NewAlliance Bancshares Update: Paul Bass catches the new incarnation of the New Haven Savings Bank in yet another violation of its old stated policy of being “a very nice bank”:

Smith-Alves has multiple sclerosis. Her government disability check gives her little more than $500 a month to live on. She deposits that money in an account at NewAlliance–which until last month was known as “New Haven Savings” and, until it was hijacked by a group of greedy out-of-towners looking to milk it for millions, went by the slogan “a very nice bank.” In January Smith-Alves went into the hospital for major surgery: a partial hysterectomy and removal of fibroid tumors. She wanted to make sure her bills would get paid during her hospital stay. So she paid them with postdated checks, to be covered once her monthly disability payment arrived. Five of those checks were cashed early. NewAlliance didn’t notice they were postdated. The bank cashed them. The checks bounced.

Smith-Alves returned from the hospital to learn that the bank was charging her $28 for each of the five bounced checks. That $140 might not account for much of NewAlliance’s billions. But it accounts for more than a third of Smith-Alves’ monthly income, putting a huge strain on her budget.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions offers a new guide for unionists to fighting racism and xenophobia in the workplace and within their own leadership structures.

Sister Souljah Watch: Someone please tell me the notorious Washington Times just made this up:

Asked about outsourcing and his use of the “Benedict Arnold” epithet, Mr. Kerry replied: “The Benedict Arnold line applied, you know, I called a couple of times to overzealous speechwriters and said, ‘Look, that’s not what I’m saying.’ Benedict Arnold does not refer to somebody who in the normal course of business is going to go overseas and take jobs overseas. That happens. I support that. I understand that. I was referring to the people who take advantage of non-economic transactions purely for tax purposes — sham transactions — and give up American citizenship. That’s a Benedict Arnold. You give up your American citizenship but you want to continue to do business and deduct and do everything else. That’s what I’m referring to.”

Jacob points out Wonkette’s posting of Dana Milbank’s “pool reports” attempting to track President Bush during his time in New Haven and coming up pretty much dry. Note how much time he spends on Yale eratta like this:

The president made his way into 43 Hillhouse, the Yale president’s house, built by railroad magnate Henry Farnham in 1871. It was a High Victorian Gothic Structure remodeled into a Georgian Revival in 1937. . The building is a few doors down from 37 Hillhouse, where young George H.W. and Barbara Bush lived when he was an undergraduate at Yale in the mid 1940s, around the time our current Potus was born. Your pool, however, is in neither. We are in 34 Hillhouse, called Henry R. Luce Hall. Unfortunately there is no magazine pooler on board today to appreciate this.

Then compare it to his coverage of an incident of actual conflict in his narrative:

About 100 demonstrators were visible to the motorcade, waving signs such as “Torture is a crime against humanity/Shame on the U.S.” and “Executioner Bush” and “Resist this Endless War.”

Wouldn’t want to take the time to talk to any of them, would we? Better to keep focused on the history of Yale’s architecture.

Ah, the liberal media…

Just watched Colin Quinn prance around on his TV show dressed up as an American prison guard from Abu Ghraib and complain – after getting out of character – that his guests from Air America were harping on a few isolated cases where guards got out of hand and the whole torture scandal was overblown. Hope he reads tomorrow morning’s New York Times:

An Army summary of deaths and mistreatment involving prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan shows a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known. The cases from Iraq date back to April 15, 2003, a few days after Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in a Baghdad square, and they extend up to last month, when a prisoner detained by Navy commandos died in a suspected case of homicide blamed on “blunt force trauma to the torso and positional asphyxia.” Among previously unknown incidents are the abuse of detainees by Army interrogators from a National Guard unit attached to the Third Infantry Division, who are described in a document obtained by The New York Times as having “forced into asphyxiation numerous detainees in an attempt to obtain information” during a 10-week period last spring.

The New York Times explores how the FBI could get the wrong guy and be so sure he was the right one:

The F.B.I. quickly and confidently found a match to a Portland-area lawyer, setting in motion a chain of events that led the authorities in the United States to link the wrong man to those fingerprints, tie him to Islamic terrorists, arrest him on a material-witness warrant, jail him for 14 days, drop the entire case on Monday and then face withering questions about how the investigation could have gone so wrong. Court records unsealed Tuesday showed that the Spanish authorities had raised questions about the F.B.I.’s fingerprint match to the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, 37, weeks before his May 6 arrest. Yet F.B.I. officials were so confident of a match they described as “100 percent,” the court papers show, that they never bothered to look at the original print while they were in Madrid on April 21, meeting with Spanish investigators.

Matthew Yglesias shoots down the latest line of conservative apologia in the wake of the Chalabi implosion – that Chalabi was never that important to the neocons anyway:

When it comes to policy ideas, though, they certainly seem to have been on the same page for quite some time. Way back on December 1, 1997 Wolfowitz teamed up with Zalmay Khalilzad to write an article about Iraq policy for The Weekly Standard called “Overthrow Him,” him being Saddam Hussein…[advocating] Chalabi agenda pure and simple, complete with the gratuitious swipes at the CIA. In September 1998 Wolfowitz offered some congressional testimony on Iraq policy…Chalabi through-and-through. Ten days later Robert Kagan penned an article in the Standard endorsing the Wolfowitz plan. In November of that year the Standard waxed eloquent about the just-passed Iraq Liberation Act which funnelled large sums of taxpayer dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, specifically citing Wolfowitz’s testimony as the genesis of the idea. By January 1999 some people were starting to notice that this exile-based Iraq policy was a bad idea. Mark Lagon of the Kristol-run Project for a New American Century reponded…[his] argument — it’ll work if we help them more — doesn’t make much sense if you’re contemplating the possibility that your erstwhile democratic opposition is run by a crooked lying Iranian spy. Lest there by any doubt, Wolfowitz wrote a letter to the editor (co-authored with Stephen Solarz) in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs saying the same thing. So were Wolfowitz and Chalabi personally close? I have no idea. Is Wolfowitz a long-time advocate of a Chalabi-centric Iraq policy? He most certainly is.

