Year: 2011

About Time…

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It look like Prosecutors have finally gotten the guts to prosecute a bishop for concealing child abuse:

The first U.S. bishop criminally charged with sheltering an abusive clergyman has been accused of failing to protect children after he and his diocese waited five months to tell police about hundreds of images of child pornography discovered on a priest’s computer, authorities said.

Bishop Robert Finn and the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic Diocese have pleaded not guilty on one count each of failing to report suspected child abuse, officials said Friday.

Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said Finn and the diocese were required under state law to report the discovery to police because the images gave them reason to believe a child had been abused.

“Now that the grand jury investigation has resulted in this indictment, my office will pursue this case vigorously,” Baker said. “I want to ensure there are no future failures to report resulting in other unsuspecting victims.”

The indictment, handed down Oct. 6 but sealed because Finn was out of the country, says the bishop failed to report suspicions against the priest from Dec. 16, 2010, when the photos were discovered, to May 11, 2011, when the diocese turned them over to police.

Finn denied any wrongdoing in a statement Friday and said he had begun work to overhaul the diocese’s reporting policies and act on key findings of a diocese-commissioned investigation into its practices.

“Today, the Jackson County Prosecutor issued these charges against me personally and against the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph,” said Finn, who officials said was not under arrest. “For our part, we will meet these announcements with a steady resolve and a vigorous defense.”

Finn faces a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted of the misdemeanor. The diocese also faces a $1,000 fine.

Maybe if some of these guys at the top start seeing the inside of the jail cell, they will stop aiding and abetting sexual abuse among their ranks.

Oh For F%$#’s Sake!!!!

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Obama is sending troops to Uganda:

President Obama is sending about 100 special forces troops to central Africa to help target the leadership of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious militia that has been raping and pillaging in the remote jungles of northern Uganda and neighboring countries for more than two decades.

The first team of armed advisors arrived in Uganda on Wednesday. Over the next month, the remaining U.S. troops, most of them Army Green Berets, will be sent to Uganda and surrounding countries, including South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Congo.

In a letter notifying Congress on Friday, Obama said the goal of the U.S. mission was to assist regional African forces in removing “from the battlefield” the militia’s leader, self-declared prophet Joseph Kony. But the U.S. troops will not fight unless fired upon, the letter said.

A militia known for forcing abducted children to fight and for mutilating its victims, the Lord’s Resistance Army has long been condemned by the U.S. and human rights organizations for atrocities against civilians.

Not only are we going into a yet another counter-insurgency, but we are going on a Mohamed Farrah Aidid style bug hunt.

When Obama said that he was opposed to “Stupid Wars” in 2003, what he neglected to say was that he doesn’t believe that any wars are “stupid”.

Here’s a Surprise…

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It turns out that the US Marines are manufacturing statistics to falsely represent the safety of the V-22 Osprey:

It’s an aircraft with a reputation for falling from the sky. But on at least one occasion, the U.S. military’s controversial V-22 Osprey tiltrotor — a hybrid transport that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like an airplane, thanks to its rotating engine nacelles — did just the opposite. It flew upward, out of control of its pilots.

On March 27, 2006, at a Marine Corps air base in New River, North Carolina, an MV-22 assigned to Medium Tiltrotor Training Squadron 204 experienced an unplanned surge in engine power as the three-man crew was preparing for a flight. “That caused the aircraft to inadvertently lift off the deck approximately 30 feet,” Marine spokesman Maj. Shawn Haney explained. “It came back down … there was major damage sustained to the right wing and the right engine.”

………

Yet the Marines and the Naval Safety Center ultimately decided that the Osprey’s dangerous joyride didn’t count as a serious flying accident, known in Pentagon parlance as a “Class A flight mishap.” The reason, said Capt. Brian Block, a Marine spokesman: The aircraft wasn’t supposed to take off just then; therefore, it’s not a flight problem. If a V-22 suffers damage while preparing to launch or after landing, or if the crew does not explicitly command the aircraft to take off but it does anyways, then the accident doesn’t count as a flight accident.

“No intent for flight existed,” he told Danger Room. “As such, it is not included in calculating the Class A flight mishap rate.”

