Docudharma - Recommended Diaries

Let's Pretend...The Essay

dharmasyd — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:16:05 GMT

Now see this:

And just think, there's only 23 shopping days left until April Fool's!

god fucking dammit...THANK YOU

Lady Libertine — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:38:55 GMT

Ive always known I would get this call... for years.

god god god fucking dammit.

my ex-husband ... crazy mutherfucker ... one of the dearest soul friends I could ever have. I rarely see him but he's always there, floating around in my conscious watery mind.

fuck

no info just yet... waiting for that. Sometime between last night and this morning. Word will come through the vine, when they know. Body at the ME's now.

Im shaking.

UPDATE: 7:30PM: Found in a field, not far form his sculpture studio, maybe on his way to the store for coffee, pullin' an all nighter. Thoughts / suspicions of foul play (or something weird) lessened now considerably.

On Walkabout. Or a Vision Quest maybe.

A FB'r posted: "The Harris County Medical Examiner's office has a tentative ID, they are waiting for fingerprints to confirm. That is standard practice. The autopsy was completed today and a preliminary finding will be available tomorrow, I will post more when I find out. "

He was one of the original Urban Animals. Among other things.

~~The Tribe is gathering at the Pub, guess Ill head over there.~~ this weekend.

THANK YOU ALL for your love and sweet thoughts. Muchly appreciated.

Godspeed, my friend.

UPDATED: 10PM... some folks are starting to upload some pics into a FB group now. This one is just so funny. He used to joke about wanting to find a Lime Green Leisure suit... he liked to piss off the snotty Elitist Art World whenever possible, so a find like this jacket was quite a thrill for him. I decided to title this pic (its not my pic) ..."Dancing With Hunter". He was an avid reader and could recall details from books that he read 20 years ago in impressive detail. Kerouac, Hunter, Tom Robbins... the usual suspects.

Why we are headed for a double-dip depression

gjohnsit — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:45:04 GMT

It may be the one-year anniversary of an amazing stock market rally, but economists are sounding rather pessimistic these days.

A growing expectation of a double-dip recession is evident in a new poll of financial executives...the poll found more than half of financial executives predicting another downturn, and most expecting jobs recovery to lag into 2011.

The predictions don't end with just this poll. Nouriel Roubini is also warning of a second leg down, and even more disturbing is this report.

Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country's worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis - one that will be even worse than the current one - is looming, according to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators.

What is important isn't the warnings themselves, it is the why that matters. The why tells the story, not just of how the crisis happened, but also what we should be doing. In this case, the why also tells us much about our economy and are values.
From the report:

The report warns that the country is now immersed in a "doomsday cycle" wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management - and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.
"Risk-taking at banks," the report cautions, "will soon be larger than ever."

The report centers on the simple fact that the financial system has not been reformed, and is in fact more concentrated than even before the crisis. It also blasts our political leaders for showing none of the backbone and good sense that is needed at a time like this.

Despite the scary quotes, the report doesn't go as far as it probably needs to go. For instance, William Black, the guy who helped clean up the S&L banks in the 90's, has this opinion on the state of the financial industry.

PAUL SOLMAN: What would you have us do about the major financial institutions as they currently exist?
WILLIAM BLACK: First, stop them from getting bigger. The 19 largest institutions are what we call systemically dangerous institutions. Many of them are already insolvent on any real market value basis.
PAUL SOLMAN: What do you mean insolvent? I mean, they're reporting large enough profits, that they can give bonuses to their employees.
WILLIAM BLACK: They were able to get Congress to extort FASB, which is the Accounting Standards Board, to change the rules, so that you no longer have to recognize losses on your bad loans, unless and until you actually sell them.

A country full of broke banks is not a new scenario. It happened as recently as the early 1990's in Japan.
Like Japan, we had a credit-induced stock market and real estate bubble. Like Japan, both bubbles burst around the same time. Like Japan, the government decided to stimulate now and reform later.
The Japanese government used targeted tax cuts and infrastructure spending, with the budget going from positive territory to deeply negative territory, much like we are today. Japan's central bank responded by cutting interest rates to zero, much like we have today.

Japan has run up the national debt equal to 200% of GDP - the greatest Keynesian stimulus program in history - all in the name of stimulating the economy back to health. It has failed miserably. Japan's nominal GDP is about the same as when the stimulus began. Those who advocated the policy blame Japan's failure on either the stimulus being too small or not being sustained for long enough - that is, the dosage, not the medicine itself, was at fault...
What ails Japan is a lack of reforms, not stimulus. The prolonged and massive bailout has only allowed a bad situation to continue. As governments around the world look at their own problems, this is the lesson they should draw from Japan - not the wrong one that insists Japan should have spent more.

Throwing money at a problem that is essentially created by easy money is the wrong solution. The country is suffering from decades of malinvestment created with bad debt. That bad debt needs to be washed out of the system. Losses need to be recognized and written off.

