Join us saturday for a discussion on Dukes v. Wal-Mart

The Shared Sacrifice podcast Saturday morning at 9AM (archived thereafter) will feature a discussion with Christine Owens of the National Employment Law Project, concerning the setback to workers and women from the recent Supreme Court decision in Dukes v. Wal-Mart. Don't miss it!

Clarence Thomas, meet Abe Fortas

Think Progress has this on lockdown. Justice Thomas, who has at least three ethically problematic issues weighing him down, brings to mind Abe Fortas, who resigned from the high court in disgrace in 1969 for actions at least comparable, and maybe less severe, than those of Thomas:

Fortas’ questionable gifts first came out when President Johnson nominated him for a promotion to Chief Justice of the United States in 1968. Fortas had accepted $15,000 to lead seminars at American University — far more than the university normally paid for such services — and the payments were bankrolled by the leaders of frequent corporate litigants including the vice president of Phillip Morris. Fortas survived this revelation, although his nomination for the Chief Justiceship was filibustered into oblivion.
Just a year later, the country learned that Fortas took another highly questionable gift. In 1966, one year after Fortas joined the Court, stock speculator Louis E. Wolfson’s foundation began paying Fortas an annual retainer of $20,000 per year for consulting services. Fortas’ actions were legal, and he eventually returned the money after Wolfson was convicted of securities violations and recused himself from Wolfson’s case, but the damage to Fortas — and the potential harm to the Supreme Court’s reputation — were too great. Fortas resigned in disgrace.
It is difficult to distinguish Fortas’ scandal from Thomas’. Like Fortas, Thomas accepted several very valuable gifts from parties who are frequently interested in the outcome of federal court cases. One of Thomas’ benefactors has even filed briefs in his Court since giving Thomas a $15,000 gift, and Thomas has not recused himself from each of these cases.

Today's generation of conservative Justices, however, play in an entirely different key.

Huntsman Can't Win, Here's Why

So Jon Huntsman is officially running. But there's a problem:

Presidential candidates need to be physically attractive in this day and age. Huntsman will never win because he has the face of a weasel. Or a ferret. People will call him "ol' ferret face."

I don't make the rules.

Peter Bach and Robert Kocher: make medical school free but charge specialists for their training

Peter B. Bach of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and former special assistant to President Obama on health care and economic policy Robert Kocher, both MDs, have laid out a cogent, persuasive case for government-paid general practitioner training, with specialties coming at a cost. Among the claimed benefits: more general practitioners, avoidance of personal debt as a driving force behind the excessive pursuit of specialties at the expense of the public good, and the program would pay for itself by charging doctors for specialty training. Incremental versions of some of this are already happening:

Many states have loan forgiveness programs for doctors entering primary care. The health care reform law contains incentive programs that will include bonuses for primary care doctors who treat Medicare patients, and help finance a small increase in primary care training positions.

Free education would also increase the quality of applicants, the doctors claim, and would reflect the already symbiotic relationship between medical training and taxpayer money.

Critics might object to providing free medical education when students have to pay for most other types of advanced training. But the process of training doctors is unlike any other, and much of the costs are already borne by others. Hospitals that house medical residents and specialist trainees receive payments from the taxpayer, through Medicare. Patients give of their time and of their bodies in our nation’s teaching hospitals so that doctors in training can become skilled practitioners.

Some letters to the editor expressed skepticism that this would encourage more medical students to become general practitioners when people could just borrow money to become specialists, but I can see how at least some low-to-medium income students would choose the general path and avoid the debt. It might also encourage people, say, in their 20s to pursue new careers in medicine after they see how bleak a lot of other options are right now.

truth can be tragic, but lies are dangerous

It may be too late to undo some of the damage created by this story, but it's definitely worth posting that it wasn't true.

The headlines were nothing short of chilling.

"Aspiring 'Miss Ukraine' Killed Under Shari'a Laws In Crimea" warned Ukrainian online newspaper "Gazeta Po-Kievski."
"Radical Islamists Murder Young Girl In Crimea," screamed Russia's "Svobodnaya Pressa."
"Muslim Girl,19, Stoned To Death After Taking Part In Beauty Contest," was the headline on Britain's "Mail Online," the "Daily Mail" website.
The circumstances around the death of Kateryna Korin, a 19-year-old Ukrainian student on the Crimean peninsula, appeared to point to a made-for-tabloid tragedy: a young beauty-pageant contestant brutally killed by her admirer, a radical Islamist who chose to stone her to death under an unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law.
There was just one small problem: They weren't true.

Instead, the suspect doesn't appear to be very religious at all, and the inferences of fundamentalism appear to be baseless according to the available evidence. Rather than "stoning" Kateryna, the suspect appears to have strangled her and struck her on the head--with a stone.

Fundamentalism is dangerous. So is ginning up stories designed to incite hatred.

Multilayered Resistance in Honduras

Over at politicalcontext.org I've posted More than Zelaya: Multilayered Resistance in Honduras, featuring analysis and interviews on Zelaya's return and the state of the resistance in Honduras. Enjoy.

a hoisted by their own petard kind of thing

Ol' Tim Pawlenty may be in a bit of a soup. A Daily Kos blogger passed along the news that

...then-Gov. Pawlenty granted to a sex offender in October 2008, a pardon that is certain to haunt Pawlenty throughout his campaign. Turns out the man Pawlenty pardoned was later arrested again for molesting his daughter more than 250 times in an eight-year span, including six years prior to his pardon.
Jeremy Giefer served 45 days in prison in 1994 after being convicted of statutory rape. However, because he married the then-14-year-old girl and stuck around to father the child they conceived together, he begged the state for an extraordinary pardon, which would no longer require Giefer to report himself as a sex offender.
The board — which included the Minnesota attorney general, the chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, and then-Governor Pawlenty — voted unanimously to pardon Giefer.

