Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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Peter Schiff, the libertarian-leaning economist who's best known for seeing the economic collapse coming before it hit, says he's seriously considering a run for the Senate against Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut). If he runs, Dodd will be in serious trouble, and that really wouldn't distress me much.
Ben-ami Kadish passed super-secret documents to the Israeli government, repeatedly, over several years. When he was found guilty in court, US District Judge William H. Pauley 3d (Clinton 1998) scolded Kadish and ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine and go on his merry way. "When the $50,000 fine was ordered, Kadish said, "No problem." Why the simple slap on the wrist? The Supreme Court has decided that you have a lot less right to legal counsel than you did a week ago. The cops can interrogate you without your lawyer being present. It's pretty sickening, and pretty much expected. Curse the court, sure, but don't forget to thank the Democrats, who played roll-over for years, allowing cro magnon after cro magnon to be seated on the Supreme Court. A federal judge in California says it's constitutional, "a minimal intrusion", for police to forcibly take DNA samples from arrested persons. You don't have to be convicted of anything, says Judge Gregory Hollows (Bush41 1990) — being arrested is enough to justify drawing blood or swabbing saliva for a DNA database. And this, says the judge, is no more worrisome than fingerprinting or taking a mug shot. "The court agrees that DNA sampling is analogous to taking fingerprints as part of the routine booking process upon arrest," he wrote, calling it "a law enforcement tool that is a technological progression from photographs and fingerprints." I try so hard not to scream, panic, or pull my hair out, but sometimes it's pretty dang difficult to remain calm. If this ruling stands and becomes the accepted legality, it's difficult to see how the concept of privacy as it was understood in my childhood could be even comprehensible to the next generation.
Global climate change kills more than 300,000 people every year, according to this report from a group I've never heard of called Global Humanitarian Forum. And they're talking about now, not some hypothetical future. These are deaths caused by increasing hunger, illness, and climate-change-caused weather disasters, all of which are expected to bring the annual death toll to half-a-million by 2030. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu suggests painting your roof white. It sounds like joke fodder for Kimmel and Letterman, but Chu's logic makes sense to me. Remember the Uighurs? A small group of Chinese Muslims are being held at Guantanamo despite a court ruling last year that they pose no threat and must be released. Continuing the Obama administration's disgraceful walk-back from anything that smacks of change from the Bush-Cheney administration, the Justice Department is arguing that the Uighurs can't be released in America, that they "have already obtained relief" (while they're in prison at Guantanamo?), and that their imprisonment is actually quite pleasant. The people who write such legal claims are not far removed from the Bybees and Yoos, et al. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has indicted several people near Kansas City for running a human-trafficking ring that spanned 14 states. They're alleged to have run ads offering foreign nationals jobs in the United States, charging the foreigners thousands of dollars, then bringing them into America, working them in major hotels and probably at other companies you've heard of (where management will feign ignorance), housing them in crap conditions, charging them up the wazoo for everything, threatening deportation if they complain, etc. It's a scheme you've heard of before, if you're paying attention, but this one's on a larger scale. I'm extremely skeptical when management at the Westin and Doubletree hotels say they "had been assured that the workers were being paid prevailing hourly wages and were properly documented". I'm also a little skeptical that this trafficking ring would've drawn any scrutiny at all, if it had been operated by ordinary-sounding white folks instead of by a bunch of immigrants from Uzbekistan and Moldova. Perennial candidate Ralph Nader says that Terry McAuliffe, then chair of the Democratic Party, offered him big bucks to go away during the 2004 Presidential campaign. It's news now, because McAuliffe is running for Governor of Virginia, and we're certainly hoping he loses. Virginia politics is not my area of expertise, but nobody needs another big-time Democratic Party operative in another position of high power. Screw 'im. That said, the allegation also makes me think less of Nader. "When you get a call like that, first of all it's inappropriate,'' says Nader. "The other thing is if you don't immediately say no, it's like taffy, you get stuck with it." Well, did Nader say no immediately? Did he say it loudly, to the press, as he should have? 