Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Welcome to the Handmaiden’s Tale

1 Comment

A judge in Minnesota just gave a free pass to employers who don’t want to cover contraceptives. I’m wondering when a Jehovah’s Witness gets to deny coverage for blood transfusions:

A federal judge in Minneapolis ruled Monday that the owner of Hastings Ford and Hastings Chrysler Center does not have to pay for health insurance coverage for certain contraceptives such as Plan B, ella emergency contraceptive and certain kinds of IUDs.

Douglas Erickson said in a lawsuit that contraceptives that prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted in a woman’s uterus violate his belief that life begins at conception. Erickson’s businesses have 63 full-time employees and about 15 part-timers.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson is the latest in a string of decisions involving family-owned businesses that have sued to become exempt from a portion of the federal Affordable Care Act because of their religious beliefs.

………

Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and North and South Dakota issued a statement Tuesday after the ruling became public.

“It’s unbelievable that we are still fighting for access to birth control in 2014, with some politicians who want to get rid of the birth control benefit completely,” the statement said. “We know firsthand that access to birth control is both a health care and economic concern for women.”

Here’s a hearty f%$# you to the Supreme Court over the Hobby Lobby decision.

I’ll Go With the Under on Net Neutrality

No Comments

The cable companies pet FCC commissioner has estimated the cost of net neutrality regulations to consumers at $17 billion, while an open internet advocacy group has pegged the cost at $0:

After a dramatic shift in the debate over net neutrality last month, many expect the FCC will reclassify internet providers so as to bar them from giving special treatment to some websites over others. The question now becomes how much (if at all) the agency’s decision, which turns on an arcane process called Title II, will cost consumers.
Depending on who you ask, the answer is that Title II, which would treat internet providers akin to public utilities, will be ruinously expensive — or will have little financial impact at all. Among the Cassandras, you can count Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai:

 “It will cost $17 billion in new fees,” Pai told an audience of telecom lawyers in Washington on Friday, warning that consumers’ monthly internet bills are set to soar.

Pai’s number, which has also popped up on the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page and in other right-leaning outlets, is lifted from a purported study by the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank that has reportedly taken funding from AT&T.

………

Like so much else in the pitched debate over net neutrality, however, the $17 billion number may have been ginned up for political purposes. According to Free Press, a nonpartisan advocacy group for open internet, the figure represents a misleading worst-case scenario that will never come to pass.

As the group points out, reclassification does not appear to require any new consumer fees. Such fees, it they do appear, will instead be the result of a separate set of decisions by the FCC and various governments.

I have no doubt that the PPI has taken funding from AT&T.  After all, their parent organization, the now defunct Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was funded by the Koch brothers.

Also note that most of the $17 billion involved is on a separate regulatory ruling, and that the FCC has made it very clear that they will engage in regulatory forbearance, and not impose the charges that Mr. Pai is mentioning, but these charges have nothing to do with reclassification of Title II.

Even if there are a few buck additional charges, it would well worth it to prevent “Cable Company F%$#ery.”

Quote of the Day

No Comments

Good Point

It’s funny, I just made this movie about a guy who triumphs over the inhuman conditions in his imprisonment in an authoritarian country, and I don’t think they did half that sh%$ to him.

— Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is rightly appalled.

He just did a movie about torture, and the elements of the state security apparatus in Iran were more humane, and less brutal, than those of the United States.

Our torture, and the support for it, both tacit and explicit, exhibited by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, are going to bear bitter fruit for the us for decades.

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

As former federal regulator Bill Black notes, the second circuit court decision effectively legalizes insider trading:

We know that insider trading is an activity in which cheaters prosper. We know that Wall Street and the City of London are dominated by a fraudulent culture and we know that firm culture is set by the officers that control the firm. We know that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has allowed that to occur by refusing to prosecute any of the thousands of senior bank officers who became wealthy by leading the three most destructive financial fraud epidemics (appraisals, “liar’s” loans, and fraudulent sales of these fraudulently originated mortgages to the secondary market) in history. No one is surprised that Wall Street’s elites have also engaged in widespread efforts to rig the stock markets so that they can shoot fish in the barrel through insider trading. Unlike the three fraud epidemics, one DOJ office, the Southern District of New York, has brought a series of criminal prosecutions against these officers.

