Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Republicans the Party of Values

No Comments

What a surprise. We have an Arizona sheriff being accused of corruption after he threatened to deport his gay lover in order to force his silence:

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu — who became the face of Arizona border security nationally after he started stridently opposing illegal immigration — threatened his Mexican ex-lover with deportation when the man refused to promise never to disclose their years-long relationship, the former boyfriend and his lawyer tell New Times.

The latest of the alleged threats were made through Babeu’s personal attorney, who’s also running the sheriff’s campaign for Congress in District 4, the ex-lover says.

He says lawyer Chris DeRose demanded he sign an agreement that he would never breathe a word about the affair. But Jose (New Times is withholding his last name because Babeu and his attorney have challenged his legal status) refused.

This guy first came to prominence when one of his deputies fabricated a story about being shot at by illegal aliens, and Babeu went on a self promotional media tour.

BTW, until this all blew up, he was one of Mitt Romney’s campaign co-chairmen in Arizona.

Ha Ha!

No Comments

Lehman and its its creditors have subpoenaed Timothy Geithner over his discussions with JPMorgan Chase over the time when the investment bank collapsed:

Lehman Brothers‘ bankruptcy estate and its official committee of unsecured creditors asked a court late on Thursday to compel Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to testify about the investment bank’s collapse.

The request for a subpoena comes as part of the estate’s lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, which asserts that the bank illegally took $8.6 billion in collateral from Lehman, precipitating that firm’s demise.

The lawsuit’s main argument is that JPMorgan, apprised of Lehman’s fragile condition, improperly profited from making its collateral demands — and also pushed Lehman into bankruptcy.

Lawyers for Lehman’s creditors wrote in a court filing that they and the estate served Mr. Geithner with a subpoena last August, ordering him to testify about conversations he had held with both JPMorgan and Lehman over the former’s calls for collateral in early September 2008.

Mr. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, spoke with JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, 10 times in the week before Lehman fell, according to the filing. Many of those conversations, the lawyers contend, must have been about JPMorgan’s collateral demands.

Basically, Lehman is asserting that Jamie Dimon’s bully boys stole from them in order to push them over into bankruptcy.

The implication is that they did so because they knew that, in the event of a collapse, they would get to keep the money.

Note that they are not asking about deliberations at the NY Fed, but the content of his discussions with Jamie Dimon.

Still, I relish the though of Geithner in the dock forced to answer questions about his dealings with the big banks.

You Can Always Depend on Flight International for a Cutaway

No Comments

Full Size Pic at Link

This time, they are doing the Boeing F-15 Silent Eagle.

Seeing as how the F-15SE is supposed to have a very small forward aspect radar cross section, I have to wonder about their guess about the radar.

I am not am expert in low observability, but it seems to me that the radar would be angled off the centerline in order to reduce RCS.

While the full fit-out for the aircraft is not certain, how IRST is integrated into the airframe is unclear, for example, but the flight control system is is going to a digital fly by wire system.

It should be a good deal on fly away cost, but cost per hour might be higher than its likely competitors.

‘Phants Phess Up to Ph%$#ing Up Caucus Count in Maine

2 Comments

So, Mitt Romney won by a couple of hundred votes, and the Maine Republican Party said that this was the end of the matter.

The problem was that there were a number of (Ron Paul trending) town caucuses in Maine that were not counted, as well as all of Washington County, which delayed the vote because of a snow storm.

So, after a rising crescendo of coverage of the irregularities, they are now apparently conducting a recount, as well as allowing Washington County to conduct its vote tomorrow:

The Maine Republican Party has reversed course and will recommend that delayed caucus results from Washington County be included in its final presidential poll tally. The party also is reconfirming results from local caucuses in the wake of the recent controversy over how its presidential caucuses were handled.

“The results of the Washington County caucus will be reviewed at the March 10 Republican State Committee meeting,” Maine GOP Chairman Charlie Webster said in a prepared statement approved by the state party’s executive committee.

