Bush Lawyers

For When Newspeak and Doublethink Don't Go Far Enough

John Yoo, Tenured Loser
Apparently John Yoo gets to return to his job teaching at Berkeley law school, despite being the author of the infamous torture memoranda that gave Bush the greenlight for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the CIA 'black sites' around the world, etc.

The dean of Berkeley's law school says he is "substantively" troubled by former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo's legal memos, which critics say authorize torture, but he does not believe Yoo's conduct while working for the Bush administration justifies his dismissal from the law school where he has taught for a decade.

...

Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here is the relevant excerpt from the "General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees," adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of Regents:

Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty. [Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015]

This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, but I will put aside that shield and state my independent and personal view of the matter. I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are these: Was there clear professional misconduct—that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney—material to Professor Yoo’s academic position? Did the writing of the memoranda, and his related conduct, violate a criminal or comparable statute?

I guess advocating torture and murder in an official government capacity is legal for an American.

In World War II, we put people like Yoo on trial at Nuremberg, but times have changed.

Source: Raw Story

Just So You Know Who You're Dealing With
Here's an excerpt of Yoo's sterling legal thinking, from a 2006 debate with an actual human being.

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.

It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, "Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the 'war on terror’ than John Yoo."

This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Yes, Yoo thinks that there is no treaty or law that Congress can pass or approve that would ban the President of the United States from ordering the torture and mutilation of children.

It all depends on WHY he wants to crush a child's testicles with a hammer, you see.

Source: Information Clearinghouse

Eighth Amendment? What's That?
John Yoo is also the man who argued that torture doesn't violate the 8th Amendment because, even though a person has been declared an enemy combatant and is being held against their will, they're not being CONVICTED of anything, so it's ok to beat them and strap electrodes on and so forth.

A second constitutional provision which might be thought relevant to interrogations is the Eighth Amendment. The Eighth Amendment, however, applies solely to those persons upon whom criminal sanctions have been imposed.
--snip--
The Eighth Amendment thus has no application to those individuals who have not been punished as part of a criminal proceeding, irrespective of the fact that they have been detained by the government.
--snip--
The detention of enemy combatants can in no sense be deemed "punishment" for the purposes of the Eighth Amendment. Unlike imprisonment pursuant to criminal sanction, the detention of enemy combatants involves no sentence judicially imposed or legislatively required and those detained will be released at the end of the conflict.

See? It's ok to torture people as long as they have not been convicted of anything!

His reasoning, ironically enough, means that the only people safe from torture are convicts.

Justice Scalia shares this Alice in Wonderland approach to punishment of course.

Scalia said that it was "extraordinary" to assume that the U.S. Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" also applied to "so-called" torture.

"To begin with the Constitution ... is referring to punishment for crime. And, for example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime," he said in an interview with the Law in Action program on BBC Radio 4.

Scalia said stronger measures could be taken when a witness refused to answer questions.

"I suppose it's the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?" he asked.

"It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game" Scalia said. "How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?"

See? Torture is ok, if people are not yet convicted of a crime!

You can only punish the legally innocent!

What incentive is there for anyone to ever be tried at all? Just round up all your enemies, shove them in holes, and every couple of days haul them out for a rousing waterboard session. Don't bother thinking up charges; YOU WON'T NEED THEM.

Source: Firedoglake

Yoo Memo
And here of course is the famous Yoo Memo from last week, where he argues that, amongst other things, the military can MAIM YOU in the course of an interrogation, and that's ok.

Seriously. He does.

He also argues that the Fifth Amendment doesn't apply to torture, so long as it's done outside the United States, or to people who aren't US citizens.

And that the 8th amendment, again, has no place in torture.

From just a skim of this trash, which I intend to digest later when my blood pressure goes back down, it appears that Yoo likes to dance on the edge of any number of knives; what the President does to prisoners is ok, because we're at war, and you can do what you like during a war to people on the other side, according to the Constitution and Federal Law. Of course, if we WERE at war, the Geneva Conventions would apply, so we're not, because that would be wrong. But if we're not at war, then the Fifth Amendment would apply, at least on US soil (which Guantanamo is, for example, by treaty)... so we're not.

We're in a Quantum War state, both in, and not in, war at the same time. Our prisoners are both POWs, and not POWs. Our prisons are both US facilities, and foreign ones, as we see fit.

