The White House, bless them, has threatened to veto the Farm Bill if Congress passes the House version of the legislation, which cuts $2 billion a year from the food stamp program (SNAP), instead of the Senate version, which contains a mere $400 million in annual cuts.
The White House would prefer, if we are in a cutting mood, to cut direct subsidies to farmers and crop insurance, two longtime mainstays of the Farm Bill that have basically totally fucked up our entire food system for decades but that also have made a few giant food companies quite rich…
Good one, guys. Good policy, good attempt at deficit reduction, good governing.
Food stamp enrollment has increased dramatically since the 1990s. To conservatives, the increase is evidence of fraud and excessive generosity. Fraud, abuse, and accidental overpayments, though, are at historic lows.
There are a lot of people on food stamps because there are a lot of poor people. A minuscule percentage of SNAP recipients live on incomes above the poverty line. I also don’t think most members of Congress in either party are aware that “the poverty line” is $23,550 for a household of four.
The federal government spent $81 billion on SNAP in fiscal year 2012, with 92 percent of that going directly to beneficiaries. The Defense Department spent $67.3 billion on 188 F-22s that asphyxiate their pilots. The F-35 comes in at an affordable $391.2 billion.
Comparing totally unrelated government expenditures can be a facile exercise, but those b-numbers often need some context. We’ll spend almost any amount on an unnecessary war plane designed to maintain our air superiority over an assortment of potential enemies whose most likely weapons will be capitalism or improvised explosives.
Helping poor people buy food? That’s where we draw the line.
Why obsess over cutting SNAP?
Because Republicans are simply convinced, all evidence aside, that the American welfare system is too generous, and that a little government cruelty is just the kick in the pants impoverished people need to get up and get jobs as computer programmers or something.
Intentional cruelty is basically a Republican policy goal…
We might propose a different sort of plan for Republicans and Democrats alike in Congress. It’s pretty simple, really. Stop sending jobs and profits overseas, end corporate welfare, lobbyists, and offshore tax shelters, pursue a path towards peaceful prosperity and bring American manufacturing back.
In a little-noticed speech on May 10 to the Iowa Republican Party in Cedar Rapids, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul humorously chided President Obama’s signature health care overhaul, noting the 140,000 medical diagnostic codes doctors will have to use in order to inform the government about injuries sustained by Americans.
That’s 122,000 newcodes, up from the previous 18,000. Those codes, said Sen. Paul, a medical doctor himself, include line-items for ‘injuries sustained from a turtle,’ and ’walking into a lamppost.’
Paul has attracted attention in recent weeks for spending time in the Hawkeye State because it’s among the first states to weigh in during the 2016 Republican presidential primary season.
As a video of Paul’s remarks surfaced Monday on YouTube, news emerged that a CNN/Opinion Research poll showed 54 percent of Americans don’t support Obamacare.
The Center for Public and Media Affairs at George Mason University is a nonpartisan research and educational organization which conducts scientific
studies of the news and entertainment media.
This is their piece released yesterday, May 28, 2013:
A leading media fact-checking organization rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats, according to a new studyby the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University.
The study finds that PolitiFact.comhas rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims during President Obama’s second term. Republicans continue to get worse marks in recent weeks, despite controversies over Obama administration statements on Benghazi, the IRS and the AP.
According to CMPA President Dr Robert Lichter, “While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party.”
The study examined 100 statements involving factual claims by Democrats (46 claims) and Republicans (54 claims), which were fact-checked by PolitiFact.com during the four month period from the start of President Obama’s second term on January 20 through May 22, 2013.
Major Findings:
PolitiFact rated 32% of Republican claims as ‘false’ or ‘pants on fire,’ compared to 11% of Democratic claims, a 3 to 1 margin. Conversely, Politifact rated 22% of Democratic claims as ‘entirely true’ compared to 11% of Republican claims, a 2 to 1 margin.
A majority of Democratic statements (54%) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18% of Republican statements. Conversely, a majority of Republican statements (52%) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to only 24% of Democratic statements.
Despite controversies over Obama administration statements regarding Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press, Republicans have continued to fare worse than Democrats, with 60% of their claims rated as false so far this month (May 1 –May 22), compared to 29% of Democratic statements by a 2 to 1 margin.
This study’s findings are similar to those of a previous CMPA study, which found that PolitiFact gave more negative ratings to the Romney campaign than the Obama campaign during the 2012 presidential election campaign.
Examples of PolitiFact Ratings:
Pants on Fire: Michele Bachmann decries ‘huge national database’ run by IRS with “personal, intimate” details (May 15, 2013).
True: Obama says bipartisan background check plan ‘outlawed any (gun) registry’ (April 17, 2013).
* * * * * * * *
Be this as it may, the Democrats aren’t exactly up there with 22% of their claims registering as ‘entirely true’ according to this CMPA/Politifact study. With one of the lowest approval ratings in history, both aisles of Congress– Democrat and Republican alike– haven’t fared so well in the public’s view.
We wonder how this study might have turned out if it had weighed in with theIndependents, Greens, and Libertarians for overall truthiness.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization which is affiliated with George Mason University. It has monitored news coverage of every presidential election and every new administration since 1988.
For CMPA findings on the Obama administration see: cmpa.com
To note,Politifact.comis an adjunct of the Tampa Bay Timesand recipent of the Pulitzer Prize in reporting.
Above: Bush’s “Mission Accomplished’ speech on May 1, 2003, when US casualties stood at a few hundred. The
list would grow to nearly 5,000 dead and 30,000 wounded.
The results: the break-up of Iraq and permanent US bases near major oil fields.
The cost: $3-5 trillion to American taxpayers.
(Clip from “Fahrenheit 9/11″ by Michael Moore)
SO WE’VE REACHED the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, the nadir of any US presidency since the time Richard Nixon made his getaway in a helicopter from the White House lawn.
The aircraft carrier stunt was a Karl Rove PR production designed to provide images for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. Back in 1984, Ronald Reagan’s media Svengali, Michael Deaver, patched together– to great effect– campaign footage of a flak-jacketed Reagan gazing into binoculars at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
As with everything else, Rove sought to turn Bush into a cowhide version of the Great Communicator.
On May 1st, 2003, Rove apparently believed that a victory lap with Bush donning a “Top Gun” costume and prancing around the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln would be political gold for 2004. Bush could burnish his “wartime president” bona fides and thwart any Democratic attempts to talk about anything other than the “War on Terror.”
When the U.S. occupation of Iraq soon degenerated into the totally predictable ethnic and sectarian bloodbath it became, Rove dropped the idea of running the images and even used surrogates to blame the sailors for erecting the “Mission Accomplished” banner.
In US-occupied Iraq, every car bomb, every IED, every suicide bomber, and every sectarian killing that followed that sunny day in May off the San Diego coast made a mockery of Bush’s premature spiking of the proverbial football and brought deserved derision from the rest of the world.
“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush proclaimed. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
This news might come as a surprise to the families of the 3,424 Americanswho died in combat in Iraq over the course of the next eight years.
With all the warmongering we’ve heard lately regarding Syria from the usual suspects and the anti-Muslim bigotry following the Boston Marathon bombings, I wonder if we’ve learned anything over the past ten years…
The Humboldt Sentinel appreciates Dr. Palermo sharing his article with our readers.
Before earning a Master’s degree and Doctorate in History from Cornell University, Professor Palermo completed Bachelor degrees in Sociology and Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz and his Master’s degree in History from San Jose State University.
Dr. Palermo’s expertise includes the 1980s; political history; presidential politics and war powers; social movements of the 20th century; the 1960s; and the history of American foreign policy.
Confirmation by the Constitution Project nearly a decade late that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military and ‘intelligence’ services committed acts of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere appears a Rorschach test for the ‘sentiments’ of the American people. However, sentiments aside, formal indictments of culpable officials on war crimes charges and the start of impeachment proceedings against current President Barack Obama are the only relevant responses to the report. Torture is a crime under laws to which the U.S. is signatory. And with his war on Iraq George W. Bush and his administration murdered, or caused the premature deaths of, more than a million people and substantially destroyed a modern nation state.
By 2004, when pictures of Iraqi civilians being tortured and humiliated at A
bu Ghraib prison were leaked, it was widely evident the Bush administration had established a global system of kidnapping, torture, rape and murder. The grotesque euphemisms ‘take the gloves off’ and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ provided cover for criminal behavior only to the extent Americans were willing to suspend judgment of what was before their eyes. The ‘fog of war’ was the fog of contrived fear and the malicious acts of America’s idiot prince and his bosses and acolytes were fueled by ignorance and fed on arrogance and stupidity. The language of nationalist psychosis was revived to insist the saving of ‘American’ lives was worth any price and as the Constitution Project report demonstrates, America’s victims paid that price in real time. And today under the new boss, Barack Obama, they are still paying.
What at first glance seems surprising in the development of the report is Republican Asa Hutchison, former Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Mr. Bush, and as such a legally culpable party to the crimes exposed in it, co-led the Constitution Project effort. The decade-long use of euphemisms for what was clearly torture served both as legal cover and the public relations interests of the Bush administration. By explicitly calling acts ‘torture’ in the report a boundary of legal culpability was breached. An earlier report conducted by the U.S. Senate reportedly contains similar findings but remains classified. Together these indicate ‘official’ evidence of culpability that could be used as the basis for criminal prosecutions if the will and means to prosecute are found. As such, Mr. Hutchison’s role appears to be as leader of an informal ‘truth and reconciliation’ committee. However, the magnitude of the crimes of aggressive war and torture warrant criminal prosecution, not reconciliation.
In his statement accompanying the release of the Project report Mr. Hutchison proposed that ignorance of legitimate interrogation methods, and possibly naiveté, were behind the Bush administration’s torture policies. The proposition itself is naïve, and in legal terms irrelevant, in that the Bush administration contemporaneously sought legal cover for its actions behind bogus legal theories, engaged in efforts to cover up illegal behavior and carried out phony ‘investigations’ of torture that limited culpability to low-level operatives. In addition to providing clear and detailed statements that Bush administration actions were torture, Mr. Hutchison restated facts of broader culpability: former President Bill Clinton started the ‘extraordinary rendition’ program used by the Bush and Obama administrations and current President Barack Obama continues torture practices and is hiding other current U.S. practices of dubious legality behind the illegitimate veil of ‘state secrets.’
To address the most prominent rationale for recent American defenders of torture: as copious evidence suggests, the George W. Bush administration had been warned of the attacks of September 11, 2001 by internal intelligence services, by overseas intelligence services and through a number of personal calls made directly to Mr. Bush from prominent world leaders prior to their occurrence. The ‘failure’ of 9/11 was the failure to respond to copious and overwhelming evidence an attack was imminent, not from an absence of information. Administration reaction to its failure to prevent the attacks was to fraudulently infer blame onto Iraq to justify launching a war of aggression against it. And illegal torture has been a standard tactic of the U.S. military and intelligence services overseas for decades with no relation to an imminent attack on the U.S. either claimed or inferred. In other words, even if torture had revealed the plot it would have made no difference– it was the failure to act on the available information that facilitated the attacks.
Part of the value of the Constitution Project report is it broadens the realm of ‘officially’ known U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan to include systematic torture by the U.S. military and intelligence services. That is, far from the administration’s contention the use of torture was limited to specific ‘targets’ and designed to yield specific and urgent information needed to prevent another attack on the U.S., torture was widespread, often used where no information relevant to activities against the U.S. was suspected, and was carried out for purposes unrelated to direct ‘U.S. interests.’ When put together with a separate BBC report claiming forces led by American James Steele were sent to Iraq to lead ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts that included the systematic torture and murder of Iraqi ‘insurgents,’ historical continuity is added to America’s torture program.
According to the BBC report, in the 1980s Mr. Steele led counter-insurgency forces in Central America on behalf of American business and imperial interests. That effort also included the systematic murder and torture of accused ‘insurgents,’ often innocents caught in the way of right-wing ‘death-squads’ supported by the U.S. The cluttered, confused, and ultimately irrelevant legal ‘justifications’ for torture provided by the Bush administration were transformed from theory to fact when Mr. Steele was sent to Iraq. This isn’t to suggest that U.S.-led torture and murder in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t precede Mr. Steele’s arrival, but it ties systematic torture and murder past to present. It cannot credibly be argued systematic torture and murder are a response to specific events when they precede those events by decades.
When Barack Obama entered office in 2009 he claimed the right to ‘look forward, not back’ that wasn’t his to claim. The law requires war crimes be investigated and prosecuted if evidence of guilt is found. Behind a veil of political pragmatism, not wanting to be caught up in ‘partisan’ politics, Mr. Obama moved America’s programs of political torture and murder into the 21st century. Had he enthusiastically prosecuted Bush administration crimes Mr. Obama could have revived international sanction against aggressive war and torture and ended, even if only temporarily, the of use of ancient imperial techniques in a world with the technological capacity to murder, maim and torture beyond the ancient imagination.
Instead of doing this Mr. Obama claimed the illegitimate and illegal rights of aggressive war, permanent incarceration of known innocents, torture and technocratic slaughter, all under the cover of opaque public relations techniques, quasi-sophisticated language and his casual demeanor. By choosing continuity and enhancement over clear, straightforward and unambiguous break with Mr. Bush’s catastrophic policies, Mr. Obama codified them into the set of ‘acceptable’ practices of American empire. But much as the context of fear and ignorance temporarily protected Mr. Bush and his administration from the clear language of their acts that will sooner or later condemn them to their ever so deserved fates, Mr. Obama chose the wrong side of history. The claims of real politic, that some innocents must die no matter who leads or follows, occasionally joins the ruin corrupt and criminal leaders meet when their crimes pass the historical context that facilitated and incubated them.
Unstated in the continuity of imperial torture and murder is that they never serve their claimed purposes. It was well understood by the standing bureaucracy in Washington during the ‘Bush years’ that torture doesn’t produce ‘useful’ information and that political murder eliminates the unlucky and the unfortunate, not the purported ‘targets.’ When the Bush administration offered nearly unfathomable wealth to poor Afghanis to turn their neighbors in for ‘crimes’ against America, even they weren’t so stupid as to believe those turned over were guilty of anything but misfortune. The unstated purpose of imperial torture and murder is to provide evidence of imperial power—to produce subservience and acquiescence through random terror. Why else does Mr. Obama randomly murder with drones, did Mr. Bush establish his torture regime and concentration prisons, and did Mr. Clinton create his program of kidnapping and torture?
The practical problem with using imperial / state terror as a strategy of political repression is that random torture and murder don’t force compliance with imperial and / or state interests—their random nature precludes association between their infliction and specific acts. This general principle was understood by the time of the Nuremberg trials—Nazi law couldn’t be followed because it was incoherent. But the point of Nazi law was to force the will of the Nazi leadership onto the German citizenry, not to maintain civil order. What change in behavior can be obtained through Mr. Obama’s drone murders other than to prevent people from being males between the ages of 16 and 50 or from sitting down with their families to share a meal? What interest is served other than to terrorize people? The Bush administration had little interest in determining the guilt or innocence of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay because the point of their incarceration wasn’t (isn’t) to punish guilt; it is to demonstrate imperial power.
Americans who see themselves on the ‘lucky’ side of torture and murder are either members of the tiny ruling class at present outside the realm of possible torture and / or murder or aren’t looking at present and recent past circumstance very hard. The purpose of the surveillance state isn’t to solve some ‘crime’ wave because there is none. Persons of the ‘wrong’ skin color and / or economic class aren’t harassed, beaten, fraudulently incarcerated or murdered to reduce ‘crime’ because an entire ruling class of economic and war criminals is hiding in plain sight and available for arrest were it in ‘the state’s’ interest to reduce crime. The rise of solitary confinement (torture) and the revival of debtor’s and for-profit prisons in the U.S. illuminate the political economic interests behind the incarceration state. And as New York City’s police Commissioner Ray Kelly recently articulated, the purpose of harassment of, violence against and incarceration of black and brown youth is to create a level of state terror that precludes ‘crime.’ In other words, terror is the state tactic of repression, not the crime.
Finally, this piece is written in the context of events surrounding the recent bombings in Boston. I lived in Cambridge, a few miles from the bombings, for five years and only recently moved back to New York. I have for decades had family and friends who have run the Boston Marathon, have been an avid runner myself for some twenty-five years, and have been a spectator at the Marathon on several occasions. There is no argument that could be made that any of the victims of the bombings were legitimate political targets. Where I now grieve for those maimed and murdered in Boston, so have I grieved for the innocents, now numbering over one million in Iraq and Afghanistan, who died in illegal wars of aggression, and the many who were also illegally tortured. If what happened in Boston was a crime, and it was, so too is illegitimate war and torture. Mr. Bush and his administration, and now with Mr. Obama joining him, deserve fair trials for their crimes and fitting punishment if found guilty, just as the murderers in Boston do.
