May, 2008 archive
Contractors Lurking in the Bushies 0
From your friendly local Bush Administration. You know, the folks who gave you poisonous FEMA trailers.
The practice of stealing equipment and supplies destined for the U.S. military was so pervasive that KBR employees invented a slang term to describe it: “drug deals.” But thefts were not limited to military supplies, said Linda Warren, another former KBR employee who testified at the hearing. Upon her arrival in Baghdad in 2004, she was shocked by the number of contractors involved in criminal activity. “KBR employees who were contracted to perform construction duties inside palaces and municipal buildings were looting,” she said. “Not only were they looting, but they had a system in place to get contraband out of the country so it could be sold on eBay. They stole artwork, rugs, crystal, and even melted down gold to make spurs for cowboy boots.” Like Cassaday, when she complained to her superiors about the thefts, she was punished. She said her vehicle was taken away, her movements were closely monitored, and her access to phones and the Internet were cut off. Eventually, she was transferred out of Baghdad.
Those troops they were stealing from included my son.
Crooks and liars. Them and them what hired them.
Via Harry Shearer.
Bubble (Updated) 0
This week, This American Life, in conjunction with NPR News, explored the mortgage crises.
It was a fascinating show, including interviews with mortgage brokers, bankers, salespersons, homeowners, and credit counselors, some of whom were rich beyond their dreams before they became broke beyond their means.
From the website:
You can go to the website to learn more–listening to this story of greed, of willful blindness, and of the belief that if it is making money it must be right faith in the invisible hand of the market is well worth your time.
(I am sorry, but I could not find an easy way to link to the show itself. There is a “full show” icon on the webpage, but it be that the show won’t be available for streaming until later in the week. But this was one of the best hours of radio I’ve heard in weeks, because it is real people talking about what they really did and how they, as customers, mortgage company employees and brokers, and bundlers, let themselves be sucked into the what Duncan calls the big shitpile.)
Addendum:
The show is now available from the website. Click the download link.
Willies 0
It’s not just a jeep. (Oops, that was Willis. This is a Clinton, sort of.)
Via Phillybits. If YouTube pulls the video, go over to his place for the alternate link.
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques–the Ones that Work 0
The Philadelphia police have not had a good two weeks. First, a good officer was cut down doing his job, and then the Fox29 helicopter caught some other officers indulging what appears to have been, at first glance, a Rodney King moment. For more details about what happened, you can read Monica Yant Kinney’s column from today’s local rag here.
It seems that the tip which led to the capture of the last suspect in the cop killing was phoned into a retired FBI agent by someone he once interrogated. The agent in question has a reputation for being extremely hard-nosed and extremely fair–according the story about him (link below), two person he sent up the river have named kids after him.
Buried in the middle of this story was this little gem about how to conduct interrogations that work (hint: nudity and water are not involved):
(snip)
“As soon as you heard you were getting the information from one of Jesse’s sources, you knew it was gospel,” Carbonell (another retired agent–ed.) said. “He’s been gone a year, and agents still call him for help. Even the bad guys found him honest and fair.”
Leonard Wideman, a self-described former Philadelphia methamphetamine dealer and addict, met Coleman for the first time during an FBI raid. . . .
“Jesse was a straight-up dude from the giddyup,” said Wideman, who would later testify for the government. “Jesse was police, but he was a gentleman.”
Defense lawyer Brian McMonagle, who has cross-examined Coleman in several high-profile trials, said jurors could sense his credibility on the stand. “You’ll never see him shade the truth or lie.”
Clearly, there would be no future for Mr. Coleman in the Vice President’s Office.
RSS Changes 2
I have been messing with my RSS feeds tonight.
I have added some of my favorite local blogs, to join other favorite local blogs that were already there.
I have, with sadness, removed a blog that for a long time was one of my favorites, but has become rather weird in the last couple of months. With sadness, because that blogger has taught me a lot through example and has long been a favorite read. Nevertheless, that blog has lately lost any grounding in reality or in fact-based discourse.
(Yeah, I know. Most of what I deal in is opinions. Opinions, though, must bear some at least tenuous relationship with facts–unlike Bushie policies, which are in a whole nother world–but I digress. Otherwise, there is no fun in sarcasm and name-calling. I can, however, tolerate only a limited amount of complete and total detachment from the real world before I have to say, “Enough.”)
If you want “unbiased” comment–meaning comment that balances one opinion with another opinion, as if there were no truth, as if there were only competing opinions and no facts, go somewhere else.
If you want striving towards truth (he said self-importantly), stay here, follow the RSS feeds, and read the blogroll.
Here, you will find fact-based bias.
Philadelphia 0
was at its best today:
Here is a view from the Art Museum towards City Hall:
Note the wedding parties getting their pictures taken. We saw at least five wedding parties having pictures taken. Wonder what kind of cut the Museum gets from the photogs?
Here is a view of Center City west (that means west of Broad Street–City Hall is at the intersection of Broad and Market; you can just see City Hall in the left side of the picture) from the Art Museum. I used to work just over there, in that building. No, the other one. Yeah, that’s the one.
Of course, these are just snapshots. None of them are as good as Phillybits’s work.
What’s Next? Apple Pie? 0
Republicans vote against Mother’s Day.
Yeah, I know it was just a stupid parliamentary ploy . . .
Accent on the stupid
. . . and I’m blowing it out of proportion,
but, dammit, if you act like a pack of clowns, the rest of us get to stand around you in a circle, giggle, point, and say, “There’s a pack of clowns!”
