Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!

The first week of the New Year continues to bring College Football bowls and weird news.

The BBC thinks that Arkansas bird mystery may be solved. You may have heard that thousands of birds fell out of the sky on New Year’s Eve in the small town of Beebe.  Poison was ruled out since many of them wound up as midnight snacks for local cats and dogs that didn’t get sick. Now, investigators believe that fireworks may have caused the birds to panic and fly into each other and other things.

Initial laboratory reports said the birds had died from trauma, the AGFC said.

Residents reported hearing loud fireworks just before the birds started raining from the sky.

“They started going crazy, flying into one another,” said AGFC spokesman Keith Stephens.

The birds also hit homes, cars, trees and other objects, and some could have flown hard into the ground.

“The blackbirds were flying at rooftop level instead of treetop level” to avoid explosions above, said Ms Rowe, an ornithologist.

“Blackbirds have poor eyesight, and they started colliding with things.”

Here’s an interesting thing at The Economist on the PornoScans used by the TSA.    Evidently, they efficiently humiliate us, but terrorist find them pushovers.  They’re expensive, offensive, and they don’t work.

BOINGBOING’s brilliant Cory Doctorow has dug up a paper (published in the Journal of Transportation Security) outlining how easy it would be for terrorists to beat the new backscatter “full-body” imaging scanners that are being installed at major airports worldwide. Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson, two professors at the University of California, San Francisco, submitted their paper, “An evaluation of airport x-ray backscatter units based on image characteristics” ( PDF) on October 27, way before the John Tyner/”Don’t touch my junk” incident pushed the controversy over airport security rules into the cultural mainstream. The findings are pretty clear-cut: a smart terrorist could defeat backscatter units (or “pornoscanners,” as Mr Doctorow dubs them) with relative ease …

Here’s a story from NPR that should bring more shame to the Texas justice system that imprisons and kills people at an unbelievably high rate. Where’s the DOJ when you need them to investigate violations of civil rights on things like this?

Prosecutors declared a Texas man innocent Monday of a rape and robbery that put him in prison for 30 years, more than any other DNA exoneree in Texas.

DNA test results that came back barely a week after Cornelius Dupree Jr. was paroled in July excluded him as the person who attacked a Dallas woman in 1979, prosecutors said Monday. Dupree was just 20 when he was sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980.

Now 51, he has spent more time wrongly imprisoned than any DNA exoneree in Texas, which has freed 41 wrongly convicted inmates through DNA since 2001   more than any other state.

“Our Conviction Integrity Unit thoroughly reinvestigated this case, tested the biological evidence and based on the results, concluded Cornelius Dupree did not commit this crime,” Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said.

Dupree is expected to have his aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon conviction overturned Tuesday at an exoneration hearing in a Dallas court.

There have been 21 DNA exonerations in Dallas since 2001, more than any other county in the nation. Only two states — Illinois and New York — have freed more of the wrongly convicted through DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal center representing Dupree that specializes in wrongful conviction cases.

I’ve been posting some links down thread on some of the names floating around for the people on the probable list to replace Rahm and Summers at the White House.  Their main qualifications appear to be working for Investment Banking firms.  Leading contender for Rahm’s replacement as White House Chief of Staff is J.P Morgan’s William Daley.  Former Economic Adviser Larry Summer may be replaced by a Goldman Sach’s  beneficiary Lawyer Gene Sperling whose been an adviser to Timothy Geithner. Yes, that’s right; a lawyer for an economic adviser.  You’d think our economics-disabled POTUS would want an actual economist.  It seems, however, that Obama is highly worried that Big Business and Wall Street don’t like him.  Oh dear, we wouldn’t want any donations to dry up to the re-election campaign, would we?  Daley is close to Axelrod and Chicago’s Mayor Daley.  Feel all better now?

Antonin Scalia provided yet another reason why we need to reconsider resurrecting the ERA.  He just gave an interview and said women don’t have constitutional protection under the 14th amendment. He said this last September also.  There are lots of feminist blogs writing on this and you can find their links on Memeorandum.

Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, called the justice’s comments “shocking” and said he was essentially saying that if the government sanctions discrimination against women, the judiciary offers no recourse.

“In these comments, Justice Scalia says if Congress wants to protect laws that prohibit sex discrimination, that’s up to them,” she said. “But what if they want to pass laws that discriminate? Then he says that there’s nothing the court will do to protect women from government-sanctioned discrimination against them. And that’s a pretty shocking position to take in 2011. It’s especially shocking in light of the decades of precedents and the numbers of justices who have agreed that there is protection in the 14th Amendment against sex discrimination, and struck down many, many laws in many, many areas on the basis of that protection.”

