America, Just Like In the Songs

America, America, etc.

Won't Stand on Ceremony
So Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the first game of the season, at the first game EVER for the new, all-baseball stadium in DC.

He got a very, very chilly reception to say the least.

Source: Think Progress

Sign Up
So Firedoglake has filed an FEC complaint against St. John McCain for violating campaign finance regulations, ironically his own, from McCain-Feingold.

Maverick is breaking a law you wrote, I suppose.

Anyway, after Jane Hamsher filed the initial complaint, they asked for cosigners. I signed, along with 32,000 other people, and they delivered the signatures to the FEC.

They're up to 34 and change now. Not that the FEC will do anything, but it's nice to let them know that lots of people are watching.

Source: Youtube/Firedoglake Channel

Can't Shoot Straight
A nice summary of Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, who is a total tool.

In his first months as DNI, McConnell did plenty to undermine that rep. He told Congress that three German terrorism suspects had been arrested due to intercepts made possible by the then-new Protect America Act when in fact they were obtained under the old FISA law. Soon after, McConnell offered a especially misleading account to Congress of a supposed FISA Court ruling that had delayed the U.S. from spying on the kidnappers of U.S. troops in Iraq. And throughout congressional debate on a surveillance law he claimed that the debate itself endangered American lives.

Then earlier this year, he suggested that a questioner at a public event at Johns Hopkins was "disappointed" that the U.S. hadn't suffered additional terrorist attacks. And now McConnell has really let lose, framing the Senate debate on the surveillance bill as being between those who think "we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community" and those who do. That has prompted a letter from Sen. Russ Feingold demanding an apology for those false characterizations of the debate.

Yes, that FISA law, which only governs domestic spying, really is an impediment to wiretaping Iraqis in Iraq... err, wait a second...

Plus of course, even if they were making calls into the US, you can tap and apply for warrants up to 3 days later.

Which they weren't. Because there's no reason to, they're not that stupid, Iraq has a few functional hours of power a day and I doubt their phones work all that well... sigh.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Go Keith
So Wal-Mart has dropped their attempt to squeeze a brain-damaged woman for the money keeping her in care and off the street. Finally.

Wal-Mart is dropping an effort to collect over $400,000 in health care reimbursement from a former employee who is confined to a southeast Missouri nursing home since she suffered brain damage in a traffic accident.

The world's largest retailer said Tuesday in a letter to the family of Deborah Shank it will not seek to collect money the Shanks won in an injury lawsuit against a trucking company for the accident.

Wal-Mart's top executive for human resources, Pat Curran, wrote that Shank's extraordinary situation had made the company re-examine its stance.

Deborah's husband Jim Shank welcomed the news. Family lawyer Maurice Graham of St. Louis said Wal-Mart deserves credit for doing the right thing.

"It's a good day for the Shank family," Jim Shank said in a statement.

Wal-Mart has been roundly criticized in newspaper editorials, on cable news shows and by its union foes for its claim to the funds, which it made in a lawsuit upheld by a federal appeals court.

Insurance experts say it is increasingly common for health plans to seek reimbursement for the medical expenses they paid for someone's treatment if the person also collects damages in an injury suit.

The practice, called "subrogation," has increased since a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that eased it.

Thanks a lot Supreme Court!

Pfft. I'm sick of people saying that politics doesn't affect them. The next Supreme Court justice will determine whether we get more of this nonsense. Keep that in mind.

Source: Raw Story

Clinton SMASH
Eep. I hope nobody angers him on his next stop in B-town.

The Bill Clinton who met privately with California's superdelegates at last weekend's state convention was a far cry from the congenial former president who afterward publicly urged fellow Democrats to "chill out" over the race between his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama.

In fact, before his speech Clinton had one of his famous meltdowns Sunday, blasting away at former presidential contender Bill Richardson for having endorsed Obama, the media and the entire nomination process.

"It was one of the worst political meetings I have ever attended," one superdelegate said.

According to those at the meeting, Clinton - who flew in from Chicago with bags under his eyes - was classic old Bill at first, charming and making small talk with the 15 or so delegates who gathered in a room behind the convention stage.

But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

"It was very, very intense," said one attendee. "Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns."

When he finally wound down, Bill was asked what message he wanted the delegates to take away from the meeting.

At that point, a much calmer Clinton outlined his message of party unity.

"It was kind of strange later when he took the stage and told everyone to 'chill out,' " one delegate told us.

"We couldn't help but think he was also talking to himself."

When delegate Binah - still stunned from her encounter with Clinton - got home to Little River (Mendocino County) later in the day - there was a phone message waiting for her from State Party Chairman Art Torres, telling her the former president wanted him to apologize to her on his behalf for what happened.

Some people just can't accept defeat with any sort of grace.

Bill, in a winner take all system, a 1% pluarlity is .9999999999999% more than you need to be the winner. You'd think this would have come up at some point in your long political career.

Source: SFGate.com

Spouses
The Pentagon, surprise surprise, is not exactly a bastion of tolerance.

The Pentagon at first blocked Rep. Tammy Baldwin's domestic partner from traveling on a military plane with a congressional delegation on a trip to Europe but gave in after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intervened.

The Pentagon said it was merely following House rules, which do not define domestic partners as spouses. Pelosi's office countered that the Pentagon has its own rules about who can go on its planes.

Both sides agree that Defense Secretary Robert Gates reversed the decision to keep Baldwin's partner, Lauren Azar, off the plane after getting contacted by Pelosi, D-Calif.

"It's a matter of fairness that spouses should be allowed to go, and she is Ms. Baldwin's spouse," said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly. He said that Baldwin had raised the exclusion with a colleague, who mentioned it to Pelosi. The lawmakers visited France, the Czech Republic and Poland last month.

Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat and openly gay House member, declined to talk about the incident, which was first reported by the political newspaper Politico. Azar, a Madison energy law attorney who serves on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, did not return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

The Pentagon still has in place its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which bars gays from serving openly in the military. But that had nothing to do with this case, said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.

"This is strictly about following our statutory guidelines and the House rules," he said.

Morrell said that Pelosi asked Gates to honor her decision to waive House rules to allow Azar to travel and that Gates asked her to put that request in writing.

"She did so, and he — in this one case only — agreed to it," Morrell said. "This is not a precedent by any means. This does not open the doors for life partners to travel on congressional delegations." But Gates has agreed to review future requests on a case-by-case basis, Morrell said.

Daly said that both the Pentagon and Pelosi had to issue waivers.

But gay people don't need the same rights as straights!

Personally I don't think being married should get you a free plane ride any more than living together, or just being good friends. You should get one free jump seat a piece. Anything else is religious/cultural discrimination.

Source: Page One Q

Old Man McCain
Man, could this geezer get any more decrepit?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain believes many Americans are cynical about their country, and their idea of liberty is "the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."


What these people need, he will argue on Wednesday, is a good dose of public service.

That is one of the messages McCain will give on Wednesday on a visit to his university, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he admittedly bucked authority and slacked off on his studies to the point that he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class.

McCain is on a nostalgic tour of places important to developing his character as he fights for media coverage dominated by the extended Democratic battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Old Man McCain is on a NOSTALGIA tour, where he gives speeches about how these whipper snappers today aren't like kids used to be!

Lord.

He comes close to calling some Americans spoiled, saying they are cynical because "the ease which wealth and opportunity have given their lives led them to the mistaken conclusion that America, and the liberties its system of government is intended to protect, just aren't important to the quality of their lives."

Skepticism is healthy, he will say, "But when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."

Oh yeah. They're cynical because everything is JUST SO GREAT.

We're in a full blown depression, our infrastructure is in ruins, our bridges are falling down, factories are closing like bad broadway shows and McCain's solution is to mock people who aren't just GUSHING.

Keep it up, geezer. Keep it up.

We'll stay off your lawn.

Source: Raw Story

Show Us Your Papers!
The Pentagon is going to defund colleges that honor student requests not to have their personal details handed to military recruiters.

Scum.

The Defense Department has announced a new get-tough policy with colleges and universities that interfere with the work of military recruiters and Reserve Officer Training Corps programs.

Under rules that will take effect April 28, defense officials said they want the exact same access to student directories that is provided to all other prospective employers.

Students can opt out of having their information turned over to the military only if they opt out of having their information provided to all other recruiters, but schools cannot have policies that exclude only the military, defense officials said in a March 28 notice of the new policy in the Federal Register.

The Defense Department “will honor only those student ‘opt-outs’ from the disclosure of directory information that are even-handedly applied to all prospective employers seeking information for recruiting purposes,” the notice says.

