KBR has released a typically douchey statement:

"However, the decision validates what KBR has maintained all along; that the arbitration process is truly neutral and works in the best interest of the parties involved."

However, their actions tell a different story. Unlike Jamie Leigh Jones, (who won the right to take her lawsuit to court), Barker's claim was kicked back to arbitration. Now that the settlement is in Barker's favor, KBR is still trying to fight their own system:

Barker said she was upset KBR is trying to modify the award.

"They are still dragging it out," she said. "They didn't win and now they want to amend the award. You can't with binding arbitration. How is that fair?"

(Image via ABC News)

Woman Awarded $3M In Assault Claim Against KBR [TPM]

Earlier: Jamie Leigh Jones Takes On Pro-KBR Senators On Rachel Maddow
Republicans: Defending Rape Victims Is A "Political" Move
Sen. Franken Fights KBR On Behalf Of Rape Victims
After 2 Years, Court Rules Gang Rape Unrelated To Employment
Iraq Sexual Assault Victim: "I Felt Safer On The Convoys With The Army Than I Ever Did Working For KBR"

Maddow made a point to mention that she reached out to all thirty senators who voted no on the bill amendment for comment - and none of them responded. Maddow also asks Jones and Kelly directly about their thoughts on the senators that voted no, and Session's accusation that this was "a political move."

Jones:

"Hopefully the thirty senators will have a change of heart [...] Maybe if they tried to understand how they would feel if their daughter or wife or somebody was in my position, how they would feel if it was to go in front of an arbitrator, maybe they'd change their position in it."

Kelly:

"If this amendment had been in place when Jamie went to Iraq, her rape, most likely, would have never have happened. [...] [Companies like Halliburton/NBR] are only going to implement [rules and protections] if their actions are exposed to the light of day.

Earlier: Sen. Franken Fights KBR On Behalf Of Rape Victims
Republicans: Defending Rape Victims Is A "Political" Move

On the surface, the amendment, attached to a defense appropriations bill, may seem a little complicated. It seems less so when you learn why it's necessary. Former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones says she was drugged by her coworkers and gang-raped so brutally that she awoke "with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn‚ which would later require reconstructive surgery." She was then locked in a shipping container, presumably to keep her from testifying, and her rape kit and other evidence went mysteriously "missing." When she tried to sue, she was informed that her contract required her to address the allegations in arbitration instead, a process which FishbowlLA's Pandora Young says "overwhelmingly favors the employers." The Guardian also spoke with two other women whose claims of assault or harassment had been ignored by Halliburton/KBR.

Not dealing with companies that actively keep rape victims from justice seems, Stewart says, like a "slam dunk." But not for Sen. Jeff Sessions. He says,

Instead of eliminating arbitration, we should probably be looking for ways to utilize mediation and arbitration more in these kind of disputes.

Makes sense — after all, it's really important for rape victims and the companies that hold them in locked shipping containers while disposing of evidence come to an amicable settlement in a friendly, non-litigious atmosphere. Bonus points if that atmosphere is controlled by the company, as opposed to an impartial court. Because since outsourcing the Iraq war to Halliburton worked so well, we might as well outsource the settlement of rape claims to them too.

Sessions also calls Franken's bill "a political amendment [...] representing a sort of political attack directed at Halliburton." As Stewart points out, this accusation rings a bit hollow, especially since four of the Senators who voted against Franken's bill recently spoke out in favor of an amendment to withdraw government funding from Acorn. Of that amendment, Sen. Richard Shelby said "we've got to get corruption out of any organization that's taking taxpayers' money" — apparently that applies only if those organizations are, you know, liberal. But the real money quote comes from Stewart: "If to protect Halliburton, you have to side against rape victims, you might want to rethink your allegiances."

'The Daily Show' Examines Republican Opposition To Anti-Rape Bill [FishbowlLA]
Rape Case To Force US Defence Firms Into The Open [Guardian]

MOE: Ummmmm is it just me or is today, like, all about POLICY??
MEGAN: It does seem like my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none brain when it comes to policy issues might come in handy this morning! Where do you want to start?

MOE: Maybe with the incredibly astute words of McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic aide to Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, dismissed the Obama strategy as "classic industrial policy which shows a lack of faith in private markets."

