Men on the Defensive

On January 11, 2008, in People v. Jua, District: 1 DCA, Division: 5, Case #: A116578, the California appellate court upheld the need for a warrant before entering a home based on suspicions of minor offenses, including smoking marijuana.  

In this case the cops detected the “distinct order” of marijuana emanating from a residence, followed by their observation through the window of someone in the living room “whose conduct was consistent with smoking marijuana.”  

The cops knocked on the door, the defendant opened it, the cops smelled more dope, entered uninvited, did a search, and found 46 growing plants. 

The appellate court reversed the lower court, ruling that the nature of the crime was “insufficient in gravity” to warrant the entry without a warrant.  

This is a strike against the Constitutionally-bereft practice of so many law enforcement officers: enter first, and decide later the reasons for doing so. 

Yesterday the FBI arrested a Novato, CA. school bus driver and den leader for the Boy Scouts just as he was to enter a Marin County courtroom on related charges.

The man, Remsen McGinnis Benedict, 52, was making a required appearance for a preliminary hearing for state charges brought for his having downloaded child porn on his lunch break at work and when his wife was asleep at night at home.

Benedict was already facing 25 felony counts for possessing child pornography in the state court when the Feds stepped in.

Use of the Internet for child porn is a Federal crime and carries heavy penalties.

After the FBI arrested Benedict they asked Marin County to hold him in its jail until they can get him before a Federal judge in San Francisco next week. After that, he will come back to Marin to face the state charges.

Benedict’s Boy Scout membership has been revoked.

Bob Herbert wrote a guest column in The New York Times, styled Politics and Misogyny, dated January 14, 2008, which has me wondering if one of us belongs on another planet.

After complaining about the “dark persistence of misogyny in America,” Herbert really gets going: “[F] or many men, it [sexism] is the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.”

I can just see Jon Stewart doing a riff on that one. “Much bigger than baseball or football?”  How do we know this? What do sport have to do with it?

Herbert notes that the presidential candidates are now in Nevada, and complains that they are not telling the truth, which is that the silver state is the “misogyny capital of the America.” I would like to see Senator Reid’s off the record reaction to that.

I once spent a few years, on and off, in S. E. Asia and Latin America, and when I hear someone say something along the lines that America, of all places, has a “dark persistence of misogyny,” I wonder how that person would characterize the way 90% plus of the world’s population lives.

Has Mr. Herbert have a clue on how 90% plus of the world works? It is not pretty and it is far, far worse than in America. Universally, women do not seem to get a fair shake.

Having said that, other than Scandinavia, I cannot think of a country that has less “dark persistence of misogyny” than this country. Yes, America should be better in this area, as we should in other areas involving discrimination and ignorance. But we are not that bad, and I do believe we are all getting better at the male-female respect thing.

Herbert ends by lamenting that this country has become “ . . . so used to the degrading, contemptuous and even violent treatment of women that we hardly notice it,” giving way to “ . . . themes of death and dismemberment, female submissiveness and child pornography.”

You got to be kidding.  This is some kind of feminism run rampant, really just gibberish.

Remember all that fuss about why the telecoms permitted the government to spy on citizens without warrants? It was due to patriotism. They were allowing wiretapping without warrants because they were “good patriots.” That is what they told us.

Item: A Justice Department audit recently released disclosed that many wiretaps have been cut off because the FBI forgot to pay the bills, tens of thousands of dollars of bills. In one office alone, unpaid bills amounted to $66,000.

When it came to getting paid, patriotism apparently lost its luster for the communication giants. It did not want to give the U.S. government any more credit.

Remember the old saw about the last refuge of scoundrels?

Convenient patriotism, this.

Under the how-goofy-get-you label, check out Susan Faludi’s new book, THE TERROR DREAM. The book’s premise?  The 9/11 attack led to an assault on the freedom and independence of American women! We men used the attack to, “ . . . restore the image of an American invulnerable to attack, using the illusion of an mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it.” 

Yes, 9/11 led to a “peculiar urge to recast a martial attack as a domestic drama, attended by the disappearance and even demonization of independent female voices.”

And on and on. Pure nonsense. Someone must read this stuff, unfortunately.

Testaverde, the quarterback still playing in the NFL at age 44, ended a recent interview with, “I wouldn’t say I’m a smart person, but I know football. There’s two things I think I’m good at. It’s playing football and being a good father.”

Home Depot has a new TV ad. Father and 12 year old daughter in the kitchen. Mom sitting in living room. Daughter to dad, complaining about the kitchen: “Helloooo. What is with this cabinetry. And these lights. So gross. You need to go to Home Depot, dad.” After letting dad know how it is, the daughter saunters out of the kitchen and through the living room, as mom slips her a twenty. Dad is hapless throughout of course. Daughter is thoroughly haughty and condescending to dad, in league with mom to manipulate the poor guy, cutely.

Same old: make the father look silly, manipulatable, and simple minded. It is a cute ad, but it also sends a clear signal that mom is cool it while dad is lame. This is such a common portrayal of men in TV and other media that you would think someone would at least want to be original for a change–but it seems imbedded in America’s social fabric these days that dads are to be treated with scorn or at least a lack of respect.

Last December the United Nations voted to call for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1. The one hold-out country now has 73 inmates in it prisons serving life sentences without the chance of ever seeing the light of day for crimes they committed when they were 13 or 14. The hold out? George Bush’s United States of America of course. Our country. The U.S. stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison.

Draconian drug laws passed for ideological reasons, mandatory 3 strikes sentencing, no meaningful gun control, highest prisoner per capita ratio in the world, a prison building industry in league with unions and right wing politicos…not a pretty picture.