The highest court takes the low road

Attention "Supremes": People are not experiments.

People's lives are not experiments. People's families are not experiments. People's homes and businesses and visitation rights and survivorship benefits and wills...are not experiments.

People's civil rights are not experiments.

When you sidestepped the Constitution and installed in the White House a sociopathic idiot-child dry-drunk with a God complex?

That was an experiment.

The Washington Post "addresses" a few TSA matters

In a post today by the normally clear-eyed Jonathan Capehart -- and in The Washington Post, no less -- you will see plenty of admiration for the way the TSA handles children and the elderly (they get to keep their shoes and jackets on!) as well as cheery support for the some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others Pre-Check program:

Anyway, all I’m asking is that the TSA treat the rest of us the way it treats little kids and old folks. Since 2011, youngsters under age 12 have been allowed to keep their ubiquitous light-up shoes on. And those age 75 and older have been able to keep their footwear on since 2012.[. . .] 

But there is a way around the shoe rule and others that would transport you back to the golden days of air travel when you could breeze through security and go right to your gate. It’s called TSA Pre. If the agency approves you after you’ve undergone its voluntary risk assessment, you get to keep your shoes, belt, and jackets on, and your laptop and plastic goody bag of 3 oz. toiletries get to stay in your carry-on. 

Looks like I better sign up for this thing.

To Capehart and the TSA apologists alike (who, to my profound disappointment, are well represented in the article's comment section): I must remind you that just because the intrusive and often-painful gropings of sex organs (which in many instances are both abusive and, according to FBI definitions of sexual assault and rape, illegal), the needless and forced removal of prostheses and artificial limbs, or any one of countless debasements and offenses to human dignity have not happened to you personally, doesn't mean that they haven't happened to other people all over the United States.

Innocent people who merely want to get from Point A to Point B in their own country.

As we have said so many times we're feeling metaphorically hoarse -- as well as afflicted with serious writer's cramp --  the TSA is an agency rife with criminals, from thieves to child-porn aficionados to rapists to drug-smugglers to (yes) muderers and spouse-abusers.

On top of all that, the agency itself is an unjustifiable use of tax dollars. It should be disbanded.

Furthermore, TSA Apologists, although you may have "breezed through" what is rightly described as, and proven by security experts worldwide to be, pure Security Theatre, those of you who are in possession of a modicum of conscience and a decent level of sympathy toward your fellow human beings should take a moment or two and read about at least some the agency's victims . Click the tab at the top of  the TSA News page, where resides an ever-growing Master List of documented abuses and crimes.

Read it and realize that your tax dollars support an indefensible, ineffective, fascistic agency that violates your Constitutional rights and emphatically does not make us safe. Reinforced and locked cockpit doors; alert, non-compliant passengers; and good, solid police work on the ground -- long before a terrorist even gets near an airport -- are what protect us from that which is statistically speaking, an event so rare that one has a greater chance of being struck by lightning -- four times more likely, in fact-- than  being involved in a terrorist attack.

Crossposted at TSA News Blog.

(Photo: veggiefrog/Flickr Creative Commons)

The droning

There are actually people, in the blogosphere, on Facebook, and on Twitter, who argue--with a straight face--that the Constitution (specifically the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees to due process before execution) doesn't apply if acting in accordance with it and following its directives might be risky, dangerous, inconvenient, or politically inopportune.

The Constitution exists precisely for such circumstances, as opposed to just those times when upholding the cause of justice is a simple, straightforward, innoxious exercise. Period, full stop.

Yes, there is plenty of danger inherent in sending armed forces into another country to try to capture, and bring to justice, an American citizen suspected of crimes. And it is pretty well laid out in the Fifth Amendment that when the United States is at war with a country, American armed forces, military and navy, may--in accordance with the rule of law--do what is necessary to defend the nation.

And furthermore, who could argue that flying into Pakistan, under that country's radar and without its permission, and attempting a capture-or-kill of the leading and most-wanted terrorist of our time--Osama Bin Laden--was not fraught with risk and dangerous in the extreme?

Bin Laden was not even an American citizen, yet the children living with and around him were spared, as we were repeatedly reminded by the media in the days that followed. A cynic might call that politically opportune.

But the droning continues elsewhere, in the villages and homes and hideouts of terrorists less well-known and headline-worthy.  Innocents live there too, but they aren't as lucky as the ones who slept under Bin Laden's roof.

To drone apologists and the various incarnations of "all's fair in love and war" they keep repeating, I say this: We are not at war with Yemen.

Nor are we at war with Pakistan.

In the case of targeting an American citizen, living abroad, for execution, why is it regarded as "whining", "puristic", or "naïve" to call out these crimes against humanity and the law itself for what they are?  How can a thinking, moral person be fully satisfied that a suspect's right to due process isn't being abridged when he is summarily executed--blown to bits--without having been afforded the basic rights that are constitutionally guaranteed to citizens, whether here or abroad? Denied the rights to confront his accusers and make a case for his own defense even, or to simply stand in front of a judge and state how evil this country is--or indeed to say nothing whatsoever, but to at least be given the chance to do so instead of having that choice--to speak or not speak--made for him, and done so brutally, antiseptically, irreversibly, and with concurrent harm to others?

And even if one were thus satisfied (and I am emphatically not), one cannot deny that the United States has been sending missile-loaded drones into that which our government deems "enemy territory" but which, while very likely serving as home and refuge to suspected terrorists, happens to be home to countless innocents, too. Ordinary families, that is, with their children, their animals, their homes, their places of worship, and even their emergency personnel--those brave souls we call "first responders", the people who rush to the scene when an explosion occurs in order to offer aid. All killed, by either the first explosion, or by the followup bombing, as happens in the execrable "double-strike" attacks, which wipe out any stragglers and even neatly take care the first responders--the medical personnel--whose life's work it is to attempt to save lives, not extinguish them.

All these people are killed along with the terrorist suspects.

They are not merely the unintended damage occasioned by war, because, again, the United States is not at war with their country.  They are not, Heaven help me, collateral damage. (What a hideous euphemism that is.)

They are rows upon rows of sooty-faced children: always motionless but for any still-flowing blood; often with bits of their skulls missing. Children who are no less innocent--and no less beloved by parents, family, and friends--than the white, middle-class victims of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut for whom President Obama, and countless others, publicly shed tears.

And I can't countenance any of this. Neither the wanton disregard for the rule of law, nor the wanton disregard for innocent human life--wherever it exists, and whatever its nationality, faith, or skin color.

