The New York Times just ripped out a piece on Linda McMahon - and it notes that Daily Kos has already mocked her. Strangely, the Times didn't reach for local criticism of her on Myleftnutmeg.

 

Nor did the Times mention another pro wrestler, Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. Perhaps he ran an insurgent third party candidacy, and most likely would criticize her foray into duopoly politics, so they didn't want to compare them.

 

The NYT story is here. Right now, it is on the front page of the Times website.

 

The profile talks to everyone Watertown Republican Sean Williams (a Simmons supporter), Dick Ebersol and an anonymous senior GOP thinker, who criticizes her. Williams suggested that McMahon's affiliation with WWE left her vulnerable because WWE objectified women and glorified violence.

 

The CT GOP is moving to the center when a rising star admits women are objectified - that wouldn't go over much in Mississippi.

 

Make no mistake - the Senate primary is a fight for the soul of the CT GOP. Rell is behind McMahon, by promoting her to the CT BOE.

 

But note the higher education story that McMahon's eyes point to: the prepaid college savings plans heralded as a way to ensure affordable education, since they are tied to the stock market, are pretty much crap. McMahon, though, will be avoiding major issue statements for months. She is introducing herself to voters.

 

She has a plan. A timetable. She didn't just get into this. She has been thinking about it for months. She had to have a succession plan in place at WWE for her departure.

 

The problem with political theater is that we never really know when the curtain falls and when the play starts again.

 

The cast and crew of "What's the matter with Connecticut?" met up for a healthcare sinecure – a sinecure being a job you don’t need to show up for, coming from the middle aged feudal position of a job in the church that didn't involve the saving of souls.

 

Sen. Chris Dodd, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, and two Obama cabinet members, former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, now Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services, and U.S. Small Business Administrator Karen Mills converged on Hartford.

 

The handlers selected a humble warehouse at 39 Belmont Street in Parkville, home of a successful small business, Connecticut Commercial Maintenance, Inc.

 

More than 90 people packed into this tiny, hot space, where two kayaks sat on wall shelves, and many ladders of all sizes leaned against walls covered in mudded and taped sheetrock that had never been painted.

 

Despite the fact that Parkville is poor, and two perfect-sixes sat across the street from the venue (one blighted and boarded up, the other with broken windows and children sitting on the front stoop), the show attracted a hardly diverse crowd.

 

Perhaps it wasn't fair for me to engage in racial profiling, but I counted six African-Americans in the Democratic audience, (seven if we count a DHHS cop who didn't want me taking pictures of his lapel pin), and maybe a dozen people who appeared to be Latino.

 

Aside from the journalists, the bloggers and the cops, including DHHS' internal security service who refused to identify which law enforcement agency they worked for, the regular suspects attended.

 

The reserved front row featured Connecticut Democratic Party Chair Nancy DiNardo, Senate President Don Williams, Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, and Secretary of the State and wannabe Governor Susan Bysiewicz.

 

Also spotted in the audience were City Councilman Larry Deutsch and former State Senator and now a staffer in Congressman John Larson's office, Billy Ciotto of Wethersfield. CCAG boss and former Lamont campaign manager Tom Swann was there, too.

 

The AP daybook email circulating around said the dog-and-pony show about the proposed Democratic health care plan would start at 9:45. Dodd and DeLauro met in a private room upstairs with some locals prior to the show. Sebelius arrived at about 10, and the show began.

 

The Democrats wouldn’t be talking about single payer - the health care policy where the US government becomes the main purchaser of health care services (a monopsony where one buyer controls the market).

 

Why so many cops at protests? (link)

 

If Sen. Chris Dodd and Congressman John Larson sought to replicate the Top Gun glory of Maverick and Goose, standing together to drum up support to save funding for the F-22 Raptor, they ended up looking more like Laurel and Hardy.

 

Suave Maverick Dodd and goofy Goose Larson have been shilling for the threatened F-22 since April. This past Monday, July 14, they lined up their talking points before a 1:15 p.m. press conference phone call.

