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Note to Ed Shultz: PLEASE acknowledge that you also said ‘shakedown’

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Note to Ed Shultz: PLEASE acknowledge that you also said ‘shakedown’

This is getting slightly depressing. I am all for castigating Joe Barton, his oil donations, and the harmful policies he almost always espouses. But I’ve been listening–for the past few minutes–to Ed Schultz castigate Barton for calling the BP $20 billion escrow fund a ‘shakedown’. Regrettably, Schultz went on about Barton for several minutes without mentioning up front that he did the same (previous post).

Also regrettably, rightwing bloggers are picking this one up: See links here and here and here, for example.

To be fair, Schultz has previously defended his word choice, in a panel discussion elsewhere. But the buzzword is out there,and he seems to have helped legitimize it. This is no time to pretend that he didn’t say it, or to expect liberal audiences to suck it up and pretend the same.

The video clip of Schultz praising Obama for shaking down BP is linked here. MSNBC needs to do some homework here. Chris Matthews, on Nerfball, did a version of the same thing–going off about BP and Joe Barton, truly and applicably enough, without taking into account the cable-and-radio cross-transmissions that influenced this dialogue.

No wonder Rush Limbaugh is further demonstrating his eerie lack of shame by repeating and defending the ‘shakedown’ reference.

Hearings on BP oil spill today; IG report faults Interior Dept

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Hearings on BP oil spill today; IG report faults Interior Dept

Congressional hearings begin today on the BP/Transocean/Halliburton oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Update: Side note here–BP is also being sued by its own investors, according to Natl Law Journal. The first lawsuit was filed in New Orleans on May 7. Plaintiffs allege that

“BP executives and its board of directors “recklessly disregarded accidents and safety warnings for years” related to the Deepwater
Horizon rig. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of breaching their fiduciary duties by, among other things, causing BP to violate safety and environmental laws, exposing the company to criminal and tort liability, and subjecting BP to adverse publicity and impaired earnings.”



Meanwhile, overwhelming evidence continues to mount that public policy, applied with feeling and thought, could have prevented this disaster. Even as many people labor to clean up the mess created by a combination of laissez-faire non-regulation and non-enforcement with corporate greed and unscientific wishful thinking, comes the release below.

It should be more than apparent by now that the brand of physics, chemistry and engineering applied by BP in our Gulf of Mexico was about on a level with curing warts by splitting them and burying them.

You heard it here first: The way to escape the fiscal burden of ‘foreign oil’ is not to ruin America’s shorelines. The way to escape the fiscal burden, and incidentally to escape the physical harms including state war and guerrilla war, is to use less oil. An intelligent public policy apparatus would have been supporting scientific research to that end for the past fifty years. From the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

“INTERIOR SCIENCE HAS INTEGRITY ISSUES, IG SAYS”
No Safeguards against Political Manipulation of Science despite Repeated Scandals

Washington, DC – The U.S. Department of Interior still lacks any policy to ensure the integrity of its scientific data, according to a new Inspector General report.  As a result, agency scientific findings remain susceptible to alteration or suppression in support of pre-determined political positions, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).  .


The report by the Interior Office of Inspector General (IG), dated April 2010, was quietly posted without announcement on the IG website late last week.  In recent days, Interior has been reeling from reports that it ignored both internal and external scientific warnings about the risk of oil spills and the lack of response capacity before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a major expansion of offshore drilling, just days before the disastrous BP explosion and spill.”

PEER lists the following examples:

 

  • Continued efforts inside the Minerals Management
    Service to stifle scientists who raise environmental concerns about
    offshore drilling, as documented in an April 2010 Government
    Accountability Office report;
  • Endangered Species Act positions taken by the U.S. that fly in the
    face of the overwhelming weight of agency science, on issues ranging
    from the Florida panther to the sage grouse.  As under Bush,
    conservation groups are able to prove in court that Obama agency stances
    are “arbitrary and capricious” for ignoring the best available science;
    and
  • Interior’s ongoing hostility toward whistleblowers and continued
    reliance on “gag orders” and other restrictions on specialists candidly
    discussing problems or sharing data.

“In March 2009, President Obama promised new policies that would both protect agency science from
political tampering and scientists from retaliation for doing their jobs but those policies never were promulgated,” Ruch added.  “Compromised
scientific integrity is not just a problem inside Interior; it is a government-wide phenomenon whenever technical data carries heavy policy implications.”

Contrary to the IG report, Interior claimed that it did adopt a scientific code of conduct back in 2002, but the agency did so via a press release and never put it into its official manual.  That code applied only to the scientists and not to managers and political
appointees who remain free to alter technical documents for non-scientific reasons.”

