Tuesday, June 2, 2009

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Millions Of Homeowners Don't Qualify For Obama's Mortgage Assistance Program Top
MESA, Ariz. - She had seen the advertisements for the new government program offering relief. She had heard President Obama promise that help was on the way for homeowners like her, people who had lost jobs and could no longer make their mortgage payments.
 
Cheney Led Briefings Of Members Of Congress To Defend Interrogation Techniques Top
Former vice president Richard B. Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about the controversial interrogation program, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees. More on Dick Cheney
 
Chavez Accuses CIA Of Backing Plot To Kill Him Top
CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday alleged that U.S. intelligence agencies were behind a purported assassination plot that prevented him from visiting El Salvador. Chavez had planned to attend the inauguration of leftist President Mauricio Funes in the Central American nation on Monday, but canceled his trip due to the alleged plot. "I don't doubt that the intelligence organizations of the United States are behind this," Chavez said, accusing them of plotting with Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles to murder him. He said Venezuelan intelligence services have "very precise information" that they were planning to launch rockets at the Cubana de Aviacion plane he was going to travel in. Venezuela has asked the U.S. to extradite Posada, an opponent of former Cuban president Fidel Castro and a former CIA operative accused of plotting the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane in Venezuela that killed 73 people on board. The 81-year-old Posada denies involvement in the bombing. Chavez has repeatedly accused the U.S. of plotting to overthrow him or to invade Venezuela, without offering proof. The U.S. State Department has denied such accusations in the past. Nobody at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas was immediately available to comment Tuesday.
 
Michael Rowe: KRXQ Sacramento Radio Hosts Encourage Violence Against Transgender Children Top
Even by the flexible moral and professional standards of American talk radio, the May 28th segment of KRXQ Sacramento's Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning radio talk show makes for a sickening half-hour of ugliness and cruelty. For once, the focus was not LGBT adults, but minors. The hosts devoted the segment in question to a vicious diatribe against transgender children, some as young as five, focusing in particular on the case of one Omaha family dealing with their gender dysphoric child, and their decision to support her transition from male to female. Hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States took terms referring to gender dysphoric children as "idiots" and "freaks," who were just out "for attention" and had "a mental disorder that just needs to somehow be gotten out of them," either by physical abuse on the part of the parents, or even shock therapy. "Allowing transgenders to exist, pretty soon it becomes normal to fall in love with the animals," they said. For his part, States assured listeners that if his own son were to ever dare put on a pair of high heels, States would beat his son with one of his own shoes. He urged parents whose own little boys expressed a desire to wear a dress to verbally abuse and degrade them as a viable response. "I'm going to go, 'You know what? You're a little idiot! You little dumbass!" States sneered, adding later, "I look forward to when [the transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy." Or dead. In light of the well-publicized suicides in April of this year by the two boys who took their own lives because of bullying and harassment for "acting gay" (which, in the argot of modern North American teenagers, often refers to acting in a way considered unmasculine by their peers) the stunning lack of moral compass on the part of States and Williams is breathtaking, but it points to the increasingly degraded landscape of talk radio. I shudder to imagine the response of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover's mother if she'd had the misfortune to hear the KRXQ broadcast. "They were always saying, 'you're gay, you must be gay, you act like a girl'," Sideaner L. Walker said, speaking of the dead son she had to cut down from the support beam he hung himself from after months of taunts from his peers, taunts that likely bore more than a passing resemblance to the invective used by States and Williams on their broadcast. "I'm not open-minded once I look into sumpin'" one of the two men grunted at the beginning of the segment. "I have every right to call you a freak and judge you on that. It makes me sick. 'Mommy, I'm a girl trapped in a boy's body,'" he simpered, mimicking an effeminate child. "I want to wear a dwess ." The causal link between Bill O'Reilly's obsessive baiting of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and his murder on Sunday, May 31st as he was ushering in his Kansas City church, is currently being explored, an exploration particularly relevant in the case of Rob, Arnie, and Dawn in the Morning , and the potential violent fallout from their inexplicably rage-filled invective against not only transgender children, but even boys who err on the feminine side of standard adolescent behavior, behavior States and Williams consider unnatural because "men are hunters and women are gatherers." "You're actually defending allowing people to become freaks?" they asked their colleague, co-host Dawn Rossi, who seemed genuinely horrified by the rising crescendo of ugliness from the two men. "A boy who wants to wear a dress is a freak. A nut." Comparing transgender children to "fat bastard kids on Maury ," States and Williams urged advocates of transgender children to "stop hiding behind research and laws," which they wholeheartedly reject, presumably with the same authority that they assured listeners that "transgenders" didn't exist forty years ago. With the braying certainty of the jubilantly ignorant, States and Williams told listeners that "transgenders [sic] did not exist four decades ago," apparently unaware of the historical fact that transgender individuals have existed in every culture throughout recorded history, including in native American cultures where the "two spirited" were revered as teachers, healers, and shamans. By no objective standards are individuals like O'Reilly, or the Wal-Mart variant like States and Williams, journalists, nor are they experts in any capacity. But one doesn't need a primer of transgender or transsexual history in order to appreciate the awesome brutality of the KRXQ shock-jocks' diatribe. All one needs is to know a child, any child. They're small, they're vulnerable, and the world is populated with gods whose sole divinity is their adulthood, and their perceived authority. States and Williams chose to use that authority to attack a segment of the childhood population who are more vulnerable than almost any other. Transgender children are at a point in their lives when their own bodies are enemy and alien to them, where they go to bed praying that when they wake up their bodies and their inner gender will be aligned. "If the kid ever gets to be 18," States snarled, "and says 'I still feel like a woman,' you say, 'Get out, go be a freak, and understand, son, that society will never accept you because we still have some moral judgment." As sickening as it has become to an increasingly enlightened segment of the American population to hear LGBT adults vilified and degraded in the media as the discussion over gay marriage and Don't Ask, Don't Tell reaches a boiling point, nothing might could have prepared anyone who had even a passing acquaintanceship with decency for KRXQ's May 28th pageant of brutality towards transgender children. Who are, after all, children , first and foremost. Trusting, innocent, and vulnerable, they ought to be beyond the reach of the violent, hate-mongering rhetoric that is a taken for granted byword in American talk radio. One needs to particular sympathy for transgender people to understand the prodigious boundary transgression of promoting hatred and disgust towards children, on the airwaves. This should disturb adults of every political, economic, and social background, whatever their stand on LGBT issues. My little godson Michael is the light of my life. His father was a hockey player and his mother is a legendary beauty, and he embodies those two people to absolute perfection. It's been educational to watch his awareness of his own gender---indubitably male--- assert itself in the last few years. His gender identity wasn't "learned," it came to him already hardwired, in the same way studies continue to show that a transgender child's gender is hardwired. And whatever else his struggles may be in later life, I personally doubt that gender identity is going to be one of them. But his gentleness and his vulnerability brings my protectiveness into hyper-focus. And if he wanted to wear a dress, or told me he was a girl, my instinct as an adult would be to protect him and try to understand him. Aside from the perfect horror of imagining be Arnie States child, if anyone ever called my godson a sick little freak, or a nut, or a freak of nature, or beat him for being himself, I could not be held accountable for my reaction, or my eventual response. I know which end of the shoe I would be on if I ever met another adult who took Arnie States and Bill Williams' child-rearing advice to heart after hearing it on the radio. More on Bill O'Reilly
 
Stephen Kaus: Sadly, Attorney Susan B. Jordan Has Been Killed in a Plane Crash Top
This morning's paper brought the sad news that Susan Jordan, one of our most courageous and resourceful attorneys, was killed last Friday in a private plane crash in Utah. Aside from Susan's successes in individual cases, her forty year legal career empowered both women attorneys and women crime victims. Susan made an indelible impression on me when I first saw her in court in 1973. She was one of a group of lawyers representing a group accused of robbing the Bank of America at Adeline and Ashby in Berkeley. The attorneys for the defense were five men in dark suits and Susan, resplendent in a vivid blue western style pantsuit with red piping that, I was told, she had made herself. The issue was bail and Susan dominated the courtroom as if there had been a spotlight on her. Susan was probably most famous for her representation in the 1970s of Inez Garcia , a Latina who, under circumstances that appeared to fall short of classic self defense, shot and killed a man who had previously raped her. Garcia became a feminist symbol of resistance to male domination, but at her homicide trial, Garcia's attorney Charles Garry unsuccessfully advanced a politically weak diminished capacity argument. Garcia was convicted of second degree murder. After a reversal on appeal, Susan took over for the retrial, ditched diminished capacity and went for broke, successfully arguing self-defense. Personally, I worked on a case with Susan in the early 1990s and had two memorable flights in her airplane. The first was a trip to Chico to visit an expert on an impossibly spectacular day. I felt like I was living one of those PBS Over California programs. The second flight, from Santa Rosa to Oakland, was somewhat more nervous, at least for me. After we were about halfway, the radio went out. Eventually we discovered that if I reached under the dashboard and pinched two wires together, the radio went back on, sort of. In truth, Susan was the most careful of pilots, going over a checklist before each flight that other pilots disdained, and I did not feel unsafe at any time. Apparently, she was not flying the plane on Friday. I last saw Susan at a Saturday morning spinning class a couple of months ago. She left a bit early and I did not get to say hello, which, of course, I now regret.
 
