How many of these scenarios have there ever actually been?
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Al Swearengen, History at 5:45 PM MDT
May 7th, 2008
Ticking Time Bomb
April 16th, 2008
Merck wrote the research & doctors signed it for money
JAMA published this today. Every one of these doctors need to provide answers to the medical community, and if they didn’t actually conduct the research they attached their name to, their medical license should be revoked. People are dead because of this nonsense…
Recent litigation against Merck & Co Inc related to rofecoxib provided a unique opportunity to examine the practice of guest authorship and ghostwriting related to the research and promotion of this medication. Our objective was to provide a review using a case-study exploration of court documents, in tandem with a review of the medical literature, to describe the practice of guest authorship and ghostwriting related to rofecoxib.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Al Swearengen at 10:03 PM MDT
March 27th, 2008
Don Siegelman is being released!
I’ve written about this a few times, and have been checking out Scott Horton’s posts over at Harper’s...this 60 Minutes piece will bring you up to speed if you don’t know anything about this:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice at 10:33 PM MDT
February 15th, 2008
Halliburton Steals Information from Petrobas (PBR)
If someone just made this story up…
(Reuters) - Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras (PETR4.SA: Quote, Profile, Research)(PBR.N: Quote, Profile, Research), said Thursday that computers containing “important information” of oil and gas field research off the Brazilian coast were stolen. “There was a theft of equipment that contained important information for the company,” Petrobras confirmed by phone. “The event is under investigation.” The company said it has copies of the stolen data but did not specify the nature of the data.…The subsalt cluster has aroused strong interest from the oil industry after Petrobras said, in late 2007, it had recoverable reserves at between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels of light crude in the Tupi field and in-place reserves of up to 20 billion barrels. [ID:nN23604539]
(CNN) The objects were being transported by U.S. oilfield service company Halliburton Co. (HAL), the Web site said. The hardware contained confidential information on research that led to recent discoveries of massive new oil and gas fields in ultra-deep waters off the Brazilian coast, Terra said, without giving sources.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Economics at 12:21 AM MST
January 31st, 2008
Harper’s Weekly Review (part)
“…Dwarf thieves had infested Swedish buses,9 Lithuania was pondering changing its name,10 and a plot by retired Turkish Army officers to kill Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was foiled. 11 Police in Malda, India, were battling avian flu by conducting a poultry massacre. “We have planned to collect ‘backyard chickens’ from the houses in the evening and kill all of them late at night,” said the district’s deputy director of animal-resources development, N. K. Shit.12 George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.” (by Christian Lorentzen)
Scott Horton is without a doubt my favorite writer at the moment. Harper’s online has his work up for free on the site’s front page. You can find out why John Yoo hasn’t come over for dinner lately. Keynesian economics, Leo Strauss, J$hn Ashcr$ft, Afghanistan, “Blitzwasser” or hot-water incident (so named for the kettles of boiling water that the citizens threw at federal tax collectors), Don Siegelman…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Justice, Politics, Economics, History, Military at 11:25 PM MST
January 30th, 2008
Election Shenanigans in New Hampshire
BlackBoxVoting.org on top of things up in New Hampshire:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Video, Politics at 10:44 PM MST
January 20th, 2008
Mississippi mud
This is a good one…
(Lead Story - NYTimes Sunday Business Section - By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ) …Linking Mr. Scruggs, Mr. Patterson and other figures in the case is an obscure former college football star, farmer and politically well-connected adviser to Mr. Scruggs named Presley L. Blake (Google Search). At the hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors described Mr. Blake as a key go-between in an elaborate bribery plot, and they are now examining his ties to Mr. Scruggs. No charges have been brought against Mr. Blake.The story of Mr. Blake, who has received at least $10 million from Mr. Scruggs, threatens to reveal just how Mr. Scruggs worked the political back rooms of Mississippi — and Washington — to win a huge settlement with cigarette makers that garnered him approximately $1 billion in fees as well as a role in “The Insider,” the 1999 movie about the battle with Big Tobacco. Mr. Scruggs’s connections have never been a secret: his brother-in-law is former Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. But the expansion of the investigation is especially significant because for Mr. Scruggs, law and politics have been closely intertwined…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Politics, Economics at 2:39 PM MST
December 6th, 2007
Randi Rhodes
This one’s a bit long (35 minutes), but it’s one of those speeches that define a moment so perfectly, that it will represent what a person is remembered for long after they’re dead. Dig this…
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Video, Politics at 12:32 AM MST
November 12th, 2007
Nance, Kleinman, and Waterboarding: The Remix
This is a compilation from a House committee hearing last week, courtesy of TPMmuckraker:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Video, Military at 1:32 AM MST
November 7th, 2007
Olbermann on Torture
A Special Comment on torture:
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Video, Politics, History at 2:40 PM MST
November 6th, 2007
Democracy Now!
