Month: November 2011

What the F%$#?

It appears that Lisa Riniker, the DA for Grant County, Wisconsin, has filed a felony prosecution against a 6 year old who was “playing doctor” with a 5 year old:

The parents of a Grant County boy who authorities have accused of first-degree sexual assault for playing doctor with a 5-year-old girl when he was 6 years old have filed a federal lawsuit against the county’s district attorney, a social worker and a former Sheriff’s Office investigator.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Madison, seeks $12 million in damages for alleged violations of the constitutional rights of the boy and his parents.
It names as defendants Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker, as well as Jan Moravits, a social worker with Grant County Social Services, and recently retired Grant County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Kopp.
…………
Among the suit’s claims is that the boy was selectively accused of a felony for playing doctor with the daughter of a Grant County political figure. It also alleges that the investigations by Kopp and Moravits were haphazard and biased in favor of the girl’s father because of his political status and that Riniker did not act reasonably in charging a 6-year-old with first-degree sexual assault.
…………
The boy, who is now 7 and has a developmental disability, has been diagnosed with stress disorders that medical professionals attribute to the defendants’ actions, according to the suit. He has experienced fear of going to jail, as well as anxiety, depression, sleepless nights, vomiting, crying and missed school time.
The lawsuit also asks that a judge issue a permanent injunction to stop Riniker’s “attempts to coerce” the boy’s parents into forcing the boy to admit guilt.
…………

It gets better. The DA got a judge to slap a gag order on the parents, and the charges would mandate that he register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life.

Seriously, this juxtaposes the worst of overzealous prosecution and political cronyism.

I despair for the whole human race right now.

BTW, here is the DA’s business contact info, if you feel compelled to express your opinion to her:

Lisa Riniker
130 W Maple St
Lancaster WI 53813
Phone: 608-723-4237
Fax: 608-723-4382

Regardless of party (I could not determine this from the Google machine), this is the worst elected official in all of Wisconsin.

H/t Americablog.

The filing is attached after the break:


Lawsuit Filed Against Overzealous DA who Charged 6 Year Old with Sexual Assault for Playing Doctor

Not Enough Bullets…

Here are two bullet points for the presentation

On the morning of July 21, before the Eton Park meeting, Paulson had spoken to New York Times reporters and editors, according to his Treasury Department schedule. A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie’s books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets.

A Different Message

At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.

Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives — at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.

After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.

Stock Wipeout

Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said.

The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information — to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.

I think that the next two paragraphs, while appearing to exonerate those involved, actually reveal the criminality:

There’s no evidence that they did so after the meeting; tracking firm-specific short stock sales isn’t possible using public documents.

And law professors say that Paulson himself broke no law by disclosing what amounted to inside information.

I understand where the reporter is coming from: He knows what could be done with information, and what probably was done with the information, but his legal department said that he could not connect the dots.

This is Wall Street and the “Vampire Squid” we are talking about.  Of course they would use this information to profit.  It’s what they do.

As to the morality of Hank Paulson, I will refer you to the fact that he does not use email, and “People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes.”

And this guy was the f%$#ing Secretary of the F%$#ing Treasury of the United States of America

The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke(pictured to the left), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an audit would have on markets. Nevertheless, the results of the first audit in the Federal Reserve’s nearly 100 year history were posted on Senator Sander’s webpage earlier this morning: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3

What was revealed in the audit was startling: $16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious — the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.

To place $16 trillion into perspective, remember that GDP of the United States is only $14.12 trillion. The entire national debt of the United States government spanning its 200+ year history is “only” $14.5 trillion. The budget that is being debated so heavily in Congress and the Senate is “only” $3.5 trillion. Take all of the outrage and debate over the $1.5 trillion deficit into consideration, and swallow this Red pill: There was no debate about whether $16,000,000,000,000 would be given to failing banks and failing corporations around the world.

Seriously, if we don’t start prosecuting these folks, this is never going to end, and by these folks, I mean Hank Paulson, and any member of the Federal Reserve who did anything beyond jaywalking.