The CIA and the $3 million coffee table

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The CIA and the $3 million coffee table

Amidst other events in a week of losses, pain and gains, some good news on legal/security matters.

First, a remarkable case involving secret electronic surveillance and fraud against the court has been settled in DC.

When the CIA replaces your coffee table without your consent or knowledge, and you are a loyal employee of the U.S. government, sometimes the Agency has to pay. Plaintiff Richard A. Horn, a former Drug Enforcement Agency officer, sued the CIA and others for secretly bugging his home when he was stationed in Rangoon, Burma, in the 1990s. On March 30, plaintiff and CIA finally settled the lawsuit, Horn v. Huddle, for $3 million.

 

Richard A. Horn

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of D.C. District Court issued the final order. The case has dragged since its 1994 filing by plaintiff Horn, alleging that CIA and State Department personnel illegally wiretapped him.

One colorful detail from Horn’s lawsuit was the following:

“As evidence of his claim, Horn points to a cable transmitted by Huddle, which contains quotation marks and which Horn claims quotes him verbatim, as well as a suspicious entry into his apartment when, unsolicited, his government-issued rectangular coffee table was swapped for an oval replacement while he was out of town.”

 

The lawsuit was delayed under two administrations, terminated and revived, placed under seal but unsealed after convincing signs of fraud against the court, i.e. intentional misleading statements to the judge by government lawyers.

Rather than just deny swapping out Horn’s coffee table and other activities, CIA argued that the state secrets privilege protected it from having to come clean. Regrettably, the Agency also falsely told both the District court and the appeals court that the defendant CIA officer was covert. He was not. Both courts were jarred when this claim was retracted; as Lamberth noted in 2009,

“The new Department of Justice attorney in the case filed a notice with the Court that Defendant II’s identity was not actually covert—the declaration stated that Defendant II (Arthur Brown) had his covert status lifted and rolled back in 2002. Of course, no one from the Office of General Counsel for the CIA (which was actively working on this case) nor the defendant himself informed this Court or the Court of Appeals of that fact.”

Thus “defendant Brown and at least one attorney committed fraud on this Court and the Court of Appeals,” and the CIA officer was reinstated as a defendant.

 

Fraud against the court, or fraud on the court, is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “A lawyer’s or party’s misconduct in a judicial proceeding so serious that it undermines or is intended to undermine the integrity of the proceeding.” Examples include bribing a juror and introducing fabricated evidence.

Like other crime, fraud on the court does not pay. In January 2009 the judge referred the CIA attorney to the Court’s Committee on Grievances. Contempt motions were filed by plaintiff against others including former CIA Director George Tenet. Plaintiff also filed motions for attorneys’ fees. CIA threw in the table, and on the Pottery Barn principle—You replace it, you buy it—the two parties have settled, pursuant to court directions regarding any future filings, for $3 million to the plaintiff for damages, fees and other litigation costs.

In the process, the state secrets privilege also went over the side:

“This development demonstrated that Director Tenet’s assertion of the state secrets privilege was no longer accurate as to at least one material fact (the secrecy of Brown’s identity), and led the plaintiff and the Court to question what portions of Director Tenet’s assertion still were accurate and what information the government still believed was privileged.”

The judge rejected assertions of state secrets privilege in this CIA-related matter and also granted permission to file an amicus brief is to attorneys in a wiretapping lawsuit on the West Coast. The amici curiae brief by Al Haramain Foundation should be informative. The Al Haramain case is the last case still alive with evidence provided by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein that the telephone company participated with the NSA in extensive wiretapping.

 

(In an otherwise unrelated development, Norman Leboon, the off-balance Philadelphia man who made death threats against Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and his family, also attempted to sue his phone company over alleged wiretapping.)

 

More transparency would be a break in the case, from a public policy perspective.

As reported in law.com, in dismissing the case, the judge “ordered the Justice Department to notify him whether it will refer allegations of government misconduct to the Office of the Inspector General and to appropriate oversight committees in Congress . . .”


The judge said there is “disturbing” evidence in a sealed motion that “demonstrates the benefit” of notifying the oversight committees of Congress.”

Disturbing, indeed: Lamberth says that the sealed motion suggests that “misconduct occurred in the Inspector General’s Office both in the State Department and in the Central Intelligence Agency.” It would be illuminating to have the sealed evidence disclosed by the current Justice Department.

The watchword to go with transparency is accountability. In approving the settlement between the parties, the judge added that “it is not without some misgiving that the Court reaches this decision.” Despite the undeniable benefit of having a contentious 15-year case settled and out of the courts, Lamberth notes that another $6 million was awarded to an individual in the anthrax investigation. That would be Steven Hatfill, whose life was made miserable by berserk accusations about the anthrax mailings, and who was later exonerated. A defendant in the Hatfill case was Bush’s third Attorney General, Michael Mukasey.

