Later On

That seems a major oversight. David Goldstein for McClatchy:

For several years, Afghan police recruits under the tutelage of private U.S. government contractors couldn’t understand why their marksmanship never improved.

The answer became clear earlier this year. Italian contractors also helping to train Afghan volunteers showed them that the sights on their AK-47s and M-16s had never been adjusted.

"We’re paying somebody to teach these people to shoot these weapons, and nobody ever bothered to check their sights?" Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said, after relating that story at a hearing Thursday.

To McCaskill, who chaired the hearing of the Senate Contracting Oversight panel, it illustrated why the U.S. has spent more than $6 billion on private contractors, but the police-training program remains rife with problems.

"It is an unbelievable, incompetent story of contracts," she said. "For eight years we have been supposed training the police in Afghanistan. We’ve flushed $6 billion."

Improving and expanding the 90,000-man Afghan National Police to maintain stability and protect the population is crucial to the Obama administration’s plan to begin reducing the American military presence in July 2011.

But the training contracts have been plagued by mismanagement. Investigations by the Government Accounting Office and the inspector generals from the Departments of State and Defense have sharply criticized both the contractors and the government oversight. They detailed a lack of supervision and controls over spending, among other failures.

"Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong," Defense Department Inspector General Gordon Heddell told the subcommittee.

Moreover, the job of an Afghan police officer is exceedingly dangerous. The death rate has risen from about two dozen per month in recent years to about 125 each month, Heddell said.

The most pressing issue is that the program is now in contract limbo. Last month, the GAO blocked the Army from awarding a $1 billion police training contract to Xe Services, the company which used to be known as Blackwater and which has its own troubled government contracting history.

Agency auditors said that the Army unfairly excluded other potential bidders and agreed with a protest by DynCorp International Inc. DynCorp has had a $1.2 billion training contract from the State Department…

Continue reading.

This is nice to read. Trudy Lieberman for the Columbia Journalism Review:

A few days ago, I found myself a visitor in Lincoln, Nebraska, a city where I cut my teeth as a reporter. So with a bit of time on my hands, I decided to do some reporting there again, this time to see if the now-infamous Cornhusker Kickback was still on residents’ minds, and to get a read on Sen. Ben Nelson’s political future. I headed in the direction of Lincoln’s historic district, where the old Burlington railroad station has morphed into a banquet hall, and hipsters and seniors drink mochas in buildings that once housed saddlery shops. Plenty of people wanted to chat.

The Cornhusker Kickback still grates on Nebraskans. A refresher here: To secure Nelson’s crucial sixtieth vote to pass the health reform bill before Christmas, Senate majority leader Harry Reid bestowed a $100 million gift on Nebraskans and their Democratic senator, which would have helped the state cover its share of Medicaid costs for low-income Nebraskans.

No doubt that money would have helped the state treasury, but Nebraskans, despite their reputation for fiscal conservatism, would have none of it. The deal offended the sensibilities of the state’s residents, who apparently don’t care much for hand shakes in back rooms. The kickback made the state, which has one of the lowest mortgage default rates and where people still pay cash, look bad. Nelson has taken the heat ever since. Although Congress struck the provision from the final legislation, people were pessimistic about Nelson’s future.

“I see it as detrimental in getting him reelected,” Ed, a driver for UPS told me. “He singled out Nebraska and made people wonder what was going on under the table.” Thirty-one-year old Jeff Melichar, who was working at his family’s Phillips 66 station on P Street, put it this way: “We even had the governor of California knocking us.” Melichar, a Democrat, voted for Nelson, but he added: “This is not going to go away. Any Republican could stand on the corner and point Cornhusker Kickback and make him sound as shady as possible, and that’s it. I wish it wasn’t the case, but he damaged himself. The fact he voted ‘yes’ on the bill ended his political career in Nebraska.” …

Continue reading. I have never much cared for Ben Nelson, who seems uninterested in the principles of the Democratic Party (as I understand them, at any rate), but I am glad that he voted for healthcare reform. He did it for the wrong reasons, but he did vote "Yes."

