Author: Matthew G. Saroff

I Have Mixed Emotions About This………

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I think that Texas Governor Rick Perry is a truly evil person, he has presided over the dubious executions, as well as the obstruction of the investigations of these questionable executions.

Additionally, I think that his handling of Texas retirement funds have been clearly corrupt.

I also get the fact that they got Al Capone for tax evasion.

But I have mixed emotions about the abuse of power allegations against Rick Perry:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was indicted on felony charges Friday by a grand jury in Austin for allegedly abusing his veto power to force the resignation of a Democratic prosecutor.

The grand jury indicted the 2016 presidential hopeful on two felony counts – coercion of public official and abuse of official capacity, according to The Associated Press

Perry, 64, must turn himself in to the Travis County Jail, where he will be booked, fingerprinted and have his mug shot taken, according to KVUE-TV.

The charges stem from an ethics complaint filed last year by Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning government watchdog group, claimed that Perry abused his official powers by threatening to veto money for public corruption prosecutors in the state in order to pressure a local district attorney to resign.

The public integrity unit is housed in the Travis County district attorney’s office. Perry called for the resignation of District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg after she was arrested and pled guilty in April 2013 to drunken driving.

Lehmberg, a Democrat, did not resign. Perry eventually made his veto threat a reality. The special prosecutor on the case worked to show evidence that Perry’s threat to veto $7.5 million over two years was unlawful.

I do not think that Governor Goodhair is on the side of the angels. 

Travis County is both one of the few strongly Democratic counties in Texas, and because the capitol, Austin, is located in Travis County, it also runs the state public integrity division.

Were Lehmberg to resign, it is clear that Perry would replace her with a political crony who would do their level best to ignore the ethical cesspool that is Texas politics.

On the political or social merits, it is clearly a good thing that Rick Perry is looking at some time in the hoosegow, but I am a bit dubious as to the underlying legal theory:  It seems to me that a governor’s veto should be accorded a wide amount of respect, even if the governor in question should not be accorded any respect.

When Fox News’ Ruben Bolling is Tired of Your Right Wing Agitprop, You Have Jumped the Shark

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That’s one big shark


This is Not Star Trek. 
 In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, who is also chief cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

In this case, it’s James O’Keefe (the evil one), and Reuben Bolling of Fox News is tired of his sh%$:

Controversial filmmaker James O’Keefe, known for deceptively editing videos in order to push his canard of “political disinformation,” released a video of himself dressed up as Osama Bin Laden to purportedly show how a terrorist could easily get into the U.S. from the Mexican border. Gawker immediately debunked the O’Keefe video, explaining that the area O’Keefe claims to have crossed in includes a “well-patrolled road that runs parallel to the river” and other obstacles that did not appear in his video.

 And even Fox News dismissed O Keefe’s latest stunt.

 During the August 8 edition of The Five, Bolling explained that talking about real border issues is helpful, but “what’s not helpful [is] … filmmaker James O’Keefe donning an Osama Bin Laden mask and crossing the Rio Grande.” Bolling added that O’Keefe should “give it a rest.”

Dude, your 15 minutes of fame are over.

Get a real job, and stop living in your parents’ basement.

StudentsFrist Rhee-Boots

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Or more accurately, it boots the doyenne of educational grifters, Michelle Rhee:

Michelle Rhee had big ambitions when she went on Oprah four years ago to launch her new advocacy group, StudentsFirst, with a promise to raise $1 billion to transform education policy nationwide.

But as she prepares to step down as CEO, she leaves a trail of disappointment and disillusionment. Reform activists who shared her vision say she never built an effective national organization and never found a way to use her celebrity status to drive real change.

StudentsFirst was hobbled by a high staff turnover rate, embarrassing PR blunders and a lack of focus. But several leading education reformers say Rhee’s biggest weakness was her failure to build coalitions; instead, she alienated activists who should have been her natural allies with tactics they perceived as imperious, inflexible and often illogical. Several said her biggest contribution to the cause was drawing fire away from them as she positioned herself as the face of the national education reform movement.

“There was a growing consensus in the education reform community that she didn’t play well in the sandbox,” one reform leader said.

That last bit is pretty much the story of her career:  Walk into a room, kiss up, kick down, and do everything possible to ensure that her name is in the lights.

I do wonder what her next con-job will be, though.

