Tuesday Reads
Posted: September 17, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Aaron Alexis, Glenn Greenwald, Greenwald Derangement Syndrome, Keith Alexander, NSA leaks, Star Trek 27 Comments
Good Morning!!
We’ve had another mass-murder and I think I can safely predict it will have no effect on America’s gun culture. Now we’ll have the aftermath: the list of the dead and wounded; the background on the “ticking human time bomb” who “went off” after years of psychological problems and run-ins with law enforcement; the fruitless talk of change that won’t happen because of the right wing nut jobs who apparently run the country despite the Democrat in the White House.
Navy Yard Murders
So far. seven of the people Aaron Alexis killed at the Navy Yard have been named:
— 59-year-old Michael Arnold
— 53-year-old Sylvia Frasier
— 62-year-old Kathy Gaarde
— 73-year-old John Roger Johnson
— 50-year-old Frank Kohler
— 46-year-old Kenneth Bernard Proctor
— 61-year-old Vishnu Pandit
From The Boston Globe: Navy Yard shooting victims had long careers there. You can read some background on each of these shooting victims at the link.
In other news of the massacre, police have now established that Alexis was the only gunman.
Fifth Anniversary of the 2008 Crash
I didn’t see much mention of it, but yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Lehmann Brothers bankruptcy that precipitated the 2008 financial collapse. The White House released a report on the progress made since then, and President Obama warned Republicans that if the nutjobs in the House continue their efforts to shut down the government, they could easily reverse that progress. From The New York Times:
President Obama on Monday seized on the fifth anniversary of the 2008 financial collapse to warn that House Republicans would reverse the gains made and willfully cause “economic chaos” with the uncompromising stands they have staked out on looming budget deadlines.
“Budget battles and debates, those are as old as the republic,” Mr. Obama said before a friendly audience assembled in a White House annex. But, he added, “I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can’t get 100 percent of what it wants.”
A bloc of conservative House Republicans have said that unless Mr. Obama’s signature health insurance law is delayed or repealed, they will not support financing for government operations in the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1 or an essential increase in the nation’s borrowing limit in mid-October.
Failure to act on federal funding would provoke a government shutdown; even worse, failing to increase the debt limit would leave the government unable to pay bills and creditors and ultimately threaten the nation’s default.
“The last time the same crew threatened this course of action back in 2011, even the mere suggestion of default slowed our economic growth,” Mr. Obama said, recalling that summer’s market-rattling showdown.
No doubt the warning fell on deaf ears…
Fifth Anniversary of the 2008 Crash
I didn’t see much mention of it, but yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Lehmann Brothers bankruptcy that precipitated the 2008 financial collapse. The White House released a report on the progress made since then, and President Obama warned Republicans that if the nutjobs in the House continue their efforts to shut down the government, they could easily reverse that progress. From The New York Times:
President Obama on Monday seized on the fifth anniversary of the 2008 financial collapse to warn that House Republicans would reverse the gains made and willfully cause “economic chaos” with the uncompromising stands they have staked out on looming budget deadlines.
“Budget battles and debates, those are as old as the republic,” Mr. Obama said before a friendly audience assembled in a White House annex. But, he added, “I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can’t get 100 percent of what it wants.”
A bloc of conservative House Republicans have said that unless Mr. Obama’s signature health insurance law is delayed or repealed, they will not support financing for government operations in the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1 or an essential increase in the nation’s borrowing limit in mid-October.
Failure to act on federal funding would provoke a government shutdown; even worse, failing to increase the debt limit would leave the government unable to pay bills and creditors and ultimately threaten the nation’s default.
“The last time the same crew threatened this course of action back in 2011, even the mere suggestion of default slowed our economic growth,” Mr. Obama said, recalling that summer’s market-rattling showdown.
No doubt the warning fell on deaf ears…
UN Report on Chemical Weapons in Syria
Yesterday the UN released a report on its investigation of the chemical weapons attack in Syria. From the LA Times: U.N. report cites ‘clear’ use of chemical weapons in Syria.
A United Nations report finding “clear and convincing evidence” of a deadly chemical attack built new momentum Monday for demands by the United States and allies to impose tough penalties on Syria if it fails to honor promises to surrender its arsenal.
Although the 38-page report from a U.N. scientific team does not assign blame, Western diplomats and independent experts said it offers undeniable evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad‘s forces fired sarin-filled rockets with Russian markings into Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The United States says more than 1,400 people were killed.
Western diplomats said the weapons and sarin described by U.N. experts displayed sophisticated manufacturing techniques beyond the capabilities of rebel forces, and that U.N. data about the trajectory of the rockets indicated that they were fired from government-held territory.
