Unknown News | Helen & Harry's cranky weblog of news and opinion | unknownnews@inbox.com
"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
Jailing whistleblowers, getting used to Geithner,and letting corporations buy elections
♦ Sure seems curious that Bradley Birkenfeld, the whistleblower in the UBS banking scandal, is the only person involved who's being sent to prison. Especially since he blew the whistle before anyone knew diddly about the crimes, and he specifically blew the whistle on his client, California billionaire Igor Olenicoff, yet he's somehow been convicted of protecting Olenicoff.
♦ While heading the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner tried to cover up billions and billions in payouts to Goldman Sachs and Société Générale. Basically, AIG was a giant slush fund that made crooked banksters whole when they should've lost their shirts.
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If Democrats were interested in honest government or "change" or if Republicans were seriously interested in raising hell they'd be standing together to go after Geithner's obvious corruption and/or incompetence. But he's protecting big-money interests, so both parties are standing together on Geithner's side. And it goes without saying that even if a fury of righteous indignation suddenly arose and Geithner was plunked out on his arse, there's nobody Obama would nominate or the Senate would confirm who'd be noticeably less corrupt.
♦ The experts' expectation seems to be basically unanimous — the US Supreme Court will effectively strike down limitations on corporate funding of campaigns, allowing McDonald's or ExxonMobil to spend as much as they wish on bribing candidates and elected officials with campaign contributions. (Login as unknownnews with password unknown.)
♦ Here's an utterly ordinary slice of politics as usual, the insider gladhandling that keeps insiders inside and keeps outsides like you and me farther and farther outside. In California, a genuine progressive, Marcy Winograd (donate), is mounting a serious primary challenge to an entrenched, corporate-friendly, "Blue Dog" Democrat, Jane Harman (D-California). But the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus is backing the godawful Harman, and working for her re-election. Congresswomen Lynn Woolsey (D-California) is by most accounts a real, rock-solid Democrat, while Harman usually stands in the way on those rare occasions when Democrats might accomplish something, but they're probably friends — they're both Democrats, both from California, both women, and maybe Woolsey needs Harman's power, wealth, and connections to get re-elected herself. Not knowing the back-room facts here, it's hard for me to turn a 360° and suddenly hate Woolsey, who probably has good reasons for stabbing the progressive movement in the back. The problem ain't Woolsey, ain't even
Harman. The problem is that the American election system is owned and operated by Big Money concerns, so candidates such as Winograd — who's neither a millionaire nor under the millionaires' control — are always, always, always at a huge disadvantage. You can count on one hand the times when genuine good guys win against Big Money's candidates. And until we have publicly-funded campaigns, it will always be this way.
♦ A proposal to restore portions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, the repeal of which played a key role in the economic collapse, is said to be "gaining traction in Congress". I have my doubts, and the claim that it's "gaining traction in Congress" seems to be largely wishful thinking. I'm going to quote the succinct words of a reader who goes by the handle Deep South, who wrote, It's the same with any issue, any controversy. Don't bother sizing up the relative merits of the positions, just look at the bottom line. See which side the big money is on, and know without doubt that's the way the cookie is gonna crumble. When the cookie crumbles the big banks will get their way, so short of massive protests the likes of which America hasn't seen since the 2003 attack on Iraq, Glass-Steagall is dead and gone and ain't coming back.
♦ About 40 Yemenis long held prisoner at Guantanamo despite being cleared for release will be held even longer, now that the Obama administration has succumbed to political pressure and scuttled the release of any more prisoners to Yemen.
♦ The D.C. Circuit Court has ruled that the President's power to declare "enemy combattants" and order people imprisoned on such claims is " not limited in any way by international law, including the law of war, but is limited only by domestic law, a limit which frequently seem to me rather weak and nebulous or non-existent.
♦ Abby Johnson has become a red-hot celebrity among conservatives since quitting her post at Planned Parenthood and suddenly becoming an anti-abortion activist. Curiously, though, there are aspects of her "crisis of conscience" that seem to be lies, like, for example, her crisis of conscience — her resignation letter makes no mention of having political or philosophical doubts about abortion. She's also lying to her new allies about having received no threats of violence while she was with Planned Parenthood — or she was lying about the threats while she worked for Planned Parenthood, threats taken so seriously that security cameras were installed around her house.
♦ Defense attorneys for the alleged murderer of Dr George Tiller have subpoenaed the former Attorney General of Kansas, Phil Kline. Kline's entire career has been based on an enthusiastic opposition to abortion, and when he was A.G. he used his authority to legally harangue Tiller for performing abortions.
