Betting ring on an Australian Navy ship alleged where one could win points/money on having sex with female sailors, with bonuses for daring locations and less attainable women (including gay women).

Some people do not learn.   Disgusting.

The new way to get tourists back to Mexico: we did such a good job on H1N1, don’t worry. Now, on to making sure that the furious drug lords war in Mexico doesn’t catch you on the street with an AK-47 before you get to see an interesting stage show in Tijuana.

Tip to Bamm Hartman for the video link.

While retrieving THE FIXER from one of my off-air VHS tapes, I ran across the real-life story that the movie/novel was based on - see the story of the Beilis Trial in late Tsarist Russia in Wikipedia.  Wow.

Horrible story (with the names blanked out) from a divorce court in Britain about an effort by the husband to get a L500000 settlement from his ex, which the judge shot down - because the husband had been a terrible pedophilic monster, preying on the wife’s grandchildren.

Describing the man as “manipulative”, Mr Justice Moylan ordered him be paid £100,000 from the sale of a jointly-owned overseas property. However, he also ordered him to pay £50,000 towards his ex-wife’s £250,000 legal costs.

…and I also find the idea of political murder and terror repugnant.    I understand that you find Dick Cheney a sadistic MF, or a Army recruiter someone who is hurting your co-religionists by supporting the war, or you find Dr. Tiller a baby-killer.

Fine.  Then work constructively to bring people to justice, or to outlaw abortions, or to end the war.  Don’t go out and kill people over their politics or for doing things that are legal where they are done.   Political murder and assassination is wrong. Such things lead to — the death of Gandhi himself, because he didn’t hate enough.   It’s terror, no matter how you slice it.

From my old home town of Dayton, Ohio:

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

Two items from my hometown newspaper in Dayton, Ohio:

Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer and two of his deputies warned on Tuesday April 21, that county budget cuts will decimate the sheriff’s department and hamper crime fighting efforts. “If don’t have the people I can’t keep people safe,” said Plummer, during the county commission meeting “I need more resources, not cuts.”

And then this little gem:

Warren County is saying “no thank you” to federal stimulus funds. The county is the only one in the state that has rejected stimulus money for transportation improvements, according to the Ohio Department of Transportation.

Commissioners rejected $373,000 in stimulus money to buy three new transit buses and upgrade their fleet, citing their opposition of deficit spending for buses and vans.

“I’ll let Warren County go broke before taking any of Obama’s filthy money,” Commissioner Mike Kilburn said.

ODOT spokesman Scott Varner said the money was specifically for transit improvements in rural areas to improve transportation for disabled people, seniors and others needing access to health care and educational opportunities.

“I’m tired of paying for people who don’t have,” Kilburn said. “As Reagan said, ‘Government is not the answer, it’s the problem.’”

…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries).  Interesting news coming out of it, of course.  Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.

Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked?  Not really.  It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously.  It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.

I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-richer-and-more-brutal in both countries.    It occurs to me that stupid rich bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone else have caused a mighty amount of pain in the world and created revolutionary conditions again and again, and never realized that pushing people repeatedly to the edge will end up in disaster, eventually.

The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*.  As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large.  Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.

You’d think some folks would learn…

I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.

The People at the US Attorney’s office in NYC who didn’t bother vetting emails that they got in after a call for statements from people who were rooked by Bernie Madoff.  They included with a ton of other emails a ‘Nigerian scam’ style email “If you can assist, I am willing to give you 10% of the funds that is US$3.5Million” that some joker sent in.  Sheesh.

