Thursday, April 14, 2011

ANOTER REASON THE JUDGE SHOULD THROW THE SINGLE GUILTY BY BONDS JURY! This guy's answer is Bull----, too! How non of the female jurors have spoken?

Bonds convicted for his "BS answer," juror says

Homerun king "gave a b------- answer" to the grand jury, foreman says of Bonds' conviction on obstruction charge


The federal jury was told in its instructions to find the slugger guilty of obstruction if any one of seven specific statements he made in 2003 to a grand jury investigating sports doping was "evasive, false, or misleading" and if Bonds knowingly made the statement to keep the grand jury from accomplishing its task. In other words, the jury was asked to figure out if Bonds lied in an attempt to obstruct the grand jury.


In the end, the jury deadlocked on whether Bonds was obstructing justice on six of the statements.

The statement that triggered Bonds' conviction came from an exchange with prosecutors that started with a question about performance-enhancing drugs, needles and Bonds' relationship with his childhood friend and personal trainer, Greg Anderson.


Bonds guilty of obstruction, jury hung on others

This is the statement jurors were given:

"Q: Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?

Bonds: I've only had one doctor touch me. And that's my only personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don't get into each others' personal lives. We're friends, but I don't — we don't sit around and talk baseball, because he knows I don't want — don't come to my house talking baseball. If you want to come to my house and talk about fishing, some other stuff, we'll be good friends, you come around talking about baseball, you go on. I don't talk about his business. You know what I mean? ...

Q: Right.


A: That's what keeps our friendship. You know, I am sorry, but that — you know, that — I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don't get into other people's business because of my father's situation, you see ..."

Jurors were only supposed to make their decision based on the second answer, the one beginning "That's what keeps ..."

However, it seemed after the verdict on Wednesday that they looked at the whole exchange. The foreman of the jury, who said his first name was Fred, repeatedly used an expletive to describe Bonds' answer to the question from the prosecutors.

"When you're in front of a grand jury you have to answer, and he gave a b------- answer. It was a b------- answer," Fred said. "He gave a story rather than a yes or no answer."

Why The Barry Bonds Verdict Should Be Thrown Out

barry bonds
BARRY BONDS: GUILTY OF OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
Our initial reaction upon hearing the Barry Bonds verdict was: "How can you obstruct justice without actually lying?"
The answer is, you can't. And at least one legal expert agrees that his conviction should be thrown out for that reason.

Barry Bonds was on trial because prosecutors believed that he lied in front of the grand jury investigating BALCO, a drug supplier that Bonds was associated with. He was brought to trial on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice.

In order to prove that he obstructed justice, prosecutors essentially had to prove that he lied to them in front that grand jury. But one of the counts of perjury was dropped before the trial ended and the jury could not agree on the other three. (On two of the counts, the jury was actually leaning toward acquittal.)

In other words, the government did not prove that he lied.

The obstruction count included the phrase "evasive and misleading," which is why the jury eventually found him guilty. But being evasive and misleading isn't really a crime. Under oath, you're required to tell the truth, but you aren't required to be helpful. If the prosecutors didn't like his answers, they should have asked better questions.

Bonds was not the target of the original grand jury -
 (He was actually offered immunity in exchange for his testimony.)
 Five BALCO associates were either convicted or plead guilty as result of that case, so it's hard to argue that Bonds' evasiveness "obstructed" any justice.

On May 20, at the next hearing in this case, Bonds' defense team will argue that very fact.

 They will say that the jury's verdict on the Count 5 can't hold up if they didn't convict on the perjury charges.

(The fact that they were 11-1 to convict on Count 2, means his escape was very narrow, but still an escape.) They will ask the judge to set the verdict aside and let their client go free.

And ESPN's legal analyst Roger Cossack says if he was the judge, he would agree.
The conviction should be thrown out.
This case was all about lying and the government didn't make its case.

Economism and Economites

The theory that people’s lives are principally focused on “production, exchange, and consumption.”

Writing for The New American, Isabel Lyman listed a number of things that might indicate you are an “economite including, subscribing to Forbes magazine, or forgoing “family time to work to afford more expensive gadgets, clothes, and trips”:

The term “economite” was coined by John Attarian in his book, “Economism and the National Prospect.” In a brisk 72 pages, Attarian, who earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan, provides plausible answers to the troubling questions that currently preoccupy many thoughtful Americans:

“What has happened to this great nation?
Where are we headed as a people?
Who’s taking us down this road to destruction?
Why do so many seem to be oblivious to the danger?”

Attarian places the blame squarely on the worldview he calls “economism” and its adherents, the “economites.”

Economism incorporates the belief that men and women are primarily economic beings, focused mainly on “production, exchange, and consumption.
Indeed, economism tries to explain virtually all human motivation and action by economics. ”

So when will someone go to jail????????

Probe: Goldman Misled Investors

CS - Goldman Sachs Wall Street
Reuters
A two-year Senate probe into the U.S. financial crisis is wrapping up, and its diagnosis of Goldman Sachs is far from flattering. “Our investigation found a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), while Sen Tom Coburn (R-OK), who also approved the findings, said, "It shows without a doubt the lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions,"

The probe found that Goldman Sachs designed, marketed, and sold collateralized debt obligations that misled investors and created conflicts of interests just before the U.S. housing market collapsed, in one case telling investors in a CDO that their interests were aligned when in fact the firm held 100 percent on the short side.
 “In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled the Congress,” said Levin, referring to the investment bank's testimony before a subcommittee at an April 2010 hearing.

 Levin went on to say he would refer their testimony to the Justice Department for possible perjury charges, as well as to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Asked if he was disappointed no Wall Street figures had gone to jail in connection with the crisis, Levin replied, “There's still time.”

How to Save a Trillion Dollars, , ,

In the scheme of things, saving the 38 billion bucks that Congress seems poised to agree upon is not a big deal. A big deal is saving a trillion bucks. And we could do that by preventing disease instead of treating it.
For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.

But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.

This isn’t just me talking. In a recent issue of the magazine Circulation, the American Heart Association editorial board stated flatly that costs in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death here and in much of the rest of the world — will triple by 2030, to more than $800 billion annually. Throw in about $276 billion of what they call “real indirect costs,” like productivity, and you have over a trillion. Enough over, in fact, to make $38 billion in budget cuts seem like a rounding error.

Similarly, Type 2 diabetes is projected to cost us $500 billion a year come 2020, when half of all Americans will have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Need I remind you that Type 2 diabetes is virtually entirely preventable? Ten billion dollars invested now might save a couple of hundred billion annually 10 years from now. And: hypertension, many cancers, diverticulitis and more are treated by a health care (better termed “disease care”) system that costs us about $2.3 trillion annually now — before costs double and triple.
It’s worth noting that the Federal budget will absorb its usual 60 percent of that cost. We can save some of that money, though, if an alliance of insurers, government, individuals — maybe even Big Food, if it’s pushed hard enough — moves us towards better eating.

The many numbers all point in the same direction. Look at heart disease: The INTERHEART study of 30,000 men and women in 52 countries showed that at least 90 percent of heart disease is lifestyle related; a European study of more than 23,000 Germans showed that people with healthier lifestyles had an 81 percent lower risk.

And those estimates might be on the low side. Dean Ornish, the San Francisco-based doctor who probably knows more about diet and heart disease than anyone, says, “My colleagues and I have found that more intensive diets than those studies used can reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease.”
In his latest book, “The Spectrum,” Ornish recommends that people at risk eat stricter diets (more plants, higher fiber, lower saturated fats and so on) than those who are generally healthy, but it’s not all or nothing — the more you change your diet and lifestyle, the healthier you are. “What matters most,” he says, “is your overall way of eating and living. If you indulge yourself one day, eat healthier the next.” I’ve been preaching similarly for years. But the trillion-dollar question is, “How do we get people to eat that way?”

I don’t have an easy answer; no one does. But it for sure will take an investment: it’s a situation in which you must spend money to make or save money. (Yes, taxes will go up, but whose taxes?) Some number of billions of dollars — something in the rounding error area — should be spent on research to figure out exactly how to turn this ship around. (The NIH, which pegs obesity-related costs at about $150 billion, just announced a new billion-dollar investment. Good, but not enough.)

Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. Some other billions of dollars must go to public health. Again: we built sewage systems; we built water supplies; we showed that we could get people to eat anything we marketed. Now all we have to do is build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that.

Experts without vested interests in the status quo come to much the same conclusion: Only a massive public health effort can save both our health and our budget.

Can we afford it? Sure. Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard-affiliated pediatrician and the author of “Ending the Food Fight,” says, “The magnitude of the deficit is small when you consider costs of nutrition-related disease; the $4 trillion that the Republicans want cut over a decade is about the same as the projected costs of diabetes over that same period.”

In last week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Ludwig made a number of concrete suggestions, like restructuring subsidies, regulating the marketing of food to children and adequately funding school lunch programs.

His most novel ideas use existing and future technologies to help the food industry retain profits while producing less junky products: devising a method of preserving polyunsaturated fats, for example (dangerous trans-fats are widely used simply because they are stable) or making bread with real whole grains instead of refined ones.
 (His research demonstrates that people who eat ultra-processed grains rather than whole grains for breakfast go on to consume 600 to 700 calories more than other people each day.) “I’m not arguing that the food industry should be philanthropic,” he says. “Its purpose is to make money. But the goal of the government should be to encourage industry to make money by producing more rather than less healthful foods.”

The best way to combat diet-related diseases is to change what we eat. And if our thinking is along the lines of diet improved = deficit reduced, so much the better. If a better diet were to result only in a 10 percent decrease in heart disease (way lower than Ludwig believes possible), that’s $100 billion project savings per year by 2030.

This isn’t just fiscal responsibility, but social responsibility as well. And the alternative is not only fiscal catastrophe but millions of premature deaths.

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