A 16-year-old avoided spending time in prison for killing four people in a car accident in June after the judge bought his lawyers' argument that he was the victim of wealth...
New evidence has shaken the confidence of former Rep. Lee Hamilton in his two-decade-old judgment clearing Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign of going behind President Carter’s back to frustrate his efforts to free 52 U.S. hostages in Iran, the so-called October Surprise case, Robert Parry reports...Oh and let's not forget Tricky Dick: Did Nixon Commit Treason in 1968? What The New LBJ Tapes Reveal.
Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla., pleaded guilty Wednesday to possession of cocaine and was sentenced to one year of supervised probation...
What’s Ken Starr up to these days? According to Virginia court documents, the famously pious former Clinton prosecutor recently pleaded with a Fairfax County judge to let a confessed child molester go free. Because he’s a family friend. Here’s the letter...One of the commenters over at Gawker wondered why this story wasn't front-paged on the New York Times. Good question.
And also Charlie: she "went there" in a taped tribute for Billy Graham's 95th birthday salute. She allowed that "My mom was raised Catholic, and she … was yearning for something more .... she became a Christian, led the rest of the family to Christ". I thought that was a thing of the past; with the entente between the evangelical fundies and the Bill Donoghues .... apparently not.
...The United States has experienced fundamental changes that are dramatically detrimental to democracy. Voters’ ability to define political discourse has been so diminished that even decisive election results like Barack Obama’s in 2012 have little impact. That’s because powerful interests — freed to, in effect, buy elections, unhindered by downsized and diffused media that must rely on revenue from campaign ads — now set the rules of engagement. Those interests so dominate politics that the squabbling of Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, is a sideshow to the great theater of plutocracy and plunder. This is not democracy. This is dollarocracy...
Former House Speaker Jim Wright was denied a voter ID card Saturday at a Texas Department of Public Safety office and says, “Nobody was ugly to us, but they insisted that they wouldn’t give me an ID.” Wright has voted in every election since 1944.
About ten days ago, a Texas district judge was almost barred from the polls. She has voted for the past 49 years without issue until now, courtesy of the state’s new voter ID law...
...The study Warren was referring to refuted a common conservative argument blaming the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act for forcing Fannie and Freddie to buy shoddy mortgages in poor neighborhoods. "It was the federal government that pushed the subprime loans … that pushed the Community Reinvestment Act," said Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in a GOP primary debate during her presidential campaign, when asked who was to blame for the financial crisis.
However, the St. Louis Federal Reserve analyzed data in California and Florida -- two states hard-hit by the mortgage crisis -- and found that "the extensive purchases of risky private-label mortgage-backed securities by the GSEs were not due to affordable housing mandates..."
...Terrill, a Republican, is accused of offering then-Sen. Debbe Leftwich, a Democrat, an $80,000-a-year state job at the medical examiner's office in 2010. Prosecutors allege he bribed her so she would not run for re-election in 2010...
A 3rd Court of Appeals panel, split 2-to-1 along partisan lines, on Thursday reversed the money-laundering and conspiracy convictions that ended the political career of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay seven years ago.Update: Bug Man's Greatest Hits! Here, here.
The Sugar Land Republican was facing a three-year prison sentence before the court’s majority opinion ruled that there was “legally insufficient evidence” at DeLay’s 2010 trial before a Travis County jury...
...I think "Forget about reality because it's not working" should be tattooed on the forehead of every major banker from Jamie Dimon to these thieves over here. The tapes also are fairly clear evidence that complete amorality among the financial services industry remains far from an American phenomenon. It's important to remember that, not long ago, as the bubble was building, Ireland was Exhibit A for the case being made by the master thieves that a combination of deregulation and cowboy banking was the golden staircase. The Celtic Tiger, remember? In point of fact, the Irish bubble was even bigger and more fragile than ours was, and when it popped, it did so with a far louder bang. In the aftermath, however, there was even less transparency as to the causes of the crash than there was in the United States...
The Internal Revenue Service gave the largest whistleblower reward ever to UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld in September 2012. He received $104 million for tipping off the federal government to UBS's secret Swiss bank accounts. UBS paid a fine of $780 million and provided the names of more than 4,900 American taxpayers who held offshore accounts...
Former President Bill Clinton, recruited by the White House to explain the misunderstood health law, is looking to play Obamacare peacemaker.
In a highly-anticipated speech from his presidential library, Clinton challenged Republicans to finally work with Democrats to improve on President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement instead of constantly trying to undermine it...
If you know about foreclosure fraud, the mass fabrication of mortgage documents in state courts by banks attempting to foreclose on homeowners, you may have one nagging question: Why did banks have to resort to this illegal scheme? Was it just cheaper to mock up the documents than to provide the real ones? Did banks figure they simply had enough power over regulators, politicians and the courts to get away with it? (They were probably right about that one.)
A newly unsealed lawsuit, which banks settled in 2012 for $95 million, actually offers a different reason, providing a key answer to one of the persistent riddles of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The lawsuit states that banks resorted to fake documents because they could not legally establish true ownership of the loans when trying to foreclose...
This story seems unreal in the United States of America. In short, Lu Ann Ballew, the Child Support Magistrate who serves the 4th Judicial District of Tennessee that includes Cocke, Grainger, Jefferson, and Sevier counties, renamed a Tennessee’s mother’s child’s name. She did this based on her own religious beliefs and the preponderance of the Christian religion in the child’s surroundings.
This is more serious than it seems on the surface. Many in the Right Wing get upset when they are compared to the Taliban, yet the type of control they attempt to take on the civil liberties and freedoms of citizens is immediately visible. The attempt in Tennessee and in various states governed by Right Wing politicians to pass laws against non-existent Sharia Laws as cover for their attempt at their own theocracy and ideological dominance is dangerous...
A Detroit-area doctor has been charged with bilking the government of tens of millions of dollars by deliberately misdiagnosing patients with cancer and illegally billing Medicare for the treatment...
Donald Trump warned Iowa Republicans in a speech Saturday night that Hillary Clinton would be a tough candidate to beat in the 2016 presidential election.
"Hillary is going to be tougher to beat" than Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, Trump said, and he urged Republicans to choose "the right person, the perfect person" at their next convention, ABC News reported...
More than eight in 10 voters say Congress hasn't worked hard enough to take five weeks off, according to a new Fox News poll.
...Our Congress is now a cut-rate circus with nothing but eunuchs as performers. Some of these people, like Stutzman and his colleagues in the flying-monkey caucus, become eunuchs by choice. Some of them, like John Boehner, are drafted into the position. Their job is to be forcibly impotent so that the government itself becomes forcibly impotent. They are proud of what they do. They consider it a higher calling to public service that they decline to serve the public. They sing a soprano dirge for democracy in Jesus's name, amen.