They don't hate us for our freedom. Meddling, slaughtering, lies, and hubris...well, yeah.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, whom I generally admire--and who, to her endless credit, has pushed a lot of social issue envelopes on her show--recently occasioned and narrated a documentary called Hubris (you can watch all six parts here). Hubris was advanced as reporting on "how the Bush administration viewed the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an opportunity to remove Saddam Hussein from power", and promoted as a thorough analysis of:  the utterly false casus belli (the metal tubes, the mushroom cloud threat, etc.) for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003; the evidence presented to Congress (that would eventually be completely discredited); the use and abuse of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell by pushing him to make an under-informed and flawed case for war; and finally, the horrifically poor management of Iraq subsequent to the removal from power and execution of Saddam Hussein.

The same Saddam Hussein who, it must be noted (if not discussed too often, if ever, on MSNBC), was on the C.I.A. payroll since 1957 and to whose Ba`ath party the U.S. provided monetary and intelligence assistance--first in the coup of 1963, and again in that of 1968, about which David Morgan of Reuters wrote:

In 1968, Morris says, the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé in 1979. “It’s a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA’s) involvement there was really primary,” Morris says.

Thus would Hussein, in 1979 and with the blessing and backing of the United States, occupy Iraq's highest office. Come the 1990's, however, he was regarded as less and less useful for "America's national interests" (read: those of Big Oil).

All that said, you might conclude--correctly--that my opinion of Hubris is not a uniformly positive one. I felt a few extremely important concerns--the most important ones, in fact--were either skipped over during the writing process itself or, more likely, edited out of the narrative on the orders of higher-ups (but who can say?).

Anyway, in order to better express--and to augment--my own complaints, I'm going to share with you, dear readers, some luminous observations and criticisms of Hubris by two writers I deeply respect.

First: the following is a letter to Rachel Maddow and MSNBC by my friend Geoff Wheeler, a fellow Briton by birth as well as a retired merchant seaman. Geoff lives in Florida. (Published here with his permission.)

Subject: Letter to Rachel Maddow, MSNBC

Ms. Maddow: I was looking forward to your program ‘Hubris,’ which aired on MSNBC on Monday night, based on the book of the same name written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, which I bought soon after it was published in 2006. I could ask why you waited so long, but I prefer to ask why you blew your chance to nail the Bush Gang in the very first minute by saying that Saddam kicked the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, which he never did. Your program was intended to indict Bush, yet right at the beginning you falsely indicted Saddam. In 1998 Richard Butler, head of the U.N. weapons inspectors, accused the Iraqis of obstructing their work, so Clinton said he would use air strikes, and out of concern for their safety Butler withdrew his team. I repeat: they withdrew voluntarily - Saddam did not kick them out. 

So you blew that, and then compounded your error by not mentioning that it was Bush who ordered Hans Blix and his team out of Iraq just before he invaded in 2003. As the reporter you think you are, how could you miss that? I saw and heard the bum on TV say that the reason he invaded was because Saddam would not let Blix and his team in, when they had been in the country for more than two months and had found nothing! Which of course was not what Bush and Cheney wanted, which was a reason to invade Iraq, so it was they who kicked the inspectors out, killed 60-80,000 Iraqi civilians a few days later with ‘Shock & Awe,’ which grew to untold thousands of Iraqi dead in the ensuing eight years, not to mention a trillion American dollars down the drain and our reputation mud around the world. Bush stated exactly the opposite of what actually happened, and you let him get away with it! 

You had a chance, Ms. Maddow, to educate the millions of viewers on Monday night who tuned in to your show, particularly those who lost loved ones in Iraq and continue to delude themselves that they died for this country and not for Iraq’s oil and the lying bastard (make that plural to include Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice and the rest of the gang) who sent them there. You will probably never get the chance again, leaving Bush-lovers to wallow in their selective ignorance of the facts, and for that you should be ashamed. 

R. G. Wheeler

---------

Second: Some notes on the documentary Hubris by Driftglass (he of the acuminous political lens that is his eponymously-titled blog), wittily live-tweeted for our edification (where witty = tear-evoking gallows humor):

• Republicans watching "Hubris" 2night out of nostalgia 4 watching a dry-drunk war criminal trying to wrestle the word "nuclear" to the ground.

• Except of course history did not begin until 01/20/09. All "events" before that are rumors created by Evil Liberals

• Remember David Brooks' column calling people who opposed Wolfowitz antisemitic? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember David Brooks' columns mocking Liberals who opposed Iraq war as deluded Bush-deranged posers? No? That's the fucking problem

• Remember David Brooks calling people cynical assholes who objected to Dubya's flightsuit tango? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when the collaborators at the NYT gave a fucking weekly column to Bloody Bill Kristol? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when David Brooks leveraged his Liberal bashing tripe into a column-for-life at the NYT? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember [* the late & brilliant blogger] Steve Gilliard? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when the wingnutosphere went nuts trying to discredit every alarming report out of Iraq? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when palette-trucks of shrink-wrapped taxpayer cash just fucking vanished into Iraq? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when everything that is now settled history was America-hating surrender-monkey treason? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when a gay hooker Conservative "reporter" w/ a fake name sat 100 ft away from Dubya for 2 yrs? No? That's the fucking problem

• Remember when Halliburton made $$ selling American soldiers in Iraq toilet water? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when the GOP make "Fuck Reality" into American national policy? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when Phil Donahue got fired for telling the truth and Conservatives got promoted for lying? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember how the Cheney clans got really, really rich sending kids off to die for their lies? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when 60 million Americans re-elected these deficit-creating war criminals? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember the incompetent children of GOP campaign contributors were put in charge of governing Iraq? No? That's the fucking problem.

• Remember when Fox News told soldiers rolling into battle to look into the camera and say "Fox Rocks!" No? That's the fucking problem.

Remember writing, thinking, speaking, marching, screaming against the coordinated, deafening roar of the Conservative hate machine and Beltway press?

Well, for what it's worth, Driftglass, I do.

I remember landing and disembarking in Vancouver that winter evening in early 2003, only to see a number of customs personnel thereabouts openly weeping; concerned--horrified, actually--I asked them what was going on, and they replied that that the U.S. had just started bombing Iraq, something they had hoped against hope would not happen. (Oh, those idealistic peace-loving Canadians!) I remember coming home later that week and writing what would be the first of innumerable letters to Florida's representatives in Congress, as well as the White House itself, exhorting them to put a stop to this war built on obvious lies. I remember screaming and crying, too.

