Category: Corruption

Why You Cannot Rely on the Cloud

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Google, or more accurately its evil twin Alphabet, bought the a leader in the “smart home” industry, Nest.  

Flush with money, Nest bought competitor Revolv, but they didn’t want the technology, they just wanted the staff.

And now Google/Alphabet/Nest has announced that they will be shutting down all Revolv home control units.

I don’t mean that they will stop supporting the units, I mean that they will shut the units down.

They will go dark.

They are now door stops:

Nest, a smart-home company owned by Google’s holding company Alphabet, is dropping support for a line of products — and will make customers’ existing devices completely useless.

It’s a move that has infuriated some customers, and raises worrying questions about the rights of consumers in the ever-more connected future.

In October 2014, Nest acquired Revolv, a smart-home device maker, nine months after it was itself bought by Google. The terms of the Revolv deal were not disclosed, and as Re/code reported at the time, the deal was an acqui-hire — buying a company for its talent rather than its products or users.

Nest cofounder Matt Rogers praised Revolv as “the best team out there,” and Revolv immediately stopped selling its $300 (£210) home hub, which could be used to control lights, doors, alarms, and so on.

Revolv’s team was to work on “Work with Nest,” Nest’s API program, but customers’ existing Revolv products continued to be supported — until recently.

Just over a month ago, Revolv updated its website to announce that it is closing down completely, pulling the plug on its existing products in May. “We’re pouring all our energy into Works with Nest and are incredibly excited about what we’re making,” wrote Revolv founders Tim Enwall and Mike Soucie. “Unfortunately, that means we can’t allocate resources to Revolv anymore and we have to shut down the service.”

Shutting down Revolv does not mean that Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.

As one customer puts it, Google parent company Alphabet is “intentionally bricking” the devices on May 15, 2016.

Arlo Gilbert, CEO of medical app company Televero, is infuriated by Nest’s decision. He has written a Medium post about the impending closure, labelling it a “pretty blatant ‘f–k you’ to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware.”

I’ve experienced this on a smaller scale, when “upgrades” to blogger have made the product less capable and less powerful.

But this is just a blog, and until such time I own/rent my own server, I have to live with this.

If you let Google or cloud type company control your business or your phone, they are going to f%$# like a drunk sorority girl, whether it is product shutdowns, or upgrades that you hate.

I still use Office 2003, but if I used Google docs, I would be forced to work when they changed their interface and went with their low contrast “flat design”, and it would no longer support Office 2003 formats.

If you want to control how you get your work done, you cannot rely on the cloud.

Getting the Story Wrong

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It appears that back in 2012, the CIA proposed yet another of its regime change ideas to the President, and he decided not to proceed with these plans.

Given our record on deliberate regime change, our best “success” led to the Mullas in Iran, this is a good thing, but this hasn’t stopped the CIA from claiming that Obama stopped a program that could have prevented the rise of ISIS:

The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.

It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.

In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.

Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an “ops plan” that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting.

A former senior intelligence official said Laux’s ideas—many of them shared by other members of the CIA’s Syrian task force–were heavily represented in the plan that was ultimately presented to Obama.

But the president, who must approve all covert action, never gave the green light. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.

You may have noticed over the past few years that there are no “Moderate Syrian Rebels”, and there never have been.

Also, we know what happens when our quest for regime change hits reality, clusterf%$#s like Libya,

Also, when see that the plan was backed by David Petraeus, who turned the CIA into a drone based Murder, Inc., which served to generate more terrorists than it killed, the fact that Obama did not authorize this is a good thing.

Our moves toward regime change have never turned out well for us, or the citizenry of the nations where they are directed.

Pass the Popcorn

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It appears that someone has hacked into the files of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, and found a treasure trove of evidence of international corruption:

A massive leak of documents has blown open a window on the vast, murky world of shell companies, providing an extraordinary look at how the wealthy and powerful conceal their money.

Twelve current and former world leaders maintain offshore shell companies. Close friends of Russian leader Vladimir Putin have funneled as much as $2 billion through banks and offshore companies.

