Residents with police complaints in Fountain Inn now have a place to air their side of the story.

Fountain Inn has set up a Police Review Committee made up of seven city residents who will review formal complaints against officers as well as cases where police officers use force.

Fountain Inn Police Chief Keith Morton welcomed the new committee saying it would help the Police Department be transparent.

“We’ve never had anything to hide at the Fountain Inn Police Department,” Morton said. “This is just an opportunity to let citizens from our community see what we do.”

Fountain Inn agreed to start a review panel after mediation between the city and members of its black community following the July 2007 hanging death of a black man in the city jail. Greenville County Solicitor Bob Ariail ruled the death of Richard “Jabo” Johnson, 25, Fountain Inn, a suicide, but citizen outcry led to involvement by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The new committee has great responsibilities, Mayor Gary Long said.

“We hope we don’t have to use it very often but when we do, at least we have one now that we have an appeal to go to,” Long said.

It took three years to establish the committee, partly because it took time for the two sides to agree on a list of criteria to be involved on the committee. Members must be a city resident, registered voter with a driver’s license, and must either have completed the Police Department’s Citizens Police Academy or pledge to complete it within one year, Morton said.

So…Fountain Inn was bullied into creating a bureaucracy hostile to law enforcement after a guy hung himself and the people who wanted the board actually fought the city on requirements that make sense, like understanding the law and police procedures. As of now the people who will handle civilian complaints against police have merely “pledged” they will take a course at the academy, but will begin their duties before doing so.

What could go wrong?

Here’s a question people should be asking. How much does this cost? Do these board members get paid? How will they conduct investigations? What’s their budget?

Cost should be first and foremost in residents minds. While the 2009 financial report Fountain Inn has available on their official site paints a rosy picture of economic stability (using some creative accounting) table A-2 (pg 7) shows that there is a declining trend in wealth generating private business activity and an increase in governmental expenditures.  Specifically, you’ll see that while governmental charges for services, government grants and property taxes have all increased by at least $500,000, private business activity (the fees the city collects from businesses) has decreased by more than $2,000,000. This would indicate to me that the city is raising taxes on businesses which are being forced to pick up the slack for businesses that have been hurt by the recession or have closed down completely. If that’s the case the loss in revenue will be worse for this year’s financial report.

Table A-2 also shows a decrease in government expenditure on city services with a simultaneous increase in charges on those services for private business. This doesn’t seem like a sustainable economic policy.

Table A-4 (pg 9) is more startling, showing that the city has racked up a little under $10,000,000 in long term debt which is a little more than 32% higher than the year before. At that rate, this year the outstanding debt will be over $13,000,000 but the city revenues may still be decreasing by almost 10%.

So again, does Fountain Inn have the resources to throw at what is at best a vanity project for political activists and at worse a money grab by opportunists which addresses a problem that may not even exist? I don’t think so, do you?

WSPA has video of these miscreants making threats and attempting to force the police, via intimidation, into charging Gregory Collins with a hate crime. They are helping to organize a march on Newberry which they hope will turn violent:

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation has released a scathing attack on the NBPP claiming, among other things, that the original Black Panthers “operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.” Er, sure. The real issue between the two is that the original Black Panthers were Communists/Socialists while the NBPP is a crazy Black Muslim cult … that’s getting pretty popular.

Since the NBPP advocates killing White people their appearance in our state is something we should all be concerned about.

Castile first came to work for the City of Greenville in June 1995 and worked in the Recreation Division  until May 1999 when he left the City to serve as Executive Director of Within Reach, a non-profit  organization originally developed to implement a $5 million drug-elimination program grant secured by the City to address drugs in its at-risk communities. In September 1999, he was recruited back to the City of Greenville by then City Manager, Steve Thompson, who had identified the City’s need to create a  high-level position that could provide problem-solving across the entire organization and could manage city-wide projects versus individual department-driven projects.

