Undernews For April 11 2011

Since 1964, the news while there's still time to do something about it

Morning Line: Mending my ways

Sam Smith

I'm sorry. Now I understand. Until last week's budget deal, I never really appreciated the importance of adult conversation, bipartisanship, moderation and calming a bunch of bullies by giving up everything you promised the voters.

I'm going to try to mend my ways. From here on out, I'm only going to advocate policies that have at least majority support with the American people. I hope President Obama, and the media that so admires his lofty elevation above all debate, will join me.

In keeping with this standard I propose for starters that we raise to the top of the agenda the following items most Americans say they want:

Gay marriage

A faster withdrawal from Afghanistan

Legalized marijuana

An end to corporate personhood

Increasing taxes on the wealthy

No cuts in Social Security.

An end to capital punishment

Mr. President, would you join us mainstream Americans for an adult conversation on these matters?

If not, could you advise us as to which programs we should threaten to abolish in order to get your attention? We're kind of new to this maturity thing.

U.S. military spending almost doubles in ten years

Think Progress - A new report released today by SIPRI, a Swedish-based think tank, reveals that U.S. military spending has almost doubled since 2001. The U.S. spent an astounding $698 billion on the military last year, an 81% increase over the last decade.U.S. spending on the military last year far exceeded any other country. We spent six times more than China ¬ the second largest spender. Overall, the world expended $1.6 trillion on the military, with the United States accounting for the lion’s share:

As a percentage of GDP, U.S. military spending has increased from 3.1% in 2001 to 4.8% last year.

Obama's birth control problem

Sam Smith

Dismissing the skeptics of Obama's birthplace with haughty ridicule doesn't help much. In fact, the percentage of doubters seems to be increasing.

This is another example where the media and politicians refuse to deal with real anomalies in a story and, as result, actually encourage greater unsupported speculation.

Here's how the story stands as of now:

There is no substantive evidence that Obama was born anywhere but in Honolulu. Evidence that he was born in Hawaii includes a short form birth certificate and two newspaper announcements at the time. Both the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star Bulletin published announcements of the birth of a son to Mr and Mrs Barack Obama on August 4, 1961.

The state of Hawaii, even at the request of the new Democratic governor, refuses to release the so-called long form birth certificate, saying that it can only be done at the personal request of the person on the certificate.

Obama, for reasons unknown, has not made such a request. Why does a Harvard lawyer let such a claim continue to fester in public without taking the simple steps necessary to quash it? Possible explanations include:

- An initial attitude of screw-them, which has now transformed into a major political issue from which Obama still doesn't want to back down, perhaps more for reasons of ego than of common sense.

- The lack of Obama's long certificate for reasons unknown. CNN has suggested that the original certificate no longer exists since all such records were discarded in 2001 but the state denies it. Hawaii is, in effect, denying the absence of something it can't or won't produce.

- Some information on the certificate that Obama did not want released, not necessarily having to do with birthplace.

Certainly the way Obama handled the matter during the campaign was strange. FactCheck.org alone was invited to view a hard copy of the original document and later reported:

"FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said."

But why not just tell Hawaii to let a pool of reporters and lawyers view the actual document? After all, in this case FactCheck was hardly the objective observer it pretends to be since it is funded by the Annenberg Foundation, whose Chicago Challenge had as a board member none of other than Barack Obama. One Annenberg fundee clearing another one is not the best way to prove your point.

Further, Governor Abercrombie's effort to resolve the matter has come to naught. According to Abercrombie, he was told by the state attorney general that he can't see the original certificate without the consent of the individual involved.

But this is not new information. This has been the state's legal position all along and Abercrombie presumably knew it from the start. Yet a day earlier, the British Daily Mail had reported:

"Abercrombie said on Tuesday that an investigation had unearthed papers proving Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. He told Honolulu's Star-Advertiser: 'It actually exists in the archives, written down,' he said.

"But it became apparent that what had been discovered was an unspecified listing or notation of Obama's birth that someone had made in the state archives and not a birth certificate.

"And in the same interview Abercrombie suggested that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health. .

"He acknowledged the birth certificate issue would have 'political implications' for the next presidential election 'that we simply cannot have.'"

