Category: Evil

Wall Street: It F%$#s the Airlines Even Worse than the Airlines F%$# the Airlines

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Aviation Week, in reporting a leadership change at JetBlue, notes that much of the impetus for removing the current CEO was because he was too passenger centric: (paid subscription required)

When the JetBlue Airways Board of Directors decided not to renew CEO Dave Barger’s contract but instead elevate airline President Robin Hayes to the top spot, it implicitly endorsed a view held by many on Wall Street that the carrier, while profitable, lags too far behind its rivals.

Barger, an original JetBlue executive, took over in 2007 after the board determined the carrier’s visionary founder, David Neeleman, struggled at running day-to-day operations. Barger quickly fixed the operation, helping it recover from a devastating “valentine” that was delivered on Feb. 14, 2007, when the airline failed to properly prepare for and react to an ice storm that hit the New York area. But like Neeleman, who insisted JetBlue be more refined than its competitors, Barger kept the focus on the customer, preferring not to add baggage fees or seats to aircraft even when most other U.S. carriers adopted both practices.

His resistance to some revenue-generating ideas may have been Barger’s downfall. Despite signaling in recent months he might remain at JetBlue, Barger will be replaced on Feb. 16 by Hayes, a former British Airways executive vice president for the Americas. Hayes is not talking revenue—he has not been saying much at all—but Wall Street analysts say they are hopeful JetBlue will start acting more like competitors. In arguing this summer for a CEO change, Cowen & Co. analyst Helane Becker wrote: “JetBlue is an overly brand-conscious and customer-focused airline, which has resulted in lagging fundamentals.”

………

“What I see Dave Barger doing is leading the company through difficult times and not going into bankruptcy,” says George Hamlin of Hamlin Transportation Consulting. “If there’s something wrong with that, I am living in a strange world.”

(emphasis mine)

If you are wondering why flying sucks wet farts from dead pigeons, just look at this.

“Activist investors” have decided that JetBlue gives an excessively positive experience to its customers, and this must not be allowed to stand.

The Handmaiden’s Tale, Alabama Edition

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In the can you top this world of Talibaptist abortion restrictions in the United States, Alabama has started giving legal counsel to the embryo, but not the girl:

Ever since Sandra Day O’Connor resigned from the Supreme Court in 2006, anti-abortion activists have been playing a game of chicken with the justices. On one side are the activists, who want to push anti-abortion laws as far as they can without getting slapped down by the court. On the other side is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wants to let states make abortions harder and harder to obtain without actually outlawing them. For more than 20 years, Kennedy has approved literally every anti-abortion law he’s encountered, leading some liberals to fear he’d finally abandoned Roe v. Wade altogether.

Soon, however, Kennedy may finally be forced to balk. On Tuesday, the ACLU sued to halt an extreme new Alabama law targeting minors who are seeking abortions. The measure is very clearly designed to degrade and humiliate teenage girls, far beyond what any state has previously attempted (and what the Supreme Court has allowed). Alabama already requires a minor to secure parental consent before obtaining an abortion, but if she cannot—if, for instance, it was her parent who raped and impregnated her—she can ask a judge to bypass this requirement. The new law takes that judicial bypass and turns it on its head, permitting the judge to appoint a lawyer to represent the minor’s fetus and advocate for its best interests. The judge may bring the district attorney into court to question the minor. And, worst of all, the district attorney can call witnesses to testify against the minor—and in favor of her fetus.

All of this is quite heinous. But it gets much worse. If the judge rules in favor of the minor, the district attorney is now permitted by law to appeal the ruling and make his case all over again to a higher court. By letting the district attorney call an endless number of witnesses then appeal an unfavorable ruling, the law creates a loophole that could let the state delay a minor’s abortion to the point that she couldn’t even legally receive one. (In Alabama, that’s 20 weeks, unless there is a threat to the mother’s health.) If Alabama gets away with this law, in other words, it’ll have effectively nullified young women’s constitutional right to an abortion.

I would also note that parental notification laws, in more than a few of the cases, means that the girl has to ask permission from her rapist.

