The Absurd Things George Zimmerman And His Wife Did To Try To Keep Their Money Secret

Nick R. Martin June 18, 2012, 8:22 PM

It didn’t take an expert cryptographer or even a secret decoder ring to figure out George Zimmerman really wasn’t talking about Peter Pan during jailhouse phone calls with his wife in April.

In hushed conversations from a Seminole County, Fla., jail, the man charged with second-degree murder in the killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was instructing his wife how to transfer huge amounts of money between bank accounts and allegedly out of the gaze of local authorities.

The name “Peter Pan,” in this case, appears to have been code for the company PayPal. Zimmerman was using the online banking service to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from supporters who believed he was either a hero of gun rights or a man being railroaded by a corrupt justice system.

Clumsy and obvious, the code was just one of several tactics that verged on the absurd that the Zimmermans used to try to keep their fundraising secret from authorities. The tactics were brought to light on Monday when prosecutors released audio recordings of six jailhouse phone calls between Zimmerman and his wife.

The calls, along with dozens of pages of bank records, showed the contortions the couple went through in April to keep their fundraising on the down low.

“Um, I asked Ken to double up on it, do, you know, $10 in the morning and then $10 in the evening,” George Zimmerman said to his wife during one of the calls released Monday. “And that way you can put, you know, into mine and then you can take uh 10 for you and 10 for her for Susie.”

“Okay, why can’t he just do both of ‘em?” Shellie Zimmerman replied.

“Because he can only take it from Peter Pan to mine.”

“Oh okay, okay, right.”    READ MORE

Annotated Re enactment video:

 

Pants on Fire Romney

(CC-BY-SA)

Posted on May 29, 2012

By Eugene Robinson

There are those who tell the truth. There are those who distort the truth. And then there’s Mitt Romney.

Every political campaign exaggerates and dissembles. This practice may not be admirable—it’s surely one reason so many Americans are disenchanted with politics—but it’s something we’ve all come to expect. Candidates claim the right to make any boast or accusation as long as there’s a kernel of veracity in there somewhere.

Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit.

“Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history,” Romney claims on his campaign website. This is utterly false. The truth is that spending has slowed markedly under Obama.

An analysis published last week by MarketWatch, a financial news website owned by Dow Jones & Co., compared the yearly growth of federal spending under presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. Citing figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, MarketWatch concluded that “there has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear.”   READ MORE

 

Grieving Father Struggles to Pay Dead Son’s Student Loans

NCinDC (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Posted on Jun 15, 2012

By Marian Wang, ProPublica

This piece originally appeared at ProPublica.

A few months after he buried his son, Francisco Reynoso began getting notices in the mail. Then the debt collectors came calling. “They would say, ‘We don’t care what happened with your son, you have to pay us,’” recalled Reynoso, a gardener from Palmdale, Calif.  

Reynoso’s son, Freddy, had been the pride of his family and the first to go to college. In 2005, after Freddy was accepted to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, his father co-signed on his hefty private student loans, making him fully liable should Freddy be unwilling or unable to repay them. It was no small decision for a man who made just over $21,000 in 2011, according to his tax returns. 

“As a father, you’ll do anything for your child,” Reynoso, an American citizen originally from Mexico, said through a translator. 

Now, he’s suffering a Kafkaesque ordeal in which he’s hounded to repay loans that funded an education his son will never get to use—loans that he has little hope of ever paying off. While Reynoso’s wife, Sylvia, is studying to be a beautician, his gardening is currently the sole source of income for the family, which includes his 18-year-old daughter Evelyn.    READ MORE

Dispatches From Cairo: The Dream Dissolves

Candidate Ahmed Shafiq is the beneficiary of an
Egyptian court ruling that appears to have cleared
his path to the presidency.

 

 

By Lauren Unger-Geoffroy

CAIRO—And checkmate. Game over? 

Thursday afternoon, 98 degrees in the spring shade in Cairo, three days before the final presidential runoff election, and the entire Islamist-led Parliament has just been dissolved by a court ruling.

The decision included the invalidation of the temporary constitution and the committee assigned to write the new one, and it returns all legislative powers to the military.

This “soft coup,” as it is now being called, is based on rulings that the election of one-third of the Parliament’s seats and the Political Disenfranchisement Law, which was proposed to disallow the candidacy of members of the deposed government, were both unconstitutional. The lower and upper houses of the Parliament are now null and void, as is the constitution committee.

