From ctblogger I caught a cross your fingers and hope it is true comment linking to this story:

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Considering Stepping Down

John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court

, is seriously considering stepping down from the nation’s highest court for personal reasons, RadarOnline.com has learned exclusively.

Absolutely no sources in the story... Zip. Zero. Nada. But imagine the SCOTUS being taken out of the screwardship of that far right wing activist judges' corporate influenced rule?

[update - CM1] Linkbait? Radaronline updated with:

Update: RadarOnline.com has obtained new information that Justice Roberts will NOT resign. The justice will be staying on the bench.

I just came across this little blurb on CNN regarding the "party crasher" incident at the White House:

It was unclear whether the Salahis would accept the committee's invitation to testify, according to the committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi.

"Late this evening, I was informed by the Salahis' counsel, that their clients, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, may not appear before the Committee tomorrow as requested," Thompson said in a statement released Wednesday evening. "If the Salahis are absent from tomorrow's hearing, the Committee is prepared to move forward with subpoenas to compel their appearance."

Really? Prepared to move forward with subpoenas to compel their appearance?

Yes, I use the word "justice" loosely there for the fact that there was no real justice in Judge Mark
Ciavarella's court room. If you were a kid you were just a commodity to be sold off and incarcerated for his own personal enrichement:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled late Thursday that almost all
juvenile delinquency cases heard by former Luzerne County Judge Mark
Ciavarella from Jan. 1, 2003 to May 31, 2008 must be thrown out.

Ciavarella took millions in kickbacks to incarcerate juvenile offenders in private detention facilities.

The affect of this recent decision is that it could effect change in as many as 6500 kids' sentences. ABC has some video and a nice writeup updating this story:

[Reposted from author's site with permission]

By David Swanson

If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised. But if I told you that these women and men had gotten together and, after three years of work, brought the nation's largest high-cost lender to its knees, forced it to sell out to a foreign company, and won back a half a billion dollars of what had been taken from them-one of the largest consumer settlements ever-you'd probably ask me what country this had happened in. Surely it couldn't have been in the United States of the Second Gilded Age, the land of unbridled corporate power and radical government activism on behalf of the rich and the greedy.

Yet, it was. These victims identified a problem and named it "predatory lending" in the late 1990s. Their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That's why more people haven't heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

I was ACORN's communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign, but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

To see this posed as a potentially serious question by the commercially-interested media caused my eyes to open a little wider than usual. After 8 or 9 years, they finally consider the prospect?

CNN: Could George W. Bush or some of his top aides end up behind bars?

And then assessed that unlikely outcome in light of the reluctance of Obama Administration to have even started down the retrospective path "look forward, not back."


It's exactly the willingness of political officeholders to overlook their predecessors' disdain for the Constitution and the once-hallowed rule of our law that recycles people like Dick Cheney into second and third terms. He's obviously extended the damage left undone in previous tenures.

Fortunately, beyond also egging wackos on to the farthest reaches of their peculiar universes (some in Texas are about to enshrine 'wisdom' of the likes of Newt Gingrich in their textbooks, have they seceded from the Union yet?), the large vaccuums of responsibility that forward-looking" Administrations leave behind have moved at least some grassroots efforts to creative work-arounds able to get the attention of retiring criminal classes.

Netroots Nation has posted a video of my panel, Organizing as a Healing Process: A Fresh Look at PTSD.

Panelists discussed PTSD as a soul wound, an altered spiritual state that enables the sufferer to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances such as war, and severe personal or historical trauma. We related troop PTSD to the symptoms suffered by refugees and the survivors of disaster or genocide. People experiencing soul wounding have witnessed the naked face of humanity stripped of the divine. They are messengers, encouraging awareness of injustice and all that is wrong with our ordering of our world. Organizing heals the wounds of the sufferer, empowering her to tell her personal story, and allowing the rest of us to listen.

Special Initiative on Agent Orange/Dioxin

Backround From 1961 to 1971, U.S. military forces sprayed more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides on forests and crops in southern and central Vietnam. The campaign had both human and environmental consequences. The immediate effect was to defoliate and destroy vegetation over wide areas. The delayed impact came from dioxin, a highly toxic chemical in Agent Orange that is critically harmful to humans................

Kudo's Barrack, Kudo's, But Much More Still Needed! US Doubles Funds for Agent Orange Cleanup

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — The United States government has doubled its funding for dealing with the environmental and health consequences of its wartime use in Vietnam of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange, the embassy said Friday. President Barack Obama recently signed a bill increasing the funding from $3 million to $6 million, embassy officials said. Most of the money is being used in Danang, where U.S. troops used to mix and store Agent Orange at an Air Force base before loading it onto planes.

Explain the logic of why the GOP wants Pelosi to resign again...? Why not just engage a commission to investigate torture to find out exactly what happened, who knew what and when did they know it? Why aren't the GOP pundits and Congress-critters -- both current and former -- naming any of their own and demanding an investigation of everyone and the entire program?

I've seen screeching by insane, unbalanced right-wingers and headlines claiming that the GOP is loudly proclaiming that Pelosi could have objected to the process. That, of course, begs a pertinent question: Which (R) individuals objected? What were they told, and when? Where are calls for their resignations? Why is the GOP so silent on their own involvement and complicity? Why are their pundits and their rabid base of supporters not interested in a full and complete investigation?

And what's so objectionable about criticizing the CIA -- weren't they involved? Haven't they been involved in conspiracies and cover-ups before?

Today, from the New York Times:

Iran Sentences American Journalist to 8 Years
By NAZILA FATHI, New York Times

TEHRAN, April 18 - A revolutionary court has sentenced an Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi, to eight years in prison after convicting her of spying for the United States, her lawyer said Saturday.

The "revolutionary court" is, of course, very familiar to us: it's very much like the military tribunals held for Guatanamo inmates, particularly as practiced under the Bush Administration and their strongly politicized Department of Justice.

Hopefully, those practices are being mothballed in America now by the Obama Administration, along with many of the other quaint, highly illegal and unConstitutional practices that the prior Administration prided itself on.

This is an Open Thread.

Over the past few months since the inauguration of President Obama, people have speculated about whether or not the various alleged -- and actual -- crimes of the Bush Administration would ever be truly investigated. Some thought that Attorney General Eric Holder would initiate domestic investigations. Some were heartened by the example set by the British as they began their own internal investigation, hoping that the U.S. would soon follow suit.

But nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition...

Well, maybe nobody. But nonetheless, Spain has begun an inquiry and started the process for indicting six former member of the Bush Administration for their actions.

It's about time.

This is an Open Thread.

 Originally posted 2009-01-21 07:28:58 -0500; promoted by carol. Please note links to two additional videos.

ePluribus Media contributors: avahome, luaptifer, greyhawk, carol and roxy

Over the last three years, ePluribus Media researchers and writers have delivered reports on the corruption and partisan shenanigans at the Justice Department.  

We brought you indepth coverage of the US Attorney Purge as it was happening.

In February of 2007 Dr. Donald Shields brought his findings on the politization of the Justice Department and ePluribus Media published the first of two reports and an interview with Dr. Shields.

The body of Dr. Shields work was around "leaked reports" of investigations:

The focus of the study was the reporting (and thus the leaking) of federal investigations from supposedly secret grand jury subpoenas, federal agent inquiries, and grand jury testimony. Those press reports are not ephemeral at all. That's why we give the approximate date of each story (or indictment, if any) -- so that readers can go search it out for themselves and confirm the investigation.

The study of the leaked reporting did not look at the people behind these reports ... the lives that were thrown into disarray, the careers that were damaged or ruined.

Now, this series of videos has come on our radar, and it is highlighting the same body of work that has already been published, only in a powerful "first-person" interview style. In the first segment of the series, you will see one of the interviewees ... Kathryn Shields, who is the sister of Dr. Shields, tell her story, along with many others. Here are links to parts two and three. that complete the set.

This is only the beginning of the process of uncovering the "rot" in the Justice Department. We must be vigilent in our watching the new administration to make sure these wrongs are righted and that Justice is returned to the DOJ and it is not used as a political tool. 

Posted with permission of Nicholas Benton, owner/editor of the Falls Church News Press

Hillary: A Champion of Women, Globally

by Nicholas Benton

Sen. Hillary Clinton's tour-de-force in the confirmation hearing on her appointment as Secretary of State before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee provided a picture window into the scope and depth of the transformative power the in-coming Obama administration will bring globally.

The 65-page transcript of the hearing is worth reading in full, a veritable textbook on American foreign policy, on how the new administration promises to reverse the incredibly damaging worldwide effect of eight years of George W. Bush lunacy.

Clinton may have preferred to be president, but in her role as Secretary of State, she will become an incredible force for good for the planet, hands down the most influential American woman since Eleanor Roosevelt, and maybe ever.

Promoted by carol. Originally posted 2009-01-16 11:56:00 -0500. Many of us have been thinking along the same line as Krugman but IMO it is useful for a Nobel Winning NY Times correspondent to also be on message.

I'm so happy I found this haven for lost diaries... Again, I posted this at the KOS and watched it slide down the great orange slopes. Again, it was rescued, and praised by a few diligent readers there. And, again, I bring it to you. Thank you for being here.

"I guess it depends if you're a half-glass empty guy or a half-glass full guy."
—George W. Bush

Ever get a parking ticket when you were a half-glass empty guy? Or maybe you were a full-glass full guy, in Bernie Madoff's old neighborhood, and you've had some million dollar months? A $100 equals a tenth of a grand a month, one ten-thousandth of a million. If you make $50,000 a year (a little above the median), that ticket is 0.024% of your monthly income. If you make $12 million  per year, it's 0.0001%, approximately 240 times less than the median American's unhappiness over the same violation.

A flat tax would be more fair than a flat fine. At least with flat income taxes, we'd all be paying the same percentage of our income.

Dwindling tax revenues force governments to look for ways to balance their budgets. Draconian nose amputations are showing up in emergency rooms all over America. More are on their way. Regressive taxes are just worsening the pain on the lowest earners.