Tuesday Reads: Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela; Robot Police; Republican Stupidity; Harold Ramis; and Women of “True Detective”
Posted: February 25, 2014 Filed under: abortion rights, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, misogyny, morning reads, NSA, National Security Agency, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, Syria, U.S. Politics, Ukraine, Venezuela, War on Women | Tags: Bobby Jindal, crime fighting robot, Dan Malloy, Harold Ramis, Knightscope, Mark Ames, State Sen. Steve Martin (R-VA), Syria's children, True Detective 42 Comments
Good Morning!!
There is so much foreign news these days, and I have to admit ignorance when it comes to discussing the situations in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Syria. I don’t even know where to begin to understand the issues, and to be honest I just don’t have the time to try to do it. But here are some articles from sources I trust that struck me as important.
I’ll begin with something I can easily understand and care about: the fate of children in these conflicts. From The Independent, ‘No one cares’: The tragic truth of Syria’s 500,000 refugee children. The article is about British photojournalist Ed Thompson and an art student from Lebanon, Sammy Hamze, who went to Lebanon to put a spotlight on what is happening to Syrian refugee families.
We have heard the stories. Children at risk of dying from the cold in refugee camps; vulnerable to trafficking; begging on the side of the road; left orphaned and out of school; girls sold into marriage. But what shook Thompson most was that the children, although appearing older than their years, were still so young. “They are innocent, completely innocent,” he says now. “One father told me to look at his family; he could barely feed his son. They had been through hell, walked through hell and got to hell. All they want to do is go home.”
The conflict that has torn Syria apart has raged for almost three years, left more than 100,000 people dead in its wake and driven nine-and-a-half million from their homes. It took intense political pressure to get the British Government to agree to offer hundreds of the “most needy people” in Syrian refugee camps a home in this country. “We live in the modern age – we can read what’s going on in Syria; we’ve never had more information at our fingertips,” says Thompson – “but no one cares.”
If anything can break through the apathy, it is his pictures.
Read more and see some of Thompson’s photos at the link.
On Ukraine, I posted this article by Mark Ames in the comments yesterday, but I’ll link it again here: Everything you now about Ukraine is wrong.
I haven’t lived in that part of the world since the Kremlin ran me out of town, so I’m not going to pretend that I know as much as those on the ground there. Still, I’ve been driven nuts by the avalanche of overconfident ignorance that stands for analysis or commentary on the wild events there. A lethal ignorance, a virtuous ignorance….
Nearly everyone here in the US tries to frame and reify Ukraine’s dynamic to fit America-centric spats. As such, Ukraine’s problems are little more than a propaganda proxy war where our own political fights are transferred to Ukraine’s and Russia’s context, warping the truth to score domestic spat points. That’s nothing new, of course, but it’s still jarring to watch how the “new media” counter-consensus is warping and misrepresenting reality in Ukraine about as crudely as the neocons and neoliberals used to warp and Americanize the political realities there back when I first started my Moscow newspaper, The eXile.
Read about what Ames calls the “simplifications/misconceptions” that are driving Ames crazy at Pando Daily.
And then there’s Venezuela. At The Washington Post, Adam Tayor asks, Amid the coverage of Ukraine, is a crisis in Venezuela being ignored? It’s an interesting question. And what about Syria, which has pretty much disappeared in all the coverage of Ukraine? Is American media simply incapable of covering more than one foreign conflict at a time? Read all about it at the link.
One more story on Venezuela from Peter Weber at The Week: Venezuela isn’t going to be another Ukraine.
Venezuela is not Ukraine, and beneath the similarities in the protest movements are significant differences.
The first is time: The Kiev protesters started their demonstration in November after Yanukovych reneged on a European Union trade pact, and they gradually built up a tent fortress in the central Maidan Square. In Venezuela, the protests started on Feb. 4 at the university in San Cristóbal, with students showing their anger over the lack of police response to an attempted rape and crime in general.
The “brutal police crackdown” on the student protesters in San Cristóbal led to similar protests at other universities, which were also violently suppressed, says Francisco Toro in The New York Times. “As the cycle of protests, repression, and protests-against-repression spread, the focus of protest began to morph. What was at stake, the students realized, was the right to free assembly.” Toro continues:
It’s this intolerance of opposing views, and violent repression, that Venezuela’s students are now mobilized against. Today, after 13 deaths, 18 alleged cases of torture and over 500 student arrests, the protest movement has snowballed into a nationwide paroxysm of anger that puts the government’s stability in question. The protests’ lack of structure has given them resilience, but also an anarchic edge. There is no single leader in a position to give the movement strategic direction. [The New York Times]
Read more comparisons at the link.
In Other News . . .
The K5 robot outside a school
If you think the prospect of being spied on by NSA is frightening, you need to read this article by James Robinson at Pando Daily: Knightscope’s new robotic law enforcer is like staring at the demise of humanity.
Knightscope’s autonomous, crime fighting robot has the complexion of a washing machine. In pictures it looks cute, the size of a penguin maybe. In person it is five feet tall with intimidating breadth. It moves steadily and with insistence. If you stare at it long enough, the twin panels of lights about two-thirds of the way up its body start to take on the appearance of shifty, judgmental eyes. It sees what you’re doing and wants you to cut it out.
The full name of the Knightscope robot on display at the Launch Festival this morning was the K5 beta prototype. Former Ford Motor Company executive and Knightscope CEO William Santana Li describes it to MC and festival organizer Jason Calacanis onstage as a “crime fighting autonomous data machine.” But that doesn’t come close to doing it justice….
As Santana Li outlines proudly, the beast before him on stage takes in 360-degree video through four cameras, is capable of thermal imaging, registers gestures, recognizes faces and can run 300 license plates in a single minute. It works off proximity GPS and scans its environment every 25 milliseconds. It runs off nearly identical technology to Google’s self-driving cars. He boasts that it can see, feel, hear and smell. It is autonomous, will roam outdoors, can take video, decide when it needs to return and charge its batteries and can detect biological and chemical pathogens and radiation.
The Knightscope will get put out in the field gathering data, Santana Li says. The owner can log in to a security panel and get a read of what is going on in the area. The robot can scan license plates and report back on stolen cars. Its facial recognition capabilities can alert its owner to any registered sex offender in the area. The sample dashboard Santana Li logs in to, shows that the robot can report back about things as specific as how many people are lying horizontal and how many are gesturing with their hands. The company is working on giving it a 3M graffiti proof sheen, it emits a piercing sound if someone tries to tip it over and the machines will often work in pairs so they can protect each other.