Amy Goodman is the host of this show, which can be seen and heard by going to the Democracy Now! website. Without fail, where the mainstream media fails to even attempt digging into a story, this show right here will make up the difference. What I like most is how useable the site is, so when I get into a certain story I can easily search and if sometime in the past an interview pertaining to it took place, I can always have the transcript and audio file downloaded to my PC within minutes.
I’ve read two of her books, which at least one of she co-wrote with her brother. I highly recommend both of them:
STATIC: GOVERNMENT LIARS, MEDIA CHEERLEADERS, AND THE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT BACK
What got me thinking about Democracy Now! lately, has been this stupified glop glop in the press on scandals and Constitution-shredding that is packaged as something new, when in fact it is anything but. I’ll post a clip tomorrow that will provide a perfect example, having to do with Donald Rumsfeld’s management philosophy. He’d shoot off 60 or so “snowflakes” around the Pentagon every day, basically mucking up the works, as these things wouldn’t even cover something actionable, but could represent more of what was going on inside the old bastard’s head on a given day. As if he were having a debate with himself over the ins and outs of defending a personal failure by spreading out the misery far and wide, and trying out his political swirms on the department as a whole.
I got aggrivated mostly because this story was actually covered in Bob Woodward’s ‘State of Denial’ over a year ago. Anyone could read that book and see Rumsfeld for what he is, the infighter with little competence to lean on when it came to managing the defense department. Though for me it’s the series of books that have come out since then, mostly relying on released documents and interviews with people who wouldn’t have spoken up sooner, which go much further than a couple of snowflakes telling us what we already knew.
Donald Rumsfeld is a war criminal. By the standard set by our own laws and certainly the standard set by international law, he should find himself on trial at some point. Piecing a belief like this one together is something that takes place over a stretch of time, with hundreds of thousands of words read, and once in a while the crucial interview with someone in the know on a show like Goodman’s Democracy Now! opens up a doorway. It is a crucial function of our fake democracy, these shows that really focus on finding out the truth. They are few and far between.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Al Swearengen, Military at 1:49 AM MST
October 24th, 2007
No Lake, No Trout
I. (TPMmuckraker - Iraq Revokes All Contractor Immunity - Spencer Ackerman) “The metaphorical statue of L. Paul Bremer III has come crashing down. Today the Iraqi government formally revoked one of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s enduring vestiges — a decree of immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for U.S. security contractors.“
II. (Think Progress) “In California, half of the equipment the National Guard needs is not in the state, either because it is deployed in Iraq or other parts of the world or because it hasn’t been funded, according to Lt. Col. John Siepmann. While the Guard is in good shape to handle small-scale incidents, “our concern is a catastrophic event,” he said. “You would see a less effective response (to a major incident),” he said.
