Author: Matthew G. Saroff

An Old Witch Tells the President What to Do

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Read Hecate:

……… I pulled A’s in a lot of law school classes, but the class in which I did my absolute best was Negotiations 101.

 Of course, unlike our President, I didn’t go to Harvard Law School and I was only assistant editor, not editor, of Law Review. I’ve never taught ConLaw and I’ve never held elective office. But I have had cause to wonder, more than once, if Mr. Obama may not have been busy doing something else on the day they taught Negotiating 101 at HLS.

 ………

 So, I’m an old woman who didn’t go to HLS and wouldn’t presume to imagine that I could lead the United States. But I’ll still, as someone who’s actually been in the field, practiced law, and successfully negotiated good outcomes for my clients, presume to give Mr. Obama some advice.

 If I were sitting today where you sit, Mr. Obama, almost at the confluence of the Anacostia River, the Washington Chanel, and the Potomac River, here’s what I’d do:

 I’d announce that, now that the government’s been closed for two days, I’m unwilling to sign anything but a clean bill to fund the government, except that now I also want the Rapeublicans to approve all of my judicial nominees who have been languishing in Congress lo these many years.

 Tomorrow morning, I’d eat breakfast, put on my nice suit, walk out into the Rose Garden (it’s gorgeous in DC this week) and announce that now that I’ve slept on it, I won’t sign anything except a clean bill with approval of all of my judicial nominees and statehood for DC. I’d wave to the reporters, go play golf (include a woman this time, Mr. President), review their homework with my daughters, and get a massage.

 On Friday, after I had lunch at the Palm with my wife (have the crabmeat cocktail and the steak salad, rare), I’d walk up to Dupont Circle and say that I’d been discussing it with Ms. Obama and, now, I’m unwilling to sign anything except a clean bill with approval of all of my judicial appointees, statehood for DC, and a new bill of Elizabeth Warren’s choosing.

 I’d take the weekend off, go to Camp David, let the girls and the dogs run around and enjoy Indian Summer in Maryland, have dinner with some crazy, wild-eyed liberals, and make sure the press knew who they were and what we ate (include arugula and craft beer on the menu).

 On Monday, I’d wait.

 On Tuesday, I’d give a speech and announce that, having thought about it over the weekend, in the calm of Camp David, I also need a new program of really strong controls on financial markets.

 You get the picture.

 Right now, the only people upping the ante are the Rapeublicans. In order to “meet in the middle” and appear “reasonable” Mr. Obama has to move towards their position. That’s no way to negotiate.

 Rapeublicans who are watching the polls go even further down on the notion of shutting down the government (they’ve already crossed that Rubicon — another river reference — so what the heck), need some additional motivation to move towards Mr. Obama. And they need to see that continuing to hold out will cost them even more.

 Maybe, in the end, Mr. Obama shows what a reasonable guy he is by compromising on a new bill of Elizabeth Warren’s choosing and half of his judicial appointees. That’s how negotiations work.

The outcome of any negotiation is an artifact of power, and I do not think that Obama gets that.

“Welcome the Interest of the American People,” My Ass

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If Barack Obama “Welcomed” a discussion on NSA surveillance, he would not be fighting the tech company’s request for transparency on the spying orders:

The U.S. Justice Department has told a secret surveillance court that it opposes a request from technology companies to reveal more about the demands they receive for user information, according to court papers released on Wednesday.

Negotiations between the federal government and companies such as Google Inc have gone on for months, and while U.S. spy agencies said they plan to be more transparent, they have opposed company requests to disclose more detailed data.

The court papers were filed under seal on Monday in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body originally created to curb intelligence abuses.

Microsoft Corp, Yahoo! Inc, LinkedIn Corp and Facebook Inc are among the companies seeking permission to publish statistics about the extent of the demands placed on them.

Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does.

Greece ……… Is ……… F%$#ed

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The leaders of the Greek Fascist Golden Dawn Partywere formally charged with assault and murder:

Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the extremists’ enigmatic leader, was said to be in his pyjamas when police surrounded his home and knocked at the door. Like his second-in-command, Christos Pappas, who subsequently surrendered, and the four MPs who were hauled before a public prosecutor on Tuesday, he stands accused of murder, money-laundering, blackmail and illegal possession of arms.

But they were almost immediately kicked loose on bail:

Three senior lawmakers from Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn were freed on Wednesday pending trial on criminal charges, an unexpected setback to the government’s efforts to clamp down on a party it has labelled a neo-Nazi criminal gang.

