Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Mixed Emotions

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When something bad is happening to an group of truly awful people, I frequently experience schadenfreude.

When it in suggest negative implications for the rest of us, my feelings are more mixed.

Case in point, the defamation suit that may bankrupt the National Review:

National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955, has had an enormous impact on the nation’s politics. Its writers formulated the ideology that animated the quixotic Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, and then Ronald Reagan’s successful run for the White House in 1980. In the years since, National Review has often worked to keep Republican presidents focused on implementing its vision of conservatism, while bucking up the conservative troops when the movement has found itself out of power.

Today the magazine enjoys circulation roughly equivalent to that of The Nation, the American Left’s leading journal of opinion, and more than twice that of William Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, its primary competition on the Right.

And now, National Review may be fighting for its life.

Climate scientist Michael Mann is suing National Review and Mark Steyn, one of its leading writers, for defamation. It’s a charge that’s notoriously hard to prove, which is no doubt why the magazine initially refused to apologize for an item on its blog in which Steyn accused Mann of fraud. Steyn also quoted a line by another conservative writer (Rand Simberg) that called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” (Simberg and the free market think tank for which he works, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are also named in the suit.)

The lawsuit has not been going well for the magazine. In July, Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.

That’s not all. On Christmas Eve, Steyn (who regularly guest hosts Rush Limbaugh’s radio show) wrote a blog post in which he excoriated Greene, accusing her of incompetence, stupidity, and obtuseness. As a result of this outburst, the law firm that had been representing National Review and Steyn (Steptoe & Johnson) has dropped Steyn as a client and reportedly has plans to withdraw as counsel for the magazine as well.

Part of me hopes that The National Review gets sued into oblivion.    It is a pernicious organization, and it has been since Buckley founded it, and filled it with Oh-So-Civilized support for segregation.

Part of me worries that the Kochs will start funding SLAPP suits against in an attempt to intimidate real news gathering organizations.

And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?

H/t Salon.

You Sure Picked the Wrong Guy to go All ‘Roid Rage On, Representative Grimm………

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After the State of the Union Address, a NY1reporter Michael Scotto asked Congressman Michael Grimm about his fundraising scandal.

Grimm, expecting questions about the SOTU address, was upset and walked off.

Then he walked back, and threatened to break reporter Scotto in half and throw him off of the Congressional Balcony.

This does make the persisistent rumors of anabolic steroid abuse more credible.

But he picked the wrong reporter to threaten.

You see Michael Scotto is the nephew of Anthony Scotto, a former head of the Brooklyn longshoremen’s union and a former boss in the Gambino crime family.

Grim went postal, and, to my non-lawyer eyes, it was technically assault, on the nephew of a Gambino crime bus.

Sucks to be you.

BTW, before he was a Congressman, he was an FBI agent, and I have to agree with Alex Pareene when he says, “We shouldn’t let people like him have badges and guns.”

The only thing worse than a goon is a goon with a gun and a badge.

Deep Thought

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The death of Pete Seeger has me thinking of Woody Guthrie:

See the label on his guitar saying, “This machine kills fascists?”

Folk songs are about not some sort of generic emotional warm fuzzies.

They are about life, and they are about deep moral outrage.

H/t TPM for the picture (c. 1943).

Barack Obama, Fire James Clapper Now

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If you want to give a guy the keys to our security apparatus, they cannot hold the Constitution of the United States of America in contempt:

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, appeared today before the Senate Intelligence Committee, his first appearance since outright lying to that Committee last March about NSA bulk collection. In his prepared opening remarks, Clapper said this:

Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.

Who, in the view of the Obama administration, are Snowden’s “accomplices”? The FBI and other official investigators have been very clear with the media that there is no evidence whatsoever that Snowden had any help in copying and removing documents from the NSA.

If there were any credible evidence of foreign agency involvement, it would have been leaked by Obama and His Evil Minions™, if not publicly trumpeted in a press conference.

Clapper, the man whom Edward Snowden proved to have lied to Congress, should not be allowed to have access classified of any kind.

Here’s hoping that Mr. Snowden wins the Nobel Peace Prize he was recently nominated for.

