Beginning with Charlie Stella. Who has the best summary of the Penn State scandal that I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, this appears to have been, and I have no doubt it was, yet another corporate cover-up; men in charge of a very wealthy institution protecting a brand above the welfare of innocent kids (those we know about and those we probably never will know about).

Pedophiles are pedophiles. Yeah, they’re culpable for their actions, but they’re gonna be pedophiles. Those who allow them to do what they do, they’re something far worse. Anybody who knew children were getting raped and didn’t stop it, they deserve a hell of a lot worse than firing. Here’s hoping somehow, some way, they get it.

Speaking of cover-ups at corporate universities and molestation of a different kind, the American Association of University Professors’ Colorado Conference released a report last week that found that CU’s firing of Ward Churchill was not only not justified, but that Professor Churchill committed no academic misconduct. This from Westword.

“We found that he did not commit academic misconduct,” [lead report author] Eron says. “I wasn’t surprised by finding that the university caved in under public pressure, because there was something phony about seeking alternative means for firing him. But I was very surprised by the report by the Standing Committee for Research Misconduct. Before the report came out, there was considerable faculty support for Churchill, but afterward, it was widely perceived that he was a fraud, even though our conclusion is that what they called academic misconduct was actually a normative practice used by numerous experts in the field — and even by some people on the committee itself.

“That tells me they felt under enormous pressure to act as they did,” he continues. “Clearly, they were trying very hard to reach the conclusions they reached. My guess in going over the transcript is that at every step, they either presumed that Churchill was lying or guilty.”

You can, and should, read the whole report here. I probably can’t tell you how excited I am to see this go to the Colorado Supreme Court. Without the machinations of Larry Naves, I’m thinking this’ll be a pretty easy win for the First Amendment.

In other good news, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! got a really nice review from Stefan Raets at TOR.COM, and he had particularly nice things to say Andrea Gibbons, Rick Dakan, and I.

1.) “Berlin: Two Days in June” by Rick Dakan is a gorgeous little story about a young sales rep walking around present day Berlin, trying to sell a social marketing app to shopkeepers but getting caught up in the history of the city. The way this story hits the intersection of technology and human emotion is just wonderful.

2.) “Cincinnati Lou” by Benjamin Whitmer was, for me, the big discovery in this anthology. The story’s protagonist, Derrick Kreiger, is a fascinating scumbag you will want to read more about — and luckily, it looks like Whitmer’s debut novel Pike features the same main character. Based on “Cincinnati Lou” I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for more works by this author.

3.) “The El Rey Bar” by Andrea Gibbons (who co-edited the anthology with Gary Phillips) is a sad, beautiful snapshot of a group of people in a Los Angeles dive bar in the wake of unspecified terrorist attacks and riots. It’s one of several stories in this book looking at the human cost of revolutions, and one of the best ones.

Which brings us to revolutions. Sort of. I got the following picture in my email from somebody at Occupy Detroit. Here’s hoping it makes you laugh as much as it did me.

That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

Unsurprisingly, in O’Rourke’s letters of reference, the Churchill case comes up a couple of times. I say unsurprisingly because it seems like CU is looking to reward everyone involved in that First Amendment gutting — including Larry Naves, the judge who saved CU’s ass after O’Rourke proved himself incapable of any occupation more demanding than holding saliva in his mouth.

Unfortunately for O’Rourke, it looks he lost out, however. Which is too bad. But, hey, he oughtta be proud that by the nature of his connections, he almost made it. Given what I’ve seen of his legal prowess, I can only imagine the amount of ass-kissing he had to put in to get as close as he did.

I wanted to post more about Russell Means on Wednesday, but I haven’t been doing much posting, or anything else, this week. Turns out the cold I had at Bouchercon wasn’t actually. I’ve been feeling really shitty and weird for about a month now, but last Saturday night it turned into a fever. Hating doctors, I tried to wait it out, but my wife finally convinced me to go to urgent care last Sunday night. Which, it turns out, was a pretty good idea, because what I actually had was bronchitis and pneumonia. So, after almost a week of bedrest, and lots of steroid mist and antibiotics, I finally feel something like myself for the first time in three or four weeks, albeit a little weak.

So, anyway, excuses aside, on to what I wanted to say about Russell Means. The first time I met him was probably 12 or 13 years ago. We had dinner with him at the invite of a mutual friend, Ward Churchill. Now, I don’t consider myself particularly easily intimidated, either by celebrity or tough-guy presence, but Russell had the affect of reducing me to a quivering mess. Just scared me shitless. I found the best description of his demeanor in a book by Peter Matthiessen called In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.

