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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Do we get our constitution back? (Spoiler alert: Nope.) ♦ Two more of the "worst of the worst", as described by Bush & Cheney, have been acquitted. Faghoul Abdelli and Mohamed Terari spent seven years at the Guantanamo concentration camp, before being returned to their native Albania to face terrorism charges last summer. Last week they were quietly found not guilty, so — do they get their seven years back? Do we get our constitution back? Nope. ♦ Phillip Carter, the Obama administration official who was supposed to be in charge of getting the Guantánamo concentration camp closed, has resigned. He was an ardent critic of the Bush-Cheney administration's policy of ignoring human rights and committing war crimes, and a strong supporter of Barack Obama as he ran for President last year. And now he's gone. Draw your own conclusions.
♦ After all the earlier reveltions, is it news to learn that the Bush-Cheney administration sidestepped another Congressional inquiry about its policies endorsing torture? ♦ There was never any serious doubt, but the Obama Justice Department offers a reassuring Yes, of course, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales won't face prosecution for misleading Congress about the assorted crimes of the Bush-Cheney administration. ♦ Nobody can be surprised to learn that when US Judge Leonie Brinkema (appointed by Clinton in 1993) asked in 2005 whether the CIA had audio or video of its torture sessions, feds instantly destroyed the tapes so they could answer "no". ♦ It is again found, this time by an official government report, that then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld's ineptitude or worse allowed Osama bin Laden to elude capture. ♦ A new book by a lawyer for the 9/11 Commission reiterates what's been previously noted, that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) altered their "facts" about the events of ♦ For reasons unexplained, the Obama administration will send alleged terror-conspirator Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al Darbi to a kangaroo court instead of a real trial. ♦ Wikileaks has published an archive of half a million text messages sent in the aftermath of Wikileaks is a confidential whistleblowing service so they can't identify their source for these messages, but an un-named Wikileaks spokesperson says “it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11.” Which leaves questions unanswered, and largely unasked — what organization is doing such detailed archiving, and why, and do the senders and recipients of text messages understand how utterly un-private their communications are? ♦ Studs Terkel was a decent human being, so of course the FBI tailed him for 45 years. I have done my best to make sure that my FBI file is thick if not interesting. How does yours look? ♦ In the college town of La Crosse, Wisconsin, police went on-line posing as an attractive 19-year-old woman, and under this guise cops were able to be "friended" and gain access to students' non-public Facebook accounts. Once "friended" in, cops were able to see photos of underaged college students (are you sitting down?) drinking alcoholic beverages. With this evidence of criminal activity, prosecutors have brought at least four miscreants to court. Can you even begin to imagine the DreamLand where this might seem a reasonable allocation of police resources? ♦ Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi is a Libyan baker who's guilty of nothing, but was captured by bounty hunters, sold to Americans, and has been held and tortured at Guantanamo for several years. He's already had his military trial, where US officers determined that there was "no factual basis for concluding that the individual should be classified as an enemy combatant", but because the verdict wasn't what Americans wanted he was tried again, found guilty, and continued to rot at Guantanamo. In June of 2009 al-Ghizzawi's lawyer, H. Candace Gorman, heard through the grapevine that he had been cleared for release by the Obama administration, but the lawyer was also told that she couldn't go public with that information. Then, a few weeks ago, the gag order was lifted and she was, at last, free to talk publicly about the case. She promptly posted details on her blog — and was then told that the lifting of the gag order was a mistake and she'd have to delete that blog post. That's a fairly quick overview of the situation, but the details are more aggravating and it would all be even more embarrassing to the American concept of justice if Americans gave a damn about justice. ♦ A ballot initiative in Alaska seeks to effectively ban abortion by declaring fetuses human. ♦ White supremacist and radio host Hal Turner worked as an FBI informant for about five years, beginning in 2002. ♦ Have another toke on the stupidity of the war on drugs, as a Los Angeles rabbi/rabblerouser tries to get off the hook for running Temple 420, and preaching that "it isn't a sin to smoke pot". The accused, Craig Rubin, is defending himself in court so he's going to prison, but can anyone in L.A. or anywhere else explain what public good is gained by laws against a leaf and the prosecution of a preacher? ♦ You know those omnipresent fake abortion clinics, billed as "crisis pregnancy centers" or "emergency pregnancy services", where the mega-Christian staff is always eager to talk panicked women out of having an abortion? The city of Baltimore has passed legislation requiring that such businesses post signs stating plainly that they don't provide abortion services or referrals. ♦ In what's described as "a novel anti-crime surveillance program", the license plate of every vehicle entering and leaving tiny Tiburon, California will be databased by the town. "I think it makes the community safer," says the police chief. I'll feel safer far from Tiburon, but I'm not the kind of person they'd want there anyway. ♦ Kentucky police have decided that the census worker who was found gagged and hanged with the word "Fed" written across his chest killed himself. You certainly have to respect the late Mr Sparkman's ability and desire to appear murdered. ♦ As a side effect of the intense demand and profoundly unfair distribution of swine flu vaccine, there's a pretty good chance that a lot of old folks will die of ordinry flu this winter. ♦ An un-named insider tells Bloomberg News that Bank of America and eight other financial institutions are now supposed to lay out a timetable and plan for repaying the $142-billion they've received in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout bucks. A little breathtaking, ain't it? If you're little people you fill out a zillion forms and show how you can repay a loan for a car or a house and then you cross your fingers and hope you'll maybe get the loan. If you're big people you take the money, billions and billions in federal cash, and a year later you take a phone call from some schmuck at the Fed hoping maybe you'll start planning to make a payment. ♦ The Obama administration's economic policies continue to be utterly ass-backward and basically bonkers, unless you're a Wall Street gazillionaire, in which case Obama's the great news for your solid-gold wallet. "The fact of the matter is we’re giving banks money at a time when the government has rules that say you can make more money if we give you money if you don’t lend it."
