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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

11 Oct - Sunday Surfing

 truckerspeed

 Michael Moore Aggressively Bites the Feeding Hand

  • Posted by Sean
  • on September 11, 2009
  • Filed in: Film
Michael Moore obviously doesn’t give a fuck. That being said, he definitely gives a fuck.
And that’s the essence of his persona. He’s the rebel with a cause. He’s the  little prankster that utilizes the sheepish grin in defense of God’s Americans. He’ll throw a tantrum and scream and yell until some Momma somewhere show’s the cookies.
moore_l
I write that he doesn’t give a fuck because history holds that, if one chooses to galavant as a filmmaker, one must bow to the studios.  They give the money, you take the money. They say you can’t have the money and you cry until a pillow is soggy. Moore, not too-surprisingly, does not conform to this paradigm. You may not agree with his politics or the methods in which he delivers them, but you have to admire the balls he travels with. Take the following quote as evidence.
Why would these companies give money to me, a guy who is diametrically opposed to everything they stand for? One of the beautiful flaws of capitalism is they will use the rope you give them to hang themselves if you can make a buck.
This bit of bewildered skepticism is targeted at Paramount, the studio which financed his latest documentary titled Capitalism: A Love Story.
He has more gems in the same FUCKYOU vein that reveal a man who knows exactly what his words will do and how they will be interpreted by the targets of his ire:
They are not an ideology, they are just about money. I can imagine the conversation - ‘Look what he’s said about us’ says one man, and other says ‘But look how much money he made.’
This is a very refreshing bit of honesty that goes a long way in calling out the latent sickness in the system. Most aren’t naive enough to believe a studio is interested in much more than making some bucks, but to articulate the extent at which they go for that buck, like Moore did,  is giggle-worthy.
Moore knowingly calls out the flaws because he is in a very rare and privileged sect of filmmaking (especially documentary filmmaking).  He is successful. Very successful. Call him a propaganda-slut if you want to, but the man was able to make millions of dollars on a 9/11 documentary. He was able to churn out green while making a documentary on fucking Columbine.
So, with this success, it gives him room to say exactly what he’d like to say. Which only further perpetuates his own wily-outsider legend. As evident by the cherry on top of his calculated tirade:
I have been saving up my money since ‘Sicko’ to get to this day. I will always make my own movies. Now I have my own money to make them.
I have often wondered what a man like that, a man with so many problematic issues related to our monetary system, does with the excess he garners from success.
To burn bridges and then build up your own in their place is exactly the sort of behavior that renders me susceptible to his manipulative charm. And it makes me glad he’s still around. Sitting in the back row of class, cracking-wise.


Why don't we punish egregious abuses of the legislative process? (+)
http://theygaveusarepublic.com/diary/3948/why-dont-we-punish-egregious-abuses-of-the-legislative-process


One night last week, I saw a segment on Rachel Maddow's show that set me off. It was about a law in Oklahoma that is not yet in effect, but that will, if it goes into effect, violate any number of Federal statutes.  The law would require physicians who perform abortions to collect a survey from women who seek abortion services that demands women provide answers to 37 questions, including the age of the woman, her pregnancy history, her race, it even asks if she was a state employee and how she paid for the procedure.