“Russ is a psychological terrorist, at least in public,” one Indian says. “Until he has control of the situation, he is always trying to throw strangers off balance, and he usually succeeds. But when you’re alone with him, and he doesn’t have to prove anything, he’s great — warm, intelligent, and a lot of fun to be around.”

I got to know a little of that warm side as I saw him over the years. I never knew him real well, but now and then we’d end up at the same dinner table or event (or jail cell, on at least one occasion), and his generosity and sense of humor kept coming out more and more.

Which is not to say that Russell’s sense of humor is exactly tender. I don’t wanna try to trick anybody into thinking he’s a teddy bear. By way of example, here’s one of my favorite stories — one I was mangling it for M.A. Littler outside a bar not too long ago — which comes from Russell’s autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread.

Drinking beer with my friend — officially my bodyguard — John Thomas, I met a couple of Indian guys named Weston and Jimmy Weddell. Greg was head of the local AIM chapter. These hoodlums, barely out of their teens, opposed his leadership. We got into a silly argument about it, politics compounded by macho posturing and alcohol. Suddenly they were pointing weapons at us. They told us to go outside, then ordered me across the street. Weston had a .222, a high-velocity varmint rifle. Weddell carried a .357 in his left hand and a .22 in his right.  I crossed the street and turned around. When Weddell said, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” Weston aimed his rifle and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck just below my left nipple; the impact spun me around and I fell down. Weddell slugged John knocking him to the street. As John started to get up, Weddell shot him from about six inches with his .22. It’s a good thing he was right-handed — if he had fired the .357, it would have blown John’s head off. Instead the slug slammed into the bony ridge under John’s eye and was deflected downward through his neck.

As the two punks took off, I crawled over to Greg’s house. The last thing I remember clearly before the ambulance ride was knocking at the door. The slug had nicked my lung, detoured around my spine, and exited through my back. When I pulled off my shirt in the emergency room, the bullet fell out. When the press reported that the bullet had missed all my vital organs, as in both of my previous shootings [and at least one stabbing, several brutal beatings, etc.], people back home started to say that I didn’t have any vital organs!

That’s the personal side of Russell Means for me. Funny, intimidating, warm, self-effacing, but always interesting.

Vastly more important than that, however, is his political side. And since I would not, for all the money on the fucking planet, try to put words in his mouth, I’ll direct you to his YouTube channel, to the Republic of Lakotah website, and to his own website.

And for some kind of understanding as to Russell’s political import, the following is the final episode of a PBS special called We Shall Remain. It’s the best I can find on YouTube to give some context to one of the many movements Russell was pivotal to.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Part seven:

Part eight:

Part nine:

Of course, all of this is just a longer way for me to say that if you’ve got money — or, as some folks have been saying, the means to host some kind of fundraiser — Russell Means is a helluva person, who could use, and deserves, help.

Cancer’s a motherfucker. And an expensive motherfucker, at that. You can make donations online at the bottom of the page here.

Well, now it looks like the Colorado Supreme Court is taking up Ward Churchill’s appeal. And if you’re a fan of free speech, it looks like a winner. From Westword:

As you’ll recall, CU looked into Churchill’s scholarship following publicity surrounding an essay he wrote post-9/11 in which he compared victims of the terrorist attacks to “little Eichmanns” — and after finding areas of concern, the university’s regents fired him. Churchill responded by suing the school for violating his First Amendment rights in retaliation for his essay, and he won — the jury awarded him one dollar in damages. But Judge Larry Naves slapped down his request for reinstatement, ruling that CU had the right to give him the heave-ho — and the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed.

After this defeat, Lane appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, with his filing focusing on three questions:

1) Can an investigation into his writings and speeches if motivated by retaliation for First Amendment protected speech (Churchill’s 9/11 essay) amount to a free-standing First Amendment violation?

2) Should the Regents have been given quasi-judicial immunity from suit?

3) Can equitable relief (Churchill gets his job back) be given even if the Regents got quasi-judicial immunity from suit?

Lane hoped one of these topics would stick — and he says he’s floored that all of them made the cut.

​”They’re the only issues we asked the court to take a look at, and they’ve agreed to hear all of them, which is extremely unusual,” he maintains. “First of all, granting cert is really unusual. But if they do grant cert, they’ll usually do it on one or maybe two issues. Three is really uncommon.”

The rest.

If you don’t know much about the case, here’s a great documentary:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

And here’s another that Liz Garbus created for HBO called Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

But Judge Naves, who presided over the trial, threw out the verdict. For reasons that pretty much, well, everyone found bizarre.