Those exposed in the leak include the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, an alleged bagman for Syrian President Bashar Assad, a close pal of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and companies linked to the family of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Add to those the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Morocco, enough Middle Eastern royalty to fill a palace, honchos in the troubled body known as FIFA that controls international soccer and 29 billionaires featured in Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people.

Also mentioned are 61 relatives and associates of current country leaders, and another 128 current or former politicians and public officials.

The documents within the leak also expose how secretive offshore companies at times subvert U.S. foreign policy and mock U.S. regulators. When drug traffickers, money launderers or other crooks control companies, they undermine national security, and the trail of dark money flowing through them strips national treasuries everywhere of tax revenues.

………


The firm is one of the world’s top five creators of shell companies, which can have legitimate business uses, but can also be used to dodge taxes and launder money.

More than 11.5 million emails, financial spreadsheets, client records, passports and corporate registries were obtained in the leak, which was delivered to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in Munich, Germany. In turn, the newspaper shared the data with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

It would be nice if we actually saw some action by they criminal and tax authorities in response to the leaks, but I doubt it.

This is Not a Surprise………

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Sacramento Mayor, former NBA star, and spouse of School privatization bunco artist Michelle Rhee, has left an amazing trail of corruption in his post basketball career:

Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He’d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. He’d helped elbow out racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed a little of the spotlight for himself in the process. He’d been named president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

He and his wife, Michelle Rhee—once the brightest star in the corporate-backed “education reform” movement—showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. An adviser told Johnson’s hometown newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, that the couple was a “modern-day version of Bill and Hillary Clinton.” There was talk about a run for California governor or U.S. Senate.

At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepreneur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a “world-class” city where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter schools, “never check out a library book,” and have “more smart devices than toothbrushes.”

………

By the fall of 2015, Johnson’s political career was effectively over. He was under scrutiny, again, for allegedly molesting a sixteen-year-old girl two decades before. And he was facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct; a city employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint. The City of Sacramento’s legal advisers warned Johnson not to hug or touch anyone at city events. So Johnson, deciding two terms in office were enough, announced that he will not seek reelection this November. His exit will coincide with the opening of the new arena, easily his most significant mayoral achievement.

Meanwhile, debt service on the bond-financed arena will reach about $18 million a year, draining money from the city treasury. Sacramento’s city finance department is warning that the city’s spending is already “unsustainable” and budget deficits are imminent. For now, however, Johnson is being credited with a dramatic makeover of the new arena district—where a decaying shopping mall had been before.

It goes on and on, and it gets more petty and sordid.

It’s not surprising.  At the core of his political success has always been the Hope Academy charter school, which much like most of the charter school empires, is built on a foundation of broken promises and dubious statistics.

H/t Atrios

Corruption is as Corruption Does

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It appears that Brian Newby, the Executive Director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, got his job there because his patron,Kansas Secretary of State Chris Korbach, pulled strings to insert him at the agency, where he later made transparently illegal moves to further Korbach’s goal of suppressing minority votes:

A Kansas county elections official used close ties to one of the nation’s leading advocates of voting restrictions to help secure the top job at a government agency entrusted with making voting more accessible, and then used the federal position to implement an obstacle to voter registration in three states.

An email provided to The Associated Press through open records requests offers a glimpse into the mindset of Brian Newby, executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who decided — without public comment or approval from bosses — that residents of Alabama, Kansas and Georgia can no longer register to vote using a national form without providing proof of U.S. citizenship.

As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: “I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to.”

Voting rights advocates were stunned by Newby’s action once he got the job and have sued to overturn it. Activists say it flies in the face of the commission’s mission to provide a simple, easy form to encourage voter registration.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states must accept and use the federal voter registration form, and an appeals court ruled in 2014 in a lawsuit filed by Kobach that states could not force the commission to require residents to provide proof-of-citizenship documents on the national form.

………

Documents obtained by AP show Newby’s ties to Kobach, the architect of voter ID and other restrictive voter registration laws around the nation that he says are needed to prevent voter fraud. Critics say there is very little voter fraud and Kobach’s measures hurt voter registration and deprive eligible voters of the right to vote.

Kobach had appointed Newby to be a county elections commissioner in Kansas, and helped him get the federal job that he took in November.