It’s not the only seemingly serious accident that the Marines neglected to include in its tally of flight mishaps for the Osprey. A review of press reports, analysts’ studies and military records turns up 10 or more potentially serious mishaps in the last decade of V-22 testing and operations. At least three — and quite possibly more — could be considered Class A flight mishaps, if not for pending investigations, the “intent for flight” loophole and possible under-reporting of repair costs.

………

The Marines boast that the Osprey is the “safest tactical rotorcraft within the U.S. Marine Corps” over the last decade, in the words of Lt. Col. Jason Holden, the V-22 plans officer at Marine Corps headquarters in Virginia. By the official reckoning of the Marine Corps and the Naval Safety Center, the V-22 has a Class A flight mishap rate of 1.28 per 100,000 flight hours over the last 10 years, compared to a Class A flight mishap rate of 2.6 per 100,000 flight hours for all Marine aircraft over the same period.

But the Marines have given all sorts of reasons not to trust that official rate.

The Marines are so vested in the success of the V-22, that they cannot be trusted to manage the program.

The fact that the Marine Corps feels compelled to go to these lengths is an indication that the Osprey is not performing as promised.

Just Desserts

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Phill Klein, the virulently anti-abortion former Kansas Attorney General, has been under investigation by the Kansas bar for leaking confidential medical records in order to harass abortion providers and abortion recipients.

Well, the disciplinary board has now recommended that his license to practice law be permanently suspended:

A Kansas disciplinary panel said Thursday that former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline should be indefinitely suspended from practicing law in the state because of the “dishonest and selfish” way he pursued abortion clinics.

The recommendation of the attorney disciplinary board culminates a turbulent six-year period in which Kline — as attorney general and later Johnson County district attorney — presided over investigations of the late George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita and Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.

I’m not sure if this is a disbarment, or just one step short of this.

In any case, I wouldn’t worry about Mr. Kline. I’m sure that the VWRC will find him something remunerative to him, because, unlike Democrats, the wingers take care of their own.

Maddow notes that Jerry Fallwell’s phony school has already given him a professorship.

Occupy Wall Street Stays at Zuccotti Park

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At least for now, but there were arrests, including, according to Olbermann, at least one arrest for being run over by a police vehicle. (Yep, you got that right)

He was arrested with enough force to require his hospitalization.

Here is the kicker:

The man on the ground has been identified as 32-year-old Ari Douglas, a legal observer at the Occupy Wall Street protests for the National Lawyer’s Guild. The video appears to show a police officer running over Mr. Douglas’ leg with a scooter.

First the viral video of the senior New York policeman (white shirt, lieutenant, at least) pepper spraying without provocation, and now we have this.

We also have two cases of what appears to be two unprovoked assaults on protesters, again by white shirt cops.

Seriously, these guys are going to make the Occupy Wall Street more popular than The Beatles:

10 Percent of the Chinese Economy?

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It turns out that much of the lending to small businesses in China is done by loan sharks, because the official banks prefer to lend to large state owned enterprises.

That’s not shocking. Official Chinese societal structures have always been for the benefit of the few over the many.

That being said, a throw away line in a New York Times article is truly shocking:

Such illegal lending amounts to about $630 billion a year, or the equivalent of about 10 percent of China’s gross domestic product, according to estimates by the investment bank UBS.

10%?  10% of the f%$#ing Chinese economy is loan sharking???????

When the bubble bursts in China, and there is a bubble in China, it’s going to be incredibly ugly.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

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And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Piedmont Community Bank, Gray, GA
  2. Blue Ridge Savings Bank, Inc., Asheville, NC
  3. First State Bank, Cranford, NJ
  4. Country Bank, Aledo, IL

Full FDIC list

Busy week. 4 Banks.

Right not, this is in a path for 101 bank closures, but my guess is that it will be just under 100, because they don’t want to break 3 figures.

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Heard About the Shooting at the Salon In California?

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See the License Plate Frame?

Normally, I don’t say anything about such things, but then a friend pointed out the license plate frame on the shooter’s truck. (See the join the tea party dot us URL?)

From reports, this is not a politically motivated shooting, and I have no reason to believe that it is.

