Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Bush with a Tan

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Obama is escalating in Iraq:

President Barack Obama has approved doubling the U.S. military force in Iraq and allowing troops to venture beyond headquarters already established in Baghdad and Erbil, in an escalation of the U.S. effort to defeat Islamic State extremists.

………

The president’s approval to send as many as 1,500 personnel is in addition to 1,600 he previously authorized, 1,400 of whom are in Iraq today protecting U.S. facilities and assisting the Iraqi military. Troops that have been confined to Baghdad, the capital, and Erbil in Kurdish northern Iraq now will be permitted to train and advise Iraqi forces at a number of Iraqi military facilities, according to a White House statement.

This of course, not going any sort of escalation, they promise:

“U.S. troops will not be in combat, but they will be better positioned to support Iraqi security forces as they take the fight” to the Sunni extremists, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said today in the statement.

  • Double the troops.
  • Double the exposure to possible violence.
  • Double the possibility that one of them will be taken captive.

Nope, no escalation here.

Good Point

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It bears reading, but in the The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf makes a point about Barack Obama that I have been making since 2007:

But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American; 2) covered up torture; 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations; 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes; 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so); 6) let high-ranking national-security officials break the law with impunity; and 7) persecuted whistleblowers—confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in 10 Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National-security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.

To see it all with open eyes is to disapprove.

But for the fact that he leaves off the bit about his relentless protection of the corrupt ratf%$#s on Wall Street who destroyed our economy, he lays it out pretty well.

Read the rest.

Wonkett Nails It

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Democrats Have Great Exciting New Idea: Being Democrats:

Here’s an idea that’s so crazy, it just might work! After the thorough ass-kicking the Democratic Party suffered on Election Day, some Democrats are considering the possibility that maybe running “Democratic” candidates who are embarrassed to be Democrats is not the best way to appeal to the Democratic Party. Crazy, huh? With candidates refusing to support Obamacare, refusing to support Democratic policies, refusing to even say “Hell, yes, I voted for Barack Obama because I am a Democrat, DUH,” the new minority is thinking maybe it’s time to get back to being Democrats.

According to Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to the soon-to-be-ex Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the new plan for 2016 is to maybe — maybe — run Democratic candidates on a Democratic platform.

Your mouth to God’s year, Faiz.

Cowardice is bad politics.

I Have to Give an A for Inventiveness

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The European Union has classified spyware as a restricted item requiring an export license, much like weapons:

Companies which make spyware will have to apply for permission to export the software once new EU regulations come into effect in late December.

Officially referred to as “intrusion software”, the software will now be included on the EU’s list of “dual use” items, defined as “goods, software and technology normally used for civilian purposes but which might have military applications or contribute to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

The restriction means that companies will have to apply for a licence to export spyware, although it doesn’t affect the sale of the software within the UK. Inclusion on the dual-use list places the technology alongside nuclear reactors, ultra-high-resolution cameras, and rocket fuel.

While the regulation is implemented by the European commission, the British government supports the restriction of spyware. “The UK has made it clear over the last two years that we believe that while these kind of technologies do have legitimate uses, they also pose threats to national security and to human rights and should be subject to export controls,” said a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Hopefully, this the export of such software to repressive regimes, as FinFisher did with its FinFish spyware, which it probably exported to Egypt, Bahrain, Ethiopia, etc.

Additionally, I hope that it will serve to also restrict the use of such programs by commercial entities.

Things like tracking cookies, and Verizon’s new “super cookies”, should be included in this category.

Taibbi is Back

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Now that Matt Taibbi is no longer being gaslighted by FirstLook media, he’s back to writing about corruption in finance, and this one is a doozy.

Basically, he has found a whistle blower who taking the step of breaching her confidentiality agreement to reveal extensive and systematic fraud at J.P. Morgan Chase:

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

leischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”

………

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.

This past year she watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.


And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

Read the rest. 

It’s a long read, but well worth it.

The fact that all the big banks are criminal enterprises is now a surprise to anyone who reads the paper, but Taibbi’s description of Fleischmann’s experience with the so called regulators and so called authorities a searing indictment of the deeply craven and corrupt people at the Justice Department, particularly Eric “Place” Holder.

