Category: Evil

Not Enough Bullets…

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One of the largest food trading firms in the nation is bragging about how drought and food shortages will make them lots of money:

Every so often a business titan forgets himself, drops his guard and tells us what he’s really thinking.
So it was that a big cheese at the world’s largest commodities trader bragged that the worst drought to hit the US since the 1930s – and the worrying volatility in food prices around the world – will be “good for Glencore”.
On one reading, Chris Mahoney, the business titan in question, appeared to be celebrating the destruction of 45 per cent of America’s corn and 35 per cent of its soya bean crops this year. The crisis threatens to push cereal prices to a new record in a move that will put further pressure on the world’s poorest people and raises the prospect of a fresh round of food riots.
Mr Mahoney’s comments have put the spotlight firmly back on food prices, which rose by an average of 6 per cent globally in July, while cereals accelerated considerably faster still, jumping by 17 per cent to within a whisker of their record in April 2008, according to the UN.
“The US weather starting mid-May…has been among the worst three or four years of the century, comparable to the dust bowl years of the mid-30’s,” said Mr Mahoney, Glencore’s head of agriculture, suggesting that it won’t be long before cereal prices hit a new record.
“In terms of the outlook for the balance of the year, the environment is a good one. High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities [the sale and purchase of an asset to profit from price differences in different markets],” he added.

The usual suspects were suitably appalled, but as Concepcion Calpe of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization noted, it won’t happen because agribusiness in general, and Glencor in particular, “Know this and have been lobbying heavily around the world to water down and halt any reform.”

Our economy is run by and for sociopaths, and they control our food.

Not a Surprise

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A three star general is now alleged to have explicitly ordered the tortured of Bradley Manning:

An order to submit WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning to harsh and allegedly illegal treatment in prison apparently came from the upper echelons of the Marine Corps.

According to military e-mails released to Manning’s defense, a three-star general was the force behind the marching orders to hold Manning as a maximum-custody detainee under prevention-of-injury watch, or POI — orders that resulted in severe conditions at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, that left Manning isolated and repeatedly mistreated by his guards.

Defense attorney David Coombs disclosed the contents of the e-mails in a post published on his blog on Friday. He did not publish the actual e-mails.

Coombs called the treatment a “flagrant violation” of his client’s right to not be punished prior to trial and has filed a motion asking for the charges against Manning to be dismissed based on the allegedly unlawful treatment.

“These e-mails reveal that the senior Brig officer who ordered PFC Manning to be held in MAX and in POI was receiving his marching orders from a three-star general,” Coombs wrote on his blog. “They also reveal that everyone at Quantico was complicit in the unlawful pretrial punishment, from senior officers to enlisted soldier.”

OK, we now know that when Obama said that he had “received assurances” that Manning’s treatment was “Humane”, those assurances almost certainly came directly from this unnamed general, and Obama either knew this, or he was willfully blind, as did everyone between the two of them in the chain of command.

As a rough guess, I figure that something over half of the General officers in the military, along with their superiors on the civilian side of Pentagon, are aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.

This is why you cannot allow any torture:  It grows to subsume your entire state security apparatus, because eventually the whole of the state has to join in the coverup.

Assange Formally Granted Asylum by Ecuador

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This is not an unexpected development.

The British are saying that they are never going to allow his passage out of the country, and are continuing to imply that they will use a law passed in late 1980s to raid the Ecuadorean embassy.

The law in question was passed after someone shot a Bobby from inside the Iranian Lybian embassy, which is clearly a different circumstance from this.

The real issue here is that pretrial process, and extradition, in Sweden is opaque, and Assange has publicly stated that he would be willing to go to Sweden if they gave him guarantees that he would not be transferred to US custody.

This is about Obama, and people close to him, desperately wanting to get their hands on him so that they can make an example of him. (Even if there is not a successful prosecution, there will be torture, even if he does not get sent to Gitmo, look at what they did to Bradley Manning in pretrial detention.)

Rather unsurprisingly, all the news that’s fit to print, i.e. the NY Times reported this as a hit piece against Assange.

There are Really Evil People in Kansas

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Case in point, most of the members of the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, who are attempting to strip a doctor’s license for not forcing a 10 year old girl with mental health issues to carry her uncle’s baby to term:

The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the governing body that regulates the practice of medicine in the state, stripped the medical license of a woman who refused to force a mentally-ill 10 year old to give birth.

As Robin Marty reports, Dr. Ann Neuhaus became the target of domestic terror group Operation Rescue after her colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered. Neuhaus assisted Tiller by providing second opinions for mental health exceptions for late-term abortions.

