Michelle Bachmann's Newsweek Cover Vs. Sarah Palin's Newsweek Cover: Queens Of Tea Party Rage? Sexist Or Fair?

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Does The Michele Bachmann Newsweek Cover Make Her ‘Look Crazy’?

Conservative media watchdog Newsbusters is helpfully defending GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) honor against those serial cover photo offenders at Newsweek, excoriating the magazine for using a cover photo of the Tea Party fave that makes her “look crazy.”

Their hearts are in the right place, but is Newsbusters really helping Bachmann out by starting a national debate about how crazy she looks?

Newsbusters‘ headline might make you think they’re just being oversensitive, but once you get a load of Newsweek’s cover, it’s immediately apparent that they have a point. Newsweek subscribers, upon receiving this issue, will probably scratch their heads trying to remember when they signed up for a trial subscription to It Puts The Lotion In The Basket Weekly.

There’s something about Newsbusters Editor Noel Sheppard’s commentary that isn’t quite right, though. Take a look at the full cover, and tell me if you can see what’s missing from Sheppard’s one line of criticism about Newsweek:

Exactly what were the editors thinking putting this kind of a picture of a sitting Congresswoman and presidential candidate on their cover?

Is Sheppard conceding the point that Michele Bachmann is “The Queen Of Rage,” as the Newsweek cover giant-fontedly dubs her? If not, it’s a pretty glaring omission.

Sheppard also neglects to mention any of the previous Newsweek cover “controversies,” a deviation from Newsbusters’ normally exhaustive M.O.

A cynic might wonder if the real point of this item was, in fact, to start a national debate about how crazy Michele Bachmann looks. In a Republican presidential field that’s weaker than Charles Atlas beginners class, Bachmann’s ability to connect with the energized Tea Party base has made her a danger to the likes of Mitt Romney (R-MA) and Tim Pawlenty (R-UhRoh). Republicans have come out of the woodwork to attack Bachmann over her migraines. A debate over her “crazy eyes” fits in well with a strategy to discredit a candidate who is a very real threat to the GOP establishment.

For what it’s worth, the Newsweek photo certainly doesn’t seem designed to flatter Bachmann, and is strongly evocative of her post-SOTU address to the faerie on the cameraman’s shoulder, but it’s probably intended to pair with that “Queen Of Rage” headline. It’s tough to see how anyone could have a problem with one, and not the other.


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Sources: Fox News, Huffington Post, Mediaite, Newsweek, The Slate, Youtube, Google Maps

Nafissatou Diallo's PR Campaign Garners Public Support; Stops Character Assassination

Let's Hear It For Nafissatou Diallo! Alleged Rape Victim Of Former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Ms. Diallo's Decision To Come Forth To The Public, Defend Her Name & Give An Extremely Detailed Account Of What Happened In DSK's Lavish Manhattan Hotel Room Has Garnered Her Much Support From Women & Common, Everyday Citizens Well Aware Of How Frequently People With Great Wealth Are Allowed To Simply Walk Away After Committing Crimes.

I Admire Ms. Diallo For Boldly Speaking Out Despite The Manhattan D.A.'s Office Attempt To Destroy Her Character.

Had She Not Come Forth To The Public Soon, Cyrus Vance's Office Would Have Totally Destroyed Her & Dismissed The Case Like Yesterday.

Just Because Ms. Diallo Is A Victim Of Life's Circumstances, Does NOT Mean She's A Liar Or Gold Digger!

You Go Girl!!




The Real DSK Maid Tape

The lawyer for the hotel maid who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault tells The Daily Beast that tape recordings in the possession of prosecutors capture her describing her alleged attack to an incarcerated friend less than 24 hours after it occurred in a manner consistent with what she told police and prosecutors.

The tapes also show a much different conversation about lawyers and money than what was leaked by authorities earlier this month in a newspaper report, attorney Kenneth Thompson said late Wednesday night after listening to the audio recordings for the first time.

Thompson and the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, 32, met Wednesday with the New York District Attorney’s Office for the first time in nearly a month after the relationship between the alleged victim and prosecutors fell apart over questions about her credibility.

The meeting came just days after Diallo described the attack in an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK.

Strauss-Kahn was the head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for French president before Diallo accused him of attacking her and forcing her to have oral sex after she entered his luxury suite to clean it May 14 at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan.

After being arrested, Strauss-Kahn resigned his IMF post and has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault and attempted rape in a case that has fascinated two continents and taken several dramatic turns.

After steadfastly standing by Diallo, prosecutors disclosed late last month they had serious reservations about her credibility after learning she lied to them about an earlier rape in her home country of Guinea, filed a false tax return, and lied on her application seeking asylum in the United States.

During an eight-hour session Wednesday, the prosecutors grilled Diallo about her conduct and contacts after the alleged attack, and they allowed her to listen for the first time to a tape-recorded conversation she had 24 hours after the alleged attack with Amara Tarawally, an illegal immigrant convicted on drug charges and being held in an Arizona detention center.

The call became a critical and tantalizing piece of evidence in the case after The New York Times reported July 1 that law-enforcement sources claimed the tape captured Diallo making a comment to the effect that her alleged attacker was rich and she knew what she was doing. The leak has since been used to suggest that Diallo may have schemed with her incarcerated friend to make money off Strauss-Kahn.

Diallo and Tarawally, in interviews with , also disputed the leaked version of the call.

Thompson said the tape was played Wednesday for Diallo in her native Fulani language and an interpreter explained what was on it. In all, the imprisoned friend called Diallo at least three times in the aftermath of the attack, according to Thompson.