'Cuz if he did, how come I didn't hear about it until five years later? The Newspaper Association of America, which represents pretty much all of America's mainstream print papers, held a "clandestine meeting" near Chicago last week, to discuss charging for on-line content. Charging a reasonable price is probably a good idea, though it'll squeeze the budget at this blog and others, but to my non-lawyer thinking the meeting sounds like an illegal collusion. Update: The meeting was not at all secret, say the attendees, it just wasn't publicized ... By all indications, the Obama administration isn't doing anything to change or challenge the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy that's already seen some 200 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines fired just since Obama took office, and he's doing nothing about his other campaign promises to the gay & lesbian community. And if doing nothing isn't enough, President Obama made a little joke about it last week. Federal prosecutors have dropped the last case against James Tobin. He's the Republican operative in New Hampshire who had Democrats' phone lines jammed on election day in 2002, as John Sununu won a very, very close Senate race. So, other than a few years of legal hassles, there's no penalty for what Tobin did. As you've no doubt heard, the California Supreme Court is OK with denying civil rights to gay folks. Gays already married remain married, but future gay weddings are banned. Even more so than ordinary laws blocking gays from marrying, this ruling seems to violate the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, as I understand it. Where in the past we had first class citizens (straights) who could marry and second-class citizens (gays) who couldn't, now we have three classes of citizenship — first class citizens who can marry, second class citizens (married gays) who remain married for state but not federal purposes, and third class citizens (unmarried gays) who can't marry. This court ruling will, as they say, live in infamy. [ Gay Wired ]
Ted Olson, who has long been a power broker for the right-wing and who's proven himself a bastard time and time again, is going to a federal court to argue for overturning California's Proposition 8. Yeah, you read that right — a long-time bad guy has switched to the good guys' side, at least for this one issue. "It is our position," says Olson, "... that Proposition 8, as upheld by the California Supreme Court, denies federal constitutional rights under the equal protection and due process clauses of the constitution." For this battle, Olson is teaming up David Boies, who, you may recall, argued for Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, while Olson argued for Bush. Two thoughts: First, worry, 'cuz a lot of people are thinking that this strategy might be unwise, with a Supreme Court tilted farther to the right than it's been in my lifetime. If the Supreme Court gets it wrong, it could set back gay marriage for a generation. And second, the lawyer who helped put George W Bush in the White House is doing more for gay rights than the President who promised change. If I could do that one-eyebrow-up look that Spock does on Star Trek, I'd be wearing that face right now. A group of anti-gay bigots and faux Christian ministers in Washington DC are trying to raise enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot, to challenge the city's recognition of gay marriages performed elsewhere. They only need 21,000 signatures to gain ballot access, so that's probably a given. Comic fans are pretty pissed about the collector prosecuted for possessing comic books that offended a prosecutor. It's an outrage brought to you by the "Protect Act" of 2003, yet another piece of Republican legislation that lies in its very title. According to this study, "after five years of staying clean an individual with a criminal record is of no greater risk of committing another crime than other individuals of the same age." So if he's made himself a good citizen later in life, there's no real gain in having a 50-year-old man have to 'fess up to a car theft conviction from when he was 22 every time he fills out a job application. I know I'll sound like a bleeding heart liberal, but if someone's gone five or ten years without an arrest, why not wipe his record clean? A 15-year-old in suburban Pittsburgh gets a lengthy suspension from school for possession of an eyebrow shaver? The Associated Press has thoughtfully neglected to name the school official responsible for this sterling stupidity.
In what's described as "the most successful interrogation of an al-Qaeda operative by US officials", prisoner Abu Jandal was treated with respect and given sugar-free cookies (he's diabetic). And with that, Jandal, who had been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, became a very cooperative prisoner. If you're curious about those prisoner abuse photos that President Obama won't let you see, here's a description from General Antonio Taguba, who authored the report on Abu Ghraib:  At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent
 Taguba says The Telegraph got it wrong, while Scott Horton writes that "The Daily Beast has obtained specific corroboration of the British account, which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, from several reliable sources, including a highly credible senior military officer with firsthand knowledge, who provided even more detail about the graphic photographs that have been withheld from the public by the Obama administration." In pondering who to believe, Horton is a writer whose work I'm familiar with and trust, and I have no reason to doubt General Taguba, but plenty of reasons to doubt the Obama administration, which is asking the Supreme Court to help suppress the photos. Can you imagine the present Supreme Court not agreeing to keep the photos secret? A 14-year military interrogator has undercut one of the key arguments posited by Vice President Dick Cheney in favor of the Bush Administration's torture techniques and alleged that the use of torture has cost "hundreds if not thousands" of American
Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), who's privy to exactly the same classified documents that Cheney claims would prove that torture was wildly effective, says he's seen the documents in question and Cheney is full of crap.