The other issue is whether - due to his father's British (not Kenyan) citizenship, Obama is a "natural born American" as described in the Constitution.

Several judges have already rejected cases involving the matter - undoubtedly in part on the unspoken grounds that determining that Obama was not entitled to be president would tear the country apart as never before, especially when the argument is based on something as shaky as his whereabouts during a stage of life when he couldn’t even pee in a toilet, let along speak the mother tongue.

Second, there is quite an interesting history of public figures being similarly challenged and an equally interesting history of nothing much happening as a result including Chester Arthur, Charles Evans Hughes, George Romney,Barry Goldwater, Lowell Weicker, and John McCain. The definition of a "natural born citizen" has been a topic of a heated debate throughout our history. It wasn't well defined at the time of the Constitution was drafted and it hasn't been since.

Clerk who changed Wisconsin judge vote is an old hand at it

Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing - The plot thickens for Kathy Nickolaus, the Waukesha, Wisconsin county clerk who used her own home-brewed voting software to miraculously discover 14,000 votes for her former boss, Tea Party-favored Supreme Court Justice David Prosser. Yes, former boss -- Nickolaus worked under Prosser at the disgraced Assembly Republican Caucus, who were exposed while illegally conducting secret campaigns for Republican legislative candidates. What's more, Nickolaus is something of an old hand when it comes to voting irregularities:

In 2006, Nickolaus, who was elected Waukesha County clerk in 2002, was criticized for posting election returns that temporarily skewed results of a Republican primary for the 97th Assembly District. At the time, Nickolaus told reporters some returns from the city of Waukesha were entered in the wrong column.

And last summer, the Waukesha County Board ordered an internal audit of her office, citing concerns Nickolaus was secretive and refusing to cooperate with the county's technical staff in a security review of the computerized election system.

Prominent lawyers protest Private Manning treatment

Guardian, UK - More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Tribe joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago.

He told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that "is not only shameful but unconstitutional" as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia.

The harsh restrictions have been denounced by a raft of human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and are being investigated by the United Nations' rapporteur on torture.

More myths about Michelle Rhee

Diane Ravitch, Washington Post - The most chilling episode in Richard Whitmire’s biography of Michelle Rhee occurs near the end, when Rhee says to a PBS camera crew, “I’m going to fire somebody in a little while. Do you want to see that?” Of course they did, and they taped the chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools firing a principal. The victim’s face was not shown, but the episode revealed a woman who relishes humiliating those who have the misfortune to work for her.

“The Bee Eater” is a worshipful portrait of Rhee, who is best known for the Time magazine cover in which she is portrayed broom in hand, ready to sweep clean the filthy stables of the school system. And sweep she did, as nearly half the district’s teaching staff and a third of its principals resigned, retired or were fired during her brief tenure. . .

Did she succeed? Whitmire insists that she did and points to the District’s test score gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2007 to 2009. But the gains on the federal reading tests under Rhee were no greater than those under her predecessor Superintendent Clifford Janey, which were achieved without the firings and angst of the Rhee era. From 2005-07, under Janey, black fourth-grade students made a five-point gain in reading, but only a three-point gain under Rhee; Hispanic students made a 13-point gain in reading during Janey’s tenure, but only a one-point gain from 2007-09. Reading scores for eighth graders didn’t budge from 2002-09, regardless of who was running the school system. On the federal math tests for fourth grade students, the gains recorded on Rhee’s watch outpaced Janey’s, but the gains from 2003-05 were larger than those achieved under either Janey or Rhee. In eighth-grade math, D.C. students have made steady gains from 2003-09. . .

Michelle Rhee once ate a bee to show her students how tough she is. Now she is advising the nation’s most conservative Republican governors, including Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Scott in Florida, encouraging them to get rid of seniority and tenure. She applauded Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin as he stripped the public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights. She appeared in Indiana with Gov. Mitch Daniels, cheering the enactment of voucher legislation.