 Wall Street’s court of appeals (the Second Circuit) has just issued an opinion not simply overturning guilty verdicts but making it impossible to retry the elite Wall Street defendants that grew wealthy through trading on insider information. Indeed, the opinion reads like a roadmap (or a script) that every corrupt Wall Street elite can follow to create a cynical system of cutouts (ala SAC) that will allow the most senior elites to profit by trading on insider information as a matter of routine with total impunity. The Second Circuit decision makes any moderately sophisticated insider trading scheme that uses cutouts to protect the elite traders a perfect crime. It is a perfect crime because (1) it is guaranteed to make the elite traders who trades on the basis of what he knows is secret, insider information wealthy absent successful prosecutions and (2) using the Second Circuit’s decision as a fraud roadmap, an elite trader can arrange the scheme with total impunity from the criminal laws. The Second Circuit ruling appears to make the financial version of “don’t ask; don’t tell” a complete defense to insider trading prosecutions. The Second Circuit does not simply make it harder to prosecute – they make it impossible to prosecute sophisticated insider fraud schemes in which the elites use junior cutouts to create (totally implausible) deniability.

The New York Times article on the decision was entitled “Two Insider Trading Convictions Are Overturned in Blow to Prosecutors.” The title is partially correct. The real blows, however, were to investors, the already crippled integrity of Wall Street, and every honest trader on Wall Street who cannot possibly compete with his rivals who cheat through the “sure thing” of insider trading now that the Second Circuit has written an opinion explaining how to corrupt the entire system with impunity from the criminal laws.

………

The Second Circuit decision admits that the prosecutors presented evidence established a massive conspiracy designed to allow Wall Street elites to profit by engaging in insider trading, a conspiracy that greatly enriched the defendants that were convicted in the case under appeal.

“At trial, the Government presented evidence that a group of financial analysts exchanged information they obtained from company insiders, both directly and more often indirectly. Specifically, the Government alleged that these analysts received information from insiders at Dell and NVIDIA disclosing those companies’ earnings numbers before they were publicly released in Dell’s May 2008 and August 2008 earnings announcements and NVIDIA’s May 2008 earnings announcement. These analysts then passed the inside information to their portfolio managers, including Newman and Chiasson, who, in turn, executed trades in Dell and NVIDIA stock, earning approximately $4 million and $68 million, respectively, in profits for their respective funds.”

The Second Circuit was not distressed that senior Wall Street officials received information that was clearly insider information that they knew they should not have access to. The insider information they were provided was the crown jewels – two major corporations’ soon to be announced “numbers” – at least one of which was sure to be a major surprise to the markets. A senior trader that knows “the number” in advance, particularly when he knows that the number will be a surprise, can shoot fish in a small barrel with a large shotgun. The insider information allows the senior trader to reduce the risk of loss to trivial levels while increasing the probability of gain to near certainty. The trader makes a fortune by cheating, not through any unusual skill. The senior trader knows that no employee of any publicly traded corporation is permitted to release such secret and proprietary insider information to investors.

The Second Circuit was not distressed that the senior Wall Street officials did not react to being provided what was clearly insider information by demanding to know how their analysts got the information and instructing them that their actions violated the firms’ ethical standards and would lead to their termination if it were ever repeated. The firm’s ethics manuals banned the senior traders from trading on the basis of insider information. Instead, of serving as ethical leaders in training the analysts not to engage in such behavior and instead of following their firm’s ban on trading on the basis of insider information, the senior officers engaged in a cynical financial version of “don’t ask; don’t tell.” The analysts and the senior officials that traded on the inside information understood the wisdom of the old line “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you know lies.” The senior officers proceeded to profit by exploiting this advantage over honest investors while minimizing the risk of a successful prosecution not by being ethical, but by consciously maintaining (not remotely) “plausible deniability.”

