Reporter recounts massacre as new information is revealed by WikiLeaks

Sep 3, 2011
Reporter recounts massacre revealed by WikiLeaks
By Justin Elliott
Salon.com

This week, a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks brought renewed attention to a disputed killing of several civilians in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006.

The cable contains a copy of a letter of inquiry by a U.N. investigator outlining allegations that U.S. forces had handcuffed and then "executed" 10 people in the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee. The soldiers then called in an airstrike that destroyed the house, it alleges.

The U.S. military has maintained that nothing improper happened, but to this day has refused to comment in detail about the case.

Beyond the primary question about what happened that day and whether it was an unjustified massacre or a case of collateral damage, the incident has political ramifications. As the AP reported Friday, Iraqi politicians said this week the incident could have an impact on any agreement to allow U.S. forces to stay in the country beyond Dec. 31.

As the AP noted, "Whether U.S. forces in Iraq will continue to have legal immunity from prosecution if they stay is one of the major stumbling blocks in the ongoing negotiations, as Washington will not allow the military to remain without it."

A Pentagon spokesman said this week, "We've already investigated these allegations, and there is no new information."

To learn more, I spoke to journalist Matthew Schofield, who has been covering the incident since he first wrote about while on assignment in Iraq in 2006. He is currently an editorial writer at the Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, but he wrote a news article on the WikiLeaks cable this week.

I know there are competing accounts, so can you explain what do we know -- or think -- happened in this incident in 2006?

What we know happened -- what everyone agrees on -- is that U.S. troops went to a house in Ishaqi, Iraq, in March of 2006. In one official U.S. version, the troops were looking for an al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist, or, in another official account, someone who had shot at U.S troops. When they approached the house in the early morning hours, there was a gunfight. Neighbors talked about this. In the U.S. version, in the course of the gunfight, the people in the house were killed, the house was destroyed at the same time, and they were able to detain the person they were looking for. In the account the neighbors told, as well as the report of a U.N. investigation on this, the house was standing when the soldiers went inside and was destroyed sometime later.

The bodies of the dead were found against one wall in one room, all handcuffed in white plastic handcuffs according to neighbors. The coroner we talked to after the incident said that the people who died were killed by gunshots to the upper chest and head. It didn't necessarily look execution-style -- the shots were not all to the same place in the head, or anything like that -- but it looked like they were from fairly close range. His guess was that the bullets were from an M-16. The Iraqi police investigators, who had been trained by U.S. forces, said in their report that these had been execution-style killings by American forces.

Who was killed exactly?

There were five children under the age of five, the youngest being five months old. Then there was a mother, her sister, the grandmother and a visitor -- four women in all. The father, in his 20s, was killed as well.

What about the question of an alleged airstrike on the house?

The house was certainly rubble after the raid -- that's clear. When it collapsed is the question. The neighbors said that after the U.S. troops left, an airstrike was called in. At the time, they said it was helicopters. U.S. forces maintained that it collapsed during the firefight. I couldn't get to the site when I was in Iraq because at that time we couldn't get far out of Baghdad very safely. We relied on a stringer who we had worked with quite a bit in the past. He took a satellite phone and we did phone interviews with the coroner and the police and others.

What has the military said about the incident over the years?

The initial reaction was always that "this can't be true." In June 2006, the U.S. military finally said that nothing untoward had happened in Ishaqi. But there were questions about the military investigation. They weren't on the ground for a particularly long time. Again, we were not there when the investigation took place, but neighbors told us afterwards that investigators were on the scene for a total of 30 to 45 minutes. The military maintained that it had been thorough. Some Iraqi government officials have long maintained anger over the incident.

How did you end up covering the incident?

It was an almost insanely violent period. So we were trying to do some in-depth coverage of what was going on, a sort of day-in-the-life piece, instead of just letting the violence roll. On the day we had settled on this idea, news of the Ishaqi incident was released. We got a press release from the U.S. military that talked about five people who had been killed in collateral damage. So we started looking into it. After our stringer talked to the neighbors, he told us, 'Look, the version I'm getting doesn't jibe with the version you're getting from the military.' He said it's not five people, it's at least 10. After I went to the military with this, they then came back and acknowledged the higher body count was accurate.

What did we learn from the cable just released by WikiLeaks?

One, it shows different sources of information than what I was dealing with. It shows that officialdom was concerned about this. They were not admitting they were concerned when we were on the story back then. They gave much more credence to the story than they had suggested to the press at the time. Behind the scenes, there was a great deal of concern over what exactly had happened there.

The cable outlines pretty much exactly what the worst-case scenario was when we were reporting on it. I didn't really pursue the worse-cast scenario because I didn't believe it was possible. We looked into it and we reported on the allegations at the time, but we were always looking for other explanations, for other ways this could have happened. This cable seems focused on that worst-case scenario, which I found fascinating.

So what happened with the U.N. investigation? It was essentially stymied?

Yes, it died. They sent questions out to the United States, and there was no response. They have said there was frequently no response from the United States on these matters. They sent questions to the Iraqi government, and they said these things also just tended to vanish because Iraq was a mess at the time. The investigator, Philip Alston, who is the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told us this week that they just had nowhere left to go after these nonresponses.

So this incident has really never been addressed by the U.S. military in a comprehensive way?

It has not. The military has always been dismissive of this case. It may well be that it should be dismissed. But there's enough smoke there that it deserves a very thorough investigation. These are very disturbing allegations. The Iraqi cops who investigated this had U.S. training; they were not anti-American. They had respect for the training they had gotten. There has been and continues to be a desire for concrete answers.

Ridiculed, an N.F.L. Owner Goes to Court

Dan Snyder sues paper that criticized him
Citizen Media Law Project

On November 19, 2010, the Washington City Paper published "The Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder." The article levied a wide array of complaints about Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins NFL franchise since 1999. The complaints largely concerned his management of the team, as well as his control of several other business ventures.

On November 24, 2010, Washington Redskins General Counsel David Donovan wrote a letter on behalf of Dan Snyder to Atalaya Capital Management, an investment company that, according to the letter, purchased the City Paper out of bankruptcy in 2009. The letter alleges that the City Paper article, and its inclusion of a photograph of Snyder with drawn-in devil horns, goatee, and uni-brow, were anti-Semitic and that the allegations made regarding Snyder and his wife in the article were false and defamatory. The letter also suggests that the statements regarding Snyder may have been published at the direction of Atalaya Capital, which competes with RedZone Capital (an entity which Snyder co-founded).

On December 7, 2010, attorneys for Atalaya Capital responded to Snyder's letter, rejecting the assertion that Atalaya had control over the content of Washington City Paper, disputing the factual allegations made in the letter, and asserting City Paper's First Amendment right to criticize Snyder under Hustler Magazine v. Falwell.

On February 2, 2011, Snyder filed suit in the New York Supreme Court for New York County against Atalaya Capital, its portfolio company Creative Loafing, Inc., and 10 "John Doe" defendants. Snyder alleged that four statements made in the article were defamatory, and sought relief in excess of $2 million

On April 26, 2011, Snyder discontinued his action in New York and filed a second the complaint in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, this time against Creative Loafing, Inc., Washington City Paper, and Dave McKenna, the author of the article.

Using DC's recently enacted anti-SLAPP law, the defendants brought a special motion to dismiss on June 17, 2011. The defendants argue that D.C. Code § 16-5502 protects the statements as they are "an act in furtherance of the right of advocacy on issues of public interest" and that Snyder will not be "likely to succeed on the merits" of his claims.

According to the Blog of LegalTimes, Snyder filed a memorandum in opposition to the motion to dismiss on August 1, 2011, in which he argues that the anti-SLAPP law in question is in violation of the Home Rule Act, the federal law which delegates some congressional control of the District of Columbia to the DC local government. On August 30, 2011, the District of Columbia intervened in the case for the limited purpose of defending the validity of the anti-SLAPP law.

Oral argument for the motion to dismiss is currently scheduled for October 14, 2011.


