Scott Brown attempting to unseat Dem. Jeanne Shaheen in NH

Yep, it's sadly true looks like Republican Scott Brown is making another attempt at attaining a Democratic senate seat. This time he MOVED to NH just to unseat the wonderful Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. I will not state the obvious that this must NOT happen.

I am sure NH Dems will come out in MAXIMUM strength to make sure it does NOT. The rancid Brown, equipped with his nefarious attack on the great Senator from Mass., Elizabeth Warren by besmirching her ethnicity with his insulting racist Indian war hooping minions leading the way, cannot be allowed yet again to try to turn the Senate Republican this time in the Massachusetts's neighboring state of New Hampshire. He did NOT win against Senator Warren and he CANNOT win against Shaheen.

NH voters MUST GET THE DEMOCRATIC vote out to ensure this does NOT happen.

We are at a crossroads in our nation's history. Either we move forward to an all inclusive nation or we move backwards into a pre Civil War era with the nullification of everything the Democratic Party has achieved for all of us.

The 1% are coming for it all -- your money and for everything as the great George Carlin so presciently predicted in his "American Dream" monologue.

Make NO mistake Scott Brown is NOT about you. He can say he is all he wants but he is NOT about the 98% He is about the 1% and most assuredly he is not about most of us!

Google George Carlin's "American Dream" monologue if you want to hear someone get a bulls-eye by predicting in 2007 what is true today. I wish he were here today to realize how correct he was. If you Google it be warned it contains some profanity. I can take the profanity because he is 100% right on the money ... literally!

Lyndon Johnson gave a speech about legislation giving every American the right to vote - LBJ Presidential Library

What we stand to lose if Republicans take power as they try to suppress the vote all over the nation. Listen to the speech LBJ gave. How dignified and brave for a man from the south to take up the cause of minorities and all of us! Feel free to forward.

http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/speeches-films/president-johnsons-special-message-to-the-congress-the-american-promise/

Your Life

If Republican lies on Obamacare win it all for the Republicans and if the Koch Brothers with other bottomless money pits wrest control of the entire country for them YOU WILL lose. 

If Republicans take it all and you do not mind losing your rights to an endurable life making the 1% richer and the 98% poorer then pay no attention to 2014 election and simply let Republicans win.  

If they win YOU and all of us (except the richest 1%) will lose.  If you do not mind losing your right to a better life, the right to make your own choices, the right to hope for a better life then feel free to sit this one out.  I suspect once you lose these things many take for granted you will NOT like it.Work for a Democratic win and TURN OUT THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE.   I list, again, the following that WILL occur if Republicans win it all:

Eradication of the Affordable Care Act which is bringing health insurance to those who had none and saving lives Republicans do not care to save;

Social Security – they want to privatize it;

Medicare—Republicans will tell you they want to save it from Obama cuts but that is a lie.  They want deform it with vouchers;

Medicaid—they want to eradicate it;

Private Enterprise rights over civil rights—they want each state to decide if they want to discriminate even if it means not serving minorities at a lunch counter or restaurant with the ultimate elimination of the 1965 Civil Rights Act;

The reversal of Roe v. Wade eliminating a woman’s right to choose her own family planning and medical fate, who for numerous medical and other reasons seek abortion relegating them to the back alley abortionists of yesteryear who blood poisoned and through infection killed thousands and reduced women sometimes even to sterility;

Returning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy to the military so gays must live in fear of Putin-like policy and, yes, even elimination from society at large by imprisonment;

Codifying Constitutionally-based discrimination;

Re-instituting the Defense of Marriage Act;

Capturing the judiciary with extremist right wing judges;

Promoting a culture of guns even for 5 year olds and even in our schools;

Ad infinitum eternal war and a bloated military budget;

Relegating women to second class pay status;

Eradicating unions that protect workers;

More tax cuts for the rich which will NEVER trickle down to you;

