2nd Amendment friendly bank that will be glad to have our business. You won’t mind if I tell the NRA, SCI and everyone I know that BofA is not firearms industry friendly?”

“You have to do what you must” he said.

“So you are telling me this is a politically motivated decision, is that right?”

Mr Fox confirmed that it was. At which point I told him that the meeting was over and there was nothing let for him to say.

I think it is import for all Americans who believe in and support our 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms to know when a business does not support these rights. What you do with that knowledge is up to you. When I don’t agree with a business’s political position I can not in good conscience support them.

We will soon no longer be accepting Bank of America credit cards as payment for our products.

For additional information visit McMillan’s website, www.mcmillanusa.com or on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/McMillanGroupInternational.

About McMillan:
McMillan Group International, located in Phoenix, Arizona, is the corporate parent for a family of firearms companies committed to excellence in the firearms industry. Companies include McMillan Firearms Manufacturing (formerly “McBros”), a manufacturer of the McMillan tactical and hunting rifles; McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, a leading manufacturer of premium custom fiberglass stocks for hunting, competition, tactical and OEM markets; and McMillan Machine Company, a contract manufacturer of precision machined parts.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Having lived through the deplorable mayhem, killings, looting, arson, permanent disabling injuries, thousands of arrests, and massive property destruction, the observation that Watts, CA. circa 1965 represented an apocalyptic watershed of epic proportions was inescapable. Even Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. had to admit the carnage went beyond the limits of his specialty. Yet some too young to have seen it engage in historical revisionism in the service of justifying today’s street violence such as Seattle’s 2012 May Day demonstrations, trivializing the property damage and assaults on journalists. The following essay is such an attempt presented here so the public may consider for itself the respective opposing arguments for peaceful resolution vs. ‘direct action’ in the face of state sponsored terrorism, repression, and systemic marginalization:

The Decline and Fall of the
Spectacle-Commodity Economy

 August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into a new found lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never the real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve?

We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, those at its center issued an Address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system. Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live…and in the final analysis, this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites who were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, which has pre-selected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the generosity of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distort their real needs. The flames of Watts consumed the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California extreme opulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state, but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off as disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of stratified wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of confrontation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike⁽¹⁾ challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role. The ‘spectacle’ promptly  responded with exposés of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual ‘immorality’ — the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity. The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society, disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic-cultural spectacle. By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence, the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian promise of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general. The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not achieved, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer viable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that makes history by provoking struggles” (The Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has no special monopoly on that.

The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people whom the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchy. But because this hierarchy must remain unavowed, it is expressed in that form, and irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrationality. It is this hierarchy that creates racism everywhere. The British Labor government has come to the point of restricting non-white immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their sub-proletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models. This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see — the moment they engage in a negating practice — that every hierarchy is absurd.

The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level — they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown.

Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage. That is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks) — the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status). It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of confrontation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war.⁽²⁾ A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Watts — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that could fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
December 1965

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. The “Free Speech Movement.” See David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement.

2. Lincoln Brigades: Americans volunteers who went to Spain to fight against Franco during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista): Spanish revolutionary Marxist organization, allied with the anarchists in opposing the machinations of the Stalinists within the anti-Franco camp. It was largely destroyed by the Stalinists in May 1937 through a series of repressions, arrests and assassinations.
     The concluding sentence (“A revolt against the spectacle . . .”) is a détournement from Marx: “A social revolution involves the standpoint of the whole — even if it takes place in only one factory district — because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the single actual individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting is the true community of man, true human nature” (Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” 1844).

