DINO Dogs, Villains and … to make you smile … the Worthy

I went to town this morning with my buddy Fishin’ Jim, who had a bunch of prescriptions to pick up; he has both Medicare and secondary insurance which should be enough to cover his needs — but he is invariably confused and annoyed because both have different deductibles, limits, and pecking orders, not counting the eventual ‘donut hole’ … leaving him wondering how it is he pays more filling the same meds on one trip to the pharmacy than he does on another. And he knows he’s likely to get invoices demanding payment for this or that … what should have been covered but got caught in the crosshairs; all of which will take a flurry of calls to untangle. No matter the insurance, there are traps and stumbling blocks — nothing is straightforward or easy to understand — and deep at the bottom of it, you know they’re making money off of you as fast as they can.

Seniors everywhere all have the same dilemma — but, bless em, at least they have coverage. And they are among that well-insured generation that seems not to understand that they enjoy the last of such stability; a good Liberal, Jim says that he gets more upset when others get screwed than when he does, but he resents being so continually and deliberately confused! Amen and amen.

With the Republicans bellowing how effectively they’re killing healthcare reform and plunging Obama’s numbers closer to his Waterloo … a meme sadly but predictably picked up by MSNBC’s Matthews … and Politico, of course, who are announcing a Republican return to influence with little to warrant it [in fact, the numbers tell quite another story] … I was heartened last night by Charlie Rose who hosted Dr. Bill First [no longer as ruthlessly Stepford as when he was Pub majority leader] and Dr. Howard Dean in a discussion of the current healthcare propositions and probabilities.

First off, I admire Dean … I love his enthusiasm and I’ve always approved a truth-teller. I’m disappointed that the administration has treated him so abominably, which I suppose is due to the Rahm v. Howard difference in approaches that GOT us the DINO Dogs to begin with [Rahm's doing] — but gave Obama uplift with the 50 State Solution [Howard's doing.]

Both Frist and Dean think something will pass soon; both seem optimistic that Public Option will be included, although Frist opposes it. Dean said … and I completely concur … if the PO is not included, it cannot be called healthcare reform; simply insurance reform. Half a loaf … the rest to be baked at some later date. The Prez sez he’s still pushing hard for the PO; now we’ll wait until after recess to see how it shapes up.

In an article below, Nancy Pelosi calls the insurance companies villains — to my way of thinking, head villain of the political push is Max Baucus of Montana, leader of the Blue Dogs and the recipient of MILLIONS in HMO and Big Pharma money. There are six Senators involved in the Baucus caucus in the Senate Finance Committee, collectively representing 2.8% of the total US population; and that’s what’s holding us all up — one of democracy’s little glitches.

Just keep following the money, dearhearts — you’ll find the villains. As Bill Maher determines in last weeks New Rule, below, not EVERYTHING is about profit … and healthcare shouldn’t be. By the way, on Real Time he did NOT say the nun puts the thermometer in yer mouth!

The first article here is just for fun — but it speaks to the epidemic of Wackadoodle we’re enduring — I’ve never seen the like. I’m throwing in some fun videos on the topic; Sarah Palin hijinks … and remember, she’s still a comer for 2012. As further illustration of how far down the Rabbit Hole some of us are [and bonus,] I’ve added a trio of articles that you need to read to believe. The one by the employee of Goldman Sachs is just a jaw dropper.

Finally, here’s a pick-me-up to remind you that some of us are still sane and even inspired. Given the Medal of Freedom choices Dubby handed us, Obama’s … celebrated as Agents of Change … are a breath of fresh air; you’ll find the list of recipients here with bio’s, among them Teddy Kennedy, Desmond Tutu, Sandra Day O’Connor, Billie Jean King, Sidney Poitier, Stephen Hawking, Harvey Milk, the Rev. Joseph Lowery who delivered the benediction at the Inaugeration and 94 year-old Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow.

Ummmm, lemme see — males, females, blacks, whites, disabled, gay, South African and … cherry on the cake … the last remaining War Chief of America’s indigenous people. Diverse enough for you?

Now, THAT’s an America I can believe in!

Jude

Sarah Palin Vs. That Crazy Santa Cruz Lady (VIDEO)

William Shatner Makes Palin’s Speech Into Poetry (VIDEO)

Civil Warp
Steven Weber, HuffPo
July 29, 2009

When the history of the last 10 years of this country is writ (if anyone will give a good goddamn or be able to read anything that’s not in twit-speak) it will reflect the final moments before the two disparate, warring sides of the American psyche separated.

The last, moist threads linking those two factions are at their breaking points, with each side the embodiment of an ideology whose ultimate fear is the opposition’s complete dominion over the other, thus signaling the end of America as a country and arguably the greatest and most successful experiment in democracy the world has seen.

On the current flashpoint of health care, the shrill voices of opposition, having hoarded their profits, are inundating the masses with primal fears of death and evoking iconic evil. And like good, sensitive, easily manipulated children, they believe Mommy and Daddy could never be wrong, could never be cruel.

In the instance of health care for all Americans, they have declared a war on reason. The instigators of this assault, one must assume, had to have been emotionally broken as children. They cling to myths and have developed a mortal hatred of the truth. They seethe and simplistically demonize their opponents in order to understand the purpose of their own existence in this short life; if they didn’t they might realize that perhaps they had no purpose, no practical reason for being here at all. And when their arteries eventually burst, they will need the very health care they assail as wicked.

And the poor folks who are stirred to hurling mindless vitriol at the idea of health care for all Americans are, of course, the victims of a massive scam: drench the herds in low-brow entertainment, decry long-held fact based beliefs, isolate people’s genuine feelings of pride and hope, add a dash of primal fear and stand back.