He is far more deserving that President “I Have a Drone”:

One of the biggest debates over the last year was whether Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who ignited a storm of controversy when he revealed a huge number of covert measures by the NSA, was a traitor or a hero. Today, the latter camp got a big boost after it was announced that Snowden had officially been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

While Nobel Peace Prize nominations are typically kept secret for 50 years, those who submit nominations can make them public themselves sometimes. Thousands of different people, including academics, elected officials, and former recipients can make nominations for whomever “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” over the preceding year.

Snowden was nominated by Norway’s Socialist Left Party politicians Baard Vegar Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen, a member of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where Valen announced the whistleblower’s nomination earlier today.

The FCC Gets Lemons, and Makes An Antifreeze Cocktail

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I have a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel………Not!!!!

Because the FCC is unwilling (not unable, just unwillint) to properly classify broadband providers as common carriers, because they are a bunch of wimps have been cowed by, and have bought into, the bankrupt philosophy of the free market Mousketeers, so they have come up with a plan that makes Baldrick from Blackadder look like a genius:

The nation’s top telecom regulator is tipping his hand a bit more on network neutrality.

While FCC chairman Tom Wheeler wouldn’t say outright how he intends to respond to a recent court decision overturning his agency’s rule barring Internet providers from blocking Web traffic, he appears to be leaning increasingly toward using the FCC’s existing legal authority to regulate broadband providers.

Industry watchers say this approach would likely turn on a part of the Communications Act known as Section 706, which gives the FCC authority to promote broadband deployment. Moving in that direction would put more distance between Wheeler and another alternative that’s been floated, which is to reclassify Internet service provders (ISPs) as a kind of utility (making them much more like the phone companies the FCC already regulates strongly).

You see the problem here, don’t you?

What happens when the next Michael Powell, a corporate tool nonpareille ends up running the FCC, and they decide, much as Powell did, that eliminating regulation will magically promote broadband.

This is what has given the United States the slowest and most expensive Internet access in the developed world.

Here is an Amicus Brief I Fully Support

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There has been a fascinating friend of the court (amicus) brief on the latest Obamacare suits, the “ladyparts are icky” suits from Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties.

It argues that the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” is an unconstitutional because it is an unconstitutional abrogation of the constitutional role of the courts in interpreting the law:

Arguing that Congress has gone too far to push aside the Supreme Court’s constitutional role in religion cases, a loose coalition of child welfare organizations, survivors of clergy child sexual abuse, and non-believers has urged the Justices to strike down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when it rules on a new dispute over the federal health care law.

 The amicus brief, written by a prominent academic authority on religion and the law, Cardozo Law School’s Marci A. Hamilton, seeks to add a bold new dimension to the Court’s review of the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate.”

 “RFRA,” the document contended, “is Congress’s overt attempt to take . . . over this Court’s role in interpreting the Constitution. . . . [T]his novel federal statute, which is one of the most aggressive attacks on this Court’s role in constitutional interpretation in history, has fomented culture wars in the courts like the one ignited” in the pending cases by for-profit businesses seeking a RFRA-based exemption from the mandate to provide health insurance for pregnancy-related services to workers.

Normally, I would not expect that this would have any bearing on the court’s decision, but the core of this argument is flattering the court as an institution, so that makes it a bit more likely.

And the New York Times Just Went Medieval of Christie’s Lt. Governor………

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It appears that  New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno has drawn the attention of the Times, and when the hed is, “A Lieutenant Governor, an Artist and a Portrait of a Smear, it’s pretty clear that your political career is in trouble:

In her first year in office, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno opened a frontal attack on an unlikely target, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Its contracting was “inexcusably” flawed, she said. Its practices were “unethical” and too cozy. Its director had to go.

Ms. Guadagno went on like this for months in 2010, and no one knew what to make of it. She wanted more control over the Arts Council, which distributed $16 million a year all over the state and was broadly respected.

In spring 2011, she began a new offensive. She went before legislative committees and pilloried a man doing work on an Arts Council contract, building a 9/11 timeline at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. His contract was no-bid, she said, the money unclear.

This gentleman is Daniel Aubrey, a 62-year-old man with a gray-flecked goatee. He and his wife, an artist, live in a modest home on a modest block just outside Trenton. A friend called him that day and exclaimed: The lieutenant governor just spelled out your name and said there was contract fraud!

A day later, an assistant attorney general called Mr. Aubrey. You are involved in an illegal contract, the prosecutor said. Do you have a criminal attorney?

He did not.

Just like that, Mr. Aubrey fell into reputation’s ditch, and the Christie administration piled dirt atop him. Except — and this is not incidental to our story — Mr. Aubrey did nothing wrong.