Operation Rescue filed a negligence complaint against Neuhaus alleging that her exams were not thorough enough to support her medical conclusions and her follow-up care was inadequate because she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization after each procedure.

Neuhaus offered a rebuttal of her own. “To even claim that isn’t medically necessary qualifies as gross incompetence,” said Neuhaus. “Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that. You’re going to send this girl for a brain scan and some blood work and put her in a hospital?”

Seriously, these are deeply evil religious zealots, and they are way closer to terrorists who intend to strike in the United States than most of the threats that the FBI manufactures.

I’m not hoping for drone strikes against these folks, but it’s clear that there are more direct links to terrorism with Operation Rescue than there is with, for example, the now shuttered Holy Land Foundation.

I Gotta Read This Book

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Neil Barkofsky’s book on his experiences monitoring the TARP, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, and the Bush administration comes off better than the Obama administration:

The Huffington Post described a scene in a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP, where Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a string of F-bombs during a discussion about transparency. I’ve read the book, and while that’s an amusing diversion, it’s nowhere near the headline story.

The important moment in the book for me comes conveniently after Barofsky recounts this FDL News item, one of my HAMP horror stories. Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to all sorts of problems like this, with trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky mused that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP, and the issue came up in a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, which was also attended by Elizabeth Warren, then the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, another TARP watchdog.

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

This is a revelatory moment for Barofsky in the book, and should be for everyone reading. Geithner’s concern, first of all, was with how the banks would respond to the program, not how homeowners would respond to it. In fact, homeowners are quite besides the point. Regardless of their situation, they will be one of the 10 million foreclosures, in Geithner’s construction. His goal was merely to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health, mostly through the other parts of the bailout, that enabled them to earn profits.

I will note that the Cossacks work for the Czar, and notwithstanding all the turnover on the economic side of his cabinet, Geithner has been a constant.

This is going on because this is what Obama wants.

Racist Diatribes from SB 1070 Sponsor

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In the challenges to Arizona’s immigration law, one of the claims made is that it was motivated by bigotry.

Well, the plaintiffs now have sponsor’s, former state senate majority leader Russell Pearce’s, emails, and we have the smoking gun:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona has released thousands of e-mails that it says proves Arizona’s controversial immigration law was racially motivated.

The e-mails, acquired through a public records request to the state Legislature, are to and from former senator Russell Pearce, who authored Senate Bill 1070.

The ACLU included dozens of those e-mails as part of a legal filing this week, asking U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton to prevent a key part of SB 1070 from going into effect.

The e-mails from Pearce in the court documents include statements like, “Can we maintain our social fabric as a nation with Spanish fighting English for dominance … It’s like importing leper colonies and hope we don’t catch leprosy. It’s like importing thousands of Islamic jihadists and hope they adapt to the American Dream.”

They include statistics such as “9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens,” and “the illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two-and-a-half times that of non-illegal aliens.”

Some quotes:

“Battles commence as Mexican nationalists struggle to infuse their men into American government and strengthen control over their strongholds. One look at Los Angeles with its Mexican-American mayor shows you Vincente Fox’s general Varigossa commanding an American city.”

“They create enclaves of separate groups that shall balkanize our nation into fractured nightmares of social unrest and poverty.”

I am not surprised at all that this guy is a bigoted ratf%$#, though I am surprised that he was stupid enough to reveal it on email.

When Ed F%$#ing Rollins Finds a Republican’s Political Statement Beyond the Pale…

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Click for full size


C. Megalodon*

You have not just jumped the shark, you have jumped C. Megalodon, on a unicycle, while wear nothing but piercings and a rose between your teeth.

It appears that Michelle Bachmann has managed to cross this event horizon:

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s former campaign manager has joined the bipartisan chorus criticizing the Minnesota Republican for questioning the loyalty of State Department aide Huma Abedin and alleging she has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I have been a practitioner of tough politics for many decades,” Ed Rollins wrote in an op-ed for FOX News. “There is little that amazes me and even less that shocks me. I have to say that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s outrageous and false charges against a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin reaches that threshold.
………
“Having worked for Congressman Bachman’s campaign for president, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy level,” he wrote.

Generally, Republicans are busy saying that Joe McCarthy has been given an unfair rap by pinko historians, so this boggles the mind.

The real question is whether the Beltway gasbags  will start treating her like that crazy guy in a bath robe on the soapbox in the park.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Kafka, Obama Style

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The prosecution in the Bradley Manning Wikileaks trial the claims to have proof that he was aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty, but is refusing to produce any evidence”

The US government claims to have proof that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks suspect, knowingly passed state secrets to a location where it was bound to be obtained by enemy groups, a military court in Maryland has heard.