Deregulating the economy-crushing Wall Street and returning business to a pre Great Depression and Great Recession status;

Never passing a minimum wage;

Eradicating unemployment benefits;

Denying science, climate change and the catastrophes we already have suffered from man-induced global climate change including severe drought, severe storms, tornadoes, floods, fire, ice and snow;

Denying the fact of evolution so that new biological discoveries which will save lives will not happen; teaching the mythological creationism as fact-based non science;

Severe cuts to the NIH eliminating government’s disease fighting and disease tracking efforts; 

Diminishing regulatory agencies like the EPA;

Eliminating mental health government-sponsored studies;

Proliferating dirty oil and fracking that have polluted so much of the nation and setting it literally on fire;

Emphasizing alternative clean energy;

Negligence repairing Infrastructure that has decayed all over the nation.

Our nation, if Republicans are given total power, will end programs that have helped sustain it over decades even centuries.  They have done so in states where Republicans reign.

We MUST work hard to tell the Koch Brothers and their ilk that they CANNOT buy America.  We must work HARD to elect, contribute to and advocate for Democrats everywhere.  MOST OF ALL GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE in every state and for each branch of Congress in 2014 and beyond! 

Your life is at stake. It's that simple.

Pass this on to whomever you like.

The Leader Obama Wanted to Become and What Became of Him

An interesting view of the Obama presidency so far and one which I am loathe to admit. The author Professor David Bromwich may, however, speech some truth worthy of a spot on my blog.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/the-leader-obama-wanted-t_b_4932145.html

SUNK: Why I care

My heart sank as I heard last evening about the Florida Congressional House loss of Alex Sink in close race of a bellwether election. I thought the Democrats' ability to take back the House in 2014 to pass legislation that matters for the nation is at risk BUT as a caveat I am told by a Democratic colleague "There was an "independent" who took the rest and it is said he took votes away from Sink. Otherwise Sink would have won. The GOP spent $5MN + - highest in the history of any house race. This was a special election and I believe the winner has to run again in Nov 2014." 

The obstructionist Republicans want this president's legacy, if they can get nothing else, to be failure. They ultimately want nothing less than a takeover of every branch of our government. THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN.

Here is why I care: I care because I care about those who by dumb luck did not get handed life's good luck. I care because I do not believe we are put on this earth in this nation to sink or swim on our own. I care because I believe we ARE our brother’s keeper and because I believe in the success of FDR’s New Deal and ALL the New Deals that have taken place after that.

The Republican Party has devolved into the Party of the 1% richest in this nation using its endless money pit and populist rhetoric filled with lies to dupe mostly aging low information whites, religious fanatics and Confederate sympathizers of the old south to support their cause. The Republican Party is now the right wing extremist Party of white nationalists who will stop at nothing to take what the middle class and the poor have worked so hard over centuries to achieve.

Here is what you stand to lose if Republicans take all three branches of the US government over time:

Eradication of the Affordable Care Act which is bringing health insurance to those who had none and saving lives Republicans do not care to save;

Social Security – they want to privatize it;

Medicare—they want deform it with vouchers;

Medicaid—they want to eradicate it;

Private Enterprise rights over civil rights—they want each state to decide if they want to discriminate even if it means not serving minorities at a lunch counter or restaurant with the ultimate elimination of the 1965 Civil Rights Act;

The reversal of Roe v. Wade eliminating a woman’s right to choose her own family planning fate, who for numerous medical and other reasons seek abortion relegating them to the back alley abortionists of yesteryear who blood poisoned and through infection killed thousands and reduced women sometimes even to sterility;

Returning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy to the military so gays must live in fear of Putin-like policy and, yes, even elimination from society at large by imprisonment;

Codifying Constitutionally-based discrimination;

Re-instituting the Defense of Marriage Act;

Capturing the judiciary with extremist right wing judges;

Promoting a culture of guns even for 5 year olds and even in our schools;

