Judge Sonia Sotomayor~r~r~r

NYT: "President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the White House."

She'd be the third woman on the bench and the first Latina. As of late she was involved in the Connecticut case over reverse discrimination when no blacks made it past New Haven's firefighter promotion test and the department scrapped the test. Check out her Wikipedia page. As of right now there are nine citations about her possible nomination to the Court.

Boston's police get reckless, treat Shepard Fairey and arts community as pawns

Shepard Fairey (designer of the iconic Andre the Giant, OBEY and Obama Hope campaigns) was arrested in Boston last Friday night just outside of and moments before the opening of his career-spanning show "Supply and Demand" at the Institute for Contemporary Art. The cops nabbed him on two revived warrants for various bits of graffiti, but what's notable is the timing and method of arrest. As they pulled up to ICA:

The driver slowed down to attempt to make the turn but still missed the entrance by just a fraction of a second and we passed it by a short distance. The driver tried to back up or turn around but the unmarked SUV directly behind us was blocking our path. Police officers quickly surrounded the cab, and one of them pounded loudly on the driver's window. "Boston Police, stop the car! Turn off the car!" The officer exchanged words with the cab driver, and one of the officers flashed a badge and asked us each to identify ourselves. When Shepard calmly said, "I'm Shepard," one officer commanded, "Everybody out of the car, now!" We quickly decided to OBEY.

In this account given to Wooster Collective by friends traveling in the cab with Fairey and his wife, it appears as if the Boston Police planned to 'ambush' Fairey at the door of the show in order to stir up the crowd or even provoke a riot but scrapped the plan when the cab missed the turn. They make the case by noting the Boston P.D. had two weeks to arrest Fairey but waited until the show in order to cause a media shit storm for the Mayor, who had been promoting Fairey's visit and feuding with the P.D. on wages and residency requirements. Hell, the warrants were issued the day after the Mayor and the P.D. finished negotiations!

Never forget, and if you're in the arts you may want to avoid Boston like... forever.

"I am Shawn Earl Gardner, live man, flesh and blood."

Washington Monthly featured this story "Too Weird for The Wire" about four African-American defendants charged with murder, drug dealing, weapons possession and racketeering by the federal district court in Baltimore back in 2005. The story behind the case is grisly and devious but altogether unremarkable in the world of narcotics. The hook is their invocation of the "flesh and blood" defense, a strange route of logic that states because the federal government keeps its records on citizens using Social Security numbers and names in uppercase letters, a federal criminal charge is really against a "legal straw man," not the person detained.

That defense relies on the argument that, because of the post-Civil War act "Posse Comitatus" passed in 1878 to maintain segregation, federal law enforcement jurisdiction is limited to federally-owned property. Thus those SSNs and uppercase identifiers are not applicable to people outside of this federal domain. William Gale, a certifiably loony anti-Semite and minister of racist Christian Identity theology, repurposed Posse Comitatus to devise this theory back in 1971. He used it to form groups tasked with "enforcing the Constitution" against an illegitimate government:

Soon, Posses were sprouting across the country, attracting veterans of the 1960s-era tax protest movement, Second Amendment absolutists, Christian Identity adherents, and ardent anti-communists who had abandoned the John Birch Society because they felt the organization wasn’t extreme enough. Local groups would meet to share literature, listen to tapes of Gale’s sermons, and discuss preparations for the approaching End Times. This extremist stew produced exotic amalgamations of paranoia, such as when Posse members would explain the need for local militias to stockpile weapons in order to defend white Christians from blacks in the coming race war sparked by the inevitable economic collapse caused by the income tax and a cabal of international Jewish bankers bent on global dominance through one world government, for Satan.

We're talking over-the edge conspiracy theorists here, guys with tinfoil hats and sheds full of illegal arms. Terry Nichols, co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, was a subscriber to one of these Posses. The article gets into how these ideas founded in racism and separatism made their way to four African-Americans defending themselves against drug and homicide charges and the whole story is really engrossing, I highly recommend it. The case has still not gone to trial.

(via kottke.org)