♦ In the midst of all the trillions spent bailing out millionaires and billionaires, it's worth remembering that helping little people is what really helps the economy. And this is what the Obama gang is most fervently reluctant to do. ♦ You won't be surprised to learn that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke opposes any audit or oversight of the Fed. ♦ The skeletal remains of what used to be America's manufacturing base is being bit-by-bit repurposed, at least in those rare instances where it isn't just rotting and rusting. ♦ From the Duh Department: The economic collapse has been bad news for renters, too. ♦ Big Business interests are lobbying hard to have new proposed restraints scuttled, so that they can continue importing products to America made by child labor and slave labor.
There will, of course, be no loudly-asked questions of how the government will pay for this escalation, since money only matters when we're talking about Americans' health, not when we're killing people. And next week, Obama will be in Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize.
♦ Iran has announced that it's planning "new uranium enrichment plants in a major expansion of its atomic program". Yes, let's all worry, but how can any nation with nuclear weapons and/or nuclear power plausibly object?
Here's a serious offer: $10 says Israel will be building new settlements before the ten months are over. Any takers?
Dick Cheney would be so proud. Heck, maybe Cheney's involved — it has his scent, and other than moving out of the Vice Presidential mansion there's been little evidence that he's actually gone from US government. The article claims, improbably, that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command might be in the dark about the program's existence.
♦ In England, the Human Genetics Commission, described as "an independent government advisory body", has concluded that police are arresting people — in general, black people — specifically to get their DNA into the country's DNA database. Three out of four British black men between 18-35 now have their DNA in the database. ♦ The family of Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot and killed by crazed British cops who thought he was a terrorist when he was actually only Brazilian, will receive an un-specified compensation. They family also got an apology, and the deceased was described in a public statement as "a totally innocent victim and in no way to blame for his untimely death". This moment of simply human decency took Metropolitan Police only four years. ♦ Ever vigilent, the same Metropolitan Police blew up another not-quite-white gentleman's car a few weeks ago, because after parking it he was in a hurry and ran.
Or perhaps, Dr Phil Jones has a problem. He's a scientist who seems to have made snide remarks suggesting that documents be deleted rather than surrendered in a Freedom of Information Act inquiry. Which sounds like a pretty serious problem, potentially, for Doc Jones. I don't know the law in America let alone England, but I wonder whether people can be prosecuted or sued on the basis of stolen correspondence. More to the point, though, I don't know or care about Phil Jones and his alleged emails are not conceivably a problem for science in general or global climate change. Except, of course, that the deniers will exaggerate everything to suggest that it exposes some enormous fraud, but that's what they'd be doing with or without Dr Jones' emails. Scientists like Jones should be aware by now that this is about more than science. It's about money. So their emails and letters will not be private, their trash cans will be pawed through, their past affairs and political connections and the videos they've rented and every detail of their lives could all be used against them. The bad guys have basically bottomless funding and bottomless ethics. They're the liars who testified before Congress that tobacco is safe, the liars who focus-tested the phrase "death panels" before using it to keep poor people from medical care, the descendants of liars who argued that slavery was the backbone of the American economy and anything that challenged it was a threat to God and Country and peace and safety. And now they've hacked into emails that they can play up as discrediting science, with a hit carefully timed to yank the rug out from under the coming Copenhagen meetings.
