Whiskey Fire

Eric Holder Resigns

Here's John Cassidy at the New Yorker: Why Didn’t Eric Holder Go After the Bankers?

Amid all the coverage of Eric Holder’s resignation, I still haven’t seen a convincing answer to one question: Why didn’t the Justice Department, under his leadership, prosecute some of the senior bankers whose firms were largely responsible for the subprime-mortgage blowup and the Great Recession? It’s a gap in Holder’s record that historians will ponder at the same time they criticize his record on civil liberties, particularly his endorsement of the surveillance state, and praise him for trying to tackle some enduring problems in the American criminal-justice system, such as the imposition of long prison sentences for minor crimes and the scandalously high rates of incarceration, especially among minority groups.

Yes, John, if you ignore the fact that both Holder and Lanny Breuer (Assistant Attorney General, head of the DOJ's Criminal Justice division) came from white shoes criminal defense firm Covington and Burling, it might be difficult to answer that question. And if you don't mention it in your article, you're doing a disservice to your readers. Scot J. Paltrow (Reuters): Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

A President doesn't pick people like Holder and Breuer for the top positions at the DOJ if he wants Wall Street criminals brought to justice...quite the opposite in fact.

That youtube is parody, of course, but it's also your answer, John Cassidy.

The actual Frontline piece was damning enough that Lanny resigned shortly after it was aired. (We needn't cry for him, he's back at Covington in the newly-created role of vice-chairman of the firm, his reward for servicing the clientele while at the DOJ.) And speaking of Bill Black:

William R. Black on Prosecuting Criminal Banker CEOs: Obama and Holder Don’t Even Care Enough to Fake It

P.S. Here's Mario A. Murillo on one of Holder's cases at Covington: Holder, Chiquita and Colombia. I find it notable for mentioning candidate Obama's opposition to our free trade agreement with Colombia as a reason for disappointment with his nomination of Eric Holder. Of course, Our President would forget about his opposition to agreements like this just months after he was sworn in.

Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place.

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Charter Schools: Grift Or Scam?

(Not to abuse our posting privileges, but this education item probably belongs here as well as there.)

Nice people, charter school operators. And dedicated to nothing but the students, as indicated in this press release The (Online) WSJ was kind enough to publish. We found it at theeastsiderLA.

The Superior Court lawsuit was served today on the Semillas charter elementary school, its chairman Marcos Aguilar, and his wife Minnie Ferguson, who serves as the school's principal. It was served previously on LAUSD.

[Restaurant & plaintiff] Hecho en Mexico is sandwiched between two parcels that comprise the elementary school. Semillas is a sister school to a charter high school about a mile away that is under the same ownership. Last week, the LAUSD board refused to renew the high school's charter, citing low test scores, financial troubles, alleged refusal to cooperate with district auditors, and failure to follow guidelines required of all district charters.

[...]

Simultaneous with its campaign against Hecho en Mexico, Semillas opened its own Mexican restaurant across the street. The Semillas restaurant was shut down for failure to comply with public health regulations but the campaign against Hecho en Mexico continued, the suit says.

The purpose of the Semillas campaign is "to interfere with and prevent the operation of (Hecho en Mexico's) business and ultimately seize the opportunity to operate the restaurant for themselves," the suit says.

Why, it's almost as if Marcos & Minnie (Nepotists, too. Is that approved of in charter schooling?) are interested in nothing but grifting taxpayers, & have found that charter schools are an excellent way of getting some property tax & California Lottery money that is supposed to be spent on education rather than restauranting.

Remember this the next time a reactionary spews that tired "poverty pimp" crap.

— M. Bouffant

Eyewitness Evidence

Shorter Ann Althouse on eye-rolling:

If I didn't see Alito do it w/ my own two eyes it did not happen!

She is, however, willing to split the difference:

I don't trust the descriptions of Epps and Milbank. Maybe we could get some more discussion of the meaning of Alito's head — from some observers who like him. And then I could calculate the truth from there.

Ah, perhaps the Justice only rolled one eye!

— M. Bouffant, exclusive to Whiskey Fire.

So. Cal. Police Terror Report

Amazing that a "tear gas" canister that won't make the structure it's fired into explode in flames hasn't been developed in the almost 40 yrs. since most of the Symbionese Liberation Army were killeddied in a fire set by the LAPD's magic tear gas canisters.

A cynical America-hater (me) might think it awfully convenient for certain organizations dedicated to service (to the powerful) & protection (of their property from the less-powerful) that Christopher Dorner will never be placed on trial, let alone have a chance to air his grievances in a public forum.

It's almost as if there are no such things as tear gas canisters at all, but only explosive devices that happen to have a little tear gas in them.