This behavior is unconscionable, and if it is not illegal, it should be.

No surprise, but Kim Guadagno used to be a professional bully prosecutor.

Sucks to be her right now.

Another Strike Against the No Fly List

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Obama must love Kafka and Orwell’s nightmares, because he is emulating them

And this ruling is not being classified as secret:

A Virginia man who claims that as a teenager he was detained, interrogated, and abused in Kuwait at the behest of the Obama administration (a story I wrote about here) has won a key victory in his lawsuit against the government. A George W. Bush-appointed judge allowed Gulet Mohamed’s case to move forward on Wednesday, ruling that by putting him on the no-fly list (and thus infringing on his right to return home to the US), the government made him “a second class citizen.”

 Judge Anthony Trenga of the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that the no-fly list’s “impact on a citizen who cannot use a commercial aircraft is profound,” restricting the right to travel and visit family, the “ability to associate,” and even the ability to hold down a job. Inclusion on the list also “also labels an American citizen a disloyal American who is capable of, and disposed toward committing, war crimes, and one can easily imagine the broad range of consequences that might be visited upon such a person if that stigmatizing designation were known by the general public,” Trenga added. Here’s another key excerpt:

In effect, placement on the No Fly List is life defining and life restricting across a broad range of constitutionally protected activities and aspirations; and a No Fly List designation transforms a person into a second class citizen, or worse. The issue, then, is whether and under what circumstances the government should have the ability to impose such a disability on an American citizen, who should make any such decision, according to what process, and by what standard of proof.

This little bit of Kafkaesque horror is something that came from the Obama administration.

This is not the product of one of Dick Cheney’s security wet dreams, this is Obama embracing and extending those policies.

Conservative Butthurt

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Normally, I have no interest in awards, but the Grammy’s have their moments.

The last time was in 1984, when Annie Lennox stunned and offended ½ of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States (and amused the other ½).

This year, however, it is a bit more significant. Queen Latifa officiated at the wedding of 34 couples, some of them same sex, and right wingers are having a major butt hurt about this:

Anti-gay commentators were none too pleased with last night’s performance of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love” at the Grammy Awards, which included a ceremony where thirty-four couples — including same-sex couples — were married. Unsurprisingly, many claimed that the show was evil and mean to anti-gay activists.

My heart bleeds borscht for these bigots.

Pravda on the Potomac Blames Ukraine For Enacting U.S. Like Laws

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The Washington Post is criticizing the Yanukovych government in the Ukraine for laws that exist in their hometown without any comment:

The lunatics writing the Washington Post editorials want to blame the Ukraine (and the Russian president Putin) for its remarkable patient defense against the foreign supported, neo-nazi vandals of the Svoboda party who try to storm and take over government buildings in Kiev.
One paragraph especially shows their unmatched hypocrisy:

The repressive new restrictions, which criminalize such activity as wearing helmets and setting up tents in public spaces, look a lot like the strategy the Russian ruler used to crush mass demonstrations against his regime in 2011 and 2012. Mr. Yanukovych even adopted the regulation Russia imposed on nongovernment groups that receive foreign funding — a product of Mr. Putin’s paranoid conviction that pro-democracy movements in his country and elsewhere are the result of Western government plots.

Wearing helmets and masks at demonstrations has been unanimously criminalized by the D.C. Council in the Washington Post’s hometown. Tents set up in public spaces by the Occupy movement have been outlawed and cleared by force all over the United States. The Russian and Ukrainian laws that regulate foreign money to political organisations are copies of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act which is law of the land since 1938.

(emphasis original)

There is very little difference between how the Ukraine is using law as an instrument for crushing political protest, and how the United States s using law as an instrument for crushing political protest.

Not Enough Bullets………

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It appears that the hyper wealthy think that people not liking them or how they make money is just like the holocaust, “Seems like billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins is very, very afraid of progressives. In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Perkins expressed his deep fear that fascist progressives were going to burn down the city.”

He actually invoked Kristallnacht:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is ludicrous.

BTW, San Francisco has a law against private vehicles blocking bus-stops, as the aforementioned Google buses do. It’s a $271 fine, and this means something north of $½ billion in fines have been ignored by the city by various tech firms, because big tech is above the law.

