Sports Illustrated’s five-part series on Oklahoma State football

Posted on September 10, 2013 by mea

Illicit payments, toothless drug policies, academic dishonesty and even the use of sex to induce recruits comport with the most cynical perception of big-time college sports programs. More troubling and revealing, though, was the human cost of the corruption in Stillwater. From Dohrmann and Evans’s reporting, a portrait emerges of  ill-prepared young men who feel they were exploited by the university.  Over the past decade an astonishingly large cohort of OSU players never earned a college degree, lasting only a season or two, their scholarships revoked after they were injured, arrested or simply deemed unable to contribute. Once the perks ended and they were discarded, some former Cowboys turned to drugs and crime, and a few attempted or contemplated suicide. As one former OSU assistant says of the players, “The sad part is when [the coaches were] done, they threw them away.“

via Sports Illustrated’s five-part series on Oklahoma State football – College Football – SI.com.

Meanwhile, over at Northwestern:

New Northwestern University head basketball coach Chris Collins has put down some roots here, paying $2.55 million for a newly built, seven-bedroom house in Winnetka.

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Let Freedom Ka-Ching! On The 50th Anniversary Of ‘I Have A Dream,’ AT&T Can Use The Speech To Sell Phones, But You Can’t Post It

Posted on August 28, 2013 by mea

As you hopefully are aware, today is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s powerful, moving and memorable I have a dream… speech. In a just world, that speech would be in the public domain. And, legally, it might be. While King did apparently send a copy of the speech to the Copyright Office, he did so as an “unpublished work.” There has been a dispute, then, about the speech itself, since that would be a publication. His estate, however, has argued that the speech was not a “general publication,” but rather a “limited publication” and thus King retained a common law copyright — and an appeals court appeared to agree, but the lawsuit over this was settled without a final ruling, and no one has challenged it since. However, King’s estate has been ridiculously aggressive in trying to lock up his speeches and take down videos commemorating his talks, with a focus on this momentous speech.

via Let Freedom Ka-Ching! On The 50th Anniversary Of ‘I Have A Dream,’ AT&T Can Use The Speech To Sell Phones, But You Can’t Post It | Techdirt.

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Guardian bombshells in an escalating battle against journalism

Posted on August 20, 2013 by mea

We have the spectacle of communications between two American journalists-in-exile—reduced to passing information via courier because their government is spying on everything they do online—busted up by the US’s top ally, apparently with no protest from the Obama administration, which was given a heads-up.

On top of that, Greenwald’s paper has been threatened by its own government with prior restraint and had its hard drives smashed in its basement to make a (stupid) point.

This is police-state stuff. We need to know the American government’s role in these events—and its stance on them—sooner rather than later.

via Guardian bombshells in an escalating battle against journalism : Columbia Journalism Review.

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The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture

Posted on August 7, 2013 by mea

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

via Sarah Stillman: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture : The New Yorker.

Another case involves a monthly social event that had been hosted by the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. In the midst of festivities one evening in late May, 2008, forty-odd officers in black commando gear stormed the gallery and its rear patio, ordering the guests to the ground. Some in attendance thought that they were the victims of an armed robbery. One young woman who had fallen only to her knees told me that a masked figure screamed at her, “Bitch, you think you’re too pretty to get in the mud?” A boot from behind kicked her to the ground. The officers, including members of the Detroit Police Department’s vice squad and mobile tactical unit, placed the guests under arrest. According to police records, the gallery lacked proper city permits for after-hours dancing and drinking, and an old ordinance aimed at “blind pigs” (speakeasies) and other places of “illegal occupation” made it a crime to patronize such a place, knowingly or not.

After lining the guests on their knees before a “prisoner processing table” and searching them, the officers asked for everyone’s car keys. Then the raid team seized every vehicle it could find, even venturing to the driveway of a young man’s friend nearly a mile away to retrieve his car. Forty-four cars were taken to government-contracted lots.

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U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

Posted on August 5, 2013 by mea

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses

via Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans | Reuters.

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