Author: Matthew G. Saroff

News from South of the Manson-Nixon Line

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The US offers free “lifeline” cell phone service for the poor.

In Georgia, the powers that be decided to levy a fee on the free cell phones, because ……… They just want to hate on the poor, I guess.

A Federal Court just told them to go Cheney themselves:

A federal judge has blocked Georgia’s plan to charge low-income residents $5 per month for cell phone service that currently is provided free of charge.

The fee was set to take effect on Jan. 31 and would have made Georgia the only the U.S. state to charge for the federally subsidized phone service.

“The public interest tilts in favor of providing telephone services to low-income households that otherwise would be unable to afford mobile phones,” U.S. District Court Judge Richard Story wrote on Tuesday in a temporary injunction that stops the new fee while a court challenge is pending.

Nationally, about 14 million households participate in the Lifeline phone program, according to the Universal Service Administrative Co, the nonprofit organization that administers the program.

The level of hate and evil here is only exceeded by the pettiness shown.

Un-dirtyword believable.

Frau Merkel Speaks the “S-Word” to Barack Obama

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No, I don’t mean the word, “Sh%$,” though the Germans have many words for excrement, I mean the word Stasi, as in the East German secret police:

The dispute also reflects very different views of how far the state should go in conducting surveillance, both at home and abroad.

 In an angry conversation with Mr. Obama in October after the phone monitoring was revealed, Ms. Merkel said that the N.S.A.’s activities reminded her of growing up as the daughter of a Protestant minister in East Germany. “She told him, ‘This is like the Stasi,’ ” said one person who had discussed the conversation with the chancellor.

 Another person familiar with the conversation said Ms. Merkel had told Mr. Obama that she was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, “the N.S.A. clearly couldn’t be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out.”

This is, to quote Joe Biden, a “Big f%$#ing deal.”

Angela Merkel grew up in the DDR, and this likely not a term that she invokes lightly.

The capabilities of our state security apparatus are remarkable, but the custodians of those capabilities, the NSA, CIA, and the rest of the three letter acronyms, cannot be trusted to deploy these capabilities in the best interest of the United States.

They are simply too enamored of their abilities, and so act without regard to the consequences of a potential failure.

Bush Used Phoney National Security Excuse to Cover Up For His Saudi Buddies

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I am so not surprised by this. There is a reason why Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saudr, is also known as “Bandar Bush” for his close ties to the Bush Crime Family.

We know that the Bush administration flew members of the Saudi royal family out of the US following 911, and now we know that they redacted all references to the House of Saud funding terrorism from the 911 report:

With relationships changing between the US and major actors in the Middle East, perhaps it is inevitable that the issue of Saudi Arabia’s funding of terrorism in the US is being revisited.
George W Bush in the Oval Office

Congressmembers Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass) recently got access to unredacted copies of the 2002 report of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) on 9/11. You may recall that 28 pages of that document had been redacted by George W. Bush for “national security purposes”. It has been widely reported that the 28 missing pages of the JICI report document a money trail from the Saudi Royal Family to the 9/11 hijackers.

‘I was absolutely shocked by what I read,’ Jones told International Business Times. ‘What was so surprising was that those whom we thought we could trust really disappointed me. I cannot go into it any more than that. I had to sign an oath that what I read had to remain confidential. But the information I read disappointed me greatly.’

This is no new revelation. At the time of the JICI report’s initial release, there was controversy about the extensive redactions and the information that was being withheld. Fourty-six Senators (all Democrats but one) signed a letter asking Bush to release the 28 pages. Bush refused.

The Congressmen Jones and Lynch (The Dem, Lynch, is also pretty right-wing, FYI) are doing their level best to say that Bush covered up for the House of Saud without actually revealing technically classified data.

I do not expect Obama do declassify this.

First, his actions over the past 5 years indicate that he has no interest at all in transparency, and 2nd, he is not sutpid, and he understands taht there is an implicit contract between him, and George W. Bush, and whoever is Obama’s eventual successor, that dirty laundry will not be revealed.

