Category: Evil

By a 5-4 Vote, the Supreme Court Says, “Silly N*gg*rs, Votes Are For Whites!”

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The Supreme Court just castrated the Voting Rights Act:

Handing Congress an assignment with profound political risks, a divided Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a key part of the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act and left it to Congress to try to salvage the law as the effective ban on racial bias at the polls that it has been for nearly five decades. It appears that the future of the Act’s core depends on members of Congress being willing to impose heavy new legal burdens on their own states.

Before the Court in Shelby County v. Holder (docket 12-96) were constitutional challenges to two of the main sections of the 1965 law; the Court nullified one and left the other formally intact but perhaps in deep peril, too. The dissenters complained that, without the invalidated part, the other will be “immobilized.”

If the full potential impact of the ruling does occur, what would mainly be left to authorize challenges to racial discrimination in voting would be other parts of the law not under review Tuesday, but those parts require a potentially time-consuming process of one lawsuit at a time, persuading a court to give a remedy that applies to one state or local government per case.

See also here.

BTW, less than 2 hours later, the Texas AG unleashed their minority voter suppression plan:

Just two hours after the Supreme Court reasoned that discrimination is not rampant enough in Southern states to warrant restrictions under the Voting Rights Act, Texas is already advancing a voter ID law and a redistricting map blocked last year for discriminating against black and Latino residents. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued a statement declaring that both measures may go into effect immediately, now that there is no law stopping them from discriminating against minorities.

………

In the case of the new electoral map, a panel of federal judges found that “substantial surgery” was done to predominantly black districts, cutting off representatives’ offices from their strongest fundraising bases. Meanwhile, white Congress members’ districts were either preserved or “redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent’s grandchildren.” The new map was also drawn in secret by white Republican representatives, without notifying their black and Latino peers. After the court blocked the map, the legislature approved small changes to appease Democratic lawmakers last week. Now that they are free to use the old maps, however, Gov. Rick Perry (R) could simply veto the new plan and use the more discriminatory maps.

The strict photo ID requirement blocked by the DOJ and a federal court would require Texans to show one of a very narrow list of acceptable photo IDs. Expired gun licenses from other states are considered valid, but Social Security cards and student IDs are not. If voters do not have an ID — as many minorities, seniors, and poor people do not — they must travel at their own expense, produce their birth certificate, and in many cases pay a fee to get an ID.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, the DOJ no longer has any power to block these laws, even with the backing of federal judges who found blatant discrimination. Under the remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act, individuals may sue to kill these measures, but only after they have gone into effect and disenfranchised countless Texans of color.

BTW, if you think that this sucks, I think that David Kaiser is right when he predicts a return to a property requirement for voting rights:

………

It occurred to me this morning that the solution to Republican electoral problems is, when you think about it, obvious, and a friend of mine from a red state pointed out that a Tea Party leader has already mused about it, back in the heady days of 2010. The solution, which has a rich tradition in western and US history, is a property qualification for voting. And what is rather shocking is that there does not seem to be anything in the Constitution to prevent it.

We are going to be seeing the teabaggers lobbying for this, the only question is which is the first state where this actually is formally submitted by a state legislator.  (My money is on it being Texasissippi)

A Horriffic 5-4 Supreme Court Decision

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They just Eviscerated the 5th Amendment. They say that you cannot be forced to testify, but if you don’t, a prosecutor can use your silence against you:

Because merely keeping quiet when police ask damaging questions is not claiming a right to silence, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, prosecutors may use that silence against the suspect at the trial. If an individual is voluntarily talking to the police, he or she must claim the Fifth Amendment right of silence, or lose it; simply saying nothing won’t do, according to the ruling.

The Court had taken on the case of Salinas v. Texas to decide whether it violates the Fifth Amendment for prosecutors to use pre-arrest silence as evidence of guilt. But the Court did not reach that issue, since it said that one must say something that invokes the Amendment’s protection, or else it does not apply. Prosecutors’ use of the silence is then permitted, it ruled.

“A witness’s constitutional right to refuse to answer questions depends on his reasons for doing so, and courts need to know those reasons to evaluate the merits of a Fifth Amendment claim,” Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., wrote. The Court rejected the argument that, because suspects do not know the law, their silence should be understood as a Fifth Amendment plea.

