MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Pamela Engel, Business Insider via Slate, Jan. 10, 2013
Vermont has a growing drug problem. It's gotten so bad that on Wednesday, Gov. Peter Shumlin spent his entire 34-minute State of the State address talking about Vermont's "full-blown heroin crisis." [....]
By Simon Shuster, Time Magazine, Jan. 10, 2014
A French magazine's exposé into the French President's love-life marks a departure from the country's previous nonchalance over the peccadilloes of its premiers
By Masha Gessen, Slate.com, Jan. 9, 2014
[....] The Greenpeace activists went home to their respective countries; Khodorkovsky went to Germany, into what appears to be involuntary exile. Only Alyokhina, 25, and Tolokonnikova, 24, remain in Russia, speaking out. Their message is: Do not buy the newly varnished façade. Russia is continuing to abuse the rights of its own people in ways most cannot even imagine. And anyone who goes to the Olympics, whether as an athlete, a spectator, or an official, in effect condones these abuses. [....]
The most important thing they learned from their first press conference was that, at least for now, they have a large international audience.
“I was worried that no one would be interested in prisoners' rights,” Tolokonnikova says. “I thought this might be just something Masha and I want to work on because we have experienced it.”
But prison is an object of almost universal fear and interest in Russia [....]
By Spencer Ackerman in Washington, theguardian.com, 10 Jan., 2014
The National Security Agency and its allies are making a final public push to retain as much of their controversial mass surveillance powers as they can, before President Barack Obama’s forthcoming announcement about the future scope of US surveillance.
Security officials concede a need for greater transparency and for adjustments to broad domestic intelligence collection, but argue that limiting the scope of such collection would put the country at greater risk of terrorist attacks.
In a lengthy interview that aired on Friday on National Public Radio (NPR), the NSA’s top civilian official, the outgoing deputy director John C Inglis, said that the agency would cautiously welcome a public advocate to argue for privacy interests before the secret court which oversees surveillance. Such a measure is being promoted by some of the agency’s strongest legislative critics.
Inglis also suggested [....]
... three years ago, dispatched to an almost certain death by an assassin’s bullet, I was allowed the opportunity for a new life. I had planned to spend my 40s continuing my public service and starting a family. I thought that by fighting for the people I cared about and loving those close to me, I could leave the world a better place. And that would be enough.Instead, I’ve spent the past three years learning how to talk again, how to walk again. I had to learn to sign my name with my left hand. It’s gritty, painful, frustrating work, every day. Rehab is endlessly repetitive. And it’s never easy, because once you’ve mastered some movement or action or word, no matter how small, you move on to the next. You never rest.I asked myself, if simply completing a normal day requires so much work, how would I ever be able to fulfill a larger purpose? The killing of children at the school in Sandy Hook a little over a year ago gave me my answer. It shocked me, it motivated me, and frankly, it showed me a path. After that day, my husband and I pledged to make it our mission to change laws and reduce gun violence in a way that was consistent with our moderate beliefs and our identities as proud gun owners. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, that special interests were arrayed against us, that congressional dysfunction was an enemy.
“What he said a couple of times,” Mr. Lavin recalled, “was:
‘The governor told me to make sure you don’t get this message mixed up; say these exact words.’ ”
By Rick Gladstone and Thomas Erdbrink, New York Times, Jan. 9/10, 2014
Iran’s supreme leader harshly denounced the United States on Thursday as negotiations to conclude an interim agreement in the Iranian nuclear dispute resumed, saying those talks illustrated what he called the hostility of Americans toward Iran and the Muslim world.
The remarks by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reported by Iran’s official news media, covered a range of grievances against the United States [....]
Ayatollah Khamenei also reiterated his contention that the American-led economic sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program had no relevance to the progress in the negotiations [....]
Also see:
Nuclear talks showed US hostility towards Iran, says supreme leader
'The enemy's smile shouldn't be taken seriously,' says Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as talks resume in Geneva
By Saeed Kamali Dehghan, theguardian.com, 9 Jan., 2014
[....] "We had announced previously that on certain issues, if we feel it is expedient, we would negotiate with the Satan [the US] to deter its evil," he told a crowd of clerics and his followers from Qom, which devout Shia Muslims consider a holy city. "The nuclear talks showed the enmity of America against Iran, Iranians, Islam and Muslims."
A few hours after Khamenei's speech, Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was due to meet Helga Schmid, a deputy to the EU's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, in Geneva to discuss issues still to be resolved before the nuclear deal can be put into effect [....]