How would you like to live in a world where one of those things is checking up on you wherever you go?
From Laura Bassett at Huffington Post, here’s the latest from the land of Republican misogyny and stupidity: Virginia Republican Says A Pregnant Woman Is Just A ‘Host,’ Though ‘Some Refer To Them As Mothers.’ Yes, someone really said that.
A pregnant woman is just a “host” that should not have the right to end her pregnancy, Virginia State Sen. Steve Martin (R) wrote in a Facebook rant defending his anti-abortion views.
Martin, the former chairman of the Senate Education and Health Committee, wrote a lengthy post about his opinions on women’s bodies on his Facebook walllast week in response to a critical Valentine’s Day card he received from reproductive rights advocates.
“I don’t expect to be in the room or will I do anything to prevent you from obtaining a contraceptive,” Martin wrote. “However, once a child does exist in your womb, I’m not going to assume a right to kill it just because the child’s host (some refer to them as mothers) doesn’t want it.” Martin then changed his post on Monday afternoon to refer to the woman as the “bearer of the child” instead of the “host.”
Martin explained that he edited his post because “people took it the wrong way.” Read his original post at the link.
And then there’s good old Bobby Jindal, who still thinks he has a chance to be POTUS: Jindal Breaches White House Protocol To Take Shots At Obama.
The National Governors Association is supposed to bring Democrats and Republicans together to discuss policy and share ideas for mutual success, but after a meeting at the White House Monday, all pretense at bipartisan comity was shattered as a press conference with lawmakers descended into a partisan fracas.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal launched into a repeated assault on President Barack Obama’s leadership in the shadow of the West Wing, in defiance of established bipartisan protocol. Speaking after a meeting of the NGA at the White House, Jindal, the vice chair of the Republican Governors Association, said Obama is “waving a white flag” by focusing on executive actions with three years left in his term. “The Obama economy is now the minimum wage economy,” Jindal added….
Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy rose to challenge Jindal immediately after he spoke to reporters, calling his remarks on Obama waving a white flag “the most insane statement I’ve ever heard.”
Jindal then returned to the microphones to continue his barrage against the Obama administration, saying as Malloy walked off, “I want to make sure he hears a more partisan statement,” and saying Obama should delay the Affordable Care Act mandates. It wasn’t the first time Jindal had used the microphones outside the White House to attack the president, having done the same at last year’s meeting.
Fortunately, Bobby Jindal will never be president. What a horrible excuse for a human being.
As everyone knows by now, we lost a great comedy writer, director, and performer yesterday. From The Chicago Tribune: Harold Ramis, Chicago actor, writer and director, dead at 69.
Harold Ramis not only may be the most successful comedy writer-director that Chicago has produced, but some wouldn’t even confine that statement to Chicago.
“Harold was clearly the most successful comedy writer-director of all time,” said Tim Kazurinsky, who followed Ramis at Second City and later became his friend. “The number of films that he has made that were successful, that were blockbusters, nobody comes close. Even in light in of that, he was more successful as a human being.”
Ramis’ career was still thriving in 1996, with “Groundhog Day” acquiring almost instant classic status upon its 1993 release and 1984’s “Ghostbusters” ranking among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, when he decided to move his family back to the Chicago area, where he grew up and had launched his career.
On Monday, Ramis was surrounded by family in his North Shore home when he died at 12:53 a.m. of complications from autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a rare disease that involves swelling of the blood vessels, said his wife, Erica Mann Ramis. He was 69.
Read The New York Times obituary here: Harold Ramis, Alchemist of Comedy, Dies at 69.
Finally, a little True Detective news. Dakinikat posted this in the comments yesterday, but if you didn’t go to the link you might have missed something really revelatory.
A number of writers have noted that the hit HBO series focuses almost exclusively on the male characters and that women and children are only seen and heard in terms of their effect on the men–for example, see this article at The New Yorker by Emily Nussbaum: The shallow deep talk of “True Detective.”
Yesterday two feminist writers took a different point of view. At Slate, Willa Paskin argues that the way the men of True Detective treat women is actually at the heart of the narrative–that by not listening to women, Detectives Marty Hart and Rust Cohle miss the very clues that would help them solve their 17-year case.
Ignoring women may be the show’s blind spot, but it is also one of its major themes. True Detective is explicitly about the horrible things that men do to women, things that usually go unseen and uninvestigated. No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up. Another little girl was abducted, and a report was never even filed. “Women and children are disappearing, nobody hears about it, nobody puts it together,” Rust told his boss Sunday night, outlining what he believes is a vast conspiracy in the Bayou. Rust is haunted by women who aren’t there—his ex-wife and his dead daughter—while Marty cannot deal appropriately with the women who are.
Please read the whole thing, if you haven’t already. Amanda Marcotte agrees with Paskin, and she turns up the work of some “internet sleuths” to provide some evidence. Marcotte:
I’m inclined to agree with Paskin. In fact, I’m going to take it a step further and argue that I think, whatever else happens, this inability of the main characters to really see women is going to be their downfall. Over and over again, the show obsesses about the gap between self-serving delusions and narratives and what’s really going on. Marty repeatedly talks about how detectives frequently overlook what should have been most obvious, what was right under their noses. He calls it the “detective’s curse”. “Solution was right under my nose, but I was paying attention to the wrong clues.”
I am going to offer this prediction, then: The solution will be right under their noses, but they missed it because they don’t really see women.
Indeed, the internet sleuths are already on it. Remember that all-important yearbook photo that they found one of the victims in? Well, guess what? Other female characters that Marty and Rust have interacted with are in the picture. Here’s the picture with the women helpfully numbered.
On the far right of the front row is a girl who grew up to be the woman who killed her three children because of Munchhausen by proxy syndrome–the woman whom Rust got to confess and then told her to kill herself. Was she traumatized at that school? Could she have given him some valuable information? Why didn’t Rust follow up on those photos?
Something to think about while we wait for Sunday night to roll around.
Now it’s your turn. What stories are you following today? Please share your links in the comment thread.