“I wanted you in the loop, in part because of other issues in the past with the EAC,” Newby emailed Kobach. “I also don’t want you thinking that you can’t count on me in an upcoming period that will tax our resources.”

………

Kobach said Wednesday that he spoke to one, and possibly two of the Republican commissioners, about Newby prior to his hiring.

………

But documents from open records requests and interviews by AP show that as early as April 2015 and continuing in the months leading to Newby’s hiring by the commission, Kobach and his staff met with county officials to discuss concerns about Newby’s job performance in Kansas. Those concerns led officials to call for an audit of the Johnson County election office Newby led.

Kobach told AP he never informed the federal commissioners about those problems, and insisted they would not have affected Newby’s performance at his federal job.

The audit released earlier this month found Newby intentionally skirted oversight of government credit card expenses, wasted taxpayer funds and improperly claimed mileage and travel expenses while at his former job in Kansas. Newby has called the audit inaccurate and misleading.

………

Newby told Kobach that he never would have been considered for such a high-profile position if it weren’t for Kobach’s support, adding that he would be saying “repeated prayers of thanksgiving for that.”

You can find more about the audit here, and it appears that this guy was stealing the taxpayer’s money, on pretty chickensh%$ stuff, like getting reimbursements for limo service to the airport despite having a car allowance.

As Yael T. Abouhalkah of he Kansas City Star so pithily states, “Kris Kobach’s voter fraud slime now stretches from Johnson County to Washington.”

H/t Charlie Pierce.

A Real Estate Developer Does the Right Thing

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In response to larcenous demands from the incumbent (monopoly) connectivity providers, the developer of Jasper Highlands built and wired up his own gigibit ISP to serve his new development:

Tennessee is at the center of a nationwide battle over whether cities and towns should be allowed to build broadband networks without facing restrictions that help private ISPs avoid competition from the public sector.

But with a lawsuit and legislative battle over a Tennessee state law still pending, one home developer decided to build his own ISP. John “Thunder” Thornton of Chattanooga needed to install high-speed Internet for “his mountaintop residential development in Marion County,” but was unable to get affordable service from AT&T or Charter Communications, a Chattanooga Times Free Press article said yesterday. He also couldn’t get service from a Chattanooga electric utility that also provides Internet because the state law prevents it from expanding to nearby areas that lack fast, affordable service.

To solve the problem, Thornton “spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available,” the article said. He announced yesterday that his Jasper Highlands community in Jasper, Tennessee, “is now able to offer high-speed, gigabit-per-second Internet service for all home sites in his 3,000-acre complex.”

Thornton’s ISP is called Hi-Tech Data. It sells 100Mbps fiber service for $70 a month and gigabit service for $80 a month. Phone service is available for another $30 a month. Since the existing fiber didn’t go all the way to the Jasper Highlands development, Hi-Tech Data deployed its own fiber to cover the final 2,000 feet.

This is a natural consequence of the rent seeking behaviors engaged in by the baby Bells, cable companies, and the rest of the incumbent providers.

It’s yet another case where we have actors whose primary business model is to sit athwart the productive work of others, and extract rents, which they use to pay off politicians so that they maintain their privileged position.

It is Called Ticket Punching

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With about 5000 US troops in Iraq, there are 21 generals leading the troops there.

Typically, a full bird colonel would command a unit with 5000 soldiers, but there are 21 Generals:

In the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the U.S. military is notably short on soldiers, but apparently not on generals.

There are at least 12 U.S. generals in Iraq, a stunningly high number for a war that, if you believe the White House talking points, doesn’t involve American troops in combat. And that number is, if anything, a conservative estimate, not taking into account the flag officers running the U.S. air war, the admirals helping wage the war from the sea, or their superiors back at the Pentagon.

At U.S. headquarters inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, even majors and colonels frequently find themselves saluting superiors at a pace that outranks the Pentagon and certainly any normal military installation. With about 5,000 troops deployed to Iraq and Syria ISIS war, that means there’s a general for every 416 troops, give or take. To compare, there are some captains in the U.S. Army in charge of that many people.

Moreover, many of those generals come with staffs and bureaucracy that some argue slows decision-making against an agile terror group.