Fighting the last war

Right from the start of this crisis, our leaders have prescribed the wrong medicine for what ails us. Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner have approached this as a crisis of liquidity (i.e the ability to borrow) instead of one of insolvency. Renown economists such as Paul Kruman and James Galbraith have pointed out this fundamental error to no avail.
What does it mean to make this mistake? A good example of the consequences of this flawed policy are in this mostly overlooked news article.

Nevada Federal Credit Union has a deal for big savers: Withdraw your money and you'll get a bonus...
The financial institution typically uses member deposits, including certificates of deposit and money market accounts, to make loans, which typically bear higher rates than deposits.
Beal figures those interest-bearing accounts are a money-losing proposition in Nevada's current depressed economy.
"We don't have any loan demand right now," Beal said.

Approaching this as a liquidity problem means the prescription is to push down interest rates and making sure that financial institutions can borrow all the money they need from the Federal Reserve. As is evident in the example above, that policy has actually done harm instead of helped.
The problem isn't the ability of banks to get money. The problem is finding credit-worthy borrowers. Everyone from Wall Street to Main Street is already overloaded in debt after purchasing overvalued assets. This weird dynamic has broken the traditional banking model that all financial regulation is built upon.

The old definition of banks, "take demand deposits and make commercial loans," has been changed in practice to a new one: "borrow money guaranteed by the government and make real estate loans." The implications of this structural shift for systemic financial risk have yet to be worked out.

The year long stock market rally has managed to push bank equity values up and give them the appearance of health, but their underlying portfolios are still full of toxic assets that have continued to fall in price. Thus the insolvency of the banks has continued. William Black says that this is all by design.

The administration and industry do not want the public to know that the financial system brought us to the brink of a Great Depression and that Treasury and the Fed only delayed that catastrophe by adopting policies that (1) increased "moral hazard", which makes future crises more likely, and (2) combine the worst elements of "crony capitalism" and the "socialized losses."
There has been no honest examination of the crisis because it would embarrass C.E.O.s and politicians...
Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well. There have been no prosecutions of the chief executives of the large nonprime lenders that would expose the "epidemic" of fraudulent mortgage lending that drove the crisis. There has been no accountability.

The first step toward fixing this mess is creating accountability. The idea that it was a "few bad apples" has been floated, but few have fallen for it. Very quietly, Wall Street has been losing one lawsuit after another from angry investors. Wall Street has paid out $430 Billion in damages to victimized investors in 1,500 different lawsuits. Yet the SEC is unable to bring a single criminal charge against a bank CEO.
It isn't just Black who thinks the crisis was caused by fraud. Elizabeth Warren also suspects massive fraud, as does Janet Tavakoli, Congress woman Marcy Kaptur, economist Max Wolff, and economics professor James K. Galbraith.

You had fraud in the origination of the mortgages, fraud in the underwriting, fraud in the ratings agencies.

Instead of doing what is right, both the Bush and Obama Administrations have worked hard to eliminate accountability. If anything, there appears to be an ongoing cover-up that spans both White House administrations and both parties in Congress. The fraud even appears to stretch into the Federal Reserve itself.
The news media has participated in this sham by covering the crisis in a way that takes all the human elements out of it.

What's a little fraud between friends?

As Elizabeth Warren has pointed out repeatedly, few wealthy investors "took a haircut" from their bad investments, few CEO lost his jobs, and no Too-Big-To-Fail bank was broken up. Nothing has changed on Wall Street, except that there are fewer banks where bankers are free to commit fraud.
Reform is important, but prosecuting the fraud is even more important. The crisis happened because no one was sure of the extent of the fraud, so everyone stopped loaning money to each other, and buying each other's financial products. There was a crisis of trust. Trust must be restored before the system starts working properly again, and to do that the criminals must be held accountable.

The public will need to "hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again." In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again, he argued.

There was a three year gap between the 1929 stock market crash and the Pecora Commission, which exposed to the public massive fraud and conflicts of interest that caused the crash. During that three year period the country sank into Depression. The results of the Pecora findings was the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933, and the creation of the SEC.
The economy would never have recovered without these reforms, the reforms would never have happened without the Pecora Commission, and the Pecora Commission would never have been created without a collective decision that people had to be held accountable for the fraud.

Until the collective outrage of the American citizens overwhelms the politician's loyalty to their corporate sponsors, and some of these criminals are prosecuted, then we will continue to follow the path of Japan. One year of sluggish growth and high unemployment will follow the next, while the government runs up enormous deficits in the false hope that the next stimulus bill will finally do the trick.

This is one of the instances where the moral and just thing also happens to be the smart thing to do. The criminals must be exposed and punished. The speculators on Wall Street must recognize their losses. The financial monopolists must be broken up.
It seems so simple. What lies between us and this logical outcome is a broken political system and a wealthy criminal class.

Overnight Caption Contest (new)

Night Owl — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:29:50 GMT

Schoolkids Beaten by Cops for Protesting Fee Hikes

AmericanRiverCanyon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:39:58 GMT

This is a followup piece to my diary about the MSM noticing that on March 4, 2010 college kids all over the country were protesting the drastic tuition and fee hikes they are facing in order to try to continue their educations.
"It did get a bit disruptive"
http://www.docudharma.com/diar...

