Later On

They love the gift but in public attack both the gift and the giver. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) joined a handful of Republican governors last year in rejecting various portions of the economic recovery package.

Perry explained his position: "[It] was pretty simple for us. …We can take care of ourselves."

The Texas state legislature eventually pushed Perry to accept the money but he still insisted he believes "there are better ways to reinvigorate our economy and believe [the stimulus] will burden future generations with unprecedented levels of debt."

However, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that "billions of dollars from that initiative helped Texas legislators balance the current budget."

Perry is not the only governor to rail against the stimulus while relying on it to balance his budget. Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) called the stimulus "incoherent" and "largely wasted," but still used it to fix one-third of his state’s budget hole.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office recently found that the Recovery Act not only prevented key state budget cuts around the country, but also raised GDP by up to 4 percent and created 2.8 million jobs.

Scott Hiaasen and Curtis Morgan in the Miami Herald:

Facing more than 100 lawsuits after its Gulf of Mexico oil spill killed 11 workers and threatened four coastal states, oil giant BP is asking the courts to place every pre-trial issue in the hands of a single federal judge in Houston.

That judge, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, has traveled the world giving lectures on ethics for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a professional association and research group that works with BP and other oil companies. The organization pays his travel expenses.

Hughes has also collected royalties from several energy companies, including ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy, from investments in mineral rights, his financial disclosure forms show.

Hughes, appointed to the bench in 1985 by then-President Ronald Reagan, declined to comment for this report.

Legal experts say the request for a single judge, while not unprecedented, is unusual, and they surmise BP is seeking rulings from a judge well-versed in the company’s issues.

Edward Sherman, a law professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who has closely followed the BP legal maneuvers, said BP probably studied Hughes’ past rulings and his caseload before suggesting he take the cases.

"Obviously, another factor is they would like to have a judge who understands their point of view," Sherman said.

Hughes is "well known as a competent judge," Sherman added.

No one has suggested that Hughes — or any judge — would rule a certain way before hearing the evidence. Records show the jurist has ruled both for and against the industry — including one ruling on behalf of oil companies later overturned on appeal.

In court papers, BP said Hughes should handle the cases because he is already hearing one class-action case, filed by a group of Vietnamese-American fishermen after the spill, and has presided over complex, multi-jurisdictional cases in the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

BP and the Obama Administration interests coincide in this: neither wants visible evidence of the damage the spill has done. BP wants to keep the damage unknown to reduce its legal liability, the Administration wants to keep the damage unknown because of a deep desire to control what the public knows. Newsweek reports:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials—working with BP—who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporter’s repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement. The latest instance of denied press access comes from Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc., which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover on Tuesday afternoon, and says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

“We are not at liberty to fly media, journalists, photographers, or scientists,” the company said in a letter it sent on Tuesday to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). “We strongly feel that the reason for this massive [temporary flight restriction] is that BP wants to control their exposure to the press.”

The ability to document a disaster, particularly through images, is key to focusing the nation’s attention on it, and the resulting clean-up efforts. Within days of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, pictures of dead otters, fish, and birds, as well as oil-covered shorelines, ignited nationwide outrage and led to a backlash against Exxon. Consumers returned some 10,000 of Exxon’s 7 million credit cards. Forty days after the spill, protestors organized a national boycott of Exxon. So far, no national boycott of BP is in the works, despite growing frustration over the company’s inability to cap the leaking well. Obviously, pictures are emerging from this spill, but much of the images are coming from BP and government sources.

The U.S. Coast Guard insists that they and BP have gone to great lengths to accommodate journalists and “roughly 400 members of the media have been given tours of the spill on either BP-contracted aircraft or Coast Guard helicopters,” says U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer David Mosley, who is based at the BP command center in Houma, La. (BP referred all questions to the command center). “I understand there may be some frustration [among the press], but there is a constant ongoing effort to fulfill media requests.” Mosley defended flight restrictions as a necessary safety precaution. Since the flight restrictions were expanded on May 11, private aircraft must get permission from BP’s command center to fly over a huge portion of the Gulf of Mexico encompassing not just the growing slick in the Gulf, but the entire Louisiana coastline, where oil is washing ashore. If a request is denied, aircraft must stay 3,000 feet above the restricted area, where visibility is minimal.