The Obama administration has frequently argued that the U.S. maintains a so-called light footprint in Iraq to reassure the American public that its military is not back in Iraq. Indeed, at times, the United States has not acknowledged where it has deployed troops until one of them died.

There are this many generals in Iraq because of the career needs of the general officer corps, not out of military need.

Getting a combat posting, even a useless one, paves the way to further promotions.

We saw something similar in the cruise missile attacks against Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, when the navy held off launching missiles for hours, so that more ships could get into position so that their captains could get it into their service records.

The missiles missed bin Laden by minutes as a result.

Between the military-industrial complex revolving door and up or out, our military is seriously, and deeply broken.

Some Sanity on Asset Forfeiture

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The government may not freeze assets needed to pay criminal defense lawyers if the assets are not linked to a crime, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a 5-to-3 decision that scrambled the usual alliances.

The case arose from the prosecution of Sila Luis, a Florida woman, on charges of Medicare fraud that, according to the government, involved $45 million in charges for unneeded or nonexistent services. Almost all of Ms. Luis’s profits from the fraud, prosecutors said, had been spent by the time charges were filed.

Prosecutors instead asked a judge to freeze $2 million of Ms. Luis’s funds that were not connected to the suspected fraud, saying the money would be used to pay fines and provide restitution should she be convicted. Ms. Luis said she needed the money to pay her lawyers.

The judge issued an order freezing her assets. That order, the Supreme Court ruled, violated her Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in a plurality opinion also signed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, said the case was simple.

One would think it would be simple.

Asset forfeiture is two things at its core:  A cudgel to extract guilty pleas, and theft without due process.

It is deeply corrupting, and needs to end.

How Utterly Proper

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George Mason University, a welfare program for reactionary economists and lawyers, has, with significant funding from the Brothers Koch, Decided to rename the George Mason University Law School to ASSoL, the Antonin Scalia School of Law:

George Mason was a founding father. He was one of the men who was responsible for the Bill of Rights — he wouldn’t sign the constitution without it (or at all, ultimately). Now, the law school at the university that bears his name is changing its name to the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University.

 ………

 Good lord. You are deemphasizing the name of a founding father to honor a man who fetishisized the beliefs held at the founding? A guy who didn’t go there, or have any connection to the school, who wouldn’t have hired a George Mason law student as a bathroom attendant, much less a Supreme Court clerk? That’s the guy you are renaming your law school after? Your Twitter hashtag is now #ASSLaw (Antonin Scalia School of Law). Who was in second place, Donald Trump?

 ………

 We talk a lot about the law school application crunch, and how that crunch disproportionately dings middling law schools like George Mason. There is a flight to quality, there is a flight to “free,” and schools that are neither are having a heck of a time filling their seats.

 But branding themselves as “Antonin Scalia,” who most people even lightly interested in law have heard of before, versus “George Mason,” who you should have learned about in AP History but probably didn’t because he’s not a Kardashian, might help them.

Even if Scalia Law generates some push in application and matriculation revenue, especially from right-of-center students, would it be enough to offset the negatives? Changing the school’s name in this way is sure to piss off some alumni.

Reports are that this was in response to, “$30 million in donations, $10 million of which came from the Charles Koch Foundation.”

This may very well be beyond parody, even ignoring the irony of naming a law school after a justice is on a fast track to be considered among the caliber of Roger Taney, James Clark McReynolds, Clarence Thomas, Henry Billings Brown, etc.

#ASSLaw #ASSoL

So Not a Surprise

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It appears that the University of California was preferentially admitting out of state students because they wanted the higher out of state tuition:

The University of California has been admitting thousands of students from out of state with lower grades and test scores than state residents as a way to raise cash, a state audit released Tuesday reveals.

In the last three years, nearly 16,000 nonresident undergraduates — about 29 percent of those admitted — have won spots at the coveted public university with grade-point averages and scores below the median of admitted Californians, according to the 116-page audit. The report criticizes university practices it says undermine state residents’ access to UC in favor of nonresidents, who pay about three times the basic tuition and fees of in-state students: $38,108 versus $13,400.

