tvc184

If you watch CNN or MSNBC, everything is about race. Any argument they don’t like, they choose a word or phrase and it becomes a “code word”. Joy Reid from MSNBC is so eaten up with race it is kind of entertaining. The Republicans said we want to get back to basic education. We know what “education” means… That is a code word (meaning white supremacy) When education becomes a racial hate word, you know they have lost touch with reality. Anything a Republican says, becomes a code word. If a candidate says he/she is for school choice, “choice” becomes a code word. It makes you wonder how Winsome Sears became the lieutenant governor. Not only is she black, she is the first woman to win any state wide race in Virginia history. Maybe it’s because the Republicans and conservatives don’t care about the color of her skin or her sex but the fact that she was a United States Marine before she was an American citizen, she backs up gun rights (and if you want to see a meltdown, watch YouTube at the reaction on the left when she took a picture with an AR15), she doesn’t want to destroy history and tear down monuments, etc. No, it can’t be that!! She must’ve had some kind of code word in her campaigning. This is an almost 3 minute YouTube clip about Sears gun photo… [Hidden Content]

I don’t exactly understand common core math but think we need to be taught the traditional way. Do I need to be able to explain common core before I can oppose it?

Do you know how much typing that is at 3 AM on an iPhone????? No telling how many typos or wrong words are in there……

Again, I think the guy in the story is more likely a victim. It is likely a racially motivated incident. Do we know what happened beforehand though? Does it matter? You have to get the whole story if at all possible. In this case it sounds like there are witnesses and hopefully disinterested so they are not choosing sides. But… Like many times, I’m going to refer back to experience. About 25 years ago I was making a family disturbance call where a woman or maybe her daughter called about her husband assaulting her. Another officer and I (happened to be my best friend) showed up at about the same time in separate patrol units. Like what is routine if possible, we separated the man and the woman and my partner spoke with the woman in one room and I spoke with a man in another. After my friend/backup officer spoke with the woman, he came over and told me he was putting the man in jail. I asked why. Because he had assaulted the woman and she had a visible but slight injury. NOT SO FAST! The officer had a statement by a person who had a visible injury, named the person that assaulted her (husband) and legally the officer had probable cause to make a lawful arrest. Is that what happened? In fact it was… but… Now the other side of the story. I had interviewed the man and got a few more details. He agreed that he caused injury to his wife. So now we have somewhat agreeing but somewhat conflicting stories on what happened. The other officer, like most people (not just cops), heard what certainly seemed like a plausible story and the husband kind of agreed, he had injured his wife. Case closed!! Without knowing the entire story from the other side, my partner basically wanted to take up for the woman because she had been assaulted by her husband. His immediate thought was, the husband is going to jail. Here is the story I got from the husband. If I remember right his daughter was 16 years old and he caught her stealing a ring from the next-door neighbor, who was supposed to be her friend. I think his daughter was visiting next door and snuck the ring out of the house. Daddy caught her with the ring and confronted her about where it came from. When he found the story, he made his daughter go next-door, give the ring back and apologize to the family. Awesome dad right? He wasn’t finished however. He was going to use lawful corporal punishment under Texas law. So he went and got a switch and was wearing her butt out. Mama didn’t like it and jumped on his back and started clawing his neck. While he was still switching his daughter, with his free arm he kind of shoved her away while she was hanging on his back and gouging his neck. She fell off and got a slight bruise or red mark somewhere but I don’t remember where. Like maybe her forehead hit the door frame. The man never attacked his wife, she was attacking him and he had visible gouges on his neck. Oops! Now where do we go? These are decisions that police officers have to make every day, in every city and no matter what happens, at least one side is not going to be happy and possibly both sides. With this new information the other officer re-interviewed the woman and she pretty much confirmed the story. Well yes I was clawing my husband, I did not want him switching our daughter. Daddy flat out told me with words something like, no daughter of mine is going to be a thief. Awesome dad right? The husband did not want his wife in jail but they were still angry and we could not leave them together. So we basically had two options. Those were to arrest one person or get someone to leave the house for the day to hopefully prevent any further violence. One way or the other someone was leaving the house either in handcuffs or voluntarily to go spend time with a family member or something like that. I was the senior officer and made the decision that if anyone was going to jail, it was going to be the woman. My partner agreed…… once he got the entire story…. which is the point of this whole story. We confronted her and told her she had two options, she could leave the home with family members or she can leave the home and end up in the County Jail charged with assault. She called her family over and I mean her mother, her father and may be a couple of brothers. They were angry with the police (naturally) and it started getting pretty heated. There was no way the police were taking their daughter to jail and she was not going to leave the house. What we thought was a simple solution, nobody goes to jail and she spends a day with her mother and father turned out to almost be a small riot. So we called for additional officers and two or three more showed up. This is where often police get blamed for escalating the problem and we were doing everything we could to get out of the problem. Once the officers arrived, we told the angry family that there were two options for them. They could take their daughter peacefully and go spend some time together or we were going to put her in jail and if anybody interfered, they would go to jail also. We also probably noted that injuring a police officer was up to 10 years in prison. They were not happy and 25 years later they are probably still cussing the police….. but they took their daughter out of the house and that was the last we heard of it. We also made a police report of the claimed assaults by the husband and wife as required by law and took photographs of a gouges on his neck and her slight injury also. As is typical with these kinds of calls, mostly people want the police to take their side but don’t want anything legally done such as filing charges. They basically want us to referee a fight and let the other side know they won the argument. This long winded story is just an example, until you know the entire story, you might have a hunch what is true but you may be wrong. I trust my good friend and partner and when he wanted to put the man in jail he was legally correct and the woman seemed like a sympathetic victim. He was caught up like most of us would be, in hearing a story that seems true, especially looking at visible injuries. Honestly, it most situations many of us would feel more sympathetic to the woman than the man anyway. This is one of probably many examples I could give on where we need to get the entire story. In this particular case I had the advantage of about four years more experience. That still doesn’t necessarily keep me from making a mistake but experience sure helps. So back to this case. As I have mentioned before, the guy that claims to be assaulted controlled the video. That means he started filming when he wanted to. That does not negate his story but was there more to it? Was he flipping off the other guy and yelling his own racial slurs? Did he challenge the man (suspect) and say something like, come over here and I’ll whip your butt!! When the suspet accepted the challenge and started marching toward the guy, is that when he started to video, conveniently leaving off his instigating the confrontation? Could this be two people who voluntarily fought each other because both were angry? Could they have both been yelling racial slurs and profanity at each other? Did the claimed victim in this case voluntarily fight, maybe after he instigated it and he just lost the fight? Could this just be two guys fighting and not really a hate crime? If I was going to bet on it, I would be about 99% sure that the man was assaulted and this at least had something to do with race. With witnesses, hopefully that will be cleared up shortly and if the man is guilty, he will have the appropriate charges filed in him. I think maybe aggravated assault. People like to say there are three stories in every situation. You have one side, the other side and then the truth is somewhere in the middle. I understand what the saying means but it kind of makes me mad sometimes. It is possible in cases like this that the man assaulted told 100% of the truth and there is no other side. Until we know that however, we need to look at all sides. Like other people, I might not know what happened but I can still make reasonable assumptions so it’s not unfair to say the guy in the story certainly looks like the victim… But…