“The technical details of the U.N. report make clear that only the regime could have carried out this large-scale chemical weapons attack,” said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “It defies logic to think that the opposition would have infiltrated the regime-controlled area to fire on opposition-controlled areas.”
A little more from The New York Times:
The weapons inspectors, who visited Ghouta and left the country with large amounts of evidence on Aug. 31, said, “In particular, the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were used.”
But the report’s annexes, detailing what the authors found, were what caught the attention of nonproliferation experts.
In two chilling pieces of information, the inspectors said that the remnants of a warhead they had found showed its capacity of sarin to be about 56 liters — far higher than initially thought. They also said that falling temperatures at the time of the attack ensured that the poison gas, heavier than air, would hug the ground, penetrating lower levels of buildings “where many people were seeking shelter.”
The investigators were unable to examine all of the munitions used, but they were able to find and measure several rockets or their components. Using standard field techniques for ordnance identification and crater analysis, they established that at least two types of rockets had been used, including an M14 artillery rocket bearing Cyrillic markings and a 330-millimeter rocket of unidentified provenance.
These findings, though not presented as evidence of responsibility, were likely to strengthen the argument of those who claim that the Syrian government bears the blame, because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency.
“Greenwald Derangement Sydrome”
After months of wading through Glenn Greenwald’s turgid, error-filled Guardian articles on his NSA “bombshells” and his defenses of his ticket to the bigtime Edward Snowden, and reading his self righteous and self-promoting tweets detailing praise for his “scoops” and his irrational hatred of President Obama and Democrats in general, I’ve reached the point where my dislike of this man is so intense that I can’t stand to look at his smarmy, smirking visage or listen ot his grating, whiny voice. My GDS is so strong that I feel instant empathy for anyone he attacks–even if it’s the Devil incarnate. This brings me to one of the silliest pieces Greenwald has written yet: Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander. See Alexander had the temerity to have his NSA office designed too look like the deck of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. Greenwald intones:
The article describes how even his NSA peers see him as a “cowboy” willing to play fast and loose with legal limits in order to construct a system of ubiquitous surveillance. But the personality driving all of this – not just Alexander’s but much of Washington’s – is perhaps best captured by this one passage, highlighted by PBS’ News Hour in a post entitled: “NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek’s Enterprise”. The room was christened as part of the “Information Dominance Center”:
“When he was running the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a ‘whoosh’ sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather ‘captain’s chair’ in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.
“‘Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,’ says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.”
Next, the obligatory attack on Obama:
Numerous commentators remarked yesterday on the meaning of all that (note, too, how “Total Information Awareness” was a major scandal in the Bush years, but “Information Dominance Center” – along with things like “Boundless Informant” – are treated as benign or even noble programs in the age of Obama).
Which “numerous commentators?” Greenwald doesn’t name them, because they probably consist of Greenwald, his boyfriend who is young enough to be his son, and a couple of other Guardian writers.
Okay, Alexander’s office is kind of dumb, but is it really symbolic of some deep evil intent? The interesting thing about Greenwald’s recent Guardian articles is that he is no long writing “substantive” pieces on the NSA leaks. Those have been turned over to writers at the Washington Post, The New York Times, and other media outlets. Perhaps the Guardian got tired of defending Greenwald’s lies and exaggerations.
Along similar lines, I want to call attention to this article at ZD Net that Ralph posted last night. NSA cryptanalyst: We, too, are Americans. It’s an important reminder that not all government employees are evil, despite the claims of Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and their gang of resentful libertarian white men. Please read it if you haven’t already.
Homeless Man Honored by Boston Police Department
I’ll end with a feel-good story about a Boston man named Glen James who found a backpack containing “$2,400 in cash, $39,500 in traveler’s checks, passports, and various personal papers.” The Boston Globe reports:
A humble homeless man who returned a backpack full of cash and traveler’s checks to police said he felt “very, very good” to do it and used a ceremony honoring him at police headquarters to thank all the people who have ever given him money on the street.
Glen James said, “I don’t talk too much because I stutter.” But he handed out a handwritten statement in which he said, “Even if I were desperate for money, I would not have kept even a … penny of the money I found. I am extremely religious — God has always very well looked after me.”
The statement also said, “I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank everyone — every pedestrian stranger — who has given me spare change. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said that James’s actions were “really a remarkable tribute to him and his honesty.”
“He’s an honest guy and realized the property belonged to someone else,” Davis said.
