I rest my case.
And I don’t directly link to his column. He does not deserve my meager page hits.
Category: Evil
Living in a Police State
Case in point, the (black) school teacher who was tased and pepper sprayed by (white) police officers.
You see, she called in a complaint of a prowler around her house, and while waiting for the police to show up, called in a friend to stay with her for safety.
The police showed up, and promptly went jack booted thug on her because she did not want to give the name of her friend, so they handcuffed her, and then tased and pepper sprayed her.
It was so bad that the chief of police, who showed up at the end of this little drama, has publicly stated that he, “suspects the outcome would have been different if the woman had been white and the officers black.”
What is at the crux of this, is the belief, widely held in this country and universally held in the law enforcement community, that any order given whether justified or legal, must be obeyed.
That is, by definition a government by and for police, and hence a police state.
Unfortunately, no one has won political office by defending the rights of the citizen against bad cops.
Yes, the Housing Crisis Was Caused by N%$##@&S
You know the right wing talking point, that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, AKA the GSEs, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) are responsible for the housing meltdown.
Ignore the fact that the GSEs proportion of mortgage securitization fell during the housing bubble, ignore the fact that the lenders that drove the craze were not banks, and were not covered by the CRA’s requirements for them to do lending, because if you are are a right winger, it’s all the fault of people who had the wrong coloration.
Once you let “darkies” buy houses, disaster is soon to follow.
It’s a f%$#ing lie, and the latest data point on this is the fact that, “The rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.”
So an essential part of this narrative, that non-whites cannot be trusted to pay their debts or to be lent to seems to be another lie:
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist.
(emphasis mine)
The right wing has spent a lot of time attempting to manufacture the fiction that it was attempts to deter discrimination and to put some fairness into the system that caused this problem, but the GSEs could never securitize the jumbo mortgages, and the CRA never applied to the neighborhoods where the über-rich built their homes, because you don’t need banks to be forced to lend in well-to-do neighborhoods.
Their lying in furtherance of their bankrupt ideology, as well as a corrupt press corps which elevates “balance” above the truth, is all they have.
The facts prove them to be morally bankrupt parasites who should not be trusted.
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
On Thursday, Sharon* spent 6 hours in the emergency room with severe chest pains.
It turned out that it was her long-standing problems with acid reflux, so it was not a heart attack, it was heart burn.
Well, because of Sharon’s* sensitivities, allergies, and odd interactions between her body chemistry and drugs, there is currently only one drug on the market, the proton pump inhibitor Dexilant, on the market which can address this.
She’s tried all the other ones, and they don’t work, but the insurance company drones have decided that it’s a good idea to deny the authorization to save a few bucks.
We are appealing.
How many f$#@ing trips to the ER with symptoms of a heart attack, which they cover at 100% does it take to wipe out any savings?
Well, let me give you a hint,we have already blown through that with the first trip to the ER.
Not enough bullets.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Obama Tries to Prove Rush Limbaugh Right
Unfortunately, no one notices.
The Obama administration is looking to implement draconian new IP laws that will literally criminalize certain types of thought:
While they may never be able to truly defeat piracy and drive it from the lurking depths of the internet, copyright protection attack-dog organizations like the RIAA and MPAA have long dreamed of the day when they would no longer have to pay for their own copyright enforcement. Now that dream is on the verge of coming true, thanks to the Obama administration.
……
The White House’s vision is perhaps a prelude to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which will go before Congress later this year. The bill would make P2P or BitTorrent client development a criminal offense if the distributed software was used for infringement. It also implements an interesting provision called “imminent infringement”, which allows the government to charge people who they think might be about to infringe with a civil offense (for example if you searched “torrent daft punk”). This is among the first official “thought crime” provisions to be proposed by the U.S. government. The bill also makes it a criminal offense to bypass DRM.
As I have said before, IP law is, at its core, public interest law, as is clearly stated in the Constitution, and this stuff is just nuts.
It does not serve anyone to spend taxpayer money to enforce private licenses, particularly not when doing so implies a regime that would have Eric Arthur Blair* spinning in his grave.
*Better known by his nom de plume, George Orwell.
Why We are a Sick Nation
I don’t mean mentally ill, I mean generally unhealthy.
A study has been done, and it shows that countries with more equitable wealth distribution are healthier, even amongst the wealthiest in society:
……
Links between bodily and economic well-being are far from straightforward. In the related area of socioeconomic inequality we’ve already become aware of unexpected influences through the work of Professor Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham.
