Big Quake in Haiti

 Posted by at 2:53 am  Politics
Jan 132010
 

This story is dominating the MSM:

haitian-quake A major earthquake hit impoverished Haiti on Tuesday, toppling buildings in the capital Port-au-Prince, burying residents in rubble and causing many deaths and injuries, witnesses in the city said.

The magnitude 7.0 quake, whose epicenter was inland and only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, sent panic-stricken people screaming into the streets as a cloud of dust and smoke from falling buildings rose into the sky.

As darkness fell amid scenes of chaos and anguished cries from victims, residents desperately tried to dig out survivors or searched for missing relatives in debris-strewn streets.

The presidential palace was among buildings damaged, Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, Raymond Alcide Joseph, told CNN. "My country is facing a major catastrophe," he said.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has a history of destructive natural disasters. Some 9,000 U.N. police and troops are stationed there to maintain order.

The quake, followed by aftershocks, prompted a tsunami watch for parts the Caribbean but this was later canceled.

"Everything started shaking, people were screaming, houses started collapsing … it’s total chaos," Reuters reporter Joseph Guyler Delva said in Port-au-Prince.

"I saw people under the rubble, and people killed," he added, saying he had witnessed dozens of casualties.

U.S. President Barack Obama said his "thoughts and prayers" were with the people of Haiti and pledged immediate aid.

The United States would provide both military and civilian disaster assistance to the Caribbean country, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the start of a speech on Asian relations in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who is the U.N. special envoy for Haiti, also pledged assistance. The Inter-American Development Bank said it would provide $200,000 in immediate emergency aid.

PALL OF DUST AND SMOKE

A local employee for the charity Food for the Poor reported seeing a five-story building collapse in Port-au-Prince, spokeswoman Kathy Skipper told Reuters.

Another Food for the Poor employee said there were more houses destroyed than standing in Delmas Road, a major thoroughfare in the city.

"Within a minute of the quake … soil, dust and smoke rose up over the city, a blanket that completely covered the city and obscured it for about 12 minutes until the atmospheric conditions dissipated the dust," Mike Godfrey, who works for USAID, told CNN.

"The international airport appears to be functioning," he added, saying he saw an airliner take off after the quake.

Experts said the quake’s epicenter was very shallow at a depth of only 6.2 miles, which was likely to have magnified the destruction.

Dale Grant, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist in Golden, Colorado, told Reuters there had been no quakes this large in Haiti for more than 200 years.

"There were two major quakes there in 1751 and 1770 but, since then, there has not been a quake of this magnitude," Grant said…

Inserted from <Common Dreams>

Listening to the news I get the impression that the Obama administration is responding to this disaster far more quickly and efficiently than Bush and the GOP responded to Katrina.  Please keep these people in your prayers/thoughts/wishes, and if you can help, beware scam charities and religious right charities.

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The Duplicity of Big Health Care

 Posted by at 2:53 am  Politics
Jan 132010
 

This is something we knew, but it’s excellent confirmation.

Insurance greed 2 Last September, ThinkProgress reported that, despite its public support for health care reform, the insurance industry was engaged in a “duplicitous” campaign to undermine the effort. Now the National Journal has confirmed that from September to December 2009, “six of the nation’s biggest health insurers began quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress.” The companies used America’s Health Insurance Plans — the lobbying arm of the insurance industry — “as a conduit to avoid a repeat of the political flack that hit the insurance industry after it famously ran its multi-million dollar ‘Harry and Louise’ ads to help kill health care reforms during the Clinton administration”:

That money, between $10 million and $20 million, came from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint, according to two health care lobbyists familiar with the transactions. The companies are all members of the powerful trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. The funds were solicited by AHIP and funneled to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to help underwrite tens of millions of dollars of television ads by two business coalitions set up and subsidized by the chamber. Each insurer kicked in at least $1 million and some gave multi-million dollar donations…

…The industry’s covert ad campaign isn’t the industry’s only means of wasting millions of premium dollars on sabotaging reform. As former health insurance executive Wendell Potter told ThinkProgress, insurers are using a variety of front groups to advance a hidden attack campaign. The industry regularly feeds talking points to right-wing media like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, mobilizes anti-reform “grassroots” groups and coordinates with conservative think-tanks to produce academic-appearing reports to advance their cause… [emphasis added]

 

Inserted from <Think Progress>

You have not heard much from me in the subject of health care reform, because I’m waiting for something substantive to discuss.  I don’t want to jump at every rumor and innuendo.