The middle-aged man, balding, bespectacled, and thin, appeared friendly but shy and slightly overwhelmed by the attention from the media drawn to a feel-good story.
On his way out of the building after the news conference, the police department clerks gave him an ovation.
Now someone please find this man a job and a place to live and maybe send him for FUE hair transplant in Sydney if you are a rich philanthropist.
So….what’s on your reading menu today? Please post your links in the comment thread and have a terrific Tuesday!
what’s on your reading menu today? Please post your links in the comment thread and have a terrific Tuesday!
Monday Evening News Update
Posted: September 16, 2013 Filed under: Crime, SDB Evening News Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Aaron Alexis, gun violence, mass murder, Workplace shootings 20 Comments
Good Evening!!
It’s been an eventful day in Washington DC, so I thought I’d post a brief update tonight.
I know JJ is busy dealing with her daughter’s upcoming surgery, and I haven’t been around for the past few days because I was doing some marathon kid-sitting. I’m still a little tired after spending most of the day last Wed. and Fri. and Sat. nights with my 8 and 10-year-old nephews. I love them more than anything and love spending time with them, but their energy does wear me out after a while.
Anyway–the news. The top story is of course the latest mass shooter, Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people and injured at least 14 others at the Washington Navy Yard this morning. Alexis is also dead. From CNN:
The picture emerging of a dead gunman in Monday’s rampage at the Washington Navy Yard is a study in contrasts, one of a man who practiced languages and meditated and another of a cold-blooded killer.
Authorities have not released a possible motive in the shooting at the headquarters for Naval Sea Systems Command that witnesses described as terrifying and chaotic.
The gunman was identified as 34-year-old Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist and a current military contractor, the Washington FBI Field Office told CNN. His identity was confirmed by fingerprints and a picture ID card, the FBI said.
Police are still looking for a possible second shooter, but that wouldn’t fit the pattern of these workplace-type shooters. But we’ll have to wait and see.
Alexis, who was from New York City, served as a full-time Navy reservist between 2007 and 2011, according to military records.
In the Navy, Alexis achieved the rank of aviation electrician’s mate 3rd class, working on aircraft electrical systems, the records show.
Alexis was discharged after a “pattern of misconduct,” a U.S. defense official, with knowledge of the investigation, told CNN on condition of anonymity. The official did not detail the misconduct.
Most recently, Alexis worked as an information technology contractor with the Navy…. His last known address was outside of Fort Worth, Texas…
This CNN story has more details on the shooting itself.
Alexis has a history of violent behavior. In 2010, he was arrested for firing a gun through the ceiling of his Fort Worth apartment, according to USA Today. No charges were filed.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office issued a statement Monday saying that no charges were pursued against Alexis. “It was determined that Alexis was cleaning a gun in his apartment when it accidentally went off,” Tarrant County District Attorney Joe Shannon Jr., said. “No one was injured.”
Aaron Alexis’ mugshot from 2010 arrest
The Smoking Gun has more detail on the incident as well as two earlier ones in 2004 and 2008. The neighbor into whose apartment Alexis fired a bullet (here’s the police report)
said that she was “terrified” of Alexis, who had previously confronted her about making too much noise. The woman, who was “visibly shaken up” when questioned by police, said that she believed the shooting was “intentional.”
When police confronted Alexis, who is seen in the adjacent mug shot, he claimed that he was cleaning the weapon when it discharged. Alexis told cops that he was cooking at the time and his hands were slippery as he “began to take the gun apart when his hands slipped and pulled the trigger discharging a round into the ceiling.”
Asked why he did not notify police or check on the welfare of his upstairs neighbor, Alexis said that he “didn’t think it went all the way through since he couldn’t see any light through the hole.” Additionally, “In regards to the noise he said he thought that people would just think it was a firecracker.”
Um…that really sounds like a red flag to me. Maybe guns going off randomly in apartments isn’t such a big deal in Fort Worth?
In 2004, Alexis was arrested in Seattle for
shooting out the tires of a car owned by a construction worker who purportedly “mocked him.” Alexis told cops that an anger-fueled “black out” promted the shooting. Alexis’s father told investigators that his son suffered from “anger management problems” that were related to post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps connected to his involvement in rescue work following the September 11 terror attacks.
Here’s more detail on the Seattle incident from the Seattle PD:
At about 8 am that morning, two construction workers had parked their 1986 Honda Accord in the driveway of their worksite, next to a home where Alexis was staying in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.
The victims reported seeing a man, later identified by police as Alexis, walk out of the home next to their worksite, pull a gun from his waistband and fire three shots into the two rear tires of their Honda before he walked slowly back to his home north of the construction site….