No, I don’t want Republican Son in Laws
Posted: January 17, 2014 Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, War on Women, worker rights 66 Comments
I so badly want to write on your blog, Bob, or at NOLA.com about your op ed because it sounds so, well, reasonable. However, I’m going to do it here where I am totally surrounded by my friends. Yup, you’re reasonable, my friend, like most democrats I know. Y’all will compromise on just about anything because y’all so reasonable. I’ve got the President in mind when I say that one, actually, let alone most of the senators and congressmen in the democratic caucus. I’m a political independent, Because y’all tend to be so reasonable,
I don’t really mind that my oldest daughter grew up to be a democrat and that she married one. However, I would completely totally freak if either daughter registered republican or brought one home to me. I say this with the caveat that up until the Clinton years, I was a republican and I ran for office in Nebraska as a republican. You may be reasonable, but today’s republicans are not. There is no compromise with them. There is no one reasonable left in the party unless you count the people that don’t believe the dogma but enable it any way to either get re-elected or to have their businesses get preferential tax treatment and subsidies. I don’t want these folks in my home or near my daughters.
So you ask “Would you be troubled if your son married a Republican? What if your daughter married a Democrat?” and I’m answering you here because I don’t want to sully up the nola.com site or your blog site. My answer will be trolled beyond anything reasonable people can imagine and it won’t be by my fellow independents or your democrats. You can read my response here where I am surrounded by loving friends who will agree with me and will give you their own stories as Latinas, feminists, GLBTs, atheists or religious and racial minorities, and people that are not only reasonable but will stand up for what’s right.
According to a 2010 national survey, 40 percent of us would be “upset” with such a marriage. That’s worrisome, but almost as interesting as the historical trend. In 1960, when a pollster asked a similar question, only 5 percent said they would be “displeased” if a child married into the opposite party.
Doesn’t it feel some days that the entire, polarized country is obsessed with politics, down to the political affiliation of our children’s spouses?
I may have agreed that you were oh, so reasonable if I haven’t witnessed so much disrespect coming from the Republican Party towards women, gays, racial minorities and non-christians. I have the perspective of having been republican, having ran for office as a republican, and 
being basically drummed out of the republican party for being pro-choice and having “marched in the streets with lesbians” in support of an anniversary of women’s voting rights like it was some kind of immoral act.
As a matter of fact, I just had this conversation at a friend’s house last month. I met a woman who had a son undergoing gender reassignment surgery. I was telling her that one of my best friend’s nephews was having the same surgery and was a doctoral candidate at UC Berkley in the AI robotics program. We both laughed and said it could be worse, they could’ve become born again and republicans. I thought about it and decided that’s about the only thing that would cause me never to speak to either of my children. The idea of having a Michelle Bachmann as a daughter or a Ted Cruz, or a David Vitter or a Steve Scalise any where near my daughters let alone married to them would cause me to worry about their safety and their sanity.
Let’s check legislation proposed by today’s Republicans.
Here’s a new proposed law in Arizona.
A veteran state lawmaker is pushing legislation that would allow businesses to discriminate against gays — and maybe even women and Jews — as long as they were acting on sincerely held religious beliefs.
SB 1062 would allow those sued in civil cases to claim that they have a legal right to decide not to provide their services to any individual or group because it would “substantially burden” their freedom of religion. That specifically means doing something that the person feels is contrary to their religious teachings.
Sen. Steve Yarbrough, R-Chandler, said the measure is aimed specifically at preventing what happened in New Mexico where courts there said a gay couple could sue a wedding photographer who turned away their request to take pictures at their nuptials. He said that should not be allowed to happen here.But Yarbrough said his legislation could also be interpreted broader than that, allowing motel operators with vacant rooms to refuse to rent to gays.
Potentially more significant, Yarbrough acknowledged there may be individuals who have religious beliefs about unmarried women, or even employing people who do not share their same beliefs.
On the morning of December 11th, Gretchen Whitmer, the charismatic 42-year-old minority leader of the Michigan Senate, stood before her colleagues in the Statehouse in Lansing, and told them something she’d told almost no one before. “Over 20 years ago, I was a victim of rape,” she said. “And thank God it didn’t result in a pregnancy, because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker.”
No one in the gallery said a word. Instead, with just hours to go before it broke for Christmas recess, Michigan’s overwhelmingly male, Republican-dominated Legislature, having held no hearings nor even a substantive debate, voted to pass one of the most punishing pieces of anti-abortion legislation anywhere in the country: the Abortion Insurance Opt-Out Act, which would ban abortion coverage, even in cases of rape or incest, from virtually every health-insurance policy issued in the state. Women and their employers wanting this coverage will instead have to purchase a separate rider – often described as “rape insurance.” Whitmer, a Democrat known as a fierce advocate for women’s issues, described the new law as “by far one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve seen in the Michigan Legislature.”
And it’s not just Michigan. Eight other states now have laws preventing abortion coverage under comprehensive private insurance plans – only one of them, Utah, makes an exception for rape. And 24 states, including such traditionally blue states as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, ban some forms of abortion coverage from policies purchased through the new health exchanges. While cutting insurance coverage of abortion in disparate states might seem to be a separate issue from the larger assault on reproductive rights, it is in fact part of a highly coordinated and so far chillingly successful nationwide campaign, often funded by the same people who fund the Tea Party, to make it harder and harder for women to terminate unwanted pregnancies, and also to limit their access to many forms of contraception.
Here’s a great list of what right wing, christianist republicans say about women and their bodies. They believe it’s perfectly acceptable to deem women property of the state and endanger their lives.
1. Texas State Senator Wendy Davis is a “terrorist” because she filibustered an anti-choice bill.
2. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
3. Who needs abortion when victims of sexual assault can just get “cleaned out” by a rape kit?
4. Women shouldn’t terminate pregnancies resulting from rape because it’s what God intended.
5. Women shouldn’t complain about forced transvaginal ultrasounds, because they’ve already had sex.
6. “If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.”
7. “Abortion is much more serious than the rape of children by priests.”
8. Abortion rights caused the Sandy Hook massacre.
9. Ban abortions because of masturbating fetuses.
10. Abortion is just like the Holocaust.
I would worry about the safety of my daughters because of this: Virginia GOP candidate: Spousal rape isn’t a crime if she is ‘wearing a nightie’.
“I do not know how you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape, when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie and so forth,” Black says. “There’s not injuries, there’s no separation or anything.”
or this: Medical Records Confirm The Pregnant Texas Woman On Life Support Is Actually Dead
Did I mention that my oldest is actually an ob/gyn and she went to practice some place where these folks aren’t second guessing her medical expertise? You’ll excuse me if I say that with their guns, their onward christian soldiers zealotry, and their anger/meanness that I believe that the only thing safe around these people might be a clump of cells called a zygote.
Then, there’s the laws they want enacted to teach specific creation mythology as science. Oh, and we taxpayers get to foot the bills for christianist madrassas.