Basically, if you are rich enough to have a lawyer, you can invoke that, but if you are too poor for one, then invoking the 5th Amendment in any way other than a specific and precise legalistic manner, it will be used against you.

Would You Cut Someone’s Throat for Money

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The hed is instructive, “Chicago Hospital Accused of Cutting Throats for $160,000.”

When people talk about how the private sector solves everything, just remember this story:

A surgeon at Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital cut a hole in Earl Nattee’s throat on Jan. 3, the day before he died. It’s not clear why.

The medical file contained no explanation of the need for the procedure, called a tracheotomy, according to a state and federal inspection report that quotes Sacred Heart’s chief nursing officer as saying it happened “out of the blue.” Tracheotomies are typically used to open an air passage directly to the windpipe for patients who can’t breathe otherwise.

Now, amid a federal investigation into allegations of unneeded tracheotomies at the hospital, Nattee’s daughter, Antoinette Hayes, wonders whether her father was a pawn in what an FBI agent called a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid.

“My daddy said, ‘They’re killing me,’” Hayes recalled, in reference to the care he received at the hospital.

Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them — enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.

They have witnesses who wore wires, and a number of doctors, as well as the CEO of the for profit (notwithstanding the Catholic hospital sounding name) hospital.

There is a reason why governments need to aggressively regulate, or operate, critical services, because incentives to produce good behavior are either ineffective, or more expensive than explicit regulation.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Yes, We Are Being Watched

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Glenn Greenwald got a copy of a FISA court order requiring that Verizon turn over all phone call information for a 3 month period.  Members of Congress have revealed that this was in fact a renewal, and that this has been going on for 7 years.  Senator Udall stated that he has been trying reveal that this was going on for much of that time, but he had been stymied:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

 The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

 The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

 The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

And, BTW, they are also data mining all the major Internet providers:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

 The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

 The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

 Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

 ………

 A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

 ………

 “Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them,” the presentation claimed. “It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all.”

Because that whole Constitution is just so inconvenient.

BTW, the Washington Post also published an article about the PRISM program at the same time as the Guardian, and toward the end of their article, they have this tidbit:

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

And in the world of conventional wisdom, the New York Times editorial board, has unleashed a can of whup ass on the Obama administration about this:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

 The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

………

 On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

 “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

 Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

Yes, I agree with what Sensenbrenner says, which is a complete mind f%$#.

BTW, it gets worse, because it looks like the NSA was getting credit card data as well:

The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency’s activities.

 The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.’s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA’s operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.

BTW, Marcy Wheeler is spot on when she says that the only reason for all this secrecy is to prevent court challenges by making it impossible for a plaintiff to show standing:

The Administration wants you to believe that “all three branches” of government have signed off on this program (never mind that last year FISC did find part of this 215 collection illegal — that’s secret too).

But our court system is set up to be an antagonistic one, with both sides represented before a judge. The government has managed to avoid such antagonistic scrutiny of its data collection and mining programs — even in the al-Haramain case, where the charity had proof they had been the target of illegal, unwarranted surveillance — by ensuring no one could ever get standing to challenge the program in court. Most recently in Clapper v. Amnesty, SCOTUS held that the plaintiffs were just speculating when they argued they had changed their habits out of the assumption that they had been wiretapped.

This order might just provide someone standing. Any of Verizon’s business customers can now prove that their call data is, as we speak, being collected and turned over to the NSA. (Though I expect lots of bogus language about the difference between “collection” and “analysis.”)

That is what all the secrecy has been about. Undercutting separation of powers to ensure that the constitutionality of this program can never be challenged by American citizens.

It’s no big deal, says the Administration. But it’s sufficiently big of a deal that they have to short-circuit the most basic principle of our Constitution.

Also, read Bruce Schneier’s impassioned defense on whistle blowing.

As I have noted a number of times before, Barack Obama is showing himself to be the Worst ……… Constitutional ……… law ……… professor ……… ever.

