In the movie Witness, there is a scene where a little Amish boy, who has witnessed a murder, takes the gun of the detective who is there to protect him from a chest of drawers. He is caught by his grandfather who sits him down for a talk. The grandfather asks if the boy would use this gun to kill. The boy says that he would only kill a bad man. The grandfather asks “How will you know who is the bad man?” This is the central point of our system of justice, we don’t just assume that someone is a bad man before punishing them, we have an elaborate process designed to require proof of actions before we punish.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Unfortunately our trauma with terrorism has eroded this system. Today, as you read this, there is a list of people around the world who are targeted for death. They are suspected of being involved with terror plots, and some of them are your fellow citizens. If they are found anywhere in the world by our forces they will be killed. Not captured and brought to trial, not attempted to be captured, but killed out right.

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from Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica (view source)

Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown -- collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

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Former Presidential Senior Advisor turned Fox News Political Analyst Karl Rove interviews former President George W. Bush six months from today at his Crawford Texas ranch, and finds a broken, pathetic ex-president who's reverted to his former days of booze and cocaine since leaving the brightly lit world stage he inhabited for eight years.

Rove finds the venerable ex-president who sacrificed so much and made it his life's mission to protect America from the hordes of evil terrorists world wide swimming across the oceans with knives in their teeth to kill American babies in their beds has sunk into a paranoid hallucinatory state in which he's broken all the mirrors in his house out of fear that they are "looking at me" every time he passes one, and who lives in the sad, pathetic delusion that President Obama and the Democrats fully intend to have him arrested, charged, and finally held accountable for what he terms "all my sins" - his war crimes.

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Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for all you have accomplished in your time in office. I sincerely appreciate all of the many ways you are different than George Bush. Your wife and children are beautiful and vivacious and a pleasure to watch and in Michelle's case, listen to. And by the way, that tie really brings out the color of your eyes, and the salt and pepper hair thing is looking pretty darn good on you!

Thank you for protecting us from Canadian health care and those that would close the pentagon. I am heartened to see that you are keeping your elbow tucked in when you elevate for the three-pointer. Bo looks like he is growing up nicely and you must be feeding him well, you can see it in the sheen on his coat.

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Fairly Unbalanced Steve Doocy - Fox News

It's hard work promoting bigotry these days, I guess.

Fox News Online Poll - 71% View Anti-Gay Marriage Proposition 8 as Unconstitutional
by Steve Clemons of The Washington Note

Is it possible that even the center-right tilting viewing audience of Fox news programs is also open to significant upgrades of gay civil rights? That is what a surprising new, unscientific survey of a Fox web audience seems to be showing.

With pleasure, I direct you to this interesting Fox News online poll in which at the time of this posting 300,499 votes had been cast.

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week.  He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. "Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” 

Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in school civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement.  After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands. 

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Gareth Porter is an historian and investigative journalist and US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Porter is author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Porter talks with Real News Network's Paul Jay with a dissection of Obama's Iraq 'withdrawal' smoke and mirrors kabuki.

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Depending on what study and what definitional criteria one wants to use the number of LGTB citizens is between 4% and 20%. It does not matter at all to me what this number is as I have had gay and lesbian family members, close (best) friends and acquaintances all my life. They were never “my lesbian friend” or “my gay cousin” they were just the people in my life and that they were family or a good friend has always been a hell of a lot more important than who they liked to frolic under the sheets with.

Still the fact of their sexuality was always an issue. Even if I didn’t care, the rest of the world seemed to and this made them have to lead their lives differently for fear of being attacked or just legally discriminated against. It still breaks my heart on a daily basis to see good people who just want to live their lives like every other citizen having to hide or downplay what and who they are because of the irrational prejudice against them.

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Has anyone wondered what happened to FISA reform that President Obama promised to do after he took office? Well if this is his idea of reform, he is no better than the gang that occupied the Executive for the last 8 years.

The Washington Post last week reported that a White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity "by adding four little words, 'electronic communication transactional records' -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval", so that the government will have access to the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. The government lawyers are claiming that it would not grant access to content. If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.

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BP appears to be delaying decisions about the validity of many claims for damages from the Gulf oil spill, leaving claimants frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles and confusing requests for more documentation.

The company's claims process is guided by the Oil Pollution Act, a 1990 federal law that holds oil companies responsible for repaying direct "removal costs and damages" caused by a spill. But many claims are for damages that are not explicitly covered by the law -- such as ruined start-up companies and lost income from commission payments -- and many of those are in limbo.

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