“The tape they played today does not capture Nafi Diallo being recording as saying, ‘He has a lot of money and I know what to do,’ as was leaked to The New York Times,” Thompson said. “Instead it shows there were at least three calls over several days.

“In the first call on the day after the attack, Ms. Diallo clearly reported to her friend in prison that ‘a man tried to rape me on my job. He is big and powerful. I did not know who he was when he attacked me. Because he couldn’t take off my clothes, he put his penis in my mouth.’ And she explained she tried to stop him,” the lawyer said in an interview.

Thompson said that in a later call, the prisoner called back to check on his friend after learning more about the man who allegedly attacked her. During that call, there were discussions about Strauss-Kahn’s wealth and the fact that Diallo had gotten a lawyer, but the quote attributed to Diallo in the leaked report was not on the tape, he said.

At one point, the tape shows Diallo learned after the fact that the man she accused was politically powerful and wealthy. She also acknowledged hiring an attorney, Thompson said.

“Later in the call the prisoner makes a statement like ‘you could get money from this.’ I take this to mean he was referring to a lawsuit,” Thompson explained as he related what the translator told him was on the tape. “Nafi Diallo’s first reaction is ‘wait, wait, wait,’ suggesting she wasn’t worried about that. She then makes a comment like ‘he can deal with it,’ which I took to mean her lawyer could deal with the issue.”

Thompson said he was angry after learning the tape recordings are different from what was leaked and that he conveyed his concerns to prosecutors during Wednesday’s meetings.

“For nearly a month, information has been leaked to the media that falsely portrays Ms. Diallo as scheming to take Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s money a day after he attempted to rape her,” Thompson said. “But what I heard today shows that Ms. Diallo has been telling the truth from the very beginning, that she was sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn while doing her job at the Sofitel.”

Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment late Wednesday. They are continuing to investigate the evidence in the case as they try to determine whether to proceed to trial despite their concerns about the maid’s credibility or drop the charges. A decision is expected in weeks.






Strauss-Kahn’s Accuser Meets the Press and Thanks Supporters

Nafissatou Diallo continued her transformation from anonymous accuser in a headline-grabbing criminal case to a public figure, making a brief statement on Thursday afternoon at a Brooklyn church.

Ms. Diallo’s appearance came just days after she first revealed her identity to the public, and the day after she walked past reporters to discuss the case with lawyers at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. While brief, her comments suggested that she was prepared to be a highly visible presence as the case moves toward possible resolution in the coming weeks.

Before a throng of journalists and supporters from her native Guinea, Ms. Diallo, who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault, thanked supporters and spoke about her case in the lobby of a megachurch in East New York, Brooklyn, shortly after noon.

“I’m here because I had people call me a lot of bad names,” Ms. Diallo said softly at the Christian Cultural Center on Flatlands Avenue. “A lot of things they said about me was not true.”

Before being introduced by the Rev. A.R. Bernard, senior pastor at the center, Ms. Diallo, 32, dressed in a dark suit, rubbed her fingers together slowly, blinking often as she gazed out the windows of the lobby, past the bank of cameras and reporters.

“Me and my family, we are going through a lot,” she said. “We cry every day.”

Ms. Diallo, a housekeeper at a Midtown hotel, made her accusation in May against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, but has watched the case crumble around questions of her credibility. She said her 15-year-old daughter had seen her crying recently, prompting a plea from the girl.

“She said: ‘Please stop crying. Be strong for me,” Ms. Diallo said at the church. “I told her, ‘I will be strong for you and for every other woman in the world.’”

Ms. Diallo, working without a script or notes, spoke for less than five minutes at the event on Thursday and did not take questions from reporters before being escorted from the lectern. Her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, and other supporters remained at the microphone and spoke with reporters, as did Mr. Bernard.

Khadijah Shakur, a member of the New Black Panther Party, was among the roughly two dozen supporters who joined Ms. Diallo near a small stage in the lobby, assembled behind red velvet rope.

“She is being blamed, but she is the victim,” Ms. Shakur said before the news conference.

Ms. Diallo broke her public silence last week, granting interviews to Newsweek and ABC News.

At another prominent house of worship on the other side of Brooklyn, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry stood in the pulpit of the House of the Lord Church on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill and called for prosecutors to aggressively pursue charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

“I urge District Attorney Cyrus Vance not to drop the case but to pursue truth and justice and let the chips fall where they may,” Mr. Daughtry told a handful of reporters in an otherwise empty house.

In meetings on Wednesday at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, Ms. Diallo and her lawyer, Mr. Thompson, listened to recordings of conversations Ms. Diallo had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizona prison after the alleged attack.

Last month, law enforcement officials told Mr. Thompson and The New York Times that Ms. Diallo could be heard saying on the tape “words to the effect of: ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’ ” After hearing the recordings on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson said his client’s statements, which were made in her native language, Fula, had been mischaracterized.


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Sources: ABC News, AP, Atlantic Wire, Daily Beast, Newsweek, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps

Nafissatou Diallo Vs. DSK: His Accuser Goes Public! "Hello? Housekeeping"

The Maid's Tale



“Hello? Housekeeping.”

The maid hovered in the suite’s large living room, just inside the entrance. The 32-year-old Guinean, an employee of the Sofitel hotel, had been told by a room-service waiter that room 2806 was now free for cleaning, “Hello? Housekeeping,” the maid called out again. No reply. The door to the bedroom, to her left, was open, and she could see part of the bed. She glanced around the living room for luggage, saw none. “Hello? Housekeeping.” Then a naked man with white hair suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere.