Pope Francis Walks the Walk

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For all that Pope Francis has said about changing the focus of the church from right wing agitprop to helping the poor and doing good, it is in the bureaucracy, particularly the personnel structures where change has to be made.

Well the rubber has officially met the road, as he canned a notoriously right wing Cardinal from his position on the Congregation for Bishops, which is responsible for selecting new Bishops:

Pope Francis moved on Monday against a conservative American cardinal who has been an outspoken critic of abortion and same-sex marriage, by replacing him on a powerful Vatican committee with another American who is less identified with the culture wars within the Roman Catholic Church.

The pope’s decision to remove Cardinal Raymond L. Burke from the Congregation for Bishops was taken by church experts to be a signal that Francis is willing to disrupt the Vatican establishment in order to be more inclusive.

Even so, many saw the move less as an effort to change doctrine on specific social issues than an attempt to bring a stylistic and pastoral consistency to the church’s leadership.

“He is saying that you don’t need to be a conservative to become a bishop,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy, a liberal Catholic research institute. “He wants good bishops, regardless of how conservative or liberal they are.”

………

Cardinal Burke still serves as the prefect of the Vatican’s highest canonical court, but analysts say his removal from the Congregation for Bishops will sharply reduce his influence, especially over personnel changes in American churches.

“The Congregation for Bishops is the most important congregation in the Vatican,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and the author of “Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.”

“It decides who are going to be the bishops all over the world,” he added. “This is what has the most direct impact on the life of the local church.”

Note that when Archbishop of S. Louis, Burke publicly announced that he was refusing communion to John Kerry.

This is a substantive change, assuming that he lives long enough,* for them to take.

*I am not suggesting a Da Vinci Code type conspiracy, I am merely observing that he is 75 years old.

The Rotational Velocity of Kafka and Orwell Has Slowed a Bit

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The military commission in Guantanamo has decided that the defendants recollection of their own torture is not classified, so they can testify about their own experiences:

MILITARY COMMISSION RETREATS ON CLASSIFICATION OF TORTURE MEMORIES FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact: James Connell 011(5399) 5168

Alternate: Erin Daste 011(5399) 5321

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA Today, the military commission in the 9/11 case issued several orders (AE200II, AE 013CCC, and AE013DDD) which lift the provision classifying the “observations and experiences” of defendants formerly held by the CIA.  Defense attorneys are still required to treat CIA information as classified, but the military commission acknowledged that it had limited authority to control defendants’ thoughts and memories.

“This ruling is an important step forward in accountability for torture,” said James Connell, attorney for Ammar al Baluchi.  “The real question is whether the prison will allow the prisoners to communicate with foreign government officials, medical care providers, human rights authorities, and media.”
This ruling is the latest vindication of a series of defense challenges to the United States’ authority to classify the thoughts, memories, and statements of the former CIA prisoners.  In September 2012, the government abandoned its long-held policy of “presumptive classification,” in which every statement of former CIA prisoners was considered classified, but substituted a provision defining all prisoner observations and experiences on CIA detention as classified.  Defense attorneys challenged that provision as violating the Convention Against Torture.  Today’s ruling, which the prosecution strenuously opposed, lifts that restriction.

“People who have been abused by officials have a right to tell human rights organizations, medical care providers, and others about their torture,” said Lt Col Sterling Thomas, United States Air Force, military attorney for Mr. al Baluchi.  “If governments are allowed to keep allegations of torture secret, the protection against torture is worthless.”

 Now to prosecute, or at least pull the security clearances, of everyone who had anything to do with conducting, managing, or approving torture.

Thank Edward Snowden for this Court Ruling

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Yesterday, Federal Judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA’s bulk gathering of phone records was probably unconstitutional.

There are a fair number of points that were made.

The first was that the data release by Edward Snowden, and its publication by Glenn Greenwald made the fact that the NSA was collecting everyone’s phone records a matter of public record, and hence that the litigants had standing because they knew that their data was being collected.