As Lamberth writes, “It does not appear that any government official was ever held accountable for this huge loss to the taxpayer.” “Now,” the judge writes, “this Court is called upon to approve a $3 million payment to an individual plaintiff by the United States, and again it does not appear that any government officials have been held accountable for this loss to the taxpayer. This is troubling to the Court.”

Health care reform according to the Washington Post

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Health care reform impossible, according to the Post

–I’ve said it before: ‘Smart people’ living in places like Massachusetts–those would be the ones who did not vote in the special election–have no idea what President Obama is up against in Washington.

Quick fact:

Over the previous year, the Washington Post has run 1,642 articles, columns or editorials mentioning health care reform or health insurance reform. From March 22, 2009, to today, writers working for the Washington Post Company, or guest writers or columnists, have published articles on the legislative effort to reform health care over 1600 times.

Of these articles, at a conservative estimate over 90 percent have been negative.

Actually, only 73 of these hits according to the LexisNexis database pertained to “health insurance reform.” Something about the proportion of 73 to 1,642 indicates how dangerous a topic ‘insurance reform’ is for the WashPost. Not that the Post has made that transparent through its reporting, you understand, but it is conspicuous by its omission.

Previously taboo topic: Health insurance reform

A quick run-through gives a representative sampling. Long-time WP columnist David Broder has authored 32 pieces on health care reform over the previous year, all casting doubt on the legislation itself or on its chances of passing, or both.

A typical example: June 7, 2009, in “Obama’s Biggest Battle,” Broder wrote,

“Obama will have to carry much of the burden of advocacy himself–if outside events don’t intrude, as they did on Bill Clinton. The president has shown his willingness to bargain, signaling, for example, that he would now consider taxing some employer-provided benefits, an approach he denounced when John McCain endorsed it during the campaign.
But it will take much more than that to win what promises to be an epic struggle.”

Another typical example from Broder, Mar. 1, 2010; “Obama, Dems at crossroads on health care reform”:

“Nobody really expected much from President Barack Obama’s health care summit, and those expectations were fully realized.”

Be it noted that the last time Broder employed the term “insurance reform” in a piece was 1994. That was an article about the Clinton administration, jointly authored with Ann Devroy, no longer at WP.

Then there is George F. Will, as in a Jan. 20, 2010, piece titled “Massachusetts mandate shoves liberals off the cliff”:

“If the Democrats” congressional leaders are determined to continue their kamikaze flight to incineration, they will ignore Massachusetts’ redundant evidence of public disgust. They will leaven their strategy of briberies with procedural cynicism—delaying certification of Massachusetts’ Senate choice, or misusing “reconciliation” to evade Senate rules, or forcing the House to swallow its last shred of pride in order to rush the Senate bill to the president’s desk. Surely any such trickery would be one brick over a load for some hitherto servile members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, giving them an excuse to halt their party’s Gadarene rush toward the precipice.”

Like Broder, Will does not mention ‘insurance reform’ in print, although he has done so on air at ABC Television’s This Week, formerly with George Stephanopoulos.

Over the past year, Will has run nine pieces mentioning health care reform—including one calling Obama a modern-day ‘Huey Long,’—all opposed.

Unsurprisingly, he and Broder are joined by WP columnist Robert Samuelson, with seven pieces mentioning health care reform over the previous year, all opposed; Samuelson actually mentioned “health insurance reform” once (July 27, 2009) but only in quoting from a speech by the president.

Needless to say, the WP also offers up the wisdom of ultra-rightwing neocon and PNAC signatory Charles Krauthammer, as in this July 24, 2009, piece titled “Why Obamacare is sinking”:

“What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality.”

Krauthammer has run 18 pieces opposing current health-care reform proposals over the past year. This passage comes from Aug. 7, 2009, “Health-care reform: A better plan”:

“The administration’s defense is to accuse critics of being for the status quo. Nonsense. Candidate John McCain and a host of other Republicans since have offered alternatives. Let me offer mine: Strip away current inefficiencies before remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The plan is so simple it doesn’t even have the requisite three parts. Just two: radical tort reform and radically severing the link between health insurance and employment.”

‘Tort reform’ for Krauthammer means limiting plaintiffs’ ability to litigate. According to “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” in Parade Magazine, Krauthammer himself successfully sued a swimming pool manufacturer, after the swimming accident that sadly left the young Krauthammer injured.

