Category: Evil

This is Not Going to End Well………

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The regular reader(s) of my blog may be aware of my travails with RP the feral cat.*

The short version is that we caught her in a Have-a-Heart trap, and brought her in.

When I let her out she freaked, and ran into the basement ceiling, but not before biting me and giving me puncture wounds through oven mitts.

The next day, I saw her outside, so she figured a way out of the house.

When we got our cats, RP continued to come into the house somehow, and eat our cats food. (Video here) We still haven’t figured out how she does that.

A few weeks after that, RP fell out of the ceiling, and I caught her, and she peed on me and clawed the hell out of me.  (I did not blog on that particular affront to my already limited dignity)

I even made a cat shelter outside in the vain hope of giving her an alternative to going into the house. No such luck.

Well, this morning, I got a call from Sharon†. RP was in the house, and had lured our kitten Destructo into the ceiling.

The kitten had gotten stuck (or maybe just confused)and was panicking, and my wife and kids had to reach into the suspended ceiling to get him out.

While this was going on, RP was watching with what my wife describe as smug amusement.

It’s on. It is totally on.

I’m halfway through cobbling together a trap made from the cat travel cage and the aforementioned Have-a-Heart trap, and if it works, we will either try to tame the cat, or take to a shelter and get it the f%$# out of our neighborhood ……… and my house.

I do realize that I have been channeling Robert Redford playing John Dortmunder in the 1972 film, The Hot Rock

Dortmunder: Not me. I’ve got no choice. I’m not superstitious. And I don’t believe in jinxes, but that stone’s jinxed me and it won’t let go. I’ve been damned near bitten, shot at, peed on and robbed. And worse is gonna happen before it’s done. So I’m takin’ my stand. I’m going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me.

Considering my record with this cat, I can only conclude that the chances are remarkably good that it will get me.

There is a part of me that fears I am so going to get killed or maimed by this f%$#ing cat.

*RP stands for Rodentia Phage, or Ravage and Pillage, or maybe just RP. I don’t know for sure, but it is a cat, so it does not come when it is called.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

The FCC Gets one Right, Big

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The FCC has issued a temporary rule forbidding the extortionist phone rates charged to prisoners and their families:

Today was an extremely emotional meeting at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After ten years of fighting, the FCC resolved the Petition filed by Martha Wright and concluded that the rates charged for prisoners to make and receive phone calls are “unjust and unreasonable” and therefore violate Section 201 of the Communications Act. The FCC imposed interim rates and issued a further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to ensure that rates going forward are based on actual cost to provide service, not jacked up outrageously because prisoners and their families have no choice. Importantly, the FCC ruled that the “commissions” (aka kickbacks) paid to jails for the right to exploit the helpless and profit from the misery of their families are not a “cost” that can be recovered. (FCC press release here.)

This is a repulsive practice.

Not only was it creating a literally captive customer base for these obscene rates, it also had the effect of increasing recidivism, and impoverishing the families of prisoners.

Lying Liar

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Obama went on Leno a few days ago, and insisted that, “There Is No Spying On Americans:

President Obama defended the , telling NBC’s Jay Leno on Tuesday that: “There is no spying on Americans.”

 “We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”

 Obama also called the National Security Agency’s surveillance a “critical component to counterterrorism,” and defended the shutdown of U.S. embassies and travel warnings this weekend, saying they followed information about a possible terrorist threat “significant enough that we’re taking every precaution.”

He’s lying, as James Ball and Spencer Ackerman showed in today’s Guardian, where it was revealed that the NSA is using a legal loophole to warrantlessly search Americans emails and text messages:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

 The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.

 The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.

 The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

 The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as “incidental collection” in surveillance parlance.

 But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals’ communications.

Only, as I noted a few days ago, the DEA is using NSA intercepts against people in the United States and lying about it.

You may be thinking that it is still not a problem, because you don’t do drugs, but you probably use money, and guess what, the IRS is using NSA intercepts too:

Following up on exclusive reporting from earlier this week about how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency uses NSA surveillance data and tips from a secretive unit called the Special Operations Divisions (SOD) to initiate investigations, Reuters on Thursday reveals that the Internal Revenue Service was aware of and may have also used these “unconstitutional” tactics.

