When the
There have been notorious parallels. Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich, back in the day, famously left his wife for beautiful supermodel-actress Cybill Shepherd—and his career fizzled, leaving a ... more »
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Thursday, July 2
Governor Mark Sanford’s Two-fer
by
margieburns
on Thu 02 Jul 2009 10:32 AM EDT
Friday, June 26
Sad follow-up: Monica Conyers pleads guilty to $5K bribery
by
margieburns
on Fri 26 Jun 2009 04:18 PM EDT
In a sad follow-up to this morning's post, even sadder given the powerful message and content of this morning's press conference, Monica Conyers, wife of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and a Detroit city councilwoman, has pleaded guilty to a single bribery charge in an ongoing federal investigation ultimately involving the entire city council.
Rep. Conyers did not appear at the press conference organized for this morning on prosecutorial misconduct. His place on the panel in the National Press Club's First Amendment Lounge was taken by Judiciary Committee counsel Elliott Mintzberg. Mrs. Conyers' guilty plea could result in up to ... more »
Today, John Conyers at National Press Club: Bush prosecutors targeted Dems
by
margieburns
on Fri 26 Jun 2009 06:13 AM EDT
Today, June 26, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) is
scheduled to speak at the National Press Club at a press conference about political
prosecutions in the previous administration (8am-11am).
From the publicly released statement: "Conference At National Press Club About DOJ Political Prosecutions Features Rep. John Conyers, Don Siegelman, Scott Horton, And Former Alabama Federal Judge Clemon" A study previously referenced by the House Judiciary Committee shows that Democrats were eleven times more liable to be prosecuted under the Bush Department of Justice. Confirmed speakers, from the release: Alabama's former Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat who was convicted on corruption charges ... more » Thursday, June 25
Why do insurance companies balk at paying for MRIs?
by
margieburns
on Thu 25 Jun 2009 11:15 AM EDT
Why do insurance companies balk at paying for MRIs? The softball was a useful reminder that hardballs are available: ... more » Monday, June 22
Senator Graham, please stop using Quaker language to ramp up hostilities
by
margieburns
on Mon 22 Jun 2009 08:52 PM EDT
Call this an open letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos called on President Obama to step up hostility against the Iranian regime. He also called the president, who endures more personal attacks daily than Graham is showing much awareness of, "timid" and "passive."
The kicker is that Sen. Graham employed the old Quaker expression "Speak truth to power" to convey his rhetorical bellicosities. I myself was a Quaker for years, although I left my meeting several years ago--a local Religious Society of Friends meeting, here in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. In ... more » Sunday, June 21
Still trying for war with Iran
by
margieburns
on Sun 21 Jun 2009 09:20 AM EDT
The neocon war-boosting machine does not give up easily. Today--Sunday, June 21-- Fox News Sunday leads with the protestors in the streets in Tehran, and as with the central GOP talking point since last weekend, uses the protestors' bravery as a tub to thump for war. Here are the options for Iran, as Fox presents them: "Is this another revolution, or another Tienanmen Square?"
These commentators are not supporting the protestors. They are using the protestors to support war on Iran. Some alternatives: In Fox's presentation, the Iranian government either is about to crack down even more harshly, like the ... more » Thursday, June 18
Watergate break-in conspirator Bernard Barker worked for the Mafia, author says
by
margieburns
on Thu 18 Jun 2009 12:39 PM EDT
Watergate break-in conspirator Bernard Barker worked for
the Mafia, author says The main (or second) break-in at the Watergate, discovered by a security guard, started ... more » Monday, June 15
Federal judge nullifies Hondo, Texas, “unprecleared” recall election
by
margieburns
on Mon 15 Jun 2009 11:18 PM EDT
Federal judge
nullifies Hondo, Texas, “unprecleared” recall election --Temporarily resolving
the dust-up over three Mexican American city council members for the small city
of
Iranian-Americans voted for change
by
margieburns
on Mon 15 Jun 2009 11:23 AM EDT
Seeing Iran from Emeryville, California
--Voting for many Iranian-Americans in northern California was located in the Hilton Garden Inn, Emeryville CA, where by coincidence several National Writers Union members, in California for a training session, were also housed this weekend. Turnout was immense, enthusiastic, and dedicated: Hundreds of Iranian-American voters showed up to vote--and stayed, waiting patiently and cheerfully in line for hours, when ballots ran out and six hundred more paper ballots in Farsi and English had to printed, filling the ground-floor lobby of the hotel and spilling out of the front entrance. I spoke with some waiting voters ... more » Thursday, June 11
The right to bear arms already--if your gun is already drawn
by
margieburns
on Thu 11 Jun 2009 08:05 AM EDT
Targeting the Internet versus scrutinizing the NRA: Following up on last night’s post— We’re not off to a good start. In the aftermath of rising
gun sales and recent fatal shootings including the killing of security guard
Stephen Tyrone Johns at the A quick run-down on how those issues ... more » Wednesday, June 10
Dear NRA, what part of "well regulated" do you not get?
