Year: 2015

We are F%$#ed

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The massive Larsen C ice shelf is predicted to collapse by 2010 2020:

It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula, the part of the vast frozen continent that extends northward toward South America.

Earlier this week, we learned that the gigantic marine-based Larsen C ice shelf, which is almost as big as Scotland, has several worrisome vulnerabilities — including a growing rift across it. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and several other research centers say this could pose an “imminent risk” to its stability.

And now, NASA scientists are giving an even worse verdict for the remnants of the nearby Larsen B ice shelf, much of which already disintegrated back in 2002. Back then, the shelf lost a region larger than Rhode Island, but there are still 618 square miles left of it — for now.

However, in a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine say that this remnant now faces its “approaching demise.” In a news release, NASA adds that the ice shelf “is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.”

If these two research teams are right, then the coming years could see major ice calving events off of the Antarctic peninsula — especially for Larsen B.

“What might happen is that for a few years, we will have the detachment of big icebergs from this remaining ice shelf, and then at one point, one very very warm summer, when you have lots of melting of the surface, the whole thing will just give way, and will shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs,” says the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ala Khazendar, lead author of the new study.

Clearly, anthropogenic climate change is a myth.

Note that this is an ice shelf,  and as such, is already supported by the ocean so the impact on ocean levels is effectively nil, but this will change the environment and albedo (reflectively) which will likely increase the flow of glaciers into the ocean.

Prediction made by climate experts have consistently been exceeded by what is really going on.

Not good.

Bad Day at the Office

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Click for slideshow


Yes, I think that this is a class 1 mishap

I think that this is the wing

Because of some as yet undetermined braking issue, a Hungarian Gipen overran the runway at the Lion Effort 2015 military exercise: (Google Translate, original here)

Air base in Caslav Gripen crashed Hungarian army. He slid off the runway and ended up in a field. The pilot ejected. Both are fine. The army said that the aircraft not brake, but it is not clear whether it was pilot error or a technical fault to blame. Damaged aircraft is probably damaged beyond repair.

“At this moment I can say that the aircraft slid off the runway. Pilots are in accordance with the provisions ejected. If the machine is uncontrollable and threatens serious accident, they must leave the plane. Both, however, are in order and nothing dramatic happened in the outcome, “said iDNES.cz Defense Ministry spokesman Petr Medek.

Airport spokesman Tomas Maruscak on Czech Television said that the aircraft not brake. “At the moment it is not possible to say whether it is to blame pilot error or a technical failure,” he said. According to him, the aircraft ended up in a field.

The airplane rolled out of the runway at approximately 13:40. Until the sixteenth hour airport was closed because of an accident and other flights are diverted to the airport in Pardubice. “Aircraft accidents being examined by the Commission of the Department of Military Aviation Section of Supervision and Control of the Ministry of Defense,” said Magdalena Dvorakova of the Communication Department of the General Staff.

The fact that both men escaped without injury, it is not obvious. Ejection from an aircraft that is on the runway, is a very difficult matter. “Ejection at zero altitude for pilots is a big adrenaline rush when I say it in quotation marks,” he told ČTK former military pilot Jan Vachek. According to him, it can only seat state of the art, which are equipped with Gripen fighters.

According to another expert, who asked not to be named, the Gripen crashed beyond repair. Damage could increase antenna systems located at the end of the runway, which is likely to aircraft at high speed when landing entered.

In Caslav held an international exercise Lion Effort 2015, air exercise States whose armies have any versions of the JAS-39 Gripen. Outside the Czech participates just Hungary, and Sweden. The Kingdom of Thailand participating without their aircraft.

Martin Baker ejection seats save another two unlucky aircrew.

I Have Never Watched Mad Men

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And I really do not give a sh%$ about the series finale.

Except for the whole DB Cooper theory.

I spent my high school years in the Pacific Northwest, and it imbued me with a fascination with all things DB Cooper.

