Category: Evil

Why Ignoring CIA Torture Was a Bad Idea

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Some how or other, the CIA “accidentally” deleted the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, though there appears to be another copy “safe”:

……

Yeah, good luck with those files, especially given the spectacular news from this side of the pond regarding one of the CIA’s most recent escapades in international thooleramawnery. Once again, the dedicated worker bees of our intelligence community have proven themselves tragically accident prone. As Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reports:

Although other copies of the report exist, the erasure of the controversial document by the CIA office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident. The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.

And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

It is a good thing that the Congressional oversight panels have been right on the ball in informing we suckers who foot the bill about this flagrant disregard for security protocols and spectacular bungling by the relevant authorities in The Company. No, wait.

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case. A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.

Well, I’m certainly reassured. They’re probably using the disc to play floor hockey at Langley.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein is still a trusting soul.

The functions of our state security apparatus are important.

The enormous intelligence industrial complex that we have created is not.

It is out of control, wasteful, and incompetent.

So Does Blowing Up Innocent Civilians, You Over Pampered Sack of Sh%$

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David Petraeus makes the point that anti-Muslim bigotry helps terrorists.

While it is an obvious point coached as deep meaning, which is kind of what Petraeus does, it misses the obvious point, which is that our mindless drone war, of which Petraeus was its most aggressive advocate, was an even more effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and Daesh.

We have been reigning down death from the skies on wedding parties, children, and first responders (“double tap” strikes), and this creates people who want revenge on the west in general and the US in particular.

There is a special place for you in hell.

Something to Hide

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Purdue Pharma, best known as the manufacturer of the opiate Oxycontin, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep their marketing tactics from the public, but today a judge ordered those records unsealed:

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, lost a legal battle Wednesday to keep records and testimony about its bestselling and widely abused painkiller secret.

A judge in Pike County, Kentucky, a region hard-hit by prescription painkiller abuse, granted a motion by a news outlet to unseal records from a lawsuit by the state accusing the company of fraud, conspiracy and negligence in the development and marketing of the drug.

Purdue settled that suit in December for $24 million without any admission of wrongdoing.

Circuit Judge Steven Combs granted the request of Boston Globe-affiliated investigative health news outlet STAT to unseal the documents, writing: “The Court sees no higher value than the public (via the media) having access to these discovery materials so that the public can see the facts for themselves.”

The judge said the order would not take effect for 32 days, allowing Purdue time to appeal.

Let’s be here:  Purdue has been aware of its potential for abuse and its addictive properties for a very long time, and it is clear that they used these to increase sales.

They are no different from the corner drug pusher, and seeing their marketing exposed to the light of day, with the resulting social pressure and prosecutions, would please me no end.

Not Enough Bullets

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The pay of hedge fund managers, who have underperformed the market forever, and lost money last year, is simply obscene:

The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua.

Kenneth Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel, and James Simons, founder and chairman of Renaissance Technologies, shared the top spot, taking home $1.7bn each – equivalent to the annual salaries of 112,000 people taking home the US federal minimum wage of $15,080.

The earnings of the best-performing hedge fund managers, published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine on Tuesday, dwarfs the pay of top Wall Street executives who have been under fire for their multimillion-dollar pay deals. The best paid banker last year was JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who collected $27m.

The huge pay at the top comes despite a tumultuous year on Wall Street that has led many well-known hedge funds to lose billions of dollars and others to close down. Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point, a hedge fund that manages $17.5bn, has described market conditions as a “hedge fund killing field”.

The, “Heads I win, tails you lose,” system of remuneration in Wall Street is wrong, and creates a lot of evil in our society.