Hmmmm. If I’m reading this right Castile “left” the city government to run a non-profit that was being funded by a grant to the city, and stayed at that non-profit for five months. That non-profit, Within Reach, has no website and the last number I could find for it ((864) 467-4305) has been disconnected. The reports are that it was a anti-drug program but in its last filing (2005) it was listed as running a daycare center and youth services. It also listed their income at $50,099. Within Reach may be defunct but the organization is still used in sales pitches for membership to groups like Greenville’s Interfaith Forum. Sounds like he did a bang up job.

Of covering his tracks.

The 467 prefix this “non-profit” used is coincidentally the same one dedicated to Greenville county government. Lucky for Castile that he was able to get a number that was easy to remember number when he “left” public service.

The story has a stink to it, but the local hacks are too busy lauding Greenville’s first African American city manager to care about whether John Castile’s previous dealings with your tax money were on the up and up.

From WSPA:

In a replay of what happened after Mark Sanford dropped Folks when it came to light that Folks was a violent degenerate who liked to beat women in drug and alcohol fueled rages, Folks has started slinging mud at Nikki Haley like he’s the proverbial woman scorned. I wrote about Folks’ criminal history before in a post which included information on his role and motivation in keeping the Mark Sanford affair a big story. Here’s a quick summary for those who never heard of him before:

Who’s Will Folks, some of you might ask? Well he once worked for Sanford, starting out as a campaign worker and later went on to embarrass Sanford several times while working for him.

Sanford stood by this douche until Folks roughed up his fiancée, a woman named Ashley Joy Smith. Just a couple of months after that assault Folks found his ex at a bar called The Black Porch and flipped out on her so bad that an arrest warrant was issued for him. You can read an archived news article about those incidents here courtesy Brad Warthen’s Blog. Sanford dropped him like the sack of dung he was (Mark may be a cad, but he’s an old fashioned cad) and Folks has, according to the muscadine vine, held a grudge ever since. Apparently he seems to believe that people made too big a deal of his abuse and insanity.

Folks worked as Sanford’s trained attack dog until Sanford cut ties with him over Folks’ abusiveness. Then Folks spent the last few years lying in wait, pouncing on Sanford whenever possible. Now when Haley has decided not to use this political consultant, Folks, at the behest of a candidate who should be ashamed of himself and should expect similar treatment by Haley supporters in the future, rolls out a smear campaign that’s not just libelous but patently absurd.

Will Folks is claiming he had a sexual relationship with Nikki Haley.

Now I was going post pictures of both people to show how fanciful this charge is but this is too serious an issue to make jokes about. Suffice to say that I met Nikki Haley at a meet and greet and she is a very beautiful woman with class and charm. Will Folks is a bloated, overaged frat boy who “pops the collar” of his pink Polo shirts while trying to convince the 17-year-olds he trolls for in Hot Topic he’s “still cool.”  Will Folks is literally White trash, human refuse that congealed in the gutter of South Carolina politics and makes a living getting on the shoes of candidates then crying when he’s scraped off.

I’m thinking Nikki Haley could do better if she wanted to cheat.

Whether Folks was hired by another candidate or is just a spiteful douchebag is irrelevant. When it’s proven Folks is lying you’ll see that this, for all you people who don’t know what libel means and constantly threaten me with frivolous lawsuits, is literally actionable libel. Folks has disseminated a false allegation specifically designed to damage Haley. That, not name calling, is what slander and libel cases entail. Folks should be sued, and when he is he will lose badly.

Will Folks is defrauding the public with his lies and attacking a candidate that has stood up against the corruption of our state. Let’s hope Folks is held accountable for what he’s done.

Vote Haley!

Video courtesy WSPA:

Alex Knepper has inexplicably become something of a cause célèbre on the right. He’s widely considered to be some sort of provocateur, targeting the excess of feminism, and was widely defended by the right when he wrote a misogynistic screed about date rape in a college newspaper. This was largely a knee-jerk reaction to Knepper claiming to be a righty being “attacked” by out of control college feminists.

Which was untrue. Knepper, in essence, claimed date rape was lie, that if a woman was raped by someone she was drinking with she was not only to blame but she wasn’t even a victim.