Oh Crap

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If reports from the Ukrainian government are true, and I’m not big on the idea of trusting them, then they just shelled a Russian aid convoy:

Ukraine claims it has destroyed Russian military vehicles in the country’s east, a day after a column was spotted moving across the border.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, told David Cameron by phone that his country’s armed forces had destroyed part of an armed convoy that the Guardian saw moving through a gap in a border fence on Thursday night.

There was no immediate proof, and it was impossible to establish if the Ukrainians had targeted the same convoy seen by the Guardian. The Russians categorically denied that any of their troops were even in Ukraine. But the claim marks a new escalation in the six-month confrontation over Ukraine and if verified would amount to the first confirmed military engagement between the two adversaries since the crisis began in the spring.

“The president informed [Cameron] that the information was trustworthy because the majority of those machines [Russian military vehicles] had been eliminated by the Ukrainian artillery at night,” a statement from Poroshenko’s office read.

Russia is denying this, but if this is true, or worse, they shelled an aid convoy in the dead of night, the Russians have arranged one with the Red Cross, things are going to go pear shaped quickly.

I Sure Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Constitutional Right to Bribe Edition

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Yes, once again, the ‘Phants are looking at a 1st amendment challenge to anti-pay to play regulations:

Wall Street is one of the biggest sources of funding for presidential campaigns, and many of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 contenders are governors, from Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas to Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. And so, last week, the GOP filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning the pay-to-play law that bars those governors from raising campaign money from Wall Street executives who manage their states’ pension funds.

………

With the $3 trillion public pension system controlled by elected officials now generating billions of dollars worth of annual management fees for Wall Street, Securities and Exchange Commission regulators originally passed the rule to make sure retirees’ money wasn’t being handed out based on politicians’ desire to pay back their campaign donors.

………

In the complaint aiming to overturn that rule, the GOP plaintiffs argue that the SEC does not have the campaign finance expertise to properly enforce the rule. The complaint further argues that the rule itself creates an “impermissible choice” between “exercising a First Amendment right and retaining the ability to engage in professional activities.” The existing rule could limit governors’ ability to raise money from Wall Street in any presidential race.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, a spokesman for one of the Republican plaintiffs suggested that in order to compete for campaign resources, his party’s elected officials need to be able to raise money from the Wall Street managers who receive contracts from those officials.

“We see (the current SEC rule) as something that has been a great detriment to our ability to help out candidates,” said Jason Weingarten of the Republican Party of New York — the state whose pay-to-play pension scandal in 2010 originally prompted the SEC rule.

Because bribery is protected speech, I guess.

No, this is not The Onion, but I wish it were.

The Most Transparent Coverup Ever

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So, the Ferguson police department, aka the gang that cannot shoot straight, but will do so with fully automatic weapons mounted on top of an MRAP, decided to both release the shooting officer’s name and begin a policy of character assassination against Michael Brown:

Police on Friday said that Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown last weekend, confronted Brown after the teenager was identified as the main suspect in a convenience store robbery that occurred Saturday morning.

 However, hours later, authorities said that the robbery was not the reason for the encounter that ended with Brown shot to death on a suburban St. Louis street, suggesting that it was unrelated to the confrontation.

As Ezra Klein notes, “The police are the issue in Ferguson, not Michael Brown’s character.”

I am tempted to go all Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp fiction, and asking if Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson thinks that we look like a bitch, because he is certainly trying to f%$# us like one.

If there are not multiple of indictments of the police involved in this, both for the town of Ferguson and for St. Louis county, I will be suggest that it will be because of collusion between the police and the prosecutors.

This is F%$#ed Up and SH%$

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Private equity companies are worried about regulations on insane levels of leverage, so they are lobbying organizations that don’t even regulate them:

The private equity industry’s lobbying group met officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve last week to address concerns over a crackdown on junk-rated loans, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

 The private meeting – the first between the Private Equity Growth Capital Council (PEGCC) and the U.S. regulators over the issue – underscores many buyout firms’ reliance on leveraged loans for outsized returns in their debt-fueled acquisitions of companies.

 It also highlights the willingness of the OCC and the Fed to engage with parties they do not regulate. Private equity firms are typically regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Seriously. What has got them worried? Has the SEC, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, been too hard on them?

I get it. You are pillaging barbarians, and your weapon is other people’s money.

