The people who switched their votes on this once they thought that it was going to pass need to be targeted to ensure that they never hold elective office ever again.
I’m with Jonathan Capehart. This reveals the, “cowards and civil rights myopia in the statehouse.
Damn.
They have decided to start publishing essays by serial liar Andrew Breitbart, so, not only won’t I link to them, I won’t go to the site.
The legislature has now passed the bill, which would give the governor the power to declare any government or school district in the state and take it over, hand it to a crony, and dismiss elected officials he did not like.
Background here.
I honestly thought that P.J. had committed bureaucratic Seppuku when he gave an honest opinion about the torture detention conditions of alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, so on one level, I am not at all surprised that Barack Obama fired him.
But Will Bunch, who was lied to by Obama during the campaign, Barack said that he would prosecute torturers and other administration and official law breakers, nails the dishonesty and hypocrisy involved:
“I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.”
— Barack Obama, June 18, 2008.Barack Obama lied.
He lied because somebody — a good man, a decent man, and a respected spokesman for the U.S. State Department — pushed Obama out of his comfort zone this week. And so what happened? — the Obama administration forced him out of his job. Apparently Obama does just want to have people who agree with him. Imagine that.
I’m not surprised, but I am disgusted.
Recall time!So, the Wisconsin State Senate just pulled the anti-union provisions out of the budget bill, and then, since they did not require a quorum, since they were non-budgetary, they passed it with an 18-1 vote.
I will note that the motion appears to be in violation of the state constitution:
The measure approved Wednesday forbids most government workers from collectively bargaining for wage increases beyond the rate of inflation. It also requires public workers to pay more toward their pensions and double their health insurance contribution, a combination equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut for the average worker.
Those savings would appear to be budgetary to me, and hence subject to the state constitution’s quorum requirement.
Firedog Lake’s invaluable David Dayen has some more of the finer points, and it appears that this is definitely headed to court, though the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is heavily Republican.
If you want to donate to the recall efforts, you can go to my Act Blue Page. There is a link there for donations.
Also note that in the middle of the most important fight for ordinary working Americans in decades, the Obama administration has decided that they don’t want to be involved:
Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.
Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.
I guess that someone in the administration finds unions, and ordinary working people to be icky. After all, they expect to spend a billion dollars in 2012 on the Presidential election, and the working man just does not have that kind of money.
Barack Obama is very lucky that the Republicans are as awful as they are, because otherwise, as awful as he is, he’d have a serious primary challenger right now.
What can I say, when Mitt Romney is the class act in the room, you have a very scary political party.
The New York Times times reported on a horrific rape of an 11 year old girl in Texas, and saw fit to blame the victim for the crime.
Some selected quotes:
The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.
………
The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?
“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
Drawn into the act?
The alleged Rapists have to live with this for the rest of their life?
But it gets even better:
Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.
“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”
You see, she hung out with the wrong crowd, and she wore slutty clothes, so she deserves to be raped.
By comparison, the Houston Chronicle doesn’t go out of their way to portray an 11 year old girl as something akin to Jezebel.
Why reporter James C. McKinley Jr. and whoever his editor is are still employed at the Times is completely beyond me.
In Michigan, the governor is pushing a bill through that would grant Governor Rick Snyder the powers of a dictator.
Basically, he can declare a financial emergency for any municipal government or school district, and then he can assign an “Emergency Manager”, who could, without any review cancel any contracts (including labor contracts), dismiss elected officials, disincorporate towns, and dismantle school districts.
What’s more, the Senate version of the bill allows the emergency manager to be assigned to a corporation, like Blackwater (now Xe) or Halliburton.
There is no criteria for such a declaration, but even if there were, they are also gutting local aid, which pretty much means that they are creating fiscal crises anyway.
Basically, any elected official, and any semblance of due process is to be wiped away, in a bill that really does resemble the Emergency Laws that Mubarak used to rule Egypt with an iron fist for all these years.
This is about a corporate takeover of civil society, and the vesting of near absolute power in the executive.
Right wing videographer hack James O’Keefe* has secured yet another scalp, the president of NPR has resigned.
This guy has been proven to be a serial liar, but he releases his crap, Fox News picks it up, and suddenly, people are freaking out.
This just makes it worse for NPR, because they just capitulated to a terrorist.
*Who is not to be confused with my former classmate, founder of the Massachusetts Pirate Party, former Green Party candidate for Massachusetts Treasure, and all around good guy, James “Jamie” O’Keefe.