I remember aging a lot in the years thereafter. I remember the hiding of flag-draped coffins at Dover; the smearing of bereaved mothers who dared to speak out against Bush and Cheney; the disgusting and widespread incidences of torture that came to light, like Abu Ghraib; and the horror stories about innocent young men of middle-Eastern descent being swept up from the streets and, along with actual terrorism suspects, being shipped to the shameful prison in Guantánamo, Cuba, where they would all languish, uncharged and untried, choking on the putrid fumes of some evil, gray-area incarnation of the law, for years to come (indeed, a great many are still there, as yet uncharged and untried.)

Hubris? More like Malefaction, the magnitude of which, in terms of treasure squandered and American and Iraqi blood spilled, is unprecedented in modern history.

[* Like Driftglass, I highly recommend reading the incredibly prescient writing of the late, great Steve Gilliard; here's an especially good post from August 2003.]

TSA's non-apology

My colleague at TSA News, Lisa Simeone, reports that the TSA has "apologized" to Lucy Forcke and her parents. Lucy is the little girl in the wheelchair about whom I wrote here.

The TSA screeners on duty admitted they had specifically targeted the little girl in a wheelchair. Yet despite this admission, TSA management not only kept mum for three days, but the statement they have now offered goes like this: 

“TSA regrets inaccurate guidance was provided to this family during screening and offers its apology.” 

I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as pretty thin gruel.

Ah yes, The Book Of TSA Apologies.

Thinner, even, than The Directory of Honest Politicians, Simple Do-It-Yourself Computer Repairs, or Humble Business-School Graduates: A Field Guide.

With contents that are just as risibly disingenuous.

TSA assaults & traumatizes three-year-old girl in wheelchair

I wish I could say that this is a new low for the contemptible thugs in blue for whose equipment and "services" taxpayers pay billions of dollars every year.

Sadly, it isn't. It's just par for the course; another Day in Despotism here in the Land of the Meek, Home of the Afraid.

In case you couldn't bring yourself to watch this indisputable display of abuse -- this disgusting mistreatment of a little girl and her family about which her mother and father comment "look at her all dressing like a potential terrorist/drug trafficker; people who roll in on hot pink wheelchairs, wearing a gingerbread coat and clutching a stuffed baby lamb, are just begging to be harassed" -- let me itemize the violations and absurdities at hand (perhaps you can identify more; as a mother myself, I'm too upset by what I just watched to further research the laws, statutory and logical).

First, there is the obvious Fourth Amendment violation against unwarranted search and seizure. I don't care what kind of pretzel logic the TSA twists itself into parroting in order to justify groping a three-year-old in a wheelchair who's on her way to Disney World: it's a violation of her Constitutional rights. Period. Full stop.

And this should not stand. Not in the country that calls itself the United States of America. Citizens and residents who accept otherwise should not only be ashamed of themselves, but should, in my opinion, be constantly, and in strenuous terms, be made aware that they're engaging in a kind of treason against the very freedoms the nation's founders established (and countless fought for and died to protect), and thus, by extension, debasing the idea of America itself.

Second, travelers are indeed permitted to photograph and/or videotape the so-called "screening procedure" (more accurately, security theatre), including aggressive pat-downs that would be defined as sexual assault in any other context and nude photography of their bodies. The only subject matter exempt from passengers' freedom-to-document are the screening machines themselves. As shown in the above video, these TSA screeners try to claim otherwise and keep harping on their imagined rule that the passengers can't record the incident, even as the parents ask them to cite the actual law pertaining thereto.

Third, the tactics here are insensitive and unkind on their face, as well as pointless. Not only is this little girl so obviously terrified to the point of crying out loud, and desperately upset that her comfort toy -- her stuffed animal -- is being taken away, she is distraught that her parents' attempts to protect her are being summarily ignored. Imagine how frightening that must be. If indeed the child "alarmed," the screeners could have resolved the matter by allowing one of the cleared parents to carry her through the metal detector in their arms while they checked her wheelchair for hidden bombs, machetes, or fusilage-piercing grenade launchers.

What will it take for the American public to recognize how wrong this is, all of it, and demand that our so-called leaders put an end to it? Why are citizens not carrying out a full-on economic boycott of the airlines for all non-essential travel? What will it take, if not the unconstitutional persecution of a little child in a wheelchair?

Also at TSA News.

Christopher Dorner's amazing self-teleporting wallet

We know that both the LAPD and the San Bernardino PD have lied, egregiously, about certain facts pertaining to the manhunt and extrajudicial execution-by-fire of the fugitive ex-cop and murder suspect Christopher Dorner.

We witnessed "law enforcement officers", in this and other press conferences and interviews, flatly denying they started the extravagant, floor-melting fire in the San Bernardino cabin Tuesday night--the fire that either burned Dorner alive or occasioned his suicide by gunshot. 

Yet actual evidence strongly suggests the opposite is true: officers with one or more departments on the scene did indeed deliberately start the fire that completely destroyed the 80-year-old structure and everything inside it. And I can confirm, as journalist Max Blumenthal also confirms, in detail, that the PD scanner conversations were exactly as recorded in this YouTube video compiling them--and as heard in this raw footage shot inside one of the news helicopters hovering above the scene ("Burn that fucking house down" and then, repeatedly, "Burn that motherfucker out, burn that motherfucker out")--because along with numerous other bloggers and independent journalists that night who communicated with one another on Twitter, I was listening to the police/fire scanner feed, live and in real-time.

At least, I was until the feed abruptly stopped--either because the site crashed due to the number of people accessing it, or because everything was simply cut off. Reporters on the scene and in the sky happily allowed themselves to be cut off, too; that is, they meekly complied--without question or pause--when asked to back off with their helicopters and cameras.  To take their scrutiny, such as it was, far from the blazing cabin, and to cease tweeting about the siege, even though authorities already knew Dorner couldn't possibly have been following any media coverage because the cabin was unoccupied and had no cable or Internet services (indeed, it may not even have had its electricity turned on).

Even so, what we had already heard was sufficiently damning. (You can read Max's comprehensive Twitter timeline on Storify.)

And now we have another curious item to ponder: Christopher Dorner's Amazing Self-Teleporting Wallet.

The wallet, containing Dorner's identification, that authorities claimed showed up near the US/Mexican border last Thursday, February 7, as reported on Monday, February 11, in the L.A. Times:

After authorities interviewed the boat captain early Thursday, they found Dorner's wallet and identification cards "at the San Ysidro Point of Entry" near the U.S.-Mexico border. That same day, a guard at the Point Loma Naval Base told authorities he had spotted a man matching Dorner's description trying sneak onto the base, according to the court records.