Why Species Patents Suck, Part Gazillion

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Stuck in the middle of an article about the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS) is this tidbit about how a lab is claiming all rights to its genome, impeding research on the illness:

But impeding an effective response is a dispute over rights to develop a treatment for the virus. The case brings to the fore a growing debate over International Health Regulations, interpretations of patent rights, and the free exchange of scientific samples and information. Meanwhile, the epidemic has already caused forty-nine cases in seven countries, killing twenty-seven of them.

At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia’s deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that “someone”–a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki–mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.

“The virus was sent out of the country and it was patented, contracts were signed with vaccine companies and anti-viral drug companies, and that’s why they have a MTA [Material Transfer Agreement] to be signed by anybody who can utilize that virus, and that should not happen,” Memish said.

Though Memish referred to a “patent,” the Dutch team has not patented the viral genetic sequence but has placed it under an MTA, which requires sample recipients to contractually agree not to develop products or share the sample without the permission of Erasmus and the Fouchier laboratory. Memish said that the Dutch MTA was preventing Saudi Arabia from stopping the MERS-CoV outbreak, which appears to have started eleven months ago in the Eastern part of his country. The Dutch team denies the MTA is slowing work on the outbreak, saying it has given virus samples to any lab that has requested it.

If you thought that the idea of patenting software was bad, patenting genes and species is a whole new level of f%$#ed up.

In today’s world, when we are in the middle of a potential epidemic, our first priority is to make the world safe for scumbag profiteers.

Narcissistic Twaddle from “Liberal Hawks”

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The Washington Post published an article about how the Liberal Hawks are cowed because of their failures in Iraq and Libya:

For interests on both sides of Syria’s civil war, this has been the week to increase the pressure. Hezbollah sent reinforcements to the troops of President Bashar al-Assad, and Russia reiterated its intention to furnish the regime with weapons. At the same time, Republican Sen. John McCain secretly visited rebels and promised to push the Obama administration to arm the retreating forces. The European Union allowed its weapons embargo to lapse as nations such as Britain and France appear increasingly eager to aid the opposition fighters.

But amid the burst in outside engagement, one influential group seems noticeably silent. The liberal hawks, a cast of prominent left-leaning intellectuals, played high-profile roles in advocating for American military intervention on foreign soil — whether for regime change or to prevent humanitarian disasters. They pressured President Bill Clinton to intervene in Bosnia, provided intellectual cover on the left for President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and urged President Obama to engage in Libya. But even as the body count edges toward 100,000 in Syria and reports of apparent chemical-weapons use by Assad, liberal advocates for interceding have been rare, spooked perhaps by the traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and the clear reluctance of a Democratic president to get mired in the Middle East. Call them Syria’s mourning doves.

“Everybody has their own ghosts to deal with,” said Vali Nasr, a former Obama administration official and leading proponent of intervention in Syrian. “But those people understand that what is going on in Syria cannot go on indefinitely.”

Why the f%$# should we listen to these folks.

  • They were wrong about Iraq.
  • They were wrong about Libya (where Islamist rule, and ethnic cleansing of black Africans is the rule).
  • They have been agitating for a military strike against Iran, which would probably extend the rule of the mullahs by decades, as Saddam’s attack in the 1970s cemented their rule.

And now their feelings are hurt because people don’t take their push for military intervention seriously.

It’s just a no fly zone ……… Only a no fly zone is very clearly an act of war:

Kudos to Josh Rogin for breaking the news that “the White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a no-fly zone inside Syria.” But wouldn’t it be a more powerful story without the euphemism?

Relying on the term “no-fly-zone” is typical in journalism. But that is a mistake. It obscures the gravity of the news.

Here’s how an alternative version of the story might look: “The White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for bombing multiple targets inside Syria, constantly surveilling Syrian airspace alongside U.S. allies, and shooting down Syrian war planes and helicopters that try to fly around, perhaps for months.”

The term “no-fly-zone” isn’t analytically useless. It’s just that folks using it as shorthand should make sure everyone reading understands that, as Daniel Larison put it right up in a headline, “Imposing a No-Fly-Zone in Syria Requires Starting a New War.” That becomes clearer some paragraphs later in Rogin’s article, when he discussed Senator John McCain’s advocacy for a “no-fly-zone.” “McCain said a realistic plan for a no-fly zone would include hundreds of planes, and would be most effective if it included destroying Syrian airplanes on runways, bombing those runways, and moving U.S. Patriot missile batteries in Turkey close to the border so they could protect airspace inside northern Syria,” he wrote.

