Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just finished testifying (at his insistence) in front of the Chilcot Iraq inquiry. After some discussion of how he thought that invading Iraq “was the right thing to do,” we’ve been getting a stream of figures and more figures and then even more figures in an attempt to justify why the military had what it needed, irrespective of what anyone else has said. Brown himself came across as a rather pleasant and well-meaning sort of fellow—he wasn’t nearly as patronizing as Tony Blair was, nor as abrasive as Alistair Campbell was, nor as apparently clueless as Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon were. He seemed to be trying to be both avuncular and precise at the same time, but he couldn’t help himself—he kept butting into questions with long and detailed explanations as to why the Ministry of Defense (MOD) was in fine shape.
Full Story »

Never thought I’d invite a teabagger to join political forces with me. But it’s going to take an odd and broad coalition of folks who comprise “We the People” to fight back against today’s U.S. Supreme Court action granting stunning new power to corporate America to buy our government. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, rolled back all limits on the rights of organizations to spend money to influence the outcome of federal elections.

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process. Full Story »

This forthcoming week we expect some more outright lying to go on in the Chilcot inquiry. This is because those appearing—-particularly former Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and former foreign secretary Jack Straw-—have an occasional habit of doing this. Both are expected to provide some interesting testimony, especially in light of testimony this past week from Alistair Campbell, and testimony in December from a number of senior military figures.

Before getting to what we might expect, let’s look at what we learned this past week. P.G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth, whose motto was “Stout Denial!” would have been proud of Alistair Campbell. Campbell, Tony Blair’s Communications guy, can lie with the best of them, and we presume he did. In fact, what was unsurprising about Campbell’s testimony was the extent to which he stuck to the script, while at the same time the extent to which he tried to blame everyone else. Campbell’s testimony and answers to questions even included a reference to Psalm 56 on his whiny blog, “All day long they twist my words”, which, as Hugh O’Shaughnessy pointed out, would be funny if it came from someone else. Full Story »

Read it and weep:

Over 6,600 uninsured veterans will die by 2013: estimate

A Raw Story analysis, based on a recent Harvard Medical School study, estimates that 135,000 American citizens and over 6,600 US veterans will die due to a lack of health insurance before current proposed healthcare reform measures would take effect.

One hundred and thirty-five thousand US lives far exceeds the total number of Americans who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the attacks of 9/11 combined. The lives of over 6,600 US veterans is more — by over 1,300 — than the total number of US soldiers who have thus far died in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-author of the Harvard Medical School study, called Raw Story’s estimates “quite reasonable.”

Read the rest… (great insights from experts throughout, including a veterans’ advocate who discusses the correlation between lack of proper healthcare and the military’s suicide epidemic)

Every sperm and every egg, fertilized or not, is a living, breathing person, endowed by its Creator with certain inalienable rights. At least, that’s what the proposed 2010 personhood amendment to the Colorado state constitution implies. No, it doesn’t say that literally, but thanks to the vague wording of the amendment, that’s one possible interpretation.

It’s also clear from an article in The Colorado Independent that this is only half of what the amendment’s authors intended.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” [Gualberto Garcia] Jones explained. (Jones heads the organization that initiated this year’s amendment)

That this law could be interpreted to include sperm is an ironic example of the law of unintended consequences. Full Story »

“I keep telling you guys my aim is to become a legend,” said Usain Bolt, after smashing the world 200 metres record and becoming the first man to hold the 100 and 200 metres sprints in both the Olympics and the Athletics World Championships.

Competition at international sporting events is fierce and the pursuit of an edge, sometimes measured in hundredths of a second, leads some to cheat.  Steroid abuse aims to increase the strength, speed and endurance of what is natural.  But the androgens created by the body are not set to any standard.  Some people do genuinely produce more than others.  Figuring out what is normal and what is not is difficult.

And, sometimes, something else is going on. Full Story »

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has conditionally reinstated former Atlanta quarterback Michael Vick, who was convicted of running a dogfighting ring in 2007. Vick served 23 months in federal prison, followed by two months of house arrest.

Last Thursday the Philadelphia Eagles answered the question as to which team would sign a convicted dog-killer (there were 32 possible answers to the question, and “none of the above” wasn’t one of them), and in doing so touched off a long-awaited PR war for the souls of their stunned fans. Full Story »

(updated below: updates I-II)

Clark Hoyt’s New York Times public editor column on Sunday, “Telling the Brutal Truth,” brings the ongoing “debate” over whether waterboarding is torture to brave new heights of absurdity.

