New video of the Japanese tsunami

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GOP discovers Jewish guy made donation to NPR

Let's face it. The problem that conservatives have with George Soros is that he's a Jew. They won't say that, because it's not nice. But their followers know the code. Rich guy using all his money to control the financial markets, the media, politics and thus the world? Uh huh, we get it.

The Republicans are always quite adept at bashing minorities and women in subtly ways that take advantage of the minority status without quite saying that exactly (Barack Hussein Obama, anyone?) Read the rest of this post...

ABC News: Fukushima-style Mark 1 nuclear reactor design caused GE scientist to quit in protest

And one more shoe drops (h/t Marshall Y. in the comments to this post; my emphasis):

Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.

Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power, and today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s.

"The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release."

GE, of course, is having none of it:

GE told ABC News the reactors have "a proven track record of performing reliably and safely for more than 40 years" and "performed as designed," even after the shock of a 9.0 earthquake.

GE did eventually perform retrofits, including at Fukushima. Bridenbaugh is still skeptical, however:

When asked if that was sufficient, [Bridenbaugh] paused. "What I would say is, the Mark 1 is still a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment."

I guess what we're watching is a field test. Good thing the cascade didn't breach containment around GE's corporate profits. Now that would pose a problem. I'll bet the "it's not our fault" ad campaign is already on the drawing board.

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Harry Reid: I will not support any change to Social Security for the next 20 years'

Thanks goodness someone has political instincts they haven't been finessed out of. Harry Reid could not be more definite in this interview with the "let's tweak Social Security" maven Lawrence O'Donnell.

There's a nuclear power discussion starting at 0:35 (remember that Reid is from Nevada, a state that's been targeted as a recipient of nuclear waste). Following that, a lip-lock love song to Henry Clay and Compromise at 1:40. If you like, skip right to the Social Security discussion at 5:10.



O'Donnell is pretty ... disgusting? unsurprisingly obvious? ... in his desire to keep beating the "fix it now" drum (8:35). This may be one of the reasons he's not holding Olbermann's audience.

Reid, on the other hand, is persistently clear in the other direction: "Two decades from now, I'm willing to take a look at it. I'm not willing to take a look at it now." Easy to grasp — in 30 years we get a shortfall; in 20 years we figure out what to do. Next question.

Now this is the No Compromise we've been waiting for. (Psst: Next step, follow through.)

By the way, some Democratic genius must have whispered into Reid's shell-like ear — the first Dem who messes with Social Security takes the party down with him.

That genius would be right. Team Twelfth-Dimensional Chess, take note.

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GOP discovers Jewish guy made donation to NPR

Let's face it. The problem that conservatives have with George Soros is that he's a Jew. They won't say that, because it's not nice. But their followers know the code. Rich guy using all his money to control the financial markets, the media, and thus the world? Uh huh.

The Republicans are always quite adept at bashing minorities and women in subtly ways that take advantage of the minority status without quite saying that exactly (Barack Hussein Obama, anyone?) Read the rest of this post...

IL legislators trying to lift smoking ban in bars and casinos

Bull. Someone's not going to gamble because they can't smoke? Right, that's like saying someone is going to stop having sex because they can't smoke. Not gonna happen. Same goes for drinking. This is a cute way to curry favor with the smoking, bar and restaurant lobby. Read the rest of this post...

EU to establish 'right to be forgotten' online

Gotta love the EU.

The European Union is to enshrine a “right to be forgotten online” to ensure that, among other things, prospective employers cannot find old Facebook party photos of someone wearing nothing but a lampshade. In a speech to the European parliament, the EU justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, warned companies such as Facebook that: “A U.S.-based social network company that has millions of active users in Europe needs to comply with EU rules.”

In a package of proposals to be unveiled before the summer, the commissioner intends to force Facebook and other social networking sites to make high standards of data privacy the default setting and give control over data back to the user.