………

But worse will soon come. The Second Circuit’s decision is a “how to” manual on how elites Wall Streeters can become wealthy through insider trading with impunity from the criminal laws. The Second Circuit opinion shows that using a “cutout” is the key to achieve the “sure thing” of enormous wealth through insider trading without financial or legal risk. The Second Circuit lays out the game plan. The little folks in the organization develop the contacts with insiders in publicly traded firms. The analysts function initially like any good intelligence agent recruiting an asset. These assets have insider information of their employers, the publicly traded corporations. The analyst develops a rapport with the employee or exploits an existing tie. The analyst shows the employee a very good time – a taste of how good his life can be if he plays ball. But the analyst doesn’t make any explicit promises or deals. (In the case decided by the Second Circuit others cutouts earlier in the insider trading chain made the corrupt payments to the employees.) The Wall Street senior officers who grow wealthy by trading the insider information will make sure that the analysts are well cared for – discretely and at a later date.

The analyst then has to do one thing and avoid doing a second. Both are simple. The analyst needs to signal to his superior that the information is reliable. The government complaint against SAC show one the innumerable means of sending that signal. The government’s appellate brief contains the text of an email in which an analyst explicitly conveyed the reliable track record of the leakers of the inside information to the senior traders so that they could be sure they had a “sure thing” by investing on the basis of the inside information.

The analyst needs not to explicitly tell the senior officer conducting the trade that the insider information was the product of a deal in which the employee who leaks the insider information was explicitly promised a quid pro quo to the leaker. Again, the government complaint against SAC and the government appellate brief in the case reversed by the Second Circuit show in detail how simple it is to design systems of not making these matters explicit. That is why the Second Circuit ruling imperils prosecutions in every case in which the insider trading scheme was done with even modest cleverness.

………

The Second Circuit’s reasoning has the perverse effect that the more corrupt individuals engaged in the insider trading scheme the more likely the scheme is to be declared lawful as long as the traders use their corrupt colleagues as cutouts. Note that the Second Circuit reasoning does not simply make it harder to prosecute sophisticated insider trading schemes – it holds that the actions of the elite traders who know that they are achieving the “sure thing” of immense insider trading profits on the basis of deliberate leaks of that information are not unlawful and cannot be prosecuted. The Second Circuit has created the perfect crime and publicized how to shape the scheme to insure wealth and impunity through creating widespread chains designed to corrupt the markets, employees of the publicly traded corporations, and the Wall Street firms.

The tone of the opinion is particularly galling. The Second Circuit is not even mildly distressed by the result. It expresses disdain for the idea that Wall Street elites should not be able to enrich themselves with complete impunity from the laws through corrupt arrangements such as those proven at the trial. The opinion consciously deliberately creates a straw man argument designed to hide the fact that insider trading schemes of this make it impossible for honest competitors to prevail through skill and hard work.

I’m hoping that someone manages to take them down before the banksters destroy us all.

Welcome to Our Police State

1 Comment

And now the cops are sending SWAT teams to check on the license of hair stylists:

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued a ruling on the sort of issue you’d hope a federal appeals court would never need to rule on — whether the government should be allowed to use SWAT-style tactics to perform regulatory inspections.

At issue were a series of police raids on barbershops around the city of Orlando. The raids were basically fishing operations for drug crimes and to recruit confidential informants. All of the raided shops were black- or Hispanic-owned. The problem is that, because they were fishing expeditions, the police didn’t have enough evidence to obtain a warrant. Instead, the police asked an occupational license office to send along an inspector. Voila! These were no longer drug raids. For the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, they were now officially licensure inspections that just happened to include armored cops storming the businesses as if they were harboring an ISIS sleeper cell.

