Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton*, a Republican who fought to keep a law criminalizing gay sex in that state, has been charged with felony assault for beating and choking his girlfriend during a sexual encounter.
His defense, it appears is that, “she did not use the agreed on ‘safe word’ to end the activities”, but she is accusing him of having drugged her.
You can find excerpts of the police report here.
*Sounds like a pr0n star name.
One of the ways that federal prosecutors have gone after corruption recently has been with the theft of honest services law enacted in 1988.
The theory behind the law is that if people are taking bribes, they are depriving the taxpayer of their honest services, and so can be prosecuted.
Well, the initial reports from oral arguments indicate that the Supreme Court is not inclined to support the law in its current form:
Justices across the court’s ideological spectrum took turns on Tuesday attacking the law as hopelessly broad and vague.
Justice Steven G. Breyer estimated that there are 150 million workers in the United States and that perhaps 140 million of them could be prosecuted under the government’s interpretation of the law.
Complimenting the boss’s hat “so the boss will leave the room so that the worker can continue to read The Racing Form,” Justice Breyer said, could amount to a federal crime.
I tend to agree, you saw this law being used by Bush and His Evil Minions™ to go after political rivals, on the theory that they were stealing their full performance from their state jobs, because they spent a lot of time serving as state legislators …… Funny how everyone prosecuted was a Democrat, and most of them were black.
The downside is that one of the plaintiffs are crooks and corrupt.
The first plaintiff is Conrad Black, the former Hollinger International CEO, who stole from his company and shareholders to finance a lavish lifestyle, and the other plaintiff, Alaska legislator Bruce Weyhrauch, soliciting lucrative employment from VECO at the same time that he was shepherding their requests from the legislator for taxpayer money.*
Still, seeing how the law has been abused, killing it would be a very good thing.
*A word about Alaska: The taxpayers in Alaska are basically the oil companies, as Alaska relies on oil revenues, and does not collect state income or sales taxes.
It appears that the two Ugandan legislators who have been the driving force for putting forward a bill to apply the death penalty for homosexuality intend to come to the United States next year to attend the National Prayer Meeting, as they did last year.
The kicker is that Barack Obama attended it this year and is expected to attend it next year.
The appropriate response to these folks is to deny them entry to the USA, but my guess is that he won’t do that, and if they show up, he’ll probably talk anyway, spouting something about the need for people to talk.
Remember when I wrote that a political appointee at the Office of Personnel Management was instructing insurance companies not to write a policy for a woman’s wife in California, despite an instruction from the courts to do so?
Well, now Director of the Office of Personnel Management,and Obama political appointee John Berry is saying that he won’t follow the court order because he has no authority to do so.
Dude, when a court gives you an order, you cannot claim that you don’t have any authority.
You can appeal and ask for a stay, but that’s it. A court order is the authority to do so.
In another illustration of the fact that don’t need more democrats, but rather we need more good Democrats, the New York State Senate voted down marriage equity. 24-38, with 8 Dems, along with all the ‘Phants voting pro-hate.
I’m being as nice as possible when I say that Barack Obama and his administration is afraid of offending homophobic bigots.
That’s because the only other alternative hypothesis is that Barack Obama is a homophobic bigot, and while this is a simpler solution, and Occam’s razor cuts toward that, my sense is that they do not feel that the LGBT community has anywhere to go, so they will throw them under the bus to get a few votes.
It really does not matter, but their latest, where the office of personnel management is refusing to obey a court order to allow a woman to buy insurance for her spouse, at the insistence of the Obama administration is really a proverbial “bridge too far”.
The money quote here is here:
The order was not published, and garnered little or no notice at the time. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts moved to comply with the judge’s ruling, submitting Golinski’s insurance form to Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the case would have probably gone away — had the Obama Administration not stepped in. “After the AO submitted Ms. Golinski’s form, I thought this matter had concluded,” Kozinski wrote. “The Executive Branch, acting through the Office of Personnel Management, thought otherwise. It directed the insurance carrier not to process Ms. Golinski’s form 2809, thwarting the relief I had ordered. I must now decide what further steps are necessary to protect Ms. Golinski and the integrity of the Judiciary’s EDR [employee dispute resolution] plans.”
