EVERYBODY KNEW

EVERYBODY KNEW:

Everybody Knew Valerie Wilson’s Identity
Matalin: “Everybody in town knew” that Plame was at the CIA

On the November 21 edition of MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning, Mary Matalin, a former assistant to President Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, was the latest among many defenders of the administration to repeat the unsupported claim that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV himself disclosed the identity of his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame. Criticizing special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak, Matalin asked, “What’s the crime here?” She contended that “[e]verybody in town knew that, and who outed her was her husband — ‘my wife, the CIA wife’ and all this stuff.” Matalin offered no evidence to support her assertion that Wilson himself had introduced his wife in public settings as a CIA employee.

Media Matters for America has previously debunked several iterations of this rumor (here, here, and here). Purveyors of this rumor include former CIA operative Wayne Simmons, who claimed that Plame was “traipsed” and “waltz[ed]” around Washington by Wilson, who introduced her as “my CIA wife”; and Fox News legal analyst Andrew P. Napolitano, who reported that “at least one” of his Fox News associates heard Wilson present Plame as “my CIA operative wife.”

BEAR AND MOCHA

The New McCain takes brainless new stands. But he's still thoroughly honest

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2006 POOR RICHARD, NOVELIST:

evidence never effects their novels. Case in point? Here’s the first paragraph from Richard Cohen’s column in today’s Post: COHEN (12/19/06): Earlier this year a close friend of John McCain gave me fair warning: McCain was about to become much more conservative, and I would not like what was coming. He was right. I did not like McCain’s speech at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and I think his support of intelligent design is—sorry, John—just plain brainless. But it is not the supposedly new McCain that bothers me, it’s the old one: His incessant sword-rattling has gotten just plain rattling. Grisly! According to Cohen, McCain deliberately “became much more conservative” this year, forging a “supposedly new McCain.” And not only that—in order to reinvent himself, the New McCain has adopted positions which are “just plain brainless!” Ah yes, a New McCain! We well remember the days when Cohen punished Big Dems for imagined reinventions; in those days, Cohen was even prepared to invent absurd “evidence” to support the vile charges he was making. But nothing can be permitted to change the novel he’s typing about John McCain. Case in point? Here’s the sixth paragraph from Cohen’s column—yes, from his column today: COHEN: Anyone who knows McCain appreciates that his call for more troops in Iraq is not, at bottom, part of any political strategy. McCain is a thoroughly admirable man. Like any other politician, he will punt when he has to, but he is fundamentally honest, with sound political values. For a long time those values—a belief in public service, a visceral hostility toward the ways of Washington’s K Street lobbying crowd and a sense of honor that his Vietnamese captors came to appreciate—obscured the always present, but muffled, sound of drums and bugles. We now have a New McCain, complete with “just plain brainless” positions. But so what? The novel was blocked out long ago. McCain remains “a thoroughly admirable man.” It’s the law—he’s “fundamentally honest.”

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EVERYONE’S GOT A LITTLE CAPTAIN IN ‘EM

YouTube – Captain Morgan:

