POST SCRIPTS

Hey, you gotta play the cards you're dealt. I mean, that thing was blatantly aimed at pushing poor black folk of the voter rolls ... blatant ... I mean, really, some sad segments of our society have gotten quite bold under the present administration.

But there will be no sneaking 'round the Voting Rights Act. Good effort, though!

From the AP:
The House has approved a bill that will require people to show they are citizens before they can vote.

The vote of 228-196 was mostly along party lines.

Republican supporters of the bill call it a common sense way to stop fraud at the polls. It requires that by the 2008 elections, individuals show a photo ID before being allowed to vote in federal elections. Two years after that, the photo ID has to certify they are citizens.

A supporter, Congressman Vernon Ehlers, said the concept isn't new. He noted ID is needed to get on planes, buy alcohol or cash checks.

Democrats repeatedly charged the bill creates a "21st century poll tax." They say it will impact minorities, the poor and the elderly, groups that tend to vote Democratic.

But supporters denied the bill is a poll tax, saying the bill requires the government to pay for an ID for anyone who can't afford one.

RACE CARD...it's old, warn at the edges, a blatant sick lie....AND IT'S SO OBVIOUS...by now you'd think they'd be ashamed and move on, but, they have nothing else. Scaring poor black folks for votes is such a kind and compassionate tactic too.

Democrats are the ones screaming "voter fraud" at the drop of a hat, yet they are unwilling to support a simple common sense way to address the problem. I'm sure if they had control of the house the bill would be heralded as the best thing since the civil rights amendment! It's all partisanship...all the time...and to he*l with what's good for America.

It is a "disgusting game" as you described it. Even more disgusting are the politicians who voted against this. They obviously don't give a da** about protecting our democracy. It appears that they are much more into protecting their own self serving, political agenda.

Our rights as Americans and the value of the Constitution are diminished with every fraudulent vote cast. The bills in question also include safeguards and spending to insure that poor black folk or anyone else entitled to vote can. Resistance to reform seems to originate from those who benefit from fraudulent voting. It seems they would sell out our country in order to regain power.

Democrats are after the illegal vote. This is too obvious. They are rats. What else can you expect from rats?

I wonder if Libby will provide us with the language in the bill which she found to be responsible for "pushing poor black off the voter rolls".

maye she would also like to throw in the part where it undermines the Voting Rights Act.

Im also curious if she will ever get around to validating the any of the other statements she has made in several posts leading up to this one.

Ron: "Our rights as Americans and the value of the Constitution are diminished with every fraudulent vote cast."

Oh they are not. Such hyperbole. Especially when you consider the fact that only about a third of the eligible electorate can be bothered to exercise their Constitutional privilege. If a couple million fraudulent votes could turn an election, whose fault is that?

You are all so dead set on blaming SOMEBODY ELSE for the problem, whatever that problem may be. I swear to Pete, you all make me look positively Christian!

"Ooops, sorry, our bad. Wrong address."

An innocent grownup adult would have a good laugh with the officers and thank them for doing the best they can at the job we citizens have asked them to do FOR US. Maybe offer them coffee and donuts before sending them on their way. Then he'd have a great story to tell about how he was up all night the next day.

A snivelling child adult would spend the next few hours writing snide poor me garbage on a blog. Like "the man" gives a rats rear where you live.

"You are all so dead set on blaming SOMEBODY ELSE for the problem, whatever that problem may be."

Noticing that people cast fraudulant votes and that others abet them in doing so and then doing something to remedy the problem, like writing and passing legislation per our governmental process, is not "blaming somebody else" . It is acting responsibly...even Jimmy knows this:

"President Jimmy Carter. "Effective voter registration and voter identification are bedrocks of a modern election system,"

The following represents blaming "SOMEBODY ELSE"

"...it would target "poor blacks in the South" and it would effectively steal away their votes, they said the GOP was trying to turn back the clock to the bad old days of rampant segregation."

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

HA HA, this is great!!

Between Libby thinking that illegal voting isnt a problem, and Tasker thinking that it is a grand conspiracy to kick in his door, I am thourghouly amused. Sometimes I think they are playing a trick on me!!

I give you liberal rationalism!! Behold its....glory??

Huh??? My door kicked...coffee and donuts, wha? Task, please take your meds...I worry about you when you get like this.

No Jack, I hope he keeps going like this. I dont even have to fashion a response when he goes off the deep end.

I cant believe that at one time I held out hope that Tasker might be a somewhat rational human being.

I wonder if he has bothered to compare the amount of mistakes compared to successful operations run by SWAT and other teams from the 1970's till now. There is no way he has.

Why bother when you can just run off at the mouth! This is great!!

Keep going tasker!!

After all Jack, he mentioned 5 instances!

5 whole instances!

forget the fact that every major city in this country has a SWAT team that averages hundrends of operations a year. Then take into account all the other police operations in this country on a daily basis, and yu can bump that number up into the thousands. Then take into account that each operation is then scrutinized by review boards.

And what you have is a better chance of getting killed by a doctor on the operating table, than by a SWAT team if you dont resist arrest.

Really Libby? You think it is a good thing that illegal aliens or felons can vote in our elections? Well, you have a point. A few hundred more felons voting in Florida in 2000 would have given the state and the country to Gore. I can see where that appeals to you.
And of course it matters silly girl. If everyone had a Lexus it wouldn't be a status symbol. If everyone could vote in our elections they wouldn't be special to our Democracy. As for the millions that do not vote. If they don't care enough, respect this country enough, can't be bothered to learn about issues then I don't want them voting anyway.

"How about if they accidently shot your grandkid in the head? Would you give the cop that did that a glass of warm milk?"

Believe it or not , Tasker I would. I would be aggrieved by my own loss and I would also recognize the grief and agony the officer would experience for the rest of his life because of something he did in error on the job. And don't bother to question me on this, I have experience in two unrelated events in my life that qualify me to believe strongly in what I just said.

The people of these United States have done a miserable job at raising our children to be happy, well adjusted, educated, responsible citizens. If we could get better at that the police officers could go back to dealing with the occasional robbery or murder....or better yet, speeding tickets.

This is a reply to Taskers long post about all the mistakes cops made..he infers there were no accidents, just "jack booted" thugs doing what they do.

CALIFORNIA: It was early Sept. and this day I was sitting in an underground briefing and raid planning room at the Sheriff's Office. We used the S.O. because it had the largest briefing room and most secure. All the allied agenices would meet there when we had a big raid going down or some sort of multi-agency sweep. It was 6 a.m. and in another hour the raid would be on and we could be in a gun fight, you never knew. We didn't dwell on it, but this was always a possibility with every major raid.

We usually started our more dangerous raids early in the morning because dopers/criminals rarely got out of bed before noon, so if you were about to get into a gunfight, better to have your opponent's mind still fuzzy and wiping the sleep out of his (or her) eyes while you are sharp and focused.

When you come into a raid room just proir to a raid, you don't go back out until raid time! You are warned: No phones, no radios, you are just stuck there until you are told you can leave, this was all part of the security.

On one wall there was a blackboard and it was covered by a tarp. This was where the raid planning began and ended and it was covered until the appropriate moment, also a security factor. I think this part was due to the fact that occassionally a non-sworn person might enter the room to deliver a note and see something they weren't supposed too. While we waited we bs'd, grabbed some hot coffee and sat down in the desk/seats. It was a squeeze for some of the big guys with all their gear, so sometimes they just took a regular folding chair instead...too many donuts! lol

Then our raid leader/planner came in with a fist full of papers and a few case files and addressed the team. He yanked the the tarp off the black board and there was a sketch of all roads and trails in the area of our target.

We had our radio frequency assigned on the black board...this time we were using CLEMARS. Each officer got personal paper copy of the map and raid instructions. There were 8x10 black and white photos passed around showing the bad guys vehicles and all the known players. These pics had been taken over the course of the investigation by a special surveillance team. There were also couple of mug shots being passed around depicting the same people we caught in the surveillance photos. So they were ex-cons too, typical. There was also an aerial photo taken at about 1500 feet from a police spotter plane, so now we knew the house and all the out buildings, fences, ditches, trees, etc. as well as a surveyor!

