Via Indymedia Houston:

After four weeks of striking, Houston janitors have won a contract!

Houston janitors with the SEIU announced today at City Hall that they've won a contract. A really energetic group of janitors and supporters gathered for the 4pm press conference to announce the news. Mayor Bill White was there to express his support for the janitors and their push for better wages.

Everybody was so excited! Janitors, SEIU organizers, and community supporters were hugging and crying, giving thank yous and congratulations.

And here:

The Janitors won a victory today to be announced later tonight in detail. But the gist of it is:
- they will now be under a contract

- over the next three years they will go up gradually to $7.75

- over the next three years they will get more benefits and full time status with at least 30 hours per week

At the announcement at City Hall, Mayor White thanked the hard work of various downtown building owners in reaching the agreement, singling one out as an MVP, despite years of oppressive treatment of these workers.

There will be celebration tonight at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Way to go! I've no doubt at all that the widespread blog coverage and general outrage at the Houston police and their treatment of the janitors had a lot to do with the cleaning firms' decisions to return to the negotiating table after days of recalcitrance.

Next up: justice for those who were trampled by horses and abused in custody. Let's see Mayor White, a Democrat, do something about that!

After a long delay - since September in fact - Bush has finally nominated a new Inspector General for the Defense Dept. And what a nominee. On the face of it, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Laufman looks like a Bush crony in every way, singularly ill-qualified for the position.

As Kos diarist smintheus has noted in an extended version of his Kos diary over at his own blog, Laufman's main claim to fame so far has been the successful prosecution of some high profile terrorism cases - including getting Ahmed Omar Abu Ali imprisoned for 30 years for plotting to assasinate Bush himself. But there's no military service, no previous experience as an inspector of any kind. It would be easy to write Laufman off as another in the tradition of his predecessor Schmitz, who has joined mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater USA after leaving his post under a cloud of investigation for conspiracy to rig bidding and for obstructing the course of justice.

But there is a bit more to Laufman, although you have to dig to find it, which proves that while Bush may play tiddlywinks and the Dems may play checkers, the likes of Cheney and his military/industrial pals play a fine game of chess.

If you thought that eventually common Americans would rise up in protest at Bush's totalitarian power-grabs, think again. "Respectable People" think everything's O.K. because the government would never use those powers of the King-President against them, only against those awful terr'ists. Independent Institute fellow Robert Higgs recently attended a discussion in St. Louis which opened his eyes somewhat:

My expressions of disapproval in regard to the government's recent invasions of liberties, in particular, elicited expressions of stunned disbelief. I had said that the government's announced claim is that the president may, at his sole pleasure, arrest, incarcerate, and punish, even put to death, anyone he describes as a terrorist, wholly denying due process of law to the accused terrorist. One lady adamantly insisted that I say exactly whose rights had actually been so violated. When I replied that the leading case concerns a U.S. citizen named Jose Padilla, I thought she might expire from apoplexy. No sooner had I uttered Padilla's name than she half shouted, half sputtered indignantly "a terrorist!" "How do we know," I replied, "if he does not receive due process of law? Are we to accept the government's claims solely on its officials' say-so?" Well, for this lady and for most of the others in the room, of course, we were to accept all such claims on the government's say-so. These respectables are simply incapable of imagining that the government they so blindly and enthusiastically support might do anything to harm THEM or, by extension, any other similarly respectable persons in the United States - clearly, the only people who matter.

This kind of "us and them" myopia, so carefully fostered by Rovian fearmongering, is why although I respect his writing greatly I think for once Glenn Greenwald is on the wrong track when it comes to his explanation for the Great Democrat Wimp-Out on the nomination of General Hayden as CIA director - and on just about every other issue connected to the rise of the King-President. Glenn believes that the Dems are simply used to operating "from a place of fear and excess caution" and will continue to do so even though they (subtext) know they should speak up. He believes that Dems on the Hill think they have a comfort zone now and can think to themselves:

What can I say about the forced retirement of Paul Hackett by the Democratic party establishment that I haven't said before in other circumstances?