Here in CA the state is raising tuition 32%, while cutting funding to state colleges and universities by a total of 1.4 billion dollars. Community colleges are also facing drastic cuts in funding for classes, meaning that there ARE no classes for 200,000 students.

In that diary I had a bit of a time getting a short little video to embed of protesting students in Oakland, who had marched several miles then got up onto the 880 freeway, which showed a view of the freeway, shot from above and at a distance out of somebody's apartment window, with the cars stopped in the distance and the protesters were huddled up on the exit ramp below by the police. (thanks to Edger for fixing it)

Student Protest In Oakland shuts down Freeway, March 4 2010, from CNN iReporter

This new video is rather brutal as it shows the view on the ground, as the Oakland PD's Riot division beating the crap out of the same Oakland students with batons, whom they had herded up against the freeway median divider. One 15 year old suffered a fractured skull after either jumping or being pushed in the melee, trying to escape. The people who took the video were also arrested and held for over 20 hours inspite of having press credentials for Democracy Now!

*
March 4, 2010: Police Attack 880 Interstate Takeover

This was on HuffPo as Student Activists Beaten After Rally On Interstate
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

In my previous diary I said that if you've lost the polite and super smart students of agricultural UC Davis, you've lost them all.

In this diary I say that if you are protesting tuition fee hikes and class cancelations in much poorer and grittier Oakland, you are at higher risk of physical injury by the authorities, even if you're lying on the ground.

I guess they could try emailing next time because that always gets more school funding.

The Gitmo 9: First Let's Bash All The Lawyers

davidseth — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:11:15 GMT

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Henry VI, Part 2; Act 4, Scene2

The New York Times editorial gets it right. The Right is attacking DoJ lawyers who once represented Gitmo detainees. The Times correctly points out that this is a smear for political gain that undercuts justice in this country.

In the McCarthy era, demagogues on the right smeared loyal Americans as disloyal and charged that the government was being undermined from within.
In this era, demagogues on the right are smearing loyal Americans as disloyal and charging that the government is being undermined from within.

These voices - often heard on Fox News - are going after Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantánamo detainees when they were in private practice. It is not nearly enough to say that these lawyers did nothing wrong. In fact, they upheld the highest standards of their profession and advanced the cause of democratic justice. The Justice Department is right to stand up to this ugly bullying.
Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has been pressing Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. since November to reveal the names of lawyers on his staff who have done legal work for Guantánamo detainees. The Justice Department said last month that there were nine political appointees who had represented the detainees in challenges to their confinement. The department said that they were following all of the relevant conflict-of-interest rules. It later confirmed their names when Fox News figured out who they were.
It did not take long for the lawyers to become a conservative target, branded the "Gitmo 9" by a group called Keep America Safe, run by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and William Kristol, a conservative activist (who wrote a Times Op-Ed column in 2008). The group released a video that asks, in sinister tones, "Whose values do they share?"

"Whose values do they share?" They share my values. I've been a criminal defense lawyer for more than thirty years. When I represent someone who is charged with murder, I'm not endorsing murder. When I represent someone who is charged with other heinous acts, I'm not advocating for those acts. No. Not at all. Not ever. I'm trying to do something that's hard: to make sure that the accused gets a fair trial regardless of what s/he is charged with. I'm trying to make sure that the accused has the benefit of each and every legal right s/he has under the US Constitution and laws. And I do this proudly. It's a sacred obligation. It's called justice. And it doesn't depend on the popularity of the accused.

But that's not the approach of the Righwing talkers and blabbers.

On Fox News, Ms. Cheney lashed out at lawyers who "voluntarily represented terrorists." She said it was important to look at who these terrorists are, including Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who had served as Osama bin Laden's driver. Let's do that.
Mr. Hamdan was the subject of a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ms. Cheney conveniently omitted that the court ruled in favor of his claim that the military commissions system being used to try detainees like him was illegal. Republican senators then sponsored legislation to fix the tribunals. They did not do the job well, but the issue might never have arisen without the lawyers who argued on behalf of Mr. Hamdan, some of whom wore military uniforms.
In order to attack the government lawyers, Ms. Cheney and other critics have to twist the role of lawyers in the justice system. In representing Guantánamo detainees, they were in no way advocating for terrorism. They were ensuring that deeply disliked individuals were able to make their case in court, even ones charged with heinous acts - and that the Constitution was defended.
It is not the first time that the right has tried to distract Americans from the real issues surrounding detention policy by attacking lawyers. Charles Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs under George W. Bush, urged corporations not to do business with leading law firms that were defending Guantánamo detainees. He resigned soon after that.
If lawyers who take on controversial causes are demonized with impunity, it will be difficult for unpopular people to get legal representation - and constitutional rights that protect all Americans will be weakened. That is a high price to pay for scoring cheap political points.