They are the Gullible Americans (to go alongside their Ugly cousins) and their fear based psychology cannot conceive of traitors in their midst — unless the traitor is of a darker color or has a foreign sounding name. From swift boats to birthers, the sales pitches have reached a level of fervor seen only in tent meetings, full of hyperkinetic gobbledygook and political glossolalia.

The division is clear. It is, finally, right versus wrong. And on this side of the division we declare:

it is wrong to for a modern, wealthy country to not provide all its citizens with health care.

It is wrong to not provide better education.

It is wrong to go to war unilaterally.

It is wrong to cater to corporate interests when ordinary people are disadvantaged and struggling.

It is wrong to cater to radical, ignorant, religious zealotry and to give it a place at the table when it should be banned to the fringes.

It is wrong to foster a distrust of progress.

It is wrong to have a fear of “otherness.”

It is wrong to perpetuate institutionalized racism.

It is wrong to deny science and to avoid culpability in the polluting of our planet.

These are the things a thinking, modern, progressive nation stands for. Those on the other side of the divide — well, we’ve seen what they believe in. And, sadly, we’ve lived it. ++

Who Wins the Battle During August Recess Will Determine the Fate of Health Care Reform
Mike Lux, HuffPo
July 30, 2009

Usually when I leave DC for a few days, as I did recently, my mood and hopefulness about the country improves — it’s a lot easier to be hopeful when you meet real people working in their communities for change. And usually when I talk with my insider Democratic friends in DC, my optimism fades because everyone in DC tends to be so cynical and overly-cautious. But on this trip, I got really depressed with the steady drumbeat of bad news coming out of the traditional media about health care. When I got back yesterday, though, and started talking to people who were actually working on things here, I remembered how relentlessly negative big media tends to be, how every story emphasizes the conventional wisdom story line about how health care reform is impossible to pass.

This health care fight is just one motherf-er of a battle. Every step of the way will be really hard and really painful. The final trade offs will piss virtually everybody off. Passing something real, something that actually matters, has never been more than a 50/50 proposition. But talking with people on the Hill and at the White House, and watching what has happened over the last 24 hours, I now believe our chances at real reform are still alive.

The fact is, Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi forged a deal with the Blue Dogs that didn’t require them to give up anything that really mattered very much on the substance. While the Energy and Commerce bill will be the worst of the 3 bills reported out of House committees, it still has most of the important things you would want to see in a health care reform bill, including a decent public option. It is a great thing that progressive members of the House are pushing back hard against the bad compromises that were made, though, because progressives need to send a clear signal that they will not be rolled. When the 3 bills are merged during the August recess, that pressure will help deliver a very solid version of the legislation.

Speaking of the August recess, while I am not thrilled that the House put off the floor vote until after it happens, that is also not a disaster for us. But it is a test for those of us who believe in serious health care reform. The battle over who wins the organizing and message fight in the August recess — grassroots reformers or the astroturf insurance lobby in league with right wingers everywhere — will decide the fate of health care reform, pure and simple.

The conventional wisdom in the media is simply wrong about the nature of the health care fight: the Senate Finance committee is not determinative. That’s what the Republicans, the insurance lobbyists, the conservative Democrats want everyone to believe, and that mantra is being pushed day and night in the offices and hallways of the DC establishment. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Four committees out of five did the right thing, and the signal that I’m getting from the White House is that they are still fighting hard for the public option, and Senate Finance is not the end all and be all. What will change the dynamic is progressives winning the organizing and messaging fight in August. Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate, and at least two Republican Senators from a small progressive-leaning state in play. If our side out-organizes the insurance/right wing astroturfers, if the White House and Reid and Pelosi put every bit of muscle into winning the fight for real reform, it can still happen. Everything is at stake here, as I wrote yesterday: if we don’t win this fight, the Obama Presidency, Democratic prospects in the 2010 election, and any hopes we have for victories on other big issues are all in deep, deep trouble. But we still have a real shot at winning this battle, and now is when we need to pull out all the stops to do it. ++

Pelosi: Health Insurance Companies The Real “Villains”
Jeff Muskus, HuffPo
07-30-09

Forget the Blue Dogs, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday. The real “villains” in the fight for health care reform are insurance companies.

Work on the legislation resumed Thursday morning after more than a week of delays to accommodate conservative Blue Dog Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Blue Dogs won significant concessions and also forced delay of a full House floor vote on the final bill until after Congress returns from its upcoming month-long recess.

But Pelosi on Thursday cast the blown deadline as a positive, arguing that the process is further along than it would have been with no date set. Meanwhile, her blistering attacks against health insurers offered a good preview of what to expect from Democrats trying to rally support for reform back at home.

“They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way,” Pelosi said of the insurance industry after her weekly press conference. “It’s almost immoral, what they are doing,” she said, referring to industry lobbying against a public insurance plan option. “Of course, they’ve been immoral all along. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening, and the public has to know about it.”

The current system works so well for insurers that they don’t even want subsidies, Pelosi claimed. “They’ve had a good thing going for a long time at the expense of the American people and the health of our country,” she said, adding that it will be tough to keep them from getting their way. “This is the fight of our lives.”

Pelosi referred to the health insurance industry’s campaign against reform — specifically, the public option — as “carpet bombing” and “shock and awe” during the press conference. She also sought to present a unified Democratic front, dismissing complaints from progressives that they have been shut out of negotiations dominated by swing Blue Dogs on Energy and Commerce.

“Progressives have been well represented,” she said, noting that all three House committees that have worked on health care bills are chaired by progressives.

The public option currently outlined in the Energy and Commerce Committee is significantly weaker than the other two House committee bills, and more closely resembles that of the Senate health committee, in that it unlinks the plan from Medicare rates, leaving negotiation to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Pelosi reiterated her desire for a stronger public plan Thursday, but did not commit to it.

