June 30, 2009
• UnitedHealth Group 'accidentally' goofed on its database, which is shared with other insurance giants, which led two-thirds of the nation's health insurance companies to 'accidentally' overcharge customers by billions of dollars. But fear not, UnitedHealth Group has made up for billing people billions too much, by paying a $350 million fine and admitting no wrongdoing. That certainly seems like a very, very profitable 'accident', eh?
• In signing the latest war funding bill extending the US occupation of Iraq, President Obama issued a signing statement announcing his intention to ignore portions of the legislation. So the Bush era lives on -- the Obama administration, which says it can't possibly ignore "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or the Defense of Marriage Act, can and will ignore legislation it *really* doesn't like.
• In 2006, as the Justice Department was investigating then-Congressman Rick Renzi (R-Arizona), word of the investigation was leaked in a chorus to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Associated Press. Curiously, the leaks downplayed the severity of the allegations and suggested, falsely, that the allegatiuons were probably unfounded. Career staffers at the Justice Department now say that the Bush-Cheney administration orchestrated the leaks, which, as intended, led Arizonans to rally behind Renzi, who won re-election and went back to DC for one more term of corruption and ineptitude before being indicted.
• Does the last sentence of the previous post need some explanation? It might, if you're not up to speed. During the Bush-Cheney era, elected Democrats were seven times more likely to be prosecuted than elected Republicans. Consider please, the curious case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (D), or the odd matter of Paul Minor. Why has Attorney General Holder shown no interest in these cases, or even indicated that he's aware of such matters?
• The United Nations has done an about-face in its 2009 World Drug Report, acknowledging the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal. This analysis from the The Huffington Post makes it sound like the UN is endorsing the idea, and that's far too intelligent to be true. Still, by the standards of stupidity in the drug war, if the international powers that be are just taking a momentary break from decades of snickering at the notion of freedom, that's the equivalent of an apple hitting Isaac Newton's noggin.
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June 23, 2009
• Federal Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong (Bush41 1991) has tossed out laws protecting children from military predators.
• The United States is planning to bomb the moon. Seriously, and of course.
• In Wisconsin, Dodge County Judge Andrew Bissonnette has ordered the state's Department of Corrections to stop torturing inmate Warren Lilly.
• File this under holy crap: In DOZENS of cases in Florida, a dog's "testimony" was admitted in court, and in at least several cases it helped put men behind bars.
• In Gloucester County, Virginia, citizens who signed a petition asking that four county supervisors be removed from office have been fined $2,000 each.
• Prison inmates have no right to challenge their convictions using DNA evidence, says the cro magnon Supreme Court, in its traditional and sickening 5-4 split.
• More than 100 American children whose parents have been (or could be) deported have filed suit against the President.
• Senator Harry Reid ('D'-Nevada) says, not quite in so many words, that he has utterly zero interest in repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell".
• There's a tipping point coming soon, a moment where Barack Obama will have irreparably defined himself as the black Dwight Eisenhower, an easygoing guy who wants to be popular, won't ruffle feathers, and thus won't accomplish much of anything.
• Harriet Miers, former lawyer for George W Bush, has testified in the Congressional probe of the Bush-Cheney administration's firings of US Attorney who wouldn't push their politicized prosecutions. Or at least, we're supposed to think it's a probe and we're supposed to think Miers testified, but all this is taking place behind closed doors so for all we know they're just sharing shrimp hors d'oeuvres and drinking rum.
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June 16, 2009
• Eli Lilly & Co. urged doctors to prescribe Zyprexa for elderly patients with dementia, an unapproved use for the anti-psychotic, even though the drugmaker had evidence the medicine didn't work for such patients, according to unsealed internal company documents.
• And then there's the toymaker Mattel, which will pay a $2.3-million fine for selling toxic playthings for little kids. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Mattel and its Fisher-Price subsidiary knowingly violated a federal ban on lead paint in toys.
• Charles Lynch, who ran a medical marijuana dispensary in California that was in compliance with the state's laws, was prosecuted by Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department as if he was street scum. The Obama administration wanted Lynch locked up for five years, but a kindhearted judge instead gave him a mere year and a day in prison.