Note that March 10 is after Super Tuesday, so the effect of a Romney “win” turning into a loss won’t hit the media narrative until after he’s probably made his nomination a near mathematical lock.

This has happened twice now, so I think that the tinfoil hat explanation is gaining credence.

Sergey Aleynikov Freed

No Comments

You may recall that he was convicted under the Economic Espionage Act for downloading some high frequency trading software from Goldman Sachs, where he worked.

Apparently, the judge in the trial completely bought into the prosecutions expansion of the law, intended to prosecute people for selling military secrets to the Chinese, to this case, and the appellate court came down hard on the judge. They did not just remand this back to the lower court, they ordered the lower court to enter a judgement of acquittal.

Felix Salmon explains why whole case was such an outrage:

The secrets at defense contractors, of course, are secret for reasons of national security. The secrets at investment banks and hedge funds, by contrast, are secret purely for reasons of profit: they reckon that if they have some clever algorithm which nobody else has, then that makes it easier for them to profit from it. Which is why it was always a stretch for the government to use the EEA to prosecute Aleynikov — indeed, it is why it was always a stretch for Aleynikov to be criminally prosecuted at all. Goldman could have brought a civil case against him, but instead they got their wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. government, to come down on him so hard that he ended up with an eight-year sentence. Violent felons frequently get less.

The forthcoming decision from the Second Circuit is likely to be a doozy; I’m told that the judges shredded the prosecutors during the oral hearing. And certainly their decision to enter a judgment of acquittal, rather than any kind of retrial, is a strong indication that they handed down this order with extreme prejudice against prosecutorial overreach.

(emphasis mine)

This has been a lose-lose for the Vampire Squid. They looked like bullies, they brought a lot of attention to the bit of front-running that is high frequency trading, and they have now lost the case.

That being said, I don’t expect Goldman, or the prosecutors, to give up just yet.

Background here.

Fabulous!!!!!!!

No Comments

The Maryland House has just approved gay marriage in Maryland:

A bill that would legalize same-sex marriage squeaked through the House of Delegates Friday night with one more vote than the minimum needed for passage, putting Maryland on the cusp of being the eighth state to allow such unions.

Cheers erupted when the gavel dropped on the final 72-67 tally. Within minutes, Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, walked from his second-floor office to the door of the House chamber, embraced House Speaker Michael E. Busch and said, “Good job, man.”

“We are a good people. We all want the same things for our kids,” O’Malley said. Then he extended credit to delegates and activists, many of whom had been skeptical about his commitment to the issue. “These guys did it,” he said.

The measure now goes to the Senate, which passed a similar bill last year and is expected do so again. The chamber will likely take up the measure next week.

Should the bill pass in both chambers, activists on both sides believe it would be petitioned to referendum in November. If voters approve the measure, the earliest a gay couple would be able to wed is January 2013, when the law would go into effect.

The victory is significant for O’Malley, who threw the weight of his office behind the measure after a similar bill fell a few votes short in the House last year. The governor had been working the halls of the House office building at all hours to persuade wavering delegates.

In national terms, the Maryland vote caps a week in which proponents of same-sex marriage have scored significant victories with the signing of a similar law in Washington state and the Legislature’s approval of a marriage bill in New Jersey, though Gov. Chris Christie vetoed it Friday.

This is very good news, because it passed the state Senate last year, so it looks like it will make it to the Governor’s desk.

One weird bit: One of the people that we have to thank for this is Dick Cheney:

By far the biggest boost came in the morning when Republican Del. Wade Kach, who was considered a sure-fire no vote, threw his support behind O’Malley’s bill. Kach had voted against the bill two days earlier in committee.

The Baltimore County delegate said he reached his decision after mulling the testimony he’d heard during a nearly 11-hour hearing on the bill last week and watching how same-sex couples supported one another. “I thought to myself, if my constituents were here, they’d have a different perspective on the issue,” Kach said. “I’m sure of it.”