Even more bizarre, I just got the following email forwarded to me:

University of Colorado Law School
30th Annual Law Alumni Awards Banquet

WHAT: The 30th Annual Law Alumni Awards Banquet for the University of Colorado Law School

WHEN: Wednesday, March 9, 2011
5:30 p.m. – Cocktails
7 p.m. – Dinner & Awards ceremony

WHERE: Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center
650 15th Street (corner of 15th & California Street)

WHY: Each year, the University of Colorado Law School recognizes its outstanding Alumni working in the public sector, private practice and in the judiciary. It also presents the William Lee Knous Award, the law school’s highest award given to an alumnus or alumna in recognition of outstanding achievement and sustained service to the Law School. Proceeds from the event benefit the University of Colorado Law School’s Alumni Scholarship Fund.

WHO: Those being recognized this year are:

William Lee Knous Award
L. Richard Bratton ‘57

Judiciary
Judge Larry J. Naves ’74

Public Sector
Anne J. Castle ’81

Private Practice
Mark A. Fogg ‘ 79

Also being recognized this year for distinguished service and contributions to Colorado Law are retired Federal District Judge Jim Carrigan, Dean David Getches and Professor William Pizzi.

Jill McGranahan
Director of Communications & Public Relations
University of Colorado Law School
303-492-3124
jill.mcgranahan@colorado.edu

Y’know, I try real hard not to believe in conspiracies and shit like that, but this is the kind of thing that makes it real hard. And even harder not take my CU diploma down to Boulder and stuff it down Bruce Benson’s throat.

Update: If you don’t have any idea what the hell this post is about, here’s a good video.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

(Cross-posted at PM Press.)

From the description:

Bird’s eye view from center of Native American Lakota Sioux camp to the northeast, across the council circle, after the fight at Wound Knee creek, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota; shows scattered frozen bodies in the snow, tepee poles; one with a soldier standing under them, a broken down wagon and U. S. soldiers with horse in distance.

This is the 120th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre. For those who don’t know the story, after several decades of open extermination campaigns directed by the US military, this was the final stroke. The Seventh Cavalry, who’d been a little embarrassed under Custer about fourteen years prior, got drunk one night, and invented a pretext to gun down hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children, effectively ending the so-called Indian Wars.

As with the Sand Creek Massacre, and most other massacres prior, this one was met with some hand-wringing, but mostly, well, more calls for extermination. In fact, calls for extermination were the norm. Take this editorial, penned by no less a figure than L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, who wrote in response to the assassination of Sitting Bull only a few days prior to the Wounded Knee Massacre:

Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead.

He was an Indian with a white man’s spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies.

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.

Extermination was open policy, as William Tecumseh Sherman’s letters during his time administering the Indian Wars make clear. In one letter to President Ulysses S. Grant, he writes, “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” In another letter he writes, “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year. They all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.” Nor was he just writing, he was giving orders to the likes of General Philip Sheridan to cut down as many women and children, as well as men, as he could.

Extermination was a policy that was, by the way, largely successful. By the end of the 19th century, a population that is estimated to have been somewhere from 15 to 25 million had been reduced to 237,000.

Nor was that the end of it. Extermination policy shifted, found new ways to adapt, and shed itself of its openly genocidal trappings, but has, as scholars like Ward Churchill remind us, hardly disappeared.

I had a long-winded post all planned, but I’ve already said most of it before — just click the Ward Churchill tag on the bottom of this post — so, instead, here’s what David Lane and Ward Churchill had to say:

Attorney David Lane responds:
It is truly unfortunate that our most cherished freedoms are left in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats in black robes to protect. We are less free today because the Colorado Court of Appeals has given the go-ahead to the Regents to fire any professors they wish after running them through a sham “due process” procedure. A jury of Professor Churchill’s peers found that the Regents violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Colorado Court of Appeals is letting them get away with it. Their made-up justifications ring hollow in light of the freedom lost by their actions.

Ward Churchill summarizes the ruling:
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is wrong.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is wrong.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is wrong.
The ACLU of Colorado is wrong.
The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) is wrong.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is wrong.
The National Coalition Against Censorship is wrong.
Latina/o Critical Legal Theory is wrong.
And Federal law doesn’t apply in Colorado.

Here’s David Lane, from a Westword piece:

“There’s no doubt about it — Judge Naves’s decision was a politically motivated decision,” he maintains. “And if it’s left to stand, then academic freedom and tenure mean absolutely nothing in any public university.”

In his address before the court of appeals, Lane says he argued that “the judge erred in vacating the jury’s verdict and granting immunity to the regents — and he also erred in dismissing our claim that the investigation launched by the regents to study every word ever written or spoken by Ward Churchill was a violation of the First Amendment separate and apart from the termination.”