Does Opposing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Bolster US Militarism? A Debate with Lt. Dan Choi and Queer Activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Lt. Dan Choi brilliantly debates (he’d make an excellent lawyer) the adamant Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore over the issue of gays in the U.S. Military on Amy Goodman’s DEMOCRACY NOW television show. Matilda’s appeal to morality is compelling, passionate. Dan’s appeal to critical thinking is dramatic, demanding the listener pause and listen to his reasoning. Dan is easily the more polished speaker, avoiding the many verbal pauses in Matilda’s presentation.  Amy Goodman’s production is topnotch including the wonderful musical score that’s incorporated. This is compelling viewing–click on the following link to watch it:

Don’t Ask — Don’t tell queer debate

Amy Goodman hosts a debate on whether the queer rights movement should be focused on repealing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law between Lt. Dan Choi and queer antiwar activist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Celebrating the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Sycamore says, only makes progressive movements in the US complicit with American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan

Thurston District Court judge gives press conference regarding attack on him

September 11, 2012

Thurston District Court judge injured in chemical attack

BY JEREMY PAWLOSKI and CHELSEA KROTZER

A Thurston County District Court judge was injured after answering the door to his home and having an unknown substance thrown into his face Monday night.

Judge Michael “Brett” Buckley answered his door at 9:25 p.m. when the man thew a clear liquid into his face, according to an Olympia Police Department news release.

Buckley told police the man said nothing during the incident, and that the man simply turned and walked away.

Buckley initially felt no reaction to the clear liquid, but later went to the hospital for skin irritation. He was released from the hospital Tuesday morning with minor injuries. Samples of the liquid are being analyzed.

No suspects or motives have been identified. Buckley described the suspect as a 6-foot tall, medium build man between 20 and 30 years old with a dark complexion and black hair. The man had a short beard and was wearing a maroon knit cap, dark sweater and light khaki pants.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the investigating detective, Chris Johnstone, at 360-709-2793.

Police Sketch

Judge OK after chemical attack at Olympia home; clues sought

JEREMY PAWLOSKI | Staff writer • Published September 11, 2012

A Thurston County District Court judge answered the door of his Olympia home Monday night and was met by a man who thew liquid into his face, causing skin irritation that was treated at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

District Court Judge Attacked at Home

HOW TO HELP

Anyone with information about the attack is asked to contact Olympia detective Chris Johnstone at 360-709-2793.
Presiding Judge Michael “Brett” Buckley suffered only minor injuries in the 9:25 p.m. attack in the South Capitol neighborhood and was released from the hospital Tuesday. Police were trying to identify the attacker but had precious little in the way of leads, spokeswoman Laura Wohl said.

No motive has been determined, Wohl said. Police are analyzing the liquid, which was thrown from a glass container; the process could take several days, she said.

Buckley got a good look at his attacker, who left without a word after the attack, Wohl said. Buckley did not recognize the man, who is described as 20 to 30 years old with a dark complexion, black hair and medium build, standing about 6 feet. He had a short beard and was wearing a maroon knit cap, a dark sweater and light khaki pants.

Shaken attorneys and court personnel in District and Superior Court said Tuesday that most take it for granted that some defendants, or their families, might have negative feelings about their cases. But it is shocking and scary, they said, to consider that someone might feel compelled to attack.

“Judge Buckley is one of the nicest people that work in this building,” crime-victim advocate Stanley Phillips said during an afternoon meeting for all court employees to discuss safety precautions. “If you see something suspicious around the courthouse, you need to report that immediately,” he told fellow employees.

During a news conference outside the District and Superior Court complex on Lakeridge Drive, Wohl and one of Buckley’s colleagues, District Judge Sam Meyer, said they knew of no threats against the judge or any contentious cases that might have led to the attack. Wohl said only that police hope Buckley’s description of his attacker might help.

Meyer didn’t know when Buckley might return to work but added, “knowing Judge Buckley, I expect him to be back quite soon.” Meyer also read a written statement from Buckley, who was described by friends and neighbors Tuesday as kind and considerate.

“My family and I greatly appreciate the thoughts and prayers of those who have contacted the court and my family,” reads Buckley’s statement. It continues, “I’ve given as much information to the police as I can, and I have faith that they will conduct a thorough investigation.”

