Category: Evil

Handmaid’s Tale. It’s their goal. It’s ALWAYS been their goal.*

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In Texas (why is it AWAYS Texas), a personal tragedy for a scared young girl is made a full metal jacket exercise of police and Christofascist excess:

Parents in Texas are upset after police reportedly “swarmed” a Texas high school because a girl may have had a miscarriage in one of the bathrooms.

KDFW reported that a school custodian notified the principal at Woodrow Wilson High School after finding a “possible fetus” in one of the bathroom stalls on Friday.

The principal contacted police, who “swarmed” the school, according to KTVT.

“I seen a helicopter and I was really worried,” one student recalled.

Parent Christine Kerry was outraged that she had not been notified as to why so many police had been deployed to the school.

“I got out of my car and specifically asked, ‘What’s going on, and is it safe for these kids to be out here?’” she said. “And I was told to go away.”

………

Dallas Police Department’s Child Abuse Unit detectives were investigating to find out who may have abandoned the fetus. The person involved was being considered a “suspect.”

“We’re reviewing video, talking to the teachers, trying to determine if anybody has any knowledge of any student that may have had something going on in their life, and pray,” Dallas Police Major John Lawton said.

Alan Elliott of Baby Moses Dallas explained to KDFW that the mother could have avoided any criminal charges if she had taken advantage of Baby Moses laws by carrying the child to term, and then dropping it off at a safe baby site like a fire station.

“And that’s a happy ending when that happens, because the baby is safe, the mother is protected from any sort of prosecution, so it’s a win-win for both of them,” Elliot noted.

However, it was not immediately clear how far along the pregnancy was, and the cause of the possible miscarriage was not known.

And the cops are already treating it as a crime scene, because maybe a poor, scared girl, might have taken RU-486 or some similar drug to terminate a pregnancy.

This is all about punishing some poor, scared, teen because she tried to assert autonomy over her body.

These people just hate fear women, and their sexual power.

Please, can we give Texas back to Mexico?

*H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the title.

The Stupid, It Burns Us!!!!!

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Rather unsurprising, the source of the stupid is the ultimate neocon legacy hire, William Kristol:

Bill Kristol wants to bomb first and figure it out later. News at ten.

During a Monday interview with Laura Ingraham on the ongoing situation in Iraq, the Weekly Standard founder discussed his desire to forgo national debates and simply bomb ISIS forces immediately.

………

After mimicking his fellow talking heads who suggest that perhaps it’s best to have a national debate before using military force, Kristol then said: “What’s the harm of bombing [ISIS] at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens? I don’t think there’s much in the way of unanticipated side effects that could be bad there. We could kill a lot of very bad guys.”

Why is this guy not flipping burgers for a living?

The US State Security Apparatus has Dropped Even the Pretense of Cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Their Torture Report

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Because they have put a defense attorney who represented some of the CIA torturers in charge of making the CIA’s redactions in the torture report:

The background of a key negotiator in the battle over a Senate report on the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques widely denounced as torture has sparked concerns about the Obama administration’s objectivity in handling the study’s public release.

Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is a former defense lawyer who represented several CIA officials in matters relating to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Now he’s in a key position to determine what parts of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report will be made public.

Litt’s involvement doesn’t appear to be an ethics issue, at least by the legal definition. But experts say that while it may be acceptable on paper, his involvement in the review should have been a red flag.

Seeing as how Obama has seriously drunk the CIA’s Koolaid, the only way that the torture report will see the light of day in any meaningful way is if the Senate votes to declassify it on their own, which they are authorized to do by statute.

Today’s Must Read

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Charlie Pierce notices something about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, specifically the treatment of the body:

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war. Bodies lie in the street for four hours on back roads where people fight over the bare necessities of simple living, where they fight over food and water and small, useless parcels of land. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in places in which poor people fight as proxies for rich people in distant places, where they fight as proxies for the men who dig out the diamonds, or who drill out the oil, or who set ancient tribal grudges aflame for modern imperial purposes that are as far from the original grudges as bullets are from bows. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street, as object lessons, or to make a point, or because there isn’t the money to take the bodies away and bury them, or because nobody gives a damn whether they are there or not. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street.

4 hours with his body lying in the street, with no effort to cover him.

This cannot be seen as anything but a demonstration of raw power to, and contempt of, the community, by which I mean the people of color in Ferguson, Missouri.

It may not say anything conclusive about what happened that day, but it does fairly clearly tell us that the police force of Ferguson do not see themselves as protectors of the poorer side of town. They see themselves as an occupying force.  (Of course, whole Mosul in Missouri thing that has been going has made this pretty clear anyway. )

That being said, read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s post. It is quite good.

Shorter Republicans: N*****s Shouldn’t Vote

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The Executive director of the Missouri Republican Party has called the voter registration drive being conducted in Ferguson “Disgusting”:

Encouraging more participation in the democratic process in a community that feels alienated from political power — hence the demonstrations — seems like an obviously good idea; and one that’s particularly compelling because it’s so simple. Voting is an alternative to protesting in the streets.

 And yet, the executive director of the Missouri Republican Party, Matt Wills, denounced the plan.

 Mr. Wills told the right-wing website Breitbart: “If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is. I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate.”

 On another right-wing site, Red State, Dan McLaughlin also argued that there was something indecent about the registration drive. Ferguson presents an opportunity for “Right and Left” to find “common ground,” he wrote. But “the minute you turn your energies into just another effort to register Democratic voters and fire up the Democratic base in advance of an election,” he argued, “the harder you make it to keep the common ground from vanishing in the fog.”

In case you’re wondering, Mr. Sharpton did not say that the residents of Ferguson should vote for Democrats; he said they should vote, full stop. He didn’t even mention the ideological composition of the area’s governing bodies; though he did mention their racial composition (lopsidedly white in a majority black community). And of course the residents of Ferguson, once registered, will have the ability to vote for anyone they please — not just Democrats.

Your inner Jim Crow is showing, dudes.

Voter registration is not a partisan activity, it is an invocation to civic virtue, so of course Republicans are against it.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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This is the epitome of a pro police state mentality:

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

Yes, just let the cop search your car, and your person when they have no right to.

Let them shut down your completely legal demonstration.

Let them prevent you from talking at a city council meeting because the Mayor disagrees with you.

Never, ever tape cops when they don’t want you to.

How difficult is that?

Don’t worry, cops never abuse their power.

Just a little pinprick. ……… But you may feel a little sick.

This is Beyond Repulsive

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It appears that some courts have made the conscious decision to imprison poor people for just being poor:

In a recent letter to the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized the growing trend of evidence-based sentencing, in which courts use data-driven predictions of defendants’ future crime risk to shape sentences. Mr. Holder is swimming against a powerful current. At least 20 states have implemented this practice, including some that require risk scores to be considered in every sentencing decision. Many more are considering it, as is Congress, in pending sentencing-reform bills.

 Risk-assessment advocates say it’s a no-brainer: Who could oppose “smarter” sentencing? But Mr. Holder is right to pick this fight. As currently used, the practice is deeply unfair, and almost certainly unconstitutional. It contravenes the principle that punishment should depend on what a defendant did, not on who he is or how much money he has.

 The basic problem is that the risk scores are not based on the defendant’s crime. They are primarily or wholly based on prior characteristics: criminal history (a legitimate criterion), but also factors unrelated to conduct. Specifics vary across states, but common factors include unemployment, marital status, age, education, finances, neighborhood, and family background, including family members’ criminal history.

Such factors are usually considered inappropriate for sentencing; if anything, some might be mitigating circumstances. But in the new, profiling-based sentencing regimen, markers of socioeconomic disadvantage increase a defendant’s risk score, and most likely his sentence.

So, you live in the bad part of town (high crime area), you go to jail longer.

You grew up poor, you go to jail longer.

Broken family, you go to jail longer.

Unemployed, you go to jail longer.

From a single parent household, you go to jail longer.

As Hamilton Nolan observes:

Design an economic and political system that requires a great many people to be poor. Pass laws that are far more likely to be broken by poor people. Use a computer to dispassionately predict that poor people will probably break the law more in the future. Then sentence poor people to longer prison terms.

This is a f%$#ing abomination.

When Fox News’ Ruben Bolling is Tired of Your Right Wing Agitprop, You Have Jumped the Shark

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That’s one big shark


This is Not Star Trek. 
 In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O’Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, who is also chief cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

In this case, it’s James O’Keefe (the evil one), and Reuben Bolling of Fox News is tired of his sh%$:

Controversial filmmaker James O’Keefe, known for deceptively editing videos in order to push his canard of “political disinformation,” released a video of himself dressed up as Osama Bin Laden to purportedly show how a terrorist could easily get into the U.S. from the Mexican border. Gawker immediately debunked the O’Keefe video, explaining that the area O’Keefe claims to have crossed in includes a “well-patrolled road that runs parallel to the river” and other obstacles that did not appear in his video.

 And even Fox News dismissed O Keefe’s latest stunt.

 During the August 8 edition of The Five, Bolling explained that talking about real border issues is helpful, but “what’s not helpful [is] … filmmaker James O’Keefe donning an Osama Bin Laden mask and crossing the Rio Grande.” Bolling added that O’Keefe should “give it a rest.”

Dude, your 15 minutes of fame are over.

Get a real job, and stop living in your parents’ basement.

StudentsFrist Rhee-Boots

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Or more accurately, it boots the doyenne of educational grifters, Michelle Rhee:

Michelle Rhee had big ambitions when she went on Oprah four years ago to launch her new advocacy group, StudentsFirst, with a promise to raise $1 billion to transform education policy nationwide.

But as she prepares to step down as CEO, she leaves a trail of disappointment and disillusionment. Reform activists who shared her vision say she never built an effective national organization and never found a way to use her celebrity status to drive real change.

StudentsFirst was hobbled by a high staff turnover rate, embarrassing PR blunders and a lack of focus. But several leading education reformers say Rhee’s biggest weakness was her failure to build coalitions; instead, she alienated activists who should have been her natural allies with tactics they perceived as imperious, inflexible and often illogical. Several said her biggest contribution to the cause was drawing fire away from them as she positioned herself as the face of the national education reform movement.

“There was a growing consensus in the education reform community that she didn’t play well in the sandbox,” one reform leader said.

That last bit is pretty much the story of her career:  Walk into a room, kiss up, kick down, and do everything possible to ensure that her name is in the lights.

I do wonder what her next con-job will be, though.

I Sure Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Constitutional Right to Bribe Edition

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Yes, once again, the ‘Phants are looking at a 1st amendment challenge to anti-pay to play regulations:

Wall Street is one of the biggest sources of funding for presidential campaigns, and many of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 contenders are governors, from Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas to Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. And so, last week, the GOP filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning the pay-to-play law that bars those governors from raising campaign money from Wall Street executives who manage their states’ pension funds.

………

With the $3 trillion public pension system controlled by elected officials now generating billions of dollars worth of annual management fees for Wall Street, Securities and Exchange Commission regulators originally passed the rule to make sure retirees’ money wasn’t being handed out based on politicians’ desire to pay back their campaign donors.

………

In the complaint aiming to overturn that rule, the GOP plaintiffs argue that the SEC does not have the campaign finance expertise to properly enforce the rule. The complaint further argues that the rule itself creates an “impermissible choice” between “exercising a First Amendment right and retaining the ability to engage in professional activities.” The existing rule could limit governors’ ability to raise money from Wall Street in any presidential race.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, a spokesman for one of the Republican plaintiffs suggested that in order to compete for campaign resources, his party’s elected officials need to be able to raise money from the Wall Street managers who receive contracts from those officials.

“We see (the current SEC rule) as something that has been a great detriment to our ability to help out candidates,” said Jason Weingarten of the Republican Party of New York — the state whose pay-to-play pension scandal in 2010 originally prompted the SEC rule.

Because bribery is protected speech, I guess.

No, this is not The Onion, but I wish it were.

The Most Transparent Coverup Ever

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So, the Ferguson police department, aka the gang that cannot shoot straight, but will do so with fully automatic weapons mounted on top of an MRAP, decided to both release the shooting officer’s name and begin a policy of character assassination against Michael Brown:

Police on Friday said that Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown last weekend, confronted Brown after the teenager was identified as the main suspect in a convenience store robbery that occurred Saturday morning.

 However, hours later, authorities said that the robbery was not the reason for the encounter that ended with Brown shot to death on a suburban St. Louis street, suggesting that it was unrelated to the confrontation.

As Ezra Klein notes, “The police are the issue in Ferguson, not Michael Brown’s character.”

I am tempted to go all Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp fiction, and asking if Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson thinks that we look like a bitch, because he is certainly trying to f%$# us like one.

If there are not multiple of indictments of the police involved in this, both for the town of Ferguson and for St. Louis county, I will be suggest that it will be because of collusion between the police and the prosecutors.

This is F%$#ed Up and SH%$

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Private equity companies are worried about regulations on insane levels of leverage, so they are lobbying organizations that don’t even regulate them:

The private equity industry’s lobbying group met officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve last week to address concerns over a crackdown on junk-rated loans, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

 The private meeting – the first between the Private Equity Growth Capital Council (PEGCC) and the U.S. regulators over the issue – underscores many buyout firms’ reliance on leveraged loans for outsized returns in their debt-fueled acquisitions of companies.

 It also highlights the willingness of the OCC and the Fed to engage with parties they do not regulate. Private equity firms are typically regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Seriously. What has got them worried? Has the SEC, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, been too hard on them?

I get it. You are pillaging barbarians, and your weapon is other people’s money.

You need insane levels of leverage so that you can make your money by shutting down factories, moving production overseas, charging excessive fees to “manage” your acquisitions, etc.

Clearly, you need assurances that no one will ever prevent you from doing this, because anything that might get in the way of your f%$#ing the rest of us would be an affront to  the gods of the market.

Not enough bullets.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 2: the Protests and the Police Response

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These are not peace officers, These are an implacably hostile occupying force.

This guy is eager to start shooting “animals”

First, and perhaps most telling, was the police officer caught on tape screamig, “Bring it, all you f%$#ing animals! Bring it!”

This is not just a cop who is ill trained to either handl a protest and defuse potential violence, this is someone who actively wants to shoot some people. (One does wonder which Cracker Jack box this guy got his badge out of)

Then, we have the comments by the Ferguson police chief, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” which has historical echos to the comments of people like Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I think that it is fairly clear that both the Ferguson, and the St. Louis County PD have not covered themselves with glory, but a bigger issue is the increasing militarization of the police, and their increasing view of the general public as the enemy:

Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer from a police force of 53, serving a population of just 21,000. But the police response to a series of protests over his death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.

 Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests in a show of force that is a stark illustration of the militarization of police forces in the US.

 “I’m a soldier, I’m a military officer and I know when there’s a need for such thing, but I don’t think in a small town of 22,000 people you need up-armor vehicles,” Cristian Balan, a communications officer in the US army, who was not speaking on behalf of the US military, told the Guardian. “Even if there’s an active shooter – are you really going to use an up-armor vehicle? Do you really need it?”

Of course the don’t but the Pentagon is giving away their slightly older stuff for free, and they are fun toys.

The problem is that it makes things worse, not better:

“As we’ve seen in Ferguson, the militarization of policing tends to escalate the risk of violence to the communities,”said Kara Dansky, senior counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the prime author of its June 2014 report on the militarization of US police. “We think that historically, the police and the military have had different roles and that American neighborhoods aren’t war zones and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

 She said the trend of militarizing local police forces has continued over the past several decades and that communities of color bare the brunt of most military policing.

 Representative Hank Johnson, a house Democrat from Georgia, said on Thursday that he plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act”, which would end the department of defense’s military surplus program.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Representative Johnson.

I would also suggest that requiring on duty police to wear cameras at all time would help.  We know what happens when both the police, and the citizenry, become aware that there is monitoring of law enforcement interactions with the general populace:

.
In 2012, Rialto, a small city in California’s San Bernardino County, outfitted its police officers with small Body Cams to be worn at all times and record all working hours. The $900 cameras weighed 108 grams and were small enough to fit on each officer’s collar or sunglasses. They recorded full-color video for up to 12 hours, which was automatically uploaded at the end of each shift, where it could be held and analyzed in a central database.

 When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking. Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

The situation in Ferguson has gotten so bad that both liberal icon Elizabeth Warren, and Teabagger militant Justin Amash have condemned the overreaction of the police, and civil rights icon John Lewis has called for Barack Obama to federalize the National Guard and declaring martial law.

On the bright side, the local constabulary, both the Ferguson and the St. Louis county PD have been removed from command, and replaced by the state Highway Patrol, which has resulted in a lighter touch and less violence:

A wall of militarised police had blocked the centre of Ferguson, Missouri, this week, shooting teargas and rubber bullets at seething protesters who dared to show any defiance.

 On Thursday evening it melted away.

 A carnival-like demonstration filled the centre of the city after a new police chief given control of protests over the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old implemented a dramatic shift in tactics.

 Hundreds of people gathered at the same intersection in this northern suburb of St Louis that has been the epicentre of violent clashes with police in the previous days.

 But where the officers with assault rifles once stood, backed by armoured trucks topped with snipers’ nests, on Thursday there was almost no police presence.

 Car horns filled the air as people blew whistles and chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the slogan adopted in solidarity with Michael Brown, who according to witnesses was shot by a police officer as he fled a confrontation with his arms aloft on Saturday afternoon.

 The shift followed the installation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri state highway patrol as the effective commander on the ground, under orders earlier in the day from the state governor, Jay Nixon. His force replaced the St Louis county police in leading the operation

Gee, a simple rule, “Don’t be a savage and blindly unreasoning racist asshole,” appears to have defused much of the situation.

I think that the police forces in that part of Missouri rate a full deep dive investigation of their policies and actions by the Feds.

Zero tolerance, baby.

And Now the Banksters Want Our Drinking Water

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Seriously, these guys are a bigger threat to our way of life than Osama bin Laden ever was.

Yes, if they just turn Wall Street’s full potential on the supply of water, everything will be great, because ……… magic sparkle pony fairy dust:

The problem of water scarcity is growing at an alarming rate. By 2050, experts forecast a 55% increase in the amount of water required to meet demand from rising populations, food production and industry. Failure to meet that demand will have devastating consequences: water shortages will become chronic, leading to the proliferation of water riots and water wars. According to UN estimates, $1.8 trillion in new investments will be needed over the next 20 years to avoid such a calamity. The question is:

 Whence Will That Money Come?

 According to the wise masters of big capital and finance, there can only be one source: the ever-knowing, ever-perfect financial markets. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Critchlow argued the case for financializing water:

Markets can play an important role in providing future water security (DQ: Note the use of the term “water security,” not “water independence” or “water sustainability”). The City can help to fund vital water infrastructure and the creation of a futures market to trade water would help to create a baseline pricing mechanism against which regional water tariffs could be fairly set

 “Water will become something that is traded, there will be a market for it and this could happen in the next decade,” said Usha Rao-Monari, chief executive officer of Global Water Development Partners – an affiliate of New York-based investment giant Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm with a reported $280bn under management

The reasoning is clear: in order to create more efficient distribution of the world’s most vital resource, we need to create myriad new layers of middlemen and financiers and have them trading billions (if not trillions) of dollars in derivatives of that scarce resource on global commodity exchanges. It will be the Enron-ization of water, as the exact same people who almost destroyed the global economy with mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps and who have corrupted the basic pricing mechanism of just about every commodity market on the planet will be entrusted to determine the price of the water we consume.

 “It’s intuitively appealing to talk about water as a traded asset,” said Deane Dray, a Citigroup analyst who heads up global water-sector research. “If you look at projections over the next 25 years, you’ll see that global water supply and demand imbalances are on track to get worse.”

What will this mean for the rest of us?

Well it ain’t anything good:

As a result of this huge influx of Wall Street money, the food commodity markets are now 80% speculation, with the volume of financial transactions between 20 and 30 times as large as the real transactions. As Kaufman told Wired magazine, the direct consequence has been volatility two standard deviations above the 1990’s norm:

We’ve seen the price of food become more expensive than ever three times in five years [DQ: sparking food riots and revolutions throughout the developing world]. Normally we’d see three price spikes in a century. And part of the reason is this new kind of commodity speculation in food markets.

If you aren’t worried about what Wall Street will do if it gets control of safe supplies of drinking water, you are either catatonic, deluded, or a follower of Ayn Rand. (But I repeat myself.)

Remember, the most recent WTO talks broke down because the US, and Wall Street, wanted to shut down poorer nations’ ability to stockpile staple foods to avoid being held hostage by speculators.

Be very, very afraid.

Man Who Works Sucking the Marrow out of the Economy Is Hired to Suck the Marrow out of the LA Times

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At least, there is symmetry.

That sound that you hear is the legendary publisher Otis Chandler spinning in his grave:

The Los Angeles Times has named Austin Beutner, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and Wall Street banker, as its new chief executive and publisher.

 The appointment, announced on Monday, comes a week after The Times’s parent, the Tribune Company, spun off its newspapers into a separate publicly traded company called Tribune Publishing.

 Mr. Beutner, 54, a former partner at the private equity firm Blackstone Group and a co-founder of the investment bank Evercore Partners, most recently worked as Los Angeles’s deputy mayor of economic development. He also explored a run for mayor and was once reported to be a possible buyer of The Los Angeles Times alongside the billionaire Eli Broad.

 Jack Griffin, Tribune Publishing’s new chief executive, noted in a statement how these experiences would help Mr. Beutner in his new role.

 ………

 Mr. Beutner is taking over The Los Angeles Times at a major transitional point for its parent company, Tribune. After Tribune braved years of bankruptcy proceedings and threats of takeover by eager buyers, The Los Angeles Times, along with its fellow Tribune-owned papers like The Chicago Tribune, split from Tribune’s television stations into a separate company. But print institutions like The Los Angeles Times now face a brutal time for newspapers as more readers consume the news online.

And this guy won’t be helping.

He is there is to exsanguinate the LA Times, much like any vampire squid in finance.

Think what Mitt Rmoney did at Bain.

The New York Times Compares the CIA Torture Coverup to Catch-22

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If you recall, the Times was forced to publish its story about NSA spying on Americans when their James Risen, who co-wrote this story announced that he was going to publish on its own.

The “Gray Lady” has a long history of kowtowing to the US state security apparatus, which is why we see an OP/ED by Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal invoking the seminal Joseph Heller war farce to describe the CIA’s behavior with regard the Senate Inteligence Committee’s torture report:

In Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, “Catch 22,” the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers’ letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish.

It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian’s example.

The C.I.A. was given the task of censoring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report denouncing none other than the C.I.A. for torturing prisoners, lying to its overseers in Congress about the torture, and exaggerating how much valuable information the torture provided (if any). The result was predictable and proof, if anyone still needed it, that having the subject of the report censor that report is a very bad idea.

When the White House approved the C.I.A.’s censorship (the term of art in Washington is “redaction”) and sent the report to the Hill, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said in his usual sneering way that 85 percent of the report was intact and that half the blackouts were made to footnotes.

The issue, of course, is not merely how much is deleted, but what is deleted. On Monday, McClatchy reported that C.I.A. censors had blacked out the pseudonyms used to protect the identities of agents involved in the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. That, McClatchy said, rendered parts of the report unintelligible.

“Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat, who is a member of the intelligence committee. “Try reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out.”

………

Asked about the dispute, the White House press secretary Josh Earnest, offered the usual boilerplate about national security reviews. Here’s how Yossarian might have quoted him: “It is BLANK that a BLANK process be carried out that BLANKS sources and BLANK and other BLANK that is BLANK to our BLANK BLANK.”

Let me be clear: this is not one of the unsigned Times editorials, and as such, it is not as official as that would be, but this is the f%$#ing editorial page editor of the f%$#ing New York Times, and as such, is arguably the 3rd most official statement from the paper. (something from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. coming in at number 2).

As I have said before, Obama, and the rest of his national security troika, fetishize secrecy, and you can expect a good faith declassification from them, so the Senate Intelligence Committee should exercise its statutory authority, and declassify the report on its own.

Oh, My F%$#ing God! This is Not the Onion

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Private prison company Corrections Corporation of America, looking to expand its business. intends to open an animal shelter:

Sorry, give me a second. BREATHE JANE. BREATHE…okay. Just a few more deep breaths.

 Almost there.

 So Corrections Corporation of America — the people who brought you immigrant abuse in their private Texas prisons — want to get into the animal shelter business. In Citrus County Florida.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH that CCA is understaffing their people prisons to cut corners, resulting in higher levels of inmate violence and death. Which they then overbill for. And you can’t FOIA how many sexual assaults are happening there because as a private company they’re not responsive to FOIA requests.

 They’ve been sued for insufficiently treating inmates who have health problems because that costs money, then they pay academics from Temple University to run “astonishingly misleading” studies that say they “save money” because they don’t take into account health care costs. Which they don’t want to pay.

 They also hire people to work in prisons who have, you know, murdered people.

The most depressing thing is that we are likely to see more outrage over how CCA would treat dogs than how it would treat human beings.

Barack Obama Just Admitting to Covering Up Crimes Against Humanity, Which is a Crime Against Humanity

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Barack Obama has blithely stated that, “We tortured some folks,” but continues to insist that there will not be any sort of accountability for this:

In startlingly blunt phrasing, President Obama on Friday acknowledged the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation tactics in the years after the Sept. 11 attack, even as he defended the agency’s top spy, who is a veteran of the era.

 “We tortured some folks,” Obama said to reporters during a news conference Friday. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”

 ………

 He sought to put the interrogation program in context, recalling Americans’ fear after the Sept. 11 attacks and the “enormous pressure” on law enforcement to prevent more attacks.

 “You know, it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” Obama said. “And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”

No, they weren’t patriots, they were “Good Germans”.

He also further makes it clear that not only will there be no prosecution of torturers, there won’t even be a real investigation of who gave the orders.

As Richard Nixon’s head in a jar might attest to, sometimes it’s the cover up that constitutes a crime, and Obama has thrown his lot in with the coverup.

Whoever performed, authorized, or ordered torture, at a very minimum, should be stripped of their security clearances and fired.  (I would argue that the same should apply to those who did not report torture through the chain of command)

He was forced to make this statement, since the Senate report on this reveals that the torture was more common and more brutal than was reported to Congress of the public, as well as the fact that it never produced meaningful actionable intelligence.

It is also important to note that many of the people tortured were guilty of nothing, and had just been swept up in a panic driven dragnet and bounty program.

Finally, it should be noted that torture comes home.  National guardsman who observe or participate in torture, and then come home to work in civilian law enforcement, are more likely to engage in torture themselves.

Prosecution, and public shaming, are essential to stopping this.