It made me stop and think
"Although the TSA has manufactured over 1 million “terrorists” for our state-of fear watch-lists, air travel remains a safer mode of transportation then most long highway journeys. It’s too bad that while we’re being hyped and barked at by talking heads all along the terrorism watchtower, about these extremely rare violent air-incidences, that we aren’t able to divert some of these massive funds for some simple down-to-earth homeland security measures, such as upgrading some of Idaho’s terribly dangerous high speed rural roads into safer divided highways."
Jim Banholzer
"Time was, Americans would do anything to pay their mortgage — forgo a new car or a vacation, even put a younger family member to work. But the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible? "Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.
Roger Lowenstein
"Deliberatists are right-wingers who believe not only that Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are destroying the country (all right-wingers believe that) but that Obama and theDems doing it on purpose. ... The best-known exponent of this theory is Rush Limbaugh,who told Greta Van Susteren last summer, "President Obama and the Democrats are destroying the U.S. economy. They are purposely doing it, I believe" and said a couple of months earlier on his radio show, "The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state."Deliberatists believe that Democrats' ultimate purpose is to create permanent dependence on government."
Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog
"Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it'suncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can't tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead. "We have seen the same pattern of pretty speeches followed by empty exhortations on issue after issue. The president has, on more than one occasion, gone to Wall Street or called in its titans (who have often just ignored him and failed to show up) to exhort them to be nice to the people they're foreclosing at record rates, yet he has done virtually nothing for those people ... "The time for exhortation is over. FDR didn't exhort robber barons to stem the redistribution of wealth from working Americans to the upper 1 percent, and neither did his fifth cousin Teddy. Both men told the most powerful men in the United States that they weren't going to rip off the American people any more, and they backed up their words with actions."
Drew Westen
♦ In Washington DC, San Francisco, New York, and probably other American cities you can be arrested and charged with prostitution if you're carrying more than two condoms in your purse, wallet, or backpack. As the article points out, this is more than mere prudery and stupidity, it's a blatant call for sex workers to stop practicing safe sex, and in that sense the law is an accessory to murder.
♦ A Massachusetts woman claims she was given a tubal ligation, a basically permanent form of sterilization, when she had only authorized installation of a reversible intrauterine device. And it looks like she's telling the truth, as the hospital has been unable to locate her required authorization paperwork. She's poor, on public assistance, and has nine children, so she's of course received a flood of hate mail, but just as "of course", none of the above justifies what was apparently done to her without her consent.
♦ Marc Hall, a member of the US Army (we're not told his rank), recorded a hip-hop song to voice his anger at the Army's (in my opinion) illegal "stop loss" program that's keeping him in the military and re-deploying him to Iraq against his will. But wait, there's more. He mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon, and as they say about the sit-coms, hilarity ensued. He's being charged with violating Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, with the rather obviously bogus assertion that his song is "of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces."
On days when I'm sleepy or just weary of the bullsh*t I have to laugh at news like this. Mr Hall, of course, is absolutely within his rights to sing a song and send it to the Pentagon, but he can't be surprised at the response. Quite the contrary, I suspect and hope that this is exactly the response he expected, and it seems like a brilliant strategy — it might keep him from being returned to the front lines.
♦ The American Law Institute, a bunch of lawyers who've staunchly supported the death penalty for decades and whose "Moral Penal Code" formed the basis of the Supreme Court's standard for capital punishment enacted in 1976, has ended its ongoing endorsement of execution. This is apparently a landmark shift, as ALI's work has provided "the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States", or so says U-Cal Berkeley professor FrankZimring . Sounds like good news to me, but as Sentencing Law and Policy points out, it probably means little so long as the sitting president is big fan of the death penalty, and the present President is.
♦ Petty and prudish officials at the California State Parks Dept have found a new way to discourage visits to a stretch of beach favored by nudists, by burying a dead sea lion under the sand.
♦ Manwhoring is finally legal in Nevada. Seems fair and proper and past due, as womanwhoring has long been legal there.
♦ A county judge in Tennessee, Durwood Moore, is being sued for ordering a court spectator arrested and drug-tested because, says the judge, he had a hunch the guy was a user. The test came back clean, but of course, more to the point, judges aren't gods and courtroom spectators who aren't making a ruckus should have no fear of arbitrary arrest out of nowhere.
♦ The Montana Supreme Court is OK with assisted suicide for the terminally ill, a moral and proper stand.