BTW, I never watched Breaking Bad either. 

I am so out of touch with the media habits of America’s glitterati.

I Have Not Electrocuted Myself

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The light switch in the bathroom went bad, so I replaced it.

I went with a simple switch, instead of the current dimmer, because:

  • I can use LED and compact fluorescent bulbs now.
  • Why the f%$# would anyone ever want to dim the light in the bathroom.

It actually went pretty smoothly.

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to whoever invented the wire nut.

I had Charlie in the basement so I could check if I got it right without running up and down stairs.

Some Other Folks Feel the Same Way about the Media’s Response as I Do

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There have been two cogent and well written critiques of the generally dismissive response of the mainstream media to Seymour Hersh’s story which claims to show that the official narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing was largely untrue.

The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review is likely to gain the most currency. It’s a fairly conventional analysis, and notes that Hersh’s critics have been lazy and knee jerk in their dismissal of his latest story:

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

………

Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh’s critics put together. She wrote in the Times this week that she “would not necessarily dismiss [Hersh’s] claims immediately” and that “he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of.” Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA to bin Laden, Gall wrote that “my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s.”

………

Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.

Over at Pando, the redoubtable Mark Ames focuses more tightly on the 1970s CIA spying revalations, which to my mind makes for a more compelling critique of the recent press wank-fest, if just because the reaction seems identical to the last time:

………

Hersh has pissed off some very powerful people and institutions with this story, and that means the inevitable media pushback to discredit his reporting is already underway, with the attacks on Hersh led by Vox Media’s Max Fisher, CNN’s Peter Bergen, and even some on the left like Nation Institute reporter Matthieu Aikins. Yesterday Slate joined the pile-on, running a wildly entertaining, hostile interview with Hersh.

Such attacks by fellow journalists on a Sy Hersh bombshell are nothing new—in fact, he used to relish them, and probably still does. He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 exposé of the CIA’s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents.

Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.

………

And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh’s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, “The CIA’s ‘Illegal Domestic Spying,’” attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources—this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:

“While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”

………

A common line of attack was to call Hersh’s series “overwritten and under-researched.” Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo’s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh’s stories as “overwritten and under-researched”; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone’s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn’t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes “overwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.”

………

Hersh might’ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:

“William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.”

After the CIA chief’s confirmation of Hersh’s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted’s book, after Colby’s admission,

“The Washington Post reported that Colby’s disclosure had ‘confirmed major elements’ of Hersh’s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby’s testimony had substantiated ‘many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.’”

Today we’re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh’s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.

Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider—who was then an editor at the WaPo—summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh’s revelations:

“the press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.”

My how we’ve grown so much in the 40 years since.

I don’t know how much of Hersh’s story is true, but the press response at this point seems to exquisitely lame.

Background, and underlying story here.

Lawsuit Filed in Japan Against TPP

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This is actually a not a tinfoil hat thing.

The lead plaintiff in this lawsuit against the TPP is a member of the Japanese Diet (Parliament) and former agriculture minister, and the the legal argument addresses a huge flash point in Japanese culture:

More than 1,000 people filed a lawsuit against the government on Friday, seeking to halt Japan’s involvement in 12-country talks on a Pacific Rim free trade agreement, which they called “unconstitutional.”

 A total of 1,063 plaintiffs, including lawmakers, claimed in the case brought to the Tokyo District Court that the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would undermine their basic human rights under the Constitution.

 The lawsuit is led by Masahiko Yamada, 73, a lawyer who served as agriculture minister in 2010 as part of the Democratic Party of Japan government.

 “The TPP could violate the Japanese right to get stable food supply, or the right to live, guaranteed by Article 25 of the nation’s Constitution,” Yamada, who abandoned his party in 2012 over then-Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s push to join the TPP talks, said Thursday before the court filing.

 The envisaged pact would benefit big corporations but would jeopardize the country’s food safety and medical systems, and destroy the domestic farm sector, according to the plaintiffs.

