![[866.jpg]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_6c1-qjsrY6s/SPZ1gRyGSnI/AAAAAAAAA3c/QhqH3zweIjk/s1600/866.jpg)
The priest was lost in the Channel District and needed directions to Interstate 275, so he tapped a U.S. Marines reservist on the arm and, in a thick Greek accent, asked for help. That's how police say the incident began. But Lance Cpl. Jasen Bruce said the man, who was wearing a robe, sandals and a long beard, propositioned him in English and grabbed his genitals. Both versions of events end the same way – with the priest recovering from a beating with a tire iron, the Marine reservist under arrest and police investigating a possible hate crime. The Rev. Alexios Marakis, visiting from Greece, had performed a blessing of a retired Greek priest in the West Shore area before accidentally exiting I-275 into downtown Monday evening, police said. Marakis followed cars into the Seaport Channelside Apartments on Twiggs Street and got out to ask for help.Bruce is free on $7500 bail and faces charges of battery with a possible hate crimes enhancement. The Marine Corps will wait for the criminal investigation to conclude before taking any action of their own. Two years ago Bruce pleaded no contest to battery on a tow truck driver.
Bruce, a reservist with a West Palm Beach unit since March, had his trunk open so he could get dry cleaning out, police said. Bruce, who lives in the apartment building, was not in uniform. Bruce grabbed a tire iron from the trunk, hit Marakis four times over the head and chased him about three blocks before pinning the priest, police said. In a 911 call, Bruce made a derogatory comment about a man he said was a terrorist and was trying to rob him and had grabbed him in a sexual manner, police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said. When officers arrived, police say, Bruce told them he heard the man say "Allahu Akbar" – Arabic for "God is great." "That's what they say before they blow you up," Bruce said, according to police. But at a news conference today, Bruce's attorney said his client didn't understand what Marakis said. "Lance Cpl. Bruce defended himself with the full legality of the law for being sexually attacked and potentially robbed," lawyer Jeffrey Brown said.
The State of South Carolina’s $450 million incentive package to recruit Boeing is probably only the beginning of the costs associated with bringing badly needed industrial production jobs to the Lowcountry. With starting wages of $14 per hour and benefits which probably won’t match the generous allowances of years ago, many of these new jobs are not the lucrative economic drivers the higher pay and better benefits were at the Navy Yard years ago.
While fond hope must reside in the hearts of real estate developers and car dealers that this will revive the auto centric suburban sprawl of years past which left Mount Pleasant with 1500 empty houses, these wages aren’t going to support purchasing homes on Mount Pleasant’s suburban fringe, putting a child in daycare and covering a car payment.
Making a job at Boeing work on these wages will require providing residents with a life which is faster, more efficient and cheaper...
According to the Tampa Bay Online account, Bruce alleges that Father Marakis propositioned him in English—a language he speaks with difficulty—and grabbed his genitals, and then ran off shouting “Allahu Akbar” in Arabic—a language he doesn’t speak at all. The local story also notes that Lance Cpl. Bruce has a history of previous assaults. In 2007, he was accused of assaulting a tow-truck driver when his Jaguar was about to be towed. Bruce told police on this occasion that the truck driver had grabbed him to prevent his getting into his car.
There will come a day when historians will take note of this list for what it really is: a hall of shame of American Catholic dioceses which, in the first decade of the 21st century, chose to use the resources of their faith community to make the lives of a targeted minority harder than they already are.
These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities. Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned.
It is, in other words, precisely the world in which we actually live. For all her railing against our decadent times, Parker is a stalwart defender of the status quo, committed to the arbitrary prejudices of our age -- recall her problem with men in jewelry -- and skeptical of anyone whose ideology might challenge our present state of affairs. She is literally a conservative, which means she is nothing of a Republican. And it is only by pretending that we are much, much further along the road to perdition than we actually are that Parker can look longingly back to some lost age of decency.
"The great thing about having five mothers," she told me, "was that with each one you get a new religion and new décor. Women take everything. When you get a divorce? They take the switch plates. So we lived in an empty house the last three years in high school. We literally had no furniture."
Parker writes for those who want to keep the furniture in place, the house unstripped. Week after week, she bolts the living-room set to the floor. And at a time when the low rumble of a moving truck suggests not hope of change but fear of loss, she is more popular than ever.
In the contrived urination tournament between the two conservative campaigns for governor, Grooms’ and Lexington State Representative Nikki Haley’s, there has been a LOT of nonsense being cast about, mostly – as my sources offer – from the Grooms campaign.
