Month: September 2011

Fantasy Thread

Okay, so I finally got the Fantasy Football draft out of the way. Here’s my Week One starters:

QB: Matt Schaub
RB: Chris Johnson (assuming he’s ready)
RB: Ahmad Bradshaw
WR: Calvin Johnson
WR: Dwayne Bowe
WR: Mario Manningham
TE: Tony Gonzalez
W/T: Johnny Knox
W/R: BenJarvus Green-Ellis
DEF: Chicago Bears
D: Clay Matthews

If Chris Johnson isn’t ready, I’ll suit up Marshawn Lynch.

Considering I started with the fifth overall pick, I think this is very strong team. How’s it stack up to yours?

Bush’s Crimes Won’t Go Away

One unintended consequence of toppling the Gaddafi regime is that the CIA’s close relationship with Libyan intelligence has now been revealed, including details about our rendition program from 2003-2007. It’s just more evidence of Bush-era crimes. It seems like we can’t keep any secrets anymore. Wikileaks’ Julian Assange went ahead and published his full cache of State Department cables in completely unredacted form. It will probably land him in prison, possibly for the rest of his life. But it has also exposed a bunch of sensitive sources, undermining our ability to collect intelligence, but also exposing many highly embarrassing and even scandalous facts.

Iraq’s government will reopen an investigation into a 2006 raid in which U.S. forces killed at least 11 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, a spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Friday.

The new probe comes after a diplomatic cable surfaced in a WikiLeaks cache that raised fresh doubts about the Pentagon’s version of events, which cleared the U.S. military of any wrongdoing.

Someone ask Dick Cheney about this while he’s still on his Book Tour.

Iraqis in the town of Ishaqi have long claimed that U.S. military forces executed at least 11 people there — including women and children — and then hid the crime by directing an airstrike to the area, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

A Pentagon spokesman dismissed the claims on Friday, saying that, from the U.S. military’s viewpoint, nothing had changed.

In the document released by WikiLeaks, Philip Alston, a human rights official for the United Nations, appears to support the Iraqi claims. He cabled the State Department about two weeks after the incident to describe how U.S. forces approached a house in the early hours of March 15, 2006, and found a family inside, then “handcuffed all the residents and executed all of them.”

Among the dead were a 28-year-old Iraqi man, Faiz Harrat al-Majmaee, and his extended family, including five children younger than 5, the U.N. report said. Autopsies done later in the hospital in Tikrit showed that “all the corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed,” Alston noted.

U.S. coalition spokesmen said at the time that there was no wrongdoing and that the commander “properly followed the rules of engagement as he necessarily escalated the use of force until the threat was eliminated.”

Our country needs to be able to have a confidential communications network for our diplomatic corp, but we also need to have accountability for crimes against humanity committed under George W. Bush’s command. If Bush thought his crimes could remain hidden from history, he’s learning otherwise this week.

I Handed Out Burglary Tools to Criminals

Well, at least he’s honest about how he feels about my work helping poor people to register to vote.

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

There are desperately poor white people living all throughout Appalachia who voted overwhelmingly for John McCain and Sarah Palin. They all benefit from the Motor Voter Law, which makes it possible for them to register to vote at the welfare office as well as the Division of Motor Vehicles. You NEVER hear Democrats complaining about how easy it is for these folks to vote. It’s true that the Democratic Party benefits when overall turnout is high and suffers when it is low. Democrats have a self-interested motivation for doing voter registration, including among the poor. But we’re not hypocrites about it. We try to make it easy to vote for everyone.

If we’re talking about people voting more than once, or voting when they’re not eligible to vote, or people impersonating someone in order to cast a vote, there is almost no voter fraud occurring in this country. Probably the most common cases of voter fraud are when people move and fail to reregister in their proper precinct. If they go ahead and vote at their old precinct, that’s voter fraud. It’s minor, but it does take place. Much less common are cases like Ann Coulter’s where people deliberately lie about what precinct they live in for whatever reason.

These types of relatively minor cases of voter fraud do not involve an increase or decrease of the overall electorate, and unless someone moves out of state, they only impact local races. When people don’t follow the rules, they should be punished, but there is no epidemic of voter fraud, and certainly not from the underclass.

Yet, the Republicans have moved in state after state to make it more difficult to vote.

The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.

Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes…

…In Georgia, Florida, Ohio and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. In this case the justification is often fiscal: Republicans in North Carolina attempted to eliminate early voting, claiming it would save money. Fortunately, the effort failed after the State Election Board demonstrated that cuts to early voting would actually be more expensive because new election precincts and additional voting machines would be required to handle the surge of voters on Election Day.

Voters in other states weren’t so lucky. Florida has cut its early voting period by half, from 96 mandated hours over 14 days to a minimum of 48 hours over just eight days, and has severely restricted voter registration drives, prompting the venerable League of Women Voters to cease registering voters in the state altogether. Again, this affects very specific types of voters: according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, African-Americans and Latinos were more than twice as likely as white voters to register through a voter registration drive.

So, the evidence is quite plain. Democrats want more people to vote, and Republicans want less. The Democrats try to expand the electorate, and they don’t try to suppress Republican votes. The Republicans actively try to suppress the Democratic vote.

The idea that all citizens are equal and we’re all entitled to one vote is perfectly fine with the Democrats, but it it’s a socialist plot to conservatives.