The economic news in the last two weeks points to bad news for the economy and a reason for people to mobilize and demand change. We want to emphasize that as bad as the situation looks, there are solutions and ways to protect ourselves. The time to act is now.
Before we get to the impact of the Obama budget, let’s explode a critical myth: there is no recovery (at least for the 99%). Last month’s unemployment numbers revealed the fraud of the unemployment rate. Even though the country produced less than 90,000 new jobs, when over 120,000 are needed to keep up with growth, the unemployment rate declined. Why? Because hundreds of thousands are giving up on work each month and they don’t get counted.
The combination of poor federal economic policy – which is getting more off-track – and a corrupt economy is bringing on the next crash. In an article in Truthout last week, we point out the deep corruption of the finance system, which dominates the economy. Security fraud expert Bill Black told us that the evidence shows that fraud is “pervasive” among the “most elite financial institutions,” yet the Obama government policy was no prosecution. The Economic Collapse Blog points out there are 11 crashes going on right now: gold, silver, bitcoins, consumer confidence, 401(k) retirement accounts, casino gambling, Greek employment, European financial stocks, Spanish bankruptcies and energy demand; and predicts the bloated US stock market is next.
If either President Obama’s or Paul Ryan’s budget, or some of each, is enacted, and they will since these are what DC is considering, the economy will get even worse. The bipartisans have fully embraced austerity and are being cheered on by the corporate media and wealth-funded think tanks, as Margaret Flowers found when she debated two on the Marc Steiner Show, one from a “liberal” Democrat think tank, the other a conservative Republican – they agreed while Margaret had to correct their false statements.
These wins for industry are losses to the health and welfare of Americans. Congress does its job for big business well; research shows big payoffs for members who vote to deregulate the deeply corrupt finance industry. And, agribusiness food giant Monsanto was able to get the Monsanto Protection Act passed, which prevents regulation of GMO’s and even prevents courts from intervening.
It is now clear that Americans who deposited money in big banks could suffer the same result as the people of Cyprus, remember the lessons of the Depression, and have their deposits seized and turned into bank stock. Ellen Brown reports this is part of the “too big to fail” banks plan to withstand the next collapse. In fact, massive and risky derivatives investments, almost as large as the US economy, would receive more protection than depositors. It could happen here in a collapse, and it would be fast and furious, with the banks or the FDIC writing down deposits to save the banks at the expense of consumers. And, if you can’t pay your bills, be wary of debtor’s prison.
The political and economic mess of Washington and Wall Street, the foundering economy and threat of another collapse, are leading more and more people to question the viability of big finance capitalism; with criticism ranging beyond its traditional critics. More and more call for breaking up the big banks and tougher enforcement against banksters. But, others are calling for more structural changes. In an article that will be published in Truthout tomorrow, we discuss how to transform the Federal Reserve to make it transparent, democratic and responsive to the economy; the creation of public banks in every state and major cities as well ways to opt-out of the Wall Street economy.
The crisis of the US economy and government are upon us. The only way we will stop the cuts to necessary social services, the continued privatization of public services and government gifts to big business is to mobilize to stop business as usual in Washington, DC. Beyond that, it is important for all of us to envision and begin to create the new economy as the old one collapses. There is more information about the new economy and links to resources at ItsOurEconomy.us.
The future is ours to define. Now is the time to for action!
(Editor’s note: According to Common Dreams, a pair of explosions rocked an area near the finish line of the Boston
Marathon on Monday, leaving at least three people, including
one child, dead and more than 130 injured, many critically.
Six of the seven Humboldt County residents attending the Boston
Marathon are confirmed safe as of press time.)
Just hours after two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston marathon earlier today, telltale signs are already emerging that this incident, like so many others, fits a pattern we’ve seen many times before in suspected terrorist plots in America’s history.
At the time of writing this, reports vary on the number dead and injured, but one thing is certain — two explosions went off near the 26.2-mile marathon finish line, putting the nation under yet another post-9/11 security lockdown. Cellphone service was shutdown in Boston, and SB Nation cited AP that law enforcement shutdown cell service to Boston to “prevent any possible remote detonations in the future”:
AP reports circulated that Boston cellphone service was shutdown by law enforcement to prevent “remote detonations”.
As details trickle in and others get changed completely, the facts are still largely being sorted out.
Here’s what do we know.
“It was just a drill.”
University of Mobile coach Ali Stevenson told local NBC affiliate WPMI-TV 15 that not only did he feel something was ‘odd’ about the bomb-sniffing dogs posted at both the marathon’s start and finish, but just after he crossed the finish line, police were announcing a drill:
“They kept making announcements on the loud speaker that it was just a drill and there was nothing to worry about,” Coach Ali Stevenson told Local 15. “It seemed like there was some sort of threat, but they kept telling us it was just a drill.”
Adding to this compelling report is the fact that Boston police admittedly detonated a “controlled explosion” at the 600 block of Boylston Street near Copley Square near the location of the first two explosions, as confirmed by police scanner transmissions, raising questions about the origins of the other explosions. The Boston Globe tweeted, “Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.”
The 26th mile of the marathon was dedicated to Newtown victims, and their families were VIP seated near the finish line.
MSNBC’s original headline shown in purple.
MSNBC first reported, “26th mile of Marathon was dedicated to Newtown victims,” but just 13 minutes ago at the time of writing, the establishment-friendly outlet has changed the page’s headline to, “‘You can’t go anywhere’: Newtown runner’s wife speaks“.
MSNBC’s newer headline, updated for maximum trauma impact.
The New York Post reports that Newtown victim families were stationed right near the blast zone:
Relatives of the victims of December’s school massacre in Newtown, Conn. were among those attending the race finish at a VIP area. It was not known of any of the relatives were among the casualties.
Since the mass shooting tragedy at Sandy Hook, our President, politicians and their puppet media have exploited the Newtown tragedy for every last ounce of momentum they could, pushing a greater nationwide gun control and disarmament agenda. At 6:10 EST tonight, President Obama addressed the nation, affirming the perpetrators would “feel the full weight of justice” and that the FBI would be leading the investigation into the Boston bombing.
It’s only time before the Newtown shooting is made synonymous with this bombing tragedy to further condition the public that A) we must give up our weapons because not only are they dangerous, but B) only the government can truly keep us safe.
Authorities are reporting a “Saudi Arabian National” is the leading suspect.
Multiple media outlets including the New York Post are reporting that a 20-year old Saudi man with shrapnel wounds is being detained as the lead suspect in the marathon bombing at a Boston-area hospital.
The idea that drills are used to cover for involvement by the intelligence community is not just speculation, it is admitted fact in countless cases where FBI informants set-up and controlled al Qaeda suspects or other would be terrorists. In 2011, RT profiled an FBI report admitting that nearly every attempted terrorist attack since 9/11 was actually goaded on by uncover informant who had infiltrated suspect groups, typically encouraging individuals to take action on concocted plots.
“The report reveals that the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated by FBI-involved agents.”
In most of these high profile cases, the FBI “foils” the plot that they helped create, or the attacker is given a ‘dud’ explosive device. Then the media plays up the event as another near miss in the critical war on terror, while quietly admitting that no one was ever in any real danger, essentially acknowledging that the plot was theater for public consumption.
While the threat of terrorism is constantly emphasized, the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies have enabled and encouraged such plots is rarely mentioned on air and almost never focused on in media coverage.
In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, CNN was already propagating within hours the idea that ‘right-wing extremists‘ were behind the bombing.
Like so many historical examples, the establishment is patently using the tragedy to further their own ends, and the creepy tie in to victims’ families of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting only further likens the chances that Americans rights will be curtailed by the national security response to disaster after disaster.
Concluding arguments on marriage law, several Supreme Court justices indicated an interest in striking down a law that denies federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples today, presenting the possibility of a major change in gay marriage law in the next few months.
The law is the focus of a second day of oral arguments before the high court as it tackles the gay marriage issue. Five votes on the court would be needed to invalidate the law.
The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) law passed by the House with a vote of 342 to 67 and signed by President Clinton denies married same-sex couples access to federal benefits by defining marriage solely as being between a man and a woman. A section of the law, in effect, bars federal agencies from recognizing same-sex marriages, even in the states where they are legal.
The oral argument came a day after the court previously signaled that it is unlikely to issue a sweeping ruling declaring that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
The issue today was the application of the federal estate tax to a lesbian couple who had been married in Canada and lived in New York. As executor of Thea Spyer’s estate, Edie Windsor paid more than $360,000 in federal estate taxes. Windsor is seeking a refund on the ground that she is Spyer’s surviving spouse and under federal law, property that passes to a surviving spouse is generally free from estate taxes.
There are more than 1,000 federal laws and programs also having rules that depend in part on a person’s marital status.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, a potential swing vote, warned of the “risks” that infringes upon the traditional role of the states in defining marriage.
Kennedy referred to DOMA as “inconsistent” because it purports to give authority to the states to define marriage while limiting recognition of those determinations. He indicated that he had problems with law: whether Congress and the President had the right to say what marriage is, instead of leaving it to each state to make the legal definition.
Kennedy also seemed troubled by what he saw as the lack of narrow focus of the law. He said DOMA applies in the nine states that have decided to permit same-sex marriages as well as in the states that do not permit it.
On the liberal side of the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan echoed some of Kennedy’s concerns about the states’ rights issue.
“What gives the federal government the right to be concerned at all about the definition of marriage?” Sotomayor said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also raised concerns about the law, stressing how important federal recognition is to any person who is legally married. Justice Ruth Ginsburg said that because the federal rules which apply to married couples are so pervasive in the states that permit same-sex marriages, married same-sex couples could not get the federal benefits couples that heterosexual couples
get. They would, therefore, end up with “a skim milk marriage.”
“It affects every area of life,” Ginsburg said.
It is possible the court would not reach the wider issue of same-sex marriages in the case because of preliminary legal matters relating to whether the court can hear it or not.
On that issue, conservative justices criticized the decision by President Barack Obama to abandon the legal defense of DOMA, and called into question his willingness to defend other laws passed by Congress and challenged in court.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Antonin Scalia were the most critical of the approach the Obama administration has taken about the law. “That’s very troubling,” Justice Kennedy said.
While the criticisms may not affect how the justices eventually rule, it clearly showed their frustration with how Obama has walked a thin and difficult political line concerning gay marriage.
Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, said in February of 2011 that they would cease defending the DOMA law because they believed it is invalid under the Constitution. Don’t expect Republicans to embrace same-sex laws or marriage anytime soon, either. In the place of the Justice Department’s buckling, Republican lawmakers have stepped in to argue for the law and against same-sex marriage.
The court is expected to issue a ruling by the end of June.
Council punts on Eureka Fair Wage Act; voters to decide on November 4, 2014
By Charles Douglas Humboldt Sentinel
Not worth passing, and not worth studying.
The value of a $12-per-hour minimum wage in the City of Eureka was lost on the Council’s conservative majority, which rejected the citizen petition to immediately adopt the increase, and also rejected the option of ordering a 30-day study period to allow City Hall to research the matter.
“I’m not convinced at all we need a 30 day report,” Councilmember Melinda Ciarabellini said. “I’m also not convinced that the City of Eureka should take responsibility for a full and complete report assessment.”
Aside from the cost of a report — Ciarabellini cited a San Jose study, brought up by initiative proponents, as a $50,000 expenditure — the elected reps seemed predisposed in their decision. There was no amount of inquiry which appeared to interest them in creating the first municipal minimum wage in Humboldt County was advisable.
“We don’t have an option to alter the ordinance, so basically the interim study-type thing wouldn’t be complete, it wouldn’t change the outcome,” Councilmember Marian Brady said. “People will hopefully get educated on what the unintended consequences are.”
The 4-1 vote sends the Eureka Fair Wage Act to the next regularly scheduled municipal election, to be held on November 4, 2014. Proponents had hoped to gather the signatures of 15% of Eureka’s registered voters, which would have forced a special election this summer. About a fifth of the submitted signatures, however, were determined to be invalid, leaving them with 1,635 which counted; this still meant they were well ahead the 10% mark needed to qualify for a spot in the next general election. This will put the $12 wage question on the same ballot where the Mayor and three out of five members of the City Council will appear.
As ever, Councilmember Linda Atkins dissented from her colleagues, arguing strongly that the city need not wait nearly two years to alleviate the suffering of poverty-wage workers.
“I hope we can discuss this in kind of an unbiased way because I think in the last 30 years we’ve been inundated with a mindset that hasn’t worked…starting somewhere in the 80s, there’s been a concentrated effort to think of working people as the enemy,” she said. “We’ve been told that to raise people’s wages, we’re going to hurt businesses, when the San Jose study has showed that putting money in working people’s pockets helps the economy.”
Atkins pointed to figures provided by the California Budget Project, which show that it would cost a single adult $13.32-per-hour to skip any assistance from the government and pay for their own food, health care, transportation and housing — assuming a remarkably low rate of $569-per-month for an apartment.
“We’re not even talking about raising this wage to the point that people could actually live on,” she said. “I think we should just vote to pass this, and tell the people of Eureka we support you…our poverty level is hideous and I think this could help.”
A majority of public comments at tonight’s meeting made the same case on poverty, as Humboldt continues to rank as the third-poorest county in California.
“Many of Eureka’s problems are inseparable from our income being half the state average,” retired restauranteur George Clark said. “Sub-poverty wages require enormous public subsidies…a cycle that turns the poor into the destitute.”
Clark also called out the Councilmembers — namely Brady, Ciarabellini and Atkins — who form a majority of registered Democrats on the Council. He said they should honor their party’s platform to legislate on behalf of the working majority, a point also made by initiative proponent James Decker, who cited President Barack Obama’s call for a smaller federal minimum wage increase in this year’s State of the Union address.
“The critical variable in all the statistics is poverty,” Eureka retiree Lorraine Dunaway said. “Poverty is the number one risk factor for kids, for families, for females who make up far too much of the minimum wage work force. We would have a whole lot less dependence on social services if people could make a decent living.”
Neither party loyalty nor poverty appeared to motivate Brady and Ciarabellini; more apparent is the lasting impact of their cross-endorsement in their respective political campaigns with each other and with Mayor Frank Jager, a leading local Republican figure who served as County Coroner, and Councilmember Mike Newman, the former Chair of the Greater Eureka Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber has come out swinging against the $12 wage proposal, even though it wouldn’t directly affect a majority of its members, as the act excludes businesses with 24 or fewer employees.
Heavy hitters like Liana Simpson, owner of Sequoia Personnel Services, one of the largest temp agencies in the region, suggested people would drive from Eureka to Trinidad for the same meal if higher wages led to a four dollar increase in price.
“Employers of 25 or more who have minimum wage [workers] are less than 5% of the population,” she said. “These are the same employers who provide retirement benefits, education benefits and other incentives to our community.”
The “San Jose study” cited by both sides of the debate was produced by The Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, part of The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. The author, economics professor Michael Reich, concluded that San Jose’s Measure D, which raises that city’s minimum wage to $10 (without any exemption for small businesses), would pump $190 million into the regional economy without hurting employment levels.
“Measure D will increase operating costs of the average business by less than 0.25 percent,” Reich states. “These costs will be partly offset by cost savings to employers, such as more workers applying for jobs, lower employee turnover costs and higher worker productivity.”
“Prices in low-wage industries such as restaurants will increase by less than 0.71 percent, which translates into less than twenty-five cents on a $30 meal. Price increases of this magnitude do not measurably hurt sales.”
Although he doesn’t vote on such matters except to break a tie, the Mayor did attempt to strike one conciliatory note with the initiative’s backers, many of whom were involved in the Occupy Eureka activist group. The local version of the ‘Occupy Movement’ had encamped on the Courthouse lawn in late 2011 in a weeks-long protest before being raided and forcibly removed by the Eureka Police Department (the results of which are still being played out in court).
“I appreciate you going through this process than the process we just went through in the courthouse,” Jager said. “So thank you for this.”
He had previously accused Occupy Eureka of trashing the courthouse and wasting public resources, and advised them to “go home and use a different tactic.”
Apparently they have, and this time the voters, not the police, shall decide the outcome.