Man Crashes Into Gas Station, Steals Banana Then Leaves
By LeAnn Gendreau, NBC News Miami, Jan. 9, 2014
Police in Newington are looking for the man who they said committed a bizarre crime early this morning when he backed an SUV into a Connecticut gas station, stole a banana, ate and left in the damaged vehicle [....]
When they reviewed surveillance video, they saw a light-colored Ford Freestyle station wagon with Connecticut registration plates back into the store door several times and break the glass. Then, a man went into the store, took a banana from a shelf, peeled it, ate the fruit and left the store, police said [.....]
Also see:
Woman Beats United Airlines Ticket Agent: Deputies
NBC News Miami, Jan. 9, 2014
A woman was arrested for violently beating an United Airlines ticket agent at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, authorities said. Shelby Henderson Griffiths, 22, was arrested on Tuesday after she demanded that the agent, Teresa Rodriguez, help her, and when Rodriguez tried to help her, she became violent, the Broward Sheriff's Office said.
Rodriguez tried to shield herself from the punches by covering her face, but Griffiths grabbed her hair and pulled her to the floor, authorities said. "At the time the suspect began kicking the victim in the stomach and legs as the victim laid helpless on the floor," [....]
Alan Dershowitz tells the Jerusalem Post that he’s thinking of becoming an Israeli citizen. He wants to send a message to supporters of BDS that “if you’re boycotting Israel, you’re boycotting me.”
There are several things that need to be understood regarding Gates’ career at the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense.
By Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Jan. 8, 2014
Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, denounced a campaign of attacks on Palestinian civilians and property by extremist Israeli settlers as “outright terror” on Wednesday, after two cars were set on fire with Molotov cocktails and Hebrew graffiti — reading “price tag” and “Esh Kodesh revenge” — was sprayed on the walls of a West Bank village.
The vandalism took place in early morning near the village of Qusra, in apparent retaliation for an incident there the day before [....]
According to a translation from Israel Hayom, Mr. Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, said on Wednesday: “The phenomenon called ‘price-tag’ is inherently wrong and I consider it outright terror. We are sparing no effort to find its perpetrators and we will show them zero tolerance.”
“The State of Israel cannot permit itself to have phenomena of this kind emerge from within,” he added. “We will not permit marginal, extreme and violent groups to take control by force of land that is not theirs, in violation of the law, or to threaten Palestinian residents who are working their land.” [....]
Senator Colburn is suffering from a second bout of cancer.
Re-election does not come up until 2016; but he may actually have to resign his seat.
This man is strange. He will claim that Obama is a personal friend and then go on and on about what a terrible man our President is.
I get a kick out of him from time to time.
I just had no idea that he had a first bout with cancer!
I personally wish him the best.
By Jacob Poushter, Factank @ pewresearch.org, Jan. 8, 2014
Larger-size chart and details in text @ link.
By Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News (in collaboration with USA Today,) Jan. 7, 2014
Lede: A growing number are starting for-profit Medicaid managed care plans to boost revenue and gain more control over patient care
Excerpt: "If you have to ask for money from the bank … you might as well be the bank," says William Baker, a health center consultant in Austin, Texas.
A number of community health centers have already formed nonprofit Medicaid health plans, including ones in California, Rhode Island and New York. Prestige is one of a handful of for-profit plans created by the centers, but more are looking at that business model as a result of two overlapping trends: the increasing number of people eligible for Medicaid under the federal health law and state decisions to shift enrollees into managed care plans.
[....] Two of today's largest for-profit Medicaid insurers -- Centene and Amerigroup -- started out as nonprofits owned by community health centers [....]
Venal, buffoonish old-fashioned pol corruption like this offers a welcome respite from the much more serious wrong-doing we see so often today.
It makes me feel like the old values haven't disappeared after all. God's in His heaven and all is right with the world.
Puts me in the mood to curl up with a Dickens or Sinclair Lewis novel.
The Editorial Board, New York Times, Jan. 7/8, 2013
When President Obama took office in 2009, he promised an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” In a memo issued the day after his inauguration, he wrote, “The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”
In the latest reminder that the Obama administration has failed to live up to that promise, the Justice Department last week won its fight to keep secret a memo that outlines the supposed legal authority for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to collect Americans’ telephone and financial records without a subpoena or court order [....]
Associated Press/CBS News, Jan. 7, 2013
NEW YORK - Scores of retired New York City police officers, firefighters and prison guards were charged Tuesday with faking psychiatric problems to get federal disability benefits - with some falsely claiming their conditions arose after the Sept. 11 attacks, prosecutors said.
Four ringleaders coached the former workers on how to falsely describe symptoms of depression and other mental health problems that allowed them to get payouts high as $500,000, said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The ringleaders made tens of thousands in dollars in secret kickbacks, Vance said.