• The US Attorney's Office in Nevada (also under Attorney General Holder's purview) has subpoenaed the LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL, demanding that the paper identify readers who posted comments responding to the on-line edition of the paper's coverage of a tax protester's trial.
• While Attorney General Eric Holder remains utterly uninterested in the mountains of evidence of Justice Department corruption during the Bush-Cheney administration, he's found time to freeze bank accounts of on-line poker sites, depriving who knows how many Americans of their winnings.
• I'm unfamiliar with Peter Lance, or with his book TRIPLE CROSS, but it's gotten US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's goat -- he's written to the book's publisher, asking that the book be withdrawn instead of republished. I have long thought that the left-wing's widespread adulation for Fitzgerald is bizarre, as there was certainly nothing impressive in his investigation of a small corner of the Bush administration's criminality (an investigation that led to just one low-level conviction, promptly commuted by President Bush), nor in his actions against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (which amounted to using press releases instead of legal procedures to have Blagojevich removed from office). To me this call for censorship is strike three, and it's apparent that Fitzgerald is an ass of stellar proportions.
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June 8, 2009
• Attorney General Eric Holder says that immigrants have the constitutional right to legal counsel again. The previous Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, had announced that immigrants had no such constitutional right.
• The Justice Department has asked that two former state lawmakers in Alaska be released from prison, due to prosecutorial misconduct. That's a running total, so far, of four Republicans that Attorney General Eric Holder has moved quickly to have released from prison, or, in the case of election thief James Tobin, have charges dropped. And I wouldn't necessarily complain, because you could make a reasonable case for relenting in all four cases, and it's wise, I think, to bend over backwards to avoid the perception of politicizing the Justice Department. But the question is, does Eric Holder give half a shriveled fig about the Democrats who were railroaded into prison by the crooked Justice Department during the Bush-Cheney era? To the best of my knowledge, neither Holder nor anyone else in the Obama administration has said a single word about Don Siegelman, Paul Minor, and others Democrats who were the victims of Bush-Cheney's politicized Justice Department. Remember, there were lots more Democrats than Republicans railroaded by Bush-Cheney (I don't have a link handy, but my recollection is that from 2000-08, Democratic politicians were 6+ times as likely to be prosecuted as Republican politicians).
• Radio hatemonger Michael Savage does NOT own Rockstar Beverage Corp, makers of Rockstar Energy Drinks. It's owned by his wife and his son, but Savage himself is, they say, not involved in that company in any way, though Rockstar Beverage Corp and Savage Productions do share the same mailing address and street address.
• The giant telecom companies that eagerly helped the Bush-Cheney administration with its illegal wiretapping of Americans (you're not allowed to know how many or which Americans -- maybe you -- were spied upon) will apparently get away with everything, as expected. A judge has ruled that Congress meant it when they passed retroactive immunity for the telecom companies. The judge was appointed by George Herbert Walker Bush, the legislation in question -- retroactively making what was illegal legal -- is unconstitutional on its face, and here comes an appeal from the good guys at the ACLU and EFF.
• Here's the Obama administration hard at work, trying to block justice and protect American officials who authorized torture and other war crimes over the past eight years.
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June 2, 2009
• In the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation case, where the Bush-Cheney administration illegally wiretapped the charity and then inadvertently revealed the wiretap, the Obama administration is arguing exactly as the Bush-Cheney administration would have. Obama's Justice Department is citing "national security" and fighting a judge's order to disclose documents.
• Peter Schiff, the libertarian-leaning economist who's best known for seeing the economic collapse coming before it hit, says he's seriously considering a run for the Senate against Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut). If he runs, Dodd will be in serious trouble, and that really wouldn't distress me much.
• Ben-ami Kadish passed super-secret documents to the Israeli government, repeatedly, over several years. When he was found guilty in court, US District Judge William H. Pauley III scolded Kadish and ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine and go on his merry way. "When the $50,000 fine was ordered, Kadish said, "No problem." Why the simple slap on the wrist?