When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.
The opening line of the workbook section declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.
Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms.
I’m a political independent but frankly, if my daughters came home spouting this stuff or with some man in tow that thought it was okay, I frankly would see if they need to be institutionalized and thoroughly checked by a psychiatrist. Fortunately, my son-in-law is a nice registered Democrat and Hindu. My other potential son-in-law is also a democrat and is as agnostic as they get. My son in law is a doctor and my youngest’s SO has degrees in biological engineering so both of them are reality based.
However, I could go on and on and on about the climate change denial, the treatment of the poor in this country, the unemployed, and just about any one else who isn’t a big political donor to the Republican party and ask you to rethink your treatise. The leader of GOPround just quit because he couldn’t take the bigotry any more.
Jimmy LaSalvia co-founded political action group GOProud to prove to America that the Republican Party is a safe home for gay conservatives. But he no longer believes his own arguments. On Monday, he announced on his blog that he could no longer take his own party’s refusal to stand up to bigotry: he was leaving the Republican Party and had registered as an Independent. “I am every bit as conservative as I’ve always been, but I just can’t bring myself to carry the Republican label any longer,” he wrote.
His condemnation of the GOP was even stronger when he explained his decision to TIME on Wednesday. The Republican brand,
he says, is so tarnished that he no longer believes it is salvageable. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to pull the plug on the patient. It’s been brain-dead for a long, long time.”
In a wide-ranging interview with TIME, included before in an abbreviated form, LaSalvia explains the journey that led him to abandon the party ship:
TIME: You are someone who once had lots of hopes for the GOP. What happened?
LASALVIA: I have been my whole life the ultimate team player. I was ‘The Gay for Mitt’ last year. I think that what I did should cause the leadership in the Republican Party to ask themselves, How bad must it be if we’ve even lost Jimmy?
I spent my career working to create an atmosphere in the conservative movement where gay conservatives can be open and honest and live their lives and work within the conservative movement. I wanted it to be a place where straight conservatives could publicly support gay Americans and even eventually come to support civil marriage for gay couples. I feel like I have accomplished that. I had hoped that would be enough to melt the anti-gay bigotry that runs through the ranks of some in the Republican Party. I’ve come to realize that it is not, and that the leadership of the party tolerates bigotry, not just antigay bigotry, but anti-Muslim, any people who are not like us it seems like, because they are afraid of losing that sliver of their base who are anti-gay. And the truth is they are turning off millions more Americans by kowtowing to a group that frankly is losing and who most Americans think are wrong.
The entire party has become a safe haven and magnet for neoconfederates and bigots. Jimmy just came to the realization about 20 years later than me. I am sure there are some folks that seem like reasonable people. But try telling your conservative “friend” you’ve decided that you’re not a christian anymore and see what happens. Reasonable people do not tolerate and enable unreasonable and mean ideas, actions, and speech. My elderly father is the only Republican I allow near me any more and he just about does me in when he spouts all those Fox lies and Republican talking points that are about as far from the truth as they can be. Some times what he says horrifies me but he’s 90.
Our current democratic president and nearly all of his policies are just about as Nixonian as one can get. He’s pushing the new trade agreements. The Affordable Health Care Act was the republican response–called Chaffecare or Dolecare at the time–and the individual mandate is the cost demanded by private insurers for taking on people with pre-existing conditions like ovaries, HIV, or cancer. His budget and the level of government spending represents draconian cuts. His national security programs are still pretty extreme. Yet, every Republican sees him as a socialist. It’s total balderdash and racism!
Here’s a nice South Carolina Republican Senator advocating gun violence to get his views enacted.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s top-polling primary challenger, state Sen. Lee Bright, stood on the steps of the South Carolina statehouse (Confederate flags proudly displayed behind him) and said:
“If the Tenth Amendment won’t protect the Second, we might have to use the Second to protect the Tenth.”
Lee Bright’s insinuation being, if you don’t let South Carolina do as they want then South Carolinians will take up arms against you.
Go read some of the quotes from this darling of the Tea Party.
Let’s face it. It doesn’t take long for the congress and the U.S. Senate to come in and say, ‘Y’know what? These states are a lot of trouble. They’re gettin’ in the way. They’re organizing these people. They’re having these rallies. They got, you know, they got, some of them are even talking about militias. I mean, we gotta do something about this. So let’s just go ahead and dissolve them.
Today’s republicans and today’s republican party are no where near even Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan who had some pretty 
outrageous things to say in their day. They would hate Nixon, Ford, Eisenhower, and they dis Lincoln. All you have to do is talk to a Rand Paul follower and you’ll hear nothing but criticism of Lincoln. I don’t even have time to describe how absolutely crazy they are about regulation, the Federal Reserve Bank, balanced budget amendments, and policies that should be fairly noncontroversial that would get people back to work again.
Yes, Bob, I would absolutely say yes to your question: DEMOCRAT? REPUBLICAN? ARE WE REALLY ALL THAT DIFFERENT?
I wouldn’t let people like these near my home, let alone near my daughters. I wouldn’t even let Senator David Vitter near my home or near my daughters. Would you?
If you don’t believe me, ask another person who used to be a big reasonable republican party insider and is another economist. That would be Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett. Hit him up on his facebook page or just watch his thread. He calls them all wankers now. Frankly, I’ve got worse words for them after my experiences trying to be pro-choice, pro-era, and pro-equal wages for equal work back in the day.
Anyway, that’s my rant illustriously peppered with republican rally signs. You know those great people that did things like boo at gay soldiers and believe in secession, they’re as reasonable as you so I’m sure I’m gonna hear from them here. That way, I wont sully your website.
Thursday: A Mixed Bag of Reads
Posted: January 16, 2014 Filed under: Barack Obama, Crime, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Water, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: "Paysage Bords de Seine", art theft, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brian Schweitzer, David Sirota, Elkhart Indiana, foreign espionage, grocery store shooting, Jamie Bouie, Martha Fuqua, NSA, phone metadata, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ron Paul, telephone companies 38 Comments
Good Morning!!
I’m going to begin with a quirky story about a stolen painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Renoir painting allegedly sold at flea market returning to museum. From the LA Times:
A small Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting that a woman said she purchased for just $7 at a flea market will return to a Maryland museum that argued that the painting was stolen from its premises in 1951.