From the Drug War Chronicle:

Gil Kerlikowske, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP — the drug czar’s office), testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday that the Obama administration is seeking "a new direction in drug policy," but was challenged both by lawmakers and by a panel of academics and activists on the point during the same hearing. The action took place at a hearing of the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee in which the ONDCP drug budget and the forthcoming 2010 National Drug Strategy were the topics at hand.

The hearing comes in the wake of various drug policy reforms enacted by the Obama administration, including a Justice Department policy memo directing US attorneys and the DEA to lay off medical marijuana in states where it is legal, the removal of the federal ban on needle exchange funding, and administration support for ending or reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenders.

But it also comes in the wake of the announcement of the ONDCP 2011 drug budget, which at $15.5 billion is up more than $500 million from this year. While treatment and prevention programs got a 6.5% funding increase, supply reduction (law enforcement, interdiction, and eradication) continues to account for almost exactly the same percentage of the overall budget — 64%–as it did in the Bush administration. Only 36% is earmarked for demand reduction (prevention and treatment).

Citing health care costs from drug use and rising drug overdose death figures, the nation "needs to discard the idea that enforcement alone can eliminate our nation’s drug problem," Kerlikowske said. "Only through a comprehensive and balanced approach — combining tough, but fair, enforcement with robust prevention and treatment efforts — will we be successful in stemming both the demand for and supply of illegal drugs in our country."

So far, at least, when it comes to reconfiguring US drug control efforts, Kerlikowske and the Obama administration are talking the talk, but they’re not walking the walk. That was the contention of subcommittee chair Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and several of the session’s panelists.

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Interesting review by Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review:

Alien Hearts

by Guy De Maupassant

A review by Lorin Stein

Sooner or later, in writing about Guy de Maupassant, one feels impelled to address a rumor. Classy writers refer to this rumor obliquely. Tolstoy, in a preface to Maupassant’s stories, mentions “something remarkable and incredible in regard to his relations with women.” Henry James, in a book review, rather more subtly calls him “master [of] his instrument . . . that of the senses.” Frank Harris, a memoirist who had no class whatsoever, claims to have got the straight dope from the master himself:

“I suppose I am a little out of the common sexually,” he resumed, “for I can make my instrument stand whenever I please.”

“Really?” I exclaimed, too astonished to think.

“Look at my trousers,” he remarked, laughing, and there on the road he showed me that he was telling the truth.

“What an extraordinary power,” I cried. “I thought I was abnormal in that way, for I always get excited in a moment, and I have heard men say that they needed some time to get ready for the act; but your power is far beyond anything I have ever seen or heard of.”

“That is the worst of it,” he remarked quietly. “If you get a reputation some of them practically offer themselves.”

In a career that spanned barely a decade — the 1880s and early 1890s — Maupassant produced some 300 stories, 200 articles, three travel books, a collection of poems, three plays, and six novels, and the bulk of this production was consumed with the pursuit of illicit sex. His specialty was the conte leste, a kind of bawdy comic story we have very little of in English after Chaucer (think Boccaccio or The Arabian Nights). Maupassant modernized this tradition, testing the boundaries of what was permissible even in the Paris tabloids, where many of his stories first appeared. He was the best-selling writer of his generation.

According to his mother, who doted on him, Maupassant had his first romance at the age of sixteen, “followed by a friendly affection which lasted a long time.” This pattern would repeat itself all his life. He had a succession of mistresses, society women known for their wit and beauty, and a long intermittent affair with a spa attendant (who bore him several children), plus hundreds or thousands of briefer liaisons. Friends said he took more pride in his sex life than in his books. He never married.

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From a collection of photos taken of Molly and McGee, the barn owl couple, and their babies:

I made a second batch of the Greek baked beans, using Mortgage Lifter Beans (very large white beans). I’m getting into the bean mood, and I was pleased to see this post by SquawkFox with three easy recipes for baked beans using a crockpot/slow cooker (or you can cook in the oven in a covered pot: 200ºF = crockpot "Low"; 300ºF = crockpot "High"). The three recipes:

Baked Beans

Boston Baked Beans

Vegetarian Baked Beans

The recipes suggest sautéed onion as an ingredient. My advice: sauté the onions for at least 15 minutes, stirring often, so the onions caramelize, which greatly increases the flavor.