And on, and on, and on, down and down we go into the very pits of hell.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Finally, From the Bill of Rights

Amendment IV


The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V


No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI


In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VIII


Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX


The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

It almost seems like the Fourth Amendment guarantees your right to being safe in your own body, doesn't it?

And the Fifth, to being held against your will without due process, except perhaps during a war, which we never declared.

Or the Sixth, guaranteeing that you can't be held forever without a trial.

Or the Eighth, that doesn't seem to deal strictly with stuff that happens after a trial, as Scalia says, does it? I mean, you don't have bail AFTER a conviction. It's almost like they're NEVER supposed to beat you with metal rods.

And the Ninth would seem to say that, just because the Constitution never spells out 'We cannot torture people, cut off their fingers, torture their kids and rape their wives', that doesn't mean that the Government can, in fact, cut off your fingers, torture your kids or rape your wife.

Funny. I must be wrong, because a Berkeley law professor says it just isn't so.

Source: Cornell Law

Wastes of Human Skin Around the World

Jerks!

Insanity, Utter
What in the world could motivate someone to say something like this, in public no less.

Some 1,000 people attended a memorial service at the Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary Thursday, marking the one-month anniversary of the murderous attack which claimed the lives of eight young men.

Also attending the service were many prominent rabbis of the Religious Zionist Movement, who were not shy about expressing their rage against the government's policy.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, head of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, chose to explain the attack by saying that "the Torah and the land of Israel are acquired only through agony."

Former Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu called on the government to decree that for every life lost in the attack another yeshiva and township will be formed.

"Even when we seek revenge, it is important to make one thing clear – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs.

"The Talmud states that if gentiles rob Israel of silver they will pay it back in gold, and all that is taken will be paid back in folds, but in cases like these there is nothing to pay back, since as I said – the life of one yeshiva boy is worth more than the lives of 1,000 Arabs," added Rabbi Eliyahu.

A prominent religious leader said this. In a public gathering. And no one shouted him down.

Amazing. Thankfully there are moderate voices speaking out too, right?

Ramat Gan's chief rabbi, Yaacov Ariel, chose to deliver a more moderate message: "We do not seek vengeance, we seek retaliation. The terrorist's house should have been demolished immediately, regardless of the law. It should have been done because it was a matter of life and death – the deterrence could help save future lives."

"We are against killing innocent people or harming children," he added, "but once terrorists hide behind children, we have to strike back. The blood of those living in Sderot is worth just as much as the blood of those the terrorists hide behind."

He's referring to a vigilante mob that went to the house of the killer and tried to murder his entire family and raze his house to the ground.

That's the moderate position; kill a criminal's entire family. The hardline position is to kill a thousand innocent people of a 'lesser race' for every one you lose.

Once again, I state merely for the record: Israel is not our friend.

Individual Israelis? Of course. Israeli society as a whole? Never.

(The South is much the same way really)

Source: Ynet News

Security Guard
Now we move on to a more petty form of casual evil from our own Republican Party (also not our friends).

During a public appearance on Saturday, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) belittled a U.S. soldier in Iraq who was following orders and wouldn’t let McHenry go to the gym without the proper credentials. McHenry referred to the guard as a “two-bit security guard“:

We spent the night in the Green Zone, in the poolhouse of one of Saddam’s palaces. A little weird, I got to be honest with you. But I felt safe. And so in the morning, I got up early — not that I make this a great habit — but I went to the gym because I just couldn’t sleep and everything else. Well, sure enough, the guard wouldn’t let me in. Said I didn’t have the correct credentials.

It’s 5:00 in the morning. I haven’t had sleep. I was not very happy with this two-bit security guard. So you know, I said, “I want to see your supervisor.” Thirty minutes later, the supervisor wasn’t happy with me, they escort me back to my room. It happens. I guess I didn’t need to work out anyway.

How dare the lowly soldier question him, the Lord and Master of A North Carolina District? Doesn't he know how to treat his social betters? So what if Milord McHenry (R-Douchebagistan) didn't have his ID? Surely a servant should know the faces of all his masters!

But the GOP is the party of The Troops. Riiiiight.

Source: Think Progress

Lunatic Renders Satire Obsolete
Stephen Colbert probably thought that, when he started his comedic crusade against Bears, that he had found a bogeyman so comically absurd that no one could possibly take him seriously.

Alas, Glen Beck has found a new source of terror to wet himself about.