You need insane levels of leverage so that you can make your money by shutting down factories, moving production overseas, charging excessive fees to “manage” your acquisitions, etc.

Clearly, you need assurances that no one will ever prevent you from doing this, because anything that might get in the way of your f%$#ing the rest of us would be an affront to  the gods of the market.

Not enough bullets.

House GOPer: Obama Impeachment Talk Is A ‘Trap’

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Actually, he looks less like an alien than John Boehner’s “tan”

In the House, Representative Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) is warning his fellow party members that all the impeachment talk is a ploy from Obama and the Democrats:

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) last week said that Democrats are “desperate” for House Republicans to impeach President Obama, but warned the GOP against falling into such a “trap.”

“Believe me, let’s make one thing perfectly clear. The only people who want impeachment more than the right wing of the Republican Party is the entire Democrat Party,” Mulvaney said in an interview with WQSC 1340, according to audio obtained by Buzzfeed.

The congressman said that Democrats are using calls for impeachment to distract from other issues and raise money.

“They’re desperate for impeachment. They would love to be able to talk about impeachment and immigration between now and the November elections, instead of talking about jobs, and the economy, and health care,” he said. “They are desperate to change the dialogue, which is exactly why you heard the president starting to talk about his amnesty cause he’s begging to be impeached.”

This is completely unfair.

There are no Democrats who would attempt to extract political benefit from ……… Attempt to use impeachment ……… Sorry, I just cannot keep a straight face.

Of course this is what they are doing!  

The Republicans are being played for fools, and the Democratic politicians and consultants who are “condemning” the Teabaggers for calling for impeachment are the players doing this.

It’s all they can do not to drool in public over the prospect.  (Well, Mark Penn is drooling a bit, but he always does)

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 2: the Protests and the Police Response

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These are not peace officers, These are an implacably hostile occupying force.

This guy is eager to start shooting “animals”

First, and perhaps most telling, was the police officer caught on tape screamig, “Bring it, all you f%$#ing animals! Bring it!”

This is not just a cop who is ill trained to either handl a protest and defuse potential violence, this is someone who actively wants to shoot some people. (One does wonder which Cracker Jack box this guy got his badge out of)

Then, we have the comments by the Ferguson police chief, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” which has historical echos to the comments of people like Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I think that it is fairly clear that both the Ferguson, and the St. Louis County PD have not covered themselves with glory, but a bigger issue is the increasing militarization of the police, and their increasing view of the general public as the enemy:

Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer from a police force of 53, serving a population of just 21,000. But the police response to a series of protests over his death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.

 Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests in a show of force that is a stark illustration of the militarization of police forces in the US.

 “I’m a soldier, I’m a military officer and I know when there’s a need for such thing, but I don’t think in a small town of 22,000 people you need up-armor vehicles,” Cristian Balan, a communications officer in the US army, who was not speaking on behalf of the US military, told the Guardian. “Even if there’s an active shooter – are you really going to use an up-armor vehicle? Do you really need it?”

Of course the don’t but the Pentagon is giving away their slightly older stuff for free, and they are fun toys.

The problem is that it makes things worse, not better:

“As we’ve seen in Ferguson, the militarization of policing tends to escalate the risk of violence to the communities,”said Kara Dansky, senior counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the prime author of its June 2014 report on the militarization of US police. “We think that historically, the police and the military have had different roles and that American neighborhoods aren’t war zones and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

 She said the trend of militarizing local police forces has continued over the past several decades and that communities of color bare the brunt of most military policing.

 Representative Hank Johnson, a house Democrat from Georgia, said on Thursday that he plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act”, which would end the department of defense’s military surplus program.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Representative Johnson.

I would also suggest that requiring on duty police to wear cameras at all time would help.  We know what happens when both the police, and the citizenry, become aware that there is monitoring of law enforcement interactions with the general populace:

.
In 2012, Rialto, a small city in California’s San Bernardino County, outfitted its police officers with small Body Cams to be worn at all times and record all working hours. The $900 cameras weighed 108 grams and were small enough to fit on each officer’s collar or sunglasses. They recorded full-color video for up to 12 hours, which was automatically uploaded at the end of each shift, where it could be held and analyzed in a central database.

 When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking. Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

The situation in Ferguson has gotten so bad that both liberal icon Elizabeth Warren, and Teabagger militant Justin Amash have condemned the overreaction of the police, and civil rights icon John Lewis has called for Barack Obama to federalize the National Guard and declaring martial law.