Ad infinitum eternal war and a bloated military budget;

Relegating women to second class pay status;

Eradicating unions that protect workers;

More tax cuts for the rich which will NEVER trickle down to you;

Deregulating the economy-crushing Wall Street and returning business to a pre Great Depression and Great Recession status;

Never passing a minimum wage;

Eradicating unemployment benefits;

Denying science and the catastrophes we already have suffered from man induced climate change including severe drought, severe storms, tornadoes, floods, fire, ice and snow;

Denying the fact of evolution so that new biological discoveries which will save lives will not happen; teaching the mythological creationism as fact-based non science;

Eliminating government’s disease fighting and disease tracking efforts by severe cuts to the NIH and all government regulatory agencies like the EPA;

Eliminating mental health government-sponsored studies;

Proliferating dirty oil and fracking that have polluted so much of the nation and setting it literally on fire;

Failing to seek alternative clean energy;

Leaving our infrastructure to decay.
I care because of all these things and more.

Our nation, if Republicans are given power, will not survive and in short we are SUNK.
It is why I care and why we MUST work hard to elect Democrats throughout the land in 2014 and beyond!

A Suggested First Look

Glenn Greenwald civil libertarian supreme, documentary film maker Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill (Academy Award nominee for best documentary film: Dirty Wars,) Matt Taibbi the brilliant expositor of Wall Street's egregiously unethical activities that helped crush the middle class are creating a new enterprise.  

They are all my gurus despite the fact that I do not agree with everything they posit.  I agree with enough of their views to make them a part of my intellectual quest for truth. They and others whose intellectual gifts are many and whose political slant is humanitarian left of center are joining forces to create an online enterprise called "First Look Media." I link it here or below.  It is in its formative stage. When it is completed it will be one of the web pages I will go to often in my quest for journalistic excellence.  

I urge to you check it out.  They summarize its objective as follows:

First Look Media seeks to re-imagine journalism for the digital age, combining the promise of technological innovation with the power of fearless reporting. Founded by Pierre Omidyar, the organization will pursue original, independent journalism that is deeply reported and researched, thoroughly fact checked, and beautifully told. We are driven above all by a belief that democracy depends on a citizenry that is not just highly informed, but deeply engaged. In all our work, we are committed to strict standards of accuracy and honesty, a willingness to report our own errors and inconsistencies as well as those of others, and a deep respect for the transformative power of true stories.

https://firstlook.org/#/home

I wished them luck and said in an email to them:

There can be no doubt that the forces of mendacious media that promote lies and half truths is filled to the corporate teeth with money that makes it so difficult to forge a new way and report truth.  I have followed Glenn Greenwald when he wrote for Salon, the Guardian and when he was interviewed by numerous media.  I have heard him speak at Harvard and have followed closely the Snowden revelations and other civil libertarian issues about which Glenn has written. While I take issue with some things, I look to Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and many others for truth that most reporting and journalism in our time sorely lacks.  

I lived through the anti-war era of Howard Zinn and many others in the late 1960's, looking up to their scholarship. My life was changed philosophically and politically by them.  Now I look to this new generation of humanitarian journalists to point the way for our time as it is time or rather it is way past time that the course of our nation change and recapture that which the so called "Greatest Generation" of my parents illuminated but has over decades lost its bright light and therefore its way.

I write my own opinion blog which is not the scholarship your writers will provide but transmits my view so that when, perhaps, scholars study this era long after I am gone, they will see there are those among us who wanted to speak truth to power and stand for something humane again.  

I will give "First Look" a first look, a second, a third and more.

I wish you all luck in your new venture.  Judging from your video explaining what you are trying to do I suspect you will be a success.  I look forward to reading your work.

The Ukraine Another Wiew--the Winners of History

There is another view out there in news land and it does not make the US and NATO look all that good with respect to Ukraine.  The problem is the media in this country is corporatist controlled and wants you to know what it wants you to know.  White-hat American exceptionalism is used often as the rationale and myth for war. But this is still a free speech nation, the fact I love most about it, and other points of view IF one looks for them are out there.  You have to look.