Photographers who have traveled to the Gulf commonly say they believe that BP has exerted more control over coverage of the spill with the cooperation of the federal government and local law enforcement. “It’s a running joke among the journalists covering the story that the words ‘Coast Guard’ affixed to any vehicle, vessel, or plane should be prefixed with ‘BP,’ ” says Charlie Varley, a Louisiana-based photographer. “It would be funny if it were not so serious.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Proraso soap made a fine lather with the G.B. Kent BK4, and then the Mühle open-comb with a newish Astra Keramik blade executed three flawless passes. A splash of Proraso, and I’m off to a late start.

I got to thinking more about the idea in this post, of how a guest on, say Meet The Press, will arrive with his/her iPad already loaded with full-screen graphs on the facts that might be at issue in any of the hot topics of the week—I would guess 20 graphs would be ample. A sidebar touch menu allows any of the graphs to be displayed with a touch.

Since a factual graph will shoot down almost any of the Sun a.m. bloviators, this would be a powerful and effective trick—to the extent that the shows would immediately try to ban it, but genies are reluctant to return to the bottle, and guests will quickly learn to say, “I actually have a graph that shows this very point, on my iPad, right over there, why don’t I just get it?”

Also, people would start to wonder why in hell Dick Gregory hire someone smart to make a set of such graphs for him to use in a constructive role as discussion leader—shooting down totally spurious ideas so the group can focus on fact-based analysis.

Nah. Never happen.

UPDATE: Were it to happen, I would expect a kind of reverse Gresham’s Law at work: well-informed and thoughtful guests (unafraid of graphs of facts) would replace the ignorant and misinformed who now predominate (naturally not wishing to be exposed as the fools they are) and will run from the new format.

It would make an enormous difference in Sunday mornings. Hell, the shows would even become interesting.

I guess the world probably sees it as hypocrisy on stilts. I certainly do. Greenwald:

The Washington Post, today (h/t Arkinsaw):

A judge granted parole Tuesday to Lori Berenson, the 40-year-old New York activist who has spent 15 years in Peruvian prisons on a conviction of aiding leftist rebels. . . . Berenson had for many years denied any wrongdoing, maintaining she was a political prisoner and not a terrorist. But her defense team said in papers submitted to the judge that she "recognized she committed errors in involving herself in activities of the MRTA" . . . .

Berenson was arrested in 1995 and initially accused of being a leader of the MRTA, which bombed banks and kidnapped and killed civilians but was nowhere near as violent as the better-known Shining Path insurgency. It is blamed for, at most, 200 killings. . . .

She was convicted of treason by a military court in 1996. But after an intense campaign by her parents. . ., she was retried in a civilian court in 2000.  It convicted Berenson of the lesser crime and reduced her sentence to 20 years. . . . The U.S. State Department had pushed hard for the civilian trial, saying Berenson was denied due process by the military tribunal.

Washington Post, May 9, 2009 — CNN, November 9, 2009 –Washington Independent, April 27, 2010:

The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . [Attorney General] Holder also announced that five other detainees held at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be sent to military commissions for trial. . . . Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has finally signed and issued a Manual for the Military Commissions Act of 2009. It’s 7:30 p.m. as I write this. Approximately 13 and a half hours from now, Col. Pat Parrish, the military judge presiding over Omar Khadr’s pre-trial hearing, will gavel the first full-fledged military commission proceeding of the Obama administration into order.

It’s true that the Berenson military tribunal in Peru was filled with due process deficiencies.  That’s what happens when governments deny accused Terrorists a trial in a real court, and instead concoct ad hoc military tribunals:  it’s inevitable that grave injustices will occur, such as refusing even to provide the rules governing the proceedings until 13 hours before the tribunal begins, as just happened with the child soldier, Omar Khadr, at Guantanamo.  As the Berenson conviction highlights, the U.S. previously protested military tribunals and demanded civilian trials even when it involved a foreign national credibly accused of involvement in a designated Terrorist group (as was true of Berenson in Peru).  Now, we’re the ones who deny civilian trials.  We’ve gone from protesting the "justice system" of the Peruvian authoritarian Alberto Fujimori to (at best) following it.