The decision to free the men after an 18-hour court session raises questions about the solidity of the state’s case against Golden Dawn after one of its sympathisers stabbed to death an anti-fascism rapper.

Party spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris and fellow lawmakers Ilias Panagiotaros and Nikos Michos stormed out of the court to cheers of “bravo” from supporters. They kicked and shoved journalists out of the way before hailing a taxi.

“We will not back down!” Michos shouted. “You can only stop us with bullets. Even from the grave, we will rise up – know this well!”

The parallels between a certain beer hall putsch of a failed painter are rather alarming.

The Euro looks to be doing the same job of stabilizing Europe during a depression as the mindless fixation on the gold standard of the German central bank did in the 1930s.

It’s Official, the Nobel Peace Prize is a Joke

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First, they give the following people Nobel Peace Prizes:

  • Henry Kissinger
  • Barack “Drones ‘R Us” Obama
  • Jimmy Carter (Bought a civil war and plunged Afghanistan into 30+ years of hell just to f%$# with the Soviets).

And now we have the, “International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World,” Nominating Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Of course, the Nobel committee has not awarded him the prize, but the fact Russian President “Cuddles” has been nominated does indicate that their credibility is shot.

No this is not The Onion.

I Wish I Could Smith Words Like Charlie Pierce

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This New York Daily News Cover, and related story aren’t as good as the classic “Ford to City: Drop Dead”, but it’s close

Because his characterization of the recent leaks of Boehner communications on healthcare to the press as, “The Democrats Are Bringing Guns To A Gunfight,” is both succinct and evocative.

He is describing the fact that Democrats have finally taken the gloves off, and they are leaking emails from Boehners staff to the press:

Senate Democrats are considering leaking a series of emails between the chiefs of staff of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker John A. Boehner regarding employer contributions to congressional staff health care plans, multiple top-level sources said late Monday.

 Senate Democratic chiefs of staff discussed the emails between Reid chief David Krone and Boehner chief Mike Sommers at a recent meeting, according to a source with direct knowledge of the meeting.

 Leaking the emails would be unusual, given the taboo over disclosing personal communications between top staffers. But the missives also would reveal Boehner’s position on employer subsidies for congressional staff. Democrats believe the Ohio Republican’s decision to attach an amendment to revoke those contributions to the most recent House continuing resolution was a direct shot at vulnerable Senate Democrats up in 2014 and would like to highlight the contradiction between Boehner’s public and private stances on the issue.

Pierce is right when he approves:

This would only be responding in kind. For years, Washington worked on a system of both written and unwritten rules of behavior. One of the marked characteristics of the reign of the morons has been to trash the informal systems of acceptable conduct. Fine. Let’s do away with all of them and have an actual brawl over what’s at stake.

BTW, some of the leaks have already occurred, with communications between Boehner and Reid being leaked to Politico:

With the federal government nearing shutdown, House Speaker John Boehner stood on the House floor Monday and called on his colleagues to vote for a bill banning a “so-called exemption” that lawmakers and staffers receive for their health insurance.

 “Why don’t we make sure that every American is treated just like we are?” Boehner asked, seeking to prohibit members of Congress and Capitol Hill aides from getting thousands of dollars in subsidies for their health insurance as they join Obamacare-mandated insurance exchanges.

 Yet behind-the-scenes, Boehner and his aides worked for months with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and others, to save these very same, long-standing subsidies, according to documents and e-mails provided to POLITICO. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was also aware of these discussions, the documents show.

 During a five-month period stretching from February to July, Boehner and his aides sought along with Reid’s office to solve what had become a big headache for both of them. They drafted and reviewed a possible legislative fix, as well as continued to push for an administrative one from the Office of Personnel Management.

 ………

 “As POLITICO has previously reported, Speaker Boehner was aware that Sen. Reid and the White House were discussing this issue. He was always clear, however, that any ‘fix’ would be a Democratic ‘fix.’ His ‘fix’ is repealing” Obamacare.

 But according to several sources in attendance at a mid-July meeting with Reid, Boehner wondered aloud at one point whether he and the Nevada Democrat could quietly slip some language into a bill to end the problem without it receiving any public attention.

 “When I was in the state legislature, we used to stick things in [bills] and no one would notice,” Boehner said during a private meeting with Reid in July to discuss this issue, the sources said.

 Boehner’s aides then told him this would not be possible, so the idea was dropped.