“I am for the strongest possible public option,” she said. The Senate health committee bill “is one that I think would be okay. It’s not my preference. My preference is a stronger bill. But it meets the test of having an effective public option.” ++

Nothing ‘Centrist’ About Them
Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nation via HuffPo
July 27, 2009

At this moment — when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day — the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform.

So why does the media keep ceding them the label of “centrist” or “moderate” as if they are the guardians of mainstream values? In a recent profile on reform slayer Max Baucus — Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and creator of his majority Republican “Coalition of the Willing” — Washington Post reporter Dan Eggen refers to Baucus as “a longtime centrist in the Democratic caucus.” Even Harold Meyerson — who along with E.J. Dionne and Ruth Marcus keeps the Washington Post op-ed page from being neocon central and is one of the best in the business at understanding the ideologies at play in Washington — in a recent op-ed repeatedly decries the “centrist Democrats” such as the Blue Dogs who fight against taxing the richest 1 percent of Americans and promote a “can’t-do” view of government.

All Things Considered host Guy Raz recently introduced a story on “forty centrist House Democrats from the so-called Blue Dog Coalition [who] are threatening to block the proposal in its current form….” He also spoke of “Congressman Mike Ross [who] heads up the Health Care Taskforce for the centrist Blue Dog Democrats.” Want to see how “centrist” Mike Ross is? Check this out.

Even a good regional paper like Louisville’s Courier-Journal — in rightly blasting the Blue Dogs as “deplorable” for being “unable to muster the spine to pay for health care reform with even so innocuous a measure as higher taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans” — calls them “centrist”.

The danger is that promoting the view that these conservative Democrats are somehow at the center of our politics plays into the hands of those who would like to marginalize progressives as far outside of the mainstream. (And I have no doubt K Street is advising Republicans to constantly refer to their Democratic allies as “moderate” and “centrist”.) It also misrepresents what most Americans want from the government in these times.

As Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of the invaluable The Political Brain, told me: “The average American, according to all available data, has largely moved slightly left of where it was in the Reagan years, and with changing demographics, it will be far left of Reagan and Bush in twenty years. So to call Democrats who are substantially right of the center of the electorate (let alone of their party), like Heath Shuler, ‘moderates,’ is both to misrepresent the center of political gravity in the general electorate and in the Democratic Party.”

How we tell the story of this battle for health care reform matters and will impact whether the battle is won or lost. So-called “centrists” are far from the center of this debate. They are, in fact, out of touch and out of the mainstream — like the rest of their conservative brethren. ++

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit
Bill Maher, HuffPo
July 23, 2009

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn’t used to define us. But now it’s becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a “war profiteer” was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­– like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason –­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you’re going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that’s where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That’s why America has the world;s largest prison population ­– because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite’s day. I thought, “Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.”

But maybe they aren’t. Because unlike in Cronkite’s day, today’s news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That’s why it wasn’t surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter’s time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there’s health care. It wasn’t that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that’s good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they’re run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They’re not hospitals anymore; they’re Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America’s largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it’s not a right, it’s a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they’re always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like “recision,” where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you’ve been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what’s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care “socialized medicine,” I get to call private health care “soulless vampires making money off human pain.” The problem with President Obama’s health care plan isn’t socialism, it’s capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what’s wrong with firemen? Why don’t they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks! ++

Wackadoodle Bonus

The Hose Of Authority
digby, Hullabaloo
7/30/09

Here’s Pat Boone writing for World Net Daily:

The American people have long opposed abortion, same sex “marriage,” universal, socialistic health care and a host of other ultraliberal causes; current polls confirm we still do. But the waterboarding began, literally, within the first three days of this new administration. With no instigation from Congress, the freshman president picked up his new hose of authority and, by executive order, overturned the long-standing Reagan-era regulations prohibiting foreign aid going to organizations that finance overseas abortions – and handed international Planned Parenthood, chief provider of abortions worldwide, 200 million taxpayer dollars!

And now, while we’re strapped down by the Democrat-controlled Congress, gasping and gulping beneath a flood of strong-arm tactics, the “health reform” bill taking shape outlines a “minimum-benefits package” that will be universal – that is, required of every American’s insurance plan, whether provided by a private firm or by the government.

Cunningly, abortion isn’t specifically mentioned, but will be decided by a “Health Benefits Advisory Committee,” handpicked by the president and his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who already has a record while governor of Kansas supporting late-term abortions! See how this “taking advantage of a crisis” thing works?

But we’re not helpless yet, folks. We’re drenched and near-drowned and gasping for breath, but there’s a growing coalition of staunch Republican and “blue dog” Democrats in both houses of Congress digging in their heels and saying, “Wait! This is all too much, too fast! We need time to read and digest and consider this torrent of legislation. Mr. President, hold off!”

And that gives us debt-soaked citizens a chance to rise up and gasp and spit and shout: “MR. PRESIDENT, AND YOU, TOO, CONGRESS! YOU WORK FOR US! NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND! WE VOTED YOU IN! AND WE CAN TAKE YOU OUT! STOP THIS WATERBOARDING!!”

That excerpt stands alone, but you really need to read the whole thing — and World O Crap’s deconstruction — to fully grasp old Pat’s POV: The good waterboarding saved the Brooklyn Bridge while the bad waterboarding is universal health care. It’s hard to explain because, well, it’s insane. You have to read it for yourself. ++

The road to socialized medicine
STAR PARKER, Capital Hill Blue
July 28, 2009

“America, America, God shed His grace on thee.”

Many demoralized souls felt over recent months that this famous appeal in “America the Beautiful” had been falling on deaf ears.

But we’ve had a miracle. The socialized medicine freight train, chugging down the track with seeming insurmountable inevitability, has been, for the moment, derailed.

And, miraculously, the derailment has occurred because of values as well as economics.

Conservative Democrats have parted company with their liberal colleagues because the health care legislation in process will bust our federal budget and deliver new federal abortion funding.

