Another day, another school shooting.
F%$# the f%$#ing NRA and Wayne f%$#ing LaPierre.
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
Deep Thought
H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
It’s Jobless Thursday!!
Jobless claims spiked last week, up 68,000 to 368,000. (Seasonally adjusted)
So this week’s was 368K, last week was 300k (revised upward by 2K), and the week before that was 321,000.
What this all means is that we are having issues with the seasonal adjustment.
It Ain’t the F%$#-Up, It’s the Cover-Up
Remember yesterday, when I wrote about how a crony of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie closed entry lanes on the George Washington Bridge in what appeared to be retribution for the (Democratic) mayor of Fort Lee, NJ for not endorsing him?
Well, I figured that this was an instance of some underling deciding to take initiative, kind of like when Nixon was in the White House, when he would rant in private, and say something like, “Someone should shoot that SOB,” and aide Chuck Coleson would go and buy a gun.
It’s one of the problems that one can have with evil minions. Sometimes they are too enthusiastic.
Well, maybe not so much. Because it has now been revealed that Governor Christie made a private call to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asking him to instruct the head of the Port Authority to quash the investigation:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week to complain about a Cuomo appointee’s handling of a growing controversy over traffic pattern changes on the George Washington Bridge, a person familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Christie, a Republican, complained in a private phone call to Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, that Patrick Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was pressing too hard to get to the bottom of why the number of toll lanes onto the bridge from Fort Lee, N.J. was cut from three to one in early September, according to this person. The lane closures occurred without notice to local authorities, officials have said, and snarled traffic for a week in the small borough on the Hudson River bluffs.
Messrs. Cuomo and Christie share control of the Port Authority, which oversees Hudson River bridges and tunnels and the region’s airports and is rebuilding the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan.
Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey have accused Christie appointees of ordering the lane closures to punish Fort Lee’s mayor, Democrat Mark Sokolich, for not endorsing the governor’s re-election campaign. Mr. Christie’s campaign has denied that, and his Port Authority team has said the lanes were closed to study traffic on the bridge.
A spokesman for Mr. Christie said the governor talks to Mr. Cuomo regularly “on any number of mutual-interest topics. Those conversations are private.”
A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo declined to comment.
The call between the governors was an illustration of how the controversy has mushroomed into a headache for Mr. Christie. One of his top representatives at the authority, David Wildstein, resigned last week, citing the bridge closures. Democratic calls for the resignation of another top authority aide, Bill Baroni, have escalated this week.
It wasn’t clear how Mr. Cuomo responded to Mr. Christie’s call or if it was the first time Mr. Christie had lodged a complaint.
The exchange appears to stand in contrast to Mr. Christie’s public remarks on the bridge matter. At a briefing on Dec. 2, the governor mocked a legislative inquiry on the lane closures and joked that he himself had moved the traffic cones that winnowed local access to the bridge.
The perspective on this whole matter has just shifted.
Yesterday, the conventional wisdom was, “Why did Christie hire such a stupid motherF%$#er?”
Today, the question is, “What does Chris Christie have to hide?”
Tinfoil Hat Time
Loretta Fuddy, the director of the Hawaii Department of Health, was killed in a plane crash.
Ms. Fuddy was the official who released Obama’s “Long Form” birth certificate.
Within minutes, “whacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real,”* lunatic teabaggers were already saying that she was murdered for knowing too much:
When President Obama marched into the White House briefing room with his Hawaiian birth certificate in April 2011, he said: “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.”
How right he was. The release of his long-form birth certificate did not eliminate the “birther” movement, which wrongly contends that Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to be president. Although conspiracists had demanded its release, once he made public the document it merely shifted the debate. Some birthers accused Obama of forgery, while others turned their focus to his college transcripts in hopes of proving that he had applied for admission as a foreign student. (He had not.)
And this week, birthers seized on a plane crash off Hawaii that killed one person: state public health Director Loretta Fuddy, the woman who verified the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.
Skeptics turned to social media Thursday to suggest that Obama had played some role in Fuddy’s death. Twitter posts included: “The WH tying up loose ends?” “What did she really know?” and “R.I.P. Loretta Fuddy — we’ll know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama, regardless.”
Donald Trump, a longtime doubter of Obama’s birthplace, also weighed in on Twitter: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”
That reaction didn’t surprise those who study conspiracy theorists.