The state’s Master Plan for Higher Education says UC should admit only nonresidents who are at least as qualified as the “upper half of residents who are eligible for admission,” according to the report from State Auditor Elaine Howle.

But in 2011, UC changed that threshold so that nonresidents only had to “compare favorably” with residents, the audit notes.

This is what you get when you chronically underfund public higher education.

More Ratf%$#ing?

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The Arizona Secretary of State has affirmed in testimony before the state elections committee that someone was screwing around the the voting in the Arizona primary:

Monday’s hearing on voter suppression and election fraud in Arizona’s Presidential Preference Election revealed a slew of failures, which took place at virtually every level of government, all of which contributed to the state’s May 22 election fiasco .

………

A poll worker testified that the system in her district attempted to force her to give Republican ballots to Democratic voters throughout the day. To her credit, she gave those voters paper ballots and recorded every person that was impacted by the supposed system failure.

Secretary of State Michele Reagan testified about what she claims were multiple unintended failures which occurred on the Secretary of State’s website.

Those ‘mishaps’ ranged from the system’s failure to identify registered voters when the information was entered in lower-case letters, to the system ‘accidentally’ showing 100 percent reporting, along with patently false election results, at least six hours before the last vote was cast.

One of the most important things to come out of the hearing, however, was Secretary of State Reagan’s acknowledgement that voter registration information was tampered with.

When asked if there was any truth to the widespread allegations that the party affiliation of voters was changed ahead of the election, Reagan immediately responded by saying “Yes.”

She then told the election committee,

“This is something that I know happened, and I know it happened to people in this room. It is not hearsay. It happened to someone in my own office.”

Watch this video clip from her testimony below.



On Monday, Anonymous released the preliminary results of their own investigation into Arizona election fraud.

So far the group has confirmed 151 voters whose party affiliation was altered ahead of the Arizona primary. Of those, Anonymous has verified that 12 republicans, 139 Democrats and one voter of unidentified party affiliation were impacted.

The group further confirms that of the 139 Democrats they have identified thus far, two were Hillary Clinton supporters, 113 were Bernie Sanders supporters and 24 were of unknown preference.

I’m getting myself fitted with a custom tinfoil hat.

H/t PP at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

This is a Good Old Fashioned Rat F%$#ing

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Some how or other, the Washington, DC Democratic Party managed to be a day late with filing Sanders’ name to get him on the DC Democratic primary:

As a result of a registration error committed by the District of Columbia Democratic Party, Sen. Bernie Sanders won’t appear on the Washington D.C. ballot.

The Vermont senator’s name won’t appear on the ballot because the party submitted the requisite paperwork one day too late, according to NBC’s Washington affiliate, News4.

Both the Sanders’ campaign and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid the $2,500 fee to appear on the June 14 Democratic primary ballot on time but the district’s Democratic Party failed to inform the Washington D.C. Board of Elections until March 17, one day after the deadline.

Yes, a “registration error”.

I call yet another rat f%$#ing by the Democratic Party establishment.

What a Surprise. The FBI and the DoJ Lied

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After attempting to invoke the All Writs Act, the FBI just unlocked the San Bernardino shooter’s phone all by themselves:

The Justice Department is abandoning its bid to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack because investigators have found a way in without the tech giant’s assistance, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Monday.

In a three-sentence filing, prosecutors wrote that they had “now successfully accessed the data” stored on Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone and that they consequently no longer needed Apple’s court-ordered help getting in. The stunning move averts a courtroom showdown pitting Apple against the government — and privacy interests against security concerns — that many in the tech community had warned might set dangerous precedents.

I am going to put my tinfoil hat on here, and suggest that the FBI always knew that they could hack the phone.  It was probably only a call to Fort Meade away.

It took them just a few days once they realized that the court was not receptive to their demands and they were getting excoriated in the press.

 They were sandbagging the court and abusing legal process.

Yeah, He Endorsed Joe Lieberman Too.

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Barack Obama just endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, because while he killed Osama bin Laden, he really hates liberals:

While President Barack Obama won’t tell us who he will be supporting in the general election, one candidate he has fully endorsed is Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman Schultz is currently running for her life in Florida against the first Democratic congressional opponent she has faced during her time in the House. Opponent Tim Canova is running on the idea that Wasserman Schultz is far too corrupt and indebted to Wall Street to effectively represent the people of her district. Canova has endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders and has been backed by some of the same groups that Sanders is.