Following his arrest, Alexis told detectives he perceived he had been “mocked” by construction workers the morning of the incident and said they had “disrespected him.” Alexis also claimed he had an anger-fueled “blackout,” and could not remember firing his gun at the victims’ vehicle until an hour after the incident.
Alexis’ father told Seattle police that his son had PTSD.
Finally, according to The Smoking Gun, in 2008, he was arrested for disorderly conduct in DeKalb County, Georgia. The guy really got around. I guess we’ll be learning a lot more about him over the next few days.
A man is taken into custody by uniformed Secret Service Police on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House on Monday,
The shooting spree at the Navy Yard wasn’t the only out-of-the ordinary incident in Washington DC today. A short time ago, a man was arrested by the Secret Service outside the White House after he tossed some firecrackers over the fence. USA Today:
Officials identified the man only as Alexander Sahagian; he is believed to age 52.
The firecrackers, which to some sounded like gunshots, triggered a lockdown of the White House complex.
Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie said the suspect was transported to a nearby police station and will likely be charged with illegally throwing a projectile.
If I get more detail on these incidents, I’ll post links in the comment thread. So…what are you hearing? Any big news in your neck of the woods?
Friday Morning Reads
Posted: September 13, 2013 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bobby Jindal, David Vitter, drug testing pregnant women, Eric Cantor, food stamps, Greg Zoeller, Hawaii, Indiana, molasses spill, sequester, SNAP 41 Comments
Good Morning!
Syria is again dominating the headlines. Here’s a few things that might be slipping under the rug.
If Congressional Republicans have their way, SNAP recipients will only get $3.37 a day for meals.
In July, House Republicans decoupled SNAP from the rest of the farm bill. Now, led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, they are working on a food-stamp provision that could cut as much as $40 billion over 10 years, according to reports. Legislative language for the Cantor proposal is not yet available.
The conservative case goes like this: The food-stamp program is abused by recipients who are not meeting eligibility requirements. In particular, conservatives want to tighten loopholes that they contend allow able-bodied adults without dependents to receive assistance; they want to limit coverage for the able-bodied adults to three months within a 36-month period.
“Currently, working middle-class families struggling to make ends meet themselves are footing a bill for a program that has gone well beyond the safety net for children, seniors, the disabled, and families who desperately need the assistance,” said Cantor spokesman Rory Cooper.
Antihunger advocates say House Republicans’ proposed cuts would hit some of the neediest Americans hard, and they argue that the law already contains adequate restrictions against abuse.
At the Capital Area Food Bank, a 100,000-square-foot warehouse facility — a kind of Sam’s Club for food pantries in the metro Washington area — officials say food-stamp funds typically last recipients two and a half weeks. After the benefits run out, many go to food pantries to help make ends meet, according to the Food Bank’s Brian Banks.
Conservatives, meanwhile, argue that food-stamp funding has been rising too quickly. The program cost about $78.4 billion to help feed roughly 47 million participants in 2012, according to the Agriculture Department. That’s up from about $17 billion from 2000, when 17 million Americans participated.
“The national debt has now topped $16 trillion and will continue to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future. To preserve the economy, government spending, including welfare spending, must be put on a more prudent course,” wrote the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Katherine Bradley in a white paper.
Anti-hunger advocates, though, point to a spike in the number of Americans who are “food insecure,” a term used by the government, that correlates to the recession. According to USDA, the number has recently stayed at roughly 15 percent, with 17.6 million households classified as such in 2012, according to a newly released report. With 59 percent of food-insecure households using food stamps, advocates argue that it’s important not to slash SNAP.
Now that Congress has returned, the farm bill and the food-stamp program will compete for scarce legislative time with the situation in Syria, appropriations bills, and a debate over the debt-ceiling limit, which the government is expected to reach sometime this fall. Among antihunger
organizations, optimism is in short supply.
Indiania seems to hate its pregnant women. They’re at it again. This time they want to drug test all pregnant women even if there is no probable cause to believe they might be ingesting something harmful.
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller is calling on the legislature to help reduce the number of babies being exposed to narcotics while still in the womb.
It is called Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS, newborns exposed to addictive illegal or prescription drugs before they are born.
Attorney General Greg Zoeller says treating NAS at Indiana hospitals cost an estimated $30 million in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, and he says that’s with limited tracking because hospitals are not required to report the condition.
Zoeller says one solution is requiring pregnant women take drug tests to identify the problem and start treatment before birth.