TOP TEN CIVIL LIBERTY OUTRAGES

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui Long after it was clear the hapless Frenchman was neither the “20th hijacker” nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government pressed to execute him as a “conspirator” in those attacks. Moussaoui’s alleged participation? By failing to confess to what he may have known about the plot, which may have led the government to disrupt it, Moussaoui directly caused the deaths of thousands of people. This massive overreading of the federal conspiracy laws would be laughable were the stakes not so high. Thankfully, a jury rejected the notion that Moussaoui could be executed for the crime of merely wishing there had been a real connection between himself and 9/11. 9. Guantanamo Bay It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. After the Supreme Court struck down the military tribunals planned to try hundreds of detainees moldering on the base, and after the president agreed that it might be a good idea to close it down, the worst public relations fiasco since the Japanese internment camps lives on. Prisoners once deemed “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth” are either quietly released (and usually set free) or still awaiting trial. The lucky 75 to be tried there will be cheered to hear that the Pentagon has just unveiled plans to build a $125 million legal complex for the hearings. The government has now officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo’s court bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners. 8. Slagging the Media Whether the Bush administration is reclassifying previously declassified documents, sidestepping the FOIA, threatening journalists for leaks on dubious legal grounds, or, most recently, using its subpoena power to try to wring secret documents from the ACLU, the administration has continued its “secrets at any price” campaign. Is this a constitutional crisis? Probably not. Annoying as hell? Definitely. 7. Slagging the Courts It starts with the president’s complaints about “activist judges,” and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts’ authority to hear whole classes of cases—most recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees—almost seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties. This leads to … 6. The State-Secrets Doctrine The Bush administration’s insane argument in court is that judges should dismiss entire lawsuits over many of the outrages detailed on this very list. Why? Because the outrageously illegal things are themselves matters of top-secret national security. The administration has raised this claim in relation to its adventures in secret wiretapping and its fun with extraordinary rendition. A government privilege once used to sidestep civil claims has mushroomed into sweeping immunity for the administration’s sometimes criminal behavior. 5. Government Snooping Take your pick. There’s the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program wherein the president breezily authorized spying on the phone calls of innocent citizens, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI’s TALON database shows the government has been spying on nonterrorist groups, including Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Veterans for Peace. The Patriot Act lives on. And that’s just the stuff we know about. 4. Extraordinary Rendition So, when does it start to become ordinary rendition? This government program has us FedEx-ing unindicted terror suspects abroad for interrogation/torture. Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen, was shipped off to Afghanistan for such treatment and then released without charges, based on some government confusion about his name. Heh heh. Canadian citizen Maher Arar claims he was tortured in Syria for a year, released without charges, and cleared by a Canadian commission. Attempts to vindicate the rights of such men? You’d need to circle back to the state-secrets doctrine, above. 3. Abuse of Jose Padilla First, he was, according to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, “exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” Then, he was planning to blow up apartments. Then he was just part of a vague terror conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. Always, he was a U.S. citizen. After three and a half years, in which he was denied the most basic legal rights, it has now emerged that Padilla was either outright tortured or near-tortured. According to a recent motion, during Padilla’s years of almost complete isolation, he was treated by the U.S. government to sensory and sleep deprivation, extreme cold, stress positions, threats of execution, and drugging with truth serum. Experts say he is too mentally damaged to stand trial. The Bush administration supported his motion for a mental competency assessment, in hopes that will help prevent his torture claims from ever coming to trial, or, as Yale Law School’s inimitable Jack Balkin put it: “You can’t believe Padilla when he says we tortured him because he’s crazy from all the things we did to him.” 2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 This was the so-called compromise legislation that gave President Bush even more power than he initially had to detain and try so-called enemy combatants. He was generously handed the authority to define for himself the parameters of interrogation and torture and the responsibility to report upon it, since he’d been so good at that. What we allegedly did to Jose Padilla was once a dirty national secret. The MCA made it the law. 1. Hubris Whenever the courts push back against the administration’s unsupportable constitutional ideas—ideas about “inherent powers” and a “unitary executive” or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime—the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

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The President’s praise of fair trials and the rule of law

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: The President’s praise of fair trials and the rule of law: “The President’s praise of fair trials and the rule of law

(updated below – Update II)

By Glenn Greenwald – President Bush today hailed the critical importance of fair trials and the rule of law . . . . in Iraq:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial — the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people’s resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

The President is certainly right that it is is a good thing that Saddam Hussein was given a trial, represented by lawyers, with an opportunity to contest his guilt, before being deemed to be guilty. That is how civilized countries function, by definition. In fact, allowing people fair trials before treating them as Guilty is one of the handful of defining attributes — one could even say (as the American Founders did) a prerequisite — for countries to avoid tyranny.

Howard Zinn Speaks to Democracy Now

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 18:

Howard Zinn Speaks to Democracy Now By: Nicole Belle @ 2:10 PM – PST Submit or Digg this Post Amy Goodman is one of the best interviewers in the country. Today, Howard Zinn speaks to the uses of history and how it applies to the “War on Terrorism”. You can download the program (about 1 hour long) here. Howard Zinn’s brilliant book “People’s History of the United States” should be on your reading list.

