They Gave Us A Republic

The Nightowl Newswrap (+)

by: BG & YD bring you the news

Sat Aug 01, 2009 at 23:30:00 PM CDT

They know they got nuthin' so they resort to intimidation and bluster. It is so blatant that their instruction sheet actually says - Try To "Rattle Him," Not Have An Intelligent Debate: "The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions." I don't know about you, but I will have no qualms about heckling the hecklers and calling them out. For starters I will point out to the first liber-loon I cross paths with that if he or she finds government services so objectionable, Somalia is lovely this time of year.

A coalition of one The United States is now the only foreign military in Iraq after Britain and Australia both pulled the last of their troops out. The quiet, inauspicious end of the coalition was quite the opposite of its creation, when then-president Bush wooed nations large and small for support before and after the March 2003 invasion.

Guilty The Wisconsin man who prayed over his 11 year old daughter instead of seeking medical help while she lay dieing has been found guilty of second degree reckless homicide. The girl's mother was convicted earlier in a separate trial and they both face up to 25 years in prison when they are sentenced in October.

Fake bomb brings La Guardia to a standstill A drunk with a fake bomb in a duffle bag in La Guardia's central terminal brought all activity to a halt on Saturday morning, disrupting one of the busiest travel days of the year. Thousands of passengers who were awaiting early morning flights were evacuated for nearly three hours.

Extensions run out on the unemployed Even though unemployed workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, high unemployment means that many workers are exhausting their benefits before they find another job. Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year.

Halliburton shareholders sue the board for malpractice Shareholders, mad as hell after more than half a billion dollars in fines were levied against the company for bribing Nigerian officials, are suing the company in Harris County District Court, seeking to "punish" officials who allowed such lax standards that millions of dollars could be spirited away to Nigerian bureaucrats, incurring massive fines and harming shareholders' profits. "According to the lawsuit, 'the defendants caused Halliburton to maintain internal controls that were so deficient that Halliburton insiders were able to divert millions of dollars of company funds to pay illegal bribes to various foreign officials in direct violation of the [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act]. Defendant's failure in this regard has caused substantial damage to Halliburton,'" Houston Press reports.

Warren Buffett has the President's back Taking questions at a reopened furniture store in Urbandale, Iowa, the business magnate had the President's back on everything from cap and trade legislation ("I don't know all the details, but I do know we ought to start reducing the carbon emissions in the atmosphere today. ... We led the world into this, so I think we should lead the world out of it." ) to government spending ("Shortly after World War II, government spending, as a percentage of gross domestic product, was 120 percent. Today, it's about 52 percent. So while the spending is certainly greater than it has been for a while, we're really not in really dangerous waters yet.") to a general assessment of President Obama's overall job performance. ("He's got a tough job. He inherited a tough situation .... I think in three or four years, everyone will owe President Obama a big thanks.")

HillPAC officially shuts down The political action committee created and controlled by former Senator and current Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has officially dissolved and ceased all campaign finance activities with the filing of termination reports with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday. Since its creation in January of 2001, HillPAC distinguished itself as one of the largest and most aggressive fundraising leadership PACs ever established, taking in a total of $12.6 million in contributions and distributing nearly $2.5 million to Democratic candidates, party committees and other PACs.

Gunman kills three in gay teen center in Tel Aviv Israeli police say that a gunman entered club for gay teens and started spraying bullets at a support group meeting for gay teenagers. Three were killed and eleven were wounded according to a spokesman for the police. Micky Rosenfeld said it was "most likely a criminal attack and not a terror attack," anticipating the assumption that it was a terror attack because Tel Aviv has been a target for attacks by militants in the past. The gunman fled the scene and remains at large, and the police have launched a massive manhunt with roadblocks and the whole nine yards. (Israel has a problem with right-wing haters too, just like we do. We need to remember that when we craft our Israel policy.)