One of the consistent concerns of Japanese society is food security, a rather unsurprising fact given that the nation is both densely populated and highly populated, placing arable land at a premium.

Particularly when juxtaposed with the Soybean Bounce of the 1970s, when the US abruptly embargoed soybean exports in response to a spike in livestock feed prices, which sent Japan scrambling for alternate sources of their dietary staple, this is is a big deal.

Even if the case gets laughed out of court, it will be a lightning rod for opponents of the deal.

Boston Bombing Victims Brought Back to Life

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Of course, they have not been brought back to life.

Neither have lost limbs, damaged hearing, or brain injuries been fixed.

All that happened was that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death:

Two years after bombs in two backpacks transformed the Boston Marathon from a sunny rite of spring to a smoky battlefield with bodies dismembered, a federal jury on Friday condemned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the 2013 attack.

In a sweeping rejection of the defense case, the jury found that death was the appropriate punishment for six of 17 capital counts — all six related to Mr. Tsarnaev’s planting of a pressure-cooker bomb on Boylston Street, which his lawyers never disputed. Mr. Tsarnaev, 21, stood stone-faced in court, his hands folded in front of him, as the verdict was read, his lawyers standing grimly at his side.

No one is made whole by this, and no one would be if there still weren’t years of appeals ahead.

I do not support the death penalty. It amounts to little more than a thrill killing conducted by the state.

Senate Dems Don Spelunking Helmets

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Senate leaders, after personal intercessions by President Obama, reached an agreement Wednesday on a path to grant the president accelerated power to complete a sweeping trade accord ringing the Pacific Ocean — just a day after fellow Democrats had blocked him.

The larger aim is to secure a 12-nation agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, spanning the Pacific from Canada and Chile to Japan and Australia and encompassing 40 percent of the world’s economic output. Mr. Obama sees the pact as a central part of his economic legacy, the largest trade deal in two decades and the realization of his foreign policy pivot toward Asia.

It also means money. Major American business interests, from Nike to Boeing and Hollywood to Silicon Valley, want the deal badly. Labor and environmental groups see it as a threat to American workers at the expense of profits.

A series of trade-related votes will begin Thursday and stretch well into next week. The trade promotion authority would give the president the ability to move more quickly on the deal, leaving Congress with the power to vote up or down on the agreement but with no ability to amend it.

I had hoped that they would have at least made it a full day,

Amtrak Train Crash Just Got Weird

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It appears that a short time before the Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia, two other trains on the same track were hit with ……… Something:

Just before Tuesday’s deadly Amtrak derailment, both a SEPTA commuter train and another Amtrak train in the same corridor were hit by projectiles, one which crashed through the engineer’s window.

An Amtrak spokesman could not be reached regarding Amtrak Acela Train 2173, which passengers said was struck at about 9:05 p.m. A SEPTA train was struck by a projectile at about 9:10 p.m., according to a SEPTA spokeswoman, who said there is no indication the incident is connected to the derailment, which happened at about 9:30 p.m.

………

SEPTA northbound Train 769, en route to Trenton on tracks on the Northeast Corridor beside the Amtrak rails, was approximately four miles from the derailment site when it was struck at about 9:10 p.m. SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams said an “unknown projectile” broke the engineer’s window.

No injuries were reported and the train was held on the tracks ahead of the North Philadelphia station. The 80 passengers were transferred to buses.

Amtrak’s northbound Train 188 derailed on the Northeast Corridor tracks, killing at least seven and injuring scores. The cause of the derailment is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Railroad Administration.

I’m wondering if some kids having “fun” with cinder blocks on an over pass, or some nut with a firearm, was playing a really stupid game that night.