That’s how Nafissatou Diallo describes the start of the explosive incident on Saturday, May 14, that would forever change her life—and that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and, until that moment, the man tipped to be the next president of France. Now the woman known universally as the “DSK maid” has broken her public silence for the first time, talking for more than three hours with NEWSWEEK at the office of her attorneys, Thompson Wigdor, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue.

“Nafi” Diallo is not glamorous. Her light-brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened, and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure. When her face is in repose, there is an opaque melancholy to it. Working at the Sofitel for the last three years, with its security and stability, was clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have, after years braiding hair and working in a friend’s store in the Bronx as a newcomer from Guinea in 2003.

Diallo cannot read or write in any language; she has few “close friends,” she says, and some of the men she has spent time with, whom she does not call fiancés or boyfriends, but “just friends,” appear to have taken advantage of her. One, now in a federal detention center in Arizona awaiting deportation after a drug conviction, won her confidence—and, she says, access to her bank accounts—by giving her fake designer bags: “Six or seven of them,” she says. “They weren’t very good.” Her face goes almost blank. “He was my friend that I trust—that I used to trust,” she says.
Related: The Strauss-Kahn Timeline »

Some of Diallo’s most upbeat moments in the interview came when she recounted the small promotions and credits available at the Sofitel for a job done well. She was supposed to clean 14 rooms a day for a wage of $25 an hour plus tips, according to her union. It’s an achievement, Diallo said, to get a whole floor of your own because it saves the time wasted going up and down in the elevator to clean random individual rooms. Another maid had gone on maternity leave in April, Diallo said, and she’d gotten the 28th floor. “I keep that floor,” said Diallo. “I never had a floor before.” When every door has a “Do Not Disturb” notice, maids save precious minutes by going to the hall closet and quickly refilling their cleaning carts with soap, towels, and other amenities. Diallo’s eyes lit up talking about the routine and about her colleagues. “We worked as a team,” she said. “I loved the job. I liked the people. All different countries, American, African, and Chinese. But we were the same there.”

Occasionally as Diallo talked, she wept, and there were moments when the tears seemed forced. Almost all questions about her past in West Africa were met with vague responses. She was reluctant to talk about her father, an imam who ran a Quranic school out of the family home in rural Guinea. Her husband died of “an illness,” she said. So did a daughter who was 3 or 4 months old—she wasn’t sure. Diallo was raped by two soldiers who arrested her for a curfew violation at night in Conakry, the Guinean capital. When they had finished with her, they released her the next morning, she said, but made her clean up the scene of the assault. At first she said she couldn’t recall what year that happened, but later she said it was 2001. Diallo had managed to get her surviving daughter, now 15, out of Africa and to the United States “for a better life,” she said. But precisely how that happened was not a subject she or her lawyers would explore. Again, her eyes stared downward, welling with tears.

When Diallo reached the point of her alleged assault in the Sofitel, however, her account was vivid and compelling. As she told NEWSWEEK, she had used up a lot of time waiting for guests to check out of room 2820 before she cleaned it. Then she saw the room-service waiter taking the tray out of 2806, one of the hotel’s presidential suites. The waiter said it was empty. But still she decided to check. This is her account.

“Hello? Housekeeping.” Diallo looked around the living room. She was standing facing the bedroom in the small entrance hall when the naked man with white hair appeared.

“Oh, my God,” said Diallo. “I’m so sorry.” And she turned to leave. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. But he was like “a crazy man to me.” He clutched at her breasts. He slammed the door of the suite.

Diallo is about 5 feet 10, considerably taller than Strauss-Kahn, and she has a sturdy build. “You’re beautiful,” Strauss-Kahn told her, wrestling her toward the bedroom. “I said, ‘Sir, stop this. I don’t want to lose my job,’” Diallo told NEWSWEEK. “He said, ‘You’re not going to lose your job.’” An ugly incident with a guest—any guest—could threaten everything Diallo had worked for. “I don’t look at him. I was so afraid. I didn’t expect anyone in the room.”

“He pulls me hard to the bed,” she said. He tried to put his penis in her mouth, she said, and as she told the story she tightened her lips and turned her face from side to side to show how she resisted. “I push him. I get up. I wanted to scare him. I said, ‘Look, there is my supervisor right there.’” But the man said there was nobody out there, and nobody was going to hear.

Diallo kept pushing him away: “I don’t want to hurt him,” she told us. “I don’t want to lose my job.” He shoved back, moving her down the hallway from the bedroom toward the bathroom. Diallo’s uniform dress buttoned down the front, but Strauss-Kahn didn’t bother with the buttons, she said. He pulled it up around her thighs and tore down her pantyhose, gripping her crotch so hard that it was still red at the hospital, hours later. He pushed her to her knees, her back to the wall. He forced his penis into her mouth, she said, and he gripped her head on both sides. “He held my head so hard here,” she said, putting her hands to her cranium. “He was moving and making a noise. He was going like ‘uhh, uhh, uhh.’ He said, ‘Suck my’—I don’t want to say.” The report from the hospital where Diallo was taken later for examination notes that “she felt something wet and sour come into her mouth and she spit it out on the carpet.”

“I got up,” Diallo told NEWSWEEK. “I was spitting. I run. I run out of there. I don’t turn back. I run to the hallway. I was so nervous; I was so scared. I didn’t want to lose my job.”