 

A press e-mail from Dodd advertised special guests John Harrity, Connecticut Machinists Official and President of GrowJobsCT and Gen. Mike Dunn, a retired three-star Air Force commander.

 

Both the Senator and the Congressman hit the high points of their arguments for shielding the F-22 Raptor from President Obama's budget ax.

 

The F-22 Raptor is an aptly named Cold War dinosaur. But Maverick and Goose argued to maybe eight press people on the phone that the single-seater stealth fighter will help the United States maintain global air superiority, deter our enemies and maintain the production line.

 

The production line, which represents more than 1,000 subcontractors and 25,000 workers spread across 44 states, needs to stay active for three years until the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter comes on line, lest production of that weapons system be slowed.

 

Panhandling for the war machine falls onto Dodd and Larson because Hartford-based United Technologies manufactures the super hi-tech jet engines for the F-22 through its subsidiary of Pratt and Whitney. The engines mean 2,000 jobs for Middletown.

 

Aside from the $339 million price tag per F-22, Bush/Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants to cut the F-22 because the radar-invisible fleet of F-22s has not seen a day of action in Afghanistan or Iraq.

 

The $6 billion for 20 new planes could be better spent on a more mobile military, Gates claims. Obama has an ally in Sen. John McCain, who sees the program as worthless.

 

Dodd led off the presser by stressing the critical importance the F-22 has in our arsenal.

 

"This is essential to national security and our competitiveness in this world," Dodd said. "I wouldn't be making a case to you on the basis of a parochial issue."

 

Of course not, Senator. It's a corporate issue. UTC chairman George David needs his puppets in Congress to help finance his massive legal bills from his messy divorce, and his spoiled brat countess ex-wife’s $53,000 a week lifestyle.

 

Dodd has his own spending habits, and he needs corporate moguls and unions to finance them. A few hours before the conference call, Dodd announced a $1.2 million haul for his campaign war chest in the second quarter of 2009.

 

While the FEC contribution chart listed nothing from either the Machinists or UTC, other unions like firefighters, electrical workers and boilermakers gave healthy sums and defense contractors like Raytheon contributed to Dodd as well.

 

The whole thing seems like a charade to me anyways. Obama wants to appear like he is challenging the military-industrial complex and reigning in military spending while expanding a costly war, and then blame this on Congress. The members of Congress will face no electoral repercussions because they brought the bacon home.

 

Save the F-22 Raptor, Contribute Here (story con't)...

Just rereading the account of Rachel Corrie's death makes me angry, sad, upset and frustrated. This may be overwrought, but I cry when I think too much about it.

 

Six years ago today, non-violent protestor Rachel Corrie was murdered, run over by a heavily-armored American-made, Isreali-piloted Caterpillar bulldozer. She was trying to protect a house from demolition.

 

Whatever has been said about her, I prefer to let Rachel Corrie speak for herself. Rachel's Words has the emails she wrote to her folks in Olympia, Washington. I'll republish an email from February 20, 2003 that she wrote to her mom:

 

Love you. Really miss you. I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again - a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded. Jenny and I stayed in the house with several women and two small babies. It was our mistake in translation that caused him to think it was his house that was being exploded. In fact, the Israeli army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground nearby - one that appears to have been planted by Palestinian resistance.

This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded up and contained outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads and around them, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses - the livelihoods for 300 people. The explosive was right in front of the greenhouses - right in the point of entry for tanks that might come back again. I was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were all going to be shot and I tried to stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but just this father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, just happened to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I felt it was our translation problems that made him leave.

I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed - the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here - recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours - do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed - just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would.

You asked me about non-violent resistance.

When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family’s house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I’m having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be. I felt after talking to you that maybe you didn’t completely believe me. I think it’s actually good if you don’t, because I do believe pretty much above all else in the importance of independent critical thinking. And I also realise that with you I’m much less careful than usual about trying to source every assertion that I make. A lot of the reason for that is I know that you actually do go and do your own research. But it makes me worry about the job I’m doing. All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above - and a lot of other things - constitutes a somewhat gradual - often hidden, but nevertheless massive - removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I’m terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon’s possible goals), can’t leave. Because they can’t even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won’t let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can’t get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don’t remember it right now. I’m going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don’t like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside.