President Obama does not often endorse candidates in House primaries, so his support for Wasserman Schultz is telling.

Interestingly enough, this came shortly after the Florida Democratic Party was shamed into providing voter lists to Mr. Canova:

Last week, the Florida Democratic Party — and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — took some serious heat after it banned upstart congressional candidate Tim Canova from using the party’s voter data files, which help candidates research and contact supporters. But the Florida Democratic Party reversed its decision yesterday, party spokesperson Max Steele has confirmed to New Times.

Improbably, this was the second voter-data scandal to ensnare Wasserman Schultz this election cycle. In December, Wasserman Schultz, acting as chair of the Democratic National Committee, temporarily banned Bernie Sanders from accessing the DNC’s voter data files after his campaign staffer was caught hacking into Hillary Clinton’s campaign data. (The information allows candidates to research and contact potential supporters in their area.) But the move backfired, and Wasserman Schultz has since been accused of intentionally trying to sink Sanders’ chances at the presidency. Sanders sued, the move was overturned, and critics across the country have called for her ouster. She’s had a bad few months.

In something of a twist, Canova, who once advised Sanders on Wall Street reform, then said he had also been denied access to that very same data. This was due to a Florida Democratic Party rule, instituted in 2010, which bans candidates running against incumbents from using the information. In an interview, Canova called the rule “undemocratic” and said the party was acting to protect Wasserman Schultz.

The party did not offer data access “to candidates challenging incumbent members of Florida’s Democratic congressional delegation,” Steele told New Times earlier this month. “This policy has been applied uniformly across the board since 2010. We stand with our incumbent members of Congress, and we’re proud of the job they do representing the people of Florida. The Voter File is proprietary software created and owned by the Democratic National Committee that is maintained and operated by the Florida Democratic Party here in state.”

………

After Canova put up a fight, the Florida Democratic Party reconsidered how Canova’s case looked to the outside world, Steele says. The party made the choice today to give Canova, and only Canova, access to the file.

“Given the unique circumstances of having an incumbent member of Congress who is also the DNC chair who is being challenged by a Democrat (a situation that as you can imagine has never arisen), the FDP has decided to grant Mr. Canova access to the Voter File,” Steele said via email. The file will cost $3,500 to access.

Steele reiterated that this will be a one-time policy change: “Given the dual nature of an incumbent who is also a national party chair, we’ve decided to grant Mr. Canova access to avoid any appearance of favoritism,” he said. Other candidates who run against incumbents will be out of luck.

As an aside, they would not have done this, or at least not have done this so soon, unless there was a significant amount of loathing directed towards Wasserman Schultz in the state party.

Considering her refusal to support challenges to reactionary Cuban-American Republicans in competitive districts, I rather expect that there is no small amount of loathing among the locals there.

Erdoğan Is Now Owned by the House of Saud

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It turns out that, following his indictment for money laundering, Bilal Erdoğan was smuggled out of Italy with aid from the Saudi Embassy, which included hiring the Mafia and using a Saudi diplomatic passport:

According to Rai News 24, Italian police spokesman Lt. Colonel Domenico Grimaldi accused the Saudi legation in Rome of facilitating the escape of Bilal Erdoğan who was detained for money laundering allegations. Bilal Erdoğan’s short detention in Rome and later escape are the latest in a series of scandals hitting President Erdoğan’s family.

“Mafia activities continue to plague our judicial system and the Polizia di Stato is blamed for this humiliating security lapse in Rome airport. We also found that a notorious mafia gang active in Calabria and Sicily was hired by members in the Saudi embassy and they managed to release Mr. Erdoğan from Regina Coeli Prison,” police spokesman Lt. Colonel Grimaldi told AFP.

They moved Bilal Erdoğan to Excelsior Hotel, added Lt. Colonel Grimaldi, and Erdoğan was caught on cameras leaving the Hotel, donned traditional Arab dress and adroitly disguised as a Saudi diplomat; Bilal passed the security check holding a fake Saudi diplomatic passport and we believe, he couldn’t have escaped without the connivance of a number of police officers in Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

Turkey is a US ally like Pakistan is a US ally, which is to say, “Not at all.”

