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BREAKING: U.S. Department of Justice announces independent investigation into shooting death of Trayvon Martin | Statement: “The department will conduct a thorough and independent review of all of the evidence and take appropriate action at the conclusion of the investigation. The department also is providing assistance to and cooperating with the state officials in their investigation into the incident. With all federal civil rights crimes, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person acted intentionally and with the specific intent to do something which the law forbids – the highest level of intent in criminal law. Negligence, recklessness, mistakes and accidents are not prosecutable under the federal criminal civil rights laws.” The U.S. Attorney and the FBI are also participating in the investigation.

NEWS FLASH

Wargame: U.S. Dragged Into Regional War After Israeli Strike On Iran | A Pentagon wargame simulating an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities ended with the U.S. involved in a regional war after an Iranian retaliatory missile killed 200 seamen aboard a Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. According to New York Times sources, CENTCOM Commander Gen. James Mattis, who is responsible for the region, found the results “particularly troubling.” The initial Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities delayed its program a year. After the U.S. entered the fight, subsequent bombings set back the program another two. U.S. intelligence agencies haven’t concluded that Iran has made a decision to produce a bomb, and, while Obama keeps all options on the table, he has said, “a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better.”

By Ali Gharib on Mar 19, 2012 at 6:33 pm

Economy

Rep. Issa Confronted By Protesters At Foreclosure Hearing, Blames Bank Fraud On Homeowners

By Travis Waldron on Mar 19, 2012 at 6:15 pm

A month after the nation’s largest banks reached a mortgage fraud settlement with the federal government and state attorneys general, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) joined Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY) for a foreclosure hearing in Brooklyn this morning. The field hearing included remarks by both Issa and Towns as well as scheduled testimony from representatives of Wall Street banks that were a part of the settlement, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase.

The hearing was almost immediately interrupted by protesters, however, who called on Issa and the panelists to “stop fighting for Wall Street and fight for the people that elected you!” Others chanted at Issa, “Work for the people!” before they were removed by security.

Watch it, courtesy of Raw Story:

The protesters were promptly removed for interrupting the hearing, but Issa was just getting started. He later blamed homeowners for robo-signing, the fraudulent foreclosure practice that landed banks in hot water in 2010, according to AlterNet reporter Sarah Jaffe:


Blaming homeowners and backlogs for robo-signing is directly contradictory to a report issued by the inspector general of the Department and Urban Development last week. That investigation found that the nation’s biggest banks — several of which had representatives on Issa’s panel — knew about the fraudulent practice, and that managers had authorized robo-signing. Bank managers gave out “vice president” titles to unqualified employees so they could robo-sign documents and squashed investigations into the practices. And when the scandal originally broke in 2010, banks promised to end the practice, only to keep robo-signing documents for at least another year.

Issa’s thoughts on foreclosure fraud, unfortunately, aren’t new. Before the GOP took control of the House in 2011, Issa promised not to investigate the fraudulent acts committed by Wall Street banks, instead vowing to focus his attention on home loans made to poor people.

NEWS FLASH

Facing Sinking Shores And Rising Seas, Louisiana Hopes To Lift Highway | With massive offshore drilling and a shunted Mississippi River, Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta has been sinking ever more rapidly into the Gulf of Mexico. Now, global warming is accelerating the disappearance of Louisiana with sea level rise. “Even according to conservative climate models, rising seas will make the road to Port Fourchon, La., a major artery to Gulf of Mexico refineries, largely unusable by the end of the century,” the Washington Post reports. “A plan to raise 19 miles of the highway has stalled with 10 miles completed.” “Not only is the sea rising as the ocean warms and expands, but heavier rainfall in shorter bursts is battering Highway 1,” writes Juliet Eilperin.

By Brad Johnson on Mar 19, 2012 at 6:11 pm

NEWS FLASH

Major New Study Shows Which States Are Most, Least Corrupt | A landmark new study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity, and Public Radio International grades the level of corruption in each states. The least corrupt states were Connecticut, Washington, California, Nebraska, and despite popular conception to the contrary, New Jersey. Eight states in total received the ignominious honor of “most corrupt“: Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and Wyoming. Notably, all eight states have both Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures. It appears the nation has been misguided in its focus on “Chicago-style corruption”; it is now time to turn our attention to the perils of Cheyenne-style corruption.