Revealed: Mitsubishi's Bid To Corner World's Bluefin Tuna Market As Stock Plummets Toward Extinction Top
Japan's sprawling Mitsubishi conglomerate has cornered a 40 per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna, one of the world's most endangered fish.
 
Arianna Huffington: When Will Dick Cheney's Tower of Lies Finally Come Tumbling Down on Him? Top
Dick Cheney's statement to Greta van Susteren that "On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that" is being widely portrayed as an admission. But it's less an admission than a PR move. Cheney has spent the better part of the last seven years doing everything in his power to convince the American people of the very connection he now says there was "never any evidence" of. In 2004, even after the 9/11 commission found " no credible evidence " of Iraqi involvement in 9/11, Cheney was still claiming the evidence that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was "overwhelming." When he was asked in '04 if Iraq was involved in 9/11, he said, "We don't know." Three years after the attack -- and he still didn't know? Even after they had tried every trick in the black book -- including torture -- to find a link? And while Cheney's gotten more careful with his words over the years, he's never really stopped insinuating that there was a connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Indeed, as recently as two weeks ago in his big speech at the America Enterprise Institute, Cheney was still banging the drum about Saddam's "known ties to Mideast terrorists" as part of his rationale for invading Iraq and using torture. Cheney's ongoing Forget Everything I Ever Told You Tour is historical revisionism at its most despicable. And we are clearly watching a master manipulator at work. I've always felt that his best -- and by that I mean worst -- work was going on "Meet the Press" in 2002 to tell us about those ominous aluminum tubes and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq... or his repeated designed-to-terrify-voters warnings about nuclear attacks on US soil. But this ranks right up there. In his interview with van Susteren, Cheney also backed away from his claim that the documents he wants the CIA to declassify would prove that torture was effective -- saying instead that they would offer a good summary of "what we learned" not just from waterboarding but the detainee interrogation program as a whole. So, he gets all the media value and spin by originally making the claim that the intel documents would prove the value of torture - if only Obama would let the truth come out. Then he backs away from the claim, using weasel-words to give him sufficient wiggle room to say that what he really meant was that the overall interrogation program provided useful information -- not that waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation techniques did. Perhaps it suddenly dawned on the former VP that he doesn't have the power to keep those documents classified any more -- and that he could be proven to be a liar (yet again) with the stroke of President Obama's pen. Hence the verbal tap-dancing. But eventually the pile of lies may get so high that it will tumble down on him. For instance, it's not a very smart idea to go around saying that Richard Clarke missed the warning signs on bin Laden and 9/11 when there is email after email after email from the spring and summer of 2001 showing that it was actually Cheney and Bush who ignored the warning signs on bin Laden. You know what they say about people living in glass houses? Well, people with a paper trail that proves they ignored the looming threat of al-Qaeda, sanctioned torture, and used lies and manipulated intelligence to get us into a war, shouldn't be so fast to throw stones either. Please join me on Facebook and Twitter . More on Iraq
 
Dan Solin: Smart Investor Makeover: Is Now the Time to Jump Back in the Market? Top
There is no shortage of market timing advice. Viewers of "Fast Money" and CNBC get a daily dose of conflicting opinions from financial pundits, each of whom is confident they can predict the direction of the markets. Depending on which economist you are watching, this is either the beginning of the end of the recession or a sucker's "bear market rally." What's an investor to do? Check out the video below. It is the first of a series of Smart Investor Makeover videos. Please give me your feedback. I want to pull out all the stops to be sure that you don't become victims (again!) of the securities industry and the financial media. The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. Returns from index funds do not represent the performance of any investment advisory firm. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Readers who require investment advice should retain the services of a competent investment professional. The information on this blog is not an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any securities or class of securities mentioned herein. More on Video
 
Huff TV: Arianna On MSNBC, Discusses Cheney's Statements On Lack Of Iraq-9/11 Link Evidence Top
Arianna spoke to Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" Tuesday about Cheney's recent statements on the lack of evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, which she described as an attempt to "re-write history." Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy More on Dick Cheney
 
NYPD Friendly-Fire Training Video Top
This is the decade-old video the NYPD uses to teach cops how to avoid "friendly fire" incidents like the one that left a young officer dead last week.
 