In other related news, "the White House has been working with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to craft legislation that would restructure the amount of time interrogators can hold suspected terrorists domestically without reading them their Miranda rights."  And the President’s top Terrorism advisor, John Brennan, said today that it was both necessary and just that the U.S. hold detainees indefinitely without any charges of any kind — not even before military commissions, a re-iteration of the Obama administration’s previously expressed commitment to indefinite detention.  But that’s because, Brennan explained, we’re now facing a "new phase" of Terrorism.  Whatever that means, it evidently requires brand new rules of "justice" (Brennan said all that after he beat his chest and bellowed:  "We will destroy Al Qaeda").  Somehow, it was a grave violation of due process for Peru to try accused foreign Terrorists before military tribunals, but not for us to hold them for as long as we want with no charges of any kind.

UPDATE:  For more on what a complete mockery of justice these military commissions have become in general, and the Khadr tribunal specifically is, see Harper‘s Scott Horton:

The Gates Pentagon prepared the manual for the military commissions completely behind closed doors. It disregarded established procedures under which proposed procedural rules are disclosed for public comment and the views of the military bar itself are explicitly solicited. We now see that it turned to secrecy because it had something to hide: the rules were recognized as flawed and weak even within the Obama Administration, where they were subjected to appropriately sharp criticism. Had they been publicly aired, the Pentagon would have been forced to work out the contradictions in them. But it opted to keep the country and the bar in the dark.

Horton’s whole analysis is worth reading.  And remember:  Peru denied due process to Lori Berenson by putting her before a military tribunal rather than a civilian court, just as the U.S. State Department — in a prior incarnation — long complained.

 

If you detect narcissism in the above, please point it out. (I’m trying to determine why it is that people see Greenwald as narcissistic, so I need specific examples that justify the claim. I rather easily checked off the diagnostic criteria of Narcissistic Personality Disorder for George W. Bush—a search on the blog will take you to the posts.)

Scott Horton:

A total of 779 prisoners have been held in Guantánamo in connection with the war on terror. Five hundred seventy-nine were released, most by the Bush Administration, a quiet recognition of errors made in the decisions to detain them. A large number of those still detained are contesting their imprisonment through habeas corpus—under which the government must make a minimal showing that it has a reasonable basis for holding the prisoner. In roughly three-quarters of these cases so far (36 out of 50 decided), which are being heard before largely Republican-appointed, conservative federal judges in Washington, the court has found that the United States has no reason to hold the prisoner. That’s not surprising. In fact, we now know that 80 percent or more of the Guantánamo prisoners were captured not by American forces on or near a battlefield but rather by Afghan warlords and Pakistani security forces eager to collect reward money the United States was offering. So Ahmed the taxi driver and Mohammed the shepherd were whisked off to Gitmo.

What happened to the 600–800 Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders for whom the prison was originally conceived? We now have a pretty good idea. In the late fall of 2001, military operations in Afghanistan were successful, and Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership figures had fled to two last redoubts—the city of Kunduz in the northeast, and the Tora Bora region along the Pakistani frontier. But for reasons known only to him, Vice President Dick Cheney ordered a halt to the bombardment of Kunduz and opened an air corridor to allow the Pakistani military to airlift the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders out of Kunduz. The maneuver was ridiculed by one U.S. military official present at the time as “Operation Evil Airlift.” The United States quickly moved to fill Gitmo with nobodies. With that fact now becoming painfully apparent, you’d think that Congress would be calling for an investigation into how original plans for Gitmo were botched—specifically how the Al Qaeda and Taliban figures for whom it was built evaded capture in the face of one of the most powerful military forces ever fielded in Afghanistan. That could well be one of the most significant “lessons learned” of the war.

Instead, influential Republicans in Congress are crying out for an investigation of the lawyers. Florida Republican Jeff Miller has secured a provision in the current defense appropriations act (PDF) requiring that the Defense Department’s inspector general “conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers” who represent clients at Guantánamo if there is some reason to believe that they “interfered with the operations” at Gitmo or “violated any applicable policy of the Department.” Of course,as Steven Vladeck has explained, in the thinking of the Bush era, prisoners were to be held at Gitmo without access to attorneys or the ability to make legal arguments, so everything that the defense counsel did amounted to “interference with the operations”–starting with securing a series of Supreme Court decisions holding that those operations were illegal.