Welcome to the era of the 21st century G.I. Bill It got underway today with the official launch of the post-9/11 GO Bill. The program promises that almost everyone who serves three years or longer on active duty has access to a college education at taxpayer expense. Career personnel can transfer benefits to their family members. For those with three or more years of service, the program fully covers basic tuition and fees up to the maximum cost in each state for undergraduate education at the most expensive four-year public college or university for in-state students.

Maybe it's because I took all those years of piano lessons, but this gave me a lump in my throat Two newly discovered pieces written for the piano by Mozart. The Mozarteum Foundation has released very few details about the works, but they will be performed for the first time in Salzberg, the city of his birth, at the Mozart Residence Museum, where the composer lived for seven years.

Score one for Senator Franken During the Sotomayor hearings he got Sessions to admit that liberals don't have a monopoly on activist jurists. He considered that a victory and I do, too.

Souter encourages civics education and encouraged the nations attorneys to get involved in informing the citizenry. Citing a poll that showed 2/3 of Americans can't name the three branches of government, and warned that that situation has to change to keep the nation's judiciary independent of political pressure. A politicized judiciary is anathema to a democracy. In fact, one can not exist in the presence of the other.

This Time, Ignoring Mexico's Crisis Will Be Fatal

by: Yellow Dog

Sat Aug 01, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM CDT

I think it was former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who said that living next to the United States was like sleeping next to a bear - you notice every twitch.

For Mexico, it's been more like getting regularly crushed by that bear.

In the Nation, Jeff Faux examines how the perverted incentives of NAFTA and Wall Street have exacerbated Mexico's political weaknesses to create a narco state on the verge of revolution.

Another infusion of cash to the Mexican economy, unacknowledged in the official statistics, is the roughly $25 billion in illegal drug exports to the States. Today, with remittances, oil prices and tourism depressed, the narco trade is probably Mexico's largest single earner of hard currency.

NAFTA and the neoliberal ideology it represents are certainly not the root causes of narco-trafficking. But they have been major factors in its recent monstrous growth.

For starters, the trade agreement created a two-way overland superhighway for contraband; the Mexican drug lords use the dollars they have earned from their exports to import guns, aircraft and sophisticated military equipment from the United States to fight their territorial wars. By wiping out small Mexican farms that could not compete with heavily subsidized US agribusiness, NAFTA also expanded the pool of unemployed young people that provides the narco-traffickers with recruits. And banking integration under NAFTA made money laundering much easier.

Perhaps most important, NAFTA has helped maintain the corrupt network of Mexican oligarchs. The 1988 presidential election--which the then-ruling PRI had to steal from the PRD to win--shocked the establishment on both sides of the border. By opening up Mexico to US money and influence, NAFTA was a way, as the US Trade Representative said to me at the time, "to keep the Mexican left out of power."

Until the 1980s, Mexican drug (mostly marijuana) smuggling to the north was modest in scale and generally tolerated by successive PRI governments. Their message was: we don't care what you sell to the gringos, but no rough stuff here, keep it away from our kids and of course share a little of the profit under the table. But the US-backed neoliberals who took over the PRI in the 1980s had closer ties with the Mexican cartels. The brother and father of president and NAFTA champion Carlos Salinas--hailed in Washington as a good-government reformer--were widely accused of being connected to the drug business. In Salinas's first year in office his national police chief was found with $2.4 million in drug money in the trunk of his car.

SNIP

The entire relationship must be rethought. In this regard, Obama's abandonment of his campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA was a missed opportunity. A renewed debate over the trade deal could have spurred public discussion of the failure of neoliberal economics, the "war on drugs" and an immigration policy that ignores conditions in Mexico that drive people across the border. It could have been a forum to think through the question of how continental integration can work for working people rather than just investors. For example, what kind of cooperative transportation, energy and green industrial policies would make the people of three nations--now bound together in one market--globally competitive?

