Magical realism

“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

--U.S. interrogator to Fouad al-Rabiah at Guantanamo Bay. H/t Andrew Sullivan.

Interesting

Daschle withdrew. I didn't think it would happen, honestly.

I started to write a post yesterday about how Daschle's lapses didn't seem that big a deal to me. In the course of listing my caveats and "on the other hand" clauses, I convinced myself that actually there was a much stronger argument against him than there was for letting it slide, so to speak.

But I can't seem to get riled up about it on a gut level. I don't know.


At any rate, having gone through that exercise and now reading the NYTimes on his health care industry connections, I'm content with the withdrawal of his nomination.

Frankly, I think it's ridiculous that Geithner got a pass and Killefer got axed, given that Killefer owed less than a thousand dollars and Geithner owed tens of thousands, but I guess Geithner got there first and used up the one free pass that was available this time around.

Finally, to echo Hilzoy, what the hell is going on with these people and their taxes? And how much tax revenue is going unpaid by people who aren't being vetted for Cabinet posts? And how is it that you can discover you owe huge amounts of back taxes and then just go on not paying them without any sort of enforcement by the IRS? How much taxpayer money are we losing here?

...Perhaps a better way to put it would be that I can't get riled up about it in relation to his eligibility for HHS. It would appear that I can, in fact, get riled up about it in itself.

Blago appointed a senator anyway.

Damn. This goes beyond chutzpah to a level approaching gangsta. Ta-nehisi agrees:

I didn't catch all of it but I did hear him say something like, "Don't see myself resigning, even if these feds house me/Big up to Jesse Jr. Big up to Jan Schakowsky..." And then he dissed Common.

What I want to know now is how Kanye and Lupe Fiasco fit into all this. You know they gotta be taking sides.

Hilarious

Okay, so I was reading this, nodding along thinking "Yup, typical. Association of Physicists posts one article by a few members arguing against client change + sloppy editing + same day as Gore speech = Right wingers start jizzing all over the place about how the rats are abandoning ship and the planet is doing just peachy."
And then I got to the end:

So, what happened here? Climate Progress explains the story very well, but it appears that one sloppy editor relied on one frequently-debunked British Lord — and conservatives reflexively pounced on a development that was far from what it appeared to be.

Kevin summarized this nicely: “Lord Monckton, who triggered the original article in DailyTech, may be a lord, but he’s also a longtime global warming skeptic. There’s nothing new here, and, as you might expect, scientists continue to believe that climate change is largely driven by human activity. Nice try, though.”

LORD MONCKTON?! BRILLIANT! THANK YOU, UNIVERSE.


Also, have you ever heard of KBR? It's a subsidiary of Halliburton, and it's been doing the bulk of the contracting work over in Iraq.

Well, on top of the numerous suspicious incidents, rapes and killings of female employees which go unprosecuted, and the mounting evidence that they've been effectively stealing money from the government for years now, it turns out that they're shitty electricians.

The NYT has a piece about the electrical conditions in troop facilities in Iraq, and it's apalling. The conditions are unacceptable--getting electric shocks in the shower?!--people have DIED, more have been injured (this is troops, you understand), and on top of it KBR and the Pentagon seem to have been quite happy to do absolutely nothing about it even when they knew damn well what was up. The only reason this is coming out now at all is the family of a soldier who died in the shower pushed for answers.

Electrical issues are the number one non-combat risk to troops.

Further in the "horrific" department, part of how this happened seems to be that because the government contracted out so much work so fast to KBR, oversight officials couldn't keep up, and KBR couldn't do all that work fast enough and so subcontracted to other entities that often employed poorly educated Iraqis who made only a few dollars a day.

In other words, if the government hadn't been in such a tearing hurry to pour money into Halliburton, our troops would be better equipped, better housed, and in better health. And some of them might be alive today.

These are the ones who berate us for not supporting the troops.

HOL LEE KER RAPP

Holy crap.

Blackwater--Blackwater, the main mercenary military contracting firm employed by the U.S. Military in Iraq? That Blackwater?--asked the court handling a suit against them to do so using Shari'a law.

You have got to be motherfucking well kidding me. Three Blackwater employees died in a plane crash in Afghanistan. Their widows sued.

Last year, Blackwater argued that since they were working as agents of the government and soldiers can't sue the government (they can't? Who knew?), the suit should be dismissed. That argument was disallowed by a court.

So now, because it took place in Afghanistan and because Shari'a law doesn't hold companies responsible for the actions of employees, that's their angle.

Besides the obvious sliminess of trying to wiggle out of damages, the sheer vortex of irony, shamelessness, deadpan balls-to-the-wall opportunism, and general BULLSHIT is just too much to handle. It boggles the mind.

GAH. It's doubly frustrating because under other circumstances questions of the overlaps or encounters between different forms of law, together with church/state issues, would be very interesting. But this really should not go forward. It's disgusting.