This is undiluted evil, and should no more be compromised with than we would with Osama bin Laden,

Student Athletes, My Ass. It’s Legalized Slavery

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In the middle of the rout of the University of Michigan football team by the University of Minnesota football team, the coach, Brady Hoke not only declined to pull a student who was clearly concussed, but he put him back in the game after pulling him:

But, by the third quarter against Minnesota, things were slipping through Hoke’s fingers. Once again, Michigan’s offense was discombobulated, this time with quarterback Shane Morris rather than Devin Gardner, and the Wolverines looked to be in serious trouble when two turnovers in a span of less than two minutes propelled the Gophers to increase their lead from 10-7 to 27-7. At this point, I finally caved and believed that there was little chance for Hoke to save his job, but I still thought he should finish out the season.

And then this happened:





2:05 – 3:58
Morris remains in the game, and then something happens that we never want to see as college football fans. Morris drops back to pass and rolls to his left. As Morris flings the football, Minnesota defensive end Theiren Cockran closes in at full speed, drops his helmet, and unleashes a dirty and ejectionable helmet-to-helmet hit on Morris. Morris’ pass is overthrown and incomplete, but, when the ESPN cameras come back to Morris after the play, we see him walk around dazed for a few seconds and then this:

………

Morris clearly wobbles and tries to prop his head on Ben Braden’s right arm to remain upright. Braden recognizes this and uses both arms to catch Morris and prevent him from falling to the ground. Braden then keeps his right arm wrapped around Morris’ back to keep him standing. Khalid Hill then walks over and says something to Morris, which prompts Morris to look to the Michigan sideline and wave off a substitution.

………

But, not only does Morris remain in the game for another snap, Michigan allows him to drop back for a pass, which could lead to him being on the receiving end of another bone-crushing hit delivered by Minnesota’s pass rush. Absolutely abhorrent. Thankfully, Morris releases his pass before any Gophers can get in the vicinity to do so.

After the play, the ESPN cameras get a shot of Morris staring at the Michigan sideline, and anyone and everyone with a brain can see that Morris is completely dazed and confused. As Morris drops his head, Hoke and the Michigan staff finally realize that Morris is in no condition to be on a football field and motions for Gardner to replace him.

One play too late, though.

 ………

5:05 – 6:33
At the end of Gardner’s third play on the field, during which he scrambled, his helmet was ripped off by a Minnesota defender. Accordingly, by rule, Gardner must sit out the following snap unless a timeout is called by either team.
The decision here for Hoke should be pretty simple: (1) send out third-string quarterback Russell Bellomy for the next play; or (2) use one of Michigan’s remaining two timeouts and keep Gardner in the game.
But that is not what happens, and what does happen next is a fireable offense.
As Bellomy removes his headset and begins scrambling to find his helmet, Morris, who had finally taken off his helmet, starts walking towards the field of play, puts back on his helmet, and jogs onto the field. No Michigan coach, including Hoke, or any member of Michigan’s training staff stop him. At this point, Bellomy retrieves a helmet — one I do not believe is actually his — and starts to sprint onto the field before halting when he sees Morris is already in the huddle.

 ………

For starters, Morris never should have been in this huddle. But look at the play clock in the graphic above. THERE ARE A FULL 25 SECONDS ON THE PLAY CLOCK. That is plenty of time for Hoke to either: (1) call Morris back to the sideline and sub in Bellomy, who now has a helmet; (2) call a timeout, which still remains an option every second until the ball is snapped; or (3) PUT IN ANY PLAYER — WILTON SPEIGHT, BRIAN CLEARY, ALEX SWIECA, LINEBACKER JAKE RYAN, DEFENSIVE TACKLE WILLIE HENRY, ETC. — THAT IS NOT CONCUSSED.

Even the umpire looks over to Michigan’s sideline and asks Hoke if he wants to take a timeout, to which Hoke declines, before starting the play clock.

Disgusting. Reprehensible. Despicable. Atrocious. Disturbing. None of these adjectives can truly describe just how horrifying it is that Hoke had absolutely no problem reinserting Morris back into this game. None.

(all emphasis original)

People are upset that coach Hoke did this.

I’m appalled that Hoke, and the athletic director David Brandon, whose tenure as a Domino’s Pizza CEO and as a Republican political apparatchik (but I repeat myself) presaged his aggressively capitalist management of his “student athletes”, have not been fired yet.

This is not a just a failing of U. Mich, it symptomatic of the fundamentally abusive nature of top tier collegiate athletics.