Congress waited six years to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after it opened the bloody floodgates for the Vietnam War in August 1964.
If that seems slow, consider the continuing failure of Congress to repeal the “war on terror” resolution — the Authorization for Use of Military Force — that sailed through, with just one dissenting vote, three days after 9/11.
Prior to casting the only “no” vote, Congresswoman Barbara Lee spoke on the House floor. “As we act,” she said, “let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
We have. That’s why, more than 11 years later, Lee’s prophetic one-minute speech is so painful to watch. The “war on terror” has inflicted carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere as a matter of routine. Targets change, but the assumed prerogative to kill with impunity remains.
Now, Rep. Lee has introduced H.R. 198, a measure to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force. (This week, several thousand people have already used a RootsAction.orgspecial webpage to email their Senators and House members about repealing that “authorization” for endless war.)
Opposed to repeal, the Obama administration is pleased to keep claiming that the 137-month-old resolution justifies everything from on-the-ground troops in combat to drone strikes and kill lists to flagrant abrogation of civil liberties.
A steep uphill incline faces efforts to repeal the resolution that issued a blank political check for war in the early fall of 2001. Struggling to revoke it is a valuable undertaking. Yet even repeal would be unlikely to end the “war on terror.”
At the start of 1971, President Nixon felt compelled to sign a bill that included repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. By then, he had shifted his ostensible authority for continuing the war on Vietnam — asserting his prerogative as commander in chief. Leaders of the warfare state never lack for rationales when they want to keep making war.
In retrospect, the U.S. “war on terror” has turned out to be even more tenacious than the U.S. war that took several million lives in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Some key similarities resonate with current circumstances. Year after year, in Congress, support for the Vietnam War was bipartisan. Presidents Johnson and Nixon preached against unauthorized violence in America’s cities while inflicting massive violence in Southeast Asia. Both presidents were fond
of proclaiming fervent wishes for peace.
But unlike the horrific war in Southeast Asia, the ongoing and open-ended “war on terror” is not confined by geography or, apparently, by calendar. The search for enemies to smite (and create) is availing itself of a bottomless pit, while bottom-feeding military contractors keep making a killing.
Beyond the worthy goal of repealing the Authorization for Use of Military Force is a need for Congress to cut off appropriations for the “war on terror.” A prerequisite: repudiating the lethal mythology of righteous war unbounded by national borders or conceivable duration.
What may be even more difficult to rescind is the chronic
disconnect between lofty oratory and policies digging the
country deeper into endless war.
“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” President Obama said in his 2013 inaugural address, after four years of doing more than any other president in U.S. history to normalize perpetual war as a bipartisan enterprise.
Repealing the Authorization for Use of Military Force will be very hard. Revoking the power to combine lovely rhetoric with pernicious militarism will be even more difficult.
______________________________
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He writes the Political Culture 2013 column.
–Or, How Can a Barrel of Washington Monkeys Throw a Shoe in the Works–
(VIDEO)
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
“Corporate welfare– the enormous and myriad subsidies, bailouts, giveaways, tax loopholes, debt
revocations, loan guarantees, discounted insurance and
other benefits conferred by government on business– is
a function of political corruption.
Corporate welfare programs siphon funds from appropriate public investments, subsidize companies ripping minerals from federal lands, enable pharmaceutical companies to gouge consumers, perpetuate anti-competitive oligopolistic markets, injure our national security, and weaken our democracy.”
~Ralph Nader
So what has happened to our great nation?
Politicians. 545 of them, to be exact.
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems– and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, why do we have deficits? If all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, why do we have inflation and high taxes? The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
Let’s put it all into some perspective unless we’ve forgotten or
resigned ourselves as to how things got this way.
You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does. You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million who are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
Excluded are the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank. The value of the dollar has lost ground ever since.
Excluded are all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They should have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. Even if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash, that politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it’s the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 monkeys spend much of their monkeyshine energy convincing you that what they did isn’t their fault. They cooperate in this common flimflam con game regardless of their party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of the Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget; he can’t force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? John Boehner; he’s the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. The House has passed a budget, but the Senate hasn’t approved a budget in over three years. The President’s proposed budgets have gotten almost unanimous rejections in the Senate during that time.
It seems inconceivable that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that’s not traceable directly to those 545 people.
When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is because they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red. If an unregulated Wall Street caused the greatest recession in our collective memory, it’s because they want it unregulated. If companies send jobs, earnings, and tax-sheltered profits overseas, it’s because they want them sheltered. If the five largest banks that gambled and lost can’t be allowed to fail while millions lose their jobs, farms, and homes, it’s because they want the gambling. If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Congress does not receive Social Security but are on an elite retirement plan
not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.
Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate. What’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate? There should be no insoluble government problems.
Don’t let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; or to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.
Above all, do not let them hustle you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power. They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people– We the People– who are their bosses.
We might note the man with the best job in the country is the Vice-President. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, “How is the President?”
Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees, perhaps it’s time we vote all of the monkeys out of office– and begin cleaning up their mess.
So, what happened to our great nation? You can spell ‘politicians.’ But can you spell “545 bought and paid for, monkey business-as-usual, beastly-political professional fat cat bureaucrats?”
Not one of the taxes below existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had no national debt, we had the largest middle class in the world, and we had Mom who
stayed at home to raise the kids so they’d grow up properly.
The only difference between death and debt is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
Accounts Receivable Tax Building Permit Tax CDL license Tax Cigarette Tax Corporate Income Tax Dog License Tax Excise Taxes Federal Income Tax Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA) Fishing License Tax Food License Tax Fuel Permit Tax Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon) Gross Receipts Tax Hunting License Tax Inheritance Tax Inventory Tax IRS Interest Charges IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax) Liquor Tax Luxury Taxes Marriage License Tax Medicare Tax Personal Property Tax Property Tax Real Estate Tax Service Charge Tax Social Security Tax Road Usage Tax Recreational Vehicle Tax Sales Tax School Tax State Income Tax State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) Telephone Federal Excise Tax Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax Telephone State and Local Tax Telephone Usage Charge Tax Utility Taxes Vehicle License Registration Tax Vehicle Sales Tax Watercraft Registration Tax Well Permit Tax Workers Compensation Tax
“Just be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.”
~Will Rogers
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Our appreciation goes out to Arlo Guthrie (Woody’s son), Ralph Nader, Charlie Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, Will Rogers, and to Sue O. of Medford, Oregon, for their contributions to this article.
Feel free to share this with others– or your local monkeyshine reps in Washington.
Send it around 545 times. We would be honored. Thank you.
Proposed New Mexico Law Would Now Prosecute Abortion Providers Instead of Rape Victims
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
Santa Fe, New Mexico– A Republican state lawmaker in New Mexico proposed a law last week that would send a woman to prison for three years on a felony if she had an abortion after being raped– for “tampering with evidence.”
“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.”
The physician and health care professionals who perform the abortion could be charged criminally as well with a felony.
Brown says it’s all a misunderstanding. She said her intent was not to go after rape and incest victims, but to prosecute rapists and incest perpetrators who coerce women into having abortions. She said the mistake occurred during the drafting of the bill, and she’s working on a substitute to make it clear the proposal wouldn’t apply to the victims.
Brown is a Carlsbad lawyer serving her second term in the New Mexico House since 2010. She’s a past GOP chairwoman and has been on the board of Right to Life of Carlsbad, an outspoken
anti-abortion group.
Controversy and Outcry
Nine New Mexico House Republicans, all women, signed on as co-sponsors. The bill quickly caught the eye of ABC News, The Huffington Post, Slate, Courthouse News, and Salon.com.
New Mexico’s state Democratic Party, the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and House Democrats all blasted the bill.
The first to publicize Brown’s bill was the liberal PAC Progress Now New Mexico. “In addition to being blatantly unconstitutional, the bill turns victims of rape and incest into felons and forces them to become incubators of evidence for the state,” said Pat Davis, the group’s executive director.
Democratic Party Chairman Javier Gonzales called the legislation “atrocious” and demanded, “The war on women in America has to stop. No woman should ever be forced to carry a child for evidence, plain and simple.”
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, moved to distance herself from HB 206. Responding to a request for a comment, her spokesperson said Martinez, as a career prosecutor, “would never support a bill that re-victimized rape survivors.”
On the national level, Democrats have decried a GOP “war on women” and cited outlandish statements about rape by Republican candidates to bolster that claim. Some Republicans have said that such missteps by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin and Indiana Senate contender Richard Mourdock cost the party U.S. Senate seats in those states.
Revising a Poorly Written Bill
In an interview last Thursday, Brown explained her intention, saying, “I’ve been talking to my constituents in Carlsbad and with law enforcement people, and they say we’re not doing enough to protect women and children.”
Her intent, she said, is to “go after perpetrators of incest and criminal sexual penetration who cover up their crime by forcing girls and women to get abortions.” Prosecuting rape or incest victims was never the goal of the bill, Brown stressed, adding, “It’s the guy who does the sex crime.”
Brown revised her original bill Friday to specify that victims can’t be charged.
Brown posted the new version of the bill on her personal website. In the new version of her bill, she added a sentence saying “In no circumstance shall the mother of the fetus be charged under this subsection.” The original version of the bill, however, is still posted on the Legislature’s website.
The executive director of the state Democratic Party said Friday that the ‘new’ Brown bill still has problems.
“The bill still makes it a crime to ‘facilitate’ an abortion for a woman who wants one …,” said Scott Forrester in a news release. “That means doctors, nurses, or anyone else who works at a health care clinic where this is one of the services provided would still be guilty of a felony.”
In another twist, Brown on Friday explained to a news reporter how the poorly written bill came about. She had asked a bill drafter with the Legislative Council Service whether she should include a sentence about not charging the mother. But, she said, the drafter told her that it wouldn’t be necessary– and prosecutors would understand that.
Brown has said part of the problem was that the original drafter quit his job before finishing the bill, so it went to another drafter.
Asked about what had happened with drafting Brown’s bill and for permission to look at the file, John Yaeger of the Legislative Council Service said, “… we’re prohibited by law from disclosing the nature or contents of any request from a legislator, which includes any conversations, communications and the file.”
Critics of the proposed bill are questioning whether Cathrynn Brown and the New Mexico Legislature are going too far, overreaching for evidence from rape victims that would normally be obtained in other ways while
criminalizing abortion health care providers.
The key to the new conservative “Constitutionalism” is
that they love, love, love every single word of the Constitution…
except for the parts that they hate. And those parts therefore
don’t count and have to be changed.
The truth is that “Constitutionalist” has become code for “far-right Teabagger” just like “southern preacher” has become code for “closeted homosexual.”
As much as these people say they adore the Constitution, they’re a little choosey about what they do and don’t like about it:
Second Amendment? Love it. Tenth Amendment, which gives un-delegated power to the states? Gotta have it. But the “no establishment of religion” part of the First Amendment? A little wobbly on that one.
The 17th Amendment, which allowed for direct election of senators (by the people; as opposed to legislative appointment), is on their chopping block. In fact, John Yoo wrote about it a few years ago in the National Review Online, saying that the 17th “undermined federalism.” John Yoo, of course, earned his Constitutional stripes by shitting all over the 8th Amendment while making room for torture.
The “no unreasonable searches and seizures” in the Fourth Amendment? They kind of like it, but only for white people.
The 16th Amendment, which allows income tax, well, obviously that’s gotta go as well. What were we thinking? The Founding Fathers obviously wanted us to fund our modern military with rainbows and candy.
The 14th Amendment is right there in the Constitution too, but it allows the evil spawn of Mexicans to be citizens, so it clearly needs some tweaking.
And of course there’s all the stuff that’s not in the Constitution that needs to be.
If only our Founding Fathers had the wisdom to foresee the invention of fire and cloth, we wouldn’t need a flag-burning amendment. But we do. And somehow James Madison must have left the “no gay marriage” amendment in his other pants the day he introduced the Bill of Rights, so we’ll have to fix that, too.
If they really loved the Constitution so much, wouldn’t they have more respect for it than that?
The reality is that Conservatives love their Constitution the exact same way they love their Bible — as something to thump, not something to read.
* * * * * * *
This article by Bill Maher, “Cafeteria Constitutionalists,” and others,can be found here.
Not only that, we’re in debt. The City is $7.8 million behind in its pension debt for employees. The City– and specifically City Manager David Tyson and Finance Director Paul Rodrigues– want to adopt a bond issue covering the multi-million amount.
Even more surprising is that they want to make an end run around the normally required 2/3 ballot vote by having the bond issue remain off the ballot by seeking court approval instead of having taxpaying voters decide upon the measure. The bond issue looks to have a whole cabal of
embedded toxic and arcane financing instruments worthy of the winged
monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.
This news comes on the heels of recent revelations that the McKinleyville School District and its trustees bought a high interest loan package of CABS– Capital Appreciation Bonds– and spent $72 million dollars to borrow $7-14 million and heaping the monstrous burden of debt onto unsuspecting McKinleyville property owners.
City Hall: Who’s Minding the Store?
Long before these events occurred we had an inkling of the City’s runaway debt expenses. Things just didn’t add up.
We were wondering, for example, why the five Eureka Ford police vehicles newly purchased by the City of Eureka at a cost of over $100,000 two years ago were still sitting unused and mothballed at the Eureka Corporation yard, exposed to the elements and seemingly rotting away without being put into service. One has since been sold for a loss at auction.
The Eureka Police Department decided put the Fords aside in favor of purchasing some newer sexier Dodge Chargers to use instead. We were given several explanations: The Ford cruisers were awaiting light bars; they would be rotated into service soon; they were awaiting the start of next fiscal year’s budget. None have happened. The Fords are still sitting there, untouched, unmoved, and seemingly resting in a state of arrested decomposition like empty caskets awaiting cadavers.
Councilmember Marian Brady did bring the subject up, popping the question to our City Finance Man in a Eureka City Hall meeting nine months back. Eureka’s Finance Director—a dapper panjandrum– gingerly skirted the issue. He didn’t even attempt to give a cogent or congruent response. Surprisingly, none of Eureka’s Councilmembers followed up on his blatantly non sequitur explanation that was dished out to them.
They sat in dumbfounded silence, waiting for a few pregnant moments as the pea was adeptly shuffled under a different shell, and, resuscitated from their paused hesitation and obvious discomfort, moved onto the next item appearing on the agenda. After all, they knew it was a waste of money– and they wouldn’t have to pay for it. The taxpayers would. Shuffle the pea, move on, and hope no one notices the difference.
We also took notice that City Manager David Tyson will be retiring with a percentage of his yearly retirement pay of $157,000. Eureka’s incoming City Manager, William Panos, will be receiving a bit more, at $158,000. Someone has to pay and pad those salaries. That someone is you.
So we wondered: how much do these these municipal folks typically get paid per year? Here’s a few numbers we came up with, taken from the California State Controller 2010 figures:
City Manager David Tyson: $150,339 (His Assistant City Manager rakes in another $111,000)
City Attorney: $135,960
City Engineer: $121,739
Redevelopment and Housing Director: $101,166
Public Works Director: $98,495
Personnel Director: $93,464
Finance Director: $89,640
That’s just for starters. There’s a lot more. And remember, they all have additional staff and assistants on the payroll, too.
The City has 491 employees for an area of 9.4 square miles and 26,066 residents. That’s one City employee for every 53 citizens. The total City wage payroll comes to a whopping $16 million per year, or about $614 for every man, woman, and child in the city limits. The average per capita household income in Eureka is $29,000.
The Police Department
Then we heard word that the Eureka Chief of Police, before Measure O was passed bolstering safety needs in our fair City, was paid roughly $133,000 in 2010– but his total wage compensation package bumped up to nearly $156,000, according to the California State Controller.
But there’s more. The EPD Chief’s wages were followed by:
His Captain annually topping out at $112,500;
Two Lieutenants making approximately $107,000 each;
Nine sergeants pulling in $71,831 to $103,462 each;
And 89 other employees– ranging from 37 police officers to dispatchers to records specialists to an animal control technician, at different salary levels. In all, there are nearly 100 EPD personnel fighting crime in various capacities in Eureka.
Perhaps we need it and this isn’t unusual given the complexity of police work nowadays. Eureka, indeed, does have a fairly significant crime problem. EPD deals with the unseemly ne’er-do-wells, scoundrels, rogues, vagabonds, and bugaboos infesting the City with skullduggeries that more genteel folks would prefer not to embrace.