Directories are an important recruiting tool because they include the names, birthdates, phone numbers and academic pursuits of college students that can be used to identify people with knowledge and interests that are particularly useful to the military.

So if you want to get any job at all in America now, post-college, you need to take all the harassing phone calls the Army wants to make.

What's next? Mandatory Army exit interviews?

Are we going to start the draft again, or what? Honestly, stop sissying around and do it if you're going to. You'll be surprised at the response. The day after you people try it, there won't be a recruiting center left standing.

Which is of course why they do this backdoor draft to their own people and swindle the poor kids out of their lives.

Federal funding can be cut off if colleges and universities do not give recruiters and ROTC programs campus access. While student financial assistance is not at risk, other federal aid, especially research funding, can disappear if a school does not cooperate.

The Pentagon can declare colleges or universities anti-ROTC if they prohibit or prevent a Senior ROTC program from being established, maintained or efficiently operated.

The new policy is, in part, the result of a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal government’s ability to use funding as a means of forcing equal access for military recruiters and ROTC units on campuses.

Thanks again, Supreme Court!

Also, nice how the school can be penalized if THE ARMY PEOPLE don't 'efficiently run' an operation. Also nice that in a country getting its butt kicked by the EU in science and tech, our first response is to SLASH OUR RESEARCH BUDGETS.

Source: The Army Times

Enough Already!
Prostitutes! Everywhere!

WASHINGTON -- Speaking for the first time about her husband's acknowledgment that he paid for sex with an alleged prostitute, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow told the Free Press this afternoon she's going through a "very difficult and personal" time and will continue to work through it with her family.

The senator from Lansing did not want to talk about whether she and her husband are still together or how she learned of his being stopped by Troy police in February. According to a police report obtained this morning by the Free Press, Tom Athans -- a liberal radio talk-show executive -- told Troy detectives he paid a prostitute he contacted via the Internet $150 for sex at a Residence Inn in the metro Detroit suburb.

What is WRONG with these people? They've got money! If you want a prostitute, by all means, go where it's legal!

This isn't hard folks. People do it all the time for gambling vacations. Just get a ticket to Vegas, Amsterdam, what have you, take a trip, get yourself a legal, regulated prostitute. If you go to Vegas, take in a show too! Amsterdam, you can do shrooms or smoke weed all day and nobody will look twice.

Yeesh.

Source: Detroit Free Press

Not Good Enough
Nice try though, Barack.

Chances for an Al Gore presidency may be all-but-nonexistent at this point in the campaign, but Barack Obama said Wednesday the former vice president might just have a spot in his administration, perhaps even cabinet-level.

A woman at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania asked whether Obama, if elected, would tap Gore for such a position to address global warming issues.

"I would," Obama said. "Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem."

Obama said Gore is "somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real."

I'm not sure what the cabinet position would be for climate change. We don't have any agency devoted to such matters.

State is involved with treaties, but I'd put a Climate Change guy in at Energy. We're only going to get out of this long-term with new energy sources and technology, and by spending a lot of money on research.

Source: Raw Story

McCain the Anti-Semite
St. John McCain sure has some less than saintly friends.

It was the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government. Boy, was it ever recorded! On Sept. 24, the presidential recordings program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs released transcripts of Nixon White House tapes concerning the unauthorized publication in the New York Times and the Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers. Some of these conversations were previously transcribed by the nonprofit National Security Archive, but many were not. Among the previously untranscribed conversations is President Nixon's historic inquiry into a topic unrelated to Daniel Ellsberg's leak: How many Jews were employed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

Loyal readers of this column are aware of my fascination with this repulsive episode. The Miller Center's new transcriptions are accompanied by audio, allowing us not merely to remember this squalid transaction but to relive it. Kenneth J. Hughes, the Miller Center's Nixon tapes editor, has kindly furnished Slate with the memo traffic concerning the Jew count, including a never-before-published memo by White House personnel director Fred Malek confirming the planned transfer of three Jews to less-visible jobs and the effective demotion of a BLS deputy with a Jewish-sounding surname. Malek, today a very wealthy investor, remains active in Republican politics; this past April, he was named national finance co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign. Last year, Malek was edged out by an octogenarian real-estate tycoon to become owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team, despite strong local support. I have my suspicions the Jew-counting episode was a factor in baseball Commissioner Bud Selig's choice, though that isn't the official story.

That's right! McCain's finance bigwig helped Nixon's paranoid attempt to purge the government of Jews!

Boy I'm eager to see a McCain presidency.

Two days later, on July 26, Haldeman sends a memo to Malek. "What's the status of your analysis of the BLS; specifically of the 21 key people?" Haldeman writes. "What is their demographic breakdown?"

Malek answers in a memo the following day. Out of 50 names on the organization chart, Malek has run down the party affiliations of 35. Twenty-five are Democrats, one is a Republican, and nine are either independents, not registered, or of unknown party affiliation. "In addition," Malek writes (someone—presumably either Haldeman or Nixon himself—has underlined this sentence), "13 out of the 35 fit the other demographic criterion that was discussed." Scribbled beneath this (I'm guessing by Haldeman) are the words, "Most of these are at the top." (Malek's method of identifying who was Jewish and who wasn't was to scrutinize surnames, rendering his estimate as unreliable as it was abhorrent.)

So he's not only an anti-semite, he's an idiot.

I'm very much amused by the fact that Jews are supposed to be this evil, supersecret, super devious cabal, but that at the same time they're supposed to be too dumb to change their last names.

Wow. Cognitive dissonance.

Source: Slate

Chemical Cheney
So Cheney is involved in more evil than previously known. Big surprise.

Vice President Dick Cheney opposed the signing ratification of a treaty banning the use chemical weapons, a recently unearthed letter shows.

183 countries pledged never to "develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone" under the Chemical Weapons Convention, put into effect in 1997.

But in a letter dated April 8, 1997, then Halliburton-CEO Cheney told Sen. Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that it would be a mistake for America to join the Convention. "Those nations most likely to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention are not likely to ever constitute a military threat to the United States. The governments we should be concerned about are likely to cheat on the CWC, even if they do participate," reads the letter, published by the Federation of American Scientists.

The CWC was ratified by the Senate that same month. And since then, Albania, Libya, Russia, the United States, and India have declared over 71,000 metric tons of chemical weapon stockpiles, and destroyed about a third of them. Under the terms of the agreement, the United States and Russia are supposed to eliminate the rest of their supplies of chemical weapons by 2012. But that looks unlikely -- the U.S. government figures it will get the job done by 2017.

Later this month, the 183 countries that have signed onto the CWC will meet in the Hague, to discuss how the Conference can be adapted for the future. An Iranian diplomat told Arms Control Today that Iran would like this so-called "review conference" to describe any violation of the 2012 deadline “as a clear case of serious noncompliance,” which could eventually lead to punitive measures.

Ahh, Iran. I'd say that they're right and we're dragging our feet, but I also know just how hard it is to get rid of the stuff the US made in the cold war.

*shrug* If we wanted to get it done we would. I bet the pace of destruction slowed way down when Darth Cheney took over, at any rate.

Source: Wired (Danger Room)

Basra
So, why did Maliki attack Basra and almost bring about the destruction of his own government?

Well, it turns out, he hates democracy almost as much as his patron Bush.

The campaign was a predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States. So why did al-Maliki do it? With no obvious immediate crisis in Basra that called for such desperate measures, what could have motivated the decision to attack?

Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.

The Sadr Movement leaders themselves are convinced that the recent setting of a date for provincial elections, on Oct. 1, 2008, and al-Maliki's desire to improve the government's position in advance of the elections, precipitated the prime minister's attack. It is widely thought that the Sadrists might sweep to power in the provinces in free and fair elections, since the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the major incumbent party in the southern provinces, the Islamic Supreme Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.


Provincial elections could radically change the political landscape in Iraq. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadr Movement sat out the last round, in late January 2005. Thus, governments in the Sunni Arab areas are unrepresentative and in one case a Sunni-majority province, Diyala, is actually ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which Sunnis tend to see as a puppet of Iran.

Likewise in the Shiite south, the ISCI, led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is largely in power, even though probably a majority of the population favors Sadr. To have a minority in power and the majority feeling disenfranchised is especially dangerous in a violent society such as Iraq. The disjuncture has contributed to endemic fighting in the capital of Qadisiya Province, Diwaniya, for instance, between Sadr's Mahdi army and the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council, or Badr Corps. In many provinces, ISCI has infiltrated members of its Badr paramilitary into the police and security forces, thus giving them the presumption of legitimacy and allowing the branding of the Mahdi army as violent militiamen with no popular mandate, won at the polls.