For the past year, Krauthammer has been running columns with titles such as “Kill the bills: Do health-care reform right,” etc. Krauthammer has actually mentioned “insurance reform” four times, always to oppose the concept and to attack Obama.

There is no need to belabor the basic point here. For the past year, a time of extensive public discourse on health insurance reform, the Washington Post has mentioned “insurance reform” somewhat over 100 times in a crop of 1,600+ articles on health care. Most of those mentions occur either in the context of vote-counting, the politics horse race, in political reporting; or in hostile opinion columns by the right-wingers and corporatists above, joined by Michael Gerson, Fred Hiatt, and equally hostile guest columnists. As written previously, many of the horse-race pieces in the A section, purportedly objective and neutral, are actually spun to cast doubt on the legislation and on its chance of passing.

Note: None of the information contained in this post can be gleaned from today’s piece by Howard Kurtz, the Post’s ‘media critic,’ titled “Journalism’s slide into health-debate weariness.” Kurtz has not mentioned the Post’s opposition and hostility to insurance reforms.

 

[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

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Why aren’t tea partiers angry about insurance abuses? Part 1.

Tea Party rally

CPAC came and went its course in Washington this year, revealing once again that it has nothing to offer in the way of principled conservatism. As might be expected of supposed ‘rebels’ actually backed by big-time funding, it also demonstrated, to any tea partiers actually paying attention, that ‘conservative’ movers and shakers are no more genuinely concerned about fundamental conservative principle than is the GOP.

Media outlets can focus all they want to on a rift between the establishment GOP and its far right. But in truth, whether you are talking about Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio in Florida, Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas, or John McCain and J. D. Hayworth in Arizona, the supposed rift is only a muffin-top crackle on the deeper blendedness of the two ‘wings’: They are all opposed to taxing the super-wealthy, regardless of how poor the rest of the country gets; and they are all opposed to reining in the abuses of corporations, regardless of the number of deaths.

That is both the sign and the deep structure of their version of ‘conservatism.’ That is basically their reason for being in politics. They are in power for one purpose and one purpose only, to prevent any fiscal reforms that would redress the abuses of monopoly, of consolidation of power, of ownership in a few hands—the kind of thing we see increasingly in the U.S., from the lovely Maryland village of Ellicott City owned by real estate interests, to whole mountains in Appalachia owned by coal companies, to control of the insurance market in entire states by one insurance company or a few companies.

Test this proposition. With all the railing about deficits, do you ever see Crist-Rubio, Perry-Hutchison, or McCain-Hayworth suggesting that we curb tax giveaways to corporations that ship U.S. jobs overseas? Do you ever see them recommend that we eliminate tax havens in the Caymans? Do they ever recommend that we rein in abuses including outright fraud by big-time military and security contractors?

Quite the contrary: Hayworth, in particular, is running on a nearly overt promise of increasing slush-fund giveaways for ‘border security,’ which means contractors. Hayworth, who was tied for years to now-imprisoned super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, may be a particularly blatant example of a candidate openly soliciting contributions from the military-security-surveillance sector. But he is by no means alone. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas does the same.

Texas Governor Rick Perry

Okay, Mr. Basel, Mr. Flanagan, Mr. O’Keefe: one more time

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Okay, Mr. Basel, Mr. Flanagan, Mr. O’Keefe, Mr. Dai: One more time, from the top . . .

 

O'Keefe

From the Lafourche Parish, La., Daily Comet, Jan. 28:

“Last month, protesters marched in front of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office to criticize her support for health care legislation and complain that they couldn’t get through on her office phones. Now Landrieu’s phones are at the center of federal charges against four men accused of trying to tamper with them. Among those arrested was conservative activist James O’Keefe, who gained notoriety last year with hidden-camera videos showing him dressed as a pimp . . .”

Setting aside once and for all that unconvincing ‘pimp’ get-up—a Halloween-costume, joke ‘pimp’ outfit rather than gear for body-guarding streetwalkers—the question now before us is what these four post-frats were going to do in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans building on Jan. 25.

James O’Keefe says in his self-exonerating Friday statement that

“I learned from a number of sources that many of Senator Landrieu’s constituents were having trouble getting through to her office to tell her that they didn’t want her taking millions of federal dollars in exchange for her vote on the healthcare bill. When asked about this, Senator Landrieu’s explanation was that, “Our lines have been jammed for weeks.” I decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for “weeks” because her phones were broken. In investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieu’s district office–the people’s office–to ask the staff if their phones were working.”

Okay, that’s clear enough. 1) Sen. Landrieu told the Baton Rouge Advocate in an interview that her phone lines had been “jammed” for weeks. 2) The four interlopers took the senator to mean not that her lines were jammed with people trying to get through—which would be the typical statement–but that Landrieu was saying there was something technologically wrong with her phone system. 3) So, they decided to show up at her office to– ?