A federal judge in Virginia ruled on Friday that Renoir’s “Paysage Bords de Seine,” which was painted in 1879, is the rightful property of the Baltimore Museum of Art. The decision brought to an ostensible end a bizarre case that pitted a driving teacher against the museum in a battle over an Impressionist work estimated to be worth $22,000.
Martha Fuqua, who reportedly teaches driving in Virginia, had said that she acquired the painting from a flea market in West Virginia in 2009. She later attempted to sell the work at an auction, which came to the attention of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The weird part is that people who knew Fuqua claimed they had seen the painting in her mother’s home. So who stole the painting? From the Washington Post:
…a number of people who know Fuqua have cast doubt on her flea market story, including her brother. Some family acquaintances told The Post that they remember seeing the Renoir in the 1980s and 1990s at the Fairfax County home of her mother, Marcia Fouquet, who attended art college in Baltimore at the time of the painting’s theft in 1951. (The mother passed away five months ago at the age of 85.)
Apparently, Marcia Fouqua was an art thief. Here’s the original police report (PDF).
Unfortunately, there’s more bad news today–another shooting, this time in a grocery store in Elkhart, Indiana. NBC News reports:
A gunman killed a member of staff and a customer at an Indiana grocery store before being shot dead by police, officials said early Thursday.
The man had his gun pointed at a third person when officers arrived at Martin’s Super Market in the city of Elkhart, Indiana State Police Sgt. Trent Smith said in a press conference early Thursday.
When he trained his weapon on the officers they shot him dead, Smith said…
Smith said it was a “huge crime scene” and that shots had been fired from one end of the store to the next. The victims were found 10 to 12 aisles apart.
Police rushed to the scene shortly after 10 p.m. on Wednesday after receiving a 911 call. They heard gunshots when they arrived and rushed to the section of the store from which the shots were fired.
Smith described the gunman as white man in his twenties who lived in the area. He said he was armed with a semiautomatic handgun and a large knife.
A little more from Reuters:
The three dead were believed to be a female store employee in her late teens or early 20s, a female shopper in her mid-40s, and the shooter, who was thought to be in his late teens or early 20s, Smith said.
Details such as what motivated the violence and whether there was any connection between the gunman and store employees were not immediately known, he said.
Police found a large knife and a semi-automatic handgun inside the store near the suspect, who was believed to live in the area, Smith said.
Police were withholding the suspect’s name pending notification of his family.
David Sirota was up to his old tricks yesterday on Twitter. Once Sirota pretended to support Barack Obama–that was in the days when you couldn’t blog on Dailykos unless you behaved like a zombie Obot. But even Kossaks mocked Sirota for his constant bragging about receiving a phone call from then-Senator Obama in 2006 and then being invited to interview Obama and his staff.
In those days, Sirota was critical of Obama. In the build-up to the 2012 election, Sirota became a Ron Paul Fan, calling him a “real progressive.” After Obama was elected to a second term Sirota became so “unhinged” by Obama Derangement Syndrome that he compared Obama to George Zimmerman!
These days, Sirota has fastened his presidential hopes on Brian Schweitzer, former governor of Montana. And so when Jamie Bouie dared to suggest that by “positioning himself as a liberal repudiation of Obama,” Schweitzer was in danger of alienating African American voters who still strongly support the President; Sirota responded by strongly implying that Bouie (an African American) is a racist by calling Bouie’s post at The Daily Beast an “[e]xample of how communities of color are condescendingly portrayed as monolithic & unthinking voting blocs.”
Wow.
Here’s a little bit of good news from yesterday’s LA Times: U.S. accuses Wal-Mart of labor violations.
The National Labor Relations Board, an independent federal agency tasked with policing bad behavior by employers, is targeting Wal-Mart Stores Inc. over the retail behemoth’s alleged crackdown on its protesting workers.
The NLRB filed a formal complaint Wednesday against the Bentonville, Ark. chain, alleging that the company violated the rights of more than 60 employees rallying over workplace conditions in 14 states — including California….
The Wednesday filing stems from NLRB findings released in November that deemed unlawful Wal-Mart’s reactions to employees who participated in strikes around Black Friday in 2012.
The rallies spread to 100 cities. Nineteen employees were discharged from the company, allegedly as a reprimand for their involvement in the rallies, according to the NLRB.
The agency said that efforts to broker a settlement between Wal-Mart and its workers failed, leading to Wednesday’s complaint. The filing names more than 60 Wal-Mart supervisors — 19 in California — and corporate communications vice president David Tovar.
The article quotes experts who speculate that the NLRB may be trying to signal to corporations that it is going to stand up for not only unionized workers, but also those in non-unionized businesses. If true, that is excellent news.
Last night Cincinnati acted to protect residents from the chemical plume that is making its way down the Ohio River from West Virginia. From WLW 700: Cincinnati Water Works Prepares to Close Water Intake Valves.
(Cincinnati)–Days after a hazardous chemical leaked into the Elk River in West Virginia the chemical has flowed into the Ohio River and the Cincinnati area.
The Chemical known as 4-methylcyclohexane methanol leaked from a 48,000-gallon storage tank owned by Freedom Industries, in West Virginia. Investigators believe the leak began on Thursday Jan, 9. and the chemical foaming agent seeped though a one inch hole, in the storage tank and into the River….
Lisa Cochran the Communication Coordinator with The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO) said the Chemical MCHM was first detected Sunday Jan 12. in the Ohio River.
She adds (ORSANCO) is coordinating with multiple organizations, including Cincinnati Water Works, Northern Kentucky Water, Kentucky Division of Water, US Coast Guard, West Virginia American Water and others to monitor the progress of the spill. “We have field crew members who actually go out and take samples” to determine the concentration of the chemical.
Cincinnati Waterworks is prepared to close their Ohio River water intake valves when the hazardous chemical plume is found. Cochran says “they (Cincinnati Water Works) do plan to shut down when the plume reaches their water intake”.
In NSA news, The New York Times published more “revelations” from the material that Edward Snowden stole. As has become the accepted technique with NSA stories, the article begins with supposedly terrifying news: the NSA uses mysterious “radio technology” to attack computer that aren’t even connected to the internet! Aiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee!
But read on. So far the software has only been used on 100,000 computers since 2008, primarily in countries like China, Russia, and Pakistan, and the software must be physically installed by a human spy with a flash drive. It has never been used domestically.
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.
Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property. But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls “computer network exploitation.”
So basically, the NSA uses this technology to do its job–spying on foreign countries to protect U.S. interests. Horrors!
