The William Holmes Blog

Poisons of Monstru Print

Originally uploaded by SteamCrow

– If Texas were not in the Union, the Democrats would currently have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate — or at least they would once Al Franken gets seated. This is because, in a 98-seat Senate, only 59 votes would be required to break a filibuster.

– If Texas were not in the Union, the Republicans would operate from a significantly weakened position in the House, since the net 8-vote advantage their congressional delegation gives them in the state (they have 20 seats to the Democrats’ 12) is by far their largest.

– If Texas were not in the Union, George W. Bush would never have become President in 2000 — not because he’d be constitutionally ineligible (Bush, despite his Texas twang, was born in posh New Haven, Connecticut). Rather, he wouldn’t have had enough Electoral Votes to defeat Al Gore.

– If Texas were not in the Union, Barack Obama would have won the Electoral College 389-147 instead of 365-173 (note that there are two fewer votes total, because there would be two fewer Senators). The vast majority of Texas’ electoral votes would be redistributed to lib’rul states like California (which would go from having 55 electoral votes to 59) and New York (34 rather than 31):

By NEDRA PICKLER – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship, lambasting the case as a waste of the court’s time and suggesting the plaintiff’s attorney may have to compensate the president’s lawyer.

In an argument popular on the Internet and taken seriously practically nowhere else, Obama’s critics argue he is ineligible to be president because he is not a “natural-born citizen” as the Constitution requires.

In response last summer, Obama’s campaign posted his Hawaiian birth certificate on its Web site. But the lawsuit argues it is a fake and that Obama was actually born in his father’s homeland of Kenya, even though Hawaiian officials have said the document is authentic.

“This case, if it were allowed to proceed, would deserve mention in one of those books that seek to prove that the law is foolish or that America has too many lawyers with not enough to do,” U.S. District Judge James Robertson said in his written opinion.

The lawsuit didn’t even use Obama’s legal name but called him “Barry Soetoro,” the name he went by while attending elementary school in Indonesia. It’s one of many that has been filed claiming Obama is ineligible to serve as president.

Robertson ordered plaintiff’s attorney John Hemenway of Colorado Springs, Colo., to show why he hasn’t violated court rules barring frivolous and harassing cases and shouldn’t have to pay Obama’s attorney, Bob Bauer, for his time arguing that the case should be thrown out.

Defying a major blizzard, students plan to take the Capitol by storm, with more than 2,500 ready to be arrested. Read story at NewsCloud.

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here. Three things struck me in reading through the account.

First, Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned. This placed the prison guards under unjustifiable mental stress and anxiety, and, as any person familiar with the vast psychological literature in the area (think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance) would have anticipated produced abuses. Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Second, there is a good deal of discussion of displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities, and also specific documentation of mistreatment of the Qu’ran. Remember that the Neocon-laden Pentagon Public Affairs office launched a war against Newsweek based on a very brief piece that appeared in the magazine’s Periscope section concerning the mistreatment of a Qu’ran by a prison guard. Not only was the Newsweek report accurate in its essence, it actually understated the gravity and scope of the problem. Moreover, it is clear that the Pentagon Public Affairs office was fully aware, even as it went on the attack against Newsweek, that its claims were false and the weekly’s reporting was accurate.

Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

from Information Clearing House

from Information Clearing House

Madoff’s
fall has planted the seeds of suspicion. We now doubt those we have
done business with for years. The presumption of trust is gone.

Dcember 20, 2008 “The Nation” — – The
news of Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion fraud has hit the investor/401(k)
class as nothing else — not the fall of Lehman Brothers, not the death
of Bear Stearns, nor the string of insolvency announcements of one
household name after another. Madoff is the blow that did it.

That
Madoff took some of the members of the centimillionaire club to the
cleaners is not what caused the shock. It is the damage done to so many
smaller investor/savers, so many pension funds, so many charities. You
do not have to be one of Madoff’s victims to be affected. Madoff, his
own businesses aside, was a major figure in the world of investments,
of stocks and bonds and securities and exchanges. If the former chairman of Nasdaq is a crook, whom do you trust?

Madoff
has sown the seeds of suspicion everywhere. He has caused us to doubt
men and women with whom we have done business with for years. There is
no way of knowing if someone is a con artist. The presumption of trust
is gone.

Business
depends on trust, trust of all kinds. Trust that when you place an
order with a broker he or she will get you the best price, trust that
your investment or retirement adviser is not getting an under-the-table
kickback to put your old age money into a shoddy annuity.

Trust
is the indispensable element in all businesses. Contractors depend on
subcontractors to get the job done when they say they will; retailers
depend on distributors to deliver on time; lawyers are trusted to meet
filing deadlines, steel fabricators are expected to get gigantic
trusses to the building site exactly when they are needed. Doctors are
expected to put patients’ interests above money considerations; parts
manufacturers are relied on to deliver on time to the factory. Business
runs on trust, and Bernard Madoff has busted it.

So the Wall Street Journal says to its readers, “Could your investment manager be another Bernard Madoff?…
if someone like Mr. Madoff can be accused of running a $50 billion
Ponzi scheme, can investors anywhere sleep easy? Ordinarily, when you
are picking an investment manager or financial planner, you’re given
some common-sense advice. Avoid managers who are unknown, or
unregulated, or come without good referrals, or haven’t been in the
industry long. But none of this would have saved you from Mr. Madoff.
‘This guy had oodles of referrals, at the highest levels,’ notes Duane
Thompson, a managing director at the Financial Planning Association in
Washington. ‘He was [former] chairman of Nasdaq. He’d been in business
since 1960. ”

Fear, confusion and mistrust have been amplified by the absence of government supervision, regulation or policing. The Securities and Exchange Commission admits it did not do its job.

With
the closing down of the old-time pension system, millions of employees
were forced into 401(k)s requiring knowledge of finance, bonds, stocks,
weird-sounding investments and tax law. They have had to make
investment decisions effecting their future with no government
protection against misrepresentation, legal traps laid for them and the
small print obfuscation financial institutions practice on their
customers. The result is the heart-wrenching situation
for millions who fear that they will be living out the last decades of
their lives counting their food stamps and hunting for bargains in the
used clothing bins.

The
Madoff swindle puts the spotlight on the collapse of the 401(k)
retirement plan. The United States is the only advanced nation without
a complete retirement system.

For
401(k)s to have worked, a bull market or at least a flat market was
necessary. It was an unreliable gamble from the git-go, an arrangement
that would fall to pieces when next the market crashed.

Madoff
and the crash underline the powerlessness of the millions. As a matter
of principle, the Republicans defended the unregulated lawlessness that
enabled a Madoff to run his swindles. As for the Democrats, sometime in
the Clinton era they sold their party to Wall Street and now they have
Chuck Schumer to make sure it stays sold.

It remains for President-elect Obama to void the deal and break his party free to help those who have nowhere else to look.