And this is why we need the corporate death penalty, serious jail time for the official of criminal corporations, and the ability to claw back profits from investors when a corporation is criminally negligent.

Eyewitness News

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (Bob Aaron, Heath Harrison) -- Another spill has been reported at Freedom Industries facility near Charleston.

An excavator ripped into a pipe containing water and crude MCHM Thursday night.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection said the material spilled into a cutoff trench and did not reach the Elk River. The pipe was not listed on the maps of Freedom Industries' grounds.

Momentum is growing to finally end a great injustice.

Why Israel Fears the Boycott

These days, Israel seems as terrified by the “exponential” growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or B.D.S.) movement as it is by Iran’s rising clout in the region. Last June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively declared B.D.S. a strategic threat. Calling it the “delegitimization” movement, he assigned the overall responsibility for fighting it to his Strategic Affairs Ministry. But B.D.S. doesn’t pose an existential threat to Israel; it poses a serious challenge to Israel’s system of oppression of the Palestinian people, which is the root cause of its growing worldwide isolation.

...

Begun in 2005 by the largest trade union federations and organizations in Palestinian society, B.D.S. calls for ending Israel’s 1967 occupation, “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality,” and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced and dispossessed in 1948.

Why should Israel, a nuclear power with a strong economy, feel so vulnerable to a nonviolent human rights movement?

"Human trafficking", in the sense of people being abducted and forced to work either in sweatshops or in brothels, does exist. But the idea that large number of women within the U.S. are being enslaved as prostitutes is not accurate, and the picture of the Super Bowl as a hotbed of sex slavery is just wrong:

The Super Bowl of Sex Trafficking?

No data actually support the notion that increased sex trafficking accompanies the Super Bowl. The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, a network of nongovernmental organizations, published a report in 2011 examining the record on sex trafficking related to World Cup soccer games, the Olympics and the Super Bowl. It found that, “despite massive media attention, law enforcement measures and efforts by prostitution abolitionist groups, there is no empirical evidence that trafficking for prostitution increases around large sporting events.”

More and more people are seeing the obvious. It's just a shame that it has taken decades and so many ruined lives.

'Drug Criminalization Inherently Incompatible with Human Rights,' Says Human Rights Watch (Alternet)

On the same day as the President's address, Human Rights Watch released their annual watch report, in which they declared that "drug criminalization is inherently incompatible with human rights."

The report makes note of how drug laws further entrench the wildly unequal nature of the American criminal justice system, where blacks are ten times more likely to receive a drug conviction than whites despite similar rates of using and selling. It also noted the now familiar statistic that 2.2 million people in the world's oldest constitutional republic are in prison or jail, the highest number in the world--a figure fattened by the number of those incarcerated for low-level drug offenses.

Jason Edward Harrington gives us the inside story on the TSA, especially the farce of the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners:

Dear America, I Saw You Naked (POLITICO Magazine)

At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.

“They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket.

We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone.

Ken White nails it:

Your Criticism of My Holocaust Analogy Is Like Yet ANOTHER Holocaust | Popehat

Vigorous and hurtful and unpleasant speech is what we have instead of violence. Our ability to level such viscerally satisfying attacks on speech we don't like is a crucial part of what convinces us, as a nation, not to censor speech we don't like. In Europe, Tom Perkins might face official sanctions for saying the wrong thing about the Holocaust; here, he faces late-night jokes and insulting cartoons and the contempt of many. I like our way better.

I have argued that there is no hard line between poetry and prose, but I've never made that argument with a knife.

As the author notes, "All we can really say for sure is...the real truth of genres is that comedy and tragedy coexist easily". I'd almost welcome seeing news of a murder in Bmore inspired by a literary dispute rather than the drug trade or a pair of shoes or somebody looking at somebody funny.

Poetry-vs.-Prose Argument Leads to Stabbing Death in Russia (Gawker)

At risk of being somewhat reductionist, here is a bit of advice: Russians love poetry. Fuck with that at your own risk. If, for example, you tell a learned Russian that "the only real literature is prose," don't be surprised when he shivs you in the face.

According the the Russian news service RIA-Novosti:

A former teacher was detained in Russia's Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday.

The 67-year-old victim insisted that "the only real literature is prose," the Sverdlovsk Region's branch of the Investigative Committee said.

Another Tea Party winner. "Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this f**king balcony."

Republican Congressman threatens to kill reporter after State of the Union (Boing Boing)

...After giving a terse statement to an NY1 reporter, [Congressman Michael Grimm] was asked about the ongoing issue of his campaign finance. He declined to discuss the matter and stormed off, then returned a moment later, apparently unaware that the camera was still rolling, and threatened to "throw [the reporter] off this f**king balcony." Grimm followed this with "you're not man enough, you're not man enough. I'll break you in half. Like a boy."

...Grimm is under investigation by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York for this, and for other finance irregularities, including accepting cash donations larger than $100, and for laundering a donation of $25,000 through a third party.

...

...Grimm is a former US Marine who served in Iraq, and then worked for the FBI. While at the Bureau, he was investigated for abusing his authority: threatening his date's husband ("I'll f**king make him disappear where nobody will find him") and pulling a gun in a nightclub.

Sub-zero wind chills forecast for Bmore tonight, while Alaska is melting. Climate change may destroy human civilization but at least its interesting, amiright? (Valdez is apparently the port town for which the ill-fated Exxon Valdez was named and out of which she sailed. The determination of irony inherent in the town that is the namesake once removed of one of the most famous oil spills being the victim of a disaster probably related to climate change, is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Warm temps blamed for massive avalanche that cut off Alaskan town (NBC News)

A warmer winter is being blamed for the mammoth Alaskan avalanche that has cut off a port city’s sole road to the outside — stoking fears of flash floods and future landslides.

Snowy debris hundreds of feet long and up to 40 feet deep slammed onto Valdez’s Richardson Highway early Friday and again on Saturday.

Of course there's nothing really new here, re-legalization in Colorado and Washington only throws Obama's hypocrisy and our government's inadvertent (I presume) support for drug cartels into sharper focus

Obama's Pot Problem (Rolling Stone)

Ironically, if Obama succeeds in gutting the new state laws, he will essentially be serving the interests of foreign drug cartels. A study by the nonpartisan think tank Instituto Mexicano Para la Competitividad found that legalization in Colorado and Washington would deal a major blow to the cartels, depriving them of nearly a quarter of their annual drug revenues – unless the federal government decides to launch a "vigorous intervention." If that happens, pot profits would continue to flow to the cartels instead of to hard-hit state budgets. "Something's wrong," says Stamper, the former Seattle police chief, "when the lawbreakers and the law enforcers are on the same side."

In the end, the best defense against federal intervention may be other states standing up against prohibition. While pro-pot sentiment is strongest in the West, recent polls show that legalization is now beginning to enjoy majority support nationwide. "We're beyond the tipping point," says Stamper. Spurred by the victories in Colorado and Washington, legislators are already moving to legalize pot in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine and Iowa. "It's time for the Justice Department to recognize the sovereignty of the states," Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared. "We don't need some federal gendarme to come and tell us what to do."

Obama, the former constitutional-law professor, has relied on the expansive powers of the chief executive when it serves him politically – providing amnesty to a generation of Dream Act immigrants, or refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. A one-time pothead who gave a shout-out to his dealer in his high school yearbook, Obama could single-handedly end the insanity of marijuana being treated like heroin under the Controlled Substances Act with nothing more than an executive order.