So it shouldn’t surprise you that EPD officers can enjoy early retirement at age 50 with 90% of their salary for life. A 3% @ 50 CalPers safety compensation package is standard issue for peace officers along with their weapons. It’s a costly proposition. Every officer may very well be worth his/her shiny badge of value as are those Ford patrol cruisers the City wastefully
put on ice.
The Fire Department: Gold Plated Brass
So it didn’t surprise us, either, looking at some of the more shocking figures for
the Eureka Fire Department (since reorganized as Humboldt Bay Fire).
His two Assistant Chiefs hauled in nearly $108,723 and $119,643, respectively. Very nice!
More surprising was the addition of even more shiny brass. The above administrative positions were followed by– get this– a gaggle of 18 Fire Captains I/II– at salaries ranging from $56,088 to $104,195 each. Those were followed by 11 Fire Engineers with salary levels of between $48,456 to $70,359.
Of course, every fire department needs basic firefighters towing the line and putting out fires. We only have six of those, ranging in price from $43,932 to $61,951. A bargain!
Altogether, the Eureka Fire Department had 40 employees in 2010– with nearly all having the same 3% @50 retirement package as police officers.
There aren’t so many fires these days as there were back in the days of yore. Buildings just don’t burn down like they used to, given the current building codes, safety standards, and new materials for construction. Nowadays, our fire department performs first responder/ambulance calls, conducts fire inspections, and instructs first aid classes when they’re not going to schools teaching kids about fire safety. Like EPD, the EFD/Humboldt Bay Fire also has a dangerous job to do; perhaps they, too, deserve safety pensions and retirement at the highest salary levels by age 50– even those hapless
bureaucratic souls who push paper at a desk. After all, they may trip
over a chair getting up.
One can argue there are far too many chiefs and fat-cat administrators than there are troops in the trenches. By retiring early, they’re set fairly well for life while the next round of recruits are to be similarly compensated.
Because California has had a spiralling upward trend of government salaries– while it, too, goes broke– one can argue salary levels in Eureka are merely commensurate with the rest of the State. And so the problem continues unabated.
Public Works and Recreation
But, surprisingly enough, it wasn’t EPD or EFD’s figures that
gave us cause for pause. Here’s the sum that truly amazed us:
the number of allocated positions in one area of the City’s
enchanted 9.4 mile realm: Public Works.
Public Works has a staggering 162 positions dedicated to… recreation workers! Seven pages worth in 2010, the State Controller reports, with salaries ranging between mostly paltry levels on the low end to a maximum $60,636 Recreation and Facilities Manager on the other. The latter position carries a retirement package at age 57. Another position we saw was entitled Men’s Basketball Official, paying $46,101. Now that’s what we call a good gig. Looking up the position again for this column several months later, it appears to have been since removed.
But due to the whopping number of recreation workers—162—we feel there must be some mistake. Perhaps the majority of these positions are temporary, part time, vacant, frozen, or simply redundant in some way–a Twilight Zone of anomalies. The City spent $512,847 per year on these wages in 2010 but the total budgetary allotment of the recreation positions comes in at a staggering $3 million. Heavens to Betsy. That can’t possibly be true, can it? Read the figures and weep, folks.
Of course, Eureka does have its share of crumbling, decaying, and downright miserable roads that the City Council members discussed recently, mutually wringing their hands and nodding their heads in unison and dismay over the given plight of our potholed thoroughfares.
Fortunately we’re pleased to report, and you’ll be overjoyed to know, Eureka has been working on that. They have nine positions—9!– set aside for maintaining our streets. True, it’s not as many as our safety officers– or our recreation workers– but it
works. And few of those roadworkers make as much as
our noted basketball official.
But don’t take our word on this fiasco. See the figures from the State Controller’s Office for yourself, and tell us what you think and come up with.
Feeding the Beast, Gouging theTaxpayer
However, you may want to know who are the lowest paid employees. Surprisingly enough, the City Council. They receive roughly $6,000 per year, plus health benefits, for their civic servitude. And the Mayor? He pulls in $7,500 and doesn’t have to vote unless it’s a tie. He does have to remember to raise or lower the podium and turn on the microphone.
We won’t even venture to guess how those City pensions will be paidoff in the future. Measure O helped fill part of the fiscal gap, at least temporarily.
That is, until City Manager David Tyson, who doesn’t reside in the City limits, told us they now need more money, and before his own hefty retirement comes due. How much more? $7.8 million in arrears, apparently, to cover employees pension costs, we were told. We ask: why weren’t the pension obligations budgeted, tracked, and paid for in the first place?
Where did the money go? We would venture to guess that,
like the rest of California, Eureka has become a runaway
fiscal train, a lucrative Ponzi scheme for its own employees, enriching its base at the expense of taxpayers.
Then, of course, there have been the many costly lawsuits the City either settled or lost over the past several years. But that’s another story altogether.
Maybe it’s time to draw in the reigns and finally say enough is
enough– to debt, bonds, runaway pensions, and government
servants gouging its citizens unmercifully.
* * * * * * * * *
When we first looked into the salary levels for Eureka we were astounded. The Humboldt Sentinel has been the only media outlet initially reporting on these surprising sums from the State Controller’s Office.
On April 1, 2013, Grant Scott-Goforth’sTime-Standard article, “State Website Shows Local Government Wages“ later confirmed our suspicions. It reported “Eureka paid $16 million in wages — the 10th highest total out of more than 100 cities with populations between 10,000 and 30,000.”
The Eureka City Council will approve the pension bond issue– and thereby sideswiping voters from a ballot vote– at their
next meeting Tuesday, December 18 at 6 p.m.
at the Eureka City Hall.
Concerned residents should call or contact their Eureka Councilmembers. At the very least, request the item be pulled from the agenda/consent calendar for public discussion. Otherwise, it receives immediate blanket consent. Send or share with them this article.
You can reach Councilmembers by phone, e-mail, or fax using the links below:
Despite Bahrain’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the U.S. has continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small Mideast nation.
Defense Department documents released to ProPublica
give the fullest picture yet of the arms sales: The list includes
ammunition, combat vehicle parts, communications
equipment, Blackhawk helicopters, and an unidentified
missile system. (Read the documents.)
The documents, which were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and cover a yearlong period ending in February 2012, still leave many questions unanswered. It’s not clear whether in each case the arms listed have been delivered. And some entries that only cite the names of weapons may in fact refer to maintenance or spare parts.
Defense Department spokesman Paul Ebner declined to offer any more detail. “We won’t get into specifics in any of these because of the security of Bahrain,” said Ebner.
While the U.S. has maintained it is selling Bahrain arms only for external defense, human rights advocates say
the documents raise questions about items that could
be used against civilian protesters.
“The U.S. government should not be providing additional military equipment that could make matters worse,” said Sunjeev Bery, Middle East advocacy director for Amnesty International USA.
There have beenreports that Bahrain used American-made helicopters to fire on protesters in the most intense period of the crackdown. Time magazine reported in mid-March 2011 that Cobra helicopters had conducted “live ammunition air strikes” on protesters.
The new Defense Department list of arms sales has twoentries related to “AH-1F Cobra Helicopters” in March and April 2011. Neither the exact equipment or services being sold nor the delivery timetable are specified.
The U.S. is also playing a training role: In April 2012, for example, the Army News Servicereported that an American team specializing in training foreign militaries to use equipment purchased from the U.S. was in Bahrain to help with Blackhawk helicopters.
Bahrain’s ambassador to the U.S., Houda Nonoo, said the country’s military has not targeted protestors. Bahrain’s military “exists to combat external threats,” Nonoo told ProPublica. ”The potential for U.S. foreign arms sales to be used against protestors in the future is remote.”
The Obama administration has stood by Bahrain’s ruling family, who are Sunni, during nearly two years of protests by the country’s majority Shia population. Bahrain is a longtime ally and the home to a large American naval base, which is
considered particularly important amid the current tensions with
nearby Iran.
The itemized arms sales list does not include dollar values but a separate document says military equipment worth $51 million was delivered to Bahrain in the year starting in October 2010. (That period includes several months before the protests began.)
The U.S. has long sold weapons to Bahrain, totaling $1.4 billion since 2000, according to the State Department. The sales didn’t come under scrutiny until security forces killed at least 19 people in the early months of the crackdown in 2011. Dozens have died since then.
The administration put a holdon one proposed sale of
Humvees and missiles in Fall 2011 following congressional
criticism. But Foreign Policy reported that other unspecified equipment was still being sold without any public notification.
The new documents offer more details on what was sold during that period u2014 including entries related to a “Blackhawk helicopter armament” in November 2011 and a missile system in January 2012.
In May 2012, the administration announced it wasreleasing some unspecified items to Bahrain’s military that “are not used for crowd control” while maintaining a hold
on the Humvees and TOW missiles.
State Department spokesman Noel Clay told ProPublica, “We continue to withhold the export of lethal and crowd-control items intended predominately for internal security purposes, and have resumed on a case-by-case basis items related exclusively to external defense, counter-terrorism, and the protection of U.S. forces.”
The U.S. has also sold Bahrain a helicopter fit for the royal family.
In September, Missouri-based aviation services firm Sabrelinerreported that, as part of an official government arms sale, it delivered to Bahrain a fully customized UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter for “a variety of missions including transporting heads of state.” The aircraft was outfitted with a “clam shell door” for ease of entry, a “new VIP interior,” and a “custom Royal Bahraini” paint job.
In other recent developments in Bahrain, the country’s highest court this month upheldlengthy prison sentences for 13 high-profile activists accused of plotting to overthrow the government.
In a rare occurrence in November, a series of homemade bombs were set off in the capital of Manama, killing two and leading some observers to argue that the opposition is growing more militant.
Also in November, an Amnesty International report found that despite government promises, “the reform process has been
shelved and repression unleashed.”
The Growing Debt Divide: Obama Advances While GOP Buckles Under Pressure
(VIDEO)
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
This story just hit the wires today from Washington’s ‘The Hill’:
House Republicans are discussing a short-term debt ceiling increase to buy time for broader deficit reduction negotiations with Democrats, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters Thursday.
“We’re discussing the possible virtue of a short-term debt limit extension so that we have a better chance of getting the Senate and the White House involved in discussions in March,” Ryan told reporters gathered at the pricey Kingsmill resort in Williamsburg, where the House GOP is holding its annual retreat.
“All of those things are the kinds of things we’re discussing,” said Ryan, the party’s budget chief and 2012 vice presidential candidate.
A small hike in the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling would give the government more time to make payments on its responsibilities as lawmakers and the White House haggle over federal spending. A GOP leadership aide said there was no consensus on the size of a debt limit hike, and that it would have to be coupled with entitlement reforms or spending cuts.
Ryan did not specify how long a short-term increase would be or even whether it would include spending cuts, which Boehner has consistently demanded in conjunction with approving new borrowing authority.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has told Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that the nation hit its borrowing limit at the end of 2012 and will run out of ways to avoid a first-ever default sometime between mid-February and early March. $85 billion in across-the-board 2013 cuts to defense and domestic spending are set to begin taking effect in March, and the government will run out of funding a month later…
Let’s toss out some numbers: the US Government is borrowing $6 billion dollars a day, or $4 million every minute. That’s $50,000 for every man, woman and child, or $140,000 per US household.
This year the national debt will fly through $17 trillion, get a peek at $18 trillion, and mark a 2015 date with $20 trillion. The numbers could rise higher as interest rates move upward in the future.
To note, the national debt has grown by $6 trillion since President Obama took office, and four more $1 trillion deficits are on the waybefore he leaves Washington in 2016.
It gets worse. Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher calculated that the government’s unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare alone comes to a staggering $99.2 trillion, or $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.
It’s an impossible figure, but still on the low side compared to this estimate of $222 trillion published at Bloomberg news.
If we keep kicking the can down the road and don’t balance the national pocketbook soon before it’s too late, bad things will happen. We’ll be at the the point of no return: unable to repay debts and further borrow, lenders not willing to lend anymore, treasury and bond markets defaulting, and the ‘full faith and credit’ of the US dollar crashing.
Think it won’t happen? We’ll find out. We’re getting closer. if it should happen, we’ll be Lost in Space forever.
President Barack Obama proposed a ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, but some still worry about the pressure for police presence in public schools.
The proposed legislation comes about a month after a gunman massacred 20 grade school children, his mother, and six teachers and administrators in Newtown, Connecticut.
In response, Obama unveiled nearly 23 executive actions, including orders to facilitate police background checks, launch safety campaigns, review existing standards, mandate further research and increase access to mental health services.
Another order established hiring grants for community-oriented policing services, or COPS, which funds the assignment of officers to monitor public schools, an apparent concession to the National Rifle Association.
NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre proposed a similar “Secure Our Schools” initiative shortly after the Newtown tragedy of Dec. 14, 2012.
Laura Murphy, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office in Washington, decried police surveillance of schoolchildren.
“We have several concerns about the administration incentivizing police departments and school districts to put more police officers in schools,” Murphy said in a statement. “We fear that neutral sounding safety policies, such as putting more cops in school will lead to the over-incarceration of school-age children, especially students of color and students with disabilities, who are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted for issues that would normally be handled by school administrators when law enforcement is introduced into schools.”
The ACLU has previously described this phenomenon as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Meanwhile, the NRA described Obama’s other gun-control measures a “power grab,” and the White House launched a counteroffensive calling the NRA’s campaign “cowardly.”
Neither side acknowledged similarity between the “Secure Our Schools” and the “COPS Hiring Grants” programs in their official statements.
To note, the fellow in these highly popular YouTube videos isn’t Russian whatsoever– he’s an American named Kyle Myers from Georgia who fakes the foreign accent. Mr. Myers claims to own or have borrowed these very real weapons, adding they’re sold to governments, militaries, and civilians, and are “100% legal for him and others to possess in the US– ”if you have the right paperwork.”
(Video clip and images by the Humboldt Sentinel. Posted by Skippy Massey)
The 5th Amendment states in part: “No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”
That may change.
The Senate passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act allowing for the indefinite military detention of US citizens on American soil by an 81-14 vote on December 21. It was stripped of a provision covering 5th Amendment protections for citizens.
The National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 will now head to the White House. The administration had earlier pledged to veto the NDAA because it prevents the president from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. It is unclear whether the president will follow through on the threat.
The NDAA is a reauthorization of the large military budget bill but it has proven most controversial for a provision that critics say would allow the military to abuse its detention powers to lock Americans away on the mere suspicion of support or contact with terrorist groups.
In November, a bipartisan group of Senators led by Dianne Feinstein affixed an amendment to the NDAA that would have explicitly prohibited the military from detaining American citizens on US soil without due process. But earlier this week, a House-Senate conference committee led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) stripped away that measure.
Paul, a libertarian Republican, voiced his opposition to the conference committee’s move in strong terms and urged his colleagues to vote against the bill. He said:
“We had protection in this bill. We passed an amendment that specifically said if you were an American citizen or here legally in the country, you would get a trial by jury,” Paul said. “It’s been removed because they want the ability to hold American citizens without trial in our country. This is so fundamentally wrong and goes against everything we stand for as a country that it can’t go unnoticed.”
“When you’re accused of a crime in our country you get a trial, you get a trial by a jury of your peers, no matter how heinous your crime is, no matter how awful you are, we give you a trial,” he said.
“This bill takes away that right and says that if someone thinks you’re dangerous, we will hold you without a trial. It’s an abomination.”
Tipping Point: Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre
(VIRAL VIDEO)
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
The White House and a growing number of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill appear to be uniting on the issue of gun control.
In Washington and around the country, the legacy left by the 26 people slaughtered in a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, has galvanized efforts in what might be meaningful legislative reform.
Several lawmakers have promised to introduce or reintroduce gun control legislation, ranging from a reinstatement of a federal ban on assault weapons to banning the sale of high-capacity magazines over the past several days. Congressman Mike Thompson, Viet Nam veteran, Purple Heart recipient, gun owner and hunter, has been chosen to lead a House-led Task Force looking into legislative action and reform.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said President Obama supports California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s forthcoming legislation to reinstate a ban on assault weapons which expired in 2004, noting the president would also consider limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines and closing a loophole allowing individuals to purchase firearms at gun shows without a background check.
Carney emphasized that new gun rules would only compose a portion of a more comprehensive effort to address mass casualty events. The press secretary emphasized, for instance, that improved mental health services were an important element in any effort.
It will be an uphill battle. Gun rights advocates, the National Rifle Association, and gun manufacturers (that heavily support the NRA with financial contributions) will have no part of it, and can be expected to fight any legislative curbs tooth and nail as they’ve done in the past. And let’s face it: we love guns. In America guns are revered and sacred objects– symbols of our liberty and freedom– that we hold to dearly.