♦ Travelers from 14 countries deemed "state sponsors of terrorism" will face extra levels of scrutiny and humiliation at airports, under the Obama administration's Homeland Security and Transportation Safety bureaucracies. (Login as unknownnews with password unknown.) The targets will include everyone who isn't wealthy and hails from Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. This is wrong and counterproductive, of course, and also stupid. Cuba isn't a country that funds international terrorism, and its presence shows that the list is about politics at least as much as it's about security. And isn't it a bit bizarre that this change in policy is going into effect now, in 2010, instead of nine years ago or perhaps earlier? Afghans and Iranians coming to America haven't already been given the Third Degree as a routine tactic?
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♦ Unless he's overruled by a higher court, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker (appointed by Bush41 in 1989) will permit cameras in the courtroom during the lawsuit over California's anti-gay Proposition 8, followed by quick, relatively unedited showing of the trial on YouTube. It's a good move if you believe in openness, as we do, and what the anti-gay lawyers are arguing will sound like the hatred that it is, which might not play well with ordinary Americans.
♦ Rhode Island lawmakers overrode several of Governor Donald Carcieri's vetoes last week, including his staggeringly homophobic veto of legislation that allows the surviving member of a gay couple to plan a passed partner's funeral. And yes, Gov Carcieri is a Republican, but you knew that.
♦ The anti-civil rights group American Center for Law and Justice has filed a brief representing 39 Republican members of Congress, opposing gay marriage legislation in DC.
♦ The New Jersey Senate has considered giving gays and lesbians full civil and human rights, and decided against it.
♦ Oklahoma's famously anti-gay state legislator, Sally Kern (R-Of Course), has proposed state legislation that would narrow the grounds for (straight) divorce.
♦ Here's a depressing visual comparison of the American states that allow gay marriage, versus the number of American states that allow first cousins to marry.
♦ Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William Sterling has ordered the cops to return 60 pounds of pot seized from a member of a medical marijuana collective as he was transporting it.
♦ Truly, the incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administrtion was almost beyond comprehension. This is something we mentioned some months back, but Steve Benen does a dang fine job "connecting the dots", so to speak, to remind readers that the Bush-Cheney administration didn't even have files on many or most of the prisoners at Guantanamo.
fascism : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of oppositionMerriam-Webster
♦ A lot of the banks bailed out by the Bush-Cheney and Obama administration's raid on the Treasury have subsequently made billions of dollars in profits by trading securities that were also rescued by the government. Sure seems to me that the scam industry is about the only thing left that's driving the hollowed-out US economy.
♦ During tough economic times, the need for public transit doesn't decrease, it increases. But of course, the funding for public transit heads in the opposite direction, another symptom of seriously stupid governmental priorities.
♦ About one out of every fifty Americans now subsists on nothing but food stamps. So the budget for that will no doubt be cut, too. (Login as unknownnews with password unknown.)
♦ Democratic Senators Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) won't be running for re-election. Conventional wisdom has the donkeys losing Dorgan's seat but probably installing a new Democrat in Dodd's parking spot. Dorgan might be missed and Dodd's taking one for the team — he could've fought and probably lost, but instead he's put the country above himself and walking away classy.
♦ We're supposed to believe that the special election for the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts is a toss-up. The little-known Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, has run a weak campaign, and the Republican, state Rep Scott Brown, is polling well and the cro magnon crowd is supposedly motivated as heck, so they're saying Brown might win. I'm just not buying it — Massachusetts is still Massachusetts, and the Democrat is going to win comfortably. But still, wake up and vote, Massachusetts Dems.
♦ Word from the arch-conservative Washington Times is that some big-money Republican donors are shutting their checkbooks in response to the continued Bush-level incompetence of Party Chair Michael Steele. The guy's provided an endless series of gaffes and unintended punchlines since getting the chairman's gig a year ago, but if the money starts drying up then he'll be gone pretty quick.
♦ The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is still fighting CBS to collect a $550,000 fine for the Super Bowl airing of Janet Jackson's areola. Further proof, as if any more evidence is needed, that American society and government are insane.
♦ Amanda Simpson, a lady lawyer who used to be a man, has been named a senior technical advisor for the Commerce Department, making her (as far as anyone can tell) the highest-ranking transgender appointment in US government history. Republicans, of course, have blown a brain gasket.
♦ We give President Obama a lot of complaints because, let's face it, he deserves a lot of complaints. He's a go-along-to-get-along guy when America desperately needs a complete about-face on any number of fronts — war and peace, civil rights, the environment, the economy, open government, on and on. But in the interest of fairness, we'll also give him a pat on the back when Obama gets something right.
Last week the Obama administration ended a hysteria-based Reagan-era rule that prohibited anyone who's HIV+ or has AIDS from entering the country.
And language inserted at the federal government's website for job-hunters seems to announce a new policy of non-discrimination against the transgendered. (Login as unknownnews with password unknown.)