Which is also the wallet, likewise containing Dorner's identification, that authorities claim was found in the burned-out cabin some five+ days later and 100 miles away, as reported on Wednesday, February 13, in USA Today:

Report: Dorner's wallet found in burned-out cabin

[...] The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office said charred human remains were found in the rubble where Christopher Dorner is said to have been cornered Tuesday. "We have reason to believe that it is him," sheriff's spokeswoman Cynthia Bachman said. 

A wallet with a California driver's license bearing the name Christopher Dorner also was found, the Associated Press reported, citing a law enforcement official who was briefed on the investigation but declined to be named because of the ongoing probe.

Is there a cobwebby ghost of a chance that anyone working within what Charlie Pierce calls The Courtier Press is paying attention and doing his or her job?

Anyone?

The human face on which they stomped

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. -- George Orwell

I read Christopher Jordan Dorner's entire, unedited manifesto (as it is called), which to my mind would be more accurately described as a vivid narrative--albeit one that's deterring in its length--or else an ethical and legal brief; an apology; an outreach; and, for the reader who will put the media chatter on pause and think for himself, an invitation to consider (if not completely understand, ever), the impetuses driving a broken man's embrace of violence and anarchy. Viewed thus--as both exposition and treatise, as opposed to mere expression of vengeance--Dorner's writing belies a rage driven by the constant thwarting of the basic human inclination toward equilibrium and logic, toward having the world around us make sense. It is also a rage fueled by the relentless frustration of his desire to see justice served, which desire, after all, might understandably be that much more powerfully felt by someone who served in law enforcement, and, before that, in the defense of his country.

Dorner's writings are therefore not so easily dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. And they paint--in harsh strokes, with raw pigment--a searing picture of the kind of rage that, let's face it, surely lies frighteningly close to the collective surface of an unknown number of aggrieved and oppressed souls among us.  It is even more terrifying to consider that said number surely climbs every year, as dignity, agency, autonomy, and even survival beyond the narrowest definition of the word elude the despondent many; as vaunted notions like freedom, hope, happiness, and political power are increasingly, exclusively, owned and controlled by the unaccountable few.

If I'm honest, I'll admit that Dorner's rage is in many ways understandable, even as the murders it engendered cannot be condoned, and it should go without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that I don't condone them, or indeed any violence, in any shape or form.

The treatise is driven by Dorner's apposite disgust with the asymmetry of both the respect conferred and the dignity afforded a black man within the culture of his profession, as opposed to a white one--even today, even as a black man occupies the nation's highest office.  And it is laced throughout with righteous fury and unimaginable torment.

It is, at its core, the plea of a man who wants his identity and dignity back. Who accepts that if this does take place, ever, he won't be around to appreciate it. Who is simultaneously devoted to satisfying the former, and unconcerned with the inevitability of the latter.

Christopher Dorner is a man who, like the rest of us, lives in a world wherein war criminals, along with well-dressed, well-born sociopathic thieves, are held irreproachable and uncensured.  Meanwhile, ordinary human beings--their lives' trajectories generally preordained by culture; their quest for temporary escape more often than not compelled by abject circumstance (specifically, and especially, citizens who, like him, happen to be black or Latino)--languish, incarcerated, for years on end despite the trivial moral weight of their (usually drugs-related) transgressions; the invariably self-abusing and/or internecine nature of their crimes; and the comparatively hair's-breadth scope of the harm done thereby to the world at large.

This, in stark contrast to the far-reaching devastation wrought by the atrocities their powerful and well-placed betters commit, and commit unashamedly, unrelentingly, and without receiving as much as the smallest measure of punishment.  This, what a moral individual can only view as the desecration of justice itself and the incremental extinguishment thereby of the human spirit. This, yet another foul eruption of the gangrenous institutionalized contempt with which impervious authority regards our better angels and our natural hunger for fairness and dignity.

So, his conscience thus tortured, and his attempts to effect justice via officially sanctioned means thus thwarted and retaliated against, Dorner was at last bereft of options and defeated of spirit. That is, he could no longer reconcile the menaces of hypocrisy, noxious racism, and corrosive, unpunished evildoing swirling around him daily with the unblemished and marble-smooth contours of Justice, which paramount ideal he'd sworn to protect and uphold. Christopher Dorner then turned--tragically and to most, I'm sure, incomprehensibly--toward what must have seemed to him the only logical road ahead.  He decided that the cause of protecting and upholding justice--no matter how warped and ruinous others would regard his interpretation thereof--was more deserving of his energies and devotion than the very preservation of his own life.

As I said when I posted the link to his unedited writing on FaceBook, I strenuously disagree with those commenters asserting that Christopher Dorner's writings were edited, were somehow modified or augmented, by an outside party. These individuals apparently don't believe that a man who snaps this way--who kills, who terrorizes, who is mortally wounded and clearly, heartbreakingly mentally ill--can also be intelligent, reflective, erudite, empathetic, or just. I am angered--well, more like profoundly dismayed--by their reflexive avoidance of unsettling truths; their predictable retreat into the false comforts of boilerplate pop-culture narratives; and their apocryphal, self-satisfied pronouncements about mental illness in general, and nihilist desperation in particular, about which I have written before.

I loathe all kinds of violence, and by that I necessarily include the violence Christopher Dorner has unloosed against the community of the L.A.P.D. and, by extension, his city and country (even as those entities all too often visit their own kind of violence, metaphorical and real, on noble but moribund ideals, and on innocent lives).  I am shocked, but not surprised, at the staggering, ongoing malfeasance of a police force who, like far too many of their counterparts around the nation, oppress and abuse the members of the communities they are supposed to serve, violating their civil liberties and making a mockery of the jurisprudence underpinning the very idea of America.  Who pervert the most basic of moral ideas enshrined in the Constitution--who viciously, and without remorse, tear its blueprints for a just and civilized society into limp ribbons--when they take it upon themselves to shoot first, identify the target later.

I mourn all this loss of life. I also mourn the now-permanent annihilation of the dignity and name of this man, Christopher Dorner, who says quite plainly that it came down to that: to witnessing the destruction of his name, his identity. For this is a man who might well be any of us, were our own identities so forcefully, gleefully shaped--so glossily and appealingly built out--by the brute hands of corporatism, gender expectations, ever-fewer career options, and ever more plentiful and nefarious government needs--only to be dispassionately ablated (and sometimes demolished completely) by those same contemptible architects whenever morality raised its inconvenient head.

I'm able to do that--to hold those two ideas in tension. I ask of others: are you?