• The Six Flags parent company is looking at bankruptcy. Wheeeee goes the rollercoaster…
• American Axle, a big supplier of GM and Chrysler, is looking at going out of business.  Broken Axle jokes accepted at the door.
• CNBC’s Cramer The Huckster gets down with a mea culpa of sorts with Jon Stewart’s show.  I’ve seen the earlier Cramer/Stewart matchups, and it makes me very aware of why I never watch the regular CNBC programming unless something is crashing and I need to see the as-it-happens tickers.  And that’s pretty rare.
• Madoff pleads guilty with his own mea culpa, will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.  So he’ll get to do “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” as a duet with Killer and Rocky in the slam, while the rest of us do a chorus of “I got plenty of nothin’” in the background.
• You can get that shirt here, by the way.  I’d get one with my name on it, but they won’t fit me or Susan.
• Going Galt: How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away ?  And more hits in the tune of That Term Does Not Mean What You Think It Means.
• US Pension plans just discovered a $217 billion deficit.  Turns out that they invested in Wall Street, whodathunkit.
• The Bank Situation in Europe is much worse than here; they invested in all sorts of boondoggles that didn’t pay off, more than ours, and the same sort of acquisitions idiocies (big-fish-eating-littler-fish wise).
• All sorts of numbers as to how-much-world-wealth-has-been-destroyed-so-far are being tossed around.  Long ago, I asked my Mom - what happened to all the money in the Great Depression for people to all go broke?  The answer was that people were mostly only rich on paper only, and I had to research out the Great Depression to find that part out…that a lot of the money was really not there in the first place, but everyone acted like it was.  The seriously rich are still pretty much the seriously rich unless they put their money in the seriously stupid.

The FDIC didn’t take insurance premiums from banks from 1996 to 2006 - because, well, everything was doing so well, and Congress didn’t want them to bother the banks.

But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized - and that bank failures were so infrequent - that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.

Now with 25 banks having failed last year, 17 so far this year, and many more expected in the coming months, the FDIC has proposed large new premiums for banks at the very time when many can least afford to pay. The agency collected $3 billion in the fees last year and has proposed collecting up to $27 billion this year, prompting an outcry from some banks that say it will force them to raise consumer fees and curtail lending.

To possibly reduce the fee increase, the FDIC has asked Congress for the temporary authority to borrow as much as $500 billion from the US Treasury - up from the current $30 billion limit - in case the number of bank failures increases even more dramatically.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Bristol Palin has decided that she’s had enough of Levi Strauss Johnston and chased him off to the Alaskan bush.  Details in the 10 o’clock news.

Hedge funds, no longer magically able to make money from thin air, are laying off tens of thousands of employees.   Give them bonuses!

The UK economy is looking at it’s worst year since 1931.   I assume that includes the war years as well…cripes!

Bernie Madoff may be pleading guilty, but the trust level in the economic wise guys is dropping faster than the Dow Industrial.

Norm Coleman’s entire donor list just had their credit cards hacked, which is always a good way to get more contributions because they trust that you know what you’re doing.

From The People’s Daily: Jiangmen cops broke a child selling ring.  Details after the cut.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

On the one hand, practically everyone in Illinois Democratic politics has called for Burris to resign  his Senate seat, along with the big Chicago newspapers and the Washington Post.  Senator Durbin corralled him today and told him to his face.   His response:

We are not hearing that I should resign. Quite to the contrary, we keep hearing from people all over this nation, all over this state that say, “Roland, you cannot step down  You are the best thing to happen to Illinois and the US Senate ever.”  We are committed to doing Illinois’ work in the US Senate and all of this silly stuff about Rod Blagojevich isn’t about Roland Burris.

If I admitted I heard voices like that, they’d put me in a mental health ward, not the US Senate.    The short version is that Burris’ ego will never let him resign.  You’d have to toss him out.

New story on the Pakistani-American TV exec who beheaded his wife; dude had a LONG history of mental instability and rage - the dead woman was wife #3, and she wasn’t the first one to be worked over.  This things rarely happen in a vacuum.