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Open Thread – 1/13/2010

 Posted by at 2:52 am  Open Thread, Personal
Jan 132010
 

Yesterday I caught up on replying to comments and visited most ofg the blogs on my blogroll.  Today I’ll be gone, volunteering in a therapy group for former prisoners, running several errands, and grocery shopping.

Today’s Jig Zone puzzle took me 4:34.  To do it, Click Here.

Here’s your cartoon:

Happy Hump Day!!

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Editorial: Was Read’s Gaffe Racist?

 Posted by at 3:48 am  Editorial, Personal, Politics
Jan 122010
 

Tom122007 I trust that you all know by now what I think about the Nevada Leg Hound, Harry Reid.  I’d like him to dildo his own nether regions with a saguaro cactus, native to his state.  Why?  There is not a GOP or DINO leg in the Senate that Harry hasn’t humped in the process of caving-in to our detriment.

The media and the blogosphere are awash with accusations and claims that Reid should step down, and the Republicans are comparing Reid to Lott.  I suppose it’s time for me to weigh in on this.

I’d like to establish my own creds on racism, as a point of reference.  My father was an equal-opportunity bigot.  He hated all minorities, but especially blacks.  By the time I was nine or ten years old, I knew that black people were shiftless, unsanitary, lazy, and untrustworthy.  Back then, I was diving for mussels in the bay, came up under a boat, hit my head and knocked myself out cold.  A young black boy (meaning about my age) saved my life.  After talking with him for awhile, he did not seem at all like my father’s description.  I wanted to be his friend, so I took him home to meet my family.  We walked into the living room, and I blurted out what he had done.  My father got red in the face and screamed, “Get that little nigger out of my home!”  I was so ashamed that, in my heart, I became an activist that very day.  By the time I was 18, I had made three trips to the south during vacations to protest for civil rights.  I faced down police dogs and fire hoses.  I escaped serious injury, only because black people there protected me.  When Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream!”, I was there.  I dropped out of college after two terms to become a full time activist against the war in Vietnam and for Civil Rights.  I worked primarily through SDS, before the weather faction took over.  I liaised with other groups to coordinate our efforts, so I was well acquainted with such luminaries as Roy Innis of CORE and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC.  As a member of the national steering committee for MLK’s Vietnam Summer, I attended several meetings with Dr. King.

Keeping this in mind, on the previous incarnation of this blog, I wrote that I was hesitant to support Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president, because I doubted that a black man could be elected in this nation.  That was not a racist remark on my part.  My creds prove that.  It was an honest expression of concern about the level of racism that remains in our nation.  I voted for Obama in the Primary and in the General, and am pleased to admit that I was wrong.

Harry Reid’s ‘light skinned’ and ‘negro dialect’ statement was surely ill conceived, but just like me, Reid has the creds to prove that he is no racist.  Comparing him to Lott is absurd.  Lott said he wished Strom Thurmond had been elected President.  Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat (1948) and an Independent (1960) on a platform of segregation.  An avowed racist, Thurmond switched to the GOP and led the GOP filibuster against the Voting Rights Act.  Reid, on the other hand has been a strong supporter of every piece of civil rights legislation during his career.  When Reid made this statement, he was probably thinking out loud.  Hw was considering factors he thought would make Obama less vulnerable to our nation’s remaining racism.