Vice President Biden: It's my birthday. Kindly wipe the floor with that innumerate little Koch-up Paul Ryan tonight.

Dear Vice-President Biden:

Tonight, I'm asking you to demand that Paul Ryan explain how someone can live on the average Social Security check of about $1,200 a month--and remember, that has to cover food; rent or mortgage; insurance; utilities (including water, garbage collection, electricity, and heating and/or cooling your residencw); clothes; car payments and/or car maintenance (and insurance for that) and/or train or bus expenses; and--here's a big one--needed medicines and services that Medicare doesn't cover--and not go straight over a "fiscal cliff" all his own.

Then, as a follow-up, ask Paul Ryan if, given that his Social Security check was swallowed up and then some by the above-described expenses, he would be okay with having a guy like Paul Ryan telling him, Here you go, here's a voucher for USD$8,000. Go out and get your own health insurance, old dude. Good luck with those no-pre-existing-conditions clauses!

Then ask Paul Ryan if he has any idea how much a defibrillator costs, should he need one of those when he's in his late sixties.

Ask him how, given that with his generous eight-thousand-dollar voucher, he'd only be able to afford the World's Shittiest Insurance Policy With Massive Co-pays and Deductibles, he would propose to pay for heart surgery. Or brain surgery. Or cancer surgery and followup chemotherapy. Or hell, even an uncomplicated hernia-repair, meaning things went without a hitch and the hospital wasn't required to keep him longer than a half-hour post-op.

Ask him if he will support requiring that all Ryan-Plan-advocating sociopaths in Congress give back (opt out of) their gold-plated, taxpayer-funded healthcare and, in its place, receive vouchers for eight thousand bucks. Oh, and they must also try to live on $1,200 a month, not their generous Congressional salaries (the ones they keep voting to raise, I'll add. Convenient!) and make up any healthcare shortfalls out of that.

Ask Paul Ryan if he knows how much a tin of tunafish costs today. How about a jar of peanut butter, Congressman? Store-brand fish-sticks? Ramen noodles?

Ask Paul Ryan how often he buys himself a new winter coat. From Goodwill.

Ask Paul Ryan if he's familiar with basic mathematics concepts.  Ask Paul Ryan if he's ever actually added and subtracted things on his own--no fair using the iPhone calculator app.

Ask Paul Ryan: If you, Joe Biden, were to walk over and place a stethoscope against his sternum right now, would you be able to hear anything beating?

Anything at all?

Thanks, Mr. Vice-President. Break a leg (among other things).

All Best,

Deborah

Bloggy thoughts

To anyone stopping by for the first time, Hello, and welcome.

I write about a lot of different things that interest me; my posts on national politics come from a viewpoint that's likely more leftward in orientation than that of many blogs you already read. If you're familiar with Northern Europe's successful social democracies, and you believe, as I do, as Albert Einstein did, that under the current system in the States:

There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

...or if, at the very least, you are interested in reading the thoughts and observations of someone whose worldview is thus--even as you may disagree with all or part of it--you'll appreciate at least some of what I write, and I'm glad you're here.

I sometimes swear. I rail against all manifestations of dishonesty, cruelty, fascist creep, police state drift, and institutional sociopathy. I adore Frank Zappa and think he was an American genius, one who received--and still receives--far too little acclaim in his own country.

All that said, if reading things here causes your eyes to bulge and your mouth to froth, you should probably go elsewhere. There are lots and lots of other blogs out there, and you can even start your own.

I don't accept any advertising and I derive no revenue from this blog whatsoever. It is, in short, a pastime. Other than notifying friends on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus that I've posted something new, I don't consciously drive traffic here; if my observations or ideas have that result, it is certainly not by design--as I said, I don't work for anyone but myself, and I do not make any money from this blog. If the pageviews for any one day total ten or ten thousand, it makes no difference to me, financially or even in terms of puffing up my chronically undersized ego.

Where it does make a difference, though, is in my comment sections and the amount of vitriol that fills my in-box. I suppose I am just one of those people who, despite often disagreeing vehemently with something a right-wing blogger has written, has never felt the urge to name-call in comments, or, worse, to send hateful, sexist, threatening, and even obscene e-mails to someone. Someone I've never even met. I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around that mindset. (Good grief, what is wrong with some people?)

That's why I've been tweaking the comments policy a bit this weekend. Obviously, accepting comments from anonymous people is out of the question, now and forever. Yikes.  Even having Open ID registration has its bugs and, of course, it does nothing to constrain people from name-calling under whatever pseudonym they've chosen at that moment, for that comment.  I turned off comments altogether this weekend because I am visiting my injured mother as she recovers from an accident that left her with a broken arm and leg: I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with rude, nasty people who come here unbidden to beat up on the girl.

As I am wont to say, Fuck that noise.

Anyway, I've decided to try having comments open, but with moderation in place. I'd love to hear what you have to say, but for the love of crumb-cake, please play nice.  I'll approve and publish comments on a regular basis. Unless they are exceedingly mean-spirited, trollish, sexist, racist, or generally unacceptable.

And I get to decide what's mean-spirited, trollish, sexist, racist, and generally unacceptable.

I support free speech. Of course.  That said, this is not a government entity and therefore the First Amendment does not guarantee that you can say anything you want here and not realize any consequences for your words, including but not limited to having them altogether censored.  So don't even bother with that argument. I am, as I keep saying, a private, single-person, non-advertisement-accepting, non-revenue-generating blog that's been around since 2006.

One that's written by a human being, believe it or not.

Thank you.

XXX
DNT

"Make the U.S. a tax shelter". Yeah, that'll work.

Via Mother Jones comes yet more evidence of Paul Ryan's scary innumeracy, not to mention his ignorance of basic macroeconomics and geopolitics:

In 2010, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), now Mitt Romney's running mate, called the Cayman Islands "the place you hide your money," arguing that the United States needs to slash tax rates below those of other countries in order to make this country "a haven for capital formation." But in previously unreported comments, from an interview with American Business Magazine in August 2011, Ryan went even further on the same topic, saying, "let's make this country a tax shelter for other countries instead of having other countries be a tax shelter for America."

Approximately 55,000 people comprise the entire population of the Cayman Islands; in fact, there are more corporations in the Caymans than there are people. There is no income tax, capital gains tax, or corporate tax. The only source of revenue for the country--in order that it can run essential government operations--is indirect taxation, which is to say, an import tax (or duty) on virtually everything that comes into the islands. Since little manufacturing occurs there, that means a tremendous amount of goods are imported, many of which (like some automobiles) are taxed with a duty rate as high as 100%.