When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

I love you and Dad. Sorry for the diatribe. OK, some strange men next to me just gave me some peas, so I need to eat and thank them.

Rachel

 

Read more from Rachel Corrie

The war on drugs has claimed another politician: Ned Lamont will moderate a forum at the "Drug Policy for the 21st Century" conference at Central Connecticut State University, Wednesday, February 4, 2009.

 

National legalization experts like keynote speaker Ethan Nadelmann from the Drug Policy Alliance, and panelist Jack Cole, from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition will lead the conference, co-sponsored by CCSU's Peace Studies Department and its Institute for the Study of Criminal Justice. Tickets are still available for the conference here.

 

Give Lamont some credit for guiding the afternoon's premier panel, featuring Connecticut anti-prohibitionists like Cliff Thornton, whose 2006 Green Party campaign for governor I managed, former Hartford City Councilman Bob Painter and A Better Way's Lorenzo Jones.

 

But surrounded by activists openly touting legalization, with no one on the panel to argue for the drug war, you think that Lamont, who enjoys a part-time professorship in the Peace Studies Department at CCSU, would be forthcoming about his opinions and history with illegal drugs.

 

"No, I am not answering any of those questions," Lamont said when I asked him if he had ever done any illegal drugs. Nor would he go on the record to analyze prohibition.

 

"It is a long overdue debate for the state of Connecticut," Lamont would only say. "As a moderator I am going to do everything I can to be neutral. I am going to be a provocateur."

 

So Ned is playing his participation like a man who is running for office in 2010. And frankly, I tire of leadership - or those who purport to want to lead society via electoral office - equivocating on the most intense, important issues of our day.

 

Lamont did not make the war on drugs an issue in his Senate campaign. So when did he have this epiphany that the war on drugs was bad? Or does he think by lending his world-famous, Lieberman-slaying name to a conference that endorses legalization, he can still straddle this fault line of an issue?

 

"A leading indicator of a politician's character is their stance on the drug war, or lack thereof," Thornton said.

Link...

The Senator from Aetna finally responded to my early November suggestion that he vote to yank Lieberman's Homeland Security chairmanship.

 

Label Dodd's December 17 letter Exhibit A as to why people are cynical about writing their elected representatives.

Like you, I was very disappointed with many of the actions taken by Senator Lieberman during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Sidebar comment: What is a phone conversation between Dodd and Lieberman like? What kind of a relationship do they have? Does Lieberman even give a crap what Dodd thinks? I think not. Why? Read on.

Moreover, I understand the concerns of those who believe that Senator Lieberman should have been removed from the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs because of his behavior.

Sidebar Comment: Yet, Dodd also understands that his cheating on Aetna with Countrywide is as pathetic as Lieberman's marriage to McCain.

 

Cross-posted at MyLeftNutmeg

 

Senator Dodd's mid-term cabinet position in 2010 looks further and further away every day, and the ignominy of his father - the only U.S. Senator ever to be censured - looks closer and closer each day.

 

Kevin Rennie over at the Hartford Courant reminds us that Dodd, who owns three houses, including one in Ireland, got a sweetheart deal from a failing mortgage company:

For nearly a year and a half, Countrywide failed (or declined) to secure its interest in Dodd's home by taking the ordinary and essential step of presenting the documents to the local town clerk and recording them in the land records.

This is exceedingly rare in the mortgage business. No wonder Dodd refuses to lift the veil on his deals with the generous lender that went bust this year.

Little Chris Dodd, like Jack Horner, stickes his finger in every pie. Dodd will be the keynote speaker at a bankers conference assembled by do-no-evil Google next week, according to document clearinghouse Wikileaks.

 

"With the world economic situation in turmoil, Google is assembling a who's who, including US senator Chris Dodd, for an intensive, one day executive gathering in New York on 19 Nov 2008. The document is a scanned imaged of the invitation."