The idea that somehow or other, either criticism or legitimate law enforcement actions directed toward the extremely wealthy is somehow a fascist style persecution against the 0.01% is both pernicious and laughable.

You Learn Something New Every Day………

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I was using Google to confirm the spelling of the word “Bated”, as in, “Bated breath,” the other day, and I came across its origins.

It turns out that it’s a diminutive form of the word “abated”, and the first recorded use was by William Shakespeare, specifically, Merchant of Venice, “Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this; ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spurn’d me such a day; another time You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?”

I already knew that the first recorded use of puke, actually the word puking, came from The Scottish Play.

I just think that it’s kinda cool.

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My Thoughts on This Year’s Superbowl

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Normally, I do not watch the Superbowl for the Football.

When my team, Washington is playing, I do not watch.

The least time I did was Super Bowl XXII.  I watched the first quarter, and Denver was leading 10-0, so when some friends came by suggesting dinner, I turned off the TV, and we left the hotel, (I was at a Boskone) and went put to eat.

I returned an the start of the third quarter, and the Redskins had scored 35 unanswered points.

I then realized that Washington had lost whenever I watched, and won when I hadn’t, so I do not watch them in that game.

You can call me superstitious, just don’t call me late for dinner.

So these days, I watch out for the ads, if I watch at all.  (I saw Apple’s 1984 ad when our originally aired.)

However, there are some exceptions to this.

If the Buffalo Bills play the Minnesota Vikings, I’ll watch.

Another exception is if the Superbowl is played outside in inclement winter weather, as the Football gods intended.

This year, the game will be played at the stadium formerly known as The Meadowlands, in North Jersey, so there is a distinct possibility of real Football played in real Football weather.

So if the mercury is below -10°C, our of there is some serious snow, I well be watching.

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Federal Civil Rights Board Condemns NSA Snooping Program

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The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board just issued a report on the NSA’s metadata driftnet.
They have concluded that it is both ineffective and illegal:

An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.
The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.
………
The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”
………
But the privacy board’s report criticized that, saying that the legal theory was a “subversion” of the law’s intent, and that the program also violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
“It may have been a laudable goal for the executive branch to bring this program under the supervision” of the court, the report says. “Ultimately, however, that effort represents an unsustainable attempt to shoehorn a pre-existing surveillance program into the text of a statute with which it is not compatible.”

The ruling was not unanimous, the two members, both alumni of the ferociously corrupt and incompetent Bush DoJ, Rachel L. Brand and Elisebeth Collins Cook, both thought that everything was all hunky dory, with Ms Cook letting loose this bit of completely moronic insanity:

Still, in her dissent, Ms. Cook criticized judging the program’s worth based only on whether it had stopped an attack to date. It also has value as a tool that can allow investigators to “triage” threats and provide “peace of mind” if it uncovers no domestic links to a newly discovered terrorism suspect, she wrote.

Translation: Just because spying on the whole country hasn’t yet worked, doesn’t mean that at some point there might be a chance of it doing something good.
To paraphrase Jimi, excuse me while my head explodes.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica goes a bit further down into the weeds, and covers some important minutae:

The Thursday PCLOB report only addresses critiques of the Section 215 program, but it notes that a future report will address problems found in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FISA AA). Meanwhile, the report describes the rules for targeting non-Americans outside the United States. The government argues that PRISM and related spying programs targeting non-Americans outside the United States are authorized under Section 702.
………
The report goes into great detail explaining both the mechanics of the bulk metadata collection program and how it began. It also emphasizes that under the Section 215 program, the NSA does not collect cell-site location information (CSLI), which can be used to provide geographic information about a call.
However, the report ominously notes:

In the past, the NSA has collected a limited amount of cell site location information to test the feasibility of incorporating such information into its Section 215 program, but that information has not been used for intelligence analysis, and the government has stated that the agency does not now collect it under this program.


 The PCLOB concluded, as Ars has previously, that by allowing analysis of up to “three hops,” this could potentially encompass around half the population of the United States:

If the NSA queries around 300 seed numbers a year, as it did in 2012, then based on the estimates provided earlier about the number of records produced in response to a single query, the corporate store would contain records involving over 120 million telephone numbers.

The PCLOB also notes that there is a significant difference between using phone calling data to follow up on a reasonable suspicion, and collecting information on every phone call made in the country.

Still, I don’t expect anything but minor cosmetic changes.

Full report after the break: