BartBlog

August 6, 2010

The Tattlesnake – Who’s Watching the Watchers? Edition

Or, in the Maxine Waters case, investigating the investigators.

Rep. Maxine Waters’ (D-CA) three ethics charges, so far as I’ve read, involved talking to Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in 2008, asking him to try and make sure a bank that helps poor people and women, OneUnited, got its fair share of the bailout money. True, her husband was previously on the bank’s board, and he retained stock at the time, but she didn’t threaten or in any way coerce Paulson improperly – she just asked. If this is the hoary ethics violations the Big Media is getting so hot-and-bothered about, then they’d better start charging nearly every member of Congress with a similar lapse of ethics, because a whole passel of Republicans and Dems did the same thing. Waters herself has stated: “The record will clearly show that in advocating on behalf of minority banks, neither my office nor I benefited in any way, engaged in improper action or influenced anyone.”

It’s worth noting that progressive Democrat Waters sits on the House Financial Services Committee that drafted get-tough legislation on banks and pushed for strong consumer protection from these miscreants. At least we know the Big Banksters would definitely not be sorry to see her go.

It’s interesting that of eight investigations or charges made by the House ‘independent’ ethics committee, all of them are against members of the Democratic Black Caucus. As Eugene Robinson said the other night, the notion that only black Democrats would be involved in unethical conduct is statistically astronomical.

It’s also interesting that one of the senior members of this ‘independent’ House ethics committee is co-chair Porter J. Goss, former rabid in-the-tank Bushite Congressman and, in Congress and as head of the CIA, a man who had considerable ethics problems himself.

Some of Porter Goss’ ‘greatest hits’:

– As head of the House Intelligence Committee, former CIA employee Goss said he could find no wrongdoing in leaking covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the media that warranted a Congressional investigation. He ‘joked’ if you could find him a “blue dress with some DNA” he’d open an investigation into who in the Bush Administration leaked her name; short of that, he apparently didn’t care.

– On illegal torture: “March 18, 2005, Reuters reported that Porter Goss ‘defended his spy agency’s current interrogation practices but could not say all methods used as recently as last December conformed to U.S. law.’” And then did nothing to ensure future conduct conformed to U.S. law.

– When Bush-appointee Goss took over the CIA in September 2004, bringing with him his partisan Bush team from Congress, veteran CIA employees with a combined 300 years of intelligence experience resigned or were forced out after his installation. The weakened CIA under Goss then went into “free fall” according to senior House Intelligence Committee Democrat Jane Harman. In other words, Goss was willing to sacrifice the CIA’s mission of non-partisan collection and processing of intelligence to protect America to serve his Republican political agenda.

– On May 5, 2006, Goss resigned under a cloud as Director of the CIA after his handpicked man Kyle “Dusty” Foggo’s Hookergate scandal came to light. Through Foggo, Goss was also connected to disgraced Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham who admitted to and apologized for taking bribes from defense contractors.

“‘Something happened,’ neo-conservative magazine editor William Kristol said on Fox News this afternoon. ‘It’s going to be a bad few days. We’re going to discover something … It will be something not good for the Bush Administration.’ Fox News actually got a phone call from a ‘top White House official’ during Kristol’s damning comments, and Kristol was cut off so Bush mouthpiece Chris Wallace could say the Goss resignation is just a harmless part of the ‘White House shakeup.’”
– Sploid, by way of MediaCynic.com, commenting the day Goss resigned.

Also let’s keep in mind that Goss’ honesty was vouchsafed by no less than Bush confabulator and White House flack Dan Bartlett: “This man has impeccable integrity.” If Bartlett says it, we can pretty much conclude the exact opposite is true – it’s like having one’s veracity on the Iraq invasion endorsed by Dick Cheney.

Gee, I wonder if Maxine Waters had refused to investigate evidence of treason in the White House, turned a blind eye to illegal torture, degraded the CIA’s intelligence-gathering capabilities due to political partisanship, and was connected to a major bribery scandal which caused a Congressman to quit in disgrace along with senior CIA officials she’d hired, if she would be eligible to sit on any future House ethics committees?

As Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic DC delegate to Congress, told Ed Schultz on Tuesday, these are allegations, not convictions, and Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and anyone else charged with ethics violations have the right to defend themselves in a public hearing rather than resign and appear guilty.

In the meantime, the questions remain: Who would appoint a flagrant Bush hack like Goss to a supposedly independent ethics panel and, most importantly, who’s watching the watchers here?

© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.

August 5, 2010

The GOP Jobs Plan – Just Kidding, They Don’t Have One!

cartoon-gop-jobs-plan

August 4, 2010

69 Americans who will not see another August sunset

Filed under: Uncategorized — Greg in cheeseland @ 5:29 pm

Author’s note: I am not sure how to post this one on the blog here…it’s really long. Let’s start with this, a poem…

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Excerpt:
The words of Dr. McCrae, written in 1915 after witnessing the death of his friend, have as much relevance today as they did then. July was the deadliest month for Americans in Afghanistan since the war began almost nine years ago. And there is no end in sight.
President Obama marked the beginning of August with a speech, stating that:

Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future. To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe-haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s Security Forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.


It is, however, unclear how this “goal” and these “objectives” can be attained without either the full cooperation of the Afghan people, a never-ending U.S. military presence, or both. Meanwhile, the members of the armed services who put their lives on the line every day are paying to achieve these ambiguous goals and unclear objectives with their lives.

Here are a few of their names…

Cpl. Larry Donell Harris Jr., age 24, Thornton, Colorado. 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force. Died while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on July 1, 2010. Following a rifle volley at Fort Logan National Cemetery, a Marine took the American flag off Larry Donell Harris Jr.’s silver casket, folded it and placed it on the lap of his weeping wife. The Harris’ had only been married for four months.

Spc. Morganne Marie McBeth, age 19, Fredricksburg, Virginia. Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Special Troops Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. Died on July 2, 2010, in Al Asad, Iraq, of wounds sustained in a non-combat related incident in Khan Al Baghdadi, Iraq, on July 1, 2010. “Morganne treated all of her patients with unsurpassed compassion, regardless of their injury or illness severity,” said 1st Lt. Abraham Medina Jr. “Morganne’s vivid smile and attitude were contagious. Regardless of how rough your day may have been, if Morganne entered the room you were going to smile. Her spunky character and selflessness will be remembered by all who were privileged enough to have met her.”

Capt. David Anthony Wisniewski, age 31, Moville, Iowa. 66th Rescue Squadron, 563rd Rescue Group, 23rd Wing. Wisniewski died July 2, 2010, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, of wounds sustained when his HH-60G Pave Hawk rescue helicopter was shot down near Forward Operating Base Jackson in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on June 9, 2010. Four other airmen also were killed in the crash. His brother, Craig, said Dave had his sights set on flying helicopters ever since their grandfather took them to Offutt Air Force Base, Neb. “As we left, he tugged on my grandpa’s shirt tail and said, ‘You know what grandpa? One day I’m going to do that. I’m going to fly one of those things.’ ”

Staff Sgt. Christopher Francis Cabacoy, age 30, Virginia Beach, Virginia. B Troop, 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division. One of two soldiers killed when insurgents attacked their vehicle with a roadside bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on July 5, 2010. The last contact from Cabacoy to his family came on Facebook, just three days before he was killed. He told his wife, Tami, “I love you and can’t wait to see you.” And to his little boy Aidan, he wrote “Keep growing and be good, I love you.”

Pfc. Michael Shane Pridham, age 19, Louisville, Kentucky. Company D, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment. One of three soldiers killed when insurgents attacked their vehicle with a roadside bomb in Qalat, Afghanistan, on July 6, 2010. Pridham’s wife, 17-year-old Deidre, says it’s all hard to believe. “He would always tell me, I’m coming home. Don’t worry, I promise I’m coming home. I knew something was wrong because there were two army men in my house. But, it just felt kinda like a dream…like a nightmare.” Deidre and Michael got married just days before Michael was deployed. Michael was supposed to be back home in just six weeks, close to when the couple is expecting their first child. Deidre says Michael would always talk about how much he was looking forward to coming home and “he asked about the baby all the time.”