 The speaker and his chief of staff, Mike Sommers — who was at that July 17 meeting as well — cannot “recall the Speaker making such a comment,” Boehner’s office said.

 In mid-July, as Boehner and Reid were trying to schedule a private meeting with Obama on the super-sensitive topic, the speaker’s top aide said it was okay to use a cover story to conceal the true nature of that prospective White House gathering.

 “We can’t let it get out there that this is for [Boehner] and [Reid] to ask the President to carve us out of the requirement of Obamacare,” Sommers told David Krone, Reid’s top aide in a July 17 e-mail obtained by POLITICO.

 “This is a little bit more difficult because it isn’t a routine meeting, as [Nancy] Pelosi and [Mitch] McConnell won’t be there. I am even ok if it is the President hauling us down to talk about the next steps on immigration.”

 After Krone suggested that the White House press office might float that the Boehner-Reid-Obama meeting was on immigration, Sommers said he wasn’t concerned about what cover story was just as long as the real reason behind the meeting wasn’t disclosed.

 “I really don’t care what is is about[,] it just can’t be about what we know it is about!” Sommers told Krone.

If Harry Reid did not specifically order the leaks, then he knew in advance, and said nothing to dissuade the leakers.

More of this please.

Democrats need to stop wringing their hands about how people observed the social niceties  in the good old days, and recognize that the ‘Phants do not see those niceties as anything but a weapon to be wielded against their opponents.

I’m not suggesting that Democrats go back to caning people on the floor of the Senate, Democrats need to understand that you do not bring a Hello Kitty® doll to a gunfight.

Even as Obama and Holder Refuse to Go After the Banksters, the Judges are Getting Cross

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Well, about 99% of the population have wondered why no banksters have been criminally prosecuted, and now, judges are beginning to wonder as well:

Last week, for the first time since the financial crisis, the government faced off in court against a major bank over lending practices during the mortgage mania. Lawyers for the Justice Department contend that Countrywide Financial, a unit of Bank of America, misrepresented the quality of mortgages it sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage finance giants, starting in 2007. Fannie and Freddie incurred gross losses of $850 million on the defective loans and net losses of $131 million, the government said.

Bank of America disagrees. Its lawyers say that Countrywide did not defraud Fannie or Freddie.

This case is undoubtedly big, but it is only one of many mortgage-related matters inching through the judicial system. And what is notable about some of the lower-profile matters is the tone and tack that federal judges are taking in their rulings. District court judges are not generally known as flamethrowers, but some seem to be losing patience with the banks.

For decades leading up to the foreclosure debacle, plaintiffs’ lawyers say, judges generally took the side of lenders when borrowers came to court complaining of problematic lending or predatory loan servicing. Many judges still do. But some are getting tough, perhaps having seen too many examples of dubious bank behavior.

“Maybe the judges are tired of the diet of baloney sandwiches the banks have been feeding them,” said April Charney, a foreclosure defense lawyer who for years represented troubled borrowers at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid in Florida. She is now in private practice.

Two recent rulings — one in New York involving Bank of America and one in Massachusetts involving Wells Fargo — serve as examples. In the Wells Fargo case, a ruling on Sept. 17 by Judge William G. Young of Federal District Court was especially stinging. In it, he required Wells Fargo to provide him with a corporate resolution signed by its president and a majority of its board stating that they stand behind the conduct of the bank’s lawyers in the case.

The case involved a borrower named Joseph Henning who fell behind on his mortgage, which he received from Wachovia, an entity later absorbed by Wells Fargo. In a suit filed against Wells Fargo in May 2009, Mr. Henning contended that the loan was predatory.

Judge Young agreed with the bank’s argument that federal laws pre-empted the state-law remedies Mr. Henning was seeking. But he did so reluctantly, calling it a win based “on a technicality.”

Then he chastised the bank. “The disconnect between Wells Fargo’s publicly advertised face and its actual litigation conduct here could not be more extreme,” the judge wrote. “A quick visit to Wells Fargo’s Web site confirms that it vigorously promotes itself as consumer-friendly,” he continued, “a far cry from the hard-nosed win-at-any-cost stance it has adopted here.”

If Wells Fargo does not supply the corporate resolution within 30 days of the ruling, the case will go to a jury trial, the judge said.

It is notable that there is no right to jury trial here, and Wells Fargo does not want to place their fate in the hands of ordinary people who are likely to understand how

Even if prosecutors are unwilling to hold the banksters to task, it appears that some judges are no longer willing do deal with the sh%$ that banksters are trying to peddle as Shinola.

