Rush Limbaugh: Full quotes at the link. At the other end of the world, Congressman Michelle Bachmann is suggesting that the Obama Administration is going to use Census information to round people up that it doesn’t like, and cites the Japanese-Americans rounded up during WW2 and taken to internment camps.
So I guess it’s probably really my fault for voting for Obama and plunging us all into a deep, dark gay socialist hell on earth. Sorry, Governor Sanford, I just had no idea as to what I was doing. I was only follwing the instructions of Comrade Jiang Yu Cai as she was directed by the ChiCom Politburo, too, so they’re involved in the heinous plot.
…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.
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say. To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.
There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss. Where they could trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease. The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.
Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all. And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information. Information they didn’t have.
My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out. And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.
I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam. But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise. As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.
And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual. Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do. Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.
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.
British discount airline mulls making their planes’ toilets PAY toilets, assume people have pound coins in their pocket. I assure you, I don’t carry major change in my pockets in US airliners - the metal detectors would go nuts.
UK bankers have a fit over cuts in bonuses and whatnot; some say they’ll look for overseas jobs (good luck finding them), some demand their million-dollar pensions for driving the bank into collapse are sacrosanct, and some are going back to divorce courts to demand that their lavish spousal settlements be reduced because they aren’t going to keep getting zillions in bonuses.
Lesson #1: Don’t make public statements about dramatic events in your life unless they’re something that won’t fall apart the next day. Bobby Jindal’s bureaucrat-fighting story during Katrina sounded bogus at the time, and it turns out that it was. So on top of everything else, he makes up fake stuff on national TV - hey, this guy is seriously dumb, folks!
And lastly, John Bolton makes a funny about terrorists nuking Chicago ( a real thigh-slapper to me), Joe the Plumber suggesting Congresscritters who don’t like the war should be shot, and Tom DeLay suggesting that Limbaugh is right, and that he too wants Obama to fail and the country to go into a depression.
Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone, and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless - and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand. The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything else waaaaaaaay later, and that bunches of people in Gitmo and the other ‘black’ jails, like the taxi-drivers in Abu Ghraib, were just Joe Blows scooped up in a wide net and tortured at length for information they didn’t have.
25. The written statement allegedly containing Mohammed’s confession and thumbprint is in Farsi. Mohammed does not read, write, or speak Farsi. There are several factual assertions in the statement that are false, including Mohammed’s name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, his uncle’s name, his residence, his current residence, his age, and an assertion that he speaks English. The statement’s account of the grenade attack — the responsibility for which the statement ascribes solely to Mohammed — conflicts with the eyewitness accounts of the American victims. Yet, it was this statement that Respondents and their agents primarily relied on as a basis for Mohammed’s detention, and for the charges brought against him in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.\
That was written by one of the prosecutors, folks.
He was the lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. After spending over a year on the case, he became convinced that the government had no good case against Jawad, that Jawad had been badly mistreated and was suffering serious psychological harm, and that continuing to hold him was “something beyond a travesty.” (p. 1) That’s why he wrote the declaration in question, in support of Jawad’s habeas petition.
Secret Service agent in nearby Naperville notes the terrible, snowy weather and all sorts of reports of terrible commuting situations this morning, and decided to take the commuter train this morning. Never took the train before. Suddenly realized ‘hey, I have a gun on me, I should figure out about train security’, so he says something like ‘Hey, I have a gun, what’s security like on the train? Any metal detectors?’ to the ticket counter guy at the Naperville station. Then, he gets on the train without IDing himself as a Secret Service guy or cop or anything. DING DING DING DING!!!!
He gets taken OFF the train by the Lisle (our town, next stop) cops at gunpoint with semi-automatic cop stuff. Schools call me at home and say they’re in lockdown. The entire commuter train line suddenly went into lockdown, stranding a zillion commuters. And the guy’s brain went into lockdown, apparently.
Be interesting to know how much trouble the guy got into with work over that one.
..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.
- Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
- The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with. Of course, government policies for a LONG time promoting hardshell settlers with lots of government support and funds created this mess in the first place.
- Pat Robertson now thinks Bush is a bumbling schmuck who has mismanaged things terribly, and has nothing but praise for Obama. *faint*
W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post.
“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems not to have been aware that this same principle applied to him.”
Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by. Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set up solid and profitable ranches and farms all over the colony. (It was one of the areas of Africa that Europeans could deal with the local bug population, let alone the climate, Kenya and South Africa being others, to a point where they’d be interested in settling down there in numbers. )
Eventually, Britain wanted to join the two (Northern and Southern) Rhodesias with Nyasaland into One Big Colony in the 1950s to create a new colonial nation-state under a white-minority rule, but the African nationalist groups that were on the rise didn’t want that at all. (In most of Africa, the Europeans were the creators of national/colonial boundaries, and those had zero to do with ethnic and cultural groups that were present before The White Guys came.) Eventually, the ‘federation’ broke up, and the three states were all slated for black-majority rule statues in the early 1960s.
Southern Rhodesia, however, wasn’t interested. The number of white settlers there were MUCH higher than the other states, and more were rolling in all the time. In 1927, the white/black numbers were roughly 40k/920k; in 1947 80k/1640k, and then the white numbers really jumped, to around 330k at the highest, but never exceeded 6% of the total population.
The Whites ran the show, and had a good life with about 50% of the land of the colony in their hands, and the colony prospered - most especially the white colonists. Finally, they declared themselves Independent of Britain in 1965, and intended to run their semi-apartheid state by themselves forever.
Yes, there’s a lot of similarities with South Africa. There’s a reason. The blacks in the majority never were allowed to have any political power, and about at the same time, the black nationalists went to the bush as guerrillas to armed battle with the government. In Rhodesia, the battle was aimed at the settlers on the farms and the raids and international shunning finally led to the white-led government handing over power to a new black-majority government in 1980.
The problem since then can be cut down to have / have not problems with the economy, and political power issues. Simply put, the people who have held power in Zimbabwe since the early 1980s were the black guerrilla leaders of the past who originally had (at least on the surface) Marxist leanings and saw the whites as the Oppressor Class. Problem was that the whites also had the capital, the education and the know-how to keep the economy humming, and after Zimbabwe became a black-majority state, the external sanctions came down and the country boomed.
Land ownership in particular was a sore spot, and land reform started after 1980 to return white settler lands to black ownership - with an aim to get small landowners set up on their own to make a good go of it. The problem was that not that many whites wanted to sell out, and that even after the whites were politically forced (including at gunpoint) to start selling out, the land didn’t go to the poor farmers-in-waiting - most went to big shots in the Single Party Revolutionary Fighters government and army.
The result was that the remaining whites fled with whatever they could take with them, and the One Big Party under Robert Mugabe, the surviving guerilla leader, ran the country as a brutal kleptocracy. And the result was that the business and farming that kept the country going went to pieces - cutting open the golden goose doesn’t get you any golden eggs and all that. The value of the currency has gone to nothing. Nobody has money to buy food or keep up sanitation, or get clean water, and a cholera epidemic is running wild in Zimbabwe, and businesses, schools and hospitals have collapsed.
The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.
The response to this is - more brutality, and statements about how either there is no cholera, or it’s really a British chemical bioweapon aimed at bringing the state to its knees, or it’s some other type of invasion plot by foreigners. And regardless of the beatings and the rhetoric, the people suffer and die.
From the New York Times…one more place for fear:
The origins of India’s Jews remain uncertain, but according to some accounts they may have come as emissaries from the court of King Solomon. They established communities and lived peacefully with Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and, later, Muslims. The absence of anti-Semitism throughout this history has been a source of pride in India.
“This is one of the few countries where Jews never faced discrimination and persecution,” said Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, a leader of the Jewish community in New Delhi.
Jews played a prominent role in several coastal cities, but nowhere more so than in Mumbai. Jewish merchants from Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries arrived in the late 18th century in what was then British Bombay and quickly established themselves as leading businessmen, opening textile mills and international trading companies.
Only about 200 of these so-called Baghdadi Jews remain in Mumbai, with the rest having immigrated to Israel, Britain and the United States. But their legacy endures: synagogues, libraries and schools, many of which serve Jews and non-Jews. They also financed the construction of several city landmarks, including the Flora Fountain and the Sassoon docks.
Today, most of Mumbai’s Jews have roots in a group known as the Bene Israel community, which claims to be descended from seven Jewish families who were shipwrecked on India’s shore while fleeing persecution in the Galilee during the second century B.C. Over the centuries, they adopted Indian language, dress and cuisine. Since India became independent, these Jews have often played influential roles in Indian society, including in government and Bollywood.
“We always felt we were Indians first and Jews second,” said Mr. Malekar, a Bene Israel Jew.
Uniformed officers burst into Lulu Matheson’s house in the village of Shieldaig, Wester Ross, kept her son Gus in his bedroom for two hours, handcuffed her grandson Stephen, and turned the house upside down.
The high-profile afternoon raid involved three squad cars, seven officers and sniffer dogs. They told the family they were looking for cannabis, but after searching for several hours had to concede the green plants visible in the window from the roadside were tomatoes. The plants, of which police requested a sample for analysis, were bearing fruit.
So here’s my ideas, half-baked:
- Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario. This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
- All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
- The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event. Say goodbye to what’s left.
- The receivership corporation essentially will rehire management staff at their discretion. Golden parachutes and stock options and excessive compensation just vanished. Cap salaries at $250k. We’ll talk about bonuses when you make things people want to buy.
- Immediately make interest from car loans deductible on taxes, and lean heavily on the nations banks to start making car loans again. Offer a sizable tax rebate ($4000-5000) scaled towards more fuel-efficient cars made by the ‘corporation’ and its spinoffs. You want a Hummer or a Corvette? You’re on your own.
- Eliminate car financing by the manufacturers.
- The UAW and the auto makers were in the process of setting up trusts to handle retiree health costs - in 2010. Have the government take over the gap of that trust and set it up to be self-maintaining. This would eliminate the vast legacy costs for health care from the auto makers’ books now.
- Eliminate and standardize. You don’t need all of the crap brands and submakes out there. Bust out the better parts and make them their own company. And eliminate the old dealer/line deals that mandate that you have to keep the obsolete car lines.
- Focus all R&D towards two things - serious materials / fuel efficient cars, and away from oil-based fueling systems towards electric cars / serious hybrids.
The hardest angle on this is about the union workers and where to set up the jobs that will remain, and that’s tough. Here’s a union perspective on some of this.
I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter. Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.
My own struggles on this:
( Read the rest of this entry » )3) John McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any member of the Senate except for Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. He hasn’t cast a single vote in five months, since April 9. All of a sudden, McCain is demanding that the presidential race shut down so he can return to Washington?
4) A reminder: President Bush was able to debate John Kerry while he was president. For all of his sudden urgency, McCain acknowledged just yesterday that he had not even read the administration’s three-page bailout proposal.
and the South China Morning Post is reporting that Chinese banks have been ordered to stop interbank loans to US banks. Not sure if that’s for certain, but it’s a cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face move, since a bank failure in the US (or a recession of major proportions, take your pick or both at once) would collapse the symbiosis between China and the US.
If you think *we* were in a grows-forever plan-accordingly spend-like-drunk-sailors cut-off-the-top-for-me bubble, the Chinese government is stable ONLY so long as the prosperity of recent years keeps rolling in at the rates they’d like to become accustomed to. When that stops, and a lot of Chinese realize that the good times are over, all of the simmering resentments over government corruption, greed and whatnot will boil over in a very very nasty way. The still-poor and the recently-well-off will be both down in the dumpster. Add to that a lot of unemployed young men who don’t have prospects for future work or future brides (see also: one child policy).
The Chinese have about 2 Trillion of US foreign Reserve currency in hand. Every time you buy a Moosehunter Barbie doll for your kid, or a million other things, your cash ends up (in part) over there. Of course, if all of a sudden, the value of those dollars goes to hell because the Treasury just printed up a lot of extra bills to pay for bank stuff, and the Treasury expect Chinese banks to buy up the T-bills that support that money….and nobody’s buying…
The Chinese are not doing a spread the wealth plan, anyway. From Xinhua:
Admittedly, China now boasts the most profitable lenders in the world after market-oriented reforms transformed State-owned banks into commercial lenders. But domestic financial market and financial institutions remain unable to meet the country’s growing demand for financial services to fuel its economic growth.
For instance, the government has spearheaded a national campaign to revive the rural economy. But by the end of last year, as much as 7 percent of villages and towns lacked any financial outlets offering simple, low-cost financial services to boost local economic growth and raise farmers’ living standards.
One last thought: who would you rather have pick the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, and the Secretary of the Treasury?
And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power:
- Airlines are majorly cutting international flights into LA because costs have risen dramatically for fuel and foreign demand for flights to the USA have dropped.
- Noting the cyber-attacks on Georgia during the recent war, it’s starting to occur to people that the USA could be similarly hit. Reports are coming in that while a few systems are relatively well protected, most in the US (including some seriously critical stuff) aren’t, and that very little organized, concerted effort is being taken because nobody’s getting out in front on this subject.
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