That the week's fighting was intended to bolster pro-government forces in preparation for the October provincial elections is at least plausible. During the fighting, the Iraqi army was allied with the Badr Corps paramilitary of the ISCI, which was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. ISCI, the leading Shiite political party in parliament, is now al-Maliki's main backer in the government, along with his own smaller Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party. And U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner told a news conference on Wednesday that the Iraqi army's military operation, which U.S. forces aided, was aimed at improving "security" in the city ahead of provincial elections.

So there you have it. Our Iranian trained allies are trying to kill off all their rivals ahead of an election they cannot hope to win.

Thanks, El Presidente!

Source: Salon.com

The Politics That Flaps In the Night

Let's Get Political

Wastes of Skin
So here's a story of what happens when idiot hyper-religious people are allowed to raise children.

An 11-year-old town of Weston girl died Sunday night after her parents refused to seek medical attention for her treatable case of diabetes.

Everest Metro police Chief Dan Vergin said autopsy results confirm Madeline Neumann died from diabetic ketoacidosis, essentially an untreated case of diabetes.

Neumann's parents believed that their faith could heal the girl, Vergin said. They do not belong to a specific church or religion.

Neumann's aunt from California called authorities Sunday asking them to check on the girl, Vergin said. Authorities found the girl's almost lifeless body at the house. Neumann was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Clare's Hospital in Weston.

Authorities will send the results of their investigation to the Marathon County district attorney's office to determine whether the parents should face criminal charges.

These scum make me utterly sick. The next time someone tells you that gay people would make terrible parents, or atheists, or anyone else, remember what can happen when two 'normal', midwestern religious parents screw up.

Source: Wisconsin Radio Network

Wal-Mart Sucks
Keith Olbermann has been beating the drum on this, and good thing too. It's outrageous.

JACKSON, Missouri (CNN) -- Debbie Shank breaks down in tears every time she's told that her 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in Iraq.

The 52-year-old mother of three attended her son's funeral, but she continues to ask how he's doing. When her family reminds her that he's dead, she weeps as if hearing the news for the first time.

Shank suffered severe brain damage after a traffic accident nearly eight years ago that robbed her of much of her short-term memory and left her in a wheelchair and living in a nursing home.

It was the beginning of a series of battles -- both personal and legal -- that loomed for Shank and her family. One of their biggest was with Wal-Mart's health plan.

Eight years ago, Shank was stocking shelves for the retail giant and signed up for Wal-Mart's health and benefits plan.

Two years after the accident, Shank and her husband, Jim, were awarded about $1 million in a lawsuit against the trucking company involved in the crash. After legal fees were paid, $417,000 was placed in a trust to pay for Debbie Shank's long-term care.

Wal-Mart had paid out about $470,000 for Shank's medical expenses and later sued for the same amount. However, the court ruled it can only recoup what is left in the family's trust.

The Shanks didn't notice in the fine print of Wal-Mart's health plan policy that the company has the right to recoup medical expenses if an employee collects damages in a lawsuit.

The legal fight is over, as the Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal.

So Wal-Mart is going to bleed this woman for every penny she has left in the world, which is all that pays for her lifetime of medical needs.

The family's situation is so dire that last year Jim Shank divorced Debbie, so she could receive more money from Medicaid.

Jim Shank, 54, is recovering from prostate cancer, works two jobs and struggles to pay the bills. He's afraid he won't be able to send their youngest son to college and pay for his and Debbie's care.

"Who needs the money more? A disabled lady in a wheelchair with no future, whatsoever, or does Wal-Mart need $90 billion, plus $200,000?" he asked.

The family's attorney agrees.

"The recovery that Debbie Shank made was recovery for future lost earnings, for her pain and suffering," Graham said.

"She'll never be able to work again. Never have a relationship with her husband or children again. The damage she recovered was for much more than just medical expenses."

Graham said he believes Wal-Mart should be entitled to only about $100,000. Right now, about $277,000 remains in the trust -- far short of the $470,000 Wal-Mart wants back.

Refusing to give up the fight, the Shanks appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But just last week, the high court said it would not hear the case.

Graham said the Shanks have exhausted all their resources and there's nothing more they can do but go on with their lives.


Jim Shank said he's disappointed with the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case -- not for the sake of his family -- but for those who might face similar circumstances.

For now, he said the family will figure out a way to get by and "do the best we can for Debbie."

"Luckily, she's oblivious to everything," he said. "We don't tell her
what's going on because it will just upset her."

Soulless scumbags.

This story illustrates perfectly why we should dispense with private health insurance with all due speed. You don't see this kind of garbage in any civilized country.

Source: CNN.com

Bill-O!!
A fascinating and quite lengthy Bill O'Reilly biographical piece from a couple of years ago. It really does give one some insight into the increasingly-irrelevant talk show host.

Class—that is, class resentment—is where, for O’Reilly, politics, and everything else, begins. His first best-seller, “The O’Reilly Factor,” published in 2000, asserts, “Whatever I have done or will do in this life, I’m working-class Irish American Bill O’Reilly.” (Another of O’Reilly’s feuds is with the columnist Michael Kinsley, who several years ago suggested that O’Reilly is actually from a middle-class background; last year, on the radio, O’Reilly objected to a call by the Los Angeles Times editorial page, then edited by Kinsley, for legal representation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. “They’ll never get it,” O’Reilly said, “until they grab Michael Kinsley out of his little house and they cut his head off. And maybe when the blade sinks in, he’ll go, ‘Perhaps O’Reilly was right.’ ”) In the book, O’Reilly goes on, “No one ever told me or my sister that we were pretty far down the social totem pole while we were growing up in 1960s America. We took for granted that it was normal to buy cars only when they were secondhand, that every family clipped coupons to save money, and that luncheon meats were the special of the day.” And so on: “When our family went out to eat, a rare treat, we didn’t waste money on appetizers, if only because we didn’t go to the kind of restaurants that offered appetizers. Typically the pasta dish was spaghetti, and that was it. No linguine, fettuccine, rigatoni, etceterini, etceterini, to confuse the issue.”

I never saw Nassau County, Long Island, where O’Reilly, who is fifty-six, grew up, in the nineteen-sixties, but I’m guessing that restaurants so unpretentious that they wouldn’t serve a soup-of-the-day didn’t actually exist. Still, the idea of such a restaurant captures O’Reilly’s idea of himself. As soon as he left home—to go to Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York—O’Reilly had occasional encounters with members of the fortunate classes, in which, inevitably, he was put down. At Marist, he longed for the girls from nearby Vassar, but “the Ivy Leaguers up from Princeton or down from Cornell got the dates; we were treated like hired help.” By O’Reilly’s account, wealth and fame have not changed the pattern. Even now, when he wanders within range of the “swells,” which he does surprisingly often for a guy who despises them, they sneer at him, just as they would sneer at any ordinary American.

In particular, it's worth noting just how ritualized the O'Reilly factor is. It's a cliche, I know but the show sounds like nothing so much as The Two Minutes Hate.

But the real gems are the items on just how bitter and borderline insane Bill really is.

O’Reilly’s account of what went wrong at CBS has him, as always, pissing off powerful people because he won’t play their phony games. The key moment seems to have come when, during the Falkland Islands War, O’Reilly and his crew got some exclusive footage of a riot in the streets of Buenos Aires and it wound up being incorporated into a report from the veteran correspondent Bob Schieffer, which failed to mention O’Reilly’s contribution. O’Reilly was furious, and after that, by his account, he was in career Siberia at CBS. During this period of forced inaction, he later wrote, “on a visit to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I stumbled upon an amazing story. The tiny fishing village of Provincetown had become a gay mecca!” O’Reilly took a cameraman there and did a piece on the dangers this posed to local kids, but the network wouldn’t air it. Not long after that, he left.

In 1998, after the launch of “The O’Reilly Factor,” but before superstardom, he published a thriller called “Those Who Trespass,” which is his most ambitious and deeply felt piece of writing. “Those Who Trespass” is a revenge fantasy, and it displays extraordinarily violent impulses. A tall, b.s.-intolerant television journalist named Shannon Michaels, the “product of two Celtic parents,” is pushed out by Global News Network after an incident during the Falkland Islands War, and then by a local station, and he systematically murders the people who ruined his career. He starts with Ron Costello, the veteran correspondent who stole his Falkland story:

The assailant’s right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello’s mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.


Michaels stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. He next murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him: he buries the guy in beach sand up to his neck and lets him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. O’Reilly describes each of these killings—the careful planning, the suffering of the victim, the act itself—in loving detail.