That being said, what is clear is that there are a lot of teabaggers with easy access to firearms and a few screws loose, and there are a lot of people out there who are giving encouragement for them to go postal (Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly), and the fact that a few of them are going do decide to do very bad things as a result is more probable than just possible.

H/t Hedgehog at SP.

Scientist Poke Holes in FBI’s Anthrax Mailer ID

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And they are doing this in a peer reviewed journal:

A decade after wisps of anthrax sent through the mail killed 5 people, sickened 17 others and terrorized the nation, biologists and chemists still disagree on whether federal investigators got the right man and whether the F.B.I.’s long inquiry brushed aside important clues.

Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated. The scientists make their case in a coming issue of the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

F.B.I. documents reviewed by The New York Times show that bureau scientists focused on tin early in their eight-year investigation, calling it an “element of interest” and a potentially critical clue to the criminal case. They later dropped their lengthy inquiry, never mentioned tin publicly and never offered any detailed account of how they thought the powder had been made.

The new paper raises the prospect — for the first time in a serious scientific forum — that the Army biodefense expert identified by the F.B.I. as the perpetrator, Bruce E. Ivins, had help in obtaining his germ weapons or conceivably was innocent of the crime.

Both the chairwoman of a National Academy of Science panel that spent a year and a half reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work and the director of a new review by the Government Accountability Office said the paper raised important questions that should be addressed.

…………

In its report last February, the National Academy of Sciences panel sharply criticized some of the F.B.I.’s scientific work, saying the genetic link between the attack anthrax and a supply in Dr. Ivins’s lab was “not as conclusive” as the bureau asserted.

If the authors of the new paper are correct about the silicon-tin coating, it appears likely that Dr. Ivins could not have made the anthrax powder alone with the equipment he possessed, as the F.B.I. maintains. That would mean either that he got the powder from elsewhere or that he was not the perpetrator.

The FBI hasn’t covered itself in glory,

Their behavior towards their first “person of interest”, Steven Hatfill, as well as their behavior toward Bruce Ivins, seemed to be geared more toward driving their subjects to self destruction than to any finding of fact. (They went after Ivins’ counselor, for example).

The bottom line here is that there is a lot of highly classified information that was not subject to review for this article, and a continued insistence on the part of the DoJ merely serves to reinforce the people who believe that the FBI did not find the right guy.

The Lesson Here is If You Cheat Investors, Be a White Man

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Long prison term, dark face, any questions?

You know why Raj Rajaratnam just got sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading:

Fallen hedge fund tycoon Raj Rajaratnam has been sentenced to a record 11 years in prison after his conviction in the biggest Wall Street insider trading case in decades.

Prosecutors had pushed for 25-year sentence after convicting Rajaratnam, 54, in the biggest insider trading investigation ever conducted by US authorities.

Legal experts said that while prosecutors may have been disappointed with the decision, the sentence was still the highest ever given for insider dealing.

The thing to remember here is that this is actually fairly small time by the scale of the financial meltdown, and that he is not white.

I won’t believe that there is any sort of meaningful crackdown on the banksters until we see someone who is both white, and at least at the VP level for a major bank.

This is just, “Rounding up the usual suspects.”

If They Believe Mayor Bloomberg, They Are Idiots…

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He’s claiming that the Occupy Wall Street people need to leave Zuccotti Park to allow for cleaning:

The small Manhattan square occupied by anti-Wall Street protestors for almost four weeks will be temporarily cleared for cleaning on Friday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg went to the protest site, where several hundred people are camped out, to explain the move, which would be the first time the demonstrators are asked to leave, the mayor’s office said.

Bloomberg said the owners of the plaza wanted to exercise their duty in cleaning it — and that this was their right, although protestors would be allowed back immediately.

My first question is why did they sell a public park to private owners?

It was not clear whether this signaled an attempt by the city to clear out the protest, which is being held in a privately owned plaza that the owners are obliged to make available to the public.

Holloway promised “protesters will be able to return to the areas that have been cleaned, provided they abide by the rules that Brookfield has established for the park.”

Among new rules posted at the park are a ban on sleeping bags and other camping paraphernalia.