It’s not education, it’s not athletics, it’s human trafficking.

If it were anything else, everyone involved in this debacle would already be suspended pending termination.

I hope that the QB, Shane Morris, is talking to a lawyer.

F%$# You for that Mental Image

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Talking with a Gentile cow-orker about Rosh Hashanah, and the blowing of the Shofar.

We talked about how some are short (ram’s horns) some are longer. (some sort of gazelle, and rather more melodic)

I noted that while the Shofar is played much like any brass instrument, i.e. with buzzing lips, but it differ in that the Shofar blower traditionally blow from the corner of the mouth, not the middle.

He said, “Kenny G. style“.

GAH!!!!

The Wisest Thing Said so Far this Year

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If regular Americans acted like corporations and the moneyed class, our country would collapse in a week from systemic theft, corruption and greed.

Donald Trump is going bankrupt for the 5th time, Richard Fuld is still a rich man, Goldman Sachs is still a going concern, airlines and other businesses routinely declare bankruptcy to cheat their workers.

It’s no surprise that recent studies have found the wealthy to be less ethical than the general populace.

And when a deal goes bad? They just walk away.

Basically, the much of the obscene levels of wealth that have been accumulated, particularly by the MBA class, come from their monetizing our ethics and their lack thereof.

For the Past two Decades or so, not Having a Substantive Conflict of Interest Policy has been Goldman’s Business Model

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In looking at the recent ProPublica and This American Life coverage of the capture of the Federal Reserve regulators by the Vampire Squid (Goldman Sachs) it’s important to note that they miss a basic point, which is that, as
Justin Fox so ably points out in the Harvard Business Review, Goldman Sachs has been using conflicts of interest as a mechanism to generate much, if not most of their profits.

I recommend that you read the ProPublica story, and then listen to the This American Life podcast, but Mr. Fox does make a legitimate complaint about the coverage.

Specifically one of the big reveals is that a Goldman executive said that consumer protection laws do not apply to rich clients.

This is in fact true under US law:

In the first, Carmen Segarra, the former Fed bank examiner who made the tapes, tells of a Goldman Sachs executive saying in a meeting that “once clients were wealthy enough, certain consumer laws didn’t apply to them.”  Far from being a shocking admission, this is actually a pretty fair summary of American securities law. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s “accredited investor” guidelines, an individual with a net worth of more than $1 million or an income of more than $200,000 is exempt from many of the investor-protection rules that apply to people with less money. That’s why rich people can invest in hedge funds while, for the most part, regular folks can’t. Maybe there were some incriminating details behind the Goldman executive’s statement that alarmed Segarra and were left out of the story, but on the face of it there’s nothing to see here.

The theory here is that the very rich, by virtue of having a lot of money, are assumed to be knowledgeable investors, and so are more able to protect themselves.

Simply put, they are saying that they are not the general public, because they either have, or can hire, financial knowledge.

In highlighting this, they underplay the 2nd reveal of the story, and what is clearly the reason for Ms. Segarra’s unjustified termination, the fact that Goldman Sachs never had a meaningful conflict of interest policy:

The other smoking gun is that Segarra pushed for a tough Fed line on Goldman’s lack of a substantive conflict of interest policy, and was rebuffed by her boss. This is a big deal, and for much more than the legal/compliance reasons discussed in the piece. That’s because, for the past two decades or so, not having a substantive conflict of interest policy has been Goldman’s business model. Representing both sides in mergers, betting alongside and against clients, and exploiting its informational edge wherever possible is simply how the firm makes its money. Forcing it to sharply reduce these conflicts would be potentially devastating.

(emphasis mine)

Mr. Fox makes another interesting point, that any organization that is responsible for the stability and the viability of the banks, such as the Federal Reserve, have an inherent interest in ensuring that those organizations are profitable, because profitable banks are more stable than unprofitable.

Carmen Segarra, in pushing for Goldman having a conflict of interest policy, was attacking the attacking the viability of a bank.

This raises a larger question, whether we really want to have an organization for which has unethical behavior at the core of both its culture and profits to remain viable.

This was the question that no one has asked about Wall Street in general, and Goldman Sachs in particular.

It needs to be asked.

Damn. No Jail Time

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Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza avoided prison on Tuesday when a U.S. judge sentenced him to serve eight months in a community confinement center after he pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law.