In the novel, O’Reilly splits his alter ego in two, by creating a second tall, b.s.-intolerant Irish-American, a New York City homicide detective named Tommy O’Malley. O’Malley is charged with solving the murders that Michaels has committed, while competing with Michaels for the heart of Ashley Van Buren, a blond, busty aristocrat turned b.s.-intolerant crime columnist. Michaels, a possibly once good man driven mad by broadcast journalism, tells Ashley, “Journalism, as you know, is a profession that requires its participants to be aggressive, skeptical, and persistent in pursuit of the truth. Yet, the moment you enter your own newsroom, you’ve got to drop all that. The managers want total conformity. They want you to play the game, to do what you’re told to do.” And, later, “It’s a self-obsessed business. ‘How are things going to impact on me? Is this person my friend or my enemy? I’ll get him before he gets me.’ That kind of thing. It’s a brutal way to live.” Again and again, O’Reilly’s characters remind us that on-air broadcasters are among the most powerful and glamorous people in America, and so the stakes in television newsroom politics could not be higher.

Tommy O’Malley, too, has a lot of ambition and rage, but he channels it into bringing bad guys (not just Michaels but a collection of urban ethnic street punks out of the old “Dirty Harry” or “Death Wish” movies) to justice. Michaels, though rejected by the suits, the swells, and the phonies, is not entirely immune to their values. He lives in a mansion, eats filet mignon, dresses stylishly, and can’t dismiss the A-listers from his consciousness. He is drawn to places like Malibu, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Upper West Side, partly to carry out his murders and partly because a kind of psychological undertow pulls him there. O’Malley seems not to know that they exist; he is broke and not stylish. He is morally redeemed by the police mission, just as Michaels is morally damned by television.

So there you have it. O'Reilyl engages in, even publishes, grotesque revenge fantasies and ultimately seems to desire his own self-destruction as much as that of his enemies.

Truly a bizarre man.

Source: The New Yorker

Yet More Olympics
So the lack of momentum for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics seems to be not-building.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, yesterday became the first world leader to decide not to attend the Olympics in Beijing.

As pressure built for concerted western protests to China over the crackdown in Tibet, EU leaders prepared to discuss the crisis for the first time today, amid a rift over whether to boycott the Olympics.

The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games' opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown's determination to attend the Olympics.

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

"The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate," Tusk said. "I do not intend to take part."

Further, it looks like the EU as a whole might boycott the Olympics.

The EU foreign ministers are to discuss the China quandary at lunch in Slovenia today, with calls being made for a common European position.

"We don't support a boycott and don't intend to boycott the opening of the games," a British Foreign Office spokesman said. "None of the 27 [EU states] are calling for a boycott yet."

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has described the boycott proposal as "interesting", while Sarkozy this week hedged his bets and said his attendance depended on China's conduct.

"Yet". None of them are doing it.. "yet".

Hehe.

Source: The Guardian

Siege of Basra
So the Iraqi central government, under Iranian semi-pupppet Maliki, decided to bust a cap in its political adversaries to the south, and staged an invasion of Basra.

Things went predictably enough.

BAGHDAD — Shiite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault.

Witnesses in Basra said members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating.

Senior members of several political parties said the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.

Mr. Maliki has staked his reputation on the success of the Basra assault, fulfilling a longstanding American desire for him to boldly take on militias.

But as criticism of the assault has risen, it has brought into question another American benchmark of progress in Iraq: political reconciliation.

Security has suffered as well.

Since the Basra assault began Tuesday, violence has spread to Shiite districts of Baghdad and other places in Iraq where Shiite militiamen hold sway, raising fears that security gains often attributed to a yearlong American troop buildup could be at risk. Any widespread breakdown of a cease-fire called by Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who founded the Mahdi Army, could bring the country back to the sectarian violence that strained it in 2006 and 2007.

So basically, Maliki's Pro-Iranian government, which recently gave the Iranian President Ach-ma-dick-inajad (credit to the Daily Show for giving me a pejorative which saves me spelling his name) a warm welcome, complete with flowers and red carpet treatment, is trying to take out its biggest Shiite rival, Al-Sadr. Meanwhile, Iraqi politics continued to degenerate.

“We don’t have to rush to military solutions,” said Nadeem al-Jabiri, a Parliament member from the Fadhila Party, a strong rival of Mr. Sadr’s party that would have been expected to back the operation, at least on political grounds. Instead of solving the problems in Basra, Mr. Jabiri said, Mr. Maliki “escalated the situation.”

...

In Baghdad, the American military was also drawn deeper into the violence generated by the Basra assault. The military issued a statement saying that American soldiers had killed nine Iraqis that it called terrorists in firefights around Sadr City, the Shiite slum that forms Mr. Sadr’s base of support. The statement said seven of the Iraqis were killed after they attacked an American unit, and two more when they were caught placing roadside bombs. Later Saturday, the military announced that two American soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in Shiite-controlled eastern Baghdad.

Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said they would extend a strict and citywide curfew indefinitely, in an attempt to keep the streets clear.

Mr. Maliki’s forces may also have lost ground in the battle for public opinion when, in a well-publicized event in Sadr City, 40 men who said they were Iraqi police officers surrendered their weapons to Sadr officials, who symbolically gave the officers olive branches and Korans. The weapons were returned after the officers pledged not to use them against Mahdi Army members.

“These weapons are for defending the country but not for fighting your brothers,” said Sheik Salman al-Fraji, head of the Sadr office there.

Although a citywide curfew remained in effect in Baghdad, the booms of rockets or mortars were heard in the morning. It was not immediately clear who had fired them or where they landed, although the fortified Green Zone, the nerve center of American and Iraqi governmental operations here, has been a frequent target since the Basra operation began.

Clashes between militias and Iraqi government security forces continued elsewhere. There was intense fighting for a second day north of Basra in Dhi Qar Province and its capital, Nasiriya, where officials said the toll on Saturday was 28 killed and 59 wounded. There were running battles on a main bridge in Nasiriya, an Iraqi police officer said, and gunmen controlled the town of Shatra, about 20 miles north.

...



“Unfortunately we were expecting one thing but we saw something else,” said Ali Hussam, 48, a teacher, who said that after Saddam Hussein the people of Basra had hoped for peace. “But unfortunately with the presence of this new government and this democracy that was brought to us by the invader, it made us kill each other.”

“And the war is now between us,” he said.

Source: The New York Times

Live from Basra
Some great reporting by an Iraqi stringer for the Times on how things went down in Basra.

Iraqi forces started their assault on the Shiite militias in Basra on Tuesday. Whatever the initial goal of the operation, by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.

...

That is when we started to see terrible signs of the conflict in Basra. I counted about 20 civilian cars coming north with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf. My driver and I were unsure about the road ahead, so we flagged down a family driving in the opposite direction. As we did so, a woman in the passenger seat began frantically waving a piece of white cloth — a white flag — out her window.

It turned out that she was terrified that we might be members of the Mahdi Army, who she said had put bombs and snipers all along the road where the family had just passed. Once we calmed her down, she suggested another way.

...

Gun battles broke out unpredictably, so I ran or walked when it was quiet, then dropped down and sought cover when I could hear shooting. After 45 minutes or so, I came upon the Rumaila Hotel in a central neighborhood called Ashar. Amazingly, it was open, with six or seven guests inside and a couple of employees. I was so exhausted I didn’t think twice, just checked in.

The next day I moved around as much as I could. The common observation was this: There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will.

...

On Saturday I was talking with a colleague on my cellphone when a gun battle started right outside the hotel. It was so loud I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line anymore. I dived into a corner of my room and waited for it to end.

A while after the shooting stopped, some other residents of the hotel and I went outside. The street was littered with the shells of heavy machine guns where the Mahdi Army had fired toward another hotel, the Meerbad, where Ministry of Interior officials were staying, perhaps 50 yards away. We could see their pickup trucks, now full of bullet holes, in the parking lot of the hotel.

Yeah, this thing went really well.

Source: The New York Times

This Looks Like a Job For.... Iran?
So who could dampen the escalating violence in Iraq? Who could possibly wield enough power and influence in such a volatile place?

Who's actually in charge, in other words?

BAGHDAD — Iranian officials helped broker a cease-fire agreement Sunday between Iraq's government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according to Iraqi lawmakers.

The deal could help defuse a wave of violence that had threatened recent security progress in Iraq. It also may signal the growing regional influence of Iran, a country the Bush administration accuses of providing support to terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

NOt to mention predictable.

Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni lawmaker who oversaw mediation in Baghdad, said representatives from al-Maliki's Dawa Party and another Shiite party traveled to Iran to finalize talks with al-Sadr.