• The Supreme Court has decided that you have a lot less right to legal counsel than you did a week ago. The cops can interrogate you without your lawyer being present. It's pretty sickening, and pretty much expected. Curse the court, sure, but don't forget to thank the Democrats, who played roll-over for years, allowing cro magnon after cro magnon to be seated on the Supreme Court.
• A federal judge in California says it's constitutional, "a minimal intrusion", for police to forcibly take DNA samples from arrested persons. You don't have to be convicted of anything, says Judge Gregory Hollows -- being arrested is enough to justify drawing blood or swabbing saliva for a DNA database. And this, says the judge, is no more worrisome than fingerprinting or taking a mug shot. "The court agrees that DNA sampling is analogous to taking fingerprints as part of the routine booking process upon arrest," he wrote, calling it "a law enforcement tool that is a technological progression from photographs and fingerprints." I try so hard not to scream, panic, or pull my hair out, but sometimes it's pretty dang difficult to remain calm. If this ruling stands and becomes the accepted legality, it's difficult to see how the concept of privacy as it was understood in my childhood could be even comprehensible to the next generation.
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May 26, 2009
• The Federal Trade Commission is preparing rules that would "require bloggers to disclose when they're writing about a sponsor's product and voicing opinions that aren't their own". We're told that such regulations wouldn't be binding (then what's the point?) but it just sounds like a phenomenally stupid idea. I DO want to know if a blogger is being bought, but I feel the same way about newspapers and magazines and television newscasts, which to the best of my limited knowledge have no similar regulations.
• There's no link to accompany this, because I haven't seen anyone but me complaining about it, but -- why is Robert Mueller still the Director of the FBI? He's a Bush-Cheney nominee and thus an utter slimeball, and he was certainly up to his eyebrows in the corruption of the Justice Department under Bush, Cheney, Rove, Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Mukasey, but he's still on the job 4+ months into the "change" administration?
• Former Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland says he didn't know that sex with children was a crime. Seriously. And seriously, if you're a member of the Catholic Church or if you've ever written a check to the Catholic Church, may I just ask, WHY?
• In the lawsuit over Bush-Cheney administration's illegal wiretaps of the Islamic charity Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the judge has rebuked the Obama administration for "continuing to assert legal positions already specifically rejected by the court in previous orders" and "refusing to cooperate with the court's orders."
• An Iowa man has accepted a plea bargain, and now faces up to 15 years in prison, for possession of a comic book filled with disgusting drawings of pre-teens in sexual situations. Again, DRAWINGS, not pictures.
• Because of prosecutorial misconduct, charges have been dropped against the guy who allegedly opened fire at Delaware State University in September 2007. The prosecutor withheld information on a witness who said that the alleged shooter wasn't the shooter. And in coverage that's absolutely up to Associated Press's standards, the prosecutor isn't named, and there's no mention of whether he or she will face even the slightest wrist-slap.
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May 19, 2009
• Gays will be allowed to serve openly in the military (in Uruguay) and the President says that the Uruguayan government won't discriminate against any of its citizens on the basis of political, ethnic or sexual identity.
• The Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, in a welcome display of common sense, that cops can't get around the requirement for a search warrant by sending SWAT officers to accompany ordinary regulatory inspections.
• Don Siegelman, the former Alabama Governor railroaded into prison by the Bush-Cheney administration's corrupt Justice Department, has had his appeal denied by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals. And federal prosecutors (in other words, the Obama administration) has recommended that Siegelman's sentence be nearly tripled, to twenty years.
• You've no doubt heard about Donald Rumsfeld and the Bible quotes by now, but there's more, much more in this belated but invaluable coverage of Rumsfeld's tenure that paints the fellow as an extraordinary jackass. What stands out the most to me, is that one of Rumsfeld's key accomplishments was actively working to block rescue efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
• Counterinsurgency whiz boy David Kilcullen tallies the dead from American drone attacks in Pakistan, and the numbers are deadly indeed. "Since the drone strikes began in earnest in 2006, the US has killed 14 mid-level Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. In the same time frame, the strikes have killed 700 Pakistani civilians." Since having one's loved ones smote dead tends to infuriate people, it is fair to assume that Kilcullen is correct when he surmises that the Americans' strategy of death from above in Pakistan is creating terrorists far quicker than it's killing them.