Reader Supported News in my opinion is a respected left of center news source.  If you care about nuclear war or war in general, if you care about your children's lives and their children's lives you should read it and then read another side of the issue which is saturated in our mainstream news.  Make an informed opinion.

It is, for me, often very difficult to know the truth as it was impossible to know at the time that the Vietnam Gulf of Tonken rationale for the years long Vietnam fiasco was untrue as were the rationales for the Iraq War.  It became known after the dastardly deeds and effects of those war killed, maimed and exiled millions.  

Much later after the explosions have stopped the truth eventually often comes out.  Wars supporting the American Vietnam War and the recent Iraq war were all based on lies, ill advised, ill conceived without understanding future cultural consequential disasters.  This is proven so.  In view of that and in view of a dangerous potential confrontation in this latest potential conflagration with a nuclear armed state, Russia, the American electorate should damn well know and weigh all sides before blood pours in a gush and this time not only from soldiers but from us civilians.  

Think well on whom you elect and think well before the US enters into something that would have catastrophic global implications.  I am not asking you to accept the article below but to merely consider it and know the winners of history prevail in the writing of it.

More reader commentary is here if you scroll below the article pasted below or at this link: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22381-focus-us-provokes-russia-acts-surprised-to-get-a-nasty-reaction

US Provokes Russia, Acts Surprised to Get a Nasty Reaction

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

04 March 14

How crazy will Americans get over Ukraine?

f too many people get sucked in by the current, distorted media coverage of events unfolding now in Ukraine, then there's a good chance life will get very ugly for a lot of innocent people, since one of the logical end points is the use of nuclear weapons. Everyone in power knows that's a potential reality, but the urge to demagogue the Russians is presently overwhelming honesty and caution.

Ukraine is NOT a real place. Ukraine has never been a real place, not in the sense that Madascar or Cuba are both undeniably real places with real edges. Ukraine has no real edges, just lines on a map imposed by some treaty or army over the past several thousand years. To speak, as the more pompous do, of Ukraine's "territorial integrity" is to speak of an imaginary construct, useful for blurring people's minds for political purposes.

Ukraine in recent years has been what the power brokers of the disintegrating Soviet Union decided to let it be in 1991. Ukraine has no coherent history as a nation. First inhabited some 44,000 years ago, most of the region's history is as occupied territory.

Russia's history of maintaining a military presence in Crimea is older than United States history. The Russian Black Sea Fleet has been based in Sevastopol in Crimea continuously since 1783. For the Russians, this is a crucial warm water port, currently leased from Ukraine till 2042.

To understand what this means to the Russians, it probably matters more to them than the United States would care if the Cubans decided to threaten the Naval Base at Guantanamo, and we know that wouldn't have a happy ending.

Is anyone involved in Ukraine NOT to blame for something?

In spite of its history as a subjugated non-state, Ukraine has managed something like a functioningdemocratic government from time to time in recent years. Now is not one of those times. The elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was by all accounts corrupt, but he was elected. Although the process was somewhat messy, he was duly elected in 2010 with almost 49% of the vote, concentrated in Russian-populated eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Now Yanukovych has been deposed, perhaps justly, but by an unjust process spearheaded by a street mob and a disenthralled parliament. The parliament has appointed an acting president and Yanukovych is in asylum in Russia. It's not clear that Ukraine now has a legitimate government of any sort.

The Ukrainian presidential crisis, which is ongoing, is surely the result of longstanding, internal Ukrainian faultlines, ethnic, political, and economic. And the crisis is even more surely the result of deliberate, years-long interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine by the United States, the European Union, NATO, and other western forces, as Robert Parry has described. Ukraine appears to be the latest victim of those New American Century conspirators who brought the world such success in Afghanistan, Iraq, Honduras, and Syria (home to another Russian warm water port and their only Mediterranean base).