(emphasis mine)
This is not an accident, nor is it a Bush holdover, as Michelangelo Signorile notes that the “bombshell here is that the Office of Personnel Management was ordered by the White House to refuse to give a lesbian federal employee her court-ordered rights”.
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on the subject.
The macro picture is that Mugabe continues to refuse to behave in accordance with any of the agreements that he signed, and Tsvangerai can’t do much about it, and the SADC in general, and South Africa in particular, won’t do much about it.
It’s kind of a dysfunctional stasis.
That being said, the trial of Roy Bennett, the MDC treasurer and nominee for deputy agriculture minister, the government’s star witness has said on the stand that his earlier testimony was coerced by torture.
The judge has ruled that eter Michael Hitschmann’s confession cannot be used against Bennett because of this.
The big news is the political fight over a bill to reform the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which after much conflict, was finally passed by Parliament.
What likely led to this meeting of the minds was evidence that the incompetent and corrupt management of RBZ Director Gideon Gono was driving away potential donors and foreign investors.
That being said, I do not think that the RBZ bill was why China has signed an $8 billion investment deal.
In any case, Gono was last seen attempting to strong-arm banks into lending to expropriated farms, which is not surprising as the ZANU-PF is stepping up its farm seizures for corrupt bureaucrats program.
In any case, the unity government is holding cabinet meetings again, which is a good sign, I guess.
Of more significance is the fact that Botswana President Ian Khama is calling for new elections and explicitly blaming the ZANU-PF for the lack of progress.
It’s nice that someone involved the SADC “Enable Mugabe Program” is pushing back.
Additionally, we are starting to see protests in Europe against the SADC’s support of Mugabe: Zimbabwe Vigil has petitioned the EU to suspend all aid to members of the SADC, which is a start.
More significant, though may be the fact that PM Morgan Tsvangirai is to meet with Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, current chairman of the AU.
This is a positive development for a number of reasons:
So, after massive smuggling, murders by the authorities, and forced labor, the Kimberley Process decides against suspending Zimbabwe’s certification as a being not “conflict diamonds”, despite a
report from their own investigators saying that they should be suspended.
This reveals the Kimberly process a complete and utter joke, and on queue, once the threat of suspension is lifted, the New Reclamation Group Ltd. mining company sweeps in with a contract.
There is a promise by the Zimbabwe government not to export diamonds until measures are in place to prevent abuse, but I don’t trust this very much, if it comes from the Prime Minister’s office, then it means nothing, and if it comes from Mugabe, it’s a flat out lie.
Of note, The Rapaport Group and the RapNet Diamond Trading Network have announced that they are “implementing an immediate trading ban on all diamonds from Zimbabwe due to severe human rights violations in Marange,” and Leber Jeweler Inc. has announced the same.
Meanwhile, outside of the diamond trade, things continue apace, with Mugabe and the ZANU-PF planning to introduce a law which would require that foreign owned companies be majority black owned. Note: not even the majority locally owned, this is determined by the pigmentation of the equity holders.
ZANU-PF has become the party of Apartheid in Zimbabwe.
We also have continued use of the state security apparatus to intimidate the opposition, with the head of the national trade union being arrested on trumped up charges, as well as the increasingly bizarre trial of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett.
What do we have on the case of Bennett, we have a judge who made statements at the trial of the chief witness against Bennett that indicate bias. This is important because this witness, Peter Hitschmann, has recanted his testimony and alleged that it was extracted by torture.
We also have the police presenting weapons that were not seized from Bennett’s house as evidence, and that the Defence is has a request to have the police log books on this matter made available to them, and the police, as well as the attorney general, are vociferously fighting this.
Good.
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General, gave a speech in which she said that the 2005 amendment to the Texas State Constitution bans all forms of marriage:
The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:
“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”
Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively “eliminates marriage in Texas,” including common-law marriages.