Well, I can say that Hackett dropped in my estimation by saying he would leave politics entirely. I would have hoped he could show the guts he obviously had as an active serviceman and continued his political creer, perhaps as an independent. By dropping out entirely he invites criticism that he didn't really have the courage of the convictions that led him to try becoming a political animal in the first place.

Matt Stoller gets that part perfectly right:

Professor Phillipe Sands QC, a professor of international law with intimate connections to Britain's Foreign Office's legal eagles, has a new edition of his book "Lawless World" out. In it, he alleges that he has seen a secret British Government memo of a two-hour meeting between Bush and Blair at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - which:

reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

On Monday, Geoffrey R. Stone, Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, published a carefully reasoned legal argument by himself and thirteen other legal alumni - every single one an acknowledged expert and most with high government offices in the legal field under their belts too. We're talking senior professors, Presidential councils, even a former CIA director.

The subject? Bush's ordering of NSA surveillance on American citizens.

The conclusion? It was clearly illegal and unconstitutional.

The reaction by rightwing legal bloggers and blogging lawyers? Sssshhh...listen to the tumbleweed...

Not a single one of them has mentioned it, had a counter to it, anything. Not Glenn Reynolds, not Eugene Volokh...no-one!

Which tells you everything you need to know. They had already figured out it was illegal from word one, folks - everything else was smokescreen.

Now here's the fun part. When Bush's legal team came up with the justifications for NSA surveillance, they must have known that some bright sparks would eventually publish a counter-argument like Stone's. They must have realized that their legal arguments were shaky at best and completely spurious at worst. You would have thought a rational administration "for the people" would have had second thoughts at that point and found another way to do things instead of the NSA taps. But the Bush White House went ahead with the whole caper anyway. They thought no-one would find out about the secret wiretaps and the legal stuff was only ever meant to be a contingency cover-ass so no-one bothered much with making sure they were on the right side of the law. To me, that shows the Bush administration has a complete arrogant confidence in its own power and knows it is untouchable.  

But as Jon Henke said at Q&O blog when Snoopgate first broke, that's ok for the Bush cheerleaders right now but would they be so happy if Hillary Clinton became President and kept on using Bush's rationale to spy on Americans?

I'm going to repeat something I said yesterday.

The great danger with arguing that a national leader is above all law except that which he himself decides on is that matters then depend entirely on the character of the Leader of the moment. That character could think using dissenters as human torches to light garden parties is a good idea, for instance. Once the precedent of "I am The Law" is set then every President will use it, be they Julius, Claudius...or Caligula.

To many here on the Left, Bush is getting pretty close to an elected despot. Some of us are even beginning to wonder, understandably, whether he would actually step down if the '08 elections didn't come out the way he liked or if he would try to use that Presidential power of Law to stay in office. However, I would like to remind the wildest cheerleaders for Bush that if democracy takes it course, they might one day see a liberal President they would feel was a latter day Caligula.

Do they really want to hand every President from now on this much power?

Welcome to 2006. You could be forgiven, though, for momentarily believing that the extra leap-second which ushered in the New Year was a symptom of some strange Philadelphia Experiment designed to throw the world backwards in time to "1984", not forwards into a new year. And therein lies my problem. As I've mentioned before, I find that the outrage I should feel at the many and various lies of the Bush administration, the GOP in general and their lapdog poodle across the pond, Tony Blur, instead is a dull and generalised ache of discontent. I am so overloaded by scandal, lies and totalitarianism that my outrage has been burned out. I have Lying Bastard Fatigue.

Back in November I posted a list of links, 73 of them in all, imbedded in a profile of what it is to be a sociopath. The post was entitled "You Don't Have to be a Sociopath to be Republican, but it Helps," and the link was designed to show that the profile fits Bush, his administration and the current GOP leadership to a 'T'. America is being governed by a bunch of empathy-impaired borderline crazies - I am no longer surprised that they are Lying Bastards for that is the primary symptom of sociopathy. However, the post is also worth looking at because it gives some idea of the breadth and depth of their lying bastardness. It includes lies about intelligence, lies about the economy, lies about corruption, lies about featherbedding for their rich selves, lies about the dismantling of welfare and healthcare safety nets that mean America's poorest suffer a new Katrina every single day, lies about torture, lies about those who would point out the lies and lies about the lies themselves. Every kind of lie under the sun.