They're just liars, and aren't we weary of liars by now? If they don't take down Dr Jones (or if they do) they'll be taking down someone else soon. If they hadn't successfully had these emails hacked they'd be working on another batch (and they undoubtedly are). The good guys are fighting back and trying to save the world as they always have, but the lies are going to get uglier and uglier and as always there's a strong chance that the Big Lies of Big Money will win. It's our duty and yours to stand up to the liars, so we're doing what we can to help, and then trying to do a little bit more. ♦ When illegal wiretaps and cracked voicemails were used against Newt Gingrich or to incriminate Chiquita, the invasion of privacy — the wiretaps and cracked voicemails — were the scandals, at least as reported by the corporate-controlled media. It's curious, then, that when scientists' emails were hacked and embarrassing emails were revealed last week, there were next-to-no questions about the propriety and legality of breaking into people's email accounts anywhere near the headlines.
♦ Nuclear power plants are all the rage worldwide, and America is supposed to jump on this damned dangerous bandwagon, to save us from global climate change. ♦ In another showcase of its journalistic standards, Time has published a doctored photo purportedly showing Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) with a load of sticky semen in her hair. Classy. ♦ Though it's completely evaporated from the media's coverage of the murders at Fort Hood, it's worth remembering that for days after the bloodshed the accused gunman, Major Nidal Hasan, was described in media reports as having been distraught over the military's refusal to grant him a discharge or an exemption from serving in the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ♦ As PBS's Bill Moyers retires next year, two working journalists will remain on American television. ♦ Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch are negotiating, or want Google to think they're negotiating, to have Murdoch's many media properties de-listed from Google and listed only in Microsoft's new search engine, Bing. Sounds like a win-win situation to me, as we never use Bing anyway, and having Murdoch's brand of journalism gone from our Google searches would be a feature, not a bug. ♦ Noted right-wing smearmaster Alex Castellanos will take on a larger role with the Republican Party, but he will, of course, also continue working as a CNN analyst. Because the media is controlled by liberals. ♦ Kurt Greenbaum is an editor at the St Louis Post-Dispatch, who, after a reader typed the same vulgrity in two on-line comments, traced the post's IP address, contacted the poster's employer, and got him fired. And then gloated about it. To say that Greenbaum is a dim bulb and a creep is to state the obvious, and it warms my faith in American integrity that he's getting plenty of heat, but apparently Greenbaum is still employed at the Post-Dispatch. ♦ Democracy Now anchor Amy Goodman was detained for an hour and a half and had her car, computer, and notes searched at the Canadian border over the weekend. By Canadian border cops, not the Americans, because oppression is contageous. ♦ It's 2009, and Associated Press still uses "flesh" as a descriptive term for the color of white people's skin. ♦ The Detroit Daily Press, the new newspaper that started publishing last Monday, suspended or ceased publication later in the week. The paper's management was blindsided by the flaccid advertising market in metropolitan Detroit. Because who could've seen that problem coming? ♦ The increasingly despicable Huffington Post celebrates (prematurely) a shard of good news for child rapist Roman Polanski. ♦ A guy described as "some kind of radical" who "didn't believe in the government" was injured in suburban Cleveland when one of the pipe bombs in his apartment exploded. Police found 30 completed pipe bombs in Mark Campano's apartment and components to make more, plus 17 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. But he isn't an Arab or a Muslim so this won't be the top story all over the news 24/7 for the next month, and most Americans outside of Cleveland will never hear about it at all. ♦ Judging from the amount of time and ink spent covering a couple of harmless doofs who crashed a White House party last week and got in despite having no invitation to the big soiree, you'd think it matters. It doesn't. It's empty, meaningless news filler, which fills more and more of the news on every channel and in every paper. Is there some conceivable sense in which this news item is newsworthy? And CNN is paying a long-time top-level Republican operative to write that people should go to prison for this. ♦ Rupert Murdoch's New York Post quotes un-named sources to the effect that Timothy Geithner is on the way out as Treasury Secretary and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is the preferred replacement. My estimate of Barack Obama's brains is headed down, but the President would need a rapid lobotomy to make a switch that stupid. Dimon is one of the few people in America who'd be a worse choice for running the economy than even Geithner, and this is why it's impossible to take the New York Post seriously. ♦ Fox's Glenn Beck has announced that he'll be staging a big anti-Obama rally on September 11, 2010. ♦ Google does the right thing with racist, anti-Semitic search results, and explains why. ♦ There's some effective push-back being noted against one of the Obama administration's staggeringly stupid appointments, naming Islam "Isi" Siddiqui, a pesticide industry lobbyist, to become Secretary of Agriculture. It is conceivable that if you add your phone call, post card, or letter to the editor to the pile, it might lead the Obama gang to stop channeling Bush-Cheney for long enough to withdraw Siddiqui's nomination. ♦ Dana Perino, who was named to the Broadcasting Board of Governors by President Obama in thanks for her service as Spokeswoman and chief liar for the Bush-Cheney administration, went on Fox News last week and claimed that there had been no terrorist attacks on America during the Bush-Cheney administration. And since she said this on Fox News, nobody else on the set pointed out the little plane wrecks of September 11, 2001 or the anthrax attacks that followed. ♦ When the Washington Post tells me that the Obama administration is winning an important battle against entrenched lobbyists, my reaction is more one of skepticism than celebration. No, Virginia, I don't have much confidence in either the Washington Post or the Obama administration, but heck, it would be nice.