Obama Claims That Fast Track Will Not Kill Dodd-Frank. Canadian Files NAFTA Complaint to Kill Volker Rule

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Obama calls the claim lubricious, but the government of Canada has moved to exempt its own bonds from the Volker Rule:

In her attacks on Obama’s pending trade deals, Elizabeth Warren has argued that could undermine US financial regulations like Dodd Frank. The Administration has taken to trying to dismiss Warren as not knowing what she was talking about. More skillful defenders of the traitorous trade deals took the tact of saying that Warren could in theory be right, but the odds of her fears playing out were so remote as to not be worth worrying about.

In a long, careful article in the Nation yesterday, George Zornick explains even with the limited information that we have now about the contents of proposed treaties like the TPP and its ugly European step-sister, the TTIP, Warren’s worries are valid. ………

………

But an example of Warren’s concerns came out of left field yesterday, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

A U.S. rule that prohibits banks from taking risky bets with their own money violates the North American Free-Trade Agreement because it bans U.S. banks from trading triple-A-rated Canadian government debt, Canada’s finance minister said Wednesday…
Canadian concerns about the Volcker rule’s treatment of sovereign debt aren’t new. In 2012, Canada joined European countries and Japan in raising concerns about the law’s reach..

Mr. [Joe] Oliver noted that the Volcker rule reflects concerns about the credit standing of some foreign securities. That concern doesn’t apply to Canada, he said, because Canada’s credit rating is better than the U.S. government and U.S. municipalities…

“I believe—with strong legal basis—that this rule violates the terms of the Nafta agreement,” Mr. Oliver told a securities industry audience in New York that included the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Bruce Heyman. “I hope the United States administration sees that changing the Volcker rule is in its own best interests and that of its biggest trading partner.”

Yep, clearly Obama was right to portray Warren as a hysterical woman over the possibility of the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process will never be used to roll back financial regulations.

When juxtaposed with how Mitch McConnell crowing about how a future Republican President will use Fast Track to run impose the Republican agenda:

If we had a Republican president right now, not a single Democrat would vote for Trade Promotion Authority. So what I’ve said to my members, if we want the next Republican president, who we hope will be sworn in less than two years from now, to have a chance to do trade agreements with the rest of the world, this bill is about that president as well as this one.

Fast Track, the TPP, and the TTIP are seen by the Republicans as a weapon to weild.

Achilles Emerges from His Tent

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Saying his “desire to serve is stronger than ever,” Democrat Russ Feingold announced Thursday a bid for his old U.S. Senate seat against the Republican who defeated him four and a half years ago — Ron Johnson.

A Johnson-Feingold race would be a rare rematch of Senate opponents, offer voters a stark ideological contrast and easily rank as one of the top Senate races in the country in 2016, fiercely contested by both parties.

Feingold made the announcement in a short video shot at his Middleton home, saying he wanted to “bring back to the U.S. Senate strong independence, bipartisanship and honesty.”

He did not mention Johnson in the video or lay out his campaign message in any detail. He said he was focused on the worries people in Wisconsin have about “their economic well-being.” He also raised a familiar Feingold theme — the role of money in the political process.

“People tell me all the time that our politics in Washington are broken and that multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations are calling all the shots. They especially say this about the U.S. Senate. And it’s hard not to agree,” Feingold said.

I would expect a Democratic pickup here.

Ron Johnson won in a Republican wave year, and he was to some degree an unknown quantity.

Now, he is known as one of the stupidest guys in the Senate, as well as being a teabagger.

Feingold should have run against Walker in the recall, but he was brooding in his tent at the time.

Sy Hersh’s Bin Laden Story Is Looking a Bit Less Fantastical

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I mentioned yesterday that Seymour Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden, which is at siginficant variance with the official “Zero Dark Thirty” version was a potential bomb shell, but (at least initially) it was a bit light on sourcing.

Well, today, we have some more data points that seem to point to his story being accurate, at least in part.

First, we have a report from NBC saying that there was a Pakistani source inside the country’s state security apparatus:

Intelligence sources tell NBC News that in the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a retired Pakistani military intelligence officer helped the CIA track him down.

