April 2011

Again, the IOKIYAR syndrome strikes:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has vowed to bring the Senate to a standstill unless congressional leaders agree to allocate $40,000 for a federal study on deepening the Port of Charleston.

Graham says one out of five jobs in South Carolina stem from trade through Charleston’s busy port, and he warns the entire state economy will suffer unless the port is overhauled.

The senator suffered a setback last week when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not include the funding in the 2011 budget deal.

Graham said he will not block the budget agreement to keep the government funded through the end of September but that he will hold up all other business until the matter is resolved. He said he would not delay the stopgap spending measure because it includes funding for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When we fund research for things like cancer, monitoring volcanoes or tsunamis or anything other thing that can save millions of lives and billions in property, the right balks at “government waste”. Here we have a Republican Senator wanting to spend federal dollars to research something that will affect a community of less than 350,000 and the right is silent. While the dollar amount is far less, for some reason I am having flashbacks of the “bridge to nowhere” and the late Ted Stevens.

At the end of March an atrocity happened in the Supreme Court, one that can redefine our system of justice and put us more on track to become a third world nation governed by dictators.

John Thompson was convicted of murder and robbery in the 1980’s in New Orleans. He was then sentenced to death. For the next 14 years he resided on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary until it was uncovered that prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated him from the crimes. Today Thompson tells his story in the New York Times:

I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.

Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else today.

Read the entire thing and you will realize the horror that any of us could easily go through. Not just the fear of being put to death, but the loss of 18 years of your life for something you never did. You might even think you’re reading a John Grisham book, but this is real life.

Mother Jones:

Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.

What’s Mike Huckabee trying to hide? We already know how he likes to let hardened criminals out of jail, like Maurice Clemmons, who went on to kill four police officers. Is there something even worse hiding in Huckabee’s tenure?

Wells Fargo  received $25 billion from the George Bush TARP program. One of Wells Fargo’s biggest problems was the acquisition of Wachovia in December of 2008. Wachovia came with a whole slew of problems, but probably none bigger than this:

On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller's cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.