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Finally!

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The mercenary monger behind Blackwater, is being investigated for selling mercs to foreign governments and money laundering by the US Department of Justice:

Erik Prince, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.

What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.

Prince, through his lawyer, Victoria Toensing, said he has not been informed of a federal investigation and had not offered any defense services in Libya. Toensing called the money-laundering allegations “total bullsh%$.” (%$ mine)

The Intercept interviewed more than a half dozen of Prince’s associates, including current and former business partners; four former U.S. intelligence officers; and other sources familiar with the Justice Department investigation. All of them requested anonymity to discuss these matters because there is an ongoing investigation. The Intercept also reviewed several secret proposals drafted by Prince and his closest advisers and partners offering paramilitary services to foreign entities.

For more than a year, U.S. intelligence has been monitoring Prince’s communications and movements, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence officer and a second former intelligence official briefed on the investigation. Multiple sources, including two people with business ties to Prince, told The Intercept that current government and intelligence personnel informed them of this surveillance. Those with business ties were cautioned to sever their dealings with Prince.

As an aside, Toensing, she of the unprofessional legal utterances, was a major player in the pursuit of Bill Clinton’s penis in the 1990s.

Prince is an evil dangerous man with delusions of creating a full mercenary army to rival nation states.

I really hope that he gets taken down hard.

H/t Charlie Pierce.

What Bill Moyers Said

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There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.

Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.

In fact, while we’re at it, and if Secretary Clinton really wants us to believe she’s no creature of the corporate and Wall Street money machine — despite more than $44 million in contributions from the financial industry since 2000 and her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, not to mention several million more paid by other business interests for an hour or two of her time — she should pick up the gauntlet herself and publicly call for the departure of these two, although they are among her nearest and dearest. And we don’t mean Bill and Chelsea.

No, she should come right out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair — and Florida congresswoman — Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In one masterstroke, she could separate herself from two of the most prominent of all corporate Democratic elitists.

Each is a Clinton disciple and devotee, each has profited mightily from the association and each represents all that is wrong with a Democratic Party that in the pursuit of money from rich donors and powerful corporations has abandoned those it once so proudly represented — working men and women.

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This is why Emanuel and Wasserman Schultz must go. To millions, they are enablers of the one percent, perpetuators of the Washington mentality that the rest of the country has grown to hate. What a message such servants of plutocracy send: Democrats — a bridge to the past.

Hillary is not going to do this, but it would be a savvy political move.

Also, putting Emanuel and Wasserman-Schultz in the political cross-hairs would be good for the party and their constituents.

How Convenient?

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The office in Flint Michigan that stores their water records has been burgled, and the police chief is calling it an inside job:

Mystery still surrounds an unsolved December break-in at an executive office inside City Hall where Flint water files were kept.

As of Friday, March 18, there were still no suspects in the case, and officials say it may never be known what — other than a TV — was taken.

But the city’s new police chief Tim Johnson says it’s too suspicious that there was a break-in where important documents were kept, just as investigations began heating up and decision makers were beginning to be held accountable.

“It was definitely an inside job. The power cord (to the TV) wasn’t even taken. The average drug user knows that you’d need the power cord to be able to pawn it,” Johnson said.

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An employee returning to work at City Hall, 1101 S. Saginaw St., after the holiday break on Monday, Dec. 28, discovered a broken window and the break-in. No other offices were disturbed.

[Flint Mayor Karen] Weaver did not say exactly where the room was located in the suite, but did say a window was broken in an apparent effort to access to the area.

“They had to know what room to go into, I could just say that,” she said.

This does sound a like a Nixonian rat-f%$#ing, doesn’t it?

How Lovely!

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As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had her State Department aggressively push fracking across the world:

One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart­ment’s lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.

The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe—part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American officials—some with deep ties to industry—also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.