Climate Progress

Bombshell: After Fixing Errors, UK Met Office Says 2010, 2005 Hottest Years on Record, World Warming Faster Than Thought

By Joe Romm on Mar 19, 2012 at 6:08 pm

Reuters: Setback for the ‘stalled’ global warming view advanced by ‘skeptics’

Global temperaturesThe UK Met Office said two years ago it had underestimated recent warming. The key reason is their Hadley/CRU (Climatic Research Unit) Temperature dataset (HadCRUT) undersampled the Arctic — the place on earth warming up the fastest.

Now the Met[eorological] Office (part of the Defence Ministry) has corrected their errors and update their temperature record (release here, video below). No longer is 1998 the hottest year on record. It has been (slightly) edged out by 2010 and 2005. As the UK Telegraph reports:

Between 1998 and 2010, temperatures rose by 0.11C, 0.04C more than previously estimated.

The new data set also shifts around the hottest years on record, so that the new temperature series, known as HadCRUT4, is more in line with other global records held by NASA and NOAA in the US. The American series had already added Arctic temperatures from extrapolated information.

Before it was thought the hottest years were 1998 followed by 2010, 2005, 2003 and 2002. The updated series puts 2010 as the hottest year on record followed by 2005, 1998, 2003 and 2006.

The main conclusions of the new temperature series remains the same – that overall warming since 1850 has been around 0.75C and the 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the last 14 years.

data analysis graphThe deniers haven’t gone so ballistic over a new study since we saw the Koch-Funded Berkeley temperature study “confirm the reality of global warming” last year and conclude recent warming was “on the high end” and speeding up. Indeed, that study made clear that the HadCRUT dataset was the outlier, as the figure on the right shows.

That’s why the deniers always had a love-hate relationship with the HadCRUT data. They kept accusing the CRU scientists at the University of East Anglia, whose emails were stolen, of fudging the data. But at the same time, they kept citing the HadCRU data since it showed less warming in recent years.

Everyone but the anti-science disinformers have known for a long time that the Met Office dataset UNDERestimates — not OVERestimates — the recent global temperature rise.  Their data excludes “the place on Earth that has been warming fastest” (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“ and here).   NASA’s James Hansen has made this point for years. The Met Office itself concluded a December 2009 analysis that “The global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming.”

Now, as CRU Director Phil Jones explains, ”For the latest version we have included observations from more than 400 stations across the Arctic, Russia and Canada. This has led to better representation of what’s going on in the large geographical region.”

The Met Office has corrected a second mistake, an error the global sea-surface temperature dataset.  Here is Peter Stott, the Met Office’s head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution, in a video explaining all the corrections:

Read more

Alyssa

Tom Hardy to Return from Vietnam, Punch Hippies

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 19, 2012 at 6:08 pm

In a project that sounds alternately fascinating and disappointing, and certainly is proof that we’ve looped around a bit from the pro-soldier anti-war flicks of the first decade of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom Hardy is going to play a Vietnam veteran who, disillusioned by anti-war sentiment on his return home, reacts by joining a violent motorcycle gang. I find this thing sort of irritating because it feeds the persistent, and false, narrative that opposing sending young men into situations where they can be killed, maimed, and traumatized somehow means not being supportive of those men and their interests. But it’s also kind of too bad because one of my favorite, deeply weird movies about Vietnam deploys bikers to precisely the opposite effect.

I discovered The Losers a couple of years ago while writing a piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan movies. The plot of the movie is essentially as follows: a group of violent bikers get dropped into Vietnam to do a covert mission the military apparently can’t, in its official capacity, carry out. They soup up their bikes with ridiculous killing machinery, wreck dive bars in Saigon, plot to get their Vietnamese girlfriends home, and behave with honor after serving time for rape. Eventually, they’re sold out and killed by the C.I.A. after they succeed in rescuing a captured officer in Cambodia—it turns out, they were meant to fail, and their failure was supposed to be a pretext for expanding the war into yet another country.