Here's another important thing to remember about the Caymans: they are still a British overseas territory, and their national defense, as well as internal security, is provided by the United Kingdom.

The United States population is over 300 million. Its defense budget is staggeringly large: more than twice the combined defense-spending totals of China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia.

While the Cayman Islands imports virtually everything, the US maintains a significant manufacturing base (if not as large a manufacturing base as we could and should have). Imagine what would happen to the economy if we did away with income tax, capital gains tax, and corporate taxes the way the Cayman Islands did and had to impose import taxes commensurate with the amount of money required to maintain US defense spending alone (lets set aside all other essential government programs for the time being). Imagine what the cost of a television or cell phone would be; imagine the price tags on everything from t-shirts to teapots; imagine how utterly unaffordable life itself would become.

One begins to see the problem. When things are that expensive--and mark my word, they would be incalculably expensive under Ryan's ridiculous scheme to do away with all the aforementioned taxes and turn the US into a "tax haven", thanks to the monster duty slapped on them--no-one buys anything.  Our economy in large part depends on consumption--on people buying things.

Sure, we could make almost everything here: that would cut imports from all our trading partners by an enormous amount.  (They're going to love that.)  And if we did--if we manufactured everything here so as to avoid having to slap massive import taxes on the goods--well, where is the revenue for our jaw-dropping defense budget going to come from?  Remember, we've done away with income, capital gains, and corporate taxes so we can be just like the Caymans.

I don't think Paul Ryan--or, for that matter, his wide-eyed acolytes--would be too thrilled about the United States reverting to being a British overseas territory so as to have the United Kingdom provide defense for it.

I don't think Britain would be too thrilled about having to provide defense services for America, either.

Honestly, Paul Ryan ought to read a few books before he makes such ridiculous proposals as this. The man whom the GOP touts as being their economics whiz-kid and wonk can't even think his way to the second move.

He'd be great fun to play chess with--I bet I could beat him in a matter of minutes while blindfolded and blind-drunk.

Come on--ten thousand bucks.

A letter to a friend

Good Morning, my friend.

I have to apologize for being so snippy to you on Twitter (although in my defense, Twitter-writing can be snippy practically by definition, more so when one has been attacked all day).  I am, as you know, a writer and poet, not a journalist, and the need to see truth pursued and justice served tend to occupy a significantly larger part of my nature than trivial matters like, oh, concern for what others think of me, to name just one casualty.

I knew a few guys like Mitt Romney when I was at UF. Hell, I went out with one--just once. He drove beautiful, expensive German cars--a new one every semester, it seemed--and had his own plane, at age 20. He paid people to write his term papers for him. He was utterly unconcerned about the rights of others, or the laws by which everyone else's lives are constrained. The phrase "moral imperative" might just as well have been written or spoken in Swahili, it was that foreign to him. In fact, what interested him--what seemed to be the only things that made him happy, however temporarily--were "getting" a girl away from another young man, and breaking rules. In other words, generally doing the opposite of what everyone else did regardless of it being mean-spirited, dumb, dangerous, or illegal. Or all of those things.

I may have been very young, and I was admittedly intrigued with the notion of being swept off my feet by someone who could take me to the nicest places in town for dinner when I mainly existed on peanut butter and wore a lot of thrift-shop clothes (albeit very stylish ones, I'd add, in the days before we called them "vintage"). But thank God, I was both sickened and quite unnerved by his utter lack of care for other people during the time I spent with him. I'm sure it bothered him not one bit that I didn't return his calls for a second date. There were thousands of pretty middle-class girls at that school.

This morning, I accept that people are happier believing that the final candidates for the country's highest office are, by default, decent, ethical sorts who would never stoop so low. We all know how well it goes when someone unethical is given outsized amounts of power (and firepower).

So, you're right: I have to let it go sometimes, because it's probably impossible to convince others to assign the same weight to a potential leader's core morality that I do. It's actually kind of scary to contemplate a Greg Stillson (from The Dead Zone) character having access to the nuclear codes--no-one wants to leave his or her comfort zones that way. And of course, no-one wants to be ridiculed as a crackpot conspiracy theorist, which is often the first epithet hurled when someone says, This is not quite right…something is off.

Come to think of it, eyewitness reports are themselves often dismissed as having been "seen wrong" anyway; or, worse: people who commit wrongdoings, like the pepper-spraying cops at U.C. Davis, are not held accountable for things that everyone saw and even recorded on video.  Because in some twisted version of modern jurisprudence it's considered unhealthy for the system--or something--to set a precedent of going after authority figures.)

My very best to you. 

Fondly,

Deborah

The GOP's shocking (yet unsurprising) attempt to steal the election: Why is Nathan Sproul still walking around as a free man?

Here's tireless blogger Brad Friedman on Thom Hartmann's show discussing the amazing Republican voter registration fraud that Mitt Romney's paid consultant and long-time GOP operative Nathan Sproul almost got away with.  Sproul and his firm Strategic Allied Consulting, at the behest of the Florida RNC (and those of other states, it's now coming out) who hired them, had been sending in address changes for Democrats in at least ten Florida counties, re-registering them as living in various strip malls and commercial buildings; this way, when said Democrats went to vote, they would be turned away or forced to vote using provisional (aka not counted) ballots. Disenfranchising them, in short.

His firm were also registering deceased people in Palm Beach County and other Florida counties.

Of course, the Florida RNC are scrambling to distance themselves from Sproul, despite having paid his company some USD$1.3 million this year alone. But even as they're trying to remove the stench that is their effort to steal the election for The Stench, it now comes out Sproul was doing the same thing in other key battleground states.

From The Brad Blog:

Since that appearance, FL officials are now confirming "suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms" in "at least ten counties" in the state, which shatters the "one bad apple", "just one individual in Palm Beach" talking point which the AP had been helping both the RNC and Sproul's shell company, Strategic Allied Consulting, pass on to the public late last night. 

There will be more on this, as the story continues to be both developing and fast moving. I'm working on pulling together several threads all at once over here, as there is evidence that this scandal is larger than just the five key battleground states (FL, NC, VA, NV, CO) acknowledged by the RNC, so far, where Sproul's firm was working.

Friedman notes that Sproul has been doing this for years.

I want to know why Nathan Sproul, along with any and all persons involved in all this baldfaced fraud, is not in prison.  Electoral fraud is a serious federal crime

If you aren't already doing so, I highly recommend following Brad on Twitter--he's @TheBradBlog --so as to stay up-to-the minute with this story.