Diallo says she hid around the corner in the hallway near the service lobby and tried to compose herself. “I was standing there spitting. I was so alone. I was so scared.” Then she saw the man come out of 2806 and head for the elevator. “I don’t know how he got dressed so fast, and with baggage,” she said. “He looked at me like this.” She inclin-ed her head and stared straight ahead. “He said nothing.”

The entire incident had taken no more than 15 minutes, and maybe much less. According to a source familiar with the phone records, nine minutes after Diallo entered the room, Strauss-Kahn made a call to his daughter.

The maid had left her cleaning supplies in room 2820 when she went to check on Strauss-Kahn’s suite. Now she retrieved them and returned to the suite in which, she says, she had just been attacked. Disoriented, she seems to have sought some kind of solace in resuming her routine. “I went to the room I have to clean,” she explained. But she couldn’t think how or where to start. “I was so, so, so—I don’t know what to do.” Prosecutors, losing faith in Diallo’s credibility, would later raise an issue about this sequence of events. They said she told the grand jury that after the attack she hid in the hallway, but subsequently changed her story to say she cleaned room 2820 and then began to clean the DSK suite. She disputes that she changed her story, and hotel room-access records support what she told NEWSWEEK.

Many aspects of Diallo’s account of the alleged attack are mirrored in the hospital records, in which doctors observed five hours afterward that there was “redness” in the area of the vagina where she alleges Strauss-Kahn grabbed her. The medical records also note she complained of “pain to left shoulder.” Weeks later, doctors reexamined the shoulder and found a partial ligament tear, she said.

If there is one inconsistency for defense lawyers to dwell on in the hospital records, it is a passage that says her attacker got dressed and left the room, and “said nothing to her during the incident.” In her interview with police and her account to NEWSWEEK, Diallo recalled several statements Strauss-Kahn made during the alleged attack.

Defense lawyers are expected to challenge the nature of her injuries, her recollection of events, the veracity of elements of her life story, and her conduct with other men if the case proceeds.

Diallo’s supervisor, making the rounds, found her in the hallway. She could see Diallo was shaken and upset and asked what was wrong. “If somebody try to rape you in this job, what do you do?” Diallo asked her. The supervisor was angry when she heard of the assault, Diallo recalled. “She said, ‘The guest is a VIP guest, but I don’t give a damn.’” Another supervisor came, then two men from hotel security. One of them told Diallo, “If this was me, I would call the police.” At about 1:30 p.m., an hour after the first supervisor was told of the alleged attack, the hotel dialed 911.

At that moment, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was still one of the most powerful men in the world. As head of the IMF, he was the lead player in attempts to keep the European, and indeed the global, economy from plunging into a potentially apocalyptic recession. He was also getting ready to declare his candidacy for the presidency of France in an election only a year away. If he were to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy, the hugely unpopular incumbent, DSK would then govern a country that is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and has the world’s third-biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Prosecutors have identified a hotel concierge who says DSK made an unwanted advance to her the previous night. They have also identified a blonde American businesswoman observed going into the same elevator as Strauss-Kahn at 1:26 a.m. in what appears to have been a consensual relationship. (The French magazine Le Point reported implausibly in July that Strauss-Kahn had even admitted to his wife, the heiress and former television personality Anne Sinclair, that he had had sex with three women that Friday and Saturday as “a last glass before hitting the road for the [French] presidential campaign.”)

What’s more certain is that after checking out of the hotel at 12:28 p.m. on May 14, Strauss-Kahn went to lunch with his youngest daughter, Camille, who had been studying at Columbia University. From there, he went to JFK airport to catch Air France Flight 23 overnight to Paris. The next day he was supposed to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. But as he waited to board the plane, Strauss-Kahn apparently couldn’t find his IMF cell phone. On another mobile, he called the Sofitel to ask if it had been found in the suite. The police, now on the scene at the hotel, had an employee say yes (although in fact the phone was not there) and ask where they could get it to him. The Air France terminal, Gate 4, he said, and asked them to rush to get it to JFK before takeoff. Instead, the Port Authority police were notified, and just before the plane was ready to taxi away from the gate, they took Strauss-Kahn off it. “The NYPD need to speak with you about an incident in the city at a hotel,” one of the cops told him.

While Strauss-Kahn languished in “the box,” the interview room at the Manhattan Special Victims Squad in Harlem, Nafissatou Diallo was taken to the hospital for examination, then back to the hotel with the police to walk through what had happened to her, showing them where she stood, where she fell, where she spit. As the day wore on, she became increasingly frantic about her daughter alone at home. Finally the police took her back to the Bronx at 3 in the morning. Neither she nor the girl could sleep. “She was so scared,” Diallo remembered.

But when Diallo watched the morning news, she was terrified: “I watched Channel 7 and they say this is [the] guy—I don’t know—and he is going to be the next president of France. And I think they are going to kill me.” The phone started to ring in her apartment as reporters found her number. Others appeared at her door. She woke her daughter and told her to pack her bag and get ready to stay with a relative. She told the girl how powerful DSK must be: “Now everybody say everything about me, all the bad things.” The girl tried to reassure her mother. “She says, ‘Please, Mom, don’t hurt yourself. I know one day the truth will come out.’ I was so happy when she said that.”