On another note of wisdom, I have heard the saying that it is best to learn by the mistakes of others because we can’t possibly live long enough to make them all ourselves.

I love Christmas music but two months is a bit much…..

Allowing an individual to do as he wishes is fine. That is a big difference than requiring it. If a student wants to carry a Bible around in school, that is OK also if the school allows any books to be carried. They cannot allow some books and restrict others….. Unless it causes a disruption in the school, if we can figure out what does that. 😀 As far as the Constitution and probably all state laws, you don’t necessarily have to swear something under oath. Even more than 200 years ago the intelligent men that wrote the Constitution, did not require you to swear something under oath. Several times it has the phrase “Oath or Affirmation”. I believe that is because some people think that swearing an oath is swearing to a religion like swearing on the Bible whereas being under affirmation is just saying “yes” or “ I will go along with it“. Article VI in the Constitution specifically says there will be no religious test as a qualification to hold public office.

I can guarantee it scares some (most?) of them because they don’t know what to do. There is an organization called ACLJ (not ACLU) / American Center for Law and Justice which sometimes fights these battles and I believe most of the time they win. There are already court cases in place so I think most the time they just send letters. It is like, a teacher going oh my gosh, I heard a kid in the hallway between classes mention Jesus. Panic!! Call the school board! So I wonder how PAISD is doing with the mask mandate……