The team leader went over the details of the search warrant, so we all knew what we were up against. Then each officer was given his special assignment. The planning and details were always impressive to me, so much thought went into every raid. Its hard to describe how much thought there was in this short space, but it was considerable...all aimed at minimizing the risk to officers and the public.

Early on, the team leader had asked who wanted to go through the front door first. We never forced anyone to do this because we knew this would most likely be where you got shot, if it went bad. We never had any trouble finding volunteers. Now the entry team was selected, three officers through the front door, others to follow.

Three officers were assigned to cover the rear and then 4 officers flanking either side of the house, and they made up the outer perimeter. This served to keep the bad guys from escaping, as well as keeping the unintended visitor from walking up at the just the wrong moment.

The search warrant had a street number, but for safety sake, the type of home (wood sided) and the color of the house (green) was included on the warrant address and even its proximity from the nearest landmark (a fireplug) that was visible to the raid team. Even the front door was described in great detail as to color and style, white with a brass mail slot. Why so much detail? Because of a few past mistakes, they are very rare, but they do happen. Like where an address number was transposed on the search warrant during the final typing, #1315 A street became #1513 A Street, but hey, that's two blocks off! Could be the same kind of house, same color, but wrong address and if you notice the door isn't white, it's stained, it could mean a save! So we look for that stuff and we check and re-check and re-re-check!

In all my years we never made a mistake and hit the wrong house, but we also backed up the raid entry by using the undercover agent that had been to the house earlier, so even if the numbers were completely gone and the house had just been re-painted, we still knew we had the right place!

So, this raid was no different, extreme detail of the house was given and everyone had the location and address, triple redundancy. Everyone knew their raid part and their position and theiur timing for their assigned task was worked out long before we left the raid room.

We even knew the order in which vehicles would arrive and where they would park before moving in on foot. We knew the caliber of our weapons and weapons assignment too and any extra tools that might be needed, like bolt cutters.

You had to arrange your firepower based upon each raid situation and we carried whatever it took with emphasis on public safety. We hesitated using big guns in crowded areas even if it mean putting ourselves at risk. We use all sorts of weapons too, from sawed off shotguns to machine guns...to us, they were just tools of the trade and we didn't act like cowboys just because we had a fair amount of firepower. Actually, I would say in most raids the bad guys had better guns than we did, but then they were NOT constrained by a fiscal budget either!

Ok, once the raid assignments had been given out, the teams were grouped up and we headed out together to our plain cars and police units, nobody went alone. We trusted each other with our lives, but this is the way its done for security, because its the right way. No exceptions.

Most of the times we proceeded in a caravan to remote raid site with little or no radio traffic, save for the team leader's. Then the team fanned out, encircled the target and set up our perimeters. Hand signals were used to communicate mostly, sometimes a radio with an ear jack, but anything that blocked your hearing or eyesight was not that all welcome, so we tried to avoid that except where absolutely necessary, like a forced entry. But, a no-knock search warrant was really rare, we didn't like them and neither did the judges who had to authorize them. They required a whole bunch of circumstance that we had to prove before we got a no-knock (door kick) warrant and more often than not, it just wasn't worth it. Same for serving a late night warrant or pre-dawn warrant, it almost never happened. I can only recall doing two "no-knocks" in my whole career and both were for killers, not drugs.

Once at the front door of the target residence, it was 5 loud knocks, then "police officers, we have search warrant to search the premises, open the door!" This was repeated once more for safety sake. Then we tried the door, most of the time we just walked in and then we repeated in a loud voice the same thing, "Police....

The most experienced guys, who generally knew each other well and what to expect from the raid and from each other, were the first to go in. The leader carried the warrant in hand. The other officers secured the entry and started clearing the house, usually two more uniformed officers would follow securing the areas already cleared.

