Obama Convicts Loughner Before Trial

Somebody didn't vet President Obama's milquetoast Arizona Daily Star op-ed on gun control last weekend:

"But one clear and terrible fact remains. A man our Army rejected as unfit for service; a man one of our colleges deemed too unstable for studies; a man apparently bent on violence, was able to walk into a store and buy a gun.

He used it to murder six people and wound 13 others. And if not for the heroism of bystanders and a brilliant surgical team, it would have been far worse." -- Barack Obama, Arizona Star, March 13, 2011.

Hmm.... one of the first things I was taught in Journalism 101 is that you never, ever categorically state that someone committed a crime.  You write something to the effect of "Joe Blow was arrested on charges of public lewdness"  or "Barry allegedly passed on the right, causing the accident."

Obama just succeeded in tainting any jury pool called to consider the fate of Loughner.  This could be a gift to his defense lawyer.  How could anyone get a fair trial once the President of the United States has already declared him a murderer?

I give props to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell for pointing out the op-ed's glaring faux pas on his show last night. I am really surprised it hasn't been picked up by any other media outlets -- at least I haven't seen it reported anywhere else in all my internet news travels.

This all leads me to believe that Obama didn't even write this plodding, talking-pointy, bullet-pointy op-ed. He may not have even read it.  As a graduate of Harvard Law, he should have caught the mistake. 

Sounds like a few heads need to roll besides that of a State Department spokesman who speaks out against the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning.

Chasing the Devil Out of Chase

A group of ministers stormed JP MorganChase on Park Avenue in New York on Friday to both perform an exorcism and close their accounts.  Although they waved their crucifixes with aplomb, and sprinkled holy water in an attempt to cast out the devil of greed, the banking behemoth was still standing as of Monday. No credible reports of CEO Jamie Dimon suffering attacks of pea-soup projectile vomiting or head-spinning have yet been received.



Jamie Demon Dimon

Chase, the nation’s third largest mortgage servicer, has modified the loans of only six percent of the New Yorkers requesting such relief in the past year. Out of more than a thousand city homeowners seeking help from Chase under the federal government’s Home Affordability Modification Program, more than 80 percent of the applicants never even got a reply from Chase.  Lloyd Blankfein. of that other mega-bank, Goldman Sachs, once infamously said that his Wall Street house was doing the "Lord’s work." But now the people who are really doing the Lord’s work are as mad as hell, and they aren’t taking it anymore.

It’s common wisdom that not only has HAMP been a bust , but the big banks are still acting like Mafia shakedown artists in foreclosing illegally and utterly thumbing their noses at the struggling homeowners the program was designed to help. Documents released today by the hacking group “Anonymous” reveal that Bank of America has been running a scam which forces its own expensive insurance on mortgagees without their knowledge.  Emails provided by a BofA whistleblower seem to indicate an effort to cover up the scam from the prying eyes of auditors.  A nonpartisan, populist activism group called Ampedstatus.com has recently morphed into a social networking site to organize anti-Wall Street demonstrations and nonviolent resistance against the oligarchy.  Protest events at several branches of the Federal Reserve are being planned for later this month.

Our government is not watching out for our interests, so somebody has to. President Obama is not about to come out on the side of the people when his White House is stuffed to the rafters with Wall Street insiders. His new chief of staff, Bill Daley, is fresh from a stint as one of the head honchos of JPMorgan Chase. So what if he temporarily divested himself of his bank stock?  That revolving door from government to the Military Industrial Complex and K Street is spinning apace, and the boundaries between private and public have become so blurred as to be nonexistent.

The small group of church people and their followers sang “We Shall Overcome” and quoted Martin Luther King before they peacefully performed their symbolic exorcism, entered the bank and closed out their accounts.  Rev. Allen Ramirez of the Brookville Reformed Church passionately shouted, “We are here to sprinkle holy water on the Evil Empire!"