Iran has close ties with both al-Sadr's movement and al-Maliki, who spent several years in exile there. Al-Nujaifi said the agreement was brokered by the commander of Iran's al-Quds Brigade, which is considered a terrorist organization by Washington.

That's right, they traveled to Iran, on orders from its 'terrorist' military, where they agreed to a peace ordered by the Iranians.

Wow.

Source: USA Today

Another Perspective on the War
Namely, one you get from actually considering the human cost of grand ambitions, which is something that El Presidente would never do.

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart was in Washington, DC Tuesday night for the USO-Metro Awards Dinner, where the Daily Show host was honored with a Merit Award from Joint Chiefs vice-chair General James Cartwright. If it seems an odd fit for a comic who consistently lampoons the Bush administration, the Washington Post's Reliable Source informs readers that all the comedic comfort Stewart gives critics of the Iraq War is matched by his efforts to comfort our wounded soldiers:
Turns out the comedian has been quietly visiting soldiers at Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals, trips he began in 2004 to better understand the Iraq war. "I felt that I was living in a world of theory," he told the audience, "but I hadn't touched the reality and the humanity of it." The first patient he met was "funnier than I was" -- and Stewart's been a regular ever since.

Stewart told the Post, "I certainly get a lot more out of it than they do...If anything, it's made me angrier... You can be for the war, against the war, but you can't be uninformed about it. To see the human cost is part of the equation."

Source: The Huffington Post

Not Just Iraq
Finally, a story that shows the Bush administration can reduce any number of countries to uninhabited rubble, not just Iraq.

Imagine that your home was reduced to mold-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant.


Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

...

One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, has $11 billion in federal funds.

...

Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen's Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.

"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."

The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, helping it buy out four other companies and enter government contracting in sectors including national defense and the environment.

Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state body that asked for the Blanco-ICF investigations, acknowledged the collections could be painful for applicants, many of whom have used up their nest eggs to rebuild.

...

Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen's Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.

"I think they are looking for ways to decrease awards and that's part of dissuading people," she said.

Oh, I'm sure everything is above board, with this massive private contractor operating under the Bush administration.

Riiiight.

Source: Raw Story

Ultra Post

Very Large

Fraudulent
So the man responsible for investigating fraud in the Pentagon in the Bush administration is going to jail.

For fraud.

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Richard T. Race, the Pentagon inspector general's chief investigator of procurement fraud and official misconduct, quit his job and pleaded guilty last month to violating U.S. banking laws.

The previously unpublicized case was filed Feb. 26 in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, according to court papers. Race, 61, admitted he made cash deposits at the Pentagon's credit union on three straight days in March 2007 that were designed to evade laws that track large currency transactions. The government seized the total of $20,000 in deposits as part of the plea deal.

Race, who will be sentenced May 2, faces as long as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He voluntarily retired Feb. 16, the inspector general's office said in a statement.

The whole situation seems fishy to me. Why are they going after a man this hard for a simple structuring case? For that matter, why did he go to this trouble?

He told a credit union teller that he had sold a car for $20,000 and reported that on his tax returns, according to court papers. Race told the teller he was making three separate deposits -- two for $9,000 and one for $2,000 -- that were ``to avoid generating a report to the government, which he believed could result in tax being assessed twice on the same sale,'' the papers said.

Race pleaded guilty to one count of structuring cash transactions to evade reporting requirements. Federal law requires that banks tell the Treasury Department about any single-day deposit of at least $10,000.

It makes no sense. Something else is going on here. I bet the car sale was cover for a bribe of some sort, the way he received money for services rendered. Either that, or a complete fiction cover story.

Source: Bloomberg

Cartoonish
Osama Bin Loser is up to his old tricks again.

In a new audio message purportedly from Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader threatens the EU over the re-printing of a cartoon offensive to Muslims.

The voice on it says the cartoon, re-published recently in all major Danish newspapers, was part of a crusade involving Pope Benedict XVI.

The drawing, first published in 2005, depicts the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

Hehe. Awww, a cartoon makes him mad.

Actually, the article suggests he doesn't give a damn. It's just a good way to remain 'relevant', hip with today's younger, trendier bomb throwers.

Or something like that.

Source: BBC News

Hep Cat
So the investigation into the Chinese heparin that's sickened a bunch of people continues.

A modified form of a cheap and widely used dietary supplement sold to relieve joint pain was identified as the contaminant found in tainted and at times lethal heparin produced in China for American patients, Food and Drug Administration officials said yesterday.

Agency officials said they were investigating whether the compound, chemically modified chondroitin sulfate, was intentionally added to cut costs and boost profits or was mixed in by mistake. In either case, they said, it was not part of the prescribed manufacturing process.

"This is a biological compound that is not found in nature," said Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "At this point, it's still to be determined if it was introduced intentionally or by accident."

The announcement drew an immediate and worried response from members of Congress and drug experts, who said the tainted heparin is a sign of a much larger problem.

"I have no doubt that there are other contaminated or counterfeit drugs like heparin coming into the country, because there's really no system in place to stop them," said William Hubbard, a top official at the FDA until 2005 and part of a consumer and industry group lobbying -- so far unsuccessfully -- to get more resources for the agency to address the dangers of foreign-made drugs.

Ahh, the Bush administration. Making you less safe since January 2001.

Source: The Washington Post

Limits at Fox?
It would seem that some of the tools working for Fox News have ethical limits after all. Who knew?

Veteran journalist Chris Wallace admonished Fox & Friends over their characterization of a comment in which Obama referred to his grandmother as a "typical white person."

"I love you guys, but I want to take you to task if I may respectfully for a moment," Wallace began. "I have been watching the show..., and it seems to me that two hours of Obama-bashing on this 'typical white person' remark is somewhat excessive, and frankly, I think you're somewhat distorting what Obama had to say."

As the F&F hosts began grinning and shifting around in their seats, Wallace continued, "What he said was, 'The point I was making was not that my [grandmother] harbors any racial animosity--she doesn't--but she is a typical white person...,'" which is where you generally have clipped it."

As co-host Steve Doocy denied the charge, Wallace continued, "But what he went on to say is, '...who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes comes out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society.'"

Added Wallace, "I'm not saying that's the most felicitous remark that anybody ever made, but I think it's a little more complicated than we've been portraying."

Meanwhile, as Wallace was forced to take his own network to task on air, another host was driven to walk off the set in protest.

This morning on "Fox and Friends," Brian Kilmeade walked off the set after a dispute with his co-hosts Gretchen Carlson (she who celebrates deadly floods) and Steve Doocy over Obama's comment that his grandmother is a "typical white person." Kilmeade argued that the remark needed to be taken in context and eventually got so fed up with his co-hosts that he walked off set.

Amazing.

Still, they'll always have Bill-O, to express his astonishment that black people can sit down to a meal without gunfire.

Sources: Raw Story
The Huffington Post

Ignorance is Bliss
For rapper DMX, at any rate. (reformatted to make it easier to distinguish questions and answers in this format)

Q-Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.

Q-You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Q-Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Q-Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Q-Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Q-Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

Q-You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.

Q-I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

Q-So you’re not following the race. You can’t vote right?
Nope.

Q-Is that why you’re not following it?
No, because it’s just—it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. It doesn’t really make a difference. These are the last years.

Q-But it would be pretty big if we had a first Black president. That would be huge.
I mean, I guess…. What, they gon’ give a dog a bone? There you go. Ooh, we have a Black president now. They should’ve done that shit a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the fuckin’ position we in now. With world war coming up right now. They done fucked this shit up then give it to the Black people, “Here you take it. Take my mess.”

Q-Right, exactly.
It’s all a fuckin’ setup. It’s all a setup. All fuckin’ bullshit. All bullshit. I don’t give a fuck about none of that.

Q-We could have a female president also, Hillary Clinton.
I mean, either way it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. No one person is directly affected by which president, you know, so what does it matter.

Q-Yeah, but the country is.
I guess. The president is a puppet anyway. The president don’t make no damn decisions.

Q-The president…they don’t have that much authority basically?
Nah, never.

Q-But Bush pretty much…
You think Bush is making fuckin’ decisions?

Q-He did, yeah, he fucked up the country.
He act like he making decisions. He could barely speak! He could barely fuckin’ speak!
Can’t be serious. He ain’t making no damn decisions.

Q-Well Barack has a good chance of winning so that might be something.
Good for him, good for him.

Right, because the PRESIDENT doesn't have any power.

Wow. Lol. What a moron. El Presidente and his handlers have killed between 350k-1 million people in Iraq, but they don't affect anything.

Sure. Sure.

Now, given that this man is an ignorant tool, should I take the obvious cheap shot?

Sure I will!