Gun control legislation is going to happen in some way, shape or form as evidenced by Representatives
Boxer and Pelosi’s statements below. What we see and
what will happen next is anyone’s guess.
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) released the following statement yesterday on the need to end gun violence and better protect our children following the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut:
Washington, D.C.– I rise today to discuss the tragedy that I know has touched the heart and soul of America.
I will be very straight-forward in discussing my feelings today – feelings of a mother, feelings of a grandmother, feelings of a Senator whose state has been touched far too many times by mass shootings.
On July 1, 1993, a gunman with an assault weapon walked into a law office in San Francisco and killed 8 people and wounding another six. One of those people was a brave lawyer who threw his body over his wife, sacrificing his own life to save hers.
That young man was one of my son’s best friends and so I know without a shadow of a doubt how these horrific and senseless tragedies live on with the survivors forever – the parents, the spouses, the children, the families and friends. It changes their lives and pierces their psyches forever.
Yes, as human beings after these tragedies, we come together to find meaning and justice – and to find love in the middle of mayhem. Some find solace in their faith and their God. Some find solace in their community. And some find no solace at all.
The slaughter of innocents must stop.
I have spoken to many of my constituents. They are coming up to me and are begging me to act. Some own guns, some don’t. They want us to act and we must.
My heart is broken. Little babies gone – babies – barely on this earth. Loved, nurtured, taught, trusting. Trusting us. Looking up to us. They trusted us and we failed them.
We couldn’t even stop a sick person from getting a high-capacity clip. The gunman didn’t even have to reload his weapon until he fired 30 shots.
Brave law enforcement responded. But we had no law enforcement there to maybe – just maybe – prevent it before it started. And there was apparently no appointment that day with a mental health professional. Instead there was an appointment with death.
We must act and whoever criticizes me for saying that now, I say this: When is the right time?
In 2009, 31,347 people died from gun violence in our nation. That’s 87 people for every day of the year. Another 73,505
people were injured by firearms. So 87 people a day killed by
gun violence in this country and this is not a good time speak out,
I guess.
But I will talk about it now.
Here is what I think we must tackle – and we can do it without violating gun rights:
First, we must take weapons of war and high-capacity clips off our streets.
Second, we must ensure that local law enforcement is involved in reviewing conceal and carry permits.
Third, we must close the gun show loophole so background checks are conducted.
Fourth, we must keep all guns out of the hands of the mentally ill – and get them the help they need.
And finally, we must keep our schools safe by utilizing all of the law enforcement tools at our disposal.
We have failed our children.
Since the Columbine school shooting in 1999, 203 students and teachers have been killed and 175 students, teachers and others have been wounded due to gun violence at our schools.
We have to stop worrying about our political skins. There is more to life than that. There are judgments that will be made about us while we are here and after we are gone.
Let us pull together and show our children we love them and we will protect them by taking clear and common sense steps together.
* * * * * * *
Washington, D.C. – Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats held a press conference yesterday calling for the swift passage of the McCarthy-DeGette bill banning assault magazines. Below are Ms. Pelosi’s opening remarks:
Good morning. As we mourn the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Members of Congress and all Americans have offered words of consolation to the families – words of grief, of mourning, our prayers – that no words are adequate to console the families of these children, and others, who were taken from us in an act of senseless, unspeakable violence.
Here in Congress, what we need now are not more words; what we need is action. We must take action to protect our children from harm, to preserve the safety of our schools, and to keep our communities safe. We must take action so that we can tell our children that we are doing everything in our power to prevent these tragedies from ever happening again. This morning, you will be hearing from Members of Congress.
As we know, the President said so eloquently on Sunday night: ‘we can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.’ In Congress, we’re blessed with the leadership of Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy. She has brought to this debate her own loss in a senseless tragedy, her own experience as a health care professional, and her own even-handedness to help make that
change with legislation to ban assault weapons. Thank you, Carolyn,
for your tremendous leadership and for the inspiration you are to all of us.
Today, I am pleased to announce that Congressman Mike Thompson has been selected to head a new task force focused on reducing and preventing gun violence. He is a Vietnam vet, a wounded Vietnam vet I might add, an avid hunter, and he is ideally suited to lead the effort to channel all of the energy that you see here. Many of our Members are in committees but their thoughts are with us to channel this energy, work with the Administration, and to do so in a bipartisan way.
These are the steps – some steps that we all want to take, that Members have expressed, but we must go further: restoring the assault weapon ban and strengthening our background check system to ensure that dangerous firearms do not fall into the wrong hands.
Yesterday, I met with the Brady Campaign and members of families who have experienced tragedies and that was a very high priority for them: addressing the issue of mental health to keep weapons out of the hands of those in the greatest danger of doing harm to themselves and to others; and addressing the issue of violence in our society.
Even as we tackle these concerns it is important to note these actions do not eliminate the need for a ban on assault weapons and on assault magazines – high capacity additions that make any gun an assault weapon.
The tragedy in Newtown struck the hearts of every American. We have to respond. It’s very complicated. This is hard. But we can get the job done, we can calibrate the legislation in a way that really is effective.
We mourn the loss of precious children. We’re reading about their love of sports, their love of animals, their love of music. We mourn the loss of their teachers, their counselor, the principal of the school. We owe them, again, to do everything in our power to take sensible action to prevent gun violence, to ensure the safety of our schools and neighborhoods, and to build a future of safety for all Americans.
* * * * * * * *
Gun control and gun violence are controversial subjects. The Sandy Hook massacre of 20 elementary school children and 6 adults is a senseless tragedy of epic proportions.
National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre said today that putting a police officer in every single school in America would make schools safer. At an estimated $80,000 a year per armed guard or police officer, the NRA proposal would cost the nation’s 98,817 public schools $5 billion a year.
LaPierre blamed violent video games and movies, the media, gun-free zones in schools, and other factors in the organization’s
first public statement following the Newtown school shooting. He was interrupted by two protesters holding signs reading “NRA KILLING OUR KIDS,” and screaming that the gun rights group had “blood on its hands.”
LaPierre refused to answer questions regarding gun violence or his proposal during the press conference. The NRA temporarily took down its Facebook page and kept Twitter on the downlow.
Whether you agree or disagree with Ms. Feinstein, Ms. Boxer, Ms. Pelosi, and the House Democrats’ point of view, you may want to contact your legislators and weigh in with your opinion:
Today’s Times-Standard article, “Congressman Thompson to Lead House Dems’ Gun Control Task Force” by Kaci Poor and San Jose Mercury News reporter Josh Richman can be found here.
(The guy in these videos isn’t Russian– he’s an American named Kyle Myers from Georgia. He owns these very real weapons, adding they are “100% legal to possess” in the US with the “right paperwork.”)
–Shocking Testimonial in RT News: Your Mail is Being Taken and Recorded
(VIDEO)–
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
Good Will Hunting’s Matt Damon got it right 14 years ago.
A formerly high-ranking member of the National Security
Agency (NSA) claims digital privacy has become a freedom
of the past.
“The FBI records the e-mails of nearly all US citizens, including members of Congress,” NSA whistleblower William Binney reaffirmed recently.
In a 2011 New Yorker article, the former NSA employee said that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from “everyone in the country.” Since then, the collection of e-mails has broadened significantly.
“What I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which
is basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country,” Binney
said in his interview Tuesday with the Kremlin-funded news outlet Russia Today (RT).
In the interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone– and he suspects it’s what brought down CIA Director General David Petraeus by having his private e-mails read by the FBI.
According to the New American magazine, Binney stands among a number of
other former officials who have testified against the NSA, exposing a series of
controversial methods that could put an end to the agency’s post-9/11
domestic surveillance campaign.
Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned after observing countless acts of what he determined to be blatantly illegal methods to spy on the American people. He recently received the Callaway award this year, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.
New American reporter Brian Koenig wrote about Binney today:
One effort he (Binney) deemed unconstitutional was the use of a technology referred to as “Naris,” which the NSA uses to aimlessly harvest e-mails and other digital information without having to receive permission from providers. Binney testified that all congressional lawmakers are being monitored as well.
“They are all included,” he said, “So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason — they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.”
In his interview with RT, the intelligence analyst further emphasized that the FBI does not filter e-mail messages but obtains and stores all of a person’s e-mails, and when he or she becomes a target, their entire records are extracted and analyzed for the desired information.
“I don’t think they are filtering it,” Binney asserted. “They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.”
Koenig continues to say that although the government’s domestic surveillance efforts are still officially secret, Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Sonia Sotomayor have criticized them, and the Senate Judiciary Committee has affirmed support for increasing consumer e-mail privacy.
The overall theme represented in Binney’s testimony seeks to protect the freedoms and liberties granted to Americans under the U.S. Constitution.
“The central (U.S.) government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you,” Binney concluded.
“They are violating the foundation and Constitution of this entire country … and they are not living up to the oath of office.”
Indeed. Binney’s revelations are shocking.
George Orwell was right. 1984 and Big Brother are here.
A Senate proposaltoutedas protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.
Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to FBI and other law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, H.R. 2471, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail, is scheduledfor this week.
The proposed law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans’ e-mail privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access to e-mail and other digital files, all without a warrant.
Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies– including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission– to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant.
It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.
It’s an abrupt departure from Leahy’s earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications. The Vermont Democrat boastedlast year that his bill “provides enhanced privacy protections for American consumers by… requiring that the government obtain a search warrant.”
Now Leahy’s bill is being morphed into the complete opposite of its original intention due to law enforcement’s forceful intervention.
The above video clip is a parody about Facebook and privacy concerns. Similar to the Leahy’s H. R. 2471 bill, it has some real overtones to consider, now doesn’t it?
–Say They Blocked Vote Flipping and Fraud With Use of Ohio Firewall–
(VIDEO)
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
According to Radio host Thom Hartmann, the hacktivist groupAnonymousclaim they are the reason thatKarl Rovehad a near meltdownon Fox News on Nov. 6, Election Night 2012, after stopping him from stealing the election.
Thom Hartmann reported the claim on his radio show Friday, and seen in the above video clip.
To note, Anonymous has claimed things in the past which later turned out to be false. This one, however, is interesting: they claim the election was rigged, discovered the source, and stopped votes from being transferred and ‘flipped’. They said Karl Rove, Republican campaign manager and former advisor to George W. Bush, tried to hack and steal the 2012 election.
Republican strategist Karl Rove seemed incredibly shocked when the results came back from Ohio. He was genuinely amazed and in disbelief over results favoring Obama’s lead. Rove insisted the Ohio tally was incorrect, and should be double checked.
The denial was so pervasive that Rove flatly told Fox News analysts they were wrong. Rove and his campaign riggers truly believed the Ohio results and 2012 election were in the bag— hence no concession speech was either needed or reportedly written by Mitt Romney.
When the Ohio results did come in, Fox News anchors looked genuinely stunned as if they had been hit upside the head with a brick. Karl Rove’s financial supporters—shoveling a ton of money into Rove’s campaign coffers ensuring ‘their candidate’ would win at all costs—were mightily pissed.
A billion dollars had been spent without a single negligible result to show for it. Republican donors, the Koch brothers, Super PACs, and the ‘dark money’ organizations had all lost their money. Karl Rove was the front man who was supposed to deliver Romney to the Oval Office at all costs, giving them a return on their hefty investment.
“The Ohio vote was counted in Ohio, at 11:13 p.m. at night, the entire Ohio voting system crashed.
A minute later they came up.
In that minute, all the votes had been re-routed through a server system in Tennessee, and so all the vote totals flowed back into the system in Ohio, and John Kerry lost, even though the exit polls showed him winning.”
Was the crashing of servers, rerouting of votes, and alleged vote flipping going to happen again in 2012? Why didn’t Ohio go for Romney in 2012?
And here’s where it gets really interesting: Curiously enough, the exact same thing did happen again. The Ohio Secretary of State’s vote tabulation website went down exactly at 11:13 p.m. Rove even mentioned it on the air.
Coincidence? Possibly. In this age of technology,hackers throwing a monkey wrench into the works isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Computers are subject to bugs– take this example of a voting machine that would not allow the user to vote for Obama on Nov. 6.
However, according to this report, Anonymous stopped any voter fraud from happening. The hacker group put up firewalls on election night to stop any data from flowing out of Ohio.
“According to the story, Anonymous discovered Rove’s plan months in advance and began coding firewalls to block ‘kingmakers’ from changing votes on Election Day. Networkers working for Rove tested the hack in the days leading up to November 6, while firewalls were disabled.
On Election Day (at least by Anonymous’ account) Rove’s “worker bees” made 105 attempts to cross through firewalls, but the hacker network successfully kept them out. They offered specific (albeit coded) details regarding Rove’s attempt, and hinted that more details may appear on Wiki Leaks in the future.”
Anonymous, according to their “letter,” could have tried to capture the data and expose the criminals, but that would have been far too risky. Instead, they closed the hole that Rove was going to use and blocked the theft of the election.
Is there any real proof that this happened?
No. But based on Anonymous past exploits, however, we believe it is possible. In addition, in late October, Anonymous posted a little viewed video here that warned Rove and others that their theft of the election was not going to be successful.
It would be very interesting if Anonymous captured enough information to give the Justice Department evidence to take down the criminal scoundrels. Odds are it won’t happen. Still, it would indeed be interesting to see Rove and others brought to task.
We won’t put anything past what shenanigans Boss Rove and his political cronies might do. We’d like to see an investigation brought forward if any of the claims come close to even being remotely true.
* * * * * * * * *
Our appreciation goes out to Thom Hartmann, Tom Sebourn, and the Examiner.com news for information sourced in this article.
WASHINGTON—Sources confirmed this afternoon that a heavily armed Karl Rove has positioned himself atop the Electoral College clock tower and is planning to pick off at least 50 electors with a high-precision sniper rifle…
“Karl, come down from there,” said former president George W. Bush, shouting into a bullhorn. “I love you. And I know you love me. I would be devastated if I lost you, so don’t do something stupid…”
The Rocky Mountain High State just got a whole lot higher.
On Tuesday night, Amendment 64 — the measure seeking the legalization of marijuana for recreational use by adults — was passed by Colorado voters, making Colorado
the first state to end marijuana prohibition in the United States.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a vocal opponent to the measure, reacted to the passage of A64 in a statement late Tuesday night:
“The voters have spoken and we have to respect their will. This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through.
That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug– so don’t break out the Cheetos or Gold Fish too quickly.”
The passage of the state measure is without historical precedent and the consequences will likely be closely-watched around the world. This is the second time Colorado voted on legal weed: in 2006 Coloradans voted the measure down; yesterday, it passed.
Although Colorado “legalized it,” it will be several months, perhaps as long as a year, before Colorado adults 21-and-over can enjoy the legal sale of marijuana. However, the parts of the amendment related to individual behavior will go into effect as soon as Governor Hickenlooper certifies the results of the vote, The Colorado Independent reported.
It’s a huge victory for the Campaign To Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, the pro-pot group behind Amendment 64.
“Over the past eight years in Colorado, we have argued that it is irrational to punish adults for choosing to use a product that is far less harmful than alcohol,” Mason Tvert, co-director of the campaign, said in a statement.
On the same night that Colorado passed Amendment 64, Washington state passed Initiative 502 which regulates and taxes sales of small amounts of marijuana for adults, The Associated Press reported. Oregon also had a similar recreational marijuana measure on the ballot.
Under Colorado’s Amendment 64, marijuana is taxed and regulated similar to alcohol and tobacco. According to the Associated Press, analysts project that that tax revenue could generate somewhere between $5 million and $22 million a year in the state. An economist whose study was funded by a pro-pot group projects as much as a $60 million boost by 2017.
Brian Vicente, also a co-director of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana, said in a statement:
“Today, the people of Colorado have rejected the failed policy of marijuana prohibition.
Thanks to their votes, we will now reap the benefits of regulation. We will create new jobs, generation million of dollars in tax revenue, and allow law enforcement to focus on serious crimes.
It would certainly be a travesty if the Obama administration used its power to impose marijuana prohibition upon a state whose people have declared, through the democratic process, that they want it to end.”
The big unknown still is if the federal government will allow a regulated marijuana market to take shape.
Attorney General Eric Holder, who was a vocal opponent of California’s legalization initiative in 2010 saying he would “vigorously enforce” federal marijuana prohibition, has continued to remain silent on the issue this year.