(emphasis mine)

I would also note that anyone who thinks that this operation would be limited to air and air defense assets should look at the Libyan intervention, where it turned almost immediately into direct close air support for the rebels.

This has disaster written all over it.

There is a reason that “Liberal Hawks” were described as “Useful Idiots” by Tony Judt.

Just When You Thought that Democrats Could Not Get Any More Craven………

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David Vitter proposes a lifelong ban from food stamps for felons, and Democrats blithely included it in the Ag bill:

In today’s Senate debate on the farm bill, Senator David Vitter offered — and Senate Democrats accepted — an amendment that would increase hardship and will likely have strongly racially discriminatory effects.

The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since. In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.

So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut.

Given incarceration patterns in the United States, the amendment would have a skewed racial impact. Poor elderly African Americans convicted of a single crime decades ago by segregated Southern juries would be among those hit.

Robert Greenstein, the author of this post, is an optimist. He notes the disparate racial impact, but does not draw the proper conclusion: Disparate racial impact is a goal of Vitter, not an incidental effect of the proposal.

I’m not surprised that David Vitter proposed this.  He’s just another evil Republican with a diaper fetish who procures prostitutes.

I am depressed that Democrats allowed this amendment to pass.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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At Salon, David Dayen observes that it, “Turns out much-hyped settlement still allows banks to steal homes,’ even after the much hyped mortgage settlement.

This is not an oversight.  The Obama administration has aggressively allowed banks to cheat customers an investors since day one.

Basically, they see this as a way of making sure that the banks appear solvent.

See my writings on HAMP. Here is one quote:

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

By “them”, he means the banks.

By foaming the runway, he means that it allows them to delay writing down bad loans, and continue to extract payments and fees by cheating the public.

The suggestion that this is anything but deliberate policy is simply naive.

Not Enough Bullets………

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It turns out that there is a scam going on at Disney World, wealthy mothers are hiring handicapped people to masquerade as family members to allow their kids to cut in line:

They are 1 percenters who are 100 percent despicable.

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida.

“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”

The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a “handicapped” sign on it. The group was sent straight to an auxiliary entrance at the front of each attraction.

I wonder if moral turpitude is a reason to call in child protective services, because these kids are going to grow up to completely f%$#ed up sociopaths if they stay with those parents.

What a Repulsive Exercise in Truth Telling

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In the UK, an adviser for the (Conservative Party, what a surprise) Prime Minister has said that the recession is a good thing because it pushes wages of ordinary people down:

The prime minister’s adviser on enterprise has told the cabinet that the economic downturn is an excellent time for new businesses to boost profits and grow because labour is cheap, the Observer can reveal.

 Lord Young, a cabinet minister under the late Baroness Thatcher, who is the only aide with his own office in Downing Street, told ministers that the low wage levels in a recession made larger financial returns easier to achieve. His comments are contained in a report to be published this week, on which the cabinet was briefed last Tuesday.

 Young, who has already been forced to resign from his position once before for downplaying the impact of the recession on people, writes: “The rise in the number of businesses in recent years shows that a recession can be an excellent time to start a business.

 “Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater.”

A Downing Street spokesman said Young was merely stating a “factual point and nothing else”. But the comments were described as “appalling and ill-timed” by union leaders, with job-market figures due out next week expected to show that the initial resilience of employment has faded while wages are being severely tightened.

If they said this in public, they would never serve in public office in ever again.

It’s nice though that someone was willing to leak this to the press.

He’s already been let go once by David Cameron for saying that ordinary folks “never had it so good” during the recession because of low rates, but they let him back in.

My guess is that this troll will be back again.

This is Repulsive

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Norristown, PA has a policy of trying to evict victims of domestic violence:

Gosh. Norristown, Pennsylvania seems like it must be a real nice place to live what with its strict schoolmarm rule against “disorderly behavior.” In order to be fair, however, the rule applies not only to those who perpetrate “disorderly behavior” but also to those who might happen to be victims of it. Best legal system in the world! Watch and learn, America: The Norristown police notified a woman whose boyfriend assaulted her that she was being evicted for the crime of disturbing the peace by being assaulted too many times.

