DOUBLE-BIAS ATTACK IN THE BOROUGH OF CHURCHES

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"GAY" ECUADORANS BRUTALLY BEATEN IN BROOKLYN BY ANTI-LATINO ANTI-GAY THUGS

BUSHWICK FAMILY STRICKEN AS THEY WITNESS UNPROVOKED ATTACK BY STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN NEIGHBORHOOD



Now, What Will Those Famous Churches Do About This?

Given the role of so many religious institutions in fear-mongering, scapegoating and focusing hatred on gays, one wonders what their reaction will be to the product of their labors. What, for God's sake, would Jesus do?

I'm no Biblical scholar, but I can't honestly recall any parables, epistles, sermons or psalms about gays, positive or negative. Maybe they were among the Apocrypha stricken out by post-Christ censors in Palestine, Greece, Rome or Byzantium. Maybe they skip over them today in Sunday school and catechism. Maybe those uncomfortable silences after children inquired about Mrs. Jesus or the lady apostles said it all. I'm not going to scour the bloody New Testament just to find out.

Christian attitudes toward sex and gender, sensuality and sexuality, love and friendship, marriage and divorce, abortion and birth control, women and gays, morality and individual rights, all pretty much turned me away from churches a long time ago. I've never felt any inclination to go back.

Lately though, I have begun to wonder what is going on in those curiously shaped buildings. We hear clerical boy-rapers squealing about "the homosexual agenda," mountain-man bigamists mounting campaigns to save "traditional" marriage, televangelist con-artists wishing hurricanes on gay paraders. Is the anti-Christ already here, under the assumed name of Billy-Bob? Or, in the case of Brooklyn, Vito, Shawn or Tyrone?

Is that a sign of my own prejudice? Maybe. But nobody's going to die for it. Somebody did just die for the same prejudices instilled and inflamed quite deliberately by "men of God," and "moral leaders." If there really were a God in Heaven, these people would have to answer, first among us, for all this hate. The irony is, neither victim in this case was actually gay. Just the perception that they were was enough to inspire a brutal attack. In fact, the two "gay" victims were brothers, and simply observing the custom common in most of the world, and among women even in this country, of walking arm-in-arm down the street. So, even if you are not gay, be very careful not to let anyone think you are. They might kill you.


NY1
"Police Investigate Hate Crime, Victim Remains On Life Support"
When crossing the street, look both ways. And then look straight.

' Police are calling an attack on a pair of Brooklyn brothers over the weekend a hate crime. Investigators said 31-year-old Jose Sucuzhanay was walking home with his brother Romel early Sunday morning when one of them stopped to give the other his coat at the intersection of Kossuth Place and Bushwick Avenue. That's when investigators said a group of men jumped out of an SUV and beat them with a glass bottle and baseball bat while yelling anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs. Romel was not seriously hurt, but Jose was taken to the hospital where he is on life support. "My brother is in critical condition. He has to go through brain surgery. He's okay there. But right now he's not moving, he's not talking, he's in very critical condition. And we hope he will recover," said Sucuzhanay. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "There's no indication that they had any previous contact with the victims. So it clearly appears to be a hate crime based on ethnicity and perceived sexual orientation." '

NY TIMES
"Family Keeps Vigil for Beaten Brooklyn Man "
Blacks attacking Hispanics because they think they are gay. Only in America, land of hate crimes of opportunity.

' Early Sunday, less than a mile from where Mr. Sucuzhanay worked, he and his brother Romel were set upon by men the police said they believed were strangers. The brothers were walking home from a bar, arms around each other, the police said. At the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place, three men riding in what a witness described as a maroon or red sport utility vehicle spied the brothers and shouted anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs. One of the men hit Jose over the head with a bottle, and the driver of the car swung an aluminum baseball bat at his head, the police said. He fell to the floor as the three attackers, who were black, continued kicking and punching him, the police said. The beating ended only when Romel held up his cellphone and said he was calling the police. On Tuesday, the police released a description of one of the men, saying he is 6 feet tall and thin, and wore a black leather jacket, boots, dark jeans and a dark baseball cap during the attack. The authorities said they did not have the license number of the car. The reward for information was set at $22,000. Julia Osman, who worked with Mr. Sucuzhanay, visited him at the hospital on Monday. His face was so swollen that she could not see his eyes, and his head was wrapped in bandages. “He was kind, and cared about everyone who worked with him,” she said. '

EL DIARIO NY
"Another victim of hate"
If you're going to target someone, make it an immigrant, or an undocumented alien. They won't dare report you. Especially if you kill them. Unfortunately for the criminals, this victim was a citizen.

' Jose Sucuzhanay, a Bushwick business owner, was with his brother Romel on Sunday when he was beaten by a group of men using a bat. He was reportedly declared brain dead yesterday. Romel had come from Ecuador to visit his brother, not bury him. Witnesses heard the cowardly attackers shout anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs at the brothers, according to police. They mistook Jose and Romel cozing up in the extreme cold as a sign that they were gay. This hate and violence is anything but isolated. In 2005, the FBI documented more than 1,200 hate crimes against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) persons. But this is a vast undercount, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. On top of inaccurate data tracking, hate crimes overall are under-reported. Undocumented immigrants are the least likely of all victims to report these crimes. '

NY NEWSDAY
"Cops: Bias crime attack victim dies"
So, now it's murder.