In an impressive piece of point-missing, researchers at OSU have figured out that people prefer to read media sources that reinforce opinions the reader already holds. The press release ends with an academic scolding: "If you only pay attention to messages you agree with, that can make you more extreme in your viewpoints, because you never consider the other side." All well and good and, c'mon, pretty dang obvious. But there's no indication that the study asked why people seek out news from sources they agree with, so let me 'splain it, broadly. When I was a kid there weren't very many news sources available to ordinary people — you read one or both of your city's newspapers, and augmented that by watching a network newscast. Now, of course, there are thousands of media sources to choose from, but I wish I didn't have to dig through so many sources. I would be friggin' delighted to stop surfing the web for news, stop choosing between sources I generally agree with and sources that I don't, and read one trusted newspaper again — if there was a newspaper I could trust to report the news that matters. But there isn't. The news that matters gets buried under mountains of bullcrap and press releases presented as news, so you've pretty much gotta spend time digging through myriad news sources to find out what's going on, or you don't find out what's going on. And of course, when you make people work that hard to be reasonably well-informed, they're going to avoid the sources that lie or suppress the news, and they're going to concentrate on the sources that seem to tell the truth. Here's an intriguing comparison about how the Washington media is slathering Dick Cheney with love for his cutting attacks on the Obama administration, versus the same voices' opposite response when another former Vice President, Al Gore, made far less inflammatory criticisms of the Bush-Cheney administration in 2002. Politico catalogs attacks on Sotomayor, but is that
Like anyone who's a regular reader of political reporting, I'm familiar with the byline of Jeffrey Rosen. Until recently I'd held him in medium-high esteem, but after his rather unfair report on Sotomayor and his just plain weaselly refusal to take responsibilty for what he's written, I'll never be able to see his byline again without the word "schmuck" popping into my mind. Now that it's no longer publishing on paper, the Tucson Citizen is rethinking its on-line operations. Editor Mark B. Evans says they're going to publish a plethora of local bloggers, offering pay based on hits. This is a good idea, and I recognize its goodness because it's been my idea for a long while. Welcoming and paying local bloggers who do good work is, in my humble opinion, the best way to re-invent and re-invigorate the news business. Time Magazine is (surprise!) full of crap, equating the modest tensions between blacks and Hispanics in America with the historically deadly relation between blacks and whites. It's not so much that I want to bash the author for a clumsy sentence, because anyone can bang out a clumsy sentence. Hell, I don't like my first sentence in this paragraph. But doesn't Time have editors paid to read the copy and smooth out such bonkers bits? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has challenged US President Barack Obama to a debate. Sounds silly, and of course it would be silly. How's about a sit-down and talk session, though, just the two of them and their translators? [ Associated Press ] The US put up a billion bucks for a joint Russian-American facility in Siberia that'll be used to dismantle and destroy Soviet-era chemical weapons. Nice start — now start dismantling the nukes, please.