Put another way, the Rightwing argument from Beckistan is that Atticus Finch should never have taken on that case in Maycomb County, Alabama. And William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass should never have taken on that case in Chicago. And Thurgood Marshall should never have taken on that case about the Topeka, Kansas Board of Education. The list of lawyers who shouldn't have taken various cases is a proud and an exhausting one. I can think of a few cases I have handled that I hope fit comfortably in the same category. After all, it's relatively easy for lawyers to know which cases these are: they're the ones where complete strangers, not to mention immediate family members say to you in words or substance, "How could you represent that awful person who did such terrible things?"

The Times is right that the tactic from Fox and elsewhere is about "scoring cheap political points." The bigger question, the one the Times doesn't reach, the one that is really most disturbing, is how the general state of understanding of the justice system became so beclouded that the Fox argument was not immediately scoffed at as arrant stupidity.

---------------------------------------
simulposted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos

I'm Still Not Ready To Make Nice

TheMomCat — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:07:06 GMT

Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I'm not sure I could
They say time heals everything
But I'm still waiting
I'm through with doubt
There's nothing left for me to figure out
I've paid a price
And I'll keep paying
I'm not ready to make nice
I'm not ready to back down
I'm still mad as hell and
I don't have time to go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
'Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is you think I should
I know you said
Can't you just get over it
It turned my whole world around
And I kind of like it
I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don't mind sayin'
It's a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Sayin' that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over
I'm not ready to make nice
I'm not ready to back down
I'm still mad as hell and
I don't have time to go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
'Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is you think I should
I'm not ready to make nice
I'm not ready to back down
I'm still mad as hell and
I don't have time to go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
'Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is you think I should
Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I'm not sure I could
They say time heals everything
But I'm still waiting

What she said.

Since when just being a unpaid volunteer not make you one of them?

Annabel Park Is Not an Obama Operative

Annabel Park, who created this fan page and ignited the movement, volunteered for Obama in 2008 along with millions of her fellow Americans. She and her partner, Eric Byler, created a YouTube channel for filmmakers to contribute videos supporting Obama (www.youtube.com/unitedforobama). No one got paid.

Prove that you're progressive and left of the left other wise you are just one of the "roll over and play dead, SFTU" crowd.

Sucking Our Nation Dry

Michael Gass — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:30:57 GMT

No, this is not an essay on some X-rated movie. It is about how the government and Wall Street have continually conspired to take and use any new money it can get its hands on, which, now means YOUR money.

The latest new "idea" floated by FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair is to have state pension funds buyout failed banks.

Now, I am not totally ignorant about economics, nor, am I a studied professor on the subject. However, I'm not sure who could glean any meaningful information out of the following:

In a speech to the National Association for Business Economics Washington Policy Conference, FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair outlined what she called "a pre-funded resolution mechanism," but did not specify what exactly that is. She instead said it would be "similar to the FDIC's receivership authority for failed banks," exposing only shareholders to risk, as opposed to the bank bailouts that saw billions of taxpayer dollars funneled into a near-crippled financial system.
"Shareholders and creditors would bear the losses, not the public," she explained. "But, the process would be orderly and help prevent a catastrophic collapse of other firms."

Go ahead, do your head shake to clear the cobwebs, and let's talk about the latest plan for the government to get their hands on YOUR money.
Before we talk about the pension funds, however, we must look at the ways that the government and Wall Street have already taken YOUR money.

Social Security

We continually hear about how, without reform, social security will become insolvent. The reason that our government wants to "reform" social security is because they have looted so much money from it, using it as a slush fund, that there is no way that the government can repay it back. Thus, the system needs to be "reformed" so that the problem simply goes away.

In a little-known book, "The Looting of Social Security: How the Government Is Draining America's Retirement Account," Allen Smith, who has a P.h.D. in economics, details how the Bush administration looted social security in his eight years in office. But, it wasn't only George W. Bush, it started with Ronald Reagan.

From The Boston Globe
If you ... have the stomach for a truly demoralizing read -- you may wish to take up ''The Looting of Social Security: How the Government Is Draining America's Retirement Account," by Allen W. Smith (Carroll & Graf, paperback, $14 ). With dismal clarity, Smith lays out the step-by-step history of how a national pension plan was transformed into an outright shakedown of working people, a maneuver that began during Ronald Reagan's administration. Bill Clinton aggravated the situation by making no distinction between general revenue and Social Security in crowing about budget surpluses -- which, in turn, culminated in the grand largess of George W. Bush in handing out whacking great tax cuts to the rich.

It is an unfortunate fact that the social security fund is basically broke since it is running on IOU's. As Bush said:

"Our system is called pay as you go. You pay into the system through your payroll taxes and the government spends it. It spends the money on current retirees and with the money left over, it funds other programs. And all that's left behind is file cabinets full of IOUs."

THAT is the reason that Bush wanted to privatize social security; all those IOU's are suddenly gone and a NEW system instituted.

Retirement pensions became IRA's

Many people have IRA's. Many people saw their IRA's take a huge hit when Wall Street almost crashed. That is because the money you have in an IRA is money that is traded on the stock market. In addition, no matter when you take out the money, it is treated as taxable income.