Basically, he is saying that the ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty international, that people could not challenge secret surveillance, because it was secret, so they had no standing.

As Charlie Pierce notes, this makes for a game changer:

Let us be clear. No matter what you think of Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, and no matter what you think of what they did, this ruling does not happen if the NSA doesn’t let a contractor walk out of the joint with the family jewels on a flash drive. This ruling does not happen if we do not know what we now know, and we don’t know any of that unless Snowden gathers the data and leaks it to the Guardian.

His next point illustrates just how 6 degrees of separation works:

“Suppose, for instance, that there is a person living in New York City who has a phone number that meets the RAS standard and is approved as a ‘seed,’ ” Judge Richard Leon writes in a broad opinion finding that the National Security Agency’s “telephony metadata” program is likely unconstitutional. An R.A.S. is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that someone might have something to do with terrorism; a seed is a search term, perhaps a telephone number, that the N.S.A. plugs into a database of hundreds of millions of phone records it has collected indiscriminately. “And suppose this person, who may or may not actually be associated with any terrorist organization, calls or receives calls from 100 unique numbers, as in my example. But now suppose that one of the numbers he calls is his neighborhood Domino’s Pizza shop,” Judge Leon continues:

The Court won’t hazard a guess as to how many different phone numbers might dial a given Domino’s Pizza outlet in New York City in a five-year period, but to take a page from the Government’s book of understatement, it’s “substantially larger” than the 100 in the second hop of my example, and would therefore most likely result in exponential growth in the scope of the query and lead to millions of records being captured by the third hop.

It is also interesting to note that  Judge Leon specifically noted that the intelligence drift net did not get any meaningful results:

A warrantless, suspicionless search that abridges a legitimate expectation of privacy might be “reasonable” if it was justified by a compelling security interest that cannot be addressed any other way. In perhaps the strongest passages of Justice Leon’s opinion, he persuasively argues that there is no such interest in this case. The government has simply not shown that these intrusive searches are justified as counterterrorism measures. While the government argues that these warrantless searches are necessary for reasons of efficiency, they simply haven’t made the case:

…the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature. In fact, none of the three “recent episodes” cited by the Government that supposedly “illustrate the role that telephony metadata analysis can play in preventing and protecting against terrorist attack” involved any apparent urgency.

I hope that his ruling will stand, but I fear that it won’t.

OK, I Get That This Guy Was Scum Who Ripped off the EPA

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But it seems that every story is some variant of, “EPA reels as climate-change expert awaits sentencing for $1m CIA fraud.”

This is simply not true.  Not the “fraud” part, nor the “EPA” part, nor the “CIA”, part, they are all true:

It is a story that flummoxed investigators – how a highly paid climate-change expert at the Environmental Protection Agency managed to defraud the government of nearly $1m, by pretending for a decade to be an undercover CIA agent.

John Beale, 65, is to undergo sentencing in a DC federal court on Wednesday, after pleading guilty to defrauding the government of $900,000 in salary and other benefits. Beale, who used his ruse to disappear for months at a time, has agreed to pay some $1.3m in restitution. He faces up to three years in jail.

The scandal could rebound against the current administrator of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, and her efforts to carry out President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda. Last week, an official investigation found that she knew of the fraud for more than a year. Other officials who worked with Beale at the agency are under investigation and in a report last week, the EPA inspector general said senior agency officials had “enabled” Beale by failing to challenge any of his stories or expense claims amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Beale, who retired last April after learning he was under investigation, earned salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, far more than his supervisors. His fraud consisted largely of failing to turn up for work – in one instance for 18 months – and offering excuses connected to his fake intelligence role at the CIA.

(emphasis mine)

It’s the “climate change expert” bit that is wrong.  He’s not a scientist, his background in public affairs and law, with a Master’s Degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a Law Degree from New York University (PDF, and here is the Google cache if they purge it).

Yes, this sh%$ is mind boggling, but this guy managed (when he was actually, like, you know, there) the office.

But every story that I’ve seen has something like, “Lead Scientist,” or “Lead Expert.”