Obama's Wall Street advisers have no more interest in this sort of change than did Bush's. And without a new economic direction, life for the average Mexican will surely worsen and social tensions rise. Some Mexican friends point out that the revolution against Spain erupted in 1810 and the one against the US-backed dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910. And in 2010... ?

In any event, Mexico's growing troubles will not stay conveniently on the other side of the Rio Grande. Build a ten-foot wall, and desperate people will find twelve-foot ladders. Free trade will, of course, continue to flourish; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano estimates that Mexican drug cartels are now operating in 230 US cities.

So, thanks to the people who brought you the subprime mortgage disaster, the credit freeze and the Great Recession, the next Mexican revolution may come closer to home than you think.

Read the whole thing.

The Nightowl Newswrap

by: BG & YD bring you the news

Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 23:15:00 PM CDT

There are legal remedies for lobbying firms that forge letters from community organizations in an attempt to influence legislation As freshman congressman Tom Perriello was deliberating how to vote on ACES, he received six letters from influential organizations that represent the interests of minority groups, urging him to vote against it. Except the letters were not authentic. In total there were six forgeries, mailed out by someone at the Washington lobbying firm Bonner & Associates. So here is how you deal with this sort of thing. First, you charge mail fraud. Charge the lobbying firm and the "John Doe" they claim to have fired for undertaking the mailings with mail fraud. Then you get a federal search warrant and go to their offices and seize all documents looking for more instances. Add the firm(s) that colluded as conspirators and charge them all under RICO statutes. That is how you send a message that this sort of shit won't be tolerated any longer.

Pressure grows in Britain to come clean on torture Binyam Mohamed, the British subject who was held at Guantanamo Bay for several years before his release this year has filed suit alleging that he was tortured and that the British government is complicit. He charges that while he was held in Morocco an MI5 agent was on site where he was being held and tortured at least three different times.

For that kind of money you could probably get Green Day to play in your dorm room In only the second such case to go to trial, a Boston U student from Providence, R.I has been slapped with an order to pay four record companies $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing thirty songs.

President Obama renominates one of the "Pearl Harbor Day Massacre" U.S. Attorneys Daniel Bogden was one of the nine U.S.A.'s fired for political reasons on December 7, 2006. Now President Obama has formally nominated him back to the position AGAG Bush Rove wanted him fired from. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he thought that Bogden's firing was unfair and urged the Obama administration to restore his appointment.

A cash infusion for "cash for clunkers" Wow. This is what a successful government program looks like. Congress, facing the reality that they had done something that people really, really like and want to take advantage of when they dreamed up the 'cash for clunkers' program, quickly allocated an additional $2 billion for the program before they took off on vacation. It was necessary because it was so wildly popular that it used up the entire budget in the first week of what was intended to be a twelve week program. The House shoved other business out of the way on its last day before the August recess to rush through a measure to address the cash shortage of the car program.

Federal agencies make a habit of skimming money off the top of earmarks About half a billion dollars, or nearly 3% of the total amount of the money earmarked by members of congress for projects back home in the district never makes it back home to the district. Instead, some of it gets skimmed off for so-called administrative expenses.

Republicans get in trouble for being fringe lunatics and encouraging the birthers, and Eric Cantor blames Democrats Birtherism, you see, is not the fault of the architects and authors of the conspiracy theory, or even the politicians who played along. Instead it is the fault of "Chris Matthews, MSNBC, lefty news outlets and bloggers" that the story caught on.

Healthcare bill passes out of House Energy and Commerce Committee on a 32-28 vote. The key amendment backed by the Blue Dogs passed on a 33-26 vote, slicing $100 billion from the $1.6 trillion bill. That amendment also requires negotiated reimbursement rates under a new public insurance option and increases the exemption for small businesses from a new insurance mandate from $250,000 to $500,000 in payroll. It also sliced subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans and forces states to pick up more of the tab for Medicaid beginning in 2015...As part of the deal negotiated by Waxman, liberal Members added amendments allowing direct negotiations to lower drug prices under Medicare, include a drug formulary for the new public insurance option and restrict the ability of insurance companies to raise premiums faster than medical inflation under the new national insurance exchange. Savings realized from those amendments would help restore the subsidies for low- and middle-income people...Seven committee members also said they had received a commitment from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to have an up-or-down vote on the House floor for a single-payer insurance option - the choice preferred by many liberals.