I'd also like to hear less whining about dead police ossifers (You live by the gun, you die by the gun. Can't be simpler than that, so stop whining.) & more concern for the mother & daughter newspaper carriers & guy who didn't fit the description of Dorner (but were driving pick-up trucks not at all similar to Dorner's) & were all three nearly murdered by the gang that can't shoot straight, the police. (You know, the "good guys" w/ guns who'll stop bad guys w/ guns. My ass.)

Almoost finished, but here's a late update: Thanks to Typepad reading what I typed & providing related links & posts (Which is more than a little frightening, by the way.) I see the L.A.Times has reported this:

Related articles

Dorner manhunt: Incendiary tear gas reportedly used on cabin

Try the link in that dumb-ass box ("Powered by Zemanta™," whatever that is.) but few who don't pay an inflated price can access that fish-wrapper, even from links. Nonetheless, before it was hidden I saw the phrase "hot gas." Turns out this is a thing. A works-out-great-for-the-coppers thing.

And how could I have imagined what the hoped for result was w/o knowing that tear-gas canisters are deliberately designed to be incendiary? It's as if I'm psychic or something!

— M. Bouffant

Law & Order: Lake Siri Investigations

All scenes filmed on location in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

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An Armed Society Is A Civil Society

Much "civility" claptrap issuing from the usual sources (white guys, old & privileged, in the Puffho).

Look, the shooter was a paranoid & delusional schizophrenic. The sudden introduction of the civility for which wretched old honkies (Of whom, in the interests of disclosure, I am one, 'though not wretched in the way Fineman, Paul Helmke or other media villagers are.) pine into "the discourse" would not have made George Wallace's proverbial dime's worth of difference to the young man alleged to have killed & wounded his fellow humans in a Tucson parking lot.

Attention has been paid to Arizona's recent passage of a concealed weapons carry law & to Sarah Palin & others (Rep. Giffords' opponent in the recent election among them) using violent, gun-oriented imagery & rhetoric to play to their threatened, fearful base, but (especially considering Arizona's attitude toward the medically indigent) the first place we should look in the finger-pointing process is Arizona's treatment (if any, ha ha) of its mentally ill population.

Beyond the state's apparent assurance that every disturbed paranoid (who is a legal resident) can get at least one gun.

M. Bouffant (In addition.)

The Law

Shorter Randy Barnett:

It's a shame that the Sotomayor hearings are going to be a circus, with senators engaging in vapid posturing and riding their absurd political posturing. Don't they know they're wasting a golden opportunity to get her to admit that The New Deal was, like, worse than anything Stalin ever did? Also, Al Franken is dumb.

Of course, since the NY Times asked Ann Althouse to blather about the hearings this isn't the stupidest thing we'll hear about them today, but it is pretty stupid.

Double Standards Incorporated

The Supreme Court is something I approve of in the sense that it's not the Senate, and so is not the most ridiculous of all American political institutions; as to whether the SC is any more preposterous than the presidency, I'm not quite sure.

It really is all my balls, though.

The shithead kabuki that accompanies SC nominations is a consistent national embarrassment, as it makes politicians feel compelled to denounce politics, which I always find creepy as hell, especially when it's done on the fucking Senate floor. The whole notion that Supreme Court judges somehow ascend to Nonpartisan Legal Nirvana after passing a Senate vote that is always Based on the Qualifications is stupid: in and of itself it is a transparently politically motivated dumb-show that fools nobody except hopeless idiots, drug-addled frogs, the Washington Post editorial board, moss-covered rocks, doorknobs, and Ann Althouse commenters.

Roberts and Alito were proposed and passed because they were hacks in the right place at the right time, and it's far too late to be anything less than apologetic for Scalia and Thomas, who consistently remind us that to be a long-winded lightweight with a durable career, all you have to do is box your corner and try not to piss all over yourself, and then you can act like an obnoxious pompous know-nothing fuck to your heart's content until you die, and get praised for it like everybody isn't pretendng you're not really just a shmuck and an operative and an ideologue. I don't mind Supreme Court appointments being lifetime but I do think every three years they should be trotted out so The Brethren might be quite sincerely pelted with garbage. Though Scalia would probably just eat it. That would be Supreme Court garbage, hummph hummph, fooferaw! Get your plebian paws offa that offal! Grunt grunt fart "my immense dignitude" fart fart stuffing half eaten drumsticks in the robe pockets "for later." Stupid Scalia fuck...

All of which is prelude to saying that to replace Souter Obama is going to nominate a moderate (trendng right, natch) who isn't a horrible old white shit, and this will provoke shitstorms and snivelings galore from our wingnut friends. Because it should be about the "qualifications"! Which means if you're not excited about nominating yet another pasty pre-Vatican II Catholic fucknose, why, you just be in the market for someone as motherfucking absurd as motherfucking Daffy Duck!

Because why oh why can't we ever conduct so ideologically virginal a search as that which gave us our current Federalst Society high court hatchlings? 

To Clarify...

