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Jun 12 2010
Alvin Greene for the United States Senate! (Updated)
Alvin Greene said he won the Democratic U.S. Senate primary by crisscrossing South Carolina to stump, but he refused Thursday to name a single place he’d visited.
He said he put $2,000 of his own money in the race, but had only one campaign flier to show, and was reluctant to part with it.
The state’s highest-profile Democrat, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, called for investigations into how Greene paid his $10,400 filing fee, his lack of federal election reporting and how he managed to capture almost 60 percent of Tuesday’s vote without campaigning.
Harharharhar!!!
At last the Democrats have nominated a candidate entirely untainted by their miserable record as corporate suck-ups and roll-over puppies for the neo-con agenda!
Hurrah!
(And I’m not the only one cheering!)
If this 32 year-old man without a cell phone or computer, who has never held any political office, has no job and is “on the not-guilty side” of a felony charge, can become the Democratic nominee for Senate from South Carolina, then literally anyone can. That means me, or you, or that guy on the street corner who talks to cats.
Alvin Greene has broken down the last barrier, a barrier some refer to as “being somewhat qualified to hold office.” Now, with $114 in his campaign account, no job, unclear funding sources and “involuntary” discharges from the Army and Air Force, he is ready to take on the system.
This is the greatest political story of my generation! But it won’t have a happy ending without you, my friends!
So break open those piggy-banks and make a contribution to Alvin Greene’s campaign for the United States Senate from South Carolina…
…just as soon as he has a campaign, or a website, or a campaign fund, or…
Whatever!
…………………………………………………………………………..
Update: After staring at this story for 24 hours without anything like an idea, it finally occurred to me that there’s always an alternative to paying a big-time filing fee if you want to run for public office, and since one of the questions that everybody in the MSM echo-chamber is asking is…
How did Greene come up with a $10,400 filing fee to run in the Democratic primary, it might be more worthwhile to ask…
Why bother?
Why pay $10K when there’s always an exception for indigent candidates? Otherwise an un-Constitutional qualification for office by wealth will have been surreptitiously imposed!
For example, in Bullock v. Carter the Supreme Court ruled that…
It seems appropriate that a primary system designed to give the voters some influence at the nominating stage should spread the cost among all of the voters in an attempt to distribute the influence without regard to wealth. Viewing the myriad governmental functions supported from general revenues, it is difficult to single out any of a higher order than the conduct of elections at all levels to bring
Page 405 U. S. 149
forth those persons desired by their fellow citizens to govern. Without making light of the State’s interest in husbanding its revenues, we fail to see such an element of necessity in the State’s present means of financing primaries as to justify the resulting incursion on the prerogatives of voters.
(3)
Since the State has failed to establish the requisite justification for this filing fee system, we hold that it results in a denial of equal protection of the laws. It must be emphasized that nothing herein is intended to cast doubt on the validity of reasonable candidate filing fees or licensing fees in other contexts. By requiring candidates to shoulder the costs of conducting primary elections through filing fees and by providing no reasonable alternative means of access to the ballot, the State of Texas has erected a system that utilizes the criterion of ability to pay as a condition to being on the ballot, thus excluding some candidates otherwise qualified and denying an undetermined number of voters the opportunity to vote for candidates of their choice These salient features of the Texas system are critical to our determination of constitutional invalidity.
And likewise at all times and in all places where a filing fee which many people could not afford to pay has been imposed.
Jun 10 2010
A Longer and Wronger Way Home from “Obama’s War”
Among many other recent innovations, including a “featured advertiser,” Pheedo, which showed up like news on their RSS feed today, the Washington Post has been calling the war in Afghanistan “Obama’s War” for the past few months, and in case you wonder what that never-ending mess is all about, they add a helpful sub-title…
Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan
So we were apparently “combatting extremism” in Marjah when we reduced that primitive hamlet to rubble, and the very bad new news on top of all the other very bad old news about that brutal operation is that it was…
Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines.
Firefights between insurgents and security forces occur daily, resulting in more Marine fatalities and casualties over the past month than in the first month of the operation, which began in mid-February.
Firefights every day! More and more US casualties!
It’s like some kind of nightmare joke! A Marine blogger at Military Times calls Marjah a petting zoo in Hell!
And that’s a scene from Marjah! Look at it! One shack, one Marine, and one crazy dog!
So this total honking failure has finally inspired General Stanley A. McChrystal with some second thoughts about running the same kind of operation in Kandahar.
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is finding himself squeezed between a ticking clock and an enemy that won’t go away.
On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.
And meanwhile Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was extending another deadline…
“All of us, for our publics, are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway,” Gates said Wednesday during a visit to London to meet with British leaders.
Is our strategy “on the right track?”
We won’t “know” until the end of the year!
Harharharhar!!!
Jun 07 2010
Obama Bitch-Bitch-Bitches About BP
President Obama, speaking from Louisiana today, criticized BP for spending big money on television advertising and shareholder dividends, suggesting the company was prioritizing its own interests over those of Gulf residents.
Every day it’s something different! Yesterday it was TV ads, last week it was crime!
“We have an obligation to investigate what went wrong,” Obama said. “If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice.”
If our laws were broken?
BP was cited by OSHA for 760 egregious willful violations between June 2007 and February 2010!
Egregious! Meaning “flagrant, outstandingly bad!”
Willful! Meaning it wasn’t some sort of “oopsie, we didn’t mean to do it!”
760!
That’s 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years!
My solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice.
So what are you waiting for?
Round ’em up! Lock ’em up in Guantanamo! Throw away the key!
BP also killed 15 people in Texas in 2005, and the case was still pending when Obama walked into the Oval Office in 2009.
In 2009, the British-based company paid $87.43 million for a single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violation for willful negligence that led to the deaths of 15 workers in a 2005 explosion at a Texas refinery. BP handed over $50 million to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the same crime.
BP paid Obama a couple of fines for the criminally negligent homicide of 15 workers, and the $137 million total of those fines amounted to BP’s profits for two whole days, at $6 billion per quarter, $2 billion per month, $66 million per day!
So Barack Obama isn’t exactly a hanging judge when it comes to punishing corporate criminals, even for homicide, and I guess it isn’t suprising that all he does is bitch, bitch, bitch, while the Gulf of Mexico fills up with oil.
But wasn’t this a perfect time to turn around the Republican meme that the federal government is always the problem, and never the solution for any problem?
Wasn’t this a perfect time to put the best and brightest in one big room, and keep them locked up until they solved this goddamned problem?
The federal government of the United States put a man on the moon!
And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?
The federal government of the United States defeated two enormous industrial and military powers in WWII!
And now all Obama can do is bitch, bitch, bitch?
Jun 05 2010
Apocalypse on the Beach, and Al Capone in Afghanistan
Most of the cops I know don’t use language from the Book of Revelation to describe a crime scene, but P.J. Hahn, a candidate for Chief of Police in Kenner, Louisiana and currently director of coastal zone management for Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, somehow rose to the occasion as an enormous orange slick washed up on his local beach.
The oil has reached the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. It has turned marshlands into death zones for wildlife and stained beaches rust and crimson. Some said it brought to mind the plagues and punishments of the Bible.
“In Revelations it says the water will turn to blood,” said P.J. Hahn, director of coastal zone management for Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. “That’s what it looks like out here – like the Gulf is bleeding. This is going to choke the life out of everything.”
And meanwhile in Afghanistan, let me introduce you to Matiullah Khan!
Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster – and sometimes even supplant – ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.
His main effort – and his biggest money maker – is securing the chaotic highway linking Kandahar to Tirin Kot for NATO convoys. His company charges each NATO cargo truck $1,200 for safe passage, or $800 for smaller ones, his aides say. His income, according to one of his aides, is $2.5 million a month, an astronomical sum in a country as impoverished as this one.
In some cases, these strongmen have restored order, though at the price of undermining the very institutions Americans are seeking to build: government structures like police forces and provincial administrations that one day are supposed to be strong enough to allow the Americans and other troops to leave.
This is a full-tilt protection racket, on the model of Al Capone’s “safe streets” in Cicero Illinois, where nobody would mess with you, as long as you played ball with Big Al.
A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a criminal group or individual coerces other less powerful entities to pay money, allegedly for protection services against external threats (usually violence or property damage, and sometimes perpetrated by the racketeers themselves).
In this case, the “other less powerful entities” include NATO and the United States.
Jun 03 2010
Obama Makes Angry Faces About the Oil-Spill
Ever since Barack Obama found some oil on a beach…
He has been trying to look angry, but he just looks weird!
So it would probably be better if he stuck with his usual expressions…
“I would like to thank the Academy for this award as Cutest President Ever!”
…and left making angry faces to really angry people like Britney Spears.
Jun 01 2010
Obama/BP’s Big Lies About the Big Spill
Since both the Obama administration and BP have an obvious interest in under-estimating the amount of oil which Deepwater Horizon has already dumped into the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t surprising that everything these partners in crime produce for public consumption is bullshit.
On Thursday, U.S. Geological Survey director Marcia McNutt announced that the Flow Rate Technical Group — a panel of scientists from government and academia — had determined that the overall best initial estimate for the rate of flow from the leak was between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil per day.
But it was impossible for members of the team that analyzed the oil plume video to estimate the upper boundary of the oil spilled, according to the Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Steven Wereley, a researcher at Purdue University.