It gets unclear. Aside from some little problems with 1) and 2) aforementioned (see below), according to O’Keefe’s statement,

“The sole intent of our investigation was to determine whether or not Senator Landrieu was purposely trying to avoid constituents who were calling to register their views to her as their Senator. We video taped the entire visit, the government has those tapes, and I’m eager for them to be released because they refute the false claims being repeated by much of the mainstream media.”

Reduced to plain English, the narrative is that the four guys believed or affected to believe that Sen. Landrieu was making excuses; they took her to be saying that her phones did not work; therefore they went to her office in person to show via videotape that her phones did work or otherwise to show that she was simply avoiding constituents’ calls.

First question: Okay, so why didn’t they do that? Why didn’t they just go visit her office, like any other constituent, and stand around videotaping—inconspicuously or otherwise, as with cell phones—while her phones rang?

Second question, a corollary to the first: Why did they need phone-company costumes to determine whether the senator was trying to avoid constituents? After all, O’Keefe himself was apparently not in costume.

WAIT A MINUTE, I hear you ask: WHAT COSTUMES?

—from the FBI affidavit:

“4) On or about January 25, 2010, at approximately 11:00 a.m., FLANAGAN and BASEL entered the Hale Boggs Federal Building, each dressed in blue denim pants, a blue work shirt, a light fluorescent green vest, a tool belt, and carrying white, construction-style hard hat . . .

5) WITNESS 1 stated that upon entering Senator Landrieu’s office, FLANAGAN and BASEL represented to her that they were repair technicians from the telephone company and were there to fix problems with the telephone system. WITNESS 1 stated that they were each wearing a white, hard construction hat, a tool belt, a fluorescent vest, and denim pants and tops.”

[Side note: Not gentlemen. Gents take off their hats inside a building, not outside.]

This is another version of the first question: If their purpose was only to embarrass Sen. Landrieu by videotaping interactions to show that she was avoiding her constituents’ calls, why would they claim that her phones were not working? Wouldn’t it make more sense to show that her phones were working? The affidavit says they even videotaped themselves making the inapposite claim:

“WITNESS 1 further stated that when FLANAGAN and BASEL entered the office, O’KEEFE positioned his cellular phone in his hand so as to record FLANAGAN and BASEL. . .

6) BASEL requested to be given access to a telephone in the office, and WITNESS 1 allowed him access to the main telephone at the reception desk. WITNESS 1 observed BASEL take the handset of the phone and manipulate it. BASEL also tried to call the phone with a cellular phone in his possession. He stated that he could not get through.”

All this while the cameras were rolling, figuratively speaking. What were the alleged perps going to do, under O’Keefe’s explanation—go back to their loyalists saying, Hey, she’s right, her phones don’t work?

Sen. Landrieu

Second set of questions: If the alleged perpetrators were there only to embarrass the senator by videotaping in her office, why did they then try to gain access to the main telephone closet? From the FBI affidavit:

“7) Thereafter, FLANAGAN and BASEL told WITNESS 1 that they needed to perform repair work on the main telephone system and asked for the location of the telephone closet. WITNESS 1 directed FLANAGAN and BASEL to the main GSA office, located on the tenth floor of the Hale Boggs Federal Building. Both men went to the GSA office.”

Why did they then (allegedly) try to get inside the telephone closet? –The affidavit:

“8) FLANAGAN and BASEL spoke with WITNESS 2, a GSA employee working the GSA office, and represented that they were employees of the telephone company and needed access to the telephone closet to perform repair work. WITNESS 2 asked the men for credentials, and FLANAGAN and BASEL stated that they had left their credentials in their vehicle.”

 Hooray for the GSA: The two did not get inside the telephone closet, and the rest is history.

–With some gaps left to fill in:

  • Purely on the factual side of the matter, it would be good to know how they got those work uniforms and hard hats. Were they purchased? If so, where and when, and by whom?
  • Who paid for them?
  • Side note: Did they get that idea of the telephone-repairman disguise from Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, or from Burn Notice? Or did they get the idea from an earlier Nixon-Segretti or Lee Atwater-Karl Rove episode in the ongoing series, U.S. political dirty tricks?
  • Who got the idea for those disguises?
  • If the defense was that this was basically a prank, will we hear the defense claim that the disguises weren’t real work clothes, just male-stripper telephone-repairman costumes or the like?
  • Re the legal aspects, it would be good to know whether O’Keefe consulted with the others before issuing his statement, given that the statement provides cover for him rather than for the guys who went, disguised, to the GSA office.
  • Related question: Are those hapless work-costume guys represented by the same attorney/s representing O’Keefe? Wouldn’t be my call, if I were their parents . . .
  • Also related: What was the role of the fourth guy, the one in the car? Doesn’t leaving one guy in a car look like arranging a get-away driver? Was the fourth, Mr. Dai, seated behind the wheel? Whose car was it?
  • Another factual detail: Did Sen. Landrieu’s phones ring, any time while the alleged interlopers were in her office?
  • As to that office: Landrieu has five offices, counting the one in DC. Did the guys enter any of the other offices? If so, when? If not, why not? –What would be the point in videotaping phones and staffers in one office, showing that the phones in one of Landrieu’s offices either did work or did not work, if that left all the other offices—Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Capitol Hill—unaccounted for? How could videotaping in one office be comprehensive? How could it accomplish as much as, say, cutting the lines or otherwise disrupting the phone service in one office?

 

Bravo, Please keep your ‘real housewives’ away from D.C.

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Open letter to Bravo:

 –Bravo, please stay away from D.C.

Unreal

Dear Bravo, I’m begging you, in all earnestness–please keep your ‘real’ housewives out of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, the metro area I have lived in since 1982. I have reared a child here, a young adult whose character puts to shame many of the pseudo-independents and phonies who rail against “Washington.” That word real in your title is bad enough in itself: any word that beggars the term ‘misnomer’ is putting too much power in human hands. The term “housewives” does not do much for the twenty-first century, either, not for people who defend homemakers and not for people who like the idea of a career, not for anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. Even the show’s title is a minor calamity; the show itself would be a local disaster. It already is.

U.S. Capitol at night

Maybe I should confess up top—well, near the top anyway—that I have never watched an episode of Real Housewives. There’s a reason for that: I have been force-fed enough promotions for the show in its various locations—CA, Atlanta, wherever—to add up to the length of an episode, and seeing the promos is enough for me, more than enough. From everything I can glean—and this is from you, you understand, from your very own cable presentations designed to entice viewers—the ‘real housewives’ are a bunch of over-painted loudmouths.

I have yet to hear, even secondhand, that they have done anything much for humanity, done anything for this country, done anything for the world; that they have any talent or skills unrelated to using so much hairspray that they deserve to have a hole in the ozone layer named after them.

 

Truckloads of complexion-destroying makeup, yes; gallons of hair dye, yes; women’s clothes that suggest someone at Bravo hung onto a warehouse left over from the Eighties, check. Creepy rudeness, uninteresting conflict, bumptiousness that challenges any notion of humankind as the last word (to date) in evolution. This is the way a reasonably popular cable channel wants to present women?

 

Why?

 

Top Chef dvd

As you may have figured out, Bravo, there’s a reason why I even know this stuff in spite of being so revolted at the concept of Real Housewives that I have promised myself never to watch it. Here it is: One of my guilty pleasures is watching Top Chef. Speaking of a Bravo program, Top Chef could use the skills of the phenomenal Tyra Banks, of whom I am a fan. If only some of the female contestants on Top Chef could get a pep talk from Ms. Banks, we might have a less unbalanced competition in some ways. I intend to watch tonight’s cookdown—I admit it—partly because I enjoy the vicarious cooking experience on the show, and partly because I’m curious to see who will come out ahead. The Big Question awaits answer as always: Which will the show send home first—The Woman, or The Southerner?

 

The Southerner

But I digress, as Tom Lehrer would say. Back to your disaster program, the single worst thing about watching a show like Top Chef is being subjected to promos for Real Housewives. Do I really deserve that?

I don’t mind entertainment; I’m for it. I’m not even against reality shows, as long as they involve talent and skill. The existing reality shows that do involve talent and skill—cooking, singing (American Idol), dancing (Dancing with the Stars)—trump the ‘reality’ shows that involve an unskilled ensemble of non-actors who are also non-writers, every time. The latter seem to be mainly an excuse to put on a television series of sorts that stiffs writers.

Maybe that’s their purpose.

Striking writers

Seriously, I’m begging you: Send the ‘housewives’ home.

I would never say that about real housewives, of course.

[Note: Sure enough, the woman lost out first, then the southerner. Last men standing, an uninteresting sibling rivalry.]

[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

Trains, books, and anti-union propaganda

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Trains, books and anti-union propaganda

In an OpEd News interview with Joan Brunwasser I referred to some antique anti-union propaganda I ran across. Here are more specifics.

The book series itself was titled THE BOYS’ STORY OF THE RAILROAD SERIES, published early 20th century by The Page Company (which, like the vast majority of early U.S. publishers, no longer exists). The books are obviously designed to inspire, or to play upon, kids’—or at least boys’—love of railroads and trains. They also are obviously designed to instruct boys how to become rail employees.