 What’s troubling in both cases, according to legal experts, is the manner in which the agencies hide the true source of an investigation’s starting point—never revealing the use of the highly classified sources involved—and then “recreate” a parallel investigation to justify criminal findings.

 Additionally troubling is that the IRS and the DEA are only two of the more than twenty federal agencies that work in tandem with the SOD, leading to speculation that the practice of utilizing than hiding surveillance techniques that have not been properly documented or approved could be far-reaching.

So, the f%$#ing IRS is f%$#ing collaborating with the f%$#ing NSA to invade your privacy, and find out if there is something, anything that they can use against them.

And by the way, the successes that they are touting as a result of our government going “Big Brother” on all of us?  The best that they have come up with is the trial and conviction of a cab driver who did nothing but send money to al-Shabab in Somalia:

He was a San Diego cab driver who fled Somalia as a teenager, winning asylum in the United States after he was wounded during fighting among warring tribes. Today, Basaaly Moalin, 36, is awaiting sentencing following his conviction on charges that he sent $8,500 to Somalia in support of the terrorist group al-Shabab.

Moalin’s prosecution, barely noticed when the case was in court, has suddenly come to the fore of a national debate about U.S. surveillance. Under pressure from Congress, senior intelligence officials have offered it as their primary example of the unique value of a National Security Agency program that collects tens of millions of phone records from Americans.

For getting this cabbie, we are spending $2-4 billion just on a data center in Utah.  (The NSA budget is estimated to be worth more than $ 10 billion)

Big brother don’t come cheap, apparently.

I don’t care about Obama’s most recent offer to create the illusion of transparency.

It is clear that the problem with surveillance dragnets that it will be abused by bad people, and bad people, whether he understands it or not is Barack Obama in his war on whistleblowers.

The Corrupt Educational Industrial Complex In a Nutshell

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Tony Bennet, who has been Florida commissioner of Education of 7 months just got fired resigned because it was discovered that he fabricated the ratings of a politically connected Charter school at his last position:

A national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education resigned as Florida education commissioner Thursday, amid allegations that when he ran Indiana’s schools, he changed the state grade of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor.

 In a resignation letter that surprised many, Tony Bennett dismissed the brewing scandal as “malicious and rooted in unfounded allegations” but said that it had created “a distraction from important work” and that he was leaving his post immediately.

The move came two days after the Associated Press reported that it had acquired e-mails written by Bennett in 2012, while he was running Indiana’s schools, in which he directed his staff to change the state grade for Christel House Academy. The charter school was founded by Christel DeHaan, who has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett.

 The school, which had been kindergarten through eighth grade, added grades nine and 10 in 2012, and test scores from the new students were low enough to pull down the school’s rating from an A to a C on an A-to-F scale.

At Bennett’s direction, staff used a loophole in regulations and removed the scores of ninth- and 10th-graders, bringing the school’s grade back up to an A. Bennett has said that changing the grade made the rating system credible because he knew Christel House to be a high-performing school.

 The Indiana State Teachers Association thinks otherwise. “It’s time to call the Tony Bennett letter-grading scandal exactly what it is — cheating,” union officials wrote in a statement. “There are no excuses for the actions taken by Bennett and his staff, as revealed in the string of e-mails, other than favoritism, cronyism, self-interest and hubris — none of which has a place in public school policymaking.”

He lost his last job in Indiana when voters tossed his sorry ass out in the 2012 elections, because the voters saw through his bullsh%#.

But Republicans, and the educational reform establishment didn’t see his bullsh%$.

Case in point, the biggest stars in the anti-teacher pro-privatization education establishment,  Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, and Bush’s  Chiefs for Change coalition, all just just offered a full throated endorsement of this ratf%$#.

This is not a an anomaly.   We now know that Rhee’s “success” was built on altered tests, and the former head of the Atlanta schools, Beverly Hall, has been literally been charged with racketeering.

The goal of people like this is to destroy the public schools and the teachers’ unions, so that private operators and their Wall Street backers can make bank, not to help our kids.