And as for the phone call metadata program, Phone companies don’t want the job of spying on customers’ calls. PBS Newshour:
President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday what changes he is willing to make to satisfy privacy, legal and civil liberties concerns over the NSA’s surveillance practices. One of the most important questions is whether the government will continue to collect millions of Americans’ phone records every day so that the government can identify anyone it believes might be communicating with known terrorists.
The president’s hand-picked review committee has recommended ending the phone records program as it exists. It suggested shifting the storage of the phone records from the NSA to phone companies or an unspecified third party, and it recommended new legal requirements before the government could search anyone’s phone records.
The phone companies don’t want the job. Executives and their lawyers have complained about the plan in confidential meetings with administration officials and key congressional intelligence and other committees, according to interviews by The Associated Press. Two phone executives familiar with the discussions said the cellular industry told the government that it prefers the NSA keep control over the surveillance program and would only accept changes if they were legally required. The executives spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the private discussions. But there have been public complaints, too.
Frankly, I’ve never trusted the phone company. I’d much rather have this data stored on government computers, where it can’t be accessed without a warrant approved by the FISA court.
Finally, Rolling Stone is highlighting the Republican war on women’s reproductive rights with a long read by Janet Reitman: The Stealth War on Abortion. I haven’t read the article yet, but I hope it’s good. We need more high-profile publications to highlight what’s happening to women’s rights in red states.
So . . . there’s a mixed bag of reads to get you started on the day. What stories are you following? Please post your links in the comment thread, and have a great Thursday!
Thursday Reads: Human Evolution, Snowden Leaks, and Other News
Posted: December 5, 2013 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Great Britain, morning reads, Newt Gingrich, NSA, National Security Agency, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: Alan Rusberger, Barton Gellman, cell phones and privacy, David Miranda, Denisovans, DNA, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, human evolution, Laura Poitras, Louise Mensch, Mark Ames, Neanderthals, science, Sima de los Huesos 15 Comments
Good Morning!!
I seem to have caught a little cold, nothing serious; but I’m a little slow this morning. Anyway, I have a few interesting stories for you, beginning with an amazing discovery that has stunned scientists and forced them to adjust their assumptions about human evolution. From the NYT: Baffling 400,000-Year-Old Clue to Human Origins.
In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.
The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.
The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.
Now the experts are going to have to find a way to incorporate these new discoveries into their understanding of human history. The story offers several different possibilities from different scientists.
Hints at new hidden complexities in the human story came from a 400,000-year-old femur found in a cave in Spain called Sima de los Huesos (“the pit of bones” in Spanish). The scientific team used new methods to extract the ancient DNA from the fossil….
Since the 1970s, Spanish scientists have brought out a wealth of fossils from the cave dating back hundreds of thousands of years. “The place is very special,” said Dr. Arsuaga, who has found 28 nearly complete skeletons of humans during three decades of excavations.
Based on the anatomy of the fossils, Dr. Arsuaga has argued that they belonged to ancestors of Neanderthals, which lived in western Asia and Europe from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago.
But based on newly discovered methods for extracting DNA, researchers learned something very different. Read the rest of this fascination story at the NYT link above.
Yesterday the Washington Post published a new story by Barton Gellman, based on the data stolen from the NSA by Edward Snowden: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show. Except if you read the whole story you’ll learn that this is being done only to collect foreign intelligence; it’s not being done in the U.S. Data from Americans who are overseas could get caught up in the data collection, but the point is to track the locations of suspected terrorists.
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.
In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.
Honestly, is anyone really surprised by this? I’m not saying it’s a wonderful thing, but, as I recall, tracing cell phone locations was the method used to catch Osama bin Laden. Not only that, but local police in the U.S. routinely use cell phone tracking to investigate crimes–and like the Feds, they have to get warrants to do so.
Anyone who didn’t know that you have no expectation of privacy when using a cell phone must have been living in a cave for a very long time. But if you really think the NSA is listening in on all of your personal phone calls and reading your text messages, you’re–quite frankly–nuts. The NSA would have to have millions of employees in order to sift through everyone’s data.
Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.”
The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.
As noted in the article, data collected from Americans overseas isn’t protected by the Fourth Amendment; and the Supreme Court decided long ago that telephone call data is owned by the phone companies and that Americans have no expectation of privacy when talking on the phone. If we want to increase privacy protections, it will have to be done through legislation–not by whining about the NSA doing it’s job, which is to collect foreign intelligence. (A side note: a short time ago, former NSA analyst John Schindler offered some suggestions for “Reforming NSA from the Top.”) I wish journalists would devote as much energy to investigating why millions of Americans can’t get jobs and why so many of the ones who do have jobs can’t get paid a living wage as they do to telling us things we already knew or strongly suspected about NSA data collection.
Meanwhile, there are some troubling questions and revelations about some of the journalists who have been involved in releasing the Snowden files. As everyone knows by now, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras now have control of all of the data that Snowden stole. This data includes the names of all British and American intelligence agents. Greenwald and Poitras are currently working on developing a new news website, a project backed by libertarian Ebay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Here’s an extensive profile of Omidyar by renegade investigative journalist MarkAmes.
Recently, Ames wrote another piece at Pando Daily questioning the ethics of Snowden’s cache of NSA data being controlled by two individuals who are beholden to one wealthy backer headlined Keeping Secrets: Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald and the privatization of Snowden’s leaks.
Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras?
Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a billion dollars to
personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, it’s a question worth asking.It’s especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to as many as 200,000 files. That’s right: Snowden doesn’t have the files any more, the Guardian doesn’t have them, the Washington Post doesn’t have them… just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company created by the founder of eBay.
Edward Snowden has popularly been compared to major whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg,Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Wigand. However, there is an important difference in the Snowden files that has so far gone largely unnoticed. Whistleblowing has traditionally served the public interest. In this case, it is about to serve the interests of a billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is truly unprecedented. Never before has such a vast trove of public secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire as the foundation of a for-profit company.
I didn’t realize this until yesterday, but apparently Greenwald did not have the data on British intelligence originally; but he somehow forced the Guardian to turn it over to him before he resign from the newspaper. This may be the data that Greenwald’s husband David Miranda was caught with at Heathrow airport when he was detained there awhile back. The British Parliament is currently investigating the behavior of the Guardian and its editor Alan Rusberger. From the blog of BBC journalist Louise Mensch: Rusbridger admits shipping agents’ names – what now?
MPs today got Alan Rusbridger to admit a number of things he, and his paper had previously denied.