“I want to explicitly clarify that people shall have the right – and not only the possibility – to withdraw their consent to data processing,” Reding said. “The burden of proof should be on data controllers – those who process your personal data. They must prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary.”

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NYT to start charging for content, kind of

It's a bit confusing. But basically, you'll be permitted to read 20 pages of the site a month, which isn't much, then you'll be cut off. Unless you come to the page via a blog or Twitter, then you'll be permitted to read it (so maybe they're trying to make bloggers buy this, not that there are that many of us as compared to our readers). It's a bit odd, though understandable - none of us can continue in this business without making a profit, it's our job, and the bills don't pay themselves. Still, this sounds awfully expensive, especially if you want to be able to read the Times on your iphone and ipad, it seems you pay twice more for that, which is kind of absurd if it's the same account - $15 a month for the web site and smartphone, $20 a month for Web and iPad, and $35 a month for Web, iPhone and iPad - which strikes me as a bit absurd, paying over $400 a year for one newspaper.

I'll be curious to see what this dos to their readership. Some will pay. I'm not entirely sure I will. I use the Time's iPhone app. I'm not sure I'd pay for it. And I'm certainly not paying twice for an iphone and an ipad (were I to have both). Would you? Read the rest of this post...

Trump questions Obama's citizenship

The funny thing is how George H.W. Bush was long rumored to have had an affair with a State Department employee, and the only time a single journalist asked about it, Bush shut it down and it was never asked about again. Then there's George W and the mystery surrounding his alcoholism. Nada. And Laura Bush, and the guy she killed as a teenager. Zippo. But when the presidents and their wives are Democrats, we not only get to air all of their dirty laundry, we even get to talk endlessly about stuff that's just made up.

From Politico:

Trump seemed to throw his lot in with the discredited rumors that President Obama wasn't born in America, saying he's a "little" skeptical of Obama's citizenship and that every so-called birther who shares the view shouldn't be so quickly dismissed as an "idiot."

"Growing up no one knew him," Trump told ABC's "Good Morning America" during an interview aboard his private plane, Trump Force One. "The whole thing is very strange."

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Video of helicopters dropping water on Japanese nuclear plant

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Bills to repeal DOMA introduced in House and Senate

Yesterday, Rep. Jerry Nadler and Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced bills to repeal DOMA. Nadler's bill, HR 1116, has here. So far, there are 108 (No Republicans.) The Senate bill is S. 598. So far it has 18 cosponsors. (No Republicans.)

We've got more at AMERICAblog Gay.

We really need a Senate hearing. I want Senator Leahy to put some of the leading haters, like Maggie Gallagher and Tony Perkins, under oath. See, some of these biggest names in gay-bashing didn't testify in the Prop. 8 trial. The reasons were explained eloquently by David Boies after the trial:

"In a court of law you've got to come in and you've got to support those opinions, you've got to stand up under oath and cross-examination," Boies said. "And what we saw at trial is that it's very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens of the right to vote [sic] to make all sorts of statements and campaign literature, or in debates where they can't be cross-examined.

"But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that's what happened here. There simply wasn't any evidence, there weren't any of those studies. There weren't any empirical studies. That's just made up. That's junk science. It's easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court you can't do that.

"That's what we proved: We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost," Boies said.

Yeah, the homophobes lie on television all the time. So, put them at a witness table in the Senate, swear them in and see if they lie.

There's also an anti-DOMA House resolution in the hopper. The 97 sponsors of that bill comprise the biggest homophobes in the House. There are a lot of freshmen teabaggers on that list (for example, Sean Duffy (WI), Kristi Noem (SD), Tim Scott (GA) and many more.) It's clear that the freshmen teabaggers are not just concerned about the financial issues. They really are right-wing extremists across the board. Read the rest of this post...

'Diluted' radioactive plume heading from Japan to North America

It is indeed a small world after all. The financial markets in the U.S. are getting hit by the crisis in Japan. Now, the radioactive plume is on its way (but shouldn't be dangerous by the time it gets here):

A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.

Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.

The Times has an interactive map showing the track of the plume. Read the rest of this post...

NY Review of Books: Prison rape is constant and mainly done by the guards

The March 24 issue of The New York Review of Books has a stunning article on the frequency of prison rape, and on Eric Holder's DOJ dragging its feet in correcting the problem. That's Barack Obama's Eric Holder's DOJ.

The article starts with a story (my emphasis throughout):

Back in 1998, Jan Lastocy was serving time for attempted embezzlement in a Michigan prison. Her job was working at a warehouse for a nearby men’s prison. She got along well with two of the corrections officers who supervised her, but she thought the third was creepy. “He was always talking about how much power he had,” she said, “how he liked being able to write someone a ticket just for looking at him funny.” Then, one day, he raped her.

Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” If Jan had gone to the officers she trusted, they would have had to repeat her story to the same warden. Jan was only a few months away from release to a halfway house. She was desperate to get out of prison, to return to her husband and children. So she kept quiet—and the officer raped her again, and again. There were plenty of secluded places in the huge warehouse, behind piles of crates or in the freezer. Three or four times a week he would assault her, from June all the way through December, and the whole time she was too terrified to report the attacks. Later, she would be tormented by guilt for not speaking out, because the same officer went on to rape other women at the prison.

The authors hit all the bases. For example, how frequent is prison rape?

How many people are really victimized every year? Recent BJS studies using a “snapshot” technique have found that, of those incarcerated on the days the surveys were administered, about 90,000 had been abused in the previous year, but as we have argued previously, [2] those numbers were also misleadingly low. Finally, in January, the Justice Department published its first plausible estimates. In 2008, it now says, more than 216,600 people were sexually abused in prisons and jails and, in the case of at least 17,100 of them, in juvenile detention. Overall, that’s almost six hundred people a day—twenty-five an hour.

Who are the rapists? Mostly, it's the people with the power:

Overall, most victims were abused not by other inmates but, like Jan, by corrections staff: agents of our government, paid with our taxes, whose job it is to keep inmates safe.

And Holder is dragging his feet in multiple ways. For example:

In 2003, seeking to address this disgraceful situation, both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), a law that created a commission to study best practices and come up with national standards for preventing, detecting, and responding to the problem. This commission spent years consulting with corrections officials and other experts. Finally, in June 2009, it delivered its recommendations to Attorney General Eric Holder, who by law then had twelve months to revise them before formally issuing standards that would be nationally binding.

He missed that deadline. The estimate of 216,600 inmates sexually abused in a year comes from a draft of the proposed final standards, which Holder has only now published for public comment—a step that is still far from the last. (The public comment period will run until April 4, 2011. People wishing to comment on the Justice Department’s proposals can learn how on our organization’s website, www.justdetention.org.) Moreover, the standards that the department has proposed, taken all together, fall far short of the commission’s recommendations.

The article is, as I said, stunning; filled with numbers and damning data.

I'll just add this. In popular culture, the notion that if you go to prison you meet "Bubba" — the (darkly hued) prisoner-next-door who takes "care" of you — is ha-ha funny, a cruel joke for the comedy club circuit. And behind that is the widely held notion that prison rape is just part of the gig, part of what you get. Wrong.

(1) Prison rape is torture, or as the article says, "a human rights" violation. The judge doesn't sentence people to "three years of rape, with one year off for lying about it." Everyone who laughs at this kind of "joke" is a vicarious participant in the cruelty. Everyone.

(2) Rape by the powerful is systematically protected by the institution. In the same way that cops who commit police brutality are systematically protected by the "code of silence" in every police organization, prison employees who abuse are protected. The article details in how many ways that works.

As a society, we're both as good as our aspirations and ideals and as bad as our behavior. This is another face of torture in America.