He also became the target of a last-minute lobby effort, and said his voice mail was full of messages from important people, including Mehlman, Bloomberg and an offer to talk with former Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Kach regards as a “great man.” All three are recognized for their support of gay rights issues.

But you know, I’ll take it.

That being said, there are still enough bigots in Maryland to put this on the ballot, and it’s probably gonna be close.

In Honor of Black History Month

No Comments

I present to you what must be the best former slave snark ever:

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

For a man of his background, this is impressively fierce eloquence.

H/t Americablog.

Least Shocking News of the Day

No Comments

San Francisco County has conducted an audit of 400 foreclosures, and found a morass of fraud and corruption:

An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday.

Anecdotal evidence indicating foreclosure abuse has been plentiful since the mortgage boom turned to bust in 2008. But the detailed and comprehensive nature of the San Francisco findings suggest how pervasive foreclosure irregularities may be across the nation.

The improprieties range from the basic — a failure to warn borrowers that they were in default on their loans as required by law — to the arcane. For example, transfers of many loans in the foreclosure files were made by entities that had no right to assign them and institutions took back properties in auctions even though they had not proved ownership.

Commissioned by Phil Ting, the San Francisco assessor-recorder, the report examined files of properties subject to foreclosure sales in the county from January 2009 to November 2011. About 84 percent of the files contained what appear to be clear violations of law, it said, and fully two-thirds had at least four violations or irregularities.

Kathleen Engel, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston said: “If there were any lingering doubts about whether the problems with loan documents in foreclosures were isolated, this study puts the question to rest.”

The report comes just days after the $26 billion settlement over foreclosure improprieties between five major banks and 49 state attorneys general, including California’s. Among other things, that settlement requires participating banks to reduce mortgage amounts outstanding on a wide array of loans and provide $1.5 billion in reparations for borrowers who were improperly removed from their homes.

(Emphasis mine)

And the settlement is going to let these guys off for about 2 grand a pop.

My Heart Bleeds Borscht

No Comments

Bummer of a birth mark, Scott

It looks like prosecutors in Wisconsin are closing the noose on corruption by now Governor Scott Walker during his tenure as Milwaukee County executive:

A recall from his position as Wisconsin’s governor could ultimately be the least of Gov. Scott Walker’s worry, if a criminal complaint quietly moving forward in the Badger State court system continues on its current trajectory. At the moment, Walker seems to be at the bottom of a mountain where an avalanche is just beginning to roll.

A 51-page criminal complaint [PDF] (the “Rindfleisch complaint”), which formally charges Kelly M. Rindfleisch with four felony counts of misconduct in public office, contains factual allegations which implicate a number of individuals, listed as “interested parties,” including WI’s controversial Republican Governor, in a wide-reaching criminal conspiracy to misuse public employees and resources for partisan political gain.

…………

The factual body of the Rindfleisch complaint suggests that prosecutors are painstakingly examining evidence that may well place Walker at the center of a criminal conspiracy to illegally utilize employees within the Milwaukee County Executive Office to engage in fundraising and campaign activities on behalf of the Friends of Scott Walker and others during office hours at the expense of Milwaukee taxpayers.

Each violation of the relevant WI criminal statutes at issue in the matter carries with it a potential imprisonment of up to 3.5 years. As that case moves forward apace, Walker could lose a great deal more than simply his hold on the governor’s office. His very freedom may prove to be at stake as well…

I don’t expect an indictment of Walker before the recall vote, but this is another well-deserved nail in the coffin for his political career.

H/t Kenneth Quinnell.

Virginia Republicans Are Aliens

No Comments

I don’t mean foreigners, I mean malevolent creatures from another world.

Think about it. The only time you hear about involuntary probes, it is because of alien abductions.