That afternoon, Diallo went back to the Special Victims Squad to look at a lineup of five men. “My heart was like this,“ she says, patting her chest. But she knew him immediately. “No. 3,” she said, and left as quickly as she could. Later she was housed in a hotel with her daughter for weeks, almost incommunicado, neither of them allowed cell phones after they were placed in protective custody by prosecutors. It would be almost two months before she was allowed to return to her apartment to pick up her possessions. “I don’t know why I have to do these things,” she says. “Is it because he is so powerful?”

To this day, we do not have DSK’s account of what happened in suite 2806. Since his arrest, Strauss-Kahn has shielded himself with highly skilled lawyers and investigators who have kept his version of events off the public record. His lawyer, William Taylor, told NEWSWEEK, “What disgusts me is an effort to pressure the prosecutors with street theater, and that is fundamentally wrong.” To charges of criminal sexual assault, attempted rape, and related offenses, Strauss-Kahn entered a plea of not guilty. Meanwhile, his supporters have attacked the maid’s account, her reputation, her background, and her associations. But Strauss-Kahn’s antecedents surfaced with a vengeance as well.

In 2008 DSK admitted to an affair with a subordinate at the IMF. Speaking to investigators, he called it “a personal mistake and a business mistake.” In July a young French journalist and novelist, Tristane Banon, filed charges against him in Paris for what she claims was an attempted rape in a Left Bank apartment where she went to interview him in 2003. She told fellow guests during a TV appearance in 2007 that he had come after her like “a chimpanzee in rut,” and her account bears some similarities to Diallo’s as she describes a man who seems to lose control completely when at the height of sexual desire. Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, is an ambitious politician in her own right who is often identified with Strauss-Kahn’s rivals in the French Socialist Party. She recently claimed that she herself had had consensual but “brutal” sex with him in 2000. Among DSK’s acquaintances from Paris to Washington to New York, dinner-party conversation is rife with tales of close calls and wild encounters. One French magazine calls him “Dr. Strauss and Mr. Kahn.” He also has long enjoyed a reputation as being hugely charming and seductive.

DNA evidence in suite 2806—the result of all that spitting that mingled the maid’s saliva and Strauss-Kahn’s sperm—makes it virtually impossible to deny there was a sexual encounter between DSK and Diallo. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers raised the possibility early on that it was consensual and have left it to others to speculate about the circumstances under which that might have been the case: that Diallo expected money that she did not receive, or that the sex got rougher and more aggressive than she would accept. The New York Post published stories attributed to an anonymous source that claimed Diallo was at least a part-time prostitute. Her lawyers, Kenneth Thompson and Douglas Wigdor, are now suing the Post, saying the story is false. The newspaper stands by its story.

In her interview with NEWSWEEK, Diallo didn’t disguise her anger at Strauss-Kahn. “Because of him they call me a prostitute,” she said. “I want him to go to jail. I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money.” She said she hoped God punishes him. “We are poor, but we are good,” she said. “I don’t think about money.”

Perhaps. But on the day of the incident, by Diallo’s own account, she made two telephone calls. One was to her daughter. The other call was to Blake Diallo, a Senegalese who is from the same ethnic group but no relation. He manages a restaurant, the Cafe 2115 in Harlem, where West Africans gather to eat, talk, politic, and sometimes listen to concerts. Nafissatou describes Blake as “a friend,” and one of the first things he did for her after the incident was to find her a personal-injury lawyer on the Internet.

More problematic were a series of phone calls that Nafissatou Diallo received from Amara Tarawally, whose uncle owned the bodega where Diallo worked when she first came to the United States. Originally from Sierra Leone, he divided his time between New York and Arizona, where he sold T shirts and fake designer handbags. But last year he was busted in a sting operation run by Arizona police when, according to cops, he paid them almost $40,000 cash for more than 100 pounds of marijuana.

On July 1, The New York Times reported the existence of a taped conversation between Diallo and Tarawally. The article said they talked the day after the incident at the Sofitel and quoted a “well-placed law enforcement official”: “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’” But at the time, prosecutors did not have a full transcript of the call, which had been conducted in a dialect of Fulani, Diallo’s language. The quote was a paraphrase from a translator’s summary of the tape, and the actual words are somewhat different, sources told NEWSWEEK.

In July NEWSWEEK talked to Tarawally in Arizona. He insisted that the quotation must refer to a later conversation and in any case was taken out of context. Diallo said she no longer talks to Tarawally. He used her bank account to move tens of thousands of dollars around the country without informing her, she said. She denied he ever gave her money to spend. “Like I say, he was my friend,” Diallo told us. “I used to trust him.”

But the list of reasons for prosecutors to doubt Diallo’s credibility does not begin or end with Tarawally. In a letter to DSK’s defense lawyers on June 30, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. cited several lies and deceptions in her past. She had claimed deductions for two children on her taxes instead of one. She had understated her income to get cheaper housing. And, most important, she had lied on her asylum application.

Diallo, a widow, came to the United States in 2003, leaving her then–7-year-old daughter behind in Guinea with a brother. Having entered the U.S. under dubious circumstances and without working papers, she lived with family members for some time, eking out an income braiding hair and then working in a bodega in the Bronx.

In late 2003 Diallo applied for asylum. Because she had suffered genital mutilation as a child, and doctors confirmed that fact in a medical report, she probably would have qualified for asylum in any case, given current law and practices. And she insists she was raped after curfew by two soldiers. (This is not unheard of in Guinea. In 2009 soldiers conducted mass rapes and killed as many as 160 people in a Conakry sports stadium, according to human-rights organizations.) But bad as the realities were in Diallo’s homeland, she admits the account that she gave the U.S. government on her asylum application was heavily embellished. Her fictionalized narrative worked to get her a green card and allow her to bring her child to America. But her past misstatements may make it impossible to win a criminal case against DSK based on her testimony.