Sasha/Digweed

YouTube – Sasha at Club Glow Washington DC

Sasha, born Alexander Coe (born September 4, 1969), is a WelshDJ and record producer. He is best known for partnering with fellow English DJ, John Digweed, as Sasha + Digweed. The pair released several mix albums together, including the Northern Exposure series (released between 1996 and 2001). They also released one of the all time best selling mix albums, The Renaissance Mix Collection part 1, in 1994. The album was recently re-issued. Sasha also released two Global Underground solo mix CDs, San Francisco (GU009) and Ibiza (GU013), which are considered classics of the progressive house genre. In 2002 he released his first solo LP, Airdrawndagger, a result of collaboration with Spooky, James Holden and Junkie XL. The album enjoyed excellent reviews upon its release, and recently a wave of quality remixes by various producers has re-kindled interest in Sasha’s production work. 2004 saw the release of Involver, his third in the Global Underground series. This mix album differed from previous albums in that each track was completely reproduced in the studio, as opposed to simply being blended together. More recently, in 2005, Sasha began moving away from mixing with records and CDs in favor of a new approach with computer software and a dedicated controller for his live sets. With the sequencing/mixing software Ableton Live and a custom controller that Sasha helped to design, he is able to use mixing techniques that are difficult or impossible with conventional methods, including mixing together many sources at once, adjusting pitch and tempo of sources independently, and cutting up and rearranging songs. His most recent mixed CD, Fundacion, was recorded using the Ableton Live software and the album bears the name of his monthly residency nights in both New York, Los Angeles, Denver and GLOW in WASHINGTON D.C.

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Byron York Is An Assclown

What does this say about their judgment?

TULLYVISION – Chris Matthews Has No Idea Who This Joe Wilson Fellow Is:

TULLYVISION

Just an abdication of any sense of journalism. Tip O’Neill is twirling in his grave.
Three things that are most troubling about this goddamned case lately: 1: Lawrence O’Donnell at the end of this summer, all of a sudden declares on Olbermann’s Countdown program that it’s all over(the Fitzgerald case) and that it was much ado about nothing (possibly in reference to Armitage’s confession/reveal that he was blabbing about Valerie Wilson as well around that time) 2: Bob Woodward’s complete skullduggery about this sickening political payback/blowback and his public, blatant disregard for honest disclosure about his direct involvement in this possible illegal act while simultaneously mocking it in the press. 3: That Washington Post Op-Ed after the Armitage reveal. Worst day in their history.
Disgusting.

JT
New York Herald Sun

Gassed His Own People

Gassed His Own People

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.—Who is “tolerating” that? Bush is — from the comfort of his treadmill in the White House gym — and Cheney and Rumsfeld, maybe. But do you honestly think that any mother trying to raise a family on the streets of Baghdad tolerates it? And the evidence is overwhelming that they don’t tolerate it one bit. Why do you think that a whopping 71 percent of Iraqis want America to leave in the next year?

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Tip O’Neill is twirling in his grave

TULLYVISION

Just an abdication of any sense of journalism. Tip O’Neill is twirling in his grave.

Three things that are most troubling about this goddamned case lately: 1: Lawrence O’Donnell at the end of this summer, all of a sudden declares on Olbermann’s Countdown program that it’s all over(the Fitzgerald case) and that it was much ado about nothing (possibly in reference to Armitage’s confession/reveal that he was blabbing about Valerie Wilson as well around that time) 2: Bob Woodward’s complete skullduggery about this sickening political payback/blowback and his public, blatant disregard for honest disclosure about his direct involvement in this possible illegal act while simultaneously mocking it in the press. 3: That Washington Post Op-Ed after the Armitage reveal. Worst day in their history.

Disgusting.

JT

New York Herald Sun

50,000-70,000 troops

Yesterday, President Bush announced his intention to increase the “overall size” of the Army,
acknowledging that the current forces were “stressed.” The Washington
Post reports he’s considering an increase of 50,000-70,000 troops.

On June 3, 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) — campaigning for the presidency — proposed expanding the Army by 40,000 troops. Bush quickly slammed the proposal as unnecessary and counter-productive:

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Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat:

Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat:

Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat – Mark Morford Wednesday, December 13, 2006 The good news is, we’re all back in harmony. All back on the same page. No more divisiveness and no more silly bickering and no more nasty and indignant red state/blue state rock throwing because we’re finally all back in cozy let’s-hug-it-out agreement: The “war” in Iraq is over. And what’s more, we lost. Very, very badly. Sure, you sort of sensed from the beginning that we couldn’t possibly win a bogus war launched by a nasty slew of corrupt pseudo cowboys against both a bitterly contorted Islamic nation and a vague and ill-defined concept that has no center and no boundaries and that feeds on the very thing that tries to destroy it. It was sort of obvious, even if half the nation was terrifically blinded by Bush administration lies and false shrieks of impending terror. But now it’s official. Or rather, more official. Now it’s pretty much agreed upon on both sides of the aisle and in every Iraq Study Group and by every top-ranking general and newly minted defense secretary-designate and in every facet of American culture save some of the gun-totin’ flag-lickin’ South. We lost. And what’s more, we have no real clue what to do about it. After all, it’s not easy to accept. It’s the thing we cannot easily hear, the thing most Americans, no matter what their political stripe, just can’t quite fathom because we’re so damned strong and righteous and handy with a gun, and because we are the superpower and the God among men and the bringer of light to the world and therefore we never lose. Except, you know, when we do. It’s not like we were overpowered. We weren’t outmanned or outgunned or outstrategized, hence we weren’t defeated in any “traditional,” kick-ass, take-names, sign-the-peace-accord way. It wasn’t because our can’t-lose military didn’t have the latest and greatest killing tools of all time, the biggest budget, the most heroic of baffled and misled young soldiers sort of but not really willing to go off and fight and die for a cause no one could adequately explain or justify to them. We still have the coolest, fastest planes. We still have the meanest billion-dollar technology. We still have the most imposing tanks and the most incredible weaponry and the badass night-vision goggles with the laser sights and the thermal heat-seeking readouts and the ability to track targets from 2 miles away in a dust storm. It doesn’t matter. What we don’t have is any idea what we’re doing, not anymore, not on the global stage. We lost this “war” and we lost it before we even began because we went in for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong planning and with all the wrong leadership who had all the wrong motives based on all the wrong greedy self-serving insular faux cowboy BS that your kids and your grandkids will be paying for until about the year 2056. Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you say, “Wait, wait, wait, it’s not over at all, and we haven’t lost yet. Isn’t the fighting still raging? Can’t we still ‘win’ even though we’re still losing soldiers by the truckload and thousands of innocent Iraqis are being brutally slaughtered every month and isn’t Dubya still standing there, brow scrunched and confounded as a monkey clinging onto a shiny razor blade, refusing to let go and free us from the deadly trap, ignoring the Iraq Study Group and trying to figure out a way to stay the course and never give in and “mission accomplished” even as every single human around him, from the top generals to crusty old James Baker to the new and shockingly honest secretary of defense, says we are royally screwed and Iraq is now a vicious and chaotic civil war and it’s officially one of the worst disasters in American history?” Oh wait, you just answered your own question. Yes, technically, the war is still on. The fighting is not over. And, yes, you can even say we (brutally, tactlessly) installed ourselves with sufficient ego to give us a modicum of violent, volatile control over the gulf region’s remaining petroleum reserves — which was, of course, much of the point in the first place. But the nasty us-versus-them, good-versus-evil ideology is over. Ditto the numb sense of Bush’s brutally simpleminded American “justice.” Any lingering hint of anything resembling a truly valid and lucid and deeply patriotic reason for wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives and roughly an entire generation’s worth of international respect? Gone. What’s left is one lingering, looming question: How do we accept defeat? How do we deal with the awkward, identity-mauling, ego-stomping idea that, once again, America didn’t “win” a war it really had no right to launch in the first place? After all, isn’t this the American slogan: “We may not always be right, but we are never wrong”? It’s still our most favorite idea, the thing our own childlike president loves to talk most about, burned into our national consciousness like a bad tattoo: We always win. We’re the good guys. We’re the chosen ones. We’re the goddamn cavalry, flying the flag of truth, wrapped in strip malls and Ford pickups and McDonald’s franchises. Right? Wrong. If Vietnam’s aftermath proved anything, it’s that we are incredibly crappy losers. We deny, we reject, we evade, ignore and refuse responsibility until it becomes so silly and surreal that even the staunchest warmonger has to cringe in embarrassment. At this point, it seems nearly impossible for America to accept defeat with anything resembling perspective and dignity and the understanding that maybe, just maybe, we ain’t all that saintly or perfect and maybe God really isn’t necessarily on our side after all, because if God took sides, she wouldn’t actually be, you know, God. But what happens to a country if it loses the thing that supposedly defines it most? If we don’t have our bogus “victory,” if we don’t always win, if we don’t have a sense of righteousness so strong and so inflated and so utterly impenetrable that even when it seems like we’ve lost, we still stumble through some sort of offensive end zone victory dance, well, what’s left? What, conscience? Humility? Humanitarianism? Or how about the realization that we could maybe, just maybe, learn to be defined by something other than rogue aggressiveness and the vicious need to win? Something like, say, a mindful, flawed, difficult but oh-so-incredibly-essential move toward that most challenging and rewarding of human ideals: peace? Yeah, right. Who the hell wants that?