Virginia republicans want to mandate involuntary vaginal probes for women:

Inserting something into the vagina of an unwilling woman is a violation in every sense of the word. But not to a majority of Virginia’s Senate.

This week, the Senate passed a bill, largely along party lines, that would require a woman seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound and wait as long as a day for the procedure.

The ultrasound requirement may evoke images of the abdominal sonograms standard in most pregnancies, fuzzy black and white pictures conjured by a wand passed across a woman’s stomach.

But those ultrasounds are ordinarily done fairly late in pregnancy. In the beginning, particularly the first weeks, an abdominal ultrasound may not be sensitive enough to detect anything.

That’s why doctors in many cases use a transvaginal ultrasound. In plainspeak, they insert a condom-covered probe into a woman’s vagina to obtain an image.

In order to satisfy the goals of the legislation – which includes a requirement that a doctor determine the gestational age of the pregnancy- a transvaginal ultrasound may be the only reliable course.

The bill, among the most invasive ever passed in Virginia, is the result of frustration by lawmakers opposed to abortion. Unsuccessful in making abortion illegal and unwilling to be frank about their goals, they have tried by technicality and obfuscation to make it harder for a woman to terminate a pregnancy.

Every so often, I hold the delusion that Republicans cannot get any more contemptible.

They always manage to disabuse me of this.

It’s a Start

No Comments

But only a start.

The FCC has placed further restrictions on robo-calling:

Those aggravating automated telemarketing calls will be interrupting your dinner a lot less often.

After receiving thousands of complaints from consumers, the Federal Communications Commission clamped down Wednesday on unwanted robo-calling by approving sweeping changes to its telemarketing rules for wireline and mobile phones.

Even with the national Do Not Call Registry in effect — the initial effort to block those pesky calls — telemarketers have found ways around the rules. But the FCC’s latest effort is “closing a loophole,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“This is an important step forward to make it easier for consumers to take advantage of the Do Not Call list,” Rotenberg said about the FCC’s changes. “These are additional safeguards to provide consumers greater protection.”

Telemarketing calls have a bigger effect on mobile phones, he noted, because those calls can eat up the minutes in consumers’ wireless plans.

Under the new FCC rules, telemarketers are required to obtain written consent, which can be in the form of an online approval, before placing autodialed or prerecorded calls to a consumer.

Telemarketers also must provide an automated opt-out mechanism during each robo-call so that consumers can immediately tell the telemarketer to stop calling.

The FCC also eliminated the “established business relationship” exception, which had allowed robo-calls to be placed to the land-line home phones of consumers with “prior or existing” associations with companies represented by telemarketers.

And the agency strictly limited the number of abandoned or so-called dead-air calls — in which consumers answer their phones and hear nothing — that telemarketers can make within each calling campaign.

The exemptions are still more than I would like to see, the exemption for non-oprofits, allows them to contract out to for-profit telemarketing firms, for example, but it’s a positive development.

Here is an American Hero

No Comments

Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17 year Army veteran who almost certainly won’t make it retirement, because he wrote a report saying that senior military officials are lying about Afghanistan:

Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?” Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.

Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.

Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”

According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he’d been up to. Evidently Davis’s truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for “possible security violations,” according to NBC News.

They are going to go after him, and they won’t just try to kick him out, they will try to send him to Leavenworth.

The hyper-aggressive criminalization of whistle-blowing is one of the extra special innovations of the current administration.

The Pedophile Protectors Move the Goal Post

No Comments

You knew that the be satisfied with nothing but a right to enforce their religious beliefs on the rest of us:

Hours after calling the Obama administration’s contraceptives compromise a “first step,” the Catholic bishops said Friday night they have “two serious objections” to the new policy and will fight its enactment.

First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the administration’s plan still includes a “nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.”

“This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern,” the bishops said in their statement. “We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

I am so not shocked by this.

This is why compromise is not an option.

There isn’t one. You either capitulate, or fight.