Tag: Scandals

The mayor of Columbia, S.C., the capitol of the state that led the rest of the Confederacy off the cliff of secession in December 1860, has a letter in the local paper in which he pleads with racist conservatives who still run the state to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds:

The presence of the Confederate flag in front of the State House … is an obstacle to economic development, and in particular to South Carolina’s and Columbia’s efforts to enter the knowledge economy. The flag creates an unnecessary, negative image of South Carolina to the world.

My experience is that outside of South Carolina, the flag creates a controversial and uncertain image of South Carolina that ties current state policy of flying the flag on the State House grounds to our history of racial segregation and intolerance. This negative image exists even though I readily accept the fact that most of the advocates for the flag do not intend to convey that message. Unfortunately, in today’s world of the Internet and national and international media, the Confederate flag, fairly or not, has become a symbol of intolerance.

The mayor, Bob Coble, is courageous for speaking out. He risks having a cross or two burned in his yard, at the very least. He could also be facing the end of his political career and, at worst, risking the safety of himself and his family.

He’s right about the battle flag. To the rest of the world, it has become a symbol of racial hatred on par with the Nazi swastika. As such, the flag at the South Carolina statehouse is one of the most lurid examples, since it was first raised in the Civil Rights era as a middle-finger salute to the United States Dept. of Justice, African-Americans, Yankees and anyone else who opposed Jim Crow.

There are still Southerners who cling to the delusion that the Confederate flag is symbol of the valiant cause of Southern independence. Whatever it once was, from the moment the North claimed victory, the Confederate flag became the symbol of a lost cause — and rightly so.

As long as the Confederate flag flies at its state house, South Carolina deserves its reputation as a backwater, with rankings in education, health care and productivity among the lowest in the country. And every multinational company that moves facilities there should be tarred with the same brush — especially including the German automaker BMW that saw no problem with a swastika, er, Confederate flag flying in the capitol when it opened a plant in Greenville.

As my colleague Trish often points out, stupidity about race is by no means a Southern trait. In Michigan, the Rapid City Businessmen’s Association flew a special KKK branded Confederate flag at its family picnic over the weekend:

[…]

Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. Madam, recently turned over thousands of phone numbers belonging to clients of her high-class escort service to Brian Ross at ABC News. Ross announced his findings last night on “20/20.” I’m glad I didn’t stay up:

The phone records trace back to thousands of men, including a career Justice Department prosecutor. There are NASA officials; at least five military officers, including the commander of an Air Force intelligence squadron … The phone numbers also track back to Georgetown mansions and prominent CEOs, officials at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and lobbyists both Republican and Democratic.

But as usually is the case in Washington, much of it is dull. There were no members of Congress that we could find in these phone records, no White House officials.

Quite frankly, but for the few exceptions, most of the men on this list just aren’t newsworthy, not even as customers of the D.C. Madam’s escort service.

Hiring a prostitute is as illegal as being one, or so I thought. So the fact that a Justice Dept. official and military officers are breaking the law would be newsworthy to a lot of people.

We knew that Deputy Sec. of State Randall Tobias, the head of the Bush administration’s global anti-prostitution crackdown, resigned after being outed as a Palfrey client.

(Tobias’ role as the anti-prostitution czar adds irony to this cavalier remark: “Tobias said [calling for a prostitute] was no different than ordering a pizza and denied there was any sex.”)

But the name Harlan Ullman was new to me:

Also named by Palfrey is Harlan Ullman, a leading military analyst who wrote the book “Shock and Awe,” a concept cited by the Pentagon in planning the war in Iraq.

Palfrey says she remembers Ullman as “Mr. U,” — remembers him well.

Jeane Palfrey: I think he was a disagreeable character. And there were some complaints about him, yes.

Brian Ross: From your women.

Jeane Palfrey: Yes.

Brian Ross: They didn’t want to go?

Jean Palfrey: Because he was an unpleasant person.

I assume Palfrey gave the phone numbers to Ross with the intent that he would expose her clients’ names so that they would suffer some of the same consequences she will, if she is found guilty. She should have known better.

As Melissa Farley, an academic who studies prostitution, said to “20/20” last night:

The women are arrested; the women are incarcerated; the women are taken out in handcuffs, and the men who buy and use women in prostitution slowly and quietly slink off, and they’re pretty much socially and legally invisible.

Same as it ever was.

At the Veteran’s Administration, it pays to support your president. Literally.

By lying about their budget, doling out care so bad it risked the lives of wounded veterans, and presiding over rat-infested hellholes, the guys and gals who run the V.A. took the biggest “performance payments” of anyone in civil service.

The list of bonuses to senior career officials at the Veterans Affairs Department in 2006… documents a generous package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among those receiving payments were a deputy assistant secretary and several regional directors who crafted the VA’s flawed budget for 2005 based on misleading accounting. They received performance payments up to $33,000 each, a figure equal to about 20 percent of their annual salaries.

Also receiving a top bonus was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who helps manage a disability claims system that has a backlog of cases and delays averaging 177 days in getting benefits to injured veterans.