 While the Pakistani intelligence asset provided vital information in the hunt for bin Laden, he did not provide the location of the al Qaeda leader’s Abottabad, Pakistan compound, sources said.

 Three sources also said that some officials in the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

 The asset was evacuated from Pakistan and paid reward money by the CIA, sources said. U.S. officials took pains to note he was one of many sources who provided help along the way, and said that the al Qaeda courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, remained the linchpin of the operation.

 The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking the courier.

 The new revelations do not cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission.

NBC qualifies as a reputable source, and this appears to be confirmation of a part of Hirsh’s story.

It should be noted though, that this omission from the official story might very well be an issue of “Sources and Methods” as well as diplomatic reality, both of which would mitigate against revealing the complicity of Pakistani security.

What’s more, this is precisely the sort of stuff that Hersh would uncover.

It’s significant, and embarrassing, and makes authorities look far less heroic, which history shows to be Hersh’s favorite kind of reporting.

Another interesting data point is that another reporter,  R. J. Hillhouse, is claiming that he took her story without attribution:

Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it’s either plagiarism or unoriginal.

If it’s fiction–as some have implied, it’s plagiarism. If it’s true, it’s not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011:

“Bin Laden Turned in by Informant — Courier Was Cover Story”

“Questions Raised by Real Story of How US Found Bin Laden”

On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:

………

I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources–which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.

Hillhouse has writeen extensively on the US state security apparatus, including stories on outsourcing of intelligence activities that have drawn responses from the Director of National intelligence.

So, we have confirmation from NBC that someone inside Pakistan’s intelligence establishment came to the administration at least a year before the raid, and two very similar accounts of the events of May 2, 2011 which appear to have been derived from different sources.

What’s more, according to what appears to be an interview with Hillhouse in The Intercept, the account of SEALS throwing bin Laden’s body, or body parts, out of a helicopter because they believed that the official story was going to be a drone strike, was something that she had been told by one source, but could not confirm, which provides some additional credibility to both accounts:

Hillhouse also claims that one of her sources told her a particular detail that she did not include in 2011 because she could not confirm it: that the Navy SEALs threw bin Laden’s body out of the helicopter while traveling over the Hindu Kush mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Hersh’s story includes an assertion from his main source that “during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains.” While this seems bizarre in retrospect, it would be plausible if the SEALs had believed at the time that the Obama administration planned to say publicly that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike.

Hillhouse believes that “Everything that [Hersh] has said has been spot on” but “You can’t help but notice that everything he is saying in the story, which is true, was first broken by me.”

So this account is definitely plausible.

The journalist “debunking” at this point seems to be loosely sourced accusations that Hersh has gone off the deep end.

The lesson here is that blithely dismissing reporting from Seymour Hersh is not a good idea.

His reporting, at the very least, merits serious due diligence by anyone following that event.

Shoot Me Now

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Caribou Barbie, aka Sarah Palin has said that she is seriously interested in running for President in 2016:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin told The Washington Post in an interview Friday that she is “seriously interested” in running for the White House in 2016.

“You can absolutely say that I am seriously interested,” Palin said, when asked to clarify her thinking about a possible presidential bid.

My brain hurts.

This is bad for the Republicans, and bad for the country.

The only people to benefit by this are political satirists.

It Looks Like I Wasn’t the Only One Who Thought That Obama’s Attitude toward Elizabeth Warren Was Sexist

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It turns out that the distinguished gentleman from Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown, found Obama’s statements about Warren and the TPP dismissive in a way that he never would be to male members of congress:

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown threw a grenade into the ongoing war of words between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and President Barack Obama, a war that reached new heights with Tuesday’s dramatic setback of Obama’s trade agenda in the Senate.

Brown, one of the top Democratic leaders of the uprising against Obama’s trade push, criticized the president for what the senator saw as “disrespectful” comments toward Warren and suggested that Warren’s gender may have played a role.