Last night on his CNN Headline News show, right-wing pundit Glenn Beck hosted global warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Beck allowed Inhofe to rant about how — with “all the liberals” running the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works — he was forced to sit through hearings on “that nice white fuzzy polar bear.”

Inhofe argued that the polar bear population isn’t endangered. “[I]f anything, it’s an overpopulation problem,” said Inhofe. Beck then jumped in and claimed that, in fact, the extinction of polar bears may be a good thing:

They eat people! For the love of Pete, they’re big, angry bears. They eat people. Not that I say we go out and kill all of them, but I mean, it doesn’t seem to be a problem here. Senator, I can’t take the — I can’t take the lies anymore.

There is currently an estimated 20,000-25,000 polar bears worldwide who are threatened with “losing their habitat and becoming extinct over the next 50 years” because of global warming and melting sea ice. The U.S. Geological Survey predicts that without action, “11 of the 19 subpopulations will be extinct by the middle of this century, with an additional three subpopulations vanishing shortly thereafter.”

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne skipped a Senate hearing on listing the polar bear as a threatened species. His agency missed a Jan. 9 deadline to decide on classifying the polar bear, in violation of the Endangered Species Act, according to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

Inhofe is a famous loon on climate issues, but this bear thing is a new one for, well, everybody. Except Colbert, who is probably having a hard time dealing with the way he has to keep moving the Crazy Goalposts to stay ahead of the right wing.

Source: Think Progress

Mugabe
Ahh, a classic. The inept, bumbling, hyper-corrupt dictator offering to step down in exchange for immunity and getting to keep all his stolen stuff.

Robert Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.

But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree then Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.

Then of course there's the stick; if the oppo doesn't agree to his demands, he'll negate their election win and try to murder them all.

Really, if history's not cyclical, it certainly is repetitive.

Source: The Guardian

Huh?
Right wing commentator Hugh Hewitt, trying to find fault with a Hillary speech.

I played excerpts from Hillary's speech from today, in which she references "hurling" her "bookbag" across her room at college on hearing of the assassination of MLK, as well as wearing a black arm band in a protest march in Boston in the aftermath of the murder.

Listeners are e-mailing skepticism about their being bookbags and arm bands in 1968. I have no opinion, being 12 at the time. E-mail evidence to hugh@hughhewitt.com

Bookbags and arm bands? In 1968?

Why, they only had stone tablets and mammoth pelts in 1968! Clearly she's a liar!

If only there was a famous historial example of students and arm bands in the 1960s that could settle this difficult question for Mr. Hewitt. Oh, if only

MR. JUSTICE FORTAS delivered the opinion of the Court.

Petitioner John F. Tinker, 15 years old, and petitioner Christopher Eckhardt, 16 years old, attended high schools in Des Moines, Iowa. Petitioner Mary Beth Tinker, John's sister, was a 13-year-old student in junior high school.

In December 1965, a group of adults and students in Des Moines held a meeting at the Eckhardt home. The group determined to publicize their objections to the hostilities in Vietnam and their support for a truce by wearing black armbands during the holiday season and by fasting on December 16 and New Year's Eve. Petitioners and their parents had previously engaged in similar activities, and they decided to participate in the program.

The principals of the Des Moines schools became aware of the plan to wear armbands. On December 14, 1965, they met and adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband to school would be asked to remove it, and if he refused he would be suspended until he returned without the armband. Petitioners were aware of the regulation that the school authorities adopted.

On December 16, Mary Beth and Christopher wore black armbands to their schools. John Tinker wore his armband the next day. They were all sent home and suspended from school until they would come back without their armbands. They did not return to school until after the planned period for wearing armbands had expired--that is, until after New Year's Day.

That's right! It's Tinker v. Des Moines School District, the landmark 1969 case which strongly held that students in public school do in fact have political rights!

First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

One of the most important legal decisions in the modern era! One of the most famous court cases of the decade!

Ahh, right wingers. So astoundingly ignorant.

Moron.

Sources: Instaputz
Boston College (though you can get the Tinker ruling about ten million places, it was just the first Google hit)

Saudi Idiots
So the Saudis are looking to murder a Canadian kid.

A Saudi Arabian court convicted a 17-year-old Canadian for involvement in the murder of a classmate and sentenced him on Saturday to a year in prison and 200 lashes, his father and lawyer said.

The boy's older brother, Mohammed Kohail, was already convicted on March 4 in the murder, and sentenced to death by beheading, along with a third man, a Jordanian.