by
margieburns
on Wed 10 Jun 2009 07:10 PM EDT
Don't blame this on the Internet . . .
Hysterically angry, hate-filled, disturbed, abusive, elderly James von Brunn has become the newest destroyer of the public peace, opening gunfire in the Holocaust Memorial Museum and shooting and killing heroic security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns*. Within minutes, media personalities were already targeting the public discourse--and blaming the Internet. more »
Tuesday, June 9
Patrick Fitzgerald, Peter Lance, Rupert Murdoch and Judith Regan? I’m siding with the librarians
by
margieburns
on Tue 09 Jun 2009 09:40 AM EDT
Monday, June 8
Voting in South Texas, voting south of the tracks
by
margieburns
on Mon 08 Jun 2009 08:27 AM EDT
Hondo, Texas, Elections Questionable recall election in On May 9, three newly
elected members on the Hondo, Wednesday, June 3
Crime in the United States: What is Illinois concealing?
by
margieburns
on Wed 03 Jun 2009 11:38 AM EDT
The FBI publishes its Crime in the United States report annually. Here are a few quick facts from Crime in the United States, 2007, from available homicide data:
- Law enforcement agencies submitted SHRs to the FBI for 14,831 murder victims who were slain in 2007. - Concerning single victim/single offender incidents in which the age of the offender was known, 93.6 percent of the victims were killed by adults (persons 18 years of age or older). (Based on Expanded Homicide Data Table 4.) - Of single victim/single offender incidents, 91.9 percent of black victims were murdered ... more » Tuesday, June 2
Prince Turki al-Faisal says to kill Bin Laden and get out of Afghanistan
by
margieburns
on Tue 02 Jun 2009 10:42 AM EDT
This passed along from Spytalk, via CQ Politics: Prince Turki al-Faisal, formerly head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, is recommending forcefully and publicly that the U.S. "kill" Osama bin Laden and then "get the hell out of Afghanistan."
He is half right. We need to be out of Afghanistan, and if bin Laden's purported presence there is the rationale justifying an unending and open-ended guerrilla campaign, then bin Laden needs to be found. Still, as written previously, anyone with the United States' interests at heart would want bin Laden captured, not killed. Killing a spy or a terrorist is ... more » Sunday, May 31
Sotomayor and that dangerous word “Better”
by
margieburns
on Sun 31 May 2009 12:17 PM EDT
Years ago, back when I was teaching while pregnant, a couple of undergrad guys chose to sit in desks over against one side wall of the classroom, where they could watch my breasts getting bigger as the semester, and my pregnancy, progressed. It is a given that no man teaching college courses has had exactly this experience, and it would be nice to hope that the experience in some way made me better ... more » Thursday, May 28
Cheney and Rumsfeld, Congress and CIA; continued
by
margieburns
on Thu 28 May 2009 10:38 AM EDT
When the Church Committee began looking into abuses by the intelligence community—including CIA manipulation of the news media and domestic surveillance of administration critics—back in the 1970s, White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant to the President Dick Cheney, working for Gerald Ford, knew they had to circle the wagons. Predictably if ironically, they did ... more » Wednesday, May 27
Congress, CIA, Cheney and Rumsfeld; continued
by
margieburns
on Wed 27 May 2009 08:09 AM EDT
Following up with Lamar Waldron,
author with Thom Hartmann of Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of
the JFK Assassination: Declassified archives show that Richard Helms, then number-4 man in the CIA, withheld even from his CIA chief and from President John F. Kennedy the CIA’s unauthorized continuation of plots to kill Fidel Castro and remove the ... more » Tuesday, May 26
Cheney and Rumsfeld pressured CIA to mislead Congress in the 1970s, too
by
margieburns
on Tue 26 May 2009 09:15 AM EDT
Congress and
Cheney and Rumsfeld and the CIA The first time Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld pressured the CIA to mislead Congress was in 1975 and 1976, when Cheney was Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford and Rumsfeld was Ford’s secretary of defense. Cheney, having held a series of positions alongside Rumsfeld—starting under him in the Nixon ... more » Thursday, May 21
This week in news: 90 senators saw Aladdin, CIA helps out Nancy Pelosi
by
margieburns
on Thu 21 May 2009 09:14 PM EDT
Just two days after I posted an entry critical of the CIA and its manipulation of the Washington Post in the lead-up to the Iraq war (last Sunday—May 17), the CIA did it again. Not to be bullied by some independent journalist, they showed their defiance by once again giving anonymous ‘quotes’ to the same Post reporter I quoted before. In that October 2002 article previously cited, the CIA made the anonymous argument—if ... more » Tuesday, May 19
CIA FILES LIST OF DOCUMENTS ON DESTROYED TORTURE VIDEOTAPES
by
margieburns
on Tue 19 May 2009 01:09 PM EDT
With grateful thanks to Marc Ambinder, who posted this convenient list compiled and filed by CIA in the federal case presided over by Judge Hellerstein.