When asked how Obama was being disrespectful of the Massachusetts Democrat, Brown replied: “I think by just calling her ‘another politician.’” He continued, “I’m not going to get into more details. I think referring to her as first name, when he might not have done that for a male senator, perhaps? I’ve said enough.”

Particularly when juxtaposed with a former staffer saying of the Obama White House that, “It actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women,” and his “Sweetie” comment to a female reporter, I think that the burden of proof must be on the President, and not Mr. Brown.

And now Obama, though his proxy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, is not just asking for an apology from Senator Brown, but is insisting that it inevitable that he will eventually apologize.

The word, “Whiny Bitch,” is completely inadequate to describe this.

We Need to Put This on a T-Shirt, and Have People Wear It Whenever Jeb Speaks

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Less than a week ago, Jeb Bush called his brother, George W., one of his closest foreign policy advisers, and said that he would have invaded Iraq in 2003 as well.

Today, he was giving a speech at a small gathering, and Ivy Ziedrich, who appears to be very sharp said “Your Brother Created ISIS.”

The whole exchange is telling:

“Your brother created ISIS,” the young woman told Jeb Bush. And with that, Ivy Ziedrich, a 19-year-old college student, created the kind of confrontational moment here on Wednesday morning that presidential candidates dread.

Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida, had just concluded a town-hall-style meeting when Ms. Ziedrich demanded to be heard. “Governor Bush,” she shouted as audience members asked him for his autograph. “Would you take a student question?”

Mr. Bush whirled around and looked at Ms. Ziedrich, who identified herself as a political science major and a college Democrat at the University of Nevada.

She had heard Mr. Bush argue, a few moments before, that America’s retreat from the Middle East under President Obama had contributed to the growing power of the Islamic State. She told the former governor that he was wrong, and made the case that blame lay with the decision by the administration of his brother George W. Bush to disband the Iraqi Army.

“It was when 30,000 individuals who were part of the Iraqi military were forced out — they had no employment, they had no income, and they were left with access to all of the same arms and weapons,” Ms. Ziedrich said.

She added: “Your brother created ISIS.”

Mr. Bush interjected. “All right. Is that a question?”

Ms. Ziedrich was not finished. “You don’t need to be pedantic to me, sir.”

“Pedantic? Wow,” Mr. Bush replied.

Then Ms. Ziedrich asked: “Why are you saying that ISIS was created by us not having a presence in the Middle East when it’s pointless wars where we send young American men to die for the idea of American exceptionalism? Why are you spouting nationalist rhetoric to get us involved in more wars?”

What Ms. Ziedrich said both true and a devastating indictment of Jeb’s and Dubyah’s foreign policy chops.

It’s not just the family thing here.  Jeb Bush described his brother as his most important foreign policy adviser, and he has said, even knowing what we know now, he would have invaded Iraq.

This man should not be a pastry chef.

The Coveted “Biggest Asshole in Silicon Valley” Endorsement., Marco Rubio Haz It

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I am referring, of course, to Larry Ellison, even if one ignores the persistent rumors of sexual harassment at Oracle, who will be hosting a fundraiser for Marco Rubio’s Presidential campaign.

Rubio is, “Not a mindful human being,” to borrow Ron Reagan Jr.’s phrase,* which is why he accepts Ellison’s money with such equanimity.

Of course, for a Republican Party candidate for President, being a, “Mindful human being,” is a luxury that he cannot afford.

Just look at the amount of fellating that is directed toward Sheldon Adelson by various Republicans, where recent news strongly implies strong ties to Chinese mobsters.

We need real campaign finance reform, if just so that Republicans can tell people like Ellison and Adelson to shut the f%$# up.

*RRJ said about Dick Cheney, “I don’t think he’s a mindful human being. That’s probably the nicest way I can put it,” when describing Cheney’s behavior toward his mom, Nancy Reagan at his Dad’s funeral.†
†The Link is here. The Cliff Notes version is that Dick Cheney escorted her to Reagan’s casket, and he stopped at the bottom of some stairs, and allowed an 80 year old woman with glaucoma to flounder her way up the stairs. (Really classy)

I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find That Gambling Is Going on in Here

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Cue Captain Renault

A whistle blower at Tiversa is alleging that the company manufactured false evidence of breaches to gin up business:

A bombshell lawsuit is raising eyebrows in the cybersecurity industry.

A former cybersecurity forensic examiner named Richard Wallace is claiming that his former employer — cybersecurity company Tiversa — “would typically make up fake data breaches to scare potential clients,” CNNMoney reports.

Wallace claims that Tiversa would routinely do this then “pressure firms to pay up” by buying its cybersecurity services, according to a federal courtroom transcript obtained by CNNMoney. This came to a head when Tiversa allegedly approached cancer testing services company LabMD about a supposed hack. LabMD refused to buy into Tiversa’s services, so Tiversa allegedly reported the cancer-testing company to the FTC for having a data breach.

………

This lawsuit raises some potentially worrisome issues about practices in the cybersecurity industry.

Gee you think?

It’s the f%$#ing Wild West out there, with no standards of what constitutes a breach, and no meaningful certification of the security firms.

People have been selling cyber Armageddon, with only one concrete example of their horror stories panning out (Stuxnet which was created by the US and Israeli government), why is it a surprise when we discover that people are selling “breaches” that are either non existent or minor.

I guess being a cybersecurity consultant beats working for a living.

This Sh%$ Just Got Real on Fast Track

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Senate Democrats voted against cloture, 52-47, so the vote failed to reach the 60 vote threshold:

President Obama collided with his own party Tuesday when Senate Democrats stalled consideration of a trade measure that would give the administration greater authority to negotiate more freely with other countries.

The Senate vote was a sharp blow to the president’s efforts to win approval for a new Asia-Pacific trade bill that has emerged as a top agenda item for Obama. Only one Democratic senator, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, voted with the president Tuesday.

Administration officials and Republican leaders immediately said they would bring a measure back to the Senate floor.

But the setback highlighted the president’s failure to convince Democratic lawmakers, labor union leaders and environmental groups that the 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership would help the U.S. economy. Obama has argued that the pact would open markets, promote better labor conditions abroad and protect endangered species and the environment.

I called both of my Senators this morning to ask them to vote now and to vote against cloture.

For the next round, you should do the same.

What didn’t help was Obama’s belittling, and quite frankly chicken sh%$ dismissal of Elizabeth Warren’s concerns:

………

What began with a slight jab at Warren’s trade views — “She’s wrong on this,” Obama told MSNBC three weeks ago — has escalated into a series of daily barbs and retorts carried out on cable TV and Internet interviews, on radio shows and from the official podium at the White House.

Over the weekend, Obama used a rather harsh turn of phrase — “a politician like everybody else” — against Warren, who has carefully constructed an image as a principled voice in the wilderness taking unpopular political stands to help the voiceless working class.

Warren returned fire in interviews and appearances Monday and Tuesday, accusing the president of duplicity because he “won’t actually let people read the agreement” before Tuesday’s procedural vote in the Senate.

………

Allies of Warren were taken aback by the personal nature of the president’s remarks.

“I think the president was disrespectful to her, the way he did that. I think the president has made this more personal than he needed to,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who has led opposition to the trade legislation, told reporters after Tuesday’s vote.

Brown said that some of Obama’s comments were perceived as insults directed not only at Warren but also at other Democratic opponents of the trade deal.

I haven’t heard this about Sherrod Brown, or about Bernie Sanders, or other male Senators.

