Friday, September 20, 2013
Good morning:
Joseph Cotto at the Washington Times has written a screwy article about the Kruidbos lawsuit against Angela Corey for wrongful termination and Sundance’s FOIA request for documents pertinent to the firing. Kruidbos is the naive former IT guy in the State Attorney’s Office who was fired for blowing the whistle on a non-event and was used to feed Wesley White’s desire for revenge against Corey after she fired him for not doing his job. White was an Assistant State Attorney who now represents Kruidbos and filed the lawsuit.
The lawsuit accuses Corey and Assistant State Attorney Bernardo de la Rionda (BDLR) of withholding exculpatory evidence from George Zimmerman’s defense team. The evidence consists of the inadmissible photographs and text messages stored on Trayvon Martin’s cell phone that were disclosed to the defense in January 2013, five months before trial.
Although I have no sympathy for Corey and BDLR after they basically threw the trial permitting the defense to win, I feel compelled to state that I do not believe there is any basis to this lawsuit.
Cotto’s article is an amusing and irritating example of right-wing-non-sequitur thinking and its strategy of keeping a lie alive.
Frederick Leatherman Law Blog 
ok. I didn’t get the hot links out. Don’t know why but post is in moderation. Since it’s off topic, I won’t repost but Prof can make the decision to release or not.
I think it’s funny that Sundance has been outed..name and all!
If I recall coorectly, Sundance was given as the source for three articles the Washington Times ran during the trial, all within a day or two, One smeared Tracy Martin as a member of the Crips, with obviously photoshopped pictures, and one falsely attacked Ben Crump. I can’t remember the topic of the third right now, but I believe that Jospeh Cotto was the author of all three.
I missed it last night, but posted it as a new article as soon as I saw it this morning.
Thanks for bringing this matter to my attention.
Fred
ot but important I left in only one hot link. You’ll have to cut and paste the others.
Harvey Wasserman
The Crisis at Fukushima 4 Demands a Global Take-Over September 19, 2013
We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.
Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.
Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.
The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.
Why is this so serious?
We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil’s brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.
Tepco continues to pour more water onto the proximate site of three melted reactor cores it must somehow keep cool.Steam plumes indicate fission may still be going on somewhere underground. But nobody knows exactly where those cores actually are.
Much of that irradiated water now sits in roughly a thousand huge but fragile tanks that have been quickly assembled and strewn around the site. Many are already leaking. All could shatter in the next earthquake, releasing thousands of tons of permanent poisons into the Pacific. Fresh reports show that Tepco has just dumped another thousand tons of contaminated liquids into the sea (http://www.alternet.org/environment/)
The water flowing through the site is also undermining the remnant structures at Fukushima, including the one supporting the fuel pool at Unit Four.
More than 6,000 fuel assemblies now sit in a common pool just 50 meters from Unit Four. Some contain plutonium. The pool has no containment over it. It’s vulnerable to loss of coolant, the collapse of a nearby building, another earthquake, another tsunami and more.
Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.
Radioactive hot spots continue to be found around Japan. There are indications of heightened rates of thyroid damage among local children.
The immediate bottom line is that those fuel rods must somehow come safely out of the Unit Four fuel pool as soon as possible.
Just prior to the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that shattered the Fukushima site, the core of Unit Four was removed for routine maintenance and refueling. Like some two dozen reactors in the US and too many more around the world, the General Electric-designed pool into which that core now sits is 100 feet in the air.
Spent fuel must somehow be kept under water. It’s clad in zirconium alloy which will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Long used in flash bulbs for cameras, zirconium burns with an extremely bright hot flame.
Each uncovered rod emits enough radiation to kill someone standing nearby in a matter of minutes. A conflagration could force all personnel to flee the site and render electronic machinery unworkable.
According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.
The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.
Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.
Chernobyl’s first 1986 fallout reached California within ten days. Fukushima’s in 2011 arrived in less than a week. A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.
Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”
Neither Tokyo Electric nor the government of Japan can go this alone. There is no excuse for deploying anything less than a coordinated team of the planet’s best scientists and engineers.
We have two months or less to act.
For now, we are petitioning the United Nations and President Obama to mobilize the global scientific and engineering community to take charge at Fukushima and the job of moving these fuel rods to safety.
You can sign the petition at: http://www.nukefree.org/crisis-fukushima-4-petition-un-us-global-response
If you have a better idea, please follow it. But do something and do it now.
The clock is ticking. The hand of global nuclear disaster is painfully close to midnight.
—————————————————————-
Harvey Wasserman is Senior Editor of the Columbus Free Press and http://www.frepress.org, where this was originally published. He edits http://www.nukefree.org where the petition for global intervention at Fukushima is linked.
Columbus Free Press was recently resurrected. Good to see it up and running again. It has its roots in the Vietnam anti-war movement at Ohio State University.
New post up:
Robert Zimmerman needs to shut up
Professor..when journalists (or people who claim to be journalists then scream they are entertainers at the sign of trouble) deliberately write lies or distort facts about a person, can that person sue them for libel, slander or some other tort.
There are to many bloggers that write lies about people (Sundance a perfect example) and get away with it. If a blogger claims to be a credible source of news, he should be held accountable and sued just like the Inquirer, Globe or any other tabloid paper.