Score one for football; teachers, not so much

What a shame it is that Education majors in our various universities don't have people taking tests for them and writing their term papers.  Nor do they have wealthy alumni buying them cars and condos and lawyering them up when they get in trouble for their controlled-substance-abusing or female-student-raping.

Because if Education majors were thus valued, their subsequent work as teachers and the importance of their labor issues would perhaps be held in the same regard as the work and labor issues relevant to the game of football.

A sharp rebuke of the Slash-happy Sociopaths threatening our people

If you're like me, you've seen the damning Secret Romney Fundraiser Video in its entirety (full video here, full transcript here).

And if you had any doubt about the things that would happen to retirees, veterans, the poor, the middle class, the unemployed, students who aren't from wealthy families, Americans who have the misfortune to fall ill or suffer an accident while unemployed or poor or continuing-to-exist-after-having-served-in-the-Armed-Forces or all the above, under a Romney presidency...well, the gentleman from Utah (or was it Michigan? Or Massachusetts?) made it crystal-clear for you at that fundraiser.

As I wrote on Wednesday, Mitt Romney is in awe of the way Chinese slave-labor factories are run.  This should concern you.

Romney is also enamored of privatizing (and thus significantly cutting) Americans' earned benefits--namely Medicare and Social Security--and slashing social programs like Medicaid. While far from perfect, Americans' earned benefits and social programs--meager though they may be, certainly as compared to those the rest of the developed world enjoys--keep millions of elderly, sick, and poor Americans from falling right off the edge.

It cannot be stated often enough: Any and all federal spending cuts should come from the billions of dollars that annually enrich the REAL entitlement pigs: Defense Contractors. And not from programs that quite literally protect, and save, American lives.

President Obama has said that everyone must do his part to tackle the national debt, that everyone must sacrifice.

I would like to know how an unemployed person for whom Medicaid means the difference between life and death can reasonably be expected to sacrifice anything at all.

I would like to know how an elderly person who already has to scrimp and save in order to stretch his or her Social Security check and thus make rent, put a few store-brand groceries in the fridge, and buy a comfortable mattress or a decent winter coat every five years or so can reasonably be expected to sacrifice anything at all.

But here's the thing: Social Security can be kept solvent for many decades to come simply by raising the wage cap, and indefinitely if the cap is done away with completely. Currently (in 2012, that is) only the first $110,100 of one's earnings are subject to the Social Security payroll deduction--dollars above that amount are not.  So those who make less than $110,100 per year have 100% of their earnings taxed for Social Security; those who make more than that--whether it's thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars more--have a decreasingly smaller percentage of their income in play.  In other words, under current parameters, an investment banker who ears, say, a million dollars a year, will only see 11% of his income subjected to the SS deduction; the remaining 89% is, for the purposes of SS at least, untouched.  However, the schoolteacher making $50,000 and the small businessman drawing a salary of $95,000 will see the entirety of their yearly wages subjected to the deduction.

One begins to see why the very wealthy, along with the conservative think-tanks and Super PACS they lavish with funding, are against raising the cap to keep the program solvent for everyone: they are reflexively opposed to anything that means more for the nation and less for them.  They prefer to slash to ribbons a successful program that has lifted millions of elderly Americans from poverty (or else privatize the program and loose it to the vagaries of the stock market)--and to thus relegate the elderly to existing in poverty--than have the same percentage of their annual income subjected to social security as the rest of the country. Heaven forfend.

But lets return to the notion of "entitlement" as it truly exists, and not earned benefits, which incidentally is how this writer regards Social Security, Medicare, Public Education, and yes, even Medicaid, and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as "food stamps").  And I include Medicaid and SNAP because I believe in a robust social compact; I believe that simply by being a human being who exists in this incredibly wealthy, resource-rich country, you have inalienable rights--rights you are born with--namely, the right to breathe air, drink water, eat food, and not bleed to death, cough up your lungs, be consumed by microbe or tumor, or otherwise suffer and/or die from one of the myriad illnesses and injuries that modern medicine can alleviate (if not always cure).

Or, as I often state, after referring people to the cold facts about the better health outcomes, happier citizens, and large, thriving middle classes of Europe's Social Democracies:

Yes, I'm a Socialist*. So was German-American, theoretical physicist, and renowned genius Albert Einstein. What are you--an Anti-Socialist?

Via Robert Reich, here are the REAL Entitled Housewives (and SenateWives) of America.  Just look at these numbers (click to enlarge):

Now, consider how the United States' defense budget compares to that of the next five biggest spenders in the world. I'm not a math whiz, but even I can see the big elephant in the room (so to speak, although the defense contractors lobby--and donate heavily to--politicians of both parties).

The United States spends more than twice the combined defense-spending totals of China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. You read that correctly. In terms of defense spending:

2 X (China+Japan+UK+France+Russia) = USA

(Graphic via HuffPo, on behalf of FaceTheFactsUSA,

a project of The George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs.)

Cut this, Congress, not the earned benefits of--and vital assistance to--the citizens for whom you work, as opposed to the bloated defense contractor giants for whom, despite any gifts, "donations", and perks they shower you with, you do not work.

Cut this, Catfood Commission.

Cut this, Mr. President.

* Socialism, alas, is all-too-frequently conflated with Communism, even today. I blame television, vestigial McCarthyism, the above-mentioned conservative think-tanks, and the country's moneyed sociopaths (aka much of Wall Street), who recoil in horror at the notion of being limited to just seven mansions and one private jet if they had to pay a tiny bit more to make life healthier and happier for the people and country that undoubtedly played a part in their own rise to riches, whether they care to admit it or not.

Chinese slave-labor: The segment of Mitt's Secret Video that no-one on tee-vee is mentioning. Yet.// UPDATED

By now, virtually everyone has seen at least part of the Mitt Romney Secret Video. And the mainstream media has focused on Romney's jaw-dropping assertion that 47% of Americans are dependent on government and possessed of what he describes as a sense of "entitlement" to such things as food, health care, and housing.  These people, he says, don't pay income taxes, and since they won't be voting for him, they aren't worthy of his attention.

However, there is another segment that deserves attention. And I can only imagine why it's not, as of this writing, being widely discussed: it is, in short, a devastating indictment of the horrific truth behind outsourced labor.

It shows Romney talking to the rapt fundraiser-attending audience about a Chinese factory he was considering buying during his Bain days.  He describes what sounds like a gulag with wonder and admiration in his voice:

"Ninety-five percent of life is set up for you if you were born in this country," Mitt scolds.  "We went to China to buy a factory there.  It employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women, between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23.  They were saving for potentially becoming married." [How Romney knew this about the employees, one can only guess--it was probably something the factory owner told him through a translator, knowing Romney was a man whose faith placed a great deal of value in being married, ahem.] 

