I looked up "Bill of Attainder" --



Madison could have been writing to the tea-baggers.

http://www.techlawjournal.com/glossary/leg...

But this is hardly the first time the news media acted -- collectively, like a symphony orchestra -- as an instrument of disinformation. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, for instance, had the story pretty straight, about The Chimp and his days in the Texas Air National Guard. But we couldn't be allowed to focus on the facts. For that matter, the Vietnamese "attack" in the Gulf of Tonkin is still presented as fact in school history texts, the genocide in East Timor (and the complete lack of news coverage on it, at the time), and any number of other "too hot for the truth" topics are banned from media attention... No News is Old News.

Edit P.S. --

It's not just "progressive" news stories/narratives that are under-reported. The half a million (700,000? who knows how many?) Iraqi Christians that have been terrorized and forced to flee Iraq since the U.S. invasion hardly ever make the news. (One of the relatively few good things Saddam was responsible for was keeping them safe from their fellow citizens.) Keeping the Right and Left permanently at each other's throats seems like one of the permanent goals of our media overlords. 'Manufactured consent' includes a divide-and-rule strategy.

Powerful, nearly silent, electric motors provide the required torque to lower -- and raise -- those giant bedposts. (Middle photo.)







http://www.mediaite.com/online/this-is-whe...

also:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/02/r...

What I'm saying is...


Your.... SOURCES....


...and References....


and all the bogus, pretend and bullshit mastery of the facts of the case that you pretend to have --



...The Question that you can never begin to approach a reply to is, 'By the way, WHY is it SO important for the U.S. government to fry this man... wtf... what's the big deal, HOW has this whole thing gotten dragged out for so long....? ...Are there ANY larger issues that might be at play?'

Your own silence will condemn you to Future Historians.

......

{Edited to remove a reference to an... ass wad.}

...He wasn't expected to live.

He was also shot at the crime scene.

Faulkner was shot by a different caliber weapon than Mumia had.


BUT -----> the "frame" wasn't made to fit those facts, in the event that Mumia survived being shot, himself.

....Hence, the incredibly tangled web of information and dis-information that's sprung up from this case, as the prosecution's attempted to paper over all the unintended consequences. Your lame attempt to throw some bogus (and mostly incorrect) 'facts' as the "last word" on the trial just plays to type.

This is one of the biggest political trials in history. Right up there with Lieutenant Colonel Albert Dreyfus, Sir Thomas More, Sacco and Vanzetti, and any one of the kangaroo court proceedings that were presided over by Torquemada. Torquemada had a latter-day reincarnation in the person of the "prosecutor in robes," Judge Albert Sabo -- who got to preside over the retrial of the case!!!!


Keep that in mind, Paulsby ------> You can't keep people from thinking for themselves, long after you're gone.


The significance of this trial -- why has all of this been going on and on... and on... and on... for 30 years? -- isn't really about who should be "fried," for whatever kind of circumstantial evidence.

It's important because it's a frozen moment in time -- just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and Brown vs. Board of Education, and the 60's "urban riots" -- that FUTURE historians might focus on.

...Like Vietnam, in other words, it's a "hearts and minds" propaganda campaign.


THAT's the fact that needs to be discussed.

...And that's probably the way later generations are going to judge the case. So you guys have already lost. The City of Paris has named a street for Mumia. That's probably going to last longer than the memory of you or me, swapping rhetorical punches here in the 21st century... Some unknown "investigative journalist" -- here's hoping that job description gets revived in more than name only -- will figure it all out.

Thanks. I think you have eminent justification for feeling cautious and skeptical about all this. (I'm going to check out that Arthur Benavie book, believe me.)

But I also think the poster (thanks, Judi Lynn) deserves big props for paying attention, and relaying the report. The "drug war" is anything but black-and-white/simple/straightforward. One websearch you might want to do is for Catherine Austin Fitts' multi-part series, "Narco-Dollars for Dummies." She's not the world's greatest writer, style-wise -- it'll take a little patience to wade through some parts of her commentary. She labors a bit from initial hypothesis, to possible deductions, all the way through her very logical conclusions -- but it ultimately just adds to the impact, when you consider that what she's writing about may very well be accurate and justified. Given her background and experience and the story she tells. (Jump to the chase and start your search at http://www.scoop.co.nz /

then how did the French lose "more than 50,000 soldiers, including 18 generals" from an expeditionary force that numbered "20,000 men under the command of his {Napoleon's} brother-in-law?"