Recovered History: Running war baptisms

I've only seen one total immersion running water baptism. It came as a complete surprise and one of life's truly unique moments. Sitting in a country cabin a few hundred feet from a river and a bridge, there suddenly was singing and ritual shouting. I grabbed my then very young son and we hid under a truck and watched as the minister directed the total immersion of a young woman as two dozen people stood in the river or on the bridge - Sam

Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set - River baptisms are inextricably associated with the American South, and with the first few decades of the 20th century, when many of the rituals that made the South alternately special or wretched were in their waning days. On display now in a single room at the International Center of Photography in New York City is a wonderful exhibit of picture postcards documenting the practice in the South and Midwest between the late 19th and early 20th centuries called “Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms.”

The community of faithful would gather together along a river’s banks, often in their Sunday best, sometimes in white, sometimes as is. The pastor would find a place in the river where he could stand about waist high. Some days, only one member of the community was being baptized while other days featured multiple baptisms. The initiate, the person being baptized, also stands waist high, away from the safety of the riverbank, waiting to be dunked. Notably, this person is an adult or child but never a baby. . . Falling backwards, going under, emerging from the water with arms reaching out to the crowd.

A river baptism doesn’t have to be in a river; it can be in a creek, the sea, an old bathtub in the yard. One “Take Me to the Water” photograph shows a 1920 baptism being performed in a square, above-ground, wooden swimming pool that is part stage and stands in the middle of a barren Kansas prairie.

The river baptism’s audience isn’t just made up of believers. Because they are meant to take place in ordinary, open settings, the rituals would often be joined by the curious, passersby, or, as we now know, a photographer.

Infographic on the for-profit education scam

Word

Everything has been said but not everyone has said it yet. -- Rep Morris Udall at 1988 Democratic convention

Pocket paradigms: On corruption

1. Hit the corrupters at least as hard as the corruptees. The real danger in corruption is what the bribe buys, not the soul of the bought politician (which probably never was in that great a shape anyway).

2. The worst corruption tends to be legal, therefore hardly anyone notices it. Remember that corrupt not only means dishonest, it also means without integrity. In most jurisdictions the latter is not a violation of the law.

3. Just because the corruption is legal doesn't mean you have to accept it. Martin Luther didn't -- and so helped to reform a little church-run protection racket known as indulgences.

4. Simply because corruption is bad, don't assume all reforms are good.

5. If forced to choose between minor corruption and major incompetence, take the former. It's cheaper and easier to live with.

6. Favor corruption that is well distributed-- that gets down to the street over that which only favors a few. Thus: reform zoning policies before you worry about parking tickets. - Sam Smith

Word: The war against teachers

It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.

I cannot say for certain¬not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing¬but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination. - Teacher quoted by Chris Hedges in "Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System"

Recovered History: The next stop after Hope

Sam Smith

The best piece of political fiction in modern America is still Bill Clinton. Much of the narrative he wrote himself, but a deeply embedded national media distributed it widely and made sure that reality didn't intrude too much.

The tale began in Hope, Arkansas. As Clinton said when first nominated, "I still believe in a place called Hope." The National Park Service would eventually give his birthplace official landmark status. And everyone knows about Hope.

What they don't know is that when he was seven, Bill and his mother moved to Hot Springs.

Hot Springs would become the first of innumerable deletions or brush overs from the official Clinton story, but it came back to mind the other day when a memoir by Dora Maxine Temple Jones arrived on my desk.

It was a 2008 edition of a book originally published in 1983, when Clinton was still a young politician. Dora Maxine Temple Jones was already ill and past her prime as Clinton got started.

Nonetheless, the book will tell you more about the real Bill Clinton and where he came from then most of the hundreds of thousands of words that have been devoted to the topic. Further, it's the sort of book that should be required reading in every American political science course. And isn't.

Maxine, you see, was the top madam of Hot Springs, in the heart of one of most corrupt states in the union. It was, to be sure, a simpler period, with gambling and prostitution the lead enablers. By the time Clinton became chief executive, these sins had been replaced by drugs, with the state becoming of the leading importers and with the governor's prime assignment - as in earlier times - to look the other way. A pilot would tell a reporter that he loved bringing drugs into Arkansas and gave as an example the time he landed in a pasture with his pickup being a state trooper in a marked car.