There are real problems with the education that our children receive in the US, but the biggest problem is that there are more poor children in the US, and the poverty is more intense, than in the rest of the industrialized world.

Wall Street and Their Evil Minions™ cannot help with that.

In fact, their role in our economy has to been to exacerbate these problems.

This is Beyond Orwell’s Wildest Imaginings

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In his seminal work 1984, he coined the idiom, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

Well, Obama and His Evil Minions™ have done this one better, and they claim that the list of people that we are at war with is classified:

Back in May, we noted the oddity of the charges in Bradley Manning’s trial, in which he was accused of aiding three different “enemies,” with the last one being classified. Specifically, he was accused of aiding Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which is different than AQ itself) and… mystery enemy. Back at the beginning of July, the government quietly dropped the charge against the classified enemy, so that’s no longer in play in that case. That said, apparently this concept of classifying who we’re at war with wasn’t just limited to the Manning trial. ProPublica has the ridiculous and frightening tale of finding out that the answer to the simple question of who the US is at war with, is apparently classified as well.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

The Pentagon also went on to tell ProPublica that revealing who we’re actually at war with would do “serious damage to national security.” The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more.………

If the UK were to hook up a generator to the grave of Eric Arthur Blair, they could power all of Europe, because he is surely spinning in his grave at unbelievable speed.

More Adventures of the New Party of Jefferson Davis

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Paul Krugman notes that the current attempts by Congressional Republicans to use the threat of a government shutdown to roll back Obanmacare mirrors the actions of the South when they tried to destroy the United States.

You see, Marco Rubio is now claiming that Obama wants to shut down government because he will not end his health care plan.

As Krugman notes, Lincoln nailed this at his Cooper Union speech over 150 years ago:

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

The party of Lincoln has become the party of Jefferson Davis.

A New Definition of Chutzpah………

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Know your meme

Yes, John Pike, infamous as the Pepper Spray cop in Berkeley, who subsequently became a meme, and is now a poster boy for the banality of evil, has now filed for workmans’ comp:

The former UC police officer who was internationally condemned for pepper-spraying demonstrators at UC Davis is seeking workers’ compensation, saying he suffered psychiatric injury as a result of the November 2011 incident.

 John Pike has a settlement conference set for Aug. 13 in Sacramento, according to the state Department of Industrial Relations’ website and an Associated Press report.

 Pike was fired in July 2012, eight months after a task force investigation found that his action was unwarranted.

I’m beginning to think that the only folks out there with a bigger sense of entitlement than Congressional Republicans Newt Gingrich are bad cops.

Whenever the worm turns, and the scrutiny that they apply to others is applied to them, they employ every trick in the book to avoid justly deserved consequences.

Even in Bankruptcy, Detroit Must Pay for a Millionaire’s Toys

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Bankruptcy, Schmankruptcy, billionaire Mike Ilitch’s new stadium must get its $450 million:

When Detroit filed for what is the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history, one of the items immediately placed on the potential chopping block was pensions for current retirees who had worked for the city. A pension shortfall accounts for $3.5 billion of the city’s $18 billion in debt, and the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has called for “significant” pension cuts.

But even with pensions possibly getting the axe – along with who knows what else in terms of services for the already downtrodden city, or even masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Art – Detroit still seems ready to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for a new arena for the National Hockey League’s Detroit Red Wings………

This is not The Onion.

Detroit is in bankruptcy (sort of, long story), but this billionaire has to get a shiny new stadium for his team.

It buggers the mind.

Just When You Thought that Obama’s Secrecy Fetish Could Not Get Any More Reprehensible………

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I present to you the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was imprisoned at the demand of the US government because he revealed that it was a US drone strike, and not a Yemeni army attack, that killed 41 civilians in al-Majalla in 2009.

His “trial” was condemned as a kangaroo court by numerous human rights group, and when the President of Yemen wanted to pardon him because of internal protests, Barack Obama personally called him to brow beat him into extending his detention.