MEGAN: Obama's got this part right though: "How much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is."
MOE: I mean, what have the private markets done to instill faith in you lately? Are we supposed to be like Job with these things?
MOE: right.
MOE: This isn't something I would mind seeing: "Americans with incomes above $2.8 million would see their after-tax income decrease by 11.5%."
MEGAN: Hardly anyone pays the actual income tax rate because of loopholes. If I heard my now former boss say it once, I heard it 15 times, if you eliminate deductions and credits, you could reduce the corporate rate to, like, 25% without losing revenue. You could lower personal rates even further and eliminate taxes for a percentage of the population. It's an incredibly inefficient system.

MEGAN: I did an analysis of the candidates' tax plans on young single women. Obama's is better.
MOE: Did you see this handy graf on the rebirth of the plutocracy? Just before the Great Depression the top .01% of households averaged 892 times the household income of the households in the bottom 90%, and that number of course plummeted and only really began steadily rising in 1980 to the point that it's now 976. These are imperfect numbers, of course — how big is the top .01%? How about the top .1%? Etc. etc. But it's a nice visual aid!

MOE: The income required to make the Top 400 list of earners has tripled since 1992, AFTER ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION.

MEGAN: I mean, the question is, from a policy perspective, is whether that's truly undesirable and what can be honestly done about it. Given the nature of the international financial sector and personal and currency mobility, would heavy taxation be effective? Can we limit income? Can you create or force businesses to create better oversight and board systems to protect shareholder interests, say, with a mandate that multimillion dollar compensation packages that aren't effectively tied to long-term performance are considered not in shareholders' best interests? I don't think either of the candidates has really talked about serious policies aimed at resolving income inequality because it's such a squishy issue to get your arms around let alone resolve from a policy perspective.
MOE: A few things: 1. Well yeah I think income inequality is truly undesirable from a policy perspective. 2. And the only way to deal is tax the everliving shit out of capital gains and use that money to beef up the SEC and education. Because the people who set executive compensation, the people who "look out for the interests of shareholders," the people who monitor the people allegedly looking out for those interests, the people who kick out executives for underperformance and are charged with luring in a new guy to "clean house" — all those people are part of this racket. And one, their version of "long term" is at most five years. And two, they set the yardsticks, the standards. They're all friends and acquaintances and they all know exactly how much everyone gets paid and they've pushed the baseline up up up.
MEGAN: What is "taxing the shit" out of capital gains? Back up to 25%? Higher? Won't they just try to pull some work around if that happens, the way private equity funds are just an elaborate way around taxation?
MOE: Well every policy creates loopholes, and certainly you'd probably see some money shift to less taxable assets, not that we didn't see that already with the real estate bubble, but none of the hundreds of executives indicted on backdating their stock options worked for a private company, you know? I mean, eventually the big payoff in private equity tends to come from the public markets, right? Or an acquisition? The thing that people need to get through their thick fucking heads is that yeah, there's always a greater and greatest fool losing out here, and we've missed out on a lot of the fundamental zero-sumness of corporate earnings growth because our standards of living are being propped up by artificially low standards in China, which China maintains as part of its INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

MEGAN: Hypothetically speaking, then, not that this is in my personal best interest as a homeowner, one of the ways to keep people from transferring assets into real estate to reap tax benefits would be to reduce the tax preference for home ownership and for real estate more generally.
MOE: Right. Although I don't know if you'd do that in the middle of a housing crisis?
MEGAN: Which, by the way, would probably have helped slow the bubble, and would slow the growth in home prices because creating a tax preference creates a market for people seeking to exploit it and it pretty quickly gets built into the price
MOE: Well yes.
MEGAN: Well, why wouldn't you? I don't know that it could hurt anymore now. If you wanted to be fair you could grandfather it or give some sort of one-time rebate payment or something and call it a fucking day.

MEGAN: The mortgage interest deduction and state and local tax deduction (which includes property taxes) are two of the largest deductions in the tax system, that are taken advantage of almost exclusively by people earning above the median income. They're also, along with having kids, the main reason people in the so-called "middle class" end up paying the Alternative Minimum Tax, though "middle class" is kind of a stretch for someone making $100, $120K/year when median income is $45K, but I'll accept that definition. Obama's willing to go up to $250K.
MOE: I wonder if there is like, a rich folks CPI that tracks the rising costs of… luxury real estate, private education, corian countertops, that sort of thing.