Subsidized health care delivered through a proposed government insurance plan would inevitably mean abortion funding in the standard benefits package. The only way around this would be explicit language to prohibit it.

Attempts by Republicans in three House committees to insert such language were defeated, despite a handful of conservative Democrats joining them.

Now a broad coalition of pro-life organizations has initiated a campaign to fight any health care legislation permitting new government abortion funding.

President Obama has called this an attempt to “micromanage” health care benefits. Planned Parenthood has echoed these sentiments.

Is the concern of these pro-life groups legitimate? You bet it is.

Pro-abortion forces have been forever calling abortion health care. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, defines its business as providing “reproductive health care.”

Or consider our president’s thinking.

Then Senator Obama stated his disagreement with the Supreme Court decision banning partial birth abortion because it “departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women.”

Partial birth abortion is a procedure in which a doctor kills an infant near birth by smashing its skull and sucking out its brains. The Supreme Court acted in 2007, thank God, to make this illegal. The decision permits the procedure if the life of the mother is danger.

Yet this is unacceptable to our president. He wants vaguely defined health considerations, beyond the question of the life of the mother, to permit what is essentially murder.

For pro-aborts, murder, if the victim is an unborn child at any stage of development, is health care.

So, yes, we can be sure that, without specific prohibiting language, legislation that directs new federal funding to individuals for health care will cover abortions.

There is particular irony that Obama and others championing health care reform insist that it’s unrelated to abortion concerns.

We hear a lot of talk about eliminating waste and having more preventative health care. But the most powerful health care initiative we could get is the last thing they will propose: Traditional family values. The same values undermined by the liberal abortion regime and moral relativism they promote.

A wide array of studies shows married individuals physically and mentally healthier than singles.

Among the 47 million uninsured that we hear so much about, two thirds are unmarried.

And, according to a recent study on the uninsured published by the Employment Policies Institute, “lack of health insurance is not likely to be the major factor causing higher mortality rates among the uninsured.” The higher mortality rates tie more closely to behavior that leads to poverty, such as poor education and dysfunctional lifestyles.

Let’s capitalize on the miracle that has occurred with a truth initiative about our health care crisis.

New government bean counters, programs, taxes, spending, and subsidies are not the answer.

For those currently on private plans, we need less, not more government. More competition and health savings accounts.

For the uninsured, break the cycle of poverty with school choice and rebuilding families in poor communities.

Health care is not about bureaucrats but about individual human behavior. We should be talking about a culture of life and the traditional values that sustain it. ++

Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education

Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools
Michael Lewis, Bloomberg
7/28/09

From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t.

It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human.

Thus, like many of my colleagues, I have adopted a strategy of never leaving Goldman Sachs, apart from a few brief, spasmodic attempts to make what you outsiders call “love” or “the beast with two backs.” Goldman recognizes how important it is for its people to replicate themselves. We bill no performance fees for the service.

Today, the sheer volume of irresponsible media commentary has forced us to reconsider our public-relations strategy. With every uptick in our share price it’s grown clearer that we who are inside Goldman Sachs must open a dialogue with you who are not. Not for our benefit, but for yours.

America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.

Rumor No. 1: “Goldman Sachs controls the U.S. government.”

Every time we hear the phrase “the United States of Goldman Sachs” we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn’t a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)

What small interest we maintain in the U.S. government is, we feel, in the public interest. Our current financial crisis has its roots in a single easily identifiable source: the envy others felt toward Goldman Sachs.

The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG — all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take, in a pathetic attempt to replicate Goldman’s financial returns.

For too long we have allowed others to emulate us. Now we are working productively with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Congress to ensure that we alone are allowed to take the sort of risks that might destroy the financial system.

Rumor No. 2: “When the U.S. government bailed out AIG, and paid off its gambling debts, it saved not AIG but Goldman Sachs.”

The charge isn’t merely insulting but ignorant. Less responsible journalists continue to bring up the $12.9 billion we received from AIG, as if that was some kind of big deal to us. But as our CFO David Viniar explained back in March, we were hedged. Our profits from AIG “rounded to zero.”

People who don’t work at Goldman Sachs, of course, find this implausible: How could $12.9 billion round to zero? Easy, but you just need to understand the mathematics.

Let’s assume AIG transferred $12,880,560,250.34 of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs. A Goldman outsider, asked to round this number, might call it $12,880,560,250.00. That’s not how we look at it; at Goldman we always round to the nearest $50 billion, so anything less than $25 billion rounds to zero.

Think of it that way and you can see that $12,880,560,250.34 isn’t even close to not rounding to zero.

Rumor No. 3: “As the U.S. government will eat the losses if Goldman Sachs goes bust, Goldman Sachs shouldn’t be allowed to keep making these massive financial bets. At the very least the $11.4 billion Goldman Sachs already has set aside for employees in 2009 — $386,429 a head, just for the first six months — is unfair, as the U.S. taxpayer has borne so much of the risk of the wagers that generated the profits.”

Really, we don’t know where to begin with this one. It is wrong-headed in so many different ways!

Let’s begin with the idea that the taxpayer is running a bigger risk than we are. The billions he stands to lose are trivial; after all, they round to zero.

The real risk, when you think about it even for a minute, is the risk we take ourselves: that Goldman will cease to exist and we will cease to be Goldman employees. To flirt with such tragedy we obviously need to be paid.

Rumor No. 4: “Goldman employees all look alike.”

Several recent newspaper photos have revealed that a surprising number of Goldman Sachs workers are white, male and bald. That non-Goldman people glance at such photos and think “Holy crap, they even look alike!” just shows how deeply anti- Goldman bigotry runs in American life.

We at Goldman represent unique clusters of DNA; if we bear some faint surface resemblance to one another, and to creatures from the 24th century, it is only because our superior powers of reasoning lead us to hold in our minds exactly the same thoughts, at exactly the same time.