There is no way to understand the Clinton story without the Hot Springs context, and Maxine tells it in an amazing fashion. Her clients included a federal judge, senators and representatives. Writing "Maxine: Call Me Madam" in 1983, she said, "Some of them have been in Washington for years, and some are still there."
Hot Springs was the southern recreation center for America's underworld and for those wishing to escape more visible and moral climes.

"My guests included local businessman, doctors, and many top officials form the state.

"One such official was the attorney general, Beauregard Clochard (his name changed by the author). We did each other a lot of favors during his term in office and he did a lot of special favors for Garland County officials while he Attorney General.

"Prominent underworld figures from the East and the West coasts were also among my clientele. . .They'd fly into Hot Springs, go to their hotels, and then hire a limousine to drive them to the Mansion. They always respected me and liked me. They were the best customers I had; they were generous with their money and conducted themselves in a gentlemanly and respectful fashion towards my girls.

"They were polite and even kind. I admired them; they were my kind of people. You would never had guessed that they were underworld figures or hired killers."

The book is riddled with examples of trade-offs, pay-offs and favors:

"When election day came I loaned by Cadillac to a cab driver. He hauled people all over town to the polls to put in the people I wanted. Back in those days you could do a little stealing in the voting situation, so they would take my girls to one poll to cast their vote, and then across town to another polling place, and they'd vote for them again."

Maxine was tough and did things her own way, symbolized by the fact that when she was just a prostitute, she steadfastly refused to remove her bra. Most anything else was permitted.

It all fit in with the Hot Springs I had described back when Clinton was in office:
|||| In the 1930s, Hot Springs represented the western border of organized crime in the U.S with the local syndicate headed by Owney Madden, a New York killer who had taken over the mob's resort in Arkansas. Owney Madden was an English born gang member who had been arrested more than 40 times in New York by the time he was 21. Madden got the assignment from his boss, Myer Lansky. The plan for Arkansas was modeled on an earlier one in which Governor Huey Long opened a Swiss bank account into which the mob would put $3 to $4 million annually for the right to run casinos in the state. Lansky then moved to Hot Springs where he hired Madden, former operator of Harlem's Cotton Club. According to one account, "The Hot Springs set up was so luxurious and safe that it became known as a place for gangsters on the lam to hole up until the heat blew over."

Hot Springs was also where Lucky Luciano was arrested and brought back for trial prosecuted by Thomas E. Dewey. According to one account, "Dewey proclaimed Luciano Public Enemy No 1, and a grand jury returned a criminal indictment against him that carried a maximum penalty of 1,950 years. . . He was arrested in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and extradited back to New York. There, in the New York State Supreme Court, he was tried, and on June 7, the verdict of guilty was returned. ||||
Another description added:
|||| There is evidence that many syndicate groups became involved in Hot Springs. Owney Madden was the overseer of everything and watched out for the New York mob's interests. Morris Kleinman, who was one of the founding gangsters of the Cleveland syndicate spent much time in Hot Springs. It is rumored that the Cleveland boys had pieces of the profits from Hot Springs gambling. Johnny Roselli, an "upper level" member of the Chicago mob was a silent partner in many Hot Springs casinos in the 1940's and 1950's, as was Frank Costello. All of these groups used local operators as "fronts", a system perfected by the Cleveland syndicate in Ohio, Florida, and Kentucky. Since Hot Springs was a very popular tourist spot, the command went out from the different syndicates that there should be no murders carried out in Hot Springs. This would be the rule in Las Vegas too. If bodies littered the streets like in Chicago, it would only hurt business. Also "petty" crimes like burglary and armed robbery were not to be tolerated. If the suckers weren't comfortable, they wouldn't come to Hot Springs.

Owney Madden laid the groundwork for gangsters on the lam to hide out in Hot Springs. The city had a resort-like atmosphere and elegant nightlife, with people coming and going all the time. This was the perfect situation to "hide" mobsters who couldn't be seen in their hometowns. Al Capone would stay at the Arlington Hotel when things got too hot in Chicago. |||

Hot Springs Business Men's Social Club, aka Maxine's

Maxine's troubles - including ending up in prison at one point - were basically those of a local small business operator up against the mob - compromising, paying off, trying to hold her own. And Owney Madden (Oney, she calls him) is mentioned numerous times in her tale.