Still, engineering what is in effect a no show job for over a decade is a pretty remarkable bit of bureaucratic Jiujitsu.

Your Moment of Kafka, No-Fly List Edition

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There is now a distinct possibility in the lawsuit filed by Rahinah Ibrahim about her being on the no-fly list, the verdict might be kept secret. (My prior post on the trial is here.)

That’s right, win or lose, Rahinah Ibrahim, and the general public, may never know if she was on the list, if she is on the list, or whether her name has been removed from the list:

Is former Stanford University scholar Rahinah Ibrahim connected to Malaysian jihadists, as the FBI once suggested, or is she the victim of misguided U.S. bureaucrats who erroneously placed her on a U.S. terror watchlist? Is she even on a watchlist at all?

 Those are the lingering unanswered questions in the first-of-its kind federal trial challenging a traveler’s alleged placement on America’s notorious no-fly list. The 48-year-old Malaysian woman’s case against the U.S. government — in which she seeks solely to clear her name — is awaiting a judge’s verdict after a week of testimony, the bulk of it classified and given behind closed doors here in a San Francisco federal courtroom.

 But underscoring the Kafkaesque flavor of the trial, there’s a real possibility the verdict itself will be kept a secret, even from Ibrahim.

 “It is conceivable? If the government continues to keep this information secret from her and the public, and the judge sustains that objection, it is possible we can have a ruling in this case and she would not know the result,” Elizabeth Marie Pipkin, Ibrahim’s pro-bono attorney, said in a telephone interview.

You can call it Kafkaesque, or you can call it Orwellian, or you can call it police state tactics, but in any case, this really, really, wrong.

Because It is too Expensive, and the Side Effects are too Extreme

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Over at “Even the Liberal” New Republic, Eric Sasson finds a new drug that reduces the chance of HIV transmission by nearly 99%.

He is perplexed ans surprised that there has been little in the way of publicity or action regarding the now FDA approved drug, Truvada.

The answer to this question is simple. In addition to nasty , potentially lethal blood chemistry changes, osteoporosis, liver problems, hepatitis B infections getting worse, Neausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, joint pain, trouble sleeping, and back pain, this drug has an extremely high price, to the tune of over $1200 a month.

This is yet another example of how an over broad IP regime.

The retail price, set by the manufacturer by virtue of their monopoly rights under patent, is preventing it from having a meaningful impact on the AIDS epidemic

The solution here is to make patents, particularly those for drugs, less expansive (also, end evergreening), along with an aggressive regime of compulsory licensing.

Time for Another Blogger Ethics Panel………

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60 minutes just did a laudatory story on the NSA showing.

They show how this heroic group of people just want to protect us.

Well, now we know why.  It turns out that the host of that segment previously wrked for the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and was Looking at leaving journalism to take a job as spokesman for the NY Police intelligence unit:

“60 Minutes” received another round of criticism Sunday for what critics called soft coverage of the National Security Agency — and the next morning, the host of that segment was reported to be taking a job in intelligence or counterterrorism.

The news program was given “unprecedented access” to the agency and its employees, said host John Miller at the outset of the report — where he did note that he had formerly worked in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But the Daily Beast and Huffington Post have reported in recent days that Miller was under consideration for a job at the NYPD in an intelligence or counterterrorism role. On Monday, the New York Post’s Page Six reported that Miller was on the verge of taking such a job.

Revolving door journalism.

Yet one more way that certain members of the 4th betray their profession.

Props to Krugman………

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A few days ago, Paul Krugman announced that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) was no big deal.

I think that he got this very wrong, because he viewed it through the lens of comparative advantage, which is, after all pretty much his specialty in economics.

It was a classic, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” error.

He misses the fact that the objections to the TPP have nothing to do with so-called free trade, and everything to do with it being structured to benefit the rent seekers in IP and finance by strengthening the regulations on IP, and by preventing meaningful regulation on finance and capital flows, in addition to the very basic infringements on sovereignty that the entire regime entails.

