2011 May 18 - Headline News

(INN) — Iran has executed an Israeli-born Jewish woman along with her Armenian Christian husband, according to reports.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that Adiva Mirza Soleyman Kalimia and her husband Varjan Petrosian were hung back on March 14 at Evin Prison. According to the report, three other people, including one woman and two men, were also executed at the same time.

The report noted that the executions were done secretly.

Adiva Mirza Soleyman Kalimia was born in Jerusalem in 1956 to an Iranian-Jewish family, said reports. She resided in Miami for several years, and visited Iran three times in recent years before being arrested and put in prison.

The agency quoted a Revolutionary Court as confirming the executions but refusing to provide further details about surrendering the bodies for burial. The report added that relatives of the dead who tried to recover the bodies for burial were threatened with arrest.

The agency said that it is unknown what the executed prisoners were charged for, but the official cause of Kalimia’s arrest was reportedly adultery.

[more....]
http://weaselzippers.us/2011/05/18/iran-executes-jewish-women-and-her-christian-husband-reportedly-for-adultery/

Countrywide Financial was arguably the lynch-pin of the entire financial crisis.

And to keep government officials at bay, it offered a program called "Friends of Angelo" (referring to Angelo Mozilo, chairman of Coountrywide) that offered special deals to powerful Democrats in government and in government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae.

Recipients of these unique mortgage deals included Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND), former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, former ambassador Richard Holbrooke and former Fannie Mae executives James Johnson, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick.

Just how sleazy was the Countrywide operation? There are some great details in a newly released legal complaint (PDF) that dissects the alleged activities and asserts that Auric Orangefinger -- my nickname for the pumpkin-skinned Angelo Mozilo -- was well aware of the skulduggery.

[the rest of the story...]
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/05/newly-released-complaint-how.html

By Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway, Published: May 17

This week, the War Powers Act confronts its moment of truth. Friday will mark the 60th day since President Obama told Congress of his Libyan campaign. According to the act, that declaration started a 60-day clock: If Obama fails to obtain congressional support for his decision within this time limit, he has only one option - end American involvement within the following 30 days.

Obama has not only failed but he hasn’t even tried - leaving it to Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, to call for a “specific resolution that would give [the president] authority.” Neither the president nor the Democratic congressional leadership has shown any interest. They have been sleep-walking their way to Day 60.

Obama’s politics of silence contrast sharply with clear and consistent legal pronouncements of the executive branch. Richard Nixon vetoed the act in 1973, precisely because it imposed restraints on presidential warmaking. But two-thirds of both houses of Congress overrode his veto, and the presidency soon fell into line. Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department expressly affirmed the constitutionality of the 60-day clock in 1980 - and its verdict has not been challenged by executive-branch lawyers.

Obama has continued this tradition. His March 21 letter to Congress telling of the Libyan campaign stated that it was “consistent with the War Powers Resolution.” And his Justice Department issued an opinion that acknowledged the 60-day rule without questioning its constitutionality.

Why, then, hasn’t the president been pressing Congress to approve the war before the looming deadline? Because it’s easier to paper over the problem with new legal fictions pretending that the time limit doesn’t apply to this instance. By Friday, the administration’s legal team is likely to announce that the clock stopped ticking on April 1 - the date when NATO “took the lead” in the bombing campaign. Since NATO is running the show, the argument will go, the War Powers Act no longer applies, and the president doesn’t have to go back to Congress after all.

But American planes and drones continued their bombing long after the April turnover - and the drones are still flying over Libya. Since the cost of the mission is at three-quarters of a billion dollars and climbing, it is sheer fiction to suggest that we are no longer a vital player in NATO’s “Operation Unified Protector.”

This is especially so when an active-duty American officer remains at the top of NATO’s chain of command. As supreme allied commander, Adm. James Stavridis “leads all NATO military operations.” While a Canadian air force general, Charles Bouchard, is in charge of the Libyan campaign, the buck doesn’t stop with him but with Stavridis, who also reports to the Pentagon as head of the U.S. European command. Even if American drones discontinue their operations before the deadline, an American admiral will still be in a position to call the shots.

This is no accident. NATO has been a key vehicle for American military interests since the 1950s. It would create a terrible precedent to pretend otherwise. Once Obama crosses the Rubicon, future presidents will simply cite Libya when they unilaterally commit America to far more ambitious NATO campaigns.

[continued....]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/death-of-the-war-powers-act/2011/05/17/AF3Jh35G_print.html

Per posts at The Hill and Ben Smith, the Obama administration is playing its usual childish games, this time heaping praise on Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Republican Governor of Utah, for the purpose of undermining Huntsman's appeal to Republican voters should Huntsman choose to run for President. Or maybe it's just some reverse psychology.

From The Hill:

The White House is showing no signs of letting up on its campaign for Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s presidential prospects - if anything, it’s in pile-on mode.

Chief of Staff Bill Daley on Sunday heaped praise on Huntsman (R), Obama’s ambassador to China who is resigning his post and is said to be mulling a challenge to his boss for the presidency.

“He’s done an excellent job on behalf of the Obama administration,” Daley said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he was barely able to suppress a smile as he spoke.

Then Daley went into overdrive. “[Huntsman’s] support of the Obama administration, his support of the president, the things he did on behalf of the administration, and the closeness in which he worked with the president is most appreciated. And I’m sure he’ll talk about that in the Republican primary.”

I know almost nothing about Huntsman, but I'm certainly not going to like/dislike him based on what comes out of the White House's billion dollar spin machine, which already is in campaign mode.

[more - plus updates....]
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2011/03/so-tell-me-about-john-huntsman.html

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/05/18/soros-spending-48-million-funding-media-organizations/#ixzz1MjsC7la9

This DAY in History:

May 18, 1896:
Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson

In a major victory for supporters of racial segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court rules seven to one that a Louisiana law providing for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" on its railroad cars is constitutional. The high court held that as long as equal accommodations were provided, segregation was not discrimination and thus did not deprive African Americans of equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which indicated that the federal government would officially tolerate the "separate but equal" doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, "colored" facilities were never equal to their white counterparts in actuality, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere because of the ruling. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was struck down by the Supreme Court in their unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/supreme-court-rules-in-iplessy-v-fergusoni