A good lather from the Art of Shaving Lemon, thanks to the Simpson Persian Jar 2 Super. Then the Elite razor, with a newish Astra Keramik Platinum blade, performed a very nice three-pass shave, followed by a splash of TOBS Mr. Taylor’s aftershave.

Greenwald:

The Obama Justice Department today announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.  Drake’s indictment, of course, has nothing to do with the criminal surveillance undertaken by the NSA.  Rather, the DOJ alleges "that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA," and it claims "Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information."  In other words, he’s being subjected to what The New York Times’ Scott Shane calls a "highly unusual" prosecution for being a whistle-blower on the Bush era’s sprawling and secretive Surveillance State.  Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.

Let’s spend just a moment thinking about what this means.  We’ve known since December, 2005, that Bush officials, including at the NSA, committed felonies by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law — crimes punishable by a five-year prison term and$10,000 fine for each offense.  All three federal judges to rule on the question have found those actions to be in violation of the law.  Yet there have been no criminal investigations, let alone indictments, for those crimes, and there won’t be any, due to Barack Obama’s dictate that we "Look Forward, Not Backward."  Thus, the high-level political officials who committed crimes while running the NSA will be completely immunized for their serious crimes.

By stark contrast, an NSA official who brought to the public’s attention towering failures and waste at the NSA — revelations that led to exposés that, as Shane put it, were "honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists" — is now being prosecuted for crimes that could lead to a lengthy prison term.  Why doesn’t Obama’s dictate that we "Look Forward, Not Backward," protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens?  Isn’t the DOJ’s prosecution of Drake the classic case of "Looking Backward," by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?

Interestingly, the Bush DOJ long threatened to prosecute not only NSA whistle-blowers but also The New York Times for revealing its illegal spying.  It never did so, however, likely because, as Shane speculates, prosecutions for those leaks would cause light to be shined on what the NSA actually did when eavesdropping on Americans.  Yet here is the Obama DOJ prosecuting a whistleblower, a prosecution that is certain to intimidate and deter other whistle-blowers, thus choking off one of the very few avenues which Americans have left for learning about what this sprawling, obsessively secret Surveillance State does.  As Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the NYT today:  "The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will."

For that reason, the DOJ’s aggressive prosecution of someone who exposed serious waste and mismanagement at the NSA could, as the NYT‘s Shane put it, "raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from public scrutiny."  Whatever else is true, decreeing that we must "Look Forward, not Backward" — and then bestowing that Imperial Generosity only to the crimes of the President and his aides but not to courageous whistle-blowers (or, for that matter, anyone else) — is anything but "Justice."

* * * * *

Although I was a serious skeptic for quite some time of the value of Twitter, I’ve been converted and have been using it for multiple purposes of late.  Those who want to can follow my Twitter feed here.

UPDATE:  The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder summarizes The Baltimore Sun revelations which are almost certainly what Drake is accused of leaking:

In 2006 and 2007, Siobahn Gorman, a highly regarded intelligence reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote a series of articles about how the National Security Agency was (mis)managing a highly sensitive, very expensive collection program known as Trailblazer. Relying on interviews with current and former senior intelligence officials as well as internal documents, Gorman was able to show that the NSA’s "state-of-the art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications" was a boondoggle of sorts — and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored.

Under the Obama DOJ’s two-tiered justice system (and it’s an Obama political appointee, Lanny Breuer, trumpeting the indictment), engaging in serious wrongdoing entitles you to immunity (Look Forward, Not Backward), whereas exposing it to the public merits a lengthy prison term.

Hilary Andersson of the BBC:

Afghan prisoners are being abused in a "secret jail" at Bagram airbase, according to nine witnesses whose stories the BBC has documented.

The abuses are all said to have taken place since US President Barack Obama was elected, promising to end torture.