Well, Krugman has admitted that his initial comments were hasty and a bit ill considered:

Dean Baker takes me to task over the Trans Pacific trade deal, arguing that it’s not really about trade — that the important (and harmful) stuff involves regulation and intellectual property rights.

I’m sympathetic to this argument; this was true, for example, of DR-CAFTA, the free trade agreement with Central America, which ended up being largely about pharma patents. Is TPP equally bad? I’ll do some homework and get back to you.

This reflects well on him.

It’s an admission that he did not consider the issues as comprehensively as he should have, with a promise of further comments, without any excuses.

Now I Know Where Sharon* Gets It From….

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I’m at my mother-in-laws, tweaking her computer. (Right now, I am waiting for updates to install)

Additionally, there were some documents she could not find.

They were on her kitchen table, and now she cannot find them.

Well, she did find them.  It turned out that she had put them away, in the proper folder, in the proper drawer, in her filing cabinet.

If I had a dollar for each time that Sharon* did something list this, I’d be a part of the 1%.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, She Who Must Be Obeyed, my wife.

They Really do Loathe Women’s Sexuality

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Hatred and fear of women actually enjoying sex, so they must be punished, even if it is a rape:

The Republican-dominated Michigan state legislature pushed through a bill on Wednesday requiring women to purchase separate insurance policies if they want to have an abortion, the Detroit Free Press reported.

“I don’t think elective abortion should be a part of insurance,” state Rep. Nancy Jenkins (R) told the Free Press. “This doesn’t affect access to abortion. It will still be legal when this law takes effect. Who should be required to pay? Not Michigan taxpayers.”

However, the law, which takes effect in early 2014, will also ban women from purchasing the policy after becoming pregnant under any circumstances, including rape and incest, causing opponents to refer to it as a policy on “rape insurance.”

The bill passed by a 27-11 margin in the Senate, and a 62-47 vote in the House, mostly along party lines. According to the Associated Press, state Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D) said during the debate that she was raped 20 years ago.

“Thank God it didn’t result in a pregnancy because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker,” Whitmer was quoted as saying. “If this were law then and I had become pregnant, I would not be able to have coverage because of this. How extreme, how extreme does this measure need to be?”

What is wrong with these people?

This is not ignorance, it is raw hatred and evil.

This Would Be Followed by a Suspicious Small Plane Crash

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An NSA official has mooted the idea that Edward Snowden be granted amnesty in exchange for his giving back all the documents:

A National Security Agency official said in an interview released Friday that he would be open to cutting an amnesty deal with intelligence leaker Edward Snowden if he agreed to stop divulging secret documents.

Rick Ledgett, who heads the NSA’s task force investigating the damage from the Snowden leaks, told CBS television’s “60 Minutes” program that some but not all of his colleagues share his view.

“My personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about” a possible deal, said Ledgett, according to excerpts of the interview due to air Sunday.

But Snowden would have to provide firm assurances that the remaining documents would be secured.

“My bar for those assurances would be very high… more than just an assertion on his part,” said Ledgett.

And if Snowden were to accept this, and then return to the United States, they would find a way to imprison him or kill him anyway.

Omerta must be enforced.

You Know that Whole Inflation Running Wild Thing?

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Not so much:

Wholesale prices in the U.S. declined for a third month in November, reflecting lower costs for energy and cars.

The 0.1 percent drop in the producer-price index followed a 0.2 percent decrease the prior month, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 77 economists called for no change. The so-called core measure, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.1 percent.

Prices of goods and materials used in the earlier stages of production fell for a second month as slow improvement in global markets limits demand. Scant signs of accelerating inflation indicate Federal Reserve policy makers meeting next week have more room to maintain their unprecedented $85 billion in monthly asset purchases in order to help spur the expansion.

“Inflation remains quite tame,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics Ltd. in Valhalla, New York, who correctly projected the drop in prices. “Over the course of the next year, the core numbers will drift up a little bit as the economy remains healthy and unemployment keeps falling.”

An important thing to note is that the inflation hawks have been wrong on everything this time around.