This topic has spun way off of the PAISD mask mandate but as long as we are talking religion in school…. I have see opinions repeated several times that when they removed prayer from schools, our problems started. If your child is waiting to get to school to find prayer, your problems started way before that. I don’t understand how you can be a Christian or any other faith and be a true believer but when you get to school, if they don’t lead you in prayer, you have somehow lost the faith. “I am 18 years old and have been a Christian and been baptized into my church but my teacher did not lead me in prayer today so I am now at atheist”? No……. As far as prayer in school, the Supreme Court has never outlawed prayer at public schools as claimed by some people. That is a myth. What they have banned was the government leading the prayer. One of the big cases in religious history was from the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It originally had no bearing on the rest of the country but it was cited by the United States Supreme Court later. In that case it was Christian versus Christian. The school led prayer from the King James Bible but Catholic parents protesting because the Catholic Bible was not allowed. Therein lies the problem with the government, a public school district, determining what you hear. It was an atheist against Christians, it was them against themselves. In another case a Jewish parent brought suit. The children were told to put their hands together in prayer at the beginning of a class. The father who brought the suit said he had no problem with the Christian faith and their praying and he believes in prayer also. His complaint was that in the Jewish faith they don’t put their hands together to pray. Maybe they cannot force his son to place at hands together but that would make him an outcast an open to ridicule because the government has now determined what prayers they would say. But by Supreme Court rulings, can students pray at school? Certainly. They can pray privately or they can meet in non-classroom time in groups and pray. Being on school property has no bearing. The prayer cannot be led, encouraged nor discouraged by the school. Some schools have wrongfully attempted to stop such prayer and the Supreme Court has upheld that right to pray at school. The popular way at one time of doing so was meet at the flagpole. If there were students who wished to pray, they got together before or after class. Schools cannot restrict religious writings at school such as an essay in class. Some schools mistakenly believe(d) that if you write anything religious in a class assignment it is unconstitutional but that has been ruled incorrect. If the assignment in English class is to write an essay on McBeth, then the essay would have to be on that topic. If the essay was for example on anything that interests you, the school would be violating a student’s rights by restricting religious speech in such an essay. So prayer is not forbidden at school, it is not forbidden in essays if that fits the topic at hand and it is not forbidden on school property. In fact to try to restrict it would be unconstitutional. Supreme Court has said that a moment of silence in school is allowed but again prayer cannot be led and neither encouraged nor discouraged by the school. The only issue is when the government tells you which prayers you will say or listen to.

Both of our posts ended with, “extent of the injuries“. 😂

😀 I just answer that for mat.

It depends. From just a new story it appears that he suffered what is usually considered a class A misdemeanor assault or in the Penal Code, an assault with bodily injury. Under the Texas hate crime law, a class A misdemeanor cannot be enhanced to a felony. An Assault could be upgraded to an Aggravated Assault but there are two ways to make that under Texas law. One way is to use a deadly weapon and the other way is to cause serious bodily injury. I have not seen any claim of a weapon so assuming there was none, it goes to serious bodily injury. That is not defined as how it looks. If a person slapped you on the arm and you said you felt pain, it would be the same penalty as getting a blackeye and a busted nose. It is all considered bodily injury. Serious bodily injury is an injury that causes death, could cause death or there protracted/extended loss of a bodily member or organ. So a broken arm in my opinion would be serious bodily injury because for four weeks, you will lose the use of that arm because it will be in a cast. If a person gives you a blackeye but it causes your eyes to be shut for two weeks, could a jury consider that a serious bodily injury? I think they might. If you had broken bones in your face due to such an assault and a surgery to repair the damage caused you to have a patch on your eye for a month, would that be considered serious bodily injury under loss of an organ for an extended period? Just from appearance this appears to be bodily injury only but the video said the man would need surgery to repair the injury. If that is true, I suspect that the man arrested will have the charges enhanced from merely bodily injury to serious bodily injury and therefore Aggravated Asssault. It will depend on the extent of the injuries.

That could be a yes or no answer. Evidence of a crime is whatever can be brought to the witness stand. It can be physical evidence or it can be testimony. A jury is given the task to determine what weight any evidence has. In Texas a hate crime it’s not a crime in itself. It is like conspiracy to commit a felony, an attempted crime or organize crime laws. Those laws are not crimes and have to be attached to other laws either to enhance or lower penalties. To that extent, bias crimes in Texas can be enhanced to a higher level. For example a class A misdemeanor carries up to a year in the county jail but has no minimum. If a jury finds it was due to bias, it has a minimum of 180 days but still a one year maximum. Other crimes to be raised one level such as a B misdemeanor if deemed a hate crime by a jury, can become an A misdemeanor. So to your question, would lack of a video lessen the crime or punishment? Again, yes or no. The law gives no specifics what can be used to prove a crime although there are some limitations such as hearsay for example. Even if there was no video and the DA decided to attempt enhancement of the penalty due to bias, he could do so on testimony from the victim or witnesses. On the other hand, even if video did show a racial slur, a jury could determine that there was an assault but it was not because of bias and that the racial slur was simply an anger reaction. I don’t hate women in any profession or position in life but I can think of some pretty bad names to call them if I was mad. Does that mean I am biased? That is why the answer could be yes or no whether there is video or not. The DA has the authorityi to prosecute for a hate crime enhancement with no video if he wishes or if such a video existed, a jury could give the verdict that it was not a hate crime. Whether a DA attempts to enhance a penalty in this case due to racial bias is completely on him. The weight given to any such evidence, is completely on the jury. You ask a very good question but here is the true answer. Will the DA go to trial for a hate crime if he does not have the video as evidence, particularly if there is only the defendant and the victim as witnesses? It comes down to what we call he said/she said. It is your word against mine and in my experience, most of the time the DA will not bring such an argument to the table. Let’s play the what if game. What if there is video of the man assaulting the victim as claimed in this case? The video is shot from the perspective of the victim. As such, he controls when the video starts and I believe in the article, he said he started it “after” he suspects started advancing on him. Okay…. What if the claimed victim was using racial slurs towards a suspect, flipping him off, etc.? Once he got the reaction he wanted, then he started videoing. Does that change it? I doubt that happened but that is why it is best to wait for all evidence to come out. How many times do we watch football games and a player will shove another player but the referee only sees the retaliation?

The destructi of a booming American economy because of Covid shut downs invigorated people.

….. and my background has nothing to do with it. I don’t think you have to be in law-enforcement to believe that the Constitution should be upheld. My opinion did not change when I was almost 30 years old and was sworn into office. My knowledge has considerably.

No, I put a lot of stock in the Constitution because I believe it. There are plenty of laws that I completely disagree with and have no faith in whatsoever.

What does religion have to do with manners in school? When did we abdicate teaching children manners or discipline to a public school district? None of that is forced in any case. You do not have to send your child to a public school. In fact you don’t have to send him to school at all but the government does require attempted learning even at home. Apparently some people have a very difficult time understanding constitutional rights with laws that have nothing to do with rights. I mean by your argument, we should be able to drive 120 miles an hour do a residential neighborhood because of freedom. That is nonsensical. The freedoms that I am talking about all the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States. None of your comment has anything to do with that.

A Republican has not won a state wide office in Virginia for 12 years. Why would this be an easy Republican win? You are correct that people that voted for Biden probably held their nose in voting because he offered nothing. It is a strange campaign when the candidate for the presidency is hitting in a closet. It seems like Biden‘s main campaign strategy was, don’t say anything. I doubt that Trump will win the Republican nomination in 2024. Whoever the nominee is, Trump seems to have invigorated the conservatives and they are not going to vote for the Democrat and it does not matter who the Republican or the Democrat is on the ballot. If the country continues on the same path as the first nine months of the Biden presidency, if Trump wins the nomination in 2024, he will win in a landslide in the general election.

Going by the article with accompanying video, the evidence appears to be overwhelming that it was an assault. I am curious about the cell phone video evidence but I am reasonably certain the suspect probably was motivated by race and use racial slurs. If he actually needs surgery, that might enhance the crime from Assault to Aggravated Assault.

Absolutely true. But being right you’re talking about is it right in your mind only. You’re entitled because no government can tell you what to think. Even China and North Korea cannot control people’s thoughts. They can only control what they say and do in public. So you can pick any topic you wish and say “I disagree”. Of course if you say so publicly, you’re going by the United States Constitution under your freedom of speech. It doesn’t make you right, it just makes you legal.

Youngkin doesn’t matter. He will not run in 2024 but that is not the issue here. What should have been an easy Democrat victory was a loss. Midterms are not usually kind to the party in power in the White House. In Obama‘s first midterm, he lost 63 seats in House. If only five seats flip in 2022, Pelosi will be sent out to pasture. Heck, we might even see Joe Biden get impeached if he is still in office by them. Anybody that thinks this is about Youngkin Is deflecting the issue. Biden carried Virginia by 10 percentage points. He has been in office approximately nine months and Virginia has now gone Republican in the governor, lieutenant governor and Attorney General. Youngkin?

Constitutionally there is absolutely something wrong with it. I find some humor that people fall back on constitutional rights until it goes against one of their beliefs. I have the right to freedom of speech! I have the right to own firearms! I have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures! i am not to keen on the freedom of religion though….

A lot of things are not harmful. That does not mean you should be forced to do them under the guise of freedom.

I wasn’t either but it was common in most school districts before I started school.

The new Republican Lt. Governor of Virginia.