Companies finally realized that it came out of their profit margin, and, Wall Street wanted a new way to their hands on more money. The "win-win" scenario? To stop giving retirement pensions and, instead, force people to set up accounts that they put their money into that Wall Street could then use on the stock market.

The stock market, however, has three "lanes"; the slow lane, the fast lane, and the ultra-fast lane.

The ultra-fast lane is used by those who run the industry, and, they never lose money. The fast lane is used by those "preferred members," and, they rarely lose money. Everyone else, to include these IRA's accounts, use the slow lane, meaning that when the market takes a loss, it is the people in the slow lane who take the biggest hit.

To put it more bluntly, it is our money that is lost first so that others can keep their profits.

How to get more money?

I posed this very thesis before, that our government and Wall Street will continually want more money, that companies will continually want higher profits, and, as wages stagnate and decline, there are fewer and fewer ways for that to happen. The government has already stolen the funds from social security and Wall Street already has all the money they are likely to get from IRA's.

We've already seen that banks hold no accountability for their failures and debts. In fact, we just saw this, and the ramifications of it, in action; in Iceland. When an Icelandic bank went bankrupt, the British and Dutch governments are demanding reimbursement for debts incurred by the failed bank. The Icelandic government is now trying to push that debt, incurred by a bank, onto each individual person because the debt is so large even the Icelandic government can't afford it. Our government could afford it, on our taxpayer money, by simply increasing the national debt by a few trillion dollars.

The idea today is "reforming" health care, but, as Dennis Kucinich has said, all the bill does is make all American's buy health insurance by federal mandate promising that this will keep rates low. What promise has our government ever kept?

When you look at what Sheila Bair said, it is now evident where they are looking to find that new money; state pension funds.

Here is what she said, see if you can follow this thinking...

A state's pension fund is used to bolster failing banks, and, if the bank fails, only the shareholders and creditors will take the loss.

But, if a state's pension fund is used, that means that each person who has money in the fund is now considered a shareholder. Thus, they lose their money they had IN that pension fund.

Doesn't that sound like another "win-win" scenario? The FDIC uses the money that average people contribute to a state pension fund and are looking to fund their retirement to cover banks, and, if the bank fails, it is the people that lose, not the banks, not the government.

Unless someone knows something I don't, that is exactly what I am reading. Sheila Bair is simply floating a new way for the government to get their hands legally on more of our money.

They've drained our social security. They drain our IRA's to bolster losses in the stock market. Now, they want to drain state pension funds.

That pretty much sucks any safety net for the average person dry.

For Your Consideration: War Crimes Continued

TheMomCat — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:36:33 GMT

Anybody remember this?

Monday, April 14, 2008 Obama would ask his AG to "immediately review" potential of crimes in Bush White House

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to "immediately review the information that's already there" and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as "a partisan witch hunt." However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because "nobody is above the law."
The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.

Or this

Turley: Obama 'owns' Bush 'war crimes' if he looks the other way

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw Story
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
President George W. Bush's offhand acknowledgement in an interview Sunday with Fox's Brit Hume that he personally authorized the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may create thorny legal and moral problems for incoming President Barack Obama.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Monday, "We now have President Bush speaking quite candidly that he was in the loop, we have Dick Cheney who almost bragged about it. The question for Barack Obama is whether he wants to own part of this by looking the other way."
Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, "We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward."

All most bragged about it? How about admitted it. Not only did the media "yawn", so did the Obama and the Justice Department

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Cheney told Karl, as if he were issuing a challenge to officials in the current administration, including President Barack Obama, who said flatly last year that waterboarding is torture, to take action against him. "I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..."
The former vice president's declaration closely follows admissions he made in December 2008, about a month before the Bush administration exited the White House, when he said he personally authorized the torture of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called "high-value" prisoners.
"I signed off on it; others did, as well, too," Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times about the waterboarding, a drowning technique where a person is strapped to a board, his face covered with a cloth and then water is poured over it. It is a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish

Now there is this

Live Terrorists Are Worth More Than Dead Ones: Celestine Bohlen

The Obama administration has stepped up these kinds of remote-control bombardments, launching at least 64 drone strikes within Pakistan in its first 13 months; in its last three years, the Bush administration unleashed 41, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation.
The U.S. doesn't like to think of itself as being in the assassination business, which is why the preferred term is "targeted killings." Either way, this growing practice involves large legal and moral questions that should loom large, but don't -- not compared with the outcry over coercive interrogation or extraordinary renditions.
How many terrorists have been killed? How many innocent civilians? The CIA program is shrouded in secrecy, and therefore virtually unaccountable. Information about the strikes is often second-hand; mistakes aren't always reported. One study, published last May, cited Pakistani sources who claim more than 700 civilians have been killed by drones, or 50 civilians for every terrorist -- a shocking ratio that explains why public opinion in Pakistan is so outraged.

Pres. Obama has now OK'd the targeting of American citizen's merely on allegations that they are members of so-called terrorist organizations.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged Wednesday that government agencies may kill U.S. citizens abroad who are involved in terrorist activities if they are "taking action that threatens Americans."
Blair told members of the House intelligence committee that he was speaking publicly about the issue to reassure Americans that intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense "follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed" in the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens.

