Author: Matthew G. Saroff

This is the 2nd 911 Joke that I’ve Heard

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And I made the first one a few years back, and it wasn’t that good.

Well, Chris Rock hits it out of the park:

On the eve of the New York City Marathon, “Saturday Night Live” host Chris Rock opened his monologue with jokes about last year’s Boston Marathon bombings. Too soon? Well, the joke was pretty tame, all things considered. But that was just the warm-up for Rock’s main riff on the Freedom Tower, the new One World Trade Center building that’s now America’s tallest skyscraper. He went there — to the 9/11 joke.

“What were they thinking?” Rock demanded with trademark incredulity. “What kind of arrogant Floyd Mayweather crap is this?” then “Who’s the corporate sponsor, Target?

It’s really funny.

The Least Likely Democrat to Tell the Truth and to not Backtrack About it Is………

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That would be Mary Landrieu, who said that part of the hostility against Obama in the South had its roots in racism, that’s the truth bit, and now she has refused to apologize for speaking the truth:

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu made conservative heads explode by stating a truth, that the South has not always been the friendliest place go African-Americans and to women. Landrieu’s campaign put out a press release standing by her comments.

This is a level of guts and honesty that I would never have expected of her.

The World Just Got a bit Less Funny, and a Lot Less Weird

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Tom Magliozzi, half of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, died today

Tom Magliozzi, the older, taller half of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, died today at 77 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Tom and his brother Ray Magliozzi first broadcast their public radio call-in show Car Talk in 1977 from the studios of WBUR in Boston.

They offered advice on cars and life, but it was the duo’s sense of humor and Tom’s iconic laugh that made the show so memorable for millions of fans across the country.

NPR began distributing Car Talk nationally in 1987. More than 4 million people tuned in each week, making it one of public radio’s most successful shows ever.

I was actually was on Car Talk once, in 1997.

I asked them about the edibility of automotive fluids, which, come to think of it, may explain how my writing style developed.

Finally………

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Brazil has finally made its selection of the Saab Gripen for their air force:

Buying a new jet fighter can be a long-drawn-out process. Brazil, after many years of planning and procrastination, has finally signed a contract for its future combat aircraft.

Officials from the Brazilian Defense Ministry’s Aeronautics Command and the Swedish Saab Group put pen to paper recently, and the Brazilian air force is now set to receive 36 Gripen NG fighters.

The jets, worth a little over $5.4 billion, include 28 single-seat Gripen Es and eight twin-seat Gripen F aircraft. Deliveries will begin in 2019 and will be completed in 2024.

………

In late 2007, the government formally relaunched the new fighter project, and at the time excepted to acquire 36 multi-role jets at a cost of $2.2 billion. By July 2008 the F-X2 project had split into two phases. In the first, Brazil would get 36 new fighters, blowing the $2.2 billion budget.

………

By September 2009 it looked as if the twin-engined Rafale had cinched F-X2. Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the Rafale’s victory even before the competition was over. Saab and Boeing were both furious, and Lula instead declared that the government would delay the F-X2 decision until after a new president took office.

In January 2011, new president Dilma Rousseff deferred the decision to 2012 owing to budgetary problems. As the defense budget began to feel the cutbacks, the pricey Rafale started to lose its edge. At this stage, the program cost ballooned to $8 billion. Rousseff launched new comparative studies and called upon Embraer for its opinion.

The two cheapest options now became the front-runners. The Super Hornet offer—for 36 fighters—was for $7.5 billion, while the Gripen offer cost $6 billion. The Rafale offer exceeded $8 billion.

There are a number of ways to cost aircraft, and it can vary by a lot.

The numbers here run to about $150 million a plane, which I believe is the total weapons system cost, while the quotes that we normally see in the press for US systems are flyaway costs, which looks to run something like 50% of total system cost, so this is actually significantly cheaper than the F-35 JSF.

Still, $150 million a pop?