"KREMLIN DEPLOYS MILITARY TO SEIZE CRIMEA" - N.Y. Times headline

That front page headline in the Times is, perhaps, less inflammatory than others elsewhere, but it was five columns wide and deploying "Kremlin" that way is pure Cold War journalism. As for accuracy, it's close - even if it doesn't acknowledge that Russian troops have long been based in Crimea and "seize" is a hyperbolic rendering of an unopposed deployment which may even have been welcomed by most of the population.

The subhead - "REBUFF TO OBAMA" - is essentially propaganda, as it tries to make the president personally relevant to a situation that has its own dynamic. It's also propaganda insofar as it tries to make this an American crisis to which we're supposed to respond, rather than one we promoted for reasons that remain obscure.

The Times offers some idea of why Russia might be wary, but that's deep in an inside sidebar, not the front page story. The deadpan tone hides a host of implied threats to Russian stability and safety:

"Ukraine had accomplished some military reform with NATO advice, but since President Yanukovych said that Ukraine was not interested in full NATO membership, cooperation has lagged, the NATO official said. Ukraine has, however, taken part in some military exercises with NATO, contribute some troops to NATO's response force and helped in a small way in Libya."

In other words, the "pro-Russian" Yanukovych was contributing to NATO, albeit in a small way that might even have been part of a balancing act reflecting Ukraine's unfortunate but inescapable geographic location bordering both Russia and NATO members Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. As far as the NATO allies were concerned, Ukraine's effort to be a buffer state with good relations with all its hostile neighbors was not enough. Both NATO and the European Union were pressuring Ukraine to choose sides, NATO's side. How did they honestly expect Russia to react, sooner or later?

These provocations have gone on for years in different forms, apparently with President Obama's blessing, since he apparently did nothing, or nothing effective, to mitigate or even stop the relentless instigation of Ukrainians toward violence. In mid-December 2013, former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich warned of the trap Ukrainian demonstrators in Independence Square were headed toward.

The fascist, neo-Nazi, ethnic cleansing forces in Kiev and western Ukraine do not control the government at this point, but they control the streets and they are the most armed and organized of the factions in Ukraine. They provided many of the shock troops in recent confrontations with police at Independence Square.

Concern about the possible rise to power of right-wing forces contributed to the decision by Crimean authorities to reject the legitimacy of the Kiev government and establish de facto control of Crimea as, effectively, a temporary independent and autonomous province of Ukraine. After that, Sergei Aksyonov, prime minister of Crimea, asked the Russians for help safeguarding the region.

Aksyonov also announced that Crimea would hold a public referendum on independence on March 30.

The government in Kiev mobilized the military to defend Ukraine and dispatched some troops to Crimea. There the majority of those troops reportedly joined the forces of the Crimean autonomous region.

"PUTIN GOES TO WAR" - New Yorker online headline, March 1, 2014

The usually brilliant David Remnick somehow sees this multi-faceted, low level, uncertain and ambiguous situation as a "war." Since no shot had been fired by the time he wrote about what he called a "demonstration war," that made it an especially interesting demonstration.

"Putin's reaction exceeded our worst expectations," Remnick wrote, suggesting that no one had realistic expectations. For this statement to be true, "we" must have been delusional. Remnick must know that a rational person's expectations when provoking a huge nuclear power would have to be extreme - or detached from reality.

What did anyone expect Russia to do in the face of perennial probes affecting its vital interests, real or perceived? Writing with a Cold War approach that denigrates or omits anything that makes sense of Russian behavior, Remnick compares the Russian deployment in Crimea to Georgia in 2008, Afghanistan in 1979, Checkoslovakia in 1968. He omits any mention of Sevastopol or NATO. He argues instead that this is all about Putin's psyche.