Lance Cpl. Daniel Gabriel Raney, age 21, Pleasant View, Tennessee. 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force. Died while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on July 9, 2010. Penny Riley said, “One of the last things he said to me was ‘I can’t wait to come home and take my baby brother and my cousin Kody to the movies.’” Penny said she was notified of her son’s death just one day after she found out he was to be home for a visit in August. “It was a happy day. We were all so ecstatic and happy because we got a homecoming date. Then I came home and there was this vehicle in my driveway. At first, I thought they were lost, but then I looked at the car tag and noticed it was government. I saw the green uniforms. I screamed ‘no!’ of course, and I ran to the back seat of the car to pick up my 11-year-old, who was crumpled over already. I don’t remember much else after that.”

I know…I am preaching to the choir here on the bartblog, so no need to go through all 69 of them.

Almost every day young Americans are dying in these wars. 69 may not sound like a large number when given a 30-second sound byte or a few sentences, but it is very large when ones looks into the lives that each and every one of these individuals could have had. The casualty list above does not include the 123 soldiers of other nations that have died in these wars this year or the 85 U.S. troops wounded in July.

There are now 5629 U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, each with their their own story, a life and loved ones they have left behind. 5629 families without fathers or mothers, sons or daughters this August, as well as the tens of thousands that have been horribly wounded in these wars. With all the other problems that this nation faces today, is it not about time to end this insanity?

Many Americans voted for a leader that promised to bring an end to the wars, yet nothing substantive has been done toward that end. Meanwhile, the corporate media buries news about the wars, leaving these brave young men and women to die with a hardly a mention to their names. They deserve more. We as a nation deserve more.

Read more, read all the names and links here: Madison Independent Examiner – 69 Americans in Flanders Fields.

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel & Iraq: America’s favorite money pits

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Jane Stillwater @ 2:16 pm

Yesterday my two-year-old granddaughter Mena and I were completely at logger-heads. She’d already stubbornly refused to make nice at the library, a restaurant and an olive-tasting party — and now she was refusing to take a bath. Ah, two-year-olds. I’m too old for this!

“But Jane,” someone advised me, “she’s obviously rebelling against you because she is bored. She’s tired of doing little-kid things and now she wants to do big-kid things.” I’ll just bet that she does. And what kind of big-kid things does she have in mind? Declare wars, get drunk, pollute the air and/or lobby to corrupt our politicians?

“What that kid needs is to go to a pre-school.” Hey, you might be right. So I trudged off to look at pre-schools for Mena.

There’s a neighborhood pre-school right down the block from me, the Martin Luther King Child Development Center, that is run by our school district and serves as an inexpensive daycare provider for working parents who might otherwise not be able to afford safe and decent daycare. My son Joe went there 30 years ago — and the place is still going strong. So I went over to see if I could enroll Mena there too. No luck. “There’s a really good chance that we will be permanently closing our doors forever on August 31,” said one of the school’s teachers. “The State is cutting our funding.” What?

Let me get this straight. California is going to cut its funding for daycare for working parents and then said working parents are going to get fired because they can’t show up for work without daycare — and then all these working parents will be forced to go on unemployment? And this saves the state money how? That’s totally stupid.

“But government shouldn’t be paying for people’s daycare,” you might say. Well why not? We already pay for billionaires’ tax breaks — even though statistics prove that for every corporatist billionaire created by outsourcing or subsidized weapons manufacturing or Wall Street bailouts or tax breaks for the uber-rich, approximately 100,000 working-class Americans sink below our country’s poverty line. If we are going to flat-out subsidize billionaires, why can’t we also subsidize daycare for people who actually do pay taxes?

And speaking of layoffs and things that our government should or should not be spending money on, apparently it’s not okay for our government to spend money on police and fire protection either. Oakland just laid off80 cops and San Jose just laid off 53 firefighters. But if spending money on that stuff is also a no-no, then what exactly SHOULD our government spend money on? Apparently nothing — except for corporate welfare and wars.

I remember back in the day when the United States used to have all kinds of surplus money — more than enough to fund education, infrastructure improvement, libraries, firefighters, cops and even daycare. But what happened to all that surplus money? Where did it all disappear to? Hmmm. As far as I can tell, an awful lot of it has been vacuumed off into America’s all-time four favorite money pits — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Iraq.