Outside Buckley’s home Tuesday, a cleanup crew including a man in a hazardous-materials suit worked inside the front door, which was stained from Monday’s attack. Neighbors expressed shock that their quiet neighborhood would be the scene of a brazen assault.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” neighbor Barbara Packard said of the attack. “He’s a great guy. Everybody likes him. Wonderful family.”

Sheriff John Snaza has ordered that corrections deputies in charge of courthouse security be vigilant and visible in public areas, Lt. Greg Elwin said Tuesday.

Olympia Police Lt. Jim Costa said detectives will look at criminal defendants who came before Buckley who may have threatened him, or acted strangely.

“We’ve got to go backwards and figure out who in this judge’s past has had an issue with him,” he said.

Police don’t know whether the suspect left the scene in a vehicle or on foot, Wohl said.

While working on editing the almost 2 hour recordings of the 9-7-12 Traditions (Fair Trade) Cafe billed as ‘PUBLIC’ (the public was invited) and announcing the event would be FILMED, a call from one of the panelists (TESC professor, Peter Bohmer) came urging an editorial policy shift for this publication/reporter.

This call from Professor Pete Bohmer was regarding the controversy surrounding the recent spate of threats/intimidation for covering what was billed as a public event (the public was invited to attend) and announcing well in advance it was to be filmed was advertised. (Traditions in Olympia on 9-7-12 @ 7:00pm) A group of panelists were to make presentations under the title: Resisting Grand Jury Subpoenas & Know Your Rights. These included Professor Peter Bohmer and a couple of young women under Grand Jury subpoena from Portland. The ostensible organizer was a local attorney and Media Island volunteer, Mike Coday, who resides with his wife in the Chehalis/Centralia area.

Pete urged this investigatory journalist to sign onto the notion people had some ‘right‘ not to be recorded/filmed/photographed or documented when participating in a public event such as this unless they ‘consented‘. My position (substantiated in law) is that citizens have no expectation of privacy in a public forum and ‘consent‘ IS IMPLIED–certainly in law. We all know (or should) if we stand up in a crowded movie theater and yell “FIRE!”, that nobody (including journalists) is obligated on any level (legally or ethically) to protect any possible anonymity, to fail to document/record/film/photograph the incident, or to refrain from reporting on it in full. The act need not be illegal. The public has an intrinsic and legal right to the making and dissemination of news reports regarding what occurs in public venues.

Pete went on to advise he would condone attempts to bar or remove this reporter from future public venues if he didn’t subscribe to or adopt an ‘advocacy journalism’ style such as, for instance, Amy Goodman’s. The response he got was ‘advocacy‘ editorials were a possibility if well considered and voluntary, but the reporting on facts, images, and audio in the actual public venue event itself must remain unaltered in the service of accuracy and the public’s right to know unless a confidentiality agreement with a source has been consummated. Though, under some circumstances, identities may be blurred where an immediate or tangible threat to the safety of the subject can be demonstrated (e.g. underground Jews in Nazi Germany) it remains an editorial decision under a tremendously huge umbrella called JOURNALISM encompassing reporters of every stripe and persuasion. Their right to cover news for the public at public venues, however, remains undifferentiated. Moreover, the participants in these events are SEEKING ‘publicity’, as are those who commit wanton public street violence in demonstrations. To then claim news footage documenting their acts (or even their identities) somehow violates there right to anonymity in the absence of explicit consent is the height of sophistry and arrogance–a blatant bid for control through, as it so happens, threat and intimidation.

The right of the public to cover news events in public venues is clearly established and enshrined in our 1st Amendment. The case law easily reflects this fact. But a debate/discussion on the relationship of the press and independent citizen reporters with radical (even violent) elements of political activists might be productive to all interested parties were it carefully modulated/facilitated (with equal time to the different viewpoints) by a trusted group such as the League of Women Voters.

Even were the U.S. Constitution yet unwritten, we (the people) have an inalienable right to speak, to see, to hear…these rights are part of our nature…our humanity, and we are endowed with them by our creator, not by the largess of government…or the consent of radical political elements.