Hoyt opens the column:

A LINGUISTIC [all caps are Hoyt's] shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Reading this, you might think, “Finally, in its news pages, the Times is going to call waterboarding what it is and what it always has been since its first recorded use during the Spanish Inquisition — torture. Plain and simple.” Yet you would be gravely disappointed.

For Hoyt then writes:

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal.” (On the editorial page, they long ago added up to “torture.”) Full Story »

Part of the reason I’ve been off the radar here for so long — my latest investigative report for Raw Story:

Federal agencies were involved in the decision to raid the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Nevada last October, just weeks before Election Day, the offices of Nevada’s Secretary of State and Attorney General say.

The allegations raise questions of whether politics played a part in the raid and calls into question assertions by the US Attorney’s office that they were uninvolved. Federal guidelines instruct agencies investigating election fraud to avoid action that might impact the elective process.

Bob Walsh, a spokesman for Nevada’s Secretary of State, and Edie Cartwright, a spokeswoman for Nevada’s Attorney General, said that not only were the Nevada US Attorney’s Office and the FBI involved in investigating Nevada ACORN on allegations of voter registration fraud but that all four agencies jointly made the decision to conduct the raid. Both the investigation and the raid were conducted as part of the joint federal-state Election Integrity Task Force announced last July, the spokespersons said. Full Story »

On August 14, 2008, President Bush signed into law the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA). Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said of the new law “[t]his landmark law will strengthen our ability to prevent unsafe toys from being sold, remove from the shelves more quickly products that are found to be harmful, and increase fines and penalties for violating product safety laws.”

Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences is working overtime on the CPSIA. A law intended to protect children from harmful products will do so partly by driving literally tens of thousands of small businesses and craftspeople out of business, and those businesses that survive will be saddled with tens of millions of dollars of unsellable inventory on their shelves and in their warehouses. Just as the U.S. needs an economic stimulus to create jobs, the CPSIA will add tens of thousands of people to the rolls of the unemployed.

The CPSIA is yet another example of a good idea – protecting children from toxic materials – gone horribly wrong. Full Story »

The image is striking.  A fat, sweaty and uncomfortable-looking white man is squatting on the back of a large black man.  The white man is holding a dry canvas bag over the head of the black man and looking sadly and nervously at the camera.

The Truth Commission was unlike any trial the world had ever seen.  In exchange for complete disclosure about all past crimes, both known and unknown, claimants would be given complete absolution.  In the case of this one sweaty white man, his victim had asked that he demonstrate how he had tortured him.

Waterboarding has become famous.  Place a thick, heavy and wet fabric over your victim’s head, and then hold them stationary.  It causes no lasting physical damage, but gives a very real sense of drowning.  Anyone who has ever had a similar experience knows it is terrifying. Full Story »

According to today’s NYTimes, President-elect Barack Obama is digging in his heels about giving up his BlackBerry. Good for him! I understand that there are security and legal concerns – cell phones can be tracked via GPS and cell towers and they can be turned on remotely by the service providers, and presidential emails are not privileged and private, they’re documented and archived and have been since email had the post-Watergate documentation rules applied to them.

But how often does a President demand that everyone around him relinquish their cell phones for security reasons? How hard would it be for the Secret Service to turn to the President and say “Your phone too, sir.” Seriously, when security provisions would be that strict, the Secret Service isn’t going to take no for an answer, even from the President.

And given that everything the President says and does is documented, how is archiving emails any different? Historians will know in a few decades when President Bush II called over to the East Wing and said he’d be late for dinner (if they care, anyway) – how is Obama’s emailing or texting Michelle any different? And popping the Presidential bubble is far too important, especially after eight years of a president who’s bubble was not only thick and stifling, but opaque too.

President-elect Obama, you were quoted as saying “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.” Good. Don’t let them.

