Reporters in our Washington bureau have been tracking the former congressional staffers (and members) now on the payroll for companies getting taxpayer bailouts. The full list is here. A sample of the lobbying firepower and Big Finance’s return on investment:
AIG
ASSETS: Moses Mercado, Obama campaign adviser, former deputy chief of staff, Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.)
Ronald Christie, former special assistant, President George W. Bush
Hazen Marshall, former staff director, Senate budget committee
Gregory Nickerson, former staff director, House Ways and Means subcommittee
Robert Leonard, former chief counsel and staff director, House Ways and Means committee
LOBBYING EXPENDITURES (2008): $9.7 million
BAILOUT: $180 billion
ROI: 1.85 million percent

Reporters in our Washington bureau have been tracking the former congressional staffers (and members) now on the payroll for companies getting taxpayer bailouts. The full list is here. A sample of the lobbying firepower and Big Finance’s return on investment:
AIG
ASSETS: Moses Mercado, Obama campaign adviser, former deputy chief of staff, Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.)
Ronald Christie, former special assistant, President George W. Bush
Hazen Marshall, former staff director, Senate budget committee
Gregory Nickerson, former staff director, House Ways and Means subcommittee
Robert Leonard, former chief counsel and staff director, House Ways and Means committee
LOBBYING EXPENDITURES (2008): $9.7 million
BAILOUT: $180 billion
ROI: 1.85 million percent

It’s a bright day in February, and I am in a pink villa on the outskirts of Fallujah, sitting with a tribal sheikh and a Marine commander as they hunch over a plate of truffles. The sheikh is Eifan Saddun al-Isawi, a charming 33-year-old Iraqi in a red-checkered kaffiyeh, a brown dishdasha, and DKNY wraparound sunglasses who uses phrases like "sons of bitches" when he talks about Al Qaeda with Americans. He is the head of Fallujah’s Sahwa, or Awakening, council, the Sunni militia hired by the United States in early 2007 to fight its enemies in Iraq, and he’s become one of the American military’s go-to guys in the city, as evidenced by the photos on his walls of him with George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Sheikh Eifan Saddun al-Isawi poses with two prominent patrons.

The American officer, Lt. Colonel Chris Hastings, apologizes for forgetting to bring Eifan "magazines with pictures of pretty ladies" and congratulates him for winning a seat in the provincial elections. He proceeds to tell Eifan to make sure that a certain someone the Marines are "concerned" about doesn’t make it into local politics. Eifan assures him he’ll see to it.

It’s a bright day in February, and I am in a pink villa on the outskirts of Fallujah, sitting with a tribal sheikh and a Marine commander as they hunch over a plate of truffles. The sheikh is Eifan Saddun al-Isawi, a charming 33-year-old Iraqi in a red-checkered kaffiyeh, a brown dishdasha, and DKNY wraparound sunglasses who uses phrases like "sons of bitches" when he talks about Al Qaeda with Americans. He is the head of Fallujah’s Sahwa, or Awakening, council, the Sunni militia hired by the United States in early 2007 to fight its enemies in Iraq, and he’s become one of the American military’s go-to guys in the city, as evidenced by the photos on his walls of him with George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Sheikh Eifan Saddun al-Isawi poses with two prominent patrons.

The American officer, Lt. Colonel Chris Hastings, apologizes for forgetting to bring Eifan "magazines with pictures of pretty ladies" and congratulates him for winning a seat in the provincial elections. He proceeds to tell Eifan to make sure that a certain someone the Marines are "concerned" about doesn’t make it into local politics. Eifan assures him he’ll see to it.

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
Echo Platoon is part of the 82nd Replacement Detachment of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Soldiers in the platoon are relegated to living quarters in a set of dimly lit concrete rooms. Pipes peep out of missing ceiling tiles and a musty smell permeates beds placed on cracked linoleum floors.
For soldiers who have gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave) and then voluntarily turned themselves in or were forcibly returned, the detention conditions here in Echo Platoon only serve to reinforce the inescapability of their situation. They remain suspended in a legal limbo of forced uncertainty that can extend from several months to a year or more, while the military takes its time deciding their fate. Some of them, however, are offered a free pass out of this military half-life—but only if they agree to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.
Specialist Kevin McCormick, 21, who was held in Echo Platoon for more than seven months on AWOL and desertion charges, was typically offered release, subject to accepting deployment to Iraq, despite being suicidal. "Echo is like jail," he says, "with some privileges. [You are] just stuck there with horrible living conditions. There’s black mold on the building [and] when I first got there, there were five or six people to a room, which is like a cell block with cement brick walls. The piping and electricals are above the tiles, so if anything leaks or bursts, it goes right down into the room."

The last person to see Syed Mehmood Hashmi as a free man was his friend Mohammed Haroon Saleem, who on June 6, 2006, drove Hashmi to London’s Heathrow Airport, walked him to the security checkpoint, and watched him hoist his bag and head for the gate. But Hashmi never made his flight. At passport control, constables pulled him from the line and told him they had an extradition warrant on behalf of the US government. He was to be charged with aiding Al Qaeda.
Today Hashmi, who is 29, sits in a windowless cell, in solitary confinement. He is not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio or read a newspaper unless it is at least 30 days old and censored. He is not allowed to speak to guards, other inmates, or the media, or to write anyone but his attorney and his family (once a week on three single-sided pages). The only people cleared to visit, besides his lawyer, are his mother and father, but he couldn’t see them for three months after he was caught shadowboxing in his cell—an infraction that cost him visiting privileges. Hashmi’s lawyer, Sean Maher, says the isolation is slowly driving his client mad.

THE PHANTOM TRADE: Navy Culinary Specialist Joe Lee thought he’d gotten a sweet deal on a used Mercedes. Then he learned that the Norfolk, Virginia, dealer never paid off the loan on his trade-in, a common scam. It simply sold his old Hyundai and pocketed the cash, plus money he’d put up to cover the old loan. Now Lee is stuck with two payments.
THE YO-YO SALE: In this classic credit ruse, you leave the lot with one interest rate only to be called back and asked to pay a higher one. Army Specialist Michael Hill smelled a rat after his Florida dealer claimed financing had fallen through on the used Acura he’d bought the week before. He and his wife refused to bring it back, so the dealer retaliated with phone calls, five an hour, threatening arrest—until they hired a lawyer.

ONE DAY in April, a 19-year-old sailor named William Kirkgaard was walking to the store at the Norfolk naval station when a man in a black Ford Mustang pulled up and asked for directions to the main gate. Kirkgaard indicated the way, whereupon the man, who said he was a former Marine, began asking questions: Why don’t you have a car? Are you a member of the Navy Federal Credit Union? Claiming he worked there, Kirkgaard says, the man then offered him a ride to the credit union to open an account—the first step toward buying a car. So the sailor got in. But an ominous feeling overtook him as the Mustang drove on and on. "I kinda thought I was gonna die at that point," he says. The real destination, it turned out, was Tidewater Auto Brokers, a used car dealership in Virginia Beach, about 14 miles away. Mustang Man didn’t work for the credit union, and the Marines say they have no record of his having served, either. He was a used car salesman.
Kirkgaard had maybe $20 to his name—not enough to get a taxi back to the base, much less buy a car. He’d only been in the Navy 10 months and had never bought a car without his parents. He didn’t even have a driver’s license on him, which meant he couldn’t legally drive off the lot. Still, Mustang Man, whose real name is Jesse Neely, eventually persuaded him to test-drive a 2005 Dodge Stratus with 78,000 miles and a $10,000 sticker price. It shook violently and the "check engine" light flashed. Kirkgaard told Neely he didn’t want the car, he says, but he naively agreed to give the dealership his personal information. Afterward, employees asked him to sign some paperwork; the sailor obliged without much thought. "Congratulations," they told him. "You just bought a car."

Ann Coulter thinks they’re "cranks." Right-wing radio kingpin Michael Medved prefers to call them "nutburgers." Their ranks include a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, a Clinton conspiracy theorist, a habitual presidential candidate, and a professional poker player. They’re convening amateur grand juries and suing the President—not to mention suing each other. Meet the birthers: people who believe, despite truly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and has illegally usurped the presidency.
Orly Taitz

Born in the former Soviet republic of Moldavia, Taitz is a peroxide-blonde SoCal dentist with a law degree from an online academy and a black belt in Taekwondo. More than anyone else, she has vaulted birthers—their preferred nomenclature is "doubters" or the "eligibility movement"—into the public eye.
In 2008, Taitz helped to bring a lawsuit on behalf of Alan Keyes, disputing the validity of Obama’s birth certificate. This year, she hit the headlines again when she filed another lawsuit from an Army reserve major who charged that "Barry Soetoro" was not his lawful commander in chief. Both suits were rejected, prompting Taitz to accost Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia at public events to demand an investigation into the matter. All of this has won her generous, but not always flattering coverage from television personalities like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and David Shuster, who Taitz has described as "brownshirts."
Recently, Taitz has caused a rift among the birther ranks by circulating a document that she claimed was Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. A federal court threw it out after determining that it was a fake—later it emerged that the document may have been a prank played by an Obama supporter. This fiasco led leading birther Andy Martin to denounce Taitz as an "obvious crackpot."

The residents of the coastal town of Taiji, Japan, would have you believe that they love dolphins. Murals depict cuddly cetaceans on buildings, the dolphinarium draws tourists, and trainers come from all over the world to handpick their charges during the annual migration just offshore. But what the throngs of visitors don’t see is a heavily guarded cove where every year, thousands of dolphins are corralled and killed, their mercury-laden meat turned into school lunches or passed off as pricey whale to unsuspecting restaurateurs. With equal parts outrage and spy-flick derring-do, this exhilarating film chronicles director Louie Psihoyos’ quest to penetrate the cove and expose Taiji’s secret.