………

I’ve since posted about incidents in which SWAT teams were sent to raid someone suspected of credit card fraud and a woman involved in an ongoing zoning dispute with the local government. Of course, we’ve also seen hundreds of SWAT-style raids on people in the medical marijuana business, even though they pose little threat to police or the public. There have also been SWAT raids on doctors and patients suspected of crimes involving prescription painkillers, even though, again, there’s little reason to think these suspects are dangerous. Last year, a spokesperson for the St. Louis County, Mo., police department told a local TV station that all felony warrants there are now served with SWAT teams, regardless of the crime.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is completely nuts?

And We Have a Couple More Credit Union Failures

No Comments

It’s been a over a month since we’ve had a bank failure Friday, there has not been a bank failure since early November, but we just had a couple more credit union failures:

  1. Metropolitan Church of God Credit Union, Detroit, MI
  2. Health One Credit Union, Detroit, MI

Here is the Full NCUA list.

I’m still not sure why the ratio between credit union failures and bank failures is some where between 3 and 4:1.

Why Does Maureen Dowd Still Have a Job?

No Comments

It’s one thing to ask for comment from a subject of a story, but preclearing the story with your subject before publication is not journalism, it’s PR:

Leaked emails from Sony suggest that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd promised to show Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal’s husband, Bernard Weinraub, — a former Times reporter — a version of a column featuring Pascal before publication.

The end result was a column that painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication. It also scored Pascal points back at the studio, with Sony’s then-communications-chief calling the column “impressive.”

The exchanges were uncovered in a trove of Pascal’s emails released as part of a massive hack on Sony carried out by the group known as “Guardians of Peace.” The column, published after the Academy Awards earlier this year, lamented how “Oscar voters and industry top brass are still overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged.”

I’ve never understood the allure of MoDo.

She writes about the great issues of the day like a middle schooler dissing another girl’s choice of shoes.

I expect that her job is safe,. but I really hope that her editor cuts her a new one about this.

If This Isn’t Suborning Perjury, It’s Still a Violation of Legal Ethics

No Comments
One of the things that prosecutors are not supposed to do is to encourage a witness to lie. It’s called suborning perjury, and it is a crime.

On a marginally lower level of corruption and malfeasance is knowingly putting a witness on the stand who you know will lie.

In what is surprisingly unsurprising news, it turns out that the St. Louis prosecutors office called a witness to testify in the Michael Brown killing who they knew to be lying:

So, you are Prosecutor Bob McCulloch. You have a grand jury investigation with the entire world watching. One of your witnesses in support of the officer is revealed by the FBI to have made up her entire account. What do you do?

Apparently you present a discredited witness to the grand jury anyways. He played the FBI interview, which revealed that Witness 40’s car was not at the location, that 40 could not have exited in the manner described, that 40 did not even tell anyone her story until over two weeks after the shooting. They tore her apart, showing that she changed her story several times while sitting on the stand. For example, in her interview, 40 claimed to have made no contact to the police for two weeks, then later claimed that she did contact them several times before agreeing to be a witness. And that is not the only occasion they caught her changing her story, with other times her lack of knowledge of the crime scene, how her journal and testimony did not match, how the exit for the complex did not exist where she claimed all being revealed. That interview, found on pages 86-184 of Grand Jury Testimony Volume 15, completely discredits her as a witness.

Then, fully knowing this, Bob McCulloch brought her before the grand jury, and entered her hand written journals filled with racist language into the record. And this testimony, by a discredited witness, is the one cited by right-wing media outlets in their attempts to support former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson. Claims of Michael Brown charging like a bull? Her account, and only her account.

 Seriously, why does Bob McCulloch still have a law license?

Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

No Comments

Veronica Dunnachie, the “Open Carry” activist, who has just been arrest for shooting her ex-husband and step daughter to death:

A woman charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and stepdaughter has strong connections to groups advocating for expanding open carry gun laws in Texas.

Local news outlets on Wednesday reported that Veronica Dunnachie was arrested and charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and step daughter.

Buried in some of the initial reporting on the arrest of Dunnachie seems to have been an active participant in open carry groups in Texas. The local ABC affiliate, WFAA, noted that Dunnachie’s Facebook page is photos of her engaged in open carry firearm advocacy activities. WFAA also noted that one of her profile pictures included the text “Sometimes removing some people out of your life makes room for better people.”

Veronica and Russell Dunnachie were going through a divorce, according to court records.

They say that the gun most likely to kill you is your own.

It appears that the 2nd most likely gun to kill you belongs to your ex.

Please Use Yiddish Responsibly

No Comments

Would someone please inform Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their subsidiary formerly known as Wisconsin as to the proper use of Yiddish:

Navigating a religion or culture you weren’t brought up in can be challenging, to say the least.

 It’s something most politicians find themselves doing at one point or another, though, whether it’s in relating to constituents or appealing to donors.

………

 As Gov. Scott Walker courts Republican mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s support for a likely 2016 presidential run, he’s found himself dining with top GOP donors — but also addressing a crowd at the Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting.

 ………

 These overtures represent a marked improvement from a letter Walker sent — also about a menorah — during his time as Milwaukee County executive.

 In an undated letter unearthed by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now during the August release of documents from the first of two John Doe investigations related to the governor, Walker responded to a letter from Milwaukee attorney and chairman of the Wisconsin Center District Franklyn Gimbel.

 Walker told Gimbel his office would be happy to display a menorah celebrating “The Eight Days of Chanukah” at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, and asked Gimbel to have a representative from Lubavitch of Wisconsin contact Walker’s secretary, Dorothy Moore, to set it up.

 The letter is signed, “Thank you again and Molotov.”

 Presumably, Walker meant to write “mazel tov” and didn’t intend to wish good tidings of incendiary weapons. Perhaps it was a case of AutoCorrect or that pesky Microsoft Word paperclip causing shenanigans.

Under these circumstances, it is clear that he intended the Yiddish version, pronounced MAW-zil-Tawf, not the Hebrew rendition, pronounced maw-ZIL-Tove, and this is always pronounced the first way in the US under similar circumstances.

In any case, while the term is used in modern Hebrew, it is not used in Biblical Hebrew, and the term originated in Yiddish.

In either case, Governor Walker, don’t even bother.

You are arguably the Whitest Guy in Wisconsin™, and you are just going to embarrass yourself.

Israel’s Right Wing Christian “Allies” are a Bigger Threat to them than Hamas

No Comments

Case in point, one Adam Everett Livvix,* who was indicted for plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem:

The Israel Police and Shin Bet Security Service released information on Tuesday regarding a Christian American citizen arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack on Muslim holy sites in Israel.

According to Shin Bet and Israel Police reports, the suspect is Adam Everett Livvix, a 30-year-old from Texas. Livvix has previously been wanted in the U.S. on drug charges. He was arrested in Israel on November 19, on suspicion of possession of illegal weapons and planning a terror attack.

According to the Shin Bet, Livvix, while residing in the Palestinian territories prior to his arrest, was approached about assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama while the latter was visiting Israel, though the suspect refused to take part in the plan.

Livvix came to Israel in 2013 and lived in the Palestinian cities of Hebron and Bethlehem. It was while living in Bethlehem that Livvix was approached by a Palestinian about assassinating Obama the with a sniper rifle. Livvix refused. After leaving Palestinian Authority territory, Livvix entered Israel illegally, and remained in the country illegally for roughly a year and a half.

Livvix became acquainted with Israelis and presented himself as a former U.S. Navy SEAL. During questioning, Livvix admitted to being involved in various fraud schemes, as well as the initial stages of planning terror attacks on sites holy to Islam in Israel.

He was apprehended in possession of various weapons and explosives that were stolen from the Israel Defense Forces. In October of this year Livvix asked his roommate, an IDF soldier, to procure weapons for him in exchange for money. His roommate managed to bring him a 1.4 kilogram explosive device, for which Livvix paid part of the agreed upon sum.

The American Federal Bureau of Investigation was notified of the investigation by Israeli security services, and the Central District Prosecutor filed an indictment against Livix in the Netanya Magistrate’s Court. On Monday, the court ordered that Livvix be held until the end of legal proceedings, and that he undergo psychiatric evaluation as per the request of his defense attorney.

The Israel Police and the Justice Ministry stated that the suspect attempted to flee when he was apprehended by police, by jumping out of his seventh-floor window onto a sixth-floor balcony.

Livvix’s indictment comes at a time of rising tensions in Jerusalem, mostly over a disputed holy site that is holy both to Muslims and Jews.

You know, the Rapture Ready™ crowd literally expects the Jews of the world to burn in hellfire so that they can float up to heaven like a bunch of helium filled sex dolls.

That’s why they do sh%$ like this.  They literally want to hasten the end of the world.

Can you imagine the sh%$-storm that would have come down if he had succeeded in blowing up a bomb on the Temple Mount?

He wouldn’t care.  Anything bad that happens to people in Israel is just collateral camage to their warped theology.

BTW, in addition to everything else, it appears that this guy is a seriously bent piece of work.

*Why do all these guys always go by three names from anyway?

F%$# the South

No Comments

Michael Tomansky, writing for The Daily Beast, suggests that the Democrats are wasting resources trying to win in the South:

I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).

………

 But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Charlie Pierce disagrees strongly:

I sympathize with Mike. I truly do. But I still will stand with Governor Dean and the 50-state strategy, at least applied judiciously. To me, the key to the problem is to break the stranglehold of the Washington-based consultant class over what candidates will be run in what places. It wasn’t the Beltway crowd who found Jon Tester in Montana, or Jim Webb in Virginia. The national party should be involved in these races only as a means by which money can be shrewdly spread around, and as a means of employing some sense of party discipline. No, Mr. Breaux, we won’t be following your easily rented ass any more. We will find progressive populists, white or black, and we will run them and support them, and maybe the first five tries won’t work but, sooner or later, there will be a breakthrough, and it will not be led by the next Bill Clinton and the next DLC.

For example, Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds in South Carolina and in Mississippi. He wouldn’t come close to winning anything in either of those states, but there is a working-class audience there that is interested in listening to him, and that is worth respecting in our politics. There always has been a kind of working-class populism in the South, and it always came to grief over race. But it’s 2014, and forging an actual alliance of working people, black and white, in the places that need it the most, is a worthwhile effort whether it fails initially or not. To abandon the people trying to forge that alliance — and, therefore, to abandon the people on whose behalf that alliance is being forged — would be political malpractice of the highest order. It would be an odd kind of confirmation of Willard Romney’s first bumbling attempts to run away from himself on health care, whereby G.I. Luvmoney averred that what worked in Massachusetts would not work in Mississippi, as though Those People were expendable because the Mississippi Republicans would have them die by the side of the road. Sometimes, the fight alone is enough.

The problem is much like the supporters of Julian Schwinger’s and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga’s competing theories of quantum electrodynamics.

They are actually saying the same thing, but they are talking past each other and arguing about notation.*

Neither one of them is actually suggesting that we not run candidates.

They are both asserting that the current campaign for seats in the south is being done by compromising Democratic Party values, and neither of them are suggesting that candidates not be run.

In order to support the clearly doomed campaigns of Landrieu in Louisiana and Pryor in Arkansas, Obama held off on an executive order to help illegal immigrants.

Over the past 6 years, Obama has engaged in the most aggressive deportation policies in our nation’s history in an attempt to support southern candidates.

It’s been bad policy and bad politics.

*I am making no claims here to my having anywhere near the intellectual heft of the man who resolved this dispute, Richard Feynman. He is way out of my league.

Stay Classy, My Friends

No Comments
A bar in Missouri (or is that Misery?) was found to offer a “Michael Brown Special”, 6 shots of Jose Cinge for $10:

A “Michael Brown Special” is now being offered at Mug Shots, a Missouri bar. The six shots of Jose Cinge for $10 drink has sparked quite a controversy both in the town of St. Joseph and around the country.

Mug Shots bar is reportedly known for its “sarcasm is always free” mantra. One of the co-owners of the Missouri bar now regrets his most recent attempt at sarcasm and the creation of the Michael Brown Special drink.

During an interview with WDAF-TV local news, the co-owner who asked not to be identified, said, “[The Michael Brown Special drink] was not meant to cause any harm. I should have thought a little bit more about it before I made it a shot special.”

Gee, you think?

It’s on a par with the Trayvon Martin pistol targets.

Get back under your rock and stay there, you contemptible ratf%$#.

We Finally Got the Torture Report. It is Actually a Bit Worse than I Expected.

No Comments

Understand that we are talking about an executive summary (PDF) that spans 525 pages(!), and I have not read it in detail.

But here are the basic points from the report:

  1. The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
  2. The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
  3. The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
  4. The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
  5. The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  6. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
  7. The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
  8. The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.
  9. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
  10. The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
  11. The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
  12. The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
  13. Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
  14. CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA headquarters.
  15. The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
  16. The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
  17. The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
  18. The CIA marginalised and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  19. The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
  20. The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.

First, I curse the people who jade me agree with John McCain, when he said that he suspected that, “The objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure: torture’s ineffectiveness.”

It is the nature of secret organizations to misuse the classification process to avoid embarrassment and for bureaucratic and budgetary infighting.

BTW, John “I Opposed Torture, I Pinkie Swear” Brennan is saying that we should the ignore this document, because torture really worked.

He keeps slicing that bullsh%$, and Barack Obama keeps a swallowing it.

Here are some things have been observed by people who have read the report in more detail than I have been able to yet:

Note the Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into releasing this report.

For all of his assertions that the President wants to ensure that this will not happen again, the people who did this, people who were rewarded with promotions and prestige, will suffer no consequences.

We will torture again, and we will do this soon, because people in senior positions at the US state security apparatus are in those positions because they either tortured or facilitated torture.

Fire Brennan.  He supports torture, and he lied to Congress.

Fire Clapper.  He lied to congress.

Pull the security clearances of those involved in the torture program, particularly Jose Rodriguez, for moral turpitude.

Get the contractors out of the intelligence committee.  They are a cancer on an already dysfunctional culture.

I So Wish She Were Running for President

No Comments

Elizabeth Warren just opened up a serious can of whup ass on the Obama toadies who are pushing for the nomination of Antonio Weiss for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made clear on Tuesday that she is not swayed by supporters of Obama administration nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy Antonio Weiss. Warren upped the ante in the unusually heated nomination fight, even mocking his defenders who point out that he supports “poetry.”

………

Warren, in her speech at an event hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Roosevelt Institute and Americans for Financial Reform, ticked off the most common points defenders of Weiss have made about his nomination.

“He spent the last 20 years at the investment bank Lazard and has been named to be under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department. He is focused on international corporate mergers — companies buying and selling each other,” Warren said. “Now, it may be interesting, challenging, but it does not sufficiently qualify him to oversee consumer protection and domestic regulatory functions at the Treasury Department.”

………

Weiss’s nomination contradicts the Obama administration’s opposition to bringing in personnel who won’t have conflicts of interest with Wall Street, Warren said.

“Now, this matters because at the end of the day the administration undercuts its own opposition to this practice by nominating someone who was involved in a high profile, cross boarder inversion and who, by the way, made $15 million in the last few years, working for Lazard, a firm that did three of the four major announced inversions,” Warren said “And by the way, Lazard isn’t an American company anymore either. It already moved to Bermuda to cut its taxes.”

Recent profiles of Weiss, oddly, have included the fact that he’s been involved in publishing the Paris Review in ticking off his Democratic bona fides. That wasn’t lost on Warren.

“Third, and maybe you can help me understand this argument, people say opposition to Weiss is unreasonable because, wait for it, he likes poetry,” Warren said. “I’m actually not kidding on this one. Supposedly because he helps publish a literary magazine called the Paris Review we should trust that he will zealously pursue financial reform. Now I confess, I don’t read many literary magazines but, really?”