Pig Felching Rat Bastards of the Day

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Ford Motor Company, who fired about 100 workers by robocall over this weekend:

Nearly 100 workers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant got a robocall on Halloween telling them their services were no longer needed and they were terminated.

It wasn’t a trick or a morbid prank.

Dozens of workers missed the call or didn’t believe it, so they showed up to work Saturday anyway, according to an autoworker who wished to remain anonymous. They found their ID badges had been disabled and were told by security they had been fired.

“As part of our normal business process, we’ve temporarily adjusted our workforce numbers at Chicago Assembly Plant,” Ford Motor Co. said in a statement.

Remember what I said about honey and rabid wolverines?

HR at Ford should get this treatment too.

I Want My Howard Dean!!!

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What Atrios says:

One thing that I think people tend to forget is that Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy wasn’t simply about fighting everywhere, it was about shoveling money out of DC before the vultures there could get their hands on it. It was about the idea that people who run campaigns out of Washington don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but that as long as the money was sitting there, candidates didn’t have much choice but to deal with them.

In case you doubt the wisdom of his words, note what some anonymous Democratic Party functionary asshat said about all this:

“This is a tsunami. Heads will roll at 1600. And if they don’t, shame,” the insider said, adding: “The president has 60 days to clean house, regrow his spine, and lay out an aggressive, centrist agenda. If he fails at any of those, he might as well just start writing his memoir.”

Note that in the same article, there is someone who gets it:

“Democratic operatives who refuse to acknowledge this is the White House’s fault are out of their f—— minds,” the operative said. “These operatives who don’t understand that the White House fucked up are the same hacks who overcharge House and Senate candidates for shitty consulting work and help lose elections year after year.”

The operative also said Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hurt the party by delaying ambitious action on immigration and other hot-button issues to protect incumbent senators in southern states.

“It also doesn’t help that Dems completely broke their promise to enact immigration reform. Reid’s strategy of ‘no big bills’ this year that could protect [Arkansas Sen. Mark] Pryor, [North Carolina Sen. Kay] Hagan, and [Louisiana Sen. Mary] Landrieu obviously backfired,” the operative said. “They lost anyway, and we pissed off our base at the same time.”

Let me make a note here:  Were the Democratic Party to adopt a “F%#@ the South strategy”, much in the same way that Republicans have adopted a “F%$# New York City & Hollywood & San Francisco & Boston & non white Americans”, there really wound not be a down side.

Over the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has devoted increasing resources to keep its foothold in the white South, and that is simply not going to happen.

The dynamic that LBJ said over 50 years ago, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.“

We as a nation are not going to change this dynamic until we as a nation stop pandering to it.

Needless to Say, I Wish that I Wasn’t Right

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The Republicans have taken over the Senate, as I predicted 12 days ago.

Needless to say, I am kind of bummed about being right.

I expect there to be pressure in the next Congress to impeach Obama, and in response, I expect Obama to try to gut Social Security and Medicare.

I would also lay even odds that, in the spirit of hope and change bipartizanship cowardice, Obama will end up sending troops back to Iraq.

We are unbelievably screwed.

Chickensh%$s on the World Stage

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As you are no doubt aware, anonymous sources at the White House called Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu a Chickensh%$.

There was a minor sh%$ storm over this, but reaction was, and is, “But he IS a complete chickensh%$?”

He’s a guy with no morals or vision who cannot look past the next election.

Then again, in the least surprising news of so far this week, email have leaked revealing that, despite their contemporaneous denials, the Obama administration was intimately involved in the firing of Shirley Sherrod:(Background here)

A 2010 e-mail from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says his department was “waiting for the go-ahead” from the White House before accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, according to newly released documents, despite Obama administration assertions that her ouster was Vilsack’s decision alone.

The e-mail, which was made public Friday in an ongoing federal court case over the matter, shed more light on the evening of July 19, 2010, when the USDA hastily asked Sherrod to resign after a video showing her making supposed racist remarks surfaced on a conservative Web site. Her dismissal turned into a racial firestorm after it became clear that the video had been edited and her remarks were meant to tell a story of reconciliation.

Both the White House and Vilsack have repeatedly said that the agriculture secretary made the decision to ask for Sherrod’s resignation without White House input. The e-mails, along with earlier e-mails obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act in 2010 and 2012, make it apparent that Vilsack wanted Sherrod to leave the department and ordered her resignation. But a newly released e-mail sent by Vilsack himself suggests that he was awaiting a decision from White House officials on how to proceed.

“She has offered her resignation which is appropriate,” reads an e-mail from the initials “TJV” to Dallas Tonsager, then the USDA undersecretary of rural development and Sherrod’s boss. Vilsack’s middle name is James. “The WH is involved and we are waiting for the go-ahead to accept her resignation. I suspect some direction from WH soon.”

Israel has a chickensh%$ Prime Minister, and the US has a chickensh%$ president.

Anyone who is surprised by either of these facts has been living under a rock.

Westboro Baptist is Going to be Fabulous, Whether they Like it or Not

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A federal judge has struck down the gay marriage ban in Kansas.

I am sure that those sociopaths at Westboro Baptist are feeling unhappy, and they deserve every bit of misery that the universe delivers to their door:

Federal Judge Daniel Crabtree today has found that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Judge has placed a temporary, one-week stay on his ruling, until November 11, unless the State of Kansas indicates it will not appeal.

The ACLU had filed the suit, Marie v. Moser, after the U.S, Supreme Court refused to review any same-sex marriage cases, including those in the 10th Circuit’s purview, Utah and Oklahoma.

Kansas voted to add an amendment to its constitution banning same-sex marriage back in 2005.

“In the past year, nearly 50 different rulings have been issued from state and federal courts in favor of the freedom to marry for same-sex couples,” Freedom To Marry notes.

Same-sex couples in Kansas had a day to marry before the state Supreme Court place a stay on an October 9 ruling.

 Fabulous!

Yes, I Voted Today,

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This morning, before I went to work.

With the exception of voting for Peter Franchot as state comptroller, it was a thoroughly depressing lesser of two evils experience.

And now, I am watching MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow is so happy to be covering the election that it looks like she is having a newsgasm.

This is Not The Onion

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The head of Naval intelligence has unable to do his job because his clearance has been suspended:

The head of naval intelligence has not been able to view classified information for an entire year.

 Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, had his security clearance suspended in November 2013 after being investigated for possible misconduct. In the year since, no charges have been filed and there is no sense of when they might be, leaving the Navy in an untenable situation.

 If classified information is being discussed at a meeting, the director of naval intelligence has to leave the room.

 If Branch drops by a subordinate’s office, the space must be sanitized of any secrets before he enters.

 Branch can’t attend morning intelligence briefs, or sit with the other services’ intel chiefs when they meet with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said a naval intelligence source, who spoke on background because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

 This festering situation has sown resentment among some in naval intelligence, who feel they don’t have the pull in national security circles that comes with having a three-star at the table. Meanwhile, the Navy brass is hamstrung — with no idea when or if Branch will be charged or cleared.

Yes, the biggest concern is that they don’t have a 3-star to engage in dick swinging at the annual Intelligence Community Sock Hop.

You have a f%$#ing 3-Star who has had his security clearance pulled because concerns about his possibly being bribed with Lion King tickets: (seriously, not joking here)

Branch’s clearance was suspended along with that of a deputy, Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, the director of intelligence operations, for possible connections to Glenn Defense Marine Asia — the husbanding firm at the center of one of the Navy’s biggest bribery scandals in decades. Their clearances were pulled while the Justice Department investigated their connections to GDMA and its larger than life CEO, Leonard Glenn Francis, who is accused of bribing Navy officers to steer ships to ports where he allegedly overcharged the Navy in exchange for junkets, prostitutes, even “Lion King” tickets.

Why the f%$# is this guy still in charge there?

He clearly cannot do his f%$#ing Job, so either Naval Intelligence isn’t functioning, or it is completely redundant.

It appears that the Admiral’s 3-star status is linked to his current assignment, and he would revert to a 2-star and I guess that the General Officer coffee klatch is working full time here.

Today’s Must Read

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Mother Jones has an article describing the sordid history of the the Koch family’s involvement in politics, The Making of the Kochtopus.  (Also, they have a fairly complete list of their web of shell organizations here.)

These people have been a cancer on the American body politic for half a century:

The John Birch Society likes to point out that its members were tea partiers before the tea party existed. And indeed, some of today’s conservative fears—from a socialist president to a United Nations-driven “one-world government”—wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the early 1960s, when Birch Society leader Robert Welch commanded a right-wing movement that Republican establishmentarians viewed as a mortal threat.