“You can reduce the length of stay for the newly born baby from six weeks to two weeks, the better health of the baby as well as the costs,” he say.s
State Senator Pat Miller, R-Indianapolis, says the legislature is exploring different options because of concerns about mandatory drug tests.
“Verbal screening as opposed to the kind of blood or urine analysis that might drive women away from getting prenatal care,” she says, adding that a definitive answer has not been reached and a legislative panel will continue to investigate the issue leading up to next session.
Republicans are gearing up for the fight over the sequester in October.
On Tuesday, House Republicans unveiled their proposal to keep the government running past September 30, when the law that currently funds federal operations expires. It would last through December, at which point the parties would have to come up with yet another extension. As expected, the proposal more or less “locks in” funding levels from budget sequestration—in effect, it keeps the cuts that have been reducing Head Start slots, weakening the economy recovery, and generally wreaking havoc. As you may recall, sequestration cuts were never supposed to happen: They were supposed to be so crude and unpleasant, to conservatives and liberals alike, that the two parties would agree on an alternative way of reducing the deficit. But that hasn’t happened, so the cuts have taken effect this year. And if this new House Republican proposal passes, they will stay in place for at least a little while longer.
The House proposal also includes a provision to withhold funds for implementing Obamacare. Again, this is not a surprise. And, like some previous efforts, this one is mostly an effort of political theater. By design, the Senate could strip out the Obamacare defunding and approve everything else in the House leadership proposal. That would leave a “clean” government-funding bill, as House Republican leaders call it, for President Obama to sign. But House Republican leaders have assured anxious conservatives that a real effort to undermine Obamacare will come soon—proabably sometime in early October, when the federal treasury nears its official borrowing limit. At that point, the leaders say, they will refuse to authorize more borrowing unless Obama and the Democrats agree to certain concessions. The demands will include some kind of effort at defunding or delaying Obamacare—quite possibly, by insisting that the Obama administration postpones the individual mandate (the requirement that everybody get health insurance) by one year.
Senate Democrats have had all they can take from David Vitter and his fixation on Obamacare — and they’re dredging up his past prostitution scandal to hit back.
Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has infuriated Democrats this week by commandeering the Senate floor, demanding a vote on his amendment repealing federal contributions to help pay for lawmakers’ health care coverage.
But Democratic senators are preparing a legislative response targeting a sordid Vitter episode. If Vitter continues to insist on a vote on his proposal, Democrats could counter with one of their own: Lawmakers will be denied those government contributions if there is “probable cause” they solicited prostitutes.
According to draft legislation obtained by POLITICO, Democrats are weighing whether to force a Senate vote on a plan that would effectively resurrect Vitter’s past if the conservative Republican continues to press forward with his Obamacare-bashing proposal.
It is now much easier to make the case that Gov. Bobby Jindal knows his chances of winning the presidency in the 2016 election are securely in his past. In fact, given the record he is now so feverishly and self-destructively building, it is difficult imagining the governor winning another — any — statewide election in Louisiana. In making that case, Exhibits No. 1 through No. 50, at least, are on display in Jindal’s bafflingly deliberate and long-running defiance of orders issued by Baton Rouge state district court Judge Janice Clark in a key public records case.
Over five months ago, on April 25, Judge Clark emphatically ruled in favor of plaintiff newspapers, the Advocate and NOLA.com | Times-Picayune, and ordered the LSU Board of Supervisors to “immediately produce” the documents identifying all those who sought the combined job of LSU president and chancellor. F. King Alexander was selected for the job, and Jindal does not want citizens to know who the other candidates were. Thus he directed his go-to lawyer, Jimmy Faircloth, to burn a trainload of taxpayer money by stiffing the citizenry and the judge … repeatedly … and proudly.
The rarity of observing such a months-long political train wreck was underscored by Lori Mince, the attorney representing the two Louisiana newspapers, in a Sept. 10article by Mike Hasten of Gannett News. Ms. Mince noted, “This is the first public records case I’ve had when the public body refused to comply.” No one else with whom I have spoken or emailed can remember another such instance, either. Such makes sense because once a public records case goes all the way to court, and a judge orders the documents produced, public officials have every reason and need to, well, produce the documents. That is precisely what happened when a group of us in Shreveport sued the highway department for documents, went up against Jindal / Faircloth’s initial opposition, and headed to Clark’s court. When our hearing came up, the requested documents appeared as Faircloth did the opposite.