Captain Joe Morrow, a member of the five-strong prosecution team assigned to the case, said that the government would show at court martial that Manning had knowingly “aided the enemy” – the most serious of the 22 charges facing the soldier that carries the death penalty. Morrow said the evidence would show that Manning sent the information to a “very definite place” that he knew was used by the enemy.

He did not mention al-Qaida, though the terrorist network has been explicity named by the prosecution in previous hearings.

The insistence by the US government that it can prove Manning had actual knowledge that the WikiLeaks dump would be used by enemy groups was instantly disputed by the lead defence lawyer, David Coombs. He demanded that the government produce the evidence to which it was alluding.

“We haven’t seen any evidence that the government has provided by discovery that supports any knowledge that the information would be obtained by the enemy,” he said.

Note that if the court accepts this, to quote the ACLU, “the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog on the internet. In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals.”

I believe that this is one of the goals of this prosecution.  When you define laws this broadly, every is a criminal, and so “troublemakers” can be dealt with.

Most Transparent Administration Ever

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Have you heard the latest? The FDA spied on outside critics in an attempt to find out who were the whistleblowers.

The f%$#ing F f%$#ing D f%$#ing A was engaged in a f%$#ing witch hunt and coverup?

Un-f%$#ing-believable:

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.
What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.
Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.
F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.
While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared.
The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.
The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.
A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

There is a saying, “A fish rots from the head,” and this is completely in line with the Obama administration’s jihad against whistle blowers.

Least surprising News of the Day

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It turns out that his syndicate, Premeir Radio Networks, hires ringers to call into his show:

One of the common refrains in the media world is that Rush Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio. He is eager to capitalize on this, multiple times per episode in fact. But how true is this claim?

Limbaugh is one of several radio hosts syndicated through Premiere Radio Networks, including right-wing darlings such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck as well as known liberal voices such as Randi Rhodes and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. One of the features for Premiere syndicated shows is a service Premiere On Call, a phone banking service for voice talent. What this means is, they hire people to call in. If you ever listened to one of the shows distributed by Premiere, you may find yourself impressed at how a caller would bring up a subject which then the host would have a perfect response to, like a perfect pitch in a baseball game to allow the home run hit. Premiere On Call’s hiring standards appear to be focused on hiring people able to generate accents, vocal inflections, or other ways to enable re-use of the same voice actor multiple times without being identified as such.

Limbaugh obtained the largest audience during an era when audience count was made by manually filled out diaries, a practice which has been slowly phased out over the past few years, as detailed electronic tracking became available. Once the detailed tracking was available, Rush’s ratings dropped significantly, by over a third. With an estimated weekly audience of 15 million users now, that comes to an average of less than 3,000 listeners per station, not very good ratings at all. For comparison, left-wing giant Ed Schultz on Jones Radio Network sports an estimated 8,000 listeners per station. To get these numbers, we took the totals given from Talkers Magazine and cross-referenced with the number of stations that carry each show. Rush is carried on over 10x as many stations as Big Eddie. Even though Rush’s overall listenership is high, the number per station is low.

………He gained these stations originally due to an arrangement system whereby these stations were given his show, for free, in exchange for 15 minutes of advertising space. It was a win-win for these small stations, effectively adding filler to the stations airwaves in a non-prime spot.

What a surprise, the nation’s leading spokesman for recreational Oxycontin use appears to be running a pump and dump ratings scheme.

How is Penn State Like the Catholic Church?

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Their attempts to cover up child rape are so heinous that even the hiring of the hactackular Louis Freeh to run the investigation cannot mitigate the truth:

The independent panel investigating Pennsylvania State University’s role in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal has determined that the school’s top leaders, including legendary football coach Joe Paterno, tried to cover up the abuse for 14 years.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who led the investigation, outlined the findings of the panel’s 162-page report in prepared remarks released in advance of a 10 a.m. news conference in Philadelphia.

The report is available at www.philly.com/freeh

“The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized,” Freeh said.

Naming Paterno, former Penn State President Graham Spanier, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, a university vice president once in charge of the campus police, Freeh said they “never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest.”

To state the obvious, if this had been curling, or for that matter college Baseball, they would have turned this matter over to the police over a decade ago.

There is no better case to be made that big ticket athletic programs are a corrupt and corrupting influence on higher education, and they need to be excised from higher education, either by the schools themselves, or by the IRS pulling tax exempt status from these programs.