Miller explained the need for this provision in a blog post for the Heritage Foundation. As he makes clear, his purpose is entirely retaliatory:

Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Horton:

In the military commissions prosecution of the Canadian child warrior Omar Khadr, the United States charges murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, in connection with an incident in which a grenade was hurled at American soldiers, leaving one dead and injuring several others. The theory underlying this charge is that Khadr was not a member of any lawful armed force, and his throwing a grenade was an unprivileged act of homicide or attempted homicide. It’s uncontroversial that throwing a grenade with the intention of killing others is a criminal act that can be charged as homicide or attempted homicide unless it’s a privileged act. However, there is a strong opinion among law-of-war scholars to the effect that it is not a violation of the laws of war, but rather a violation of the criminal law of the nation where the incident occurred. Thus, the Khadr prosecution rests on a faulty or eccentric legal position. Now the Vancouver Sun has disclosed that senior lawyers inside the Obama Administration fully recognized that the prosecution of Khadr rested on a false legal premise and attempted to stop and change the prosecution, apparently without success.

Officials in the Obama administration demanded a game-changing rule change for the Guantanamo Bay military tribunal that would have likely scuttled the war crimes murder charge against Canadian-born terror suspect Omar Khadr, Canwest News Service has learned. The officials sought to strip a new commissions manual of a law-of-war murder definition that is central to Khadr’s prosecution in the mortal wounding of Special Forces Sgt. First Class Chris Speer during a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan, insiders say. Omission of the segment could have also obliged prosecutors to trim or abandon “up to one-third” of its cases, according to one inside estimate. Prosecutors said in the wake of the Bush Administration they were prepared to take about 60 Guantanamo detainees to trial—among them the accused co-conspirators of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The Sun notes that the dispute erupted between lawyers at the State and Defense Departments, with the nation’s senior international law officer, Legal Adviser Harold Koh, arguing that the provision should be dropped, while the senior Defense Department lawyer, Jeh Johnson, supported the provision.

I recently discussed Koh’s attempt to justify the use of drones for targeted killings. I noted that Koh had failed to address an obvious legal issue—that the drones were being operated by civilian contractors, not uniformed military personnel who are privileged to used lethal force under the law of war. The drone warfare raises the same issue that the Khadr prosecution does: if the operators of these systems are not privileged to use lethal force, are they committing a crime under the law of war when they do so? The language adopted in the manual for military commissions argues that they are, but the position taken by the State Department to justify the use of drones assumes the opposite. These positions are difficult to reconcile.

Does this mean that the prosecution of Omar Khadr for homicide as a violation of the law of war could boomerang on the United States? It’s clear than some of the Obama Administration’s best legal minds are concerned about precisely that. And it’s clear that the posture taken in the prosecution of Khadr presents a troubling precedent for civilian contractors, not just those who operate the drones. It is not likely, of course, that the United States will ever charge any of its contractors with “homicide under the law of war” for the use of lethal force in a conflict setting, but the prosecution of Khadr opens the door for others to do so.

The Sun report only serves to highlight the shortcomings of the process of setting the military commission rules. The Gates Pentagon prepared the manual for the military commissions completely behind closed doors. It disregarded established procedures under which proposed procedural rules are disclosed for public comment and the views of the military bar itself are explicitly solicited. We now see that it turned to secrecy because it had something to hide: the rules were recognized as flawed and weak even within the Obama Administration, where they were subjected to appropriately sharp criticism. Had they been publicly aired, the Pentagon would have been forced to work out the contradictions in them. But it opted to keep the country and the bar in the dark. [The reason is probably due to Obama's actual views on transparency. – LG]

The Obama Administration owes the country a clear explanation of its legal policy positions with respect to law-of-war issues. What it has served up instead is a series of half-baked and unresolved controversies that undermine confidence in the military justice system. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which the Supreme Court has held to be binding on the military commissions, says they must be a “regularly constituted court.” But at every turn, the Pentagon has taken shortcuts that compromise the credibility of these tribunals.

Read it for yourself.

Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

In communities across the country, Muslim Americans are under attack as radical conservatives are denying them the right to build their own places of worship. Here are a few examples:

– In Brentwood, Tennessee, Muslims planned to build the first mosque ever in Williamson County. After agreeing to numerous restrictions on how they would build their mosque so as to not offend the surrounding community — like not having outdoor speakers to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer — the Muslim community was finally able to get the Brentwood city commission to approve land to be used to build a mosque. Radical conservatives responded, and “through e-mails, blogs and word of mouth, opponents told friends and neighbors they were suspicious of the mosque and feared its leaders had ties to terrorist organizations.” After intense community pressure, the mosque’s builders decided last week to simply withdraw their plans. “There comes a time when you have to say, ‘We can’t do this anymore,” said Jaweed Ansari, a Brentwood physician involved in the mosque project.

– Two nights ago, the city council of Alpharetta, Georgia, voted unanimously to deny “an application by the Islamic Center of North Fulton to expand” their mosque. Alpharetta Muslim Parwaiz Iqbal protested the decision, saying, “If we are denied a decent place of worship, you might as well hang a banner here in downtown Alpharetta that Muslims are not welcome in this city.”

– In New York City, radical conservatives are attacking plans to build a mosque in a 13-story community center located two blocks from Ground Zero. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) joined the crusade against the mosque by saying it’s “very offensive and wrong” to build it, while regretfully admitting that it can’t legally “be stopped, however, because of the first amendment.” All of the right-wing outrage ignores the fact that innocent Muslim Americans, too, died on 9/11 — like Salman Hamdani, a police cadet and part-time ambulance driver who died “doing everything he could to help those in need” at Ground Zero. Last night, a Manhattan community board backed the proposal to build the Muslim community center there by a 29-1 vote.

In addition to being denied their places of worship, Muslim communities have been the victims of dangerous hate crimes. Last week, the Islamic Center of North Florida was rocked by an explosion, and police suspect that a pipe bomb was responsible. The Islamic Center is located in Jacksonville, Florida, and is attended by Muslim Human Rights Commission member Parvez Ahmed, who recently faced hateful remarks from a city councilman and area residents over his faith. Noting the lack of media coverage of the attack relative to the failed car bombing in Times Square, Matthew Yglesias observed, “Somehow this attack, despite its greater technical sophistication, hasn’t obtained nearly the same level of media attention. And I just can’t figure out why.”

The Washington Post noted Monday that the rise in anti-Muslim tensions has “prompted many Pakistanis who once had deep ties to the United States to look elsewhere for work, education and travel. It has also left some Pakistani Americans feeling uneasy in their adopted homeland.” “My uncle has been living in the United States for years,” said Akmal Abassi, an English language instructor and in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. “He still admires the American values of freedom and equality, but now it is much harder for him to convince people here at home.”

UPDATE: The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes that the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens has proposed a religious litmus test that Muslims should have to answer before they open mosques. Reflecting on the test, Duss writes, "Would Stephens, or anyone, dare propose a similar religious test for any other faith? What about asking Jews whether they condemn violence by Jewish settlers in the West Bank before they can build a synagogue somewhere? Or asking Christians planning a new church whether they will invite the input and participation of Christian gay and lesbian groups? You know, just as a ‘confidence-building measure’? Doubtful. It would be considered un-American."

It’s trickier than I thought. First, the Garmin 260W is not designed to be used outdoors when it’s sunny. Under those conditions, the screen looks totally blank, though somewhere in there are pixels dimly glowing, no doubt. Also, I couldn’t determine directions—i.e., when I parked near the cache, and got out with the PND to find it, no indication at all of the direction to walk. I picked a direction and did determine that in going that way I ended up farther from the cache, but no idea if I was walking directly away or at an angle.

The screen does sometime brighten—and then dim—and then brighten. So far as I can tell, the intervals are random.

Need to study this a bit more.

UPDATE: The manual explains how to set the display (for example, default brightness is 50%, but you can ramp it up at some cost in battery life) and how to set navigation for driving or walking. I’ll take another run at it tomorrow.

Excellent takedown by Greenwald of pomposity and overweening self-regard (with not a trace of narcissism, so far as I can tell—at least none on Greenwald’s part, though other narcissists are on full display).

I’ve never attended a brainstorming session where I was told that only ideas with which the leaders already agreed could be spoken. Less a brainstorm than a braindrip?

Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress:

House Republicans launched a new website (America Speaking Out) yesterday to “listen” to Americans’ policy ideas in order to craft a new Party agenda. However, the site is not an open forum for just any idea. Project leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the GOP will stick to its “principles” — meaning they won’t incorporate any idea they don’t already agree with.