• Iran has released imprisoned Iranian-American journalist and accused spy Roxana Saberi. She was portrayed in the American media as the victim of despicable Iranian courts that used trumped-up charges to imprison her ... but at the time of her arrest she possessed a classified Iranian government report about the US war in Iraq. Her release came thanks largely to intervention by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ... who, according to unanimous western media reports, is supposed to be a madman. The moral of the story is, sometimes the facts of the matter are not quite as they're portrayed in the media. Imagine that.
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May 12, 2009
• Attorney General Eric Holder personally authorized international "renditions" of terror suspects while he was a deputy to then-President Bill Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno. This is now being lorded over Holder's head to pressure him to stand firmly against any investigation of the Bush-Cheney administration's crimes against humanity. And it's probably working.
• TV preacher and milti-millionaire Pat Robertson is being sued for $3.6-million by SunTrust Banks, over a scuttled oil refinery project.
• Germany is banning MON 810, one of the more horrific breeds of genetically modified (GM) corn brought to you by Monsanto's biotech labs.
• Someone says they've stolen 8.3 million patient records, and now the FBI is on the case.
• For generations dating back to the McCarthy hearings and perhaps earlier, the Republican Party has used its alleged hyper-patriotism as a bludgeon against all opposition. And yet, in a poll conducted in April 2009, when respondents were asked, "Do you think the state that you live in would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?", only 62% of self-identified Republicans answered that the United States should remain a nation. Twelve percent of Republicans said their state should secede from the Union, while 26% of Republicans replied "unsure". Among Democrats, by comparison, 91% would choose to remain Americans, while a combined 9% of Democrats say they're either in favor of or uncertain about secession.
• The European Parliament has passed legislation recognizing internet access as a human right, a legal first, I believe. Called the 'Telecoms Package', the bill also supports net neutrality.
• Duke Energy -- not exactly a hotbed of progressive activism -- has quit its membership in the National Association of Manufacturers, at least in part because Duke wants to distance itself from NAM's policy of opposing any serious response to global climate change.
• There's evidence to suggest that R. Allen Stanford, the Texas banking billionaire involved in allegations of sweeping fiscal misconduct, was protected in his criminal conduct from Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) scrutiny because he had a lucrative deal as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
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May 5, 2009
• In Ireland, they're going to junk the unreliable voting machines and go back to counting paper ballots. So they're going to do democracy right, in Ireland. Why can't we do that in America?
• In Minnesota, the state's highest court has ruled that people convicted of drunk driving on the basis of the Intoxilyzer breath test device are entitled to see the machine's source code, to determine whether it's reliable. It's reminiscent of voting rights activists wanting to see the innards of the machine that counts or miscounts votes. Everybody hates drunk drivers, sure, and this ruling opens a hell of a can of worms, but the principle remains the same and it's a good principle -- if the machines' reliability can't be proven then the machine ain't worth diddly.
• In a surprising and disappointing ruling, the California Supreme Court has ruled that private schools are free to discriminate. The case came from a Lutheran school's expulsion of two 16-year-old girls who self-identified as lesbians, but the implications of the court's green light to discriminate seem even broader than that. As Steve Benen points out, this is a very pungent reason to oppose school vouchers. If private schools want to discriminate perhaps that's their right, but if they're taking tax dollars then they damned well better be operating under the principles of liberty and justice for all.
• An official with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety has ordered internet service providers to block everybody in the state from accessing on-line gambling sites. This is, of course, wrong-headed and obvious censorship.
• Set to melodramatic action-movie music, this short video is designed to convey the message that the President of the United States is putting the nation at great peril of foreign or terror attack, and that Barack Obama Must Be Stopped!!! I've been observing American politics for decades, and I've never seen a political ad quite this ... provocative? Treasonous? This isn't a political message -- it's just assassination fodder. And this isn't something put together by a blogger or wingnut activist, it's from Congressman John Boehner's website.