Wereley and Leifer were both members of that team, and Leifer participated in the satellite image analysis as well. Both researchers say that the seven minutes of video that BP provided to the plume team was not sufficient to estimate the upper boundary of the amount of oil — only to give a lower-end estimate.
“What everyone on the panel agreed was that due to the low-quality data BP provided to us, it would be irresponsible and unscientific to estimate an upper bound to the emission,” said Leifer. “So what we presented in the [plume team] report is a range of expert opinions on what the lower bound is.”
Wereley said he was surprised to see the estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels and was “disappointed” with the way that the press release was phrased.
“I was really confused when I read the press release yesterday,” he said. “I had to read it several times.”
So the figures which are quoted all over the media with the phony appearance of upper and lower bounds, “between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil per day,” really only apply to the lower bound, and the best independent estimate of the upper bound remains the figure which Professor Steve Werely provided for NPR on May 20:
100,000 barrels per day, and at 42 gallons per barrel, that’s….
4,000,000 gallons per day.
If we split the difference between that upper bound and the lower bound from the USGS, we arrive at a middle-of-the-road estimate…
60,000 barrels per day, and that’s…
2,400,000 gallons per day.
And that produces a middle-of-the-road estimate that the total amount of oil which Deepwater Horizon has already dumped into the Gulf of Mexico in 42 days is about…
100,000,000 gallons already!
That’s almost ten times as much as the Exxon Valdez, but what the heck!
Who’s counting?
May 31 2010
Obama’s Oil-and-Water Bipartisanship
Excerpts from Obama’s Oil-and-Water speech yesterday in New Orleans…
What is striking about today’s debate about oil and water mixing in the Gulf of Mexico is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s – in arguments that go back forty years or more.
In the early years of the environmental movement and opposition to the offshore drilling, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of Big Oil of being hippy tree-huggers.
Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of corporate America itself – by defacing Exxon signs; by blaming Shell Oil for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor the CEO’s who enrich us all by enriching themselves.
Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views – these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that concern for the environment does not make you a hippy tree-hugger, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America’s corporate hierarchy.
And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments – a fact most evident during our recent debates about oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, when those who opposed offshore drilling were tagged by some as eco-freaks, and a corporation providing its full resources to shut down the leak was accused of criminal negligence.
Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions.
May 30 2010
Democratic and Republican Scum-Bags for US Senate from Illinois
The Republican candidate for President Obama’s old Senate seat inaccurately claimed to have received the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for service during NATO’s conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.
The New York Times is even more euphemistic about this lying shit-head.
Mark S. Kirk, the Republican candidate seeking the United States Senate seat once held by President Obama, has acknowledged that his official biography incorrectly listed a prestigious military award that he never received.
Incorrectly listed? Inaccurately claimed?
“I was the Navy’s intelligence officer of the year in 1998” is how this shameless skank described himself in a Congressional budget hearing in 2002.
But in reality it was only Kirk’s unit which receved a citation from the National Military Intelligence Association, and “the citation does not mention Kirk and instead designates the entire Intelligence Division Electronic Attack Wing at Aviano,” and although the same NMIA awards many individual citations every year, none of them went to Kirk.
This wasn’t an inaccurate claim or an incorrect listing. It was a lie about the only and unreal distinction on this chump’s résumé, but if the Times and Post started throwing around words like “liar” in Washington, there’s a small chance idiotic voters might look around for a better alternative to major parties which habitually nominate liars like Mark Kirk and stooges for organized crime like the Democratic contender for the US Senate from Illinois, Alexi Giannoulias.
Regulators have seized the Chicago community bank owned by the family of Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic nominee seeking the Illinois seat once held by President Barack Obama.
Giannoulias touted his experience as a senior loan officer there as a key credential in his 2006 bid for the treasurer’s office, though once elected he downplayed his role there after reports emerged of dubious loans and financial dealings with organized crime members and convicted political fixer Antoin Rezko.
Now Giannoulias claims that all those bad things only began to happen after he left the bank to run Illinois State Treasurer in 2006, and…
He clung to that position to deflect questions about the bank’s dealings with questionable characters, including two organized crime figures who borrowed $20 million from Broadway from 2004 to 2006.
And what state wouldn’t be delighted to have a state treasurer or US Senator whose family bank was in bed with the mob while he was a senior loan officer?
But maybe Giannoulias didn’t know anything about anything! Maybe he’s an idiot, instead of a crook!
He’s said that as VP he oversaw all of Broadway’s lending–but he’s also said he was really just the guy who serviced the bank’s loans–overseeing things like billing and payment collection– while more senior officers, including his older brother Demetris, negotiated the deals and made the final decisions. When I pressed him to specify his job descriptions at each stage of his employment at the bank, he laughed.
“You have to understand that it was the family business–I did everything there,” he said.