Canada has said it would seek clemency for Mohammad, 23.

Mohammad and his younger brother, Sultan Kohail, 17, were detained in January 2007 after a school yard brawl resulted in the death of another student from internal injuries.

According to one of the defense lawyers, Mohammad had gone to the school to pick up his brother when a group of young men started harassing the younger boy. A scuffle ensued during which a Syrian classmate, Munther al-Haraki, died.

Sultan was sentenced to a year in prison and to 200 lashes, both the boy's father, Ali Kohail, and lawyer, Saleh al-Ghamdi, told The Associated Press.

...

Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, rape and armed robbery can be executed, usually with a sword. So far this year, 36 people have been executed in the kingdom.

Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976.

Canada did, but not us!

The United States and Saudi Arabia really do have something in common!

Seriously, a bunch of kids get in a fight, one dies. You want to kill someone for that? For what is obviously some sort of manslaughter?

Prison term I can understand, but death by beheading? Are they insane?

Oh wait. It's Saudi Arabia. Of course they are.

Source: Raw Story

Gag Rule
Disgusting.

A prominent public health school has restored the word "abortion" as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.

The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.

The restriction on the POPLINE Web site — "population information online" — had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.

USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.

This is what's known as the 'Global Gag Rule', that is to say, if you even mention that abortions exist, you can't get money to help people. Aid agencies in Africa and so forth are required to deceive and mislead their female patients, if necessary allow them to suffer and die from pregnancies rather than get abortions.

That's the compassion in compassionate conservatism. Now it hits Americans too. Sigh.

Source: Raw Story

France Has Them Too

Vandals desecrated 148 Muslim graves in France's biggest war cemetery, hanging a pig's head from one tombstone and daubing slogans insulting France's Muslim justice minister, officials said Sunday.

President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "profound outrage" at the "sordid" attack on the Muslim quarter of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, near the northern town of Arras on Saturday night. He vowed that those responsible would be punished.

The cemetery is France's biggest military graveyards and commemorates tens of thousands of victims of a series of long and bloody battles for control of northern France at the start of World War I.

The attack came almost exactly a year after a similar incident in which neo-Nazi vandals scrawled swastikas on 52 of the cemetery's Muslim graves.

...

Prior to 2007, there were four incidents involving the desecration of Muslim graves in northern and eastern France in 2004, and one in 2003.

There have also been several attacks on Jewish graves in cemeteries across France in recent years.

Just goes to show that wherever you have xenophobic conservative politics, you get mind-numbing crime. France has had a really bad run of arch-conservative Muslim bashing in recent years, and here you see the end result.

Source: Raw Story

Hitchens
Legendary drunkard and all around jerk Christopher Hitchens was on MSNBC the other day, which can only mean the bars were closed. He made a fool of himself as usual.

Summary: On MSNBC's Tim Russert, responding to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan said, "And now you've made me forget my second point," to which Hitchens replied, "Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it."

I'm not even sure what's going on here. Andrew Sullivan is a well known and somewhat idiotic gay conservative. Is Hitchens insulting him for being gay? Confused about his gender? Does he think lesbians have conversational trouble?

Seriously. He's so wasted he isn't even making sense in his offensive comments.

Source: Think Progress

El Presidente Doesn't Just Outsource Our Jobs

The CIA secretly transported at least 14 war on terror detainees to Jordan between 2001 and 2004, making it the top "rendition" destination at that time, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

"While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan," the rights group said in a statement.

The prisoners were interrogated and tortured by Jordan's General Intelligence Department, according to a new Human Rights Watch report that documents eight previously unknown cases of rendition.

...

The report includes an excerpt of a note handwritten by a rendered prisoner while in Jordanian custody in late 2002. The prisoner is now at the US war on terror prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi wrote that GID interrogators beat him "in a way that does not know any limits."

"They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs .... [They said] we'll make you see death .... They threatened to rape me," the note said.

A common torture method was falaqa, by which prisoners are given extended beatings on the bottoms of their feet.

"Just about everyone at GID was beaten with sticks," a Jordanian former prisoner told Human Rights Watch. "People were beaten on their feet. They did it in the basement."

"Outsourcing torture is not only wrong, it's illegal," Mariner said. "And the US can't say it doesn't torture if it sends people to countries that do."

So naive. Of course it can! And will! Even with St. John McCain, himself a torture survivor! American hypocrisy (the Republicans call it 'American Exceptionalism') knows no earthly bounds!