The US military has denied the existence of a secret detention site and promised to look into allegations.

Bagram was the site of a controversial jail holding hundreds of inmates, who have now been moved to another complex.

The old prison was notorious for allegations of prisoner torture and abuse.

But witnesses told the BBC in interviews or written testimony that abuses continue in a hidden facility.

"They call it the Black Hole," said Sher Agha who spent six days in the facility last autumn.

"When they released us they told us we should not tell our stories to outsiders because that will harm us."

Sher Agha and others we interviewed complained their cells were very cold.

"When I wanted to sleep and started shivering with cold I started reciting the holy Koran," he said.

But sleep, according to the prisoners interviewed, is deliberately prevented in this detention site.

"I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise," said Mirwais, who said he was held in the secret jail for 24 days.

"There was a small camera in my cell, and if you were sleeping they’d come in and disturb you," he added.

The prisoners, who were interviewed separately, all told very similar stories. Most of them said they had been beaten by American soldiers at the point of arrest before being taken to the prison.

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This is an interesting story, suggested by a commenter. It’s from Jan 27, 2006, but it seems relevant with the Massey disaster in the news. It begins:

The owners of the West Virginia coal mine where 12 miners were killed in a Jan. 3 explosion were ordered by a federal judge Jan. 26 to allow Mine Worker safety experts access to the Upshur County mine as part of the investigation into the deadly blast.

On Jan. 25, International Coal Group (ICG) barred UMWA safety officials from accompanying federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and state mine safety investigators into the nonunion Sago Mine.

Federal mine safety laws permit the union to represent miners at any mine on safety issues at the request of two or more miners. Several Sago miners, along with the families of two of the miners killed, asked for UMWA representation in the investigation. Over ICG’s objections, MSHA certified the union’s participation Jan. 18.

When ICG refused union leaders entry Jan. 25, MSHA sought a court order to force the company to allow UMWA representatives access to the mine. The next day U.S. District Judge Robert E. Maxwell ordered ICG to stop blocking union safety officials from entering the mine. The company agreed to allow UMWA safety investigators into the mine while it appeals the ruling.

Mine Workers union leaders and other job safety advocates say the nation’s mine safety has been compromised by the Bush administration’s emphasis on voluntary compliance with safety rules—in contrast with previous administrations, which have favored strong enforcement.

Since taking office in 2001, the Bush administration has cut funding and staff at MSHA, the federal agency in charge of enforcing the nation’s mine safety laws. The Bush administration has eliminated 170 jobs at MSHA and proposed to cut the MSHA budget in fiscal year 2006 by some $4.9 million in real dollar terms.

“ICG has spent countless hours and wasted valuable time with its baseless attacks on the UMWA,” says union president Cecil Roberts. “Meanwhile, the Sago miners, the families of the victims of this disaster and the American public cry out for answers. Let’s get on with it, and find the answers to the questions surrounding this tragedy.”

ICG’s strident objections to allowing the union to take part in the investigation appear to stem from its strong anti-union history. According to The Charleston Gazette, court papers filed by ICG charge that MSHA is “allowing the UMWA to infiltrate the Sago Mine. It’s clear that the union is launching a broad-based campaign against IGC, a 100-percent union-free company.”

“It’s time for ICG to stop its delaying tactics at the Sago Mine, stop lying about the facts of the UMWA’s involvement with this investigation and get on with the critical need to find out exactly what happened at Sago so that we can all take steps to see that it never happens again at Sago or any other mine in America,” Roberts says. “That has been and remains the UMWA’s only focus in this investigation,” he adds.

UMWA representatives will have the right to be present during any MSHA and state interviews of the miners and will be allowed to accompany investigators during mine walkthroughs.

Meanwhile, Gov. Joe Manchin (W. Va.) Jan. 23 signed new mine safety legislation that requires all miners be equipped with tracking devices that will give rescuers a better chance of finding missing miners in a disaster and requires supplies of oxygen to be placed throughout the mine to supplement the one-hour supply miners now carry.

The law would also create a Mine and Industrial Rapid Response System, including a 24-hour hot line to move rescue crews faster to mine emergencies. Operators would be required to report fires and explosions within 15 minutes, or face $100,000 fines.

“MSHA was developing similar rules on the federal level, but when the Bush administration took office in 2001, they killed these and many other important safety and health protections,” says AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario.

In addition, the law requires operators to store additional supplies of oxygen for miners, on top of the one-hour canisters now required by federal law.

In Washington D.C., congressional hearings convened following the Sago disaster and the deaths of two miners Jan. 20 in a fire at a Logan County, W.Va., mine. Lawmakers looked into the Bush administration’s funding cuts in MSHA, its reduction in the number of safety investigators and it’s record in negotiating reductions in fines with mine owners over safety violations.

In addition, mine safety advocates also say the close coal industry ties of Bush administration appointees to MSHA leadership positions have further weakened the MSHA’s commitment to safety enforcement. Bush has appointed former senior executives from Peabody Energy, AMAX Inc., the American Mining Congress, Cyprus Minerals Co. and other such companies to high-ranking posts within MSHA.

Continue reading.

Steve Lopez in the LA Times:

So this guy goes to the doctor for back pain and the diagnosis is pretty awful: The patient is going to need spinal surgery again, for the third time in three years.

Charles Fleming thought back on all the misery he’d endured the first two times he was cut open like a Christmas goose. He gave about two seconds’ worth of consideration to the doctor’s proposed disc-ectomy and said thanks, doc, but not just yet.

He couldn’t face the knife again.

Just one problem: What to do about the crippling pain?

Fleming, a best-selling author whose books include "High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess," had his wife, Julie, drive him down from their hilltop home in Silver Lake to a flat stretch of pavement. He got out of the car, clenched his teeth and walked, trying to stretch out, and it felt OK. In fact, it was the only thing that relieved the pain.

He started modestly, covering two blocks or so in those early days, back in 2006. Then he got braver, and looser, and soon he was up to half a mile, followed by a mile, followed by long, therapeutic walks that felt really good. Much better than surgery, in fact.

Fleming is no doctor, but he thinks he has a reasonable medical explanation for this miracle cure called walking.

"Your spine is supposed to be curved," he said, throwing his head and shoulders back and arching the small of his spine. But we’re often slumped in the wrong direction whether slaving at a desk or sinking into a sofa. "When you walk, your shoulders are back, your hips are out," and the spine curves the right way, taking pressure off the lower back.

Emboldened by this discovery and his new agility, Fleming began seeking out and walking up and down the public stairways that were carved into the hills of Echo Park, El Sereno, Highland Park, Hollywood, Mt. Washington, Pasadena, Silver Lake and Santa Monica in the 1920s and ’30s, delivering travelers to and from mass transit lines.

Those stairways were largely forgotten when the automobile became the rage and trolleys were abandoned to make way for the modern city, but they’re still there, some of them covered in vines, a few of them littered with drug and alcohol debris. To this day, many of them serve as the only entryway to houses that have no nearby street.

You do see the occasional story about people living in hideaway bungalows accessible by several hundred steps, and the classic stairway reference is to the scene in Hal Roach’s short film "The Music Box," a 1932 classic in which Laurel and Hardy deliver a piano up a steep flight between Vendome Street and Descanso Drive in Silver Lake.

Fleming learned a great deal from a book called …

Continue reading.

Is it just me, or does the Obama DoJ act an awful lot like the Bush-Cheney DoJ? Glenn Greenwald:

A very significant case involving core privacy protections is now being litigated, where the Obama Justice Department is seeking to obtain from Yahoo "all emails" sent and received by multiple Yahoo email accounts,despite the fact that DOJ has never sought, let alone obtained, a search warrant, and despite there being no notice of any kind to the email account holders:

In a brief filed Tuesday afternoon, the coalition says a search warrant signed by a judge is necessary before the FBI or other police agencies can read the contents of Yahoo Mail messages — a position that puts those companies directly at odds with the Obama administration.