It’s the Bankster’s World, We Just Live in It

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Case in point, Moberly Missouri, where the New York Times scolds them for not paying debts incurred through fraud and the corruption and/or incompetence of banks and regulators:

Residents of Moberly, Mo., got a shock last year when they discovered that their city had guaranteed $39 million in bonds, sold by an independent authority, to help a Chinese company build a plant to make sucralose, an artificial sweetener.

The project fell apart in a matter of months, and residents learned that they had been misled about the company’s track record in China — and that they were now expected to make the bond payments.

But municipal bond market participants say they were shocked, too, by how quickly the city of about 14,000 would walk away from a solemn promise to guarantee the debt payments through 2025, the life of the bonds.

Cities like Moberly that guarantee debts for entities that borrow for projects like parking garages and hockey arenas often “don’t understand that they are responsible for making these payments,” said Matt Fabian, managing director of Municipal Market Advisors, a research and consulting firm. However, he said, “It’s as if your kid runs up a $400 cellphone bill. You can’t get out of paying it by saying you didn’t authorize that.”

Moberly, where the biggest employer is a state prison, had responded eagerly to a pitch by the Missouri Department of Economic Development to host the project, hoping for hundreds of jobs. The company, Mamtek International, was said to have a sucralose plant in Fujian Province producing a sweetener called SweetO, for use in drinks, candy and pharmaceuticals. Most of the authority debt, to go toward building and equipping the plant, was issued under a federal stimulus program allowing private investors to use tax-exempt municipal financing.

But when a bond payment came due last August, with the building still unfinished, Mamtek officials said they didn’t have the money. Construction stopped; the handful of employees in Moberly were laid off. Weeks of confusion followed, with subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission, rumors of a split between the Chinese company and its United States subsidiary, reports that the plant would be liquidated and fears that the bond proceeds were gone forever.

………

Investigators also learned that state development officials had learned — before the bonds were sold — that Mamtek’s sucralose plant in China had never opened, because of environmental concerns. But that information was not relayed to Moberly, according to a report by the Missouri House Interim Committee on Government Oversight and Accountability.

Let’s be clear here:  the good citizens of Moberly were swindled by Mamtek, state development officials, and likely whoever issued the bonds.

There were serious material discrepancies.

This is the very definition of odious debt, and it should be repudiated without penalty.

Verizon Sucks

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And I am speaking now as a Verizon customer (FIOS).

You see, they are claiming that they have a first amendment right to censor your internet access:

Last week, Verizon filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit laying out their various and sundry complaints against the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order, which put net neutrality regulations in place for Internet service providers. The telecom giant is suing to have the FCC’s order thrown out, and one of their legal arguments is raising more than a few eyebrows. Verizon, per the court document, considers itself your Internet editor. Or your Internet editor-in-waiting.

It goes like this: the Open Internet Order says that Verizon, as a provider of broadband Internet, can’t block or slow access to (legal) online content because they disagree with its message or are being paid by an outside party to do so. This is essentially how the internet has operated since its inception, and the Open Internet Order is intended to prevent ISPs like Verizon from becoming gatekeepers. Verizon, however, argues that it has the constitutionally protected right to decide which content you, as a Verizon customer, can access — that it is no different from a newspaper editor:

Of course, when they are sued, they claim to be mere dumb pipes, and scream “safe harbor.”

C%$# sucking pig felching rat bastards.

Here We Go Again

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MF Global, meet PFGBest:

More than $200 million in customer funds appears to be missing from the accounts of U.S. futures broker PFGBest, regulators said on Monday just hours after the firm’s founder attempted suicide outside the company’s Iowa headquarters.

The suicide attempt and missing money renewed anxiety over the stability of the brokerage industry less than a year after the collapse of much larger MF Global. PFGBest told customers their funds had been frozen and clients would be allowed to liquidate open trading positions, but would not be able to withdraw funds or make new trades until further notice.

The National Futures Association (NFA), an industry group that also plays a regulatory role, said it had issued an emergency order to effectively freeze PFGBest’s operations after finding that a U.S. bank account the broker said contained $225 million in customer funds actually held only $5 million.

“It appears that PFG does not have sufficient assets to meet its obligations to its customers,” the NFA said.

The disclosure came hours after owner Russell Wasendorf Sr., a 40-year veteran of futures markets, was found in his car near the company’s new headquarters, having apparently attempted suicide. He is in critical condition at the University of Iowa Hospitals, according to local news reports.

(emphasis mine)

I’m wondering if I’m a bad person for thinking that Wassendorf’s attempt to top himself shows a little bit more common decency and remorse than we got from Jon Corzine in the MF Global matter.