Little did we know when the Twin Towers were destroyed back in 2001 that what we were watching on the television screen was not just two buildings being destroyed but also the United States economy’s destruction. It took mere hours for the World Trade Center to fall. And it took almost a decade for our economy to fall after it. But the causes were the same — and the results were the same. We were sold a bill of goods and conned into spending our money on guns instead of butter. And now there are guns everywhere but there’s no butter — and no pre-schools either.

Sorry, Mena. You are just going to have to be bored. And if we don’t stop shoveling trillions of dollars into America’s favorite money pits in the Middle East, by the time you’re an adult, one of the big-kid things you’re gonna be doing is standing in an unemployment line.

August 3, 2010

The National Enflatulator – With Immigration, the GOP Flogs Another Election-Year Distraction

cartoon-national-enflatulator

August 2, 2010

Farewell to Kodachrome

Filed under: Guest Comment — Tags: , , , , — Bob Patterson @ 4:03 pm

On the last Saturday in July of 2010, this columnist stumbled on a yard sale in Berkeley CA, that provided a chance to purchase cassette tapes at the incredibly low, low price of a quarter each and since there were a good many tracks from artists who were synonymous with the sixties, we glommed on to almost three dozen. That evening, while listening to the music, we thought of the fact that the last place in the United States that offers development for Kodachrome film will cease that service at the end of this year. That, in turn, prompted this columnist to realize that an old way of looking at the world would soon be shut down. Hmm. We started to wonder if the commencement speaker at our college graduation ceremony had warned us about how grim things were going to be forty-five years later. The class of 1965 had every reason to believe and expect that the era of unlimited growth and prosperity was at hand and that we could record the spectacle on Kodachrome for posterity. With the death of Kodachrome, it seems that people will have to adopt (both literally and figuratively) a new way of seeing the world. In May of 1965, the uber-optimistic commencement speaker sure didn’t lay it on about “no more Vietnams” because it wasn’t until the start of the following month that LBJ decided to send some Marine Divisions there to straighten up the mess.

The British Invasion back then meant Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five (how many members of that group can you name?), and Petula Clark, and not oily tar balls and dispersants.

The marvel of Kodachrome was that it used dyes and not an emulsion that produced grain which was a primitive chemical based form of pixilation. The difference between Kodachrome and Tri-X was similar to the difference between analogue (no pixels) and digital (grainy) music.

If the commencement speaker had told the class of ’65 that the United States was going to suffer a metaphorical Dien Bien Phu in the next ten years, he would have been laughed off the stage. If he has told this columnist, that within six months he would walk the streets of Casablanca, the young man would (most likely) have said: “Of all the gin joints in all the world . . . .”and had a good laugh.

One member of that particular class had been killed in a car wreck that happened between the end of final exams and the Sunday ceremony. At least one more was killed in Vietnam before the class of 1966 got to hear their commencement speech. Another fellow from the class of 1965 came back from Vietnam, used some of the money he had earned there to buy a high performance Corvette and learned it was more car than he could handle. Over the ensuing years, one recurring though has been to wonder (if time travel were possible) what it would be like to travel back in time to Berlin for the Christmas of 1938 and warn the German’s what lay ahead.

As July of 2010 became August, we read a piece by Ted Rall grumbling about how he is having a difficult time getting editors interested in stories relating to their audiences, just how things are going in Afghanistan. We realized that any time travel trip back to Berlin for the 1938 Christmas season would be an exercise in futility. “I’d sing out danger, I sing out warning . . .” and get the Sounds of Silence.

If you search diligently into the history of television, you will find that in Germany from 1936 to (approximately) 1943, there was a nightly newscast featuring officially state sanctioned information available to the few owners of TV sets in that city. The US has Fox News and they had lies from Wolfschanze.

One of the items we picked up was a copy of a Roy Orbison album titled King of Hearts. If we like Orbison so much how could we have missed a whole album? We wondered what else may have slipped under our cultural radar in the last forty-five years.