As part of a case conducted largely under seal and thus hidden from public view, the DOJ demanded these emails from Yahoo without any effort to demonstrate probable cause to believe the email user was involved in the commission of any crime, but instead merely based on the vague claim that there is "reasonable grounds to believe" the emails "are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."  If the DOJ position were accepted, Americans would have substantially less privacy protections in their email communications.

Federal law is crystal clear that a search warrant is required for the Government to obtain any emails that have been stored less than 180 days — one that requires a showing of probable cause and that the documents sought to be described with particularity.  In contrast to the nation’s largest telecoms’ eager cooperation with Bush’s illegal surveillance programs, Yahoo — to its credit — refused to turn over any such emails to the Government without a search warrant.  As a result, the DOJ is now seeking a federal court Order compelling the company to comply with its demands, and a coalition of privacy groups and technology companies — led by EFF and including Google — have now filed a brief supporting Yahoo’s position.  Both Yahoo and that coalition insist that federal law as well as the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure protection bar the Obama DOJ from acquiring these emails without a search warrant.

The law in question — the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. sec. 2703 — could not be clearer:

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Kevin Drum:

Fortune magazine reports on corporate revenue:

Last year, Fortune 500 sales fell 8.7% to $9.8 trillion, the largest percentage decline since 1983.

And yet profits soared:

For 2009, the Fortune 500 lifted earnings 335%, to $391 billion, a $301 billion jump that’s the second largest in the list’s 56-year history….The 500′s profits virtually returned to normal after years of extremes — bubbles in 2006 and 2007, collapse in 2008 — despite a feeble overall recovery that’s far from normal.

So corporate profits tripled during a recession year in which sales fell 8.7%. Has that ever happened before? The key to this, of course, was layoffs: "In 2009, the Fortune 500 shed 821,000 jobs, the biggest loss in its history — almost 3.2% of its payroll." In other words, we have now been through a recession in which, essentially, nobody has really suffered except for all the workers who have been let go. Wall Street is doing great. Corporate profits are doing great. The stock market is recovering. Is it any wonder that Republicans don’t really care about any further fiscal stimulus? Their constituency is doing fine, thankyouverymuch.

Brayton:

The Washington Independent has begun to tally up all of the safety violations in just the ten most commonly cited Massey mines. One of their mines in Kentucky has actually managed to rack up 66 violations since the fatal accident in West Virginia a few weeks ago, including 23 violations that were deemed "significant and substantial."

A commenter alluded to some union transgressions, but the Massey Mine transgressions that resulted in so many dead seem much, much worse to me. And if the miners have no union, we see what happens. (He didn’t say what he thought the miners should do to protect themselves, but he’s pretty sure a union is the wrong idea. Maybe just trust Massey? )

I’ve run into this myself, and find it mysterious. Steve Benen:

It’s been nearly a month, but the far-right obsession continues. It’s getting embarrassing.

On March 20, House Democratic leaders walked from a caucus meeting to Capitol Hill, en route to the final debate over health care reform. As the lawmakers approached the building, assorted right-wing activists chastised Dems, reportedly used racial and ethnic slurs, and in one instance, spat on an African-American lawmaker.

Prominent far-right voices have gone to truly ridiculous lengths to insist that the slurs never happened.

Conservatives apparently can’t help themselves. James Taranto, a Republican writer at the Wall Street Journal, got in touch with Rep Heath Shuler’s office after the North Carolina Democrat expressed his disappointment to a local newspaper over the ugliness of the right-wing, mid-March protests.

[W]hen we phoned Shuler’s office this afternoon, press secretary Julie Fishman told us the local reporter misunderstood. According to Fishman, Shuler’s comments to the Times-News referred to the general tenor of the protests, not to the black congressmen’s specific allegations.

Fishman said that Shuler was not walking with Cleaver and did not hear the "N-word." Shuler was, however, in proximity to Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and heard someone call Frank, as Fishman put it, a "communist F-word" (that would be "faggot," not the other F-word). At least one reporter also was said to have heard the antigay slur directed at Frank, so we’re inclined to believe that claim. But the allegations of racial slurs remain uncorroborated.

