October 2008 archive

Finally, some action is being taken against the management of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, IA, the site of one of the largest raids of undocumented workers in U.S. history when 389 people were arrested on May 12th of this year.

Federal immigration agents arrested Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the plant, on Thursday.  Rubashkin is being charged with conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for financial gain, aiding and abetting document fraud, and aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.  He resigned shortly after the May 12th raid.  If convicted on all counts Rubashkin faces up to 22 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.

On a visit over to VetVoice in an open thread there was a reply with this link that you should visit, which had this photo:

We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems. While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

The WaPo editorial for today calls out McSame for yet another “vile smear:

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.

For his part, Mr. Khalidi, an academic of the first degree, squashes McSame like a bloated cockroach and even throws the clammering, allusion-hungry masses (that would be us) a bone:

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

HAPPY

HALLOWEEN

Mortgage Plan May Aid Many and Irk Others



By DAVID STREITFELD

Published: October 30, 2008

As the Treasury Department prepares a $40 billion program to help delinquent homeowners avoid foreclosure, it confronts a difficult challenge: not making the plan too tempting to people like Todd Lawrence.An airline pilot who lives outside Norwich, Conn., Mr. Lawrence has a traditional 30-year mortgage that he has no trouble paying every month. But, thanks to the plunging real estate market, he owes more on his house than it is worth, like millions of other people.

Robert Fisk: Scandal of six held in Guantanamo even after Bush plot claim is dropped

 No evidence that men living in Bosnia plotted attack on Sarajevo embassy

Friday, 31 October 2008

In the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the “war on terror” has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp.

George Bush’s assertion in his 2002 State of the Union address – the same speech in which he wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had tried to import aluminium tubes from Niger – was that “our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy [in Sarajevo].” Not only has the US government withdrawn that charge against the six Algerians, all of whom had taken citizenship or residence in Bosnia, but lawyers defending the Arabs – who had already been acquitted of such a plot in a Sarajevo court – have found that the US threatened to pull its troops out of the Nato peacekeeping force in Bosnia if the men were not handed over.

USA

A Last Push To Deregulate

White House to Ease Many Rules

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 31, 2008; Page A01

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

Happy Celtic New Year! (1) aka Samhain or Oiche Shamhna! A time for

fondly remembering those who have crossed over before us. And here’s a

little secret: if you set an extra place at the table and whisper the

names of your dead loved ones tonight, they’ll come calling and sit

down to dinner with you. So make sure you don’t accidentally whisper

the names of those  relatives you hated when they were alive, or

you’re stuck with them for the evening.

My brewing buddy used to throw Halloween parties for my club.  He’d time them so that they happened the longest night of the year so everyone could stay an extra hour (and hopefully until morning because he’d brew up about 15 gallons).

It was quite a shindig, the peak was about 150 one year when we were politicking.  He was an audiophile and invested thousands of dollars in a CD based dj sytem, mixer, amps, speakers- so good I can still hear the difference between the first and second plays on vinyl.

But you can play CDs a hundred million times exactly the same so- I’ve DJed many Lincoln/Reagan dinners and eaten well (well eaten at least) for free at them, but I’ve never been able to get Republicans to dance after the event.

They can’t wait to get the fuck out of there.

Before dinner you’d play  something that was low and sounded vaguely hip.  We had hours of Steely Dan.  During dinner instrumental new age and after?  For the first few years I’d try, but after that I knew there wasn’t an instant hit that could keep them from their cars.

At the Halloween party we had people in costumes dancing and hooking up, what can I say.  We had to have a woman who was psychotically fixated on me carted off by the police one year.  This led to my brief torrid affair with the nurse who raised Siamese cats and dachshunds and daughters.  She (the nurse, pay attention) thought I was too serious about her and dumped me before Christmas but it all worked out in the end.  She married a biker and is very happy she tells me when she and I and her husband (who I knew before I knew her) meet on ceremonial occasions.

But that was simply one year among many.  We were relentlessly dance oriented at the party, to the point of limiting seating so people were forced to get up and circulate.  Tons of food.  No party games.

At the very first, or one of the very first ones we made the mistake of setting up video game stations and playing videos.  People grabbed the nearest couch.  I’m not sure I was at the last one, but I can understand why my brewing buddy stopped hosting them.  Attendance was down and we’d long since ceased having an agenda.

Logistically big parties are a bitch- 3 or 4 days of work.  I’ve been part of a lot of them come to think of it, one interesting one not a lot of people who know me know about is Gerald’s Party in Binghampton.

Gerald was my next door neighbor in Syracuse and he was kind of a weird dude who kept exotic pets (python, tarantula, monitor lizard).  He didn’t have a car and I did and he wanted to go to this party in Binghamton.  Big.  Live band was arriving Friday, he knew them and we could all crash the night before.

Well, I had a Friday night party, but I told Gerald I’d drop him off and pick him up and he was like- dude.

The Saturday part was quite splashy enough for my tastes.  The band was good and everbody loved them.  I recognized some friends of Gerald’s I’d met the day before so I didn’t feel left out.

I dunno, my inner Emily tells me there is just something classy about a party with a live band.