A strict reading of the law does seem to indicate that this is true, since marriage is a, “Legal status identical or similar to marriage,” it appears that marriage is illegal in Texas.
Oopsie.
The late, and much missed, Molly Ivins used to say that Texas was, “Mississippi with good roads,” but not it appears that it appears that Texas is “Mississippi with good roads, and no brains.”
Well, at least they are safe from zombie hordes.
There are a couple of interesting points to this development, the first is that Attorney General Holder is clearly cherry picking, with those people for whom he feels that a conviction is guaranteed, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, getting trials in Federal Court, while other people getting military commissions, because they evidence is either shakier or tainted:
Mr. Holder also announced military tribunals for five other Guantanamo detainees, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Officials said the tribunals were chosen, over civilian courts, based on several factors, including the fact that their alleged crimes were against military targets or occurred overseas.
Navy Lt. Cdr. Stephen Reyes, the lawyer for Mr. Nashiri, said “The decision today was legally unsound. The real reason why the government chose to go to a commission was to ensure a conviction through otherwise inadmissible evidence.”
Another issue, and one that has not yet been brought up in the press is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children are currently being held by the United States, or held by someone with whom the United States has significant control over, and I’m waiting for a defense attorney to say that their client cannot aid in their own defense because, “KSM’s children [ages would appear to be in the 8-12 year old range] are held hostage by the United States.”
I am not a lawyer, I am an engineer, dammit,* but if I were a lawyer, and I were his lawyer, this would be one of the first motions that I would bring up, because if your client has the prospect of harm to his children hanging over his head.
It’s clear that the US knows the location and condition of his children, and this would be yet another mess left by Obama’s refusal to thoroughly clean house following Bush’s gulags.
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
So, Bob Gates has blocked the release of torture photos, nominally because they would “endanger US forces”, which is a sack of sh$# they hate us already.
The real reason is that if we see pictures of children being tortured, there might be an outcry for prosecution of the senior officials who authorized this, and that is something that the Beltway Bozos and His Evil Minions™ simply cannot abide.
Following repeated actions by Barack Obama and his administration to do absolutely nothing about gay rights, including a particularly illuminating exchange between DNC Treasurer and Andrew Tobias, which I noted here.
Well, it appears that some people concluded that enough was enough, and John Aravosis launched a donor boycott of the DNC. (There is a particularly damning list of the bill of particulars at the link)
So, after months of everyone, including Barney Frank, saying that nothing could be done right now about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), because the plate was too full, we now treated to the spectacle of that same Barney Frank saying that DADT will be repealed in next year’s defense authorization bill. (see also here)
Amazing that.
I think that if people are interested in gay civil rights, it needs to be understood that while Barack Obama and his administration may not be homophobic, they are hostile to the expenditure of any political capital on this matter.
Simply put, while they may not hate gays, they find the LGBT community inconvenient.
This means that the only way that anything is going to get done is if the LGBT community makes doing nothing even more inconvenient.
You remember Kelo v. City of New London? That’s where the city of New London took people’s homes in order to build a business park for Pfizer.
Well, following it’s purchase of Wyeth, they are closing their facility there, (also here) leaving the city with a big honking hole, and Pfizer looking to sell the land, for which it paid nearly nothing, and building.
You know, when you give free sh$# to contemptible greed-heads, this is what they do: They f@#$ you over when it’s convenient.
Needless to say, the plaintiffs in Kelo are as unamused as anyone in this development.
So, the cut a deal between the President of Honduras, and the leaders of the coup that ousted him.
It’s a fairly simple deal, a power sharing arrangement, but then the coup leaders decide that they can’t hold a vote to approve this until after the elections, meaning that they will be in complete control of the electoral process, and doubtless engaging in fraud, and the response of the Obama administration is, “Sounds good to me”:
Under fire from allies in Latin America and on Capitol Hill, the Obama administration moved Tuesday to try to salvage the American-brokered agreement that had been billed as paving the way for a peaceful end to the coup in Honduras. Instead, the accord seems to have provided the country’s de facto government with a way to stay in power until a presidential election scheduled for the end of this month.