I’m beginning to wonder if your money might actually be safer invested in Nigerian 419 scams than it is with financial professionals.

And In the Role of Enron, JP Morgan Chase

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Remember the California Energy Crisis in 2001? When Enron was found to be manipulating the energy market.

Well, now it’s JP Morgan:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s refusal to turn over e-mails in a federal probe of potential energy-market manipulation is the latest challenge for Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon as the bank faces multiple investigations.

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sued JPMorgan July 2 to release 25 e-mails in an investigation of possible manipulation of power markets in California and the Midwest by J.P. Morgan Ventures Energy Corp., according to court filings by the Washington-based agency. FERC opened the probe in August after complaints from California and Midwest grid operators that JPMorgan’s bidding practices were abusive, the documents show.

The real lesson here is that these energy markets are rife for abuse, as are most “market based” alternatives to regulation.

Market based solutions, in effect if not in intent, are about the elites in government throwing cash to their old school chums in finance.

This Is The World’s Violin, and It’s Playing Just For You

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Yes, the rat F%$# made this Ad

Republican political adman Fred Davis, the man who created Carly Fiorina’s infamous “Demon Sheep” ad, is sad because he’s caught flak for the fact that he’s a contemptible human being:

He’s not a witch.

Nor, Fred Davis wants the world to know, is he a racist.

Humbled, humiliated, saddened and chagrined, the Republican ad maker recently sagged into a chair in a noisy Las Vegas restaurant and for more than an hour talked about May 17, a date that will forever be ringed in red as one of personal infamy.

That day the New York Times published on its front page details of a proposed Davis-run campaign against President Obama, focusing on the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the president’s former pastor, “in a big, attention-arresting way.”

The intent, a do-over of sorts, was to “inflame … questions” about Obama’s character and competence. A 54-page outline, leaked to the newspaper by someone apprehensive of the plan, was very much like Davis himself: jokey, irreverent and a bit out there.

Obama was described, and demeaned, as a “metrosexual black Abraham Lincoln.” Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee for whom Davis worked, was derided as “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused” and failed to exploit the target-rich opportunity presented by the venomous Wright.

………

Two of his commercials were among the most widely noticed of the 2010 campaign: the infamous “demon sheep” ad for California’s Carly Fiorina and his meet-the-candidate spot for Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, with its indelible opening, “I’m not a witch.” Both U.S. Senate hopefuls lost their elections, though Fiorina made it through a combative primary and, hey, Davis made you look, didn’t he?

………

But when it comes to the proposed super PAC campaign, Davis insisted, it was never his intention to use race as an incitement. “I am maybe the only person in America who didn’t see that as racist,” he said of juxtaposing the president with the fiery rants of his longtime pastor, who Obama disavowed in the heat of the 2008 primary. “I saw it as an interesting fact in a guy’s upbringing and the way he’s formed his opinions.”

No, you’re not a racist, and you’re not an asshole, because your previous oeuvre has been so uniformly positive and nice.

Listen while I say this slowly: If you did not see that as racist, it is because you are not only racist, but because you are a stupid racist.

Your presentation was too racist for a Republican billionaire, OK?

You f%$# with the bull, you get the horns.

Perhaps you want some cheese with your whine?

Not Enough Bullets…

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So, JPMorgan Chase loses $9 billion under the watch of their Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew, so they fire her, and they are letting her walk with millions of dollars:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s decision to let Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew retire four days after the bank disclosed a $2 billion loss in her division allowed her to walk away with about $21.5 million in stock and options.

Drew, who resigned May 14, can keep $17.1 million in unvested restricted shares and about $4.4 million in options that she otherwise would have been required to forfeit if the New York-based bank had terminated her employment “with cause,” according to regulatory filings and estimates from consulting firm Meridian Compensation Partners LLC.

A 30-year JPMorgan veteran, Drew also had accumulated 661,000 unrestricted shares of common stock worth about $23.7 million based on the May 14 closing price, $9.7 million in deferred compensation and $2.6 million in pension pay as of Dec. 31, according to company filings. Altogether, Drew’s stock, pension and deferred pay come to about $57.5 million.

“She was with that company for a long time,” said Frank Glassner, a partner at Meridian in San Francisco. “She was an incredibly talented, well-thought-of employee, not only within the company but on the Street. A lot of this money had been earned over a great deal of time, not just yesterday.”

Obviously, part of this is money already earned, but unvested shares?  For ordinary people, if you leave, the unvested shares are gone.

 Seriously, am I the only one who thinks that this is hush money?

H/t Felix Salmon