Looks like a lot of illuminating material pertaining to those destroyed CIA videotapes, esp considering the dates--from April 13, 2002, onward. Clearly, the policymakers were communicating throughout the process. They kept it up on Shakespeare's birthday, too. more »
Why doesn't the Justice office in Chicago report its homicide statistics?
by
margieburns
on Tue 19 May 2009 11:51 AM EDT
Pursuing research on firearms and gun crime, including homicide, via the Department of Justice web site, one runs up against a stumbling block: Other major cities around the U.S. are included in the tabulations of homicides, but Chicago IL is not.
Here for those following broad trends is the link: http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/ If you click on "Trends in one variable"--the variable being number of homicides, over multiple years and in multiple jurisdictions--you can get statistics for Houston, DC and Miami among others, but not for Chicago. If you click on "Single agency trends," meaning mostly ... more » Sunday, May 17
The speaker versus the speakers’ bureau: Nancy Pelosi should resign; CIA should provide intelligence instead of CYA.
by
margieburns
on Sun 17 May 2009 01:29 PM EDT
It should be clear by now that the Central
Intelligence Agency under Bush-Cheney functioned less at its top levels like an
intelligence agency than like a speakers’ bureau: ‘We have experts on call to meet your every need, from
war in the Middle East to discrediting political opponents at home . . . We have earned our reputation in the
Friday, May 15
What is the moderate number of foreclosures?
by
margieburns
on Fri 15 May 2009 08:11 AM EDT
Kudos to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Wednesday, Sanders introduced an amendment to the upcoming credit card bill being passed by the Senate that would cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent. Unfortunately the amendment was voted down by sixty senators, mostly the same ones who defeated the cram-down amendment two weeks ago—including Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.), who had promised to caucus with the Democrats; those two ‘moderates’ of Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan ... more » Wednesday, May 13
Today: Judiciary Subcommittee hearing -Continued: 302s to be released
by
margieburns
on Wed 13 May 2009 12:33 PM EDT
C. 12:15 p.m., and it's time to switch away from Lindsey Graham trying to finesse a definition of torture he can make fun of--If you put a spider in a cage w/ someone who's afraid of spiders, Is it yadayadayada. The hearing on Bush admin torture has produced some evidence, however: For the first time, the 302s--FBI documents--from the interrogation of Abu Jandal are to be released.
Abu Jandal, though not present today, was among captives interrogated by one of today's witnesses, former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan. Soufan's testimony definitively contradicts the false narrative presented in the torture memos, ... more »
Today: Judiciary Subcommittee hearing -Continued
by
margieburns
on Wed 13 May 2009 11:04 AM EDT
C. 10:40 a.m.-The Subcommittee recesses its hearing for a few minutes, for a floor vote. Introductory remarks and one witness, Georgetown Law professor David Luban, so far.