You Cannot Tell Me that This Wasn’t Done at the Request of the White House

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We now see a case where the state security apparatus declares a critic to be a “supporter of terrorism”, and so our poodles at the British intelligence services harassing a man who is protesting and documenting America’s drone strikes:

A well-known and highly respected Yemeni anti-drone activist was detained yesterday by UK officials under that country’s “anti-terrorism” law at Gatwick Airport, where he had traveled to speak at an event. Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen.

When he objected that his political views had no relevance to security concerns, UK law enforcement officials threatened to detain him for the full nine hours allowed by the Terrorism Act of 2000, the same statute that was abused by UK officials last month to detain my partner, David Miranda, for nine hours.

Shiban tells his story today, here, in the Guardian, and recounts how the UK official told him “he had detained me not merely because I was from Yemen, but also because of Reprieve’s work investigating and criticising the efficacy of US drone strikes in my country.”

 The notion that Shiban posed some sort of security threat was absurd on its face. As the Guardian reported Tuesday, “he visited the UK without incident earlier this summer and testified in May to a US congressional hearing on the impact of the covert drone programme in Yemen.”
Viewing anti-drone activism as indicative of a terrorism threat is noxious. As Reprieve’s Cory Crider put it yesterday, “if there were any doubt the UK was abusing its counter-terrorism powers to silence critics, this ends it.”

Greenwald further goes on to describe NSA documents, which describe opposition to drone assassinations as a military threat to operations:

One specific entry discusses “threats to unmanned aerial vehicles”. It lists various dangers to American drones, including “air defense threats”, “jamming of UAV sensor systems”, “terrestrial weather”, and “electronic warfare employed against the command and control system”.

 But alongside those more obvious, conventional threats are what the entry describes as “propaganda campaigns that target UAV use”.

 Under the title “adversary propaganda themes”, the document lists what it calls “examples of potential propaganda themes that could be employed against UAV operations”.

 One such example is entitled “Nationality of Target vs. Due Process”. It states:

Attacks against American and European persons who have become violent extremists are often criticized by propagandists, arguing that lethal action against these individuals deprives them of due process.”

In the eyes of the US government, “due process” – the idea that the US government should not deprive people of life away from a battlefield without presenting evidence of guilt – is no longer a basic staple of the American political system, but rather a malicious weapon of “propagandists”. The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, among many other groups, have made exactly that argument against the US drone targeting program (“the US government’s killings of US citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011 violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law”).

And the “loyal opposition” in the US is busy shutting down the government over insurance policies.

Hello? If you are worried about tyranny, perhaps there are some places you could look for it that are not simply batsh%$ insane.

I Think that this is a Diss of John Paul II

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It’s generally being presented as a unifying gesture, but I think that the decision to canonize Popes John Paul II and John XXIII on the same day:

Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII will be declared saints on 27 April 2014, Pope Francis has announced.

 The Pope said in July that he would canonise his two predecessors, after approving a second miracle attributed to John Paul.

 Polish John Paul, the first non-Italian pope for more than 400 years, led the Catholic Church from 1978-2005.

 Pope John was pontiff from 1958-1963, calling the Second Vatican Council that transformed the Church.

 The decision to canonise the two at the same time appears designed to unify Catholics, correspondents say.

 John Paul II is a favourite of conservative Catholics, while John XXIII is widely admired by the Church’s progressive wing.

………

The double canonisation will be the first in the Church’s history.

Here is why I think that this is a comment on

John Paul has been on a fast track to sainthood since his death, when crowds in St Peter’s Square chanted “santo subito” (“sainthood now”).

 During his own papacy he simplified the process by which people are made saints, and created more of them than all previous popes combined.

 John XXIII is remembered for introducing the vernacular to replace Latin in church masses and for creating warmer ties between the Catholic Church and the Jewish faith.

 He has a big following in Italy, where he is known as Il Papa Buono, the good pope.

 ………

 Two miracles have been officially attributed to Pope John Paul II – the number usually needed for canonisation.

 ………

 Pope John XXIII was beatified by John Paul II in 2000, and Pope Francis took the unusual step of waiving the requirement of a second miracle in his case.

John Paul II’s canonization was on a rocket docket that Francis knew could not be stopped, but by making John XXIII, he takes some of the wind out of the sails of the inevitable JPII, and by waiving waiving the “2nd miracle” for John, he makes a comment on how standards were relaxed by John Paul.