We need to start throwing asses in jail, serious time in serious prisons, because if we don’t, they are just going to keep looting.

This is Odd

Well, the last thing didn’t work out, so I am looking for a job.

Basically, one of the rules of thumb is that November and December are pretty dead, particularly after Thanksgiving.

I’m not sure why, but since the first week of November, things, at least those things that are presented to me by recruiters, are on a fairly sharp upswing.

I’m not sure why this is so, and it could be that my experience is an outlier.

Frank Will Not Run for Reelection

He is citing redistricting as the reason for this:

US Representative Barney Frank, the state’s highest-profile congressman and one of the nation’s leading liberal voices after being among its first openly gay elected officials, announced today that he will not seek reelection next year.

The Newton Democrat faced the prospect of a bruising reelection campaign next year after surviving a brutal battle in 2010. He also would have run in an altered district that retained his Newton stronghold but encompassed more conservative towns like Walpole.

The PV on the new district was about +10 PV for the Dems, as opposed to about +18 PV in the old one, so the idea of a “bruising” reelection campaign is a joke.

I will take him at his word, that redistricting was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I also think that it is also an indication of the fact that he does not believe that Democrats will take back the house in 2012, and I also get the sense that he is sick and tired of fighting the Obama administration over financial regulation, where his own admittedly weak tea is watered down.

I’ll miss him.

Our Liberal Media (#wordingfail)

The following image has been floating around Twitter (hash tag #wordingfail). I added the emphasis.

It appears that CNN thinks that any accusations of sexual impropriety against a Republican is “false”.

I’m not sure how much is the increased corporate ownership/consolidation and how much of this is 40+ years of the ‘Phants playing the ref.

FWIW, the this time, it’s not just an allegation of sexual harassment, it’s an allegation of a 13 year long affair that ended a few months before he entered the Presidential race, and she has records of repeated cell phone calls and text messages.

Jon Stewart is rejoicing.

Deep Thought

If you blow chunks, make sure that the last thing you have had was a 40 ounce cherry Slurpee.*

*I did this today. I got a cherry Slurpee because I wanted to cut down on my caffeine. It looks like you are vomiting blood.
It’s how I handle extreme emotions. When the storm blows over, I heave, and yesterday, when we had to put Tudza to sleep. Charlie was inconsolable,§ Natalie was teary, and my wife was bumming.
It’s how I’ve handled such things since I was 7 years old. It scared the crap out of my parents at the time.§
§He couldn’t function. He wouldn’t eat dinner or breakfast, and he was hopeless at school until lunch. Now that he’s back to normalcy, he is back to functioning and eating, we are giving him, the ultimate comfort food, my baked spaghetti and cheese, because his appetite has returned with a vengeance.

And the Banksters Win Yet Again

It looks like the Euro Zone may be letting the big banks get 100¢ on the dollar for bad sovereign debts:

Euro zone states may ditch plans to impose losses on private bondholders should countries need to restructure their debt under a new bailout fund due to launch in mid-2013, four EU officials told Reuters on Friday.

The possible move helped push stocks up in Europe and the U.S.

Discussions are taking place against a backdrop of flagging market confidence in the region’s debt and as part of wider negotiations over introducing stricter fiscal rules to the EU treaty.

Euro zone powerhouse Germany is insisting on tighter budgets and private sector involvement (PSI) in bailouts as a precondition for deeper economic integration among euro zone countries.

Commercial banks and insurance companies are still expected to take a hit on their holdings of Greek sovereign bonds as part of the second bailout package being finalized for Athens.

But clauses relating to PSI in the statutes of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) — the permanent facility scheduled to start operating from July 2013 — could be withdrawn, with the majority of euro zone states now opposed to them.

The concern is that forcing the private sector bondholders to take losses if a country restructures its debt is undermining confidence in euro zone sovereign bonds. If those stipulations are removed, most countries in the euro zone argue, market sentiment might improve.