Source: Raw Story

Mukasey is a LIAR
Well, either that, or the Bush administration actually did cover up the WTC attacks.

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:
I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

...

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

It's binary, folks. Either Mukasey was lying, or Bush actually did cover up the true origins of the Buildings Go Boom day attacks.

We live in an unprecedented era for jerks.

Source: Glenn Greenwald

George Will
A man who just doesn't care about a few dead union workers.

Yesterday George Bush signed a "fast track" bill that allows him to force a vote within 90 days with no amendments from Congress on the Columbia Free Trade Agreement. George Will is visibly aroused at the sight, and takes the opportunity to have a swing at both Obama and unions:

Nevertheless, U.S. unions oppose the agreement, probably to preserve the moral clarity of their monomania: Damn the details, full speed ahead in opposing more free-trade agreements, anywhere, anytime. Colombia, America's best South American ally, shares a border with America's most aggressive South American enemy, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.

Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, has made stunning progress against the drug cartels, right-wing militias and FARC, the 9,000-man Marxist terrorist group that is financed by drug smuggling and kidnapping. But Obama, nimble at the art of enveloping the courtship of interest groups in clouds of high-mindedness, says Colombia has not done enough to protect its trade unionists.

Colombia's unions, however, document that the number of murders of their members has sharply declined. Edward Schumacher-Matos, visiting professor of Latin American studies at Harvard, notes that "it was far safer to be in a union than to be an ordinary citizen in Colombia last year": The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally.

Meanwhile, the facts on the ground seem to be a bit different.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, according to Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS), a highly regarded labor institute based in Medellin, Colombia. Two thousand, two hundred and sixty two union officers and rank-and-file members have been brutally and systematically murdered since 1991. More than 400 trade unionists have been murdered since President Uribe took office in 2002, including forty in 2007 for exercising their fundamental right to form unions for a better life. In those cases where the perpetrator is known, government-supported paramilitary organizations or the armed forces or police are most often responsible.

That's right, only a few hundred dead unionists under the benevolent Uribe.

That's all.

And that's fine with George Will!

Source: Firedoglake

Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer for his odious article about how ignorant the working man is.

_ Feature writing, for Gene Weingarten's story on world-class violinist Joshua Bell, who, in an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station just to see who commuters would react;

On its surface, Weingarten's story is designed to make you feel wistful about the sad state of humanity. That's the goal, to confuse the issue, to write a seemingly banal but harmless lamentation about modernity.

But a closer look reveals yet another elitist jerk. Weingarten staged his 'experiment' at a busy subway stop during rush hour. He then castigates all the people on the way to work who don't stop, miss their trains, arrive late at their jobs and possibly get fired, for not appreciating the music he considers important.

He just assumes that everyone has the liberty to waste the day away on leisure. He also assumes that his taste in leisure and culture is definitive.

And the Pulitzer people just signed off on it. Reprehensible.

You'll note he didn't try his experiment outside an investment bank, or a fancy restaurant. No no; he knows that the upper classes have respect for culture. He has to see what the lowly, common man thinks.

I'll tell you what they might be thinking. They might think that a guy who judges them so harshly for having work and lives is a colossal asshole.

Source: Raw Story

Chris Matthews
Well, the loudmouthed jerk who made his bones on the Lewinsky scandal, well-known egotist and misogynist Chris Matthews, has a big feature biographical piece in the upcoming NYT magazine. A couple of highlights:

"People are a little impressed with themselves," Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. "It's a bit of an echo chamber." Matthews is central to that echo chamber -- at the Ritz, as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Mat-thews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of "Hardball." "Hey, there I am -- it's me," he said, staring at himself on the screen. "It's me."

...

"Did you get a load of Lou Rawls's wife?" Matthews said as he left the spin room. Apparently the Rev. Jesse Jackson was introducing the widow of the R&B singer at the media center. "She was an absolute knockout," Matthews declared. It's a common Matthews designation. The actress Kerry Washington was also a "total knockout," according to Matthews, who by 1 a.m. had repaired to the bar of the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. He was sipping a Diet Coke and holding court for a cluster of network and political types, as well as for a procession of random glad-handers that included, wouldn't you know it, Kerry Washington herself. Washington played Ray Charles's wife in the movie "Ray" and Kay Amin in the "Last King of Scotland." She is a big Obama supporter and was in town for the debate; more to the point, she said she likes "Hard-ball." Matthews grabbed her hand, and Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC who was seated across the table, vowed to get her on the show.