Stocks enjoy their best July in 20 years So when will the idiots who were blaming the falling stock market on Obama's election admit that they were wrong? I'm waiting...

It's sad when men like this fall so far Bobby DeLaughter was one of the good guys. A tenacious prosecutor who put Byron de la Beckwith, the killer of Medgar Evers, in jail three decades after Mr. Evers was shot in the back and murdered. Later he was a judge with a sterling reputation. Then he went and lied to an FBI agent who was investigating corruption, and now he is on his way to jail.

A political career that ended before it got started The newly elected mayor of Hoboken who was promptly caught with his hand in the cookie jar then swore he was innocent and would fight the charges has resigned. Peter Cammarano took office just three weeks ago following a runoff election, and was snared last week in a federal corruption probe that resulted in the arrests of 44 people, including rabbis and dozens of public officials.

Zuma's honeymoon is over Less than three months after Jacob Zuma was swept to power in South Africa, the same unions and urban poor voters are now mounting strikes and protests in the shanty-towns that ring South Africa's wealthy cities, making the images streaming out of the nation eerily reminiscent of the 80's and anti-apartheid protests.

Always consider the source of the criticism and if it is coming from Rudy Giuliani, you will be forgiven for snorting with contempt and derision. Asked by Hannity to respond to the president's hope that the Gates arrest would be a 'teachable moment,' this: 'He's actually right. It is teachable. Here's the lesson: Shut up.'" Giuliani, who was known for being tough on crime, might have taken the same advice in 2000 when he reflexively defended police after they shot and killed an innocent black man, who, the mayor said, was "no altar boy." Actually, Patrick Dorismond was an altar boy, and "the city settled a civil lawsuit in the case and paid the family $2.25 million."

Give the fucker hell, Al! T. Boone Pickens tried to sidle up to Al Franken today and didn't get his ring kissed, instead he got his ass rhetorically kicked. Franken was talking to someone else, remained seated and unloaded on the bastard who financed the Swift Boat Liars. Fuckin' A!

Makes sense When I was in high school, the drinking age was 18, and we learned how to drink as teenagers. We were using designated drivers before there was any such thing as MADD, and when we got to college we could spot the kids who had no experience with alcohol at every party. They were the ones puking and passed out.

Pat Buchanan was back on the McGlaughlin Group tonight and that prompted me to send the following message to the PBS Ombudsman: I can not believe that Pat Buchanan is back on the McLaughlin Group after his racist tirade on Rachel Maddow's show in which he insisted that white men built this country and are now, as a group, discriminated against...He has been conspicuously absent from the airwaves since that infamous night, and now he is back on one of your shows?...Unbelievable. Not just unbelievable, but unconscionable as well. You can send your own message by clicking the link. It conveniently takes you to the page to contact the ombudsman.

Corazon Aquino, 76 It saddened me to hear of the death of the much beloved former Philippine President Corazon "Tita Cory" Aquino this evening, after a year-long battle with colon cancer. I mourned with her when her husband was assassinated on the tarmac in Manilla when he returned home to challenge the dictator Marcos in 1983,- and I think I held my breath for at least a week in 1986 when her people powered revolution swept her to the presidency and Marcos into exile. Her revolution inspired nonviolent protests around the globe and had a hell of a lot more to do with the end of communism and independence for eastern bloc nations in Europe than Ronald Reagan blustering about tearing down walls at the Brandenburg Gate. "She was headstrong and single-minded in one goal, and that was to remove all vestiges of an entrenched dictatorship," Raul C. Pangalangan, former dean of the Law School at the University of the Philippines, said in 2009. "We all owe her in a big way."