Firstly, that he shipped the names of GCHQ agents abroad to newspapers and bloggers. Mr. Rusbridger was reminded that this was a criminal offence, and said he had a public interest defence. He also, however, kept arguing that he hadn’t published any names, which rather blows up his public interest defence – it’s self-evident that you don’t need the names of intelligence agents to report on GCHQ spying, so why not redact them?
The fact is, Rusbridger did acknowledge that it put GCHQ agents at risk when he first shipped files to ProPublica. He redacted the names of GCHQ agents from those files, and he promised the government he had done so….
In Parliament today when asked why he didn’t redact the names he said there were 58,000 documents – essentially, he could be bothered to go through the <100 files he FedExed to ProPublica, but could not be bothered to go through the entire batch he sent to the NYT.
Really? He couldn’t take a week, and black out agents’ names? There were copies of the docs in the Guardian offices in New York, so time was not an issue for Rusbridger – instead, he exposed the names.
Perhaps worst of all, Rusbridger confirmed my very worst suspicions, which were that he hadn’t even read through the top secret files before shipping them. He redacted no names; he redacted no operational details; he didn’t even read them. And by “he” I mean any employee of the Guardian. Nobody at that paper read the 58,000 documents through, not even once, before sharing them in bulk.
Mensch updated that post with more information yesterday: HAS Rusbridger exposed thousands of GCHQ personnel? A commenter on the original post explained that in revealing the names of intelligence personnel to multiple people, Rusberger and the Guardian essentially destroyed their careers and seriously damaged British intelligence efforts. Here’s the comment:
A comment was left on that last blog that I have to reproduce. It shows that every agent exposed by Rusbridger has had their career ruined for the duration of it; none of them can ever work in the field again. Furthermore, the writer makes the compelling case that the NSA-GCHQ wiki, which the New York Times published extracts from, and the directories of staff interests like gay and lesbian clubs, ghost hunting clubs etc, mean that Rusbridger has actually sent abroad not just a handful of names, as he claimed to Parliament “there were names on power points” but actually thousands of GCHQ names.
Read the whole explanation at the link. I apologize for writing this before I nail down every detail, but I think this is important and it’s highly unlikely the corporate media will look into it since they could also culpable.
I’m afraid I rambled on too long on the NSA story, so I’ll just add a few more links that you might like to check out.
Raw Story: Debbie Wasserman Schultz schools Newt Gingrich over ‘war on women’ crack about Joe Biden
Bloomberg: That’s Gonna Hurt: Bankers Brace for the Volcker Rule
AP via Business Insider: A Period Of Bitterly Cold Temperatures Not Seen In A Decade Is About To Hit Parts Of The US
JM Ashby at The Daily Banter: Their Kind of Individual Mandate
Politicus USA: CNN Throws In the Towel as it Schedules Hour-Long Glenn Beck Interview
Now it’s your turn. What stories are you focusing on this morning? Please share your links in the comment thread.
Saturday Reads
Posted: November 30, 2013 Filed under: 2014 elections, China, Foreign Affairs, Great Britain, just because, morning reads, North Korea, NSA, National Security Agency, Russia, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Edward Snowden, health care costs, Merrill Newman, Obamacare 25 Comments
Good Morning!!
There’s a little breaking news this morning. The Guardian reports: China scrambles fighter jets towards US and Japan planes in disputed air zone.
China scrambled fighter jets to investigate US and Japanese aircraft flying through its new air defence zone over the East China Sea on Friday as the regional clamour over the disputed airspace escalated.
The ministry of defence announced the move, which is the first time China is known to have sent military aircraft into the zone alongside foreign flights, stepping up its response to the challenge after its unilateral establishment of the zone. It previously said it had monitored US, Japanese and South Korean aircraft and had flown routine patrols in the area on Thursday.
The ministry’s statement said two US reconnaissance aircraft and 10 Japanese early warning, reconnaissance and fighter planes had entered the zone.
The airforce “monitored throughout the entire flights, made timely identification and ascertained the types”, defence ministry spokesman Shen Jinke told the official China News Service.
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times,
Even as China scrambled fighter jets to enforce its newly declared air defense zone, the Obama administration said on Friday that it was advising American commercial airlines to comply with China’s demands to be notified in advance of flights through the area.
While the United States continued to defy China by sending military planes into the zone unannounced, administration officials said they had made the decision to urge civilian planes to adhere to Beijing’s new rules in part because they worried about an unintended confrontation.
Although the officials made clear that the administration rejects China’s unilateral declaration of control of the airspace over a large area of the East China Sea, the guidance to the airlines could be interpreted in the region as a concession in the battle of wills with China.
“The U.S. government generally expects that U.S. carriers operating internationally will operate consistent with” notice requirements “issued by foreign countries,” the State Department said in a statement, adding that that “does not indicate U.S. government acceptance of China’s requirements.”
Just what we need, a fight with China….
Meanwhile North Korea is still holding Merrill Newman an 85-year old American who fought in Korea as a young man and had arranged a trip to visit the places he remembered. From Reuters, via the Times of India:
SEOUL: North Korea said on Saturday it had arrested US citizen Merrill E Newman for “hostile acts” against the state and accused him of being “a criminal” who was involved in the killing of civilians during the 1950-53 Korean War.
Newman “masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the DPRK and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People’s Army and innocent civilians,” the North’s official KCNA news agency said.
North Korea apparently forced the elderly man to make a confession and apologize on video.
In a separate dispatch, KCNA carried what it said was a statement of apology by Newman, made after being detained.
“During the Korean War, I have been guilty of a long list of indelible crimes against DPRK government and Korean people as advisor of the Kuwol Unit of the U.N. Korea 6th Partisan Regiment part of the Intelligence Bureau of the Far East Command,” it said.
The unit appears to refer to one of the special operations units of partisan, or irregular, fighters acting against the North.
Newman, who had been visiting North Korea as a tourist, has been held in Pyongyang since officials took him off an Air Koryo plane that was scheduled to leave the country on October 26.
I really feel for Newman and his family. His wife must be frantic. The Daily Mail has photos and more details on the “apology.”
A video has been released by the North Korean government showing detained American veteran Merrill Newman, 85, admitting to being ‘guilty’ of crimes including killing innocent civilians when he was a soldier in the Korean War.
Newman, who has not been heard from since he was detained on October 26, is seen reading a four-page hand-scribbled letter on camera in an undisclosed location in the video released on Saturday.
The veteran from California looks uneasy in the video, and with shaking hands apologizes for what he supposedly did 60 years ago.
