July 16, 2009 archive

Va. paper expresses regret for backing segregation

A Virginia newspaper is expressing regret for supporting the state’s fight to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch says in Thursday’s editorial that it played a central role in the “dreadful doctrine” of Massive Resistance _ a systematic campaign by Virginia’s white political leaders to block school desegregation. The newspaper says that “the record fills us with regret.”

The newspaper took the unusual step of promoting the editorial on its front page. It comes on the eve of a conference in Richmond marking the 50th anniversary of the end of Massive Resistance.

Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, writes in an opinion piece at the Washington Post that “it is time we were bold again in space.”

Aldrin’s vision, “Time to Boldly Go Once More“, advocates creating an American colony on Mars in 20 years. He believes if the United States space program “avoided the pitfall of aiming solely for the moon, we could be on Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight.”

Aldrin thinks NASA plans to re-explore the moon is a “dead end”. Instead, Aldrin says we should commit our nation to establishing “an American colony” on Mars.

1. The Hill reports Job worries for Obama at NAACP. “Some NAACP officials say the president’s general approach to the economy and unemployment has not gone far enough to address the specific concerns of the black community… One source said many in the black community have expressed frustration with the administration over the number of traditional Wall Street firms handling the funds’ disbursement.”

   With black unemployment rates nearly 5 percent higher than the national average, Obama’s standard line that growing the national economy as a whole “will lift all boats” won’t cut it with some NAACP members.

   “We heard that phrase from Ronald Reagan, and it isn’t necessarily so,” said NAACP board member Amos Brown.

   Brown said that he and others “would expect of [Obama] the same as we would any other president – to be involved in specifics and not generalities.”

   Mr. Brown, good luck with getting specifics from the president.

2. The LA Times reports Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson testifies that Merrill Lynch sale helped stave off ‘great peril’. Paulson tried to justify the “actions he and other Bush administration officials took during the crisis in conjunction with the Federal Reserve and other financial regulators… Paulson said the actions
   ‘were not perfect’ but ‘they saved this nation from great peril.'”

   Paulson claimed he was told not acting would have caused another Great Depression with “people in the streets” and global political instability. “I knew it was going to be very bad, and I didn’t want to experience very bad,” Paulson said.

   The NY Times adds Members of Congress say Paulson misled them. ‘Several lawmakers accused Mr. Paulson of misleading Congress about how government money in the banking bailout would be used.”

   Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, said the real issue was whether taxpayers should have aided the merger of Bank of America and Merrill. He calls the government’s $20 billion capital injection into the bank a “potentially illegal act.”

   Mr. Paulson repeatedly defended himself during the course of the hearing, saying at one point, “No one was more protective of the American taxpayer than I was.” …

   Representative Michael Turner, [an] Ohio Republican, called TARP “a crock” and the “largest theft in American history.”

   Along with Rep. Turner, the LA Times adds Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts, “accused Paulson of misleading Congress during its consideration of the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.”

   “If you had come up here with Mr. Bernanke and said, ‘I want to take [$700 billion] of taxpayer money and I want to give it to my pals in the nine biggest banks in America,’ how many votes do you think you would have got here?” Lynch told Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs. “That’s why in my opinion you misled Congress.”

Four at Four continues with Obama seeking to increase the size of the Army and an update from Afghanistan.

For those of us who are really concerned (obsessed) with the rule of law the revelations of the Cheney sponsored CIA Death Squads are the kind of thing which makes you want to curl up and rock back and forth while thinking of our happy place. It might be going a little under-thought about by most of the nation right now as we are focused on the Health Care bills and the ever diverting “Great Republican Melt Down” with Americas three current favorite clowns, Governor’s Palin and Sanford, and Sen. Ensign (The Family, NV) taking up all the oxygen but this is serious stuff we should be really concerned about.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

So according to the Washington Post, the Obama Administration is objecting to a provision in the 2010 defense funding bill that would bar the hiring of outside contractors for purposes of interrogations.

The provision, strongly backed by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), describes interrogations as an “inherently governmental function” that “cannot be transferred to contractor personnel.” It would give the Defense Department one year from the bill’s enactment to ensure that the military had the resources to comply with it.

We have seen the egregious consequences of privatization of governmental functions – all one has to do is mention KBR or Halliburton or Blackwater.  But why is the Obama Administration objecting to this provision?

CIA was a long way from Jason Bourne

The agency tried to assemble a team of anti-terrorist assassins. But officials could not solve logistical problems, including how to get close to targets while keeping U.S. involvement secret.

 By Greg Miller

July 16, 2009

Reporting from Washington — In movies, the CIA has so many prolifically lethal assassins roaming the world that the main problem often seems to be reining them in.

But details that spilled out this week about a real CIA assassination program indicate that when the plotting is being done by spies instead of screenwriters, the obstacles are not so easy to surmount.

According to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, the CIA spent seven years trying to assemble teams capable of killing the world’s most wanted terrorists but could never find a formula that worked.

The struggles came during a period in which the agency had been given unprecedented authority and resources, and a cause — responding to the Sept. 11 attacks — with broad public support.

High-Born Prussians Who Defied Their Origin

ABROAD

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: July 15, 2009

BERLIN – Monday is the anniversary of the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler, and services will be held here, as they are every year, where the conspirators were executed. Among those remembered, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg may not ring many bells these days outside Germany, or even inside it. Others came to be famously associated with the plot. But as the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote, “Schulenburg was the inner driving force of the conspiracy.”

Schulenburg’s sister, Countess Elisabeth von der Schulenburg – Tisa, as she was called – was an artist. They constituted an extraordinary pairing.

The Schulenburgs were a very old, very high Prussian clan, staunchly Nazi, and as such a reminder of the complexity of families, not least German ones, aristocratic or otherwise. Their story is a cautionary tale about judging history, or a people, any people, in black and white.

Note Docudharma Times will not appear tomorrow as I “must” attend an Enkai

I think a lot of the wrongheaded thinking on both sides of the discussion about the “economic crisis” is that people keep calling it a “crisis”. This is a word that’s abused almost as much as the word “tragedy”. A crisis is a short, sharp event or series of events. And when it’s done, things get back to normal. If — as I strongly suspect — the capitalist system is collapsing into a much smaller economic ball (a collapsing star, if you will), then the unemployment numbers and the nosediving housing situation and the freezing of formerly free-flowing credit are nothing more (or less) than the new normal. Perhaps, going forward, 10% + unemployment is going to be normal (it already is in the EU). Perhaps, going forward, those houses that popped in “value” from $500K to 1.5 mil in a few years will stay at their real value (say, $200K)and never regain their former puffed-up “value”. Perhaps, going forward, credit of all kinds will not be freely available to one and all, and the engine of American consumerism — which has always, at its base, been built on the mad flow of credit — will slow down permanently to the more sedate levels we saw when people put things on layaway instead of whipping out their Platinum Card.

Perhaps this is the new normal. Perhaps this is how we live from now on. Perhaps.