' Police have released a sketch of one of three assailants of an Ecuadorean man left brain dead after a savage beating in Brooklyn, where attackers hurled anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs. At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, the family of Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, said they still held out hope. "He's not dead," Diego Sucuzhanay, one of his five brothers, said at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, where Jose had been listed in critical condition yesterday after surgery. "There are some decisions that need to be taken," he continued. "We are brothers and we do not have the power to make that decision." Sucuzhanay's parents are in Ecuador. But a law enforcement source said the case is being investigated as a homicide and Sucuzhanay has been declared brain dead. The Associated Press said he had been taken off life support, according to a law enforcement source. Community leaders and city politicians called for the swift arrest of the attackers. Sucuzhanay suffered severe head trauma in the 3:30 a.m. beating Sunday in Bushwick. Police Tuesday asked for the public's help in locating one suspect, described as a male about 6 feet tall and between 18 and 20 years old, wearing a dark baseball cap, a black leather jacket, dark jeans and boots. A $22,000 reward is also being offered for information leading to the arrest of the attackers. Police asked the public to call 800-577-TIPS. '

[Cross-posted at CoffeeHouseStudio by cosanostradamus.]
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DO NOT ASK FOR WHOM THE POLL TOLLS

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IT TOLLS FOR THEE

MAINSTREAM MEDIA PRETEND POLLS MEAN SOMETHING

Yawn. Another Slow News Day. Let's Make Something Up.

Having done polling myself, I can tell you, they're pretty much bullshit. A bunch of minimum-wage marginally employable misfits is forced by circumstances to sit in a room together, calling up complete strangers at inconvenient times and harassing them with stilted questions on subjects the "respondents" don't know or care about at all. If the telemarketers, er, surveyors, don't produce "results," they get fired.

"Results," of course, are pre-determined. Questions are written and arranged to elicit certain specific answers. The tel, er, surveyors know this and try to conduct the "surveys" accordingly. For the most part, no one monitors them, there are no recordings made or listened to in detail, only a record of how long each survey took to complete, and how many were completed by each surveyor. The surveyors all know how many surveys they need to complete, and how long each survey should last. If a respondent needs to be led by the nose, or to have his answers provided for him, the surveyor basically does the survey himself, just to get credit for it and to keep his or her job. Sometimes surveyors will finish a survey themselves even after the respondent has hung up on them. Sometimes they call friends or family to help them out. Usually, nobody checks. Nobody cares. The company has to provide something for their fees. And they already know what is wanted. All they have to do is provide it.

Even the most scrupulous polling company is going to have trouble getting real results these days. First, there's that pesky "DO NOT CALL" list. Then again, most people rarely answer their phones, if they even have land-lines any more. Many people screen their calls with answering machines or caller-ID. Others simply hang up on telemarketers and pollsters at inconvenient times, or any time. Pollsters can't call people at work or in school, and they can't call cell-phones. They can't call too early in the morning, before people leave for school and work. They can't call people too late, when people finally get home again. Some pollsters don't work on the weekends, many never work Sundays. Then there's the whole time-zone thing, if you're polling nation-wide. It's tough.

The "representative sample" now consists of the tiny minority of yutzes and putzes who are sitting around home waiting for some stranger to call them up and ask them a lot of personal questions. These are people with absolutely nothing to do, who will comply at length with the unreasonable requests of a total stranger for no reason at all. Unlike most people who are busy, or paranoid, or possessed of a minimum of self-respect, the "representative sample" will drop everything and do anything to please a voice on the phone. They're representative, all right: Of mental incapacity. That's whose opinions make headlines today, folks: Children, morons, the senile and the terminally lonely.

In the Summer, the situation gets worse. People stay outdoors, take vacations, go to the movies, come home late, anything rather than sit home watching reruns on TV. For the mainstream media, or the polling companies themselves, to pretend that a poll in August is the same as a poll in March or October is just a blatant lie. The results are always questionable at best, but really meaningless in the dog-days of Summer. Never heard that? You never will. There's money to be made in the opinion business. And their poor surveyors never take vacations. They can't afford to.

To make matters worse, we now have polls that are openly and deliberately biased being touted as the real scoop on where America is headed. Push-polling puts words in people's mouths, and surveys of "likely voters" pick only specific people to respond. "Balance" is achieved by eliminating males or females, Democrats or Republicans, etc, until the numbers can be forced to jive. Yet all of these polls are treated equally, regardless of method or methodology. Why? The political Parties and the tame corporate media know that there is a certain percentage of sheep out there who will base their opinions, and their votes, on the opinions of others, as "shaped" and pushed by the Parties and the media. The Big Lie requires some big statistics, so they manufacture some, and put it all out like so many tainted tomatoes. And the sheep eat it up. At least, that's what the Republicans are counting on this year.

Don't fall for it, folks. Reality is how you live your own life, not something the media puts out. When it comes time to vote, think about your own circumstances, and who helped create them. Think about your own interests, and who can best serve them. After all, when's the last time the mainstream media put bread on your table? And which Party has had control of the White House for eight long hard years now? Thanks to them, are you better off? If so, vote Republican. If not, vote Democrat. No matter what anybody says, vote your own interests. Don't get poled this year.
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