D’Souza, 53, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan to live in a center, which would allow him to leave during non-residential hours for employment, for the first eight months of a five-year probationary period.

Berman also ordered D’Souza to perform one day of community service a week during probation, undergo weekly therapy and pay a $30,000 fine.

This is a guy whose wife wrote a letter to the judge that condemned him for forging her signature and being abusive:

During the sentencing hearing, Berman read from a blistering letter submitted to the court by D’Souza’s estranged wife. In the missive, Dixie D’Souza alleged that her ex-spouse forged her signature on one campaign contribution form, and that he had an “abusive nature.”

D’Souza, who was married to the defendant for 20 years, wrote, “In one instance, it was my husband who physically abused me in April 2012 when he, using his purple belt karate skills, kicked me in the head and shoulder, knocking me to the ground and creating injuries that pain me to this day.” Click here to download a PDF of Dixie D’Souza’s five-page letter to Berman.

Seriously.  What does a Republican have do to get thrown in jail these days?

Welcome to Amazon, Washington Post Employees

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Now that he has the Washington Post, he is getting ready to treat them like his Amazon employees:

The Washington Post announced large cuts in retirement benefits on Tuesday, declaring that it would eliminate future retirement medical benefits and freeze defined-benefit pensions for nonunion employees.

The company also said that in negotiations that started Tuesday, it will seek to impose the same conditions on employees covered by the union — one of the first indications of how The Post’s new owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, will manage relations with the staff of the news organization.

The changes will hit hardest at employees hired before 2009 who could plan on receiving pension payments based on their income and years of service. Each of those employees could see scores — or hundreds — of thousands of dollars less over the course of a retirement. More recent hires do not have traditional pension plans.

Here is the kicker:

The Post’s existing pension plan was about $50 million, or approximately 20 percent overfunded, last Oct. 1 when Bezos bought The Post.

No money problems, he just wants to loot the WaPo pension fund, because that’s what capitalists do.

Anglo-Saxon hypercapitalism is a truly nasty piece of work.

Nope, no Racism Here

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A Wisconsin militia group is planning send armed representatives to target black voters on election day:

A visit to the group’s Facebook page features makes it clear exactly who they are targeting. All of the pictures on the page feature African-Americans. The group is trying to get African-Americans who may have outstanding warrants arrested in order to keep them from voting. The group wants people to report those they suspect of having warrants out on them to the police on election day, “Do the community a favor and keep an eye out for people wanted on warrants and report them to the police on election day.”

The “poll watchers” also plan on harassing and following people who they suspect of being wanted on warrants to their homes. The plan seems to be to use the police to intimidate African-Americans into not voting in November’s election.

The group admits that they are targeting Democrats. They aren’t exactly subtle in making it clear that they are targeting African-American voters. The scheme is an attempt to intimidate African-American voters while getting around the Voting Rights Act. The point of this campaign isn’t to get felons off the streets. The “poll watchers” are trying to keep African-Americans away from the polls.

The party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

My first thought was that there ought to be a law against this.

My second thought was Google it and see if there is a law against this.

It turns out that there is, 18 U.S. Code § 594:

Whoever intimidates, threatens, coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose, or of causing such other person to vote for, or not to vote for, any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner, at any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing such candidate, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

 I might suggest that these guys might need some scrutiny from Federal authorities.

I’m just saying.

(BTW, I did Google this story, and the word “Hoax” and got nothing but right wingers kvetching)

More Feet of Clay from the American “Educational Reform” Establishment

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What a surprise, the favorite project of corporate schooling advocate, and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is an abject failure:

The Obama administration’s signature $4 billion Race to the Top initiative, designed to spur far-reaching education reforms across the country and raise student achievement, is largely a failure, an analysis released Thursday concludes.

Most winning states made what the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education labeled “unrealistic and impossible” promises to boost student achievement in exchange for prizes that were ultimately paltry in comparison with their pledges.

But three years in, Race to the Top hasn’t spurred states to address what really is behind students’ poor academic performance: poverty and the associated lack of opportunities that accompany it, said Elaine Weiss, national coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Her group advocates for a more targeted focus on poverty over the current slate of education reforms involving testing and accountability.