"I know why he wants you on," Matthews said to Washington while looking at Griffin. At which point Matthews did something he rarely does. He paused. He seemed actually to be considering what he was about to say. He might even have been editing himself, which is anything but a natural act for him. He was grimacing. I imagined a little superego hamster racing against a speeding treadmill inside Matthews's skull, until the superego hamster was overrun and the pause ended.

"He wants you on because you're beautiful," Matthews said. "And because you're black." He handed Washington a business card and told her to call anytime "if you ever want to hang out with Chris Matthews."

This is a man who was apparently only drinking DIET COKE. He's fascinated, Narcissus style, with his own reflection and strutting around like a horny dog, but he's only on DIET COKE.

God I'd hate to see him drunk.

Source: Media Bistro

You Can't Spell Lieberman Without 'Lie'
So Holy Joe Lieberman was losing the Democratic primary badly against Ned Lamont. As a last ditch measure on the day of the primary his website went down and he accused Lamont's web people of attacking and compromising it. Lamont's team said that was crap. The FBI investigated and never released the results. Now they have:

One of the stranger episodes of the Lieberman-Lamont primary in 2006 was the Lieberman campaign's charge that supporters of his rival (whose web guy, Tim Tagaris, is above) "attacked" Lieberman's website.

Anyway, the FBI has finally gotten to the bottom of it, in case you were wondering. The verdict: Not guilty.

So the FBI found out that Lamont didn't do it, and then they refused to say who did.

So who was to blame?

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti-Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters.

"The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack," according to the e-mail.

A program that could have detected a legitimate attack was improperly configured, the e-mail states.

"New Haven will be administratively closing this investigation," it concluded.

The e-mail, dated Oct. 25, 2006, was included in a technical packet of information recently sent to The Advocate in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act filed in late 2006 with the offices of state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.

The Advocate filed the requests after Blumenthal and O'Connor closed the case but declined to divulge details. They stated only that they found no evidence that Lamont supporters were to blame.

...

"Our Web site consultant assured us in the strongest terms possible that we had been attacked," former Lieberman campaign spokesman Dan Gerstein said in December 2006.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. . . . Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

That's right, Holy Joe! He blamed others for his own campaign mistakes, slandered Ned Lamont, and the FBI got in the tank for him!

Then fought tooth and nail to prevent it getting out in court!

Source: The Politico
The Stamford Advocate

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

Even More Political News

Political

Goooooooooooooooore
So there's chatter about Gore as a consensus candidate for the Dems.

That'd be amazing. But it will never happen. The world is not that kind to me.

Plans for Al Gore to take the Democratic presidential nomination as the saviour of a bitterly divided party are being actively discussed by senior figures and aides to the former vice-president.

The bloody civil war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has left many Democrats convinced that neither can deliver a knockout blow to the other and that both have been so damaged that they risk losing November's election to the Republican nominee, John McCain.

...

Following a brief flurry of speculation that he might jump into the race last year, Mr Gore claimed he had "fallen out of love" with politics, but he has pointedly refused to rule out another tilt at the White House and said that the only job in public life that interests him is the presidency.

Source: The Telegraph

Tip 'Sharing'
This isn't about the standard 'wait staff share with kitchen staff' sort of thing.

This is where Starbucks stole tips from hourly workers for management.

Starbucks Corp. plans to appeal a San Diego Superior Court ruling last week that ordered the coffee chain to compensate California baristas for tips they shared with shift supervisors.

...

In a separate statement Thursday, Starbucks said there is no money to be "refunded or returned from Starbucks."

The California lawsuit was filed in 2004, and was granted class-action status in 2006. Last week, San Diego Superior Court Judge Patricia Cowett ordered Starbucks to pay baristas more than $100 million in back tips and interest, saying state law prohibits managers and supervisors from taking a cut from the tip jar. A hearing is set for May 1 before Cowett on how the California tip money should be distributed.

Starbucks responded in the statement that "shift supervisors are not managers and have no managerial authority," and customers don't differentiate between the supervisors and baristas when they tip.

Cowett also issued an injunction preventing Starbucks' shift supervisors from sharing in future tips, but Starbucks spokeswoman Valerie O'Neil said it would not comply with that order while it appeals the court decision.

Right. The 'supervisor' has no managerial authority.