Among the retirees arrested were 72 city police officers, eight firefighters, five corrections officers and one Nassau County Police Department officer.
Investigators said the scam stretched back more than two decades, with the ex-officers and other workers collecting years' worth of benefits for citing mental health problems so severe that they couldn't work at all. The workers were coached on how to portray their problems, reporting that they were so psychologically damaged that they couldn't take care of themselves, prosecutors said [....]
Also see:
80 From N.Y. Police and Fire Forces Are Charged in Social Security Fraud
By William K. Rashbaum and James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times, Jan. 7/8, 2014
Eighty retired New York City police officers and firefighters were charged on Tuesday in one of the largest Social Security disability frauds ever, a sprawling decades-long scheme in which false mental disability claims by as many as 1,000 people cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, according to court papers [....]
By Susan Davis, USA Today, Jan. 7, 2014
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate agreed Tuesday to move forward with a three-month extension of expired jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, which affects an estimated 1.3 million Americans.
Six Republicans voted with 54 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, which includes two independents, to overcome a 60-vote threshold to begin consideration of bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Dean Heller, R-Nev [....]
Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, was not present for the vote. Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., surprised Democrats by providing the key vote to advance the bill [....]
The next steps are uncertain. The Senate still has to pass the bill, and it faces considerable opposition in the GOP-controlled House, where Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has said he could consider an extension if the cost is offset by budget cuts elsewhere.
President Obama will keep pressure on Congress to act at a White House event Tuesday with some of the Americans affected by the benefits' expiration [....]
Tomorrow from noon to 1pm, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, is hosting a panel about the VC’s own book, A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case. The one and only John Malcolm will moderate, and the participants will be Randy, Ilya, editor Trevor Burrus, and me. For those who can’t attend in person, I think you can watch the event live at the Heritage website. It will also be broadcast on C-SPAN at various times (and available online) via C-SPAN’s weekend Book TV series.
I saw this while checking out The Volokh Conspiracy website. Might be interesting.
By Lawrence Wright, "Comment" @ The New Yorker, Jan. 13, 2014 issue and online now
In ruling last month on the N.S.A.’s phone-surveillance program, a federal judge drew the wrong lesson from the story of a 9/11 hijacker.
[For those who don't know of Wright, as his bio says, among other accomplishments: ....His most recent book, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” (2006), a narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2007 and was nominated for the National Book Award....as well as His work has included “The Man Behind Bin Laden,” about Ayman al-Zawahiri; an article on John O’Neill, the head of the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism effort in New York, who was killed on September 11th...]
By Thomas Erdbrink, New York Times, Jan. 1, 2014
TEHRAN — One of Iran’s most prominent former diplomats, an ally of President Hassan Rouhani, has returned to the country, ending his unofficial exile in the United States, state news media reported on Tuesday.
The former diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who for many years was the spokesman of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, left Tehran for Princeton University in 2009 after hard-liners accused him of espionage during earlier rounds of nuclear talks with European powers.
“I have returned to Iran to stay,” he was quoted as saying by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency [....]
It was unclear from the news accounts of Mr. Mousavian’s return what role, if any, he might play in the current nuclear negotiations or in other government affairs. But the publicity given to his homecoming suggested that Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, remained confident in Mr. Rouhani’s handling of the nuclear negotiations [....]
Francis also warned against accepting men for the priesthood who may have been implicated in sexual abuse or other problems
By Nicole Winfield, NBC Bay Area, Jan. 3, 2014
[....] The pontiff made the comments Nov. 29 during a closed-door meeting of 120 superiors of religious orders who gathered at the Vatican for their regular assembly [....]
Francis [...] also warned the superiors of some of the failings of seminary training, or "formation," such as when would-be priests merely "grit their teeth, try not to make mistakes, follow the rules smiling a lot, just waiting for the day when they are told 'Good, you have finished formation."
"This is hypocrisy that is the result of clericalism, which is one of the worst evils," Francis was quoted as saying, returning to the issue of clericalism — or a certain cronyism and careerism among the men of the cloth — that he has frequently criticized.
The training of priests, he said, must be a "work of art, not a police action." "We must form their hearts. Otherwise we are creating little monsters. And then these little monsters mold the people of God. This really gives me goose bumps," he was quoted as saying [....]
Also see:
Pope abolishes honorary title of monsignor for diocesan priests under the age of 65
By Gerald O'Connor in Rome, Vatican Insider, Jan. 4, 2014
In a new move aimed at reforming the clergy and eliminating careerism in the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has abolished the conferral of the Pontifical Honor of ‘Monsignor’ on secular priests under the age of 65 [....]