The Department of Education rejected the report’s conclusions, saying it’s seeing promising signs of improvement in student achievement in Race to the Top states and warning that it’s too early to draw sweeping conclusions. Some state officials also said they are finding the competition useful.

Of course, this assumes that the real goal of the corporate driven education reform is actually to improve education, and not simply an excuse to allow Wall Street to asset strip yet another segment of our society.

I do not share the optimism of  Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.  I have concluded that it is about private profits, and not an honest desire to improve American education.

Ah Hell!

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Despite the International Whaling Commission ruling to the contrary, the Japanese are going back to hunting whales:

Japan announced Thursday that it will restart its scientific whaling program next year in response to a new resolution adopted by the International Whaling Commission placing stricter regulations on scientific whaling.

This new nonbinding resolution—proposed by New Zealand—adopts the criteria used by the UN’s International Court of Justice earlier this year when it ruled that Japan’s current whaling program was not scientific. (See “Japan Halts Whaling Program in Response to International Court Ruling.”)

The new guidelines establish criteria for the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) scientific committee to consider when it reviews whaling plans submitted by member countries. The criteria include consideration of whether a program needs to lethally sample whales to obtain data, how many whales a scientific program will take, and whether the number to be taken is justified.

At this week’s IWC meeting, Japan’s representatives stated the country’s intention to revamp its scientific program based on “international law and scientific evidence.” They planned to submit their proposed program to the IWC’s scientific committee this fall, with the aim of conducting scientific whaling next year.

The Japanese have years worth of whale meat stockpiled, because Japanese tastes have changed, but they insist on whaling, because ……… Well, just because.

And people wonder why the hell that everyone else in Asia has never forgiven them for their war crimes in WWII.

I’m thinking that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society should start mounting guns and torpedo tubes on their ships.

Air Force TaliBaptist Leadership Caves Over Oath

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After spending nearly a month threatening people who refused to swear to God to reinlist, the USAF has reversed itself:

The Air Force has withdrawn a requirement that all airmen who take the oath of enlistment and officer appointment conclude with “so help me God,” the service announced Wednesday.

 The Air Force previously allowed airmen to omit those words, but removed that option in October based on its interpretation of 10 U.S.C. 502, 5 U.S.C. 3331 and Title 32, which contain the oaths of office. The Navy, Army and Marine Corps allow their service members to omit “so help me God,” spokesmen for all three services told Air Force Times last week.

 The Air Force sought a legal review of the rule by the Defense Department’s General Counsel on Sept. 9, five days after the American Humanist Association announced it was representing an unnamed atheist airman, stationed at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, who was denied reenlistment for refusing to say, or sign a form, stating “so help me God.”

 Monica Miller, an attorney with the AHA’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center said the association would give the Air Force until Sept. 19 to reverse course.

 On Tuesday, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the service was “making the appropriate adjustments to ensure our Airmen’s rights are protected.”

“We take any instance in which Airmen report concerns regarding religious freedom seriously,” James said in the release announcing the change, which is effective immediately.

Translation: We never thought that anyone would notice our attempt to go all Taliban on the Air Force, and we are very sorry that we got caught.

Whichever General Officer signed off on this abomination should be fired, as in no pension.

Kansas Supreme Court Slaps Down Kris Korbach’s Election Shenanigans

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The court ruled unanimously that Democrat Chad Taylor’s name has to be dropped from the ballot as he requested:

The Kansas Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the Democratic candidate for Senate in his attempt to drop off the November ballot, creating a tougher contest for the Republican incumbent, Pat Roberts, in a race with a strong independent candidate.

But the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, a Republican who had fought the withdrawal, said afterward that Democrats would have to pick another candidate, adding to the uncertainty about whose names would appear on the ballot.

Noticed the last bit?

Where Korbach is now insisting that the Democrats will have to nominate a replacement, something he never brought up during arguments?

I understand the electoral dynamics. 

The current polls show that Pat Roberts wins in a 3-way race,  and gets demolished in a 2-way race, but this is not an excuse for the secretary of state to be so blatantly corrupt.

Here is hoping that Kris Korbach ends up like disgraced former Kansas AG Phill Kline, who was disbarred.

And I Would Have Gotten Away With it Too, If it Weren’t For Your Meddling N***ers!