A Clinton is only mentioned once in the book.

Her first attorney - she calls him Uriah Toper - didn't look respectable enough for her tastes. So she bought a new set of clothes for him at Dan's Men's Store and then told him:

"Mr Toper, you need a new car. I'm supposed to be the high classed madam of this town and if you're going to represent me I want you to look like a high classed lawyer. . . Let's go down to Raymond Clinton's Buick place and get you one." And they did, paid for in cash.

Raymond was Bill's uncle. Clinton's stepfather had been a gun-brandishing alcoholic who lost his own Buick franchise through mismanagement and pilfering. He physically abused his family, including the young Bill. His mother was a heavy gambler with mob ties. According to FBI and local police officials, Uncle Raymond -- to whom young Bill turned for wisdom and support -- was a colorful car dealer, slot machine owner and gambling operator, who thrived (except when his house was firebombed) on the fault line of criminality.

Among other things he ran the Belvedere Club. Gail Sheehy would politely describe it this way: "The club offered the full menu of wink-wink 'illegal' pleasures, liquor, crap tables, waitresses who could be persuaded to get familiar with the customers."

Raymond also helped Clinton's mother get started in nursing by providing her with prostitute clients. Virginia especially liked Maxine's crowd, explaining once that "Mister president of the bank might not pay me on time, but Maxine's girls would."

Bill Clinton's mother loved Hot Springs because, "I'm not one for rules, and the only rule in Hot Springs was to enjoy yourself - a rule I could handle." On another occasion, she remarked, "Hot Springs was so different. We had wide-open gambling, for one thing, and it was so wide open that it never occurred to me that it was illegal - it really didn't - until it came to a vote about whether we were going to legalize gambling or not. I never was so shocked."
And when Governor Winthrop Rockefeller took over and shut down the illegal gambling (with help from Maxine whom he had pardoned) one of Virginia's friends complained, "the Puritans ruined this town."

Only months out of Yale Law School, Bill Clinton returned to Arkansas to run for Congress. Author and investigative journalist Roger Morris described what happened next:
||||| A relative unknown, he faces an imposing field of rivals in the Democratic primary, and beyond, in the general election, a powerful Republican incumbent. Yet as soon as he enters the race, Mr. Clinton enjoys a decisive seven-to-one advantage in campaign funds over the nearest Democratic competitor, and will spend twice as much as his well-supported GOP opponent. It begins with a quiet meeting at his mother's house in Hot Springs. Around the kitchen table, as Virginia Clinton will describe the scene, avid young Billy meets with two of his most crucial early backers -- uncle Raymond G. Clinton, a prosperous local Buick dealer, and family friend and wealthy businessman Gabe Crawford. As they talk, Mr. Crawford offers the candidate unlimited use of his private plane, and Uncle Raymond not only provides several houses around the district to serve as campaign headquarters, but will secure a $10,000 loan to Bill from the First National Bank of Hot Springs - an amount then equal to the yearly income of many Arkansas families. Together, the money and aircraft and other gifts, including thousands more in secret donations, will launch Mr. Clinton in the most richly financed race in the annals of Arkansas -- and ultimately onto the most richly financed political career in American history.

Though he loses narrowly, his showing is so impressive, especially in his capacity to attract such money and favors, that he rises rapidly to become state attorney-general, then governor, and eventually, with much the same backing and advantage, president of the United States . . . No mere businessman with a spare plane, Gabe Crawford presided over a backroom bookie operation that was one of Hot Springs' most lucrative criminal enterprises. [And the] inimitable Uncle Raymond - who had also played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in keeping young Bill out of the Vietnam draft - was far more than an auto dealer. In the nationally prominent fount of vice and corruption that was Hot Springs from the 1920s to the 1980s (its barely concealed casinos generated more income than Las Vegas well into the 1960s), the uncle's Buick agency and other businesses and real estate were widely thought to be facades for illegal gambling, drug money laundering and other ventures, in which Raymond was a partner. He was a minion of the organized crime overlord who controlled the American Middle South for decades, New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello or "Mafia Kingfish" as his biographer John Davis called him.|||||
As Paul Bosson, a Hot Springs prosecutor, would put it, "In Hot Springs, growing up here, you were living a lie. You lived a lie because you knew that all of these activities were illegal. I mean, as soon as you got old enough to be able to read a newspaper, you knew that gambling in Arkansas was illegal, prostitution was illegal. And so you lived this lie, so you have to find some way to justify that to yourself and, you now, you justify it by saying, "Well," you know, "it's okay here."