Moreover, the new site comes with some caveats. “Someone who wants to come on and make the suggestion on how to raise taxes, for example,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL). “They are welcome to do that, [but] that’s not something that we are going to take up.”

Also discouraged? “Suggestions on amnesty or a path to legalization for illegal immigrants and anything pro-choice.” However, it appears that references to Hitler are just fine. In addition to mentions of Hitler, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports some other rather odd and offensive suggestions the GOP has allowed on America Speaking Out:

“End Child Labor Laws,” suggests one helpful participant. “We coddle children too much. They need to spend their youth in the factories.”

“How about if Congress actually do their job and VET our Usurper in Chief, Obama is NOT a Natural Born Citizen in any way,” recommends another. “That fake so called birth certificate is useless.” [...]

“Don’t let the illegals run out of Arizona and hide. … I think that we should do something to identify them in case they try to come back over. Like maybe tattoo a big scarlet ‘I’ on their chests — for ‘illegal’!!!” (Filed under “job creation.”) [...]

“I oppose the Hispanicization of America,” said one. “These are not patriotic people.” Another contributor had parody in mind (we hope): “English is are official langauge. Anybody who ain’t speak it the RIGHT way should kicked out.”

The Wonk Room’s Andrea Nill observes some other friendly suggestions on the website, such as: “Why support illegal immigration to bring this country down to the level of Mexcico [sic]? Whe [sic] to the Hispanics just go home?”

As the country descends into oligarchy, we can still fight some rearguard actions. Just recently the telecoms are moving hard to kill net neutrality. And, of course, they are buying members of Congress in job lots to do their will. Maybe you can help. I just got this via email:

Congress just sold you out to Comcast, Verizon and AT&T.

74 House Democrats and 37 Senate Republicans have signed industry-written letters telling the FCC to abandon efforts to protect Internet users and stop big companies from blocking Internet traffic.

It’s yet another example of dirty politics destroying our democracy, and it has to stop.

Tell Washington: Congress Doesn’t Speak for Me

The nasty little secret that everybody knows? Almost every one of these representatives has accepted massive contributions from the phone and cable lobby. Now the industry is demanding a return on its investment.

Fortunately, your member of Congress isn’t among this group of sellouts.

By signing the industry letter, these members of Congress have drastically undercut the FCC’s ability to get a fast, affordable and open Internet to everyone in America. They are actually taking a position against the interests of rural and low-income communities.

We aren’t going to let this outrageous and unethical behavior stand. Today, we’re asking hundreds of thousands of Americans to sign our own letter and telling Congress and the FCC that these members of Congress don’t speak for us, President Obama or the millions of other Americans who support a fast, open and affordable Internet.

Don’t Let Dirty Politics Kill Fast, Open and Affordable Internet

That so many members of Congress would intentionally sell out the public may be hard to imagine. Perhaps these representatives didn’t know what they were signing. Or perhaps this is just business as usual, another D.C. betrayal of the public trust. (Is it any wonder the latest Gallup public opinion poll counts a congressional disapproval rating of 73 percent?)

These members of Congress acted on blind faith that phone and cable companies have the best interests of Americans in mind.

But Comcast and AT&T can no better police themselves to protect the open Internet than BP can police itself to protect the oceans. We already know how that ends. The phone and cable companies must play by our rules before it’s too late.

Congress can’t hand over the future of communications to these companies. The results would be disastrous.

By taking action today, you’re telling Congress that these bad deeds won’t go unnoticed.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Free Press Action Fund
http://www.savetheInternet.com
http://www.FreePress.net

P.S. Be sure to sign this letter to Washington. Then forward this e-mail to your friends in California and share the action via Twitter and Facebook.

Yet another Obama promise broken. This guy really doesn’t care what he promises, does he? David Corn in Mother Jones:

When Mexican President Felipe Calderon addressed the US Congress on Thursday, he called for the United States to reinstate the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004 under the Bush administration. Calderon noted that a ban on these weapons, which are flowing south across the border to violent drug cartels, could help Mexico reduce the horrific violence that has seized parts of that country.