On the bright side, the local constabulary, both the Ferguson and the St. Louis county PD have been removed from command, and replaced by the state Highway Patrol, which has resulted in a lighter touch and less violence:

A wall of militarised police had blocked the centre of Ferguson, Missouri, this week, shooting teargas and rubber bullets at seething protesters who dared to show any defiance.

 On Thursday evening it melted away.

 A carnival-like demonstration filled the centre of the city after a new police chief given control of protests over the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old implemented a dramatic shift in tactics.

 Hundreds of people gathered at the same intersection in this northern suburb of St Louis that has been the epicentre of violent clashes with police in the previous days.

 But where the officers with assault rifles once stood, backed by armoured trucks topped with snipers’ nests, on Thursday there was almost no police presence.

 Car horns filled the air as people blew whistles and chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the slogan adopted in solidarity with Michael Brown, who according to witnesses was shot by a police officer as he fled a confrontation with his arms aloft on Saturday afternoon.

 The shift followed the installation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri state highway patrol as the effective commander on the ground, under orders earlier in the day from the state governor, Jay Nixon. His force replaced the St Louis county police in leading the operation

Gee, a simple rule, “Don’t be a savage and blindly unreasoning racist asshole,” appears to have defused much of the situation.

I think that the police forces in that part of Missouri rate a full deep dive investigation of their policies and actions by the Feds.

Zero tolerance, baby.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 1: the Shooting

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This first bit is arguably the least important detail in the whole affair.

What we know at this point is that two black men of roughly college age, Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson, were walking down the street, that a police officer confronted them over this and it ended with Michael Brown dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

The video you see is Dorian Johnson describing the confrontation.

The police claim that Mr. Johnson went for the gun, and Mr. Johnson claims that the (as still unnamed) police officer went after Mr. Brown, and that Brown was trying to get away, and his death was the result of the police officer being shot while holding his hands up.

So, what really happened?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that what happened in the immediate aftermath is very strange.

What surprises me is that Dorian Johnson has not yet been questioned by police.  Heck, it surprises me that he wasn’t taken into custody, as he wasn’t just a witness, but he was a part of the incident, as he was walking down the street with the victim.

The only reason that I can imagine that the police are studiously avoiding questioning witnesses in this matter is because the police already knew what happened, that the officer was at fault, and they are trying to cover it up.

Note that I am not talking about the law enforcement reaction to the protests, that will be part 2, I am simply describing the profound irregularities in the investigation that I cannot explain except by deliberate wrongdoing.

If Not an Explanation, At Least It Gives Us Some Context

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It turns out that Robin Williams was suffering from early stage Parkinson’s Disease:

Patients with Parkinson’s disease often suffer from depression, medical experts said Thursday, after Robin Williams’ widow revealed that the comedian was in “early stages” of the neurological disease at the time of his apparent suicide.

The same biochemical changes in the brain that cause the hallmark physical symptoms of Parkinson’s — tremors, slowed movement, rigidity, balance loss — can also affect mood, said Dr. Jeff Bronstein, a neurologist in the Movement Disorder Program at UCLA.

“Obviously getting the diagnosis can make people depressed,” he said. “But we also know that there’s a much higher incidence of depression even before the disease is recognized. We think it’s one of the early symptoms.”

I don’t think that anyone can truly understand what was going on in his head, but the fact his limbic system was being short circuited from a lack of dopamine was certainly a major contributing factor.

Gee, You Think?!?!?!?

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In an exercise worthy of Captain Obvious, the CFPB is warning people that their Bitcoins are probably not safe from hackers:

“The CFPB advises consumers to be aware of potential issues with virtual currencies such as unclear costs, volatile exchange rates, the threat of hacking and scams, and that companies may not offer help or refunds for lost or stolen funds,” the government agency announced in an advisory on Monday . Consumers who’ve experienced problems with the virtual currency can also submit a complaint with the bureau, the CFPB said. “Virtual currencies are not backed by any government or central bank, and at this point consumers are stepping into the Wild West when they engage in the market,” it warned.

Well duh!

And Now the Banksters Want Our Drinking Water

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Seriously, these guys are a bigger threat to our way of life than Osama bin Laden ever was.