From the ACLU:

Last year in Norristown, Pa., Lakisha Briggs’ boyfriend physically assaulted her, and the police arrested him. But in a cruel turn of events, a police officer then told Ms. Briggs, “You are on three strikes. We’re gonna have your landlord evict you.”

Yes, that’s right. The police threatened Ms. Briggs with eviction because she had received their assistance for domestic violence. Under Norristown’s “disorderly behavior ordinance,” the city penalizes landlords and tenants when the police respond to three instances of “disorderly behavior” within a four-month period. The ordinance specifically includes “domestic disturbances” as disorderly behavior that triggers enforcement of the law.

Oh, well, that certainly makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, the poor police officers wouldn’t want to be dragged away from their donuts and coffee just because some broad got in a fight with her man because he didn’t load the dishwasher right or something, and then she called the 5-O on him just ’cause bitches, man, sometimes they’re like that.

After her first “strike,” Ms. Briggs was terrified of calling the police. She did not want to do anything to risk losing her home. So even when her now ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, she did not call. And later, when he stabbed her in the neck, she was still too afraid to reach out. But both times, someone else did call the police. Based on these “strikes,” the city pressured her landlord to evict.

Seriously.  How about arresting her psycho ex-boyfriend?

BTW, if you go the the ACLU link you will find that Norristown is not alone in this.

Any number of municipalities have a policy of punishing the victim, because it is inconvenient.

Dropped from My Blogroll

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Matthew Yglesias has been dropped from my blogroll.

He just wrote an article saying that it’s OK that all those people died in Bangladesh, it’s a choice made by “rational actors” to trade safety for jobs:

I think that’s wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good.

Shades of Larry Summers suggesting that we ship toxic waste to Africa because they need the money.

The workers did not have a choice about safety. They knew that they, and their families, would face starvation if they got fired for not going into an unsafe building. The choice was made by their evil bosses.

This is a constant theme of his writing, and I am no interested in his faux liberal bullsh%$.

While there are people on my blogroll with who I profoundly disagree with because they provide insight into foreign view points.

Retired Maryland Republican hatchet man Joe Steffen, and Russian/Orthodox Christian Nationalist Stanislav Mishin are two such examples on my blogroll.

His view, which can best be described by the phrase, “Even the liberal The New Republic.”

It’s all about self-entitled white guys who never have to wonder about where their next meal is coming from play the Michael Kinsley counter-intuitive idiocy game in an attempt to prove how smart they are.

It’s dull, it’s predictable, it’s bereft of any real insight, and it’s off my regular reading list.

J’Accuse!

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Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff when he was Secretary of State is now saying that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld knew that most of the people in Guantanamo were innocent, but kept them locked up to avoid embarrassment:

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.”

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, “all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” are “terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden’s] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker.”

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners “are the worst of a very bad lot” and “dangerous” and “devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort.”

Now, in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, said Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew the “vast majority” of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

………

Wilkerson’s declaration was made in support of a lawsuit filed by Adel Hassan Hamad, a 52-year-old former Guantanamo detainee who is suing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Joint Chief of Staff Richard Myers, and a slew of other Bush administration officials for wrongfully imprisoning and torturing him.

I don’t expect that there will ever be any justice, either through civil action or criminal prosecution, but the recent return of Bush to polite society is an indictment of our society. (to say nothing of Cheney return as an old wise man on the Sunday shows)

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Like Cthulhu With Fur

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OK, you remember the kitten, right?

He’s soooooooooo kawuuuuuutttteeee!!!

Well a couple of days after we got him, he chewed through the micro-usb cable my daughter uses to charge her phone.

Well, today, it was her ear phones.

Somehow I do not think that the warranty applies.

Maybe I should name him Nyarlathotep.

Unspeakably evil, but he can appear attractive when it suits him.

Worst People in the World

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The modeling agents in Sweden tried to recruit models from an eating disorder clinic:

A well-known clinic in Sweden has managed to attract a following that stands outside the entrance, approaches patients, and … tries to recruit them to be models?