• Another nut, convinced by right-wing liars that the Obama administration is about to confiscate everyone's guns, has killed two cops. I don't know what the solution is, but what Fox News and other well-funded bullsh*t artists are doing is somewhere between sedition and treason, and we tolerate it at the nation's peril.
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Tuesday, Apr. 28, 2009
• It's remarkable, the lengths the New York Times has gone and continues going to keep from reporting the truth about torture -- that IT IS TORTURE. You're being lied to by the New York Times and every other media outlet, every time you read or hear phrases like "enhanced interrogation", "harsh questioning", etc. Torture is torture, even when it's hidden behind euphemisms.
• Does anybody else think it's odd, albeit telling, that for chunks of the corporate press corps, the emphasis surrounding the release of the Bush era torture memos is now centered on the political problems they've created for the Obama administration -- how the memos reflect poorly on the current White House -- and not, y'know, what the memos say about the administration that actually okayed the law breaking in the first place?
• The US must prosecute Bush-Cheney officials who authorized torture, says the UN's top guy on torture.
• Obama's "Intelligence Czar", Dennis Blair, says that the Bush-Cheney administration's torture tactics may have rarely yielded some "high value information", but that the damage done to America by torture "far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." Of course, the media and right-wing sources (but I repeat myself) have portrayed this as Blair's "endorsement of torture", when any sane and fair evaluation of what he said shows that it's the opposite.
• "[The torturers] have endangered any American unlucky enough to find himself at the mercy of our enemies in the war on terror. They have impeded our progress in that war. More fundamentally, they traduced their mission, betrayed their fellow soldiers, and disgraced their country. Anyone up or down the chain of command who was criminally complicit should be prosecuted, too. ... There's only one way to drain this poison, and it isn't further breast-beating, from the administration or its foes. Bring on the trials, and the punishment." That's from the arch right-wing WEEKLY STANDARD, circa 2004, back when the news of torture at Abu Ghraib had just broken, and nobody was yet seriously suggesting that torture was America's official policy.
• Wisconsin's Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (very R) has announced that citizens have a constitutional right to openly carry firearms. Much hilarity ensues as Milwaukee's Police Chief says he'll keep instructing his "troops" that if they see someone wearing a gun they should "put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether you have a right to carry it".
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Tuesday, Apr. 21, 2009
• There's one sector of the American economy that's still booming, and that's guns & bullets.
• Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-California) was recorded in a wiretap promising to fix espionage charges for AIPAC.
• Obama's announcement that the Department of Justice won't prosecute CIA torturers is itself a violation of international law, says a UN official.
• "Since Obama took charge he has not shown us that anything will change," says Mohammad el Gharani. He's a prisoner at Guantanamo (despite being ordered released in January) who told prison officials he was calling his family but actually called al-Jazeera from the prison, telling them that torture at Guantanamo has continued unabated under the Obama administration.
• Here's a little karma kickback: John Hatley, the Army Sergeant convicted last week of murdering four Iraqis by shooting them in the back of their blindfolded heads, was also involved in smearing Army Pvt Scott Beauchamp, a whistleblower on war crimes.
• We're supposed to be happy, I think, that the Obama administration has officially closed the Defense Department's best known propaganda office. We're supposed to believe that this was the room where the propaganda was coming from, and now the propaganda production will cease. Sounds like propaganda to me.
• The wife of Paul Minor, the Mississippi defense attorney railroaded into prison by the Bush-Cheney administration's corrupt Justice Department, died last week. Minor wasn't allowed to visit her deathbed, and he apparently won't be allowed to attend her funeral. As Legal Schnauzer says so well, "I can't help but think that Attorney General Eric Holder has the authority to do something about this. But where is he when rampant abuse is going on under his department? Is he asleep at the switch?"
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Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2009
• US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who presided over the now-tossed trial of corrupt Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), says that prosecutorial misconduct is increasingly common, and he's appointed a special prosecutor to investigate government attorneys' behavior in the Stevens trial.
• In the wake of a prosecutorial misconduct scandal in the corruption case against former US Sen. Ted Stevens, a Miami federal judge has imposed extraordinary sanctions on federal prosecutors in Florida for secretly taping the defense team of a physician who was ultimately acquitted in a prescription drug case.