In a report published Sunday by NBC News, President Obama’s former senior drug policy advisor, Dr. Kevin Sabet, said that if the marijuana initiatives pass, a war will be incited between the federal government and the states that pass them.
“Once these states actually try to implement these laws, we will see an effort by the feds to shut it down,” Sabet said.
The DOJ has yet to formally announce its enforcement intentions, however, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said during a recent appearance on 60 Minutes that, “We’re going to take a look at whether or not there are dangers to the community from the sale of marijuana and we’re going to go after those dangers,” Reuters reported.
Stunned by an Obama win, Fox News Channel anchor Shepard Smith was equally at a loss for words describing Colorado’s historic cannabis vote last night. He asked during the final election results, “Wait– did you just say Colorado legalized marijuana?” into his earphone with a look of confused disbelief before returning to his viewers with a pregnant pause, blinking, and not knowing what to say. It was an awkward moment for Shepard as he stared in apparent discombobulation.
We imagine US Northern District Attorney Melinda Haag was equally baffled as well.
All local measures pass — except Rio Dell’s road bonds
By Charles Douglas Humboldt Sentinel
Another whirlwind set of national, state and local campaigns have come to an end as the 2012 General Election has come and gone.
Incumbent Barack Hussein Obama was re-elected President by over 2 million votes (58,331,418) over former Massachusetts Governor Willard “Mitt” Romney (56,214,017), while former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson scored over a million votes (1,087,503) as the Libertarian nominee, the best third party showing since Ralph Nader in 2000. The Green Party’s Jill Stein finished a distant fourth place with 368,324 votes.
Obama won nearly all the so-called “swing states” which play a key role in Electoral College calculations, while Florida was the only state still too close to call as of press time, with Obama hanging on to a 42,836 votes lead over Romney — a margin less than the 43,397 cast for Johnson thus far.
In Humboldt County, the nail-bitter of the night was the Eureka City Council race for the contested Second Ward seat, where incumbent Linda Atkins, the lone liberal remaining in office in the county seat, fended off a strong challenge from Republican Central Committee stalwart Joe Bonino.
Atkins received 3,935 votes (50.75%) over 3,727 (48.07%) for Bonino, while 35 write-in votes (0.45%) were cast for Charlie Bean. This was despite a nearly two-to-one fundraising advantage for Bonino, who received the unanimous endorsement of the rest of the Eureka City Council along with campaign bucks from Supervisor Rex Bohn and noteworthy developers such as Kurt Kramer and Bill Barnum.
In Eureka’s Ward Four, appointed incumbent Melinda Ciarabellini received only 67% as an unopposed candidate, while 2,486 ballots were apparently cast blank.
The race in Fortuna was no contest, as Mayor Doug Strehl cruised to re-election with 2,675 votes (47.2%), while the second at-large seat will go to newcomer Tami Gillam-Trent 1,817 (32.0%). Notably pro-big box candidate Josh Brown was a distant third at 1,141 (20.1%).
Ferndale wins the prize for the strangest result of the night — the Victorian Village is the only municipality besides Eureka to directly elect its Mayor, and Ken Weller is tied with Stu Titus in this race with 287 votes each. Unqualified write-in candidates received 22 votes, while two votes were apparently “over votes” where voters attempted to vote more than once in this race.
In local ballot measures, Fortuna citizens gave the thumbs up to a new round of school bonds; Measure D gets 4,095 (60%) support, while it needed 55% to win; 2,732 (40%) were opposed.
Arcata Elementary School District voters passed a pair of measures to fund local education. Measure E, a school parcel tax which needed to surpass two-thirds support as a property tax, grabbed 3,811 (77.3%) against 1,118 (22.68%); Measure F, which will issue school bonds for the district, passed with 3,610 (74.8%) in favor and 1,217 (25.2%) opposed.
Trinidad will maintain its status as tied for the highest sales tax in the county — Measure G, which keeps in place the 0.75% additional sales tax rate, passed with 97 votes (55.4%) in favor and 78 votes (44.6%) against.
In a purely symbolic move, Arcata decided to declare that corporate personhood no longer existed in the city — except in cases where such a local ordinance was preempted by state law, which is essentially a permanent situation so long as corporate personhood is recognized in the California Corporations Code. Measure H, the so-called “Corps Ain’t Peeps” campaign by former Arcata Councilmember Dave Meserve, passed with 5,140 (81.6%) against 1,162 (18.4%).
Arcata might not like corporations, but small time growers are also on the hit list, as Measure I, which imposes a huge tax on “excessive” energy use, passes with 4,287 (69%) in favor and 1,930 (31%) against.
The only failed local measure? Poor Rio Dell, whose second attempt at a street repair bond falls well short of two-thirds support. Measure J garnered only 492 votes (54.9%) with 404 (45.1%) against.
In the North Coast’s new Second Congressional District, Marin-area Assemblymember Jared Huffman (Dem.-San Rafael) cruised to victory with 151,010 (69.8%) over 65,359 (30.2%) for Mill Valley investment banker Dan Roberts.
Wes Chesbro (Dem.-Arcata), who has spent 12 years in Sacramento representing the region, will have one last term in the State Assembly, as he garnered 75,164 (63.1%) votes. Sonoma County Planning Commissioner Tom Lynch made a respectable showing, for a candidate with no money, receiving 43,979 (36.9%).
Statewide, the sales and income tax increase package known as Prop. 30, which Governor Jerry Brown (Dem.-Oakland) staked his political career on, appears to be passing after trailing early on Election Night. Also passing are Prop. 35, to enhance human trafficking penalties, Prop. 36, to reform the Three Strikes law, Prop. 39, to increase taxes on out-of-state businesses, and Prop. 40, a referendum approving the State Senate maps developed by the Citizens Redistricting Commission.
Libertarian Gary Johnson faces off against the Green Party’s Jill Stein
By Charles Douglas Humboldt Sentinel
On the eve of the 2012 general election, where voters will pick which Electoral College delegates will determine the fate of the President of the United States,
one last debate will be held.
Two weeks ago, the Free and Equal Foundation, along with a bevy of co-sponsors from across the national political and media landscape (including the Humboldt Sentinel), conducted an internationally televised forum where all six candidates qualified on enough state ballots to win the Presidency were invited to debate the nation’s future.
With the controlled candidacies of the two-party system bowing out in favor of their own rigged debates which only Barack Hussein Obama and Willard “Mitt” Romney could participate in, the Oct. 23 debate in Chicago featured the Constitution Party’s Virgil Goode, the Justice Party’s Rocky Anderson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson.
While blacked out by the national establishment media and by every local media outlet with the exception of the Sentinel and Bicoastal Media’s KGOE 1480 AM, the debate was carried on local television — and in a last-minute decision, also broadcast live on C-SPAN. View the entire debate here:
Goode, a former Congressman from Virginia, and Anderson, the former Mayor of Salt Lake City, found common ground with their rivals on many domestic and foreign policy concerns — but when the public used ranked choice voting in an on-line poll to determine which of the four would advance to a final debate round, they both fell short.
Thus it comes down to Johnson, the former two-term Governor of New Mexico, and Stein, a physician who previously ran against Romney for the office of Governor of Massachusetts, to duke it out in a debate which was delayed for a week due to the impact of Hurricane Sandy.
Their talk will be held at the RT America studio in Washington, D.C. and moderated by Thom Hartmann, the nationally-syndicated radio talk show host who also produces RT’s weeknight news program The Big Picture.
The debate begins at 6 p.m. and will be broadcast locally on Access Humboldt Channel 12 (Access Humboldt also carried the previous debate on live local television thanks to the Sentinel).
It can also be found streaming live at the Free and Equal website, freeandequal.org/live and is likewise being streamed by Free Speech TV, Stitcher, Orion Radio Network, Yes Magazine, NextNewsNetwork, American Free Press and by media outlets internationally in countries such as Switzerland, Sweeden, Russia, China, Spain and the United Kingdom.
A pre-debate show at 5 p.m. will feature Hartmann and several political correspondents:
Sam Seder – comedian, writer, actor, director, producer and talk radio host
Amber Lyon – Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist and whistleblower
Maytha Alhassen – journalist, writer, editor and University of Southern California Provost Ph.D. Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity
Matt Welch – editor in chief of Reason magazine
UPDATE: The final debate can be viewed in its entirety here, thanks to RT America’s YouTube channel:
We don’t always agree with Representative Ron Paul, but we appreciate the lone, contrary and different voice he brings single-handedly to the table. Tirelessly speaking out on issues with a moral conscience and compass firmly in hand, he often goes it alone.
And this guy’s a great pumpkin carver, too, even if the music is a bit on the schmaltzy side.
We thought the article was curious but in all fairness it scarcely proved a thing. Nonetheless, it was an interesting notion needing far more analytical proof to be considered substantial or of worthy import. More meat on the bone needing to be fleshed out, so to speak. Some data-wonk statisticians remarked the hypothesis was worthy; others said it was flawed in its process.
We were, however, more intrigued when the publisher of the site and author of the piece, Denis G. Campbell, remarked under the comments:
Apologies, we have been under a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack for 13 hours now. We’re slowly coming back. Please let the world know about this attempted election theft. Thank you.
Hmmm. The plot thickened.
So our search on the subject continued, leading to the above video. Now this was something veryinteresting. We pulled the original testimony by Mr. Curtis testifying before Congress and found his presentation above to be contextually accurate:
“Mr. Curtis,” said the questioner at the U.S. House Judiciary Committee proceedings, “are there programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?”
“Yes,” Mr. Curtis replied. “I was asked to write a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney.”
Now this warranted a closer look.
And so began the fascinating story of Clint Curtis detailed above– computer programmer, Floridian, Republican– who was asked by the company he worked for to create a vote-rigging software prototype that he assumed would be used to try and catch would-be fraudsters.
The truth of what occurred weaved into a tangled web the 2000 and 2004 Presidential Election debacles, a then-sitting U.S. Congressman, electronic voting, and a whole lot more.
Which then led us to this chillingly good documentary below: Murder Spies and Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story.
We suggest you give it a look because it’s surprisingly well done. Produced by Earthworks Films, Patty Sharaf, and Brad Friedmanof the the Brad Blog, it’s
encapsulated in 10-minute viewing segments for those on a tight timeline.
With interviews by knowledgeable folks of reasonably sound mind, good judgement, and articulate recollection, this fair and reasonable documentary raises some serious questions about elections, ethics, and voting machine fraud.
It also includes suspenseful side plots of murder, computer hacking, Chinese spies, corrupt lobbyists the likes of Jack Abramoff, suicide, Diebold, payoffs, and everything else a good conspiracy is made of. Even local citizen David Cobb makes an appearance at the end.
We found it riveting. We hope you do, too.
It will cause you to wonder about the veracity of those electronic
machines and why Congressman Tom Feeney (R-Fla) remained
in office for so long shielded by an Ethics Commission and after
being named one of the 20 most corrupt members of Congress:
Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only
more evident with time.
Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency.
In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy.
Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications.
However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.
At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers.
The political and moral damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivaled the conflict’s price in blood and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.
…The satirical paper The Onion came up with a painfully apt inaugural headline: “BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB.”
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him…
The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration.
Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.
… There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney.
The Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity.
In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society.
A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone:
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.”
Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.
Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes…
But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth
with no assistance at all from government or society…
The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama… takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.”
That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work…
Larry King to host four-way Presidential contest, live at 6 p.m.
By Charles Douglas Humboldt Sentinel
Finally, the American public will get to hear from all the candidates who have a chance of winning the Presidency.
The public watched the three rigged two-party affairs sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a creature wholly created by the Republican and Democratic entities to exclude any challengers to their unconstitutional duopoly and dominance of the political process.
The final of these, taking place last night in Florida, was widely regarded as revealing the fundamental similarities between Democrat incumbent Barack Hussein Obama and Republican challenger Willard “Mitt” Romney — especially on the purported subject of the evening, foreign policy, where the two two-party reps fell over themselves in mutual adoration of increased military spending, of Israel’s domination of the Middle East, and of the NATO mass bombing of Libya, which inflicted injury and death upon thousands of civilians.
Tonight, however, will be a different matter, as Free and Equal, a foundation dedicated to open and fair elections in the United States, has brought together over 100 co-sponsors (including the Humboldt Sentinel) to host a debate where all six of the national candidates on enough state ballots to conceivably have a shot at winning the Electoral College are invited.
Naturally, Obama and Romney stuck to their rigged CPD establishmentarian debates devoid of authentic public participation, and have refused to even acknowledge the invitation. The other four candidates, however, have committed to attend. The participating candidates are:
Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party nominee and former two-term Governor of New Mexico;
Jill Stein, Green Party nominee and a physician from Massachusetts;
Virgil Goode, Constitution Party nominee and a former Congressional Representative from Virginia;
Rocky Anderson, Justice Party nominee and the former Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Free and Equal Debate takes place at the International Room of the Hilton Chicago. Viewers are invited to submit question on the Free and Equal website at freeandequal.org or to use Twitter with the #AskEmThisLarry hashtag.
Local viewers can tune in to Access Humboldt Channel 11 tonight at 6 p.m., where the Sentinel is sponsoring a live telecast of the debate; Ora TV, Free Speech TV, RT and most recently C-SPAN have all agreed to pick up the live debate on their channels as well. Also carried on-line at www.freeandequal.org/live, the debate will be moderated by nationally renowned talk show host Larry King, formerly of Larry King Live on CNN and now host of Larry King Now on Ora TV.
“We are honored to have Larry King moderate this historic debate,” stated Christina Tobin, Founder and Chair of Free & Equal. “The previous debates between President Obama and Governor Romney have failed to address the issues that really concern everyday Americans. From foreign policy, to the economy, to taboo subjects like our diminishing civil liberties and the drug war, Americans deserve a real debate, real solutions, and real electoral options.”
King is featured in this clip on Ora TV:
“This is a truly exciting opportunity,” said debate moderator Larry King. “I have interviewed every US President since Nixon, and lest people forget, I helped usher Ross Perot into the national conversation during the 1992 presidential contest. I appreciate the importance of providing a platform to those with real alternative visions for our country’s future.”
To demonstrate the benefits of Instant Runoff Voting, also known as Choice Voting, the Free and Equal Foundation is utilizing an original method of determining which two of the four candidates will advance to a second debate taking place on Tuesday, Oct. 30. Viewers will vote online via IRV after tonight’s debate to pick their top choices in ranked order, with voting lasting 24 hours end ending at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. The top two candidates with the most votes will be announced Thursday, Oct. 25.
“Millions of Americans have already watched political coverage on web outlets like YouTube this campaign season, and we think there will be great interest in hearing from the set of candidates that Free and Equal has brought together,” said Ora TV CEO Jon Housman. “The diverse perspectives of the featured candidates, combined with the unparalleled experience of Larry King, will make this a must watch event.”
Tune in for a truly Free and Equal Debate, tonight at 6 p.m.:
The political puppet show continued unabated as Mr. T paid a telephone visit to the biasedly unfair and unbalanced Fox and Friends network this morning.
Mr. Trump, ever the spoiler and foiler for promoting his conservative and capitalistic agenda, said that he will reveal “very big” news about President Obama “at noon on Wednesday” and suggested it could ”possibly impact” the election.
He declined to give so much as the slightest hint of his plan.
Now, the Donster blows a lot of hot air. He likes a dramatic production. He likes what’s good for his interests and his monied political supporters. He loves a conspiracy, especially if it’s his conspiracy. And he expects a payback on his investitures.
“Something very, very big concerning the President of the United States,” he said. “It’s going to be very big. I know one thing — you will cover it in a very big fashion.”
Trump said he will announce the news on Twitter at noon tomorrow and declined to say whether he had talked to the Obama or Romney campaigns about what he intended to disclose.
The conservative businessman who considered a run for the White House but instead endorsed former Gov. Mitt Romney has long been a high-profile Obama birther conspiracy theorist. As we know, Trump’s investigation on the matter went nowhere except to give his private detectives an extended vacation in Hawaii.
“It’s a big fact,” Trump said. “I can’t talk about it ‘till Wednesday…We’ll see what happens.”
We suspect it’s much ado– or a Don– about nothing. Other than scaring, confusing, and swaying undecideds come November 6, we believe Trump and Fox and ’friends’ will undoubtedly play it up as much as they can– even if it’s patently untrue.
UPDATE Wednesday October 24:
Donald Trump just tweeted out his major announcement: he demanded that President Obama release his college and passport applications.
In return, Trump vowed to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice.