In college, we had used a 4X5 Speed Graphic to get photos for the 64 and 65 yearbooks. We had spent some time making extreme enlargements from small (about the size of a 35mm negative) portion of the image on the piece of sheet film (remember the notches code?) and so when we now say that carrying a Nikon Coolpix around in our pocket makes us feel like we have a portable studio with us at all times, we realize it sounds like hyperbole. Obviously the newer bigger more expensive digital Nikons would be commensurately better than the Coolpix, but the basis for this comparison is a very heavy and bulky fifty year old state of the art piece of camera equipment.

Listening to the pure voices of Joan Baez, Mama Cass, and Patsy Cline, counter pointed by the raw raspy sound of Janice Joplin, we got to wondering if the young DJ’s on KALX and KLXU could assert that artists like this Lady Gaga person (to the best of our knowledge, we’ve never heard her sing) has a voice that can deliver a song on key let alone has perfect pitch. Perfect pitch? Isn’t that what a baseball team gets when they deal with only 27 batters from the opposing team?

The famous Philadelphia curmudgeon W. C. Fields has been quoted as saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again . . . then quit because there’s no use looking like a damn fool.”

Is that all there is to say after a weekend soaked in musical nostalgia? Oh, no, my faithful readers, let’s break out the travel brochures and apply to the Gonzo Journalism Foundation (AKA my bank account) for a grant to subsidize a summer of 2011 trip to Berlin and let the roster of younger bloggers write about reviving the draft, a possible war with one of Iraq’s neighboring countries, and/or the possible existence of a pesky foreign student loan application from the past.

In May of 1965, all graduating classes were (I assume) promised a big wide wonderful world full of appealing possibilities unlimited opportunities and now forty-five years later, after attending the Academy Awards twice, having a Seven Up in Hemingway’s favorite bar in Paris and a diet Pepsi in Skimpy’s Saloon in Kalgoorlie, having a ride in the Goodyear blimp, chatting with a former co-worker at the Playboy West Coast Mansion (which gives us a chance to slip in a plug for Hugh Hefner’s new work-safe website called “The Smoking Jacket” here), giving my autograph to Paul Newman, asking John Wayne for his, and having Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson ask if he could use a story line I had brought into the conversation, it might seem like there’s nothing left to anticipate but the impeachment proceedings that the Republicans are anxious to initiate in January.

Oh, no, my faithful readers, after a weekend of discovering never-before-heard songs by Patsy Cline, the Mamas and the Papas, and Sonny and Cher, it’s obvious that even though there were no guarantees given to the class of 1965, there might be (just might mind you) be some additional new thrills in this old world left to discover. Thrills? What if there are some unheard Janis Joplin tracks left to find? Are we sure that we have heard every Doors song in existence?

Look out, Isle de Levant, I’m on my way! Well, next summer, if I live that long. Is there any chance of bumping into any fellow members of the class of 1965, in a hostel in Prague, or Munich, or . . . Amsterdam? Most of my classmates went the family and house with a white picket fence route so they should be wealthy and retired now. What’s to stop them from going? Don’t think twice; it’s all right. Retirement’s just another word for nothing left to lose . . . by going on the road just one more time.

[Note from the Marvelous Co-inky-dink Department: at the same time this columnist was buying cassette tapes, Bard Pitt and Angelina Jolie were (according to the Berkeleyside website) also enjoying a relaxing day in Berkeley CA.]

Berlin on Christmas Day of 1938? Graduation Day 1965? January 2011? Janis Joplin summed it all up: “. . . because, as a matter of fact . . . as we learned on the train, ma-a-a-n, tomorrow never happens. It’s all the sa-a-a-me fu-u-u-cking da-a-ay, ma-a-a-an!”

Now the disk jockey will play Roy Orbison’s “Heartbreak Radio,” Sonny and Cher’s “Sing C’est la vie,” and Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.” We have to go look for a copy of “Europe on $5 a day.” Have a “U. S. out of Vietnam now!” type week.

August 1, 2010

There goes the Judge: CA’s scary court-closing epidemic

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Jane Stillwater @ 4:33 pm

Next Friday I’m going to be the plaintiff in a small claims court trial — at least that’s the plan. But according to a judge who recently spoke before the Berkeley-Albany Bar Association, there’s a rather good chance that I might show up for the trial but there might not be a courtroom left to hold it in.