Wankers.
*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the comedian Denis Leary.
European Parliament Just Sent a Big “F%$# You” to the US State Security Apparatus
The European Parliament has voted to invite NSA Leaker Edward Snowden to testify:
The European parliament has voted to formally invite Edward Snowden to give testimony on NSA spying, despite opposition from conservative MEPs. If the US whistleblower provides answers to the questions compiled by parliamentarians in time, a hearing via video link could take place in early January.
It had looked on Wednesday as if European conservatives were trying to kick the hearing into the long grass. The European People’s party (EPP), the alliance of centre-right parties, had raised a number of concerns about inviting Snowden for a hearing, noting that it could endanger the transatlantic trade agreement with the US.
But on Thursday morning, the leaders of the main political groupings in the European parliament voted to invite Snowden. In the coming weeks, questions will be compiled and then forwarded to the former NSA contractor’s lawyer, with roughly two questions coming from each political group.
Labour MEP Claude Moraes, the lead rapporteur for the European parliament inquiry on the mass surveillance of EU citizens, welcomed the outcome of the vote and promised that questioning would be “rigorous and fair”.
This is a huge diss to both the United States and its poodles in the UK.
I think that Bush damaged the stand of the United States in the world, because much of the world, particularly in Europe, realized that the country was being run by disingenuous belligerent nut-jobs.
What Obama further diminished the standing of the US because, as he has embraced and extended Bush era policies, that Bush was not an outlier, but rather very much in line with the consensus in Washington, DC.
It’s that moment when saying, “If only the Czar knew,” for years, you realize that the Czar does know, and has always know.
H/t Ole Texan.
Supreme Court Considers the Death of the 5thAmendment
One of the foundations of our civil rights is that you have the right not to testify against yourself, and that asserting this right cannot be used against you.
In other words, not testifying cannot be used against you, whether in the trial or in the sentencing, except it appears in the punishment phase of a death penalty case:
As in many recent cases applying limits on relief contained in the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s text (AEDPA, 28 U.S.C. §2254(d)(1)), Wednesday’s argument in White v. Woodall involved mind-numbing hairsplitting. On the state’s side, Susan Lenz, an attorney in the office of Kentucky’s attorney general, sought to explain why Woodall’s entitlement to a “no-adverse-inference” instruction at the punishment phase of his capital trial was not “clearly established” at the time the Kentucky courts rejected his constitutional claim. Yes, the Supreme Court had held that the Fifth Amendment entitles a defendant to a no-adverse-inference instruction at trial (Carter v. Kentucky). Yes, the Court had announced that the right against self-incrimination applies in punishment as well as trial proceedings (Estelle v. Smith). And, yes, the Court had reversed a sentence where a trial court had actually made an adverse inference regarding a contested fact based on a defendant’s silence at sentencing (Mitchell v. United States). But here, Lenz argued, the defendant sought a no-adverse-inference instruction when he had conceded all of the facts concerning his death eligibility. Because the state had already satisfied its burden of proof, the defendant’s silence would not be used to make the state’s case.
Kentucky is arguing that a refusal to testify can be used as affirmative evidence of lack of remorse, and hence used to sentence him to death.
Delightful.
Here’s hoping that the Supreme Court makes the right decision, but I doubt it.
We Have All Been There ……… All Men, I Mean
Man kills himself after trapped on 5hr shopping trip.
Been there, almost done that, have not bought the f%$#ing T-shirt.
I Don’t Mean to Belabor the Obvious, but Raul Castro is Not Adolph Hilter
Jon Stewart again, observing that shaking the hands of another world leader with whom we have poor relations at a funeral for a man who invited his own jailer to his inauguration is not Munich.
I am waiting for a politician to realize that the pandering to the delusional demands of the right wing of the Cuban-American is neither good policy nor good politics, and to tell them to go pound sand.
It’s been 55 years since Castro took over Cuba, get over it.
Remember the Satanists Who Wanted a Monument at the Oklahoma Capitol?
While the committee who makes the decision in Oklahoma could (but shouldn’t) argue that Satanism is not a “real” religion, or too
on the “fringe”, neither of these arguments would apply to Hindus, who have somewhere around 1 Billion adherents world wide, and so the request by the Universal Society of Hinduism place a statue of Lord Hanuman: (shown)
A week after the Satanic Temple said they wanted to put up a monument outside the Oklahoma Capitol building (in response to a Ten Commandments monument already on the grounds), a Hindu group is following in their footsteps.