Then...all this information is sent on to the state health department and posted to a publicly accessible database . Needless to say, I went nuts.  "Oh my god," I said to my husband.  "That entire law is a blatant HIPAA violation."  I may not be an expert on much, but I know from HIPAA, and I started ranting about the protections of  "individually identifiable health information" that HIPAA defines, quite explicitly:
(6) INDIVIDUALLY IDENTIFIABLE HEALTH INFORMATION.--The term 'individually identifiable health information' means any information, including demographic information collected from an individual, that-- "(A) is created or received by a health care provider, health plan, employer, or health care clearinghouse; and
"(B) relates to the past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition of an individual, the provision of health care to an individual, or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to an individual, and--
"(i) identifies the individual; or
"(ii) with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual. [emphasis added]
I would hope that the attorneys who represent medical practices and Planned Parenthood are flooding the state attorney general's office and the US Attorney's office for Oklahoma and protesting this law as one that their clients can not possibly comply with because if they were to comply with the mandates of the state law, they would be in violation of Federal statute(s), and I'm real sorry "states rights" types, but your states take federal dollars, especially federal healthcare dollars, so state laws are superseded by federal laws. Period. Full stop. But don't just take my word for it. Consult the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, which makes it quite plain: "The Constitution and the laws of the United States...shall be the supreme law of the land...anything in the constitutions or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." So no way in hell this piece of paternalistic, misogynistic crap passes constitutional muster.     
Especially when you consider that the framers of this law say openly that the intent of the law is to decrease the number of abortions in Oklahoma and if shame is the only thing that amoral sluts will respond to, they're good with that.
I don't know about you, but I am so sick of this crap...and that is what it is...it's utter crap. We settled this nearly 40 years ago, before I even entered puberty and I am peri-menopausal for fucks sake! I remember vividly the first time I saw protesters outside a clinic. It was the second time in my life I heard my mother drop an "f bomb" and that got my attention. "Fucking know-it-all assholes. If they are against abortion, no one is forcing them to have one." I have pretty much felt that way about it since that Saturday afternoon when I was 12.
Why the hell doesn't the whole fucking world just listen to my mother and be done with it? I mean really, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse. (Trust me on this.)

Graham moves to block Obama from trying 9/11 suspects in U.S.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/politics/story/76933.html

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is trying to prevent the Obama administration from holding criminal trials in civilian courts for the alleged Sept. 11 plotters instead of bringing them before military commissions.
Graham, who helped craft the 2006 law that established the military commissions, said Friday that he'd attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that would prohibit the Obama administration from spending money on the prosecution and trial of the accused terrorists before U.S. civilian federal judges.
"Khalid Sheik Mohammed needs to be tried in a military tribunal," Graham said. "He's not a common criminal. He took up arms against the United States."
Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is being held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, along with four other alleged plotters of the jetliner strikes that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
The Obama administration is studying whether the plotters should be brought to the U.S. to face trial. Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department's general counsel, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee in July that the administration preferred trying some of the Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts, but hadn't decided where to hold trials for the accused 9/11 plotters.
"It is the administration view that when you direct violence on innocent civilians in the continental United States, it may be appropriate that that person be brought to justice in a civilian public forum in the continental United States," Johnson said then.
Federal prosecutors in at least four different U.S. attorneys' offices in Virginia and New York are vying to bring the alleged Sept. 11 conspirators to court for what would be among the most high-profile criminal trials in the nation's history.
Earlier this week, Democratic leaders in Congress agreed to drop provisions of another bill that would have blocked funding for transferring any Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for trial.
Graham, an Air Force Reserve colonel and the only member of Congress who's served active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, said trying the 9/11 plotters in federal courts, instead of before the military tribunals, would be a grave mistake.
"I've been warning the administration not to criminalize the war on terror," Graham said. "These guys should be tried in military court, where we can protect classified evidence better. These people aren't robbing liquor stores. They're part of terrorist organizations that are waging war against the United States."
Open trials in federal courts would become media circuses, Graham said.
"It would be a nightmare," he said. "It would become a zoo, and it would change the theory of how we detain these people."
Such trials, Graham said, would make surrounding communities terrorist targets.
Graham's amendment blocking funds for civilian prosecutions and trials is part of the annual measure to fund the U.S. departments of justice, commerce, state and other federal agencies.
The Senate took up the appropriations bill Thursday. Graham said he hopes to force a vote on his amendment as early as next week.
Aides at the White House, the Pentagon and in the Justice Department declined to comment on Graham's amendment.
The amendment reads in part: "None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available for the Department of Justice by this Act may be obligated or expended to commence or continue the prosecution in (a civilian) court of the United States of an individual suspected of planning, authorizing, organizing, committing or aiding the attacks on the United States and its citizens that occurred on September 11, 2001."
"As a matter of policy, we don't generally comment on proposed or pending legislation," said Cynthia O. Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman.
Obama has pledged to shutter Guantanamo by January, a deadline that Graham said he doubts the president will meet.
Attorney General Eric Holder is overseeing a Cabinet-level task force of prosecutors, Pentagon lawyers and other senior officials to determine how to handle the more than 220 detainees at Guantanamo.
Decisions on many of those cases are expected by mid-November.