Yeah, like this this isn’t an attempt to shut these folks down.

Expect cops to start seriously breaking heads in the next week.

(on edit)

The deadline given by Brookfield is 7:00am EDT (GMT-4) today.

It’s the Vampire Squid’s World, We Just Live in It

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So when Goldman Sachs gets caught helping clients evade taxes, and British authorities hand them a get out of jail free card:

Britain’s tax authorities have given Goldman Sachs an unusual and generous Christmas present, leaked documents reveal. In a secret London meeting last December with the head of Revenue, the wealthy Wall Street banking firm was forgiven £10m interest on a failed tax avoidance scheme.

HM Revenue and Customs sources admit privately that the interest-free deal is “a cock-up” by officials, but refuse to say who was responsible.

Documents leaked to Private Eye magazine and published in full by the Guardian record that Britain’s top tax official, HMRC’s permanent secretary Dave Hartnett, personally shook hands on a secret settlement last December.

Hartnett is due to be questioned on Wednesday by the Commons public accounts committee. The leaked documents suggest that a previous PAC chairman, Edward Leigh, was misled when he was told it was illegal to reveal details of such cases to parliament.

Leaked legal advice from James Eadie QC, which the Guardian also publishes today, says the opposite. Hartnett has discretion to reveal such facts to the parliamentary watchdog, according to the advice.

………

In the 1990s, Goldman set up a company offshore in the British Virgin Islands. This entity, called Goldman Sachs Services Ltd, supposedly employed all of Goldman’s London bankers, who were then “seconded” to work there.

The device appears to have been designed to conceal the size of the bonuses. Judge David Williams said in 2009 that it was “a way of keeping information about the GS accounts and payroll out of the public domain and confidential”.

Goldman also begrudged paying its share of UK national insurance on the six-figure bonuses. Court judgments disclose that a typical Goldman bonus to a junior banker was £143,000 in 1998, and £191,000 the following year.

The company, along with 21 investment banks and other firms, purchased blueprints for an avoidance scheme called an employee benefit trust (EBT). The bonuses were indirectly invested into elaborate share option schemes.

It took the Revenue until 2005 to demonstrate in court that these EBTs were merely illegitimate tax avoidance devices. The 21 other firms surrendered, and handed over what they owed.

But Goldman Sachs refused to pay its £30.81m bill. Instead the city firm Freshfields and the tax QC David Goldberg fought tooth and nail on Goldman’s behalf through the courts. By 2010, according to a public judgment, the unpaid bill with accumulated interest had mounted to £40m.

Seriously, we need to take these muthas down hard.

God Bless The Onion

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President’s Approval Rating Soars After Punching Wall Street Banker in Face

And in a related story:

The banker punch may have also been a boon for President Obama’s efforts to pass his American Jobs Act. When asked if he still opposed the bill this afternoon, a visibly nervous Republican house majority leader Eric Cantor said, “No no no. I’ll pass whatever the President wants. P-p-please don’t let him hurt me.”

Heh.

Holy Sh%$!!!

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This is scary

It’s rained so hard world wide that ocean levels fell in 2010:

Guest Blogger on Oct 2, 2011 at 12:40 pm
by Barry Saxifrage, via the Vancouver Observer

“The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year’s worth of mega-floods. “ – Meteorologist Jeff Masters

I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.

As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.

Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.

According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.

Great googly moogly.

When Michael Hayden Says That You Over Classify…

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You have gone way beyond an even remotely sane assessment of the need for secrecy:

Ex-head of the National Security Agency and CIA and retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden said federal agencies need to open up to public and private industry to address cyber threats

As cyber security climbs its way up the priority list after 2011’s string of attacks against government and corporate systems, U.S. government agencies and companies struggle to find a happy medium between excessive secrecy and too much disclosure regarding the handling of such issues.

Going one way or the other can have severe repercussions. Excessive secrecy can stifle cyber defense, as too much focus could be placed on an issue that was already resolved elsewhere. If you keep it secret, someone who might know how to fix it cannot do so. Too much disclosure, on the other hand, gives hackers what they need to work around security systems.

This is kind of like Sweeney Todd saying that you are too rough when you give a shave.