The original law passed by the Parliament banning members of former President Hosni Mubarak’s government from candidacy was intended to prevent the powerful elite network of his regime from reinstating his government. This law was appealed and set aside to enable Ahmed Shafiq—a Mubarak loyalist, a former air force general, a former minister of aviation and a onetime interim prime minister—to run. Considered for years a possible alternative to Mubarak’s son as successor in an autocratic, one-party system, Shafiq was promoted as a military strongman who could reimpose order and save the country from Islamist theocracy.

By Lauren Unger-Geoffroy

CAIRO—And checkmate. Game over? 

Thursday afternoon, 98 degrees in the spring shade in Cairo, three days before the final presidential runoff election, and the entire Islamist-led Parliament has just been dissolved by a court ruling.

The decision included the invalidation of the temporary constitution and the committee assigned to write the new one, and it returns all legislative powers to the military.

This “soft coup,” as it is now being called, is based on rulings that the election of one-third of the Parliament’s seats and the Political Disenfranchisement Law, which was proposed to disallow the candidacy of members of the deposed government, were both unconstitutional. The lower and upper houses of the Parliament are now null and void, as is the constitution committee.

The original law passed by the Parliament banning members of former President Hosni Mubarak’s government from candidacy was intended to prevent the powerful elite network of his regime from reinstating his government. This law was appealed and set aside to enable Ahmed Shafiq—a Mubarak loyalist, a former air force general, a former minister of aviation and a onetime interim prime minister—to run. Considered for years a possible alternative to Mubarak’s son as successor in an autocratic, one-party system, Shafiq was promoted as a military strongman who could reimpose order and save the country from Islamist theocracy.   READ MORE

Sectarian Violence Undermines Syrian Regime

A Syrian revolutionary flag waves on top of a
building on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria.

Posted on Jun 17, 2012

By Juan Cole

The Syrian upheaval has gone through several stages. It began with relatively peaceful protests by crowds in a handful of small and medium-size cities outside the large metropolitan areas of Damascus and Aleppo. Severe repression by the national regime led some revolutionaries to turn to guerrilla tactics. The ruling Baath government subjected the quarters held by the Free Syrian Army to heavy artillery and tank assaults. More recently, as the rebellion continued to spread in small towns, the military has provided cover to death squads that have massacred civilians in an attempt to scare them into submission. The most frightening thing about this spiral of ever greater violence and brutality is that some of the now-hardened lines have been sectarian.

 The Syrian army assault on the rebellious Sunni village of al-Haffa in Latakia province, which has left it a ghost town, exemplifies this move toward religious war. Latakia is heavily Alawite, and protecting members of this religious group from Sunni dominance is one of the latent functions of the regime. The upper echelons of the ruling Baath Party and its officer corps are dominated by the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam. Only about 10 percent of Syrians are Alawite. On the order of 70 percent of Syrians belong to the rival Sunni branch of Islam. (Many Syrian Sunnis are secularists.) The car bomb that recently damaged the Shiite shrine of Sayyida Zaynab in Damascus may have primarily targeted nearby Intelligence Ministry buildings, but those who detonated it may have been happy enough to hurt Shiite religious sensibilities.   READ MORE

Journalism Was Only a Bit Player in Exposing Watergate Crimes

History in an Hour (CC BY 2.0)
President Richard M. Nixon

Posted on Jun 14, 2012

By Stanley Kutler

No leak, no “investigatory journalism” ever revealed any facet of what we know as Watergate that was not already a subject of investigation and inquiry by authorities. The marking of the 40th anniversary of the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in nevertheless appears to focus on the role of a few journalists. Robert Redford will reprise the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men” with a documentary version. Now, of course, he can identify Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat,” as the leaker who destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency. Felt indeed played a part, and Nixon knew of his actions in October 1972, as revealed in Nixon’s tapes released in 1997, eight years before the elderly and ailing  Felt went public. Nixon was furious because he had considered Felt, “that Jew”  (he was not), for the post of FBI director. Nixon realized he could do nothing, for Felt “knew too much”—as, for example, the illegal break-ins committed by Nixon’s “plumbers.”  

The media’s canonization of its primacy in “breaking the case” threatens to leave us with “Hamlet” absent the Prince of Denmark. Inevitably the Watergate narrative will be reduced to its bare essentials. G. Gordon Liddy surely will not make an index, and the “President’s Men” will slip into their deserved place as largely anonymous spear carriers. But Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, and his story will endure. Future textbooks (assuming we will have them) will render his history roughly as follows: “Richard Nixon, the first president of the United States to resign as a result of his abuses of power and criminal obstruction of justice…,”  perhaps then followed with several sentences describing other parts of his presidency. For certain, Nixon is the principal player of Watergate; journalism will at best be remembered as a bit player in bringing him down.  