We were always concerned about an occupant mistaking us for some bad guys and opening fire on us, so a uniformed officer was always there. We also wore the raid jackets, you've probably seen them on TV shows that say POLICE front and back. There's case law somewhere that says you have to have POLICE in large bold letters on your back and front in case some crook dusts you, then the DA can at least get him for killing a cop.

Yes, we wore vests, but 99% of the vests were only designed to stop a handgun, almost any rifle bullet would go right through them. I wore a vest designed to stop a .44 mag and I added a trauma plate in front of my heart for a little extra protection, but still it wasn't much if you know what hit the fan.

The guys I either knew or heard about that got killed doing raids were shot through the vest or just above or below the vest. So a Kevlar vest was better than nothing, but I knew I was still far from being bullet proof!

This raid caught the bad guy (biker) in bed with his old lady. We walked in on them, "Police officers. We have a warrant to search your house, get up." He was pretty cool about it, as if it wasn't the first time he had his sleep interrupted this way. He was naked and so was she, but we let her stay under the covers while the drug suspect put on his pants and was cuffed up and walked outside to a caged unit. One that had now pulled up to the front of the house for that reason. We allowed the female to slip something on under the covers even though we took a risk that she could have pulled a gun on us in that brief moment while we gave her some privacy. It's happened before and we knew it, but its what you do as gentlemen. We had hoped to catch three other bike drug dealers, but as luck would have they made an unexpected trip and missed all the fun...we got em later though.

Now the suspects are interviewed and taken off to jail and the place is searched. We took care not to really toss items and to do the minimum of damage in search drawers and piles of clothing. This part can get pretty stinko... druggies like to put their stash in all sorts of creative places like a stack of dirty baby diapers.

The search itself is not without dangers too. We have found light switches wired to gasoline filled light bulbs, gunpowder in light bulbs, even 220 volts wired into the door mat and screen door at one nice place. Then there were trip the wires to explosives and some wired to guns or shotgun shells fired by mouse traps. There were all kinds of tricky and deadly things I've found searching places, shot gun booby traps in closets were always fun to find, usually they were meant for some rip-off, not necessarily cops. The bad guys usually told you where everything was so they didn't get busted on a murder rap, but sometimes they were NOT there and you had to find the booby traps on your own. Once, I found 3 or 4 IED's crawling through a tunnel, I forget exactly how many I found, but anyone of them would have taken my head off.

So this is how it all goes down.

There is almost never a night warrant or early morning search warrant, that's Hollywood stuff. We almost always knocked too, even knowing that drugs might get flushed, that was the risk we took and sometimes we had ways to stop this too, but I won't say how.

The mistakes in search warrants were rare, considering the huge numbers that are served every day across the nation. And when somebody did screw up, we talked about it in briefing and we all learned from their mistakes. Thank god we were never talked about in some bodies briefing! So there you go...you just got a walk through of your first real raid and warrant service.

Course there's all sorts of ways search warrant can get served, but basically this is how its done. Oh, and we never once shot anyone by accident.

How does that square with Taskers, "Yah, Jack Lee. (he loves to mock me by calling me by my first and last name) After having your door destroyed and your family terrorized, at the least, you would thank them and offer them coffee and donuts. How about if they accidentally shot your grandkid in the head? Would you give the cop that did that a glass of warm milk?"

Task...you been watching too much television and not getting enough reality. Its a real shame you are so jaded, because the guys you hold in such low esteem are really pretty nice guys who risk an awful lot for you every day, whether you know it or not.

PS Of my original class academy class, 50% were gone in the first 3 years. You have no idea how tough it is until you are in it and most people, even those who thought they always wanted to be cops, can't take the constant stress and violence or what it does to their family.

Half of all cops never make it to retirement, they get disabled out or killed. Of the narcotics officers I knew 2 were killed, one by explosion and one by gunshot. Of my cop friends and guys I knew at total of 5 were killed by gun shots, 2 by car wrecks and 1 by a massive heart attack while on the job.