I'm sorry, but this is absurd. Management stealing from the tip jars? Seriously?

Give me a break. When they want to break a union, companies call nurses 'managers'; when they want to steal from workers, they call managers 'shift supervisors'.

They don't just want to have their cake and eat it too; they want yours.

Source: Raw Story

End Game
So, how does a longtime insurgency, like the one we're facing in Iraq, actually end?

Simple. It ends when everyone gets exhausted.

The first time I visited Belfast, in 1977, it was a city under siege. Stores were closed. British bunkers protected by anti-rocket meshing sat on most intersections. Police and military patrols were the only sign of life on the street. The Europa, which had to be the most bombed hotel in the world, was a sandbagged fortress.

On paper at least, the 1998 agreement between the IRA and the British government was what started to put an end to the violent conflict. But at the bottom of it the IRA lost the will to fight.

This year's IRA parade on Easter morning was one of the most anodyne, sentimentalized events I've ever seen, made up mostly of little boys and old men not even bothering to pose as veterans. A half a dozen marchers carried wooden rifles, but the Republican banners were furled — on orders from the IRA's leadership. Armored police Land Rovers were parked inconspicuously on side streets, but they were there to protect the marchers from Protestants rather than keep a watch on them.

Any lingering doubt I had that the conflict was truly over disappeared when I saw the Europa. There wasn't even a car bomb barrier out front. The place was full of families, many of them American, coming home for Easter. Ex-IRA foot soldiers out front offered driving tours of the old IRA battlefields. Who would ever have thought Northern Ireland would be turned into a theme park?

...

But it wasn't just in Northern Ireland that there was an end to violence. I was in Palermo on Good Friday and met the city's police chief. It's been 15 years since the Sicilian Mafia has been blowing up judges and prosecutors. Is the violence over? "If I dare say it, it is," the police chief said. "The Mafia figured out it just wasn't worth it, the killing and bombing, drawing the fury of Rome."

To be sure, the Mafia still runs Sicily. But like the IRA it is an anodyne force. It is moving into white-collar crime — where the real money is and the sentences are lighter.

...

Before I left Beirut last week I sat down with a member of Hizballah's politburo. He didn't look anything like the old Hizballah I knew from the '80s. For a start he asked to meet in the posh Vendome Hotel, in the rooftop restaurant that has a commanding view over the Corniche and the Mediterranean. Clean shaven and carrying a new leather briefcase, he offered me a Cuban cigar as soon as he sat down. He had just come from a class teaching economics.

We started off talking about the Hizballah military commander Imad Mughniyah, who was assassinated in Damascus on February 12. "Yes, indeed," he said in fluent English, "Hizballah will absolutely have to respond. But not now. There is too much too lose."

He added that he thought that it was unfortunate the West focuses only on Hizballah's military wing. "Can't anyone see Hizballah is just as much about an economic revolution as it is fighting Israel?"

People complain about the Godfather Pt. III endlessly, but it turns out that the portrayal of the end of the Corleone family was fairly accurate. When people tire of violence, they end up moving on to something else, often something more lucrative.

Source: Time.com

Sign of the Times
The housing crisis has become so bad that looters are stealing the copper pipes from old houses, which are worth significantly more than the houses they're found inside.

Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India.

In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

"We're in an incredibly unfortunate time where the nonferrous metals commodities market for scrap is at an all-time high. Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process," Cleveland city councilor Tony Brancatelli said.

"We're seeing houses sold for $100 that are distressed houses that should not be recycled," he said. Some boarded-up homes in his Slavic Village community have "No copper, only PVC" painted on the boards to stop would-be thieves.

This isn't a joke; houses can go for less than the price of their telephone wiring.

Thanks a lot, El Presidente!

Source: Raw Story

A Picture Says 4 Thousand Names
Portrait of El Presidente and St. John McCain, made from the composite of pictures of the four thousand people we've lost in Iraq.

Source: Huffington Post

Cesar Chavez Day
Clinton and Obama are working to one-up each other, but for a change, in a good way.

Cesar Chavez Day.

That's what Barack Obama is endorsing: A national holiday in honor of the late, legendary activist for farmworker rights (pictured below).

Today is Chavez's birthday -- and Hillary Clinton's campaign was the first to draw attention to that this morning, issuing a statement celebrating the 81st anniversary of Chavez's birth (he died on April 23, 1993).