And now we can add lies about spying on Americans themselves - and lying about those lies too. The New York Times has a report today on how Bush came here to the Alamo City yesterday and used a military base and military personnel for another political speech in which he defended "both the legality and the necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he misled the public last year when he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order". Even some on the Right are starting to smell the coffee, although others are still in denial having invested too much intellectual and emotional capital in their sycophancy and others still are sociopaths themselves and hope to be part of the in crowd. The issue is not the wiretaps themselves as the sociopaths keep insisting, its the erosion of democracy caused by warrantless taps. But I'm unsurprised - sociopaths erode democracy in favour of totalitarianism whenever they can. They hate our freedoms, you see.

However, pandering to the sociopaths, for fear of being attacked by them as being "weak", is just going to give them what they want. That's why people like Marshall Whitman aka the Bull Moose and Democrat leaders who are Hawks so as not to appear lilly-livered Doves are so wrong. Appeasing sociopaths, as we are so often told, leads nowhere except to being contolled by them.

It is also why one of the current issues which actually manages to give me an acute sense of outrage, rather than the dull ache of repeated domestic batterings, is the current rush to "do something" about Iran. Despite the debacle that is seeing a slide towards civil war in Iraq, despite the vast sums of money spent there but not on things made of concrete, despite the "staying the course" that seems never to get to that "last throe" - despite so much, it's all being reduxed like a bad remake of a bad old monster movie. We can expect better special effects this time around.

Have the media and the Democrats forgotten already? Have they forgotten the lies about WMD programmes? The charismatic figure at the head of a very dodgy rebel organisation who kept coming up with intelligence "revelations" that later were found to be fabricated from an agenda? Even the false allegations of ties to the boogeyman, Al-Qaida? It would seem so, because its all being done again and they are all following along like nodding dogs in a car's rear-window.

Alas, the sociopaths actually count on their victim's becoming dull to the pain from repeated assaults. It makes them easier to abuse and less likely to rise up and strike back. The sheer weight of different lies on so many different levels helps the next one to be lived with. The victim becomes numb.

Lying Bastard Fatigue - it's insidious, pernicious and dulls the senses. I resolve, this New Year, to fight back and to beat it.

Brian Dominick, editor of the New Standard, sent me a heads-up on this exclusive story from one of the paper's freelancers. Its a fine example of why publications like TNS, which are progressive and unfettered by corporate ties (even advertising) deserve our support.

It seems that Chicago Transit Authority have kept secret an offer from Venezuela and its oil company, CITGO, to provide discounted fuel oil - 40 or 50% below the current price - for CTA's fleet of buses. The one stipulation, at the bidding of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was that the CTA, in turn, pass those savings on to poor residents in the form free or discounted fare cards.

The CTA have turned down this unilateral offer with no explanation and instead plan a huge 25c price hike.

This is going to hurt the poor and the minority people, like me," said Dorothy Chew, resident of Humboldt Park, where one-third of residents live below the federally recognized poverty level - currently just $16,000 for a family of three. Chew relies on the CTA to get to work and to Chicago Commons, where she attends classes daily in preparation for taking her GED.

CITGO has been providing discounted heating oil to poor areas in New York and Boston but only 12,000 homes in all of Illinois use oil for heating. Thus the offer to the CTA, which would enable far more poor people to benefit. "We didn't know how else to reach enough people," said Mark Sanchez, Venezuela's consul general in Chicago.

To recap - Chicago Transit Authority had an opportunity to give thousands of poor commuters free travel. Instead they decided to raise prices. They kept all this secret from the people they serve. Even when asked, the CTA refuses to give a reason for turning down CITGO's offer, which leads more than just me to suspect meddling from the Bush administration or the GOP.

Anyone up in Chicago want to ask their Representatives how they feel about this?