But rehashing that nonsense isn’t necessary. NewsReal Blog and the Frum Forum both employ Knepper as a content producer, and his association with the latter should have been enough to cause the right to scrutinize Knepper more closely. While I don’t read the Frum Forum myself (he’s a cut rate Kathleen Parker at best), I do follow Newsreal Blog because my wife is NewsReal’s own Jenn Q. Public. She had a powerful piece up on Newsreal not long after that controversy which was a response to yet another “provocation” by Knepper where he lambasted rape survivors for “debasing” the term survivor.

Knepper’s reaction was this piece of pro-rape agi-prop that should have ended the debate as to whether Knepper hated women once and for all. Read this and weep at what cretins like David Frum and whoever handles Knepper at NewsReal thinks is intellectual debate. Here’s Knepper’s response to arguments that women die at the hands of rapists all the time making the term survivor is legitimate:

Characteristic to plane crashes, car crashes, house fires, cancer, and other things that people die from: people die from them. David’s example, Ted Bundy, illustrates my point: he was not only a rapist, but a murderer. We would say that someone survived Bundy’s brand of aggression because he was a killer. But it is impossible not  to survive a non-lethal act. Women die at the hands of rapists, but the rape is coincidental to the fact that they could have died. Women die at the hands of vegetarians, zookeepers, and Deadheads, too — but when evaluating whether one “survived” an act, we have to look at whether they may not have come out alive. All else being held equal, rape is not that kind of experience: it is simply not looking at death in the eye. It is undoubtedly a horrific experience, of course — but it is a particular kind of horror: one of violation, of total loss of physical and sexual control. It is manifestly different than, say, a house fire, or suffering in a concentration camp.

If it sounds a little to you like there’s a disturbing pattern developing you’re correct. Knepper, who is openly gay, tends to write pieces about women’s sexual victimization which fetishize male dominance over a submissive partner while painting women as hysterical, malicious partners in their own abuse, all too eager to be raped so that they can lord their victimization over others. Rape isn’t a “loss of physical and sexual control,” it is a brutal assault by a sadist whose sexual gratification is achieved through pain, degradation and humiliation. Knepper’s definition of rape is more like a visit to a bondage club in the meat packing district than a crime.

Knepper suffers from what I like to call the Tennessee Williams Syndrome. That’s where an author’s own antipathy toward women in general (and in his case feminists in particular) causes him to characterize women as two dimensional objects that simply cause problems, and fetishize their abuse by men. Knepper and I got into it on that piece in the comments and David Swindle, who runs the site, threatened to ban me for hurting poor Alex’s feelings.

The feelings of people who have been raped were never considered.

I don’t blog politics anymore unless it relates in some way to crime, so I have been ignoring Knepper’s rantings. However someone sent me his most recent piece where he responds to the recent Supreme Court ruling on civil commitments of sex offenders. Unsurprisingly, Knepper is against it. Also unsurprisingly, he’s completely sympathetic to rapists and child molesters:

Our post-Cold War bogeyman is the child molester. He manifests himself in the daily scare segment on the Today Show; in macabre, hyperbolic convolutions by Oprah, and in NBC’s (in)famous To Catch a Predator. He is a sociopath, he is mentally disturbed, and he is about to break into your house, rape your child, and bury her alive in a shallow grave. And worst of all: he is the mass-man — he lives among us.

Recent scholarship — mostly by women, men are petrified by the stigma surrounding sexual controversies — has started shooting holes into this TV-ready outrage, perpetuated by demagogues like Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace. Women like Vanessa Place and Susan Clancy have bravely stood up against the mob to demand that common sense be restored to its rightful place. More recently, one of the lynch mob’s leaders, Martha Coakley — who, in an attempt to look “tough on crime,” kept a man falsely accused of “Satanic child rape” in prison — was denied access to the halls of the Senate. But these are drops in an ocean of manufactured outrage. On the whole, the mob has seized control of our discourse.