Well, Shaye has now been released, but the official wheels in the Obama administration continue to try to grind him to dust:

News broke yesterday afternoon that, after a nearly three-year-long imprisonment, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye had been released by the Yemeni government. Shaye’s work drew international attention in 2009 when he reported on a U.S. airstrike in the Yemeni village of al-Majalla that killed 41 civilians. He also conducted multiple interviews with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

 U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have told journalists that Shaye facilitated AQAP attacks, but his accounts of his arrest detail press intimidation by the Yemeni government, then still headed by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned amid mass protests in November 2011. Shaye’s five-year prison sentence has drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Yemen-based Freedom Foundation.

 The U.S. government is still concerned about Shaye. Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told FP this morning by email, “We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Meehan did not comment on whether the United States advocated against his release.

This is so repulsive on so many levels.

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banksta

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Because as a bankster you can break into someone’s house, and take all their stuff, and not only are not arrested, you don’t have to pay them anything for this:

An Ohio bank is refusing to reimburse a Vinton County woman whose house they unjustly repossessed while she was out of town.

 Katie Barnett recently returned home after being away for two weeks to find that the lock on her door had been changed. She crawled in through the window to find all of her stuff missing.

 Barnett suspected she had been robbed — and she wasn’t too far off.

 It seems that, while Barnett was gone, the First National Bank of Wellston arrived at her place of residence, broke in, and took possession of all her belongings, including the house.

 Except, as it later turned out, they had the wrong address.

 “They told me that the GPS led them to my house,” Barnett told 10TV. “My grass hadn’t been mowed and they just assumed.”

 Phoning the local police to report the incident did Barnett little good, as the McArthur Police Chief refused to investigate and considered the case closed.

But for Barnett, the ordeal is very much ongoing.

With all of her stuff either sold off by the bank or thrashed, the homeowner presented the bank’s president with an $18,000 estimate for restitution.

He refused to pay up.

“He got very firm with me and said, ‘We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,’” Barnett recalled. “I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back.”

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, will no one prosecute these rat bastards?

They break into your house, they steal and trash all of your stuff, and when caught, they refuse to make you whole.

I would suggest that Katie Barnett lawyer up, put a lien on the f%$#ing bank’s HQ, and then start foreclosure proceedings.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

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So, a judge rules that guards grabbing the genitals of Guantánamo prisoners who want to talk to their lawyers is interfering with their right to counsel, so they are appealing:

A federal appeals court is allowing Guantánamo guards to resume searching detainees’ genitals on their way to and from legal meetings while the Obama administration challenges a federal judge’s ruling that the searches unfairly impede attorney-client interaction.

 The order Wednesday by a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit capped 24 hours of legal wrangling: The Justice Department asked a New York lawyer to let guards search her client’s genital area, the lawyer refused and the Southern Command’s top general joined the fray with a sworn declaration that a federal judge got it wrong.

 Groin searches aren’t intended to prevent legal meetings, said Southcom’s Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, noting that his Guantánamo soldiers similarly search captives meeting with Red Cross delegates.

 Past practice of shaking a captive’s trousers to see if “nails, shanks, ragged scraps of metal” fall out “posed an unacceptable risk to the safety and security of detainees and guards,” Kelly said.

 Last week, detainee lawyers persuaded U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth that the invasive searches, adopted amid a widespread hunger strike, were discouraging some of Guantánamo’s 166 captives from voluntarily leaving their cells for meetings with their lawyers. Lamberth ordered the guards to stop it, and resume the practice of physically shaking the waistband of the pants of a prisoner to see if any contraband comes out.

 ………

 In his ruling last week, Lamberth concluded that the motivation for the searches was not to enhance security but to deter the detainees’ access to attorneys by implementing search procedures that are “religiously and culturally abhorrent” to devout Muslims.

 Lamberth’s ruling had sought to reset the search procedures to an era before Latif’s death. The judge noted that there was no proof that Latif hid the drugs in his genital area.

………

In London, detainee attorney Crider, who works for a non-profit law firm Reprieve, called the refusal to follow Lamberth’s order “contempt of court, pure and simple. Why is it suddenly essential for the government to grope my clients in a way that been off-limits for years?”

I’m beginning to think that the Bush/Cheney regime of overt lawlessness is preferable to the protestations by Obama and His Evil Minions™ that they “respect” the rule of law and due process.