MEGAN: Not, by the way, that this bears any relationship to the conversation at hand, but coffee may be helping us live longer. I'm hoping alcohol consumption offsets that.
MOE: Okay so I'm creeping through his interview and, you know, the Journal basically says "well Clinton said a lot of this stuff but then he became obsessed with the deficit and it's not like THAT'S not a problem right now" and Obama says like "well now we have energy problems too so there's that." Like there's this meme out there that alternative energy is going to become this huge new sector of the economy but like who is going to lead that?

MOE: Ha I like how it ends

WSJ: A lot of folks would say cutting corporate tax rates are equivalent growth.
Sen. Obama: I don't want a distorting effect of our tax code on corporate decision making. But that's different from just saying you know, let's run up the deficit another couple of trillion dollars …

MEGAN: And after all those bonuses, too!
MOE: Yeah they're only on track to get $19 billion this Xmas sad sad world. But I don't know, can we really make the argument that it would be societally optimal for that money to …maybe find other uses for itself?
MEGAN: Ooch, Obama is co-opting the Republican small government ethos, but with a delish Democratic twist — making it, you know, actually effective.

I think the danger is always to equate size of government with effectiveness, and I don't. It's not clear to me that we want a larger government, but we certainly want a government that is setting more intelligent priorities and using taxpayer dollars more wisely and structuring tax policies that are conducive to long-term economic growth. As I mentioned during the speech, there may be programs that no longer work. There's certainly all kinds of previsions in our tax code that are antiquated and are not spurring economic growth. We've got offices like the patent office that are outdated to take advantage of new discoveries here in the United States.

Republicans have gotten so focused at starving the beast or cutting off the snake's head that they've forgotten they can actually do proactive things to reduce gov't. Or, in the case of this administration, they haven't wanted to reduce its size.

MOE: Thomas Frank doesn't have a new column out yet I guess that happens tomorrow but he changed the name to "The Tilting Yard." Weird.
MEGAN: Is it, like, a Cervantes reference? Is he Don Quixote?

MOE: Well he had the same column name, "Fighting Words" as Hitchens, whose last column on Hillary and sexism is the most Hitchens thing Hitchens has ever written, right down to the Juanita Broaddrick ref:

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate's spouse (and campaigner in chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for—among other things—obstruction of justice.
MOE: The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination had implicitly relied on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the rancor of the "white working class." The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate's eyes had welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate had said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith "as far as I know." The first time that the loser in the delegate count had failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.

MEGAN: I tried to write something about it, but it's so hard to respond to stupid sometimes.

MEGAN: This is, after all, the same dude that ejaculates at the thought of Bill Clinton. Granted, it's at his humiliation, but I don't think that makes him any less of a gay, S&M fetishist with a hair trigger. I feel sorry for his wife.
MOE: So maybe Tilting Yard was a dig at Hitchens who I bet 1. gets it and 2. has had on more than one occasion, like, epically tilted into something mid-rant at a party or something, but that is just my guess.
MEGAN: Well, if by "tilted" you mean "stuck his small British peen into the vagina of a 19 year old with hero worship in her eyes," then, yes, he's done that at parties.
MOE: So guess what, I totally missed talking about torture again, or the Army official who claims he was fired for refusing to approve a billion dollars in shady fees to KBR, or like, drilling in the wildlife refuge or whatev. Do you have anything to say about this shit?
MEGAN: Oh, McCain doesn't want to drill in ANWR, he wants to drill along the CA/FL coasts, something that Bush and Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist and Arnie and the Republicans from all those states have opposed because it will ruin the views of Republican voters who hate high gas prices and environmentalism but love them their views.

MEGAN: Also, the KBR thing is just confirming what everyone already knew, which is that pressure was applied at some point. I am amazed that no one caught the part where the Administration recently signed a 10-year contract with KBR to provide services to our troops in Iraq. That's, you know, until 2018.
MEGAN: We also didn't talk about the floods will raise food prices or the Chinese expat newspaper article about Obama's skin color, but shit happens.

• The good news: there's a female marathon runner in Philly who helped the homeless by starting a running club with them. She seems nice. They also have a job training program. [CNN]
  
• Onto the bad news! There's yet another female KBR contractor coming forward to say that she was raped in Iraq. Same old story, really: a violent gang-rape followed by intimidation, the run-around, no consequences for the perpetrators and a non-disclosure agreement she was basically forced to sign to get anyone to investigate anything. [The Nation]
  
• Oh, and in case you weren't pissed off enough, a public health database funded by the federal government has decided to make it all-but impossible for the average library user to find information about abortion. [Women's Health News]

• Katie Couric hosting a Presidential debate? Do. Not. Want. [WaPo]
• Speaking of that oh-so-uncontroversial race for the Democratic nomination, March fundraising numbers are out today. Obama bested Clinton 2-to-1 in dollar terms, and about half of his donors were newbies. [Fox News]
• John Edwards has put his well-shod foot down and refused to be the Veep candidate this time. Oh, Angry Johnny, there are definitely a couple of Jezebels in hell now. [WaPo]
• The other pissed-off Johnny though isn't scared of nuthin', and he'll be damned if any earpieces are going to follow him around any sooner than they have to. Of course, if we're taking bets about whose nutcases are more likely to shoot which candidate, McCain doesn't top that poll either. [WaPo]
• Oh, but the men with guns? Yeah, they're on the streets in Zimbabwe tonight. So much for a peaceful transition! [CNN]
• And you probably don't want to get on a plane any time soon, but you already knew that. Guess we spent so much time messing around with shoe bombers that we forget that airplanes can actually crash on their own. Whoops.

Pamela Jones and Linda Lindsey are two other women who were abused while working for KBR abroad. Jones, who ended up winning her private arbitration against KBR, said "it was known that if you started complaining that you could lose your job...They give you an 800 number to report. But then they shoved it under the rug, and they told me I was a pest." In the years since another "pest," Jamie Leigh Jones, spoke out last year, 38 other women have come forward with allegations against the company.

There are no hard statistics on the number of sexual assaults on contractors working overseas, the Times reports, because no one in the government is tracking them. What's more, KBR requires its employees to sign waivers agreeing to settle disputes in private arbitration, circumventing the US judicial system entirely. Continues the paper, "the Bush administration has not offered to develop a coordinated response to the problem."

Limbo For U.S. Women Reporting Iraq Assaults [New York Times]
U.S. Women Reporting Rapes In Iraq Remain In Limbo [International Herald Tribune]

Earlier: Defense Contractors: If It Wasn't For Diplomatic Immunity-Protected Rape, They'd Never Get Laid
How The Halliburton Rape Cases Explain Everything We Think About
"What, Don't You Always End Up In Need Of Reconstructive Surgery After A Night Of Good Consensual Sex?"

(Kicklighter's cronies say that the rape kit eventually ended up with State Department officials, though apparently not until after KBR had ample time to tamper with it. ABC News attempted to get to the bottom of the kit's whereabouts, but "An Army spokesman referred questions about the rape kit to the State Department, which declined to provide new information on the case.")

KBR still says that "the safety and security of all employees remains KBR's top priority." A commenter on ABC News' website sums up the situation pretty succinctly: "This 'alleged' rape happened on US Army turf. The Department of Defense should have a boot half way up someone's keister by now."

Pentagon Won't Probe KBR Rape Charges [ABC News]

Earlier: Defense Contractors: If It Wasn't For Diplomatic Immunity-Protected Rape, They'd Never Get Laid
"What, Don't You Always End Up In Need Of Reconstructive Surgery After A Night Of Good Consensual Sex?"

We were worried those military contractors in Iraq had maybe lost every last shred of their humanity. We were worried there was complete lawlessness. That the State Department had pretty much thrown up its hands at the whole place and left all its investigations of military contractor behavior to be led by a bunch of worthless perverts.

But no. Once again, it's clear they care about something, and that something may not be women, it may not be Iraqi civilians, but it is man's best friend.

And I guess that is something.

OMG They Killed A Puppy [Wonkette]
Earlier: Brave Troops Open Hotel Rwanda Of Puppies

Luckily, you know, her kinda-matronly ensemble convinced the investigator to advocate prosecuting Mokhtare, but it wasn't so easy convincing the Justice Department...Here's her story from Friday's 20/20.The full interview is here.