... what I said last night about Rob's post here. I'm certainly not of the opinion that Rob is arguing in bad faith or defending the indefensible; sorry if it came across like that. It is a real question as to whether a prosecution of the agents involved is feasible, as a pragmatic matter. I regret the "nuts" remark; I meant more that the entire situation is nuts, not Rob, but I botched the sentence.

As for the substantive question, IANAL, but I do still think that there are strong reasons to presuppose that government agents who did anything like what the memos describe ought to be open to prosecution. Because, after all, it's not unreasonable to assume that government actors should know that you can't stick someone in a box and drop bugs on them. If they actually did this then they should be prosecuted even if somebody above them wrote a memo saying it's OK to do that.

To put this another way, I can't imagine a cop ever thinking it was legal to put, say, a mob guy in a box and drop bugs on them, even though the cop may know the mob guy may, well, know of a ticking bomb somewhere. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure even if the cop in the situation got a DA to say he could get away with it, he'd still be screwed, because a cop just ought to know better. Hence on this immediate point, the best possible defense of the agents who would be immediately responsible for any bug-dropping would be the "just following orders" defense, which I had imagined we had long ago settled as no defense at all.

From a wider POV (and here I don't imagine Rob and I would have a disagreement), taking this line of reasoning a step further, to say that it's different scenario from dealing with mobsters because of the legal limbo pertaining to international terror suspects, would just reinforce the point that what we're discussing, after all, is the deliberate creation of a legal limbo.

And I'm pretty sure that's against the law -- how could it not be? That would actually be, I don't know, anti-law, the wholesale negation of the entire concept of law. Surely that is the very essence of illegality? And should it not be prosecutable?

Anyway Greenwald is a lawyer and this seems to make sense.

The World Did What It Told Me It Would

So a few days ago we had jury duty. Yes, "we." Molly I & I got called on the same day. This is slightly unusual, I suppose, but then again, we don't really live in what you would call a very large urban area, so it wasn't totally amazing like winning the lottery or anything. Besides, I'd actually been called in April, but had punted to the summer for two reasons: (1) I had more free time in the summer; (2) the letter calling me for jury service had somehow fallen behind our dresser and was not recovered until the day after I was supposed to show up. Oopsie! I called, explained, it was all right.

Anyway it worked out for the best. Jury duty is a lot better if you have a buddy. And we both got it over with.

Now, as to this last sentiment, "getting it over with." Yes, that's how it is: it's not pleasant, but I'll do it. I don't like going to the dentist either, but I go, because I have to. Same concept. It is a pain in the ass, but I'll do it. (Anyone who really wants to be on a jury should not be allowed to be on a jury. I hope I need not explain why.)

In New York, as I imagine in other states, the first thing that happens when you show up for jury duty and get herded into whatever pen they have prepared for you, is they show you a video (and here it is!) about how important jury duty is. The first ten minutes or so is spent dramatizing how in the olden days in cesspit Europe they used to determine guilt or innocence by tying you up in a sack and tossing you into a lake, and if you sank, good for you, you were innocent.

Afterwards, in New York, as I imagine in other states, they spend the remainder of your jury duty in proving that we have a superior system of justice than the sack-lake-tossing method. In this regard, having considered the matter carefully, I would have to say they succeed. The video is kind of stupid but it does very well in showing how 21st century America is more advanced than the Dark Ages. Cleverly, it is put to you that no matter how nonsensical the next several interminable hours might in fact be, at least there is no sack tossing going on. It's quite comforting.

Or not. Overall I found the experience more than a little troubling, for a lot of reasons. But here is the big one. There is a lot of selling going on about the greatness of the American justice system when you go to jury duty -- for obvious reasons, both practical and, yes, ideological. I have no problem with that. Yes, we do have a system that should work as well as anything else imaginable; at least, I have no better ideas myself.

But here's the thing. The Law, for all its majesty, is a human construct. If we stop believing in it, it's just a great big pile of bullshit. But then what do you do when you emerge from jury duty and are greeted with shit like this:

Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.      

The fresh allegations of prison abuse are contained in statements taken from 13 detainees shortly after a soldier reported the incidents to military investigators in mid-January. The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan, according to copies of the statements obtained by The Washington Post.

Throwing people into lakes tied in sacks starts looking not all that bad.

If the American justice system is going to mean anything, if it is going to be something in which we take civic pride, if we're going to say that participating in it is something that citizens ought to understand as a solemn responsibility...

WE NEED TO FUCKING DISAVOW WEASELING ABOUT TORTURE CARRIED OUT IN OUR NAME.

Otherwise it is the goddamn Dark Ages still and we need to say so to prospective jurors. Either our laws mean something or they don't. Either we believe "innocent until proven guilty" or we don't.

Damn. Explain to me the functional difference between the sack-lake-tossing and waterboarding. It's the same fucking thing.

It's just that simple.