(Then, again, it was nowhere near as stupid as their War in Iraq and their annual so-called budgets and their fraudulent voodoo trickle-down economics.)
How Is This Any Different from a Bushie Budget? 1
Via El Reg:
Forth Worth police earlier this week slapped the cuffs on a 21-year-old music biz wannabe who decided the best way to raise some venture capital was to cash a dodgy cheque for $360bn, NBC 5 reports.
I’m Sure the Headline Editor Had His Tongue in His Cheek 8
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 0
Ya know, it’s not the pet connection.
It’s the use of an industrial facility. Poor guy who they sent over there comes home in a box and they don’t even have the respect to use a funeral home.
They just truck ’em down the street to the nearest furnace.
(snip)
Pentagon officials said they do not think that human remains and animal remains were ever commingled at the facility. “We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever at this point that any human remains were at all ever mistreated,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a news conference hastily convened last night.
Regardless, the Pentagon will no longer permit crematories not located with funeral homes to handle the remains of U.S. troops, defense officials said.
H/T Karen for the story.
Swampwater (Updated) 1
Gets away with murder.
Again.
Natch. They’re Bushie Groupies.
What other outcome could be expected?
Rule of law my ass.
Addendum, 5/10/2008:
Tbogg takes the case.
Bushonomics 2
The failed Republican stewardship of the government is leaving its stamp on the economy.
Unfortunately, it’s a food stamp (emphasis added).
These are, social-service advocates say, dire days for families already beset by climbing gas prices and declining wages.
At the kitchen table, the gas pump and the workplace, people are being squeezed and compelled to live their lives with less and less.
But food is the greatest worry.
“We have a crisis,” said Sydelle Zove, interim food-stamp campaign manager for the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.
“Meals are scarce,” said Susan Smith, a 44-year-old Chester woman with diminishing means. “I’m 5-foot-10 and weigh 130. I should weigh 150.
“I need some food.”
(snip)
All this has occurred as food prices in the Northeastern United States have risen 14 percent since 2002 and median wages in metropolitan Philadelphia (excluding New Jersey) have dropped 4 percent during the same period, said Mark Price, labor economist with the Keystone Research Center, a nonpartisan policy-development institute in Harrisburg.
Regarding the boldfaced portion: So much for the Republican lie of “trickle down economics.”
Democratic Delegates from Florida and Michigan 0
Florida and Michigan broke the party’s rules.
Consequently, the Booman’s arguments are irrelevant.
Valid, but irrelevant.
End of story.
Hillary Clinton Gives Me the Willies . . . (Updated) (Updated Again) 7
. . . as I have pointed out before.
It is, admittedly, an emotional reaction, but it is real.
But it’s taking a more solid form. From the McDonald’s of newspapers:
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
(Go here to see a discussion on the implication in the above quotation that hard-working Americans are, ipso facto, white Americans.)
The implications of her remarks, and, indeed, of her overall conduct during this campaign, leads me to a different set of willies.
It is certainly true that racism is a part of our society. It can be argued that racism is the original sin that stains the birth of the United States of America. The legacy of that sin and the continuing real live racism are all around us (I have fulminated about that before).
(Indeed, I have a good friend, whom I respect greatly, who is afraid that, if Senator Obama receives the Democratic nomination, the Senator will not live to see the election returns. Given the number of homegrown nutcases and racist terrorists we have, that is, sadly, not that far-fetched a fear. And I suspect that it is something Senator Obama has thought about. Nevertheless, if it does not deter him, neither should it deter others.)
That legacy of racism is what makes Senator Clinton’s argument that, despite her being an also-ran in the national results to date, she should be nominated because she is white, quite willie-inducing.
It is one thing to recognize that racism and bigotry are very real–and very dangerous–elements in our society. If you doubt that, go here (and, while you’re at it, kick in a little donation; Morris Dees is the real deal, a person who gave up a potentially lucrative career to fight for justice at the risk of his life).
It is quite another thing to argue that the Democratic Party should base its selection of its nominee for the office of the President of the United States on the United States’s legacy of racism.
I know that I am arguing a subtle difference. In my craft of writing, it would be called a difference of tone, which is defined as that quality of writing which conveys the author’s attitude to the reader.
The tone of Senator Clinton’s remarks, not only in this, but also in other instances, is not the tone of someone expressing a concern about the course and heritage of our society; it is the tone of someone gleefully wielding a weapon to her own ends.
It can be interpreted more sinisterly: that, as a white person, she is entitled to the nomination, whereas Senator Obama, as a not 100% white person, is not.
It is the tone of someone playing to racism for his or her own gain, the tone of Pitchfork Ben Tillman and Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and others of their kind.
Hillary Clinton gives me the willies.
More from Brendan and the Booman.
Addendum, 5/8/2008:
Time for a PFA. (That’s Protection from Abuse Order for those who don’t live in Delaware.)
Addendum, Sometime the Next Day:
Via Delaware Liberal.
Speed Racer . . . 0
. . . seems to be all the news today.
I remember Speed Racer.
Left me cold. I much preferred Super Car and Lancelot Link.
And, of course, Bugs Bunny.
Voting Rights–and Wrongs 6
Remember, it wasn’t the Supremes who sang, “Won’t Get Fooled Again“:
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.
“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,'” Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.
They weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. “You have to remember that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”
Of course, the question is, “Why are the Republicans afraid of nuns’ voting?” (Follow the link before you comment, oh ye two or three who choose to comment.)
DDay has more.