The Daily Mislead calls Bush on his cynical manipulation of the symbolism of the 9/11 firefighters and cops and his cruel refusal to protect their health:

While the President’s very first campaign commercial used photos of coffin draped corpses4 being pulled from the rubble, the White House has sought to hide evidence that Ground Zero firefighters and cops were exposed to hazardous toxins. Specifically, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) intervened to doctor EPA press releases that were supposed to warn the public about toxins near Ground Zero. The press releases were modified to claim that the air was safe – despite the fact that there was not adequate scientific evidence to substantiate that claim. The CEQ was headed by James Connaughton, a former asbestos industry lawyer who represented companies in toxic pollution cases. When Ground Zero firefighters and cops began getting sick, the White House tried to block $90 million in funding for medical treatment. When Congress forced the Administration to accept the $90 million, the Administration then delayed the money and threatened to shut down the health-screening program. Even today, the New York Police Department has been denied much needed health grants.

As the 23,000 New York state home healthcare workers represented by SEIU District 1199, Martin Luther King’s favorite union, prepare for a June 7 strike date, 1199 has launched the Invisible No More website to bring its cause, and its members’ stories, to a broader audience:

I came to the U.S. from Guyana with great hopes, but the American Dream has become the American Nightmare.  My agency doesn’t give me any health benefits or anything, and I can’t miss a day of work because the agency will just give my patients to someone else.  Right now, it takes me two hours to get to and from work.  I’ve had cases in the past where I traveled three hours to work, worked a four-hour shift, and then traveled three hours home.  This is happening to many aides right now, so we are fighting to get a new contract.

When June comes, expect management to begin making appeals to the importance of the work these women and men do so as to frame the planned strike as a cruel and irresponsible action, a strategy deployed against 1199 since its inception (compellingly documented in the unfortunately out-of-print Upheaval in the Quiet Zone). Thus it becomes all the more important to reclaim the discourse on the urgency of this work, and to demonstrate that truly valuing the health of patients means valuing the work done for them by valuing the people who did it and justly compensating them for it with living wages and affordable healthcare of their own. Nothing makes this case better than the testimony of individual workers.

I work close to 40 hours a week if you include travel time, but I only get paid for the 20 hours I spend with my patients.  Raising a son on $140 a week is pretty much impossible, I have to rely on the government for everything, and I don’t want to rely on anyone but God and myself.  My 6 years in the U.S. have worn away my dignity.  I want health benefits, I want more than $7 an hour, I want to be able to give my son all that he deserves.

Pledge your support here, and donate to their strike fund here (or with the links on the right).

Reuters reports on a new International Institute for Strategic Studies report which makes clear just how “soft on defense” Bush is when it comes to actually defending Americans from terrorism:

Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden’s network, a leading London think-tank says. Al Qaeda’s finances were in good order, its “middle managers” provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden’s drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said on Tuesday. “Galvanised by Iraq if compromised by Afghanistan, al Qaeda remains a viable and effective network of networks,” it said. The IISS said al Qaeda lost its base after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 but had since adapted to become more decentralised, “virtual” and invisible in more than 60 countries. “The Afghanistan intervention offensively hobbled but defensively benefited al Qaeda,” it said.

Karl Rove’s brilliance as a strategist is in his willingness not simply to attack opponents on their perceived weaknesses but to charge head on at their perceived strengths – Ann Richards’ tolerance, John Kerry’s Vietnam experience – and fight to neutralize or poison them. Sometimes it’s worked for Bush, and sometimes, it’s backfired. But Kerry, following the trend of the Democratic party of late, has been overly shy about directly challenging Bush’s record on the safety of this country.

Over the weekend, I had the chance to ask a friend in the Communication Workers of America about the SBC strike. “We’re hoping to win in four days,” she told me. Looks like that’s just what happened:

Local-phone giant SBC Communications Inc. reached a tentative contract agreement with more than 100,000 union employees early Tuesday, hours after the workers’ planned four-day strike came to an end, union and company officials said. Communications Workers of America leaders say the five-year deal, which is subject to member ratification, improves wages and strengthens job security for the employees it represents in 13 states…”This agreement helps ensure that American workers and their communities benefit from the promise of new information technology jobs,” CWA President Morton Bahr said in a statement, adding that the pact provides opportunity for members as they move from traditional telecom work to the new technologies of the industry. The tentative agreement provided across-the-board base wage increases. On average, employees will receive base wage increases of 2.3 percent per year for five years and lump sums averaging $300 per year, said SBC officials…The agreement also includes new access to jobs in the growth areas, protects health security for both active employees and retirees, and improves pensions. The settlement guarantees no layoffs of employees currently on the payroll for the life of the agreement and calls for rehiring of several hundred workers who had been laid off at SBC Southwest and SBC Midwest.

“Because of our members’ unity, we were able to reach a settlement that everyone is proud of,” said Anthony Bixler, CWA vice president in California, Hawaii and Nevada. While some increases in co-payments for medical services and prescription drugs were agreed upon, SBC will continue to provide fully paid health care benefits, the union said.

More power to them.