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Clinton, who was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, believed that shale gas could help rewrite global energy politics. “This is a moment of profound change,” she later told a crowd at Georgetown University. “Countries that used to depend on others for their energy are now producers. How will this shape world events? Who will benefit, and who will not?…The answers to these questions are being written right now, and we intend to play a major role.” Clinton tapped a lawyer named David Goldwyn as her special envoy for international energy affairs; his charge was “to elevate energy diplomacy as a key function of US foreign policy.”

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Goldwyn had a long history of promoting drilling overseas—both as a Department of Energy official under Bill Clinton and as a representative of the oil industry. From 2005 to 2009 he directed the US-Libya Business Association, an organization funded primarily by US oil companies—including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Marathon—clamoring to tap Libya’s abundant supply. Goldwyn lobbied Congress for pro-Libyan policies and even battled legislation that would have allowed families of the Lockerbie bombing victims to sue the Libyan government for its alleged role in the attack.

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But environmental groups were barely consulted, while industry played a crucial role. When Goldwyn unveiled the initiative in April 2010, it was at a meeting of the United States Energy Association, a trade organization representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and ConocoPhillips, all of which were pursuing fracking overseas. Among their top targets was Poland, which preliminary studies suggested had abundant shale gas. The day after Goldwyn’s announcement, the US Embassy in Warsaw helped organize a shale gas conference, underwritten by these same companies (plus the oil field services company Halliburton) and attended by officials from the departments of State and Energy.

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Around the time of his departure, WikiLeaks released a slew of diplomatic cables, including one describing a 2009 meeting during which Goldwyn and Canadian officials discussed development of the Alberta oil sands—a project benefiting some of the same firms behind the US-Libya Business Association. The cable said that Goldwyn had coached his Canadian counterparts on improving “oil sands messaging” and helped alleviate their concerns about getting oil sands crude to US markets. This embarrassed the State Department, which is reviewing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline proposal to transport crude oil from Canada and is under fire from environmentalists.

After leaving State, Goldwyn took a job with Sutherland, a law and lobbying firm that touts his “deep understanding” of pipeline issues, and launched his own company, Goldwyn Global Strategies.

In late 2011, Clinton finally unveiled the new Bureau of Energy Resources, with 63 employees and a multimillion-dollar budget. She also promised to instruct US embassies around the globe to step up their work on energy issues and “pursue more outreach to private-sector energy” firms, some of which had generously supported both her and President Barack Obama’s political campaigns. (One Chevron executive bundled large sums for Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, for example.)

So Clinton, who at the Flint debates was using double-talk about common sense regulations, employed a energy industry lobbyist to run her policy of aggressively pushing fracking to the world.

Later in the article, they talk about how her pet lobbyist lobbied aggressively for Canadian tar sands at State.

Yes, she sure sounds like someone who is serious about the dangers of fracking and Canadian bitumen, and the associated problems with global warming, doesn’t she?

Vatican Cans Nuncio Who Set Up the Pope

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Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who set up a meeting between anti-gay (and non-Catholic) town clerk Kim Davis without informing the Pope of the context is being removed as the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the United States:

The Vatican is replacing its controversial ambassador to the U.S., who arranged the meeting between Pope Francis and antigay Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis last fall.

Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò will leave the position of apostolic nuncio, the equivalent of an ambassador, and will be replaced by Archbishop Christophe Pierre, a French-born clergyman who is currently the nuncio to Mexico, Catholic magazine America reports, citing Sandro Magister, a blogger who covers the Vatican.

The Vatican is not expected to confirm the news until the Obama administration has agreed to the new nuncio’s appointment, the magazine notes, but it adds that “reliable sources” expect an official announcement before Easter, which falls on March 27 this year. Because of his experience in Mexico, Pierre may well emphasize immigration issues, The Washington Post reports

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During the pope’s visit to the U.S. last year, Viganò arranged for him to meet with Davis, the Rowan County clerk, who shut down all marriage operations in her office to avoid serving same-sex couples after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. After she was sued and disobeyed a federal judge’s order to resume marriage operations, she went to jail for contempt of court before agreeing that her office would serve all eligible couples.

There are any number of player in and around the Vatican who have been trying to Ratf%$# pope Francis, and this is a brush back pitch.

There are a lot of rocks to be turned over in the Vatican, and I really hope that the Pope is around long enough to clean house.