...Never mind, that's my bad idea of History Geek humor. (I had a reply downthread, somewhere in the 40's.) In all those Very Important Discussions about History, someone's always putting the numbers into one contentious dispute or another...

Really, I just wanted to reply to say thanks for taking the time to cut and paste the history. I never knew the story about the Poles who stayed to fight with the locals. There were maybe a couple of hundred, total (I just looked it up) -- again, numbers, who knows? -- but the story's been passed down by appreciative Haitians, for centuries now, and ethnographers and anthropologists have been kept busy looking for blue-eyed, flaxen-haired Jamaicans.

Which is kind of like finding out that that fictional, "Lieutenant Dunbar" character, in that movie with Kevin Costner and all those nice Native American folks, had a real-life historical antecedant. Or maybe 100, 150, or 200 of them.

If they made a movie of that story, it'd be called, "CHAR-dosh with Maroons." Or some kind of play on words trading off "polka" and "different drumbeat" references. Or something like that.

...If he was quoted accurately as having referred to "Napoleon the Third, Whatever..."

At the turn of the 19th century, the Original, first-one-to-use-the-name Napoleon Bonaparte was the leader of the French. Napoleon the Third (brother Jerome's kid, a nephew) was apparently the one who made his own Faustian bargain, which ruined the Mexicans (and his brother, Maximilian, the nice guy in the family), and his own country (see "Franco-Prussian War") as well.

It's just so typical, these guys are giving lectures on history, on what it means for us today -- and they don't have a clue, their ass-and-elbow recognition skills having been so hopelessly compromised by the oxygen deprivation that's a direct consequence of having their heads so far up their own rectal cavities.

...as in this painting,



With all that money being shuttled back and forth so seamlessly from the pockets of insurance industry execs to the pockets of politicians -- and being returned, again, over and over...

...some of the Lemmings leaping off cliffs may feel a surge of common humanity, a twinge of sympathy for the plight of others -- maybe even a quick rush of enthusiasm ("everybody's pulling oars in the same direction -- 'We're In This Together'"), in those last final moments of clarity/epiphany, as the tide sweeps all floaters out to sea.

Thanks for posting. As a Wisconsinite helping a friend with a pending EEOC claim, it's nice to know that these things sometimes actually do have good outcomes. On the down side, though, there's something about the story that reminds me of an entry from last week's "News of the Weird" column:

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw09...




In this case, the "down side" (the 'Can't Possibly Be True' part) is that -- possibly, I'm just guessing -- this HoneyBaked Ham outlet is very likely just a single, isolated, franchise outlet. In other words, a bunch of mostly decent, no better/no worse -- no doubt hard-working -- local folks. They are probably, in their own way, as S.O.L. as the manager who got shot during the robbery.

The "invisible" element of the story is most likely the fact that the franchise arrangement in no way holds the parent company liable for trivial, local events like this. The parent corporation (for all legal intents and purposes, "a person") has all the name recognition/brand loyalty/marketing rights to the business plan (all the "good stuff"), but the agreement with the franchisees probably indemnifies them against isolated, far-away occurences like this (all the "bad stuff.")

So the bottom line is that whatever happens at any individual franchise outlet, the real "owners" of the business plan can't be held accountable.

.....Insurance companies that screen against "pre-existing conditions" are the other side of the Catch-22.

.....It's like the Fall of Rome/Dark Ages/Collapse of Civilization all over again, only this time the feudal barons who assume the responsibility for protecting the average person, are also at one and the same time, the Huns who are CAUSING the Collapse of that Civilization. As they cash in their "winnings" at some off-shore bank, Cayman Island or Bermuda or wherever, with a big 'F.U. very much, Sayonara Sucker, Good Bye.'

RE: "The story is consistent, and after nearly fifty years we probably won't get any more credible interpretation."

Sez who?

...What a lousy attitude. Where's your intellectual curiosity? Don't you even have a spark of a flicker of a hope, that just maybe, some day, the Truth will out?

Wasn't it just a little while ago that people thought we'd never solve the identity puzzle of that Watergate "Deep Throat" whistleblower?

Before Napoleon's soldiers turned over a big rock in Egypt, revealing the Rosetta Stone (a mere two centuries ago) no one could begin to conceive of a way that Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing could ever be translated.

How many days, weeks and months has it been since everyone started to believe "first black president" and "not in our lifetime" were words that always had to be included in the same sentence, like Chang and Eng, the original Siamese Twins, forever joined at the hip?