Without doubt, Putin's Russia has its horrors, but not everyone is blinded by them, any more than they are blinded by American horrors. Writing in Haaretz on February 25, before Ukraine fully came apart,Amatzia Baram wrote with clear-eyed analysis of the developing situation:

If Ukraine degenerates into chaos, Russia's naval base in Sevastopol will be in danger. If that happens, Putin may have an interest in seeing Ukraine split, for he will have no choice but to seize control somehow - perhaps with the services of a loyal Ukrainian politician - of Sevastopol and the surrounding area, or even of Eastern Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula where it is situated.

The United States does not bear the sole responsibility for de-stabilizing Ukraine and risking a nuclear power confrontation, but there is little doubt that if the United States had not been an eager co-conspirator in twenty years of increasingly reckless global expansionism we wouldn't be in this current quandary.

But here we are, headed into another media wonderland where the actual context of putting missiles near another country's borders is expected to elicit a reaction different from the one the Russians would get if they tried to finagle Mexico into a military alliance or base missiles in Canada.

Come on, people, keep your wits about you. American exceptionalism isn't always such a good thing.

---

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theater, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

The Conundrum-Staring us in the Face

 Ukraine, the casus belli of the moment, is a conundrum.

The problematic events in Ukraine, a Crimea Putin/Russia-US/the west standoff, evoked an oh-no-here-we-go-again sigh.  Will this be another Georgia (the country bordering Russia) and the one in which Russian troops remain to this day because the conservative darling of war George W. Bush simply let Russia take it?  No one cared about Georgia.  Of course, now when it is Obama facing his foreign policy emergency moment in Ukraine conservatives hopped on the anti-Obama train before it left the station.  They now care about it so much.  If the president is for something the Republicans will be against it excoriating him for, as some said, “feckless” leadership.  That’s a help--not!  Show the world how severely divided the US is as if it, especially Putin, did not know that fact already.  Did McCain of putrid politics without principles immediately want the US to rattle its sabers and invade yet another country?  Yes, sure, John, let’s have another 10 year war especially with a nuclear-armed nation.  We know how much the electorate loved the last illegal war in Iraq as the US invaded a sovereign nation based on a lie and how much fun it was. [A suggested note of community interest: The Rachel Maddow special tonight on MSNBC at 9:00 p.m. “Why We Did It” is being shown. My guess is she will show you why we are a war weary nation.]

Here’s a pop question for you:  How many wars has the US been involved since its inception?  Answer found among an interesting list of ad infinitum and ad nauseam wars athttp://www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/we-re-at-war-and-we-have-been-since-1776/ (I do not agree with all of the web’s slant but on US war making I think it correct):

“Since the United States existed she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence.  In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.

To put this in perspective: Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.”

Does this nation want yet another war?  I suspect it does not hence the furious diplomatic efforts to avoid one.

It is hard to wax critical of the speck in the other guy’s eye when one has a log in one’s own. -- Matthew 7:1-6

History has its shades of gray though.  This latest dust up (we hope it remains just a “dust up”) is no different.

My grandparents on my mother's side emigrated to the US from two small mostly Jewish Diaspora shtetls (towns) of Shepatovka and Slavuta near Kiev, Ukraine.  If they had not left those grandparents, one aunt and one uncle born there would have been killed as would all of the others in the family line.  They would have died either in the Nazi Holocaust or from the pogroms (violent actions against Jews by Russians and the vicious anti-Semites of those areas in Eastern Europe) from which they fled.  Their progeny never would have achieved the success it did containing numbers of Ivy League school graduates, one Harvard educated doctor, one Johns Hopkins graduate and Stanford University surgeon, one speech therapist, one graduate of Yale Law School, one speech writer in the White House, one Wellesley College graduate, teachers, professors and more.  This country offered them possibilities.