‘I realize that I cannot be forgiven for my offensives but I beg for pardon on my knees by apologizing for my offensives sincerely toward the DPRK government and the Korean people and I want not punish me,’ he reads.
There’s much much more on the public humiliation of this poor man. I hope he wasn’t tortured. Watch the video at the link if you want. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. I just kept thinking of my Dad who was a WWII veteran. I would really like to know what the U.S. is doing to get Newman out of North Korea. It could be time for another rescue trip by Bill Clinton.
CNN is out with a new poll that found lots of Americans are unhappy with the way things are going in the U.S. these days.
[A] CNN/ORC International survey released Friday also indicates that less than a quarter of the public says that economic conditions are improving, while nearly four in ten say the nation’s economy is getting worse.
Forty-one percent of those questioned in the poll say things are going well in the country today, down nine percentage points from April, and the lowest that number has been in CNN polling since February 2012. Fifty-nine percent say things are going badly, up nine points from April.
Well, that isn’t too surprising, since the economy has been just awful for the vast majority of Americans for a very long time now. Good to know that more than half of the people polled have noticed something is off.
Besides an obvious partisan divide, which contributes to a urban-rural gap, the survey also indicates a difference of opinion between younger and older Americans.
“There’s a slight generational divide, with 46% of those under age 50 saying things are going well. That number drops to 36% for those 50 and older,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
So either older people are paying closer attention, or they can remember the pre-Reagan days when there was less income inequality; while younger people can’t recall a time when the economy was doing well.
It’s likely some of the negativity Americans are feeling is a reaction to the media’s constant trashing of the Affordable Care Act AKA “Obamacare.” This morning Reuters is reporting the the federal health care website–which was supposed to be fixed by today–is still experiencing problems and has been temporarily shut down.
Just hours before the Obama administration’s self-imposed deadline to get the insurance shopping website working for the “vast majority” of its users by Saturday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that it was taking down the website for an 11-hour period that would end at 8 a.m. EST on Saturday.
It was unclear whether the extended shutdown of the website – about seven hours longer than on typical day – represented a major setback to the Obama administration’s high-stakes scramble to fix the portal that it hopes eventually will enroll about 7 million uninsured and under-insured Americans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
At the very least, the shutdown suggested that nine weeks after the website’s disastrous launch on October 1 prevented most applicants from enrolling in coverage and ignited one of the biggest crises of Obama’s administration, U.S. officials are nervous over whether Americans will see enough progress in the website to be satisfied….
After weeks of round-the-clock upgrades of software and hardware, Obama officials said they were poised to successfully double its capacity by this weekend, to be able to handle 50,000 insurance shoppers at one time.
Paul Krugman defends the program based on a “dramatic” reduction in health-care costs that no one else in the media can be bothered to report.
Much of the Beltway establishment scoffed at the promise of cost savings. The prevalent attitude in Washington is that reform isn’t real unless the little people suffer; serious savings are supposed to come from things like raising the Medicare age (which the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded would, in fact, hardly save any money) and throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. True, a 2011 letter signed by hundreds of health and labor economists pointed out that “the Affordable Care Act contains essentially every cost-containment provision policy analysts have considered effective in reducing the rate of medical spending.” But such expert views were largely ignored.
So, how’s it going? The health exchanges are off to a famously rocky start, but many, though by no means all, of the cost-control measures have already kicked in. Has the curve been bent?
The answer, amazingly, is yes. In fact, the slowdown in health costs has been dramatic….
Since 2010, when the act was passed, real health spending per capita — that is, total spending adjusted for overall inflation and population growth — has risen less than a third as rapidly as its long-term average. Real spending per Medicare recipient hasn’t risen at all; real spending per Medicaid beneficiary has actually fallen slightly.
Read the rest at the link.
Edward Snowden is still in the news, and there’s talk of making him “person of the year.” That would mean lots more money and attention for Glenn Greenwald. The latest link doesn’t seem that exciting to me–but what do I know? From The National Post: NSA tracked online sex activities of suspected terrorists, latest Edward Snowden leaked documents reveal.
LONDON — The American spy agency NSA tracked the online sexual habits of suspected terrorists in an attempt to expose them as hypocrites.
Details of the exercise emerged Wednesday in the latest leak of classified documents by the leaker Edward Snowden.
The spy agency identified six targets, all of whom were Muslim, as examples of how electronic surveillance could be used to gather potentially embarrassing information on individuals, such as evidence of visits to pornography sites.
One of the six “globally resonating foreign radicalizers” is believed to be a U.S. resident while the others live outside America. None of the targets, whose names have been redacted, is accused of being involved in terrorist plots.
I guess I should be all upset about this, but for some reason I’m a lot more freaked out by breadlines in NYC, the ongoing war against women, and the possibility of Republicans taking over the Senate and/or the White House.
A little more worrying is the possibility that the Greenwald/Snowden cult might decide to release the names of U.S. and U.K. intelligence agents. The Daily Telegraph: NSA terror over ‘doomsday’ cache of secrets stashed in online cloud by Edward Snowden
U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a ‘doomsday’ cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud.
The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.
The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters….
One source described the cache of still unpublished material as Snowden’s ‘insurance policy’ against arrest or physical harm.
U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public.
Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories.
Ironically, Snowden himself is living under the thumb of Russian security services, according to a recent story at al Jazeera.
After a dramatic arrival and a prolonged confinement at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is wanted by the United States government on espionage charges, has quietly vanished into a life of seclusion.
Nobody seems to know exactly where one of the most wanted and famous men in the world lives, who protects him or how he spends his days — beyond learning Russian and reading Dostoyevsky. Such glimpses into his life have been offered to the public by his Russian lawyer and de facto spokesman, Anatoly Kucherena.
Kucherena is a on the board of the FSB, Russia’s powerful intelligence agency.
“We know at this point that he’s not free,” said Yuri Felshtinsky, a Russian scholar who has written extensively about the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Felshtinsky, who believes the FSB controls Snowden, called the American exile a “Christmas gift” for President Vladimir Putin’s “public relations war” with the United States….
“He’s always going to be monitored and watched,” said Peter Savodnik, a journalist and author of a recently published book about another famous American defector who grew tired of his Soviet exile: Lee Harvey Oswald. “If he doesn’t already want to leave, he’s going to want to leave very soon.”
Good luck with that.
Those are my offerings for today. What stories are you following? Even if you’re just lazing around enjoying the final hours of the long weekend, please leave a comment or two and let us know what’s happening where you are.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments