Catfish Wallow

02-11-09

Evangenital pastor says abortion to blame for fires in Australia (current) - Another of the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson fruitcakes of the world. Please, may the rapture come quickly and take them from our midst.

That 180-degree reversal of Obama's State Secrets position (salon - includes Rachel Maddow discussion).

The State Secret Protection Act (emptywheel) - "This bill would establish a CIPA-like process to allow the admission of evidence over which the executive has invoked State Secrets. . . . The bipartisan State Secret Protection Act is modeled on existing protections and procedures for handling secret evidence. Specifically, the bill would require a court to make an independent assessment of the privilege claim . . . ." - There's no time like the present to really push for this bill.
Are Bush's Secrets Safe With Obama? (commondreams)

Madsen: NSA’s meta-data email surveillance programs exposed (onlinejournal).
Lendman: Obama's "War on Terror" (globalresearch.ca) - "The language is softened and deceptive. The strategy and tactics are not. The "war on terror" continues. Promised change is talk, not policy."
America’s Predators: Fighting the Afghan War From Las Vegas (commondreams) - "Singer talks of pilots shooting missiles at enemies thousands of miles away and then getting into their Toyotas to be home for the kids' soccer practice." - There are more than 5000 of these unmanned remote killers prowling the skies now over Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and . . . . If not already here, they will become an addition to the planes in U.S. skies. They are indiscriminate in who they kill and depend primarily on young military personnel, often with limited training for their jobs, sitting at consoles perhaps thousands of miles away, to give them their lethal instructions.

Obama planning to be a one-termer: Says he won't run again if stimulus fails (bostonherald). - Well, as I've commented before, among the long-term crushing economic collapse the ultra-wealthy elites have visited upon us AND the relentless conservative corporate news media's microscopic and often deceitful examination of every grain of Obama administration dust AND the unchallenged GOP election theft machine, he probably will be a one-termer anyway. But, just for fun, couple his comment with what Roubini and Taleb say in the video below. I wonder what the master puppeteers have up their sleeves for 2012. Will there be enough economic improvement by then to turn it back over to the Republicans, or will there still be such devastating and continuing damage that it will be politically expedient to leave it in the hands of the Democrats awhile longer so they can be blamed for it? -- But on the other hand, Obama is getting so good at saying one thing and then doing the opposite, maybe he'll come across for us again in 2012 anyway.

Senate Stimulus: Steal from the Poor to Give to the Affluent (emptywheel) - "ProPublica has done a comparison of the House and Senate stimulus packages. It shows, in striking fashion, how much the Grassley-Isakson-Coburn-Collins-Bad Nelson bill skews spending away from the poor--the most stimulative kind of spending, since these people need this money badly and would spend it right away--to the upper middle class"
Required Watching: Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on CNBC 2/9/09 (youtube) - The only problem with this video is that we have to listen to the over-talking CNBC used-car salesmen blather on and on among the two experts' comments.

Project Censored's # 7 story for 2009: Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking (projectcensored) - "When Mello asked an African-American Katrina survivor who supported the guest workers’ grievance how he justified comparing guest work to slavery, he responded, “Do you know the story of the Middle Passage? . . . In slavery, you send a slave catcher, they go to the chiefs and make a deal. They say, We’re going to take your people to heaven, and they show them a few pretty things from heaven. You load them onto the ships and only when they get out to sea do they know they’re slaves. You take them to one owner, and if they leave they’re a runaway. Well, with guest workers . . .” He trails off, says Mello, his meaning clear. "

FBI Probing 530 Corporate Fraud Cases (fauxnews) - Why so few?
China airport executive sentenced to death for embezzlement (marketwatch) - Time to import this form of justice to U.S. white-collar criminals. Peanut processing plant executives who knowingly dispense disease, for example -- and government executives who deliberately shred or aid and abet in the shredding of the U.S. Constitution.

Flashback to 01-22-09: China: Life imprisonment and death sentence for those at center of tainted milk scandal (nytimes). An idea we definitely need to import to the US. My views on the death penalty have changed considerably over time. I now believe that most offenders should not receive it. However, it should generally be reserved for only the very powerful -- those who cause a lot of damage to a lot of people through their criminal actions, especially including government and corporate figures -- that their appeals be limited and execution be by swift, merciful and final means such as the guillotine -- and that those executions be publicly broadcast to the world, as was Saddam Hussein's execution. I defer to the death penalty for those particular individuals because of the greater likelihood that through their power and influence, they would otherwise eventually be prematurely delivered from their just desserts.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009