The bonuses were awarded even after government investigators had determined the VA repeatedly miscalculated if not deliberately misled taxpayers with questionable methods used to justify Bush administration cuts to health care amid a burgeoning Iraq war.

Ever idly wondered what selling your soul feels like? Just ask the V.A. They sold theirs to Bush.

In July 2005, the VA stunned Congress by suddenly announcing it faced a $1 billion shortfall after failing to take into account the additional cost of caring for veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan…

The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, determined the VA had used misleading accounting methods and claimed false savings of more than $1.3 billion, apparently because President Bush was not willing, at the time, to ask Congress for more money.

V.A. officials based in Washington D.C. got the biggest checks, triggering the Senate Chair of the Veteran’s Affairs Committee, Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) to ask what’s up with that. Smells like cronyism to me.

After six years of Bush, the big surprise is that we can still be surprised at his administration’s blatant raiding of the public till. After all, this is small potatoes compared to the rip-off which is private contracting. But still.

Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the VA bonuses appeared to reflect a trend in government where performance bonuses were increasingly used to reward loyal associates and longtime employees…

“Simply put, people who nearly shortchanged our veterans shouldn’t get a bonus check at the end of the year,” he said.

Now that’s keeping a secret!

A lawyer with “good reason” to suspect his client will appear on the D.C. Madam’s list has contacted ABC News to keep them from revealing the client’s identity.

But his client’s name is so secret, he didn’t even tell ABC. Wha?

In a letter to ABC News, Steven Salky of Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, D.C., said he has “reason to believe” that his client might be named in this Friday’s “20/20” report about the alleged prostitution ring.

But Salky did not identify who his client is.

Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “D.C. Madam,” is pulling a Jack Abramoff and spilling her guts so she won’t be the only one in jail for breaking the law. She is also suing former employees who engaged in real sex, as opposed to the “fantasy sex” she says her business offered and that all her clients claim to have purchased.

Whoever the mystery man is, he must be really, really impotent. Sorry, I meant he must be “important,” if his lawyer is trying that hard to keep him out of the public mud.

Maybe ABC can hire Miss Cleo to figure out who the client is so they can comply with the lawyer’s request. Or to be safe, just not mention the name of any Republicans known to be flaming hypocrites. On second thought, calling Miss Cleo would probably be more realistic.

On Friday, the Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested a homegrown American rightwing terrorist named Paul Ross Evans who had attempted to bomb an abortion clinic in Austin earlier in the week week:

A 27-year-old Austin man was … charged with placing an unexploded [sic] bomb containing some 2,000 nails outside an abortion clinic in the state’s capital.

The explosive device also included a propane tank and a mechanism “akin to a rocket,” Austin Police Commander David Carter said.

The device was discovered on Wednesday in the parking lot of the Austin Women’s Health Center, police said.

It is surprising that Evans was arrested by the terrorism task force — which is comprised of federal, state and local law enforcement authorities — and not the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS). And even though Evans was arrested by a terrorism task force, none of the charges against him are terrorism-related:

Evans was charged with violating federal laws banning the manufacture of explosives and interfering with access to an abortion clinic. He appeared before a federal magistrate, and was being held without bail.

No further arrests were anticipated in the case. “The threat is over,” Carter said.

It is exceedingly strange that in the Republican mindset that dominates our culture abortion clinic bombers do not fall under the purview of DHS and yet child predators and pornograhpers do. (I first learned that DHS tracked pedophiles when the department was instrumental in arresting John Mark Karr, the man who falsely claimed to have killed JonBenet Ramsey.)

Certainly, the government has a responsibility to investigate and arrest anyone involved in child predation and porn, but it’s hard to make the case that this problem, serious as it is, is a threat to homeland security. It seems that these sorts of crimes ought to be handled by the FBI.

Conversely, people who bomb abortion clinics are, by definition and intent, terrorists who threaten America homeland security. Who would be better at investigating them than DHS?

A cynic might wonder if the reason DHS leaves domestic terrorists to task forces like the one in Texas is political, since clinic bombers are tacitly supported by the GOP’s Christian nationalist allies.

Sen. John McCain is out banging the drum for Bush-style perpetual war by strongly criticizing the Democrats’ plan to redeploy troops from Iraq, which, via Rove talking points, he calls a “precipitous withdrawal.”

Well, look who was for precipitous withdrawals in the 1990s:

October 1994 — McCain argued for the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Haiti: “In my view that does not mean as soon as order is restored to Haiti. It does not mean as soon as democracy is flourishing in Haiti. It does not mean as soon as we have established a viable nation in Haiti. As soon as possible means as soon we can get out of Haiti without losing any American lives.” [Senate Floor, 10/6/94]

October 1993 — McCain argued against giving any strategy the chance to succeed in Somalia: “Mr. President, can anyone seriously argue that another 6 months of United States forces in harm’s way means the difference between peace and prosperity in Somalia and war and starvation there? Is that very dim prospect worth one more American life? No, it is not.” [Senate Floor, 10/14/93]