How anyone can defend Russia with its history of pogroms, anti-Semitism and murderous tyrants like Stalin who killed millions, arrested, condemned to exile in Siberia thousands I do not know.  Putin’s Soviet KGB legacy he wants so much to resurrect with his macho style, vicious dogs and Cossacks-of-old unleashed against any innocent who dares to question him, or simply desires to wear a rainbow T-shirt, or sing a song without being pummeled, jailed or worse is not a man whose support the west should aspire to court.  There are ways to isolate this brutal man and the Russia of old without hopefully a drop more bloodshed but if in the end Crimea wants to join with Russia I say let em and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

The conundrum of my life continues.  While the west is not perfect I think it infinitely freer than anywhere else on earth.  I am, though, not unmindful of those who raise critiques and question western policy and its many often futile wars. It is a tribute to the west that we can critique it without fear of the thought police coming to get us in the night.

Man has had a long history filled with war, lies and death.  Indeed, life is nasty, brutish and short as Hobbs the 17^th century philosopher once said.  It is no less so in our time but the advantages of western culture and free thought cannot be denied.  It stares us in the face whether we want to look at it or not.

Who's the Crook and Who's the liar?

Martin Bashir Reminds Viewers Of Darrell Issa's Criminal Past

By karoli May 17, 2013 9:00 am

 3203Share837 899Share16 13.4K

Bashir spent some time reminding us all of Darrell Issa's past criminal transgressions just in case we had forgotten that the fox is in charge of the henhouse right now.

Now that we're all being treated to the sight of Darrell Issa puffing up and bloviating about his work as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, this clip with Ari Melber and Martin Bashir is an excellent reminder of which fox currently chairs the henhouse. Ryan Lizza's 2011 profile of Issa served as the basis for today's discussion.

There is the car theft, for example. Oh, alleged car theft, I should say. After all, the man who made his fortune from a car alarm company was accused of auto theft at one point:

A member of Issa’s Army unit, Jay Bergey, told Williams that his most vivid recollection of the young Issa was that in December, 1971, Issa stole his car, a yellow Dodge Charger. “I confronted Issa,” Bergey said in 1998. “I got in his face and threatened to kill him, and magically my car reappeared the next day, abandoned on the turnpike.”

Ok, maybe that was a prank, but after that, there was this:

On March 15, 1972, three months after Issa allegedly stole Jay Bergey’s car and one month after he left the Army for the first time, Ohio police arrested Issa and his older brother, William, and charged them with stealing a red Maserati from a Cleveland showroom. The judge eventually dismissed the case.

While the Maserati case was pending, Issa went to college. Just before 11 p.m. on Friday, December 1, 1972, two police officers on patrol in the small town of Adrian noticed Issa driving a yellow Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street. The police pulled him over, and, as Issa retrieved the car registration, an officer saw something peculiar in the glove compartment. He searched it, and, according to the police report, found a .25-calibre Colt automatic inside a box of ammunition, along with a “military pouch” that contained “44 rounds of ammo and a tear gas gun and two rounds of ammo for it.” Issa was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. The policeman asked why he was armed. “He stated in Ohio you could carry a gun as long as you had a justifiable reason,” the report said. “His justifiable reason was for his car’s protection and his.” Issa pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered gun. He paid a small fine and was sentenced to six months’ probation.

When Issa ran for the Senate in 1998, he rewrote his past:

"He had been a soldier, and he claimed that he was part of an elite bomb detecting unit that guarded President Nixon at the 1971 World Series," said Williams.

Williams called up the Nixon Presidential Library, and was told that Nixon hadn't gone to any World Series games that year. Then Williams looked into Issa's purportedly stellar career in the Army.

"The biography that he was providing the press in the context of his campaign was all wrong. He had a bad conduct rating. He was demoted, and a fellow soldier accused him of stealing his car," said Williams.