The Obama administration, and Barack Obama, have a long history of being dismissive of women, with one former aide describing his administration as, “This place would be in court for a hostile workplace. … Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women“. (See also “sweetie“)

In addition to allowing his sexism to show, Obama also was stupid about this, because it is precisely the sort of behavior that gets every Senator’s back up.

I’m happy about this development, though I am concerned that I am on the same side of this as the right wing morons at Pajamas Media, who are, “Rooting for the Democrats to Block Obama’s ‘Fast Track’ Deal.”

Truth be told, part of the nearly unanimous opposition of the Democrats for cloture is not as significant as it seems, as some of the Democrats want to attach related provisions to the vote:

According to Democratic leadership aides, Senators Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, and Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat, have proposed a compromise to Republican leaders: First, hold a separate vote on legislation aimed at discouraging so-called currency manipulation by American trading partners, which could be vetoed by the president. Then, wrap the fast-track authority he is seeking with a more encompassing bill, including assistance for displaced workers, extension of an African trade accord and other trade enforcement measures.

That offer could be the path forward, given that at least eight Democrats who normally embrace trade deals voted no on Tuesday.

So the votes may shift in the next few days.

A note for Delaware voters, there was only one Democratic Senator who voted for cloture, Delaware’s Tom Carper.

Delaware primary voters, and anyone interested in donating to his campaign, please take note.

$82,000 on Snacks? What the F%$# Are You Eating?

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Somehow or other, Chris Christie managed to spend $82,000.00 of state money on snacks at football games:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spent more than $80,000 of taxpayer money on snacks at NFL games between 2010 and 2011, according to a report from New Jersey Watchdog. Christie used his government debit card 58 times at MetLife Stadium, and his office “did not provide any receipts, business reasons or names of individuals entertained, but defended the expense.”

Christie’s office has defended his use of the expense account, but were clearly embarrassed by the revelation that the governor was expensing quite a few beers while watching the Giants and Jets play because it reimbursed the costs associated with the games.

My first response was shock, of course. Christie averaged $1,500 in concessions at each game and didn’t bother keeping receipts to explain the expenses. But my second response was total envy. Spending $82,000 on snacks is an actual dream of mine. I mean, not the exact amount but the idea of spending the cost of a down payment on a home on queso and hot dogs has always been very appealing to me.

That $82,000.00 is only what he spent at the Meadowlands Stadium for football games, if you read the full report, the total spending on comestibles by Jabba the Governor is actually a bit more than $360,000.00, but that can include things like (for example) state dinners, and other public events.

Spending $1500.00 at a football game though is clearly excessive.

It should be noted that Christie has a long history of being profligate with taxpayer money in order to enhance his own comfort.  When he was US Attorney for New Jersey, he was cited for similar behavior:

When he was a top federal prosecutor, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey routinely billed taxpayers for hotel stays whose cost exceeded government guidelines, according to a report the Justice Department released on Monday.

The report, by the department’s inspector general, examined travel expenses for all 208 people who served as a United States attorney from 2007 to 2009. It spoke of five who “exhibited a noteworthy pattern of exceeding the government rate and whose travel documentation provided insufficient, inaccurate or no justification for the higher lodging rates.”

While the report did not identify any prosecutors by name, the travel patterns of an official called “U.S. Attorney C” — the one “who most often exceeded the government rate without adequate justification” in terms of percentage of travel — match records about Mr. Christie that were released in the 2009 campaign for governor by his Democratic opponent, the incumbent, Jon S. Corzine.

As governor, Mr. Christie, who was the United States attorney for New Jersey from 2002 to 2008, has pushed to cut government spending and waste, making him a rising star in the Republican Party.

………

The report also noted the reimbursements Mr. Christie received for airport transportation costs. Rather than taking a taxi for the four-mile trip between his hotel and the Boston airport, he took a car service costing $236. A similar arrangement for a London trip cost $562.

I really hope that someone in oppo research is paying attention to this stuff, because it’s not going to play well in either Iowa or New Hampshire.