The movie’s a total mess, but it’s entirely comfortable with the idea that you can separate out the government’s interests from the interests of the men in its service. It’s unfortunate that it takes a B movie to embrace what should be an obvious principal, and one that, if it was championed by slicker, more high-profile movies wouldn’t be so easy to marginalize.

Security

U.S. Official Pushes Back On Right-Wing Claims That Obama ‘Lost’ Iraq

By Guest Blogger on Mar 19, 2012 at 5:36 pm

By Peter Juul

Antony Blinken, Deputy Assistant, Office of the President; National Security Advisor, Office of the Vice President

Soon after President Obama last year fulfilled his pledge to withdraw all American troops from Iraq, conservatives eagerly pounced with baseless declarations the president had somehow “lost” Iraq to Iran and increased “the risks of failure.” Neoconservative analysts Fred and Kim Kagan proclaimed that the withdrawal amounted to “defeat.”

Since the U.S. withdrawal in December, nearly every act of violence or political crisis has been interpreted as evidence that Obama should not have ended the war. Brookings Institute analyst Ken Pollack provided the basic narrative: the withdrawal has caused American influence in Iraq to decline “precipitously;” removed a stick with which to threaten Iraqi “bad guys” (with some commentators lamenting the lack of a stick to shake at Iran and Syria as well); and the military influence U.S. troops provided has not been replaced by political or economic influence. Or as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) put it, Iraq is “unraveling because we didn’t keep a residual force there.”

Last week, Antony Blinken, a deputy assistant to the president and National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden, refuted these allegations of defeat and lost influence in Iraq at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress.

Blinken noted that violence in Iraq remains at record lows despite widely reported terrorist attacks, shootings and other acts of violence. Fewer than 100 weekly security incidents occur today as compared with 1,600 at the height of the violence in 2007 and 2008.

Blinken recalled that the events of a 2007 political crisis in Iraq resemble one that began just after U.S. troops left Iraq in December, noting that in 2007, the U.S. had more than 100,000 troops on the ground there:

“In the end, the main difference between the two episodes was that in 2007/2008, the boycott lasted eight months — at a time when the United States had more than 150,000 troops on the ground. In 2012, we had no troops on the ground, and the boycott ended after less than two months.”

What’s more, Blinken argued, accusations that the United States has lost diplomatic influence in Iraq are baseless. The U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, James Jeffrey, has met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki nine times this year and movements from U.S. diplomatic posts have increased by a third over the last quarter of 2011.

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Ellen Returns To First Job, Helps Customers At JC Penney | Ellen DeGeneres stopped by her hometown JC Penney in Metairie, Louisiana, where she worked as a teenager, and tried to help customers return merchandise, dress for a wedding, and pick out glasses. DeGeneres’ new partnership with the company drew criticism from conservative activists earlier this year, who accused the retail chain of undermining traditional values. JC Penney stood by the openly-gay comedian. Watch the segment:

Related Posts

Justice

GOP South Dakota Governor Vetos Bill Allowing Concealed Carry of Firearms Without A Permit

By Ian Millhiser on Mar 19, 2012 at 5:10 pm

The South Dakota legislature recently passed a bill which would have allowed most people to carry a concealed firearm without first obtaining a permit. To his credit, the state’s Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard vetoed this bill on Friday:

[T]he more he studied House Bill 1248, the more the governor had doubts. And by Friday, he had seen enough to veto the bill.

“When I looked at the bill, it really was a solution in search of a problem,” Daugaard said Friday. “The process for gaining a concealed carry permit is very simple and easily accomplished. I just don’t see this (bill) as something that would improve that by a great deal.” . . .

But the bill’s supporters say Daugaard’s veto was misguided.

“I believe that concealed weapons permit is a restriction on your constitutional right,” said Sen. Larry Rhoden, R-Union Center, who sponsored HB1248. “Whether or not it’s a legitimate restriction – that can be debated. But it is a restriction. If you don’t have a good, rock-solid restriction to leave that restriction in place, why not remove that restriction?”

Rhoden, of course, is wrong about the Constitution. Although the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects most individuals right to own a firearm, it also concluded that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” It then suggested that a long list of gun regulations are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment, including “prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons.”

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