Irony is Officially Dead

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Ashton Carter, the Secretary of State, just issued the highest civilian award that the Pentagon can issue to a civilian to Henry Kissinger:

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter hosts an award ceremony honoring Dr. Henry A. Kissinger for his years of distinguished public service at 4 p.m. EDT, in the Pentagon.  Media interested in covering the ceremony should plan on meeting in Room 2D961 by 3:45 p.m. to be escorted to the ceremony.  Foreign journalists without a Pentagon building pass must plan on being escorted from the River Entrance Pedestrian Bridge only, or, if arriving at the Pentagon Metro Entrance Facility, must contact 703-697-5131 a minimum of one hour prior to arrival.  Please arrive no later than 45 minutes before the event if coming by Metro.  U.S. journalists without a Pentagon building pass will be picked up at the River Entrance Pedestrian Bridge or the Pentagon Metro Visitors Entrance only.  If arriving by Metro, please contact 703-697-5131 a minimum of one hour prior to arrival, and plan to arrive no later than 30 minutes before the event; have proof of affiliation and photo identification.  Please call 703-697-5131 for escort into the building.

If you are unaware of his record, here is a quick primer:

On Monday afternoon, at 4 pm Eastern, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will host an awards ceremony at the Pentagon honoring one of the world’s most notorious war criminals.

The criminal in question, Dr. Henry Kissinger, has never been charged. But the evidence that he aided and abetted war crimes during his time in the White House advising Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford is well-established and overwhelming.

While Kissinger deserves real credit for some of America’s most important Cold War victories, including Nixon’s diplomatic opening to China, he is also responsible for some of its worst atrocities. Carpet-bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, greenlighting the Argentinian dictatorship’s murderous crackdown on dissidents — all of those were Kissinger initiatives, all pushed in the name of pursuing American national interests and fighting communism.
While the Obama administration might want to pretend that only the first half of his résumé exists, that doesn’t change reality. The secretary of defense is handing an award to a man whose actions belie the values Obama administration claims to stand for. It’s hardly alone in this: Kissinger has been treated as an elder statesman in polite Washington society for decades. But this is the most recent example, and one of the most high-profile, of polite Washington society rewriting Kissinger’s legacy. Let’s not forget what it really is.
 

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Most infamously, Kissinger masterminded a Nixon-era plan to carpet-bomb Cambodia. Nominally, the bombing — which indiscriminately hit targets in civilian-populated areas — was supposed to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases. In reality, it was designed to improve America’s strategic position before a negotiated withdrawal.
 
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American bombs killed between 150,000 and 500,000 people in Cambodia. That created a swell of public support for Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge rebels, who exploited popular anger at the bombings to seize control of the government in 1975. The Khmer Rouge then slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and starved even more, ultimately killing at least a million people, about one-seventh of the country’s population.
 
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He pulled the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, from his post for questioning the policy, and blocked efforts to pressure Pakistan (a US ally) to end its slaughter. The killing only stopped after India intervened to stop it; estimates of the death toll range from 300,000 to 3 million.
 
………
 

In 2014, newly declassified documents suggested that in the 1970s, Kissinger signaled to Argentina’s right-wing military leaders that the US would not object to its plans to launch a 1976 crackdown on dissent that became known as the Dirty War — which killed about 30,000 people.

He’s kind of like Stalin, without the charm.

This is some unbelievably f%$#ed up sh%$.

Yeah, This Really Inspires Support for the TTIP

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The US ambassador to Italy, a political appointee by Obama, is saying that the US and Europe need to approve the trade deal in order to prevent prosecution of the banksters at the mega-banks:

On May 7th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or German Economic News, headlined, “USA planen mit TTIP Frontal-Angriff auf Gerichte in Europa” or “U.S. Plans Frontal Attack on Europe’s Courts via TTIP,” and reported that, “America’s urgency to sign TTIP with Europe has solid reason: Megabanks must protect themselves from claims by European investors who allege that they were cheated during the debt crisis. … The U.S. Ambassador to Italy has now let the cat out of the bag on this — probably unintentionally.”