Q-There’s talk of a new album for you. When’s that coming out, like what’s up with that? Can you tell me what stage you’re at as far as recording?
Well, I’m bout to start working on the gospel album.

QW-Yeah, the gospel album. It’s like a double album right?
It’s two different albums. Two albums, separate albums. I got a couple more tracks to do on it and that’s done. It’s the first time anybody did anything like this—two separate albums on the same day.

Q-What made you want to release a gospel album now?
I’ve done gospel songs on every album. I figured I’d just dedicate a whole album to it.

Religion and ignorance, religion and ignorance. I don't even need to make jokes here anymore!

Source: XXLmag.com

Nuke Cat
Uncovering the terrifying story of a NUCLEAR CAT.

The unsettling thing about living in a surveillance society isn't just that you're being watched. It's that you have no idea.

That's what struck me about a story told last week by a border agent at a meeting of 200 San Juan Islanders. He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs.But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."

It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear "dirty bombs." They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.

"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]."

The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.

Did he find a nuke?

"Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier," Giuliano said.

Now that they've caught this veterinary menace, the DHS can rest easy.

Seriously, wow. Talk about a useless toy. Imagine all the cancer patients fresh from their radiation treatments at the hospital who are going to end up stopped, searched and humiliated over this.

Big Brother can do no wrong though, naturally.

Source: The Seattle Times

Show Us Your Papers
We really are living in a Proto-Soviet state here.

WASHINGTON — Millions of residents of three states will soon face tougher and longer screening at airport checkpoints if their governors defy a federal law requiring new, more-secure driver's licenses.

Maine, New Hampshire and South Carolina have until March 31 to say whether they plan to comply with the law, which they say is costly and will inconvenience residents by forcing them to get new licenses.

If the states don't comply, the Homeland Security Department will bar travelers from using those state's licenses and ID cards to board airplanes starting May 11.

"We are not bluffing," department spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said.

Some fear massive confusion and delays at the 15 airports in the three states. Passengers showing unacceptable licenses will be pulled aside for additional screening, possibly including pat-downs.

So in other words, if your state doesn't comply with the new State Security Apparatus' demand for a National ID card, they'll randomly pat-down search and harass you if you try to travel.

Ahh, isn't Democracy grand?

Source: USA Today

Bridges and the GOP
Yet another thing they can't get right.

ld photos of the Interstate 35W bridge show two steel connecting plates were visibly bent as early as 2003 — four years before the span collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people.


Minnesota Department of Transportation officials declined to say when the state first knew about the bending in the pieces of steel, called gusset plates.

Two photos, part of a report issued earlier this month by the National Transportation Safety Board, reveal slight bends in gusset plates that hold beams together at two separate connecting points. The plates are in areas believed to be among the first points of failure when the span collapsed.

...

The two photos are believed to have been taken by URS Inc., a San Francisco consulting firm the state hired to examine the bridge from 2003 to 2007.

"URS and the state have both got a lot of explaining to do as far as why (the bending) was not observed, and if it was observed, why that was not immediately investigated," James Schwebel, an attorney representing a group of victims, told the AP on Sunday. "How could it possibly have been missed?"

...

Since the bridge's construction during the 1960s, the state highway department had increased weight on the bridge by adding a layer of concrete to the deck in 1977 and by installing concrete barriers in 1998. And the NTSB said last week that, at the time of the collapse, more than 191 tons of construction material had been piled over the bridge's weakest areas.

Republicans and government do not mix.

Source: Raw Story

Diplomacy in the Bush Era
Seems to consist of threats and espionage.

On March 14, 2003, less than one week before the eventual invasion, Chile hosted a meeting of diplomats from the six undecided governments to discuss its proposal. But U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell moved quickly to quash the initiative, warning their governments that the effort was viewed as "an unfriendly act" designed to isolate the United States. The diplomats received calls from their governments ordering them to "leave the meeting immediately," Muñoz writes.

Muñoz said subsequent ties remained tense at the United Nations, where the United States sought support for resolutions authorizing the occupation of Iraq. He said that small countries met privately in a secure room at the German mission that was impervious to eavesdropping. "It reminded me of a submarine or a giant safe," Muñoz said in an interview.

The United States, he added, expressed "its displeasure" to the German government every time they held a meeting in the secure room. "They couldn't listen to what was going on."

Ahh. Nothing like bugging the UN and harassing member countries.

Any wonder the whole world hates us now?

Source: Raw Story

Stoned
Well well well. Turns out the Spitzer investigation really was shady after all.

In the 1970s, he was on the payroll of Richard Nixon's now-infamous Committee to Reelect the President. In the 1980s, he helped George Bush Sr. trounce Michael Dukakis by floating a racially charged ad about the Democratic governor's role in furloughing a black inmate. And in 2000, he organized the so-called "Brooks Brothers" riot, forcing the shutdown of a recount in Miami-Dade County, Florida, that may have turned the election to George W. Bush.

Last November, his lawyer wrote a letter to the FBI. In it, GOP political operative Roger Stone's attorney, Paul Rolf alleged that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer "used the services of high-priced call girls" while in Florida, basing his information on a "social contact."

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Stone gleaned the information from "a social contact in an adult themed club."

"The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services," Rolf wrote. "It is Mr. Stone's understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer."

It continued, including particular detail -- Stone's lawyer wrote that the governor hadn't taken off his calf-length socks "during the sex act."

It's unclear whether Stone's letter sparked the investigation: court papers say the investigation began "in or about October 2007."

...

The missive's timing -- in November -- was preceded by contact from the FBI. The Miami Herald, which first reported on Stone's lawyer's letter, said the letter was written in response to contact from federal investigators.

"His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted," Herald reporter Amy Driscoll wrote Friday.

Subsequent reports shed little light on why the FBI sought to speak to Stone before the letter was sent. The Times speculated that the bureau might have wanted to talk to Stone about a threatening message he allegedly left for Spitzer's father, which resulted in his being fired by New York's top Senate Republican.

So it looks like the FBI may have whitewashed a political hit-job on Spitzer.

Of course, Stone wasn't wrong; the Governor really WAS seeing prostitutes.

Still, they probably figured a hollywood story about Honest, Hard-Working Agents Uncovering Corruption would sell better than 'Longtime Hack Takes Down Longtime Sleaze'.

Source: Raw Story

Nightmare
The Austin-American Statesman has an interview with James Yee, the former Army chaplain at Guantanamo who got too uppity defending his charges and as a result was arrested for, err, treason.

After harassing him for 76 days of sensory deprivation and confinement, along with a quarter million in legal bills, they let him go with an honorable discharge.

It's the 'softly, softly' approach, in the Bush administration.

One year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. Army Chaplain James Yee — a converted Muslim, born and raised in America — was sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility with the assignment of a lifetime. His job: to minister to the prisoners there, in service to the United States.

It was harrowing work.

"We say that the war on terror is not a war against Islam, but that's not how it felt most days at Guantánamo," Yee writes in "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire," his 2006 memoir. The environment at Guantánamo "excused, if not encouraged, open hostility toward Islam."

By almost every measure, Yee's tour at Guantánamo was a nightmare, offending his sensibilities as an American and a Muslim. For 10 months, from November 2002 to September 2003, Yee says, he bore witness to man's inhumanity to man as the Guantánamo prisoners were systematically beaten and humiliated by U.S. military police and interrogators.

Yee says he was horrified to see "religion used as a weapon" against Guantánamo detainees — as prisoners told him of detainees being forced to bow down in the middle of a satanic circle in an interrogation room and profess that Satan was their god, not Allah. Detainees were mocked during prayer and taunted or teased sexually by American women while chained. At first, Yee thought it an act of compassion that Guantánamo detainees were allowed to keep a Quran in their cells. But the detainees begged Yee to have them taken away, he says, for American MPs took such delight in mishandling the books or breaking their bindings during random searches.

"I was not willing to silently stand by and watch U.S. soldiers abuse the Quran, mock people's religion, and strip men of their dignity — even if those men were prisoners," wrote Yee, who became an in-house human rights advocate for the detainees. "It was my job to stop those behaviors — it was my duty, even, since the day I took my oath as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army."

And that's just the introduction.

The whole thing's worth a read. Man's inhumanity to man indeed.

Source: The Austin-American Statesman

This is How You Do It
In light of China's Tibet crackdown (which I need to write up here at some point) and their continued oppression of, well, everyone, the decision to host the Olympics there was a bit dicey.

Fortunately for the Chinese government, the Olympics people have been very accomodating with their own repression of civil rights and free speech, to try and quell protests against the Chinese government before the games reach Chinese soil, aka 'Base', where protestors can be quietly thrown in a dark hole forever.