From Glen Greenwald on Jan 17, 2010 who says it best

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

(all emphasis in quotes is mine)

Legal Procedures? What is legal about assassinations? What is legal about using an unmanned drone to target and kill so-called terrorists that also slaughter by-standers?

Obama not only owns Bush's war crimes, he adds to them.

No, I am NOT ready to make nice.

Civility and reason to you, friends!

AndyS In Colorado — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:21:08 GMT

Oh man I just had the most horrible dream! You see I went to this diary, wherein I was told, join, join, join them, and you can change it. Learn the joys of coffee... then I went to this facebook page.....

Then I found myself somehow whisked to this town. It was a strange town where people wore these strange clothes, like it was the 1800's, but underneath the 19th century duds and bow ties and hats they all had on instead of a button downed white shirt and blouse, an Obama T-Shirt.

No sooner had I appeared, than a man with a vacant grin approached me.

"Civility and reason to you, friend!", said he.

"Uh, civility and reason to you!" I replied, my eyes widening at this odd greeting.

"Coffee hour approaches," the man went on, as if in the same vein. "What will you have? Mocha? Latte? Frappucino? Maybe a triple espresso cappucino?"

Well, I was getting a bit wigged out at the cognitive dissonance, you understand. Little alarm bells were going off in my head, but I couldn't place it. "Uh, maybe some decaf?" I evaded, hoping to buy time.

"Isn't Obama the best president evah?" The man prompted me.

"Uh, yeah, he's great," I answered, trying not to sweat too much. The man nodded and walked on, seeingly forgetting he had offered me coffee. "Coffee hour approaches," the man mumbled, apparently to himself. "It is the will of Obama."

"Hey!" I shouted at the man. He turned. "Aren't you supposed to be a grass roots organization?"

"Yes," the man smiled. "Civility and reason, and accountability, and equal justice for all. All together in the grassroots. Obama knows all, he sees all. You will see. Are you not of the body"? Suddenly the man's expression changed. From vacant and pleasant to suspicious and demanding.

"Yeah, I'm of the body, dude. Whatever you say!" I smiled back weakly, then ran.
Anyway, I hid out between two buildings. At this point I was seriously freaked. And then I noticed on every corner there was an open air Starbucks, and all the people of the town were lining up at them, getting free coffee, except they were little ceramic cups and not Starbucks cardboard. And no one ordered decaf.

And they were all getting increasingly agitated. I sweated as I hid out, thinking, "What the fuck, is there METH in this Coffee?"

"Civility! Reason! Teabagger!" Soon the square was filled with shouts. A woman turned to me and said "Equal justice under the law!" And threw her cup at me. It shattered over my head.

I had to get out of there. I ducked into this shop to get away from the increasing carnage, my feet crunching on broken crockery.

So there were these two old men in the shop. One of them, not the least bit vacant, came up to me and said, "What are you doing here? It's coffee hour!"

"What is this coffee hour?" I demanded, panting. "Can't you see, people are throwing dishes at each other out there!"

The other man, with a more kindly aspect, patted my shoulder. "It is the will of Obama," he sighed. "I will get you some decaf, and after Coffee Hour is over, you can stay here to sleep it off."

"Decaf?!" the other man raged. Looking at me, he said "Are you not of the body?"

"Yeah, yeah, of course," I mumbled, no doubt looking desperate. "I just sort of want to keep on an even keel, you know."

"Relax, Plouffe," the kindly man said. "He's from Denver. Their ways are different there."

"Whatever," Plouffe screamed. "You know, he could be a radical socialist Archon, sent here to change our ways. It is not the will of Obama!"

I suddenly decided to get clever. "Obama," I sighed, adopting a cerubic smile. "He knows, he sees, he gathers all under his grassrootsy umbrella of civility and reason and goodwill."

"I know your type," Plouffe sneered. "We will see what the lawmakers have to say about this!" and stormed out.

Anyway, then I woke up. Man, caffeine. It can be nasty stuff when you overdo it!

Keeping a Progressive Eye on Immigration Reform

Nightprowlkitty — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:00:00 GMT

I wrote yesterday about a meeting Obama had scheduled with Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham to talk about immigration reform.

Well the meeting was postponed. According to RollCall:

A meeting between President Barack Obama and Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) scheduled for Monday afternoon on immigration reform has been postponed and will be rescheduled later this week, thanks to flight cancellations in South Carolina.

At a 2008 speech to the League of United Latin American Citizens, then-Senator Obama said:

"We need a president who isn't going to walk away from something as important as comprehensive immigration reform when it becomes politically unpopular," he told the group. "That's the commitment I'm making to you. I fought with you in the Senate for comprehensive immigration reform. And I will make it a top priority in my first year as president."

That was in 2008.

Now we have had a taste of how Obama governs and how he promotes legislation. There is no excuse, therefore, to think that somehow the dynamic of immigration reform legislation will be any different than it was for healthcare, even if Republicans have a more "bipartisan" role.
I have had the dubious benefit of reading some comments over at the Orange and even one here at DD which question the need for immigration reform as well as how our immigration laws ought to be reformed.

