Jann Arden:
Author: susie
This is why I believe in cheap, accessible abortion
In hopes that women like this will terminate their pregnancies:
WEST CALN TWP., Pa. — Police say a man and his girlfriend are charged with murdering the girlfriend’s 3-year-old son.
Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan announced the arrests of Gary Fellenbaum and Jillian Tait Thursday morning. He says Fellenbaum, his wife, and girlfriend, Tait, all lived in a trailer park on Hope Lane in West Caln Township.
On Tuesday authorities were called to their residence for the report of an unresponsive child. Responding EMTs found 3-year-old Scott McMillan suffering from bruises, lacerations and puncture wounds all over his body.
Police say Fellenbaum, Tait, and another witness confessed that the little boy had been beaten with blunt and sharp objects, whipped, taped to a chair with electrical tape and beaten, hung up by his feet and beaten, leading to his death.
Authorities say they beat Scott to death using homemade weapons, like a whip, a curtain rod, and an aluminum strip.
Police say Tait explained that the fatal beating began when the boy wouldn’t eat his breakfast.
Hogan said, “Little Scotty McMillan is dead. Over a three day period … he was systematically tortured and beaten to death. He was punched in the face and in the stomach. He was scourged with a homemade whip. He was lashed with a metal rod. He was tied to a chair and beaten. He was tied upside down by his feet and beaten. His head was smashed through a wall.”
Tait allegedly told police that Fellenbaum beat her 6 and 3-year-old boys on a number of occasions. He would allegedly hit them with a closed fist in the head, face, chest and buttocks, and on one occasion she says he strung the boys up by their feet and beat them, while she and Fellenbaum laughed.
H/t Nicole Naum.
Bombshell: JPMorgan Chase witness breaks her gag order
I’ve said it before: Rolling Stone is the only major publication digging into these stories. If you can afford it, buy a subscription. And now Matt Taibbi is back with a huge bombshell of a story: The main witness in the JPMorgan Chase settlement is breaking her gag order!
She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.
“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”
Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.
Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.
Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.
Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”
Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.
This past year she watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.
And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”
Time for Pelosi to go, too
What the what? Pelosi offered Steve Israel ANOTHER term at the DCCC? She’s gotta go, too:
Sleep-deprived and smarting from what he called “an ugly night for Democrats at all levels,” Israel said one lesson from the midterms that’s essential in 2016 is identifying and contacting voters, early and often.
But Israel won’t be preparing the DCCC for that. He said Wednesday he turned down a request by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to return as chairman for a third election.
Instead, he said he is talking with her about staying in House Democratic leadership.
“I’ve been really clear with leader Pelosi that I would like to continue to have a seat at the leadership table, because it makes me more effective,” he said. “I’ll stay in Congress for as long as I believe I’m effective, but I’m not going to occupy a seat in Congress for the sake of having a seat in Congress.”
Looking back on his tenure at the DCCC, he points out he won eight House seats for Democrats in 2012 and said he prevented losses Tuesday that “could have been a lot worse.”
See, that’s our standard for victory under Blue Dog, “Center Aisle” Steve Israel: “Hey, it could have been worse!”
Still, Republicans exceeded their goal of winning a net 12 seats from Democrats by three, giving them their biggest House majority since the 1940s. The DCCC lost 11 of the 24 Democratic seats they spent millions of dollars to defend, and picked up only a few Republican seats.
Even in Israel’s backyard, Republicans gained three New York State Democratic seats, including that of Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton), and failed to beat Rep. Michael Grimm (R-Staten Island) despite his federal indictment.
Here’s what Howie Klein wrote about good old Steve:
Ros-Lehtinen, a close friend and political crony of DCCC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has protected her in the past, was a member of Steve Israel’s Center Aisle Caucus. Charlie Dent was a member of the same centrist caucus composed of Blue Dogs and other Wall Street-owned Democrats and relatively mainstream conservative Republicans. One of the premises is that the members don’t oppose each other– which was certainly a good enough reason for Nancy Pelosi to have not made him head of the DCCC. But she did. And tonight she’s reaping the whirlwind– and so are more rational Democrats and the American people.
When David Broder first wrote about the determinedly centrist Congressional Center Aisle Caucus in 2005, he almost ejaculated for joy on the editorial page of the Washington Post over the sheer civility of the project. I wonder why they didn’t make him an honorary member. Broder claimed there were 47 invited members (which later grew to 60), roughly equally split between the two parties, although that membership roll isn’t readily available anywhere, almost like it’s being hidden. They meet, or met, secretly, in a Chinese restaurant two blocks from Capitol Hill; no joke. The caucus was founded by Republican Tim Johnson (IL) and the-Blue Dog… Steve Israel (NY) with the stated purpose of bypassing Congress’ partisan ways.