Julie Menin: No Apology Necessary for Sotomayer Top
Recently Politico.com quoted former Bill Clinton advisor Lanny Davis as having said about the White House and Sonia Sotomayor's controversial statement from a speech she gave at Berkeley, "She misspoke. Every day that goes by that they don't say she misspoke and she used the wrong words ... they just feed it and give it life and give Rush [Limbaugh] and [Sean] Hannity more airtime unnecessarily." (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23053.html) I totally disagree with this. Looking at the context of those remarks it's clear that Sotomayor was speaking about a judge ruling on a sexual or racial discrimination case, not in general. Thus, her point was when assessing the circumstances of a woman who has been sexually harassed or a minority who has been discriminated against, of course a Hispanic woman would bring her particular experience to the table. She even quoted multiple Yale law professors who advocate the impossibility of disregarding one's own background entirely even when making a concerted effort to do so. Her comments are also no different in import from ones made by Clarence Thomas in his confirmation process when he said, "I can bring something different to the Court. I can walk in the shoes of the people who are affected by what the Court does. You know, on my current court I have occasion to look out the window that faces C Street, and there are converted buses that bring in the criminal defendants to our criminal justice system, bus load after bus load. And you look out and you say to yourself, and I say to myself almost every day, 'But for the grace of God there go I.'" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/30/clarence-thomas-on-walkin_n_209376.html) or those of Samuel Alito who said, "When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who, who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or, or because of gender. And, and I do take that into account." (http://www.nfmpolitico.com/kpix/2009/05/31/dems-differ-on-wise-latina-defenses/) Judges are not robots or automatons who simply apply the law and facts without any type of intuitive and experienced analysis and thought. David Brooks makes a great point when he writes, "People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don't know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/opinion/29brooks.html?_r=1) Take the issue of a woman's right to choose for example, one of the hot button issues of the day. We can see the importance that having personal experience brings to the bench. We need women on the bench since they understand the particular nuances around a woman's right to have control over her body and her choices. That is, of course, not to say that a man cannot and would not reach the same conclusion, but a woman's perspective is unique and helps provide a bench that is properly reflective of the population. And Latinos are the fastest growing population in the US. As Maria Teresa Petersen, Founding Executive Director of Voto Latino, pointed out during her appearance on Give and Take (http://juliemenin.com/2009/03/maria-teresa-petersen-part-iii/), Rush Limbaugh's anti-immigrant stance, the Republican lack of support for its own leader Michael Steele, and its overall failure to be more inclusive, is alienating Latino voters, who in part, as a result of being disproportionately affected by the subprime mortgage crisis, are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the political process. Even if the right refuses to support Sotomayor despite her overwhelming qualifications, they would only gain politically if they did. The fact that the right is focusing on Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment shows just how few credible arguments they have against her. She has more experience on the bench than any recent nominee and her stellar educational background coupled with her record as a judge leave little room for attack. Interestingly, the other line of attack the right is using is to focus on the Ricci v. New Haven case, where Sotomayor sided with the city and not the white firefighters who were denied promotions despite passing a departmental test. Conservative commentators argue that Sotomayor is somehow a "reverse racist" for not siding with the white firefighters, but she was merely following precedent that upheld a city's right to throw out exam results to avoid a Title VII claim. To argue that Sotomayor should have ignored precedent would have actually made her a judicial activist. The right's strategy of attack to block Sotomayor's confirmation is flawed and ignores context, and if Sotomayor ruled the same way the right is attacking her, which she does not, only then would the right have a case. More on Sonia Sotomayor
 
Tim Geithner Can't Sell His Own Home Top
The real estate market's troubles are hitting close to home for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. After reducing the price on his house in a tony New York City suburb to less than he paid for it, Geithner still couldn't sell and recently rented it out instead, according to real estate agents familiar with the deal.
 