...I'm completely thrown by your linkage in that last paragraph, that because Oswald was "unaccountably without a ticket in the Texas Theater," ...

...

...

"Oswald shot Tippit."


Huh?


Can you run that by me again? What is the linkage between having -- or not having -- a ticket, and whether or not Oswald was or was not the shooter?

Pardon my sarcasm, but it turns my stomach to read a post that's so piously mainstream and middle-of-the-road, yet so soul-crushing, at the same time.

As is your premise about "little pieces of 'questionable' information" throwing people off the track.

It's actually the Big Picture that most people have trouble seeing.

Take those 3 big buildings that came down in NYC, in 2001. The Two Towers (and the little 47-story mini-tower, Building Seven), all collapsed exactly the same way that buildings pre-wired/pre-set for a controlled demolition would be expected to fall. But in order for any structure to collapse that way -- to fall straight down, without tipping towards one side or another -- extreme care has to be taken to make sure that the stresses on the building weight supports are all perfectly symmetrical, and evenly distributed all the way around.

It's very difficult to believe that happened, with all three of those buildings, since the planes that were flown in to them didn't strike the buildings dead center. The collapse of Building Seven was 'explained' by the presence of a fuel tank, but that was located in a far corner of an upper floor. If the fires in them did actually cause any of these three buildings to topple, it simply defies credibility to suppose that the sequence of failures, in all three events, was so wonderfully well-distributed, that not one of the three tipped over sideways.

That these are the only three multi-story, modern skyscrapers, in the history of the world, to have ever come down -- solely as a result of fire damage -- makes it all the more remarkable.

RE:



What did you have in mind?

I'm afraid that it's an inherently unweighted, off balance, "lose either way" situation. The politicians and corporate propandists will be paid even more, to come out with even more outrageous lies. They've been screwing over the population, so arrogantly, for so long, a normal person would think it might have begun to give pause. But they lose nothing by cranking up the volume on the one-channel, 'All-Republican-talking points-all-the-time' Noise Machine -- and continuing to make the roles of idiots like Glen Beck ever more prominent. As though he spoke for any but the most pathological and opportunistic among the hard-line Right.

It makes my head hurt to try and guess if Sensenbrenner was being honest, or just pulling a plausible-sounding number out of his big (and mercifully, pin-stripe covered) butt.

Art Kumbalek was more accurate, in the Shepherd, a couple of weeks ago:



Any real solutions for the current mess would require dismantling some of the for-profit/coverage-denying incentives our current 'health care' providers enjoy. So their heels are dug in.

...Never mind that the U.S. has the highest cost pharmaceuticals on the planet, or that our health care outcomes rank below Slovenia's, at more than twice the cost, per capita.

A Medicare-for-all single-payer system would take a much bigger bite out of everybody's payroll check, BUT:



From a Dave Lindorff article, at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff092220...

Anyway, Thanks for the report.

1.4 Billion is probably small potatoes, loose change, couch-cushion-found-money -- compared to what's getting funnelled to The Powers That Be under the current setup.

I saw poll results from Mexico, today, in a news report that said only 28% of Mexicans polled believe that the Federales are "winning" the very violent and bloody cartel drug wars, down there, right now. It's only a thin slice of irony -- finely carved, like a good prosciutto -- but those numbers perfectly mirror Dubya's last approval ratings, and the current segment of the U.S. population who self-identify themselves as "Republicans," to pollsters...

The recently discovered bodies of 14 drug cops -- all kidnapped while they were off-duty, then tortured, before they were killed -- no doubt skewed those Mexican poll results a little, but it's hardly news to anyone that's been following the all but invisible conflict south of the border.

Harper's magazine had an outstanding article a few months ago (May) that anyone interestd in the subject should familiarize themselves with:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/008...

http://borderviolenceanalysis.typepad.com/...

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/17/the-... /

David Cay Johnston's book, "FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMSELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL." The former WSJ and NYT financial reporter writes about the successes of lobbyists who worked to rig the 'Free Trade' game so that any actual PROFITS (Income) from all those out-sourced business ventures could be off-shored (invisibly) to Cayman Islands accounts.

...Which has the effect of exacerbating the harmful results of all those lost jobs, as 'untaxable' corporate income isn't there, either, to help cover the increased government "safety net" costs, like unemployment benefits, and hospital emergency room visits for people who no longer have health insurance.