In Ireland, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, chaired by a High Court Judge, said priests and nuns had flogged, starved and, in some cases, raped children in Ireland's now defunct network of industrial and reformatory schools from the 1930s. Religious authorities knew about the abuse but covered it up. The Irish government colluded in the silence. A lawsuit by the Christian Brothers led the commission to drop its original intention to name the abusers and no one will be prosecuted as a
Sounds quite a bit like detainee abuse in the US. 20,000 or so souls are dead, in the final battles of the Sri Lankan civil war. For the duration of the decades-long war, the death toll is estimated to be between 80,000 and 100,000. Canada's securities industry watchdog has opened a hotline for investors wishing to report wrongdoing, fraud or unethical behavior, mirroring steps taken in the United States following multibillion-dollar Huh? The US took any kind of action at all to encourage whistleblowing? Real action, as opposed to pure sham? Prove it. Show me some big fish reined in with it. Zero? That's what I thought. North Korea is threatening to attack South Korea. The Northside is ruled by a rather eccentric character, and I have no clue what might be an appropriate way to make Kim Jong Il play by the ordinary rules of tyranny. But he's been in power for fifteen years so I'm not sure there's a crisis every time he opens his yap. Also, let's get real: We had similar saber-rattling and worse with George W Bush here in America, and I'll have a hard time taking it seriously if you tell me Kim Jong Il is a bigger threat to peace and humanity than George W Bush. Under Obama, socialism chatter has permeated the media in 2009. But beyond sound bites, what is One way to tell Obama isn't bringing socialism to America is how unhappy we all are. I'm getting the impression that the Obama administration is serious about enforcing antitrust laws, which have been generally ignored since the Reagan era. Antitrust is a firewall that prevents capitalism from devolving into feudalism, and decades of government that doesn't give a damn about antitrust laws is a big part of what's brought the American economy to its knees, so this is a very welcome baby step in the right direction. Chrysler wants Lee Iacocca's car and pension back. "By a wide margin," says President Obama, "the biggest threat to our nation's balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It's not even close." And yet, he's allowing the only proven maximum cost-saver — single-payer — to be left entirely out of the discussion. Senator Max Baucus ('D'-Montana) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health and insurance industries, so when you see him banging his gavel as chair of Senate Finance Committee meetings on health care, you're seeing health care get sold down the river. Every time Baucus walks into the room, in his briefcase he's basically carrying the deaths of a few thousand more uninsured Americans and the sickness and misery of many thousands more. General David Petraeus says that Americans should live up to American values — don't torture, close Guantanamo, abide by the Geneva Conventions, and by the way, Pakistan is a catastrophe waiting to happen. What Petraeus says matters to a lot of people because he was in charge of the American occupation of Iraq for a year and a half, and he's presently running the United States Central Command, which means he's in charge of the US military in the Middle East. He wears a lot of glittery stuff on his chest, so people listen to him. In a sane, civilized society, most of what he said last week goes without saying: of course we shouldn't torture, of course we should close a prison that's a ghastly international embarrassment, and of course we should comply with the accepted rules of war. But since it needs to be said I'm glad that Petraeus said it. President Obama has named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The Republicans' Swift-Boat gang, of course, has painted her as the demon spawn of Karl Marx and the Anti-Christ. How tedious. From everything I've read about Sotomayor's record, she seems to be a choice calculated to ruffle as few feathers as possible. She's a former prosecutor and a corporate lawyer, and you'd need an imagination to spot anything leftist in her rulings. Troublesome: She decided that it's OK for a school to punish a kid for calling school officials "douche bags" in her off-campus personal blog. Also troublesome: She sided with a cop in a case that sounds somewhat outrageous. She seems like a bright woman with middle of the road perspectives, and I abhor the middle of the road, but I never would have expected a liberal appointment from Obama. For me the bottom line is, compared to some of Obama's more colossally stupid appointments, Sotomayor is ... adequate. The problem (and really it's the same problem we've seen for years, decades) is that progressives (like me) believe that a certain centrism is a good idea in most aspects of government, so progressives (like me) will sigh and see someone like Sotomayor as a reasonable choice. We won't make a stink, and barring any late-breaking scandals, she'll be confirmed.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's no such concession to what's reasonable — they want people who can't be reasoned with; dogmatic, iron-clad nominees who stand far to the right of what used to be called "conservative". And that's what they got from the Bush-Cheney administration's nominees, for the Supreme Court and for every other position, without exception. So of course, they expect the same from Obama in the opposite direction, because the media and right-wing leaders (but I repeat myself) have told them Obama is a leftist. Sigh. Obama's no leftist and neither is Sotomayor, except in comparison to Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and John Roberts and Sammy Alito. [ Comedy Central ] In the Republicans' blizzard of smears against Sonia Sotomayor, we've tried to set the record straight on the biggest lies, but most of the rhetorical sticks and stones thrown against her are best ignored. One attack that stood out like a pimple on the tip of your nose, though, was when former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) said that the National Council of La Raza is a "Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses." On the specific and absurd allegation that La Raza = KKK, I like Josh Marshall's response: "For those who aren't familiar with it, La Raza is basically a Latino equivalent of B'nai Brith or the NAACP. Garden variety and uncontroversial unless you thinks it's a public safety issue if more than a handful of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans get together in one place at the same time." And let's add that the Ku Klux Klan has murdered tens of thousands of black people, while La Raza, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't killed anyone. Republicans have a long history of using racism for political advantage, and Tancredo's lie about La Raza is familiar among the severest bigots of the far, far, no farther than that right-wing. There's really nowhere else on the political spectrum that Tancredo could have formed this opinion. Chat for a few minutes with the kind of conservative who thinks illegal immigrants from Mexico should be shot on sight, who thinks anyone who looks Hispanic should be stopped by police and required to produce a green card, and from the same people you'll often hear that La Raza wants to seize the American SouthWest and give it to Mexico. When you hear someone badmouthing La Raza with such silly assertions, that's the sound of racism, as surely as hearing someone speak casually of niggers, wops, kikes, and spics.