More on this Story


The Wichita Eagle
Lead levels higher in Treece residents
http://www.kansas.com/news/story/1005154.html
Residents of the mine-waste polluted town of Treece have about 60 percent more lead in their bloodstream than the average Kansan, according to the results of medical tests performed last month.
Comprehensive lead testing done Sept. 8 and 9 found that the median lead level for Treece residents is 4.0 micrograms per deciliter of blood, compared to a norm of 2.5 for all Kansas residents, said a report released by the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday.
One of the 16 children tested last month showed a blood-lead level higher than 10, the point at which state health officials define lead poisoning. Two others showed levels between 5 and 10.
EPA officials estimate that the children tested represent about half the population of Treece from birth to age six.
Combined with test results from 2005 to 2008, the health survey estimated that 8.8 percent of children in Treece would have lead levels of more than 10, compared with 3.8 percent of children across Cherokee County, which includes Treece, and 2.9 percent of children across the state.
"It's an alarm any time we have children with (elevated) lead levels," said David Bryan, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency in Kansas City, Kan.
He said the EPA and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment will be retesting the child whose levels indicated lead poisoning.
The agencies also will follow up with families whose tests showed borderline results, to help them reduce their exposure to the toxic metal, he said.
Bryan said the results of the September testing were about what the agency expected.
For many years — and in a lot of cases for life — residents of Treece have been exposed to environmental lead left behind by a century of mining operations.
The town is surrounded by hundreds of acres of lunar-like piles of "chat," a gray lead- and zinc-contaminated waste left over from the mineral extraction process.
In addition, the area is dotted with abandoned shafts and cave-ins that flooded when the miners left and pumps that kept the mines relatively dry were turned off in the early 1970s.
Treece residents and local officials have been campaigning to try to get the EPA to buy out the town and move out the people, as it did with the neighboring community of Picher, Okla.
The closure of Picher hurt Treece, eliminating jobs, shopping, recreation and public services including fire protection and cable television.
The lead testing was offered to everyone in town after three top EPA officials visited Treece in August to tour the community, assess the environmental hazards and listen to residents' concerns.
Government estimates say it would cost $3 million to $3.5 million to buy up the remaining homes in Treece and relocate the population.
Late last month, the U.S. Senate passed a bill recognizing the health risks posed by living in Treece and authorizing the EPA to buy out the community.
The language was inserted into an environmental spending bill by Kansas Republican Sens. Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback, and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who shepherded the Picher buyout through Congress.



Blue in the Bluegrass
http://blueinthebluegrass.blogspot.com/search/label/ACORN


Saturday, October 10, 2009


ACORN Idiocy Just Latest Skirmish in Repug War On Poor People

As I explained last month, the real source of the wingnut freakazoid hysteria over ACORN is the bedrock repug belief that helping poor people should be illegal.

At The Nation, Chris Hayes takes it a step further by exposing the accountability gap that allows repugs and their corporate owners to avoid all responsibility for stealing billions from the taxpayers while Congress throws a hissy fit over ACORN's hard-earned pennies.

But if the disconcerting contents of the videos were the proximate cause of ACORN's Congressional rebuke, it is the organization's mission that made it a target. Since the 1970s, ACORN has committed itself steadfastly to building power for poor people. "Unlike almost any other institution on the left," a former organizer told me, "they constantly gravitate toward the most fucked-over people." Not surprisingly, this makes America's right wing furious. O'Keefe says he was inspired to pull the stunt after watching a video that showed ACORN engaging in civil disobedience by breaking the padlock on a foreclosed home and escorting its locked-out owner inside. The video, O'Keefe told the Washington Post, made him "upset."

For the past several years, reactionaries of every stripe have waged a relentless campaign aimed at delegitimizing ACORN, and the organization's manifold dysfunctions have given them a steady stream of ammunition. "When I was working for them we'd hired all these low-income people, and we couldn't even get them their paychecks on time," another former ACORN organizer told me. "We were losing really good employees. It comes from this place where there's so much work to do, we don't do logistics because there's always a crisis. But logistics matter."