• Camembert fanciers have pushed back on laws that require it to be made with pasteurized milk only.
• Bristol Palin, teenaged mom, now says that abstinence-only sex-ed courses are not realistic at all…no kidding!
• The US Postmaster General, who says the US Post Office needs to cut services one day a week and raise prices for the second time in a year, is doing the ridiculous-bonus-for-running-things-into-the-ground chacha, with a 40 % raise in the last two years, and a $135,000 bonus last year.   The Post Office had a operating loss of $2.8 billion last year.  Total with all perks and bonuses is over $800,000 a year.
• The guy who started a Muslim TV station in New York and pushed against US acceptance of cultural stereotypes of Muslims (see his TV station’s logo above) beheaded his wife for deciding to divorce him.  As usual, please remember: 99% of this sort of crap is not the fault of the religion as such, but the fault of idiots and madmen who use their own insecurities and tribal nonsense and twist things around to use their idea of religion and the law to justify their acts.    I could go on and on about John Yoo, but…

Now Attorney General Lisa Madigan (major Democratic pol in Illinois) wants Burris investigated.  He’s toast, sooner or later.    His desire to run for the seat in 2010 was feeble at best, but this and the Republican upset over things will make it impossible to win even the Primaries, and it’s obvious that he BS’d the impeachment committee about his contacts with Blago.  He’s too proud of a man to quit, though.  We’ll see what happens.

MUNCIE, Ind. - A self-proclaimed white supremacist and Satan worshipper accused of biting a 9-year-old boy has accepted a deal with prosecutors under which he pleaded guilty to battery resulting in bodily injury.
Dmitriy V. Sklyarov, 20, of rural Muncie, also received a $100 fine under the deal. Prosecutors dismissed a charge of neglect of a dependent.

Investigators said Sklyarov bit the boy at least 13 times on the arms and legs last Oct. 8. Delaware Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cannon Jr. accepted the terms of the plea agreement during a hearing last week. Sklyarov was scheduled to go on trial Tuesday.
Public defender Steven Bruce said his client was engaged in horseplay with a child left in his care when the boy bit him.
“I bit him back,” Sklyarov said.  “Multiple times, correct?” Bruce asked.  “Yes,” the defendant responded.
Sklyarov will not begin serving his sentence until he finishes a 90-day term for contempt of court. At a Dec. 1 hearing, Sklyarov curse at Cannon’s predecessor on the Circuit Court bench, Chris Teagle, while also shouting “Heil Hitler!” and “white power!”

This was, of course, not the first time this nitwit was in trouble; he had a track record of waving around scary stuff like voodoo dolls allegedly soaked in his own blood, pot in high school, threatening teachers in school, and hokey crap like this:

On a web site, Sklyarov calls himself an Aryan sorcerer. He also suggests instead of sacrificing a dog, why not “sacrifice a high school teacher who promotes mixing of the races.” And another line states: “To be a black magician means to embrace knowledge of the dark forces.”

GMAFB, dude.  Indications are that the kid came over with his mom from Russia about 10 years ago, and has been a serious PITA to everyone since, with heaps of look-at-me-I’m-Dangerous-Dan stuff.

“Anyone who suggests otherwise,” Mr. Burris added, “or would insinuate that my testimony in person or in writing is anything other than fully compliant with the committee and consistent with the truth is simply playing at partisan politics.”

Roland Burris NOW admits that Blago’s brother hit him up for big contributions just before the selection of Mr. Burris for Obama’s old Senate seat.   His defense on anger that has arisen about his backtracks on sworn testimony to the Impeachment Committee sounds an awful lot like Bill Clinton’s ‘depends on your meaning of what is is” legal slice-and-dice cuteness - I didn’t care much for that, either.

I think the only real solution is for the Illinois State Legislature to pass a Special Election bill to cut this crap short and elect someone else to fill the rest of Obama’s term, and for the Feingold Amendment to the Constitution (make all Senate vacancies filled by special elections) to become the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution.  Yes, I’m a Democrat, but I’m a good-government sort who has always considered Burris a hack, and think we could have a lot better in that seat.

The Illinois GOP is hot on this one because it upsets the Democrats, of course.  And the Democrats don’t know what to do because they don’t want to possibly lose the seat to some numbskull Palinite Republican in an open election, and will wring their hands a lot and wish it would all go away, which will not help their chances if this gets much worse and people demand Burris’s removal, or in a special election, or when the seat is up again in 2010.