In this particular case, the megabank that’s being sued isn’t American but German, Deutsche Bank, which the U.S. Ambassador to Italy has cited as his example to defend, perhaps so as to appeal to Germans to protect their megabanks against lawsuits from foreign investors (such as Italians) who complain. In that case it was investors in the Italian city of Trani, population 53,000. The smallness of the city was an issue the Ambassador raised against the suit’s having been brought there.

Reuters headlined on May 6th, “Italian prosecutor investigates Deutsche Bank over 2011 bond sale”, and reported that, “An Italian prosecutor is investigating Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) over its sale of 7 billion euros ($8 billion) of Italian government bonds five years ago, an investigative source told Reuters. A prosecutor in Trani, a town in southern Italy, is investigating because Deutsche Bank allegedly told clients in a research note in early 2011 that Italy’s public debt was no cause for concern, and then sold almost 90 percent of its own holding of the country’s bonds.” The U.S. bond-rating agencies are also subjects in this suit, because Trani had relied upon their ratings of those bonds.

The Obama Administration (through its Italian Ambassador) seems thus to be saying, in effect, that unless TTIP is passed into law, Europe’s megabanks (and the U.S. bond-rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch) will be able successfully to be sued by cheated investors, just as has been happening with such American banks as JPMorgan/Chase and Goldman Sachs in the United States, which — since TTIP hasn’t yet been in force anywhere, including in the U.S. — were forced to pay billions to cheated investors. Apparently, Obama would be happier if those suits had been impossible in the U.S. The argument here, though only implicitly, seems to be that TTIP is the way to protect megabanks and the bond-rating firms. It concerns specifically the selling of sophisticated derivative investments.

I didn’t think that there was any bit of news that would make me more opposed to the TTIP or TPP.

I was misinformed.

Meet the Old Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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Hillary is now actively courting Bush donors:

Hillary Clinton’s supporters in recent days have been making a furious round of calls to top Bush family donors to try to convince them that she represents their values better than Donald Trump, multiple sources in both parties told POLITICO.

The moves come as Clinton and the Democratic Party try to take advantage of deep unease among establishment Republicans on Wall Street and elsewhere with Trump’s emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee.

Top targets for the Clinton team include people like Woody Johnson, Jeb Bush’s former finance chair and the owner of the New York Jets. In recent days, Bush’s brother and father, former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, have said they plan to skip Trump’s nominating convention.

One person close to Clinton said supporters of the former secretary of state drew up a list of Wall Street donors who supported Jeb Bush and other unsuccessful Republican candidates months ago but wanted to wait until Trump locked down the nomination before beginning to make the calls.

Yeah, now THERE’S a staunch defender of the Democratic Party’s liberal traditions, campaigning as the best Republican in the race.

At the rate that this is going, Jill Stein is going to qualify for federal matching funds.

Ez a Mechayeh!

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In July, Microflaccid’s offer for a free upgrade to Windows 10 expires, and it means that those f%$#ing pop up windows will be going away:

There was one issue that went unspoken in Microsoft’s announcement on Thursday that the free Windows 10 upgrade offer would end on July 29. What would the company do about all those annoying, almost malware-like, pop-up notifications to upgrade to Windows 10 that appeared on the PCs of Windows 7 and 8.1 users? The answer is they will disappear.

“Details are still being finalized, but on July 29th the Get Windows 10 app…will be disabled and eventually removed from PCs worldwide,” Microsoft told WinBeta in a written statement.

Hallelujah

The company warned that it may take some time to disable the upgrade pop-ups on computers worldwide.

Hallelujah is right.

I am sick to death of Microsoft’s nags to install its f%$#ing spyware.

*It’s Yiddish, “איז אַ מחיה,” and it means that it is a great joy.

And Hillary Clinton Acolytes Continue to Ruin the World

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The US is intensifying the pressure on Cyprus to accept a secret NATO plan to keep Turkish forces on the island.

