Prairie Weather

Mr. Clean

Remember? Dennis Hastert was presented as a nice guy, school coach, remedy-for-past-sins kind of Speaker of the House.  Then we learned about those land deals.  And now...

According to the indictment, the man who for eight years was second in line to move into the White House, if both the President and the Vice-President were incapacitated, told agents that he was taking all that cash out of the bank because he didn’t trust the safety of the American banking system.

One can put that in the category of proffered hypocrisies. When the news of the indictment broke, many accounts stuck to the theme that every last person who knew Hastert was shocked—during his fast rise in Congress, he was supposedly known, as the Washington Post put it, for having “no skeletons” in the closet. That this might have been the case, even though Hastert was known to have made millions of dollars on a deal involving land bought cheaply and sold, at a striking profit, after he had pushed plans through Congress for a nearby highway, says something about what counts as a skeleton in Washington. ...AmyDavidson, NewYorker

The sexual misconduct hinted at in current reports could be serious.  But it shouldn't be the focus of investigation. I hope we'll take just as seriously his (and many others') betrayal of democracy, voters, and decent colleagues. I don't like watching democracy get screwed over and over again by nasty little farts who exploit others, whether it's land deals, or kids, or voters. 

If we'd known then what we know...

Two days after a letter containing a white, powdery anthrax-contaminated substance was opened in Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's personal office in the Hart Senate Office Building, nasal swabs from 31 people tested positive for the presence of anthrax spores.

Those who were exposed include 23 members of Daschle's staff, three staffers for Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., whose office on the fifth and sixth floors of Hart Senate Office Building is adjacent to Daschle's, and five Capitol Police officers.

This evening, the Senate Sgt. at Arms sent a letter to all staffers on the fifth and sixth floors of the Hart Senate Office Building asking them to go on a 60-day regimen of Cipro. Previously, a three-day regimen was suggested.

"I'm concerned for my staff. I'm angered that this has happened. But I feel very confident … about the fact that everyone will be OK," said Daschle, D-S.D., noting that no one on Capitol Hill is known to have been infected with the disease.

The House was set to adjourn at the end of the day until Tuesday, but Senate leaders decided to keep their chamber in session through Thursday. All congressional office buildings will be vacated to allow authorities to sweep the Capitol complex for anthrax spores.

Authorities said this afternoon that the bacteria does not appear to have spread beyond the general vicinity of Daschle's office.

"The exposure has been confined to a very specific area," Dr. Kenneth Moritsugu, the deputy surgeon general, told reporters on Capitol Hill. "At this time there has been no evidence of spores in the ventilation system."

Senior law enforcement officials said today that a laboratory analysis of the anthrax-laden powder in the letter received by Daschle's office last Friday and opened Monday has revealed the substance was "professionally" manufactured, suggesting the powder was produced by a well-funded organization. ...ABCNews,10/17/01

The first Bush-Cheney term had just gotten underway when Islamic terrorists assaulted the US in September.  Then, a few weeks later in October, anthrax letters began to turn up, most notably in the offices of Democratic senators on the Hill.  Several were accused over the years but no one was prosecuted.  The Bush administration showed some eagerness in blaming the anthrax on Saddam, on Islamic terrorists, on favorite perps -- in much the same way as they created enemies -- Saddam included -- to justify war. But, at least in the beginning, the administration claimed "no direct link" to Al Qaeda...

We're still dependent on circumstantial evidence.  But there's something about being reminded -- 14 years later -- that the Department of Defense has live anthrax and has sent live samples to labs around the world. ...

The Pentagon announced Friday it has identified additional labs that it accidentally sent live anthrax samples to, prompting Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work to order a review of all Pentagon laboratories. 

"As of now, 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries are believed to have received suspect samples," a Pentagon statement said. 

On Wednesday, defense officials said a military lab at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah accidentally sent live anthrax samples to labs in nine states, and to the Osan Air Base in South Korea. 

On Friday, Reuters reported that a live sample was also sent in 2008 to Australia. 

"We continue to work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is leading the ongoing investigation pursuit to its statutory authorities," the Pentagon statement said.  

Work ordered the review after consulting with Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who is meeting with officials in East Asia. 

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall is leading the review, which will look into the "root cause" of the incomplete inactivation of the pathogen. 