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First we have Georgia State Senator Fran Millar objecting to get out the vote efforts in black ares then following this up by saying explicitly that he it is the black voter voter bit:

The Georgia state senator who ranted about excessive black voting and vowed to fight a move to expand early voting in DeKalb County defended his remarks on Facebook, saying that he would rather have more educated voters than an increase in the total number of voters.

 The Republican state senator, Fran Millar (pictured), wrote that in a comment responding to others on his post where he vowed to end Sunday balloting in DeKalb County because that area is “dominated by African American shoppers” and has “large African American mega churches.”

 “I do agree with Galloway and I never claimed to be nonpartisan,” Millar wrote. “I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters. If you don’t believe this is an efort [sic] to maximize Democratic votes pure and simple, then you are not a realist. This is a partisan stunt and I hope it can be stopped. Furthermore I don’t control where people are allowed to vote but am glad Brookhaven has been added for the last week.”

This is followed up by the Georgia Secretary of State, whose job is to protect the franchise, starts a bogus investigation of a GOTV group, and then is caught on tape calling increased black votes a problem:

The audio, posted on YouTube by Better Georgia, features a man identified as Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp telling fellow Republicans at a July 12, 2014 event in Gwinnett County:

In closing I just wanted to tell you real quick, after we get through this runoff, you know the Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November. But we’ve got to do the exact same thing. I would encourage all of you, if you have an Android or an Apple device, to download that app, and maybe your goal is to register one new Republican voter.

Clearly the Supreme Court was either smoking some very good weed, or were a bunch of contemptible corrupt partisans, when they gutted the Voting Rights Act.

My money is on the latter.

Welcome to the Handmaiden’s Tale

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We are now throwing mothers in jail for getting their daughters an abortion:

A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to up to 18 months in prison for obtaining so-called abortion pills online and providing them to her teenage daughter to end her pregnancy.

Jennifer Ann Whalen, 39, of Washingtonville, a single mother who works as a nursing home aide, pleaded guilty in August to obtaining the miscarriage-inducing pills from an online site in Europe for her daughter, 16, who did not want to have the child.

Whalen was sentenced on Friday by Montour County Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary Norton to serve 12 months to 18 months in prison for violating a state law that requires abortions to be performed by physicians.

………

Matthew Bingham Banks, Whalen’s lawyer, previously told Reuters criminal prosecutions of this kind were not common.

Whalen told authorities there was no local clinic available to perform an abortion and her daughter did not have health insurance to cover a hospital abortion, the Press Enterprise newspaper of Bloomsburg reported.

Her daughter experienced severe cramping and bleeding after taking the pills and Whalen took her to a hospital hear her home for treatment, the newspaper said.

The closest abortion clinic to Whalen’s home is about 74 miles away in Harrisburg.

The right wing woman haters are chuckling about this right.

First, they make it impossible to get a abortion by legal means, and they they start prosecuting when desperate women do desperate things.

Such is the way of the ISIS of the American body politic.

Yet Another Reason to Hate Andrew Cuomo

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It turns out that the Republican coup in the New York State Senatewas sided by hizzoner the Governor:

Andrew Cuomo has always been careful to maintain a plausible-looking deniability when it comes to his role in keeping his own party out of power in the State Senate.

Whenever he’s been asked about his involvement in the creation of the controlling Republican-Independent Democratic coalition, Cuomo has shrugged and suggested that it’s not the governor’s place to get involved in that sort of thing.

“This is an internal legislative matter,” he has said.

It’s on this basis that Cuomo has been able to put distance between himself and the coalition at opportune times—such as, say, when the Working Families Party threatened to endorse someone else for governor earlier this year. And it’s this distance that has allowed him (presumably) to keep a straight face as his running mate, Kathy Hochul, attempts to bolster her own Democratic credentials ahead of the Sept. 9 primary by complaining that the Senate coalition didn’t achieve enough for progressives.

But now, multiple sources with deep knowledge of the IDC and Republican conferences’ dealings confirm that in fact the governor was not a passive observer during the formation of the coalition. He was “deeply involved,” they say, and “absolutely” encouraged the marriage that allowed the Republicans to remain in leadership even after the election of a Democratic majority. Furthermore, they say, the governor was a key player after the coalition launched, privately offering advice about tactics and messaging.

………

But while the governor did not originate the idea of an actual coalition, sources say he and his staff were active in “nudging” it along behind the scenes.