"Old Redneck" at Kos concludes that this proves Republicans fire teachers and pardon child molesters. Yeah, anyway...

This isn't Pawlenty's first pardon problem. He and Michele Bachmann sought a pardon for a character

...indicted on fraud and money-laundering charges in a U.S. District Court in Minnesota. A former North Dakota pawnshop owner who ostensibly found Jesus while serving a prison sentence in the 1980s, Vennes emerged as a pillar of Minnesota’s conservative Christian community. Then, according to the indictment, he channeled millions into a Ponzi scheme run by the businessman Thomas J. Petters, who is now serving 50 years in federal prison. Much of the money Vennes raised seems to have come from faith-based charities, pastors, and ministers, some of who have lost their life savings.
...Vennes was a major donor to both politicians, and both politicians sought pardons for him in order to wipe away the taint of the crimes that first landed him in prison. Vennes’s respectability in conservative Minnesota circles seems to have enabled his crimes.
... He donated several thousand dollars to Tim Pawlenty’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and sat on the board of Teen Challenge, a faith-based drug rehab program, with Pawlenty’s wife, Mary. In 2006, according to the Star Tribune, he was the top donor to Michele Bachmann’s congressional campaign.

(Which leads me to sidebar: Is there a bigger piece of opportunistic trash in congress than Michele Bachmann?)

It's certainly not true that only Republicans abuse the pardon process. Bourgeois politicians, products of the marketplace themselves, have trouble drawing their wheeling and dealing lines. But in this election cycle, it's the GOP that seems tainted by what Politico called "Horton's Ghost."

Sometimes these pardon scandals are a bit unfair, a bit of a stretch to the limits of configural causality and foreseeability. Mittens, for example, appointed people to a parole board who made a pretty egregious error (see the Politico link above). Even Pawlenty can't be faulted for what a shrink should have caught--that the dude that married the 14 year old was also prone to go after younger kids--including immediate family members.

One unanswered question, though, is why Pawlenty would be stupid enough to pardon ANY sex offender. Was he trying to appeal to the self-perceived wrongfully convicted sex offender constituency?

Where to go, Mr. Trumka?

At politicalcontext.org I ask: Where to go, Mr. Trumka?

Richard Trumka's call to arms, and promise of an "independent" labor movement, was refreshing. Can labor deliver? Does it mean more than just criticizing the Democratic Party? Is there a walk accompanying the talk?

"but I've grown older and wiser..."

"I am for people, individuals, exactly like automobile insurance, individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance, and I am prepared to vote for a voucher system which will give individuals on a sliding scale a government subsidy so to insure that everyone as individuals have health insurance." ~Newt Gingrich, 1993

sometimes nice guys finish first!

This is great news about a great person.

Jason West was Mayor of New Paltz New York from 2003 to 2007. An active member of the Green Party at that time, West was the first official in the United States to marry same-sex couples. He was arrested and charged with “solemnizing marriages without a license”. The charges were later dismissed.

After losing in a run at re-election West headed out west, to the University of California at Berkley to study urban planning, and later returned to New Paltz. This year he again ran for Mayor, and . . . he has won that race, giving him a second but non-consecutive term.
West ran on the “Cooperative Party” ticket.

Congrats and good luck, Mayor West. Keep fighting the good fights!

from one living right wing terrorist, concerning a dead right wing terrorist

"If [Obama] was a shoo-in for reelection, Osama bin Laden would still be alive today. There would have been no need to undertake the mission."

--Rush Limbaugh, courtesy of Media Matters and Daily Kos. I'm no Obama fan, but if the POTUS could send the Fat Idiot to Gitmo, I just might become one.

Friendly Fire

Not that I wouldn't dance on OBL's grave (the only good right-wing terrorist is a dead right-wing terrorist), but it's kind of a shame to see the CIA kill one of their own like that.

Rules of Engagement

These are very important to remember if you're working for any network or cable news outlet (including the so-called "progressive" MSNBC). Here's the bottom line:

• ‎25 tea partiers anywhere = national news coverage.
• 37,000 unemployed people protesting in Raleigh = apparently not network newsworthy.

Any questions? Good. You now know the rules. But as my friend Pete pointed out: "Read your constitution. Ben Franklin had the foresight to guide the framers (with the help of Jesus, of course) to set the ratio for worker value at one tea partier to 1480 workers. It was called the 3/4440 compromise. It's right there in black and sepia, you commie."

I'm glad we had this discussion.

 

New WikiLeaks Revelations on Guantanamo Lies

From BBC and Alternet: The argument for Gitmo has always been that it's necessary to house dangerous people. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that a lot of the people the U.S. put there were not dangerous at all, and the U.S. knew this.

At least 150 people were revealed to be innocent Afghans or Pakistanis - including drivers, farmers and chefs - rounded up during intelligence gathering operations in the aftermath of 9/11.

The detainees were then held for years owing to mistaken identity or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the memos say. In many cases, US commanders concluded there was "no reason recorded for transfer".
Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for al-Jazeera, was held for six years, partly so he could be questioned about the Arabic news network

Six years in Gitmo, just to be harassed because you work for a news network.

"a nation of laws"

"We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law."

-President (and constitutional scholar) Obama, on Bradley Manning, who hasn't yet been tried or convicted of anything.