How's that working out?

Protests against China's rights record and crackdown in Tibet disrupted ceremonies on Monday to light the Olympic flame for the Beijing Games.

Three French men from a media rights group breached tight security around Ancient Olympia to unfurl a flag demanding a boycott of the Olympics. Later 10 Tibetan activists staged their own protest in the town's main street before they were detained or chased by police.

...

Three members of Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders -- RSF) staged the first protest as the chief Chinese Olympics organiser, Liu Qi, who is Beijing's communist party chief, made a speech before the flame was lit.

One man unfurled a flag declaring "Boycott the country that tramples on human rights." Another tried to grab the microphone from Liu and shouted "freedom! freedom!" in front of Rogge and other top officials were sat.

Security officers quickly dragged all three away. Greek police had imposed heavy security, including armed police watching down on the site from nearby hills.

Greek state television cut its live broadcast away from the protesters. China's state broadcaster also quickly changed and did not mention the demonstrators.

Actors in ancient Greek costume then carried out the traditional ceremony, lighting the torch using a parabolic mirror to focus the sun's rays.

But as dignatories dispersed, about 10 Tibetan activists, covered in red paint, marched out of a hotel in Olympia and lay down in the town's central street, shouting slogans against China's rule in Tibet. At least two were detained by police and the rest ran away.

"I think it's always sad when there are protests, but they were not violent and that's the most important thing," IOC president Rogge told reporters after the first incident.

Yes, Democracy is such a sad thing, isn't it Rogge?

Go suck a goat.

Speaking before the ceremony, Rogge said that "the major political leaders don't want a boycott." He added: "There is no momentum for a boycott."

"Bush doesn't want a boycott, Sarkozy doesn't want a boycott, Brown doesn't want a boycott," Rogge said, referring to US President George W. Bush, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

But he acknowledged that the torch relay across 20 countries - and Mount Everest and Tibet - might be hijacked.

"Of course it's a concern," he said. "I would hope that potential protesters will understand that public opinion would not want the torch relay painted by political protests. It would be counterproductive."

Aww, your pointless little spectacle might be marred by that silly quest for human rights and freedom.

POOR LITTLE YOU

A crackdown on anti-Chinese protests in Tibet, which exiled Tibetans say have left at least 130 dead, has overshadowed the buildup to the Games.

Various rights groups have drawn up plans aiming to galvanise opposition to China's record on Tibet, Darfur, human rights, religious freedom and other issues in the run-up to the Beijing Games.

The Falungong group is running a rival torch relay to highlight the plight of its followers in China, who it says are subject to brutal persecution.

Dream for Darfur, an organisation set up to pressure China into helping end the bloodshed in the western Sudanese region, is planning protests along the torch relay route.

Thai environmental activist Narisa Chakrabongse, chosen to carry the Olympic torch when it crosses Thailand next month, has declined in protest against Beijing's crackdown.

Yes, there's no momentum for a boycott at all.

Except amongst much of the free world.

Source: Raw Story

El Presidente and the POWs
So El Presidente has found yet another new way to screw over veterans groups.

The facts:
In the first Gulf War, 17 American prisoners of war, held by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, were viciously tortured while in captivity.
On April 4, 2002, the former prisoners filed suit in federal court, seeking remuneration for their ordeal. They had sought to avoid litigation by offering to arbitrate their claims before an international tribunal. Iraq refused.
The United States State Department served process on Iraq; in July 2003, a Federal District Court ruled in favor of the American troops.
The court found that "there must be a premium on protecting POWs because POWs are uniquely disadvantaged and deterring torture of POWs should be of highest priority."
The Bush administration intervened to absolve Iraq of responsibility for torturing the American POWs. The President blocked the POWs from collecting on their judgment.
For over four years the POWs have tried, again and again, to meet with the administration in an effort to come to some kind of resolution. Their efforts have been futile. The administration has didn't even bother to refuse the POW’s humble entreaties... Each and every attempt by the POWs to meet with the administration has been callously and unforgivably ignored. Their letters go unanswered.
During Alberto Gonzalez's confirmation hearings, the issue was raised. He promised to consider meeting with the POWs. The POWs contacted him. He refused to meet.
The Federal District Court urged the government to settle. Several Congress members wrote letters to the administration on the POW’s behalf. The Senate voted unanimously (even the Republicans!!) to urge the administration to work out a solution. Every single effort has been ignored.
The administration won't stand up for the POWs, but they are making every effort to reconcile the claims of foreign corporations that took losses as a result of the Iraq War.
The latest war funding authorization included a provision that would have provided for the POWs. On Christmas Day 2007, George W. Bush announced his attention to veto the bill.
Congress bent to the President's will and passed a new war funding bill without the POW provision.

Seriously, what the hell? We could have easily paid for the POW's suit out of the Trillion Dollar Waste Fund that is Iraq. We did destroy the government that had them tortured; we could assume its debt here without any logical contradiction. It's not like Saddam can pay up; we sort of killed him in a ghoulish hanging.

Source: Daily Kos

JP Morgan and Bear-Stearns Cont.
So when the Fed bailed out JP Morgan's takeover of Bear-Stearns, it was with the understanding that, you know, SOMEONE had to take the blame for this colossal fuckup. That group of someones ended up being the shareholders at Bear, who were going to get one-fifteenth of its worth. A third of the shareholders at Bear are employees, so a lot of people were losing, well, everything. Though they were the same people who sold a pack of lies to cities that now have to lay off teachers and such, so I can't feel too badly for the hucksters.

But, then of course, once the 30 Billion in taxpayer money goes through, why, the bailout gets sweeter and the pay cut for Bear isn't as bad as, well, it was supposed to be.

JPMorgan Chase was in talks on Sunday night for a deal that would quintuple its offer for Bear Stearns, the beleaguered investment bank, in an effort to pacify angry Bear shareholders, according to people involved in the negotiations.

The sweetened offer is intended to win over stockholders who vowed to fight the original fire-sale deal, struck only a week ago at the behest of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department.

Under the terms being discussed, JPMorgan would pay $10 a share in stock for Bear, up from its initial offer of $2 a share — a figure that represented a mere one-fifteenth of Bear’s going market price.

The Fed, which must approve any new deal, was balking at the new offer price on Sunday night after several days of frantic, secret negotiations, these people said. As a result, it was still possible the renegotiated deal might be postponed or collapse entirely, said these people, who were granted anonymity because of their confidentiality agreements.

If the Fed were to reject the new proposal, it could set off a furor among shareholders of both firms that the government was preventing them from making a fair deal.

In an unusual move, Bear’s board was seeking to authorize the sale of 39.5 percent of the firm to JPMorgan in an effort to move closer to majority shareholder approval. Under state law in Delaware, where the companies are incorporated, a company can sell up to 40 percent without shareholder approval.

The renegotiation, which would set a sale price of more than $1 billion, comes after a tumultuous week on Wall Street and in Washington because of the near collapse of Bear and the hastily devised deal to save it.

While the initial agreement appeared to have defused the financial crisis of confidence that undid Bear, the initial terms of the deal — and the government’s controversial role in reaching them — drew criticism from those who say the takeover amounts to a government bailout of Bear, a firm at the center of the mortgage meltdown.

A new deal could raise even more questions about the Fed’s involvement in the negotiations. As part of the original deal, the Fed guaranteed to take on $30 billion of Bear’s most toxic assets. The central bank also directed JPMorgan to pay no more than $2 a share for Bear to assure that it would not appear that the Bear shareholders were being rescued, according to people involved in the negotiations.

In television interviews last week, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., who has been closely involved in the negotiations, sought to portray the agreement not as a rescue effort but as a way to provide stability for the entire financial markets.

“Let me say that the Bear Stearns situation has been very painful for the Bear Stearns shareholders,” Mr. Paulson said on Monday on the NBC “Today” show, referring to the $2 a share price. “So I don’t think that they think that they’ve been bailed out here.”

If the price is increased, however, some critics could have more ammunition to complain that taxpayers are helping to bail out a Wall Street firm that should be responsible for its own risky behavior. That is one reason the Fed was hesitant on Sunday night to approve the transaction at $10 a share, people briefed on the talks said.

Gee, I wonder why people would think that, given that Bear was trading at like 5 bucks a share when this deal was negotiated.

Once again, the public pays, the private sector gains. Privatize profits, socialize losses.

Sigh.

Source: The New York Times

This is Not the Way to Do It
So the website for an upcoming film criticizing the Quran has been pulled by its provider.

A Web site where a Dutch lawmaker was promoting an upcoming film that criticizes the Quran has been suspended by its U.S. hosting service.