The challenge of keeping this political debate in a progressive frame is, in and of itself, daunting and entails wading through many incorrect statements by Democrats who have been conditioned by our media into a state of blissful and comfortable ignorance as to how our immigration laws affect all of us, not just folks trying to become citizens here in the USA.

I'm going to try to go slow. This is a complicated topic which has been deliberately distorted by nativist groups who have managed to worm their way in to both the mainstream media (see my yesterday's essay regarding CIS) and our day to day culture.

The politics especially will be difficult to ascertain in the face of Obamacrats and hardliner Dems who don't care about reform but only electoral victory. I have already read comments saying that because of the poor economy it would be a terrible idea, politically, to work on immigration reform, that folks don't care about it, that we need all our jobs for us, etc., etc.

And those are the nicer comments.

But let's talk about politics and let's talk about the economy.

From Duke Reed over at Migra Matters (emphasis mine):

There are numerous reasons why it would be wise for Washington to address the nation's failed immigration policies sooner rather than later and finally fix a system that no one on either end of the political spectrum believes is either functioning properly or serving the best interests of the people . Even though studies show that reforming immigration would be a boost to the economy at a time when it could surely use one, and human rights issues make reforming the system a moral imperative, many still believe that it's an issue too politically hot to handle.
Since nothing yet has provided the requisite motivation to those in Washington to move forward and tackle reform, it's time to start to look at it through a prism they can understand: Pure Machiavellian political calculation.
As has been rightly pointed out, reform cannot be a one party affair, and to get it accomplished there will have to be some reaching across the aisle and bipartisan compromise. Yet, given the current polarization in Washington, accomplishing such a task might seem to be impossible ... until of course we look at the alternatives.

I wish that the moral imperative alone would sway folks to realizing this is an urgent challenge that needs to be met.

But I will instead look at this politically, and the first aspect of that is that in our present situation folks need jobs.

From the footnotes of Duke's post, here is a study by Raul Hinojosa for the Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center (warning, pdf) (emphasis mine):

This report finds that comprehensive immigration reform that includes a legalization program for unauthorized immigrants and enables a future flow of legal workers would result in a large economic benefit-a cumulative $1.5 trillion in added U.S. gross domestic product over 10 years. In stark contrast, a deportation-only policy would result in a loss of $2.6 trillion in GDP over 10 years.

You don't see this information in the mainstream media ... ever wonder why?

There is one other political factor for Democrats to think about and that is the large turnout of Latino/a voters for Obama in the Presidential election.

From Patricia Murphy at the Capitolist:

But after Obama's victorious presidential campaign, in which he won with 67 percent of the Latino vote, immigration advocates say they are still waiting for the results that Obama promised them 18 months ago. And their patience is wearing thin.
"There is a palpable, grassroots anger that is going to go national if there is not a breakthrough soon," said Frank Sherry, the founder of America's Voices, a group that advocates immigration reform. "If there's not, I think the effort to pass legislation will become akin to a social movement to raise the moral stakes of 11 million people living in the country with no meaningful rights."
Other Latino leaders and immigration advocates say they understood that the president had to deal first with the economic crisis that confronted him when he came into office, and even that he chose to address health care reform as his next domestic priority. But in interviews with Politics Daily, several said they believe that some Democrats are slow-walking reform to avoid dealing with the politically hot-button issue.
"I think there's a bit of this Rahm Emanuel kind of mentality, where they think that immigration reform is a liability for Democrats who would rather not take a tough vote," said Brent Wilkes, executive director of the LULAC group that Obama addressed in 2008. "They think that as long as they think they can keep the immigrant community mollified, they can just put it off without delivering on that promise."

Both the Republicans and the Democrats will, of course, court the Latino/a vote.

From an editorial in the New York Times dated March 1, 2010:

The administration has doubled down on the Bush-era enforcement strategy, unleashing the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies and setting loose an epidemic of misery, racial profiling and needless arrests. The intense campaign of raids and deportations has so clogged the immigration courts that the American Bar Association has proposed creating an independent court system that presumably would be better able to command adequate resources.
Tensions and anger in immigrant communities are rising. Religious and business groups are urging change - for moral reasons and because they believe that bringing immigrants out from the shadows would help the economy. Young students who have patiently waited for the Dream Act - a bill to legalize immigrant children who bear no blame for their status - are frustrated. Groups across the country are planning to march on Washington this month, demanding action on reform.

Progressive immigration reform will not only NOT hurt the economy, it will help it. It will create new jobs. It will give the Democrats more votes in 2010.

Enforcement-only policies have not worked and the moral damage it has done to our country rivals the moral damage done by US torture.

But I don't expect morality to have a big place in this debate - the cowards and conservaDems and Obamacrats and Dem party hardliners will appeal to morality only to shut down progressives who may have a question or two for this Administration on its present - and future - immigration policies. I would imagine the mantra of "he's the PRESIDENT, he doesn't do LEGISLATION" will be repeated, but the fact is the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are Executive Branch organizations and have a great deal of power in and of themselves in this situation.