From the introductory statements: Subcommittee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse refers to the necessity for such a hearing as regrettable, saying "how loathsome . . . what a few men did" in the previous administration. Legislators having no authority to declassify, Whitehouse said, "we could not reply" even when hearing administration pronouncements about classified material that members of Congress knew to be false. Whitehouse also praises Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Intelligence Committee. Sen. ... more »
Today: Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Bush administration torture
by
margieburns
on Wed 13 May 2009 08:03 AM EDT
Today’s hearing
of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts
may help to clarify some recent history. Asked by Keith Olbermann on Countdown what America
will know after the hearing that it does not know now, Subcommittee Chairman
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said last night that “I think what I`m really more doing is trying to build a foundation for looking at the Office of Professional Responsibility opinions that ... more » Tuesday, May 12
The false automobile-insurance analogy
by
margieburns
on Tue 12 May 2009 11:02 AM EDT
“Earlier this year, [the insurance industry] offered a major concession, offering to abolish policies that deny coverage because of preexisting coverage. In return, insurers said they want Congress to enact legislation that requires every American to have insurance . . . many Democrats back the concept, comparing it ... more » Monday, May 11
James Jones says U.S. does not know whether Osama bin Laden is alive
by
margieburns
on Mon 11 May 2009 10:26 AM EDT
Remarkably, according to Jones, “The best intelligence is that we--we gauge our reaction based on what intelligence we have, and it is inconclusive.”... more » Friday, May 1
Senate caves to bankers, passes up chance to help U.S. homeowners
by
margieburns
on Fri 01 May 2009 11:01 AM EDT
The U.S. Senate could have stepped up to the plate yesterday and passed an amendment to help bankruptcy judges help homeowners. Instead, twelve Democrats joined all the Republicans in the Senate--including those two supposed 'moderates' from Maine that we hear so much about--to defeat the amendment.
The amendment to Senate bill 896, called the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 and introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), would have facilitated renegotiation in foreclosures by bankruptcy judges. It was proposed by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)--and if only Durbin had been stronger in protecting the rule of law in ... more »
Souter will be a loss no matter who replaces him
by
margieburns
on Fri 01 May 2009 09:59 AM EDT
Reports that Justice David Souter will be retiring from the Supreme Court may not be a total surprise but are no good news. Regardless of who replaces him, Mr. Justice Souter will be a loss to the high court.
Intense media speculation about his replacement is inevitable. But regardless of who is chosen for the next open seat on the court, and regardless of who makes the best prediction about that choice or is given the scoop, there is one point to bear in mind: The reason that Souter has been so well regarded across the board is that when ... more » Thursday, April 30
So Much for 'Good Credit'
by
margieburns
on Thu 30 Apr 2009 08:17 AM EDT
Americans are inundated with reminders about the
importance of a good credit rating. Those disinterested folks at the
credit-rating companies, for example, are always hiring twenty-something actors
to come at us on the airwaves, touting the significance of good credit and thus
of their product. Public discourse during the Monday, April 27
Why is anyone listening to Dick Cheney on torture?
by
margieburns
on Mon 27 Apr 2009 10:53 AM EDT
--Admittedly the old rules of thumb for picking a topic of
interest in journalism include prominence and proximity, and former Vice
President Dick Cheney has settled right here near DC, in northern Virginia. But
for talk shows or news broadcasts to treat Cheney as though he were somehow a
credible voice on torture violates the key standard of journalistic
objectivity. Cheney, who has a track record when it comes to criticizing political ... more » Sunday, April 26
Does the VA have ambulances?
by
margieburns
on Sun 26 Apr 2009 11:55 AM EDT
We're still paying for Vietnam.
Two instances of longtime PTSD left from the Vietnam War have obtruded among my friends recently. The first I cannot write about for privacy reasons. The other occurred this morning, when a neighbor of mine had a flareup of a chronic condition. His family was not home at the time. I first noticed that an ambulance was stopped in front of the neighbors' house. Then after a little while it pulled away. Shortly afterward, my Purple Heart neighbor came knocking on my door to ask for help getting to the VA hospital. The ambulance would ... more » Wednesday, April 22
Fitzgerald tried to get Obama, came up with “Zilch,” says former Chicago Tribune editor
by
margieburns
on Wed 22 Apr 2009 10:34 AM EDT
Fitzgerald tried to get Obama, came up with “Zilch,” says
former Chicago Tribune editor Monday, April 20
The torture memos and the U.S.S. Cole
by
margieburns
on Mon 20 Apr 2009 01:26 PM EDT
There are a few areas of clarity in the memos newly released
by the Justice Department: 1)
The torture memos rely heavily on the CIA in discussing the
prisoners. 2)
The CIA stated repeatedly that waterboarding was used only
on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd Al-Rahm Nashiri. 3)
The three memos dated |
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