In this season’s eighth episode, Boston Legal – the relentlessly liberal ABC dramedy starring William Shatner and James Spader – lobbed an absolute bomb at those of us on the pro-choice side of the Roe v. Wade question. The bunker-buster was posed, predictably enough, by Crane Poole & Schmitt’s resident conservative, the gleefully Republican Denny Crane, portrayed by Shatner. BL fans know Crane to be positively Cheney-esque in his politics (although he did finally cross the aisle to vote for Obama because even he couldn’t stomach four more years like the last eight), and he routinely plays the straw man for the passionate liberalism of Spader’s litigator par excellence, Alan Shore.

This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. Full Story »

What the hell has happened to “innocent until proven guilty” in the state of Illinois? Since when did mob rule – composed of the Illinois state legislature, much of the state and national media, and even President-elect Barack Obama himself – replace the rule of law?

Governor Rod Blagojevich may – may – be guilty of corruption. If what the FBI has released to the press is representative of their case against him, then Gov. Blagojevich probably is guilty. But not only is that a big “if”, Gov. Blagojevich’s case is looking more and more like “trial by media” instead of trial by jury. Full Story »

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has accused Executive Recycling (ER) of Englewood, Colorado of violations of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations regarding electronics waste (e-waste). As a result of the GAO report, the EPA is now investigating ER. But an S&R investigation into the findings of the GAO report, the EPA regulations and ER’s actions has discovered that ER’s guilt of CRT rule violations may depend greatly on how the EPA classifies the “waste” shipped overseas. The investigation also discovered evidence of possible conflicts of interest on the part of the non-profit environmental advocacy group Basel Action Network (BAN) and one of BAN’s affiliates with respect to the investigation. Full Story »

For today’s TunesDay, why don’t we forget about the music and talk about music lawyering? Because really, chicks dig the suits.

Let’s start with my favorite assortment of anti-music fucknozzles, the RIAA. Up first, one of the industry group’s top hired guns wants to “intervene” in a probable cause hearing. Seems some kids at NC State aren’t terribly happy about the RIAA’s business model random trolling for file-sharing violations. You know how it works – ‘let’s sue everybody on the off chance that they might be guilty and/or unable to afford a lawyer.”

Of course, those Woofpack students can at least stand up for themselves. Full Story »

Finally, FINALLY we’re starting to treat the RIAA like an organized crime syndicate. Check the latest on a RICO class-action in Missouri, via Slashdot:

“In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA’s ‘driftnet’ tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO ‘predicate acts’ alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

This is a wonderful approach. Full Story »

No, nobody at your old high school is dying to talk to you.

I’m not normally a litigious guy, but hat’s off to this class-action suit. Classmates.com is not only annoying as hell, they’re apparently making stuff up, to boot.

(And before you ask, I’ve tried desperately to unsub. But I joined a bunch of years ago with an e-mail address that’s now dead, but they’re forwarding to an alias I set up, I think. It’s complicated, and I’m a little too clever for my own good, I guess. But I could ask them to stop, right? Sure, that’s bound to work….)

by Michael Tracey

Let me return to a period which is widely regarded within the advanced industrial societies as a high water mark of public service broadcasting, the BBC in the early 1960s. A key figure from those years was Sir Arthur fforde (that is the correct, if old-fashioned spelling of his name), in my view quite possibly the greatest of the chairmen of the BBC. In 1963 he published a little booklet called What is Broadcasting About, which was printed privately in an edition of 400. In this at first curious piece he tries to lay out a theological context for what was happening within the BBC, which was then at the height of its creative and social impact on British society, and causing all kinds of heartburn among what used to be called the Establishment. Full Story »

Don’t miss my investigative report over at Raw Story:

Interviews with numerous legal experts suggest that Colorado US Attorney Troy Eid misled reporters and diverged from state law when declining to prosecute any of the three men arrested in Denver for threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

The article includes pretty shocking exclusive comments from the Weld County CO investigator who had pursued the main suspect, Sean Robert Adolph, for two years:

According to a federal affidavit, one of the men arrested, Nathan Dwaine Johnson, said that another in the group, Sean Robert Adolph, had come to Denver to shoot Obama during his DNC acceptance speech. Johnson told the Secret Service that Adolph said “it wouldn’t matter if he killed Obama because he was going to jail on his pending felony charges anyway.”

Vicki Harbert, an investigator at the Weld County, Colo., sheriff’s department, who had pursued Adolph since 2006, told RAW STORY, “It’s very easy to see Adolph saying something like that. He had nothing to lose. With his criminal history, he was going to jail for the rest of his life.” Full Story »