Mr. Trump gave his YouTube video announcement moments ago. It lists Trump’s charitable extortion demands with one or two caveats in typical Don Vito “Make Him an Offer He Can’t Refuse” fashion:
The records must be complete and to Mr. Trump’s satisfaction, and they must be handed over by 5 p.m. on Halloween day.
Spoiler alert: Mr. Trump’s YouTube video has 4,738 ‘Likes’ and 9,508 “Dislikes’, comments are conveniently disabled, and the Fox folks are working overtime parroting the message through their squawk box echo chamber.
Presidential Debates Are a Major-Party Snow Job, Libertarian Nominee Says
WASHINGTON (CN) – The Commission on Presidential Debates shuts the door on minor party candidates – and the public – by barring third-party candidates even if they qualify for the debates, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson claims in Federal Court.
Johnson and his Libertarian Party campaign committee – Gary Johnson 2012 – sued the Commission in Federal Court for unlawful discrimination and breach of contract. Johnson claims the Commission kowtows to the two major parties and discriminates on the basis of party affiliation.
Johnson claims the Commission began its “hoodwinking of the American people” in 1988, when The League of Women Voters withdrew its sponsorship of that year’s presidential debate.
The League of Women Voters withdrew its sponsorship to protest an agreement between the George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis campaigns that allowed the major party nominees to decide who would be invited to the debates, and who the panelists – i.e., questioners – would be. The League said at the time that going along with the major parties’ demands “would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.”
Johnson says in his complaint: “The two major parties, acting through their national committees, organized the defendant Commission on Presidential Debates for the purpose of hosting debates at the exclusion of all other political parties.”
Johnson claims that Republicans and Democrats are in cahoots to exclude third parties and their view from the 60 million Americans who watch the presidential debates. He says the Commission and the two major parties pulled off a “closed-door masterpiece” in establishing qualifications to participate in the debates.
To qualify for the debates, a candidate must be 35 years-old, a natural born citizen of the U.S. and resident for 14 years, and otherwise eligible to be hold the office under the Constitution.
Johnson says the Commission also requires that candidates be on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance at winning, and have the support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate, as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations’ most recent publicly reported results.
Johnson says he met all the qualifications, but was locked out of the debates anyway.
Johnson claims he’s on the ballot in 48 states and the District of Columbia as the Libertarian Party nominee, and that he has “developed a level of support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate,” a process he claims “took thousands of man hours and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
He claims that five recent national polls showed at least 15 percent of the vote when matched head-to-head with President Obama. One poll, conducted by Gravis Marketing, had him at 34.1 percent up against the president, Johnson says.
“In addition, an Internet-based nationwide public survey of more than 4 million Americans, run by a nonpartisan company shows Johnson with a support of more than 40 percent, second only to Democratic candidate President Obama, and well above the support levels for Republican candidate
Governor Romney,” according to the complaint.
Johnson, 59, was governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003 and ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, but dropped out of the race and joined the Libertarian Party, receiving its nomination for president in May.
Though he’s considered a fiscal conservative, his views on marijuana legalization and abortion have earned him the attention of young people and liberals.
“Plaintiffs believe and aver that the Commission’s failure to include Governor Johnson is attributable to Governor Johnson’s Libertarian Party affiliation,” the complaint states.
The complaint also said:
The Commission has repeatedly refused and excluded Governor Johnson from the debates, to his personal detriment, the detriment of his campaign, the detriment of his supporters and the detriment of the public generally.
The debates create television exposure to more than 60 million American viewers for each debate, and countless follow up television, print and radio exposure, all of which results in increased visibility for the candidate’s campaign and millions of dollars in fundraising for the featured candidates.
Johnson – too late for this year – asks that the Commission perform on its contract with presidential nominees, plus damages for breach of contract, bad faith and unlawful discrimination.
He is represented by attorney Jason Garber of the Reger Rizzo firm, of Towson, Maryland.
“Presidential Debates Are a Major-Party Snow Job, Libertarian Nominee Says”courtesy of the Courthouse News Service
* * * * * * *
Now Gary.
We know that you know that you were known for conservatively vetoing hundreds of spending bills, competing in the Ironman Triathlons, and hiking Mount Everest with a broken leg.
And yes, you were a Republican state governor and made the 2012 Libertarian Party nomination fair and square before turning your back on us. So how’s that party debate-y thing working out for you now?
I mean, have you ever seen a musk ox running full gallop across the tundra?
If you missed it, President Barack Obama and former governor Mitt Romney met in Boca Raton, Florida., for the final debate on foreign policy, moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS News last night. This is the opening 20 minute segment of the one and a half hour debate, courtesy of PBS. The full debate is covered in 3 segments
that follow afterwards.
The third and final presidential debate proved to be a substantive, if not sharp, discussion on the major issues facing the nation. Both candidates tried in earnest to persuade the small sliver of undecideds to vote for them. There was heated, but measured, disagreement.
President Obama played the commander-in-chief card. Former Governor Romney gave his vision-for-America card.
Obama emphasized international alliances and coalition building. He would maintain the military budget status quo with smarter choices and precise fiscal spending.
Romney touted peace through strength in a broader vision for U.S. foreign policy. He would increase military strength and spending by $2 trillion dollars.
Both said national and trade deficits, and Iran’s growing nuclear capability, are unacceptable.
The President did his share of burrow-eyed frowning. The former Governor did his share of glisten-eyed smiling.
Perhaps You Can Figure Out What the Buzz is All About (VIDEO)
Skippy Massey Humboldt Sentinel
There are some things we simply don’t understand. This is one of them.
Eye of the Sparrow– A Bad Lip Reading of the First 2012 Presidential Debate is a comedic Mad Lib non sequitur nonsensical parody of something or another. Think Words with Friends gone horribly bad. We can’t explain exactly what it’s about– or why. It just… is.
Wildly popular on YouTube, this esoteric little schizophrenic gem of unanswerableness has had 4 million hits in the last week, garnering favorable reviews and nearly 8,000 comments. And it’s also very, very strange.
Why does moderator Jim Lehrer refer to President Obama as ‘Ahmed’ and Governor Romney as ‘Matt’?
What does “I don’t wanna touch sandpaper” or “This has got me thinking; I see a purple idiot, speaks German with a big spunky Irish Labradoodle puppy” mean?
Why is everyone trancing out on OMs?
We don’t know. A little pitchy, but viewers say it’s between fantastic and hilarious and wonderful. Our test subject loved it. She was sober.
It’s a mystery to us. An enigma wrapped up in a Prozac burrito. Maybe we’re just getting old and serious and tired of politics and ready for something completely different.
Sleeping in public will no longer be illegal as of Nov. 15
By Charles Douglas Humboldt Sentinel
With little deliberation, a unanimous Eureka City Council charged ahead last night with ordinances seeking to stem the tide of a crime wave.
A crime wave, that is, of panhandling on transit buses and sitting on sidewalks in various business districts.
In her very brief staff report, City Attorney Cyndy Day-Wilson admitted that the current Section 130.02 prohibited laying or sleeping. The new ordinance does not mention sleeping at all, and the ban on sitting & lying in 18 separate sections of the city does not apply between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., as originally reported by the Sentinel on Oct. 1.
Day-Wilson confessed upon introducing the ordinances a fortnight before that she had engaged in a sudden re-write days before her presentation of them to the City Council, as a landmark ruling had been issued last month by Superior Court Judge Dale Reinholtsen which tossed out nearly all of the Arcata anti-panhandling ordinance’s restrictions against holding signs and asking for help on street corners and other public properties.
“I quickly revised the ordinance to reflect Judge Reinholtsen’s concerns,” Day-Wilson said.
With only one member of the public arising on Oct. 16 to voice any objections, Third Ward Councilmember Mike Newman repeated on Tuesday the same throwaway line spat out two weeks earlier about the law being another tool in the toolbelt of the police state.
“It’s not just going to be an arbitrary thing, its’ going to be a useful thing, its not just going to be meted out as a strong arm tactic, it’s meant to help clean up parts of the city around our business areas that have habitual people who are lying in the area of businesses.” Newman said.
More public opposition was in evidence when the ordinances were introduced on Oct. 2, with all but one speaker denouncing the Council for crafting laws designed to criminalize homelessness.
“Before you make any decisions, make sure you let a human rights group see what you are about to do,” Occupy Eureka activist Dane Carr said at the public hearing which introduced the ordinances. “Before you make any true decision, why don’t you try living like us first.”
“Try feeling what it’s like to be homeless before you try banning our activities more. We can barely live out here to begin with.”
U.S. Army veteran Gabriel McMillan, who was honorably discharged from the 101st Airborne, gave a lengthy address on the problems of the economy leading to increasing desperation amongst the populace.
“This nation was founded on property rights, the right to have what you need to live, every human being has those rights,” McMillan said. “I don’t think you understand what you’re doing when you make these laws. You’re driving a wedge between the government and the people. You’re creating a division in this city, in this nation, and throughout the world through the example you’re setting with this policy.”
“You need to turn around. You need to bring this city together…we need just and benevolent leaders who will provide for the safety and happiness of all of our citizens here and restore domestic tranquility. That is your responsibility. A failure to do that is a failure to govern. And anyone who fails to govern and leads us down a path where our economy gets worse and the people oppose the government more and more will be judged for that and will be held accountable.”
Ciarabellini noted at the time that exemptions existed to the anti-sitting law for persons attending a parade or a permitted demonstration. “It appropriately covers events where free speech is valued,” she said.
Fourth Ward Councilmember Linda Atkins asked whether the panhandling ordinance in particular would result in a mere catch-and-release program for the destitute.
“Often when I’ve been approached by aggressive solicitors, the people are obviously mentally ill, and it just gets to be a much bigger problem than just giving somebody a ticket for soliciting,” Atkins said. “how will this help?
Eureka Police Chief Murl Harpham said his department had hired a former mental health worker to accompany officers three days a week to help determine whether a ’5150 status’ could be designated, which requires the 72-hour involuntary committal of a supposedly deranged person in a mental health facility.
“[In] 72 hours they could be back, yes,” Harpham concluded.
The role of law enforcement in enforcing these ordinances was also queried by local retiree Loraine Dunaway, who has previously asked the Council to address a crime wave of property theft and violence on the Westside of Eureka.
“For the last several months, every time we attend a council meeting and Chief Harpham comes up, we hear about the crime rate in Eureka,” Dunaway said. “We hear about the out of control crime rate in Eureka. It doesn’t seem like the police need another thing on their plate.”
“I can’t imagine how the police could respond appropriately to these ordinances. They seem overwhelmed. They really do at this point. The evidence in the statistics in this town are clear. They are overwhelmed…”
Mayor Frank Jager was moved to respond to Dunaway with some measured amount of agreement, before the usual refrain to tool analogies.
“It’s true that the police are overwhelmed in the city of Eureka, but they’re responding to these incidents already,” Jager said. “This just gives them additional tools to deal with these incidents they’re responding to, and it just helps the police force be more effective in what they do.”
Both Ordinance 856 (anti-sitting) and Ordinance 854 (anti-panhandling) were introduced on Oct. 2 and adopted on Oct. 16 on unanimous votes.
They will take effect on Nov. 15 — just in time for the holiday shopping season.
In case you missed it, here’s the full replay—1 hour and 38 minutes worth– of the Obama-Romney Presidential Debate II at Hofstra University on October 16, 2012, courtesy of PBS.
Two people who didn’t make it to the debate were Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her vice-presidential running mate Cheri Honkala, who were arrested after trying to enter the debate hall without “authorized” credentials.
The Green Party says they were excluded from the presidential debate “per a secretive process controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties.” You can view their subsequent arrests here, courtesy of Democracy Now!.
Phillip Smith-Hanes sacrifices supermajority termination clause in process
Staff Report Humboldt Sentinel
After months of speculation and reports of job-shopping in far-flung jurisdictions, Humboldt County’s top administrator is set to get a new five-year contract from Supervisors next week.
The Sentinelreported earlier this year that Phillip Smith-Hanes, who has served as County Administrative Officer since 2009, was a semi-finalist for the position of City Manager in Key West, Florida. He decided to drop out of the final selection round, however, opting instead to further pursue contract negotiations with the Supes.
Tuesday’s consent calendar for the Board includes ratification of a new agreement to keep the CAO around through Dec. 22, 2017.
“The salary and benefit package is essentially the same as is currently in place for the CAO position,” County Personnel Director Dan Fulks stated in his report. “Future adjustments to salary if any, are the same as those provided to other Elected/Appointed Department Heads if any.”
That’s not going to be the case a couple of years down the line for Smith-Hanes, however. The salary level for the Humboldt CAO continues to be $14,083 monthly, or approximately $169,000 per year — but irrespective of any across-the-board wage hike, Smith-Hanes will get a 5% bump no later than Apr. 4, 2015. He’ll also start getting 20 paid vacation days a year, instead of the current 15, as of that date.
The previous contract length was extended from three to five years; in exchange, Smith-Hanes gave up the clause that required a four-fifths majority of Supervisors to agree as to whether to terminate him before the end of his contract. Under the new contract, a simple majority of Supervisors would be able to vote to fire Smith-Hanes — although they would have to fork over six months worth of his salary in the process. The CAO also would only have to give 45 days notice, instead of 60, should he wish to depart on his own.
Smith-Hanes was originally hired on Apr. 4, 2005 and served as Assistant CAO for two years before ascending to his current position.
The California State University Board of Trustees today named Timothy P. White, chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, as the seventh chancellor to lead the 23 campus CSU system, the largest four-year public higher education system in the country.
“I am humbled to have been chosen to lead the California State University system at such a transformative time,” said White. “As Chancellor, I look forward to engaging with faculty, students, staff, campus presidents and CSU trustees, along with the communities we serve, as we advance this vital system of higher education for California’s future.”
White, 63, has served as UCR Chancellor since 2008 and was among the finalists for the position to succeed Chancellor Charles B. Reed who announced his retirement following a 14-year tenure with the system.
“Tim White’s background and experience reflect the institutional values and mission of the CSU,” said CSU Board Chair Bob Linscheid. “His demonstrated leadership and commitment to student success are the right combination for the university’s future.”
White is the eighth chancellor of UC Riverside, and has led the growth of the campus to almost 21,000 students, a record for the campus that opened in 1954. Shortly after arriving at UCR, he formed a committee of faculty, staff, students and community stakeholders to develop a 10-year strategic plan for the university’s next stage of development. He also furthered UCR’s goal for the establishment of a School of Medicine by hiring its founding dean and securing $100 million in gifts and financing for the initial years of the school’s operation. The school this week received preliminary accreditation to serve students. In addition, he recently announced the opening of the UCR School of Public Policy.
Under White’s leadership, UCR has consistently been rated well in the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings both in academic quality and diversity. Within the UC system, UCR has proportionally more minority students than any other campus, and more than 53 percent of UCR students receive Pell Grants.
“As a long serving member of the board, we are grateful to appoint a chancellor with Tim White’s commitment to reaching out to underserved students that was initiated by Chancellor Reed,” said CSU Trustee Bill Hauck who led the search committee. “Tim has experienced firsthand the powerful impact of higher education, and has the leadership qualities to guide the system through these fiscally challenging times.”
Prior to serving at UCR, White was president of the University of Idaho from 2004 to 2008. There he established a strategic direction to further the university’s role as the state’s land-grant and flagship research university.
White also served as a dean, provost and executive vice president, and interim president at Oregon State University. He previously held positions as professor and chair of the Department of Human Biodynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, and as professor and chair of the Department of Movement Science and research scientist in the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan.
White is a member of numerous national organizations, and is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine. In addition, he has served on the NCAA Division I Board of Directors, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment on Sustainability, the Big West Conference Board of Directors, and the University of California systemwide Working Smarter Initiative and Rebenching Committee.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, White immigrated to Northern California, and is a first-generation college student who has matriculated within every college system in California. After beginning at Diablo Valley Community College, he earned a bachelor’s from Fresno State, a master’s degree from Cal State Hayward (East Bay), and a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He also spent two years as a post-doctoral scholar in physiology at the University of Michigan before starting his academic career in Ann Arbor. He is internationally recognized for his work in muscle plasticity, injury and aging.
White is expected to start in his new position at the end of December, and will receive an annual salary at the same level as the current chancellor, $421,500 plus a $30,000 supplement from CSU Foundation sources, as well as the standard benefits package for CSU employees.
White and his wife Dr. Karen White have four sons. She has been engaged with UC Riverside as a part-time assistant clinical professor for the Biomedical Sciences program, and as director of Operation Education, a scholarship program that supports veteran students with disabilities.