"...seeing them work, the number of hours they work per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with, uh, little bathrooms at the end of maybe ten...ten rooms. And the rooms, they have twelve girls per room. Three bunk beds on top of each other." 

"And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers. And we said, Gosh! I can't believe that you, you know, keep these girls in! And they said, No, no, no, this is to keep other people from coming in, because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out!"

No mention of Foxconn-style netting around the upper floors to catch any stray suicidal workers.

Now, if you think for a moment that Mitt Romney, Outsourcer-In-Chief of Bain Capital, believed that Chinese factory owner's story to the rich American men to whom he wanted to sell his factory, I've got several bridges to sell to YOU.

Romney knows full well what goes on in places like the one described.

He simply didn't want to spoil everyone's dinner.

Do watch the whole thing. I have a feeling the reason the network Chatterati are not talking about this too much is that many of the products made by their sponsors come from factories exactly like this one.

UPDATE: Via Patrick at Politicalgates, here is a short documentary called Santa's Workshop. It details the conditions at factories like the one Mitt Romney described at his USD$50,000-a-plate fundraiser earlier this year.

I urge readers to watch it; its subject matter is undeniably heartbreaking, but nothing is going to change until a hell of a lot more Americans are fully aware of what goes on in these sub-Dickensian factories halfway around the world.  I don't mean just entertaining an abstract notion à la "Oh, this was probably made in a sweatshop, ha-ha", but rather, having a full, visually and viscerally-informed understanding of the way their fellow human beings are treated in order to keep toys, electronics, and other consumer goods ultra-cheap--and corporate heads like Mitt Romney ultra-wealthy.

This film, Santa's Workshop, is almost entirely in English; the few foreign-language segments are all accompanied by English subtitles.

My thoughts on Innocence of the Muslims: There IS no full-length movie.//UPDATED

Yesterday evening, Bloomberg news posted an article entitled Figure Tied to Anti-Islam Film Has Criminal Fraud Record.

With all due respect to the writers, the article mainly reports that which those of us following the developing story online already knew earlier yesterday: that Mr. Bacile/Nakoula was an ex-con with a pretty jaw-dropping history of bank fraud and identity theft, and in the late 1990's, involvement in methamphetamine trafficking/creating.

However, at the end of the article, I found an extremely revealing quote from Christian extremist, "Wake Up America" video-star, and Media For Christ figure Steve Klein (my emphasis):

Klein, 62, heads the group Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment, which stages rallies and educational events, contending Islam is a threat to U.S. democracy and freedom.  

He said he read the script before the movie was shot and advised the filmmaker to recruit actors through a Hollywood talent agency. Klein said he didn’t know the name of the agency.

The movie had one theatrical showing at a cinema on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, Klein said.

“I got there about a half hour before the movie started and stayed a half hour after it started and I saw zero -- nada, none, no people -- go inside,” Klein said.

To date, Klein is the only source I'm aware of for the assertion that Innocence of the Muslims was actually a movie--not just a 13-minute piece of agitprop--that was shown in a theatre, that is to say, an unnamed cinema on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

Look at Klein's exact word choice: He says he got there thirty minutes before the movie allegedly began--a reasonable window of time while the lights are still on before assorted previews, commercials, and the actual movie begins and an important detail indicating you could see properly if you were going to later assert, believably, that no-one else walked in.

Klein then says he stayed a half-hour after the movie started and saw "zero -- nada, none, no people -- go inside,".  This time frame is important, too, because if he had claimed to have sat through the entire length of the alleged movie--let's say it was purported to be 90 minutes--he might have been asked about scenes and details that he saw which were not in the now-infamous 13-minute clip.  Klein needed to be able to explain the fact that he knew of no other scenes or details, so he kept the time frame of his alleged attendance very short.

Think about it: Why would the person who has, thus far, seemed rather proud of and unapologetic about the "film" NOT want to sit through the entirety of the project that he helped bring about--at least once? Even if it meant sitting all by himself in a dark theatre for 90 minutes (which would be preferred conditions for a critical screening anyway)?

I seriously doubt Klein sat in any theatre on Sunset and watched Innocence of the Muslims by himself for any length of time whatsoever.

And I strongly suspect, based on what we know so far, that there IS no full-length movie. Only the incendiary agitprop piece, timed to be just long enough, but not so long as to exceed the 15-minute time limit that YouTube places on uploads by non-verified accounts.

[I copied this post directly from a long comment I made this morning at Daily Kos; that site's font and typesetting styles remain intact.-- DNT]

UPDATE: It turns out I was wrong about the 13 minute clip being all there was. (I maintain Klein is still lying about having seen the movie in a theatre on Sunset. If evidence proving otherwise surfaces, I will publish it here.) This Monday morning, I'm learning there is a longer version--74 minutes--of the film that has recently been posted to YouTube. I will not link to it here, but readers should easily be able to find it if they are so inclined.

Furthermore, yesterday afternoon, I learned via the extremism-watchdog blog Talk To Action that islamophobic blogger Pamela Geller had not only co-hosted anti-Muslim rallys with Coptic Christian extremist Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih, head of Media For Christ, but also had posted on her blog Atlas Shrugs a fundraising appeal for the "movie" by another figure involved in the making of the film--seemingly a screenwriter who goes by the name Ali Sina (his own website is currently offline, and all Internet archives after summer of 2011 have been scrubbed).

Ali Sina establishes a clear intent to inflame:

I am not thinking of a high budget movie, but given the subject matter, it can become one of the most seen motion pictures ever. (Recall Danish cartoons?)

And in a comment responding to another Atlas Shrugs reader, he offers details that would appear to line up with the content of the piece that would eventually be called Innocence of Muslims:

"Any film about Mohammed should not leave out the beheadings of 900 men and boys of the Banu Quraysha tribe, his 78 battles in the last nine years of his life, nor his thieving, misogyny, lying, murderous and paedophilic ways. But somehow, I would expect it to have these glaring omissions. We are in the politically correct self-loathing West and are afraid of offending a mouse if it sports a crescent." 

Not so! All those details are in the movie. That is the whole porpose of this movie - to tell what others don't. In 4 hours you can't tell everything, that is why I have chosen the parts that really matter. The devil is in the detail.

Obviously, this is a developing story. As further, updated information becomes available, I will share it in a new post.

-- DNT