GOP’s Immigration Problem

Personally, whenever I think about the increasing racial diversity of the country at all, it’s usually in the favorable context of better food choices both at grocery stores and in restaurants. The truth is, I don’t really think about racial diversity much at all. Yet, it seems to be an all-consuming preoccupation of a large percentage of the Republican base. The candidates are going across the country trying to talk about jobs, regulations, taxes, and other economic issues. That makes sense since the economy is horrible and people continue to tell pollsters that jobs and the economy are their number one concern. But the candidates keep discovering that Republican voters are obsessed with our southern border (even in New Hampshire).

KEENE, N.H. — Mitt Romney opened his town hall meeting here talking about the economy — his thoughts on growing business, getting government out of the way — just as he does nearly every other campaign event. But when he opened last week’s forum for questions, the first voter he called on didn’t seem concerned about any of that. He wanted to know the Republican presidential candidate’s stance on border security.

A similar scene played out in South Carolina a few days later, when Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) attended a town hall meeting she assumed would center on the economy, jobs and the federal deficit — only to see the assembled voters react most passionately to her comments on illegal immigration.

I understand that illegal immigration is unfair to the people who are trying to immigrate legally. At the same time, I also understand that illegal immigrants are moving here because there is a legitimate demand for their labor. We could improve the situation by providing a lot more legal openings for people to immigrate from Mexico and Central America. The thing is, what’s bothering the base of the Republican Party is not really that these folks are breaking our immigration laws. What’s bothering them is that they’re not white and English isn’t their first language.

The result is that, once again, conservatives come up with positions that can’t be satisfied because they involve magical thinking. Whether it’s Bachmann’s plan to fence “every mile, every yard, every foot, every inch” of the southern border, or it’s Romney’s plan to crack down on employers who hire undocumented workers, no Republicans are willing to address the demand for their labor. Who is going to harvest the fruit in this country if not Mexicans, Guatemalans, etc.? If you won’t let them come here legally, and you’re successful in barring their entry into the country, you’re going to have a problem.

“After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

In response, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia. Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.

You either need to accept that the country isn’t going to retain the same racial dynamics as in the past or you need to convince a ton of white people to immigrate from Europe to take back-breaking jobs in our fields.

How many undocumented workers do you think would not prefer to be documented? If people didn’t let race get in the way of sane policy, we wouldn’t have any people working here illegally because they would have been invited in. Of course, if you invited them in, you’d have to pay them more. That’s another reason the GOP’s top donors don’t want a sane immigration policy anymore than their racist base.

FHFA To Sue Banks

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is filing suit today or on Tuesday against JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of American, and more than a half-dozen other large banks, in an effort to recoup billions in losses from shitty AAA-rated mortgage securities.

It’s about time. The statute of limitations is about to run out.

The FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which all conservatives know caused the economic collapse by giving mortgages to black people. I assume their heads will explode when they discover that that Freddie and Fannnie are suing the banks for fraud. In their twisted racist worldview, the banks should be suing the FHFA (or black people) instead of the other way around.

Of course, the New York Times expresses more concern that the banks will lose the case and have to be recapitalized than they do hope that some measure of justice will be done.

We the People Want Pot Legalization

I am going to make a fearless prediction about this:

The White House on Thursday announced a new way it will keep in touch with public concerns — by promising to consider online petitions that get at least 5,000 supporters.

The idea behind “We the People” — as the program will be called — is that anyone with an idea or cause can go to the White House website and make a public pitch for support. If the idea gets 5,000 backers within 30 days, said White House spokeswoman Sandra Abrevaya, a “working group of policy officials” will respond.

I predict that the number one issue that will succeed in getting 5,000 supporters will be pot legalization. It seems like this is what happens whenever the political parties pretend to give a crap about what ordinary folks care about. Personally, I have other interests at the top of my list, but I don’t know anyone who thinks we should treat casual pot-smoking as a serious crime. I’m not advocating smoking marijuana. But I think you undermine respect for authority and the rule of law when you have laws that no one respects or wants to see enforced. Legalize pot and tax it. Use the revenues to help petty criminals deal with their substance abuse problems and to give them work-skills so that they can be productive members of society. Empty the prisons of drug offenders and put them through the training/rehab program.

I bet I can get a million supporters for a well designed plan like that.

Boston Red Sox and Other Flights ‘Invitees’

.

How US firms profited from torture flights

(Guardian) – Richmor’s president, Mahlon Richards, told the court that the aircraft carried “government personnel and their invitees” (pdf). “Invitees?” queried the judge, Paul Czajka. “Invitees,” confirmed Richards. They were being flown across the world because the US government believed them to be “bad guys”, he said. Richmor performed well, Richards added. “We were complimented all the time.” “By the invitees?” asked the judge. “Not the invitees, the government.”

The court documents make only passing reference to the human cargo being transported. Enough details of the rendition programme generally have now been disclosed to know that men on these flights were usually sedated through anal suppositories before being dressed in nappies and orange boiler suits, then hooded and muffled and trussed up in the back of the aircraft. The precise conditions in which suspects were transported on Richmor flights are not known.

The aircraft’s ultimate owner was Phillip Morse, an American businessman with substantial sporting interests who was subsequently appointed vice-chairman of Fenway Sports Group, the company that owns Liverpool FC. In between rendition flights the aircraft was used to fly the Boston Red Sox baseball team.

Huge stash of rendition documents reveal how the CIA covered its tracks  

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."