In this instance, the government we have chosen has recognized these rights and codified them in our 1st Amendment guarantees. We have the right to speak as well as NOT to speak…to express ourselves in dance, in speech, in literature, in music, in art, in a myriad of ways as countless as the stars. Similarly, we have the right to report, to record, to document, to film, to photograph, to draw, etc. what we see, hear, feel, smell, sense. It is an inalienable right and part of our nature. We do not, intrinsically, have the right to deny others their senses or documenting, reporting, recording, filming, photographing the same in a public forum. That is the law in America. It is also common sense.

Singling out journalists a radical faction does not like/trust for assault or intimidation is essentially an assault on the public’s rights. Personal ethics of convenience may not legitimately be substituted for those brightly demarcated boundaries established under the law. Professor Pete Bohmer takes issue with this critical reasoning. He does not agree with it.  Some of his supporters and many of the most violently radical so called blac bloc anarchists don’t either. He, et ux, profess more conviction for solidarity than the public’s right to freedom of the press. But unless we, the people (public) are to cede the streets to violence, assault, massive property destruction, coercion, intimidation, and blackmail, we have no choice but to resist a course that would lead to eliminating those rights & liberties we have left.

Corruption in government is rife and a direct threat to these rights & liberties. But so is corruption within the people. Both must be guarded against.

Perhaps Salmon Rushdie’s poignant telling the story of going into hiding after a fatwa was issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini provides the greatest insight into where either/both forms of corruption lead when the press is reviled. You can read Mr. Rushdie’s piece by clicking on the following link:

Publishing Satanic Verses and going into hiding story.

Have we acquired our own version of Ayatollah Khomeini right here, at home, working as a professor on the TESC (Evergreen) campus?

OR

Why complain of the attention/publicity one seeks?

Billed as GRAND JURY RESISTANCE & KNOW YOUR RIGHTS, the public has been invited to attend a panel discussion of recent events surrounding the Seattle May Day street violence and the justice system’s reaction to the same. Those targeted by the Grand Jury subpoenas protest their ‘rights’ are being violated (presumably their 1st Amendment rights) in what amounts to a political witch hunt for ‘anarchists’ and their associates. Yet the rhetoric exposed on Facebook pages belies this claim as activists openly threaten investigatory reporters & photojournalist seeking to cover this news as part of the public invited to attend.

The following are pertinent excerpts from that exchange from Mike Coday’s Facebook page created for the purpose of organizing and promoting it. The content of much of that rhetoric serves to reinforce the antipathy much of the public holds for those being investigated.

A panel discussion about the recent raids and subpoenas targeting activists in the Pacific NW

Event is free, open to the public and disability affirmative!

Join your community allies for a discussion about the federal grand jury process and how it is abused to repress political
movements and activists. The past few years government witch hunts went after activists in Minneapolis, Chicago and Oakland. Now in the past month, NW activists have been targeted by the FBI;having their homes raided, computers seized, as well as being
served grand jury subpoenas to testify against their fellow community members. Find out how you can resist political
repression and support activists.

Lauren Regan is the founder, executive director, and staff attorney of the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC). She has worked with targeted communities and hundreds of activists confronted with federal grand jury threats over the last 15 years. The CLDC
educates and defends activist engages in radical or progressive social change in order to empower effective activist and organizers working to confront the current repressive political climate. Knowledge is power, know your rights in order to powerfully advocate for the change you want to see in the world.

We have camera gear reserved from TCTV through Media Island and plan to capture the event on video. It does seem like an important topic and I would like to commit that we will be able to produce an informative video (or series of short videos) on grand jury resistance, but we capture a lot of footage and are only occasionally able to release a finished product. Usually hours and hours of video-editing for a couple of minutes of video. It’s time-consuming work. MaybeMarylea Coday and I have some future video project saved to disk, a record of Oly political action, that will allow us to weave minutes from many events into a big project. May have time for that when I retire from work force. All that said, we would like to get out a rough cut of this event to get the word out. Also willing to share the footage if there are video editors out there with time on their hands.