Greg Sargent added, "Okay, so yes, someone at the Tea Party rally did call Barney Frank a ‘communist faggot,’ but the racial slurs remain unproven! So there: The liberal media’s efforts to smear the Tea Party movement as a hotbed of intolerants and bigots has been conclusively debunked!"

If there’s any sense in this strategy, it eludes me. Even far-right members of Congress see no value in pushing this line of attack. House Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said, "I take at face value what John Lewis said. If John Lewis said he heard it, I believe he’s a man of integrity. And I would denounce those kinds of statements in the strongest possible terms."

That’s really all conservatives have to say to put this matter behind them. Instead of accusing John Lewis and other black lawmakers of lying, conservative activists like Taranto, Andrew Breitbart, and Mark Steyn have a far more sensible alternative. They can say, "We didn’t hear the racist slurs, but if they occurred, we reject them entirely. Those misguided individuals don’t speak for our movement, and there’s no room for bigotry in the Tea Party."

But, no. Instead the message, in effect, is, "Don’t trust those black Democrats. They say they heard racism, but they’re probably lying."

What’s more, they keep saying this. Taranto’s piece didn’t run in March; it ran yesterday. It’s as if the right believes if they just keep accusing African-American lawmakers of being liars, the allegations of racist rhetoric will disappear.

Usually, the right is more adept when it comes to political rhetoric. This is just bizarre.

I think this is happening because overt racism is generally opposed so the GOP has to find other ways to express its racist beliefs (e.g., "Confederate history month", attacking "welfare" (except those programs that benefit whites), and so on). By harping on the (supposed) dishonesty of an African-American Congressman, the Right can safely express racism.

Brian Doherty at Reason.com:

On a warm, bright winter day in January, I spent a few hours driving around two neighborhoods in Los Angeles, looking at marijuana stores.

You know, marijuana stores. Where you (well, not necessarily you) can walk in and, if you can prove a doctor has recommended marijuana to you for relief of an ailment, walk out with a brown bag full of buds, pot brownies, or cannabis candy bars. Los Angeles has more than 500 of these stores. My companions on the drives were two citizen activists who didn’t like seeing so many marijuana shops and who regularly let the Los Angeles City Council know of their unhappiness.

Michael Larsen, a 43-year-old family man, is public safety director for the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council. He doesn’t like to discuss his day job in the press, saying it has drawn too many hostile medical marijuana supporters to his work-related websites in the past.

Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, is visibly aging but remains dignified and distinct, with commercial areas occupied mostly by low-slung, pale old buildings housing storefront doctor’s offices, service businesses such as beauty salons and tax preparers, and independent restaurants and boutiques rather than chain stores. As we cruise a mile or so up and down Eagle Rock, York, and Colorado boulevards, Larsen points out more than 10 pot dispensaries. “Eagle Rock is about being a small community with a small-town feel, and we want to retain that,” he says.

Responding to criticisms he’s received from medical marijuana activists, Larsen insists: “I’m not being uncompassionate. I may be a NIMBY, but I’m fine with that. Eagle Rock is struggling to maintain the character of the neighborhood, for my kids or other people and their kids.” Larsen tells me about the healthy-looking young men who sometimes congregate in parking lots or on streets near dispensaries, smoking pot or blasting music. He points out one such young man entering AEC, a dispensary on Colorado Boulevard, while we are in its parking lot. He tells me about a local woman in her 80s who can’t understand what kind of world she’s living in, where marijuana is sold on her corner.

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Dennis G at Balloon Juice:

When one mentions Slavery it seems that many members of the Republican Confederate Party feel that you are trying to buzzkill their celebrate Confederate History Month.

A certain fat bastard from Mississippi called it Diddling a Nit (or something like that). And all over one can hear the sons of the Confederacy recite their talking points that the Civil War was not about slavery. They insist that the system of human bondage was a side issue. And as I look at the record of the Republican Confederate Party in recent times and the history of the Confederate Party regardless of its political host over the last 150 years—I am ready to admit that there is a bit of truth to their POV.