There is evidence to support his concern.  According to a National Academy of Sciences study:

…People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, whereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election…

Furthermore, if this were not a concern, why did a staffer in the Clinton camp edit debate video used in a Clinton campaign ad to make Obama appear darker than he is, if not to play on American racism?  Reid was doing nothing more than analyzing the nation’s political climate.

So, should Reid step down?  No!  The only reason the GOP is after him over this is to derail health care legislation.  After all, isn’t this GOP sanctimony over the sensitivities of African Americans the moral equivalent of hypothetical protestations from Israel that someone is mistreating Palestinians?

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Mooseolini Finds a Fitting Home

 Posted by at 3:47 am  Politics
Jan 122010
 

I know I predicted this, but it mush have been in comments.

Fox_News_Nazi A Fox News executive says the network will shortly announce that the former vice-presidential nominee is signing on as a contributor.

Palin, who resigned as governor of Alaska last summer, will appear as a commentator on various Fox shows. She will also host an occasional program that will examine inspirational tales involving ordinary Americans.

Palin will join Mike Huckabee as a Fox contributor who was also involved in the 2008 campaign. The exposure can only help Palin if she decides to pursue a 2012 presidential bid.

At the moment, Palin makes pronouncements mainly through her Facebook page. The Fox connection would give her a platform on the nation’s top-rated cable news channel.

Palin is extremely popular with her conservative base, which has fueled the sales of her best-selling memoir. But she is a divisive political figure who not only draws the ire of liberals but some Republicans, including staffers who deal with her during her run as John McCain’s running mate… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Washington Post>

The plus for Mooseolini is that her ignorance will not be an impediment, as Faux Noise values ideology over accuracy.  The plus for Faux Noise is that they gain nationally prominent political figure, a sex-symbol to the rabid right, and a mind so oblivious that she will gleefully parrot Rupert Murdoch’s lies in the belief that they are true.  Palin could not have found a better fit than the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda.

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Obama Considers a Big Banks Tax

 Posted by at 3:47 am  Politics
Jan 122010
 

Well, something has to be done!

FatCat President Obama will try to recoup for taxpayers as much as $120 billion of the money spent to bail out the financial system, most likely through a tax on large banks, administration and Congressional officials said Monday.The president has yet to settle on the details, and his senior economic advisers are weighing a number of options as they finish the budget proposal Mr. Obama will release next month.

The general idea is to devise a levy that would help reduce the budget deficit, which is now at a level not seen since World War II, and would also discourage the kinds of excessive risk-taking among financial institutions that led to a near collapse of Wall Street in 2008, the officials said.

But the president also has a political purpose — to respond to the anger building across the country as big banks, having been rescued by the taxpayers, report record profits and begin paying out huge bonuses while millions of Americans remain out of work.

The administration previously rejected two ideas that have received much attention in recent months: a transaction tax on financial trades and a special tax on executives’ bonuses.

The most likely alternatives would be a tax based on the size and riskiness of an institution’s loans and other financial holdings, or a tax on profits.

Lobbyists for bankers, taken by surprise, immediately objected to any new tax. They said financial institutions had been repaying their portion of the bailout money in full, with interest. Losses from the $700 billion bailout fund — estimated to run as high as $120 billion — are expected to come from the automobile companies and their finance arms, the insurance giant American International Group and programs to avert home foreclosures, and the president is aiming to recoup that money.

“It is perplexing to us,” said Edward L. Yingling, president and chief executive of the American Bankers Association. He recalled that Mr. Obama recently had two White House meetings with bankers to urge them to provide more loans to credit-starved small businesses. But a tax, he said, would be “a hit on banks that will decrease their ability to lend.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Of course cousin FatCat and his bankster buddies oppose this, but their arguments are pathetic.  The statement that they are paying back everything they got with interest ignores a crucial fact.  A huge portion of governments $120 billion loss comes from bailing out AIG, and most of those funds were payments to banks, snuck through the back door by Geithner and Paulson.  Saying that a tax would decrease their ability to lend is bogus, because they aren’t lending anyway.  They’re speculating.  I can’t say whether or not I endorse Obama’s plan until he presents it.  I cannot evaluate it until I know what it is.