CU’s regents “targeted him because they didn’t like his 9/11 essay, which is what the jury concluded,” Lane continues. “But the judge gave them immunity after the jury basically convicted them — and that has huge First Amendment implications. That means the regents could stand on the front steps of Regent Hall and say, ‘We’re firing the following 25 professors because we disagree with their politics’ and they’d have as much immunity from lawsuits under the ruling as a judge does.”

Regarding CU’s side of the story, Lane says, “They basically recycled the same argument they made to Judge Naves — that Ward Churchill got fired for plagiarism and fraud, and the university gets to decide if people violate their rules.” But in Lane’s view, the regents “are convicted civil rights violators, and the jury already rejected that very argument.”

There’s no time frame on when the court of appeals will issue a ruling — and if the decision goes against Churchill, he won’t meekly accept it, Lane says: “The remaining steps in this case for whichever party loses is to ask the Colorado Supreme Court to review it, and Ward Churchill is ready to go there. And we can also ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review it, and he’s willing to do that.”

Lane adds that he’s received friends of the court briefs from “many organizations that are extremely interested in seeing that the Constitution is protected here, including the Society of American Law Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild. That’s very unusual.”

The rest.

Here’s video of David Lane and Ward Churchill:

Also here’s complete audio of David Lane’s arguments.

I’ll have more in a few days, when I’ve had some time to listen to the audio and think about it. At first blush, it seems obvious: CU’s argument is that CU is not answerable to the United States Constitution, and can violate it at will. Hell, as determined by a jury, they’ve already done so: now they want the right to do so with impunity.

I always kind of wonder where the local Constitution Party is when this issue comes up. Or the Tea Party. Of course, for all their horseshit, they’re not really too up on what the Constitution actually says, anyway.

Here’s the thing: if you’re a writer, your agin’ this shit. You don’t have a choice. You can dislike what Ward Churchill said — I don’t, but you can — but when it comes to the First Amendment, you protect it if you’re a writer. This particular freedom is the water you swim through. It’s your entire environment. Only the most feeble-minded or cynical kind of hack could reserve the First Amendment for only certain kinds of speech.

Unfortunately, of course, as I’ve been learning my entire adult life, there are lots of feeble-minded and cynical hacks out there.

Back in the fall of 1993, the Denver Metro klavern of the Ku Klux Klan was casting about rather frantically for a means to redeem the humiliation of having been publicly routed by a surging mass of irate black teenagers amidst an attempt to commemorate Adolf Hitler’s birthday on the steps of the Colorado Capitol.

Their solution, brilliant in its way, was to have Thom Robb, fundamentalist minister cum Grand Dragon of the Arkansas-based Knights of the KKK (subsequently retitled “Christian Concepts, Inc.”), to observe the 1994 Martin Luther King holiday by giving a speech in front of the old courthouse adorning Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.

Predictably  –  at least it can be said with certainty that Robb predicted it – a host of the more purportedly enlightened denizens of the People’s Republic sallied forth at the designated time to denounce the pastor’s unabashed celebration of white supremacist values with chants and placards demanding the utmost “tolerance” of racial/ethnic “diversity.”

Unfortunately – or not, depending on one’s point of view – things didn’t go quite as those on the “antiracist” side of the confrontation anticipated.

Fixing his gaze upon the small sea of hecklers neatly ensconced behind rows of metal barriers erected by the ever-growing overburden of Boulder’s finest – this, it was claimed, was to “ensure his safety,” although it would’ve taken someone a lot less canny than Thom Robb to worry that whatever protestors might turn out in the veritable buckle of the granola belt would so much as sip a cup of herbal tea without first reciting the Pledge of Nonviolence – the pastor seemed downright amused.

Then, having to all appearances extracted a full measure of mirth from the spectacle, and making even fuller use of his PA system, he delivered an utterly devastating blow (albeit, sadly, I can only repeat it in paraphrase). “What’s all this yapping about ‘diversity’?” he wanted to know.

“The town we’re standing in is 94 percent white. That’s why I’m here. This place is exactly what [the Klan] is trying to duplicate all across the country. If it’s racial diversity you’re looking for, you might want to consider moving to Newark or Detroit. But, hey, you’re not about to do that, are you? Ever wonder why that might be?”

Sometimes the effects produced by a little dose of reality can be amazing.

A queasy silence settled over the crowd even before Robb’s verbal roundhouse was complete. People shifted from foot to foot, not-so-figuratively squirming in place, the message boards they’d been holding lowering steadily, as if the signs themselves were wilting.

By ones and twos, then in somewhat larger clots, they began, almost furtively, to slink away.

The rest.

Y’know, it’s not very often I cheer for the klan.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Hannah Arendt wrote of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

The rest.