The site had shown Geert Wilders' film's title, "Fitna," the words "Coming Soon" and an image of a gilded Quran. Now it shows a note that the company is investigating whether the site violates the firm's terms of service.

Wilders has not described the 15-minute movie, due to be released by March 31, in detail but has said it will underscore his view that Islam's holy book is "fascist."

Dutch officials fear the movie could spark violent protests in Muslim countries, similar to those two years ago after the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper.

Wilders said he would release his movie on the Internet after television stations refused to air it.

"In this situation with the dialogue that's happening throughout the world we've made the choice to suspend the site as of last night," said Susan Wade, spokeswoman for Network Solutions. "This site is suspended so people can't see the content right now but the customer still has access to their site. They can make whatever changes are necessary as we complete our investigation."

...

Network Solutions' terms of service contain a sweeping prohibition against "objectionable material of any kind or nature."

A Dutch court will hear a complaint lodged by Muslim groups seeking to bar Wilders from releasing the film March 28, but there is no legal barrier preventing Wilders from releasing his film before then.

Look, I can see pulling hate sites that advocate violence, though the White Power people seem to have no trouble finding hosts. But this? This is just a crank exercising his free speech, and you're yanking his site because you don't want to make waves.

That is a jackass thing to do.

As for the Dutch government? Blocking a film whose point of view you don't like? For shame, for even considering it. For shame.

Source: Raw Story

It's Pat!
Pat Buchanan, a regular on MSNBC, made the following remarks recently.

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks - with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.

Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

Give me a break. Seriously. Black people should be GRATEFUL for slavery? White people have it so much harder than blacks?

I'd love to know where he gets his statistics on crime. I don't ever recall seeing uniform stats on the racial characteristics of criminals and their victims, but there is no way, just no way that his lunacy on rapes and robberies are correct. It's absurd. For one thing, there's no way to collect stats like that on rape; 85% or more of rapes go unreported. Rape statistics are a shadowy netherworld in CJUS reporting; there's no way to accurately gauge demographics from the slim percentage of victims who come forward.

I plan to look into this a bit more in depth later, but wow.

Also, Jena was a hoax? Excuse me? So those were fake nooses in that tree? That was fake violence against black students? That was not the mayor of town who sided with the Klan over civil rights protestors?

Give me a damn break. This man is a thug.

Source: African American (Black) Opinion

Beardy
So the other night on Countdown we watched Richardson's endorsement of Obama and the interview he gave on the subject, and I noticed he had a shiny new beard. I commented to my roommate on how sharp said beard looked, and lamented that my own is so terrible. We both observed that Hispanic men can often grow really nice facial hair, and thought that was a good thing, and good for Richardson, since he apparently likes said beard.

Who knew that some people would take this grooming decision and turn it from a very minor racial plus to some kind of radical statement in their heads.

Summary: While discussing on Fox News' The Live Desk New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama, Philadelphia radio host Dom Giordano said of Richardson's beard: "I don't know if it's playing into the ethnic card, or whatever." Host Martha MacCallum stated, "[Richardson] said, you know, 'It's hard for me,' he said to me once, 'people don't even know I'm Hispanic,' " and then asked, "So is that part of what he is ... cultivating here?" Giordano replied, "I think so."

Or, he could just be growing a beard. He looks better with one; so did Lincoln.

Nobody accuses Lincoln of trying to pander to white beard wearers; everyone just accepts it as a personal choice.

Yeesh.

Source: Media Matters

Dobbs
While we're on the subject of racist assholes, we have Lou Dobbs.

Summary: Lou Dobbs introduced the March 21 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight by announcing: "Tonight, Senator [Barack] Obama wins the endorsement of the nation's only Hispanic governor, Bill Richardson. Is Obama pandering to ethnocentric special interests again? We'll have complete coverage." The subsequent report included no discussion of whether Obama is "pandering to ethnocentric special interests."

Because all those wetbacks stick together! He's only governor of a major state because he's a lousy border hopping member of the Reconquista!

God, someone get this hack off the air, please.

Source: Media Matters

Halliburton Once Again
This time they were poisoning people en masse.

Hallburton subsidiary KBR told employees at a water injection plant in Iraq a sand-like substance scattered around the plant was just a "mild irritant," workers recall.

It turns out to be sodium dichromate -- a highly toxic chemical which can lead to cancer even with limited exposure.

Now nine Americans are suing KBR, according to a report in Tuesday's Boston Globe. They say they spent 2 1/2 months covered in the substance as they rushed to get the plant online, a key component in Iraq's oil infrastructure.

"Many of the 22 Americans and 100-plus Iraqis began to complain of nosebleeds, ulcers, and shortness of breath," the Globe's Farah Stockman writes. "Within weeks, nearly 60 percent exhibited symptoms of exposure, according to the minutes of a meeting of project managers from KBR, the Houston-based construction company in charge of the repairs."

According to Oxford University, sodium dichromate is a "NTP human carcinogen and IARC human Group I carcinogen. Inhalation, ingestion or skin absorption are harmful, and may be fatal. Exposure may cause cancer."

A material safety data sheet at Fisher Scientific says chronic exposure may lead to ulcers, asthma, cancer and infertiliy.

Ahh, Halliburton. They are scum.

The workers, however, face a daunting task in court. Under a World War II-era law, KBR isn't obliged to pay damages unless workers can prove the exposure was malicious.

But KBR isn't out of the woods. Because the company hired the workers through subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, the workers' lawyers say they shouldn't be protected as a federal contractor.

"KBR's lawyers argued in a legal brief that the workers should be considered employees of KBR because they were part of a corporate subsidiary that was working on a KBR team," Stockman writes. "The company's spokeswoman, Heather Browne, pointed out that the company's projects in Iraq take place in a 'dangerous, unpredictable environment,' but said the firm maintains an 'unwavering commitment to safety.'"

...

The workers say KBR's managers discouraged them from raising safety concerns.

"What was done to us, I believe, it's criminal," Danny Langford , a motor specialist from Texas who worked in the most contaminated room in the facility, told the Globe. "I think it was deliberate. They wanted this six month job - get you in, get you out, and send you on your way, and 10 years later you start dying of cancer."

Sounds like a plan!

So what is this stuff anyway?

Sodium dichromate is the chemical compound with the formula Na2Cr2O7. Usually, however, the salt is handled as its dihydrate Na2Cr2O7·2H2O. Its chemistry, appearance, and behaviour are very similar to those of the more widely encountered potassium dichromate. This chemical is around twenty times more soluble in water than the potassium salt (49 g/L at 0 °C) and its equivalent weight is also lower, which is often desirable.[1]

...

Safety

Like all hexavalent chromium compounds, sodium dichromate is considered hazardous, possibly carcinogenic.

Hexavalent chromium, where have I heard of that before...

Hexavalent chromium is the substance against which Erin Brockovich campaigned. It was found in drinking water in the Southern California town of Hinkley. Chromium(VI) is carcinogenic in groundwater,[5] and the 0.58 ppm in the groundwater in Hinkley exceeded the Maximum Contaminant Level of 0.10 ppm currently set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.[6] A similar case was discovered in 2007 in Asopos River, near Oinofyta, Greece and Brockovich is again focusing on it. [7]

Oh right! It's that really nasty stuff from the movie that gives you all sorts of cancer and eats you alive.

Wonderful!

Toxicity

In an organism's cells, hexavalent chromium undergoes reduction, first to metastable pentavalent chromium, then to trivalent chromium. Trivalent chromium binds to proteins and creates haptens which trigger immune system reaction. Once developed, chrome sensitivity becomes fairly persistent; in such cases, even contact with chromate-dyed textiles or wearing of chromate-tanned leather shoes can cause or exacerbate contact dermatitis.

Hexavalent chromium compounds are genotoxic carcinogens. Chronic inhalation of hexavalent chromium compounds increases risk of lung cancer (lungs are especially vulnerable, followed by fine capillaries in kidneys and intestine).

...

Researchers have recently reported discovering that vitamin C reacts inside human lung cells with chromium(VI), causing massive DNA damage. Low doses of chromium(VI), combined with vitamin C, produce up to 15 times as many chromosomal breaks and up to 10 times more mutations, compared with cells lacking vitamin C. Outside cells, vitamin C actually protects against the cellular damage caused by hexavalent chromium.[4]

(genotoxic == alters DNA in a bad way)

So you get massive amounts of genetic mutation, cancer, and damage to your digestive tract, lungs and brain.

Thanks Halliburton!

Sources: Raw Story
Wikipedia (Hexavalent Chromium)
Wikipedia (Sodium Dichromate)