The State Department sent Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Craig Kelly to Honduras on Tuesday for meetings with Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted from power as president more than four months ago, and with the head of the de facto government, Roberto Micheletti.
The problem here is that when bad people seize power, they like to hold onto it, and the Obama administration took a cowardly position, because they just did not want to be bothered with little things like the principle of democracy and free elections:
The deal began to unravel last week when the Congress announced it would postpone a vote on Mr. Zelaya’s return to power until after the election. In protest, Mr. Zelaya then refused to submit names for the coalition government. And the United States, breaking with its allies in Latin America, announced it would recognize the results of the coming presidential election, even if Mr. Zelaya were not reinstated.
A hint that this move on their part was a completely boneheaded move that gave succor to tyrants? This:
While the announcement was celebrated by Republicans as a “reversal” of the administration’s policy, it ignited a storm of criticism from Mr. Obama’s allies at home and across Latin America.
If you are getting cheers from the ‘Phants, you are on the wrong side of the argument.
What happened here is that it was pressure from other Latin American nations that forced the State Department to start talking about sanctions against the coup leaders, and the Treasury started talking about possible restrictions on remittances, which created an agreement.
The problem was that once the agreement was signed, signals were sent indicating that the US no longer had any interest in the matter.
This is a big deal for a number of reasons.
First, it is a reversal on the progress toward democracies in Latin America, and second it has some very real implications for US foreign policy in the region, because, unlike the US (and Canada), the rest of this hemisphere takes a very dim view on green lighting coups, because they all remember the bad old days when the overthrow of a legitimately elected government, sometimes at the request of US corporate interests, was the rule, rather than the exception.
China and Russia are both making significant efforts in the region, both in terms of securing raw materials and making military sales, and this, along with out completely boneheaded policies on Cuba, are likely to make Latin American countries much more receptive to their overtures.
They have sent a letter to Pelosi with 41 signatures saying that they will not vote for any healthcare bill with the Stupak Amendment, or anything that, “restricts a woman’s right to choose any further than current law.”
They get it. They realize that the Stupak amendment effectively bans insurance that covers insurance from the public exchanges, which would have the effect of banning coverage for abortion nationwide over a relatively short period of time.
Good for them, and we need to primary Bart Stupak…..Hell, if I have a job in 2010, I’m considering contributing to his Republican challenger.
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
H-232 Capitol
Washington, DC 20515Dear Madam Speaker:
As members of Congress we believe that women should have access to a full range of reproductive health care. Health care reform must not be misused as an opportunity to restrict women’s access to reproductive health services.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment to H.R. 3962, The Affordable Healthcare for America Act, represents an unprecedented and unacceptable restriction on women’s ability to access the full range of reproductive health servicesto which they are lawfully entitled. We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law.
Sincerely,
Stupak (n) – The sepsis commonly experienced after unsafe back alley abortions
Coined by Atrios.
So, in order to pacify the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops which has been completely captured by the right-wing and hostile to Democrats for something approaching two decades, the House has agreed to a allow an amendment to be voted that would effectively ban all health insurance policies that pay for abortion services:
Under the agreement, anti-abortion Democrats will be permitted to offer an amendment on the House floor to the health-care overhaul bill. The amendment would prohibit a new government-run insurance plan created by the health-care bill from offering to cover abortion services, congressional sources said. It would also block people who received federal subsidies for the purchase of health insurance from buying policies that offered coverage for abortions.
No doubt about this: by excluding these plans, it will cause their extinction, because it effectively bans such plans from the new insurance exchanges.
I think that the House Leadership should have told Bart Stupak (D-Vatican) to go Cheney himself, and perhaps a fuller application of criminal conspiracy laws, against people like, for example, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who actively conspired to conceal child abuse by clergy is in order too.