Yes, if they just turn Wall Street’s full potential on the supply of water, everything will be great, because ……… magic sparkle pony fairy dust:

The problem of water scarcity is growing at an alarming rate. By 2050, experts forecast a 55% increase in the amount of water required to meet demand from rising populations, food production and industry. Failure to meet that demand will have devastating consequences: water shortages will become chronic, leading to the proliferation of water riots and water wars. According to UN estimates, $1.8 trillion in new investments will be needed over the next 20 years to avoid such a calamity. The question is:

 Whence Will That Money Come?

 According to the wise masters of big capital and finance, there can only be one source: the ever-knowing, ever-perfect financial markets. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Critchlow argued the case for financializing water:

Markets can play an important role in providing future water security (DQ: Note the use of the term “water security,” not “water independence” or “water sustainability”). The City can help to fund vital water infrastructure and the creation of a futures market to trade water would help to create a baseline pricing mechanism against which regional water tariffs could be fairly set

 “Water will become something that is traded, there will be a market for it and this could happen in the next decade,” said Usha Rao-Monari, chief executive officer of Global Water Development Partners – an affiliate of New York-based investment giant Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm with a reported $280bn under management

The reasoning is clear: in order to create more efficient distribution of the world’s most vital resource, we need to create myriad new layers of middlemen and financiers and have them trading billions (if not trillions) of dollars in derivatives of that scarce resource on global commodity exchanges. It will be the Enron-ization of water, as the exact same people who almost destroyed the global economy with mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps and who have corrupted the basic pricing mechanism of just about every commodity market on the planet will be entrusted to determine the price of the water we consume.

 “It’s intuitively appealing to talk about water as a traded asset,” said Deane Dray, a Citigroup analyst who heads up global water-sector research. “If you look at projections over the next 25 years, you’ll see that global water supply and demand imbalances are on track to get worse.”

What will this mean for the rest of us?

Well it ain’t anything good:

As a result of this huge influx of Wall Street money, the food commodity markets are now 80% speculation, with the volume of financial transactions between 20 and 30 times as large as the real transactions. As Kaufman told Wired magazine, the direct consequence has been volatility two standard deviations above the 1990’s norm:

We’ve seen the price of food become more expensive than ever three times in five years [DQ: sparking food riots and revolutions throughout the developing world]. Normally we’d see three price spikes in a century. And part of the reason is this new kind of commodity speculation in food markets.

If you aren’t worried about what Wall Street will do if it gets control of safe supplies of drinking water, you are either catatonic, deluded, or a follower of Ayn Rand. (But I repeat myself.)

Remember, the most recent WTO talks broke down because the US, and Wall Street, wanted to shut down poorer nations’ ability to stockpile staple foods to avoid being held hostage by speculators.

Be very, very afraid.

Schadenfreude, We Haz It!!!!!

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Head bigot at the rabidly homophobic group Texas Values, Jonathan Saenz appears to have a personal reason for his animus against other people’s happiness, his wife left him for another woman:

Mere months before Jonathan Saenz became president of the anti-gay group Texas Values, his wife left him for another woman, according to Hays County district court records obtained by Lone Star Q.

The revelation could help explain Saenz’s seemingly abrupt transformation from socially conservative lobbyist to homophobic firebrand.

Saenz, a devout Catholic, has been a right-wing operative in Texas for many years — working on abortion and religious liberty cases as a staff attorney for the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute as far back as 2005.

However, it wasn’t until recently that Saenz emerged as one of the state’s best-known — and most extreme — anti-LGBT voices.

Court records indicate that Saenz’s ex-wife, Corrine Morris Rodriguez Saenz, is a member of the LGBT community who was dating another woman when she filed for divorce from Saenz in August 2011.

In early 2012, with their divorce still pending, Saenz would take the helm of Texas Values after the organization spun off from the Liberty Legal Institute, where he’d risen to chief lobbyist.

With Saenz as president, Texas Values has led the charge against not only same-sex marriage, but also passage of LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinances in San Antonio and Houston. In fighting the ordinances, Saenz has often repeated the debunked right-wing myth that sexual predators would use the laws to prey on women and children in bathrooms.

All this while going through a “War of the Roses” style brutal divorce.

Seriously, are there any professional conservatives out there who aren’t complete nutjobs?

H/t Raw Story.