It will also examine Defense laboratory biohazard safety procedures and protocols, laboratory adherence to established procedures and protocols, and identification of systemic problems and the steps necessary to fix those problems. ...TheHill

The threats from outside terrorists seems increasingly puny compared to damage done internally by the police (as we've been learning over the past years), from the Pentagon and federal law enforcement.  I don't think we should gloss over threats to Democratic senators during the most recent Republican administration.  It's more than probable -- given what we know about the later outrages of Bush-Cheney -- that anthrax threats  were part of their game.

Police make the streets more, not less, violent

The risk of your being killed by the police -- for no good reason -- is growing yearly.

In an alley in Denver, police gunned down a 17-year-old girl joyriding in a stolen car. In the backwoods of North Carolina, police opened fire on a gun-wielding moonshiner. And in a high-rise apartment in Birmingham, Ala., police shot an elderly man after his son asked them to make sure he was okay. Douglas Harris, 77, answered the door with a gun.

The three are among at least 385 people shot and killed by police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more than two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than twice the rate of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete.

“These shootings are grossly under­reported,” said Jim Bueermann, a former police chief and president of the Washington-based Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving law enforcement. “We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information.” ...WaPo

Breaking down the statistics, the Washington Post reports that about half were black or Hispanic, and half white.  But what about gun ownership?

About half the victims were white, half minority. But the demographics shifted sharply among the unarmed victims, two-thirds of whom were black or Hispanic. Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the census tracts where the shootings occurred.

And many were killed when they were no threat to the police.

Running is such a provocative act that police experts say there is a name for the injury officers inflict on suspects afterward: a “foot tax.”

Police are authorized to use deadly force only when they fear for their lives or the lives of others. So far, just three of the 385 fatal shootings have resulted in an officer being charged with a crime — less than 1 percent.

The low rate mirrors the findings of a Post investigation in April that found that of thousands of fatal police shootings over the past decade, only 54 had produced criminal ­charges. Typically, those cases involved layers of damning evidence challenging the officer’s account. Of the cases resolved, most officers were cleared or acquitted. ...WaPo

Don't moralize. Monetize.

Faith, hope, and charity are nice words, but they're not concepts ruling our lives.  We may be closer to losing our reputation, as Americans, for being generous... maybe have lost it already. 

This report doesn't help.

After a lifetime of abusing drugs, Horace Bush decided at age 62 that getting clean had become a matter of life or death. So Mr. Bush, a homeless man who still tucked in his T-shirts and ironed his jeans, moved to a flophouse in Brooklyn that was supposed to help people like him, cramming into a bedroom the size of a parking space with three other men.

Mr. Bush signed up for a drug-treatment program and emerged nine months later determined to stay sober. But the man who ran the house, Yury Baumblit, a longtime hustler and two-time felon, had other ideas.

Mr. Baumblit got kickbacks on the Medicaid fees paid to the outpatient treatment programs that he forced all his tenants to attend, residents and former employees said. So he gave Mr. Bush a choice: If he wanted to stay, he would have to relapse and enroll in another program. Otherwise, his bed would be given away.

“‘Do what you do’ — that’s what he told me,” Mr. Bush recalled.

Mr. Bush, rail-thin with sad eyes, wanted to avoid the streets and homeless shelters at all costs. He turned to his self-medication of choice: beer, with a chaser of heroin and crack cocaine. Then he enrolled in a new program chosen by Mr. Baumblit.

In the past two and a half years, Mr. Bush has gone through four programs, just to hold onto his upper bunk bed. ...NYT

Will Hastert wind up in prison? Why?

As we're all straining our eyes and ears to get the details of the case against former House Speaker Hastert, having moved on from the disgrace of our treatment of Mexican migrants in crowded buildings in Arizona and across the southern border --as distinct from how we deal with serious crime in our financial sector -- we're also trying not to think too much about our criminal justice system as a lucrative end-of-the-rainbow for a growing American industry:  penal institutions.

How many Americans wind up in jail after overblown prosecutions?  How many of the prosecutions result from of exposure in the media rather than scrupulous investigation by law enforcement?  How many of the "perps" are nabbed and punished thanks to "dirty" police?

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting perspective on why America is known for its crowded prisons.