The politics are on the side of the progressives.

We must grab the narrative and hold on tight in the face of the rightwing noise machine and its newly arrived cousin, the OFA/DLC noise machine.

I know that this essay and the one I wrote yesterday is still very unweildy and disorganized, and I apologize for that. I'm workin' on it, though!

Dallas Office Shooting Gets Very Personal 20100309

Translator — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:02:29 GMT

Hello, all. This is sort of an irregular blog for me. Except about myself, I rarely talk about other family members to protect their privacy. However, this has been on national news, so their privacy is not very protected already.

Everyone is familiar with violence, at least on the news. This piece affects me personally, and even though I watched some of the news feed in real time, it was after the medics had already left with the victims.
A local Dallas TeeVee Station ran a feature here. If you closely at about 1:08 minutes, you will see a 66 year old, white haired man being carted on a gurney to the ambulance. At around 1:13, give or take, a younger man is shown in a similar manner.

The older man is MY BROTHER! The younger one is MY NEPHEW! My two closest living blood relatives were nearly exterminated yesterday by the action of what appears to be a very disatsified customer. You see, my relatives were in the financial planning and stock selling business, and apparently the former customer, a disbarred attorney (for bribery of a public official) wanted them to pay.

As I said, I never gave it a second thought whilst I watched the live feed. Dallas is big, and there are lots of Pop and Son firms. I have never been to their building, so it did not register. Thus, I gave it no mind.

Things changed early this afternoon. I was working on tax returns for the former Mrs. Translator and the boys, and the telephone rang. I was in the middle of calculations, and almost all of the calls that I get are telemarketers, so I let it go. A few minutes later I checked the Caller ID, and then I knew. Whilst I have a very cordial and loving relationship with my aunt and uncle, we do not call "just to talk". She and my brother were much closer than he and I were, mostly because of the closeness in age and the absence of sibling rivalry. Before I called my aunt, I hit the net, and sure enough, the names had been revealed.

The funny thing is that when I had spoken with the former Mrs. Translator last evening, she specifically asked me if it were my brother and nephew. I said no, because I had not heard anything at the time and also because the odds were pretty slim.

At the risk of sounding sexist, let me state this here as an axiom for the future for me. Women seem to have a knack for cutting through bull, quickly. I spoke with her today a couple of times, and she indicated to me that she KNEW, from the first news report, that the victims were them. I was clueless, and just chalked it up to another news story. Folks, check out the female intuition until it is found to be baseless, and it rarely is baseless.

Here is what happened, from my very morphine-dosed brother:

He was working at his desk and he heard a shot. Our family is very experienced in firearms, and he immediately knew that a large bore pistol was used. He jumped up from his desk and started to the door of his office.

The shooter had aimed for my nephew's head, but somehow he ended up striking his mouth (it is not clear if from the inside or the outside at present), and the bullet tore though his neck.

About the time that my brother was standing up, the shooter came into his office and shot him in the leg. Obviously, my brother immediately fell to the floor. Then the gunman ordered him to go sit in his chair. My brother indicated that he could not walk, after being shot in the leg, so the gunman ordered him to crawl there. It is unclear whether or not he did so, but in any event, the gunman shot him in the other leg, damaging bone.

My brother and the gunman talked for a while, and then the gunman left. By that time, police were all over the place and the gunman tried to leave, brandishing his weapon. After a couple of missed shots by the police, the gunman reentered the building and shot himself under the chin, as I understand it. He was taken to hospital, as were my brother and nephew.

My brother told me that he attempted to talk the gunman out of killing himself, after the gunman asked my brother what killing shot to himself would leave the least disfigurement for his funeral.

After four shots, all hits, were done, the three people still live. The fate of the gunman is shaky, as he is still in extremely critical condition. My brother and nephew came through surgery well, and are expected to recover without not much sequalae, but the cosmetic aspects of my nephew's wounds are unknown as of yet. My brother is expected to regain full use of his legs after some rehabilitation.

Now for my armchair psychologist's view of this situation. Real psychologists, please comment. I think that the shooter was looking to make my brother miserable for the rest of his life, but to let him live. I believe that he had little anger towards my nephew, but knew that killing the apple of his father's eye would hurt my brother. Thus, the attempted head shot that by the wildest accident happened not to be fatal.

Then he shot my brother in the legs, damaging one quite a bit. I think that the shooter wanted my brother to live in the agony of knowing that his only, dear son was dead forever and that my brother could never walk properly again. Sometimes a living hell is worse than a dead one.

Obviously, I am on the side of my family. But I must say this, in all fairness: the shooter had many demons, and did the wrong thing this time, and other times before. I may in time forgive him, but it too early to say that right now. But there must be family of his that are suffering. I extend my hand and a wish of good wishes in what is probably their very worst days in their lives now. I have no animosity towards his family, and I hope that they are able to come through this less damaged that might have been. I want them to know that I am not their enemy, and never will be.

Tears are rolling now. I apologize for any typos.

Warmest regards,

Doc
here