Activist Rajan Zed put out a press release today saying that his group, the Universal Society of Hinduism, would be applying for a monument of their own outside the Capitol building, this one honoring Lord Hanuman:
One depiction of Lord Hanuman[Zed] said that if the Oklahoma State Capitol was open to different monuments, we would love to have a statue of Lord Hanuman, who was greatly revered and worshipped and known for incredible strength and was perfect grammarian.
…
Rajan Zed stated that he had written to Oklahoma State Capitol Preservation Commission Chair Trait Thompson and others for detailed procedure, required forms, conditions to be met for approval, size and dimensions of the statue, etc., for permission to erect the Lord Hanuman statue, which they planned to make big and weather-proof.
If the Commission votes yes on the proposal, conservatives will flip out.
If they vote no, they’re just inviting a lawsuit.
I have no sympathies for the Talibaptist Neanderthals in Oklahoma who wanted to inflict their religion on the society at large.
They made their bed, let them lie in it.
As an aside, I think that the various American Indian tribes in Oklahoma should apply as well. They are very much a part of Oklahoma’s heritage.
Vacation in Uruguay
The final legislative hurdle has been cleared, and Uruguay legalized growing and selling marijuana:
The world’s most far-reaching cannabis law has been passed by the Uruguayan parliament, opening the way for the state to regulate the production, distribution, sale and consumption of the planet’s favourite illegal drug.
The law, effective from next year, will: allow registered users to buy up to 40g of marijuana a month from a chemist’s; registered growers to keep up to six plants; and cannabis clubs to have up to 45 members and cultivate as many as 99 plants.
A government-run cannabis institute will set the price – initially likely to be close to the current black market rate of $1 a gramme – and monitor the impact of the programme, which aims to bring the industry under state control and push illegal traffickers out of business.
Julio Bango, one of the politicians who helped draft the bill, said it would probably be four months until the first harvest of legal cannabis, by which time the government would have a licensing system in place. “We know this has generated an international debate and we hope it brings another element to discussions about a model [the war on drugs] that has totally failed and that has generated the opposite results from what it set out to achieve.”
I think that I’m getting old though, because if I went to Uruguay, I’d be excited about visiting the wreck of the Graf Spee.
Major Supreme Court Not-Ruling on Labor Organizing
After giving cert (accepting) the case, the Supreme Court has dismissed the case, essentially saying, “Oops, my bad.”
Unions dodged a bullet today when the Supreme Court took the unusual step of dismissing the strange and possibly disastrous case of Mulhall v. Unite Here Local 355 as “improvidently granted.”
Though the dismissal leaves some bad law in place in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Florida, Alabama and Georgia, labor should nonetheless breathe a sigh of relief.
In Mulhall, a Florida casino employee backed by the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW) argued that neutrality agreements violate an anti-bribery provision in the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 and therefore constitute a federal crime.
Making neutrality agreements a crime would have struck at the heart of organizing as it is practiced today. The neutrality approach—in which the employer agrees not to oppose an organizing campaign—has been the mode of choice in most union drives since the ‘90s. The employer usually further promises to “card check,” which means that it will recognize the union if a majority of the employees sign cards stating their desire for union representation.
………
Although this was a bad ruling, letting it stand would have been less dangerous than the approach Unite Here took—appealing it to the Supreme Court and giving them the chance to invalidate neutrality agreements entirely. Though incorrectly reasoned, the 11th Circuit decision did not end neutrality agreements as we know them. The precedent may have caused some problems for unions in the 11th Circuit by scaring some potentially cooperative employers into demanding NLRB elections, by inviting additional lawsuits from the NRTW (which uses “strategic litigation” to “eliminate coercive union power and compulsory unionism abuses”), or by posing a possible danger in the hands of a future, zealous Republican U.S. Attorney in Florida, Alabama and Georgia. However, the case did not pose an immediate threat that warranted bringing this case before the Supreme Court—a court that has been found to be the most pro-business Supreme Court since World War II.
I’m not sure of his analysis, but the dismissal is profoundly odd.
- They accepted the case.
- They had oral arguments.
- Then they dismissed the case.