Applicants for membership weren’t admitted unless they recruited companion members from the opposite party. Caucus members avoided lightning-rod issues and focused only on areas that most likely would produce agreement. Under one unwritten bylaw, members vowed never to engage in political campaigns against other members. That’s nice… but does it make sense to appoint the person who came up with that chairman of the DCCC? I’ll answer that for you– NO! These are the exact candidates the DCCC should be going after… but regardless of how vulnerable they are, Israel keeps the DCCC off their backs one way or the other. In a rational world, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen would have been a top tier DCCC candidate, but Steve Israel doesn’t live in a rational world; he lives in a Center Aisle world and ignores the fact that Ros-Lehtinen is in a blue district that Obama won– and by a way stronger margin than just about all of Israel’s targeted districts. But Ileana gets a reelection free-pass from Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Last year Wasserman Schultz was complicit in recruiting a cardboard candidate, Manny Yevancey, who no one ever heard of, who raised zero dollars and who campaigned exactly zero days. His only job was to occupy the Democratic ballot slot so no one else could run against Wasserman Schultz’s and Israel’s BBF.
There are 21 seats like this in the House, winnable seats Steve Israel willfully ignored, even if they were much easier than impossible targets in deep red districts where he ran his handpicked Blue Dogs and New Dems. All of these incumbents represent districts where Obama won in 2008 and/or 2012 but where Israel has refused to back the grassroots local candidate or has frightened off anyone from running against his Republican pals.
Bernie Sanders on looming oligarchy
MY GOODMAN: [This is] Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, on this day after. That’s right. Last night, Tuesday night, during Democracy Now!’s five-hour special broadcast, Juan González and I spoke with Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, just as it started to become clear from early election results that the Senate was clearly going to be controlled by Republicans.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: What I do know is that if in fact the Republicans carry the Senate and control the Congress, as they may, I think it will be a disaster for the middle-class and working families of this country. And we’re just going to have to figure out how we can fight back as effectively as we can.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what do you see as the options for—in case that does turn out to be the result tonight, what do you see the options in terms of how President Obama can move forward any kind of a Democratic or progressive agenda in the remaining two years?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I think it’s quite far-fetched to believe that he can move forward a progressive agenda. I think the immediate effort will be to stop to have more tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations, which the Republicans will certainly bring forward. I think under the guise of, quote-unquote, “entitlement reform,” they will be making efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. They’ll go after Medicaid. They’ll go after education. They’ll go after nutrition. They’ll probably want to increase funding for the military. And my guess is, with all of the money from the Koch brothers coming in and the other fossil fuel industries, they’ll continue to ignore scientific evidence about climate change. So, I think we’re going to be more of a defensive mode trying to prevent bad things than having illusions at this point about doing good things.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Sanders, your state has struggled with your Obamacare website. It has caused a very major issue particularly in Vermont, because of the quest by Governor Shumlin and many others to make Vermont the first single-payer state. Can you talk about the significance of this and what it will mean?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, it’s obviously a negative. I mean, I am a strong advocate of a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. I think if you want to provide quality care to all people in a cost-effective way, that is the approach you have got to go. Clearly, it is not a good thing for a state government, or in fact federal government, not to be able to run a website which is accountable and works well for people. So, that’s a negative. But I hope very much that despite that, we’ll go forward and be the first state in the country to pass a single payer.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, one argument that even Governor Shumlin has used is that, you know, Obamacare is complicated—
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —and that that is not the ultimate answer. And this, the downing of your website, proves this.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Look, what you need—the American healthcare system is enormously complicated. And when you have a system that is complicated, it becomes very, very expensive,
and we end up spending approximately 30 percent of every healthcare dollar in the administration and profiteering and everything else. Clearly, in my view, and I think the view of a whole lot of Americans, healthcare should be a right. We should fund it through public funding in a progressive way, and people should be able to go to the doctor they want in the hospital they want. And it turns out that in our country we spend—and people don’t understand this—we spend almost twice as much per person on healthcare as do the people of any other nation, precisely because it is a complicated, bureaucratic, confusing and profit-oriented system.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Sanders, the issue of the minimum wage, in all the states that it is being introduced, the ballot initiative being voted on in Alaska, in Arkansas, in Nebraska, in South Dakota, even if they’re Republican states, it is overwhelmingly, two, three to one, being voted for. What message does this send to your Democratic colleagues?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, Amy, that’s an excellent point, and it’s a very important point. And it’s not just the minimum wage. On economic issues, whether it’s raising the minimum wage, whether it’s pay equity for women workers, whether it’s investing in rebuilding our infrastructure and creating millions of decent-paying jobs, whether it is making college education affordable and ending this burden of student indebtedness that so many young people have, guess what. The vast majority of the people want change.