Indeed, while the United States struggles to keep women’s health clinic patients safe from vitriolic anti-abortion protesters, Sweden’s issue is based at the 1,700-bed Stockholm Center for Eating Disorders, the largest clinic of its kind in the country. Agents have been known to stand outside the clinic and approach teenage patients, offering the sometimes horrifically ill girls work as models because of their small size. These instances provide a shocking look into how shallow the modeling world is capable of being, caring only about young women’s physical attributes and not their health.

One of Sweden’s largest modeling agencies once approached a 14-year-old girl and handed her a business card, while another girl who was so sick she was in a wheelchair was interviewed by another agent right outside the clinic. These awful people care not for these girls’ poor health — you know, the reason they’re at the clinic — but instead for their proven ability to lose a lot of weight very quickly.

This is so deeply evil that it just buggers the mind.

Their mothers should have drowned these guys at birth.

So Not Surprised

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After well documented aggravated assaults against Occupy protesters, the DA has decided not to prosecute the thug cops who got caught on tape:

Two New York City police officials involved in separate incidents during the Occupy Wall Street protests won’t face criminal charges, according to a report from NBC News New York.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna (“Tony Baloney,” as he became known to Occupiers) and Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona were investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Bologna, who was immortalized in a hilarious Daily Show segment called The Vigilogna, was disciplined by the NYPD for pepper spraying two women who were caught behind mesh police netting during a demonstration in 2011. The department docked him 10 vacation days and reassigned him to Staten Island, but the DA has decided there’s not enough evidence to prosecute him on criminal charges.

Kaylee Dedrick — one of the pepper-sprayed women — filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD and the officer.

The other incident, involving Cardona, was a few weeks later during an altercation with Occupy protester Felix Rivera-Pitre. The NYPD said that Cardona was sprayed in the face with an unknown liquid by a group of demonstrators and that Rivera-Pitre attempted to elbow Cardona in the face. Cardona is seen in the video below lunging at Rivera-Pitre. The protester said the attack was unprovoked and that Cardona punched him in the face, and tore an earring from his ear.

What a surprise.  Cops break the law in the service of the banksters, and the prosecutors no-bill.

You can see the videos at the link.

I Do Not Care That Their Votes did Not Matter, Primary Them

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The 4 Democrats who voted for the filibuster on the (already largely ineffectual) background checks on guns need to have their political careers ended:

As the Senate began voting Wednesday on nine proposed changes to a gun control bill, the centerpiece proposal on background checks quickly failed to win enough support, despite broad public backing.

The vote on the so-called Manchin-Toomey amendment was 54 in favor, 46 against — failing to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to move ahead. Four Republicans supported it, and four Democrats voted no.

………

In addition to McCain and Toomey, the amendment was supported by Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Mark Kirk (Ill.) The Democrats who opposed the measure were Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.) The four Democrats face difficult reelections in rural states with strong gun cultures.

And their votes will not make a difference.

The NRA will still run ads against them, and the 10% of the electorate who oppose a sane background check policy would never vote for them.

It is more important to enforce meaningful party loyalty than it is to allow these ratf%$#s to hold their seats.

Why Does George W. Bush Hate America?

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Because that is the only reason that he would approve of his aid threatening to ban William F. Buckley from the radio because he criticized them:

Buried in this op-ed by former Bush speechwriter Matt Lattimer about Margaret Thatcher is this incredibly juicy nugget.

A few years later, when (William F.) Buckley questioned the wisdom of the Iraq war and George W. Bush’s 2008 surge, he was all but drummed out of the conservative movement. “If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced, it would be expected that he would retire or resign,” Buckley once said of Bush. For such apostasies, Bush aides threatened to ban Buckley from the radio airwaves. (I know because I was there.)

(emphasis mine)

These guys sound more like Stalinists every day.

We Tortured

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A bipartisan panel convened by the Constitution Project has concluded that torture was practiced, and was approved by our most senior leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, actually use the word torture:

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

………

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

………

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Unfortunately, they do not take a position on prosecutions, which means that their warnings on the US returning to torture are pretty toothless.

The people who conducted, and ordered, torture should be sent to a Federal “Pound Me in the Ass” prison for a very long time.