• Do you remember Paul Minor, the Mississippi defense attorney railroaded into prison by the Bush-Cheney administration's corrupt Justice Department? Well, the Obama administration's Justice Department has issued a 77-page legal brief to convince a court not to allow Minor to see his wife one last time before she dies.
• A former deputy US marshal is going on trial in Chicago for allegedly leaking secrets to the mob about a federally protected witness.
• Spanish prosecutors have announced that they will indeed indict six former American officials for their role in the torture of Spaniards at Guantanamo.
• During the presidential campaign, Obama criticized Bush for being too quick to invoke the state secrets claim. But last Friday, his Justice Department filed a motion in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit, brought by the digital-rights group EFF. And the Obama-ites took a page out of the Bush DoJ's playbook by demanding that the suit, Jewel v. NSA, be dismissed entirely under the state secrets privilege, arguing that allowing it go forward would jeopardize national security.
• There's increasing heat over the Obama administration's attempt to out-Bush the Bush-Cheney administration's outrageously unconstitutional "state secrets" claims. But as yet, not enough heat, so crank it up please.
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Tuesday, Apr. 7, 2009
• Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who was belatedly appointed to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), has admitted that she pretty much can't "oversee" TARP, because the Treasury Department won't let her see anything.
• Bill Black, a former S&L regulator, offers an insider's perspective on the bailouts, especially the bailout of AIG, and the conflicts of interest and the walls of secrecy that have surrounded those bailouts.
• Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council and President Obama's top economic adviser, seems every bit as in the pocket of Wall Street as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
• Banks that received billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bolster their capital could place bets on the same toxic assets that got them into trouble in the first place -- and with government support.
• A Red Cross report on the Bush-Cheney administration's treatment of "high-value detainees" has been leaked, and perhaps more importantly, it's been summarized in the WASHINGTON POST.
• The Obama administration is urging General Motors to declare bankruptcy, which would allow the company to jettison union contracts and dealership agreements en masse.
• The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.
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Tuesday, Mar. 31, 2009
• A Spanish counter-terrorism judge has referred to prosecutors a potential case against six high-level Bush-Cheney officials: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defense; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior Justice Department legal advisers. This seems to be for real, not just a stunt. Under Spanish law, Judge Baltasar Garzón has the authority to try foreigners suspected of genocidal acts, even if such acts took place outside of Spain. His most successful reach outside Spain's borders was the extradition of a former Argentine military officer, Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, from Mexico to Spain, where he faced charges of genocide and terrorism. Garzón also tried to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and while that extradition was eventually quashed, it did get Pinochet arrested in England, and it created enough international furor that Pinochet was eventually charged in Chile. So I'd say that this is BY FAR the biggest step we've yet seen toward justice for some of the Bush-Cheney administration's more famous criminals, if not (yet) Bush and Cheney themselves.
• Meanwhile, in news anyone with a triple-digit IQ already knew, the WASHINGTON POST reports that the CIA's torture of Abu Zubaida resulted in zero -- zip, zilch, nada -- worthwhile information about terrorism. '... not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced. His torture accomplished nothing beyond adding still more to the mountain of reasons that many people hate America, and a few of the most fanatic among them build bombs.
• Speaking of Bush-Cheney criminality, here's John Hannah, who was national security aide for then-Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005-09. Hannah went on CNN Monday and made statements that seem to back up Seymour Hersh's recent allegations that Cheney ran an international assassination squad out of the VP's office.
• The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that allegedly insures workers' pensions (similar to the FDIC's insurance for bank deposits) was apparently another colossally mismanaged agency during the Bush-Cheney era. Just months before the start of last year's stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks. What this means for Americans who are depending on their pensions remains to be seen, but it's certainly not good news, and it could well be disastrous.
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Friday, Mar. 27, 2009
• US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan to wipe up to US$1 trillion in bad debt off banks' balance sheets, unveiled on Monday, offered "perverse incentives", says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The US government is basically using the taxpayer to guarantee against downside risk on the value of these assets, while giving the upside, or potential profits, to private investors, he said. "Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people. I don't think it's going to work because I think there'll be a lot of anger about putting the losses so much on the shoulder of the American taxpayer."