To grasp how bizarrely foolish the Jindal / Faircloth / Board of Supervisors argument is, it began with Faircloth arguing that the only word in the related law which mattered was “applicant,” and that there was only one of those — the winner, F. King Alexander. Note that Faircloth made this argument to Clark even though Blake Chatelain, the LSU board member who led the search committee, said in his subject court deposition that he and his committee began their work with about 100 prospects, cut that to 35 keepers, then down to “six or seven,” before picking Alexander. All of this was managed via a web portal belonging to a Dallas consultant hired for such purpose, a reported key in the Jindal plan to maintain secrecy throughout the process. (Thanks to Gordon Russell, then writing for the NOLA.com | Times-Picayune, for his April report.)
It is anyone’s guess as to what Jindal is hiding: Was/is Alexander qualified? Was he the best candidate? Who did Jindal really want, and why didn’t that person get the job? Those of us who have been down this road with the man and his team, especially Faircloth, know that the explanation may be much simpler: Jindal has never believed the rules and law and constitution apply to him.
It seems a molasses spill in Hawaii is killing fish.
Officials responding to a spill of 1,400 tons of molasses in Hawaii waters plan to let nature clean things up, with boat crews collecting thousands of dead fish to determine the extent of environmental damage.
The crews already have collected about 2,000 dead fish from waters near Honolulu Harbor, and they expect to see more in the coming days and possibly weeks, said Gary Gill, deputy director of the Hawaii Department of Health.
“Our best advice as of this morning is to let nature take its course,” Gill told reporters at a news conference at the harbor, where commercial ships passed through discolored, empty-looking waters.
So, that’s a little this and that! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: 9/11 Memories, Adoption Horror Stories, and Other News
Posted: September 12, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, child sexual abuse, children, Crime, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, physical abuse, Russia, Syria, U.S. Politics | Tags: 9/11, Boston, Carri Williams, child pornography, Edward Snowden, foreign adoptions, Glenn Greenwald, Glenna Mueller, Hanna Williams, Larry Williams, Nicole Eason, Oath-Keepers, Pedophilia, Pentagon, Quita Puchella, Randy Winslow, re-homing, Robert Menendez, Vladimir Putin, World Trade Center 22 Comments
Good Morning!!
It’s been cool here in the Boston area for the past few weeks, and then suddenly yesterday on the anniversary of 9/11/2001, the temperature shot up to 97 degrees.Today it’s only supposed to get up to the high 80s. And then we’re back to fall over the weekend. Very strange. You just never know what to expect from the weather these days.
On that day 12 years ago, my parents had rented a house on the beach in Rhode Island for a week. We had been obsessed with ExploreSUP reviews of paddle boards and were trying them out in the water. My sister from Indiana and my brother and sister-in-law from Cambridge were there too. This was before my two nephews were born. It was a beautiful New England day, and I recall it was pretty warm–but not hot.
I was out sight-seeing with my parents and sister when we got the first hints that something was terribly wrong. My sister heard someone say that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. We rushed back to the beach house to horrible scenes of carnage on TV. We spent the rest of our vacation reading newspapers and watching TV for updates. A couple of days later, I had to drive back to Boston where school was starting and I had to teach at Boston University.
Driving up I-95 alone, I felt irrationally frightened, and I kept looking up in the sky for planes, even though I knew all air traffic had been grounded (except for the bin Laden relatives whom the Bush administration allowed to fly out of Boston–creepy!). The fact that the planes that hit the twin towers had flown out of Boston felt like a terrible violation. So even though nothing had happened to me and I was safe, I still had some post-traumatic stress. I guess we all did. For the first time, Americans learned what it feels like to be attacked in our own country. It was a loss of innocence.
Anyway, that’s my 9/11 memory–not very dramatic, but impossible to forget.
President Obama chose to mark the anniversary with a moment of silence on the White House lawn. From The New York Daily News:
Under a perfect blue sky, President Obama stood stock still on the neatly-manicured White House South Lawn and said not a thing.
In a capital where words are weapons, the silence was disarming.
The President, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden and Jill Biden had quietly walked out of the glistening white residence to observe a moment of silence on Wednesday, the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
They were flanked by a military honor guard and White House staff. If you looked toward the South Portico of the nation’s most famous home, a flag was at half-staff.
The two couples held hands as a bell tolled at 8:46 a.m., exactly the moment when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. The poignant simplicity was inescapable.
Afterwards, Obama attended a memorial service in front of the Pentagon, at the site where one of the planes had been flown into the building that symbolized America’s military might.