That’s a big jump from the less than $5 million that the F-4 Phantom in its heyday.

Eric Arthur Blair* Would be Appalled

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At the Guantanamo show trials, defense attorneys are being asked to respond to motions that they are not allowed to read:

Despite enormous logistical and legal hurdles, defense attorneys for high value detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison, say they press on for the judgment of history, if not for a fair turn before the embattled military commissions that substitute for trials in federal court.

 Attorneys for alleged 9/11 attack planners Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh and alleged USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri described their challenges to an audience gathered by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in Manhattan on Wednesday night.

 Even though all the defense attorneys are vetted and cleared to access Top Secret documents, they agree that secrecy remains the root of most delays and dysfunction.

 “If you sat down to design a system and said, ‘I want to create a legal system where everything will move slowly, glacially,’ you would design this,” said Richard Kammen, who represents al-Nashiri. For example, if Kammen, who is based in Indianapolis, wants to read a classified court document, he must travel to a secure facility in Washington, D.C. to do so. Once, Kammen said, he was ordered to respond to motions he was not allowed to read.

 Even when the attorneys are at Guantanamo to meet in person with their clients, a detainee’s own words are considered secret.

 “We were told that anything that came out of client’s mouths were considered to be ‘presumptively classified,’” said Jason Wright, who represented KSM until this August. “This phrase ‘presumptive classification’ is something that has never existed before in the laws of the United States.”

 To make sure he understood, Wright, a former Army JAG, received a power point presentation at Guantanamo.

 “I had a briefer who told me, when you meet with your high value detainee, you have to treat everything that he says as presumptively classified – every word, every utterance, every gesture,” Wright recalled.

 “I said, ‘Hypothetically, what if he told me he liked peanut butter sandwiches? Is that classified?’”

 “Yes,” he was told.

(emphasis mine)

This is a blot on American jurisprudence and the rule of law.

It is lawless, uncivilized, and cowardly.

*George Orwell’s real name.

The Pentagon wants its War, and Now they are Waging a War of Leaks

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We now get leaks of the military complaining that the Obama administration is “micromanaging” operations in Iraq and Syria:

Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

………

Other gripes among the top Pentagon and military brass are about the White House’s decision not to work with what’s left of the existing Syrian moderate opposition on the ground, which prevents intelligence sharing on fighting ISIS and prevents the military from using trained fighters to build the new rebel army that President Obama has said is needed to push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into a political negotiation to end the conflict.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel himself is among the critics of Obama’s strategy in Syria. Hagel wrote a memo last week to Rice warning that Obama’s Syria strategy was unclear about U.S. intentions with respect to Assad, undermining the plan.

What is going on here is that the Pentagon, including Hegel want the US to move aggressively for regime change in Syria, because they feel that it is their God given right to wage war with, and overthrow, whoever they want.

We’ve seen what happens if they get their way, the clusterf%$#s that are commonly known as Iraq and Libya.

The fact that the adults in the White House (there is an expression I never thought that I would say) are telling the war mongers in the Pentagon that they cannot topple yet another government just because, they are leaking to the press.

Thank You Chelsea Handler

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Comedienne Chelsea Handler posted a parody of Putin’s shirtless horseback photo to Instagram, and was justifiably pissed off when they took the image down, (NSFW pic at link) and has dumped Instagram for Twitter in response.

I understand, and I agree with her basic point, but this is not why I am thanking her.

I am thanking her for showing us her breasts.

I believe that a woman voluntarily, and proudly, showing her breasts is an independent good. (No, I have not seen the stolen photographs of Jennifer Lawrence, etc., and I find the involuntary posting of these sorts of pics to be an unconscionable violation of privacy)

I consider it to be a very public gift, and so I am writing this note to thank her.

Give Me a High 4, Jose

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There are a number of rules to responsible gun ownership.