[update]
That piece of sh$# amendment passes, 240-194, a little bit after 10:00pm.
*I’m paraphrasing Nixon administration Secretary of Agriculture, and notable bigot, Earl Butz, and yes, I can understand how it’s potentially offensive, but far less offensive than members of the clergy attempting to dictate policy.
Not surprising, when he replaced the Gay friendly DNC chair (Howard Dean ) with yet another bible thumper (Tim Kaine)bible.
As I have said before, Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are desperately afraid of offending homophobic bigots.
Well, the DNC was claiming that they sent those emails to folks in Maine, asking for support for Corzine in NJ, without any mention of the Hate Referendum in Maine by accident, but John Aravosis got a copy of an email sent to donors which proves that to be a lie.
Ironically enough, the email was from Andrew Tobias, who is the author of The Best Little Boy in the World, who later got involved in the comments section of the above thread, and blamed John for, “turning people against support of the Democrats,” ignoring Obama’s record on such things.
I think that it is absolutely clear now, between Donnie McClurkin, his reversals on DADT, inviting homophobes to offer prayers at the inauguration, and, of course, the disgraceful DOMA briefs that Barack Obama will do whatever is possible to avoid basic civil rights for gays.
I don’t know if it’s because he wants everyone to like him, and so does not want to offend anti-gay bigots (homophobia-phobia), or if he is homophobic himself.
It does not matter. There is a pattern here, and it’s not going to change.
Excerpt of email after the fold.
Email to donors:
1. An email went out asking activists to make calls to New Jersey. It was insensitive not to omit Mainers from that email. I apologize that no one thought to do that. I can’t imagine it could have cost No On One even a dozen votes, but I still wish someone would have thought of this in time to catch it. Mistake noted.
2. A different email went out to Mainers urging them to vote. As the only thing of substance anyone was voting on in Maine was Question One, and as Democratic activists vote our way, this was a small but positive effort to be helpful.
I would have liked to see that email discuss No One One directly, in case there may have been an email-enabled Organizing for America activist someplace in Maine who did NOT know where Maine Democrats stood on this issue. (Out of the country without Internet access until the night before the election?) But I’m told there was concern that advocating specifically for a ballot initiative, whether LGBT or otherwise, would set a precedent for every other ballot initiative. Bureaucracies are nervous about setting precedents.
It’s been about 3 weeks, so it’s time to update everyone on the hell hole that Bobby Mugabe made again.
On the bright side, the UK is saying that they will give Zimbabwe $100 million in aid, though I wonder if recent developments (see below) may interfere with this.
First, we have the case of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett, who has been imprisoned on what are clearly trumped up charges, with an improperly filed indictment for, “possessing weapons for the purposes of insurgency and banditry,” a crime that carries the death sentence. (See also here)
While he was finally granted bail, this was one of the proximate causes of Tsvangirai and his MDC-T
disengaging from the ZANU-PF, which means that they are no longer attending cabinet meetings.
It should be noted that Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara and his MDC-M are also participating in the boycott of cabinet meetings.
Tsvangirai is Trying to get the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to intervene on what has increasingly become a phony power sharing arrangement.
Meanwhile, ZANU-PF harassment of the MDC and human rights activists continues apace with raids on MDC offices in Harare (also here) claiming that they were looking for arms…..Shades of Bennett’s kangaroo court.
Inter party talks between the MDC and ZANU-PF have broken off without a resolution, and the human rights situation in the country has gone straight into the twilight zone with Mugabe detaining, and then expelling the “UNHRC special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” Manfred Nowak.
Meanwhile, the Marange diamond fields, which are one of the few sources of hard currency available to Mugabe to keep his supporters paid off, are under a Kimberly process investigation for widespread torture, forced labor, and smuggling, which could lead to ban on the export of their gems.
The reports are that, once again, the Kimberly process will wimp out and do nothing , even after members of the Zimbabwe delegation to the meeting threatened and harassed witnesses at the meeting.
Finally, we have the ZANU-PF ordering the state run media to stop covering any MDC activities.