Victoria Nuland, the State Department official in charge of regime change in Russia and Ukraine, met for talks last week with the President of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, and with Turkish Cypriot figures. The State Department and US Embassy in Nicosia have kept silent on what was said. A well-informed Cypriot source reports Nuland “was in Cyprus to pre-empt any likelihood of future deepening in relations with Russia. Anastasiades may not want to, but he may have no other option.” A second Cypriot political source said: “[Nuland] will try to blackmail him. I’m not sure how he will react.”

Andros Kyprianou, head of AKEL, the Cyprus Communist Party running strongly against Anastasiades’s party in next month’s parliamentary election, issued an unusual warning against the Nuland plan. “For us”, Kyprianou (right) said, there is only one acceptable outcome to negotiations between the Greek and Turkish communities for the reunification of the island. This is a “solution that ends the occupation and colonization, restoring the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and unity of the Republic, based on UN resolutions, the High Level Agreements, International and European Law. The solution is to demilitarize Cyprus and excludes any guarantee and intervention rights in the internal affairs of the country by foreign forces.”

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US military commanders and political leaders have never advocated Turkish withdrawal from the island, or compliance with the UN resolutions. Instead, they have recommended incorporating both parts of Cyprus into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The political and military commands in Ankara have been reluctant to accept a NATO solution for Cyprus because they object to what they regard as “dilution” of their army on the island. The Nuland plan is the latest attempt to give Ankara what it wants, and override Greek Cypriot objections. Nuland has also told Anastasiades she wants to accelerate agreement on the terms of settlement before the US presidential election in November.

Anastasiades has already declared himself in favour of joining NATO by signing the preliminary Partnership for Peace programme, but AKEL has been able to block it. For the time being, Cyprus is not a NATO member, and cannot accept another NATO base on its territory. “How can Nuland now push through a Turkish base on the island”, a well-known Cypriot strategist asks – “that isn’t a Turkish base and isn’t a NATO base either, but meets Ankara’s demand for a military ‘guarantee’, and will be accepted by Anastasiades?”

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For weeks now in Moscow, there have been public hints that Nuland has resuscitated the scheme for withdrawing Turkish forces under the Turkish flag, then returning them under a NATO flag. In Nicosia in December, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that such a scheme would be unacceptable to Russia. “The sides should reach agreements that would provide these security guarantees on a fundamentally new basis,” Lavrov said, “which will be acceptable to both Cypriot communities…This role should be primarily played by the UN Security Council.” For more details, read this.

In February, Lavrov’s spokesman at the ministry in Moscow attacked statements by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his “calls on the Cypriot Turks to take a tough, uncompromising stance in the ongoing intercommunal talks in Cyprus, including on territorial delimitation, a very sensitive issue. This is in stark contrast to Ankara’s statements on its commitment to facilitating a peaceful settlement on the island in the near future. It is obvious that by addressing such calls to one of the parties to the inter-Cypriot dialogue, Turkey’s leaders are rudely interfering in the negotiation process with a view of promoting their own interests.”

 This Neocon bullsh%$ is getting really old.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

I Know That It’s Not Good to See the Sausage Made, but We Should Know When It Is a Sh%$ Sandwich

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Greenpeace has published leaked documents detailing the negotiations between the US and EU over the TTIP, and it is worse than previously thought:

Bernd Lange, the chairman of the European Parliament’s important trade committee, has indicated that he now expects the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations will probably fail, following a major leak of confidential documents from the talks.

Greenpeace Netherlands has released half of the entire TTIP draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US, which reveal US demands in detail for the first time.

Although the EU has improved transparency recently, and routinely publishes its offers for each TTIP chapter, the US has consistently refused to do so. Even MEPs and MPs have faced extreme restrictions on what they are allowed to look at, copy, or even say when it comes to the US position. The new leak by an unknown whistleblower represents a major blow to US attempts to keep its negotiating demands confidential, and provides important information to the both the EU and US public for the first time.