A shared disinterest in growing hair, for instance, isn’t a coincidence of nature but an expression of healthy like- mindedness.

“The world is a pool table,” our naked-headed CEO likes to tell us. “And all the people in it are either stripes or solids. You alone are the cue balls.”

Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.

For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs — nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does –ever happens by accident. ++

“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
~ Barack Obama

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment July 30th, 2009

Testing the Constitution

A gaffe, they say, is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth — Obama is gaffe prone; thank God/dess. So’s his VP. When the Prez said that the cops acted stupidly he was on the money; and now the conversation needs to focus not only on the stereotyping of people of color, but police intimidation techniques as well … it applies to all of us. During the Bushie years, you may remember, I warned against demanding Constitutional rights if you crossed the cops — they’d been primed to see that as dangerous Liberalism and react harshly. Now that we’re turning the nation in a Liberal direction, they will need some remediation; but that’s way down there on the To Do List, obviously.

Meanwhile, FAUX News angry-black-man and we-want-an-apology BS aside, I want a wider dialogue. I have sympathy for the job demanded of the police force — the old saw that you’ll be less critical when you need one is true enough, but loaded with flawed propaganda combined with complacency about what we will have to suffer until that magic moment when we need a hired gun defending us; it’s an old, tired argument. The cops have a nasty job, and PTSD has to be part of it; but there is an overload of adrenalin and testosterone going on these days. I think of this as the Lyndee Englund meme — it’s only the bad apples, doncha know. NOT. We need a housecleaning in the worst damned way.

The taser thing is out of hand, for sure — you need to open this link to see just how badly confused we are! Yikes! Then go here and see the ramifications of this kind of violence in a YouTube entitled, Police Brutality: 14 yr old girl Tasered in the Head NM. This should be criminal, itself! And read below about the man who was, figuratively, raped by authority … almost literally.

When you’re dealing with a domestic dispute between a mother and 14 year old daughter, and the mother has brought the child to the cops to have them HELP explain the consequences of her actions — when you have a man on the ground, already tased and subdued with his hands behind his back, outnumbered 3 to one — is this NECESSARY to prove you’re the authority? The man in charge? The Man? The Giant American Penis that will “serve and protect” even though the unfortunate detainee ends up in the hospital or even dead?

We PAY these people to do this … we should have some SAY in how brutal they can become before there is accountability. If the cops are uniformly going to make US the enemy, the world is going to get a lot more dangerous before this is over. They are touted as heroes, day in and out — and that can certainly be true as they face the worst issues society has to present to them; they can also be thugs in a pissing contest with those unequipped to resist them, and we’re seeing WAY too much of that. We got a problem, kids. Now that the mythology is up to scrutinize, we need to get a toe-hold in the Achilles Heel of this conversation and push for reforms.

Meanwhile, the air was filled with racist pap over the weekend — anyone who thinks Obama’s ascendency makes us post-racial has another think coming; we are, at least, discussing it more frankly among ourselves. I can’t vouch for media. Given the pundit blather on Sunday, I’d just like to shake them … hard; although I’ll give kudos to Stephanopoulos for putting some articulate Lefties on his roundtable — Krugman, Huffington, Brazile — to counterpoint increasingly disgruntled old poop, George Will.

Obama’s gonna have a beer with the two chest-bumpers that had the smackdown in Cambridge; this is where the man shines — reconciliation. And it should put the ‘orange juice v. coffee’ debate to bed, although the Red’s will not give him credit for going mainstream-American with the beer proposition. But that’s not going to put this issue to bed as we wade through the details. From Sully:

Several readers have noticed a strange discrepancy - not unusual in police reports:

As you’ll see, on page 3, Figueroa claims to have heard Gates refuse to provide ID after he entered the premises. But, according to Crowley, on page 1, Crowley was the only officer there at first. Gates had already provided the ID before Figueroa got there.

You’ll find the reads on this in the bonus section — the first portion will regale you with Uncle Dick’s Splendid Adventures, ongoing. Details continue to leak out about Darth’s behavior in a constant stream of negative ions. One day, not long in the future, we will recognize this man as the dangerous fool he is; and once we do, I hope we have settled enough of the immediate national concerns to go after him in spades. Culpability for his complete disdain of the Constitution he vowed to protect needs to be an object lesson for Americans everywhere; if the nation needs a psychic lift, THAT would surely help us regain respect for the system.

Cheney on roughing up the Little Decider to pitch for Libby, playing with posse comitatus and assassination squads — and there’s more to this story than killing of Al Qaeda, for sure … very few in these parts have issue with that. Besides, Sy Hersch had given us the info a year ago. Who ELSE was Uncle Dick interested in offing? And lets note that Pelosi received no Righty apology for the cries that she was a traitor for questioning the ‘always truthful’ CIA. Pffffft!

Then MoDo does a good job for a change; last, videos and articles to illustrate our growing threat of institutionalized police brutality. If trading insults with a cop in your own home can get you arrested, then the Bushies did a pretty thorough job of mind-criming this nation and assaulting the Constitution. We ignore this stuff at our peril.

It’s time to take authority back and demand reform from government, financial institutions, law enforcement, religion, and anyone else who deems themselves fit to think FOR us and do TO us.

Doncha think? Thought you did. The Constitution covers most of this — how did we go so wrong? Hint: Greed is Good … and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Jude

Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests
MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID JOHNSTON, NYT
July 24, 2009

WASHINGTON — Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests.

Most former officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations about the case involved classified information. They agreed to talk about the internal discussions only after the memorandum was released earlier this year.

New information has recently emerged about the deliberations and divisions in the administration over some of the most controversial policies after the Sept. 11 attacks, like the decision to use brutal interrogation methods on Qaeda detainees.