The result of this moral panic is that sex offenders of any kind — whether a stranger-rapist, child molester, someone who was peeking at kiddie porn, or even someone who had sex with a fourteen-year-old at the age of nineteen — are being denied their basic civil rights and liberties. Laws restricting the right of sex offenders to buy homes — since some neighboring homes will have children, after all! — have become so draconian in the city of Miami that they are forced to live under bridges after being released from prison. But which politician will speak up for sex offenders? Except to say that our laws aren’t “tough enough,” of course.

Oh, the poor rapist/child molester. Why can’t we look past his brutal sodomy of a 9-year-old and give him a break? As an aside, I will point out that given that Knepper is in college, his 19- and 14-year-old thing at the end there raises my eyebrow. I’ll point out as well that some douche in college looking to nail a high school freshman deserves to be on the registry.

But beyond that, we see yet again Knepper fetishizing rapists. Now they’re oppressed and misunderstood. Next I suppose they’ll be a sexual minority and Knepper will insist we call rapists “rough-sex-o-sexuals” and claim child rape is part of “youth liberation” the way NAMBLA did all those years ago.

If this all sounds familiar it’s because literally everything Alex Knepper has written comes directly from the online pro-sex offender movement. What’s that? Never heard of them? You have actually. Whenever you see some weirdo in the comments of a news story about a rape or child molestation claiming that women lie all the time or sex offenders have low recidivism rates (both lies by the way), you’ve run across the “pedo militia” run by groups like SOSEN and ROAR for Freedom.

Both of these groups are “activist” groups formed online for the sole purpose of promoting the view that sex offenders are being unfairly persecuted. Both are also groups comprised almost entirely of registered sex offenders. The few people who aren’t RSOs are the wives and girlfriends of RSOs, some of whom allowed their husbands and boyfriends to molest their own children and many, like Knepper, fetishize abusers and attack victims. Here’s a quote from the former CEO of SOSEN Shirly Lowrey about Jessica Lundsford’s rape and murder:

Jessica was not tortured and her death comes across more as an assisted suicide than a murder. There were no drugs or alcohol in her system and only her wrists were bound. She had not strained to try and free her arms. She could have easily kicked through the plastic bags but she did not. There were no tears, rips or even stretch marks. It looks as if she stepped into the bags of her own accord, squatted down and waited for death. There was no hand stretching upward as if asking foe [sic] help.

Depraved? Certainly. More depraved than Knepper’s assertions that drunk women can’t be raped or that rape victims are “debasing” the term survivor? I don’t think so. In fact, the sentiments sound quite similar to me.

Everything Knepper just vomited out in his lament about the plight of the child rapists in this country has been written before. You can find it on pro-child rape forums like Boychat and Girlchat. On pro-child rape propaganda sites like Newgon. And from the writings of sex offenders and their advocates themselves. How is it that Knepper’s words and theories on sexual abuse so closely mirror that of the most depraved amongst us?

But more to the point, how is it that NewsReal blog continues to accept this madness? Alex Knepper, perhaps unwittingly, is propagandizing for the most evil movement in our country today. The “sex offender law reform” groups have been proven time and again to be nothing but pro-child rape, pro-sex-crime cults where individuals are enabled and encouraged to re-offend. Blogs like Absolute Zero United cover this extensively and anyone wanting to see how widespread and active this movement is should go there and prepare to be shocked.

There’s a phrase that (rightfully perhaps) has fallen out of favor but I always liked the sound of it when I read it in some dusty tome. Synagogue of Satan. The pro-sex offender movement is most aptly described that way: a synagogue of Satan spreading their filth and perfidy in an attempt to corrupt the very moral fabric of society. NewsReal Blog, with its focus on Islamism, radical leftism, and all the other “isms” that are seen by we on the right as tearing away at the fabric of society is the last place one would expect to find a safe harbor for the basest immorality, the idea that rape is essentially harmless and our concern should be for rapists rather than rape victims. Why would any decent person publish this?

Why would they allow, and indeed in some cases demand, that these horrible ideas (which if adopted by people will lead to even more horrible acts) to be sheltered from the scorn and derision they deserve?