And the Obama White House will renominate Dawn Johnsen, his choice to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), along with other nominees whose confirmations were obstructed by Republicans last year.
And eleven months after taking office, the Obama administration has transferred a Bush crony who's been running the Justice Department's Voting Rights section since 2007, when blatant racist John Tanner was forced out. Christopher Coates, who seems to be a serious scumbag, has been "quietly reassigned" to an office in South Carolina, and anti-voting-rights activist Hans von Spakovsky is outraged — which is enough to convince me that unzipping Coates was the right thing to do.
And with the sound of one hand clapping, we'll note that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has nudged the rules toward slightly lower smog limits. It's something that'll cost some real money and it's something more than we ever saw during the Bush-Cheney years, but it's more a step toward protecting the
environment than actually protecting the environment. And it's probably outweighed by the EPA's endorsement of mountaintop removal coal mining, a horrendously destructive and largely irreparable method of extracting a dirty, polluting substance, to cheaply help the liars who babble about "clean coal".
And fourteen months after the 2008 election, keeping kooky and craven Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) from becoming President continues to be Barack Obama's greatest accomplishment.
♦ A lawsuit against Florida Power & Light has led to revelations that its Turkey Point nuclear power plant is held together with ancient equipment and severely overworked staff, a little like the place where Homer Simpson works only with amphetamine addicts sitting in Homer's chair.
♦ Facebook has shuttered a "Kill Obama" group that had more than 100 members. With a mission statement that started "We are going to kill Obama", the group had been up and running since November.
♦ Apple's new style of doing business is a complete break from the way the web has worked in the past, and it's worrisome. Customers who buy an iPhone only own the hardware, and the software is full of restrictions, with Apple sealing off development and allowing only "approved" add-ons. Is this the wave of an ugly, rather starkly controlled future?
♦ Wal-Mart has destroyed unsold clothing, just to make sure that poor people don't scrounge the duds out of the trash. This also happened at a chain called H&M; (which I'd never heard of but Wikipedia tells me has 2,000 stores in 35 different countries). Wal-Mart's public relations people say it's a mistake, and gosh they have no idea why the unsold clothes were run through a machine that punched gaping holes in the fabric. Common sense says it's much more likely a corporate policy of some kind, as employees probably wouldn't destroy and trash clothes on their own initiative.
♦ I've lived all my life under capitalism, with many of those years spent as an ardent libertarian, but there's no theory of capitalism under which I can explain the urgent, unanimous quest of banks to pay outrageous bonuses no matter what, and to be bastards about it whenever possible.
♦ The estate of sci-fi great Phillip K. Dick is suing Google over the "don't be evil" giant's appropriation of the brand name "Nexus One". You might recall, that was a model of android that went rogue in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which became the movie Blade Runner. Sounds to me like the Dicks are morally right, 'cuz it's doubtful that Google picked the name without knowing why it rings a bell in the public mind. But the Google gang will probably win, since Nexus One was never trademarked.
♦ When Arrow Trucking went out of business last month, they did so in a typically mean manner, just canceling the gas cards for its hundreds of drivers on the road.
♦ Another reason I'm glad we've stopped eating at McDonald's and Burger King, etc: no more ammonia-burgers for us.
♦ Whole Foods CEO John P. Mackey has taken a break from his work against health care reform to add erroneously that “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change, and that it would be a pity to respond to “hysteria about global warming”. The good guys at Mother Jones explain further that for all its green hippie imagery, Whole Foods is an abysmal corporation on green issues. If you're shopping for corporate ethics you'd do just as well shopping at Wal-Mart or 7-Eleven.
♦ On December 31, 2009, it was widely reported that eight CIA officers had been killed the day before in a suicide bombing at an American military base in occupied Afghanistan (though of course the American media never uses the accurate word "occupied"). It took a week for the original, incorrect information (8 CIA dead) to be replaced with what's presumably the fact: The death toll has risen to nine, as a person injured in the blast has since died, but the number of CIA officers killed has been reduced to five. Of the four non-CIA employees killed, one was an Jordanian intelligence official, and the other three were contractors, in media-speak, or mercenaries, in more ordinary vocabulary. Two of those three were employees of Blackwater (which now calls itself Xe), the mercenary firm infamous for its random murders and frequent indictments. It's no surprise that the American occupation of Iraq is carried largely on the shoulders of the CIA, and that the CIA's work relies heavily on support from Blackwater's staff. Considering Blackwater's ugly but well-earned worldwide reputation as a collection of hired killers and thugs, I am reminded of something my mama told me many, many times — that your character can and will be judged by the people you associate with. It's an adage that's applicable here, don't you think?