• A group of lawyers representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have filed multiple lawsuits -- including a motion of contempt against Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- accusing the DoJ of violating the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of detainees.
• Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) is apparently serious about pursuing stateside prison reform. He's introducing legislation to establish a bipartisan commission to explore fixes to America's awful, inhumane prison system.
• A comprehensive report issued by Amnesty International USA Wednesday finds that tens of thousands of immigrants are being held in detention in the United States -- many in violation of international law.
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that decades of US anti-narcotics policies have failed miserably and contributed to the explosion of drug violence in Mexico. Brilliant and true, and Clinton even hints at a "new approach", but I don't think she has either the authority or the insight to actually push for legalization -- the only approach that would deflate the drug wars in Mexico, and also, not coincidentally, help rush a recovery of the American economy.
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Wednesday, Mar. 25, 2009
• Eliot Spitzer wonders, Why did $12.9 billion of taxpayer money go from AIG to Goldman Sachs? Spitzer's reputation and career were ruined by his curiously-timed sex scandal, but the guy still has a lot on the ball. He'd be a good investigator for digging into the bailout/bank heist, if anyone is ever allowed to investigate the crime of the century.
• Michael Ratner is a lawyer, a human rights activist, and a frequent guest on left-leaning radio talk shows, where he's many times expressed the proper fury over the crimes of the Bush-Cheney administration and the subsequent endorsement of those crimes by the Obama administration. And John Yoo is a lawyer too, but he's the opposite of Ratner -- Yoo is an activist AGAINST human rights, and when he worked in the Bush-Cheney administration he wrote a series of Kafkaesque legal opinions that effectively abrogated the US Constitution and handed George W Bush the powers of absolute tyranny. Yoo's name remains unfamiliar to most Americans, so perhaps you need a further introduction? As legal adviser to the White House, Yoo wrote specifically that in war-time -- meaning, the so-called "war on terror" -- "the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches are swept away" and "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully." Yoo's memos provided that illegal legal framework for the Bush-Cheney administration's policies of spying, torture, and war beyond the Geneva Conventions. It amounts to treason, of course, but his staggering crimes against America and against humanity, Yoo has been given a professorship at the University of California. Anyway, I haven't seen a better, easier to understand overview of Yoo's amazing memos than this analysis, offered by Michael Ratner: "What those memos lay out means the end of the system of checks and balances in this country. It means the end of the system in which the courts, legislature and executive each had a function and they could check each other. What the memos set out is a system in which the president's word is law, and Yoo is very clear about that: the president's word is not only law according to these memos, but no law or constitutional right or treaty can restrict the president's authority. What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone. What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the US and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the US for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.) The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat. Who has suspended the law this way in the past? It is like a Caesar's law in Rome; a Mussolini's law in Italy; a Fuhrer's law in Germany; a Stalin's law in the Soviet Union. It is right down the line. It is enforcing the will of the dictator through the military."
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Monday, Mar. 23, 2009
• The Department of Justice says the Central Intelligence Agency has about 3,000 documents, including e-mails, transcripts and cables to officials in Washington, related to the missing and destroyed videotapes of "interrogation" (it's called torture, except by American media and government mouthpieces) during the Bush-Cheney administration.
• On 60 MINUTES last night, in addition to stupidly saying that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's job is safe, President Obama said the right things about former Vice President Dick Cheney's recent ludicrous accusations that America is somehow "less safe" because Obama has announced that he's dialing back the torture and endless, hopeless imprisonment without trial, closing Guantanamo, etc. "How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney?" he said. "It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment." That's so true, but just saying so isn't much of an advertisement that things will change. You know what would REALLY get that message out? You know what might really convince the people who hate America most that things are different? Dick Cheney in irons.