Calderon might be forgiven for assuming that this would be a reasonable request to make to the Obama administration. While campaigning for the presidency, candidate Barack Obama backed permanently reinstating the ban. After he assumed office, his administration quickly announced it would proceed on this front. On February 25, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder declared,

As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons.

Holder specifically noted that resurrecting the ban would reduce the number of guns pouring into Mexico and fueling the violence there.

Compare Holder’s unequivocal statement to how the White House these days addresses the matter. Hours after Calderon’s appearance on Capitol Hill, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about this issue. Here’s the full exchange:

Q: Robert, speaking of President Calderón, this morning in his address to Congress, he asked lawmakers to reinstate the assault weapons ban, something the President has supported in the past.  Does the President still support that and does he plan to lean on Congress to make progress?

GIBBS:  I would — because the President largely got asked this question yesterday about both drugs and weapons moving across the border, I’d point you to the answer that he gave about increased inspections on cargo that’s moving from the north to the south.

You know the rest. At Obama’s joint press conference with Calderon the previous day, this is what the president said,

Through increased law enforcement on our side of the border, we’re putting unprecedented pressure on those who traffic in drugs, guns, and people.  We’re working to stem the southbound flow of American guns and money, which is why, for the first time, we are now screening 100 percent of southbound rail cargo.

Nothing about an assault weapons ban. A Mexican journalist followed up and asked Obama, "Shouldn’t there be an initiative that will regulate guns as they are sold? Is there going to be a ban?" Obama again talked about interdiction efforts and didn’t address the assault weapons ban.

Not only will the White House not make good on candidate Obama’s promise to revive the ban or Holder’s announced decision to do so, it won’t even talk about the assault weapons ban. Not a word. The reason is obvious: Obama and his aides don’t want to spark a backlash from the NRA and voters who cling to their guns—especially as Democrats ride toward a difficult mid-term election. On this dicey topic, Obama cares most about ducking a political bullet.

Political courage at its finest.

Of course: BP is focused totally on minimizing the impact on its profits and, if possible, find a way to increase profits from this. Marisa Taylor and Shashank Bengali for McClatchy Newspapers:

Under pressure to stop the oil spill that’s gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP is struggling to play conflicting roles: projecting an image of a responsible company while deflecting legal blame for the disaster.

That tension, which is reflected most recently in BP’s decision to continue using a chemical dispersant that the Environmental Protection Agency calls toxic, has fueled a growing perception that the company is more focused on protecting its own interests than the public’s.

Scientists and legal experts said that BP’s decision to keep using Corexit, a chemical dispersant that the EPA says may be toxic to marine life, helps the company appear to be fighting the slick. However, it also may hide how much oil is being spilled, which could help BP in court.

"They want to be seen to be doing something," said Rick Steiner, a veteran marine conservation consultant who’s based in Alaska.

"Secondly, they clearly want to limit the amount of oil coming to shore; that’s what people see. And thirdly, if they can limit the amount of oil in evidence, they can limit the public outrage and likely pay less financial damages down the road."

For better or for worse, the company’s legal and PR strategies are likely to be shaped by Exxon’s; that company fought civil lawsuits for two decades after a catastrophic 1989 spill off the coast of Alaska and was rewarded with a Supreme Court decision that slashed damages from $2.5 billion to $500 million.

It’s unclear what strategy BP will adopt. In earlier and smaller spills, it took a more conciliatory stance toward the government and litigants, but the Supreme Court decision, and the size of the spill in the Gulf, may persuade it to be more aggressive.

The cleanup and economic damages could cost BP billions of dollars.

"Is the new BP (really) the old BP that stepped up and met their responsibilities after some initial jousting in court?" asked Lloyd Benton Miller, one of the lead plaintiff’s lawyers in the Exxon Valdez case. "Or is the new BP going to be a kind of post-Exxon BP that decides that Exxon had it right: The way to deal with this is to fight, fight, fight and grind down the plaintiff and the government as long as possible."

The company is expected to try to protect its own legal rights and corporate image — and it has a duty to its shareholders to do so. In recent weeks, however, this stance has run counter to demands that the company be more forthcoming about what caused the spill, how much oil is spewing out and how to clean it up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post:

BP’s official response plan for oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t actually say anything about how the company would stop a blowout, wildly underestimates the worst-case scenario, and lists walruses among the Gulf’s “Sensitive Biological Resources” — leading an environmental group to suggest Monday that no regulator could possibly have seriously examined it.