More Thoughts on Nixon Around the 40th Anniversary of His Resigning

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First is Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal obituary of Nixon, titled He was a Crook:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

The rage of Hunter S. Thompson’s is something truly awesome to behold.

I will not disagree with Mr. Ford.  He should be in hell for that.

Then there is John Dean’s interview at Salon:

How should we see Nixon now? On one hand, there’s been some Nixon revisionism as Republicans turned so hard to the right that people look at OSHA, at the EPA, and say that Nixon was practically a liberal compared to conservatives today.

 Well, first I’m not sure if those are really Nixon. I heard some tapes — I didn’t put everything I heard in there, but there was clearly some stuff where Nixon is telling John Ehrlichman, who is something of a liberal/progressive — certainly a moderate at the time — who wants these ideas. And Nixon, in essence, tells him, go ahead and do whatever you want, just don’t get me arrested, or don’t get me in trouble. Not arrested, but you know, don’t get me politically in trouble for any of this stuff. So it’s really not Nixon driving any of this stuff.

 On one hand, the domestic agenda is fairly progressive.

 It is.

 On the other hand, Nixon going back to his first campaign against Helen Douglas and “the Pink Lady” was a pretty nasty character. And he probably would have been right at home with the Tea Party today.

 Exactly what I was going to say. He was an opportunist and I think he would feel very comfortable with the Tea Party.

 At the same time, some of Nixon’s abuses, as horrible as it is to hear them being coordinated from the Oval Office, seem almost quaint compared to Iran-Contra, or what we saw under Bush/Cheney, or the extent of the NSA surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden.

No question. We don’t know what the parallels were from earlier, if the NSA was doing the same kind of stuff.  The Church Committee certainly uncovered a lot of unseemly stuff, and I think because technology changed, the NSA changed. ………

His portrait of Nixon as a political opportunist with little in the way of  core principles seems to ring true to me,  particularly since Nixon was a master of the politics of resentment.

I am rather surprised that Dean tags Erlichman as the architect of Nixon’s progressive domestic agenda.

It means that I probably gave Nixon too much credit on his domestic agenda yesterday, but it should be noted that he was still HMFIC when OSHA.EPA/etc. were created.

Edward Snowden Still has a Lot to Say

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He gave a rather expansive interviewed with Wired. Here are the most recent revelations:

  • He left “bread crumbs” which should have let shown the NSA what he took. He ascribes the fact that they continue to be surprised to incompetence, but I am not buying it.  I think that acknowledging what was taken would put our state security apparatus in the position of validating some programs that have not yet come out:

    • Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy sh%$.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

  • Some of the leaks appear not to have come from Snowden, which points to a 2nd whistle blower.
  • The CIA’s IT infrastructure is archaic.
  • Syria did not shut down its internet at the beginning of their civil war, it was an NSA cock-up:

    • ………One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

  • The NSA has setup  a program called Monstermind, which would have it launching cyber-attacks against other nations without human intervention.
  • The final straw for him was when James clapper flat out lied to congress about spying on Americans.  (I liked his use of the phrase, “Banality of Evil,” to describe this, though I didn’t like his use of the boiling frog metaphor, which is scientifically inaccurate)

There are more revelations to come.

It is really worth the read.

I Know that Some People are Offended, but I Approve

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In a a primary in Arizona, one candidate has invoked Trayvon Martin in describing another candidate’s support for stand your ground:

An Arizona candidate for Congress has sent out a mailer displaying the image of Trayvon Martin to attack her opponent’s record as a state lawmaker.

 Mary Rose Wilcox used the mailer to slam her opponent, Ruben Gallego, in the Democratic primary for Arizona’s 7th Congressional District in Phoenix, according to The Arizona Republic, which posted a copy of it.

 “America doesn’t need more Trayvon Martin tragedies,” the mailer reads, underneath a portrait of Martin in a hoodie. On the next page it lists Gallego’s support for “Stand Your Ground” legislation and what it describes as his B+ record from the National Rifle Association.

More of this, please.

If we ever want to push against against the NRA and other ammosexuals, we must extract a political price on people who find capitulating to 2nd amendment extremist, and the best place to do this is in the primaries.

It is is a good thing for supporting the NRA is turned into a liability at the primary level.

It’s the first step to standing up to the ammosexuals.

To quote former Reagan staffer James Baker,  “F%$# ’em, the won’t vote for us anyway.”