Prosecutors are likely weeks away from making a decision on whether to proceed with the -charges. They remain confident that the forensic evidence shows a sexual encounter and impressed by the consistency of the story Diallo told to two maid supervisors, two hotel security guards, hospital personnel, and detectives during the first 24 hours. The prosecution team has “no idea what it is going to do yet,” a person close to the case said. The investigators are “treating it like any other case that runs into these problems, and that means gathering all the evidence.”

Given the issues of Diallo’s credibility, investigators have been building a “suspect profile” of DSK, interviewing other women who claim to have been assaulted or who had consensual affairs, trying to establish a pattern of behavior and comparing it to Diallo’s account. In mid-July they talked with the lawyer for Tristane Banon. Though not required to do so, New York prosecutors have begun the process of asking French authorities to let her speak to U.S. officials, providing the alleged victim some political cover in her home country, where the DSK case is a media rage.

Almost immediately after the indictment was secured and long before the public knew of the problems with Diallo’s past, prosecutors began digging around in her financial records and interviewing friends, looking for any evidence of extortion or criminal activity. The review found ties to shady acquaintances and suspicious transactions, to be sure, but no evidence of a premeditated plot against Strauss-Kahn.

It’s possible that Diallo is a woman who has lived for the last few years on the margins of quasi-illegal immigrant society in the Bronx, associating with petty con artists and dubious types trying to get a foothold in this country. But that does not preclude her having been the victim of a predatory and powerful man. Nor does it mean she will rule out an attempt to make some money from the situation.

Given the climate of suspicion that developed around her, Diallo’s last three encounters with authorities, on June 8, 20, and 28, were difficult sessions, as prosecutors grilled her like a defendant. The mistrust between Vance and Diallo’s lawyers boiled over on July 1, when Thompson held a news conference in front of the courthouse and accused the district attorney of abandoning Diallo.

Since then, both sides have tried to smooth matters over. Thompson has signaled a willingness to let his client be interviewed again if prosecutors let her see a transcript of the disputed prison call, and that is something prosecutors say they are willing to do. But the distrust and tensions could be renewed again after prosecutors learn of Diallo’s decision to go public after weeks of remaining in protective custody. Diallo says she gave the interview to NEWSWEEK to correct the misleading portrayal of her in the media. Her account of what happened has remained the same all along, she says. “I tell them about what this man do to me. It never changed. I know what this man do to me,” she says.

Looking to the future, Diallo says she would love to go back to working in a hotel, but maybe in the laundry. She wants never again to have to knock on a door and call out: “Hello? Housekeeper.”


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Sources: ABC News, CNN, Newsweek, Google Maps

Tax Day 2010 Best Ever! Voters Enjoy Lowest Taxes In Years! Tips

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Today Is The Best Tax Day Of Your Life


Almost nobody likes tax day, but people may look back nostalgically on tax day 2010 and those of earlier years because, almost certainly, taxes are going up in the future, and they may go up a lot. With hindsight, tax day 2010 may seem almost dreamy.

Why?

For starters, almost half of U.S. households aren't paying any income taxes on their 2009 earnings. The exact figure is 47 percent, says the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, two think tanks. Among elderly households, 55 percent pay no income tax; among all households with children (including those headed by single parents), the nonpaying share is 54 percent.

By contrast, only 38 percent of married couples filing jointly don't pay. (Of course, this doesn't mean people pay no federal taxes; about three quarters of households pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than in income taxes.)

The personal exemption and standard deduction, combined with the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, shield many poor and middle-class families from the income tax.

In 2009 they got extra protection from President Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit, which was $400 for single workers (phasing out at $75,000 of income) and $800 for a couple (phasing out at $150,000 of income). Without that credit, probably only 40 percent of households or less wouldn't have paid income taxes.

President Obama has proposed that the credit be renewed for 2011. But given the massive federal budget deficits, there's a good chance that the credit will someday expire.

So that's one pressure for higher taxes. But it's peanuts compared to the real threat: an aging America. As almost everyone knows, the huge baby-boom generation is edging—or collapsing—into retirement. Its first members, born in 1946, turn 65 in 2011, when they will qualify for Medicare.

Some have already taken Social Security as early as 62 at a reduced rate. Boomers collecting benefits, combined with uncontrolled health costs, are the underlying engine for rising federal spending and endless budget deficits.

To which there's at least one obvious solution: raise taxes. By all estimates, the budget outlook is daunting. The latest projections of the Congressional Budget Office reckon the cumulative deficits under President Obama's policies to be $12.7 trillion from 2009 to 2020.

In 2020 the estimated annual deficit will be $1.25 trillion, or 5.6 percent of the economy (gross domestic product), despite assumed "full employment" of 5 percent.

And the deficits get larger with every succeeding year. Given unavoidable uncertainties, these precise projections are likely to prove wrong. But their basic message seems incontestable: there's a large and growing gap between the government's promises and the existing tax base.

How big a tax increase would be needed to close the gap? Well, huge. To put things in perspective, all federal taxes (income, payroll, and excise) averaged 18.1 percent of GDP from 1970 to 2009.

Under CBO's assumptions about Obama's policies, taxes in 2020 would already be slightly higher, at 19.6 percent of GDP. But on top of that, there'd need to be a further tax boost approaching a third to balance the budget, because spending is projected at 25.2 percent of GDP. Needless to say, this would be the largest tax burden in U.S. history, even including World War II.