SNIP

For all its organizational problems, ACORN does vital, indispensable, unglamorous work: it trains legions of organizers, builds grassroots leadership and wages disciplined and effective local and statewide campaigns, such as its minimum-wage effort in Florida in 2004.

But it is hardly the colossus of right-wing mythology. For proof of ACORN's meager influence, one need only look at the swift action by Congress to cut off its funding and compare that to the fate of other government contractors under a cloud of far more damning revelations. Like, for instance, Blackwater. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill has reported, a recent federal audit suggests that Blackwater may owe the government $55 million allegedly for failing to meet the terms of just one of its federal contracts. Five of its employees face murder charges for their role in the massacre of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Yet Blackwater's $217 million security contract in Iraq was just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. Or consider former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which received $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electrical wiring in Iraq; so far, sixteen soldiers and two contractors have died from electrocution from that wiring, precipitating a comprehensive Defense Department review. And in what was perhaps the most buried news story of the summer, there was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's $2.3 billion fraud settlement with the Justice Department for its illegal promotion of painkiller Bextra and other drugs. According to fedspending.org, Pfizer had more than $73 million in federal contracts in 2007 alone.

But the government contracts of Blackwater, KBR and Pfizer remain intact. (In a delicious bit of irony, the legislation defunding ACORN was written so broadly that Representative Alan Grayson and the Project on Government Oversight have compiled a list of firms they say fit the defunding criteria, and it reads like a Who's Who of the military-industrial complex.)

The disparity in the treatment of Blackwater et al. and ACORN is part of a larger American problem, what might be called the Inequality of Accountability. We diligently apply the principle of accountability to the poor and the powerless, and the principle of forgiveness to the wealthy and powerful.

Even before it was punked by a couple of right-wing twenty-somethings, nobody knew that better than ACORN.

After all, their members see it every day.

Read the whole thing.\

You often hear that the history of civil rights in this country is one long struggle to expand voting rights to all citizens.

I say the history of human rights in this country is one long struggle to stop rich people from fucking over poor people.

Sunday, September 20, 2009


Anti-ACORN: Because helping poor people should be illegal

I'm so used to the constant demonization of the poor in this country that I haven't been able to muster the appropriate outrage over the lies and false accusations against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Thank goodness for Joe Conason, who never stops calling out the poor-bashers.

The right-wing crusade against ACORN is a far bigger fraud than any misdeeds a few employees might have committed.

SNIP

Like so many conservative attacks, the crusade against ACORN has been highly exaggerated and even falsified to create a demonic image that bears little resemblance to the real organization. Working in the nation's poorest places, and hiring the people who live there, ACORN is not immune to the pathologies that can afflict institutions in those communities. As a large nonprofit handling many millions of dollars, it has suffered from mismanagement at the top as well -- although there is nothing unique in that, either.

Yet ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.) The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

SNIP

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator. Indeed, the indignation of the congressional Republicans screaming about ACORN and the phony streetwalker is diluted by the presence of at least two confirmed prostitution clients -- Rep. Ken Calvert and Sen. David Vitter -- in their midst. Neither of those right-wing johns has been even mildly chastised by their moralistic peers. Nobody is cutting off their federal funding.

ACORN has pledged to institute reforms, with the appointment of a distinguished outside panel to oversee that process. Let us hope they succeed. Even now they seem far more likely to improve their performance -- and to be more sincere in their intentions -- than the Washington hypocrites who are trying to destroy them.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Crooks and Liars.