What is going on here is that the European Central Bank (ECB) was structured to eschew one of the most basic activities of a central bank, back-stopping debt sales in the presence of an investor panic.

The problem is that the ECB was structured largely in response to the German experience with hyperinflation in the 1920s, which led to the creation of the ECB as an organization committed to austerity and battling inflation to the exclusion of all other concerns.

I guess I kind of understand this, because, after all, they think that this period of extreme inflation led to the collapse of the German economy in the 1930s, and the rise of the Nazis, and WWII.

Of course, the German central bank of the 1930s was among the tightest of the central banks, and made the German depression particularly brutal, which could also tagged as leading to rise of the Nazis, and WWII.

Of course, if subscribe to the theory that roughly every century a war occurs in Europe, the parallels now, and 1914, when the Very Serious People in Europe, with the memory of the Napoleonic wars (1812), frantically tried to integrate the economies of Europe, which also sounds a lot like the entire Euro currency project.

My brother has predicted a new war in Europe, (see the comments)and this has led me to start looking at rather alarming echos of the past.

OK, Props to Obama on This One

If there is one area where he differs from his predecessor, it is his anti-trust enforcement.

Another example of this is the pushback against the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, where FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has come out strongly against the deal, and now has appeared to have killed it:

AT&T and T-Mobile USA edged closer to scrapping their proposed merger, saying on Thursday that they had withdrawn their application to the Federal Communications Commission to join their cellular phone operations.

Deutsche Telekom, the parent of T-Mobile, and AT&T said in a joint statement that they still intended to pursue the $39 billion merger and would prepare for a federal antitrust lawsuit that is seeking to block the deal. But the companies also said that AT&T planned to take a $4 billion charge against earnings to reflect the potential breakup fees that AT&T would have to pay Deutsche Telekom if the deal failed to go through.

The actions followed the decision this week by Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, that the merger did not meet the commission’s standard for approval. Mr. Genachowski sent other commissioners a proposed order to refer the case to an administrative law judge, the first step toward a commission move to block the deal, which would combine the second- and fourth-largest cellphone carriers in the United States.

The application withdrawal appears in part meant to prevent the F.C.C. from making public AT&T and T-Mobile records about the potential effects of the merger, records that could then be used by the Justice Department in the antitrust trial.

The companies have maintained publicly that the deal would not lessen competition and that it would create jobs in the United States. But the Justice Department has said that the merger would severely restrict competition, and F.C.C. officials have said that AT&T’s confidential filings indicate the merger would eliminate jobs.

The withdrawal of the F.C.C. application “is a tacit acknowledgment by AT&T that this story is all but over,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “The fat lady hasn’t started singing yet, but she’s holding the mike, and the band is about to play.”

While Genachowski is still too timid for my tastes, compared to the Republican appointees, particularly the execrable Michael Powell, he is doing a creditable job.

The Unbelievable Wankitude that is Sam Brownback

Seriously. It appears that a girl watching Sam Brownback address a mock legislature tweeted that he “sucked”, and Brownback’s office found her tweet and contacted school authorities:

A Kansas teenager is in trouble after mocking Gov. Sam Brownback during a mock legislative assembly for high school students.

Emma Sullivan, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village, was in Topeka on Monday as part of Kansas Youth in Government, a program for students interested in politics and government.

During the session, in which Brownback addressed the group, Sullivan posted on her personal Twitter page:

“Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”

On Tuesday, Sullivan was called to her principal’s office and told that the tweet had been flagged by someone on Brownback’s staff and reported to organizers of the Youth in Government program.

The principal “laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment,” Sullivan said. “He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.

“I’m mainly shocked that they would even see that tweet and be concerned about me,” she said. “I just honestly feel they’re making a lot bigger deal out of it than it actually was.”

Sullivan said the principal ordered her to write letters of apology to Brownback, the school’s Youth in Government sponsor, the district’s social studies coordinator and others.

Karl Krawitz, the school principal, did not return calls or e-mails Wednesday.