In his 2009 book The Spirit Level, co-authored with Kate Pickett, he summarised a raft of research all pointing in more or less the same direction. In countries where there is a big earnings gap between rich and poor, life expectancy is lower while mental illness, obesity and drug and alcohol abuse are all more common.
The real surprise is that it’s not only the poor who suffer. The population as a whole do less well if the gap is wider. The nations with the smallest wealth gap and the lowest incidence of health and social problems are the Japanese and the Scandinavians. The countries with, respectively, the greatest and highest are America, Portugal and Britain. The biological explanation for this is uncertain, but possibly mediated by the hormonal effects of perpetual anxiety about status and position, or loss of them. Economics affects health but not always as you might expect.
In our accommodating the insatiable desire of the people at the top for, “Another yacht to water ski behind,” we are shortening, and worsening, the lives of everyone in our society, both among the haves and have nots.
The economists or social scientists might have a more complex explanation for this phenomenon, but as for me, I will keep the lesson simple, “Evil is bad for you.”
A Contemptible Excuse for an Educator…
And a contemptible excuse for a human being.
And no, I am not referring to DC schools chief Michelle Rhee, who by all indications subscribes to a similar policy, but rather New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, because all he thinks that all that has to happen to fix schools is to make teacher’s jobs crappier:
Klein told Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute last week that the D.C. contract is marvelous and in fact ground-breaking. ‘This deal slayed The three dragons. Seniority. Lockstep pay. Tenure. It got them all.’
(emphasis mine)
I understand that management does not like labor unions, and does not like the protections that union contracts afford to workers.
So I can understand how an administrator might see a weakening or destruction of a labor union as a step on the road to school improvement, or at least a step on the road to making his job easier.
That being said, what Mr. Klein is saying here is that crappifying the teacher’s working conditions is The Only Thing that is required to fix schools. That is what he is saying when he talks about the three dragons.
School reformers view education like investment bankers, and other chief executives, view their jobs: They have no obligation to work for the stake-holders, children and teachers for schools and the shareholders and employees for businesses, they simply have to work for their own personal benefit.
It’s not about education, it’s about making things more convenient for administrators, you see.
I can’t speak to whether or not Michelle Rhee holds the same opinions as her one time mentor Joel Klein,since she hasn’t explicitly stated that she holds this view, as Klein clearly has.
My guess is that she holds these views, particularly since she went out of her way to ensure that millions in private funding for the DC schools was dependent her continued employment as the Chancellor. (Scroll down past the snark about her fiancee.)
This is why, when I hear people like Rhee and Klein talk about accountability, or when I hear someone like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sing the praises of charter schools (which, by the way don’t outperform public schools), I roll my eyes.
The culture of American management for the past 30 years or so has been to maximize personal gain at the expense of both the enterprise the society as a whole, and I guess that this is just a reflection of this warped value system.
While it is a revolting and reprehensible development as a nation-wide trend, it’s just plain evil when our children, and their ability to become thoughtful citizens to the alter of executive expedience.
When We Line Up People Against the Wall………
They don’t care, they’reThe Phone Company
We need to include Verizon Wireless execs, who have issued orders to fire customer service representatives who tell customers that they can turn off web access for their phone.
I Just Hope That We Aren’t a Sinking Ship…
But you should know that the president of Xe, the company formerly known as Blackwater, mercenary rat Eric Prince is planning to leave the country and settle in the United Arab Emirates, and the UAE has no extradition treaty with the United States:
Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled head of the world’s most infamous mercenary firm is planning to move to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Middle Eastern nation, a major hub for the US war industry, has no extradition treaty with the United States. In April, five of Prince’s top deputies were hit with a fifteen-count indictment by a federal grand jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges. Among those indicted were Prince’s longtime number-two man, former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former vice presidents William Matthews and Ana Bundy and Prince’s former legal counsel Andrew Howell.
The Blackwater/Erik Prince saga took yet another dramatic turn last week, when Prince abruptly announced that he was putting his company up for sale.
While Prince has not personally been charged with any crimes, federal investigators and several Congressional committees clearly have his company and inner circle in their sights. The Nation learned of Prince’s alleged plans to move to the UAE from three separate sources. One Blackwater source told The Nation that Prince intends to sell his company quickly, saying the “sale is going to be a fast move within a couple of months.”
Rest assured, if Prince is has charges filed, we can be sure that Obama and His Evil Minions™ will turn over no stones at all in an attempt to bring him to justice.