In the news…
I hope you’ll find time to read this important investigative article by Reuters reporter Megan Twohey about Americans who adopt children from foreign countries, then have regrets, and then give their children away to total strangers they meet on the internet. Many of these children end up being abused emotionally, physically and/or sexually. It’s one of the most shocking stories I’ve ever read. Here’s Part One and Part Two. I really can’t do this story justice with excerpts, but here’s the introduction:
KIEL, Wisconsin – Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they’d adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days – by posting an ad on the Internet.
Nicole and Calvin Eason, an Illinois couple in their 30s, saw the ad and a picture of the smiling 16-year-old. They were eager to take Quita, even though the ad warned that she had been diagnosed with severe health and behavioral problems. In emails, Nicole Eason assured Melissa Puchalla that she could handle the girl….
A few weeks later, on Oct. 4, 2008, the Puchallas drove six hours from their Wisconsin home to Westville, Illinois. The handoff took place at the Country Aire Mobile Home Park, where the Easons lived in a trailer.
No attorneys or child welfare officials came with them. The Puchallas simply signed a notarized statement declaring these virtual strangers to be Quita’s guardians. The visit lasted just a few hours. It was the first and the last time the couples would meet.
I can’t believe such a thing is possible in the U.S., but it turns out most states don’t really regulate what adoptive parents do with their children. Within a few weeks, Melissa Puchalla learned that Quita and her new parents were missing and that Nicole Eason had a troubling history as a mother:
• Child welfare authorities had taken away both of Nicole Eason’s biological children years earlier. After a sheriff’s deputy helped remove the Easons’ second child, a newborn baby boy, the deputy wrote in his report that the “parents have severe psychiatric problems as well with violent tendencies.”
• The Easons each had been accused by children they were babysitting of sexual abuse, police reports show. They say they did nothing wrong, and neither was charged.
• The only official document attesting to their parenting skills – one purportedly drafted by a social worker who had inspected the Easons’ home – was fake, created by the Easons themselves.
On Quita’s first night with the Easons, her new guardians told her to join them in their bed, Quita says today. Nicole slept naked, she says.
In Part Two of the report, Twohey writes about another man whom Melissa Eason partnered with to get access to unwanted adoptive children.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Left-Wing” Pundits Root for Putin to Humiliate Obama
Posted: September 10, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, Russia, Syria, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bob Cesca, chemical weapons, Cuban Missile Crisis, diplomacy, John F. Kennedy, John Kerry, Laura Rozen, Nikita Kruschev, Robert Dreyfuss, Robert Scheer, The Nation, Truthdig, Vladimir Putin 19 Comments
President Obama through Emoprog eyes
Obama hatred has really reached a crescendo today, and I’m not talking about hatred spewed by the Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, or Rush Limbaugh. I’m talking about people who identify themselves as “progressives.” Twitter is mobbed emoprogs making a concerted effort to ensure that if there is a deal with Russia and Syria to prevent military action over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, President Obama will get zero credit for it.
Meanwhile supposedly “left-wing” pundits Robert Dreyfuss and Robert Scheer are praising Russia’s anti-gay, ex-KGB agent President Vladimir Putin for leading the way to peace.
Check this out from Dreyfuss at The Nation:
It’s tempting to enjoy the moment, that is, the humiliation of President Obama and the short-circuiting of his war push by a brilliant coup conducted by Vladimir Putin, that sly old dog and ju-jitsu expert, along with Russia’s ally, Syria. President Obama might as well not bother giving his Oval Office speech tonight, because the chances that Congress will approve Obama’s Authorization to Use Military Force are zero, and the possibility that the United States will go to war against Syria without congressional support are now less than zero.
You know, I really don’t take pleasure in seeing the President of my country humiliated; and I have to wonder about the judgement of a “journalist” who does–especially a journalist who probably doesn’t want to see a President Ted Cruz elected in 2016.
Dreyfuss can’t imagine a scenario in which Obama doesn’t particularly want to bomb Syria but threatens to do so in order to pressure Russia to respond with a diplomatic alternative. However he can picture Putin doing something clever and sneaky. Dreyfuss even quotes Tucker Carlson and Fox News–of all people!–in support of his belief that Obama is utterly incompetent and incapable of guile.
Ask yourself–if instead of threatening military strikes, Obama had simply asked Assad in a nice way to give up his chemical weapons, what would have happened?
Robert Scheer also wrote a snide piece at Truthdig that isn’t quite as in-your-face nasty as Dreyfuss’s but it’s pretty bad, and Scheer also quotes a right-wing pudit–Peggy Noonan! Scheer writes:
…there was a moment Monday when the odds for sanity seemed to finally stand a chance of prevailing. It came when President Obama acknowledged the Russian proposal for Syria to avert war by agreeing to destroy its chemical weapons stock as “a potentially positive development.” It was quintessentially an un-Bush moment when suddenly this presidential “decider” seemed possessed of a brain capable of reversing his disastrous course.