………

As Ars noted last September, in the face of massive public concerns about ISDS, the European Commission is proposing a modified approach, the Investment Court System (ICS), which it claims addresses the problems of ISDS. However, even though the ICS idea was formally presented to the US last year, one of the TTIP leaks shows that it was not even discussed during the 12th round, something that the European Commission’s public report on the negotiations omitted to mention. This confirms earlier indications that the US is not interested in ICS, and will insist on including standard ISDS in TTIP, regardless of EU worries.

A leaked chapter on “Regulatory coherence, transparency and other good regulatory practices” indicates that the US wants all regulations, even those concerning health and safety or environmental issues, to be judged by the yardstick of their effects on trade: “When developing a regulation, a regulatory authority of a Party shall evaluate any information provided in comments by the other Party or a person of the other Party regarding the potential trade effects of the regulation that it receives during the comment period.”

n practice, this means that companies will be able to challenge any new EU and US regulations that might have an adverse effect on their profits, as is often the case when new environment regulations are brought in. It is likely to make it much harder to strengthen laws that might disadvantage business but protect public health and safety.

………

The key sentence comes in the particularly sensitive document entitled “Tactical State of Play of the TTIP Negotiations.” This is essentially the European Commision’s frank evaluation of where things stand in the TTIP talks. Here’s what it has to say on the US demand: “progress on motor vehicle-related parts would only be possible if the EU showed progress in the discussion on agricultural tariffs.” In other words, if the EU doesn’t open up its markets to agricultural products from the US—which means things like beef treated with hormones, and maybe even chlorine chickens—there will be no improved access for EU car manufacturers.

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It is also concerned that the EU’s “precautionary principle,” which requires that products should be shown to be safe before they can be put on the market is being replaced by the US “risk-based” approach, which allows products to be sold until it is proved that they are dangerous.

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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, public support for TTIP was already plummeting, even before this leak appeared. It seems unlikely that the information it reveals about US demands will assuage any European fears.

Looking at the positions that have been taken by  the US in these negotiations, I can only say that, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The worst parts of the trade deals that the US have negotiated over the past few decades is not that reality, and our partners, require compromises.

The worst parts of the trade deals that the US have negotiated over the past few decades come from a foreign trade establishment who follows the most extreme and destructive philosophy.

Here is hoping that the free market market mousketeers who have been driving foreign trade deals get a job flipping burgers, because their death toll is beginning to rival that of Josef Stalin.

Same as it Ever Was………

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It looks like GSE Freddie Mac may need another baliout:

Freddie Mac is expected to report a loss when it announces first-quarter earnings before the bell on Tuesday. That’s bad news for any public company, but especially critical for the mortgage provider because of its tangled history with the federal government.

Freddie and its counterpart, Fannie Mae were put into conservatorship in 2008 as the mortgage meltdown ensnared the financial system. They have lingered as wards of the state ever since. The Treasury Department modified the deal in 2012, requiring Fannie and Freddie to send all quarterly profits to the government — and shrink their reserves to zero by 2018.

As Mel Watt, the chairman of Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, put it in a speech in February, Fannie and Freddie are quickly approaching the point where they won’t be able to weather quarterly losses without going back to the Treasury for taxpayer dollars.

………

Bank analyst Richard Bove speculated about the possibility of a first-quarter loss in a recent note. “It is impossible for an outsider to predict what this will do to Freddie Mac earnings but it is not unrealistic to assume a loss of $2 billion plus in derivatives (it could be as high as $4 billion or more). At the $2 billion plus level, Freddie Mac’s pretax earnings would be negative $749 million,” Bove, vice president of equity research at Rafferty Capital Markets, wrote.

Spokeswomen for Freddie and its regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, declined to comment.

A Treasury draw is a possibility, Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi told MarketWatch, although he thinks the chance of one is “less than 50-50.”

The 10-year Treasury declined 49 basis points in the first quarter, far more than the 29-basis point drop that caused Freddie’s loss last year, noted Laurie Goodman, director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. (A basis point is one one-hundredth of a percentage point.)