Some of the operations were quite complex. Say the syndicate had a rich guy from Dallas who had just lost $10,000. He offered to write a check, but the syndicate would instead fly him back to Dallas accompanied by one of its girls to pick up the money in cash. Liquor would flow as well and, often as not, the gambler would come back with the $10,000 plus more to lose.

Maxine survived on a strong but attractive personality, bribery, proto-feminism, and blackmail. The fact the Hot Springs was a no-kill zone for the mob probably didn't hurt, either.

I first heard about this distinction from investigative reporter Dan Moldea who had once gotten word in Michigan that, because of his aggressive reporting, there was a hit out on him. He went to the FBI whose agents told him there wasn't much they could do until he got hit, but that he might think about moving to one of the neutral cities - places that were off limits for mob murders. Hot Springs had fallen off the protected list by then, but Las Vegas, Miami, and Washington were the three mentioned. Moldea moved to DC.

In any case, Maxine stood up for herself. When her lawyer became a judge who tried to get her to close her place, she told him, "You're not going to make me a scapegoat just because I wouldn't pay off the syndicate."

Later she confronted Judge Toper, then accompanied by the sheriff: "I'm going to tell you something, Mister Bigshit. You may be a judge now, but you represented me for twelve long years. You took my money that came out of the whorehouses.. . .Has the syndicate got you under their thumb?"

She gave the judge and the sheriff until six o'clock that evening to close every other whorehouse in town or "I'm going to Little Rock to the newspaper and tell them what's going on."

They agreed and she shut her place as well: "At six pm, you never saw so many whores going out of town on buses and planes in your life."

Some time late a grand jury was called, but her testimony nowhere as secret as she thought. A microphone had been hidden so that Owney and other mobsters awaiting their turn could hear what she had to say.

On another occasion, facing trial after a raid on her place, Maxine's lawyer confronted the prosecutor, "Dennis, if you don't lay off Maxine. . . I'll have her tell how many times you've been in her whorehouse and gone to bed with her girls."

Then he added, "You didn't have natural relations with hose girls, either. There was a picture made of you with your head down between their legs."

Maxine even took on the FBI, obtaining Attorney General Bobby Kennedy's private phone number to ask that he send some clean agents down to deal with syndicate. Kennedy sent a squad to the scene, but the syndicate had already pulled back.

Maxine had some friends among the cops - such as sheriff's deputy Kyle Mason who drove her to start a prison term. He remarked, "You know, Maxine, if it wasn't for losing my job, I'd let you get out of this car and catch the next plane to Mexico."

When she came up for parole, however, the situation was a bit different. Every member of the parole board had been at her whorehouse and one of them said, "Maxine, we can't let you got right now. The governor's coming up for reelection. We'll just keep you a few more months and til the next heard, and then we'll let you go."

Out of prison, she confronted the mayor in his office: "Remember this. If you bother me again, I'll have that goddamned house of your blown up and your family along with you. Put that in your little hat and think about it. . . By the way, if you ever repeat this to anyone, it'll get back to me, and I’ll have it done anyway." The mayor and the cops left her alone.

And to an FBI agent: "Listen, honey. You can forget the instruction course on federal law you’re at such pains to give me. I know how to read, too, you know. I'm a professional racket woman, and I make a point of keeping up with all the new laws passed on prostitution."

In the end, Maxine summed it up this way

"Most people think prostitution is a dirty business but I can tell you a profession that makes a prostitute look like a Little Miss Muffett in a child's nursery rhyme book. That profession is none other than politics. . . .