My guess right now is that the Supreme Court has 5 justices more or less inclined to rule that neutrality agreements are bribery (WTF?!?!?!), but one, or two, of the 5 decided that they needed some less expansive cases to build a foundation to justify to their partisan goal of gutting organized labor.
If you want to look at the legal minutae here, try SCOTUS blog.
It’s On Now, Girl!
It looks like Jon Stewart has finally had enough with the continuous lies about spying on all of us, as evidenced by last night’s segment, “That Thing They Said They’re Not Doing? They’re Totally Doing.”
This is absolutely brutal.
Why Chris Christie Will Not Be the Republican Nominee
In many ways, Christie’s putative Presidential campaign reminds me a lot of Rudolph Giuliani’s in 2008.
Governor Christie he suffers much the same problem as Guiliani,* which is that the better that people know him, the more that they will dislike him.
He is clearly too liberal for the nut-jobs who caucus in Iowa, and his actions in the rough and tumble of New Jersey Politics show that he is someone who people in New Hampshire will dislike when they see him in person.
Case in point, it now appears that one of his appointees shut lanes to the George Washington Bridge in order to punish the Democratic Mayor for not endorsing him:
It would seem a minor whodunit for a small suburb: On the first day of school in September, three access lanes leading from Fort Lee, N.J., streets to the George Washington Bridge were unexpectedly and mysteriously shut down. Cars backed up, the town turned into a parking lot, half-hour bridge commutes stretched into four hours, buses and children were late for school, and emergency workers could not respond quickly to the day’s events, which included a missing toddler, a cardiac arrest and a car driving into a building.
But the George Washington Bridge is the world’s busiest, and New Jersey is led by one of the nation’s most pugnacious and prominent politicians, Gov. Chris Christie — who also happens to appoint the people who control the bridge.
So the unfolding story of the lane closings has become something of a cause célèbre, resulting in a hearing before the New Jersey Legislature on Monday, as well as a window into the proudly aggressive and often secretive dealings of Mr. Christie’s team.
The mayor of Fort Lee, a Democrat, complained in a letter in September that the lane closings were “punitive” — Mr. Christie, a Republican, was leaning heavily on Democratic mayors to endorse him for re-election so he could present himself as a presidential candidate with bipartisan appeal, but the mayor was not going along.
Mr. Christie laughed off the idea that he had been involved in a matter as small as closing bridge lanes, and his chief appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, insisted that the lane closings were simply part of a traffic study.
But on Friday, the man who ordered the closings — a high school friend of the governor’s who was a small-town mayor and the founder of an anonymous political blog before Mr. Christie’s appointee created a job for him at the Port Authority — resigned, saying the issue had become “a distraction.”
The people of New Jersey might understand (though the indications are that they aren’t, because their commutes were f%$#ed with in a major way), the people of most of the rest of the country (pretty much everyone but New York and New Jersey) won’t.
*Also, Christie has not been zinged the way that Joe Biden zinged Rudy that, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9/11,”
The Volker Rule Has Been Finalized
AFter 3 years, and interminable lobbying by finance industry, the Volker rule restrict proprietary trading by banks has been finalized :
Government regulators ushered in a new era of oversight Tuesday aimed at reining in Wall Street risk-taking, voting to prevent big banks from trading for their own benefit.
The “Volcker rule,” named after former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, also bars banks from owning hedge funds and private-equity funds. The centerpiece of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law took three years to complete as government infighting and intense lobbying by banks slowed the process.
“Our financial system will be safer and the American people are more secure because we fought to include this protection in the law,” President Obama said in a statement.
Lawmakers devised the measure to prevent banks with government backstops such as deposit insurance from making risky trades for their own benefit, arguing that the bets could endanger taxpayers. The challenge for regulators has been restricting such proprietary trading without impeding acceptable practices, such as firms trading on behalf of clients as market-makers or hedging their risk against fluctuations in interest rates.
But banking industry officials continued to warn that the rule goes too far. “Many bankers will struggle to understand complex provisions that have no application to their business model and are open to conflicting interpretations,” Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Association, said in a statement.
On Tuesday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board and the Federal Reserve unanimously approved the final version of the rule. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3 to 2 in favor, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission adopted it in a 3 to 1 vote.
Supervision will ultimately be the responsibility of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the CFTC and the SEC.
That last line is profoundly worrying, since with three agency being responsible for enforcing this, none of them will be held accountable.