 

The press release Wikileaks sent out Friday afternoon said:

US Senator Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, is to deliver the keynote address at Googles New York office. Senator Dodd was the Democratic party's point man ushering through the $850 Billion banking bailout last month.

'This invitation only event will bring together 200 Senior Executives for a day of information sharing with leaders from the financial and digital marketing communities to discuss how to capitalize on the current environment..,' the invitation, obtained, verified and released by Wikileaks reads.

Also billed as speaking is Mary Meeker, Managing Director of Morgan Stanley.

Wikileaks makes it clear: "Unless otherwise specified the document described here: At that time was classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public." Yeah, Senator Dodd, can you help us understand this?

 

Sunday Morning Blogorama, Lieberman, Obama...

 

Scumbags abound. As far as Esquire magazine is concerned, Holy Joe is one of the ten worst losers in Congress. Being called the worst in the nest of 535 idiots is something to be reckoned with.

 

Esquire put Holy Joe (4) up there with Georgia scumbag Saxby Chambliss (1), Louisiana's $90k in cold hard cash William Jefferson (6), California's lunatic Pete Stark (5), the indicted Alaskan Ted Stevens (10), and of course, Minnesota's anti-American McCarthyite, Michele Bachman (2).

 

As Esquire said of Connecticut's sleaziest independent:

Inherent in politics is the fact that someone always loses. Some lose gracefully, some lose poorly, and, as in the case of Joe Lieberman, some lose their minds. Since being defeated by an antiwar candidate in the Democratic primary in 2006, Lieberman (who was subsequently reelected as an Independent) has pursued his campaign of revenge against his former party, thinly disguised as an act of principle, replete with the quavering sanctimony that no country should have to put up with from anyone, much less from this small man.

So yeah, forget blaming Ralph Nader for Bush's victory in 2000. Connecticut's liberal son gone bad had something to do with that Democratic defeat. And for Lieberman staffers in 2006, like Ken Curran, do you feel utterly stupid yet for foisting this idiot of a Senator on us? We have to suffer through him for four more years. Jeez. The Republicans who ran Giordano against him in 2000 should be even more ashamed.

 

Lieberman's successor as CT Attorney General, Dick Blumenthal, is his first name for hitting this struggling law student with a $500 security for costs charge in my civil rights lawsuit for false arrest against the city of Hartford, four city cops and two state cops. Blumenthal's office represents the state cops.

 

Under the guise of Federal District Court for Connecticut Local Rule 83.3(a), Blumenthal's office said I had to fork up half a grand because they feared I was a vexatious litigant, and the money insured I was serious in pursuing a remedy for violations of my civil rights.

 

Seriously Dick? I spent 13 hours in jail because an executive branch law enforcement agency targeted me for exercising my First Amendment rights. I nearly got my face rearranged in jail for accidentally touching a large man who could snore and chew gum simultaneously, and my life was turned upside down by being called erratic and equated with a violent lunatic in the New York Times, and you think I'm being vindictive? You heard what John Stewart said to Sarah Palin, right?

 

The real pisser: Local Rule 83.3(a) was promulgated by the District Court in response to a steady flow of vexatious litigation by one Anthony R. Martin-Trigona, a pro se litigator who filed numerous meritless suits, like one to intervene in federal Judge Jose Cabranes' divorce and get custody of the Cabranes children.

 

Martin-Trigona was prevented from joining the Illinois bar because he has a "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character." So go figure that there's this guy named Andy Martin on Sean Hannity a few weeks back saying Obama is a Muslim.

 

Andy Martin is Anthony R. Martin-Trigona, who actually was born in Middletown, and ran for Senate in Connecticut. Wikipedia has a complete dossier on this jackass Andy Martin. Dickipedia has the dossier on Hannity. Does he vet his guests? Is this how low the right is sinking - relying on guests who are so mentally imbalanced that the Illinois Supreme Court refuses to allow them to practice law?

 

Gary Jules is not a scumbag, and he has an ode to those of us trying to remain sane in this Mad World. If you didn't notice, it's 2 a.m. and I'm done pulling punches after reading admin law for the past three hours.

Link...