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Sy Hersh on Obama & Afghanistan: 'The stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field'

Here are a few excerpts from a speech given by award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in January 2011, as reported in Foreign Policy magazine. Hersh has a long career that includes the exposure of the Vietnam-era My Lai massacres and the Abu Graib prison-torture scandals. (That whole last link is worth a read.) A good overview of Hersh and his career is here.

Now the excerpts from the speech. Keep in mind this is a transcript, so there are a lot of retracements of thought. Unlike in his writing, Hersh is a wandery speaker. Much of this is coming from his research on an upcoming book on Dick Cheney.

First, on differences between Obama and Bush in the use of torture (my emphasis throughout):

In any case, Obama did abdicate, very quickly, any control, I think right away, to the people that are running the war, for what reason I don't know. I can tell you, there is a scorecard I always keep and I always look at. Torture? Yep, still going on. It's more complicated now the torture, and there's not as much of it. But one of the things we did, ostensibly to improve the conditions of prisoners, we demanded that the American soldiers operating in Afghanistan could only hold a suspected Taliban for four days, 96 hours. If not... after four days they could not be sure that this person was not a Taliban, he must be freed. Instead of just holding them and making them Taliban, you have to actually do some, some work to make the determination in the field. Tactically, in the field. So what happens of course, is after three or four days, "bang, bang" -- I'm just telling you -- they turn them over to the Afghans and by the time they take three steps away the shots are fired. And that's going on. It hasn't stopped. It's not just me that's complaining about it. But the stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field -- the secret prisons, absolutely, oh you bet they're still running secret prisons. Most of them are in North Africa, the guys running them are mostly out of Djibouto [sic]. We have stuff in Kenya (doesn't mean they're in Kenya, but they're in that area).

On Cheney and the "whacking" in Afghanistan:

Stanley McChrystal had been in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command [see below] from ‘03 to ‘07 under Cheney. In the beginning under Cheney -- what I'm telling you is sort of hard to take because the vice... In the beginning they would get their orders, they would call up on satellite phones, from the field, to Cheney's office, and get authority, basically, to whack people. Sometimes names were given, sometimes generic authority was given. This was going on. There's still an enormous amount of whacking going on right now. What happened is after McChrystal ran into trouble and he was replaced, Petraeus took over the war, General Petraeus -- they call him King David, David Petraeus -- and he has done this in the last 6, 8 months; He has doubled up on the nightly , nightly assassinations. He's escalated the bombing. He's gotten much tougher. His argument is: Let's squeeze them, let's bomb ‘em, let's hit ‘em, and then of course they'll be open to negotiation.

For background on JSOC, here's Hersh from a different speech, given in 2009, as quoted in Alternet:

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. [...]

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

And finally, this — Hersh on the relationship between the military and right-wing Catholic societies like Opus Dei. Quoted without comment (though others have had much to say). This is about the "Knights of Malta" (really, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta) — a land-less state with many diplomatic privileges, by the way:

[I]n the Cheney shop -- I can write about it in ways I could not then, because I didn't want expose anybody who was there -- in the Cheney shop the attitude was, "What's this? What? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting? And wait a second, Sunnis don't like Shia? And there's no WMD? And there's no democracy? Don't they get it? We're going to change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get hold of all the oil, nobody' s going to give a damn." That's the attitude: "We're going to change mosques into cathedrals."

That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven -- all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They're all believers -- many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. [...] Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei. It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will. But for me, it's always, when I think of them, I always think of the line we used about Werner von Braun [a Nazi rocket scientist brought to the US to help with the missle program] [...] "Werner von Braun, he aimed for the moon but often hit London." With his rockets.

As with my earlier Robert Fisk article, I can only present this as representing Hersh's research, which he isn't yet sharing. On the other hand, this is Seymour Hersh, not Swiss cheese.

There's much more to this speech; please read it all if this stuff interests you. (And if you find an online link to Part II, please post it in the comments. Thanks.)

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