Time to party like it’s late 2008, I guess.

Seriously, has there been a financial “Innovation” since the Automatic Teller Machine that has been about anything but ripping the rest of us off?

We are now in a never ending bust and bust cycle where the banksters get richer, and the rest of us get poorer.

Guys Like this Need to Sell Cosmetics for a Living

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Admiran (Ret) William McRaven, former head of JSOC, is ranting incoherently about the fact that civilian authority actually exerts authority over the military:

A long-percolating feud between Navy brass and the Senate has erupted into open conflict, with the retired admiral who oversaw the daring 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden publicly accusing lawmakers of harboring deep disrespect for military leaders.

In an unusually blunt column published Sunday in the Tampa Tribune, William H. McRaven, a retired four-star admiral, former Navy SEAL and former commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, blasted members of Congress for a “disturbing trend in how politicians abuse and denigrate military leadership, particularly the officer corps, to advance their political agendas.”

Although McRaven did not single out lawmakers by name, he made clear that he was angry at the Senate for its treatment of Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey, the commander in charge of the Navy’s elite SEAL teams and other commando units. Losey, who formerly served under McRaven, was denied promotion last month and is being forced to retire after several senators from both parties pressured the Navy to hold him accountable for retaliating against multiple whistleblowers.

Calling Losey’s fate a “miscarriage of justice,” McRaven called him “without a doubt one of the finest officers with whom I have ever served. Over the past 15 years no officer I know in the SEAL Teams has given more to this country than Brian.”

Speaking on the Senate floor April 6, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was “an honored naval officer” but was “a serial retaliator” who deserved to be denied a promotion. (United States Senate)

………

McRaven’s description of Losey as an innocent victim is at odds with the findings of the Defense Department’s inspector general, which concluded that he had repeatedly violated whistleblower-protection laws.

The agency investigated Losey five times after subordinates complained that he had wrongly fired, demoted or punished them during a vengeful but fruitless hunt for a person who had anonymously reported him for a minor travel-policy infraction. After conducting separate investigations that involved more than 100 witnesses and 300,000 pages of emails, the inspector general upheld complaints from three of the five staffers and recommended that the Navy take action against him.

The Navy, however, dismissed the findings that Losey had violated the law and was poised to promote him last fall to become a two-star admiral until details of the case were revealed publicly for the first time in October by The Washington Post. That prompted several senators to object to the Navy’s plans. They turned up the pressure with a variety of legislative tactics until Navy Secretary Ray Mabus relented in March and announced that Losey’s promotion had been nixed. 

The travesty here is not Congress holding a corrupt general accountable.  It is the US Navy refusing to hold a corrupt general accountable.

These attitudes pervade the culture of the senior officer corps(e) in the US military. 

It is an entitled attitude that breeds corruption and incompetence.

The Democratic Party Bears Far More Blame on This That the Republican Party.

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Over at Medium, Steve Five notes that, “If These Two Win, This is Going To Be The Sh%$tiest Election in US History,” with the charming sub hed of, “Dear God When Will It Be Over Please Make It Stop.”

He’s right:

After last night’s sweeping wins by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it appears even more likely that the two will become their respective party’s nominees. But according to multiple different polls and recent data, these are the sh%$tiest candidates in recorded history and this election will be a total mess.

 A recent CBS poll has Clinton at 52% unfavorable rating, with Trump at 57% unfavorable. These are the lowest favorability ratings of presumptive nominees since CBS began polling, and other polls show similar findings. Clinton’s sh%$tiness has been seen as a major problem for the Democratic party, while the only consolation to the Democrats is that Donald Trump is statistically sh%$tier, to the point that he is potentially starting a civil war within the Republican party. If either of these two are elected, they will be the least favored nominee to become president in the history of polling.