"The best thing that could happen would be to put all the freeloading politicians behind bars and let the whores out so they could do an honest night's work"

Little did she know that instead, and only a few years later, one of the former, raised and well trained in Hot Springs, would be elected president of the United States.

Senate Democrats vote against own programs

John Nichols, Nation - A Senate Appropriations Committee review says that most of the $2 billion in cuts contained in the one-week bill come from a $1.5 billion slashing of the Federal Railroad Administration's High Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail program. More cuts are achieved by hacking $220 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Fund. And research into making air travel safer and more efficient took cuts as well. In other words, precsiely the sort of programs that Democrats used to defend were slashed. The Senate agreed to the one-week plan by unanimous consent.

The GOP now out to slash benefits for 1.3 million veterans

Kitsap Sun - The House Budget Committee, chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), has told a veterans' group it is studying a plan to save $6 billion annually in VA health care costs by canceling enrollment of any veteran who doesn't have a service-related medical condition and is not poor. Committee Republicans. . . .are targeting 1.3 million veterans . . .

Washington Post dependent on federal government for survival

Glenn Greenwald - Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration -- the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. "By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government." The Post Co.'s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.'s business -- a reality of which they are well aware.

"It was understood that if you fell out of grace [with the Education Department], your business might go away," said Tom Might, who as chief executive of Cable One, a cable service provider that is owned by The Post Co., sat in at company-wide board meetings.

Campaign contributors recovering from recession

In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2 percent, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.7 trillion. . .Unemployment, although down from its peak, stood at 8.8 percent in March. And few economists predict the jobless rate will drop substantially anytime soon. For the average C.E.O., however, the good times have returned. The median pay for top executives at 200 major companies was $9.6 million last year. That was a 12 percent increase over 2009 - NY Times

Why I Mourn for Glenn Beck

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch - I've always had a soft spot for Beck, partly because of his deep roots in the mulch of American nutdom, fertilized by the powerful psychic idiom of rebirth and redemption.

His mother and her lover drowned in Puget Sound, off Tacoma in the state of Washington was Beck was 15. He says she was a suicide. He also says he was on booze and drugs from 16 to 31, when – through one marriage and out the other side - he eschewed the suicidal path of his fellow Washingtonian Kurt Cobain and joined AA. He left the Catholic Church and became a Mormon.

Glenn Beck says his intellectual development was nourished by close reading of Nietzsche, Hitler, Billy Graham and Carl Sagan. He started his Mercury Radio Arts Company in 2002 and in less than a decade was earning $23 million a year with a big national audience.

Hitler taught him the uses of fear, and also the total irrelevance of criticisms that the fears he touted were phantasms from some distant time – the Sixties, the Thirties, the early Twenties, all patches of the twentieth century when the Left had some heft.

To Americans in the late Nineties and current decade, maxed out on their credit cards, with negative equity in their homes amid a political culture swerving relentlessly to the right, Beck endlessly promoted the conspiracies and looming threat of a left in this country which in reality has effectively ceased to exist.

"Progressives", today's milquetoast substitute for old-line radicals, have trembled at his ravings about the left's conspiracies against freedom. Personally, I found them heartening. Respect at last! Who but Beck could turn a conservative African-American Harvard grad, an errand boy for corporate America, into a latterday recreation of W.E. B. DuBois and Malcolm X, now installed – oh, the horror! - in the White House.

Who but Beck could dredge up Frances Fox Piven as a woman, now in her late seventies, and denounce her as a latterday Lenin, whose seditious blueprint still threatens to drag America into serfdom. . .

A fairly typical reaction from the pwog sector was that of Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way, who swiftly proclaimed that "It's encouraging to know that it is no longer economically viable for a major television network to support the demagogic rantings of its most unhinged conspiracy theorist."

But from Keegan's point of view, aren't demagogic and unhinged rantings exactly what he and his liberal fellows should want from Fox? Isn't it good to have a clownish ideologue bringing the Republican Party into disrepute?. . .