ACORN and Accountability 

Capitolism

By Christopher Hayes

September 23, 2009



With the notable exception of handing over $700 billion to Wall Street last year, the United States Congress is not known for quick, decisive action. But recently, in a resounding bipartisan vote, members of both houses voted to deny federal dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN and its affiliates have received on average about $3.5 million a year from the government, or approximately one-millionth of this year's budget.
The votes came just a few days after the release of a series of (now infamous) videos in which young right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles pose as a pimp and a prostitute. They take a hidden camera to a number of ACORN tax preparation offices around the country seeking tax and business advice. (Why a pimp and prostitute? Who the hell knows. Neither answered my request for an interview.) The undercover duo provoked responses from ACORN staff that ranged from the unconscionable (an employee in Baltimore reacting to O'Keefe's plan to bring in thirteen Salvadoran girls as prostitutes with the suggestion he claim some as dependents) to the obviously sketchy (a Brooklyn tax adviser suggesting the couple put their cash profits in a can and bury it in the backyard) to the praiseworthy (the ACORN offices in Philadelphia called the cops and filed a police report)--O'Keefe and Giles haven't seen fit to post that tape. Mostly, though, the tapes are a testament to what might be called the Borat Effect: human beings' intense socialization to be helpful and not rock the boat, even when confronted with someone doing something objectionable, outrageous or preposterous.
But if the disconcerting contents of the videos were the proximate cause of ACORN's Congressional rebuke, it is the organization's mission that made it a target. Since the 1970s, ACORN has committed itself steadfastly to building power for poor people. "Unlike almost any other institution on the left," a former organizer told me, "they constantly gravitate toward the most fucked-over people." Not surprisingly, this makes America's right wing furious. O'Keefe says he was inspired to pull the stunt after watching a video that showed ACORN engaging in civil disobedience by breaking the padlock on a foreclosed home and escorting its locked-out owner inside. The video, O'Keefe told the Washington Post, made him "upset."
For the past several years, reactionaries of every stripe have waged a relentless campaign aimed at delegitimizing ACORN, and the organization's manifold dysfunctions have given them a steady stream of ammunition. "When I was working for them we'd hired all these low-income people, and we couldn't even get them their paychecks on time," another former ACORN organizer told me. "We were losing really good employees. It comes from this place where there's so much work to do, we don't do logistics because there's always a crisis. But logistics matter."
Last year news broke that the brother of Wade Rathke, who founded ACORN, had embezzled nearly $1 million. Rathke didn't disclose it to the board. The revelations precipitated a change in management and a much-needed self-evaluation, a process formalized by ACORN's announcement that former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger will "lead an independent inquiry into the organizational systems and processes surrounding the social services of the organization."
For all its organizational problems, ACORN does vital, indispensable, unglamorous work: it trains legions of organizers, builds grassroots leadership and wages disciplined and effective local and statewide campaigns, such as its minimum-wage effort in Florida in 2004.
But it is hardly the colossus of right-wing mythology. For proof of ACORN's meager influence, one need only look at the swift action by Congress to cut off its funding and compare that to the fate of other government contractors under a cloud of far more damning revelations. Like, for instance, Blackwater. As my colleague Jeremy Scahill has reported, a recent federal audit suggests that Blackwater may owe the government $55 million allegedly for failing to meet the terms of just one of its federal contracts. Five of its employees face murder charges for their role in the massacre of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Yet Blackwater's $217 million security contract in Iraq was just extended indefinitely by the Obama administration. Or consider former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which received $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electrical wiring in Iraq; so far, sixteen soldiers and two contractors have died from electrocution from that wiring, precipitating a comprehensive Defense Department review. And in what was perhaps the most buried news story of the summer, there was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's $2.3 billion fraud settlement with the Justice Department for its illegal promotion of painkiller Bextra and other drugs. According to fedspending.org, Pfizer had more than $73 million in federal contracts in 2007 alone.
But the government contracts of Blackwater, KBR and Pfizer remain intact. (In a delicious bit of irony, the legislation defunding ACORN was written so broadly that Representative Alan Grayson and the Project on Government Oversight have compiled a list of firms they say fit the defunding criteria, and it reads like a Who's Who of the military-industrial complex.)
The disparity in the treatment of Blackwater et al. and ACORN is part of a larger American problem, what might be called the Inequality of Accountability. We diligently apply the principle of accountability to the poor and the powerless, and the principle of forgiveness to the wealthy and powerful.
Even before it was punked by a couple of right-wing twenty-somethings, nobody knew that better than ACORN.
After all, their members see it every day.

They Gave Us a Republic noted a specialized USN transport was named after 

Medgar Evers The only thing appropriate about that - as far as I can tell in my ignorance - is that he was a man who fought for what he thought right ; and paid the price.

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