Where is the outrage?

If the Washington Post Were to Replace Richard Cohen with Pat Buchanan………

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No one could tell the difference, except that Pat is a more interesting writer.

So, it’s OK to stalk a black boy in a hoodie because he’s a black boy in a hoodie, just like when he said that it was OK for jewelers to refuse to allow black people into their stores.

He also decided that the Polanski child rape was no big deal, basically because he likes Chinatown.  (I would note that there are legitimate issues of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, which are serious issues, but Cohen, and the almost as awful Anne Applebaum, are just horrible human beings.)

I do not understand why Cohen is not sweeping floors for a living.

I Think that Carl Levin Just Suggested that Obama Fire James Clapper

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Seeing as how Levin is one of the most intelligence agency friendly Senators, so the fact that he is subtly suggesting that DNI Clapper be fired is a significant thing:

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said Tuesday that he was “troubled” by the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and was unsure how Clapper could be held accountable.

………

The testimony prompted criticism from lawmakers and led to some calls for his resignation over the false testimony.

Levin said he wouldn’t go that far but suggested that the only way Clapper could be held accountable was if President Obama fired him.

“I’m troubled by that testimony, obviously,” Levin said at a breakfast roundtable hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

“How do you hold him accountable? I guess the only way to do that would be for the president to, somehow or other, fire him,” Levin added. “I think he’s made it clear that he regrets saying what he said. I don’t want to call on the president to fire him, although I’m troubled by this.”

Actually, the distinguished gentleman from Michigan does want Clapper fired, he would not have brought it up, and then dismissed the suggestion, if he did not want Clapper gone.

Crap

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The Commodities Futures Trading Commission could have instituted real and effective rules on swaps trades by doing nothing, but they caved to the banks, because the banks refused to prepare for the deadline:

I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.

As readers may recall, CFTC chairman Gary Gensler was in a position to stare down bank efforts to water down critical provisions of Dodd Frank on derivatives (see here for details of the issues at stake). The short version is that Gensler did not have the votes among his commissioners to support his position since the Administration had managed to appoint a bank stooge as one of the Democrats. However, Gensler controlled the agenda. That meant he had the option of not putting the matter to a vote of his fellow commissioners at all, which meant Dodd Frank would become effective as written (mind you, normally legislation does legitimately require some tweaking since the legislative language may be imprecise or not mesh well with existing rules).

What appears to have forced Gensler to relent was not the CFTC politics, but bank refusal to prepare, which meant they could stamp their feet and say if Gensler did not back down, the markets would blow up and it would all be his fault.

Read the rest, and you will not just be disgusted by the CFTC, you will want to replace the SEC with a trained monkey as well.

Well Duh!

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The Washington Post notes that, “Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight.”

Gee, you think?

Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress’s ability to rein in government surveillance.

Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

The most recent example came on March 12, when James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the government was not collecting information about millions of Americans. He later acknowledged that the statement was “erroneous” and apologized, citing a misunderstanding.

“Misunderstanding,” my ass.

Clapper was given a day’s notice that the question was going to be asked, and he was given an opportunity to further clarify immediately after the fact.

He simply lied, because he knew that he could.

Why Ellsberg Could Turn Himself In, and Edward Snowden Cannot

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Basically, it comes down to the fact that while Ellsberg might have been at risk by illegal activities of the Nixon administration, he was not at risk by the law itself, while Edward Snowden would be tortured as a matter of law and Department of Justice policy:

Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.

After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice.”

Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

(FYI, “incapacitate me totally” means assassination by Nixon’s people)

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

What he is saying here is that Snowden will be tortured if he ever enters US custody.

Hell, they did that almost 20 years ago in the case of Wen Ho Lee, where he spent months in pretrial solitary, largely because the prosecutors, and the counter-espionage apparatus, wanted to break him.

BTW, when we look at the NSA surveillance regime, it is what a former East German Stasi officer would call a totalitarian state’s wet dream:

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

You know, if your surveillance regime is something that gives a former Stasi agent a stiffie, you are doing something profoundly evil.