The connective tissue linking the Birchers of the past to today’s tea partiers meanders through the libertarian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and de

tours into the tobacco wars of the 1980s and the Hillarycare battle of the 1990s. At the nexus of this throughline is the Koch family, which for more than six decades has helped to finance and cultivate the ideological uprising that has now, at long last, established itself at the very heart of Republican power.

Patriarch Fred Koch—a leader of the successful effort to make Kansas a right-to-work state in the late 1950s—was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Fred was in the room the day in 1958 when Welch addressed a small group of prominent conservatives to plan a movement that would place its weight on “the political scales in this country as fast and as far” as possible. Charles Koch, a Birch Society member like his father, would later join a group of fellow Birchers committed to growing the Freedom School, a Colorado-based educational center founded by a controversial libertarian guru named Robert LeFevre.

Through the Freedom School—which taught free-market dogma and whose leader postulated that any rights the government conferred, it had first robbed you of—passed many of the luminaries who founded the modern libertarian movement, not least of them Charles and David Koch. Together, the brothers would go on to play a pivotal role in bringing the libertarian ideology (a “radical philosophy,” Charles readily admitted) to the masses.

 They have been very evil for a very long time.

Linkage

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Ben Stein demonstrates why he’s not a bag of sh%$, because a bag of sh%$ can serve a useful purpose. In this case, here he is accusing Barack Obama of being a racist because all Stein’s friends call him n***er:

Notice how he has honed the coded language for race that he first deployed as Richard Nixon’s speechwriter.

If This is True, We Made Them Do It

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It has been reported that the FCC will be reclassifying ISPs as common carriers, which will allow for real regulations to protect consumers and establish a competitive market:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reportedly close to proposing a “hybrid approach” to network neutrality in which Internet service providers would be partially reclassified as common carriers, letting the commission take a harder stance against Internet fast lane deals.

However, the proposal would not completely outlaw deals in which Web services pay for faster access to consumers.

As reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, the broadband service that ISPs offer to consumers would be maintained as a lightly regulated information service. But the FCC would reclassify the service that ISPs offer at the other end of the network to content providers who deliver data over Internet providers’ pipes. This would be a common carrier service subject to utility-style regulation under Title II of the Communications Act.

“People close to the chairman” say that Chairman Tom Wheeler is “close to settling on a hybrid approach,” the Journal wrote, continuing:

The plan now under consideration would separate broadband into two distinct services: a retail one, in which consumers would pay broadband providers for Internet access; and a back-end one, in which broadband providers serve as the conduit for websites to distribute content. The FCC would then classify the back-end service as a common carrier, giving the agency the ability to police any deals between content companies and broadband providers.

 The emerging plan reflects proposals submitted by the Mozilla Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, though it departs from both in parts. The main advantage of the hybrid proposal, as opposed to full reclassification, is that it wouldn’t require the FCC to reverse earlier decisions to deregulate broadband providers, which were made in the hopes of encouraging the adoption and deployment of high-speed broadband. The authors of the new proposal believe that not having to justify reversing itself would put the FCC on firmer legal ground.

Let’s be clear about this: The FCC did not want to do this.

They were dragged into this kicking and screaming by the avalanche of public input, and unless I miss my guess, there will be some huge loopholes in this “hybrid” approach.

Remember, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler got his start as a cable lobbyist, so I am expecting a poison pill in all of this.

What a Surprise, the No Fly Zone over Ferguson was About Restricting Press Access

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It was patently obvious at the time, but now we have evidence on tape:

The federal government agreed in August to a request by the police to restrict about 37 square miles of airspace over Ferguson, Mo., for 12 days for what they said were safety concerns, but audio recordings show that the local authorities privately acknowledged that the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.

On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, the agency’s air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to allow commercial flights to operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and for police helicopters to fly through the area — while still prohibiting flights.

“They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” one administration manager said about the St. Louis County Police Department in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. “But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.”

At another point, referring to the temporary flight restriction, a manager at the administration’s center in Kansas City, Mo., said the police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this T.F.R. all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”

Seriously, this is America, and this is not acceptable.

Not only do we need to disband the Ferguson PD, we probably need to do it for the St. Louis County PD as well.

These are ineluctably corrupt organizations.

They cannot be fixed.  They need to be shut down.