... There’s a reason the U.S. has become a sprawling, oppressive penal state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any other nation in the world, both in raw numbers and proportionally. There are actually many reasons: the profit motive from privatized prisons, the bipartisan nature of the “tough-on-crime” agenda, the evils of the Drug War, mandatory minimum sentences, the disproportionate use of arrest, prosecution and imprisonment against minorities.

But one key factor is over-criminalization: converting relatively trivial and harmless acts into major felonies. The postal worker who just engaged in an act of nonviolent political protest — flying a gyrocopter to the U.S. Capitol lawn to protest the corrupting role of money in U.S. politics — faces up to nine years in prison on multiple felony charges. That is over-criminalization, as are the shamefully large number of people in prison for selling prohibited narcotics to consenting adults who wanted them, or even for just possessing them. ...Greenwald,Intercept

Thar's money in them there hills...

Radley Balko, who has done among the best work on the broken U.S. criminal justice system, said this morning: “Dennis Hastert is one of the last people I want to be defending. But these charges are the picture of over-criminalization run amok.” Indeed, who is the victim in Hastert’s alleged crimes, which — again — do not include the “past misconduct”? He literally faces felony counts and years in prison for hiding an agreement to pay someone claiming to have been victimized by him, an agreement that is perfectly legal and standard (even common) when done with lawyers as part of an actual or threatened court case. ..Greenwald,Intercept

"Over-criminalization breeds injustice and abuse of power," Greenwald writes.  You bet it does!  And it's not just the police doing it.

The people who "own" the police and the Department of Justice -- that's you and me -- are allowing this to happen. "Sexual misconduct" (alleged) is an accusation that draws us in, every time.  It's a good deal easier to get hold of than the corruption in every element of our justice system, from the federal government right through to our state and local law enforcement.

The media, of course, imprison "perps" in their own way.  The beat goes on...

Wheaton College has received and accepted J. Dennis Hastert's resignation from theboard of advisers to the center that bears his name, but college officials have not decided whether the name of the Hastert Center for Economics, Government and Public Policy will change following the former U.S. House Speaker's recent indictment, a spokeswoman said Friday. ...AuroraBeaconNews

___

And then this video popped up from Hastert’s Nov. 13, 2014 appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, in which a man identifying himself as “Bruce” asked Hastert: “Do you remember me from Yorkville?” He then cackled and hung up, leaving Hastert visibly uncomfortable. (The indictment said that Individual A had started meeting Hastert in 2010, and Hastert started making payments to that individual shortly thereafter.)

BuzzFeed also reported that at the request of Hastert’s lawyers, the U.S. Attorney’s office agreed to withhold the “explicit” details from the indictment that concerned why Hastert agreed to pay Individual A $3.5 million in hush money. But at this point, we can’t stop people from jumping to conclusions. ...Mediaite

I watched that video several times and didn't catch the discomfort.  And Greenwald added this update:

In the indictment, the DOJ made the decision not to expressly specify the “past misconduct” Hastert sought to conceal. Nonetheless, federal law enforcement officials apparently spent the day running around leaking to media outlets what the indictment worked hard to insinuate: that “Hastert paid a man to conceal sexual misconduct while the man was a student at the high school where Hastert taught.” So this seems to be a case where federal prosecutors wanted to punish someone for a crime they couldn’t prove he committed, so instead reached into their bottomless bag of offenses to turn him into a criminal for something else.

Obviously, “sexual misconduct” with a student is a serious offense, but that still is not part of what Hastert is charged with. In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers. What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that. ...Greenwald,Intercept

Adiosito, Citizens United?

If true and viable, this would be a solid reason to vote for Hillary.  If true and viable...

Hillary Clinton has been telling people — a group of financial backers in Brooklyn, a house party in Iowa — that as president, she would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn the Citizens United decision erasing limits on political spending by corporations.

“I will do everything I can to appoint Supreme Court justices who protect the right to vote and do not protect the right of billionaires to buy elections” is the way she puts it. ...LindaGreenhouse,NYT

Well ...maybe.  But Roberts and Alito look as though they'll be around for a while.  The most fragile Supreme Court justice is probably Ruth Ginsberg and even Ginsberg looks hardy. And then we have to contend with the problem that this is a campaign promise, not by any means a guarantee.