Former officials in the administration said this debate was not as bitter as others during Mr. Bush’s first term. The discussions did not proceed far enough to put military units on alert.

Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.

Among those in opposition were Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

“Frankly, it was a bit of a turf war,” said one former senior administration official. “For a number of people, crossing the line of having intelligence or military activities inside the United States was not worth the risk.”

Mr. Bush ended up ordering the F.B.I. to make the arrests in Lackawanna, near Buffalo, where the agency had been monitoring a group of Yemeni Americans with suspected Qaeda ties. The five men arrested there in September 2002, and a sixth arrested nearly simultaneously in Bahrain, pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.

Scott L. Silliman, a Duke University law professor specializing in national security law, said an American president had not deployed the active-duty military on domestic soil in a law enforcement capacity, without specific statutory authority, since the Civil War.

Senior military officials were never consulted, former officials said. Richard B. Myers, a retired general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a recent interview that he was unaware of the discussion.

Former officials said the 2002 debate arose partly from Justice Department concerns that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna. Mr. Cheney, the officials said, had argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.

Earlier that summer, the administration designated Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and sent him to a military brig in South Carolina. Mr. Padilla was arrested by civilian agencies on suspicion of plotting an attack using a radioactive bomb.

Those who advocated using the military to arrest the Lackawanna group had legal ammunition: the memorandum by Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty.

The lawyers, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the Constitution, the courts and Congress had recognized a president’s authority “to take military actions, domestic as well as foreign, if he determines such actions to be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and before.”

The document added that the neither the Posse Comitatus Act nor the Fourth Amendment tied a president’s hands.

Despite this guidance, some Bush aides bristled at the prospect of troops descending on an American suburb to arrest terrorism suspects.

“What would it look like to have the American military go into an American town and knock on people’s door?” said a second former official in the debate.

Chief James L. Michel of the Lackawanna police agreed. “If we had tanks rolling down the streets of our city,” Chief Michel said, “we would have had pandemonium down here.”

The Lackawanna case was the first after the Sept. 11 attacks in which American intelligence and law enforcement operatives believed they had dismantled a Qaeda cell in the United States.

In the months before the arrests, Mr. Bush was regularly briefed on the case by Mr. Mueller of the F.B.I. and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. The C.I.A. had been tracking the overseas contacts of the Lackawanna group.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article in March, Mr. Yoo defended his 2001 memorandum and its reasoning, saying that after Sept. 11 the Bush administration faced the real prospect of Qaeda cells undertaking attacks on American soil. “The possibility of such attacks raised difficult, fundamental questions of constitutional law,” he wrote, “because they might require domestic military operations against an enemy for the first time since the Civil War.” ++

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

Compromise, Cheney Style
digby, Hullabaloo

Reading this thing about the Tanks of Lackawanna, something has become clear to me that wasn’t before: the excesses of the Bush administration, the war, the torture, the wiretapping, were the result of compromises between the sociopathic Cheney faction and the merely dull and incompetent remainder of the administration, including the president.

“Ok, Dick, now don’t get crazy. We can’t send tanks into New York. Can you meet us halfway here? How about we just send tanks into Bagdad? Would that be good enough?”

It’s possible that Cheney did this on purpose, but I suspect he just went for it in all circumstances and got away with as much as he could. The president and his closest advisors, being boobs, thought they were being tough by denying Cheney his most outrageous proposals and only giving him “half a loaf.”

I think when the history is written, the most astonishing thing is that the Vice President of the United States, a man who chose himself for the job as second in command to a childlike fool installed by his father’s Supreme Court appointees, managed to get away with all he got away with. Perhaps even more astonishing is, as dday points out, the fact that president’s apologists are now trying to sell him as some kind of brave constitutional guardian for stopping Cheney from doing worse that what he did. Leadership, Republican style.

I think this proves that our vaunted system may have a few little holes in it, don’t you? ++

Cannot Tell A Lie
dday, Hullabaloo
Thursday, July 23, 2009

Time decided to do some reporting about the final days in the Bush bunker, particularly about Dick Cheney’s efforts to extract a pardon for his pal Scooter Libby. It’s clearly from Bush’s perspective, but nevertheless it’s a pretty fascinating article just for seeing how the Bush loyalists spin the tale.

Petitions for pardons are usually sent in writing to the White House counsel’s office or a specially designated attorney at the Department of Justice. In Libby’s case, Cheney simply carried the message directly to Bush, as he had with so many other issues in the past, pressing the President in one-on-one meetings or in larger settings. A White House veteran was struck by his “extraordinary level of attention” to the case. Cheney’s persistence became nearly as big an issue as the pardon itself. “Cheney really got in the President’s face,” says a longtime Bush-family source. “He just wouldn’t give it up.”

And there was a darker possibility. As a former Bush senior aide explains, “I’m sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up.” It had been an article of faith among Cheney’s critics that the Vice President wanted a pardon for Libby because Libby had taken the fall for him in the Fitzgerald probe. In his grand-jury testimony reviewed by TIME, Libby denied three times that Cheney had directed him to leak Plame’s CIA identity in mid-2003. Though his recollection of other events in the same time frame was lucid and detailed, on at least 20 occasions, Libby could not recall details of his talks with Cheney about Plame’s place of employment or questions the Vice President raised privately about Wilson’s credibility. Some Bush officials wondered whether Libby was covering up for Cheney’s involvement in the leak of Plame’s identity.

That makes it seem like Bush just wanted to separate himself from the Libby case altogether, despite the fact that Libby was a special adviser to the President, not the Vice President, and he was protecting both Bush and Cheney. It makes sense for Bush to compartmentalize the Libby leak, as if he were an innocent bystander, and refusing to pardon obviously helps him in that case. But it’s not true at all. Marcy Wheeler has a lot more on this.