Leaks are a way of life in Washington circles; their purpose and motive are self-evident and self-serving. Onetime Nixon presidential counsel Leonard Garment regularly talked with media people to reveal forthcoming potentially explosive news, hoping to defuse it. Sam Dash, the Watergate Select Committee counsel, once remarked: “Leak? I leaked all the time”—to advance his committee’s work.   READ MORE

 

Occupy Will Be Back

Posted on Jun 18, 2012

 By Chris Hedges

In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial. 

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the “left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.  READ MORE

Arctic Sea Ice Dips Below Ominous Milestone

By Julia Whitty

| Thu Jun. 14, 2012 11:21 AM PDT

 

This week the extent of Arctic sea ice dipped below the extent for 2007, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). As you may remember, the 2007 season holds the record for lowest Arctic sea-ice extent in recorded history.

 

Walt Meier at NSIDC tells me the melt is accelerating, notably in the Bering Sea, where higher than normal winter ice hung around two to four weeks longer than average. But it's thawing fast now.

 

The Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and Canada and the Laptev Sea north of Siberia are also melting quickly. "We don't normally see ice opening so fast in those areas," says Meier. "This is an indication that the ice there is pretty thin."

As you can see from the satellite mosaic of the Arctic for today, 14 June (above), the rapidly melting Laptev Sea lies at the downstream end of the mighty Lena River in Siberia. The Beaufort Sea lies at the downstream end of Canada's mightiest river, the MacKenzie River (delta not visible)—where May temperatures rose well above the 20th-century average (see last image, below).  READ MORE
 

Is a Soda Tax a Good Idea?

IkeX/Flickr

Nutritionist Marion Nestle and Mother Jones food and ag blogger Tom Philpott answer reader questions.
—By Kiera Butler and Maddie Oatman |
Mon Jun. 18, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

In today's Econundrum, Maddie Oatman argues in favor of taxing soda. She points out the scary amounts of calories that people consume in the form of sweetened beverages—and the mounting evidence that sugar, like alcohol and tobacco, is addictive.

Oatman speaks to an economist who has crunched the numbers and believes that a penny-per-ounce soda tax (like the one proposed in Richmond, California) could actually be enough to persuade consumers to quit their Big Gulp habits.

The revenue from such a tax could also be used to pay for health care and education. But as Oatman also points out, the idea of a soda tax is nothing if not divisive. Which means it should make for a fun debate.

We're lucky to have two experts to facilitate a conversation on the subject and answer reader questions: nutritionist and author Marion Nestle, whose new book is called Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, and MoJo food and ag blogger Tom Philpott.

Got a question for Nestle and Philpott? Leave it in the comments section, tweet it at @Econundrums, or email it to econundrums@motherjones.com. We'll be updating this post with more questions and answers as they come in.

To get things rolling, we asked Nestle and Philpott: Is soda really what's making us fat, anyway?
 READ MORE

Drones over America: Are they spying on you?

Deputy Amanda Hill of the Mesa County Sheriff’s
Office in Colorado prepares to use a Draganflyer
X6 drone equipped with a video camera to help
search for a suspect in a knife attack.

Thousands of them could be flying in US skies within the next 10 years 

By Brad Knickerbocker Staff writer

updated 6/16/2012 11:26:50 PM ET

Most Americans have gotten used to regular news reports about military and CIA drones attacking terrorist suspects – including US citizens – in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere abroad.

But picture thousands of drone aircraft buzzing around the United States – peering from the sky at breaches in border security, wildfires about to become major conflagrations, patches of marijuana grown illegally deep within national forests, or environmental scofflaws polluting the land, air, and water.

By some government estimates, as many as 30,000 drones could be part of intelligence gathering and law enforcement here in the United States within the next ten years. Operated by agencies down to the local level, this would be in addition to the 110 current and planned drone activity sites run by the military services in 39 states, reported this week by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a non-government research project.

The presence of drones in the US was brought home Wednesday night when some people thought they saw a UFO along the Capitol Beltway in Washington. In fact, it was a disc-shaped X-47B UCAV (Unmanned Combat Air System) being hauled from Edwards Air Force Base in California to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland for testing.

'Beltway UFO' sparks saucer frenzy in D.C.
  READ MORE