Over a delicious luncheon menu of pan-seared salmon, sauteed asparagus, fruit tarts and Peet’s coffee at La Rose Bistro on Shattuck Avenue, a judge from the Alameda County court system spent an hour and a half laying out a series of hard facts and cold realities with regard to courtroom availability in California in general and in Alameda County in particular. “Currently,” said the judge, “we are even considering holding trials in broom closets.” I think she was joking, er, at least I’m hoping that she was.

“The status of Alameda County’s courtrooms is abysmal,” stated the judge. “The search for courtrooms has become desperate here. They are currently using the grand jury room, which has posts running down the middle of it. They’ve also been looking at hallways, a library and the probate examiner’s office since the Broussard building has been mostly shut down. They are even moving people from Oakland courthouses down to Fremont and Hayward. There have been 23 moves in all.” Fremont is a long freaking distance away from Oakland. It’s closer to San Jose than it is Berkeley.

And courtrooms aren’t the only thing now being 86ed in the CA court system. People are disappearing too. “As for money, 72 people have been laid off. Statewide, court personnel funding has just taken a 100 million dollar hit. There was a 2.6 million dollar budget hit for Alameda County alone. Courts are now being closed on the third Wednesday of every month. That’s twelve days a year that we can never make up.”

Then there’s the mandatory furlough days. “In order to avoid more lay-offs, we’ve had to cut down people’s hours. And next year’s state and county budgets will be worse that this year’s. Judges are considering voluntary salary cuts.”

And California’s court security needs are being effected as well. “We are trying to get enough sheriff’s deputies to cover the courts. By consolidating courts, we have managed to free up two deputies however. But the Sheriff’s office has also been financially hit. And then there was the cost of the Oscar Grant trial. And that has taken up a lot of sheriff’s deputies as well.”

So far, the number of judges has not been effected by the budget cuts, but who knows how long that will last. “And we need more self-help centers, not less. As the economy goes down, there will be a much greater need for self-help centers,” and that need will not be met either. “California’s unemployment is currently the highest in the nation.”

By this time in the presentation, I had finished my salmon and was starting to hanker for dessert — while the judge continued her sad litany of judicial wants and needs that were not going to get met. “We need more courtrooms. We’re not going to get them. And we’re not going to get any more judges either. And small claims court commissioners are being reduced for 16 to ten. Plus filing fees are going to be increased because we can’t increase taxes.”

As I finished up my berry tart and was vaguely considering the etiquette-related pros and cons of licking my plate, the judge continued. “This county’s judicial system is definitely economy-driven. We want a courthouse out in the Pleasanton-Dublin area but realistically we don’t have the money. We need more judges and more support staff. We are looking at every single dime being spent. Alameda County saw this coming and prepared for it but we are still running tight.” Then the waiter served coffee. Yummers!

“We may be forced to move toward having regional courts instead of county courts,” the judge concluded. “We’ve already consolidated the municipal courts with the superior courts. And court administration has already been centralized — even its janitorial services.”

So. What will be the answer to this immense problem? I wanted to suggest to the speaker that we might be able to use Judge Judy’s courtroom when her court wasn’t in session, but that probably wouldn’t work out so well for her.

It appears that a goodly amount of taxpayer money that used to fund Alameda County’s court and prison systems is being used to fund cool new court and prison systems in places like Baghdad, Kabul and Tel Aviv instead of here in Berkeley. Does this mean that the Middle East has all the money they want for their courtrooms — whereas California courtrooms have become neglected and derelict? Yeah.

You cannot fund a trillion dollars worth of war in the Middle East and expect that money to come out of nowhere. And as a result of short-sighted congressional decisions to spend our taxes on the luxury of war in the Middle East instead of here in America for the last ten years, we no longer can afford to buy basic necessities here at home — such as courtrooms.

It appears that the criminals of Baghdad, Kabul and Tel Aviv have a pretty good ride — while the criminals of Oakland and Berkeley, due to our sad lack of courtrooms and judiciary personnel, are either having to wait for their trials in overcrowded jails that taxpayers must pay for or else are running around free in the streets.