But this just blew me away. After Cheney lays out the case for a pardon, repeatedly, incessantly, for weeks:

A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, “expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision … He didn’t take it well.”

Two days after that, Libby, who hadn’t previously lobbied on his own behalf, telephoned Bolten’s office. He wanted an audience with Bush to argue his case in person. To Libby, a presidential pardon was a practical as well as symbolic prize: among other things, it would allow him to practice law again. Bolten once more kicked the matter to the lawyers, agreeing to arrange a meeting with Fielding. On Saturday, Jan. 17, with less than 72 hours left in the Bush presidency, Libby and Fielding and a deputy met for lunch at a seafood restaurant three blocks from the White House. Again Libby insisted on his innocence. No one’s memory is perfect, he argued; to convict me for not remembering something precisely was unfair. Fielding kept listening for signs of remorse. But none came. Fielding reported the conversation to Bush.

OK, is it normal for the subject of a possible Presidential pardon to personally lobby for it on his own behalf? Has that ever happened before? If it has, I don’t recall it.

The article is decent enough, but don’t start to drink a glass of water when you read this part, or you’re in for a surefire spit-take:

While packing boxes in the upstairs residence, according to his associates, Bush noted that he was again under pressure from Cheney to pardon Libby. He characterized Cheney as a friend and a good Vice President but said his pardon request had little internal support. If the presidential staff were polled, the result would be 100 to 1 against a pardon, Bush joked. Then he turned to Sharp. “What’s the bottom line here? Did this guy lie or not?”

The lawyer, who had followed the case very closely, replied affirmatively.

Bush indicated that he had already come to that conclusion too.

“O.K., that’s it,” Bush said.

Yes, that moral paragon, truth-teller extraordinaire, George W. Bush, Honest George I think they called him, comes down firmly on the side of truth in virtually every circumstance. History will judge him as the most forthright human who ever bestrode the earth. A colossus among men.

Incidentally, the man, Jim Sharp, that Bush is talking with here? It’s his own defense attorney.

… you have to love Cheney’s response to the story. I guess the Bush loyalists got under his skin. ++

House Panel to Investigate Canceled CIA Program
Paul Kane and Joby Warrick, Washington Post
Saturday, July 18, 2009

The House intelligence committee announced yesterday it will investigate the CIA’s handling of its secret al-Qaeda assassination program, including whether Vice President Richard B. Cheney improperly intervened to stop the agency from telling Congress about the initiative.

The probe will examine the nature of the now-canceled program — described by intelligence officials as a series of planned attempts to use assassins to kill or capture senior terrorists — but it will mostly focus on whether the agency improperly withheld information from lawmakers, committee members said.

“The committee must be kept fully and currently informed of significant intelligence activities as required by law,” Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the panel, said in a statement. He said the decision to investigate was made in consultation with House Republicans.

The committee already has requested documents from the CIA and probably will hold hearings, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), one of several committee members who questioned whether the agency violated the law by failing to notify Congress for nearly eight years. Intelligence officials have said that the agency was not obligated to disclose the program, in part because it never became fully operational.

Schakowsky declined to say whether the committee might call Cheney as a witness.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency will “work closely with the committee on this review.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the existence of the program to House and Senate oversight committees on June 24, a day after he first learned of it. CIA officials had been considering a new training program connected with the assassination plan at the time. ++

Staff writer Perry Bacon Jr. contributed to this report.

Colbert Takes On Cheney And Chuck Todd Over Torture Investigations (VIDEO)
HuffPo
7/22/09

bonus

Bite Your Tongue
MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
July 25, 2009

WASHINGTON - Being obnoxious isn’t a crime.

As we reflect on the arc of civil rights dramas from Jim Crow to Jim Crowley, my friend John Timoney, the police chief of Miami, observes: “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech. It can get tough out there, but I tell my officers, ‘Don’t make matters worse by throwing handcuffs on someone. Bite your tongue and just leave.’ ”

As the daughter of a police detective, I always prefer to side with the police. But this time, I’m struggling.

No matter how odd or confrontational Henry Louis Gates Jr. was that afternoon, he should not have been arrested once Sergeant Crowley ascertained that the Harvard professor was in his own home.

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted. His soothing assessment that two good people got snared in a bad moment seems on target.

It escalated into a clash of egos — the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar, the town vs. the gown, the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Crowley told a Boston sports station that Gates “seemed very peculiar — even more so now that I know how educated he is.”

Gates told his daughter Elizabeth in The Daily Beast: “He should have gotten out of there and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, good luck. Loved your PBS series — check with you later!’ ”

Gates told me Crowley was so “gruff” and unsolicitous “the hair on my neck stood up.” Crowley says Gates acted “put off” and “agitated.” But the strong guy with the gun has more control than the weak guy with the cane. An officer who teaches racial sensitivity should not have latched on to a technicality about neighbors — who seemed to be outnumbered by cops — getting “alarmed” by Gates’s “outburst.”

From Shakespeare to Hitchcock, mistaken identity makes for a powerful narrative.

A police officer who’s proud of his reputation for getting along with black officers, and for teaching cadets to avoid racial profiling, feels maligned to be cast as a racist white Boston cop.

A famous professor who studies identity and summers in Martha’s Vineyard feels maligned to be cast as a black burglar with backpack and crowbar.

Race, class and testosterone will always be a combustible brew. Our first African-American president will try to make the peace with Gates (who supported Hillary) and Crowley (whose father voted for Obama).

I tracked down Gates by phone at J.F.K. on Friday after he had talked to the president and agreed to go to the White House for a symbolic beer with the man he labeled “a rogue policeman.” Gates, coughing from a cold he picked up in China, said he wondered if perhaps “fate and history chose me for this event.” He was pleased with the thousands of empathetic e-mail notes he’s getting, material for a PBS documentary on racial profiling.