Then again, ich bin a Yid, so my knowledge on the Catholic Church is neither deep nor broad.

This is a Level of Surreal that Buggers the Mind

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I am at a Jiffy Lube, and a Football Game is on, Baltimore vs. Buffalo.

They cut to the Vikings-Steelers game at Wembley in England.

It’s a foreign outreach thing that the NFL does.

They show the singing of both national anthems, the Star Spangled Banner, and God Save the Queen.

Singing the the Star Spangled Banner was Kiss bassist Gene Simons.

Gene Simmons singing the Star Spangled Banner?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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An Important Lesson About How to Reduce Piracy

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Interesting. It appears that the expansion of Netflix into Canada had reduced piracy by ½:

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings dropped a surprising statistic during an interview with Dutch website Tweakers last week, as he made the rounds promoting the launch of Netflix Netherlands.

When asked if Dutch viewers would switch from piracy to Netflix, Hastings said sure, some will switch, and that piracy helps “create the demand” for easier, legitimate ways to watch video through the Internet. Pressed for examples of markets where Netflix has actually brought about a decrease in piracy, Hastings pointed to Canada. Here, he claims, “Bittorrent traffic’s down by about 50 per cent since Netflix launched three years ago.”

There are some facts in the entire copyright debate, particularly as applies to entertainment:

  • It’s inconvenient for people to pirate things.
  • They are willing to pay when the institutions who control the content aren’t dicks who make “legal” use of the products even more inconvenient because they want to wring every possible penny from their users.

Of course, it’s rather unlikely that the the powers that be are going to stop acting like a dicks, seeing as how they have the political pull to turn what should be civil infractions into felonies though their pet congresscritters.

H/t PP at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Sikorsky S-97, the Proposed Production Application of Advancing Blade Helicopter Technology, Enters Final Assembly

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Fuselage is on its way to Sikorsky


3-view images are courtesy of Sikorsky

I’ve had an affection for this technology since the Advancing Blade Concept in the 1980s.

It’s simpler than a tilt rotor and does things like autorotation and a lower disk loading, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it flies:

Sikorsky will begin final assembly of its S-97 Raider helicopter prototype this week, according to company officials.

 That puts the helicopter manufacturer — which is competing for the US Army’s Armed Aerial Scout program — on track for a first flight at the end of 2014.

 “It’s just a really exciting foundational milestone for us, and it’s great to be leaving the design phase of Raider and getting into the build phase,” Chris Van Buiten, Sikorsky Innovations vice president, said.

 The Raider is based on the X-2 technology developed by Sikorsky in the late 2000s, but grows the size and weight significantly. Where the X-2 demonstrator was a one-person, 5,000-pound platform, the Raider will be roughly 11,000 pounds with room for six troops in its combat assault mode. In reconnaissance mode, that space could be used for extra equipment or ammunition.

 Despite that growth, Sikorsky executives are confident the design will bring a mix of speed and maneuverability that helicopters have not yet achieved.

 “This thing has to fly faster than 220 knots” at cruising speed, Van Buiten said when asked about key performance targets. “It has got to do more than a 3G turn at speed. It has to demonstrate hover at 10,000 feet and 95 degrees. Those are the non-negotiables.”

Hopefully, this will work better than the over priced and under performing bucked of bolts called the V-22 Osprey.

Linkage

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Well, at least it’s not saying, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

H/t Ecop on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Captain Obvious Strikes

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It appears that his secret identy is Nancy Pelosi:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sought Friday to lay the blame for a possible government shutdown on congressional Republicans, saying that they refused to negotiate on the issue.

Pelosi pointed to the GOP’s inability to reconcile their competing factions as the reason that the federal government is a few days away from shutting down.

“It’s impossible for Democrats to negotiate with House Republicans when they can’t negotiate with themselves,” Pelosi told reporters. “We don’t know what we’re going to vote on from one minute to the next because I don’t think they know what they’re going to vote on.”

“I don’t know that they even know what they’re doing,” she added.

Well, duh!

Matt Taibbi Nails it Again

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This time, he’s writing about how Wall Street is robbing ordinary working people’s retirement:

In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.

………

Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.

The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of “proprietary” information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. “When I asked, I was basically hammered,” says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island’s nine-member State Investment Commission. “I couldn’t get any information about the actual costs.”

This is the third act in an improbable triple-f%$#ing of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.

Read the rest.

Not enough bullets.