I’d much rather spend our hard-earned money here at home and have criminals running free in the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine — instead of having criminals running free in the streets of Oakland and Berkeley.

It just seems such a shame to spend a trillion dollars to tinker around with the Rule of Law in the Middle East — at the risk of losing the Rule of Law here at home.

But enough about lamenting the loss of our courtrooms into the money pit of the Middle East. Let’s think about other places where all our court-funding money has been drained off to in the last ten years — into the pockets of bankers, Wall Street gamblers, global out-sourcers who have systematically destroyed America’s manufacturing base, and, of course, those ever-present and greedy weapons manufacturers who trick us into paying them to kill strangers by the millions. Isn’t it time to plug up those money sink-holes as well?

PS: Regarding my upcoming small claims court case this Friday, I may or may not be able to tell you what its outcome will be — depending on whether or not there is still a courtroom available to hear my case in. Who knows? We may end up having to try my case in Kabul.

The Dudman Cometh – Just Call Him BeePeeBob

Filed under: Opinion,Toon — Tags: , , , , , , — RS Janes @ 7:02 am

cartoon-beepeebob

Despite what corporate media would like people to believe, there is still oil in Gulf

Filed under: Uncategorized — Greg in cheeseland @ 1:14 am

Author’s note: Apparently the corporate propaganda network has made the oil disappear!

Text:
If one believes recent reports like this from ABC News, this from USA Today, this from the New York Times, this from CBS News, or this from the Washington Post, it may be tempting to think that the worst of the Gulf oil disaster is over and the oil is gone. But scientists say that is simply not the case and a recent fly-over of the Gulf shows otherwise (see video here).

The unprecedented heavy use of dispersants by BP and the U.S. government may have kept the oil out of sight and out of mind, but also may have created an even more dangerous toxic soup that is impossible to clean up.

The New York Times reported today that there are conflicting numbers regarding the amount of dispersants used, prompting Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, to write Admiral Thad Allen of the Coast Guard on Friday saying that the dispersants contributed to “a toxic stew of chemicals, oil and gas, with impacts that are not well understood.”

In a request filed on June 16, BP told the Coast Guard that in the previous several days it had used a maximum of 3,365 gallons of dispersant in a single day. But in e-mails to members of Congress giving updates on the cleanup, the company said it had used 14,305 gallons of dispersant on June 12 and 36,000 gallons on June 13.

Researchers at Tulane University have already found the chemical dispersant, Corexit, present in blue crab larvae from the coast of Florida to the coast of Texas. These tiny creatures are a major source of food for fish and other marine life in the Gulf.

According to a Louisiana Fox News affiliate report, University of New Orleans’ Martin O’Connell, Ph.D said, “If you’re a small fish and you eat 1,000 of these small crab larvae and all of them have oil or Corexit droplets in them they could get into the fish — that little fish could be eaten and so on and so on.” Pondering the future of the Gulf, O’Connell said, “I think they should be more concerned that we might be losing whole cohorts of these animals when they’re very small, and we won’t see the impact in the adults but three or four years from now.”

Florida toxicologist Dr. William Sawyer, who has been hired on behalf of sickened fishermen and cleanup workers, says “some of these chemicals are in great excess of risk-based lethal levels…[and] the current hydrocarbon levels are capable of sterilizing our fisheries and estuary production zones.” Furthermore, the EPA and Gulf state officials have admitted that while Gulf seafood is being tested for oil, it is not being tested for the presence of dispersants.

What may even be more telling about the amount of oil that leaked into the Gulf is that despite the use of up to 1.8 million gallons of dispersants, a recent flyover of the Gulf revealed that oil is still floating on the surface of the water, and other videos show that oil is still seeping from beneath the surface of the water (see videos here).

The bottom line is that it is up to readers to believe whom they choose – the corporate media, BP and the federal government, or the scores of researchers gathering information and their own eyes. After months of obfuscation, which sources do you trust?

Get links and videos here: Madison Independent Examiner – Despite what corporate media would like people to believe, there is still oil in Gulf

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