I should have said defamation of charter
I suspect that is still a pretty wide open territory that will need to be worked out in the courts. Remember when, I think it was Carol Burnett, first took on the tabloids for their constant barrage of trash. It began to set some precedent for what could be put into print by the folks who cared far more about sensationalizing that maintaining journalistic integrity.
Breitbart got caught with his pants down enough to raise some limited awareness that there are now standard, legal or otherwise guiding “journalism” in the blogosphere. The sad thing is that once a lie is in circulation it becomes a story in and of itself, and legitimate journalists with, you know scruples and stuff, cannot just ignore it.
Reporters can and should call a statement a lie when there is evidence available to indicate that it’s a lie. Reporters have no duty to repeat lies.
I think that the problem is in the whole grey area of “unconfirmed” information. Ideally, an upright news organization ignores such info for publication while tracking down it’s source. However, if, meanwhile someone like Breitbart publishes it, the Republicans respond by demanding action and the President jumps the gun–well, there’s a story. Even if they are later able to show that the video was edited.
Except that any story initially reported by Breitbart had to be a lie because he specialized in lying for political purposes.
As always, Jon Stewart says it so well:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/534550
That whole segment was a hoot. Especially Jon’s team of reporters….really funny. And, sadly, so true.
Thanks for bringing it here.
It’s not the reporter; it’s the person defamed who determines the legal standard.
Proof of defamation requires proof of actual malice in the case of false statements published about public figures or public officials. Proof of defaming anyone else only requires proof that the false statement was negligently made.
Journalists do not have any rights that the rest of us do not have, except for the reporter’s privilege to refuse to identify their sources of information. Most states have enacted laws to protect reporters from being compelled to identify their sources. Congress has not, however.
REAL conservatives should back law and order.
Fogen is the poster boy for lawless disorder.
No real self-respecting conservative would back him.
Must have a RACIST editor.
PS – Oh, the Washington Times – they’ve been running lots of pro-Fogen articles since the end of the trial. Must have a conservative editor.
I have a feeling all these neo-conservative castles will crumble because their stories aren’t based on any reasonable reality.
Professor Leatherman, I think your assessment is perfect. There are no good guys here and I hope the suer and the suee both get their due.
Into the sewer with both of ’em!
Fuck exculpable evidence foggage is a walking talking poster boy for a GUILTY MURDERER With an expolosive temper an obnoxious attitude an zero concern for the lifes of those he either knows.
Or strangers he bumps into as he goes of in his rambling no particular destination excursions..
Seeing the sights consists of him scopeing out targets of opertunity.
HeShows utter disdain to those whom stood in his corner what chance do strangers have against this now deluded even more than thinking he is the worlds police.
Now thinks he is a cause celibre a celeb
He was primed an ready to blow the night he encountered stalked an Murdered Trayvon.
He is esactly the same now primed an ready to blow with batshitcrazy exposiveness.
Apparently he does not realize that CTH is not a reliable source even though Corey is corrupt I doubt they can get anything on her and Kriuidbos did break the rules he got what he deserved.
“The Conservative TreeHouse, a political blog which detailedly reported……..”*detailedly* ???
This is what passes as journalism in ‘merica
New adverb, dincha know.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Washington_Times
owned by the Rev Sun Myung Moon’s Unification church
it’s “the moonie times” with ties to ALEC
Yes, the crazed authoritarian reverend.
well…that’s very tellingly.
Realingly tellingly I must say.
Holy moly – any writer worth their salt knows that adverbs like that are a big no-no!
Just like Fogen treated his wife with preciousness.
Good Morning, Fred.
People write screwy articles. People write screwy posts and sometimes screwier comments.
I have a bad cold and feel not so great. So, chickie soup is on and I think I’ll ignore the rest of the world for the rest of the day.
All best to everyone.
Chicken soup sure sounds good.
I hope you feel better.
Thanks. Good thing I poured out and saved all the broth from the chicken I roasted yesterday.
It’s a book and bed day for me, I think.
We all need to pay attention to ourselves, the red flags in our lives and take measures to turn stuff around.
Lots of liquids and rest for you Deborah A good day to hibernate and recover. Also, flu shots are out and from what I’ve read at the CDC influenza tracking reports – could be a doozy of a season.
I know influenza vaccines aren’t for everybody, but they have successfully worked for me.
Government employees suing other Government employees, funny actually..
Thanks, Elijah.
I just got up from the bed to get a cup of soup and sat down to check in here.
What a swell bunch of folks you are to care.
(And, I did pick the right day, didn’t I? Still overcast on This Side.)
Don’t ignore your bed an a duvet as there part of the rest of the world.
Get well soon.
Hearts to you, Colin.
Yes, today, my bed is my best friend. And, the soup.
even better than chicken soup…SLEEP
try to get 50% more than usual and increase your protein intake for a couple of days too.
Yes, Tzar, to both.
You’re a hon.
Back to bed for me.
Wow, that was a pretty screwy article. And how the outhouse manages to get in there – ughhh. Of course, their “involvement” may have things go in a direction they are not prepared to take. I hope so.