But probably the most suspicious and most uninvestigated event in Issa's checkered past is the mysterious 1982 fire at his factory at a time where he was buying out the owner of Steal Stopper, the predecessor to Issa's car alarm company. Issa quadrupled his insurance coverage and then boom! The place burned down. Lizza:

Joey Adkins, the former owner of Steal Stopper, provided the main evidence against Issa. On the afternoon of September 20, 1982, in a lengthy recorded interview with an insurance investigator, he described a series of suspicious actions by Issa before the fire. Adkins, who still worked for Steal Stopper, said that Issa removed the company’s Apple II computer from the building, including “all hardware, all software, all the instruction books,” and also “the discs for accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer list, everything.” According to Adkins, Issa also transferred a copy of every design used by Steal Stopper from a filing cabinet to a fireproof box. He also said that Issa put in the box some important silk screens used in the production of circuit boards.Insurance officials noted that, less than three weeks before the fire, Issa had increased his insurance from a hundred thousand dollars to four hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars. “Quite frankly,” Adkins told the investigator, “I feel the man set the fire.”

So did the insurance company. They finally settled out of court for about $20,000, which was a fraction of what Issa had sued them for.

Not mentioned in the Bashir discussion but equally interesting is this small nugget:

The insurance company, meanwhile, had found something peculiar about Issa, unrelated to the arson: there was no indication of where his initial capital came from. After interviewing a family member, an investigator reported, “She was unable to advise us as to his financial banking [sic] to become an officer in Quantum Inc.” A second report noted, “We were unable to find the source of his financing for the business ventures he is engaged in at the present time.”

This is the guy holding himself out as the crusader for What is Right and Just. Or as Bashir called him, a "paragon of virtue."

Wise Beyond Her Years

I enclose a YouTube speech here or below played by Larry O'Donnell on his show last evening given by Lupita Nyong'o when she accepted an honor from Essence Magazine's 7th Annual Awards for Black Women in Hollywood. The speech is as gorgeous as she is matched only by the humanitarian beauty of her heart. It is why she won and should have won the Academy Award for "12 Years a Slave."

"12 Years a Slave" is a film as poignant to me as "Schindler's List" and as meaningful to my human spirit as those who survived the Holocaust.

Every now and then someone comes along whose words, actions and compassionate essence change the world. I believe Lupita Nyong'o is such a person. Enjoy this fantastically beautiful and moving speech from a woman who is wise well beyond her youthful years.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPCkfARH2eE

An Award for the Awards -- A Short Comment

This is the first time I can say I loved and was entertained by the Academy Awards. Everything seemed to work and was done in good taste. There were no outfit malfunctions, no outrageous costumes, little profanity, often limited thank you's and buckets of talent. I saw most (not all) of the films.

Ellen DeGeneris was, I thought, wonderful. She makes the famous and non famous feel at ease. She has a gift for the ability to connect even to the everyman like me. I wanted a piece of that pizza she doled out to Meryl, Brad, Jennifer, et al and a bit of the money in the collection hat too! I commit one (only one) of the seven deadly sins when I watch the Oscars -- envy. Their talent is a gift from the DNA god or goddess that creates us all. They win life's lottery by having its genes of creativity and talent in seemingly perfect order.

I thought all who won deserved to win in a field of choices that were stunningly competitive. A special place in my heart is reserved for "12 Years a Slave," a film that shows each one of us who saw it one hopes the true malevolence of slavery's history and why this nation suffers from its massive impact the consequences of which we experience to this day. That "peculiar institution," so noted by the French historian de Tocqueville in his 1835 classic "Democracy in America" was democracy's antithesis to itself. It provoked discord and hypocrisy's division woven into the fabric of the nation's construct in that time and bestowed to us in ours.

The rage slavery invokes is emphasized by a film that reflects its magnitude so necessary for all to see. Perhaps, now, more will see it who need to see it and those of us who know it will keep working to ameliorate its sin and perfect the justice for which it cries out and to which the foundation of this nation speaks.

Kudos to all the winners -- well done, indeed!