• The Obama administration intends to declassify and publicly release another set of previously classified Justice Department memorandums, drafted in May 2005 to provide the Bush administration with faux legal authorization to torture "high-value" detainees. These memos were written by Steven Bradbury, who was Bush-Cheney's head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and Jay Bybee, who was Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Drip, drip, drip, the incriminating evidence is revealed, and I don't know what to make of this. Feedback from readers would be appreciated, and your feedback might be to smack me in the head for saying this, 'cuz it's going to sound stupid and I don't really believe what I'm going to type here. I'm not putting this out as my theory, because it's just too preposterous, but the drip-drip-drip seems to be intentional. There's no reason the Justice Department couldn't have revealed these memos along with the last batch of memos revealed and the next batch, all at once -- or they could've not released any of the memos at all. One big dump of Bush-Cheney memos would make news once and be forgotten in days, but if they keep letting the evidence out bit by bit, then it keeps making news and keeps coming back to make news again, and the drip-drip-drip might conceivably lead to a groundswell of public outcry demanding an investigation? It goes without saying that I don't trust Obama at all -- his administration has endorsed much of the Bush-Cheney legacy, argued for continued unconstitutional acts, tried to block lawsuits, etc. And yet... If Obama *wanted* a wide-ranging investigation of the Bush-Cheney administration, and also wanted to make sure it didn't look like it was his idea, this might be a workable strategy.
• Lots more news
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Thursday, Mar. 19, 2009
• Michael Chertoff, the Bush-Cheney administration's Secretary of Homeland Security, played a key role in approving American torture, while he was working in the Justice Department's Criminal Division.
• Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff at the state Department under Colin Powell, says that the reason Bush-Cheney opted for torture instead of trials is simply that they knew they lacked the evidence to convict many of the poor schmucks they'd rounded up and imprisoned at Guantanamo. Of course, Wilkerson is saying nothing that wasn't already known to be factual, but it adds to the weight of the evidence when it comes from someone so high-ranking.
• Meanwhile, the stated policies of the Obama administration regarding "detainees" are being robustly criticized by human rights groups and legal scholars.
• Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is calling for an investigation into the charges that Dick Cheney ran an assassination ring out of his office while he was Vice President. And Congressman Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) wants an actual investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001. Of course, as with all of the crimes of the Bush-Cheney era (except the few allegedly perpetrated by Democrats) an investigation won't be allowed, or if it is it'll be rigged or ignored. The sickening bastards who ran American government into the ground from 2001-08 are "untouchables" -- they're above the law, and they know it. Everybody knows it.
• Premier Election Systems (a.k.a. Diebold) has admitted in a California public hearing that it's not just one or a few models of its election machines that allow ballot deletions without any record. That's a built-in function on ALL of Diebold's machines. Again, the moral of the story is that if you're voting on Diebold machines you have no way to know that you're really voting, and if your election officials use Diebold machines (or the machines of most of Diebold's competitors) then your election officials aren't interested in honest elections.
• Lots more news
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Monday, Mar. 16, 2009
• A Red Cross report from 2006 details a little bit more about American torture policies of the Bush-Cheney era, including “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” and “confinement in a box.”
• Another UK governmental memo supports the earlier memos, which pretty much proved what was already known
• Former Vice President Dick Cheney has again appeared on national television to acknowledge that the Bush-Cheney administration tortured prisoners. In response, the newscaster interviewing him didn't blink, and Cheney was once again not arrested and hauled off in irons.
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is suing HSBC and Wells Fargo over the banks' apparent policy of steering blacks into deadly subprime loans. According to the NAACP's lawyer (and other reports we've read) "Black homebuyers have been 3½ times more likely to receive a subprime loan than white borrowers, and six times more likely to get a subprime rate when refinancing ... Blacks still were disproportionately steered into subprime loans when their credit scores, income and down payment were equal to those of white homebuyers."
• American International Group (AIG) warned federal officials of "potentially catastrophic unforeseen consequences" if it was allowed its well-earned collapse, a dire prediction which got AIG another $30-billion in federal funds. Of course, AIG is still handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in executive bonuses. Are there any major players anywhere on Wall Street that AREN'T wasting enormous piles of money on self-gratification? Are there any executives who AREN'T clueless over the damage they're doing with this endless bad publicity? Is there anyone running a company in the finance industry who's competent at running a company in the finance industry?
• Lots more news
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