But Obama, who has struggled to overcome Clinton's significant advantage among Latino voters in state after state, sought to one-up his rival for the Democratic presidential nod by joining the call for creating a national holiday to commemorate the father of the United Farm Workers.

Now if we could only get them doing this on Iraq.

Source: The LA Times

Enough Already

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room finds a 2006 report written for U.S. Special Operations Command that suggests ways the military should deal with the blogosphere. One suggestion is for the military to hire bloggers to “pass the U.S. message“:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence…to pass the U.S. message. … On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog.

Yeah. This isn't the least bit unseemly.

Source: Think Progress

Primaries
I can't believe I agree with a Florida politician, but I've been saying the same basic thing for a while now.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) appeared on CNN to slam both the Democratic Party nominating process and the Electoral College.

Nelson said he would like to abolish the Electoral College entirely, because "people are increasingly dissatisfied when you can have the most votes for president and the other candidate ... ends up being elected, as last happened in the year 2000."

He is also proposing to do away with the current presidential nominating procedures in favor of six large regional primaries, which would be held between March and June of every presidential election year in an order to be determined by drawing lots.

CBS's John Roberts did not comment on the merits of Nelson's proposal, but merely noted that "Iowa and New Hampshire are going to scream bloody murder."

"Of course they're going to kick up and scream, "Nelson replied, "but those states are not representative of America as a whole and why should they have an outsized influence?"

The regional primary is a neat idea. It would curtail travel costs and provide a logical grouping, so that regional issues and focuses would be retained.

On the other hand, 'region' is a bit hard to define. California is big enough and powerful enough to count as its own country. It would easily qualify as two or three regions of its own. On the other hand, the South may be a series of states, but demographically and politically they comprise, with the exception of Florida, one big bloc of Stupid.

I'd suggest a rotation for primaries, with first year determined by lots, rather than lots each time. That could lead to a run of one area being first or last that would be unpleasant.

Other than that, not a shabby plan. As for Iowa and New Hamsphire? Fuck 'em. The current system is the height of anti-democratic behavior.

Source: Raw Story

Death of Death Benefit
So Chrysler is screwing over their middle rank white collar workers.

Chrysler LLC's white-collar retirees are losing free life insurance benefits but are eligible for a one-time pension boost of up to $4,000, according to a letter retirees should receive this week.

Previously retirees were covered by a life insurance policy at no charge, with a death benefit equal to their last year of pay, for those who retired before 2003, or $50,000 for those who retired after that.

Chrysler is allowing affected retirees a one-time opportunity to buy into a voluntary plan through MetLife at a reduced, group rate.

...

On one hand, retirees' families are less likely to need the life insurance payout to support a family or pay off a mortgage, Wise said. On the other, the cost of a 65-year old obtaining even a 20-year term plan is steep -- $1,600 a year or more, he said.

...

White-collar retirees will receive from $1,000 to $4,000, depending on their years of service and years since retirement. They may choose to take the payment as a one-time lump sum, roll it into an Individual Retirement Account, or have it paid as part of their monthly benefit.

So they get at most 4 grand in exchange for losing 20+ grand of insurance premiums.

Oh yeah, what a bargain!

Still think we don't need white collar unions?

Source: The Detroit News

King Corn
The Ethanol Lobby strikes again.

BB&T Capital Markets analyst said Monday corn rationing may be necessary this year, following a U.S. Department of Agriculture report predicting farmers would plant far fewer acres of corn in 2008.

According to the March Prospective Plantings Report, farmers intend to plant about 86 million acres of corn this year, down 8 percent from 2007, when the amount of corn planted was the highest since World War II.

Analyst Heather L. Jones said in a note to investors if the USDA estimate proves accurate, the year may produce just 200 million bushels of corn. That, she said, wouldn't be enough to meet demand, given current export and feed demand trends and higher ethanol demand. Both ethanol and animal feed are made with corn.

...

Shares of Tyson Foods Inc., one of the world's largest meat companies, fell 12 cents to $16.01 in afternoon trading, while shares of pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. dropped 39 cents to $25.57.

Chicken producer Pilgrim's Pride Corp. shares dipped 19 cents to $20.28. Earlier in the day, the stock reached a new four-year low of $20.08.

Thanks a lot, Flexfuel Fuckers.

Thanks a lot.

Source: Raw Story

Hagee Video
This is still in my browser window from quite a while ago.


Man it's been in there forever.

Source: Attytood

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