Mike Malloy: Kill Them. Kill Them All Top
Dick Cheney - and some of us have been saying this for years - is a bloodthirsty killer, an honest-to-god murderer who, when given the chance, will kill with impunity and without remorse. Yesterday, as he continues his "Goddamit, I'm Innocent Tour - 2009″, he spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, and, as he does each time he opens his mouth, he further indicted himself on future charges of war crimes - charges that will have to be brought by a government other than ours since ours is run by cowards and possible co-conspirators. According to the Washington Times (owned by the Korean crazy man the Rev. Sun Myung Moon - who sees himself as the latest incarnation of Christ) Cheney said Monday the only alternative to holding some suspected terrorists indefinitely would be to execute them, arguing against the Obama administration's plans to close the Guantanamo detainee prison. " If you're going to be engaged in a world conflict such as we are, such as the global war on terrorism, if you don't have a place where you can hold these people, your only other option is to kill them," he said, his eyes darting wildly around the room. And, then, sneeringly, caustically, the words dripping with irony and sarcasm, the cyborg killer added, "And we don't operate that way." "We don't operate that way," he said. And, in fact, he's being honest. Cheney never, ever operates that way, in the open, with witnesses, using some code of conduct whether it's political, religious, military, or something devised by Giant Spiders. No, Cheney operates in the darkness where sounds are muffled and the screams are quickly silenced. Ask our new commander in Afghanistan, Lt. General Stanley McChrystal. He might know. In fact, he could probably reveal a great deal about the former Vice. For example, the whereabouts of Mr. Cheney during those long, unexplained absences that were so frequent during the administration of President Chucklenuts. In an article published May 16, 2009, titled, "McChrystal was Cheney's Chief Assassin" it was reported? suggested? revealed? that . . . Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing and the head of the wing has recently been named as the new commander in Afghanistan. In an interview with Gulf News (the Persian Gulf's largest daily English language newspaper) Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, said that there is a special unit called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that does high-value targeting [killing] of men that are known to be involved in anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities. According to Hersh, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was headed by former US vice president Dick Cheney and the former head of JSOC, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal who has just been named the new commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan. You believe that shit? I certainly do. Of course, one must presume that Lt. General McChrystal would never, ever rat out his former handler. Not even under conditions of, um, enhanced interrogation. No, the Lt. General will keep mum on who was "targeted" (back in the day it was called "terminated with extreme prejudice"), who ordered the hit, when, where, and how it was accomplished. But, there is a partial record, of sorts. Human Rights Watch has documented one particularly grisly form of murder. (And I am sure it was ordered - please forgive my jumping to conclusions - by Vice.) Death by Shipping Container. An interrogator at Camp Nama (Afghanistan) known as Jeff described locking prisoners in shipping containers for 24 hours at a time in extreme heat; exposing them to extreme cold with periodic soaking in cold water; bombardment with bright lights and loud music; sleep deprivation; and severe beatings. The "extreme heat" referred to inside the containers were temperatures in excess of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. (Consider where the containers were located: The Afghanistan desert.) At that point human flesh begins to slowly cook. When the shipping containers were opened in the early morning, the corpses would be shoveled out into canvas bags for burial in the desert. And, of course, Death by Shipping Container was only one method of murder ordered by (please forgive my jumping to conclusions - again) Vice. There was also plain, old fashioned beating. Ah, it just goes on and on, doesn't it? The tales of absolute horror slowly leaking out; Dick Cheney continuing his "Goddamit, I'm Innocent Tour - 2009″; the Democratic Party leadership in the House, the Senate and the White House utterly refusing to order an inquiry, a hearing, an investigation. So, where do you suppose it'll all end? - MDM Mike Malloy can be heard daily on his radio show 9pm - 12pm ET. Visit www.mikemalloy.com to stream live or find a station near you. More on Dick Cheney
 
U.S. Releases Secret List Of Nuclear Sites Accidentally Top
The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked "highly confidential," that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation's civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.
 
Paul Baldwin, NH Man, Arrested For The 153rd Time To Plead Guilty Top
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — A man has been arrested for the 153rd time, this time after he was accused of punching someone in the face over the weekend. Paul Baldwin, 49, told a judge Monday he plans to plead guilty to the assault, along with trespassing and alcohol charges. He said he's had a long battle with alcohol and was trying to correct the problem during his most recent one-year jail term, which ended last week. The Foster's Daily Democrat newspaper said Baldwin's record dates to 1984 and includes 152 other arrests, eight trespass orders, 75 citations, four Social Security aliases and 17 name aliases. Prosecutor Rena DiLando said she didn't have time to read Baldwin's full criminal record because it's so long. ___ Information from: Foster's Daily Democrat, http://www.fosters.com
 
Obama Not Keeping Up With Bush's Reading Pace? Top
It appears President Obama has to step up his reading pace if he wants to beat his predecessor in one particular measure: how many books a president can polish off a year.
 

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