At a press conference five months ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) echoed these concerns, stating, “A lot of equipment has gone to Iraq, and it doesn’t come back when the troops come back.” The Chronicle reported that the California National Guard was missing about $1 billion worth of equipment. Now, as 14 major wildfires rage across the state, those earlier warnings are materializing. While California currently has approximately 1,500 Guardsmen serving in Iraq, the strains on the disaster response teams are compounded by the missing personnel and equipment.“
III. (CNN - Turkish Planes Bomb Kurdish Rebels) “Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships have been bombing Kurdish separatist positions in Turkey along the Iraqi-Turkish frontier amid continuing diplomatic efforts to avert a major cross-border incursion by Turkish military forces.“
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Politics, Military, Words at 11:48 AM MDT
October 23rd, 2007
Lake Trout
I. Two Republican representatives, both of whom I think the worst of as a rule, seem to be battling against Cheney over the White House’s leaking of false information that indicates Israel struck a nuclear facility in Syria that was being built with the help of North Korea. Check this out:
(Raw Story - GOP Accusing White House of Leaking) In 2006, Larisa Alexandrovna reported for RAW STORY on Hoekstra’s approval of Vice President Cheney’s renewed use of former Iran-Contra middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar to help frustrate diplomatic talks between the US and Iran. A follow-up article by Alexandrovna revealed that Hoekstra himself had met with Ghorbanifar in the late spring or early summer of 2006 in a possible attempt to create “falsified intelligence” that could lead to war with Iran. Alexandrovna has also reported that the target of the Israeli airstrike was not a nuclear facility and, most recently, that sources in the intelligence community believe Vice President Cheney is behind the selective leaks concerning the incident.
One intelligence official told Alexandrovna, “The allegations that North Korea was helping to build a nuclear reactor have not been substantiated by US intelligence, but that hasn’t stopped Dick Cheney and his minions at the NSC, Elliot Abrams and Steve Hadley, from leaking the information [to the press], which appears to be misleading in the extreme.”
II. After the bloggers (including myself and others) jumped all over the story about Senator Rockefeller’s love for the idea of granting immunity to telecom companies coinciding with a campaign bucks bonanza - the NYTimes finally covers it, on a Tuesday and thus far only online.
III. 
“(Murray Weiss - NYPost) THE number of NYPD cops using drugs, stealing property - even from the dead - and committing other acts of corruption, including extorting sex from female suspects, spiked sharply last year, according to a confidential NYPD report.“
IV. (Raw Story) “The mayor of the Indian capital said Monday that authorities could not deal with the scourge of violent monkeys, blamed for the death of a top city official over the weekend. The danger posed by the estimated 10,000 monkeys that roam the city was brought home sharply on Sunday when deputy mayor S.S. Bajwa, 52, died after falling from his apartment while fighting a horde of wild simians. If the animals are caught, “we are under pressure to release them due to pressure from animal activists and from people due to religious reasons“
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Politics, Military at 12:32 AM MDT
October 21st, 2007
bBlogBouillabaisse - DiceK in Game Seven
Pam’s House Blend: “Rudy flip-flops on marriage amendment — and still fails to win over Values Voters“ Straw Poll Results:
Name … Percentage
1. Mitt Romney … 27.62%
2. Mike Huckabee …27.10%
3. Ron Paul … 14.98%
4. Fred Thompson …9.77%
5. Sam Brownback …5.14%
6. Duncan Hunter …2.42%
7. Tom Tancredo … 2.30%
8. Rudy Giuliani …1.85%
9. John McCain … 1.40 %
Al: “Manny Ramirez gets put on the top six stories on Yahoo for saying it doesn’t matter if the Red Sox lose game 5…mountains of words all over the frivilous vast expanse of sporting media, and Dubya slides on this episode right here”. Video pulled from Blue Girl, Red State
Manila Rice from The Largest Minority covered Maher Arar’s appearance at a House hearing (via satelite, since it’s still not safe for him to actually step foot in America): Calls Mount for Bush to Apologize to Torture Victim
The Liberal Doomsayer sends Dennis Hassert off proper
James at NBAObsessed: Gilbert Arenas to test Free Agency
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Politics, Sports at 2:33 AM MDT
October 19th, 2007
Senator Rockefeller (D-WV) - Selling Us Out
I’ve been watching this immunity story like a hawk, but haven’t had the time to comment on it here. This post I found after reading TPMmuckraker’s front page today was too good not to share. I’m posting the first 2 sentences of the post written by Ryan Singel on Wired.com, along with two charts. He’s put together an outstanding case study on why we will never have a government “of/by/for the people” as long as elections continue to be financed with private money.
(Ryan Singel: Democratic Lawmaker Pushing Immunity Is Newly Flush With Telco Cash) Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is reportedly steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans. He has also recently benefited from some interesting political contributions.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Justice, Politics at 10:30 PM MDT