I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six and several weeks more of discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather smelly additions.
September 30, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis has been a failure. The banks welcome public money to remove toxic assets from their books, insured by we-the-taxpayers, as well as the hundreds of billions in direct handouts, but they’ve hardly returned the favor.
September 30, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
A declassified ruling by a federal court judge reveals that Fouad al-Rabiah, an innocent Kuwaiti prisoner who was ordered released from Guantanamo last week, was brutally tortured into making false confessions by U.S. interrogators and repeatedly threatened until he confessed to terrorist activities he was not involved in.
September 30, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
Read More »
As you can see from this clip, ACORN has already been conflated with the right wing paranoia about the census, with Fox’s Megyn Kelly re-enforcing these misperceptions up until Bachmann evokes the Japanese internment camps in World War II as reason for us to be suspicious today. That ACORN is raised as a specter in the same breath as the internment of Japanese-Americans by the U.S. Government post-Pearl Harbor reveals the far-flung misimpressions of this community umbrella organization. ACORN sounds like COBRA.
September 30, 2009 | Filed under
Nation |
Read More »
Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus’ statement in the markup meeting before he voted against the Rockefeller amendment to add public option to the healthcare bill.
September 29, 2009 | Filed under
TPRvideo |
Read More »
Joseph Hirko, former co-chief executive officer of Enron Broadband Services (EBS), Enron’s failed telecommunications business, was sentenced Monday to 16 months in prison.
and ordered to forfeit approximately $7 million in restitution to victims through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Enron Fair Fund, in accordance with the terms of the plea agreement.
September 29, 2009 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, wrote press releases about the prosecution of Gov. Don Siegelman that were distributed under the signature of assistant prosecutor Louis Franklin. Also, Canary regularly had two assistants communicate her suggestions about Siegelman’s case to Franklin. All of this took place after Canary had announced [...]
September 29, 2009 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
Last Monday, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants in the long-delayed 9/11 trial at Guantánamo were scheduled to make an appearance before their Military Commission judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, to discuss some procedural arrangements and the ongoing dispute about the mental health of one of the men, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the naval base’s airport was busy, as reporters, observers and relatives of the 9/11 victims were flown in to witness what some parts of the military clearly still regard as a viable trial system.
September 29, 2009 | Filed under
Law |
Read More »
On Sunday, following the revelation of the identity of one of two Uzbeks released from Guantánamo to take up a new life in the Republic of Ireland, I published a letter from Guantánamo written by this man, Oybek Jabbarov. The letter also included a statement by his lawyer, Michael J. Mone Jr., to a Committee of the US House of Representatives, in which Mone explained that Jabbarov was a refugee, living in northern Afghanistan with his pregnant wife, infant son, elderly mother and other Uzbek refugees at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001,
September 29, 2009 | Filed under
World |
Read More »
A Facebook poll that asked users to vote on whether they believed President Obama should be killed was removed Monday from the popular social networking website and is now the subject of an investigation by the Secret Service.
September 28, 2009 | Filed under
Nation |
Read More »