In leaving Lazard, Warren noted that Weiss would receive a golden parachute of about $20 million.

“For me, this is just one spin of the revolving door too many. Enough is enough,” Warren said. “The response to these concerns has been, let’s say, loud. First his supporters say ‘come on, he’s an investment banker so of course he should be qualified to oversee complicated financial work at treasury. But his defenders haven’t shown his actual experience that qualifies him for this job at treasury.”

One of the more substantive arguments against Warren’s opposition to Weiss is that he’s as good as could possibly be gotten in a nominee for a top treasury position. Warren said she has supported qualified people with ties to Wall Street but that’s not what Weiss is.

“Look, when I set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau I interviewed, I hired, and I worked alongside many people with Wall Street experience and I was glad to do so. In the Senate I have voted for plenty of nominees with Wall Street experience,” Warren said. “But we need a balance. Not everyone who swoops in through the revolving door should be offered a top job without some serious examinations. Qualifications matter and Weiss doesn’t have them.”

Ouch.

Instead, I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for some corporate Democrat.

Unless Bernie Sanders run.

Run Bernie!!! Run!!!

“Most Transparent Administration Ever,” my Ass!!!

No Comments

So, the administration, via the gentle words of John Kerry, has asked that the unclassified summary of the torture report release be delayed:

Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.

 Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad. Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now.

 “What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. “He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue — it’s a foreign policy issue.”

Bullsh%$.

If this gets delayed, then Richard Burr (R-NC) is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina has made it clear that he is opposed to any release of any information regarding torture by the committee.

The Obama administration, which has been thoroughly captured by the most repulsive elements of the US state security apparatus, would be fine with that.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Call me a Curmudgeon, But………

No Comments

The most recent news on employment, which shows good employment growth, is good news, but I would not start singing Hosannas yet.

There are a number of temporary externalities, most notably a 40% drop in the price of oil in the past 6 months and renewed froth in the housing market, that account for much of this, and neither of them are sustainable.

Also, it increasingly looks like the big casino on Wall Street is back, and they can f%$# up anything.

Voting Against Voting Against Nazism: Where Bad Foreign Policy Takes You

No Comments

The Russians proposed a motion in the General Assembly of the UN condemning the Nazis, and those who glorify them.

The United States, Canada, and the Ukraine voted against the resolution, while the EU nations abstained:

The war of words between Russia and Ukraine over the issue of anti-Semitism heated up this weekend, with Moscow condemning the former Soviet republic, as well as the US and Canada, for voting against an annual UN resolution condemning Nazism.

The draft, which was approved by a vote of 115 to 3 in the UN’s Third (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) Committee on Friday, condemned the “glorification” of Nazism, neo-Nazism and “other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” It was backed by Russia, with support from Pakistan, Cuba and Rwanda, among others. Fifty-five countries abstained from the vote.

It is “highly regrettable” that the US, Canada and Ukraine opposed the measure and that members of the European Union withdrew from the vote, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

Russia was particularly “depressed and alarmed” over Kiev’s opposition, the ministry said, as Ukrainians “experienced the full brunt of the horrors of Nazism and contributed importantly to our common victory over it.”

Russia has consistently asserted that Ukraine’s post-revolutionary government, which took power after popular demonstrations pushed out pro-Moscow President Victor Yanukovich, is composed of fascists and anti-Semites.

“It could never occur to anybody that radicals and neo-Nazis could come to dominate Ukrainian politics,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told deputies in Russia’s parliament last week.

The US government actively supported the right wing nativist Pravy Sektor party and its violent and xenophobic militia to overthrow the government of Victor Yanukovich

Both of these organizations see themselves as heirs to the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, and Pravy Sektor is a part of the ruling coalition in the Ukraine, it’s not surprising the the Ukrainian ambassador would vote no.

Because the US was instrumental in making this happen, it’s not surprising that we cast what is essentially a pro-Nazi vote.

As to Canada, at least under the Harper government, being in mindless lockstep with the US is just how they roll.

Still, it’s pretty f%$#ing disgraceful.