So now alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning is forced to stand outside of his cell naked for extended periods:
Manning, a 23-year-old Army private suspected of passing thousands of classified documents to the online site WikiLeaks, was placed on suicide watch for two days this week – against the recommendation of the jail’s forensic psychiatrist, attorney David E. Coombs said.
During this time, Manning was forced to stay in his cell around the clock, stripped to his underwear, the lawyer said. His prescription eyeglasses were taken from him, except for the hour of television he is allowed to watch or when he was reading, Coombs added.
The circumstances of Manning’s confinement have drawn public attention. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said he submitted to the State Department a formal inquiry about Manning’s treatment.
You know, the other stuff, covering up the war crimes by Bush and His Evil Minions™ is a secondary crime, an accessory after the fact.
This is something different. This is him authorizing torture on his own, because he is at the top of the chain of command, and he knows it is going on, and he is allowing it to happen.
I’m with Mark Kleiman on this, “This is a total disgrace. It shouldn’t be happening in this country. You can’t be unaware of this, Mr. President. Silence gives consent.“
There is a part of me who wants a Republican to win the 2012 election, who then prosecutes Obama for war crimes.
Of course, they won’t, because it would apply to them then, but the fact that there have not been cabinet level prosecutions over this is a travesty.
And here he is tweeting his support a month agoWhen Maryland Delegate Sam Aora (D-Silver Spring) ran for office, he said that he supported gay marriage.
He’s one of the cosponsors for the bill that provides for recognition of Gay marriage in Maryland.
Well, now that it’s passed the state Senate, and looks like it is going to pass , he says that he is going to vote against it.
This isn’t just about a politician lying. This is about a politician making the issue the core of his campaign, and then betraying the people who supported him because of it.
It was at the core of his campaign.
He campaigned on in, and raised money on it.
Unsurprisingly, there is now a drum beat of people who are asking for their campaign contributions back, particularly since it looks like his vote will kill the bill.
This guy might be the biggest slime ball in Maryland, and that says a lot!
They have added, giving aid to the enemy, which carries the death penalty to the list of charges against the soldier accused of leaking diplomatic cables, and probably the “collateral murder” video, to Wikileaks.
What is going on here, with his pre-trial detention, with 23 hour a day solitary confinement, which is best described as torture, and now the threat of execution, is that they are clearly attempting to coerce perjured testimony, so that they can gin up some charges to engage in a political prosecution of Julian Assange.
Yet another truly repulsive embrace of Bushes Stalinesque embrace of the unlimited national security apparatus by Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™.
There’s his campaign slogan for 2012: Marginally less morally repugnant than whoever he is running against.
Following revelations by Anonymous that HBGary Federal was developing a plan of Nixonian dirty tricks, with false identities, forged documents, and other disinformation, the CEO of HBGary Federal has been fired resigned:
Aaron Barr’s departure as CEO of HBGary Federal represented the latest twist for the company and its Sacramento affiliate, HBGary Inc. A spokeswoman for the Sacramento company confirmed the resignation.
According to numerous reports, Barr’s company, which is based in Colorado and Washington, D.C., proposed conducting a disinformation campaign against critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The plan was presented to the chamber’s law firm, but the chamber says it wasn’t aware of it.
The plan was aborted after the hacker group Anonymous stole tens of thousands of e-mails from both HBGary and HBGary Federal – and posted many of the messages on the Web.
And now Democratic members of Congress are calling for an investigation of these activities.
Of course, there won’t be an investigation in the House. The Republicans are busy looking for a blue dress.
In an effort to remove demonstrator from the Wisconsin capitol, Scott Walker had the windows welded shut to prevent people passing food in.
In related news, a district judge has issued an injunction against Scott Walker’s order to shut the capitol until a full hearing can be held.
Is it just me, or does dealing with Republicans remind one of the O. Henry story, The Ransom of Red Chief?
And the trailer
But Charles Ferguson, the director of the documentary The Inside Job, upon accepting his award for best documentary, raised an obvious point:
Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.
It’s a good question, and, considering the timing of the crisis, it really started in September 2008, and there was no way that anything but damage control could be done over the next few months, the answer has to be, “Because Barack Obama does not want a single financial executive to go to jail.”
There are some issues that were mismanaged by the Bush administration, they had no intention to reign in excessive bonuses, for example, but the only way that major figures, such as the recent decision to no-bill Angelo Mozillo, is if there was a conscious decision not to apply to the rule of law at the highest level.