Titles:

THE YOUNG SECTION-HAND; Or, The Adventures of Allen West. “The whole range of section railroading is covered in the story,” said the Chicago Post at the time. At 278 pages, it should have been. (The Chicago Post, like hundreds of other formerly competing city dailies, no longer exists.)

THE YOUNG TRAIN DISPATCHER.

THE YOUNG TRAIN MASTER. “It is a book that can be unreservedly commended to anyone who loves a good, wholesome, thrilling, informing yarn,” said the Passaic News. (The Passaic News, like hundreds of other small newspapers, is gone.)

THE YOUNG APPRENTICE; Or, Allan West’s Chum. This one got a blurb from the Baltimore Sun: “The story is intensely interesting.” (The Sun still exists but is owned by the Tribune Company, parent of the Chicago Tribune.)

Author Burton E. Stevenson seems to have been relatively successful with his Allen West, since this staunchly anti-union protagonist turns up again. The spelling of young Allen’s name changes, however.

Several of Burton Stevenson’s books are available as free e-books, although the railroad series seems not to have turned up on the list yet.

The Page Company published a number of these small series by its stable of authors. There are two titles by author Lucy M. Blanchard—CARITA, AND HOW SHE BECAME A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN; and CARITA’S NEW WORLD.

Author Herschel Williams penned THE MERRYMAKERS SERIES, about a family enjoying life around the country. See for example THE MERRYMAKERS IN CHICAGO:

Blurb:

“The Merrymakers who had such a splendid Christmas vacation in New York, enjoy another rollicking good time,–a summer vacation in Chicago. While brother Ned, the young newspaper reporter, “covers” the Republican national convention in Chicago, Carl, the oldest of the four sightseeing Merrymakers, decides that he wants to own a department store some day, and incidentally learns all the steps he must take from being an errand boy to a merchant magnate.”

 

Et cetera.

TARP money and hush money

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TARP money and hush money

The steady stream of reports is becoming a torrent: Notwithstanding abundant evidence of shortcomings in-house and public revulsion on the street, firm after firm that benefited from taxpayer bailouts and other public funding is now—again–setting aside enormous funds for executive bonuses.

AIG

This morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that AIG—American International Group, is holding off on planned bonuses for executives, including $235 million specifically for its troubled financial products unit. Outrage over the planned bonuses, almost dwarfed by the bonuses contemplated at other financial firms, is leading to congressional oversight. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other metropolitan dailies are carrying the story of this quarter’s round of bonus revelations.

Yesterday Morgan Stanley was reported as setting aside $3.9 billion for payouts–in spite of posting losses of $159 million for the second quarter of 2009–an increase of 26 % over compensation from a year ago. That would be 72 percent of Morgan Stanley’s net revenues.

Last week Goldman Sachs reported setting aside $6.65 billion for executive compensation. Unlike Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs reported whopping profits for the quarter. Still, the amounts involved were enough to strengthen demand for a “say-on-pay” law in Congress, with Goldman, which repaid $10 billion to the U.S. Treasury, as Exhibit A in a general picture of shamelessness among Wall Street tortfeasors.

Meanwhile, J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America also posted windfall earnings—all financial giants bailed out by Lilliputian taxpayers. Citigroup is also among banks planning multi-year bonuses for executive recruiting.

The week before, AIG asked administration approval for retention bonuses, including bonuses for the financial products unit largely responsible for the troubled mortgage-backed derivatives commerce involved in the financial crisis.

Needless to say, all these bonuses come at a time when millions of ordinary people face job loss, foreclosure or bankruptcy, or at best diminished income from the general business downturn. Also, the companies involved are battling demands for greater oversight from the feds, going so far as to ramp up their lobbying—paying for the lobbying, while keeping the purse strings tight in their lending–to prevent more effective oversight. Financial companies are also fighting off demands for greater transparency from their shareholders—whose stock losses in their 401(k)s helped get the Wall Street no-strings-attached bailout passed in Congress, last fall, even under the outgoing and discredited Bush administration. And not only have stock prices suffered, but shareholders for the most part are not exactly being sweetened with increased dividends.

You really do have to wonder why some of the biggest financial entities on Wall Street would be so much more willing to send away their own shareholders angry, and to anger the public, than to send away some of their top management angry.

There ought to be a law . . .

Reforms are being contemplated by Congress, and some reform legislation will undoubtedly pass. In the interim, we do have law enforcement. The phrase “hush money” may be slang, but it is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “A bribe to suppress the dissemination of certain information; a payment to secure silence.”