A recent study by Rosanne Altshuler, Katherine Lim, and Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center shows what this would mean for income tax rates. Their study uses earlier and somewhat more optimistic CBO projections.

Moreover, the study assumes only that the budget deficit is cut to 2 percent of GDP—not that it's balanced. Still, income tax rates would have to rise sharply to reach even this goal. If all income tax rates were increased proportionately, today's lowest rate of 10 percent would go to 15 percent and the highest rate of 35 percent would go to 52 percent.

If only today's top two tax rates of 33 percent and 35 percent were raised, the new top rates would be 86 percent and 91 percent. At those astronomical levels, the study says, the well-off and wealthy would work less and pursue aggressive tax avoidance. Tax revenues would suffer.

These bleak estimates demonstrate why politicians of both parties have avoided confronting the government's long-term budget deficits. Anything they might do—raising taxes or cutting retirement benefits such as Social Security and Medicare—risks a public backlash.

Some experts urge new taxes, such as a value-added tax or energy taxes. Others talk of "broadening" the income-tax base by eliminating or reducing tax breaks (deductions, credits, or exemptions).

But of course, none of these steps would be popular. Hardly anyone wants to pay higher taxes, and most big tax breaks (the home-mortgage interest deduction, credits for college tuition, the charitable deduction) benefit major constituencies.

Almost all the pressures on taxes are in the same direction: up. It will be hard for President Obama to keep his promise not to raise taxes on households with incomes below $200,000 (for singles) and $250,000 (for couples).

It will be hard for economic conservatives or the tea party to achieve meaningful tax reductions. Just about everyone will be tempted to deplore federal budget deficits—and do nothing about them. But this escape route may close; many economists warn that endlessly large deficits risk big jumps in interest rates. Someday, higher taxes may be unavoidable.

So, the lesson for tax day 2010 is simple: enjoy it while you can. It's not going to get any easier.




Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, Newsweek, Youtube

"Palin's Book Going Rogue Is Based On Fabrications,"...Says Nicolle Wallace (McCain's Camp)

Nicolle Wallace responds to Palin charges. Rachel Maddow discusses statements by former McCain campaign staffer Nicolle Wallace to The Rachel Maddow Show about Sarah Palin's new book with Ana Marie Cox of Air America Radio.

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McCain adviser: Palin’s book is fiction


Former McCain campaign senior adviser Nicolle Wallace says Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue" is "based on fabrications," and that the basis for Palin’s depictions of her and former McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt as villains "took place entirely in her imagination."

In a statement to The Rachel Maddow Show, the former McCain spokesperson repeatedly used the word "fiction" to describe Palin's narrative and echoed criticisms by other former McCain staffers.

"She probably has a legitimate complaint that things could have been better conceived and executed," Wallace said. "A book about that would have been painful but not entirely unfair," Wallace told an msnbc producer in an off-camera, on-the-record interview.

Wallace took particular issue with Palin's version of her Katie Couric interview, which did not cast the former vice presidential candidate in a favorable light.

Working Mom interview?

Palin described thinking the Couric interview would be lighthearted and fun. "It was supposed to be ... a working mom speaking with [another] working mom and the challenges that we have with teenage daughters," she told "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in an interview broadcast Monday.

Wallace told msnbc that this is "rationalization or justification or fiction." "We set up this interview on the day of the U.N. General Assembly, with a walk-and-talk in front of the U.N. It was never made as two working gals ... that was supposed to be to highlight her foreign policy savvy."

In her book, Palin writes that the campaign selected Couric to interview her as a favor, to give the evening anchor "a career boost."

"She just has such low self-esteem," Palin recounts Wallace as saying.

Wallace said that was also "fiction," adding, "I am not someone who throws around the word 'self-esteem.' Katie Couric was selected because we did evening anchors ... I did not advocate an interview for anyone I am friends with."

"I think she fixated on me from very early on. She hated me from the beginning," continued Wallace.

Trying to quell feud

On Sunday, NBC News reported that McCain specifically asked his former aides not to do television interviews rebutting Palin's charges and to avoid escalating the feud. In an interview with the Hill newspaper, McCain reportedly said he enjoyed reading Palin's book. "I hope she sells lots of them," McCain said.

Palin continues to make the rounds to promote her book. In an interview with Barbara Walters broadcast Tuesday, Palin says that a 2012 presidential bid is "not on my radar," but wouldn't rule out playing some role in the next presidential election.

"My ambition, if you will, my desire is to help our country in whatever role that may be, and I cannot predict what that will be, what doors will be open in the year 2012."

In her interview with Walters, Palin said she's received plenty of offers during the past few months, including to open up her family for a reality show. She has rejected that, but also said she wasn't sure whether a talk show would be best for her family.

"I'd probably rather write than talk," she told Walters.

The former Alaska governor also discussed David Letterman, whom she criticized for a sexually suggestive joke made at the expense of her teenage daughter in June. Palin told Walters she has ruled out an appearance on Letterman's late night TV show. "I don't think that I'd want to boost his ratings," she said.

Despite the internal squabbling and ultimate loss, Palin said she would go through the experience again. She "would do it again in a heartbeat," she told Walters.



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Sources: MSNBC, Harpo Productions, Newsweek, Think Progress, Youtube, Google Maps

Former SCOTUS Nominee Robert Bork Slams Sotomayor

Newsweek----

His name has become a verb, one so crisp and eloquent that it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary: if you've been blocked from appointment to public office, you've been "borked." The term's namesake is Robert Bork, whose path to the Supreme Court was derailed in 1987 by a hostile Senate. As Sonia Sotomayor braces for the same firing line, Bork, 82, sat down with NEWSWEEK for a rare interview. Excerpts:

NWPresident Obama has spoken of empathy as his key standard for choosing judicial nominees. What do you think of that approach?

Bork: I don't know exactly what empathy means. I suppose at a minimum it means you want a judge who will depart from the meaning of the constitution when a sympathetic case arises. It does seem to raise a warning that we're talking about a judge who does not follow the law.

NW: And I take it that you don't approve?

Bork: You are quite correct.

NW: What are your thoughts about Judge Sotomayor's nomination?

Bork: I think it was a bad mistake. Her comments about the wise Latina suggest identity-group jurisprudence. She also has a reputation for bullying counsel. And her record is not particularly distinguished. Far from it. And it is unusual to nominate somebody who states flatly that she was the beneficiary of affirmative action. But I can't believe she will be any worse than some recent white male appointees.

NW: Anyone you'd care to name?

Bork: I could, but you don't want the estate of these people suing me, do you?

NW: As it's currently composed, this is sometimes called a conservative court.

Bork: I don't see it at all. It's a very left-leaning, liberal court.

NW: Could you elaborate? Compared to what?

Bork: Well, compared to what the Constitution actually says. They tend to enact the agenda or the preferences of a group that thinks of itself as the intellectual elite.

NW: How have you been struck by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito since they were appointed?

Bork: My general impression of them is quite good. The justice up there who I most admire is Clarence Thomas. I notice that when he and Scalia differ—it's not that often, but when they do—I tend to agree with Thomas.

NW: What's the responsible approach for Senate Republicans now to take if they share some of the concerns you've expressed about Judge Sotomayor?

Bork: I don't think they ought to filibuster. That would be very bad press for them. But I don't think deferring to the president is always a good idea. I would suggest that they air the issue so that people understand what the objection is. And then vote against, which will not affect anything. Or, if they air the issue thoroughly, some could even vote in favor of confirmation. But you've got to be clear what the problem is.

NW: Any particular issues or cases come to mind?

Bork: No. I've read them, but I no longer worry about those things, because I don't teach it anymore. In fact I refuse to teach constitutional law, because it's so obviously politics and not law. The incoherence of some of those opinions is astounding. If you want to know what the constitution means, you will not learn it from the court.

NW: Can you describe your Judicial philospohy?

Bork: Well what it is Originalism. Which means you try to interpret the Constitution according to the principles as they were originally understood by the people who drafted it, by the people who voted for it. And that's neither conservative or liberal. But the court has moved so far to the left that any correction back to the proper central position would look like conservative activism to some people.

NW: Is there a principled definition of what Judicial Activism is?

Bork: Sure. A judge is an activist when he announces principles or reaches results that cannot plausibly be related to the actual Constitution.

NW: On another front, the court has decided three cases against the Bush administration on Guantanamo, the most recent one giving habeas corpus rights to supposed enemy combatants. What do you make of that whole line of cases?

Bork: It strikes me as preposterous to begin to extend rights to enemy combatants that we never extended to captured Germans, Italians and Japanese in World War II. It's also dangerous once we begin to judicialize the conduct of a war. It can only make our forces less effective. But something has changed in the attitude. I think it was the invasion of Grenada, when a commanding officer refused to let the press come to the front lines, and a reporter said "in World War II we were allowed in the front lines," and the commander said "in World War II you were on our side."

NW: Your own confirmation hearing in 1987 is often called a watershed for the process.

Bork: It wouldn't have been but for the fact that I looked like the fifth vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. And in modern politics, that is a subject that raises hysteria.

NW: Would you have been the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?

Bork: Oh, of course. It's one of the most corrupt decisions I've ever seen.

NW: Was it your view that the law on abortion should be left totally to the Democratic process?

Bork: I oppose Abortion. But an amazing number of people thought that I would outlaw Abortion. They didn't understand that not only did I have no desire to do that, but I had no power to do it. If you overrule Roe v. Wade, abortion does not become illegal. State legislatures take on the subject. The abortion issue has produced divisions and bitterness in our politics that countries don't have where abortion is decided by legislatures. And both sides go home, after a compromise, and attempt to try again next year. And as a result, it's not nearly the explosive issue as it is here where the court has grabbed it and taken it away from the voters.

NW: What was it like being in the middle of that confirmation hearing? It's fair to say that you were attacked from coast to coast.

Bork: It was really quite harrowing. It got to the point where I could not read the paper because every reference to the proceedings was really adverse to me. So I quit reading everything but the sports section. And then one of the sportswriters took a crack at me. [Laughs.] This kind of stuff was new to my wife, and so she wanted us to read a psalm every morning. I finally came to one about praying to God to break the teeth of my enemies. That seemed to be an adequate sentiment.

NW: I recall one of the people who were working on your confirmation hearings said that "you didn't really prepare for a knife fight."

Bork: The White House didn't do anything. They didn't offer any advice. In fact, the only people I talked to in the administration said I was doing fine. [Laughs.] I guess I wasn't doing fine. The way I was painted by the adversary camp and the news media and so forth, Sen. [Howard] Metzenbaum asked, "Why do women fear Judge Bork?" And [Attorney General] William French Smith responded, "Because they've been lied to."

Sources: Newsweek, USdoj.gov, The Situationist, Black Liberal