Related Links:

John Sharkey, Dan Snyder Gets a Taste of D.C.'s New Anti-SLAPP Law, CMLP Blog, June 17, 2011.

Dan Snyder, Why I am suing Washington City Paper, Washington Post, April 25, 2011.

Michael Schaffer, Bully Pulpit: Why Dan Snyder's Lawsuit Matters, Washington City Paper, Feb. 11, 2011.

Rep. Steve Cohen, Protect Free Speech by Combating SLAPPs, Roll Call, May 23, 2011.

Erik Wemple, Daniel Snyder lawsuit: No settlement in sight, TBD, April 26, 2011.

David Carr, Ridiculed, an N.F.L. Owner Goes to Court, New York Times, Feb. 6, 2011.

Stetson Kennedy, Exposer Of Ku Klux Klan Secrets, Dies At 94

Stetson Kennedy, Exposer Of Ku Klux Klan Secrets, Dies At 94
By TERRY SPENCER
08/27/11

MIAMI -- Author and folklorist Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan six decades ago and exposed its secrets to authorities and the public but was also criticized for possibly exaggerating his exploits, died Saturday. He was 94.

Kennedy died at Baptist Medical Center South near St. Augustine, where he had been receiving hospice care.

In the 1940s, Kennedy used the "Superman" radio show to expose and ridicule the Klan's rituals. In the 1950s he wrote "I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan," which was later renamed "The Klan Unmasked," and "The Jim Crow Guide."

"Exposing their folklore – all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were, dressing up in white sheets" was one of the strongest blows delivered to the Klan, said Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press. She was a friend of Kennedy for about 30 years and did her doctoral thesis on his work as a folklorist.

"If they weren't so violent, they would be silly."

Kennedy began his crusades against what he called "homegrown racial terrorists" during World War II after he was deemed unworthy for military service because of a back injury. He served as director of fact-finding for the southeastern office of the Anti-Defamation League and served as director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.

"All my friends were in service and they were being shot at in a big way. They were fighting racism whether they knew it or not," Kennedy said. "At least I could see if I could do something about the racist terrorists in our backyard."

Using evidence salvaged from the Grand Dragon's waste basket, he enabled the Internal Revenue Service to press for collection of an outstanding $685,000 tax lien from the Klan in 1944 and he helped draft the brief used by the state of Georgia to revoke the Klan's national corporate charter in 1947.

Kennedy infiltrated the Klan by using the name of a deceased uncle who had been a member as a way to gain trust and membership.

But the Klan did not know that Kennedy was giving its secrets to the outside world, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Anti-Defamation League and Drew Pearson, a columnist for The Washington Post.

When he learned of plans for the Klan to take action, he would make sure it was broadcast, thwarting them.

"They were afraid to do anything. They knew that somebody was on the inside. They had first-class detectives looking, and I was trying hard not to be caught," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said he always feared exposure and remained scared throughout his life. "Nonstop, to date," mentioning threats, the shooting of his dog and frequent attempts to burn his home...

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
By WARREN E. BUFFETT
New York Times
August 14, 2011

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

Rick Perry under fire over veiled Bernanke threat

"'To accuse Bernanke of being a traitor to his country -- treason is a crime punishable by death -- to say you are going to treat him pretty ugly if he was down in Texas, this was unpresidential and unnecessary,' said Rove."

When Karl Rove says a fellow Republican has gone too far, it's time to worry. But here's my question. How does someone like Rick Perry, who talks about having Texas secede from the US, manage to also claim to be a patriotic American?


Perry under fire over veiled Bernanke threat
(AFP)
August 16, 2011

WASHINGTON — Republican White House hopeful and Texas Governor Rick Perry faced disbelieving and angry reactions Tuesday to remarks seen as threats of implied violence against Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke.

At a campaign stop in the heartland state of Iowa on Monday, Perry said he would consider any attempt to boost the US economy before the November 2012 elections as "almost treasonous" and invoked the specter of mob justice.

"If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa -- but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas," Perry told supporters.

"I mean, printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous -- or treasonous, in my opinion," Perry told supporters at a backyard get-together, with US President Barack Obama not far away on a campaign-style swing through Iowa.

The eyebrow-raising comments, visible in a video that was widely available on the Internet Tuesday, drew fire even from Republicans, though most of his rivals for the party's presidential nomination initially kept quiet.

Tony Fratto -- a former spokesman for Republican President George W. Bush, who named Bernanke to the Fed chief post -- took to Twitter to call them "inappropriate and unpresidential."

Bush political guru Karl Rove warned on Fox News Business television that Perry's Bernanke comments sounded like he was going to "take him out behind the barn and whup him" and warned the candidate "did not help his cause."

"To accuse Bernanke of being a traitor to his country -- treason is a crime punishable by death -- to say you are going to treat him pretty ugly if he was down in Texas, this was unpresidential and unnecessary," said Rove.

Perry may have stoked worries among some voters who could be wondering "is he going to be too much of a cowboy?"

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Melanie Rousell dismissed Perry's unusual broadside at Bernanke as "inflammatory schoolboy taunts" that left other Republican candidates "looking positively thoughtful."

She also invoked Perry's past controversial remarks suggesting Texas might secede, saying he "would have needed a passport to visit Iowa if he had his way."...

Maddow discusses Rick Perry's connections with a Christian conspiracy group

Aug 11, 2011 07:12 ET
Maddow discusses Rick Perry's connections with a Christian conspiracy group
A number of the Texas governor's prayer rally pastors are plotting world domination

On Wednesday night Rachel Maddow discussed Texas Gov. Rick Perry's prayer event, The Response, which took place last weekend. The event "raised eyebrows," she noted, for involving pastors known for their extreme conservative views. A number of the pastors have something more in common explained Maddow:

"Many of them are part of a little-known, very specific religious and political movement... The New Apostolic Reformation."

According to a cover story in the Texas Observer this month, pastors in the movement believe themselves to be modern day prophets or apostles, directly linked to God. Their aim, explained the article author Forrest Wilder, is "to infiltrate government, and Rick Perry might be their man."

The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they're intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an 'army of God' to commandeer civilian government.

Just days before Perry is expected to announce his presidential run, Maddow expressed concern that the Texas governor was able to hold a very public prayer event, largely organized by members of this group, without the Beltway media exposing who they really are...

Why Mitt Romney believed it was wrong to force anti-abortion beliefs on others

Mitt Romney and his young relative Ann Keenan in her high school yearbook picture.

Aug 8, 2011
The abortion that Mitt doesn't talk about anymore
His young relative died tragically in an illegal abortion in 1963: Her untold story -- and what it means for Romney
By Justin Elliott
Salon.com

In a 1994 Senate debate with Ted Kennedy, Mitt Romney revealed a startling chapter from his past: A close relative had died many years earlier in a botched illegal abortion, shaping Romney's stance in favor of safe and legal access to abortion for all women. But in the many years since that revelation, even as Romney flipped his position and became an ardent opponent of legal abortion, the details of his young relative's story, including even her name, have never been reported.

The relative he was referring to back in '94, Salon has learned, was a Detroit woman named Ann Keenan. She was the sister of Romney's brother-in-law and died at the age of 21 in 1963, a full decade before Roe v. Wade. While much of what happened remains murky, an investigation by Salon has uncovered never-reported details about her life and death, including: how she died (an infection); that her grief-stricken parents asked for memorial donations to be made to Planned Parenthood; and that the family apparently wanted to keep the death quiet because Romney's politically ambitious father, George, was then governor of Michigan.

With access to abortion increasingly restricted in many states and the possibility that a Republican victory in 2012 -- potentially by Romney -- will tilt the balance of the Supreme Court against Roe v. Wade, Romney's account of how a back-alley abortion touched his own family is more relevant than ever. The episode is a window into an era when obtaining an abortion meant the real risk of serious injury or death. It also represents a key part of Romney's political journey on the issue of abortion, which has more than any other tarred him as a flip-flopper.

