Bad Deeds for 3-11-2009

Disabled Men Forced into ‘Fight Club’ by Staff at Texas State Facility: Police – Profoundly disabled young men were forced into “fight club” style battles by the people hired to care for them at the Corpus Christi State School, police said Tuesday. video footage showed staffers provoking the young men until they became physically violent, then shoving them at each other to make sure they fought. The mentally and physically disabled residents pushed, punched, and kicked each other and then had their arms raised in victory when they were declared the “winner.”

 

CNBC’s Jim Cramer Says He Manipulated Markets, Says It’s Important Not to be Truthful – In light of the current economic crisis, and with the hullabaloo ignited recently by Jon Stewart over the accuracy of CNBC’s reporting, we thought it might be useful to revisit this shocking 2006 interview Jim Cramer gave to TheStreet.com’s Aaron Task.

In it, the host of Mad Money says he regularly manipulated the market when he ran his hedge fund. He calls it “a fun game, and it’s a lucrative game.” He suggests all hedge fund managers do the same. “No one else in the world would ever admit that, but I could care. I am not going to say it on TV,” he quips in the video.

He also calls Wall Street Journal reporters “bozos” and says behaving illegally is okay because the SEC doesn’t understand it anyway.
Here are some gems:

-On manipulating the market: “A lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund, and I was positioned short, meaning I needed it down, I would create a level of activity before hand that could drive the futures,”

-On falsely creating the impression a stock is down (what he calls “fomenting”): “You can’t foment. That’s a violation… But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it.” He adds, “When you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment.”

-On the truth: “What’s important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view – it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction,” Cramer advises. “You can’t take any chances.”

 

Jim Cramer Exposed on Daily Show and Colbert Report

 

Republican Senator Flips Out at Airline, Sets Off Security Alarm – The Republican senator who found himself on a DC madam’s client list is drawing new attention over “impulse control.” After missing a flight last Thursday from Washington to New Orleans, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter opened an armed security door and went off on a United Airlines employee, according to a report filed Wednesday by (paid-restricted) Roll Call. The door sounded a security alarm.

Vitter had arrived at the gate for a flight from Dulles Airport, only to find that the door had been closed twenty minutes prior to departure. After setting off the security alarm, the Louisiana senator proceeded to dress down an airline employee who told him entering the restricted area was forbidden. He invoked his standing as a senator, delivering a “do-you-know-who-I-am” tirade, the paper said.

 

Hannity Suggests Christianity is Compatible With Torture On his Fox News show, Sean Hannity asked Meghan McCain, “Do you disagree with your dad at all about enhanced interrogations?” asked Hannity. John McCain has been vocal about his opposition to torture. Before allowing McCain to answer, Hannity went on a mini-diatribe and suggested that his religious beliefs wouldn’t prevent him from supporting an anti-terror tactic almost universally considered to be torture.

“Because my attitude is that if we capture an enemy combatant in the battlefield — or we can use Osama bin Laden — who may have information about a pending attack. You know what, I don’t have any problem taking his head sticking it underwater and scaring the living daylights out of him and making him think we’re drowning him,” declared Hannity, “and I’m a Christian.”

McCain disagreed. “I think it’s what separates us from the terrorists . My father could never lift me up as a child because he can’t move his arm. He can’t ride a bike because he can’t bend his knee because he was tortured. I think he knows better,” she said.

 

Dumbest Proposal Ever? – If President Barack Obama’s response to the economic crisis is imperfect, as he acknowledges, and if the Congressional Democrats leave much to be desired as well, then Americans can at least be thankful that the nation’s fate has not been consigned to the frozen minds on the other side of the aisle. Things are bad, and seem very likely to get worse—but the Republicans seem determined to plunge us into a real depression, gambling that catastrophe would return them to power.

From those Republican politicians often deemed most thoughtful, such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, comes a droning chorus for tax cuts on capital gains. This is the conservative panacea in good times and bad, but it is of little relevance to the problems of the moment. Investors are not fleeing the markets because they worry about enormous returns that will be subject to punitive taxation; they are abandoning stocks and real estate because those assets are deflating like punctured balloons. Until there is a real prospect of capital gains, cutting taxes on them will scarcely affect investment and jobs.

Descending the intellectual scale brings us to the House minority leader, John Boehner. He responded to the frightening February data on job losses—more than 650,000 laid off in a single month—to demand a “freeze in government spending” and a presidential veto of the $400 billion continuing budget resolution.

So is Mr. Boehner suddenly crazy? Is he just economically illiterate? Or is he convinced, like the would-be revolutionaries of the Depression era, that the worse our general situation becomes, the better for his party? All three could be true at once, but his motivation matters less than his ideas, which would be ruinous to everyone if enacted.

What makes someone like Mr. Boehner important and potentially dangerous is not that anyone takes his stupid advice seriously, but that he and his caucus can block or stall policies that might rescue us from the worst consequences of the bust.

 

Chuck Norris’ Roundhouse Kick to the Gut of American Democracy – Chuck Norris, one-time TV star and the inventor of chun kuk do, is preaching the martial art of insurrection against the U.S. government. He also wants to run for — and no, I’m not making this up — “the president of Texas.”:

The call by some right wing leaders for rebellion and for the military to refuse the commander in chief’s orders is joined by Chuck Norris who claims that thousands of right wing cell groups have organized and are ready for a second American Revolution. During an appearance on the Glen Beck radio show he promised that if things get any worse from his point of view he may “run for president of Texas.” The martial artist/actor/activist claims that Texas was never formally a part of the United States in the first place and that if rebellion is to come through secession Texas would lead the way.
Norris really comes close to crossing a line with this:

Norris claims that; “Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation.” The right wing cells will meet during a live telecast, “We Surround Them,” on Friday March 13 at 5 p.m.

He closes with the words of Sam Houston followed by a plug for his next martial arts event.

“We view ourselves on the eve of battle.”

 

Seymour Hersh: ‘Executive Assassination Ring’ Reported Directly to Dick Cheney – Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh described an extra-legal operation,. the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

Regards,

Jim