The Confederacy really wasn’t about slavery. That was just a tactic. The real issue was finding the best way to steal the labor of others.

Before the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment (which Mississippi has still NOT officially ratified) slavery was a State sponsored institution in America and it was the easiest way to steal the labor of others. Protecting the simplicity of that labor stealing system is why the Confederates started the Civil War.

Back in the day, slavery was a great deal for the owners, a bad deal for the slave and a real problem for the average working man or women of the South. Having a way that the elites can steal the labor of some always hurts the wages of most working people—especially if this theft of labor is protected by the State. This was true in 1860 and it is still true. As the Civil War began the business of stealing labor was massive. In the Ta-Nehisi Coates essay I mentioned last night he quoted Civil War historian David Blight about just how much money was being made though this organized system to steal the labor of others:

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Billmon at DailyKos:

Proving once again that no power on earth can force the "newspaper of record" to recognize what it is determined to ignore, the New York Times tonight released the results of a major survey of the teabagger movement. The paper’s considered judgement:

Their fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The original headline on the web version of the story:

Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class

But, that particular piece of misinformation has since been flushed down the memory hole, to be replaced by the more anodyne (though still dubious) heading:

Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated

Which, if true, would be a terrible indictment of our national diploma mills and matchbook cover mechanical academies, but more likely is another example of the now-familiar tendency of teabaggers to claim things (diplomas, in this case) that are not, in the strict technical sense of the word, true — in this or any other universe.

But the original headline actually did a much better job of capturing the Times’s deliberate cluelessness about the wellspring of all that teabagger rage, which appears to have a hell of a lot more to do with the particular, um, complexion of the alleged recipients of the Obama Administration’s generosity — as well as the guy allegedly giving it — than it does with their place on the socioeconomic ladder:

"I do believe we are responsible for the widow and the orphan," said Richard Gilbert, a 72 year old retired teacher. "But I think there is a welfare class that lives for having children and receiving payment from the government for having those children. They have no incentive to do any better because they have been conditioned into it."

Gee, I wonder who he might be talking about? Some of the "widows and orphans," it appears, need to move to the back of the bus.

What’s particularly comic (sinful would be the better word, if American corporate journalism still had a soul with which to sin) is that the truth (and the lead) is right there in, well, Times Roman. It’s just buried in the seventh paragraph:

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John Cole at Balloon Juice:

You try living like this:

The neighborhood of Kufr Aqab has evolved into a kind of no man’s land—it’s technically part of Jerusalem, but it lies on the Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier the Israelis have built to try to keep out suicide bombers.

Kufr Aqab’s residents have to pay taxes to the Israeli authorities, but they get virtually nothing in return. Still, the East Jerusalem district’s population is booming as Palestinian couples like Bayan Barghouti and his wife, Roula, move there.

The two don’t look like star-crossed lovers, but like the majority of Palestinians in the neighborhood, they surmounted a great deal of opposition to be together.

I have no other place to live with my husband. He’s a West Banker and I cannot live in an area in the West Bank, nor he can live in an area in Jerusalem, so it’s the middle.

The problem? Roula is from Jerusalem; Bayan is from the West Bank.

Palestinians from Jerusalem can travel freely between the West Bank and Israel, but to maintain their residency permits they have to live within the Jerusalem municipal boundaries. Most Palestinians from the West Bank don’t have permission to cross the wall Israel has built in and around the occupied territory.

And this “only democracy in the Middle East” comes complete with taxation without representation:

To prove residency, Palestinians in Kufr Aqab have to pay arnona, the Jerusalem municipal tax. But their streets are mostly unpaved, services are minimal, there are few schools and only one recently opened clinic.

Roula and Bayan say this place is symbolic of how Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are slowly being disenfranchised. Israeli restrictions are forcing Jerusalem residents to either marry other Palestinians from Jerusalem or risk losing their residency in the city.

“If you are married to a West Banker you are punished—you have to pay more; you have to live in an area that’s not organized at all,” Roula says.

Maybe Bart Stupak will offer an amendment so my tax dollars don’t go to support this kind of mess. That would be nice.