This is very similar to, and as least as damaging in the long term as, his conscious to allow the worst excesses of torture, perjury, and civil rights violations for Bush and His Evil Minions.™
This is corrosive to society.
RBS bankers get £950m in bonuses despite £1.1bn loss:
More than 100 bankers at Royal Bank of Scotland were paid more than £1m last year and total bonus payouts reached nearly £1bn – even though the bailed-out bank reported losses of £1.1bn for 2010.
The chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, said the number of millionaires was lower than a year ago and said a quarter of the group’s 18,700 investment bankers would not receive a bonus from the £950m payout pool agreed with UK Financial Investments, which controls the taxpayer’s 83% stake in the bank. Unions were baffled that any bankers were getting bonuses.
The unions are not the only ones who are baffled.
When Colin Powell spewed his lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, his staff had already warned him that the information was complete crap.
In one case, he personally made up dialog that did not exist, and in others, he used reports that flagged the data as “Weak” and “not credible”.
Not a surprise.
Here is hoping that at some point in the not-too-distant future, Powell’s reputation experiences the same sort of reevaluation that Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan has.
The Department of Justice, no doubt looking forward rather than backward, had dropped its criminal investigation of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo:
Federal prosecutors have shelved a criminal investigation of Angelo R. Mozilo after determining that his actions in the mortgage meltdown — which led to $67.5-million settlement against him — did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.
As the former chairman of Countrywide Financial Corp., Mozilo helped fuel the boom in risky subprime loans that led to the crippling of the banking industry and the near-collapse of the financial system.
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles began probing Mozilo in 2008, and four months ago he agreed to pay a $22.5-million fine and to repay $45 million in what the government said were ill-gotten gains to former Countrywide shareholders. The payments settled a civil action by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As Atrios notes, what this really means is that if you want to run a criminal enterprise, make sure that everyone has a piece of it, because, “If Everybody Is Guilty Then Nobody Is.”
Matt Taibbi is right, our society is now run by people who have declared criminals to be untouchable before the law.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was bankrolled by the Koch brothers Josef Stalin derived fortune:
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker, whose bill to kill collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions has caused an uproar among state employees, might not be where he is today without the Koch brothers. Charles and David Koch are conservative titans of industry who have infamously used their vast wealth to undermine President Obama and fight legislation they detest, such as the cap-and-trade climate bill, the health care reform act, and the economic stimulus package. For years, the billionaires have made extensive political donations to Republican candidates across the country and have provided millions of dollars to astroturf right-wing organizations. Koch Industries’ political action committee has doled out more than $2.6 million to candidates. And one prominent beneficiary of the Koch brothers’ largess is Scott Walker.
Seriously, these guys are to the conservative wackdoodle movement as Gaëtan Dugas was to AIDS.
*No seriously, Koch Industries made its money building refineries for Josef Stalin.
So, BP is whining because it thinks that Ken Feinberg’s slow walking of meager settlements is too generous:
In the eight months since Kenneth R. Feinberg took over the $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, he has been attacked by many of those filing claims and by coastal state politicians who argue that the process is opaque, arbitrary and slow. Many of them have also argued that Mr. Feinberg’s recently published estimates of future damage to those in the gulf are too optimistic, and thus his offer of compensation in a final settlement is too low.
Now he is getting complaints from another quarter: BP.
The oil giant is arguing that if anything, Mr. Feinberg’s proposed settlements are too generous. The planned payments far exceed the extent of likely future damages because they overstate the potential for future losses, the company insists in a strongly worded 24-page document that was posted on the fund’s Web site Thursday morning.
And after that, BP murdered its parents, and asked for mercy because it was an orphan.
Mark Ciavarella, Jr. who took kickbacks from private prisons to sentence children to confinement, has been found guilty of racketeering, money-laundering conspiracy, fraud and filing false income tax returns, though not of bribery:
A federal jury on Friday found a former Pennsylvania judge guilty in a so-called kids-for-cash scheme, in which he took money in exchange for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit detention centers.
………
The jury found him not guilty, however, of seven counts of extortion and 10 counts of bribery.
The former judge faces a maximum sentence of 157 years in prison. The jury also ruled he must forfeit $997,600.
I think that the jury felt that they had to find proof that he would not have sent these kids away if he hadn’t been paid, i.e. what was in his head at the time, which is impossible.
Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but the fact that hid the money, that whole money laundering and racketeering bit, is pretty good evidence that he knew what he was doing is illegal, but I wasn’t in the court room.
Here is hoping that the judge sentences him to the max. What Ciavarella did was truly beneath contempt.