Feds have now-Senator Roland Burris (D-Illinois) on tape offering a check for then-Governor Rod Blagojevich. But he says he changed his mind after hanging up the phone. Near as I can ascertain, the evidence of Burris's corruption is every bit as clear as the evidence against Blagojevich when Blago was forced to resign. So will Burris be forced out, like Blagojevich was? Harry Reid ('D'-Nevada), who is routinely among the most clueless and obstinate of the blue dog Democrats and thus the Democrats' Leader in the Senate, has stepped back from his colossal stupidity of last week. You may recall that he said he'd oppose closing Guantanamo, because prisoners can't be transferred to another prison without first being released. Scratch your head over that for a while. So now he says of the Uighurs, the Chinese Muslims imprisoned at Guantanamo who've been found to pose no danger, "Should they go into a maximum security prison? Probably not." This guy is dumber than a box of corn flakes. It looks like a Democrat will run for the Senate seat currently held by Arlen Specter ('D'-Pennsylvania). Congressman Joe Sestak (D-Pennsylvania) says he'll run unless his family asks him not to. Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore is running for Governor in Alabama. Former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerik has been indicted for lying to White House officials during the Bush-Cheney administration, when he was being vetted for Homeland Security chief. I dunno the ins and outs of the law, but always remember, kids, when you're talking to a cop or any government official, think of yourself as "under oath", 'cuz if you're lying there could be consequences.
While he was President, George W Bush was infamous for pre-screening the questions at his rare public appearances, so that tough questions almost never slipped by. He's apparently following the same strategy in his rare post-Presidential appearances, answering only questions that have been pre-screened. Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Indiana) has been subpoenaed. He says he's confident he'll be cleared of all allegations. Sounds familiar. The headline here ("Church of Scientology members banned from editing Wikipedia") is misleading, since church members are still free to add edits, but Wikipedia has banned edits that come from the Church of Scientology's domain. It's a move that seems to makes sense, since the Scientologists have been acting like a bunch of wankers (i.e., like a bunch of Scientologists).
I glanced at this article from some deluded Baptist minister in Sarah Palin's home town paper claiming that the Anti-Christ will be homosexual, but sure as Satan didn't read it. But I got a kick out of Mike Malloy's radio interview with the author, Minister Ron Hamman, in which Malloy asks Hammon, "Do you have any idea which homosexual is the Anti-Christ?" It's from France but it's in English, it's not safe for work, and it's going to put a smile on your face. [ YouTube (video) ] Baseball has killed a lot more people than I would have thought. Helen & Harry seek your advice: We want to read webpages that behave like print pages. We are a couple of increasingly crusty old farts, and we have no patience for websites that blare unexpected sound, or for ads that move around to get your attention, etc. Audio and video are fine when you're looking for audio and video, but when we're reading we want the page to just sit there. Toward this goal, we run Firefox because it's much more user-friendly and advertiser-unfriendly than Internet Explorer, and we use NoScript and AdBlocker add-ons to silence and still unwanted sound and movement. When that fails, we can train our firewall to filter images from selected websites. 99% of the time when we're surfing the web at home, we simply don't see such annoyances, and generally it's only when we use the computer at the library (with its IE browser) that we're reminded of how awful the web experience is with Internet Explorer. There's really only one website we routinely visit from our home computer where we haven't been able to conquer the built-in annoyances, so I come to you, dear reader, to ask for help: When we're reading news from Reuters at reuters.com, there's a new scrolling headline at the top of the page every few seconds (here's an example) and we've been unable to figure out how to make it stop. It isn't an image, so I don't know how to block it. It's a minor annoyance, but any advice would be appreciated.
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