The outlines of the story first became public when Romney -- unprompted -- brought it up in that 1994 debate with Kennedy, whom he was trying to unseat. At the time, Romney, who was making his first bid for office, was struggling to prove his pro-choice bona fides to liberal Massachusetts voters. In the debate, he insisted that he separated his personal beliefs -- opposition to abortion -- from his policy position that abortion "should be safe and legal in this country." Accused by Kennedy of being "multiple-choice," Romney angrily fired back:

"On the idea of 'multiple-choice,' I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter...

This is new: tundra fires in the Arctic

28 July 2011
Huge Arctic fire hints at new climate cue
By Richard Black
BBC News

An exceptional wildfire in northern Alaska in 2007 put as much carbon into the air as the entire Arctic tundra absorbs in a year, scientists say.

The Anaktuvuk River fire burned across more than 1,000 sq km (400 sq miles), doubling the extent of Alaskan tundra visited by fire since 1950.

With the Arctic warming fast, the team suggests in the journal Nature that fires could become more common.

If that happens, it could create a new climate feedback, they say.

Fires in the tundra are uncommon because the ground is covered in snow and ice for large periods of the year.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Melting can lead to other huge changes... releasing carbon that's been frozen since the Pleistocene”

Michelle Mack University of Florida

Temperatures are low even in summer, and the ground can also remain wet after the ice has melted.

But 2007 saw unusually warm and dry conditions across much of the Arctic - resulting, among other things, in spectacularly fast melting of Arctic sea ice.

This created conditions more conducive to fire, and when lightning struck the tundra in July, the Anaktuvuk River fire ignited.

"Most tundra fires have been very small - this was an order of magnitude larger than the historical size," said Michelle Mack from the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led the research team on the Nature paper and is currently conducting further field studies in Alaska.

"In 2007, we had a hot, dry summer, there was no rain for a long period of time.

"So the tundra must have been highly flammable, with just the right conditions for fire to spread until the snow in October finally stopped it."...

Horn of Africa aid caravan too late, again

Horn of Africa aid caravan too late, again
By Barry Malone
EL ADOW, Kenya
Jul 26, 2011

(Reuters) - A besuited U.N. official wearing well-buffed shoes crouches in the orange dust near a cluster of huts in northern Kenyan, and, as his tie wafts in the breeze, raises an iPad and carefully films the rotting carcass of a cow.

Since drought gripped the Horn of Africa, and especially since famine was declared in parts of Somalia, the international aid industry has swept in and out of refugee camps and remote hamlets in branded planes and snaking lines of white 4X4s.

This humanitarian, diplomatic and media circus is necessary every time people go hungry in Africa, analysts say, because governments -- both African and foreign -- rarely respond early enough to looming catastrophes.

Combine that with an often simplistic explanation of the causes of famine, and a growing band of aid critics say parts of Africa are doomed to a never-ending cycle of ignored early warnings, media appeals and emergency U.N. feeding -- rather than a transition to lasting self-sufficiency.

"Although humanitarian agencies are gearing themselves up to mount a response, it is far too late to address anything but the worst symptoms," Simon Levine, an analyst at the Overseas Development Institute think-tank, wrote on its website.

"Measures that could have kept animals alive -- and providing milk, and income to buy food -- would have been much cheaper than feeding malnourished children, but the time for those passed with very little investment," Levine said.

The drought gripping the region straddling Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia is the worst for 60 years, some aid groups say, and is affecting more than 12 million people. In the worst-hit area in Somalia, 3.7 million people are at risk of starvation.

"It seems once again that slow onset disasters don't get attention until they become critical," said a senior humanitarian adviser at a U.N agency in the region

"One can understand this with rapid onset disasters as they come out of the blue, but drought ... we've seen it before and we will again," said the official, who declined to be named.

The man filming the dead cow with an iPad was just one in a series of incongruous episodes when the director of the U.N. food agency, Josette Sheeran, flew for a day-trip to a small village and the world's biggest refugee camp in Dadaab to see how her organization is delivering emergency food.

Sheeran posed awkwardly next to the dead carcasses, an uneasy almost-smile on her lips as her staff snapped away with cameras and phones, watched by bemused locals.

Officials then had stilted conversations with refugees used to answering questions from Western aid workers who come with sometimes sympathetic nods, always promising that they can make things better.

"While international NGOs can be very active around humanitarian response many of them don't have a long-term development strategy for these areas," Andrew Catley, an expert on the Horn of Africa at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, told Reuters.

THORNY POLITICS

Reporters accompanied Sheeran, knowing they might need the iconic, loathed-by-Africans footage of the most emaciated babies they could find to get air time, or chance upon the "haunted" mother with the most dead children.

For many analysts, however, the story being told in the Horn of Africa by the humanitarian and media caravan is simplistic and misleading.

There is clearly a drought, they say, but the reason tens of thousands of people are leaving their homes in search of food is also because a festering insurgency in Somalia -- along with the forced recruitment of youths -- is making things worse.

Much of southern and central Somalia is controlled by al Shabaab Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda who imposed a ban on food aid in 2010. They have since lifted the ban but maintained the embargo on the WFP, calling it a "spy agency."

"This is not political," Sheeran briefed frontline aid workers in northern Kenya, saying that responding to the crisis was all that mattered now. "It's about saving lives."

Al Shabaab accused the United Nations last week of exaggerating the severity of the drought and said it would not allow agencies with "hidden agendas" to return.

Part of the problem, analysts say, is that much of the funding for WFP, and some other aid agencies, comes from the United States, opening them to charges of skewed objectives.

"What they are really interested in is security in Somalia. Since 9/11 a development for security agenda has come in with big donors like USAID and (Britain's) DFID," said a former senior aid worker in the Horn of Africa.

"Humanitarian issues and real development have basically played second fiddle to their security agendas," he said.

The State Department website says that although USAID is independent, it "receives general direction and overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary."

According to WFP's website, the United States has contributed 45 percent of its government funding since the start of 2007 -- or $7.3 billion out of $16.3 billion.

Analysts say that, without tackling the political complications that influence the distribution of food aid, and even the use of the word "famine," droughts will remain difficult both to prevent and to manage.

"Whilst it is tempting to say that the causes of the crisis are natural causes, it's much more difficult to look at the man-made causes of the crisis such as governance, conflict and economic trends," Catley said.

Several senior aid officials spoken to by Reuters did not want to be named when criticizing the aid system for fear of losing their jobs or being banned entry by African governments, but said the industry desperately needed an overhaul.

"Some of these organizations have been in these regions for 20/25 years and they're doing the same things today that they were doing 25 years ago," one said.

"If you were in any other sector -- and you had such a terrible impact -- you'd be out of business."

(Editing by David Clarke)

Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda

Michael Takiff says threatening to pull the trigger unless you get your way is immoral
Jul 22, 2011
Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
By Michael Takiff
Salon.com

These days Eric Cantor is steering the United States Treasury to default -- and the world economy to catastrophe -- as he defends to the death the sacred right of corporate jet owners to amortize their aircraft over five years instead of seven. Not long ago he was giving George W. Bush all the credit for killing bin Laden. Before that he was threatening to shut down the government over the budget bill. Earlier he claimed that the House of Representatives could make law without the approval of the Senate or the president.

Jul 22, 2011 07:45 ET
Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
By Michael Takiff

Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
AP
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, center, flanked by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, left, and House Speaker John Boehner, right

These days Eric Cantor is steering the United States Treasury to default -- and the world economy to catastrophe -- as he defends to the death the sacred right of corporate jet owners to amortize their aircraft over five years instead of seven. Not long ago he was giving George W. Bush all the credit for killing bin Laden. Before that he was threatening to shut down the government over the budget bill. Earlier he claimed that the House of Representatives could make law without the approval of the Senate or the president.

Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?

Shonda what?

* * *

My father used to tell us a morality tale. Not long after the events of November 22 and 24, 1963, our rabbi attended an interfaith meeting of clergymen from our midsize New Jersey town. He later reported to his congregation a conversation he’d had at the gathering. “The Protestant minister,” Dad would say, “said to the rabbi, ‘I see one of your people got Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Jack Ruby was Jewish, you know. [Right, Dad, I know from the other 18 times you’ve told me the story.] And the rabbi said, ‘Yes, and I see one of yours got the president.’”