The Hell That Fraud Has Created (Dore engraving from Dante's Inferno)

That there is a special place in hell reserved for banksters is not a new idea. Dante assigned the penultimate recess of his fiery pit – the Eighth Circle – to the greedy and the fraudulent. One of its denizens is Geryon, the demon of avarice. He has a smiling human face, so we don’t immediately notice his grasping claws and stinging scorpion tail. Dante knew his banking industry, all right.  It hasn’t changed in the 700 years since he lived and without regulation, it never will. This is Medievalism Redux.

The only cure for avarice is outside intervention. Exorcism, of course, has some pithy symbolic value. It’s a nice theatrical segue to the mass demonstrations, recalls, elections, public exposure and relentless drumbeat of discontent that grows ever louder with each passing day.

We. Have. Had. Enough.

A Garden of NeoCon Horrors*

You’d think Paul Wolfowitz would have the good sense to keep quiet, but as Maureen Dowd wrote in her column on Sunday, he has no shame. Neo-Cons, like all fanatics and preachers of moral rectitude, do not know silence, nor do they have the remorse chromosome in their genetic codes. They are not known for the qualities of soul-searching and self-examination. If they ever admitted they were wrong about Iraq, their heads might explode.

And, as long as complicent cable news outlets and newspapers are willing to give Wolfowitz and his cohort free airtime and space, they will never be silenced. They may have left public office, but they still wield inexplicable power in the court of public opinion. Like their cousins in radical conservatism, the Tea Partiers, the Neo-Cons thrive on fear-mongering and outright lies. They make millions of dollars on their ghostwritten fictional memoirs, and rise to the top of bestseller lists. Somebody out there is buying what they sell.

For example, Wolfowitz told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last Sunday that the families of the Pan-Am bombing victims had demanded money during the Bush Administration's negotiations with Libya over its removal from the official terrorism list. Wolfowitz admitted he had no proof to back up his claim, but he said it anyway. (The Pan-Am families, of course, have vehemently denied his allegations). But no matter – Wolfowitz and other relics of the Bush era seem to have a peculiar talent for staying front and center. Do you suppose it’s because we are all so in awe that none of them has ever been prosecuted for war crimes, and we are irresistibly drawn by the sheer chutzpah of career criminals who get away with it?. Or, does the mainstream media still remain convinced now, as they were then., that Iraq was a grand adventure and a rousing success despite a few “setbacks?”

Now. Wolfowitz is calling for aggressive military intervention in Libya, and was given valuable Wall Street Journal op-ed space to make his case.  Several months ago, he and Bush torture enabler John Yoo lambasted the decision to try terrorists on our soil, or to close Gitmo, in a high-profile New York Times op-ed piece.   Somebody obviously listened to them. Attorney General Holder long ago walked back on plans for New York City trials as perfect symbolic venues for 9/11 terrorism payback. Gitmo is still very much there. All trials will now be by military tribunal, not in civilian courts.

 Maureen Dowd suggested in her column that Wolfowitz should just go away and take up horticulture. Any NeoCon Garden would surely include the toxic herb Wolfbane, which is an apt name and has the unpleasant side-effect of causing too much nervous excitement ( I think W. might have been given an infusion of that particular herb to psych him up for invading Iraq).

 And Wolfowitz has always cultivated bleeding hearts, which look lovely, but their pretty name belies the fact that every part of them is poisonous. The Bush crowd sold the nation on its bleeding heart doctrine in the run-up to invasion - by ginning up a lie about WMDs and then spreading vaunted, unwanted and nonexistent Democracy where it smelled money to be made for the Military Industrial complex.

Of course, there's always been a fair amount of the noxious Dumbcane in the NeoCon botanica. That's another toxic weed that is the devil to get rid of once it takes hold. Just when you think you it's gone, it keeps popping up, year after year.  It  thrives especially well in the moist unhealthy air and swampy soil around Washington, D.C. 

 * This post was originally submitted as a "comment" to the NY Times. It was rejected, probably because it was deemed too abusive.  How can you be too abusive to Paul Wolfowitz?  Other posts openly called for his demise.  Wow, life is so unfair.