He says he’s ready for “marriage counseling” from the “Solomon” in the Oval, who wrote in his memoir that the police pulled him over “for no apparent reason.” “If Sgt. Crowley and the president and I meet, it’s clearly not going to be like Judge Joe Brown, OK? ‘You tell your side, you tell your side.’ We have to agree to disagree. But I would be surprised if somebody didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry you were arrested.’ ”

How can they ever reconcile their accounts? Crowley says he asked Gates to come outside and the professor replied, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Gates wryly suggests Crowley got the line from watching “Good Times” as a child.

“Does it sound logical that I would talk about the mother of a big white guy with a gun?” he asked. “I’m 5-7 and 150 pounds. I don’t walk on ice, much less (expletive) with some cop in my kitchen. I don’t want another hip replacement.”

I asked how he felt when he learned that Crowley was the one who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Reggie Lewis, the black Celtics basketball star, in a vain attempt to save his life after a heart attack in 1993. He replied: “I don’t stereotype. I never saw him as the head of the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe he was just having a bad day.”

And Gates says that if anyone thinks he’s a fiery black militant, they’ve got the wrong guy, considering he married a white woman, has mixed-race daughters and has white blood himself.

Mike Barnicle warns that the next time Gates needs 911, he should call the Harvard faculty lounge instead. But Gates ripostes, “I have a feeling the Cambridge police will be especially attentive to my needs.” He said that, as he was packing for China, he got a call from the Cambridge police soliciting a donation and told them to try back in two weeks.

“I haven’t quite decided,” he said between coughs, “if I’m up to that right now.” ++

Idaho man sodomized by police Taser plans to sue
Daniel Tencer, Raw Story
July 25, 2009

A Boise, Idaho, police officer who pushed a Taser inside a man’s buttocks and threatened to “Taser his balls” violated use-of-force policy, but didn’t break the law, an ombudsman has found.

The man in question, whose identity is being withheld, plans to sue the Boise police.

On February 14 of this year, the “complainant,” as he is called in police reports, physically blocked the door to his residence when police arrived to investigate a domestic disturbance. Believing the police officers, who he claims did not identify themselves, to be a person coming to “beat him up,” he refused to allow them entry.

When officers forced their way in, “three officers rushed in and within nine seconds, had the man face down on the floor and had deployed the Taser against the small of his back. Only after the first [tasing] did they order his hands behind his back,” reports the Boise Weekly.

In a report, Boise Community Ombudsman Pierce Murphy “said the officer who used the Taser — described as Officer #3 in the report — also coarsely threatened to use the Taser in the man’s anus and genitals. Murphy’s report says that use of Taser on a man’s buttock’s does not violate policy in and of itself,” reports the Idaho Statesman.

The Statesman printed a transcript of an audio recording of the altercation:

Officer #3: Do you feel this?
Complainant: Yes, sir.
Officer #3: Do you feel that? That’s my -
Complainant: Okay
Officer #3: -Taser up your ass.
Complainant: Okay
Officer #3: So don’t move.
Complainant: I’m trying not to. I can’t breathe.
…
Officer #3: Now do you feel this in your balls?
Complainant: I do, sir. I’m not going to move. I’m not gonna move.
Officer #3 Now I’m gonna tase your balls if you move again.
A minute later, this exchange occurred:
Officer #3: Okay, I’m gonna take this Taser out of your asshole now. Are you going to fight with me?
Complainant: No, not at all, sir.

The audio file can be found here (MP3).

The Statesman is now reporting that the complainant “plans to sue the Boise Police Department for excessive use of force.”

The Boise Weekly quotes Boise Police Chief Mike Masterson as saying the allegation against the officer is “one of the most serious charges that an officer can face … It is an offense that is very likely to lead to termination.”

But the complainant’s lawyer, Ron Coulter, said that the officer in question is still walking his beat.

“I don’t think he should be back on the street, but then I’m not the chief of police,” Coulter told the Boise Weekly. “When you do things like he did I’m not sure that person’s even fit to wear a uniform.” ++

Further on the Tucumcari girl, via YouTube:

Tucumcari Police Chief Roger Hatcher has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into last weeks Taser shooting of a teenage girl.

Hatcher said he shot two Taser darts at Kailee Martinez, 14, Thursday while responding to a domestic dispute between the girl and her mother. One hit her in the head and the other struck her back.

Martinez said she was released from Albuquerques University of New Mexico Hospital on Sunday following a two-hour surgery to remove one of the darts from her head.

The surgery left her with 18 staples and six stitches.

“I feel good being home,” Martinez said Tuesday. “It is a lot better than being in a hospital.”

Martinez mother, Stacy Akin, said she drove her daughter to police headquarters after they fought about a cell phone.

Hatcher said the girl walked away from the police station and when he talked with Akin she had a bloody lip and scratches from a fight.

Hatcher said he found the girl in a city park, but when he tried to talk to her she ran into traffic without looking.

Hatcher said he was unable to catch her and used the stun gun because he didnt know where she might go and he had to get her stopped.

“I was going to the park to clear my mind,” Martinez said. “I go there when I get angry. It is a place where I can calm down.”

Martinez said she saw Hatcher drive around the park and did not want to stay there and deal with him. She said she was walking west across Monroe Street when Hatcher got out of his vehicle and told her to stop.

“I remember him saying ’stop, stop’ and then watching him pull it out (Taser),” Martinez said. “The next thing I remember was being in the ambulance, handcuffed.”

Akin said her family has hired an attorney but declined to discuss any legal actions the family may take.

Akin said they will return to Albuquerque in a week for a follow-up doctors appointment.

“To be honest, none of this should have ever happened,” Akin said.

Rose said Hatcher was placed on administrative leave Monday ++

“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
~ Barack Obama

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment July 27th, 2009