It was an article of faith among American Jews of my parents’ generation -- people who came of age in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, when the best country clubs and colleges and suburbs and law firms still remained unpolluted by the Hebrew menace -- that the bad example of any Jew (e.g., Jack Ruby, né Rubenstein) casts disgrace on every Jew, even though no one generalizes about Christians on the basis of a single bad apple (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald). (Or even a string of bad apples: “Man, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson ... all the way to Clinton and Bush and Obama. Those dirty Christian bastards control the government!”) Our shtetl-minded insecurity survives today -- if not among all of us, if not as centrally in our lives -- when anti-Semitism, in the West, anyway, is but a bad memory. (Right, Mel Gibson, Oliver Stone, Julian Assange, Helen Thomas, John Galliano, and Charlie Sheen?)

When a Jew is publicly bad -- especially publicly really bad -- large numbers of the rest of us Jews cringe. That Jew becomes a shonda fur die goyim -- a disgrace for the non-Jews, an example for the gentiles to latch onto as evidence that every one of us is out to control their banks, run their newspapers, and make matzoh from the blood of their children. Think of the long list of Jewish financial miscreants of the past 25 years -- Ivan Boesky, Mike Milken, Bernie Madoff, the gonifs at Goldman Sachs. Let’s see, rich Jewish financiers screwing millions of ordinary people -- gee, that doesn’t play into any pernicious stereotypes about Jews, does it?

It’s gotten to the point that when I read about a swindler who is not one of us I’m ecstatic. A while ago the New York Times reported on the trial of an allegedly crooked defense contractor named Brooks: “A goy!” I said after reading the first paragraph. “Thank goodness. Keep reading.” I did, drooling with schadenfreude. Oh, this was a juicy one: According to the charges, he and another employee pulled down $190 million via stock fraud. To top it off, his company, which makes body armor for our troops in Afghanistan, allegedly paid out more than $6 million to cover his personal expenses, including plastic surgery for his wife and pornographic videos for his son.

But then came one last example of his obscene conspicuous consumption. The guy spent millions -- hiring 50 Cent and Aerosmith as entertainment -- on his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Bat mitzvah? So Brooks isn’t Brooks at all -- he’s Brodsky or Bernstein or Bergman or Buxbaum, whose grandfather changed his name years ago so he could be one of the goys. Such a shonda!

And the neocons. Oy, the neocons. Do so many of these momzers, so keen on sending other parents’ children off to war, have to be tribe members? Ken Adelman, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Elliot Abrams, Scooter Libby, and the Podhoretzes...

In other words, Ivan Boesky, you should know better. In other words, William Kristol, reread the list of sins -- the al chaits -- we reel off on Yom Kippur. In other words, Eric Cantor, didn’t you learn anything from your upbringing? Were you out on your shul’s front steps enjoying a smoke when your rabbi sermonized about the Jewish obligation to lead an honorable life?

Evidently you didn’t learn, because if you had, you’d share my belief that just as Jews should not stage multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, so they should not threaten to bring about world economic calamity for no better reason than to curry favor among a bunch of mouth-breathing fanatics who don’t know a principle of economics from a pulled-pork sandwich. You’d understand that a man who counts himself among the People of the Book, a people that has won Nobel Prizes in a ratio as much as a hundred times its share of the world’s population, should not dismiss the learned opinions of credentialed economists who warn of dire consequences should Congress not do its duty and protect the full faith and credit of the American dollar. You’d know, without being told, that pointing a gun at working people everywhere and threatening to pull the trigger unless you get your way is immoral...

Fox News Bias Exposed By Leaked Memos

Fox News Bias Exposed By Leaked Memos
TheYoungTurks
Uploaded Dec 10, 2010

Cenk Uygur (host of The Young Turks) discusses leaked memos from Fox News that expose a clear right wing conservative agenda.

You and I know that Fox News is not fair and balanced, they do conservative programming.

Propaganda. That's exactly what Fox News Channel does. And this is yet another case of overwhelming evidence of that.

The Perils of Polar Bears’ Longer Swims

July 20, 2011
The Perils of Polar Bears’ Longer Swims
By FELICITY BARRINGER
New York Times

In arguments over the impact of climate change, some of the images commonly associated with those clashes have attracted skeptical critiques, perhaps none more so than those of polar bears forced to swim longer distances because their sea ice habitat is melting. Some skeptics point out that polar bears are born swimmers and that the worries of environmentalists are therefore overdone.

Now comes a new study from researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the World Wildlife Fund indicating, after tracking a small sample of bears wearing radio collars, that the swims have indeed grown longer over the last six years. Five of the 11 mothers swimming with cubs lost the cubs along the way, and one bear even swam 427 miles to reach sea ice...

Bonuses for Billionaires

Bonuses for Billionaires
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times
July 20, 2011

The first few times I heard House Republicans talk about our budget mehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifss, I worried that they had plunged off the deep end. But as I kept on listening, a buzzer went off in my mind, and I came to understand how much sense the Tea Party caucus makes.
Damon Winter/The New York Times

Why would we impose “job-crushing taxes” on wealthy Americans just to pay for luxuries like federal prisons? Why end the “carried interest” tax loophole for financiers, just to pay for unemployment benefits — especially when those same selfless tycoons are buying yachts and thus creating jobs for all the rest of us?

Hmmm. The truth is that House Republicans don’t actually go far enough. They should follow the logic of their more visionary members with steps like these:

BONUSES FOR BILLIONAIRES Republicans won’t extend unemployment benefits, even in the worst downturn in 70 years, because that makes people lazy about finding jobs. They’re right: We should be creating incentives for Americans to rise up the food chain by sending hefty checks to every new billionaire. This could be paid for with a tax surcharge on regular working folks. It’s the least we can do.

Likewise, the government should take sterner measures against the persistent jobless. Don’t just let their unemployment benefits expire. Take their homes!

Oh, never mind! Silly me! The banks are already doing that.

LET JOBS TRICKLE DOWN Leftist pundits say that House Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. That’s unfair! Granted, the Republican-sponsored Cut, Cap and Balance Act would eliminate 700,000 jobs in just its first year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, but those analysts are no doubt liberals. America’s richest 400 people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans, and the affluent would feel renewed confidence if the Republican plan passed. We’d see a hiring bonanza. Each of those wealthy people might hire an extra pool attendant. That’s 400 jobs right there!

Cut, Cap and Balance would go even further than the Ryan budget plan in starving the beast of government. Sure, that’ll mean cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs, but so what? Who needs food safety? How do we know we really need air traffic control unless we try a day without it?

ROOT OUT SOCIALISM Republicans have been working to end Medicare as we know it but need to examine other reckless entitlements, such as our socialized education system, in which public schools fritter resources on classes like economics and foreign languages. As a former Texas governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, is said to have declared when she opposed the teaching of foreign languages: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

For that matter, who needs socialized police and fire services? We could slash job-crushing taxes at the local level and simply let the free market take over:

“9-1-1, may I help you?” “Yes, help! My house is burning down!” “Very good, sir. I can offer you one fire engine for $5,995, or two for just $10,000.” “Help! My family’s inside. Send three fire engines! Just hurry!” “Yes, sir. Let me just run your credit card first. And if you require the fire trucks immediately, there’s a 50 percent ‘rush’ surcharge.”

CHILL OUT ABOUT THE DEBT CEILING House Republicans like Michele Bachmann are right: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, some solution will turn up. As Representative Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia, observes: “In the end, the sun is going to come up tomorrow.”

We got through the Great Depression, didn’t we? It looked pretty hopeless in 1929, but in just a dozen years World War II bailed us out with an economic stimulus. Something like that’ll come along for us, too. Ya gotta have faith.