And then there is the fact that, “The 71-page rule, a streamlined version of the 298-page draft, addresses many concerns about which activities and investments are allowed, but gives regulators flexibility to interpret the rules.”
The article wrings it’s hands about how the banksters have to spin off their prop trading desks, but as Dean Baker observes, that was the point of this whole endeavor:
It’s not clear what this could mean, since the point of the Volcker Rule was to keep banks from engaging in proprietary trading. If they have spun off their trading desks then its purpose will have been accomplished. The goal is not to prevent trading, but to prevent banks from effectively speculating with government guaranteed deposits.
Even then, I do not think that it’s going to work.
Rapists in the Pentagon win ……… For Now
The Senate has passed the defense authorization bill, and caved to the pro-rape faction in the military by dropping Kristen Gillibrand’s proposal to remove such charges from the chain of command:
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said she will push legislation to remove sexual-assault allegations from the military’s chain of command after congressional leaders spurned her approach in crafting a compromise defense measure.
“I have an assurance that we will get a vote, just not when we will get a vote — before the end of the year or maybe right away in the new year,” Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, told reporters today. Leaders of the House and Senate armed services committees yesterday agreed on a $552.1 billion defense authorization bill for the current fiscal year.
Under the compromise, commanders would be stripped of the ability to dismiss a finding by a court martial and would be barred from reducing guilty findings. Retaliation against personnel reporting sexual assaults would become a military crime.
President Barack Obama has said the issue of sexual assault is undermining trust and readiness among members of the armed forces, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has called attacks a “scourge” and a “blight” on the military.
While Hagel and uniformed leaders in the military have backed changes in the handling of such cases, they have resisted Gillibrand’s approach, saying commanding officers must be able to discipline their own troops.
The issue has crossed party and gender lines. Gillibrand has won support from Republicans including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, while her proposal has been opposed by such Democrats as Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who heads the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri.
Just so you know, the military says that such crimes need to remain in the chain of command to preserve, “Good order and discipline,” even though other militaries, like, you know, the Israel Defense Forces.
After all, it’s not like the Israelis have been at war in existential struggles in the past 60 years, has it?
Our officer corps is profoundly dysfunctional, and we need to stop the inmates from running an asylum.
This is Just Nasty
As you may be aware, Senator John Cornyn has gotten himself a Teabagger challenger in the primary, US Representative Steve Stockman (R-WTF).
Well, Harry Reid’s communications director just Tweeted this:
.@woodruffbets Senator Reid has always felt that Senator Cornyn is someone he can work with on a range of issues.
— Adam Jentleson (@AJentleson) December 10, 2013
Well played, Mr. Jentleson, well played.
It sounds nice, but it is read meat to the ‘Baggers who will vote in the primary.
This is an Expected Consequence of Obamacare
I have repeatedly stated that the first problem with healthcare is not the price of healthcare, not the cost of healthcare.
Absent fiat regulation, it is more important to initiate price competition both in insurance and in medical services, which means that the pricing will be clear, and high price insurance will be eschewed by consumers, and high price medical services will be eschewed by the insurance companies.
Therefore, it comes of no surprise that insurance companies are cutting the big name providers who charge a premium:
Americans who are buying insurance plans over online exchanges, under what is known as Obamacare, will have limited access to some of the nation’s leading hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centres.
Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centres, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country.
This was not just foreseeable, it was the inevitable consequence of the Heritage Foundation designed plan.
In the long run, this is a good thing, because the consolidation of hospitals over the past few years has not been about efficiencies, but rather about the accumulation of pricing power.
You may not like that Sloan Kettering is not in your network, but in the long run, some for of price controls are essential to fixing our broken healthcare system,
Because They Are Doing What He Wants
Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.?
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Yeah, whoever wrote proposal this is still laughing
It has been disclosed that the NSA and the CIA were aggressively monitoring:
Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.
Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.
The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games — fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions — American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.
Online games might seem innocuous, a top-secret 2008 NSA document warned, but they had the potential to be a “target-rich communication network” allowing intelligence suspects “a way to hide in plain sight.” Virtual games “are an opportunity!,” another 2008 NSA document declared.
But for all their enthusiasm — so many CIA, FBI and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat.
I kind of think that the pitch for the program went like this:
Even if you do not have privacy issues with NSA spying, the fact that they were paying people to play video games indicates that they have way too big a budget.