Because Obama has, until now, been completely intractable and inflexible, with a Bush-like brain?
The bipartisan rejection of the inevitability of a military response has been stunning in its geographical reach, and as Peggy Noonan, a leading Republican intellectual as well as a former top speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, observed in her Wall Street Journal column Saturday: “The American people do not support military action… . Widespread public opposition is in itself reason not to go forward.” Although underscoring the need to “rebuke those who used the weapons, condemn their use, and shun the users … a military strike is not the way, and not the way for America,” she wrote.
She is right. The use of chemical weapons cannot be ignored, even though the U.S. did just that decades ago when then-Mideast special envoy Donald Rumsfeld embraced Saddam Hussein after he deployed those heinous weapons on his own people and in his war with Iran. A strong response to the use of those weapons is in order, but instead of more violence that would inevitably kill innocent people, why not give peace a chance? At the very least, even if the Syrian government continues to deny responsibility for the chemical attacks, it must abandon its arsenal of these weapons that are inherently inhuman.
So what would that response be? Scheer credits Russian foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov with a sudden brainstorm in response to a supposedly off-handed remark from John Kerry.
Lavrov seized upon Secretary of State John Kerry’s purely rhetorical point that Syria could abandon its chemical weapons supply and asked, why not? It was a serious plan, given that it had been previewed in a phone conversation between Lavrov and Kerry and that Syria’s foreign minister, who was in Moscow at the time, welcomed the sentiment.
Except if Kerry and Lavrov had discussed the idea previously, then Kerry’s remark wasn’t an off-handed gaffe that destroyed Obama’s dream of war, was it? Scheer truly wants to describe events in such a way that Obama comes out looking like a stupid, incompetent war monger.
Since Dreyfuss’ and Scheer’s diatribes were posted, we’ve learned that Obama and Putin have been discussing diplomatic solutions to deal with Syria’s chemical weapons for months. Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy writes at The Back Channel:
U.S. and Russian officials confirmed Tuesday that they have had discussions about removing Syria’s chemical arms going back months before the August 21st alleged chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, and that the idea was not born out of a stray comment made by US Secretary of State John Kerry at a London press conference Monday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that he and President Obama had “indeed discussed” the idea during a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia last week.
He and Obama agreed “to instruct Secretary of State [John Kerry] and Foreign Minister [Sergey Lavrov] to get in touch” and “try to move this idea forward,” Putin told Russia Today in an interview Tuesday.
According to Rozen, Obama and Putin discussed the issue a year ago when the two met at the G-20 summit in Mexico and John Kerry talked about it further with Putin when he was in Moscow in April of this year. I guess in the time of Wikileaks, Snowden, and Greenwald, it’s now assumed that government are permitted no secrets and diplomacy must be carried out in the glare of TV cameras. Well, folks, that really isn’t how it works.
And now, as Sam Stein noted on Twitter, emoprogs are “this close” to hoping for a failure of the diplomatic solution so that Obama can be further mocked and humiliated.
I’m not sure where all the Obama hatred is coming from, but it’s really ugly; and the more I see of it, the more I want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. I really like Bob Cesca’s take on this: A Deal to Prevent an Attack on Syria Reveals Obama as JFK, Not GWB.
Is anyone else here old enough to recall the Cuban missile crisis? Kennedy had learned that Russia had installed missiles in Cuba. His advisers urged him to attack Cuba and take out the missiles, but that would have forced the Russians to retaliate and likely led to World War III. Instead Kennedy set up a blockade around Cuba, and gave both sides some breathing room. From Wikipedia:
in secret back-channel communications the President and Premier initiated a proposal to resolve the crisis. While this was taking place, several Soviet ships attempted to run the blockade, increasing tensions to the point that orders were sent out to US Navy ships to fire warning shots and then open fire. On October 27, a U-2 plane was shot down by a Soviet missile crew, an action that could have resulted in immediate retaliation from the Kennedy crisis cabinet, according to Secretary of Defense McNamara’s later testimony. Kennedy stayed his hand and the negotiations continued.
The confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when Kennedy and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached an agreement with Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba. Secretly, the US also agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Jupiter IRBMs, armed with nuclear warheads, which were deployed in Turkey and Italy against the Soviet Union.
Now that we know that the US and Russia have been engaging in “back-channel” negotiations over Syria, isn’t that a better comparison to the current situation than Bush and Cheney lying us into Iraq?
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