Would you rather sit in a traffic jam listening to Robert Segal than Glenn Beck? Why no threatened advertising boycott from PAW against Rachel Maddow, hot for US intervention in Libya: ""President Obama announced his own military intervention, but he pointedly declined the opportunity to do it in a way that US presidents usually do." According to Maddow, Obama has foresworn "the chest-thumping commander-in-chief theater that goes with military intervention of any kind," and "that in itself is a fascinating and rather blunt demonstration of just how much this presidency is not like that of George W. Bush."

Pocket paradigms

What we think of as culture and history is really a form of artificial evolution. While both cooperation and selfishness have deep roots in our genetic core, nothing in this core made inevitable the Civil War or the end of small pox, Martin Luther King or Margaret Thatcher. Human choices did that, choices that included deciding what tools, virtues, bludgeons or trickery to pull out of the overstuffed closet of humanness.- Sam Smith

Word

It's good to see you. It means you're not behind my back -- Henny Youngman

The GOP platform

Willie Geist, MSNBC - Are you willing to hold up this entire budget over defunding Planned Parenthood?

Rep Mike Pence R-IN - Of course I am.
Former Iowa gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats - If we’re teaching the kids, ‘don’t smoke, because that’s a risky health style,’ the same can be true of the homosexual lifestyle. . . It is a public health risk

Latino population growing in the suburbs

Huffington Post - [In Aurora , IL]– more than 35,000 of about 55,000 new residents between 2000 and 2010 were Hispanic. The city, which is now 40 percent Hispanic, has surpassed Rockford to become Illinois' second-largest city.

The trend of immigrants heading directly to American suburbs instead of starting in a major city intensified from 2000 to 2010 – and was one factor in Illinois' 32 percent increase in Hispanic population in that period, according to recently released U.S. Census data.

Demographers say they aren't just seeing it around Chicago. The same thing is happening around other major cities that have long been entry points for immigrants, such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even as the steep growth of the Hispanic population in Chicago tapered off, the arrival of Hispanics helped make Kendall County west of Aurora the fastest growing county in the U.S. for several years during the decade.

Word

80% of success is showing up -- Woody Allen

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm - Winston Churchill

Pocket paradigms

Why are we allowed to have theories on every topic from the creation of the universe to who is going to win the World Series with the sole exception of wondering who in power is screwing us and how?

The very use of the term 'conspiracy theorist' is an anti-intellectual attempt to silence argument for which the labeler has no factual answer. Ironically, it is often the very accuser who is more inclined to believe in conspiracies, albeit benign ones, because it implies a small number of people deciding the course of history, which is how these critics were taught in college that society properly functions.

Thus anyone who attacks someone else as a conspiracy theorist should be ignored on grounds of simple incompetence with the possible additional liability of disingenuousness. To do the job right, one must follow the evidence and be clear when it stops. The rest is theory or hypothesis, acceptable and worthy of debate, but in a lesser category than fact.

The massive effort to stop people from wondering about such matters is itself reasonable cause for suspicion since the effort relies so heavily on ridicule and so little on fact. Not probably the result of a conspiracy, mind you. More likely, one might theorize, absent further evidence, just plain stupidity. - Sam Smith

Morning Line: Trashing of America update

Sam Smith

The corporatist Republicans have managed to cut $78 billion from the budget as their war against government in any but its military and police state aspects charges ahead.

As Dan Balz noted in the Washington Post, "President Obama and the Democrats have themselves to blame for being in this predicament. Had they done their jobs last year, when Democrats had ample majorities in the House and Senate, the government would have been funded for the current fiscal year before Republicans assumed control of the House."

Add to that Obama's pathetically phony above-it-all attitude which accomplished nothing, and you have another case where the irrational defeated the incompetent.

While Democrats will cheer that funding for Planned Parenthood will remain, you can expect, as in the past, to hear little from liberals over the fact that the budget denies the use of any federal or local funds for abortions in the nation's leading colony, Washington DC. Even though the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, its problems just don't make it to the national liberal work list.

The deal also requires a vote on Planned Parenthood funds in the Senate, which the Democrats have tried to avoid so their candidates for reelection won't be caught publicly voting for decency.

So those DC residents planning to take their trash to John Boehner's house will have to wait until the next big budget fight. But the trashing of America continues unabated.

ENDS

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