It’s easy to get lost in Knepper’s rape fetishism and forget that the real problem with his writings is that he’s acting on behalf of degenerates as a preemptive apologist for their criminality. Knepper’s works are designed to minimize rape and molestation and create support for rapists and molesters. He is indeed, outside of groups like SOSEN, a degenerate’s best friend. Don’t think they don’t recognize this, and they are some of his most ardent supporters.

Which just shows that you can judge people by the company they keep. So why are we keeping company with Alex Knepper?

Update: Victory! Newsreal seems has taken Knepper’s new piece down. Now let’s hope they stop letting him post this drivel.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina’s attorney general said he will not criminally prosecute Gov. Mark Sanford for travel and campaign reimbursements that drew civil charges and the largest ethics fine in state history.

McMaster on Monday said that the governor’s use of pricey airline tickets, travel to personal and political events on state aircraft, and questionable campaign reimbursements had not risen to a criminal level.

“While I’ve acknowledged repeatedly my own moral failing in this matter, we feel confirmed in our consistent belief that this administration has always been a stalwart defender of the taxpayer,” Sanford said in a statement. “SLED’s findings, the House Committee’s dismissal of 32 of 37 ethics allegations, and the Attorney General’s decision today reaffirm this long-held belief.”

The other politicians who continue to waste our money on lavish trips, tax payer funded cars, and the various other “perks” of office remain unindicted.

Speaking of criminals who belong in jail but got off easy, in a display of hypocrisy so rank it nearly choked me to death, Will Folks of FITSNews has expressed his extreme displeasure at Sanford being “given a free pass” by Henry McMaster who was running the investigation. Who’s Will Folks, some of you might ask? Well he once worked for Sanford, starting out as a campaign worker and later went on to embarrass Sanford several times while working for him.

Sanford stood by this douche until Folks roughed up his fiancée, a woman named Ashley Joy Smith. Just a couple of months after that assault Folks found his ex at a bar called The Black Porch and flipped out on her so bad that an arrest warrant was issued for him. You can read an archived news article about those incidents here courtesy Brad Warthen’s Blog. Sanford dropped him like the sack of dung he was (Mark may be a cad, but he’s an old fashioned cad) and Folks has, according to the muscadine vine, held a grudge ever since. Apparently he seems to believe that people made too big a deal of his abuse and insanity.

Is it necessary to point out that people who beat the crap out of their old ladies then go berserk in public but didn’t end up on the wrong end of a 10 year bid in the joint are living in a glass house when when it comes to complaining about “so-called investigations” into wrong doing?

Sammy Fretwell lapped up this asinine, Orwellian twisting of reality like any so-called journalist these days, noting that “many scientists” agree that evil corporations release greenhouse gases that destroy the environment. Like so many journalists who have the intellectual curiosity, integrity, and common sense beaten out of them with copies Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals it never occurs to Fretwell to pose the three basic questions about “global warming” that anyone with half a brain should ask:

1) Since by “greenhouse gasses” we generally mean CO2 (which plants need to grow and produce oxygen), doesn’t a program designed to significantly reduce CO2 in the atmosphere run the risk of hurting crop production in the long run?

2) Since global warming would literally create millions of acres of new farmable land in places like Greenland and Canada at a time when we are having a hard time producing enough food, wouldn’t we want the earth to warm up?

3) Why are NASA models showing a significant cooling trend and an increase in glacial ice formation?

But that’s too much to ask. How could a “journalist” be expected to take a break from tongue bathing a technocrat to do a little research or critical thinking? But even if Fretwell and Jackson didn’t want to bother dealing with the more esoteric questions about climate change (like, is it even real since even Phil Jones admits there has been no global warming since 1995?) and instead just wanted to promote their Green Revolution I am still shocked that they would work together in corporatist harmony to spread such a blatantly obvious lie. Either these two think you’re stupid, or neither one of them understands how the world works:

In an exclusive interview with The State newspaper, Jackson said her agency will focus the nation’s first greenhouse gas regulations on large industries that produce about 80 percent of the pollution linked to global warming. She labeled as unfounded reports in South Carolina that the rules would apply to businesses like restaurants and apartment complexes.