The three upcoming so-called presidential debates (actually parallel interviews) between Obama and Romney show the pathetic mainstream campaign press for what it is – a mass of dittoheads desperately awaiting gaffes or
some visual irregularity by any of the candidates. The press certainly does not demand elementary material from the candidates such as the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns that controls the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the campaigns’ corporate offspring.
A similar secret contract between George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004, obtained by George Farah, executive director of Open Debates (www.opendebates.org) showed just how the two Parties rig the debate process. Both Parties agreed that they would: (1) not request any additional debates, (2) not appear at any other debate or adversarial forum with any other presidential or vice presidential candidate, and (3) not accept any television or radio air time offers that involve a debate format. Were this deal to be between two corporations, they could be prosecuted for criminal violation of the antitrust laws.
This year voters are not allowed to know about the current backroom fix between Obama and Romney.
Farah revealed more. The Bush/Kerry closeout of the voters and the media extended to their agreeing not to ask each other direct questions but only rhetorical questions, and to clear any questions from the audience by their chosen moderator prior to the debates. Of course third party candidates are excluded. In 2000 and 2004, national polls showed majorities wanting me in the debates – the only way non-billionaires could reach tens of millions of voters – but the captive CPD and their compliant director, Janet Brown, created other exclusionary barriers.
Nothing seems to motivate the mainstream campaign press into challenging the two Party duopoly, its definition of important questions, or the rancid corporate sponsorship of the debates down to the hospitality parties the corporatists hold at the debate locations in Colorado, New York and Florida this October. The reporters must like the free wine and food.
Nor did the supine press inform the voters of recent written requests by numerous organizations in the Pittsburgh, District of Columbia and Portland, Oregon regions inviting the presidential candidates to debate in these areas (http://nader.org/2012/09/18/ralph-nader-dc-organizations-call-for-presidential-debate/). Heaven forbid that the people strive to shape the presidential debate process and weaken the duopoly’s grip. Imagine a democratic process.
Substantively, the supine press applies its own rules. Rule One is to avoid pressing questions that extend the public’s agenda beyond what the two major candidates are wrangling over. So if they don’t debate pulling back from unauthorized wars, invasions, incursions or other important foreign policy moves they are not asked. Rule Two is to ignore what major civic groups or groups with credible track records propose for the candidates to address. So Obama and Romney are not pressed by the press to expressly respond to many important issues including: what they would do on law enforcement against corporate crime, fraud and abuse, whether they favor a $10 minimum wage that catches up to 1968, inflation adjusted, for thirty million workers, or on their positions on either a Wall Street speculation tax that can raise big money or even a carbon tax.
Union organizing rights, workers’ health and safety, and a variety of important consumer protections are scarcely on the press table even when their own colleagues often report on these timely subjects.
When a matter is super-timely and they can interview the nation’s foremost expert on the politics of presidential debates – George Farah, author of No Debate – the major media is not interested. They have rejected his op-eds. Apart from local radio shows, he cannot get on national public radio, public TV or the commercial networks. It is not for lack of space and time being devoted to the Presidential campaigns.
I know Farah. He worked for me over a decade ago, right out of Princeton before going to Harvard Law School. He is an interviewers’ dream –speaks crisply, cogently and convincingly.
Maybe reporters should be given “curiosity training sessions” about what the public needs and wants to know but that the candidates are not interested in discussing.
Maybe columnists should work with the people on the ground instead of just working off clips and dealing with political flaks who restrict access to the candidates. Some columnists could benefit from a sabbatical for self-renewal.
Maybe editors and producers should expand beyond the usual “talking heads” and give the many important outside voices and movements some deserved coverage.
Our country needs a better performance by the major media that is stuck in routines, ruts and stagnant self-censorship from the national to the local levels. This is especially true of the concentrated television industry that uses our public airwaves, free of charge.
* * * * * * * * * *
The Humboldt Sentinel greatly appreciates Mr. Nader allowing us to share his column with our readers.
His biography is extensive. Mr. Nader is a political activist, author, lecturer, and attorney. Areas of particular concern to him include consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government.
Ralph Nader has been called one of America’s most effective social critics. His documented criticism of government and industry has had widespread effect on public awareness and bureaucratic power galvanizing a population of consumer advocates, citizen activists, and public interest lawyers who in turn have established their own organizations throughout the country.
Since 1966, Nader has been responsible for: at least eight major federal consumer protection laws such as the motor vehicle safety laws, Safe Drinking Water Act; the launching of federal regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Environment Protection Agency (EPA), and Consumer Product Safety Administration; the recall of millions of defective motor vehicles; access to government through the Freedom of Information Act of 1974; and for many lives saved.
In his career as consumer advocate he founded many organizations including the Center for Study of Responsive Law, the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), the Center for Auto Safety, Public Citizen, Clean Water Action Project, the Disability Rights Center, the Pension Rights Center, the Project for Corporate Responsibility and The Multinational Monitor (a monthly magazine).
Mr. Nader’s articles can be seen at his website, Nader.Org.
Sitting, lying, panhandling all targeted by latest bright ideas from City Attorney
By Charles Douglas Humboldt Sentinel
It’s not every day when Eureka looks to follow the example of Arcata.
Turning decades of municipal rivalry on its head, Eureka is looking up to its smaller municipal brethren across Humboldt Bay — at least when it comes to firing off a fresh round of anti-homeless laws.
Fresh on the heels of a 4-1 Council approval of stiffening the ban on sleeping in public by boosting the legal definition of this famous crime from an infraction to a misdemeanor, City Attorney Cyndy Day-Wilson has cooked up two separate sets of amendments to city code on the eve of next month’s general election — one in which the sole dissenting Councilmember, Linda Atkins, faces stiff opposition for her Ward Two seat.
The first volley is a slight re-wording of Arcata’s decade-old law which bans sitting or lying on the sidewalk in a wide swath of the downtown and northtown areas — although the staff report is careful not to mention the dreaded A-word, but refer to examples in, improbably, Berkeley and Santa Cruz instead. Specifically, Eureka’s ordinance would set a 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. ban on the nefarious sitting-type behavior, and would set up 18 districts covering nearly all commercial and industrial areas of Eureka, along with adjoining residential areas. The obstruction of pedestrian traffic would also become a crime in the new ordinance.
“While the City currently has other laws that could address inhospitable behavior such as aggressive panhandling, that violation requires a citizen or merchant to sign a complaint and agree to appear in court before police can act,” Day-Wilson states in her report to the Council. “No one may be cited unless first notified by a police officer that he or she is sitting or lying in a prohibited area and is in violation of the law.”
“First time offenders would be charged with an infraction and either fined or ordered to perform community service. Repeat offenders would be charged with an infraction or misdemeanor at the discretion of the City Attorney.”
Cyndy Day-Wilson
Day-Wilson has taken a peculiar interest in prosecuting the lowest of the low-end, victimless crimes. Due to a series of severe budget cuts and grant funding fumbles, District Attorney Paul Gallegos has previously gone on record as stating that his office can no longer afford to divert scarce prosecutorial resources away from chasing down convictions for serious and violent crimes. Thus the City Attorney herself has spent a considerable percentage of her time in office this year fighting to convict local poor and homeless individuals on such charges as sleeping in public, open container, camping and panhandling — according to the staff report she wrote for this week’s meeting, her office has prosecuted over 300 such cases thus far in 2012.
Day-Wilson frankly admits in the second paragraph of her report on the anti-sitting ordinance that such laws are usually seen by opponents as “veiled attacks on the homeless.” She didn’t need any straw men to defend against, however, in her report introducing the second ordinance, given the proximity to Superior Court Judge Dale Reinholtsen’s ruling last week which gutted almost all provisions of Arcata’s anti-panhandling ordinance.
Her proposal steered clear of the latest embarrassment to befall Arcata’s city attorney, Nancy Diamond, and instead stuck to a short-list ban on panhandling outside of automated teller machines and on public transit buses — along with the usual missive against aggressive panhandling, which wasn’t part of the successful lawsuit against A-town by Arcata civil rights activist Richard Salzman.
“The proposed ordinance is neither overbroad nor vague and is narrowly tailored to serve a substantial government interest,” Day-Wilson stated. “The goal is to protect citizens from the fear and intimidation accompanying certain kinds of solicitation that are an unwelcome and overwhelming presence…by imposing reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on solicitation while respecting the constitutional rights of free speech for all citizens.”
In a startling about-face, however, the anti-sitting ordinance sneaks in a casual deletion of the entire anti-sleeping law in Section 130.02 which the Council upped the penalties for this summer. There’s no word yet on whether the threat of litigation played a role in this proposed repeal.
In terms of the role these issues are playing in Atkins’ re-election efforts, her primary opponent, former Republican Central Committee treasurer Joe Bonino answered a question about the Occupy Eureka protest by saying: “I am advocating something that’s common sense. You definitely do not want people out there camping, which is what it devolves to. I mean, you can definitely have a lot of people sitting on the sidewalk. When we do our protests for political things, you know, the police come and say very nicely, you gotta stay out of the street, and you’ve got to stay on the sidewalk.”
Also at their first debate on Sept. 12 (which the Sentinel helped produce), held at the Community Media Center on the Eureka High School campus, both Atkins and Bonino were asked by Redwood ACLU treasurer Peter Martin if they agreed with criminalizing sleeping.
“It’s illegal to sleep in public, but also, there’s really no place for you to sleep in public anyways because no one wants you to sleep near there in front of their house, and so that precludes all sidewalks, all alleyways, everything and all private property,” Bonino said. “So it’s a tough question but I don’t think what the City did is a harmful thing.”
Atkins shot back, saying Bonino didn’t live in her neighorhood of Cooper Gultch, where she noticed homeless people sleeping in front of, behind of and down the street from her house.
“We have a really big problem of homeless people not having a place to sleep in Eureka,” Atkins said. “And the Council’s been hesitant to even talk about the idea of a campground located somewhere away from our tourist area where people could come and set up their tent and have a place that is safe and comfortable for them to sleep in.”
Bonino in his rebuttal said he would be willing to entertain the idea of a campground, so long as it was strictly run, along the lines outlined in the John Steinbeck novel The Grapes Of Wrath.
Both Ordinance 856 (anti-sitting) and Ordinance 854 (anti-panhandling) will be taken up by the Council this Tuesday at 6 p.m. at City Hall — where sitting is as yet not a crime. If introduced, the ordinances would need to come back up for a second reading and formal adoption on Oct. 16.
Despite the best efforts of consumer rights groups and universal Internet access advocates, the Goliath beat the daylights out of David this weekend with the signing of California Senate Bill 1161, which guarantees a regulation-free future for telecommunications corporations pushing to end the old land-line lifeline in favor of Internet Protocol telephones.
In his signing statement, Governor Jerry Brown (Dem. – Oakland) pointed to the weak power of the California Public Utilities Commission to compile complaints and report them to the Federal Communications Commission and the Legislature as sufficient to keep the telecoms in line.
“VoIP providers will continue to contribute to the State’s universal service programs and provide E-911 access,” Brown stated.” The bill does not affect the authority of the California Public Utilities Commission regarding the construction and maintenance of facilities and access to utility support structures, including pole attachments.”
SB 1161 was hatched by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a 50-state spanning lobby of many of the world’s largest transnational corporations, including AT&T and Verizon. It was in their interest that SB 1161 powered through the state legislature this summer, with the support of corporatist Republicans and neoliberal Democrats alike. Lobbyists Jim Hawley of TechNet and Kristine Berman of TechAmerica crowed about their victory on their respective websites:
“The Governor’s signature on this legislation will improve California’s worldwide technology leadership by establishing an Internet policy that supports innovation, investment and job creation,” Hawley and Berman stated. “Continued investment and innovation will bring California consumers more of the products, devices and services like VoIP they want and that are enhancing their lives.”
The motley crew of opponents — including The Utility Reform Network, Communications Workers of America, Media Alliance and local legislators like Assemblymembers Wes Chesbro (Dem. – Arcata) & Jared Huffman (Dem. – San Rafael) and State Senators Noreen Evans (Dem. – Santa Rosa) and Mark Leno (Dem. – San Francisco) — were simply overwhelmed by the lobbying power and campaign cash of ALEC and the telecoms.
“Governor Jerry Brown’s signing message for SB 1161 yesterday indicates that he believes the promises of private industry when their advocates say they will protect consumers, ensure public safety and secure universal access to open internet services,” Access Humboldt executive director Sean McLaughlin stated in a release. “Given the history of telecommunications market failure and the lagging status of universal access to open internet in California and across the US, we see a great need for localism, competition and diversity in the communication networks that form our marketplace of ideas.”
“These are not trivial goals that industry has failed to meet, in spite of many past promises, huge subsidies and large profits. So, we do not agree with the Governor’s assessment of SB 1161.”
McLaughlin’s warnings were echoed last month in a Wired.com op-ed by Harvard Law School professor Susan Crawford, who blasted the Legislature for caving in on open access concerns in favor of private profiteers fully exploiting public airwaves and spaces.
“Reliable, affordable, high-capacity, and neutral communications services are a vital input to the entire range of California businesses,” Crawford stated. “But the carriers want to be able to charge everyone for everything, without any oversight, and without any obligation to serve everyone; they’d like to have a two-sided market, in which the communications provider not only charges the consumer for network access but also charges service providers for access to the consumer. Big companies are fine with this, because they’ll have leverage in these negotiations. Smaller companies, poorer Californians, startups, and society as a whole will suffer.”
“Like the wildfires that are racing through Northern California, the carriers are sweeping the country with bills like SB 1161, gutting legislative and regulatory authority wherever they can. Having an unregulated monopoly over a basic input into all economic activity is a great business. California is just an example of an overall trend. But it’s a very big and important example.”
The bill’s signature may even jeopardize parts of the Telecommunications Element under consideration next month by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors as part of its General Plan Update process.
Read on for the full text of Governor Brown’s signing statement:
“Office of the Governor
September 28, 2012
To the Members of the California State Senate:
I am signing Senate Bill 1161 that limits California Public Utilities Commission (Commission) regulatory authority of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Internet Protocol (IP) enabled services until January 1, 2020. This bill encourages the continued growth of these and other innovative services that have become a hallmark of our state.
The existing consumer protections safeguarded by this bill are crucial. VoIP providers will continue to contribute to the State’s universal service programs and provide E-911 access. The bill preserves enforcement of State and federal civil and criminal laws and local ordinances of general applicability, including consumer protection rules and proscriptions against unfair competition. The bill does not affect the authority of the California Public Utilities Commission regarding the construction and maintenance of facilities and access to utility support structures, including pole attachments.
Importantly, the bill emphasizes the Commission’s authority to monitor, track and report complaints from VoIP customers to the Federal Communications Commission, and empowers the Commission to report their findings annually to the Legislature. I know the Commission stands at the ready to be diligent in this effort. Likewise, I expect VoIP providers to cooperate fully and promptly to resolve consumer complaints brought to the attention of the Commission.
As Bill Nimitz said of Portland, Maine's new slogan, "I've seen old telegrams with more sizzle." It also interferes with our efforts to give Maine a new slogan, based on the most common phrase uttered by Maine restaurant servers when someone orders a Coke: "Is Pepsi okay?" "Yes, life's good here" but for more than […]
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Trying hard to keep this all straight, but as we understand it, you are a terrorist is you have any dealing with Al Qaeda, yet it's okay for the Obama folks to arm Al Queda in Syria. Now it's gotten more complicated: Sky, UK - The Taliban has said it was behind an attack that killed four US troops in Afghanistan, just hours after Washington announc […]
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Sam Smith If you want to scare the establishment, get people together who it doesn't think belong together. If you are students having a problem with your principal don't just go to his or her office with the usual troublemakers; walk in with some of the smartest kids, some jocks, a few punks, blacks, whites, latinos, and, best of all, the kids wh […]
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Greg Kaufmann, Nation - University of California at Davis economist Hilary Hoynes and her colleagues looked at adults born between 1956 and 1981 “who grew up in disadvantaged families (their parent had less than a high school education)”, and the impact of access to food stamps early in life. The authors find that “access to food stamps in utero and in early […]
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Reuters - As many as 200,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Brazil's biggest cities on Monday in a swelling wave of protest tapping into widespread anger at poor public services, police violence and government corruption.The marches, organized mostly through snowballing social media campaigns, blocked streets and halted traffic in more tha […]
Why obsess over cutting SNAP?
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