Eschaton:

So, let’s do a recap on the Very Serious junior senator from Connecticut. About a year ago Lieberman wrote: Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. In March Lieberman was still claiming that things were getting better. In June he said: I believe, that we will be able to withdraw a significant number of our men and women in uniform from Iraq by the end of this year and even more by next year. And I express that optimism based on the election and formation of the new Iraqi unity government, the increasing capacity of the Iraqi security forces to protect their own people, and the commitment of the new government to disarm the sectarian militias. In July he said: So I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops, and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home. A little later in July he said: BRIDGEPORT — U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman believes the U.S. will withdraw a “solid” contingent of its military forces in Iraq by the end of the year because of gains made by the Iraqi armed forces. “There really has been progress made by the Iraqi military,” Lieberman said Tuesday during a meeting with the Connecticut Post’s editorial board. “Two-thirds of it could stand on its own or lead the fight with our logistical support.” The three-term U.S. senator said he believes a complete withdrawal is possible by late 2007 or early 2008. Apparently all of that is no longer operative and now he’s standing with St. John McCain calling for more troops. Joe Lieberman, wrong about everything, yet still a very serious person. -Atrios 11:50 AM

You link to it, you OWN it

Canadian Cynic: You link to it, you OWN it. Deal with it.:

You link to it, you OWN it. Deal with it.  Back here, we have a thoroughly exciting comments section going, where “Strong Conservative” Jonathan Strong finally just plain pisses me off when he writes: Miscommunication, I didn’t personally link Condit stuff, I was just linking Gateway, that was my intent. I don’t give a fuck what your intent was. I am thoroughly tired of people who link elsewhere, get called on what they linked to, then throw up their hands with, “Hey, I didn’t write that, I was just linking to it,” as if that absolves them of any and all responsibility. I don’t think anyone has put it as well as Glenn Greenwald in his sixth update here: Tiger Hawk claims that the other Reynolds — Glenn — merely linked to, but did not endorse, Hinderaker’s reprehensible argument, an excuse which Reynolds quickly embraces. Are there really still people left who don’t understand that Reynolds links to extremist arguments all the time in order blatantly to promote them, only to then claim that he “only linked to it, not endorsed it” once the argument gets exposed, as it so often does, as deceitful, inaccurate or hateful garbage? As Robert Farely said just yesterday when pointing out the utter incoherence in a Victor Davis Hanson article promoted by Reynolds: “I swear to you, the first person to write ‘but Reynolds just linked; he didn’t say that he approved of Hanson’ in comments gets permanently banned.’” If you knowingly promote an argument like Hinderaker’s — which disgustingly asserts that it was to be expected that Foley harassed underage pages because he’s gay — then it is incumbant to make your objections clear (as Tiger Hawk did when linking to my post, or I did when linking to Hinderaker’s). Otherwise, it amounts to: “Hey, I just linked without comment to that white supremacist article, knowingly sending tens of thousands of readers to read it, but I wasn’t endorsing it.” That is Reynolds’ modus operandi, and virtually everyone has caught on. Once and for all, Jonathan, did you catch that? I mean, really, did you catch that? If you link to someone else’s article in any kind of supportive and unqualified way, then you fucking own that article, lock, stock and barrel. All of it. So grow the fuck up and stop being such an infantile whiner. If you have a case, make it. If you can use your own words, terrific. But if you choose to link elsewhere, then that stuff becomes your problem as well. If you can’t handle that, then I suggest you find a less dangerous avocation than blogging. Because you just don’t seem prepared for it. posted by CC

Canadian Cynic: You link to it, you OWN it. Deal with it.

Canadian Cynic: You link to it, you OWN it. Deal with it.

Government Of the Corrupt, By the Corrupt and For the Corrupt

By: Pachacutec

Your government, looking out for the not-so-little guy:

The Justice Department announced new rules yesterday that will make it harder for prosecutors to bring criminal charges against companies, bending to intense pressure from business groups that claim the government has overreached in its pursuit of financial malfeasance.

In presenting the revised rules, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty called the changes a substantial and direct response to a lobbying drive by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, among others.

Since devastating bankruptcies at Enron and WorldCom prompted Congress to pass a stringent corporate accountability law four years ago, business interests increasingly have pushed back on efforts to police their operations, arguing that the government has imposed too many costs on companies with too few benefits for investors.