“Not while I’m head of the EPA,” Jackson said before an environmental justice conference in Columbia. “I don’t know where that comes from, except that people are rightly afraid of stuff they don’t understand.”

But Jackson said “it doesn’t make sense” that the EPA would place the burden on small businesses.

“You go after the big folks. You don’t start with the little ones,” she said. “It wouldn’t be in anybody’s interests.“

Okay. There’s a lot wrong with this statement but let’s take just the most important one. Going back to our evil millionaire frantically putting in orders for every bit of sunscreen stock he can find, how did he make all his money anyway? Obviously by producing something that people consume.

Let’s call it electricity.

But it could also be food, bottled water, gasoline, building materials like concrete or wood, cars, computers, glass, clothing items, or hundreds of other things, but for our purposes let’s just work with power.

When the EPA “goes after” this millionaire, what happens? Either through fines or compliance fees and expenses (most likely both) our millionaire begins to lose money as producing electricity becomes more expensive. Since our millionaire doesn’t run his evil pollution factory (where our electricity is generated) by himself, this loss of money hits dozens if not hundreds of workers who use the salary they make to support dozens of other businesses. In fact, the workers at this electrical plant are some of the few workers in America who actually produce something because more than 60 percent of our economy is consumerism. In other words, most economic activity in America is based on people buying products, not making and selling products which makes our few producers extremely important to our economic survival as a country.

But I digress. Even with layoffs our millionaire is still spending more to make electricity, so what happens next? That’s easy, he charges more for it. And that is the part of the story where Sammy and Lisa hoped you wouldn’t get to, where burdens on large businesses that produce goods that almost everyone needs end up raising the prices on those goods.

But now some of you are saying, “But we want him to go out of business so we can have clean energy!” while shaking a Whole Foods bag filled with fair trade fruits angrily at me. Really? How’s that “clean energy” working out in Minnesota?

Last year, about a dozen Minnesota communities dreamed of clean, green energy: spinning windmills powering hundreds of homes.

Now, months after the deadline, the windmills stand largely immobile, and communities are still waiting for the power to flow.

Eleven cities, including North St. Paul and Anoka, are participating in the wind turbine project, each getting a 115-foot windmill via the Minnesota Municipal Power Association, or MMPA.

The turbines were to be fully operational by Nov. 7. To date, the number is zero.

One reason offered this week at a North St. Paul City Council meeting: hydraulic fluid and lubricating oil in the turbines’ gear boxes.

In cold weather, the fluid turns gel-like and doesn’t flow, said Derick Dahlen, president of Avant Energy, which manages the MMPA.

That can be particularly problematic if the turbines are already at a standstill.

And since “huge amounts of fossil fuels” are needed to make solar panels in a process that leaves behind tons of toxic waste (that companies will be on the hook for to clean up) I don’t see how we’re going to find a way to keep energy prices down.

Of course, maybe if there was a professional reporter who had access to an EPA official I would see exactly how small businesses, who will be looking at higher prices for power, gas, and materials as the best case scenario laid out by the EPA, will be able to avoid being hurt by these regulations. But instead, we have Sammy Fretwell taking dictation from the office of a political appointee who herself cobbled together a series of class warfare-lite platitudes designed to appeal to college co-eds and those creepy baby boomers who hang around Coffee Underground.

On many levels they are playing South Carolina for suckers. The EPA hopes you can be placated long enough for them to put in regulations that will further degrade your purchasing power at the behest of “environmental justice” special interest groups most of which happen to be funded by the Tides Foundation (which coincidentally gives a lot of money to Democrats), and Sammy Fretwell hopes none of you will care that no one is looking out for South Carolinians or asking the hard questions of government officials who are making decisions that will directly affect your life.

So maybe it’s time we all demanded to know exactly how the EPA intends to ensure that their new regulations won’t hurt South Carolina if the regulations’ intended targets produce the things we use everyday and in many cases can’t do without.