Continue reading “Bernie Sanders on looming oligarchy”
Allergies
After five hellish days of no antihistamines, I finally had my allergist appointment. Guess what? They didn’t have enough nurses in that day to do the allergy tests. He wants me to come back in a month.
“I’m not doing that again,” I told the doctor. “You’re just going to have to test me with the Zyrtec.”
“It won’t be as accurate,” the doctor said.
“Not my problem,” I told him. “Besides, I have faith in my body’s ability to generate an allergic reaction on demand.”
Not the end of the world
The senate seats we lost were from states that were red until Obama got elected, and now they’re just flipping back. I just don’t believe this was a massive repudiation of Democratic ideals. Maybe Obama, but not our polices — we passed gun control and minimum wage raises wherever they were on the ballot. They even voted to ban fracking in Denton, Texas!
If anything, just the opposite. I think some voters are very, very angry over the economy and took out their frustrations in the voting booth. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a bad thing to lose all those seats. But it doesn’t mean Democrats will never win again.
And then we have the older voters, who voted because of Benghazi Ebola Terrorist Immigrants! We were never going to get those.
The way it never was
This song always reminds me of a really awful ex who compulsively lied and cheated, and was telling me why we should give it another go. “You and I had a great relationship!” he said enthusiastically. It was one of those moments where you shake your head at somebody else’s version of reality, and I thought to myself, “No, you had a great relationship, not me.” Kim Richey:
What really went wrong
Democratic pollsters talk to Greg Sargent:
The exit polls show that candidates like Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Bruce Braley and Mark Udall lost by anywhere from large to truly massive margins among non-college whites and older voters. That’s also true of theoverall national electorate. You should treat these exit polls with a grain of salt, but the pollsters I spoke to agree that this gets at a fundamental problem Democrats face.
These pollsters argued that this was above all the result of a failure to connect with these voters’ economic concerns. At the root of these concerns, Mellman says, are stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery’s gains to achieve wider, more equitable distribution. Democrats campaigned on a range of economic issues — the minimum wage, pay equity, student loan affordability, expanded pre-kindergarten education — but these didn’t cut through people’s economic anxieties, because they didn’t believe government can successfully address them.
“People are deeply suspicious that government can deliver on these problems,” Mellman says, in a reference to the voter groups that continue to elude Democrats. “And they are not wrong. We’ve been promising that government can be a tool to improve people’s economic situation for decades, and by and large, it hasn’t happened.”
Republicans were able to capitalize on the failure of Democrats to connect economically, in large part because of Obama’s unpopularity in these states, which helped ensure that the Democratic Party owned people’s economic anxieties.
“Republicans were exceptionally successful in nationalizing the election in most places, and on focusing voters’ anger and anxiety on Obama,” pollster Geoff Garin, who polled in the Iowa race, told me. “Voters were particularly inclined to punish whoever is running things. Democrats owned the status quo in voters’ minds.”
This dynamic fed into the broader Republican strategy of seizing on every crisis that came along to sow doubts about Obama’s — and government’s — competence. Pollster Andrew Maxfield, who polled in the Arkansas and Alaska Senate races, says Republicans successfully made the case that government just wasn’t working for people — economically or otherwise.
“This election — like 2006 — was in large part about accountability,” Maxfield says. “It became a referendum on perceived government incompetence. ISIS, Ebola, and the border fit squarely in there but it wasn’t exclusively about competence. It was also about who government is working for economically. Linking specific Democrats to Obama became a catch-all for that broader case.”
Ultimately, stressing individual issues such as the minimum wage hike and pay equity wasn’t enough to get past that — even if they are quite popular — because these voters want to hear a more comprehensive message about how Democrats would move the economy forward. Pollster Celinda Lake, who polled on multiple races, says the broader failure to articulate this — from the President on down — led these voters to opt instead for vague promises of a change in direction.
“We have a huge problem: People do not think the recovery has affected them, and this is particularly true of blue collar white voters,” Lake said. “What is the Democratic economic platform for guaranteeing a chance at prosperity for everyone? Voters can’t articulate it. In the absence of that, you vote for change.”
“Our number one imperative for 2016,” Lake concluded, “is to articulate a clear economic vision to get this country going again.”
Wait, what? We need white working class voters and a strong economic message? Whoever would have guessed it?
My hero
I’m sure he was asking for it!
UPDATE: Here’s the rest of the story. As I suspected, he was an obnoxious wingnut.