CONSIDER ASSET SALES While Democrats are harrumphing about “default,” Republicans have sagely noted that there are alternatives in front of our noses. For example, why raise taxes on hard-pressed managers of hedge funds when the government can sell assets?

Fort Knox alone has 4,600 tons of gold, which I figure is worth around $235 billion. That’s enough to pay our military budget for four months! And selling Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon would buy us time as well.

RENT OUT CONGRESS If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we could also auction members of Congress for day jobs: Are you a financier who wants someone to flip burgers (steaks?) at your child’s birthday party? Why, here’s Eric Cantor! Many members of Congress already work on behalf of tycoons, and this way the revenue would flow to the Treasury.

Finally, if we risk default, let’s rent out the Capitol for weddings to raise money for the public good. Wouldn’t it be nice to see something positive emerge from the House?

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench:The Supreme Court justice broke the law by not disclosing his wife's $700K

Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench
The Supreme Court justice broke the law by not disclosing his wife's $700K think-tank payday. Paul Campos on Clarence Thomas' "preposterous" defense and why he likely won't be punished.
March 3, 2011

The criminal-law scholar George Fletcher once quipped that the maxim "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is one of the few fundamental principles of law that most people actually know. As harsh as this principle may sometimes be when applied to ordinary citizens, applying it to justices of the Supreme Court seems only reasonable.

Thus it's difficult to feel sympathy for Clarence Thomas, as he finds himself embroiled in a controversy over his failure to reveal the sources of his wife's non-investment income (or indeed that she even had any such income). The 1978 Ethics in Government Act requires all federal judges to fill out annual financial-disclosure forms. The relevant question on the disclosure form isn't complicated: Even if Justice Thomas wasn't a lawyer, he shouldn't have needed to hire one to explain to him that the box marked NONE next to the phrase "Spouse's Non-Investment Income" should only be checked if his spouse had no non-investment income.

In fact Ginni Thomas was paid nearly $700,000 by the Heritage Foundation, a "conservative think tank," between 2003 and 2007, as well as an undisclosed amount by another lobbying group in 2009. Justice Thomas' false statements regarding his wife's income certainly constitute a misdemeanor, and quite probably a felony, under federal law. (They would be felonies if he were prosecuted under 18. U.S.C. 1001, which criminalizes knowingly making false statements of material fact to a federal agency. This is the law Martha Stewart was convicted of breaking by lying to investigators.)

Thomas' defense is that he didn't knowingly violate the law, because he " misunderstood" the filing requirements. This is preposterous on its face. Bill Clinton was impeached—and subsequently disbarred—for defending his false statements about his affair with Monica Lewinsky with an excuse that wasn't as incredible as the one Thomas is now employing...

Michele Bachmann: counseling clinic received nearly $30,000, family farm received some $260,000 in subsidies.

Michele Bachmann denies benefiting from government aid
By Richard A. Serrano
Los Angeles Times
June 26, 2011

With a new Iowa poll putting her in a dead heat with the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Rep. Michele Bachmann deflected allegations that she and her family had benefited from government assistance programs and said that hundreds of thousands of dollars to her family farm and a counseling clinic went instead to her employees and her in-laws.

"My husband and I did not get the money," she said, appearing on Sunday news talk shows as she prepared to officially open her campaign in her original hometown of Waterloo, Iowa.

The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota and "tea party" favorite, portrayed herself as a fiscal conservative while also benefiting from government funds and federal farm subsidies. An examination of her record and finances showed that a counseling clinic run by her husband received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, with part of the money coming from the federal government. And a family farm in Wisconsin, where she is listed as a partner, received some $260,000 in federal subsidies.

Bachmann and her staff declined to talk to about the government assistance for the L.A. Times article. But asked about the issue on "Fox News Sunday," she insisted that she and her husband had not benefited at the expense of federal and state taxpayers.

"First of all," she said, "the money that went to the clinic was actually training money for employees. The clinic did not get the money. And my husband and I did not get the money either. That's mental health training money that went to employees."

As for the farm, she said it belonged to her father-in-law. "It's not my husband and my farm," Bachmann said. "And my husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm."

As the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday, however, in financial disclosure forms, Bachmann reported receiving between $32,503 and $105,000 in income from the farm, at minimum, between 2006 and 2009.

Bachmann also repeated her stance that she was opposed to federal earmarks that sponsored pet projects for politicians back home and said she believed "the states have to build roads and bridges," not the federal government. But asked whether that was an inconsistency given that her family appeared to be benefiting from government aid, she said the clinic money was spent to train employees when they otherwise would have been there working...

Corporations line up to block rules that would force companies to disclose comparison data.

Business group: Public companies shouldn’t have to compare CEO and worker pay
By Peter Whoriskey
June 24, 2011

Here’s one financial figure some big U.S. companies would rather keep secret: how much more their chief executive makes than the typical worker.

Now a group backed by 81 major companies — including McDonald’s, Lowe’s, General Dynamics, American Airlines, IBM and General Mills — is lobbying against new rules that would force disclosure of that comparison.

The lobbying effort began more than a year ago. It involved some of the biggest names in corporate America and meetings with members of both parties on the House Financial Services Committee and Senate banking committee.

The companies and their Republican allies in Congress call comparisons between the chief and everyone else in the company “useless.”

But some Democrats and investors say the information should be issued to highlight the growing income disparity in the United States. They add that opponents of disclosure merely want to hide the outrageous scale of executive pay packages.

On Wednesday, a House committee approved a bill that would repeal the disclosure requirement.

Disclosing such comparisons “can mislead or confuse investors,” said Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth (R-N.Y.), who filed the bill to repeal the disclosure. “It creates heat but sheds no light.”

She also said the calculation of the ratio would be a burden for companies, especially those with global operations.

The committee vote was largely along partisan lines: Twenty-nine Republicans and four Democrats supported repeal; 21 Democrats opposed it.

“The real reason House Republicans want to keep the typical worker’s pay secret is that it may embarrass some companies to reveal that they pay their CEO in the range of 400 times what they pay their typical worker,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.)...

Republicans roll eyes at Obama's (accurate) assertion that taxes were higher under Reagan

Republicans roll eyes at Obama's (accurate) assertion that taxes were higher under Reagan
by Jed Lewison
Daily Kos
Jun 02, 2011

First, the facts (.xls):

During Ronald Reagan's presidency, total federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP averaged 18.2%, reaching a low point of 17.3% in 1984.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

During Barack Obama's presidency, total federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has averaged 14.9% and is projected to drop to 14.4% in 2011.

Second, the punchline:

GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. The White House and Republicans are trying to reach a deal on spending cuts that could allow the $14.3 debt ceiling to be raised.

“(The President) made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (former President Ronald) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”

The fact is, one of our biggest fiscal challenges is that taxes are too low, yet not only do these guys refuse to even consider raising them, they never get tired of denying the plain reality that we have historically low taxes. Perhaps if they acknowledged that simple fact, then they'd have to admit that taxes aren't the problem: underinvestment is.

Activists cry foul over FBI probe

Activists cry foul over FBI probe
By Peter Wallsten
Washington Post
June 13, 2011
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
CHICAGO — FBI agents took box after box of address books, family calendars, artwork and personal letters in their 10-hour raid in September of the century-old house shared by Stephanie Weiner and her husband.

The agents seemed keenly interested in Weiner’s home-based business, the Revolutionary Lemonade Stand, which sells silkscreened infant bodysuits and other clothes with socialist slogans, phrases like “Help Wanted: Revolutionaries.”

Anti-war activist Tom Burke meets Barack Obama in 2004 at Burke's Chicago-area union hall as Obama was running for U.S. Senate. Burke is one of 23 prominent anti-war activists to be subpoenaed as part of an ongoing FBI terrorism probe.

The search was part of a mysterious, ongoing nationwide terrorism investigation with an unusual target: prominent peace activists and politically active labor organizers.

The probe — involving subpoenas to 23 people and raids of seven homes last fall — has triggered a high-powered protest against the Department of Justice and, in the process, could create some political discomfort for President Obama with his union supporters as he gears up for his reelection campaign.

The apparent targets are concentrated in the Midwest, including Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise...

1% of your neighbors are psychopaths; so are 4% of business leaders

The Psychopath Test
This American Life
05.27.2011

Recently we heard about this test that could determine if someone was a psychopath. So, naturally, our staff decided to take it. This week we hear the results. Plus Jon Ronson asks the question: is this man a psychopath?

Facebook hires 2 former Bush aides as lobbyists, stepping up efforts to friend Washington

Facebook hires 2 former Bush aides as lobbyists, stepping up efforts to friend Washington
By Associated Press
May 26, 2011

NEW YORK — Facebook said Thursday that it hired two aides of former President George W. Bush as lobbyists. The world’s largest online social network is stepping up efforts to friend Washington as it grows.

Facebook hired Joel Kaplan as vice president of U.S. public policy in a newly created position. Kaplan will oversee the company’s public policy strategy and interactions with federal and state policymakers. He was previously deputy chief of staff in the Bush White House.

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The other hire, Myriah Jordan, will be Facebook’s policy manager, focusing on congressional relations. Jordan most recently served as general counsel to Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. She also worked in the Bush White House in the office of the Chief of Staff.

Facebook now has four registered lobbyists. The new Republican hires join Democrats Tim Sparapani and Adam Conner. Facebook has 12 staffers in its Washington office, including administrative support.

“At Facebook, we’re committed to explaining how our service works; the important actions we take to protect the more than 500 million people who use our service; and the value of innovation to our economy,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement. “This work occurs daily in Washington, at the state level, and with policymakers around the world.”

The company spent $230,000 lobbying in the first quarter, according to a recent filing with the House clerk’s office...

O'bama visits Irish village of his ancestor

Obama in Europe: tending to old friends, new global problems and ancestral roots in Ireland
By Associated Press
May 21, 2011

...A highlight of Obama’s opening stop in Ireland will be a feel-good pilgrimage to the hamlet of Moneygall, where America’s first black president will explore his Irish — yes, Irish — roots, and most likely raise a pint.

It turns out that Falmouth Kearney, who immigrated to the United States in 1850 at the age of 19, is the great great great grandfather of Obama on his white, Kansas-born mother’s side. Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, will connect in Moneygall with distant relatives from the Irish branch of his family tree.

Michael Collins, the Irish ambassador to the United States, says the president’s visit will be “a golden moment” for a country that’s been on the economic ropes after its boom time. The visit is sure to play well at home for Obama — make that O’bama — as he heads into re-election season after being pushed to great lengths simply to prove he was born on U.S. soil...

England and Ireland are friends; are Israelis and Palestinians next?

Queen leaves on high as Irish crowds finally appear
By Conor Humphries
May 20, 2011

CORK, Ireland (Reuters) - Large crowds cheered Queen Elizabeth for the first time on her historic visit to Ireland on Friday, as police relaxed security for the final day of a bridge-building mission widely seen as a success.

After an arrival marred by bomb scares and a riot by people opposed to Britain's continuing control of Northern Ireland, police appeared to ease security to allow thousands of people within yards of the monarch for the first time.

She responded with an unscheduled walkabout to shake hands with her well-wishers in the center of Cork, Ireland's second city. She later boarded the royal plane past an honor guard.

"This will show the world that the past is the past," said Pamela Hyland, 41, who brought her 9-year-old child to see the queen. "It has taken us decades to achieve peace and this is the icing on the cake."

Organizers slowly breathed a sigh of relief that the four-day trip, the first by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland since independence from London in 1921 and a diplomatic high-wire act, had gone off without a hitch.

Daring gestures included the queen laying a wreath to those who died fighting the British crown and visiting the scene of a massacre of 14 people by British forces. In a speech to the nation, she expressed sympathy to those who suffered during hundreds of years of conflict between the two neighbors.

"It has been a stunning success," said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. "We knew what was going to happen in advance, but it's not until you see it that you realize the power of the symbolism."

"It got to people in a way that probably surprised them."

Several dozen nationalists protested a few hundred yards from the queen, but there was no disorder in Cork, known as the rebel county for its resistance to the partition of Ireland during a civil war that followed independence from Britain...

Iowa conservative group hosting potential GOP candidates accepted $3 million in federal grants

Iowa conservative group hosting potential GOP candidates accepted $3 million in federal grants
By Associated Press
May 13, 2011

IOWA CITY, Iowa — A conservative group that has brought a string of potential presidential candidates to Iowa to lecture about the need to reduce government spending owes some of its past success to generous federal grants, which it has since rejected amid charges of hypocrisy.

The Family Leader has organized multicity forums for Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Sen. Rick Santorum. Each has called for reining in federal spending and talked about family values.

The same group received more than half of its funding from federal grants over a five-year period when it operated under a different structure as The Iowa Family Policy Center. The group was among those that benefited from former President George Bush’s faith-based initiative, which made it easier for social and religious organizations involved in community work to win federal funding.

The organization defends taking the grants, the bulk of which helped provide marriage mentoring for couples, but decided last year to turn down the final $550,000 in grant money and operate free of government involvement. In all, the group had accepted more than $3 million in federal grants since 2004...

Hypocrisy among religious conservatives doesn't happen only in America--Osama Bin Laden's compound reveals stash of porn

May 13, 2011
Porn found in Bin Laden compound
By Tracy Clark-Flory
AP

...A porn stash was found in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, according to unnamed U.S. officials. Reuters reports that the smutty library "consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive."

Now, we don't know who was watching the porn. We don't know what particular genres or titles were favored...All we know is that someone in Bin Laden's compound was indulging in X-rated entertainment of some sort. A religious extremist turning out to be a total hypocrite -- particularly when it comes to sex? Why I never!...

Donald Trump says everyone is as much of a racist as he is

Donald Trump Cancels on Letterman Over Racism Allegation
5/2/2011
by THR staff

...Trump wrote Letterman a personal note, stating he was "disappointed to hear the statements you made about me last night on your show that I was a 'racist,’" according to the New York Post. "In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth and there is nobody who is less of a racist than Donald Trump," Trump went on.

Donald Trump's racial discrimination problem

Apr 28, 2011
Donald Trump's racial discrimination problem
In the 1970s, he was sued by the feds for not renting to African-Americans
By Justin Elliott

In an episode early in Donald Trump's career, his New York real estate company was sued by the federal government for discriminating against potential black renters. After a lengthy legal battle, it ultimately agreed to wide-ranging steps to offer rentals to nonwhites.

The little-remembered case provides crucial context for the current discussion centering on Trump and race. The celebrity businessman made news last month when he declared, "I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

He has recently come under fire for attacks on President Obama that critics have described as racially tinged. CBS anchor Bob Schieffer, for example, said Wednesday there is "an ugly strain of racism" in Trump's recent (baseless) accusations that President Obama should not have been admitted to Columbia. Also yesterday, Trump told a black reporter, unprompted, "Look I know you are a big Obama fan."

The discrimination case began in the earliest days of Trump's career, when he was still in his 20s.

Fred Trump, Donald's father, was, unlike his son, a self-made man. He made his fortune by building thousands of units of middle-class housing in Brooklyn and Queens. But in the early 1970s, Donald was made president of the family company.

One of Donald's first challenges came in October 1973, when the Justice Department hit the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act. The Times reported:

... the Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals "because of race and color." It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.

The journalist Gwenda Blair reported in her 2005 Trump biography that while Fred Trump had sought to combat previous discrimination allegations through "quiet diplomacy," Donald decided to go on the offensive. He hired his friend Roy Cohn, the celebrity lawyer and former Joseph McCarthy aide, to countersue the government for making baseless charges against the company. They sought a staggering $100 million in damages.

A few months after the government filed the suit, Trump gave a combative press conference at the New York Hilton in which he went after the Justice Department for being too friendly to welfare recipients. He "accused the Justice Department of singling out his corporation because it was a large one and because the Government was trying to force it to rent to welfare recipients," the Times reported. Trump added that if welfare recipients were allowed into his apartments in certain middle-class outer-borough neighborhoods, there would be a "massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants, but communities as a whole."

A federal judge threw out Trump's countersuit a month later, calling it a waste of "time and paper."

Writes Blair in her book:

Donald testified repeatedly that he had nothing to do with renting apartments, although in an application for a broker's license filed at the same time he said that he was in charge of all rentals...

McCain's Birth Abroad Stirs Legal Debate

McCain's Birth Abroad Stirs Legal Debate
His Eligibility for Presidency Is Questioned
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post
May 2, 2008

The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States.

That is the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, then under U.S. jurisdiction. The bad news is that the nonbinding Senate resolution passed Wednesday night is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks.

Article II of the Constitution states that "no person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of president." The problem is that the Founding Fathers never defined exactly what they meant by "natural born citizen," and the matter has never been fully tested in court. At least three pending cases are challenging McCain's right to be sworn in as president.

Jurists on both sides of the political divide, consulted by the McCain campaign, insist that the issue is clear-cut. They argue that McCain is a natural-born citizen because the United States held sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone at the time of his birth, on Aug. 29, 1936; because he was born on a U.S. military base; and because his parents were U.S. citizens.

But Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the "natural born" issue in detail, said the question is "not so simple." While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.
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"The Constitution is ambiguous," Duggin said. "The McCain side has some really good arguments, but ultimately there has never been any real resolution of this issue. Congress cannot legislatively change the meaning of the Constitution."

Senators sympathetic to McCain's position, including Democrats Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), dropped an earlier attempt to quell the eligibility controversy with legislation. McCaskill acknowledged in an interview that there is "no way" to completely resolve the question short of a constitutional amendment, a cumbersome process which could not be concluded before November.

She described the nonbinding resolution, which she sponsored, as "the quickest, clearest and most efficient" way for the Senate to send a message to the courts that McCain has the right to be president.

One person who disagrees with that premise is New Hampshire resident Fred Hollander, who has filed a suit in U.S. District Court claiming that the Republican candidate is "not a natural born citizen." In an attempt to prove his argument, the 49-year-old computer programmer filed a subpoena last month seeking McCain's birth certificate.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees citizenship services, declined to hand over copies of the document, saying the subpoena was improperly served.

In his autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain writes that he was born "in the Canal Zone" at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Coco Solo, which was under the command of his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr....

Priorities in the Land of the Free

Apr 19, 2011
Priorities in the Land of the Free
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

Millions of Americans are without jobs and are having their homes foreclosed. The U.S. is currently fighting three out-in-the-open wars (or, if you prefer, one war, one occupation, and one kinetic humanitarian intervention) and several other covert ones. Financial and political elites are preparing to tell Americans (quite unpersuasively) that they have to sacrifice Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements because the U.S. debt is so large and unmanageable that it threatens to subvert America's superior creditworthiness. And we're constantly told that civil liberties erosions are necessary to combat the Great Menace of Domestic Terrorism. So what is our political class focused on, and to what are law enforcement resources being devoted? First, there's this, from a couple weeks ago:

Nearly half of the members of the U.S. Senate are urging Attorney General Eric Holder to step up federal prosecutions of adult pornography...

Penny wise and pound foolish? The cost of not helping the homeless

Click on the following link to see the original story, which is full of terrific links:

Morning Report: The Half-Million-Dollar Transients
April 21, 2011
by Randy Dotinga

Seven homeless people in the county annually cost taxpayers more than half a million dollars each. Another 16 transients cost $250,000 to $500,000 every year. Now, advocates are launching a program to help people like them find a place to live and stop requiring so much care.

"It's more expensive to ignore the problem than confront the problem," said the commissioner of the United Way's Plan to End Chronic Homelessness yesterday. The numbers are pretty amazing: Just seventeen of the transients "had an average of 16 ambulance rides, 17 emergency room visits and five inpatient medical stays a year," the NCT reports."The cost is estimated at $218,552."

So far, though, only a few homeless people have been helped. In part, that's because the transients in need aren't easy to find.

A 2006 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell tells a similar story of a homeless man who cost Nevada more than a million dollars. He spoke to NPR about it, too.

Let’s Not Be Civil

Let’s Not Be Civil
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
April 17, 2011

Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party’s values — in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.

That’s a bad idea. Equally important, it’s an undemocratic idea.

Let’s review the story so far.

Two weeks ago, House Republicans released their big budget proposal, selling it to credulous pundits as a statement of necessity, not ideology — a document telling America What Must Be Done.

But it was, in fact, a deeply partisan document, which you might have guessed from the opening sentence: “Where the president has failed, House Republicans will lead.” It hyped the danger of deficits, yet even on its own (not at all credible) accounting, spending cuts were used mainly to pay for tax cuts rather than deficit reduction. The transparent and obvious goal was to use deficit fears to impose a vision of small government and low taxes, especially on the wealthy.

So the House budget proposal revealed a yawning gap between the two parties’ priorities. And it revealed a deep difference in views about how the world works.

When the proposal was released, it was praised as a “wonk-approved” plan that had been run by the experts. But the “experts” in question, it turned out, were at the Heritage Foundation, and few people outside the hard right found their conclusions credible. In the words of the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers — which makes its living telling businesses what they need to know, not telling politicians what they want to hear — the Heritage analysis was “both flawed and contrived.” Basically, Heritage went all in on the much-refuted claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy produces miraculous economic results, including a surge in revenue that actually reduces the deficit.

By the way, Heritage is always like this. Whenever there’s something the G.O.P. doesn’t like — say, environmental protection — Heritage can be counted on to produce a report, based on no economic model anyone else recognizes, claiming that this policy would cause huge job losses. Correspondingly, whenever there’s something Republicans want, like tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations, Heritage can be counted on to claim that this policy would yield immense economic benefits.

The point is that the two parties don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans in particular having a stable of supposed experts who reliably endorse whatever they propose.

So when pundits call on the parties to sit down together and talk, the obvious question is, what are they supposed to talk about? Where’s the common ground?

Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy.

Now, Republicans claim that last year’s midterms gave them a mandate for the vision embodied in their budget. But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the “massive Medicare cuts” contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?

For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day.

The Ox-Files: 'Mass cow sacrifices by aliens' sent White House into panic, FBI records reveal

The Ox-Files: 'Mass cow sacrifices by aliens' sent White House into panic, FBI records reveal
By Richard Hartley-parkinson
Daily Mail
13th April 2011

Cows were sacrificed by aliens sending the White House into a panic declassified FBI files have revealed.

It is claimed that more than 8,000 cows were abducted by UFOs before they were mutilated and thrown back down to earth over the southern United States during the 1970s.

The memo is one of thousands of previously unreleased classified files that the bureau has made public in a new online resource called The Vault.
Close encounters of a herd kind: Farmers continue to believe their cattle are being targeted by extraterrestrial beings

Close encounters of a herd kind: Farmers continue to believe their cattle are being targeted by extraterrestrials

The files detail how the aliens took trophies from their victims in the form of body parts and in some cases they drained the animals entirely of their blood.
Cattle Star Galactica: Some of the cows were mutilated by aliens

Cattle Star Galactica: Some of the cows were mutilated by aliens

One investigator's theory was that 'these animals are picked up by aircraft, mutilated elsewhere and returned and dropped from aircraft.

'Identical mutilations have been taking place all over the south west. whoever is responsible is well organised with boundless technology, financing and secrecy.'

When news of the cow abductions reached the White House in 1979, there was fear.

'The materials sent to me indicate one of the strangest phenomenon in my memory,' said the then US Attorney General Griffin Bell in a letter to senator Harrison Schmitt, according to The Sun newspaper.

Mr Schmitt represented New Mexico, where countless incidents were reported at a ranch in Dulce, a small town in the north of the State.

In one case an 11-month old bull was dropped close to someone's house from an aircraft and its sex organs had been removed.

