Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Supreme Court still chipping away at Right to Counsel

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The U.S. Supreme Court issued two more bad rulings today. One of them involved procedures for obtaining legal counsel. Chief Justice Roberts seemed really bummed out (see this detailed analysis from The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen) that the Court’s ruling — on freezing assets of defendants before trial — might make it harder for super-wealthy suspected criminals to hire the best representation. But as Cohen observes, Roberts doesn’t seem too bothered by the fact that the ruling has little bearing on people who can’t afford the best anyway — a problem he has helped exacerbate recently, as I discussed in depth in December.

Doge Care.gov?

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I’ve really started getting a kick out of the fun social media teams in some of the cabinet departments and Federal agencies. h/t to @radlein on Twitter for catching this official Doge-based posting by the Dept. of Health and Human Services and bringing it into my timeline

dogecare

Now if we were to get health insurers to accept DogeCoin as a currency, would that bring us one step closer to former Nevada U.S. Senate Candidate Sue Lowden’s dream of people being able to barter chickens for health care — or is it still too abstract and non-animal-based?

No joke: Arizona SB 1062 just cleared way for Uganda anti-gay law

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uganda-flagThe office of the president in Uganda has announced they will be signing their anti-homosexuality bill into law today.

The president’s spokesman cited the Arizona legislature’s decision last week to pass a bill (SB 1062) permitting private non-religious businesses to discriminate against/refuse service to gay customers, suggesting that this showed them that the U.S. wasn’t serious about lecturing Uganda — a major regional military player and U.S. ally — on anti-gay legislation.

As I write this, the following tweets were posted just in the past couple hours ago by Ofwono Opondo, the official spokesman of the president’s administration.


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South Sudan: Gathering the victims

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south-sudan-map-ciaThe fighting in South Sudan is somewhat reduced, in large part because of a massive Ugandan Army operation on behalf of the South Sudan government, but it’s still going on.

Meanwhile, human rights workers are already undertaking the awful task of trying to assemble and count the bodies from hundreds of different massacres in December. In those incidents, entire groups of civilians — ranging in size from a dozen to well over a hundred — were cut down by rampaging soldiers from the divided army after it split suddenly along ethnic lines at the end of last year. In the past 3 weeks alone, one man and a few helpers have recovered 2,000 bodies.

The dirty $3.5 million at PBS

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pbs-logoAccording to a very damning report by David Sirota, WNET/PBS allegedly solicited $3.5 million from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to produce a two-year series on the need to reform and/or slash public employee pension benefits, entitled “Pension Peril.” John Arnold and his foundation have become noteworthy in recent years because of their support for those who advocate exactly that agenda.

The Foundation, in agreeing to fund the series, reserved the right to cut funding at will, at any time, guaranteeing a lack of objectivity — against PBS rules. Following the release of the report linked above, PBS returned the money.

But the series already began airing late last year, using the Foundation’s policy positions heavily. For example, it emphasized the “need” to cut pensions to balance state and local budgets, even in cases where the purportedly near-bankrupt state/local governments were actually spending far more on discretionary corporate and “economic development” subsidies than on non-discretionary pensions. The program also advocated a California ballot initiative being bankrolled by John Arnold himself. Consistently, the show is presented as part of the news division and not an opinion show.

Episodes consistently failed to disclose the Arnold Foundation funding, despite the conflict of interest, in stark contrast to the prominent disclosure of much less directly conflicted donations of David Koch to, say, NOVA.

As Sirota points out, unfortunately (and partly as a legacy of the George W. Bush Administration), this is just the tip of the iceberg on PBS corruption by conservative money.

Kony 2012: Never forget (the damage you did)

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Remember when Invisible Children, a young American group with barely-concealed ties to U.S. evangelical organizations, tried to get everyone to lobby Congress to provide more support to the (undemocratic) Ugandan government, including increased military aid?

Not much policy action came of it, in part because the U.S. already provides the regime with a lot of weapons and military advisers anyway (and because Joseph Kony is nowhere near Uganda anymore).

But it was definitely great anyway to rally a bunch of American students to support the violent and regressive agenda of the U.S. evangelical-backed dictatorship in Uganda and its evangelical Christian president, Yoweri Musevini, who took power in January 1986. Nice boost of moral support for their agenda, which included seeking gay executions several years before the Kony 2012 campaign.

Oddly, that agenda of criminalizing homosexuality (along with a much more extensive multi-decade campaign of general repression supported by Westerners) didn’t disappear. And because I’m the Secretary of the Department of Told-You-So, I’ll just drop the latest on that here:

The anti-gay legislation cruised through Uganda’s parliament in December after its architects dropped an extremely controversial death penalty clause.

The measure, which has been greeted with international condemnation, would criminalize the promotion or recognition of homosexual relations.

Obama suggested that the Ugandan president — a key regional ally for both the United States and the European Union — risks damaging his country’s ties with Washington if he signs the bill into law.

“As we have conveyed to President Museveni, enacting this legislation will complicate our valued relationship with Uganda,” Obama said.

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice wrote in a series of tweets on Sunday that enacting the law “will put many at risk and stain Uganda’s reputation.”

She added that on Saturday, she “spoke at length with President Museveni… to urge him not to sign anti-LGBT bill.”

Museveni, a devout evangelical Christian, has expressed the view that gays are “sick” and “abnormal.” He suggested in a letter to parliament that homosexuality was caused by a genetic flaw, or a need to make money.

 
So on the one hand, the pressure campaign advocated increasing support for this monstrous pseudo-democracy and provided visuals of thousands of young Americans rallying behind the regime and its agenda. On the other hand, they shook a strong finger at a coked-up self-styled prophet who hasn’t been in Uganda in years.

But, of course, that was probably the point.

bush-mission-accomplished