After all, Prince might roll on senior Bush White House officials, and the uproar might force Obama to investigate them, which appears to terrify him.
Finally, Someone in Arizona Stands Up to Bigots
In Prescott, Arizona, the administrators at commissioned a mural depicting current students at the school:
Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the “Mural Mice.”
Unfortunately, since some of these actual students at the school were black and Hispanic, Steve Blair, a City Councilman and right wing talk show host on KYCA-AM, threw a hissy fit over the description of darkly complected students.
The weasels school administrators responded to this by ordering the artists to lighten the children’s faces:
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.
The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.
It’s gotten a lot of coverage, and as a result, Steve Blair has been fired by the radio station, so apparently there are limits to racism in Arizona.
Here’s hoping that the voters will do so in the next election, but my guess is that they will elect him mayor.
I Can Haz Prosecushuns?
So, now George W. Bush has explicitly stated that he authorized torture:
George W. Bush’s casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded — and would do it again — has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.
Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is “unequivocably torture”, said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.
“As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War,” Irvine said. “Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life.”
Irvine told the Huffington Post that Bush doesn’t appreciate how much harm his countenancing of torture has done to his country.
Here’s a baseball metaphor to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder: You are the umpires, Bush and Cheney are calling you a c*cks*ck*r.
You have no credibility when the worst of the criminals proclaim their crimes, and you do nothing.
This isn’t, “looking forward, not backward,” it’s moral cowardice, it’s being a criminal yourself, because by being an accessory to the cover-up you are an accessory to the crime.
What’s more, much like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, your insistence on denying the rule of law will encourage further law-breaking in the future.
In the Annals of the Unsurprising
Tony Perkins Christo-Fascist Family Research Council lobbied Congress in support of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.
Insert Godwin’s Law comment here.
Anyone here surprised?
Joe.My.God is right when he says, “It’s time for the Southern Poverty Law Center to reclassify the Family Research Council as an official hate group.”
Quote of the Day
I think Woodward’s capitulation to interviewing people in limousines, as opposed to people on the subway, is something I feel is partly responsible for the fact that we ended up in Iraq. Because so many reporters, Judith Miller is the most egregious of them, spoke to Scooter Libby and some other higher officials, and never spoke to intelligence people on the ground. They swallowed wholesale Colin Powell at the U.N., and [ultimately] their limousine reporting meant that 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. I don’t think anything can be so neatly drawn, but I think in this case it can be neatly drawn.
—Novelist, and former Washington Post reporter Lorraine Adams on her former colleague Bob Woodward
(emphasis mine)
A very succinct indictment of what is wrong with the Washington DC press corps.
IMFed
Yes, going through a debt crisis means selling off state assets at pennies on the dollar, so that private operators can underfund basic maintenance and overcharge consumers for luxuries like, you know, water:
Greece on Wednesday outlined plans to sell stakes in state-owned railway, water and real estate companies as part of a drive to raise billions of euros to help restore its ailing public finances.
…………
The European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout for the heavily indebted country projects revenue of 1 billion euros ($1.22 billion) per year from privatizations for the 2011-13 period.
…………
As part of the plan, the cash-strapped government will sell 49 percent of loss-making railway company OSE, 39 percent of Hellenic Post, 23 percent of Thessaloniki water EYATH and 10 percent in Athens water EYDAP.
I hope you are ready for the riots when people’s water bills triple overnight.
It’s sh%$ like this makes things worse.
The method is: sell the assets at an undervalued price, remove the revenue stream from your control, and they tell you that net result will be financial stability.
No, it’s just a slope to bankruptcy and the destruction of the middle class, and it is why the IMF is so justifiably despised across the world.
OK, So Al and Tipper Gore are Separating
It’s really no one’s business but their own. They are both over 60, and they have been married for 40 years.
It’s really none of our business.
So, why am I writing about this?
Because once again, the Washington Post demonstrates just how horrible a human being you have to be in order to have some sort of gig writing opinions for them.
In this case, it’s Stephen Stromberg, who is suggesting that there was something “false” about their kiss at the Democratic Convention in 2000 because they are getting separated now.
He’s making a point about people complaining about Obama being too cook, but he can’t manage not to take a shot at a married couple who are breaking up after 40 years, because that’s what the Beltway Kule Kidz do.
Mr. Stromberg, I’m sure that you don’t read my screeds, but you are a miserable human being, and I would not piss on you if you were on fire.