And now for the good news!
The Green Party candidate for the US Senate from Illinois is not a liar or stooge for the mob, and instead worked his way out of poverty with a career in journalism beginning at the tender age of 13!
LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent.
“How much money did the American economy lose because of the derivatives and the credit default swaps?” he asked. “There have been only two men prosecuted for that level of crime, Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford. How much is the drug industry worth in the United States? It is not worth $45 trillion. How many African-American and Hispanic men are incarcerated for being the same kind of capitalist? If we swap dope for derivatives there wouldn’t be a Wall Street because they would be behind bars. If we prosecute derivatives the same way you prosecute dope, which is not different in how it undermines a family, Wall Street wouldn’t exist.”
But who wants to waste a vote on a guy like LeAlan Jones, when you could vote for a Democratic scum-bag or a Republican scum-bag instead?
LeAlan Jones for US Senate from Illinois!
May 29 2010
“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”
Ronald Reagan once claimed that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
But of course that senile stooge for Big Money got it wrong. The nine most terrifying words in any language are…
“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”
My update of the Reagan Doctrine (insofar as that senile stooge ever had a “doctrine,” or even an idea, except stooging for Big Money) occurred to me when Baghdad was selected as the worst city in the world on the Mercer 2010 Quality of Life Survey.
After seven years of beneficent American occupation!
And Baghdad had to beat out some real humdingers among messed up cities to win that prize!
More messed up than Khartoum?
You betcha!
This was reminiscent of some recent headlines from Afghanistan, selected by Save the Children as the worst place in the world to be born. The worst place to be a mother! The worst place to be a child!
After nine long years of American “assistance!”
May 28 2010
I am the crossbow cannibal. My name is Uniqlo.
Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai, above, is worth over $9 billion.
From New York Magazine…
Every day, at every Uniqlo worldwide, customer advisers repeat what are known as “the six standard phrases,” which they are expected to use while on the floor.
The first and third “standard phrases” are…
“Hello, my name is Uniqlo, how are you today?”
“Let me know if you need anything. My name is Uniqlo.“
Every office at Uniqlo displays the same poster.
ALWAYS FOLLOW COMPANY DIRECTION.
DO NOT WORK IN YOUR OWN WAY.
And from the New York Times…
A memorial for the three women Stephen Griffiths is accused of killing outside his home in Bradford, England.
In a grisly case that British newspapers have compared to the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1970s, the police on Thursday charged a 40-year-old man pursuing a Ph.D. in 19th-century homicides with the murders of three women identified by the police as prostitutes.
One victim was caught on closed-circuit television last week being killed with a crossbow shot to the head before her dismembered body was dumped in a nearby river.
At his arraignment, Mr. Griffiths replied to the standard questions…
What is your name?
I am the crossbow cannibal.
What is your address?
Here, I guess.
May 27 2010
Good News from the Gulf, and the Next Big Lie (Second Update)
Engineers have stopped the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government’s top oil-spill commander, U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.
That’s the very good news! And now…
The “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting.
Allen also said that, later Thursday, an interagency team would release a revised estimate of how much oil had flowed from the well into the gulf before the “top kill” effort began.
Think of yourself as a turtle on the information super-highway. It took a long, long time for you to find out anything about how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon.
But now a semi-truck full of bullshit is rolling down that highway at a hundred miles per hour, and it’s aimed at you, little turtle!
The pressure from the well was very low, he said…
And a very low estimate of total damage is on the way!
But what if BP hadn’t blocked access to the well-head for five long weeks, so nobody except BP could measure the “pressure from the well,” way back when the pressure from the well was high enough to blow down Deepwater Horizon?
What kind of estimate of total flow would some pointy-headed independent scientists have produced, when that godawful leak was young and frisky?
We info-turtles will never know.
And why did BP waste so much time with preposterous gew-gaws like the “top hat” instead of applying the “top kill” right away?
We info-turtles will never know.
Update: And now suddenly on the video feed you can see an ugly mess of mud and who knows what boiling out of the pipes!
But I might as well mention (since it wasn’t obvious enough for some people) that the main subject of my diary is what comes next, in the form of low-ball estimates of the damage.
There are plenty of ROVs out there which can operate at 5,000 feet, and if anyone in the chain of command had wanted a better estimate than eye-balling a video feed allows, we would already have some real measurements, instead of a very fuzzy collection of videos.
But now it doesn’t really matter what anybody sends down to the well-head! The flow has been radically diminished, at the very least, and there’s essentially nothing left to measure.
Second Update: And now of course it has all gone backward, and BP has suspended their “top kill.”.
BP had to halt its ambitious effort to plug its stricken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday afternoon when engineers saw that too much of the drilling fluid they were injecting into the well was escaping along with the leaking crude oil.