Truly disgusting. Time Magazine has a new report on the medical disarray at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The report is based on interviews with medical staff and a document it obtained about medical treatment at the prison and the use of restraints by the Army in Iraq medical facilities. From a press release received by e-mail:

Medical personnel and others who worked at Abu Ghraib prison tell TIME that, with straitjackets unavailable, tethers-like the leash held by Private Lynndie England-were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor. That such a restraint-which is supposed to be placed around legs, arms or torsos-ended up instead around a man's neck seems to be a case of a medically condoned practice degenerating into abuse, TIME's Adam Zagorin reports.

But there was also medical disarray at the prison: amputations performed by nondoctors, chest tubes recycled from the dead to the living, a medic ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide. That in itself would have made Abu Ghraib a scandal even without the acts of torture inflicted on the inmates by their guards.

If you can't access the article at the link above, you can read it a snippet here and a full description here.

According to this Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial , young workers are the real victims of Bush's proposed social security revisions.

Please pay attention, young workers, because you get taken to the cleaners by his plan.

Bush is not telling the truth when he says that private acccounts would offset the future cuts he proposes for everyone, thereby leaving younger workers better off. The paper lays out the numbers to show how twisted his logic is.

More lies concern the claimed wnership and inheritance features of Bush's proposed plan:

Bump and Update: The pillorage continues.

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Ohio Supreme Court Justice Alice Robie Resnick got a D.U.I. last week. She refused to take a breath or blood test so she lost her license for a year. The cop used a portable breath teast on her which is not admissible in Ohio courts and it came out at .216, a number she immediately said had to be wrong.

Her conversation with the cop was recorded as standard procedure. What is not standard procedure is that the newspaper has released three videos of her interacting with police to the public on its website. Can she get a fair trial after this?

Her state-owned jeep was impounded and returned to the Court. She said she will make arrangements for someone to drive her to court in Columbus (from Toledo where she lives) at her expense.

There's an interesting op-ed in today's L.A. Times by Joan A. Lukey, former president of the Boston Bar Assn., positing that Bush's best bet to get a conservative, moral values driven nominee on the Supreme Court is by nominating Anthony Kennedy as Chief Justice to replace Rehnquist. In a nutsell, here is her reasoning.

The Republicans, however, do not have the 60 votes necessary to defeat a filibuster. He therefore needs a plan to circumvent the talkathon strategy. Most likely, this will take the form of giving with one hand while taking away with the other by putting forth two candidates at once.

By nominating a conservative but relatively centrist chief (i.e., a conservative who occasionally shifts toward the center, including on social issues), Bush will earn kudos, and political capital, for his restraint. With that additional capital, he can invest in his "values" agenda by filling the associate-justice vacancy with a staunch social conservative, a move that has a much more profound, and longer-lasting, effect on the ideological balance of the court.

Robert Chambers, who served 15 years in prison for manslaughter in what was known as "the preppy murder case," has rejected an offer to plead guilty and serve four months for possession of two straws and an empty tinfoil that had traces of drug residue on them. The maximum he could receive if he went to trial and lost is one year.

Cops stopped him in Harlem last year and ticketed him for driving with a suspended license. The straws and tinfoil turned up in a search of the back seat of his car.

Were they even his? Does anyone else go to jail in New York for drug residue? He and his lawyer are not talking.

Here is a bulletin from NarcoNews about Washington's claims that "narco-traffickers in Mexico are kidnapping and murdering U.S. citizens in Mexico and that law enforcers along the border are being targeted by the “cartels.”"

If you get caught running a red light or speeding in Phoenix, you can expect the cop to pull out an inkless fingerprinting pad along with his ticket book. Is this the shape of things to come?

The cops say it's voluntary, but how many motorists believe that? As the local ACLU spokesperson says,

"`The standard is not whether we have anything to hide... ``It's 'Does the government have a right to invade our privacy?'''

[link via CrimProf Blog and Grits for Breakfast.]

The Frieder Brothers of Cincinnati, long deceased, are receiving some well-deserved recognition for their heroism and good deeds in rescuing more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis by bringing them to the Phillipines, which welcomed them and provided safe haven and employment.

The brothers from Cincinnati had taken turns going to Manila for two-year periods during the 1920s and '30s to run the Helena Cigar Factory, started by their father in 1918. While they were there, they established a Jewish Refugee Committee and worked with highly placed friends - U.S. High Commissioner of the Philippines Paul V. McNutt and Manuel L. Quezon, the first Philippine president - to help the mostly German and Austrian refugees get passports and visas, then find employment and homes in Manila.

by TChris

During February, PBS will air Slavery and the Making of America, a four-part series "documenting the history of American slavery from its beginnings in the British colonies to its end in the Southern states and the years of post-Civil War Reconstruction."

As one reviewer notes, it's worth reflecting on the disgrace of our past to better comprehend the present.

To have a real understanding of America -- its history and its values, its economic growth and social order -- it's important to know more about slavery in America and its development and dimensions. In the words of James Oliver Horton, a professor at George Washington University, "Slavery was no side show in American history -- it was the main event."

by TChris

Voting irregularities in the United States during the last two presidential elections produced angry commentary but little action. Not so in Iraq, where disenfranchised voters took to the streets.

Hundreds of Iraqis shouted slogans and waved Iraqi flags Sunday outside Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone to protest alleged irregularities they say prevented tens of thousands of people in Mosul from voting in last weekend's landmark elections. ... Electoral commission officials in Baghdad have acknowledged that many polling sites never opened Jan. 30 or opened late because of what they said were security concerns.

by TChris

Some members of Congress evidently believe the First Amendment doesn't apply to law schools. Representatives recently voted (by 327 to 84) to support a resolution encouraging the executive branch to challenge a Third Circuit decision that upheld the right of law schools to ban military recruiters from their campuses without losing federal funding. The military needs more lawyers, but some law schools prefer not to be associated with the military's discriminatory policies.

The 2-to-1 [court] decision relied in large part on a ruling in 2000 by the Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory.

Representative Tammy Baldwin explains why the resolution (like the law withholding federal funds from campuses that "obstruct" military recruiting) is short-sighted.

"We should be looking at ways to strengthen our military and expand our resources," Ms. Baldwin said. "When will we have the debate about the harm caused by excluding many qualified, skilled Americans from serving in our military simply because they are gay or lesbian?"

Sharia law may be coming to Iraq. This certainly isn't what the Bush Administration had in mind for the new Iraqi government. But Bush-backed candidate Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is behind in the vote tally to the United Iraqi Alliance.

It was the country's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who initially demanded speedy elections, knowing that a popular vote would bring to power a legitimate government run by the majority Shiites. When the Bush administration objected, the ayatollah forced the White House to back down by calling protesters into the streets of Iraq.