♦ We simply never consider crime, killings, and disasters our beat, so you'll have to look elsewhere to read all about the gunman in suburban Tacoma, Washington, who killed four policemen in a donut shop. But what caught my attention was a subsequent report that the alleged killer, Maurice Clemmons, was a long-time bad guy whose 35-year sentence for armed robbery in Arkansas was commuted by then-Governor Mike Huckabee. Clemmons later resumed his life of violent crime and was re-jailed and re-paroled; brief details below. ♦ According to people who were there, the Soviet Union actually built a doomsday device. "The point of the system ... was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched." And they kept it a secret. Which is where my skepticism pops up. If true it's fantabulously stupid, because, to borrow a line from Dr Strangelove, "Of course, the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!" ♦ There was never any serious doubt, but the New York Supreme Court offers a reassuring Yes, of course, the government can use eminent domain to help billionaire Bruce Ratner. ♦ County Judge Jeffrey Spinner has delivered a fine smack-down to OneWest and IndyMac after the banks refused all reasonable offers on a past-due mortgage and lied about fundamental facts in court. The judge wiped away the half-million mortgage on a Long Island home in a ruling that accurately refers to the banks as "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". Yes, there will be an appeal, but for now the good guys win. ♦ Google executives need to be jailed, say Italian prosecutors. ♦ Super-spammer Alan Ralsky gets 51 months in the slammer. ♦ Arizona's famously crazy, scandal-plagued, and weirdly popular sheriff Joe Arpaio would win if he ran for Governor, says a new Rasmussen Poll. ♦ Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island) has been excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church. From this report I gather that he's still allowed to attend and give the church money, but he's not allowed to receive communion because (brace yourself) Kennedy supports abortion rights. He believes women are people and fetuses aren't. Imagine that. And for this he's deemed not good enough to be Catholic. I'm a thousand miles from Kennedy's district, but I've sent him a post card with my cheerful suggestion. Why not quit the Catholic Church and start attending Methodist or Espiscopalian or Unitarian services? The Catholic Church needs its Kennedys more than the Kennedys need the Catholic Church. Quitting would set an example for other Catholics who live in this country and this century, and I'm sure the Methodists would appreciate Kennedy's tithes and presence. ♦ Is it even worth mentioning when the Catholic Church again apologizes for its decades of covering up for pedophile priests, while routinely transferring them to fresh parishes when locals complained about all the raped children? You might remember that the Vatican ordered bishops worldwide to cover up priests' sex abuses, and yet these stories are always, always presented as if it's another isolated coincidence, as if another bishop or archbishop made the random oopsie of protecting another pedophile priests. ♦ Fading evangelist Billy Graham says God is using Sarah Palin to wake America up, or at least that's how Graham's arch-fundamentalist son paraphrases his father who art on Earth. ♦ Lou Dobbs, who was a TV journalist in the 1980s, says he's thinking of running for President. ♦ Straightforward questions and answers with folks waiting to see Sarah Palin at a Borders book signing. If it was scripted it would be too much to be believed, and I suppose it's possible that the video was edited unfairly, and that dozens of other attendees had well-informed answers. But I don't think so. ♦ Federal Express is rolling out a new device that not only tracks your package as it's being shipped, but tells you it's temperature and lets you know if it's been handled roughly or dropped. ♦ Unknown News is updated once weekly, usually on Mondays. Have a seat and some cheese puffs but please, no smoking. With a tip o' the hat to AK for free quick and efficient software assistance, JR Mooneyham, Unsilent Generation, Jonathan Turley, Sherri B., Cassandra, Joseph D., Joe G., Lon Garm, J.S. (not the Watergate felon) Magruder at Why Not Resist?, SirJ, Bill T., Wig, the letter Z, our first home at pitas.com (1999-2003, and still a great place for publishing your blog), and the love of my life (who prefers to remain anonymous).
Recommended sites for gathering unknown or underreported news: Media Matters Pro Publica ThinkProgress Washington Monthly TruthOut
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