Full disclosure: I did actually vote for Nader in 2000, because my vote did not matter, as I lived in Texas, and I regret that vote to this day.
OK, Now We Know that He Was Insane
Blah, blah, blah!
We now have a report that George W. Bush told former Argentine President Néstor Kirchner that the Marshall Plan was a screwed up “Democrat plan”, and that the real way to help the economy is to start a war for some reason or other:
KIRCHNER: I said that a solution for the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war. And that the United States has grown stronger with war.
STONE: War, he said that?
KIRCHNER: He said that. Those were his exact words.
STONE: Is he suggesting that South America go to war?KIRCHNER: Well, he was talking about the United States: ‘The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.’ He said it very clearly.
(emphasis original)
This is why we cannot afford to have a military that is so overwhelming that we can invade any non-nuclear power on earth without a 2nd thought.
It’s like giving an 11 year kid with ADHD a loaded gun, and, if anything, the Sarah Palin/Teabagger wing of the Republican Party is even more delusional than Bush/Cheney.
It is inevitable that the minority party will eventually win, and when they do, these will be seriously disturbed people with a world view that could destroy the nation and the world.
Continuing to maintain a tool, and extending it with something like the “invasion in a box” Sea Basing concepts that are in development is a clear and present danger.
Deep Thought
If Goldman Sachs is seeking a 9 figure settlement with the SEC, reports are $250 million, then they really should paying at least a 12 figure settlement.
Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico?
The Texas Board of Education has adopted standards rehabilitating Joe McCarthy, attacking the establishment clause of the 1st amendment, mandating coverage of Phyllis Schlafly, etc.
If I were a on the board of any major university, I would reject the judgment of accreditation body which gave their stamp of approval to any school system adhering to these “standards”.
More, “Looking Forward, Not Backward,” from the Obama DoJ
There will be no criminal prosecutions of the people who created the clusterf%$# that took down AIG:
Federal prosecutors will not bring criminal charges against current and former American International Group Inc. executives for their role surrounding financial contracts that nearly brought down the insurer about two years ago, according to people familiar with the matter.
The decision brings to a close a criminal investigation that, while mostly under wraps, was widely followed. The September 2008 bailout of AIG was one of the biggest and most shocking of the financial crisis, as trading by a noninsurance unit brought down one of the most iconic financial companies world-wide.
The probe focused on Joseph Cassano, who headed a London-based unit of AIG called Financial Products, people familiar with the matter have said. Other executives at the unit, Andrew Forster and Tom Athan, also were targets of the investigation, these people said.
Seriously, at this point, we should be referring anything with the slightest possibility of conviction to a grand jury for indictment.
Anything else encourages more wrongdoing by the Wall Street boys, much in the same way that Obama’s policy of not prosecuting torturer, but pursuing the whistle-blowers encouraging more torture.
Remember the Laptop Spycam Cased in Lower Merion, PA
I’ve been kind of remiss in all of this, but the final analysis is that someone working at the Lower Merion school district) there took thousands of pictures of minors without any justification. (Background here)
Basically, the school supplied laptops took thousands of pictures of children to whom the computers were assigned, including some that involved children in a state of partial undress, and the school district’s information systems coordinator took the 5th when questioned.
As always, there are emails:
Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into “a little LMSD soap opera,” a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program.
“I know, I love it,” she is quoted as having replied.
What’s more, the behavior is so egregious that the school district’s insurer is balking at covering legal fees:
A New York insurer that issued a $1 million liability policy to the Lower Merion School District is balking at the school board’s request that it cover any legal costs and payments associated with the civil rights lawsuit challenging the district’s secret laptop tracking program.
In a suit filed in federal district court in Philadelphia, Graphic Arts Mutual Insurance Company contends that none of the seven claims made by Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins in his invasion of privacy lawsuit amount to “personal injury” as defined in the coverage that the district bought last year.
So, a vice principal got a copy of some of the pictures, of a kid eating Mike & Ikes candy, which she thought were drugs, the school district scrambled to buy insurance, and the behavior seems to have been egregious enough that the insurer is claiming, albeit indirectly, that the Lower Merion SD’s claim is fraud.
This is pretty much what an independent investigation of this cluster f%$# determined too.
What is abundantly clear is that the taking of these pictures constituted an invasion of privacy, that there was a reasonable expectation that this created what is technically child porn, and that a significant number of school staff, both in and out of the Information Systems department, knew that this was going on.
No prosecutions yet, but there should be.