Scrutinizing ‘the Internet’ when they should scrutinize the NRA

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The right to bear arms already—if your gun is already drawn

Targeting the Internet versus scrutinizing the NRA:

Following up on last night’s post—

We’re not off to a good start. In the aftermath of rising gun sales and recent fatal shootings including the killing of security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns by James von Brunn at the Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, we need to let the sunshine in on U.S. firearms trafficking and the political insolence of the gun lobby.

Stephen Tyrone Johns

A quick run-down on how those issues are surfacing in major newspapers today:

  • The New York Times: number of times today that the National Rifle Association and/or the NRA is mentioned: 0. One article about James von Brunn’s shooting at the museum. At least the Times doesn’t blame it on the internet.
  • The Washington Post: number of times today the Post mentions the National Rifle Association or NRA: 2. One mention comes in a politics report handicapping the Virginia governor’s race; the other appears in the obituary of an NRA member. Number of times today the Post brings up the Internet in connection with violence: 3. Number of times the Post brings up the NRA, the gun industry,  firearms trafficking, or firearms in connection with violence: 0. (“Firearms” is, however, a keyword for indexing articles about the shooting and Mr. Johns’ death in the Lexis-Nexis database.)
  • Los Angeles Times: number of times today that the LATimes mentions the National Rifle Association/NRA: 0. The LATimes does not blame the internet in connection with von Brunn.
  • Chicago Tribune: Well, things are looking up. Of articles on the museum shooting in the Tribune, one article mentions that convicted felons are not supposed to be allowed to own firearms.
  • Baltimore Sun: The Sun being owned by the Tribune, the above-mentioned article from the Trib appears in the Sun. Local reporting details well von Brunn’s decades-long history as a troubled and violent personality.
  • Number of times all major U.S. newspapers, combined, raise the question how such a troubled person—with a felony conviction for attempting a “citizen’s arrest” of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1980s and a short stint in county jail for assaulting a sheriff back in the 1960s—could obtain firearms: 0.

One newspaper article today, in this generously resourced nation of ours, does bring up the issue of firearms in connection with von Brunn’s actions—to argue that gun control is futile. A gun advocate writing for the Examiner, owned by conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz, reportedly considering buying the Boston Globe from the Times company, argues that what von Brunn was doing is illegal already:

“Item #1: As a convicted felon, von Brunn could not legally own a firearm, so when he carried what has been described as a “long rifle” or a “long gun”, he was already in violation of that particular statute.

   Item #2: It is illegal in Washington, D.C. to trot around with a gun, and illegal everywhere to enter a federal building with a firearm.

   Item #3: It is illegal to criminally assault someone with a firearm, yet that is exactly what the suspect did Wednesday.”

Ergo, laws do not work. So we should not have them.

 

As the argument continues,

“When is the last time anyone heard of a mass shooting at a gun range, gun show or an NRA convention? Never? Well, DUH! There’s a reason for that. As exemplified by last month’s NRA gathering in Phoenix, AZ, there was a definite armed presence; a gunman would have been met with a fusillade.”

The author seems not to connect the fact that guards at the museum were armed, although to do him justice he does mention the fact:

“This is all the more reason why law-abiding American citizens should be allowed to exercise their right to keep and bear arms virtually anywhere. Placing restrictions on legal concealed or open carry has been proven time and again to provide a risk-free working environment for lunatics bent on harming a lot of innocent people. Gun-free zones are killing fields for madmen.

   Of course, the museum is not exactly a gun-free zone. Security officers, including Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, who was fatally wounded, are armed. This incident happened very fast, Metro Police Chief Kathy Lanier said the suspect opened fire immediately when he entered the doorway of the museum. It is not clear whether Johns was able to engage and exchange shots or whether one of the other guards shot the suspect.”

 

So the difference between the museum—not, as the writer points out, “a gun-free zone”—and “a gun range, gun show or an NRA convention” is what? Not the presence on the scene of guns. No. The difference must be the sheer number of guns on the scene, sufficient to be a deterrent presumably, although that word is not used. But this gunman was clearly suicidal as well as homicidal, broke and in debt, barely able to make ends meet. The tragic events look like what police call “suicide by cop,” varied only slightly to become suicide by armed security guard.

Or is the difference that the guns at the museum were not already drawn? “This incident happened very fast.” In other words, as news reports indicate, von Brunn fired before the guards had time to draw their guns. Clearly guns being fired at a gun range are already drawn. But are the guns at “a gun show or an NRA convention” also already drawn? New news, if so.

von Brunn


Along these lines—Come to think of it, it would be illuminating to know what precautions the NRA takes when it fires someone.

 

[Editorial disclaimer: This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]