The police report about the incident said: 'The bull sustained visible bruises around the brisket seeming to indicate that a strap was used to life and lower the animal from the aircraft... flesh underneath the hide was pinkish in colour.

'A probably explanation for the pinkish blood is a control type of radiation used to kill the animal... both the liver and the heart were mushy. Both organs had the texture and consistency of peanut butter.'
ROSWELL MEMO
ROSWELL MEMO

Un-bull-eivable: The FBI has put hundreds of files online so that people can access them more easily

FBI agents were dispatched to farms across the country upon reports to probe the abductions.

A report from the farm in Dulce during 1976 said that a suspect aircraft had landed and left three pod marks in a triangular shape.


More...

* Could aliens be living on planets deep within black holes?
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A further report commissioned in 1979 added: 'The Department of Justice advised that their criminal division has been aware of the phenomenon of animals being mutilated in a manner that would indicate such acts were performed by persons as part of a ritual or ceremony.'

The FBI added that other possible theories for the mutilation of the animals was as a result of biological warfare or 'unidentified objects' were to blame.
Fact or fiction: A memo sent regarding the Roswell incident in 1947 said that three 'flying saucers' were found that contained the bodies of alien pilots

Fact or fiction: A memo sent regarding the Roswell incident in 1947 said that three 'flying saucers' were found that contained the bodies of alien pilots

The documents about the cows is just one among thousands of files released by the FBI.

Another secret document released as part of the projects detailed how police and army officers witnessed a UFO exploding over Utah in April 1949.

The top secret document reveals how an army guard, a policeman and a highway patrol, who were all miles apart, each saw a UFO, which they said exploded over mountains near Logan, north of Salt Lake City.
X-RAY SPECS FOR FBI AGENTS

The FBI investigated whether it could teach its agents to see through walls, one memo details.

In the document, written by agent WA Branigan in July 1957, it says that if extrasensory perception could be mastered then the 'possibilities are endless.'

It continues that the Bureau cannot afford to not investigate further, so later that month they held a secret meeting with William Foos.

Foos claimed he could make the blind see and did a stage show where his blindfolded daughter would read a book.

However an investigation revealed the blindfold contained tiny holes and the demonstrations were concluded as 'merely tricks.'

Another file released involves FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and details of the infamous Roswell incident in 1947.

The memo claims that the air force recovered three 'flying saucers' which contained the bodies of alien pilots.

The aliens were described as being 3ft tall with human like bodies, which were dressed in a fine metallic cloth.

The memos from Hoover are the only evidence that the Roswell incident did in fact take place - and the names of the FBI staff involved have been withheld...

For Super Rich, Taxes Keep Falling

For Super Rich, Taxes Keep Falling
April 17, 2011
ABC News' Kevin Dolak reports:

With just one day left for Americans to file their tax returns, the super wealthy can look forward to paying significantly less than they would have two decades ago: Since 1992, the average federal income tax actually paid by the wealthiest 400 households in the country has fallen from 26 percent to 17 percent.

But why, if the top income tax rate in the U.S. is 35 percent, are the very, very wealthy paying such a small percent of their income into taxes? Short answer: tax breaks. There are built-in tax breaks in every bracket that everyone can take advantage of, including breaks for having children, paying a mortgage and furthering education.

According to Washington, D.C.-based think tank Tax Policy Center, the number of tax breaks is so high that this year it is estimated that 45 percent of households will not pay any taxes whatsoever.

Roberton Williams explained to The Associated Press the conundrum that leads to these tax-free households.

"It's the fact that we are using the tax code both to collect revenue, which is its primary purpose, and to deliver these spending benefits that we run into the situation where so many people are paying no taxes," Williams said.

This has led to efforts to overhaul the tax laws on both sides of the political aisle, and today on “This Week with Christiane Amanpour,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner accepted that disagreements remain with Republicans on the scope of how to reform the tax.

"We have very big disagreements on what the right balance is," Geithner said. "The things we're going to disagree on for some time, we can take more time to resolve."

However, he said he does not believe fundamental deficit reduction can happen without ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which were extended in a temporary agreement last December, and remain in place in House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan passed Friday by the House.

Geithner said he thinks the deficit can be reduced without raising taxes on the middle class, by ending tax loopholes and deductions that primarily go to wealthier Americans who itemize their tax returns.

"Those benefits, even like the mortgage interest deduction that lets people have two homes, pretty expensive homes … if you target them on the most fortunate Americans, they can afford to take a little bit larger share of the burden," Geithner said. “They can afford to do that, and it's the responsible thing to do for the economy."

"Patriotic Millionaires": Raise our taxes, please!

Apr 13, 201
"Patriotic Millionaires": Raise our taxes, please!
Republicans insist that raising taxes on anyone would be catastrophic. But some of the most affluent disagree
By Justin Elliott
Salon.com

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a group of dozens of the wealthiest Americans that formed last year during the fight over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, is now jumping into the budget battle just as President Obama is expected to call for an end to the Bush cuts on the rich.

"For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000," the group writes in a new letter to Obama, Harry Reid, and John Boehner. "We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned incomes of $1,000,000 per year or more."

Last year, Obama signed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts after originally proposing that the two highest tax rates return to 36% and 39.6%, up from the Bush tax cut levels of 33% and 35%.

One of the signatories of the new letter, film and television producer Linda Gottlieb, explained her participation to me this morning: "For me to be sitting and hoarding my money is insane," said Gottlieb, whose producer credits include Dirty Dancing and who now teaches at NYU's Tisch school. "We all give to charity, but that's not the same as creating a more equitable society."

Gottlieb said she has been upset by the experience of her grandchildren, who attend a New York City public school where arts education has been cut and parents have had to organize an auction to try to fill the gaps. She added that raising taxes on the wealthiest people would be an important way of reducing the deficit.

"For rich people to moan and groan -- nobody likes to pay increased taxes -- but it's not going to change your life in any important way," she said. "What it can do is help your country."

The millionaires who comprise the group are in the process of reaching out to more of their wealthy peers and may take a trip to Washington at some point down the road, according to Erica Payne of the Agenda Project, the New York-based progressive group that is behind Patriotic Millionaires.

Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that any tax increases are a "nonstarter." So expect a big fight on this ahead.

Becoming human: watch the NOVA series from PBS

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Man Convicted in Racially Motivated Church Burning After Election

Man Convicted in Racially Motivated Church Burning After Election
April 14, 2011
Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- A 26-year-old white man was convicted Thursday in what prosecutors said was the racially motived burning of a predominantly black church in the hours after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

An all-white, 12-member jury found Michael Jacques guilty of all the charges he faced in the burning of Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield.

Prosecutors portrayed Jacques and two friends who pleaded guilty as racists who were upset at the election of the nation's first African-American president.

Jacques, his lawyer and family said he is not racist and only confessed during a police interrogation because he suffered withdrawal from painkillers.

Prosecutors had said during closing arguments that Jacques' racism reached the "boiling point" when Obama was elected. They said he often used racial epithets, expressed anger that minorities were "taking over" the country and once set a dog on a black person.

Jacques was convicted of conspiracy against civil rights, damage to religious property and use of fire to commit a felony.

"They got it all wrong," Jacques said outside court after the verdict was returned.

His attorney, Lori Levinson, said, "We are very disappointed. We will be appealing."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Smyth said he was pleased with the jury's verdict. Smyth said when the church was burning on Nov. 5, 2008, law enforcement officials hoped it was not arson. "In the few days that followed, our worst fears were confirmed," he said.

Smyth said the government was pleased that all three men had been convicted, two by pleading guilty. Benjamin Haskell was sentenced to nine years in prison in November. Thomas Gleason pleaded guilty last year and awaits sentencing after testifying in Jacques' trial for the prosecution. Both implicated Jacques in the arson.

Jacques could face 10 to 60 years in prison. Smyth said federal sentencing guidelines call for a prison term closer to 15 years, but he said it is too early to say what prosecutors will recommend.

Judge Michael Ponsor revoked Jacques' bail and ordered him to report Friday for detention until sentencing Sept. 15.