“This response plan is not worth the paper it is written on,” PEER board member Rick Steiner, a marine professor, said in a statement. “Incredibly, this voluminous document never once discusses how to stop a deep water blowout even though BP has significant deep water operations in the Gulf.”

The entire 582-page plan, titled “BP Gulf of Mexico Regional Oil Spill Response Plan” and dated June 30, 2009, can be found here; the section on “worst case” scenarios is here.

The plan also doesn’t contain information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deep-water blowouts.

Meanwhile, it gives a website for a Japanese home shopping site as the link to one of the “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for] rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis”.

One part of the plan that does seem to be very much in force is the guide for public statements, directing company spokesmen not to make statements that contain any of the following:

a) Speculations concerning liability for the spill or its legal consequences.

b) Speculations regarding the cause of the spill. An extended inquiry may be needed to determine the actual cause, and legal liability could be affected by what is said.

c) Estimates of damage and/or value expressed in dollars, production statistics, sales volume, or insurance coverage.

d) Estimates of how long cleanup will take or cleanup costs.

e) Promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal.

I like Congressman Alan Grayson more and more. John Nichols in The Nation:

Congressman Alan Grayson [1] is at it again. This time, the Florida Democrat who shook up the health-care debate by saying Republicans were the real death-panel party and who shook up the bank reform debate by leading (with Texas Congressman Ron Paul) the “Audit the Fed” fight, is shaking up the debate about so-called “emergency” supplemental spending to fund the occupations of foreign lands.

Grayson’s mad because the Pentagon and its allies in the White House (be they Bush and Cheney or Obama and Biden) keep demanding tens of billions in additional allocations to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. And they do so in a manner that makes debate difficult and dissent rare.

But Grayson is out to provoke a debate—and he is definitely dissenting.

“What George Orwell wrote about in 1984 has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the ‘military-industrial complex’ has come true,” the congressman argues. “War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.”

Grayson proposes to change this circumstance with a bill he has introduced: “The War Is Making You Poor Act.” [2]

“The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars,” he explains.

To make the cost of war real for working Americans, Grayson performs a simple calculus: [3]

“Next year’s budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American’s income. Beyond that, (it) leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.

“And that’s what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.”

The congressman is betting—with good reason—that the key to opening up a real debate about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is to make real the cost of these occupations to American families.

“The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war,” explains Grayson, with a reference to the mounting trade deficit with China. “We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don’t even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using ‘emergency supplemental’. A nine-year ‘emergency.’”

If Americans recognize what they are personally paying to maintain occupations of distant lands, Grayson argues that Americans will tell Congress: “the cost of these wars is too much for us.”

It’s a good bet.

In the first 72 hours after Grayson introduced his legislation, more than 22,000 Americans signed an online petition [4] endorsing it.

Does anyone seriously believe that corporations care 2¢ for the public welfare? Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress:

This week, the House of Representatives is working on a package extending several popular tax breaks as well as important social safety net provisions like unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers. The bill costs about $200 billion, but is partially offset by a few tax changes, including the closing of a loophole that allow corporations to claim U.S. tax credits on profits earned overseas.

These unjustified tax breaks have been on the radar of Congress’ tax writers for the last few years, but so far they’ve remained in the tax code due to pressure from big corporations.

This time, even though the bill also extends some of their favored provisions, like the Research and Development tax credit, the Big Business lobby is fighting to preserve its ability to exploit tax loopholes, at the expense of the benefits extension:

International Business Machines Corp. and trade groups for major U.S. companies are pressing Congress to defeat a jobs bill containing billions of dollars in taxes on their global operations…In a letter to lawmakers yesterday, Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s biggest computer-services provider, told lawmakers it “strongly opposes” the legislation and would rather do without the research credit than face new taxes on overseas profits.

The Chamber of Commerce has, of course, weighed in on behalf of the corporations, claiming that the legislation is a “job killer.” Closing the loopholes in question would raise about $14.5 billion over ten years, or about $1.5 billion per year from the entire multinational corporation community. According to the National Employment Law Project, 1.2 million Americans who are currently eligible for extended benefits will lose them in June if Congress doesn’t act. The Wonk Room has more.