I Liked Him Better as Ford Prefect

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Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) volunteers to be force fed to show what it’s like for the Guantanamo detainees. (Not for the faint of heart, I felt ill after watching)

Note that they stopped when he asked. In our Gulag in the Caribbean, they don’t stop, and it goes on for 2 hours ……… Twice a day.

Because torturing people who have been cleared of any crime, because Barack Obama lacks the balls to let them out, is what we have become as a society.

And still, the Republicans are working on a phony IRS and Benghazi scandal, instead of this, or his coddling the banksters.

There are very real crimes here, and the Republicans cannot bring themselves to complain about the torture of non-white people.

And this will be the response from the Obamabots:

American Extremists - Food for thoughtlessness

Food for thoughtlessness

Live in Obedient Fear Citizen

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Remember that you are the bankster’s property, and the Bill of Rights never applies:

Jeff Olson, 40, is facing a potential 13-year jail sentence for perhaps the world’s most costly sidewalk art. A former aide to the U.S. Senator from Washington, Olson used water-soluble statements like “Stop big banks,” and “Stop Bank Blight.com” outside Bank of America branches last year to protest the company’s practices. He eventually gave up his protest but prosecutors later brought 13 charges against him. Now a judge has reportedly banned his attorney from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial.” It appears someone associated with Bank of American could finally go to jail, but it will not by the bank officials in the financial scandal. It is the guy writing slogans in chalk in the sidewalk.

 I have long been critical of the degree to which American judges are now barring parties from making defenses and arguments before juries. These rulings often have an outcome determinative impact on trials. In this case, free speech was the motivation of Olson, but he will reportedly have to defend himself as just a guy who walked up and started drawing in front of this bank.

 Olson and his partner had been campaigning to get people to take their money out of the bank. This campaign led to a confrontation with Darell Freeman, vice president of Bank of America’s Global Corporate Security, who reportedly demanded action from local prosecutors. Olson stopped when contacted by the San Diego Gang Unit in 2012.

 Yet, the bank insisted the chalk caused $6,000 to clean up, a rather suspicious claim. These were slogans written on the sidewalk. Prosecutors hit him with 13 counts of misdemeanor vandalism charges and $13,000 in restitution to the City and to Bank of America.

(emphasis mine)

This has gone viral, and the response of the judge was swift, to put a gag order on all the participants for a f%$#ing misdemeanor:

As reported in a Thursday evening, June 27, BuzzFlash at Truthout update to the chilling San Diego (SD) city attorney prosecution of Jeff Olson, an SD Judge placed an unprecedented gag order on a misdemeanor trial — in particular muzzling Olson. But it also apparently included witnesses, the jury and others.

 Judge Howard Shore also chastised the Mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner. Filner apparently in the judge’s eyes had the temerity to call the trial of Olson a waste of time and taxpayer money. According to the San Diego Reader, Filner sent out a memorandum on June 20 that read in part:

This young man is being persecuted for thirteen counts of vandalism stemming from an expression of political protest that involved washable children’s chalk on a City sidewalk. It is alleged that he has no previous criminal record. If these assertions are correct, I believe this is a misuse and waste of taxpayer money. It could also be characterized as an abuse of power that infringes on First Amendment particularly when it is arbitrarily applied to some, but not all, similar speech.

Judge Shore, in essence, warned the mayor of San Diego, who happens to be a Democrat in a traditionally conservative city, to keep his comments to himself, and would likely have issued a gag order on the mayor if Judge Shore were able.

(Again emphasis mine)

Silly rabbit, free speech is for Banksters.

Barack Milhaus* Obama

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Yes, Barack Obama has stepped it up a notch in his war against transparency in government by requiring federal employees to snitch on each other, and declaring both leaking and investigative journalism as tantamount to treason:

Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

 President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

 Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

 “Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

 The Obama administration is expected to hasten the program’s implementation as the government grapples with the fallout from the leaks of top secret documents by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who revealed the agency’s secret telephone data collection program. The case is only the latest in a series of what the government condemns as betrayals by “trusted insiders” who have harmed national security.

(emphasis mine)

This really is chilling and truly evil.

Mr. Obama is truly the worst constitutional law professor ever.™