Number 1 on the list should be, “Make sure that the gun is unloaded before you try to clean it.“

It appears that this bit of common sense has escaped former Baseball all-star Jose Canseco:

Former major league slugger Jose Canseco blew his middle finger clear off his hand while cleaning his handgun at home in Las Vegas.

Jose’s fiancée Leila Knight tells TMZ Sports … he was sitting at a table in their home cleaning the gun when it went off. She says he didn’t know it was loaded — and the shot ripped through the middle finger on his left hand.

Leila tells us 50-year-old Canseco is in surgery right now as doctors desperately try to save what’s left of the finger. She says the bullet tore through the bottom part of the finger and doctors have already said he’ll never have full use of it again … even under the best of circumstances.

Here is a suggestion for gun owners out there, and I am not kidding: create a checklist for yourself for each weapon that you own, much like the one that is used for flying aircraft.

If you use it, one of the early steps will be something along the lines of, “Remove the magazine and confirm that there are no rounds in the chamber.”

Really, I am not being snarky here.

Everyone has a brain fart occasionally, and that is what check lists are for.

20 Years ……… Jeebus

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It’s my 20th wedding anniversary tonight.

We will be celebrating it on the Hebrew calendar date, because today is my Mom’s Yartzheit, and so a celebration is not in order tonight. (Yes, I lit a candle)

I am stunned.

Note that I am not stunned that Sharon is still with me, she is not the divorcing kind, but rather that she has not (yet) murdered me, because my little Cutsie Woodles IS the murdering kind.

Thank God for women with poor taste in men.

I Think that This is an Indication that Glenn Greenwald’s New Employer is Circling the Drain

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First, Matt Taibbi has left First Look:

Matt Taibbi, the star magazine writer hired earlier this year to start a satirical website for billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, is on a leave of absence from the company after disagreements with higher-ups inside Omidyar’s organization, a source close to First Look confirmed today. (UPDATE: Taibbi has left the company. See statement below.)

Taibbi’s abrupt disappearance from the company’s Fifth Avenue headquarters has cast doubt on the fate of his highly anticipated digital publication, reportedly to be called Racket, which First Look executives had previously said would launch sometime this autumn.
………
UPDATE:  Omidyar announced on Tuesday night that Taibbi has left the company. Here’s the full statement posted on FirstLook.org:

I regret to announce that after several weeks of discussions, Matt Taibbi has left First Look. We wish him well.

Our differences were never about editorial independence. We have never wavered from our pledge that journalistic content is for the journalists to decide, period.

 We’re disappointed by how things have turned out. I was excited by Matt’s editorial vision and hoped to help him bring it to fruition. Now we turn our focus to exploring next steps for the talented team that has worked to create Matt’s publication.

I remain an enthusiastic supporter of the kind of independent journalism found at The Intercept and the site we were preparing to launch. As a startup, we’ll take what we’ve learned in the last several months and apply it to our efforts in the future.

Above all, we remain committed to our team and to the First Look mission.

The word for Mr. Omidyar’s claim about it not being editorial independence is best described as a lie.

When this enterprise was announced, Taibbi noted in interviews it would be “focusing on financial and political corruption,” while Omidyar described it as, “A new digital magazine with a satirical approach to American politics and culture.”

These are not the same things, and Taibbi’s understanding was that he would be going after people who are very much like Pierre Omidyar friends and business associates.

There is also the issue of Marcy Wheeler’s brief tenure with First Look, which appeared to be caused by her writing about entities linked to Pierre Omidyar being linked to the coup in the Ukraine. (Though Wheeler denies that this the proximate cause of her exit.)

When all this is juxtaposed along with Omidyar’s own statements about how First Look was moving from news organization to news platform, (think eBay for journalists) will leave him with very little in the way of a news organization:

I mean, I get it. Editorial is expensive. Christ, it’s so expensive… But it gets worse: Not only is editorial expensive, but nobody wants to pay for it. Readers, we’re told, don’t want to pay for it (I’ll deal with that bullshit another time). And investors certainly don’t want to pay for it… No investor of sound mind thinks he or she will make money from a magazine, any more than they think investing in restaurants or airlines is a smart move.