 ………

 If Clinton and Trump win their party nominations, we’re in for six months of peak sh$%tiness. Trump saving $2 Billion on ad revenue means he can outspend a cash-strapped Clinton after the primaries, and his sh$%ty rhetoric and fistfuls of money will force a hawkish Clinton to at turns go tough on him and differentiate herself with a market-tested party unification approach.

 ………

 One thing is certain, if Clinton and Trump become their party’s nominees, it will be a race to the bottom. With Trump’s schoolyard rhetoric and Clinton’s distrustfulness, a heated general election fight will turn off an already election-fatigued American populace. According to the data, no matter who wins, a majority of Americans will lose.

I think that the assessment is fundamentally accurate.

It’s a f%$#ing mess, but Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two different phenomena.

Donald Trump is the proverbial black swan. The Republican party could not have predicted him, or what he would be, or his ascendance.  No one could have predicted this.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been a known quantity for decades, and she record of failure that would make Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld blush, whether it is Iraq, NAFTA, Hillary Care, crime bill, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, or any other signature of her issues.

But the Democratic Party establishment, following the script to Blazing Saddles, has decided that, “”We’ve gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!”

It is the Iron Law of Organizations Institutions, where power WITHIN an organization is pursued at the expense of the power OF that organization.

The Democratic Party establishment has consciously chosen its course for the most venal of reasons, and the rest of us will pay for this.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I Really Thought That It Was Impossible for Him to Make Me Loathe Him Any More

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But Ted Cruz proved me wrong when he announced the wildly premature choice of Carly Fiorina as his running mate:

Ted Cruz just suffered one of the worst drubbings of his presidential campaign, losing badly in five states, falling further behind Donald Trump and watching his dim hopes of capturing the Republican nomination fade further.

Yet less than 24 hours later, the senator from Texas did something normally reserved for presumptive nominees rather than struggling underdogs: He announced a vice presidential running mate.

In choosing Carly Fiorina for that spot here Wednesday, Cruz reached for a political lifeline at a time when he is running out of them. Facing a must-win situation against Trump in next Tuesday’s Indiana primary, Cruz is trying one un­or­tho­dox maneuver after another in hopes of extending the race and forcing a contested Republican convention in Cleveland — his only hope for becoming the nominee.

The announcement was designed in part to sharpen the contrast with Trump that Cruz is trying to draw. Introducing Fiorina at an afternoon rally in downtown Indianapolis, Cruz highlighted the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive’s fierce exchanges with Trump and her refusal to back down from him when she was a candidate.

The juxtaposition of the two of them is way worse than either one of them alone.

This is like watching a dog vomit, and then eat its own barf.

Not Long Enough

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Child rapist and money launderer Dennis Hastert has been sentenced to 15 months in prison:

Mr. Hastert, whose date to report to prison has yet to be set, was ordered to pay $250,000 in fines, never to contact his victims and to receive sex-offender treatment.

“If there’s a public shaming of the defendant because of the conduct he’s engaged in, so be it,” Judge Durkin said.

Hopefully, given the nature of the crime and the length of sentence, he spends his time in a at least a medium security prison.

Classic Chutzpah

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Darnell Earley, the former emergency manager of Flint, Michigan is trying to get the impoverished town to pay for his legal defense of his poisoning them:

Former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley tried to bill the cash-strapped city $750 an hour for an attorney to sit with him while he was questioned last month in Washington by a congressional committee and to represent him in ongoing criminal investigations related to the Flint drinking water crisis, records obtained by the Free Press show.

Earley, whose office was searched by state investigators on Feb. 29, and who told the City of Flint on March 11 that he is under criminal investigation in connection with the lead contamination of Flint’s drinking water, wants the city to pay legal fees that already have topped $75,000 and continue to grow, records obtained under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act show.

Flint City Councilwoman Jacqueline Poplar reacted with outrage Friday when she learned of the Earley invoices from a Free Press reporter.

“If he did send a bill — shame on him,” Poplar said. “The City of Flint shouldn’t be giving him a dime for legal fees or anything else. I would like him to refund every penny the City of Flint paid him to take us down this road.”

The classic definition of Chutzpah is the child who murders his parents, and demands mercy as an orphan.

Mr. Earley comes pretty close to that standard.

Quote of the Day

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“We thought America was the best in the world,” he said. “But unfortunately this happened, and it made us [think] like American police are the same as our police in Burma.”

—Eh Wah the manager of Klo & Kweh Music Team, a Burmese/Karen band after Oklahoma cops stole $53,000 from him using asset forfeiture,

There is a happy ending here:  After the Washington Post wrote a story about this (link above), the cops and the prosecutors have done the right thing, and dropped the bogus charges, and sent him his money back.

A Feature, Not a Bug

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In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Korbach has managed to so hamstring voter registrations that ⅔ of voter registrations in Kansas are not being processed:

Voting rolls in Kansas are in “chaos” because of the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirements, the American Civil Liberties Union has argued in a court document, noting that about two-thirds of new voter registration applications submitted during a three-week period in February are on hold.

Kansas is fending off multiple legal challenges from voting rights activists, and just months before the state’s August primary, the status of the “dual registration” system remains unclear. Federal judges in separate voter-registration lawsuits unfolding in Kansas and Washington, D.C., could rule at any time. There’s also greater urgency because registrations typically surge during an election year.

Kansas is one of four states, along with Georgia, Alabama and Arizona, to require documentary proof of citizenship — such as a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers — to register to vote. Under Kansas’ challenged system, voters who registered using a federal form, which hadn’t required proof of U.S. citizenship, could only vote in federal races and not in state or local races. Kansas says it will keep the dual voting system in place for upcoming elections if the courts allow its residents to register to vote either with a federal form or at motor vehicle offices without providing proof of citizenship.

This guy has been engaging in a felony concpiracy to deprive people of their rights for years.

When do we throw his sorry racist ass into a PMITA prison ?

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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What a surprise. People are using facial recognition to stalk porn stars. I expect this to extend to non porn stars shortly:

This story originally appeared on Global Voices Advocacy

The developers behind “FindFace,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, say the service is designed to facilitate making new friends. Released in February this year, FindFace started gaining popularity in March after a software engineer named Andrei Mima wrote about using the service to track down two women he photographed six years earlier on a street in St. Petersburg. (They’d asked him to take a picture of them, but he never got their contact information, so he wasn’t able to share it with them at the time.)

From the start, FindFace has raised privacy concerns. (Even in his glowing recommendation, Mima addressed fears that the service further erodes people’s freedoms in the age of the Internet.) In early April, a young artist named Egor Tsvetkov highlighted how invasive the technology can be, photographing random passengers on the St. Petersburg subway and matching the pictures to the individuals’ Vkontakte pages using FindFace.

“In theory,” Tsvetkov told RuNet Echo, “this service could be used by a serial killer or a collector trying to hunt down a debtor.”

It ain’t just the government that is creating a panopticon.  The private sector is moving there even faster.

Useless Meatbag of the Day

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Former Senator Jim Webb, who seems to think that a little genocide is just a misunderstanding between friends:

Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) is not happy about former President Andrew Jackson being bumped from the front of the $20 bill.

Webb joined conservatives in blasting the Treasury Department’s decision to bump Jackson to the back of the bill in order to put legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the front. He wrote Sunday in a Washington Post op-ed that the decision was “an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.”

“This dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in a vacuum,” he wrote. “Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades.”

This racist asshole argued that despite, “Jackson’s involvement in the events that led to the Trail of Tears, he argued that the former President was not genocidal because he raised an orphaned Native American baby as his son.”

Andrew Jackson ignored a Supreme Court ruling, and sent in troops to send the Cherokee on a death march to Oklahoma.

F%$# Webb, and f%$# his Neo-Confederate bullsh%$.