Greenberger added that under Scalia’s doctrine, women could be legally barred from juries, paid less by the government, receive fewer benefits in the armed forces, and be excluded from state-run schools — all things that have happened in the past, before their rights to equal protection were enforced.

Republicans are once again using Islamphobic slams to motivate the base and set ground for their continuing radical assault on constitutional rights.  We should be so lucky to have Shari’a compliant finance and banking.  Think no usurious interest and fees.   Also, the aim of investing in Shari’a compliant finance is ethical and moral investing and hoarding is prohibited.  Money must be used for the good of the community.   Plus some revenues must be set aside to take care of widows and orphans.  The most outrageous thing about some of these lies is that Orthodox Jews in places like New York have similar laws and practices already in place.  You don’t hear complaints about that though, do you?

Rep. Allen West (R-FL), a newly-elected member who has loudly scapegoated Muslims and campaigned on a promise to oppose religious diversity, appeared on Frank Gaffney’s radio program last week. Gaffney, who routinely says that Obama is both a secret Muslim and a member of the “Muslim Brotherhood,” asked West about how the new Republican Congress plans to “take on Sharia as the enemy threat doctrine?” West said that, although he has not spoken with all of the new members, he hoped that Congress would focus on the “infiltration of the Sharia practice into all of our operating systems in our country as well as across Western civilization.” He explained that targeting Sharia should be part of America’s “national security strategy” and that a response to Sharia would somehow include “tailor[ing]” American “security systems, our political systems, economic systems, our cultural and educational systems, so that we can thwart this”

Propublica reports that Obama is trying to expand his options on Guantanamo.  The problem is that they also expand executive power in a way that would give a pretty good hard on to Dick Cheney.  Obama may use a signing statement.

Obama has issued a number of signing statements taking issue with more than a dozen legislative provisions and has come under some criticism for it from both Republicans and Democrats. Shortly after he took office, Obama promised to use them with less frequency than former President Bush, noting in a presidential memorandum in March 2009: “I will act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded.”Bush established Guantanamo through executive order and issued over 150 signing statements, more than any other president. The practice was especially controversial when Bush applied it to legislation dealing with detainee treatment.

The American Bar Association issued a report in 2006 that called signing statements “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers.” The report was signed by a number of legal scholars including Harold Koh, who was then dean at Yale Law School and is today the top lawyer at the State Department and one of several advisers involved in the administration’s Guantanamo policy.

It seems that deceit webs–once woven–keep entangling the rule of law.

Robert Reich calls Obama and the Democrats enablers of Republicans and Their BIG Lie on his latest blog thread.

Republicans are telling Americans a Big Lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is our economic problems are due to a government that’s too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.

The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can’t borrow as before, and must save for retirement.

The short-term solution is for government to counteract this shortfall by spending more, not less. The long-term solution is to spread the benefits of economic growth more widely (for example, through a more progressive income tax, a larger EITC, an exemption on the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and application of payroll taxes to incomes over $250K, stronger unions, and more and better investments in education and infrastructure.)

But instead of telling the truth, Obama has legitimized the Big Lie by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, freezing federal pay, touting his deficit commission co-chairs’ recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase, and agreeing to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Will Obama stand up to the Big Lie? Will he use his State of the Union address to rebut it and tell the truth?

No and No.  Robert, you should know by now that Obama believes The Big Lie and that Democrats won’t stop him.  Raise your hand if you think The Big Question will be how long into the State of the Union Adress will it take before Obama tries to sell us The Big Lie and tells us we need to hand over and cut our Social Security?

We don’t appear to be the only group of liberals worried about Obama betraying the Democratic position on Social Security according to The Hill.

Maria Freese of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare said she thinks Social Security is “more at risk than it was in 2005,” when President George W. Bush proposed far-reaching changes to the program, including personal accounts. The plan was vigorously opposed by Democrats and liberal groups and never came up for a vote in Congress.

Now, with Social Security coming to the forefront once again, liberal groups are preparing a campaign to oppose any “backroom” deals on retirement benefits.

“What I am really afraid of is another deal behind closed doors,” said Nancy Altman, the co-director of Social Security Works. “At least with President Bush, he went around the country on a tour and presented his plan, and people didn’t like it.”

This is such a true statement.  We saw that Obama was more than willing to sell us out–behind close doors–to big Pharma interests during health care reform.  We witnessed Obama dropping a public option so  quickly–despite campaign promises–that it must  been prearranged.   There’s got to be a connection to all these Investment Banker people showing up in the West Wing and that big pool of  money and investments in Treasury Bills out there that are pledged to those of us that have paid into the program since our first day of work.

Whats on your reading and blogging list today?