A platform, on the other hand… well, that’s the answer to everything. Noone ever went broke building a platform. For one thing, a platform doesn’t need to commission editorial: some other sap takes care of that — either clients (Atavist, Punch!) or Joe User (GOOD magazine).

First Look is not going to mature into an internet news org like Pro Publica,  Talking Points Memo, or Pando, and I expect to see further staff defections in the not too distant future.

OK, this is Weird

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Republicans like Nickelback. No Surprise.


Republicans hate the Empire State Building. So did King Kong. Coincidence? I think not.


Ronald Reagan wrote a book? Was it a coloring book?


Man the ‘Phants hate Maddow.

Click for slideshow.

I was reading Kevin Drum, and he pointed me toward an article that polled people on their musical preferences and politics.

While I would expect some differences, I don’t expect ‘Phants to like Springsteen or the Dixie Chicks, but it turns out that conservatives hate The Beatles:

With the 2014 midterm elections approaching, we decided to take a look at the cultural similarities and differences between people who support Democrats and people who support Republicans. To do this, we looked at everyone who liked the campaign page of any Democrat or Republican running for governor, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. We then looked at what other pages those people liked on Facebook and identified the pages that were most differentiating—that is, the pages which were disproportionately liked by the supporters of one party versus the other—and those that were most balanced.

 Note: in all of the figures below, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Republican candidates, the farther right the page name appears (precisely indicated by the darker line in the middle). Conversely, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Democratic candidates, the farther left the page name appears. The font size of the name is proportional to the total number of people from the US who liked that page.

I have a theory, with absolutely no facts to back me up, about why Republicans hate The Beatles:  Jealousy.

You see, of all the bands listed here, none is more closely connected with the 1960s, and the changes in cultural mores, the whole sex and drugs and rock and roll thing, and the Republicans are pissed off that they spent the 60s defending “virtue” while everyone else got their piece of ass.

Of course, the children of the 60s are in their 60s now, and while most of the Republican apparatchiks are younger than that, they were brought up under the tutelage of those frustrated segment of the children of the ’60s, and the rage remains.

It’s kind of sick, and kind of juvenile, but it’s the Republican Party,

Streamlining = Enabling Fraud, Waste, and Inefficiency

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I am very dubious of this proposal to, “streamline military acquisitions.”

Basically, the problem is a lack of adult supervision of either the defense contractors, or the Pentagon, or the resulting revolving door, is the problem with our current system,. not excessive regulation:

The Pentagon and Congress have better odds of reaching agreement on how to streamline myriad overlapping laws that slow the process of buying military equipment and services, a top Defense Department official said.

“I am optimistic,” Andrew Hunter, a former congressional aide who helped draft many of those laws before joining the Pentagon four years ago, told reporters Thursday. He said he saw emerging consensus among industry, lawmakers and defense officials about the need for changes.

Hunter, who runs the Pentagon’s joint rapid-acquisition initiative, also has led a drive to simplify current laws, which Frank Kendall, an arms buyer for the Department of Defense, has said put “an extraordinary and unnecessarily complex burden on our program managers and staff.”

U.S. defense officials have been in talks with congressional committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and hope to submit some reform legislation as part of the fiscal 2016 budget process, said Hunter, who is moving to a job with the Center for Strategic and International Studies next month.

“We’ve come up with some proposals that we hope will be favorably received,” he said. Hunter said the goal was to build on some key legislation already in place while giving program managers more flexibility to focus on the main issues.

The Pentagon initiative dovetails with fresh efforts by the House and Senate armed services committees to reform the slow, cumbersome U.S. military acquisition process and reverse years of schedule delays, cost overruns and other challenges.