It goes without saying that Krawitz is a bully and a coward, full of demands when he’s leaning on a student, and silent when the press calls, though in all fairness, being a bully and a coward depending on circumstances is pretty much the definition of a Principal’s job.

That being said, the fact that any political operation decided to go after a teenager over a tweet is pathetic beyond belief.  This is “Michelle Malkin stalking a 12-year old over his support of S-Chip” pathetic.

It’s also deeply evil, and un-American.

Just when I think that the ‘Phants could not go any lower, I am disabused of this quaint notion.

Hopefully They’ll Get the Clue

Click for full size



H/t Buzzfeed for the pics


Look at his eyes. He is not a happy camper.

But I doubt it.

In any case, representatives of OWS have “Mic Checked”* Barack Obama:

President Obama was heckled on Tuesday during an appearance at a New Hampshire high school.

Obama had traveled north to the Granite State, which holds the nation’s first presidential primary, to discuss the economy and his proposal to extend a current payroll tax cut.

Just as the president started his speech, protesters, apparently from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, used the “human mic” technique to amplify their voices. It was unclear what the protesters were saying, or what point they were attempting to make.

The president smiled through the disruption, saying: “No, it’s OK,” as other parts of the crowd sought to hush the protesters by chanting his name and old campaign slogan, “Yes We Can.”

In Chicago, another group mic checked Rahm Emmanuel too.

I don’t expect either of them to sympathize with OWS’ goals, ever.

They are both products of the wing of the Democratic party that is beholden to big money, and the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector’s money in particular, so to the degree that we see any movement towards accountability and meaningful regulations for the banksters, it will be because they are dragged kicking and screaming toward doing the right thing.

Republicans Lose One in Arizona (For Now)

The Arizona Supreme court has overturned the removal of the head of the Arizona independent redistricting panel:

The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday rebuffed Gov. Jan Brewer’s efforts to remake the state panel that draws political maps by reinstating the chairwoman Brewer recently ousted.

The court ruled that Brewer’s letter removing Colleen Mathis from the panel fell short in showing “substantial neglect of duty” or “gross misconduct,” as state law requires, the Arizona Republic reported. A Brewer spokesman told the paper that the Republican governor “strongly disagrees” with the decision and was considering her next step.

The once-a-decade map-making, though somewhat technical and arcane, can help cement a political party’s grasp on power for several election cycles. While redistricting often results in political battles, the one unfolding in Arizona has been particularly brutal.

In 2000, Arizona voters approved a ballot measure that made redistricting the responsibility of a panel composed of two Democrats, two Republicans and an independent chair, which was supposed to tamp down partisan warfare. (This year, California’s political lines were drawn for the first time by a similar independent panel.)

What the court basically said was that the governor had to actually show neglect of duty or misconduct, and not just because “I said so.”

The head of the panel, as per the law, has to be an independent, and it appears that the ‘Phants objections consist of the fact that she is married to a Democrat, and that the proposals for a map are too “fair and balanced.”

I have not doubt that the Republicans will take a 2nd bite at this apple, and probably a 3rd bite as the apple, as they attempt to trump up charges that can pass a court’s smell test.

I think that we are going to see court drawn  districts in Arizona.

CoIntelPro for Banksters


Someone is sh%$ting bricks

I’m not sure if the Banksters have signed off on a disinformation, disruption, and infiltration program against Occupy Wall Street, but a a prominent Washington lobbying firm is trying to sell it to them:

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”

The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.

CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

The memo also suggests that Democratic victories in 2012 should not be the ABA’s biggest concern. “… (T)he bigger concern,” the memo says, “should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

It’s amusing, but it’s not time for a happy dance.

The thing to remember, and Chris Hayes is clear on this in the vid, is that this memo is just one pitch at creating a CoIntelPro type program, even if the American Bankers Association turned down this proposal.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of similar proposals in the works, and people who are trying to find someone obscenely rich mother f%$#er to bankroll them, so you have to figure that there are similar programs in process.

We are, after all, juxtaposing unconscionable levels of wealth with a sense of entitlement, and that’s a toxic brew.