I’m sorry, did you mention the US Chamber of Commerce?  Let’s have a look at the US Chamber’s CEO, Tom Donahue:

If it were possible to pick one person as the representative for American business in Washington, Thomas Donahue is that man.  He is the President and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the most important business lobbying group in the country.  He is also on the Board of Directors and the Audit Committee of Sunrise Senior Living, and was caught selling stock ahead of the revelations of accounting problems.  That is a serious no-no for any board member or any business executive.  It’s deeply unethical and possibly illegal, because it’s stealing from investors.  If there’s any indication that the business lobby under Republican rule became unbelievably corrupted, look no further than Thomas Donahue, the man that the business community picked to represent them to the Republican power structure.

I’m a small businessman, and the big business lobbies of big pharma, the US Chamber of Commerce and all the rest do not represent me.  They work against my interests and pump a steady stream of lying economic happy talk out through the media.  Net neutrality is good for me, but the telcos and cable companies want to sell me out to extract extra money from big corporate citizens who can pay for better access and accessibility online.  American big business is against universal health care while those of us doing the hiring and growing in the grass roots business community are much more for it.  Big business wants to stifle innovation to protect its markets from little business guys like me. To hell with them.  You want to see what their big corporate welfare does for American jobs and prosperity?  Look no further than the US auto industry.

We don’t need less accountability on our big multinational corporations.  We need more.  Milton Freidman is dead.  Companies have more stakeholders than just shareholders.  Companies that do business in the US are not just global citizens, they are accountable to US citizens.  In earlier times, you had to have property to have a say in government.  That supposedly changed.  But now, government is owned almost outright by multinationals writing laws against the interests of the people in the dark of night for bad actors in Congress – Democrats and Republicans -  to pass as is, without debate, in exchange for campaign contributions and lucrative lobbying jobs for their families, friends and even themselves.

It’s up to us to stop it.  What’s happening to the little guy?  I’m guessing there’s a clue in the fact that late mortgage payments increased in the third quarter of this year.

Nieman Watchdog > Commentary > Arabs, Israelis voice pessimism on Baker/Hamilton

Nieman Watchdog > Commentary > Arabs, Israelis voice pessimism on Baker/Hamilton

skyline583

skyline583

Originally uploaded by The Beardog.

toohotfortnr

tooho:tfortnr Since you been gone, I can breathe for the first time

Hey, Frank, great editing, buddy. You really are a credit to the magazine, and I’m a total dick. Here’s what you let Bob Kagan write for you this week:

U.N threat

un threat.jpg (JPEG Image, 800×574 pixels)

Schmuck – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Schmuck – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “In his famous cultural lexicon, The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten lists the Yiddish schmuck as related to the Slovene word, šmok, meaning ‘a fool, an innocent, a gullible dolt”

CNET editor James Kim, family missing

CNET senior editor and Crave blogger James Kim and his family are missing. The 35-year-old Kim, his wife Kati and daughters Penelope (4 years) and Sabine (7 months) left their home in San Francisco last week on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. They were last seen on Saturday, November 25, in Portland, Ore.

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Feds to Pay $2M to Man Wrongly Accused of Terrorism

The federal government has agreed to pay an Oregon lawyer $2 million to settle part of a lawsuit he filed after the FBI misidentified a fingerprint and wrongly arrested him in the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings. “The pain and torture and humiliation that this (case) has caused my family is hard to put into words,” Brandon Mayfield said…

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St. McCain’s look of desperation

“St. McCain’s look of desperation
By: John Amato

John McCain had this weird—glazed look in his eyes as he attacked John Kerry’s botched joke on Hannity & Colmes Tuesday night. (Here’s Kerry’s reply to the distortions)

Video -WMP Video -QT

How quickly St. McCain forgot his high praise of Kerry:

In his work toward that day, Kerry earned the ‘unbounded respect and admiration’ of McCain, who, like others in the Senate, originally viewed Kerry with suspicion. ‘You get to know people and you make decisions about them,’ says McCain. ‘I found him to be the genuine article.’

or this :

On a more serious note, McCain added later, ‘I think that the best Americans from both parties should be the nominees of their parties, so that the American people would have the very best to select from, and I would certainly put Sen. Kerry in that category.’

It’s sad how an election cycle will bring out the worst in people. I guess the Republicans are that desperate, but by bringing up the Iraq war front and center, they might have made a mistake:

In attacking Mr. Kerry and defending the war, the White House clearly made the calculation that achieving what has been its”