Sorry, but the problem ain’t excessive regulation, it’s a system which is corrupt and dysfunctional to its core.

Another Bank Failure

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This Friday was another bank failure Friday.

We’ve had the 16th bank failure of the year, The National Republic Bank of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois. (Full FDIC list)

Wouldn’t you know it, I comment on how commercial bank failures were low relative to Credit Unions on October 10, and there are failures in each of the following weeks.

Go figure.

Here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

This Will Be Before the Supreme Court in the Next 2-3 Years

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A state court in Florida just ruled that police need a search warrant to access cell phone tower data:
Americans may have a Florida drug dealer to thank for expanding our right to privacy.

Police departments around the country have been collecting phone metadata from telecoms and using a sophisticated spy tool to track people through their mobile phones—often without obtaining a warrant. But a new ruling out of Florida has curbed the activity in that state, on constitutional grounds. It raises hope among civil liberties advocates that other jurisdictions around the country may follow suit.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday that obtaining cell phone location data to track a person’s location or movement in real time constitutes a Fourth Amendment search and therefore requires a court-ordered warrant.

The case specifically involves cell tower data for a convicted drug dealer that police obtained from a telecom without a warrant. But the way the ruling is written (.pdf), it would also cover the use of so-called “stingrays”—sophisticated technology law enforcement agencies use to locate and track people in the field without assistance from telecoms. Agencies around the country, including in Florida, have been using the technology to track suspects—sometimes without obtaining a court order, other times deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of the devices to track suspects, telling judges the information came from “confidential” sources rather than disclose their use of stingrays. The new ruling would require them to obtain a warrant or stop using the devices.

………

The Justice Department has long asserted that law enforcement agencies don’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages. Instead, authorities say, they operate like pen-register and trap-and-trace systems, collecting the equivalent of header information. A pen register system records the phone numbers that a person dials, while a trap-and-trace system records the phone numbers of incoming calls to that phone.

This is going to be appealed to the Federal Courts, and it will end up at the Supreme Court, where, unless Antonin Scalia chokes on his own bile in the interim, I expect a 5-4 decision saying that no warrant is needed.

With the NSA, It’s Not Just the Orwellian Stuff, it’s also the Outright Corruption

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There are reasons for secrecy, but we need to remember that secrecy is the enemy of competent and honest government, as the recent corruption scandals at the National Security Agency proves:

One of the nation’s top spies is leaving her position at the National Security Agency (NSA), a spokesman confirmed Friday, amid growing disclosures of possible conflicts of interest at the secretive agency.

The shakeup comes just a month after BuzzFeed News began reporting on the financial interests of the official, Teresa Shea, and her husband.

Shea was the director of signals intelligence, or SIGINT, which involves intercepting and decoding electronic communications via phones, email, chat, Skype, and radio. It’s widely considered the most important mission of the NSA, and includes some of the most controversial programs disclosed by former contractor Edward Snowden, including the mass domestic surveillance program.

The NSA provided a statement Friday that said Teresa Shea’s “transition” from the SIGINT director job was routine and “planned well before recent news articles.” The agency indicated she would remain employed, but did not provide specifics.

The Sheas did not respond to a message left at their home telephone number.

In September, BuzzFeed News reported that a SIGINT “contracting and consulting” company was registered at Shea’s house, even while she was the SIGINT director at NSA. The resident agent of the company, Telic Networks, was listed as James Shea, her husband.

This is in addition to the trail of corruption that the former NSA head Keith Alexander left behind him, with the NSA’s CTO taking a lucrative consulting gig with former NSA head Keith Alexander’s new security consulting firm, along with Keith Alexander’s suspicious stock trades, patents that appear to come from his work product at the NSA, and his consultancy that clearly plays on his connections in the intelligence community.

Secrecy is a petri dish for incompetence, corruption, and dysfunction, which is why our fetishizing of secrecy is so dangerous.