The governor’s interest, say knowledgeable sources, was ensuring that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn’t be handing over power to New York City Democrats.

“The governor and [top aide] Larry [Schwartz] made it very clear they wanted the IDC to work with the Republicans to run the Senate,” one source explained.

Another recalled that there were “many, many conversations” between Schwartz, Cuomo and Republican leaders. The governor frequently expressed frustration with Democratic Senate leaders, and complained that he couldn’t work with them.

Before the coalition was announced, Cuomo privately made the IDC feel more comfortable working with Republicans and assured them they “wouldn’t get crucified,” or be “left out to dry” if they made the move.

This is not a surprise.

Cuomo was implicitly supportive of the renegade Democrats in the state senate, and now we see evidence of direct collusion.

He so deserves to lose his primary race.

Sucks to be British Petroleum Right Now

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Bummer of a birth mark, BP

A federal judge has ruled that not only was BP negligent,  BP was grossly negligent in the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill.

This has the effect of increasing their fines by a factor of 4:

In the four years since the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has spent more than $28 billion on damage claims and cleanup costs, pleaded guilty to criminal charges and emerged a shrunken giant.

But through it all, the company has maintained that it was not chiefly responsible for the accident, and that its contractors in the operation, Halliburton and Transocean, should shoulder as much, if not more, of the blame.

On Thursday, a federal judge here for the first time bluntly rejected those arguments, finding that BP was indeed the primary culprit and that only it had acted with “conscious disregard of known risks.” He added that BP’s “conduct was reckless.”

By finding that BP was, in legal parlance, grossly negligent in the disaster, and not merely negligent, United States District Court Judge Carl J. Barbier opened the possibility of $18 billion in new civil penalties for BP, nearly quadruple the maximum Clean Water Act penalty for simple negligence and far more than the $3.5 billion the company has set aside.

Note, however, even at $18 billion, that is less than last year’s profits, which were just under $24 billion.

It ain’t enough.

Republicans Aren’t Even Trying to Appear Non Corrupt Anymore

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Last night, Democratic Senate Candidate Chad Taylor withdrew from the race for US Senate:

Kansas voters have lost a chance to vote for a Democratic senator this fall — and Republicans could pay the price.

 Chad Taylor’s stunning decision Wednesday to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race forced partisans and analysts to recalculate the potential outcome of the Kansas contest.

 The consensus: Longtime incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts is in serious trouble, and the GOP’s chances of controlling the Senate could suffer as a result.

 “It’s extraordinary. It’s stunning. It’s shocking,” said Stu Rothenberg, a nationally known political analyst. Roberts “is still going to be the favorite, but the fact that those of us in Washington who look at races actually have Kansas on our radar is a significant development.”

 After surviving a brutal GOP primary in August, Roberts — and other Republicans — were counting on a four-way election to split his opposition, giving the veteran a chance to win in November with less than a majority of votes.

 The likelihood of that outcome tumbled dramatically Wednesday when Taylor quit.

 A recent poll found remaining independent candidate Greg Orman leading Roberts by 10 points in a one-on-one matchup. The Olathe businessman enjoyed the same margin in a different mid-August poll.

Chad Taylor was in 3rd place, and Dems in Kansas are focused on the governor’s race, so it makes sense to do this.

Senator Roberts nearly lost the primary to a doctor whose hobby was posting gunshot victims’ X-Rays on Facebook, and so his going from 2 opponents to one is a very big deal, as the poll numbers show.

In going from a 3 person to a 2 person race, Pat Roberts gains just 1% against Greg Orman, while he picked up 10% and Taylor was still behind in the polling, so from a tactical perspective (Orman would likely caucus with the Dems) it makes sense for everyone involved.

Of course, this story is not complete.  After contacting the Secretary of State’s office, and getting explicit instruction on withdrawing from the race, but Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach is trying to invoke the heretofore not used in a Senate race no backsie rule:

Chad Taylor doesn’t want to be in the race for U.S. Senate, but he’s going to remain on the ballot at least for now.

 Taylor, the Democratic nominee for Senate and district attorney of Shawnee County, submitted a formal letter to the Secretary of State’s Office to withdraw his candidacy on Wednesday, the deadline to drop out of the race.

 Political analysts said his withdrawal would give a boost to independent candidate Greg Orman against U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts in November. But Secretary of State Kris Kobach announced Thursday afternoon that Taylor must remain on the ballot.

 A few hours later, Taylor announced plans to challenge that decision, saying that Assistant Secretary of State Brad Bryant had assured him he met all the requirements to withdraw.

 “I specifically asked Mr. Bryant if the letter contained all the information necessary to remove my name from the ballot. Mr. Bryant said, ‘Yes,’ affirming to me, and my campaign manager, that the letter was sufficient to withdraw my name from the ballot,” Taylor said in a statement

Kris Kobach has been at the forefront of the Republican efforts to keep Blacks and Hispanics to vote, and he’s on Senator Roberts’ steering committee, but it appears that the words “ethics” and “recusal” are not in his vocabulary.

This ratf%$# makes Katherine Harris look like a responsible public servant.

But having a completely corrupt partisan in charge of the election is not enough for the national Republican party, so they have brought in national political operatives to run the Roberts campaign:

National Republicans on Thursday moved to take control of the campaign of Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas by sending a longtime party strategist to the state to advise him, a day after his hopes for re-election and those of his party for taking control of the Senate were threatened by the attempted withdrawal of the Democrat in the race.

………

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is sending Chris LaCivita, who has served as a political troubleshooter in past Republican campaigns, to counsel Mr. Roberts and help oversee his campaign. The committee will also seek to hire a local lawyer in any legal challenge against Mr. Taylor, who had tried to drop off the ballot on the last day candidates were allowed to do so.

Just when I think that Republican politics can’t get any more repulsive, they exceed my own low expectations.

Talibaptists Do Not Get Irony

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On Hannity (of course) J. Crewe clothes horse turned Duck Dynasty ZZ Top impersonator Phil Robertson declared that we must convert ISIS to Christianity or murder them:

Then, Robertson arrived at the most controversial part of the interview, saying of the Islamic State: “You either have to convert them, which I think will be next to impossible. I’m not giving up on them but I’m just saying, either convert them or kill them.”

As near as I can figure out, the only difference between Mr. Robertson and ISIS is that the ISIS militants are better dressed.

James Foley was Tortured Before Being Beheaded Because We Tortured

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Dan Froomkin, in a post on the continuing efforts by the US state security apparatus to use redactions on the Senate torture report to conceal the nature torture, gives us this tidbit:

Feinstein also agreed with [NBC reporter Andrea] Mitchell’s suggestion that Islamic militants in Syria tortured Americans — including journalist James Foley, who was reportedly waterboarded before being beheaded — in a “rebuke” to the U.S. for its own use of torture during the Bush administration.

 “The United States military has always prevented any kind of torture or waterboarding because they felt that then, whatever the enemy was, would come back and do it to our people,” she said. “In this case, the enemy came back and did it to one of our citizens.”

So, torture does not work, and it gets our guys tortured.

BTW, it’s clear that the CIA is attempting to change the conclusions of the report through supposedly security related redactions:

Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein expects the executive summary of her staff’s long-awaited report on the torture of American detainees to be ready for public release before the end of September, she said in an unaired segment of her “Meet the Press” interview this weekend (starts at 10:25 of the video).

The torture report, which was five years in the making, was sent to the White House for declassification in April. But the exhaustive redactions that Obama administration officials sent back in early August included such things as the elimination of pseudonyms, apparently to make the report too confusing to follow, and the blacking out of copious supporting evidence, such as proof that information derived from torture actually came from other intelligence sources.

“What we are engaged in is working with the administration to see that the redaction is such that it does not destroy the report,” Feinstein told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “If you redact the evidence — heavily — then we cannot sustain our findings. We will not put out a report that does not enable us to sustain our findings. And I believe that that is understood.

………

People who have seen the report’s executive summary have told reporters that it discloses abuse that was more brutal, systematic and widespread than generally recognized — and presents extensive evidence that officials most closely linked to the torture regime lied to others inside the CIA and the Justice Department, as well as to Congress and the public, about what they were doing, what they had done, and what it accomplished.

The evidence is quite clear at this point:  The CIA is actively obstructing the oversight process, and as such, it should have no input whatsoever in clearing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report.

Obama should, but won’t, remove the security review process from the CIA, so the Senate Committee should do release it on it’s own, as its right under statute.