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Kudos to the ACLU for Davis Suit

 Posted by at 3:45 am  Politics
Jan 122010
 

Sometimes the ACLU takes on cases that I disapprove.  This is not one of those times.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

col-morris-davis NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a lawsuit against the Library of Congress on behalf of Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions, who was terminated from his job at the Library’s Congressional Research Service (CRS) because of opinion pieces he wrote about the military commissions system. The lawsuit charges that CRS violated Davis’s right to free speech and due process when it fired him for speaking as a private citizen about matters having nothing to do with his responsibilities at CRS.

"Col. Davis has a constitutional right to speak about issues of which he has expert knowledge, and the public has a right to hear from him," said Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. "Col. Davis’s firsthand experience is invaluable to the ongoing debate over military commissions, and the public should not be denied the chance to hear from him just because he is a public employee."

After 25 years in the United States Air Force, Davis resigned from his position as chief prosecutor in the military commissions in October 2007 because of his belief that the system was fundamentally flawed. He then became a vocal critic of the commissions, writing articles, giving speeches and testifying before Congress. In December 2008, Davis began working as the Assistant Director of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division at CRS, a position that is not related to the military commissions.

On November 11, 2009, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece and the Washington Post published a letter to the editor in which Davis argued against having a two-tiered system of justice in which some Guantánamo detainees are tried in military commissions and others in federal courts. Both pieces were written by Davis in his personal capacity, made clear that he was writing as a private individual and former chief prosecutor of the military commissions and made no mention of CRS. Davis wrote the pieces on his home computer during non-work hours. In meetings that followed, Davis’s supervisor at CRS, Daniel Mulhollan, informed Davis that as a result of the pieces his employment would be terminated. Davis was transferred to a temporary 30-day position at CRS, which will expire on January 20.

"My status as the former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay and my opinions on that subject are completely unrelated to my position at CRS and totally separate from my duties there, and they don’t interfere with my ability to do my job," said Davis. "The work that CRS does is incredibly valuable and I am proud of the opportunity to continue serving my country after a career in the military. I hope to be reinstated to my original position so I can continue to support Congress at this critical time in our nation’s history."

In response to a letter from the ACLU in December, the Library of Congress stated that it would not reinstate Davis to his job at CRS. Today’s lawsuit seeks to reinstate Davis to his position and to reaffirm that governmental employees, including employees of the Library of Congress, may not be terminated for speaking in their private capacities on matters of great public concern.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit against James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, and Mulhollan in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Attorneys on the case are Fine, Alexander Abdo and Jameel Jaffer of the national ACLU and Arthur Spitzer and Frederick Mulhauser of the ACLU of the National Capital Area.

The ACLU’s complaint is available online at: www.aclu.org/free-speech/davis-v-billington-complaint

More information about the case is available online at: www.aclu.org/free-speech/davis-v-billington

[emphasis added]

Inserted from <ACLU>

Like I said, I don’t always agree, but I’m proud to be a member of the ACLU.

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Open Open Thread – 1/12/2010

 Posted by at 3:44 am  Open Thread, Personal
Jan 122010
 

Yesterday was a full day.  I had chest X-rays, pulmonary function tests, a long meeting about programs, and an exam by the pulmonologist.  As a result, I had no time to answer comments here or visit other blogs.  The doc also scheduled a sleep study, because the doc suspects sleep apnea, and a cat scan.  I hope cousin FatCat doesn’t do it.  That bankster would charge so much that he’d get my insurance cancelled.  Today my agenda is to reply to all unanswered comments here and to visit as many blogs as I can.

Today’s Jig Zone puzzle took me 4:48, matching the average.  To do it, Click Here.  How did you do?

Here’s your cartoon:

What’s on your horizen?

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